Darkness Rising (The East Salem Trilogy) (40 page)

Tommy had never seen Carl ride so fast. It was as if he had a death wish. He’d catch him, he knew, but it wasn’t going to be easy. And one or both of them might be killed.

Coming down a hill, Tommy slowed. Carl was no longer on the road in front of him. Tommy lifted the visor of his helmet to see better. It was possible Carl had gone into a ditch somewhere.

Then he saw him speeding cross-country, or more accurately, crosscountry-club. He’d turned from the road onto the tenth fairway of The Pastures. Tommy kicked down into second gear, used a roadside hummock as a ramp, and launched himself over the hedgerow; he landed in a sand trap on the left side of the twelfth fairway, then cut across the wide swath of manicured grass to intercept Carl.

Tommy ducked to miss the low-hanging branches of the red pines lining the other side of the twelfth and dug a deep groove in the turf as he leaned hard left to keep pace with Carl, who’d moved over to the next fairway. Tommy had worked there as a caddy in high school, so he knew that Carl was speeding down and then up the hill of the par three sixteenth, which was a dead end. Tommy was now just fifty yards behind him and closing fast.

Carl nearly wiped out when he hit the green and came close to laying down the bike. Tommy jumped his bike off the slope of a bunker and
landed on the green just as Carl accelerated again, ripping into the rough and through the underbrush.

Tommy followed. Neither bike was built for off-road travel, with low ground clearances and stiff suspensions. If either one of them were to hit a log buried in the fallen leaves, he was sure to launch over the handlebars.

Getting traction was difficult. Tommy’s wheels were slipping, and he threw a rooster-tail of leaves in the air behind him. Under these conditions the massive power of his engine worked against him, like a Corvette on an inch of snow.

He kept up the chase, the bike beneath him bouncing off unseen rocks hard enough to jar him off the seat. He wrestled the handlebars, fighting to keep the bike upright while Carl slashed through the woods, now thirty feet ahead of him.

Carl burst out of the woods, bouncing onto a paved road. Tommy followed. He’d nearly caught the larger bike when Carl braked suddenly and turned hard. Tommy overshot him and skidded to a stop, yanking his handlebars to execute a U-turn as he kicked down into first, screeching rubber against the pavement as he sped up again and followed Carl.

He recognized where they were. It was the path Amos Kasden had taken the night he’d brought Julie Leonard up to kill her on Bull’s Rock Hill. He knew the way intimately, having made it part of his training runs in high school, and he still ran it from time to time. It would widen and flatten into a gravel road a hundred yards short of the top of the hill. The path was relatively straight and wide and free of fallen trees, but laced with thick roots that slowed them both down.

When Carl picked up speed, Tommy knew in an instant what he was going to do. He was headed for the top of the hill and the cliff where, beyond the precipice, Lake Atticus lay more than one hundred feet below.

Tommy’s gift, his physical intelligence, had allowed him to make instantaneous decisions on the football field. If he could visualize what he wanted to do, his body could do it.

He visualized what he wanted to do now.

He glanced at the speedometer and closed the distance between his motorcycle and Carl’s. Seventy miles an hour, eighty . . . ninety . . . Tommy could see the cliff and the darkness beyond. He was just thirty feet behind Carl, then twenty, then ten and no way to stop now—

Carl hit the edge of the cliff at ninety miles an hour, sailing out into the black abyss.

Tommy hit the cliff at ninety-two miles an hour, flying right behind Carl but diving off his bike, pushing it down.

He caught Carl’s bike in midair before it began to drop and ripped the touring bag from the sissy bar, grabbing it with both hands and rotating with as much torque as he could wield. As he descended toward the lake, he saw Carl.

He reached out his hand, hoping to grab hold of his friend, falling and falling . . .

Tommy knew of two boys who, over the last hundred years, had believed they could survive a dive into the lake from Bull’s Rock Hill. Both of them had been wrong.

As Tommy fell, he believed something far greater, that Jesus and the angels he commanded would save him. He believed it because the first page of the book had promised that whoever held the book would be protected.

Instead of hitting the surface of the water, which at that velocity and from that height would have been like hitting solid concrete, he felt two arms encircle him in midair and carry him to the near shore, where he turned to see two motorcycles—and one man—smash into the water with a horrific splash.

Tommy rose to save his friend, but the angel put a hand on him to quiet him, then said, “I’ll get him.”

Tommy watched as the angel Charlie carried Carl from the water and set him down gently. Tommy pulled his helmet off, his hair drenched with sweat despite the cold night air.

“I’m glad you understood,” Charlie said.

“I’m glad I did too,” Tommy said.

He knelt beside his friend. He undid the chinstrap of Carl’s helmet, pulling it off him. Carl coughed. Tommy looked to the angel for instruction.

“The demon that attacked him is gone,” Charlie said. “It left as you fell. But your friend is gravely hurt. His body won’t survive the damage that’s been done to it.”

“Carl?” Tommy said, cradling Carl in his arms. “Come on, man—talk to me.”

Carl looked up at him and smiled. “Hey, Tommy,” he said. “That was some ride.”

“Best one ever,” Tommy said. “The book is safe, Carl. I’ve got it. You did good. You’re free.”

“Feels great,” he said. “It’s my own fault. I messed up. So tired . . .”

“Shh,” Tommy said.

“I invited it in. I wanted to die. Can you forgive me?”

“Absolutely,” Tommy said.

“I thought maybe if I could split you and Dani up, they wouldn’t see you as such a threat. I know how they think, Tommy. You must be doing something right because they’re scared of you. Wherever two or more of you are gathered in his name . . .”

Carl coughed, spitting up blood. He wiped his mouth with his sleeve.

