The Homecoming (57 page)

“Kate. Thank God. I was afraid I’d missed you.”

“You look awful, Lemon. You’re white as a sheet. What’s wrong? Why do you have a gun?”

Lemon was looking at Rainey, who was now sitting back and staring straight ahead. Still glaring at Rainey, Lemon asked, “Kate, I’ve been calling you. So has Reed. Your phone’s off.”

“No it isn’t. It’s right here.”

She pulled her phone out of a slot on the outside of her purse, pressed the screen.

“It
is
off. I never—”

“Rainey been alone with it?”

Kate turned to look at Rainey, who was still staring straight ahead, breathing through an open mouth, looking pale and hungry.

Cain
was drilling through his brain.

this one is worse than the others he can see

“We stopped for lunch. I left him in the … Rainey, did you turn my phone off?”

“No. I never touched it.”

He was still staring straight ahead.

“Why are you here, Kate?” Lemon asked. “Don’t you have to be at WellPoint?”

“He will probably have to stay there overnight, so he wanted a few things. There’s a DVD of his parents. He thinks it’s still in the player in Sylvia’s house. Then we’re going to the clinic.”

Lemon looked at Rainey.

“Kate, I’m going to have to show you something. You may not be able to see it, but I think Rainey can. So may I?”

“Certainly. What is it?”

“You’ll see. Park the car. Come with me.”

Lemon took Rainey by the elbow, a firm grip on the bone, and steered him toward the driveway. Kate followed a few feet behind. When Lemon and Rainey reached the bottom of the stairs, the Shagreen-shaped things came into being again. Lemon could feel Rainey’s body vibrating under his grip.

this one can see kill him kill him he can see

“Kate, do you see anything on the landing?”

“On the landing?”

“Yes. Do you see anything?”

Kate stepped closer.

One of the Shagreen shapes came down a step.

Lemon put the Smith on it and said, “No.”

Rainey was staring at it, fixed and rapt.

yes take them now take them both

“I can see … you’re talking to something,” said Kate. “Is it kind of a shadow?”

“Is that all you see?”

“Maybe there are two. The sunlight looks … like it’s bending.”

“Rainey. Tell Kate what you see.”

now do it now

Rainey said nothing.

Lemon put the muzzle of the Smith up against the side of Rainey’s head. Kate reached for his hand to pull the gun away.

“Lemon, what are you
doing
?”

“Tell Kate what you see, Rainey, or I’ll kill you right where you stand.”

An acid smell was coming off Rainey. His breathing altered. He looked at Lemon with different eyes and smiled. When he spoke it wasn’t his voice. It was a woman’s voice.

“they belong to us.”

“What are they?”

“they are guardians they’re a gift.”

“A gift from whom?”

“from nothing.”

“From
nothing
?”

“yes we got them from nothing at crater sink.”

Lemon took the revolver away from Rainey’s temple.

“What would have happened if Kate had gone up those steps?”

said too much say nothing

Kate came around and looked into Rainey’s face. There was nothing human in it. He opened his mouth wide and sucked in a gulp of air, held it.

“Dear God.”

Lemon was looking up at the things on the porch. They were staring back down at him, as still as gravestones, faces blank. The same stink was coming off them too. Even Kate could smell it now.

She looked up at the porch. The light bent and wavered, and darkened, and then she saw the figures clearly. The Shagreen brothers, at least their shells. She turned back to Rainey, who was smiling up at her, and then to Lemon.

“Lemon, we have to fix this.”

Lemon’s expression was remote and cold.

“How do you figure we can fix something like this, Kate? There’s no
fixing
this.”

Kate was staring into what was in Rainey’s eyes. There was
nothing
in there. She was looking at nothing and dead-eyed nothing was staring back at her. It was in him and it would have to be driven out. She didn’t know if that was even possible.

But she had to try.

“He has to go back.”

“To WellPoint?”

