Valley of the Shadow (32 page)

    Meanwhile, someone had turned on the hallway light. Devon felt dizzy; his knees buckled and his body fell limp.

    A voice said softly in his ear, “I’ve got you, kid. I’ve got you.”

    Devon fought through a haze of images and memories. He wondered if he had passed out. He found himself lying on the couch in the living room. There was a bustle of activity around him. A figure loomed over him. A stranger.

    But he looked vaguely familiar. A big white guy. Devon thought he might have recognized him, but the memory was hazy. And there was Hayden’s wife and daughter, along with some other woman. A redhead. Their faces seemed concerned.

    And his mother sat beside him, her eyes red and her hands trembling. “Baby? Are you okay?”

    “Mom?” Devon tried to sit up. “What are you doing here?”

    “We’ve been looking for you.” Her tears began again. “We had to find you before you went and did something stupid.”

    The big man spoke. “You know where you are?”

    “Yeah . . . I think so.” Devon tried to recall the specific events that led him here. Much of it was a jumble. “I… uh, I was in juvie.”

    “You escaped yesterday. You remember any of that?”

    Devon groaned. His head was throbbing. “Some dude… was… He made me… wanted me to… to kill…” Devon felt the room spinning. He lay back and felt himself sinking into darkness. He tried to tell them that he hadn’t wanted to hurt anyone. He had to tell them about the Pale Man. It was his fault. He had to tell them, but he was too tired.

    “. . . ghosts . . . in my mirror…”

“WHO?” CONNER’S MIND
was spinning. “Wait until who gets here?”

    Owen moved behind Conner. “Let me kill him, and then I’ll go back out and find the girl. Either way, we’ll still have two of ’em.”

    Conner craned his neck, trying to see if Owen had a gun or if the guy was just planning to kill Conner with his bare hands. “Uh…” He tried to sound nonchalant but his voice was still shaky. “If it’s all the same to you… I just as soon wait.”

    Mrs. Bristol stared at Conner for a moment. “I know you saw Howard. Met him like you said. During your heart attack. I believe you.”

    “You do, huh?” Conner said.

    Mrs. Bristol seemed to get a glow in her eyes. A smile spread across her face. More like a psychotic grin. “You see, Mr. Hayden, I have a kind of sixth sense.”

    “Sixth sense?”

    “Ever since I was a young girl. Sort of an insight into the next dimension.”

    “I kind of got the feeling you were a little paranormal.”

    Mrs. Bristol smiled but ignored his comment. “When I was twelve, I nearly drowned in the pond we had out back. Out here in the woods. It was in the winter and I fell through the ice. I don’t know how long I was under, but my father pulled me out.”

    She went to the window and peered into the darkness. “I remember seeing the whole thing as it happened. I could see my father running with me in his arms. I could hear his frantic calls for help. I could see him crying. Tears, big and fat on his red cheeks. He made it here to the cabin. Farmhands used to stay here during harvest time. And he tried to breathe life back into my lungs.”

    Conner felt a strange tightness in the pit of his stomach. He took a breath. “I take it he succeeded.”

    Mrs. Bristol twirled a strand of hair as she stared out the window. Like a schoolgirl. “It was all so clear. I could see every detail. Hear every sound. I found myself outside in the snow, though I wasn’t cold. I wandered through the forest until I saw him.”

    “Him?” Conner frowned. “Who?”

    She turned and looked at Conner, her eyes almost alive with excitement. “The pale man. Out in the woods. He called to me. Said he was waiting for me.”

    “The pale man?” Conner said.

    Mrs. Bristol nodded. “He was beautiful… like a guardian angel. He said I had to go with him. But I didn’t want to. I could hear my father weeping and I wanted to go back to him.”

    “So what did he do—the pale man? He just let you go?”

    She looked down. “He said I could go back if I chose to. He said he’d let me live but that there’d be a reckoning someday. Someday he would come again. And if he did, I would have to do what he said.”

    Conner glanced at Katie. Her face showed complete disbelief, but she didn’t say anything. He looked back at Mrs. Bristol. “So is this why you’re doing this? Your pale man? He’s telling you to do this?”

    “Yes,” she said. Then her face grew solemn and she shook her head. “Oh, but it’s not what you think.”

    “How do you know what I think?”

