The Scream (39 page)

Rachel finished with the stairs, made her way toward the kitchen. Upstairs a door creaked open. He didn't stir at the sound of it. Good. The thought of getting caught within three feet of him was terrifying.

She slipped rapidly past him and into the kitchen. Like their bedroom, it was brightly moonlit. The towel and pitcher were next to the sink, where she'd left them last night. She turned the cold water on full, let it thunder against the aluminum basin for a moment, then proceeded to fill the pitcher. The noise would help him ease out of the nightmare; the water would finish the job.

She hoped.

He was halfway into a scream when Rachel reentered the living room, halted a full six feet back, and let fly. A quart of ice-cold soaring water sent an electroshock spasm through his body as it hit. He jumped, eyes snapping open, seeing nothing. His hand reached out automatically, with chilling precision, for the hilt of a nonexistent knife.

He sucked in a huge wheezing breath, eyes flicking over at his empty hand, then back. This time, there was no question that his half-crazed gaze was aimed at her. She backed away, trying to take the murderous terror and panic and rage of his expression in stride. It didn't work. It never did. When Jacob awoke from his dreams, it could be the scariest thing that Rachel had ever seen.

Then his eyes cleared, and his expression softened, and he crumpled into himself. The leap from nightmare to Naugahyde had been broached, again. She stood firmly before him, skewered by his sight.

As the nightmare memory slipped tenuously behind.

"Shit," he said throatily, wiping water from his eyes. His body glistened in the blue light.

"I know." Her throat was clogged, too.

"I'm sorry."

"It's okay."

"No, it's not." He looked up at her, his gaze appearing merely disturbed. It was a big step back from crazy. It would have to do.

Rachel stepped forward and tossed him a towel, playing it safe.

"Thanks." He snagged and shook the towel fold-free with a fluid motion. He had remarkably articulate musculature, and it displayed itself in the gesture. She watched the way his body gleamed in the boob tube glare: cut and packed and deadly. She watched him dry off. There was silence between them. Her fingers drummed softly on the empty pitcher in her hands.

He was shaking, too. Even more than usual.

"No. It's not," he repeated, almost to himself. "It was different this time.

"It was worse."

Rachel shuddered, confused. Great.
What could possibly be worse?

Jake cradled his head in his hands. "I saw Pete." He rubbed his scalp as if to massage away the memory. "He was . . . I think he's . . . no . . . shit, it's too weird." His head shook vigorously. "I don't even know what I'm talking about."

"He was what?" She drew nearer, her fear receding face of her concern. For Pete. For Jake. For the mean level of sanity. "What about Pete? What did you dream?"

"That he's dead." He said the words without looking up.

Ask a stupid question
, Rachel thought. She touched him lightly, stroking his sweat- and water-slicked hair. "Honey, it was only a dream-"

"BUT IT WASNT
JUST
A DREAM!" he spat.

Upstairs, Natalie let out a shriek. Ted's door flew open; his footsteps thudded in the hall. "Mom?" he yelled.

"It's okay, honey," she lied. "Everything's fine."

"That's great," Jake groaned. "I had to wake up the whole fucking house, too. I'm sorry." He was serious. The dreams made him ashamed.

"I'll go get the midget." Rachel started toward the stairs.

Jake looked at her anxiously. "Will you come back down?"

"Do you want us to?"

"Yeah." He feigned a smile. "I wanna see my women."

"Both of us?"

"Both of you."

"And Ted?"

"Oh, yeah. Maybe most of all."

She came to him then, pulled the towel from his hands, and brought her open lips to his. If they ever had any doubts as to the status of their love, all they had to do was kiss. Like the old saying goes: You don't need a weatherman to tell you which way the wind blows.

The wind was blowing some extremely bad ways. The bad news from the concert was doubtless still coming in, and it was apt to get a whole lot worse before it got any better.

But the kiss was good. And that, too, would have to do.

"Pinky and I will be right back," she said, pulling gently away. He touched her face: an act of reverence, softly delivered. She smiled again, stepped out of his reach, and turned toward the stairs.