“No. To Glynis Ruelle.”

the harvest we can’t go there

In Rainey’s head the voice abruptly stopped, went down deep, and hid itself. Rainey’s eyes rolled up and he dropped like a dead thing.

Lemon caught him.

“Kate, we have to call Nick.”

She shook her head.

“No,” was all she said.

Delia Cotton’s rambling Victorian house on Upper Chase Run was sealed and shuttered, as it had been ever since her disappearance last spring. It spread itself out in gables and porches and galleries and glass-walled garden rooms under the blue shadows cast by ancient live oaks and towering willows. Pools of sunlight shimmered on the rolling lawn that led up to the house. The shutters on all the windows were closed tight and padlocked. The black iron gates at the bottom of the long curved drive were chained shut.

Kate pulled the Envoy to a stop in front of the gate. Lemon got out and walked up to the chain, looked at it. Then he came back to the Envoy and got the tire iron out of the storage space under the rear loading deck. He went back to the gate, set the blade of the iron between the fence and the chain link, jerked it downwards. The chain snapped off and fell to the ground.

Lemon walked the gates back and Kate rolled the Envoy up the drive, Lemon following along on foot. She stopped the truck under the lacy gingerbread roof of the portico and turned the engine off.

Rainey had come around a while ago and was sitting up and looking at the house with a blank expression. It was as if the thing inside him had gone away and all that was left was a boy in a walking trance. Lemon came up just as Kate was stepping out of the Envoy.

“Is he awake?” he asked.

“His eyes are open. I’m not sure he’s in there. Can you get us inside?”

“Sure. The trick is to do it without bringing down the security patrol.”

Lemon walked up the stairs while Kate stood beside the truck, watching Rainey.

“Rainey. Can you hear me?”

Rainey looked at her.

“You want to send us to the harvest.”

A flat declaration without sentiment.

And a pitch-perfect accusation.

Rainey could still feel
Cain
inside his head, but the thing had gone down very deep. Rainey could feel it curled up at the base of his skull, blinking in the dark, waiting, saying nothing.

It came to him that
Cain
was afraid.

Kate ran her fingers through her hair, shook her head to clear it.

“Rainey, did those Guardians come with you?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t smell them. I think they can’t come to this house.”

“Why not?”

“You know why.”

Again, no pitch or tone.

Just a flat, emotionless statement. It was so devoid of hope or fear that Kate had to look away.

Lemon was back.

“Okay. How about this? The front door’s not locked. It’s shut, but not locked. I looked in. The place is boarded up, so it’s dark. But the power’s on. What do you want to do?”

“What we came to do.”

Lemon wasn’t happy about it. But he opened Rainey’s door and helped him down, keeping a strong grip on his left arm. Rainey was slack and silent. He offered no resistance, and that
smell
was gone.

They went up the steps to the main door and walked into the hallway. It was like stepping into a jewel box. The walls and floors were polished oak. Brass sconces lined the entrance hall and a narrow Persian runner led down to the base of a broad flight of stairs. In the dim light they could make out a galleried second floor. An enormous crystal chandelier dominated the central hall.

Halfway down the hall, double-glass doors opened onto a woodpaneled study on one side, and on the other a light and airy music room in an octagonal shape, with stained-glass windows on every wall. The windows were shuttered and the music room was dim and shadowy.

They stood at the bottom of the central staircase and listened to the old house creak and groan as the heat of the day slowly faded.

“Where to now?” asked Lemon, who had never been inside Delia Cotton’s mansion before. All he knew of her was that she was one of the famous Cotton clan, that her husband had made a fortune mining sulfur, and that she had been a stunning beauty when she was young.

Before her disappearance, she had lived alone at Temple Hill in the kind of Victorian splendor that old money favored and then one sunny afternoon she had virtually walked off the planet, never to be heard from again.

“I think it’s this way,” said Kate, leading them down a side hall that opened up onto a large paneled dining room. At the far end of the dining room French doors led back into the music room. Beyond the dining room was a huge kitchen and past that was a glass-walled solarium full of ferns and palms and orchids.