“I was supposed to bring them the book,” he said. “After that you’d be expendable. You have to be careful. You have no idea how strong they are. How strong it is. The demon that attacked me.”

“Shh,” Tommy said. “Don’t try to talk.”

“You can’t understand what it’s like,” Carl said. “To touch evil like that.”

“Do you know what they’re doing?” Tommy asked. “What’s going on at St. Adrian’s?”

But he couldn’t be sure Carl had heard him. Carl coughed again, and blood bubbled out from between his lips. Carl wiped it with the back of his hand, then looked up and saw the angel.

“This is Charlie,” Tommy said. “The one I was telling you about.”

Carl smiled broadly through his pain. “I’ve always wanted to meet an angel,” he said.

Charlie reached out his hand and put it gently on Carl’s forehead. “It’s nice to meet you too, Carl. Jesus is waiting for you. Esme too. You can go now.”

Carl closed his eyes and breathed his last.

Tommy held him for a moment, then laid his friend’s head on the ground and stood. He stared at the crumpled, lifeless body, and a tear rolled down his cheek.

“So the demon that attacked Carl,” Tommy said. “Was that the Wendigo?”

“No,” Charlie said. “The one that attacked Carl won’t be back, but it wasn’t the Wendigo.”

“Well then, where’s the Wendigo?” Tommy said, turning to address the angel, but when he did, he saw that he was alone.

Tommy put Carl’s touring bag on his back like a pack, took a few steps, then began to sprint. The others back at the house were in great danger. There were two demons, not one, in their midst. And the one that remained had a mission.

37.

Tommy ran hard, on hiking paths and bridle lanes, taking the same shortcuts he’d discovered as a boy. He’d walked or run through these woods for miles to get to friends’ houses or to meet the guys downtown at the diner. He knew the way. He also knew he had a long way to go. Carrying the touring bag wasn’t a problem. He’d once, on a bet, run up to Bull’s Rock carrying a teammate on his back. This was nothing.

He cut through some heavy brush that put him on a trail under the power line just beyond the southern edge of his property and scaled the tenfoot deer fence to enter the woods, approaching his house from the other side of the pond. He paused on the edge of the two-acre pond. The house was ablaze with light. He rounded the greenhouse and saw what appeared to be a bloody shirt or rag. Moving closer—startled briefly when the motiondetector turned on the floodlights in the courtyard—he saw it was a dead chicken. He turned to see the courtyard and the lawn beyond littered with dead chickens, his white-tufted Sultans and his green-black Sumatras and his French Marans, all dead. Near the gate to the chicken coop, he found the body of Elvis, his twelve-pound French Maran rooster.

“Hey, buddy. I’ll bet you put up quite a fight,” Tommy said, kneeling to lay a hand on the body. “Good boy.”

He drew his gun and entered the house.

In the empty kitchen he called out but got no response. He went to the intercom, pressed the all-call button, and asked again if anyone was home. There was a cup of tea on the counter. When he felt the cup, it was still warm.

At his kitchen computer he clicked through the video feeds of his surveillance cameras, but saw nothing moving. He was about to call up the events log when a message box signaled an intruder alert.

On the monitor he now saw something registering dark blue, growing clearer in the middle of the courtyard.

He cocked his automatic, removed Abbie’s book from the touring bag, tucked it under his arm, and stepped out into the courtyard.

The demon had the neck and face of a lizard, but the body seemed more like that of an oversized humanoid with a tail, like the hybrid creatures in the painting hanging in the museum at St. Adrian’s. Its dark skin was shiny with slime, and the odor coming off it was worse than anything Tommy had ever smelled. As the demon materialized, Tommy guessed it was perhaps twenty feet tall and, judging from the way the patio tiles beneath its feet were cracking, as heavy as an elephant. Tommy could see shriveled wings on its back, and thought that a thousand years ago this demon might have been called a dragon or a gargoyle.

If there was any good news, he decided, it was that dragons could be slain. More to the point, he held in his hand something the demon could not defend itself from, and he wasn’t thinking of the gun. The book contained the Word of the Lord and the power of Christ. He held it in front of him like a shield.

“Go!” Tommy shouted at the beast. “Leave us alone.”

The thing cringed at the sight of the book and then, with a shriek that hurt Tommy’s ears, grabbed a rake and swung it at him. Tommy turned quickly to dodge the rake, but not quickly enough. He instinctively dropped the book to protect himself, just as the rake caught the book flush and sent it flying, pages fluttering to the ground.

Tommy was puzzled, and then scared.

“Charlie?” he said as the demon took a step toward him, lowering its head as if ready to pounce. “You wanna explain that?”

Tommy fired his gun at close range, gripping the automatic with both hands to steady his aim. Each time he fired, the Wendigo moved its head, dodging the bullets quicker than Tommy would have thought possible. Tommy was distressed that he had been unable to hit the beast, but if it was bothering to dodge his bullets, it must be vulnerable. It could be hurt. Maybe it could be killed. How many shots had he fired? He’d lost count, but he believed he had one bullet left.

He backed toward the greenhouse and the garden shed, looking left and right for anything he might use as a weapon. He saw on a shelf a can of insecticide capable of shooting a jet of the toxic chemical thirty feet to destroy the nests wasps built under the eaves of a house. He popped the top off the can, gave the can a shake, and sprayed it directly at the face of the Wendigo from point-blank range just as the creature approached. The beast took a step back at first, grimacing as the spray hit it in the eyes, then rose up, wiped the fluid from its eyes with one hand, and licked its fingers, savoring the deadly chemical.

Note to self
, Tommy thought.
Buy stronger insecticide
.