The Trilogy of the Void: Boxed Set: 1-3
Author: Peter Meredith
Date: 2015-05-05 04:00:00+00:00
Description: In all the deepest pits and in all the rank, vile dungeons that make up the illusion of Hell, no fiend is more feared than the dread demon, and for good reason. These pitiless monsters feed on bile and blood, they lap up the screams of the damned, they corrupt and destroy and they hate with an unrelenting fury. And to release one upon the world is the ultimate in black sin. When Commander William Jern and his wife Gayle are given an opportunity to move into one of the spacious Colonial homes on the Village Green, they jump at the chance. Only the Jern's new dream home quickly becomes an icy ni

The Trilogy of the Void

The Complete Boxed Set

By Peter Meredith

Copyright 2015 Peter Meredith

Kindle Edition

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Fictional works by Peter Meredith:

A Perfect America

The Sacrificial Daughter

The Apocalypse Crusade War of the Undead Day One

The Horror of the Shade Trilogy of the Void 1

An Illusion of Hell Trilogy of the Void 2

Hell Blade Trilogy of the Void 3

The Punished

Sprite

The Feylands: A Hidden Lands Novel

The Sun King: A Hidden Lands Novel

The Sun Queen: A Hidden Lands Novel

The Apocalypse: The Undead World Novel 1

The Apocalypse Survivors: The Undead World Novel 2

The Apocalypse Outcasts: The Undead World Novel 3

The Apocalypse Fugitives: The Undead World Novel 4

The Apocalypse Renegades: The Undead World Novel 5

Pen(Novella)

A Sliver of Perfection (Novella)

The Haunting At Red Feathers(Short Story)

The Haunting On Colonel's Row(Short Story)

The Drawer(Short Story)

The Eyes in the Storm(Short Story)

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

Invictus,

William Ernest Henley, 1875

The Horror of the Shade

Chapter 1

The Row-Adrina

June 15, 1959

1

When Adrina woke that morning with sweat chilling her pillow and her heart making sporadic, spastic thumps in her chest, she knew it would be bad. Even before she sat up the anxiety was on her. It seemed almost as if a cloud of fear hung in the air making it difficult for her to find her breath.

She puttered around the kitchen of her small apartment, waiting for it to happen. There was nothing else for her to do but wait. What would happen, would happen. There was no avoiding it. And she wouldn't even try. If she did, it would only make things worse.

Her growing anxiety made her feel she had to pee frequently, and she found herself sitting on the toilet for half the morning, staring blankly at the tile pattern of the floor. It was all very neat and straight.

Adrina called in sick to work. She was on the cleaning staff for a swanky New York hotel and knew she'd be useless that day. It was better if she were alone, fewer people would get hurt.

"You know that won't matter a bit!" she scolded herself. No, it wouldn't matter, but she knew this wasn't about the hotel, or any of the service staff she worked with. This was far more personal.

With her nails long bitten down to nubs, she began to pace. To the window, to the door, to the bathroom. With each trip to the window, she would peek out hesitantly, afraid of what she might see. Always the same dull view.

On one of her many trips to the bathroom, she gazed for some time at the tired, scared face in the mirror. She had been pretty once, but that had been many years before, and at 68, her black hair had long been replaced by grey. Now that was being replaced too, and a smattering of white hairs stood out from the rest. Looking at them, a sigh that was almost a death rattle escaped her—she didn't notice.

With each trip to the door, she walked almost tiptoe across the carpet, listening for any sound in the hall. She thought about scooting a chair over to the door, so she could look out through the peephole, but she knew she would look ridiculous. In her youth she stood five feet tall, but she had been shrinking steadily for twenty years and the peephole was all but useless to her now.

The day dragged on, and it was not until after dinner that it finally came. There was a loud knock on the door and Adrina clutched her hands to her scrawny chest; she wasn't expecting anyone. Except that she was. In her heart, she knew that hiding in her apartment wouldn't stop what had to happen. She was about to open the door and there'd be someone standing there and she would know. She would know something that she couldn't possibly know.

Today it would be about death, there was no question. Maybe one terrible death, maybe more, perhaps a lot more. It had always been this way when she was this keyed up. Someone was going to die.

"Let it be me, let it be me," she repeated to herself as she walked down the little hall. Adrina thought she was ready for death however, in this she was terribly wrong. She paused at the door, afraid of what was to come, but the sound of another, more insistent knock, made her face her fears and turn the knob.

"Hello, Mother." Adrina's son Tomas stood in the doorway. He looked terrible; never in her life had she seen someone with eyes so bloodshot. He had great dark circles under them that were swollen and puffy. Clearly he had not slept in a long time, and the dark circles made his sallow skin appear sickly yellow. His normally neat black hair stood out uncombed and his face was unshaven...

Facing away from Adrina, Tomas knelt on the hardwood floor of a barren room. It was a room she had never seen before. The wood flooring was glossy and looked polished, and was spotless, without a trace of dirt or dust. Adrina stood behind her kneeling son, holding a heavy, heavy gun in her right hand. It felt like she must have just pulled it out of a freezer; it was almost painfully cold. Her vision focused on the back of Tomas' head; his hair was just beginning to show a few grey hairs.

Emotionless she nudged the barrel up against his head and pulled the trigger. It was loud and a spike of pain shot through both ears, she didn't care—she seemed beyond caring. The bullet blasted out of her son's face, spraying the room with blood and gore. About the edges, her vision clouded and tunneled, so that only when he toppled over onto a girl, did Adrina realize the walls were a harsh stark white.

Tomas' blood stood out brightly against the white. It trickled down...down, slowly down. Adrina's eyes followed the blood until it slid to the flooring where it gathered with more blood in a pool. Tomas sprawled face down over the body of a girl who was pale as death. His blood pooled around her and steam rose from it.

..."Hello, Tomas," her voice was a hollow whisper. The nervousness was gone and in its place was only stunned disbelief.

"I need your help badly," Tomas said desperately. He walked in uninvited and began to pace the room, frantically. He seemed to be looking for the right words. "Mother, I..." he stopped in midsentence, his eyes on the carpet as his mind worked.

The images of the future spun around in her mind. The cold, cold gun; the blood flying; the pale girl wearing what looked to be a long pillowcase. It had to be wrong!

It's never wrong.

Her mind went over the vision a second time. Tomas had been kneeling and facing away, it could have been someone else. It had to be someone else.

He's wearing the same shirt, a voice inside her said. It'll be today.

"I don't think I c-can hel-hel-help you that way," Adrina stammered, her voice still with only the strength of a whisper.

He looked at her sharply. "What way? What do you know?" he demanded and this question focused her quickly. She couldn't tell him of her vision, no matter what. How this could get worse, she didn't know, but it would be, if she tried in any way to avert his fate. Somehow it would be worse.

"I, I, I don't have any money for you, if that's what you want." It was all she could think of to say. It was a poor cover up and Tomas saw through it.

"Why would I want money? Don't play stupid with me, Mother! I know you have a gift...powers...or clairvoyance or something. That's the reason why I'm here." He was angry and stared hard at her. In a moment however, his exhaustion doused the anger and his shoulders slumped. "You know things you shouldn't. You see the future, right? I've known since I was a kid," he added quietly.

"You call it a gift?" Adrina's voice became strident. "It's not a gift, it's..."

"You can tell me in the car," Tomas said cutting her off. He gripped her shoulders with both of his hands and gave her a slight shake. "I need you to come with me. You'll come, right? It's Emily." His red eyes looked suddenly very sad, his face drooping in misery. "She needs you... your kind of help."

Adrina didn't think she would be much help to Emily. In the vision, the body on the floor had to be her granddaughter and Adrina was sure she was dead at that point. She'd been so pale that Adrina hadn't even recognized her, and she wondered again how this could get any worse.

She drew in a long breath. "I'll come and I'll do what I can, but...but, I won't, I can't..." There was no way she could kill her own son. How was she supposed to help? She didn't even know what she was supposed to do, other than pull a trigger. Her mind started to replay the vision and she shook her head, hard.

"Good. Do you need anything to...to...you know, bring anything?" he asked. Adrina was confused and thought Tomas meant luggage.

"Where are we going?" The image of the heavy gun had never left her, its grip had been like ice. "Is it cold there? Should I bring a coat?"

"We're going to my base on Governors Island," he paused, thinking. "It will be cold, yes, you'll need a coat. Bring your heaviest coat and your...do you need anything to, you know..." He looked at her expectantly, his red eyes darting about her face. "You know, to cast a spell or something"

"A spell?" she cried. First with the vision and now with Tomas talking spells, Adrina suddenly worried that Tomas might have gone insane. He certainly looked it. She also realized with dawning horror how this could get worse. If she interfered in some way, even by accident, he might go on a rampage, killing who knows how many others. "No. No I don't think I'll need a spell," she said calmly with a forced smile.

Her abrupt mood change caused Tomas' brows to come down in consternation. "Mother, listen to me. Something has happened to Emily. I don't know what exactly." He paused blinking repeatedly, trying to hold back tears. "I think maybe... she might be possessed by a..." he looked away from Adrina now, shaking his head back and forth slowly as if he couldn't believe what he was saying. "By a demon I think," he finished in a whisper.

He wasn't crazy and worse he was telling the truth. Adrina knew it. For the second time in ten minutes, she knew. Goose bumps broke out down her arms and back and she shivered momentarily. There was a demon. How was this possible?

"It's important you tell me everything you know," she said.

"Everything? Ok, ok, well, there've been weird things going on in that house for a while. Really, since we first moved in. Small things, like the furnace wouldn't stay lit and things would go missing and sometimes there are odd sounds in the house. Like that. But...but it was the other day, Friday? What day is today?" he asked her.

"Monday dear," she replied calmly. Her voice was calm but her body was beginning to shake. It started in her arms and hands, but soon even her chest felt like it was vibrating. She went to the couch and sat down.

Tomas blinked a few times and then rubbed at his eyes. Adrina could imagine how gritty they must feel. "Lord, it was Friday night. That long." He sighed, a deep tired sigh. "Emily had a friend spending the night, and I guess something happened."

His mouth hung open and he shook his head in bewilderment. "I don't know what. I was in bed with Mary, when I heard a scream. It was a scream like someone was scared to death...and...and...and it was coming from the attic where Emily's room is. I was up and running out of my room when I heard racing footsteps on the backstairs. I stopped. I figured the girls were going to come tell me about a mouse or spider or something. However, it was Emily's friend. She sped down the stairs right past the second floor landing and down the next set of stairs in a blur."

"I went to the landing and was about to call down when I felt the cold coming from the attic. It was like winter up there. I was shirtless, because it had been a warm night, but the cold made me start to shiver. I went up the stairs and everything was dark, so I turned on the hall light at the top, and... and." He stopped talking. Adrina saw that he too was shaking. His eyes were large and far away, seeing whatever it was in the attic. "And the hall is only about fifteen feet long. And Emily's room is on the far right. And there are a couple of other rooms and...and...and."

"And what was in Emily's room?" Adrina prompted him.

"I went to her doorway and there she was lying on the floor and it looked like she was on fire, you see?" He turned to his mother, nodding his head to get her to agree with him.

Adrina was horrified at the thought of her granddaughter on fire. "Why was it so cold if she was on fire?"

Tomas shook his head. "I thought she was on fire, so I ran to her, thinking to smother the flames, but there were none, there was only smoke. I was just putting my hands out to grab her when I touched it." He had his hands out in imitation of himself, they were shaking badly, and for the first time Adrina noticed that he had a bandage on his left hand. He balled them up and held them to his chest. "I screamed. I know I screamed. It was the coldest thing and...and...the deadest." His eyes were far away again. He started to weep. "It sucked on my hand. It was dead, it wanted me."

Adrina watched him cry, feeling bewildered. She didn't know what he meant by his last sentence and she was sure she didn't want to. Her arms reached out for him and he cried against her for several minutes. When he had settled somewhat she said, "What happened next, I need to know."

He blubbered again but this time savagely, "I am such a coward! I almost ran away and left Emily. I had fallen over when...when I touched it. If I hadn't I would have ran, I know it."

A dreadful thought occurred to Adrina. "Did you get her away from it?"

"Yes." The exhaustion was back, sucking the energy out of him and with it came an uncaring attitude. "It was like smoke that seemed to start about a foot over her. It was over her...her...her chest. So, I sort of crept to her feet and pulled her to me. I was so scared. I just picked her up and ran."

Adrina slid closer to her son. "You did everything you could. No one could have done better."

"But what do I do now?" His red eyes looked into her black ones. "How do I save her?"

"Save her? I thought you said you grabbed her and ran."

"I did, I did, but she hasn't woken up... she's in some sort of coma. It's the demon! Emily is freezing cold to touch. They have these electric blankets on her constantly, but she doesn't get warm. And when you touch her..." He paused, his fingers in the air touching something that wasn't there. "You feel the heat pull out of you, like she is sucking it from you somehow."

Adrina's head overflowed with too much unwanted information. She felt like throwing it up or crying it out. She wanted to make some tea, then go to bed and stay there where it was safe. Instead, she spoke the words that she would later regret, "I'll go with you, and I'll do what I can. I fear it won't be much." Besides killing her son, she didn't know how she was going to be any help at all.

2

The trip from Queens through the city was actually slower in the car than if they had taken the subway. Traffic had them crawling along and Adrina had nothing to do, but stare out the window as anxiety built up in her. Every few seconds, her hand would wrap itself around the ice-cold grip of an imaginary gun. The gun would be loud. Would it wake the neighbors? Would the police be called? Did she care? She decided that she didn't. She was on her way to kill her son, how could she care about anything else?

There was just one part of the trip when the anxiety left her mind.

It occurred during the short ferryboat ride from the southern tip of Manhattan to the Army base on Governors Island. She got out of the car and stood looking out at the beautiful view while the last light of day was setting just to the side of the Statue of Liberty, which looked toy-like with the distance. The other view, down the length of the boat, was of New York City, brightly lit just for her enjoyment or so it seemed.

The lights made the city look alive and inviting and she wished momentarily that she was young again, and that her worries would just flit out of her and drift out to sea. Adrina breathed in the sea air and felt joy at the weather, which was perfect, just the right shade of warmth. She wanted it to last, but the ride was short and Tomas honked his horn in a hurry to be killed.

The day had been one of the longest in her life, however now that the end was drawing near, time sped up with a dizzying pace. In what felt like seconds they had docked and so quickly after they neared the church to collect the priest. Right away Adrina knew he was not going to attempt a real exorcism.

Tomas pulled up to the little white church and hopped out without killing the engine. "Are you all ready?" he asked the priest, who stood outside.

She felt it then. It came in little bursts: Tomas had pressured the priest into doing an exorcism. The priest didn't really believe in demons or Hell for that matter; the priest would go through the motions and perform Last Rites but in Latin and wouldn't do the needless exorcism; he would then go home and have some strawberry ice cream and watch the late news.

Father Menning was a small slim man; he wore the simple black attire of his calling and carried nothing but a single book and a black bag that reminded Adrina of a time when doctors made house calls.

He gave the appearance of concern, nodding gravely and was just about to speak when Adrina asked, "May I help you with your things?" She climbed out of the car slowly hearing her knees pop. Father Menning looked confused at her question. "I can carry your vestments and maybe the censer?" Adrina didn't wait for the priest but started to move directly toward the church.

Tomas hurried to catch up. "Right, just tell me what I can carry for you." The priest stood for a moment contemplating and then sighed moving with some reluctance to unlock the doors.

Once they entered, the priest bustled about with Adrina always nearby offering suggestions; she unfortunately knew the basics of exorcism. "Do you have an olive branch? Holy water is best used with an olive branch, rather than this...ah?"

"That is an aspergillium, and it'll work just fine."

"You should wear the proper vestments, you know. The violet from the Easter service will be good. Besides it'll be cold." Her mind strayed again to the cold gun and she rubbed her hands together as if they were already freezing.

"She's right, you'll want to bundle up," Tomas agreed.

The priest almost started to protest the wearing of the Easter Vestments, but stopped. For the first time he looked to be taking this seriously. Father Menning, with Adrina's supervision gathered his necessary accoutrements and piling into Tomas' car, they made their way to the islands one small hospital. As before Tomas left the car running and hopping out, disappeared into the building.

Father Menning tried to make small talk, which aggravated Adrina to no end, but again Tomas was quick and back in a wink. How he was able to get the girl out of the hospital, she had no idea. He laid the cold dead body of Emily across the long back seat of the Buick, and Adrina recognized the pillowcase that the girl wore, but now saw that it was only a hospital gown.

"She's still alive...I know she may not look it, but she still is," Tomas assured the priest, who had shrunk back away from the girl's body looking disgusted. Adrina reached out and touched her granddaughter, but pulled her hand away, rubbing it.

It was there beneath Emily's skin. The demon lay hiding just below the surface and the touch had been as cold as sin.

Time seemed to compress in on itself, like the cars of train in a head-on collision. Adrina had barely put on her seat belt before she saw Colonels Row, where her son lived. All the other homes on the Row were lit up and pretty in the night, but his was completely dark and foreboding.

As they pulled up to it, she could see that Father Menning finally understood. Just touching the unnaturally cold bricks of the house left no room for doubt and he marveled at the frost, which continually formed and evaporated on them.

He was a brave man and seemingly firm in his faith and at the urging of Adrina, he baptized them and heard their confessions. Adrina wanted to confess about the gun and about her plan to shoot Tomas in the back of the head and drench the wall with his blood, but she couldn't. She kept reminding herself that it'd be worse if she mentioned anything, though more and more she hoped and prayed her vision had been a mistake. It was Tomas' only chance.

Before they entered the house Father Menning had a censer smoking, sending up grey plumes of fragrant smoldering spices. He swung the brazier about the kitchen and began exhorting loudly in Latin.

Adrina didn't speak the dead language, however she had been a part of four exorcisms in her time, two of which had been real. They had been terrifying, hair-raising experiences, but she knew it was the priest and Emily, who were in the most danger. Still she shook with fear.

The house had a cold sinister feel to it. The kitchen was far darker than it had any right to be and Adrina took solace in the small glow of the brazier. She followed around after the priest carrying the silver container of holy water. Every few seconds he would dunk the aspergillium in it and liberally splash the water on the walls and floors.

Tomas, who stood in the near freezing dark holding his daughter, became impatient. "The demon is in the attic."

"Colonel, it's best to be cautious. We'll be up there in a few minutes."

Father Menning was a man of his word and he slowly went up the back staircase still going on in Latin. They followed him despite the growing cold and the steadily escalating fear.

Their fear slowly ramped up, however the priest seemed particularly immune to it—that is until they reached Emily's room and saw the demon. Then Father Menning ceased speaking and stood in mute horror.

The demon appeared to be a tremendous column of black and grey smoke. At first Adrina thought it had a vague spiderlike shape with many thin arms and legs, but that was an illusion. What she had at mistakenly thought to be arms and legs, were actually tendrils of smoke. These started as barely visible wisps a few feet from it, but then they seemed to gain mass and thickness as they streamed toward the "body" of the demon. It looked to have a head too, and that was the worst. In the head was a terrible opening, a hole from which nothing could escape.

It seemed to drink from this world through that void.

"Do the prayer again," Tomas demanded. The sound of his voice seemed to be muffled and far away.

The priest jumped a little at the words and then started his incantations once more, "Exorcizo te, omnis spiritus immunde, in nomine Dei..."

The Latin barely registered on Adrina's ears; she felt lost and useless, and had stark terror running through her. She had no purpose there, except to die horribly. She wanted to look away, she wanted to run away, but neither was an option.

Forced by a power greater than her pathetic self, Adrina stared into the black pit of the demon's face. She would stare and stare until she was used up and what would happened after that, she was deathly afraid to find out. She hoped she'd die before that could happen, but she was certain the demon wouldn't allow it.

From the moment she had walked in, the demon held her in its gaze and she could only stand there and see what the demon wanted her to see, and think what the demon wanted her to think. For the moment, it wanted her to see the surprise it had for her. She was allowed to see the smoke of its body flowing up into the pit of its face. The smoke was all chaos and madness yet what lay beneath it was worse—it came together, congealing to form a streaming liquid gruel. In the foul gruel there were shapes and it hurt Adrina deep in her chest to see these. An arm, a face, part of a torso. These would form out of the vile fluid and then sink back in.

The face was the worst.

Pain gripped her heart when she saw the face. It was the face of her granddaughter Emily, contorted into a silent scream of agony. The demon had Emily's soul and was letting it surface so that Adrina could feel her pain too. The demon enjoyed this, but it was a malicious evil joy and it was horrible to feel that sort of joy.

The demon drew them slowly toward it. Like a magnet it pulled everything into that black pit. Even the smoke and gruel that made the demon's body flowed continuously up into the endless void.

The air around them coursed into the thing and it was like a wind at Adrina's back. She leaned away, but the demon drew her on. It dragged the breath from her lungs and sucked the heat from her body. It ran off her, streaming into the voracious pit, leaving her cold inside and out.

The pit was feasting. Feasting on Tomas, feasting on the priest, but right then it was gorging itself on Adrina. Not just the heat of her life; the demon had opened her mind like a can of peaches and was savoring each morsel of sin, of fear, and especially of pain.

3

Because the demon wished it, Adrina suddenly remembered the first time her mother sent her to kill a chicken for their evening meal. She had been ten-years-old and a little scared, but wanted to prove herself. Going to the coop, she grabbed up the largest bird and carried it to the old tree stump. The small axe lay in the grass nearby. The head of it was stained with rust and blood and there were little pieces of old flesh on it. The axe looked like a dead thing itself. Adrina grew afraid to touch it, worried it would move, worried that maybe the axe was really alive and if she reached for it, it would bite her.

On the stump, the bird squawked in irritation and Adrina jumped. She screwed up her courage and bent to grab the axe.

It was warm.

Her hand drew back and she cast a look over her shoulder at their tiny shanty, but her mom wasn't about. The axe had felt warm, as if it were alive.

No! It was just a thing, a thing lying in the sun. But it felt like an evil hungry thing that enjoyed the death it caused. What else would it enjoy? Fear gripped her and Adrina nearly ran inside with the chicken. However, she knew her mother would be angry. She would just do it and not think about it.

Swallowing hard, Adrina grabbed up the little hand axe, and discovered not only that it was warm, but it also had a nasty smell about it—old death and new corruption.

Ignoring the smell as best she could, she laid the chicken on the stump, as she'd seen done countless times and brought the axe down hard.

The ungainly tool turned in her hand and hacked into the chicken's back and shoulder. Blood exploded out of the bird and it bounced about in her grip, squawking in terrific pain. Adrina looked upon the bird and the axe in confusion.

That never happened when her mom killed a bird. It always went so fast, but this was horrible. Choking back unexpected pity she stepped down lightly on the bird to hold it still. The axe was hot, drenched in blood and as she raised it a second time, she saw it was smiling a gory, blood-dripping smile. There had been no notch in the axe before, yet now one was plainly visible and it looked to be a wicked, hungry, toothy grin.

Horrified, Adrina swung the axe down a second time, but again the axe, slippery with blood, turned to the side. This time she struck its back dead center and she had to pry the axe out of the bird that still squawked in terrific misery. The axe did not want to let go of the bird, it seemed to have a hold of it and Adrina had to work it back in forth before it would come out.

The wide grin was larger and bloodier.

Adrina knew what else the axe liked more than death, and that was pain. Death could happen in an instant but pain lasted longer. Ten-year-old Adrina, now drenched in blood, threw the axe from her, terrified. She let go of the chicken as well. It tried to run, but it veered off sideways, and fell over. The chicken took a long time to die, flopping about in delectable agony, while the axe lay grinning in the sun enjoying the spectacle. Adrina stood far back, crying and shaking as the coppery blood on her turned tacky...

Adrina gasped.

She was back in the almost silent room with the mumbling priest and the demon. Her stomach rolled over, she was going to be sick. Her throat started to work up and down yet still she stared at the silent black nothingness in the demon's face. Yes, this was good...the demon wanted her to throw up, but not just yet. It enjoyed the gorge coming up in her throat and the heaving of her stomach.

It was like chamber music playing in the background of its cruel banquet. Adrina tried to fight it, but it was no use, next she tried to force herself to vomit. However, the demon enjoyed this too much; vomiting was like death.

It ended things.

Not only that, there was always a moment after getting sick when she would feel just a little bit better, even if for a second. Kind of like the feeling she had at the end of being raped. Maybe there had been more than just a feeling of relief.

Wasn't there just a bit of pleasure in it? The unbidden thought couldn't have been hers; it had to be the demon's.

The rapes weren't all bad—you liked it.

It had to be the demon. It had to be.

"No, no. I didn't like it, it was..." Adrina cried aloud.

She didn't want to remember the rapes. However, the demon wanted it from her and as she stared, she was powerless to stop it. The demon could force itself into her mind, so that she felt wide open, like an open book... open as her legs had been the first time with Claudio Butolask.

"No!" she screamed. However, the fiend sucked the sound directly from her throat, and she barely even heard herself.

Her legs had been pried open brutally with a harshness that seemed unnecessarily sadistic. The nails of his right hand dug deep and cruel into her flesh making her bleed. Her mind screamed but she was afraid to make even the slightest noise, she'd been warned. And she believed he would keep his promise.

Butolask had held the long knife between her legs and had asked which she wanted in her: him or the knife? He told her if she chose him, she would have to ask nicely...in the end, she begged him. Before he brought out the knife Adrina had fought hard, but her skinny fourteen-year-old body was no match. Butolask was small but he was strong. He didn't look it, but he was. Adrina had foolishly thought she didn't need to be careful around a small man, a man her own size.

Even though he had a knife and she was crippled with fear, he gripped her around the throat with his left hand and squeezed. Hard. Her face turned red and swollen, the veins bulging, her eyes bugging out of her head. Her world started to go black around the edges of her vision. Butolask said something to her, but she couldn't tell what.

His face leered at her, just above her, smiling. She felt a stinging on her cheek and then again. He was slapping her but as she began to pass out it was a distant feeling. Unfortunately he relaxed his grip on her throat and she became aware again.

He wanted her to be awake—he wanted her to feel everything. Leaning his weight on her left thigh, he easily pried her legs apart. He was too strong.

A moment later he ripped into her. It hurt badly. The pain shrieked inside her. She felt something rip and hot blood ran. Adrina was afraid for her insides. Butolask grunted and rutted and the pain was very great, but her fear that she was torn up and ruined inside occupied her almost completely. What had he done to her?

She tried lifting herself up and back but he gripped her throat harder and held her in place. When after an eternity he finally came it burned terribly and she cried out despite his warnings. However the searing pain faded quickly and with one final spasm he was done. He pulled out and when he did the relief was so intense, that...that...it felt good.

4

"Mother! Mother!" There was someone calling to her from a great distance. It sounded like she was at the beach and the wind whipped away the shout, before it could reach her ears. A hand grabbed her roughly and tried to pull her around, but the demon's gaze from across the room was like a magnet and there was no denying it. Her body turned, but her head and neck didn't, they twisted horribly as she was forced to stare.

Mercifully a hand came down in front of her vision, blocking the sight of that foul unending void. Her mind was suddenly closed to it, but the demon was still all about her demanding more, hammering at her.

"No—no, it didn't feel good," she whispered. "It didn't..."

"Mother! Look at me!" She felt slow and stupid and old. Every one of her sixty-eight years pressed down on her bending her back. She had no strength to turn around, to face away from the demon. It was almost too much even to stand and her legs began to shake.

Suddenly and mercifully the presence of the demon, beating at the edges of her mind lifted. She was no longer its focus; it had looked away.

Adrina fell to her hands and knees and vomited. She vomited again and then retched repeatedly. The spew drew her eyes to it with ghastly fascination. The half-liquid runny mess drained toward the demon as if it was running down hill. It reached the base of the smoking fiend and started to drip upward into the smoke. Adrina began to gag uncontrollably at the sight, unable to breathe.

Tomas grabbed her up in his arms from behind and lifted her off the floor, turning her away from the demon. He held her briefly, but as she began to breathe easier, he yelled into her ear.

"You're ok. Can you hear me?"

She looked into her son's face. His eyes were so terrifically red and blood shot that they seemed almost inhuman.

It was then that the priest screamed, "I'm sorry! I didn't mean it! Please! Please, I didn't mean it!" His face wore a look of fearful desperation and his eyes seemed to spin madly in their sockets. "No! No! Please I didn't mean it! Take her instead!" Swaying like a drunk, he came at Adrina.

Tomas gave him a quick shove away from his mother and the priest fell to the floor still screaming and begging for forgiveness. As they watched in horror, he started tearing at his own eyes and soon blood stained his fingers.

As the priest mutilated himself neither Tomas nor Adrina could turn away. "Mother, what do we do?" Tomas begged.

They had almost no time before there was nothing left of the priest—the demon was doing something horrible to the man. After that, it would be one of them clawing their own eyes out. Adrina knew the demon would go for her again, she still had so much pain left to agonize over.

"I don't...I...don't," she said hesitantly. There was one thing she could do, but the consequence was too great—in her mind she saw again the gun in her hands and Tomas' blood spraying the wall.

Was that the penalty?

Adrina knew things. Passively, images of the future came to her. In brief flashes she just knew. However...however, if she wanted to or needed to badly enough she could see the future—purposefully.

Only there was a price to be paid, always.

The price this time: the life of her son; killed by her own hand.

This was why she hesitated. Save herself or her son. There was no hope for the priest or poor Emily. Adrina could look into the future or...

"Run," she said to Tomas in a tiny voice. There was no way she could run; she would have trouble even making it to the door in the state she was in. He was the only one with any chance of getting out alive.

"What?" Tomas shouted.

Father Menning no longer clawed at his eyes, they were gone. Now he was turning a fantastic shade of deep red. There was almost no time left.

"Run!" Again, she said it too quietly, barely above a whisper and he bent his head down so that his ear was next to her mouth. "Run please," the words left her mouth without strength.

She knew what would happen if he left her. The demon would own her soul for all time and the very thought sapped her will.

"You need to speak up!" he shouted.

Adrina knew that if he didn't start running in the next couple of seconds, he wouldn't make it—her entire being shook with fear, but somehow she summoned the strength to yell, "Run!"

Tomas began shaking his head—his lips moving—his finger pointing. She tried to shove him away, but it was too late. She knew it.

Adrina had taken too long. Her eyes were drawn to the priest and he was now a repulsive purple color. Her son would never make it out of the house alive. She had killed him with her cowardice and there was nothing left to do but to save herself.

Chapter 2

Commander William Jern-In the House

May 10, 1980

1

Commander William Jern considered the weather. His upturned face scanned, first eastward as always in the morning, and then slowly rotated a full 360 degrees. The dull clouds drizzled a light chilly rain, and looked like they would all day.

This was a morning ritual for him dating back to the days when having his own Cutter was still a possibility. His mind pictured one of the long, gleaming white boats the Coast Guard used for drug interdiction, search and rescue, and patrols—he gave a little sigh.

"Let's go Katie; you don't want to be late." In the military being late was a cardinal sin. Katie looked up at her father and had to crane her neck far back to do it. He was just over six feet tall, very strong and broadly built, while she was a tiny thing.

"Can I wear your hat, Daddy?" Katie asked as she danced around the puddles. She loved wearing his broad-brimmed white hat with the gold braid. It had meaning to her; it marked her as 'Daddy's Girl,' and of course with it there would be the, 'Oh so cute!' compliments that every 6-year-old girl lived for.

"Not today honey, I think it will mess up your pretty braids. Mommy worked very hard on them, didn't she?" Braiding hair was quite beyond William, it looked to be an extremely complicated endeavor. The most he would ever attempt were pigtails and they usually came off cockeyed.

His own hair was dirty blonde and he never permitted it to grow longer than one inch. He had the same hairstyle, which could only be referred to as "regulation" for his entire eighteen years with the Coast Guard.

"She didn't work hard at all and my hair is real hard too. Feel." Running back to him, Katie pulled off her little plastic hood and presented her shoulder length blonde hair to him. He dutifully reached down and touched it very gently. He was not about to knock one of those braids out of place. "Daddy, you gotta feel harder than that!" she exclaimed still holding her head out to him.

"Yes, I felt the toughness honey, but the answer is still no. I have to keep my hat on while we're outside. Regulations, remember?"

"Yeah, those are like rules, right? We have rules in Miss Canaday's class. You're not allowed to chew gum and there's this boy who is kinda mean, Donny, and he had to put his gum on his nose and leave it there for a long time!" She giggled at the memory, "Do you have that rule too?"

"Oh yes, we have the 'gum on the nose rule'. I constantly have lieutenants walking about saluting with gum on their noses. How else do you think they'll learn their lessons?"

Katie laughed loudly at the thought and began skipping as he walked along beside her. She would go out of her way to leap over the puddles and William smiled at her; of his three children, she was currently his favorite.

2

The question of "favorites" had come up the week before when one of his subordinates, Lieutenant Valdens, had mentioned he had a favorite and really didn't like his other children. This seemed like an odd and rude thing to say, but it caused William to consider whether he had favorites. He didn't think he did, except when he got home that night, he had to reconsider.

He was helping his sixteen-year-old daughter, Talitha with her homework and suddenly the thought struck him, "She's my favorite." Talitha was beautiful like her mother, brainy like her father, kind, gentle, and funny as well. William loved her with all of his heart.

However, the notion that he loved her more than he loved the others made him a bit sad. He decided he needed to spend more time with his other children and went to his son's room. As usual, William ended up in a wrestling match with Will. At seventeen, his son was fast becoming a man and couldn't wait for the day when he could out-wrestle his dad.

That day wasn't far off since Will was already taller than, and almost as strong as William. Will was athletic and handsome, and William was very proud of his son. From a young age, he was extremely personable and could sit among adults and converse on their level. With all that, one would think he would have a certain amount of conceit, but Will was also very humble. Lying there, holding his son in his "Unbreakable Death Grip," William realized that he had been wrong earlier and that it was his son who was really his favorite.

And later that night after William read Katie her bedtime story: Are You My Mother and tickled her until she couldn't breathe, he concluded that his favorite child was whichever one was closest to him at the moment. He didn't know if this was considered proper parenting, but he didn't much care either.

Now, watching his daughter skip about the puddles in her Minnie Mouse raincoat and matching shoes, his heart swelled with the love he felt for her.

He asked her, "Do you still think Miss Canaday is the meanest teacher ever?"

"What? No Miss Canaday is the best teacher I ever had." This was odd since Katie had proclaimed her: "The Meanest Teacher" ever just two days ago.

William's wife Gayle had received a call from Miss Canaday who stated that Katie had become too affectionate with one of the boys. Too affectionate, didn't sit well with William. His other daughter Talitha even at a young age, considered herself above such nonsense. She saw almost all boys as terribly immature and beneath her dignity. This was an attitude William appreciated, kissing boys in the first grade was not.

That night William and Gayle had a talk with Katie, and William took the lead, "Katherine, we need to discuss how you're acting in school. With boys that is. Miss Canaday tells us that you've been doing quite a bit of kissing. Honey, this is inappropriate behavior for a young lady. Kissing boys leads to promiscuity, and that leads to...um...ahh," William had started the sentence well, but couldn't seem to finish, especially with Gayle eyeing him.

She was obviously enjoying this, but he persevered, "And that could lead to bad things...improper things."

Gayle cocked an eyebrow at him and then turned away to hide her smile. Katie however, had the proper attitude. She saw that daddy was using his stern face and commanding voice, so she immediately brought forth her corresponding sad face with a complementary contrite tone.

"I'm sorry, Daddy. I don't think I meant it. I think it was an accident. What does promise-too-ity mean?" William could see that she was trying to cute her way out of trouble.

Gayle turned back to him, this time with both eyebrows raised and a slight smile, it was an 'Oh please, do tell what promise-too-ity means, I can't wait,' kind of look.

"First off, you don't accidentally kiss a boy. Second the word is promiscuity and it means...ah," William refused to look at Gayle, but with his peripheral vision saw her eyebrows edge up slightly. "It means it's bad to go around kissing lots of boys."

He glanced at his wife, her face now told him, 'Eh not bad, could have been better.' William was in the middle of giving her a, 'It was fine' face with a slight head nod for emphasis when Katie showed him it wasn't fine.

"But I didn't kiss lots of boys! It was just one boy, I kissed lots of times," she explained. "And Miss Canaday is a snitch and the meanest teacher ever, she hates me! And I don't think I am being a promise-cute-ity neither!" She said this last bit with arms crossed and a small stamp of her foot.

"Listen, its prom-es-cu..." he started to explain the proper pronunciation when Gayle interrupted.

"I think we're done trying to teach our six-year-old that word," Gayle said to William, her face giving him a look that agreed with the statement, maybe even a bit more so. "Katie honey, no more kissing at school." This time it was William whose eyebrows shot up and Gayle continued quickly, "I mean you're too young to be kissing at all, so cut it out. Another thing, Miss Canaday is not a snitch and isn't the meanest teacher ever."

Now, William was glad to hear that Miss Canaday was back to being The Best Teacher Ever. He certainly appreciated a teacher who would go out of her way to call over something as simple as that.

The drizzle started to fall just a little heavier and William opened up his black umbrella. He almost called Katie over, but she was practicing her ballet in the rain and she was too precious to interrupt.

She suddenly looked like her mother. With her little hood thrown back, the rain had darkened her hair and the braids resembled the way Gayle had kept hers when she had danced. She'd been very good once and Gayle still kept her figure slim and tone. Katie almost never looked like her mom, but it was these little moments when she did that he liked the most. She was normally the cutest thing on two legs, but every so often, he would catch a glimpse of the beautiful woman she would become and he'd glow with pride.

"Daddy, my school is that way," she said interrupting his thinking. She pointed down Clayton Road, the direction they normally took to her school.

"I know dear, but I wanted to swing by our new home and find out how the work is progressing. You can see your new bedroom," he added as an inducement.

"I like my room now, with Tal. And we don't want to move," Katie said this as she leapt a very large puddle, just barely clearing it. "Tal wants to stay in my room with me, and we don't know anyone way over here, and all my friends are back at the apartment."

William expected this. "There are lots of nice children who live in this area. I see them all of the time when I'm at work." He pointed up at a window in the three-story brick building they were walking next to. "Do you see that window?"

Her blue eyes blinking into the rain, Katie said, "Uh-huh"

"That's my office where I work and right over there is our new house." William pointed across a large oak-tree lined grassy park at a row of brick houses.

Katie squinted at the house, her tiny nose wrinkling. "I don't like it. And Tal doesn't like it. It's so dark and red and we only like houses that are white with blue window thingies," she explained.

"Thingies? Do you mean shutters or drapes?"

"Are the shuterns on the outside or the inside?" Katie asked. She stood in front of the largest puddle yet, contemplating.

"The 'shutters' are on the outside. And Katherine." When her daddy used her full name and his commanding voice, it meant pay attention. She paused just as she was getting ready for her run up to the puddle and looked up at him. "Don't try to jump that puddle. You won't make it across and you will get those pretty shoes all wet."

She looked down at her little black shoes and Minnie Mouse looked back up at her. "Hmm," she said now eyeing the puddle. One more glance at her shoes and she skipped around it; Minnie's input must have helped. "Well Tal definitely doesn't like the house, unless she can stay in my room with me and even then I'm sure she doesn't like it."

"Talitha has already seen the house and has told me she approves of it." A minute later, as they walked up to it, William pointed again. "Do you see that window over the porch? That's your room, and if you look," he faced back to the building across the park. "There's my office. If you ever get lonely or scared, you can just wave to me."

Katie brightened at the idea and ran to the brick porch and up the stairs. Looking back, doubt swept across her face. "Are you sure you can see that far?" she asked. "It's kinda far and you're getting really old."

"What? I'm only forty-one. Where do you get the idea I'm getting too old to see that far?" William climbed the stairs and looked back, squinting. He was that old it seemed. The window was plainly visible, but he didn't think he would be able to see her little arm from there.

Katie, still looking at the window across the way, replied, "You said it right after you wrestled with Willy J. You said, 'I must be getting old' and you have glasses; I have seen them by your bed. And you have grey hair. And that makes you old," she explained. "Grandpa is really, really old, but I think you're only really, kinda old."

William was in great shape; he ran five miles a day and lifted weights three times a week. He played in a basketball league with men half his age and routinely left them in his dust. He was about to explain this to his daughter, but the idea of defending his physical abilities to a six-year-old, well... made him feel old. Besides, she had a point. "You could flick your lights on and off as a sign," he suggested.

"You won't see them in the daytime and that's when you work," Katie enlightened him patiently.

Now in addition to old, he could add stupid to how he felt. "You're pretty smart, you know that?" he said. She smiled and nodded in agreement. He continued, "How about this. If you're lonely you could put your blue blanket in the window and if you're scared you, ah... put your red jacket in the window. I can see those easy."

"That's a good idea. You are kinda smart too, Daddy," she said still smiling happily up at him.

"Thanks."

"You're welcome." After a pause she asked, "Is there room for my bike here?"

He climbed down from the porch. "Of course. That," he said pointing to the left side of the house, "over there, is the garage and it will fit the car and the bikes." Her bike, along with most of their belongings was currently in a large storeroom.

Their last place was a spacious four bedroom suburban house; their "home" now was an eight hundred square foot apartment. It was so tiny that he and his wife were sleeping on his son's old bed, since their king sized one didn't fit in what was laughably called the master suite. Their heavy leather couches that were purchased fourteen months ago at great expense, lay under boxes and boxes of dishes and clothes and who knows what else.

They'd come to Governors Island, expecting one of the nice colonial homes only to be told that the house they had been promised had been given to a higher ranking officer. With no other houses available they had no choice, but to move into one of the four apartment buildings on the island.

There they lived cramped, tremendously so, with no end in sight, until an unfortunate event occurred. A vacancy on Colonel's Row came about when illness befell the wife of Commander Steve Nelson; this had forced their entire family to move. It was sad for the Nelsons, but the Jerns were going to finally get some much-needed space.

The Nelsons had moved out ten weeks previous and the Jerns were starting to get antsy, especially Gayle. Their move in date, delayed three times already, was the reason why Commander Jern was at the house again. He was there to see what, if anything had been done on the very short list of repairs.

Looking back up at the house, it was obvious nobody was currently working on it. The windows were black and impenetrable; they seemed to glare down at him. In fact, from the sidewalk the house appeared to lean forward imposingly.

Mounting the steps, he worked his key into the lock and stepped inside.

3

The place was quiet as a tomb, and as cold as one—William was amazed to be able to see his breath. It felt close to freezing inside the house.

Snapping on the entire bank of light switches in the foyer, he went first to the thermostat and saw that the setting was at its coldest. He cranked it all the way over and waited, listening.

"Come on, Daddy! Let's go see my room!" Katie tried to tug him into the living room.

"Just a second," he murmured, feeling an unusual need to be as quiet. The house was so silent that on a subconscious level the least noise grated on him. "Let's take off our shoes...so we don't make a mess of these pretty floors."

Katie was all too happy to slip off her Minnie Mouse shoes and once in her stockings, she did a quick pirouette and almost scampered off again, but he held her back.

"Not yet," he said in a hushed tone. Fervently he hoped the pilot light to the boiler was still lit. On his last visit, he had to light it himself and that had been a strangely upsetting experience. In order to light the boiler, he had to lie down in front of it and stick his arm deep within. It felt like he was reaching into a great mouth and he had the feeling that at any moment, it would bite down.

He didn't know much about boilers, but the insides of this one, felt unnecessarily pointy and sharp, which only added to the illusion of a tooth-filled mouth. It gave him the shivers, like someone had walked over his grave.

From somewhere upstairs, came a sudden loud bang. Then another sound, like a hammer striking thick metal came from the direction of the dining room. Even though he knew the sounds were coming, he jumped and the muscles of his back and chest tightened.

"What's that?" Katie asked with a touch of mild alarm.

"Don't worry, it's normal," he said, relaxing. "We have radiators here and they always make this kind of ruckus when heating up."

The explanation calmed her fears and she dashed off, sliding across the glossy hardwood floors into the living room. It was a large room and it contained the best feature in the house.

A wide curving staircase that descended from the second floor in a great sweep. The banister was hand crafted out of a dark, rich wood and inlaid with beautiful leaf patterns. The staircase made the room feel significant and William imagined throwing parties here.

In his mind's eye, he could easily envision Gayle, slowly, elegantly descending it. Every head in the room would look up at her, as she gracefully moved down. Smiled at the image he went deeper into the room. With it empty the fireplace seemed to dominate it. Its mantle was over five feet tall and nearly four feet wide. The fireplace itself was very deep and made from the same dark red brick as the exterior of the house. It seemed well used and William pictured how the room would look with a roaring fire.

Katie didn't pause to picture anything and moved through the archway separating the dining room from the living room. The dining room contained an equally impressive fireplace and little else. There was a door at the other end of the room, which led to a small hallway containing a pantry, a bathroom, and the kitchen.

"Katie Honey, your room is this way." William pointed back toward the staircase. She had gained the kitchen but turned on the spot and ran back. As she sped into the living room, she braked purposefully and slid on her stockinged feet a good ten feet. Oddly, the noise of the radiators seemed to stop just as she began her slide, so that the only sound in the house was the almost silent, long swwwisshh of her feet on the wood. The sound seemed to stretch out and there was an expectancy about it, as if some small event would occur when she finished sliding.

She stood there with her arms out from her sides, still in her sliding stance. Her head cocked to the side listening and a big smile lit up her face. William smiled and was about to tell her, "Good slide," but the words stuck in his throat, as if he didn't want to be the first one to break the silence. It was like a voice inside his head said, "Sshhh."

After a long moment, Katie asked, "Did you see that, Daddy?" As if right on cue, the radiators began banging away again.

"I did. It was very impressive, you should be in the Olympics," William responded, but quietly, speaking in low tones as though he didn't want to disturb something with his loud voice. He walked up to her and snatched her off her feet, and carried her to the stairs.

"Can I slide down this...this...thing?" she asked pointing to the banister as he climbed the stairs.

"It's called a banister and I guess so. You'll have to go down on your tummy until you get older." William refused to treat his girls like china dolls.

They reached the second floor and he put her down. The second story of the home had a long hallway that ran completely through it. To William's left, the hallway went about twenty-five feet before it ended at the back staircase. There were only two doors on the left; the first was the bathroom that Talitha and Katie would share. The next door opened practically onto the landing of the back stairs and was to be Talitha's room.

Directly in front of him was the family room and just to the right, the hallway only ran another ten feet. It ended with the door to Katie's room on the right and the master bedroom on the left.

"This one can't be mine," she said looking into the family room, which was windowless and boxy. The wall-to-wall, red carpeting seemed to absorb the light from the single bulb in the fixture. It was the dimmest room in the house and when Gayle first saw it, she eyed the red carpet as if it had personally offended her. He smiled at the memory of their first trip to the house, two months ago. "Are we allowed to rip it out?" Gayle had asked then.

"Only if we replace it," he had replied.

"What if it happens to have a very unfortunate 'accident?' I was thinking about taking up smoking, you know."

William was just considering that he might surprise his wife by ripping the carpet out one these days when Katie ran into the room and turned a nice cartwheel.

"I like the carpet. Does my room have this kinda carpet too?"

"No. Your room is right...here." William walked over and opened the door to her new room. She ran to it, but stopped in the doorway as if she wanted to take it all in before entering. There wasn't much to take in; it was a dinky eight by ten.

William tried to mentally describe the room and it was odd but he considered it sweet or nice. With two windows that took up the entire south wall it was easily the brightest room in the house. Added to this was deep shag carpeting in a very light yellow and bright white walls.

"Wow!" Katie's eyes were huge; she bent down and felt the carpet. "Daddy, feel this. It's really soft." Pulling her socks off, she walked about in the deep carpet. She stopped in front of him, looking down at her feet, as her tiny toes curled and uncurled in the shag.

Remembering suddenly, she turned and ran to the window. Peering through it, she cried, "I can see your office! It's right through those trees, right?"

William came over and bent down. "Yes that's it. Do you like your room?"

"I do. I like it a lot but Talitha won't fit in here, will she? She's going to be sad, not sharing a room any more. Can I not go to school today? I need to plan where all my stuff is going to go. When are we moving in? On-a-cuz I think we should move in pretty soon." Katie seemed excited.

"You're going to school today. And I don't know when we're moving, soon I hope. I'm going to check on some repairs and if you want to start planning, go right ahead." William headed for the doorway.

As he walked down the hallway, he heard Katie say, "Poor Tal, she'll be so lonely." In truth, Talitha couldn't wait for a little loneliness. Katie drove her sister up the wall with her constant talking. A typical conversation would sound like this:

Talitha: "Katie, I'm trying to read, can you quiet down for a while?"

Katie: "Sure, Tal." In a whisper, "Is this how quiet you want to me to be?"

Talitha: "How about you just don't talk at all?"

Katie: "Ok, I can do that. Mmh, mmh, MMH, MMhhhm!"

Talitha: "And no humming."

Katie: "You heard that?" In a whisper, "Can you hear this? Ta-lee-tha?"

Talitha: "MOM!"

4

William headed for the basement, thankful that Katie was staying upstairs for the moment. One of things he wanted to check on was a picture that one of the Nelson's kids had drawn on a wall. It was unpleasant and he didn't want Katie to see it.

He went down the backstairs through the kitchen to the basement door, but stopped, feeling a note of anger rising in him. He'd seen this on his earlier visits: someone had put a hasp and combination padlock on the door.

It was annoying. There wasn't any need to have it there in the first place and yet someone kept locking the thing up. Shaking his head, he began to work the shiny new lock, not having to remember the combination, which was written in pencil directly above the hasp.

It was pointless and he wasn't a fan of pointless things.

The basement had a long hallway with five rooms off it, two on each side and one at the end. Just to his left was the boiler room and despite the thing roaring away mightily, the room was cold. William stepped in and inspected the device.

The boiler had been one of the key issues keeping them from moving in and he happily noted that it was brand new. It seemed to be a huge improvement over the last one, which had gaping holes where it had rusted through, while this was shiny and looked state of the art.

William checked that off his mental list.

He then went to the big room at the end of the hall.

"Damn."

The picture, or mural he supposed it actually should have been called, was still there; it hadn't been painted over. It was evidence of some sort of psychosis or neurosis—he could never tell what any of those high falutin words really meant. He did know that a happy well-adjusted kid didn't draw the picture. It was about four feet high and seven feet long, and in a sick sort of way, it was very well done.

It depicted some kind of black, two-headed monster, standing over a dead person, a little girl by the looks of it. The girl looked to have died in extreme agony, her head twisted around at an odd angle. It was the monster that fascinated him. One of the monster's heads was sticking out of its chest and was so well drawn, it looked three-dimensional. Using only crayons, the kid who drew it, captured incredible movement and emotion.

Unfortunately, the emotion captured was a sick, heavy fear. That's what William felt at least as he peered closer. He noticed now that someone, probably the artist kid, had scratched viciously at the face of one of the monster's heads. The fingernail marks went clear through the crayon, and the underlying paint beneath and then into the drywall.

"Damn," he said again, practically whispering it. He gazed a long time at the picture when he noticed there was a little bit of blood in the gouge marks. On impulse, he glanced to the floor under the mural and saw there what he didn't want to see.

Two fingernails.

Not ones that had been snipped off or even chewed off in nervousness, but ones that had been ripped off. He bent down and saw there was black crayon under the shredded remains of the tops of the nails, and that a small amount of skin and dried blood were still attached to the undersides.

He stood up quickly, feeling suddenly nauseous, and that was when he heard someone walking around in the kitchen. Whoever it was, wasn't trying to be quiet. The footsteps thumped heavily as if caused by work-boots, so that he thought it might be a painter coming to cover over the mural.

For a brief second, William felt like calling out.

However, something inside warned him to remain quiet and a sudden cold chill ran up his spine. The chill was literal; the temperature of the room dropped at once, as if someone had just opened a freezer door behind him.

Presently, the sound of the heavy tread neared the basement door and William suddenly realized he'd left the lock sitting on the counter next to it. Worried about being locked in accidentally, he made to call out to the owner of the boots, but his throat tightened as he heard the door swing shut with a deafening, quiet click.

Chapter 3

The Painter

May 10, 1980

1

When William heard the door shut, he felt one of the strangest feelings in his life: panic.

He was not a man prone to fear. He felt fear like everyone else, but he'd always been able to control it, burying it beneath his sense of duty. To command a Coast Guard Cutter in the midst of the most ferocious of storms meant that he must first command himself. He prided himself on his ability to conquer his fear and that was why he was so shocked when he stood in mute panic.

The feeling of being trapped was so overwhelming, that he froze in place for a span of seconds, scarcely breathing. However, the spell was broken when he heard the work-boots moving away, toward the backstairs.

Katie!

Throwing off his panic, he sprinted for the basement stairs and ran up them two at a time. At the top, the door was shut against him. Was it locked?

The door is too thick, you'll never break it down, a voice inside his head said.

That was very true. Everything about the house was well made and quite sturdy. Hesitantly he reached out and turned the knob—it came open easily.

An embarrassing sigh of relief escaped him. "Man," he whispered.

How had he let his fears run away with him? It wasn't like him.

"Hello," he called out self-consciously, as if the person who had shut the door knew of his fright. There was no answer and what's more, the footsteps seemed to have stopped altogether.

"Hello!" This time he raised his considerable voice and an echo came in back to him. Again there was only silence, not even a peep from Katie.

The thought of her sent a jangle of alarm through him and now he sprinted at a dead run up the backstairs to her room. When he reached the hallway that ran down the center of the house, he saw her door stood shut.

The alarm within him slid very close to panic and he ran down the hall so quick he could feel wind in his ears. At her door, he didn't hesitate and threw it open, taking in the whole room in a single glance.

"Hi, Daddy." Katie's voice was calm, but she had a startled look in her eyes.

The room was empty save for his little girl. William spun about looking down the hall and listening to the sounds of the house—there came only the banging of the radiators.

"Are you ok?" she asked sweetly.

"Yes, I am...didn't you hear me calling?"

"Yeah, you were saying hello."

"Then why didn't you answer?" That seemed like the reasonable thing to have done and he began to feel a little cross at her for...for what? Assisting in scaring him?

"Were you calling for me?" she asked, but didn't wait for his answer. "I didn't think you were, on-a-cuz when you do, you say KAY-DEE!" Her little voice went as deep as it could, which was actually surprisingly deep.

"You're right, that's what I say," he responded, rubbing his head in puzzlement. "Did you hear anyone or see anyone?" he asked as casually as he could, not wanting to scare her, especially now after she seemed happy to be moving in.

"Nope...will my dresser fit against this wall?" she inquired with her hands on her nonexistent hips, looking exactly like her mom in miniature.

Had there been someone in the house at all? It seemed suddenly empty. With a mental shrug William gave the wall a quick glance and eyeballed the measurement, "It'll fit."

"Really? The dresser is pretty big."

"No, you're just so small that everything looks big to you." He heard another noise then, coming from the attic, but thought it likely to be one of the radiators banging again.

"I'm going to check a few more things and then we have to get you to school."

She began to give him a look that suggested she knew of another reason she should stay home from school, but he squelched it with a simple, "No."

2

He left her scheming, trying to find a realistic excuse, and went into the master bedroom, hoping a handyman had fixed the loose bricks in the fireplace. They wiggled under his fingers.

Right behind his forehead, he felt a headache coming on.

As a greater hint to the workers, he pulled the bricks out and set them on the mantle. Out of frustration he considered making a little building with them, but decided instead that when he got to his office, he'd put a call into Lieutenant James Andre and tear a good size chunk out of his ass. The boiler was good, but some of the easier fixes should've been done weeks ago.

Clunk.

The small sound had William's full attention. It came from the attic. After a quick peek in at his daughter, he slipped down the hall as quietly as his two-hundred plus pounds would allow and made his way up the stairs. Here, there was no sense trying to be quiet; the stairs creaked loudly with his every step and besides, there was no way out of the attic.

The layout of the attic was simple: two storage rooms to the left and right at the beginning of a long hallway. At the end of the hall were two bedrooms and a bathroom. That was it.

At the top of the stairs, he paused listening, but no sound came and after a moment, he glanced into both the storage rooms and found them empty. The same was true of the bedrooms, he even checked the closets. He was just thinking that the 'clunk' sound must have been the radiators, when he heard the first scream.

"Ayeeee!"

William froze for the barest instant and then raced along the hall. In a second, he flew down the stairs pausing at the landing to look toward Katie's room.

It was empty.

"Ayeeeee!"

Another scream came from the kitchen. William took two giant leaps down the back staircase and was in the kitchen in a flash. What he found astonished him: little Katie standing calmly over a man lying on the floor.

The man, who appeared to be a painter, looked from Katie to William with a terrified expression on his face. He had both hands in front of him, palms out, as if to protect himself from William's forty-pound daughter.

William stepped between Katie and the man. "Hey! Calm down now!" he yelled. "What's going on here?"

The man blinked rapidly a few times and said, "I uh, I uh." He took a few breathes to calm himself. "I'm ok, I'm ok." He waved his hands to show that he was ok. William first thought the man was a lunatic, but the more he looked at him however, the more he thought drug addict.

"Ok, ok...wow...I'm sorry, I really am," the painter said.

"Is he a retardo, Daddy?" Katie asked unexpectedly. "He's kinda like Arnold Frimley and Arnold is a big retardo." The man looked at Katie with surprise.

"The proper term is 'retarded', Katie," William explained, and wondered if the man was indeed a bit soft. "But it's impolite to make such assumptions, however."

"No, no, I'm not retarded," the man said. He got to his feet. "I'm real sorry. I didn't think anyone was here is all, and she," he pointed at Katie. "Scared the hel...I mean she frightened me very badly. She came out of nowhere." He glanced over at William in a slightly fearful way and William realized he was still scowling fiercely at the man.

The Commander softened his features, but only by a little. "That's hardly a good enough excuse to go about scaring little girls."

He stepped forward and eyed the man, trying to get a sense if he was on drugs or was really just afraid. The painter was a small man and wore an all white outfit. Overalls, jacket and painter cap were all white, and each had many layers of white paint on them. He was exceedingly speckled with paint, yet under all of it he had the Mediterranean tan of a Greek or as an Italian.

"I wasn't afraid," Katie piped up. She was spinning a padlock absently mindedly in her small hands. "He was afraid of me!" She giggled at this. Then a new idea came to her. "Maybe you're a spaz! Do you think you might be one?" she asked the painter.

His expression of embarrassed relief changed at the question and he glanced over at William in a perplexed manner.

"Katherine!" William said sternly. "You're being insulting. Please apologize to the gentleman, right now."

Katie looked very contrite. "I'm sorry, I asked if you were a spaz and a retardo...I mean a retarded...and I'm sorry that I scared you so bad."

The painter gave her a smile. "That's ok. I'm the one who should be apologizing to you and to your dad." The painter's manner now seemed completely normal. Maybe he had been just afraid.

"I suppose it happens," William said.

Whatever had just occurred was definitely odd. Most people when shocked like that would jump back a little and maybe make a little frightened noise, but this was different. The man had screamed! There was a long pause; William had no idea what to say to a man who behaved like that.

The painter's embarrassment continued. "Are you with Vendor Management? I was just getting an early start you know." William looked puzzled. The painter explained, "I'm David, with Papa's Painters."

"Of course, you're with one of the work crews," William said. "We aren't with Vendor Management; this is going to be our house." The man looked to Katie quickly and then back to William. It was obvious he wanted to say something and he opened his mouth to start, but then shut it. William found himself getting frustrated with this odd man.

"You're a worker man?" Katie practically jumped with excitement. "Can I have my shutters blue, please?"

"This house doesn't have shutters, little Miss," David responded.

"Well, you can put them on. I want mine to go on the outside, right Daddy?" David smiled in an unusually sad fashion at Katie and shook his head, no.

"Katie, we won't be getting shutters on this house, sorry," William said to her, but then turned to David. "Why were you so afraid anyway?"

"Oh, I don't know, I guess I'm just jumpy," David's answer was clearly a lie and the Commander wasn't the sort of man you lied to.

"Katie, go wait on the porch. I'll be right there," his tone was kindly toward his daughter, but when she left his face turned stony. "Now, before I get angry, try answering my question again, truthfully."

The answer the painter gave him, made his headache rev its engines and it was all William could do not to punch the man.

"Your house is haunted," David intoned with wide eyes.

Chapter 4

Will

May 26 1980

1

"Hey, Willy J," Amy Harris purred seductively. Sometimes the island was just too small for his liking, Will thought.

"Oh hi, Amy." He'd be polite but nothing more; anything else would be an invitation for her to follow him all the way to Lisa's apartment building. Lisa wouldn't be happy about that.

Amy had appeared out of nowhere and in fact, had given him a bit of a fright. One second he was walking next to a parked van, the next she was pressing her almost impossibly large breasts onto his arm.

"So Willy J where you off to?" She put both of her hands into her thick brown hair and teased it. This pulled her sweater even tighter across her chest and she knew it.

Will Jern prided himself on being a gentleman and did his best to look away and was mostly successful. She was difficult not to look at, but she always made it easier by calling him Willy J. The nickname grated on him.

"I gotta date with Lisa. So if you don't mind, I'm late and I really gotta go."

She pouted for just a second and then smiled with insincere sweetness. "Maybe next time then, see ya Willy J."

He had got off surprisingly easy. Normally getting rid of her was like scraping gum off his shoe. Giving her a small wave, he slipped quickly between the parked cars.

There had been a time when he had honestly thought about giving Amy a whirl. She was gorgeous and back then he hadn't known about her well-deserved reputation. Thankfully for him, she had insisted on using the name Willy J at every opportunity despite him asking her not to. Will hated the name. He was ok with his full name William Jern Junior, it was that damn nickname, Willy J that really burned him up inside.

When the Jerns had first moved to Governor's Island a little over year before, he'd tried desperately to lose the nickname and become "Will." He had pleaded with his family for their help and his father and sister Talitha were willing, but his mom had trouble letting go.

"I love the name Willy J. You've been Willy J since you were a baby," she said during dinner that night, their second night on the island. He had hung his head and played with his mashed potatoes.

"Honey, you're going to have to let it go," his father intervened, cutting into his food. "Willy J is almost...I'm sorry, Will is almost seventeen, and Willy J is just not a name for a man." Will's father understood at least and the talk of him becoming a man, made Will sit up a little taller in his chair.

"I think Willy J is an ok name for a man, that is if you live in a trailer," Talitha had said and then giggled. "Remember that guy, Jerry-Jim what's-his-name, in Mobile? Bet yawl diddy con doit. Yawl gonna scritch your beehind," she drawled out her best Jerry-Jim impersonation and this set them all to laughing.

"Scratch your beehind!" Katie's impersonation wasn't so good, but she made up for it with exuberance and a quick pantomime. Hopping up on her chair, she started scratching at her skinny five-year-old bottom madly. They were all laughing hard and there were tears in Gayle's eyes.

"All right Katie, have a seat," William cautioned. Katie overplayed it as she always did. If one bottom scratch brought a laugh, then ten must be ten times as funny.

"Alright, Daddy," she said standing on her chair, delicately rubbing her little bottom now. "That was starting to hurt." This brought on another gale of laughter and Katie realized her time on stage wasn't over with yet. "Yeah it really hurts, Mommy. Can you kiss it better?" she asked putting her bottom in her mom's face.

Little Katie was a natural and could say and do things that would have got Will in big trouble. His father was strict, but Katie just had a way about her. Gayle gave her bottom a playful slap and tugged her down into her chair.

That had been their first week on Governor's Island and he had been Will for only the next three. All it took was one slip of the tongue and he was back to being Willy J.

Quite by accident, Talitha let it slip. The two of them were at the community pool with some of their new friends when it happened. Will decided to splash a sunbathing Talitha and out it popped.

"Hey, Willy J! Stop it," she groused angrily, but realized her mistake immediately. The moment seemed to drag out for the two of them as they looked at each other.

And then it started.

Amy Harris, who had a huge crush on him from the moment he first stepped foot on the island sang out, "Willy J, that's so cute! Is that what they call you at home?"

It was all downhill from there. Talitha felt terrible, and tried to correct anyone who used the nickname but it was a useless battle. For his part, he forgave her quickly since it was an obvious accident and he loved her all the more, seeing her repeated attempts at bringing back Will.

"Hello Will," she would say loudly and importantly and for some reason with a slightly deeper voice than her normal one. "Are you done with the comics, Will? Say Will, what do you think about those Mets, Will?"

Finally, a week later, when Willy J seemed to have been carved in stone, he'd asked her to give it up. Talitha stopped being so obvious about it, but she never called him Willy J again. Katie and his mom however continued to use the nickname. His mom figured if everyone else got to call him Willy J, then she should be able to as well. And Katie was five years old; she didn't need any other reason. His father, who either went by William or Commander Jern, rarely changed his mind on anything, so he continued to call him Will.

The only other person, who called him Will, was Lisa Kawalski.

It was oddly enough, one of the reasons he was initially attracted to her. Will was tall, athletic, and handsome. He had his mother's thick brown hair and his father's blue eyes and he knew that he could have his pick of the girls on the Island. Lisa was not the obvious first choice. She was pretty, but not strikingly so and there had been some real beauties who had made their affections very clear to him.

It was just the simple way Lisa said, "Hello, Will" that caused him to look at her in a different light. It stood out in stark contrast to all the other girls squealing, "Hey, Willy J."

She was calm and direct and it lent her an air of maturity and seductiveness that played on him. Lisa was small and athletically slim with dirty blonde hair. Her best feature were her green eyes; they always caught people's attention. Lisa enjoyed that moment when first meeting people, when they would pause and stare into them. They changed her somewhat average face into something closer too beautiful.

Now with June almost upon them, the two had been going out for a year. Actually, just three weeks shy of a year and there was a significance to the date that a number of people thought him oblivious to. Will could be oblivious to a great many things. It wasn't that he lacked smarts; he was just a daydreamer of the highest order. If he wasn't playing football or kissing Lisa, he was likely not paying very close attention to the world going on around him. It was in fact the reason why he was currently hurrying along the seawall late for his date.

Time had slipped away from him once again. His bedroom window had a wonderful view of New York Harbor and sometimes it was all he could do to pull himself away from the sight. It wasn't the tall buildings or the lights of the city that drew him, it was the amazing number and variety of ships that swept by.

Hundreds a day, came through the harbor and they reached out and touched something within him. He had been looking out on a two-masted schooner strutting about, showing off the plumage of its beautiful white sails. In his mind, he was out on its yardarm, drifting up and down with the light seas, letting the glow of the evening sun warm him, when a voice interrupted his daydreaming.

"What are you still doing here?" He jumped as if bitten and Talitha gave him a smile. "Aren't you supposed to be somewhere?"

"What do you mean? What time is it?" he asked suddenly worried.

"It's time you learned how to read a clock. I won't always be here you know, so one of these days you're going to have to start relying on yourself." Talitha had a beautiful smile even when she poked fun. "One more time...when the big hand is on the twelve and the little hand is on the seven it means you are late for your date."

"Seven! Oh man!" He hopped up quick and darted from the room.

"I think you forgot to say thank you," she called after him, "and I think you forgot your wallet as well."

He was back in a flash, and kissing her on the cheek, said, "Thanks." Will grabbed his wallet but remembered his money was actually in the jeans he wore the previous day. As he searched through the mess of his room he asked, "So do you and Brian have a hot date as well?"

"Oh yes. We're going to the library. He seems to believe in the silly notion that hypnosis can be an occurrence completely separate from autohypnosis. It's my conjecture that...what are you doing?"

"I can't find the jeans I wore yesterday, my money was in them."

"You didn't wear jeans yesterday; you wore your brown cords. Remember, you spilled jelly on them at breakfast and thought no one would notice, but everyone did. They're right there." She sighed heavily reminding Will of their mom. "You're going to have to work on this self reliance."

"I will, I promise. See ya." He was gone again thinking she was probably right.

He did tend to lean on his little sister for help. In school, he relied heavily on her. They were in the same grade and when they could, they always tried to share classes.

Will hadn't been held back due to grades, he'd just been born too late in the school year while Talitha had been born a month premature and only ten months after him. That meant he was always one of the oldest kids in their class and she the youngest.

They were both very smart, but Talitha actually used her brain scholastically and during test time, she'd take two tests at once. Her eyes darting back and forth from her work to Will's and if she ever made even the slightest noise, he would quickly change his last answer.

Will thought Talitha was beautiful, but he knew that she didn't see herself that way. She saw herself as bookish, nerdy, and shy. There was no denying the bookish part, since the girl read two or three books at a time constantly. She wasn't nerdy either, but rather frightfully smart with a very quick, funny and sometimes biting wit that left most boys her age feeling stupid and lost.

And lastly, she wasn't shy, but instead quiet. She listened to those speaking around her and only spoke when she thought she could contribute to a conversation meaningfully. However, since she considered most of what her peers talked about inane, she tended to listen more than she spoke.

Will knew other boys thought her to be pretty as well. Talitha always looked to have just come from the beach, sporting a warm golden tan year round. Her straight hair was a dark brown that matched her eyes and she had high cheekbones, a small slim nose, and full lips. She never wore make up and never appeared to need to, but despite all this, Talitha considered herself plain. Will valued her opinion on all matters, except for her opinion of herself.

Part of why she didn't find herself attractive was that she was so seldom asked out.

Will tried to explain the logic boys used: asking a girl out was tough—asking a pretty girl out was even tougher—asking a pretty girl out who was not only smart as a whip, but also seemed to enjoy cracking the whip was just not worth the effort.

"And you believe I enjoy cracking the whip?" she had asked. "When have I ever cracked this metaphorical whip?"

"Yes, you enjoy cracking the whip," he replied. "Remember Danny Mcland? And another thing, more boys might ask you out if you didn't sound like a walking dictionary all the time. You're sixteen! Try talking like a teenager for once. By the way, what do you mean by metaphysical whip? And don't tell me to look it up!"

"I was being figurative," Talitha explained without explaining anything. "And it's not my fault that Danny Mcland can't string two words together intelligently... uh, uh, Ta, Ta-leee-tha, uh, uh, douwannna, uh, uh, douwannna, uh," she mimicked.

"He was nervous! It's not easy asking out a girl, you know." Will became exasperated, "How many of the other guys do you think wanted to ask you out when they heard that you responded back to him in Chinese?"

"It was Cantonese and it was the only eighteen words I know. I was just trying to demonstrate that it's impolite to speak in a language that the listener doesn't understand," Talitha justified.

"You're being obtuse. The point is no guy wants to be shot down as well as made fun of."

Talitha sighed heavily and Will could see that she was considering the points he had made. She suddenly brightened up and said with a mischievous smile, "You looked up obtuse didn't you? I knew you would."

That was the only time that Will had tried to help her romantically, while he on the other hand, seemed always in need of help. In early December, he'd been completely surprised when Talitha asked him if he was ready for the big day.

"Christmas? I think I'm ready to open presents if that's what you mean." They were in their Dining Room doing homework. Their dining room consisted of their living room, only with the TV turned off and their folding card table opened out.

"No. I'm talking of your big day with Lisa," Talitha said with a knowing look. The look bewildered her brother.

"I have time to get her something still, Christmas is like three weeks away. But that reminds me, can you help me pick something out and can I borrow a little money?"

"Not Christmas. Your six month anniversary." She shook her head in disbelief.

"That's a thing?" He managed to look panicked, angry, frustrated, and lost all at once. "What am I supposed to do? Am I supposed to get her a present? Do you even think she knows it's almost our... six month...wait." He stopped in mid sentence while he tried to figure out if it really was almost six months. "It's close I guess."

"What do you mean you guess? You don't know when you asked her out?" Talitha closed her textbook, so he knew this was getting serious.

"Sure, it was ah, like a few weeks after we moved in...the first week or two of June, right?" Will started to get a nervous feeling in the pit of his stomach.

"Try June 15th and she definitely knows the date. You should get her a small present and maybe some flowers." Talitha had a slight dreamy look about her.

Their mom was eight feet away in the kitchen and said, "I don't think you should make a big deal of this Willy J. You might be setting yourself up, you know."

"In what manner would he be setting himself up?" Talitha had an odd way of asking the questions that Will was just thinking of, and she sometimes seemed to speak as if she was his attorney.

"I'm just saying if he begins his relationship by spoiling her, where will it lead to?" their mother asked. "He'll have to constantly top the last 'big day' and that can get expensive." Despite holding a spatula in one hand and an oven mitt in the other, she still managed to put air quotes around big day.

The nervous feeling slid toward fear. He never seemed to have very much money and his mom using the word expensive had Will thinking she was winning the argument.

Talitha wasn't done yet however. "I think he should spoil her and she should spoil him right back. This is what people do when they're in love. Doesn't dad spoil you? And I'm not talking anything expensive, even a card if it contains the right message, will be sufficient."

Will liked the idea of getting Lisa a card, but only since it was in his price range. He was never partial to giving a card as a gift; it felt weird using someone else's words to try to describe how he felt. Besides, he really didn't know what he felt.

2

Eventually, Will went with the card Talitha picked out for him. It was a wise choice as most of her choices were and Lisa almost cried, but in a good way. His mom had been right about one thing, he subconsciously felt the need to top the small gift at Christmas. So he went with a sweater and another card.

Then came Valentine's Day and the word love was thrown around far too casually for Will's liking. Lisa talked frequently of love and started saying that she loved him, and he felt forced to say the word back. But he honestly didn't know if he loved her or not and despite what Talitha and everyone else thought, he was painfully aware that their one year anniversary was coming up.

They seemed to be at a crossroads in their relationship. Up to now, he had been having fun, enjoying the time they spent together but never worrying about or even considering their future. He didn't want anything to change and bringing in love with all its attendant responsibilities was a huge change and one he didn't think he was ready for.

Lisa, on the other hand, seemed to love him with all of her heart, which only made him feel worse.

Will felt like he stood at a tipping point and that if he became unbalanced in some way, he'd either slide deeply in love with her forever or else end the relationship painfully. He was afraid either way. He didn't think he could break up with her, because he knew it would hurt her too badly. At the same time, if he let go and embraced her with all of his heart, then what?

Would he be next in line to be married?

Was he going to become whipped as his friends joked and stop being himself and start being "Lisa's Boyfriend?" Was he going to miss out on all the fun and let life pass him by? He started to feel that he was too immature to be in love.

The immaturity however was strictly emotional.

Physically, his body made great demands on him. He felt an urgent need to be with her sexually and it started to dominate his thinking when he was with her. She, on the other hand wasn't ready for sex. But, she wasn't prudish either and they had done their fair share of necking and fooling around. Of course, that just made it harder on Will when she told him to stop.

All of this zipped through his mind as he half-walked, half-ran around the sea wall to where they were supposed to meet. Lisa lived in the smallest and most rundown of the islands four apartment buildings, something his mom pointed out repeatedly. This was another painful aspect of their romance, his mother didn't approve of Lisa. She didn't come out and say the words of course, but it was there and he wondered if he held back in some way to please her.

Lisa was waiting for him outside her building and when she spotted him, ran up excitedly. "Hey you," she said right before she kissed him. It was a long slow kiss. "So, what do you want to do?" she asked with a smile, as she pulled back and looked up at him.

"I dunno. I got paid yesterday so if you want to go see what's playing at the theater we could do that."

Back in March, he had managed to secure a job: he worked part time for a friend of his dad's in the service management office. This meant he mowed the grass in the summer and did odd jobs whenever they came up.

It wasn't great money or even good hours, but he couldn't bring himself to flip burgers at Burger King, the island's only fast food place. Lisa however did and it was the smell of her clothes when she got off work that kept him from ever taking a job there. She called the smell "Will Repellant" and she refused to let him see her until she had dashed home, showered, and changed.

He usually ended up paying for most of their dates and he didn't mind a bit. He thought of it as his duty as the boyfriend to pay her way and he also knew that despite her working longer hours than he did, she had far less money to spend on fun. Her money went to buy necessities like clothing, school supplies, and sometimes food, for her and her younger brother.

To Lisa's bitter embarrassment, her mother was a boozer. Sometimes her mother would "borrow" money from Lisa's pockets so Will frequently held onto her money for her. The drinking was the primary reason Lisa refused to ever let him near her apartment.

"I think they're still playing, Kramer versus Kramer and once was too much for me," Lisa said. Will had to agree—it was dull. "We can go by the Teen Club," Lisa suggested. The Teen Club was the Coast Guard's way to try to reduce vandalism and other mischief done by bored children, by organizing supervised fun.

Supervised fun was not Will's idea of fun. "That place is getting overrun by middle schoolers. Carlos Manalo is throwing a party, how bout we go?" It was worth a shot.

"Carlos? I'd rather not. His parties can get pretty crazy." She wrinkled her nose at the idea. Because of her mother's boozing, Lisa didn't like to be around people when they were drinking and she never touched a drop of alcohol herself. "Are Talitha and Brian going?"

"No, they're going to the library." That had been his only chance at going to the party. If Talitha went then Lisa would go, but unfortunately for him, Talitha was even more against these parties than Lisa. She saw them for what they were: childish and stupid, and really just an excuse to get drunk. He disliked the getting drunk part and tended to leave at the first sign of vomit.

"The library, again? She loves her books way too much!" Lisa took him by the arm and started to lead him away from the building and toward the seawall. "If she had to choose between Brian and all of her books, which would she choose?"

They came up to the seawall and leaned against the chain link fence. The setting sun warmed the evening and quite a few people were taking in the glowing New York skyline.

"That's just it," he said. "She'll never have to choose, since he loves books almost as much as she does." The wind coming off the water blew Lisa's hair back and her eyes shown a brilliant green. Will looked at her and thought she was the prettiest he had ever seen her. His love or liking or whatever it was that he felt for her, filled him suddenly and he took her in his arms and kissed her for a long time.

When they broke apart, Lisa gazed out to the sunset and seemed lost in thought. "They're pretty lucky. I wish..." she paused and sighed.

"You wish what?"

"Nothing. They're just lucky that's all. They're made for each other don't you think?"

3

Talitha and Brian did seem to be two peas in a very nerdy pod. They started going out the previous October after Will had explained to Talitha The Math concerning the thought process behind how boys asked girls out. Very soon after that she surprised him when she actually flirted with a boy.

"Hello Brian. That's a nice shirt you're wearing," she had said. The subtly of this little comment was almost lost on Will. It wasn't until later when he looked at Brian's striped shirt, that he realized it was the same shirt he wore every fourth or fifth day and it wasn't nice at all.

For Talitha, this constituted flirting. However, it was with a boy, Will wouldn't have suggested, but at least it was a start.

If anyone could claim to be bookish, nerdy, and shy, it was Brian Galt. However, he wasn't wholly a lost cause. He played on the high school football team, strictly junior varsity, but it was something. Another not-so-nerdy aspect of Brian's was his confidence; he had an unusual, almost commanding air about himself.

However, being a nerd was almost all about looks. Brian stood a scant two inches taller than Talitha, while his large glasses and the ever-present science fiction book in his hands increased his nerd factor. He was a loner and Will frequently saw him sitting by himself reading.

On the other side of the ledger, Brian was aggressive and tough when called for. Will had seen him fight twice in the short time he knew him and both times, Brian had ended the fights in seconds with blazing fast punches. Talitha had called him a dichotomy and after Will looked it up, he had agreed.

But, dichotomy or not, Brian didn't seem to realize Talitha's sudden interest in his apparel signified flirting. She tried again the next day.

"Brian, you're taking calculus, right? Could you show me how to do this problem?" This was like Beethoven asking somebody what the black keys on a piano were for and Will almost jokingly called her a slut.

Talitha and Brian talked math for a while and the conversation seemed short and to the point, and if there was any flirting going on, Will missed it completely.

When she left, Brian blurted, "I'm going to ask your sister out."

Brian asked Talitha to a Halloween party the next day, and now seven months later, they appeared to be the happiest nerd couple he'd ever seen.

He sometimes even envied them. They were so smooth together and they seemed to fit so right. Will could tell that neither of them doubted for a second the truth of their feelings.

It was his own doubt that he knew was the problem. He was lost in thought as they wandered slowly down the road with the sun easing down, seemingly right into the waters of the harbor.

"Talitha and Brian were made for each other," Lisa said a second time. "Tell me, do you believe in soul mates?"

His first thought was Inmates and that made him feel like a complete jerk. "I don't know," Will answered. "Maybe."

"They're so perfect for each other," she said placidly, but he knew her well enough to know that she had been irked at his response.

They strolled inland with no particular destination in mind and didn't speak much, which would've been normal. The two of them were very comfortable with each other and didn't feel the need to talk, just for the sake of being heard. Except that night, Lisa had something to say, which she was finding difficult to spit out.

They walked down Clayton Road and Will decided to cross the Village Green. The Green was a large oak-lined park and he loved to lie in its soft grasses. He grabbed her and pulled her down onto the lawn, beside him, and decided he'd just wait patiently until she was ready to talk.

Colonels Row was visible a short distance away, Lisa asked, "Which one's going to be your house?"

In the daytime all the homes looked pretty much identical. Now they all were lit and seemed lively, except for one that was very dark in comparison.

He pointed to the dark one. "It doesn't look too happy."

Lisa hopped up. "Come on, I want to see it." She dragged him to his feet and they set off toward the house. "Do you know which one is your room? Is it on this side of the house?"

"Mine is in the attic, either those windows on the left or the ones nearer to the center. I haven't decided which room I want." Will pointed up to the top most of the black windows, they seemed very high up. "Talitha wants a room around the other side of the house, on the second floor. It's so small." They were nearing the dark house and Will's voice dropped to slightly above a whisper. "You'd think after being squished in that terrible apartment for so long she'd want one of the bigger ones upstairs."

They stopped on the brick sidewalk that ran all along the Row and stood looking up at the house. It was full dark now and it made the house look brooding and uninviting.

4

"Look at this place," Lisa remarked quietly. "It's like you're rich or something." She climbed the stairs to the porch and turned back, looking out at the Village Green.

He joined her and the view was beautiful. The lights from the building across the Green twinkled warmly through the trees and they heard kids laughing and yelling down the long row of houses to the left. To the right soft music came from the house next door. Will looked in that direction, but could see no one in any of the windows; the closed drapes barely allowed any light to seep through.

Behind them, Will's new house stood looming, completely silent.

Lisa went to the front door and tried the knob, it opened and she turned back, giving Will her patented wide-eyed 'I'm about to make mischief' smile. She glanced up and down the Row, and then slipped into the house. He quickly followed after and nearly knocked her down when he stepped into the foyer.

The foyer, a partially enclosed room was almost pitch black. "Sorry about that," he whispered. Lisa shushed him as if he were being loud in some way.

He found her hand in the dark and pulled her into the living room, which was better lit from its three windows. Even so, it took a few seconds for their eyes to get used to the dark and then Lisa went to the grand staircase, and ran her hands over the wood banister.

"Wow, this is so nice," she whispered. She then went into the main living room area, not bothering to wait for him and walked to the large fireplace, caressing the wood. "I sure would like to see this in the daytime. Do you think your Mom is going to invite me for dinner anytime soon? Now that she's losing her big excuse, that is."

His mom refused to have anyone visit them in their tiny apartment and their move in date to the big house was a week away. However, Will didn't think she would be sending Lisa an invite in the near future. He could already hear the excuses: "We just moved in, let's give it a few weeks; It's almost your Dad's birthday, maybe next month."

He could think of nothing to say that was believable. "Possibly," he managed finally, with a shrug.

"Sure, maybe I'll just hold my breath." Lisa turned away from him and went into the dining room. Over her shoulder, she murmured, "It's your house too, Will."

He was perplexed at her behavior. She was normally the sweetest person he knew. Will caught up to her as she was heading into the kitchen. "Hey, are you ok?"

She stared at the huge kitchen. "I'm fine, don't worry about me. This room alone could hold half my apartment." She exaggerated, but only by a little. Lisa walked around the room, her green eyes running over the appliances, the windows, and even the wallpaper. "I don't like it," she declared. "It's neither as old and classy as the rest of the place nor is it modern enough. It's got to be one or the other."

Will looked around; he'd been in the house only once before and had never given the room much thought. "As long as there is food in here, I'll be happy," he said. Lisa was quiet for a time as if thinking, and he found it hard to judge her feelings in the darkness.

"Basement?" she asked suddenly, pointing to the basement door. She didn't wait for an answer, but walked past it to the back staircase. These were narrow and as she began walking up them, surprisingly loud. She stopped quickly and paused listening, but after a few seconds she started up again, this time more quietly. Will followed after.

Lisa acted as her own tour guide. She went to the second floor, took the right into the hallway and stopped briefly looking into Talitha's room.

"If this is Tal's room, you're right it's dinky," she said quietly, before moving on to the family room. Here she didn't even pause since it was utterly dark. Instead, she looked into the master bedroom and whistled at the size of it and at the fireplace. "Fancy, fancy, their own fireplace," she muttered almost to herself. "Must be nice." And with that, she marched past a confused Will and into Katie's room.

She paused in the doorway of the little room and slowly bent down and felt the long fibers of the carpet. She then went over to the windows and Will came up behind her, putting his arms around her waist and holding her. There was something wrong with Lisa, but for the life of him, he didn't know what it was.

The view was the exact same as from the porch, just at a slightly higher angle. The lights of Ligget Hall, across the Green from them were golden and pretty through the trees.

Lisa turned around and kissed him aggressively, almost fiercely. She pulled him down onto the carpet, continuing to kiss him. He was pleasantly surprised at this and kissed her back with passion. She took his hand and laid it on her breast, he massaged it as they kissed and she moaned softly. It became obvious that he was getting aroused and that's when Lisa said, "I love you Will. I truly do."

He paused slightly. "I love you, too." He was a little puzzled again, at her behavior and how she'd said, "I truly do," because it sounded like she was talking to herself.

"Ok, we're done. Get off me please," she demanded without explanation. He pulled back and knelt on the long light yellow shag carpet, confusion marring his handsome features. She saw his look and gave a shrug. "I'm...I'm sorry about that. I'm going to check out the rest of the house. Are you coming or what?"

"What the hell is going on?" Will hissed. "This whole night you're acting like I did something wrong. Why don't you tell me what game you're playing here?"

"I'm not playing anymore, so you don't have to worry," she spoke quietly and walked off down the hall toward the back stairs.

Dumbfounded, he knelt in Katie's room and just shook his head trying to make sense of what had happened. When he heard her on the stairs going up, he got to his feet and followed after.

He found her at the end of the hall in the bedroom to the right; she was just looking at the floor and holding herself with both arms.

"Don't choose this room, it's pretty cold," she advised.

"I don't think you have the right to treat me this way," he said quietly.

She turned toward him and there were tears in her eyes. "You're right. I screwed up somewhere. Probably a year ago. Either way," she paused and looked away blinking rapidly as more tears formed, threatening to spill over. "I should have...man it's cold in here. I think the air conditioner is on."

Will felt it then as well.

It was very cold in the room all of a sudden and he began rubbing his arms. He was just about to ask her why she felt that she screwed up when he heard someone moving about in the kitchen. After the briefest hesitation, he leapt quietly to Lisa and placed his hand over her mouth, just as she was about to speak.

"There's someone down stairs," he whispered this so softly that he was afraid that she didn't hear it, but a moment later she nodded her head.

Will realized with the rooms empty there was absolutely no place to hide and a thread of disquiet started to unravel somewhere deep within him. Their best course of action was to get out before whoever it was came up stairs. He figured it to be the Security Patrol and that someone must have seen them come in.

"Let's go downstairs," he said as low as before. "If they stay in the kitchen, we'll go out the way we came in. You head straight home; I'll get them to chase me. I can out run all of the SPs, so don't worry, just go home. I'll call you."

She nodded a second time in agreement.

He reached down and slid his tennis shoes off and when Lisa did the same, he started to silently slide over the hardwood floors. When he reached the stairs, he paused listening. Barely twenty seconds had passed since Will had first heard the person and whoever it was sounded like he was still in the kitchen.

Will put his shoelaces in his mouth and half-slid down the walls, keeping the weight of his feet off the center of the stairs, trying only to touch the edges. Lisa imitated him and though they were nearly noiseless, they still made enough sound that Will thought the person in the kitchen should have heard something.

When he reached the landing he heard a murmuring from the kitchen. It was odd sounding, like a foreign language, but despite straining, he couldn't make it out. It gave him the creeps and his back muscles danced and twitched. Sweat trickled down his skin, despite the air conditioning.

Lisa came up behind him and he pointed for her to go on toward the main stairs.

Her face looked deathly pale in the dim light and he saw the fear in her eyes as she turned and started slowly...too slowly, moving down the hall. She seemed to be taking forever. He stood by Talitha's bedroom door just in case he had to make a distraction and Lisa was only halfway down the hall, when Will heard the first heavy footfall on the backstairs.

With a start, he turned to go down the hall and was surprised to see Lisa frozen in place midway down it, her face looked stiff with fear. As fast and quietly as he could, he slid down the hall and as he got to Lisa, he gave her a nudge to get her moving.

"Go," he whispered

However, she stood immobilized with fright, staring back behind him at the stairs and wouldn't budge, except to tremble, fawnlike. There was no way they would make it to the stairs in time, so in silence he picked her up and stepped into the pitch black family room.

A second later, he heard the patrolman pause at the landing and Will felt oddly apprehensive. Not just nervous but afraid. He shouldn't have been. If they were caught all that would happen is his Dad would ground him or make him do some extra chores, but for some reason he felt far more afraid than the situation called for.

He stood there in the dark room with Lisa in his arms. She breathed very shallowly into his neck, and he could feel her body trembling against his. Slowly the tempo of her breathing began to pick up.

For what felt like an eternity, the security patrolman stood on the landing, listening for them. Why wouldn't he leave? Fearing that the sound of her breathing would give them away, Will pressed Lisa's face firmer into his neck.

Finally the patrolmen began climbing the back stairs and Will felt the stress drain from him.

"Go on," he whispered a few seconds later. Above them the patrolman creaked about whispering in that strange language, making the hair on his arms raise. Will didn't want to hear another word of it and hurried Lisa onto the banister of the great stairs.

They slid down it and escaped out into the night moments later.

The night air felt suddenly very hot and muggy after the coldness of the dark house, but he was glad for it. The warmth helped to drive away the last of the chill that had settled in his bones. Leading the way, Will slipped through the gloom of the looming shadows of the tall oaks and periodically turned and walked backwards to stare up at the house.

It was creepy. The house was so dark that it was almost a hole in the surrounding shadows and his body gave a shudder at the sight. It was soon lost from view by the trees and he was glad for that. They reached the end of the Row and cut across the narrow portion of the Green heading home and only then did Will breathe out a huge sigh of relief.

"I bet that was Skipper. None of the SPs are as slow as him, thank God." He laughed feeling the tension drain away and smiled at Lisa. Skipper was the Island's ancient bow-legged security guard; he had very bad knees and waddled everywhere.

She smiled a crooked smile back. "That was...you were great, Will. I completely froze. I would've been caught for certain and I was so afraid. I mean, I was petrified. It was weird. I guess in a spooky house at night, even Skipper can be frightening."

She shook her head and ran her hand across her face. Will reached out to her, their argument of a few minutes earlier completely forgotten by him.

But not by her.

"Will, I need to break up with you." He pulled his hand back as if she had tried to bite it. "I'm sorry," she continued. "But I need someone to really and truly love me and you don't. I've been fooling myself now for so long, but I can't do it anymore."

"What? I do love you. What have you heard? Is there some rumor going around that I don't? Lisa, look at me, I do love you." He felt it then, the love, but he also felt something else he had trouble putting his finger on. Relief? Anger certainly. Frustration? Bewilderment? Maybe all of those at once, but also indignation that she would presume to tell him how he felt.

"Will, stop it! I don't think you know what love is. Maybe I don't either. But I do know that it isn't temporary—it's supposed to last. And I can tell you don't feel the same way I do." He started to protest, but she cut him off. "Will, do you want to spend the rest of your life with me?"

He paused looking astonished. "I'm seventeen, damn it! How do I know who I'm supposed to spend the rest of my life with! You're asking for the impossible. I do love you, but I'm still a kid."

Lisa had been walking this whole time but stopped. "I sometimes think you love me as much as I love you and that's what has kept me going. But if you really do love me...then you're holding something back." She started to cry, the tears making the green of her eyes stand out, even in the dark. "When you're truly in love, Will, you never ever think about it ending. You want it to last for always."

"Wait! Lisa, you're making a mistake, I love you. But I don't know. I... I...you're asking too much." Will's mind swirled with everything she had said, and he was having trouble thinking clearly. He had never asked himself whether he wanted to spend his life with Lisa; he was still trying to figure out if he truly loved her. He didn't know even then for sure, but he knew he didn't want to lose her, he never wanted that.

She shook her head at him. "You're the one who's asking too much! I have given you all of my love, I've not held anything back. I only have one thing left to give, but it's not going to go to some scared momma's boy. You want to have sex with me, but when you're done, I'll be thrown out like yesterday's trash!"

"That's not true at all; I actually think it'll bring us closer together. Lisa, I don't want to lose you." Her tears were starting to affect him—he was hurting her, and it was the last thing he wanted to do.

Lisa sniffed hugely and said, "I'm as close to you as I'll ever get. But you never tell me you love me, unless I say it first. You don't love me. You really like me and that's great, I guess, but..." she stopped and looked up at him and he saw the misery in her eyes. He was doing this to her—hurting her and he felt a desperate need to make it right.

"What can I do to fix this?" he asked.

"Be honest with yourself," she said quietly. "We've been together for nearly a year and you don't even like to talk about love. You seem freaked out about it. Look, if you haven't figured out if you love me by now, it means there's nothing to figure out." She stopped for a moment, wiped her eyes, and then looked at him with determination. "Will, I can take it. I've known for a while that you don't love me. Here's your chance to walk away without being the bad guy. I know you see my tears and want to fix this, but you can't, not without giving everything you have to me. The feeling you have right now, right this second, is...is pity, not love. It's time to be honest with yourself and with me."

Was she right? She was certainly right about the pity; he felt her pain keenly and was willing to say or do anything to end it. But was she right about the rest? Will needed time to sort this out.

"I don't know what to say or do. I need some time," he started to say, but Lisa interrupted.

"No, it's time you started being a man. You were a man up in that house. I need you to be a man now and come clean. Just tell me the truth, not what you think will stop my tears, but the truth, deep down."

Right then she seemed so mature and Will felt like a stupid kid who didn't know what he wanted; his greatest feeling at the moment was confusion.

Lisa seemed to sense this and said, "I know this came out of the blue for you, but tell me, what you were feeling earlier tonight when I mentioned Soul Mates? You seemed to cringe."

Will cringed again. He remembered exactly what he had thought, Inmates, and he certainly wouldn't tell her that, it would just hurt her more. Maybe she was right, maybe he should tell her how confused he was.

"I don't know what to say," he whispered. "I think I love you, but I feel like a kid still and it just seems so big. I've never been in love before and I don't know. I don't know what I'm feeling or what I'm supposed to feel."

Her tears became huge and raced down her face.

"Ok, ok you're being honest...good. But...you don't know after a year, you don't know. Goodbye Will. I love you, but I...I...can't be in a relationship where I'm the only one in love." She tried to smile through her tears. "Good bye."

She walked away.

Chapter 5

M-Day

June 2, 1980

1

Gayle was finally lying in her bed. She turned her head and saw that William had a lot of room on his side. "What a bed hog," she thought and then smiled, she had plenty of room also. For the first time in fourteen months, she was back in her bed.

She snuggled deeper into the freshly washed sheets, her long brown hair standing out against the stark white of the pillowcase. The sheets had just come out of the drier a few minutes ago and they were still warm. Which was a good thing too, since their new house was always so chilly. It was one of the few things about the place that bothered her.

On the bright side, it was just another reason to cuddle with her husband. William was a big strapping man at his peak, physically. She loved to lie in his strong arms and never felt safer than at those moments. Restless, she skootched over to him, to steal his heat and thought to herself, "What a day it's been."

Gayle looked up at the high ceiling and couldn't believe she was so wide-awake; she should be dead to the world.

Only that day, at long last, had they finally moved out of the Cave, as she thought of their apartment and into the big spacious home on the Row. It had been quite a day and she figured that it was all the excitement and stress of moving that kept her up.

However, it was a good stress, the first good stress in her life since Alabama.

Whenever she thought of stress, she reminded herself that it could always be worse; William could be assigned to one of the boats again after all. He loved the boats or cutters as he called them and was never happier than when his boat would head out into a hurricane going to help some idiot with more money than brains.

She couldn't blame him however, she had known what she was signing on for when she married him. He was a man through and through and had chosen his profession strictly for the adventure. William hated his current position as much as Gayle had hated him on the boats. He worked in logistics for the first district now and the way he put it, he was the: "Officer in Charge of Toilet Paper."

There was certainly going to be no complaining from her. He was always home in time for dinner and the only night operations were at the Officer's club. Moreover, with the move, he was at least going to be treated like an officer for a change. They were now living in what people referred to as "Officer Country." Their front door opened onto the spacious, park-like setting of the Village Green while their back door went straight to the golf course.

William snored next to her. He could fall asleep practically in an instant—she envied that trait. Gayle rolled over, again. Maybe she was having trouble sleeping because her children were now so far away from her. Although Katie was close, only in the next room, Talitha was down at the other end of the hall and Willy J was even further. He had chosen the larger room in the attic, the one on the far left.

Gayle would have chosen the one on the right, since it was brighter and closer to the bathroom. She thought he would likely change his mind in a few weeks, when he finally got over that Lisa and started thinking straight.

Willy J had been moping around for a week, since his breakup with her and Gayle thought it was about time he found a new girlfriend. Their neighbors, just to the north had a gorgeous raven-haired daughter, who had been practically throwing herself on Willy J. Not that Gayle really approved of a girl acting in such a forward manner, but he should've at least noticed her.

The girl, Amy Harris, was also pretty. Lisa could only be considered plain looking and Gayle, who had seen her just a couple of times, noted that she never wore makeup even though she really needed to.

Lying there, she wondered what Willy J saw in her and shuddered at the notion of how easy she must've been. However, the weird part was that she had broken up with him. Did Lisa possibly think she could do better? And the rumors about her mother! Gayle hoped Willy J had never gone into their apartment. According to laundromat gossip, which was usually pretty accurate, the woman was a complete drunk.

To Gayle the breakup was all for the best and the fact that it happened so close to M-Day she took as a sign that there would be a new beginning for Will.

2

M-Day was the code word that Gayle used instead of saying, moving day. Since their move in date had been postponed so many times, she felt saying the words, moving day had jinxed it. The code word also went with the military theme that she had adopted. She wanted the move to go as smoothly as possible and decided to run it like a military operation.

During the week just prior to M-Day, Gayle put her plans in writing, complete with maps. She assigned duties to each of the family members and her commanding style earned her the nickname, Captain Mom. Everyone would jokingly give her an, "Aye, Aye Captain!" whenever she ordered a new chore for them to do.

When Katie saw that even her dad was saluting Captain Mom she asked him, "Is a captain bigger than you?"

William, who was busy wrapping dishes in paper towels and then stacking them in a cardboard box the neat way his wife had shown him, looked quizzically at his daughter. "Which captain do you mean?"

Katie's main job was to keep out of the way and she wasn't very good at it. She looked puzzled at her father's response and said with her little brow furrowed, "Not a witch-captain, a normal one."

This confused William so much that he stopped wrapping the dishes. "Could you rephrase your question please? Rephrase means ask it again, but in a slightly different way, so I might understand it better." He glanced and saw that his wife was looking at them and went back to work with obvious and exaggerated motions.

Katie paused and pursed her lips together, thinking about how to ask such a simple question in a different way.

"Umm, ok. Is a captain bigger?" She stood up on her chair and raised her hand high above her head, to show her daddy what bigger meant. "Or smaller than you?" At this, she placed her tiny hands about two inches apart to show William, that he was apparently mouse-sized.

William stopped working again and looked at his daughter completely nonplussed.

Talitha, who'd just entered the tiny kitchen with a cardboard box of her own, tried her best to make things clear, "Some captains are big and some are smaller, ok? Just like some mommies are big, like Mrs. Landon and some are small, like our mommy."

"I don't mean big and fat," Katie said. Mrs. Landon was the size of a house and had to turn sideways to fit through her apartment door. "I mean big." She then put her hands on her hips and puffed up her tiny chest. Talitha immediately became as bewildered as her father.

Because the apartment was so minuscule, Gayle could hear and see practically the entire conversation. She started to feel that Katie had created some sort of mental quicksand and that first her husband and now Talitha were being sucked into it. Gayle smirked; she secretly enjoyed watching the two smartest people she knew become dumbfounded by a six-year-old.

Since the kitchen already held three people and a small box and was thus over-flowing, Gayle stood in the doorway.

"Congratulations, Katie!" she said with a big smile for her daughter. "You've stumped these two geniuses with your tricky question. I think that means you're the smartest!" Katie returned her smile with an even bigger one. She liked the idea of being the smartest. Gayle then added, "You want to know if a captain can boss around a commander, like your Father and make him do things, right?"

Katie gave a look of relief. "Yes! That's it, Mommy."

"A captain is bigger than a commander...which is why he has to do what I say, because I'm captain of this here crew. Now, he'll get back to work or else I'm going to start cracking the whip!" Gayle said and then with a sly look at her husband, she continued, "And I do have a whip." William smiled right back knowingly, but Talitha grimaced.

"You two have such polluted minds!" she cried.

"You have a whip, Mommy?" Katie asked and then started to say, "What's a whi..."

Gayle cut her off. "Enough questions, Katie. I have an order for you. I need you to go and empty out your old ratty toy box. All of your toys have to go into the brown box that's sitting in your room." Gayle then stood erect and said, "And that's an order Lieutenant Katie, now move!" The little girl dashed by her mother and headed for the room she shared with her sister. "And you two, Commander Chitty Chat and Lieutenant Lazybones. More work and less talk, or you'll be walking the plank!"

"Are we supposed to be pirates?" Talitha laughed.

"She's right, honey. We don't use the plank in the Coast Guard. It would be a waste of time, since someone would have to dive right in afterwards and save them." William's tone then became serious, "And you're not supposed to use a whip either. Regulations state, a light spanking should be administered to the rear end..."

"AHHHH! My ears!" Talitha interrupted. "Will, save me! Mom and dad are being so gross."

Gayle enjoyed this, but there was a still lot of work to do. "It's seems I'm going to have to separate you two. William, finish with this here box matey and take her down to ye olde storage room. And remember landlubber when you're on my crew, you always have to come back!"

William snapped to attention and gave her his most formal salute, what he called his Admiral's salute. "Aye, aye Captain!" he said. Gayle returned the salute and went to check on Willy J, who was supposed to be putting his clothes neatly into one of the boxes.

Behind her, she heard Talitha ask her father, "Why did mom say you always have to come back? Were you going somewhere?"

"No, she was just alluding to the old Coast Guard saying and was suggesting that I shouldn't be unnecessarily slow."

"I'm not familiar with any Coast Guard sayings, what does it mean?" Talitha asked. At that, Gayle paused in the short hallway and her body gave a little shudder.

"The full quote is 'The Blue Book says we've got to go out; it doesn't say a damn thing about having to come back,' it means..." William hesitated and Gayle knew he was wondering if she could hear him. "It means," he began again, in almost a whisper. "When we're trying to rescue someone and it looks dangerous...we don't have the option to not try. We have to at least make the attempt. The quote comes from a Captain Etheridge and supposedly, what happened was a ship had run aground on some dangerous shoals and he was sent to the rescue site. He ordered the cutter's lifeboat in and the crew balked, saying, 'They would never make it back,' and he said, 'The Blue Book says we've got to go out and it doesn't say a damn thing about having to come back.' Basically he told them they had no choice but to go in."

"What happened to the ship? And why are we whispering?" Talitha whispered to her father.

"The ship? Dashed to pieces on the rocks, same with the lifeboat. But our guys had life preservers and were good swimmers so they made it out alive," William said. "We're whispering because your mother hates the saying. She always demanded that I come back no matter what the Coast Guard regulations say."

Gayle's body gave another involuntary shudder and she reminded herself that the only boat he had a shot at now was one of the big cutters and even then, he wasn't likely going to get one.

Two days after that conversation, Operation M-Day was carried out successfully, with very few casualties. The first casualty was a chair that went with their expensive couch set. It had become home to a family of mice, or at least that's what Gayle told herself. If it had been rats, she would've had to burn the chair on the spot. It wasn't a complete loss, but would have to be re-upholstered at some point when they had money to spare.

The next casualty was not a total loss either, a large fruit bowl given to her by her mom, was dropped and exploded like an artillery shell into a thousand pieces. The bowl was terribly garish and ugly, but she could neither break it purposely herself, nor hide it away due to her mom's frequent visits. Now she could be rid of the ghastly thing and not have to lie about what happened.

Due to Gayle's pre-planning, all aspects of the operation went smoothly. Each box and piece of furniture had been labeled, with a one, two, three, or B, to denote the floor of the house, followed by a letter to denote the room. For example, Talitha's room was labeled 2-T and so were all of her boxes. Gayle had been through enough moves in her time that she never again wanted to hear: "Where does this go?"

During the actual move, Gayle's biggest issue was trying to stop Katie from being Katie.

Every time she turned around, she saw the little blonde girl almost being stepped on, opening boxes, sliding down the banister, and turning cartwheels in front of the movers as they lugged heavy loads. Katie felt the absolutely unquenchable desire, to tell the movers exactly what was in each of the boxes.

Gayle discovered that the only way to stop Katie was to sit on her and she did just that. That was late in the afternoon and it turned into a mistake, as Gayle was almost too tired to get back up.

3

At that time, she could've fallen asleep on the couch with the squirming Katie giggling underneath her, but now six hours later she felt wide-awake.

Apart from William's light snoring the house was completely still. It was getting chillier however and she reminded herself to ask William where the thermostat for the air conditioner was. She thought they were lucky since theirs was the only home on the Row with central air conditioning. Every other house had the stubby little grey boxes hanging out of various windows. Gayle considered them ugly and thought her house looked the nicest without them.

Just then there was a sound on the stairs, a footstep.

Gayle realized that she had fallen asleep and was a little cross at... Willy J, by the sound of it. He normally had a huge appetite and was likely getting something to eat. Because of the tight budget they were on she would've been upset with him for sneaking food, were it not for the fact that he had been eating like a mouse since his breakup with Lisa, and so Gayle let it slide for now.

He sure was mopey sounding. It seemed to her like he was sleepwalking going up those stairs.

When it was quiet again, Gayle, who had begun shivering, snugged up closer to her husband. Thirty minutes later, she rolled over for what felt like the hundredth time.

The fans!

That's what Gayle needed. While they had been stationed in Charleston, South Carolina, their little condominium had no air conditioning at all and it would become positively sweltering in the summer. The only way any of them could sleep was if a fan were blowing right down on them. She had become addicted to the thrum of the fans at night and ever since, she fell asleep easier when they were on.

Other than the tremendous heat, she had enjoyed Charleston. She loved the beaches of South Carolina, the white sand that was always so hot...

Seven hours later, Gayle woke up feeling like a cat: she was warm, curled up in her sheets, and decided that sleeping was the only thing of any importance. It was light out however and that meant Katie would soon be demanding breakfast. She glanced to the right to check the time, but habit had tricked her. All she saw in that direction were boxes and the fireplace.

A gravelly groan escaped from her as she started looking to the left, it was so much work to roll over, but she finally made it all the way to her left, 7:46 am.

"Wow! How'd I sleep that late?" she asked aloud. She really had to get moving, but her body creaked and popped and generally fought getting out of bed. She was now feeling her forty years like never before.

William, of course wasn't in bed. Gayle knew that he'd been up at five, regardless that yesterday had been M-Day and knowing him, had likely run his five miles already as well. Governors Island was small, only about two miles all the way around it and William would simply lap it two and a half times and use the remainder as a cool down. He was like clockwork, out the door by 6:00 am, back sweating like a pig at 6:52 am.

If he varied this and went at all slower, Gayle would hear him berating himself for being soft and wimpy. This she didn't understand. Eight-minute miles at the age of forty-one was very good.

The most she ever exercised was chasing around after Katie, and now the clock told her it was time for her daily constitutional. The morning felt as chilly as the night had been and her first order of business was to find her robe. She looked all around her at the stacks of cardboard boxes sitting mutely. One of them held her robe but she couldn't remember which and she was too tired to start digging through them all. Two of William's were open and peeking in, she saw that one held his workout clothes.

Good enough she decided, and slipped on a pair of his sweatpants over her pajamas and cinched them up, just under her breasts. She then put the matching sweatshirt on as well and looked at herself in the full-length mirror.

"Hello sexy," she purred to the pathetic looking girl in the mirror.

Girl? Now that was funny. It felt like years since she'd been a "Girl." Though when she flapped her arms she looked a little like Katie pretending to be a penguin and that was girlish. She went to reach for her hairbrush, but this too was in the belly of one the stout little boxes and she aged a few years at the thought of unpacking all of them.

The sound of Katie digging through her toy box reached her. It grew louder and then Gayle heard her say "MMMHHH!" It was the Katie sound for frustration. She went to her daughter's room and standing in the doorway, peeked in. Most of her little room was jumbled with half-open boxes, while mounds of toys were strewn about here and there. By all appearances, some sort of great toy battle had been waged in the room recently.

Katie was currently half-in and half-out of a box. Her tiny bottom was sticking out of the top, while the whole of her upper body was down inside it. With the flaps partially closed, Gayle had the disquieting notion that Katie was being eaten by the box. She shook off the weird thought, reached over and gave her youngest daughter a playful spank.

The little bottom jumped as if stung by a bee.

"Hey! Cut it out," Katie's cry sounded muffled and her legs gave a little irritated kick. She pulled herself out of the box and it was obvious that like her mother, Katie hadn't found a hairbrush either. Her hair went in every direction at once and there was an old Tinkerbelle sticker stuck in it, as well as some dust bunnies.

"Oh hi, Mommy. I thought you were Tal."

"Do we look that much alike to you?" Gayle asked as she started to pull the sticker and dust bunnies out of her daughter's hair.

"Lots of times you do, yeah," Katie responded, however she then leaned back away from her mom and gave her an appraising eye. "But not today. You look kinda fat." Gayle looked down at herself in her two layers of clothing and had to agree. But at least she was warm. Katie continued on, "You know? You should only wear dresses, on-a-cuz that you're a girl. I like the pretty blue one you wore the time that daddy got all dressed up and had his sword on. Did you get to have a sword too?"

Gayle knew the dress Katie meant and she loved it as well. "No I didn't get to wear a sword that night and I'm glad too. It wouldn't have looked good with my fancy dress and they're really just for boys anyway."

"Did the boys have sword fights, like in the movies?" Katie's blue eyes widened at the thought.

"Sorry, nope," Gayle smiled at her pretty daughter. "They're just for show and they aren't even that sharp."

Gayle knew a secret about William and his sword that he didn't know, she knew: he sometimes played with his sword, swinging it about and stabbing at the air. She knew also that he wished it were sharp like a real sword. Once she'd seen him fingering the edge of his blade and muttering, "Pathetic." It was a ceremonial sword used by officers for parades and formal dinners, but it was still a sword however, and not only could you put an eye out easily, a man as strong as William could very well kill someone with it.

Katie wore a hopeful look now. "They're not only supposed to be for boys, you know. Some girls in my class have swords like daddy's, so can I get one too?" Katie lied unconvincingly.

"No, but you can have breakfast if you can tell me who these girls are, so I can call their mothers." Gayle gave her daughter a steely, 'I mean business' look.

"I...I...there are no girls with swords, Mommy," Katie admitted in a little voice. "I didn't meant it, on-a-cuz it just came out."

"It didn't just come out, Katie. We don't lie in this family, do you hear me?" Gayle's kids were good kids, but they weren't perfect and she had dealt with this before. Talitha had always tried to back up her lies with fanciful statistics. Katie looked properly miserable, which was good. "Ok, but you're going to have to do some chores around here to work it off. But first, breakfast!"

"Can you help look for something first?" Katie asked. "I can't find my Halloween costume anywhere." She grabbed a chair from her hard plastic kitchen set and brought it over to the box she'd been in. Soon, Katie's bottom was back up in the air as she dove head first into the box.

At that moment, Gayle was stuck by an intense feeling of déjà vu. It was something about the room. Not the boxes...it was that chair...and the costume. She had dreamed of Katie in a red coat, but now Gayle realized it was a costume.

The dream started to come back to her in pieces. She had been walking around the house looking in all the rooms for something. Gayle remembered feeling anxious, but about what she didn't know. All the rooms and hallways had been dark...she had started in the kitchen and then gone up the back stairs to Talitha's room. Her room had been empty and so was Willy J's, but Katie had been in her room, playing.

Gayle remembered sitting at the tiny table with her knees up to her chin having tea. The room wasn't as dark as the hallways had been, but it was still dim. There was a vague blue light coming in from the windows that made the light yellow carpet look like it was light green instead. Katie served real tea, but in the little plastic tea cups and Gayle remembered looking at the tea, fearing it would be cold. For some reason she was afraid of the cold. However, it was the costume that Gayle recalled most vividly, it was very red, and Katie's eyes were bright blue in her face. Sometime during their playing Gayle noticed that she too had on a red cape which brought with it a sense of alarm.

That was the whole dream, or all of it that Gayle could remember, and for her that was a lot, since she never remembered her dreams like other people could. Thinking about the dream and the déjà vu made her feel slightly uneasy and Gayle stood looking at Katie's bottom for a moment longer, wondering why and then said, "All the costumes are in the basement boxes."

Gayle heard a disappointed, "Oh," from the box and then Katie struggled out. "Can you get it for me, please?"

Gayle sighed, that seemed like a lot of work and she was already tired at 8:00 am. "Maybe, we'll see how the day goes. We have a lot of unpacking still to do. But now, breakfast. Watcha want?"

"French toast please," Katie responded in her sweet, I'm-just-too-cute-to-say-no-to, manner.

Gayle sighed again, that seemed like a lot of work as well, and suddenly she felt even more tired at 8:01 am.

Chapter 6

Commander William Jern and the Ghost

June 3rd 1980

1

William's pace was way off. "Come on!" he groused to himself, but it didn't have the desired effect, he only felt slightly more winded. A glance at his watch, at the four-mile mark showed him he was at thirty-four minutes. This was bad news and he pressed forward harder.

Suddenly he developed a stitch in his side and grimaced. He couldn't remember the last time he had a stitch; it might've been in the eighth grade. However, he did remember the simple key to fighting a stitch, which was to not think about it.

To take his mind off it he watched the passing scenery: the ferryboats, the sea gulls, the sky-scrapers in the distance, and he listened to the rhythmic pounding of the waves just below the sea wall.

It didn't work.

The stitch was still there and William castigated himself for being a slug. Up ahead he spied another jogger. It was a man in a grey sweat suit and he had about a three hundred yard lead on William. This is what he needed: a challenge. He stared at the man's distant back and started sucking wind. It was far too early for his final push, but this was his only chance and William forgot his stitch and found a good rhythm.

With a half mile to go his body felt good for the first time that morning, but then the other jogger suddenly stopped. The man in the grey sweat suit doubled over with what looked like a cramp in his side.

"Damn! Silly little wimp," William thought uncharitably.

In less than a minute, he breezed by the jogger and pretended not to notice that it was Captain Hadley of the Dallas. Being on patrol sure did limit one's ability to exercise, he reflected.

William finished the turn at the top of the pear-shaped island, looked down the long east side of it, and could see the Dallas at its moorings. The sweep of her lines were long and clean and William wanted her badly. He loved these runs in the morning and always tried to end them just in front of where the big Coast Guard Cutters sat moored.

At that moment, he realized his breathing had become easier and that meant he was slacking again. He kicked it in, for his final sprint but there was just not that much left in the tank, and he came puffing up to where the Dallas lay in the water, at a time of forty-one minutes and thirty-six seconds.

"Damn, I'm getting old."

His breath came up in huge gusts and the sweat drained down his body as if he had just stepped from a shower. He wandered halfway up the pier, wanting to get a better look at the Dallas, but then remembered that Captain Hadley would be along in moments and so turned for home, not wanting to embarrass the man.

He could now start thinking about his day and figured it was going to be another long one. If Gayle really knew anything about the military, the day would have been referred to, as M-Day+ 1, and she would've had objectives and plans for this day as well. Part of him rejoiced that she didn't.

Primarily, there would be unpacking, but at some point, he was definitely going to give Lieutenant James Andre another call.

James ran the service management office for the island and he had insisted that the boiler in the house was new and in perfect condition; it was most certainly not.

2

When William woke up that morning, the thermostat read forty-eight degrees; it was actually warmer outside the house than in. He checked to see if the settings on the thermostat were properly set and they were. After waiting for a few moments for the sound of the boiler to kick in, he grew impatient and went to the nearest radiator, he found it almost ice cold.

"What the hell?"

He had gone straight down to the basement at that point and it was then that his day became...weird. Entering the room, he reached out to give the light switch a casual flick and the room blazed, brightly lit for a millisecond, like the flash from a camera and then went dark.

Standing in the doorway with one hand on the switch and the other balled into a fist, he froze in place. He didn't believe in ghosts, he was far too rational, but in the hundredth of a second that the light was on, he thought he saw something. It had seemed to be a great black figure outlined against the boiler. William's breath caught in his throat; he waited one second, then another, his jaw clenched and set firm; he stood unmoving.

He knew his mind was just playing tricks on him, but the strange, fearful image carved into his mind held him in place for a moment nonetheless. Then he stepped back, reached out with his left hand and found the light switch to the laundry room, and snapped it upright.

Light blazed from behind him, showing...nothing...there was nothing in the boiler room. William stood there, not at all afraid or freaked out; instead he was angry. He was mostly angry with himself for being every kind of fool to think, even for those two seconds that there was something haunting his boiler room. Yet there was also a reserve of anger for the Greek painter, who had instilled this nonsense to begin with.

Turning on the spot, he headed back to the stairs, needing another light bulb. He started to go up but stopped with his foot on the first step. The door to the basement stood closed. It had been half-open a moment before when he went down, he was sure of it, yet now it was closed.

The house was one of the draftiest places William had ever been in and the wind must have blown the door shut, he assured himself.

The stairs creaked loudly as he started back up.

You didn't feel any draft, did you?

The question popped into his head and William ignored it.

You didn't hear it shut, either.

He ignored this statement as well, but his jaw clenched all the same.

At the top of the stairs a new thought, actually more of a vision came into his mind: he was just reaching for the doorknob when he pictured the shiny new hasp that been put on the other side of the door, and through the catch of the hasp was a shiny new lock. William's hand seemed to stop on its own,

"Don't be a fool. There's no lock in the hasp," he berated himself. He knew the painter took the lock, he remembered seeing Katie hand it to him. However, in his mind he pictured the hasp and its shiny new lock—in this vision it wasn't a combination lock, but one that needed a key.

William stood poised at the door with his hand out and he recalled thinking how much he loved the craftsmanship of the house. How everything seemed so well made, sturdy, built to last. Even the doors had come under his scrutiny and he'd found these were not veneer over plywood. No, these were thick and heavy. You wouldn't want to be trapped behind one of these doors, because there'd be no getting through it. He felt a slight tingle of fear.

The figure in the boiler room was a brief shock, but this was a creeping fear that William felt growing in him. Where's the key, William? The question, as the others before, came to him as if from someone else, and the tone was insidious and sly and the feeling of being trapped in the basement grew in him rapidly.

"There's no damn lock," William said and turned the knob. The door opened. Walking into the kitchen, he leaned over the sink with both hands on the counter. He shook his head again, and couldn't believe how he was acting. The strobe light image of the figure flashed into his mind once more.

"Jesus!" He came to a quick decision, and turning away from the sink he went back to the basement door. Passing through it, he purposefully shut it behind him so that he heard the door catch. There'd be no breeze moving the door about now. He then went down the stairs and turned off the light at the bottom and then he moved to the laundry to do the same.

His world was pitch black now and he confidently walked into the boiler room, sat down on the dusty floor and waited. He knew what he was so calmly waiting for...absolutely nothing. There was no boiler monster, or black ghost, these were only silly childish fears. William's mindset was one of determination and if there was any fear in him, it was so deeply suppressed that it didn't register.

Purposefully, he tried to bring back the feelings of fear, so that he could confront them.

William imagined the dark figure he thought he'd seen and the strobe light effect flashed in his mind. However, it was weaker and when he tried to analyze it, he found he wasn't afraid at all and chalked it up to a trick of the light.

After a while he became bored. His mind drifted to the day Katie and he visited the house and scared the painter. When Katie had left them, the painter had blurted out some foolishness about the house being haunted. At that point, William had been very happy that he'd sent his daughter away, since all it would have caused were nightmares and a phobia of the basement.

"What did the painter say?" he asked the empty room. William could only vaguely remember: scary sounds and peeling paint. He couldn't recall much more since he had barely listened. "Whatever. It was all crap."

After yawning a couple times, he decided the experiment with the "ghost" was over. He left the basement and a few minutes later began his morning run.

Now, as he walked confidently along, finishing his cool-down from his run he tried to forget how foolish he'd felt. But he wasn't forgetting his anger over the boiler and Lieutenant Andre would be getting an earful from him.

William came up to far end of Clayton road and with a last look at the East River, he turned inland. He saw the small Catholic Church to his left and decided this was probably the best way to go to get home. Colonels Row started about a hundred yards from it.

"Who would want to go to this church?" he wondered.

It was dinky and not very attractive, especially compared to the Protestant one down the street. William and Gayle had been to the other church on the island, St Cornelius for two different weddings. To him that one seemed more like a proper church, with its great high ceilings and polished hardwood floors it was almost a cathedral. Even its heavy wrought iron bound doors were beautiful.

The plainer glass ones of the tiny Catholic Church simply couldn't match up. None of it could. The church was a dull white rectangle with a small steeple in front. Just outside its double glass doors was a bulletin board, which read, "Our Lady Star of The Sea Chapel, Father Alba." To William, that seemed quite a mouthful for such a little affair.

"Star of The Sea," he murmured quietly to himself. He liked the sound of that; it went well with his calling and the theme of the island in general. On impulse, he turned up the walk and peered through the glass of the double doors wondering if the church would have a naval motif.

It seemed dark and empty and he was about to turn away when a shadow blacker than the surrounding darkness moved toward the doors. For the second time that morning, he jumped back startled. One of the glass doors opened silently and a short, chubby priest walked out. The priest had very thin brown hair, so much so, that William who towered over him, could make out the beginnings of a bald spot. He was also extremely jovial and seemed almost delighted to have startled William.

"Oh, I'm so sorry! I'm sorry!" the priest apologized, although his huge grin seemed to indicate that he was far from being actually sorry. He reached out both hands and for a second William thought the priest was going to hug him about his waist. Instead, he took William's right hand in both of his, and shook it. William was extremely embarrassed that he hadn't proffered his hand to the man in the first place.

"Commander Jern!" the priest announced. "I'm so glad to meet you, finally. I'm afraid you're late for the sunrise Mass. Tsk, tsk."

William was almost speechless. Neither Gayle nor he were religious in any way, he was an atheist while Gayle was a non-practicing Baptist. He wondered how the man even knew his name and why he would think that he'd be going to church dressed as he was in sweaty running clothes.

"Uh," was all that he could manage to say, before the priest burst into laughter over some unknown joke.

"I'm joking! Joking, Commander Jern," he enjoyed his laughter and his cheeks turned a quick pink. He wiped his eyes, chortled once more and smiled expectantly at William.

"I'm sorry, but...you must be Father Alba?" William didn't know a priest from a monk, and could only hope he wasn't being offensive.

"Yes, that's me, Father Father." At this the priest chuckled some more. Upon seeing William's blank look he added, "Alba means Father, in an African tribal language. So you see, to them I'm Father Father." There was an embarrassed pause, and then Father Alba continued, "Why do I always do that? I make jokes that no one possibly could understand. Ah well, come in, come in please. I want to show you my church."

"I'm not Catholic...Father White," William said.

"Ha ha! A scholar. Yes, the name means white as well and in more languages too. But I know you're not a Catholic, I know. That's why I said my church and not our church."

Father Alba was unstoppable. With the greatest familiarity, he hooked his arm through William's arm and led him up to the church. William felt like one of the little old men he'd seen while in Italy who went about holding each other this way. It felt distinctly un-American to him, but he couldn't be rude to such a jolly person who was so obviously well-meaning.

"You just moved in, up the Row? Isn't that correct?" the priest asked. The church seemed dim compared to the brightness of the morning and William's eyes took a moment to adjust. He was about to answer the priest, but Father Alba beat him to it. "I saw the trucks yesterday. I was walking back home. I live at the far end of the Row, in the B.O.Q you know."

William didn't know.

The Bachelor's Officers Quarters or B.O.Q in military jargon was an interesting building with wrap around porches on two floors. William had a few friends and subordinates who lived there, but he didn't remember seeing Father Alba when he had visited. The priest began jabbering on about the B.O.Q and William decided that he would remain silent and just let Father Alba talk. The man seemed so chatty he wondered what it would be like to put him and Katie in a small room together.

A minute later, after the briefest of pauses from his last statement, Father Alba said, "So I was thinking it would be a good idea," he paused for a quick breath. "A good idea to schedule a time to bless your new home." Father Alba anticipated William's objection, and simply spoke right over it, "I have you down for the day after tomorrow at six. Now you know...you know I'll be hungry at that time, so if Gayle wants to cook something I'm partial to Italian, but I won't say no to Mexican."

Did the priest just invite himself to dinner? William was almost speechless again. "Uhh," was all he could manage before Father Alba continued.

"Great! Great, it's a date. I'll bring pie and some wine...red wine should go well with the spaghetti. I can't wait to meet Gayle and the children."

Father Alba was more unstoppable than he'd first thought. William couldn't fathom how he knew any of their names but then he remembered that Will had gone to the church a few times with Lisa. He was about to comment on this, but before he could, Father Alba went on, "I forgot! I forgot in all the excitement why we're here." At this, he waved his hand grandly at the small church. In truth, William didn't know why he was there. The only thing he did know for certain about all of this was that he was going to change his cool-down route starting tomorrow.

"What do you think of my church?" Father Alba asked and this time he paused in such a significant manner that William felt compelled to answer.

The church was...nothing special. The vestibule they stood in was small and held little more than a large brass font filled with holy water. Not wanting to lie about a church while in one, he stepped into the main room.

A large center aisle between rows of pews led to the altar. The altar was square and white, above it towered a wooden crucifix on which Jesus hung in seeming agony. To William this was pretty standard stuff and was relatively unremarkable.

He turned to the priest and was about to tell him it was nice, which was the best he could do, when he noticed something on the wall behind Father Alba. It was the Stations of the Cross, which were also standard, but underneath each was a brass plaque. That was different.

He strode by the priest and went to the nearest. The station was a woodcarving of Jesus carrying his cross, and near him a girl held out a cloth. Underneath it, on the plaque was a list of names and dates.

LTJG Harry W. Woodley April 26, 1972 Training Accident

LTJG John Hudan November 8, 1974 Lost At Sea During Rescue

William had known John Hudan. They worked together for a year in South Carolina; it had been Hudan's first assignment out of the Academy.

With sad morbid interest, William then went to the first station. This showed Jesus with his hands shackled, standing in front of Pontius Pilate. He read the names under it, LTCOL Tomas Fortini and CAPT Harold Menning. They were unknown to him. After this, he went to each station in turn reading the list of names and found that he'd been friends with two other people named.

"It's the list of all the Coast Guard service men who've died on active duty while stationed here," Father Alba said with sadness. The priest then looked at William and he felt that in some way he was being tested. "Quite a long list, isn't it?"

William knew the list in Kodiak, Alaska, would've been twice as long and that would only have been counting air crews lost. Nevertheless, the list here was too long and the names that he'd known hit home painfully.

"There are at least three names here that don't fit your description," he stated. The priest nodded and his eyes told William, that he had passed his test.

Father Alba spoke, "There are four; two of which were actually the first up on the wall. As you undoubtedly figured out by the dates given, they were Army and not Coast Guard. The one that is Coast Guard, but that didn't die while on active duty here was Commander Samuels. He was our choir director for four years and was so much a part of this church." The priest paused and William wondered briefly if this final death was why he was really there. "The last was Lieutenant Olson. He was Air Force, but stationed here and died while keeping his flight time up out in Colorado."

The priest stopped talking and waited.

So it was the first two then. It was obvious what Father Alba was getting at and William sighed heavily. The priest hadn't wanted him to 'See his church,' there was absolutely nothing special about it. And judging by the position the priest had taken, as William dutifully looked about, it had been the plaques he was supposed to have seen.

There had been no caption under either of the first two names and the dates were identical, June 15, 1959. It seemed likely that the men had been murdered and logic suggested that it had probably occurred in the home where the Jerns were currently living. Why else had he been singled out for this?

William suddenly felt very tired and he checked his watch. He had work to do and didn't want to have to deal with this just then and he wondered if the priest was really going to use the word 'Ghost.'

The silence drew out between the two men and William knew something about Father Alba already—he hated to be quiet.

After a pause that must have felt very long to the man, the priest said, "Those first two men on the wall were killed in your home..." He again paused a long while, hoping that William would speak, but when nothing was forthcoming, Alba continued, "And under some peculiar circumstances, too. So that's why I wanted to do the blessing of the house. I also wanted to tell you here, privately so that you and your family wouldn't hear it as gossip. Do you understand?" This last he spoke in a rush.

"Thank you, that's very kind," William answered. "I do have to be going however...but if you feel the need to do the blessing, we'll see you at six tomorrow." With that, he smiled at the priest and walked out of the church into the beautiful morning.

3

As William went up the Row, he worried Father Alba would come bursting out of the church and talk his ear off, all the way home. When that didn't happen, he wondered if he'd made a mistake. The priest couldn't have known about his silly fears from that morning or even of his conversation with the Greek painter. Maybe this sort of thing was normal with a house where murders had occurred. Perhaps this was a way to set the new owner's fears to rest. Suddenly William felt moronic; he was now sure the priest wasn't even going to mention ghosts or any of that nonsense.

He was so lost in thought that he didn't see Greg Harris, until it was too late.

"Howdy neighbor, have a good run?"

Greg Harris' overly jovial voice startled William and he gave a little jump as he saw Greg walking from his driveway. William plastered a big fake smile on his face and shook Greg's hand. "You look like you worked up quite a sweat," Greg continued.

William found small talk, painful under most circumstances, but Greg made it pure torture. They had worked together during William's tour of duty in Charleston and those had been some of the longest months of his life. Greg never had anything of interest to say, ever. Literally, everyday it had been long talks about the weather and then the traffic. Once, during an Officer's luncheon, Greg had talked about his pants for forty-five straight minutes. William would have rather gone back down in the basement and talked to his Boiler Monster than to hear Greg that morning.

However, and this had been a painful lesson to learn, in the Coast Guard you had to be careful not to make enemies. This branch of the service was very small and you never knew who was related to some admiral or who went golfing with the base captain. Greg was guilty on both accounts and in addition, he was three years senior to him, so William smiled his smile and agreed that the weather was indeed very nice.

"Yes, it was a nice run...perfect weather for it," William looked up at the sky for added emphasis.

Greg smiled agreeably and patted his bulging blue uniform coat. "Yes. You know, I should really start hitting the track. Maybe we could go running together."

He knew Greg better than that. There was no way he was ever going to go running voluntarily. From his house on the Row, Greg could walk to work in eight minutes, but he drove, every day, rain or shine. Moreover, what he drove was just as annoying as the very fact that he drove in the first place.

Somewhere along the line, Greg must have made a deal with the Devil, because he would tool around the island in a cherry red 1972 Corvette Stingray convertible. Every time William saw Greg in that car he'd have to contort his face into a forced smile and pick up his arm as if it weighed a hundred pounds and wave.

It was pathetic, the island's top speed limit was fifteen-miles-an-hour, which meant Greg never had to step on the accelerator, but instead had to keep his foot on the break the entire drive. Then there were the Aviator sunglasses he inevitably wore, as if he were a fighter pilot.

Of course, part of William's annoyance was brought on by jealousy. When Gayle was pregnant with Katie, she had somehow talked William into buying a Plymouth station wagon. It was actually a Sport Station Wagon, with green and brown paneling. How the word "sport" ever got associated with the thing was beyond him and looking at it, made him cringe. Gayle had chalked it up to hormones and her deep-seated wish to have a dozen children.

"Sure Greg, anytime you want to go for a run, you just let me know. I like to get moving by 0600." William knew this last was a deal breaker for his new neighbor.

"Great!" Greg lied. "How was the move? Probably the shortest distance of your career right?"

How was the move? Ugh! How was any move? William's smile started to slip.

"Good, pretty smooth with Gayle running the show. Despite the shortness of the trip, it was one of the more exhausting ones we've done," he responded. The trick with Greg was to never ask him a question and to never give him more information than was needed. At the same time you couldn't be rude and just give yes or no answers.

"That's exactly what I thought you'd say." Greg gave him a knowing look. "I can picture your day already, unpacking like crazy, moving furniture here and there, and then moving it back again...women." A sad shake of his fat face accompanied the word women. Greg looked like he was just getting warmed up verbally and William groaned inwardly. "Then there are all the pictures and paintings you have to hang and then shopping for the little things. I don't envy you. You're going to be one tired pup tonight. Am I right?"

William was tired right then just listening to him. "You got that right." He thought it was time to turn his brain off and go on autopilot. He would let the words flow over him, but the words that came next out of Greg's mouth didn't flow over him, but rather ran over him.

"That's why you're coming over tonight for dinner. Henny told me yesterday how it was going to be and she said you'd make excuses and not want to impose. But I was told to not let you wriggle off of the hook," Greg said, destroying any chance that William had of looking forward to a good day.

William panicked.

He was about to say he didn't want to impose but Greg had beat him to it. Next, he tried to think of an excuse, but nothing came to mind. Time slipped away and he was on the verge of being rude. "I'll have to talk to Gayle, just in case she has anything planned." He hoped the delaying tactic would work and that his wife could think of something in the mean time.

"Wow! That's exactly what Henny said you'd say." Greg smiled largely. "She also said Gayle was a smart girl and that she would never schedule something the day after a move. So, I will have Henny fix dinner and we'll see the five of you at six sharp! Oh, she said to ask you what you wanted. She's a great cook and can make anything."

He thought that Henny must be a good cook, judging by Greg's waistline. "Steak, that's what I'm in the mood for. I haven't had a good T-bone in ages," William said and thought: 'Well, he asked.'

Greg's smile faltered just a tiny bit. "Sure, steak it is," he agreed but wasn't quite as good-humored as before. "Your littlest daughter doesn't eat steak, does she?" Greg asked hopefully.

Katie was the same at every meal, three bites of whatever was placed in front of her and then a great big serving of talking.

"Oh yeah, she loves it." He or Will would finish anything Katie didn't. "I have to go, Greg. See you tonight." With that, he turned and went into his new home, leaving a near-speechless Greg behind.

The house was still cold and his sweat chilled on him right away. What a day it had been already. He'd gone through the back door into the kitchen and was busy making coffee, when Will came downstairs.

"Hey Dad. Do you know where the thermostat for the AC is? I can't find it anywhere." Will had dressed in two layers of pajamas.

"This house doesn't have central air. I'm calling today to get the boiler looked at," William answered. "In the meantime, I think we should find where we stored those little electric heaters that we bought on the Cape. I think they're in room B-3, according to the 'Captain's' invasion maps."

Will's face went blank for a moment. "Is that the one on the right or the left?" William noticed his son still looked despondent over his break up with Lisa and it was understandable since it had only been a week. He had thought the two had made a fine pair and wondered what had happened, but Will refused to talk about it with him.

"The one on the left, do you need any help?" William asked as his son headed for the basement.

"Not from you, old man," Will said with a grin, the first his father had seen in a long while. "By the way, I have perfected an escape from your Unbreakable Death Grip. When you have recovered from your little jog, I think it is time you meet the new top dog around here."

"Care to wager on it?" William loved to put money on a sure thing. He thought Will was a good six months away from really testing him.

"What's the bet?" Will was always up for a challenge and William had a notion this might perk him up. In fact, he toyed with the idea of throwing the match.

William considered. "Simple: I have to get you in my patented Unbreakable Death Grip within five minutes or you win and, if you can get out of it in five minutes from the time I put it on you, you win." William always needed to be very clear on the rules when betting with his son. Will could twist words like the very devil. "And Talitha is judging, not your mother."

William knew the boy would have preferred to have his mom judge since she was extremely biased toward her son, but the terms were still very favorable to Will. "Ok," he answered quickly. "Loser has to go out on the porch...no, no the middle of the Village Green, at noon tomorrow and yell as loud as they can, I am a little girl! And Talitha can judge that as well."

So much for throwing the match!

Will must be confident in his technique to make such a bet. Maybe it was that five minutes, he had to put him in the death grip. Will may be thinking of just stalling, by using a very large wrestling area and just trying not to engage his dad.

"If we wrestle in the family room, it's a bet," William said and stuck out his hand. Will didn't hesitate a moment and gripped his father's hand, hard. "Now, go get those heaters. I would help, but I got to rest up you know." As his son went into the basement, the 'Boiler Monster' strobe light image flashed into his head and the smile on his face faltered. "No more of that crap," he muttered.

Talitha came down the backstairs at that moment. She topped her brother by dressing in three layers of pajamas to his two, and wore a tired-looking scowl on her face.

"Do you know how to turn down the AC?" she asked. "I was up at 2 am trying to find the control box...oh by the way, I think the heater is malfunctioning too."

He shook his head. "We don't have central air and I'll get the boiler fixed today, I promise."

Talitha looked skeptical. "No AC?"

"Nope, just one of those old brick houses that take forever to heat up and then stay broiling until you wish for the cold again," he said. Will came up from the basement a few minutes later lugging three portable heaters in his long arms. He went to help his son, but Will pulled back.

"Don't help me, not with your bad back." As Will spoke a sly smile spread over his face.

William looked puzzled. "I don't have a bad back."

"Not yet," Will said secretively and then headed for the stairs.

William started to get a nervous.

"What's he on about, do you know?" he asked Talitha. She was going from cupboard to cupboard looking for something.

"Oh, he has some new wrestling move he's going to try on you." Talitha turned and looked at him, exasperated. "Do you know where the cereal is?"

"I'm pretty sure in the pantry." He opened a cupboard himself. "Did you see any coffee mugs?" Talitha pointed. "What's the new move?" William asked her when she came back into the kitchen carrying a box of Cheerios.

"He calls it a body lock and he tried it on Brian, and Brian said it really hurt his back."

"A body lock...never heard of it. Does he use his legs or his arms?" This could get interesting if they were both trying to put different moves on at the same time.

"Oh, he uses his legs and they wrap around the waist." Talitha's eyes narrowed. "Should I be telling you this?"

"No! That's cheating, Dad!" Will had just come down the stairs and he was quite outraged.

"It's not cheating, it's called operational intelligence," William explained. "Forewarned is forearmed."

"Well it sounds a lot like cheating to me," Talitha said and William saw then the amazing similarity between her and her mother. Besides the dark brown hair and the warm tan, there was the set of her jaw at the mere notion of wrongdoing.

"Who's cheating and at what?" Gayle strode into the kitchen carrying Katie. He smiled; this time it was Gayle who seemed to be so much like her daughter. They had struck identical poses and both were eyeing William sternly.

"Dad has been prying information...secret information, out of Talitha, about our big wrestling match today!" Will was a little angrier than the situation called for in William's opinion. It was another side effect of the break up, he assumed.

"Well, it isn't exactly a state secret, Willy J, so I think you should calm down," Gayle said. "And I'm afraid there'll be no time for wrestling today. We have a big day of unpacking and getting this ship in order. Now, we have one vote for French toast for breakfast, right Miss Katie?"

"Yes please!" Katie said and then wriggled down from her mom's arms. She slipped over to Talitha's side, cast a wary look to her father, and whispered, "Did it hurt, when Daddy prying-ed the stuff out of you?"

Talitha scooped up her little sister. "You're too cute!" she told her. "Is that why she can get you to make French toast, the day after moving...I mean M-Day? Because she's so stinkin cute?" Talitha asked her mother.

William loved this. He'd seen jealousy between siblings in other families and it always bothered him. His own children fought sometimes, but overall, they loved each other and showed it.

"Yes, I only do special things for my cute children. William, do something about the AC for goodness sakes." Gayle started to open cupboards, one after the other. "Has anyone seen the glass mixing bowls?"

"You just missed them," he replied, "They were way in the back of the last one. And there is no central air conditioning here, but I'm going to give James Andre a call right now. Will and Talitha please set up one heater in here and two in the dining room."

"No air?" Gayle asked, her upper body still deep in the cupboard. After a moment and some clattering, she emerged with her glass bowls. "You tell James, that if he doesn't have someone over here by the time breakfast is done, he'll be dealing with me." Gayle gave him a long look and he knew it was not an idle threat.

"Got the message loud and clear," he said to his wife. "Good news though, you don't have to cook tonight. Greg Harris has been kind enough to invite us over for a steak dinner!" Both Will and Talitha let out moans of anguish and Gayle wrinkled her nose in a combination of disgust and irritation. William understood. "I know, I know. He ambushed me and wouldn't take 'No' for an answer." He turned to his son and daughter. "Why are you two upset? It's a steak dinner, Will." It had been a long time since the Jerns had eaten steak.

Will cast his eyes down and said nothing. Talitha, acting as his advocate as usual, spoke for him, "It's Amy, their daughter. She's been hot after Will since his breakup with Lisa and she won't take 'No' for an answer either. In fact, 'No' may not be part of her extremely limited vocabulary." She gave her mom a significant look and Gayle's eyebrows shot up.

"Oh..." William was at a slight loss. "We'll still be polite, as always... and speaking of being polite. I ran into the Catholic priest right after my run and well, he invited himself to dinner tomorrow night." Gayle gave him a 'We aren't Catholic' kind of look. He smiled at her and then mentioned, "And you're to make spaghetti."

"Really? Did he get that from the Pope?" Gayle had an incredulous look to her. "Was he rude about it?"

"No, not at all. He was just impossible to say no to. He acted like he knew us and was so darn friendly."

Gayle shrugged her shoulders. "Ok, I can make spaghetti, it's cheap."

William was about to tell her about the house blessing part of their conversation but held back because the children were still in the room.

He was just standing there, thinking about the odd morning he'd had when Gayle spoke, "William. You were going to call James?"

4

"Did you make sure the pilot light was on?" asked Lieutenant Commander Andre a few minutes later; the question was stupid and irked William. The pilot light was the first thing any man worth his salt would check, but he held his tongue.

"Yes James. And I feel I should warn you that Gayle is in a wrath and will be heading down to your office—with my blessing—if there isn't a capable man down here to fix it in the next hour."

"William, I can't just send anyone down there. I could get, hold on." He heard James shuffling papers, and then a muffled: "Damn!" Followed by more shuffling. "Is someone going to be there pretty much all day?" James sounded a little nervous.

William instantly understood. The Greek painter had asked the same question after mentioning the house being haunted. Sure the house could be a little freaky, but these were grown men for goodness sakes. He was just about to say so when the black image flicked through his mind.

"I'll be here all day and I will personally babysit whoever you send down. I have unpacking to do anyways." If babysitting was what it took to get the boiler going, then he'd just have to babysit.

The repairman showed up about two hours later. He was tall and extremely slim. He wore blue overalls that he tucked into his boots and on his head was an old green John Deere cap. His name was Seth and he looked to have just walked in from Iowa.

Seth was very nervous and bobbed his head up and down constantly as he talked. William prepared for him by having every light in the basement blazing away. He even stole light bulbs from one of the attic rooms and laid them on top of the boiler, since the ones in there didn't seem to last.

At first, Seth worked without the encumbrance of unnecessary chitchat, which William appreciated. Seth had the boiler stripped down in minutes and then scrounged around in its innards. Soon he began to relax and started to talk, but not to William. He struck up a conversation with the boiler which he dubbed, "You ole bitch."

"What the hell is your problem, you ole bitch?" he asked and William was just getting ready to snap at the guy to watch his tongue when Seth murmured, "Oh, you got a clogged filter valve, you ole bitch? I don't think you do."

This made William hope that the problem had been solved quickly. "Is that easily fixable?"

"Ayeah. But that ain't your problem." The words sounded tinny as they echoed inside the boiler. "What's going on with you, you ole bitch?" he asked the boiler again. William waited for the repairman to elaborate, but Seth kept up his conversation with the boiler instead. "Why are all your nuts so damn rusty all ready, you ole bitch?"

"William!" Gayle called down from the kitchen. "I need a hand up here." She'd been busy unpacking and directing the unpacking of the children.

"Oh, hey!" Seth pulled his long body out of the boiler in a flash. "Oh hey...ah Captain...ah, I might need you to help me here with some stuff, ok?" Back to being nervous, he began to bob his head up and down again.

Ignoring the incorrect rank, William put his hands out wide to reassure him. "I'm not going anywhere until you're done." He then went to the doorway and yelled up to Gayle, "I can't just yet honey, I'm needed down here."

Seth waited to see if William was going to actually stay. He stood there with his head gently nodding and it was only when they heard Gayle say distantly, "Ok," that he dove back into the boiler. An hour of constant scraping, and adjusting, and numerous utterances of the phrase, "you ole bitch" went by before Seth pulled his head out.

"Ok, I just need to get a bi-metallic strip and she'll be as good as new."

William wanted to tell Seth, the boiler was already new, but asked instead, "Will that take long?"

"Oh, it'll be late this afternoon before I can get it and get back...you'll still be here, right?" The nervousness lay just below the surface of the question.

"Yes, but please hurry."

Seth left quickly and William went to help with the unpacking. It turned into another very long day for the family. There seemed to be an endless supply of boxes to be emptied and furniture to be shifted, first here and then there, and then back again, just as Greg Harris had said. Pictures needed to be hung and dishes shelved.

Other than Katie, the children were a big help and seemed constantly in motion. Katie insisted on finding the box containing the Halloween costumes and spent the entire day skipping about underfoot as Little Red Riding Hood.

It was nearly four when Seth came back.

He worked quickly, but would've been quicker still, if he hadn't checked his watch every other minute. William kept close in order to keep the repairman reassured with his presence. Finally with 5 o'clock nearing, Seth had the boiler put back together and went upstairs to the thermostat to test it. William was fearful that it wouldn't start, but it roared to life after only a moment.

"Hey...ah Captain? Can you bring my tools up?" Seth called from the top of the stairs. William turned from the boiler and was just reaching down for the metal toolbox, when the light flickered once and went out. He froze in place. His eyes went wide trying to adjust to the sudden darkness. Unbelievably, the fear he had felt that morning came back and he felt a trace of panic run through him.

Quickly his ears began consciously sifting through all of the noises around him, his mind registering each and tagging them as friendly or unknown. The voices from upstairs seemed now very far away and there was a muffled quality to their sound. His eyes shifted to the boiler room door... it was no longer open. It had been open a moment before, he had been looking at it when Seth had called down, but now it was shut tight and he had the horrible notion that if he tried the knob, it wouldn't turn. The panic became more urgent as a terrible feeling began to creep over him—there was something in the room.

It wasn't possible. But he felt it nonetheless. His back was to the boiler and there was something behind him and to the right. He was close to bolting for the door when he heard Seth's footsteps come down two of the stairs.

"Hey...ah, Captain...ah?" Seth began to say, but Gayle's voice murmured something. "I mean, Commander? Could you bring up my tools?" William could picture the tall man squatting at the top of the stairs.

The sound of Seth's voice and perhaps more, the noise of his boots on the stairs had, as if by magic, dispelled William's fears. He took a deep breath, looked around into the gloom, and saw nothing. Crossing to the door, he opened it and the light from the hallway streaming in, seeming to bring with it fresh air. He glanced back into the room and shook his head in wonder at himself.

"Yeah," he called up to Seth. "I'll get them for you." William turned, and now the depths of the boiler room seemed inky black compared to the brightness of the hall. The boiler itself was a large dark outline and he could only barely make out the toolbox on the floor near it.

"Wow!" he said to himself. Then raising his voice, he called up stairs, "Gayle! Your husband is being an idiot!"

"Good that you can finally admit," she replied.

He smiled, but it was part grimace. The big man went to the boiler and stood in front of the roaring hunk of metal, shaking his head. Finally, he reached up on top of it and fished around for one of the light bulbs. Just as he was screwing it in the image from earlier, popped into his head and he paused; the mental picture of the black thing lingered in his mind.

"No! No more messing around!" he said harshly as he gave the bulb a few hard twists. Light flooded the room.

William was extremely angry with himself, but also worried. He'd always prided himself on his courage, but now twice in one day he had been afraid of the dark! The thought occurred to him that he had been too long on shore. He felt he needed to get back on the water and test himself against nature's harshest elements.

There had been many times during rescue operations when he had seen fear in the eyes of his men, but he'd always been able to cast aside his own doubts. However, it had now been four years since his last blue water assignment, and the idea that he was beginning to become shy, bothered him.

He didn't sit in the dark this time. It would be a waste of time, so he grabbed up the toolbox and went upstairs. Seth bobbed his head as a goodbye and William headed to the shower to get ready for dinner. When he finished, he noticed that the house had warmed perceptibly.

"Well the ole bitch is working now!" he observed.

"Who is working what when?" Gayle stood in the doorway. She looked tired after the long days of hard labor and he knew she was dreading this dinner almost as much as he. Gayle barely knew either Greg or Henny, but she knew enough to know this was going to a long night. She wore a simple knee length, flowered dress and cast her eyes at his blue jeans with slight disapproval.

"I was referring to our boiler, the repair man has named it that, and to tell the truth, it seems fitting."

"Will it be fitting when Katie starts telling her friends that her house has an Ole Bitch in it?" She smiled at him. It was a tired smile but he could tell that she was also happy.

"Billy the Boiler it is then!" He gave his wife a quick kiss, smacked her on the bottom, and pushed her out the door. "Children. Time to go!" he bellowed so that the whole house could hear, although he need not have since they were all sitting in the living room waiting.

Gayle gave each of her children a quick once over. "Katie, Little Red has to stay here. Take off the cape, please." Katie stuck out her lower lip, but pulled the cape off.

5

Except for the houses on either end, all of the homes on Colonels Row had the same design and floor plan, but it was only the exterior of the Harris house, which truly resembled the rest.

Greg greeted the Jerns at the door and William made sure to keep his face neutral as he entered. It appeared the home had been professionally decorated. The hardwood floors in the living room were carpeted over in light gold, deep and soft. The drapes, an even lighter shade of the gold, complemented the carpet perfectly. The walls shone in a fine color of red, while the crown molding and baseboards contrasted with a delicate red/gold leaf pattern.

The furniture added to the sumptuousness of the room. William would find out later from Gayle that the style of the four pieces was French Colonial. They were upholstered in a light cream which accented the dark wood.

After the Jern's entered and had given their proper greetings, complete with the obligatory phrases: "I hope you didn't go to too much trouble, and dinner smells great!" Greg asked them to have a seat in the living room since Henny wasn't quite ready. They had a choice of a couch, love seat, a single chair, and something William couldn't ever imagine sitting on.

It looked to be a combination of a chair and a small bed and the idea of reclining on the thing seemed ridiculous to him. If Gayle had been wearing a toga and hand-feeding him grapes, then maybe he would've given it a shot. He steered his wife to the couch and she gave him a look, heavy with meaning.

Gayle liked to people watch and once when they had gone out to eat, she had observed the fact that the older a couple was, the less likely they were to talk while in a restaurant. Her theory was that due to the loudness of the room around them they couldn't hear each other and had long ago got tired of saying, "What did you say dear?"

William thought otherwise. They still spoke just as much, but used body language to communicate. He could imagine people holding long conversations, using the simplest of gestures and Gayle and he were already accumulating their own nonverbal code.

Holy Crap! Look at this place! Gayle exclaimed, using only a widening of her eyes, followed by quick glance about.

I know. Be cool about it, he responded by way of the tiniest nod combined with a slight down turn of his lips. He suddenly felt a touch of despondency at not being able to furnish his own home this way. Gayle and he had been together for so long now that she immediately picked up on this.

It's ok, dear. You're a good husband and father, and I love you, she made this known by rubbing his back in a circular motion twice, followed by a quick couple of pats.

His look in return, brief eye contact, a very slight rise to the eyebrows and then downcast eyes, told her, I know, but still...

Will wasn't quite so inconspicuous with his non-verbal communication. Not only did his eyes say, Wow, but his lips actually mouthed the word. Talitha stared openly, however not in admiration. She inspected the room, first as a whole, taking in the opulence but then at each object in turn.

She had fantastic perception and could see and speak about the details of objects and people with amazing clarity. Her eyes hung the longest on the three pieces of art in the room. William had no sense for art and other than the Mona Lisa, couldn't name another piece, he also considered any man that could to be highly suspect.

"These two are reproductions, but still nice," Talitha commented on two different pictures of flowers. "Unless you actually own a Renoir print?" she asked Greg. His smile dipped at the corners and he just shook his head no, in the slightest manner. "But this one..." She paused and studied it from a few different angles, "...no edition numbering...this is a one of kind."

"Yes!" Greg exclaimed with delight. "It's a Caesar Fantin!" Greg could not be more suspect in William's book.

"Never heard of him," Talitha said evenly. "His strokes are so blatant, it's no wonder it was never sent to print. The piece clashes with the other two as well. I'd move it to another room." With that she smiled a disarming smile at a flabbergasted Greg and sat down next to her father.

"I love these drapes, Greg," Gayle mentioned after shooting her daughter a sharp look. They talked a while about the drapes as if they could be interesting to anyone.

William didn't know blatant strokes from subtle ones, but it was nice to see someone as pretentious as Greg, shown to be the phony he was, by a sixteen year old. Movement caught his eye, Katie had begun climbing up on the chair/bed and William had just turned to pull her down, when Henny chose to make her Grand Entrance.

It could only be described as such, since she tapped her feet loudly at the top of the stairs in order to announce herself. William watched as everyone's head turned to look up, just as Henny had intended. His did not, instead he caught Talitha's eye, and they shared a quick smile. Not to be rude, he stood up and turned to watch Henrietta "Henny" Harris slowly descending their great sweeping staircase.

Henny was a beautiful woman and the opposite of her dull and doughy husband. She had long thick black hair that hung down her back and lay across her shoulders in gentle waves. Her skin tone, a perfect and perpetual tan showed off her flashing white teeth to their fullest. Her eyes were as black as her hair and she tended to look down her long nose with them half closed in a suggestive manner.

Everything about her was suggestive.

Tonight was no different. She was terribly overdressed for the occasion, wearing a black cocktail dress that would have been more appropriate at the "Plaza" than dinner with the neighbors. The dress was almost too inappropriate in another way as well. She practically fell out of the top of it and with each slow downward step, her full breasts swayed and danced provocatively. It was hypnotic and only after she reached the first landing did William realize that it would be proper to perhaps look at something else. He pulled his eyes away from her and looked over at Will.

He was mesmerized as well. His mouth hung open and his head bobbed up and down in time with each of her deliberate steps. Embarrassed for his son, he went to give Gayle a smile, but her eyes were locked on Henny. They weren't mesmerized however, they were flinty, and her jaw was set tight, the muscles of her face pronounced.

Still not trusting himself to look in Henny's direction, he turned and saw Katie frozen in place. She had been bouncing up and down on the odd chair/bed and was currently standing full on it; her little mouth lay open in a little "O."

Talitha was the only one not sucked into the visual abundance of Mrs. Harris. A smile that seemed full of understanding played about her lips. She caught her father's eye again but William turned away. He was embarrassed to have felt a sudden fullness in his groin at the sight of Henny coming down the stairs and he knew that Talitha could be too perceptive sometimes.

"Mrs. Jern, Commander Jern, thank you for coming tonight," Henny greeted them. He looked back at her and through a concentration of will, looked her in the eye.

Gayle spoke for the family, "Henny, it's so good to see you again. You look wonderful as always." Gayle beamed at Henny, but William knew Gayle well enough to know that she was a little irate. It was the way she held her head off angle instead of full on.

"Thank you." Henny beamed right back with a radiant smile. "You look beautiful as well...so natural."

Gayle's turned a slight bit more away, now nearly looking down her shoulder at Henny almost dismissively. She hadn't expected a formal dinner at the end of such a long day and as such, she wore very little makeup and her hair had only been brushed out. Henny's words were correct however, Gayle had a very natural beauty about her. It was the tone however, that set Gayle's teeth on edge. The tone Henny used suggested that Gayle was plain in her naturalness.

"Commander Jern," Henny continued, as she walked over to him. She had beautiful white teeth. Her tongue came out delicately to moisten her lips. Erotic. He had the same feeling the other two times he had met her—erotic. "It's been so long."

He smiled and nodded but was puzzled; it's been so long since what? William didn't know exactly what, but he suddenly felt a powerful sense of guilt. He turned to his wife with an odd desire to proclaim his innocence, however the feeling died quickly as he suddenly saw just how old his wife appeared. With her standing next to Henny, the slight wrinkles around the eyes, and the few grey hairs, stood out in a way he never noticed before. He got the feeling that Henny had been blessed in some way; the two ladies were only months apart in age, but Henny looked a good twelve to fifteen years younger.

Henny had moved on, as these thoughts raced through his head and had turned to Will. "Look at this handsome young giant, you must be Will Junior. How do you do?"

Will's ears turned a dark shade of red, but he managed a very audible, "I'm fine, Mrs. Harris. Thank you for having us."

"Talitha? Right?" Henny asked as she turned toward William's oldest daughter. Henny held out her hand to Talitha. After a quick puzzled frown slipped over her face, Talitha reached out and shook Henny's hand. There was a moment of silence as the two stood shaking hands. It was a short moment, but an odd one and Henny broke it by saying, "You are the very image of your mother...so beautiful."

"Thank you, Mrs. Harris," Talitha replied without any hint of emotion. "I like your home. It's so wonderfully appointed."

"Well, we don't want dinner to get cold do we?" Greg stepped in. "I'm positively starving to death! Amy! Dinner!" he called upstairs.

"I'm not ready yet!" Amy screamed back down angrily. William was amazed that she would talk to her father like that and no one spoke for an uncomfortable couple of seconds until Katie filled the silence.

"Mr. Harris, sir? Are you from African?" she asked Greg sweetly, still standing on the chair/bed. Startled by the sight, William took two large steps and snatched her off it.

"I think you mean, are you from Africa?" Greg corrected her, smiling at the cute little girl. "And no I'm not. I'm from Delaware. Why do you ask?"

"Because you have skinny arms and a big belly, just like those kids from Africa," Katie said, with wonderful innocence. "Miss Canaday told us they were all starving to death too, just like you." William eyes shifted away from Greg's face in a hurry. He saw his son suck in his cheeks and bite down, and Will then turned away to "study" the art better. Talitha, with a surprised look of pleasure on her face did the same.

William suddenly realized that if Katie and Talitha kept this up, the family might never be invited back over for dinner.

Interesting.

He turned back to Greg with a slight smile on his lips.

"Well, I'm not starving exactly," Greg said, stating the obvious with precision. "It's really a figure of speech."

"What's a fig...?" Katie began, but Gayle was smooth, practiced at dealing with Katie, and cut her off before more damage occurred.

"It's just a saying, dear. Henny, I love what you've done with the place. Do you mind showing me the kitchen? Ours is a bit of a disappointment."

"I'd love too," Henny replied. William noticed, with a slight dampening of his spirits, that Henny was not unhappy with Katie's question at all. She had a small smile on her face and there was a hint of nastiness to it directed at Greg.

Henny commenced to act as their tour guide, but instead of heading to the kitchen, she went directly up stairs. With the only other choice being to stay behind and talking to Greg, everyone trooped up after Henny, following her about the house.

She pointed out different features of the home and who painted what picture and what country a certain piece of furniture came from. The family room, an exact replica in size and shape as the Jern's, had been styled using a safari theme. The walls were adorned with the heads of a number of creatures, including a goat's head. He had seen this before, in other homes and had wondered how much sport there was to hunting goats?

He did like the full body of a bobcat that was positioned in mid-spring, just to the right of the doorway. It looked wonderfully life-like and Katie eyed it eagerly.

"Can I please pet the little lion, Mrs. Harris?" she asked as sweetly as she could.

"You'd better not, dear. He's cranky today." Henny reached out and held Katie's hand, just in case. The carpeting of the room was in a cream that matched the walls and the two larger pieces of furniture were wicker, with a brown and white pattern, while the two smaller chairs were covered in Leopard print. The room had an odd museum quality to it and William was sure it was rarely used.

Henny was especially interested in showing off the small room just to the right of the master bedroom. She had turned it into a combination dressing room and makeup room. One of the walls hung completely covered over, ceiling to floor, with a tremendous mirror. Another wall held a long bench that one would normally see in a dressing room at a Broadway theater. There were three stations for applying makeup or styling hair, each with triple mirrors and intense lighting.

"Talitha. Come in, please," Henny said with excitement.

Talitha had been lurking in the rear of the group for most of the short tour. Henny went to her and grasping her hand brought Talitha full into the room. "This will be fun," Henny stated. "Sit in this chair." She gave Talitha the smallest shove toward the middle station.

When Talitha had seated herself, Henny flicked on the bright lights and the girl blinked in surprise. The three mirrors showed off her pretty face each from slightly different angles.

Henny stared into the mirrors at her, but Talitha, never one who felt the need to glance into a mirror every time an opportunity presented itself, examined the make-up station to her right instead, it seemed to have every color of lipstick invented, lined up in neat little compartments. Henny put both hands on Talitha's cheeks and physically pointed her head straight forward so that Talitha had to look at her own face.

"Hmmm," Henny considered for a moment and then reached down and picked up the only item at the station. It was a new hairbrush, she gave it a quick look, and without asking permission she proceeded to brush out Talitha's thick brown hair.

The girl's mouth came open to protest, but she caught her mother's reflection. Gayle's face told her, You are a guest here. Go with it. Talitha read it properly and swallowed whatever she was going to say, replacing it with a smile.

Henny worked the brush methodically and after a minute she stopped and studied Talitha. "You have such gorgeous hair, you really need to start doing more with it," she suggested in a friendly manner. Henny smiled at the girl, but it suddenly froze on her lips and her face became tight. "I mean..." she started to say and then looked down at the hairbrush, twirling it slowly. With quick movements, Henny put Talitha's hair into a ponytail that was sloppy at best. "I mean, I think I overstepped my bounds here, I'm so sorry Gayle," she apologized, but her tone was flat and lacked sincerity. "Hey, I bet Amy is ready for dinner."

With that the tour ended abruptly, which was fine with William.

Seeing the ostentatious opulence had grated on him. They headed down to the dining room by way of the back stairs. Gayle had wanted to see the kitchen, but Henny seemed to have forgotten this and breezed right through it. The kitchen was very similar to their own. It had received no special attention and the appliances were mismatched. The room was obviously not to be viewed by guests and William felt as though he had just peeked behind the curtain and had seen the "Great Oz," in all his indecent humanity.

However, the moment passed as soon as they entered the dining room, he was right back in the Emerald City.

The dining room table was so huge it nearly didn't fit the room, and the room was not a small one. The wood of the table and the matching sixteen chairs was a deep rich brown. The place settings for the two families were spread out about the table, so that William at one end was easily fourteen feet away from Greg, at the other.

This would've suited him just fine, except that Gayle was quite far away, just to Greg's right. With Henny just across and slightly to her left, William had a fine view of both women.

Gayle sat smiling at her daughter in an amused fashion. It was a warm smile and honest. Talitha was trying in the most unobtrusive manner possible, to pull the silly ponytail out of her hair, she kept pretending to yawn and stretch, giving it a quick tug on each occasion. Gayle's happy looks to her daughter radiated genuine love and it increased the naturalness of her beauty.

Henny, on the other side of the table seemed relieved and relaxed, as if she had performed some burdensome task. She sipped unobtrusively at a glass of wine, no longer the center of attention and it was oddly enough at this moment that William found her most attractive.

Normally she had an unnatural beauty about her; she seemed to be an imitation of loveliness. She powerfully aroused his body, but his mind rejected her looks instinctively. The moment passed however when she said in an irritated voice, "It's about time!"

Amy had finally made her appearance. She stood in the archway between the living and dining rooms, as if waiting for applause. The grating sound of her mother's voice sent her large smile, crashing into an immediate frown.

"I have to look good for our guests, Mother." Her eyes flashed angrily for a moment but then her smile snapped back in place. "And isn't that what you always taught me?"

"You're so right." Henny's smile and pleasant demeanor came back as well. "Dinner everyone." The table was littered with covered dishes from which many delectable smells emanated.

William had smelled the steak as soon as they entered the house and he had forced himself to concentrate on something besides his stomach. All through the tour, he had fought the urge to breathe in deeply and sigh loudly. Their dinner the night before had been Spaghetti Os and the French toast for breakfast hadn't been Gayle's best. The buttermilk, though just opened, had been sour and nobody could find the moving box which contained the syrup.

Henny stay seated and chatted with Gayle, as Greg served everyone in turn. When their plates were full, an awkward moment ensued as each family waited to see if the other was going to say a prayer or Grace. With nothing forth coming, Greg unceremoniously said, "Dig In!" He commenced to attack his steak with undisguised gluttony. A spasm of disgust slipped out from behind Henny's mask of pleasantness and her face soured briefly. But it lasted less than a second and no one other than William noted it.

As families, the Jerns and the Harris' had never been more than acquaintances. William had studiously avoided Greg whenever possible, while Gayle and Henny had always traveled in much different circles.

Despite the lack of mingling between the two families, the Coast Guard was such a small service that they were all relatively well acquainted with each other. There was something William and Gayle had never understood about Henny; what could she possibly see in Greg? Gayle had always insisted it was Greg's money, but William knew that he wasn't in fact rich.

His father, a retired Admiral, was supposedly very wealthy and Greg spoke at length of his coming inheritance to anyone who would listen. William got the impression that Greg's father had been handing out his money in dribs and drabs to his only child. The admiral probably knew that if he gave out any real money, Greg would immediately quit working. All of this meant that if Henny was in the relationship for money, she was the most patient woman imaginable.

"So Greg, how's the Admiral doing these days?" William asked. He hadn't had a real conversation with Greg in a couple of years and judging by the expensive furnishings and the Corvette, William considered it likely that the inheritance had finally kicked in.

Around a mouthful of steak, Greg said, "Still alive and kicking. Well not much kicking these days, he broke his hip just before last Christmas." Greg suddenly laughed loudly and incongruously and William had an unfortunate view of the food Greg was currently chewing.

Gayle looked at William and her eyes asked him, Did I miss the punch line to a joke about an old man with a broken hip?

When he finished chuckling, Greg took another large bite of food and explained what he thought was so funny, "The old man has these three female caretakers, and he insists that they dye their hair blonde! Ha Ha!" Greg laughed some more and William smiled and nodded in what he hoped was not too phony a manner.

Purposely, Katie took a large mouthful of food and said in her little voice, as deep as she could make it, "Blonde hair, Ha! Ha!" She had a wonderful ear for mimicry, and this little throwaway line was actually funny. Everyone smiled or gave a quick laugh, even Greg. William looked down quickly, he didn't want to see the spinach Greg had just put into his mouth.

After a moment he asked Greg, "Is he still in the hospital?"

Henny answered, "No, he's in some sort of swanky daycare for the rich and ancient." Henny wasn't bothering to hide many of her true feelings tonight. She obviously hated her father-in-law and her feelings toward her husband bordered on loathing. "So don't worry about him, it doesn't seem like he'll ever die, at least not until the Devil himself comes for him." She gave a smirk to her glass of wine and drained it.

"It’s true," Greg agreed, unfortunately not between bites. "Both of his parents lived past a hundred, so he could be with us another twenty years or more!" Henny looked as if she had just swallowed something nasty.

Well that explained a few things to William and judging by the frozen smile on Gayle's face she had caught on too. Greg hadn't come into any money; he had simply picked up some of his father's furniture, when he had moved to an assisted living facility. The shocking thing however, was how obvious Henny was being. If there had been any question before about whether she was a gold digger, it had just been answered.

William decided he'd not had enough wine and took a long pull at his glass. He almost choked on it when Amy said to Katie, "So how do you like living with the ghosts?"

William had successfully put aside his silly feelings and hadn't thought about his phantom Boiler Monster since his moment in the basement. At the question though, a thrill went up his back and the image blinked into his mind. Damn! He looked over at Amy and felt his anger rise. Her resemblance to her mother was as obvious as it was unfortunate. She was young, nubile and pretty, but in a skanky unwholesome manner and she was currently wearing a nasty, mischievous grin aimed at his six-year-old daughter.

Katie glared back with a look of anger and disbelief. "There's no such thing as ghosts," irritation coloring her voice. "Right, Mom? There's no such thing as ghosts?"

Just then, the strobe light, negative image of the lurking black creature came back to William again. He felt his chest tighten. Looking around him, seeing the calm expression of amusement in the faces of the Harris family and the slight anger in the faces of his own family, made him realize he was the only one with this feeling of fear.

"Katie-bunny, there is no such thing as ghosts," Gayle replied with a tired, but reassuring smile. The long couple of days, plus the steak, and the wine were starting to weigh her down.

"See," Katie said smugly. "And really, they aren't scary anyways, they're like Casper. And I don’t see why everyone gets all ascared." She looked across to Talitha and smiled. "It’s a ga…ga…ga…Ghost! Right, Tal? Tal and I both think he is kinda cute." Whenever she was in doubt, Katie liked to drag her big sister in on conversations. Talitha gave her a nod. The little girl continued, "And on Scooby Doo the ghosts aren't even real, on-a cuz, it’s always some mean old man." Katie paused and turned her head the slightest bit toward Greg and cast a look at him out of the corner of her eye. He was shoveling his second helping of dinner into his mouth and took no notice. Katie continued but in a slightly quieter voice as if what she was saying could be found offensive, "So there aren’t no such things as ghosts and if there were, they'd either be cute or fake." Katie felt her logic to be well founded and looked down her tiny nose at Amy, dismissively.

"That’s only on TV," Amy spoke with a superior air. "My mother saw..."

"Amy!" Henny said sharply and then softened, "Dear, that’s enough. You don’t want to scare the little one with silly stories." Her eyes flashed daggers at Amy, but then went to Talitha. "Talitha, I've heard that you are a…ah, a girl with high moral standards. You know—a good girl? Our last neighbors, the Nelsons, their daughter was quite the tramp." This statement was greeted with looks that darted back and forth across the table. What were they expected to say to that? Henny drained her wine glass again and looked expectantly at Talitha.

"I think you can rest assured that not only is Talitha a good girl, I like to think of her as the best girl," William gave his oldest daughter a smile.

"What about me?" Katie asked in alarm. "Can I be the best girl too?"

Katie was closest to him, so that she got an arm pat and a warm smile. "Of course you're the best girl too, sugar bottom."

"I don’t have a sugar bottom," Katie announced with a quick glance toward Amy. It was clear Katie thought Amy might actually believe she could indeed have a sugar bottom.

"Well that’s something," Henny said as she poured herself another glass of wine. "I'm glad my new neighbors won’t be influencing my sweet Amy into being naughty." She then smiled all around. William smiled back, but when he glanced down the table, Talitha’s face was set neutrally but also set in stone and Will’s face was completely expressionless.

"I don’t think you have anything to worry about." Gayle had a smile pulling at the corners of her lips as she said this. William had only found out that morning that Amy was a slut, but he wasn't the last to know. Greg had been so engrossed with his meal that he missed not only the looks, but the entire conversation as well.

