Anna was half sorry she'd asked. It crossed her mind to tell the woman that, because of persistent rumors, the FBI had done an exhaustive inves-tigation of the satanic cults in America. The investigation was somewhat disappointing. They couldn't find any. Like razor blades in Halloween apples, satanic cults with black Sabbaths and infant sacrifices were an urban myth. In the end she didn't waste her breath. Mrs. Dwavne would not have been comforted, only alarmed that the belief system on which her world was based was being challenged. A grand battle between Lucifer and God with humankind as cannon fodder was more appealing than the unglamorous responsibility of dealing on a daily basis with petty, mean human evil.
"Tell me about Beth's dreams," Anna said. She had little belief in the value of dream interpretation as a crime-solving tool-or a tool to solving the subconscious-but a scared girl might just tell things that were true as if they were only dreams, a way of communicating the forbidden.
"They're demonic," Mrs. Dwayne said unsurprisingly, given her ear-lier revelation. "Beth wakes screaming and crying. She wet the bed- something she hasn't done since she was three years old. Mr. Sheppard was firm about that. It's just a matter of choosing the good over the evil. Beth talked about darkness and crying things and being sorry. She asked God to forgive her over and over. She dreamed of a wolf howling. Dreams of slaughter as in the end of days."
"May I talk with Beth? I'd like to see her."
Mrs. Dwayne shook her head. "No. Mr. Sheppard thinks it would only confuse the girls further. He says they are to stay at prayers until God sends his forgiveness."
"For what?"
"We don't know," Mrs. Dwayne wailed, if wailing can be done in a whisper.
Anna truly, deeply, sincerely wanted to smack her upside her little sheep's head. Either the woman was as foolish as Robert Proffit was bright, or whatever gleam of good sense she'd once had had been sluiced away when her brain was washed.
"Why did you want to talk to me?" Anna asked sharply.
Mrs. Dwayne looked at her blankly.
"Seriously," Anna went on. "You followed me out. You are clearly agi-tated, afraid of being caught. It must have been important, yet you tell me nothing but ghost stories and dreams. Why did you want to talk to me?"
A moment's silence fell between them, a balm to Anna's ears and spirit. Mrs. Dwayne's eyes filled with tears. Anna was unmoved.
"I wanted you to help," she blurted out finally.
"I can't," Anna said bluntly. "Your daughter's in a living hell, another girl is missing and there's not a damn thing I can do about it. You know these girls. You talk to them. You want to keep secrets from me, fine. But without you, without being able to talk to Beth, what do you expect me to do? Arrest Beelzebub on loitering charges and interrogate him?"
Anna dropped the anger as suddenly as she had taken it up. It had done its work. Mrs. Dwayne was at least awakened from her trance of victimhood. Gently, Anna said, "Help me. Help me find out."
For the briefest moment Anna thought she'd gotten through, then the woman bleated, "Mr. Sheppard-" and feeling her way like someone in a blinding sandstorm, she turned to the house.
"What's his first name?" Anna called after her.
Stopping, she looked back in surprise. "Mr. Sheppard's?"
"Yeah. What's his first name?"
"Dwayne," the woman said.
"That would have been my best guess," Anna said.
Mrs. Dwayne fled toward the chapel door.
eleven
Solitude had changed since Heath had broken her back. Once she'd loved it, craved it, savored it. Now she craved it, but when it was given her, she found her feelings in conflict. Before, she'd not known why people were scared to be alone. She wished she could have gone to the grave in happy ignorance of this knowledge.
Still and all she was enjoying it, possibly out of sheer perverse will-fulness. Gwen had taken the Cushman scooter-a retro-styled aqua and white one with matching helmet-and left the Rollin' Roost to scoot the five or so miles into Loveland. Her excuse was groceries but for that she could have taken the RV. The truth was she and Heath needed time apart, just a breather. Only in solitude could certain places in the psyche renew themselves. Or so Gwen was fond of saying, and so Heath had once believed. The other truth was that Heath's Aunt Gwen loved her scooter. On it she became the wild red-haired American girl who'd ridden madcap through the streets of Florence in her college days, the girl who'd broken hearts, drunk too much wine, studied art and medicine, gotten her own heart broken and come home to Tulane University in Louisiana to become a healer of women.
