Prayer (36 page)

I sniffed my fingers, which to my relief still smelled of her. I could hardly imagine that, could I? Sara had to be real. Surely she was still waiting upstairs in my bedroom and all I had to do was fix the fuse and go back to bed with her.

As I turned to go and look for the fuse box, the lights came back on. I looked around the room and found there was very little that was as different as perhaps it ought to have been. I blew out the candle, picked up the gun, tucked it back under the waistband of my trousers, and trudged back upstairs, not really knowing what I expected to find there.

But Sara was exactly where I had left her, still sitting up in bed, her head resting in her forearms. She looked up as I came in the room and bit her lip, and I saw that her exquisite face was pale and full of concern.

“You fixed it then?”

“The fuse?” I said innocently. Surely she would leave if I told her the truth. Anyone sensible would. “Yes. I fixed it.”

She nodded. “You were a long time doing it.”

I shrugged. “I’m not an electrician.”

“I thought I heard you talking to someone.”

I took off my trousers and my shorts, and climbed into bed beside her, smiling as if nothing were wrong and my heart did not feel as if it were about to appear on the roof of my mouth.

“Myself. I always talk to myself when I’m trying to fix something. Mostly it’s just swearing on account of the fact that I don’t really know what the fuck I’m doing.”

“Kevin was the same. My second husband. He couldn’t change a lightbulb without swearing like a trooper. I think he took the failure of all household appliances personally. As if they’d insulted him.”

“I can understand that. We can leave the light on if you like.”

“Yes, please,” she said, throwing back the covers to reveal her nakedness. “Yes, I think you should see it all.”

M
aking love to her took my mind off a lot of other things, the way it does—for both of us, I shouldn’t wonder. It was a way of forgetting and I badly needed to forget almost everything that had happened to me. From the noise Sara made while my impudent tongue played around with her, I don’t suppose she was thinking very much about what had persuaded her to drive all the way down to Galveston. In fact, I don’t think she was thinking about very much at all. She just lay there on the bed in front of me, her back arched like a longbow, trembling with helpless abandon as if possessed by some insistent, gentle spirit or like a beautifully undulating landscape that was being affected by some long, slow earth tremor. When I was satisfied that she was satisfied, I climbed back up between her cool creamy thighs and, with her kisses smothering my intimately perfumed face, I took care of my own pleasure.

When I’d finished, I yawned loudly.

She kissed me fondly on the head and then added, “You may put the light out now, if you want.”

“Are you sure?” I wasn’t sure about this myself. I feared the darkness as if I were a small child.

“I’m here with you. What can happen?”

She was right. What indeed? What could possibly happen that had not already happened? And if anything else did happen, then at least we would try to meet it together. At least that was my thought, although I was trying very hard not to think of anything much other than Sara and when I was going to fuck her again.

I leaned across the bed and switched out the bedside light. I thought of the diocesan house and how long it had stood on that street and how it had withstood the battering of Hurricane Ike and the biblical flood that had followed. Could I withstand as much? It was beginning to seem unlikely. Nelson Van Der Velden’s calmly uttered threat that I would be dead before twenty-four hours had elapsed was beginning to seem quite possible—my heart already felt like someone had used a defibrillator on me while the blood in my veins must have been pure adrenaline. I thought of Philip Osborne and Peter Ekman and what had happened to them, but somehow I gradually fell into a restless, troubled sleep that was full of shadows and dread and foreboding, not to mention Uncle Bill and the loathsome creature I had wrestled with in Mr. Hindemith’s overgrown garden.

My heart had stopped beating altogether. I was quite certain of that. I had no breath, nor the possibility of breathing. I tried to cry out for help, but not the least sound came from my mouth. There was just a silent, cold, all-enveloping blackness that threatened to stifle me as though I were at the bottom of a very deep well, with something pulling me down into thick and slimy silt. I tried to push myself up and found myself sinking deeper, with strong, sharp hands pulling at my feet and then my legs. I kicked hard and tried to swim my way back to the surface that I instinctively knew was life, for I had the strong sensation that if I did not quickly escape the place I was in, I would certainly die. I sank and kicked again. And this time I felt a strong jolt and, taking a deep loud breath that could have been heard out at sea, I knew I was suddenly alive and awake.