Moments later however, Greg finally stopped eating and William braced himself mentally for the coming onslaught.

"You know what I think is the neatest thing?" Greg paused and looked around, just in case any of the Jerns were mind readers and knew what he thought was the neatest thing. "I think it's just so neat that in June, you can still feel the crispness and coolness in the mornings."

William was feeling a little worn out from the move and having Greg start in on the weather, caused his brain to shift into neutral. He quickly started to feel sleepy and to combat it he attacked the remainder of his food with gusto. However, he was soon full and the sleepiness came back even more powerfully.

He suddenly remembered the story of Rip Van Winkle. It was about a fellow who fell asleep for twenty years and woke up with his beard grown down to his toes. Subconsciously, William reached up and rubbed at his chin. It had only a little stubble on it, but there was still time. With Greg, talking about the weather, there was all the time in the world.

After what felt like a very long while, he glanced over at Katie and half expected her to be grown up, but she hadn't grown perceptibly and was currently trying to build a pyramid with her peas. Will made a small noise to get her attention and demonstrated, how with a small bit of mashed potatoes acting as mortar, she could build a stronger pyramid. His was quite large, four inches tall and the apex wasn't yet completed.

"This is perfect weather for sailing too. The wind is constant and not too strong. I don’t actually sail and don’t like boats in general…" Greg continued, almost without pause for breath. Gayle sat glassy eyed, her focus had slid off of his face, and she was currently staring at his large abdomen. William felt his chin again, and the stubble was definitely longer. He wondered how long it had been since anyone else had said anything, fifteen minutes at least, maybe an hour, it was hard to tell.

He forced his eyes up to Greg’s face and Greg snatched them. William was in that terrible position where it would be rude to look away. So he nodded sagely, hoping that Greg would turn his focus elsewhere. Greg was saying something now about underground weather and William felt that he couldn't last much longer.

He went with a desperate ploy; when reaching for his drink he 'accidentally' knocked over his napkin ring. He bent down to retrieve it and with Greg’s eyes momentarily off  him he felt a little better, but the endless droning was still in his ears and he knew he couldn't spend the entire evening down there beneath the table, he would have to surface at some point.

"She must have gone to poop."

William straightened up in his chair. Katie had just said something, he was sure of it. Feeling sleepy and dull-witted William looked over at his youngest daughter. Did she just say poop?

"Tell me Mr. Harris, do you wipe?" Katie asked conversationally. William looked around. Henny was nowhere to be seen; Amy and Will were both staring absentmindedly at Amy’s breasts, Gayle looking as if she had just woke up, was gazing at Katie with an extremely bewildered expression, and Talitha was grinning a mischievous grin.

The little girl's question had nothing whatsoever to do with Greg’s current rambling and he was slow to respond. So Katie filled the verbal void, "I only ask on-a-cuz of Brandon Wilcove…you know Brandon? A boy in my class…" Her expression suggested Greg was stupid for not knowing the different boys in her class. "Anyway, he said that boys don’t wipe after they pee, on-a-cuz they stand up to pee." Katie paused politely for any comments, but since none were forth coming from the disorientated people around the table, she expounded on her topic, "I think he is a liar on-a-cuz when I pee standing up, I have to wipe…a lot!"

Gayle’s eyes widened and she looked a little frantic. "Honey? Ah… ah…" Her eyes now began to flick from her daughter and then to Greg repeatedly. "When did you try this ah… standing up peeing?"

"Just now, Mr. Greg was talking about underground rivers so much, it made me have to go pee." When Gayle closed her eyes hard and began to rub her forehead, Katie must have sensed her mother’s frustration so she added, "But don’t worry, I cleaned up the mess really good. It’s just Miss Henny will have to wash the yellow towels on-a-cuz they are all wet." She paused, but there was only silence, "On-a-cuz of the pee…" she went on helpfully. Katie looked at everyone in turn and waited for a response but the room was silent.

Greg’s face appeared comically frozen in surprise, while Gayle kept looking from Katie to William, her mouth opening and closing like a goldfish.

Amy had been looking disgusted, but then shock and outrage widened her eyes. "The yellow towels? Did you use my bathroom?"

It was then that Henny came in carrying a pie. "Who’s hungry for lemon meringue?"

Talitha smiled and nodded her head up and down slowly, "Perfect," was all she said.

Chapter 7

Will and the First Body

May 27- June 4th

1

The day after Lisa broke up with him and still five days before M-Day, Will went looking for answers.

"Mom! Your other daughter just told me she has been trying to toast quarters! I thought you would like to know." Talitha's voice called out in the tiny apartment and Will oriented on it.

If anyone knew what was going on with Lisa, it would be Talitha. Within seconds, he cornered her in the tiny room she shared with Katie. "What the hell is wrong with Lisa?"

Talitha, who was sitting on her bed, looked up at him from her book. "Did she breakup with you?"

"How did you know? Did you have anything to do with this?"

This was preposterous and he knew it, but his anger was in charge at the moment and it was very great and his thinking tended to diminish at such times. Will stood over Talitha, towered over her over in fact, and looked to be on the verge of exploding.

"No, that was all you," she replied coolly. She didn't fear him in the least and calmly marked her place in the book. "And before you ask, we did not discuss it either. It was just obvious from your manner, coupled with the trajectory of your relationship."

"The trajectory!" He slammed his hand down on her dresser. "Love is not about science, Tal! It’s…It’s…" he began to splutter. "It’s..." Now he cast about the room for the answer, but none was forthcoming. Talitha still remained exasperatingly calm and Will found he couldn't finish his sentence. The rage wilted within him and turning away from her, he leaned his head against the wall. It was cool and made him feel the slightest bit better.

"Will, smarter people than the two of us have been trying to put the concept into words since love was invented."

The sadness that would come to define half of his waking life, replaced the anger, and tears sprang up in Will’s eyes, but there was a smile on his lips. "But only you would try to describe it scientifically." He sniffled loudly and went and sat down next to her on the bed. The mattress settled deeply under his weight and the springs creaked noisily.

"Though trajectories are mathematically based, there are enough variables in this case for me to accept your 'science' assertion." Seeing his blank look she added, "Love is a trajectory of sorts. Picture the average teen romance." She caught up one of her ever-present notebooks. "The passion is fiery, but generally brief, without consideration for any of the obvious variables, so…" She drew a shallow arc on an empty page and it ended in a small explosion. "Its demise and subsequent crash are virtually guaranteed. Note however the trajectory did not go very high and thus none of the individuals are likely to be too hurt. Now, picture mom and dad’s relationship."

"I’d rather not thank you very much," he responded. His tears had stopped, but still lay heavy on his eyelashes. Talitha looked at her brother and smiled at his little joke and her smile held love for him.

"Ok, take your mind out of the gutter," she said while drawing a circle, which Will guessed represented the earth. She then drew a line that at first arced high, but then leveled so that it wound around the outside of the circle. "This is mom and dad’s trajectory. They've attained orbital velocity," she paused and grimaced slightly. "I think I went too far with the science terms with that. What I mean to say is that due to their passion and inertia they will never crash. Their love will easily overcome all of the obstacles or variables that might otherwise cause them to crash."

"What kind of variables are you talking about?" He sniffled again. The calm rational way Talitha was going on caused him to start to relax.

"Oh, the variables are too many to count let alone name, but consider, what causes most relationships to fail? Don’t count sluts or… what is the term, in common parlance for the male version of a slut?" Talitha seemed genuinely interested in the answer.

"I think the term you are looking for is Boy or Man," he answered with a smile and she laughed and punched his arm.

"No I’m being serious, they don’t use the term Gigolo, do they?"

"By they, do you mean normal kids, unlike you?" Will asked.

"Yes," she answered expectantly.

Will shook his head and smiled at his odd sister. He realized he was beginning to feel like himself again, and this immediately made him feel sad as if he didn't have a right to feel that way. "Other than jerk, there really isn’t a term."

Talitha looked unsurprised. "I thought as much, another double standard." She sighed and then continued, "Where was I? Oh, the trajectory for every relationship, successful or not, begins the same way: Interest I, excitement E, and passion P- these all give impetus or energy to the relationship, which we will mark with an L for lift." She marked a curved line with a short equation, I+E+P=L (Lift/love).

"But every romance faces degradation in its velocity which reduces the lift. This could be a rumor of cheating C, or a boy," here she eyed her brother with an eyebrow cocked, "being grounded for poor grades G, or even pressure Pr from friends or family. Do you understand?" she asked holding up her notebook with the equation written on it: I+E+P-(C cheating + G grounding +Pr pressure) =L. He had been following her just fine until she held up her notebook.

Will had to pause a long while to try to read the tiny notes along the curved path.

"Yes, but Lisa and me had all the right…uh plusses? I mean we had more lift or is the L supposed to be Love?"

"First off, it's Lisa and I," she explained with great patience. "Second, the L really means both, the trajectory is the relationship and the L is either lift or Love and is what moves it along. Now as for your trajectory, many plusses, as you call them and very few obvious negatives, would suggest a long lasting relationship. However, take a look at your and Lisa’s intended arc." She drew another circle and from that she traced a high arc that carried well around it. Next, she drew a second arc that kept very close to the circle itself.

"Can you guess which is your arc? Lisa wants to let your relationship go as far as it will take you. But your arc suggests a fling or a summer romance."

"This is crap!" he fired back. "Your assumptions are baseless."

"Really? What did you tell Lisa you wanted to do after high school?" Will didn't say anything but looked away and she continued, "You told me you wanted to go to the Coast Guard Academy and with dad's help you were 90% likely to get in and in fact, I know the paperwork is being prepared. But you told her you didn't know what you wanted to do. Pretty much the most important decision you might ever make and you keep her out of it."

"Look, I’m damned either way. If I tell her I'll be lucky to see her two months out of the year, for the next four years, do you think she'll want to stay with me?"

"Mom stayed with dad for his last three years at the Academy. That should be her choice, not yours." Talitha was just getting started, "When was the last time, if ever, you bought her flowers for no special reason?"

"I uh…"

"At birthdays and holidays you act as if you have to buy her gifts, you should want to, simply to make her happy." Talitha looked as if she could go on but Will didn't want her to.

"Am I really that bad of a boyfriend?" He had thought he had been pretty good to Lisa, but looking back, he wondered why she ever loved him.

"Actually you're a great boyfriend." Talitha stated this as if it were a fact. This caused him to look at her in confusion. "You're a great person Will. Fun, handsome, sweet, smart…well kinda," she added with a grin. "But I think it became obvious to Lisa that being a boyfriend is all you'd ever be." His face clouded over in anger at this, but she went on, "Lisa, I'm sure isn’t looking for marriage at seventeen, but she knows she'll want more, eventually. And it's my conjecture that she believes eventually you'll tire of her and dump her."

"But I won’t!"

"You say that, but your actions keep her at a safe distance. You love Lisa, I can tell. But you're not committed to your relationship. It's not enough to love her, you have to love the fact that you're in love. Right now, you love a girlfriend, but girlfriends will come and go, unless you commit to the relationship as well. You have to ask yourself if you even want that kind of relationship. There's no saying you have to."

Will didn't know the answer then, but over the next week, he came to realize that he did. Despite the waves of confusion that washed back and forth over him, he discovered he did want Lisa, not only in his life but in his future as well.

However, she would have nothing to do with him and in fact seemed to disappear off the island completely.

Every day he went by the Burger King, lurking about near the pinball machines, but not once did she show up for work. At night, he went to their bench by the seawall, strolling as casually as possible back and forth, feeling like a fool for doing it, but not being able to help it. Eventually he summoned the courage to go to her apartment, something Lisa had begged him never to do. He knocked on her door a couple of times, however there was never an answer.

He worried that she had gone to stay with her uncle, something her little brother did every summer to get away from their mom, but Talitha had a grapevine of sorts through Brian, and knew Lisa was still on the island. He tried to get messages through to her but was rebuffed, and he became frightfully angry over this, but then almost immediately became despondent and apathetic.

His part-time job and the rigors of preparing for M-day helped keep him occupied somewhat, but they were stopgaps and even with them, he would still find himself suddenly in tears or punching a wall in anger. His mind seemed constantly on Lisa and the world became grey and indistinct at the edges, as if nothing else mattered. The actual move-in day was terrible since he had to pass by her place and their old haunts, time and again. Each trip brought fresh pain to him and he was glad in the late afternoon when all there was left to do was to move the countless boxes up the many, many stairs.

By the next day, his energy deserted him and still there was so much to be done. After endless hours of drudgery, he was desperate to go out and resume his search for Lisa, but was forced instead to go next door for dinner with the Harris family. This proved to be the most frightfully dull and annoying experience of his life, outside of school that is.

The day after that, June 4, started well but finished in a chaos that nearly ended forever any chance he had at getting Lisa back.

2

The priest was right on time for dinner, in fact Will wondered if he had been lurking outside waiting for his cue from the Jern's grandfather clock. Right after the first of its six chimes Father Alba knocked loudly and importantly on the front door.

Katie, who was excitedly expecting company zipped across the floor in front of Will to open it, but upon seeing the unassuming priest in his all black attire, choked back the memorized greeting she was about to give. Her pretty face became clouded by a combination of confusion and impatience; it was obvious to her that this was not the dinner guest.

"Yeah?" she asked absently as she danced to the left and then to the right searching for the real dinner guests. When she didn't see anyone else, she turned back to the priest. "Who are you?"

"This is our dinner guest, Katherine." Her father's voice held firm tones that caused Katie's ears to perk up. "And you need to answer the door properly and greet him as you have been taught." She turned to Commander Jern, who had been coming down the stairs and at the sight of her father's stern face, she broke out her most winning smile.

Turning back to the bemused priest, she dropped into a deep curtsy. She had practiced a formal greeting with Talitha for part of the afternoon and everyone in the house had been curtsied to, at least three times. She dipped her head demurely and the pink ribbon that kept her blonde ponytail in place drooped in front of her eyes. Her hands held the edges of the white sundress and her tan, skinny little girl legs crossed perfectly.

"I am...ah, a pleasure to welcome you into our home, uh Mister..."

The priest gave a low bow in return. "Father Alba."

"Father?" Still in her deep curtsy, her pretty face contorted in confusion, she pulled her head around to her own father. "Isn't your daddy in heaven...and this is definitely not Granpy." She gave the priest a suspicious look. "Are you jerking my chain?"

Commander Jern made a tired little noise, "Ugh." It was all Will could do not burst out laughing and he turned slightly away to hide his smile.

The priest straightened from his bow and he had a smile of his own, which he directed at the little girl. "No. No, I am not anyone's, ah, daddy. Father is my title."

A small dawning of understanding doused Katie's suspicions and she asked, "You mean your bigness?"

The priest looked confused and a little surprised at this question and subconsciously put his hand to his large stomach. "No, Katie," William said. "He doesn't have rank like a commander or a captain. What he has, is similar to the term principal, like Principal Flannery at your school."

"Oh," she said in deep thought but still in mid-curtsy. "It is a pleasure to welcome you into our new home...Father Albert."

She had just straightened from her curtsy, when the priest said kindly, "It's Father Alba."

She immediately dropped back down into the curtsy again. "Father Alba."

"Yes. Yes. Good." Father Alba smiled at Katie and patted her on the head almost shyly but then moved toward Will. "Will! Look at you. Look at you!" He reached out and shook Will's hand with great vigor. "I haven't seen you in church for a while, tsk. Although I did see your Miss Lisa, and she seemed fairly upset, yes fairly upset." A sad nod of his head, accompanied the second utterance of the phrase. Will tried to look calm but his intestines suddenly twisted themselves into knots. The priest continued, "I know things could be better for her at home. Please ask her to come by and see me, just to talk."

Will knew that he was the real problem with Lisa, but said, "I will, Father," in an almost inaudible voice.

"Good. Good. Commander Jern, it's so nice to see you." He then gave Will's father a manly and hardy handshake.

"Thank you for coming," the Commander said and then paused. Will wondered what the polite greeting was to someone who had invited himself to your house for dinner. His father went on, "I want to apologize for the way I ended our last conversation. I was abrupt and I should not have been."

"No worries, no worries," the priest responded. "The spaghetti smells great! But since it's not quite done, why don't I bless the house while we wait? Will, there's a large box on the porch. Can you please bring it in, but be careful! There's a pie in it."

Will went for the box, wondering how the priest knew that dinner would be another twenty minutes. He was equally puzzled at what a house blessing was. He'd never heard of one, but at the smell of the pie, his stomach rumbled loudly and he hoped it wouldn't take long.

"Thank you, Will. Please put it down just here, in the foyer." The priest reached into the large box and brought out a brightly polished silver brazier and a lighter. Lifting off the lid of the brazier, he lit what looked like brown sugar cubes, which began to smoke slightly. The aroma of the incense struck Will almost immediately. It was sharp and interesting and he found himself sniffing lightly in a dog-like manner as his brain attempted to interpret the smell, to define or categorize it. "We will just let that cook for a few minutes." Father Alba set the brazier aside.

"That stinks!" Katie had been trying to get a look inside the box and now she pulled back holding her nose, "P.U.!"

"Maybe you should go into the kitchen if it bothers you," her father said.

Her curiosity was too great. "No, I'm ok. What's all this stuff for anyway?"

"I'm going to bless the house," the priest explained. "This is done when a family moves into a new home. I'll ask the Lord to watch over your home and all of you who live there."

"Oh." Katie's brow furrowed with deep concentration. "Who's this lord guy?"

Father Alba laughed loudly. "The Lord is God."

"Katie, Father Alba is a priest," William added.

Before Katie could ask her next obvious question, Father Alba looked down into her face. "A priest is someone who represents God and prays to God on behalf of the people of his church. Do you understand?"

"Sure," she said, not understanding at all. "What does prays mean?"

"Well now, praying is speaking to God." Father Alba seemed quite content answering Katie's questions and Will knew that unless stopped, she would ask questions all night. His stomach rumbled loudly again.

Katie appeared skeptical again. "You talk to dead people? Are you jerking my..." A quick guilty look to her father stopped the impertinent question.

The priest looked puzzled as people often did when speaking to Katie. "Katie, God is not dead."

"Yes he is. Daddy said so." The priest and William exchanged a quick look and William opened his mouth to say something, but his mouth just hung open like a broken screen door swaying slightly. Katie spoke for him, "He says Heaven is where dead people go when they die, and God is in Heaven."

She suddenly brightened. "Hey, do you also talk to dead animals?"

This question had never been put to the priest before, judging by the bemused and bewildered look on his face. Before he could even think to ask what Katie meant, she continued excitedly, "On- a-cuz, I had a goldfish that died and mommy said that Pumpkin...that was my goldfish's name...on-a-cuz he was fat and not gold at all, but really orange...and he died, and mommy said that he went to Heaven to be with God and Granpy Jern." She paused and her face was hopeful.

Catching on, Father Alba became thoughtful and sad. "I'm sorry but I don't speak Goldfish. Now, now we had better get on with this blessing before your brother's rumbling belly gets any louder."

He picked up the slightly smoking brazier by a long silver chain that hung from its top. This he handed to Will. "Just swing it gently to give it a nice airflow." He then reached into the box and brought out a crucifix. It was a foot long and the ornate figure of Jesus looked to be made of pewter. He gave it to Katie. "Now you can carry this without dropping it, right?" She nodded and eyed the person nailed to the cross with interest. Next, from the box, came a stylish silver bucket and surprisingly it was half filled with water. Lying in it was a long silver handled cylinder, which had a rounded end. "With your permission, Commander Jern."

William had the tiniest smile straining at the corner of his mouth, but said expressionlessly, "Please. By all means."

Father Alba made the Sign of the Cross and proclaimed loudly, "Peace be with this house and all who dwell here. Blessed be the name of the lord. Amen..." He turned to Will and Katie, "Please say amen."

"Amen," Will responded.

"Amen?"

Ignoring her question, the priest continued, "When Christ took flesh through the Blessed Virgin Mary, he made his home with us. Let us now pray that he will enter this home and bless it with his presence..."

Somewhere along the way, Talitha joined them in the blessing of the house. She stood well back and watched with the uncanny way she had. His sister claimed not to have a photographic memory, but Will was sure that she would later be able to recite every verse the priest had said as he went from room to room.

At the entrance to the basement, the priest hesitated just the slightest before going down and it was the only part of the house where he did a blessing in the hall as well as each of the rooms. Will noted that there seemed to be something going on between the priest and his dad. William eyed the man with that fantastic perception he shared with Talitha. The scrutiny encompassed every action and word, right down to nuance and pronunciation, but Will couldn't see what it was his father was looking for.

The priest for his part seemed nervous under that close stare and while in the boiler room glanced with great frequency over his shoulder at the door where William stood. But whatever was transpiring between the two men, ended when the blessing was completed and they climbed the stairs to eat.

Dinner with Father Alba was fun and easily the high point in the last nine days of Will's life. He was an interesting man and had stories seemingly from every country on the planet. He ate, laughed, and talked enough for two people. But as usual, it was Katie who had Will cracking up. Near the end of the meal, she had caught on that Father Alba tended to repeat little parts of his sentences. It was when they were just serving the apple pie the priest had brought with him, that Will first heard Katie.

"Now, who wants a big piece? A big piece?" Father Alba had inquired.

And right after, Will heard: "A big piece." Katie said it in a small voice. It was like a little echo and was almost not noticeable at first.

A minute later it was: "The villagers say they saw the lion. A lion!"

"A lion," came her little echo.

Will looked at her with a smile of utter disbelief and she gave him a smile right back. Hers held a naughty joy that only mischief could bring out.

The adults didn't seem to notice and Katie's echo got just a little louder each time. This continued for a while until their father spoke icily, "Katie, would you please clear the dishes away. Thank you." She got off lightly in Will's point of view, especially since she made such a show of tottering around under piles of dishes that it caused their mother to hop up to help.

The after dinner chitchat was mercifully short. Will had things to do, foremost of which was that he needed to look for Lisa.

3

He was fast becoming an addict.

It wasn't that he wanted to look for her—he had to. Therefore, after saying a quick good bye to Father Alba. Will headed out into the evening. As was usual, there was no sign of Lisa.

With a weary sigh, he strolled over to see his friend Carlos who was throwing one of his weekly parties. Will's best friend Doug Prouders had been trying to talk him into going to it for days, using encouraging words such as, "Stop being such a mopey pussy."

Will was actually looking forward to a bit of fun and distraction and after an hour at the party he was well on his way to getting drunk enough to temporarily forget about Lisa.

However, it was then that Lisa decided to show up. Will had spent the last year trying to get her to come to these parties. And now nine days and two hours after they broke up, there she was. He had been working on his fifth beer and was finally starting to relax, when Brian Galt walked in and gave Will a large grin and an equally large handshake.

"Brian, how're you doing buddy?" Will asked and looking about added, "Where’s Tal?"

"She wanted to talk to you out back." Brian should have been quicker. He had just started to tug a slightly unbalanced Will to the back door when Lisa walked in with a man. Not a boy, but a man. He was as tall as Will and looked almost as strong and Will guessed his age at twenty-five. Moreover judging from the regulation haircut, he was likely a Coastie. Anger doused any happy buzz Will had been feeling, and he immediately started heading in their direction with a terrible fierceness in his eyes. He only made it three feet before Brian grabbed up his left arm and swung him around.

"Hey man! You don't…" Will shoved him hard and the smaller boy went over the back of a couch and landed amidst a collection of beers. His foot came down on the edge of a bowl of chips and they shot into the air, a brief golden brown fountain. Will paused only the briefest moment, looking at the sprawling boy covered in beer and potato chips, but his sudden jealousy could not be denied and he turned back to Lisa.

Carlos and Doug both came at him then, but Carlos got to him first.

He should have waited for Doug. Carlos was Filipino and small for a Filipino at that. He made Brian look big in comparison and might have weighed a scant hundred and ten pounds. Will saw them both coming from either side and as Carlos reached out for him, Will grabbed him first and threw him bodily at Doug. Carlos slammed face first into Doug’s chin and an inch long gash immediately opened over Carlos’ right eye.

The two boys went down in a heap.

Will turned toward Lisa and her man, the fierceness in his eyes matched by a wicked smile playing on his face. He had been fighting what he had called "melancholy madness" since the breakup. Waves of terrific anger at his ill treatment would wash over him, followed quickly by sadness would have him lying on the floor of his room, crying. He felt trapped by his emotions and had longed for an end to the pain and anger.

This was the release he was looking for.

The pair had barely walked in the room and were standing in the doorway as Will made his way toward them. Will saw the 'chivalrous,' bastard push Lisa behind him to shield her and the action drove Will into an almost uncontrollable rage.

Only ten feet and a chair were between Will and his enemy. The chair seemed weightless and flew aside like a toy, as Will’s hands became rock hard fists. The Coastie looked prepared for him, but there was a slight apprehension in his stance and in his eyes. This made Will only want to hurt him more, but he had barely cleared half the distance before Talitha stepped in between him and his victim.

"Stop it Will, now!"

The wicked smile left his face abruptly, replace by angry surprise. His hands opened and close a couple of times and then he tried to dodge around her, but he was obvious and she was quick.

"Talitha, move!" he roared his demand.

"No."

He dodged to the other side, but it had been his only real option and she had long before seen it, so that again she was between the man and her brother. He stared over her head and his blood began to boil. "Move now or..."

"Or what?"

"Or…or..." he was at a loss.

Her calm was as powerful as his anger, but far easier to maintain. It would be impossible for him to hurt her and he wouldn't be able to get around her without doing just that. He stood in a terrific wrath for a few seconds and then abruptly the rage within him deflated.

He turned away, suddenly apathetic to everyone and everything. Walking back into the living room of the small house he surveyed the destruction he had caused. His melancholy returned like a dead stone in a chest and stooping, he picked up a beer, opened it, and drank it in a matter of seconds.

"Hey look, I don’t want any trouble here," the Coastie said. Will’s tremendous jealous wrath returned in an instant. He turned toward him, and if Talitha had not still been in the way, he would have crushed the man.

Talitha saw all of this and with her amazing calmness said to the Coastie, "I think for your own sake you should be quiet, you cradle-robbing-asshole." At this, the low murmuring of the surprised guests ended abruptly, the broken beer bottles stopped fizzing, and it even seemed as if the crickets in the nearby baseball fields ceased their incessant chirping.

Will’s anger was doused again as suddenly as it had flamed up. In his entire life, he had never heard Talitha curse once. And not even close to once. She could keep her emotions in check with the perfection of a Zen master. Yet she had purposefully cursed. He stared hard at her, just as she had done to him countless times. He saw the love she felt for him and he saw that she was angry, not with him but with Lisa and finally he saw his own pain mirrored in her eyes.

The melancholy threatened to sink him again and what she said next caused tears to spring into his eyes. "Would you like to have a beer with me?" Talitha walked over to him and turned him away from Lisa and the Coastie. "What kind of beer tastes the best? I’ve only had sips of dad’s and it's always repellant."

Will was blinking back his tears when Brian, Carlos, and Doug walked over to the brother and sister. Carlos had a blood soaked rag pressed to the right side of his face. "What the hell, Willy J! Look what you did to me! Look what you did to my dad’s place." Will was at a loss for words, so he looked to the ultimate source for words.

Talitha stepped forward unbidden by her brother and peered into Carlos’ battered face. He glared back angrily. "That scar is going to be a rugged one," she said. "It already makes you look much manlier."

His face went from angry to hopeful in a second. "Really?" Was all he said before he ran to the bathroom mirror to check for signs of manliness.

"Don’t sweat how the place looks Willy J, it would have looked liked this by the end of the night anyway," Doug said. "Hey Talitha? How’s my manliness quotient?" He showed her his bruised chin.

"Well Doug, as you know, in mathematics, a quotient is the result of division. So if we divide your looks, deficient as they are, by your substandard penis length, the quotient, on a scale, termed for your understanding, would place you slightly above geek, but well below nerd."

Doug stared at her for a few moments, then turned to Brian, slapped him on the back and muttered, "Have fun with that one." He then walked away.

Watching Doug get put in his place by Talitha was usually hilarious to Will, but he felt hollow and stared about him with unseeing eyes. There was a great dark cloud hovering over his mind and he was having trouble catching up with the conversation around him. The word repellant that Talitha had used just came to him suddenly and he chuckled weakly.

"Talitha at a party, in the middle of a fight, drinking, cursing...what’s next? You gonna start smoking?"

"About the party: we were told to anticipate fireworks by none other than Amy Harris." Talitha replied. "I'm expecting her to show up within the next fifteen minutes. She is the most obvious…gross!" She had taken a drink of her Pabst Blue Ribbon beer. Her pretty face contorted and she gave her head a violent shake. "How can you drink this stuff?" she asked Brian who was taking a long pull from his can.

"It’s a combination of maturity and acquired tastes," Brian answered calmly and patiently.

Talitha’s eyes widened at this and she took in a large breath to begin her rebuttal. But she paused looking at Brian, and Will saw that he had been just a little too casual.

The two loved to play the game of who was smarter than whom. Brian had been hoping that Talitha would respond too quickly to the word maturity, since there was little evidence of maturity in the fourteen or so beer drinkers in the room.

The empty feeling had not left Will so he grabbed up another beer, drank deeply, and sighed heavily. Talitha gave him a quick commiserating smile but then turned back to her challenger.

She stared at Brian intensely, rubbing her chin gently as if she was stroking a beard. "First off, mine was a rhetorical question but, since you chose to answer a question that didn’t need a reply, we will discuss the topic. Be warned however that from now on I will have to tell you when I'm asking a rhetorical question since you get so easily confused."

"If that'll make you feel better about yourself, please feel free," Brian retorted and gave Will a knowing smile, but Will did not know. He was feeling slow and stupid and wanted to drink.

"Obviously you are referring to the physical and not to either the emotional or the intellectual, when you mentioned the word maturity." Brian nodded and Talitha went on, "Taste buds do change over time so it's not inconceivable that one day I will be found sipping," she consulted the can, "Pabst and gorging myself on a plate of brussel sprouts. It's the term 'acquired tastes' that has me most perplexed."

Talitha looked long at Brian. "The term itself suggests the necessity of prolonged exposure to a substance one would initially find naturally abhorrent. I can easily imagine the rest of these future alcoholics." She waved her hand to indicate the teenagers around them. "Forcing themselves to drink and to smoke due to social pressures, but you would never do that." He smiled agreeably at her reasoning. "Soooo…you acquired the taste…at the outset, how? Hmm…by linking the drink with another food item!" She said this in a rush as she was thinking it. "Pizza! A few months ago, you mentioned you only like red peppers on your pizza every once in a while, but by my recollection you like them only when you have a beer to go with your pizza." She smiled triumphantly. "You began acquiring your taste for beer by drinking it with pizza. Your father enjoys the combination as well, and I surmise this was where you were originally acquainted with the pairing."

"Yes, right down to the red peppers." He gave her a mock bow, then stepped forward and kissed her.

Will didn't realize it at first, but he had enjoyed their little nerd courting ritual. They both truly seemed to love each other and watching them he felt the dark cloud over his mind weaken. It came back, but less strong when they started to kiss. He glanced away then and saw Lisa by herself. She had never looked more beautiful.

She'd gone all out.

Her hair was curled and teased, so that it resembled a flowing blonde mane. Her makeup appeared as if an artist had worked on her, making her green eyes fairly blaze out of her face. She wore a very short, tight mini skirt and the muscles of her inner thighs were clearly visible, making Will long for her badly.

She stood next to the ice chest, holding a can of beer in one hand and rooting around in the cooler with the other. Without thinking, Will stood up, and had taken two steps toward her when he came to his senses. He stood there watching her. Lisa looked up a minute later, their eyes locked, and the connection that had been with them for the last year was still there. He thought nothing, but felt everything. His heart began to hurt, his chest constricted and it was only when his tears started to fall off his chin that she looked away, confused.

A second later Lisa turned back to him and anger burned in her eyes. She marched over to him then and now up close, he could see she was fighting back tears of her own. "No! You had your chance," she hissed at him. She wiped the back of her hands against her eyes. They were a bright green and he wanted to kiss the tears away. "You were right last week. You're like a kid. You're like a kid who only wants what he can’t have."

"Lisa, wait I do lo…"

"No! No! Don’t say it! Stop trying to talk yourself into loving me. I don’t want your pity. I’m going to be selfish from now on, you hear me?" She poked him angrily in the chest with her tiny finger. "I thought I could love you forever, even with the knowledge that you didn’t truly love me. I thought if I was unselfish and gave and gave, it would be enough for me just to have you near. But it wasn’t! I'm the bad guy here! I wanted more. I wanted to be able to trust you."

"Lisa! God damn it!" Will roared and grabbed both of her arms. He towered over her in his rage, but like Talitha, she knew he would never hurt her. "I have done nothing for you to doubt me; I never cheated on you a single time. I have been devoted only to you."

"That's not the kind of trust I'm talking about." She cast her face down and her tears were huge and heavy. They splashed as they hit the cracked linoleum of the kitchen floor. "I told you all of this last week. You're cheating me, not cheating on me. You're not giving me all you have." She looked up but not at him. Her wonderful green eyes were unfocussed and far away. "I don’t think I can love a man who doesn’t love me," she said to herself.

Will was on the verge of expressing his love to her when the Coastie entered the room and stood in the doorway. He had a sneering contemptuous look on his face and anything Will was going to say that might have saved his relationship, drowned in the blackness of his jealous anger. His body went stiff as his muscles tightened.

"Will, listen to me," Lisa said, and her maturity focused him. "Forget about him. I was wrong to bring him here; I was just trying to make you jealous." She shook her head as if to clear it. "That was a mistake, but it doesn't change the fact that you still don’t love me. You're an open book; I see the anger and the jealousy and the sadness, but not the love. You have always held back, waiting to see if something better might be coming along...well here’s your chance, go find it. I won’t stop you."

4

Lisa turned and walked out of the house followed by the Coastie. A silence engulfed Will. It extended past the staring of the other teenagers and went deep within him. He felt as though he was submerged beneath a lake. His vision doubled and then tripled and everything around him went out of focus.

Talitha hugged him and told him that it would be ok and Brian, still with potato chips encrusted to his shirt, handed him a beer. They talked to him, and around him as he drained the beer. Another one was pressed into his hands and still he heard nothing but echoes and saw nothing that was real.

Timing is everything in life.

If Amy Harris had shown up while Will had been in his fugue state, his night would have ended in a much different manner. But she arrived a few minutes after Doug came over with more beer. Doug sauntered up and giving Talitha a wide birth as if she were a dog on a chain, gave Will another drink. "Alright widdle baby, time to take your medicine," he said jovially.

"Alcohol is actually a poison," Brian said and then guzzled from his can.

"I think laughter might be the best medicine for Will," Talitha added. After the confrontation, she had started sipping at her beer and had just finished her first.

"It would be, if there was anything to laugh at!" Doug exclaimed in a loud voice. "Could you believe that Coastie hitting on teenagers? Does anyone know who that asshole was?"

"I think he works over at the firehouse," Brenda Dillers chimed in. "He's always trying to flirt with all the girls, even my fourteen-year-old sister!"

"Holy crap!" Doug became even louder and grabbing Will, he gave him a great shake. "You know what…you know what? We're gonna report his stupid ass!"

"Somebody call Skipper!" a voice yelled out and the room exploded in laughter.

"No I’m serious, the guy is a pervert." Doug did seem quite upset despite his drunkenness.

Anger started to work its way out of the black cloud of Will’s mind. It was a low simmering anger and the focus shifted constantly from Lisa, to the Coastie and then to himself.

It was then that Amy came in.

He would find out later about the lack of underwear but the fact that she was braless was immediately apparent to everyone, drunk or not. She wore a white T-shirt and a short flowing skirt. Her breasts swayed rhythmically back and forth, as she strutted up to him. Amy ignored the people around Will and knelt down next to him, placing her large breasts on his arm. She leaned into him.

"I just heard about Lisa bringing that Coast Guardsmen here tonight, are you ok?"

Will was very nearly drunk at this point and Amy might not have had a face as far as he was concerned. He had stared at her breasts as they made their way slowly up to him and when they heavily, and very warmly, settled themselves on his arm, he breathed a huge sigh. The nipples were engorged and pushed hard at the thin fabric. Will felt himself swell greatly and realizing his sister was there, he shifted in his chair and looked at Amy’s face. She was smiling knowingly and did not mind his stares in the least.

"I guess so," he allowed.

"Do you think we can go somewhere and talk privately?" She didn’t wait for a reply, but took hold of his hand and pulled. As he heaved himself up, the room spun around a couple of times and he tripped over Brian’s foot and went crashing down.

"I see some of you boys have been starting your fun early tonight." Amy went to him but Talitha beat her to Will’s side.

"I'll take care of him, Amy."

"Oh, ok. You don’t mind if I talk to Brandon then." She was referring to Brian, who had reached his limit four beers earlier and was currently staring at Amy’s breasts, as a starving man would look at a steak.

Amy walked over to him and put her hand on his arm. His eyes and his head bobbed in unison as he looked her up and down. Talitha finished helping Will to his feet and then went to Brian just as Amy crossed over to Will.

"I'll take good care of him. I'll make sure he gets home safely...I do know where he lives after all," Amy said, with a pleasant smile.

"It’s ok, Tal." Will stood swaying back and forth. "I think I’m done drinking tonight anyway and I could use some fresh air. But first!" he said importantly. "I need to take a leak."

The trip upstairs made him realize just how drunk he was. After he urinated for what seemed ages, he went to the mirror and splashed cold water on his face until the room stopped spinning around him.

"There you are!" Amy purred, as he stepped out of the bathroom. She had a very bright smile for him. He tried to concentrate on that and purposely did not look at her breasts. "Come in here." Amy spun him away from the stairs and into a darkened bedroom.

He tried to push around her but ended up in her arms instead. Her face was an inch from his and with great gentleness she reached up and started to kiss him. He wanted to resist her but a part of him had other ideas and it pushed out as if spring-loaded. Embarrassed, he attempted to pull his hips back but Amy thrust herself against him and he found himself kissing her back, aggressively. Will brought her to the bed and without caring whose it was, lowered her down on it. As they kissed his hands went to her breasts and she moaned softly as he caressed them. He was rock hard now and her hands went to him.

Something wasn't right. Pulling away from the kiss with a moan of his own he looked down at the girl and saw...Amy.

Sudden crazy guilt poured over him. "Amy, I…ah…ah…ah," he was having trouble forming words, partly due to the alcohol coursing though his veins and partly because she had not relinquished her hold on him, but was kneading him expertly. "I can’t," he said. Guilt swelled in him but his body wasn't listening and his muscles shuddered uncontrollably down his back.

"You can. She threw you away like a piece of garbage. You can do whatever you want." Her smile and her eyes and her hands made it nearly impossible to stop, but he had to and he reached down to take her hand off of him. Amy allowed this, but took his hand and placed it on her own thigh. She held his wrist and gently pulled his hand up her leg slowly, slipping it along her warm thigh. The higher his hand went, the warmer her leg felt under his touch.

He had expected panties but his fingers met no resistance and slipped into her. The heavy cloud of guilt which surrounded him faded to wisps that were blown away by her urgent moans. Any illusion he had of being able to stop himself evaporated with them and his only conscious feeling was a powerful, demanding desire.

5

Three hours later the heavy guilt—laced with panic—still kept him from breathing normally.

When he left Amy he had been tripping over things and knocking into people. It wasn't only all the beer he had consumed that caused this, it was also the realization of what he had just done. If Lisa found out, and she would, there could be no chance at getting her back. It was this realization that had him in a frenzy to get away from Amy.

He felt a burning shame at his actions and didn't want anyone to see him. Amy was drop dead gorgeous and the very epitome of sexuality yet at the same time she was strangely repulsive and cruel. Will felt terrific guilt about cheating on Lisa, but he also was ashamed of himself.

He shook his head in disgust and the night spun briefly so he put his hand out to the building next to him for support. In the dark, the white building wasn’t familiar to him, but walking to the front of it, he realized it was the little Catholic Church.

Will went up to the glass and peeked in just as his father had done the day before. Trying the doors and finding them locked, he sat down on the three short steps to pray. He always felt self-conscious when he prayed simply because he was a little fuzzy on the details surrounding the concept.

His prayers generally revolved around thanking God for the things he had been blessed with already and asking for guidance with the issues that he faced. He'd prayed a lot in the last week.

Will frequently wondered if he was even doing it right and there was no one at home he felt he could turn to on the subject. His parents never went to church or prayed as far as Will knew and he got the feeling that Talitha, with all of her science, didn't believe in God at all.

He had only been to the two churches on the island a handful of times and when he had glanced through the Bibles in the pews, he had been unable to find the chapter on prayers. Lisa had pointed out to him the Lord's Prayer but he didn't really care for it despite its simplicity. It seemed to make demands on God. 'Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our sins...' This did not sit too well with him; it glided up to the edge of his vague notion of blasphemy.

His favorite prayer said during the church services was the one repeated right before Communion. Lord I am not worthy to receive you, but only say the word and I shall be healed. To Will this was what religion was all about. Admitting that he was flawed and sinful, yet knowing that with a single word from God he could be healed or made perfect.

Other than that little tidbit, his perception of Christianity was hazy at best. He wasn't even sure about the relationship between Jesus and God. He had thought that Jesus was the son of God, but the more he attended church the more he got the idea that Jesus was God.

When he had asked Lisa about this, she wasn't clear on the details either. All her life, she had felt a great emptiness inside her—principally because of her mom—and had wanted to find out if turning to God would help fill it.

Initially, she had gone by herself thinking religion was something personal, but after two solo attempts, she had asked Will to come along. She had felt lost during the services and painfully lonely. It seemed that everyone around her sat, either in pairs or in families and she felt distinctly isolated.

Will had never thought about going to church before but wanted to make her happy, so he put on his best suit and went along. Lisa would hold his hand tightly as they sat in the pews and he rarely felt closer to her than at church. While there, he felt he was her family, her only family.

Now in the dark, sitting on the steps of the church he tried to pray, but found it impossible. His mind was a confusion and the beginnings of a thumping hangover didn't help. The binary stars of his emotions: sadness and madness, had been whirling around each other for the last nine days but now they had a new playmate, probably a permanent one...guilt

His guilt had not abated a whit, but in fact grew every time he recalled the feel of Amy's hands on him, and his hands on her. This memory kept interrupting his feeble attempts at praying and he had to give up the effort.

He got up, staggered a moment and then peered into the glass-encased bulletin board and the name "Father Alba" caught his attention.

"What did Katie say?" he asked the glass. He felt sleepy and a little sick, but a smile came to his lips when the memory finally pushed its way to the front of his brain. "Are you jerking my chain?" What a thing to say to a priest! He loved Katie, partially because the little girl was always good for a laugh, something he had been in a deep need of recently.

His smile inverted itself when he next thought of Talitha. Shame made a brief appearance on stage, pushing aside his other pathetic emotions. How was he going to look her in the face tomorrow morning? She probably wouldn't say anything either; she would just give him that look of disappointment. He sighed long and heavily; his headache thumped harder.

The night began to grow cooler—he felt slightly refreshed by it—and thought he could make it home without waking everyone up. Starting back up the Row, his shame was pushed aside by exhaustion and a whiny self-pity. He wondered why Talitha hadn't been there for him. She certainly could have stopped Amy from going upstairs.

"But then what?" he asked the night. No answer came; the night was quiet and dark, and he felt invisible, which had a great appeal to him. It seemed like he had been under the spotlight of a thousand eyes everywhere he had gone in the last week. He had heard the whispers, had seen the stares, and had tried his best to ignore them. But under the shadow of the trees, there was nothingness and he felt he could think clearly. Talitha wasn't to blame. Even if she had kept Amy from coming up the stairs, what then? Would she have had to babysit him all night?

A sudden agonizing thought occurred to him... she just might have.

Next to one of the great oaks, he stopped in the shadows and stared at the ground. He painfully realized he was overly reliant on Talitha. To him, her word was law even more so than that of his parent's. Her advice was so accurate that it carried the weight of gospel in his mind.

In school any class that he didn't share with her, he aced easily. The ones they were in together, however, were a struggle and he now concluded it was because he never had to study and instead daydreamed his way through them. He had the certain knowledge that Talitha would bail him out of any situation.

Will started walking up the row again as self-disgust crept over him.

Was this why he had treated Lisa the way he did? Had he been waiting for his little sister to tell him how to behave in a relationship? She had certainly told him how to dress, what gifts to buy, and where to go on dates, and more—a lot more. Of course, the truth was she'd never told him to do anything, but a suggestion from her was equal to the same thing. His self-disgust edged toward self-loathing. Was he waiting for her to tell him he needed to be a man?

He decided he was done. He was the big brother; from now on he'd look out for her. "From now on," he said quietly but fiercely to himself.

"From now on what?" A woman's voice spoke softly from the shadow of the tree closest to Will's house. He jumped back startled and felt a wave of adrenaline shoot through his body. Peering into the shadow, he at first thought it was Amy, and his stomach rolled queasily.

However, as the woman approached and the moonlight struck her, he saw that it was Mrs. Harris. She wore little more than a short silk kimono and held a large wine glass in her hand. The contents of the glass looked dark and thick.

The sight of her brought back the guilt; now it was tinged with embarrassment and worry. Thoughts raced through his mind. Did she know what happened tonight between her daughter and him? Had she been waiting out here to tell him off and then go spill everything to his parents? What would his mom say?

"Uh, it was nothing. I was just talking to myself, is all."

"That's not a good sign, you know. Talking to yourself at night, in the dark like this." She moved closer to him, and she was slightly unsteady on her feet. Will was shocked to see that her small kimono had not been tied very tightly and that most of her breasts peeked out at the moonlight. She seemed not to care.

"You're out late, aren't you? Out having a good time?" she asked quietly.

Had it been another time she might have turned him on, but he had only just told himself to start acting like a man and the only feeling he had for Mrs. Harris was embarrassment for her.

"No, I was taking a walk." He refused to look at her exposed breasts and instead looked up at the Moon. "It being such a nice night."

She turned to look up at the moon too. "Yeah it's great," she said it flatly without emotion. Will looked over at her then and she was staring off, literally into space. Her eyes were far away and her face expressionless. Her kimono had opened slightly wider and one of her large brown nipples was peeking out at the moonlight. The glass in her hand was all but forgotten and she held it without concern. The red wine, looking black as the night, dripped onto the bricks of the sidewalk. The resemblance to blood was disconcerting.

"Yeah, but for how long? Two more nights?"

What she was saying was lost on him. "Two more nights?"

Her body gave a tremendous shudder and her kimono opened further, but this time she seemed to realize how uncovered she was and pulled the fabric tight across her breasts.

"Yes, till the moon is full."

He glanced up at the mostly-formed orb. The moon bothered him. He felt as though it was spying on him and knew all that he had done. This time it was Will who shuddered and goose bumps broke out down his arms.

"I have to get going now. Have a nice night."

"Yes, you too," she paused and it seemed as if she wanted to say something else. Will looked at her and was just about to turn away when she spoke, "Talitha, your sister. Do me a favor and look out for her, will you?"

"Of course." Will stared at Mrs. Harris. How did she know that he had been just thinking that?

"I mean she has such a good reputation, being so virtuous. I wish my Amy was that way." The goose bumps reformed themselves on his arms. Did she know then, about tonight, he wondered. Mrs. Harris continued, with a small sigh, "She's a slut, a tramp and everyone knows it. But Talitha. You need to keep Talitha whole and unspoiled. Can you do that? Protect Talitha's reputation before she throws away her greatest gift. Very few girls look back on losing their virginity and say, 'that was a perfect moment.' Mostly it's rushed and sloppy and quickly regretted and once it's gone, there's no getting it back."

Will was almost speechless. "Yeah sure. I will. Umm, good night." He didn't know what to say. Getting advice on virtue from the mother of the biggest slut he knew felt extremely weird. He turned away as she nodded and waved her hand to him in a dismissive gesture.

Slipping around the back of the house, Will entered through the kitchen as quietly as possible, hoping to God that everyone was asleep, especially Talitha. The house was cool and dark and other than the distant sound of the boiler roaring away in the basement, it was quiet and still.

The boiler had been going nonstop for the last day since the repairman had been in, yet the house had never really heated up. It was much better than it had been, but it seemed barely to get above cool. The rooms along the back stairs were the worst and Talitha was trying to figure out why. Her current theory was that the house was situated over an underground cavern that was acting as a natural evaporative cooler. The only odd part of that to Will was she had yet to ask permission to begin to dig through the basement.

Standing in the darkened kitchen, he had a difficult choice to make. He could go up the back stairs and run the risk of waking Talitha up, and letting her get her, 'Oh so disappointed' looks in early, or go up the great stairs and try to slip past his father, who was a notoriously light sleeper and who would smell the alcohol on his breath in an instant. He had such shame that he nearly went the way of the great stairs, but instead moved up the back ones as noiselessly as possible. The stairs creaked softly under his weight, but no one stirred. In a minute, he was in bed and by the next minute, he was deeply asleep.

Will swam slowly into consciousness. It was bright out and the light made his eyes smart. He felt fine for a second and a half but then his hangover began a thunderous parade throughout his skull. He groaned softly and blinked, wondering what had woken him.

"Will! It's time to get up," his father bellowed from the second stair landing. That bellow seemed familiar, as if it had been part of the dream he was just having. Will wondered how long his father had been yelling for him. "I need to see you before I go to work!"

"I'm up!" That hurt. His head thumped hugely with each syllable.

Staggering to his feet, he went into the bathroom and squeezed as much toothpaste as he could stand into his mouth. Hurrying down the stairs, he stopped as far from his father as he could without being disrespectful. Will worried that he still smelled like beer and his father's intense gaze didn't help.

William was very much the Commander at the moment. He stood tall in his Dress White uniform—complete with sword. Everything about him was sharp and crisp, and his medals shone brightly against the white of his coat. He was looking at Will with the same perception that Talitha used, except his held an authority behind it that lent it power. It was all Will could do, not to wilt under that gaze and confess his many sins.

The Commander's eyes narrowed as he took in Will's haggard appearance, but then he looked away briefly and smiling said, "I have some chores for you to do, if you are up to it."

"Yes, I'm up for it," Will lied "Do you have another inspection?"

"Oh yes. The Admiral sure does love to play dress up." He shook his head. "If it wasn't for the sword I would look like a highly decorated waiter." This was untrue. He was a dashing figure in his uniform and Will thought he looked heroic. "I put a list for you on the table...but they don't all have to be done today."

"I'll get to them. I promise."

The Commander left through the front door and Will went into the kitchen to face the music. Talitha was just putting her breakfast dishes in the sink when he walked in.

"Wow! Did dad see you like that?" She eyed him in disbelief. Will looked down at himself.

"Oh boy!" His shirt was inside out, his fly wasn't just open but looked to be yawning hugely, and his jeans were sticky and stained with what looked like jelly. Will sat down and put his head in his hands. He hadn't seen what he was expecting to see in Talitha's eyes, not yet, but he felt it coming. With a sigh, he looked up at his sister. Leaning against the sink, she was studying him but without reproach. She smiled a small commiserating smile at him, but he could see she had much to say. There was a long silence as the two siblings looked at each other.

Finally Talitha broke it, "So are the rumors true?"

"Rumors already! What rumors?"

"You are going to play it coyly, then. I'm referring to the rumor that you..." Talitha paused and looked through the open dining room door. She continued, but in hushed tones, "That you uh, had, uh, sexual intercourse with Amy."

Talitha looked very much out of her element with this conversation. "Would you believe me if I said no?" he asked.

She looked long at him before answering with a nod, "I might, but no one else would, not with Amy Harris crowing to the world how you..." She stopped and her cheeks turned pink.

"I don't want to know," he sighed and looked out of the window. The golf course looked green and inviting. He wanted to lie in the grass and go back to sleep. "And it doesn't matter now anyway. Let her say what she will. Lisa will never have me back after last night so the truth hardly matters."

"What is the truth?" Talitha had him focused with her high-powered perception, he felt like a bug under a microscope.

He thought for a moment before answering, "The truth is, I don't kiss and tell."

"Since when?"

"Since last night. I'm sorry to be abrupt, but I've got this list dad left for me." He was tired and even though the hangover had abated somewhat, he still felt sick. "Can I give you one piece of advice? Make Brian work hard for it. Demand that he make it perfect for you, and then..."

She was shocked at what he had said but also intensely curious. "And then what?"

He smiled and tapped her on the head. "Turn off your brain, don't try to analyze the situation, just enjoy it."

She blushed furiously. He had just walked past her to get started on the list, when she said, "Yes. Ok I will. It's like the Heisenberg principle, or as some refer to it as the Uncertainty Principle..."

"Talitha! My head can't take it this morning." He looked at her tiredly, his face drooping, "And it sounds like you may need to practice at turning off your brain, so go do that." She smiled at him and the blush in her cheeks made her prettier still.

6

Moving slowly to his bathroom to get ready for what he felt was going to be a long painful day, Will couldn't stop sighing. His first chore wasn't on the list but was very necessary. Gathering his courage, he went next door to talk to Amy. He felt the need to apologize for the way he had left her at the party and he wanted to ask her to stop spreading rumors, but no one answered the door. It wasn't much of a relief and he went back home and performed all of the chores in a listless manner, as if his arms and legs were weighted down.

Later, when he had completed his labors, he suppressed a great desire to hide in his room, and instead went out. He made his usual rounds. For the previous ten days, he had gone to every teen hangout on the island hoping to find Lisa. Will hadn't seen her a single time and this was no different.

Many of his friends wanted to talk with him but he wasn't in the mood and politely begged off. He wandered about and in desperation even went to the fire station and walked boldly in. However neither she nor the Coastie from the night before were there. Finally he went to their bench and watched the sunset alone and lonely. He tried to think about what he would say to her when he eventually found her, but nothing came to mind that would excuse his behavior.

Will pictured his end of the conversation: "I love you forever, but I just fooled around with this big slut, I hope you don't mind."

How do you say that but in such a way that Lisa would accept.

Impossible.

Still, he had to try. He knew only one thing for certain and that was he would be a man about it. No more running to his sister for advice or making pathetic excuses at his behavior. He had a man as a role model and he would do his best to live up to that standard.

A sound from behind him made him turn hopefully but it was another couple out for a stroll. They were young, perhaps mid-twenties and still in love, holding hands and whispering to each other with smiles in their voices. Enviously, he watched them but then noticed the moon peeking out from the Brooklyn skyline. The curve of it crested, barely visible behind the buildings across the river and the spying sensation from the night before came back to him. It was time to go home.

His family had already eaten dinner but there was no admonishment, only a warm hug from his mother. Exhausted and melancholy, he excused himself and went to bed.

When he woke the next morning his mood had improved slightly, but the morning got even better when he found out his mom had made French toast. It tasted better than the last time she had made it and he felt the dark cloud in his mind lift. He knew his mom had made the breakfast simply to make him happy and everyone was being especially cheerful. Even his father, who told a funny story that happened the day before. The admiral it seemed had done the entire inspection with his fly open and had been pleasantly surprised at how upbeat and happy all the men were.

The family laughed at the story and Katie immediately unzipped the fly on her pink jeans and started strutting around the table. Puffing out her tiny chest, she looked every one up and down.

"Those boat-cutters are too white! I want them painted orange and do it in a hurry," she demanded in her deepest voice, sounding more like Santa Claus than any admiral. They enjoyed her antics and she spent the rest of the morning with her fly open, striking poses to best show it off. Will felt happy for a change and wished in a good way that Lisa were there so she could laugh along with them.

The day was a relaxing one and Will refrained from going on his daily 'Lisa hunt.' He figured if it was meant to be, it would happen. However he did go to their bench at sunset. He watched the sun go down and felt at peace with himself for the first time in a long while.

The sun was a beautiful golden arc just above the horizon when Lisa came and stood next to the bench.

She was a wreck.

Her hair looked wild and tangled and she had long black streaks of old mascara running down both cheeks. Her clothes were filthy and ripped and she more resembled a bag lady, than the gorgeous girl from two nights before.

Her face was pinched in anger or resolution, but her eyes were still the magic green that he loved.

Nothing could change that. The last golden rays of the sun lit them up and he looked past any imperfections and saw only a beautiful girl. She spoke to him and her tone was harsh, angry, and full of self-pity; he missed that voice. No one else knew this about her, but she had a wonderful singing voice. It had been months into their relationship before she sang for him and he realized that he missed the sound of her voice, angry or not.

Her mouth moved and formed words with perfect lips. Her tongue would slip out frequently and lick them and he remembered their exquisite softness. She had a light spray of freckles on each cheek. She had hated these with the same passion that he had always loved them and in her excitement and the light of the setting sun, they stood out obviously and he knew that they would embarrass her, if she knew. He breathed her in with a great heavy sigh and listened for a long while without speaking.

"So there is a winner after all. Have you come to shake my hand, to tell me nice try? Is that why you're here?" Lisa turned away, looked at the fading light, and clutched herself as if she were cold.

"Are you here to gloat? To make me feel small?" Turning from the last of the sun, she continued, "Well you can. I can't stop you. The Gods threw the dice and you came up the winner, didn't you? The judges decided and that's that, isn't it?"

She walked away from him then and strolled almost casually to the seawall thirty feet away. The sun had gone down and she was now just a silhouette against the rapidly darkening sky.

Will didn't move, he was afraid to. He felt that if he went to her now she would only run.

"But tell me," she called out softly from the new darkness. "Does she kiss like me? Does it..." her voice broke. "Does it feel the same?" He could hear her crying softly and shame made him cast his eyes down. "I'm sorry if this makes you feel bad, seeing me this way. I didn't..." She stopped speaking and her breath hitched in her chest like a little spasm.

Behind her, the waves gently broke against the seawall, but other than that, there was a silence around them. He could say nothing. It was almost as if he had been struck dumb. Moments later, when he looked back up, she stood over him. Will hadn't heard her at all. Like an apparition she had just appeared in front of him.

"When it was me in your arms," she said. "I thought I belonged there. Everything made sense as long as I pretended that you loved me. But you were only a spectator at a show, and it was only a matter of time before you...got up and left." Lisa seemed to be going back and forth between anger and resignation.

"I...I tried. I played all my cards but one, and now...and now...and now there's no ace left to play, is there?" She hauled her hand back and slapped him hard across the face. He had seen the blow coming but let if fall anyway and hoped she would hit him again, but she didn't.

Instead, she screamed into his face, "Is there! I was so stupid, playing by the rules!" She then unexpectedly straddled him as she had done countless times before, sitting on his lap her small hands upon his cheeks. The moon was out for the show and it looked huge, round, and cold as winter. The light from it struck her face and her eyes lost their green. The dead pale glow blurred her freckles and her lips became colorless.

Even though he kept his head up and they were almost nose to nose, she whispered, "Look at me." She searched his face as if looking for a sign. "But all that is history, because you won. You're the big winner, you understand? You get it all. I can't stop you. Take everything from me. Take my virginity it's yours. Take my life, beat me, do what you want to me. I...I...will take whatever you'll give me." She laughed hard and cruelly and her tears rained down on him. "You can sleep around, screw whoever you want, and I will still love you. I will always love you. Love doesn't have to be a two way street...but...but you have to give me something! Even if it is the smallest part of your heart. Please! Please!"

Pulling herself off of him, she threw herself on her knees and sobbed horribly, "Please, please, please!" Lisa gripped his legs fiercely as she cried and her nails dug into his skin but he didn't care.

He was still unable to form any words, but he could hold her. With his long muscular arms, he reached down and gently picked her up as if she was a child and pressed her delicate, warm face to his. He had been crying noiselessly this whole time and he let his tears mix with hers. Her lips felt puffy and wonderfully soft. With tenderness, he kissed her until she responded and their kiss became wet and passionate.

Quickly, he became aroused but he didn't want her to know, so he cradled her high to his chest. They kissed long and deeply, but eventually even his strong arms grew tired and he set her down on the bench and knelt in front of her as she had him. He felt he had to say something but had no idea what, so he let the words come as they would.

"I was wrong. I was wrong about many things." The words started slow, hesitantly, but soon began to pour out of him, "I wanted to stay a kid. That was my problem. I didn't want to grow up. I wanted to have my fun, but I didn't want to be responsible. For you or your feelings.

"I thought we could say, I love you, back and forth and have it not mean anything. I was such a coward! You see, if you really loved me that meant I was responsible for your happiness, your sadness, perhaps even for your whole life. And that scared me, I hid myself from it." He looked around at the dark amazed, wondering where all of this came from.

"So you never loved me," she asked without any strength in her voice.

He laughed in self-disgust. "No, I do love you and always have. That's the worst part. I was allowed to love you with all my heart, but you couldn't love me back. Do you know why? Do you? Because if I was the only one in love, then only I could get hurt. I could deal with that. But I couldn't deal with having it in my power to hurt you. Look what I've done to you. As much as I was sad and angry since we broke up, it hurts me ten times as much to see you in this much pain. Each one of your tears is my fault! Each tear is because of me and they stab me in the heart! That's what I'm talking about. As long as you never truly loved me, you could never feel this much pain. So I hid my love..."

He looked away shaking his head at the moon. "I held back. I wanted you not to love me as much as you did. I know now that I was sabotaging our relationship. I never wanted it to end, I just never wanted it to go forward. I wanted it to stay frozen in time, unchanging and perfect. But I never considered what you wanted..."

Will stopped and shook his head, angry with himself. "I'm lying again! Damn it! I knew what you wanted. I knew exactly what you wanted, but I was afraid of it. How can you love such a coward? You were right to break up with me. I was living in a childish fantasy. I was in Never Never Land, where I would never have to grow up."

He held her hands and looked her in the eyes. "But I want it all now. I'm being childish again—I want all of you. Please take me back. You should not be begging me, I'm not worth it. I should be begging you, and I am. Please take me back, please. I'll be strong and courageous, like you. I want this love. I want you. I want us. Tell me what I..." He stopped in disbelief. He was about to ask her what to do and how to behave. "I'll show you my love every day. I'll put you above me always."

Her face held a mixture of desperate hope and tremendous weariness. "I wish I could believe you. I want to believe you. If I take you back, don't ever hurt me please, just kill me. I can't take any more pain." Her words hurt badly. They were a razor across his heart, but he had to hurt her more now.

With one more glance into the dark, he took a deep breath. "Two nights ago, after the party I...I...I fooled around with Amy Harris. It was wrong...I was wrong! I should never have done it and I'm terribly sorry."

"Yes, I know," she spoke in a whisper. "But why was it wrong? You were free, weren't you? I told you to go find...someone better."

He was hurting her again, he felt her pain, and it became his pain. "There's no one better, at least not for me. But free? I was never free to hurt you...and I'm...I don't want to come across as conceited but I'm better than that. If I hadn't been so..." He stopped himself. No more excuses.

Lisa cast her eyes down. "It's my fault. I threw that Coastie in your face to get you jealous...I guess it worked didn't it?"

"It's not your fault. I had just told you I loved you and not an hour later...I was crazy with..." Again, the excuses came up and he squashed them down fiercely. "I'm ashamed of myself and here on my knees, I'm begging you to forgive me."

She put her hands into his hair and began to comb it with her fingers. "If you'll forgive me...for the Coastie and, and breaking up with you in the first place."

Amazingly and childishly, his jealousy over the Coastie flared up. He wanted to ask her what exactly he should be forgiving her for, but instead said, "I forgive you for the Coastie, but if you are taking me back, then there's nothing to forgive about the break up. I needed it. We...needed it."

In the dark, she smiled and he smiled back. Pulling him off of his knees she said, "Come on, I want to show you something." She led them around the seawall and he quickly realized they were heading to her apartment building.

Her dad was out on patrol and was not scheduled back for at least two more days, so he figured he was about to meet her mother. With all of the rumors he became more than a little apprehensive and as they headed up the elevator, he steeled himself for a meeting with a woman who had a very nasty reputation around the island.

Her apartment however, was empty. Will could tell the moment he walked in.

"Where's your mom?" He looked around and could immediately tell that Lisa had been cleaning. The place smelled of ammonia and furniture polish, yet it also had an underlying odor of ashtrays and greasy cooking.

"I kicked my mom out two days ago." Lisa crossed her arms, resolutely almost as if challenging him to find fault with what she had just said.

"Wow! She just left?"

"No I had to threaten to call social services on her. She took all the money, mine and dad's, and left." Will shook his head in wonder at her; she had a spine of steel to do such a thing.

With her mother gone, he relaxed and glanced around and as he did, he noted that her eyes followed his everywhere they went. Lisa licked her lips nervously. She was worried he would look down on her home. Purposely he overlooked the worn and dilapidated furniture and instead went to the pictures on the walls.

"How old were you in this one?" It was picture of Lisa in a purple and white cheerleading outfit; she smiled happily for the camera.

"That was when I was at Bourne High for my freshmen year. I still have the outfit," she added suggestively, but Will could see she instantly regretted it. "Come here." She led him down a short hallway to what was obviously her bedroom.

It was clean and smelled good. There were pictures of the two of them about the room and in each they were holding hands and looked very happy. She grew more anxious and self-consciously straightened a few of her girlish knickknacks.

"I like your room." He went to a spot on the wall that had until very recently held a poster. "Not John Travolta, I hope."

"Andy Gibb," she said sheepishly.

They smiled at each other and everything was normal for a few moments. But then she stared at his lips and her mouth came open; she went to him and kissed him deeply. Guiding him to the bed, she pushed him down onto it and they kissed as lovers do, but there was a frantic nature to her kissing, that reminded him of the night they broke up. Yet even so, he became quickly aroused and she put her hand on him and squeezed him gently. He moaned in his kiss and she broke off.

"Ok. Ok," Lisa spoke to herself as if coming to a decision and nodded her head up and down. Her hands shook as they went to his belt and fumbled at it.

Will was sad for her. He took her hands in his and brought them to his chest.

"It's ok, Lisa. You don't have to do this." He wanted it very badly, but he also wanted to be a gentlemen.

She stood up and her eyes brimmed over with tears. "Is it her? Is it because of her? You don't find me attractive, I know." Lisa went to her mirror, looked long at it and then took a brush and started to tear at the tangled mess of her hair.

"Don't, please." Will went to her and held her arms. "Of course I'm attracted to you." For emphasis he pushed hard against her. "And this doesn't have anything to do with Amy. It has to do with you and me." He turned her around, kissed her softly, and then gently rubbed his nose to hers. "I want the first time to be special."

"You mean my first time," she said stiffly.

"I mean mine and yours, yes."

"You want me to believe...ok sure. Sure. If that's what you want me to think." Breaking away from him, she went and stood leaning against the wall.

"This is why it can't be tonight. We have to get past this first."

"No, that is why it has to be tonight," she replied and moved to the light switch. The room became lit only by the bright, full moon. He watched with eyes that widened slowly as she stripped out of her clothes.

"She is still all over you, Will. Her scent, her hands, her mouth. I bet you can still feel it, can't you?" It was true, he could still feel her. Lisa continued, "The best way to get rid of a stain like that is to rub it away."

She reached out and began to run her hands up and down him. He gasped...

7

Another walk in the night.

This one far different. He breathed in, his lungs expanding largely, and instead of the sigh he had been exhaling constantly for days, he gave a little laugh. The other night he had run from Amy, but tonight he had lingered long in a deep kiss with Lisa.

Will had indeed shown her what true love was and he had never felt more like a man than at that very moment. He was so happy he skipped a few times, something he couldn't remember ever doing.

Talitha was another non-skipper. He couldn't recall her ever skipping, even as a young girl. Katie on the other hand, skipped almost everywhere. She even had three speeds of skipping, depending on her frame of mind. Will was in such a good mood that he considered trying the three out, but decided the night wasn't nearly advanced enough for that. It was just past 11:30 pm, and there was always the possibility one of his friends was lurking about.

Standing in the middle of the Green, he checked to see if his parent's bedroom light was on, but the great leafy canopy of the oak trees blocked his view. However, he could see the Harris house next door and in one of the upper floor windows, a single light burned.

Amy was going to be a thorn in his side as long as they were neighbors. Lisa had forgiven him, but there was no way short of brain damage she would ever forget. He'd have to endure her insecurity and he felt that he could handle that. But it was Amy, who was a vindictive witch, who gave him cause to worry the most. She'd no doubt be petty and cruel and he wondered to what ends she would go to get what she wanted or to get her revenge when she didn't get it.

He decided to pray on it.

His latest prayers had been answered in the most complete way, so he lay down in the cool thick grass of the Green. But after struggling to come up with an anti-bitch prayer, he decided he'd better handled Amy without divine intervention, so he simply thanked God for his blessings. When he was done, he laid there feeling the greatest contentment.

Something at the corner of his eye caught his attention and turning his head, he realized that from his current angle, he could see his house from under the leafy boughs of the oaks. One second slipped away from him as he stared, and then he sprang up, running with great speed toward the house.

In that second he saw a light in the room above the porch blinking rapidly on and off. It was Katie's room. The light wasn't the warm inviting gold that he had expected, but was red and dim, and the frantic way it flashed out into the night bespoke fear or danger.

He threw off the happy feelings of a moment before and sprinted to the house in seconds, bounding up the red brick stairs of the porch in a single leap. Will neither knew nor cared what he was going to confront when he opened the front door and he didn't hesitate a moment, but reached for the handle of the door, hoping it was unlocked.

But it was locked…and shockingly cold. It felt frozen, colder that any metal he had ever felt even in the deepest of winter. His hand stung with the cold of it and he snatched it away.

Briefly, he stared with revulsion at the unnaturally cold knob, his mind struggling to come to terms with how such a thing was possible. Then he heard a thud from above him…it was a heavy sound and in no way did it belong in that room at that time of night.

Katie!

She was in trouble. Fear started to flow through him, but it was mostly a fear for her safety and it got him moving. He vaulted over the railing of the porch, landing in the little flowerbed beside it and sped around the side of the house.

As he reached the back entrance he understood that this door might also be locked and if it was, he made up his mind that he was going to break it down regardless. Without a pause he made to open the door and this knob too was deeply cold, but it had been painted over so many times that there wasn't the sharp sting of freezing naked metal as at the front door. It still hurt however, but he ignored it and the door flew open, propelled by his strength and urgency.

A wave of bitter, dead cold swept over him, stopping him in the doorway.

The cold struck him full in the face and he gasped, but the gasp was weak, his lungs burned from his sprint, and that first breath of cold air was like an ice pick in his chest. His back felt almost on fire compared to the deep cold sliding its frozen fingers down the front of his shirt. The night had been a warm one and he thought he could feel the sweat from his body freezing in place along his neck and down his arms.

He staggered for the briefest second. It wasn't the cold that had him clutching the door with his sore right hand; there was something dreadful, a current of evil, running beneath the cold.

The feeling that something was wrong in the house, that he had sensed lying in the grass of the Village Green, had been instinctual. He had no facts to back up his crazed sense of desperation and even as he ran, a small part of him had held out hope he'd find nothing wrong. But now there was no hope of that. A great terrible presence, a thing of unimaginable foulness had emerged in baleful triumph and was in the house. It was a black-hearted evil that was beyond the pathetic human notion of the word and Will could feel its unnatural presence with his every cell.

Fear of the awful creature held him in place for only a second but something stronger inside him drove him forward across the old linoleum of the kitchen to the back stairs. Love? Loyalty? Raw courage? He had no time to search his emotions and Will was on the second stair before it realized he was in the house.

Will was not ready for what happened next.

There was no way he could have been. The foul creature was on the second floor just outside Katie's door. It perceived Will through the intervening walls and stairs, and looked upon him…and through him. If the boy had been staggered before by the cold and the feeling of perverse evil on the air, he was now literally knocked off his feet and fell back down the two stairs, landing hard on the kitchen floor.

It had not been physical. His mind had been open, and despite his fear, inquisitive. He was untrained, unprepared and what's more, he was still just a boy.

The demon—and somehow Will knew now that it was a demon—had poured out its evil simply with a look, and being open as he was, Will took it all in. Misery, torture, anguish and more, all in fantastic proportions invaded him, so much so that Will's mind short-circuited and his head snapped back as if he had been punched.

Collapsing, he lay on the linoleum and his every muscle went taught and straining. His legs and arms were straight out, while his eyes were wide and bulging. His mind and soul were being shown the ancient darkness of the demon and in the few seconds before the soft scream came, Will saw just enough to send his mind skittering on the edge of reason.

Luckily for him, a muffled scream rolled down the corridors of the near silent home and the pain and terror ended as abruptly as it had begun. The demon had looked away.

"Heee...heee...heee...heee...heee." The high-pitched noise came uncontrollably from deep in his throat, as Will thrashed and convulsed on the floor. When he could, he tore at his exposed face and arms, rubbing and scratching. Though he knew he wasn't, it felt as though his body was covered with a greasy, malignant film and he had a desperate need to get it off.

"Aaaaaiiiieee."

A scream from upstairs made him remember the first one of a few seconds before, it already seemed as if it came from a distant dream. Within moments, he forgot the foul sensation on his skin and struggled up to his feet. And it was a struggle. He found he wasn't able to move in a normal manner, his joints were stiff and he felt crazily like a robot.

Once up, he looked upon the back staircase with horror. No longer was he filled with the brash reckless courage that had spurred him into the house, instead he felt that certain doom awaited him up those stairs. He knew that he might already be dead, had it not been for the scream from...

"Katie," he said aloud.

That he loved his little sister was unquestionable, but he didn't know if he could face the demon, not up those stairs, not directly face to face. He stood in the kitchen and four precious seconds slipped by, as an internal battle took place within him. To run or to stay. His head swiveled back and forth between the stairs and the kitchen door.

Finally, he let out a quiet, whiny noise, "Ooh nooo," and ran in a jerking motion toward the stairs.

He went up rigidly, his knees almost unable to bend far enough to make each step. The staircase was dark and narrow. He kept his head up, although he was deathly afraid at what he would see above. As he neared the landing, his chest filled with great physical pain and he choked back a cry of despair.

There was a body on the landing.

It was either Talitha or his mother. They were so similar in size and appearance that in the dim light he couldn't tell which it was. It hurt him so badly to look at the body that he found he couldn't breathe. He took two more slow steps up and though he wanted to go on, his fear stopped him just short of the landing. His feet were heavy as lead so that he couldn't get them to budge and he had to content himself with standing on his tip-toes, child-like to get a better look. The darkness was amazing but he was able to see something white near the body, a notebook.

Talitha! It had to be her.

Tears sprung from his eyes and he went nearly to the top of the stairs. She laid half in the long hall of the second floor, and half on the landing. From where he stood Will couldn't see any marks on her and a wild hope filled him that she was simply unconscious. Wanting to be sure, he reached out, but just at that moment, he became aware of movement.

He flinched back, but it was only a piece of paper from Talitha's notebook fluttering down the hall. It was then that he noticed the wind for the first time. The hall felt practically breezy, and though the wind was cold, it was far warmer than the surrounding air. It blew from behind him and went straight along the hall and as he watched, the paper skipped and flipped about, picking up speed. At the far end, it spun as if caught up in a tornado and disappeared into a hellish, unnatural darkness.

The demon was there.

Down the hall in front of Katie's door—it was either the darkness itself or deep in it. Will was afraid to even glance in its direction and he wondered if he would have the mental strength to do more that try to get Talitha out of there.

He reached with his inflexible arms and made to pick her up, but she was dead weight. And there was something else too, not only was she terribly cold, stiff, and lifeless, there was a nasty sticking feeling to her skin. Just the briefest touch of her bare flesh repulsed him and he pulled away or he tried to. It felt as though his hands had become slightly glued to hers and he had to almost peel them away. The simplest touch had been horrible, not because of the cold or the weird stickiness, but because there had been a hungry, greedy demand emanating from her.

Through her skin, she fed off his warmth, and it had the feel of the demon to it. His body gave an involuntary shudder and he realized that he might never have recognized it had it not been for those horrible few moments when the demon had focused on him. But it was there and he was frightened for her.

Will knew that time was slipping by and he had to hurry if he had any chance at getting her away, but he hesitated at touching her bare skin again. It had been too awful and the thought of a human sized leach came to his mind. Suppressing the image with a mental discipline that he didn't know he possessed he reached out to grab her. Seizing her by the shirt, he slid her across the floor to him and gripped her from behind, under her armpits. The leech-like feeling was coming off her so greatly that his shirt seemed to be stuck to hers and his biceps that touched her bare arms went numb from her cold. Grimacing and gritting his teeth against the feel, he hauled her backward down the first two steps.

That was as far as he got carrying her. Whether purposely or not, Talitha pulled his heat and energy from him in endless gluttony, and his world started to turn gray and then black at the edges

He staggered and leaned back against the wall of the stairwell, still holding her to him and the darkened staircase spun briefly. And with what felt like sadness, he knew he was going to faint. With barely enough strength, he turned, so that she landed on him and together they slid backwards down the steps. Thump, thump, thump, his head hit six of the stairs before he caught up against a baseboard that checked his momentum. He lay sprawled on the stairs and struggled weakly like a dying turtle trapped on its back. From that position, he felt his life draining from him by degrees and his only hope was that his death might help Talitha in some way.

As he felt himself on the brink of death, Will’s eyes rolled in his head and he saw a great figure standing over him.

His father was there on the backstairs, but it seemed that he was more than his father now…he was Commander William Jern.

He stood looking up the stairs, his eyes hard, and his face set in determination and anger. Will tried to call out to him, to warn him, but he failed to make even a gasp. Where Will had struggled to even pull his sister to his chest, his father reached down with both hands and threw the girl over his shoulder in one powerful motion.

The relief Will felt was intense and immediate; he could breathe again. He took a long draught of air and tried to pull himself up but only flailed around awkwardly with his stiff arms smacking the walls. His father, with his daughter over his shoulder draining the life from him, reached down with his left hand and gripped Will's shirt, his fingernails digging deep furrows in his son's skin.

With one tremendous tug, Will was lifted onto his feet, but his knees buckled and the Commander was obliged to slam him bodily against the wall to keep him upright.

"Get out of the house!" Commander Jern ordered, quietly but with compelling force.

"But mom and Katie," Will said weakly.

"I’ll take care of them. Now go!" His father's body gave a small spastic jerk and Will could see the tan of his face going pale white. He gave Will a small shove and it was all the boy could do to maintain his balance as he wobbled the rest of the way down the stairs. Behind him, he heard his father yell in his sea-going voice—the one that could carry through a hurricane: "Gayle! Katie! Get out of the house! Now's your chance! Run!"

Will wanted to turn and tell his father about the demon outside Katie's door, but there was no need. It was coming for them. The feeling of the approaching fiend was unmistakable.

It caused an inhuman terror in Will and in a panic, he lurched through the kitchen toward the back door. He no longer felt simply robot-like, now he was a drunken robot. His head swam in dizziness and he struck things as he walked. His vision tunneled so that the objects that he struck did not come into focus until after he hit them; the sink, a chair, the stove.

Finally, he reached the door but it seemed stuck and Will using the last of his energy was just strong enough to open it.

Heat blasted his face; blessed heat. He paused just long enough to take a deep breath before trying to make his escape. Pushing into the heat of the cool night, he made it to the other side of the street but there his foot caught on the curb and he fell face first into the grass of the golf course.

Talitha had done something to him, or perhaps the demon had, but either way he could barely lift his arms and it took him a couple of seconds of straining just to roll over. When he did, he saw a kaleidoscope of his father. It was as if he were completely surrounded by the same man and he was a given a rough shake.

"Are you ok?" The faces used a single voice that drifted in from far away.

Will could only nod his head. His father said something else that he couldn't understand and then was gone. Will tried to get up, but the movement was too much and he fell back in a swoon. Just before he passed out, his head lolled to the side and he saw his sister Talitha lying in the grass next to him. Her eyes were glassy and stared lifelessly at the stars above. She was dead.

Chapter 8

Gayle and the Demon

June 4th 1980

1

The smell wasn't real, or so she thought, but it permeated her dreams and it was that which woke her. Gayle found that odd since she couldn't remember smelling anything in a dream before.

The smell had been wickedly pungent and in the dream, it had overpowered her and left her weak and gagging. Once long ago, Gayle had come too close to a candle she had been about to blow out, and a little of her hair had swung out over the flame instantly catching on fire. She had put it out quickly and lost about an inch, but the smell was nasty and lingered long in the room and clung to her clothes.

The dream had that smell.

It had been a chaotic dream that hardly made any sense, but the part with the smell came back vividly to her when she woke.

In the dream, she had been in her bedroom when she heard something strange on the backstairs. Without knowing why, and regardless of the anxiety that she suddenly felt, she went down the hall to investigate. A terrifically foul, reeking grey smoke filled the stairs top-to-bottom. It had that odor of burning hair but also, and far worse, a smell of burning flesh.

She felt an immediate urge to vomit and while retching in her throat she stumbled to the nearest room, Talitha's. It was empty and Gayle panicked, fearing that it was Talitha's body being burned. The dream took on a confused and hectic tempo as she dashed from empty room to empty room, looking for Talitha at first, but then anyone, until standing in the kitchen she realized that her family had abandoned her.

A sound from the basement made her go to the stairs leading down. Though she tried, she could not make herself go further than the top step and from there she could see a hellish glow emanating from the boiler room. There was utter silence in the basement, except for a horrifying sound of popping and snapping and...sizzling. Gayle heaved repeatedly in her dream, but didn't vomit.

Kneeling in the doorway of the basement and breathing heavily she was still gagging when a shadow overpowered the glow. Gayle fled from the fearsome shadow, somehow ending up in Katie's room. She had been in the room earlier in the dream and it had been empty, but now boxes from moving day stacked higher than her head formed a labyrinth.

The room at first had been dim so that the corners of it couldn't be seen but as she opened the first box, the ceiling light turned on. It was bright white at first but then it started to flash from white to red repeatedly. In a wild flurry, she began to open the boxes one after another, and there seemed to be hundreds of them. Finally, she found Katie standing in a very tall box with steep sides.

"It's time," Katie said casually.

"I know! There's something in the house, we gotta go!" Gayle reached down and picked up Katie as if she were still a baby and cradling her, spun to the door, only to find it wreathed in the sick smoke.

"We can't get out!"

With the words echoing in her mind, Gayle came awake, her brown eyes wide, her breathing ragged and harsh. Laying there in the dark, her first conscious act was to give the air a tentative sniff. The room smelled as it always had and she relaxed into her pillow and sighed in relief.

It was then she noticed the room was bitter cold, like it had been their first night in the house. Rolling over she went to snuggle and steal some of William's warmth, but his side of the bed was empty.

She sat up quick, her senses going to full alert. A glance at the clock showed it to be 11:28, and she went down a very short mental checklist of all the places William would likely be.

1) Bathroom.

2) Family room watching end of baseball game.

3) Kitchen getting a snack.

4) Having an affair? This last one was silly, but there had been no other options.

Gayle felt keyed up, not at all sleepy, and just a little bit afraid. It was the weird dream. She still had a little of the feeling of being trapped it sent a nervousness thrilling through her.

Deciding that she didn't want to be alone, she slipped out of bed, surprised to note that it was colder than she had at first thought. Luckily, she was wearing Talitha's warmest pajamas. Talitha had felt far too grown up to wear pajamas with pictures of baby ducks on them and had taken to stealing her mom's silk PJs. This had been fine with Gayle since the little ducks made her feel young again.

Tonight she wished they were footy pajamas like the ones Katie still sometimes wore. Quickly, the cold began affecting her toes and she went around the bed to the closet to get her slippers. She stopped just as she bent down to get them—William's tennis shoes were not in their normal place. He was a neat man and a creature of habit. His keys were always hanging by the door. His wallet and watch were always on his dresser and his tennis shoes were always on the floor next to the closet.

This little thing, the missing shoes, bothered her and she worried over it. Did this mean he wasn't home? What could he being doing out so late? Was there something wrong with Willy J? The idea of something wrong with her son caused her to start moving again. She left her room in a hurry and saw that the family room, where their TV sat, was cold, dark, and empty. Deep down she had never really expected her husband to be there.

She went to Talitha's room next but, before she could look in a noise came from downstairs. It sounded like it came from deep in the house, low down. It was a deep vibrating sound of metal against metal and it echoed throughout the house.

Gayle's eyes shot wide open and she took an involuntary step back. "What the hell was that?" she whispered.

The fear she had been experiencing had been a small embarrassing thing, but now suddenly, unexpectedly, it bloomed and bordered on terror. She had no idea what that noise could be, she only knew she was afraid of whatever had caused it.

The cold intensified noticeably and she started to shiver despite the ducky pajamas. The back staircase was only a couple of feet from her and it seemed to be the source of the cold and now her breath was a fog in the dim light and her fear kept ratcheting up until it became so great that she had to fight the temptation to run back down the hall. She tried to rationalize the fear, but it was useless; her mind could not come up with any reason for it, other than the obvious. There was something wrong with the house...something unnatural. Something unwanted had entered their home and it was the something that had made the huge sound in the basement.

She felt the greatest desire, in fact the greatest need to get out of the house right then. There was an actual danger here…something indefinable at the moment, but still palpable and she knew she had to get her three children and leave as quick as possible.

Talitha's door stood partially open and Gayle slipped in on her quickly numbing toes. The carpet felt wonderfully warm compared to the hardwood floors, but she didn't stop to thaw her feet since she only needed to take a few strides into the room to see that her daughter's bed was empty. It had been slept in recently and still held a touch of body heat.

Gayle's dream came back to her then: the frantic running, the empty rooms...the feeling of being trapped. This last thought caused her to spin back to the door, afraid there'd be something blocking it, but it stood open and empty. However, that fact didn't matter and the power of her fear affected her judgment. She ran to the door as if in a race, and her momentum nearly carried her into the hall.

She couldn't let that happen, If she did she would then run down the hall, and then down the stairs and then out the front door. With a tremendous effort of will she stopped herself.

Another noise from the house came at her then, a shriek. She didn't know if it was a shriek of twisting metal or a shriek from a girl in fantastic terror, and she felt it as well as heard it. Her hands had been on the doorframe of Talitha's room and the shriek vibrated through them.

The willpower, which so recently had kept her from bolting, dried up in the face of this new sound. The need to run was fierce, but concern for her children's safety was stronger. Gayle looked up the darkened staircase to where her son would be, and her breathing became frantic. He was a deep sleeper and there was still a good chance he was up there right then, not knowing the danger…the unknown danger…that was so close.

But his room was so far away. In fact, it was the farthest room from any sort of safety and she was having trouble forcing herself in that direction.

He's already gone. He ran away and left you alone. They all left you…remember the dream? And they left you trapped in the house with...oh yes, with it, the thing that devours bodies.

The thought caused her shivering to go into overdrive so that she began shaking violently. Her willpower drained completely and she turned away from the still unknown danger and as she did, she turned her back on her son.

She saw Katie's bedroom door and hope flared in her.

You could go save her! No one would blame you for the loss of Willy J, if you were busy saving your daughter.

The thought was so rational and convincing that she almost went down the hall, but at the last moment, she noticed that her eyes had slipped off Katie's door and were now on the great staircase…if she went that way she would run. She would run screaming from the house and probably not stop until she reached the ferry.

2

"I'll come back for you," Gayle whispered, picturing her golden-haired daughter. "I promise."

With a mental struggle, Gayle yanked her eyes away from that end of the hall…what she considered the safe end. It was at least warmer down there and lighter. This end, near the backstairs, was dark and becoming cruelly cold.

Gayle went to the stairs trying to hurry but her feet would not listen and her legs trembled, threatening to buckle under her as she crept along as silently as she could.

Seconds ticked by and the cold on the backstairs intensified; there was a breeze blowing straight down from the attic toward the kitchen. It was as if a current of frozen terror washed over her as she began to climb. The feeling was so bizarre that she wondered briefly if she was still dreaming. In her mind the stairs began to feel like a tall, jagged cliff. With each step up, she left safety further and further behind and after a while, her hands gripped the railings tight as if she thought that they alone kept her from falling.

Soon she began to pant in her fear and her eyes were wild and twitched and skittered about. She kept looking back down the stairs, fearful of what could be creeping up from behind. She knew It was down there; the thing that had made the noises, the thing that ate bodies. It radiated a harsh unnatural feeling that caused her nerves to thrum and her heart to race. For now It was in the basement, but she had a terrible knowledge: It was coming up, slowly at the moment yet she knew that could change at any time.

The top step came into view and she grew even more fearful. Once in the attic she would no longer be able to look back down the stairs, and the thing could come up without her knowing, and she would be trapped…and then...

A shudder ran down her back, but still she managed to force herself on until she reached the final step. At that point she couldn't go forward. It was very much like her first time on the high dive at the pool when she was a kid. Gayle had frozen there, stricken with fear of the great height, and eventually a lifeguard had to come up and help her down. But there was no lifeguard here; in fact it was she who was supposed to be saving Willy J.

Yet that was the rub.

Deep inside she knew he wasn't sleeping in his bed, she knew it for a hard fact. She was sure that Willy J wasn't even in the house. He and the rest of her family had abandoned her, perhaps even sacrificed her to appease the thing in the basement.

Somewhere below her, a door crashed open with a loud bang and wired as she was, Gayle turned and bolted; her face set in a huge terrified, grimace. She was halfway down the first set of stairs before her hands shot out of their own volition. Her fingernails scraped and dug at the walls, causing them to break and peel back. There was intense pain but still she clawed at the walls, scraping away deep layers of paint until her momentum had been checked. Panting, she clutched her aching fingers to her chest and stood, shaking. There was no way she could leave her boy. She turned to go back up but her foot caught the step and she stumbled.

He's not here! He's gone! Run while you still can! her mind screamed at her. Gayle started to cry.

She thought of Willy J then, remembering him as a baby. He was so precious and beautiful. She had fallen in love with him the moment he was born, and she knew that he loved her just as much.

He would never leave me! she thought, angry at herself. With that she sprang to her feet and ran up the stairs as lightly and as quickly as she could. The top stair came into view in a second and she barely hesitated before closing her eyes and dashing past it on feather-light feet. Willy J's was shut which she took for a good sign since he always slept with it that way and she had it open and was in the room in a flash. She would wake him as quietly as possible and then they'd make a run for it.

However…

His bed was neatly made; the top sheet was folded back perfectly, just as she had taught him and the corners were all tucked in with the military precision that his father preferred. Willy J was not in the neat bed... he was not even in the room. For seconds Gayle stared in stunned disbelief.

She was alone.

"They left me," she moaned aloud to the bed.

Tears started to gush from her eyes and she crumpled to the floor sobbing. It felt like a knife had been driven into her stomach and slowly it twisted. She looked back at the door; it had shut at some point in the last few seconds. The door had been open…she knew it had been open…but now it was closed, and she feared there could be something horrible...just on the other side of it.

Within her a feeling of being trapped bloomed. It was sudden and overwhelming, and a fear-induced madness took over her thinking.

She had to hide!

The thought sent her crawling to the bed with a plan to bury herself beneath it. Deep down she knew it was a stupid and useless plan, but her fear was so overwhelming it could not be denied. The underside of the bed was obviously where Willy J shoved everything when doing a quick cleaning and was too crowded to fit even her small body. With crazed desperation, Gayle started to pull clothes out to make room for herself, but then, like shining rain, coins from a pair of his pants, began to drop on the floor. It made a fearful racket and Gayle resembled a playful cat scrambling around after them, but stopped with the realization that It now knew where she was. Just as quick as it had come to her, she threw out the foolish plan to hide and forgetting the coins still rolling about, she ran to the nearest window. She couldn’t hide…but she could jump!

Standing on her toes she eyed the distance to the ground, it was only thirty-five or so. Insane with fear she said, "I can make it. It's not that far!"

With her small muscles bunched she strained to open the window but it seemed to be painted shut. She tried again and panted, "It's not that far," over and over again, as she threw her all into it. The window wouldn't budge and the same was true of the second one. Winded, she paused and looked out. The night seemed so lovely and peaceful; she could imagine herself jumping from the third story and simply flying away. However, the windows wouldn't budge and the glass was the new style and she didn't think she could break it. And if she could, the breaking glass would be loud, and It would come, and It would eat her.

It would eat her slowly, painfully. Enjoying the pain, far more than the taste of Gayle's flesh. Moreover, Gayle would be alive and screaming during all this, because that was the best part. She would be alive, while It ate her. Gayle would be alive a long time.

Just as she knew the beds would be all empty, she also knew this about the creature, and for her it was a cold hard fact.

It had been just over five minutes since Gayle awoke from her terrible dream, and in that time she had been very close to true panic. But being close to panicking and actually panicking, was like the difference between standing very close to a speeding train and standing in front one. The vision of being eaten alive tipped the scale and tipped her mind as well.

She turned and flew to the door and tore at the knob in a frenzy.

The door opened and Gayle sped down the hallway with a wild look in her eyes. She did not see the hall or the dark stairs beyond. In fact she saw nothing, and she couldn't tell if she was running from danger or to danger. By some miracle her feet hit the first two steps properly, but none of the rest. Stumbling, she flew forward, coming down hard on her hands and forearms in the middle of the stairs.

"Ooof!" The wind was knocked from her but it didn't seem to matter. Her body was beyond feeling or even controlling itself and she kicked crazily with her legs as she flailed with her arms.

Seconds passed as she attempted to right herself. Finally gaining her feet, she threw herself forward and it was only due to her lack of momentum that she didn't injure herself as she hit the wall at the landing. Bouncing off it like a pinball, she next slammed into the railing and this too she ricocheted off of. Her arms thrashed around and her feet again failed to find the stairs properly, and she fell in a jumbled ball. She hit her head on the landing of the second floor with what to her was a deafening, CRACK!

Her panic disappeared completely.

There was a vaguely remembered pain in her hands and arms, but then that was gone too. There had also been cold…yes, but now just numbness. She lay in the very dark staircase and could barely feel her arms and legs, but that didn't seem to matter. Nothing seemed to matter and for how long she lay there she didn't know.

Blinking cleared Gayle’s vision somewhat and she could see her legs and feet and the ducky pajamas. Her first very dizzy thought was that she must be sitting on a swing. She couldn't really tell if she was right side up or not and the swinging sensation continued, slow at first, but quickly it got worse. The numbness had been pleasant, but now going back and forth, she felt like throwing up and she rolled over to try to right herself.

It was such an effort get to her knees that she felt that anything else was beyond her capabilities. Her brain was a confused whirl of thoughts that were unable to complete themselves and seconds slipped by as she simply stared at the floor of the landing. As she stared she noticed a small movement on the floor just below her face. It took all of her will, but she managed to focus on that little thing…it was water. Little drops of water were hitting the floor right in front of her.

Rain? She thought thickly, but then her vision blurred and she knew they were tears. It took her a moment to remember why she was crying: her family had left her alone in the house with some sort of monster. However, monsters were only in the movies, weren’t they? She didn’t really know just then.

"Why are you just sitting here?" Strangely it was her own lips that asked the question, but she didn’t remember thinking it. How odd? But the question had been a good one…why was she just sitting there? And why couldn’t she think of an answer? The truth of course was that her brain had been sloshed around the inside of her skull and she had a concussion, but Gayle didn’t know that and she could only kneel crying in the dark.

What about Katie? What about your promise? The thought seeped in through the fog of her thinking.

"No, Katie is long gone. She left with the rest of them."

She's in the box, remember?

But that had been a dream and this wasn't a dream, this was the…movies?

That didn't make any sense "What?" Gayle said aloud.

Katie!

Yes, Katie. Gayle focused on her daughter and the confusion slowly drained away and she remembered where she was…and what had happened.

"I'll get Katie. I'll get her and run," Gayle said to the floor of the landing.

With a tremendous effort, she struggled to lift her head and when she did she saw it was too late for Katie and far too late for herself.

3

The stairs at the bottom were pitch black, beyond any natural explanation.

It was a darkness through which no light could penetrate, and it was the source of all fear. It was powerful and eternal and awake.

And it was Evil.

The malevolence of it came off in waves. It was beyond Gayle's ability to comprehend or to cope, and her mind was taken up with it—independent thought became impossible. She wilted back onto the stairs and looked down between her frozen feet in dreadful fascination.

It seemed deep in its blackness, as if she were just seeing the initial layers of it and a part of her screamed, RUN! However, she couldn't; physically and mentally it was an impossibility. She simply stared, hypnotized as black tendrils crept up the wall and railings toward her. They seemed hungry for her, for her heat, for her life.

The blackness would have engulfed her whole had she not been rescued then— it wasn't William, swinging in at the last minute that saved her—but a little girl's scream from far away.

"Mommy!"

Her mind clung to that scream as a drowning cat would to a stick. She clawed onto it and held it with maniacal fervor. Gayle needed that scream, it was real, and it was natural. Her mind had been completely taken up by the black creature creeping slowly toward her, but now she latched onto the scream and analyzed it, refusing to think past it. It felt like a scream from years gone by, but she recognized it at once, it was Talitha.

But it sounded like a very young Talitha. Maybe it was Katie? No, Gayle didn't think so. Katie was a practiced and accomplished screamer; she had heard her youngest scream so often that it was unmistakable. Conversely, she couldn't remember Talitha ever screaming, not like this at least. Confusion reigned over her, but she knew that scream one way or the other, and she used it to focus her thinking—she had to get out of there. There was only one direction left to her, down the hall toward Katie's room.

Gayle struggled to get up using the railings to support her shaking legs. She refused to look at the blackness, but instead stared at the wall. As inconspicuously as possible, she hugged it and barely breathing, slipped around the corner and into the hall.

Out of sight of the blackness, the fog that had clouded her mind seemed to lift and Gayle suddenly knew what she had to do. She took off in a dead sprint for Katie's door. As she passed the great stair, she eyed it longingly and with tremendous shame. It was so tantalizingly close…all she had to do was forget Katie and she could be out the door and halfway to the ferry in moments.

Gritting her teeth, she forced herself to look away.

She was at Katie's door and through it in the next second. Foolishly, she expected the room to be full of empty moving boxes, but it looked the same as it had three hours before when she had kissed Katie good night. It was the same with only one small item missing…Katie.

Her bed was empty. This wasn't heart breaking to Gayle, like when she had seen Talitha and Willy J's beds empty. No, after so much disappointment this was what she had thought she would see. Yet determined to at least try to find her daughter before she fled from the house, Gayle went to the toy box and ripped back the lid. She fished about in it for a second, before jumping up and running to the closet. This she tore open so savagely that it made her realize her panic was creeping up into her throat again. She yanked the clothes hanging there, back and forth giving the closet a quick but thorough inspection…no Katie.

There! No one could say she hadn't at least tried. Now she could run away. Gayle dashed to the door, but just as she gripped the knob a small whimper sounded behind her. At the sight of the empty closet she had experienced a tiny feeling of relief but it died a quick death at the sound.

Slowly she spun about and saw the one place that Katie could be…under the bed…across the room. This meant that Gayle would have to leave the door and the safety it promised to get to her daughter. This brought back the panic almost full-fledged but it wasn’t a total feeling. She also felt shame as her hand refused to come away from the knob. Her rebellious hand knew where safety lay and it wasn’t across the room. Gayle had to mentally pry her fingers away and only then was she able to throw herself to the carpeted floor in front of the bed. In the dim light, she saw the little blonde girl curled up far back against the wall, Katie had her thumb corked square in her mouth while tears ran around it as though it were a rock jutting from a river.

Without hesitation, Gayle reached in but her arms were too short to reach that far back, so she had to wiggle in after her daughter. She felt terribly exposed in that position— half under the bed— unable to run or fight, fearing what might be behind her. And now the trapped panicky feeling began to build up in her so that she unceremoniously grabbed her daughter by the arm and dragged her out.

The second they were free of the bed, Katie jumped up and immediately hugged her mother tight and fierce, but Gayle's mind was screaming that her time was up. She had spent too many precious seconds in the room already and with a hard desperate heart, she pried her daughter off of her and set her on the ground, a little shivering bundle of pink.

Yet when she turned to the door, the hard feeling left her. It was replaced by the renewed sensation of being trapped and this grew beyond her ability to overcome. Escape was within reach. Gayle had only to take two steps and reach out for the knob but she couldn't force her feet onward. She became convinced that the thing was right on the other side of the door—blocking their way—preparing to wrap its darkness around them—preparing to eat her and Katie at its leisure.

This image froze her feet to the floor.

"Mommy," Katie whined imploringly, shaking like a leaf. Her little teeth began to clatter against themselves.

"We gotta get out of here," Gayle said partially to Katie and partially to herself and she knew in her heart that it was true. However, she still shied from the doorknob. What lay beyond the door held so much terror for Gayle that, impulsively, she jumped up on the bed and went to the window. "It's not that far. I can make a rope out of the sheets." She envisioned an easy get away, sliding down knotted sheets and running off into the night.

Only the window, like those in the attic wouldn’t open. She beat at the frame, but saw that it had been painted shut. Briefly, she considered breaking the window, but the thought of the noise, and what it would attract, squashed that idea.

"Where's daddy?" Katie asked in an urgent whisper.

"I don't know...he's...he's. I don't know where." Saying this made her miss him terribly. This was the kind of situation he was built for and she knew if he were there, she could turn to him and say, 'What to do we do?' And he would know. As it was she didn’t have a clue. Escape through the window seemed impossible. While to chance the door seemed like certain death, and after seeing those black tendrils on the staircase, she knew that hiding was out of the question. She came to stand squarely between the two options: window and door.

"Do the signal, Mommy. Do the signal!" Katie began blubbering and hissing as quietly as she could and then the little girl started pulling on the ducky pajama shirt, pulling Gayle back to the window. Just then, there was a muffled noise from the hallway and Katie hushed immediately.

They both backed away from the door, staring at it with wide eyes. Seconds slipped by and the two just stood there, waiting, but for what Gayle didn't know. The only thing she did know was that she would not be able to open that door now. Not for anything. She was not a hero like William, she was small and weak and inadequate. Her mind started to freeze up and she could do nothing but stare blankly at the door. Katie however, started to jump up and down, uncontrollably shaking her hands just in front of her chest as if to dry them.

"Call daddy! Please, please, please!"

"I can't the phone is downstairs."

A terrible thought occurred to her: if she left Katie, there was a chance she could make it out alive. The thought just slipped out of the dirty cracks in her mind and presented itself for consideration as though it had every right to…as if it were a legitimate idea. The thought continued: you could both die, being eaten alive, or...

She gasped at her own selfishness. Hot tears streamed down her face in shame and she bent down and hugged her daughter, who hugged her back, but surprising didn't cling and it was she who pushed Gayle away.

"Not the phone! The signal! Daddy said if I was ever afraid, I could put a red blanket over the window, and he would come." She started to jump up and down again in terror and Gayle worried that Katie might be close to panicking.

"Ok. Ok. I'll do it."

Gayle went to the closet that she had just ransacked. She was pretty sure that...there it was…a red blanket. It was sitting on the top shelf. Without losing a second, she yanked it down and hopped onto the bed. Quickly she had the blanket up over the drape rod and the two of them backed away from the window looking at the blanket expectantly, hopefully. Nothing happened. After a second, Gayle felt stupid and disappointed all at once. Katie ran to the switch and started turning it on and off in quick succession, and as she did this, Gayle's dream came back to her, but there was something different. In the dream, there were red and white lights flashing, but in the room just then it was only a white light turning on and off.

Moreover, in the dream there had been a smell, and...and an overwhelming sense of being trapped, with no way out. Realizing the foolishness of pinning their hopes on the blanket, she came to a quick decision. They were both going out the door, and no matter what Gayle had to do, Katie would make it outside.

4

Thankful for the big old-fashioned knobs and locks on all the doors, Gayle bent to look through the oversized keyhole. Down the hall, she could see the It in the light streaming in from Talitha's open door. Amazingly, the thing was still on the landing at the other end of the house and Gayle decided they could make it.

Fearful curiosity had her pause just a second to eye the thing. It was huge and black, but what it was, Gayle hadn't a clue. It seemed at least partially made from a chaotic black smoke that swirled and drifted about it and it emanated an intense dire cold. It was evil through and through, whatever it was, and Gayle didn't need or want to see anymore but just as she began to pull away from the keyhole, a flash of white in the blackness caught her eye.

There was something in the swirling smoke—the outline of a person. A moment later a strong gust of the strange wind blew back the edge of the driving madness and Gayle saw a girl standing a foot or two in front of the enormous creature. Talitha.

Gayle suddenly couldn't breathe, her lungs hitched but her throat had tightened to such an extent that airflow was impossible. Her heart fluttered in her chest in a crazy staccato rhythm; it was the only part of her that she could feel.

She saw it all clearly: Talitha at the end of the hall with her back to Gayle, arms outstretched to ward off the creature, but Gayle could see that it was no use. The thing was enormous and seemed to take up the entire landing and looked about to swallow Talitha whole. As she watched, her daughter backed up to the wall and tried to flatten herself out, as if to let the thing pass by. She turned her head in Gayle's direction and the light of the full moon shone on her perfect profile. Gayle was amazed at the look on Talitha’s face; it was one of determination and not of fear.

The thing did not pass her by however, but enveloped her in a cloak of blackness until Gayle could no longer see her daughter. Then at the foot of the creature, she saw movement…and there was Talitha…lying on the floor…twitching, and jerking…nearly completely covered in the smoke. As Gayle watched in horror, Talitha was pulled into it.

"No!" Gayle shrieked at the top of her lungs and threw herself back away from the door. She kicked out with her feet, propelling herself to Katie's bed where she thumped up hard but unfelt against it. Tears streamed down her face and she shook her head back and forth in misery.

She had just killed Talitha. It was her fault that her daughter was dead. It had been Talitha's scream and not Katie's that she had heard on the backstairs. Even as she had been wallowing in self-pity about being abandoned, she left her daughter alone to deal with that horrible creature.

Her brain began to shut down and all she could manage was to cry and look at her feet sticking out of the stupid ducky pajamas without really seeing them. The light above her stopped flicking on and off, and when she looked up, she saw Katie bending down to the keyhole to find out what had so upset her mother.

"No, Katie! Don't. Don't."

Katie pulled away and looked ashen faced at her mother. The little girl's pert soft lips quivered and her hands gripped themselves against her chest, trembling as they did.

"Mommy, I'm so ascared, I..."

Gayle scrambled up and went to her daughter, finally feeling steel enter her backbone. Katie needed her to be strong and so she would be. She crouched down to Katie's level and smiled grimly at her. "There is... there is something out there, something bad, right? We can't stay here any longer. I am going to go out first and distract it. Ok? Then you count to three and then you make a run for it. Can you do that? Run outside, to the Green?"

Poor Katie began to blubber and cling to Gayle. "No, let's wait for daddy, please? I don't want to be here all by myself, please. Please, Mommy?"

"No Katie. We can't wait. Now is our only chance, look at me..." here she stared intently at her daughter. "It will be ok."

"But daddy is coming to save us and I don't want to be alone."

"You are never alone, you hear me? I'll always be with you, right here," Gayle poked Katie's skinny chest. "But now it’s time to move and Captain Mommy is giving the orders around here, so let's go!"

Bolstered by her mother’s energy, Katie nodded through her tears.

Gayle went to the door and amazingly her resolve began to overpower her fear. Taking one big breath, she then bent down to the keyhole, but flinched back. Where five seconds ago she could look down the hall with ease, now all she could see was blackness. This time, the thing was truly just on the other side of the door.

"Oh my God! Oh my God. Please Lord, don't let it in. Please...please," she said, praying for the first time in years, as she backed away from the door. Her vision tunneled on the knob, knowing that if it began to turn she would crack. Her mind would most certainly break in half and there would be no stopping her from throwing herself through the window. If that knob turned she would go stark-raving mad. If that knob...

Just then, Katie grabbed her shirt and began to cling again. With a little frightened jump, Gayle looked down and the sight of her daughter’s pitiful tear-streaked daughter, made her realize that they couldn't just stand there and wait for the knob to turn, they'd have to get out the only other way there was: the window.

Unaware that her eyes were wide and wild, or that she had begun hyperventilating, Gayle dashed around the room, searching for something heavy. She needed to break the thick glass in the window, but everything Katie owned was stamped with "Fisher-Price" and was made from light plastic.

Then it would have to be her fists, she decided.

Leaping onto the bed, she looked over her shoulder. "Katie! We're going out the win..." she stopped—struck speechless by the sight of the door. The black smoke of the creature was slipping around the edges of it as if searching for a way in. Gayle still felt in charge of her emotions, even if just barely, but Katie was in a terrible state and let out a terrific high-pitched wail of hopeless fear.

The room was starting to turn bitterly cold and Gayle jumped down and grabbed Katie who was almost literally freezing in place. The little girl was simultaneously stiff with fright and shivering with the sudden cold. Gayle put her on the bed—as if the extra two feet would make any difference—and went to the window.

She wasn't fooling herself anymore; the drop from the window was a good twenty feet and the likelihood of impaling herself on one of the bushes below was very great, yet the alternative was far worse. There was no more time for hesitation or indecision and she hauled her right arm back to strike the glass with all her force, not realizing that her radius, one of the two slim bones in her forearm, was broken long before the strike.

The bone had fractured during her fall on the backstairs, and in her almost continuous state of terror, she had barely felt the pain. Now, as her fist struck the glass, burning agony shrieked up her arm to her shoulder, and she gasped, unable to even scream. The pain was so great, her stomach rolled over; falling to her knees, she vomited over the side of the bed. The pain took over her senses and for a few moments, even her fear left her, but not her determination.

Staggering up, wobbling crazily on weak legs and a sinking mattress, she positioned herself to strike the glass again, but this time with her left hand. Gayle knew that if she broke her left hand it would be all over for them, and because of that she pulled her punch. The heavy glass vibrated briefly and that was all.

"Lord please!" she cried and punched again, this time she held nothing back. The window shattered as her hand went through it. Shards sliced her open, down the length of her wrist, and blood gushed out onto the broken glass scattered on the sheets. Heedless of the pain and the gory mess, Gayle started knocking out the remaining glass with the back of her hand.

Another scream from Katie caused her to look back—the door was fully engulfed in roiling black smoke. At the sight, Gayle's heart stopped and started in great spastic thumps. The creature was only seconds from coming full into the room.

Gayle was captivated by the unearthly sight. Despite the broken window, her pain, and the bleeding wound, and the fact that their chance at escape was practically nil, she couldn't look away—even when an outline of a face appeared in the smoke. Like the rest, the face was black and grey in color but was firm and distinct from the swirling madness around it. Gayle noticed it low down, about knee high and her eyes fixated on it as it slowly rose up the door. The face looked to be soundlessly screaming and it jerked back and forth, writhing in apparent pain.

It was Talitha.

Of that there was no doubt. A movement to the side caught Gayle's eye and she heard a small thump, but the face held her entire attention. When it neared the top of the door it collapsed, folding in on itself, and was sucked into the slim space between the door and the jam. Her mind reeled from the sight and she had trouble concentrating or even caring about what was happening around her. The creature was almost all the way through the door now and in its presence the fog she had experienced on the backstairs had returned and was now worse…much worse, because it was being directed right at Gayle.

5

Gayle's head felt heavy. She let it hang low on her neck, so that her face was to the carpet and she could see questing black tendrils of the smoke. They had the same symmetry as miniature tornados, spinning outward from the great mass of the creature forcing its way through the door. One of the tendrils was nearing the bed and swirled around the toes of a tiny little foot. The foot was pink and looked clean, as though it had been recently bathed. Gayle saw the toenails had been painted lavender; it reminded her of Katie's little foot.

The smoke would cover that foot in moments and there was nothing Gayle could do about it; her mind was no longer her own. It belonged to the demon. The thing had her mind and was running through it, casually like a man skimming a magazine in a dentist's office. It paused here and there, looking for something interesting, looking for pain, looking for something naughty, looking for sin...

Without explanation, the demon abruptly turned its gaze away from her and her mind snapped back to functioning normally with a jarring suddenness. In a flash, she finally recognized that it was Katie lying on the carpet, and it was her foot that the fingers of smoke were reaching out for. The girl looked as if she was fast asleep and Gayle could only hope that she had fainted before seeing the face of her sister in the smoke.

Gayle leapt down from the bed and made to scoop up the little girl, but stabbing pain ran up her broken right arm. It was like fire. A gasp escaped her throat at the intensity of it, yet she tried again but the arm was utterly useless, unable to grip anything.

Using her left hand, she dragged Katie to the furthest corner of the room away from the door. The door was no longer visible beneath the smoke. Even though the demon had looked away, the smoke of its body continued to pour into the room and now it was everywhere; it curled up the walls, and ran through the shag of the yellow carpet like snakes through a cornfield.

Seeing this, Gayle desperately tried to pick up the little girl with her one good hand, but only had the strength to yank her in an ugly fashion onto the bed. Gayle jumped up as well as the tendrils now covered the floor in darkness and in growing horror she saw that soon they would begin climbing up the bedposts as well.

The window over the bed, which had the appearance of a mouth filled with sharp bloody teeth, was her last chance and she began yanking and pulling poor Katie up to the sill. However, without being able to use her right arm, it was impossible.

Filled with a mixture of sick dread and despair, Gayle had a sudden wish that she could faint too and lay down alongside her daughter. It looked so nice and peaceful. She wished that she could just lay her head down and dream the nightmare away. But that was not to be and there was only one thing left to do. Gayle bent and gave Katie a kiss on the cheek. "I love you."

With that, she got up and turned to fight the demon in any way she could. Yet even as she turned to face the creature, her heart leapt in excitement; the black smoke was receding, sucking itself back through the doorframe.

It was leaving.

Why or how she didn't know, but her spirits rose at the sight and for the first time that night she felt they had a chance. However, Katie would have to be awake if they were to take advantage of the opportunity. Gayle's eyes darted around the room and came to rest on a half-filled glass of water next to the bed.

''Mommy, can I have a glass of water? On-a-cuz I'm so thirsty." Katie had said days and days ago in another lifetime or so it felt to Gayle—though in fact it had just been a couple of hours ago at bedtime.

"You won't drink it, you never do." Gayle was tired and wanted to read her own book. She had listened to Katie read her books on baby animals for the past hour; the little girl was mad about baby animals.

"I will this time, I promise. I'm sure I’m thirsty, Mommy."

"Not tonight, dear. I'm bushed. You know, if you ever drank any of it I would..."

"I'll get you some water, Katie-bunny." William stood in the doorway, nearly filling it with his broad shoulders.

He had fetched the water and tickled his girl and now the water sat on the bedside table, untouched since William put it there. Gayle grabbed it and poured the contents slowly over Katie's face and to her delight, the girl began to splutter and look about in surprise.

They had a chance!

It was very difficult, but Gayle pulled her daughter to her feet. The little girl blinked in a stuporous daze, wobbled a moment and then put her hand out to the wall to steady herself, but just as suddenly she snatched it back and the confusion in her eyes was replaced in a flash, first by understanding and then by fear. Quickly the fear in Katie’s eyes began to turn to panic.

"Katie! Listen to me. We got to get out of here. I need you to..." Gayle was just about to tell her how they were going to jump out of the window, when she heard a voice from far away. It was more than a voice, it was a bellow and one she knew.

"Gayle! Katie! Get out of the house! Now's your chance! Run!"

"Daddy!" Katie cried, fully awake now, relief showing plain on her face.

Hope flared and expanded in Gayle's chest. They really could make it. William was here, and if he said to run, she was going to run.

"Katie, I can't carry you. You're going to have to run for the front door, and don't look back!" Her complete faith in her husband was on display then. Without bothering to look through the keyhole, she threw open the door and charged out of the room pulling Katie after her.

The end of the hall near the landing was a deep, deep black. It was down there, and Gayle felt fantastically exposed with nothing but thirty feet of empty hallway between them. Ignoring this, she yanked Katie to the stairs and watched as her little feet nimbly sped down them.

Gayle stood there, out in the open waiting until her daughter reached safety. Seconds later she almost laughed with happiness; they were going to make it outside for sure. It was now on the backstairs heading down and she would only have to wait a few more seconds until Katie made it all the way down. Looking back at Katie, she saw the tiny blonde girl was only three steps from the bottom and Gayle thought in giddy triumph: 'Close enough!'

She reached out her bloody left hand, gripped the rail and started down as fast as she could, feeling almost joyous at the idea of getting out of the house. Only Gayle had no idea what she was dealing with.

The demon had not finished with Talitha before she was taken from the house and now the little girl was almost to the front door… almost out of its reach, as well. The demon was angry. It had a horrendous, hideous anger, and when it looked upon Gayle from the backstairs, she felt the fury of it pass through her and around her. Her mind went instantly numb and a great static filled her ears. She pitched forward onto the railing and then crumpled down a few stairs.

For seconds there was no sensation but the static in Gayle's mind and then she heard Katie's voice screaming up at her. The words were indistinct but the fear in her voice was starting to register.

A distant part of Gayle's brain ordered her to get up and get moving and with each passing second her body started to respond but it was not happening fast enough. Gayle began to weakly push herself with her bleeding left arm and she slid down a couple of stairs in hard jerking thumps. That was all the energy she had and she came to a stop midway down and lay looking back up the stairs. The hallway above slowly filled with an intense blackness.

She knew she should move but the demon's presence was all about her, and she felt her mind being ravaged. Memories that had been distant and vague came back crystal clear, but they were distorted and spun to show her in the worst possible way. Seeing them in her mind's eye Gayle began to hate herself. It became so bad that had she a knife on hand she would've slit her own throat.

Closer the demon came and the hate grew—she was evil—horribly so and it was no wonder her family had all left her to the fate that she so obviously deserved.

Even as the self-loathing erupted through her, William suddenly appeared standing over her and she remembered how poor of a wife she had been to him: how she had denied him sexually and had practically driven him from their bed; how she had harped and nagged at him; how she had made him feel that he was useless and pathetic, less than a man.

She saw his hands reach down to her and his face was set in anger. He would kill her. That was good. Dying by his hands was the way it should be. Yet for some reason he didn't kill her. Instead, she felt a strange weightlessness as she unexpectedly flew into the air. She ended up on one of his broad shoulders, face down, staring at the back of his legs, carried like a sack of potatoes.

Then with a snap the demon was gone from her mind.

She felt a great rush as her brain took in everything around her with fantastic clarity. She knew the endless dull ache of her broken right forearm and the painful numbness of her bare toes. She felt the blood rushing to her head and pouring in a steady stream down her left wrist. Gayle heard the cries of Katie at the front door and the steady breathing of her husband.

The rush of awareness was then followed by a wave of exhaustion so complete that she was content to hang over William's shoulder, watching her blood trickle on the stairs leaving a long red trail. Vaguely, she wondered if she was bleeding to death…and couldn't decide if she cared.

They were on the last stair when William stumbled.

He lurched to the right, catching himself from falling by holding onto the archway in the foyer. Gayle felt the presence of the demon, it wasn't focused on her, but on her husband.

William’s body went rigid beneath the things gaze. His fingernails on the wall of the foyer made a long drawn out SSSCRRRIITCHH! His left arm, the arm holding Gayle to his shoulder, began to squeeze the back of her legs with such force that she cried out in pain. She pushed up with her good arm, trying to adjust her legs, to relieve the pressure he was exerting on the bone in her left thigh. As she did, she caught sight of the staircase, barely ten feet away and saw it was as black as midnight.

Her emotions were shattered, but she knew she wanted to live, and she started to spank William on the backside to try to get him to move. Her weakened state made it an act of futility, and she could do little but hit him pathetically and watch as the blackness drew closer and closer.

This was it, William's shaking had become extreme, and his head started to whip back and forth against her leg. Gayle's only hope was that he would collapse quickly and that she would have the strength to pull him from the house, but until then she was a virtual prisoner in his arms.

"No!" he yelled out with hard savagery in his voice and instead of his legs buckling under him, he started moving forward slowly as if wading through deep water. Then a great blast of hot air washed over Gayle as he stepped out into the night. The heat was tremendous compared to the frigid temperatures of the house and it revved up her lethargy so that she felt herself slip in and out of consciousness. She was carried to the back of the house and dumped roughly on the grass of the golf course.

"Are you ok?" William's face was ashen and grey and his bleary eyes couldn't seem to focus on anything but kept wandering about.

"Talitha..." she said weakly.

He looked just to the side of Gayle and his eyes filled with tears. "I know, but there's still a chance."

A chance?

"She's alive?" It seemed impossible. Gayle turned her head slowly, looking to where William's eyes had rested and saw her two eldest children laid out in the grass. They were still and appeared pale as death. Gayle tried to stand but lacked the strength, so she crawled to her children and cried over them.

When Willy J opened his eyes briefly, her breath came out in a sharp gasp. She had assumed he was dead. In joy she kissed him, but his eyes soon rolled up in his head and he looked as though he had fainted. She wished that Talitha would open her eyes, but her beautiful daughter felt stone cold and Gayle thought her eyes would be closed forever. The thought caused her great pain and she went to kiss her baby, but drew back at once, repulsed by the feel. It reminded Gayle of the demon and she involuntarily looked up at the big house and was astounded at how close they were to it.

They were right across the street and it loomed over them in the dark. The demon was in there, somewhere and all it had to do was cross fifteen feet of pavement to get at them. With a rush of fear, she attempted to get up again, but it was a failure. Her one ‘good’ arm, the one with the terrific gash, shook with the effort to push herself up and she collapsed back down. Blearily, she looked around for William, but he was gone. Only Katie was nearby—she stood with her back to Gayle in her once-pink pajamas, which were now maroon with drying blood.

"Katie? Katie? Where's..."

"Not now, Mommy," Katie asserted with a tone of command.

This perked Gayle up the slightest bit. "Where's daddy? Katie? Katie?" The little girl kept her back to her mom and refused to answer at first, "Katie..."

"Stop it, Mommy! I'm on guard duty on-a-cuz of the monster! Daddy went to get help, sheesh!"

Gayle lay back, looking at the night sky, feeling foolish relief at being watched over by a skinny six-year-old. The moon seemed very bright and she closed her eyes.

She awoke sometime later and the light of the moon was doused by flashing red and white lights. Fear gripped her, she knew these lights from somewhere, and she struggled to get up, but a strange man gently pushed her down. The lights hurt her eyes more than the moon had and she closed them.

6

It seemed only a moment later before she opened her eyes again and saw that she had been moved to a hospital room. That was fast, she thought to herself. She tried to get up, but her right arm ached and throbbed and was too stiff to bend.

She was amazed to see it in a fresh white cast and she stared at it as if she had never seen such a thing before. Her left arm was bandaged too, and her mind was all confusion and she wondered how long she had been in the room.

Looking about, the first thing she saw was a blonde girl sleeping in a chair, curled up like a cat and Gayle didn't know who she was. The chair was pulled up to the bed next to Gayle's and her son was in the bed. He appeared to be sleeping and other than a bandage on his right hand, he seemed healthy. Relief flooded through her at the sight of him. The only other bed in the room held her darling Katie and she too, looked to be sleeping. Gayle stared long at the little girl trying to figure out where she had been injured, yet she seemed unblemished and perfect.

How could that be so? Gayle distinctly remembered seeing Katie covered in blood, almost from head to toe.

If Katie was all right, maybe that meant Talitha was ok too. For a second she allowed foolish hope to grow in her, but then she remembered Talitha's face in the smoke and the touch of her terribly cold body— the hope died in her. Great sadness took its place. Gayle turned toward the window and the sun shone through, streaming full on her face.

She looked into the sun letting it blind her and she cried quietly for a long time.

Warm soft fingers took her bandaged left hand and held it in a comforting way. The blonde girl in the chair had woken. Gayle realized the girl was Willy J's old girlfriend, Lisa. She was wearing an old ratty grey sweat suit, her face was pale and without any makeup, her hair was a wilderness of blond tangles, and her eyes were puffy, red-rimmed, and leaking tears.

And she was beautiful; Gayle saw it then for the first time. She wanted to smile at Lisa but her sorrow and tears wouldn't allow it and she simply held the girl's hand. Lisa bent and planted a kiss on her cheek, her tears fell and mingled with Gayle's, and the two stayed that way for a long time, crying in near silence.

A nurse came in to check on them, and then a long series of nurses and orderlies came, each asking the same questions and each with the same intense curious look on their faces.

The island was a small, close community and having an entire family brought into the emergency room at the same time, was sure to be a seven-day wonder. The gossip mill must have been going into overdrive, but Gayle didn't have the strength to care. She wanted desperately to ask them about Talitha, but was so afraid of the answer that she couldn't bring herself to do it. However, the longer she went without asking, the greater her anxiety became.

At some point, Katie came and cuddled up to her mother. She looked pallid, and quickly fell back to sleep with her thumb lodged in her mouth. Willy J was also up; moving about and there was restless energy to him. He kept pacing, stretching, and rubbing his arms as if they were cold. His face was set in stony mask of grim determination that was only broken by a smile for Lisa. She had gone to him when he stirred and they had kissed passionately. So much so, that Gayle became embarrassed and turned away. She stared into the sun, long after they separated.

No one spoke much and the room filled with an awkward silence. They had apparently been in the hospital for the last eight hours, and now they were all waiting for something to occur, something that would explain the events of the previous night. They also waited for news of Talitha. The subject seemed to be taboo, with no one mentioning her at all.

The only one who seemed unafraid to talk was Lisa, who doted on all of them, doing whatever was asked of her, and she bustled about, doing the job of two nurses. She didn't jabber on to fill the silences, but spoke respectfully and only when necessary. Though it was clear she wanted to, she asked no questions, and this above all else impressed Gayle.

Finally a little after 8am, William strode into the room followed by a doctor in blue scrubs and a uniformed Coast Guard officer. Her husband looked haggard and seemed tired to the point of exhaustion. Gayle didn't think he had slept at all, and marveled how he was able to keep going. He had been under the gaze of the demon just as she had and it had left her drained beyond anything she had ever felt before. Ignoring the two men who had come into the room with him, William went to each family member, including Lisa, and kissed them warmly.

"Are you ok?" he asked Gayle quietly. She knew the bad news was coming and she tried to steel herself for it, but her heart began melting, pouring into stomach, making her feel sick in her anxiety.

"Yes, how's Talitha?" Just asking was a great strain on her and the one second wait for the answer felt like it aged her a year.

"She...she's in a coma. I'm so sorry, Honey." He wiped away tears that hadn't been there a moment ago. "She's not doing well. They can't seem to get her body temperature back to normal. I..." he trailed off in uncertainty.

The doctor walked forward and picking up a chart from her bedside, gave it a quick scan. "I'm Dr Thielsen. Before we get to your daughter, how are you feeling? Are you in much pain?"

"I'm fine," she lied. "What's wrong with Talitha? Tell me."

"I will, I promise. But first, wiggle your fingers...good...now the other hand. Now look up plea..."

"I'm fine, Doctor. Please tell me, will she be ok?"

"Talitha has had some sort of shock to her system. It's nothing I've ever seen before and it's very strange. We thought at first she was suffering from hypothermia, but she has resisted all of our attempts at active warming and what's worse is that her core temperature is slowly dropping. The cause of both the coma and the thermoregulation problem are still a mystery and I was hoping you could shed some light on it."

"Me? I—I don't know."

A demon did it! It was the demon, but how do you say that? How on earth could she explain a monster in the full rational light of day?

Thielsen continued, "I've already asked your husband these questions, but I need to be thorough. Did Talitha ever faint or lose consciousness before last night?"

"No," she replied and then panicked at her answer. Maybe she had passed out when Gayle wasn't looking, or when she had been out shopping.

"Did she ever complain about being too hot or too cold, when everyone else was fine?"

"No," she answered, but then remembered there was a time at Jones beach: Talitha had said it was really hot, but Gayle hadn't thought so. She was about to tell the doctor this, but he had moved on to another question. This he did repeatedly. He was going too fast for her and right when she thought she knew the correct answer to his last question, he was on to the next one. It got worse when he started asking about different diseases Talitha might have.

"Did she have Juvenile Diabetes?"

"No, but she liked Kool-Aid, and that's all about sugar, right?"

"Sort of. What about Muscular Dystrophy?"

"No. She did like to read a lot and she wasn't very active, couldn't that mean...." This went on and on. Gayle remembered that Talitha had the Chicken Pox once, and this was the only thing she knew for certain that Talitha had ever suffered from. However, the doctor never asked about it and Gayle had to suppress a weird need to mention it. Her head began to thump badly

Finally, the doctor stopped with the questions. He looked thoughtful. "I'm sorry I had to put you through all of that, but I needed to rule out the obvious. You see, normally a thermoregulation problem stems from brain trauma, or as a side effect from a disease, but her brain seems perfectly healthy. We have run every test I can think of, but her disorder seems to fall outside of the known literature. There is some blood work that is pending and we'll know soon enough anyway, but do any of you know if she was taking any illegal drugs?"

"No, she's perfectly clean," Willy J answered. His face was a blank screen. It looked as though, he thought this was happening to someone else and he was only watching it. Gayle didn't know what to think. She felt behind and lost in the conversation and worse, there was something building up in her and she was afraid that she might just explode at any minute.

"That's what I was worried about." The doctor gave a sharp glance in William's direction. "I would like to have her transferred to Johns Hopkins. They'll be able to do more for her there and I think it would be in her best interest."

Having experienced the horror of the demon, Gayle hadn't been relieved at hearing that Talitha was in a coma, and knew that it was the fiend keeping her alive in that condition. The thought made her anxiety bloom. "What would they do differently?" she asked.

"Oh, there are a lot more tests they can run at their facilities that I don't have access to here. This is a very small hospital after all."

"More tests?" Gayle felt a silly desire to tell him that Talitha was a straight-A student, but pushed the statement down deep. It could only go so deep however, since her head felt like a balloon on the verge of popping.

"Yes, at a minimum, we need to do more tests on her blood and her cerebral spinal fluids. There are also tests that...." the doctor continued on, telling her about all of the different tests they could run. He spoke calmly, soothingly. However, the term Cerebral Spinal Fluids had stuck in Gayle mind and swirled around it, so that she failed to hear anything else.

"Cerebral spinal fluids," the doctor said in a voice that commiserated with her pain.

"Uh-huh," Gayle replied.

"Cerebral Spinal Fluids." His words, full of understanding.

"Uh-huh," Gayle said.

"Mrs. Jern?"

He had clearly said something that demanded more than an "uh-huh" answer.

She glanced about and everyone looked at her with blame in their eyes, or perhaps they weren't, she didn't know anymore. She was losing it. Her ability to reason and think rationally began to slip away from her. She felt childish and needy, and recognized in a distant manner that she was becoming hysterical.

Trying to focus, she asked, "Uh...why? Why are you doing all these tests?"

The doctor looked around in amazement, but when he failed to see matching looks of incredulity, he explained, "So we can find what's wrong your daughter. I have to tell you upfront, I don't hold out much hope, especially with the lack of electrical activity in her brain. But, there's still a chance. We need to run these tests to pinpoint the exact cause of the coma, so then we might be able to formulate a treatment plan for her."

The exact cause was a damned demon!

Rage exploded in Gayle and she wanted to scream the simple explanation in his face. She hated the doctor and his stupid blue pajamas and all his useless tests. The thread of her sanity was unraveling quickly and deep down she wanted it to unravel—all the way. If it did, she could sleep without care and not feel the tremendous pain over what was happening to Talitha. If it unraveled she could die too, and that would be the end, and she wanted that. But her mind wouldn't unravel and she was stuck somewhere in the middle between sanity and insanity, and that was far worse that either.

What she did know for certain was that there was going to be no treatment plan. Modern medicine wouldn't be able to stop the demon or end her daughter's tremendous pain.

"No!" The word was firm, bordering on harshness. "She'll stay here with me. And there will be no more needles or cutting her or any of that worthless crap!" Her body broke down crying, her chest heaving, and her breath hitching badly. William hugged her tightly and when she calmed a bit she asked, "How much...how much time does she have?"

The doctor was slow to respond. "How much time? We don't even know what's wrong yet. I've been searching through the literature trying to find anything that resembles this, but nothing has come up. I wish I could tell you that..."

Breaking in Gayle demanded, "How much time?"

"Like I said, there's no way to know, but her respirations were so dangerously low that we had to put her on a ventilator. If we were to take her off, it could be minutes."

Was it sane or insane to wish your daughter dead? Was it a sin? Was it moral? The image of Talitha's screaming face slid smoothly into Gayle's mind, and her reasoning, unbalanced already, became precarious.

"She's in pain. Talitha's in pain, I know it...you know it too, William. We can't k-keep her like this. We have to take her off the ventilator."

The Commander looked down at the overly clean floors and with a string of barely perceptible nods of his head, he conveyed his reluctant agreement.

"Well...this isn't..." The doctor seemed at a complete loss at the request. "That's your choice of course. And I wish I could give you more hope. But before we do this..."

"Not yet! Wait...wait!" Gayle screamed interrupting him; her mind slipped away from her then. The hysteria had been lurking just below the surface, and now it rose up like a great tentacled beast. The doctor was going to kill her daughter, just like that. "Let me get ready! I have to get ready! William! Stop him! Don't touch me! Get off me!" Shrieking, she struggle to rise, but her husband held her down gently. "I'm not ready! You got to stop him William; he's going to kill Talitha!"

Katie started to cry with little whimpering noises.

"Mrs. Jern. Mrs. Jern, we won't do anything until you're ready."

"William, damn it! Let me up! I'm not ready for my baby to die! Stop him...Willy J! Willy J, you stop him right now! I'm your mother and you had better stop him right now or you are in big trouble! Do you hear me!" Her screams shook the glass in the windows. Then just as suddenly as the madness took her, it left, leaving her sobbing, "Willy J, please, please."

Will looked at Dr Thielsen sheepishly and with tears in his eyes, placed his bandaged hand on the doctor's shoulder and said in a choked whisper, "I...I got him, Mom. You don't have to worry. I won't let him do anything to Talitha."

She stopped struggling and lay back weeping, "I'm sorry Doctor Thielsen. I know you won't hurt her...I just..." Whatever she was going to say was lost in her tears. She didn't know if she could do this terrible thing: kill her own daughter. But Talitha was trapped and in such pain! Gayle went back and forth with the choice and cried a very long time as the others stood about in a hard silence. She felt embarrassed at her outburst but she figured that going slightly insane might have been the sanest thing to do, under the circumstances.

Dr Thielsen looked uncomfortable. "If I had better news I think I'd try to talk you out of this. But Talitha's condition is grave and realistically speaking I can't offer much hope. At best we're looking at a deeply embedded tumor in the hypothalamus—a tricky spot under the best of conditions. And with her now so far gone...but there's always hope. Please keep that in mind." The doctor then left them, supposedly to ponder on their decision.

"Do you want me on guard duty on Tal, Mommy?" Katie asked with great seriousness. Large, fat tears hung on her eyelashes defying gravity as only a little girl's tears can. She had an unbelievably hard look to her eyes and Gayle knew Talitha would be safe with her little sister watching over her. Seeing the little girl's fierce love caused her to blubber some more and she kissed Katie all over her face. The mother in her decided that if for any other reason, she'd try to hold it together for Katie.

"I love you, Mommy, but I think you put boogers and snots on me." Katie wiped away the sticky mess on her cheeks.

"Sorry about the boogers, Katie-bunny. I think I want Willy J to stand guard over Talitha." She turned to her son. "Can you do that for me? And can you, maybe hold her hand...if it doesn't, you know." Thinking about Talitha's cold touch and how it had sucked at her life sent a shiver down her back.

Will wiped away his tears and nodded. He was just about to leave the room when the officer, who had been standing discreetly back, spoke for the first time, "I'm sorry, but I can't let anyone leave until I have interviewed each of you."

Gayle's anxiety, hysteria and sadness, turned into a nasty icy anger in a second. "William, who is this person and why does he think he can order us about?"

Chapter 9

The Death of William

June 5th 1980

1

The night passed in painful slowness and surprising speed.

William's exhaustion felt like a thick, heavy coat, one of those huge fur ones that the men would wear in the old timey pictures. His exhaustion weighed him down as well as slowed him down and basically made his waking life miserable. However in sleep that same coat was irresistible, warm, and comforting. It was torture to stay awake and when he did, time seemed to stand still, but if he ever closed his eyes, an hour would be gone in a snap. He tried to sit with each of his family members, just in case they would wake, but he did little more than blink stupidly, yawn cavernously, and snore loudly.

Near 8am the nightshift doctor shook him awake and gave him an update. Though Talitha wasn't doing well, Gayle had finally awakened, and the doctor and he went to her room to see her. William was so out of it mentally that he didn't notice the Coast Guard warrant officer who followed him into the room. He was completely unaware of the man's presence until he asked Will to stay for questioning.

"My name is Chief Warrant Officer Jeffery Ingstrom," he paused and grimaced slightly at having to do his duty under such sad circumstances. "I'm with the Coast Guard Investigative Services, and I'm the officer in charge of the investigation concerning the events at your home last night. As such, Mrs. Jern, I have to get a brief statement from everyone involved." Ingstrom was normally a neat man, but it was obvious he'd been working throughout the night and his uniform looked slightly disheveled.

In his exhausted state, William hadn't given the idea of an investigation any thought, and he became suddenly nervous.

"Do you mind if I go first, Jeff?" William asked, glad that Ingstrom headed up the inquiry. He was a good man and unfortunately, one of the few who were in the Investigative Services. Good man or not there was a danger here that his family might not be aware of. It was unlikely that the military was going to believe a lot of talk about a demon, especially without substantial proof and he wanted to find out first what Ingstrom or his men might have seen before letting loose with the truth. "Can you first tell me if the person who did this was still in the house when you arrived?" he asked, giving special emphasis on the word person and shooting Gayle a meaningful look.

"There was no one in the home, sorry Commander. We scoured it from top to bottom and have had patrols everywhere looking for anyone acting in a suspicious manner. That's the main reason I'm here Mrs. Jern, I need a description of the person. Did you get a good look at him?"

Gayle opened her mouth, seeming on the verge of saying something, when William butted in: "It was dark in the house and the person looked to be dressed up all in black. I would guess at least six feet tall, but it was hard to figure his weight because of the cape or whatever it was that he wore."

Lisa spoke up suddenly, "Do you mind if I go see Talitha? I wasn't at the house last night and I'm just here visiting...and Mrs. Jern, I'll hold her hand and I won't let anything happen to her."

"Please do, Lisa. Hold her as long...as long as you are comfortable. Thank you." Gayle's icy look had evaporated and her eyes held warm gratitude for the girl. "That is of course, if it's ok with Officer Ingstrom."

"Certainly you can, I'm so sorry." Ingstrom nodded to Lisa, who gave both Will and his mother a quick kiss before she slipped from the room. The investigator looked back at William. "A cape? That's extremely odd. Were you able to see his face at all? Was he white, black... "

"He didn't have a face," Katie interrupted without emotion. "There was a hole where it should've been." She was still snuggled up to her mom, covered very nearly completely in light blue hospital blankets. "That was the scariest part...it didn't have a face."

Here we go, William thought.

"Hi there. What's your name?" Ingstrom asked gently.

Gayle glanced at her husband and he noted the worry in her eyes, but William gave her a short nod, which implied, let Katie talk.

"Katherine Jern...but it wasn't a man...it was a monster. It was black and smoky and scary."

"Will you tell me what happened?" Ingstrom said. "Starting with where you were when all this began. Were you asleep?"

"Yeah, only I don't know what woke me up...the house I think. There were weird noises, and it got colder and I had a real bad dream. And... and I was ascared."

"What did you do when you got scared? Did you go look for your mommy or daddy?"

"No. I hid under the bed," Katie said without any emotion. She stared at the bandaged arm of her mother as she spoke. "I was afraid to leave it...and there was something out in the hall. And...and my mommy came in and we were gonna run, but we got trapped with no place to go."

"So what happened after your mommy came in?"

"We were ascared to go into the hallway on-a-cuz of the monster and...." She stopped speaking in mid-sentence and sat with her mouth open, shaking her head gently back and forth.

"A monster? Did you see it in the hallway?" Ingstrom's relaxed and unforced manner suggested he was used to dealing with children.

"Yeah after...after I saw...I saw...."Again she stopped talking and Gayle hugged her daughter with her non-broken arm.

"I think she has answered enough questions, William," Gayle said. "What more is there to say?"

"Mrs. Jern, I have to ask just a couple more questions. If I don't, I know my C.O. will have me come back again in an hour and it's best to get it over with." Ingstrom was very reasonable and he had a kind face.

Gayle, won over by his logic and kind approach, nodded.

Ingstrom squatted down next the bed so he was below her level. "Just a few more questions. Katie, was the monster a person...someone you know?"

"No...huh...huh...huh," her breath began hitching roughly in her chest, but her eyes were still clear and free of tears. "It was a...a mon... monster. It was scary and mean and nasty and all covered in black."

"It was dark in the hallway, and it was all in black. Did you have trouble seeing it?" Ingstrom asked.

"Yeah," she replied. Suddenly her breathing cleared up entirely and her voice grew clear, "It was big and black and it was hard to see into it ...but I didn't want to see it neither...it was too scary."

"Katie, where was your daddy when you were trapped in your bedroom?"

Katie stared far away. "I don't know," she answered in a small voice.

Warrant officer Ingstrom glanced briefly at William and then back to Katie, suddenly looked sad. "Did you ever see your daddy at the same time as you saw the monster?"

Katie seemed almost to be dreaming with her eyes open. "Yes. He rescued us. He ran up to the monster and I thought he was going to fight it and I was so afraid for him. But he picked up mommy...and brought her outside." She stared far away for a few seconds, remembering, and then she snapped back to the present. "You were very brave, Daddy. What is a coma and what's wrong with Tal? What did the doctor mean by thermo...irrigation? What's that mean?"

"Katie...." William started to say, but Katie began to cry.

"Is Tal going to die? Why? Why is she going to die? I don't want her to leave. I want her to stay with me! I'm her best friend, and there're no kids in heaven, only old people and she'll be so lonely without me. And I'll be lonely without her." Katie cried with true sorrow.

This wasn't a cry over a broken toy or a lost kite or stubbed toe. It was a soul-rending cry that pained William deeply to see and to hear. Soon all of the Jerns were weeping quietly. After a few minutes, Katie began to settle down and William said, "Gayle, are you strong enough to go see Talitha?"

"I have to be," she responded still holding her youngest.

"Commander, I have to apologize for the last question, but...it happens more than you think."

Confused, Gayle asked, "What happens? Monst...I mean attacks here on the island?"

William hung his head and depression started to settle on his weary face. "No," he told her. "He's talking about domestic abuse."

"Oh yeah, it's mostly what I investigate these days." Ingstrom shook his head sadly. "Can I have you tell me what happened from your point of view?" he asked Gayle.

She hadn't got past the idea of abuse. "But he has never hurt any of us! Look at him...if he hit me, I would break in half! This is preposterous." Gayle appeared bewildered at the thought. Ingstrom only looked gloomier.

"Gayle, the victims of abuse tend to deny what has happened and they will often defend their abuser." William added dejectedly. "I think we should tell our version of what happened and know the truth is on our side."

She pursed her lips tightly for a few seconds and then spoke quickly and without emotion. Her story was over in less than a minute and it was obvious she had received all of William's signals; she didn't mention the demon once. Without the demon in her story, it came out sounding suspicious, and Ingstrom looked sharply at Gayle. She didn't seem to care and exhaustion pulled down on her eyelids.

"Do you know where your husband was last night," the Investigator asked her.

"No..."

"I was out looking for my son who was past his curfew," William spoke up defensively.

"Did you find him?"

William shook his head. Even the barest suggestion of abuse was sending him deeper into despair.

"Do you have guns or other weapons in the house?"

William immediately thought of his useless ceremonial dress sword, but Gayle said, "Just some steak knives in the kitchen."

"Ok, I think those are all my questions for you, Mrs. Jern." Ingstrom then turned to Will. "Did you see what happened to your sister?"

"No...when I came home, I saw Talitha on the second-floor landing...unconscious. I looked down the hall and I saw the...you know, the man. So I grabbed her and went to run away but I fell down the stairs instead. My dad came up from outside and helped us out of the house."

"Is that when you yelled for your wife to leave?" Ingstrom asked William.

"Yes...Will told me they were trapped and...and I heard it coming so I figured it was their best chance."

Ingstrom looked thoughtful for a few moments. "Have any of you made enemies? Gotten into any fights? Have you had to discipline anyone recently, Commander?" The answer was no to all the questions. After a minute of the Jerns looking back and forth at each other with nothing but shrugs, the investigator puffed his cheeks and blew out long and slow. "There isn't much to go on, I'm afraid. There were almost no clues of any sort at the house. Maybe we'll get lucky with the fingerprints we took."

This was greeted with stony-faced silence from the family but Ingstrom seemed to just take it as a sign of exhaustion. "Now Commander, I want you to know that I personally don't see evidence of abuse here...however...it is my duty to follow up with the doctor to make sure he believes your injuries match up with the events as you described them. It'll just be a few minutes, can you all wait here?"

They were silent until he left. "Oh my God! Why is this happening to us?" Gayle threw herself back onto her pillow. She seemed grief stricken as well as panic stricken simultaneously. "What did we do to deserve this? I try to be a good person..."

William began a frantic pacing in the room. "This is my fault, Gayle. I should've been home. And the demon...I knew it last night..."

"Huh? How? What? Where were you last night?" she hissed, her brows coming down hard. "I needed you! It was terrible being trapped in that room and Tal..." She trailed off looking down at her bed but seeing nothing.

He went to her and kissed both her and Katie. "I'm so sorry. If I knew what was going to happen, I would've never left. I would've got everyone out of the house right away."

"Right away? What do you mean? Do you know what caused it, did you see it?"

"No, I just knew it on a gut level. I woke up a little after eleven and I just felt that something was wrong. I tried to go back to sleep but I was anxious or worried."

"About what?" she asked.

"The demon. I could feel the demon. I'd seen it before when we..."

Gayle's eyes bulged. "You what? You saw the demon before? Why didn't you tell me? What were you thinking?" Her angry hissing came back but louder.

He told them about the brief vision of the demon in the flash of the burned out bulb, the odd feelings he had experienced in the boiler room, and even about the repairman, and the Greek painter.

"Then it's my fault too!" Katie cried. "I scared the painter real bad and called him names. Maybe he sicced the monster on us."

"No Katie, something else happened last night. It wasn't you," William said reassuringly, "Last night that creepy feeling was back and much stronger. I was afraid and nervous, so I went to check on everyone, but Will wasn't home. I had this need to be together, as a family. I woke up Talitha to ask her where you might be, Will...what's wrong?"

Will appeared in absolute misery. "I...uhhhg! If I had been at home instead of..."

"Wait! You can't blame yourself in any way Willy J, none of us can," Gayle soothed. "How could any of you know what was going to happen?" After a pause she asked, "So, where were you?"

Will had his head in his hands and spoke so softly that they almost couldn't hear him, "I was with Lisa. We got back together last night."

"You did?" William said. "That's good. But Talitha told me which bench you two like to hang out at and you weren't there."

"We were uh, somewhere else."

"Wh..." William stopped, realizing then not where they were, but what they were doing. "Oh...well. Then that's why I missed you I guess."

Gayle eyes went wide, stunned by the unspoken news. Will hung his head, refusing to look up. There was an awkward silence that William felt needed to be filled, "Either way, I ran down to that bench as fast as I could and when I saw you weren't there, I took the sea wall back, hoping you had gone that way. However, you weren't there either and my need to get back was almost desperate. I knew something bad was going to happen, so I sprinted home as fast as I could." He paused and stared at the black and white tile pattern of the hospital floor.

"The house...when I got back, it was like it wasn't a house at all. A house is for the living, but last night it was a tomb. Did you feel it? How it felt hollow and dead inside?" Both Gayle and Will were nodding and staring off into space. William, overcome by his exhaustion, sat down in the chair between the two beds. "I heard a commotion on the backstairs, and it was you Will. There you were with Talitha lying on top of you and she was so pale-looking that I thought..." his chest became thick and heavy and he suddenly had trouble breathing.

"Anyway, I felt It coming. It was moving down the hall on the second floor. I could feel it. So I picked up Talitha and you just laid there and I was starting to panic so I grabbed you too. I didn't know if you were still in the house," he said to Gayle. "I just knew that if you were still ali... I mean still upstairs that this was going to be your only chance to make a run for it. So I yelled... something." William stopped talking for a moment and looked out the window at the pretty June morning. He wasn't silent for long; he had an odd, almost what he considered a "girlish" need to talk about what happened to him the previous night.

He told them of the frantic, wild state he had experienced. How each second had seemed to be vitally important, and he had known that if he lost even one to indecision, that someone would die. He told them of the life-draining feeling he had when he held Talitha and how the heat of the night had almost caused him to faint as he carried her to grass. He talked about how he felt seeing the demon on the main stairs just above Gayle. He spoke about how being in the thing's presence filled his brain with a terrific buzzing noise, as if a thousand angry bees had been let lose in his skull. And he told them about charging up the stairs to Gayle, afraid for her life because of all the blood.

However, the one thing he refused to talk about was what happened when the demon invaded his mind. It had brought forth thoughts and memories that had been his and not his simultaneously. It had twisted these thoughts into dreadful perversions: His desire to save Talitha turned into a desire to save Talitha only for himself. So he could have her...sexually. He had pictured her naked, posing with sweet erotic innocence and he'd had to fight an internal battle to keep from being aroused. It was horrible. The demon seemed to be able to plant thoughts into his head and then draw them out again as if they were his own.

His thoughts of Gayle had been equally bad. As he stood in the doorway of the foyer, he had hated her with an intense passion. It had seemed to him that she was a burdensome fat cow who he desperately wanted to throw to the floor and be rid of forever. She felt like a useless ton of bricks on his shoulder, weighing him down, just as she had been weighing him down ever since they first met.

With the demon sweeping toward him, he hadn't been able to think of anything but how she was the reason he hadn't been assigned to a Cutter of his own. It had been all of her ridiculous whining about the sea that had held him back and undermined his ambitions. And then there was the fact that she got between him and Talitha. She was old, fat, and wrinkled; in bed she had the body, the energy, and the imagination of a walrus—while Talitha was a nubile hidden treasure, slim, perky, and tantalizing.

Even as those appalling memories ran through his mind, Gayle asked him, "How were you able to keep going when the demon looked at you? When it looked on me, it felt like a bomb had gone off in my head and my body just sort of collapsed, no longer under my control."

"I guess it was a little different for me," he replied lamely.

"It looked at me too, and you're right Mom, it did feel like an explosion," Will agreed quietly. "It was very quick, a second or two only. I...I...think it was trying to hurt me, or knock me out. I know it didn't want me in the house." Will told his story then and he told it in a dazed, lifeless voice. It didn't take very long, but still he looked worn out by the effort of telling it. "So now what do we do? How do we get Talitha back? How can we fight the..."

"We don't even try to fight it. It's too strong," William said feeling shamefully weak.

"What if we got the priest?" Will asked.

The image of chubby, slightly balding Father Alba came to mind and William shook his head. "The house blessing was a waste of time. I don't think Father Alba has any..." He wanted to say magic, but it seemed childish, "...power over this demon and I think it could kill the priest the second he walked in the door." There was a silence as they each sat back and considered ways to help Talitha, or ways to fight the demon. In seconds however, exhaustion overtook them and unbelievably they each slipped into a deep sleep. For an hour they lay as if dead to the world, undisturbed until William woke to the sound of whispers.

2

William sat up and looked blearily at the door where Doctor Thielsen and Warrant Officer Ingstrom were talking quietly. His brain seemed to have trouble putting together thoughts and for a long moment, he could do little but blink his weary eyes. Eventually, he sat up and checked the time and was surprised to see it was just a little after 10 a.m.

Ingstrom came in with the doctor right behind him, and found the family in varying stages of wakefulness. "I'm sorry to wake you, Commander Jern, but I have to get back to the house to wrap up our investigation there, and we still have to rule out the uh abuse, however the doctor left your wife's chart in here."

"Please by all means, Jeff. Come in Doctor." William replied as he stretched and yawned hugely.

The doctor went to Gayle's bed and started flipping through his notes. "I see multiple injuries to Mrs. Jern. The broken radius is consistent with a fall...the laceration to the left wrist is almost exactly what we see at least once a month from Coasties punching windows. There are no fading contusions, which are usually indicative of long-term abuse. Now the lacerations to the son's chest could be a sign, but I doubt it. Overall, I would conclude that this isn't a domestic abuse situation."

Ingstrom nodded his head, looking satisfied. "Commander, Mrs. Jern, I'm truly sorry this has happened to you and your family. I want to assure you we're going to do everything we can to find the person responsible for all of this and bring them to justice." He smiled fleetingly and left in a hurry to complete his work.

William and Gayle let out matching sighs of relief and then gave each other identical smiles—grim and tight.

Perhaps out of habit, Doctor Thielsen began examining them. He started with Will and then moved on to Gayle, but she stopped him. "I'm sorry, Doctor, my daughter, I need to see her...I have to see her." The stress was getting to her again and she was close to tears. William worried about another breakdown when he saw her lips quivering and a wild look come into her eyes.

"Of course, just let me get a wheelchair." Gayle started to protest the need for it, but the doctor wouldn't have it. "No, don't argue with me about the chair, Doctor's orders." Thielsen said with stern kindness. He was back in a moment with a wheelchair, and it was only a matter of minutes before they neared the door to the ICU.

With each step toward his daughter's room, William began to grow anxious. The terrible thoughts the demon had put into him were suddenly coming back again: The vision of Talitha naked flashed into his mind.

William felt like a dirty old man, a pedophile, who should be taken out and shot between the eyes. He wanted desperately to slap himself in the face as hard as he could. Instead, he reached out for Gayle's hand and held it tightly.

Her hand was warm and soft, and so terribly small; he could break it without thinking. Sweating in his apprehension, his big paw was moist, and he kept letting go of her hand to wipe it on his pants. As they entered Talitha's room, he took a deep breath, afraid of what he would see and afraid of the thoughts he might have about his little girl.

The room was warmer than he had expected, and much smaller. He had pictured it to be large, sterile-white and filled with machines and monitors that beeped or sang out shrilly with one emergency after another. Instead, there was only a single, quiet monitor and a technical-looking gadget that helped her to breathe.

In a second, he completely forgot his terrible thoughts and visions. Instead he was overwhelmed with his genuine emotions for his daughter. These were real and he let them loose to run amok through his mind, without worry. He loved his little girl with all his heart and at that moment, she was his favorite and he would do anything for her.

Lisa was sitting in a bright orange chair next to the bed. As promised, she was holding Talitha's hand. Her head rested on the bed and William was instantly worried for her, as he remembered the dreadful draining sensation of his daughter's touch. He thought for a moment that Lisa had passed out while holding Talitha's hand and that maybe she had been bled dry of her warmth or energy. However, just then Lisa opened her green eyes and gave them a tired sympathetic smile.

The girl let go of Talitha's hand and rubbed hers together as if to warm them, and she was on the verge of saying something to Gayle, but Lisa noticed that Gayle only had eyes for Talitha.

With her arm in a cast, Gayle awkwardly pulled herself from the wheelchair and went to the bedside. Her face was full of fear as she bent hesitantly to kiss her daughter. William could see that the nasty feel of the demon was still on Talitha by the way that Gayle grimaced as she kissed her.

"Oh no," Gayle moaned, leaning back up and away. Tears worked their way down her cheeks to drip from her chin in a steady cascade. William went toward her to comfort her, but at that moment, Gayle turned instead to Lisa and hugged her. "Thank you for doing that for holding her hand like that, it must have been so difficult." She then buried her face in the girl's messy blonde hair and cried.

"Please, Mrs. Jern, it was nothing."

After seeing how Lisa was able to touch Talitha, William needed to know for himself and so he went to Talitha and after taking a deep breath, as if he were going to dive into dark cold water, he bent down and gently kissed his daughter on the lips. He knew instinctively he wasn't going to feel them soft and warm, but the icy feeling was worse than he expected and though he felt his life's warmth pulled from deep out of his chest he refused to pull back. He wanted to know if she was still in there; if there was any hint of life in her. Unfortunately all he felt was the unnatural oily sick feeling of the demon. Finally, he stepped back and wiped his sleeve across his mouth.

Will came forward next. He had seen his parent's reaction so he simply reached out and took Talitha's hand. William saw his son's jaw clench tightly, and then he spoke loudly, almost shouting, "I love you, Talitha." With that, he gently put his sister's hand down on the white, cotton blanket and rubbed his own on the back of his pants.

"What's a coma?" Katie asked suddenly. "It looks like she's just sleeping."

The doctor spoke up, "A coma is similar to a very deep sleep. We, doctors I mean, don't really know why it happens but we strongly suspect it's the body's way of protecting itself."

"Oh. Have you tried shaking her real hard?" Katie suggested and William was shocked to see Katie absentmindedly playing with her sister's fingers. She even placed a small kiss on the tips of each one.

"Yes, we've tried to shake her, and everything else we can think of to wake her up," the doctor replied with a smile.

"Her hands are so chilly!" Katie put Talitha's hand in both of her tiny ones and rubbed it vigorously. William looked over at Gayle and Will and they were both staring at the little girl in shock.

"Katie, maybe you should let go of her hand."

"Ok, Daddy I will, once I get it warmed up." She then blew on her sister's hand as hard as her little lungs would allow. Gayle watched Katie with a frantic hopefulness in her eyes. She reached out and gently touched the back of Talitha's hand, but pulled away quickly. The slow trickle of Gayle's tears became a river as she broke down sobbing, and William lowered her back down onto the wheelchair.

"We have to stop this." She looked up and was suddenly fierce. "We have to! I have to be strong for her sake. Doctor, I'm ready...I'm ready...I'm..." Abruptly Gayle broke down again and her fierceness disappeared, replaced with terrific sorrow. "No, I'm not ready, Oh God help me. I'm not ready for this."

Again, she cried and William cried along with her, since he knew what had to happen. Still he wasn't going to rush the mother of his children, not for something like this. The feeling coming from Talitha was that she was in terrible pain, worse than any torture. It was unnatural and abhorrent, and her misery was such that William would rather see her in flames, than to have to go through it any longer. He would have to end it mercifully—and very soon.

Finally, Gayle seemed to lack the strength to cry or to resist logic anymore. "Ok, Doctor, it's time. Please we have to stop this for her sake, for Talitha. Turn off the machine."

Thielsen eyed her warily and it was clear to William that the doctor worried about another hysteria-filled explosion. "Mrs. Jern, I'm so sorry, but I still have to get all the paperwork together, and I'm going to need witnesses and a second physician to sign off on it. None of that will be a problem; it'll just take a little time."

"How long," Gayle whispered.

"An hour, maybe two. If this is what you want. I'll get started on it right away."

"Yes, please do." These words were even quieter. "And thank you for everything." He nodded his head sympathetically and left the room.

Now that it was set in motion, the reality of Talitha's inevitable death struck William hard and he gasped through his tears, "My baby girl... I can't believe this...my baby girl." He grabbed his wife in a great hug and sobbed for a while with his face buried in her hair.

"We have to do this," Gayle said to herself more than to William.

"I know. My poor baby is trapped with...it."

Will spoke up, "Can I call Father Alba?"

Gayle answered, "Yes, I think that would be for the best, but he had better hurry. I'm not leaving her suffering even a second longer than I have to." She saw that Lisa wore a very confused expression and added, "You can tell Lisa if you wish, but no one else."

The two left the room, quietly, Will with his arm around Lisa, who looked alarmed and puzzled at the same time. When they were gone, William noticed that Katie still held her sister's hand and he asked her, "That doesn't bother you at all?"

"Nope, I love Tal and I'm her best friend. And she wants me to hold her hand, even if it's freezing cold."

Gayle sat shaking her head. "She's not going to get married is she? Or have a...babe...I was wrong William, I can't do this. I'm not strong enough. You have to kill her. It'll be your fault. Ok? Can you do it? For me? Please? It'll be all your fault and I couldn't have stopped you, because you're so big."

His wife seemed to be slipping back into a wild hysterical state of mind so William knelt down to look in her eyes. "Honey, stop it. We will do this for Talitha's sake. We will do this out of love, ok? It's nobody's fault, the demon is just too powerful, and we have to release her."

She had been almost whispering before but now she yelled in his face, "The demon won't keep her! She's too good! She belongs to God."

William nodded his agreement. "Yes she is."

But then Gayle's eyes went wild again and she was racked by sobs as she thought of something else. "She'll need something to wear, something nice...when she...when she goes to Heaven." Gayle's tone slipped back into whispering and it was not to William she was talking to, but to herself. "How about my black dress? The one she really liked, with the frills at the neckline. I wore it at Captain Billier's dinner party."

"Gayle, look at me," Wiliam commanded and her eyes, big and wide, came to focus on his. He worried for her mental state and wanted her to concentrate on something and the dress seemed like a good enough choice. "You're right. She'll need a dress, but I think the black one might be a little too...slinky for Heaven."

"Oh, yes, of course."

William remembered one of the last times he had seen Talitha all dressed up: it had been the previous Christmas. The dress she'd worn was white and sleeveless and it made her skin look deeply tanned and healthy. At the time, Gayle had eyed the dress disapprovingly, "White at Christmas? That's not really suitable."

"If white was good enough for the Virgin Mary, then it should be good enough for me," Talitha had responded and Gayle had smiled warmly but mysteriously, leaving William to ponder what was being communicated, if anything, by the dress.

Gayle had been correct about the dress not fitting in with the theme of the party. Talitha stood out in a sea of red and green. Everywhere she went, heads had turned and conversations had lagged—not because she looked out of place, but because she looked so young and beautiful, and even angelic in the white dress.

William smiled through his pain at the memory and said, "How about the white dress she wore at the Admiral's Christmas party last year?"

Gayle looked out the window and he knew that she wasn't seeing the green of the oak trees; in her mind's eye she was at the Christmas party, and she smiled seeing her daughter dancing and laughing. "Yes, get that one please. And my makeup bag, the small one, it's on the sink. She'll need shoes, I think. Yes, shoes, at least at first...in the back of the closet... in a white Macy's box, get those ones. And get a ribbon for her hair. I think the gold one will look nice, yeah...white and gold will fit perfectly for...where...she...is..."

Her tears were now coming too heavily to let her finish her sentence. William held her, rocking back and forth. He was in quiet turmoil at the thought of going back into the house. He knew it had to be done at some point, and not just for the dress. His wallet, money, identification, car keys, clothes; everything they owned was still there and he would need it all. However, just the thought of going back into the house released a thousand butterflies which flitted about his stomach, making him feel queasy.

"I don't think I can get the dress..." He hung his head, ashamed of his cowardice.

"Oh yeah, the demon," Gayle replied, and her body gave a little spastic twitch. "But that investigator, and his whole team were in the house and you can tell they hadn't seen anything. They might still be there if you go right now. And maybe...maybe it only comes out at night. Or..." and here another thought came to her, "Wait! It's in Talitha. We can feel it in her. That's where it is! You don't have to worry because it's in Talitha, remember? That's why I...you...that's why we have to do this to her." Gayle's attitude turned suddenly again to savage anger. "I hate it! I hate it! I hate that thing. I only hope Talitha drags it up to Heaven and I hope all the angels kick its damn ass!"

Alarmed at his wife's anger William held her good arm down while he attempted to reassure her: "I'll get the dress, ok? And the shoes...and the makeup, ok? Alright?"

"And the ribbon!" she yelled at him, but calmed a bit a moment later. "It's under the sink...the gold one remember? White and gold for Heaven."

"I think she will be the most beautiful of all the angels in Heaven," Katie said and her tears were impossibly large.

Gayle gasped! She had forgotten Katie was in the room. "Yes she will be, Katie. All the other angels will be so jealous! Can I have hug please?" she asked this almost timidly.

"Yes, but you have to come over here on-a-cuz Tal says she needs me to keep holding her hand. Oh, and Daddy? Tal says I need a dress, too. She says I need my white and pink sundress so we can match. And can I have a ribbon also? Can I get a gold one like Tal so all the angels will know we're sisters?"

He helped the struggling Gayle up to hug her daughter and answered her, "I'll get you a ribbon too." And he knew that he would. The house no longer frightened him.

Gayle hugged her daughter and looked into her pretty blues eyes but when she spoke it was to William, "Make sure you take Willy J with you and I think Lisa will help if you ask her."

"No, I want Lisa here with you and Katie and Talitha. She can hold her hand if you get tired Katie."

"I won't ever get tired of holding her hand, Daddy."

"Ok, just in case you have to use the bathroom, then."

Katie immediately started squirming at the thought and just as Will and Lisa walked in, she hopped down and dashed to the bathroom.

Lisa, wearing a stunned expression on her face, presumably at what Will had told her, hesitantly stepped forward and touched Talitha's hand. "I don't feel the demon. Her hand is just cold is all."

"Nobody else seems to be able to either, thankfully, not even Katie," William murmured. He reached out to touch his daughter's hand, but then immediately pulled back. "I think when it looked at the three of us, it made some sort of connection, or created a channel, so now we're aware of its presence."

"And it has Talitha." Gayle added. William saw that her eyes were still dancing about, not landing on anything for more than a second before flitting away again. "That's why we have to do it...free her, I mean."

Lisa shook her head slowly at Gayle. "But she's strong! She may be the strongest person I've ever met, and the priest is coming. He said he could be here in a couple of hours. I think you should wait for him, he might be able to do an exorcism or something."

"An exorcism? Just like the movies right?" Gayle said quietly and there was a dangerous tone to her voice. Lisa heard it and looked at her calmly, waiting for the explosion that her years with an alcoholic mother had prepared her for. It came fast. "This isn't a damn movie, Lisa. This is a nightmare that I can't wake up from! Wait another couple of hours?" Gayle gave a derisive snort. "The demon looked at me for a few seconds and I was nearly driven out of my mind with its nasty foul stench! You don't understand! Every minute that my Talitha is like this, will feel like months, or maybe years of torture!" Gayle had built up a head of steam in her excitement and was practically yelling at Lisa, who still stood calmly. "If I wasn't such a damn coward I'd put her out of her misery right now! Right Now!" This last Gayle screamed at full volume. Her emotional storm raged in her eyes but then came to an end as quickly as it had begun and staring at the floor, she added quietly, "I just hope that she can forgive me."

"Mrs. Jern, I'm sorry, I didn't know how it was for her."

Gayle looked around as if startled by the calmness in Lisa's voice. "Lisa, I'm the one who's sorry. I really am, I shouldn't yell at you. You've been a great help. It's just I think I might be going insane. I can't seem to hold it together for very long." Silence followed this statement since no one could dispute its honesty. "That's why you have to go now, William. Get the dress and get back here fast. The doctor can be back any moment and I won't wait for you, not for one second. Hurry, but be careful."

William nodded in understanding and then went to Talitha and kissed her despite the foulness of the demon. He wiped his mouth and told her he loved her. He then kissed his wife. "I love you, Gayle. Be strong, do what you have to do for your babies."

For the moment her brown eyes were clear of hysteria and she held him long in an affectionate gaze. "I will be strong...as strong as you. I love you, William. Now go, and get back quick."

"I will." He looked at his son. "We have to get going on a mission. Say your goodbyes and let's move." Will gave his father a puzzled look, before following him out of the room.

3

The day was warm and promised to be warmer still and that was all right with William. As they walked, he explained the need to get a dress for Talitha as well as a few other essential items.

"We'll also get a change of clothes for everyone. Don't load yourself down; we're just going to grab our stuff and go. If you feel anything weird, anything at all, I want you to run, ok?"

"I won't leave without you," Will replied.

"You will if I tell you to," William commanded sternly. "But we'll stick together, so you better believe that if you're running, I'll be right behind you." He smiled at Will to let him know he wasn't afraid and he found it odd that he truly wasn't. When he had kissed Talitha, he'd had the curious sensation that going to the house was the right thing to do, maybe even an important thing to do.

He was strangely lighthearted and even buoyant in his steps. It was likely the beautiful June morning that had him feeling this way; the sun and the warmth acted to dispel his fear of the cold and the dark of the house.

The two did not go straight away to their house; William headed first for the Harris', in the hopes of borrowing some luggage. His were all down in the basement and as buoyant as he felt, he wasn't keen to go down there anytime soon. The Harris' front door opened at the first knock and a disheveled looking Henny Harris greeted them with a tired smile.

Despite his own cares William asked, "Are you ok?"

"Me? Oh yeah, just a long night. The Admiral had a stroke and we've been at the hospital since four this morning. It doesn't look good but he's holding on, somehow."

"I'm so sorry for you and Greg, but can I ask a favor? I need a couple of pieces of luggage, just for a day or two."

"Sure...no problem," she replied yawning.

"Thanks," he said but when she just stood there waiting, almost expectantly, he added, "Could we get the luggage now? We're in a bit of a hurry."

"Come in. I'll go grab them for you." She left and the two stood in her foyer looking about. The house had a closed-up, stale feeling to it and the air held an odd, acidic smell. Will wrinkled his nose at it and William had to agree; whatever she was cooking was likely burning.

A few minutes later, she came bustling up with two pieces of matching luggage. They looked expensive to William and thus he was surprised when she said, "You can keep these if you wish. I was just going out today to get a nicer set."

"That's not necessary, Henny. We'll have them back in a couple of days."

"Whatever..." she dismissed the luggage with a wave of her hand. "So how is everyone? There was quite a commotion on the street last night in front of your house. Is everyone ok?" She was very curious and wasn't bothering to hide it.

"Talitha is sick. She's over at the Island's hospital right now...we..." William's throat tightened up too much to allow him to finish his sentence.

"Sick? Just sick? But all those fire trucks and ambulances. I don't mean to pry..."

Her morbid curiosity was annoying and William felt a stab of anger at his nosy neighbor. "Yep, she's just sick. But we do have to get going." He started out the door, somewhat rudely.

"Ok. I'm really sorry for your...for Talitha being so sick," she called out, but William didn't think she was sorry at all, unless she was sorry not to have heard some juicy gossip. His anger doused the lighter mood that he'd been in and it hung about him like a cloud as they walked the short distance to their front porch. The anger did take a back seat to his caution, however, as he carefully mounted the brick steps and went to the front door.

"Be careful of that knob, Dad," Will advised. "It was so cold yesterday, the skin of my hand stuck to it."

William gave it a test feel through his shirt, but the knob was as warm as the day, and it turned easily.

"Step back," he ordered his son. Cautiously he opened the front door. It drifted back soundlessly and the blast of frigid air that he was expecting did not materialize.

The house seemed, for the first time, normal.

William felt a good deal of puzzlement over this and stood in the doorway for over a minute sniffing the air and listening to the quiet of the place. There was no sign of the demon and the house seemed completely deserted, which was a disappointment. He had been hoping that some of the investigators were still about the place, but there was no one around. The only indication that anyone but the Jerns had been there, was a fine coating of what William took to be finger print dust.

Grabbing a large potted plant from the front of the porch, he wedged it in the doorway and then stepped boldly into the foyer. He paused, listening intently. Nothing.

William took three steps in and paused again—still nothing. Only then did he begin to relax, but just a little. With a small nod he motioned Will to step across the threshold and then went up the great stairs, stopping halfway up. This pause was a short one and he was moving upwards again in a matter of seconds. At the top William turned and looked at his son. They shared matching grins of sheepish embarrassment and he could see his son relax a little as well.

With the warmth of the house William figured that the demon was indeed a creature of the night, but he still wasn't taking any chances and he motioned for Will to stand guard at the top of the stairs.

Since it was the closest, he went first to Katie's room and recoiled in surprise at the bloody scene. There were trails and pools of dried blood everywhere; he wondered briefly how his wife hadn't bled to death there.