Though a seventy-one-year-old wild woman on a scooter in a herd of SUVs scared Heath witless, she never said anything.
That could change, she thought as she looked at her watch. The sun had gone behind the mountains, the sky was drifting from blue to green to the soft gray that invited the first of night's stars, and Gwen had yet to return. Refreshingly, Heath noted, she was concerned mostly with her aunt's welfare. Being self-involved was more tiring than one would think.
Sipping a mediocre but functional Merlot, she watched the purest fade of light in the east where night seeped out over the plains. A climber by inclination and trade-she'd taught at the wilderness skills training center in Colorado Springs for the past seven years-Heath had given the earth's flat places short shrift. Unless they had a deep cave one might climb down in, what possible good were they?
With wheels instead of crampons she would have to make her peace with a relatively two-dimensional world. That or get a job as an elevator operator, she thought wryly.
Idly wondering if there were even any elevator operators left, she drank again, then lit a cigarette. Wiley, lying half a dozen feet from her chair, chin on paws, raised an eyebrow. Like most animals of good sense, he didn't like the smell of smoke.
"Don't start," Heath said and took a drag. She was smoking a little too much, drinking a little too much, but tonight they were comparatively happy excesses. "Joyous addicts are less tiresome than morbid addicts," she said to the dog. He heaved a great and weary sigh and fell over on his side. One needn't even be an anthropomorphist to assign attitudes to Wiley. A cell phone Heath had been resisting the temptation to use to check on her aunt tootled. Gwen had it trained to play Dixieland. It was her aunt asking permission to stay an hour later to attend a premiere in Loveland's burgeoning arts district.
Worry over her aunt laid to rest, worry over herself drowned, Heath lit the kerosene lamp, poured a third glass of wine and settled into the uni-verse. Darkness pooled in the east, bled west to the mountains. Night was complete. Heath was in a pleasant half-dreaming state, self-hypnotized by the steady fire of the lamp, when Wiley began to growl; the mean kind of growl that warns of intent to make the bite worse than the bark. At once alert, if not fully sober, Heath ordered him quiet. He'd come to stand guard near her chair and she closed her fist in the prickling fur of his ruff more to reassure herself than to restrain him.
Nothing.
"Coyotes," she said. Because a pack of these most adaptable canines would tear apart a domestic dog, even one as brave and fierce as Wiley thought he was, she took his leash from her saddlebag, clipped one end to his collar and tied the other firmly around the arm of her chair.
He didn't growl again but neither did he relax. Heath couldn't either. It was time to go in. She was leaning down to untangle her lap rug from beneath her wheels when a faint trickle of sound flowed into the camp-site. High pitched, barely audible, it came from all directions and none. Voices heard from a distant playground. One at which the games were of pain and fear.
She felt the dog go rigid under her hand. "Shh," she whispered. The voices grew louder. Children's voices. "Please, please, please. No." The sound trailed off and Heath leaned forward unconsciously, trying to follow it. Again it swelled. "Please leave us alone. Please. Go away. Leave us alone." That was the limpet's voice, she was sure of it.
"Beth!" she called into the darkness, then waited.
"Leave us alone."
"Beth! Come out where I can see you." Heath squinted into the dark-ness that had wound tightly around her camp. Mindlessly staring into the lamp had blinded her and phantom flames followed wherever she looked.
"Leave us alone." This so small, so weak, as if the child speaking-not Beth, Heath thought but wasn't sure-was dying or fading away. Then, sudden and so clear, Heath screamed: "Leave us alone or I'll kill you. I swear I will."
The kerosene lamp on the picnic table exploded. Gobbets of fire flew into the air, rivers of fire poured over the tabletop and down onto the benches. Wiley shrieked and tried to run but he was tethered to the chair. As he hit the end of the leash, the force pulled the wheelchair over, pulled Heath into the fire running liquid beneath the table. Wiley was burning. The lap robe flamed up. The acrid bite of kerosene mixed with the smell of burning wool.
Heath could see nothing but living fire. Her eyes and the backs of her eyes and her brain were burning. Wiley was barking, high and wild and desperate.