“Someone must be watering those,” said Lemon. The smell of rich, damp earth and the scents of jasmine and lavender floated in from the solarium.

“The Cotton estate keeps the house the way it was on the day Delia disappeared. It was in her will. She left a separate fund to pay for the maintenance. That’s why the power is on. The door to the basement is over here.”

They crossed the checkered tiles of the kitchen and stopped at a large wooden door painted the same buttery yellow color as the kitchen.

Rainey halted a few feet away from the door.

Kate looked back at him.

“Rainey. We have to go down.”

“I’m not going down there.”

“We have to.”

“I know what’s down there.”

“How do you know?”

“Nick took a video of it, when he was looking for the woman who lived here. I found it. There’s a wall down there, and it was like a movie was playing on it. It was a farm and people were working in the fields. It was where I went when I was in the mirror. Where Glynis lived. You want me to go back into that place and not be in this world anymore. I’m not going down there.”

Kate opened the door and stood beside it. The stairs led down into darkness, but there was a faint glow in a far corner.

“Rainey, I can’t do anything else for you. It’s all I can think of to do.”

Lemon, quite ready to force the kid, took his arm. Rainey was vibrating and his face was white, but he went down the stairs without a struggle. Inside his head he could feel
Cain
buzzing.

Although it was dark, there was enough light to let them see that the basement was a huge open space with a stone floor. Rough-cut beams ran
overhead from one side to the other, supported in mid-course with standing girders that must have been added years after the original construction. A gigantic oil-fired furnace with conduits running everywhere stood in the shadows.

But there was light in the room.

There were slit windows set into the thick stone walls just below the beams. They were boarded up and sealed with tape.

Except for one.

There was a circular hole in it, about the size of a quarter. A beam of sunlight that looked as solid as a laser was shining in through the hole. The beam was playing on a wall of stone opposite the window. There was an image there, blurry and indistinct, but moving. There was a band of dark green running along the top of the wall, and then a line of black spikes, and a field of clear blue along the bottom of the wall.

“It’s a pinhole camera,” said Kate, looking at the image. “The image is upside down.”

“What are we looking at?” asked Lemon.

“You have to work at reading it. The green line along the top is the grass outside the house. The black spikes are the fence that lines the property. And the blue is the sky. Can you see it?”

Lemon got it in a moment.

The indistinct shapes, luminous but faint, gradually emerged as an upside-down picture of what was on the other side of the window. Lawns and trees and fences and beyond the fence Upper Chase Run. The live oaks were moving with the wind and the pale blue sky had clouds gliding across it.

Rainey had backed himself into a corner as far away from the image as he could get. Lemon looked at him, and then back at Kate.

“What happens now?”

“I don’t know. Nick said the image changed into a farm, people working in the field, pine trees.”

“All I’m seeing is the street outside.”

“And that’s all you will ever see.”

They all turned at the sound of this new voice, and there was a woman standing on the basement stairs. She was tall and slender and very old. Her silver hair was long and it flowed down over her shoulders. She was wearing a Chinese robe in sky blue silk embroidered in gold thread. She was staring at Rainey with a cold eye and her mouth tight.

“Glynis Ruelle will never let that thing come into her world.”

“You’re Delia Cotton,” said Kate.

“I am. You’re Kate Walker. I knew your mother very well. Is this child Rainey Teague?”

Rainey jerked when she said his name.

“Yes,” said Kate. “Miss Cotton, I thought you had—that nobody knew where you were?”

“Perhaps. But I knew where I was, which is all that mattered. I have chosen to live this way. I have the money to make it possible. I am very weary of Niceville and the problems it presents. Such as the one presented by this creature here.”

“Where have you been?”

“Right here,” she said, making a gesture that took the entire house in. “In Temple Hill.”

“But the place is all boarded up?”

“I have become wary of windows. And basements. I hardly ever come down here.”

“Why not?”