He only allowed himself a few seconds to stare about before he went to the dresser and grabbed some clothes, completely unmindful of whether they matched or not. He then went to Katie's closet and fished out her sundress, all of this went into the first piece of luggage.

His room was next. Unlike the scene in Katie's room, it was near perfect, with only the unmade bed suggesting anything out of the ordinary. Here he didn't pause, but dashed around collecting clothes, shoes, and all of the essentials on his mental list.

Within a minute the first suitcase, bulging at the seams, sat parked at the top of the great stair. William then started down the hall as quietly as his large, heavily muscled body would allow. His sense of purpose hadn't left him, but the back area of the house had seemed to be where the demon was not only the strongest, but also the most likely area for it to be lurking. However, the house still felt completely normal—that is until he stepped into Talitha's room.

The room was a perfect illusion of normalcy.

All of her belongings sat eerily silent waiting for her to return. It was as if her room hadn't heard the news and fully expected her to come strolling in at any second. Her bed looked warm, comfortable, and inviting. John Travolta, hanging in his customary spot, still wore his hair slicked back and still stared out with his impossibly blue eyes. The piles of books that seemed to litter every surface were all impatiently demanding to be read or re-read. It was all somehow inappropriate and even indecent that it jarred him on an emotional level.

His eyes filled with tears and though he tried to hold them back, blinking furiously, they came heavily. A loud sniffle escaped him and in the quiet house he felt sudden embarrassment, and cast a quick guilty glance at his son, who had moved to stand guard in the hall just feet from the backstairs.

Will looked tall and strong, and wore a hard, resolute look on his face. Seeing his son so much like a man, gave William the license, at least momentarily, not to be one. He went and sat on Talitha's bed and cried. He cried, uncaring of the demon, knowing he was being guarded over, and he cried, as he knew he never would in front of Gayle. For nearly five minutes he cried out his misery. He cried until he was hollow and empty and sat staring at nothing.

"Ahem," Will eventually gave a slight cough.

"Right." William shook his head. The sad hollowness he felt inside of him started filling with anger over his family's situation. It got him moving. He wiped his face with his shirtsleeves and took the second suitcase over to the closet. Since Talitha owned only a few dresses, the white one stood out. Quickly, but neatly, he folded the gown and stored it away. Only then did he remember the ribbons.

The man in him didn't want to bother with ribbons. He wanted to get Will's things and go. However the picture of Talitha lying in a coffin, looking like she was simply sleeping came to him. Now the father in him pictured her wearing the white dress and the matching shoes and saw that this was how she would lie forever. Suddenly the ribbon became an imperative.

"Will," he whispered to his son as he placed the suitcase gently down in the hall. "I forgot the ribbon, I'll be right back."

As he turned to go, Will responded with a whisper of his own, "I'm going to get my stuff. Do me a favor and...uh...when you get the ribbon wait right here. I don't want both of us up there. I kinda like the idea of you being down here, you know, to keep an eye on things."

William could tell his son was afraid of being trapped up in the attic, as Gayle had been. It was quite an understandable feeling, therefore he gave his son a quick reassuring nod before hurrying back down the hall to his room. William was in the master bathroom in seconds, and snatched up all of the gold ribbon he could find, stuffing it into his empty cargo pocket. After a last glance around the room, he turned and hurried down the hallway and that was when the demon appeared in all of its glorious malevolence.

4

From the length of the hall, the demon looked upon William. When it did, the shocking blast of the thing's wickedness sent him reeling backwards.

A tremendous static roared through his brain and there was absolutely no opportunity for rational thought. Now he knew what Gayle had meant by an explosion. She had failed to mention the pain. Invisible flames seared his skin and raced down his spine. He felt the demon punishing him, burning him and he staggered back against the wall between his and Katie's room. His body started reacting on its own. Stumbling like a panicked drunk, tearing at the walls for support, William fled into the master bedroom.

There he threw himself to the floor and writhed in agony, attempting to smother the flames he couldn't see but certainly felt. Thankfully, being out of direct sight of the demon, the burning sensation felt slightly less. The static became muted as well, so that as William crawled across the carpet, a thought was able to slowly balloon up through the pain: Will is trapped upstairs!

It was the only thought pushing through the phantom flames, and that was good because he didn't want to think— he wanted to act! William felt a terrific rage surge through him...a terrible anger at what the demon was doing to him and his family, and the rage was stoked by the pain of the fire torturing him. He liked the anger. He wrapped himself in it, knowing he would need it if he was going to fight the beast. And fighting was truly his only choice. There would be no way he'd run from the house, not with his son still inside.

The terrific mental onslaught wavered, but only slightly, as his anger grew. Even though he could still feel the demon pounding at his brain and charring his flesh, he was able to claw his way up the tall dresser. His eyes fell upon his sword. It sat atop his dresser just where he had left it after his inspection.

Trembling, he stood while pain and anger fought for supremacy within him. The feelings were so great that his vision doubled and it took a scrambling hand to find the gold-braided hilt. With a practiced motion, he pulled the polished blade from its gilded scabbard and stared fixedly on it. This is what he needed, a weapon!

The pain faded into the background and his mind became clearer as his anger intensified. Soon his hand shook, as he gripped the hilt with all his strength. Seething with rage, he threw off the worst of the pain and let loose his anger.

"WILL!!!!" he bellowed in his tremendous sea going voice—so loud that the mirror over the dresser shook and he heard a light zing sound come from the sword. "It's back! Get ready to run!" He took four long, slow breaths, all the while looking with an unbelievably animalistic ferocity at his sword.

These were purposely not calming breaths, he wanted his fury to be almost beyond his control. The breaths were only to allow Will time to get near the stairs, if he wasn't there already. On the last breath, he held it momentarily, until opening his bedroom door; he let out a bestial challenging roar and charged down the hallway.

In a cold silence, the great, black monstrosity waited for him. It was partially on the stairs leading to the attic and partially on the landing and that end of the house looked like midnight, as if the creature had sucked all the light out of the day.

William felt as if he was running headlong into a vomitus river of cold, unyielding, selfish hate.

It dragged at him, weighing him down and even though he pumped his legs furiously, he couldn't seem to build up any speed; it felt like the slow-motion running of a dream. However, despite this dream-like feeling, he was on top of the demon in a flash, and he felt the near-paralyzing cold of the thing burn his lungs and freeze his sweat.

William swept the sword up and even before he thrust it, he knew the outcome; he would die right there and right then. But he was completely unconcerned about himself and only wished to live long enough that his boy might escape. With that thought, he lunged into the outer reaches of the swirling blackness and thrust his sword with all the great strength of his right arm and shoulder, into what he took to be the face of the beast.

A second can be split in half and each of those can be split again, and this can happen over and over so that a second can be at once quick, just a heartbeat, and also eternal. For William it was both.

With a last flash of light glinting from the steel, he drove his blade into the black pit of the thing, nearly to the hilt. It felt like he had pierced soft yielding flesh, only instead of retreating from the sword, the demon sucked on it hungrily. William knew an instant of revulsion at the feeling but then realized that his mind was his own again! The mental conduit between him and the demon no longer existed. Gone was the torturous pain! The blade seemed to have knocked it askew, almost causing a prism effect, so that William felt the malicious evil of the creature flying all about him without hitting him as it had.

However, what replaced it was far worse: screams of pain, shrieks of the tortured; souls by the tens of thousands desperately crying out for pity, for mercy, for help. This frantic cacophony raced up the length of the sword from the depths of the demon, and in that half second before William knew true misery and before his sword shattered, he not only heard, but also felt every cry, moan, whimper, and shriek. It was overwhelming and after the first tenth of a second, the voices blended together into one gigantic cry of selfish agony. Then right at that moment, exactly at the point when he felt utter despair and helplessness and grief beyond his ability to cope, he heard a single clear voice.

It ran against the grain of the self-centered demands of the damned.

"Run, Daddy!"

It was a pure sound from a pure soul. It rose high above the cries of the sinners. It was Talitha's voice!

William wanted to call out to her, to tell her how much he loved her, but more than anything, he wanted to save her—yet there was no time.

For three-quarters of a second, he had been standing with his sword transfixing the demon, and now when he needed time the most, he was out of it. Something had followed the miserable cries up from the deepest layers of the demon: something beyond human ability to comprehend or even to describe.

It was Evil. It was Evil stripped of its petty excuses, of its human desires, of any restriction whatsoever. It was as pure as the voice had been, but it was only pure in its blackness, entirely devoid of a single virtue. It was Evil totally for its own sake and it was Hell.

William had assumed Hell to be a fiery place, but now he knew it was cold: a cold far beyond the understanding of science. It was that combination of cold Evil that chased the voices up from the depths of the terrifying pit of the creature's face.

William's mind acted in self-defense in the only way it could, it ceased to function altogether and it died. Every cell in his brain, still with the screams echoing through them, simply shut down. With the loss of his brain controlling the rest of his body, William collapsed down the stairs, breaking the connection with the demon. As his body started to fold in on itself, the sword, now brittle with the absolute cold of Hell, exploded into a million pieces, so that it appeared to turn to smoke, which was then instantly sucked into the pit of the creature.

Chapter 10

Will and Adrina

June 5th, 1980

1

On the walk from the hospital, Will tried to hide his fear from his father. He hardly spoke at all and when his teeth begun to chatter involuntarily, he clamped his lips together tightly. His hands shook so he kept them stuffed deep in his pockets, and it was only when he reached for one of the suitcases that Mrs. Harris had lent them, that anyone could have seen how they danced about like those of an old man with palsy. He felt that if he were to relax, they would just simply fly away.

By the time they entered their house, the shaking in his hands had progressed to his arms, and he took to almost hugging himself to hide the movement from his father. He held his father in awe. The man...the Commander seemed to be completely fearless and calm, in perfect control.

It only made Will feel worse.

Will understood the logic behind coming back, they would definitely need some of their belongings, and they couldn't stay away forever. But logic and fear did not at all mix. He didn't care that there had been five men going over every inch of the house earlier that morning. Or that there was a great likelihood the demon was a night creature, or in fact may have gone back to whatever Hell it had come from. These logical points did nothing to diminish his terrific fear, however the atmosphere in the house did. It was warm, inviting, seemingly empty, and altogether normal. He allowed himself to relax...too much...so much so that he even talked himself into the idea that going up to the attic alone wasn't at all risky.

All of it; the warmth, the normalcy, the quiet, was part of a trap. The demon had been lurking somewhere, probably in the boiler room and had slipped up the stairs as silent as the smoke it appeared to be. And Will would've been trapped for certain if it wasn't for his father's warning yell. In a flash Will understood completely and he was so keyed up that he didn't need the advice on running.

The Commander's warning coupled with his tremendous fear set him sprinting with amazing speed. So fast was he that he couldn't feel his feet touching the wood of the floor so it almost felt like he was flying. From his room in the attic, he made it down the first flight of stairs in a matter of heartbeats, but stumbled to a halt at the sight just below him.

The demon was there, just feet away, almost filling the entire landing with a churning blackness. A powerful rush of noise in his ears and a mind-numbing fear sent him to the verge of panic, but just as he felt rational thought start to leave him, he heard a distant roar.

In an instant, his father appeared racing down the hallway, charging the great beast. In his upraised right hand he held a gleaming sword. The sword no longer looked to be part of a fancy costume. Now it was a weapon, a real weapon, a man's weapon. His father brought it up in a flash to strike and the highly polished metal seemed to gather the remaining light of the darkened stairwell into it. For an instant it blazed against the dense blackness of the demon.

Commander Jern then threw his arm and body forward in a picture-perfect lunge, so that all of his momentum, weight, and strength centered on the point of the sword. Will watched as the sword drove straight and true into the deadly black pit of the demon's face.

Wild elation filled Will's heart in the half second before the sword seemed to just turn to dust and break off near the hilt. However, in that incredibly short time, he was able to see the heroic look on the Commander's face and the large straining muscles of his sword arm. The pair of them, the Commander and the demon, for just that fraction of a second were frozen as if statues, a picture from the cover of a fantasy book in which the hero wields a mighty sword and never falters in the face of evil.

But his father's sword was neither magical nor mighty and it shattered in a puff of silvery smoke, leaving only a jagged piece just above its gilded hilt. Moreover, his father was not a hero out of a book, he was merely a man. As great as he was, the demon was far greater, and it somehow struck him down so that he collapsed like a ragdoll.

Falling down the stairs, the Commander lay in almost the identical spot and position that Will had been in just the night before, with his feet and legs pointing up toward the landing.

The sword strike had some effect on the demon. The terror, as well as the noise enveloping Will's mind, suddenly left him and he blinked in surprise at the clarity with which he could see the situation. However, it was with dread that he noted that his options were very limited. The demon's immense form nearly filled the landing and left only the smallest amount of room to try to escape down the hallway. It would take a fantastic leap from the railing to jump clear of the creature...but this would leave his father at its mercy.

However, his other two options were more extreme. He could run back upstairs and attempt to scale down the side of the house. That he would fall was a certainty, but he had an even chance of living and if he didn't, it would at least be a natural death. Again, this would leave his father abandoned to the demon. His other option was an almost suicidal jump from over the railing, onto the stairs between the demon and his father. He would have to pass through at least part of the dreadful unknown of the demon's mass, which for all he knew could kill him outright just by touching it.

In a flash he saw all of this with that amazing lucidity his unfettered mind enjoyed and Will came to a decision with a speed born of necessity. After what had happened to Talitha the choice was a simple one: he would save his father or die trying.

In the same second that he made up his mind, he gripped the railing, and with a huge thrust from his powerful legs, hurled himself over it, twisting in midair like a cat so that he would land oriented with the stairs, facing the demon. As he twisted, he plowed through the outer reaches of the demon's "body" and discovered the impossible cold that tortured the very air around it.

The blackness was not solid, at least not the part he traversed. Close-up he was able to see that the air, fouled by its very proximity to the beast, was constantly changing from a black gas, to a slick, oily, ebony liquid. Underneath that, and only partly visible, the liquid solidified into a shiny, crystalline mass.

Even as he somersaulted over and through it, he took a mental snapshot of this and the picture, Will knew, would be there etched into his memory until the day he died. The solid part of the demon was made up of thousands of tiny faces, each of which looked to have been chiseled with exquisite detail, out of the shiny substance. They were layered—faces upon faces and each contorted grotesquely in untold misery.

His mind rebelled against the very idea, but the stairs were shooting up at his feet in a rapid blur and he took the picture and stuffed it deep within himself. His body cared nothing about faces or demons, but only about sticking the landing after a nine foot twisting fall.

And it did, with barely a foot to spare on either side, the demon in front of him and his father's out stretched feet behind. Again, there was not a tenth of a second to lose in hesitation or to cast a look back down the stairs, and even as his feet and legs flexed to absorb the impact of the fall, Will shot up again in a blind backwards leap.

Only an Olympic gymnast or a seventeen-year-old boy could have made both jumps and landings with such perfection. Will had been in training for this very moment all his life. He had spent thousands of hours on the playground, in trees, at the park, and on the football field, all the while honing his physicals skills so that in the darkened stairwell where the slightest error meant a terrifying death, he was able to confidently throw his body backwards over his father, not knowing where he was going to land, only knowing that he would.

Only a boy who had spent years accepting impossibly stupid dares, who had leapt from trees, fences, buildings, and even the tops of moving cars, could have done it. Will was that kind of boy. At the beach or the pool during the endless summer days that seemed like heaven, no dive was ridiculous enough in its danger to slow him down, if there was a sun kissed girl nearby to impress.

It was that combination of recklessness and youthful agility that Will relied upon as he flew backwards, hurtling down in the darkness, over the body of his father.

He twisted slightly and looked behind him at the long steep staircase and his eyes locked in onto his targeted landing spot. His hands reached out and gently caressed the walls zipping by, and with a little pressure at just the right moments, he was able to guide and correct his fall, so that he landed dead on.

The same flexing motion of his body occurred on impact; this time, instead of jumping back, his hands shot out to grab his father's wrist so that he could use his momentum to heave the big man the rest of the way down the stairs. His mind screamed a warning, Talitha's touch had an energy draining effect, and his father's could very well have it too, but his body was well past responding to fear. It was mission oriented and his hands moved in a blur, seemingly of their own volition, and took his father's wrist and just as his legs began to rebound from the fall, he pulled back hard on that wrist.

He was not gentle. Will's fingernails dug deep into the skin as he threw his weight back, his legs pistoning and surprisingly the big man was easier to pull than he expected. However, with the speed he gained there also came a tha-dump, tha-dump, tha-dump sound of his father's head on the stairs. Again, his mind screamed at him, this time to be careful. Yet bumps and bruises were acceptable and within mission parameters and his body only pulled harder.

It was just as the staircase went from dark to midnight black, that Will realized the good news that his father was not draining the energy from him. The bad news was he could see the darker shadow of the beast moving down the stairs, closer and closer to his father's outstretched feet.

Will began to worry; he was going as fast as he could expect to go, and once he hit the flat linoleum of the kitchen he knew he'd slow down considerably. Suddenly he jarred hard against the wall at the bottom of the stairs.

"Uhh!" He grunted out a rush of air and a precious second was lost, as his momentum was checked. Heedless of any damage to the wrist, he yanked his father out of the tight corner and into the kitchen.

A quick glance around the room showed him the obstacles barring the way to freedom: the kitchen table, he would detour around; a chair that lay on its side, presumably knocked over in his chaotic flight from the house—this he could kick out of the way, and finally the back door.

The back door had been stuck the night before and Will suddenly envisioned himself straining at it with the demon coming up behind. That image was like a kick to the stomach. But worse, barely five feet into the room and just moving to his right to clear the table, he saw that the demon had gained the doorway and felt its cold horror reach out for him.

The air seemed to vibrate as the heavy malicious intent of the beast swept over him and then unbelievably, passed him altogether. For a moment mad euphoria gripped the boy and he pumped his legs as hard as he could, thinking for the first time that they might actually escape.

Seconds later when he glanced up to see the demon was still in the doorway of the staircase, he had to fight a desire to cheer. It was a full ten feet away now and Will only had to...

He stumbled on the over-turned chair and fell over backwards, landing hard on his backside; his grip on his father's wrist broken.

The chair made a stifled sort of clattering and the demon suddenly seemed alerted to his position. Will felt it striving to look upon him with its cold and deadly gaze. He could feel it all around him. Yet it was unfocused, and though horrifying, it didn't stop him from climbing to his feet once again.

The demon had other ways to kill besides its gaze, and it swept forward in complete silence like a wind-born cloud of pestilence. Terror rifled along his nerves at the sight and in desperation, Will made to haul the heavy body again, but he gave a peek back at the kitchen door and he saw he wasn't going to make it in time. Looking to defend himself, he snatched up the fallen chair, but then a thought struck him. Instead of raising it to strike the onrushing demon, he hurled the chair past it toward the dining room.

The chair was heavy and wooden, but the sound was incongruously quiet and muffled. Still, it was enough, and the demon suddenly shifted direction as Will had hoped and moved toward the dining room, lightning quick.

Will was moving even before the chair had stopped tumbling and once again took up his father and hauled him to the door. The door, which had seemed unnaturally difficult to open just the night before, now opened with ease and Will was blasted by heat and blinded by the light of day.

Blinking against the sunshine and the tears that he hadn't realized had flooded his eyes, Will pulled the Commander to the supposed safety of the golf course. There he felt suddenly weak, with the thick hot air making his head swim. Dropping to his knees to keep from fainting, he looked down and noticed how amazingly blue his father's eyes were compared to the rich green of the grass.

Those blue eyes refused to blink at the new light, but only stared upwards, lifeless.

2

"Dad! Hey, Dad!" Forgetting the demon entirely, Will pulled the Commander's face toward him. The blue eyes rolled back and to the side. "Dad! Look at me!" Gripping the broad muscled shoulders, he gave his father a hard shake and watched in horror as the head lolled away from him. In a panic, he leaned in to listen at the thick chest for some sign of life; he heard nothing but his own ragged breathing.

"Oh jeez!"

At his father's urging Will had taken CPR a year before and now he tried to recall the thirty-minute lesson, only his mind was a jumble. The instructions coming back to him were muddled in a useless random order. Every moment had been precious to him in the house, but now seconds were flying by as he searched his memory for the proper method to revive his father.

"In CPR, which is more important? That the victim's heart is beating, or that he is breathing?" The instructor's question came to him then. He had turned to look at Talitha knowing instinctively she would have the answer.

Under the warm sun, in the green of the golf course, her response refused at first to come to him and he began rocking back and forth, moaning in anguish.

"Breathing...heart beat? What should I do?" he asked his silent father. The body—the corpse really, just laid there. Perhaps it didn't matter, he couldn't make things worse after all. Will went to the chest but then the answer he wanted came ghosting out of the murky depths of his mind:

"Since either is useless without the other, and neither will last but a few seconds without its complement, what is truly important, is to have the victims airway open and unobstructed." Talitha said this in such a way that it seemed beyond contention. Yet it had been contested and fiercely, but not by Will.

"Open airway," Will murmured. His hands remember the lesson even if his brain didn't and he quickly positioned his father's head properly, with the chin up. On impulse, or perhaps as part of his half-forgotten training, he listened for a few more precious seconds and again there was no sound of breathing.

That he should breathe for his dad, he knew, but how many breaths and for how long was lost to his memory. He pinched off the nose and blew a great blast of hot air into the lungs and then paused to see if this had any effect.

When nothing happened he blew in a second longer, heavier breath, as if he were attempting to inflate the body. Another pause, and Will felt on the verge of crying in desperate panic. The lesson was now becoming a complete clutter in his mind. There had been so many different hand placements, and breathing/compression ratios to learn and every question put to the instructor had been answered beginning with, "It depends."

One thing that did come back clearly, was the warning that during compressions, he'd likely break rib bones. He was supposed to ignore the crunching sound and just carry on regardless.

The warning had the opposite of its intended effect however, and Will, not wanting to break anything, administered compressions to his father's chest that were as ridiculously shallow as the breaths had been huge. After ten seconds of compressions, he suddenly remembered he was supposed to be counting, but to what number he had no idea.

He was at 36 when the body burped loudly.

Quick as a wink, he was at this father's face, peering into it. "Dad?" He asked quietly but after a moment, he yelled loudly, "Dad!"

Out of the blue, he slapped the face lightly. This hadn't been in the CPR class, but it had been in enough of the movies that he liked to watch for his subconscious to believe this was an acceptable method for revival. The slap had been too light however, since the face had only gently rocked back and forth. Therefore he hauled back and struck it a proper blow, hard with the palm of his hand. Another long gaze into the face followed this. The eyes had closed at some point and he pried one of them open, looking for some sign of life in them, but it stared out blank and the only effect the slaps had were to turn the cheek slightly red.

Will wanted to stop; he was wasting his time uselessly abusing his father's body.

Once begun, never stop CPR until:

A) The victim recovers and begins breathing on his own.

B) Another qualified rescuer takes over.

C) You are physically unable to go on.

D) All of the above.

The test question popped into his head just then. Initially, he had put down 'A', but Talitha, sitting next to him, had given a slight cough. He did a quick re-read and went with 'D' instead.

He would go on with the CPR.

Without much hope, he bent and blew another gigantic breath into the body. Then he took two enormously deep breaths, as if he were going to swim submerged across the length of a pool, and again blew hard as he could. As Will was doing this he caught movement in the corner of his eye.

His father's left hand rose up weakly and even as he watched, it feebly tried to push him away. Will leaned back, completely unaware that his eyes were overflowing with tears. He was afraid to say anything, worried that the hand would stop moving if he did. But the hand stopped moving anyway, falling back into the grass, as seemingly lifeless as it had been only a moment before. He leaned over his father, dripping tears onto his face, and asked quietly, "Dad?"

"Stop... it," the answer came back, in a very quiet whisper.

"Ok, ok. I will...what should I do? I don't know what to do." There was no answer to this and the relief he had been feeling vanished. He leaned down to see if his father was breathing. Seconds went by without any movement of the chest, but then there was a slight drawing in of the diaphragm.

"Dad!" he shouted into his father's face. "I'm going to call an ambulance. I'll be right back so don't worry." He rocked back on his heels to haul himself up but his father's eyes opened the slightest crack.

"No... run...run to the...hospital." Will had to lean all the way over him again so that his ear was an inch from his father's lips. "Don't let them kill...Talitha."

Will looked into his eyes. "No, Dad. I've got to...."

"Now!" Commander Jern demanded with a little more force. "Don't let them kill your sister."

"Ok, I will. Don't worry."

"Run." It was spoken faintly, the Commanders eyes then closed, and his head lolled on to its side. Will had another panic filled moment, until he saw the chest rise, ever so slightly. Then hope flared up again. Hope, not just for his father, but for Talitha as well. His father must have seen something, or perhaps felt something to make him change his mind about allowing Talitha to die. He hopped up and literally ran straight into Brian Galt, knocking the smaller boy to the ground.

"Brian, I need your help!" he shouted into his friend's face as he stooped and without thinking, lifted him easily to his feet. Will shoved him toward the Harris' house, "Call an ambulance! My dad was...he had a heart attack. Call and get back here and stay with him."

"What about..."

"Just go!" he yelled at Brian and gave him another shove. A great urgency filled Will and the smaller boy must have sensed it because he took off running toward the Harris' house, while Will set off at a dead sprint for the hospital which sat nestled under large oak trees, just over two hundred yards away.

Will's lungs started to burn halfway to the building, but he put his head down and ran on, concentrating solely on the grass of the Village Green fly beneath the blur of his feet.

He surprised himself at how quickly his feet hit the black asphalt of the parking lot and seconds later, he slid and skittered on the waxed hallways dodging doctors and nurses. Bursting through the doors of the Intensive Care Unit, he ignored the angry shouts directed at him and raced for Talitha's room. The fear of being too late overpowered everything else and Will barely noticed Lisa, who sat cradling a crying Katie. Her eyebrows shot up quickly but not as fast as Will, who blew by her without a word and slammed open the door to his sister's room.

Inside he saw his mother crying over Talitha, holding her hand, while Doctor Thielsen stood gaping at him in surprise. The doctor's hands were working at the tape holding Talitha's breathing tube in place at the side of her mouth. Will slowed only slightly. His breath fired out of him in great ragged gasps, and he knew it would be a waste of valuable time trying to talk to the doctor; instead Will went right up to him and grabbed his hands firmly.

"Will..." His mom began, shock at his sudden entrance showing through her tears.

"Stop! Stop...you can't..." he said, between huge gulps of air. "You can't...you can't...Dad says not to...he..."

The doctor looked at Gayle uncertainly and then turned to Will. "I'm sorry son, but..."

"No. I can't let... let you do it," Will said, interrupting the doctor. He conveyed the sincerity of the statement by increasing the strength of his formidable grip. The doctor's eyes widened in anger—but also fear.

"Look son, this isn't how you act..."

"I know...I'm sorry but... my dad told...me..."

"Willy J, where's your father?" Gayle asked with trepidation coloring her voice, her eyes knew already there was trouble. He was just about to reply, when the frantic sound of an ambulance siren rippled the air. The little color left in Gayle's face drained away completely. "No, please no. That's not for your father is it? Tell me he's all right, ok?"

"Something happened..."

His mom cut him off, "Is he...is he..." Her eyes went to Talitha.

"No, he's not like that. He's alive, Mommy." Will's tears were back and rolled unheeded down his face. His breathing had calmed somewhat but his hold on the doctor's fingers had not relaxed a bit. "He's alive...but he's not doing so well."

"What happened? Was there another attack?" Doctor Thielsen demanded furiously. Will only nodded and the doctor tried to pull his hands away. "Let go damn it. Talitha will have to wait." Will released his grip and the doctor raced out of the room.

"Oh my God," Gayle cried in a voice filled with misery. She looked so pale that Will could see the veins standing out clearly under her skin. Her hands shook as she held her daughter's and Will realized that the contact must have been draining everything she had left. He hurried to her side and gently pried her hands away from Talitha's cold ones. "Oh my God," she repeated, as he lowered her into the wheel chair. "He's not like her? Are you sure?"

"No, no he isn't. He had a heart attack I think, but he's alive and he told me to save Talitha. He saw something, Mommy, something about Talitha."

"Why did I do it? Oh, why did I make him go back into that awful place?"

"It's not your fault. He wanted to go."

"No, I made him go." she said bitterly. Her face was pinched, and Will thought she had aged a great deal in the last day.

Will saw there was going to be no talking her out of the self-flagellation so he tried a different tact. "You should've seen him, he was like a hero out of a book. He fought the demon. He attacked it with his sword, and he stabbed it, right in the...where the face should be and he saved me. Mom don't be sad, be proud of him."

"I am proud of him. I've always been proud of him. But if it weren't for me..." she looked down at her hands and her tears fell into them. "Did he kill it? When he stabbed it, did it die, or go away?"

The siren was now practically on top of them— it seemed to be just outside their window. Will looked out, but the ambulance was hidden from view by the canopy above the emergency room entrance. "No, I don't think so, but Mom we should go to him."

"No, not yet. They won't let us anywhere near him, at least for a while." She seemed to be recovering from the touch of her daughter and the shock of Will's news. "Please sit down, Willy J. You look like you're going to shake to pieces."

"What?" Looking down at himself, he saw that he was holding his arms bent, so that his hands were close to his chest—they were shaking badly. His whole body seemed to be shaking and a great hollow weakness filled him. The notion that he just might faint came to him and he lurched to one of the uncomfortable orange plastic chairs, collapsing into it.

"Lisa, can you please come hold Talitha's hand for me, thanks." Gayle's voice was weary, yet still commanding. "And Katie can you go warm up your brother, he looks to be freezing."

He looked up to see Lisa and Katie in the doorway. Each wore an identical worried frown. "What happened? Is everyone ok?" Lisa asked cautiously as Katie came and clambered up into Will's lap, giving him a kiss on the cheek once she had settled in.

Will told them an abridged version of what had happened so as not to scare Katie too much.

"Wow," Lisa said, quietly and the room was silent for a few minutes as each of them took in the story.

After quite a while, Gayle took a deep, steadying breath. "Willy J, are you feeling better?" she asked. "Do you think you can push Katie and me down to the E.R. to see dad?" Nodding, he picked up his feather light sister and gently put her in her mother's lap.

3

Gayle had been correct; the three of them were denied admittance to see William. They were left to cool their heels in the waiting room for a good long time.

They were told that he was in 'serious but stable condition', nothing more. At first, they thumbed through old Time magazines and copies of Highlights, searching for Waldo, but then, despite the uncomfortable chairs each fell into a deep sleep. It was over an hour later before a nurse came and woke them up, allowing them to come back.

Will was shocked at the ashen, grey appearance of his father's normally healthy-looking face. His eyes were red-rimmed with great dark circles under them.

"How is Talitha?" William asked, in a voice as rough as sandpaper.

"She's the same. What's wrong? Was it your heart or..." Gayle asked and she trembled with fear at what he might say.

"They think it was a minor heart attack, but it feels like it was something different...worse maybe. I could be wrong of course. I've never had a heart attack before, but I don't have any of the symptoms they describe." His weak voice ranged barely above a whisper and they all leaned in to him to hear him speak. "I just...it doesn't matter. What does matter is Talitha. We were wrong about It. It's not in her. Her soul is in IT. And the dem...the thing I should say, is not even here—at the house I mean, it's somewhere else. I don't know how it works but I think it's a part of a portal or gateway."

"Where does this gateway lead to?" Will was afraid he already knew the answer, but it was a question that burned in him.

"I don't know, but somewhere unpleasant I'm sure," William responded, his voice quieter still. "But I know this: if let Talitha die, she'll be trapped there forever. We can't do that to her." Here the Commander paused to take a deep breath before going on. "Will, do you know when Father Alba might arrive?"

"He said late this afternoon, he wasn't very specific."

"Do you think he can do something?" Gayle asked hopefully, looking from father to son.

"I don't know, but if anyone can I think it'll have to be a priest," William answered. He rested his head back on the pillow and looked up at the ceiling. There was a long silence and Will stared down at his shoes and thought of nothing. A few minutes later, he saw that his father was asleep again and that his mother was drowsing in her chair. Only Katie seemed awake, she smiled at him and put one of her tiny fingers to her mouth, suggesting they should be quiet.

The nurse who had brought them in, walked by and Katie eyed her with surprising suspicion. Will watched as her blue eyes roved over the lady and the similarity between Katie and her sister was never more apparent. They were normally as different as night and day and not just their features. It was their personalities. Katie seemed to have too much life and energy to be contained in one small person. It flowed from her unchecked, a wild untamed river without beginning or end. Talitha, on the other hand was reserved, holding everything in, and though not miserly with her life, she was careful with the precious gift.

Now Will noticed how Katie eyed the hospital staff with that same keen perception that he envied in Talitha and his father. She scrutinized each person from head to toe with those big blue eyes. At one time he would've described those eyes as being innocent. Now they were icy.

It was not long before Doctor Thielsen came in accompanied by another doctor. There seemed to be some dispute between the two concerning the cause of William's heart attack. Will didn't trouble himself with the details since they were both wrong. He sat staring at his shoes some more, as each made suggestions concerning exercise and proper nutrition.

Finally, a very tired Doctor Thielsen asked Gayle, "Do you wish to rescind the order to withdraw life support from Talitha?"

"Yes...for the time being."

"Good, that's what I was hoping for. I'm going off-shift. Doctor McKew in the ICU will be checking in on you, Commander. We're transferring you up there in a few minutes." He looked gravely at Gayle. "Your husband needs lots of rest, and he doesn't seem to be an ideal patient in that arena. Can you make sure he stays put for while?"

She nodded, but the Commander's eyes narrowed in his weary and sick face. If he was going to say anything, he wasn't given the chance; there was a sudden flurry of activity about him as he was prepped for the move upstairs. Minutes later he transitioned to a room just across the hall from Talitha, and as soon as he was settled in, Will left to check on her.

Brian Galt stood beside her bed, holding her hand, his face fairly glistened with tears. Will stepped back so as not to embarrass him in his grief and spied Lisa sitting on the floor wrapped in a blanket. Sitting next to her, he whispered his love for her.

She asked and he told her about his father's condition. With confidence she responded, "He's going to be fine. You know he will. Who's tougher than your dad, right?" When he only nodded glumly she snuggled closer. "Come here. Get under the blanket." He did and even as she kissed him on the forehead, he was falling asleep.

****

"Willy J? Hey, Willy J! Are you in a coma too?" Small hands attempted to shake him awake. He tried hard to open his eyes and finally one cracked enough to see Katie, who smiled with genuine relief that he wasn't in a coma. "Hi Willy J sleepy-head. Father Alba is here and daddy wants you to go to his room." He blinked at her, trying to figure out what she was talking about.

"What? Father Al...what?" Will asked, groggily.

"Father Alba...Al-Bah. You know, the guy who came to dinner with that stinky smoking thing." Katie replied to his incoherent question as she made to lift him up from the floor.

It was all coming back to him and the memory brought along a great deal of anxiety with it. "Right, the priest," he said. A low sniffle made him look to see that Brian was still next to the bed. His face no longer shone with tears but was now set in an angry look of hard determination. He still held Talitha's hand, but even as Will watched, Brian switched hands rubbing the cold one on the leg of his jeans.

"UMPH! Come on Willy J," Katie groused, struggling mightily, "Daddy's gonna be mad at you on-a-cuz you're so slow." He worked his body up, allowing her to think she was doing the lion's share of the work. "Are you hungry?" she asked him. "It's kinda funny but the doctor people brought Talitha dinner, even though she's asleep in her coma and all. I ate the Jell-O. It was red."

"No, thank you, we'll save it for Talitha when she wakes up." He wasn't hungry despite the clock telling him he had missed three meals and numerous snacks already. "Wow after six?"

"Yeah it's been really, really boring watching everyone nap. Even daddy napped and he never naps." Katie shook her head at the waste of a pretty day. "Hey, Willy J, nobody tells me nothing. What does it mean... heart attack? Can your heart really attack you from inside? Does it have teeth or something?"

"No, I think it means that your heart stops beating and it needs help to get going again." Katie opened her mouth to ask one of an infinite number of follow-up questions but Will forestalled her: "I have to go see dad, remember. Can you wait here with Brian? I think this will be a Grown up and Big Kid talk and I need someone who really knows how, to stand guard over Talitha." He picked her up and placed her on the bed with her sister. Katie nodded glumly, but was already helping herself to Talitha's dinner when he left.

His father's room was quiet and the atmosphere exceedingly tense. Even the normally loquacious Father Alba simply stood quietly, fidgeting with the buckle of a satchel he had over his shoulder. William appeared only slightly better from his long nap, and when he finally did speak it was with a gravely but clearly audible voice. "Brian, can you please wait in the other room with Talitha?" Will glanced behind him, and was a little surprised to see Talitha's boyfriend standing there.

"Excuse me, Mr. Jern," Lisa said cautiously. "I've already told him the whole story. I hope that was ok. He loves your daughter and I felt he should hear the truth." Brian looked at the Commander in that confident manner of his, and William stared back appraisingly.

He must have been ok with what he saw. "Brian and Lisa, this goes no further. You don't tell your parents, friends, not even your diary." When they nodded in agreement, he began his story, starting with the Greek painter and ending when Will pulled him from the house. His voice, not strong to begin with, grew weaker and more hoarse, and when he finally finished he took a long deep pull at a glass of water that sat next to his bed.

Everyone stared at the priest waiting for answers, but he just looked at the floor, still fiddling with the buckle. When nearly a minute passed Will became a little angry. "You do believe him, don't you? My mom and I are eyewitnesses, and so is Katie."

"I don't know really. If what you're saying is true...I don't know. I think this is out of my league really. I thought..." The buckle made a click-tick noise and the man's face was uneasy.

"You thought what?" Commander Jern demanded in his rasping voice. "You must have suspected something. Why else did you point out the placards to me at the church? Why did you insist on the house-blessing?"

"I thought it could be a ghost, or a lost spirit, something interesting like that." Click-tick, click-tick. "But a demon? A real demon, that's too much."

William leaned back in his bed looking exhausted and Gayle spoke up with irritation in her voice, "Too much for what exactly? You're a priest, isn't this what you do? Fight evil?"

"Yes of course, but... not really. It's just some priests; not all of us." Click-tick.

Gayle looked doubtfully at the man. "So you aren't going to help us?"

Click-tick, click-tick. "I didn't say that. I just don't know exactly what we're dealing with here. First Commander Jern says it's a demon, and then he says it's a portal. And then there is..." his hand subconsciously patted the satchel.

"There's what?" came the raspy voice of the Commander. "Please tell us what you know or why you suspected our house was haunted."

4

Click-tick, click-tick, click-tick.

The priest's fidgeting increased in tempo. "It was Judith Nelson. The Nelsons lived in the house just prior to you. Out of the blue, she started attending Mass two-to-three times a week and then she started coming to confession...a lot. She was always very chatty after Mass and I began to wonder if she was lonely or bored." He looked around nodding, and Will could see the sweat in his thin hair. "Then after about three weeks she was clearly starting to make things up at confession in order to come and see me. So I confronted her about it." Father Alba chuckled, ruefully, and shook his head in embarrassment. "I was actually worried that she...you know liked me. Stupid, I know, but it has happened before, just never to me." Click-tick, click-tick, click-tick. "Either way, either way, she took a long time to spit out that she felt her house was haunted. She told me about how it was cold in certain areas and that sometimes she had seen odd things, pretty much the same things you're experiencing."

He paused and looked down to the floor, and the buckle became a constant click-tick, click-tick, click-tick. "I didn't believe her, and I uh, suggested that she see a psychiatrist."

"Don't beat yourself up over it, Father," Commander Jern said. "You would've been correct doing just that almost a hundred percent of the time."

"That's what I tell myself," Father Alba said. A moment later he finally stopped jiggling the buckle and put his hands in his pockets. "Either way, she stopped coming to church or to confession and a few weeks later I ran into her while at the commissary. She was a wreck. She didn't look like she had slept in days; it was the saddest thing. So I told her that if she wanted me to, I would be happy to come over and bless the house. Right on the spot she broke down in tears. So I went with her to the church to collect my things and she clung to me weeping in the worst way, and I felt horrible for abandoning her the way I did."

He started again with the buckle, click-tick, click-tick, click-tick, and then began to pace in the small room, his sweat standing out in beads. "I did the blessing and she insisted I do every room including the staircases and then she had me do the basement. She wouldn't go down there for anything. I went alone, going from room-to-room speaking loudly so that she could hear me and I finished with the boiler room."

He paused dramatically, looking around, click-tick, click-tick, click-tick. "The boiler room was cold, really cold and I started to get a creepy feeling in there. So I hurried and did my prayers and as I was finishing, I started to sprinkle the Holy Water, but I raised my arm to high, and some of the water hit the light bulb hanging from the ceiling." He stopped, obviously remembering the scene, and the buckle clicking slowed in tempo. "The light bulb was right over head and it must have been hot and POP! It actually exploded. And just as it went out I saw...something. Just as you did, Commander, it was there but not there. I almost screamed. I'm embarrassed to say it, but it gave me such a fright that I nearly screamed. I would've run upstairs, only I was frozen in place with fear. I stood there, really unable to move, but after a few minutes when nothing further happened I left as fast as I could. On the way up the stairs, I felt...better, lighter. It was as if a weight had been lifted from me and the wonderful part was that Mrs. Nelson felt it too. She was smiling and laughing, it was a great moment."

A smile at the memory lit up his face briefly, but it didn't last. "For the next few weeks everything seemed great. She started coming to church again and she looked good but then she got sick, physically sick. No one knew it at the time, but she wrote to me a couple of weeks ago and it turns out she had heavy metal poisoning...Mercury poisoning I think she said. She blamed it on the house and it got me thinking about the place. I checked around the library for more information but there was nothing. I'd almost lost interest in it when I ran into Skipper outside your place, just a few days before you moved in. He was standing there looking at the house and when I walked up he began talking like we were the best of friends hanging out at a bar." Without asking, the priest took a long drink from William's water glass. "Thanks."

"What did Skipper say?" Gayle demanded, with exasperation shaking her voice.

"Well, he told me how three people were murdered in that very house."

"You only showed me the names of two people," William said.

"The third was a sixteen-year-old girl, Emily Fortini. She was the daughter of one of the murdered men. Anyway, Skipper laughs and told me the Army had covered it up. He said he was the only one left on the Island who knew anything about it."

"Why would the Army bother covering up a murder on a Coast Guard base?" Will asked, perplexed. "It doesn't make any sense."

"The murders were twenty-one years ago. Back then this island was an Army base," Father Alba explained. "So Skipper told me what he knew. A fire broke out one night and when the firemen responded, they all started to choke on a foul stench. He said that a body, the girl's, was burning in the basement and that the smell was horrible and caused some of the men to throw up. When they finally got the fire contained they searched the place and found two more bodies in an attic bedroom."

"Did the demon do it to them? Kill them, I mean?" Lisa asked. Her face looked a sick shade of green. "You keep saying murdered..."

"Yeah how did they die?" Will was filled with morbid curiosity.

"I don't think the demon killed them...at least not directly. Skipper only knew the manner of death for Colonel Fortini. He was shot in the back of the head...Skipper called it execution style, but I don't know what that means really."

"What about the girl?" William asked. "Do you know if she was...like Talitha? Did she have the same unnatural symptoms? Did Skipper mention her at all?"

"I'm afraid not, but he did mention that the other murdered man was a priest. He was trying to frighten me I think, and it worked. When I went back to my room that night I checked to see if the priest, Father Menning was his name, had left a working diary, which many military priests and chaplains do. But either he never had one or it was seized by the military or so I thought. When Will called and told me what had happened to Talitha, I decided to look through the older diaries to see if any other priests had mentioned something strange about the house. It turns out Father Menning was a bit of a cheapskate and instead of buying his own diary, he just continued in the diary of the priest who served the parish before him."

He stopped speaking, and ironically fumbled for a few seconds with the buckle of the satchel he was carrying before pulling an old book from it. Flipping it open to the last entry he read aloud in his practiced speaking voice:

"June 14: An unfortunate event has occurred in the Fortini household, young Emily has fallen ill. She's a regular at Mass and her strong singing voice will be missed. She's been taken to the island's infirmary and her current diagnosis is 'metabolic inconsistency'. Her father may be suffering some mental instability because of this and has asked, nay, demanded that I perform an Exorcism on the poor girl. I explained that I could not do so without permission, and that I would contact Cardinal Spellman as soon as I could. I made the attempt, but got no closer to the Cardinal than the Auxiliary Bishop's personal secretary. He said he's seen this sort of thing time and again, and suggested I administer Last Rites to the girl but just in Latin, since it was unlikely that Col. Fortini would understand the language. He added that by doing this I'd be killing two birds with one stone. I heartily agreed.

June 15: Just returned from visiting Emily Fortini. After seeing her deplorable condition, I decided on the spot, not to wait on the Rites and performed an Extreme Unction and administered Viaticum as best as I was able under the circumstances. The attending physician told me the poor girl wasn't likely to last through the night and it's my opinion that she won't even make it to dinner. Her skin was amazingly cold to the touch, which the doctor assured me was a symptom of her malady. Col. Fortini still shows mental instability. He left this evening to fetch his mother because as he puts it, "We need her kind of help." Part of me wishes that he doesn't make it back in time, I think it would be better for both the Father and the Daughter."

Father Alba closed the book, and glanced about nervously. "According to Skipper, the fire-Station got the call around ten that night and he was there personally when they brought the priest's body out, it was mangled..." Father Alba took a deep breath and looked down at the floor.

"What else did Skipper tell you?" William asked.

"That the priest was wearing the vestments for the Easter service..."

"Don't lie to me!" Commander Jern spoke with a quiet but ominous tone, and his eyes, tired as they were, flashed angrily.

The priest looked suddenly desperate and fearful. "I'm not lying, he said that, but he also said...he said that the body was mangled and bleeding from the eyes! Except he said the eyes were gone, torn out, and the gossip was that he ripped them out himself. And the face was purple...a dark purple that was almost black."

"Oh," William said without any force in his voice this time. The room was silent for a few minutes as each took in the horrible mental picture. The priest was breathing heavy and his eyes were bulging and wide.

"Father? What is Extreme Unction and...the other word you said?" Will asked in an effort to end the long silence.

The question seemed to distract the priest from whatever hellish vision was going through his mind, and he responded steadily, "Viaticum is the word you're looking for and it's part of the Last Rites. It would be the final Eucharist, what people usually call Holy Communion. Extreme Unction is what we call today, Anointing of the Sick. It's a sacrament, a gift of the Holy Spirit, which renews confidence and faith in God and strengthens against the temptations of discouragement, despair, and anguish at the thought of death or the struggle of death."

The answer seemed to stir William, who sat up a little straighter. "Would this Father Menning have done the Last Rites a second time at the house?"

"He could, there's no church canon stopping him, but the question is, why would he do it at the house at all, since he had already administered the sacrament at the infirmary? Personally I think that sometime after writing the diary entry he changed his mind and attempted an exorcism."

"Attempted?" William asked.

"Yes...they can go disastrously wrong." The priest licked his lips and his eyes went even wider.

"Is that what you're so afraid of then?" William accused contemptuously. "You didn't seem too afraid when you pulled me into your church playing amateur ghost hunter. But now you have something real to fight and you turn shy, is that it?"

"Yes," Father Alba admitted in a small voice, "But like I said, I don't even know what we're dealing with. We don't even know if an exorcism will even work. Father Menning might've done everything right. This could be..."

"We could find Colonel Fortini's mother, if she's still alive that is and ask her," Gayle piped up, cutting across Father Alba, who seemed to be trying to talk himself out of even making the attempt at the exorcism.

"I tried," the priest said in a small voice. "She wasn't in the phone book."

William was looking at the priest, shaking his head. "Look Father, could I do the exorcism? Do you have it written somewhere in English?"

"No. You said yourself, you don't even believe in God."

"Then I'll do it!" Will cried angrily. "I believe in God and...in the devil...now."

"No you couldn't do it either. It takes someone much older and wiser to deal with a demon. The demon would treat you like a toy and only play around before it devoured you. I'm not saying I won't do it...I'm just..." he trailed with his thought unfinished.

William adopted a patient tone with the fearful priest, "Father, I have friends in the FBI. They may be able to find this lady pretty quickly. Most people can be found in a matter of hours if they aren't actively hiding. All I'm asking is that we talk to her and see what really happened and we make our decision from there."

The priest was shaking his head to say no but instead said, "I'll at least listen to her, but..."

"Is there another priest we can get who does exorcisms?" Gayle asked hopefully.

"Yes, but it's almost a waste of time even asking. Ever since the Exorcist movies there are a thousand calls per year for exorcisms and almost all fakes or people on the verge of insanity. We would need proof—hard proof in hand before we applied to the Cardinal to send out an Exorcist. Even then it could take days or weeks just to get him out here. You see, nobody wants to be associated with this sort of thing. But, like I said if you find her, I'll go talk with Mrs. Fortini and see what she has to say. I can do that and maybe more."

"Well, we have the beginnings of a plan then," William said trying to sound upbeat.

"I have to go," Father Alba said, but at the instant hard look the Commander gave him, he added, "To pray...in the waiting room. I need to prepare myself. Just in case."

"Certainly Father, do what you need to do." Gayle responded seeking to hit an understanding note. He left in a hurry. Will didn't think highly of their chances if an exorcism was needed.

"You two are taking a lot on faith," Gayle said giving Brian and Lisa a look.

"I'm not," Brian said, with his usual confidence. "Let me show you." He walked from the room, and was back in seconds carrying a brown bag. From it, he pulled what looked to be an old towel which he gingerly unwrapped, as if afraid to touch what was in it. When he was done, the hilt of the Commander's sword lay on in the towel for all to see.

What was left of the blade was blackened as if it had been pulled from a fire and was jagged and sharp. The gilded pommel and guard were tarnished with age and only the gold braid that wound around the grip retained any of its original color.

Will stepped forward to look more closely but Brian waved him back. "Don't touch it! It's nasty and cold like you can't believe. When I got back from the Harris', I saw this sitting against the curb. Here do this, Will." He put his hand over the top of the sword, but kept it an inch away. "You can still feel the cold!"

Will put out his hand and his eyes flew open in shock. The cold emanated from it like a physical force. They each took turns and when they were done, Brian rewrapped it with the same caution he had shown unwrapping it. "It's defying physics on so many levels, I wish Tal..." He stopped in midsentence, his face clouding over and he began to blink rapidly.

Gayle reached out with her good hand and patted him on the arm. "Yes, this is the kind of puzzle Talitha would enjoy, well maybe not enjoy but she'd figure it out. I know it."

"Hey anybody! I gotta pee!" Katie yelled from across the hall— Lisa dashed out of the room.

Gayle smiled but it was fleeting. She checked the clock on the wall. "Quarter to seven...is there going to be anyone working at the FBI now?"

William appeared a few steps beyond exhaustion and he blinked up at her dully for a second. "What? Oh yeah...there are always agents on duty. Will, please hand me that phone." He made the call, but it seemed tedious and William appeared to be fading with each question answered. When he finally hung up, he was asleep before he had handed the phone back to his son, and it plopped onto the bed.

Unfortunately, his nap was only an hour long due to the quick response from the FBI. The agents had compiled a list of four possible names, the most likely of which was an eighty-nine-year-old woman named Adrina Fortini. She lived in Queens not more than thirty minutes away by subway.

Commander Jern, still looking half-asleep took a great breath and pulled off the leads to his monitors; these immediately went crazy with shrill alarms. He then casually pulled out his IV and left it dangling dripping clear fluids.

"William! What are you doing?" Gayle started to protest.

"I have to go, honey. This is Talitha's life. I won't trust it to anybody else. Will, please hand me my clothes...there in that plastic bag."

"But what about your life? You could have another heart attack." Gayle's voice was full of concern for her husband.

"Just like you, I'd give up my life for our children. Now I promise to stay in the wheelchair. Ok?" She nodded sadly.

He struggled into his pants and Brian, who politely faced away, mentioned as if in passing, "I will be going, too."

"You know I can't allow that," the Commander said.

"I'm sorry sir, but it's not up to you. I saw the address and I'll either go with you or meet you there." The two looked at each other sternly.

William was just too tired to put up much of a struggle. "Officially you can't come with us. But go say goodbye to Talitha and get back over here pronto."

"Yes sir," Brian ran from the room.

Within ten minutes, they said their goodbyes, signed a release form, handed reluctantly to William by a cranky doctor, collected the priest, and left the hospital.

5

The warm June night was beautiful. It was one of those magical nights when kids played well into the dark, screaming with laughter, and everyone but Father Alba felt better.

He had undergone such a dramatic personality change that it astounded Will. Gone was the peppy man who was always so quick to laugh, and in his place was a dour, pessimistic crank.

Will's father started well, pushed gently by Brian under the pretty oak trees, but soon his head lolled to the side as he strayed into slumber. He wavered in and out of sleep throughout the ferry ride and the short subway trip into Queens. Even though he was doing almost nothing, Will feared greatly that his father was over doing it. He kept a close eye on the man and demanded that he be left alone as much as possible, and so the Commander missed much of the uneventful trip.

Adrina's building didn't have an elevator and she lived four stories up. Will considered attempting to carry his father, but William was simply too large. It wasn't just his height; he had the build of a linebacker. When Will woke him up, it took his father a few moments to figure out where he was. William's ashen face went greyer still, when he heard the news that there was no elevator.

With dreadful slowness, William ascended the stairs, clutching at the railing for support. Each step seemed to take forever and his eyes were half-closed and unfocussed. Near the top, he swayed alarmingly, his breath coming in short gasps, and Brian was just in time with the wheelchair, sliding it under him as he collapsed.

Will felt strangely nervous about meeting the old lady. It would probably be nothing but a quick conversation yet his heart told him it was going to be more. He had laughed off Lisa's warning to be careful, when he had kissed her goodbye less than an hour before.

"Be careful? She's like a million years old. I think I can take her if we get into a fight and if not, I'm pretty sure I could out run her." It had seemed like a joke then, but at the moment he was not so certain. A glance at the priest told him he wasn't alone in that uncertainty; the man was tugging almost constantly on the tight collar about his neck.

Brian pushed William to the door where William hauled himself up out of the chair with his son's help. Not waiting for his father to knock, Will rapped hard on the door. It seemed very loud in the quiet of the corridor and they all waited silently with an air of expectation hanging about them.

Thirty seconds came and went and just when Will was starting to get angry at the look of relief on the priest's face, there came an almost imperceptible sound of metal sliding on metal. Slowly the doorknob turned and a very small, wizened old lady peered out from a six-inch gap in the doorway. Her hair and skin were a nearly uniform snowy white but her eyes still held their color. They also held a fear that had long passed into terror.

Will's father drew in a tired breath and said as loud as he could: "Hello! Are you Adrina Fortini? We're looking for the mother of Colonel Tomas Fortini..."

She stared at him aghast: her mouth slightly open, her dentures hanging loosely from her upper gums, looking too fake and too large. The stare didn't last long. She interrupted William by shrieking in absolute horror and attempted to slam the door in their faces by throwing what was likely all eighty pounds of herself against it. William pushed back as well as he was able, but he was so weak that the old lady began to win the pathetic battle. Feeling embarrassed for his father, Will gently reached out—so as not to knock the lady over—and pushed the door slowly open.

"No!" she shrieked. "No! Not like this! Not like this!" She turned away from them, her face almost comical in its terrible fear and instead of running as Will thought she would do, she fell to her hands and threw up in a great heaving retch. She spewed out some more and this time her dentures came out too. Will stood staring at the sight, stunned by what was happening and missed his father fainting backwards only to be caught by an alert Brian.

"Mrs. Fortini? It's ok, we won't hurt you," Will tried to sound as sweet as he could.

"No God! Please no. Please no," she moaned to the floor, her head shaking back and forth with a long string of saliva and vomit swinging from her chin.

Will bent down and touched her lightly on the shoulder. "Mrs. Fortini..."

"Oh, God!" She reached back with one hand clutching her bottom, and then scrambled up, hurrying to the bathroom. She hadn't been quick enough, however and Will's face wrinkled in disgust at the powerful stench of concentrated urine, that only the very old seem able to produce.

He waved the others into the apartment and they all stood about in mute embarrassment looking at the aging decor and the fading pictures. Will went to the kitchen, grabbed some paper towels and cleaned up the mess Adrina had made as best as he could, including rinsing out the dentures. These he left on the old wood kitchen table that looked as aged and worn as the lady herself.

The water ran in the bathroom for a few minutes and then Adrina came out and simply said, "Excuse me," before stepping into what looked to be her bedroom. Five minutes later, she came out wearing a different black dress and a black cardigan. She paused in the doorway and looked at each of them in turn. There was no sign of shame on her wrinkled features, nor was there any evidence of the stark terror she'd exhibited. Adrina came across in fact, to be defiant as if they had done something other than knock on her door.

"You asked about Tomas? I am his mother. I know why you're here," she added, cryptically. Her voice sounded slightly mushy-sounding.

"Mrs. Fortini, your dentures are right over here. I rinsed them off for you." Will indicated the paper towel on the table. When she looked at it, her defiance seemed to wilt slightly.

Breathing a large sigh, she went over to the table and with a shy girlishness, she turned away and put them in her mouth. The old lady sucked on them as quietly as she could and then, facing the four strange men in her apartment, said with a slight accent that Will couldn't place, "The demon, it's back, correct?"

Will's father, who had been slipping into almost a stupor, seemed roused by the statement. "How did you know?"

"Because I know," she said sharply. She walked among them, touching them lightly, placing the flat of her hand to their chests. Will was surprised when she spoke next, because her voice was filled with anger. "This is what I have to work with? I have to..." She stopped in midsentence and looked at Will. "You..."

"My name is Will Jern, Mrs. Fortini."

"A boy in a man's body! You're too afraid! In order to be a man you must be able to cast aside your fear and make the tough choices." Will began to protest but stopped when he realized she was right.

"And you are a military man of course," she murmured to Will's father.

"I'm Commander William Jern of the United States Coast Guard."

"Yes and one day you wish to be captain, no?" She paused and he simply stared at her. "Captain of your soul perhaps, or do you think that already?" This wasn't a rhetorical question; she seemed to want an answer from him.

William looked tired but also slightly cross. "I am Captain of my soul."

With a sad shake of her head she patted him on the arm. "No, you're not. Even with your head bloodied by the looming horror of the shade, you are still an unbeliever. Only those who choose to ignore God believe they are masters of their own souls. It is those of us who have faith in the Lord who know that God is master of all things."

"Master of the demon as well?" William asked with a touch of vehemence.

"Yes, even master of the demon." She turned to Father Alba and said, "I would have you ask your friend the Priest about this, but he's even worse off than you." The tiny lady advanced on the plump man and he shrank back. "You profess to believe in an all-powerful God, yet you reek of fear. Great faith cannot walk hand in hand with such great fear." His face grew angry at the words, but the truth in them was undeniable, and he could only sputter impotently for a moment before looking away.

"And finally you bring this...what do they call the young ones? A cub-scout?" She touched Brian as well, looked into his eyes, and gave another sad shake of her head. "You hide your fear better than others but it's still there, lurking and undermining your confidence, isn't it...um?"

"Brian Galt...and, yes I'm afraid, but I'm tougher than I look."

"Oh yes, much tougher and confident too. Confident that you can overcome anything. But these won't be enough to save you or to stop the demon...but..."

"But what, Mrs. Fortini?" Brian leaned in to hear.

"But, maybe your love will. You three," she indicated the Jerns and Brian. "You love the same girl, a girl that the demon now owns. Maybe your love will be enough."

Will felt suddenly hopeful. "You mean we can fight the demon with love?"

He was immediately embarrassed, when she cackled a long harsh laugh that turned into a hacking wet cough. "Love. Ha! It feeds on love and happiness and life. The demon has none of these things of its own and desires them greatly. At the same time, it hates them with an even greater passion. No, love won't destroy the shade, but it may keep you alive and it may keep you going when..." she stopped talking suddenly and Will was secretly glad she hadn't finished the sentence.

His father looked at her keenly from his wheelchair. "Mrs. Fortini, can you please tell me how you know all of this?"

"I am Gypsy," she said simply.

The four looked at each other skeptically and William retorted, "I'm afraid that doesn't clarify much."

"I am Gypsy, that is that," she said again acting as though it should be enough of an answer.

"Oooookay," William said. "Could you please elaborate? Are you a mind reader? Do you have a crystal ball?"

A laugh barked out of her and she coughed some more. "Crystal ball, ha! You are funny, Mr. Commander. The crystal ball is for the rubes and the cons. You don't know Gypsy?" she asked looking at each. "I'll tell you briefly, ok? Where to start...the word gypsy, it comes from the name of the land Egypt. You see? But the Gypsies, we did not come from there, we came from what is now northern India. In the days of Abraham and Jacob, the Gypsies were wanderers of sorts, but always they go to the same locations, you understand?"

"They were semi-nomadic. We understand," William answered easily, his fatigue forgotten in his curiosity.

"So there came the great famine, that so afflicted the Jews of the bible, it was a real thing you know. The Jews all migrated to the land of Egypt and soon after the gypsies came as well. Over time the Pharaohs enslaved the two groups and there was great rivalry between them. The Jews worshiped Yahweh or Jehovah as they later called God. The Gypsies were pagans, but turned to worshipping the false god Ba'al Zubel, to spite the Jews. Ba'al was a demon prince and demanded the sacrifice of children and thousands were burned alive to appease the creature."

She paused and her body gave a little shudder. "Then in the time of Moses, the Gypsies pretended to turn from Ba'al and they fled Egypt with the Jews, and it was to the semi-nomadic Gypsies that the Jews turned to for help. Forty years they wandered in the desert, and that was partly due to Ba'al and the Gypsies who wished to keep them astray. During that time, many Jews were converted and committed unspeakable acts. It was the Gypsies that pushed the Jews to rebel at the waters in the Desert of Zin. In return, God punished the Gypsies by showing them Ba'al Zubel's true nature; they were cursed by the sight and all their children were cursed as well."

She stopped momentarily and took a long, wheezy breath. "The legacy of the curse lives on to this day. Every Gypsy carries it about in them. Like all things, it is stronger in some than in others."

Commander Jern looked skeptical. "A Gypsy curse? Is that why the demon is here? A Gypsy did this? Is this demon, Ba'al?" The others nodded along at the questions.

"First, I don't know why the demon is back and I don't know if it is Ba'al," Adrina answered. "I do know that it's an ancient and powerful shade called forth by a Gypsy."

Brian looked interested and asked, "When you say, shade, is that the same thing as a demon?" Adrina nodded solemnly. After a quick look at the others, Brian asked a second question, "You said the demon was back. How do you know the thing at the Jern's home is the same demon?"

"I feel it on these two...especially the Commander. It's the same alright."

"Perhaps I'm misunderstanding the term curse," William added cautiously. "But you seem ok."

"I'm cursed with clairvoyance and foresight...I can sometimes see or know when things are going to happen or that have already happened. Like..." she trailed off and her mouth went slack. After another shiver, she continued. "Like I knew you were here about the demon." She coughed again and went on, "It's not what you think, I don't get the winning lottery numbers, or who'll win the World Series. It's never a good thing. There always has to be pain associated with it."

"As far as a curse goes, that still doesn't sound that bad," Father Alba put in.

"It doesn't sound that bad because you've not lived it! I see terrible things but I can't do anything about them. If I ever try to change what I know is going to happen, I make it worse. When I was much, much younger I owned a cat, she was so sweet...anyway one day I had a vision that she'd be killed by a hunter who would shoot her, mistaking her for a rabbit. I loved that cat so much...and this was before I fully understood the ramifications of my curse, so I decided to keep her in all day. She kept prowling about moodily until I decided to go to the cellar to get some peaches. As I opened the door, she shot under my foot and I stepped down on her and broke her back."

She paused and coughed her cough. "I fell down the stairs and broke my wrist and the cat crawled off howling in pain. Somehow she got wedged under the house where I couldn't get to her and it was two days of screaming and moaning before she finally died."

Father Alba looked embarrassed. "I'm sorry, I didn't know."

"And that's only a little thing! It's far worse if I ever try to look into the future."

"What happens then?" Will's voice was a hushed whisper.

"Pain...always pain and death. And I get guilt too as a bonus for causing it."

"So if you see something involuntarily and you don't do anything about it then no one gets hurt...I mean nothing more will happen?" Will asked.

"Yes that's right," she replied ruefully. "Then I'm the only one who gets to enjoy it. When my husband passed away, I knew from the moment I woke up, that he would die that day. I didn't know when or even how, only that he was to die...this is the demon's sick joke you see. I couldn't say or do anything that would let on that I knew. I walked about the entire day with a great big fake smile on my face, while inside my chest hurt so bad... I was so afraid that by doing anything I would cause him more pain or misery."

She paused again and her eyes were wet now. "He finally had a heart attack. It was after dinner and I still didn't know what to do. I worried that by calling an ambulance it'd get worse somehow and I was forced to sit there and watch, as he crawled about in pain, begging for help. He took a long time to die." She stopped talking and stared at the beat up wood table.

Will was aghast at the idea of having to watch someone die like that without the power to help in any way. "I think it sounds awful. It seems so unfair to be born with this curse."

She shook her head slowly as if to clear it of the awful memory. "Fair? Life is not fair. But you...look at you! You should be happy life isn't fair. Look how big and handsome you are. If life were fair we would all look the same, think the same, be the same, and the world would be boring. No, Will. I hate my curse and sometimes I hate myself, but life is the way the Lord made it and who am I to complain?"

William cleared his throat and asked, "Mrs. Fortini, can someone cursed like this, call or summon a demon? You would think there would be a lot more of them running about if they could."

"No, this is something else, witchcraft perhaps. I know it's a Gypsy; the scent is all over you. How she managed to call a demon, I don't know." She sat down in one of her shaky wooden chairs. "Perhaps if you told me your story, I could figure something out."

Will looked to his father to proceed, but the man appeared haggard in his exhaustion, so he told the story. It was nearly identical to the one the Commander had told the priest only two hours before. The old lady seemed exceptionally keen to Will and he felt she could almost see inside him at times. When he was done, she sat back thoughtfully and except for the wheeze in her breath, she was silent.

After a minute, however Adrina began to pepper him with questions:

"Was there anyone else in the house last night?"

"Not that I know of," he replied with a look to his father, who shrugged.

"Does your sister own a Ouija board, or know anyone that does?"

"We don't have one...and I don't know anyone who does."

"What about witches? Is she friends with any?"

"Real witches?" Will asked incredulously.

"Real or phony, either one."

"No," he said with a laugh.

"What about enemies? Do you know anyone that hates her or was intensely jealous of her?"

Will shook his head, but Brian spoke up, "There's Doug; she's always ripping him apart."

"No! It has to be a girl, the curse runs strongest through our women."

"I don't think so, she really is very nice."

Adrina put her face in her bony little hands and rubbed at her eyes. "We'll need to find the witch if we're going to help your Talitha."

"We?" William began. "Mrs. Fortini, we came here just to ask you a few questions concerning what happened to your son and granddaughter. We're looking for information about the exorcism that Father Menning performed. Can you tell us what he did wrong?"

"That's funny..." She cackled her old lady cackle and her dentures slipped down as she did. "What he did wrong! He didn't really do anything wrong, he just wasn't prepared and he didn't...I should say we didn't know."

"Know what?" William asked and they all leaned in towards her.

She breathed a tired sigh and the phlegm rattled loosely in her lungs. She told them of the night twenty-one years before. It was a long story with frequent hacking coughs but the four men listened with rapt attention. She told of how her granddaughter Emily had, out of the blue, been possessed or at least that is what they thought at the time. And the similarities between her story and theirs were glaring; from the cold deep coma and the nasty feeling of her touch, to the description of the demon.

"Your Talitha, she was virgin, yes?" Adrina asked.

Everyone looked at Brian, who blushed mightily and said with a complete lack of his usual confidence, "Ah...we, ah yeah, she was a, you know... a virgin."

Adrina nodded expecting this. "Emily was one as well. That was part of the reason I was thinking it was an exorcism that needed to be performed. A virgin is the perfect receptacle for a demon."

At this statement Father Alba, small, pudgy, balding, and sweating hugely despite the coolness of the air-conditioned apartment, began to interrogate the old lady with questions concerning the exorcism. To Will, her memory of the night so long ago, was astounding, especially for someone her age. She rattled off answers to the oddest questions, some concerning Father Menning's attire, some concerning the order in which he did things or said things and Will was quickly lost. The priest kept at it though, until Adrina became angry.

"I answered that already...twice! I tell you, he went by the book. He did not make a mistake!"

"And I'm telling you, Mrs. Fortini that unless you've been to the seminary, you're unlikely to know the differences between certain of the rites."

"In this case, you're wrong Father, I said..."

He interrupted loudly, "Tell me! Tell me! How am I wrong? Did you attend the seminary?"

"No, but I've been present at four other exorcisms and this was exactly like the others..."

With exaggerated incredulity, he interrupted again, "Four exorcisms? Four?"

"Yes, Father. It is sad, but true."

"I don't believe you." Father Alba said angrily.

"Stop it right now." William demanded coldly from his wheelchair. "Mrs. Fortini, why do you think the exorcism failed if it was done correctly?"

"I think..." she paused a long time, which seemed odd to Will after she was able to shoot out answers so quickly before. "I think it is because we performed it on the wrong girl. Remember I told you about the girl who was supposed to spend the night with Emily, but who ran out of the house? I think she was the witch and it was she, we should have done it to."

"But that doesn't make any sense," said Father Alba irately. "There's no literature anywhere that states that two people can be possessed by the same demon at the same time."

Adrina nodded her head. "You're correct Father, however when it comes to demons and their capabilities we know almost nothing."

William rubbed his eyes in a tired fashion. "Nobody knows much about demons—that's just great! How about this, we know that both Emily and Talitha were virgins, is it possible that they were maybe sacrificed to Ba'al or another demon, like you mentioned earlier? Would their virginity be a contributing factor?"

She was nodding her head excitedly even before he had finished his sentence. "Yes! Yes...damn it! I always assumed it was a possession gone wrong and that was why..." She suddenly quit speaking midsentence, got up and walked to the refrigerator. She peered in for a moment and the appliance light turned her skin almost translucent. Will could see the veins of her forehead standing out and an artery jumping at her temple.

"Uh, what would a Gypsy or a...you know a witch hope to get from sacrificing Talitha? To get rich or powerful?" Will asked hoping he wouldn't sound stupid.

Adrina shut the door and looked back at him with a grim smile covering her face. "Whatever she gets out of it, I can tell you, is not what she was expecting. A demon will twist your words around so they are beyond recognition. Ask to never die, or to stay young forever and chances are you'll end up in a block of ice for eternity. Ask to be beautiful and the demon might grant it but make it so that only you see the beauty and everyone else sees a hag. It would be that sort of thing." There was silence as they considered the ramifications of dealing with a demon.

"The Gypsy, is it likely the same person who did it to Emily?" William asked. "Would this person have to live nearby? I mean should we be looking for someone who lives on the island? If it's the whole of New York, we may never find her."

"More than likely yes to the first question, the demon is the same, the house is the same, the coma is the same, everything is too similar. It's very likely the same Gypsy using the same incantation. Now for where she lives, it is likely she lives on the island or has access to it."

"What do we do if we can't find the girl? And what do we do if we can?" the priest asked, ineffectively hiding his anxiety over the second possibility. "I mean the exorcism didn't work the last time and people died needlessly."

"We'll find her..." Adrina started to say but the priest cut across her.

"How do you know? Maybe we'll get the wrong girl."

A terrible thought occurred to Will then. "Don't answer that! It might affect things. You saw something when we first walked in and...it looked pretty bad. I don't want it to get worse for you."

"Thank you. That is sweet of you to think of me like that." Adrina smiled genuinely, a large fake-toothed smile, and Will seeing those over-sized dentures in her small wrinkled head was instantly reminded of a human shark. She added to the priest, "Don't worry we'll find the right girl, or I should say woman. She will have grown up by now. You'll perform an exorcism on her."

The priest glanced around at the others and Will could see the fear plainly all over his features and Adrina did too. "You won't have to worry, Father. The demon will be preoccupied with us. In fact, you won't have to set one foot in the house, as long as the witch is in the doorway this will work."

Will's father wanted to mollify the priest as well. "It's true, the demon can't seem to come out of the house. However, Mrs. Fortini, I don't want you to come with us. I'm sorry, but your power...or curse will either be useless, since you can't do anything about whatever you might see, or it will make things worse and we can't afford that."

"Excuse me, Mr. Jern?" Brian raised his hand as if he were still in school. "If we believe Mrs. Fortini about the curse, then logically we must bring her along. She obviously saw something connected to the demon and therefore, if we keep her from fulfilling her destiny, we will logically make it harder if not impossible for us."

"There are two problems with that Brian." the Commander said. "First, we know that things will be worse for her but not necessarily for us and..."

Will raised his hand too, but then not waiting to be called on, interrupted saying, "I know who it is, Dad." While the conversation had been flowing around him, Will had been only half-listening. He'd been going over his list of suspects, which included every woman on the island that was close to his mom's age: 36-42.

The face that came almost immediately to mind was that of Mrs. Harris, their next-door neighbor. It was partly due to her black hair and dark eyes, which his mind had stereotyped as "Gypsy" but it was also her odd behavior in the dark the other night. But since she was much younger than his mom was and would've been around ten year-old at the time of the first possession twenty-one years before he had discarded her from the list.

The fact that Talitha was a virgin and that it had to be known by the witch, limited the number of suspects to her friend's parents and maybe her doctor. There were a few mothers that fit in the age group, but they all seemed...normal, and none of them had ever appeared to take any extraordinary interest in his sister. The only one who had had been, was once again Mrs. Harris. But again there was simply nothing out of the ordinary about her, apart from her beauty and the fact that she must have married really young to have...

"I know who the witch is, Dad. It's Mrs. Harris, she...she was very interested in Talitha...ah sexually," he couldn't help it and cast a quick look at Brian when he said it. "She talked to me the other night...asking me to look out for her virtues." It all seemed so clear to him suddenly. "And remember how she kinda despised the Nelsons, and she said how their daughter was such a slut? Maybe she wanted to sacrifice Jen Nelson but couldn't because she wasn't a virgin, so..."

William looked skeptical. "So she poisoned Mrs. Nelson? There's no way."

"What about that ridiculous husband of hers!" Will turned to Adrina with excitement. "This lady, Mrs. Harris is...beautiful and you know super sexy," Will paused and blushed, feeling weird saying this to a lady as old as his grandmother. "But her husband is so...boring and ugly. I was just thinking what a cosmic joke the two of them were...you see?"

She nodded her head in understanding. "Is there more?"

"Yes, two nights ago she was outside our house wearing nothing but...uh I mean she was out there talking about how close it was to the full moon. Does the moon being full have any meaning?"

"Yes, but not the way you would think. It's an internal thing that..."

William interrupted, "I'm sorry, but I don't think it's her. I've known Greg off and on for years and Henny too. She could've done this back when we lived in South Carolina, why would she have waited until now?"

"Both time and place are equally important...I don't know why so don't ask," she said at Will's look of curiosity. "It's the house itself that posed the opportunity, this I'm sure. Twenty-one years ago, it had already been stained with blood, old blood. The weird visions you witnessed, the feeling of unease, the cold, these are signs that the house is on a fault...a weak point between worlds."

Will's father was still shaking his head. "Great, a fault! But...Henny? Sure she's sexy, but we don't know what Greg was like when they were younger, maybe he was more... manly."

"I doubt it, Dad." Will said bluntly. "But her sexiness is also part of it. When I see her I want her, but I'm also repulsed by her, she seems so skanky. I discounted her at first because of her age but then I realized, she only looks young. She's the same age as mom." William nodded his head in agreement and Will went on, "And remember how she took such an interest in Talitha when we were at dinner?"

"You were at the witch's house?" Adrina seemed alarmed by this. "Did she ask for anything of Talitha's? Did she take anything of hers?"

Will considered this but couldn't think of anything. "I'm pretty sure she didn't, I was with Talitha the entire time."

"Her hair, damn it!" William seemed to come alive and grow stronger in his anger. He told Adrina about the makeup room and the new brush that seemed out of place. "It's her, you're right Will, it's her. But what do we do now? I don't think we can just grab her and force her into the house?"

Will felt a sudden rush of hot anger. "I say yes! Knock her out cold if we have to. She has already got what she wanted from this. She's rich, now that the admiral is on his death bed."

"No," Adrina stated after a pause. "We tell her exactly what we intend to do. An exorcism on her will break the connection the demon has to this world, and if it was money she was after and she already has it, then she will likely want to go through with it."

Still flush with the energy of his anger, Will stood and paced. "So Father Alba does the exorcism, while the four of us go find..."

From his wheelchair, William shook his head. "No. I can't let you near that thing again, or you Brian."

"It won't be enough, Commander." Adrina suddenly appeared more grey in the face than white. "The boys will have to come...I know," she added cryptically. The fire of Will's anger was immediately smothered by the way she had said I know. There was a finality to it that sent a cold chill down his spine. She knew...what? Did something happen to him? To his dad? He was bursting with the need to ask her what she had seen, and was so preoccupied that he nearly missed her next question. "You are both virgins, am I right?"

The two boys turned pink in the cheeks and red in the ears, and each glanced at the other hoping each would answer first. Brian, whose eyes seemed extremely large at the moment answered in a quiet voice, "Yes...I'm a virgin."

Bolstered by his friend's words, Will stated with some confidence, "I am also." Brian gave him a sharp look, which Will returned only briefly, but then turned his eyes down to the worn table. He drew in a quick breath of embarrassment a moment later.

"You two boys aren't homos are you? Because it will be worse if you are." Adrina said and she eyed them appraisingly. Again, they looked at each other before shaking their heads in unison.

"No ma'am," Brian said to her, but then turned in his chair, which teetered on its uneven legs and looked steadily at Will. "It may be important, Will. Tell the truth, you're not a virgin."

"Wait, not a homo virgin, or a regular virgin?" Adrina asked in surprise.

If Will's cheeks had been pink before they were apple red now. "Neither! I mean...it was...uh..." he found he could not discuss the topic in front an old lady, his priest, and his dad. He had wanted to say it had been close, but that would have been an understatement when he thought back to the night with Amy Harris.

6

Amy had been all over him in that bedroom at Carlos' house, and his body had responded with irrepressible eagerness. However, his insides were a maelstrom of thoughts and emotions, all of which had been thrown into an uninterpretable mess by the tremendous amount of beer in which he had drowned himself. The battle over which would control him, his body, his mind or the beer, would've been close had it not been for Amy's practiced hands.

She had him out of his clothes so quickly that there had been no time to protest. Moreover, he didn't think it would have made any difference if he had protested for she had a velvet grip on him that left no room for doubt as to where this was heading.

His mind had capitulated to the inevitable and there wasn't enough beer in the world that could have stopped his seventeen-year-old body at that point. But he had stopped. He had been poised to enter, when Amy lied.

"I saved myself for you," she had said, huskily. It was probably the only thing, short of his mother walking in, that could have stopped him at that moment. It was the most blatant stupid lie he had ever heard, and he leaned back away from her, the dark hiding what would have been an insulting look of incredulity.

'What did that slut just say?' he asked himself and his ardor slipped momentarily.

"What's wrong?" she had asked, but hadn't waited for an answer and those expert hands had gripped him again. She had a magical touch and in a flash, his body raring to go again, but his mind honed in on a stray thought: Lisa truly has saved herself for me.

In fact, her words, 'I only have one thing left to give,' came back to him and held him in a grip greater than Amy's. All he had to do was love Lisa without reservation and she would give herself to him completely. For just long enough to slip away from Amy, get dressed and leave, he focused on the fact that he loved Lisa.

It was because of his love for Lisa, that he was still a virgin. Just the previous night, before he knew about the demon, he was on the verge of having sex with Lisa, when he heard his own advice to Talitha echo through his head, Demand that he make it perfect for you. What he and Lisa were doing was far from perfect. She saw it as a necessity, a chore to be performed to keep him from straying.

He had stopped her gently and asked, "Is this how you imagined it would be?"

She had laughed a bitter laugh. "No."

"Lisa, I want us to be forever. Do you see...If we do this now, this way, we will look back forever and see it as a mistake. I know very little in life is perfect but I want our love to be as perfect as it can be." She had stopped her frantic motions and had looked at him in that calm way of hers. They looked into each other's eyes and Will knew they were good again...in fact, he knew they were better. His desire for her swept over him and, despite his fancy words, it was all he could do not to take her right there and then.

Standing in the kitchen of the strange apartment, Will had paused as the two memories drifted through his mind. When he realized that the room had become silent, he looked up to see faces staring at him expectantly. His ears burned hotly, but he tried to hide his embarrassment by sounding confident.

"Despite the rumors, Brian, I'm still a virgin. But...but what does that have to do with anything."

Adrina was nodding and looking with keen interest into Will's face and he wondered again if she had seen into him. His ears felt ablaze and, self-consciously he touched them.

"Against the demon, there is very little protecting us: Faith in God, purity of the soul and strength of mind. This is all we have!" she said forcefully. "And it will not be enough. That Mr. Commander is why we need the boys to come. Two of us will not be enough...even four may not be enough."

"If we have come to fight, we are far too few; if we have come to die, we are far too many," Will's father quoted softly. "I can't remember who said that. Isn't that strange? I could...I could get more men. Mrs. Fortini. Would that help?"

"No, the demon would simply slip into the shadows...not in fear but in cunning. And there is little time left to save your Talitha." She gave a small cough. "We must face it ourselves, tonight. But keep in mind, we are not alone...we have God on our side." She paused again, before saying in a tired voice, "It will come for me first...or I should say, I will challenge it first. I'll hold out as long as I can, but it won't be very long. That is why you have to be quick!" she added, looking at them.

"The boys...they're just boys." William said, his eyes meandering around the rough surface of the scarred table.

"I'll go and I'll be as quick as I need to be...just tell me what I have to do," Brian declared.

"I'll go too...I love Talitha." Will spoke firmly, trying to appear as strong as Brian.

William smiled at his son. "I was wrong; you two are men and I think I'll need you, perhaps desperately so. But..." He turned and looked directly into the old lady's black eyes. "But you, I don't know if I can trust you. I'm sorry but I need to be blunt. Before I agree to you coming along, I need to know two things: how did your son die? And perhaps more importantly, how did you live?"

Chapter 11

William and Adrina

June 5th, 1980

1

William had known the old lady was holding something back. Perhaps it wasn't a total lie, but there was something...something disingenuous in her story. She had glossed over the death of the priest and failed completely to mention how her son had ended up with a bullet in his brain.

"Finish telling us what happened twenty-one years ago. The exorcism failed you say and the demon looked at the priest..."

Everyone turned to Adrina expectantly. "Yes the demon let me go. I had been falling apart and the demon likes it when you're fresh, more aware. It was such a relief! Either way it was at the priest...ripping into his mind. It was doing something to him, hurting, or punishing him. I knew that it was different from what it had done to me and it was awful to see. I tried not to look but I couldn't seem to help it. I couldn't pull my eyes off of..."

She paused gazing off out of the window of her apartment. Her mouth hung agape and William was repulsed by the stale denture smell wafting out of it. He turned his glance to the others and saw that Father Alba was pale, a sick whitish green color; absently, he chewed at the skin of lip.

Adrina started again, so suddenly that William gave a little jump in his wheelchair. "But...but time was running out and so were our options. Tomas expected me to figure something out, but I couldn't think clearly what with the demon so close and Father..." She cast a nervous glance at Father Alba.

"And Father, what? What happened to him?" Alba was clearly nervous and the fear caused his voice to become strident and angry.

"That's just it. I don't know what the demon was doing to him. He started screaming: It's not my fault! But that wasn't the worst; he began clawing at his eyes." She swallowed hard for a moment. "And then, and then he fell to the floor and the blood...it ran from where his eyes used to be...two streams of blood just poured from those gaping holes. Then the screaming stopped and it looked like he was choking. On what, I don't know, but he turned a wild shade of red, and..."

Father Alba broke in, demanding harshly, "Did you try to save him?" Adrina had been telling the story while staring off and she didn't seem to hear, but her head moved back and forth gently. Father Alba's tone became superior at the denial, "You just let him choke to death, didn't you? You let him die. Why? So you could run away?"

"Yes I let him die. It's true. But I didn't run...I couldn't. I wanted to so badly, but I was weak from the demon; I could barely stand. I tried to use the time to..."

"Use the time? You mean you used his death! You sacrificed him is what you did. You gave him to the fiend in return for what?" Alba's nervousness had been replaced by self-righteous denunciation.

"You don't know what you're talking about," Adrina replied quietly. "I sacrificed no one. The demon can kill quite easily without my help. I just used the time..." She sighed another rattling sigh, "I used the time just like you three will use the time I give you."

Father Alba deflated at the thought, and William saw that the priest wasn't ready for what lay ahead of them. He worried that the man might become dangerous in his fear.

"How did you use the time, Mrs. Fortini?"

"I uh...I told my son to run but he couldn't hear me, I guess." She looked at William with eyes that were heavy with guilt. It was apparent that she was lying again and his eyes narrowed in anger.

She didn't seem to notice. "It was just that we were out of time and there was nothing I could do. So...I looked for the answer, the Knowing if you understand me."

"But you shouldn't have," Will blurted out. "You said there would always be price to pay."

"Yes I did, didn't I? There was a price and I paid it... or at least I thought I had." Her body was racked by a great rolling shiver. It reminded William of the extreme reaction she'd had when they had first entered. Although he was perversely curiosity about it, he thought it wiser not to ask.

Instead he asked, "What did the 'knowing' show you?"

Tears sprang from her eyes, raced through the valleys of her wrinkles, and dripped down her chin with the regularity of a broken faucet. She tried to form words, but with her eyes seeing a time far away, it took a long time to spit out: "Emily had to be killed."

There was a long silence and William leaned back in his chair, and for a moment, his exhaustion was so overwhelming that he knew if he closed his eyes he would fall asleep again right there.

"She can't be trusted!" Father Alba spoke loudly and without warning. Everyone jumped except for Adrina who was still crying. "Not only did she sacrifice the priest to save herself, but she killed her own granddaughter as well! And! And I think it's safe to say that she killed her own son! What do you say to that?" He asked this with a snap of his fingers in her face.

Adrina sat staring straight ahead, as if he hadn't said anything. But then she did answer him in a quiet voice that stopped and started at odd intervals, "You're right... I shot him. But, it's not how it sounds. I didn't ask for this, I didn't want...any part of it. The priest...he was choking from the inside. I couldn't help him. I knew he would be dead soon...and I knew I would be..." She trailed off. Her eyes were dry now, unblinking and staring far away.

"You knew you would be next, right Mrs. Fortini?" Will prompted and his father was amazed at the compassion in the boy's voice.

Adrina seemed to hear it also and a smile that didn't touch her eyes slipped across her face. "Yes, you understand don't you? I was going to be next and Tomas would then try to get Emily out of the house. That's the way it should've happened. But we were up in the attic and he would never have made it out in time. You see, don't you?"

"I'm trying to Mrs. Fortini," Will spoke with the understanding of an old friend. "So the vision showed you he wouldn't make it and that you had to kill Emily? When did you shoot your son?"

"Afterwards...Emily died first. It had to be that way. I knew I wasn't the one to do it...it had to be Tomas."

The compassion was still strong in Will's voice when he asked, "Why Mrs. Fortini? Wouldn't it have been easier and quicker if you had killed her?"

There was an odd look to her eyes—they were unfocused. William asked her, "Are you ok?"

"I don't get a 'why'," she replied to Will, completely ignoring William's question. In fact, she seemed not to have heard the plainly stated words. "When I ask, all I get is an answer, no reasons are ever given. Nonetheless, I do know why. He would've stopped me. Tomas would've stopped me, and there was no time for arguments. So I said: Tomas, you have to kill her in order to save her soul."

"You mean you lied to him. Her soul isn't saved is it?" The words from Father Alba's mouth were seasoned with accusation, there was a long pause, and the priest frowned at being ignored.

"Mrs. Fortini?" Will asked in a soothing manner so as not to upset her. "Did you lie to him?"

"Yes, I lied to him. I couldn't save her soul then and I don't think I can save it now. I could only save myself, so I said: Tomas you have to kill her in order to save her soul. He couldn't do it at first, instead he cried and blubbered and I was getting angry and afraid so I said: Use the gun Tomas, make it quick! But he wouldn't. The priest was almost dead, his face was nearly black and his legs drummed up and down on the floor, but they were getting weaker and weaker." Her voice droned on without emotion and her eyes were unblinking.

It was only when she repeated words from that night twenty-one years before that she sounded alive. William realized that Adrina was in a trance. It was to his son that she was responding to and he looked keenly at the boy and saw that Will understood all of this too.

Adrina went on, "I said: Please, we don't have time, use the gun now or we'll all die! Tomas had a gun. It was a heavy gun and it was cold...it was ice cold...cold as death."

"Why did he have a gun Mrs. Fortini?" Will inquired.

"I don't know but it was cold and heavy. He took it from his coat and put it to her head and said: Mom I can't! I can't do it. She's my baby and she's so beautiful, I can't do it." Her voice had become that of a man, filled with heartbreaking sadness, and William's skin broke out in goose bumps a second time at the sound of it. You have to kill her Tomas! The priest is almost dead. And the demon will come for me next...kill her now quick, please! Kill her for me! I pleaded with him to kill his beloved daughter, so that I wouldn't have to face the demon again. I will never see the light of heaven, I know this, and I deserve what the demon is going to do to me. But there was no choice. The only one that could live through this was me." She stopped talking and the silence rolled around the kitchen as the men sat still in shock.

Finally, William nudged his son to get him to continue. "Mrs. Fortini," he said in that odd comforting voice that William had never heard before. "Did he shoot her then?"

"No he couldn't do it. He put the gun aside, slowly and I thought my death would happen then. The demon came to me...it hurt me...it didn't want to kill me fast, like the priest, it wanted to hurt me, it wanted my suffering above everything else. It wanted to feed off of me...it wanted to eat...to eat...to eat...to eat...to eat..."

The repetition was chilling and William felt his goose bumps return in force and he shuddered at the sound.

"Mrs. Fortini?" This time Will said it loudly, obviously bothered by the dreadful words. "The demon looked into you, we got that, but then what happened?"

"To eat... Yes to eat, to feed off of my pain. It was crushing my toes with a hammer, each one Bam! Bam! Just as the pain would start to recede, it would crush the next in line. I was screaming... I don't know if the screams are in my head or coming out my mouth. But I scream for its pleasure. Then, like a miracle, it's gone and at first I was so happy, so relieved, I look down and my shoes look unmarred and the pain was fading like a dream. But then Tomas starts screaming. It is like a girl's scream, high and piercing and that sound scares me worse than anything. Tomas is a man; he fought in Korea...nothing should make a man scream like that. IIIIIIEEEEEEEEEE!" Adrina suddenly screamed loudly and it echoed in the apartment.

It was the scream of her son Tomas, tearing up from her soul and William knew then, that whatever evil Adrina might have done, he would not be the one to judge her.

When the scream ended, she picked up where she had left off, "I looked to Tomas and I saw why the demon had released me. My son had his hands over Emily's mouth and he was suffocating her, killing her in the most painless way he could conceive. The demon knew that if the girl died, his gate would be closed, so it went after Tomas. The vision had made it clear I was not to kill her, so even as Tomas screamed and screamed, I put his hands back over Emily's mouth and held them there with the stabbing pain of his cries drilling through my ears."

"Mrs. Fortini, did the demon go back?"

"Yes. Emily died. Eventually, Tomas stopped screaming and looked down at his hands. The hands that had killed his own daughter. He wept long and I wept with him, miserable and disheartened."

"Because of Emily?"

"No. Because it was almost time to kill Tomas?"

This baffled William and he mouthed the word why to his son, who asked, "Why would you need to kill him when the demon was gone?"

"To save his soul. Right, Father?" She turned to the priest. However, her eyes were still huge, glassy, and unseeing in this world. Father Alba looked at the others wondering if he should answer and William gave a quick shake of his head.

Will watched them silently and then turned to Adrina and said, "Mrs. Fortini, you lied to your son about saving Emily's soul. Are you lying to us right now about trying to save Tomas' soul?"

"The demon had shattered him mentally; his head was sweeping back and forth as if he could deny what had just happened. Tears coursed down his face, they rolled off his jaw and were landing on Emily's pale face, so that it looked as if she were crying, too. No...no...no, Tomas repeated over and over again. His voice hoarse and raspy. Tomas said to me: It's too much, Mother, and I said: What? What is too much? He looked up from Emily and I saw his eyes were going in two different directions and he said: This life, it's too much. He picked up his gun...the cold one, and putting it to his head, pulled the trigger."

Father Alba looked at the others. "Skipper told me the man had been shot in the back of the head...execution style. It was..."

"Execution," Adrina interrupted speaking without emotion, "Execution. I am an executioner.

"Mrs. Fortini, did he kill himself or did you, uh have to do it?"

"I killed him. I am an executioner. The safety of the gun was on. Tomas looked at it and pressed a button and I pleaded with him, but he said: I can't be alive. I saw...things. I killed my own daughter with my bare hands just to save my own skin...I can't be alive. I said to him: No you had to do it and what you saw, it wasn't real. Please believe me, it wasn't real. Don't do this."

Tears came down her face again. Speaking as Tomas she said: "It is real I know it, everything I've done...everything I'm going to do, it's all too much! I have to die, please let me die.

"I wanted him to live, so I snatched the gun from his hands. Tomas, you just saw the demon, you know Hell is real. You know what will happen if you kill yourself. The demon is waiting for you.

"This made him pause, but it was only for half a heartbeat: Then you must kill me. I lied then and said I couldn't, but I really could because I'm an executioner. I'm an executioner, right Father?"

She turned her glassy eyes again to the priest and he shrank back away from her. Her face was that of a lunatic and despite her tiny size and old age, she looked dangerous like rabid dog. "I had killed before...executed...they were Jews, just a family of Jews. They all died, very horribly but at that time, no one cared about the Jews. The Einsatzgruppen came for us Gypsies and we fled from them. The Jews had passports and we did not." Here she shrugged; a little jerk of her scrawny shoulders. "They would've died anyway...I was just their executioner. We were in Austria, just outside of..."

Everyone stared in silence at her admission of an earlier crime, but William felt a sense of urgency, he gave his son a sharp poke in the ribs. Will jumped, startled and William gave him a look.

"Mrs. Fortini, what happened to your son?" Will interrupted the story.

She was slow to stop, "The death squad was just on the..."

"Mrs. Fortini? Tell me what happened to your son." Will's calm voice spoke with more authority.

"Kill me now mother!" She was back to speaking as Tomas. "He begged me to kill him and I still held back selfishly, but then he smiled and said: There are knives...I have so many knives. It was the way he said it, with so much comfort and peace at the idea of the knives. I realized that there would be no stopping him, so...in order to save him, I killed him. I told him not to worry about the knives that I would do it for him and I would make it quick. He smiled at me and the smile was filled with relief, thank you was all he said. And I said...I said..."

She ended unexpectedly and blinked rapidly a few times, her face became alive with meaning, "Excuse me," she whispered.

In the silence of the apartment, it carried to each of them clearly. Adrina got up slowly and William saw the whole of her body was shaking. She went to the bathroom and shutting the door, left the four men sitting in dead silence. Each seemed afraid to break the silence and they all took to staring at Will inquisitively.

2

Will looked guilty as if he were on trial, and mouthed the words, "It wasn't me. I didn't do it." William knew this to be the truth and smiled at his boy in understanding. Will found the courage to use his voice a second later, and whispered, "What the heck was that?"

"Auto-hypnosis, that is unless you have some magic power of your own," Brian said and he looked sad suddenly. "Talitha and I had an argument concerning this just a couple of weeks ago...she would've found this all to be endlessly fascinating." He stopped talking and sat staring at the beat up table. They all did and it was some minutes before Adrina came back out, looking more composed.

She peered into the pale and ashen face of William and asked, "Commander, did that answer your questions well enough? Will you be able to trust me?"

It had. He knew what he had just seen couldn't have been faked. "Yes it does and I...having seen that with my own eyes. I don't doubt you...or blame you."

"That's nice, but I blame myself enough for both of us."

"But what about the girl's body in the basement," Father Alba asked, like a kid demanding just one more story at bedtime. It was an improvement over the fear-induced self-righteousness he had displayed earlier, but it still grated on William.

"I did it, of course," Adrina snapped angrily. "I had to. That is the way...you will see."

"I'm sorry for...it's just..." Father Alba seemed at a loss for words. "But why take her down to the basement? Weren't you tired after the whole thing?"

"I thought there would be a furnace down there, maybe one of the old big ones. I had to burn the body."

William's stomach rolled over and seeing his son turn white, he decided to get the conversation back to Talitha, and what needed to be done to save her. "You said earlier that we'd have to confront the demon, how will that work? We can't touch it without...dying. Are there prayers that might do something or Holy Water?"

"This is where we'll need Father Alba the most. We will each be baptized and anointed with the Oil of Chrism, this will keep the demon away from us physically. It will not stop it from entering our minds, however. That is why we must be quick. Confronting it will be easy; as I said, it will come for me first. I will last as long as I can, but one of you must step forward to challenge after me."

William would be next, in his mind this was a foregone conclusion. "First off, Mrs. Fortini, I don't like the idea of you coming, but Brian's logic does seem correct. You'll confront it first but only because of your vision. I'll go next. After that, boys, you'll have to decide who goes next, as the situation warrants."

"Don't plan too far ahead, Commander." Adrina was stern and her voice carried authority. "You will all know what to do when the time comes but you must be quick and decisive. Do not hesitate to do what you have to do! And I know you don't want to hear this, but it may come to it. If there is no other option, your Talitha, might have to be killed."

"No!" Brian snapped like an angry dog, "It won't come to that. I won't let it."

Adrina grimaced and hung her head. "If you can't be strong enough to do the very hardest things, you shouldn't come. You three...you each have to be willing to kill. It will not be enough that you are willing to lay down your lives. If this ends in all of our deaths the demon will go on and on."

"I thought the exorcism was going to be performed on Mrs. Harris. Do we need to bring Talitha at all?" William's brow knit in consternation.

"Yes, she'll need to be there. She won't be able to get back if the gate is destroyed and her body is not present. There's no guarantee, either way, and it will be up to her to make it back."

"She'll do it," Will intoned with great certainty. "She's fearless." William and Brian nodded in agreement.

"Good. That is good, her chances will be much better."

Father Alba suddenly spoke, looking resolute, "I'll go into the house...if it will help. I should do more. I'm a priest after all."

"I don't think that's a good idea, Father." Adrina suddenly exuded kindness and understanding to the man, and she even reached out and patted him on the hand. "Because you're a priest the demon will go for you first. It'll find any weakness and destroy you completely with it." He started to protest but Adrina carried on, "I understand, we all do, the need to fight this evil. But you were called by the Lord to minster to the needy, the poor in spirit, not to do battle with this monstrous creature."

"Yes, but it's also part of my vocation...I can't run from it and I can't pick and choose which aspects, I wish to perform."

"Father you will be needed! Everyone here will need to be baptized. You will need to hear all of our confessions and then there's Communion. We do need you." She was earnest and wasn't just trying to mollify the priest.

"And the exorcism of course." William felt it odd to have to remind Adrina of the priest's most important job. "If it'll work in the doorway of the kitchen then please do it there and don't feel bad in any way."

"It's just that I want to do more," he sighed. "I just can't believe we're talking about demons!"

"Nobody ever truly does Father, until..." She left off with a shrug.

"I suppose you're right. You know, I never really believed in Hell until today." He paused looking at them for understanding and found it in William who was in the same boat. "I always thought Hell was simply the absence of God."

This seemed to rile Adrina and her face held thunderclouds that looked to explode on someone. "It is. You're right; Hell is the absence of God. However, you say it in such a casual way, as if it is a land where your ice cream Sundae doesn't come with cherries or where there are dogs but no puppies! You of all people should know that God is in everything!" Her voice grew loud and shrill, "Everything that is, but sin! Hell is built on sin, the blackest sin and only the truly greatest sinners can abide it because they have become their sins and can't see themselves any other way."

The priest shifted uncomfortably but William was curious to her point of view. "What about the demon, did God make it?"

"Yes, of course. God is the originator of all. The demon was once a being of some sort, but turned away from the Creator as have all those who dwell in the void. Demons are those who reject God completely and rejoice in their evil. That is the great difference. All the other sinners in the void know their sins, they don't rejoice but are ashamed, and that is what keeps them from God. Their souls still acknowledge God and all his works, and this is why they are so coveted by the various demons."

The men all looked slightly confused at this and Adrina went on, "A being that casts itself into the void still has memories of its life...it still feels to a certain degree through those memories. Even though demons reject God, they still want what only He can provide: happiness, love, and laughter. Everything that makes life enjoyable. The demons collect souls in order to rip out those memories...to feel, if only for the most fleeting of moments, something other than their own terrible emptiness."

"Why?" William demanded. He had been picturing his baby girl in the clutches of the demon and his anger came to a boil. "Why does God allow this to go on? I don't get it. This is one of the reasons I don't...I didn't believe in God. He could stop all the pain and misery but he doesn't."

Adrina looked to the priest to answer William, but he had an expectant look about him and was waiting on her to continue. "He could, Commander. He could do all of that and more, but it would destroy his greatest gift to us."

"Life?" Brian asked.

"No, a cactus has life; I'm talking about free will. Freedom! Commander, you're free to love God with all your heart or to turn your back on him and build your own personal hell. It's that free will that makes you who you are."

"Yes, but I'm talking about all the misery in the world. Why does God let..."

"And I am too!" she responded. "Misery is a direct consequence of free will...a murderer must choose to murder, a rapist must choose to rape. They know their actions are wrong and they may hide their faces, but they still choose to do it. People choose to live along rivers that they know will eventually flood and destroy their homes and kill their children. They then foolishly blame God for their own choice! God could protect you from your own choices, he could coddle you and keep you from harm, but you would become bored and tire of your life quickly."

"Not necessarily."

"Yes necessarily! When your children were small, they had training wheels on their bikes, yes? Yet you took them off because it was limiting their fun. Life is like riding a bike—the faster you go, the more fun it is. However, there's also more danger as well. God could take away the danger but, implicitly, the fun would go as well. Can you imagine a world without consequences? There would be no meaning in anything. You could jump off a building without getting hurt. But after awhile, you would be bored by it. You would be bored by everything! Do you still play Tic-Tac-Toe? No? Why? Because it's boring, there isn't anything to the game, there's no challenge, and it always ends in a draw. That is what the world would be like...dull and pointless."

"I can see that in our world, but what about hell? Why does God send people there?" Brian asked thoughtfully.

"You have it wrong. God doesn't judge and throw people into hell," Adrina explained patiently. "Even the greatest sinners are welcome into His presence. When you die, you won't have any of this," she gripped the Commander's bull-like shoulders. "You'll be stripped down to your purest essence, your thoughts, your experiences, your memories, your love, this is what you take with you to share. However, the light of the lord is revealing and everything is open to Him, and there are those whose transgressions are too great. Free will exists even after death and instead of facing their actions, these sinners hide in shame at their own atrocities and they flee from the light of the Lord. They dwell in the void, hating God and hating what they were and what they did, until they are found by a darkness greater than themselves."

"The demon? Why doesn't God destroy the thing?" Brian asked, his eyes smoldering with anger. "He could, but he doesn't! He should go and free all the souls it has collected."

"Maybe he does, Brian, but would that change anything? God will never force you to love him and he could destroy every demon in the void but as long as there are souls denying him, new demons would come into existence."

William considered this logical, but wondered if he would have been swayed by the arguments for the existence of God, if it hadn't been for the demon. It had been so impossibly evil that no amount of Darwinism or evolutionary theory would ever be able to explain it away. Moreover, there had been that moment when he had died, clutching his useless play sword, when he had felt what the demon had been craving. Below all of William's shallow emotions and insignificant thoughts, ran something elemental, something that was simultaneously a part of him as well as connected with something far, far greater. It was nearly impossible to wrap his mind around the concept, except to visualize it as the opposite of the demon. It was pure and true, and his heart rejoiced at the awareness of it. It was God. God had been in him.

His son disturbed his thinking with a painful question: "Mrs. Fortini, the demon is feeding off of Talitha, will she be normal when we get her back?"

"Honestly, I don't know. A lot will depend on her."

This was followed by a moment of silence in the old apartment and then Father Alba spoke in a forceful voice, having clearly come to some conclusion. "I feel the need to confront the demon...directly during the exorcism."

William nodded in agreement and was glad for the courage the priest was showing. His earlier emotional state had been annoying but at the same time understandable. The man was definitely not a heroic figure; he was more like the Ichabod Crane of the priesthood.

Adrina gave the priest an odd look. "Please wait until the moment of truth, before you make that decision. Now we must be going very soon. I feel it, the urgency to hurry. But the subject was changed and I need to know something. Commander you must tell me right now, are you willing to do anything...even imperil your immortal soul to save your daughter?"

"Yes," he answered gravely, looking her in the eye. It wasn't an easy answer after what he knew was now in him. Yet it was the only answer.

"Anything," she repeated the word ominously.

"Yes."

3

"Good! I will go the bathroom and then we go." Adrina pushed herself up from the table and William could see how her joints had stiffened in the short time they had been talking. Her knees and elbows snapped like dried twigs. At the sound she stopped for a moment and her lips came together to form a thin pink line on her wrinkled face. The sound seemed to remind her of something unpleasant, but she gave a little shake of her head and slowly made her way to the bathroom.

William slouched in his chair, and thought about what had been said. He was amazed when he found himself being shaken by the elbow. He had fallen asleep! The clock on the wall showed him it had just been for a few minutes. How strange. Adrina stood in a very heavy coat before him. She carried a large brown leather purse which was as wrinkled as its owner, and about her neck was a great black scarf that looked to have been made for someone much bigger. William's mind was playing catch up from his little nap and he looked about for his own coat.

"Oh, right," he mumbled, remembering it was June and that his coat was packed away with his winter clothes.

"It is draining to be so near the demon," Adrina commiserated. She looked around the worn down little apartment with a sadness aging her face, even more that the weight of her years. "Now we go."

His son wheeled William down the hall, while Mrs. Fortini explained that since time was short, they would have to confess their sins to the priest on the way back to the Island.

"I'm not sure what my sins are," Brian said and William thought the boy had never looked so nervous. "I know lying and stealing and thou shall not kill, but I don't really know what else there is."

They had reached the stairs and Adrina paused looking down at them as if they were a great obstacle. "You need to know that the actual commandment is Thou shall not commit murder. There is an important difference between killing and murdering." She started down the stairs with a wheezy little groan. "Your best bet during your confession, Brian is to keep the Ten Commandments in the front of your mind as a guide."

Will waited at the top of the stairs to give Adrina time to go down a bit and he spoke to her loudly, "Mrs. Fortini, I've only been to church a few times and Brian has never gone."

Brian, who was holding Adrina's arm and guiding her down the stairs, appearing like a larger than usual Boy Scout in search of a badge, nodded in agreement with Will's statement but Adrina had begun coughing that nasty wet cough of hers and missed it.

Father Alba, seeing the old lady struggling, went down the list of commandments slowly. William saw his son's brow furl at, "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife."

"Father, isn't covet synonymous with desire?" he asked. "That's another thing I always wondered about. Why would God put in to me desires and then punish me..." he paused as Adrina gave a loud purposeful cough. "Oh, right he doesn't punish. Let's say I see a pretty woman and desire her, but I don't act on the desire, how's that a sin?"

"It's not. Covetousness is far more than just desiring." The priest explained and seemed to be his usual self, now that he was on familiar ground. "It's the precursor to many sins. If you see a pretty girl and all you say is wow, Va-Va-Voom, then that..." He stopped as Brian looked back in comical disbelief and shared a look with Will. "What? They don't say that anymore?"

Will turned a little pink in the cheeks. "No, not really but it's just... it sounds extra weird coming from a priest."

At this, perhaps to hide his embarrassment, Will started down the stairs and William leaned back in the wheel chair so that he was looking at the peeling paint of the stairwell ceiling. It made him the slightest bit nauseous and he tried to concentrate on the priests words as they went down, to keep from getting sick.

"I suppose it does," Father Alba said and smiled for the first time that day. "But coveting is a state past just desiring. You see a pretty girl and you desire her, right there you're not sinning. Coveting is when you let that desire grow and it starts to dictate your actions. Do you then lie to your wife, so you can be with the other girl? Do you bear false witness concerning a friend so that she looks to you for help? It's that point when you start to lie to yourself— when the self-deception begins. That is coveting. Do you understand?"

William did...to a point. "But again these are just thoughts. If I covet without any other sin, where's the wrong in that? It seems Heaven would be an empty place, if thoughts counted as sin."

"Hold on," Adina wheezed, "You're missing the purpose to the Ten Commandments. Remember God doesn't care if you missed church a few times, or if you sassed your parents. That's completely beneath him. What he does care about is your happiness. He has given you life and free will, but also a small instruction book on how to be happy on earth and in the Afterlife. Follow the Ten Commandments, love thy neighbor, do unto others, love God and yours will be a joyful life."

"What about God being a jealous God, that doesn't sound as if everything is beneath him," William said, and almost immediately felt he had blasphemed.

Adrina stopped at the second floor and her breathing was harsh. She leaned over and coughed something grey into the corner of the stairwell. "The passage shows that the Lord knows of the false gods, such as Ba'al Zebul that I mentioned; the demon posing as a god. There's a very great danger in worshipping these false gods as the Gypsies found out. The term jealous should be interpreted as protective, though possessive would not be unfair either. God wants you to worship him for your good, not his."

"What about not going to church on Sundays?" Will asked this between heavy exhalations, the strain of his father’s weight was turning him red from the neck up.

"Keep holy the Sabbath, is what you mean…don’t let go of him! You will crush me if you do!" The chair had slipped, with Will grunting loudly. She had to scurry out of his direct path. "You be more careful with your Father! Where was I…ah, the Sabbath. Once again, the Sabbath is for men, not for God. The Sabbath is to remind man of his place in the universe. We are so insignificant, yet there are those foolish enough to think they can replace God with science or machines, or their own great egos. When we go to church we learn humility—we learn our place. A humble man is not a sinner, he knows the greatness of God, and he knows his own failings."

Brian relieved Will for the final set of stairs and though William remained outwardly calm, he couldn't help picturing himself and the chair bouncing down the stairs like a pair of large dice in a Las Vegas casino. But despite his size, Brian was very strong, a pint sized Hercules, and he brought William the rest of the way down without mishap. At the bottom of the stairs, even though her cough continued, Adrina refused to take a break and she pressed on to the subway.

Almost as soon as they made the sidewalk in front of the apartment building, Brian asked to be relieved, "Will, can you push your dad? I want to go first with the confessing." It was clear Will had wanted to go first but he agreed and took over.

Adrina warned them all: "Make no excuses. Own your sins and do not try to hide anything. You must confront your past now or the demon will do it for you later." Brian looked slightly nauseous as he dropped back to talk to the priest. William could hear them muttering to each other the entire way back, and as they neared the subway, he wondered how many sins such a young boy could have. Brian finished his confession just before the train arrived and came over as they boarded, looking immensely relieved.

"I feel good, you know at peace. It wasn't that bad," he said cheerfully, but his voice changed to concern as he caught a sight of Will. "Are you ok? You look like you are ready to hurl."

It was true; his son looked very close to being sick, his throat kept working up and down, and William asked him, "Do you want to go next?"

"Yeah I think so...I don't know." He rubbed his stomach with a pained expression on his face. "This is so weird. It's not as if I've done a lot wrong, you know. I don't know why I feel so scared..." He stopped talking and stood with that sick expression on his face, turning greener by the second.

"It does seem rather invasive," William agreed with his son, trying to hit a tone of understanding.

"Invasive..." Will said oddly, and then gave a short nervous laugh. "Invasive is right. That's what Talitha would've called it. You know she made me..." he paused for a moment shaking his head. "I was going to say she made me look it up once, the word you know, but in truth she never made me do anything. It’s just that I wanted her to think I was smarter than I really am. I always tried to be a better person when she was around." He smiled a quirky, uneasy smile and went to the priest. His confession took the entire subway ride back to the tip of Manhattan, and he too seemed to have had a burden lifted off his shoulders, when he finished.

William was left very little time to confess to Father Alba, just the short ferry ride across the junction of the Hudson and East river. However, it was all he'd need. His sins were not many and they were fresh in his mind. When the demon had looked on him, it had rifled through his memories like an overeager reporter looking for juicy gossip, relishing each one of his sins. These he rattled off to the priest with ease, since he had long ago come to terms with his rather dull transgressions. It was the implanted memories that gave him the most trouble.

"Father, last night when I first confronted the demon, it planted thoughts and memories into me. I'm not making excuses…but it made me feel, uh, covetous in a sexual way, towards Talitha." This was terribly painful to say aloud but he wasn't going to hide from it. "I have never had sexual thoughts about my daughter before, and now suddenly I have this great guilt!"

Father Alba stared out over the waters, looking slightly perplexed. "I don’t think you should ask forgiveness for actions that aren't your own. But please know, I'm not here to judge, I'm only a conduit, so if there was any part of the thoughts that were yours, you'll have to confess and repent."

"They weren't my thoughts."

"Then go in peace and sin no more." The priest had barely finished his sentence when the ferry rammed hard into the side of the slip. It was sloppy work on such a calm night, but William had seen worse, and the jarring sensation was familiar and comforting. They'd be docked on the Island in just over a minute and Adrina was tense, giving orders like the world’s smallest drill sergeant.

"Brian and you…the big one, get over here! We're getting close to being too late…you boys; you get your father to the hospital as quick as you can. Get the maiden and we meet at the house. Father, go to the church, you'll need to baptize these three, get everything you'll need and don't forget the Eucharist! They'll need to take Communion you know." She shooed them on, as the gates opened. "Hurry…do not dawdle!"

Will took the first leg of their race to the hospital.

It wasn't far, just about three quarters of a mile and the two boys took turns and pumped their legs furiously. During the trip, William had little to do besides worry. He wished he could do something besides sit in the chair, but his exhaustion weighed on him like an anchor, and he wondered briefly where the demon would be in the house and hoped that it'd be in the kitchen, or maybe the dining room. With all the stairs he didn't think he could handle the attic, but it was a better alternative to the basement. Knowing that a girl had been roasted down there made his skin crawl, and he shivered briefly despite the warmth of the night. He decided to concentrate on something productive instead: how to kidnap your own daughter from a military hospital.

4

At that time of night the corridors of the building were empty and William saw that getting her out of the hospital would be easy, compared to getting her out of her room. Talitha lay hooked up to a machine that assisted her to breathe, which they would have to keep going somehow. Not only that, she had at least three electrical leads running from her body and removing any one of them would set off beeping alarms which would alert the nurse on duty.

The boys had moved so quickly that he hadn't thought of a single way to move her, before they were pulling into the vacant parking lot. He directed them to use the service elevator at the near end of the hospital since it was the least used. As it was, the place was so deserted that they could have used the main elevators. The building seemed asleep and a few minutes later, they slipped noiselessly into Talitha’s room.

Save for the breathing of four sleeping girls, the room was silent. All but Talitha, came awake slowly and Gayle who may've been the bleariest asked, "Was it her? Was it the right lady?"

Her voice seemed loud to William and he whispered in an exaggerated fashion, "Yes, she's on the Island with Father Alba, He's going to do an exorcism, not on Talitha but on Henny Harris." He explained quickly the odd story and events surrounding Adrina.

"Wow!" Lisa exclaimed quietly. "She has psychic powers. This is great! We have a chance now."

William answered Lisa but did so while looking at Gayle determinedly, "There's no 'we', Lisa. Only the three of us, Will, Brian, and I are going. I wish Will didn’t have to go, but the lady insisted. She believed it's important."

Gayle appeared in a state of shock at the idea of sending her son back into the house. Tears rolled down her cheeks as she whispered, "My boy…not my boy."

William went to her and slipping from the wheel chair, knelt down in front of her. "Honey, he's not a boy anymore. He's a man, a valiant man and I need him by my side." He said this, not only to reassure Gayle but also to bolster Will, who periodically let his fear out to stampede across his face, and was currently looking slightly pale.

Gayle nodded through her tears and rubbed her eyes hard with the palms of her hand. "Ok…ok! But you listen to me." She suddenly tossed aside her fear and despair and looked at him fiercely. "You ALL come back! None of this Blue Book crap! You all come back. I don’t care what you have to do, but you will all come back."

"We will. Whatever it takes. I promise." William would've assured her to a greater degree but his body felt limp, like a slowly deflating balloon, and he struggled to get back to his chair. He sagged into it and tried to concentrate on his wife’s face to keep his head from spinning. Please be in the kitchen, he thought to himself. If the demon was in the attic…he refused to think on it anymore and was grateful when Brian came in to the room. Grateful but also puzzled. "Where were you?"

"Just doing a little recon. There's a single orderly at the station. If we can get him to move, we'll be able to get Talitha out. The main problem is that there are only two other patients and they're both on this end."

Will went to the door, peeked out, and then looked to his little sister. "Katie, do you think you can sneak past that big desk and go all the way to that last room on the right?"

She poked her head out and took her bearings. "Yes, that'll be easy," she said without a trace of fear. "But which way is right again?"

He pointed to the far wall. "That way. The last door on that wall." She started to go but he pulled her back in. "Not yet, Bunny. Here's the plan." Will picked up Gayle's dinner tray. "Katie, you go to that room and drop this tray as loud as you can. Then hide in the closet. Can you do that?" She nodded as if it were nothing. "Good. If you're caught just say you dropped the tray and you hid because you were scared. When the orderly goes to check out the noise we slip Talitha out of the bed, Lisa gets in it and we hook her up to the monitors. If any of those beeping alarms go off, we'll say we accidently unplugged them." He paused for questions or concerns, but no one said a word, so he kept going, "Once Talitha is disconnected we put her in the wheelchair and slide her into the closet until the coast is clear."

William didn’t like the idea of a teenage boy planning the operation and saw glaring holes in his plan. "Two problems: First, Tal and Lisa don’t look anything alike and second, how do we keep her breathing while we do all of this?"

Lisa responded to the first question, "Look how covered up she is, you can barely see her. I don’t think he'll notice."

"But the breathing…" Will said almost to himself. He went to Talitha, eyed the little pumping machine closely, and followed the tubing from it to her mouth. Tape held it in place both on her top lip and on her chin. He then went to the small cabinet next to the bed and after rummaging through it, he pulled out some identical tubing, tape, and scissors. "Here we go! The machine is simply pushing air in and pulling it out. I think if we cut the hose and leave the rest in her, we can breathe into it every few seconds. She'll be ok for a while."

"The extra tubing will go in Lisa's mouth I take it?" William asked.

"Yes, what do you think?" Will asked nervously, hoping for his father's approval.

"It's a sound plan. Her low body temperature will decrease her need for oxygen, so keep breathing for her, but make sure you don't overdo it. Will you almost burst my lungs when you saved me, which by the way, I never did thank you for."

Will went a light pink. "It was nothing."

"It was stupid to the point of being ridiculously dangerous...but also heroic beyond anything I've ever seen and I thank you." The pink color went into overdrive and Will's cheeks glowed red. "Now let's put your plan into action."

Brian and Lisa, neither of whom were affected by Talitha's touch, moved her with great care so as not to disrupt the leads right away. They put her in the spare wheelchair that Katie had played with earlier and then Lisa slipped into the bed. They taped the tube into her mouth and when all was ready, Katie glided silently out into the hall on sock-covered feet. She was quick and it was only seconds before they heard a clatter from down the hall. Gayle, who was keeping watch, put her unbroken arm down to signal that it was time to make the switch.

The monitor sang out, a low sorrowful boooooop when it was unplugged. In four seconds they had Talitha unhooked and Lisa was plugged in five seconds after that. This time the monitor sounded cheery and beeped loudly in happiness. The boys hid Talitha and everyone waited for what felt like a long time before the door swung open. Now was when they would find out if their ruse was going to work, but it was only Katie.

"Where's everyone? Did it work?" she asked of her mother.

"I guess so. The orderly never seemed to notice. Let's hope a real emergency doesn't happen up here." Gayle's relief was contagious and everyone stood about smiling, except for Lisa who could only hoot happily through her tube.

William called them back to the grave task at hand, "We have to go."

This sobered them up quickly, and instead of standing around smiling, they stood around staring at each other uneasily and no one seemed to want to be the first to say goodbye. Gayle surprised William by being the first. She went to her son, her eyes shining with tears, hugged him and then kissed him. It broke the ice and they all said quick goodbyes and gave each other kisses, all except Brian, who stood with Talitha and breathed into her tube.

Gayle broke away from William, wiped her glistening face and said, "I'm going to distract the orderly...give me thirty seconds." One more quick kiss and she was gone. William felt a terrible pang in the deepest cellar of his heart, but kept his game face on and swallowed the fear. It was not a fear concerning physical injury, but rather it was the fear that he had looked into those brown eyes for the last time.

Katie cheered him up. In the thirty seconds they had to wait, she gave him an extra hug and said, "I'm tired of this hospital food, can we have pancakes when you get back?"

He couldn't say no to that and smiled despite his heavy heart. "Anything you want, Katie." With that, he goosed her bottom once, which sent her scampering away smiling. He then turned to his son: "Will, if you would be so kind?"

Will gave a quick peek out, and in moments they were buzzing down the hall. They would have looked like kids racing each other with the wheelchairs had it not been for the fixed looks of determination on their faces.

They had barely turned the corner of the first hall when William heard, "Hey! Shtop!" For a second his heart froze but he then realized it was Brian trying to talk around the tube stuck between his lips.

Turning back, they saw the reason he wanted to stop, Talitha was sliding out of the chair like ice cream down the side of a cone. Will went to him and they tugged her back into position. He then darted into the nearest room and came back with more of the white hospital tape. They wound it about her until she was semi-erect and looked as though she would stay put. It was terrible to see her head hanging to one side. It looked lifeless.

It made William almost sick to see her like that. "Could you lean the chair back? Her head it..." he couldn't finish the sentence. Brian pulled back and Talitha's head rolled grotesquely and slowly into a better position. Without a monitor telling them she was alive, she appeared a corpse in need of a grave.

Chapter 12

Will in the Void

1

The front wheels of the chair kept catching on the uneven bricks and this forced Will to lean his father back in order to catch up to the speeding Brian. The street hadn't been smooth, but it felt like glass compared to the washboard of the sidewalk.

They had slipped out of the nearly deserted hospital without a single challenge and the darkness of the June night swallowed them up whole. It took all of a minute before Will felt the sweat rolling down his back. He was glad for it. He needed the work—the exertion—he needed anything to keep from having to think about what it was they were running so eagerly towards.

Every few minutes he forced himself to look ahead to see where Brian was. This was a reluctant move on his part because each time the house came into view, it looked larger and each time his chest tightened just a little bit more.

His father lounging in the wheelchair stretched and yawned widely in an almost bored fashion. Had it been any other man, Will would've thought the display of nonchalance to be an absurd act, but the Commander was fearless. He had literally been killed by the demon just fourteen hours earlier, yet here he was looking like he had just woken from a nap. Will wished he had that kind of bravery; instead he was practically wetting himself, and he regretted not having gone to the bathroom while at the hospital.

They were midway down the Row when Brian slowed and he was just nearing the Harris house when he came to a stop.

A low whisper from Brian: "Something moved on the Harris' porch."

Butterflies exploded to life in Will's stomach at the statement. His eyes grew huge in the night, and it was with huge eyes he scanned the darker gloom of the porch. He could see nothing but shadows, each of which seemed to hold the figure of Mrs. Harris grown huge and bloated with evil. Sweat trickled into his eye and when he lifted his hand to wipe it away, he saw that it shook badly. He slapped it back down onto the wheelchair's rubber grip and used his shoulder to clear the sweat instead.

"Go slowly past the porch, Brian," William commanded quietly. With his head cocked to the left and his breath barely under control Will followed slowly behind his friend. They were just passing the darkened porch when a voice spoke loud and confident.

"Kind of an odd night for a stroll, especially with your sick daughter. She doesn't look so good."

Will jumped, startled by the words, and the wheelchair ground to a halt on the bricks.

"Get going, Will," his father said in a very low whisper. Then louder, he spoke to the darkness, "Just taking care of a few things. Is that you, Henny?"

Will got the chair moving again and he followed the sidewalk around to the side of their house. This wasn't easy since it was a narrow path, which Will refused to look at it. Instead he watched as a silhouette drifted down the porch and came toward them across the bricks.

It was garbed completely in black, so that it melded with the shadows, and at one moment appeared large and at another small. It moved with the silent graceful ease of the demon and Will, who was close to panicking, kept his head craned around at a near impossible angle so as to keep an eye on it. Suddenly it strode from beneath the tree that grew between the two houses and the moon revealed Mrs. Harris.

"What sort of things need to be taken care of so close to midnight, William?" she asked with equal parts cockiness and curiosity.

"This has to do with helping Talitha, you probably wouldn't be interested." His father still sounded calm but he sat up straighter and Will could see he had a grip on the arms of the chair, ready to push himself up if needed.

The sidewalk strayed even farther to the left, which put Mrs. Harris directly at Will's back. He felt completely exposed to her. His skin began to crawl, and then to twitch along his spine. When she spoke again, from right behind him, he couldn't help it and his shoulders bunched as if he were expecting a blow.

"You're wrong. I care deeply for Talitha." The sidewalk jogged back to the right for the final short leg to his house and Will was able to see her again. Unbelievably, she was smiling and he stared at her in disbelief.

"Will!" his father spoke his name, a sharp word of warning and he looked forward just too late to avoid running the wheelchair into the back of Brian's legs. It must have hurt, but the boy only grunted and it was then that Will saw the reason for the abrupt stop.

Adrina was there. She stood stooped over, looking tiny next to the house. The moonlight cast shadows in her wrinkles, giving her face a craggy appearance. Father Alba then stepped from around the corner of the house and, for just a moment, Will felt relief as if the cavalry had arrived to save him from Mrs. Harris.

He moved around to the side of the wheelchair so Henny wasn't directly behind him and his relief evaporated when he saw her. Mrs. Harris looked completely composed and utterly without fear of the ridiculous group in front of her. He suddenly saw them as she must have: a shriveled old lady, a priest shaking and sweating through his vestments, a girl who looked more like she belonged in a morgue than a hospital, a man who was a sneeze away from another heart attack, a skinny little boy who looked to be just hitting puberty and Will, who was the worst of the lot.

He knew he was the weak link in a weak group and the need to pee was badly on him. And just then he remembered his foolish words from earlier; I say we knock her out cold. What a joke that seemed now.

"You brought a priest and is this his grandmother? Is this what you brought to help Talitha?" There was an edge of mocking cruelty to her voice.

Adrina turned her head without taking her eyes from Mrs. Harris and spat like a cowboy onto the bricks. "How'd you do it?" she asked. "You summon a beast of this much power not once but twice. Please, I'm dying to find out how."

Mrs. Harris' haughty demeanor didn't waver for a second. "I'm sure I don't know what you're talking about. William, what sort of people are you getting yourself mixed up with?"

Will's father turned slightly in his chair to face her. "You can deny it all you wish, but we know it was you who summoned the demon. What kind of deal did you make for the life of my daughter?" She pretended not to understand and only shook her head sadly at him. He continued, "Fine. Play it that way, but you should be happy because when we help Talitha, we'll also be helping you."

"You're so sweet, William, but I don't need your help. I'm doing just fine on my own."

The priest spoke, "Mrs. Harris, you don't have anything to fear. We're going to end the connection between you and the demon." He paused and her guilt was solidified in Will's eyes when she waited to hear how this was going to be done. The priest continued, "We're going to perform a simple exorcism on you. It won't..."

She laughed loudly in the warm muggy night. "Oh my! That's a good one! An exorcism on me! That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard. Let's say there is a demon. How on earth would an exorcism on me, help Talitha?"

Her laughter was unnerving in its complete lack of fear and everyone cast a questioning look at Adrina who only shook her head ruefully. "I guess there's no fooling you," the old woman said, as if she had been found to be a cheat. "I suppose I'll need this earlier than I thought."

She slid her thick scarf from off her shoulders and with a hypnotizing slowness, pulled from her purse a gun that looked gigantic in her small hands. Still slow and deliberate she wrapped the gun with the scarf and pointed it in Henny's direction. Henny had eyed the gun silently, everyone had eyed the gun silently, and when the scarf wrapped it, they eyed that as well.

2

The silence stretched out and Henny was just beginning to shake her head to say something, when Adrina spoke, "Bless me Father for I have sinned. It has been one day since my last confession. I lied today. I told a group of people that the witch would be glad to have the connection with the demon ended. I said this even though I knew she would never do it unless she knew I would shoot her in the liver and drag her inside by her hair if she didn't go in voluntarily. I beg your forgiveness."

No one spoke.

Henny's eyes had been huge at the sight of the gun but at the words shoot her in the liver, they grew bigger still and her mouth came open and hung slack.

Adrina gave the priest a little nudge to remind him of his duty. He started as if coming awake from a dream. "Oh yes, oh yes." Without taking his eyes from the scarf, he mumbled, "May God give you pardon and peace, and I absolve you from your sins in the name of the Father the Son and the Holy Ghost."

"Amen," agreed Adrina, the gun never wavering from Henny's midsection. "Over to the garage, witch. Brian, please open the door."

Henny came suddenly alive. "Commander Jern, you can't be serious! Don't you see..."

"Shut it, witch!" Adrina spoke sharply, her face alight with inner fire. "With the scarf no one will hear the gun and I think we'll have just enough time to do the exorcism before you bleed to death."

Everyone, including Henny, fully believed that Adrina would pull the trigger. "Ok, ok, don't shoot, ok?" Henny walked crab like in a sideways motion to the garage and Adrina shooed her to the rear.

The old lady then began to bark orders: "Father, Baptisms first, then Communion, and please be quick about it, no sermons! Everyone get inside the garage. Will, there's a box just outside, its heavy. Don't go spilling it! Brian, please put Talitha on the hood of the car." They all scurried about doing as they were told and Father Alba mumbled prayers almost continuously.

William, who had nothing to do, sat near to Henny and glowered at her with intense hatred. "How could you?"

"I don't..."

"Stop lying or I'll have the old lady shoot you. I think she'll do it if I ask nicely."

Adrina who was helping the Priest prepare the sacramental wine heard this. "Only if you say please, Commander. Wait, who am I kidding? I'd shoot her even if you didn't say please."

"But..." Henny glanced around for some sympathy, but saw only hard looks. "Ok. You don't understand how it was. The demon haunted me day and night, until I was forced to...you know with that other girl... "

Adrina interrupted and her eyes were black as jet and oozed hate, "Emily! Her name was Emily!"

"Yes, I forgot. Emily was what it needed, you know a virgin. This was back when I was just a teenager. I was just a kid; it wasn't my fault." She looked up at Adrina and quickly looked away again. "The demon was always at me, threatening and promising. So..." she paused searching in desperation for the right words.

"You gave her to the demon, right?" William's words were ice.

"Yes," Henny replied weakly. "I had to. It was driving me insane."

"Stop it with that crap! You received something in the bargain, but it screwed you over didn't it?" The man's voice had become more hoarse and Will hoped his father wasn't exerting himself too much, too early.

"Yes...it tricked me! It lied to me."

Just then Father Alba cleared his throat loudly, and pronounced them ready to begin.

He started with a quick prayer and then breathed on each of them in an exaggerated fashion. He then made the sign of the cross on their foreheads and chests. Something salty was next placed in their mouths and for some reason the priest took off his stole and slid it across them. This Will thought was odd but when the priest spat on his fingers and touched Will's ears and nose with it, Will glanced around in confusion. He had thought Baptism was about running water over you or being dunked in a pool, not about spit.

"Do you reject Satan and all his works and all his empty promises?" he asked of them.

Adrina spoke loudly, "I do." The others followed suit, including Henny, which Will found ironic.

The priest moved to each and dabbed oil on their chest and between the backbone.

He then said: "Please repeat after me, I believe in God, the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth. I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord, who was born of the Virgin Mary, was crucified, died and was buried, rose from the dead, and is now seated at the right hand of the Father. I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy Catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and life everlasting. Amen."

He spoke slowly enough for them to be able to repeat the words. They all mumbled along and when they were done, Father Alba switched to a white stole and took up what looked like a deep bowl of water.

Talitha was first and he poured the slightest amount of water on her forehead and made the sign of the cross over her. Will thought he would move on but instead he repeated the water and the sign of the cross twice more before saying, "Talitha, I baptize thee in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost." Adrina stood next to him holding a small container and the priest dipped his finger in it and again made the sign of the cross, but this time it was near the top of her head.

This he repeated on all of them and part of Will was impatient at the elaborateness of the ceremony, but the greater part of him saw this as his only protection against the demon so he waited his turn patiently. He wondered if the protective nature of the sacrament was diluted by the fact that his baptism was occurring in a garage with a kidnapped witch in attendance.

Henny went last and acted for all the world like a real catholic, but it was an obvious front and no one was fooled.

After Henny was finished, Adrina again helped the priest, this time preparing the Eucharist for communion. Father Alba zipped through barley heard prayer while William struggled mightily to keep from passing out from the heat of the garage. His head kept nodding up and down as he caught himself falling asleep every few seconds.

"Can you move over Brian," Will said. The boy had never left Talitha's side and had been blowing gently into her tube the entire time. Brian slipped around the end of the car and Will wheeled his father to the door and opened it halfway.

The night suddenly felt wonderfully cool and refreshing. Will took a deep breath and heard the priest say, "This is the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. Happy are those who are called to his supper."

Suddenly his favorite part of the Mass came to mind and he said aloud, "Lord, I am not worthy to receive you, but only say the word and I shall be healed." This earned him a nod from Father Alba, who was now ready to start communion.

"The witch first please, Father," Adrina said; Henny looked up nervously.

"The body of Christ," the priest intoned solemnly and held out the wafer of unleavened bread to her. Henny looked blankly at it.

"Say amen and then eat it, don't worry, it's not poisoned," Adrina added with a smile.

She did as she was told and then the priest took up one of the Dixie cups that held the wine. "The blood of Christ."

"Amen," she said with a little more enthusiasm and knocked it back as if it was a shot of whiskey. Father Alba gave her a tired look and then went to the rest in turn.

Will took his next and when William, who was last in line, was finished, he said from his wheel chair, "Ok, are we all done?" The priest nodded and William continued, "Then it's time to get moving. Boys, you need to get your game faces on. If you have any fear you'll need to toss it aside now, because in there, it'll freeze you in place."

Will felt his butterflies kick into high gear but now there was a little something extra that he tried to ignore. Without realizing it, he began to rub his stomach and within moments, he knew he was going to be sick. He tried to fight it, but it was losing battle and a second later, he ran for the side of the house. There, he heaved up the tiny mushed wafer and the teaspoon or so of wine, he had drank. His body didn't think it was done and retched loudly for a few minutes, but nothing of substance came up and he finally sat back in the grass shaking.

"You ok, Will?" William asked from a discreet distance.

"Yeah, just give me a minute." His need to relieve himself came on him urgently and due to his shaking hands his zipper seemed very hard to work. After a short struggle, he got it down and urinated against the demon-infested house. When he was done he felt almost giddy with relief.

"Do I have to take Communion again," he asked Father Alba, who stood hunched over, leafing through a leather bound book.

"No, once is enough, even if you get sick. But..." he paused and licked his lips nervously. "Like your Father said...I guess now is the time to get going." He sounded terribly unenthused at the idea.

"We cannot go yet," Adrina stated, focusing her gaze on Henny. "I have to know how she's done this. The manner of the summons may be of great consequence."

Henny looked about her, surprised at the question. "I don't remember all of it but I wrote it down. This isn't a trick, I swear. It's in my house." She laughed a slightly crazed laugh. "It's in the freezer! Funny huh? I couldn't keep it near me, it just gave me the creeps. I drew symbols and...never mind...you can see for yourself. Send one of the boys to get it."

Adrina looked at her in a peculiar way. "You put the instructions for summoning a demon in your freezer?"

"Yeah, I really did, funny huh? It's in a bag of coffee...no one drinks it but me. Greg is such a...I mean all he drinks is tea, like one of those British ladies."

Will realized if anyone was going to get the summons, it would have to be him, and the idea of heading into the witch's lair, as his mind suddenly saw it, filled him with secret dread. "I...I can get the summons if you want it," he said trying his best to sound natural.

"No, I think we won't need it after all." Adrina looked down at Henny, contemplating. Seconds went by with the garage still and quiet. Will was terribly antsy to get started. He worried he'd lose his nerve and chicken out if they didn't get moving fast. Still, Adrina delayed. She squatted down next to Henny and looked into her eyes. "Tell me how this all started."

William also grew impatient and sighed loudly at the delay, but there seemed to be no hurrying Adrina. Henny didn't seem to mind, in fact she appeared very relaxed. "It was an accident. A friend of mine had a Ouija board and we were just pushing the little pointer around scaring each other. Then she went to the bathroom and I was just messing with it when I noticed my hands were spelling out words. The pointer would tug just the slightest bit under my fingers, it spelled out: Who are you? I wish I hadn't answered. But I did."

Henny stopped talking as if that was the end of the story and she blinked in surprise, or so it seemed to Will. Adrina said, "And it had you, didn't it? You kept going back for more."

Henny nodded. "Yeah. It was slow at first. Like it was just learning how to spell words. Then it got faster and faster...hey, can I have shum more of that wine?"

Father Alba looked offended at the question. "No, of course not, that is Sacramental wine."

Adrina waited on Henny to continue but she was slow in answering and Will felt his butterflies pick up their tornado like action in his stomach, this happened at every break in Henny's story.

He had time to take a glance at Brian who appeared interested in the story, and looked serene giving Talitha her sips of air. This confirmed what Will already knew: he—Will Jern was the most afraid of them all. Even the priest had relaxed during his rituals, and Will was suddenly jealous that the man wouldn't have to go into the house.

"Come on, finish what you're saying," Adrina ordered, and Will saw that the big gun was back in her hand. However, it jittered about slightly, etching an erratic course over Henny. If the old lady shot the thing, it would be only a guess as to where the bullet would end up.

Henny was having trouble beginning her story again and her eyes, black and beautiful, danced in tune with the barrel of the gun, following it wherever it went.

"Bell...I mean uh, well," she started to say but blinked largely, her eyes running to catch up to the barrel of the gun. "I didn't do it hall really. The uh demon...It..." She paused blinking more, "It wush telling me what tuh do you she...It would shay...ya know, go get thish from..." She blinked stupidly, as if she couldn't recall exactly what she had been saying. She forgot about the gun and looked around, her head twisting about jerkily. "It uh, toad...what tuh...Hey! You did shumpin..."

Adrina nodded and put the gun away. "Bless me, Father for I have sinned. It has been about twenty-five minutes since my last confession. I desecrated the sacramental wine and used it to drug the witch..."

"Wha? Huh?" Henny interrupted, her head lolled to the side, she had trouble keeping it upright on her shoulders.

William wheeled himself closer, his face hot with anger. "That was totally unneeded. You had the gun..."

Adrina held up her hand to silence him, and continued, "I also lied to everyone here. I told them that a simple exorcism was all that was needed to save their Talitha. I should have told them the truth, one of them will have to kill the witch. It's the only way to close the gate and the only chance the girl has of getting back. I beg forgiveness, Lord."

3

A silence settled on the garage. Will looked down at Henny; she had fallen asleep. Amazingly, she was more beautiful asleep than she ever had been while awake. He didn't think he would have the guts to kill her.

"I can't do it," the priest said with finality.

"Neither can I. Aren't we supposed to be the good guys here?" Will asked.

"No, I meant I can't absolve you of your sins, Mrs. Fortini. You have to be truly sorry."

"Oh I am!" she spoke sharply. "I'm sorry I got out of bed this morning, or even let you four into my home! I'm sorry to have any part of this...I didn't ask for any of this. God knows how much I'd rather be home in bed right now. So don't presume to tell me, what I'm not sorry about!"

Father Alba looked chagrined. "You're right...the Lord sees into your heart, Mrs. Fortini and only through his power and blessing can I absolve you of your sins...unless you have some more you forgot to mention?" She shook her head with great weariness, and he finished, "Then I absolve you."

"Amen. Breathe for the girl, Brian." He had been staring at them; opened-mouth and the tube had slipped out. Quickly he grabbed it up as Adrina continued, "I lied because I had to. Because, as Will stated you're the good guys. Now, I will tell you the truth of what we must do." She startled the priest by reaching up and removing the broad white stole he wore around his shoulders during the sacraments. "This has to be bound to both the witch and to your Talitha, wrapping it around their hands should be good enough. The witch is connected to the demon. The connection runs through her black heart. Brian you have the sword?"

Brian took out the sword, which had been tucked into his jeans at the hip and held it up still wrapped in the cloth. Adrina nodded. "Good, hold onto it. It will be enough to stab the witch through the heart, but..."

"Wait!" Will cried, angrily. "Is this what you were talking about? Is this the tough decision that makes me a man? Stab a sleeping woman through the heart?"

"Don't do it then." She turned to Brian. "Will you do it?" His head went down and he studied the floor. "Commander, what about you?"

William looked aghast at the idea. "I uh, I..." was all he could say.

"Good for me then. I'll kill the witch now and the gate will be closed. Your Talitha will have to find her own way back." She raised the gun at the sleeping girl.

"Wait please," Will begged. His emotions were everywhere. Was this what it came down to? Murderer?

"Kill her up there, or I do it here." Adrina's eyes were black gun barrels pointing right at him. "Innocent...guilty," she motioned indicating the two sleeping females. "Good...evil. Choose! At least one of these girls will die tonight. Choose—the life of this murderous witch or your Talitha."

"I'll kill her," William announced forcefully. "I promised that I'd do anything to bring my little girl back and I will."

His strength bolstered Brian who nodded seriously. "I'll do it if I have to." Now all eyes turned to Will and he never felt further from being a man than at that moment.

"I don't think I can let this happen," Father Alba broke in. "I mean, I'm not supposed to, right? I should call the police or something."

Adrina spoke to him calmly, "You won't be a part of any killing, Father. You'll need to wait outside the house and under no circumstance are you to go in."

"But the police...this is illegal."

William, the Commander spoke, "You can call the SPs, we won't stop you, but it won't change the fact people are going to die here tonight. You'll only make it worse on everyone."

Father Alba licked his lips as sweat ran down his collar, "People? I thought it would be just the witch...I mean Mrs. Harris."

"Yes, her for certain, but also," William turned to look at Adrina. "You're going to die tonight as well, am I right?"

"Yes. I have foreseen it," she intoned quietly and apart from a grimace and a small shudder that went down her back, she seemed calm. Her death was what she had seen when they had first walked into her apartment. It had been horrible to watch and as he relived the moment again, his butterflies went into over drive. It seemed like a horrendous death judging by the way she'd acted and Will wondered if his own would be just as bad.

Despite the fact he'd just gone a couple minutes prior, the need to pee came over him again. It was terribly urgent—Will clutched his legs and tried not to think about it. Instead, his mind went to the death of Father Menning, he pictured the black face, and the eyes a white goo mixed with blood running from the gaping sockets in his head. At this Will's bladder let go; it was only a few small drops and stupid relief swept over him just as before.

Father Alba looked at the tiny lady. "What should I do then? What can I do to help?"

"This is important...you must burn the bodies, the witch's and mine, and any others."

"No I meant in the house. What can I do in there?"

"Nothing. You'll die if you go into the house. The demon's not stupid and it'll focus on you first. You'll die before we get ten feet into the place. This fear you have, the demon can kill you with it—but first it will drive you insane."

The priest paled at the notion. Will suddenly felt lightheaded and had a great desire to breathe the cool night air. With his heart thumping madly in his chest, he turned toward the garage door.

"Oh jeez," he said quietly to himself.

If the priest could be killed so easily by his fear, Will wouldn't stand a chance. He'd be the first to die. Excuses why he couldn't go into the house blossomed up in him like blackened roses. They were childish and pathetic and he strove to think of better ones, but nothing came to him except the vision of Father Menning and his ruined face. Will wanted so badly to run away that his feet moved in the direction of the ferry before he even realized it. Brian said something to him but Will was now picturing the ferryboat, seeing himself on it; the warm night air running over him as the boat sped away and he barely heard.

"What did you say?" Will asked.

Brian gave a small breath and pulled the tube from his mouth, his hand shook obviously. "I asked, what did you say? You said something just now." Will felt confused and didn't think he had said anything.

"I said something?" he asked blankly, his eyes fixed on Brian's shaking hands.

Brian noticed what Will was staring at and said sheepishly, "Man, I'm scared to death."

Will's eyes bugged at the sentence and he spoke in a rush, "Me too! I thought I was the only one." The idea that Brian was afraid also, ironically seemed to give him a touch of courage. "It'll be ok. I think so at least," he said to encourage the smaller boy.

"I hope so," Brian said. "But the idea of dying...like that priest makes me want run home and hide in my mom's bed."

Will had a sobering thought. "Do you love Talitha that much...you know, to risk this?"

"I do," Brian replied simply. He stuck the tube in his mouth and gave her a little more life.

Adrina watched them and Will began to wonder about her as well. "Mrs. Fortini, why are you doing this? I don't see how your fate could get that much worse."

"Yes, I worry over the physical pain but...I have not been a good person. A lot of times yes, I have been good. But I have done some things, some very bad things and now I have to consider my soul. This will be my last chance to balance things out. Which reminds me...Father, I said you'd have to burn the bodies of the witch and mine, but not together! Her remains, the ash and bones, have to be dumped into a river or a very large stream. As for me, I want somewhere nice. One of those pretty little towns upstate that looks like it belongs on a postcard. I want to be around people...find me a hill where the trees will turn orange and gold in the fall, maybe one that overlooks a park or a school, so I can watch the children run and play. That sounds nice doesn't it?"

She seemed to be talking to Will so he answered, "Yes ma'am, but what about heaven?"

"I hope so. I hope that's where I'll go, but I better cover my bets." She looked to the priest. "You can do it. Just use lots of wood and gasoline and don't stand down wind. Oh! I almost forgot, if we all die, burn the house down, ok?"

"What?"

"Yes. If we're not back in twenty minutes, burn it down. The gate has to close or there'll be more deaths. In fact if we all die that will mean Mrs. Harris will be alive, and I guarantee she'll come after you, Father. And, she'll come after your wife, Commander and your other daughter as well. It's another reason to be strong and do the hard thing."

Father Alba looked sick with fear, but he nodded and mumbled something that sounded like an Ok.

"We shouldn't wait any longer," Will's father declared with his characteristic fearlessness. The words made Will tense up quickly. The small spark of courage he had felt earlier was draining fast and he began to rub his hands together as if they were cold.

"This is the plan," Adrina's slight accent became noticeably thicker. "First, I go in. After comes big, strong Will...you carry the witch. Then Brian you carry your Talitha and finally you, Commander. Make sure the boys don't dawdle, I don't want to be up there all alone."

"Will it be in the attic?" William asked from his wheelchair and for once Will saw his father slightly unnerved.

"Yes, up at the top. Now as I said, I will challenge it first...and when I die, then one of you must confront it. Keep it occupied while the others tie stole and kill the witch."

There was nothing more to say and William got them moving. "Father, please push me. Boys, pick up your charges." As the priest wheeled him to the door, he continued to issue instructions, "Don't be slow on those stairs, and don't look back. Remember, do not freeze in place. Keep moving or you may not be able to start again. Good luck everyone."

4

Will heaved Henny up on his shoulder like a rolled up carpet and followed Brian around to the back of the house. The boy's eyes were wide and fearful as he looked up at the tall brick home. "How are we shuposhe to she in there? It's sho dark," he said blurring his words around the breathing tube.

Will glanced up and saw the windows were so dark they could have been made of coal.

"There'll be enough light; enough to do what has to be done," Adrina said.

"What abou va vemon?" Brian asked.

"It'll be upstairs. It will want us all the way into the house before..." Adrina took a huge breath, her hands shook as she reached out for the doorknob. "...before it comes after us. It won't want us to be able to run away." She pushed open the door and Will, who was just behind her, was physically assaulted by the cold. It was worse than it had been before. He felt the sweat of his fear freezing on him and he was glad for the warmth of Henny and hugged her to him, as if she were an animal pelt.

Adrina clutched herself despite her heavy coat and stepped into the kitchen. "The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want," she proclaimed loudly. Will felt Brian give him a push from behind and he stepped inside. Immediately, the cold invaded his lungs, searing them, it slipped beneath his thin clothes. His skin contracted in goose bumps, his testicles retreated from the dreadful cold as far up as they could go; despite this Will barely gave the cold a second thought. He was too busy being afraid.

The kitchen was impossibly dark and Adrina was already little more than a moving shadow.

"He maketh me lie down in green pastures. He leads me beside still waters." By the time she said the word 'waters', she was completely invisible to Will. Another nudge and Will realized he had frozen in fear already and he was just two feet into the blackness of the kitchen. He started shuffling forward, seconds later, he hit the kitchen table.

"Ooh!" he gave a soft cry of fear and pulled his hand back. The table seemed to be made of ice and for a second he thought the demon had slid from its hiding place and was standing right next to him and that he had touched it.

"What was that?" Brian whispered in a voice that was an octave away from panic.

"It was me...I hit something. The table I think," Will said. He heard the fear in Brian's voice, but instead of it giving him a boost, this time it only made him even more unnerved.

"He restoreth my soul," came Adrina's old panting voice. She was practically at the stairs and Will hurried forward so as not to leave her alone. As he came up he saw her then, a small figure dressed in the color of the night. Despite her age, she wasn't waiting on the men and was already five steps up. Will bent his back against his burden and headed up after her. "He leadeth me in paths of righteousness for His name's sake."

What was she talking about? It seemed to be some sort of prayer, but she was way off. The path they were taking was certainly not one of righteousness. It was a wicked path that would either lead to his death or to his becoming a murderer. It was created in sin, and sin was where it would lead. He paused looking up to get his bearings and saw the silhouette of Adrina. She had stopped and he could hear her heavy breathing in the darkness.

It was then that the Horror of the Shade looked upon him.

The demon, in the unused bedroom in the attic, sent out a casual look that nearly had Will tumbling back down the stairs. His mind became a sudden wreck and he reeled against the wall. Putting his free hand out blindly, it struck the railing, but even so he would have fallen down the stairs had the demon not moved on. He panted like a dog, while his brain scrambled to right itself. The demon was only being curious, it could have attacked in a much more powerful way, but it was only browsing through his mind, checking on their intentions.

In the darkness below him, he heard, "Uhhhhh!" And he knew Brian had been looked upon. Will tried to turn in that direction in the narrow stair, but before he could, he heard Brian say, "Oh my God!" Brian had been released as quickly as Will had been. William was next and let out a long harsh gasp.

Brian shouted, "Oh my God! It looked into me! It knows why we're here."

"Hold it together!" William growled. His voice floated up out of the shadows, sounding like it came from a very old man and he followed his words with a dry hacking cough, so that Will imagined his dad as wizened and wrinkled as Adrina. "It doesn't know or it would have stopped us already. Now get moving," the Commander ordered.

"It's just toying with us. We gotta go back," Brian cried. The boy's fear was infectious and Will began to shake in terror. Henny Harris started to shake too and then she screamed out. She was face down over his right shoulder and the scream was abrupt and without any warning and he staggered again, nearly dropping her. This was partly because he was off balance and partly because the sound tearing from her throat was so unnatural.

"H-elp me, F-ath-er Al-ba!" Henny's voice started low but went through the scale as if she were tuning it. It was an inhuman horrible sound as if she weren't alive at all—as if she was just the demon's sock puppet. Will's skin flashed from the inside out as adrenaline hit his system and he twisted in fright to look at Henny. He was in a near panic, thinking he would see her with long curved fangs in her mouth and great sharp horns upon her head, but try as he might it was impossible to see her. "The-ay are ra-ping me!" She screeched in a voice that was a poor imitation of a human's.

Above him on the stairs Adrina yelled, "Don't let the priest come in the house!"

"It's a trick, Father," William called out in his old man voice. "It's the demon. Don't come in."

"No! The-ay arrre real-ee ra-ping me!" the demon cried out.

Will was so horrifically repulsed by the infested body on his shoulder that he swung Henny slowly back and then accelerated her hard forward so that she crashed, thumping head first into the wall of the stairwell.

Undaunted the demon screamed out of Henny's lips, "The-ay arrre kil-ling me!"

Revulsion so complete had Will smashing her head a second time, uncaring that it was a person's head he was crushing.

Now there was silence both in the kitchen and on the stairs. The body hung limp on Will's shoulder, yet he waited, afraid. After a few seconds it became apparent that the priest wasn't going to come in and Adrina whispered back to them, "Let's go!"

Will started up the stairs and that's when the body on his shoulders began to increase in weight. Henny seemed unchanged in appearance still she grew heavier and heavier. In seconds, his load doubled and he bent straining at it, pushing his legs painfully through the motions of climbing the stairs.

The extra weight slowed him, but Will was very strong and he did not stop. Gasping for breath, he continued. However, the demon wasn't done. Henny twitched a little and then suddenly straightened on his shoulder. Her back leveled out and her arms and legs shot up so she appeared to be trying to fly like a cartoon superman. This unbalanced Will and again he came close to dropping her and was forced to throw her weight against the wall to keep her supported on his shoulder.

"What's wrong?" Adrina demanded. Will was surprised he could see her so well, that he was as close as he was to her.

"She's having a seizure, I think." Will squirmed beneath her to get a better grip on the ungainly body.

"Then throw her down and drag her the rest of the way," Adrina suggested. This seemed like a plan, but just then, Henny went limp and her weight returned to normal.

"I'm good, go on," Will whispered breathlessly. He turned to see that Brian, whose eyes were as big as saucers, was only a few steps behind him. His father, only just visible in the gloom, was still slowly making his way up the stairs. Will straightened to press on, only to feel Henny's weight increase rapidly again, and the same routine repeated itself. Even knowing it was coming, he almost went down in a heap, and he had a feeling that was exactly what the demon was looking for, so he toiled on. His muscles were burning and trembling even before he passed the second floor landing and the final flight up was pure hell on his back.

Just four steps from the top Adrina stood staring into the darkness of the attic hall and Will was forced to stop.

"Go," he said.

Adrina coughed her wet cough and refused to move. After a few seconds, Will's burden became desperately heavy, and he tried again, "Move! Go forward!" However, Adrina didn't budge and Will was forced to dump Henny roughly onto the stairs. He went up the last few, "Go," he said, as quietly as he could directly into her ear, but Adrina stood unmoving save for a constant shivering.

"I can't...I can't do this. I thought I could but I can't," she whispered.

Will was at a complete loss. She was the one with the plan, the knowledge, and the visions. "But the vision, remember? This will be worse for all of us if you don't go in there," he said looking down the darkened hall.

Now he could feel the baleful presence of the demon in the room not thirty feet away. It was there, he knew it was there, like a great black spider patiently waiting for its next meal. Will's heart had been beating rapidly before, but now it beat in a painful disjointed fashion and he felt each beat distinctly. He was very nearly paralyzed with fear, just as Adrina was and he remembered his father's warning about not stopping and how it would be difficult to get moving again. Suddenly Will needed his father, badly. He turned to look down into the gloom.

William was much further down the stairs than he had expected. The Commander stood slightly bent over, leaning on the rail, holding his chest. Brian was much closer and after the long climb he looked ready to drop from exhaustion.

Will realized the demon had them right where he wanted them.

If they ran now, only he or Brian would have any chance at getting out and Will didn't think it was much of a chance at all. This meant there was only one direction left to them, forward, but the thought drained the will out of him.

There was supposed to be an adult in charge, there was supposed to be someone he could rely on, someone to protect him. He had honestly thought that either Adrina or his father would confront the demon and that he would only be in charge of tying the stole. He was not even sure he could do that much. His mind suddenly started visualizing knots...slipknots, square knots, granny knots...and he shook his head, wanting to scream at the stupidity of coming up there.

"Move her. I can't get by."

Will heard whispered from behind him.

Brian, with his arms sagging and his back bent under his load, stood very close to Henny's outstretched legs. Will, in the beginning state of panic, had been close to screaming and jumping past his friend to run away, but he had been given an order—Move her. An order was exactly what Will had been looking for. It kick-started his body and he dropped down, grabbed Henny's hand, and made to haul her up.

She was heavy again but this was a good thing.

On the trek up the stairs with Henny's body weighing him down, he had been so focused on his exertions that his fear had taken a back seat. When he bent down now, he strained to move her great weight, and she came up very slowly. The exertion worked for him and his mind discarded its panic with each thump of Henny's head on the stairs.

Finally, he was directly behind Adrina and he knew she would have to get out of the way for him to continue. There was only one place to go: down the hall.

Will put an arm around her shoulders. She jumped, but the terror-stricken look on her face never changed. Her eyes were huge and round, her skin deathly white, and her overly large dentures made her face appear almost exactly like that of a skeleton's. With one hand pulling the limp body of Henny, and the other around Adrina's shoulders, he gently guided them forward to the deep black doorway at the end of the hall.

"Noooo, please" Adrina moaned softly. "I can't." She pushed back into him, but she was feather-light and he pushed her tenderly forward to her death.

As they neared the doorway, Will felt an arctic wind picking up from behind him and at first it blew gently but then it grew to a gale. It was a noiseless wind or so it seemed. Just as the other time he was close to the demon, his hearing became severely compromised. It was similar to being submerged underwater, and everything came to him muffled.

Still the words, "Not like this. No please, not like this," seemed to cut through to him like a knife.

5

They gained the doorway and Will didn't bother to look in. He knew what lay waiting for him inside. Instead, he gave Adrina a final push, one, that in his fear, was greater than he meant and it sent her reeling into the room and she disappeared from sight. Putting his back to the horror, he turned and used both hands to pull Henny forward. Her weight had grown so enormous that it took all the power of his young body just to slide the unconscious woman a few feet into the room. The second he entered a great terror-filled buzzing swamped his mind, it distorted all mental activity, and it became so overwhelming that he stopped and shook his head rapidly in a poor attempt to clear it.

The demon then reached out with its tremendous power and made to crush Will. The boy's mind was suddenly engulfed with insane unearthly Evil and even though he was far more prepared this time, his body still convulsed and he pitched forward over Henny. He lay in agony, uncontrollably twitching as the demon tortured him. For how long the waves of pain wracked him he never knew, but it did stop eventually. Brian staggered into the room after having borne Talitha's weight up the three stories of the house. The boy's chest heaved and he gasped mutedly, with eyes grown huge. He made to put his burden down in a gentle fashion but the demon looked away from Will at that moment and looked upon him instead.

Dimly, Will felt a weight fall over his legs. The retreating pain ravaging him was still too much and he didn't care what it was. Nor did he care about the demon, or his sister, or the witch whose head he had beaten against the wall.

All he cared about was the pain. Savagely he slapped at the skin of his arms, which only a second before had been burning like torches. The flames had been vibrant orange, the smoke a nasty smelling cruelty and the sound of his skin popping and sizzling had been unearthly.

Yet—just like that— the flames were gone and the pain was like a fleeing echo chasing itself to hide in some insane part of him. A semblance of thought came back, and with it came the knowledge he was going to die and die in the worst possible way. He would die after endless torture with his fingers charred down to nubs and his toes beaten with hammers. In a frenzy he fought to get up from whatever was holding him down, and his only clear thought was to run away as fast as he could.

He thrashed around in a panic before he realized that he was struggling under the comatose body of his sister. This knowledge didn't change his urgent need to flee; running away was the only thing occupying his mind. He had to get out of the house.

But suddenly his father appeared in the doorway.

The strain of climbing the stairs showed clearly on the man's grey face. Even though he looked to be seconds from another heart attack he was a gallant figure—every inch Commander Jern—and it rallied Will to see such courage.

His spirits were crushed a moment later, however, when the demon released Brian from its power and struck the Commander. He fell back from the doorway and Will could only see the man's powerful legs writhing and kicking.

Defeat entered Will's mind.

The demon could crush each of them in turn, without effort. There was no way it would allow him to tie the stole about the two women, let alone stab Henny to death. Nor would it allow him to run away and he knew that he would be tortured next if he tried. He pried his eyes from his father's agony and swept the room in a glance. Adrina stood just feet from the fiend. She was hunched over and seemed terribly small compared to the great swirling black mass. Her back was to him, but he could see that, like a child, she held her hands in front of her face as if that could in some way protect her.

She was supposed to confront the demon!

He suddenly felt bitterly angry—the feeling cleared a small part of his brain of the all-encompassing fear. How could she just stand there while we all suffer? He raged. The anger was good. It festered and boiled away at his fear and in seconds Will was in a fury.

Near to him, Brian struggled to stand, his eyes were wild with pain. "Brian!" Will roared out the name as his father would have and the boy looked over at him. "Kill the witch, now!"

Then, hoping he would last long enough, Will stood up and strode with enraged purpose toward the demon. "Come on!" Will bellowed at it with all the strength left in him. Amazingly, the demon recognized the challenge and released William from its torturous glare.

Will knew nothing of demons and their hierarchy, or of the titanic battles of will that establish their pecking order. All he knew was that he needed to give Brian enough time to stab the witch.

He wasn't even close.

When the demon turned to him, it was like the room in the attic fell away and Will was alone in a vast black world and there was nothing to it but him and the Shade's horrible, fell presence.

Before he even had a chance to get his bearings the demon's great will, formed eons ago, crushed his mind down to the size of a pea. The beast then did what it always did to a conquered foe. First it devoured its opponent and then it commenced to shred the pathetic being. It had barely begun to enjoy itself in this sport when a fresh challenge stood forth.

"Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil." Will heard this through the demon's great mind, as if he were seeing and feeling what the beast sensed.

There had been nothing to him only a moment before. His soul was the demon's and his face, stretching in cosmic pain had been added to the thousands of others arranged in a grotesque monument to the beast. But now his entire being came rushing back into the living embodiment of his soul and he suddenly felt new to his body, as if he were trying it on for the first time.

It was an amazing sensation just to breathe and he felt the intriguing pain of the cold air sting his lungs. Looking around, he noticed that everything in the room was tremendously magnified and with fascination, he could see the individual hairs that made up Talitha's eyelashes. They were black and thick, round at the base, but tapering to a point at the end. However, in the next second, his mind shifted interpretation of the light striking his retina and everything came to back to focus. His hearing too felt modified, and he recognized the red shifting of the sound waves, caused by his proximity to the void. All sound was being pulled, elongated, and slowed and this was accounting for the muffled quality to words.

His mind, discovering the cause, simply translated the sound to its common form and then he heard quite clearly Adrina say, "I will fear no evil, for thou Lord art with me."

Will looked at the tiny lady and saw her body trembling like a newborn in the snow.

She stood a few feet in front of him and slightly to his right. He could reach out and touch her if he wished and he could see just enough of her face to know that she was afraid but also enough to see that she was clear eyed and deliberate. Taking another step forward, the scrawny woman challenged the horrendous demon, "Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me."

"Kill her!" It was William. Commander Jern sagged in the doorway, looking close to death.

Brian shouted back and for a second Will wondered why they were shouting so loudly in the quiet room, but then he realized they were both hearing things differently than he did.

"No! The stole!" Brian had not killed Henny, as he should have but instead had dragged the two girls together and stood over them with the broken blade in his hands.

The sound of a pencil snapping drew Will's attention back to Adrina. In the short time he had looked away, she had lost the battle of wills and now she was shrieking with untold anguish. Another snap followed the first, and more followed that. Her right arm was being rolled up from her wrist. The bones of her forearm went first, snapping repeatedly in quick succession and then the larger Humerus popped instead of snapped. Pop! Pop! Pop! Her arm was being rolled up like a garden hose, and through it all, she screamed in fantastic soul rending misery.

This wasn't an illusion, or a mental aberration like the flames on his arms had been. This was real.

The left arm was next and it went so fast the noise was a long crunching sound, overlaying her screams. Her dentures flew from her mouth, exploding on contact with the hardwood floors and large fake teeth bounced in all directions.

"The stole!" Brian yelled again and Will realized it was just within reach; Adrina had it about her neck. He was half-laying, half-sitting and he stretched out his arm to take it from her, but suddenly she started to move, her body began twisting away from him. Her head however remained fixed, staring into the gaping maw of the demon's gate and, even as he watched, the skin of her neck began to appear stretched and braided. Still her body twisted and finally there was a gruesome "twuck" from beneath her skin.

It was the sound of one of her vertebrae breaking.

Nothing was more sickening to hear and even as Will felt his stomach lurch, more vertebrae broke, one after another. Somehow, she stood through it all, but now there were no more screams.

In the demon's vengeance, in its need to cause pain Will saw his chance. Leaping up, he snatched the stole from her shoulders and with a quick movement, he backhanded it toward Brian.

However, he got more than he realized when he took the stole from the dying Adrina, and the second the white cloth left his hand, he knew he'd made a mistake. The air swirling around the demon was not a random thing, and the demon knowing the significance of the stole, sucked it toward the void quickly.

But Will was also quick. His body reacted with the speed of his youth, and even as one end of the stole slipped into the endless black pit, he had a grip on the other. He pulled back mightily, but the void was greater still, and he slid inch by inch toward the swirling chaos. The stole was half swallowed before the corrosive effect of the void blackened the leading edge of it and Will tumbled backward when it tore.

Time became everything. Seconds became as important as decades and Will knew he was almost out of time and so as he fell away from the gate and the beast beyond it he swung his arm back in an exaggerated motion and the stole came down in Brian's outstretched hand. The boy tugged it away.

Will laid there for only the smallest fraction of a second before his father bellowed his own challenge and rushed at the fiend. Will couldn't watch what would happen to the Commander—that would take moments he didn't have, instead he twisted like a cat, scrambling to get to Brian before it was too late.

For his part, Brian was desperately winding the remains of the stole around the hands of the two women; his face was a visage of terror. He finished wrapping the cloth before Will could get to him and was just picking up the sword when they heard the sad sound of the Commander falling heavily to the floor.

Will knew Brian was going to be too late. The demon blasted him as he knelt with the sword poised above Henny's breast. Pain twisted his pleasant features into a nasty mask and the sword fell from his hands.

And Will knew he would be next.

He saw the pain coming. It would be greater by far than anything he had yet suffered and he knew as well that he wouldn't have time to plunge the blade into the witch's breast. Instead, he grabbed the gilded hilt as it fell and pressed it to his body. A fraction of a second later the demon's mind entered his own, unleashing a furious attack. Will's body convulsed as he knew it would and he fell forward onto Henny, the blade driving deep into her.

6

Will became a part of the connection.

He was a part of Talitha, and of Henny, and the Demon, but most of all he knew the eternal void.

His soul and everything that made him Will crossed through the black spinning smoke of the gate and into the void. He found himself on the path to the world, surrounded by absolute darkness. The utter blackness held a crushing fear. He could perceive the fear, not just as a mental state but with his other senses as well and he knew that the fear was almost a living thing in its own right. He could feel it demanding and lusting after him, wanting to corrupt him and yet the fear didn't affect him but seemed to slide off him in an oily manner

Wondering if this was how his father must feel, he ignored the fear and looked about, discovering that despite the dark he could see after a fashion. His vision was taken up with an insanity that was almost too immense for his mind to cope with. It was as if the walls of hell had been peeled back and all its misery lay about him.

He had to turn his eyes away.

When he did he discovered a dazzling brilliance below him. The Commander's blade—that charred piece of steel—had become a part of the void and part of the connection as well.

Except for the one moment when his father had attacked the demon with it, the sword had always seemed weak and pathetic to Will, but to the souls of the void it was nothing short of miraculous. It was a great shining beacon and all of the tortured raced to it. But the way was narrow and a great tumultuous battle broke out all around Will. It was a desperate fight that filled the darkness and it was between the shadows that the individuals fought and as soon as one was victorious, another cast him down.

However, the winner of this immense nearly infinite battle was foreordained.

The demon that had so plagued the Jerns had never left its terrible realm. It had only been able to drink through the gate, to see the world beyond, and to put forth only the smallest part of its power through it. Now, however it was going to occupy a body—Talitha's still living body— something it had waited eons for, ever since its own had ceased to live. It raced almost gleefully up the broken sword, happily destroying any of the appalling creatures that came before it. Its power in its own realm could not be denied and was absolute.

Will stood along its path, and despite whatever heroics he had performed, he was still just a boy while the demon had become a giant, a horror of shadows that dwarfed him. However, the crown of Will's head was still anointed with the chrism of his Baptism and his soul, recently purified in the baptismal waters was clean and virtuous, and Will denied the demon the body of his sister.

His mouth opened and he meant to say: No! However, something else came out instead. It was the Word, or the tiniest fraction of it.

"In the beginning was the word and the word was with God..."

That was the first line from the Gospel of John and when Will had read it in church holding Lisa's hand, he hadn't understood. But now his entire being was suffused with it and he felt God's love—the animating force that gave him life—it was in him and around him, it was a gift, but not an infinite one. It was something that shouldn't be squandered or given up lightly and Will had to choose between hoarding it and fleeing from the demon, or using the essence of his life to fight the demon and save his sister.

He hesitated not at all, and the Word rolled out of his mouth with the light of many stars and shone brightly, exposing the deception and piercing the shadows. Its intensity seemed to bring with it a wind that laid back the enveloping darkness of the demon, revealing its wretched soul, a gnarled and wizened thing. The demon fled from the light and the intense reality of God's love. It fled into the darkness and hid in its own nothingness.

With the light of the Word all about him, Will saw that the lesser creatures of the void were still battling in a tremendous swirling melee. Talitha stood out among them, shedding a dim light of her own. She was struggling with a great hellish brute and the combat was fierce and her light became faint.

Will tried to go to her, but he was drained and he could feel himself on the verge of dissipating, becoming nothing. He had nearly given too much of the force that binds us together in life. However his sister was still in a desperate situation and he called out to her, but there was nothing of the Word left in his voice.

His voice carried no light or even sound, but his breath was still hot with life and it billowed out from him. The heat of it stoked the embers of her soul, her spirit was infused by it, and her strength grew in proportion so that she was able to throw down the creature that challenged her.

But Will saw that his Talitha had changed. She had become hard and menacing, and when her opponent lay prostrate before her, she tread cruelly upon its neck and gloated over it in triumph.

It was then that a sound reached into the void from the world beyond:

"Talitha."

It was their father's voice, warm and strong with life. It echoed down the length of the sword and she looked up. With the last light of the Word, she saw herself as Will saw her. She knew shame at this, and she knew shame at things that were never witnessed outside the void.

Things done to her and worse...things she had done. She almost fled, even as the demon had, but fear and desire held her in uncertainty, until Will reached out his hand. And where once she stood far from edge of the sword, now she could stretch her arm out to it easily. And she did this, and took his warm hand in her cold dead one.

She smiled, and her love, a vague, distant memory that she had somehow held onto, crept shyly from within her. It came to him through her touch, and reminded him of life and he was eager to get back to it. And so pulling gently on her hand, he drew her forth from the void.

The End.

########

The Story continues. Book Two: An Illusion of Hell:

The Demon is Back...and Will Jern, the man who banished it eight years ago is called upon again to pit himself against the fiend.
With the lives of five children at stake, and time running out to save them, Will must find Luke, the man responsible for bringing the demon back, all the while battling a foe that is quite beyond him, not the demon, but his own sister.