In turning, her gaze swept across the snow-blind screen. It would not be so blank when she returned, she knew. He'd be rolling back the day's noteworthy broadcasts, drinking in the atrocity, relentlessly stroking the tension that drove him. Rachel moved down the hall, smiling tiredly at Ted, who scrutinized her every move. Passed the bedroom and on toward her howling daughter's lair.

Again she cursed the empty side of the bed.

And the war that she slept with instead.

Pastor Furniss's morning began in outrage, and got steadily more outrageous from there. Never before had he had so much righteous anger at his disposal, so much justification at his beck and call.

Surely the day of reckoning was at hand.

The numbers had upped since the late Saturday night reports; secular TV filled him in on that much, hours before his own program began. He paced around the kitchen in his pajamas, sucking down cup after cup of Brim while the statistics rolled in and his wife Mildred tiptoed quietly around him.

Five more dead, thirty more listed as missing in the Rock Aid aftermath. Increasingly bizarre rumors as to what had actually happened there.

Not the least of which came from within his own camp.

If only he could speak it.

No matter
, he told himself.
There's more than enough. More than enough
. He sat at the kitchen counter, impatiently awaiting his eggs over easy and pure pork sausages, his toasted Roman Meal Lite bread and molten Parkay, while the show began to take form in his mind.

Breakfast was served. He shoved it down, offered perfunctory thanks, moved to the bathroom, got ready to shower. His b.m.'s were runny and vile; it burned coming out and took forever to do so. The body, rebelling as usual.

No surprises there. It was the nature of the flesh to betray. With lust. With pestilence. With the simple passing of time. He looked at the roll of his massive belly, the tiniest protruberant hint of his flaccid genitalia, the reeking porcelain beneath, and a wave of revulsion ran through him.

"
Oh, Jesus God
," he whispered, a prayer for strength.

Then he had squeezed out the last, and he wiped disdainfully, stood, turned away, flushed without looking. There was some aerosol air freshener on the shelf before him. He spritzed it around the room to mask the smell.

He saw himself naked in the medicine chest mirror. It was not a pretty sight. He didn't like thinking about his body, its slow decline into lumpish disrepair. Clothed in the finest that the Lord's bounty could provide was another thing, yes-he looked dashing in a suit-but stripped down like this, it was more than humbling. It was humiliating.

"Vanity," he muttered, and turned back toward the shower. It was not fitting to dwell on his nakedness, nor to bemoan the state or the fate of the flesh. For the flesh was temporary, as was the world; when both were gone, he would linger still in the kingdom of Heaven.

It was just that, every once in a while, he wished that He would hurry up with it.

Because the world was crawling with sin. Oh, yes, it was. Satan was alive in every speck of matter, just waiting to drag you down, and there was no safe place to hide.

Except in fervent prayer.

Pastor Daniel Furniss pulled back the shower curtain, put the hot on three-quarters full, and the cold on just a tad. It would take a minute for the water pressure to build back up. He would use those moments to focus his thoughts, bring himself back into line.

"Oh, Heavenly Father," he began, loud enough to be heard over the water. "Grant me the courage and wisdom and power of faith in you, O Lord. Give me your blessings and your support.

"For today I face the Enemy, and he is mighty indeed. He has brought great suffering and death to our young and then dared to turn it against us. Against
you
, O Lord; for when he casts aspersions onto your Faithful, he makes blasphemous mockery of your sovereignty on Earth, the testimony of the Spirit.

"I beg you, oh Lord, to give me strength today. Cleanse me of sin and sinful thoughts. Purify me, so that I may enter into battle with the radiance of your light around me, protecting me, glorifying me as I glorify the word of your only begotten son."

The toilet's burbling hiss concluded, and the shower shot up to full strength. It was as if God had spoken. He stuck his hand under the water and found that it was good.

"Amen." He stepped under that cleansing rain.

But there were impurities within that neither prayer nor shower could rinse away. This became clear as soon as he closed the curtain, closed his eyes, allowed himself a moment to luxuriate.