Seconds passed and I just lay there panting loudly like a dog and enjoying the feel of air in my chest, which was lathered with sweat. A ringing in my ears gave way to what was happening in the room.

Sara had got up and was washing herself in the bathroom. But I knew I was wrong about that because I turned over and, finding some strands of her long hair on my pillow, stretched out my hand and patted her small skull. In the very same moment that I put my hand there, I thought her head seemed a little colder than I was expecting so that I half wondered if a window was open; then I heard someone moving again in the bathroom—a toilet flushed and then a tap was running—and, leaning across her inert, sleeping body, I fumbled in the darkness for the Walther I had left on the bedside table.

“Who’s there?” I asked.

Sara stirred underneath my body and then seemed to shrink against my side. She moaned a little, too, as if she was already crying with fear.

“Ssssh,” I whispered close to what felt like her ear. “There’s someone in the bathroom.”

Her tall, muscular body hardened noticeably as if it was now prepared for flight.

“Who’s there?” I asked again, louder now because I had the gun in my hand.

“I didn’t mean to wake you, Giles,” said a quiet but cheery voice from in the bathroom—it was Sara’s voice. “It’s just me. You were having a nightmare, I think. Your legs were moving like you were a dog in a race. Hey, I’ll be there in a minute. I’m afraid I couldn’t find the light.” She hesitated. “Wait a minute. I think this must be it.”

As it was of old, in the beginning and in the Bible.

“No,” I cried. “Don’t.”

Even as she spoke, I felt with absolute, revolting certainty the awful knowledge of a different human figure next to me—not hers—and then a cold, clammy mouth descended onto my hip. I leaped from the bed as if it contained a rattlesnake; hearing a loud cry of horror that turned out to be my own, I flew to the bathroom as Sara switched on the light. Turning back to face the bed, I fired three shots at the space I had just vacated.

“Holy shit,” she yelled, cowering on the floor and covering her ears with her hands.

I stood there staring at the bed that the bathroom light now revealed to be empty, unless you count the three bullets that must have been lodged somewhere in the mattress. Gunsmoke and some feathers from an exploded pillow hung in the pungent air, which seemed to be mixed with something earthy and old. The smell reminded me of an exhumed grave I’d once witnessed.

“What the hell?” screamed Sara. “Have you gone fucking crazy?”

“I don’t know,” I replied, trembling with fear. “I don’t know.”

“Well, that’s honest, I suppose. Jesus Christ. You might have fucking killed me. And with my own gun.”

I frowned. “What do you mean, killed you? You were in here. I was aiming at whatever the fuck was in the bed.”

She paused, becoming less irate now as she realized that I had an automatic weapon in my hand that was cocked and ready to fire. “Please, Giles. Please put down the gun. It’s making me very nervous.”

“Believe me, you can’t be nearly as nervous as I am.”

“Put it down and tell me what happened.”

After a very long moment, I eased the hammer down to make the gun safe, flicked on one of the Walther’s two safeties, and placed the gun back onto the bedside table. Then, as best as I was able—I was still shaking with fear—I told Sara what had happened.

“You must have dreamed it,” she said.

“Oh yeah? In the same way you dreamed that someone had slept in our bed?”

“You’d been asleep. So perhaps you were still confused. Suppose that it had been me in the bed.”

“Sorry, but I’m still trying to deal with the idea that if it wasn’t you then what the fuck was it? Jesus. What the fuck was that?” I wiped my arms with my hands—I could still feel the touch of the thing on me.

“What do you think it was?” she asked calmly.

“I don’t know, but I am certain of this: it was something—repulsive. I had my fucking arms around it thinking it was you for about ten seconds. And I felt something bite my ass as I got out of bed.”

“Here, let me see.”

I twisted around to look at my bare ass. There was a large human-size bite on my hip. The sight was enough to make my hair stand on end. My heart did a pretty good job of trying to stand on end, too.

“Christ,” said Sara, shaking her head. “That couldn’t have been me.”

“I didn’t say it was you, did I?”