Despite all the sacrifices to save her from the demon, 8 years previously, Talitha Jern came back from her time in hell, changed. At once, she is the sweet innocent sister that he has always loved, but she is also a diabolical beauty, cruel, devious, and powerful as well, with physical capabilities that are unmatched.

Talitha is also after Luke, not to save any useless children, but to further her own ends and Will must kill her first if he is going to have any chance against the demon.

An Illusion of Hell

The Trilogy of the Void Book Two

Chapter 1

12 Shots of Whiskey

"Did we ever kiss or, you know, fool around?" Talitha asked her brother.

"No," Will responded warily.

"What about dad? We did it, right?" She shifted in bed, rolling over to look up at him. In the dim light her brown eyes looked like deep black pits. This was heading into dangerous territory. He kept his face carefully composed—even though it was full night out, Talitha could see him as if he were under a spotlight.

"No, not dad either," Will said, then changed the subject, "Hey, it's bedtime and I'm getting pretty sleepy." Will was thankful it was at least partially the truth; now would be a bad time to lie. However, it was no lie that it was exhausting being in her presence.

She ran her hands through her long brown hair and stretched. "Am I sleepy?" She was not at all sleepy. Talitha never became sleepy, hungry, or thirsty.

"No Tal, but your body needs it's rest anyways, so roll on over..." That was a mistake, and he knew it right away.

Talitha had been on that verge between personalities and sometimes just a word would awaken the wrong one.

She'd been lying in her bed, with the silk of her sheets tucked sweetly up to her chin, then in an impossible blur of motion she was up. Her naked body, tan, lean, yet sleek with muscle, was a dreadful weapon. She advanced on Will with the speed of a striking snake.

He knew the blow was coming—a right hook that would level him, and he saw his options were limited to either fighting or lying back as submissively as possible. As usual he chose not to fight and took the heaviest part of the strike on his left forearm. Still there was plenty of force remaining and he was sent sprawling on the old orange and brown shag carpet. Immediately he went to his back, his hands up protecting his face.

To someone peering in through the window of the cabin, the scene would've been ludicrous. Will was tall, strong, and thick with muscle as well as fully clothed. He dwarfed the nude woman, who seemed exposed and unprotected in contrast. In reality it was she who held the upper hand and she jumped full upon the man cowering before her.

"Who the hell do you think you are?" Talitha screamed into his ear. "Insect! You are nothing."

She raked his left hand away from his face and slapped him hard on the side of the head, with her right. Will's head cranked hard over and went deep into the shag. He saw weird orange and brown spots in his vision, and blinked his blue eyes trying to clear them. His face felt as if it had been burned by the force of the blow, but despite that he was happy with the results. He knew it would get no worse than being screamed at.

"You don't tell me what to do, damn it! I tell you!" Her anger was real, perhaps the most real thing about her and she unleashed it on him.

"Roll over? You think I'll roll over for you, insect. You're not the Veeerdi...you're not even Ghushkaz! Roll over? Do you think you can make me? What a joke! You can't..." Talitha stopped yelling. With a sudden smirk on her face, she reached out and stroked his thick brown hair from his forehead.

Straightening his head in the carpet, so he could look full up at her, she continued, "Ok, I see now you were not fool enough to challenge me. It was this body you're after. Interesting..."

Talitha had been straddling him. Now she got up, hauling him to his feet as though he weighed no more than a child. Throwing him on the bed, she then crawled up on to him, rubbing her breasts along the length of his body.

He hated this about her.

She had become a creature with a strong sexual appetite and when she was in one of her moods, she no longer cared about social constructs. The terms brother and sister had no meaning for her, and if it had been possible, she would've raped him many times already. She'd tried in the past, but he had fought her to a standstill each time.

Tonight, thankfully, it wouldn't go that way. Will saw it ending soon and helped it along, "I'm so sorry... I didn't mean to presume. I beg your forgiveness."

"I don't like it when you beg. Stop it! You sound like such a fag when you do that." The idea that he was gay seemed to come over her, and she looked down at him with disgust and contempt. "Get the hell out of my bed! Jeez, how does Lisa put up with you?"

Will slipped from her bed, trying not to touch her as he got up. He wobbled slightly as the room pitched first to the left and then way over to the right, and he grabbed her dresser for support. The slap had been harder than he'd thought and his head still rang with it.

It took a moment for the room to steady itself and he almost waited too long to answer her, "She's even weaker that I am; she has to put up with me." This was of course only partly true; Lisa didn't have to put up with him at all, but it was the answer Talitha was looking for.

"Yes, I suppose she's just a girl."

Will felt clear headed enough and he turned to face Talitha knowing it would be disrespectful as well as dangerous to keep his back to her. She sat up in the bed with her sheets lying just below her breasts. With her left hand she made gentle patterns in the silk but it was far too dark to see what they were, and with her right hand she was beginning to stroke herself.

"May I retire, please?" he asked and knew she would allow it. He knew many things.

"Yeah, get out of here...MMmmhhh." He started to leave quickly but hesitated at the door, knowing what was coming, "Are you going to make French toast in the morning?" she asked sweetly. He hated her sweet voice, it was like icing on dog crap.

If he had to he'd make the French toast, though it was likely she'd be the one to fix breakfast. "Of course, if that's what you want," he replied, struggling to be cheery. "Do you want blueberry syrup or..." he really didn't need to finish the question and his face sunk, "or strawberry?"

"Actually...mmmh...I want chocolate. Mmmmhh." Chocolate meant she would be at this for at least an hour.

"Sure Tal, anything you want...sweet dreams."

"Mmmmhhh...get out."

Will shut the door behind him and went to turn on the lights in the cabin. As tired as he was, there was no way he'd be able to sleep, not with her erotic symphony going on. At the same time he didn't want to sleep, his dreams would be anything but sweet. Tonight he would dream about the rapes. There were so many...seemingly an endless number of them, one after another. An impossible amount, but the void was an impossible place after all.

Poking about in the cupboard he found his Wild Turkey and looked long at the deep amber colored whiskey. There was a formula to getting the right amount of drunk, though he didn't know it. Talitha would be able to tell him he was sure. If he asked her in the morning, she would break it down into charts and graphs and have a gay ole time doing it, too. However, he didn't need a chart to tell him he was going to drink half the bottle in front of him and follow that with a couple of sleeping pills.

He poured himself his first shot; his hands shook as the glass went to his lips. But he paid the shaking little attention; he knew it would stop in a few minutes, just as he knew there would be some sort of terrible rhino creature tonight. He shuddered at the image that popped into his head and quickly threw back a second shot. The horn of the rhino thing was not on its head. Will shuddered again.

"MMMmhhh, yessss."

Have fun, he thought to himself.

That wasn't something he'd ever say out loud. Even with her door closed, she would hear him. Her hearing, her sense of smell, and her eyesight, were all phenomenal. She had spent a day in the void, and it had turned her into some sort of insane superwoman. One moment she'd be taking a bath, something she never tired of, and the next she would break your arms with her bare hands. She was a murderer, but he loved her.

"Number three...down the hatch," he whispered and drained another shot.

The horn was long, over two feet in length and it wasn't smooth as he had first thought, but was ringed every few inches with jagged teeth like barbs.

"Oh jeez!" Will gave his head a vigorous shake to clear away the vision of the horn; it didn't work, it lingered like an early morning haze.

How Talitha had endured it was a mystery he hoped he would never figure out. Nevertheless, she had endured it and a lot more than just the rapes. He knew it because he dreamed it. It was all part of his curse.

Eight years ago, when he was only seventeen and Talitha sixteen, she'd been sacrificed to a demon and her soul had been sucked into the void of hell. It had taken the deaths of two people, one innocent and one guilty to free her, but she had come back changed.

For the most part, she was his sister as he had always known her sweet, funny, smart. Her eyes would still crinkle up when she smiled and she still corrected his grammar at every opportunity. Yet sometimes she'd become a monster, a beautiful killer who enjoyed the pain she caused.

She wasn't the only one that had changed.

He had tiptoed on the edge of the void himself and had seen the demon in its true form, just as she had. The gypsy, Adrina, had given Will her "gift" of foresight...a gift she saw as more a curse than anything. It had passed from her at the moment of her death and had been made permanent when he was cursed by the sight of the demon.

His curse was not nearly such a burden as Adrina's had been. For the most part she saw visions of death, but she couldn't interfere in any way or she would only make the victim's suffering worse. Adrina would know when a loved one was about to die and yet have no option but to sit and watch.

Will, however, could interfere with the future without repercussion, and had done so on a number of occasions. His visions were of many things; some random, concerning strangers, or even the weather, while others were quite personal. They would come to him out of the blue; he could see what would happen in the next few seconds or sometimes in the next few years.

Seeing the future wasn't the only aspect of his curse. There was another odd talent he possessed, and that was the ability to steal his sister's dreams. When he had pulled his sister from the void they had become linked in way neither fully understood. If they were to fall asleep anywhere near each other, his mind would instantly become flooded with her dreams and for some reason she only dreamt about her time in the torture chambers of the void.

He dreamed what she had experienced for real.

The worst part of this was that once he began dreaming he was stuck in her hellish nightmare until she woke up. Of course, he did have the choice to not fall asleep near her, but Will's conscience, his brotherly love meant he had to do something for her. He knew her pain and it was too great for him to let her experience it a second time.

Therefore, every weekend he'd take the two-hour drive up to her isolated retreat in the woods. They'd spend the day together, sometimes laughing, sometimes crying, and unfortunately when the mood was on her, sometimes fighting. At night he would tuck her in and then get drunk.

It was the only time he ever drank, but it was necessary—her dreams were that horrifying. She'd been tortured in every conceivable way by the most hideous creatures. The rapes, the machines, the blood, the pain were all as real to him as they had been to her, with one huge exception: even while it was happening, he knew it would end, eventually.

She never had that tiny luxury.

For Will, only the earth spinning about measured her time in the void. For him it had been twenty-four hours and forty-two minutes, a total of just under 89,000 seconds. But for Talitha...there was no telling how long it was. More than years or even decades, it could've been many centuries.

"Oh yeah! Oh God!" Her screams of self-inflicted ecstasy jarred him from his thoughts and made him remember he had work to do. He tossed down two more shots in quick succession. "Yes! Yes!" she screamed.

"Oh, jeez!" he mumbled to himself. He was starting to feel the alcohol.

Talitha's place was hardly more than a shack and the walls were thin enough that he didn't need super-hearing to figure out she was nearing climax. She would go at it a few more times, but he figured he still had at least seven shots left to down and he never liked trying to race her to sleep.

On occasion he had misjudged the timing. The last time, her painful shrieks and racking sobs had been almost impossible to bear and strangely when he had finally fallen asleep he'd been thankful when the torturer had turned the flames on him instead.

Will's stomach, angry over the infusion of whiskey, knotted up suddenly and he grimaced. By experience he knew the nausea would pass, yet he also knew it would slow him down in his race to get drunk. He had to concentrate on something and he went out to his jeep Wrangler to get the first of four boxes of books.

Talitha had been a reader of unbelievable appetite before her sojourn in the void, and now it was all he could do to keep up. The fact that she only slept one night out of the week didn't help, either. For the last year, he'd been bringing college textbooks as a way to appease her craving for information. The previous year, she had zipped through three different sets of encyclopedias. To keep her from being bored he would also throw in foreign languages books and sadly, romance fiction.

Talitha loved the romance novels, and would've been quite content if that was the only kind he ever brought. Sometimes she'd read to him from her favorite passages and cry when some shirtless, muscle-bound man finally realized his true love was right in front of him the whole time.

Will would very frequently cry as well, just not in front of her and certainly not over some book. His sister would never be in love again. She had torn out the throat of the only boy who had ever loved her and kicked his lifeless body out into the forest. Her love affair with Brian Galt was over before it started.

There would be no one else.

Coming in from the growing cold, Will plunked the box down heavily in the main room, knowing that Talitha would be able to pick it up one handed if she wished. He then went back to his bottle and despite the queasiness churning at his innards, took another shot.

Thinking about Brian made him long to get drunk even when he wasn't with Talitha. Brian had been an amazing individual and yet there had been absolutely nothing special about him at all. He had been small and skinny, with hair that would become a dense, impenetrable brown thicket if he went too long between haircuts, which would be always. He was cute, Will supposed, after a nerdy fashion, and Talitha had loved him

Will poured a bit too much whiskey this time and it sloshed over the side of the shot glass. He paused with the glass touching his lip, trying to remember if this was number four or five.

"Who cares," he said to the glass and drank it off. Just then he remembered that he was going to drink half the bottle and decided he would mark where he would drink to. There were plenty of pens lying about the place, but the trick was finding one that actually held ink.

Splashing about in the kitchen junk-drawer, he unearthed a pen and began to scribble away at the halfway point on the fifth of whiskey...

The horn was now covered in blood, and shreds of dripping flesh hung from the barbs of it. Will gasped, feeling the horrific pain of his insides being torn out and he pushed the horn away as hard as he could. He looked down and saw a great gory hole.

"Oh, my God! Oh, my God!" Will came back from his vision and felt sudden tears coursing down his cheeks. His breathing came fast and heavy, and the first thing he did was put his hand to his crotch and rub at the lingering phantom-pain. Glancing down, he saw that he had thrown the bottle of Wild Turkey away from him and he thanked God that it hadn't broken.

Crawling to it, he drank straight from the mouth with hands that shook greater than before. The shaking was so profound that he fumbled at capping it, and ended up taking another swig. Placing the open bottle on the counter he gave it a long look, but it suddenly reminded him of the horn and he shuddered convulsively.

"Holy crap! This isn't good, jeez," he whined miserably to himself. It was never good and it was always like this. He'd continue to get a preview of his coming torture until he passed out and then he would get the real thing. With another moan slipping from his lips, he wiped at the tears on his face and shook his head trying to figure out why he was doing this to himself.

At this point he really didn't know. All he knew was that he was supposed to get drunk. He reached for the bottle and took another long pull.

For perhaps the hundredth time Will thought about how he could kill Talitha.

"Put her out of her misery, I mean," he said to no one in particular. A high-powered rifle from three-hundred yards might do the trick, but only if it were a head shot. Anything else would just make her angry.

Killing Talitha was not something a person could do with ease. She couldn't be poisoned as far he could tell: if she didn't smell it a mile off, her body would simply break the chemicals down. That same sense of smell would make getting a gun anywhere close to her impossible and the fact that she lived in the thick woods made the long range shot just a pipe dream.

A knife, an axe, a club, or even a sword would be just silly. She could move with blazing speed and it was highly likely that she would take the blade from him and sheath it in his own belly. Still he was the only person with a ghost of a chance of killing her. His ability to see the immediate future had saved him from her on numerous occasions; it allowed him to dodge, duck or block with uncanny precision. However, on the few instances, during their frequent fights, when he has been able to strike her, he had knocked her about quite a bit but it rarely did more than increase her enthusiasm for his blood.

The thought of blood made him remember the horn. "Shun of a bish!" Again, he drank from the bottle and gave it a bleary stare. "Thas better. Ok...pill time." Will got up unsteadily and went for his bag, walking as if on the side of a steep hill.

"Donut take with alcohol ny ass," he said after glancing at the prominent warning label.

There were only two pills in the container and that was by design. Once, he had awoken the following morning from one of his tortured nights, cover in vomit. He discovered that he had taken half the pills in the bottle; deep down he knew he'd been trying to kill himself before he had to face the night.

Will popped his two pills, washing them down with the whiskey. He then looked at the bottle groggily; he was well below the line he'd made for himself. In the background, he heard Talitha's moaning, but it wasn't coming through to his brain clearly anymore, and he sat gazing about, losing focus with each passing moment.

"Ah crappity!" His stomach was going up and down like a rubber seesaw and he was going to get sick. To stave it off, he had to get up and walk around until the feeling passed or he'd lose the pills for sure. Standing up, he had only a moment of balance left in him and then the cabin heaved over on its side and sent him sprawling.

"Whoa now," he said to the floor, clutching it as though he were on the deck of a rolling ship. Crawling over to the couch, he used it to steady himself, and managed to stand on his own again. "Thas better...what the hell?" he exclaimed to the cover of a romance book staring up at him from the box. "You guys even know what the friggen buttons are for on your shirts?"

Will smirked at his own great cleverness, but in the next second he was despondent, "Oh Lisa, why do I do this? I should be at home wif you an da baby!" Lisa's beautiful face came to him and he sighed heavily with longing.

There was no baby just yet. Lisa was seven months along and her belly was only the size of a bowling ball. He loved to place his large hands around the small lump of the baby and caress Lisa's soft skin.

Thinking about her, he plopped heavily down on the couch, his nausea forgotten, and puffed out his own belly. Putting his hands on his stomach, he smiled stupidly and sang, "Gold-en slum-bers kiss your eyes..."

Lisa constantly sang to the baby inside her and it always made him smile to hear her secret voice. As far as he knew, he and the baby were the only ones who had ever heard that magnificent sound. He stopped his own deep, raspy attempt at singing, and it was with a lullaby drifting through his mind that he finally fell asleep. A short while later, Will met the owner of the terrible horn.

Chapter 2

The First Scent

"Good evenin', Sistah."

The words were soft, as if the man who spoke them wanted to disturb the night as little as possible. In the chill of the darkness the unexpected voice startled Sister Mary Agatha. Her hands shot like wounded butterflies to her chest and she gasped. She knew the voice; it took a second for her to remember it and when she did, her fright passed.

Turning slowly, in order to give herself a moment to hide the fact that she been surprised, Sister Mary took in the outline of a police officer framed against the streetlight.

The man's face was unfortunately familiar, he had been snooping around the orphanage off and on for years, but at the moment she couldn't recall his name. It was on the tip of her tongue, however there it stayed. She used to know it. Lately, little things like that would slip from her mind and she had taken to peeking at his nametag whenever he came by. Tonight he would get nothing more than officer from her, it was just too dark.

"Hello, Officer."

"I didn't mean to scare ya. I thought ya heard me." The policeman smiled disarmingly and stepped even closer to her. Now she was able to get a better look at his heavily jowled face, but the name danced even further out of her mind and she felt a moment of irritation. Nevertheless, she managed a smile, exposing her teeth, which were crooked and grey with age.

"I heard you, Officer, and you didn't scare me. I was just praying. Probably something I should get back to... if you don't mind." She turned away with a small wave of her hand indicating dismissal and said over shoulder, "So you have a good night now."

There was a time when she was much younger that she liked and respected the police, but that hadn't been for a quite few years. They were always coming down so hard on her boys, using them as scapegoats for any trivial and not so trivial crime in the neighborhood. She wasn't stupid, and she understood that her boys could be a bit rowdy at times but on the whole they were just as good as the neighborhood kids, perhaps even better.

"Well actually, I need a moment of your time," the officer replied in his thick Boston accent, his voice holding a touch of annoyance. With her back turned to him and the black coif of her habit hiding much of her face, he didn't see her rolling her eyes.

Here it goes, she thought. Which one of her boys was in trouble this time, and for what? Her mind ran down a list of the usual suspects, as the officer continued in his annoying accent, "Ya know about the kids disappearin' in the city, right?"

At this a small feeling of alarm crept over her and she turned back to the man. She knew about the children, everyone knew, the news had gone nationwide after the third boy went unaccounted for and in the last three weeks, two more had vanished. It was as if they had wandered into quicksand on a city sidewalk and had been sucked into the earth.

"Yes, yes I know about those poor boys...all very tragic, I'm sure. But what does that have to do with..."

A wild thought struck her. Sister Mary was a big woman, shaped rather like a shoebox, but she still managed to find her hips and she placed her hands squarely on them.

"You don't think any of my boys had anything to do with this? That is preposterous!" She glared at the startled police officer with eyes that were a rheumy wet blue and hard with her anger. "In all my seventy-three years, this is the most..."

"Hold on, Sistah! Ya got me all wrong. I just wanted to know if you had seen anyone lurkin' around in a suspicious mannah. Maybe takin' an interest in your grade schoolahs. Ya see anyone like that?"

She relaxed a little at this, but that feeling of alarm hung on her as if her insides were coated lightly with it. Sister Mary Agatha had never truly considered that the pervert she'd read about would target any of her boys. So far all the other children had been normal, from normal families, living in normal homes. In her mind, her boys didn't fit that description. Saint Thomas' was a home for boys that nobody wanted, not even sex perverts as far as she knew.

"No, I haven't seen anyone like that, Officer Dallins," the name sprang to her mind just as she was saying it and she smiled at this small personal triumph. "If I do, I'll be sure to call." She gave another little wave and the policeman shrugged as if he was satisfied that he'd done all he could do and he headed back to his cruiser, parked up the street.

Sister Mary watched him for a few moments before she walked off into the gradually thickening night and began praying. She'd been praying after a fashion when the officer had given her the fright; that had been no lie. When she wasn't actively engaged in conversation, prayers ran on an endless loop through her mind. Some people hummed or whistled their day away, she prayed. On average, the Our Father, which was always number one on her top 40-prayer list, would slide from her lips in a low constant mumble up to a hundred times a day.

Tonight she'd been in an Apostle's Creed mood, and she would go through at least four repetitions of it as she went about the grounds making sure the buildings were locked up.

This was part of her nightly routine and was another reason she was not terribly concerned about the pervert. Her orphanage, as she considered it, was one of the most secure places in this section of the city. The two-story building sported only three entrances, all of which were constructed of heavy steel.

Every night she'd walk the entire perimeter of the orphanage, the attached church, and the offices, giving each door a little shake.

When she came to the corner of the first building, she looked back into the gloom to check whether Officer Dallins was still nosing about, but he wasn't in sight. Turning back to her task she paused, startled for the second time that night.

Something had moved among the shadows near the front of the church. A very tall pine stood there, running nearly up the side of the building all the way to the tall steeple. It was just gorgeous in the daytime, but at night it was the perfect place for shenanigans. In her forty-two years of running the home she had cleaned up all sorts of nasty leavings under its thick foliage.

Shadows commanded its base and the idea of the sex pervert sprang to mind. This made her turn to look for the officer a second time. As before, there was no one in sight and her feeling of alarm increased. The shadows moved again and the nun backed around the side of the building, moving as quietly as possible.

This wasn't like her at all.

Sister Mary didn't fear sex perverts in the least. She was a large woman, with a loud rough voice, who was used to commanding attention. In her mind, sex perverts were skinny, little greasy-haired men who lacked the self-confidence to ask a girl out on a proper date.

Nevertheless, for some reason she hesitated and it was at least a minute before she chided herself as a coward and was able to waddle toward the dark undergrowth.

She wished she could have marched over as she had when she was younger, but a broken hip had constrained her to that unfortunate waddling gait. It was unfortunate because due to her rectangle of a figure and her black and white attire, the waddle made her look very much like the world's largest penguin. She tried not to think about that, especially now that she was going to give a sex pervert a piece of her mind.

Upon nearing the tree, her waddle slowed and her eyes went to each of the shadows in turn, but there was no one to be seen. This should have calmed the odd fear that had her hands shaking, but instead when she finally slipped beneath the branches of the pine, her feeling of alarm grew. There may not have been a person in those shadows but there was a nasty smell, one that awoke long forgotten memories in her.

She had been a nurse's aide in the south Pacific during the war and this smell was the same she had encountered many times back then. It was the gangrenous odor of rotting flesh.

Chapter 3

Every Sunday Morning

"Hey Willy J sleepy-head." Talitha's voice was soft and full of concern.

Thud! Thud! Thud! Will's headache was immediate and nearly debilitating, but despite that, his first action was to reach down and feel his crotch. His second was to breathe a sigh of relief; everything was where it was supposed to be, and more importantly, there wasn't a gaping bloody hole.

The nightmare creature with the horn had been followed by others, and he suddenly remembered that one, a scaly lizard like thing had chewed his left hand off, slowly grinding his bones. The sound of his small bones in its teeth was nasty and similar to a man eating peanuts. He shivered at the memory and brought his hand up; it was whole and the fingers of it wiggled stiffly, but now he saw that his hand was strangely large and hairy.

"Oh right," Will mumbled, his confusion slipping away. In the dreams he stole from Talitha; he would become Talitha, a girl, small and vulnerable and when he screamed, it would be with her voice.

"I have some water and aspirin for you," Talitha said, still using her softest tone.

She smiled the sad commiserating smile that he saw every Sunday morning. He knew even without any foresight that she'd been up for a while, letting him sleep a normal human sleep. Moreover, she would have the French toast ready and waiting for him, as well as coffee. He was heartily sick of French toast, having had it every week for the last four years. But, it was what she wanted and it always made her happy, so he'd choke it down if he had to.

"Thanks." He took the aspirin and attempted to smile back at her, but it came across as a grimace of pain.

"Is it bad this morning? I've read that a higher quality alcohol will reduce both the duration and intensity of hangovers. It's a factor of the distillation process..." Will put his hand out to her and shook his head weakly. Her volume had been ratcheting up as it always did when she expounded scientifically. "Oh, I'm so sorry. I'm sorry about everything. Maybe you shouldn't come over..."

"It's ok, Talitha. There's nothing to be sorry for." Will gave her the best smile he could manage with what felt like broken glass in his skull. He swallowed his pills and his stomach warned him against the French toast, at least for a while. "I think I need some coffee." He struggled to his feet wondering if this was what seventy-five would feel like, if he lived that long.

"Can you maybe brush and take a shower first?" she asked shyly. He was certain he didn't smell good and with her heightened senses, his odor was probably equal to that of a dumpster.

"Sure...just one sip and then I'll go." He could feel the pulse in his temple and it felt like it was pushing liquid steel into his brain instead of blood. After a long drink of the coffee, he headed off.

The shower helped as it always did. Talitha bathed three or four times a day and after a night like the last one, he would probably need to do the same. He was far luckier than she was however; unlike her memories, his dreams would fade in time. After a few days...or maybe even after a few hours he likely wouldn't be able to recall the horn or its terrible owner.

He stared dully at the shower wall, trying not to think about anything but the fastidiously clean grout between the tiles. The water was just turning tepid, when Talitha called out, "We have to leave for church in thirty minutes!"

He was done anyway and dried himself off, careful not to touch Brian's towel. Sadly, she would come and check to see if he had. There were little shrines in memorial to Brian all around the cabin. His drawers were still full of his clothing, his coffee mug still sat on the kitchen counter, and his toothbrush lay cockeyed on the sink where he had left it four years ago. These little clues of his life always made Will melancholy.

How he lasted a full year with Talitha was beyond Will.

Will had driven out to visit the two of them frequently and each time Brian sported new bruises layered over the old ones. It must've been hell on him but he hadn't once complained to Will. Quite the opposite; he acted as if he were the luckiest man in the world. In a way he was. There had only been one girl on all the earth, who was perfect for him, and he not only got her to fall in love with him, but he helped save her from an endless half-life of torture and pain.

You couldn't ask for much more than that—except perhaps for a quick death.

And Brian's death had been relatively quick. Will unfortunately had dreamed it all in living color even as it happened. It had been like the dreams he endured when he spent the nights in her cabin; he became her.

However, in a reversal of those dreams, Talitha had been the one inflicting pain—and enjoying it. Her victim had been Brian, the love of her life. She savored the blood, hot and coppery, fresh from his throat. It had made her giddy for a short while and then she grew angry; disappointed at how easily the man had died.

"Talitha? I hear the water!" Brian called out.

"And I hear your heart beating, so, fucking what?" Talitha murmured to herself. She hated clothes sometimes, especially if she was angry. The only clothes she liked really were ones made from silk. Her panties were silk and these she pulled off and gently rubbed up and down her body.

"What did you say, Honey?"

Did that thing just call me, honey? Talitha was tired of the thing's insolence...she would have to beat it again.

With that idea, her mood improved and she smiled wickedly cruel and slipped quietly to the bathroom where Brian was just finishing brushing his teeth.

This was going to be fun, she thought and she swore this time she would make him cry. He would normally just grunt which was unsatisfying, but today he would cry even if she had to pull his testicles off. Wait! She liked his testicles. It would have to be an eye then.

"Hey, the pot is boiling, turn it off..." Brian opened the door and froze in place. He looked down at her naked body and Talitha saw the fear in his eyes. She knew all his tricks to keep from being beaten—the cowering, the attempts at fawning, the slave-like attitude he would wear like a mask.

However, those defense mechanisms depended on him being aware of what she was feeling and how she was coping. But this morning, he had taken too long in the shower, too long to floss and brush his teeth, and he missed it when the blackness had slipped over her, warming her. If he had just come out a few minutes earlier, things might have been different.

But there was no use crying over spilt blood. Brian immediately lowered his gaze and started to say something, "Mi..."

Talitha slapped him casually and Brian's head rocked back, striking the frame of the door. His knees buckled and he might have gone down right there but Talitha reached out her hand and slammed him up against the wall, holding him in place.

"From now on, you'll get down on your knees when I enter the room, do you understand, worm?"

Brian's eyes rolled wildly as he attempted to focus and he said nothing. Talitha felt frisky that morning and letting go of him, she spun in a blur and before his knees could buckle, she sent a spinning back-kick into his mid-section. He went down in a heap and his only sound was a small hitching as his diaphragm attempted to draw in air. He struggled for endless seconds with his face turning a deep red.

Talitha became bored of waiting and picked him up by the hair with a sigh. Brian, who was normally a good fighter, was being so dull and instead of having a good time she was getting angry.

"You're trying my patience. Maybe I'll have you replaced...Will is twice the man you are," Talitha said cruelly. "However you do grovel so much better than he does...I will just take an eye. Maybe you'll learn proper respect then." She felt suddenly benevolent over her decision, but his response brought her haughty anger to a boil in a second.

"No... uhhhhghh."

This was too much. How could he say no when she being so sweet? Talitha had a grip on his throat with her left hand and she slowly tightened it, so that the color of his face deepened to a wonderful magenta. She liked the color, but it made her just a little crazy. She wondered just how much blood was in his head at that moment. There only one way to find out.

Thankfully, Lisa woke Will up a few moments later. He'd been laughing cruelly in his sleep and it had frightened her. In a state of shock, he had driven up to Talitha's cabin, meaning to bury the body, but she had beaten him to it. As well she had removed all signs of the murder, yet he could still see the wet stains on the walls and carpet, and the smell of bleach was strong in the air.

That had been just over four years before. At first Will didn't think Talitha would last very long. Her dreams and the terrible struggle to stay away day after day seemed to be tearing her apart. As well her intense loneliness grew. The only thing she had to look forward to were his visits. Out of love and pity the weekly sleepovers had begun.

They quickly fell into a regular pattern; he'd arrive sometime after noon on Saturday and they would play games or chat; they'd have dinner and sit on the back porch-swing watching the sunset. But all the while there would be a stiffness about them as if their spines had been replaced with high-tension springs.

By Saturday, Talitha had been without sleep for a week and even though she may not have had the sensation of sleepiness, her body still needed at least a little and her mood could become quickly dark and quite terrifyingly evil.

For her part Talitha couldn't relax because of the great guilt she had over what had happened not only to Brian but to the others as well. There had been quite a few others. Obviously Will couldn't relax because his very life was on the line.

He made sure to keep the conversation light and never brought up anything in the least bit stressful, but he was still exhausted by the time she was ready for bed. Then he'd begin drinking and the visions would come. At some point, he'd finally pass out. This was the only way Talitha could get any proper sleep and on most Sundays, her smiling face and sweet disposition made the pain worth it.

This was not one of those weeks.

The previous night's dreams kept coming back to him and he would shiver with the memories of that terrible horn and the grinding crunching sound his bones had made as they were being chewed.

"It'll fade. It'll fade," he said to himself. His queasy stomach and the re-occurring crunching echoing in his skull made eating an impossibility; so he pushed the French toast around his plate as politely as he could.

"Have you talked with Lisa about the baby? You know...about me, maybe babysitting sometime?" She gave him a shy smile and there was such painful hope in her eyes that it hurt to see.

"For now...I think we may have to limit you seeing the baby. I might be able to talk Lisa into coming out here a few times, but it'll be at Mass only."

Every Sunday morning he'd drive Talitha forty-five minutes to the nearest Catholic Church. It was the one place her cruel side had never showed itself, even for a single moment. "Speaking of church, we better get going if we're going to get a good seat," he added, hoping to change the subject.

The drive into town was beautiful. Western Maine was a treat in October and hell in January and that day was a fine example; the trees were exploding in gorgeous orange and gold, and the pungent aroma of burning leaves was all about them.

Talitha smiled at the sights and Will smiled at her. She was happy, almost carefree, and Will began to think that the pain of the previous night had been worth it. The images were already fading and the pain was not even a memory. It was like the time he broke his arm in the second grade, he remembered it had hurt terribly, but once it was healed, he couldn't recall at all how it felt.

The church wasn't one those great cathedrals with wonderful stained glass windows and an organ the size of a Greyhound bus; it was a little brick affair, rectangular with a low sloping roof. It was in fact nothing special, but Will liked it anyway. It was intimate and cozy and it had rustic warmth that he looked forward to after his hellish Saturday nights.

Before his living nightmare with the demon Ba'al Zubel, he went to church mostly out of curiosity but now attending Mass had become a necessity for him. Deep in his soul, he felt a need to be as near to God as he could and he not only attended this simple church with his sister, he would also frequent one close to his home at least once a week with Lisa.

As they pulled into the parking lot, the bell began to ring in the steeple and Will watched it go back and forth, feeling an odd hint of anxiety. He glanced over at Talitha and the anxiety started to blossom and grow roots deep into his stomach.

She'd just stepped out of the Jeep when her smile froze on her face. Sniffing the air in a gentle fashion, she peered about, her good mood slipping away. Now with curiosity running the same course as his anxiety, Will gave the air a tentative sniff: burning leaves, and under that, the wet earthy scent of the nearby forest.

"What is it?" he asked.

"Someone has brought a gun into the church." She pivoted, scanning each of the cars in turn, and then looked up to building. Her glance pierced every window.

"It could be a hunter...I think it's deer season." He suddenly knew it wasn't a hunter, at least it wasn't a person who hunted deer.

"Don't be stupid," Talitha's smile was gone and her brown eyes had narrowed. "All of the moronic hicks around here use Lucas gun oil. They must sell it by the barrel...scentless my ass." She wrinkled her nose. "This is different, sweeter." He had no idea she knew anything about guns or their oils, and the notion that she knew the name of even a single brand worried him almost as much as the look in her eyes.

"Maybe we should skip church today...or come back later for confession. I'm sure..."

"Shut your stupid mouth," she ordered in a low tone. She bent and picked up a rock that fit nicely into her small palm. The smile came back to her face as she hefted the rock easily, bouncing it in her hand.

It was a cruel smile.

Chapter 4

The Demon and The Nun

Sitting in the staff kitchen of the orphanage, her buttocks overflowing one the old wooden chairs, Sister Mary Agatha was contemplating sin when the sound of the sirens cut through her partial deafness. She had seen the lights of the police cars a minute earlier and in her younger years she would've heard the insistent wailing a long way off.

Tonight, however, they came to her muffled, a distant sound that was incongruent with the urgent proximity of the flashing lights. Since the police rushed through the neighborhood in this manner almost daily, she was unconcerned and after giving the speeding cars a casual look she went back to her deliberations.

Did the act of taking ice cream that did not belong to her and eating it, constitute a sin?

Four years ago, when he was new to the parish, Father John had told her to help herself to it. Recently, however, there had been looks and sometimes a, "Hmmm" would rumble from his throat at the sight of an empty ice cream container.

Despite her age, her hands were still strong and she stirred the ice cream vigorously. When it was the consistency of soup, the way she most liked to eat it, she took a large spoonful and decided it wasn't a sin after all. She was like a vampire in this way and would need to be disinvited, before she gave up her rights to it.

The lights of the cars flash up the street and around the block. They ceased to exist for her as soon as they were out of sight and she went back to her contemplations. She had moved on from sin, and was now considering ice cream in general as she worked the spoon into a cold vortex.

How she wished there was some way that ice cream would last in the main kitchen of the orphanage. Currently, there were thirty-six boys in residence, aging from six to nineteen years old. When it came to food, they ceased being boys and became human shaped piranhas.

The boys, voracious as they were, couldn't compare with the two live-in counselors, however. The counselors were very big men and she always had trouble watching them eat. Sean Shay would frequently eat, not with a fork, but with a spatula or serving spoon, shoveling tremendous amounts of food into his huge maw. Despite being only twenty-six years old, Sean wasn't in good shape and Sister Mary Agatha worried for him.

He never exercised and the only time she had seen him sweat was when he was polishing off one of his gigantic dinners. The sweat would start as a trickle in his thick black hair and soon he'd be using his napkin to mop his pale brow, like a surgeon.

The other counselor, Jim Anderson, was taller—practically a giant. Unlike Sean, he exercised quite a bit which always made him the hungrier of the two men. Though his manners at the table were better, he quite literally ate enough for three people. Both of the men were veterans of the orphanage and had been friends, since Jim had been unceremoniously dropped off in the middle of the night twenty-one years before. They'd been assigned as bunkmates and had formed a bond of lasting friendship.

Jim had been hired officially as a handyman/janitor, but he was so good with the boys that he enjoyed counselor status. The two men were a great boon to the orphanage despite the mountainous food bills. Parentless boys frequently require the heavy hand of discipline, but since the two men were so large and intimidating it was almost never needed.

This was a relief for Sister Mary Agatha who had reached an age where she could no longer freeze a child in place with just a scowl.

The nun briefly considered another portion of ice cream. However, a vision of a scowling Father John appeared as she gazed at her empty bowl, so she rinsed the bowl out and headed off for a final check on the boys.

She walked from the small office building through the almost pitch black chapel, pausing on her way to the south wing, where the dormitories were, so that she could genuflect before the altar.

There, she struggled her large body down and touched the floor with her right knee for the barest moment, weaving with her hands a quick Sign of the Cross. As she hefted her bulk upwards, her habit shifted slightly and it was then that she felt the sudden cold.

It slipped down her neckline feeling like icy fingers about her throat. Her world was orderly above all things and the sudden chill that swept over her, felt distinctly ominous. Remembering her silly fright from the night before, she made a conscious decision to ignore the feeling.

"It's an open window," she said loudly, challenging the gloom of the dark church with her fearlessness. Silence greeted this statement and she gave a smirking, "Humph," as further evidence that she wasn't in the least bit scared. She was very close to convincing herself that all was normal. It could in fact, be an open window, since it had been a cooler than normal, late October day.

Ignoring the unsettling feeling—one that was growing on her—that there were eyes watching her from the balcony, she walked toward the front of the church.

The vestibule of the church contained little besides a pamphlet-filled rack and a large ornate brass font, filled with Holy Water. Ignoring these, she moved in her waddling gate to the tall wooden doors, and gave each a small push, satisfying herself that they were locked. She then went to the stairs leading up to the choir balcony, but paused as a small worm of fear gave a little wiggle inside her. A gentle cold breeze wafted down from them.

She gave the air a tentative sniff and there was a slight nastiness to it, very much like what she had experienced the night before and it caused goose bumps to break out down her arms. Her rational side explained it away; sticking to the theory that it was just an open window blowing in both the cold air and the ugly smell. However, her feelings of foreboding began to overrule rational thought and she toyed with the idea of getting either Jim or Sean to investigate.

But then she pictured the smarmy looks they'd have on their faces when they came down from the balcony to report only that a window had been left open.

Sister Mary Agatha set her jaw firm and started up.

The air on the stairs, saturated with the late autumn cold and the insidious smell, combined to caress the darkness of the church, making it more than it should've been. She thought about the light switches down in the vestibule with sudden regret.

She'd walked right past them without a thought, but now wished that she had turned them on and she felt a sudden childlike fear of the dark springing up from out of nowhere. At the top of the stairs she knew there was another set of switches, but she imagined there could be something waiting in the dark for her and that when the light came on...

"Nothing...there's nothing, Sister," she told herself quietly. However the little worm of fear was now slithering in her belly, serpent-like, and she felt almost nauseous.

It turned out that she was right about the nothing. At the top of the stairs her hand whispered along the wall until it found the switches and she snapped them upright. The choir balcony, save for the pews and the organ, was empty.

With the sudden light, her fears scurried like cockroaches into the dark cracks within her and she let out the breath that she had subconsciously pent up. Since normally she was the most rational of women she stood amazed at how she was acting.

She shook her head at her silliness and looked around. The cause of the cold was immediately obvious; there was indeed a window open, one of the large stain glass ones on the north side of the church. These canted inward to help with cleaning and at the sight of it, she felt relief. Then annoyance.

Someone was going to get a stern lecture—the homely face of Sean Shay came to mind. This had his irresponsible feel to it. Sister Mary Agatha turned her bulk sideways and began shuffling down the long wooden length of the center pew. Something gold shone dully against the dark blue of the carpet and she saw it was the handle of the window lying there. More annoyance suffused her.

She stuck it back on the device and cranked the window shut. As she turned to leave, the cockroach-like fears that had been watching her from the dark crevices of her mind, strode boldly into the open. They had grown larger and it hadn't taken much.

Just a sound was all it took. A small, sly sound had come from the steeple above. She couldn't describe it, except to say that it seemed purposely made to send a jolt of adrenaline through her old body. The nun stood frozen in place, waiting and worrying but after many seconds had passed with no further sounds, the roaches of her fear gradually shrunk back again.

She told herself that it was nothing, however as she made her way along the pew, she kept her head cocked toward the steeple all the same. When she reached the stairs she felt the cold again, this time streaming unchecked from the steeple above.

The stairs up to it were cramped, steep, and black. Without hesitation or regret, the nun leaned over and swatted the light switch to the up position, but still she hesitated.

She battled internally; her pride against her building fear. Legitimately, she could now admonish Sean and send him up there to check all the windows, only lately he'd been making snide remarks. Remarks, harmless little jokes really, about her age, or her hearing, and recently about senility. If he got the slightest inkling that she was afraid, the not so funny jokes would never end.

With a tired sigh, she again told herself there was nothing up there; just like the balcony, the steeple would be empty.

The decision made, she compressed her large body into the narrow staircase, which had been designed, not for a woman of her bulk, but for a ten-year-old altar boy, and started up. It had been a few years since she had been up there, and she pictured the tiny room at the top. It was a small six-sided area and contained more of the stained glass windows. In the center of the room a velvet rope hung from the bell tower above and in her youth, she had enjoyed calling the people to Mass with it.

Now however, she was beginning to feel claustrophobic, especially as she turned the corner on the small landing. This felt to her like nothing more than a tall coffin and that unsettling image was lingering in her mind when the voice, a voice that was almost human, but not quite, spoke to her from the still unseen steeple.

"Sanctimonialis Mariae Agita...incessus," it was a terrible grating hiss and she jumped, startled by the suddenness of it and let out a small shriek of fright. It was a moment before she realized the words were Latin and another moment before her mind translated them: "Sister Mary Agatha approach."

Her mind was amazingly blank. For seconds, she stood rooted on the landing, her right foot, in its highly polished sensible shoe, on the first stair and her mouth opening and closing pointlessly, devoid of the slightest drop of saliva.

"Incessus!" The voice was angry and demanding. It wanted her to go up to where it waited. The small act of translating the word became a catalyst and her mind ballooned with thoughts, most of them unwanted. She could now picture the owner of that nasty voice; her mind had conjured up a vision of a great, wet, snake.

"Oh dear," she whimpered. The image had her near to panicking and she turned on the cramped landing to flee. However, she seemed to be held in place; the walls hugged her close, keeping her almost immobilized. Her claustrophobia, forgotten at the sound of the voice, came back and the walls of her coffin shrunk in on her again. In vain, she wriggled and squirmed to free herself, so that she could leap down the stairs as her eighteen-year-old self would've done.

The voice now spoke in another language, one that seemed to chill the air around her so that her breath, huffing out of her in great gasps became visible. The words of the fell language were beyond her, but she understood all too well that it wanted her up there with it.

"No," she said in a voice that was not her own. Hers held authority, command, and power. This one was small, that of a frightened child and was barely audible even to her own ear.

Sister Mary Agatha had stopped her struggles at the sound of the weird language, but then there was a small noise from the steeple, the sound of movement. It was coming for her. The very thought was all it took to send her mad with fear.

She exploded into a frenzy, twisting her body in terrific lunges. Her habit pulled back keeping her in place, until a great tearing sound came from right beside her. Her long robe like clothes had been caught on the railing, and now suddenly free, she stumbled down the stairs, a girlish scream ripping from her old woman's throat.

Falling face first; hard on her outstretched hands, she half-crawled, half-slithered down the remaining stairs to the choir balcony. With her breath laboring in her chest like an old draft horse, she had barely got to her knees before she heard the first sound of the footsteps on the stairs above.

They were slow and measured.

She became mesmerized by the sound of her approaching doom; the nun stopped breathing her great fear charged breaths. In fact, she stopped breathing at all.

Chapter 5

An Exorcism in Failure

The sound of the steps descending the stairs was relatively light, but they were magnified in her head, so that Sister Mary Agatha envisioned a great beast coming slowly down towards her. Unknowingly, she had been holding her breath and suddenly realizing it, she let it out in a gush of prayer:

"Hail Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners..." The prayer was spoken with such urgency that the words ran into themselves, becoming unintelligible in their hurry to be spewn from her mouth.

Finally, the owner of the voice came into view. It wasn't a great beast—just a man of average size with blonde hair that was in need of washing. He wore blue jeans and a grey sweatshirt, the cuffs of which were dark with blood. He held bloody hands out toward her, the palms filled to over flowing with the almost black fluid of his body. His head was cranked down and to his right side, and except for the fact that he walked and talked, the man didn't seem alive.

"Sanctimonialis, you speak in this tongue."

It was not a question.

Sister Mary Agatha couldn't find it within herself to do more than nod. Up close, the man's voice held a dreadful ripping quality and she was sure his vocal cords were being shredded as he spoke. It made her desperately want to swallow, but her mouth was bone dry.

"Nun, deliver unto Ba'al Zubel, the lackey of the foot washer...Alba."

The words were painful to hear and despite being in English with only the single Latin word, sanctimonialis for Nun, it was very difficult to understand. It took her a moment to figure out what he was talking about. "You want Father Alba?"

"Yes! Tell the lackey...Ba'al Zubel is demanding his presence. If he hides again, Ba'al Zubel will kill this...man." As he said this he indicated himself by pointing one dripping finger to his own chest.

Sister Mary was having trouble thinking straight and couldn't get her eyes past the blood. Her own voice was a warbling misery, "I will...ok. Please, don't do it."

"Ba'al Zubel will do as it will with this man." He brought his red hands together briefly and then touching the exposed side of his neck he drew a red line across it with two fingers. Blood instantly poured from a wound that hadn't been there a moment before. "The lackey. Now," he commanded.

"Yes, yes I will, please, don't do that." In order to get back to the stairs she had to crawl towards him and this she did with one hand up, to ward off any possible blow from the man. He took a step back and seemed to take no further notice of the nun, standing just as he had been with his head cocked and his neck glistening a lively red.

There was no taking her eyes off of him and she backed down the stairs until she gained the vestibule. There she turned and fled toward the office building, running in a laughable, waddling rolling gait.

"He's crazy! He's crazy!" she wheezed this over and over, as she huffed up the stairs to the staff quarters, her heart thundering in her chest. She'd stopped running as soon as she had left the church and now she was shaking with fright and unspent adrenaline, and her speed had been reduced to a simple tired plodding.

"Father Alba," she had meant to yell this as she entered the common room, but what came out was only a pathetic, breathy whisper. Squeezing her bulk between the two old leather couches that sat facing an even older TV set, she hurried to the priest's door.

The bloody man was just insane, crazy! That was all there was to this and as she beat at the door, she was quite prepared to tell Alba of the madman threatening suicide in the church.

The priest, with an alarmed look on his face, opened the door quickly at the insistent knocking. He looked to have been in the process of changing and had a green pajama shirt on over his black pants. "Father...Alba." The heavy nun took two huge gulps of air. "There's a man in the church and...he's possessed." She had been lying to herself concerning the man's sanity, but that was forgotten. The truth came rushing out: "Possessed by a demon, I think. He said his name was Bay-al Zoo-bull...I..."

At the look on the priest's face, she couldn't go on. His reaction to what she had said was not helpful to her state of mind. It was clear that he believed her. His normally pale face went paper white. He stepped back into the safety of his room and she thought he was going to shut the door in her face. Instead, he ran his hands over his large abdomen as if he was going to be sick.

Father John Santos, clad in blue and white striped pajamas, emerged from his bedroom and said, "Possession, really?" He was younger, mid thirties and with his healthy tan and dark hair, he was almost too good-looking to be a priest. "What makes you think it's a possession?"

Sister Mary, amazed that she had to explain herself, spluttered, "Because he is! He...he...spoke in tongues. Latin and uh, some other language. It was a guttural and evil sounding language." She stared back and forth at the two priests, wondering why they weren't rushing off to the church.

With frank disbelief, Father John replied, "It could've been Slovakian. Have you ever heard a worse sounding..."

The nun interrupted him, something she'd never have done if she were thinking straight, "No, Father. It was no language I've ever heard; not even close! Oh, Lord help us! It was terrible and painful sounding...and he had the stigmata!"

"The stigmata? Sister, I'm sorry but I think someone is pulling your leg." Father John smiled and looked to his fellow priest to share the humor, but Father Alba had retreated even further into his room.

The younger priest continued, "The stigmata isn't a sign of demon possession. Also, as you say, he came waltzing into the church? As far as I know demons are atheists...though I think some might be Methodists. If..."

Father Alba interrupted from deep within the darkness of his room, "Was it cold? In the steeple, was it cold up there?"

The nun's old muscles danced a jig all about her body at the thought of the cold. "Yes it was. It was very cold. And he asked for you, Father, specifically. He called you a lackey. He said that if you hid...I mean, if you didn't come, he'd kill the man...the man he was in, that is."

"Maybe we should call..." Father John began, but the other priest spoke over him.

"It asked for me? What did it look like?" He took a step forward. The nun could see beads of sweat forming in his thin brown hair.

"Like...just a man, but he was bleeding from his hands and...he touched his throat and blood came out of it!"

"Maybe we should..." Father John started again.

"Was there a shadow to it...or smoke? Or black clouds around it?"

"No, it was a man. I mean it looked like a man."

"We need to call an ambulance!" Father John spoke loudly so as not to be interrupted again.

"Not yet! I have to see for myself." Father Alba said. "Did you touch it at all?"

"No, thank the Lord!"

"Ok, ok...I need to get dressed," he spoke not to the nun, but to his bedroom door. "Sister, please get James and Sean, but do it quietly. Have them meet me downstairs in the office, in two minutes."

Father John shook his head. "Think about what you're doing! We need to call..."

"And we will! But first I have to see for myself," the older priest responded, and without waiting for any further discussion, he closed his door. The nun could hear the chubby little man scurrying about inside his room and she made to leave, but Father John spoke.

"It's not a real possession you know. There are thousands of claims per year, and only a couple ever amount to anything. And even those are a bit..." he waggled his hand back and forth to suggest that they were suspect.

"Of course, Father. I'm sure you're right," she said, agreeing with the priest out of habit alone. "But this...I have to go and do as I was asked...excuse me." She left the priest rolling his eyes, something that would normally have had her on the verge of exploding, and hurried to the dormitories to get the two counselors.

Not taking any chance, she crossed to the orphanage through the unseen back hallway that ran behind the main sanctuary of the church. Both Jim and Sean were awake and watching a movie on TV in the dorm common room.

"I need you two! You have to come over to the offices, right now," she ordered breathing heavily. She had held her breath subconsciously as she had passed the entrance to the church and her body was trying to make up for it. The sound of her voice was strangely whiny and pitched high. The image of the blood and how it had turned the collar of the man's grey sweatshirt red at first and then to black, replayed itself over and over in her mind.

"Sure, the show's almost over. It can wait ten minutes, right?" Sean said without taking his eyes from the screen. However, Jim was looking at the nun with a queer cast in his muddy brown eyes.

"No, Sean. We better get going now. Come on get up." Jim stood and stretched, his hands touching the ceiling of the room. With the extra inch on the heels of her black shoes, Sister Mary Agatha stood at five feet, ten inches, and always considered herself big, but she was dwarfed by the immensity of Jim Anderson, and just standing next to him, calmed her down considerably.

"What's going on?" Sean asked as he heaved his bulk, ponderously up out of the chair.

"There's a...a man and he's...just come on!" she cranked at the two men, but instead of leading the way, she gestured to them to proceed. She fell into step on the far side of Sean, using his expansive form as a shield of sorts, as they walked down the hall. As soon as they gained the admin building they came upon Father Alba straining with his collar button.

His hands, wet with sweat, fumbled at his neck, which was quickly turning as red as his face. "Ummph! I give up...Sister would you be so kind." She worked at the button with hands none too reliable, until it finally accepted its position in life.

"What's going on, Father," Sean asked for the second time in two minutes.

"We may be facing a case of demonic possession."

"Wow, just like the movies, cool," Sean gave a big smile to his giant friend.

The priest glared at him. "No, not cool at all. If this is real...and we don't know that it is, then it'll be far from cool." He started off toward the chapel with nothing but a bible in his moist hands.

"It is real, Father. The Lord is my witness, his hands started bleeding right in front of me," she was puffing again and it was a struggle for her to keep up. She had begun to feel a sharp pain running up her back and it was all she could do to stay near Sean who lumbered along placidly.

At the end of the hall, they came upon Father John leaving the last of the offices. He was still in his pajamas but he had thrown a matching robe on as well and in his hands were two decanters of water, a silver handled sprinkler in both.

"Jim, come take this," he held one of them out. "Now don't spill it. Just walk nice and easy and you won't, ok? Yours is filled with water that I just blessed...this one is just tap water. I think we'll be able to tell if this is a fake pretty quickly."

"In the movie, The Exorcist, what they did was..."

"Not now, Sean!" Father Alba snapped at the man. The priest's palpable fear was causing Sister Mary to have second thoughts about going into the chapel again. Her back really was hurting, probably from her fall, and she began imagining a long night spent relaxing in the emergency room eating Jello or ice cream, if they had any.

Father John gave his fellow priest a long odd look. "I think it might be best, under the circumstances, if I go first. Jim...you stay close, don't go wandering away. You never know right?" Jim only raised his eyebrows the slightest to show that he'd heard the priest.

Sean looked suddenly a little pale as if the mood of Father Alba had been contagious. "Hey shouldn't I have a weapon or...or a cross or something? Don't-cha think?"

"Your faith will be your shield," Father John spoke calmly, but this didn't mollify Sean who only shook his head, no.

"There's a large crucifix hanging on my wall, you can carry that," Father Alba said and the nun could now see that the beads of sweat on his head had reproduced to such an extent that they were forming tiny streams. These ran down his face and disappeared into the black of his clothing.

Sean hurried to the office and came back bearing both a tremendous crucifix and a satisfied look. The size of the cross was impressive but it reminded Sister Mary that her hands were empty. The nun felt old and useless and perhaps worst, defenseless. She remembered the cross at the end of her rosary and was just grabbing it when Father John spoke.

"Sister, where in the church was the man?"

The cross seemed suddenly tiny. It was tarnished, slightly bent, and barely gleamed. It sat in her palm looking older and more useless than its owner. She didn't know what she had been expecting, but it seemed empty, devoid of...magic? Was that what she had expected? For it to glow with the power of...

"Sister...excuse me," Father John looked at her expectantly.

"I'm sorry, what?"

"Where did you leave the man?" Father John asked her gently and put his hand out to suggest that she would lead.

"The choir balcony," she said this and pretended she hadn't seen the hand gesture but instead made a great show of rearranging her rosary. Father John gave a smile at this and proceeded to walk into the darkened church, followed closely by Jim, Father Alba, and finally Sean.

Sister Mary couldn't move. She stood gripping her tiny cross, and terror at what lay in the church, caused her intestines to clench and retreat rapidly.

The others didn't know. They hadn't seen the blood and the casual manner in which the demon had wounded the poor man, or heard the voice. The voice came back to her and she remembered it had called her...

"Sister," Father Alba had materialized in the doorway. "It'll be ok. Remember you can't simultaneously have great faith and great fear. Trust in the lord." She wanted to laugh at him and condemn him for hypocrisy. His own fear he wore like a mask, completely covering his normal skin. Instead, she took a deep breath and stepped into the gloom of the church.

The other three men stood waiting just to the side of the door, with only Father John showing any signs of impatience. "Everything good?" He didn't wait for an answer. "Good...now Father Alba and I will do all the talking. None of you say a word, even if he addresses you. Keep quiet. Chances are this man is in need of serious psychological help...he may be dangerous, so we'll look out for each other and don't let him corner you."

He gave each a confident look and then proceeded to the light switches against the wall. The room was suddenly and brilliantly lit. The nun scanned the balcony but the man was not to be seen and relief flooded her until Jim said, "He's in the foyer."

The man could be seen standing in that unusual manner of his just beside the font of Holy water.

The four men, trailed by the nun, advanced toward him slowly and from a distance, she could see that something had changed in his appearance. His face was now covered in blood and as she walked forward, his blue eyes sparkled out of the dripping mess. The closer they got the more obvious it was that his head had been cut in numerous places around the hairline.

"The blood on the man's face...and the cuts, they weren't there before, it's another sign of..." the nun began, but Father John cut her off with an angry gesture.

The tan, raven-haired priest flashed a white smile at the bleeding man. He appeared confident and held his decanter in a casual manner, which was a direct contradiction to the way Jim held his. The big man grasped the decanter with reverence as well as great trepidation over the idea of spilling any of its contents. Father Alba stood sweating profusely holding his bible to his chest with both hands and Sean had his crucifix held out as if warding off a giant vampire.

"Hello, my name is Father John, what's your name?" the priest began confidently in an agreeable manner.

"You come to me in clothes for sleeping...do you wish me to bed you? Is that what you want?" the possessed man said this in that terrible voice and then laughed cruelly.

"It's late...but like I said I'm Fath..."

"I know you! You call yourself John Santos...Santos... Sanctus...Saint. This is humorous. Saint John, you are not!" The voice caused Sean to raise his crucifix even higher and for Jim to clutch at his own throat.

"You speak Latin, that's nice. Did you go to a Catholic school?" The priest was still amazingly calm.

"Alba! I know you speak this tongue. Stop cowering behind your saint. Tell me, do you pray to this saint? Do you get down on your knees before him? Do you worship him with your lips, Alba?" It laughed again and Sister Mary had to turn away at the sight of it. No part of the man laughed along with the demon inside of him. Only the voice and the eyes were touched by that evil laugh.

"I still would like to know who we're talking to," Father John said and for the first time, the nun noticed that his confidence had slipped quietly away.

The thing inside the man grunted and hawked up its inhuman language that she'd heard earlier and it gave her the chills.

Father Alba stepped forward. "Who are..."

"You know me, slinking coward. I am Ba'al Zubel and you burned the body of my witch. Now I have come for that which you pulled from its chest." The man's body drooped as the demon spoke and his voice was losing its power as if he was dying with the demon inside him.

Confused at the conversation the nun turned to look at Father Alba and was horrified at the sight of the man. His mask of fear had now enveloped his whole body, which shook uncontrollably so that he bible jittered about in front of his face. She saw he was taking little steps backwards and she started back as well.

"The Holy water...now, hurry!" he said not to Father John but to Jim, who reacted with a jerk and then started bravely forward. However, Father John beat him too it and put his free hand out and stopped him.

Father John looked uneasy at what had transpired, but said with confidence, "You say you're Ba'al and that you possess this man, yet you enter a Catholic church, where Holy water sits all about you..." He seemed unsure how to finish the sentence so he left the words hanging and taking a cautious step toward the man, flicked water at him with the silver sprinkler.

The water seemed to have no effect and the man gained strength in his voice, "You are full of falsehoods Saint John...I'll have you with me soon." The confidence in Father John's demeanor vanished with the words and he motioned urgently to Jim.

Jim took only a single large step forward and sent a great rain of Holy water onto the possessed man, who reacted in the proper manner. He tore at his exposed face with his bloody hands and took to grunting, "Uhn, uhn, uhn." After a moment of this, the man threw himself to the ground, rubbing the front of his body on the carpet, bleeding into it. For long moments, it writhed on the ground.

Jim asked, "Did I hurt it? Was that supposed to happen?"

Sister Mary's heart sank at the look the two priests shared...they didn't know.

"Yes it hurts, it hurts greatly...Ba'al Zubel wants to feel more." It staggered to its feet and going to the font, plunged its face, caked in layers of blood, straight into the water.

"No!" Father John yelled. He started forward, but Father Alba reacted with desperate speed and pulled him back.

"Don't touch him, whatever you do, don't touch him!" The two stepped back as the man squirmed for what was at least a minute under the water before he pulled himself out and threw himself back to the floor. He thrashed about for a long while and then unbelievably began to imitate intercourse with the floor, humping it in great undulating waves of its body.

Finally, the body jerked in spasms and Sister Mary felt her stomach roll over. She regretted the ice cream now as it worked its way up and she began to breathe heavily, until the moment passed.

Still face down on the carpet, the demon spoke in its strange language and paused for an answer.

"What...I don't..." Father Alba began.

The path! Bring it to me!" the demon said in English.

Father Alba, gripping his bible so that his fingers were white at their tips, stammered, "The path...I don't know..."

"The sword!"

"The sword." Father Alba stared at the blood stained carpet, his mind seemingly in another time.

The demon, lying face down, growled, "Oh yes, the sword. Remember the cold of it, how it hurt your hands? Remember the body of my witch, how it was frozen? You were Arthur and it was Excalibur. Yesssss...you should have burned it with the body, but you took it. Why? What made you work that blade back and forth in her frozen chest? It took a long time; back and forth, back and forth."

Father Alba was close to tears, his eyes were watery and bulging. They were snow-globes, glassy and wet, with swirling flecks of fear, dancing in the chaos of a storm. "How did you know?"

Sister Mary's nausea came back strongly with the image of the priest and the frozen body...and the sword. She knew she was going to vomit this time and she put her hand to her mouth and felt the sweat that had built up on her upper lip. She thought nothing would stop the vomit from coming, but then she saw Sean Shay take a step backwards.

He had gone alabaster in his fear and looked to be about to sprint from the church. He was no Olympic runner, but despite the excess 200 pounds he carried, he was undoubtedly faster than the nun. It was this thought that had her ignoring the vomit, working its way up into the back of her mouth. She was the slowest one of the five of them and if it came to it, she'd never make it out of the church alive.

She looked at Sean and their eyes met. They came to a silent and unfortunate understanding. He would run and she would be left alone with it. Her heart began to palpitate painfully in her chest and she could feel each of the beats. They weren't rhythmic, but disjointed with beats missing at odd intervals and it was those missing beats that hurt.

In her distraction, she missed someone talking, but she certainly heard Father John ask his stupid question, "How do you know this man?" he asked Father Alba. She wanted to scream the answer at him but Father Alba beat her to it.

"It's not a man."

"I am Ba'al Zubel, Tyrant of the Void! The skin I wear is man...but on the inside, it is a game. Now give me the sword." It rolled over and stood in an awkward jerking motion. "Do not deny me, Alba! The penalty will be steep!"

"I won't do it...I won't give it to you." Alba seemed to holding onto the smallest scrap of courage.

The man smiled a bloody smile. "I will kill this thing..."

"Please don't!" Sister Mary Agatha cried out from behind the two priests. Her two hands gripped the small cross fiercely, the sweat from her palms making the rosary beads slippery.

"You seem worried for it, are you acquainted with it?" the man, or demon as she saw it, spoke over the top of the two priests at her. She took another step back and put the cross up to her face, protecting herself with it. She peeked foolishly around it, trying to see if she did indeed know the man, but he was a stranger to her. The demon smiled at the movement. "I will devour it, you know." With that, he put his hand to his mouth and fresh blood drained down his chin.

"Stop, stop...Father, give him the sword, please," she cried out.

Father Alba seemed unable to take his eyes from the blood, and he asked, "What do you want it for?"

"It is the path...it is the way," the demon said and looked again down at the carpet, his head back to being cocked over.

The priest became more resolved at this. "I won't give it to you. I know you. I have seen what you have done! You'll only use it to promulgate more of your evil."

The demon shrugged the man's shoulders. "Then I devour it. Another soul you have given to me...first the Gypsy, then the witch and now...an innocent."

Father John stepped over and whispered loudly, "We have to do the exorcism...it's our duty to try to save this man."

"There'll be no exorcism...you are fool Saint John. I will kill it. I will take it back with me." The demon stopped, waiting as if for a decision and Father John looked around for support, but when he glanced at Sister Mary Agatha, she was forced to turn away. Her chin began to quiver and she wished that she had never gone up those stairs to the steeple.

There was an odd guilt about that simple act, as if this was all her fault somehow. She looked over at Father Alba, wishing he'd give the thing what it wanted.

Despite his pasty, white skin, Father Alba seemed to rally his courage again and though his voice was pitched unnaturally high, it was also firm, "Then take him!"

"Father Alba, no!" Father John spoke angrily.

Ignoring his friend, the chubby priest ordered, "I said take him! We don't make deals with demons. We cast them out!" His voice grew stronger as he spoke, "In the name of Jesus Christ, I command that you leave this man in peace! Depart from him and go back to whatever hell you came from."

Sister Mary, her eyes riveted on Father Alba, felt hope expand slightly within her at his words. She turned to see what effect they would have on the demon.

It stood with the man's head still contorted down and to the side, blood dripping from his nose and chin. "You have no power over me, lackey."

Silence greeted this and with her courage fading like a sunset, she took another step back. Sean Shay saw this and upped the ante, stepping back two steps. There was now only the barest shred of sanity keeping her from running and she knew if Sean took only one more step, she would flee shrieking out of her mind.

He took two more.

"Stop!" Jim commanded in his great deep voice. He looked at his friend with the heavy eyes of a basilisk and the look froze Sean in place. Jim set the decanter of Holy water in the nearest pew, and said gruffly, "Father, I know this man's face. It was only when all the blood was washed away, that I saw it. I think he's the man the cops are looking for. He's got something to do with those kids that disappeared."

More silence as each of them stared intently at the man.

"Oh yes, I have the little ones, they are mine now."

"Oh, dear Lord, save those poor children," Sister Mary called out.

The demon laughed. "Don't bother wasting your time praying to your so-called God. He hides himself, afraid of the disappointment he would see in all your pathetic faces, if ever you would see him. No, if you want to save those children, pray to me! Get down on your knees, where you belong and worship me."

"Where are those children? Tell me!" demanded Father Alba in a hollow voice that was bereft of authority.

"Are you going to trade the lives of those children, for my path?"

The priest looked down seemingly unable to come to a decision.

"I will have my path, lackey! The children were to serve me in another manner, but I do like the idea of them slowly starving to death, with you being the cause. And there are so many other little ones, right? There are some in this orphanage that nobody wants, isn't that right? I want them. I will take them from you."

"No!" the nun shrieked at the demon and the simple act of defiance caused her courage to rekindle itself, if only in the very slightest manner.

"Then give me my path!"

"I don't have it," Father Alba said almost in a child's whine. "But...but I can get it, ok?"

Chapter 6

Talitha-Unrestrained

Talitha started toward the church, that cruel smile playing havoc with her normally beautiful features. The rock that she'd picked up, she put to her nose and sniffed at it idly.

"Talitha, please wait. The police might be in there." Will's morning was coming apart in great chunks. He felt a panicked desperation and he knew there was trouble and pain associated with going into the church. "Look, if you hurt one of them, they'll all be after you...hundreds of them."

"That sounds like fun."

"Talitha..."

She spun about, her face less than a foot from his chest. He felt like a giant compared to her yet he anxiously wanted to retreat a few steps. Her cruel smile widened at his discomfort and her teeth, looking hungry for violence, shone white in the October morning. However, it was her eyes that held him rooted to the asphalt. They weren't the soft, warm brown of his sister's. No, these were dead and icy, seemingly without a soul behind them.

The eyes, lifeless in a human sense, made the smile all the more wicked and Will felt his testicles scurry upwards in hiding. It had been a long time since he saw her eyes like this and without thinking, his left hand slipped down and went to his vulnerable groin. Not since the early days at the hospital, when the orderlies would find her in the mornings covered in blood, had her eyes been so devoid of humanity.

"I told you to shut it!" she said, with a touch of insane anger. "And now, I have to turn around with my back exposed to someone with a gun just to repeat myself?"

"I'm sorry...I'm sorry, it's just that..."

She interrupted him in a deadly quiet voice, "You will be sorry...later. You obviously need another lesson in manners. But first..." She trailed off, eyeing the church. Will could almost feel the blood lust emanating from her.

"I should tell you something, Tal. I should've told you this a long time ago, you're wanted by the police for murder and..."

Her immediate laughter was full bellied and loud, yet even through it, she kept her dead eyes full on his face as if watching for a sign. "Ha, ha, oh my! How we have the same parents is a mystery. The laws of this world don't pertain to me. I'm well beyond them. Not to mention, I'm insane, remember? They put me in an asylum for the insane. Crazy people can do anything they wish to. They're free...unrestrained by morals or laws, and your ridiculous society is too afraid to judge them for what they are."

Her laughter was as unnerving as her eyes.

Looking away from her, he asked, "Ok Talitha, how would you judge them?"

"The people who kill for fun, who can kill you as easy as shake your hand...they're truly evil. Every last man, woman, and child. Right down to their core, despite any proclamations of remorse they may make."

"Are you evil then?" he asked in a whisper. "The doctors seem to think you're suffering from schizophrenia."

"How can you even ask that? Of course I'm evil. Right now, I'm using you as a human shield, even though I'm the one with my back to the church."

He looked over her head at the building. "That's not possible."

"Sure it is. First, if it's the police, as you think, they won't shoot just in case they miss me and hit you. Second, with your wasted gift, if they do shoot you'll see it coming even before they pull the trigger. I'll just step aside and where do you think that bullet will go?" She poked him in the chest, drilling her fingernail into his shirt, smiling up at him as she did it. "Then I'll snatch you up and use your not-quite-dead body as cover. Shall I go on? Do you want to know true evil?"

He shook his head no, but she started speaking again regardless. "This is fun! Do you know sweet little Talitha is not the goody-two-shoes you think she is? That's right. I am her. She's the facade! The fiction I cover myself in, to get you to do what I want."

She kept up her dead-eyed smile and walked behind him, poking him painfully every once in a while. "I know if I looked like this every time you came over, you'd stop your little visits, and then where would I be? But big, gullible Will is always there to rescue his little sis. I use you. I let you get tortured every week so I can sleep in peace and quiet."

She paused, waiting for a response, but Will's brain was shutting itself down, and he couldn't find anything to say. She walked back in front of him, "You asked for this, right? You wanted to know. Don't worry, Will. The dreams can't last forever. I was only tortured and raped so many thousands of times."

They stood in the parking lot of the church and nothing felt real to him. The crisp cool air, the smell of the burning leaves, the orange and gold forest, all of it felt like someone else was seeing it. Like it wasn't him standing there hating his sister. It was the surreal running over his reality, distorting it, bending it away from the touch of his mind. He almost didn't catch what she said next.

"And you should want the dreams to last, really. As long as I still need you, you'll be safe enough. But once they're done...you will pay!"

Her vehemence brought him around somewhat and he asked, "What did I ever do to you?"

"What did you do? You were the one who took me from the void! Have you forgotten?"

"I thought that was what you wanted." His brain was a bewildered beehive of noise that hummed along loudly, but without a sense of purpose.

He looked up at the church shaking his head slowly and realized he could hear the opening hymn to the mass. And now they were going to miss it and for some reason this bothered him nearly as much as Talitha's crazy rantings.

But they would've missed it anyways. There were men in the building looking out at the two of them and he could feel their impatience and their fear. People with that much fear could be dangerous; yet they were unlikely as dangerous as Talitha.

"Thought? You thought? You were never big with the thinking were you, Will? Once you step down into the void...that's where you belong, forever!"

Anger started to simmer beneath his confusion. "I don't get it. You aren't explaining anything with your put-downs. Why would you be mad that I came and got you?"

"Because Will, when I was there I had value. I was worth something. I was a commodity that was bought and sold... that is something you know. Even here, being valued is worth a lot. And! And!" she shouted this in his face. "I was becoming more...more than just Talitha. I grew stronger and stronger and it was I who brought pain. Now thanks to you, I'll have to begin again. The lowest of the low. I'll get back where I belong but it'll take time and plenty of pain—my pain!"

"But you don't have to go back. Free will exists even after death." He wanted to reach out and hold her, but as he put out his hands, she turned away.

"Do you think heaven will accept me? After everything I've done? Man, you are so naive. Do you know how many people I've killed? How many I've tortured into insanity?" His mouth was suddenly devoid of saliva and his tongue became thick and useless. He wanted to tell her to stop talking but he couldn't form the words and she went on, "Just escaping the asylum, I killed...hmmm, how many? Let's play a guessing game...how many people do you have to kill to escape from isolation in an asylum for the criminally insane?"

When they had come by the house looking for Talitha, the police had told them she had killed four people in her escape. He wondered now if there were more that they didn't know about.

Will had never asked her. He had always been afraid to know the truth. "Four, I think," the words came out of his dried out mouth, thick as if he could've chewed on them for a while.

"Oh, you knew. Well there goes my surprise...how bout I tell you what happened instead?" He shook his head, no, but that only made her flash her dead-eyed smile. "The orderlies, they would come out every night when the lights went down. Just like great horny roaches. They would take turns on me and I allowed it, not that I had a choice, but I even encouraged it. Despite how unimaginative and pathetic they were, with their dull repetitious back and forth, it passed the time. We both know that I've endured far worse, right Will?"

Her smile widened and the image of the creature with the great ripping horn came back to him, making his stomach undulate nauseously.

She walked away from him then, seemingly unconcerned about the men in the church and sat down in front of an aging Honda Accord. She still had her stone from earlier and she put it to her lips and rubbed it there gently.

"Men are such idiots when it comes to their dicks. I pretended to enjoy it, night after night. I waited them out patiently, knowing it was only a matter of time. You remember I was under full restraint around the clock? They were never supposed to bring the keys into the cell with them, but that time, one of them did. I heard them chink on the floor when he dropped his pants. All I had to do was bite down and they were mine."

His eyes blinked at this image of his sister and she laughed at him. "I didn't bite it off! Not then. I needed them to release me first. Ahhh...A guy will do almost anything you ask of him, if his junk is in peril. Well, I couldn't exactly ask him, what with his cock stuffed so far down my throat, but he got the point. His friend, the one banging away like he had a bus to catch, he...what's wrong, Will? Is the idea of your sister being gang raped upsetting you? You look all pale and green."

Will did feel like he was about to get sick, however Talitha just went on talking, "That's too bad. I was just going to tell you how once they unchained me, I bit that guy's dick off, right at the root. But I guess I shouldn't mention it, what with you being all sick looking. And you probably don't want to hear about the orgasm I had when I did it either."

His undulating stomach turned a summersault and he was sure he was going to vomit. He went to the nearest car, a rusted out Ford Mustang with balding tires, and leaned over its hood. The image of his sister, grinning, with a mouthful of blood and gore seemed to cling to his mind. It was glued to the inside of his skull, and the picture was as big and wide as a screen at a drive-in. She was being brutal with her honesty, hurting him with the truth of her evil.

"Why are you telling me these things?" he finally blurted out.

"Well, cuz it's fun, of course. Just like what I did to those guards...that was fun, too. You still look at me as if I'm your little sister, but I'm not her. That girl couldn't handle the void, but I could. And what's more, I thrived there, I grew stronger! This is why I won't be packing my bags for heaven any time soon."

A smug look came over her face. "You see, I like hurting people, I get off on it. In the void there's only one pleasure allowed and that's the pleasure in causing pain. I still remember the first time when I found that out, ahhh yes, that was good. It was Auraghnash, this Crae demon..."

"No, I don't want to know..." Will began weakly.

"He had this great reputation, and really it was an honor that he traded for me, you know. The torments he'd lavish on his captives were so widely feared that I was in a perfect state of terror when I went into his chamber. He had this thing for glass, a fetish I guess you'd call it, and I found myself naked on this long cold pane."

Talitha savored the memory, enjoying it all the more when she saw Will's horror.

"It was mirrored glass and I could see my fear plainly, and he let me lay there for ages and I was just thinking he was drawing it out too long, when he started. Anticipation is half the fun you know. Your mind frequently conjures up worse images than the reality, but not this time. I figured he would cut me up or slice parts off, and sure that would hurt but it was becoming passé. You know, you've felt it."

Will had felt it in his dreams and she was unfortunately right.

She continued on, relishing the memory fondly, "There are many worse things than being cut on, and what Auraghnash did to me...was the worst. The glass pane fit me perfectly...in fact, it had been made especially for me. It was exactly my height and width and eventually the entire thing was in me.

"He slid the shards of it under my skin and into my joints and deep, deep into the marrow of my bones. The shards were long and fiendishly edged. They found the vulnerable parts of me. Parts I didn't know could even feel pain. But all that was nothing compared to what came next...he beat me with a large wooden bat so that the shards broke into thousands upon thousands of gritty, cutting particles that coursed their way throughout my entire body." She shivered slightly at the memory. "Every movement was fantastic in its pain. You have no idea."

But Will did. The memory of that particular dream came back to him and a wave of sweat instantly saturated his clothes and a sheen of it broke out on his forehead. His sick feeling doubled and he began to gag and she just smiled at his reaction.

"Do you want me to stop? Too bad! Let me just say what a genius idea that torture was. But in the end, he wasn't as good as his reputation suggested. In his excitement over having me, he went too far. You see you have to build up to these sorts of things slowly, or you'll constantly have to one up yourself. Don't get me wrong, that first time was pure hell. In fact, he ruined me for many of the lesser demons with their machines and flames...they became dull. For a while there, I thought I was starting to master the pain of the void, but then he traded for me again."

"Why? Why were you so valuable? What made you so special?" Will wanted to talk just to get his mind off his nausea.

"Because I was still alive. I still had real feelings and my pain was more...fulfilling. Anyway, he traded for me again, and I can tell you I pissed myself on the spot. No joke...splash! Just like that. I shivered and shook all the way to his dungeons and I cried a long time on that next pane of glass. My tears were sweet blemishes on that perfect surface and I'm sure Auraghnash creamed himself just watching the misery I was in. Again, he waited to start until I just about couldn't stand it and I wanted to beg him to get it over with. Eventually he began sliding the glass beneath the surface of my skin and, just as before, the pain was...how do you describe chewing on glass?"

She paused looking at him and he could only shake his head with his mouth hanging open. "Maybe I'll borrow some tricks from old Auraghnash and then you can tell me? What do you think?" Again, he could only silently shake his head, but the thought of it sent shivers down his spine.

She continued with her terrible recollection, "That second time was an absolute horror...but, it wasn't worse than the first. I feared it would be, like I said, but despite the monstrous cruelty of it, it wasn't. In fact, it had already slipped into a bit of a routine, so I knew what was coming next.

"This is really poor form. The victim can then start to count down the tortures and look forward to it ending. That's just stupid. Eventually he came to me and his dick was huge and sharply jagged with more imbedded glass, and I knew it would be just as it was before. Oh, the pain was dreadful, but I could see the moment coming when he would shoot his fire into me. The last time he had leaned in and this time was no different. That was the moment when I—finally—became my own person in the void. He had this long phallic beak of a nose, grey and putrefying, and when he leaned just a little too close, I sunk my teeth deep into it."

She gnashed her teeth and gave her head a vicious shake. "His blood was ancient, foul, and poisonous...oh my, it was nearly as bad as the tortures. It was viscous and rancid like semi-coagulated bile, but despite my almost uncontrollable gagging, I rejoiced. I had power! I was the one causing the pain! The demon screamed high and girlish and the sound was delicious, you have no idea how good I felt."

She smiled like an old ballplayer reliving his glory days and Will began to hate his sister, or at least this terrible version of her. Hate wasn't an emotion that he had often, so it was a surprise to him to feel the acid of it burning his insides.

Talitha didn't seem to mind his hard look. In fact she gave him a small smile, and continued after a moment, "Auraghnash beat me, even as I hung onto his nose like a rat terrier. I finally took off a huge junk of that stupid beak and that moronic demon demonstrated just how overrated he was. He picked me up and dashed me down among the few remaining chunks of glass. I died right there!"

She said this triumphantly and her eyes blazed away at Will, but he was a little lost and she saw it.

With a shake of her head, she explained, "No one dies forever in the void. You're reborn fully healed but there is a lag while you are traded or whatever. To be killed is the mark of an amateur."

"What happens if you don't die during the torture? You seemed happy that the demon killed you."

"Yes, you're catching on. The best tormentors leave their victims one cut, one slice, one stab away from death. That way you crawl away in the greatest misery, hiding yourself in the void, until..."

"Until what?" Will suddenly realized he had some sort of sickness that was indefinable, to ask that question.

"Until you want more," she said quietly and the triumphant voice had become a whisper.

"That doesn't make any sense...why would anyone want more of that?"

"The alternative is far worse," her voice had become so low that Will left the rusted hood of the Ford and went to her and looked down.

"There's no alternative that..."

"Yes there is," she interrupted. "Nothingness. The void itself. The total emptiness that's out there. How long can you sit in the dark without anyone or anything? Years? Centuries? Time has no meaning in the void and eventually your desire to see or feel...something, will overcome you and you'll crawl out of the blackness. You'll crawl, begging for the smallest contact."

She paused with a sad desperation on her face that suddenly turned icy. "That's why there'll be a great retribution. You see, I was becoming! After Auraghnash, I dedicated myself to inflicting pain. At first, I had to be subtle and conniving, dreaming up ways to get back at the demons that would hurt me. But soon even the lesser creatures avoided me. I had just mastered that slimy bastard, Juloo-anh-kjji when you came."

She shook her head and Will saw blood spray from it—a fine healthy red spray. It was a vision of the future. He looked up at the church expecting gunfire, but there was nothing. His hatred for her that had been burning a hole in his stomach, quite suddenly changed to concern. She'd be shot in the head—and it would be soon—but just when, he didn't know.

In his vision part of a white wall was visible behind her. For a moment, he couldn't picture the interior of the church, but then it came to him; dark brown for the chapel, but some of the office walls were painted white.

He glanced down at Talitha again. She was just sitting there, looking just like his sister, but then she turned her dead eyes on him. They were eyes that were windows to an empty soul.

She didn't notice his look. "When you came into the void, I thought it was dad at first," Talitha said quietly. "He was always so heroic...and you were always such a pussy. With all that light around you, I honestly couldn't tell. Wow, what a fight that was..." she paused, looking again on a happy memory of death. "But then you stopped Ba'al Zubel, the tyrant and...and...you ruined me. I've become soft and slow and so, so weak! All the great pain I had caused! All the treachery...I played the game like a master..."

"But that was in hell!" Will broke in. "It's expected. No one would ever blame you for what happened there. And those men in the hospital...they were raping you, it was self-defense. You see yourself as this great evil thing, but there is good in you, despite your denials. I see it every Sunday morning."

"I don't deny there's good in me. You understand compartmentalization, correct? I have perfected that. In the void, I took your sister and I put her in box and hid her deep within me. I thought I was protecting her...myself I mean, but as time went on, she became a drag on me, a hindrance and I started to crush her little cage! The bigger I got, the smaller her cage became. Sometimes I would look down at her and wonder why I ever bothered keeping her about. But you never throw away something that might have future value, and she has come in handy with you Willy J! Every Sunday morning you're putty in her hands. She acts all sweet and innocent, knowing all the while that I'm torturing you! Do you like that sweet virginal look? Do you do her when I'm not around?"

Will's shoulders slumped. His concern for her had dried up like withered leaves and was being blown away by her constant diatribe. He felt like driving away—far away and never coming back.

"Ooh, look at your poor face!" Talitha cried in delight. "I never realized how much fun this would be. I should've told you this years ago."

"I think I'm done. I'm going home; try not to kill too many people." He walked back to the jeep, no longer worrying about the men in the church.

Still in the shade of the Honda, Talitha called out, "Did I go too far? That's the trick, right? Lead them up the edge, but don't let 'em step over."

"Sorry, but I'm stepping over." He climbed in and felt old. Far older than his twenty-five years.

"Then you don't want to know about how your sweet little Talitha, the good one...is a killer too?"

He was just shutting the door and it froze inches from closing. When he looked up, she was smiling at him. She began to hike up her flowered Little House on the Prairie dress and her tan thighs with their smooth muscles were already well in view.

He turned away. "That was you, not her."

She sing-songed, "Yes it was! Some of them at least...ask her about the bodies."

"No...I'm leaving."

She said nothing to this but still smiling she closed her blank dead eyes.

"I won't," he called to her as she opened her eyes and looked around.

"Hey what...aren't we late for church?" She checked the expensive watch on her left wrist. "What's going on? Why am I..." It was Talitha, his Talitha. She suddenly had a slight panicked look to her, and she began sniffing the air. "Will! Someone has a gun...in the church, I think."

She glanced down at her legs, which were exposed up to her pink panties and shock splashed across the troubled waters of her features. Yanking down her dress, she spun on one knee so that she could peer over the hood of the Honda.

"Did you know? Did she tell you...about the gun?" she asked.

The urge to leave his sister and never come back was a heavy weight in his chest. He stared at the steering wheel hating himself for his thoughts but also hating her more. "Sorry," he muttered to himself and put the jeep in reverse and that was when a breathless Talitha hopped in.

"Why are you stopping? We got to get out of here! Do we...uh, do you know who they are?" she asked with a wild frantic look in her eyes. He sat, wondering why he kept coming back to her every week and the feeling of apathy towards her grew stronger. "Will, come on! Move the jeep!"

"Why?"

"Why? She...I...I...we," Talitha spluttered and he could see the fear expanding in her eyes, like weeds growing and corrupting the fine rich lawn of her mind. "It's just ...we have to leave, before..."

"Before what? Before you kill them?"

She began to cry, then. Her tears were very real and they fell with abandon. She pleaded with him. "Yes, she will...I can sometimes hear echoes of her thoughts when I come back. She's being challenged, it's the gun, you see? That's why we have to get out of here."

Will saw the half second of his vision again, the gun and the blood, and he shook his head to clear it. There was a chance, a good chance that he could stop the vision from coming true, but he didn't know if he wanted to. He had a child to think about now and if Talitha was killing people when he wasn't around, perhaps it was for the best if this was the end.

He had tried.

The Lord knew he had tried to help his sister. He'd actually allowed himself to hope that she was slowly getting better. But it seems it was just a ruse.

"Get out of the car," he said.

"What? Will, you can't! Please don't do this. Don't leave me here all alone. She'll kill them...maybe all of them...the whole church, Will. You don't know what she's capable of."

"No it's you...I don't know what you're capable of."

"What? I would never kill those people."

"You've killed before, why not now?" he asked, his voice loaded with accusation.

She looked as if he had just slapped her. Her eyes were wide and the tears, which had never stopped, picked up their tempo. "I...am not going to talk about that. That was different...this is worse...please drive the car, please."

His insides turned to granite at her confession and he said quietly, but with conviction, "Not with you in the car."

"Take me with you please...please, please!" She wilted in front of him and the years melted away so that she appeared to be the little girl he had played with and shared everything with. But the granite wall of his heart dismissed that girl as well, fearing it to be another fake. She reached out to touch his arm and he shrank away from her.

"Don't touch me! I'm done, Talitha. I'm done with all of this. You've been using me—just so I would dream your messed up dreams for you!" His anger was a physical thing that she shrank back from.

"You're wrong. She's the one using you..."

"You're the same person!" he shouted into her face.

"We are and we aren't...it's complicated. But Will I... I..." she blinked rapidly, looked around the inside of the jeep, and gave a quick glance at her watch.

Talitha reached up and felt her tears. She gave him a snotty look and asked, "Did you have a good cry? Was it a touching brother-sister moment?"

Will's heart sank at the sight of Talitha's dead eyes. They were so black that the pupils were nearly lost. She wiped away the wet of her face and leaned back against the jeep's door.

"Talitha and I, we never talk," she said this as if they were gal pals having a chat about their first date. "So you're going to have to tell me everything. How did she kill them? What did she do with the bodies?"

"She didn't...wouldn't talk about it. You didn't give me enough time. Maybe if you brought her back."

"Sure that sounds like a swell fucking plan. You two will have a nice heart-to-heart while you drive who-knows where." She leaned towards him and Will slid back in his chair, but she only took the keys from the ignition. He knew she would throw the keys at him then and she did a second later. He blocked it with his forearm and it hurt, but his only other option was to lose an eye.

"Nice catch shit-for-brains. Now pick 'em up and know this, if you try to leave there'll be a lot more blood on your hands."

With that, she slid smoothly from the Jeep, the stone once more bouncing up and down in her hand. "Come on!" she barked at him.

Will bent down and retrieved the keys from the floorboard as panic started to flow outwards from his chest. She was in a mood for blood and he didn't know if he'd be able to even slow her down. He knew that there were at least two men to look out for in the church. He could picture their faces with his vision and neither looked like lightweights.

Walking to the church, Will asked, "Talitha, shouldn't we at least try to talk to them before..." Before she slaughters everyone? Was that going to happen?

"Maybe, we'll see. You don't understand me very well do you? I suppose it's not your fault being as dim as you are. I don't always kill for the fun of it. Sometimes there's a reason behind it." She giggled at this, but Will, sweating through his church-going jacket and tie didn't see anything funny in it.

At the front of the church, she gave him a slow venomous smile and he felt her hand on the back of his jacket. She gripped him in such a way that he knew she was in charge. After a tiny pause, she gave him a shove, keeping her hand on his back and he opened the doors to the church.

There was an odd moment of silence broken by the sound of an organ. It was a fine, old organ, that hadn't been played well once in the four years he and Talitha had been coming to the church. Their usual seats were just to the side of it, because Talitha like to feel the vibration of it along the pew as it was played. The church laid out before them was nearly full and the singing was loudly exuberant. The organist, Mrs. Fishbon, a sweet lady with sausages for fingers, was playing a congregation favorite.

Talitha held him silhouetted in the doorway. Feeling terribly vulnerable, he looked back at his sister. Her eyes were no longer dead, but were hard and alive with the chance to kill. They flitted about the room and she took in every detail of the congregation, until she seemed satisfied and directed him to the office door to their right.

The door sat open a few inches and Will, feeling even more like a human shield than ever, was pushed through it, but held just inside. The office seemed larger than it had from the outside, mainly due to the fact that it held little besides two large leather bound chairs. Will was surprised to see his priest from his days on Governor's Island, Father Alba, seated in one of them. Flanking him a few feet on either side, were two men—one of whom was a giant of man.

The giant, wearing faded blue jeans and an enormous Boston Celtic's hoodie, stood towering over the room just to the right of the empty leather chair. Will guessed his height to be about six feet eight inches, but his weight was beyond his ability to even make a stab at. He wasn't fat, but was thick and huge with muscle. His face, sporting scars and a crooked nose, suggested that he had seen his fair share of fighting.

The other man to Will's left had an air about him that fairly screamed Cop. He wore a tired-looking suit and at six feet, he wasn't small, but appeared so when compared to the giant.

In his periphery, he could tell Talitha was taking in the scene as well and after a moment, she pushed him further into the room and shut the door behind her. With a shove Talitha moved him forward and slightly to the right so that Will ended up a few feet from the giant. The man shifted his stance, spreading his legs to just over shoulder width apart and now looked ready for action. Will swallowed hard at the sight. Generally, he thought of himself as a big man, but next to this guy he felt like a little kid.

"Father Alba, it's so good to see you." Talitha stepped out from behind Will and beamed at the priest. It had only been five years since Will had last seen Alba, but the man had aged greatly. His thin hair had become thinner still, but it was his face looking ragged and on edge that made him look like it had been closer to twenty, rather than five years.

Father Alba, sweating and failing to appear calm, smiled back nervously. "It's good to see you as well. And you Will."

Will nodded at the man, he was so keyed up that he didn't trust himself to speak.

Talitha wasn't nervous in the least. "It may be good to see you...but not to smell you, whoa! I could smell your own personal brand of cowardly stench from the parking lot. Even with these goons you brought, you're practically pissing yourself." She tossed the stone absentmindedly up and down as she spoke.

"Talitha, this is important. Forget them..." Father Alba began.

"Are you telling me what to do? Do you think that just because you're a priest, you can talk to me this way?" The cop stepped forward, looking hard at Talitha and she smiled at him. "Hello handsome," she said with a sexy purr.

The stone she had been carrying, she suddenly lobbed in a light under hand toss, high in the air to the man. It flew up lazily and floated as if it were feather light and that was when Will saw the attack coming. Unfortunately, his eyes were on the rock as Talitha had designed and as Will took a step forward, he suddenly found his legs kicked out from under him.

As Talitha had tossed the stone, she had dropped immediately into a spinning blur, her left leg out and extended, inches from the floor. She struck Will's lead leg with such force that it flew up and his body followed after. He was on in his back in a blink of an eye and he was able to watch as Talitha, smooth as a dancer, let the momentum of her spin carry her in a complete circle.

She rose like an ice skater in her turn, so that even as the cop foolishly reached to his right to catch the stone, she sprung at him. Her face held a startling look of happiness overlying her evil and she danced into the man lightly. Her right hand slipped under his jacket and her left, she held close to her body, but with the palm of it on the man's chest. They were nose to nose and her malicious joy was on full view as she gave him a light Eskimo kiss, before thrusting out with all the force in her left arm.

The man flew back with a stupid, startled look on his face, leaving his gun behind, looking gigantic in Talitha's right hand. His feet struck the side of one of the leather chairs and he somersaulted over it before hitting the far wall.

The giant reacted quickly, especially for a man of his size, but in this instance he was too slow. Talitha snapped her arm around at him pointing the gun into his face. He stopped in mid-stride and stared down at the girl, looking past the gun, which was flat black and impossibly large in her small hands.

The singing outside the room ended abruptly then, and there was a huge silence in which the springs of the inner workings of the gun could be heard distinctly. She was slowly drawing back the trigger as well as drawing out the last moments of the big man's life with sweet torturous ecstasy.

Chapter 7

Jim Meets Talitha

Jim Anderson was about six millimeters from death.

He had been warned about the girl, but the warning had seemed absurd at the time and he had ignored it. She was a murderer, she was insane, she could kill with her bare hands, and they were all afraid of her. Good for them. Let them cower, but he wasn't afraid and if she wanted a fight, he was her man.

He was hugely strong with tremendous shoulders and tree trunks for legs. However, he wasn't an Adonis and he battled against his waistline on a daily basis, but regardless of that, there were very few men that could take him in a fight. And the idea that a hundred-pound woman, no matter how insane, could stand toe to toe with him, was laughable.

He could see that she was fast...faster than he thought possible, but he was ok with that, he'd fought fast men before. She was strong as well. She had sent that annoying cop Milner, flying with no problem and that too didn't bother him. No, the only thing that bothered him was that he was going to die at the end of a gun.

It was a coward's way, especially when she had some sort of super powers. Now if he died fighting hand to hand, well that was that, but she wasn't going to give him the chance.

He gave her a snide look from around the gun. "I thought you were supposed to be tough." This he said so calmly, you would've thought they were having a drink in a bar. The trigger continued its slow backwards motion a millimeter at a time. "I guess not," he intoned blandly and waited for the arrival of the bullet. It was going to be lights out before he knew what hit him.

Somehow, the girl held the trigger a hair from sending that bullet into Jim's face. "Are you questioning me?" Talitha asked.

With a slow smile, that he hoped would rile her enough to either pull the trigger or fight, he replied, "No, I'm questioning the reputation you have with the good Father here. He told me you were dangerous and powerful, but I see now that you're only a scared little girl hiding behind a gun. There're plenty of those running around all ready, who needs another?" Even though he was sure he had just sealed his own fate, the girl's brother relaxed visibly and laid back on the floor.

Talitha smiled in a strange exultant fashion, while her eyes came alive. "Interesting...you think you can actually take me."

Father Alba still seated and still sweating said, "Miss Jern, I'm sorry if we offended you in some way, but we're not here to hurt you or to challenge you. We actually came all this way to talk to your brother."

Talitha gave the priest a quick disgusted look. "I have to tell you, Alba, I'm not much interested in what you're here for, but I'm glad that you brought this one. I think I want to try him on and see if he's all talk."

The gun, despite its size, hadn't wavered an inch and Jim smiled around it at her. "Let's go out to the woods. I bet we can find a nice spot."

"No, James. Please, there're lives at stake here," the priest implored.

"Yeah, don't be an ass, Jim Fella," Milner added as he got to his feet.

Jim's smile slipped into a hard look and his dislike was plain for all to see. He'd never liked Eric Milner. The cop had been in the orphanage as a kid and being older than Jim by four years had bullied him almost ceaselessly. When Jim reached the age of fourteen and was six feet in height, the two had fought a couple of times. He'd lost both fights, but he also stopped being picked on. Now, Milner was a cop and expected his ass to be kissed by everyone in sight.

Jim had secretly enjoyed what Talitha had done to him and seeing it replayed in his mind, caused the grimace to invert back into a smile. He said to Milner, "Just trying to speak the lady's language...something you obviously can't do."

"Ha, ha, ha," Talitha guffawed loudly and stepped back before lowering the gun. "I like him already. The priest called you James and the nitwit cop called you Jim Fella...what do you call yourself?" Her eyes gave him a long roving gaze and he felt like a prize bull at auction.

She seemed to hold onto his many flaws with her look and his confidence diminished rapidly. It may have been his hypersensitivity, but she took the greatest interest in his scars, his broken nose and most embarrassing, his cauliflower ears. The unsightly bumps and odd, ugly swelling of his ears was one of the side effects of years of wrestling. He always kept his hair long to cover them but he could tell by her look that they were exposed and he felt the first touch of a blush starting to warm his hideous ears.

Talitha had no flaws at all, not even the smallest pimple blemished her perfect tan skin. Her full lips glistened provocatively and her teeth, straight and white flashed out from behind them when she spoke. He realized he was staring and turning away, feeling the heat of his blush spread to his cheeks.

"Everyone at the orphanage pretty much calls me Jim and some of my old friends call me Jim Fella, but my name's James Anderson."

"Sure it is...what's your real name?" she asked him as she brought the gun to her nose and sniffed at it, in what looked to be a habitual manner.

"Uh, all I know is the Jim part. I never knew my parents...I was left at the orphanage."

"The orphanage? There's only one?" she asked still eyeing him in an unsettling way.

With the likelihood of a fight having disappeared, the last of his confidence went with it. Talking with pretty girls always made him feel even uglier than usual. "Uh, Saint Thomas' Home for Boys."

"In Boston, correct?" He nodded and she continued looking irritated, "I can tell by all the moronic accents...especially the cop's." Whatever was affecting her—insanity Jim supposed—came out in a withering look at Milner and he blanched at the sight of her face.

"Yes Miss Jern, we've come up from Boston." The priest looked like he was pulling himself together and sat composed in a luster of sweat, "We have a dangerous and delicate situation...you've heard about the recent spate of kidnappings in Boston, I suppose?"

"Oh yes, of course! And I'm glad you came all the way up, to hear my confession...it was me! I ate them, starting with their wee little toes." The girl then started to chatter her teeth up and down. She was no longer beautiful and looked on the verge of abandoning sanity altogether, smashing out the last smoldering ruin of it in the ashtray of her mind. Her brother gaped at her in horror, fully believing she had done just as she had said.

Father Alba had a queer, sick looking, half-smile draped over his face, "Miss Jern, there's someone else who claims to have taken the children." He was clearly afraid of contradicting the girl, "This man...is also possessed by the demon Ba'al Zubel!"

Talitha stopped her crazed chattering at the sound of the name and the tan of her face went white. "That's not possible," she whispered, shaking her head. Suddenly she laughed. "You had me going there for a moment. I assure you that it's not wise to be this great of a buffoon around me."

"And I can assure you that he's possessed." Father Alba looked put out not to have been immediately believed.

"First, it's not Ba'al, and second, a man can't be possessed at all. I thought as a priest you'd know this."

Jim was confused and the priest was right there with him. He held up the black book. "I don't want to be contradictory, however there are quite a few references in the bible concerning men being possessed."

"Yeah, but that book was written by men to be read by men. Women didn't count for much back then. You should trust me on this. I know a thing or two about demons."

Alba sort of half shrugged clearly fearing Talitha's response. "I think this one is genuine," he said. "The man knows thing he can't possibly know. He speaks in tongues, Latin, and some other horrible sounding language. I recorded it just in case I needed proof. He also bleeds at will, instantly in the form of the Stigmata. Do you know what that is?"

"Of course I do," she snapped at him irritably. "Let's hear these so called tongues, Priest and if its pig-Latin, I'm going to pull the cop's ears off and don't think for a moment I won't!"

Jim believed her and so did Milner. He backed away from her with a horrified look on his face until he hit the wall behind him. There he stood shooting his eyes back and forth from Jim and the girl's brother as if begging for help.

Father Alba dug out the Sony walkman he had borrowed from Sean Shay and without ceremony pressed the play button. The girl's reaction to the sound coming from the little machine was immediate as well as startling. Moving in a blur, she jumped full at the priest who squawked in fright and held up the walkman as if to shield himself. She snatched it from his hands and in one quick move dashed it to the floor. Without a word, she ground the thing beneath the heel of her black shoe.

When the plastic had been crushed into an unrecognizable state, she knelt, digging about in the remains of the machine, pulling at the thin tape of the cassette until moments later her hands were full of what looked like black spaghetti.

Now as she stood up, her brother had a strange look playing about his face. Sorrow and hatred seemed to battling for control of his features and he took a small step forward. His body tensed as if he was about to spring and Jim looked to see the cause.

It was the gun!

It lay as if forgotten next the girl's right foot and the man was obviously contemplating making a grab for it. Having seen the speed the girl possessed, Jim thought Will crazy for even thinking it.

Talitha seemed to have forgotten the gun in her distress. "Alba, you're such a moron! Don't record anything that man says, ever again. Ever!" she repeated in a shout. "And certainly never play something like that in a church."

"What language was it?" the priest asked wiping sweat from his eyes with the sleeve of his black shirt.

"It's a language that's used in the lower plains of the void. Very low," she added ominously. "Milner, give me that lighter in your shirt pocket."

Milner jumped at the sound of her voice, but hurried to obey. He reached into his pocket and looked surprised to find his own lighter there, even though that was where he always carried it. He started forward to hand it to Talitha, but quickly had second thoughts about getting too close and instead tossed it to her.

His shaking hands short armed the throw, so that Talitha had to take a long step forward to catch the lighter before it hit the ground.

Her brother proved no slouch in the speed category himself. Will made his move almost as if he had committed himself to going for the gun the second Milner had tossed the lighter. His timing was perfect and he and his sister seemed in complete sync as they both stepped forward with the same motion, she snatching the falling lighter, he grabbing the gun. She noticed the movement behind her a half second too late and even though she spun with amazing speed, Will had the gun up and pointed into her face.

"Don't try it!" he commanded. "I said, don't try it! I saw what you were planning to do...even you won't be quick enough." He held the gun with a steadiness that was impressive, but Talitha simply looked around it wearing a vicious smile.

"You're going to hand over that gun, Will, one way or the other," she said easily. Will just shook his head.

A sudden exhaustion overcame Jim and he went to sit down next to Father Alba, who gave him a light pat on the knee. The priest looked tired as well and it was no wonder.

The night had been long and completely without sleep. The possessed man had demanded that a room be set up for him in the cellar beneath the chapel. How he knew the rooms were there, was a mystery—pretty much like everything else about the man. The storage rooms were dark and fetid, especially the one he picked out. They were all along a single corridor and he chose the last, the one that routinely flooded and smelled of decay and mildew. He had asked for only three things, a mattress, a gallon of wine and to be locked into the room.

They were all too happy to give in to his demands, and Jim had felt a good deal of relief when he had locked the door behind the demon/man. The relief had been short lived however, because within minutes, screams of an inhuman nature came slipping around the doorframe. This caused a nervous Father John to order Sean and him to guard the man for the remainder of the night.

Now, Jim was blinking his gritty eyes, content to watch the brother and sister action play about before him. However, the girl had caught his movement out of the corner of her eyes and, ignoring her brother, she turned and looked at him with a small mysterious smile.

"So Jim Anderson, where'd you get that name? Did a nun give it to you as some sort of celibate joke?"

"Talitha!" her brother demanded.

She smiled at Jim as if to apologize for her brother's rudeness. "Just one second," she said and turning back to her brother, she pushed her forehead to the barrel of the gun. "Go ahead. What are you waiting for? Just tell me first, how are you going to rationalize this? Are you going to pretend that it's for my own good? Are you going to pretend that you'll be saving some stranger even though by killing me you'll doom the kids the priest is so worried about? How are you going to explain this to Lisa? Are you going to tell her the truth? That you killed me in cold blood?"

The brother swallowed audibly and there was great pain in the depths of his sky blue eyes. He pulled back on the trigger slowly, not out of maliciousness but due to the battle waging within him.

"Come on Will, be a man! Shoot me! We both know you're doing this to be rid of me. So you can sleep in on Sunday mornings! Come on you selfish bastard! Show me that you hate me."

Tears over flowed the damn of his eyes and he blinked hard and savagely, "You're right...I hate this part of you. You're the most vicious person...there's nothing here to love."

She gave him a smile that was almost endearing. "Now pull the trigger and I'll make sure to save a spot for you in the void. Come on! Paint that wall red and paint your soul black."

Father Alba got up from his chair in haste. "Will, please don't. Murder is always wrong and besides we may need her. She speaks the demon's language. Will, put the gun down. The lives of five children are at stake here, please."

Talitha chided the priest, "No, that's a mistake Alba. I'm not the sweet girl you knew and lusted after. I'm very dangerous and Will knows it. He's always known it. I want you down in the void with me, Will...then it will be my turn."

The gun now wavered and Will's face screwed up in painful confusion. "If I don't shoot her now she'll eventually get the gun back and..." An odd spasm jerked his features around and he stepped away from the girl, lowering the gun.

She held out her hand for it. "I'll take it from you eventually, just as you said." When he still hesitated she added, "I'm getting bored here. Either give me the bullet or the gun, those children aren't getting any older." She giggled at her own sick humor and it deflated him. His shoulders drooped and he tossed the gun her way not caring whether she caught it.

Will turned from his sister and said to the priest tiredly, "What do you need me for? You say the demon claims to be Ba'al Zubel?"

"He is a liar," Talitha sing-songed the words and then brought the gun up to her lips touching it there gently. She turned her gaze on Jim and it seemed she mocked him with her eyes and the small smile again came to her lips as if she had some sort of special knowledge of him. He looked away deliberately but could still feel her eyes roving over him.

"Whether he's a liar or not, remains to be seen, but he did use that name and he did it with some authority." Father Alba told her patiently, "The reason we're here...he asked for the uh, object I entrusted you with."

Will's eyes filled with alarm and as an involuntary action, they darted to his sister. He had to force them back on to the priest. "Did he say why?"

"No, but he was willing to trade the lives of the children for it."

Will seemed suddenly burdened with the news and his fatigue became more apparent. "I'm sorry, Father but I don't think I can give it up for this. When a demon offers to trade for something, you never agree to the deal. Talitha, this language of the lower planes, can someone learn it without being possessed?"

"Will, trust me, he's poss..." the priest began.

The girl interrupted, "I'll have to see the man first to know. Wait, Alba, did you actually make sure he is a man? Did you check his plumbing?" She walked up to priest, her face mostly hidden by the large gun that was constantly stroking her lips.

He seemed disconcerted by her proximity. "Uh, no...I told everyone to keep away from him and not to touch him."

Without asking, she pulled the Bible from the priest's hands. He had carried it about, non-stop since the night before when they had confronted the man.

Ignoring his look of surprise, she said, "That was wise...when you touch a demon inappropriately, he's bound to sue." Without warning, she tore out a good chunk of the bible and dropped it on the twisted chaos of the cassette tape. "Now since you aren't Jewish, you won't need the first few chapters in this book, right? It's full of trashy tales anyways and besides, all that dirty begetting gets me hot you know."

The priest's face turned into a frown at this, but when she bent and lit the paper on fire, he seemed to feel actual pain. "Are you done...with the rest?" He anxiously pointed at the remains of the bible in her hand.

"Sure," she flipped it at him nonchalantly. "Big Jim, you better pull that smoke alarm...what?"

He had never liked being called Big Jim and he hadn't realized it had shown on his face. "Most people call me, uh Jim."

"Well, I'm not most people, Jimbo. So reach up there and turn that smoke detector off before we have a panic on our...never mind, a panic will work too." She smiled innocently up at him, as he stretched out his long arm to the ceiling and took the battery out of the little white box, just as grey smoke began to curl up, heavily into the air.

"You're just no fun, Big Jim. So, you guys have beaten around my bush long enough, what does Mr. Zubel want? And don't lie! We're in a church and I'll be all too happy to administer God's punishment on you." She did seem happy at the prospect.

Will looked defeated still and shrugged his shoulders as if it wasn't a big deal, "He wants dad's sword...the one he stabbed the demon with."

Talitha's eyes went wide at the mention of it. "The sword," she said it quietly but with reverence.

For the first time since Jim had met her, she became alive in a normal sense. She no longer looked insanely evil. The skin of her face flushed with a healthy pretty pink and she smiled happily remembering something fondly.

"The sword...Oh my lord! I had forgotten, it was so long ago. I think I was still young in the void when it came. It brought with it hope... at least I think it was hope. I'm not too sure what that's like anymore. But it also had that smell, dad's smell. Do you remember his smell?" She breathed in slowly through her nose as if she could still smell him.

"But the sword was fleeting and it didn't last. Isn't that funny? Everything else in the void is eternal...but not that sword. I remember I recognized it at once. The long silvery blade swept across the upper reaches of the void, making it seem like there was a sky and I knew it was dad's.

"Ha! The demons were at first afraid of it, all but Ba'al, and they hid themselves as best as they could and the tortured, free from their misery, for just that short time made a mad rush for it. But I...I don't remember what happened next. I woke in the dark and the sword was gone. However, there were parts of it falling everywhere, they were like shooting stars, and the void was in chaos. The tortured and the demons ran about like children, as if they were on holiday. It was even fun! I remember smiling till my face hurt." Her face now, was almost all smile, with light tears trickling down her cheeks as if rain fell from her eyes.

She looked about at the men towering around her, but saw none of them, she only saw the past.

"I'm not bragging, but I found the largest part of the sword. Some piss-ant thing had it and I killed him for it. I took it away and hid it in the void. A part of me knew it was wrong, but I did it anyways. I covered it in my darkness, so that it would be mine alone and when the last of the sword had long since disappeared, I still had mine. I gloated over it and I stayed near it all the time, but eventually it vanished. I woke once...and it was gone. It had been whole and perfect and alive and then...gone. But I guess that's the way it's supposed to be in the void...no light, no love, only nothing."

The room was quiet and she just stood staring at the floor, until Will asked her, "Why would a demon want that sword?"

Talitha spoke in a distant way, without looking up, "I don't know. I didn't even know it still existed." She shook her head to clear it of those fond memories and her eyes hardened. "Where's the sword, Will?"

"Near my home, but..."

"But nothing! It's time to see an old friend," she said this with malevolent glee.

"But..."

She raised the gun and the gesture shut Will up quick, which made her smile. "Good boy! Alba, take that cop and get the hell out of here. If I so much as smell him again, I'll hunt him down and cut off all his moving parts, got it?" She paused waiting and when he didn't answer, she turned the gun on its previous owner.

"Yes I got it, Miss Jern...I'll meet you in Boston then?" Father Alba asked hopefully.

"Probably," she murmured.

An hour later, Will drove his jeep at a speed that was worlds beyond reckless. In the front passenger seat, Jim gripped the console with near crushing force, and he feared if they took another turn like the last one, it would tear right off. He tried to concentrate on the passing scenery and relax, but it was impossible with the wind whipping through the bullet hole next to his right knee. The sound was an irritating high keen and it unnerved him so much, that he found himself staring at the noisy little hole, instead of at the pretty orange and gold trees zipping by.

Jim didn't scare easy, he hadn't even been afraid while in the presence of the demon plagued man—but that gunshot in the box like interior of the jeep, had nearly given him a heart attack. This was what Talitha called an attention grabber. As she would later tell them, she didn't like to have to repeat instructions, so she prefaced this one by shooting the gun as near to his leg as she could.

"The next one will go in his head, Will, if you don't pick up the pace," Talitha had said this with a happy grin at the reaction she had received from the gunshot. She then took to sniffing at the barrel of the gun in an interested fashion. Will didn't need to be told twice and he had pegged the gas pedal to the floor and unbelievably had left it there almost the entire time since.

Jim soon found out that Will had some sort of supernatural power to see the future. Twenty minutes after the gunshot he turned to his sister, "There's a cop up ahead; would you like me to slow down?"

Will's face held a look of disgust that had made Jim want to look back as well. Talitha was casually rubbing the fully loaded pistol between her thighs. Jim jerked his head away, embarrassed for her brother, who had turned a light shade of brick.

"Oh damn! Yeah, slow down. Just when I was really starting to enjoy the ride. Hey Jimbo? Want to smell the gunpowder on this thing?" She held the gun out to him and he could only shake his head, no, as he felt his own color rising. As a distraction, he looked out for the police cruiser, but there wasn't one in sight. Yet Will kept the car tooling along at the speed limit, which suddenly felt unreasonably slow.

Two minutes later the cruiser came into view. Jim had to ask Will, "How'd you know it was there? Do you have a scanner hidden under the dashboard?"

"It's nothing...foresight, just a gift, it's nothing." He answered with embarrassment that Jim didn't understand. It sounded like more than nothing, and explained some of Will's quick reactions. Jim would've liked to be able to see the future. He thought it would be the coolest thing, but of course if it came with a complimentary insanely evil sister, he would probably pass on it.

He gave the passing scenery a little smirk, realizing he had just lied to himself. The only thing that he ever truly wanted was to be a part of a family. It had been denied to him, not once, but twice and with his ugly looks and freakish size, he wasn't likely going to get a third shot.

The first time had been when his natural mother had given him up. Maybe he'd been a big eater back then as well. Who knows the reason, but there he was in the middle of the night with nothing but his pajamas and a single name. As he always did when thinking about her, he tried to remember her face, nothing came; his memory of her had faded long ago.

His earliest recollection was still that first night at the orphanage when he'd been given the bottom bunk under Sean Shay. He had tried to hide his tears, but Sean had heard him sniffling and had talked to him while dangling upside down as only little boys would do. Their friendship had begun right there when Sean had told him that he'd cried as well on his first night.

Jim's second family had given him his second name.

The Anderson's, Nathan and June, had adopted him when he was in the third grade. They had visited the orphanage a number of times and they had liked his low-key style. The other boys had always hopped around the two of them like a swarm of crickets on cocaine. Since he had never considered himself worthy to be adopted, Jim hung back.

He hadn't been a cute child and he knew that was an import factor for most people. Not only that, everyone around him believed him to be a touch slow. Having never been to school before, he wasn't at all prepared for the second grade, but he was as big as the other second graders, so that's where he was placed.

Sister Mary Agatha, old even in his earliest recollections, had raised hell with the neighborhood school, but to no avail. The teachers didn't go out of their way to teach what they obviously considered a handicapped kid, but regardless he was passed along year after year.

Then the Anderson's had come along and took him from that life. For two glorious months he had been part of a real family. June seemed to care for him from the very start, lavishing affection on him at every opportunity as if he were really her child, but it had taken Nathan much longer to open his heart. However, on the day they had died, he had hugged Jim quite out of the blue.

"Did you have a good time visiting your new cousins?" Nathan had asked with a smile. He could still remember the smile on his dad's face to this day. It had been perfect. There was no lie behind it. He wasn't putting on a show in order to impress anyone with his generosity of spirit. It was just that he liked Jim...maybe even loved him and that was what made it perfect.

"Yes sir. It was lots of fun and they was real nice to me," he had answered and he remembered smiling also and thinking back, he hoped his smile was perfect as well.

"I thought at first, that it was very polite of you to call me sir, but...it's been a few months. I think it's time you started calling me dad. Do you think that's a good idea?"

"Yes sir...uh, Dad." It had sounded flat and awkward coming out of his mouth and the two of them looked at each other for a moment.

"That was weird wasn't it?" Nathan Anderson said as he came down to one knee. "Try this...Ok Daddy! See, make it peppy."

"Ok, Daddy I will," Jim didn't realize what he had just said and was about to be peppy like he been asked, when his father became his father. Nathan scooped Jim off his feet and hugged him fiercely to himself.

It was their first and last hug.

He could still recall that warm crushing feeling that was so wonderful. Nathan would be dead in fifteen minutes and June would die in the first light of the following morning, but they loved him. That couldn't be taken away, no matter what.

It was that desire to be a part of family that had been foremost in his consideration when he took the job at Saint Thomas. He figured the orphanage would be the closest thing to being in a family as he would ever get.

Jim looked over at Will, who gripped the steering wheel with white knuckled hands, and felt a stirring of jealousy. A glance back at Talitha however, nearly killed it.

Her eyes knifed into his with an unsettling intensity. She smiled, "Ok Jimbo, where'd you get your last name? You never did tell me your, oh so sad life story at the orphanage." Her question following so closely on his thoughts, made him wonder if she had more powers than just the physical ones that she had displayed.

He thought: ARE YOU A MIND READER, as loudly as he could and waited.

Her response was not reassuring, "Come on Jimbo, out with it. I'm not a mind reader you know." It seemed like the just sort of thing she'd say if she was a mind reader.

"I was adopted and I took their last name. Kinda boring, I'm sure."

"Yeah very. Please tell me the 'Fella' part is a little more exciting." Her eyes were black as twin gun barrels and the thought made him look at the gun, which she had pointing at him from her crotch. An army of goose bumps broke out along his arms and arrayed themselves in proper formation.

He pulled his eyes up to her face. "I'm sorry, there's not much to that story either. There was just another guy in my class with the same name and I used to call people, fellow all the time, so I was called Jim Fella."

"No...you would have been called Big Jim. I take it the other guy was big as well?"

"Yeah he was," he answered, wondering why she was so interested in him.

"Yeah he was," she mimicked his slow deep voice. He peeked back at her again; she sat looking out the window with her head pressed against the glass. She repeated herself again, "Yeah he was." Pivoting her head, keeping it on the glass, she asked, "He was black, right? And you were all too proper to call him Black Jim and you White Jim."

"Perhaps, I guess."

"Perhaps, I guess," she mimicked again. "Maybe I was wrong about you. I had the feeling that you were smarter than you looked. Of course, it could be the pressure. Does the gun bother you at all? I like to see how pressure affects people...look at me."

He turned back in his seat and the gun was pointing at his face; he had expected it. He looked past it and into her eyes. "What do you want?" he asked gruffly, irked that she was being such a pain.

"Here's the deal, White Jim. I'm going to test your intellect and if you get these answers wrong, I'll shoot you somewhere of my choosing." She smiled with joy over the new game she had invented. "Now I have to tell you that I brought you along simply to amuse me and you're doing a very poor job of it, so this may be your last chance."

She had been hoping for him to say something to this, but he only stared at her and she wrinkled her eyebrows at him, causing three little lines to appear between them.

"Playing it cool with a gun in your face...impressive. Plus 10 points! Now, question one, we'll start with an easy one...give me three numbers that when you add them, the total is 1011."

He wasn't going to play her stupid games and he just stared at her, looking into her eyes, which were not as lifeless as he had first thought. They were wet, bathed in the black waters of her insanity and everyone once in a while he could see a little question in them. The questioning look made her less of a killing machine and more of a person who had doubts.

She began pulling the trigger back slowly, again as he expected, and he said matter-of-factly, "Getting shot is a better way to go than dying in a car crash or getting eaten by a demon."

A girlish pout formed on her lips. "You're no fun! It's better if you're scared."

"Sorry. If you want to pass the time, we could play the license plate game."

"What? That's so childish!" With her lips pursed, she looked angrily out the window and proceeded to kick the back of his chair. He ignored it and it soon stopped. A minute later, she spoke in a grumpy voice, "A in Massachusetts."

She won the game easily, but it had the desired effect of passing the time without the fun of gunfire. The trip ended quite abruptly for Jim, who didn't know where they were going besides Will's house. They drove through the small but pretty city of Bangor and minutes later turned off of I 95. The area was wooded and hilly, looking like it should have been the setting for a postcard.

Soon after that they pulled up to a large white two-story house. It had a fine wraparound porch with a detached garage in the rear and as they got out of the car, a wonderful sweet smell drifted in from an apple orchard to the right of the house. The trees were pleasant to look upon, despite the wandering drunken fence that leaned against some of them to keep itself upright. The property had a splendid front lawn, that still held to its green and this ran down a small sloping hill to greet them.

Jim had never seen a home, more homelike in his life and he was sure that there'd be the smell of something baking when they entered. He was about to compliment Will, but the man looked more tense than he had yet seen him. His blue eyes darted about the windows of the house, never holding to one for more than a second. He walked in short jerky steps, leading the way to the kitchen door, which was a light yellow that matched the trim of the place.

When the door opened, Jim wasn't disappointed by the smell; Will's wife Lisa was definitely preparing something. He knew very little of her. Father Alba had filled him in on the pertinent details of Will's life on the drive up from Boston but he hadn't mentioned Lisa except in passing.

"Will, is that you? You're home early." A small slim lady with a great mane of blonde hair stepped into the kitchen from an adjoining room. She was pregnant, but not tremendously so and she wore a black maternity jumper with a long sleeved white shirt beneath it. His first thought upon seeing the outfit was, penguin but on Lisa, it was cute. She had a pretty face with narrow features that traversed from smiling to shock at the sight of Jim filling the kitchen door behind her husband.

He smiled back at her in a genuine fashion and because her look of shock wasn't tinged with disgust, he liked her already. She had just begun to reform the soft skin of her face into a smile, when Talitha stepped out from behind her brother.

At the sight of her, Lisa's face seemed to come unwound from the inside out and her features sagged with her mouth coming open to stay. Her eyes, visibly green from across the room widened, not in shock as they had upon seeing him, but in dread.

"Hi sis!" Talitha exclaimed loudly with exaggerated insincerity. She advanced forward caressing the gun to her cheek. Lisa looked paralyzed at the sight of her sister-in-law and the only part of her that moved as Talitha advanced on her, were her eyes, which grew larger with each deliberately slow step.

Talitha seemed to be enjoying herself and practically screamed, "OH-MY-GOD! Look at you, all knocked up! And here I thought Willy J's willy wasn't working well." Talitha stopped abruptly and turning to Jim said, "Hey White Jim! Say that ten times fast...Willy J's willy wasn't working well."

He glared at her instead and her cruelty caused him to advance forward in anger but Will restrained him with just a hand. He must have seen something, Jim thought and stepped back.

Talitha just gave him a mocking smile before turning back to Lisa. "He can talk, I know he doesn't look like he could, but there are stranger things, right? Well?" Talitha flung out her arms, the big black pistol still in her right hand; she was obviously looking for a hug. After a moment, when Lisa didn't move, Talitha pulled her in close for a tight embrace. It was all one sided on Talitha's part and she held the embrace long enough to smell Lisa thoroughly.

"A girl...you're going to have a girl, but I'm guessing you already knew that, what with ol' Will's talent. Can I touch the baby?" Talitha actually paused for an answer. "You can tell me no, if you think that's wise. I have been called insane before you know...wait, that's right you do know. You visited me in the hospital...ONCE!"

Lisa's head was shaking back and forth slowly, but still no words came out of her mouth.

Talitha continued on, ignoring Lisa's imploring looks, "We used to be best friends, but you don't call, you don't write and now you won't let me touch your baby. That's upsetting...I don't think you really mean it, so I will ask you again: let me touch your baby."

Lisa's eyes were filled with tears and rimmed red with fear, she seemed mute, unable to form words. There was a long pause as she stared in terror at the gun pointed with purposeful indifference at her belly. Finally, a slight vibration of her head indicated that she had given her coerced permission.

"Relax Lisa, the baby won't feel a thing," Talitha said this as her hands reached out and caressed the volleyball sized tummy, the gun still in her right hand. Jim felt his heart start to hurt for Lisa as her great tears dripped down on the bulge of her belly. Again, he started forward to end the cruel game and again Will restrained him.

Talitha glanced back and her eyes seemed more inhuman than ever. "Look, Will, I'm holding two people. I have two lives in my hands... right in the palm of my hands. Will, honey, tell me where the sword is. Tell me right now or else. I won't ask again. Or...the...huh? The baby, uh...what?"

Jim watched the change happen right in front of him. He'd always considered people with multiple personality disorders to be frauds and he hadn't believed the priest when he had told him of Talitha's disorder. But he was a believer now. There was no faking what he saw, the girl was looking right at him with a nasty hard look that meant trouble and then suddenly, he saw life flood into her eyes. A multitude of emotions swept across this new Talitha's face and she blinked rapidly, staring about her.

Obviously, he was one of the first things she noticed and her startled expression was edged with that look Jim hated so much. He saw it before she was able to hide it away, it was a look reserved for burn victims and drooling retards: a look of disgust. Even with all her vile behavior of the last few hours, that look bothered him more than it should have.

Talitha then took in her brother, who was staring past her, not at Lisa but at the refrigerator and a dawning look of horror crept over his chiseled features. It made both Jim and Talitha look in that direction as well but there was nothing.

Finally, she turned all the way back around and saw Lisa's face streaming with tears. Fear and desperation warred for control of the blonde girl's features, so that she seemed to have developed a number of tics, as different muscles fought to align themselves in an acceptable order.

Talitha stepped back from her sister-in-law, "No!" she cried in desperation and brought her hand to her mouth to cover it. It was then she realized she was holding a gun and she eyed it with dreadful fascination. "No!" She practically screamed this at the gun and held it out away from her at arm's length. She looked back at the two men, her eyes were wild with fright, and tears filled them with a suddenness that wasn't possible.

"This can't be...Oh God, please no! I can't be here!" Talitha's fear seemed even greater than Lisa's and her body began to shake uncontrollably, the gun in her out stretched hand waved and bounced about. She acted like it was a tiger she had by the tail. Something she couldn't let go of, but also a terrible thing she wanted as far away from her as possible. She looked past it at her brother and it seemed that she was holding it out for him to take it, but his face hardened with a marbled look of sadness and self-loathing.

This nearly brought Talitha to hysterics and she continued to hold the shaking gun out to him, she blubbered, "Please, Will...please. I can't be here. Take me away, take me back to the cabin! Please!" The last word, she shrieked but Will only stepped back, his own face a contortion of misery. Talitha deflated at her brother's odd reaction and stared open mouthed at the floor for a long moment before turning to look at a bewildered Lisa.

"I was going to kill you...you and the baby. It was there in my head...an echo...it's so strong. She hates you; she hates your baby...I gotta get out of here." She took a step to the door but then stopped with a dawning of understanding. "No, it's you that has to go! Will! Look at me! Take Lisa and go, now! The other Talitha can come back any second and...and she knows where you live."

Lisa saw that it was her friend who spoke and despite her great fear she smiled at Talitha and said, "I was always afraid of this day happening; the day when she would show up."

"I was afraid too, but now, with the baby...she hates your baby so much. And now I think she'll come after you. She'll hunt you down...but...but maybe there's something I can do." Talitha came to a decision. "Ok, ok...ok. I love you Lisa, you were my best friend. I'm sorry about this. Good bye."

In an odd silence, Will had been watching the two women and an internal struggle was clearly being waged throughout his body. Misery, sorrow, self-loathing, and fear had been revolving about the merry-go-round in his head and each came out in a distorted fashion on his face. Unmistakably something clicked when Talitha had said goodbye and he leapt toward her.

But stopped short as she stuck the gun to her own head.

She looked at him and her emotions were too many and too great to read in the short time before she said to her brother, "Love you." It was a quiet whisper and it barely registered on Jim's ears, before she pulled the trigger.

The noise of the gun in the kitchen was deafening. A fine red spray coated the refrigerator and the big man now saw that new alphabet magnets had been stuck there forming the words I LOVE DADDY. Now they were more than magnets, they were stencils in blood.

Chapter 8

The Suicide of Love

From the second Will had entered the kitchen, the vision of Talitha shooting herself began to replay itself in an endless loop.

He saw only the tip of the gun next to her head and then the fantail of blood spraying out. There was just a hint of a white wall behind her, it was his wall. His kitchen wall.

As Talitha, the evil one, spoke, he knew the vision was going to become a reality at any moment and he held the giant back with an outstretched arm. Here was his chance to get Talitha out of his life for good. He could now live like a normal person, without the weekly torture and the sleepless nights leading up to it. All he had to do was...nothing. It wouldn't be his fault and he knew...or he thought he knew, it would be for the best.

Not just for him, but for Lisa and the baby as well. His little girl would need a real father, not the empty shell that he felt himself to be. It would be good for Talitha also.

She had been killing.

It didn't come as a surprise that the bad Talitha was finding a way to secretly kill people, but the good one...that had been too much to take and he felt as if his world had been slipped out from beneath him when he heard it. Will had thought he was going through his living hell for her sake, so she could get better, but it turned out that she wasn't. He was wasting his time and his life, and he understood the only way to fix things was to do nothing.

As Talitha spoke to his crying wife, threatening her beautiful baby, he said to himself, "All I have to do is nothing." And when the real Talitha, the one he loved, came back and begged Will miserably to take her out of there, he thought, "All I have to do is nothing."

However, he wasn't a strong person. If he had been strong, he would've shot her at the church. No, he had been forever weak and his weakness was undermining what had to be done, which was of course, nothing. Unfortunately, his desire to be strong and stand his ground was a losing battle and he wanted to rush her and grab the gun from her hands and save her once again.

Talitha turned to him and told him she loved him and he believed her, and he saw now she was still the strong one. She knew what was right. She would kill herself and save the world a great deal of pain.

"Love you." Was all she said before he proved himself to be weak once again. In his vision, he had watched the blood shooting out of her head, but in real life he cringed and turned away. After the explosion struck his ears with a painful sharpness, he kept his eyes shut hard for a long time, terribly afraid of what he would see when he opened them.

A loud sniffle from his wife finally forced his eyes to open just a crack and the scene was frightful. Talitha lay across the floor at Lisa's feet with her once tan face staring up blankly at the ceiling. A pool of blood, like a red halo had formed about her head; it expanded outwards by degrees. There was more blood covering the refrigerator as well as the cute multi-colored magnets he had picked up for the baby...

Her hands shook as she removed each letter and dropped them in a glass bowl, which had one time held clear water. Now, the water was a dull reddish grey. Each letter had left an outline of itself in blood, so that the words, I LOVE DADDY, were stenciled on the white of the appliance. With the blood dripping down from the edges of the letters, the words looked like they belonged on the cover of a cheap horror novel...

The vision of Lisa cleaning up the mess smacked him in the face with its reality and he gasped. Tears, unchecked by care or consciousness ran down his face and he found himself reliving the gunshot.

"Will?" Lisa said with a voice that broke. She was a miserable looking thing and the green of her eyes stood out clearly from the red of the blood on her face. She had been standing just behind Talitha when the gun went off and somehow blood had sprayed her face so now she added gory red freckles to her natural ones.

He was supposed to go to her and comfort her...that's what people did in these situations. Will walked around the body and blood of his sister, feeling distinctly like a robot in a man suit. His emotions, so great only a moment ago, had left him completely and he felt hollow and the sound of the gun filled that void, it seemed to echo up and down the inside of his body.

She sobbed and he clutched her too his chest and knew there were important emotions that he should've been feeling but wasn't, and he worried that he was somehow broken.

Movement caught his eye and he saw the giant man that had come from the church with them, kneel at Talitha's side. He reached out gently and Will wanted to tell him not to touch the body, but he couldn't remember the man's name. Talitha had called...White Jim? That didn't seem right.

Will hadn't spoken a single word to the giant in the three hours that he knew him and he suddenly realized how rude he had been. Now he wanted to say something to the man, who simply was staring down at Talitha, but absolutely nothing came to mind. His brain worked furiously, attempting to find anything to say, but it came up empty.

"Will?" Talitha had spoken, seemingly without moving her lips and he jumped at the sound.

"Will?" Now he realized it had been Lisa and he looked at her and again he was speechless. "Will? Hey look at me...what are we going to do?"

"Uh...uh..." That was the best he could do.

"Should we call an ambulance?" she asked looking down at the body. "Or do we let her die?" Lisa stepped back from the little pool of blood that was creeping aggressively toward her feet.

Will stepped back with her and said, "She's already dead...I think I could've stopped her...I know I could..."

Lisa interrupted, "I don't think she's dead."

The giant knelt down and felt Talitha's neck for a moment. "She has a pulse...it's very light."

"What? Not dead?" Will felt the floor spin beneath his feet. Not dead? That wasn't possible—not with all that blood and a hole through her head.

"What do we do? Do we let her die naturally? I...I can't kill her," Lisa was frantic while Will couldn't decide what he was feeling—he only knew that his feelings weren't right. This was his sister lying there. Why wasn't he crying? Why wasn't he in hysterics? Was it because he was a man? Was it because he was broken? Had his weekly torture sessions damaged something inside him?

"Of course we can't kill her," the giant intoned solemnly. "Do either of you know anything about first aid?"

Lisa eyed the man as if seeing him for the first time. "You don't understand! She knows where we live! Who are you? Will, who is this man? Is he with Talitha?"

Will touched his head as if he would feel that broken part of himself. "No, he came up with Father Alba, and..."

"Father Alba! What's...what's going on? Is it back?" Her green eyes were magical emerald fires in her face and they seemed to burn their way out of the blood drying there. The giant stared into her eyes and his own narrowed in wonder at them.

"There's a man, he may be possessed by the demon," Will explained.

The giant rumbled, "He is possessed! And we have to do something about this girl before she dies."

Will bent down to his sister and felt her head as he spoke, "Ok, he's possessed, but it's not the same as before, Honey. He looks like a man...I mean he is a man, totally, there's no smoke about him and Father Alba says he's demanding the sword." Will found where the bullet had entered Talitha's head and was a little shocked to find that it had merely grazed the back of her head. "Lisa, please give some of those drying towels next to you."

He wiped away large clots of blood and could now feel the wound better. His stomach did a barrel roll as he moved what he assumed to be a small part of her skull. The crease the bullet had made was about a half inch deep and ran nearly three inches across the back of her head. The blood seemed to be clotting with amazing swiftness but she had lost so much already that it wouldn't take much more for her to die.

"She might live...if we do something," he said and honestly didn't know what to think.

"Stop talking like that!" the giant said with some anger. "I don't get you two. There are more lives at risk here than just hers."

"Our lives are at risk as well, Mr..."

"Jim Anderson," he spoke with a touch of bashfulness.

"Well, Mr. Anderson, I have known Talitha for a long time and she's always been dangerous but now...she knows where we live! And the other one...the good Talitha, you heard her...I'll never be safe."

"She's been killing as well," Will mentioned sadly. "I don't know how many, but she hinted that it was a lot."

"So you see, Mr. Anderson, there are lives at stake one way or the other." Lisa looked to be falling apart as she said this and her tears, which had slowed down were now coming with more regularity.

"We don't kill her!" Jim said adamantly.

"Then tell me, Jim, what are we going to do?" asked Will angrily from across the body of his sister. "If you want her to live, then we need to take her to a hospital, where they will easily discover her identity and arrest her! How's that going to help those kids? Tell me! How many people will she kill in the hospital when she escapes? People die around this girl all the time." Will stared down at Talitha; she seemed so peaceful and so much like her old self that his heart broke.

"I guess I don't know what we do then," the big man admitted.

"What children are you talking about?" Lisa asked holding onto her round belly.

"The possessed person, he may have kidnapped five children...you know, the ones missing in Boston? He may have them somewhere," Will explained.

The three of them stood in silence and Will could see Lisa and Jim struggling with the same thoughts he had been having. Will's heart felt like a stone, "If she lives or dies, we're damned either way. I say we leave it in God's hands. We bandage her up as best we can and if she lives, she lives."

Jim had a look of disgust on his face, "You don't sound much like a brother to me."

"I guess I'm not. I've wanted to kill her for years. I used to think it was for her own good, but that was partially a lie." The weekly visits were so terrible he had known deep down he wouldn't be able to keep it up much longer.

However, he knew the alternative for Talitha would be a living nightmare. In the asylum, when Talitha had to dream her own dreams, it had been horrible. She'd spend day after day, fighting to stay awake, fearing to close her eyes for even a second. Eventually she'd sleep, and her screams would be deafening and soul wrenching and she'd be a raging animal afterwards, hateful and vicious.

His own dreams, terrible on Saturdays, were only slightly better the rest of the week and insomnia was becoming a constant companion. He could feel his life turning ragged at the edges and he would catch himself daydreaming of running away. Not just from Talitha, but Lisa as well. He feared he'd eventually suffer some sort of mental breakdown and didn't want her anywhere near him when he did.

Will looked at Lisa hugging her little belly and felt a tremendous guilt as he always did at the thought of running out on her. That guilt also extended to his sister and he said to Jim, "No, I'm not such a good brother, but what Talitha is doing to herself and to us...it may be for the best if she dies."

Lisa agreed, "I think you're right, Will. Let's put it in God's hands. Mr. Anderson, can you please pick her up and put her over here on the couch?" Lisa hurried to lay a blanket down on the couch. For Jim, the weight of the girl must have been nothing. She looked terribly small and vulnerable in the man's huge arms and when he'd placed her down he did so with a striking gentleness.

"Paper towels too please and there's an ace bandage in my gym bag," Will called to his wife as she rushed to their little first aid kit. He was just getting a better feel for the wound when she returned. "I thought she was really going to kill herself this time," he said.

"She was," Lisa said in a small voice. "This is my fault...I couldn't let her do it. She looked at me and it was her, Talitha. The girl who was my best friend...my only best friend. At the last moment I grabbed her arm."

Will put on a fake smile. "Maybe it was meant to be then." The smile felt plastic it was so artificial. Lisa had likely prolonged Talitha's agonies on earth and after her speech about hell, Will didn't think Talitha's agonies would ever end.

He dressed the wound as best as he could and then wrapped it with the ace bandage. It had stopped bleeding quicker than he had thought possible. Even for Talitha, it had seemed quick. She had an amazing ability to recover from injuries. During one of their many fights, his wedding ring had opened up her cheek. It had furrowed quite a gouge that had bled copiously, but the following morning it was as if she had never been touched.

After he worked on Talitha, he told his wife about the bizarre day he had, including the full story of the possessed man.

"And nobody knows why he wants it?" she asked.

Will shook his head. "No, unless this Talitha knows."

"Whatever a demon wants with the sword, it can't be good. I'm willing to bet it will end up costing the lives of more than just five children. I don't think you should give it up, Will." Her face was sad but resolute and he nodded in agreement. She turned to Jim, "I think you're going to have to tell Father Alba, we aren't going to give up the sword."

He sighed wearily. "I will...but tell me, is it true? Everything he said about the last demon, back in New York. Was there really some sort of witch?"

Will was too emotionally and physically spent to tell that sad story. He sat listening to Lisa tell it and hearing it again only made him more tired.

Lisa however was in full throttle in the depths of the story, adding color here and flavor there, until it sounded almost epic. Somehow, she left out the part where he had vomited right outside the house and there was no mention of him pissing himself. It didn't matter that it was only a few drops, he had still been that scared.

Watching her rambling on, with the giant hanging on her every word, made him sad for her. Lisa was basically friendless and had a need to talk and to listen like everyone else.

Bangor was an old city filled with old people and though they had tried, Will and Lisa had made no lasting friendships. When Will was away frequently, either on business or dealing with Talitha, and while he was gone Lisa was a veritable hermit and when he returned he would steel himself for the inevitable verbal avalanche.

Will was luckier with friendships; his business had him coming into Boston about once a month and he was close with many of the people he sold software to and could always count on having dinner with someone while in town.

His father and he owned a company that developed banking software. It was actually a triumvirate. William's job was to discover areas where new software was needed, or where updates on old programs could be used. He would give the ideas to Will who would then pitch them to Talitha, this usually occurred on Sunday mornings when she was in the best mood.

Talitha was a self-taught programmer, it was something she picked up with natural ease and she looked upon the challenges that Will would throw at her as if they were a great puzzle.

Will's position was the actual sale of the software. His ability to foreseen the future made his job closer to public relations than to sales. He would know even when dialing a phone number whether or not a sale was going to happen and if wasn't, he'd just hang up and go on to the next person on his list.

It was a very lucrative business and he could afford to buy Lisa the finest things. But life was funny that way; she didn't particularly care for high living and was content with building her family and her home. However, she did spend money flying out of the tiny airport in Bangor for visits, either with her brother, now living in Florida or with Will's parents in Arizona.

His parents weren't doing well; Will and Lisa would visit them at least three times a year. William was a shadow of his former self and Will had dreamed of his father's coming death many times. The death changed with every dream, but the pain never did, it only grew as his remaining days ticked away.

Early on, Will had warned his mom, who had only smiled sadly, already knowing the truth.

William had been steadily losing weight over the years, since his confrontation with the demon and now was hollowed-cheeked and rail thin. Scores of visits to a myriad of doctors ended last year when William discovered they had run out of new tests and were now just replaying his past favorites. Simply put, there was no medical explanation for what was happening to him, but his family knew the reason. He had sacrificed himself for all them, his death being only delayed.

He didn't seem to mind and despite overwhelming exhaustion, he was optimistic and happy at Will's every visit. Katie too was always happy to see them and was now practically giddy with the idea of becoming an aunt. She seemed to grow six inches with every visit and was now a long-legged beautiful freshman.

Outwardly, she seemed to be the only member of the family unaffected by the terrible night eight years prior, but Will knew better. Despite being tall, tan, and gorgeous, Katie seemed to have a deep-rooted hardness in her eyes, which could flare out if she became angry. Sometimes that hardness would be accompanied by a savage smile that reminded him of their father, back in the day.

Will smiled at the thought of his little sister and patted his wife's baby bulge gently. His own child would be blonde as well; he knew of course because he had dreamed her. When he was ever particularly down, it always helped to picture his coming child; she would be beautiful despite not having Lisa's fantastic green eyes. Hers would be a blue-green hazel that reminded him of images of earth seen from space.

Picturing his daughter's face elicited a long sigh that transitioned into a huge yawn. He felt what little energy he had depart with the yawn and knew he wouldn't be able to stay awake much longer. His eyes strayed to his sister, sleeping on the couch and a nasty thought struck him: if she were to wake up, which Talitha would it be?

Will dashed out to the garage and came back with the slimmest rope he could find. He carried Talitha upstairs to one of the guest bedrooms and tied her spread eagle to the four-poster bed there. Lisa hadn't protested this in the least and had left briefly, coming back with wind chimes that had once hung from their wraparound porch. These they secured to each of the ropes and when tested the chimes were muted but still sung loud enough to act as an alarm.

"Don't you think you're over doing it a bit?" Jim asked as they all stood staring down at the trussed up girl. "She may be insane, but she's just a girl and a small one at that."

Lisa craned her head up at him and glowered. "Just a girl? I'm just a girl, but I can still slit your throat while you sleep."

Jim blinked in surprise at this. "Look, I didn't mean to anger you, but she's awfully small, is all I am saying. I don't think she'll be able to tear apart this bed."

Will spoke up, "She's very strong, Jim. I don't know if she can..." His brain suddenly lurched gently off the course of his conversation and he felt his hands go cold...

The water was icy cold and her hands and feet pained her greatly, she wished they would go numb already. A single rock jutted from the placid river; she slapped the shirt down hard upon it, Thwack!

The water was disturbed and rippling and she looked with satisfaction at the distorted images reflected up from the river. But it wouldn't do to let those waters calm too much and so she began scrubbing at the white shirt. She scrubbed. And scrubbed. It could always be whiter and it would eventually come clean if she just worked at it long enough.

Minutes later, a panicked feeling came over her, she had forgotten about the ripples and the water. Almost too late, she saw the surface lying down upon itself, becoming smooth and the images dancing upon its surface started to form into shapes that her mind could comprehend. Thwack! Just in time she had struck the washing stone with an exaggerated motion and the ripples were big ones, good ones...

"Hey...Will? You ok?" He heard Jim's voice coming to him and he blinked at the man giving him a long practiced embarrassed smile that was designed to show that he was just daydreaming...nothing more. Will looked around and saw that he was no longer by the calm river, but in a room with an insane person tied to a bed.

"He was just having a vision, he'll be ok," Lisa said with patience but also a touch of fear. "Was it important? Do you know if Talitha will be alright?"

He hadn't known before, but her asking the question triggered it and he did know now; Talitha would recover. A part of him, a part that he hated, felt keen disappointment at the knowledge.

"I'm good...I'm good. It was only a weird picture in my mind...nothing to do with this. But Talitha will get better...eventually."

Lisa looked anxious at the statement and Will knew she must've felt the same disappointment. "She will? Do you know how long it'll take? I'm just saying, I know you, Will. You're going to want to go to Boston and save the day, but you can't leave me with her."

"Don't worry. I would never leave you with her. In fact, if she does get better and needs a place to recover, I'll want you to clear out, maybe go look for a new place for us," he responded.

Lisa's face looked pained at the thought. She had put so much time into feathering her nest here in Bangor, that it would be a great hardship for her to leave it.

Will continued, "But you're wrong about me wanting to go to Boston...we aren't giving up the sword and it may be days before Talitha is well enough to go. It just doesn't make sense for me to go."

Jim's face grew dark at this. "Without the sword, the girl may be our only chance at saving those children."

"I know, but I can't make her get better! For all we know, it could be a week before she even wakes up and those children can only go a couple of days without water. Besides, I'm sure the real exorcist will be there soon."

"They didn't call one," Jim said matter-of-factly. At the shocked look on their faces, he explained, "You don't understand the hierarchy of the church. Since there are children involved, the first thing they would've done was call the police."

Lisa was shocked. "You haven't called the police either? They could've searched the guy's house or apartment by now."

"The police know who he is already and they've been all over the man's place and got nothing. And I can tell you, they won't get anywhere questioning the demon! As for an exorcism, the man practically took a bath in Holy water and ignored Father Alba, when he commanded the demon to leave. A real exorcist won't come with magic powers, you know. Supposedly, it's a long drawn out process and can take many days. The kids will be dead well before then."

There was silence in the room and Talitha drew their eyes to her. They stood staring at her unconscious body and Will felt his chest thicken and start to ache. He'd have to go to Boston. His visions were likely the only way those children would be saved. He looked at his wife and saw in her eyes, that she knew it too.

"Go be the hero, Will. Go save the day! I knew this would happen, but remember, you have a child too." Her eyes held accusations and angry fear.

"I don't want this, you of all people know I don't want any part of this," he said to her, avoiding looking into her eyes. Her look had hurt him.

"Maybe you don't, but you're like your dad was, heroic to a fault."

She was so wrong. The picture of his emaciated father, dying decades too soon came to him and Will knew he wasn't half the man his father was. Without his gift, his curse as he always thought of it, he would be nothing. He was no hero even with it.

His shoulders slumped as the heavy layers of exhaustion suddenly became too much. A glance at his watch showed that it was just past six pm.

"Sometimes I wish I were like him, but I'm not. I'm not what you think I am at all...right now I'm working on a dozen excuses to get out of going to Boston. I don't want those children to die; I just don't want to have to be the one that saves them. Does that sound heroic?"

She gave him a sad smile. "Are you going to Boston?"

"I have to."

"Then yeah, it does sound heroic." Another batch of tears skated effortlessly down the smoothness of her cheeks, "Go to bed. You look so tired...Jim and I will take turns watching over Talitha."

Jim nodded his large head and Will kissed his wife good night. He stumbled to his room, fighting to stay awake long enough to undress and without a single thought as to whether a girl with a head wound such as Talitha's could dream, he fell deeply asleep.

Just around 8 pm, Talitha's mind started kicking out dream after horrendous dream.

Torture befell Will, turning the night into an endless agony, and it was just as dawn broke that Will dreamt of the stream. He was being tortured by a creature that was similar to a man, however, he had too many arms. These sprouted at odd angles from his body and the creature possessed a machine that seemed designed as he was. It had too many arms as well, but these ended not with hands but with barbed hooks.

The hooks were flatter than normal, and Will guessed their wicked purpose quickly upon seeing them, therefore it was no surprise, when the man-like creature slipped them under Will's skin. The machine came alive and began twisting his flesh. It was very painful, but worse was seeing his skin looking dreadfully like spaghetti entangled around a fork. The sight was horrendous and he vomited great heaping hot chunks. However, the man-like creature was mediocre in his artistry and Will choked on the vomit as it lodged in his throat and he died right there.

Death in hell is never permanent. Will found himself walking along a riverbank. Kicking a stone into the calm waters, he knelt down hurriedly to start his laundry, it was washing day.

Chapter 9

The Virgin's Sacrifice

At first, standing guard in the dark, dank corridor beneath the church had been terrifying. Sounds seemed to creep out of the darkness suggesting activity, sly activity from every hidden corner. It was especially true of the room at the end of the hall.

From that direction, not only was the slyness more pronounced, she could also hear screams and sometimes a knocking that would go on and on, until she was just out of her mind. But worse than the sounds was the silence. It was as if someone or something was listening for her and when it became too quiet she would feel a great desire to stay absolutely still and her eyes would be wide in the weak light.

Sister Mary Agatha's first shift had come at 8am just after Jim and Father Alba had gone off to get Eric Milner. That had been almost a day ago and during those long hours, she and Sean Shay had taken turns, three hours on, three hours off, sitting alone in the corridor. And now, after so long a time, the dark and the sly sounds no longer held the same heavy fear as before and it was becoming almost routine to hear the screams.

They had been worried at first that the children of the orphanage would hear the noise, but with the walls down here being so thick and the door so heavily built, the cries were imperceptible even when standing at the top of the stairs. Moreover, the screams weren't nearly as constant or as loud as they had been and the nun had the dreadful thought that the man was dying, being eaten alive from the inside out, by the demon. The notion shivered her and she glanced at glowing face of her watch, 3:26 am.

Time was different down in the corridor. It had only been three minutes since she last checked her watch, but it felt like ten. She was starting to have to fight the urge to look at it every few seconds and she wondered if this was how addicts felt.

Her wrist and the tiny contraption on it would frequently come up to eye level unbidden and she took to holding her hand over it, just to stop herself. But sometimes, out of the blue she'd see the watch right in front of her face and would realize she had let her mind wander and her wrist, left unattended, would feel the need to do its duty and show her that time was indeed moving at a snail's pace.

She blamed Jim Anderson.

Her mind fixated on him and after every check of her now hated watch, his smiling face would float out of the darkness and gloat at her. Father Alba had returned after dinner, disappointingly without the sword and perhaps worse, without either Jim or Eric Milner. He had told them that Jim would be coming soon, and along with the sword, he was unfortunately bringing some crazy girl back with him. However, he hadn't shown up and as the night progressed, the priest was getting terribly nervous for Jim, but she wasn't.

The nun couldn't picture any girl hurting a man his size and she thought it most likely that he was set up in some nice hotel and would be back later that morning. She pictured him sitting in one of those fancy Jacuzzi bathtubs and she imagined his great size overflowing the hot water, wasting it and she ground her teeth. Sister Mary had always wanted to try out one those tubs and she now pictured herself in it instead of Jim.

"Oh my!" she said quietly. It might have been all the coffee she'd been drinking to keep herself awake or the thought of the Jacuzzi, but either way, she felt a sudden great need to use the bathroom.

"Uhhh!" she was never quiet getting up out of the folding chair. Her size and her bad hip along with her age, made getting out of any chair quietly, an impossibility. But it was worse with the uncomfortable steel thing that dug into her spine and cut the circulation off from her legs.

Once up, she pressed her knuckles into her lower back and stretched, however the nagging pain there wasn't relieved. She hadn't really expected it to be. It would likely be with her for the next couple of days, she thought as she waddled, in a slightly more pronounced waddle due to her stiffness. Though she had to use the bathroom, she first went to the door at the far end of the hall to listen.

There were no sounds that her aging ears could detect; however there was plenty of smell. The demon had been down in that black pit of a room for just over a day and had not once asked to use the bathroom, but somehow the smell was worse than it should have been. It was the smell of a rotting corpse, not a body freshly killed but one that was wet with decomposition and its nasty aroma crept along the cracks of the heavy door and it made her wince.

But there wasn't a body in the room, there couldn't be.

When the demon had demanded this particular room, both Father John and Father Alba had accompanied the man in, while she had stood in the doorway. The room looked as it always had—dark. Even with the light bulb swinging on its chain overhead, the room was dim and the shadows were large and had a physical presence, but there were no bodies and the smell was only that of fetid mildew and deteriorating wood. However, in the late afternoon of the day before, the smell had blossomed fully formed, and had sent the nun scurrying for Father John and Sean Shay.

They had stood outside the door and the smell had walked among them and covered them with its richness and with its evil. They had called out to the possessed man but had only received screams in answer. They mutually decided, with an unspoken agreement, that it was in everyone's best interest not to open the door.

Since then, the stench hadn't abated at all and it was an effort for the nun to keep from gagging as she kept her head bent down next to the door. There seemed to be no sign of life from the other side, but she had a terrible feeling that the demon was just there, just on the other side, listening for her, even as she listened for it. Stepping back away, she moved with the greatest silence she could manage down the sixty-foot hall to the stairs.

She didn't like the idea of leaving her post with the feeling of the demon being so aware, but nature was pushing at the tired walls of her bladder and she had to go.

Coming abreast of the folding chair, the old lady paused to grab her coffee mug and gave a single look back, the door was barely visible and she got a slight case of the shivers.

"We need the police," she whispered. Without Eric Milner she was suddenly more than willing to overlook her past grievances with the police. She'd gone so far as to beg both priests to bring in more officers.

Sister Mary had been overruled.

The disquieting fear that thrummed through her body had made her nearly impervious to logic and the fact that they were harboring a known fugitive, was simply a technicality to her. She could understand not involving the entire police force, but she simply couldn't get past the insistence of the two priests, that no one else be told.

They could at least bring in some more priests or deacons...or even some more nuns, maybe younger nuns. Nuns whose knees didn't pop and make that awful crunching sound as they climbed the stairs.

"Hail Mary mother of God, pray for us sinners..." the words a dry habit, slipped out of her thin wrinkled lips almost on their own accord.

She was gone from the corridor for only seven minutes, but in that time she had mumbled her way through twelve prayers and it would've been more, however she paused frequently to take small sips of her coffee on her return trip.

Each of her shifts contained at least one bathroom break and as refreshing as it was to get out of the reeking corridor, having to go back in, made it not worth it. Her nose and her stomach had to get re-acquainted with the smell, which was bad, and she would have to get used to the anxious fear, which was worse, but it was the near complete dark that made her reluctant steps back down the stairs, a slow motion terror.

The one dim bulb in the center of the corridor only gave enough light to make the shadows larger, adding a tactile dimension to them, making them physical.

To get to her little chair Sister Mary had to walk past three open doors and it was a hated ritual of hers to look into the blackness of each room. Some sort of sinister presence hid within them and when she walked by her heart always sent her a warning of its age, as it thumped mightily in her chest. Had they been furnished with a light switch she would've lit each one by then, however the rooms held a single light bulb strung from the ceiling and she lacked the courage to brave the dark. What would her hands find as she weaved about, swinging her arms in order to locate the invisible chain? Her imagination kept her from making the attempt.

The chair, with its feeble yellowed bulb above it, was an island of safety for her and when she settled her weight onto it, she couldn't stop her wrist as it came up to her face, 3:38 am.

"Uhhg," she groaned aloud and then began, "Our Father who art in Heaven..." She'd go through her top forty at least once before getting up again.

The chair was just too uncomfortable and it was her habit to check the door at the end of the hall periodically if only to stretch her legs. This time she buzzed through her prayers quicker than usual...something was different about the corridor. Something she couldn't quite figure out and her fear ratcheted up with her every breath.

Far too soon she finished her set of prayers and sat there not wanting to move, not wanting to draw attention to herself. Time clicked slowly by...very slowly and her watch, against her will, appeared before her face, 3:47 am.

She almost groaned aloud again, but something inside stopped her. The demon was listening for her again but this time she had the feeling that she was being watched as well.

That was bad, however what was worse, was the small noise that came from the room down the hall back toward the stairs.

It couldn't be explained away. It had a live feel to it. Accompanying the sound was a presence, thick with malice—and from the depths of the pitch-black room, she knew something looked out at her. She tried to peer in, but the thing was in alliance with the darkness and hid within its inky bosom and her growing fear rattled her bones about beneath her skin.

The room and whatever it was it held, sat between her and the stairs and suddenly, quite unbelievably, she felt it might be safer to be in the room with the demon than out in the corridor alone. Holding her breath, she pushed herself up slowly, without her customary grunting, and walked backwards away from the chair. With growing anxiety Sister Mary dug for the key to the room, searching and re-searching her pockets and it was with fantastic relief that she found it.

Now she was torn between her fear of the demon and her fear of the dark, and being this close to the foul smelling door, it made her second guess wanting to go into the room. In fact, the smell of death was worse than it had been and she turned and sniffed at the door, her face contorted by revulsion. Quite suddenly, the single light in the tunnel went out behind her and she stood nearly alone in the jet black.

The bulb hadn't burned out, the chain had been purposely yanked, and she could still hear the light: chink...chink...chink of it slapping the side of the bulb.

Her heart seized up and her breathing ceased. The only part of her that felt alive, were her eyes and these grew to tremendous proportions as she strived to see into the darkness. The darkness was infinite however. It stretched away from her for miles and miles in every direction, yet at the same time, it was close. The darkness hugged her greedily to it, wrapping itself around her, making her a living part of it.

The nun was not the only thing living in the darkness...the folding chair moved with a little scraping sound against the floor. The sound shot through her body, bringing with it a rush of adrenaline that had her heart beating again and her lungs pumping. She spun madly to the door, uncaring of the danger on the other side of it and searched within the blackness for the doorknob. Again and again, her hands swept up and down the flat heavy wood, feeling the old and peeling paint, but not the knob.

Behind her the chair made a long, slow scraping sound, as if pushed by a hulking menace. In terror she whipped her head around, peering uselessly into the unending darkness—it held nothing but the sound of the chair scritching along and her breath, which was loud and harsh. The old lady turned back to the door and her hand struck the knob, she fumbled for it, lost it, but then touched it again. She held it tight, fearing it would move out of reach in the darkness and frantically tried to get the key into the slot.

The chair overturned behind her with a loud clatter, but she didn't look this time, there was no point. "Oh God, please help me," she begged the nothingness in front of her and like a miracle the key slid into the hole and the knob turned. She felt the smallest moment of happiness and then the stench struck her full force. Wavering, she almost didn't go into the room. The smell had a physical presence, an acid that burned her nose and made her gag.

However, it wasn't the smell that had her in a panic of indecision about stepping across the threshold; she was struck with a sudden incredible fear of falling. When she'd opened the door, the view in front of her was exactly as the one behind her. It was as if she had opened an invisible door to a black world and even though the small part of her that could still reason told her the floor of the room was as flat as the hallway, the rest of her mind rebelled. It felt as though the floor ended just in front of her and that she stood upon the edge of a tremendous chasm of black.

"Sisssster?" the voice of the possessed man called out softly from behind or at least she thought it was behind her. In the darkness, directions had lost all meaning and she suddenly didn't know if she was facing the corridor or the room. But it didn't matter, the voice was full of malicious intent and after only the slightest pause, she took a cautious half-step forward, still clinging to the invisible knob of the door. When her foot landed upon cement, she quickly took two more shuffling steps and was in the room. She hauled the door shut behind her and threw her weight against it, scrambling again to find the key hole.

In a second, the door was locked.

Now she waited—gasping and panting—fully expecting the demon to launch itself at the door. In her mind it had grown to outrageous proportions, filling the darkness and she prayed in her speeding, mumbling fashion for the door to hold against the weight of the thing. Seconds ticked by and her mouth filled with the nasty dead smell of the room; it was putrid and she wanted to spit but a thought occurred to her. If the demon was out there...maybe the man was here.

"Uh...sir? Mr...Ba'al?" At the moment, she didn't know if that was the man's name or the demon's. "Are you in here? Could you turn on the light?" There was no sound in the room, but then a knocking came at the door and she leapt in startled, frightened surprise. Harder she pushed up against the door and how it was possible, she didn't know, but her fear grew stronger and her panting kept getting quicker and shallower. The knock came again and she jumped just as before and clung to the doorknob with all her might.

"Go away," she cried out in a high scared voice.

"Let me in...I left something in there."

She caught herself foolishly looking around at the blackness. "Ba'al, there's nothing in here," she replied with a touch more strength.

"Yes there is. My snack is in there," it said.

Her brain whirled over the last thirty or so hours and she realized they had brought him nothing to eat. It was she that he was after.

"No Ba'al, we had a deal! The sword for the children. That was the deal," she pleaded.

"I have a new deal..."

She didn't want to hear the new deal...she knew she was part of the deal. A pain began to spread in her chest, making it hard to breath. "No, Ba'al please no. We have a deal already; the sword will be here soon. Ok? Please stay out there."

"Stay out? Your walls can't hold me, if I don't want them to...feel."

Both of her hands still rested on the doorknob and despite the fact that it had just been locked it began to turn beneath her fingers. She tried to grip it tighter but her sweat made it so she could barely hold it at all and the knob continued all the way and then, though her full weight was hard up against it, the door opened just a crack.

She screamed into the black, "No please no, Ba'al we have a deal, ok?" Sister Mary's panic was near complete and she almost went running off into the darkness, chasm be damned, but suddenly the knob turned to the left and the door shut.

"I was supposed to have my path by now...that deal is gone, but I have a new one. Except you have to want it. You have to beg me for it." The possessed man's voice, though muffled was now more man than demon and she could understand it just a bit better.

"No, I want the old deal...it's very fair I think."

"Don't you want to even hear the new deal?"

"No. No I don't. I want the old deal!" The new deal would hurt, she knew it. Her fear was horrendous; she was losing control of her muscles and she shook from head to toe in the darkness. Her hands repeatedly slipped off the knob and she had to wipe them on her habit every second or so to keep any sort of grip. Her mind began to go over a litany of tortures she'd heard about, but then the demon spoke again, interrupting her.

"I will do you a favor and tell you anyways..."

"No!" she screamed.

"Here's the deal..."

"NO!"

"I want to kill tonight...before the sun comes up," he said. "Now, I think you are worth six of those boys up there..."

"Nooooo!" She was in misery and the word she screamed was a long terrified wail.

"You haven't even heard my proposal yet." He seemed a little pouty over this. "Now don't be too quick to answer...do I kill you or six of your boys?"

Sister Mary Agatha felt like she was just about to float away into the black. Numbness spread out through her entire body and in the darkness, it seemed as though she were evaporating. She wondered vaguely if she were about to faint and even as she thought it, she did.

A half-second later, she hit the floor hard, smacking the side of her head and face on the cement. It snapped her back to her terrifying reality and she weakly scrambled to the door, only to find a wall where the door had been.

"Sissster?" The word came from her right. She crawled toward the sound, and her questing fingers touched the door. She pulled herself up using the knob as a grip and stood there trying not to fall back over, speechless.

"Sissster?" He was a little more impatient this time. "That's ok...I understand. You can't find it within you, to tell me to go kill six little boys. Just remain silent and I will take it we have a deal."

"I...I...I," she couldn't form the words, she couldn't form any words.

"I what? You or the boys...if I don't get a firm decision, I will make it seven."

"No...I..." her mouth hung open and the putrid stench was no longer a factor, only her fear was important. It was everything and even though she loved her boys she couldn't bring herself to say the words that might let them live.

"Seven it is then...good! That's what I hoped you would say..."

"No," she whispered it in the weakest manner.

"I'll be back in the morning...I think I will start with the little red headed one. Who wants a red headed kid anyways, right?"

"No, not Jeremy! Please no." His precious face appeared in living color in her mind and she realized then that she was crying. She touched her face and habit, they were soaked and she wondered how long her tears had been falling.

"Not Jeremy?" the demon asked, considering. "Then you pick the seven."

"I can't"

"Then open the door and invite me in." He said it quietly and she knew that he was evil beyond any man that had ever been.

She turned the knob with numb hands and a part of her hoped that she would faint again. The door opened only a little way, perhaps a foot and then it stopped, held there by the possessed man just beyond. Sister Mary gave a little gasp and the breath that she drew in from the corridor was amazingly fresh compared to the poisonous rot of the room she was in.

"Before you agree," he began softly and she jumped back, his voice was far closer than she expected. "Are you sure you really want to do this? It's only seven boys and we both know, nobody really wants these children anyways, right Sister?"

"Don't hurt them...I'll do anything, just don't hurt them."

"That's it? You aren't going to fight me or scream?" he asked with bogus amazement. She knew screaming would be a waste of time. When the demon had first walked into his room, the one he had chosen, he had screamed bloody murder, but it had been impossible to hear, even just above in the church. At the time she had been thankful.

"No I won't scream...just...you can't hurt the boys...that's the deal." She felt the tiniest amount of courage seep into her wretched miserable soul, but he took it away again in the next second.

"But I want you to scream. Don't you know what I'm going to do to you?" He was very reasonable sounding and that made his evil all the worse. She figured that he was not driven by insanity, but by a lust for pain and she knew it would be terrible.

"I think so," she mumbled the lie. She didn't really know what he would do but only knew that it would hurt. Thinking about it made her aware of her body again...she couldn't stop her old muscles from shaking and her legs were threatening to buckle beneath her.

"You don't know, Sister. Tell me you are virgin, please." He paused breathing heavily, waiting for her response but her own breath stuck in her throat. She was a virgin. Even as a youngster, she had been homely and instead of fighting her genes, she had decided to save herself for God.

"I can't hear you Sister...before you die, am I going to be your first?"

Her legs did indeed buckle beneath her and she held to the knob with the last of her strength. There was a spinning sensation but with the blackness there was nothing to spin and she could only pant like a dog and the only other sound was a tiny, lipp...lipp...lipp, as her tears struck the floor.

"I told you, you didn't know...but I think you got me all wrong. I'm not going to rape you. I mean you're old and fat and ugly. Why would I want to rape you? I would rather kill those children, so if you don't want that, you're going to have to convince me to fuck you. But I don't see how you will, short of begging. Come on ya old saggy slut, beg me, or am I going to make it eight?"

The number eight came to her from a mile away and it brought her back again from the precipice of fainting. "No not eight...you can't." But he could. There was no way she could stop him. "Ok...ok. Please come...um do the uh..." She didn't know how to beg for it.

"I don't think your heart is into it...don't worry you tried." The door started to shut from the other side.

"No, please...I want you...uhh badly um, please make love to me?"

"Not! Good! Enough!" he roared the words at her. In terror she stepped back into the room and lost her hold on the door. She panicked at this and swung her arms about wildly, only the room seemed to have expanded greatly because she didn't come in contact with anything. Up and down began to lose meaning and she half-fell, half-sat hard upon the floor and sobbed there, blubbering loudly in the endless dark.

"This is my fault," the demon said and his voice seemed far away. "You're new at this...I like that...it gets me hard. Now I've always wanted to do a nun, so I'm going to help you. Say this: Oh yeah fuck me hard!"

Her mind rebelled against it and she had trouble saying anything with her crying so heavily, but she finally whimpered, "O-yeah...fuck me...hard."

"Now say, oh baby, that's right do me good." He was closer, somewhere in the room.

Sister Mary Agatha curled into a ball and said to the floor, the only part of the world with any substance, "Oh-baby-that's right-do me good...Hail Mary mother of God..." Pain suddenly exploded in her back.

"No praying...except for when you say: Oh God! Oh God!" He laughed maliciously and then he loomed over. She could feel him hot above her. "Now take off your clothes you little slut," he whispered with excitement in his voice.

"Ohhh nooo," she cried in quiet misery but took off her clothes all the same until she lay naked upon them, her body shivering with the cold and the terror.

Now there was only a painful silence, and it seemed that the demon had moved away. For a second hope flared that he had left her—that it had all been a cruel joke but then the door to room closed with a finality that sent a shiver down her soul and when he suddenly touched her in the darkness, she screamed. The darkness swallowed her many screams and no ears would ever hear them.

Chapter 10

Talitha Meets Jim

"Lisa."

It was a whisper in his dreams.

"Lisa."

Jim cracked an eye and saw that the girl was awake. He blinked rapidly, feeling the grit and the exhaustion. For some reason Talitha refused to look at him and she went silent with the slightest apprehension on her face as he stirred. He scowled slightly at her, not liking to be ignored, but she ignored that too.

Their silence drew out and he eyed her closely. She wasn't much to look at, despite the fact that she had slept more than anyone in the house, if indeed a coma was actually sleep. Her dress, the same one that she had worn to church the previous day was stained with hard dried blood. Her hair was tangled and stiff, again with blood and he didn't envy her trying to get it all out.

The girls hands, still tied to the bed posts were a repulsive purple and Jim suffered a slight pang of guilt at the sight, but since the restraints were a necessity he tried to look past them. Her face held relatively little of the red/brown smears and she looked healthy and well rested despite the gunshot wound to the back of her head.

She was the only one in the house who could make any claim to being well rested. The night had been easily the worst night Jim could remember and he rubbed hard at his eyes trying to clear the sleep from them. When he looked back at the girl, she still wasn't looking at him though at least had turned to face him slightly.

What a peach, he thought testily and before he could stop himself, he yawned in a great opened mouth gape, forgetting to cover his mouth until he was nearly done. She ignored that as well, staring off at the wall to his right. He figured he was seeing the good Talitha, since this one had a different, almost vacant look to her eyes, while the bad Talitha had always eyed him with such unsettling perception. The other one had been quite the talker as well; this good one, just sat their mutely.

The silence stretched from seconds to minutes, until the usually taciturn man felt an odd need to say something. It was odd in that he was uncomfortable instigating any type of conversation, especially with a pretty girl. They were generally insensitive, if not outright cruel. However, even the average person could be difficult for him to talk to since he had found out a long time ago that his opinions were basically not wanted.

Jim appeared to be a big stupid oaf and almost no one beside Father Alba ever looked past his exterior. This was true even in school where he was passed along every year with no expectations placed on him whatsoever, except to play football. College was no different. He got into Syracuse on a football scholarship, and the moment he blew out his knee it was understood that he should give up the remains of his scholarship and move on. Even though he still had a right to it, he left school; he wasn't going to stay where he wasn't wanted.

He made an exception that morning—Talitha clearly didn't want him around. When nearly fifteen minutes had passed, Jim couldn't take the silence anymore.

"Are those ropes too tight? They look painful."

She said nothing to this; she simply continued to stare at the wall; however her lips pursed the smallest amount and Jim realized how stupid his question sounded. Embarrassment reddened his ears and he looked down feeling like an idiot.

Talitha must have seen his discomfort. "They're properly tight...you don't want them any looser." Her head inclined toward him. "You were at the church weren't you? I could smell the Irish Spring on you; my brother uses that brand of soap as well."

"Yeah, I was there." He hoped his discomfort didn't show. He'd been told that she suffered from schizophrenia and it was strange to have to re-introduce himself to her. "My name is, uh, Jim Anderson and..." He trailed off wondering if he was he going to have to repeat the entire conversation he'd shared with her other self.

She paused only the slightest before saying, "You probably already know this, my name is Talitha Jern. It's nice to meet you Jim. I noticed there was the slightest hesitation when you said your last name...is that your real last name?"