    She turned back to the window. “You see, twenty-four years ago, when Owen was just a boy, he got sick. Very sick. And that’s when Pale Man showed up again. He was outside, at the edge of the woods. He said he was coming for my son. He said that was the price I had to pay for my life all those years ago. He was going to take my son.”

    She looked at Owen and her eyes welled with tears. “But I couldn’t let him. I couldn’t give him my son. So I begged him. I pleaded for him to take me instead, but he wouldn’t. He wouldn’t do it.”

    Conner glanced up at Owen Bristol, towering over him like a grizzly bear. Two months ago he would have written the old woman off as a superstitious, ghost-chasing nutcase. Or certifiably psychopathic. But not now.

    “So what did you do?” Conner’s voice was trembling. “I mean, obviously you talked him out of it.”

    Mrs. Bristol stared at Conner, her lips tightening. Almost as if struggling within herself. Probably debating how much to tell him. Conner could sense the battle. That part of her wanted—maybe needed—to tell someone. But part of her resisted the urge, warning her to use caution.

    “He said I needed a substitute for my son.”

    Conner’s voice grew shakier. “What… what do you mean?” Was this why the girls had been kidnapped? Some kind of sacrifice? Was that what he was going to be now?

    “A substitute, Mr. Hayden,” she said. A kind of calm had come over her now, as if letting an outsider in on their dark family secret had given her a sense of peace. “Someone… someone to die in his place.”

    “Someone to… So… so you killed someone else to save your son?”

    “What would you have done?” She moved toward Conner and leaned her face close to his. “Hmm? What would you have done faced with that choice?”

    “You’re a murderer,” Conner said. He looked from her to Owen. “You can try to explain it any way you want, but you’re… just murderers.”

    “Really?” Mrs. Bristol’s eyes grew cold. “What would you do if your child was about to die and you could save him by some horrible deed? What would you do to save him?” She straightened up again. “What wouldn’t you do?”

    Conner felt his breath leave him. The question hung in the air like a noose, wrapping around his neck. His thoughts flashed to Matthew, drowning in their pool. What would he have done to save his son? If someone had offered him the same kind of bargain, what choice would he have made? At the time, he knew, he would have jumped at such a deal. He would have done anything to get Matthew back. Anything.

    Mrs. Bristol was chuckling now. “No need to answer. You know you would have done exactly the same thing. You’re no better than me.”

    Conner blinked. “So who did you kill?”

    “Carter.” Her eyes traced a path around the cabin as if barely able to recall the name. “Morris Carter. He was a drunk and a wife beater and he didn’t deserve to live.”

    “I see. And you determined that?”

    She looked at Conner and smiled. “Some folks, the world’s just better off without.”

    “So, what? You just brought him here and killed him?”

    “We didn’t have much time. We needed to bring Pale Man a substitute before the day was over. October 30. Twenty-four years ago. He met us here. He wanted to see it done. He wanted to watch.”

    Conner closed his eyes and fought back a wave of nausea. He was getting light-headed. His voice was weak. “But that was twenty-four years ago.”

    “The price was higher. Pale Man had demanded only one life for mine, but it was to be the life of my son. So now he had increased the price. Morris Carter’s death bought my son just one more year of life.”

    “A year? You’ve been doing this for twenty-four years? Kidnapping innocent people and… and you bring them here to… to kill them?”

    “Innocent?” Mrs. Bristol pointed a trembling finger at Katie, who was hissing profanities at the Bristols through her tears and spitting at them. “There are no innocent victims here, Mr. Hayden. We’ve been very careful to find only those who deserve to die. Thieves and drug dealers. People who peddle in filth. People who abuse their children and go free on some technicality!” She closed her eyes a moment and took a breath. “We’re doing the world a favor by getting rid of these sorts of people. And there’s plenty of them left. We never seem to run out!”

    Owen moved behind Katie, grabbed a handful of her hair, and snapped her head back. “You know what this one did? You think she’s just an innocent victim?” He grimaced. “She’s a partier, this one. Just loves to drink. Can’t get enough. Trouble is she likes to drive after she’s had a few too many. She nearly ran me off the road last spring.”

    “That’s no reason to kill her.” Conner tried to stay calm.