Horrified, I staggered weakly into the bathroom and put my head under the cold tap for a long moment. The cold water seemed to slow my feverish brain. While I kept my head under the water, I felt Sara’s hand on the bite mark.

Sara turned away from looking at my ass to examine the catch on the bathroom door.

“You don’t think you could have done it on this?” she asked. “When you came barging in here?”

“It’s a bite, not a scratch.”

“Sure about that?” She shrugged. “Could be a bruise. Perhaps you banged yourself on the door?”

“Does that look like a bruise to you?”

She touched my behind with her finger. “No, not really.”

“Listen, sweetheart, it’s my ass and I can still feel whatever it was—its goddamn clammy mouth on me. I just shot the fucking mattress on account of that feeling. What happened to me just now—it was like being in bed with a corpse.”

“And you thought that could be me?” She shrugged. “That is a natural mistake for anyone to make, I suppose.” She folded her arms and looked thoughtful for a moment. “How much do you know about this house anyway?”

“What’s to know? Look, I thought you were a scientist. Surely you don’t believe in all that
Amityville Horror
shit.”

“I don’t. I just wanted to hear you say you didn’t believe it.”

“I don’t know what I fucking believe.”

“But there is something you’re not telling me.”

There was, of course. But trying to figure out where to begin convinced me that it was probably a lot better not to begin at all.

“No,” I said. “I think I told you everything when I was in your office at UT. And you didn’t believe it then. About the only thing that’s happened since is that I’ve been to the church. The one I told you about, where they pray for the destruction of God’s enemies. And now they’re praying for me.” I shrugged. “As a matter of fact, I was there earlier this evening and the pastor—Nelson Van Der Velden—he told me that I had twenty-four hours before the Lord’s angel of death came for my soul.”

“And you believe
that
?”

“Like I said, I don’t know what to believe. But things have happened tonight that I can’t explain.”

“Such as?”

“Just—things I can’t explain.”

“Not yet, you can’t. But just because we can’t see a rational explanation doesn’t mean there isn’t one.”

I sighed. “Sara, I work for the FBI. Before that, I trained as a lawyer, okay? I was weaned on admissible evidence. So you don’t have to give me the skeptic’s notes on this. I’ve got a pretty hard head of my own.”

Sara seemed to think better of making her next remark; instead, she said, “It won’t help to argue about this.”

I nodded. “You’re right. But please try to remember how you felt when you saw the bed, Sara.” I pressed both hands on my chest as if trying to calm my heart. It didn’t work. “That’s how I’m feeling to the power of ten right now.”

“Meaning what? That I was making something out of nothing?”

“I didn’t say that. Listen, I think we’ve each had a severe fright. My nerves are in shreds.”

“Well, mine aren’t much better,” she said. “This past week has been a fucking nightmare.”

“There’s no monopoly on nightmares,” I said. “Not here.” I took her hand. “What I mean is that there’s no point in taking this out on each other. We need to keep calm so we can figure out what to do.”

We were both of us naked and Sara went into the bedroom to fetch her T-shirt and put it on.

“Well, I think I know what to do,” she said, glancing around the floor.

“You do?”

“Can you remember where my panties are?”

“They’re downstairs. I took them off when we were on the sofa.” I frowned. “You’re getting dressed? Why?”

“Yes,” she said. “I’m getting dressed because I’m leaving. I can’t stay in this crazy house tonight. Not anymore. Not after all that’s happened.”

“You say ‘crazy house’ in a way that makes me believe you think it’s me who’s crazy, not the house,” I said.

“No, I don’t think that at all,” she said. “But I probably will think you’re crazy if you don’t leave with me.” She shook her head. “You can’t stay here.”

“You think it’s any better out there?” I pointed at the window. “Outside? Anywhere else?”

She frowned. “But there is something you’re not sharing with me, isn’t there? It might just be that you don’t want to scare me any more than I’m scared already, but we both know that you didn’t get those scratches on a fucking tree.”

“If I tell you everything, I don’t want you going into a tailspin,” I said.

“Oh, God,” she said, looking sick. “I was just bluffing in the hope there isn’t any more to know. But there is more, isn’t there?”

I nodded. “Yes, I’m afraid there is. But mostly I’m just afraid.”