Her brother seemingly had a magic power to see the future and Talitha's other self had read his thought with such accuracy he wondered if she was indeed a mind reader. Perhaps this Talitha would be more truthful.

"Can you tell what I'm thinking or something?" He felt stupid for asking, but she smiled sweetly in that slightly unfocused way.

"No, I'm just perceptive. What is your real last name?"

He told her that he didn't have one and then he told her a great many things about himself that he had rarely, if ever, told anyone. For him it was a bizarre conversation, in that it flowed easily and naturally from topic to topic, as if they were best friends. This was a first for Jim and he figured it was due to the girl's perception. Though she claimed it wasn't, it sure seemed like mind reading to him and for the first time in his life, he opened up to a woman.

There seemed no logical reason to hold back since she could tell a lie from a mile away. Moreover, unlike many people and her evil twin in particular, she didn't stare at his ugly features and this diminished his self-consciousness considerably.

When he glanced at his watch he was amazed that an hour had passed during their talk. "Wow, we've talked for just over an hour...or should I say, I've talked for an hour." She had steered the conversation away from herself at every opportunity, which he hadn't even noticed until now. "Lisa tells me you program computers or some such, do you like doing that?"

"Yes I do...I like your voice," she said with a distant smile. "It's so deep, that I can feel it on my skin when you talk. It's like the foghorn on an island I used to live on."

"BEEE-OOOHH!" He mimicked a foghorn, his voice coming out in the deepest bass. "The kids at the orphanage like it when I do that."

"An orphanage...that's nice of you. Tell me, is it only a place for unwanted children? Or are there, uh, adults there?"

"Oh yeah, there are three nuns on staff, and then there's Sean and I, we're counselors for the kids." Jim said, suddenly proud of his work.

"Oh...I see. Tell me about the orphanage. The sound of your voice makes it seem like home."

"It sure is, but first you need to talk about you. There was a question about computers that you dodged...is it really boring, I ask because it looks boring."

"I don't want to talk about myself," she replied with a half frown. She continued her practice of not looking him in the eyes, but was staring at his stomach so much that he involuntarily looked down to see if he had spilled some food. There was nothing there.

Jim sucked in his stomach a little. "I had heard that talking about things was supposed to be good for you."

Her frown deepened. "There's nothing about me that I want to talk about. Let's talk about something else or let's not talk at all."

He smiled inwardly; her little threat had stung him more than he would've thought possible. "Sure, we can talk about something else," he agreed amiably. "Programming computers can't be anything but boring anyways."

"Don't make assumptions, Jim. It can lead to trouble," she said this with a small smile and it lightened Jim's heart to see it.

"You don't make assumptions...ever?" he asked cocking his head to catch her eye. But just then, she looked down at her bedding and gave a little shake of her head.

"I won't say never," she answered. "But I try only to judge things for what they are, in the context, in which they were meant to be interpreted."

"Me too," he said, suddenly self-conscious for the first time during their conversation. She was clearly far smarter than he was. "But even though I try...I still do it, uh make assumptions that is."

"Well that's good, Jim. It's good that you can admit to it. It's not often you find someone who's so willing to admit to a character flaw."

"Do I say thank you to that?" he spoke with a smirk and she smiled as well. "Do you have any character flaws that you'd confess to?"

He had meant for it to be just a light joke, but her face froze in mid-smile and then as she turned away it went into a blank looking stare. "You've seen me already, Jim. You know my flaws."

He couldn't believe how ridiculously insensitive he'd just been and his mind flailed around searching for something to say that would show what he had truly meant.

"I...I only meant this side of you...uh, I kinda assumed that since your other self is so, uh bad, that you," he pointed at her for emphasis, but she ignored him completely. "The good you, would be all good...you know what I mean?"

"What did I say about assuming? Jim? Can you do me a little favor? Can you please look at my head? It feels big...almost like a pumpkin." Her smile froze on her face, and her eyes held a trace of nervousness.

Talitha tilted her head away and he leaned forward in his chair, inspecting the bandaged wound. There didn't appear to be any swelling that he could see from around the bandages. It was hard to see through her hair, which was thick and matted with blood. He wondered briefly, how they were going to bathe her and an image of him washing her popped into his mind and he hung onto the image a touch too long.

"Is it ok, Jim?"

He jumped a little. "Oh yeah, uh, no swelling. You look ok back here...well actually it looks gross." He started sweeping away the dried blood from her pillow, but more of it rained down from her head and he stopped.

"I hope you don't find me rude but I'm just going to face this way for a bit, it was becoming uncomfortable facing that direction for so long," she said and Jim couldn't image how anything was going to relieve her discomfort short of cutting her loose.

"Sure, that's no big deal, here." Picking up his chair, he walked it over to the other side of the bed, and plunked it down quietly. He didn't want to wake Lisa or Will; their night had been even worse than his own. When he'd sat back down, he said evenly, "Now you know, you dodged another question. Does your good side have any flaws?"

The girl sat quiet for a moment. "Did Lisa tell you what she was going to name the baby?"

Jim laughed quietly. "You won't answer, will you?"

"No."

"Then you're practically forcing me to make assumptions."

"You have free will, Jim. Use it." She was cool to him but at least she was still talking, which he took to be a good sign.

"How about this? Since you won't talk about you, how bout you tell me...what about you, is not true, but everyone thinks is true? That's not talking about you. It's talking about what others think of you."

"Tricky, tricky, but it won't work. I don't know anyone that doesn't already know all about me. Except you of course and we already discovered your silly assumption." She gave him a faint smile, which he returned broadly.

"Ok, how bout before? Before all this happened to you?" He was happily surprised that she was obviously thinking about his question.

"Some people thought that I could dance, when I never could." She said it quietly, as if it was a secret shame that he shouldn't share with anyone.

"That's funny. When I was a kid, I thought all girls had beautiful penmanship and that they could all naturally sing and dance well."

The indistinct smile on her face firmed up at this. "My handwriting is pretty good, but I can't sing or dance."

"That doesn't seem too bad. Did it bother you? You know people thinking a good thing about you?"

She saddened and her eyes dropped to the bed. "No, it was just that I was disappointed with myself. I thought I was going to be a natural dancer...like my mom, but it never happened. And despite secretly practicing, I was terrible."

"I'd bet I'm worse than you, but who knows?" He'd never danced before. Not a single time. He looked down with a tired melancholy, glad for the moment that she didn't like to look at him. He didn't want her reading his face just then, but when he looked up she was staring not at him, but through him it seemed.

"Why wouldn't you know?" she asked. "A person has to know if he can dance or not. Are you saying you've never been in a dance contest?"

"Nope. Never been in one, but you're changing the subject again. We were talking about your dancing." In truth, he wanted the subject changed badly.

She shrugged as best as she was able with her hands outstretched, tied to the posts. "What is there more to say? I can't dance. You know...part of my problem was they kept changing the dances. I would learn the Hustle only to find out everyone was on to a completely new dance. They were like month long dance fads and I couldn't keep up. Do they still do that?"

Jim didn't follow dancing at all. "I don't think so...there was this song a few years back, Thriller by Michael Jackson and there was some sort of dance that went with it."

"Michael Jackson? The boy from the Jackson 5?" she asked. She looked up at him for the answer, their eyes met briefly, and his heart felt suddenly bigger in his chest.

"Uh...no, I mean yeah. He does his own songs now. I saw Thriller at this bar once, I didn't get what the big deal was."

"You saw it? Were you at a discotheque?" She smiled prettily at his loud guffawing. "What is it?"

"No, it was on video. You're like a time capsule. By the way, disco is dead...long gone," he said. She kept smiling at him and he had trouble looking at her. He wouldn't have thought it possible but he realized that he liked Talitha and he was afraid that she would see it in his eyes.

"I for one am glad it's gone," she replied. "I was definitely not a fan...chamber music is more my style."

He felt like a moron but said, "I don't know what that is...I-I've never heard of it."

"You have heard of classical music of course. Chamber music is actually like that but on a smaller scale, thus the term chamber suggesting it can be played in a small room," she answered and looked a little bashful doing it. "It's no wonder I can't disco-dance right?"

He chuckled. "Disco-dance...it's been such a long time since I heard that phrase. But you can dance to chamber. I went to the ballet once with some kids from the orphanage and it was all chamber." His voice had risen from its normal base into a baritone and he realized he'd just got excited. Despite the girl's reluctance to look at him, he composed his face into a stony block of neutralism.

That he loved the ballet was not something he was going to tell Talitha. She'd laugh at him and he knew that it would be painful coming from her, especially now.

That one time at the ballet, with him stuffed into his best suit, sweating the fact that the seams were threatening to let go at the slightest cough, had been all it took for him to fall in love with it. But it was a secret love and an unfulfilled one.

The slight lithe bodies of the woman and the strong but agile bodies of the men had enraptured him. There movements, so fluid yet still so exact, had him mesmerized and dreaming, wishing that he could look that way, dance that way. It was all so fantastic to him, yet he'd never gone back and never would. It was just another place where he wasn't wanted. And not just by the unfortunate people seated behind him, whose view consisted solely of his massive shoulders, it was everyone.

He'd been openly gaped at, and laughed at, and whispered about. It might have been all in his head, but the eyes darting away from him, followed by mocking laughter cut him to the bone. He knew how he looked next to all the fine people in their expensive clothes—like an ogre, and they stared and stared.

The suit he wore was his only one and it had been let out so much, there was nothing left to let out. He had gone to the restroom and was startled by his own appearance, not just by the cheap suit, but also by his face, which was an unhealthy red. His shirt had taken him ten minutes to button at the collar and choked him terribly, but he didn't feel he could undo the button. There were men in tuxedos and ladies in beautiful gowns and his clothes looked already like a beggar's compared to them. Ducking his head in shame, he had returned to his seat, knowing he would never go back to the ballet and he hadn't.

Talitha was frowning slightly, staring at his mouth, which he realized was hanging open. He shut it with a snap and her smile returned abruptly, she said, "Ballet? I'm the worst at ballet. You have to be graceful and smooth...I'm not a klutz or anything, I'm just not ballet material." Jim pictured the memory of her dropping down into a spin, sweeping her brother's legs out from beneath him and then flowing back up, only to leap forward.

"Your other self is pretty agile, maybe you are too. Have you tried to uh, dance since, uh...since?"

"No, dancing isn't on my mind much. I just read my books and write code. You asked if programming is boring. It is, but in a good way. I can focus on it and it keeps me from thinking of...stuff." Her face was growing cloudy and despondent.

He saw that going down the road of discussing computers was a dead end, so he shifted back to dancing, "Uh, your mom was a dancer? What kind?"

Talitha smiled her finest smile yet and Jim couldn't help but smile too. He liked it when she was happy, it lit up her face and made her eyes come alive. But for some reason those sparkling eyes never would look into his for very long. It was as if she wouldn't or couldn't stand to look at his eyes for more than a second. It was a little depressing for him, but it was also more than any other woman had given him in a long time.

"My, mom? She was a ballerina, supposedly the finest ballerina in all of Omaha. Maybe in all of Nebraska since there is not that much outside of Omaha."

"That sounds nice. Is the ballet big in Nebraska?" he asked.

Her smile had drifted off of him, but when he spoke, it shifted back and he looked to catch her eyes, but she stared past him perhaps thinking of Nebraska. He felt the keen edge of foolish disappointment when she refused to look at him and he tried to reign in his feelings, which had been growing with every second he spoke with her.

"No, Nebraska is not the place for a dancer. When my mom she saved up enough money she moved to New York."

"Is that where she met your dad?" he asked with genuine interest.

"No she didn't meet my dad there...she starved there. You see the finest dancer in all of the great state of Nebraska, makes you number ten thousand in New York." She sighed as if it were her dreams that had faded away under the lights of Broadway.

"So what did she do?"

"I don't know. Worked I suppose, but she left New York for a spot in a small time dance company in Connecticut and that's where she met my dad. They fell in love and she gave up any chance at her dream to be with him."

He shook his head, wondering what it must be like to give up your dreams. His own dream was as simple as it was unlikely to attain, he wanted to be normal. He wanted not to be this giant freak of a man. "Wow, gave up her dreams just like that."

"Yes, love makes you do the craziest things." Her voice came out from deep within her and it was a hollow whisper, devoid of any strength. Her smile had become a thin line on her clouded face and her eyes suddenly brimmed with tears.

Jim knew what she had done to the last man that had loved her. Lisa had told him the story during the long agonizing hours they'd spent together the night before and now he sat there speechless. Not knowing what to say, he kept his eyes down so as not to embarrass her and they became mired in another long silence.

"Have you ever been in love?" she asked quietly.

He swallowed hard, wishing she'd asked about anything else. His history of relationships was short and cold. He'd never loved anyone and no one had ever loved him, and even though he had been in a few relationships, they hadn't gone anywhere. The only type of girls he seemed capable of attracting were very large women and with each it became obvious they were with him strictly because the alternative was to be alone.

On these rare occasions, he'd tried to be a good boyfriend, but eventually their baggage and selfish desires would drive him away. He knew it would be different if they'd ever liked him for who he was, but he always felt like a servant catering to their needs, without his needs even being noticed. And unlike them, he preferred to be alone.

"No...never been in love." There was bitterness in his own voice and he kept his eyes averted from Talitha.

"Oh, I'm sorry. But sometimes that may be for the best," she added trying to make the fact that he was unloved an ok thing. It grated on him and he became slightly angry that a beautiful, intelligent girl would presume to tell him, that it was all right not to be loved.

"You're wrong...it's not for the best." The conversation was an acute embarrassment for him and coupled with the lack of sleep over the past two nights his irritation grew.

She seemed slightly upset to be told she was wrong and said with growing ire, "You don't know...the alternative could be..."

He cut her off, "In this case you're wrong, Talitha. It's always better to have loved and lost than..."

"Shut up." Talitha said this dangerously quiet and her eyes flashed with black anger. "That saying is crap! I wish you could trade..." With her jaw working back and forth in rage, she stopped in midsentence, making Jim wonder if he was seeing the other Talitha now.

He didn't care which Talitha he was talking to and his resentment over her blindness to his feeling came out in his voice. "Ha! You wish you could trade places with me? I know what happened to you...and it's the worst thing I can imagine, but, you are loved..."

"I killed the only boy who ever loved me," she broke in icily and with menace. "I didn't lose him. I tore his throat out. Now please tell me again, how it's better that I lost this love?"

Her words were a knife in the continuum of his soul, but she hadn't said anything he didn't already know. "I still believe it."

"Then you are as stupid as you look."

"And you're blind to what you have! I was told that you were smart but I'm not seeing it. Can you tell me what unconditional love feels like? I can give you the definition, but I've never felt it before, have you?" She refused to answer but only stared off stewing in her anger so he went on, "How many people love you? Damn it, I can't believe you can't see this! Lisa? Your brother? Your mom, your dad? Your little sister...uh, Katie? Brian?"

"Brian's dead...or have you forgotten?"

He ignored her. "At least six people! And at least three of them were willing to give their own lives for you. And two of those were willing to be tortured for you. That is so huge."

Her anger disappeared in her tears that formed large in her eyes. "But, I am...was the one doing the torturing."

"Yeah, but they still loved you. Brian, to the day he died, still loved you. Lisa told me he doted on you every second of every day. I can't believe you're going to pretend you would want what I have, or should I say, don't have? Do you know how many people have loved me unconditionally?"

Her tears became great pools in the dams of her eyes, yet they didn't spill over but grew and she said, "There had to be someone."

"No, I don't think so. My parents threw me away like yesterdays garbage and the closest I ever came was my adoptive parents. They liked me, I hope they loved me, but I only knew them for two months before they died, so I don't know."

"What about a girlfriend? Do...you have one?" The dam finally broke at this and her eyes poured forth their pent up misery. The tears became two small rivers racing each other down her face.

The sight of it emptied Jim of the last of his anger and his heart broke for her. He tried to put a smile in his voice, "What do you think? Look at this ugly mug!" She didn't turn her head toward him and he said still lightly, "Am I that repulsive you can't look at me?"

"No, it's not that...I'm just blind." She was so calm in her delivery that he at first didn't catch what she had said.

"You are...what?" he asked in disbelief.

"Blind. The bullet damaged the back lobe of my brain, the occipital lobe. It's where the visual processing center is located in the mammalian brain." She paused as if for a comment but Jim was too stunned by what she was saying and even more, by how she was saying it. She went on still in the calmest manner, "Injury to that portion of the Cerebral Cortex usually results in some vision loss, mine just happens to be total vision loss."

Her mannerisms of the past hour or so came back to him slowly and he felt enormously stupid for not having seen it. "I'm sorry Talitha...this is terrible."

"I'm not sorry at all, Jim. I hope it's permanent."

"What? Why?"

She didn't answer because it was so obvious, her other self would be far less of a threat this way. Instead, she gave a little shrug. "Back to our conversation, which by the way, I was enjoying immensely...I'm sorry I shouted at you." Her tears had stopped at her clinical description of the cause of her blindness, but her face was still damp with them and she looked like a sweet kid after a fall from a bike.

"That's ok...uh, I'm sorry too. Our situations are so..."

He had run out of words and there was a silence again until she said, "I don't think you're ugly by the way."

"You only saw me for a moment," he laughed feeling a funny joy at her words, thankful that she was being so nice.

"Generally, a moment is all I need. As I said, you aren't ugly, though I wouldn't put you in the handsome category either. It's just that you are so startlingly big. When...hold on, there's someone moving about, it's Lisa." An odd anxious expression came over her. "Jim, how do I look, honestly?"

She was a bit of a wreck with light smears of red-brown on her face while her hair was thick and hard looking with the dried blood and it went in all directions. "You've been prettier. There's a little blood on your face and your hair's in need of help."

He went to her and tried to smooth down her hair, he was only slightly successful. Her face was a mask of worry. "Can you get the blood off my face? Is it a lot?"

"It's not a lot, but I don't have a rag or anything," he said.

"Could you just...get it off?" she asked and he knew what she wanted. He stuck his thumb in his mouth and wiped at the blood and did a fairly good job, she grinned at him as he did it. The childlike innocence in her blind eyes made him suck in his breath and it was all he could do, not to bend down and kiss her.

He came to his senses and got off the bed before he could do anything stupid and asked, "Can you hear them? How do you know it's her, maybe it's Will?"

"I feel the vibrations of her steps upon the floor; it comes up through the bedposts and down ropes. I know it's her because she's much lighter." She gave a little laugh and said, "You on the other hand, are like an elephant! I could feel your steps even in my dreams..."

Her laugh froze on her lips for just a moment and then her eyes went wild and tears erupted from them, rolling once again down her cheeks. She began to shake her head back and forth. "No...no...please no! Please, Jim you have to tell me that Will was awake last night. Please!" He couldn't tell if she was begging him for the truth or for him to lie to her.

Chapter 11

A Glimpse into the Void

For Jim the night had been long and loud and horrible, so much so that even thinking about it caused him to feel his chest tighten. However, for Lisa it was as if she was sharing the torturous pain of her husband. Will's screams elicited screams of agony from her and his tears were double only by hers. She'd done everything possible to wake him up, including dousing him with water and when that hadn't worked, they had tried to wake Talitha, but had failed at that as well.

Hour after hour, they stood by his bedside, while he went on screaming in such misery that it hurt Jim even now to think about it. Every once in a while, interspersed with his screams, Will had begged in a high girlish voice. Sometimes he'd begged the torturer to stop, and sometimes he had begged for death. However, the cruel thing to whom he pleaded ignored him and the torture went on and on throughout the entire night.

Lisa was a complete ruin. When just before daylight Will had unexpectedly stopped his cries, she'd sat there weeping with hitching sobs until Jim had gone and hugged her small body to his great one. When Lisa had explained that Will went through this on a weekly basis for his sister, Jim had been staggered and his foolish words: "You're not much of a brother," came back to haunt him. Tremendous shame over his stupid ignorance swept him, and he wondered how he could ever face the man again.

That worry was now doubled since he couldn't even look in Talitha's blind face to say, "Yeah, he was asleep. It was, uh..." It was impossible for him to describe.

"No, I can't do this anymore. Jim, help me please. Kill me...I need to die." Her pain at the misery she was causing was written across her face in tears. "Do it now before she comes in! You can say I died in my sleep, Ok? Strangle me...don't worry, it doesn't even hurt much...I've been strangled before, it'll be a mercy."

"No!" he said, and the single word spoken with his deep voice carried all the authority he could muster and it stopped her begging. She sat leaking from the eyes, her chest hitching with each breath.

A minute later, she said, "I'm sorry, Lisa. I didn't mean for it to happen."

"Well it did," Lisa's voice was icy as if from the depths of a blizzard and when she stepped into the room, her cold anger was a presence. "Tell me last night was a bad night. Tell me they're not all like that."

"I don't know," Talitha replied in a small voice. "I'm always asleep. I don't know what happens."

"This is done Talitha. Last night was the last night!" Lisa was growing in her anger, while Talitha had become tiny in comparison.

"Yes, of course. I'm so sorry."

"Stop it! You're not sorry. You're hurting him...maybe even killing him." Lisa's anger started to dip below the red-eyed veneer of her exhaustion and she walked over the bed. The bound girl looked deeply remorseful and she tried to hide her wretched face from her sister-in-law, by hanging her head as low as the ropes would allow.

"You're right. I tried to stop him, at first, but he kept coming back. But...but I'll move to...I don't know, somewhere," Talitha murmured through the hair that dangled in front of her face.

"You won't have to move. We're the ones that'll have to move, now that you know where we live, and trust me it'll be far away."

The words stung Talitha; tears, and snot ran down her face, Jim couldn't help it and wiped them away as if she were his child. She shook her head. "No, stop it. Leave me alone. I need to be left alone. Please do move Lisa. I won't look for you. I promise."

Lisa's stony face cracked slightly and a touch of emotion shown through, but it seemed that she shook it off. "You better not. The next time I see you, I plan to shoot to kill. I have to protect my family."

Talitha suddenly looked hopeful. "Kill me now! It's the only way you know you'll be safe."

Lisa stepped back at this and her face showed open shock at the plainly stated request. "I can't do that. Not in cold blood and besides, you might be needed. There's a...a thing going on, but I'll wait for your brother to get up before I say anything else."

The hope fled Talitha's face and she tried to hide behind her hair again. "He's already awake."

There was a heavy pause as Jim and Lisa turned to face the doorway and even though Jim had expected Will to look poor after his ordeal, the man was almost unrecognizable.

His passing summer tan had faded into alabaster and the dark circles under his eyes, that Jim had first noticed at the church were now an unhealthy blue black. Sporadically, the right side of face would come alive with a spastic twitch that would start near his mouth. The muscles jumping beneath his skin would jerk in a staccato up to his eye, causing a rapid involuntary blinking.

Will halted in the doorway as if surprised to find everyone in the room and he eyed them after a nervous guilty fashion. Lisa went to him slowly, obviously as alarmed at his appearance as Jim; Will flinched back from her and looked on the verge of bolting from the room.

"It's ok, honey," she said sweetly, and gradually took him in an embrace, hugging him about the chest. His response shifted from fright to relief and his face started to regain some of its natural color. When Will closed his eyes, a long silence ensued that Jim was afraid to disrupt, and he only watched as Will's facial tic started a leisurely parade across his face.

A moment later, he opened his eyes and seemed to notice Jim for the first time and the big man remembered his guilt. "Uh, good morning, Will," Jim said in his friendliest manner, forming a crooked smile to go along with his bent nose.

Will rubbed at the muscles of his face, looked at Jim and said, "Hello...um, uh." It was clear that he was still trying to come to grips with reality after his dreadful night.

"Jim Anderson, dear." His wife interjected quietly, giving Jim an embarrassed look.

"Jim, right. I remember, I'm sorry, I just had kinda a bad night." At this, his tic did a small racetrack, the muscles chasing themselves hurriedly and Jim could only nod, feeling his crooked smile go plastic, hardening in place at the sight of it.

Lisa gave her husband, who towered over her, a small ineffective push. "Let's get you back to bed. You need to get some sleep, it'll be alright, Talitha is awake now."

"Which Talitha is this?" he asked.

Jim answered from his seat next to her bed, "The good one." His new feelings for her made him want to defend her at every opportunity and he fought the urge to reach out and touch her leg.

"Oh good...what's wrong with your eyes?" He asked her, looking sharply into her face. The concentration brought about a noticeable improvement in Will, his face became reanimated and the bleached look of skin, colored slightly.

Talitha, realizing her head had come up when her brother had entered the room, quickly ducked it back down. "It's nothing, Will...don't worry about me. Why don't you go back to bed? I promise to stay awake. Jim will make sure I do."

Will's face continued to regain a semblance of life but his look of concentration shifted suddenly to one of surprise. "Can you see me?"

"No...but it's nothing," Talitha responded with a large fake smile. "Why don't you go back to bed? I can tell by your voice that you...didn't sleep well."

Lisa came up to the bedside wearing a puzzled look. "You can't see at all?" For emphasis, she waved her hands in front of Talitha face.

"No, but I can feel you waving your hand; it stirs the air."

Will looked aghast. "What are you going...Oh my God, look at your hands! They're purple. We have to loosen those ropes."

He started forward and both women shouted, "No!" in unison. Lisa, shaking her head vigorously, said to Will, "We can't, it's too dangerous." Talitha nodded in agreement.

"But her hands! That color can't be good for them...can't they rot and fall off without proper circulation?" Will looked at his own hands as he said this, acting as if he were seeing them for the first time. His tic was going crazy, drawing Jim's eyes to it, but Will didn't seem to notice it and only continued to stare at his hands.

"What is it, honey? Is it a vision?" Lisa asked with a heart full of worry showing on her face; her hands holding the baby within her protectively.

"No. It's my hands they look so big." Will said, and finally started to rub at the muscles of his face. "It was one of my dreams, it was weird...I was..."

Will stopped speaking and Jim was heartily glad for that. He didn't want to know what would cause a grown man to scream as he had. Lisa also looked ashen face at the prospect. She touched her husband and said, "You can dream normal dreams now. Please go back to bed...you don't look good."

"I can't," he said.

"Yes you can. It'll be alright this time."

"No it's not that, it's those children. I need to do something for them and I've got to do something about Talitha...your poor hands. They can't stay like that, doesn't that hurt?"

"Pain is not only subjective, but relative as well," she said calmly and then each of her hands gave a little twitch that was unpleasant to see. "As for my blindness...sadly it won't be permanent."

Will, ignoring the small tugs from his wife, went to the bedposts and inspected Talitha's hands. "Relative or not, we have to reposition these ropes. Jim, come here and take hold of her arm, just in case."

Jim did as he was asked, settling his bulk on the bed, which sagged significantly under him. As her brother undid the ropes, Jim looked down at Talitha, glad to see she was looking up at him pleasantly and even though she couldn't see it, he flashed his gap-toothed smile at her.

Will eyed Talitha's hand closely, worrying over it. "Jeez, it's so cold. Jim, massage her arm at the bicep and the shoulder." Jim had only just begun, when Talitha drew in a sharp breath.

"It's ok Jim, it's not you. It's just that the return of the blood flow can be invigorating," she said.

He went back to massaging her arm. "Invigorating? You mean it hurts, right?" She gave him a small shrug and he continued, "Are your hands going to be ok?"

"They'll be just fine. It feels better already, go ahead and put the rope back on."

Will who was staring at Talitha's hands, said, "In my dream your hands were all pruney..."

Her arm twitched beneath Jim's hands as she interrupted her brother, "Don't talk about the dreams, please."

"This wasn't one of those dreams...this was almost like a normal dream. You were at this river and you just plopped down and started doing laundry..."

Talitha interrupted him again. "Did you look in the river?" she cried in terrible anguish, her blind eyes wide in panic. Just looking at her made goose bumps rise silently on Jim's arms.

Will seemed taken back by her reaction. "No. I was afraid to. That was the only reason why I knew it wasn't a normal dream...that fear of looking into the water. What was down there? It felt terrible."

"It was nothing," she lied unconvincingly and hid herself with her hair again. Her arm muscle had tightened considerably in his hands and Jim gripped her harder in response, but she didn't seem to notice.

Lisa, who had been watching all this silently, now gave her husband a look that obviously meant he was supposed to demand an answer from his sister, but he was already ahead of her.

"No!" Will said harshly. "That's not going to cut it. We've been dancing around the truth, about you and these dreams...and the other you, the evil you, for too long. Now tell me, what was in that water?"

Talitha's face looked as if her fortress, the one that guarded the remains of her soul had been breached. "Nothing. I'm not lying to you. I stood in that water and touched it many times."

Will buried his face in both hands, sighing heavily. "Talitha, I know you won't lie to me, but you also won't tell me everything. We both know there was something there. Something terrible that you didn't want to see, what was it?"

"It was...I don't...I," she stammered breathless with fear and her arm under Jim's hands kept trying to gesticulate as if it could speak for her. Torn between a perverse curiosity and a desire to protect her from her own memories, Jim could do nothing but look into her blank empty eyes with pity.

"It isn't important. I was just...the river was..." she went on incomprehensively and then pushed her face into Jim's chest and spoke into the soft flannel of his shirt. "There was nothing in the river, Will. It was the surface...there are images or pictures of stuff that I had been forced to do, horrible things. The river will show you your guilt. It's terrible, but it's better than being tortured and if you keep working hard, you can keep the water moving too much to see the images well."

Jim felt his shirt turning damp—Talitha was crying. Her breath hitched in her chest as she spoke: "I found the place by accident, the other Talitha, she had forced me to go to the pits at Rek, in her place...and I had to go. She was too powerful at that point and I couldn't stop her. But, I decided to try something new. Something I had been practicing in secret: meditation. You know to calm the mind since...since that is all you are in the void."

"Did it work?" Jim couldn't help himself and interrupted her.

She nodded into his shirt. "Yes it did. I suddenly found myself outside...not just outside the pit, but out in the open. There were trees and rocks and dirt. And the river. It was very calm and I could see the hills around me reflected on its surface. I wandered down to it and saw a woman there. She was older than I was, maybe forty and she was plump with black hair and had a hint of a black moustache. She was doing laundry in an old-fashioned manner. Hitting her clothes against the rocks and rubbing at them with a large block of soap." She paused staring into Jim's chest, remembering.

He was about to ask if she was frightened of the woman at all, when she started speaking again. "I don't know why, but it bothered me to see her working like that. She was at it with a focused rhythm and a concentration that I was afraid to disturb. Therefore, not wishing to bother her, I walked away, up into the hills, but as the saying goes, All roads lead to Rome, I kept finding myself coming up on the river. This started to aggravate me, which began to erode my concentration and I feared that I would return to the pits if I couldn't remain focused."

"Therefore, I went down to the river, finding my hands holding a basket of clothes and my own bar of soap. Even though there was nothing special about her I was unable to take my eyes off the woman and even as my toes touched the cold water, she drew my eye. I was near to her and gave her a friendly smile and she smiled back in a neighborly fashion. In all my time in the void this had never happened.

"I called out to her, 'Hello,' and standing up, she smiled at me easily and said hello back, however she glanced down into the river near me and when she looked back up, her face had congealed into an evil look. I was shocked at this and she turned from me in contempt. I was about to ask her what was wrong, when a sight in the river, just in front of her caught my attention. The water had been calming after she had stood and now it was as flat as a movie screen and the lady was reflected there.

"The reflection was her from another time and it showed what she had done. She killed her family, one by one in a slow cruel way." Talitha's voice broke; she blinked back tears and then gave a small rueful laugh. "I had seen so much depravity in the void, but this was real. This was something she did here...on earth and that made it all worse somehow."

"The lady must have seen that my look of disgust now matched her own and she pulled her eyes from me and with painful hesitation, she looked down and saw what she had done. She started screaming at the image and I felt like screaming as well but I didn't. Instead I ran from her. But as before, I kept coming back to the woman who still screamed and screamed...it was so disturbing that my concentration slipped and I was back in the pits at Rek."

"Did you ever try to go to the river again?" Lisa asked.

"Yes...every time I could."

"Did you ever look into the water yourself?" There was a hint of accusation to Lisa's question that caused Talitha to pale visibly.

Her mouthed worked silently for a moment as she tried to spit out words but she finally spoke in a quiet whisper. "Yes...I couldn't help it. I didn't want to look in the water but my eyes...it was like a magnet."

"What did you see?" Lisa asked with that same tone to her voice.

"Just stuff...like sins I committed, that sort of thing."

"Talitha! It was more than that or you wouldn't have been so nervous about looking into the water." Lisa's face was gravely serious and her eyes had become hard emeralds, lacking any pity.

"I think we should let her be." Jim said with a quiet menace. He didn't like how Lisa was badgering Talitha. "Her sins are between her and God."

"Mr. Anderson," Lisa began in a cold voice. "The Talitha I knew, back when we were younger, did not have any sins worthy of hell. These must have been sins she was going to do in the future and I think it behooves us to know if she's going to commit any of them soon."

Her logic was sound despite the fact that Jim didn't know what she meant by behooves. He glanced down and asked Talitha, "Did you see your future sins...did you see what you did to Brian?"

Groaning as if in pain, she shook her head, tears splashing down her face. "No, it wasn't the future, it was the past. Things that I did in the void. Things that I was forced to do...to others." Her blank eyes flicked briefly to her brother and then back down. Tears fell on Jim's arm and they were warm and full of the agony of life. He couldn't help himself and he reached out and wiped her face clear with his most gentle touch.

"Oh," Lisa seemed to deflate, her worried look exchanged for an ashamed one.

Will rubbed at his twitch again, making the skin of his face red. "How can anything you do in the void be considered a sin? Wait...don't answer that. I really don't want to know about any of it. I'm just glad that I had that river dream instead of the other ones...I don't know how much longer I can take those. Let's retie her hand, Jim."

A question nagged at Jim. "Am I missing something? You were in hell for only a day, how could you have had time to sin, let alone go through...all of that." He had been confused on this for a while, but had been too embarrassed to bring it up; worried he was the only one not understanding.

"Time flows differently in the void. Either that or one's perception is skewed, but they both amount to the same thing...I was there far longer than just a day," Talitha said.

"I need some coffee," Lisa announced tiredly and without asking if anyone else wanted any, she turned and walked out of the room, her slim shoulders slumping.

Jim cinched the rope down tight on Talitha's left arm and the two men then went to work on the right, loosening the ropes and massaging the muscles. Jim looked down into Talitha's face and somehow sensing this, she arched her eyebrows.

"What is it, Jim?"

"What is what?"

"You want to ask a question of me," she stated confidently.

"Yeah, I guess I do. You said the other...uh, Talitha sent you into the pits. Wasn't that just you? I don't want to call you crazy or anything like that but..."

She moved her head in the direction of her brother and there was a sheepish cast to her features as if she were now embarrassed. "I created the other Talitha. I know what the doctors say, but she is not a psychosis or a disorder; she is a separate individual from me. When I was in the void...it was horrible, terrible and I had to do something, so I took a part of me. The hardest part of my being and I created her. It was a mistake that I couldn't take back. Of any sin that I have ever committed, that was the worst. I made someone whose sole purpose was to feel the pain that I should have been feeling. To be tortured in my place."

"How is that even possible? Creating a whole separate person?" Will asked, his hands massaging hers tenderly.

"I don't know. I didn't even ask to see if was possible. I just did it, but I wish I hadn't. She hated the pain, but seemed to revel in it as well and she grew stronger. Somehow, she took the hate and the misery and used it or adapted it to her own ends and that was when she found out she had power over me. Then it was my turn once again to face the torture. However, I hadn't been entirely idle while she had been growing stronger."

"I saw what she was becoming and I worried that the day would come, when she would be too powerful to control. I began meditating," she paused smiling and shaking her head. "Before. Before all of this, I had always considered meditation to be pure...I hate to say it, but pure crap."

Her cheeks turned a slight pink and her brother smiled sadly at this, but said in an exaggerated tone, "Talitha!" He gave her hand a light slap.

"I know I shouldn't be so vulgar, but that was how I felt. Either way it worked and I discovered the river. I would go to it and I would clean my clothes like the others, trying not to look into the water and wait."

"What would you wait for? Why didn't you just stay there?" Jim asked.

"For my body to be killed...my body in the void that is. The demons would eventually tire of abusing a body that wouldn't respond and they would kill it."

Lisa came in then bearing a tray of mugs and a pot of coffee; she proceeded to hand out the mugs, including one for Talitha.

"Should I be thirsty? What time is it?" she asked.

Will yawned largely and took a gulp from his mug before answering, "Almost nine, we got to get going."

"You're taking her, right?" Lisa asked slightly alarmed. She eyed Talitha nervously as she put the coffee to the bound girl's lips. Talitha pulled her head back.

"You have to take me. Wherever you're going, I have to go too! I can't stay here. You mentioned that there were children in trouble?"

Will grimaced before answering, "I'm sorry Tal, but...you may be more trouble than you're worth. The Talitha is too unpredictable. Would you consider going back to the hospital?"

Talitha lowered her head, her hair falling again in front of her face and said in a voice that broke slightly, "Yes, please put me back in there."

"It's just that you know where we live now," Will sad. "And you threatened Lisa, and...and you've been killing, not just her, but you too."

Lisa jumped, spilling coffee. "What? You've killed people too? Oh my God! Why would you do that?" Talitha refused to answer and kept her head down, unwilling to look her sister-in-law in the eye.

"Answer me!" Lisa shouted her demand.

"It's not what you think. It wasn't me exactly," Talitha said as her head wagged from side to side. "It was the other Talitha. I would wake up and there would be...people. She'd leave me people...as a sick joke. They would be dying in the worst way, in tremendous pain and I...I would have to kill them. I had no choice! She's an expert at slow death; she can make it last days."

Talitha paused a moment and when she began speaking again it was with a flat voice as if emotion was beyond her, "The first time, I couldn't bring myself to do it and the person lingered, howling in misery for hours, begging me to kill him. We were out in the woods; I had no idea where and I ran away from him, telling myself I was looking for help, but I was only running from the sound of his voice. You could hear him for miles, but we were alone in the woods. Just him and me and his screams..." She trailed off staring down at her stained flowered dress.

Lisa appeared aghast at first and then apologetic. "That's horrible," she said to Talitha. "She made you kill these people? Couldn't you have called an ambulance?"

"There was never any hope for them. Besides, she disfigured them so much they sometimes weren't recognizable as human. No one would want to live like that."

Jim's heart broke for the girl. There was an actual pain in his chest, just behind his breastbone. "I think we understand, Talitha. It's obvious you had no choice. Will, I think she should come with us. I think she should be given this chance to make up for what she's done."

"Atonement? It may be too late for me." Talitha declared, still without emotion.

Lisa shook her head. "I don't know. The way she...the other one looked at me and at my baby!" She shivered slightly as she said this.

"She hates you, Lisa. Almost as much as she hates me," Talitha said.

Lisa slapped her thigh in frustration. "I didn't do anything to her...I've tried to be as supportive as I could."

"She's jealous. Look at you. Look at what you have. It's everything a girl ever asks for...a handsome, loving husband. A beautiful baby girl on the way. Plenty of money. A great big house with lots of land. That's why she's jealous, but the reason why she hates you, is that it could have been you tied up in this bed, with the dead boyfriend and all the pain and the killing and the..." Talitha went quiet.

"That's not my fault." Lisa said quietly, looking at Jim and Will, her eyes hoping that they would agree with her.

"Of course it isn't. It was a coin toss and you won," Talitha agreed but with resentment seeping out into the words. "Of all the girls on the island, we were the only ones who hadn't...done it. It was down to you and me, and she hates you because...well, because you just got luckier."

Will spoke up, "But that's not true. There were plenty of other girls on the island, who were virgins. It could have been any of them."

"No. It doesn't work that way," Talitha replied. "I don't know everything about the rituals and incantations that can open a gate onto the void, but when a virgin girl is called for, her virginity in of itself is not enough, otherwise you could use a five year old. There's more to it than just virginity, there is virtue as well." She paused, but the others only stared at her with interest.

"You see there's no virtue in being a virgin, only because you're so ugly that no one will sleep with you. Nor is it virtuous to be a virgin simply because fear stops you. Fear of becoming pregnant. Fear of what your friends will think, fear of your parents, fear of the act itself. No. No, there is no virtue in fear, none what so ever."

"However, when a girls recognizes her virginity as the wonderful gift that it is, and holds onto it, waiting for the perfect man and the perfect time, to give herself freely in the act of love, that is virtue." She smiled sadly toward Lisa. "Out of all the girls on the island we were the only ones that fit that description. We were the only true virgins."

Lisa's mouth hung open and her staring eyes were large green orbs. She looked as if she had been slapped. "But...I still didn't do anything to her. She shouldn't hate me."

"You didn't have to do anything to her. It's just that you have everything." Talitha paused sniffling. "I wish I were you." The two girls faced each other and Lisa's fear and anger seemed to dissolve into sadness for her friend.

"I'm sorry," Lisa said, her voice straining with emotion.

"Don't be. You shouldn't be sorry for doing the right thing." Talitha sat silent for some time, looking lost but eventually said, "We were talking of sending me to a hospital, but is there something that I can help with first? You mentioned children."

"Yeah, maybe you can give us some insight," Will answered and then with Jim's help commenced to tell the story of the demon at St Thomas. Talitha sat stone quiet, taking small sips of coffee from Lisa at short intervals. She remained nearly expressionless, except for her lips that tightened increasingly as the story progressed. It was only when Will mentioned the sword that her look changed slightly to wonder.

The look was not lost on Will, who paused and smiled at his sister. "Your evil twin had that same look on her face when she heard about the sword."

Jim nodded. "It's true and it almost made her look, uh...happy." He had nearly said pretty and the thought of saying it out-loud had made his throat tighten. She smiled up at him in her vague way and his throat tightened even more; he swallowed loudly.

Talitha cocked an ear at the sound and her smile became almost impish as if she could tell what Jim was feeling. Talitha turned, tossing her hair at him and said to Will, "Did I ever tell you what happened when the sword came? I was deep, locked away inside Talitha. She was already stronger than I was and when I wasn't useful to her, she would keep me in the cellar of her soul. But the light from the blade, shone right through her and it was as if she became glass and I could see out. Somehow I just stepped out of her, like I was wearing her and she seemed to evaporate.

"The void was in complete chaos around me. It was crazy. I remember, everyone was running about, screaming, yelling, and jostling me as I stood there. The creatures were all making a run for the sword, thinking that they could escape and for a second, I was caught up too and I ran along with the rest of them. But then I smelled...Dad. I could smell him on the sword high above us and I stopped in the midst of the rushing souls, confused.

"I was trampled and crushed beneath them, until they had all passed me by and at first my heart broke, because I knew I would never leave the void and I would never see him again.

"I sat down and cried for ages alone, but then I felt Ba'al coming. He was a storm that raged toward the sword. He was in a great eagerness, wanting to come into the world and he was so fierce! Nothing could stop him, not even dad, and all of his courage.

"I knew dad would try to stand against Ba'al, but he could never win, opposed by such a monster, so I screamed for him to run. The void has known screams for eternity, but mine was not a scream of pain or fear, it was filled with my feelings for him. It amazed me. I was stunned by the life I still had in me. The scream was tremendously loud and seemed to shake the foundations of the void and I watched as the sword took the sound within it, vibrating slowly at first, but then rapidly and then bang! It exploded.

"I fell back as the shock wave hit me and that was when she returned, Talitha that is. She shut me up tight and I had no way of knowing what had happened to dad." Talitha paused, her face troubled and clouding over, so Jim put his hand out and patted her leg. However, he withdrew it embarrassed as she looked toward him.

"Sorry, I uh didn't mean to, uh," he stammered feeling his face flush.

"It's ok...it's nice of you," Talitha said and Jim was shocked to see her face go pink as well. "Uh...where was I? Oh yes, dad's soul. I was trapped within her until she found dad's soul and she..."

"What? Dad's soul?" Will was flabbergasted. "The other Talitha told us that she'd found a part of the sword, not his soul."

"She is a practiced and accomplished liar, Will. A prevaricator without any scruples. Never believe her about anything that you can't prove yourself."

Jim remembered the conversation clearly. "Maybe she didn't know it was a soul. She seemed to really believe it was only part of the sword."

Talitha shook her head. "That's even worse, Jim. She has lied so much, she has convinced herself! Trust me when I say there was no mistaking it for a sword."

"So, dad's soul was in the void. You know, he has never mentioned it." Will said.

"That's because there's an awaking period for souls newly dead. Moreover, dad wasn't there very long as far as I could tell. He likely didn't even know."

Will wore a rueful smile on his face. "All these years, I thought I had saved him, when it was really you. How did you get him out of the void?"

"Talitha had enmeshed him in a web of blackness. I pulled him free and he just floated away," she said dreamily, her head rising as if she were seeing the soul drift away even then.

Lisa looked at the two men, confusion making her forehead come together in three little lines between her eyes. "He just floated away? Didn't anyone try to stop him?"

"No, the void is infinite and only a demon very close to us would have even noticed him, and what's more, the void is voluntary in a manner of speaking."

"Wait...wait...wait! The void is voluntary?" Will asked, wearing a hybrid look of disbelief and anger. "You could have left at any time?"

Talitha shrugged. "Not at first, but later, yes...but where was I supposed to go?"

"To heaven... or anywhere but the void!" Will cried in exasperation.

"Heaven!" The word was acid on her tongue. Her blind eyes flared with anger, but then she drooped suddenly, hanging her head again, so she faced out through the wild thicket of her bloodied hair. "You're right, Will. I should've gone to heaven; that would have been smart of me."

"Again you act like you don't deserve heaven," Will said.

Talitha kept her head down. "You don't understand. You can't understand." She stopped talking and it seemed to Jim she wasn't going to elaborate.

"Perhaps she should take a look at the sword," Jim suggested in order to change the subject.

"It's in the attic, I'll go get it," Lisa half ran from the room. Will, Jim, and Talitha sat on the bed in a brooding silence that seemed very long, until Lisa came back.

"Here it is." She gingerly held a green bath towel out away from her body, her eyes a little too wide and a little too wild, seemingly on the verge of chucking the towel and running. "I always get the heebee-jeebeeies when I'm to this thing," she added, feeling the need to explain herself.

"You have it? I can't smell it at all!" Talitha drew in air deeply through her nose.

"It's wrapped in a towel...try now." Lisa carefully unfolded the towel as if she were unwrapping a cobra. In the thick green material lay a broken sword, barely over a foot and a half long. It looked as if it had been struck by lightning or pulled from a fire; the blade was blackened and jagged. The lower part of the sword was in slightly better shape and Jim could see a light stylized etching along the outer guard and it still had little gold braid around the handle.

"I still can't smell it. Can you bring it a little closer," Talitha asked, her face deep in concentration. Lisa brought it just under her nose.

Talitha's blind eyes went wide and she spoke in sudden alarm, "Don't touch me with it! Get it away from me!"

Lisa pulled it back quickly and rewrapped it. "What's wrong with it? Why's it always so cold?" she asked as she placed the towel on a dresser in the room.

Talitha took a moment to calm her breath, which had accelerated into a pant in the short time the sword had been near her. "Make sure nobody touches that sword with their bare hands! This is worse than I thought. From your descriptions of it, I had considered it likely that the sword represented a weakened area in the boundary that separates this world from the void. However, now I think the reason for the swords intense cold, as well as its lack of smell is that there may actually be an opening to the void somewhere along it or in it. If there is an opening, my guess would be that it's microscopic in size. Have either of you inspected the sword?"

Lisa and Will paused a moment to shake their heads at each other. "No not really...I mean we've looked at it but I wouldn't say we have inspected it," Lisa said.

"Please don't. Keep it wrapped up and put in a box, lead lined if you can find one."

"Sure," Will eyed the sword, his pupils large with fear.

"Father Alba touched the sword, when he took it out of the frozen witch," Jim said, eyeing the green towel with apprehension. "He said that it hurt, like his life was being pulled from his body through his hands."

"Frozen witch?" Lisa asked giving her husband a sharp look.

"Yeah, I didn't tell you that part of the story, it was too gross. After we stabbed," he paused and sighed. "I mean, after I stabbed Mrs. Harris, and sent the demon back into the void, you were awake, Talitha but nearly catatonic and dad was looking so grey that we decided to get you two back to the hospital. By the time, Father Alba, Brian and I returned to the house, Mrs. Harris' body had frozen solid."

Again, he paused and just shook his head as his eyes looked back to that time. Finally, he spoke again, "We put her in the back seat of our station wagon, along with poor Adrina and that was the last I saw of them. Father Alba went somewhere up state and burned the bodies. It was a great shock when he turned up a few years ago with that broken sword."

Frozen corpses gave Jim the creeps and he decided to change the subject. "What did you think the sword would smell like? Do they smell a certain way?" Jim asked, again hoping he didn't sound like a moron.

"The average person would likely only smell the agents used to clean the sword, but even metals have distinct ligands, which are basically the odor molecule of a substance. Everything radiates ligands, and with my hyperosmia...I mean my increased sense of smell, I should have been able to smell the sword easily. Since I can't, it is my conjecture that there is an actual physical opening into the void, which is acting as a vacuum of sorts, drawing in the smell."

"Oh," Jim said feeling like a moron. "The demon called it a path; do you think this opening can get bigger?"

Talitha shook her head and attempted a shoulder shrug. "I don't know, but since it's been used as a path of sorts twice already, the answer goes from possibly to probably."

Lisa asked, "What do we do with it?"

Talitha shook her head. "Don't try to destroy it, melt it, or break it in any way. If you do, you will likely draw attention to the weakened area, and that's the best case scenario, in the worst, you may make the opening larger."

"Then what are our choices?" Lisa voice was becoming shrill and she started to pace the room.

Will stood and went to his wife, hugging her. "It'll be alright. We've had that thing with us for five years and nothing has happened...it's not going to suddenly start shooting out demons." He looked at Talitha, who nodded her head in agreement. "See? For now, the only rational plan is to hide the sword."

"I suggest that you put me in an institution, Will. That way you can know that you're reasonably safe..."

He interrupted, "No. First off, you escaped once before and you will again. I won't feel safe at all unless I can keep an eye on you myself. Second, there's no way we're giving over the sword now that we know there's a hole into the void on it. I think we should take you to Boston and see if there's some way you can help us to get those kids back."

Lisa was practically in tears. "Will! It won't be safe. I need you. The baby needs you."

"I'm sorry, but the fact is, that unless we kill Talitha right now, we'll never be safe." Will eyed his wife solemnly and there was a long silence before he continued, "I can't do it. I can't kill her in cold blood. But if you can...I won't stop you."

Lisa shook her head. "I can't either."

"Then I take her to Boston. I feel it's the only way I can protect you from her and this other demon."

"I don't want to go," Talitha said unexpectedly. "Unless you and Jim promise to kill me if I...the other me gets out of hand."

"I promise," Will stated flatly.

Jim figured lying was not as bad a sin as killing, "I promise," he said, knowing he could never hurt her.

Chapter 12

Beneath the Church

They were cruising at 26,000 feet when the other, not so nice, Talitha returned. The sudden chimes, ringing with musical insistence drifted through Will's dreams and he came instantly awake.

"What? What the hell? Hey...uh, hey, Will!" Talitha began thrashing. In response the chimes tied to her ropes began a merry frenzied jingling. Jim was closest and took two large steps, bent over in the tiny cabin of the plane.

Placing a hand on her shoulder, he spoke in an urgent hushed voice, "Quiet down!"

"Who is that? Jim...White Jim?" she asked as she sniffed at the air.

"Yeah it's me. Now stop yanking on those ropes or I'll be forced to cinch them tight enough to keep you from moving at all." He growled this low in her ear, despite the loudness of the interior of the plane's cabin.

"Why can't I see anything? What's going on? Where are we going?" she asked in rapid succession, her head straining around and her eyes wide.

Will checked his watch, 10:38 am. He rubbed some sleep from his eyes and slipped up the tiny isle, climbing into the leather chair just behind hers. "Talitha, it's Will..."

"No shit! I can hear just fine, moron. I just can't see! What the hell happened?" She was loud—Will took a quick peek up toward the cockpit. A single heavy curtain shrouded it and he could only hope the pilot had his head gear on.

"You need to quiet down," he ordered sharply. "You're blind because...you shot yourself in the head."

"I what?" Talitha asked incredulously, her head wagging back and forth, making her freshly cleaned brown hair sigh gently as if in the wind. "How'd she do it? I mean, I should have seen it coming." She was speaking to herself and thankfully in a quieter tone.

The plane took a sudden lurch, the lightness of it putting them at the mercy of any turbulence. Will was used to it, having flown on this very plane a dozen times in the last year alone, but it was clear that Jim wasn't. His eyes went wide with the buffeting and his face paled noticeably.

"You ok?" he asked the big man.

"Yeah," Jim said breathily almost breathing the word out. "I'm just a little air sick."

"Damn it! She shot me." Talitha cried out. Her indignation was a little amusing to Will. "You know what I'm going to do once..."

"Yeah, yeah, yeah," Will spoke over her. "We've heard it all before Tal. So do everyone a favor and shut up." His tic bounced again on his face and he worried at it, hoping it would go away soon. Seeing it jiggle in the mirror before they left for the airport was a nasty shock and he kept his hand to his cheek whenever he could.

Turning about as far the ropes would allow in her chair, Talitha gave him an angry look. "Aren't you the cranky one? You're not the one who was shot, Will!" She pouted for a few moments and then her pert little nose started taking in air purposely. "You haven't fed me, have you? How long have I been...away?"

"I don't know, fifteen hours there abouts." Will suddenly felt guilty about not having given his sister anything to eat. "I'm sure we could come up with a snack or something. Are you thirsty?"

"Some big brother you are...ok, let me see if I got the situation down right? Talitha shoots me in the head and you're too much of a pussy to finish the job?" She paused waiting to see if he would answer, but there was nothing to say and she continued, "We're at about 27,000 feet, on a south by south west course, in a plane built for...what twelve people?"

"Ten passengers, one pilot."

"Sure, ten then...but there are only the three of us and a single pilot. So having had me shot, you now are flying me to Boston, for me to help you deal with some putz who's pretending to be possessed. And I'm going to do this, why?"

Again, he didn't have an answer. He gave Jim a look that said, what do I say to that? However, Jim was greening like springtime and Will turned back to his sister not wanting to embarrass him. "Out of the goodness of your heart?" Will suggested.

"Yeah that's a good one. So where was I...oh yeah...I don't smell the sword or Lisa, so I can assume that she's at home packing like mad. And the only real surprise in all of this, and it's a shocker, is that big White Jim is carrying the same gun that shot me in the head. How'd I do?"

Jim's eyes went wide at this and Will put his finger to his lips. "You did pretty well." She was actually spot on.

The blind girl turned back toward him. "Pretty good? Is that all I rate? I can tell you more if you want. You had another night of fun and games, didn't you? I can tell by your voice, that you've been screaming like a girl. Little miss goody two shoes had you tortured good and proper."

Will was glad that she couldn't see the muscles twitching in his face. "That was my fault, not hers. I probably should've gone to a motel."

"And let your little sister get tortured? That's pretty selfish, and hardly very Christian of you."

Jim spoke up suddenly and surprisingly on his behalf, "I think he goes above and beyond what any other Christian would do."

She rolled her unseeing eyes. "Yes, Will is quite the saint. But what about you Jimmy? You're packing a heater. What's that about?"

He looked gravely serious and gravely nauseous. "Uh, that's for you...uh, just in case you get out of hand."

With what seemed like genuine surprise she exclaimed, "Wow! What did I miss? I thought we had a little something going on between us... a little spark. Are you mad about me playing around with Lisa? That was all in fun."

"You were going to kill her! And don't bother lying, the other Talitha told us," Will said.

"Ok, I was upset...jealous really, but I'm over it. I promise I won't hurt her."

"After she saved your life, you better not," Jim drawled slowly, almost as if warning her. His face went white as the plane dropped precipitously and even Will felt his stomach in his throat.

Talitha didn't seem to notice. "Lisa saved my life?" She sat in silence for a while and her look was unreadable. She turned to Will conversationally, "Tell me, did Talitha explain how she was able to surface like she did?"

Will's eyes narrowed in suspicion. "No and I wouldn't tell you if she had."

"That's ok. It would be cheating if you had told me. We like to play this game, a mind game, you might say." The plane gave another lurch and a glance out the window showed Will that they were flying through restless dark clouds. She went on seemingly in a chatty mood, "I think it might've been a mistake not to bring the sword. I mean it's obviously important to the demon and we could've used it as a bargaining chip."

"You care now about the missing children?" Will didn't think that was possible and he wore an openly skeptical look that was lost on the blind girl.

"I won't lie to you, Will," she lied blatantly. "I'm more interested in the demon and what he wants the sword for, but if I happen to rescue some children, well good for me."

"So you don't know what the sword does?" Jim asked dubiously from his seat across from her.

"Oh, I have lots of guesses, but I don't know anything for sure."

Will climbed from his seat behind her and moved to the one just in front and knelt upon it, looking over the headrest at her, "Your other self thought it might be used as some sort of gateway."

She said nothing to this and only the slight rise in her eyebrows lent any indication that she had even heard him. Will became irritated and his voice got louder as he spoke, "Well? I asked a question: can it be used as a gate?"

"Perhaps...I don't know. I haven't seen it, remember?" Her response was icy.

"I remember and don't think for a moment that I regret it," Will answered. He looked out of the window but there was nothing to see but an ocean of grey all about them. It was depressing after the sunshine of autumn Maine. After a minute of staring into the chaos of the clouds, he looked at his sister's face. It was like she hadn't been shot just the day before. She was smooth and seemed refreshed, where as he felt empty and sick.

Talitha knew he was looking at her and smiled disarmingly. "Will, let's forget about the sword for now. It's the demon; we should be putting our minds to."

"So you believe there really is a demon now?" Will asked, again looking hard into her face, searching for indications of deception. However, the plane bucked hard, as it began a sloppy decent, deeper into the storm and he grabbed on to the headrest for support, his eyes flicking to the window.

"What did the other Talitha say? I hate to admit it, but she's the smarter of the two of us," she said this with a sigh, but Will didn't believe her for a second.

"She wasn't sure, she...dang it!" he cried in alarm. The plane felt like it had dropped a hundred feet straight down and for a moment he was weightless. His stomach had jumped to his throat and he held the seat in front of him, gripping with white knuckled hands.

"Dang it? Will, you got to learn to curse like a man." She turned her dainty features toward Jim. "Hey Jimbo...Big Jim? You can curse, I'm betting. Why don't you give my nancy-boy brother some tips on how to act like a man?"

"No thank you," Jim growled.

"Sure thing...but...but something has happened, right? Your voices are holding something back from me." She became excited and eagerly asked, "You have found some of the boys dead, right? Were they mutilated? Spoiled in a kinky way, perhaps?"

Will grimaced at her.

The hungry look on her face was unmistakably evil and exhaling heavily, he turned to see Jim staring out of the window at the grey nothingness. The big man put one of his large hands to his face and Will thought it likely he wasn't wiping the sleep away this time.

"No, that's not it. The demon somehow got out of his room and killed a nun," Will whispered to Talitha and the glee in her face became annoyance at being wrong.

Right after Will had chartered the flight into Boston, Jim had called the church to let Father Alba know the situation concerning Talitha and the sword. His face had come crashing down, scaring Will into thinking that the possessed man had somehow escaped. He wished he had.

"Did the man get away?" Talitha asked sharply as the plane smoothed out.

"He could have. But he just dumped the poor lady's body out into the corridor and somehow locked himself back in the room."

"Hmm," she faced toward the window. It was just then that they found a sunlit valley in middle of the looming clouds. It lit up the cabin of the small plane for a precious few seconds, but the moment passed and the gloom of the storm surrounded them once again.

"You know, I've always thought nuns to be so pathetic." Talitha began after the light departed. "They don't get the respect or the power of a priest, nor are they allowed a family, like a deacon. What's more, they're all clearly hiding from life..."

"Talitha," Will murmured.

"...afraid of the choices the rest of society has to make. Who to love, where to live, how many children they should..."

"Talitha! The nun was a friend of Jim's. Show some respect or shut up," Will snapped irately.

She stopped talking, and faced towards Will, her head slowly nodding as if in understanding, but her eyes narrowed and a mocking smile played along her lips.

"You're really feeling it, aren't you? Your two bitches conspire to blind me and now you think I'm at your mercy. You think I'm your dog now? Sit Talitha. Shut up Talitha. Roll over and let me fuck you Talitha! I got news for you, I won't always be blind, so it's you who'd better show some respect."

"Wrong," Will replied with savage anger in his voice. "I'm tired of your crap and if you get out of line, even for a moment, Jim here is going to put another bullet in you."

Talitha face broke into a wicked smile. "Sure...right! You're willing to commit murder, Big Jim? Are you really willing to spend the rest of your life in jail?"

Still looking out of the window, Jim said, "I'm not afraid of prison."

"Yeah? What about hell? If you aren't, you are a bigger fool than you appear to be and that would be quite the fool. Here on earth you're a big guy...I bet nobody messes with Big Jim. But, down there...you'd be nothing. An ant, a maggot." She smiled a nasty delicious smile and her blind eyes came to life at the prospect of Jim in the void. "This is all moot anyways. Jim would never pull the trigger. Not to hurt sweet little Talitha."

"That doesn't mean I won't pull it on you," Jim murmured to the window.

"Right. I see the way you look at me...or I guess I should say, I saw the way you looked at me. Not to mention the way you smell. Do you know what pheromones are?"

Will did and he snuck a peek at Jim, who was reddening up the back of his neck as he stared out the window. The big man snarled, "I know what they are, but they..."

Talitha spoke over him, "Then you know they're perceived on a subconscious level...with most people. But I'm all too aware what your musk is saying to me."

Jim glanced back at Will in worried embarrassment, the color rising in his cheeks. Talitha seemed aware of the look and paused for affect before going on.

"You got a randy scent coming off of you in waves! Jim, you must really have the hots for her. Tell me Big Jim, is she the first girl to smile at you, to give you the time of day? Did she even get a look at that ugly face of yours? Or was she already blind and you thought: here's my chance!"

"It wasn't like that," Jim declared the pink of his cheeks now becoming an angry red.

"Sure it wasn't; no really, I believe you. After all, you're quite a catch." Her sarcasm was a knife to Jim, and glowering, he turned back to the window as the airport came into view below them.

She continued, "Now don't pout. Will, how's he going to kill me if he can't stand up to a little fun? Jim? I know I'll be there for the honeymoon, but will I be invited to the wedding as well? Are you going to be wearing white? I know she won't be."

"He'll be able to pull the trigger, if it comes to it. And if he can't, I will. Now please lay off the man." Will turned and sat down in his chair as the plane began a light bucking.

"Shouldn't he know about his bride to be? Sorry to be the one to tell you, but she ain't no virgin. Yeah, gang raped at sixteen in an insane asylum...pretty sad if you think about it.

A sharp breath by Jim alerted her and she put on a facade of sympathy. "You didn't know about the nightly rapes?" She asked in a tone that dripped sweet venomous honey. "Already secrets between you two...I don't see this lasting too long. But, since you attracted Talitha with your stunning looks, I bet you have other girls lined up around the block."

Will felt drained by his sister, exhausted. "Can you please just leave him alone?"

"Sure thing," she said with a satisfied smile and relaxed back in her chair.

Will sighed heavily, and purposely didn't look in Jim's direction but instead watched Boston from his window as the plane's angle of descent became more pronounced. He never cared for Boston at this time of year; it was a dull city, perpetually grey and wet.

Now, adjacent runways came into view on either side of the plane and it would only be moments before they touched down. "Talitha, listen to me. Make all the snide comments you want...go right ahead as long as you're quiet about it. If you draw too much attention to us, you'll just alert the police and we both know what that means."

She rolled her eyes but remained quiet.

Will continued, "We're heading to the church and you're going to talk to this demon. If you try to run or if you try to hurt anyone, we will shoot you."

"When you speak to me like that I just might not be in the mood to talk."

"Then we take you to the police right away and let them deal with you," he explained calmly. The plane gave a jerk as its wheels tasted the airstrip and it bounced a moment before they got a proper grip on the paved surface.

"Yeah, but maybe I'll tell them how you harbored a known fugitive...you know what? I think that's a felony!" Her mouth came open in simulated surprise.

He hadn't considered that, but the answer came to him quickly and now it was his turn to smile in a nasty manner. "I'll turn you over to that cop you threw around at the church...what's his name?"

"Milner," Jim said in between deep breaths. The rough weather and choppy landing had given impetus to his nausea; he was clearly concentrating on not throwing up.

Talitha's face turned sour and Will couldn't help smile at it, saying, "Yep, I'm sure Milner will do a thorough job in his investigations. However, I bet he'll be even more thorough interrogating you."

"Alright, fine!" Talia's anger boiled over. "I was just having some fun. Either way, I already told you that I wanted to talk to the demon. You know, figure out what he's here for—look for clues that sort of thing."

"Sure Tal, that's fine. As long as you know we're serious." Will went about cutting her loose, stowing the ropes and wind chimes in his bag.

A few minutes later: "St Thomas off Warren and Moreland, please," Jim said as he eased himself into the front seat of the cab. Will guessed his weight at over three hundred pounds and the cab settled perceptibly in his direction. The cabbie, small and swarthy had a smile on his mouth, but his eyes were full of worry and he glanced frequently at the giant sitting next to him as if he were fearful that Jim would eat him.

"How can you stand the smell of this city, Jim?" Wrinkles of disgust lined Talitha's face. "It's a mixture of decaying buildings, rotting garbage and old sewage."

Will gave the air a tentative sniff, but it smelled like rain to him. They were driving into Roxbury, an area of Boston that he'd never traveled in before. It was an older neighborhood, one that was near its death in the slow phoenix like cycle that all cities go through. The houses were a 1950s vintage, small, and crammed close together. The yards, generally covered in either weeds or trash were so tiny, Will didn't see the point to them.

Most of houses, like the yards, were uncared for, slowly crumbling around their occupants like igloos in a rain. Porches sagged, shutters tilted, and ancient shingles were worn nearly to the roof by the dull grey showers that drenched Boston year after year. It was a depressing sight, but not a smelly one at least as far Will could tell.

"Uhg! You two don't smell that? Does this city have gravity fed sewers?" she asked Jim.

"I dunno," he said with a shrug of his wide shoulders.

"Of course you don't," the words were coated in oily contempt. The girl faced out the window, blindly staring out at the rain, sampling the air every few seconds.

"It could be worse, Talitha. Over by the Bay, on the south side, it smells like fish year round. And there's this oil plant...talk about smelly!"

"Oil plant?" she asked with a sad look and a shake of her head. "Try petroleum processing facility. They don't make oil there, Jim."

He said nothing, but his jaw clenched in anger and he scowled out the front window. The cabbie eyed him with a growing fear, and he shifted slightly further to his left. For a few minutes, the cab was silent save for the rhythmic movement of the windshield wipers keeping a lonely beat.

"I'm sorry, Jim," Talitha blurted unexpectedly. "I suppose it's not your fault that you didn't have a dad and mom around to correct you like I did."

Jim sat stock-still and silent.

"Jim, I said I'm sorry and I meant it. Aren't you supposed to forgive me or something?" Jim only sighed in weariness when Talitha went on, "Jesus would've forgiven me."

"Yeah well, I'm not Jesus. Why do you want me to forgive you anyways? You're only going to say something in five minutes that will piss me off again."

"Fine, be that way...Will? Where are we? I smell old industry mixed in with the housing."

Will wiped away the condensation from his window and peered out at the dismal view. "Yep, that's what I see."

"We're almost there," Jim grunted.

"Then I guess a nice hotel is out of the question," Talitha responded and then for some reason, she stuck out her tongue, and blew a raspberry at the window.

Will had just been hating her for the way she had treated Jim when she did it. That little thing. Blowing a raspberry like a kid, made his heart remember her with fondness and his shoulders slumped; he was too weary to hate just then.

"I'm picturing broken windows and trash and graffiti," she said dully.

She was correct and he turned in his seat to get a better look at her, worried that her eyesight might be returning, but her eyes were vacant orbs.

"Unfortunately, it's just like you're picturing it," Will responded, wondering why anyone would choose to live there.

"Hey!" Talitha said suddenly. "Cabbie slow down...Will is the graffiti old around here?"

Will looked at her first, wondering why she would want to know, before peeking through the rain at what looked like an old tire plant. "Cabbie, don't slow down. It looks old, I guess. Jim, is that old or what?

"Yeah, I think so. Graffiti always gets tired looking after a few weeks. Why do you want to know?" His question was one Will wanted answered as well.

"Just thinking about the socio-economic stratus of this city and how the decay..."

Talitha went on for some time, but Will tuned her out. She was speaking for her own benefit, just to hear how smart she was. A moment later, the cab turned onto a street where the buildings were in better shape, but Will saw a freshly sprayed indecipherable word. He was just about to point out the new graffiti to Talitha, when Jim spoke.

"There's the church...on the left." Jim took a deep breath and ran his hands through his thick brown hair. A look back at Will showed how nervous the big man suddenly appeared.

Will glanced out to see a good-sized, red brick church with numerous stained glass windows. Attached to the rear of it and forming a rough T, were two more brick buildings, both of which had lights burning away visible in the gloom of the midday storm. The church on the other hand was dark and unwelcoming.

At the sight, Will felt the first ripple of fear undulate through him. He paid the cabbie and helped Talitha out, her footing only slightly unsteady after the cab ride. They went under the eaves of the church and Will pulled on the front door, expecting to enter, but the doors were locked.

There was a pause as Jim and Will looked at each other, uncertain. Terrible images of what could be going on in the dark corridor beneath the church threatened to run amok in Will's mind, but he forced them away and rapped hard on the doors.

A minute passed with no sound emanating from the church, Jim, with his fist twice the size of Will's, pounded loudly. The sound could be heard echoing throughout the building, giving it a deserted feel. Another glance between the two men and now Will's fear became manifest and he looked away hoping the big man wouldn't be able to see it growing in his eyes.

A peek toward Talitha helped. She was quite casually stretching her legs like a ballerina. "You can stop your oafish banging, there's someone coming."

Seconds later, Will could hear footsteps advancing toward the door and then a priest, medium height with black hair and handsome Latin features peeked out. His eyes were wild and darted about until he took in Jim's great frame to the side of the door.

"Jim, thank God! What took you so long?" the priest asked with irritation coloring his voice.

"Complications," was all Jim said.

"I suppose they do happen...you must be Will Jern." Will's hand was shaken by the priest, warmly in the manner of a politician, but damp in the manner of a man in great fear. He then looked with trepidation at Talitha, not offering his hand.

"And you are Miss Jern? I am Father John Santos. Thank you for making the trip."

Clearly, she could sense his hesitation and she mischievously held out her hand. His warm smile turned crooked on his face and robot like, he took her hand at arm's length.

"It's very nice to meet you, Father." Her voice came out deep, husky and sexy. With firm, unrelenting gentle pressure, she pulled him close to her so that they were practically nose-to-nose.

Will's muscles tensed preparing to rush her, but she only breathed the priest in. A long slow inhalation with her eyes shut and a contented smile on her lips, as if she were enjoying his scent.

She breathed out slowly, "Good."

Once she released his hand, he hurriedly wiped it on his black clothes, the uniform of the priesthood, "What do you mean, good?" he asked.

"Mainly I mean there're no cops in there. Things would've been a little touchy if there were."

"There's the reputation of the church to consider, you see. However, since you failed to bring the sword..." The word failed, came out as an accusation, directed at Jim. "I'm afraid we'll be forced to bring the police into this, if your negotiations, Miss Jern aren't successful."

"You are already afraid. You stink of fear. You should be embarrassed by it. Are you?" She advanced on the priest as she spoke and he stepped back into the protection of the church.

"Actually I am."

"Are you afraid because what he did to..." she stopped in mid-sentence, because Jim did something Will thought wasn't too smart.

Putting his hand on her shoulder, Jim held her roughly in place. "That's enough playing around, Talitha." His voice was deep and held father-figure authority.

Her muscles bunched and for the slightest moment, Will thought she was going to strike the big man, but instead she pouted, "Sure...sure, no fun for poor Talitha. Maybe we can have some fun later." She was suddenly cheery and wrapped her arm around his huge one, as if ready to take a stroll. She smiled up at him prettily and he went stiff.

Will intervened, "No, sorry Tal, you're with me." He came between them, purposefully ignoring a tiny look of disappointment in Jim's eyes and took his sister's arm in his. He led her into the church's foyer and glanced about.

There was a large red-brown stain on the floor just to the side of the Baptismal font. At the sight, his fear, ignored by him with the stress of his sister, now began throbbing like a toothache, sitting in his chest like a stone. It put out little feelers, spider like arms that crept down his veins and into his hands and these began to shake at the sight of the stain. The stain was very large. When Talitha began sniffing at it, dog like, he became repulsed and pulled her away.

"Where to, Father?" he asked, putting his back to the stain, his mind however, was still on it.

"Just down here," Father John lead the way into the church, taking a quick right in the main room, he went to a set of double doors that led to a long hallway.

Will stopped just inside the hallway. A vision of what he was about to face came to him then.

At the end of the hallway was a door, behind which were stairs that led down into a darkened corridor, a corridor that seemed almost a tunnel. There was only a single bulb midway down it and standing stooped over beneath it, clutching themselves in fear were two men. They sweated freely and they both had a mad look about them. A sudden noise and Will was sure they would flee in terror.

His visions were beyond his control and he looked past the men despite a tremendous desire not to. The corridor was black at the end and he could barely make out the lines of a thick heavy door. Death lay beyond that door. But whose death, and when and how, these were unanswered. He only had a certain knowledge that someone would be dead soon.

He saw into the room, then. It was lit also by a single bulb and what it threw its feeble light on caused his mind to rebel and thankfully, mercifully at that point the vision ended.

Talitha knew from long experience what was going on and stood still waiting for Will to come out from his vision. When he did, she asked, "What's down there?"

At first he couldn't answer, the room had been covered in blood and now it was all his mind could see.

Chapter 13

Entering the Demon's Chapel

"You saw something, Will. I know you did, now tell me what." There was concern in her voice and that only made the horror that filled him worse.

"I don't know...maybe a real demon. I didn't see it. I just felt, something; something bad. And there was blood...lots of it. Maybe from the nun, but I don't think it was, at least not all of it." His mind wanted a replay of his vision and he shook his head with a frown.

Talitha bit her lip and grew silent and thoughtful. Jim, who had been ahead of them, was now most of the way down the hall. He turned with a look of worry on his homely features.

"Is there something going on?" His voice was loud in the empty building and it made Will cringe.

Hurrying forward with his sister, Will waited until he was closer before whispering, "I just had a bad feeling."

Jim eyed him with a queer expression and Will found that he couldn't look the man in the face. His fear was an embarrassment to him and he kept his eyes down. They started walking again, toward the door that Will knew would lead to the dark staircase.

Sweat stung his eyes and he tried to blink it away, to no avail. He made to wipe his face with his sleeve but as he watched his hand, shaking, come up, he stopped and brought it down quickly before anyone else could see it. His other hand, pressed around Talitha's arm shook as well and he wondered why she wasn't making a snide comment about it.

Looking down at her, he saw why; she was deep in concentration, her brow was furrowed and her right arm, thrown out, touched the wall as they walked. She seemed to be talking to herself or perhaps counting.

After a moment, she sniffed the air and it was then that Will caught a whiff of something sour and unpleasant.

The stench worsened as the three of them caught up with Father John, who stood waiting at the door at the end of the hall and when the priest opened it, Will fairly gagged. The aroma was like nothing he'd ever smelled before; it was a vile evil stench and his stomach rolled over.

Jim seemed strangely angry instead of afraid. "What's that smell?" he demanded of the priest.

"We don't know. It started yesterday afternoon and it just keeps getting worse," Father John's tan was paling before the smell and pasty white didn't suit his handsome face.

"That's not Sister Mary?" Jim asked, his anger slipping away into confusion.

"No, we moved her body into my office. The smell is something else." Will wasn't the only one sweating now; the priest wiped his forehead with the sleeve of his black tunic and started down the stairs.

Talitha didn't seem to mind the odor and sniffed repeatedly like a bloodhound on a trail, her blind eyes still narrowed in her concentration.

"Describe the room in front of us," she commanded her brother, her tone holding authority over him.

"It's not a room, it's the landing of some stairs leading down," Will said as he stepped in.

She breathed out loudly with annoyance. "Keep talking, any lights? Any windows?"

"Only one light, about four feet above your head and there won't be any more until we are down in the corridor below us. There aren't any windows, anything else?"

"Hey, how'd you know there aren't any more lights?" Father John's voice held more than a hint of suspicion. "Have you been down here before?"

Jim spoke up, using his normal voice, which again seemed unnecessarily and startlingly loud, after the whispers of the others, "He can see the future, Father. Or at least parts of it."

The priest eyed Will with an odd mixture of disbelief and reverence. "Really, Father Alba didn't mention…"

Talitha spoke over him, rude but uncaring, "Will, you say there's one light down there, what about in the room where the demon is?"

Father John answered first, clearly annoyed, "There's only a single one, but…"

She interrupted again, "Describe the fixture it's attached to."

The priest gave Will an exasperated look before answering, "It hangs from the ceiling on a chain and I don't know the wattage, in case you're wondering."

"I'm not wondering," she said sharply. "Come on, let's go down."

Will took her by the arm and steered her down the stairs. When they reached the bottom, just as in his vision, he saw the soft plump form of Father Alba standing, midway down the corridor under the light of the single bulb and with him was a large fat man, who sported a sheen of nervous sweat on his forehead, visible even at that distance.

They hurried down toward the two men, Will holding on to Talitha's arm, clutching it really, as if she were there to protect him. While she, just as before, trailed her hand along the damp concrete walls. Jim lumbered after, seemingly taking up the entire corridor behind them.

"Will…Will, how was your flight in?" Father Alba greeted them, trying to come across in a conversational tone, however his voice was high and reedy. He wore the gold and white vestments that were usually worn at the Easter mass, right down to the stole.

Will felt an urge to laugh at the ludicrous question, but smothered it. "It was fine." It had been an odd attempt at conversation and having failed, nobody looked to try again. A sudden quiet enveloped the six of them, as they stood close in to each other, huddling in the cone of pale light cast by the single bulb.

To Will, everything outside the light held dangerous and evil possibilities, especially the door at the end of the corridor. It held a dreadful fascination for him. Death lay beyond that door. He didn't know whose it would be, but at least one of the six of them, would be dead soon, and this included himself.

With each surreptitious glance down the hall, Will felt his heart thud in his chest just a bit harder and he tried not to look that way, but his only other option was to look into the faces of the people around him. He couldn't help but wonder who it would be, how it would happen and when.

His eyes settled on the fat man, who he hadn't been introduced to and he felt an unpleasant shock when his mind let slip, I hope it's him. The appalling thought reverberated through him and he quickly looked away, embarrassed that he could think such a thing about a man he'd never met.

It was then that Talitha asked, "Who's the mouth breather?" Obviously referring to the man, Will had just wished would die in his place. Father Alba introduced him, "My apologies…my apologies, this is Sean Shay. He's a counselor here at our orphanage." Sean stuck out his large hand to Will, who sheepishly took it. He was only barely able to look into Sean's face, worried that his eyes would betray his improper thoughts.

However it was a painful realization that came along with the handshake: Sean Shay would not die that day, or the next or anytime in the foreseeable future. The muscles of Will's face began to jump again. His mind however was locked on to the fact that his odds of dying had just jumped up considerably and when he began rubbing his face, it was completely subconscious.

"What's the matter, Will?" Talitha asked from next to him, breaking in on his morbid calculations; somehow she always knew when he was troubled.

I hope it's that priest.

As before, the immoral thought just jumped into his mind. He put both hands to his face and groaned aloud, trying not to picture Father John, hoping not picture anyone.

"Will?" Jim asked. "You ok?"

"Yep...it's nothing...everything will be ok." He took two large breaths praying to God that he wouldn't wish death on anyone else.

"Is it a vision or the smell?" Jim's own face was pale and he was sweating as well. Jim took up almost the entire breadth of the corridor behind them and Will felt sudden claustrophobia. His chest began to constrict and he tried to look unobtrusively past Jim at the stairs further down, but he couldn't, not with everyone now staring at him.

"It's nothing...like I said." He was unconvincing even to himself.

"Yeah right, Will. You've always been the worst liar ever," Talitha said "You saw something...and judging by your pathetic attempts at lying, I'm guessing someone is going to die?" Mouths gaped at him and he kept his face down, afraid to look anyone in the eye. He was afraid he would see their death...or worse, afraid he wouldn't.

"It's true, but I don't know whose, or when." There was silence now in the corridor as each person considered the possibility that their own death was near at hand. "Remember that the future isn't set...if I can change it so that nobody dies, I will, ok?" Will added, but he felt no reassurance at his own words.

None of them were mollified in the least and fear was seen on all of their faces. Only Talitha seemed incapable of the dread of dying and she broke the moment of stunned silence that had come with Will's pronouncement of impending doom.

She smirked, with casual indifference to anyone's feelings. "Que sera sera, or maybe not with you around, Will. So if you're done seeing all of their deaths, Will, I need you to tell me about the room."

"The room?" Will pictured the room and his stomach rolled over again and he had to fight down his lunch. "It's a big room, maybe thirty feet long and there are shelves lining the walls with boxes on them. In the middle, there's crate, a wood box. It sit's under the light and just behind it on the floor is a mattress..." his voice trailed into a whisper and then into nothing. Lying on the mattress had been a body, or most of a body. He coughed. The vision and the stink making him queasy.

Talitha, small and frail looking compared to the men around her, took charge. "Good. Now listen up. If you want to get those children back you'll do what I say, exactly what I say. Any interference will jeopardize their lives and worse, piss me off."

"I think we understand. Consid…" Father John began but she cut right across him.

"And no unnecessary yapping! Do what I tell you and keep your mouths shut. The only voice I want to hear is Will's. When we enter, Will, I want you to give me a quick rundown of the room, act like you are speaking into a tape recorder, be clinical; the subject is lying on the mattress five feet in front of me…that sort of thing. If he moves at all, do it again, unless he is talking and moving, then I'll be able to hone in on his voice. Clear?"

Will nodded and she went on, "Another thing, all of you, do not under any circumstances let on that I'm blind. Demonstrating weakness in front of a demon can be deadly. Lastly, don't mention this death that Will has foreseen, it may trigger a desire to kill and once started, demons like to go on killing sprees."

Jim, easily the most relaxed of the group besides Talitha, asked, "What do you plan on doing in there?"

"You brought me here to talk to the man, right? I think I'll start with that. Alba, since the demon knows you, I want you to stay right behind me. Father yapper, I want you to move to my right as we enter and keep the mouth breather with you. Will and Big White Jim stay to my left. Does everyone understand where they're supposed to be?"

Will nodded along with the rest of them and glanced over at Jim's relatively calm visage and felt a slight feeling of relief come over him at the prospect that Jim would be near him.

However, the feeling was short lived.

Talitha began to bark orders again, but Will only really heard the first one, "Will I want you to go first…" after that his mind tuned her out and the moment of relief he had felt, died a quick death, scared into its grave by the simple words.

He looked down the dark corridor and the door seemed larger than it had, and what lay beyond it even greater, taking up his whole world. The fear that had lain behind his breastbone had been growing slowly and was now a boulder of ice, making breathing difficult. His breath was a tiny thing that seemed to go only to the back of his mouth and then was spat back out again. He caught sight of Talitha and her lips were moving and his mind came back in time to hear the tail end of her sentence, "…waiting for?" She seemed perturbed.

Will's mouth came open wider. He didn't know if she was talking to him, and he honestly didn't know if he should say something or not, but luckily Father Alba came to his rescue.

"I think we should say a prayer." His voice was a rough little whisper.

"Uhhg," Talitha rolled her eyes. "I think we shouldn't. God ain't down here, Father.

"Then perhaps it would be best if we invited him. Now everyone…Our Father, who art in heaven…" The priest said the prayer hugging his large bible to his chest and Will fumbled and mumbled along. He was having trouble concentrating, because he couldn't help but thinking that one of the priests would be a better choice to go first. Well maybe not Father John, who stood crookedly; his fear made him look ill, distorting the lines of his body, making him appear as if he had been broken and put back together ineptly.

But he did have a large cross hung about his neck, just as Father Alba did. Will had nothing, not even the gun and he considered asking Jim for it, but then the prayer was over. It had gone by far too fast.

When the prayer ended, Talitha's sarcasm came out, "Great! Thanks Father, we're all safe now." She gave a shake to her blind head and sighed.

Everyone now looked at him expectantly and Will gritted his teeth and made to turn around, but his legs were adroitly reluctant. It took a conscious act to move forward, and robot like, he walked slowly into the stinking gloom.

"Uh…oh Lord, eh…eh…eh!" His throat began an involuntary retching. The stench grew more over powering with each step and Will fought to keep from throwing up. The smell was otherworldly, it was a hellish mixture of feces and rotting flesh. He had to pause a few feet from the door and wipe away the sweat that was going from beads to rivulets on his brow.

"Eh…eh…eh!" The fight to keep his gorge down went on, but with the greatest effort, he finally began to breathe easier. However, the urge remained lurking just under his Adam's apple, looking for any excuse to come back.

He was not alone in his misery, the others wore matching masks of pale green nausea. All but Talitha, who stood near the back of the group and said impatiently, "Come on, Will! Get moving."

The door was feet from him, just visible in the velvet blackness. His chances were 1 in 5 of dying if he walked through that door. He couldn't move.

"Go on," Sean Shay groaned from just behind him in a voice that grated on Will's sensibilities. He wanted to turn and punch him in his fat face. Sean had nothing to fear and Will's unnamed jealousy riled him, but also catalyzed him into stepping further into the dark stench.

"Sorry…sorry," Will said without meaning it and he dragged his feet forward and reached out with a slow hand and took a grip of the cold doorknob. With a deep breath of the foul air, he screwed up his face and turned it.

It didn't budge.

The door was locked! The thought was a triumph within him and a wave of stupid relief went through his body as if the locked door meant he could turn around now and go home.

"The d-d-door is l-l-locked," he said embarrassed at his stutter.

"Here you go," Sean Shay held out an old brass key and Will looked at him angrily. The fat man looked like a large pudding sweating in the sun. He jiggled around the edges and Will hated him. Sean had nothing to fear, but Will forgot that he didn't know it yet and his anger at the man's useless fear was bitter.

He refused the key and stood aside to let Sean at the door to open it. However, Sean just stood there, his fat wiggling under his arm as his hand shook. Neither moved for seconds, until Sean won the cowardly battle simply by pressing the key into Will's reluctant hand.

Will's hatred for the man spiked, but disappeared altogether forgotten, as he turned to the door. The smell and what lay beyond it consumed him. His own hands shook so much that it took both of them to guide the key into the lock and this time the knob turned easily.

The smell was terrific.

The urge to vomit came back greater than before and he breathed in great gasps to keep from hurling up his breakfast, but someone behind him threw up. It was loud and noisome and the sound of it splattering on the concrete was too much for Will. He doubled over and hurled up a great mess.

Strength left him and he fell to his knees still vomiting, holding up his left arm pathetically, to ward off any attack from the demon. But none came and seconds went by and still he retched and heaved, bringing up nothing but loud unpleasant burps. Finally, he stopped and knelt there sweating and feverish, looking back he saw Talitha alone still stood.

The men around her, were on all fours or knelt in varying stages of sickness and the mess on the floor beneath them was enough for Will's stomach to threaten him again and he turned away looking into the room. What he saw there was worse; his stomach's issues went forgotten as his mind struggled to come to terms with the sight.

A single light bulb on a chain hung from the ceiling, even as he envisioned it. It was old and dim, but still shed enough light for him to see the grisly details his premonition had missed. He hadn't seen that the walls were covered in uncouth satanic symbols, drawn undoubtedly in blood; they were now a dark black with reddish-brown edging. From the shelving that ran along the walls, long strips of flesh or meat hung, and beneath each, puddles of dark fluid collected. Upon the mattress, which was stained with enough blood to have turned it black, a body reclined, its skin had been peeled away, and the bones of it stuck out unnaturally as if someone had rummaged through the corpse in search of something.

Finally and worst of all, a man like a king on a bloody throne sat on the crate in the very center of the room. If ever there was a king of blood, this was it. He seemed covered in it from head to toe, layered, with fresh red blood glistening over the blackened dried mess below it.

The only part of the man not covered, were his eyes. These shone out of the ruin of his face, burning with insane joyful malevolence at the sight of the men vomiting in the corridor. They were blue and strikingly so compared to the red black of his skin.

Those blue eyes now locked on Will's and with a private smile that sent flakes of dried blood raining from the corners of his mouth, he showed Will something.

It was a bone, heavy with meat and wet with blood. He held it up for Will's enjoyment before biting into, tearing at the meat and chewing with gusto.

Will's eyes bugged and his legs began to tremble as the strength to stand drained away. Will tried to run from the sight, but succeeded only into knocking into Sean Shay, who also stared, eyes bulging. Will looked for a way around the fat man, but he took up the entire doorway.

The king on his throne of blood spoke then and the sound of his voice sent ice running through Will's veins, "Come in Will Jern."

Chapter 14

The Demon's Disciple

"Don't leave Will Jern, you only just got here." The man's voice was ripping up his own vocal cords and Will felt the empathetic need to swallow, but the sight of him chewing the meat wouldn't allow it and Will could only grimace as if in pain.

"How…how do you know my name?" he asked, tearing his eyes from the man and looking instead at the cement floor where a constellation of dried blood drops, were sprayed about haphazardly.

"Ba'al has a long memory for those that would defy him."

Will's mind shot back eight years, to that brief moment when he had stood upon the gleaming path denying Ba'al. But the memory must have been of another person. The man on the bridge had been strong, standing upright in defiance, while here in the room Will was weak and clutched at the blood-strewn walls to keep from falling over. The man on the bridge had looked death in the face without wavering and his hands were steady, while Will's shook uncontrollably and he couldn't bear to even look up.

"Who is…is that?" Will pointed to the mattress behind the man.

"That is a very special friend. I don't know his name if that's what you're asking, not that it matters." Ba'al looked down fondly at the ravaged remains of the corpse and calmly tossed his bone into it.

Will jumped as he did so.

A hand, heavy and fat had come down on his shoulder. "Go," Sean nudged him in the back and Will lacked the strength to resist him and was pushed further into the room. He still couldn't look directly at the man possessed by Ba'al, but he watched him with his peripheral vision until he heard the horrible voice speaking to Jim and only then could Will look at the gore-covered man.

"Jim Anderson, welcome back, you were missed. At least the tasty, tasty nun missed you." Jim's face was equal parts fear, anger, nausea, and shock. It looked as if the muscles of his face couldn't decide on which emotion to accompany and thus they twitched in an odd, somewhat random order, as he walked to stand next to Will.

Will could sympathize, his own twitch had progressed to the point that his right eye was nearly useless, opening and closing with such rapidity that he was forced to squeeze it shut. His face now looked like it had frozen in the middle of an exaggerated wink.

"Who is that hiding behind you Sean? Well, it's the saint. Saint John and look, Father Alba dressed for the Easter Bunny." From the side Will could see the villain grin at each in turn, but none could stand to look at the demon for more than a second, before turning their eyes away in fear.

All that is, except for Talitha. She stood beaming in the general direction of Ba'al, and she seemed altogether unfazed by the horror that surrounded her.

The voice slipped into a harsh lechery, "Now here is a treat, Talitha Jern, still so beautiful."

She ignored him and inclined her head toward her left. "Will, if you please?" For a moment, he stared at her clueless to what she wanted and it sent her eyebrows sliding together in annoyance.

"Oh yeah…uh, the subject is sitting cross-legged on…" He described the scene leaving nothing out of his description of the man or the room. Talitha's face, other than a look of deepening concentration remained solidly placid, but Will, who knew his sister, both aspects of her, could see there was a ripple of trepidation creasing the edges of her calm façade.

Finally, when he was done, Talitha spoke to the blood covered man, "This room, with its symbols and blood and gore…are you thinking this will frighten me?"

"I know what frightens you, and it's not a room. Teeth have always frightened you and of course glass as well… Auraghnash," he paused staring closely at Talitha, who remained absolutely still, perhaps too still. "Auraghnash sends his love."

Her jaw tightened visibly, but she rallied, "Ba'al is now the messenger of Auraghnash? Things have changed in the void since I've been gone, and for the better."

"Amusing. Still I don't recall you laughing when we were together in the pits at Rek."

Talitha paled, which sent a shock of fear through Will's heart. He had thought her afraid of nothing and the knowledge that she could be afraid, even in the smallest way of this man, made his own fear double. He was not alone in this, the priests glanced into each other's faces with eyes that had grown huge, and Sean Shay was slowly edging into Father John as if for protection.

Talitha, whose tan had now completely faded, spoke angrily but without looking full into the man's face, "I know you're a fraud. I know it. Somehow you are."

Ba'al turned his ice blue eyes on Will then. Will tried to look away, but Ba'al had him, holding him with the ferocious intensity of his gaze and Will could do nothing but step back into the wall, as Ba'al spoke with a mouth that trickled blood from the corners.

"When she first came into the void, I was there waiting on her and I took her down into Rek." He smiled at the memory and for a moment his eyes were off Will, who quickly looked away, down again at the floor. When Ba'al started again, Will could feel the words coming at him, but he dared not look back up.

"Oh, her screams were so lively. They had such strength! I can recall each of them, however my favorite was your first. Do you remember? You tried to be strong and defiant! Tell your friends what made you scream."

It was a command, but Talitha refused it, shaking her head. This only made Ba'al grin. "You aren't embarrassed are you? We were betrothed that night and…"

"You are not Ba'al!" She quivered in fury, her hands clenched.

"Then how did I know that? How do I know that your brother pissed his pants the night he took you from me?"

Will's eyes went wide and shot to the man's face in shocked surprise. What Ba'al had said was true, but Will had told no one, not even Lisa.

Ba'al had paused but now went on, "And Father Alba, how do I know the fact, that you cried like a baby and couldn't stop vomiting when you burned the body of my beloved witch? Or how do I know that Saint John the Hypocrite isn't so saintly after all?"

Father John's mouth became unhinged and fell open, which only made Ba'al laugh his grating cruel laugh. It sounded like, hreah, hreah, hreah. "You like that dark meat, don't you? What was Mrs. Johnson doing on her knees last week? Worshipping you or servicing you?"

Father John with his mouth still open and his eyes bugging shook his head in amateurish denial. He looked as though he were about to say something, but Talitha spoke then in a monotone voice.

"You're a fraud, I know it."

"Can you not look past this skin I wear? I expected more from you. And!" he thundered the word at her. "And I expect my path. Father Alba, tell me you brought more than this damaged girl."

The word seemed to wake Talitha up and she held up her hand to Father Alba, snapping her fingers sharply. "Damaged?" she asked, challenging Ba'al.

"Do you prefer malformed? You're not quite human, not quite demon, something pathetically in between, but I can fix that you know. I have that power."

"What power?" Talitha shrunk with the whispered words, while Ba'al grew. He smiled his awful smile and looked more than ever like a king holding sway over a bloody court.

"Ihgse xythm ey jsuit…" The demon spoke in his hell language and the hair rose on the nape of Will's neck. He realized that coming here had been a horrible idea and he glanced at the door, wondering if he could get past his sister. The look showed that Father Alba was having second thoughts as well; he had retreated into the corridor and was barely visible.

"I don't have it," Talitha said looking down and backing up slightly.

The demon glowered, his anger palpable, and Talitha took a second step back, and it was then that Will knew another one of them would die. The knowledge came like a shot out of the blue and following it was a wave of adrenaline coursing throughout his whole being, making his skin feel alive, tingling.

In the next second, however it went dead, numb.

There would be a third death. The knowledge simply popped into his head and there was no taking it back.

Will didn't bother hoping he would live. That he could avoid dying seemed highly unlikely and he sank into a warm haze of apathy, watching the demon's anger grow to frightening proportions as it began yelling at Talitha in his hell language.

However the yelling seemed to have an odd effect on Talitha, she no longer looked as though in the least fearful, instead a fire of hate burned behind her eyes.

Ba'al must have seen this as well and he quite abruptly changed tactics, becoming conciliatory, "You don't have the sword, but you can get it, right? Ba'al can be very generous when the mood strikes him."

From Will's point of view Ba'al should have remained angry, because Talitha now became mocking, "No, you are miserly and cruel and a liar. And not a very good liar either. You were never planning on giving back any of those boys you took, were you?"

"You do know me well, Talitha. Those children are mine to do with as I please. Why should I give them up?"

She shrugged as if she couldn't think of a reason, "I don't know. I wouldn't give them up." She gave a little wave of her hand dismissing the topic of the missing children. "In what way would you be so generous, Ba'al? The sword is worth far more than a handful of children…what are you offering?"

"I know what you crave above all else." His eyes glittered with secret knowledge. "You want a name. I can name you."

She drew in a sharp little breath, her eyes growing large at the prospect and for what felt like a significant portion of eternity, the two of them faced each other in heavy silence.

Will knew nothing of what they were talking about, but the fact that his sister was even considering trading the sword, burned through his apathy.

"What does he mean, name you?" Will asked, his voice shrill now that he had found emotion again.

They both ignored him and after exchanging a worried look with Father Alba, who had poked his head back in the door, Will said with more conviction, "Talitha! Tell me about this naming business."

Still they ignored him and minutes passed in heavy silence before the possessed man spoke, breaking the spell, "It's good that you're considering this."

Talitha let a smile slip across her face, a mysterious one and where a few minutes before she had backed up, now she advanced on Ba'al. "What would you name me?"

"Hesda Arad Olad'fa," the man said this in the rasping tearing language of his and Talitha cocked an eyebrow at it.

"Keeper of the Bridge of Blood…very cool." She moved even closer and stood just in front of him as he sat high on his tall crate, her shoulders even with his knees.

"Yes it is, very cool. What do you think?"

Talitha put both of her hands on the man's thighs and ran them up his legs before answering, "I have a better name, one that is more fitting, Ba'al Fie-ere…Denier of Ba'al."

The man's blood dripping smile transformed in an instant to look of hate and this was followed a split second later by a comical look of pained surprise. Talitha had shot her hand out striking the man square in the gut and even before all the air had shot out of him, she grabbed him and threw him bodily to the floor.

She wasted not a second before pouncing on him, but shocked them all when instead of attacking the man, she tore at his clothes, searching.

"Uh, Talitha?" Will asked hesitantly.

She ignored him and after a moment, she stepped back away from the man, her eyes roving blindly around in worry. To Will she looked as if she had just realized she had miscalculated, badly. The man, in the mean time, had found his breath and despite his labored breathing, he was making his way to his feet, his face wreathed in a frightful anger.

Talitha sensed it somehow and took a step back, running into the blood-stained crate. This sparked a new idea and turning, she heaved hard on the lid of it, straining for a few seconds before it came open, the wood screaming, or so it seemed.

This was the source of the horrid smell. What came from it then was far worse than anything they had yet experienced and it dropped Will to his knees retching and gagging. The others were in the same plight except for Sean Shay who had passed out all together, falling over as though he had been pole-axed.

Talitha in the mean time had somehow ignored the smell and was half-in and half-out of the crate rummaging through it, blindly fishing about the contents before pulling her upper body out. In her hands she held a small sheaf of yellowing paper.

"No!" the possessed man roared sending a chill wash over Will, but Talitha was now fearless of the demon and swatted him backhand across the face, a casual smack for her, but the man reeled from it.

Unbelievably she sniffed at the paper and Will begged her, "Please shut that…the crate. Shut it." This she did, displaying an act of humanity that was unlike her. The smell diminished immediately and a moment later Will was able to rise, sweating and coughing.

Relaxed now, Talitha strolled over holding out the papers. "Can you read any of this?"

Will took the papers; they were scrawled with odd letters and a maze of diagrams. Turning them over in his hands a few times he said, "Mostly no. It's in a language I've never seen, but there are some notes on the edging in English. It says something about diagram placement, but it's got yellow brown stains…maybe coffee and I can't read it very well in this light. Do you know what this is?"

Ignoring the question, she turned back to Ba'al. "Coffee? You'd drink coffee around this?" She seemed outraged at the idea and after taking the papers from Will's hand, she advanced on the man, turning her head slowly in different directions. "So, what will Ba'al do to you when he gets a hold of your soul?" she asked conversationally.

"Do not mar those papers! I am a servant of Ba'al and it's your soul you should be worried about." Will watched and heard but there was no comprehension on his part.

"Trust me, I do worry about my soul." Talitha raised an eyebrow and tore the sheets in half.

It was as if a light switch had been thrown within Will—something had changed. Something about the room and the man and thankfully even the smell, seemed less than it was, dampened or even diminished. The blood and the body and the symbols were still all about them, but now they lacked the power of fear that had saturated the room.

Even Sean Shay must have noted it, because he immediately started groaning and then struggled to stand.

"No..." the possessed man said, his voice now tired and strained as well as suddenly human. He wilted before Talitha and that was no wonder. She seemed to have grown and there was an exultant smile on her beautifully evil face.

"Yes!" she cried jubilant, holding the torn sheet up over her head in triumph beaming around the room as if expecting the men to applaud her, however Will's mind, like a tree bending under too much snow felt near the breaking point, and he was lost as to what was going on.

"Talitha…" he started, but she held up her hand.

"Hold that thought," she tilted her head slightly, pivoted on her left foot and with a speed Will didn't think possible, she tilted her body and kicked the man in the face with a snapping round house. He dropped in an instant and lay moaning, clutching the side of his face, while Talitha stood, demonstrating an amazing balance with her right foot still in the air.

She moved in reverse, with purposeful slow motion, bringing her leg back down with the grace of a dancer. "Wow, I feel good. Did you see that kick, Will? Unerring!"

"Yeah, that was great, Tal, but why? Why'd you do that? We may never get those kids back now."

"Kids? I hope I'm there when your brain finally turns on," she said this sweetly and Will felt his face get hot. "He just told us that he never planned to give those kids back. Weren't you paying attention?"

"Yeah, but…" He left off, not knowing what to say. She was right of course, the man had said that, but just then Will didn't know if that was Ba'al talking or a man.

"I can tell that you're confused as usual, but that's ok, I'm used to it." She spoke to Will as if he were a five year old and his face burned hotter with anger and embarrassment, but she couldn't see it and went on calmly, "You want those kids back and I can help you with that, however, it's not going to be pretty. So why don't you take your little friends out of here and go make some tea?"

Father Alba, who stood just inside the room asked, "What are you planning on doing, Miss Jern?"

"Torture of course. We tried it your way talking, blah, blah, blah. Now we'll do things my way."

"No, Miss Jern, we…" the priest began, but she cut right across him.

"I'm so tired of you talking to me in such an insolent manner, Alba." Her voice was low and fairly dripped with venom. "And another thing. No more of this Miss Jern crap, I am now Ba'al Fie-ere."

The man, Will still thought of as Ba'al Zubel, had just struggled to his feet, and started to say something, but Talitha alerted by the sound of his movement punched him dead center in his chest. He went down again, his breath came and went, a tiny squeaking sound, high and weak, and to Will alarming.

They all stared at the man in shock and when a minute went by and the squeaking hadn't progressed, Will asked, "Should we do something about him?"

"He'll be fine. You know, I killed a man a few months back with a punch to the solar plexus, wham! Dead center." She shook her head sadly. "What a waste, he went so fast. But you won't have to worry your pretty little head, Will. I learned my lesson; this one won't die so easily. I'll make sure it will take a long, long time."

Her smile made him cold.

"See, he's moving, I told you he'd be fine." Talitha turned her vicious smile back to the man. His breathing had progressed past the squeak and into a wheeze, which was helping his complexion. He had been a fearful purple beneath the dried blood and now, Will could see that he had turned a high pink.

Grabbing his hair, Talitha helped him to his feet by it, before slapping hard across the face. It was like the sound of a cracking whip, but with volume and the man collapsed again at the feet of Father Alba.

The sound triggered something in Will. It was like déjà vu, but he knew it was a vision. He saw blackness suddenly lit, followed by a crash. The death, the first one was creeping closer. His chest constricted painfully and he checked his watch 11:58. It would be soon.

"Miss Jern," Father Alba stared at the man groaning at his feet, "You can't…"

Talitha leapt over the possessed man, just as pretty as a deer clearing a fence and landed a foot to Father Alba right. She slipped in close to the startled priest, pivoted around him, and within a second had him by his throat.

"Hey! Uhhhng!" The priest's eyes bulged as she applied a healthy squeeze.

"Talitha, no!" This was shouted in chorus by Will, Jim, and Father John and they each stepped nearer to her.

"Stop!" her voice, startlingly loud, stopped the men. "I can tear out his throat in an instant. Ask Will if you don't believe me."

No one asked, but all eyes went to him and he nodded rapidly.

"Talitha, please…" Will began, pleadingly.

"Ba'al Fie-ere! My name is Ba'al Fie-ere!" she yelled, her face a furious mask that came and went in a second only to be replaced with a sudden blazing triumphant smile. "I have named myself! As is only proper."

"I'm sorry…Ba'al Fie-ere," Will had trouble spitting out the name. "Father Alba is about to pass out. Could you please…uh?"

"Uh, what? Not kill my hostage? I guess so, for now. Hey look at that." Talitha's head turned slightly back and forth at the blood covered man who crawled toward her in something of a delirium. She backed out of the room still holding the priest by his heavy jowls.

"Good doggy," she wore an unpleasant smile for the man. "Look at that, Will. If only you were so well trained, I would consider keeping you around, when my dreams are done."

"What are you doing…Ba'al Fie-ere?" Will had nearly forgotten to add her new name and she had glanced up with a new menace in her eye.

"I'm doing you a favor."

"What favor? I don't understand."

"What else is new, Will? When do you ever understand, shit?" Clearly aggravated she stomped on the man as he crawled up to her. "Let me spell it out for you: I'm going to hurt this little bastard! I'm going to make him scream and beg for death. I'm going to make him really bleed! And he's going to learn, he can't fuck with me!" She screamed this more at the man than at Will.

However, she calmed suddenly, the manic air about her turning sweet. "I'm going to do this for you, Will…dear brother. I know being the good guy can be so constricting, so limiting, so damn boring! You can't hurt him like you really, really want to. Deep down, I know you want to. You want to hurt him bad for what he's done, you want to punish him for what he did to that nun. Doing it in her ass, making her…"

Jim's face had grown red with a tremendous rage and Will worried that he would rush her, not to hurt her but to kill the man. He stepped in front of Jim. "Talitha…I mean Ba'al Fie-ere, please stop. Ok, I understand, I guess, but…but what do you need the priest for?"

"I had planned on taking him as a hostage the moment I heard his cowardly voice. I knew you wouldn't let me cut up this pathetic fraud without having proper collateral. He sure did have me going there though…" She looked down at the man, hatred marring her features. Grabbing the priest by his thinning hair with one hand, she pulled him down. Kneeling, she turned the possessed man over and dug through his pockets.

She held up something small and thin that glittered, "Looky! A razor blade, for sudden unexplained bleeding and…" She dug about again and brought out a key, shiny and new. "He somehow got out of his room and killed a nun," she mimicked her brother's voice making him sound idiotic. "He faked the whole thing, so he could get his hands on the sword." She pulled the priest up and stood gazing down, quiet, and contemplative. "But how did you even know about that?"

"Ok, I get it…but you have Ba'al, you could just…" Will began.

"He's not Ba'al Zubel, you idiot! He's not a demon! He's not possessed either, and never was, damn it!" She shouted at Will, shaking the priest easily as if he were a kite rattling in the wind—there was a wild fire of insanity raging behind her eyes

"Yes, yes, of course. I'm sorry." Will's hands were out uselessly attempting to placate the blind woman. "You're right, he's only a man."

"His name is Luke, I think," intoned Jim in his deep voice.

Will went on, "He's just a man, I get it, but, you have the key and the other is still in the door. You don't need Father Alba, you could lock us all in here. That way you could do…whatever to the man and we won't even try to stop you."

She nodded thoughtfully. "That does sound reasonable, but you've driven me beyond reason, Will."

The sound of an audible and deadly click came from Will's right. Jim stood, holding the gun that had traveled to Maine and back. It was small in his great hands, however in the dim light it was jet black and filled with an uncaring deadly malice.

The sound was not lost on Talitha's keen hearing and she slid easily behind the priest. "So, Big Jim has finally grown a pair?"

"He won't shoot, Talitha," Will said, but was contradicted a moment later.

"Yes I will," Jim told her. "I want answers. What the hell just happened? Were we under a spell?"

"Actually it was an incantation…"

"Is there any damned difference?" he snarled at her, and she only smiled slyly. "Forget that...forget it," he said talking mostly to himself. And then to her, he demanded, "Let the priest go, or else."

"Or else what? You'll shoot?" She gave him a little giggle. "Come on cowboy, take your best shot." She ducked left and right, playfully behind Father Alba, whose wide eyes stayed fixed on the weaving gun in Jim's hands.

Will wanted to protest. He wanted to step in between Talitha and the gun, but he realized that this could be one of the three deaths he had foreseen. He paused at the idea, hating himself as he calculated the odds of living if Father Alba were to die just now. He would go from a three in six chance down to a two in five chance and if he could…

"I can't," Jim murmured.

The sound of the gun clattering on the cement near Will sent his appalling calculations out the window. With a perverse longing, he stared down at the gun, which conversely represented life to him. If he were to possess it, he could decide who lived and who died, who would be afraid and who wouldn't. The thought triggered Will to take a sly glimpse at the men nearby and with relief, he noted they were all taken up with Talitha and no one eyed the gun, but him.

"That wasn't very smart, Jim," Talitha said and in Will's periphery he saw that she had moved to her right, out from behind the priest. Will's eyes flicked over to her, and he saw that she now had one foot on the back of Luke's neck and was grinding her heal down onto it.

The man struggled weakly.

Will didn't care. His eyes darted furtively back down to the gun and he wondered why he didn't just pick it up. After all, Talitha wouldn't know. She was blind. But there seemed to be an inertia within him that was greater than his yearning for the gun. He fought the feeling, knowing there was no reason for him not to command it and bending down, he reached out his hand…

There was a flash in the pitch black, it was brilliant, and it lit up a silhouette of a man just in front of him. Following it was the roar of the gun. It echoed all around him, and in him as well, shaking his inner being. He felt a wave of nausea wash over him, but that feeling was secondary, he needed to know the time, desperately. He pulled back the sleeve of his coat with a hand that sweated against the grip of the black gun and the familiar orange glow of his watch showed 12:19.

He came back to the present with a snap and found himself in the horrible fetid room and he gasped loudly, but the sound went unnoticed. His hand still reached out for the black gun—the one he'd use to kill and seeing this, Will's fingers curled inwardly with an involuntary motion. He pulled his hand back to his chest and glanced around, this time without any devious notions, but with worry that everyone had seen his vision as well and knew what he was going to do. However, they were all still in the exact positions they had been in, as if Will had froze time to see his vision.

With a start, he tore frantically at his sleeve and the friendly orange glow showed the time, 12:01 pm. Eighteen minutes.

"I've dropped the gun, that's what you wanted," Jim said loudly as if Talitha were deaf as well as blind, making Will jump. "Now, please let Father Alba go."

Eighteen minutes, Will would kill in eighteen minutes. He had killed before, twice. This would be his third murder.

"The future is not set," Will didn't know if he had said the words aloud or if he had just thought them, but nobody seemed to notice, nor did they notice him backing away from the gun, eyeing it as he would a dangerous animal.

"But I'm not done having my fun, he's still so squishy and lively," Talitha grabbed the priest's fat stomach and gave it a playful shake. "And besides, he's still moving."

"Don't kill him," Jim pleaded. Will looked at him and saw the tears, the real, factual tears on Jim's face. They had sprung up out of nowhere.

To Will, it had all the relevance of seeing an apple sitting on a counter. Will's mind was in another world, seeing himself as a killer, again! Knowing that if his soul wasn't forfeit already, it would be as soon as he pulled that trigger. And the fact that Jim was upset mattered nothing to him.

"Kill him?" Talitha asked. "Killing is childish, sophomoric. I'm past that, I've evolved you might say. I'm into pain." Talitha's eyes were now filled with a fevered mania and in their own way, it was worse than the cold evil that had been Ba'al's. Will saw this, but couldn't find it within him to care about that either.

That is until he heard his name sliding from his sister's mouth like warm spit. "Does that make you feel better, Will? That your priest will live? Disfigured, maimed, hopefully insane, but alive? All because of you."

Will's mouth came open and he stared at her stupidly, the conversation that had gone on around him, slowly bubbled up from the molasses of his mind. "My fault?"

Father Alba shook his head, the fat of his jowls swinging back and forth. "Don't blame yourself, Will."

"No, do blame yourself. I warned you, remember?" Talitha wasn't going to be denied. "I told you to speak to me with proper respect but you wouldn't listen. You had to go and be an asshole. So now, whatever happens to the priest will be on your head, I hope you can live with yourself."

"I'm sorry, I wasn't feeling well. I dreamed your dreams and they make me…edgy."

She glared at him, harshly. "If that had been the only thing you'd ever done to me, I might have forgiven you."

His mind cast aside thoughts of his upcoming murder and blundered about trying to recall what he had done to Talitha. "Taking you out of the void? I was trying to help."

"What about this?" She gestured at herself, from head to toe. "This is all your fault. Everything for the last eight years has been your fault! If you hadn't been out trying to dip your wick into Lisa, this wouldn't have happened. Dad left me to find you, remember? He left me alone with a demon! You were supposed to be home."

A great bonfire of guilt turned him cold inside. "I'm sorry."

Her pretty face turned nasty, feral. "I don't care about sorry. I care about payback. Come trade places with the priest. Remember the demon Juuba' al-ex? Remember the teeth? Let that be you, instead of him."

Goosebumps flared at the memory of the dream and Will took another step back away from her. The priest's eyes, huge and brown were on him. They held a desperate fear. A brave man would have traded places with the priest without hesitation; his father would have. But Will had gone through too much and he knew too much. He knew about the pain.

He hesitated a second before answering. The vision of Juuba' al-ex and the teeth, the endless teeth coming out of the black made him hesitate. And when he heard his own screams echoing in his mind, his pause stretched out.

His mouth came open, but no sound issued from it and the taste of the horror in the room settled on his tongue but it was nothing compared to the dreadful memory and it went unnoticed.

Talitha shook her head; the tremendous contempt in her smile staked his heart. "I thought so. Coward!"

"No…wait," He fished about in an empty mind for something to say, but before he could, she twisted the bitter stake into him, splintering it.

"Don't you have any of your father in you?"

"I'll trade places with Father Alba," Jim's words finished what Talitha had started and Will felt himself shrink at them. He became nothing.

"No. I want only Will," she said.

"Ok," the word was inaudible to all but Talitha, who smiled with cruel intentions. Will took a deep breath and tried again, "Ok, I'll switch…if you want me to."

"It's too late, coward," she sneered at him.

At that moment he hated her with unnatural passion, but the hatred that he felt toward himself was nearly as great and the feeling of being small went from figurative to literal; his shoulders slumped and his back stooped.

"Talitha, I want you to know, that I forgive you for what you have done and…unnnghh!" Father Alba went instantly red with the force of her squeeze and slowly, he turned a purple color in her hand.

"I didn't ask for your forgiveness and I don't want it," she said quietly.

"Talitha!" Jim growled a warning, which brought about a smile from her. Jim's eyes flashed at it and he barked, "Talitha, damn it! Let go of him."

Surprisingly she did, "Damn it? So manly, so forceful, I like it. Hey, Will. Try adding that to your vocabulary. It might make you feel like a man." Releasing her grip on the priest, she took the white stole from about his shoulders and with amazing strength, tore it in half lengthways.

Twisting one section, she tied one end of it around the neck of Father Alba, making a combination noose and leash.

"Ba'al Fie-ere, what are you doing?" Will asked, using her adopted name. It didn't matter that Jim still called her Talitha; Will knew that if he tried it, someone would get hurt.

"I'm tying up my prisoners, duh." She was sitting full upon Luke's back, working the second half of the twisted stole into a knot.

Father Alba, who had been gasping for breath, said, "I forgive you regardless…"

Talitha gave her end of the makeshift rope a sharp tug, tightening the noose suddenly. "Maybe you should wait until I am done with you before you forgive me. I promise to leave your tongue intact, so that…" She paused and swung her head around. "Jim! I hear you, now step back."

Jim had taken two quiet steps toward the door. "No. You call Father Alba a hostage, but you talk of torturing him, why shouldn't we just rush you right now? It won't be any worse for the priest."

"I'll tell you why. First, you're too slow and I'm not just talking about your lack of brains either. You'll never make it. I'll have his throat out in a heartbeat." She paused and gave a tug on Luke's leash bringing him to his feet. Ignoring his gasping, she slammed him face first into the wall, pinning him there. "Second, this isn't my fault and after what's been done to me. I'm in a very eye for an eye mood. Hey, Father? Isn't that in the bible somewhere?"

Somewhere in the last eight years, Father Alba had discovered a reserve of courage within him. He said in strong voice, "Jesus instructs us to love our enemies."

She snorted, "Yeah he was always bit fruity. But you ducked the question. Does your bible say something about an eye for an eye? The reason I ask…look at me. Remember what happened to Father Menning?"

The priest craned his neck around to look at her, his eyes bulged in fear. "Please…no."

"Oh yeah! Father Menning clawed his own eyes out, driven insane by Ba'al Zubel.," She paused, her own eyes were wide with excitement. "I don't have any of those fancy mind tricks yet, so I am going to have to take your eyes out by hand."

"What did you say?" Jim asked, with equal parts outrage and disbelief.

She ignored the big man and spoke to the white-faced priest, "Look at what Will did to me, he took my sight, soooo, an eye for an eye just like your bible says."

"Jesus would actually instruct you to turn the other cheek," the priest said in a quavering voice, his desperation sapping the strength from it.

She turned smug, "So you say, but you won't follow that command, so why should I?"

"I will," Father Alba declared quietly.

"Father," She said with a little smirk. "When I take your left eye, it won't be clean like in those Kung Fu movies; it won't just pop out. It's going to burst and I'm going to have to dig around in the socket to get all of it." She paused for the thought to sink in and Father Alba let out an obliging moan of fear. Upon hearing it, she smiled broadly and went on, "So, in accord with Jesus' teachings, you're going to then turn your head, to let me at the right one as well?"

The horrifying room with its blood-strewn walls was silent. Will shook his head back and forth, pleading desperately with wide eyes, but Father Alba refused to look in his direction and was long in answering, but finally said, "Yes I will."

Chapter 15

The First Death

Will knew she would attempt to lock them in, perhaps even before she did, but she was faster, closer and though blind, she moved with an astounding nimbleness and the door slammed shut in Will's face as he threw himself forward. The boom of the heavy door against the jam had a finality to it that threatened to overturn the now delicate workings of his mind and as he stood leaning his forehead against the door he could feel the vibrations coursing through it.

They triggered a thought that pulsated throughout his body: Three would die. He looked around at the men with him. The others had not moved and they had all stood as if helpless spectators, as Talitha entombed them with a mutilated corpse and the unimaginable stink. They looked not only helpless, but useless as well.

A scowl creased his features before he turned back to the door and pounded on it with his fists. Ignoring her new name, he shouted at the top of his lungs, "Talitha! Don't do this! Don't do this! I'm warning you. You can't come back from this!"

Will paused to listen, however there was nothing but the slight shaking of the door and the thought came to him again: Three would die. It came with more urgency and Will checked his watch, 12:06.

He felt fatigued by the sight and sagged against the door, however it was sticky with a black viscous goo and letting out a low groan, he pulled away from it, revolted to his core.

"What do we do?" Sean Shay asked as if he were a little boy, unable to think for himself. This earned him another scowl from Will, but it was also a catalyst for Jim. Striding over to the door, he gripped the knob and yanked and heaved at it, straining, becoming roused with the effort.

He was not just a tall man, but hugely strong and muscular and the sinews of his arms swelled as he pulled with all of his considerable might. But to no avail. The door held firm without the slightest shimmy and he paused to take a few big breaths.

Will only saw one way out. "Forget the knob. Tear down the door!" he barked the order to Jim and stood back out of the way. It was well that he did too, because the giant unleashed an amazing fury on the door blocking his way.

Time and again, he threw his entire weight, bodily against it, irregardless of any pain. It was an awesome sight but even he tired after a minute and at the first pause, Will order Sean at it. Sean charged it without complaint and he too was something to see, however he tired far more rapidly and still the door had not budged.

Will sent Jim to relieve Sean, who was panting like a mule and checked his watch, 12:09. Ten minutes. He would kill again in ten minutes. His eyes went back to the gun, no longer coveting it, but repulsed by it. Yet for reasons unknown to him, he went over to it and picked it up and hefted it in his hand, liking the weight.

He stared down at it, absorbed by the reality of death it symbolized. Time ticked away. Thud…thud…thud! The noise was rhythmic and it was a second before Will realized it was occurring outside of himself. Jim was kicking at the door, his great leg pistoning out, angry sweat dripping from his face. Thud…thud…thud!

"Use the gun, Will." Father John stood beside him, his face no longer handsome, but aged by fear and creased by worry.

Will's first thought, It's not time yet, made him check his watch in the exact same manner as he would at 12:19. With the gun in his right hand, he pulled back his sleeve with his pointer finger…his trigger finger and the orange glow told him it was still 12:09.

He gave the priest a puzzled look, not at what the priest had said but at the fact that it was still 12:09. Time, it seemed, was an ally of death and was holding itself back to ensure Will kept his appointed fate.

"Shoot the lock," Father John prompted.

"Huh?" It took a moment for Will to realize, the gun might have another use. "No, you do it." Will pushed the gun into the priest's hands and stepped back nodding encouragement and pointing at the door for emphasis.

"Ok, I guess. Stand aside you two!" Father John was small and thin, conversely the gun looked all the more powerful, and when he pulled the trigger, the sound of it in the room was shocking.

Jim went to try the door but stopped a few feet away, it was plain, the priest had missed. There was a hole a foot above the lock.

"Get closer," Jim suggested to the priest, who obviously didn't like the idea and only took two baby steps nearer. Will covered his ears this time.

Blam! Blam! Blam! On his fifth shot, he hit the lock dead on. Jim wasted no time and attacked it again, yanking and pulling with all of his might, but still it wouldn't budge. He turned back to Will perplexed.

Will was baffled as well, always in the movies this sort of thing had worked. He studied the lock for a second. "Get closer…no right here. And shoot at an angle."

Since he kept turning his head at the last moment, it took three more shots before Father John hit the lock a second time.

"Hold on!" Jim roared and again strained at the knob, and now there was obvious movement. He went back and forth and moments later the lock gave and the door flew open. The air of the corridor, fouled by the vomit of five men was cool and wonderfully fresh compared to the terror of the room.

The men dashed for the stairs. The feeling of relief at getting out of the horrendous room was indescribable. Will found himself grinning as he jogged along and he wasn't alone in this. Puffing next to him, his many chins bouncing up and down was Sean Shay and he sported a huge grin as well.

Will scowled at him.

He couldn't help it. He hated the man. He couldn't help that either. Will tried not to think about him and when they reached the stairs, Sean quickly fell back breathing loudly.

Mid-way up the stairs, Will caught up with Jim and as they reached the top, they tore down the hall together, but when they entered the chapel itself, he stopped.

"I don't see the trail!" Jim said, anxiety coloring his voice. He swung his huge ugly head back and forth staring down at the carpet. "There were blood drops all the way up here and now they're gone."

With the lights off in the main room, the carpet was very dark and there was going to be no chance to see blood on it. Will dropped to his knees, his hands out running his fingers delicately over the carpet.

"Here's a drop, they went this way." Will was up and racing for the front doors. As he entered the foyer, which had more windows and thus was better lit, he could see the blood plainly.

"More blood," he called out excitedly. "With Luke bleeding like this we should be able to track them easily!" He saw blood on the handles to the double doors and shot through them, eager to catch up to his sister, who couldn't have gotten very far, not with two hostages.

The rain was coming down as heavy as before and Will ran into it but stopped only a few feet from the front doors. There was no longer a blood trail. The rain flowed over him, washing away the last of his enthusiasm.

"Damn it!" Jim raged against the storm and then went to his hands and knees searching the running water.

"Stop," Father John put his hand on the giant's shoulder. "The trail's gone, but it doesn't matter, look." He pointed to a nearly empty parking lot. "Father Alba's car is missing, it was right there. They could be anywhere."

Jim stared long at the parking lot, his face congealing miserably, but then he became animated by sudden anger. "You!" he thundered at Will. "You can see the future!" It came out as an accusation and he advanced on an alarmed Will. "Where are they?" he demanded, grabbing Will and shaking him.

"I don't know."

He towered over Will and his rage made him look even bigger. "You do know; now tell me where they are!" Jim had his fist raised to strike and for a second Will wanted to be punched. A punch from a man that big would certainly knock him out, and he'd lose any chance he would have to kill…whoever it was.

"I'm sorry Jim, but it doesn't work that way. The visions come to me, I can't make them happen." Even as he said it, Will realized that may not be true; after all he had never tried and with good reason.

"Are you sure?" Father John looked at him with brown eyes that were sharp and flinty with accusation. "Father Alba told me just last night that the old lady…from before could see into the future if she wanted."

"Yeah, did he tell you that people died when she did?" Will was suddenly worried that they would ask this of him and he became defensive and angry in his own right.

"People are going to die anyways!" Jim cried and gripped him by the shoulders. Will had strong broad shoulders, but they suddenly felt frail and easily broken in Jim's tremendous hands. The man gave Will a healthy shake and continued. "I think blinding Father Alba will be just the start if we don't get there to stop her."

"And she's going to torture that demon-guy," Sean Shay said from the warmth of the church.

"He deserves it!" Will spat out angrily at him.

"You're right, Will. He does deserve it," Jim agreed reasonably. "My worry is what information she'll get from him. He knows things he shouldn't, even Talitha thought so. He might know how to use the sword."

The rain thrummed loud all about them, but the four men were silent. Will checked his watch, 12:12. Seven minutes left.

There had been seven people in the room when he had his final two premonitions and three of them would die soon, one very soon, but would any of these deaths be his fault? Would looking into the future cause them to happen?

Yes.

Unfortunately, that answer was easy. After all, he could just sit down in the rain and let the time run down until his watch read 12:20. There would be no flash of light, no roar of the gun and no blood on his hands.

Or perhaps there would be more blood. How many would die if he did nothing at all? Father Alba and Luke to start with, but if he didn't stop Talitha now, there could be hundreds. Maybe even thousands. His heart told him many thousands.

"Ok I'll do it…I'm not sure if this will work, but I'm willing to try," Will said.

Jim pulled his hands off of Will as if he had a disease that was catchy. "What should we do?"

"Nothing," Will spoke quietly, a nervousness had begun thrilling through him and he wrapped his arms around himself, for warmth as well as to keep his hands from shaking.

He thought that looking into the future would be more difficult than it turned out to be. He simply reached within the core of his mind and the vision sprang to life before him.

"It's very dark…they're going down stairs slowly, warily… they're nearby, right down the street, Haikes Rubber and Tire. I can read the sign! They're deep down in the place, underground in a sub level maybe? I'm not sure…there's a body!" Seeing it hurt Will's head, a sharp stabbing pain that went through the middle of his brain.

"Is it Father Alba's?" Jim asked in alarm.

"No…it's…a boy. Oh no!" The body was that of one of the missing boys. Will didn't how he knew that, but he did. The boy was tied, kneeling down over a box and in a second, Will saw all that he was going to see. He pulled himself out of the vision and with horror he wandered out into the rain.

He stared up into it, letting the water run into his eyes, but it didn't help, the boy was still there in his mind, he had been dead for days. His skin was a sick black color and parts of it were bloated and filled with toxic gasses. In other areas on the boy's body, the skin had split in great fissures, and these were now home to maggots roiling over each other by the thousands.

"Oh, God, no!" Will shook his head hard. Swinging it back and forth, making himself dizzy, but it didn't help and when he opened his eyes, the boy was there, just in front of him—kneeling over the box, his pants down around his knees.

Will rubbed hard at his face, the twitch jumping madly around his right eye, obscuring reality, but leaving the vision of the boy still perfectly clear. He had been sodomized in a horrendous fashion. The flesh back there was an open maggot filled gaping hole.

"No!" Will screamed at the top of his lungs.

The vision of the boy's rotting body wouldn't stop, everywhere he looked, it was there revealing more of it terrible surprises. He could now smell its sweet sickening stench and then he heard the pathetic soul wrenching cries of the boy begging for his life and then begging to die.

"No!" Will screeched again even louder. Nothing was stopping the vision, now. It came regardless of what he tried to do and Will strayed over the edge of insanity and played in its shallower waters. He struck himself with tremendous viciousness across the face and then again and again until Jim finally came up and pinned his arms to his sides in a great bear hug.

His head throbbed, however the blows had been worth it, he no longer saw the body. But it was there as a memory and the sadness of it made him cry a deep soul-wrenching cry. He sobbed into Jim's chest feeling like a child in the arms of his father.

"Ok, you did really good, Will." Jim's voice was a soothing rumble and it felt good on his aching head to hear it. "Really good, thank you…Father get your car quick…good job, Will. Good job."

Within in a minute Will had calmed somewhat and heard the approaching car, an old boxy Volvo with Father John behind the wheel. Jim released him from the bear hug and Will staggered a little but then found his legs and climbed in. There was an uncomfortable silence in the car and Will was convinced that everyone was secretly questioning his sanity, and he didn't blame them, on the contrary, he joined them.

There felt to be a great crack running through his mind, one big enough to hold a body, not the body of a little boy, but that of a grown man. Somebody would have to fill that crack and he knew that if he walked away now without finding Talitha, the crack would grow larger and larger until it was big enough to swallow him whole.

Adrina, the gypsy from whom he had inadvertently received his talent, had considered looking into the future purposefully as something unnatural, and death was the punishment for attempting it, but Will looked on death now as a form of payment. He saw and now he owed. He had been steered across a river no living man should be allowed to travel and had seen the other side. And now, the ferryman was demanding payment; a life.

"Fuck that!" Will muttered angrily. He wasn't paying anything and if he could help it, no one would.

"What's that?" Father John asked without taking his eyes from the road that was flying under them at fantastic speeds.

"We can still save Father Alba, hurry," Will demanded, and thought: the future is not set.

"No! He's good, Will. He's doing fine," Jim said in a voice that was much higher than usual.

Will felt a moment of irritation until he recognized that they were already hurrying, possibly far more than was smart. The priest had turned out of the parking lot and was now pushing the Volvo to its limit, and with the heavy rain and the great speed, Will felt mild alarm. The two men in the back seat were well past alarm and held on to the interior like a couple of tomcats on the way to the vet.

It made Will smile, but it lasted less than a second and then his face went back to the tired grave look he had worn most of the day. A part of him, larger than he would ever care to admit, welcomed a crash, especially a fatal one. The last two days had taken a psychic toll on him and the idea he was rushing to murder someone or to see that boy's body, killed any fear of a car crash, it fizzled inside him leaving only apathy and a single hope.

The future is not set.

He remembered the flash of light in the darkness. "Hey, Father? Do me a favor and keep hold of the gun."

The priest's eyes came off the road just long enough to glance at Will, look down at the seat next to him, and then back up again. "What?"

Will looked down. The gun, like a hard black snake, lay next to him on the seat, practically touching him. It was offering its grip to Will as if it knew where it rightfully belonged and the barrel pointed at the priest. Seeing it that way bothered him and as casually as he could Will spun the gun.

When he did so, it was with a disquieting feeling of playing Russian roulette, and the deadly end of the gun didn't make a full circle and caught on the seat belt, facing Will. He looked down that dark barrel and a wave of shivers washed down his back, but he ignored a sane desire to point it away from himself and instead checked his watch, just in time to see it click over from 12:15 to 12:16. Three minutes left.

"I want you to…" He couldn't finish, the priest hit the brakes hard, and everyone leaned well forward, the gun skipping off the seat. Will bent down to retrieve it, experiencing a moment of nausea as Father John turned the car sharply to the left. The gun felt alive, it eagerly bounced up and settled into his hand, comfortably, becoming an extension of himself.

The feeling was welcoming as well as repulsive as if he liked it too much. Will jammed the gun in between the back cushion and the long bench of the seat, just as the Volvo roared into the parking lot of Haikes Rubber and Tire Company.

"To the left!" Jim yelled from the back seat. "I'll take Sean and go through the employees' entrance, you two go through the front doors and move down and to the middle. Will, do you know what level they're going to be on?"

The boy knelt over the box with his pants down…Will shook his head savagely, forcing himself not to think about the vision. "No, just somewhere very deep."

"We'll do our best…right there," Jim's long arm came between Will and the priest pointing to the obvious. A loading dock and a series of boarded up doors were in front of them and the Volvo screeched up to it.

The two men started to squeeze their huge bodies out of the chunky car and Will felt a flutter of panic seeing Jim go.

He called out to them, "Remember, she's very dangerous. Try to trap her if you can and don't engage her if at all possible. Use your bulk and smother her, until we get there."

Jim gave him a last look, a queer one filled with mixed emotions that he couldn't read. "You gonna be ok, Will?"

"Yeah…yeah, I'll be fine, now get going." Will didn't know if he would be fine or not.

"Ok, good luck, Father," Jim said to the priest.

Oddly the priest kept his eyes fixed on the steering wheel. "You too, Jim."

The two men turned and jogged to the dock and Father John, not giving them a second look, hauled the car about and gunned it around the building. His eyes flicked to Will twice and it made Will slightly self-conscious. He wondered what he looked like. Crazy he supposed; he certainly felt that he was still trailing his coattails just over the edge of crazy.

"It was only a couple of times…three times actually," Father John spoke, slowing the car to clear an overturned dumpster. The parking lot that surrounded the building was nearly empty, barren of cars, but strewn with trash. Glass lay everywhere, papers, mostly newspaper hugged the fencing, old chairs and desks, broken and unusable lay in random piles and tall green rivers of weeds jutted up through the pavement in long lines.

"Three times?" Will was confused and wondered when he had missed the conversation Father John was referring to. The church was only a few hundred yards away and the trip couldn't have lasted more than a minute.

"Mrs. Jackson," the priest whispered it secretively to Will and it went nearly unheard over the sound of the car. He grabbed the door as the Volvo took a sharp turn; the front of the building was now in sight.

"Mrs. Jackson? I…I don't know her." Will was clueless to what the man was talking about and gave him a shrug hoping he wasn't being offensive with his look of bewilderment.

Father John grimaced and took a deep breath. "The demon mentioned her…and... he wasn't lying."

Understanding hit Will like a club, as did the weight of the man's guilt and for some reason, he found he couldn't look at Father John. He kept his face forward, eyes on the looming entrance.

The priest continued, "I didn't mean for it to happen. It's just… she was in a vulnerable place. Her husband is not a good person you see. And I tried to comfort her…it was only a couple of times and I tried to end it, but she was so needy, I thought she would fall apart if I broke it off."

The car pulled up, stopping hard next to an old Plymouth station wagon. Will went to get out, but Father John held him back. "You believe me right?" The man seemed desperate for Will to understand, but he didn't.

"Why are you telling me this?"

The priest's eyes slid off him and went back to the steering wheel, "Because, I need forgiveness."

A look of shock flashed across Will's features. "I'm…I'm not the one you should be asking forgiveness from. This is between you and the Jacksons."

"You're right, but you are near to God. He has touched you." The priest reached over and grabbed Will's hand almost reverently, however with a look of fear as well. "I'm afraid…I've been afraid of the demon and now I'm afraid of your sister. I just think. I just think that it would be best to confess my sins now, while there's still time."

We don't have time for this, Will thought in anger. However, the man's look of sad desperation quelled his temper. He looked into the priest's brown eyes. "God sees into your heart, if you are truly sorry, then," he paused feeling blasphemous, "Then you are forgiven."

Father John smiled in relief. "I am sorry. Thank you so very much."

Will smiled as well, but felt sleazy as if he had perpetrated a fraud and slid out of the car in one fluid motion. He glanced back in and Father John was still there, looking at him in a way Will didn't like. The look was of adoration and Will tried to ignore it, checking his watch purposefully, 12:17. Two minutes to go.

"Grab the gun, Father, but whatever you do, don't give me it, ok?"

The priest didn't seem to hear. He pulled himself from the car and stood holding the gun, smiling. He looked to have regained some of his youth and handsomeness and there was a lightness to him. "It feels so good to get that off my chest. Thanks again, Will."

"It was nothing…remember don't give me the gun. It's very important. But now we got to go." Will started for the door trying not to see that the look of adoration had not left the priest's face.

The priest held him back again. "I'll go first, I have the gun after all."

The front door of the building was at one time glass but now was constructed of graffiti scrawled plywood boards, one of which had been yanked off and lay on the cement a few yards away. Father John stepped through the opening and disappeared into the blackness beyond.

"Be careful, there's glass all over the place in here," he said from inside and it was almost as if the building itself had issued the warning. It caused a moment of hesitation on Will's part, but then he ducked in through the makeshift door.

The first thing that struck him, was the powerful stale smell of old urine, it burned his nostrils as he breathed it in, causing his face to contort. The odor reminded him of the bums he had seen about Boston and the room, once obviously a receptionist's foyer was now a trashed out mess and likely a home to one of the bums.

The empty and aging beer cans and the partially broken liquor bottles littering the floor suggested this as well and there was even a disgusting shredded sleeping bag in one of the corners. Father John walked over to it, his feet treading over the glass making it crunch in a nasty way that had Will vaguely recalling a dream.

That was the only good thing about his sister's horrible dreams, they faded from his memory just as normal ones did, however this one was fresher and with a jolt, Will realized the sound was similar to the crunching of his bones when that demon had chewed off his fingers. He couldn't remember if he had dreamed that last night or the night before, but it didn't really matter to his stomach, which felt suddenly queasy.

Father John had moved away from the sleeping bag and pulled on the main doors, he whispered, "These are locked, try that one." He pointed to a door on far left of the room, nearer to Will.

"Sure." Will's own feet continued to make the crunching sound as went to the door. He tried not to think about his dream, but then the image of a boy tied to a box came to him. His queasy stomach turned a loop and that was far more difficult to ignore.

He concentrated on the door instead.

Covered in many layers of spray paint, it was unexceptional, save for an odd little peephole located at chest height. Bending down, he looked into it but the room beyond seemed black as jet. He gave the door a try, it was blocked from the other side and budged only a few inches.

As he started to turn back to the priest to tell him that they would have to find a different way in, he saw a little placard. It too was covered over in paint and was completely unreadable, but when he ran his fingers over it, he felt the word, Stairs.

"Over here," he called over to the priest and then bent his shoulder to the door and shoved hard. It began moving with difficulty, but when Father John also added his weight, it moved far enough to allow them to enter.

Will went first.

The door opened onto a wide cement landing with stairs going off in both directions. Just as the peephole had suggested the stair well was blacker than night, with the only light coming in from the gloomy reception area. Will reached out and felt what was blocking the door; a great jumbled mass of office furniture had been piled as high as his shoulder.

"Look out," Father John cautioned from the narrow space in the doorway. With no other choice, Will took a few steps up the stairs and the little priest slipped in. "What is all this? Oh, furniture." He felt the mound. "I think we can get around, over here."

"Where's over here? I can't see you," Will said, starting toward the pile only to misjudge it, he barked his shin and the pain shot through the bone exquisitely. He wished he had thought to bring a flashlight and used the next best thing.

He pulled back the sleeve of his coat and the orange glow of his watch seemed very bright, much brighter than usual, 12:19.

Relief and excitement filled his chest; he had somehow averted the first death. His initial thought was that his forced vision had cancelled something out, but he didn't know for sure. He wondered about the next two deaths, but when he tried to recall the feeling that they had given him, he saw the boy tied over the box instead.

Will had to shake his head hard to clear the vision, which wobbled him slightly and the darkness moved oddly around him, making him think of the ocean at night.

"Are you coming?" Father John asked nervously from the other side of the pile. Will bent to the task and found it relatively easy. The orange glow from his watch was no help at all, but feeling his way wasn't as hard as he thought it would be, and in a few seconds, he had cleared the pile.

Father John had moved down a few steps to wait for him. "I doubt your sister took two hostages this way."

Will could hear the man's voice retreating down the stairs and he hurried to catch up, only to run into him in the dark.

"Sorry about that."

"You are forgiven, Will," the priest said jokingly and went down.

Light flashed.

It was a bright white, a bolt of lightning, a strobe light...hot and fast and there was Father John in silhouette. The roar of a gun, more like an explosion, echoed hugely bouncing off the walls of the cement stair well. The noise ran through Will's skin and penetrated deep into his being, deep into his soul.

He hadn't averted the first death after all.

Father John collapsed onto him, knocking Will back onto the stairs. The priest's hands were out stretched and by a quirk of fate, the man's right hand found Will's and the gun, invisible in the blackness, slipped into his own, as if it belonged there.

Bafflement flooded through him and his mind struggled to realize what had just happened. He was past the time! He had to be. Reaching across the lifeless body of the priest, Will pulled back the sleeve of his coat with his trigger finger, 12:19… a second later, 12:20.

The vision matched reality, exactly.

He realized then that the gun was cold against his skin, it hadn't been fired, and that meant only one thing. He wasn't alone in the stairwell.

Chapter 16

Beneath the Factory

Will was not alone. That thought sent a chill through him and he reacted without thinking, bringing the gun across his body, he fired three quick shots down the stairwell. Will paused listening, his eyes wide in the absolute blackness, clutching Father John's body closer to him, making him a human shield.

The shots had sent a knife-like pain stabbing through both ears, but he was still able to hear the sound of metal moving on the stairs. His breathing, quick shallow breaths, stopped cold at the sound. However, his mind quickly reclassified the sound not only as friendly, but merry as well.

One of the brass cartridge casings ejected from his gun, danced and skipped about, making its way down the stairs. It seemed to go all the way to the bottom, taking its sweet jubilant time and Will listened, all the while holding his breath.

Once it stopped it, Will let out the pent up air, slow and quiet. He sat there straining to hear the least movement, but none came and after a few minutes he felt his arm growing heavy. It had remained outstretched, pointing the gun, but now he laid it on top of Father John's chest and it was then, he felt the blood. The priest's chest was drenched with it.

He pulled his hands back and a second later he heard his first sound since the dancing bullet casing; it was far off, down below in one of the sub levels, a scream of intense pain wailed up out of the blackness. Will pictured his sister tearing out Father Alba's eyes—it got him moving.

With the gun held out at arm's length, ready to blaze away at the slightest noise, he slid out from beneath the body Father Santos. Keeping to the wall, he took a step down and felt something under his foot. Reaching down he found a heavy length of cord running across the stair. He followed it until it came to what felt to be an eyebolt drilled into the wall.

Remembering the peephole in the door at the top of the stairs, he realized that Father John must have set off some sort of trip-wire trap. For a second a touch of relief flared within him, but then the feeling died in the dark as sweat broke out down his back.

There could be any number and type of traps hidden in the darkened stairwell—steel-toothed bear traps, heavy bladed pendulums, thin-wired garrotes...

Will nearly froze in place. His only solace was the knowledge that Talitha hadn't set the traps. If she had he would've turned around right there knowing the futility of trying to make his way in the dark. This was the handiwork of...Luke. The name Jim had mentioned took a moment to squirrel out of his memory. It had to fight its way past his fear and the lurking vision of the dead boy.

The vision wanted to come back and Will hissed out, "Stop it!"

He had no time for visions—two more would die.

Moving in a slow shuffle and keeping away from the center of the stairs, Will followed the cord down and at the first landing, he accidently kicked something wooden. Feeling it, his fears were confirmed. It was a chair and on it pointed up the stairs was a rifle. String ran from the trigger and threaded through another eyebolt drilled into the wall behind it.

In the complete blackness there was no way anyone could've avoided the trap and it was happenstance only that saved Will. Yet would it save him a second time? Were there more traps ahead? He shivered in the dark and cautiously stepped around the gun.

Now his fear grew. What was out there? What new death did the dark hold? His shivering picked up in pace as his imagination ran wild and at the edge of the landing his shuffling steps stopped cold. He felt like he was standing in front of a great yawning abyss and he pictured a new trap. Perhaps there were no stairs in front of him, or maybe just one or two and then…nothing but a long fall.

Until his right shoulder and the side of his head hit the wall, he didn't know he was dizzy. In the dark there was no up or down and he let out a little yelp when he collided with the wall. But now that he had a hold of it, he could feel his head swimming and the wall felt like it was tilting back and forth.

He put his hands out and laid his cheek upon its invisible surface, breathing loudly. As long as his left hand roved up and down the side of the wall he felt better, it gave him context and placed him in the world and not…in the void. Will rarely dreamed of the void itself, but when he did, it was like this; at once eternal and infinite but also close, as if he were deep underground trapped in a lightless, airless casket.

Another scream came out of the darkness, a long horrible wail that went up and down in the scale of misery. He pictured Father Alba again and realized with a start the priest was probably now in this sightless world as well. Not as a frightened timid visitor like Will who was nothing but a guest in the dangerous world of the blind, Father Alba was a permanent resident.

"The future's not set," Will murmured, lying to himself and to the blackness.

The words didn't echo as he thought they should and the darkness squeezed more closely around him, but only for a moment. Desperation gave him impetus to reach out with both hands and he felt the wall on one side and the railing on the other. He slid his foot out feeling the stair below him cautiously, but he didn't step down.

Instead, looking to bypass the obvious, he mounted the railing and like an overgrown boy, he slid down. After a few seconds, he could feel his too large butt cheek slide off the railing and he landed, crouching as low as possible, but there was no gunfire. Giving up on the railing, he slid down the stairs on his belly, trying to feel in front of him with one hand while the other acted as a brake.

He gained the next landing, which turned out to be the first sub floor and again there was a pile of furniture in front of the door. It didn't stop him. Will knew he had to go lower but he felt a burning need to see light and began pushing the pile aside frantically. Once the door had the slightest amount of room, he pulled it open and slipped through.

After the absolute darkness of the stair well, the factory was surprisingly and reassuringly bright and he stood breathing the light in with great heavy gasps. He saw that the building had been constructed along the lines of a long rectangular atrium with the interior of it open from the skylights high above, all the way down to the lowest basement, two floors below him. The derelict factory was in a shambles and from where Will stood, he could see over turned workstations, broken desks, and light fixtures dangling by thin wires.

Rusting machines, looking asleep but still dangerous, sat haphazardly about and pipes of all sizes wove in and around them on their way to who knows where.

Will went to the railing overlooking the atrium and peered down into the lower levels, hoping to catch sight of Talitha. However, the light from above seemed to lack the power to penetrate the depressing gloom below him and everything down there appeared vague and shadowy.

Just as he turned away from the rail he heard another cry, different from the others, in that it was muffled and less urgent. Will dashed back to the rail, but still there was nothing to be seen and he began to feel a frantic desperation to get down to the lower levels, however that feeling butted directly against his dread of the possibility of traps in the blackened stairwell.

Across from him, he spied an elevator and had taken a few steps toward it before his brain kicked into gear. There was no way it would be operational and if it were…he pictured it plummeting down.

This left him with the unappealing choice of climbing down the pipes that ran up the sides of the atrium. Seeing a small set that looked as if they could hold his weight, he jogged over and was pleasantly surprised to find a ladder nestled in them and after giving it a cautious shake, he stuck the gun deep into the waistband of his jeans and swung his legs over the rail.

He made his decent as quietly as possible, pausing every few rungs to listen and to wipe the sweat from his palms. With each successive rung down, the gloom settled on and around him more firmly, but that was only part of the reason that he began to feel a terrible anxiety. There was something else. Something that he knew lurked down in the depths of the factory.

The bodies of dead children.

Decomposing horrible bodies. The stench was outlandish, second only to the smell that had radiated from the crate beneath the church, but for Will this was worse. The smell went hand in hand with the vision of the boy tied to the box and the image of it kept blossoming up, ghastly and hideous.

Will's hands began to sweat freely, and he now added a fear of falling to his anxiety, but since he also felt terribly exposed out in the open like that, he quickened his pace, and was down a few seconds later, the gun yanked from his jeans and pointing outwards.

Down there the smell intensified and his stomach threatened to explode. He fought the urge to dry heave with every ounce of concentration he could muster and his breathing came in hard gasps. If he went down to his knees gagging, Talitha could be on him before he knew it and he'd be death number two for the day.

Somehow that thought calmed his breathing and his stomach relaxed as well, giving him a chance to focus on the rooms around him. Unlike the areas above, the basement was far from open; there were more walls and doors for one thing. But it was the dark and the smell coating him with indecent filth that lent the level an oppressive constrictiveness.

The basement seemed to form a grid. Long pipe-filled hallways intersected each other like avenues in a city and Will was at a loss for which way to go. On a whim, he started toward the front of the building, but hadn't gone far when he heard a fast stomping or perhaps a drumming of someone's feet against a wood board.

Turning, he advanced quickly in the direction of the sound, his arms out stiffly, his hands gripping the gun hard. The thumping ceased and Will slowed down, moving with caution, but not enough caution. His foot came down on a piece of glass making an audible crunching sound and he froze in place. But then the thumping came again with more urgency, it came from a room maybe twenty feet from him.

Despite the near overwhelming dread that ran through his bowels, he also felt silly when he jumped into the room with the gun outstretched, like a cop from a bad TV show. What the room held for him made that silly feeling depart along with all the feeling in his hands and feet.

This was the room from his vision.

But it was far worse in person. The gruesome details were fresher, alive with the richness of the aroma of death. In a cleared space in the center of the room, the boy knelt over what eternally would be his box. This Will had seen, but there were other things, he hadn't.

For instance, he now saw that the box was made from wood and that it was blackened where the boy's blood had run down it. The ropes binding him there looked to have been knotted by an experienced sailor, one with cruel intentions and they cut deep into the remains of his flesh. The gaping maggot filled remains of the boy's anus writhed with the undulations of the horrible creatures, but there was something else he hadn't seen before, something inside the boy…Will gagged and turned away.

What Will saw, he absorbed in a blink of an eye, but even that was too much for him and he felt shocked to depths of his soul and his mind reeled.

The rest of the room was lit by the indirect gloom from the hallway behind him and he now saw that the boy knelt in the middle of a symbol painted in blood, it was a five pointed star with two circles running along the outside of it. Strange lettering spelled words within the circle; they were of no earthly language. He knew it was a hell language.

More symbols, black blood again, adorned the walls even as they had in the room beneath the church, and just as he had seen in the pits at Rek, where the great demon dwelled. The memory of those dungeons came and went, leaving him stunned and sick. He had seen this room before, not just in a vision, but in his dreams as well.

For Will, everything about the room was an illusion of hell.

His mind revolted and threatened to shut down completely at the sight. He turned back to the door wanting to leave, picturing himself out in the rain, but it was then a small movement caught his eye, Luke lay upon the ground, trussed up in the torn remains of Father Alba's stole. He was wriggling like mad, trying to escape and had butted up against the cinder blocks that made up the walls, his feet scraped at the cement of the floor and for a second he reminded Will of an inch worm.

Will was slow to realize that there was nothing wood nearby that Luke could have been kicking. The sound had to have been made by someone else.

From his right came a blur of motion followed by an amazing shrieking pain. His arms had been outstretched, holding the gun away from his body, and Talitha, lurking just behind the open door, had leapt out with a flashing front kick that struck him above the elbow. Two inches lower down and his elbow would have swung both ways. As it was his arm from the point of the blow down went instantly numb.

Helplessly, he watched as the gun tumbled from his deadened fingers, landing just in front of Talitha. She was so close to it that he feared she would get to it first, but she wasn't after the gun. Even as he bent down to retrieve it, she leaned her body to the left, and her right leg swung in a hard fast arc, a roundhouse kick that would've taken his head off if he hadn't seen it coming.

Even though he knew where it would land, it wasn't as helpful as one would think. She was too fast to avoid the blow completely and it struck him just on the top of his forehead, snapping his neck back and sending him reeling into the wall behind him—it was the only thing that kept him upright.

His head swam momentarily and he had to spread his hands on the wall to keep from sagging to the ground. Death surely awaited him if he ever went down. Talitha danced to her right, inches from the gun, swinging her head back and forth. Will suddenly realized that she could see, perhaps not well but enough.

He took an intentionally loud step to his right, trying to draw her away from the gun and nearly lost his testicles in the process. She heard the movement and sent a second roundhouse, this time high up at his face, but he saw it coming and ducked away, however that had been a feint and just as her right foot landed, she flashed in toward him with another snap kick. She held it back till the last moment giving herself a choice of targets and ruining any chance Will would have to stop it with his foresight.

He relied instead on his knowledge of his sister; she would go for the balls. They weren't the easy target most women assumed them to be and Will was able to turn just enough to take the blow on his thigh instead. That also hurt.

"Almost," she said. Smiling and flush with the action, she was pretty in the dim light. Will didn't say anything, the muscles in the top of his leg had knotted instantly by the blow, and he rubbed at them in furious silence.

"I'm honestly surprised that you got here as quick as you did," she said, moving to keep him close. "You spoiled my fun with the priest you know. You made me cut it short with all of your ruckus. So, who were you shooting at? A pigeon scare you?"

He nearly answered and the memory of Father John's lifeless body laying over him almost made him miss the snapshot of the future. A deft sidekick aimed square at his midsection. Anyone else would've had their ribs stove in, but Will dodged adroitly, still moving to his right.

"You're getting pretty quick," she complimented. "But you didn't answer my question. I can smell the blood from that yapping priest on you; was it a ricochet, or did you just get tired of him running his mouth?"

He thought again of the lifeless body of Father John and with a pang of regret, he realized he had just left him there without saying a prayer or even arranging the body. He'd been too wrapped up in his fear of traps.

With a sigh, he answered, "A trap got him." The door was just behind him and as Talitha made another feint, he stepped back through it.

She advanced on him, but paused in the doorway, her face screwed up in puzzlement. "How did the bullet miss you…oh my God. You filthy coward! You let that little priest go in front of you."

Talitha was right in a manner of speaking, but Will had been more afraid of killing than in being killed—still the acid of her accusation burned him.

Will kept backing into the hallway and she followed, looking expectant. "Are you giving me the silent treatment? If so, you got the wrong gal, it wasn't my gun, I just left…"

He saw it coming.

In mid sentence she let fly with a heavy left hook and he stepped back again—the speeding fist literally whistling by his face. He saw the next fist coming and the two that followed, but they flew so fast, one after the other that seeing the future became practically useless. After the fourth swing missed, he saw the fifth coming and knew he was out of position to dodge it and too slow to stop it.

It came at him hard and fast—the fist seemed to grow to huge proportions, he tried to step back, to lessen the effect it would have, but his foot caught on a pipe running across the floor and he fell over it. Talitha's fist just clipped him on the jaw and he went sprawling head over heels.

He landed hard on a thick clay pipe, hitting in the center of his back, knocking the wind from him. She advanced to finish him off, but her inability to see slowed her down. She wore a puzzled expression and swung her arms about in front of her, obviously not seeing him in the dim light of the surrounding pipes.

Taking advantage of her predicament, Will scurried like a rat under the larger pipes thinking to flank her and make a run for the gun, but she heard him and dodged to the side, somehow cornering him. Looking back, he saw a maze of piping that he couldn't climb over or under.

Now his only chance for the gun was a desperate dash past her. He feinted to the left and then leapt high over the pipes on the ground, it was a quick move for him, but she was so fast. Talitha caught a hold of his coat in mid-air and reeled him in with it.

Panic seized him.

It was the combination of her total maliciousness and the fact that his coat had become too constraining. This had never happened to him before, but he had been feeling an undercurrent of claustrophobia since entering the room beneath the church and now when the coat stretched taught around him, the sudden constriction caused him to explode in a bizarre panic.

He didn't struggle so much against her, than against his coat. Will tore at the zipper, while his shoulders jerked and twisted violently—and then he was free. He stumbled backwards and then ran blindly down the hall still very close to panicking.

Though he raced as fast as he could, she kept pace, dogging his footsteps, her feet softly landing on the cement of the hallway. It was as if she were out for a jog; she even had a small but very nasty smile on her lips as she loped along with indecent ease.

With the knowledge that she could outrun him, he dashed into the first room that he came to, slamming the door behind him. With the door shut, the room was black like the stairwell had been and he had to scramble around for the lock blindly.

His hands wove up and down until he realized with dread: there was no lock. Talitha threw herself against the door and Will dug his feet in, pushing back as hard as he could but it in vain and he slowly slid inwards.

"Aw man!" she grumbled unexpectedly from just on the other side of the door. "Right when it was play time. Will, it looks like we're going to have to get this over with quicker than I wanted. I just heard someone knocking into things upstairs, probably that big oaf, Jim."

She gave another hard shove and now the door was open a good foot and a half. He shoved back hard, hoping that help was on the way, but Talitha had only been toying with him before and now she pushed back with greater strength. Again, he slid inward and as he did the room became lit by the dim light of the hallway and the slow lighting revealed a new horror.

A boy tied to a box.

It was a different boy, this one had been here much longer, and the blackened flesh, what was left of it, hung from its bones that peeked out from the remains of the child cadaver. It was covered with a constantly shifting black haze of flies that buzzed loudly. That alone was too much for Will and he turned away with a moan coming from the back of his throat.

It was then that he saw Father Alba.

Near a long wooden table, the man was stretched out on the floor, his arms flung wide, unmoving. His face was a Halloween mask of horror. Where his eyes should have been there were two gaping holes seemingly large enough for Will to put his fists into. The priest looked to be crying—not with tears, but with blood and gore, which dripped thickly from the wounds.

The sight of it caused something to snap in Will. His fear of his sister forever vanished in that instant and in its place he felt a cold hatred, the malice of which sent a surge of power through his limbs. He felt that he could've held the door shut against her if he wished, but he no longer looked to hide.

He rolled away from the door, and came to his feet facing her. Talitha, surprised at Will's action didn't charge into the room; she was cunning and suspected others to be as well. Instead, she stood turning her head at odd angles to catch a glimpse of him.

"Whatcha doing, Will? Finally grown a pair, have you?"

"Yeah, I'm done running."

Her head swiveled in his direction, orienting on the sound of his voice and with a smile she stepped full into the room. "You've been a bad boy, Will. Ruining my fun, letting me get shot, all because…"

He intruded on her soliloquy which he knew from experience would be long and self-serving, "Cut the crap!"

"That's not nice," she pouted prettily in a girlish manner, something that might have touched his heart before, perhaps easing his anger, but now Will's heart was an icy stone in his chest.

"I don't care about being nice. All I care about is hurting you." He meant it.

"Whoa! Big talk. Have your balls finally dropped? Are you finally going to start acting like a man, after being such a disappointment to dad?"

"Enough Talk! Come on!" Will yelled angrily as his body geared up for the fight, adrenaline pumping into his system—he felt strong.

"Just one thing. Do you think you can beat me because I'm blind?"

That was a largest part of it, but there was no reason to admit it. "All these years, I've been holding back. That's done with."

She seemed shocked, "Are you planning on killing me?"

"Yes," his voice spoke the truth and the word came out hard.

Talitha gave him a giggle. "Where's the love? I'd never kill you. Lisa and your little baby girl, yes, but not you. I'm thinking quadriplegic; you know to keep you from running away. So you can keep doing me that little favor you do, dreaming my dreams."

"That's not happening." Her words were a goad, burning him up, turning him mean, he liked it.

"Because I can't see very well? Dear brother…you keep forgetting that I'm smarter than you, much smarter." Her teeth were a dazzling white and like the Cheshire cat, they were the last thing he saw as she shut the door, drowning his world in utter blackness.

He was now as blind as she was.

Chapter 17

To the Death

The plunge into sudden blackness froze Will in place, but for only an instant—then he knew he was about to be struck, yet it was only a vague warning. In the absolute darkness, his vision was practically useless and her first blow sank deep into his stomach, knocking the wind from him in a great, "Oof!"

His only advantage was knowing his sister; with Jim on the way she'd attack without mercy or pause and he threw himself backwards feeling the air just in front of his face roil in disturbance as a kick or a punch swished through it. He landed on his back, yet didn't remain there for more than half a second—rolling to his left he came up against something hard that stopped his momentum and in a flash changed course rolling back to the right.

The odd sounds coming from just below Talitha caused her to misjudge her next strike and there was a loud crack next his head. He wasted no time thinking or caring what she'd just hit and instead rolled faster, log like, trying to get clear of her. A second later, his face hit something hard and tacky.

It was the box the boy was tied to.

A great disease filled buzz erupted all about him as an untold number of flies took flight. The air seemed filled with them and one struck his lower lip, he had to suppress a sudden need to vomit, he scrambled up and away, only to know he was about to be hit again by Talitha. He didn't know from what direction, he just knew his face was about to feel tremendous pain and he dodged left, hoping to avoid the invisible attack. However, he guessed wrong on the direction and a clumsy, club like punch struck him on the side of the neck.

It jarred him and sent him spinning away from the box and further into the nothingness of the dark and he realized then, he was completely lost. Will had no idea where the door was, or where Father Alba lay, or even where the boy knelt, but worst of all he had no idea where his sister was.

The darkness was all-encompassing and to him she was everywhere and nowhere. While he huffed and puffed still working to regain his breath from the first blow, she was absolutely silent. He could feel her though. Talitha was out there orienting on his labored breathing, trying to judge his exact position. Will lunged blindly to his left, arms outstretched in a spastic attempt to snare her like a fish in a net, but he came up empty and he paused, listening.

To the right he heard her giggled and it turned his hatred to rage, which sent him flying in that direction, but he grabbed only empty black air. He stopped once more and listened, a foolish mistake.

Again, he knew a strike was coming, and again he guessed wrong where it was coming from. Pain exploded in the large muscle of his thigh—she had landed a heavy kick and the muscle seized up immediately. He tried to jump back as before, but she knew his moves now and jumped with him, striking out in a series of blazing fast punches, hitting him on his face and neck and stomach. Her accuracy for a blind girl in the dark was astounding.

Pain seemed to erupt spontaneously all over his body but it was over in seconds and he didn't know he was falling until he hit something heavy on the way to the floor. It was the table he had seen earlier and acting on instinct, he tried to crawl under it, only he moved tortoise like, slowly dragging himself forward and it was nothing for Talitha to find him. And like a tortoise, she flipped him over, exposing his vulnerable area.

He felt her land on his chest, straddling him and he lashed out with a punch that hit something soft and yielding. It had been weak, terribly impotent and had no effect on her at all. Talitha began to punish him then. Punches rained down on him out of the black sky, hitting him everywhere, making him grunt with the force of the blows, but she was holding back, wanting his to remain conscious, wanting him to feel the pain.

She got her wish, but only to a point, then his arms sagged down and he no longer attempted to protect himself. The punches landing now felt distant as if they were happening to someone else. Talitha must have realized he was near to blacking out and she was up off of him then.

For a few seconds he couldn't tell if he was awake or in a deep sleep and just laid there uncaring where his sister had gone to. Suddenly small hands gripped him and he felt himself lifted off the floor. Talitha had him high over her head, and her strength was astonishing, she brought him down fast, slamming him onto the wood table. It collapsed under him, practically disintegrating and he went through it to the floor.

It didn't hurt at all, but the movement up and then slamming back down had brought him around from his near stupor. His head cleared somewhat and he felt her grip his feet and pull him from the mess of the destroyed table. Struggling against her, his hand found purchase on a chunk of wood, the leg of the table, he thought.

Turning slightly he meant to attack her with it, but she was invisible in the darkness. Near or far, he had no idea and he hesitated with the make shift club pulled back waiting to strike. He knew he would have one shot but now indecision was even taking that from him.

"How you feeling? How's the back? Can you still feel your…?" she began.

Just as she had done, he oriented on her voice and he swung the table leg hard at it. There was a thud and the leg jarred uncomfortably in his hands, sending splinters into his palms, but these went ignored. He swung a second time and again hit something however, it was moving and there was less force transferred to his hands.

From a sitting position, his next blow whistled through the air, hitting nothing and he then scrambled up, swinging the leg back and forth, but still not finding a target. He knew where the table was and guessed a direction in which the door stood. Swinging the table leg in short vicious arcs, he went in that direction and felt the leg hit something unexpectedly.

It grunted.

Talitha! He attacked with more strength, but she seemed to evaporate and his club swung in vain. A moment later, he struck the wall. The club flew from his hands, which had gone instantly numb with the force of the blow.

There was no point even trying to find the club in the black. Instead, he weaved his hands over the wall, searching with a frantic speed for the door and in seconds, his questing hands found the frame and he had the door open in a snap.

The light, which had been dim before, dazzled him and he spun about. Talitha was there. Squatting in an odd position a few feet away and Will saw that at least one of his swings had done some damage, her head was bleeding profusely down the right side and the shoulder of her dress was already soaked.

She glared up at him, evil and hating, seeming to be little more than the small demon she so desperately wanted to be and the sight of her put a fire under his hatred. The club lay closer to him and he dashed forward and grabbed it, but she barely moved, only swinging to the side to face him again.

Her squatting position made him wary, fearful of the fact that she could lash out like a coiled snake and with this in mind, he juked one way and then danced back the other and swung the club. Her vision had improved; he guessed by the way she blocked the blow from the club with an out stretched arm. It was a solid blow to her left forearm, but she did little more than grit her teeth. He repeated the maneuver and with the same results only this time she grunted from pain and anger.

Her squatting seemed strange and limiting and he took full advantage of it, he next dashed halfway around her before striking, she spun in a tight circle and again blocked with the same arm, her left, but there would be no more blocks coming from it. It dangled useless now, very likely broken. He kept up the attack swinging hard for her face and now she could only throw herself back onto the floor to avoid the blow and Will now saw why she hadn't done more.

One of his strikes in the dark had been lucky, her right knee looked turned around and swollen. There was a pause as his eyes took in the sight of her mangled knee and she put up her right hand, and pleaded, "Ok! You win. Don't hurt me."

At that moment, his hatred was at its greatest and it was easy to ignore her words, he took the table leg as if it were a baseball bat in both hands and gripped it tight preparing to finish her quickly, however pain shot from his left hand. Looking down at it, a jolt of shock went through him.

Two fingers on that hand stuck out sideways looking grotesque; they had been dislocated defending himself in the dark. The sight of it made his stomach queasy and he paused for a moment, unable to take his eyes from the deformity.

"I said you win, Will." Her words were still pleading, sounding desperate and now her evil glare was gone. She was his sister again hurt and bleeding, or so she would have him believe, however he could see the cruelty lurking beneath. It was something she could no longer hide and it made his hatred that much easier to bring out.

He focused on that hatred and glared down at her, needing to be furious to do what he had to do—this was going to end here and now.

"What? Are you still giving me the silent treatment?" She paused concentrating. "Oh, I understand now. You want to kill me, is that it? I can't believe it. You would kill your own sister?"

"You're not my sister," he said, contempt forming the words, making them hard. "You're Ba'al Fie-ere, remember?"

Unbelievably she smiled and lay back tucking her good right hand under her head. She seemed to be relaxing, enjoying the moment. "I am Ba'al Fie-ere. Thanks Will. It's so good to hear you saying my name."

"Bitch! How's that for a name?" Without waiting for an answer, he jumped at her, swinging the table leg at her face. Though injured she was strong and quick and spun about kicking at his knee, intending to maim him just as she was, however, he saw it coming and dodged it.

Still relaxing, she laughed softly, "Sorry Will. It's going to be harder than you thought to bludgeon me to death, but I like the idea and not only that, I like the enthusiasm you have."

Her eyes lit up suddenly. "Picture this: You, waking up in a cold sweat and you try to wipe it off frantically, because in your mind the sweat is blood. And this goes on night after night. You no longer dream my terrible dreams once a week, but every single night! Every night you kill your sweet innocent sister, breaking her bones, deforming her pretty little face, but somehow she lives longer, far longer that you could believe. And it takes swing after swing before she stops moving and even longer, until she stops crying and still you hammer away, because you are afraid! You keep going because she just might get up and take her revenge!"

Talitha paused and sighed in obscene happiness at the image she had conjured. Will stood aghast and then he became angry, but it was an impotent anger, because he feared that part of what she'd said would be true.

She slapped the cement with impatience. "Ok, Will start swinging! Hurt me slowly." She waited for only a second before going on, "Let's go! Don't worry, I promise to make it good…I'll scream at every blow…I'll cry real tears, I swear. I'll even beg you to stop, here watch."

Talitha's face lost her evil happiness and Will stared amazed and outraged, as she suddenly looked lost and afraid, in pain. "Will! Stop please, I didn't mean it," the words shrieked out of her as if he had really been hurting her. "No, don't, it hurts! Stop please! Stop…stop." She blubbered quietly, tears running down her face and the performance was so realistic that his arm, the one holding the table leg, slowly lowered.

She might've saved herself right there, but she began to giggle like a little girl, "I wish I could see your face better. Heck, I wish I could see mine. Did I look like Talitha, did I capture her essence?" Her questions seemed sincere, but they were lost on her brother, who attacked her in a fit of rage.

"Will, no it's me Talitha," she screamed in terrific fright as Will swung the club at her leg. He missed and she pushed herself further back, "She's gone! The other Talitha has gone! It's me." She wailed, but he attacked again striking her calf. "Please stop, it's me." Her face was screwed up in pain and fright, something Will found nearly impossible to ignore and he stepped back for a second.

The moment he did, Talitha's smile returned. "Good, that was good. I like the way you don't try to rush things, remember slow pain is good pain."

"Damn it!" he roared with empty defiance.

"I told you it wouldn't be easy." She smiled wickedly. "You have to really want it."

"Yeah, but shooting you won't be hard at all," Will said with a touch of wickedness of his own.

"Damn it," it was her turn to curse. "I was hoping you had forgotten the pistol. Well let's see if you have enough rage left in you, because I gotta say you sound kinda tired."

Tired wasn't the word he would've used, he felt well past exhausted and his head was beginning to throb with what he figured would be a headache to beat all headaches. "I may be tired, but I hate you, and that will be enough."

"But do you hate the real Talitha, your sister. I was just faking back there, but if you use the gun, it'll be on her." He paused not knowing what to say and the delay brought back the evil smile. "There's only one way to find out if you hate me enough to kill her."

Talitha came back then.

Will had seen it happen enough to know it wasn't a fake this time. The provocative smile drained away slowly into puzzlement, however that look lasted less than a second until the electricity of shock lit up her face.

"Will?" It was a whisper. Her eyes shot wide and rolled about in their sockets, but her head was still, unmoving. Her nose however went into overdrive, sniffing quietly, breathing in the horror of the room.

"Will?" This was a little louder.

The fire of Will's hatred was dying slowly in him and he knew if he waited any longer, it would be gone, and he wouldn't be able do what his prudence knew to be the right thing. He took a step toward her and she jumped back afraid of the sudden movement.

"Will, is that you?"

"Yes, stop moving," he growled this through gritted teeth.

"Ok...I can see a little, shapes and shadows...Is Father Alba going to be ok? I can smell his blood and I can smell...lots of blood. Did I do all this? Did I kill all these people?"

He stood behind her trying to work up the hatred again. "You killed Father Alba and in a way...Father John as well."

"Father John?" she asked, whispering the words. "I don't know who he is, where..."

He didn't let her finish, but reached down and grabbed her good arm and began pulling her with savagery, dragging her across the floor.

"What're you doing? What's going on?" Confusion, pain, and fear made up the alarm in her voice. Will kept his face toward the door, afraid to look down and see his sister, knowing his heart would break if he did, knowing the other Talitha would win.