Thought began.

And feeling.

There were problems, coming into this morning's show-problems of the world, the flesh, and the devil-not the least of which was the anti-Christian backlash stampeding through the secular media. As if Christians had anything to do with it . . . as if any decent Christian were
capable
of doing such a thing.

No, they were fishing, and without bait at that. All they had going was the Kleinkind woman, who had quite obviously worked alone, and who quite clearly had no idea what was going on around her. So, essentially, they had nothing that would stick.

Pastor Furniss, on the other hand, knew exactly who to blame.

Unfortunately, he had nothing tangible, either.

Because, from a practical worldly standpoint, the whole thing made no sense. Why would the rock industry want to sabotage its own mechanism, make its big statement of principles a bloody disaster? The answer was simple:
No reason at all
.

But if you looked at the big picture . . . ahh. There was rhyme and reason there.

More than enough to let him know that what he knew was truth.

In the big war . . . the
eternal
war where souls lay in the balance . . . the Fallen One had very few advantages. Primary among them was deceit. The serpent had no shame and no loyalties; but it took great joy in panic and chaos, and the greatest joy of all in mocking God. Surely the already dubious credibility of the Devil's music was worth a giant stab at the heart of Jesus.

And if it worked, God only knew what demons could be born.

So yes, he had no doubt: Satan was behind it, just as he was behind the whole of rock 'n' roll. It didn't matter whether the bands or the fans believed; it didn't matter
what
they believed, in fact. Satan had them all by the short hairs. Satan worked
through
them, through their worldly abandon. Just as Satan used our own bodies against us and then gloried at our inevitable destruction.

While the chaos spread.

And the end came ever nearer.

Of course, the question still remained: What earthly vessels did the Vile One use? Demonic culpability notwithstanding, the knives and grenades had been wielded by human hands. Whose hands, precisely, were they? And how much did they know about the Evil One they served?

Which brought him to his own most disturbing problem.

The girl named Mary Hatch. . . .

Furniss became aware of the water thundering down, the pleasure it provided, the purpose it implied. He submerged his head in the spray for a moment, pulled away, wiped his eyes, reached for the Tegrin Medicated Shampoo, poured some onto his palm, massaged it vigorously into his scalp. Tegrin didn't lather well, but within a minute the top of his head was burning and tingling. He could feel those would-be dandruff cells screaming all the way to oblivion.

He rinsed his hands, wiped his eyes again, and reached for the soap. Ivory, same as when he was a kid. Eschewing the washcloth for the first run through, he began to soap himself down. Luxuriously.

And thought about Mary Hatch again . . .

Mary Hatch lay curled in the Quiet Room, face to the ceiling, staring into the light of the solitary sixty-watt bulb with her eyes open wide. Her breath was close and hot and stifling, and the thick-padded walls so close around her did nothing to alleviate it.

Paul had put her in here for getting him in trouble with the pastor. Just her and her Bible and a chamber pot, in a soundproof, windowless padded cell the size of a small walk-in closet.

The Quiet Room.

She'd been in there all night, but it didn't matter. It was stifling in there, but that didn't matter either. She couldn't feel it. She barely felt the hot sweat of her own body.

Because she felt so cold inside.

Somewhere
, she thought,
on the other side of all this cold, a message is waiting for me. If only I could see it, I'd know how to tell people. I'd know what to say.

But I can't, and I don't.

And-forgive me, Jesus-but I'm so goddamned scared
. . . .

One thing was for certain: Aunt Elaine was right. These people did not understand. Pastor, at least, seemed firm in his beliefs, so far as they went; but that wasn't nearly enough. And then Paul Weissman, with the hate like a cancer within him. Jesus would have had to be a contortionist to fit on the cross that
he
worshipped.

But they were only the smallest part of the cold within.

The crux of it, she knew, lay with The Scream.

The Scream
. Just the thought of the name made her shudder, brought the images back in full-flooding Technicolor: no longer just the Diamond Bar massacre, but Rock Aid as well, the two merged inextricably by the three factors they held in common.

The music.