    “It’s good enough for me,” Owen said. “She’s got no sense in her. No common decency. It’s only a matter of time before she kills someone.”

    Conner shook his head. “If you just need one life to buy you another year, why did you have two girls here?”

    “My Howard,” Mrs. Bristol said. “We needed to bring two souls this year. One for Owen and one for my husband. He’s been in that coma for nearly a whole year, and Pale Man said they would give him back to me.”

    “You better hope so,” Conner said. “Because I’ve seen what’s waiting for him if he dies. What’s waiting for all three of you.”

    Owen swung an arm and backhanded Conner across the face. Conner’s head jerked backward. His jaw throbbed. Blood dripped down onto his jacket. The room seemed to swirl as he teetered on the brink of consciousness.

    “He’ll be here soon,” Mrs. Bristol said. “Pale Man. And when he comes, we’ll be done with you.”

    As if on cue, Owen hushed them all and went to the window. Conner could hear Katie’s soft sobs, but beneath that, outside…

    He heard the faint crunch of footsteps.

THE HOUSE SHIFTED
under Mitch’s feet, as if the Keeper was trying to pick the entire structure up. Mitch burst through the back door and tumbled out into the darkness of the cavern. He crashed onto the cold, hard rock floor and rolled as far as he could, then crawled away on all fours.

    He glanced back to see the black shape of the Keeper thrashing about in the midst of a pile of rubble that was once his father’s house. It used its enormous claws to dig through the wood and stones as if searching for Mitch.

    Mitch felt his way up a rocky incline, smashing his hands and fingers against the stones. A light was coming from somewhere. Maybe the light he’d seen earlier when he’d first come upon the room inside the cavern. But then somehow the one room had morphed into an entire house with Mitch inside it.

    The whole thing had seemed like the shifting realities inside a dream. But the light seemed to be coming from the house—or what was left of it. And it was quickly growing dimmer. Mitch could see a small opening, maybe three feet in diameter, about ten feet farther up the incline. He scrambled up the rocky wall and tossed another glance back at the beast.

    The Keeper rose up. Mitch heard the horny protrusions on whatever head it might have had scrape against the top of the cave. He suddenly felt exposed. The beast turned toward Mitch and opened its jaws in another deafening roar. It lumbered toward him as Mitch pulled himself up and into the small opening.

    Mitch found himself crawling through utter blackness. The rock beneath his hands was cool and relatively smooth. The cavern shook as the beast pounded against the wall. Rocks broke loose and tumbled around Mitch. He could hear the sound of scraping and pounding behind him.

    Suddenly the darkness was pierced again by a soft glow up ahead. The tunnel began to descend sharply and Mitch felt himself sliding down while the beast raged behind him.

    He tumbled out of the tunnel into a second, much smaller cavern. The light was coming from somewhere above him. Scraped and bruised, Mitch climbed to his feet and looked up. And gasped.

    This cavern was maybe twenty yards across and in the middle stood a large, wooden cross. Its base was buried in a mound of rocks and dirt. A dim, bluish light seemed to shine around the cross and filled the cave. And Mitch could see the arms and torso of a figure on the other side, suspended on the wooden crossbeam.

    The cavern shook and rocks crashed down. On the other end of the tunnel, the Keeper roared and pounded against the rock wall, hunting its prey.

    Mitch circled the edge of the cave to the other side of the cross. There he could see the figure more clearly.

    If the man had a face, Mitch couldn’t make it out. Partly because it was shrouded in shadows and long, blood-soaked hair, and partly because it was misshapen by bruises and lacerations. Blood soaked his beard. His lip was swollen. The flesh of his chest, abdomen, and thighs was torn open, and strips of skin hung off like ribbons, dripping with blood.

    He was held to the wood with thick iron spikes through his hands and feet and by coarse ropes lashed around his arms. His whole body seemed to quiver, as if convulsing. After a moment, the man’s arms shook and he pulled himself up slightly. Mitch could hear a gurgled rasp of a breath. Faint. Then the body fell limp again.

    The vertical timber dripped with long trails of blood. The rocks at its base were covered as well.

    The muffled pounding and roars of the Keeper grew louder. The fury of the beast was dislodging larger chunks of rock from the cave ceiling. Mitch knew it would be only a matter of minutes before the creature brought the entire cavern down.