"Will?" she pleaded again when he didn't answer.

"I have to kill you," he said as he hauled her back to the room where some poor boy knelt bound to his eternal box.

Talitha went limp, resigned to her upcoming death. "Ok...I understand...I'm so sorry..."

Feeling each of her words loosen the bolts, holding his anger in place, he asked in a choked voice, "Please don't talk. Just be quiet."

He gained the room and pulled her inside. The gun lay near the decaying body, which he refused to look at, but saw all the same. He couldn't help it. It was the movements of the maggots, they were horrible but hypnotic and his eyes remained on them even as he reached down, fumbling for the gun.

It was a blessing to turn away from the child and with a large shaky breath, he went back to the grim task he had to perform. Talitha hadn't moved, except to sit up, and she stared vacantly at the floor, tears small and noiseless trickled from her eyes and found their way to her chin, leaping off in an attempt to escape the inevitable.

Will, knowing he couldn't shoot her in the face, went around behind her. This was better. Here, the blood of her wounds was visible and there were no familiar sad brown eyes staring up at him, holding him back.

"I'm sorry Talitha," he thumbed the hammer and aimed at the back of her head, but then turned his face away unable to watch.

"Will!" A deep voice rumbled from the doorway, "What're you doing?"

Will kept his face turned away from both of them. "It has to be done!"

"Go away, Jim, please. Don't look at this," Talitha's voice was shrill with embarrassment.

But Jim didn't leave, he advanced on Will, his face set in determination. Will swung the gun in his direction, but Jim ignored it and then ignored Will as well, calmly going to one knee, he put his great arms around Talitha.

Both Will and Talitha were stunned into a moment of silence by this, but Will found his voice, it was a child's petulant whine, "Get away from her, I mean it."

"No, if you kill her, then you kill me," Jim said and his voice was an adult's, it held gravity and significance.

The gun lowered, dropped would be closer to the truth, and Will stood impotent with it dangling against his leg. There was no way he could shoot Jim. In addition, the fire of his hatred burned away leaving behind bitter ash and all that was left in him was a sense of duty; he had a responsibility to protect others from his sister.

The boys she had come to Boston to help were all dead, as was her purpose here. Talitha realized this as well and pushed Jim away with her good arm, saying, "Thank you, Jim. That was sweet, so wonderful of you...but I'm a lost cause. Go back to your orphanage and back to your children, they need you."

Jim leaned away trying to peer into her small pretty face and she held him there with a stiff arm, "Ok, Will. Do it...kill me quick." She meant it.

Will brought the gun up, fully intending to shoot his sister, but when he turned his head away, not wanting to see the blood he would cause, he saw something. Or more closer to the truth he didn't see something. Where Luke had once lain trussed in the knotted stole, there was now only an empty patch of cement.

Chapter 18

The Pewter Cross

When Jim saw the horror of Father Alba's face, he seriously questioned his vow not to hurt Talitha. And when he saw the blood, drying on her hands, the blood that stained her with guilt, the vow went out the window completely.

But then he saw something else, a girl, small and vulnerable and in truth innocent, and he gave up his pretense of anger and moved in to hug her and to protect her and if he had to, die with her.

When she held him back stiffly, he only paused a second, before he moved her arm out of the way and hugged her tight, his face against hers and she didn't fight him but instead began to cry. Her tears were warm and soft, tickling him as they traced the border where their skin met. They were also, in a sad way that broke his heart, wonderful.

He knew her tears were partially because of him, perhaps mostly so. In their long talks, he had the sense that she'd been desperately lonely and he had shown her by his hug that he cared for her. He felt her hug him back hard, clinging, and afraid to give this up, the one true moment of affection she had experienced in years.

Jim waited for the shot to ring out with a strange feeling of contentment. He realized he could die this way and be happy. But no shot came.

"What?" Will asked perplexed.

Jim glanced up at the oddness in the man's voice and saw Will staring at an empty spot on the floor, as if looking for answers from the mute cement. Jim's contentment died right there and not because of a bullet. It was then that he noticed the hideous smell and saw the atrocity tied to the wood box in the center of the room.

"Luke...he was right there," Will muttered and sudden fear overwhelmed the perplexity on his face. He snapped the gun up and swiveled it around the room, searching the dim corners. "Jim, did you see Luke at all when you came in here?"

"No. It was just you and Talitha and...that," he added grimacing at the sight.

"Damn it! Where's Sean? Is he still alive?" Will asked urgently.

"Sean is with Father Alba, but where's Father John?" Even as Jim asked the question, he felt he already knew the answer.

When Sean and he had been trying to find a way into the building, they'd heard the gunshot. It came low and distant, a muffled noise but still unmistakable for what it was. The back entrance to the factory had proved impossible to get through and they were in the process of trying to break into a second story window when the sound of the gun, and the others that followed had nearly sent Sean and him into a panic.

They threw subtlety aside and tore the frame of the window out by hand, uncaring of the noise. They were frantic to get inside, but both men were so large that each took turns getting stuck going through the small opening and it was minutes before they could get in. They were slowed even more when they tried to race into the stairwell.

It was blocked with furniture just as Will's had been and the two men had to charge repeatedly at the door to get it wide enough to allow Sean to fit through the opening. This slowed them down, but it also saved Jim's life. The great force they sent into the door had knocked a chair loose from the pile of furniture and this had bounced down the stairs, hopping miraculously over the trip cord and into the gun, disturbing the trap that had been set for them.

When Jim, panting and sweating, came upon it minutes later, his intestines turned to water. Even in the unrelenting dark, there was no mistaking the gun and the purpose of the string and the pulleys. Jim's frenzied desire to find Luke and help Father Alba vanished almost completely and the two men were nearly paralyzed into inaction by the fear of another trap.

They had moved snail-like down the stairs and then with painful slowness had gone from room to room in the basement. Even when they heard the unmistakable sounds of fighting, they couldn't force themselves along any faster.

That Will had won the fight with his sister wasn't immediately obvious. His face was a terrific wreck and he stood bleeding gently, the red drops a quiet rhythmic lip...lip...lip, on the floor. Will didn't answer the question, but Jim could tell that Father John was dead by the man's expression.

"Was it one of the traps," he asked Will as gently as he could.

Will nodded vaguely, however he contradicted the movement, saying in a hollow voice, "No. I killed him...my cowardice killed him." He gave his head a short violent shake, spraying Jim with blood, and went to the door. "Sean! Luke is loose somewhere in the building! Come on down here." His voice was rough as sand paper.

"We should go to him," Jim said getting up. "He's with Father Alba, he can't leave him alone." He then bent and with ease, lifted Talitha up into his arms. She grunted in pain and it was then that he noticed her less obvious injuries, her left arm hung limp and sported spectacular vibrant purple bruising, her right knee, exposed by his lifting was swollen to twice the size of the left. She was in bad shape, but her brother was worse.

However, he didn't seem to notice. Not even the flap of skin hanging over his left eye, it bled like rain onto the shoulder of his shirt, which at one time had been tan, but now was a red brown. Will looked down his now bent and bleeding nose at Jim.

"Father Alba can wait, we need to find Luke."

"No. Father Alba needs to get to a hospital, right away," Jim answered.

Will blinked, confused. "What? Wait...is he still alive? How?"

"I don't know, but he is. Come on." Jim led the way carrying Talitha, who looked shell-shocked by everything that had gone on around her.

In seconds, they were in the room with the priest and the other horrible child corpse. Sean Shay knelt behind Father Alba, cradling his head on his fat thighs. "His eyes...are gone. They're just gone." His tremendous belly jiggled with his rapid breathing and the priests head bounce along keeping time.

Will knelt down and peered into the gaping holes. He reached out both hands to touch the wounds, only to stop slightly confused, and he stared for just a second at the two dislocated fingers on his left hand. The pinky and ring fingers were bent back and to the side. The sight of it bothered Jim, but when the man calmly yanked the fingers back into position, with grisly popping sounds, Jim eyes fairly bugged out of their sockets and he felt his stomach roll queasily.

Will massaged his fingers absently for a moment, before again reaching out for the priest.

"How do I look?" Father Alba asked unexpectedly.

Everyone jumped, startled. Without eyes, Jim couldn't tell that the man had been awake and just assumed him to be unconscious.

"Oh hey, Father...you look, well..." Will trailed off into silence, inspecting the wounds closer. Jim could see that the left eye looked the worse of the two; there the eyelid and eyebrow had been torn off completely. On the right side at least, the skin still hung there like an old curtain.

"Sean, prop him up higher, we don't want the blood to drain back," Will commanded and then to the priest said, "It's not so good, Father. Your eyes are gone and the skin is going to take some work to look...more normal. I'm sorry, I should..."

The priest interrupted, "It's not your fault, Will. But please tell me you didn't kill your sister."

Jim felt Talitha begin to cry again and he watched as she used her good arm to pull her broken one to her chest and tuck the blood stained fingers into a pocket of her dress, she then hid her right hand as well.

Will's eyes flicked toward his sister before he answered, "No I didn't, but I wanted to...I want to." His voice was matter of fact, cold and seemingly heartless and it pained Jim to hear it.

"Your reaction is normal...human even, but Jesus wants us to be more than that. I forgave your sister, even after she blinded me, Will."

Talitha had begun shaking against Jim's chest and she spoke up in anger, "I don't deserve forgiveness...I deserve to die."

"Remember, Talitha..." the priest began, but was interrupted again.

"Enough! I don't have time for this crap," Will cried angrily and pulled himself up. "I don't have time for your crap, Talitha or yours...uh Father Alba." Will realized too late, that pointing at the man was now useless.

"Will..." Jim was cut off as well.

"Or yours," Will turned angrily to Jim. "We have that God damned freak Luke running around. We have to get Father Alba to a hospital. We have to somehow keep from getting arrested, seeing as we harbored two mass murderers...and we have to do something with...something about..."

"Father John?" Talitha suggested meekly.

"Yeah, Father John. We can't leave him here." Will looked down in concentration and blood trickled into his eyes. He wiped it away, pushing the flap of skin back up onto his forehead absently, as if it was hair that had blown out of place by the wind. "First things first, we get Father Alba to a hospital. Sean help me carry the Father. Jim carry my sister."

He spoke in such a way that nobody second-guessed him. They traversed the building slowly, fearful of every shadow, but the factory was as silent as a tomb. Talitha was able to sniff out two more traps that stood in their way, one a gun trap similar to the ones found in the stairwells and one that they guessed was a pressure sensitive bomb. They gave it a wide berth.

The five of them paused at the body of Father John, while Father Alba gave a short prayer and then they were in the pouring rain a minute later. Luke had made a clean get away—only the old station wagon of Father Alba's sat in the parking lot and they hurried the priest into it.

"He's gone, God damn it!" Will swore when they got into the car.

"That's enough," Father Alba scolded him and then said gently. "Luke is gone and I doubt he's coming back, so you have time to move Father John's body."

"Excuse me Father, but Luke may not be so far out of reach as you might think. Will, here can see the future, maybe we can find out where he's..." Jim began, before Will broke in.

"Are you kidding? I'm done with this. Father John is dead because of me," Will said outraged.

"Will, stop blaming yourself." Jim replied, "Father John is dead because of a...I got confused, was Luke possessed or not?" he asked Talitha and everyone except Father Alba looked at her.

"Who was possessed?" Talitha stared about in puzzlement.

Jim paused for a moment, before deciding to ignore her question, since the explanation would take some time. "Father John was killed by a madman, not by you, Will."

"Either way, I'm not doing it, I won't look. He's the police's problem now," Will responded and stared out the fog-covered window.

"I'll help if I can," Talitha volunteered. "We can go by his job or house and sniff around, maybe we can find some...clues." She blushed oddly, but for what reason Jim didn't know. However, Will seemed to, and looked at his sister a long time; as he did the edges of his anger wilted.

"I guess I'm willing to go with Nancy Drew here, and look around his place," he said and she blushed harder; it was endearing to Jim.

"Will," Father Alba spoke weakly, "I don't feel well...I keep passing out, not that you could tell." He chuckled faintly. "Take this." He struggled to take the heavy pewter cross from his neck and Will helped to take it off of him. "Wear it. Remember God is always with you. Do what you can to stop Luke, please."

The request seemed to cause Will pain, he grimaced. "I will...everything but looking into the future...Father?" There was no answer from the priest and alarm shot into Will's face. "Sean, take him to the emergency room. Make something up...tell them you found him this way outside the church and..."

"Talitha," the blind priest said quietly and they all jumped, startled again.

"Y-yes, Father," she stammered.

"I have forgiven you, now you must forgive yourself. Don't take any sins with you if..." he trailed off and without eyes, his horrific expression didn't change and they were clueless whether he was awake or not.

Seconds passed in silence and then Will barked an order, "Everyone out of the car. Sean go, don't dawdle."

Talitha and Will pulled themselves slowly and painfully from the car, while Jim was just as slow due to his size. In moments they stood in the pouring rain watching the car disappearing into the deluge.

"What do we do now?" Jim had to yell due to the noise of the storm.

It turned out there was much to be done.

They started by going from room to room in an attempt to erase any sign that any of them had ever set foot in the old factory, but they hadn't got far before Jim mentioned in passing about the weird diagrams and symbols painted on the floors around the bodies of the five children.

The three other corpses, they found with ease, using Talitha's sense of smell and the positions and drawing had been identical. A spasm of anxiety rippled across her features, as Jim dutifully described in detail the symbols and drawings. She then demanded a play by play of all their dealings with Luke as well as the other Talitha.

"What's all this for?" Will asked

"I'm not sure, I almost wish the other Talitha were here, she would know."

"Don't say that, it's not funny. Just give me your best guess." Will's mood hadn't improved. He was obviously now feeling the pain of the fight and he frequently rubbed his head gingerly and let out little groans. This was the opposite of his sister, who healed so fast, that she was already limping about unassisted.

"Best guess, it's most likely some way for this Luke person to communicate with creatures in the void."

"Really?" Will walked around the circle studying the markings. "Don't you think a Ouija board would be simpler? I told you that Henny Harris used one, right?"

"You did," she assured him. "However, a Ouija board might be simpler to use, but that may mean it gives a simple message as well. Have you ever seen one? You can get answers to yes or no questions easy enough, but anything more complicated has to be spelled out."

Will nodded, staring down at the symbol without seeing it. "You may be right. Luke knew very personal information, things you'd never find out by asking yes or no questions."

Silence followed this and Jim, who couldn't stop staring at the decomposing corpse of a child who would never throw another baseball or open another Christmas present, said, "Why would he do this to little boys?"

"Do you mean defile them?" Talitha asked.

"Huh?" Defile wasn't in his relatively small vocabulary. "What do you mean?"

"Judging by the smell and their positions...it's obvious these boys were raped." Wearing a look of disgust, she turned and hobbled for the door.

"But why boys at all? You had spoken about virgin girls, not boys," Will said, stopping her at the door. "I want you to stay with us, don't wander about alone." It came out gruffly.

"I'm sorry, but being in the same room with...him, is depressing." She had a haunted look in her eyes, perhaps of a memory she wished she could forget. She sighed wearily. "Boys or girls, does it matter? It's all sad."

"I agree," Will said, "But it may matter to Luke. He went from snatching boys and doing...all this stuff, to then faking a possession and demanding the sword."

Jim felt puzzled at the conversation. "Was he faking it with that spell thing? It seemed so realistic."

"Oh I'm sure he was faking it. When the other Talitha ripped up those papers, it was like a switch was thrown and I could see the guy as he truly was. The other Talitha sure thought so, even from the very beginning, she said boys couldn't be possessed," Will remembered.

"I am tempted to believe the other Talitha," Talitha said. "Women are built structurally to carry another living being inside them. Perhaps this isn't strictly physical, perhaps there is a spiritual component as well."

Will nodded understanding. "That makes sense, but why boys for this? Was he just a whacked out pederast, or was this some sort of messed up ritual?"

Jim, feeling stupid asked, "What's a pederast?"

Will answered, "A gay guy who likes to you know, sleep with young boys."

"That's sick!" Jim was appalled and also slightly nauseous. He walked over to a heavy pipe and sat down. "But...but this Luke asshole, he also uh, defiled Sister Mary."

"Wasn't she old? I mean really old?" Will asked and when Jim nodded, Will went and sat down next to him. "Gross," he exclaimed and Jim nodded again.

Talitha stood turning her head this way and that. "I think we can throw out the pederast theory. My guess he used the boys as energy to power whatever spells or incantations he was using. The old lady? Probably just trying to increase his mystique, make everyone more afraid of him. That or he's just gross."

Will shrugged. "Seems logical. Talitha, what are you doing?"

She had been turning her head about oddly. "My eyesight is coming back. It's like being able to see for the first time, it's interesting."

"Oh," Will sounded disappointed. "How soon till you can see normal again?"

She gave a little shrug. "An hour, maybe two."

Will and Jim shared a look and a worry for the future, the bigger man turned back to Talitha. "So where does any of this leave us?"

"He has an apartment, we should go there," she answered. "If we don't find anything, then I don't know what to do. After all, this is his secret lair. It's unlikely that he has a secret-secret lair, with hidden passages and laboratories filled with bubbling test tubes." The image made Jim smile, and she seemed to sense it and smiled back.

"There could be some clues somewhere in here?" Jim waved his arm indicating the entire factory.

"I'm sorry but his scent is everywhere. If he had a secret diary or more incantations, they could be anywhere, which is one of the reasons why, we have to burn this whole place down."

Chapter 19

The Crush

From the steeple, looking through the canted stained glass windows, Jim saw the black smoke rising from the remains of the Haikes Rubber and Tire Co. And this was despite the rain that came down in steady sheets.

Talitha, freshly showered and looking young and beautiful, watched with him. They shared the same small window, which afforded the best view of a whole lot of nothing: some trees, the tops of buildings, a little smoke, and a lot of rain. But for Jim, the best view was the slender curve of her neck; an artist had created it and he could stare at it forever.

"I'm worried about the rain dousing the fire too soon," she said with a sigh.

He sighed as well, but wasn't worried about the rain at all. Even though the factory had been closed for years, there was enough flammable material to cause quite a bonfire.

"I don't think you need to worry too much, the flames were plenty high."

"No offense Jim, but bigger isn't always better," she replied turning from their window and looking up at him, craning her neck far back to do so. "It's the temperature that's most important. Have you ever read Fahrenheit 451?"

Jim could vaguely recall a book of that title that he hadn't bothered reading in tenth grade English—a class he'd passed regardless. "No, we must've read a different book."

"The title of the book is supposedly the temperature at which paper burns. If you ask any high-school student who has read the book, what temperature does paper burn? They will all tell you 451 degrees," she said this with a knowing smile.

"Is the title of the book wrong?" he asked, thinking it must be.

"Yes and no. It's funny, the author Ray Bradbury, didn't ask a scientist what the right temperature would be, he asked a fireman." Talitha smiled at this, Jim did as well, even though it sounded reasonable to him. "It just so happens that this particular fireman was very knowledgeable and gave him a pretty good answer."

"How could it be pretty good? Either he was right or he wasn't."

"Well that brings me to my worry about the rain," she answered. "451 degrees will auto ignite a certain weight of dry, untreated cellulose based paper, under proper conditions."

Jim's slow stare made her retry.

"What I mean to say is there are lots of variables the fireman didn't take into consideration before answering and some of these same variables are worrying me if Luke hid spells in the factory. For instance, there needs to be a proper amount of oxygen for the paper to burn, if they're in a sealed pipe, discoloration may be all we get. But I'm most worried about the paper."

"You just might be over thinking this. Isn't paper just paper?" Jim asked.

"No. Cellulose based paper, paper coming from wood pulp, can be of varying weights—what you would call thickness. The thicker the paper, the higher the temperature needed to start and sustain a fire. But there are other types of paper, and an incantation especially an old one, might just be written on vellum."

"Is that a special kind of tree?"

She smiled at him, but it wasn't a hurtful smile. It was a cryptic smile. "No, vellum is actually a writing surface created from the skin of mammals. Usually calf skin or sheep, but it could be almost any mammal, including human."

"Gross...that's just so gross." Jim shook his head at the idea. "But knowing this sick freak, I wouldn't put it past him." He looked again at the smoke, it was still thick and heavy, even after three hours. He sighed again and this time it was she that followed suit.

"How's Father Alba?" she asked nonchalantly. They had been up in the steeple for twenty minutes and she had clearly wanted to ask him about his phone call to the hospital the entire time.

He had talked to Father Wheal, a priest from a neighboring parish who'd been kind enough to sit in with Father Alba. Jim told Talitha what he'd been told, "He's going to live, but there's no chance for the eyes, and there will be lot's of scarring."

"It's what I expected," she replied without emotion, but that facade crumbled quickly, and her face broke, close to tears. "What are we going to do?"

He took a peek at her before answering, but it turned from a peek into a stare. He couldn't help it. In truth he didn't know if he could help it or not; he didn't try, he just stared.

Her features seemed at once delicate but strong, the two near opposites meshing to form a noble beauty. But sometimes her features would swing over to the extremes, one moment she might be delicate and sweet; childlike and in need of protection. And the next, the opposite, regal to the point of queenly, haughty, superior and sometimes dangerous.

She was beautiful, but in a way that was unlike any other woman he'd ever known. And he stared. He stared until she turned her large brown doe eyes up to him and then he looked away quickly, pretending to admire the dismal rain covered city.

"What are we going to do? I was going to ask you the same question," he said. It was the truth at least.

"For once, I'm all out of answers."

"Why do I doubt that?" he replied and they matched smile for smile. "Tell me, what would the other Talitha do if she were here?"

She slumped. "Kill someone, I guess."

"No really...well apart from that I mean." There had been too much truth in her statement to try to gloss over it.

The girl sighed again, hugely. "She'd go to his apartment, search it, terrorize his neighbors, torture his friends, and kill their dogs. She's very thorough you know." Putting her back to the window, she worked her left arm back and forth with little twinges of pain showing on her face.

"Getting better?" he asked.

"Yes, unfortunately yes." She looked down at her arm and glared at it for a second. "Have I been fed or watered lately? Did the other Talitha eat anything?"

"Are you hungry? I can make you something," he swallowed hard, wishing he hadn't just said that. His cooking skills were notoriously poor, outside of reheating frozen goods.

"I don't actually get hungry, but I still need to eat. However, I don't like the idea of eating food from an orphanage." She smiled her shy smile, one of his favorites. "It feels too much like stealing."

"Are you picturing all our boys in grubby clothes, eating small bowls of porridge, three meals a day?" he asked.

She laughed heartily. "Yes! I've never been to an orphanage; my only frame of reference is Dickens and Little Orphan Annie."

"You're not the only one. Every time we buy oatmeal at the grocery store, we get dirty looks."

This caused her to laugh again, the second time in just a few moments, it made him feel good inside to make her happy, even for a little bit.

"You know what I'm in the mood for?" she asked with a big sigh. "Ever since I heard I was getting to come with you guys to the city, I've craved pizza."

Jim's stomach rumbled loudly at the thought, but before he could be embarrassed, she reached out and patted his slightly bulging midsection.

"Excuse me, sorry," he said faking embarrassment; he was secretly thrilled by the way she had casually touched him. It wasn't that it was sexual in any way, because it wasn't. It was just that she wasn't repulsed by him, which may seem like a simple thing, but to Jim it was huge. "I always crave pizza. There's a very good neighborhood place that delivers, do you want some?"

Her eyes lit up. "Yes please!" They were a match made in heaven or so he thought.

"Onions, mushrooms, green pepper, sausage, pepperoni, and black olives...oh and spinach if they have any," she said.

So much for the perfect match, his would be strictly meat. "Do you want beer? You can't have pizza without beer."

She suddenly looked back into the rain. "I'm sorry, but I'm not as hungry as I thought. But you can get some for yourself and Will."

Leave it to him to screw up a good thing. "Talitha...I don't need any beer. I'm not an alcoholic or anything."

This brought out a long weary breath from her. "It's not that...I'm just being stupid."

"I honestly don't think that's possible," he said, feeling like he'd somehow walked off the edge of a lovely green lawn only to find himself knee deep in a swamp and now he feared to move in any direction.

He put his hands on her shoulders and gently turned her around. She looked up at him with her most delicate of looks, as if she were as insubstantial as a snowflake that would melt if he were to turn angry.

"I'm sorry. Whatever I did to spoil your mood, I'm sorry." He gave her his friendliest smile even though it was gap toothed and turned his ugly face into a mess of long laugh-lines; it was all he had to work with.

His stomach didn't help the situation. Having heard the word pizza so many times, it was getting impatient and rumbled a loud demand for it.

It brought her around. "Sounds like it's two against one, I guess we're having pizza." He was about to ask if she was sure, but she beat him to it, "Yes, I'm sure. Now go call before I change my mind."

"I'll be right back," he was gone in a jiffy, squeezing his broad shoulders sideways down the narrow stairs of the steeple, heading for the second floor of the management building. There were closer phones in the offices, but just the sight of the office doors nearly killed his hunger and he proceeded to the common room instead.

Walking in, he was quite surprised at the scene. A man Jim had seen, but had never been introduced to, was sewing up the big flap of skin hanging from the top of Will's forehead. This had gone ignored all afternoon.

Jim guessed the man to be a doctor by the precise weaving pattern his hands created as he sutured up the large cut. The needle was curved and tiny, and the thread was not the usual thick black string, but an almost invisible filament.

He leaned in close and saw that Will had already been stitched up in two other areas and the handiwork was impressive. "I'm going to use the phone, if that's ok?" he asked the doctor.

"Sure thing Jim, just don't knock the table," the doctor said, and Jim gave him a closer look at the sound of his own name, but still he was sure they hadn't met.

"I'm getting some pizza, do you two want any?" The doctor didn't look up from his work, but grunted out a no.

"I would. Pepperoni if you don't mind and if Talitha is getting any, get her a whole pie, or she'll eat most of yours. When she gets going, she can be pig," Will said from beneath the dexterous fingers of the doctor.

Jim ordered three pizzas, one for each of them and they arrived shortly after the doctor had finished taping Will's fingers together. A buddy splint, he called it.

They ate in the steeple, something Jim had never done before, but the rest of the church haunted him with memories. At first they were quiet as they ate, concentrating on the food, but the conversation picked up, at least for Jim and Talitha. Will was sullen and barely said anything.

When Jim finished eating, leaving nothing for the squirrels, he checked the time, which set off a small chain reaction. First Will then Talitha checked their watches as well, 6:11 pm.

"More milk?" Jim offered Talitha after she chugged the last of hers. He couldn't help smiling at the faint milk moustache she wore afterwards, it was endearing. She didn't seem to think so and wiped it away on the back of the sleeve of her borrowed habit.

"No thank you," she said a touch coolly, as if he had only offered her the milk so she could sport a new moustache. "Any idea when he'll call?" she asked adjusting for the hundredth time, the overly large black dress that she wore.

"No, in fact he might not call at all. He's still a little mad at you," Will said around a bite of pizza. He was eating very slowly on account of his swollen lips and missing molar on the lower left side of his mouth. With the blood cleaned away from his face, the newly sutured lacerations didn't look so bad, however the bruising and swelling was terrible. Especially obvious was the freshly set broken nose and the two black eyes.

For the moment, Jim was the better looking of the two men. He checked his watch again, 6:12, and felt an undercurrent of the awareness of time, which had started innocently enough when he had been waiting on his pizza. For him, time always seemed to flow in slow motion when a pizza was supposedly on the way, however the feeling remained even when the food arrived. It wasn't nearly as obvious, but when he wasn't actively talking or thinking, he felt anxious about the time.

Right now, they were waiting on a call from Eric Milner, hoping to get the address and key to Luke's apartment. There were a couple of other things they needed the cop's help with as well, the bodies of Sister Mary Agatha and Father John had to be explained and buried. There was also the issue of the body on the mattress in the charnel pit of a room beneath the church and the thing in the box, which no one but the other Talitha had even seen yet.

"He'll call," Jim said with confidence. "He'll make us sweat it out first, but he'll do it." Milner would do it for Sister Mary, not for Jim. She'd been a mother to Milner, something Jim had been endlessly jealous of as a kid.

Will frowned at the statement and then touched his face gently as if the small movement had been painful. "I don't think I can sit around waiting, I'm going to call him again."

This he did, leaving Jim and Talitha staring at each other, waiting for the sound of his footsteps to recede. While he was in their presence it felt like they were being chaperoned and they both struggled to keep from smiling or laughing.

Finally, the sound of a door far off at the end of the chapel could be heard and Jim said, "He's a little too nervous. Do you think he's had another vision?"

She turned slightly in the direction of the window and Jim was able to see her profile perfectly. "I don't know. Sometimes he hangs onto an old vision, worrying over it until it happens and then...what are you staring at?" she asked touching her face self-consciously.

He'd been staring at her small nose. He generally found the human nose, like the penis, funny looking and oddly designed by God, but her nose was perfect, small and slim, exactly proportioned to accent her high cheekbones and to set off her large brown eyes.

She had a beautiful nose. His resembled a medium sized potato.

"Oh...nothing," he turned away putting his hand over his face, hiding the potato. He hadn't realized he'd been staring or more accurately, he knew he was staring, but hadn't realized that he wasn't being discreet about it.

He couldn't help stare at her, she was an addiction. A happy one that he lost himself in voluntarily, or so he figured, self-reflection wasn't his strong suit. He just knew that his emotions were askew. The sadness and grief that he should've been feeling were wispy and weak, ghost like—they were there within his heart, but they lacked urgency. Anger too should've been burning him up inside and when he thought on it, he could feel the fire of it grow, but it would puff out of existence when he looked on Talitha.

These emotions, the ones he thought of as correct for the situation; sadness, anger, hatred, grief, were eclipsed or blotted out altogether by his one fiction.

He loved her.

It was stupid. Very stupid and normally he would've laughed it off and done his best to keep away from her, not wanting to bother her with his oafish presence. He knew that he wasn't in her league in any way. Not just in looks, but intelligence and personality, accomplishments and potential. He was a huge nothing and knew he would remain so, while she had everything and would only become more.

However, this wasn't a normal situation and Jim knew it was the nagging feeling of running out of time that had him embellishing his fiction instead of ignoring it. He knew consciously that what he felt for her was likely only puppy love or a crush; it wasn't real. Yet, the affect she had on him was very real.

At the sight of her, his chest would swell from within and every time she touched him with her long thin fingers, he'd feel them warm and soft, even after she removed her hand, as if his skin was trying to keep the memory of her touch for itself.

His eyes were always on her, wandering over her flesh, drinking it in, feeling the exquisite smoothness of her, but not in sexual way, no, his eyes were on her like an artist's. An artist who has seen a beauty so dazzling that it was beyond his ability to capture. An artist afraid to make even the first stroke of his brush, knowing even that little thing would never compare.

And what would an artist do in such a situation but stare longingly in vain, wishing his talent was equal to her magnificence.

That was Jim Anderson.

He would feed his crush with her loveliness, but like the artist, would never make the first stroke, knowing with doomed certainty that it would go awry and end his fantasy.

Still if he were to draw her, it would be her neck that he'd begin with. Presently she had her head tilted to the side and he took in her long slender neck as it rose to greet her jaw, the line of which was strong and could only be described as aristocratic.

Her eyes flicked to him, purposely to catch him staring and he turned quick to look out of the window.

"It's ok. You are allowed to look at me," she grinned as she said it.

His cheeks suddenly felt hot and red. "Sorry...I didn't mean to stare. It's just you have a nice smile is all."

"Really? How about now?" She made a face at him, pulling back the corners of her mouth, sticking out her tongue and crossing her eyes. It was wonderfully carefree and childlike, the sweetness of it made him love her even more.

"I like that smile most of all." And he did too. Her silly smile had been for him alone and in his lonely and loveless world, it was unique.

"If you liked that then you are beyond my help." She remained smiling at him, her normal pretty smile, white teeth against her tan. "It feels weird to smile...with everything going on."

"I know. I feel the same way. It's strange, like I'm being wrong somehow," he responded.

"For me, I know part of it is the fact that Father Alba forgave me. He really meant it, at least for now. But I still feel lighter inside," she nodded happily at the memory, while Jim felt his own smile slip. The priest's face with its gaping holes was a sight that would haunt him for a long time.

"What do you mean for now? He's forgiven you, that can't change."

Her smile remained, but became edgy with bitterness. "He was in a state of shock. Wait until he's walking into walls. Or wait until he's trapped in his apartment, afraid to go out without someone there to guide him. Or wait until his depression boarders on suicide; he'll be cursing my name for certain."

"Oh," Jim's face dropped as he imagined a blind Father Alba sitting in a dark apartment, alone. He wouldn't let that happen. "I'll take care of him, Talitha. I'll make sure that he's not alone."

"I know you will. You're a good man," she said patting his arm. The feel of her hand caused a little shiver of excitement that he squelched, but only with difficulty.

"Uh, what about you? What do you plan on doing when this is all over with?" His question was lame, but her hand had felt hot on his skin and it was taking up a large part of his mind and not a little of his body as well.

Her incredulous look dismayed him however. "Me? I guess go back my cabin." She said this nonchalantly, but untruthfully.

Jim was screwing up his fantasy. The last thing he wanted to do was to make her sad. "Whatever you do don't become a poker player. You're a terrible liar, maybe the worst I've ever seen. If you ever went to Vegas, you'd lose everything and be broke in a week."

Her smile came back, an honest one. "Sorry I lied. I was just enjoying our conversation and I didn't want to ruin it."

Concern and fear for her safety exploded in his heart. "Do you know something? Did Will tell you something?"

"No, but he is a bad liar as well. I can see it in his eyes and hear it in his voice...he thinks one of us will die." She said this quietly but a second later, incongruously, Talitha stuck a huge toothy smile on her face. "That's why I'm going to be extra peppy! If I have only a little longer left, I want to be happy. Happiness is not allowed where I'm going, so I better get all I can, while I'm here. What about you? Will you join me in celebrating our impending doom?"

She held out her hand, and he was slow to take it. The idea that his death could be hours away, occupied a potion of his mind, but Talitha still held sway over the majority of it and he reached out his great paw and swallowed her tiny one in his.

Her touch was like magic and his fears and worries vanished. He held her hand for over a minute without looking at her. He wanted to remember this touch for always, but finally he looked up and said, "I will, for better or worse."

Chapter 20

Will Doesn't Like E.T.

Luke's apartment turned out to be a complete bust.

Eric Milner had called just before seven, giving Will the address to the place, which turned out to be only a few minutes away by car. Jim didn't own a car, something he was embarrassed to admit and they were forced to use Father Alba's, which still bore the stains of his blood.

Talitha refused to get in until Jim cleaned up as much of the mess as he could and even then, her new peppy smile, bogus and strained, clashed with the misery in her eyes. It made for a quiet ride and even the rain, falling in little more than a light mist felt subdued. But thankfully the place was close and Jim was quick to hop out and open the door for Talitha, something that earned him a genuine smile.

He smiled back at her and then at her brother, but Will only scowled at the ground making his way to the door. They found the key where Milner said it would be, under the mat and as Will fumbled with it, Jim caught a nasty smell coming from the apartment.

"What is it with this guy and stinkiness?" He was putting on a show of cheeriness and Talitha after a little sigh, added to it.

"I know. You would think he just got elected mayor of stinktown."

Will gave them a questioning look, one that was hard to read in the dark. "Can you two keep quiet? This is technically illegal you know," he admonished them. They were serious for a second until he turned his back on them bending to the lock and then Jim shared a look with the girl.

"Sorry Mom, we'll be good," Talitha said quietly with a mischievousness in her voice.

Will popped back up, fear and anger in his eyes and he looked hard at his sister. "Talitha?"

"Yes?" she replied. "Oh, you think I'm the other Talitha! No it's me," she patted her chest which did nothing to convince him.

"This is the good Talitha, don't worry," Jim reassured him.

"How do you know, she very tricky." Will grabbed his sister roughly by the arms pinning them to her sides.

"Will please," Jim put his hand on the man's shoulder in a friendly manner. "I know, because she'd have called me ugly and stupid ten times by now."

Oddly, Jim felt a little insulted when Will agreed with him. "You're right, she would've. But what's with you two? You're both acting...a little drunk, and there's a serial killer out there."

"Sorry Will," Jim mumbled, feeling like a kid again after being rebuked by a nun.

"I'm sorry as well...we know our situation," Talitha said, still with her arms pinned. "We know death could strike at any time, it's just we want our time left to be as happy as possible."

With the explanation, he seemed to sag and his anger melted away. "Oh. I'm sorry...for jumping down your throats. I'm just stressed, there's so much going on to worry about." He pursed his swollen lips and blew out heavily. "Lisa. She isn't happy about me staying and she doesn't even know about all of this," he waved his hand in front of his mangled and bruised face. "Who knows, if I die, maybe she'll never have to know." He gave them a grin, but with the dim light and heavy bruising, his face looked demonic.

"How about you join us and put on a happy face?" Talitha asked her brother, just as the key finally found its way into the lock. The door swung open revealing a room in complete shambles and a fearful smell billowed out of it. It was similar, but not as strong as the one from beneath the church.

Will coughed at the odor and looked back at his sister, his face now looking even more wretched; with green showing beneath the bruises. "Sure sounds great...I'm gonna throw up!" He didn't, but it was a near thing. He walked about for a bit in the parking lot, breathing heavily for few minutes before trying again to enter the place.

Jim was similarly affected, but he remained stoic trying to impress Talitha who only wrinkled her nose at the smell. "At least we don't have to worry about putting things back where we found them."

Her attempt at lifting their spirits failed miserably and they spent the next two hours sifting through the remains of Luke's belongings. There wasn't much left or hadn't been much to begin with, but either way they found nothing that would hint at where he was now. Dejected they made their way back to the car, where Talitha began a conversation with her brother by raising an eyebrow.

Will caught the look and with an angry sigh, glared out the front window for a moment, but then said, "I can't."

"Actually you can," Talitha responded.

"Ok, I won't." Will gripped the steering wheel hard enough to turn his knuckles white.

"Will, it's our only hope."

"What's our only hope?" Jim asked confused and getting upset at being left out of the conversation.

Will gave him a sharp, slightly irritated look, but spoke again to his sister, "People will die if I do."

Talitha still ignoring Jim, said, "People will die if you don't, probably more people."

"Who's going to die?" Jim asked, real anger slipping into the deep growl of his voice.

Will kept his eyes on his sister. "You may die."

"I'm ok with that," she responded evenly and it was clear she meant it, despite in Jim's opinion, having the most to lose. Jim hoped he'd be as tough as her, if it came down to sacrificing himself.

"Jim could die," Will added, refusing to budge his eyes back to where Jim sat.

"What? Hold on..." Jim felt flustered. Talitha finally looked back at him and gave him a large wonderfully fake smile, which in no way touched the worry in her eyes.

"I'm trying to convince my brother to look into the future," she explained.

Jim's mind replayed the conversation and he nodded with understanding. "Do you know which one of us is going to die?" This he asked and then took a large deep breath, preparing himself for the inevitable answer. He figured it would be him. After all, the brother and sister both had amazing powers, both were intelligent, and both had survived worse. While he pictured himself as a very large target that only a legally blind person could possibly miss.

"I...I..." Will couldn't seem to go on and the rain, which had picked up slightly, kept a steady beat. It added tension to Jim until he thought he was about to explode all over the inside of the car.

"I don't know, what I know," Will replied and the answer was hardly satisfactory to Jim, who felt his insides caving. Will obviously couldn't bring himself to tell Jim about his upcoming death.

"Why don't you just tell us what you saw?" Talitha asked, her lips pulled in, so much so they were hidden completely.

"It wasn't a vision exactly...I sometimes just know things."

"And what sort of things do you know?" She sounded like a perturbed mother coaxing a child. She'd said she would be ok with dying, but there was nervousness to her. Talitha was trying to appear outwardly calm, only Jim had been staring at her all day and saw small telltale signs. Her jaw clenching, the movement of the muscles now visible beneath the skin; her fingers worrying over an errant piece of thread, sticking out of the car's seat; her head nodding almost imperceptibly while she waited for Will to answer.

Now, Will looked back at Jim, but it was a quick guilty look. "I know that two of us will die...soon."

There was sudden white static, a roaring of blood in his ears, but Jim could still hear his own voice ask as if from far away. "Two? Which two of us?"

"I don't know...there were seven of us in that room and that's when I knew three of us would die. Father John was the first but I don't know who will be next, however I do know," Will paused and shook his head with a sad smile, "That Sean Shay, isn't going to die. I don't know why, but he lives."

A pang of jealousy startled Jim with its fierceness, but then Talitha, for no obvious reason held his hand, rubbing his fingers gently and at that moment, he wouldn't trade places with Sean for anything. He was going to miss him however.

Will wasn't the only one who knew things. The touch of Talitha's hand, still caressing his fingers made Jim realize that his crush on her, his puppy love, his fiction, was a lie. He did love her, completely. It didn't matter to him that she didn't love him back, he loved her unconditionally and perhaps stupidly, but love was love. It couldn't be helped.

There were two other things that he knew with absolute certainty. First, was that he loved her enough that he'd die for her and second, that he would kill for her as well.

"I'm going to make sure that damned Luke is one of the two of us that dies," he said harshly making tremendous fists of his great hands.

Will gave him a look that was both sweet and sad. "If it were that easy, I would've looked into the future already. There's no saying we'll win out in the end. Two of us could die and the other might live out his life as a quadriplegic or as a vegetable in a coma. You see why I'm not jumping at this great chance? It's my fault Father Alba is in the hospital and that Father John is dead—what did we get out of that?"

Talitha riled at this. "First off, Luke is the reason Father John is dead and I'm the reason Father Alba is blind, not you. Secondly, we stopped Luke from doing whatever he was up to and I am sure that was a very good thing and third we stopped...me, the other me! From gaining access to Luke and that as well, is a good thing. I know I'd rather face..." she looked a little confused. "I mean if I were you, I would rather face Luke than me...darn it! I mean the other me."

Will wasn't backing down at her reasoning. "Who's to say we won't have to face both of you. I mean... not the both of you, but you and Luke. Do you know what I mean?" This he was asking of Jim, who was in fact, still playing catch up.

"Can we call the evil Talitha, E.T. for short?" Jim asked. "It might make things simpler."

"Sure, good idea, Jim," Will agreed with a nod. Jim felt an embarrassing amount of pleasure over this small bit of praise.

Will continued, "Like I was saying, we might have to face Luke and E.T. at the same time. She has a tendency to show up, just when she can hurt us the most. Can you control her at all?" he asked Talitha.

"No, E.T. can come and go as she pleases and she seems to know when I'm particularly stressed."

Will looked at Jim. "I'm sorry, but I don't like E.T."

"Who would? I'm sure Luke doesn't," Talitha said.

Jim smiled at her. "No, he's talking about the nick name. E.T. was a good guy; it just seems weird to say."

"What? The E stands for evil, remember? You were right here! You made it up for goodness sakes." Her perplexity caused the two men to come close to laughing, but there was also an edge of annoyance with her perplexity and they both held it in.

"We're talking about the movie, you know E.T.?" Jim waggled a finger at her. "E.T. phone home," he said in his smallest voice. Her face was priceless. Confusion ran amok there, plucking at muscles in a seemingly random order. It was clear she had no idea what he was talking about.

"It was a movie that came out when you were in the hospital. It was cute, we should rent it when this is all done," Will explained.

"Rent? What do you mean the whole theater?" Talitha was sadly lost and she was in her vulnerable state that Jim found adorable.

"No. You can now rent movies and play them on a VHS..." Will started, but a light popped into Talitha's eyes and she interrupted him.

"A video home system, I read about them before... you know before. They were big in Japan. I take it they're sold here on the mass market?"

"Yeah, we got one in '82. You'll like it. You can catch up on all of the movies that you've missed." Will said, but there was sadness in his voice as if he knew she wouldn't ever see one.

Now the car was quiet, except for the ever-present rain. Talitha stared out into it with a lost expression and Jim stared at her. He thought about the last eight years and everything that she had missed hidden away in her cabin, or trapped in an insane asylum, it didn't seem fair.

She suddenly put on a smile, "I'm being mopey, when I'm supposed to be happy. Sorry about that, where were we? Naming the evil me...how about Evil T?"

Will made a sour face. "You've never heard of Rap music have you?"

Before Talitha could answer, Jim stepped in, "Evil T will work just fine. We were talking about finding Luke and maybe people dying. I'm wondering if Luke is really all that dangerous now. Maybe going after the sword was his one big shot."

"No, I'm sorry, Jim," Talitha said. "He's after something big. Maybe he's trying to bring Ba'al into this world, I don't know, but I don't think he's going to stop until he gets what he is after." She turned to her brother. "Lisa should take the sword and leave, someplace far away."

"She is. She'll be packed and gone by eight tomorrow morning." Will's face drained of color. "I told her not to tell me where she's going, but now I don't know how I'll find her when this is all done."

Talitha took her brother's hands in her own. "Don't worry about that, you'll find her, I know it. But the danger to Lisa is another reason, you need to look."

"For once your logic is flawed. If I look and I die, who'll protect Lisa from you and Luke; she'll be in even more danger then."

Another silence followed this, but Jim was fidgety and he broke it. "I vote we take the fight to the enemy. Running and hiding? I'm not very good at either." His huge frame taking up nearly the entire back seat attested to this.

"I'm with Jim," Talitha agreed. "That makes it two against one in favor of looking."

"I can't," Will moaned and Jim was shocked to see tears coming down the man's battered face. Talitha was alarmed at the suddenness as well and touched her brother's hands again.

"It'll be ok. Jim and I will be right here with you."

Bitter mocking laughter rang out, loud and shrill from Will. "Right! What are you going to do when the visions get stuck in my head and I go insane? I...I can't do it. Ok? You don't know how it was. I could feel the maggots..." His body shuddered horribly and his tears were nonstop.

Jim recalled how the man had gone mad in seconds, right before his eyes, screaming, crying, and then hitting himself with such viciousness. Jim began to have second thoughts.

"I know that it was bad last time, Jim told me, but it may not be this time. Luke has only been gone, what eight or nine hours? He's probably in hiding tonight," Talitha added as she bit at her lower lip.

Will's tears lessened and then stopped altogether, but he didn't look up. With shame coating his words, he whispered, "I can't. I'm sorry."

"I understand, Will. It sounded horrible," her tone was all sympathy. "But what would Lisa want you to do?"

Will barked a short laugh. "That's easy; she wants me to come home right now."

"Then why aren't you going."

The rain filled the long uncomfortable silence, but at last Will spoke softly in the tone of a condemned man, "I'll look in the morning...maybe. Sometimes I will have a vision when I dream at night. If tonight I don't have one...then I'll look."

"I think that's all we could ask of you." Talitha kissed her brother lightly on the cheek.

"Yeah, I agree," Jim said and then yawned a great cavernous bear like yawn. Talitha looked shocked but followed it with an amused smile, Will however seemed suddenly nervous.

"Jim, I know you're tired, but...you can't go to sleep. You have to stay awake and keep Talitha up."

"Will, I'll be ok. I've slept two nights in a row, that hasn't happened since before," Talitha reassured her brother.

Will ignored his sister and pleaded to the big man, "Jim, please promise me that you'll stay awake."

"I will, don't worry."

"We'll keep each other awake," Talitha said with a touch of Jim's hand that sent a shiver right up his back.

Chapter 21

Love and the Illusion of Love

The Volvo's windows had long since fogged over and Jim was beginning to get cold despite the coat that he wore. Talitha, who had on just the ankle length black habit seemed very comfortable and smiled at him when he zipped his coat up tight.

"So where do we go?" she asked. "Are there rooms at the orphanage?"

There were at two least vacancies tonight, but they had been the priest's rooms and Jim wasn't keen on the idea of spending the night in one of them. "Naw, at least none that we should use, but I know a motel nearby. Actually, it's not so close, all the motels around here are gross, roaches and stains and such. But I had a friend who stayed at this one place that was ok."

"Wherever you pick will be fine with us, but I need to make a stop first," Will murmured in a small voice.

The stop surprised Jim.

Jim drove and at the first liquor store that he saw Will demanded, quite urgently, to be let out. Moments later, he came out swigging from a brown bag. With his battered face and torn up clothes, Will looked like nothing more than one of the bums or hood-rats that populated the neighborhood alleys in that part of the city.

Both Talitha and Jim plastered happy smiles over what had been shared looks of alarm only a second earlier and Talitha asked her brother, "Do you expect it to be that bad?"

Will's thousand-yard stare matched the way he shook his head in a slow distant manner, and taking another pull from the bottle, he justified, "I just want to be able to sleep. That's all." After this, he was moody and sulked quietly, slumped in the back seat, not saying anything during the short trip, but only taking frequent sips from his bottle.

When they arrived at the motel, Jim secured two side-by-side adjoining rooms and tried his best not to let his excitement mount too much. However, when he opened the car door for her, Talitha beamed at him, sending his pulse hammering through his veins.

"Wow, such a gentlemen," she said as he took her by the hand. He didn't trust himself to say anything, his tongue felt huge, dry, and unruly, so he only dipped his head, feeling warmth spread out through his chilled body.

Unfortunately, his happy feelings were doused by Will. He stopped in front of his door and instead of opening it, he simply stared at it drinking. A minute passed and still he hadn't budged or even spoke.

"We'll be right here, if you need anything," Talitha spoke brightly. Will seemed to remember they were there and gave her a half smile. He then unlocked and opened his door, yet still didn't enter. Another minute passed and now Will had finished a third of the bottle.

Jim remembered the previous night and the horrible screams. "You know, he should just look into the future and save himself from this." The two of them hadn't entered their room either, it didn't seem right to leave him out there in the calming rain all alone.

"I know, but he'll blame himself for everything that follows," she whispered back.

"That's stupid, the..." He was being too loud and she shushed him with pursed lips.

Will glanced over to them, his face glistening with sweat and the last of the rain and he only just realized they hadn't gone into their rooms. "Oh, good night...sweet dreams," he swayed slightly in the doorway.

"Good night, Will," Talitha said with quiet fake cheerfulness. Will took a final deep breath as if preparing for a long icy plunge and stepped into his room, shutting the door behind him.

With that, Talitha and Jim entered their own room, one that seemed to be the model for all motel rooms ever built. Two lamps, two chairs, one writing desk, one TV and a large bed with a standard issue floral comforter, and this last, not only dominated the room, it dominated Jim's mind as well. As he looked about, his eyes lingered longest on it and it spoke to him suggesting interesting and unlikely possibilities.

Talitha, however ignored the bed completely. Not even having a purse to fling down upon it, the bed represented no more than an obstacle and she hurried around it to the door separating the two rooms. Jim followed a trifle reluctantly and pressed his left ear to the door, facing Talitha.

From the room next door, Jim could hear only a smattering of muffled sounds and he figured what he was hearing was Will drinking himself into a stupor. He made an honest attempt at caring what was going on in there, after all, he did consider Will a friend, but after the first sniff of Talitha's hair, he knew Will would have to get drunk without him eavesdropping.

She faced him, with her right ear to the door and due to the narrowness of it and his great size, he was right on top of her. She smelled of idealized flowers. Were ever a meadow to smell as she did, he would never leave it. He stood above her, breathing her in, making her a part of him, and he would've stayed there all night, but the smell triggered another reaction.

He became alarmed at the swiftness of his body's response to her scent and the warmth of her closeness. Jim turned bodily towards the door and studied the fake wood grain with deep concentration, hoping to take his mind off of Talitha and the fact that his pants were starting to push outward painfully in the crotch.

However, in seconds he realized that wasn't going to work and he turned, putting his right ear to the door.

"Uh, this is my good ear," he mumbled as if he were eighty years old. Now he tried his best to listen to Will's drinking, but there was nothing coming from the other room that would distract his mind and he kept slipping into the memory of the bath Lisa had given Talitha that morning.

Lisa had been very discreet, covering Talitha with a towel, but it clung to her curves in a way that had been tremendously erotic. The hints of her tan skin, glistening and soap covered had been more arousing than if she had been totally naked. Thankfully, Jim had a large arm full of towels to cover his erection, but he had no such luck just then.

"Move your butt," she whispered leaning into him, "You're taking up the whole door." Feeling her against him was too much. He was becoming harder; bending at an odd angle and a glance down made him realize he would have to shift his apparatus quick.

Without explanation, he walked quickly to the writing desk and sitting down he attempted to slide himself under it, but he was too big in more ways than one.

"You ok?" Talitha asked, her ear coming off the door as she turned to him.

"It's nothing," he spoke this quickly and glancing over, he saw that she was concerned for him. She took a step in his direction and he became filled with a stupid embarrassed panic. He struggled out of coat and balling it up, he crammed it onto his lap, "Just...just hot that's all."

"Is it hot? Temperature is so relative, that I can't tell sometimes," she sat on the bed, feeling the comforter, running her hands over it gently, absently. "I hope he goes to sleep soon, or I should say, passes out soon. Drinking that much, that fast can't be good for you."

"He's young still," Jim replied curtly, trying to keep his mind off Talitha and his erection, however when he got his mind off of one, it would jump directly to the other and he went back and forth between the two, a ping-pong of perversion.

"I suppose so," her worry lines creasing her forehead, eased only slightly. "It could be the least of his problems." She kicked off her plain black shoes and laid back on the bed, the long dress riding up innocently, erotically.

"Yeah," his eyes went to her calves, which were coltish and slim, but well muscled, and appeared soft and smooth, hairless. He felt his pants were about to rip open at the sight of such a simple thing and this amazed him. He looked up the lines of her legs, past the flat of her belly and saw her looking at him in a perplexed manner.

Jim felt his face go pink and he tried to think past her body, to what she had been saying. "Yeah...the dreams, he's got to worry about those. I'm just glad it's not me. When you...the other you, told me about his seeing the future, my first thought was lucky bastard, but after last night...I'm happier not knowing what's to come." This topic was effectively killing his erection; he felt it diminishing by the second.

"I have to agree, Que sera, sera, right?"

He kept his face neutral. "Right." The other Talitha had said the same thing and he was still equally clueless as to what she meant. He felt so stupid compared to her and this drained away the last of his erection.

She had her eyes on him, studying him, it made him feel uncomfortable. "Jim, do you know what that phrase means?"

"No, not really."

"And you think you're stupid because you don't." This wasn't a question, but a statement.

Now his ears were really burning, in shame, but also with a little anger. There didn't seem to be any reason for her to be pointing out his faults, they were glaringly obvious. "Yes, among other reasons."

"Jim, you are mistaking knowledge for intelligence," she said this, sad for him. Or perhaps it was pity he saw in her eyes. Either way he felt like he was waking from a wonderful dream, and it was slipping away from him as if it never was.

"That's pretty stupid, too huh?"

"No, it's not stupid, it's a mistake, a common one made by most people. There's a difference between knowledge and intelligence, let me show you. Tell the name of a play in football, make it a good one."

If he were smart he would know what she was trying to get at, but he didn't have a clue. "Ok, a flea flicker."

She grinned happily at the words. He couldn't help himself, and got lost in that smile and he watched as her lips parted and her teeth rose and fell and her tongue, small and pink, slipped about. "That's an easy one. A flea flicker is when the ball is given to the smallest boy and he is thrown into the goal area."

She was being cute and he liked it. "No, not even close."

"So, does that make me stupid, since I don't know something I've never heard before?"

"No, but..."

"But nothing! Intelligence is not gauged by the amount of trivial knowledge one acquires." She came to the side of the bed nearest to him.

"Yeah, but it does make you look smarter."

"I suppose it does and I like that. I like to appear smart. I also like to read and study, but that's me. Not everyone likes that sort of thing, what do you like to do?"

He had to think about that. "I like to help my boys. Play with them; teach them things they won't learn in school. Show them how to be a proper man, a good person."

Her face went deeply sad and it was no longer a sad look for him, but for herself. "You like to build your soul, while I like to build my brain...in the end, who's the smarter of the two of us?" she asked.

He had never looked at his life like that and it made him feel better about himself. However, she appeared worse, not in his eyes but in her own and her smile was gone.

To cheer her up, he gave her a big gap toothed grin. "You're still smarter, I'm sure."

She looked at the grin with a touch of weariness and then forced herself to match it. "Yep, I'm the smartest. I just wish...I wish I could have a do-over. Start my life over again." She became glum, but for only a moment. And then she perked up with great insincerity—clearly remembering their pact to be happy. "What did you want to be when you grew up?"

"Are you serious?" he asked with sudden embarrassment.

"Sure, why not? We have all night."

He chuckled, feeling absurd. "Ok, I wanted to be a soldier at first. We used to play war all the time, me, Sean Shay, Timmy Heddles."

"War? Sounds like tons of fun," she said, being playfully sarcastic.

"Hey don't knock it! It was fun, better than those goofy tea parties...please tell me you didn't throw tea parties."

She beamed, the genuine article. "For a few years, I admit that I threw daily tea parties."

"So what kind of tea set did you have? Barbie?"

"I didn't have Barbie and I didn't want a Barbie tea set, my tea set was real," she said importantly. "Wipe that smirk off your face...the boys in my neighborhood didn't find my tea parties goofy."

He exchanged his smirk with a look of frank surprise. "Really? Boys would play tea? I've never heard of such a thing; I'm being honest."

"Well, my mom would let me serve lemonade and real cookies."

Jim laughed hard at that. "Oh yeah, I would've come a running too. The girls where I grew up, made mud pies and served tap water, if you were lucky and puddle water if you weren't. And there was always..."

He trailed off when he noticed her eyes had gone to the adjoining door, he could tell she was listening to her brother. "What is it?" he asked.

Her face snapped back to his and she said, "Nothing."

"Nothing? Are we keeping secrets, now? So early in our relationship?" He meant it to come out as a joke, but it sounded flirtatious instead and she gave him a look of surprise. However, her eyebrows slowly went back down as concern pushed its way onto her face.

"Huh? Secrets? No...I mean yes." She looked pained for a moment. "It's Will. Sometimes when he's been drinking, he becomes morose. I didn't mean to be secretive. I just didn't want to embarrass him."

"Morose? You mean sad? Why would that be embarrassing?" Jim asked.

"He gets weepy sometimes when he drinks. But it's not his fault," she seemed desperate to defend her brother. "He's had it so tough...and he keeps coming back."

"Look, you don't have to defend him for me," Jim said, gently taking her small hands in his. "Last night and today, I've seen what he goes through and I gotta tell you, I would weep to. In fact, since we're being so honest, I've cried more today than all the last twenty years combined."

"It's been a tough day," she agreed. Jim blinked and fought the urge to rub his eyes. He didn't ever want to let go of her hands, but she looked at him with a small concern. "I'm sorry you can't go to sleep, you look tired."

"Tired? Me? Heck no, I could talk to you all night."

"Really?" She seemed simultaneously hopeful and thankful, and something passed between them. For a moment, their eyes locked and Jim felt the impossible to be just within his grasp.

"Really," he said tenderly, but it was then that they both realized they were still holding hands and a coolness slipped over Talitha.

"One second." She pulled her hands from his and crept to the door to listen for her brother.

Jim's face fell and his soul sighed, a lonesome wind in a barren desert. Going to the door had been a polite excuse on her part to let go of his hands—she could hear all she wanted from the bed. And even though he felt a keen pain from within him, he wasn't angry with her. He had expected this. He was a great hideous ogre of a man and she was drop dead gorgeous. Had this been a movie, they would be together in the end, but this was real life and he knew he'd die alone.

So he put his now familiar practiced fake smile on to cover his embarrassment, "Is he doing anything else?" He had wanted the question to sound natural, as if he hadn't noticed that she was repulsed by him, but it came out overly cheery instead.

Her eyes closed for a second as if she had felt a hidden pain in his words. "No...only that he has quieted down. I think he might be asleep soon." She wandered away from the door nonchalantly and now went to the curtained window and peeked out. Their view was a parking lot and the back of another building.

She stared at it a long time.

"Good, I hope his dreams are productive." He said it, but secretly hoped they wouldn't be. If they were anything like his dreams from the day before, the night would be a horror.

There was a silence now between them and it was uncomfortable. Jim tried to think of something to talk about, but everything that came to mind either was related to the terrible events of the last day or concerned her and his growing feelings. Neither a suitable conversation at the moment. But thankfully, Talitha ended the silence.

She squared her shoulders and drawing in a deep breath, she looked him in the face, and asked, "So what else did you want to be when you grew up?"

"Huh?" The question was unexpected. He had figured by her quick preparations that he was going to get a, I think we should just be friends talk.

"You said earlier, that you wanted to be a soldier, at first. What did you want to be next?" she asked.

He let out a laugh that was partially relief; he hated the let's just be friends talk. "I...this is going to sound silly, but I wanted to be Spider Man."

She laughed loudly too. "You know that Spider Man is a fictitious character and not an occupation, right?"

"Are you trying to ruin the dreams of my six-year-old inner child?"

"Oh no, of course not." She sobered up, becoming professional, "What I meant to say, is that the position of Spider Man has been filled. However, if you fill out the spidey-application, we will notify you if an opening becomes available."

"That's better," he grinned through the words. The tension of a minute before was gone and their relationship, their one sided relationship was as it was before. She would be his friend and he would love her, and Jim was fine with that.

"Did you have Spider Man under-roos?" she asked teasingly.

"Oh man, I wish! The orphanage was way too poor and we only got cast offs and hand-me-downs."

"Used underwear? Yeesh!" she said and he laughed at the cute face she made. "So why Spider Man? Wasn't he a small guy? Wasn't his secret identity...puny Parker?"

"Peter Parker and yes he was small, but back then so was I. I had no clue that I would turn out so big." He leaned back in the chair and it creaked loudly under his mass. "I felt small next to the big boys and I wanted to be like Spidey, small but superfast and strong." His memory of those years was patchy like a puzzle missing half the pieces, but there was still enough for him to smile at his goofy six-year-old self.

She gave him an appraising eye. "Look at you now. I would make a better Spider Man."

"What? No way. You probably don't know the first thing about Spider Man." This may have been the silliest conversation of his entire adult life, but he didn't care.

"Sure I do, I knew his alter-ego didn't I? And I know he can shoot webs and climb walls." She wore a smug self-satisfied look.

"His name is Spider Man! For a genius, you're not impressing me with shooting webs and climbing walls. How did he get his powers?" If she knew that, he would definitely be impressed.

However, she didn't know and squirreling up her face she replied, "Magic?"

"That settles it. I'm Spider Man. Oh and did you hear that? It's Spider MAN, not Spider-woman."

"This is a new era my friend, woman's lib and all that. I'm faster and stronger than you, I'm Spider Man." She no longer was smiling, but had a challenge brewing in her eyes.

"I'm stronger." Jim insisted. He loved a challenge, especially one where strength was involved. "You want to arm wrestle?" He asked half-jokingly. He knew she was strong, but there was no way she was anywhere near as strong as he was.

"Come on tough guy," she beckoned him with her hands. He shrugged and turned the desk around and put his chair on the other side, settling in across from her.

"If I win, I'm Spider Man," he said and though he tried to keep a straight face, he broke and smiled. She had to bite her cheeks and suck in her lips, but she didn't smile, except for her eyes, which beamed like that of a child's.

"Ok, but if you lose then I'm Spiderman and you're Wonder Woman. Your boobs are bigger than mine after all." She pulled the black dress tight across her chest and looked down. He looked as well. Her breasts were high and firm, and though normally lost in the shapeless black dress, they were now quite visible beneath the tight material.

He looked up quickly when she did and tried not to think about the sudden stirring in his loins and said, "I don't have boobs. I have pecs." He gave her a quick show, flexing his massive muscles and she imitated him adding a little, "Grrr!" She was being adorable and cute and silly and sweet all at once. It was wonderful.

"Show me what you got big boy." She got herself into position, but Jim had to scoot his chair far back in order to bring his hand down low enough to hold hers without lifting it up. It was a terrible position to arm wrestle from, but Jim didn't think it would matter; he'd never in his life lost at arm wrestling.

Jim looked into her brown eyes. "On the count of three, one, two, three!" They both began, not using their full strength, but ratcheted it up quickly, until their faces were red and straining. Talitha's power amazed Jim. It was like trying to push back against the half-buried root of a tree. He was forced to put every ounce of strength of his great arm into the challenge before she started to bend against him and it was another minute before he could finally pin her hand down.

Taking a deep breath, he asked, "Tell me you didn't let me win!"

Rubbing her wrist, she shook her head. "No, that was all you. I actually can't believe it; I didn't think you would win, especially with that angle you were at. I could use my whole shoulder and most of my back and all you had was part of your arm." She looked impressed and Jim felt a foolish warm glow. "You know, the other...Evil T, she isn't afraid of you at all. She's afraid of Will, but not you. She should be though."

"I didn't think she was afraid of anything."

"Well, she's not afraid really, but she knows Will plans on killing her the next time he sees her. I felt it distinctly the last time we switched places. I can hear her thoughts, her last thoughts, before we change places."

"And you don't think she's afraid of me? She thinks she can take me in a fight? That's crazy," he smirked in disbelief.

"I don't know about it being crazy," she said it slowly, smiling another challenge. "I know for a fact that she's pretty quick and you would've to catch her first, something I don't think you can do."

"I bet it'll be easier than you'd think, all I'd have to do is this." He stretched his long arm across the desk to grab her, but in a blur she kicked herself backwards. A happy smile lit up her face, as she and the chair fell straight back.

Jim leapt up alarmed that she would crack her skull on the floor of the room, but she rolled with the chair as it hit, turning a tight summersault, pausing midway through the motion to push herself into a tall handstand.

She held it for only a second, however it was enough time for Jim to see the full length of her long slender legs, as the black dress slid down them. Just as he caught sight of the gentle curve of her small round buttocks and the tantalizing whiteness of her cotton panties, she went into a back walk over, ending up facing him three feet from the desk, the smile having never left her face.

Jim stood spell bound, his mouth hanging open by the simple gymnastic maneuver, but Talitha giggled at him and then casually kicked the desk, hard, sending it sliding into Jim's thighs and he fell back into his chair.

"Ok, this is serious now," he said, hauling his weight up. He took the desk, upended it, and stuck it against the door leading to the parking lot. He shoved the chair aside as well.

Reek, reek, reek.

Talitha, like a five year old, was jumping on the bed, smiling, looking insane with glee. Jim cautiously moved toward her expecting her to jump away at any moment, but even so, he was too slow. Reaching out to snatch her, she emitted a loud girlish shriek and ducked under his arm, rolling across the floor in a tight ball, before popping up and jumping onto the low dresser.

"What are you doing? You're gonna break something," Jim said.

"Are you calling me fat?" She was still smiling and playful; Jim's heart felt huge, full of her. He jumped at her again, but again she was too quick. She became a giggling electric butterfly. Weightless, alighting upon the bed or dresser or chair, only to flit away without reason or purpose, in random directions. A half dozen times he could have caught her, but he was having too much fun.

Finally, she purposely allowed herself to be caught, practically leaping into his arms, but once there, she went spastic, wiggling and kicking, all the while keeping up an endless giggle. This forced him to drop her onto the bed where he smothered her with his bulk. He knew how his size and weight could induce temporary claustrophobia and he quickly rolled off of her. He lay beside her panting slightly, however she, despite the fact that she had ran about like mad, wasn't winded in the least.

But now the game was over.

Talitha was irresistible. Her thick brown hair splayed out around her head, shimmering, catching the light in such a way that Jim couldn't help himself and he touched it. He ran his fingers through her hair, running its length. It was amazingly soft and he was about to comment on it, when he saw her lips part.

They were full and alluring, and the temptation to kiss her was nearly uncontrollable, but now he became the fearful artist once again, afraid to make that first stroke, seeing failure past every action. But then she licked her lips.

This one small compelling movement sent a surge through him and casting aside his fears, he bent down gently and brushed his lips against hers, not engaging in a full kiss yet, just touching his lips to hers.

This was perfect.

And natural. So natural that her body reacted even if her mind still hesitated, her lips parted invitingly, hungry for affection.

And then they kissed as new lovers do. Exploring the beginnings with tentative almost fearful excitement. The kiss was glorious and alive, and Jim felt it run through his body as if her tongue traced a conduit directly to his penis, causing it to leap and throb.

The kiss blazed huge, but somewhere his artist's stroke went awry and Jim suddenly felt Talitha stiffen coldly beside him and her lips withdrew from his and she turned her head away, only just so.

Surprise kept him silent, but he had the sense to lean back away from her so she wouldn't feel trapped and to his dismay, she promptly slid from the bed and stood with her back to him.

"I'm sorry, that was..." He felt the need to call what just happened a mistake, but it felt too right. But he said it anyways, "That was a mistake, it won't happen again."

"What?" Talitha asked quietly as if she hadn't been listening. She turned and he caught sight of a single tear coming down her cheek.

"I'm sorry that I messed this up," he said.

She looked around the room, which appeared to have been struck by a hurricane and after taking a deep breath she replied, "Turn off the lights."

It was a command, spoken in a voice low and husky, and it sent Jim's heart hammering in his chest. And when the room went dark, the thudding of it seemed to magnify, but it got worse, becoming a trip hammer, when in the dim light he saw her slowly unbuttoning the black dress.

He noticed how white her teeth were in the dim room when she said, "There's no need for you to apologize. I was wrong. I was thinking of Brian, when I should have been thinking of you." She strode toward him, the long black dress now completely open and the sight was undeniable. He couldn't have torn his eyes from her even if he wanted to and the sudden throbbing of his penis became pleasantly painful as it tried to fight its way out of his jeans.

He wanted to say something, but she wouldn't let him. She pulled his face down to hers and they kissed in earnest and she was no longer tentative, but hungry. As they kissed, she undid his pants, releasing him and then stroking him. While he gently slid the black dress off her shoulders, it whispered down the length of her body, gathering in puddle at her feet.

Jim pulled away from the kiss, meaning to take his shirt off, but he paused at the sight of her wonderful tan body. He felt a moment's hesitation, knowing this couldn't be real. He was hallucinating, or in a dream, or in heaven.

She was too perfect, all of her, there wasn't a scar or a blemish to mar her smooth skin. His eyes travelled the length of her body taking every inch of her in and he knew he could stare at her forever, but she wasn't in a pausing or hesitating mood.

Quickly, she helped him out of his clothes, before leading him down to the bed. There they kissed and explored each other's bodies with their hands and he found that she was not going to need much foreplay. She was wet, deliciously so, and moaned loudly at his touch.

He moaned at her touch as well, but it was a moan of pain, she was not experienced and it quickly began to hurt. She was very strong and he had to take his hands from her body to stop her.

"Just excited," she said with a smile that spoke of ravenous sexuality. "Here, this will make it feel better." She pulled him on top of her and he slid in like he had been greased.

He was not a virgin, but no girl he'd ever had could come even close to this. She was hot wet silk and had spectacular muscles that rolled, undulating up and down him, but there was something else that drove him wild and nearly had him exploding in minutes, it was her desire.

Her need.

Nothing is more provocative to a man, than a girl who desires him, who wants him as badly as he does her and Talitha was animalistic in her passion. Her moaning became intense and the undulating muscles rippled in a frenzy and squeezed him to the point where there was no going back and now he groaned as well, deep in his throat.

"No," she said, "Don't...not yet." However, there was a momentum building in him and try as he might he couldn't hold it back. But Talitha could. She slid her hands between his legs and pinched him viciously hard on his inner thigh.

The pain was similar to, but far worse than a wasp's sting. Jim never knew that such a thing could hurt so badly and his body jerked back from it and his great building lust was gone, just like that. He was still rock hard though and Talitha began grinding herself against him, coaxing him.

For a second he was angry with her, but her eyes pleaded with him to keep going and her hands pulled at him, to enter her again, "Please," she whispered. With that one word, his anger was a distant memory in a second and when a minute passed, he was glad that she had pinched him.

She began to moan and thrash uncontrollably and her muscles, spasming and squeezing his penis reached a fevered pitch. And even with the spot where she had pinched him, throbbing painfully, he was close to coming before her, but he was somehow able to hold back.

Suddenly she stopped moaning and her body relaxed beneath him, "That was good, that was good," she smiled up at the ceiling, "You should be proud of yourself." She lay there for a second and he thrust again into her, his need still with him.

"Hold on." She wrapped her legs around him, tucking one up under his right arm. "There you go," she said and she began squeezing him as he thrust deeper and deeper into her. He was only a moment away and she could tell; she wore a predatory smile, a wicked one that were he thinking straight, would have baffled him.

"I told you I would be there for the honeymoon," she whispered into his ear and sent one last fantastic ripple up the length of his penis. He pulled his head up in time to see the smile vanish from her face and now there was only puzzlement, which turned in a flash to revulsion. Right then, even as he began exploding into her, he realized he had been with the wrong Talitha

"No! No! Stop!" she suddenly started screaming from beneath him.

His Talitha was back, but his body was practically paralyzed by the intensity of his orgasm, waves of pleasure turned his muscles to jello and as she thrashed and struggled to free herself, it only made the feeling more forceful. They were a tangle of arms and legs and sheets, but finally, he got her leg from off his shoulder, which allowed some space to come between the two of them, and Talitha took advantage of that space.

The last thing he saw was her fist flying up at his face.

Chapter 22

12 Shots and a Dream

Will fell asleep with the murmur of voices coming in from the room next door and began dreaming almost immediately. This was his way every night, drunk or not, and if he were ever to wake up in the middle of the night, he could remember every last detail of the dream. At least until he dreamed again.

He never talked about his dreams, not even with Lisa, and not because of their horrifying or vivid nature—not all of his dreams were scary, but they were all vivid. He never spoke of them because he absolutely hated to hear anyone else's dreams and couldn't imagine anyone enthralled over his. As a rule, dreams are only interesting to the person who dreamt it; to everyone else they are senseless, fragmented, meaningless, and above all dull.

His first dream was a fine example. If Will ever had to mention it, he would say, "It was about how I tried to fix my lawnmower, but I ended up cutting my hand and had to see a doctor." That dream last 56 minutes, from 10:08 to 11:04, and in it, among many other things, he sailed a boat in search of a doctor, traveled to Washington DC by plane, met the president while he was eating lunch, but in the end, never did fix his lawn mower, or his hand.

Senseless, fragmented, meaningless and above all dull.

Of course, his main purpose tonight was to dream in the opposite fashion. His dream needed to make sense, it needed to be whole, and it needed it to have meaning. He could only hope it was dull, but he wasn't counting on it.

In fact, he was afraid it would be far from dull and he drank that night because of that fear. He had only looked into the future on purpose once and it had been horrible beyond the telling. Now he was trying to use his dreams for the same purpose, it made his insides quiver.

There was a chance that this wouldn't work, that he'd dream all night about lawn mowers and rabbits and lunch dates with the president, but once again, he wasn't counting on it. Despite almost his entire being, demanding to dream nothing but trivialities, there was a small part of him that couldn't be denied and insisted on seeing what lay ahead.

Like a single grain of sand in his lunch, or a splinter in his palm, this tiny part of him, his sense of duty, would be noticed whether he liked it or not and it would order his subconscious about.

And this occurred at 11:21.

One minute he was arranging orchids with Lisa, staring at her, seeing her belly now huge, and the next he felt an ice-cold wind sweep over him. It brought with it a familiar feel, as if he had dreamed this once before. Perplexed, thinking he was supposed to be dreaming of the future and not the past, he turned from his wife and saw the source of the cold.

He was now in an office building and in front of him was a bank of heavy steel doors, one of which stood open—he went to it, and discovered it to be an elevator. The buttons for the floors were strangely arranged with G for the ground floor at the top and the numbers counting down instead of up.

Will figured he would find what he was looking for, somewhere in the building, but didn't know for sure where, so he decided to start at the top and work his way down. He hit the lowest button, 36 and oddly, the elevator went down instead of up.

At the 18th floor, the elevator came to a halt and a man in what looked like a space suit stepped in. Will shrunk back afraid, but the man ignored him and punched 22 and four floors later, he stepped out into a dimly lit corridor and it was then that Will noticed the man's boots were huge and heavy, causing him to walk slowly in an exaggerated fashion.

Will decided to follow the man and he trailed him at a distance, agonizing over the slow pace, and long dull minutes slipped away as the man passed door after door, all of which were constructed of heavy steel. Finally, he found the door he was looking for and after pushing buttons on a numbered pad next to it, entered.

Once in, the room was a complete disappointment to Will. It held two caskets that were made of steel and glass and there was a monitor attached to each, similar to what one would find in a hospital. One of these showed what looked to be a very slow, but regular heartbeat, the other was a flat line.

"Damn!" came the muffled voice of the man as he bent over one of the caskets.

Will leaned over his shoulder peering in and saw a blonde girl of about fifteen, who looked to have frozen to death. Her lips were blue and her skin frostbit in places, was a very pale white. Will then went to the other casket, which housed a live woman of about thirty, her hair was black and her skin tan. She seemed asleep and in perfect health.

Will left.

So far the dream was meaningless as well as dull. He made his way back down the hallway checking doors as he went, they all opened under his touch, and they were all identical to the room he'd already been in, except they held live women.

Getting in the elevator, he hit 36 again and didn't plan on getting out until he reached the bottom. When he did, he wished he were wearing one of the space suits. The cold was indescribable and even though he knew he was dreaming, he was afraid of freezing to death, but there was another fear down there as well. The cold, once again, had a familiar feel and his mind kept picturing Ba'al Zubel.

Looking around he saw a long row of lockers and inside, happily, were space suits and he soon donned one feeling immediate relief from the cold. Will saw also that the lockers held oxygen tanks like a scuba diver would use and he quickly attached it to a hose at his side and slung it over his shoulder by a strap.

He was now ready, but for what? Heading away from the locker, he followed arrows on the walls until he came to an intersection where hallways met. To the right was a door that he would never walk through in his waking life.

There were danger signs of every sort written in a dozen languages: cautions not to proceed, cautions about proper gear, cautions about authorized personal and so on. He went anyways. Everything about the place so far had fairly screamed: secret military base, but he was wrong.

The door was pressurized, as was the one after that and the third. Each led to a small chamber, where the door behind would shut before the door to the front would open. Finally, he knew he would see what all the fuss was about. The last door, covered with more of the same cautions was all that stood between him and the cause of his dream and the unforgiving cold.

But he couldn't bring himself to open it.

"It's a dream, it's a dream, it's a dream," he chanted repeatedly but he still didn't move. Ba'al Zubel was on the other side. Will knew it and he didn't see any reason to go on. He knew the future now, Ba'al would be somewhere in a great underground building, what more did he need to know?

Obviously, his subconscious and his stupid sense of duty wanted more and the door in front of him began to open all by itself. The air in the room was sucked out first and he felt himself pulled to the door, almost as if her were falling sideways. Too late he read one of the caution signs about attaching a tether line to his harness.

He slipped out of the door, thankful for the weight of his boots; they gave him enough time for him to cling to a tether line by hand. The room was a gigantic steel cylinder, lit by hundreds of huge spotlights and there was a tremendous vacuum in the room, sucking him upwards and on instinct, he pulled himself up the tether and wrapped it around his arm. It was then that he felt the true presence of Ba'al.

The power of the demon made him go numb and he suddenly didn't care about the tether, or the dream. Millions of bees worked busily, buzzing throughout his mind and for how long he clung to the rope before his brain began working its way through the noise, he didn't know. But finally, feeling slow and stupid, he was able to comprehend what was around him.

Looking up he saw a tremendous column of black and dark grey smoke, many stories high. It whipped about furiously as if it were boiling when in fact, Will knew that it was cold. Colder than anything possible in nature. He felt the cold now, even through his suit, it pulled at him, making his joint stiff and his eyes water.

The smoking maelstrom was huge, over a hundred feet tall. And now he began to see the faces under the outer stratum of smoke. Layers upon layers of them. They cried and screamed in silent agony and Will suddenly felt like he was going to throw up in his helmet. He gagged and heaved, feeling sudden panic over the idea of drowning in his own vomit. He scrambled blindly for the door, his sense of duty forgotten, only the door wouldn't open. Further down, he saw another door and pulled himself upside down, feet dangling toward the great beast, along a steel cable. This door too was locked.

His hands on the cable were tiring and now the urgency to vomit was replaced with a fear of falling upwards and the more he worried over it the more he felt the exhaustion of his muscles. To relieve his hands, he hooked a leg over the cable and from that position, he saw how it ran about the gigantic room in a great circle and he guessed its purpose, but he had no tether to attach to it. However, nearby there was a person with a tether, and one who didn't really need it. His body dangled lifelessly from it, in a perpetual state of falling upwards.

Will heaved himself to the person and unfortunately was able to see into the faceplate. He screamed at the sight and thrust the body away, but like a balloon, it bobbed and came back, the face still pointing at him. It was a man and his helmet was half filled with frozen vomit and blood. His eyes looked to have exploded in his face and terrible frozen fluid hardened by the cold ran from them.

Cringing at the sight, but desperate, Will kept his face away and released the tether clamp blindly. However, he did look up to watch the man being sucked up the side of Ba'al, before it disappeared in the storm of the demon's body. With shaking hands, he attached the tether and let himself dangle for a minute, resting.

This was what he was supposed to see, he was sure. However, though he saw, he didn't understand, his mind was in a state of shock and even simple things seemed difficult to comprehend. There were questions that ran around his mind. How did Ba'al get here and how did he get so big? Where was this place? Who would do this?

Floating there wasn't going to get him answers, so when he had rested enough he pulled himself upright and looked around for a way to get out. There were more doors, higher up and more bodies. The room was huge, and sporadically about it, without apparent reason or even symmetry, bodies dangled at the end of tethers.

His stomach rolled over at the memory of the last one and he knew he would avoid getting anywhere near these others. He glided along the cable, hand over hand, until he came to another cable heading up and after carefully detaching and re-attaching his tether, he went up. Going up was easy. He was naturally being sucked upwards anyways.

About fifty feet overhead, he spied a platform jutting out from the wall and he aimed for it. He kept his back to Ba'al, refusing to look in that direction, one of the warnings had read, Remember-Face the Wall!

Will took this one seriously, wondering if the people dangling from the walls had looked at Ba'al and he didn't want to think about what they had seen. He shivered at the thought and at the dreadful cold. After a minute, he gained the platform and saw that it was enclosed in steel and heavy glass. There was a door opening out onto the great cylinder of Ba'al's chamber and mercifully, it opened as he approached. He closed it quickly behind him and didn't look back.

The room stretched in a thirty by twenty foot rectangle and unlike the rest of the facility, which was spotless, this room resembled the one beneath the chapel. Symbols and runes scrawled in what was obviously blood decorated the room, but there was no skin or entrails dangling anywhere.

However, there were a couple of noticeable differences. Just inside the door, in front of Will, a pair of heavy chains were bolted to the floor and further back in the room near another door, two caskets similar to those that he had seen, sat empty.

He guessed their purpose now. All of the girls in the caskets he had seen were alike in a few obvious ways. One of the girls would be young, a teenager, while the other could be of any age, but with features that Will now associated with gypsy. Black hair, black eyes, sallow or tan complexion.

Luke was doing, what had been done to Talitha, but on a greater scale and the immensity of the operation stunned Will and frightened him to the very core of his soul. He had seen hundreds of doors in that one hallway alone and with the thirty-six subterranean floors, there could be thousands upon thousands of girls, lying forever in this modern dungeon.

Ba'al too was greater.

He knew that the great smoking thing in the steel cylinder, wasn't in fact Ba'al, but a portal into the void, but his presence in this world was far greater. And Will worried then about the size of the portal and a new fear came to him: maybe Luke was trying to open it big enough for Ba'al to come forth onto this plane of existence.

Deciding he'd seen enough, Will tried to force himself awake, but couldn't. He even jumped up and down, but to no avail. Feeling clueless at what to do, he went to one of the caskets and sat down and waited to wake up. Likely, he'd drunk too much and as he sat, he tried to figure out how much he had drunk and he vaguely remembered the bottle at one point half-empty.

He sighed heavily and felt a sudden longing to be home in bed with Lisa. Unlike her, he wasn't much into cuddling while he slept, but he would cuddle now, if he could.

For a long while, he sat daydreaming within a dream, when he heard noise from beyond the far door. He felt a thrill of panic and jumped up; looking around he saw there would be no place to hide except for the caskets, which he ruled out immediately. So he strode to the nearest wall and leaning against it, and idled there as if in thought.

People in the space suits, perhaps twenty, marched in as if on parade and they didn't seem to notice him. The room's lights were switched on as were heaters attached to the ceiling, they bathed the room with an orange glow and Will felt the wonderful heat baking through his suit.

A woman, Will could tell by her voice, barked an order and the two smallest people came forth, one slowly.

"Ok, it's time, take off your suits." The woman commanded, she had imperial voice, which brooked no argument, and the one who had seemed quicker, stripped down; she was a girl, maybe sixteen, black hair and dark eyes. She wore what looked like a soft white jump suit and she was nervous. Her eyes flicked around the room, taking everything in but Will, who seemed invisible to them.

The other girl was Asian and young as well and she acted as if she had been drugged. Two people helped her remove her clothes and she too wore white, but she wasn't nervous, she simply stood, staring at the floor listlessly, until a moment later she was walked to one of the large symbols drawn upon the floor. There she was pushed to her knees, but still she only stared, seemingly unaware of what was going on around her.

The gypsy girl, Will considered her such, went to the symbol also, and knelt in front of the Asian.

"This is very simple. Just read the top part, like you've been taught." The imperial woman commanded, handing the gypsy a thick-yellowed piece of paper. The gypsy became more nervous, licking her lips repeatedly, but when the rest of the suited people stepped back away from her, to the wall, her fear grew and she looked like she was ready to bolt out of the room.

"Do it now or we'll find someone else who will," the woman said with a dangerous tone.

The gypsy took a deep breath. "Ok...ok, I can do this." She then read from the paper. It was a demonic language, of that Will was certain. It grated on the ears, but it went deeper than that, and sent a discordant ringing throughout his inner being. Thankfully, it was over in moments and the gypsy knelt, swallowing hard and breathing harder, as if it had been a physical trial to speak the language.

"The blood, quick!" the woman screeched.

The gypsy seemed to come alive at the voice and pulled from her white outfit a small curved dagger. Her hands were shaking and it took her a few moments to do it, but she finally cut open the palm of her left hand. She was much quicker at cutting open the Asian's hand and when she had, she grabbed the girl's hand in her own and squeezed.

The gypsy squeezed hard and the Asian clearly felt pain from it. She fell back writhing on the ground and still the gypsy squeezed, her face contorting into an evil mask, but then there was a sound from Ba'al's great cylinder room. It was like the striking of metal on metal and it vibrated through the building.

All eyes went to the windows and the black swirling mass of the portal of Ba'al seemed to be growing at an alarming rate.

"Don't just stand around, chain her, damn it!" The woman pushed at the nearest suited men and they jumped at her command.

The Asian was no longer listless, but neither was she all there mentally. She seemed terribly confused, as if she had woken from a bad dream only to find it still going on in her waking life. She struggled against the suited men, but they moved her easily forward and put her in the chains that were bolted to the floor.

The girl screamed endlessly and no one cared but Will. A part of him wanted to go to her to help her, but he was deathly afraid of Ba'al, and when the others fled the room—and that is exactly what they did, running for the door like children, Will ran too. He stayed near the back of the group and he kept looking over his shoulder at the expanding black cloud.

The door closed almost on him and against his better judgment, he turned and looked through the thick glass windows. Only one other person looked, the woman in command was just to Will's right, the rest stood huddling against the wall.

The Asian screamed on, yet now she was unheard, she struggled against the chains that bound her, only it was in vain and in moments Ba'al's form had filled the entire outer room, and that was when Will saw Ba'al, not all of him but too much of him.

The smoke swirling and eddying cleared for half a second, long enough to see that the impenetrable black at the center of the portal, wasn't impenetrable any longer.

Eight years ago, the portal had been a pinprick. Now in his dream, it was many feet across and Ba'al strained against it. Will stepped back in fear, thinking to run, thinking Ba'al would come through at any moment, but though the beast struggled against the gaping black maw, the opening was still too small.

"Damn it! Damn it! We're almost there." The woman next to him cried out. Will had a better look at her now and he could see that she was older, in her early fifties perhaps and her hair, what he could see of it, was black as were her eyes.

Gypsy.

She sighed behind the mask that hid most of her face and then nodded pleased at something. Will looked back into the room and saw that a portion of the black storm of Ba'al had slipped into the room through special vents. The Asian stopped screaming, her eyes on the death cloud as it grew in the room, and then silently it swept over her.

Seconds later, the swirling retreated and the black mass of the portal began to regain its prior size.

The woman turned to the group against the wall and said to the younger gypsy. "You did well and you are to be rewarded as I said you would." The girl nodded and then danced a crazy uncontrollable jig, as she was tasered from behind.

"You know what to do, Pablo," the woman said casually and with that, she walked off.

Will was torn between following her and finding out what they were planning next and he chose to stay with Pablo. It was a bad choice.

The men bundled up both girls and put them in the caskets; they then attached leads and began running tubes into their noses. He knew the girls would next be placed in one of the many rooms and left to rot until the end of time and he realized he should've gone with the woman.

She was the key.

Will took off after the woman, jogging as best as he was able in his heavy boots, but she was gone and soon he became lost in the maze of hallways and gave up hope of finding her.

And just then, he felt a tug.

It was a stirring of air around him and just like that, Will knew his dream was over.

Chapter 23

The Second Sight

Will came awake with a start, feeling mild alarm jangling his nerves, and sitting up, his eyes roved around the room, taking in the darker corners, looking for shapes, looking for movement. There was nothing.

He lay back with a heavy sigh. The dream hadn't been anything like what he expected and he spent a few moments replaying it in his head. Right then, he made the decision; he would see into the future to find Luke no matter what the consequences to him or to his family would be.

Except, he was afraid to.

With all of his soul, he was afraid to look. The vision of the boy and his box had been like psychic torture. It hadn't affected his body, but his brain felt branded and scarred by the vision and going through that again was the last thing he wanted to do to himself...however the idea of Ba'al in his real form, his true nature exposed for all to see, lose on earth...that would be worse.

He would look, just not by himself.

Perhaps it was hereditary, or maybe it was a sense of duty, but Will tried to be a brave man, however there was no way he could do this alone. The very thought terrified him and even if Talitha and Jim couldn't be in the vision with him, they could at least look after his body. He remembered then, how he had hit himself after the last vision and he knew he would still be hitting himself right now if Jim hadn't been there to stop him.

He got the shivers.

Feeling suddenly lonely, he kicked off the sheets, got up and pressed his ear to the adjoining door to his sister's room. He could hear water running, but no voices. A glance at his watch and the orange glow told him, 11:48pm. This was an odd time for a shower, he thought.

Still a trifle uneasy, he opened the door and the uneasiness became near panic. The place was chaos. The desk was turned upside down and thrown across the room, leaning against the door; chairs sat awkwardly kicked over, lamps laid about on their sides. The bed's sheets and blankets were tangle in a mass and Jim Anderson lay asleep naked half under them.

Will's feeling of near panic shifted gears quickly and he slipped into outrage. He had point blank begged Jim to stay awake and the man had lied right to his face and said he would.

"What the hell is this?" Will didn't scream it. He was holding back his fury by only the smallest of threads. It came out instead in a terrible growl.

Jim barely budged, but did emit a low groan as if he were suffering from a hangover.

Will kicked him.

He kicked him hard too. Right on the big man's thigh and this got Jim moving a little more and groaning a second time. Will thought about Talitha allowing this and his rage increased. How many times did he go out of his way for her? Countless!

He stormed to the bathroom and without knocking, he barged in. He had seen her naked so many times; it almost didn't matter to either one of them anymore.

"Talitha! What..." He stopped in mid-yell.

She sat huddled under the shower, still fully clothed, her black dress soaked and clinging. Steaming hot water poured off her, but she didn't seem to care.

Never had there been a more wretched girl.

The water from the shower couldn't hide her tears and when she looked up, he plainly saw the misery in her eyes. There was only one explanation as to what had happened and he turned to wreak vengeance on Jim.

"Will!" she called out to him, but it went unheeded. There was a red veil in front of his eyes and black storm clouds in his mind. He left the bathroom and Jim was standing there, right in front of him, naked, his face already caked in blood.

Will was big. Jim was bigger, but Will had an unmatched fury and Will's balled fist struck Jim hard square on the nose, crushing it. The punch sent Jim reeling, tripping backwards and he fell over the edge of the bed.

"Will!" a voice called from behind him.

He ignored her a second time and as Jim was struggling to his feet, Will took a page from Talitha's playbook and sent a roundhouse into Jim's ribs. There was a satisfying crunch as he felt his foot break bones.

Jim's mouth opened, to perhaps groan, yet no sounds came out at all. His eyes bulged and he fell back down fighting for breath. Will went to grab him by his hair, and that was when Talitha jumped on him. It wasn't an attack or he would very likely have seen it coming. Instead, she leaped on his back and hugged him hard, pinning his arms to his sides.

"It's not his fault! Will, you have to listen to me, it's not his fault!" Talitha spoke rapidly into his ear. He heard the words, but they came to him from out of a fog and he paused as his mind tried to understand, then oddly, he over balanced and fell sideways onto the bed.

Like a bull rider, Talitha leapt off before she was pinned beneath him. She righted herself faster than he could and as he made to get up, she chucked a pillow into his face.

"Will, stop it," she cried, then ironically threw another pillow.

"You stop it! That hurt." The first pillow had struck him full on the face and his broken nose, which he had suffered at her hands that afternoon was still extremely sensitive. He knocked the second pillow aside with ease, and as he advanced on her and she hopped toward the bathroom.

"This isn't what it seems," she pleaded in a soothing voice.

"What? I know what I saw!" Will cried, his anger cooling, only slightly.

"What happened was..." her face collapsed back into misery and she couldn't go on and for a moment the room was quiet except for Will's heavy breathing and the sound of the shower still going full force in the bathroom.

"I raped your sister, I'm sorry." Jim was on his hands and knees, bleeding into the carpet.

"Sorry!" Will's fury was back in an instant. "How can you say sorry? Was it a fucking accident?" He roared at Jim, who refused to look up or defend himself in any way. Will began to head toward him, but Talitha ran in front of him and put up her hand, stopping him.

"It was the other Talitha." His sister explained without force in her tired voice and her face became blank and staring.

It reminded him of how the Asian girl looked in his dream and he blinked then, slowly, feeling odd. "You couldn't tell the difference?" he demanded of Jim, dumbfounded and feeling a little woozy.

"How could he have?" Talitha asked. "I started it. I kissed him...I don't know, I guess I shouldn't have. But that's what brought Evil T out."

"Evil T?" At the sound of the stupid name, Will had to suppress sudden maniacal laughter welling up huge inside of him, and he realized then, that he was still drunk.

"And really I didn't know, I swear. She was very quiet, she barely talked or anything...until the end." Jim tried to explain, apparently to the floor. He still wouldn't look up.

"I know," Talitha said, figuring he was talking to her.

"I'm sorry," Jim spoke again to the floor.

"I know." With that, an uncomfortable silence laid a hold of them. No one moved a muscle, not even to look around. For the next minute, the motel room was like a piece of modern art, the kind that would be featured in a magazine, but no one in their right mind would ever own.

Finally Will declared without emotion, "I dreamed about the end of the world."

This animated the scene.

Jim crawled to his clothes and began pulling them on, while Talitha took a step toward the bed, had second thoughts and then went and sat on the floor against the wall. Will sat down heavily on the bed and told them of his dream, leaving off the part about Lisa and the flowers, as well as the frozen vomit and blood mixture he had seen in the tethered man's helmet.

He tried to recall every important facet, still Talitha wanted more information from him, asking many insightful questions, few of which he could answer. Jim only sat glumly holding a towel to his face and didn't say a word.

At first Jim's silence and haunted expression grated on Will; the man acted as if he was the one who had been raped. But it sunk in slowly that in fact, he had been raped, just not in the violent way that people generally think of when they hear the word. And what's worse, he'd been turned into rapist at the same time he had been raped himself.

Will wanted to reach out to him and comfort him in some way, but he couldn't, not with his victim sitting right in front of him.

For her part, Talitha refused to look anywhere near him, acting as if he wasn't even in the room. "So you didn't see Luke at all?" she asked. This wasn't one of her insightful questions, though it was the only one she had repeated.

"The answer is still no."

"Ok, so you try to dream into the future to find out what Luke is going to do and you see Ba'al Zubel instead...they have to be connected. One leading to the next...right?" She was unsure of herself. And Will was definitely unsure of himself and he only shrugged. "So where does that leave us?" she wondered aloud.

She knew where it led, he could see it in her eyes, only she didn't want to come out and say it. And neither did he. There was now the old familiar pain, the toothache behind his breastbone. His fear made him ache.

"I'm way too sober," he suddenly got up, heading to his room. To his dismay, he saw the bottle of Wild Turkey lying, keeled over on its side. It was like seeing a dog hit by a car.

"Oh God!" He raced over and picked it up gently, and mournfully looked at the tiny amount of amber fluid left. He let out a long slow breath and then upended the bottle into his mouth.

"Crap!" He was angry with himself for having spilled the bottle and he was angry with himself for being such a wuss. Mostly he was afraid. "I should've done this right when I woke up." This he said quietly and to no one in particular.

Talitha came in then, followed a few seconds later by the now mute Jim, who seemed resigned to be hated.

"I'm out," he held up his bottle to them, wagging it about but then he looked at it solemnly. It was like a totem to him, one that had lost its magic. Tears sprang to his eyes and he laughed with unconvincing gaiety. "Ha, ha, ha...oh jeez."

Talitha sat next to him, making his side wet with her clothes. "You don't have to do this...maybe Luke and Ba'al are unrelated."

"Right," he said sarcastically and then rubbed his face up and down vigorously, ending with hands covering his face. "I'm too afraid. It's like asking someone to jump off a building. I'm looking over the edge and I can't bring myself to do it." His leg started bouncing, jiggling a mad uncontrollable dance.

"Of course you're afraid, only a fool wouldn't be," Talitha commiserating with him.

Will gave her a look. "Wait, you've called me a fool like twenty times in the last week. Does that mean I should or shouldn't be afraid?"

"Exactly," she agreed.

He laughed out more tears. "Maybe I'm a stupid fool."

"What can we do to help you?" Her sincerity was so genuine, that it made his heart break a little and he remembered then, how only a short time ago he had wanted to kill her. It took his breath away and he clutched her to him hugging her fiercely all the while crying.

"Maybe you shouldn't do this," she whispered through tears of her own.

"No. I'm doing it, I'm doing it!" He punched his fist into his left hand three times, trying to pump himself up and he took a couple of huge breaths. "Don't let me go over thirty seconds! Wake me or shake me, whatever you got to do, but no more than thirty seconds, ok?" He waited until she nodded and then continued, "Here we go, on the count of three...1-2-3!" He took another big breath in and...nothing.

He couldn't bring himself to do it.

"Ok this time for real, but I'm not going to count," he laughed, embarrassed and nervous and scared. "I felt like a kid doing it that way." Talitha smiled and nodded, concern infiltrating her eyes.

Will became quiet and held his hands to his chest so they wouldn't shake so badly. He stared at the floor breathing, trying to relax and finally he closed his eyes, though it was still a few seconds before he allowed himself to look.

...She looked through the peephole, but there was a peach colored glow blocking it. However, it was moving and she guessed he was fingering the crest that the peephole sat within.

"Who is it?" Terry figured it to be Father Luke, he had just called only an hour before. Still she liked to be sure especially at this time of night.

"Father Luke," he replied pleasantly. He had been so cryptic and urgent on the phone that this pleasant voice caused her to pause for a second before opening the door, but it was a short pause and she undid the heavy bolt.

"Hi, what's going on?" she asked cheerily as was usual for her, but upon seeing him, she became concerned. "Is everything ok? You look like, you got in a fight." The priest sported a number of small bandages about his face, and there was a very large one across his neck, which she eyed with a feeling of misgiving.

"This is actually the reason I needed to see you so urgently. Can we talk inside?" She had only opened the door so much; she was a cautious girl.

"I'd rather not, it's so late."

He moved in a little closer and spoke in a conspiratorial whisper, "These cuts...this has to do with your brother, Frederick. It's not something you would want overheard."

"Rick?" Terry opened the door and took a quick peek down the hall, hers was a garden level apartment and kids sometimes hung out on the stairs, but no one was around and she let the priest in. "What's going on with Rick?" she asked once the door closed.

He punched her in the side of the head. It landed so fast that she didn't see it coming.

She didn't really feel pain, not then at least, she was too shocked and confused and numb. Her legs buckled and the next thing she knew, she was on the ground and he was on top of her, hitting her again and again in the head. How many times she hadn't a clue, but she knew she didn't pass out. However, it was a very near thing.

After a while, he stopped and peered into her face.

Her apartment swam in circles around her and she couldn't figure out what just happened. Her brain felt like mush and for a moment, she wondered if she had fallen off a ladder or a chair. She vaguely recalled being punched, but she couldn't connect it with anything, certainly not with the face leering over her. Her eyes started to focus on the face, it was full of concern or so it seemed, but he struck her again on the temple.

Terry's head spun to the side, her cheek slapping the floor and now she could barely focus on the linoleum just in front of her. Her body felt miles away and far beyond her ability to control, though she did feel rough hands yanking hard at her pajama pants, pulling them down. For a second, there was a cool breeze between her legs and then she felt his fingers in her, wiggling about.

Even then she didn't struggle or fight back; she was too weak and bewildered. The best she could do was to put her hands down there and push feebly at the fingers exploring inside her.

"Good...good everything is still where it needs to be." The words floated into her head and she heard, yet did not understand.

Father Luke, who befriended her over a year ago, who had always treated her with such respect, had a knife in one hand and a picture in the other and helped her understand what was going on. He tapped her lightly on the face a few times until she began to focus again.

"Can you hear me, Terry?" he asked softly. She was weak and could do little, but nod her head and that was when pain started to drift in on low thumping waves within her skull.

"Listen carefully," he continued, "if you scream, I'll cut your throat. Do you understand?"

It took a few seconds for the words to be interpreted and in those few seconds, she felt the pain washing through her head growing and she realized her fear. It had been there from the first punch waiting patiently to express itself and now it took command of her body and she felt it more than she did the pain.

"Y-Y-Yes. W-What do..."

"Sshhh, no talking. Just listen," he said, still calm and deadly. "When I show you this picture, you will want to scream, but don't. I want you to remember something. This is your fault. I wanted to meet at Roger's park, but you said it was too late. So now, since you couldn't walk five minutes..." he left off angry and cryptic again. Her terror grew even more intense and her brow knit in fearful expectation of what the picture would show.

"If you do exactly what I say, nothing will happen to him. Do you believe me?" he asked. She didn't know what he was talking about, and she surely didn't believe him, but felt she had no choice but to nod and he continued softly, "Remember, no screaming." He showed her the picture. It was of a boy. He was bent over a high backed chair, tied to it with kite string, and the string dug deep into the boy's soft flesh. It was her brother Rick.

Will split at that point.

He had been Theresa "Terry" Brabec, age 19, catholic, freshmen at Boston College, and still a virgin.

However now, Will was Fredrick "Rick" Brabec, age 11, catholic, 6th grade at Eastmore Elementary. Deceased.

Rick woke up to the sound of a glass breaking and a crash of some sort from downstairs.

It wasn't a clunk that you would hear if a chair had tipped over, but a crash. For a second he froze in bed, slightly nervous, however when no other sound came, he relaxed and discovered that he had to pee quite badly. He knew he'd never get back to sleep, trying to hold back this much pee.

So he slipped out of his bedroom, heading for the bathroom that he once shared with Terry, but now thankfully, had all to himself. Sharing the bathroom was the one thing he didn't miss about her. She had been so messy, with her ten thousand cases of lipstick and her curling irons and her blow dryers and the rest of her girly junk.

All Rick had ever needed was a bar of soap and a toothbrush, both of which he kept in pristine condition, using them as seldom as possible after the fashion of most boys.

What he missed most about her, something he wasn't prepared for when she moved out was her reassuring presence, especially at night. The house seemed much, much quieter with her gone and in the last two months he had become a little afraid of the dark. Not a lot. Just enough to make him nervous.

Therefore, it became his habit at night, to move a trifle slower, with a little more caution, to casually glance down a hall before moving down it. He made a game of it, playing of all things, secret service and that night, was no different.

"Termite, this is falcon. The hallway is clear, but we have information, the Ruskies are after the president. Be advised," he said quietly into the imagined microphone attached to his pajama top. With that, he padded down the hallway, keeping to the wall, his gun: the fingers of his right hand, held out in front of him.

The bathroom was at the top of the stairs, and as always he took a peek down them before going in.

"Termite this..." He stopped in mid broadcast. His mom was at the bottom of the stairs, kneeling, looking out of a window—the low one that afforded a very good view into Tish Hannigan's back yard. She was an eighth grader and had recently been classified as "Hot."

Rick Brabec had a paradigm of his mother, how she moved, how she talked, what she did on day to day basis, these things defined her in his world. However, her kneeling, sticking her head out of the window at ten thirty at night didn't fit into that pattern. And thus it was a moment before he realized her position was odd and that the window wasn't in fact open, but broken.

"Mom? What are you..." A shadow moved across her body and Rick jumped back.

"Hello Fredrick, I'm Father Luke." The man, a priest by his attire and introduction, had appeared from their dining room and casually stepped over his kneeling mother and started up the stairs toward him. The priest's face was bandaged in places and his blue eyes were hard as steel.

Rick became instantly afraid, however he had been taught from a very early age that priests were to be respected. With that in mind, he didn't flee as every nerve in his body demanded, but instead forced a small smile onto his mouth.

"What's my mom doing?" he asked attempting to peek around the priest.

"Praying of course. Tell me, do you have a camera?" Father Luke had a nice voice.

"Yeah, it's in my room, right...phoooo." Father Luke hit him hard in the stomach and all the air went out of him. Even as his eyes bugged and he doubled over, the priest scooped him up and set him on his shoulder.

He was carried down the hall and thrown on to his bed.

"Where the hell is it?" the priest demanded. However, Rick wasn't in any position to answer. His face was a terrible red and his chest was hitching in a jerking motion as he desperately tried to suck in air.

"Fuck. Why does this happen to me?" He heard the priest say angrily.

Rick, lying on his bed, had balled up in pain from the punch, but now the man yanked his legs down roughly and then laying over him, pulled his arms up, stretching him out.

Terror overwhelmed Rick, the instinctual terror of suffocation and he would've screamed if he could, but his lungs were closed to him. He struggled to breathe, trying to force his lungs to pull in air, but he only managing a tiny repetitive hih, hih, hih, sound high in his chest. The man produced a knife; it appeared out of nowhere and like a magic trick it had the amazing effect of relaxing the muscles in Rick's diaphragm.

He forgot for the moment that he couldn't breathe; his whole focus became the knife.

It was a familiar knife, one that he'd handled many times. It was one of their three remaining steak knives, part of a set that his family had from before his earliest memory.

It was a dull knife. It had lost its edge years before and when Rick ever had to use it, it would be with a saw like motion, even on tender meat that still bled warm juices. However, it still had a fine point. It was a dull silver-grey and just then, it took up most of the vision in his left eye.

The priest had it extremely close, and Rick pushed his head back into his mattress as far as it would go, but the knife still seemed horribly near.

"This may sound odd, but I hate lying," the man said, and Rick could make out his face, beyond the point of the knife. The face didn't look angry as he had expected, but seemed blank, emotionless.

"I didn't lie, it wasn't me, it wasn't me," Rick began blubbering, crying without moving. He held perfectly still as the tears ran down his face and his chin quivered uncontrollably.

"Sshhh," the man hushed him, but it wasn't his voice that shut Rick up, the knife came closer and when he blinked, Rick felt the blade with his eyelashes. He had a new panic flash through him then. His neck was straining, pushing his head into the mattress, but it was weakening, and he feared that he wouldn't be able to hold it back much longer and that when he couldn't, he would drive his own eye onto the dull silver-grey point.

"You said you had a camera," the man interrupted his dreadful thoughts. "Do you have film?"

Rick almost nodded, almost sending the point of the knife into his own eye, instead he whimpered high, but weak, "Y-Yes, it's in my desk...in one of the drawers."

"Good. Now, I meant what I said about lying. If there's no camera, this is going in your eye and if you scream..." he left off and Rick had no intention of screaming.

The man went to the desk. "Excellent." He seemed happy as he pulled the camera from the jumble of the second drawer. Rick felt a few seconds of relief and laid there on his bed trembling, and hopeful that this was all over.

"Say cheese," the priest pointed the camera at him, but saying cheese was beyond Rick and his only reaction was for his eyes to widen as his relief left him. The priest no longer resembled anything like a priest. His clothes were the same, but it was the eyes. They were the eyes of a dangerous creature. At eleven years old, Rick only partially understood the concept of insanity, but he was still new enough in this world not to have unlearned the concept of evil.

And those eyes were evil.

The flash of the camera blinded him for a moment and when he could see again, the man was right above him staring down, looking at him in a way that made Rick begin to pant in fear.

The man looked for a long time.

But then he smiled, shook the Polaroid a few times, and glanced at it. "No, this is all wrong." The man knelt down and showed the picture to Rick. "Can you work with me here? You barely look afraid."

"I am afraid. Please don't..."

"Shut up!" Luke yelled savagely and Rick cringed back, fresh tears adding to the ones wetting his pillow. The flash went off and he let out a half scream and suddenly the knife was back. He closed his eyes hard, but his left one was rudely peeled open and he was forced to stare up the serrated edge of the knife, the line of dull metal teeth echoing in sameness along its length.

"I told you not to scream! What's with you and your family? First your dumb ass sister won't leave her apartment and then your idiot mom wouldn't..." He gave a little laugh. "You know, your mom wouldn't give me the camera. I thought she was being so stupid, trying to protect it, as if it was sooo valuable. But she was trying to protect you. Good for her."

The knife withdrew, as did the fingers holding his eye open and Rick closed them, hard. He didn't move, except to ball up again and he felt a sudden urge to suck his thumb. His hands were tucked just under his chin and he gave into the urge.

The man moved about the room opening and closing the drawers of his dresser and desk, searching his things, and all the while Rick laid, rolled into a ball, unmoving, save for the shaking of his arms and legs. He kept his eyes shut tight, afraid to open them, afraid of what he would see when he did.

Rick tried his best to be small, to be inconsequential, to be something easily missed and forgotten, but he failed at this.

A moment later, he felt the man standing over him again and his fear became everything. It settled into his bones, deep in the marrow and dug in anchors. Despite all of his attempts not to, he began to cry harder, though he still kept his eyes clamped shut with manic intensity. He kept picturing the knife there, poised just above his eye.

However, the man didn't stab him. He hit him hard in the side of the head with his fist. The blow was so unexpected and delivered with such force, that all of his muscle relaxed immediately, and he went limp almost fluidly so, but he was still conscious.

His eyes came open and the bedroom spun about, literally. He was picked up, turned around, and dropped heavily onto the wood chair that had come with his desk. He hadn't felt much pain before, only shock, but now the pain was huge. With his every breath, it raced across his chest, and again he felt the panic of suffocation. He tried to push himself up, but the priest was there, kneeling in front of his face.

"I can't breathe," he said to the man in a panicky half-breath.

"If you can talk, you can breathe," the man responded, and then grabbed Rick's left wrist and tied it to the back of the chair. He was using a spool of Rick's kite string and he cinched it down very tight, it pinched the skin and the pain was sharp and nasty, and for a moment, Rick forgot about the pain in his chest.

He watched as the priest struggled to cut away the string with the dull knife and a little voice inside of him, prayed to die right there. His other hand was tied just as cruelly and then his ankles as well.

The man stood behind him for a few moments and Rick felt terribly exposed, unable in any way to defend himself or even to squirm. His tears rained down in front of him, but disappeared, swallowed up in the old shag carpet.

"No, you don't have time for this," the man said it quietly, to himself. He then moved to Rick's side and paused until Rick looked up at him. That's when he took the picture.

"Perfect," Luke said, smiling at it. But then, he smiled down at Rick and his eyes were like pools filling with wickedness, deeper and deeper. He knelt to face Rick and grabbed up a pair of his socks. They were balled up, something his mother always insisted upon, something that had been important to her, Rick had never understood it.

"I've decided that we do have time after all." This caused a fresh stir of panic in Rick, he looked up into the man's eyes and saw raw evil in them, and even at eleven years old, Rick could see his own death there.

"Open your mouth wide...wider!" He brought the knife up and Rick's mouth went open its widest, the sock was shoved in, far back, too far, and Rick lost control of himself. He couldn't breathe and he struggled horribly around the sock and this time he felt he would certainly suffocate and in desperation, he whipped his head back and forth.

But he didn't suffocate.

However, the agonies of the sadistic atrocities he'd suffer in the next few minutes, culminating with that cruelly dull steak knife, sawing at his neck, had Will wishing he had.

Chapter 24

The Search for Terry

Around the time that the brother and sister had been discussing looking into the future, Jim decided that he would burden them as little as possible with his presence. There seemed to be no reason for him to speak and barely any reason for him to even think, and he kept in the doorway that adjoined the rooms, where the possibility of escape from his tremendous shame was only a few steps away.

The darkened room where his crime had taken place beckoned him, tempting him to hide there, amidst the wreckage that a giggling girl had wrought.

However, Jim was too principled, too much of a man to hide from his sin. He had apologized and it had not been accepted. This was a good thing in his mind. He deserved to be punished; what he had unwittingly done had been too much for a simple, "I'm sorry" to fix. It didn't matter that it had been...an accident?

Could he honestly call what had happened an accident?

No, it wasn't an accident; he'd been played as a fool perfectly. The other Talitha had used his amazing stupidity and his obvious love to destroy any chance he'd ever have with the one girl that seemed so right, so perfect.

Just then Will punched his own hand three times sharply right in a row and Jim smiled. He wasn't smiling at poor Will, who was trying to get himself mentally prepared to look into the future, he was smiling at his last thought. It was a bitter smile, full of self-loathing. Who was he fooling? He never had a chance with Talitha, not in a million years.

A long sigh, heavy with emotion and weariness, slipped out of him then. It was loud, but seemed to go unnoticed as Will spoke.

"Ok, this time for real, but I'm not going to count," he laughed, embarrassed. "I felt like a kid doing it that way."

Now Will closed his eyes and seemed to relax and Jim tensed, expecting the same fireworks as had occurred earlier that afternoon, but nothing happened. At least, not right away. He simply fell back onto the mattress, as if asleep and his eyelids fluttered every few seconds. Very quickly, it seemed, the thirty seconds that Will had wished to be his limit for seeing into the future, were up. Talitha checked her watch and then his pulse.

"Should I wake him up?" she asked Jim, but her face never left her brother.

Jim poured out his soul: Talitha, you have to believe me! I would never have done that to you, had I known. Never in a million years would I do anything to hurt you and you don't have to say anything or even forgive me, but I want you to know, I'm truly sorry.

This is what he wanted urgently to say above anything else, but instead, he whispered, "I dunno."

She sagged at the two words and then turned toward him; still she didn't look up into his face. "Jim...we've gone through something that would normally take some time for us to come to terms with. However, I don't think we have that much time." Here she paused and finally looked at him, but now it was his turn to glance away. His shame was too great to meet her eyes.

"Jim, look at me," she commanded softly. He did and saw that her face was pinched and strained, but also hard. "For now, let's put what happened behind us and deal with my brother, ok?"

"Yeah," his voice was still a whisper.

She turned away again. "This," she indicated her brother, "isn't how it was this afternoon was it? Your description of his actions is completely different."

"Yeah...he was talking to me and...you know, seemed more aware. Then he went crazy, like I said."

"Right. That's why I am loath to wake him just yet. Perhaps he hasn't come to the portion of his vision that has relevance." She said this slowly with calm reasoning, but her anxiety was mounting and she rechecked her watch.

After another long minute of silence dragged out between them, with Will still only lying there with an occasional twitch, she said nervously, "It's been long enough. Will...hey Will!" She shouted at him. He didn't stir and she then climbed up on the bed next to him and shook him gently at first, but then with more energy as he failed to respond.

"Will, wake up!" she yelled into his face, but then turned back to Jim and there was a hysteria written across her features. "Something's different, you have to tell me what it is."

Jim saw nothing different except for the location and he didn't think that was the issue. "I don't know," he blurted out.

"That's not good enough. You have to..." she stopped in mid-sentence as air exploded out of Will in a rush and the man's face went bright red.

"Will...Will?" Talitha's eyes shot wide in alarm. "Oh my God, he's not breathing." She gave him a quick violent shake that had his head flopping about and then peered into his face, but only for a second. She then dragged him off the bed and onto the floor and it was then that they noticed he had begun breathing again. It was light and high up in his throat, but it was still breathing.

"Will?" she asked with a little hesitating voice, there was no response. One at a time, she peeled back his eyes, holding her hand close and then pulling it away again looking for a reaction, but if she got one, Jim didn't see it.

"Fill that coffee pot with cold water," she commanded. He rushed for it and she called out, "Please think. What's different?"

This made Jim crazy with frustration and he gripped his head in both hands. "I don't know. He looked into the future, that's all I know." Leaving a wet trail, he brought the pot to her and she poured it over her brother's face, slow and deliberate.

His body reacted, coughing weakly, but he was still gone mentally and Jim forgot his own troubles for a while as he stared down at the comatose man. "Should we call an ambulance?" he asked.

"No, this is beyond them." Talitha looked up at him then and set her face into an odd smile, one that pleaded with him, and she spoke soothingly, "This may not help at all, I don't want you to feel any pressure. Did he say anything different? Did he speak in another language at all before looking?" Jim slowly shook his head at her and she went on, "Ok, how about you go down, who, what, why, where and how. Take your time, think slowly."

Slowly was his only option when it came to thinking.

He had always considered himself smarter than anyone around him ever believed he was, not that he felt he was a genius, instead at least average. But not around Talitha. When her eyes shown his way, it was as if a piano had landed on him, which is to say he felt his mind filled with hundreds of discordant notes and half notes that lingered, thrumming loudly. It made for difficult thinking.

"The who is different. Before he was looking for you, not Luke," he said and she nodded encouragingly at this. "The uh, what...what, he didn't have a what this afternoon. He was all about finding out where you were going to be."

"But now," she reasoned, and her eyes shot back to her brother. "He does have a what. He said he wanted to know what Luke was going to do."

"Luke is a monster," Jim cried in dismay. "You saw what he did to those boys." The hideous memory came back to him, making him go weak and he went to the bed and sat down, staring at nothing.

Talitha looked down at her brother appalled and suddenly cried hard, sobbing. "No, please no," she moaned repeatedly, and Jim longed to comfort her in some way, but felt he would make it worse if he were to touch her.

Another minute passed, it had now been six since Will first closed his eyes and it was then that the air shot from his body again, it was less forceful, but equally as startling and Jim jumped a little at the sound.

Talitha leaned back over him, dripping her tears across his face, "Will? Please come back, please. Don't leave me, please." Her begging shook Jim up and he had to choke back tears of his own and resist again the urge to go to her. For the next ten minutes, she knelt that way, over the still breathing form of her brother and those minutes stretched out in helpless misery as visions of the bound boys kept invading Jim's mind.

Eventually Will began to twitch and make choking sounds deep in his throat, and this ended Talitha's tears. She no longer looked upon him helplessly, and now seemed poised for action, but there was as yet nothing for her to do.

Will's choking became more pronounced with his Adam's apple working its way up and down, spasming under the skin of his neck so rapidly that it didn't seem humanly possible. His high rapid breathing changed as well, it now more resembled the ragged sputtering of an old car's engine, and it would start and stop in an erratic manner.

"Jim, the lamp on the desk, unplug it and give it to me." There was no denying her authority when she spoke like that, and he hopped from his sitting position and got it for her.

With one hand on her brother's neck, checking the pulse, she took the lamp with her other and then did the oddest thing: she took the lamp's cord in her mouth, and pulled the lamp back sharply leaving the cord dangling between her teeth. It had been quite a bit like a soldier in a war movie, biting the pin from a grenade.

Casually, she tossed aside the ruined lamp and took the end of the cord that still bore her teeth marks and bit it again. She then pulled the cord slowly from between her teeth and he saw an inch of gleaming copper at the end of the cord.

Spitting out the excess rubber coating, she ordered, "Pull the desk back, and when I tell you to, plug the cord in."

"What? Why?" Jim asked, taking his end of the cord and pulling back the desk.

"Just in case his heart stops. I'll try to jump it back to life," she said and then bent her head to his chest, listening.

"Will that work?"

"Probably not," she stated matter-of-factly, still listening to his heart. Jim was more worried about Will's breathing: the intermittent hitching had become a little bubbling gurgle. And soon, that ended as well in one tiny lonely sigh.

Talitha was obviously worried about his breathing also. "Will!" she yelled into his face and gave him another of her heavy shakes. "His pulse is weakening, get ready to plug that in." The cord had sat limply in his huge hands as he knelt at the outlet waiting.

There was a pause as she waited to see if his chest would rise on its own. When it didn't, she bent down and plugging Will's nose, tried to blow air into his lungs. However, there was something wrong and she looked instead to be blowing up a balloon. Her cheeks were puffed out and red and she sat back with a gasp.

"Huh?" She seemed for a moment perplexed and then she ran her hands along his neck. "Layrngospasm," she said to Jim and before he could ask what that was, she bent to breathe again. This time her free hand went to Will's neck and she squeezed it firmly and as she breathed, her brother's chest rose.

She paused, her hand on his neck slipping down to his carotid artery to check for a pulse and her eyes widened with a touch of excitement. "He still has a pulse; it's light, but still there. We just have to find away to get him to breathe on..." She stopped talking, Will's chest had raised a tiny amount on its own.

Talitha then began to gently massage his neck and his breathing became heavier, "Will? Hey Willy J sleepy head are you in there?" she asked with hope.

A few seconds later, his eyes fluttered open, he immediately began to choke, and stare about in a half confused panic. He then kicked back away from Talitha, hacking and coughing.

"Will, it's Talitha, the good Talitha. Jim is right here too, ok? You're going to be alright." Understanding came to him in slow degrees and he wilted back onto the carpet still holding his throat and breathing in long exaggerated breaths.

Talitha and Jim went to stand over him, looking concerned. "There you go, just try to breathe normally. We'll wait until you are ready to talk about what happened..." she began.

"No!" He had to force the word out and it was low and raspy as if he were struggling with a terrible cold. He swallowed, which looked to pain him. "We have to go now."

Talitha gave Jim a surprised look and as she helped her unsteady brother to his feet asked, "What's going on? What did you see?"

"Not yet, I'll tell you in the car. Jim, my coat please, it's right next to you." Jim went to hand over the garment and that was when the black pistol slipped from the inner pocket and clunked heavily to the floor.

There was then a moment as all three of them eyed the thing and considered the many implications that it represented. With sudden moves, they all went for it, but Talitha was smooth and quick and she had it in the palm of her hand in a flash.

Jim's breath caught in his throat and he cast a quick eye at Will and saw alarm replacing the last dregs of the fear from his vision, but Talitha seemed innocently unaware of the two men's feelings and without a pause, held out the gun to Will.

"Thanks," he said shakily and smiled at her just a little. He then took the coat and left, hurrying to the car, leaving Jim and Talitha to catch up.

As they came up to it, Jim asked, "Where are we going?"

Will paused and with a puzzled expression, gazed out through the drizzle, at the cars parked around the motel.

Talitha looked askance at Jim before blurting out, "You don't know?"

"Sshhh." Will held his hand out to her to shut her up. "She went to Boston College...and lives five minutes from Roger's park."

"Who are you talking about?" Talitha asked giving Jim another look, a wide-eyed one that told him she was worried where this was going to take them.

"She's my sis..." Will's eyes opened wide for a second and then said, "Uh, a girl that Luke has kidnapped, not just a girl, but a virgin," he added ominously and then squinting into the low rain asked. "Is it a full moon?"

Jim looked up, but Talitha didn't need to. "Yes, and we can rule that out as a coincidence," she said quietly. "He's going to try to bring back Ba'al tonight, is an easy guess."

There was a pause and then they all scrambled hurriedly into the car, with Jim driving and Talitha in the passenger seat. Jim headed for the highway that would take him to Boston College.

"Where too?" he asked looking into the rear view mirror.

"All I know is that it's an apartment building that's five minutes from Roger's Park. Do you know where that is?" Will voice was still raspy but getting clearer.

"There are a couple of parks near the college and I'm pretty sure I know which one it is, but there are a lot of apartment buildings down there. Do you have an address or the name of the place?" Jim asked.

"No," was all he said. Talitha turned to stare at him in shock and Will protested. "It's not my fault. All I know is that it's five minutes from that park."

"By car or on foot?" Talitha asked.

"On foot...definitely on foot," he responded.

She waited for him to continue and when he didn't, irritation crept into her voice, "Please think, what else was in the vision? Was there mail lying around? A credit card statement? A post card on the fridge. Was there a view from one of the windows?"

He hesitated before answering, lingering over his vision and he paled noticeably while he did so. "My sis...damn it! Terry lives below ground, what do you call that?"

"In a basement," Jim suggested.

"He's referring to a garden level apartment," Talitha explained as if there could be no other answer.

Will became excited, "Yes exactly. And there was something on the peephole, a crest..." He went on to describe the vision in detail.

"You keep wanting to call this girl...Terry, you want to call her your Sister. I've heard it twice." Talitha stated. It wasn't a question, but it still seemed to demand an answer.

"When I'm in my dreams and visions, I become the person totally. So for the time I was Rick, Terry was my sister, not you."

"You have bad luck in sisters," Talitha spoke sadly.

"Not totally." He gave her a reassuring smile and when she smiled her thanks back, he added, "I still have Katie."

"Hey!" Now she smiled in fake indignation and the moment was a light one, but it didn't last and slowly all of their smiles faded into grim looks.

Jim was slightly confused about what happened and when, but was too embarrassed to say anything. Part of the reason of his confusion was that his mind kept straying to Talitha. He kept thinking about what had happened, trying to figure out at what point the other Talitha had shown up. But it was all a blur to him and it only left him with a sick guilty feeling.

"Jim? It's going to be soon," Talitha prompted him.

"Which part, the boy or wait... I'm confused," Jim finally admitted.

Talitha patted him on the arm. "Will looked into the future and saw Terry being kidnapped by Luke. Luke showed Terry a photograph of her brother, which he took earlier this evening in order to keep her quiet and that photograph triggered a second vision by Will, but this time it wasn't a vision of the future, but of the past. He saw Luke attacking Terry's brother...are you following me?"

"I think so. Will saw Luke attack Rick, take his picture, and then kill him. That happened in real life, about an hour ago. He also saw Luke attack Terry and kidnap her. That hasn't happened yet, but will in the next ten minutes or so." She nodded and Jim rubbed his head. "That's confusing."

"I agree, but our job is simple. Find the apartment, stop Luke, save the girl. Now, can't you go any faster?"

Jim shook his head. "I can't. I've had it floored this whole time." The old station wagon was dreadfully slow at top speed, but what was worse and they would find this out in a few minutes, was its acceleration rate.

"Down there, those buildings all lit up. That's the campus. I think the park is just beyond it about a mile." Jim pointed, turning off the highway. A half a mile from the park Talitha had him turn parallel to it and they began searching apartment buildings.

"Will, what about those coming up on the right?" Talitha called out as they came up on the first. A tall brick building, which seemed dark and broody, lit only sporadically on its front. "Never mind, no garden level; go Jim," she added with a little touch of anxiety.

He didn't need the encouragement, he had already floored the gas pedal, but the car was so sluggish, it barely chugged along and picked up speed slowly.

Again, it was Talitha who spotted the next apartment building, "There's another one, a block down." She seemed to see well past the range of the headlamps and even the thick misty rain didn't limit her vision noticeably.

This apartment turned out to be a bust also, as were the next three they found, not one having a garden level. However, the one after that did and they raced from the car like television cops, Will completing the image, running with the pistol in his hand. They found the doors locked and just as Talitha made to kick it in, Will told her it was the wrong place. He had been peeking through a window and saw there were no crests like the one he had seen on the any of the doors.

Without a word, they ran back.

Jim began to feel like a fading yo-yo. With every new building, his hopes would rise within him and with every bust, they would sink back down. But after fifteen minutes, the highs didn't get to high and the lows were getting lower.

"We're too late," Will spoke dejectedly. "I know...I can feel it. He's got her now."

"There's still a chance," Talitha said. "Keep going, Jim, but circle closer."

They found the right place ten minutes later—The Camelot. They hurried in, but with a lack of urgency and Will kept the gun hidden. The front doors of the building were flung wide, as was Terry's apartment door.

There was nothing to see.

Terry, despite a messy bathroom back home, was overall a neat freak and the apartment was spotless, she even had floor mats on both sides of her front door. They searched anyways.

Actually, Talitha searched, while Jim kept out of her way and Will stared, tears leaking from his eyes at the refrigerator where Terry had stuck pictures. Some were of friends, but most were of her brother and mother.

After twenty minutes of meticulous searching, Talitha gave up. She gave Jim a sad look and then they both looked at Will.

He felt their eyes on his back as stood in front of the pictures. "I can't do it. I can't look into the future anymore. This time for real, I'll go crazy, insane, cuckoo for coconuts. I feel myself slipping away even now...it was worse in the car, when it got quiet. I could hear their voices, and see their faces..."

"Will!" Talitha spoke sharply to focus him. "I don't want you to look into the future, ok? I'm sorry now that I even considered it. We'll find another way. Do you believe me?"

"Yes," he whispered and a moth had stronger voice that he did. She went to him and hugged him with a soft but fierce love and he sobbed for just a second before he fought to control himself.

"There you go, Will. Dad would be so proud if he knew what a man he had for a son," she said, still with his arm around her brother. "Now this is going to sound weird coming from me, but I'm clueless. How do we find Luke?"

"You think I'm supposed to know?" he asked in disbelief, his features rising only enough to show his surprise and then they sunk back down again.

Jim had an idea, but he was nearly too embarrassed to bring it up, "We could check into the fortune tellers around here, you know, gypsies? Lisa said gypsies were behind the last possession and you had that weird dream."

"Smart thinking, Jim." Talitha gave him one of her smiles that were so precious to him.

"We'll start there, but it may be a dead end." Will said. "He may not need a gypsy. After all, he was working some sort of incantation on his own."

"Maybe," Talitha acknowledged. "But in the dream it wasn't him, it was a lady."

"Either way, it'll be too late for Terry." Will glowered at this, showing some iron in his spine. Jim felt it too, an impotent fury, which he had a strong urge to vent.

"We'll start in the morning," Talitha said taking Will by the arm and leading him out of the apartment. "You two look like you're the walking..." she paused. "What is that?"

Talitha stopped and her eyes flew wide. Moving in a blur, she shoved Will into the hall and then spinning, she sent a back kick into Jim's stomach. The air blasted out of him and he reeled, stumbling into the apartment.

Chapter 25

Reunited

Jim had nearly forgotten the dull ache in his ribs from the blow Will had dealt him, however Talitha's spinning kick not only knocked the air from his body, but it brought that pain screaming back. It hurt so bad that he had trouble getting to his feet.

Will didn't even try to get up.

From his position on the ground, he yanked out the pistol and had it aimed straight into Talitha's butt. Jim gaped at the strangeness of her position. After kicking him, she had done the oddest thing possible in that situation; she dropped to her hands knees and bowed low to the doormat as if in prayer.

"Did either of you wipe your feet on the mat?" she asked in a voice, loud with excitement.

Jim couldn't answer, he was still struggling at finding his wind, but Will spoke and there was sudden dangerous steel in his voice, "Playtime's over Talitha. I will shoot you in this position, but it's going hurt more than I want it to. So sit up slowly and put your hands behind your head and I'll make it quick."

"What? I asked if you..." she looked back now and saw the gun. "Will, it's me, the real Talitha. I was with you when you had your vision of Rick and Terry, ok?"

"No, it's not ok. Why did you just attack us?" The gun hadn't lowered, it still aimed square into her backside.

"I'm sorry if I hurt either of you, but I was worried you would step on the mat. I think Luke wiped his feet on it."

Jim groaned in a tortured voice, "I didn't wipe my feet, at least I don't think I did."

The gun came down. "I don't remember," Will stated flatly, but his eyes were still hard. "What does it matter?"

"The mat has the same smell as the factory, but there's also the smell of burnt wood on it, like the ash from a campfire. It's very faint. It may be possible that Luke went back to the factory before coming here."

"And he may be going back as well," Will said getting to his feet and without another word, he turned and headed to the car. Jim and Talitha followed him out into the night.

It no longer rained, but there was a mist in the air and cold settled on Jim. He pulled his coat tighter about him and noticed then, that not only was Talitha not wearing a coat, her dress hung still quite damp from when she had sat in the shower.

He stripped off the coat and put it out for her to take; she refused. "I'm fine really. You need it more than me."

"Please take it," he insisted, but when she opened her mouth to refuse again, he opened the coat up and physically put her arms through the sleeves. It felt good to touch her skin, even in the innocent manner that he just had and it felt even better when she couldn't stop smiling.

"A fool and his coat are soon parted, as the saying goes." He held the car open for her and she dipped her head in thanks and climbed in. Jim jogged around the car, pretending not to see the glare that Will gave him from the back seat.

Jim set the slow station wagon on a course to the factory and turned up the heat in the car as high as it would go, it wasn't very high.

"Take the coat back, I'm fine," she said resolutely.

Will had stopped glaring and instead was actually smiling. "She is fine, Jim. She doesn't feel cold anymore."

"Well that's not entirely true. I feel cold, I just regulate my temperature so that it doesn't bother me," she responded.

"You're keeping the coat until you get dry clothes or until you point a gun at my head." Jim growled playfully. "I've wanted to ask you since I met you, how do you do all these things? You can smell as good as a dog; you stay warm when it's raining and cold out. How?"

"I'm going to assume you meant my sense of smell is equivalent to a dog's, unless you think dogs smell particularly sweet?"

"Just answer the question. You know what I meant." He wanted to give her a glare, but he felt the little flare of happiness that always accompanied his talks with her and he could only purse his lips at her.

"The human body, yours or mine is an amazing instrument, with capabilities far greater than any person, myself included, has ever discovered. When I came back from the void, I was able to enter my body as a stranger would, and explored it, not in the limited fashion of a newborn, but as a person fully formed and mature, and as a person who had not had a body in hundreds of years.

"It was this exploration, or rather experimentation, that showed me how I could control my body if I willed it. Take for instance my body temperature that you asked about. We both can raise our body temperatures, but you can only do so, involuntarily in response to certain external stimuli, such as the presence of bacterial or viral infection. In other words, when you are sick, you get a fever. I on the other hand can regulate that part of my brain, the hypothalamus to such an extent as to raise and lower my temperature at will. Now of course there are limitations, I can't walk about at the North Pole in my underwear and expect to live for more than a couple of days."

Jim nearly missed what she said next. He was picturing her walking around in her underwear.

"Regulation is also key to many other attributes of mine, which you might find extraordinary. Let's take my sense of smell, as another example. Humans have a very insignificant number of receptor cells compared to, say a dog, but that isn't their most limiting factor." She paused for a moment and then asked herself, "How can I put this...let's say you walk into a chocolate factory, what you'll smell and only smell is chocolate. The reason for this is that you cannot control your receptors, which will become quickly overloaded, while I will allow some receptors to smell the chocolate but leave some free for other purposes.

"So you and I and a dog enter the chocolate factory. You will only smell licorice, the dog will smell mostly licorice, but since it doesn't really care for licorice, it may smell body odor and a turkey sandwich if there's one lying about. It can't control its receptors either, or it's brain, so that unless it's highly trained, it will now smell that sandwich above all else. Lastly, I will smell everything, albeit without the same intensity as the dog would, but certainly with more purpose. I will keep freeing up receptors as I analyze the different smells, so in this way, Jim, you might say I smell better than a dog."

She stopped speaking for a moment and looked back at her brother and then to Jim. "Hopefully, I'm not boring you. Science is usually fun only to those who are interested in it."

"For me every subject in school was only good so long as I had a good teacher," Jim said. "You should go on, I'm learning a lot."

"Well, what else would you like to know?" she asked Jim, but Will spoke up from the back seat.

"How do you heal so fast? That's a trick I'd like to learn."

She gave Jim a look and he nodded indicating he would like to know as well. "The easy answer is that I heal the same way anyone does, but just at a faster rate. It's control again. When you scratch yourself, your body gets the signal that there is an abrasion and it sends out its little maintenance crews to fix the problem. However, your maintenance crews are busy fixing a thousand other problems you may not even be aware that you have. In addition, there are finite recourses available, such as vitamins, minerals proteins, fats etc. These are going everywhere throughout your body and may not go where you think they should.

"I heal fast merely by concentrating my bodies recourses on what I deem important and putting on hold those that I don't. For instance, because of the break in my arm and other lighter injuries, my hair and nails haven't grown at all, and my bones are about six percent behind in their reformation cycle...do you want to hear about osteoblasts?" she asked hopefully.

"Osteoblasts? Are they a kind of..." Jim started to say, but was interrupted by Will, who had a peculiar greenish tint about him.

"Excuse me? Jim? Can you pull over at that Liquormart?" Will's voice was tight with a hint of his earlier choking. Talitha looked back at him in concern.

"Have you seen something?"

"Nothing new...nothing I didn't know already...thanks Jim," he slid out of the car and hurried inside the over-bright liquor store. Talitha and Jim watched him walk up and down the aisles taking short fast steps.

"I guess we will find Luke tonight for certain," Talitha's face was tight with worry for her brother and her eyes followed him about. "Do you think it's smart to go after someone as dangerous as Luke, with Will being drunk?"

"There's no saying he'll be drunk and after his night, I don't blame him if he were. I could use a drink myself." Jim actually felt a different need, but Talitha beat him to it.

"I'm sorry I punched you in the face," she said looking at him as a little girl would, with her pointy little chin down, barely meeting his eyes. "I reacted on instinct, without thinking. And I know what happened...the thing...wasn't your fault and I'm sorry that I've been acting as if it was."

Jim felt like he had been punched a second time. He was even slightly light-headed. "You don't have anything to apologize about. Certainly not the punch. And the other thing...the r-rape." The word came out with difficulty, and in nearly a whisper. "That was my fault. I fooled myself into thinking I ever had a chance with you. I led myself down that path and all your other self did was open the door a crack and I walked right in."

She glared at him slightly. "I'm not as superficial as you would think, Jim." His brows came together with confusion and she went on, "It means, I don't judge the book by the cover, rather I judge it by its merits. I was always this way, but the void instilled it deeper into me. Sometimes the cruelest creatures would appear to be a fine handsome man or an innocent little girl in pigtails."

"Oh, so where does that leave us?" he asked. Jim's heart was filled with such astonished hope, that it felt feather light and instead of beating with its usual steady bass drum, it fluttered like a rabbit's.

She put on a confused little smile. "I don't know. I do know that I like you more than I thought that I would have, or even more than I thought I could have. And I know you like me. I can tell by the drool. You have some right there."

Talitha pointed to the side of his mouth and with embarrassment, he brought his hand to his face, but there was nothing there.

"Just kidding, sucka!" She giggled in her carefree way and he laughed as well, unable to restrain his happiness. There was a pause then as they looked at each other and Jim's heart still fluttered like before, but now it was a fluttering bass drum. He could feel the heaviness of his pulse washing through his ears.

They were going to kiss.

If any moment was made for kissing this was it and the fact was cemented as she slid across to him, but he hesitated.

"I'm worried."

"Are you worried that my breath will smell like a dog's?" she asked giving him her most impish of looks.

"No. I'm worried that you'll remember the rape when you kiss me," Jim said, trying to be as honest as possible.

"Then maybe my confession wasn't complete enough. Part of the reason, I held onto my anger for you, was that I was also angry with myself. Not only did I kiss you...but when you were knocked out, I could still feel you in me and my muscles still thrummed with...pleasure. I tried to hate myself for my feelings because...there was another boy."

"Brian?" Jim prompted gently.

Her smile was sad but sweet at the name. "Yes, Brian. You see I have this great guilt when it comes to him. I also have this huge knowledge deficit when it comes to love. I don't know if I'm allowed to love again, if that would be ok. And I don't know if I'm being disloyal...or hurting him or even sinning. But now, I don't have time to waste on worry. I'm not going to let anything happen to you or Will, so that means our time is short."

"You're too late. I've vowed not to let anything happen to you and since you can't break a vow, it looks like you're going to have plenty of time for worrying," Jim said. Her words of dying for him had the odd effect of putting him in a happier mood.

Her smile had slowly slipped away as she talked about not knowing about love, but it came back at his words and she said, "Is the vow in writing? Contractually, if it is not in writing..."

He kissed her then.

It was the only way he'd ever win an argument with her. The kiss was fantastic and frantic as well. It was like two rivers coming together. The waters were turbulent and full of energy at first, but then became smooth and calm, intertwining in such a fashion as to appear seamless.

The windows of the station wagon fogged in a ghost like fashion to start with, and soon nothing could be seen in or out and still they kissed. Jim kissed her not only with passion but meaning as well. He didn't think he would ever be able to express his feelings for her in any better way than this kiss, but he didn't try to be the world's best kisser, he only tried to show her the depth of his emotions. And though his penis was fully erect in seconds, the kiss was less about sexuality and more about love.

But as with all things, it came to an end, but unlike most things, it ended with a smile. "That was good...but we're being stupid. We may have to face Ba'al and we're acting like a couple of teenagers."

"How should we be acting? Remember our pledge to be happy?" Jim said wiping at his mouth.

She leaned him and kissed him again, a briefer kiss, as if this one was just to remind her lips of how he tasted. "I don't know." Her smile faltered slightly. "I just wish Will could be happy as well."

"Should I kiss him too?"

She punched him playfully and Jim kept his face neutral, holding back a grimace of pain, until she leaned over him to wipe away the fog from his window. The punch, like a hammer, had gone right to the bone in his upper arm and it got Jim thinking.

"Talitha, your other self can't read your mind or your thoughts right now, can she?" he asked.

"No, it's only the thoughts right at the change over," she leaned back, still looking through the window. "I believe it has to do with what's called working memory. The brain is much more active, dynamic you might say when it stores working memories, which it does on a continual basis..."

"So your answer is, no?" he interrupted.

Her eyes glared at him, but a ghost of a smile played behind her lips. "I ought to powzer you, but I saw how well you handled my last punch. You think I didn't notice, but I did." Jim raised his hands in mock surrender and she said, "Why do you want to know?"

"I'm afraid that your worse half might show up tonight and I won't be able to tell you apart. So I came up with a plan...if you think it's stupid, we can go with another one."

"Let's hear it. I'm tired of doing all the thinking around here." She couldn't conceal her impish side when she was happy.

"We have a code word...or a phrase, something simple that only we would know."

"That's a good one, it's smart. You pick the phrase, since it was your idea."

"Ok, but you may not like it," he said and she scrunched her face at him in puzzlement. He continued, "I ask you: who am I and I'll know if it's you when you answer: You're Spider Man."

She glared at him with more bogus anger and then she launched herself into his arms and they kissed until a knock came at the window several minutes later.

"Are you two done in there? It's getting late," Will said from just outside the car door.

They jumped apart like teenagers getting caught necking in the woods.

Chapter 26

Will Becomes William and the New Name

When Talitha said the word Osteoblast, a word Will had never heard before, he saw perfectly the vision of a black barreled pistol—the same one that lay heavily inside his coat pocket. It flashed a very bright lick of flame and from the angle he saw this, looking dead into the deep bore of the barrel, he knew he'd be on the receiving end of the bullet.

There were two curious aspects of the very brief image that had him puzzled. First, was the great sharp pain that exploded in his chest at the end of the vision and second, was the faint feeling of hope that seemed to hang around the edges of it.

The excruciating pain had him more worried than curious. In the movies, people tended to slump over in a quick manner after being shot in the chest and they never seemed to linger in pain, much less even groan. But, he knew he would feel great pain. It would hurt right through to his spine and it frightened him. It was this agony, even more than his upcoming death that had him heading into the liquor store where he purchased his second bottle of Wild Turkey of the night.

He had it open and drank straight from the bottle even as he paid, earning a dubious glance from the clerk. Feeling an urgent need, he looked about, but there wasn't a bathroom in sight and only a single door behind the register.

"Can I use your bathroom?" he asked the clerk, but the man hesitated until Will dropped a ten-dollar bill on the counter.

"Right through there," the clerk was all smiles now and cocked a thumb at the door. The bathroom hadn't been cleaned, ever by the looks of it, but Will touched nothing other than his own skin and the bottle. However, even when he was done he didn't leave the foul smelling little room. He leaned against the wall and sipped at his whiskey, looking into the dirtiest possible mirror that could still cast a reflection. There was a need deep within him to rub at his chest where the bullet would strike and he indulged the need between sips, wondering how that little spark of hope could keep him going.

That hope was the other intriguing thing about the vision.

It was mostly curious because hope wasn't a normal feeling for him. The last time he could remember feeling that wonderful sensation had been on a Thursday morning, seven months previous.

Stepping out of the shower, he saw Lisa, still in a jumble of sheets blinking at him from the bed. She had yawned and stretched, never looking more like a sleepy kitten than at that moment.

She is pregnant and the baby will be girl.

He knew it.

"I hope she has Lisa's eyes," he had thought.

That was it. His last hope. That hope had lasted the thirty seconds he took to climb back into bed with her, whereupon he saw his daughter's blue-green eyes in a quick simple vision and fell in love for the second time in his life.

Now, he breathed a heavy sigh and the smell of urine got past the swelling in his nasal passages making him grimace, but still he didn't leave. That feeling of hope nagged at him. There was no meaning to it. No explanation. It was just there within him, buried under a great avalanche of icy fear.

It wasn't a magnificent hope either.

It felt more like Hail Mary pass from deep within his own end zone, or a gambler's hope at pulling an inside straight with all his money on the table. But what it felt most like was some sort of a trick to keep him heading to the factory.

Without that little glimmer of hope he knew he would never go—he would just drive home in that jalopy of a station wagon and let the future take care of itself.

"You're a liar," he said to the man with the broken nose and black eyes and the swollen face staring at him from the other side of the dirty mirror. There was another reason that kept him going. Obligation, a sense of duty.

"Craapp," he groaned and went to see the clerk.

"I need to make a phone call, long distance to Maine. Ten dollars should cover it." Will said and handed over a twenty.

"I don't know..." The man was trying to bargain and Will fought a strong urge to pull the gun out, but instead glared at the man with a ferocity the clerk had seldom seen. "The phone is right here."

The clerk stood there for a moment while Will dialed, until he saw the glare hadn't left Will's face and then he moved off to give Will some privacy.

The call was painfully brief. Will wanted to linger there on the phone listening to the best part of his life tell him about her day, about when the movers were arriving in the late morning, about how the baby was kicking like mad, but after five minutes he started to feel the urgency, the demand of the future. It was like having the warden come to his cell, telling him that it was time and that the Governor hadn't called.

He forced himself to say his goodbyes and didn't start crying until he hit the cold of the night air. Squatting on the curb next to car, he let the self-pitying tears silently fall for a few minutes and he remembered the day eight years before when his own father had cried out his frustration just as he was doing.

His father would be dead soon. The thought struck him like a gong and it reverberated all through his body. It dried up his tears and he did just as his father had done after his long cry. He tucked away his fears and his sorrow in a deep part of himself and hardened his features.

Climbing to his feet, he called out softly to the fogged window of Father Alba's old station wagon, "Are you two done in there? It's getting late." He smiled at Talitha and Jim's reaction and gave them a few seconds to arrange themselves in a decent manner before getting into the car.

"Hey Bro, what's up?" Talitha asked trying to appear as if nothing had been going on. She was a laughably bad actress and Jim sitting as stiffly as if he was in the front pew at church was even worse.

"It's time to get going," Will said simply.

Her face lost a little of the pink she had high in her cheeks, but she nodded, "I think we're ready, what about you?"

"I have hope." His cryptic answer caused her eyes to narrow and even Jim craned his head around to eye him.

The big man gave him an odd look. "Would you say you had high hopes?" Will thought he was serious and was about to give him a straight answer when Talitha giggled and began singing.

"Will's got high hopes, he's got, high hopes..." She broke down laughing.

"You guys are weird," he said it good-naturedly and took another swig.

The two of them, Talitha and Jim chatted lightly for part of the ride, but as the minutes ticked down, their mood became somber, as Will knew it would.

When they finally quieted, Will said, "I've got good news: if we can kill Luke it means you two will live."

"What about you?" Talitha asked.

Will lied by way of a shrug. "One way or another we're going to find Luke tonight. I want us to have two rough plans outlined depending if Ba'al has been summoned or not. In a perfect world he hasn't been and we only have to deal with Luke and a gypsy...and more than likely evil Talitha. If so Jim takes care of Talitha and I try to neutralize Luke. That scenario actually frightens me the most, since it will be three against two and Luke is crazy and Talitha is even crazier."

"I think it would be wise not to view her in that way...or me for that matter," Talitha cautioned. "We're not schizophrenic, but separate entities."

Before yesterday, if asked, Will would've said she was suffering from multiple personality disorder, but he'd never really talked to her other evil half for more than a few minutes in all of the last eight years. Now, however he'd talked to her enough to know there wasn't a shred of his sister truly in her and he could believe that she was indeed a separate person.

"I'm sorry, Sis. Calling her crazy or schizo means I'm calling you that as well, right? I won't do it anymore," Will said honestly, but immediately went back to his planning, which was coming to him on the fly. "I want Talitha ahead of us the entire time, that way she can sniff for traps and if she were to switch over, we'll have an extra second to react."

Talitha and Jim nodded in agreement at this, but Will expected a little more trouble at what he planned on saying next.

"If evil Talitha makes an appearance, she'll likely try to take another hostage." Will paused a moment to gather his thoughts. "If the she does we have to kill her even if it means killing the hostage."

Silence greeted this.

Jim shook his head, as he drove. "No, there's another way. We can chain her up and leave her in the car, or maybe get handcuffs, or..."

Talitha patted his arm. "Not at two in the morning. And if we wait, Luke will have moved the bodies. I'm afraid it's now or never and Will's plan is sensible. Talitha and Luke count on us not harming the innocent, but in order to save many more lives we have to be able to sacrifice them as well as ourselves."

There was a pause—Will began to see the flash of the gun, and the boys tied to their boxes, the visions overlapping. He gritted his teeth and shook his head. "Talitha is right. I need to know, both of you, that you'll kill me if it comes down to it."

"I will if I have to," Talitha said without hesitating. Jim however was silent and she gave him a poke. "I would if I were you, Jim. He really messed up your nose."

"It's not funny," Jim growled testily.

"And it won't be funny if Luke gets away and sacrifices a thousand girls," she retorted.

"Fine! I'll shoot your brother." Jim slowed down and took a turn into the neighborhood; they were getting close.

Will got a funny chill at the way Jim had spoken. "This is all just in case. Ok? If I have to die, so be it. But if I do, one of you had better get Luke." They both nodded and he went on, "Scenario two: Ba'al is summoned already. I'm hoping that Talitha, good or bad will challenge Ba'al. If that happens we'll have a tiny amount of time to kill the gypsy. We can't hesitate. Kill her and be done. This will send Ba'al back and leave us with only Luke and Talitha to deal with."

"But what about Terry?" Talitha asked. "She won't be able to make it back to her body if we don't."

Will closed his eyes feeling sick of himself. "If Ba'al is there, we won't be able to save Terry. We don't have a sword or even a knife to form a connection. Terry is going to have to make it back on her own, if she's strong enough."

Talitha looked glum at this and the corners of her mouth came down. "We can only do our best, but if you can save her, please do," she added quietly.

"There it is," Jim pointed at the building looming up out of the mist. "Wow, maybe they're someplace else."

Will leaned down to get a better view and saw that half of the factory had basically disappeared and the rest looked like a great black pile of rubble. At the sight Will felt a foolish hope that he was mistaken about how the night would end, but the re-occurring vision of the gun told him otherwise.

"He's in there. Don't get your hopes up. Drive past it about a block, I want to be able to sneak up on them if at all possible."

Jim did this and as they were getting out of the car, Will had a stupid idea, one that he wished he had thought of before. "Tal, check the glove box."

It was right there.

Perhaps the one thing that might have saved Father John: a flash light. Will looked at it guiltily, but it gave him another idea. "Look for a bible or some crosses." They searched, but they found nothing and only Will wore a cross, the heavy pewter one that Father Alba gave him.

The vain search seemed to have taken the steam out of all of them. Jim looked like he was sweating despite the cold, while Talitha's face was pinched so tight with worry that she was almost unrecognizable as his beautiful sister and Will didn't dare check his own reflection in one of the mirrors, afraid of what he would see.

"Let's say a quick prayer, ok?" he asked. The others nodded and waited for him to begin and he went with the Our Father. The one Jesus had taught.

The prayer was over in less than a minute and his mood of fear hadn't been improved by it. Will sighed heavily. "Let's go, Talitha first."

Jim and Talitha paused and after a sheepish look at Will, they kissed. It wasn't a romantic one, but under the circumstances, it couldn't have been. It did look tender though and Will felt a moment of jealousy.

Pulling the black gun from his pocket, he waited for them to finish, letting his fear chew away his insides. He didn't have long to wait and when it was over, it sadly reminded Will of a kiss goodbye.

"Who am I," Jim asked when their lips separated. A question Will found very odd.

"Spider Man." Talitha answered brightly and then with a shy look to her brother, said, "We can go now."

Will shook his head in wonder, as Talitha walked forward, ducking under some yellow crime tape. She led them to what was left of the front of the building. It now appeared as a great, blackened skeleton; walls without rooms formed its ribs and the entrance, still with some shape, its head.

Talitha walked slowly, her steps lighter than a cat's and she barely disturbed the ash-covered parking lot. Near the entrance, she paused and studied the ground.

"Luke's been here recently; see how this impression has held its shape. And this one as well." She pointed at the soot-covered asphalt and with the night as dark as it was, Will didn't see a thing until Jim shown the light on it. She then bent low and sniffed over the prints. "I smell Luke and Terry, but there's another woman with them. I guess he has a brought a gypsy along."

"Then it's official. From here on, no talking unless we need to," Will said.

Jim now shown the light on the entrance and they could see that the doors had been pulled off and the foyer was a scorched and smoldering mess. It looked like one of the thousands of dungeons in the void and this was mainly because the walls were black and peeling like the skin of a burn victim. Many demons skin their prey and leave the rotting flesh hanging, where it will eventually turn black.

Seeing this gave both Will and his sister a pause; she turned back to him, even in the dark, her eyes were wide. Will gave her a quick nod to go on, but her hesitation drew so far out that Jim finally stepped forward to give her a nudge.

She moved then, but slowly and carefully as before and now Will could hear the faint sound of her near continual sniffing. He gave the place a tentative sniff himself, but it smelled just like a fire pit from a campsite.

The trail she followed was quite obvious to Will, but only when Jim chose to shine the light towards the floor, which was infrequent. Jim was nervous and this was plain to see by the way the flashlight swung in every direction, especially if there was any noise. Of course, with the bones of the place still smoking in spots there was plenty of settling and shifting, and the light seemed more like a spotlight searching for an escaped convict than a device to help them find their way.

Talitha was just a head of Will and as they came to the stairwell door, she stopped and sniffed at the corners and edges of it with a great deal of concentration. Perhaps thirty or forty seconds went by before she opened it as quietly as she could. However, once it was open, she stopped in the doorway and despite two little shoves from Will, she wouldn't go forward.

"What's..." Will started to whisper the question, but then he knew what was wrong. He could now feel the bone-chilling cold seeping up from the deep blackness in front of him.

Ba'al was near.

The thought sent an electric surge of fright through him and he turned without a word and snatched the flashlight from Jim and shown it down the stairwell. Again, just as in the entrance, the walls were black and not smooth as they had been, but were torn and gouged in spots, but also rippled from the heat in others. Thankfully, there was no sign of the smoking body of the demon, however the cold slowly intensified the longer they stood there.

He remembered the advice from his father, not to stop or there was a chance they wouldn't be able to get going again and so he gave Talitha a bigger push. She resisted at first, backing into his hand, but then she started edging forward.

Even though Will kept a hold of the flashlight and used it to peer as far down into the darkness as possible, she still went with exacting slowness, part of which was due to the slippery conditions. Water trickled in from every direction and mixed underfoot with the ash and Will found himself slip on more than one occasion.

He walked with a hand on her shoulder, not just to keep from falling, but also for reassurance, both for his own sake and for hers. The control she had over her body was not complete; under the large coat of Jim's, her muscles were vibrating wildly in fear and her breath was quick and light.

Will wasn't immune to this mounting fear either and his own heart rate had escalated to an amazing degree, however he felt an odd relief that he was to die with a bullet in the chest. It was a comforting thought just then to know that his death would at least be natural. Remembering the death of Adrina the gypsy sent a spasm through him and he paused to cling to the rail for a second. When Ba'al killed, the deaths were the most ghastly things—beyond imagination.

After a moment, he was able to walk again and they had almost made it to the first sub floor when Will, shining the light over Talitha's shoulder, saw the great figure of the demon on the landing at the bottom of the stairs. The brother and sister froze in place at the same instant. Will's first action was not a smart one—he raised the gun to shoot the creature.

His hand came up in a slow motion blur and even as he sighted down the length of the barrel, he saw that it was in fact not Ba'al, but a huge pile of the old furniture burned and melted into a strange exotic shape. The effect was uncanny and had fooled them both. He was just relaxing, bringing the gun down when Jim, who hadn't seen them stop due to the fact that he couldn't help looking back over his shoulder, barreled into him.

Will in turn stumbled into Talitha and his body reacted instantly, putting out his left hand to stop his fall. The flash light struck the rail and was knocked from his grasp and bounced away.

For the second time that day he was plunged into absolute darkness. Everyone froze in place and Will, who was caught between Talitha and Jim, could feel both of their heartbeats against his skin. Talitha's seemed fast, but less so than his own, while Jim's was downright alarming. It was almost as if Will could hear it beating through the man's thick chest.

For the span of only a few seconds they stood that way, gripped in the natural fear of the dark as well as the unnatural fear of the proximity of a demon. "Get the flashlight," Will said to his sister, giving her the smallest shove forward so as not to unbalance her.

"I don't know where it is." Her reply confused him. How could she not know where it was?

"Why are you being like this?" he asked snappishly. "Ba'al could come up here and we won't know it."

At the mention of the demon's name, she pushed even further back into him and again Will was sandwiched. "You get it, Will." Her voice shook, tremulously.

"Calm down, ok," he used the most soothing voice he could manage, that is to say he snapped at her, but tried not to. "I can't see it or I would."

"I can't see it either," she hissed at him.

"Of course you can," he hissed back. They had stayed in one place far too long for his liking and what he had said a moment before about Ba'al coming, began playing on his imagination. He started to see eyes sprouting in the darkness. They would form themselves and dissipate with unsettling randomness. The odd false glows came from all sides and he even put out his hand to touch one, but struck the wall instead, and was so startled by the nearness of it that he jumped a little.

"I can't," she insisted "I need at least some light to see, but this is complete darkness."

"Just feel along, it bounced down to the landing," he said.

"Please, you go get it," she turned, trying to switch positions with Will. It felt odd the way she did this, the stairs were not particularly narrow, but she acted like there was no room at all.

Will wanted to argue with her, however her voice had an edgy quality that was shrill and so unlike her that he feared she was close to true panic. What's more, Will had done this before. When she squeezed behind him, he bent down to feel the first step below him. It was clear of obstacles and he stepped down onto it. He then gently waved his arms all about the air in front of him, still nothing, so he repeated the process of bending down again, but froze as Jim spoke.

"Talitha, who am I." His voice was so startlingly deep and loud, and came out of the darkness seemingly from high above them. It made Will, for just a second, think that it was the voice of God.

When she didn't respond Will felt the hairs on his neck stand up. He had been tricked again by the evil Talitha and he felt sure he would feel a blow coming from out of the darkness, but none came and there was only silence for another second.

"Talitha!" Jim's voice was sharp, bordering on anger and again God like.

"I'm sorry, you're...you're Spider Man."

"Ok good, good," Jim said soothingly and Will could hear them hugging, and suddenly, he was jealous again. It added to the stew of his other emotions and the net result was that the slow simmering anger over his terrible situation began to come to a boil.

It made him apathetic about dying by some diabolical trap and standing back up, he walked down the stairs holding the rail in one hand and feeling the wall with the other. At the landing, he waved his hands in the air until he found the great twisted pile of furniture and then he bent and scrambled around in the muck, finding the flashlight relatively quickly.

He hesitated only a second before trying to turn the thing on. He had pictured flicking it on, only to find Ba'al looming over him, but he shook that off as silly, there was no way the demon could be so close without his knowing. Nonetheless, when he turned the switch on, he took a quick glance around, but there was nothing. He did however get to see both Talitha and Jim age twenty years in a second, just not in the way one would normally think.

When the light came on, he could have sworn he was looking into the faces of a couple of frightened six year olds. They hadn't budged, but were gripping each other tightly. The light dispelled their fears, at least their fears of the dark and they hurried down the stairs like moths to a flame.

Will wanted to be angry still. He didn't like how they continued crowding him, despite the light and how Talitha now refused to go first, or even the fact that they were all covered in black ash, as if they had rolled in it. But his anger had departed and so had most of his fear, and it was with an odd sort of elation that he realized he was now truly his father's son.

A few seconds earlier, while he had huddled between Jim and Talitha in the dark his fear had been very great, but a little thing like his anger had managed to push it aside, or so he thought at the time. Now he realized that one emotion couldn't push another one about, unless he allowed it. It was such a simple thing, but one that could never be taught, only experienced.

Right then he knew his fear was his to control, and what's more, he knew he could go on and face Ba'al and then face his own death. He squared his shoulders and made the conscious decision to die just as his father had lived.

Of course conquering fear didn't mean he would be less cautious.

He shined the light down the next flight of stairs a long time, checking every corner and tumbled piece of furniture before he started. The feeling that he was descending a stairwell in one of the void's many dungeons grew with each slow step down. And it wasn't the way the paint peeled off the walls, or how the debris began to look more like hunks of charred flesh than anything else, it was how the darkness began to overcome the light of the flashlight, squeezing the energy from it, making it seem feeble and dim.

But more than that, there was the cold.

It was the dreadfully familiar cold of Ba'al, which could be mistaken for nothing else. Each step down marked a greater temperature drop and it wouldn't have surprised Will to see the end of the stairwell encased in black ice. However it wasn't. That final set of stairs, were slippery with quickly freezing ice sludge, but at the bottom, there was a pool of black water, which it hadn't yet frozen over.

The water couldn't have been more than a few inches deep, but it gave the impression that it could be of any depth and Will hesitated before stepping down confidently even as his father would have. He turned out to be right, the water being barely two inches deep, but it was shockingly cold and it gave him a jump.

"You ok?" Talitha asked from a few stairs above him. She and Jim held hands, like a couple of lovers in a coalmine or so they appeared as covered in filth as they were.

"I'm good, the water is just cold is all," he responded and then waved her down. "Check if you can smell out any of those traps of Luke's."

Talitha came down and made a great show of sniffing at the edges of the door, even squatting down in the puddle to sniff lower down. Just as she did Jim slipped. The big man came down hard on his butt and Will swung the flashlight back to him.

"What is it?" Talitha cried softly in alarm.

"I just slipped, it's nothing." Jim whispered to her as he tried to get to his feet. However, his foot slipped out from beneath him again. "Damn," he grunted still quietly.

"Huh?" Talitha said from the blackness below. He shown the light at her, but it blinded her and she held up her hand blinking into it.

"It's nothing Tal. Did you smell anything?"

"Naw, I'm having a little trouble. The cold is freezing the mucus in my nose," she turned back to the door. "Also I can't catch the scent of another gun, because of that." She pointed to the pistol. "It's overpowering. Put it away or..." she struggled out of Jim's heavy coat, "Better yet, wrap it in this for a moment."

She held out the coat for Will to take, but Will's hands were full; the flashlight in one and the gun in the other, so she laid the coat out for Will to put the gun into.

He paused, not just because the girl in front of him wasn't his Talitha, but also because he didn't know what to do about it.

At some point in the last minute or so, they had switched, the good Talitha for the bad. He knew this not as part of a vision, he just knew it as her brother. It was how she had said, "Naw." It wasn't her style. She disliked using language in such a casual manner.

But now that he knew, he had to very quickly come to a decision. His choices were limited, in fact it seemed like he had only one choice and that was to force her at gunpoint into the presence of Ba'al, and then...he didn't know what. He hoped they would fight it out, but he came to the sudden realization that they wouldn't.

It was only a guess, but Will figured that Ba'al would orientate on him as his primary opponent strictly due to the gun and if he did, Will wouldn't last two seconds. However, if she held the gun...

"Here you go," Will said, placing the gun in the coat. She didn't play around and simply took the gun in her small hand and casually tossed the coat aside. Will felt a ball of ice form in his belly, but ignored it.

"Thanks for this." She smiled sweetly.

Jim watched this for a moment with his mouth open, but finally figured it out. "Who am I?" he asked in a hoarse whisper.

"Is this a trick question?" She looked like a cat eyeing a mouse, while chewing on the neck of a bird. For her it was a happy look.

"Jim, don't bother, this isn't our Talitha. This is Ba'al Fie-ere; she doesn't deserve the name Talitha." Will explained calmly, eyeing the girl.

"You bet I don't," she said bringing the gun up for a quick sniff. "It means 'Little Maid' and those kind fellows at the hospital took care of my maidenhood a long time ago. And speaking of maidenhood, Jimbo what happened to your face? Was Talitha not happy with our little surprise?"

"Go fuck yourself," Jim growled with a hard edge to his voice.

She brought the gun up, pointing it at him, something that was actually not at all noticeable in the dark, with only a very flimsy light shining across her. "Go fuck myself...very original. Your wit is certainly not as developed as your dick. This would be a compliment if you knew what to do with it."

"Ba'al, why don't you leave him alone," Will stepped closer to her. She brought the gun to his chest and started to slowly pull back the hammer—he ignored it.

"Because, I don't want to." She shoved him back with the barrel of the gun. "Do you even know what this guy did to your poor little sister? He raped her, Will. Rape is clearly defined as any act of sexual intercourse that is forced upon a person."

"Actually it was you who did the raping." Will's anger was an emotion that he was having difficulty controlling, so he forced himself to breathe as slowly as he could and it went from boiling to a low simmer.

She suddenly smiled wistfully. "Yeah you're right, it was genius. And Jim, you played your part, the part of the fool, so well. It gives me the tingles just thinking about it." She sighed dreamily.

"When you're done with your tingles, we have a problem." Will said in a high voice, one he hoped would be mistaken for fear. "I'm sure you're aware that Ba'al Zubel is near. We should get out of here quick." Jim's eyes flicked to Will, uncertainly, but Will made sure to ignore him completely.

"Yeah, let's run!" Talitha mocked him. "Will, your plan is transparent. You willingly gave me the gun. You want me to go out there and kill Luke and send Ba'al back to the void, why don't you just say so."

Will deflated so much so that he sat down on the slimy steps. "You're right," he said in a depressed voice.

"What are you going to do?" Jim asked the girl.

"I'm going to go talk with them. Isn't that what you wanted me to do when you thought that putz, Luke was really Ba'al?"

"Then I guess we can wait here for you?" he said knowing there was no way she'd allow that. It was so ludicrous that she even smiled.

"No, dear brother. You and Jim are going to be my bargaining chips. You see, I know for a fact that Ba'al hates you with such an amazing passion that he may be willing to give up anything to have you. Even some of those incantations or maybe something more." Her smile was terribly diabolical in that light and Will's new found victory over fear felt at that point to be a hollow triumph.

"I'm not going," Jim glared down at her defiantly, but Will shook his head.

"She'll just shoot you and make me drag you along and I'm too tired for that. And besides, this is what we came to do."

She giggled and the sound was creepy; a snake giggling would sound more human than she did. "You two came here to die?" she asked.

Hearing her say that reminded him of his vision, the knowing that two of them would die, and now the ball of ice was growing, numbing his hands and feet. "I guess so." Will said without much hope and stood to face her again.

Talitha reached back and not taking her eyes from Will opened the door. It was a door onto a frozen hell.

The air all around them whipped up and shot through the opening of the door making a high keen sound as it raced into the burned out remains of the building. Replacing the air was a cold that made the staircase feel like a June morning and Will who had just stood up felt the strength ebb from his shaking legs.

He meant to take a deep breath and follow Talitha out, but the cold stung his lungs so badly that he ended up coughing weakly and heard Jim doing the same thing. His coughing was uncontrollable and for at least a minute he hacked, but finally Talitha yanked him into the destroyed atrium.

The feeling of descending into the void while on the stairs had been nothing compared to this. No human could have wrought the crazed and malignant shapes that the consuming fire had created in its desire to destroy. The building he had been in earlier was now twisted into a perversion and blackened by greedy flames; it was slick with ice and silent as the far side of the moon.

Standing there, Will's coughs dried up, and now he barely had the strength to even breathe. But it wasn't the cold and the horrific landscape that sapped him, it was Ba'al. Will felt that horrible buzzing in his head that he had known before and his eyes went in different directions for a few seconds before he was able to control himself.

Jim took longer to begin thinking clearly; maybe two minutes more and during that time he could only moan softly as if in great pain. As he waited for his friend, Will stole glances at his sister, wondering how he could get the real Talitha back in time to deal with Ba'al.

In truth, he didn't have any faith in his sister to actually win a confrontation with the demon. Will himself had tried and in a matter of seconds had been crushed to the size of an ant. He started to get the shivers at the thought, but he remembered his father and he gritted his teeth against the onslaught he knew would be coming

At length, Jim stopped moaning and gave a sniff and Will turned to see that he was actually crying slightly. He turned away and Talitha rolled her eyes at him.

"Jeez, the two of you. It's just a demon." But even though Jim seemed able to go on, Talitha still hesitated wearing a hard look on her face. She turned to her brother. "Have you felt the eye of the demon on you yet?"

"What do you mean?" He tried to sound innocent, but her glare was so fierce he answered, "No. I think you would've noticed." He knew what she was referring too. The last time, eight years ago, Ba'al could almost drive a person insane with a just glance.

"Neither have I, but you know it's coming. In fact..." She cocked the pistol and put it to his head. "Don't worry, this is only insurance."

It unnerved Will terribly to have the gun pointed at his head, since the demon could look upon Talitha even through walls. "Don't do that or your plans will go out the window as soon as he looks on you," he counseled.

"Don't be such a wimp. I'm not like you and besides, I have faced him before you know."

"Did you win?" Will knew the answer to that; there was no way she had.

"Hell no, but I held my own, at least for a while."

She didn't realize it, but she had just opened his eyes to that one little bit of hope that had skated around the edges of the vision. He felt it then, it was a tiny thing within him, just the whisker on a mouse. Talitha really could stand against Ba'al and longer than the two seconds he had—perhaps long enough for him to kill the gypsy.

Her eyes were upon him and they were lit with a strange light and Will realized the hope must have shown on his face. He stared back and her eyes narrowed and suddenly he knew what she was feeling; she was the slightest bit nervous. He almost smiled, but cast his eyes quickly down instead.

"See the prints, follow them." Her tone was cold.