Fear is essentially a tardy emotion, demanding the luxury of time. Apocalypse was happening too fast for it to take root. Not much giving a damn whether her worthless legs burned or not, Heath began pulling on the leash, reeling in Wiley. Her hands were on his fur, closed into fists. She pulled him to her chest and beneath her chest and smothered the flames that danced with such unholy glee along his back and left side.
A lifetime's worth of reflexes came to bear; she was kicking free of the burning lap rug. It was a shock when nothing moved. With a screamed curse, she grabbed at the blanket and threw it from her and her dog.
The end of the world didn't take as long as she'd thought it might. Within a heartbeat or two the fire was out. The kerosene had burned itself up. Neither table nor benches had caught. The world, presuming there still was one, was black and utterly silent.
"Don't make us do it," hissed from the void, was made more terrible by the children lost within it. "Don't make us do it!" Louder now. They were coming, the childish voices with their rain of fire.
Heath could not regain her chair; could not even see her chair. Had she miraculously been reseated, she hadn't the wherewithal to fiddle with ramp and sliding door. Murmuring four-letter words like panicked endearments into the ears of the dog, she unhooked the leash from his collar and, Wiley clutched to her chest, she wriggled commando-style underneath the RV. Once there, she curled herself around Wiley as best she could with no bend in her knees, no tuck in her thighs, and buried her face in his fur.
Both were whimpering.
Voices turned to laughter, unholy laughter of insane children, circling around the RV. Wiley struggled to get free. He barked to put the fear of god into whatever demons were attacking his mistress. Heath wouldn't let him go.
The laughter swelled, ebbed, drifted, cut. The sound of feet pattered around wheel to wheel. "Kill it!" a child screamed, and a stick or knife jabbed Heath in the back. "Kill it! Kill it! Make it die." Again and again the stick jabbed at her. Little girls tormenting a caged cripple and a burned dog. Footsteps raining on the hard-packed earth.
"Leave us the fuck alone!" Heath screamed.
"Leave us alone," a little girl's voice mocked.
Dust and the smell of diesel forced its way past the stench of burned hair stinging Heath's nostrils. RVs burned like tinder, she remembered, their petroleum-based parts evaporating into toxic gases or melting into searing blobs. She hoped the fireworks, at least, were over.
The poking stopped.
Footsteps, laughter, taunts stopped. It took Heath a while-moments, minutes, she wasn't sure-before she realized quiet had returned. She lis-tened till her skull hurt with the effort. Her eyes had readjusted from the fire and she could see a faint difference between the starlit dirt outside and the shadow in which she lay. Wiley whined. She forced herself to loosen her grip lest, in an overabundance of fear and protectiveness, she smother him. She didn't let go of his collar. Whatever had visited the campground was too evil to be driven away by one pure-hearted dog.
Listening, staring at the crushed horizon remaining to her, she waited. Crawling out was not an option, not till the sun rose and drove all the creatures of the night back into their lairs.
This decision was a wise one. The footsteps were coming back, coming back for her and for the dog. Heath chose not to be taken as a whimper-ing crippled lady. One thing Colorado had plenty of was rocks. Feeling around she found a jagged chunk of granite with a sharp edge, half again as big as her fist.
Wiley sensed the change in her. He eased from beneath her, the hair on his back running stiff and spiky beneath her hand. A killing rumble grew in his chest.
"When I say, Wiley," Heath whispered into his ear. He froze in a half-crouch as if he understood. Sly, whispering, cold as snake's scales the foot-steps slithered over the sandy soil. Around the RV Soft as moccasined feet, bare feet, cat feet, little girls' feet.
Near the front tire on the driver's side they stopped.
"Now," Heath screamed and both she and her dog struck long and low from beneath the vehicle.
twelve
Anna was having second thoughts about this visit. It was after nine. People were, if not already in bed, settled in for the night. She'd intended to come earlier but had gotten roped into an acrimonious campground dispute over a prime site and couldn't decently get away till eight. Having driven too far to give it up, she pulled into the dusty little RV camp where Dr. Littleton and her niece were reputed to be staying.