But not nearly as cold as the carcass of the building they were walking through. The atrium and parts of the walls had fallen at some point and the five poor dead children were now buried beneath it all. With the opening above his head larger, there was enough ambient light for Will to follow the tracks without the use of the flashlight. The tracks ran on, weaving around great piles of blackened rubble, and bent piping. The basement was completely unrecognizable, but through it, unerring the tracks lay, and finally, Will saw what could only be the red orange glow of a fire. It came from a room whose walls were still mostly intact and the light flickered from its open door.

Through the wall, Ba'al looked upon Will then.

A great rushing sound filled his ears; black vile torturous thoughts raced around in his mind; pain drilled into his every pore. His vision went grey growing quickly darker and darker...

"Enough!" Talitha roared. "He is mine! I have come to barter with his soul, but if you try to take him, I will kill him here and now and you will get nothing."

Ba'al was gone then and the first thing Will saw was the dark bore of the pistol. It was a foot from his face and seemed huge as if it would shoot a cannon ball rather than a bullet. Looking past it, he saw the dark clouds of the night and this made him realize that he was actually flat on his back.

"Get up," she demanded harshly and when he only blinked stupidly at her, she kicked him hard in the arm. Jim came over and struggled to pull Will up, slipping frequently with the icy conditions. Will felt sorry for Jim then. His face was as pale as death and his hands were so cold that Will worried Jim would lose his fingers to frostbite.

It was then that they heard the voice of Luke. It was a truly repulsive sound, in that it had the effect of making Will want to crawl away and hide.

"THese are THE worDS of Bay ALLLL Zoo BuLLL."

It was similar to human speech in much the same manner as a cat walking along the keys of a piano is similar to music. The demon was speaking through Luke and was having difficulty controlling the simultaneous aspects of breathing and speech. The result was ghastly and made Will clutch at his throat.

"Bring to Ba'al Zubel Will Jern," the voice cried in the same terrible manner. It took a moment to translate, but when he did, Will could feel his hands begin to tremble. However when he tried to force them to stop, he found his new mental toughness went only so far.

Talitha's face was a study in concentration. "Yes, Lord Ba'al Zubel," she called out. In a lower voice she said, "Will, go the doorway, but do not enter. Jim, stand just to his left and pray your ass off that I don't need to use you as part of my negotiations."

"What are you..." Jim began, but Talitha pistol-whipped him across the face. Blood sprayed from a long gash that opened up high across his cheekbone. The big man staggered and Will caught him, barely holding up under the man's colossal weight.

"I hear another word out of you or if you try to interfere in anyway, I'll give you to Ba'al as well. I'll even gift-wrap you, by turning your skin inside out. See if I don't," she snarled this into Jim's face.

Jim was dazed, but defiant and glared at her as best he could. She ignored it and only snapped her fingers, pointing toward the doorway. Will and Jim, still hanging on to each other for support, sliding as they walked, made their way to the entrance and stood blinking as if they were blinded by the demon's presence.

They weren't of course. Ba'al wasn't bright in any way. It was dark and hideous, and in fact dampened the light from a small fire that burned in silence a few feet away. To Will, Ba'al was unchanged. It was a tremendous column of swirling black and grey smoke, with hints of something more solid, yet more sinister beneath.

They blinked strictly because of the affect that Ba'al had on their minds. The buzzing that they had felt before was now a great rushing noise and it was a few seconds before they could think clearly.

"You are wise to bring this offering to Ba'al Zubel." Luke said, still wheezing in and out, as he spoke. Luke stood just in front of the demon, if stand was indeed the correct word. Even though his feet were planted on the ground, he seemed to hang nonetheless like a puppet on a string. He appeared unconscious despite the fact that his glassy eyes were open and staring off. Will, revolted by the sight, flicked his gaze over him, and took in the fire.

Even fire was unnatural so near to the demon. Its flames bent over, leaning strangely toward the creature and its smoke seemed to rush happily to join in the storm. It was a cold fire as well and did nothing to warm the room, but perhaps the oddest thing concerning the fire was that it was dead silent. There wasn't a single crackle, fizzle, or snap, nor was there the wush sound of the flames dancing about. It was as if Will was seeing a silent movie of a fire.

It was disconcerting, but mesmerizing as well and his eyes hung on the bent flames a moment longer than he had meant them to, but finally he tore them away to see something more real. The girl, Terry Brabec, still in the clothes she had been kidnapped in, lay as if dead on the ice, Will felt a hitch in his throat at the sight. At that moment, he knew a touch of brotherly love toward her and with it came a natural need to protect.

It was a wonderfully human feeling and lit a fire under his anger which flared within him. There was another girl in the room, a woman actually, black haired and black eyed, kneeling over Terry.

Her demeanor was of a person listening intently, she had her head cocked to one side and in her left hand, she held a knife, the blade of which curved wickedly. Her other hand was empty and she held it just above Terry's face and from a small cut on her wrist, blood dripped into the girl's mouth.

Will felt an instant of fury and without thinking, he started forward, but Talitha held him back. He went to glare at her, however saw the pistol just to the side of his face, it was no longer pointing at his head, but at Terry and there wasn't a single quiver along its short black length.

Talitha held it steady as a rock.

"Will Jern is not an offering!" she called out in a loud voice, or so he assumed it was. It came to him in the muffled way that he had expected. The void truly was just that. It was a great emptiness, similar to that of space, except there were no stars there, no possibilities for new worlds or new life. It was just a greedy sucking blackness that echoed with fear and it pulled everything to it, including sound.

"Then why do you parade him about in front of Ba'al Zubel?" Up and down went the words, loud and then soft, but not muffled, Ba'al had control of the opening to the void.

"I will trade Will Jern for my name!" she called out.

"Ba'al Zubel cannot give you a name, fool! You have to earn it."

"I already have! However, Ba'al Zubel can witness me earn it again when I kill your virgin." The hammer went back on the gun and Will's hopes skyrocketed, but Ba'al Zubel made a strange noise that caught his attention.

"Bruagh, bruagh, bruagh," the puppet, Luke spat out and Will realized the noise was something like laughter. "Ba'al Zubel can kill you in a half a second and then you will be with Ba'al Zubel in wrath."

Talitha called out, "And I can kill your virgin in a quarter of a second, and Ba'al Zubel will no longer have his path to this world! And Will Jern will kill your witch and this thing." Talitha nodded toward Luke.

During this conversation, Will's anger slipped away from him, leaving him with only an anxious confusion. He was being bartered, but for what he didn't know. "What's going on," he asked his sister.

"If Ba'al is smart, he will say my name, if not," she shrugged as if to say it was no big deal, but Will knew better. She was the gambler now and her soul was in the pot, along with his.

Ba'al seemed to be taking a lot of time to come to a decision and Will asked, "What's the deal with the names?"

"In the void, having a name symbolizes power. You see, only demons have them." She was right behind him whispering in his ear and her breath was the only warm thing about her. "In order to become a demon you have to force another demon to say your name. It's quite simple and nearly impossible, especially..."

"Ba'al Zubel has conditions," Luke announced in his see-saw voice, interrupting her. "Ba'al Zubel will name you, but with a name of his own choosing. Second, my servant tells me that you are afflicted by the presence of a creature residing in that body. In order to ensure that Ba'al Zubel is in fact naming the right being, you will kill Will Jern now."

Talitha didn't hesitate a second and brazenly retorted, "I have already chosen my name, Ba'al Fie-ere, denier of Ba'al." She paused as if for reaction, but none came, the hideous black smoke only circled and flared in its usual manner. She went on, "And I will kill Will Jern, but only after I am named." His sister seemed to pause oddly and Will could no longer feel her breath on his ear.

"You must hand over your other servant as well," Ba'al Zubel spoke through Luke.

"I will."

"Then Ba'al Zubel names you the demon Ba'al Fie-ere, Denier of Ba'al," Ba'al said through his meat puppet. "Kill Will Jern and depart."

When Will heard the words, his skin flashed hot for a small fraction of a second and then went numb. His body seemed to be dying even before the bullet struck. His limbs felt heavy and lifeless and instead of hyperventilating, he couldn't feel himself breathe at all. Even his vision was going grey around the edges and his hearing became more muffled. His sister said something and he looked back.

She was celebrating with triumphant arms raised over her head. He expected her to look different, like some sort of hideous creature, but except for the eyes, she hadn't changed. Her eyes were blacker than ever and held the greatest malevolence, there was no sign of his sister in them, she was now all Ba'al Fie-ere.

"Get on your knees, before Ba'al Fie-ere!" she commanded waving the gun toward him. Her face held black joy and he couldn't look on it for more than a second before turning away, sickened. When he did, he saw the huge frame of Jim Anderson, it tilted slightly.

The next thing Will knew he was laying face down on the black ice. He had fainted and he looked around blearily, before strong rough hands gripped him by his heavy coat and yanked him upwards. He stood swaying, held up only by Jim.

"On his knees, you idiot," Talitha screamed. Jim pushed downwards gently and Will collapsed.

When Jim stepped back, Will said, "Thanks." It felt weird to say, but nothing else came to him. For his part, Jim didn't say anything, but just looked at Will with a face that was drawn long with lines of fear running up and down it. His brow had curious beads of frozen sweat dotting it and even as Will watched, one fell off. It bounced when it hit the black ice.

"Look at me," Ba'al Fie-ere demanded in a soft voice, that was still so much like his sister's.

Will turned and the vision he had earlier was moments from occurring. The bore of the gun ran perfectly round and the small black hole was inches from his face. He stared for a second and then hung his head. He no longer felt the slightest hope; he was going to die just as he knew he would, but without any purpose. He wished it would anger him, but he had no feelings whatsoever, not even fear. The closest thing to a feeling within him was exhaustion, and he knelt waiting for the bullet.

"Well?" Ba'al Fie-ere asked.

Will didn't look up. "Well what?"

"Any last words? Aren't you going to pray?" The tone of the voice was friendly but there was cruel mocking laughter just beneath it.

"You want me to pray? Why?" When he didn't look up she squatted down in front of him, her black dress crackling where it had frozen stiff.

"As a favor to Ba'al Zubel, actually. It would be poor form for me to kill you without giving you the chance to pray." She looked him in the eye, but he only shook his head in confusion and she continued, "It's just so much more fun to see a new soul, especially a sweet one like yours, look around the void, shocked at the lack of angels and fairies and all that crap. It's a big turn on."

"Well, I don't plan on making the void my home. Free will you know," Will said and now he was starting to get some feeling back in him, anger.

She smiled wickedly. "I love being the one to say this to you, but the void is going to be your permanent residence. You would normally have a choice, but you are dying in the presence of Ba'al Zubel." She worked hard to keep his blue eyes on her black ones. It seemed important to her for Will to know of his coming confinement in the void. "He'll scoop you up so fast your head will spin clean off your shoulders...I know because the same thing happened to me. In fact I kinda wish I could be there to see it."

"Give me the gun and I'll make sure you have a front row seat," he hissed this at her and she only smiled broader.

"How bout I just give you the bullet instead." The gun came up and Will didn't flinch at the sight of it, but glared around it and started praying.

"Our Father, who art in heaven...what are you going to do with Talitha?" Will felt suddenly sheepish about having forgotten the terrible plight of his sister, now that she was sharing her body with a demon.

"Don't worry about her. I'll drive her out of me somehow, and there are ways of storing souls until they are needed. I'll force her into a gem or some such." She actually went on talking, but Will wasn't listening.

In a blink of an eye his faint hope had been restored, kindled into life by an accidental combination of words. His mind raced down a thousand avenues searching for the simple sentence that he hoped would make a difference, but he was coming up empty.

"Will? You ask a question and you don't even have the courtesy to listen to my brilliant answer." She seemed genuinely angry and she stood back up, bringing the gun to bear on his face.

"Wait! Uh...one prayer!" Will cried in sudden anguish. She paused as she was pulling the hammer back and now there was evil joy emanating from her. This was what she was really after. She wanted him to beg and plead for his life. Instead, he found the words that wouldn't save his own life, but maybe they would save Talitha's.

The words came to him just as he had read them eight years before. In the days after his confrontation with Ba'al Zubel, the concept of demons had weighed heavily on his mind and he had read everything he could concerning them and more importantly how to get rid of them.

All that he had read had shown that there were two versions of exorcisms, the long and the short. The long one could last days, involved endless prayers, and lengthy rites. All the paraphernalia was needed, Holy Water, Crosses, Rosaries, even the proper vestments, right down to the correct kind of stole. He had none of these things, except a cross and he didn't even have time to fish that out from under his shirt.

The short version involved being Jesus Christ, or maybe one of his apostles.

Will had about ten seconds. He decided to go with the short version. After all, the power for an exorcism was not centered around the right color robe he could wear, but rather it was in the Lord. And God would either hear his plea or not, and act on it or not.

And Will, who had felt the power of God once before when he had needed it most, leaned forward so that only the demon wearing the skin of his sister could hear: "In the name of the Father and his son Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit... I command you, Ba'al Fie-ere to leave this girl at once, return to the void, and never come back."

He didn't shout the words to the exorcism melodramatically, or even wave his cross, which was still only a fantastically cold lump against his chest. He just stared her into the eyes and spoke with all the confidence in the lord he could muster.

For a second he didn't think it worked. She leaned back as if she had been slapped and looked confused as if his words were not at all what she had expected, and Will was most certain they weren't. But with a suddenness that startled him, her face screwed up, twisting into such a gruesome mask that he was sure the skin of it would split down the seams. Her expression was of a hated being that had been cheated, but it lasted only a second and it cleared like the parting of clouds, revealing his sister, Talitha underneath.

She blinked slowly in confusion, but her heightened senses told her all that she needed to know about what was going on without turning her head. Her eyes found Will's and it was all he could do not to smile at her.

"Thank you, Lord," he said, quietly relishing that one moment, perhaps the last touch of happiness his soul would ever know, but it was short lived and his mind raced. Ba'al Zubel would demand his death any second and a delay would very quickly reveal the fact that the Demon Ba'al Fie-ere was no longer with them. His only hope was that Talitha would turn in that one instant and shoot the gypsy.

He flicked his eyes in the gypsy's direction, and Talitha in a show of steady casualness gave a look into the room and Will saw the muscles of her face clench, but only the slightest. Just then, as Will had guessed, Ba'al Zubel spoke through Luke.

"He has prayed enough, kill him now."

Will looked over at the demon and saw that Luke was advancing toward them, a knife in his hand, but worse, he now stood between Talitha and the gypsy. Will was at a complete loss; to hesitate would invite an attack he didn't think they could win. Luke looked for all the world like some sort of zombie puppet and with Ba'al Zubel pulling the strings, he might already be dead and thus unkillable in a normal sense.

At that moment, his vision from earlier came back to him, complete with that tiny fringe of hope.

Will unzipped his jacket in a quick motion and then tore open his button-down shirt. The cold instantly attacked him, but he ignored it. His plan had already sent a shiver of ice down his back. It was actually quite simple, Talitha would kill him and when Ba'al Zubel was relaxed or wasn't ready, she'd shoot the gypsy.

"You have to kill me, then her. There's no other way," he whispered, but didn't dare say anything else, Luke was very close now.

Still she hesitated and he was forced to give her a glare. "Take care of business," he warned.

Finally, she brought the gun up and Will was so proud of her to see it steady in her small hand. She aimed it square into his chest and fired.

The pain was a shrieking terror and just as in his vision, it was surprisingly so, but when Ba'al Zubel looked upon him, greedy for his soul even before he died, the pain got worse. Much worse.

Chapter 27

Death and the Eternal Void

When Will yanked open his shirt, a button kicked loose and skittered on the ice near Jim's foot. It looked like a piece of plastic trying to masquerade, as a piece of wood, there was even imitation wood grain running through it. It had four little holes and in two of them, a tiny filament of white thread ran.

There was nothing else to the button, but he kept staring at it nonetheless. The alternative was to watch a man, a friend actually, die in front of him.

Jim hoped it wouldn't hurt him too much.

His own death was also a certainty. Will had foreseen it and Jim believed it wholeheartedly, he only wished to kill Luke before it happened.

He hated the man.

This was the only feeling that he could commit to. Everything else seemed far away, buried beneath the heavy strength-sapping lethargy that surrounded him. He figured it was his exhaustion, the numbing cold, and the closeness of Ba'al, looking out from his black cloud, that caused this lethargy, but also it was Talitha.

He had seen the girl he loved for the last time; of this he was sure and that knowledge left him unable to do anything but stare at a stupid useless button.

One would've thought that his hatred would've been toward the female demon, after all the trouble she had caused. However, in Jim's eyes, this was what demons did. Not that he liked her in anyway, far from it, but he would've sooner blamed the sun for being too warm.

Luke had no such excuse and neither did the gypsy, who Jim had sworn to kill as well, however that was more out of necessity. With Luke, he expected to feel just a little bit of satisfaction.

Suddenly, he noticed something new about the button. The exterior of it was raised...

Bammnn!

...relative to the interior. It looked like a poorly constructed bowl.

Will's hand came down on Jim's shoe and gripped feebly at the laces. There was blood between his fingers, it wasn't a lot, but it was very wet looking and the freshness of it bothered Jim. So did the rest of Will for that matter. The problem was that he wasn't quite dead, he was making a horrible choking noise, and his body twitched and jerked about as it lay face down.

It made Jim a little sick to his stomach and he looked up from Will expecting to see the gun pointed at him. However Talitha stood looking with ill-disguised shock at her brother. It almost seemed that she was horrified by what she had just done and was trying not to appear so.

Weird for a demon, he thought.

She even looked into his eyes and he was shocked to see a guilty sadness there, something he would never have expected from a demon.

She's trying to trick me.

It wasn't going to work; he had been played for a fool once too many times. He suspected that she'd try to make him think he was going to live, and then, Bam! Right between the eyes. At least he hoped it would be between the eyes, Will was still twitching gruesomely, and the idea of being shot like that gave him the willies.

He decided right then, he was no longer going to play their games. Will had been biding his time looking for an opening to do something and he had bided all the way into a grave.

Not Jim.

Throwing off his lethargy as best as he could, he stepped around Will's twitching body, expecting at any moment to be shot by the demon. However, she only stood there eyeing him with a strange expression on her face and Jim made a point to keep his head turned away from her, ignoring her. He walked past her and two steps into the room he found Luke.

Jim balled his mighty fist and punched Luke square in the face. It turned out not to be as satisfying as he had hoped.

For starters, Luke acted like a puppet and felt like a puppet. It was like hitting a frozen body rather than a man and what's worse, Luke didn't moan or whimper or cry as Jim had secretly hoped. Instead, he only took a few steps back and gaped at Jim with an odd blank, glassy-eyed stare, ignoring completely the fact that his nose had been crushed and was now a bleeding misshapen blob.

Jim paused a heartbeat at the oddness of the situation and then went to hit Luke again. Right then Ba'al Zubel looked at him.

It was beyond excruciating. It felt as if flames had been poured over his body. With pain like that thinking was impossible and he flung himself to the floor, rolling, kicking, screaming. The pain felt endless and he had no clue how long he endured it, but suddenly two gunshots echoed in his mind and just like that, he was released. The flames disappeared as if they had never been.

His eyes went wide, staring all around him and the room was a dizzying place, swirling about, and for a second or two nothing made sense. When he could, he sat up and felt his skin, afraid it would be crispy and black, but it was surprisingly smooth. He was just touching his face when another gunshot rang out and he felt the wind of a bullet caress him gently just beneath his ear.

This was neither alarming nor curious to him. It simply was. His mind was in a state of shock and it was only then he realized there had been two earlier gunshots. He looked over to where the sounds had come from, and saw Talitha standing rigid, gripping the gun in a tight little fist, her eyes rolled back in her head.

Clearly, Ba'al Zubel was attacking her in the same manner as he had been attacked. For a span of three seconds, he watched this blankly and uncaring, without a thought, but then he realized this was the scenario that Will had described.

A tremendous urgency overcame Jim.

His one job, and the only way he had a ghost of chance at getting out of there alive was to kill the gypsy. He dragged himself to his feet and turned to kill the gypsy who stood watching everything with wild eyes.

However, she wasn't going to cooperate with his plan so readily and just as he turned toward her there was a flash of an arm and Jim looked down to see the gypsy's knife sticking out of his chest.

The woman stepped back grinning wickedly, eyeing her handiwork, but that was a very stupid thing to do. The knife's blade was five inches long, but curved like a small scimitar and barely three inches of it had been driven into Jim. Though it looked nasty, it hadn't even scraped against his ribs and was stuck in the tremendously thick muscles of his chest.

It didn't even hurt a lick, especially not after the pain Ba'al Zubel put him through. The gypsy let out a squeal of terror as he leapt forward, far faster than she had ever expected him too, and he grabbed her by the arm and pulled her roughly into him. She fought back, but it was a useless gesture and his great hands squeezed her neck with a force few could withstand. A few seconds of this and she'd be dead, but just then Luke attacked Jim and his knife proved far more capable than the gypsy's.

A wild murderous pain shot down Jim's spine and a moment later, he felt the individual teeth of the serrated steak knife running along a bone in his back as Luke withdrew it. The villain pulled back his arm to strike again, but he hadn't count on Jim's quickness either.

Most people, when they see the enormous leviathans who play the line on football teams, assume that men that big aren't very fast. Those people are dead wrong. Jim released the unconscious gypsy and spun in one move, bringing an elbow around as he did so. The blow caught Luke flush on the side of the head and cranked it around far to the right.

Jim then went to punch the man again, only just as he did he felt a crippling pain lance down his back, all the way to his tailbone.

With a cry, he sank to one knee, reaching around to find the cause. For a second, he thought the gypsy had attacked him again, but his hand came back wet with blood from the same wound that Luke had given him. There was a hole in his back that seemed to go directly through to his vertebrae and for a moment he feared that his spinal column had been injured. However, he had no time to worry about it, because Luke attacked, swinging his knife at Jim's face.

The blow cut him across the forehead as he ducked, and blood ran like water into his eyes. Jim was now practically blind and didn't see the next blow coming. He saw Luke's arm heading in and tried to pull back, but the knife sunk deep under his collarbone, but luckily stuck there. It was only lucky in the sense that he couldn't be stabbed again, but just then another shooting pain in his spine collapsed Jim completely and he fell back with Luke on top.

Luke went to pull the knife out and Jim grabbed him by the wrists and he now had a view of Luke that sickened him. The two gunshots he'd heard less than a minute earlier had both found their mark. Part of the right side of Luke's face was shorn clear away, leaving a grizzled valley running along his cheekbone all the way to his ear. In addition, there was a second wound—a hole the size of a nickel—dead center in his chest, which should have been fatal.

For a moment, Jim could do nothing but stare with words like ghoul and zombie running through his mind, but then his situation became even more precarious when unbelievably, Luke started bending Jim's great arms down.

Jim began to panic.

There was no way a man this small could do such a thing, but nonetheless it was happening and his left arm began to hurt with the terrible strain. The arm held out only a second longer and when it came down, Luke slammed him in the head with his elbow, sending stars across his vision.

Luke struck him again with the same elbow and the blow was like a kick from a horse and suddenly there was no more fight left in Jim. His head swam and he was dazed to such extent that he was seeing things, because another person who should have been dead came up just then.

Will stood behind Luke holding a partially charred wood board in his hands; this he slammed into Luke's head, sending pieces of wood flying in every direction.

Luke flopped over but immediately struggled to his feet.

"What the hell?" It was the choked whisper of Will Jern. He stood swaying, his hands in a fighting stance, eyeing with revulsion the creature that was once Luke.

Jim's eyes went to Will's chest, expecting to see a gaping bloody hole, but instead saw only a dreadful bruise and an odd shaped bleeding cut, but also, swinging back and forth, still on its leather string was the pewter cross that Father Alba had given him. It could hardly be called a cross now, because of how it bent inwards forming a shallow 'C'.

Joy and excitement raced through Jim and he wanted to yell out to his friend, but he was too woozy, besides which, Luke attacked Will. It was a lunging attack, a grab for Will's waist, but the man dodged back, very nearly coming into contact with the smoking demon behind him.

"Look out!" Jim tried to call out, but he lacked the strength in his lungs for anything more than a loud whisper. However, Will didn't seem to need his warning and managed to step aside in time not to touch it.

"Get the gypsy!" Will yelled back.

Grimacing at the shooting pains in his spine, Jim sat up and saw the gypsy lying as if already dead. Her body lay stretched out near the fire. He couldn't walk, so he crawled to her, casting looks at both Will and his sister as he did. Will lurched about clutching his chest, dodging this way and that; however Talitha was on her knees, her hands straining at her head as if she were trying to crush her own skull.

She couldn't last.

Jim had no time, seconds maybe. Certainly not enough time to choke the gypsy to death, something that could last two or three minutes. So instead, as he came up to the gypsy he yanked the curved knife out of his own chest and plunged it with all the force he could muster into hers. With his strength the knife sheered away bone like butter and plunged deep into her heart.

In an instant, Jim became part of the connection—the connection that linked a demon, a gypsy, a virgin and his Talitha.

It was the strangest feeling. He could sense the gypsy and knew her name, and knew as well that she would live out an eternity of death in this shadow land. He could feel Ba'al Zubel as well. It was a monstrous horror that lurked behind everything, a creature of gluttonous appetites without equal in the void.

And he knew and sensed Theresa Brabec as if he were an old friend of hers, which was strange, because he now knew she had no old friends and very few new ones either. She stood far from him, deep in the void, but despite the distance, he could still feel her fear. It was rich and a delight to the fiends that flocked around her—few of which dared to stray to near because of the proximity of the horror of the shade, the tyrant.

Then there was Talitha Lynn Jern. She was a part of the connection as well and there was an intimacy the two of them shared in the fraction of time that the connection lasted. It was the same love that he'd always felt for her, but now he could feel her love in return, it was unhesitating and it was no small thing.

He could sense, in a way, all of them as soon as he crossed into the void. The void itself was inexplicable; indefinable beyond the simplest terms, which in no way can give it meaning. To say it's cold, or dark, or drowned in a caressing fear means nothing until one stands within it.

For James Anderson the most definable aspect of the void would be the fear. It was the air he breathed and it grasped at him, trying to choke him with itself. It sought to bath him in its foul purity and it left him feeling blemished and slick with its texture.

There was darkness as well, but it was not all consuming as the fear. Shadows layered on shadows gave the darkness a nightmare quality that pure blackness never could have. Moreover, the darkness wasn't absolute, there was actual light spoiling it.

The light was dim and far off, but it was real and it beckoned to Jim. But in order to come upon the light, he would have to leave the path that he stood upon, something his soul cried out against. He turned and saw he could leave the void and return to the world, if he so wished, simply by walking back up the path.

However, his heart cried out for the light as well, and he knew the distant glow was not a trick or a will-o'-wisp designed to lead him astray, but it was the light of the souls that he knew and they were in mortal peril.

Leaving the path, he flew to the small lights on winged feet, and the darkness gave way before him. In time, not time as is counted on the planes of the living, but as counted in the void, Jim found the lights of three souls and now his heart quaked in real fear. The great Tyrant of the void had stepped back and in essence had given up his claims to the light, and now a multitude swarmed over them in an effort to devour their light, that is to say their souls.

The lights of his friends were dimming quickly, there was first Talitha, she glowed brightest of all and battled with a desperate ferocity. Then there was the girl, Terry. She had already lost her battle with fear and lay as a feast for the many creatures that dined upon her light, sullying it and diminishing it. Finally, there was the gypsy, whose name he knew, and whom he had killed in the world, but still looked upon as a person. She foolishly searched for a patron among the demons of the highest rank, resigned to deceiving herself in the belief she would be safer with one of them.

Jim saw this from afar and came as a hurricane in his wrath and he felt a great power within him, and he wished to unleash it on the hordes to save his friends. He drew himself up and the darkness slunk back for a time, all save a single shadow, which stepped forward brazenly.

It was Ba'al Fie-ere.

"Save your breath James Anderson," it said, forming its shadows into a pleasing form.

The form was that of a wickedly sensuous Talitha Jern, who shined black as jet.

Jim turned away from her saying, "Don't talk to me, I cannot trust you."

"You have no choice. You are far from the path back to the world and you will never save Talitha without my help."

Jim became troubled not knowing the truth and beckoned the demon to follow and he approached closer to the souls.

He wanted to rejoice, even in the crushing darkness, at the sight of Talitha, and he went to her and made to kiss her, but the feeling of the void, which was everywhere, intruded, fouling the pleasantness of her lips.

"Jim you should not have left the path," she said holding him to her.

"That couldn't be helped, I came here for you," he answered and looked at her light closely. It was dimming slightly and he worried, for the swarms of creatures had not retreated far and were becoming bold. "I'm afraid I may not be able to find the path again," he said. This was an unfortunate truth, he had looked back for path almost as soon as he had left it, but it had been swallowed up in the endless void as if it had never been.

"I know where the path lays." Ba'al Fie-ere stepped into their light. Talitha and the demon glowered at each other.

"The demon is composed of nothing but deceit. We cannot listen to it." Talitha cautioned.

"Then none of you will return to the world. Is that what you want?" They were silent and the demon continued, "I am offering you a choice, no tricks. I will see that Talitha is freed...but I will have your soul and that of the girl as payment."

Talitha shook her head as if to say, no.

Jim said, "I can feel the power of the life in me, I can hold out against these creatures."

"But for how long? Not very I surmise and then what would you do? I have seen the power of the Word and it cannot be denied, but it is not limitless. Do you feel what is behind these shadow creatures? It is the Tyrant. He learned from his mistake the last time and he is waiting for you to do battle and when you are weak...he will take all your souls."

"If what you say is true then in good faith, show us where the path lays," Talitha said and Jim could see her plotting, but Ba'al Fie-ere was cunning and he worried that this was a trick of the demon's to ensnare all them.

"Talitha, please, no," Jim pleaded. "I'm willing to give my soul to save you, as I have vowed, but there has to be another way." Still Talitha wanted to see the path for herself, and she took his hand and followed after the demon, with Terry and the gypsy in tow.

As they travelled, the horde of demons kept pace, and some of the greater ones darted in, attempting to carry Terry off. She did nothing to defend herself save move closer to Jim, which had him puzzled.

"I feel the power of the word in me, but it is not in Talitha or Terry, or even the gypsy, why?"

"These two came into the void kicking and screaming, forced against their will," the demon answered pointing at the gypsy and Terry. "And Talitha came only because she was connected through the demon by their battle of wills, but you had a choice and you came with love in your heart."

"Speak no more to her," Talitha warned him. "She is too great a liar."

The demon, Ba'al Fie-ere gave her a patient look. "I only lie for a purpose and I only tell the truth for the same reason. I seek what benefits me. Helping you benefits me. I will receive two souls where I would have none. You will see." She was silent for the rest of the journey and they did see.

The path, red against the black was held against them by battalions of loathsome creatures and still more demons crowded in their wake. Hopelessness began to fill Jim's heart and when Ba'al Fie-ere saw this, she fretted.

"Do not despair! It will eat at your heart and weaken you, and then these Ghushkaz will have you... all of you. Know that you will save your beloved." Jim nodded and kept his eyes on Talitha. Her nearness swelled his heart and made him feel strong again.

Ba'al Fie-ere then turned to Talitha. "Do you see now, sister? Jim may be able to defeat these creatures for a time, but the power of the Word will ebb and then he will fall to the Tyrant and all will be lost. You know I am not lying about that."

Talitha nodded grimly, seeing the truth of the demon's words and Ba'al Fie-ere went on, "You would be fools to trust me, but I can trust you. So I will save Talitha first, if Jim will give me his word to come with me willingly and be my slave."

Jim did not hesitate, "I promise." Talitha was silent and he could see her mind working at their problem, but he knew there was no solution, but this one.

"I don't make that promise," Terry cried. "Take me instead!" She rushed to the demon, but Ba'al Fie-ere threw her down and stepped upon her carelessly.

"We must hurry," the demon said, as she pressed harder onto Terry.

Talitha grew angry at this. "Stop. I will not go with you. Take the girl in my stead."

Before Jim could speak the demon replied, "I can't. As much as I want you here, I can't. You are the only that I can save, watch." She stepped toward Talitha, who stood firm, showing no fear, but then Ba'al Fie-ere stepped into Talitha and they merged as if one, black, deadly and beautiful.

She then stepped away again. "You see now? I will take her with me through the ranks of Ghushkaz opposing you and release her at the gate. And when I get back, you will send forth the power of the word. This will disrupt much of the void near to us and in the confusion, I will cloak us in darkness and take you and Terry with me. I will leave this one here to attract the attention of Ba'al Zubel," she said referring to the gypsy.

Jim's heart wavered at first, but he pictured Talitha stepping into the light, smiling and happy at long last. Talitha seemed also to finally recognize that this was their only option and she began to cry, her tears were white pearls, and they grew larger as they fell from her cheeks.

The demon, Ba'al Fie-ere, eyed them hungrily and laid out a part of her, to catch them.

Jim kissed a tear of Talitha's from her cheek, it was of pure water, and it washed the oily black fear from his lips, so that now he kissed her truly. His heart swelled even greater with love, but hers swelled in sadness and he rebuked her then and told her to find love in the world.

"It's time, we must hurry," the demon said with urgency and handed the tears she had collected to Jim. "If the demons gather to close, throw one of these at them, but do not waste them!"

Jim gave Talitha a final look and the demon merged with the girl and took her. He watched them a long while and saw that they indeed passed through the formation, unhindered and made their way along the path. Finally, from a great distance a light came to him that he recognized, it was Talitha and she paused for only a second before slipping out of the void.

He felt the void become less at her passing.

The void, when Jim first entered it seemed like a huge thing; endless, but he realized then that it was actually a very small lonely place. Terry grabbed at his arm and had been for some time and finally he looked around to see the swarms drawing near and so he tossed one of the tears, which had swollen to a great size.

He thought it might act as a weapon and explode, but it didn't. It only bounced against the nothing of the void, and as it did, the demons, all of them near to the ball, charged after it and fought for it. He was forced to do this over and over and he had just two left when Ba'al Fie-ere returned with a triumphant look lighting her evil features.

"I have done my part, it's time for you to do yours. Release the word on these fiends." She was dark and beautiful, so much like his Talitha that Jim hesitated a second.

"Tell me who I am first," he ordered the demon.

"My slave," was her response and her eye gleamed—until she saw that his did as well.

Epilogue

When Jim killed the gypsy, the change in the room occurred as if a switch had been thrown and Will's first act was to cast an eye on the great hideous column of smoke, curious to see what would happen.

It was far from dramatic.

The smoke simply dissipated. It eddied about as if in confusion for a moment and then drifted away, leaving behind a black sludge, pooled upon the floor.

The change in the creature that had once been Luke was also far from spectacular. It just stopped moving, froze in place for a second, still staring at Will with its sightless glassy eyes and then it toppled over and didn't again stir.

With that, a warm breeze, at least warmer than the frozen room, drifted in and Will felt his hearing pop back to normal and he could now perceive the small sounds of the room; the snapping of the fire, the steady dripping of rain water cascading down from the partially destroyed roof, his own labored breathing.

For seconds nothing happened and he looked around him dazedly; Talitha knelt with her hands to the sides of her head, Terry lay as dead looking as she had when they first saw her and Jim lay across the body of the gypsy. His body's position looked strange to Will, who got up and went to him.

Jim was dead.

Will pulled him off of the gypsy, heaving him over, despite the pain flaring throughout his chest and felt at the man's throat for a pulse. He knew there wouldn't be one, but he checked anyways.

Suddenly he heard a great sob from Talitha and he saw her running, in a staggering drunken manner toward him. She pushed Will aside with considerable force and threw herself on top of the man's huge chest and cried many tears.

She wept for a long time and was at first inconsolable, but at length, when Will finally got up to check on Terry, she wiped at her face and said with heavy bitterness, "Don't bother, she's dead too."

"What happened?" he asked, and from her empty look he didn't figure he would get an answer, but she described everything she had seen, crying constant tears as she did. When she had finished, Will felt such complete exhaustion that he could have slept there on the fading ice.

"What did we come here for? Everyone we've tried to save has ended up dying," he said dismally.

"I've been saved, twice." Talitha whispered and then bent to Jim's lips and kissed him gently, before she stood. She eyed Will with red-rimmed eyes that held a mixture of relief and sadness. "I'm glad you didn't die...when I shot you that is. I aimed for the cross, but I had no way of knowing if it would stop the bullet or not."

Will touched his chest, gingerly, realizing only then what had happened. The pain of the gunshot had been like a fire in his chest, but what Ba'al Zubel had done to him had dwarfed it to such an extent, that only now was he truly feeling it. He took a deep breath in and felt the pain radiating throughout his bones and muscles, it hurt, but he also felt strangely comforted by the pain. It meant he was alive.

"I'm glad I didn't die as well and I'm glad you didn't either. But what about the other Talitha? Is she gone...for good? Can you feel her at all, inside you?" Will felt as if he was on the verge of passing out and swayed as he spoke, but he needed to know.

"She's gone all right, thank you for that. I feel so alive, but poor Jim..." Talitha cried again and he went to her, holding her until he began to reel on his feet. She kept him steady and gave him a sharp look through her tears. "Are you ok? I've never seen anyone so exhausted looking.

"I don't know what I'm feeling," he answered and his head began to swim. He lurched over then and she held him up.

"I'm going to take you back to the hotel. In the morning we'll figure out what to do." She gestured to the grim room and the four bodies.

Will remembered none of the details of the next twenty minutes, other than his sister getting him back to the hotel and putting him in bed. His only thought now was to call Lisa and tell her that he loved her, but the clock read 3:32 am, and he didn't want to wake her, so he slept.

It was a deep sleep, unmarred by dreams, or even worry and it was with a far lighter heart that he woke with light shining into the room. Talitha lay asleep in the next bed and he smiled seeing the great black mess she had made of the sheets from the soot that covered her clothing. Since he hadn't bothered to undress either his own bed was a mess as well.

He went to let out a long sigh of relief, but his chest throbbed and he cut it short. Slipping out of the bed, he went to call his wife, but just as he did he realized that Talitha was asleep. She had slept and he hadn't had any dreams.

He should have been elated, instead he felt a sudden coldness sweep over him. A fear like a dagger drove into him and he was suddenly sure that she was dead in the bed beside his. His fear, a metallic taste in his mouth, mounted quickly within him as he hurried over to her, but just then she snorted in her sleep.

He jumped at the sound and then leaned back, smiling for a moment. Shaking his head in amazement at how quickly his fear had exploded inside him, he turned back and went into the adjoining room. Ignoring the overturned lamps, chairs, and desk, he called his wife and as he waited for her to answer, he raised his hand and saw it shaking, he still had the fear.

"Hello, Will."

The voice coming out of the phone wasn't his wife's.

The End

An Illusion of Hell is dedicated to my wife Stacy. She is all over the pages of this book.

*

Hell Blade: The Trilogy of the Void Book Three, the story continues:

And he lived happily ever after. For just the briefest time Will Jern thought there could be a chance at the perfect fairy tale ending, but then he discovers there's a stranger in his home and that his wife is being held captive by a witch bent on vengeance and who is desperately in need of a soul.
And she lived happily ever after. For Talitha Jern it will never happen. When her demon was banished back to the Void, it left behind the gift that keeps on giving: memories. Her mind now rings with the screams of those her evil side tortured and her hands bear the scent of their blood. Soon she can't tell which memories are of her making and which came from the demon. It's enough to drive a person crazy.
And they all lived happily ever after. Not for a moment did Katie Jern believe this; she knew her family was good and cursed. At the age of six she saw the demon and peered with innocent eyes through the gate unto Hell. Those eyes are innocent no more. They are guarded lest anyone can look past her perky features and see the raging paranoia beneath. But at least she gets the answer to the question that all paranoids ask: Am I paranoid enough?
Not nearly.

Hell Blade

Prologue

As her father had once done, the blonde was out of the house by six in the morning, putting the road through its paces. The black top was cool that early and it was some time before the sweat started to work its way from the pores of her wonderfully tanned skin. After eight years in the desert, she sported an Arizona bronze throughout even the deepest days of winter.

Not that they ever had real winter in that state. More like a few weeks where she switched out her ever-present shorts for a comfortable pair of loose jeans. Always loose—so she could move. Nothing bothered her more than being constricted, or bound.

A stray breeze left over from the cool of the night tickled her calves just as the sun peeked out from behind a far hill. It would be a fine day, a hot one, an exact replica of the previous. Change was slow coming to the desert and that was just fine with her. If she had a wish, it was for summer never to fade; the cold was just something she didn't miss. The autumn trees changing to gold—that she missed. Rivers of leaves flowing at the whim of the wind, the pumpkins lit on a brisk all hallows eve, a tall fire on Christmas morning—these she missed.

But never the cold. She had felt cold that even the rawest New York winter paled in comparison too. The memory brought with it a shiver and she involuntarily picked up the pace, as if she were running from a ghost, instead of a memory.

Blowing hard, she crested the worst hill of the lot, the one her father had called, The Ole Bitch back when he used to run. It was aptly named. Long and steep. It was only the year before, when the blonde was thirteen that she first conquered it; the pain of that made her question why she ran at all. In truth, she didn't know why she pushed herself along that road every morning.

It certainly wasn't the view. That was the problem with the desert not having anything resembling seasons, the view never changed. The scenic panorama afforded her at the top of The Ole Bitch was the same on the fourth of July as it was on New Year's day.

Only it had changed that day.

Two hundred yards down the slope, sat a rusted out four door Chevrolet. It was half off the road, idling crooked, looking as if it held in its dark chamber any number of sinister possibilities. Without missing a stride, the girl crossed to the other side of the road, keeping her blue eyes sharp on the car. She began to lope, working her breathing into an easy rhythm, half conscience of the fact that she was preparing to flee. It was only half conscience because she was always preparing to flee.

Now, a hundred yards closer, a man climbed out of the Chevrolet. His outfit: jeans and blue work shirt was almost the state uniform of Arizona and seemed ordinary enough. His tan however didn't. He was too light. Had he been blonde, or even Mexican, she would've kept going along the road. But he was too light. Black hair and white skin.

In a flash, she dodged off the road and dug in her toes, clawing up the half-sand embankment. At the top, the rugged hard scrabble of the desert lay out, going on forever in front of her. She didn't hesitate. For her the desert held no fear, after all it was only sand and stone. She ran. Despite the terrain, she ran surprisingly light, keeping away from the loose dirt and holding to the bare rocks when she could. The running shoes she wore made barely a mark as she passed over low bushes or leapt the maze of shallow gullies and now she began working up a good lather. In seven minutes, the road was a mile behind and was a barely visible black line.

The man looked after the skinny blonde, but didn't follow.

Chapter 1

Will

The phone in Will's hand rang and rang.

Like a dentist's drill, each of those shrill sounds bored into mind, painfully, and he thought that if the torture were to go on much longer, his head would split open, right down the middle. Yet he waited with patience, despite the pulsating agony of his hangover and the pain of his beating. Lisa would pick up any second. Now, the fifth ring, and on to the sixth; they didn't own an answering machine.

His pulse beat into his brain and he closed his eyes, running his good right hand across his battered and swollen face. The scene in front of him, a jumbled mess of a motel room; knocked over chairs and lamps, an over turned desk, brought with it the sad memories of a dead man. He had been a good man. The ninth ring, she should have picked up by then. That little fear, the tiny squiggle he had tried to ignore when he first pulled himself out of his soot-covered bed, was no longer so little. Eleven rings.

"Hello, Will."

"Hel..." he stopped in the middle of his greeting. The voice on the other end of the connection wasn't Lisa's.

Like magic, the hangover was gone, as was the dull ache from his many injuries. The fingers of his left hand, so recently dislocated in his fight with the evil Talitha, went numb. His sternum, deeply bruised from a bullet, no longer throbbed with each breath and unaware, he rubbed the spot where he had been shot point-blank by the good Talitha. He had been saved only by the heavy pewter cross that he once wore and now he felt naked and vulnerable without it.

"Who is this?" Will whispered into the phone.

"What? You don't know remember me? I'm so hurt." The voice was light, airy, as if the owner of it was in the best of moods. It was a woman's voice and it wasn't the least bit familiar. It certainly wasn't a friend of his wife's. Lisa had no real friends. A few acquaintances perhaps, but in all the time they had lived in Bangor, she had made no lasting friendships.

And it was no one Will knew.

"I suppose it has been a while," the woman said vaguely, leaving the question of her name up in the air.

"I'm sorry, but I don't know you...can you put Lisa on?" He didn't know why he bothered asking. He knew it wasn't going to happen. The woman's insincere laughter was about to come through the cheap piece of motel plastic next to his ear and she was going to add...

"Ha, ha, ha, ha. No, I don't think so. She's...indisposed at the moment. And really, it's you and me that need to talk some things over."

That fake laugh. That obnoxious sound. That was familiar. But with his mind being pulled between fear and confusion, he still couldn't place it. "Indisposed? I really should talk to...who is this?"

To Will's left, a silent movement. His sister, Talitha, the good one...the only one now, walked in from the adjoining motel room. Her entire aspect was blackened and it looked as if she had just been pulled from a burning building. Beneath the soot, her normally tan face was white.

"That's Amy Harris," Talitha whispered with a nod to the phone.

"How do you...?" Will bit back the question.

But he knew how. Talitha, from thirty feet away, through the thin motel room walls had heard and recognized the tinny sounding voice coming through the phone. Her hearing was amazing, beyond human, beyond anything.

"Amy?" The word croaked from his throat.

"Very good," she gushed. "It's been so long...tell me, how long has it been?"

Her tone was still light, but her words were great blocks of stone that she hurled at him with the intent to cause pain. She knew how long it had been since they'd seen each other last. They both knew. It was two days after he'd stabbed her mother to death. That had been eight years previous, but it could've been a thousand years and he still wouldn't forget that day.

How Amy had been able to connect her mother's disappearance with him, he hadn't a clue. However, two days after the corpse of Henny Harris had been burnt down to ashes; Will had run into Amy, an accident he had taken pains to avoid.

Her eyes, red with sorrow, had locked onto his without the pretence of disguising her unspoken accusation. She knew. Somehow, she knew. After mumbling something to her, he couldn't remember what, he had practically run away, as if the ghost of her mother was at his heels.

"It's been...a while," Will mouthed the words into the receiver, not knowing if actual sound had come from his moving lips. He had no strength in his lungs, or in his body for that matter and he sat down upon the room's only bed.

Amy Harris was in his home.

At any time that thought would've left him weak from guilt, but now, not even seven hours after confronting a demon, the same demon Amy's mother had unleashed so many years ago, Will lacked the strength to stand. This wasn't a coincidence.

After a second, he added, "What are you doing there? And what do you mean, Lisa's indisposed?" Just asking the question aloud caused his fear to double and it made his insides tremble.

"I think you know why I'm here, Will," she replied and now her voice lost the gaiety of a few moments before.

"I don't..."

"The sword! I want the sword, you idiot." Amy had lost control for a second and had practically screamed the words into the phone, but now she pulled herself together. "You do know what sword I'm talking about, right?"

He knew. "Yes." So breathless was his response that Amy didn't hear it.

"You're going to pretend you don't remember?" she asked and now her tone was cruel. "It's the same sword you killed my mother with. How bout I describe it for you: it's broken, all black looking, really cold..."

"I know the sword," he interrupted, sharper now. "What do you want it for?"

There was a snort of laughter from the phone. "The same thing that Luke wanted with it. Oh, and thanks for taking care of that little problem for me."

"Problem? I don't..." he trailed off feeling as if the room around him was dissolving. How did she know about Luke? Or the sword for that matter? He looked at his sister, but she didn't make eye contact, she just stepped a little closer concentrating on the phone.

"Yes, Luke was an issue that I was going to have to deal with, and you took care of it. But you didn't use the sword last night." Amy paused as if thinking. "Tell me, how did you manage to send Ba'al back this time?"

"Let me speak to Lisa first, and then I'll tell you everything you want to know." Again, he knew this wasn't going to fly, but he couldn't stop himself, he only hoped she didn't hear the whine in his voice as much as he did.

"Oh, Willy J, that's not the way this is going to happen," Amy's voice came across very calm and she seemed far more mature, not to mention more intelligent than he remembered. "Unlike that fool Luke, I haven't come all this way, to this forgotten state, empty handed and without back-up. I'm the one who'll be telling you, not the other way around."

Talitha leaned in closer and whispered, "She's not lying. I hear at least three people in the room with her. Lisa isn't one of them."

"What was that, Will?" Amy asked sharply. "Is there someone with you? If there is, it'd be really smart of you to tell them to..."

"Don't worry," Will cut across her. His headache had begun to thump again mildly and he knew more was coming. It added to his bad mood; fear always made him cranky. "It's just Talitha."

"Talitha?" For a few seconds Amy seemed at a loss. "I thought..." Another longer pause followed those two words and then Amy said with evident disbelief, "Let me speak to her."

"Sure." Will's blue eyes darted over to look questioningly into his sister's brown ones. Perplexed, she only shrugged slightly.

"Hello Amy, this is Talitha," she said apprehensively into the phone, her brow furrowed showing three little lines between her eyebrows.

Those little lines in the soot suddenly gave Talitha the appearance of age, or rather, she suddenly looked her age, twenty-five. Normally, she looked so amazingly young, that if she wished to, she could pass for a sophomore in high school. And despite everything that she had gone through in her rather horrible life, she had an innocent quality to her that on occasion made her look even younger, almost child-like.

"Who did we have for science in the tenth grade?" Talitha repeated the question for Will's sake, his hearing was altogether normal and he hadn't heard Amy's question. "It was a biology class specifically and the teacher's name was Dwayne Sanders. Yes...yes. Certainly, but first...ok."

Talitha shrugged again to her brother and handed back the phone. "Are you satisfied that was Talitha? It's just her and me, there's no one else here, ok? Do you believe me?" For a few moments, there was silence. "Amy?"

"Right...right, of course I believe you," Amy replied slowly. "All you Jern's are all so honest that it's annoying really. It's just...I had it on good authority that Talitha was dead, yet there she is." Will began to worry who this authority could be. Was there someone here in Boston, spying on them? And for what purpose? The sword?

"Amy, if you want the sword, I don't have it here with me, but I can help get it for you..." Will started, but his sister dug a sharp elbow into him, shaking her head. He glared at her before continuing, "If...if you don't hurt Lisa."

Talitha snaked out her hand in a flash and covering the mouthpiece of the phone, she hissed, "You can't do this! You know what she'll do with..." Will pulled the phone away from her and their eyes locked in a silent heated debate. The sword, an eighteen inch chunk of charred broken metal had somewhere upon its frozen length a pinpoint sized opening. It opened onto the Void.

As far as Will knew, there were only two reasons to want the sword; to destroy it or to make that opening larger. Perhaps large enough to bring something from the Void into this world. It was patently obvious to both brother and sister, that this was what Amy wanted and Will understood Talitha's anger. But Lisa was in danger and so was his unborn child. That beautiful little girl that he had seen so often in his dreams, that little girl he was already madly in love with.

There was no argument in his mind. "Do we have a deal?" he asked Amy.

"Hmmm, nope. You see Willy J, I don't really need your help getting the sword. Lisa knows where it is. Sure, she's been reluctant to tell me where she's stashed it, but I have ways of getting information."

"Like how you got the information that Talitha was dead?" Will threw that out there, hoping to jar her. He sounded far more in control than he actually was. "I think you need me."

"No, what I need is a sharper knife," Amy scoffed. Will's heart froze at this, and though he wanted to beg Amy, just then his throat locked up tight and no sound came out. "The sword is around here someplace and I know for a fact that she'll tell me where in a few minutes. Here's what I want from you, Will. The incantations Luke stole from me; I want them back. They're very important to me. Can you get them?"

"Yeah, but..."

"No buts. Get them and be back up here to No-where's-ville, by...let's say five. And of course don't call the police or your wife and baby die, blah, blah, blah. I will know if you do. Do you understand what I'm saying?"

"Yeah." He knew, or at least had a guess that Amy, perhaps through her gypsy mother had more spells at her disposal. However, she wasn't the only one. "Amy, I'll get the spells, but you should know that if you hurt her in the least way, I will know even before you even try, and..."

"Right, you can see the future. I know," Amy sounded bored, which sent a separate distinct feeling of alarm running through him. How could she know? And if she did, why was she so calm about it? She continued, only now her tone turned braggadocios, "I have knowledge concerning all sorts of things. I know about the witch, Adrina and Father Alba...I know what he did to my mother, and everything that happened that night eight years ago. What I don't know just yet is what occurred last night. I know Luke is dead, perhaps worse than dead in fact. And I know that Ba'al Zubel crossed over from the Void, but was sent back. I just don't know how."

She left the last sentence sort of hanging out there, clearly hoping that he'd answer. Will didn't know exactly what to say. Would it be wise to tell her? The only thing that seemed smart to hold back was the role Talitha played.

"I'm not saying anything until I know that Lisa's safe."

"Well that's going to be tough to do," Amy replied with a bit of a sigh. "You see, I've already threatened her. Not me of course, some of my men. They waved their guns and held knives up to her and told her how they were going to cut her baby out of her and hold it up for her to see..."

"No!" Talitha interrupted with a scream. Will would've screamed as well, but he had been struck dumb by Amy's words.

"Yeah, awful right?" Amy continued casually, seeming to enjoy her role as storyteller. "Pedro had this really big knife, he's just silly about knives sometimes, you know, and he's got this razor sharp blade right up to her little bulge and still she doesn't talk. You gotta hand it to her, she can be a pretty tough cookie. But I can see in her eyes also that she's scared, so you know what I tell Pedro?" She paused dramatically.

Will found his tongue and his fear had him yelling, "What! Amy what did you do? Let me talk to Lisa right now!"

"Chill-out, Will," she said still relaxed. "I'll finish telling you what happened to your wife, don't worry. But you have to tell me what happened last night, first."

"It...it...I, uh," Will spluttered in a rush to get his story out. Suddenly the events of the previous night seemed like they'd been a long time in the past and he had trouble remembering everything, and what he did recall came to him like a puzzle fresh from the box. "I, uh, I saw where Luke was going to be and there were these boys and this girl...Terry. She died and then Jim died, but first we..."

"Maybe Talitha should tell the story," Amy interjected.

Talitha heard this and gently took the phone from Will's numb fingers, "I'll tell you what happened, I promise, but only after I know what's going on with Lisa." She had regained her composure and her tone was neutral. When after a few seconds Amy hadn't responded, Talitha added, "As you alluded to a few minutes ago, subterfuge isn't a fundamental aspect of our personalities."

Amy paused now longer than before. "I suppose you're right, you guys aren't the lying types. So, I'll go first. I haven't hurt Lisa...yet. But I'm on a bit of a time crunch and when Lisa didn't immediately spill where she'd hid the sword, even with Pedro and his knife, I couldn't afford to waste time on torture. I mean people say all sorts of things when their being sliced into, right? She could've told me she threw it in a lake or some such and then I'd be all day trying to find the thing. You know what I mean?"

"Certainly, torture is an ineffective tool when trying to ascertain information," Talitha replied. She shared a silent look of relief with her brother, whose ear was inches from the phone.

"Ineffective?" Amy grunted out the word, disdainfully. "Wrong. It's only ineffective when you don't have a lot of time. Give me a few hours and Lisa will be telling me everything...but like I said, I have places to be, so I had just started this little incantation..."

"A spell?" Will broke in, fear causing his voice to crack. "What's it going to do? Will it hurt her?"

"Damn it, Will. Stop interrupting, jeeze!" Amy cried, put out. "Not every spell is designed to hurt someone. This one will just allow me to browse her memory of the last day or so. There'll be no lasting damage at all, but like I said, I had just started it when you called, so she's out like a light and can't talk. That's it, that's the truth. Now, I told you about Lisa. It's your turn."

Will took the phone from his sister, but waited to proceed. Could he really trust a woman like Amy Harris? She had been a nasty piece of work as a teenager and clearly she'd only become more so. The answer was obviously no; nevertheless, with Lisa as her hostage he saw no alternative and began his narrative. He told her everything concerning the painful day and the terrifying night confronting the demon, with only one exception. Talitha. The very casual way in which Amy had spoke to Talitha, made Will think she didn't know as much as she thought she did. After all, it wasn't too long ago that her attitude might have put his sister in a killing mood. Her role, he left extremely vague and in the telling she came off more as an advisor than the central figure she really had been.

The reason for this was simple. The Talitha that Amy had known years before, though smart and pretty, had been unexceptional physically. Now however, despite not looking to have changed a whit in eight years, she possessed herculean strength. This, coupled with her cheetah like speed made her easily the most formidable person on earth. And if Amy knew none of this the element of surprise could make his sister all but unstoppable.

Amy took a long time in replying, "You two and some big guy, took on Luke, a gypsy witch and the demon?" She sounded skeptical.

"I told you I had a gun and I shot Luke...and it wasn't easy, if that's what you think. And..." Talitha sent him a little frown and put a finger to his lips to keep him from saying anymore.

Amy took her time, pausing for a minute considering. "Did you find out the witch's name?"

Unexpectedly, Will felt a heavy weight of guilt over this. "It was late...I mean it was like two in the morning." He didn't know what else to say, the battle had left them barely able to stand.

"I suppose, but before you come up, find out the name of that gypsy," Amy commanded. She sounded as if she was well used to her orders being carried out without question, and so authoritative was her voice that Will found himself nodding in acceptance.

"Okay, sure."

"And be here by five. It's getting dark so early and I don't want any surprises. You and your sister, come alone, come unarmed and know that any hero shit will just get your wife and baby killed, understood?"

Chapter 2

Amy

The woman set the phone in its cradle and stood thinking, her dark brown eyes staring at the ivory colored carpet. The Amy Harris that Will had known in high school had never once been accused of thinking. She hadn't been considered smart by anyone's standards, but this was a fiction that she had cultivated, purposely. Boys weren't interested in smart girls. She didn't have to look further than Talitha Jern for proof of that. Talitha had been pretty despite herself, and yet had never gone out with a boy of any merit. While raven-haired Amy, who acted the ditz to perfection could have any boy she chose.

Almost any boy. Not Will Jern. For some reason he had turned up his nose at her advances, and instead, went after the dull twig of a girl that was currently lying upon the floor at her feet. To be passed up that way had been quite a slap in the face for Amy and she had hated him for as long as she could remember, though she had hid that fact as well. Even when she was coming on to him, throwing herself at him, Amy had hated Will. She had so wanted to humiliate him, to hurt him, and it hadn't been an easy thing to do to keep up that fake smile.

But then her mother had disappeared.

Back then, she didn't blame Will as he suspected. That last time they'd seen each other, it was the pure hate for him that had finally shown through that he saw. No, she didn't blame Will back then, but she did now.

"Pedro! Get your ass in here," she demanded in a harsh voice that carried throughout the house. It was loud enough to wake the dead, but the blonde girl stretched out on the floor didn't stir. Perhaps it was because she wasn't quite dead, yet.

Pedro was there in seconds, huffing as quietly as he could and Amy smirked at the sight.

Only two people ever called him Pedro, his grandmother, and Amy Harris. Anyone else who dared would have been bleeding in seconds. Amy knew this about the big man and more. Early on she had decided that she wouldn't make the same mistake as she did with Luke and extensively explored his background. Using the dead, and there were many, many dead souls who had known Pedro, the witch discovered far more about the Mexican than he would've ever dreamt about.

She knew that Pedro was not a man to take lightly. At six foot three inches and two-hundred and forty pounds, he was big for a Mexican and he enjoyed the intimidation factor that his size allowed. He enjoyed doling out pain as well and had no qualms about killing in any manner. These attributes were highly sought after and not just by her and it was during his first stay as a guest of the California Department of Corrections that he'd been recruited into Emeros.

Emeros was a Mexican prison gang and though they liked to throw around the term Mafia in relation to the name, they were really nothing of the sort, and did little besides use drugs, sell drugs, and kill people over drugs. Since he was exceptional at all three, Pedro quickly progressed to the level of lieutenant in the hierarchy of the gang.

However, the White Witch as he called Amy Harris behind her back, with a small show of her power had ended his connection to the gang in a single afternoon. This was the only thing that could've won him over, since power was the single authority he respected. Amy had great power.

"Yes, Ms Harris?" he asked, keeping his eyes low, but all the same not looking at the blonde girl splayed on the floor. He seemed nervous at her unnatural sleep.

"How many of your boys do we have in Boston? And how many still in L.A?" the witch asked, running her hands through her thick black hair. As a habit, she would tease her hair or stretch provocatively and Pedro as always, forced his yearning eyes from her stunning figure. He'd been trained well; to ogle her was to invite trouble.

"Six in Boston and och..." Amy's eyes narrowed and Pedro quickly bit his tongue. She always demanded that he speak only English. "I mean eight in L.A."

"Have the boys in Boston get to Logan airport and make sure they're ready to fly," Amy ordered and then began pacing, her mind whirling. "Who do you trust down stairs? As soon as I'm done with her," she nodded to the blonde. "We're out of here, but I need to leave a few men behind. Later today I'm expecting two people a man and a woman. Now the girl is nothing special, but the man, may be tough..." she left off thinking.

Will was far tougher than she had first realized. Three times he'd been in the presence of the demon, Ba'al Zubel back on Governor's Island, yet he lived. And last night, she knew that he had taken on Ba'al again, as well as Luke, something that should've been far beyond him. Somehow he came out of it alive. And so did Talitha. That was an even bigger surprise.

Yet, did it really matter?

Amy was there for the sword, not some petty revenge. That she could indulge in at any time once her obligations were fulfilled that is. She hadn't been lying, when she told Will she was on a time crunch. Promises had been made in blood and she had received much for them, but the time of her payment was coming fast upon her.

"Ramon is good," Pedro answered the earlier question. "I'd leave him and Tre."

"No, make it four men." Amy nodded her head as she spoke. Will's ability to see the future would be quite easy to overcome. A simple charm would do the trick; something Luke had disregarded when he had made off with half her incantations. And without the capacity to see the future, Will was as good as dead...but she was done taking chances. There was Talitha to consider after all. The only thing Amy really knew about her was that she had gone insane the night Amy's mother had died.

Was there more to her than just brains? The insane were notoriously unpredictable after all, capable of anything. The witch began to pace, thinking, worrying, biting her lip, but after a minute she realized she was wasting her time. Worrying about Talitha would have to wait, since if she didn't find the sword nothing else mattered.

"I have some work to do in here and while I'm at it I'm going to need absolute silence. Set men around the house. No one comes in, no matter what. No mailman, no police, no nothing. You got it?"

"Yes, Ms Harris," Pedro backed away in haste, shutting the door behind him.

Amy looked down at Lisa once more and shook her head. The girl was so plain. Where was the attraction? She gave the body a quick shrug, not really caring much anymore.

Three years ago she'd cared a great deal. Her hate had been burning like a fire in her belly since her mother's disappearance. Then by accident she'd stumbled across some of her mother's belongings including a diary that at first made no sense. In fact, it seemed to purposely not make sense, as if an imbecile had written it. 3 days running out plays sometimes, off for picnic, including grapes. Bugs, little owls, otters, dams. It turned out to be a code and a very simple one at that, however, Amy wasn't a genius. Fortunately for her, Henny Harris was even less of one and as Amy read the diary it became increasingly clear that the first letter of each word had been stressed slightly.

Once Amy saw this, the code became easy to read- 3 drops of pig blood. It was so obvious that Amy became embarrassed for her mother, but that embarrassment became worse as she realized what her mother was up to.

Spells? Incantations? It seemed her mother had been into all sorts of foolish things...rites, virgin sacrifices, Ouija boards. Wondering if this had anything to do with her disappearance, Amy delved into the diary and in four very long days had written out the entire thing in English. There was some scary stuff there, but nothing personal that gave a hint to where she'd gone.

Late on the fourth night, when she had finished with the diary, Amy took up her mother's Ouija board and thinking that it worked more like a Magic Eight Ball, asked, "Where's my mother?" She then spun the little wooden heart that came with it. The arrow pointed squarely at the "W." Another spin had it pointing at the "G."

"Wug... wig... wag?" Amy said, turning her head this way and that. "This fuckin thing's broken."

Tired and stressed she went to sleep. In the morning the little wooden heart shaped planchette pointed squarely at one of the four words on the board, hello. For a very long time Amy had sat on her bed with her feet drawn up off the floor as if she thought that something could be laying in wait under it. The pointer had moved, there was no doubt in her mind that it had, but how?

Eventually, she came to terms that the Ouija board was the real deal and from then on, she was hooked, far deeper than her mother ever was. Amy delved into the underworld with a passion, but also with care.

Her caution was fully justified, since it wasn't long before she came to discover what a tremendous fool her mother had been. Henny had been timid at first, afraid to use even a single spell. But then, as if rolling the dice at Vegas, she turned full bore in the opposite direction by trying to open a Gate to a hell dimension. No simple love potion for her. She went for the big money and paid for it with her life.

Learning from her mother's mistake, Amy started small and it was weeks before she attempted even the simplest things. And for a time, she also steered clear of the Ouija board since she had no clue, who or even what would be answering her questions. However, eventually she made the attempt and one thing became crystal-clear to her. The creatures that were out there trying to communicate with her were desperate; they needed her far more than she needed them. They were utterly powerless on earth and craved even the smallest touch of life. More and more she saw this and soon she began forcing heavily favored bargains upon them.

Yet despite the lopsided arrangements they were eager for more.

At length with the help of the board, she discovered a spell that would allow her to commune with the dead. It was a massive break through. The dead were a vault of information and demanded nothing in return but to be listened to. When at last Amy discovered her mother's soul, the truth of her disappearance came out.

At that point, Amy's hate for Will became a current of fire that had her raging for days. In due course, as she kept learning and growing as a witch, and as time stretched out, the hate faded. It never left, but she had more important things to consider.

Demons for instance.

Dealing with the demons and fiends of the Void was the most fearfully difficult thing to master. Always they were trying to trip her up, to gain control of her soul and she was perpetually on guard against their schemes and plots. She traded with them, blood and souls were her currency, and power was their commodity and always in these dealings her soul was put up as bond. Yet not once did she make a deal where she couldn't hold up her end of the bargain and continuously she prevailed and as she did her capabilities increased.

Her ego grew in proportion to her power, so that she was blind to the smallest thing that lay at her feet: Luke Sheldon.

During those early days he worked in a very curious curio shop in New York City. It sold the most outlandish items legally and illegally available. Amy Harris frequented it so much that Luke quickly figured out what she was up to. He worshipped her. He went out of his way for anything that she needed and became almost a slave to her. She allowed this and slowly he wormed and groveled his way into her confidence.

It turned out that he was a liar and a conniver of great ability. He was not a gypsy nor any sort of witch, but nonetheless he learned things and became powerful in his own right. But Amy was oblivious to what her underling was up to and remained that way until she woke three months ago to find most of her spells missing and all four of the virgins she had planned on sacrificing, dead. Dead virgins were useless virgins.

Luke had left her with almost nothing but the Ouija board, yet despite that she'd worked around the clock to re-build her spell list, taking chances that previously she would've scoffed at. So that now she was almost as strong as she had been. Along with her strength she built up a thirst for vengeance. Even as she attempted to regain what she'd lost, she searched for Luke with a fiery determination, and had been getting steadily closer.

He knew she was closing in on him and this was probably why he'd gone for the sword, prematurely. It was premature since clearly he had not yet discovered Will's talent and had botched the attempt to lay hands on the blade, as a consequence. Stupid mistake. But for Amy, a timely one.

She'd known about the sword, her mother had mentioned it in passing long before, but unfortunately Henny had groused and complained  so much over her body being burned by the priest that Amy had missed the supernatural aspects concerning the artifact. To her it had only been the weapon that had killed her mother.

But as a result of Luke staking everything on acquiring it, Amy had become intrigued by the idea that there was more to the blade than she knew. A quick investigation conducted only the night before, possibly at the very moment that Luke was opening his gate, revealed the wonderful secret that the sword possessed. And the knowledge couldn't have come at a more opportune moment.

To get her power back in so short a time, she had gambled and very nearly lost. All of her excessively imbalanced bargains came back to haunt her and she began to mortgage her soul six ways from Sunday. Still, she knew that once she recovered all of her spells, she'd be able to turn the tides back again. But then children began to disappear in Boston.

This struck a cold fear into her. The children were being used as a conduit to gain knowledge. A knowledge of powerful evils and she feared what Luke was up to and she feared also what he would do to her when he was done. She was his only real rival and had the tables been turned, she would've destroyed him in a second. And so feeling terribly vulnerable, she had gone to Ba'al Zubel.

Ba'al was the ultimate power broker in the Void. It had been the first time she was forced to commune with that awful entity and worse, she went hat in hand, in the weakest of positions. The demon gave her the power that she wished for, putting her on par with Luke, and in return Amy was to open a gate just as her mother had done. She was given a month to accomplish this and the days had ticked by with an amazing alacrity.

Her problem was in finding a virgin. Virginity was a difficult thing.

It was all a matter of perfection. A physical lack of penetration wasn't even all that important; what mattered was the purity of the soul and the rightness of one's mind.

Her first attempt had been so dismal that she disliked to even think she'd been a part of it. The girl had been a fraud and had been no more a virgin than Amy was at her age and it was only just in time did she figure it out. Had Amy tried to open a gate with an impure soul, her own would've been forfeit, and whenever she thought about it, shivers ran across her back. People were just such liars these days.

Amy smiled at this.

The Jerns weren't liars. And Lisa Jern especially wasn't going to lie in the state she was in. It would be an impossibility. Though impossible or not, it was going to take time. Memories were like that. Amy would have to start at the point under which Lisa had been ensorcelled and work her way backwards. She was going to find out what Lisa had for breakfast, whether she did the laundry that morning and if her favorite squirrel had come out to beg for a piece of bread. Tedium. Suburban tedium at its worst.

Amy got comfortable and worked herself into a positive mindset. Perhaps Lisa had hidden the sword moments before they arrived, somewhere around the home, or maybe out in the forest under a rock or a log or some such. Either way she would have the sword soon.

Despite her attempt at positivity, that last thought dampened her spirits somewhat. She needed the sword, but in her heart, she was afraid of it as well. Who knew precisely what happen when it was used?

Chapter 3

Will

Talitha stood in the dim hotel room; her eyes cast down to the carpet and Will waited for her to speak, knowing that his little sister would know what to do. She always knew what to do. She was a hundred times smarter than he was, so he sat on the bed waiting, purposefully not thinking.

To think would only bring about pain. Mental pain. Physical pain he already had by the truckloads. Almost every part of his body nagged in a dull aching way, but not his mind. He had left off the conversation with Amy, dropping a foolish sounding good-bye, and as he did, terrible thoughts of the frightful misery his wife was going through came to him. Therefore he immediately switched off his brain.

With near religious faith, he sat looking at Talitha and minutes snuck by unnoticed by either of them.

Finally she spoke, "What're we going to do?"

It was then Will noticed that she seemed bewildered or perhaps overcome with everything that had happened to them in the last few days. The look wasn't acceptable. And neither was her question; she was the super smart one.

"What do you mean?" he asked feeling a flush of anger. "I'm counting on you here. Lisa's counting on you."

"I guess we go get the incantations then?"

"Tal, what's wrong?" Her eyes were brimming with tears and when he tugged her down beside him on the bed, they began to spill over.

"We're going to have to do it all over again," she said in a staccato, the syllables bouncing up and down to the rhythmic hitching of her chest. "I thought...I thought that after last night, I could just go home. Back to the cabin. But now, if I stay or go, it doesn't matter. It'll mean more death and blood and it just never ends. How much killing can I be a part of...before I'm...I'm..." Her tears came heavier and for a few moments, she sat mute with the force of her emotion.

"Before what?" Despite the renewed pounding in his head and his growing sense of desperation, he kept his tone calm.

"Before I'm like her, the other Talitha."

"Listen Tal, there is no other Talitha. That girl is gone. She's a demon now and whatever she did, it has nothing to do with you. Her evil is not your evil."

"I created her!" she cried out unexpectedly in vicious anger. The change from the fearful sadness was so abrupt that Will leaned back, startled. Talitha seemed not to notice. "I'm responsible for everything she did. All those people she killed, their blood is on my hands, both literally and figuratively." With that she brought her blackened fingers to her face. Sniffing at them she cringed in disgust. "I need a shower."

Ignoring her brother, she was up, heading for the shower in the trashed out room, but suddenly she thought better of it. The night before she'd sat in that shower after being raped. Her shoulders slumped at the sight of the door and she turned to the adjoining room.

"Tal?" Will called out. She turned her face, beautiful despite the soot and the emotion clouding it, toward him and he asked her, "You're coming to Maine with me right?" He knew that she would, but on a gut level he had to hear it.

"I have to. I'd never let anything happen to Lisa...or the baby," she replied, and barely looked back before she slipped through the doorway. In that instant, he saw there was a hardness to her face, a nastiness that would've given her demon twin a shock to see.

Talitha knew that more death was coming and the look suggested she was steeling herself against it. He would have to as well. In eight years he'd barely ever thought of Amy Harris. Her mother yes. You don't kill a person and then go about your life without reflecting on it frequently. Clearly, Amy had given Will a lot of thought and sadly, her thoughts had now turned to vengeance. He should've seen this coming.

Really, he should have, since he had the power to see into the future. Regrettably, that power wasn't always exact, nor was it timely; the visions came and went, almost unpredictably. Almost, since if he wished he could purposefully look into the future for something specific, but even that was fraught with danger and uncertainty.

Uncalled for his mind flashed to an image of a corpse; a boy tied over the back of a chair. The body was that of 11-year-old Rick Brabec, his head had been practically sawed off with a steak knife. Clutching his own throat, Will shook the picture from his mind and got up from the bed, feeling a pain inside him that wasn't physical. There had been too much death already. The death of innocents like Rick, and his mother, his sister Terry. And so many others.

Because of Luke there were eleven innocent people dead, but none stood out so keenly as that of Jim. Will saw in his mind the homely face of big Jim. The gap-toothed giant of a man. Sweet and shy, quiet by nature, he had become more than just a friend in the two days that Will knew him. He had been a brother in arms and had died like a hero, but now his soul was burning in hell, trapped in the endless Void.

And strangely Will couldn't remember his full name. Big Jim, Jimbo, White Jim, these were all the names that Talitha had called him, yet his last name wouldn't come to him.

"Jim..." he said to himself, hoping to spark a memory. Nothing. He went to the phone and dialed Saint Thomas Catholic Church. Other than his sister and himself, no one knew about the death of Jim, or of the battle beneath the factory where the demon Ba'al Zubel had been defeated.

"Saint Thomas?" The words were rich and warm, coming from the voice of a practiced speaker, but the tone wasn't honest. There was just a touch of apprehension beneath it and Will had a brief flash. The man on the phone was a priest, decked out in his working black attire; alone he sat at the desk in Father Alba's office. He was middle-aged, with the regular features of an Italian; grey at the temple, brown eyes with growing bags beneath them. Though the room wasn't in any way warm, there was sweat in his hair and down his back. He had a nagging fear to him and Will knew that his name was Father Alfano.

"Hello Father, may I please speak to Sean Shay?"

There was a pause on the other end of the phone, perhaps because Will had unwittingly called him Father, and when he spoke again, that nervousness in the priest's voice was more pronounced. "He's not available; would you like to leave a message?"

A message was out of the question: Will called. Your best friend is dead. That would be horrible.

"Do you know when he'll be in? This is kind of important," Will replied. But just then he saw clearly where Sean was. The picture bloomed in his mind like it was a memory: Standing in a hospital room, Sean, his large pumpkin sized face looking whiter than usual, held out a sheaf of thick papers to a small tidy looking man. A priest. Neat and trim the man appeared with his short grey haircut and his perfectly trimmed goatee. Confidently, the priest had his hand out about to receive the yellowed and ink scrawled vellum, his eyes were on them and he seemed equally curious and skeptical.

Another person sat in a chair near to the single hospital bed that stood in the center of the room. Will could only see a part of the person and knew not whether it was a male or female. He guessed male and guessed as well that it was another clergy member; the person wore all black but unlike the priest, this man's clothes were lined with a deep red and about his waist, he wore a red sash.

The vision was like a single frame of a movie. It was there in his mind, pure but not complete, the edges faded to black and only a portion of the hospital bed was visible, its occupant unseen. But, he didn't have to be seen and Will didn't need a supernatural power to know that it was Father Alba. His arms flared in goose bumps at the thought of the priest and all the man had gone through.

"Never mind," Will interjected just as the Father Alfano began to answer the question. "I'll...I'll just talk to him later, thank you."

"Who is..." Father Alfano started, but by that time Will had hung up the phone. He didn't mean to be rude, but his mind was whirling over the idea of losing the incantations that Sean had and there was no time for pleasantries. Running about the two motel rooms, he gathered their meager belongings and was just about to shout to Talitha to hurry, when he caught sight of his image in the bathroom mirror.

"Jeeze..."

Below the layers of soot and splattered blood, his face was unrecognizable. The swelling on the left side seemed to unbalance his entire head and for the first time he realized that he could barely see out of his left eye. The right side was only marginally better. He touched himself tenderly, but winced all the same.

"I'm so sorry about that," Talitha said poking her head out from behind the shower curtain.

The day before, when Talitha's body was under control of an evil being, a creature of her own making that resided inside her body, she and Will had fought. And now he was a complete wreck while she was unhurt, and save for her sad frown at the sight of his misshapen face, completely unblemished. One would never know by looking at him that he'd won the fight. She healed quickly.

"It's not your fault," he replied around the fingers of his right hand, which were currently testing the extent of the wiggle in one of his loose teeth. The wiggle wasn't bad, and if he lived through the day, the tooth might just be saved. The thought did little to cheer him. "We gotta hurry, ok? I think Sean Shay is on his way to hand over some incantations to some Catholic bigwig and I don't know how much time we have."

"You better clean up too," Talitha spluttered from under the water.

"You're right about that," he mumbled with a final glance at the horrible looking person in the mirror.

His shower was done in minutes and he pulled on the spare set of clothes that he'd brought with him: jeans and thankfully a hooded sweatshirt. This, he tugged up, yanking it as far over his forehead as he could. Talitha didn't have an extra set and was forced to wear the disheveled black dress she'd worn the day before. Luckily, it was jet black and hid most of the soot stains on it, but it still smelled heavily of smoke.

After dropping a much larger than normal tip for the motel cleaning staff, the brother and sister ducked into the steady cold rain that blanketed Boston and jumped into the old paneled station wagon that belonged to Father Alba. As he started the car, Will cast a quick glance at his sister but she didn't return the look. She only had eyes for what lay in front of her and kept her face steadily forward. In the back seat, the dried blood of the priest was a painful reminder of the day's previous adventures.

Having been to the city on a number of occasions, Will knew a quick route to Faulkner hospital and by the time the clock on the dashboard switched over to read 10 am they were pulling into a parking spot.

"Father...uh...Father Alba's room please," Will didn't know the man's first name. "He's a Catholic priest and had some eye damage." This he said to the thousand-year-old volunteer at the information desk. Even with her inch thick glasses, she squinted up at him. What she saw appeared to sour her look and her face crawled into a frown.

"Albert?" she asked loudly.

Feeling as if all the eyes in the room were upon him and his battered appearance, he leaned in closer and spoke even louder, "His last name is Alba."

"A...L...B...A," she spelled the word slow and steady as her eyes searched for the letters on her computer keyboard. "Room 306...but it says no visitors. Sorry you can't go up."

To get to the elevators, they had to bypass the lady. Will smiled, turning on the charm, but where once his handsome features might have turned the trick, his face was now too much of a wreck for that to work and the volunteer only looked a little disgusted. In defeat, he wandered over to Talitha, who had hung back due to the fact that a police officer was sitting behind nearby desk.

Talitha headed his way and all but ignored him. She strode past, keeping her face turned from the policeman and went to the information desk. "Hello, Elizabeth Johnson's room please," she said with a clear voice.

"Let me check," the old lady began and then peered down at her keyboard. "J...O...H...N..."

Talitha stepped back calmly and then with a little nod toward the elevators she proceeded to head in their direction.

"S...O...N. And Elizabeth...E..."

Will got the hint and they were in the nearest one, heading up before the lady could locate the "Z". Pushing the three button, Talitha grinned at her own cleverness, Will was right there with her.

"Whatever you're doing to your face, I would stop it," she said after seeing his look.

"What? I was smiling," Will couldn't tell if she was joking or not. She wasn't, judging by the fact that her brows shot up at his words. Thankfully, they were alone in the elevator and he turned to look into the mirror, which took up most of its rear wall. He gave it a small smile.

"Crap," he muttered. It wasn't a pretty picture.

"It doesn't look..." Talitha began, but she trailed off in an odd manner.

Will barely noticed; he only had eyes for his poor face. "It doesn't look that bad? Whose face are you looking at?" The door opened behind him and a man strode in, not bothering to wait to see if anyone was thinking to exit and hit the one button and only then did Will recognize the man. It was Eric Milner. Detective Eric Milner.

Talitha stood only a step from the door, but she froze in place as her nostrils dilated—she knew his smell. It was an awkward moment filled with an awkward silence and it was perhaps this that clued the detective that something was amiss. Milner glanced at Will and his eyes came to squints as he tried to place the man beneath the bruises.

"This is our floor," Will said in a hoarse whisper to his sister, hoping to get her to move, but she only stood as if glued in place. Now Milner turned toward Talitha, it was a slow motion turn, almost like a dream. His eyes shot wide as he recognized the slim young girl that had only two days before thrown him around like he was nothing and had threatened to cut off all his moving parts if she ever saw him again. Clearly, Milner had taken that threat to heart, because in the space of a half second, as the doors closed on the third floor, he pulled his pistol and aimed it square into the girl's face.

Chapter 4

Will

Eric Milner had been very fast on the draw, but not that fast. Yet still the gun had come out like a black streak, cutting a line across Will's vision and surprisingly nothing stopped it. There it was pointed straight into Talitha's face. And a second later, it was still there.

Perplexed that after all this time Milner still held the gun, Will pulled his eyes from the barrel and looked at his sister. Her face registered little more than a mild surprise.

"You were at the church," she told the man, trying to peer around the gun. "It's ok, you don't have to be afraid. I'm the good..."

"Shut the hell up!" Milner's voice was very loud in the small elevator. "Don't move."

"Detective Milner," Will began. "This is the good Talitha. We were just on our way to see Father Alba..."

The gun swung in his direction and Will leaned far back away from it striking his head with a small thump on the mirror behind him. The cop's eyes were wild. "I saw what she did to Father Alba. I don't care anymore about this good Talitha, bad Talitha crap. She's a danger to everyone who comes close to her and she's going to jail."

"Officer Mil..." Talitha began, but now the gun swung back towards her. Milner had it around in a flash, however, just then Talitha used her speed.

A second later, Will punched the emergency stop button and the elevator came to a halt with a little bouncing jolt. "Is he going to be ok?" he asked his sister.

"Oh sure. Here take this thing," she held out the gun that she had taken from the officer. As the gun had swung at her, she snapped out with a quick light punch that hit the detective in the inner part of the wrist. The muscles and the tendons in his hand had immediately flared and his hand had sprung open, releasing the gun. She followed this up a tenth of a second later with an accurate strike to his solar plexus and as she had caught the gun, she lowered the cop gently to the floor.

He was now red as a beet and making on odd hitching sound in his throat. Tucking the gun into the waist of his jeans, Will sighed and waited. It felt like a long wait.

"Whatever happened to his other gun?" Will asked as the cop continued to struggle to find an opening in his lungs that would allow in air. After seeing that bright flash the night before, Will couldn't recall what happened to it.

"It's back at the factory. I think I dropped it sometime after Ba'al...you know." Talitha dipped to one knee then and looked into the cop's face. "Are you ok? I didn't want to have to do that, but you were being very unreasonable."

Milner began to breathe easier and massaged his right wrist, however his face held a wild fearful look as if he would run screaming the second the elevator doors were to open. They waited in silence until the police officer recovered enough to speak.

"Why are you here?" Milner asked, still from the floor.

"A couple of reasons," Will answered slowly, hoping not to spook the cop. "We wanted to be able to tell Father Alba and Sean Shay what happened last night. And we need some help."

"Help? What kind of help? Not from me I hope. I could be facing a jail term already," Milner said scrutinizing Will's injuries. "Man you're all messed up. Did she do that to you?"

"Yeah, but I'm going to tell the story only once so if you want to hear it, you gotta promise us that you aren't going to go all crazy, deal?"

Milner nodded and Will got the elevator moving again. The ride was very uncomfortable in its silence. At length they came to the third floor and the cop walked them to Father Alba's room. Outside it stood a young priest dressed in the normal black garb with the hard white clerical collar. He seemed about Will's age and was fresh faced and handsome with dirty blonde hair and bright blue eyes. Those eyes widened slightly at Will's appearance.

"I'm sorry, but no visitors," the priest moved between them and the door as they approached.

Milner's face, which was already set in lines of stress, formed into an angry frown at being told where he could and couldn't go. "They're with me." He didn't bother to wait for the young man to move, instead he brusquely reached for the handle and pushed him out of the way with the door.

"Excuse us," Talitha added in a quiet voice, embarrassed by the cop's actions. There was a pretty pink to her cheeks. She slipped past the man and moved into the hospital room as silent as a ghost.

The room was just as Will's vision. In fact, at their entrance everyone froze in place so it had the same picture quality as well. Father Alba sat in the bed, his face was thankfully, heavily bandaged. The image of the man's torn and bleeding eye sockets had lain just under Will's conscious since they had entered the hospital and the bandages, though he knew they'd be there, were a relief.

Sitting in the chair next to the bed was an elderly priest...Bishop Keenan, Will suddenly knew. This was the man in Will's vision that wore the red sash and his clothes were trimmed with the same color red. He didn't wear the usual neat black outfit, instead he wore a cassock, which was a close fitting robe of sorts that reached down to his black shoes. Despite his age, seventy or so, the man had an open, almost cherubic face. He had unlined round cheeks that held a touch of Irish red and he smiled at them in the most pleasant way.

The immense form of Sean Shay leaned against the wall to their left. He wore a grey sweat suit that would have to be retired soon since it appeared to be stretching to its limit across his great gut. That he had only just got there in the last few minutes was evidenced by his damp black hair, which clung to his head like a helmet. His face was wet with a mixture of sweat and rain and it was completely unreadable. It held far too many emotions: nervousness at being so close to a bishop, shock at the sight of Will's bruised face, fear of Talitha, and a deflating hope when Jim Anderson didn't come into the room after them.

Quickly, Will looked away, feeling oddly guilty that he had lived, while Jim hadn't.

The last man in the room, the dapper looking priest with the finely trimmed grey goatee, stood by the window and as they entered, he looked up from a stack of yellowed papers. This man held Will with a steady grey-eyed gaze for a second before he turned his face toward Talitha. She stared back and her eyes were wide open as if declaring herself fit to be judged. She even lifted her chin slightly, exposing her slim neck, one of her most vulnerable points. It was an odd moment.

Will broke it. "Hello Father Alba. It's me Will Jern, and Talitha is here as well."

"Talitha?" The priest's voice sounded hoarse and worn to a whisper. "And Jim?" The siblings shared a look.

"No...he didn't make it," Will said with even less life in his words than the priest had used. Sean Shay hung his head, his emotions hidden behind the curtain of black hair that obscured his face. "I'm sorry, Sean."

"Another death?" The bishop let out a long slow sigh. Turning slowly he eyed the new comers, especially Talitha. His bright blue eyes seemed to penetrate with their intensity. "And are you the girl that did this to the good father?"

"In a manner of speaking, your Excellency." Talitha faced the bishop and matched the look that he had given.

"Really? This little girl did this?" The old man no longer appeared cherubic, instead he glared scornfully at the assembled group of men, all of whom stood at least a head taller than she. "And no one could stop her?"

"It does add credence to Father Alba's claim." This was from the dapper priest. He strode over from the window and gave Talitha a closer look, staring into her eyes.

"Rubbish, Carl." The bishop shifted in his seat to face the girl better. "Alba has already said that he didn't fight back. Anyone could have the power to do this terrible thing, when the victim doesn't fight back."

"Credence?" Will asked, putting himself between his sister and the two clergymen. He didn't care for how they were speaking as if she wasn't in the room. "May I ask who you are?"

The bishop waved to the other priest, who answered in a raspy sounding voice, "My name is Father Carlton Vogel. I am the Exorcist within the See. And this is his Excellency, Bishop Keenan, auxiliary to Cardinal Archbishop Law."

Will, who didn't know what a See was, glanced back and forth between the two men at a loss as to what sort of protocol was expected of him, he had never before met a bishop. For a moment, he considered attempting to kiss the man's heavy gold ring, but it seemed just too silly. After a second, he ended up giving the older man a simple nod. It went unnoticed as Vogel began to speak again.

"Mr. Jern, I used the word credence for the simple reason that a claim of possession is not something that we in the Catholic community take lightly. Each case must be proven before an attempt at exorcism is made."

"Which clearly didn't happen here," the bishop interjected. "Oh Alba, we talked about this. When you first came up from New York, remember? You said you were done with this demon talk and now you're trying to spin some tale about magic swords and not one, but two demon possessions. And where's the proof? Eh? Mr. Jern, do you have this magic sword?"

Feeling suddenly stupid, Will answered, "It's more of a cursed sword actually...and I don't have it here with me." His ears felt to grow warm as he spoke.

"I didn't think so," Bishop Keenan responded. "Alba, please...I don't think we should go on with this charade. You screwed up. You were in a terrible position, I understand, I really do. If a psycho told me that he had five children held hostage, I don't know what I'd do. But...but possession? Really? Help me out on this, Carl."

Vogel went the bed and touched Alba's leg. "Father Alba, from what you and Mr. Shay have told me, there really wasn't any possession concerning Luke. It was all a trick of some sort. He probably knew all about your past, and he put on a bit of a show. The only question I have is why?"

"You already know this. He wanted the sword," Talitha stated matter of factly. "Luke could've left at anytime, but he stayed for the promise of the sword."

The priest nodded gravely. "Yes, he risked quite a bit for that sword. Mr. Jern, would you mind if I went up to Maine with you to retrieve it?"

The Bishop cut in as if speaking to a child, "No. Carl, please. I'm trying to nip this exorcism thing in the bud. I know that it's part of your job, but you're like a kid with a hammer; everything looks suddenly like a nail. You've investigated three possible cases of possession already this year and where has it got you?"

"Closer to God, is always my hope, your Excellence. If I am to take my position as exorcist seriously, I will investigate every possibility out there. But if it will make the Cardinal happier, I'll fly up to Maine on my own dime."

Father Vogel gave Will a nod as if the matter was settled. Will could only shrug, feeling a growing desperation about him. "I don't know if I can get it. My wife Lisa hid it, but it's probably being stolen right this second. That's why..."

"See Carl? Father Alba?" The bishop jumped in. "No sword, no proof. All you have is a bunch of wild stories that no one is going to believe, certainly not the cardinal. Alba, he's going to see this as you trying to get out of all the trouble you have caused. Why didn't you come to me right away when this Luke first showed up?"

"You would've sent for the police and I couldn't risk the lives of those children by calling his bluff," Father Alba replied dejectedly.

"So in order to deal with a serial killer, you bring in someone worse... an escapee from an asylum for the criminally insane? And of course she ends up freeing the killer and now we have another death on our hands!" The bishop rubbed his hands across his smooth face. Just then, Will feared to correct the man's mistake, seeing as it would only hurt Father Alba even more; they had a total of six more deaths; four innocent, two guilty.

Just then, the bishop glanced toward Talitha. "Miss Jern, I'm sorry if I'm being offensive, but you don't look much in the way of being possessed to me."

Will gave his sister a look of warning, not to say anything, but seemingly on purpose she turned from her brother, uncharacteristically rebelling.

"Would you really know what a possessed girl looks like?" Talitha asked; her words, cold and cutting, quieted the room in a heartbeat. All eyes went to her and those who knew her capabilities felt sweat cool their backs suddenly. "Possession is far more prevalent than you realize. There are hundreds of demons on earth even now. The smart ones lay low, burrowing into their hosts, feeding off them, turning their souls black and only when there is nothing left, do they show themselves. And even then, most people are all but unaware how close to a demon they had been living."

She paused to let the idea sink in. "Tell me your Excellency, if I was possessed would you really want me to show proof right here in this room?"

Milner's eyes were huge and he and Will shared a look, the cop was growing nervous, as Talitha appeared to be getting more and more agitated. Will tried a smile of reassurance, but it failed, and the cop only swallowed hard at the distortion in Will's ruined face and turned away.

"Are you saying that you aren't possessed?" the bishop asked in a calm fashion. Will had to credit the old man. Despite sitting next to a priest who had his eyes torn out only the day before by the very girl who stood in front of him, the bishop was playing it cool.

"No, I'm saying be careful what you wish for." The two stared at each other for a moment.

He smiled as if the tension in the room hadn't jumped. "Perhaps you're right; maybe it wouldn't be such a good idea. However, I've been told that your brother possesses a talent that would be harmless to demonstrate. It would go a long way to convincing me that all this talk of the super-natural is true. And believe me, if I don't get convinced, the cardinal will never be."

All eyes went to Will. Even Father Alba swung his bandaged head in his direction and despite the coverings, there was a hopeful look to him. There was only one problem; Will wasn't getting a spontaneous vision. And he wasn't going to purposely look; he had done that twice before and both times had been horrendous. It was something he would never do just to satisfy someone's curiosity.

As always, Talitha seemed to read his mind and knew the reason for his hesitation. "You want to see him do some tricks? Is he a trained monkey?" she demanded of the bishop in a strident tone.

"I suppose not," the bishop replied evenly. "But I have three dead bodies to account for, as well as a priest who has aided and abetted two known criminals." He pointed a finger at her as he said this. "The way things have been going for the Church lately, the cardinal is likely going to want to wash his hands of Father Alba and without his help..." he left off with a sad shake of his head.

The room went silent at this and Will shared a guilty look with Talitha. It'd be the height of injustice to the blind priest to blame him for any of what had happened. His actions had been heroic in the face of great evil and because of this Will decided to help the man. Still, it was such a terrible thing to purposely look into the future that it was a minute before he spoke, "Maybe I can do something. Maybe..."

"No you won't, Will! This is such crap!" Talitha cried. "You should be giving Father Alba a fucking medal." Her volcanic anger and her use of profanity in front of a bishop stunned Will. It was so much like her demon plagued self that his heart began to bang against the insides of his bruised chest.

"Whoa, Tal, hey are you ok?" he asked this, turning his sister so he could look into her eyes. He feared that he would see her normal soft brown eyes looking jet black, as they sometimes did when her evil self was in control, but her eyes hadn't changed and he had to remind himself that part of her was gone. "Are you all right? You're not acting normal."

At this, she registered sudden guilt and a touch of remorse. "Oh...oh you're right. I'm sorry, your Excellency, but what you're asking of my brother is obscene and what you're doing to Father Alba is criminal."

"I think it's rather hypocritical for you to be throwing around the term criminal," the red in Keenan's cheeks was pronounced. "But I can do so without any qualms. The five of you," he waved his hands at the siblings, Milner, Sean Shay, and Father Alba. "You have all engaged in criminal activity that is guaranteed to besmirch the good name of the Church. Yet you expect the cardinal to jump through hoops on the basis of wild claims and dead bodies?"

Along with the other four who had been pronounced criminal, Will dropped his head to his chest feeling a heavy guilt. The room was silent for a time and then Talitha spoke up.

"Since this is all my fault, I will show you something if it'll help Father Alba." After a quick glance around the room, she went to a cabinet that stood near to the bed. It was filled with medical supplies, but instead of opening any of the glass-fronted drawers, she simply punched one of the little windows. Shards went everywhere and after they finished bouncing and skittering about, she picked up the largest piece and went to stand before the bishop.

She drew up the sleeve of her raggedy black dress and then with dreadful slowness, she sliced deeply into the muscle of her left forearm. Blood drained from the wound, but she didn't wince or cry out, but only dragged the sharp glass further along.

"Oh my!" exclaimed the bishop, leaning away from the wound. Talitha only smiled and tossed the stained glass onto father Alba's breakfast tray where it plopped ugly in his uneaten scrambled eggs.

"A high tolerance for pain. Very interesting," Father Vogel murmured. "Unfortunately that's not enough. There are certain sects..."

"I'm not done, but since you are such a doubting Thomas, would you like to put your fingers in the wound?" She held out her arm to him and instead of shying away, he did indeed touch the outer edges of it. Blood ran from it like water from a faucet, but even as he probed it, the blood stopped completely and not another drop oozed out. The priest's mouth came open, and his eyes widened.

Talitha paused to see if this was enough, but when the two clergymen only glanced at each other and nothing more, she continued, "Father Vogel, look at me please." Despite the please she threw in, it was more of a command. "Are you familiar with any of the tongues of the Void?"

"Do you mean Hell?"

"There is no Hell. There is only the illusion of Hell. Hell is a place with walls and dungeons and chains and demons. That place doesn't exist except in the minds of the damned, but the Void does exist. It's vast and horrible, endless. The Void is filled with pain and lies, and everything in it is an illusion, including the way out. There is no way out, but...but...but I digress. Do you have knowledge of any of the 'Hell' languages?"

"No, how could I?"

Talitha sighed in exasperation and turned to the bishop. "How can I demonstrate a knowledge of tongues if your exorcist doesn't know any?"

"Well..."

"Never mind." Talitha, again was agitated and surly. This was so unlike her that Will would have asked her to stop her demonstration if it wasn't for the fact that Father Alba needed it. She continued with a note of superiority, "Do you know any language besides English? Sprechen sie deutsche? How about... govorite li bosanski? Or... an bhfuil gaeilge agat? That last one is Gaelic and it's quite a mouthful let me tell you." Talitha then began to yammer away in different and odd sounding languages until Father Vogel put out a hand.

"I would like to tape record this, if you don't mind."

"I would say go right ahead, but you don't have a tape recorder on you."

He cocked his head curiously. "How do you know? Sony makes a very small recorder. I could have one in my back pocket."

"But you don't. Intimate knowledge of a person one has never met is a sign of possession, correct?" she asked the priest. He nodded with a slight smile. To Will it looked as if he were enjoying their little encounter. Everyone one else in the room only stared with varying levels of uncertainty.

"I know things about you, Father," she stated baldly.

"Such as?" Father Vogel hadn't blinked at her statement.

She studied him for close to a minute before answering, "You enjoy Italian food and have red wine with dinner, almost without exception. When you were younger, you played the violin, but now not so much maybe once or twice a year, instead you sing and not just at church. When you're alone... in the shower or in the car. How am I doing?"

He had lost his smile and said faintly, "Very good."

"Hmmm. You smoke cheap cigarettes, Camels I believe, but oddly, you don't use a cheap lighter. Instead you use something that has meaning to you...a Zippo adorned with an emblem."

"Yes...how did you know?"

"It's in your left front pocket. And you have a pen in your back right."

He dug these out and held them up for the others to see. "Amazing."

"Not really," she said with a shrug. "I could go on if you wish." She turned to the older clergyman and gave him once over. The bishop did little save raise an eyebrow, but his attitude was one of growing wariness. "You drink only single malt scotch at night, but during the day you drink vodka, because of the lack of an observable odor. As a child, you were poor and you suffered from rickettes, and now you sleep on a bed with Egyptian cotton sheets and you eat at the finest restaurants. You had salmon this morning for breakfast and steak last night for dinner."

"How do you know all this?" The bishop demanded. The pink in his cheeks had turned to grey that had him looking very old. "Are you...are you possessed? For real?"

"I was," Talitha replied, with her shoulders slumping. In fact, all of her sagged. "It's a long story."

"They have to hear it, Tal," her brother murmured. He knew they were now well satisfied that something supernatural had occurred.

"I know, but do I have to be here for it?"

He understood completely. Although he would do his best to skim over the worst of it for her, in the re-telling she would come away looking horrible. Like a monster, merciless and beyond redemption.

"No, but don't wander too far please. And, if you don't mind, book us on the next flight into Bangor." She gave him a glum smile and a quick head bob, before leaving. He watched her head out the door feeling wrong for some reason, but then his ability kicked in and he knew. She was deathly afraid of being hated.

"Talitha," he called down the hall. She turned back in apprehension, her hand going to the neck of her dress. "I forgot to tell you that I love you."

She smiled shy at the unexpected words.

Chapter 5

Will

The telling of their ordeal went by relatively quickly with Will staring at the white tiled floor and speaking in a dull monotone, but the question and answer session that he hadn't been counting on, following just after, did not. It was a slow painful torture. Every action by all involved was second-guessed to such a ridiculous degree that Will quickly grew angry. The worst of the lot was Eric Milner.

"Why didn't you arrange the bodies when you were done? You could've made it look like they had killed each other."

"Did she have to use my gun? She could've killed that guy with her bare hands."

"Why didn't you wipe down Terry's apartment? Now you'll have left fingerprints everywhere!"

"Why didn't you just shoot your sister in the church?"

This last roiled Will to no end, especially since the cop asked it more than once. Eventually, Will simply began to ignore the cop. This sped things up somewhat, yet it was still awhile before they were satisfied with the details of the story. Then came endless questions concerning the powers demonstrated by the brother and sister. The extent of them, their limits, their uses. The bishop stayed quiet through most of this, letting Father Vogel probe here and there for information, while he sat back studying Will.

During this part of the questioning, Sean Shay excused himself with a quiet mumble and left the room. He had been silent throughout and his sad face was ashen by the time he left. Will felt for the man, not only sadness but guilt as well. Survivor's guilt. It was an odd feeling and one that he would have a hard time putting into words if ever asked.

Sean didn't say good-bye and too late Will realized that he didn't either. But he wished he had since within minutes of the door closing behind him, Will knew he would never see the man again.

"I'm sorry for all of this," the bishop said, indeed sounding quite sorry, as if he'd been a part of what had happened. When he wished to the bishop could sound incredibly emotional. His voice had a quality to it. It made everything he said more true or perhaps more real. When he was sad, nobody seemed sadder. When he was angry, people cowered. When he spoke, people listened. He turned to Milner. "Tell me Officer, what can you do about all of this?"

Milner seemed to shrink in front of the bishop and he took two small steps back as he spoke, "Well...the crime scene with the boy, the one Will dreamed about, we don't have to do anything about that. It's clean as far as we're concerned. Mainly, it's just the one crime scene we have to worry about over at the factory. I'm guessing that the fire burned up all those little boys pretty good and since they're buried beneath tons of rubble, I don't think I can do much about that. But the rest? Seeing as Jim killed that girl, I could maybe put a gun in his hands and make it look like he shot Luke too."

"I was hoping that you could just make it all disappear, if you know what I mean." The bishop's Irish blue eyes smiled, but the cold words weren't really a suggestion and Milner nodded to the bishop while his eyes darted around.

"I might need some help. A van and maybe some boys to..."

"Whatever you need. Please speak to my assistant Father Charles, he'll be glad to aid you in any way he can." The bishop nodded to the door as a way of dismissal and Milner was up in a hurry to obey, but he paused at the door.

"Uh, Will? I'm going to need my gun back."

Will hesitated. He didn't trust Milner. "I need to go back to the factory as well. When we're done there, you'll get your gun back."

Milner looked to pout, however the bishop shooed him away simply by lifting his chin. "What do you need at the factory?" Keenan looked only casually inquisitive, yet there was sharp intelligence behind his eyes.

"The incantation to open the gate onto the Void is there. I need it, and I will need those ones too, Father." Will pointed to the stack of thick vellum in Vogel's hand. "Where did you get them?"

"Mr. Shay found them in a small nap-sack in the storage room beneath the church," Vogel answered. "He thought they were important."

"Sean was right." Will went on to explain about Amy Harris and the fact that his wife was being held hostage. As he spoke, his chest began to throb where the bullet had struck it and unknowingly he rubbed the spot.

"Oh my." The bishop sat back looking tired. "More of this?"

"Mr. Jern, this Amy Harris probably won't give your wife to you," Father Vogel said. "You have to know that once you turn over these...papers you have nothing left to bargain with and if she's anything like how Father Alba described her mother, then she isn't the type to worry too much about killing the both of you."

"I know." Will rubbed his chest some more now that his unspoken fear had been put into words. "But what choice do I have? She'll know if I call the police."

"Maybe the Church can help. We have resources," Bishop Keenan nodded knowingly as he said it.

Will hesitated, wondering exactly what that meant, but then shook his head as if clearing it from a dream. "I can't risk it. I don't know the extent of her abilities."

The bishop sat back giving his exorcist a long look, he then turned to Will. "Mr. Jern, I can't stop you from going to help your wife, nor would I ever want to. That being said, you aren't leaving with these incantations. Just as you made the decision to leave the sword behind..."

Will's sudden laugh stopped the old man's words. "Your Excellency, you don't know who you're dealing with. Even if it was just me you had to worry about, it's doubtful you could stop me from taking those papers and going to Maine. Police or no police. But you're also dealing with Talitha, and she'll leave behind a trail of bodies from here to Bangor if she has to."

"I thought you said your exorcism worked," the bishop replied, his hand going involuntarily to his cross that hung about his neck. "Is the demon Ba'al Fie-ere still in her?"

"No, the demon is gone; back to the Void. It's just Talitha you'd have to deal with...only she thinks she's cursed and that her soul is doomed either way. And after the last eight years, especially the last few days, I think she might be right. But there has been only one thing in all this time that has brought her joy, and that is my coming baby. Right now, this baby might be the only thing she has to live for and I have a feeling that if you were to get between her and Lisa..." Will left the sentence unfinished. For the most part, Will was bluffing about this, yet still he had felt uneasy a couple of times when around his sister that morning. There was an unnamed quality about her that had him a little nervous.

The two clergymen glanced at each other in uncertainty, while Father Alba lifted his chin from his chest. "Give him the incantations, please. We should not be the cause of the suffering of innocents."

Bishop Keenan looked unsure of himself. "Are we talking about a moot point anyway? If the sword can do what the two of you say, then the incantations can't be any worse. Or can they?"

Father Vogel frowned looking down at the papers. "They could be... anything is possible. Perhaps we should bring your sister in to decipher the writings."

This was agreed to and ten minutes later Talitha sat hunched by the window, pouring over the vellum. Next to her was an ordinary pad of paper and in her right hand she held a pen with which she had already written out a string of notes. She turned the first page sideways and a second later, she had it upside down.

"Can you read that language?" Father Vogel asked from just behind her. Though he was a precise, intelligent man, he was also like a curious boy, hoping to see the secret to a magic trick revealed.

"Yes...and no...and kind of," Talitha answered cryptically. "There's actually a mash of three languages being used and one of them I've never seen before..." She paused, frowning at the text. "But that's not such a big deal. There are thousands of demonic languages, yet they're all somewhat similar, especially written out."

She squinted back down at the papers, turning them as before. Minutes slipped by as she continued to scribble away and the three clergymen and Will only sat around in silence. Waiting.

"Ah!" she exclaimed.

"Have you translated the text?" Bishop Keenan asked in a rush. He had fidgeted more than the rest, clearly unaccustomed to waiting.

"No, I just discovered that the texts are enciphered!" Talitha beamed at them in excitement. Will shook his head in mock sadness at her enthusiasm.

"A code? Great!" The bishop sat back again in exasperation.

"Don't worry your Excellency. Amy Harris could never come up with a code that Talitha couldn't break," Will stated positively, however he did glance at the time 11:40 a.m. He knew that these things could take time.

"It's a cipher actually. And before you ask, there is a difference between a cipher and a code. I just hope it's only a triple-alphabetic substitution cipher. If she used a Caesar shift, this will take a while."

"What's a..." the bishop began, but Will stopped him with a headshake. Given half a chance, Talitha would talk non-stop for hours on a subject such as this and he didn't have the time.

A few minutes later: "Oops." Talitha scribbled at something, scratching over a line of text and rewriting it again. A little bit after that: "What? How did I miss..." She frowned at the paper and rechecked her work. "Darn it!" She exclaimed and then with a sour look she stacked up the papers and handed than back to a flummoxed looking Will. "I can't decipher these. Sorry, but somehow the writing on the pages shifts from language to language. It's magic of some sort. Without a spell, or perhaps a counter-spell, these are useless."

"Magic writing?" Will held them up to the light but the words didn't shift or move as he expected. "Are you sure?"

She nodded. "Yes, there's no doubting it."

The bishop put out his hand to look at the incantations as well. He stared hard for a minute. "Whoa! One of these little squiggles changed. This one right there, it didn't look like that a moment ago. I didn't see it change, I just looked away and when I looked back..." The bishop held his head down for a moment, looking at the polished floor of the hospital room, thinking hard. "I believe we need to burn these...I know what you're going to say Mr. Jern, but if they're so important to warrant this sort of protection, they can't fall back into the witch's hands."

"Your Excellency, it would make little difference," Father Vogel said. "From everything we've heard, the mother, Henny Harris discovered the secret to opening a gate into the Void by using only a simple Ouija board. It was probably quite time consuming, but effective nonetheless. My personal opinion is that we allow Mr. Jern to take the incantations with him in his attempt to rescue his wife. I think we can trust him."

"Your Excellency," Father Alba whispered. His face had slowly turned as white as his bandages and his voice was that of a man far older that he actually was. "I trust Will Jern to do the right thing."

"And what of his sister? Do you trust her?"

The blind priest's head slumped to his chest as if in defeat and he sat there like that for so long that Will was on the verge of giving him a shake to see if he had passed out, when he spoke, "My head says no, she can't be trusted, but my heart says yes. There is love in her still and deep down she is good."

Bishop Keenan stood and stretched, his back popping. He was surprisingly tall. At six-foot-two, he was able to look Will in the eye and did so for close on a minute before he spoke, "Take the incantations. Do not fail to return without them, and the sword too, bring that back as well. I'll pray for you and your family." Will took the stack of vellum, solemnly.

"I will, your Excellency. And thank you for your prayers."

"I want you to take Father Vogel with you," the bishop turned to the trim priest with iron-grey goatee. "Do you have any qualms about going?"

"Not in the least. I think it..." he broke off as he noticed the look of fear that the siblings shared. "What is it?"

"Priests don't last too long around Ba'al Zubel," Will answered. "Perhaps you should have a look at the basement of the factory before you decide to come along."

Chapter 6

Talitha

A half hour later, when they entered the room beneath the partially destroyed factory, the balance between life and death was equal between the bodies that breathed and those that never would again. But Will didn't stay for long, he cast his eyes about quickly, looking slightly dumbfounded as he did. A second later, his head gave a little wiggle that Talitha recognized as an effect of a minor vision. Will had been searching for the incantation that the gypsy had used to bring Ba'al forth from the Void and now he saw that Eric Milner had it stuffed in his right front pocket. Talitha could have told him this, she had known where it was hidden the second they walked in.

"I need to talk to you outside," Will growled at the cop. Milner's mouth came open but he didn't say a word.

When the two left, the dead held sway, they commanded the room and for some reason, the four corpses seemed larger than they had been—as if in death, they had grown more important to her. At first they held her attention, captivating her with the inhuman way their bodies splayed out in odd positions. She wanted to arrange them better, to make them more real looking, but she was afraid.

It was a strange fear, especially since she'd seen many dead bodies in her time. Normally, they only made her sad, but now she was decidedly creeped out by them. Particularly the huge corpse of Jim and the slighter one of Luke. Always as she turned her head, they were just at the edge of her vision and sometimes they seemed to move.

Because of this, she stuck close to the priest. Where he went, she went and she liked that he was alive, his heartbeat was reassuring to her. A steady seventy-eight beats a minute.

"You say you shot Luke twice, where was he when that happened?" Father Vogel asked. His voice was not melodious as the bishop's had been and she would've rather kept listening to the man's heartbeat. She pointed to a spot on the floor.

"Hmm." The sound was unpleasing to her as well, as was the spot on the floor. There was something unrecognizable on the floor; part of a human.

He went to it and studied the ground around it from different angles. Next, the dead came under his scrutiny; he studied them, touching their limbs, moving them back and forth. With Luke he spent a good deal of time on, inspecting his wounds, opening his mouth, and peering in. After this, he undressed the body, and the smell, which had been difficult for her to ignore before, was now impossible. It was the smell of the little boys on his corpse, and also it was the smell that came from the filth-laden box beneath the church. Suddenly that image came to her, the box and the foul, decomposing mysterious creature that it held. Yet she had never seen it before. It had been the other Talitha that had seen it.

Talitha squeezed her eyes shut and stepped blindly away from the priest, silently demanding that her mind ignore the horrific vision and instead she forced it to classify and quantify the various sounds of water dripping into the room. There were sixteen different trickles ranging in intensity from a feeble third of a liter per hour drip that landed on Terry Brabec's exposed arm, to a four liter per hour flow that came down just in front of the doorway.

The night before two drops from that flow had struck her with equal intensity as she dashed to the still form of Jim Anderson. The first struck her left wrist right at the junction of the radius and ulna, the second landed on her right cheek. It mingled with a tear of hers, changing its composition. Was it still then a tear? She wondered.

She forced herself not to care.

Drip, drip. Drip, drip, the water came down all around her. Loud and soft. Some faster. Some were heavy, full drops. She saw one of these and the tear was huge. It reminded her of her little sister's tears. Somehow, Katie could hold together tears well beyond the normal surface tension would allow. This one was oval shaped, or rather it was tear shaped.

Talitha shook her head. Realizing it was a drop of water not a tear that she had seen. It must have fallen from the partially destroyed ceiling of the factory and not from an eye. Her own eyes were meant to be dry. There wasn't a foreign body in either one of them that would elicit the need for any tears. Nor did she have allergies. A tear just then running down her cheek would be illogical.

The wet upon her face was only from the rain.

The priest interrupted her thinking, "After you shot Luke, did he come at you?"

Talitha suddenly remembered something as if it were a dream. She was in the factory and it was dark. In her hand was a very large gun. It was black and when she looked down its barrel, it felt as if she held the night. Her brother had handed it to her and she remembered then thinking what a fool he was and that he would pay for his stupidity. At first, she liked the feel of the gun, but then she had changed.

At that point, she hated and feared the gun. It was clumsy and she recalled how it didn't fit her hand, it was too big, made for someone with longer fingers, but she had compensated and shot her brother in the chest. Her aim had been true. She had accounted for every variable, yet he didn't die.

Instead, he screamed and screamed. That was of course an impossibility. It was illogical for a man so recently shot in the chest to scream like that.

Just then, she heard her voice answer the priest, "Yes. Luke walked toward me and so I shot him a second time."

She had shot the thin blonde man dead center in the chest. But he didn't scream as her brother did, neither did he die. Another impossibility.

"What happened next?" The priest took a picture of the floor of the room and the flash of the camera caused Talitha to blink. A natural reaction, certainly. She blinked again repeatedly and water, warmed evidently from the recent fire dripped upon her face. The water ran to her lip and she took it in. Her mind, the way she had constructed it, instantly classified the fluid, ninety-nine percent water, with traces of mucin, lipids, lysozyme, lipocalin, immunoglobulins, glucose, urea, sodium, and potassium.

An interesting mix, but altogether illogical and certainly not rain. Even the pH values were off.

"The demon looked at me from the Void." This statement was the antecedent for more of the strange fluid that wasn't rain to fall upon her cheeks.

Scientifically, she tried to tell herself that there was no Void. Such a thing was impossible to measure, to know. How big was it? What were its dimensions in kilometres? Or was it most practical to measure it in millimetres? Where was the Void? What was its longitude?

"And what was that like?" The priest took notes in a black and white composition notebook as he asked. The scritching pen was loud. She tuned it out.

In the dream, it hurt to be looked upon by the demon.

It was indescribable and thus she didn't bother with the attempt, she turned away ignoring the question, ignoring the feeling of that warm rain upon her face. Instead, she listened to the water drip. It was musical. There was a beat and it had rhythm, but it wasn't a symphony. It was all percussion, still it was nice.

Music was illogical—but happily illogical. Music held no use. It had no practical value. What was its function? How did it run concurrent with human emotion? It was essentially inexplicable in evolutionary terms. In fact, it defied evolution and made a mockery of it. It was wonderful. She managed a smile as she lost herself in the thousands of sounds that played upon her ears, all the while ignoring the words of the priest.

He spoke to her in sentences, but those tiny drips raining from the blackened ceiling above were a thousand times magnified in her head. Illogical. Illogical. Warm rain upon her face was all illogical.

"Talitha, are you ok?" Will's voice was loud, like the voice of God. She had been standing facing a wall that in all her dreams had no memory. This one wall in that horrible room was blameless. The night before it had stood mute and empty, never once framing an image of the demon or that of Will raging in pain or of Jim Anderson dead. This was the good wall. She could face this wall and see only it...nothing.

"Can I leave?" she asked her brother as more of the warm rain found its way down her cheeks. "Can I wait outside?"

"Sure Tal. You don't have..."

There was a sudden roar of a lion filling her ears. Anything else her brother might have said was drowned out in the fury of that sound. The priest was in the process of undressing Jim Anderson, inspecting his many wounds, looking into his eyes. Her first impulse was to dash the priest's head against a wall, instead she walked stiff legged out of the room. Talitha held her decorum together until she was safely out of view of that room that held so much death and then she raced for the stairs. Leaping piles of debris or dodging around the avalanches caused by the fire. She was up the stairs and standing in the rain in seconds.

Her breath came in huge gusts, like billows.

It was forced, she was letting her emotions dictate, not her mind and her emotions wanted her to act...like a girl. Or perhaps like a human. For so long she had fought that impulse, to be human. Always on guard, she had kept herself resolute to the point of being less animated than a machine. The blame for this had always been the demon, the other Talitha that haunted her, possessing her, who had used her feelings only to bring about more pain.

But that excuse was gone. Like a miracle, the demon had been sent back to the Void and now Talitha was free to cry if she wished. She could rage and scream, or laugh. The entire range of human emotion could be hers, except for love. That simple thing she would deny herself, not as a punishment, but rather as a gift to herself. Love frightened her badly.

In the Void, love was the ultimate instrument of torture. It was the sharpest knife. The cruelest whip. When the acid hand of love plied the lash, it shredded the flesh more deeply and brought pain to its greatest height.

For this reason, she would cast away love...if she could. If not she'd run from it and hope that it never would find her again.

Out into the rain she bolted, not knowing or caring where she was going, letting the elements run down her face. Ahead she recognized the church, St Thomas and she dashed off to her left, not wanting to recall the confusion of memories that swept over her. They came nonetheless; there she was standing in the steeple letting Jim stare at her, pretending she didn't notice. There they were having dinner together, gorging themselves silly on pizza all the while feeling his love for her radiate off of him. There she was pulling Father Alba and Luke along on the leashes that she had formed from the priest's stole.

This last memory was like a thunderbolt and it stopped her dead cold. She replayed it in her mind, not knowing where it came from.

"It was a nightmare, is all," she said aloud to the rain. She had slept the night before and surely that was where it had come. "It's only a nightmare!" she called out loudly. The rain's only response was to come down harder than before. The words felt like both the truth and a lie at once and in confusion, she ran again, even faster than before.

In a minute, she had lost herself in a maze of trash strewn back alleys that ran behind the dirty little hovels that passed as homes in that low rent neighborhood.

She cried. Logical or not, she cried. In truth, she bawled. She remembered another dream, perhaps the same one, and in it Father Alba seemed so resolute as her fingers, hooked like claws came at his face.

"Talitha, please know that you are forgiven for what you are about to do. Yours has been a hard life and I..."

"Shut it, Alba..."

Talitha squeezed her head hard with both hands and cried harder drowning out the memory. It was an alien sensation to cry. Or at least to cry so freely. There had been tears since her return from the Void, but always they had been light and were over with after only a minute or two. Anything close to hysterics would only bring out the demon, who got off on her misery, relishing it. So she had held back, despite the fact that it felt more and more that she was losing herself, becoming someone terribly cold and dead inside.

There had been no mourning the loss of Brian Galt. He had died. Murdered actually. Talitha had come back into her body and looked upon her cabin and knew in a second whose blood it was soaking the walls and making her hands so slippery. She hadn't cried. Even when she had found his body deep in the forest, broken and tumbled, almost unrecognizable, she hadn't cried. Not a tear.

Instead, she threw a wall around her heart that had held firm like steel until Jim Anderson. Falling for him, and so quickly had been completely unexpected, especially from a logical point of view. And perhaps that's how she allowed it happened. Who could have guessed that two people with only the extremes of loneliness in common would have been smitten so quickly. Yet there she was allowing that first kiss, begging for it, in reality. It had been illogically wonderful.

She missed him already.

"You ok?" A black man of forty or so, stood huddled beneath a tattered and weathered oversized patio umbrella. He had made a home of sorts beneath it and all of his worldly possessions were stacked in green bags around him. The smell alone had Talitha categorizing him immediately as alcoholic and homeless. His tone wasn't polite, it was more his way of announcing himself so that she would notice him and move on. She did, still crying.

Two blocks later: "Hey baby! Come on over here, get out of the rain!" The alleys were more populated than the empty streets. Most of the houses had little more than stoops in the front, but a good number of the backyards had covered porches and under them little throngs were gathered, here and there.

"Come on baby. I got some weed."

Talitha stopped at the word weed. The man had used the word as if it were an enticement. It made no sense. She glanced into the yard and indeed, there seemed to be a veritable bumper crop of commonplace weeds, dandelions, and such, growing in abundance.

Through them, a man of about her own age sauntered toward her. "Watcha doing back here, baby?" He was tall and broad with white teeth and skin the color of mocha. His tone was pleasant, but it ran inharmoniously with an insidious corruption in his eyes. These ran up and down her slim body. It was an unpleasant hungry look and it grated on her.

She remembered a man just like him once. He had come too close, thinking he was only dealing with a tiny slip of a girl, but he didn't realize what a monster she was. He had no idea how much pain she could dish out in a flash.

"I like the way that dress clings to you, very nice." The man with the weeds said and then made a low grumbly moan of desire deep in his throat.

"Go away," she warned soft and dangerous. Talitha marveled at herself suddenly. Her tears had turned to cold rain and a feeling gripped her that she had not thought possible; she wanted to hurt this man. It was a desire like she had felt so many times when the demon had controlled her. She would come alive from the black of her subconscious and it would be there, a need to lash out, a need to hate, a need to make someone pay.

"Go away?" he said with amazement. "Bitch, I live here. You must be on crack. Are you? Is that what your deal is?"

"Crack?" She fought the urge to look down to see what he was talking about, instead she gave in to the hate that roiled inside her chest. Talitha took a step forward and now a smile that wasn't matched by the cold look in her eyes flashed across her face.

The black man's eyes blazed at the smile. "Yeah, you want some hail? You gotta attack, strawberry?" His look was like a wolf's and so was hers.

"First you call me baby, then bitch and now strawberry?" she asked shaking her head. She was going to enjoy this, she always enjoyed the pain. "These are improper ways to greet a young lady such as myself. First of all etiquette would suggest that when addressing an unfamiliar individual you should use..."

"Talitha."

Out of the gloom, further down the alley her brother materialized through the grey of the rain. Even with his hood thrown forward, she could see his eyes. He loved her. She hated him.

Her breath came in heavy and she held it, feeling white-hot anger flash through her arteries. His presence was a catalyst, the spark of a primer that set her world aflame. She gave in to the hate that had no beginning. She should hate. If anyone had cause, it was her.

"Go away!" she cried out and her small slim hands drew themselves in to form rock hard deadly fists.

"This isn't smart, Tal."

"What do you know about smart?" she screamed at him. Hate! It was a drug that she needed. To be rid of love, she would need to hate and she tried to hate her brother. Will was a goody-two-shoes and a moron and Jim was worse! And stupid little Brian...he was...he was...

Brian was sweet and perfect.

"I know killing this guy won't help," Will said advancing.

"Hey, what the fuck," the black man exclaimed, his head swinging back and forth between the two intruders in his world. A world he thought he ruled. "You two think..."

"Go mind your own business, Will," she called out interrupting the man. "He has a gun. I would be only defending myself." Talitha stepped closer to her victim, as if protecting her soon to be kill from another predator. Her reasoning was flimsy to hear even as she said it and a touch of shame cooled her hate.

"Tal, I know what's going to happen. You'll kill him and then you'll wish you hadn't," Will kept his voice calm. Talitha cast a quick look up at the man. He was a drug dealer and a thug and very likely a pimp, judging by the smells and sounds emanating from his tiny home. She didn't know if he deserved death. "Are you trying to find a reason to hate yourself?" Will asked.

"No, I want to hate you," she said, but her words sounded horribly false to her own ears. She had no clue what she wanted. Her insides were a great pain of chaos.

The black man watched this little encounter with an odd expression on his face as if he were the butt of a practical joke. "What the fuck? I ain't the one gettin killed here," he intoned with confidence as his hands went to the back of his jeans.

Talitha presumed that he was reaching for the pistol that she knew he had tucked into his waistband. Now was her chance to let lose her pent up hate, to become savage. It was a chance to stop her mind from dwelling on its own pain by inflicting some of her own. Her eyes flicked to her brother, who hadn't moved. He hadn't budged, even to reach for the gun that she knew he still carried.

This was peculiar. He must have seen or perhaps knew that the thug next to her was reaching for his gun, yet he did nothing. Did he actually want her to attack the man? Or was the man not going for his gun at all, as she supposed? The second question answered itself as she saw the black pistol emerge from behind him.

The sight of it was a relief. It was a permission slip from the teacher, a doctor's note excusing her from gym class, a get out of jail free card. She could now kill him with no qualms.

Liar!

No qualms? Of course she would have qualms and doubts and misgivings. They would nag at her and always she'd know that she had killed a man who might not have deserved death. That he was a bad man wasn't doubted by her, but what were his crimes that merited the ultimate punishment? There was no way to know.

She sighed, tiredly.

And then with inhuman speed she struck the man three inches below the center of his chest, forcing his diaphragm to contract and contort. For a second the man's eyes were huge white globes in his dark face and then he pitched forward, no longer concerned with his pistol or the crazy white people. All he cared about was his next breath.

For Talitha it was déjà vu. She had seen this once before. She had done this once before.

Chapter 7

Will

In his mind Will saw the alley. It was a muddy bog from the rain, and Talitha would add the dull maroon of a man's blood to it. He saw it all. She wanted to kill; to drown her pain in another man's death. He felt keenly his sister's agony over the loss of Jim Anderson, however beneath that was the wild selfish pain over the loss of her own life. Her past had been horrors piled on horrors and her future—doom. The days she had left on Earth would come and go and then...the Void would have her once again.

It was a strange vision filled with knowledge, but absolutely no understanding and it scared him badly. Bad enough for him to briefly put aside his fears for his wife and child.

He ran out of the factory after his sister, but as he cleared the police tape and the debris he saw her sprinting away. She was a blur. Only an Olympian would have any hope of even keeping her in sight, and he was no Olympian—though he could drive. He knew where she was heading and he pushed the station wagon to its top speed. As he came upon the alley of his vision, his mind thought bog once again and fearing that the old pathetic station wagon would only get stuck, he left it and hurried along the one time dirt alley. The sides nearest the haphazard fences were the firmest and he kept to them, until he came to her.

What anger and pain was on display in her eyes!

For his entire life he could count on his Talitha to be emotionally collected where anyone else would've fallen apart. Yet just then, with no provocation, she wanted to kill this stranger.

Emotionally it pained him to see her like this. "Talitha," he called out.

His vision, capricious as always, failed him at that point. Nothing came, not even a hint. Will forced himself to rely on his other, lesser abilities and stayed calm and spoke calm. He advanced on her with deliberate slowness and made no sudden movements, even as the man went for his gun.

Will had a gun. It was stuck in the front of his jeans, beneath the grey sweatshirt that he wore. And despite the rain making his clothes cling to him, he could've had it out in a flash, yet he stayed his hand. In this situation, the gun was useless. Yes, he could pull it out and point it at his sister, but he couldn't shoot her. She was too important to him.

Amy Harris had known about his ability to see the future but had passed it off as nothing. That was an insanely stupid thing to do, unless she had some Gypsy trick to counter his ability. Increasingly, he thought this to be the case, which made Talitha even more valuable. He couldn't afford to hurt her. So he watched, sending out silent prayers that his sister would regain some sense of herself as the black man drew his piece.

The gun came around as if in slow motion and Will was struck with a horrid sense of déjà vu. Only the night before he had looked down the midnight black barrel of a pistol that was a twin of the one coming to bear on his chest. It was then that Talitha struck. The move was too fast to see. A blur of a white hand and the man was down, his eyes bugging out in a dreadful manner.

"He'll live," Talitha answered the question that had formed on his tongue. "What's wrong with me, Will? I'm going crazy." Her eyes did indeed sparkle with madness.

Will was no psychologist. "I don't know...stress? Grief? Everything?"

For a long while she didn't reply, but only looked down upon the man with barely tamed ferocity as he slowly recovered. His gun sat in the mud near his right hand and Will had a feeling that if the man went for it, she would kill him. She radiated hate that rivaled the demon that had possessed her for the last eight years. The man in the mud seemed to sense the same thing and pulled his hand back toward himself timidly.

"I want to kill him so bad," she said turning back to her brother. "Why? Ba'al Fie-ere is gone, yet I want to kill this man."

The young black man nearly had his breath under control, but clearly the talk of his possible death had him too afraid to do anything except lay in the cold rain as still as he could. Unexpectedly Talitha knelt down next to him.

"Look at me," she commanded. With the rain coming down into his face, he had to squint up at her. Even so he had a handsome face. "Are you a killer?" she asked. As she waited for him to answer she drug the pistol from the mud and sniffed at it. Will got the shivers remembering how the demon in her had done the same thing. It was cold in the rain and the shivers didn't leave him. He wrapped his arms about himself, noting the man...the guilty man shivered as well.

He was a killer.

"No...I thought you was looking for some crack," the man lied.

Too late Will turned away and Talitha saw his look of judgment. She knelt down on the man's back, forcing him deeper into the mud. He groaned at the unexpected force. Then there was silence, but for the rain. It came down steadily and loudly, jumping into the puddles all around them. Will continued to shiver.

"What should I do, Will? Should I kill him? Part of me wants to, badly but another part begs that I don't and still a third wonders if I should suffer a murderer to live? That part of me wants justice."

"Can you honestly judge a man?" Will asked, wondering how any of this had come to pass. One moment they were in the factory, the next she was running away as if death were upon her heels and now this.

"I don't have to," she replied. "You have judged him. I saw it in your eyes. You know the truth."

"But we don't do that here..."

"Because, no one has your vision! Wouldn't you kill him if he were threatening your baby?" she asked and pressed the gun into the back of the man's head, thumbing the hammer back. Even with the sound of a million raindrops all about them, that noise was loud. It had such dreadful purpose.

"Talitha, stop! I don't know what he's going to do. If I did then yes, I would kill him, but I don't see his future. Maybe he's going to change, make amends..."

"Ha! Yeah right," she exclaimed loudly, manically to the heavy clouds above her. "Are you going to go to church? Are you going to repent?" she asked the man.

"I...I..." he sputtered pathetically.

"Talitha, look at me. Why are you doing this? The demon is gone, you don't have to act like this."

"I don't know why!" she shrieked. The misery in her voice was plain to hear and so was the fear and puzzlement. "I feel so..." she looked around in the mud for the answer. "Strange, I guess. Everything I feel or want or think seems magnified. I don't understand it."

"Maybe you're feeling a delayed reaction to your grief," Will suggested. "Maybe now that you're freed from the demon, your emotions are... I don't know suddenly uncorked and you're overflowing like a bottle of champagne."

"Champagne? It feels just like that. My desires are suddenly uncontainable. I'm hungry like I've never felt before. And I'm angry. It's like a swarm of enraged bees are in my mind, running over everything."

She paused suddenly, her brown eyes going wide. "Wait, I know. It was that damned priest who did this to me!" Abruptly, she sounded savage again. "He kept questioning me, bringing things up and then... he touched Jim. And his hands weren't gentle like they should have been. Jim saved me! And who knows, maybe he saved us all, and that...that priest! His hands were cold, as if Jim was a science experiment to him. All he cared about were facts and...and..."

Her face went slack with sudden realization and she came off the shivering man beneath her, and knelt in the mud next to him. "That would've been me. I would've done the same things, except I would've been worse. I would've mapped out angles and bone fragment trajectories. All the spatter would have been..." Talitha stopped and began to blink rapidly, but the tears came in spite of that.

"The other Talitha was right. I was so useless before her," she said to her brother. "I think I want to get drunk. I've never had champagne before. Do you have any champagne...uh...mister..." She tried to give him a smile and despite the rain and her misery, she couldn't help but be beautiful.

"Jackson is his first name, but he goes by J-Bird" Will prompted. The man's name was just suddenly there in his mind.

An inch from the mud, Jackson's eyes went wider than they had and he shook his head, no. "I got some forties if you want them. You can have them, ok? They're yours, anything you want." His tone was pleading and the sound of it struck the pretty smile from Talitha's face.

"No, they're not mine. It wouldn't be right. I, uh...I'm sorry Jackson for hitting you so hard." She tried to look contrite and he nodded his head in a tiny way, still afraid.

"We don't have time for that either way. Tal, we have to go." Will held out his hand to his sister. She didn't take it right away.

"What do we do about him?" She nodded Jackson's way. "Do we leave him to continue selling drugs and running his brothel? Or do we threaten him or perhaps beat him or maybe break one of his legs?"

"Hey..." Jackson started to say, but Talitha, as if by magic had him by the collar and yanked him in close.

"I wasn't speaking to you, insect," her voice had changed like the speed of her hands and it was low and dangerous sounding.

"Tal, please stop. We let him go. We can't force a person to be good." Will came down to her level, putting out his hand to touch hers. "God doesn't do that, maybe we shouldn't either."

"You're probably correct," she replied. "But I'm going to warn you Mr. Jackson. If you continue down this road, you'll end up in hell with me, and I will remember you. I'll hurt you badly and you'll scream like a little girl being raped for the first time."

Her words had a slow heavy nightmare quality that was horribly unsettling, at least for Will they were, but not for Jackson. His sister, though so small compared to the man, had her hands hooked into his jacket with such strength that it pulled tight across his throat. Once again, his eyes bugged as his breath was choked out of his lungs. Her eyes, on the other hand held a storm of insane fury, but thankfully the fury died out in a second and she released him, standing in a single fluid motion.

"I'm starving," she proclaimed to the rain. "Mr. Jackson do you know where we can get some good French toast around here? You're welcome to join us of course."

2

Jackson logically declined the offer and they left him still in the mud and the rain.

At breakfast, the brother and sister had a breakthrough in their relationship. They did not eat French toast. It wasn't much of a breakthrough but it was something. Though in truth the meal wasn't exactly breakfast, as it was almost one in the afternoon when they ate.

"Maybe we can find an IHOP, they make good French toast, at least they used to," Talitha suggested as they walked, hand in hand down the muddy alley toward where Will had left the old station wagon. Will tried to smile at the idea, but the wires that would've held that fake smile in place felt oddly broken. In truth it wasn't the idea of eating French toast for the millionth time that did it, it was worry over his wife and the fact that time seemed to be against him. The seconds of each minute were glacial in their slowness. Their flight wasn't for another two and a half hours, and with no bags to check and the airport only fifteen minutes away, they had too much time.

Not only did he have time to fret, there was also time to spare for worry and even anxiety.

She caught his odd look. "You don't want IHOP? I thought you liked it," Talitha said with a slight frown on her wet face.

Will sighed as he climbed into the car. "No I don't, sorry. After French toast for breakfast so many times, I'm kind of sick of it."

"Me too!" she cried, with manic jubilance. "All this time, we've both been eating the same thing because we thought the other person liked it."

"Yeah." The car spluttered into being, kicking out blue smoke. Will turned it toward the factory.

"That's so stupid." Her smile was suddenly gone. "We've been eating crap for so long because neither of had the guts to tell the other..."

Will had to interrupt. Her abrupt mood swings were unsettling, and when she was in her angry phase, she was just as bad as the evil Talitha had ever been. It bothered him nearly as much as how slow time felt to be progressing and he couldn't take it any longer. "Talitha, listen to me. We said nothing because we each didn't want to hurt the other, even in this inconsequential thing. That's love. Maybe stupid love, but love nonetheless."

"I guess so."

Will pulled over, the blackened frame of the factory just visible down the road. "I need you, Tal. And so does Lisa, but not like this. You're out of control and you'll end up getting us all killed. You've been through hell, I know it, but can you pull it together?"

Talitha nodded her head, though she kept her face down, staring as her fingers knotted and unknotted in her lap. "I can't seem to stop myself. I have so many memories and dreams all running together, I sort of don't feel like myself. One second I'm furious, the next I'm sad and then I'm excited."

"Maybe you can start by realizing that you can live now and that you don't have to go to hell when you die. You're a good person and..."

"Shut up!" she screamed. Her fist drove down onto the faded passenger side dashboard, sending an explosion of plastic in the damp air of the car. "As always you don't know what you're talking about. I am going to hell. It's done. My future is set."

He leaned back from her outburst, unsettled not by what she said, or even how she said it, but by the unguarded look of hatred she sent his way.

"Do you think that it's my fault?" he asked in honesty, not trying to dodge blame, or to anger her further, but only trying to understand.

She took a long time to answer, which was answer enough for Will. "No, none of any of this is your fault," Talitha said, now suddenly docile. "Will, you'll never understand, unless you go there yourself. And you...you're the last person that would ever feel that they would have to go. So please, don't ask. It just hurts."

She was correct about his not understanding. "I'm not asking, I'm telling you. The Void is for evil people and you're not evil, at all."

"How can you even say that? Of course I am," she replied with an odd faraway look in her eyes. Talitha fingered the ruined glove compartment, the door hung open reminding Will of a groper's mouth, absently she worked it up and down. It looked to be chewing.

"Tal, you are not ev..." He stopped in mid-sentence. She had said this to him before. He tried to recall the conversation, but it only came to him in bits and pieces and just then he couldn't remember if it had been her or the evil Talitha. "Tal, you had an odd look on your face before. It looked like you hated me, can you tell me why?"

She seemed to feel pain at the question and kept her face down looking at her fingers, which had retreated to the safety of her lap and began meshing themselves nervously together. "No...I can't, I mean I don't. I don't hate you."

"Are you mad that I took you from the Void?" he asked, fearful of the answer. She nodded with a blank look in her eyes. "Because you had value? Because you were worth something?"

She shook her head and replied in a whisper, "No, because I was becoming. Becoming powerful— becoming a demon." The eyes of the brother and sister met and there was fear in both of them. These had been the words of the demon.

"Is Ba'al Fie-ere in there with you? Right now?" Will asked, his eyes straying to the gun Talitha had taken from the man from the alley only a few minutes before. It sat between their two seats.

"I...I don't know. I can't tell. I don't think so. It's just that I'm remembering things that the other Talitha had been doing and saying. It's horrible, it's like I've done these things and I'm only now remembering it."

"Can you stop it?"

Talitha started crying again, hard. "I don't know. We shared the same brain clearly, but our memories were always inaccessible to each other before. Yet now hers are sifting into mine. Pretty soon, I won't know which ones are which. Did I rape you?" She gasped in horror as the memory struck her like a slap.

"No, you tried but I stopped you. Tal, look at me. Look at me." He waited until her eyes were full on him. "What is the square root of, uh one-hundred and sixty-nine?"

Her eyes shifted up for a second, before she answered, "Thirteen. Why?"

Will blew out, exasperated. "Because, that's why. What's the square root of two-thousand and sixty-nine?" Her brows came together and he could tell she was about to ask again why. "I'm trying to occupy your mind, while I try to figure out how to stop these memories from happening."

"Oh." Her eyes went up again and she began calculating, as she did, her lips started to move in time with the math running through her mind.

Will reached out and wiped away the fug that had settled on the windshield. The view was only slightly better, a grey curtain that came steadily down. He drove, and at first he headed toward the factory, thinking about asking Father Vogel what he thought they should do. He seemed like an intelligent man, but Talitha's eyes went wide when she saw the building looming before them.

"Oh, God! What did I do? What did I do to poor Alba?" Her hand went to her mouth.

"Tal! Where are you on that square root?"

"I don't know, uh...fort-five, point four something," she moaned out the words.

"Do you want a new calculation to do?"

"Yes...hurry." She began tapping her cheeks rhythmically. Her eyes hollow spheres of fear.

"Two-thousand three hundred and four," he called out, hoping that it would be a good number. Personally, he could only calculate the simplest square roots in his head. Deciding against the factory, where awful memories abounded, he turned to his right down the next street, but didn't catch its name, the condensation was building in the car rapidly. The street was a twin to the next one. The houses were all unremarkably similar.

"Forty-eight. Will, I'm going to become her! I know it..."

"You aren't!" he cut across her. "Twelve thousand three hundred and six." He turned right again at the next main intersection. He had no clue where he was going or really what to do.

"That one's too hard, give me an easier number. I have to become her, it's a certainty."

"Twelve thousand three hundred and six," he repeated, feeling scared that she was correct. She was so rarely wrong.

"One-hundred and eleven...I think. Right around there," she replied desperately as if the right answer could help her in any way. "Will pull over. See that pizza place? It's the same one that Jim got our dinner from last night. I'm hungry. I want that; it was a good memory."

The place was a hole in the wall. Still, when it came to pizza those were usually the best. Almost as a rule, a fancy pizza joint was a poor pizza joint.

Sliding into the booth closest to the door that had jingled merrily above them, Talitha looked around wide-eyed at the other people in the restaurant.

"Why does their hair look like that?" she asked timidly, running her hands through her own straggling locks.

Will glanced back. For the most part the customers and staff in the restaurant were young and resembled his stereotypical vision of people of Italian decent. The women had great masses of hair and in his opinion too much makeup.

"It's the style I guess, don't worry about it," he replied, but she was quite worried.

"And their clothes?" she whispered.

Their stone washed jeans were worn high up, above the waist and they were pegged or rolled up at the ankles. In eight years, Talitha hadn't been in public save for her weekly trips to a rural podunk church, and popular clothing styles had changed dramatically in that time. Compared to the other women in the place, with her ill-fitting black dress, she looked like an Amish girl who had lost her bonnet.

Before he could answer her concerning clothing, a waitress came over, eyeing their raggedy appearance with distaste, probably sensing little opportunity for a tip. She had a magnificent head of dark brown hair—teased almost to the point of being a mane and Talitha gazed at with wonder.

"Kinda wet out, huh? Didja come in on an awk?" the waitress asked in a friendly manner, expecting at least a smile. However, her Boston accent was terribly thick, with the word ark coming out sounding like awk and Talitha only opened her eyes wider and looked at her brother, bewildered.

He was used to the dreadful sounding accent and replied easily, "Nope just a station wagon, which is pretty close in size to an ark. Can we get a couple of Cokes and two large pies, please? One a supreme and the other just pepperoni."

Just then Talitha made the mistake of glancing back up at the waitress, who asked her, "Uh cupla lah-ges? Aw ya expectin any maw?" Again, Talitha was forced to look to her brother for interpretation and he thought she was coming across as a retarded Amish girl now.

"No just the two of us. We aren't expecting any more people," he answered for the two of them. Talitha's mouth came open slightly and she nodded gently in understanding.

When the waitress was safely out of ear shot, Talitha smiled, her troubles momentarily put aside. "Wow, that's a thick accent. I think while we're in Boston, I'm just going to pretend I'm deaf."

"Yeah," he agreed absently, checking his watch for the hundredth time that day. Two hours until their flight. Another hour and fifteen minutes in the air and then a twenty-two minute car ride. He had a total of two-hundred and seventeen minutes to help his sister come to grips with her memory and mental issues.

"Tal, we have to fix this thing going on in your head," he started. "Yesterday you told me how you could control aspects of your body, can't you just lock away these memories."

Talitha looked about to speak, but her brows came down and she paused for a moment first. "You know something strange? The other Talitha, she actually liked Jim Anderson too. She thought they had some sort of connection."

"She did? That's a little strange," Will agreed. "You wouldn't have thought so, she treated him pretty poorly. But you're getting off subject. Can't you control memory just as you control your sense of smell?"

"Only when I'm concentrating on something else. Also, I don't know what memories to try to reject until they come to me. You see in order for me to block a memory, I have to know what to block first. I'll give you an example, look around this restaurant." She turned her head scanning objects and people.

Will did as well, not seeing her point. It looked like just a hole in the wall pizza joint, one of many that he had been in. Arranged in a long rectangle there were maybe fifteen booths running down the wall to the right and due to the bar there were half that many on the left. There were Italian themed pictures on the walls; the leaning tower of Pisa, the Roman Coliseum. As well, there were pictures of famous people of Italian heritage; actors and sports figures for the most part.

Joe DiMaggio's relatively ugly face sat large in a frame centered on their booth. He gave it a glance, wondering what in the world Marilyn Monroe saw in the gap-toothed ball player.

"Ok?" he asked after a minute.

"Everything in this place has memory associated with it. See this tablecloth." She held up an edge of the red and white checkered spread. "Remind you of anything?"

"Yeah, Papa Gino's." Papa Gino's was an east coast pizza chain they used to frequent as kids.

"That's what I thought as well. But remember that guy?" She flashed her white smile.

He remembered. Every one of the chain's restaurants had tablecloths of checkered red and white and once when the Jern's were eating at their local Papa Gino's, a man came in wearing pants of the exact same pattern. Every head in the entire place turned in unison and stared. It was terribly comical as the man paused in the doorway not seeing the tablecloths but only seeing fifty pairs of eyes following his every move. It was only when he was shown to his table by a hostess, barely suppressing a laugh, did he notice. The poor man turned on his heel and walked out with fast strides and when he had scampered to the parking lot the entire restaurant burst into laughter.

Even now Will had to smile at the memory. "That was funny. The guy probably went home and burned those pants. I know I would've."

"I agree, but my point is, how could I suppress that memory without experiencing it first? I'm going to have to feel everything that she felt and it isn't going to be like a stranger's memory either. It's going to be me doing those things...I saw what I did to Father Alba. I tore out his eyes, I dug..."

"Tal! Focus on me. Ok?" She had quickly turned white under her tan at the memory of what happened to Father Alba. Will grabbed her hands and squeezed hard. "Let's just deal with the man with the Papa Gino pants, ok? We'll start small, can you suppress that memory?"

"Here go," the waitress seemed to just suddenly appear next to them. She plunked down their cokes with an unreadable look and left as quickly as she could.

"Papa Gino's pants man," he reminded his sister. "Concentrate." He tried to sound smooth and confident in her, but he was in truth nervous.

"I don't think I can," she sounded scared herself. "The memory is so entwined with others. Even this little conversation would have to be hidden away behind a wall in my mind. Remember Foghorn Alley? You would take Lisa and me to picnic there?"

What that had to do with her memory he didn't know, but all the same, he did recall those times. The wind at the southern point of Governors Island was always nice in the summer, making it feel ten degrees cooler. For fun, he had taken the three of them there for picnics a number of times and they had enjoyed the breeze, relaxing, watching the ships plying the wide mouth of the harbor.

"Yeah, I remember. And I remember the old blanket we used as well. It was red and white checkered, but the pattern wasn't the exact same."

"True, but you may recall we told Lisa the story about the Papa Gino's pants guy. In detail. All in all, I think I've told that story a half dozen times and I've heard you tell it as well. You see how impossible this can be? In order to suppress that one memory of that poor guy, I would have to cover up or contain a dozen others and perhaps more. Do you know what song was playing in the restaurant at the time he came in?"

"No. Do you?"

She shook her head. "I don't, but my subconscious does. You see? Even if I were to suppress all the horrible things Tal... I mean Ba'al Fie-ere has done, I would still have to deal with my subconscious mind. That part of me, with its trove of insidious memories would pervert me just as if the memories were all fresh in my mind, only it would be slow and torturous."

"What about destroying the memories outright?"

With a moan, she buried her head in her hands. "I can't. I mean, I don't think I can. Physically, I can control my body to a great extent, but the mind is different. It's far too complex. Aristotle is oft quoted as saying, The whole is more than the sum of its parts. He was referring to synergism, the concept that certain agents when combined become far greater. When things are acting with synergism one plus one is greater than two."

"I know the term."

"With regards to the brain, it's so complex that it's like one plus one would equal a million. It can't be done," she sighed as a way of finishing her sentence.

Will was about to speak, when lunch arrived. Their big haired waitress had brought along another girl, whose hair was equally as grand in size and they placed down the pies, ogling the brother and sister with less than secretive glances. Will felt self-conscious about his bruised and swollen face and too late did he recall that smiling only made him look worse.

Their waitress leaned back as if he had leprosy. "Anything else?"

"No thank you, Tracy. I think we have all that we need," he replied. Her name had popped into his head as if they had been introduced. She looked shocked all of a sudden, and her eyes narrowed at him searching his face. Her nametag read Meg.

"Do I know you?" she asked quietly.

"I'm an old acquaintance of your mother's." It was all Will could think of and it sounded strange even to him since the waitress looked just a couple of years younger than he.

"Ok...sure. Enjoy," she nodded at their food and turned away still with a skeptical look. He knew she was on her way to call her mother.

"Crap," he murmured to his sister. "We might want to eat quick. She's going to call her mother right now." He checked his watch. The slow hand of time was still against him, one-hundred and ninety-six minutes left.

Talitha had her eyes squinted in concentration. "I can hear her..." She paused and suddenly tense lines of hate distorted her pretty face. "That whore-bitch just called you gruesome. I should go..."

"Talitha, hey!" Will hissed at his sister. She had been very loud. "Look at me. Look at me."

"What?" She seemed unsure of herself and looked around in puzzlement. "Did I just use the word whore-bitch? Did I?" She was close to tears again.

"Yes, please quite down." People had turned to look at her.

"That just popped out, I didn't mean it," she explained. "It was like listening to someone else say those words. Will, I'm in trouble. I'm going to be her. I am her! Oh my God...I killed a lady once with a hammer...or did she? I don't know. Did I do that or was it her?"

"Shush, please. It was her. It was her, you'd never do something like that." Clearly, Will wasn't convincing his sister. Talitha's eyes grew wider and wider as memories came to her. He tried a different tact, "Talitha...what is eighty-one squared."

"Uh, uh nine."

"No, I said squared."

"Oh...sixty-four hundred...sixty-five hundred and sixty-one." She looked at him to see if that was the correct figure. He had no idea, but he had her more focused.

"Good job. Now listen to me. You are the good Talitha. Trust me; I can tell the two of you apart, you haven't called me names since last night." He tried to smile as he said this, but her look was too forlorn. "You want memories? I've got some good ones. When you were three years old, you were already practically a lawyer. This one time, mom told you not to play in the street and later, there you were sitting in the street with your dolls. She started to yell, but you calmly pointed out that you were actually playing in the gutter, not the street itself. She gave you that look... you know the one, where she takes a deep breath while shaking her head like she wants to say something but she just doesn't know what. Eventually she says very clearly, I want you to stay on the side walk."

Talitha was looking at him in the most delightful way, just then. He pointed to her food. "Eat your pizza. So, we were playing, I forget what, and once again you were out in the street and mom comes up and she really starts yelling at you." He paused to take a gargantuan bite of his pizza.

"What happened?"

"Mom yells, what did I tell you about staying on the sidewalk? And your reply was, I am on the sidewalk, look. Although most of you was in the street, you still had one foot on the sidewalk and you said, I never left it. After that mom always had to spell out her instructions, just in case."

"I did that?" She smiled and for a few seconds it warmed the brown of her eyes. After the story, Talitha seemed to calm considerably and they ate quietly. This was just fine with Will since he was too famished to tell too many more stories just then.

After he had eaten half the pizza, he asked her, "Tal, can you do me a favor and try to destroy those memories? Isn't it worth a shot?"

She shook her head. "I've been thinking about this and I have to tell you that it's not worth a shot. The brain is far beyond even my abilities. Remember that old saying, if a million monkeys typed for a million years, one would produce the works of Shakespeare?" she asked. He gave her a little noncommittal shrug in return. "The complexity of the brain is such, that what you're suggesting would be like having a single monkey build a typewriter from scratch, learn English and then type out Hamlet. It's impossible."

"Not really. If you can find a monkey that can build typewriters, I bet the rest would be a snap."

She didn't smile. "You have to realize that memories aren't exactly named, or color-coded. They're enmeshed in everything we are...our personalities, our thoughts and feeling, are all shaped by our memories. And monkeying around with them is filled with so many hazards that I couldn't even name them all."

He peeked at his watch, they had one hour and twenty minutes until their flight was scheduled to take off. "Then what are we going to do? You know Lisa's predicament. You know what the evil Tal wanted to do to her...and my baby."

A case of the shivers struck her, it was a long roll of her muscles down her back. "I know what she wanted to do. She wanted to...to box up the rest of the pizza." Her face unfurled into a broken looking grin.

"Huh?" Will asked perplexed.

"I'll getchya a box," Tracy/Meg the waitress had come up suddenly, stealthily. She left just as quiet.

Talitha glared at the girl as she walked away. It was a feral look that only became more so when she bared her teeth suddenly. "That little cunt was trying to eavesdrop. Can you believe that shit? Somebody should do her a favor and yank all that stupid hair out by the roots!"

The restaurant went silent.

The word cunt had so startled Will that he had sat speechless as Talitha had gone on in a loud voice that had carried as far back as the kitchen. Quickly he dug into his wallet and dropped three twenties onto the table.

3

"Fuck you, bitch!" Tracy/Meg screamed from the doorway of the pizza place. Behind her was a throng of angry Italians.

Thankfully, just at the moment, Will was peeling away at the station wagon's top speed. For a few precious seconds, just long enough to pull her to the car, Talitha had seemed stunned by her own outburst. Now she seethed.

"I know where she works, Will! When we're done with Amy, I'm coming right back here," her face was marble in its hardness.

"Tal, stop it, please. What's the square root two-thousand..."

"Who gives a fuck about square roots? Do I look like a fuckin calculator to you?" She yanked her hair back into a quick braid. Her hands pulling hard were punishing her scalp.

Will began to feel an awful desperation growing in him. His sister was fast becoming a time bomb and he needed her whole and sane. "You're not trying hard enough, Tal! Please fight this, you've got to be tougher."

Practically since he had woken up, he had been hoping for a vision concerning Lisa, a hint, a clue as to what he should do, but instead he saw Talitha reach for the gun between the seats.

Yet even with the vision, he knew he'd be too slow. There had been too little warning. Her hand was a blur and a fraction of a second later he felt the cold steel pressing against his cheek.

"Let me pull over first," he whispered, keeping his hands at the ten and two position on the wheel. They were sweating so badly that he worried that he would slip and drive into one of the parked cars lining the street.

"I remember I used to want to kill you, when you had the impudence to order me about," as she spoke, she drilled the gun into his face. It hurt. His flesh was still terribly sore from his beating at her hands only the day before.

"You don't wish to kill me now?" It was a small spark of hope, but it was all he had.

She laughed cruelly. "I want to kill you now more than ever. You did something to me. I don't really know what. I only know that now there's a demon in the Void wearing my face. Ruling where I should be ruling. Hurting those I want to hurt."

Will again wished for a vision, instead he got the sound of the hammer of the gun drawing back in his ear.

Chapter 8

Talitha

A fury burned a fire within her, blotting out the sound of screaming. The screaming was far away, as if from another time or another mind. She couldn't tell which it was or whether it was both at once. However, it didn't really matter. Of all the beings she hated, and there was quite a list, none deserved death more than Will Jern. And no amount of screaming and begging echoing in her psyche would stay her hand another second.

Except that she did pause. The begging sounded familiar and after a second, she realized that it was Talitha begging for her not to pull the trigger. But...but, she was Talitha, or at least that's what she used to call herself, before. And then she called herself...Ba'al. That's right, she remembered. Her name had been Ba'al Fie-ere, denier of Ba'al. But when was that, she didn't know.

Her mind, rocking and swimming in confusion though it was, was well made up on one thing at least. Her brother would have to die. Simply the fact that he had beaten her twice, once physically in hand to hand combat and once mentally with his deceitful exorcism, meant that he was a living embarrassment to her. She thumbed the hammer back, and as she did, a low trickle of sweat crept meekly from his hairline at his temple.

It made her smile. "Any last words?"

"If you don't mind, I wanted to tell you a final story. It won't take long. When I was five years old and you were four, we used to play that game with the lava monsters, remember?"

Unbelievably, she nodded. She put off his death for another moment as she recalled that time, running and jumping over the sidewalks, which back then seemed so unbelievably wide. Was it always summer when they had been children together, it felt so. Always warm and sunny.

Will had nervous eyes and they slipped toward her, briefly, fearfully. She liked that and let him go on, prolonging the moment, "That day we were playing over by the Davidson's house. I don't know what we were thinking. Timmy Davidson had been grounded and couldn't come out to play and there we were right beneath his window, laughing and screaming, 'Look out! The lava-monster!' With him sitting looking all mopey. You had pigtails in your hair that day, with yellow yarn tying back each. I remember you had on a yellow turtleneck and brown cords. It's like a picture in my mind. You jumping over the bricks, with the green-green grass behind you, framing everything."

Talitha sat in the car, frozen in place, remembering this moment in the past only as it unfolded from Will's lips. She didn't know what was to come and her curiosity kept her finger a hair's breathe from finishing the pull on the trigger of the gun. It hadn't wavered an inch.

"We were both barefoot you and I. Didn't it seem as if we were always barefoot back then? Perhaps it made the prospect of touching the lava that much more exciting." He shrugged as if that little observation didn't matter. "Either way, you were giggling up a storm all along and your mood must have affected Timmy, because he started playing with us from up in his room. Right behind you Tal, run! He'd scream down. We ran and jumped over the sidewalks and Timmy kept directing back and forth until we were all out of breathe and then Mrs. Davidson came. Timothy Nathaniel Davidson! What are you doing? You're supposed to be grounded." Will's voice was way up high and Talitha suddenly remembered Mrs. Davidson, a small woman with a big voice. It carried up and down the block when she was upset with her son, which was frequent.

"His mom scared Timmy so bad he almost fell out of the window. She yanked him back in and then she turned to glare down at us...do you remember what you said to her?"

"No," she was clueless.

"You suddenly point up at her and scream, Run Willy J a lava-monster has gotten Timmy! Oh my God that was the funniest thing! We both took off, laughing our heads off because of the look Mrs. Davidson had on her face."

Talitha smiled at the image. "That's a cute story. Did it have a point past keeping you alive for a few more seconds?"

Will gave her a little shrug. "I wasn't done. So there we were running back home, but we were so weak from laughter and from the lava-monster game that we were practically stumbling and we weren't watching where exactly we were going. You have to remember that German-shepherd that lived between us and the Davidson's."

Talitha did indeed. In her mind, its teeth were four inch long curved sabers and it could open its mouth wide enough to half swallow her. It was a nightmare dog, and the legend of it in her mind was probably pitiful compared to its actual ferocity.

"That day we accidentally walked into its ring of death." He gave her a knowing look around the pistol. Though the rest of the story opened up in her memory only as it went along, she recalled quite clearly the ring of death. It wasn't something she would enter even on a dare.

Will went on, "The dog's name was Nancy. How stupid is that? I couldn't think of a worse name for such a beast as that even if I tried. It ran around on a chain and cut a perfect circle in the grass, a dirt path that meant certain doom to anyone foolish enough to cross its boundary. That day you walked right over it without thinking."

"I don't remember this at all," Talitha murmured shaking her head in slight way. The gun in her hand was now forgotten. It had fallen into her lap and she couldn't even feel her fingers around its grip.

"It's true. We were just laughing away and didn't hear Nancy charging at us. She was always so silent...but that look in her eyes, yeesh." Will paused as his body became racked with shivers. "She came at you and I swear she could've swallowed you in one giant bite. Her mouth looked to open a foot and a half, but at the last second, I saw her and pulled you back. Those freaking giant teeth came down with this really loud snap an inch from your face." Will puffed out his cheeks and blew long and slow.

"Huh," Talitha nodded a series of small little nods, suddenly remembering that moment with amazing clarity. Nancy's teeth, curved and wickedly sharp were a beautiful white, as if they were polished on a daily basis. They came together with a clicking sound and when they did, a large huff of her breathe struck Talitha in the face. It was hot and wet, and it stank of aged garbage.

"I remember that. I thought my heart had stopped in my chest," she paused a moment feeling that fear from so long ago come back to life. It felt so real, almost as if it had just happened.

"I..." Just then, she looked down, becoming mystified. "Will, what are we doing in the car? And why am I holding this?" She held out the gun, with shaking hands. The last thing she had remembered was hearing someone approach the table at the restaurant and then she was there in the car, listening to the story of Nancy and the lava-monsters feeling extremely confused. Part of her confusion was the low burn of anger that was even then draining away from her. She'd been so monstrously angry just a few moments before, but now she couldn't understand why.

Will reached out and took the gun from her. "You are...how do I put this? The other Talitha, the one I thought I banished, or exorcized I mean, is back. Or maybe it never left."

"No she's gone," Talitha implored. "She has to be gone. I would feel her in me. I would know it!"

Will put the car in drive and sped off into the rain. "I don't know what to say. I know her better than you do and it was definitely her. I don't think it's a memory issue you're dealing with."

She didn't know what to say either. Odd memories flashed through her mind. In one, she was masturbating in bed expressing her pleasure with embarrassingly loud moans. In another, she was talking to a doctor from the asylum, pretending to be sane, trying to lure him just a little closer so she could get at him with her teeth. A third saw her outside a home, one that was set way back in the woods. A man stood near a fireplace in the living room and she couldn't decide whether to kill him or rape him.

"Talitha come on, I can't leave you here alone," Will said, his voice was a combination of stress and fatigue.

They were parked outside the wreck of the factory. "How did we get here so fast? We were just..." They had just been by the pizza place only a second before.

"What do you mean? It wasn't that fast. But come on, I want to get you some new clothes before we go to the airport. So we got to grab the priest and hustle. Are you still doing ok?" He wiggled his fingers at his own head.

"Yes, it's still me in here," she replied, attempting, but failing at giving him a smile. Talitha climbed out of the car feeling a nervous thrill in her stomach. She had barely blinked and they had been at the factory. Had she been daydreaming, or perhaps concentrating on those old/new memories so much that she missed the entire car ride? She didn't think so. Time had just snapped by in way she couldn't describe.

Before her the entrance to the factory was a black nightmare against the cold grey rain. Portions of its charred walls still stood three stories up into the gloom. She barely gave these a glance, what concerned her was below them. Deep in the black pits of the building were nine corpses.

"Did you hear that?" she asked her brother. He had to have. It had been plenty loud. A scream had come up from the depths of the factory. A man's scream of horrid pain. It was Father Alba's voice.

"No, I didn't hear anything. What was it?" Will had his head cocked to the side listening.

"It's..."

Father Alba sounded like he was being tortured. As if his eyes were being torn from their sockets. One of her new memories came back to her and on impulse, she tentatively gave the air a sniff. The smell of the priest was distant and fading, he wasn't in the building, and hadn't been since the day before. Just like that the scream seemed to die away.

Had it even been there in the first place? The scream had sounded so real when she first heard it, but now only seconds later it was more an echo in her mind.

"It's nothing. Just something settling, I think," she lied. Will's brows came down, he didn't fully believe her, all the same he turned back to the entrance.

Steam or smoke wafted up from it making it look eerie, reminding her of another doorway she had been through once. That one she had to be dragged into. How she screamed so hysterically! That one entered upon the crypt of Jubal and it was the first time Talitha had sent her to be tortured in her place.

"Talitha...sent?" she asked aloud to the building. "Who am I?" Her mind wavered in confusion. Was she the other Talitha? The evil one? She didn't think so, yet her memory was definitely of forcing the good Talitha into the crypt where the teeth came alive? She could picture that girl even now, she looked so innocent, so fearful and so weak.

"Will...I'm having problems. I...I...I don't think I can go down there."

"Tal..." Will had a pained expression. "Time's running out, we got to do this, how about I hold your hand? Will you be able to come down then?"

She didn't want to go down there regardless, the many teeth of Jubal kept flashing anew in her mind, but she had no choice and took his large hand in her small brown one. They descended quietly for a time before she caught the scent of the police officer who had been in Father Alba's room at the hospital. She remembered his name was Milner and she remembered as well throwing him about a small white room. She had made him look weak and pathetic, and he had cringed, practically in tears when she looked his way.

The one thing she couldn't recall was when any of that had happened.

She didn't dwell on it, however, the thought of Milner was too distracting. There was something about him that she found terribly annoying. He was irritating like an itch you couldn't scratch and his voice had the quality of nails on a chalkboard. Quickly all thoughts of the crypt of Jubal vanished, they were buried beneath a growing anger. The anger simmered rapidly into hate. It was a warm feeling, one that made her forget her worries and fears. Hate could conquer all of that nonsense; it could conquer anything. Talitha knew this. She remembered now how weak and frail she was without it and she allowed herself to be engulfed in its powerful arms.

Chapter 9

Will

The little room hadn't changed. And neither did Will's reaction to it. When he entered he gave it a quick glance and a familiar depression settled onto him. Other than the remains of the fire the gypsy had built the night before, the room was furnished solely in contemporary American death.

"Father Vogel, I hope that you're just about finished down here," he said, checking his watch, feeling a flight of humming birds swarm for a brief moment in his chest. Their plane would depart in one hour and two minutes.

"Yes, I am. However, I still have some more questions, but they can wait until we're on the plane." The priest answered in an amiable manner. His tone was light and it didn't go with the morbid surroundings.

Will didn't relish the idea of any more questions. He was sure that they would only set Talitha off again and that was something he couldn't afford, at least not yet. His main fear was that if the evil Talitha came out too many more times, she would be impossible to contain.

Eric Milner was in the room as well, weaving a beam of light around. He stood in a long grey coat, bundled against the chill, wearing a glum look on his face, shaking his head at all of the bodies. "Will, I'm really gonna need my gun back now. You aren't going to be able to get them on the airplane you know."

Will shrugged, knowing the man was right, and held out the weapon. "Keep it out of sight will you?" A gun in his hands was another thing that could set his sister off, her other self seemed to hate the cop with a dreadful passion. Will sighed heavily, not knowing how he was going to keep Talitha together long enough to overcome Amy.

"Mr. Jern, where is your sister?" the priest asked, his own flashlight he sent shining past Will. "I have some questions for her as well.

"Huh? Talitha is right..." Will turned around, his sister was nowhere in sight. A burst of fear went through him that he tried to ignore and he put his head out into the dark hall. "Talitha?" he called out to her, hoping that she'd only stepped out for some air. He was getting nothing in the way of a vision and had no idea what was going on in her mind. "Talitha!" This time he yelled louder, but the building felt empty.

"It's ok Mr. Jern, it can wait," Father Vogel said, before heading for the door. Will grabbed him quickly by the arm and spun him around, putting his finger to the older man's lips. Will then pointed to the two men and then pointed to the floor. Stay here, he mouthed. The priest looked surprised at the hard look on Will's face, but complied. Milner was another story.

"Oh shit!" The cop, who had just put away his gun, yanked it out again and held it at arm's length, his face looking as grey as his coat. With his free hand, he produced a second gun. It was the one that Talitha had shot Will with the night before. "What's going on? Is that bitch sister of yours going psycho again?"

"She can likely hear you," Will replied quietly. Milner's face went white. "I really don't know what's going on, it could be nothing whatsoever. She could be outside getting some fresh air, or she could be wandering around the building. All I know is that she was right next to me when I came in. But all the same, I'm worried. Talitha has been acting a little odd."

He paused, unsure how much to tell them. If he told them too little, he could be putting them in danger if the evil Talitha was really back. If he told them all that he knew and suspected, the cop would likely shoot first and ask questions later. It would mean putting Talitha in danger and he didn't know if he could risk that, he needed her too much.

"What do you mean by odd?" Milner hissed.

"She has been acting...only for very short periods, mind you, kinda like her other self. You know, a little violent, a little weird."

"Mother fucker, you can't be serious!" Milner reacted just as Will had feared. The guns were trained on the door and he was sure that the cop would shoot at the first sign of movement in the hall.

"Aren't we being a might bit paranoid?" the priest whispered. "Would she really attack us? Three grown men, one of whom is a police officer?"

Milner looked at the priest as if he was an idiot. "No disrespect Father, but we weren't lying about this girl. She's freaking possessed! I told you how strong she was, and you heard Sean's story. There were six men in that room beneath the church and even though she was unarmed and blind, she managed to take two of them hostage. And you saw how big Sean and Jim was! They ain't no tiny guys."

The priest considered for a moment, stroking his grey goatee. He turned to Will. "You were rather certain that you had exorcized the demon in her. What has changed?"

"Honestly I don't know. It started this morning, but it got really bad only an hour or so ago, when we came here. She acted a little distant, kind of spacey you could say, and I figured it was due to seeing Jim. They liked each other quite a bit." Will paused as Milner gave a contemptuous snort. He sent the cop a hard glare before continuing, "So we were all standing here looking at the bodies and the next thing I know she takes off and runs out into the rain. She started talking about having memories from the other Talitha coming into her head, but I think it is way more than that."

"More than that? What the fuck does that mean?" Milner asked. His fear and anger battled to turn his voice into a whine. "And what are we supposed to do? Just sit here and wait to see which freaky girl shows up."

Will didn't know. If the evil Talitha was controlling her as he suspected, then to go out into the dark factory where shadows ruled, would be suicidal. He shrugged.

For a long while, none of the three men budged. They all stood staring at the door, beyond it was only the blackened wall of the corridor. The iron haired priest showed his light in its direction, working the tight beam around the edges of the doorway. Other than soot-covered sludge, it revealed nothing.

Will checked his watch and what he saw made his chest tremble, time was now clicking by in hurry. "We should go back up to the street."

"No way, I'm staying put." Milner stepped further back from the door as if Will was going to drag him upstairs with him. "She could be anywhere out there, waiting to drop a desk on our heads or something."

"Fine. I'm going up. Give me one your guns," Will demanded, holding out his hand. The gun that Talitha had taken from Jackson had been thrown into a dumpster on the way to the factory.

"Hell no!"

The response wasn't unexpected. Milner feared Talitha and for very good reason. "Do you want me to fix this? I can't do it without a gun. You..."

A great crash from somewhere in the building echoed down to them cutting off his words. It was so loud that Will wondered if part of a wall had fallen in.

"Perhaps she tripped?" the priest suggested. He seemed extremely unperturbed, which was quite the opposite of Milner who shined with sweat and backed further away.

"Talitha doesn't trip. Ever," Will replied truthfully. "That sounded like that might have been part of a wall coming down." The three men looked at each other uneasily. "I think we all should go up."

Milner looked unconvinced. "It wasn't that loud. It could have been anything, or maybe she's just trying to get us to think that..." Another crash came, this one closer and to their right. For a few moments the three men stood breathing lightly, trying to listen past the steady monotonous dripping of rainwater seeping down from the ruined roof of the factory.

"I do believe she may be trying to trap us down here," the unflappable priest said calmly.

"Can she do that? Aren't there a number of ways to get out of here?" Milner asked. At one time, the factory had been large, running over a football field in length and stood three stories high. After the fire, however it was hard to judge what percentage was still standing and impossible to know how much of the labyrinth like lower floors were still intact.

"There can't be too many ways out," Will replied searching his memory. "Part of the lower basement, near the center is actually open to the sky and if we can get to that it would only be a matter of climbing out. That being said, I do think we can be trapped and maybe easily since so many of the corridors down here are already blocked. Some of the upper floors have collapsed onto them." Will began to think that the day before, Talitha had done perhaps too good of a job at destroying the factory.

"Crap," Milner muttered. He held out one of the black pistols to Will. "Let's get outta here. Take this... you should go first. Since you can see the future. Father you go next, I'll take the rear."

"What an interesting predicament," Father Vogel announced nodding his head in agreement with his own words. "Mr. Jern, would you like my flashlight?"

"Thanks." With the gun in his right hand, Will took the light in his left and shown it at the empty doorway. "I'm afraid if the demon is back, interesting wouldn't be the word I'd use. Now, stay close, both of you."

"Well it's interesting to me," Vogel explained as they began moving toward the door. "The life of a priest can be somewhat routine."

Will paused at the doorway, shining his light back and forth a moment. It was an eerie sight. Fire and water appeared to have warped the building. In places the walls sagged as if they bore far too much weight, in others, great cracks ran up them to the ceiling where large chunks of wood and cement had fallen in. The concrete floor was cracked and buckled as well and everything was blackened and tortured looking. It gave him a nasty thrill to see the place like this, knowing that evil lurked in it just it had the night before. His stomach knotted, but the priest seemed so calm that Will was a little embarrassed. He put a little more bravado in his voice.

"Routine? I would think that as an exorcist you'd lead a pretty exciting life for the most part."

"It can be, but..."

"Will you two stop talking for Pete's sake?" Milner interrupted hissing out the words. "Your freak of a sister could be sneaking up on us right now."

Will glanced back, but the man was barely visible in the odd shadows made by the two flashlights weaving about. "She could be, and if she were I really doubt that we would hear her, but I'll be quiet. You need to stay closer Milner, try not to leave such a gap."

The cop was a good nine or ten feet away. Too far in Will's opinion. After Milner closed the gap, Will started forward again, but hadn't gotten far down the sludge-filled corridor when he came to a great tumble of charred beams blocking the way they had come. It was a new cave in and it forced them to turn around.

For the next ten minutes, the three men moved down different corridors trying to find a way out. Sometimes they ran into natural dead ends, as a number of the halls would suddenly open onto large storage rooms and at other times damage from the fire stopped them. Each time they were forced to turn about retracing their steps in the black muck.

It was after their fourth such turn that Will saw a clear set of tracks running down another gloomy hall. The shoe prints were quite small. Excitement grew in him and he realized then that in the back of his mind, this is what he'd been after all along. He still needed his sister. Getting out of the building and going to Maine alone had been his last resort.

He set off following along after the tracks, moving slowly and as carefully as possible, shining his light into every room before progressing. Like Milner, he was afraid that his sister would try to collapse a ceiling onto them and thus he paid particularly close attention to the roof above their heads. And more than a few times, he felt a peculiar tingle as he stepped beneath what looked like an avalanche of precariously balanced wreckage.

The others followed, close in the case of the priest, while Milner hung back. The beam of light coming from the cop's shaking hand jittered about. Sometimes it would shine ahead of Will and then at the slightest sound it would disappear into the gloom behind them. This constant motion of the man's light only made seeing into the shadows harder, making them seem to grow or move.

Will knew they were in an impossible situation, his gut told him that Talitha hadn't run away, and that the footprints they were following after wouldn't lead to a way out. She was there in the building, somewhere up ahead, plotting. After a few minutes he began to distrust the tracks they were trailing—she had to know how obvious they were. It was almost as if she wanted him to find them and follow after. Although he didn't have one, he wished he had another choice. The imprints went steadily without deviation except for when they came to a door to a room. At each of these, they turned and Will could picture his sister peering in before moving on.

She was after something. A weapon perhaps. He picked up the pace hoping to find her before she could find what it was she was looking for and soon he made the mistake of barely giving each room a glance as he passed them. The hall they were traversing came to an intersection of another hall and without warning, the tracks disappeared as if Talitha had suddenly grown wings and had flown from then on. Will cast his light down both directions but where there should've been marks in the soot, there was only what looked like black carpet greeting his light.

"Look at this," Father Vogel pointed to the wall at Will's right. There was an odd smearing of the soot on the wall and Talitha's small handprints were clearly visible. It looked as though she had been wiping away the grunge to see beneath it, but there was nothing there to see. It wasn't like her. She wouldn't casually mark up the wall like that, there was a purpose to it. But what that purpose was, he couldn't figure out until a vision came to him a second later.

A second too late.

Chapter 10

Will

With the charring and the coating of dark ash, the room was blacker than night ever could be. Suddenly the wall to the left of the door appeared to grow eyes. They blinked once and then shown steadily with an unhealthy evil light. Around the eyes a face, also blackened by ash seemed to form from the shadows, and then beneath that a body materialized as if from nothing. The creature, all the color of pitch save for those fiery eyes, stepped forward soundlessly, moving toward the door, moving to where beams of light danced about as if in play.

"Milner!" Will snapped his head back and screamed at the cop. "Behind you!"

He was too late and Milner too slow.

The cop's light seemed to leap from his hands, spraying the hall with radiance and shadows. There was a flurry of movement and grunts and then Eric Milner was gone, pulled into a room by what appeared to be a shadow that had come alive. Sluggishly, as if the flashlight weighed many pounds, Will turned his light down the hall and saw little but a jumble of footprints on the floor as if a waltz had been danced there. Shocked by the rapidness of the attack he stood listening, breathing heavily, with Father Vogel a step in front of him doing the same thing.

But then he saw.

Will knew what was coming, but for half a moment his mind was too disorganized to act. A bullet was going to come screaming out of the dark straight down the hall, centered dead on the chest of the priest in front of him. The man would fall back into his arms knocking the two of them over and there he would be lying in the dark with a dead priest draped over him, protecting him...just like yesterday... just like yesterday. It was an echo of déjà vu.

And so close was this coming moment to the dreadful one of the day before that Will's mind was nearly paralyzed with confusion. Was that horrible scene going replay itself once again? Was it a bizarre reverberation of a past event haunting him or was this real? Questions flashed through his mind, but his left hand cared nothing for them.

The flashlight fell forgotten from his hand and began a slow motion spin to the ground, casting strobes of light down the hall. That left hand, now free, shot out and raked furrows into the skin on the back of Father Vogel's neck, as Will's nails dug in to gain a purchase on the man's tight collar. With his grip firm, Will's left foot planted and he pistoned outward with the great muscles of his thighs, sending both him and the priest hurtling in a dive toward the junction of the two hallways.

Down the corridor, light blazed for an instant and then a huge flat crack, like sharp lightening, erupted. Will landed in the sludge and slid, not knowing if he or the priest was hit by the bullet. Another flash lit the hall and this one seemed altogether silent save for the hiss of a hot angry bee zipping by his neck.

The two men finished their slide, pitching up against the far wall and instantly Will scrambled up, bringing his gun to bear. He moved to the corner where the halls joined and quick as a wink, dodged his head out and then back again. The two flashlights were still shining bright, but both, unfortunately were sending their light his way. Everything beyond them was impenetrably dark.

"You're getting pretty quick Willy J," his sister called out from the inky black. Will took another peek, barely letting his head show; the corridor was still empty. He then whipped about to see the wide-eyed priest climbing to his feet.

"Are you ok?" he asked the priest in a hushed tone, ignoring his sister.

"Oh yes. Was that the demon?" the priest asked with some excitement. He attempted to look around the corner as Will had done, but the bigger, younger man held him back.

"Shhhh," Will hushed him, pulling the man in close. "You have to get out of here. Take this hall, go down it, and keep veering to the right and..."

"I wouldn't do that if I were you Father," Talitha called out. "You'll be going out blind in the dark and I can hunt you by sense of smell alone."

"Can she do that?" the priest asked without a hint of nervousness.

Will nodded, and leaned close enough to touch the Vogel's ear. "Go. Follow the corridor." The words held only the strength of a baby's breath.

"You need me." The priest was being obstinate.

"Oh, he needs you, Father," the girl spoke loudly. "He needs you to be a distraction to me so he can run away. Will Jern ain't no hero. Remember Father Alba? I gave Will the chance to trade places with him, but he was too much of a coward."

Involuntarily, Will looked back at Father Vogel. The older man gave him a piercing glance that only stoked Will's guilt. "She's lying about the distraction part, Father. Only I can deal with her, I need you..."

"You can't deal with shit, Will!" Talitha screamed at the top of her lungs. "Vogel, don't you go anywhere. I say who stays and who goes." A weird gasping noise came from her direction, which was followed by the sound of a sharp slap.

"I'm not going anywhere, Miss Jern," the priest said loudly. His firm raspy voice sounded composed, which matched his outwardly calm demeanor. "Miss Jern? Is Officer Milner all right? Is he injured?"

"Oh, I suppose he's ok. He just had a little trip and bashed his face in a bit. He's so clumsy." Another little cry of pain accompanied this.

"Miss Jern..." Vogel began, but Talitha's voice stopped him cold.

"Father, if I hear the words 'Miss Jern' one more time, Officer Milner is going to have another accident."

"Of course," Father Vogel remained unruffled despite the threat. "What would you like to be called then?"

"Ask Will, he knows."

Father Vogel looked at Will. Will looked at his watch.

Forty-four minutes until their flight was scheduled to take off. If he kept his foot stomped on the gas pedal the entire way, he could get to the airport in ten minutes. With ditching the car and running to the ticket counter; he was looking at another ten minutes. A dead sprint could get him anywhere in the airport in five minutes add another five for complications. He had no time for this.

"I don't have time for this Tal. Why don't you tell me what you want?" He called out angrily, earning him an irate headshake from the priest.

"Nothing other than to prove to the world what a coward you are," Talitha answered back just as furious. "Everyone just loves Will. He's so handsome and good that he's practically a saint. He stopped the demon, he saved poor little Talitha. Let's all kiss his ass and worship the ground he walks. But I know you, Will. You ain't shit! In fact..."

Will interrupted heatedly, "Wrap it up Tal. What's your point?"

"My point is, dear brother, you're nothing. And despite what everyone thinks, you're not even a good person. Dad died trying to save you, mom was in the hospital because of you. You killed Henny Harris and Adrina. You let Father John die and you let Father Alba have his eyes torn out. You were too chicken to look into the future at first, so we can add Terry Brabec and her family to the list of deaths that are all your fault. What else...oh yeah, does the name Jim Anderson ring a bell? That poor man is probably being tortured right this very moment all because you lacked the guts to..."

"That's not true," Will said quietly. "I was fighting Luke."

"The whole time? I don't think so. You told me last night that you hit him in the head with a piece of wood. Why didn't you just go kill the gypsy? Wasn't that our plan? Kill the witch as soon as possible?"

That had been the plan. She was right. So why hadn't he followed through with it? Had he been afraid to face the Void again? Will couldn't exactly remember. His memory of those seconds was a terrible blur. He remembered the pain in his chest and the torture by Ba'al Zubel that followed, but then what? He had laid upon the black ice for a few seconds trying to breathe, trying to come to grips with just being alive and then he had heard the gunshots. They were like a needed slap, bringing him back to his horrible reality. He had struggled to his feet and the first thing he'd seen was Luke beating Jim, smashing his elbow into the big man's face repeatedly, blood was everywhere.

"I was trying to save Jim," Will said in a whisper.

"You were trying to save yourself!" Talitha screeched.

Will didn't argue; he hung his head instead. In the shadows of the hallway, Father Vogel patted Will on the arm and tried to give him a warm smile. Will kept his face averted. Was Talitha correct? The absolute truth was that he didn't know. She was spot on with the notion that he was afraid of going into the Void again, but all the same he didn't know if that was the underlying reason why he had attacked Luke instead of the gypsy witch.

After he was silent for a few seconds, Talitha continued, "There is a way to make amends you know. Officer Milner, a fine upstanding man of the law is about to go through a very heinous and long death... you could trade places with him."

Seeming to oblige her words, a strangled cry rolled down the corridor to greet them.

"I can't," Will said, again in a whisper.

"What was that dear brother? We couldn't quite hear you down here."

Father Vogel spoke up, "He said he can't, but I will trade places with..."

"No! I want Will only," Talitha interrupted. "What's your excuse this time, Will?"

"You know what it is. Lisa and the baby. And the sword." Will refused to even glance toward the priest. He felt small.

"Oh sure," Talitha snorted back laughter. "What a champion you are. I can't be a hero now, but I promise I'll do it later. Sorry Milner, it looks like you're out of luck."

"Will please!" Milner screamed out. The man's fear was a knife to Will's guts.

"I...I can't," Will called back with a voice that cracked. He didn't have time to explain things to Milner, and even if he did, would the cop understand? Not likely.

"You're an asshole, Will! An asshole. If..." Another slap silenced the fear driven fury of Eric Milner.

The priest grabbed Will by the shoulders and tried to look up into his face, "You have to stop this. You have the power to end his suffering."

"He won't do it, Father. Will's last real heroic act was rescuing me from a dog named Nancy... a scary little puppy dog. Why don't you tell everyone that story? It's another look at me, I'm Will. I'm so great story. Why did you even waste my time on that one?"

"That story wasn't about me," Will replied in a small voice. "It was about you."

"Then you must have told it wrong."

Will checked his watch, he had wasted four minutes already, but this little story of Talitha when she was young was something he felt both the good and the bad side of her should know. It had nothing to do with lava-monsters or scary dogs or even bees or glass. It was the day that he, at five years old, had known that he loved his sister with a greater love than he had thought possible.

"I didn't tell the story wrong, I was interrupted," Will began, ignoring the curious look of the priest standing next to him. "When Nancy charged at you, I actually started to run, but at the last second I saw that you were staring at those gigantic teeth and hadn't budged an inch. Your eyes were huge, but the rest of you looked so small. Anyways, I reached out and grabbed you, and pulled you back, but you went completely mad. It was like touching someone drowning, you threw yourself on me and clambered over me in an effort to get past those teeth."

There was silence from down the hall, but Will only paused a moment before going on, "You tackled me right there, and for a moment we were all arms and legs flying everywhere trying to escape, but eventually we managed to crawl out of the circle of death. We ran like crazy, but this time we weren't laughing. We were both crying. You were practically in hysterics over the dog and I had cut my foot on some glass.

"This is the part that I will always remember, this the part that I wanted to tell you. Because of my cuts, I had to go to the emergency room, and when I got back, I was all mopey having to sit on the porch, unable to walk or play. So...you danced for me."

"I didn't," Talitha said from her end of the hall.

"Oh yeah you did. You were cute as a button and danced like a little ballerina until mom came out to applaud you. After that you became shy and then..."

Talitha interrupted, "I stepped on a bee."

"Yeah, you stepped on a bee. On purpose."

"What?" she asked, skeptical.

"You stepped on a bee so you could be with me."

"That doesn't make any sense. I could've been with you without having to hurt myself." Her point was logical.

"I used to think it was because you loved me so much that you wanted to feel what I felt. You used to be like that when we were young. If I was sick, an hour later you were sick, even if I was faking it to get out of going to school," Will replied. "But who knows? Maybe you were worried I was bored or lonely, either way we spent that afternoon sitting on the porch drinking that super tart lemon aide that mom used to make."

"That stuff was crazy, I don't know if she ever put sugar in it," Talitha said. There was a momentary pause and then she added, "What are we doing here? What's... shouldn't we be going to the airport?"

Pausing only long enough to snatch up one of the flashlights Will dashed down the hall, feeling sick with relief. He knew his Talitha was back, and he found her straddling Milner looking lost with the heavy pistol in her hands. Her face was black and fierce, but her eyes were innocent.

"Will, we were just outside talking." She held out the gun to Will as if it could explode in her hands. "And now...what's going on with me?"

Will pulled her off the cop and went to help the man up but Milner shoved him aside. "Don't touch me! I'm done with this, all of this. Give me those." He grabbed the guns from Will. "If I ever see the two of you again..."

"Officer Milner, I'm sure the Cardinal is deeply in your debt," Father Vogel said in his calming manner. "I'll let him know that you have gone above and beyond."

"You do that," Milner replied backing out of the room and he then dashed off down the hall.

"I think he's going the wrong way," Talitha murmured. "But I don't think he'll listen to me."

"I don't think he'll listen to any of us," Will added, checking his watch. "Thirty-seven minutes till take off; we got to go. We can talk about what's going on with you once we're on the plane. Which way is out?"

Father Vogel took a hold of his arm and attempted to pull Will in close. "Will, your sister can't come with us. She's a danger to everyone around her. She needs psychiatric attention."

With a twist of his large arm, Will pulled away from the smaller man. "She's coming. The only person I question about who may or may not be coming, is you." His words came out quite bit more nasty than he had intended, causing both Talitha and the priest's eyes to widen. He had trouble caring—his head had begun to thump almost as soon as the evil Talitha had departed.

Talitha looked unsteady and a little sick beneath her black camouflage and Will grabbed her arm, steering out into the hallway. "Which way?" he asked again. She pointed back the way they had come. As they walked, he turned to the priest. "I don't mean to be rude, but I need her, I don't really need you."

With his usual serenity Father Vogel responded, "That remains to be seen. Miss...may I call you Miss Jern?"

"Call me Talitha, please. Take the turn to the right, Will. This is weird, I don't really remember coming down here, but at the same time I do, like I dreamed all this."

Will's pace was frantic and in seconds, Father Vogel was panting, but still he managed to say between gasps, "Talitha, do you mind if I ask you a few questions?"

A glance at his sister told Will it wasn't a good idea. Her eyes looked still wild, the whites oddly huge in the black soot. "Not here, Father. Not just now." His tone was much kinder this time.

Chapter 11

Will

Will only allowed a real conversation to occur once they were safely on the plane.

They quick marched with dogged determination through the factory losing two minutes in Will's calculations due to the slowness of Father Vogel. The man was gasping loudly at the pace, but Will pushed them on relentlessly. With his iron-grey hair and web of wrinkles around his face, Will put the older man's age at close to sixty. Yet with the safety of his family on the line Will wasn't going to miss their flight no matter what.

He made those two minutes back up on the drive to the airport. It should have been a white-knuckled ride, only everyone was so covered in black soot that it wasn't obvious. Even if the priest wanted to ask questions, there was no way he could have as Will drove the old station wagon like it had never been driven before. Relying more on luck than on his second sight, he careened through the light traffic like a man possessed and pulled into the airport parking lot with twenty-three minutes left. A minute later, the station wagon was abandoned to its fate and they were dashing to the ticket counter.

A thousand pairs of eyes were upon them.

"You can't board the plane like that. They won't let you," the woman behind the counter said with an embarrassed smile.

The three of them were a sight, with the priest being the least offensive. Talitha's borrowed black dress was in tatters, but worse was her face. The soot that she had applied had been partially smeared by the rain, making her eyes appear creepy and with her bedraggled hair, she looked ready for a starring role in a haunted house. Yet worse than her was Will.

His blue jeans and grey hooded sweatshirt were covered in black muck, as was his hair, which went in every direction. However, it was the spectacular bruising of his face and the burning fierceness of his blue eyes that drew people's attention.

"There's a boutique on the way to our gate," Will tried to sound smooth. "We'll stop and get a change of clothes there."

"Ok, but you only have eighteen minutes," she gave him a smile, but it faltered when he tried to smile back. It only distorted his face more.

"Thanks, I guess we'll have to hurry." Will knew precisely how much time they had and they were wasting precious seconds. He began drumming his fingers impatiently. The counter woman was either terribly uncomfortable with this crazed man in front of her, or finally got the hint that they were in a rush. She began typing at a blazing speed and a minute later, they were racing away with tickets in hand.

As the least disreputable looking, Father Vogel went directly to the gate. "I'll hold the plane until you arrive."

Will didn't bother with a smile. He was feeling far too stressed to make the attempt and every time he had tried people only looked at him as if they were about to be sick. He waved instead and sped off to a little shop that sold purses mostly, but also had a section for clothing.

A sales lady, very tall and blonde saw them approaching through the glass and her eyes went wide at the sight. Will ignored her and strolled in, heading straight for the men's section, which consisted solely of two racks of expensive jackets. On the spot, he stripped off the grey sweatshirt and pulled on a brown leather jacket. It did little to help his appearance. He also grabbed a blanket to cover his seat when he boarded. His shopping time twenty-eight seconds.

"Will, look at these dresses," Talitha's eyes were big for the clothing. Her head wagged this way and that, surprising her brother. She had never been much for shopping. "Can we afford these?" Nothing in the store was priced below two-hundred dollars.

"Yes, just pick something, ok."

There was no hurrying her and Will's agitation soared to new heights. He began pacing back and forth, as Talitha went through every rack, slowly.

"All these outfits are so dark. It's kind of depressing," Talitha said with a shake of her head. To Will, any of the clothes would be an improvement. She currently looked as if she had stepped out of a nightmare.

The sales lady tried to be helpful, "They're dark because it's after Labor Day you know. Will you want new shoes also?" Talitha's black pumps were ugly.

Will groaned. "Nine minutes Tal," he tapped his watch. "We don't have time for shoes."

"Ok, ok. Can you grab me a blanket as well, please?" She went to the rear of the store. In a moment, she giggled oddly and came dashing up to him. "How about this? Can I get it, please? It's on clearance."

It was a flowered sundress. Had she been in the least bit presentable it would have pretty on her. "Of course you can," Will answered. With a quick tug, he pulled the tag off the dress. "There's a bathroom across the concourse, you have eight minutes. Go get changed."

She took all eight minutes. Will ignored the sale lady's explanation of how a sundress wasn't the right choice for that time of year and paid for the clothes. He then went to wait outside the bathroom. There he paced again, feeling a growing anxiety in his chest that ran down into his hands making them shake. With an effort, he tried not to think about Lisa or the baby, or whatever spell Amy had them under. All of that only made him want to throw up, so he paced.

Talitha came out of the bathroom just as he was about to stick his head in to yell at her to get out. It took him a second to recognize her. Her skin was scrubbed clean and her tan fairly glowed, even her hair, though damp, was no longer a straggly filthy mess, and was now its usual deep brown.

"I need some money," she said glancing around nervously. "I made a huge mess in there and I think I should leave a tip or something. Is that what people usually do?"

"Not when they're late," Will answered, grabbing her hand and running. Soon, he had to let go however. He was an athletic man who trained regularly, due in a large part because of his sister, and because of this training, most people would've considered him fast. Yet next to Talitha, he was dead slow. She sped on feet that seemed barely to touch the ground while after thirty seconds of pure sprinting he was beginning to lumber, falling behind.

"I see Father Vogel," she said seconds later as if they were strolling in the park. Will could say nothing. It was all he could do to breathe. He lifted his head and indeed the priest was there, seven or eight gates further on, waving his arms for them to hurry. Talitha increased her speed and all eyes were upon her; she was a sight with her hair streamed out long behind. As she lengthened her stride, her coltish legs looked longer than normal and only then did he notice she wasn't wearing shoes.

"Here they come," Will heard Father Vogel say as he came huffing up, winded. They were escorted aboard the plane by a stewardess in blue who tried her best not to stare at Will's face. He helped by keeping his chin down, popping it up only to glance down the length of the plane. Thankfully, though the plane wasn't a large one, it was only half-filled.

"Let's go to the back," Will gasped. He didn't want to be too near anyone, since he was sure the priest would start in with the questions as soon as they sat down. Always the keeper of the rules, Talitha turned back pointing to her ticket and Will spoke before she could protest. "Talitha, we paid for the seats, we can sit where we please as long as no one's already there. It'll be fine." He gave her a nudge.

"Talitha," Vogel pointed to the window seat and after she slid in, he sat down next to her. "Where are your shoes?"

"Do I have to wear the shoes?" she asked drawing her feet under her and looking around as if the shoe police were on their way. "Is this airline one of those: no shirt, no shoes, no service, deals?"

In truth, Will didn't know, but just then, the plane began backing away. "If it is, then it's too late now, so don't worry." He took a seat just behind his sister and lifted up the window. The view was ugly. Dour rain beat down against the pane steadily, but as they moved toward the runway, the drops turned sideways.

"Will it be ok if I ask you some questions?" Father Vogel inquired of Talitha. Her shoulders slumped and she turned her face to the little square window, she nodded.

The priest paused for a moment in thought and then spoke quietly so as not to be overheard, "I need you to be as honest as you can. Is the demon, the one you called Ba'al Fie-ere, is she still inside you?"

Talitha turned her head from the retreating airport. "I don't know, but you're an exorcist. If she's in there, you can do something about it."

Will put his head between the seats and interrupted, "No. Not while we're on a plane. Tonight, after we make sure Lisa's safe, you can try another exorcism then."

"Maybe not even then," Vogel replied. "I still need to establish that she is indeed possessed. What do you think, Will? Last night you say you exorcized the demon, but here she is today doing all sorts of remarkable things."

"I don't know what's going on. I saw the exorcism work. Ba'al Fie-ere's face was beyond furious at being cheated; I mean it was so real. But now it's like all that never happened." Will paused for a moment as a question of his own came to him. "Before we go too much further down this road, do you believe in any of this, Father? I know you're an exorcist and all, but that doesn't necessarily mean you believe this stuff."

"I believe that possession happens, with all my heart."

"Have you ever had to exorcize a real demon?" Will asked.

"Once for sure and two other times where I couldn't be certain. They were..."

Talitha turned sharp at this and grabbed the priest's arm, interrupting him. "What were the names of the demons?" Her voice was loud and held a manic quality.

With a worried look, Father Vogel leaned back from her. "One wouldn't give its name and the other two...well, I don't think it would be wise to bring up their names just now."

Will concurred, "Please don't. Talitha shouldn't get worked up." The plane had reached the end of the runway and was cleared. It accelerated quickly, pushing them deep into their seats before nosing up into the rain.

Talitha watched the ground dropped away. "I'm not getting worked up. But that 'demon' who wouldn't give you his name was a fake. All a demon really has is its name and they aren't shy to let you hear it."

"Thanks Talitha, I'll keep that in mind for the future."

"If you live to see that future, Father," Talitha kept her face to the glass as she spoke.

The priest gave Will a glance. "Why do you think that I might not live?"

She huffed out a long breath. "Because you don't fully believe our story. If you did, you would've begged to stay back in Boston. There it goes." Just then, the city disappeared below the heavy clouds and she watched it with sad eyes.

"Actually, I believe your story. All that remains to be seen is if you're still possessed and I for one think you are." For a moment, there was an awkward lull in the conversation with only the thrum of the engines running through their ears. Talitha nodded in agreement.

"Are you sure?" Will asked the priest.

"Pretty sure. She's been exhibiting quite a number of signs that point in that direction... the personality changes alone are drastic enough for me to believe that she's possessed. But it's her super-human powers that make this case incontrovertible. I've never seen anything like it."

Will's stomach knotted and unknotted unpleasantly. "I explained that to you already. She doesn't have unnatural powers, she only has magnified abilities. Like those people who walk on coals or lay on beds of nails, or like those people who can lift a car off of a loved one...like that."

Father Vogel shook his head. "She knew things about me that she couldn't have. And look at her arm, it's practically healed."

"She heals fast! Like I said, she can send out chemical thingies...markers I mean, to speed up the healing process. And the stuff you ate for dinner, she smelled it on you, I bet."

"What about my Zippo, she knew it had an emblem on it." He pulled it out and there was a cross on the silver finish. "She also knew about my violin playing and...that I like to sing."

Will was at a loss. He didn't know how she knew those things.

Talitha shrugged. "You have a habit of tracing the outline of the cross on the Zippo in your pocket. I knew it wasn't a normal lighter by the smell; due to their construction, Zippos lose their butane at a higher rate." She took the priest lined fingers and held them up. "The tips of your fingers on your left hand still have the calluses of a violinist, as does the pad of your right thumb and tip of the right index finger. You use the Russian bow grip, I presume?"

"Yes," he was surprised. "And my singing?"

"That's easy. You have tears in your vocal chords that are common to...rock singers." She seemed embarrassed, as if she were accusing him of something bad. "My guess is that you are losing your hearing somewhat and are over compensating."

"You see that?" Will cried out in his excitement. "These were only observations and anyone could've seen them."

"But if I'm not possessed, what's wrong with me?" Suddenly she looked a little green as if from airsickness. "I disemboweled a man once. I made sure that he was still alive and I fed his own..."

"Talitha! Stop it." Will growled. "That wasn't you, ok? That was someone else."

"No it was me...I did it with these hands. I can feel the man's blood, hot and sticky... I'm scared, Will," she refused to look from the window but Will could see her tears in the reflection. "I became a demon once before. I think it's happening again."

Will got up and went around to the seat in front of her and leaned over it. "These are only memories. They're not who you are."

At this Vogel's eyebrows shot up meaningfully. "There is a small possibility that you are suffering from dissociative identity disorder."

Will looked to the priest nonplussed. "What's that?"

"It means that he thinks I'm crazy," Talitha answered and her words were suddenly colder than they had been. "Right priest? You think I've gone off the deep end?"

"Tal, don't do this," Will said with menace in his own voice. "He said a small possibility, maybe he's wrong."

"He is wrong, Will. There was a demon in me and now it's coming back. There's no other explanation." She slumped back in her seat, glaring out of the window moodily, the tears on her face now forgotten.

"Why don't you tell me what dissociative disorder means?" Will asked his sister, purposely looking at her, and not the priest, wanting her to talk and definitely not wanting her to change.

She sighed loudly fogging up the window. "It's dissociative identity disorder. It's a fancy way of saying that I have a split personality. But we both know that's just crap."

"Actually I agree with her," Vogel said with a nod. "Generally speaking, dissociative identity disorder is one of the most overused and clichéd diagnosis in America. It's become a fad. We're number one in the world when it comes to this mental disorder. It's diagnosed at ten times the rate compared to countries like Germany or France and four-hundred times the rate of India or China."

Talitha turned back to him. "If it's all such claptrap why did you suggest I may be afflicted by it?"

"Because of everything you and Will have told me. There was a real person residing in your mind for the last eight years. You mentioned that you never knew what she was up to when she had control of your body. This means that though she was using your brain, she was using different neural paths than you, creating memories that you couldn't access. But now there is no guardian of that part of your mind and as you stumble across memories, your brain...and this is only conjecture, your brain travels down the path of least resistance and you become her, at least for a little while."

Will was scared of this possibility, as well as confused. "I don't get what you mean by path of least resistance. Isn't her brain like mine and just kinda flows back and forth?"

"It's not. Think of her mind like a railroad. Running all through her brain, she has two sets of tracks, but of different gauges..."

"Gauges?" Will shrugged not knowing what the priest meant by this.

"The widths of the rails. A train's wheels can only sit on the correct size track. So Talitha is churning along thinking her brilliant thoughts, but suddenly she comes to a memory that is shared between her and her evil twin. Let's take what happened at the factory for instance. They both had traumatic moments there and because of this, her train jumped from one track to another. Suddenly she's on a new track and her thinking is easier as long as she stays on it. You see? Right then she has just become the other Talitha."

"Why would her mind do that? Why doesn't it stop itself?" Will asked looking at his sister thoughtfully.

She kept her face steadily out the window, but even in profile, he could see that she was thinking on this as well.

"Curiosity at where those memories lead? Guilt?" Father Vogel shrugged his shoulders. "Perhaps that is just the way the mind works. It's all a guess, even to those of us with advanced degrees in psychology. It's one of our dirty little secrets. The mind is far more complex than we'll ever likely know. And though we can work out some of the details of the how things work up here." He tapped his forehead. "The why is frequently beyond us."

"I had a psychologist once...DeBracy," Talitha said with a frown on her face. "One day he was there and the next..." she trailed off.

Will snapped his fingers in front of her face. "Talitha, don't think on that." Seven years ago, the evil Talitha had snapped kicked the man's larynx in and only an emergency tracheotomy by another doctor had saved him.

"Why not? Whatever happened to him? Did I do something to him? If I did he deserved it that rat faced-asshole." Her face clouded into anger, snarling her lip.

"He's in private practice." Actually Will had no idea. "Speaking of doctors, did I tell you that Lisa has been dragging me to Lamaze class?" Talitha nodded vaguely, losing her sudden anger and her eyes wandered around the plane in confusion. She was trying to get her train on the right track. He continued, "Remember, I told you all about that goofy breathing they were making us do?"

"Oh right. I remember." She paused a moment, her brows coming down. "Were we talking about Lamaze before?"

Father Vogel spoke up before Will could say anything, "What's the last thing you can remember before we started talking about child birth?"

"Train tracks? Were we talking about trains... no wait. We were talking about your voice. You have tears in the vertical aspect of the ventricular folds of your vocal chords. Right? From your singing, right?"

Will plastered an imitation of a smile on his face. The conversation about her abilities had been a few minutes ago. "Yep. Tell me, those two stewardesses, can you tell me what they are saying?" Two women in the blue uniform of their profession were all the way at the front of the plane. They seemed to be whispering to each other.

Talitha gazed toward them and shook her head slowly. "No, there is too much ambient noise from the engines. I can read the blonde woman's lips if you want. Actually, they're talking about us, or rather you, Will."

"Tal, it doesn't matter. Look at me. I want you to do some math while I talk to Father Vogel in the front of the plane. What is a good sort of problem for you to work on?"

"You're going to talk about me?" Talitha asked meekly, dropping her gaze down.

"Yes. I need to be able to talk freely about subjects that might get the other Talitha all riled up. But it's only to try to figure out how to help you. Ok?"

She nodded. "Ok. I guess I could figure out the decimal representation of Pi past the fifteenth point. I just need some paper and a pencil."

Father Vogel dug through his bag and pulled out both items and they left her scribbling away. To Will, she wasn't working with the enthusiasm that she normally found in math. She was going through the motions, only.

"Do you mind if we talk up here?" Will asked the blonde stewardess.

She gave him a fake plastic smile, that didn't touch the slightly disgusted look in her eyes. "Only for a little bit. Passengers aren't really supposed to be up here, ya know." She left them, pushing the drink cart down the tiny center aisle.

As soon as she was out of earshot, Will hissed in a loud whisper to the priest, "What's happening to Talitha? Why couldn't she remember so much of our conversation just now? She was right there."

Father Vogel leaned in close. "This can happen to a person with split personalities. Likely, the conversation was not transferred from her short-term memory to her long term and thus poof; it just didn't happen for her. Or the conversation is with the other Talitha who was just starting to emerge. If it is she will have a full recollection of it while this Talitha won't."

"Will it always be like this? Earlier today, she was afraid that she was going to become the demon. She acted like she had no choice. Is that really going to happen?"

"Possibly, though I wouldn't find it probable," Vogel responded with a glance back down the plane. "Most likely she will develop an amalgamated personality. A mixture of both the good and bad sides of her, but dominated by her good side. You see she has had now... how old is she, sixteen?"

"She just turned twenty-five."

"Really? That's amazing" He gave another look back, shaking his head. "But back to my point, she's had twenty five years to lay the physical ground work, the actual neural path of her thoughts in her brain. The evil side of her has only had eight years, so in most things, she will use the older, better-worn paths. It will only be when she is confronted with a stark memory of her evil, that her dark side will emerge."

"What about when she gets angry? It seems to be coming out then as well."

Vogel pondered this for a moment and then asked, "Before all of this, was Talitha quick to anger, or was she more the mellow type?"

Will turned his swollen face lopsided with a smile. "She was generally the sweetest girl. Only very rarely did she get angry."

The priest's shoulder's sagged at this. "Then I think you can expect her bad side to come out whenever she would get angry. And really, it will probably come out at many other times as well. As an example, just now her bad side began to emerge when we were discussing psychologists. Death also seems to bring it out...she talks as though she has been associated with more deaths than just the ones from last night." He made it sound less as a statement and more as a question.

Will leaned back against the pilot's door. "Yeah a lot more. I never knew about them until a couple of days ago." His headache began to pound away and he rubbed at his temples. "So what do I do with her? Is there some sort of treatment, some counseling maybe?"

Father Vogel crossed his arms, thinking for a moment. "The usual treatment is to try to consolidate the different personalities into a single working one and then deal with the underlying issues that caused the split in the first place. But with Talitha..."

Will jumped in, "That can't be her treatment! The other Talitha is beyond help. She's a monster; she's more vicious and cunning than humanly possible, she can't be allowed to become a part of Talitha. I have a feeling that if that happens, her evil side will corrupt the good and wear it like a mask." Will looked down the plane at his sister. She wasn't working on the math problem; she was staring out of the window. "That could be the evil girl right now sitting there and we wouldn't know until..." he left the words trailing.

The older man sighed. "I agree, that can't be her treatment. Though I have to say that when personalities collide they generally don't stay so true to form as what you are suggesting. In other words, the evil will be tempered by the good and vice versa, especially now that she is aware of her situation. She will feel shame at her hate, but also angry at her supposedly weak feelings, such as love. But for her the best news is that there's no reason for her to keep the other personality."

"Is there ever a reason?" Will didn't see how there could be.

"Yes, and I have to say that even though I called dissociative identity disorder a fad, it is a real condition. The people afflicted with it develop their extra personalities for actual reasons. Perhaps not entirely sane reasons but they are legitimate to the individual. I knew of an unfortunate young lady whose mother never allowed her to have an opinion of her own. She grew up to be the meekest person and married a man who took over where the mother left off, silencing her whenever the subject wasn't what she was making for dinner. Eventually, she developed a separate personality—that of an actress. She would sign autographs, audition for plays, show up at cast parties, all without being aware of it. I mention her to illustrate the point that there is sometimes an actual need, a reason for the extra personality."

Will shook his head in bewilderment at the weirdness of people. "Talitha doesn't fall into that category, I'm sure she wants to be rid of it even more than we do."

"I agree and it's one of the reasons that I believe she will be a good candidate for hypnotherapy." The priest seemed serious.

"Really? That's an actual thing?"

Father Vogel smiled at this. "Yes. It's been used since before the Civil War, and there have been some notable successes using it to treat mild forms of dissociative identity disorder. The idea is to induce a hypnotic suggestion when the patient is in that in-between state of personalities. That way both personalities accept the suggestion as their own thought, each reinforcing it through the subconscious mind."

Despite an inherent belief that hypnosis was bogus, Will grew excited. "What sort of suggestion would you put into her?"

"In Talitha's case we have to deal with two distinct issues. The first and the one that I feel we should begin working on right away is the rage and anger that's left over from the demon. She can't seem to control it and in fact, she doesn't seem to want to. That's because those neural paths are conditioned to loop, to stay angry. In order to break that loop we must be able to feed the demon's rage into the good Talitha..."

Will held out his hand for the man to stop. "Wait. Hold on, that sounds like it'd hurt more than it would help her. Why on earth would we want to do that?"

"It won't hurt her, trust me," Vogel replied. "Picture, if right now, without warning you became angry. I mean furious. The first thing you would do would be to question its causes. Why am I so angry? What's doing this to me? Just asking those questions would go a long way to calming you and soon you'd understand where the feeling came from. By channeling the emotion into the good Talitha, we bring her personality to the forefront. She will then be aware and in charge of herself and able to deal intellectually with her emotions."

It seemed like a good idea to Will, if it could be done. "I would love for this to work, but Talitha is pretty smart. She's not going to go to sleep with you waving a watch in front of her face."

The priest smiled at this. "In one sense, you don't know how right you are. Talitha appears to be a very concrete thinker, and hypnotherapy works best with fantasizers. Yet she's also dissociative, which is the second best group to work with. And I'll have you know, I won't be waving a watch and I won't try to trick her; any attempt at subterfuge will focus her mind away from our objective. It's important that she will know beforehand everything that I wish to accomplish, and how I wish to accomplish it. This knowledge plants the seed in her mind and as we progress, and I do exactly what I said I would, her expectations are fulfilled, one after another, making each step that much easier."

"I'm probably the most skeptical person, yet you almost have me halfway convinced this'll work," Will said.

"I'm fairly certain that the first part will work, it's the second that has me worried," Father Vogel replied. "The second issue Talitha has to deal with is guilt. The memories are going to feel completely real to her. She'll be able to picture her hands doing all those terrible deeds. She'll second guess every one of her thoughts and actions, and likely yours as well."

"She won't be the only one. I am complicit in every death she's been a part of." Will's mind began to drift toward all of the deaths he had been associated with, but Father Vogel began speaking again and he focused his attention on the priest.

"Because you didn't die eight years ago?" Vogel asked.

Though he wasn't feeling the least bit amused, Will gave a weak rueful chuckle at this. "The flight is only a little over an hour long, Father. You don't have time to shrink me."

"I do have time to start on your sister," Vogel answered back. "You'd be surprised, but a half empty plane is a wonderful place for hypnotherapy. It's that constant thrumming noise from the engines. Take a look, most of the passengers are already asleep, or halfway there."

"Father, no. Really, we don't have time," Will replied as his anxiety came back to him. "When we're finished dealing with Amy, by all means, let's try this hypno-stuff. I'll fly you to Denmark and back if that what it takes to help Talitha, but not right now."

Father Vogel stepped back from Will with a queer look in his eyes that made Will very uncomfortable. "Mr. Jern, we have nearly forty-five minutes, which is very good for a start. The loop within her that I'm suggesting to break will make her much less dangerous."

The priest was of course correct. Will looked down at the worn black linoleum floor and said nothing.

The priest persisted, "We could be done with the first session in half an hour. What I want to do is bring Talitha's...the good Talitha's anger to the..."

"I said no," Will answered, allowing his own anger to show, hiding the self-disgust.

"For the life of me, I don't understand." The priest's grey eyes locked on Will's ice-cold blue ones. "You want your sister to stay like this? She could snap at any second killing who knows how many people. And you're ok with this?"

"Excuse me?" the blonde stewardess broke in. "The girl you're with? She's getting kinda mad. She wants a drink but we can't serve anyone under twenty-one."

"A drink?" A sudden worry came over Will and he dashed down the aisle.

Talitha sat in her seat looking confused and before Will was even halfway to her, she called out in a loud voice, "Will, I'm over twenty-one, right? I swear I am." Feeling embarrassed with all eyes on the plane on him, Will put his fingers to his lips, but this only angered his sister. "Don't shush me! All I did was ask you a question."

"You're right, I'm sorry." Will went and sat on the arm of the chair catty-corner to hers. "You say you want a drink?"

"Yes but these whore-bitches won't serve me one. They say I'm too young, but I'm sure I'm older than twenty-one...only I don't remember any birthdays, or parties."

On her twenty-first birthday, she had alternated between trying to rape him and kill him. "I didn't throw you a party on your twenty-first."

"Why the hell not?"

At the end of word not, she hurled the pen at his throat. He saw it coming and he knocked the pen aside with a backhand move. His hand stung fiercely, he didn't let it show on his face. Talitha liked seeing pain and it usually made her hungry for more.

"We were still in mourning over Brian's death. I didn't think it would have been appropriate."

"Brian? He screwed me out of a party? Even in death he tried to fuck me over!"

Father Vogel spoke up from behind Will. "Did you kill Brian?"

"Of course I did." Her face was shocked at the question.

"You seem very angry just now...no make that furious. Were you ever this furious before your initial encounter with Ba'al Zubel?" The priest's tone was astonishingly calm. It seemed to jar Talitha.

"Before? Hell no. I was a complete wimp. A fucking pushover."

"Did you ever feel like cursing like this before, back when you were a wimp, but didn't?"

Now it was Will's turn to grow angry. "Don't answer that Talitha. I told you, Father we aren't going to do this right now."

"She needs me, Will," the priest returned.

"Actually what I need is a drink," Talitha said sullenly, sounding more like a barfly than either the innocent girl or the insane killer that she really was.

"What do you want to drink?" Will asked. "I'll get whatever you want."

This question stopped Talitha. Save for a single beer, she had never drunk before as far as Will knew and the question stumped her. With her confusion, her anger seemed to depart.

"I don't know. Remember that Jackson guy from this morning? He mentioned having forties. Do you know what those are?"

In spite of everything, Will had to smile. "Trust me, you don't want that. It's malt liquor and it's nasty. But you had wanted champagne before. I bet I can get you a mimosa. That's a mix of champagne and orange juice," he added at her look of puzzlement.

"Oh that sounds nice." Her aspect seemed to calm considerably at the prospect and Will thought that he had headed off a potentially dangerous moment.

The stewardess had been further back behind Father Vogel watching the spectacle play out. She looked as though she had been slapped by what she had heard. "Sir, like I said, I can't serve..."

"Four mimosas please. They're all for me." His stare was like granite and the stewardess decided against pressing the point and hurried off. Father Vogel sighed loudly and meaningfully, but Will ignored him. "You didn't get too far on your calculations." The paper was scribbled on from top to bottom, but it didn't look like there was enough math for what she was trying to accomplish.

Talitha looked sheepish. "I don't know why, but I couldn't concentrate. I also... I couldn't concentrate." She finished lamely, hiding something inexpertly.

"Will, can I talk with you," Vogel asked, sounding very much like a parent wishing to chastise a child.

"Perhaps after I've had my drink. You don't know how my head is just pounding."

A silence, save for the steady drone of the engines befell them as they waited for their drinks to arrive. Will's head did indeed hurt, but no more than it had all day, he had just mentioned it because he didn't want to have to talk to the priest. He didn't want to have to tell him why he was against Talitha being even a little bit cured just at the moment.

"Here ya go, that'll be eighteen dollars. Cash only." The blonde stewardess would have made a horrible actress. Her smile looked sick on her face. Clearly serving them drinks, perhaps getting them drunk, was the last thing in the world she wanted to do. But still it was her job to smile and so she did.

Will gave her a twenty and took two of the drinks handed them to Talitha. "Hold these for me will you." He then grabbed the next two. "Keep the change."

The mimosa was good, as was the second one. Father Vogel refused the drink he was offered and waited patiently until Will had finished both. "Will, if you don't mind." The priest went to the front of the plane.

Reluctant to follow, Will looked to Talitha. "Do you like your drink?"

"Oh, it's so much better than that beer I drank that one time," she said with a smile. She appeared to be relaxing, allowing the alcohol to do its thing rather than biochemically neutering it as she could have.

Will attempted a smile. "I'll be right back. If you have any weird feelings or get angry at nothing, just wave your hand." He left her nodding up at him, very much looking like she was his baby sister from so many years ago.

At the front of the plane, Father Vogel barely waited for him to clear the first two rows of passengers before starting in on Will. "What's wrong with you? She has a real chance here."

Will only stared at the priest, not knowing what to say.

"Will, the longer she stays like this, the greater the chance she'll kill someone! And if she does, she'll no longer be able to blame it on some demon or some evil twin living in her mind. It will be all her. Do you know what that will do to her? She will become the killer."

"That's not what you said a little while ago," Will countered. "You said her good side was too ingrained in her psyche and would dominate her evil side."

"I did, however if she happens to kill someone, then truly which side of her is good and which is evil? From her point of view, they will both be bad and as more and more memories of torture and death come to her, she will find it impossible to categorize them. They will all be her. Is that what you want?"

"No."

"Then why won't you let me help her?"

"I need the evil Talitha and I need her whole," Will whispered this. The two of them had been getting loud and Will was afraid at least some of what they were saying was filtering back.

"You can't be serious," Vogel was back to being loud. The second stewardess, a girl with short brown hair came up the aisle.

"Can you two please take your seats? You're starting to make the other passengers nervous." Clearly, she was nervous as well and glanced at Will frequently even though she spoke to Father Vogel.

"Certainly," the priest responded cordially, but Will could tell he was more than peeved. In seconds, they were back to their seats and Will thought he was done having to explain himself when Talitha hopped up.

"I haven't been on a plane since I was six years old and I can't remember, is one of the bathrooms designated as a ladies room?" she asked. Will shook his head and Talitha gave him a slightly disgusted look. "Well they really should have one." She nudged her way out to the aisle and as soon as she was halfway down Father Vogel turned to Will.

"Why on earth do you want her evil? I demand that you tell me why."

"I told you when we were at the hospital what I was up against," Will answered. "My wife and unborn daughter are being held by a vengeful gypsy witch who has at least three men with her. She knows about my ability to see the future and she doesn't care! And that means she has some way to counter act it. I haven't had a vision concerning my wife all day. Just that alone is enough to tell me that I'm right. And that means I'm all but useless."

"But you aren't even giving Talitha a chance to fight as herself," Vogel replied heatedly. "Logically she can fight to protect loved ones. It would be considered noble and set her good side apart."

"Wrong. It'll get us all killed... including you. Talitha can't fight, let alone kill. I know her better than anyone, and I know she'll hesitate to hurt people or to strike to kill—Amy Harris won't. But the other Talitha...she's a living weapon and is all but unstoppable."

"You know you may be dooming her and I just don't mean here on earth."

Talitha had exited the bathroom and came down the aisle smiling at people as she passed. She looked terribly innocent to Will.

"Talitha?" Will began as she sat down. "Father Vogel and I have been discussing what's going to happen when we get to Bangor. It's going to be dangerous, and uh, I don't know how to say this..."

"I'm aware of what you want, Will," she said with a smile so tight that it stretched her lips into little pink lines. "You want to turn the evil side of me lose on Amy Harris. Don't give me that look of surprise. You know that I am blessed with somewhat above average reasoning capabilities."

Father Vogel jumped in, "Talitha, I need to warn you that if you end up killing anyone, you may be setting yourself up where we may not be able to fix your duo personality problem. Do you understand? Your subconscious will have it further ingrained that all you are, is a murderer, both sides of you."

"That is the least of my concerns, Father."

"What about your soul, Talitha? Don't you think you ought to be concerned for that?"

She smiled prettily at the priest, her teeth, straight and very white next to her natural tan looked like something out of a television commercial and to see her like that one would never think she'd gone through so much. With a shrug, she turned to look out of the window.

Vogel was mystified over her reactions and glanced at Will. "What about you? As her brother shouldn't you be concerned with her soul?"

"I am, but I have to be concerned for Lisa's as well. She is innocent in any of this..."

Vogel interrupted slamming his fist down on his armrest, "And your sister isn't! She's as much a victim as any one and right now I would have to say she is being victimized yet again, by you. What do you have to say about that? You're using her and won't even give her a chance at any sort of future."

Will suddenly needed another drink. He stretched his long muscular arm up, hitting the call button and decided, after seeing the stewardess's face contort into a grimace at who it was that rang for her, that he would have two drinks. He turned to look out the window just as his sister was. "You're asking me to blunt my sword right before going into battle."

"No, I'm..."

Will wasn't done speaking and rudely talked over the priest, loudly, angrily, "If I take your advice and we lose this fight, what do you think will happen to our souls then? Amy Harris is a witch! She buys her power with souls. They are the currency of the Void, and mine and Talitha's are almost priceless. Ba'al Zubel would pay dearly for us...as would Ba'al Fie-ere for that matter." He had been loud and he didn't care. The stewardess had an odd look on her face as she tried to figure out what it was she had just heard. Will, still staring out the window asked her, "Do you have Wild Turkey?"

Her mouth came open at the question, "Uh, Wild Turkey? Oh, you mean the whiskey. No, we have Jack Daniels."

Will shook his head in disappointment yet still dug out a couple of twenties. "Let me have six please and keep the change."

With eyes that were wide in surprise, the stewardess left, her blonde hair swinging back and forth. Will didn't notice. His own eyes were on the great gold and red expanse below him. The clouds over Boston hadn't extended into Maine and he was looking down on her wonderful forests. It gave him a thrill for home, which mingled with his nervousness, making his stomach seem particularly light and empty.

After a few minutes of silence, Will felt he had to finish explaining himself. "There was never going to be any trading of incantations. I didn't need second sight to know that. We're going to Maine simply to save my wife and daughter. And there will be a fight, there's no question about that. If we lose, then all our souls may be forfeit, if we win... then maybe just Talitha's. I wish there was another way."

"Will? Are you going to look into the future? Purposely?" Talitha asked timidly. Her tone suggested that she he hoped he would, that maybe it was her only chance not to be a killer.

"Yes, when we land." He got the shivers. "You know I can't do it here." Will was desperately afraid to look into the future, knowing that it was unlikely to show anything but pain. His leg started bouncing up and down nervously and he looked up for the stewardess anxiously. She came down the aisle, parading the tiny bottles about for the other passengers to see and more than one head glanced back in Will's direction. They were quick glances only as Will was in a fierce mood and no one cared to accept the challenge he held in his eyes.

The stewardess gave him the fake plastic smile of hers, which he didn't bother to return, and handed over the Jack Daniels. Even before she turned away, Will had the first small cap unscrewed and guzzled the shot down. The second bottle went just as quick, but the next four he spread out over the remaining time of the flight, which seemed very short.

For a long time, the three companions didn't speak until Will said, "This way, Tal."

Up till that point, their silence seemed unbreakable. They had deboarded the plane and progressed through the small airport without saying a word. They were currently in the parking garage and he pointed to his red jeep, the one with the bullet hole in the passenger door.

"Huh?" Talitha seemed confused and she looked around with a start. "Where are we?"

"Did you lose track of time?" Father Vogel asked with concern.

"Yes. We were just in the plane and you Will, you had just ordered some drinks." Her eyes went wide, "Did I do anything? Anything weird or...mean."

"Try not to be too concerned, losing track of time is a symptom of a dissociative," the priest replied in his soothing tone. "You didn't do anything weird, you were just quiet. We all were. I was praying and your brother was drinking."

If Father Vogel had meant anything by the comment, Will didn't know nor in fact did he care. He was lost in his stomach churning fear. It was two minutes after four in the afternoon and there was no more time to put off what he had to do. Yet he did put it off for another moment. After scanning the near empty garage, he climbed into the hard-topped jeep and fished out a bottle of Wild Turkey from beneath the seat.

The burn of the whiskey was a relief to him. This bottle was his 'Saturday afternoon drive to Talitha's cabin' bottle. It was almost empty. He held it out to the priest, who quite unexpectedly took it and drank. Even more of a shock, Vogel held it out to Talitha.

"Does it taste bad?" she asked looking at the bottle squeamishly. Father Vogel nodded at the same time that Will shook his head. She gave a little laugh at them and then tipped the bottle. It was worth giving up some of his whiskey to see the little jig of revulsion that her body involuntarily went through a second later.

She spluttered for a moment and then smiled. "Does this mean I passed the initiation?"

Will took the bottle and drained it. "Let me stay under for only three minutes...no five minutes. Five minutes only. You may have to hit me to get me out of it, just watch the nose, will you? It still stings from yesterday."

Talitha climbed into the passenger seat and gave Will a nod, but Father Vogel looked confused. "Hit you? Why would she have to do that?"

Ever since Amy Harris had picked up the phone at his house, Will had been battling a fluctuating anxiety. It was now reaching its highest peak and he was too nervous to even try to explain and he gave his sister a jerk of his head.

"Can you explain it to him, please?" While he spoke, his fingers began to mush themselves together. "Crap!" He felt a sharp pain from the fingers on his left hand, and only then did he remember they had been dislocated the day before. He massaged them gently and tried unsuccessfully to tune out Talitha.

"So as to have an accurate picture of what is coming, Will is going to endeavor to look into the future on purpose. Normally, visions just come to him out of the blue, and invariably these are disjointed. Now, he's tried this twice before and both were very difficult on him, mainly due to the horrific nature of what he was looking for, but also because the visions wouldn't let him go. Am I describing that correctly?" she asked Will. After a flash came to his mind of the decomposing corpse of a boy, he swallowed loudly and nodded.

"It's like I can't pull away. My mind becomes synced with the vision as if that's my reality and this," he indicated the car with shaking hands, "is all a dream."

Leaning against a shiny black Buick next to the jeep, Vogel nodded trying to understand. "And you are worried about what you might see in your home, I get it now. Good luck Will."

"Thanks. Here we go. Shit, I'm so scared...five minutes only, and then get me out. Five minutes...five minutes," Will took a few deep breaths. And looked.

Chapter 12

Will

There was nothing to see, which gave his nerves a jolt. He tried a second time and again saw nothing save for the black behind his eyelids. His anxiety reached an unhealthy pitch and a pain began developing behind his breastbone. "It's not working," the words escaped out of him in a frightened warble.

"I hate throwing psycho-analytical babble out every few seconds, but your fear of what you may see is probably inhibiting your ability," the priest said, coming to stand next to Will.

"Or maybe...there's nothing to see." In the front seat of the jeep, Will went white as he spoke. "Maybe Lisa doesn't have a future. Maybe she's already..."

"Don't jump to conclusions," Vogel advised. There was concern written on his face and gently, with soft cool hands he reached out to grasp Will's wrist and took a measure of his pulse for close to a minute. "Hmmm, a hundred and fourteen beats per minute," he said with a touch of unease.

"For Will, that's tachycardia. His resting pulse hovers around fifty," Talitha took his left wrist.

"My chest hurts too, I think something's wrong with me." With his right hand Will massaged his chest, feeling the pain where he had been shot the night before. Suddenly and quite atypical for him, he felt himself start to hyperventilate, his breath started to blow in and out rapidly. He looked with wild eyes to his sister for help.

"Relax Will, breathe easier. I can feel that it's sinus tachycardia, not ventricular," Talitha said. He had no idea if this was a good thing or a bad thing. Just as he was about to ask her, she reached out and touched his neck. "And your blood pressure is still very good. Panic attack?" she asked the priest.

"I believe so," Vogel agreed. "Will, look at me. I want you to remember your Lamaze training. Give me a signal breath, nice and slow."

"Signal...do you mean a cleansing breath?"

Vogel nodded and smiled, and began to breathe along side of Will. Soon their breathing became matched and Will tried to make a joke of his situation, "I feel so stupid. This is for pregnant ladies." What he really felt was a thrill of fear running all along his nerves like lightening.

"No, it's for anyone who's in a stressful situation and needs to relax," Vogel replied evenly, breathing slightly slower.

"He's correct, Will," Talitha added. "Most people think that the mind controls the body, but they don't seem to realize that it's actually a two way street. A person who doesn't exercise feels mentally torpid as well as physically so, while a person in peak condition feels more alert and cognitively attuned. You see? In your case, calm your body and your mind will follow."

"Or I can listen to you jabber on with your big words until I forget what had me so anxious in the first place." It was only a half-jest since he had to take a pause from his anxiety long enough to interpret a little of what she had said. And that, coupled with the Lamaze breathing had him calming to a degree.

"Well if it ameliorates your apprehension, I could extemporize for a time on a multiplicity of subjects," she replied with insincere sincerity.

"If you were hoping that I'd ask what ameliorates means, I'm not going to do it."

"Good. It'll save me the trouble of telling you to look it up."

The brother and sister looked at each other like they hadn't for some time, as if the years had fallen away and they were young again. After a moment, she smiled and seemed carefree, and he did his best to return it in the same manner, but he was far from carefree. He had many cares and she was not the least of them. Was he going to destroy her mentally by unleashing her on Amy? Would the personality of the evil Talitha take over for good? Would any of this really matter since she thought she was doomed to hell anyway?

It made his chest tighten up again just thinking of those questions. He pushed them aside. "I'm going to try again." Without any fanfare, he closed his eyes just as he had done before. There was nothing. A blank wall. He tried harder, ignoring any fear or anxiety, concentrating on the future, picturing Lisa. But there was only emptiness. "I can't do it. I'm not seeing anything."

"I bet she's blocking you somehow, like you thought," Talitha said.

This was very likely true, but he could only summon the energy to agree halfheartedly, "I guess."

A part of him was relieved that he couldn't see. A million terrible things could've been done to his wife and he didn't want to have to know any of them. Another part of him felt suddenly weak, vulnerable and terribly unsure of himself.

"So where does that leave us?" Father Vogel asked. Will remained quiet. For so long he had relied on his vision that now, without it, the future looked endless and impossibly full of wrong choices. Fear of making one kept him quiet.

"We go on to the house," Talitha replied in a quavering voice, after a long moment. "Will, drop me off just past that little bridge, ok? Wait four minutes and drive slowly on. I'll go through the orchard and approach the house from the rear and hopefully with all eyes on you, I'll be able to enter through the back unseen, and I'll, you know uh...take care of business."

Will nodded, grateful that Talitha had come up with something. His own mind had frozen up. Father Vogel looked skeptical. "Are you, Talitha going to try to do this yourself?"

"It'll be the other Talitha," she answered, not lifting her eyes to meet his gaze.

"You're risking too much," Vogel said with a touch of anger in his voice.

"I'm not. I have nothing to risk," Talitha returned.

Before the priest could reply, Will slid out of the car and pulled the seat forward. "We have to get going, Father. Hop in, if you're coming with us, but if you do, please don't try to stop her."

Looking as if he wanted to say more, Vogel clambered in and Will steered his car toward home—toward certain danger and very likely death. It seemed that this concept was on all their minds and for most of the ride they were silent. It was only when they left the tiny city and were winding their way under the autumn trees did anyone speak.

"I miss my cabin," Talitha murmured. "I miss my books."

"You miss the false sense of security that these afforded you, Talitha," the priest said from his cramped perch in the short back seat.

"Yes, I do miss that." She stared out of the window. Will missed it as well. He felt lost, like a blind man in a strange city. The bridge came up quickly.

He stopped the jeep in the middle of the road and looked out at the view. On all sides, they were surrounded by trees that seemed like nothing more than low flung golden clouds and as they watched, these let loose their dry autumn rain. The leaves flicked and ticked about the street, coming together by the thousands to form a great river of gold that flowed before them.

The breeze was sharp and ran steadily away from behind, and in the distance, a yellow house with a wraparound porch could be seen sitting placidly, as if waiting for an artist to draw it into the idyllic forest scene.

Talitha opened the door letting the fall air, cold yet clean, run into the jeep. "When I see you again, make sure you have a story for me. It helps."

"I will."

"Love you, Willy J."

"Too."

Talitha smiled at this, before sliding from the jeep and running off into the woods. With her floral print dress and her fine brown skin, she looked to be a part of the forest itself, like nymph, a spirit of nature leaping through the grass. She was beautiful, and as long as Will watched her run, he wasn't afraid. However, she was gone too fast and a gloom settled over him.

"She's still barefoot," Vogel said with a shake of his head. "I'm afraid for her. What happens if the other Talitha doesn't come out?"

"Trust me, that's not the worry. It's getting the real Talitha back, that's the worry. Who am I kidding? Actually just living through this is my worry."

"You're worried for yourself? Aren't you going to let Talitha...the other Talitha that is, take on the witch and her men? These words are so weird for me to even say," Vogel said with a half-smile.

"Yeah. Witches and demons it seems so..."

"Unreal," the priest offered.

"No, stupid," Will replied. "But stupid or not, I can't give Talitha free reign in that house. If she takes out all the bad guys that's great, but then who knows what she'll do? Maybe she'll go after Lisa, and if she does, then I'll need to deal with her and that means I'm going to need a gun."

"Oh, I see. Maybe we could come in once..."

Will was quick to interrupt, "There's not going to be any 'we'. This is where you get out, unless you're going to sit there and tell me you're some sort of a ninja priest?"

"No, but there's the witch you have to deal with also," Vogel said this with very little enthusiasm. They both knew he would be of little use against her as well.

"Father, I think it'll be best if you stay out of sight. If Talitha and I both fail then I'll need you to alert the police, and the Pope too for that matter."

Vogel rubbed his head as if he was getting a headache. "We should call the police right now. That was where Father Alba made his big mistake."

"And what would we tell them? That Amy Harris is a witch? That she's threatening to conjure a demon from the pits of hell?" Will stared out the window, wishing it would be so easy as to call the police. "Besides, she said she'd know if we did, and I'm not going to call her bluff. No, the way to go is to strike hard and fast while we have any semblance of an upper hand."

There were a few moments of silence and then the priest surprised Will, "Do you have any sins that you would like to confess?"

Will's mind suddenly went blank. "What? Oh, I don't think so. Nothing new since the last time I went to confession."

Vogel got out of the jeep. "I'll pray for you, Will."

They waved to each other as Will put the car in gear. "Thank you. That means a lot." And oddly, it did. The shaking in his hands grew less pronounced as he started down the road.

The scenery was beautiful and he found it odd that he took the time to notice it at all. He thought that he would be freaking out, but for some reason he wasn't. He had been all day, but now he was tooling along at ten miles per hour, slow and steady, like a one car funeral procession, looking out his partially open window at the golden trimmed trees and feeling strangely calm.

Even at the unhurried pace at which he traveled, the house quickly loomed and the jeep rolled into the driveway only minutes after he had waved good-bye to the priest. He pulled behind a long black Cadillac and on impulse, he laid on the horn briefly. That ought to get their attention.

His feeling of calm ended abruptly when he stepped down out of the jeep, still it wasn't replaced with nerve rattling anxiety, but only with loneliness. He felt very alone standing on his white gravel drive. This was his house, yet it didn't feel welcoming, as had always been the case in the past. Though he knew there were people in it, the house had an empty feeling. Perhaps even a dead feeling, but most certainly it had an ominous expectation. It seemed the house was waiting for him.

"Let it wait," he murmured aloud to himself. He hadn't checked the time when Talitha had ran off into the woods, something that he regretted, and he didn't know if he was too early or too late. By the lack of screams and gunshots, he suspected he was running too early.

Movement in a second story window caught his attention. That was to be his daughter's room. Now he felt a cold anger. He had painted the trim of that room in pink, he had spent two hours assembling the crib, and there were stuffed animals lining the wood rails that he had personally chosen. And now there was a strange person in that room. Had it been Lisa she would have smiled down at him as she had done countless times before, perhaps giving him her usual little wave as well.

He glared up into the window, but there was no one to be seen. All the windows were glassy and reflected only the magnificent autumn colors around him. There were no lights on in the house.

With a deep breath, he walked purposely up toward the porch, but stopped after only ten feet. He wasn't afraid. Not for himself at least. He stopped because he was sure the people inside weren't expecting it. They were in there, crouching behind his furniture like a bunch of children playing at hide and go seek. And now this little unexpected thing he hoped would have them wondering what he was up to, perhaps worrying what he was going to do. All but Amy that is.

She would be sitting casually in his living room. This would be her triumphant moment and he pictured her wearing a great big beautiful smile. Right now, it would be frozen in place as she waited.

Purposely he lingered, counting to ten before he started forward again, and when he reached his porch he made sure to tread loudly on each of the three steps running up to it. Slow and deliberate: thud... thud...thud. Again, he paused, hoping that the muscles in her face would begin to tire and that when he finally opened the door her look wouldn't be that of a triumphant witch but rather that of a sour bitch.

He could hope. There wasn't much more he could do. Fishing the incantations from his pocket, he held them up briefly and then gripped them in both hands. These were his only insurance and he would tear them up as a last resort or perhaps as his last act.

Where was Talitha? He could go no further without her. It would be the height of folly to step through his front door too early, as Amy's thugs would likely shoot him at the first sound of a commotion in the back of the house. Yet at the same time, to hang out on the front porch for too long might clue them in that he was only acting as a decoy.

"Amy! I have your spells," his voice was clear and strong. "I'll shred them up if Lisa isn't out here in ten seconds."

Silence greeted this. Will stood there and ten seconds went by quickly, "Amy!"

Still nothing. Not from Amy, or her thugs and worse not from Talitha. Had she been neutralized by some sort of spell? His front door was a thick heavy wood that he had painted a bright white. It was unblemished and he kicked it three times as a way of knocking, marring the paint.

"Amy, stop your hiding." Another twenty seconds ticked by.

He was now out of options. Stepping to the side of the front door, he reached out and tested the knob. It turned easily beneath his hand and he pushed the door open.

"I'll tear the spells," he cautioned as he stepped just across the threshold of the doorway and scanned the room. Had he not been in such danger, he might have smiled. Two young men of Hispanic dissent were making a childlike attempt at hiding behind his furniture. One crouched behind the long sofa, ten feet in front of him and the other was further back, squatting behind a large high backed chair that Lisa had picked up at Ethan Allen.

As expected, they both held guns in their hands. Yet what wasn't expected was that both of them sprang up at nearly the same instant and leveled their guns in his direction. For the briefest part of a second Will felt as if he were at a surprise party, but then a brilliant light seemed to erupt from the barrel of the gun being held by the man who had been hiding behind the sofa.

The light was followed by the magnified sound of a gun being discharged and this was followed by the sharp sound of a loud crack inches from his left ear. They were shooting at him! Just before light blazed from their pistols a second time, Will realized he was framed as a perfect target in the doorway. At this range, they could hardly miss.

Chapter 13

Talitha

To the average person, the forest in that fading afternoon sun would've been considered quiet, sleepy even. Save for a few birds and a late season fly buzzing past, very few people would have noticed any of the abundant wildlife going about their dangerous lives in the serene way that God had laid out for them.

As she passed, squirrels dodged to the far side of trees. Mice scampered beneath fallen branches. An orange tabby hunkered lower, blending with the gold leaves about her perfectly. A buck in the rut sniffing out a doe tensed and prepared to spring away. Talitha saw and heard and smelled all of this.

She felt wonderful. For the first time in eight long years, she felt wonderful. The air was perfectly crisp and she breathed in all the smells as if she was at a feast. The sweet odor of decaying and fermenting apples, the wet leaves molding below the layer of dry ones, a far way wood stove burning and an even more distant scent of a final barbeque. This last made her hungry.

Normally she didn't allow the feeling of hunger, it was a waste. But that wouldn't be for too much longer. The other Talitha liked the feeling. It drove her. She gave into all her urges no matter how primitive or animalistic. Still she wasn't in control yet. Talitha pushed away all thought of her and ran.

The earthen floor beneath the orchard was clear compared to the forest and she was able to pick up speed, stretching out her legs to their maximum. Already her feet were black from the rich soil and she smiled at them, feeling a touch childish. This would be allowed. She had never had much of a childhood, her mind had matured far too quickly and now it was a regret.

She had never regretted her abbreviated childhood before; she'd been too busy exploring her books, searching for knowledge and understanding. But there, flying along beneath the boughs of the apple trees, she wished she had played more and laughed more and lived more.

Soon, very soon she would lose that opportunity forever. The Void beckoned her. Really, it beckoned the other Talitha, who wanted it badly and wouldn't be put off forever.

Ahead, a ramshackle fence six feet high barred her way. She cleared it with ease, soaring over it, propelled by the great strength hidden in her slim legs. It felt a little like she was flying and though she was sprinting close to world record speed, her breathing was easy. Her heart rate at ninety beats a minute was triple its resting average yet she could've gone faster.

Off to her right on a low branch, an apple hung forgotten by all. It was very red and perfect. Impulsively she ran to it. She wasn't heedless of her mission, Will's jeep still idled by the bridge, even from a mile away she could hear it plain. She had time. The apple was sweeter than expected and very juicy. Feeling a childish need to be a child again, she let juice run down her chin and slurped at her apple. She giggled.

The jeep began to move. With a last sigh, she spun and pegged the apple core at a tree and watched with approval, as the remains seemed to disintegrate. It gave her an idea and she snatched up a fallen apple and sent the worm eaten piece of fruit zipping through the air at the same tree. Her aim was perfect and it struck dead center, exploding outward. The action struck a very satisfactory note within her and she laughed, wishing she had never grown up. Wishing. Wishing on a lot of things. Mostly wishing that time could stand still for her.

Will's jeep moved ever closer.

She took off again, speeding parallel to the road, leaping another fence, scattering a gaggle of blue jays. It was with difficulty that she refrained from chasing them and instead increased her speed, knowing she had to get past the yellow house and then double back. A few hundred yards later, she slipped across the road and blended in with the foliage on the other side.

Now she slowed, ghosting along in the thickest cover she could find. Her run had been easy and carefree; she could feel her breath running in and out, her blood working through the pipes of her arties. It was all good.

The wind, a gentle forty-seven degree breeze that playfully lifted her light summer dress began to bring to her the scent of strange men. At one time, there had been seven men, all Mexican in the house, but now there were only four. A part of her felt disappointed at this and she sighed.

That disappointment was just another symptom that her eight-year vacation was coming to an end. She wouldn't be Talitha much longer. On the plane she had lied to her brother and had overheard their entire conversation. Father Vogel had been right on so many counts, but he was missing facts. Facts that her brother had routinely ignored. Talitha was going to hell and not because of anything that her evil side had done, but what she had done. Knowingly done.

Her soul was stained with the screams of people she had tortured and as soon as the evil Talitha, this new one, this one that wasn't really a separate entity, but only just another personality, when she found out...well, it would be all over at that point. And she would find out.

Just as she was getting her evil twin's horrible memories, it stood to reason that when the other Talitha was in control, she would be getting access to her secret memories as well. And this was where Vogel had it wrong. The good side of her wasn't completely good or pure. Not even close. There were horrors in her that she had buried deep and when they came out, the evil Talitha would destroy her with them.

Perhaps this was the way it was meant to be she reasoned, slipping around one of the last trees on the edge of her brother's finely manicured lawn. Perhaps she should just allow it to happen and be done. She was doomed to the Void either way, perhaps she should go, not kicking and screaming, but go there as a conqueror. That was how Ba'al Fie-ere had gone and after all, they were essentially the same being.

The demon was in truth her real twin. This evil personality that battled for control of her body was simply the remains of the fiend. For a second, Talitha wondered what would happen if she did go into the Void fully evil, as an almost exact match to the demon. It would be interesting.

Her reverie was cut short. The crunching sound of gravel beneath the jeeps tires announced that her brother had arrived. It was time for action and Talitha peered into the dark windows of the house. A man, Mexican, aged nineteen to twenty-three stood just to the side of a window on a second floor. He was nervous and constantly licked his lips. He was an asshole.

Her reaction to the man at first surprised her. "What?" she said aloud. The thought seemed so unlike her, but then she felt familiar anger brewing in her and she knew that it would consume her, devouring everything she thought she was if she didn't do anything about it, but this time she didn't fight it.

2

For a second Talitha was unsure of herself. She had no clue as to what time it was or even what day. She felt as if she had been drunk or perhaps drugged. In her mind, she could picture odd flashes of strangers. A priest, a bishop, a big haired waitress that she had wanted to kill. There was even a snotty stewardess, who looked down her nose at her. It was all so strange.

Her last real clear memory had been standing over that cop Milner back in the factory. She had hoped to kill him too, but just then, out in the cool of autumn Maine, she couldn't remember if she had. Bringing her hands up to her tall slim nose, she took in their scent.

"Mother fucker!" she hissed. There was no blood on her hands. This was Will's fault, she knew it—only she didn't know exactly how she knew it or exactly how he had stopped her.

Though there hadn't been blood, there was the scent of apple on her fingers, it made her feel strange and reminiscent, lifting her head, she took in the air through her nostrils and ignored the extraneous markers of the orchard and the wildlife about her. Now, she knew where she was.

This was Will's Little House on the Prairie home, where he liked to pretend he was mister goody-two-shoes Charles Ingalls. Will was such an asshole. Only an asshole would paint his home yellow. Only an ass... the thought stopped abruptly. There had been another asshole she remembered, a very recent one.

Her eyes scanned the windows and saw there was some sort of Spanish boy...no a Mexican peeking from the corner of one them on the second floor. She breathed in, catching the scent of three other Mexicans in the house.

"Bean eatin mother fuckers," she whispered savagely. Her anger over her brother was momentarily forgotten as she took in the smell of their guns. They thought they were so tough sporting their little pistols...

A jeep's horn rang out for the space of three seconds. The sound focused her in a hurry and she cocked an ear. The jeep's door shut loudly and the scent of her brother grew. He was heading for the house. He was walking into a trap! The idea brought a smile to her full lips and she chuckled, but then she wondered what in the hell she was doing outside his home, hiding in the trees. Was he expecting the other Talitha to come rescue him? Or perhaps to attack from the rear?

"But..." But what happened to the other Talitha? This was very vague in her mind. There had been a confrontation with Ba'al Zubel, this she recalled and she had been named. That was very clear to her. She had named herself Ba'al Fie-ere, Denier of Ba'al, but now she was standing out in a forest. What the hell had happened? Everything was such a hodgepodge of images and memories.

Around the front of the house, heavy footsteps sounded on the porch. They went up the stairs and then paused. Will must have used that damned second sight of his and saw the attack coming, she thought.

"What a cheater," she murmured to herself.

"Amy! I have your spells," Will's voice was clear and strong. "I'll shred them up if Lisa isn't out here in ten seconds."

Spells? Amy? Talitha sniffed at the cool air once more. The scent of Lisa was obvious and strong, but she ignored those markers and concentrated on the fainter ones. There had been another woman at the house and three other Mexicans, but they were long gone, hours gone judging by the faintness of their odor. The scent of the woman was unfamiliar, but the only Amy that she knew of was Amy Harris. Interesting.

"Amy!" Will called angrily. There was a few seconds of silence and then he hammered, or maybe kicked at the door. Again, interesting. He must know that he was about to be attacked, was he really expecting them to answer the door?

"Amy, stop your hiding," came the cry from the front of the house.

Talitha's mind suddenly pounced on an unsettling idea. If Will knew he was about to be attacked that meant that he was probably carrying a gun as well. And if that was true, those Mexicans wouldn't stand a chance, ergo, Will would remain in possession of whatever spells that he had been mentioning. Probably the ones that Luke had in his possession beneath the church. It would also mean that since he had a gun and spells, she would be in a weak position relative to him, something she hated more than anything.

On the ground, a foot from her was a smooth rock the size of an egg, she hefted. It would do nicely. Her brother was going to be in hell of a rude surprise.

"I'll tear the spells." This was the last thing she heard from him before she took off at a dead sprint for the back door. The man in the upper floor window had disappeared at some point in the last thirty seconds and she crossed the lawn in moments, unseen.

Just then, gunfire erupted from in the house, but that had been expected and she didn't slow a whit. When she was twelve feet from the door she leapt, sailing through the air with her left foot back and chambered. She struck the door with that left foot and sent it blasting inwards, not knowing or caring whether it had been locked or not. Her momentum carried her into the kitchen where the man that she had seen in the window of the second floor was just rushing in from a separate hallway to her left.

Before he could even think to bring his gun up, Talitha hurled the egg-sized rock across the room directly into the man's forehead. In between the sound of gunshots that came loud to her ears from the living room, she was able to hear a wonderful thock sound. The rock shattered the man's skull and like a tennis ball off a wall, it bounced right back to her. She was out of the room before he hit the floor.

Down the hall, she flew towards the sound of guns. There were two guns firing in sporadic manner as if the men who wielded them were unsure exactly what they were shooting at. They were clearly amateurs.

In the living room, she discovered two men both with their backs to her. The one closest stood in a half crouch. A roundhouse to his throat not only crushed his larynx but also drove it into his cervical vertebrae. In a second, he was dead twice over. With her momentum carrying her, she spun, deftly catching up the dead man's pistol with her left hand. At the culmination of the spin she torqued her body much like a pitcher in baseball and hurled the stone faster than the eye could follow at the second man.

Talitha could have fired the gun with her left hand without losing any of her inhuman aim, but the rock was just so much more fun.

"Oh poo!" she pouted with a small stamp of her muddy foot. Her rock had imbedded itself in the back of the man's head. She'd been hoping for another lucky bounce. After all, there was another man coming down the stairs. He thought he was being sneaky.

Talitha took two silent loping steps and then slid across the smooth hardwood floors on her knees. It was something a child might do, but no child had ever worn such an evil gleeful smile. She zipped toward the stairs with only a whisper from her dress, and as she passed them, her angle was perfect and her aim exceptional, she fired twice, shattering both of the man's kneecaps. With a girlish scream, he crumpled, losing his gun, but managing to cling to the railing. She ignored him and his pathetic whimpering. He would keep for now.

"Oh Willy J!" she called out with a happy sing-song. It turned out that he hadn't been armed after all. Otherwise, she was sure he would've killed the two idiots that had been firing at him. Their aim had been atrocious, she counted five bullet holes scattered about the doorframe and the wall to its right.

Feeling a pleasant contented warmth, she went onto the porch, expecting him to be cowering there, but he wasn't in sight. "Olly-olly in-come free!" She tilted her head, listening, cancelling out the sobbing of the Mexican crawling away up the stairs, cancelling the wind and the flicking leaves. Will's heartbeat was a drum to the girl. He was to the right of the porch around the corner, breathing loudly as if he had just run a sprint.

"Is this going to be hide and seek, Will?"

"No. Where's Amy? Is she dead?" he stepped from around the corner of the wraparound porch gripping a sheaf of old yellowed looking paper in his left hand. He had a nervous look in his eyes—she liked that.

"She's long gone; she hasn't been here for hours. But it was sure nice of her to leave these toys for me to play with." She sniffed at the gun—the man who had owned it was a chronic masturbator. Quickly, she pulled it from her face and looked at it in disgust.

Will blinked, clearly bewildered. "She's gone? What about Lisa? Is she here?" He didn't wait for an answer but started to walk around his sister giving her a very wide birth.

Talitha forgot about the gun in her hand and stepped to her left a few feet, coming to stand in the doorway, essentially blocking his path. "Hold on now, we were talking. Are those the incantations that Luke used?" Will nodded and held them out to her.

"Take them please, I need to see Lisa," he said with a good amount of pleading in his voice. She didn't take the papers, but only smiled at him.

"Sometimes you're just perfect. You use just the right amount of begging to make a girl feel good about herself. I'm sure Lisa's fine...wait." Talitha paused sniffing again, "She hasn't had the baby yet? When...when was it that we took on Luke? How long has it been?"

Will face contorted into puzzlement. "That was last night."

"Last night?" It felt as if it had been months ago. She remembered so many things happening since the fight with Luke. They had met with Lisa at church only a few weeks ago and had gone out to lunch with her. And she had worked on an algorithm for the software she was developing and she was certain that she had shown it to Will...

"That wasn't me," she said aloud. "That was the other me. Will! You did something to me. Or did Amy? Did that witch put a spell on me?" She was suddenly wonderfully furious. She hated the feeling and loved it at the same time. It gave her freedom and strength. "Tell me or I blow your fuckin brains out right here!" She advanced on Will, who backed to the side of the house.

"She didn't do anything to you, but I don't think you want to know what's happening..."

"Hey!" the Mexican that she had shot yelled out with a quaver of pain in his voice. "Get me a phone. Get me a phone or this bitch dies."

Will, to her amazement, tried to rush past her. With a casual strike, she sent him to his knees gasping for breath. Beneath his bruised face, he turned a very red-burgundy. The colors were fascinating.

"Hey! I said get..."

"We heard you, asshole," Talitha called out, angry that the man's whiny voice was disturbing her appreciation for...art. Was what she could do considered art? If not, it should be.

"I'll kill her," he tried.

"One more word and I'll put out your eyes." Her rage was fast becoming insurmountable.

"Stupid bitch." The man muttered this to himself, but he might as well have whispered it directly into Talitha's ear.

"That does it."

She pulled her wheezing brother to his feet and dragged him inside the house. The Mexican was upstairs, moaning. The sound irritated her to no ends and she decided to put a stop to it. Her mood was black and she was simply beyond thinking.

"Lisa?" Will called out in a raggedy voice, as Talitha drove him on toward the stairs. "Hey you, mister, is she ok?"

"Get me a phone or I kill her."

Will tried again between gasps, "Is she ok?" When silence greeted this, he turned to his sister. "Don't kill him, please. I need him alive. We have to find out where Amy..."

His words didn't register in her mind. She was caught up in a rage that she hadn't felt in years, not since those early days in the asylum. All she wanted was to kill. The Mexican was in a room at the end of the hall, she could hear his heavy breathing as easily as if he were blowing his nasty bean eating breath in her face.

She could smell that he had another gun, but she didn't care. Her brother would act as a shield, and as a battering ram. She threw him bodily against the partially open door and he fell through it stumbling to the floor. The Mexican stupidly shot at Will, but his aim, at chest height, was too high to hit the falling man and a small neat hole formed in the wall inches above Will's back.

Talitha's aim was spot on. Though she wanted to kill him, it didn't mean she wanted it to go fast and her shot struck him in the right wrist. He screamed, but it was drowned out by a roar that ripped from her throat. Like a ferocious dog that had just slipped its collar, she was on him in a flash and over the next minute, she bludgeoned him to death with her bare hands, crushing bones and rupturing organs with every strike of her hammer like fists.

Only when the body ceased even its involuntary twitching, did she stop punching. It had all been very satisfying, deeply so and as she straddled him, she couldn't help gyrating her pelvis a few times on the warm corpse. Feeling a wonderful contentment, she sighed largely and climbed up on the bed next to Lisa. The girl seemed very much asleep, yet Talitha knew better.

Her brother, who had just sat up, blinked away fresh blood that dripped into his eyes; one of his stitches had loosened and sprung a leak. He seemed dazed by his impact with the door and stared at her with red-rimmed eyes. He stared and stared, and it began to affect her newly found good mood.

"What?" she asked, it was more of a challenge than a question. His mouth came open and his head gave a little shake, but that was all.

Just then, a very timid voice called from the doorway to the house, "Hello?" She recognized the voice as familiar, but she couldn't place it. "Hello? Will?"

"We're upstairs," Talitha brought the gun up, sighted it on the door and waited. Her mouth hung open and she breathed light but excited.

"Don't come in here, it's not safe," Will said in a shaking voice, looking back and forth rapidly between the gun barrel and the door.

Now she blew out her breath, exasperated and the gun dropped back on her lap. She looked at him as if he had just spoiled a good joke. "Dang it, Will. Stop being a pain. Who is that, anyways?"

"What are you talking about? That's Father Vogel."

"Vogel?" The named seemed familiar, her brow came down in concentration. "The priest who was at the factory?"

Will nodded, "Yes. Please, put the gun down. You're not right...you're thinking it's all..." He left off uncertain what to say.

"My thinking is fine," she replied, but it wasn't, even for her it wasn't. She felt that her mind could best be described as a little warped. The killing had been fun, but now her mouth tasted like metal, and the odd memories filtering into her subconscious were distracting and aggravating. They were of things she had never done, or never would do: going to church, writing out algorithms, working on puzzles. Puzzles for God's sakes!

"Will?" The priest was at the top of the stairs. "Is Talitha with you? Is she... ok?"

The brother and sister locked eyes. "She's... she's, uh..." His mental state looked to be cracking like an eggshell and he stammered, "She's... she's... not injured."

"You sound disappointed. Are you? Do you wish that Jose, over there had been a better shot?" She pointed with a tacky red index finger, to the mush that had once been a human.

He seemed to see the man for the first time and paled, his eyes going very big. "No. No I don't wish that, but..." He stopped talking. It seemed that he needed to concentrate in order to pull his stare from the grisly thing lying in a pool of blood. "I...I...I just..."

Father Vogel spoke up again, closer this time but still nearer to the stairs than the door, "Will, shouldn't you be doing something?"

"What are you supposed to be doing? Saving your poor little wife?" Talitha yanked Lisa by the shoulder and she lolled like a corpse in the sea. Her head rolling on her shoulders coming to face Will. From a certain point of view, it was probably disgusting or upsetting at least, and tears began to escape from his eyes, they were pink with diluted blood.

"I can't. I can't do it," he moaned.

His misery had a calming effect on Talitha. The memories ceased to come to her as rapidly as they had and this put her in a benevolent mood.

"What can't you do, Will?"

"I was supposed to tell you...something, but I can't. We have to help Lisa first. She's alive, right?"

Talitha looked at the girl and shrugged. "No less than usual. She was always such a stick in the mud that does it really matter. So what were you supposed to tell me?"

"Nothing," Will cast his eyes down, staring at the carpet.

"Will, you have to," Father Vogel called from down the hall. Closer.

"Yeah Will, ya gotta," Talitha agreed for fun. The more miserable he looked the less strange her brain felt. "What is it ya gotta do?"

"He has to..."

"I was talking to my brother, Vogel. What kind of name is Vogel anyways?" She was only mildly curious. In truth she was waiting for the priest to take two more steps further down the hall, at that point he would be just outside the door. She lifted her arm, holding the gun out, sighting it at the crack of the door. The urge to peek into the room would be impossible for the man to resist.

The floor creaked in the hall once.

"Father, don't come any closer she has a gun..."

Thunder erupted in the room as the gun spat out a spinning hunk of lead. It buried itself in the wall an inch from Will's right ear.

"Will, you're such a pain in the ass, you know that?" she asked amiably; for the moment, her blood lust satiated. Will looked too stunned for words and only sat leaning against the wall while his mouth opened and closed like a fish at the bottom of a boat. Talitha smiled at him. "So what was it you were supposed to do?"

"I...I was supposed to tell you this story, but...I don't think I can."

"What's with you and your stories? Didn't you start one earlier that you never finished?" Her brother gave her a flaccid little shrug. "Hey, I got an idea, Big Bro. You tell me a story and if I don't like it I kill Lisa." Talitha suddenly got excited at the thought. "This will be just like One-thousand and One Nights. Remember that? If the girl couldn't come up with a beguiling enough story every night, she'd die. This story thing is a great idea, Will."

Will's pale skin went pasty white now and his eyes darted about. Clearly, he couldn't think of a thing, which only added to Talitha's excitement. Seconds ticked by and his fear was delicious.

She thumbed the hammer back on the pistol, which got him started, but poorly so, "Remember dad, how..."

"Of course I remember my father. It's you who obviously doesn't. If this was mom lying here all dead looking, we both know dad would come over here and take this gun, just like that," she snapped blood stained fingers, flecks of red leaping into the air as she did. "He would put an end to this nonsense right quick. I would get the paddling of a lifetime and a long-ass lecture to boot."

"Maybe not," Will said, taking a long time to reply. "Maybe not, he wasn't always the best disciplinarian. Remember how he used to count to three when we wouldn't listen to him right away."

"I think so," Talitha couldn't quite recall what Will was talking about and suddenly she had a moment of unease. Perhaps this story idea wasn't such a good one after all. There had been something odd about the ending of the last one, but before she put her mind to figuring it out, Will began speaking again.

"Well, you were the reason he stopped doing that. We were at this hardware store shopping for...I don't know what. Remember that Ace by our house? The one that sold brauts and hotdogs out front? You always begged for one, when we left."

"I remember the hotdogs." The smell of those long ago hotdogs came to her and it suddenly made her hungry. Will seemed to read her mind.

"Just thinking about them is making my stomach growl. But they really weren't all that good. It was the smell that drove us nuts, not the taste. They were usually overcooked and the buns were dry as sawdust." Will paused and Talitha nodded; the picture he was describing was very familiar. Now that he had begun his story, it seemed easier for him to go on, "This one time you were playing on a display of plastic door mats inside the store. You know the ones with the fake stubby grass and the white and yellow daisy in the corner?"

It was a rhetorical question, but she nodded all the same. Their family had at least one of those mats outside their house for years.

Will waited for the small nod from her before he wiped his wet nose with his sleeve and picked up where he left off, "Well, they had this big stack of them, three stacks actually. They looked like stairs to us and you were playing on them, even though they slipped and shifted around beneath you. You know how mom was back then, everything was dangerous to her. She said 'Get off there or you'll break your neck.' But you didn't listen and then dad steps in, 'Tal! I'm going to count to three!' Well, all you did was smile huge as if daring him to start counting."

"That was me? That doesn't sound like how I used to be." She couldn't quite remember, but she had always thought of herself as too straight laced to do anything like what Will was saying.

"I'm pretty sure that was you," Will replied and now his voice was more hopeful. "Anyways, dad puts on his mean face and says, all important sounding, 'one'. You only grinned bigger, because you had a plan brewing to outsmart him, which is funny because you were like three years old at the time. So dad scowls even fiercer and says even louder, 'TWO'. At this, your eyes are huge and mischievous and you get into a squatting position. Your plan is to leap up the second dad begins to say three. And he knows this and doesn't know what to do, because he will end up looking kinda stupid being outsmarted by a three year old. Mom starts to die laughing and a second later dad looks like a balloon that just lost its air."

Suddenly Talitha did recall this in full detail. It just mushroomed whole into her mind. "That wasn't me that was Katie."

"Oh, you're probably right," Will replied quickly as if this was a minor point. "Katie did always have a special something about her that kept her out of trouble. Remember the time she tried to make jello in the toilet?"

Talitha smiled at that crazy memory. The little blonde girl had boiled five gallons of water and had slowly poured it into the toilet all the while stirring in six or seven packets of Jello. She had let it set overnight and then purposely kept the second floor bathroom occupied so that her father would get a weird surprise in the morning. Coming out of the bathroom, his face was priceless.

"For a little girl, she was brilliant at getting into trouble and genius at getting out of it again," Talitha said shaking her head. She then looked at the gun in her hand and then around at the room, confused and with growing fright. "Will, I think I'm back."

Chapter 14

Will

"Will, I think I'm back," Talitha announced in a shaky voice; her words were quiet and full of shame and thumped into his pounding head as if they were rocks coming from her mouth. Her first act was to put the gun down gingerly on the stand next to the bed, she then reached over and touched her sister-in-law, "She's alive, and so is the baby."

"Oh God," Will was up in a flash, but his head was none too stable and he tottered for a moment as the room swayed. He stumbled and lurched around the bed to his wife who, despite what Talitha had said, lay apparently dead to the world. Gently he shook her. "Lisa! Lisa!" he called, soft yet urgently. His eyes brimmed with sudden tears. "Vogel, get in here!" Fear caused his words to come out as a harsh order.

The priest rushed in, white faced, but otherwise cool and collected; he too went to the blonde and began a brief examination. He lifted her eyelids, opened her mouth, took her pulse, ran his hands over her head and neck, and then down her spine. Next, he checked her abdomen and chest, after that he just shrugged.

"I don't know what's wrong with her," he said lamely. "We need to get her to a hospital."

"Call nine-one-one, there's a phone in the master bedroom, the first door just to your left in the hall," Will commanded, roughly giving the priest a shove toward the door.

"Father Vogel, wait," Talitha hopped up to intercept the priest grabbing him by the arm. "Can't you smell that? Amy wasn't lying, there's been witchcraft performed in here. It's very strong on Lisa."

The last twenty-four hours for Will had been long and full of pain, his mind felt drained and stuporous. "Right, what was I thinking? Can you look at her?" he asked his sister.

"Me? I'm not a witch," she replied, backing toward the wall.

"Please?" Will begged.

"I guess...I guess I can try." Talitha went to the girl and bent so low over her face that for a moment Will thought she was going to kiss Lisa. Instead, Talitha closed her eyes and breathed in deeply through her nostrils. They wrinkled in disgust. "There's something here." Lisa wore a purple sweater that rode high up on her neck due to the way she was laying. Talitha pulled down the warm material and stepped back. "You didn't give her that did you?"

Around her neck, Lisa wore a strange necklace. It was of laced twine and odd fragrant flowers, small discs of what looked like hammered dimes hung from it.

"No. Do you think I should take it off of her?" Will knew next to nothing about witchcraft. Talitha shrugged, and when he looked at the priest, Father Vogel appeared even more lost. Will doubted it would do any more damage if he did and so with a quick motion, he yanked the necklace off his wife.

Quite literally, thousands of images flashed through his mind in the space of the next few seconds. They came so fast that none was able to actually register on his consciousness. Along with the images there was stinging burning pain in his eyes as if he had looked into a laser and he forced them closed, yet still the pictures came.

"UHHGG!" Will cried out. They were a blur, a machine gun of lights, faster than any strobe. In seconds, his balance went and he swayed a moment before falling over, but strong hands gripped him and gently lowered him to the floor.

"Will, are you ok?" He knew his sister would ask this.

"Will, are you ok?" she asked.

At first he could do little, save moan and roll back and forth on the floor, but then the visions began to slow in pace and when his sister repeated her question, something he knew that she'd do, he was able to nod. Finally, a last image of a man stayed in his mind. It was of a very big Mexican with tattoos running up his neck, he had the eyes of a puff adder, hooded and poisonous, they stared at him.

"What happened?" He knew Father Vogel would say.

"What happened?" the priest asked like an echo.

"Please be quiet for a moment," Will begged, holding out his hand to them. He attempted to open his eyes, however double images surrounded him, he was seeing the room a second into the future. This was layered over the image of the room in the present and it was disorienting as well as nauseating. A few moments later, he tried again and the double images wavered, blurred, and then fused into one.

"I...I think I just got my vision back, you know my second sight. I think that thing around her neck was like a charm keeping me from seeing what was happening here. How's Lisa? Did breaking that necklace do anything for her?" he asked, trying to get up.

"I'm sorry, but there's no change," Vogel replied. "Do you think it's possible Amy Harris has used your wife to open a gate into the Void with a spell? Weren't you in a similar state, Talitha?"

"No, it's not the same spell. Feel her skin; she's not at all cold. And look around us, there's no demon about. This is something different...move over." Talitha again sniffed Lisa thoroughly. She shocked Will by next running her finger along Lisa's gums and then she stuck her own finger in her mouth. "She hasn't been poisoned or drugged."

"What about the other Talitha?" Will asked. "Would she know what this is? I think we should ask her."

Talitha leaned back shocked. "You want me to bring her back? So soon? Will, please no. Look what I did." She pointed at the grotesquely beaten body of the Mexican.

"He deserved everything he got," Will growled as anger flared in him at his sister's refusal. "You won't do this for me? For Lisa? How many times have I risked myself for you? How many of those damn dreams did I put up with for you? Huh?" Compared to his weeping and frustration, the guilt trip and the anger were oddly satisfying to him and they went well with his headache.

"Will, I can't. It would be a waste, even if she knew, there's no way she'd help you. She hates you and Lisa both; I think she would just try to make it worse somehow."

She was right, but perhaps there was another way. "Father Vogel, could you hypnotize the information out of her?"

The priest shook his head. "No, for a number of reasons. Her subconscious is not..."

"A simple 'no' is fine," Will interrupted. He got up and paced the room feeling his emotions spin away from him. All day he'd been holding back a nagging fear of what was happening to Lisa and now here he was and still just as much in the dark.

Talitha tugged his leg as he passed and said, "There's another way perhaps. Since your ability seems to be back, you could look into the past to see what happened here. There is precedence for this; you were able to see the past as it concerned Fredrick Brabec."

Will hesitated, afraid of what he would see, afraid to know what they had done to her. "Tal...was Lisa violated?" He shifted his eyes from his sister as he asked.

Talitha was quick to answer, "No. She hasn't been, not like that. What do you think, will you look?"

"Yes."

Without preamble he sat and took Lisa's hand. Closing his eyes, he sent his mind back, searching.

It was like running into a very dark night. Heavy black shadows were laced by slighter ones and nothing seemed to have form. Further out, just at the edge of his vision, things seemed lighter and he ran forward, hoping. It felt as though hours passed and still the light was only at a distant horizon. He became frustrated and swung his fist through the shadows close to him, but couldn't touch them. They shifted constantly and were unreadable. They were useless, as was his vision. After a time he grew discouraged and bored; not knowing what else to do he wandered uselessly—his steps numbering in the tens of thousands. Time stretched out as he walked, but then suddenly snapped back when he heard his name called. Will opened his eyes and had to blink from the bright light.

"Did you see anything?" his sister inquired in a rush. She looked worried.

"No, it was as if there's nothing to see. It was like that spell not only blocked my vision, but erased the past as if it never happened. How long did you let me stay under?"

"Eight minutes," Talitha replied, anxious that she had made a mistake. "I know that seems like a long time but your heart rate and breathing remained unchanged during the duration. Was that ok?"

"Yeah," he answered somewhat distantly—the eight minutes could have been eight months.

Father Vogel took Will's pulse and gave him a quick once over. The priest then asked, "Talitha, can you track Amy by sense of smell?"

"I could, but not if she drove, which I think she did. Do you have any idea where Lisa hid the sword?" she asked Will.

"No." Surprisingly, Will had plum forgotten about the sword. His concern had been focused squarely on the safety of his wife and child. "Still, I don't think it matters. Amy has to have it by now."

"Does she?" Vogel murmured. "Maybe Lisa hid it deep in the woods. We might still be able to catch up with her."

"Perhaps," Talitha eyes went slightly out of focus and she breathed in deep. Suddenly, she bent over Lisa again and began inspecting even closer than she had before. She paid close attention to her shoes, a pair of very white Nikes. "She didn't go out in the forest in these sneakers."

Talitha hopped up quick and ran from the room. Will guessed she was heading to the master bedroom and he found her with her head in Lisa's closet. "I don't think she's been in the forest in the last week at least, judging by her shoes."

"So where does that leave us?" Vogel asked dispiritedly from the doorway. He was looking down at the hardwood floor eyeing the blood that trailed along from the stairs.

"The bishop hinted that the Church could help out," Talitha mentioned, getting up from the closet. "Could they use some influence and maybe find out where Amy lives, or who these four men were?"

Vogel nodded. "It would take time. Probably a couple of days..."

This shocked Will. "A couple of days? No, we need to find her now. I want you to call the bishop right away, right this second."

"I can't." Father Vogel had an odd embarrassed look to him. "He's still in the air. His plane isn't scheduled to arrive in Bangor until five." Will's mouth dropped open and the priest went on to explain, "Bishop Keenan wanted to have a backup plan available just in case you and your sister weren't successful here."

"And what did the bishop think he could possibly do?"

"He didn't come alone, Will. He brought with him a special paramilitary unit. You see there are certain people, men and women of great faith who volunteer their services in time of need. Thankfully, that need is extremely rare, in fact I've never seen one of these groups in action, but the bishop deemed the incantations important enough to call upon them."

"Do they have any special abilities? Do you think they'll be able to help Lisa?" Will asked in a rush. Hope and relief made him feel a slight bit giddy.

The priest killed the feeling quick. "I'm sorry, but I don't think so. They're just normal people. Most of them have military training, some have medical training and a few like Eric Milner are with the police or the FBI."

"Milner is one of them!" Will no longer felt hopeful at all.

"Technically yes, like I said, they're just normal people. Officer Milner has been very helpful to us in the past and I hope that despite what he has gone through, we'll be able to count on him again in the future."

"Would it help if I apologized?" Talitha asked. She stood meekly half in and half out of the closet, biting her lip.

Will answered before the priest, "No, it'd probably make it worse. But I don't think you have much to worry about, I'd bet that Milner isn't with them, just when he could be of some help." He walked out of the room, feeling the strain of the last few days on him like a weight. The bishop and a few boys with guns weren't going to able to help them out. At the door to the nursery room, Talitha caught up with him and tugged at his shirt.

At first, she seemed nervous to the point of tears. "May I hide the bodies, please? I can maybe put them in the basement or in the trunk of their car. We have twenty minutes before they land and another twenty before they get here..."

"Tal, hold on. Just leave them for now, they can wait. I need your help figuring out where Amy went."

"They can't wait! The bishop will be here soon, and he can't see what I've done." Her eyes were wild in her head and the tears were only seconds from coming. "He'll blame me. He'll think I did all this on purpose or for fun. Please, please, let me move them. Is there a deep lake anywhere near here? I can weigh them down really well. They'll never come back up."

This last she said with such honest conviction that Will's insides seemed to loosen and turn watery. She had sunk bodies before, he was quite sure of it. The other Talitha had left her many presents, the dead and the dying, for her to clean up.

From behind his sister, Father Vogel asked, "How many bodies are there in the house, Talitha." He said her name deliberately to keep Will from answering. It was a moot point, he didn't know.

"Four," Talitha replied in a whisper.

"Can you recall how each died?" The question from the priest was strange and off-putting. Will looked past his sister; Vogel gave him a little headshake, telling him to keep quiet.

"Yes. I shot the man in the nursery three times and then finished him off by bludgeoning him with my fists." Talitha's voice was low and unemotional, as if she were reading off a laundry list. "There were two in the living room; I killed the first with a kick to the throat, the second I killed with a stone." Her face clouded slightly at this, "I was angry about this for some reason. Oh yeah, right. It was because the stone didn't bounce back like I wanted it too."

"Ok Talitha, you don't have to go on. I just..." Vogel started.

She gave a little laugh, like a short bark. "You should've seen the first one I killed. I chucked this stone, Bam! Right in the forehead and you wouldn't believe, it just bounced right back to me, like it was a tennis ball I had thrown against a brick wall. It was so funny." She smiled at her brother as if she honestly thought he would appreciate what she had said.

His mouth came open and he could only shake his head, confused. First, that he could, in any way, think her story was funny and second, that there were only four men in the home. By the sound of the gunfire, he would've thought it closer to six or seven. He remembered the two in the living room, but he had only stood there for maybe all of a second, before he had dived away. The gunshots had been strange. The first few had sounded like thunder in his ears, but then the noise had flip-flopped. The guns went suddenly muffled, while the bullets that tore through the air all around him had become loud. They zipped past with the shriek of shredding canvas.

The priest spoke up in that very calm manner of his, "Talitha? Listen to me. You weren't here when these men died. Where were you?"

Her smile had faded away. "I don't know. One moment I was outside in the backyard and the next, I was in the nursery. But now, I'm starting to remember what happened."

"She shouldn't go near the bodies, Will," Father Vogel advised. "I'm worried the sight of them may spark a snap changeover. Talitha, the gap between your personalities is closing quicker than I thought it would. I don't have an explanation for it either."

A pounding in his head reminded Will that it still ached and he rubbed at his temples, "If that's the case Father, then I have to ask you a favor. Will you please move the bodies and all of the guns out to where that black car is parked? I would, but I have to keep an eye on Talitha."

The priest nodded easily. "That's not a problem."

Brother and sister waited in the master bedroom until the priest moved the corpse out of the nursery, and then they went to the spare bed there. Talitha seemed drawn to Lisa, she gently massaged the little bulge where the baby lay nestled, warm, and hopefully safe. Her eyes were deeply sad as if this was as close as she would ever get to a baby. He felt compelled to try to cheer her up.

"Just getting broodie?" Will asked.

A puzzled expression cleared her face of most of its worry. "Broodie? What's that?"

"Stop the presses. Talitha Jern doesn't know a word? Oh, you have no idea how badly I want to tell you to go look it up!" Will exclaimed. "But since from personal experience I know that can be terribly annoying, I'll answer your question instead. It's Australian slang. When a woman sees a baby, or another pregnant woman she sometimes gets that hankering for a baby of her own. That's being broodie."

Talitha snorted, a noise somewhere between contempt and amusement. "First, there's no such thing as a dictionary of Australian slang, so it would be impossible for me to look it up. And second... I'm not broodie, I'm jealous. It feels like I've been cursed. Like my entire life has been one long demented joke, and I'm jealous of this baby. She has a future."

"We hope."

Talitha put her ear to the bulge, but spoke to Will, "You could find out. Without the little charm, you could look into her future; maybe you'll see something hopeful."

"Or maybe I'll see something horrible," his voice cracked as terrifying images of his own making flashed into his mind. His imagination was too good sometimes. "That's why I'm not jumping at the chance. I'm afraid Lisa's future will be as empty as her past day has been."

"That's no excuse," Talitha admonished. "If you rely on me or what little the bishop can do, your wife and child may pay the price for your cowardliness. There could be something that will point us in the right direction."

Will cast his eyes to the floor and studied it for a long time. "I know." He sighed huge and then looked up at his sister. "Five minutes, no more, if her future is horrible I don't want to be there any longer than I have to." She nodded and he cracked a crooked, nervous smile. "Ok, here we go..."

Will heard a voice that sounded like his own say, "You're having a contraction."

"Oh really? I didn't know." Lisa's face was very white and was lined with a grimace of pain. Her mass of blonde curls was tied up in a great blob sitting on top of her head and she wore such a garishly flowered gown that he wondered briefly if they were in Hawaii. They were in a single occupancy hospital room; its walls were two-tone, pink on top, blue on the bottom. They were alone.

It was an odd feeling being alone. Where was everyone? Shouldn't his parents be here? And what about Talitha? There wasn't even a doctor present. At the very least he had expected a smattering of nurses buzzing around like worker bees. But they were very much alone. Except that is for the technical looking machinery hemming-in the bed and a vase full of newly bought flowers from which pink balloons struggled to get away.

There should have been more flowers.

The contraction had been brief and when it was over, Lisa picked up the magazine that sat in her lap. The cove: a glossy picture of some young starlet shown out at him. He felt his eyes roll.

Will's lips moved, "Would you like some ice?" He hadn't meant to say it, nor had even thought it, but out came the words nonetheless. Will was along for the ride in his own body and had no control of what it did.

"No thank you," she sounded bored and Will didn't blame her. Even riding shotgun in his own body, Will was bored. He supposed that to be good thing. People in fear or danger were rarely this bored. How long had they been there? It felt like hours.

Now Will looked down at a line of paper spilling from one of the machines. He didn't want to do this, but had no choice. What he really wanted to do was get a better look at his wife, to see if she had any scars or bruising, yet his stupid self of the future only stood staring at the procession of paper. After thirty seconds or so, a running blue line on the paper edged upwards. Next to him, Lisa gasped.

"You're having another contraction," he said in a pleasant conversational tone. Will wanted to smack his future self.

"Thank God you're here to tell me these things," Lisa said in between her panting.

Will felt a sudden spin and the scene changed, but not terribly so. The walls of the hospital room faded to white and now Lisa was asleep. The machinery all looked the same, they beeped and hummed as they had before. There were other smaller changes, the flowers for instance had been moved and were no longer in his vision.

In fact, his future self wasn't in the room. The room was empty save for the girl sleeping in the bed. For a long time he watched her, having no capacity to do aught else and in all that time she didn't budge, but slept as the dead. The sun went down and the room grew dark, but that was for seconds only and then the sun was up again.

The blurred ghost like shape of people sped in and out and then it was dark again and still Lisa slept. The light came once more and then disappeared. This repeated itself, faster and faster so that it appeared as if a naughty boy was playing with a light switch. But then it went too fast even for that and soon the light stayed a steady grey. And still Lisa slept.

Her hair grew and a second later, it was shorn practically all away. In seconds it grew again and eventually, like the light, her hair seemed to stay in a halfway stage. However, he knew that it wasn't, he was seeing a year fly by in seconds.

It took a while, but eventually Lisa aged. Her beautiful golden hair turned grey and then white, while her face sank in so that her teeth grew more pronounced.

And then she was dead.

Light flashed brilliant and it stung to see, but Will couldn't blink away and was forced to watch in pain as Lisa's coffin was lowered into the ground. No one stood nearby and no flowers were anywhere in evidence. The view became only an intense black and the only sense that accompanied this was a rushing crackling sound. Then he was alone in the darkness. Lisa had decomposed and was gone.

The utter darkness now became familiar. It was a cold, cold darkness. He was in the Void and he was all alone.

"No!" The word tore from his throat as soon as Talitha shook him out of his trance.

"Are you ok?" she asked, her brown eyes were very large in her face.

Will hopped up without answering, and at first paced the small room, but in seconds, it didn't feel big enough. He hurried downstairs and surprised Father Vogel who was carrying a roll of paper-towels. Will didn't say a word to the priest, but left the living room in a rush, heading for the kitchen.

"Will? What's going to happen?" Talitha called out from somewhere behind.

"I don't know. All I saw were the outcomes for Lisa." The second outcome, where she stayed forever in that unnatural coma hurt his mind to dwell upon.

"There was more than one? Will, come on you have to tell us. We're a part of this too," Talitha swept into the kitchen and then stopped dead, her eyes darting around. She was seeing her past, the memory of how she had killed the Mexican, it gave her a shudder. She came to the table and picked up a pair of scissors that were lying there. Will snatched them from her.

"Sorry," she said with a little embarrassed shrug.

Father Vogel hurried. "You looked into the future?" There was a long unstated, aaannd?

Will told them. Viewing the first part of the vision had been only odd, but re-telling it was uncomfortable in the extreme. Talitha had been painfully absent and he didn't leave that part out. She sat spinning a roll of masking tape appearing nervous and sad at once. The second part of the vision was even worse, since it was very likely in that future, none of the three would live.

"I'm sorry," Will said as a way of finishing.

"You're sorry!" Talitha suddenly seethed with volcanic anger. She threw the roll of tape at his face as hard as she could and though Will managed to block it, his left forearm went numb from the elbow down. "Is that all you have to say? You're sorry? Well sorry doesn't count for shit. What's going to happen to me? Huh? Look into the future and see. Right now."

"That would do you no good, Talitha," Vogel reasoned. "Clearly the future isn't set and by looking into it and seeing your death, you automatically invalidate the vision."

"That's the fucking point!"

The priest remained amazingly calm. "Your death is going to be a surprise no matter what you do. If you invalidate this vision, you're still going to die eventually and who knows, it could be in a much more painful manner. And for certain it will be for a far less noble cause."

"Who gives a rat's ass about noble?" Talitha replied.

"Talitha I want you to know that..." Will started to speak, but had to stop in midsentence. "I was going to say that if I could, I'd die in your place, however I can't say that with any honesty right now." Her brown eyes flashed dangerously, yet he continued, "Why should I? You keep telling me you're doomed to go to hell, why should I risk everything to keep you from hell for a few more years?"

"I told you that you wouldn't understand."

"Oh, I understand. It's because you're afraid," Will answered back in a loud voice. "Everyone else is afraid of the Void, but you're afraid of heaven. It doesn't make sense."

"It's your fault that I'm not going!" At first she seemed all in a rage, but suddenly she looked desperate. "I can't talk about this right now, the stranger is right here with me. I can feel her, it's like she's looking over my shoulder."

Vogel looked sidelong at Will, "Do something, tell her a story."

"You tell her a story, I can't think of any." Will's mind had gone suddenly blank. All that occupied him was the fact that he had left a gun sitting by the bed where Lisa lay asleep and Talitha had an eight foot head start in that direction.

Vogel nudged him and Will shrugged. The priest put on a fake smile. "Will, you should tell her why you've been lying to her all these years. You told her the story of that big dog, but you told a rather large lie in it."

"What?" Unbeknownst to him, Will wore an embarrassed smile.

"You're a terrible liar, Will. But please don't be offended, that's a good thing. People who are accustomed to lying, or who are morally ok with it, are the best liars. The way you lied, it seemed like a very rare thing."

Talitha eyed the men in a strange manner and Will saw the back in forth in her eyes as the two personalities balanced each other out. He had lied, but since Talitha had never known, he didn't know if this was in fact the best way to get her on the right track.

"What did you lie about?" Talitha asked with narrowed eyes.

"It was nothing, really. I didn't cut my foot on glass like I said. That was it, that's all," Will answered.

"Talitha, how did he cut his foot?" Vogel inquired.

"Duh, he just told us this story," Talitha replied rudely. "He cut it on some glass."

"But he also just admitted to lying," Father Vogel answered. "Think back. Do you remember the glass?" Talitha furrowed her brows trying to remember and Vogel continued, "Was it green glass, like so many bottles were made out of back then? Was it clear like the glass from a window? Did you step on any of it? He said he came up right behind you. Why weren't you cut as well?"

"No, I don't remember the glass, but I'm sure there was some there." Talitha's eyes darted back forth scanning the table, scanning her memory. "We had just got away from Nancy when I noticed him crying and he was limping and there was all this blood. It looked like his foot had on a shiny red sock... wait, did Nancy bite you?"

"Yeah, but I didn't tell you because I didn't want you to feel bad. I didn't want you to think it was your fault or something."

"But it was my fault. I walked into the ring of death like an idiot and you saved me. And then when I went berserk and knocked you over, I remember you pushing me on." She began to pace, frowning as she did. "You were attacked by the dog so I wouldn't be. Is that right?" He nodded and she went on, "And you did it again with the demon. You risked your life for me. And also with the dreams. You did that for me."

For some reason, she seemed angry over this and out of the blue, slammed her fist into the refrigerator, denting it badly, and showering the floor with pictures and magnets. "That's it, Will. No more. You can't save me anymore." When he started to protest, she held up her hand. "The other Talitha is gone for right now and I don't want her back just yet, so listen. Why I'm going to the Void when I die is my affair. You'll never know the reason, let alone understand it. That being said, no more. You were correct before, I'm a lost cause, so please don't try to save me. I am doomed."

With her face set, Talitha stalked out of the room. "I need a drink. You guys want one?"

"I wish, but we don't keep alcohol here," Will replied. "Remember Lisa's mom was a raging alcoholic?" He tossed the scissors down on the table, where they clanked heavily and came to rest open like a hungry alligator. Inside him, the urge to have a drink rose up demanding.

Talitha popped her head back into the kitchen, she wore an odd expression. "I don't want to be a snitch, but Lisa has vodka here. Somewhere. Down the hall, I think."

Why this was so important considering everything they were facing, he didn't know, yet still he got up quick. "Show me."

Giving the air a light sniff, Talitha went to a little used closet that sat just off the den and opened the door. As she did, a red Christmas ball in a suicidal mood, leapt off a shelf and would have dashed itself to pieces on the hardwood floor below, but Talitha caught it neatly. She nestled it with a jumble of other ornaments, which sat on the tidy stacks of brown cardboard boxes that held their ever-growing number of holiday decorations.

She fished out a bottle of Smirnoff from behind the boxes and held it out to Will. "This isn't a good sign."

It certainly wasn't. Will took the bottle and sighed, feeling that he had let his wife down in some way. A fully formed image came to him: Lisa sitting at the kitchen table alone on a Saturday night. She poured an exact amount of the vodka into one of their kitchen glasses. He knew that amount never varied. Next, she added orange juice and then in defiance of reason, she put the ice in last. Drops of orange juice and vodka leapt over the edge of the glass and landed on the table, causing little lines to crease her forehead.

She got up and wiped the few drops with a dishrag and then, neat as always, she rinsed out the rag and set it to dry. Only then did she start to drink.

"This isn't like her," Will said mostly to himself.

"And neither is this," Talitha added pointing to the closet.

Will glanced up from the bottle and looked in. "What? That's how it always looks."

"Actually it isn't," his sister replied picking up one of the Christmas ornaments. It was a small gold bell that tinkled in her hand. "There's not a stray mote of dust on any of these. This little pile was in a box not too long ago."

She said it with some importance, but Will was missing what that could possibly be and she looked up at the ceiling in exasperation. "Do I need to spell it out for you? A box is missing. There is tape and scissors sitting out in the kitchen..."

Finally, it clicked. "You think she mailed the sword somewhere?"

"Yes, hold on." Talitha sniffed at the air, "She still uses Maybelline?" Before Will could respond, Talitha was moving down the hall toward the kitchen she went directly to the door and there next to it on a peg was his wife's purse. Talitha dug through it for a moment. "She went to UPS yesterday and spent forty-eight dollars. What's UPS?"

"United Parcel Service," Will replied in excitement. "It's a delivery company. And the fact that she spent forty-eight dollars means that she had the sword sent over night."

Father Vogel had trailed along after the brother and sister in silence, but now he spoke up, "Does the receipt say where she sent it?"

"No," Talitha replied, but it didn't have too.

Chapter 15

Amy

On the wall, a phone began to ring.

"Don't answer that," Amy ordered. One of her thugs had reached his hand out for it. She couldn't remember this one's name. But to be honest, she could barely remember any of their names except for Pedro and the one who called himself Diablo. "We'll let the answering machine get it. You do have an answering machine right?"

The couple in front of her nodded as one. They were older than she had expected, especially the man. William Jern looked terrible, like he had a disease or something. He was dreadfully skinny and his hair which eight years ago had been blonde was now completely grey as well as sparse. His cheeks were hollow and thick dark bags sat puffy under his blue eyes.

Gayle Jern, whom Amy couldn't help but think of as Mrs. Jern was better off. Her hair was still a thick rich brown, dappled only slightly by grey and her skin was a wonderful deep tan. Only about the eyes did her years stack up on her. They were enmeshed in wrinkles and lines that bespoke of the long burden of worry and now fear only added its weight. She looked about to cry.

And that was too bad for her.

Not that Amy was uncaring or unsympathetic, but if she couldn't get that gate open for Ba'al, she was looking at a long stretch, an eternity in the Void. And that scared her badly. Right there, sitting in the Jern's living room she felt her insides thrumming with nervousness. She had looked into the Void on too many occasions not to be properly afraid.

The phone rang a second time and involuntarily she checked her watch. It was just after three. Nine hours left. Nine hours to fulfill a promise. The phone shrilled again. It made the silence on either ends of the ring uncomfortable and everyone, including the bored looking Mexican thugs wanted to answer the thing. After the fifth, the machine picked up and the room waited in mute expectation, but the caller hung up.

"Where were we?" Amy leaned back relaxing. The phone call had bothered her. It had seemed almost too coincidental that it would start ringing so soon after she had entered the home. It had only been four minutes since her thugs had slipped into the unlocked ranch style home from three directions and found the Jerns sitting quietly in their kitchen. "Oh, yes. You were going to tell me when Katie will be coming home."

"Actually, we weren't. That was an incorrect assumption on your part," William replied.

He was wonderfully calm, and had steel in his eyes. Amy could appreciate this and truly wished her own father had been half the man William Jern was. And that steel should have been enough to stop her own mother from going after Talitha. That had been mistake number one. Instead, her mother should've gone after Lisa. No one would have cared, much less put their life on the line for her. Lisa's mother was a drunk and her father was always away. It would've been a snap, a piece of cake, but that was water eight years under the bridge now.

"Mr. Jern, I only ask because I don't want her walking in here and accidentally surprising one of my men. Look at them. They appear to me a little trigger happy, don't you think?"

They actually looked like a bunch of iguanas basking lazily in the sun. There were six men in the room lounging about the furniture or leaning against the walls and she had to fight the urge to scream at them to stand up straight. Amy hated their slovenly appearance, their poor manners, and most of all, she hated the fact that none could speak passable English. Yet for all that, they were dangerous and fulfilled a purpose.

"She's running track. She'll be home at half past five," William stated, keeping his eyes hard on Amy's face.

"See? That wasn't so difficult," Amy smiled, despite that William's words added to her anxiety. She had hoped the girl would be along sooner, too many things could happen in the next two and half hours. Even a simple thing like a neighbor stopping by for a visit could start a chain reaction that could unravel everything, and she was simply out of time for any new plans.

It would have to be the sword. There was an opening on it somewhere and it was possible to expand it large enough to allow Ba'al to be set loose. Amy just wasn't sure exactly how, though she had an idea. Her mother had been killed by it and her soul sucked directly through it into the Void. Likely, the more souls that passed through the opening, the bigger it would get.

Erosion on a metaphysical, level so to speak.

Amy got up and paced about, trying to release some of the stress building in her. She wasn't really a killer; always, if she could, she had someone else do any actual killing that was needed. But in this case, she was pretty certain that she alone would have to do it. The thought made her neck ache and she rolled her head back and forth trying to relieve it.

A picture on a credenza caught her attention and she walked over to it. At first, Amy thought it was a picture of her mother Henny Harris, but on closer examination, she saw that it was actually a young looking Gayle Jern. Although her mother had darker hair and more up top in the breast department, the two women could have passed as sisters. Amy laid the picture face down.

"I like your home, Gayle." It was nice. It was styled as a sizeable 'T' shaped ranch and had long halls and tall ceilings. The main living area, the kitchen, living room, and dining room were separated by short three-foot high walls, which made the area look larger than it was. All the rooms were fashionably decorated and the floors were covered in white wall-to-wall carpeting. Too bad for the carpet, Amy thought. It was about to be ruined.

"You have what you came for," Gayle pointed, without raising her arm, toward the brown box a few feet away. "Take that horrible thing and go," it came out as a whimper.

Amy sauntered back toward them and tried to smile, but failed, her stress was too great. "I'll do as I please...Gayle." She had almost called her Mrs. Jern, which would've been laughable at the moment. "Have either of you touched it?"

"Not today," William answered. "But I did eight years ago."

Amy eyed the man closer. Was this what happened to a person who touched it? The idea made her nervous. "What about you, Gayle? Did you touch it?"

Gayle shook her head. "No, never. Amy, please don't do this. You could tie us up and cut the phone lines and..."

Amy rolled her eyes, interrupting, "Pedro, have your boys tie them up. Thanks Gayle. That was a good idea. Do you have any more?" When Gayle only put her head down, Amy smiled for real. "Good. Make sure those are tight," she said to one of the men who had come forward. Was it...Pablo? She couldn't remember.

As he tied the couple up, Amy took a hold of the box. She sat herself on the glass coffee table in front of William Jern and stared at the ugly broken blade. Despite the fact that it looked like it had just been pulled from a fire, it emanated cold as if it was an open freezer door.

"I wouldn't touch it I was you," William warned.

Amy did anyway. "Uhg!" She had just put out a finger and barely made contact, but a ghastly sick feeling had run up her arm. "That's horrible. You killed my mother with that?"

"I didn't, but I would have," William answered right back. "Your mom was a sadistic evil person and she deserved everything that she got."

"Blah, blah, bah. Gag them both." Amy got up and walked away. She didn't want to see their pathetic struggles or hear any of their whining and she wished again that Katie were here. The virgin method for opening a gate was far less messy; a little blood, some hell-bred runes, a rather short incantation, and then step back.

But she couldn't wait. Teenagers were terribly flighty and it would be just her luck that today would be the day that Katie would decide to go to the mall, or stay late and chat up some high-school boy.

Breathing hard and with a face set in grim lines of determination, Amy came back to stand in front of the two; she would make this quick. "Close your eyes, Gayle. You don't want to see this." As she could have predicted Gayle didn't close her eyes but squirmed and wriggled ferociously. "Have it your way then."

William didn't budge an inch, but only stared at her with his hard blue eyes. It was slightly off-putting and because of that, Amy didn't draw the moment out any longer than she had too. With a quick move, she caught up the sword and made to stab him in the chest, however she hadn't counted on the horror of the blade. The quick touch she had given it before was nothing compared to actually grabbing it. The metal was nasty and unnatural and it was an effort to force her muscles to grip the handle and because of this, she made a weak fumbling attack.

Still, the blade drove deep into the left part of his rib cage, but to the side of the heart and low. It went in easy. Perhaps even eagerly.

Beneath his gag, William screamed. A second later, Amy screamed as well. She felt a sick vile suction drawing down her arm—something was pulling her in—drawing that part of her, the true essence of what it was to be Amy Harris out of her and into the blade.

Fear and pain drove her into a frenzy and like a wild animal, she bucked and yanked at her own arm. The hilt of the blade seemed frozen to her hand and if she had an axe, she would've hacked it off at the wrist. Time meant nothing. Only the loss of her soul had meaning.

But fortunately for her, William lost his soul first. She felt it rush down the blade, like a train on fire.

With a shriek, she was able to pull her hand away—back she fell, tripping over the glass coffee table and the sword went flying, clanging against a far wall, but she didn't hear. Her ears were filled with the echoing screams that had come tearing up the blade. There had been millions of them, maybe even billions. Amy Harris, who was at that moment the greatest witch on the planet rolled onto her stomach and cried.

Minutes passed this way, but at length her own sobbing and that of Gayle drowned out the fading echoes and she began to be aware of where she was. The room was cold.

"Someone turn off the fucking air conditioning," her voice was a hoarse rasp. No one moved. Except for Gayle that is. She had somehow wriggled next her husband and cried over him. His eyes were open and his mouth hung slack. He looked as if he had aged thirty years before he died. Amy tried to stand, but was too weak and so for a few minutes she knelt on the white carpet next to a spray of red and looked about blearily.

Her Mexican thugs, those, oh so tough gangbangers had backed away and to a man they no longer looked so sleepy. "Pedro, tell one of these morons to turn off the air conditioning before I get angry." She was very cold and had at some point commenced to shiver. Her words had some effect, a few of the men looked around for a wall mounted thermostat.

"Ms. Harris, I think the cold is coming from that." He pointed at the sword. It lay next to the wall that separated the living room from the family room.

"Oh, right. Then turn up the damn heat." After another minute Amy felt renewed slightly and was able to stand; it was only then that her men began to scurry about. She looked down at Gayle who still cried over her husband. It was a pitiful scene, but pity didn't touch Amy's heart, that was numb to everything save fear. She was afraid to touch the sword a second time. "Pedro, come close his eyes. I don't like the way he's staring at me."

The Mexican strode over and bent over the man.

Amy didn't watch. Instead, she went to the kitchen and found a dishtowel. In her heart, she knew that the thin veil of cloth wouldn't save her soul, only a better strike could do that; a quick clean kill. William had lingered as he had because her aim had been off, but she hoped that the towel would help a little, at least with the cold.

She wrapped it around her hand.

Still, she was afraid to touch the sword. The thing had tried to take her soul and just looking at it sent shivers down her spine. Yet she had no choice. Amy tottered toward the blade and hesitated above it, preparing herself.

"Fuck you bitch! I'm going to be waiting for you. When you get to hell, I'll be there and you better believe I'll be ready." Amy turned back at the poisoned words. Gayle's tears had loosened the tape about her mouth and it hung like a flap of skin from the side of her face. Their eyes locked and Gayle's hate was such a force that it caused Amy to pause. Still the pause was only for a second. On the line, it was either Gayle's soul or her own and thus there was little choice in the matter for Amy. She bent down for the sword. Her dreadful work was not over.

The phone rang.

Everyone in the house stopped what they were doing at the same time and froze. It rang again and Amy felt a sudden touch of worry. A third ring and Amy looked at Gayle. The older lady wore an expression of wonder and hope. After the fifth ring, the answering machine came on as before.

"Mom, dad? It's Will. Pick up the phone, it's an emergency. Hello? Hello? Please listen carefully. Lisa sent you a package in the mail. It should arrive today. Don't open it...do not open it. It's the sword, remember." There was a pause and Will could be heard breathing deeply. "There are people after it. You need to get Katie and leave. Don't bother calling the police they wouldn't understand and don't try to contact me. I'm heading your way with Talitha, but don't wait for us, we'll catch up to you. Disappear for a few days, use only cash and keep moving. Get in touch with Bishop Keenan from Boston. He'll be expecting your call. I love you. Bye."

"Ha! My boy is coming and he will get revenge," Gayle was in a lather of vindictive righteousness and shrieked the words loudly. "Revenge! You have no clue what you're up against. He has powers that you only can dream about, and Talitha! I hope he turns her loose on you. She's a monster. She's been to hell and back, she'll tear through these idiots like they were babies. She'll kill all of you." Gayle's usually warm brown eyes now blazed in her face.

Her raging speech had the impact of a small explosion. Amy's crew of thugs stepped back uneasily, eyeing each other with silent questions. They knew that Will was supposed to have been killed by now. Seconds went by in silence and then Pedro with a scowl on his fearsome face began barking out orders in Spanish. Whatever he said caused the men to nod subserviently to him; they left the room and went to the kitchen where they stood milling.

"What should we do?" Pedro had returned to the living room and stared down at the body of William as he spoke.

Amy needed time to think. "Post a man at every corner of the house. Call L.A. I want every one of your thugs here as fast as they can."

"What about the police? Won't her son call the police?" This was the first time Pedro had so openly questioned her, but she was in no real position to make it an issue. For one she was weak and still shaking from her ordeal and for two, her reserve of spells were not inexhaustible. There was only so much she could do. In fact, there was very little she could do. Her powers of witchcraft weren't like those from a movie. She couldn't shoot fire from her fingers or lightening from a wand. Her abilities were far more subtle and took time to prepare.

"If he told his parents not to call the police, why would he? No, I don't think he'll will, but I'm going to go find out for certain. Keep everyone quiet—including her." Amy pointed at Gayle.

Pedro nodded and left, going about muttering to the men in Spanish. Amy looked around for a second, feeling slightly shell-shocked.

Her day had begun with such promise. Back in Maine, Lisa's mind had opened easily to her and the memory from the day before of her boxing up the sword and mailing it out was strong and clear. The spell had taken less than half an hour. She had been giddy at the time and it wasn't only because she knew that the ghastly blade had been sent to Will's parents. It was because Amy Harris had completely forgotten about the youngest Jern, Katie.

At fourteen, Katie couldn't be anything but a virgin and the right kind of virgin as well. The church going, mind your parents, eat all your vegetables type that would be perfect for the spell to open the gate. All through the plane ride, the picture of the little blonde pain in the ass that Amy had known, wound through her mind, putting her in the best of moods.

And then as they pulled out of the city of Phoenix heading south and then west on route eight to what was questionably considered a suburb of another smaller city, they happened to catch up to a UPS van. Amy ordered Pedro to slow and fate seemed to be on their side because the van went straight and true in the very direction they were heading. They followed it right to the Jern's home and then parked discreetly well away until it left.

As it drove off, Amy had felt that happy giddy feeling grow. She would get the sword and a virgin.

Only, Katie wasn't there and the sword seemed horribly double-edged, biting the hand that would dare to wield it. Not only that, Will should've been dead and Talitha as well for that matter. Even Amy's petty revenge had been diluted by the upsetting gaze in William's dead eyes. They held her guilty even in death.

She wasn't feeling at all giddy now.

Her stomach ached. It was a sharp pain right in the pit. With a quick intake of air, Amy left the room with all the dignity she could muster and after getting her satchel, she went to an unused back bedroom. From inside her bag she brought out aromatic candles and her well-worn board.

After lighting the candles and placing them around the board, she began to force herself to relax, breathing in and out slowly, clearing her mind, thinking only about her focus. For her it was an orange. Her mind swept over every aspect of her imaginary orange. The dimpled rind, the endless loop of the navel curving in on itself. Where did it begin, where did it end? The dimples seemed tiny from far away, but up close, they were huge orange hills...

"Damn!" she cursed. Her mind wasn't letting go, as it should have. From her bag, she brought out a small bottle of amber liquid and drank straight from the lip. The rum was one-fifty-one and burned as it went down. She gasped and then took another swig and gasped again while her face screwed up into an unpleasant grimace. After a third swig she put the bottle away.

Placing her hands on the faded wooden planchette and with eyes closed she tried again. Once more, the orange filled her consciousness and every aspect of it, her mind dwelled upon until she saw the long tan fingers come and grasp it. Manicured nails slid beneath the outer skin and into the rind effortlessly.

"Would you like some?" The words came to her from out of a dream. It was a memory from long ago and the voice was that of her mother's. This was her focus. When the words came to her, she knew that she was ready.

"Mommy?"

The planchette dragged her fingers to one of the four words on the board, 'Yes.'

"Will Jern is still alive. He is coming to kill me. Will he bring the police?" Amy asked in a whispering monotone. She had to remain as serene as possible or her mother would become worked up and unreadable.

The planchette went to the word, 'No' and Amy felt relief drain the tension from her shoulders, but then the planchette began to move quickly, sliding from letter to letter with barely a pause. 'WARRIORS OF GOD'

It was with difficulty that she kept her calm and as much as she wanted another shot of rum Amy kept her fingers on the little wooden pointer.

"Do they have special powers?"

'NO HUMAN'

This was a problem communicating in this fashion. Did her mother mean that the warriors were not human? Or did she mean that the warriors were human with no special powers. Amy would have to reword the question, carefully. Even more than when she had been alive, her mother hated to repeat herself.

"Are they super-human in any way?" It was all she could come up with.

The pointer slipped to the word 'No'. That was something at least.

"How many are coming?" Across the bottom of the board were a line of numbers and the planchette went first to the six and then to the seven.

"Sixty-seven!" It had been more of an exclamation than a rhetorical question, but her mother took it as neither and the pointer went to the 'No' and then back to the six and then to the seven.

So she didn't know the exact number. This was a little odd. Normally she either knew something or didn't, there wasn't a middle ground. But did it matter? Really? It was just after three in the afternoon now and L.A. was so close that she figured that she would have a total of seventeen of her thugs in Phoenix by six pm—way before Will and his little posse could ever hope to arrive. She hoped.

"When will they arrive?" Amy asked. The pointer went to the seven and wiggled back and forth between it and the eight. That seemed oddly quick. Amy did a quick calculation and surmised that it was faster than her flight had been by at least an hour. Still it was plenty of time. But enough time for what? She could kill Gayle at any moment she pleased with the Hell blade, only she realized that she didn't want to.

It was so horrible, that she would force herself to wait on little Katie Jern.

"Is a proper virgin coming here today? One that can open the gate?" The pause for the answer was no longer than normal, but Amy held her breath afraid of the answer.

'Yes' the pointer was right on the word. Amy sagged and blew out her pent up breath.

Only two more questions remained: "Is Talitha Jern dead?" This had been nagging in her mind since the morning.

'Yes' the planchette wiggled, but didn't come off the word. For some reason Amy suddenly doubted her mother. Where or even how the soul of Henny Harris came by her knowledge, Amy hadn't a clue, but she had never been wrong. Many times Amy's mother didn't know an answer to a question, but if she ever gave an answer, it would be correct.

Yet on this, Amy worried that she was wrong. "Will Jern says he is bringing Talitha here, tonight. Is he?"

'CANT '

"Will J..." Amy nearly pulled her fingers off the planchette by accident. It started moving almost as soon as she began speaking.

'HER SOUL IS IN THE VOID'

This was a shock. Miss goody-two-shoes in hell. It was hard to believe. "You've seen her?" The skepticism came out strongly in Amy's voice, yet her mother didn't notice.

'Yes'

That was another shock, there were too many souls in hell for that to be a coincidence. Something odd was happening down there and before she broke the connection, she tried to find out what it was. Unfortunately for Amy, her mother was reluctant or unable to discuss it and she couldn't pursue the issue too far. She had to prepare another spell.

Thirty minutes later Amy checked her make-up and sent a brush through her thick brown hair. She never looked better. And she felt good too. The pain in her stomach had subsided and the weak feeling that had come over her after killing William Jern would be gone in a minute.

"Pedro!" she yelled as soon as she stepped out of the guest bedroom. He slouched toward her with an air of insolence. A number of his men loitered around the kitchen eating the Jern's food and watching her. They seemed to be expecting something of a show and Amy didn't blame them in the least.

They had seen her at her weakest. Screaming, acting like a feeble pathetic girl, letting a bound woman shame her. The men mocked her with their eyes. There were seven of them including Pedro, which meant that only two were actually standing in vigilance, keeping an eye out for the coming virgin. That was about to change.

"Are the cops coming?" Pedro asked without the slightest sign of respect.

Amy smiled and her white teeth flashed as she walked past him toward the kitchen. It was funny to her that so little a thing as ignoring Pedro, their leader, would make such a change in the men. Each of them sat up a little straighter and all were suddenly more alert. Good. She wanted their undivided attention.

She turned back to Pedro.

He had seen a demonstration of her power on only two occasions and it was obvious he needed to see another. It must have shown in her eyes, because he suddenly seemed a slight bit more nervous.

"I only asked cause we need to think about, ya know, gettin outta here."

"But you didn't ask me nicely," she said still smiling. "Where was the ma'am? Where was the Ms Harris? Where were your manners?"

"Sorry, ma'am." His eyes were a straight up mix of fear and fury. He was being made to look bad in front of his men.

She casually put a hand on his chest. It seemed sexual the way she did it, like it was a caress. "That's ok, Pedro. As long as you learn your lesson. Enoi-aya Findronose," she said soft and far from dramatically.

Pedro's hooded eyes shot up and his face registered a torturous shock. His strength drained out of him and flowed into Amy, so that all her previous weakness was forgotten. For a span of seconds, he shook in place and his great bulk seemed to be held up by the slim elegant arm of Amy Harris. In a moment, however, she pulled her arm back and he slithered to the floor in a state of semi-consciousness.

A very obvious stain spread out from his crotch and an unpleasant smell filled the room.

"Oh my!" Amy exclaimed waving her hand in front of her face. The thugs who had been eyeing her with impertinence only moments before scrambled out of the way, as she went to a closet and took from within it a broom. Bare handed she snapped it in half. She took it back to Pedro and smashed him in the face with it a number of times, careful not to damage him too badly. He would still be needed.

"Diablo," she crooned softly. The man who called himself Diablo hurried forward and it was good to see that his usual smirk was not twisting his thin black goatee. His attire was as always, black. Black jeans and a t-shirt hugged his blade thin frame. In his eyes, he had a spark more intelligence than the rest of the goons but he also had the black smoke of insanity rising there as well. He liked to hurt people.

"Yes, Miss?"

Amy's lip curled at his accent. Miss came out meese. She jerked her head at the limp moaning man at her feet. "Get two men to clean him up. The rest I want watching out for the girl. There are pictures all around this place in case these morons don't know who to look for."

"Yes, Miss."

Men fell over themselves to do as she ordered. Thankful for a reason to get out of the stinking kitchen, Amy walked with purposeful casualness to the living room. The blade still lay against the wall where it had been thrown, she turned her back on it, knowing that she would have to pick it up eventually. Just not yet.

Gayle Jern was uncomfortably cuddled up to her husband's body, looking as if she were trying to protect him. The sight annoyed Amy. It was just so truly pathetic. What good did Gayle think she could do with her hands tied behind her back? The only positive that she could garner from the scene was that somebody had shut William's eyes.

"Diablo! Get someone to move this corpse. Gayle, where do you keep the sheets?"

"No," Mrs. Jern whispered harshly and shook her head pushing herself further onto her husband. Diablo came up, looking sidelong at the sword as if he feared to take his eyes from it.

"Gayle, please." Amy felt a surge of anger at someone telling her no, but she attempted to be compassionate. "Your daughter will be home soon. I doubt that you want her to see her father this way. We need to move the corpse."

"Eh, maim, theese penejo ain't daid." Diablo pointed at William shaking his head. It took Amy a moment to figure out what the man was saying.

"What? Not dead? Is that what you said?"

"Si."

"Uhg! This is fuckin America! When you're in this country, you say yes, not si." She shook her head in anger and then turned toward William.

"Don't touch him, please," Gayle whined.

"Oh shut up." Amy no longer felt the least bit charitable. She leaned over the cringing form of Gayle Jern and felt William's neck. His skin was only cool to the touch and not cold as she had expected and what's more, there was a light thumping beneath the man's scrawny chest. This was a puzzle.

William Jern no longer had a soul, least ways not in his body. It was in the Void somewhere—yet the man's body still lived. Amy went to pry open one of his eyes but Gayle interceded with her head, thrusting it in the way.

"Please no. Let him be," she begged. Her eyes were beet red, but they seemed incapable of putting forth any more tears.

Amy shoved her roughly away, ignoring the older lady's bleating. One of Amy's spells, the most horrid one she possessed came to mind as she looked upon the body of the man. The spell was dreadful, even more so than the Vile Gate, which brought forth the demon. Its name Mancipium Donec Nex, meant nothing to her since she didn't speak a lick of Latin, but what did matter were the very gruesome effects it produced in its victim.

The person's soul was sacrificed to a demon and in return, the gypsy who cast the spell would be able, for a time, to control the victim who would go on in a semi state of life. They became a ghoulish nightmare that was in effect, indestructible, and due to their inhuman strength, basically unstoppable.

It had been the very spell that had persuaded Pedro that she was the real deal when it came to witchcraft. She had chosen a rival gang member and sucked the life out of him with the spell. The demonstration had fulfilled its purpose, but it had also left a nasty taste in her mouth for dealing with the undead.

And now here was William Jern alive without a soul. What could she make of that?

"William, open your eyes." She spoke clear and loud, but his eyes remained closed. Amy tried again louder, "William Jern! Open your eyes!" Nothing happened.

Gayle wiggled to her knees again, "What did you do to him?"

Amy turned away, not wanting to deal with the woman. She was trying to figure out how to turn this to her advantage. One of the problems with the Mancipium spell was its relatively short duration. The gangbanger had started off as practically invincible, but over an hour-long period it had wound down, slowly losing its energy, until it finally just fell over and ceased to function.

It was for this reason that she was so interested in William. He'd been stabbed over an hour previous, yet he still looked fresh. Sort of.

"What did you do to him? You have to tell me," Gayle whined.

Amy was tired and more than a bit cranky. She snapped her fingers at Diablo, "Shut her up."

It wasn't a very specific order. Diablo grabbed the middle-aged woman and began slapping her across the face. Tied up, Gayle could do nothing and her eyes bulged and her screams split the air.

"Stop it, you idiot! I said stop," Amy commanded advancing on the man. Diablo backed away, letting Gayle flop to the carpet where she rolled into a ball and began moaning. "Get the hell out of here. Go!" Amy was beside herself, enraged. She paced around Gayle for a few seconds, wondering at the stupidity of these idiot thugs. "Pedro, get your ass in here now."

Pedro was there in seconds, dripping water onto the carpet and wearing nothing but a towel. "Yes ma'am."

"Your men are fucking morons. If we lose the girl, I'm going to hold you personally responsible. Do you understand me?" The big Mexican paled considerably beneath his natural tan and he nodded with vigor. "Good. Now Katie could possibly show up at any time and we can't have her being warned off by people screaming in the house. Get dressed and then...then lay Mr. Jern on the couch and cover him with a blanket as if he were taking a nap. How's that Gayle? Is that good enough for you?"

The woman only wept, crying into the carpet. Amy shook her head, and looked back at the big man. "Get her up. Put her in one of the chairs so that she can't be seen from any of the windows. When you're done with that, I want you to go around to each of your men and instill in them the fear of fucking this up."

"Don't do it, Pedro," Gayle glared up suddenly. "If you do, you'll be dead by midnight. Run away instead. Take your men and run." Her words were spoken with such conviction that it sent a chill through Amy.

The witch stared down at Gayle. "One more word and the gag goes back on for good." Gayle clamped her mouth shut but the defiance was nestled in her eyes to stay. For just a moment, Amy wanted to bring Diablo back in and have him smack the defiance out of her, but instead she twisted around to gaze at Pedro, judging his loyalty. "Here's the deal. We're waiting solely on the girl. When she shows up, we snatch her and take off."

"Yes ma'am. Do we take the two of them?" He pointed at the Jerns. Amy didn't know. If everything went according to plans she wouldn't need them, but she couldn't exactly count on that happening.

"I think so. She's going to be my backup plan if all else fails. I think if the sword takes a few more souls, the gate will open. It's just I'd rather do it the good ole fashioned way. Now make sure someone stands guard on these two every single moment. I want your man right here on this goddamn love seat and if they take their eyes off of her for a second, I want you to shove their balls down their throat."

"Yes ma'am. May I make a suggestion? You should gag her right now."

Amy smirked. In truth, the only reason that Gayle wasn't gagged was that Amy felt sorry for her. How funny was that? She hoped to become the ultimate power on the planet and still she felt pity. She was being stupid. "Good idea. Gag her and make sure it stays this time. I'm going to be in the back bedroom. Let me know when the girl shows up."

She left Pedro, knowing that he'd do everything she had ordered, and slipped into the bedroom. The Ouija board was still out and Amy gave it a glance. Should she try to contact her mother to ask about William Jern? A great yawn erupted out of her as an answer. It made her eyes drip.

Spell casting was more taxing than she would've ever guessed, but the spell that she had laid on Pedro was one of the worst. She had drained his strength and fed it into her, yet now she was exhausted. The spell was similar to a drug, in that it brought her to a great high but almost as quick, it also sent her crashing down.

The witch was just too tired for the Ouija board, in fact she felt close to swooning. She went to the bed and within thirty seconds was sound asleep. It was deep refreshing dreamless sleep, one that her body needed.

A light knocking woke her and for a moment, she couldn't figure out where she was. The room was dark save for a single sputtering candle and this only coated everything in shadows, making her surroundings even more unrecognizable.

The knock came again and this time was accompanied by a fearful sounding voice, "Ma'am?"

Right. She was at the Jern's home. "Do we have the girl?" She got up and flicked on the overhead ceiling light.

"Not yet."

What? On her wrist, she wore an expensive gold watch. The time was ten minutes to six. Amy was out of the room in a flash. "Is everyone still in their positions? Did you check that they were keeping out of sight?"

"Yes, ma'am," Pedro sounded desperate to please. He had changed into what must have been a pair of William's sweat suits. Decked all in grey, he looked soft and far less imposing. "I woke you after checking each position. The men are all situated real good."

The pain that Amy had been feeling earlier stabbed again into her stomach, she rubbed it absently, looking back into the bedroom. "Maybe I should consult the spirits." She liked being mysterious by saying things such as, maybe I should consult the spirits. It just sounded better than saying I'm going to go ask my mom. But she changed her mind quick. "Show me where the men are positioned."

Pedro nodded and stood back from the door, not moving to show her as she asked. He knew better. Amy swept past him heading to the living room where William lay partially covered by a blanket and Gayle sat trussed up being watched over by Diablo. The older lady looked startled at Amy's sudden quiet appearance and froze statue like, sweat dripping off her brow.

Amy barely gave her or Diablo a glance and went toward the family room that opened off the living room. Behind her, she heard Gayle begin to grunt loudly. Amy ignored it. The family room was smaller and cozier than the living room. It had tall windows and a glass door that looked out upon a deck. The room itself was nicely furnished with two long matching leather couches oriented on a television. A fully stocked wet bar took up one corner of the room and large portraits of the family adorned the walls.

One of Pedro's men sat in one of the rooms big comfortable chairs facing out toward the deck. The man went by 'Jin' Amy recalled. "Anything moving out there?" she asked.

"Nah," Jin replied with a shake of his head. Behind her Pedro snapped his fingers and Jin straightened slightly. "I mean no ma'am."

The witch smiled inwardly at the man's attempt at manners and strolled past him staring out of the window at the beginnings of a very chilly dusk. Soon her men would be at a disadvantage—Katie being able to see in, better than they could see out.

"Jin, come stand just to the side of the window. Right here," Amy ordered. "Pedro, make sure all of the lights are off in the house except the master bedroom and maybe one of the bathrooms."

With that, she left, heading for the kitchen. Gayle kept her eyes down as she passed, making Amy smile again. "You there..." she pointed at a man in faded jeans. "Amador, don't sit right there. You're too obvious. Move around the counter."

Despite the fact Katie wasn't home yet, Amy felt good. She was rested, her stomach no longer hurt and she had actually remembered two of the Mexican's names. This was a small triumph for her. Both men hadn't been situated badly, it was just that as their leader, she felt it a good idea to bark out an order every once in a while to remind them of who was in charge.

After going through the kitchen to the garage and checking on the man there, his name eluded her, she went back to the living room and paused. Katie would be along soon. Any minute in fact, her own mother had told her so. Yet all the same, sudden disquiet fluttered her heart.

Heading toward the guest bedroom where her board still lay on the floor, she called over her shoulder, "Pedro, see that I'm not disturbed. I need to see what's keeping that damn girl."

At this, Gayle began to go crazy, bucking and squirming, as well as grunting beneath her gag as loud as she could. Amy stopped and glanced her way, wondering if it would be worth her while finding out what the ruckus was about. She decided against it, but just then a drop of sweat stung her eye. "Pedro, one more thing, turn down the heat. You're roasting..." It was hot. Way too hot.

Amy ran down the hall to the living room. The hell blade was no longer lying up against the wall as it had. "Where's my sword?" she screeched with her heart booming loudly in her chest. It had taken two seconds but she had gone from relaxed to almost literally panicked. "Who took my sword? Diablo, where the fuck is my sword? What did you do with it?"

Diablo had hopped up at the first of Amy's screams and now he backed away shaking his head holding out his hands in front of him, "I no know. I no know."

Pedro had heard the commotion from the kitchen and came running. "The sword? It was sitting right there, you know before." He pointed at the blank spot on the wall.

"Before what? Goddamn it! I want that sword back right now. Get all your men in here and make it fast." Pedro took off, hissing in Spanish, calling to them. Amy began to pace in a fury. "Whoever took it is going to pay! I am going to fucking kill whoever did this."

"Mmm...mmhm!" Gayle grunted. With a raging snarl, Amy turned to her, raising her hand to slap the tape off her mouth. However, Amy stopped with her hand raised. Gayle's eyes were smiling; she knew who had the sword.

"Diablo, let Mrs. Jern see your knife."

Chapter 16

Katie

At three twenty-six pm, the young blonde in the blue sweat suit looked back for a third time. Her eyes appeared bored and indifferent as if the long ride had dulled her senses as it had most of the other teens. It hadn't. She only pretended so. She sat near the front of the school bus as it bounced along the rutted roads and this was because, unlike most of America, Arizona was still hot even this deep into the school year. All the cool sophomores and some of the cute or personable freshmen who made up the in-crowd sat towards the front. The air condition was more effective there.

The nerds and the forgotten sweltered in the rear.

"It's so stinkin hot." Next to the blonde a rail thin brunette complained, "How can you stand to wear warm-ups when it's this hot out, Kate."

Unlike her brother's long ago failed transition from Willy J to Will, Katie had begun calling herself Kate, two months before on the first day of her high school career and through sheer willpower and blackmail her new name had stuck, at least at school it had.

"I'm fine. It's not even that hot, probably not even ninety degrees," she replied, seeing the sweat in Megan's hair. Since Katie's head was already turned she gave the back of the bus another glance, purposely maneuvering her eyes around Brad Tarleton's handsome face two rows back. He was, as always, trying to catch her eye and it was best if she just pretended that she hadn't noticed.

Brad claimed to love her and was practically a stalker these days. It was a lesson learned for Katie; if you wanted a little fun, don't have it with one of your neighbors. On a not so chance meeting during the last week before school had begun, the two had fooled around pretty good. Now Brad was always prowling around looking for more, but that wouldn't happen. He had served his purpose. Katie, despite being tall and beautiful, sporting a tan the color of warm honey, had never so much as kissed a boy before. Brad, on the other hand was considered a lady's man by all his friends and never denied—and probably started—the false rumors that he had gone all the way at least twice.

He seemed like the ideal boy for Katie's designs and she'd received the kiss she had wanted from him. It had been disappointing, clumsy, and amateurish. It was funny, despite her complete inexperience, she didn't blame herself in the least. She blamed his ill-deserved reputation. And that was a lesson as well.

Katie refused to meet his eyes. Instead, she stole a look at a raven-haired girl sitting along the bus' rear axle. The girl had a flat round face with wide spaced dark eyes, and these were currently locked onto Katie's ice blue ones. They stared at each other until the black haired girl looked away. When she did, Katie continued to stare, examining her. The girl had a reddish brown tan. That was good.

After a few seconds, she turned back to her friend. "That girl back there on the right. The one with the black hair and the white t-shirt, who is she?"

Megan looked back in her most casual and secretive manner, which wasn't very secretive. "Oh, she's new. Her name is like Dominguez, Gomlinglez, or something like that."

"Mexican?"

"Yeah, I think."

Katie dropped her voice low. "Does she have an accent? Does she sound like a Mexican?"

"Yeah, I guess. Why? What's up?" Megan gave her friend an inquisitive look and then dropped her voice to a level just below conspiratorial, "You got a problem with beaners?"

Katie's eyebrows went up, surprised by the question. She realized she must've allowed her undercurrent of suspiciousness to show. With an easy natural smile, she smoothed it away. "No, I don't have a problem with Mexicans. I was just curious as to who she was."

"Well I don't really know her at all," Megan replied wiping a trickle of sweat from her forehead with the sleeve of her pink Izog shirt. "She's in Cindy's homeroom, so she's a junior. Did I tell you that I caught Cindy wearing my jeans again? My Jordashe jeans that I just got for my birthday. She's got a job; you'd think that she could buy her own clothes instead of swiping mine and stretching them out with her big butt."

Megan went on talking for some time and Katie nodded her blonde head at all the correct pauses, but wasn't really listening. Her mind strayed briefly to the Mexican girl and decided she wasn't likely much of a threat and graded her a six. This wasn't about looks.

This was about Katie's obsession with evil.

After the time with the demon, Katie had carried on in her bubbly sweet fashion as if nothing had happened, and no one, not even her wonderfully brilliant father, knew any different. On the outside, she was the essence of sweetness, but on the inside she was cold steel. Those who knew her best, didn't know her at all.

She had seen the demon. She had felt its questing tendrils taste her and long for her in the most horrible way. She had looked into that black pit, the gateway to the Void—and the experience had matured in a way that couldn't have been duplicated. It had also warped her in the same way. The world had changed for Katie Jern.

Evil, once an ethereal, intangible concept had become for her very physically and spiritually real. At six-years-old, she had become obsessed with evil, and she strove to understand it. She knew that demons existed, but what about witches and vampires, ghosts and goblins, what about these? In secret, she read and learned all she could, including everything that had occurred and what was currently occurring with her family.

It hadn't been easy, and in order to learn all she had, it took listening at keyholes, reading private letters and skimming through doctor's reports. In the end, she had found out the truth.

Katie's mother was secretly convinced that their family was cursed. To her credit, Gayle had kept this secret buried deep, but Katie divined the truth. And from the very start, she had shared her mother's conviction.

They were cursed. How could it be called anything different? Her murderous sister had been driven insane. Her father was quite visibly dying, while her mother was dying as well, but just less noticeably. When William went, Gayle would go shortly after. And her brother, Willy J, with every visit he appeared to shrink, not physically, but spiritually. The dreams that he endured were corroding his very soul.

Oh yes. They were all good and cursed.

Yet everyone pretended otherwise. No one had ever spoken to her about the demon, nor had they mentioned Talitha's problems other than to say she was sick. The topic of her father's coming death was avoided altogether, as were the hell dreams. All of these subjects were strictly taboo. They were trying to protect her, to shelter her. They needn't have bothered.

In her mind, the truth would have been a better shield to defend her.

The bus braked in its usual jolting fashion and a number of kids got up and filed in solemn procession off of it. Brad Tarleton was among them. He gave her a wave and she gave him a smile, not wanting to be purposely rude, but it was also a small smile so as not to lead him on.

"You coming to the Dojo tonight?" Adam Gustafson asked as he passed by. He was a tall gangly sophomore and they took Taekwondo classes together. He loved her madly and had since she'd moved out to Arizona during the second grade.

Her homework load was light and though she had run four miles that morning she was up for another workout. "Yep, I'll see you there." There was no question that he was going. If she went then he went. He would accept a pummeling at her hands as if she were doling out kisses.

Like everything else in her life, her karate was fueled by her warped obsession and thus she was far from the ideal student. If her sensei hadn't needed the money, he likely would've kicked her out of the class after her first year. She barely took any time to learn the flowing ballet like Katas, or in fact any techniques that she felt would be suspect in a fight. These would include any of the fancy spin moves, where an odd landing could put her at a terrible disadvantage.

She went to the Dojo three times a week strictly for two reasons. The first was for heavy bag work, where she perfected her skills and tried to increase her speed and striking power. The second and more important reason that she went was for sparring, which was simply in essence, mock combat between two individuals. Because she frequently disregarded the 'mock' part of the combat, she wasn't allowed to spar with any of the other girls anymore. This was fine with her. At five feet eight inches and one hundred and thirty pounds, she was even too much for many of the boys to handle.

"I can't believe you let Adam sweat all over you every week," Megan whispered. "Gross, gross and more gross!"

Katie gave a little fake embarrassed shrug. "I suppose you're right, but he doesn't really have any friends and I don't want to mean."

"I say you need to start being mean."

The bus jerked away from the curb and Katie cast her eyes out of the window as she always did. The next stop was hers and the bus would pull up just about seventy yards from her driveway. Out of an ingrained vigilance, Katie kept her eyes out as her street approached.

"Cindy saw you running this morning. Isn't it way too early to get ready for track season?" Megan asked. Though the brunette was slim, it wasn't due to any exercise and she seemed to dislike that her best friend spent so much time at it.

"No, I only have five months to get ready," Katie had meant for this to be a bit of a joke, but her words fell flat out of her mouth. They were pulling up to her stop and instead of seeing her driveway empty as always, there were two long cars parked outside of her house and her attention was riveted on them. A man in black leaned up against the nearer of the two. He glanced up toward the bus and as he did, his hand went to his mouth, stayed for a second, and came back down to his side.

"Megan, can I get off at your stop?" Katie whispered with some urgency, slumping down in her seat. The man was smoking! Her mother would never have allowed that within five hundred yards of her home, not with the way her father had been feeling lately. There was something wrong. This time she was sure of it.

"Sure, why..."

"Mr. Jenkins? I'm getting off at Megan's stop, if you don't mind." Mr. Jenkins shrugged indifferently and pulled away even before he had a chance to stop.

"What's going on Katie?" Megan asked, eyeing her as if hoping for something juicy.

"Uh...uh, it's my grandmother," Katie lied. "She would freak out if...uh, she saw me dressed in sweats. She likes me in dresses and high heels."

"I can't say as I blame her, if I had your figure, I'd never wear sweats." Megan blew out in exasperation. "I can't wait till my boobs start to grow."

Now it was Katie's turn to be exasperated. The two of them had this conversation a dozen times already and she really wanted to focus instead on what she was going to do about whoever was at her house. It's probably nothing, she told herself. Aloud she said vaguely to Megan, "You only just turned fourteen. They'll come in, don't worry. Just look at your sister."

"How can I not? She parades around the house naked, showing them off."

Two minutes later, the bus began slowing down again and Katie motioned for her friend to get up, only she wouldn't and Katie, feeling deepening anxiety, stepped over her. "Sorry, I'll call you."

She was the first off and without ceremony she began jogging back the way the bus had come, her big freshman backpack smacking into her every second step. The land this close to the Sonoran desert was rugged and lonely and seemed comprised solely of dried out gullies, nasty choking scrub brush, and windswept hills. As soon as Katie crested the first of these hills, she tugged her backpack off, unzipped an inner pocket, and pulled out the four-inch jack knife she kept hidden in a nest of tampons.

She stashed the bag under a thick stand of scrub and took off in a loping run, thankful that Megan's bus stop was basically all uphill from her own. First, she ran along the lee side of the hill for about a quarter of a mile away from the road until she saw a good spot to head toward her house. Even from a mile away, the house was visible and obvious. It was the only one on this side of the road and looked like a lonely fort in the middle of Indian country.

As she closed on it, the land flattened somewhat and at moments the house was visible and at others, such as when she ran down into one of the many gullies and fissures torturing the landscape, it couldn't be seen at all. At about a hundred yards she slowed and began to use as much cover as nature could provide. A steep fissure ran to within twenty yards of the deck in their back yard and she used it to get as close as possible.

When she could go no further, she slowly peeked her head up, using an arrayed cactus as cover. There was a man, Hispanic by the look of him, framed in the glass of her family room window. For a moment, he stared out into the desert and then turned away. Katie had never seen him before. Her anxiety reached a new deeper level within her, seeming to sit smack dab in the middle of her chest.

She didn't know what to do. It was very possible that this man and the other one she'd seen had every right to be at her house. They could be friends of her parents. Or contractors of some sort, it wouldn't be the first time. But then again it wouldn't be the first time that she had over reacted and freaked out for nothing. Once she'd called the cops on a plumber. And another time she had been exactly two seconds away from getting caught snooping through the truck owned by their landscapers. They had hired someone new. Someone, who in her mind, had skin a little too light to be a proper landscaper.

To Katie, he had a sallow tint to him and that had been enough to brand him as gypsy. She hated and feared gypsies with a passion. But in that circumstance, the man was just getting over a case of jaundice and it turned out to be nothing. Yet as always, it was better safe than sorry. Only she had been sorry so many times that lately she had begun to worry that her obsession had turned into paranoia. Not the silly teen paranoia which was all about self-aggrandizement and the egocentric: everything is about me attitude. No, she worried about her actual mental state.

There were just so many more people in high-school and she had begun to see gypsies at every turn. By her second week, Katie had started keeping a list and rated every person in the school based on their threat level. Janitors, teachers, the football coach, all were on the list. Every kid that was new to her went into her book, but then she began to add old acquaintances from middle school. Kids that she thought she knew, but who now began to look different to her.

Even her best friend Megan was on the list and was rated as a two. After all, there was a chance that she could be coerced or blackmailed. But blackmailed into doing what? Whenever Katie could step back away from her obsession, she could see that it was unhealthy and getting worse, but she couldn't seem to stop herself.

It was a compulsion. The raven-haired girl on the bus, who had been rated as a six, would be unknowingly subject to a rather personal investigation. Discreet inquiries would be made as to where she lived, where she came from, who her family and friends were, and what her parents did for a living. Her knowledge of Spanish would be tested by Katie, who was fast becoming fluent. The rating of six wouldn't drop unless all the questions had been answered in a thorough and complete manner and then, if the girl was lucky, the rating would go to a four.

The men at the house, who had done nothing as far as Katie knew, had already subconsciously been rated as nines. It was a scary rating. Scary for Katie. Her mind was on the edge of paranoia and she knew, but pretended that she didn't, that if one of them made a false or sudden move while she was too close, she could very well bury her knife in his belly.

She looked down at the knife. The blade was out and shining at her. She folded it closed, not knowing when she had opened it.

"It's probably nothing," she whispered. Not for a second did she believe it and wouldn't until the men broke out saws and hammers and began building a cabinet or some such, and even then there would be doubts in her mind.

It was an obsession. And the obsession ran all the way down into her toes, so that as the man turned away from the window, Katie darted forward without even thinking. She sprinted for her house keeping her eyes locked on the man's back ready to dive to the ground if he so much as twitched in her direction. Her feet were quick and light, guided by her peripheral vision and she was at the deck in seconds, crouching low at first and then crawling along so that she was hidden by the patio furniture.

Her mind began exploring realistic sounding excuses as to why she was there just in case her mother came out, but then voices came to her from one of the open living room windows. She crawled closer.

A woman's voice came out with startling clarity, "Ugh! That's horrible. You killed my mother with that?"

Katie froze. The voice was known to her, but she couldn't place it just yet, especially since what had just been said was so bizarre and unexpected.

"I didn't, but I would have. Your mom was a sadistic evil person and she deserved everything that she got." That was her father and he sounded...strong. Even angry. To hear him like that, so much like his old self, settled the flame of fear that had been whisking about her insides. Whatever was going on, Katie knew that her father would take care of it.

"Gag them both."

The fear that had just been subsiding erupted again inside of her and now it was much greater. She had to know what was going on and she decided to poke her head up to see, but just then a different man went and stood by the glass door that led from the deck to the kitchen. The deck was a large square that took up the inner angle where two of the wings of the house came together. There were two doors that opened on to it, one to the kitchen and the other to the family room and she was trapped between the two, hidden only by a wicker couch and a barbeque grill.

She hunkered back down and began to tremble from head to toe. The realization struck her hard—her father wasn't suddenly going to take care of things like she thought.

The woman spoke again, "Close your eyes, Gayle. You don't want to see this." There was a pause and Katie's heart stopped beating. What didn't she want to see? What was going on?

"Have it your way then," the woman added.

A strange muffled roared, followed a second later by a woman's scream split the air. It went on and on and Katie began to whimper, tears dripping down her face. All her Taekwondo training was forgotten, as were her lists, her vigilance, and hyperawareness. She was no longer anything that she thought she had been. Gone was the woman on a mission who had prepared herself for the next attack on her family. In her place was a fourteen-year-old girl who above all wanted to run away.

Sobbing came now. It was her mother crying out in wretched misery. The sound was of the deepest grief and Katie knew what it meant, her father was dead. Now she began to cry in earnest as well, complete with great slobbery tears and a hitching chest, but she was afraid of being heard and in desperation she clamped her hand over her wet mouth. In a minute, she was able to control herself to a degree, but her mother wouldn't stop crying and it was a pain that went right to Katie's soul. So Katie took her hands from her mouth and covered her ears and closed her eyes.

There was nothing about this she wished to hear or to see. Mumbling got past her fingers yet still she cringed defying the brutishness of the world, letting her tears drain down her face in silence. But then the phone rang and its shrill noise penetrated into her awareness.

Hope flared at the sound and she removed her hands from her ears and waited. Everything seemed to wait; the house, the wind, even the insects enjoying the heat stopped what they were doing. Nature itself paused to hear who had called.

It was her brother, Willy J. In that brief phone call, he explained everything and now Katie knew who the woman was. It was Amy Harris and she was here for the sword. Katie's immature mind reeled, but then her mom started screaming about revenge, and about Talitha being a monster and Will's powers.

It seemed to light a fire under the people in the house but it didn't help Katie at all. Her mom was going to die, just as her father had and Katie would have no one. She would be alone, just as the desert.

Because of the awful screams, Katie guessed that Amy Harris had used the sword on her father and it wasn't something she wanted to hear a second time. She loved her mother dearly, however she feared anew for her sanity. If she heard her mother die in the same way as her father, she figured her mind would simply cave in on itself.

She had no choice but to make a run for it.

With slow, slow movements, she poked her head up, only to drop back down again. There was another man in the kitchen. A second later, there was a small thump almost above her—one of the Hispanics that she had seen earlier leaned against the window. Fortunately he was looking out at the tired view and not down.

She froze in place. For a very long time, over an hour, she laid there with the man above her. For some reason they hadn't killed her mother, which was a relief, however it was only a slight one since the men above her seemed to be settling in and Katie realized she would have a long wait beneath the wicker couch. Because of the angles of the windows, she felt relatively safe there, yet she knew that if anyone were to actually come out onto the deck she'd be in big trouble.

As she lay uncomfortably, she pondered all of what had happened and what she'd heard and guessed that the sword wasn't exactly what Amy had thought it would be. It was Amy's scream that had mingled with her father's—clearly it had hurt her in some way. Katie's reaction? She grinned with barred wolf teeth.

But if they weren't going to kill her mom, what were they waiting for? It seemed odd that they were hanging around, since they had the sword. It made no sense. Unless they were waiting for Willy J and Talitha. They'd be fools if they were. In the early days after the demon had come, Katie had seen what her sister could do. She had somehow grown cruel and monstrously strong. Talitha threw men twice her size around with ease and broke bones as if she were snapping twigs. Only Willy J seemed able to control her.

He could see into the future now. He could see all her punches coming and he was fast. Nobody seemed quicker. And he was big. So if they were waiting for her brother and sister, they were only waiting around to get their butts kicked.

Unless they had help coming. A thousand goose bumps tented upwards on Katie's skin. Perhaps they were going to bring the demon back. The girl feared the demon more than anything, more than any gypsy-witch, that was certain. The demon was in her every nightmare. It was the reason beneath her paranoia. And if they were going to bring the demon back, that meant they weren't waiting for Willy J or Talitha, hey were waiting for a virgin. They were waiting for her—Katie Jern

A movement in the kitchen caught her attention and she saw that for once no one stood looking out. Quickly she turned to see if there was anyone above her staring out of the living room window and that too seemed clear. To be on the safe side she rose and peeked into the room. There was a thuggish looking Mexican in the love seat, idling playing with a long knife, and on the couch her mom bound at the wrist and ankles lay across the dead body of her father. Tears sprang again to Katie's eyes, but she blinked them back.

Now was not the time to cry. Now was the time to be strong, as strong as she could be. Amy and her foul gang were waiting on a helpless, innocent, little girl and if Katie wanted to save her mother she would have to be anything but helpless, or innocent for that matter.

She made to duck back down, only at that moment, she saw the sword. It lay as if forgotten against the wall next to doorway of the family room.

How very strange that it was just sitting there. The thug who sat in the love seat turned slightly and gave it a queer look. He acted as if the sword would jump up and stab him on its own. Katie realized that the man was definitely afraid of it and since no one else had picked it up, she guessed that they all were. A smirk enveloped her face at their cowardice. Her brother wasn't afraid. He had possessed that blade for something close to four years and yet he didn't shy away from it.

Their fear of the thing gave her a touch of courage and Katie began slithering backwards beneath the couch. Her plan was to crawl away and then call the police from their nearest neighbor, the Tremens, who lived just about a half mile away on the other side of the road. But unfortunately, just as she came abreast of the family room door someone strode into the kitchen. It was Amy Harris.

The newfound courage in Katie turned into a fire of hatred, burning her insides. Amy's back was to her and just then, Katie could have wormed her way off the porch and fled, but she didn't. Eight years ago, her father hadn't run away, nor had her mother. They had saved her.

"Pedro!" Amy called.

At this, there was a general movement toward the kitchen by all of the men and Katie saw that the family room was left unguarded. Without hesitation, she reached up a sly hand and pulled the door open toward her and slipped in. She crawled low so as not to be seen by the group in the kitchen and went to the three-foot wall that separated the living room from the family room.

"Are the cops coming?" one of the men, likely Pedro, asked. His tone bordered on insulting.

The words seemed very loud to Katie and they stopped her just as she was about to take a glimpse over the wall. Now there was a pause and this time she rose her head up the slightest amount and looked. The kitchen was crowded about with a number of men, and it was a bit of shock to the young girl to see that one of them carried a gun stuffed down the back of his waistband. This was something she hadn't noticed before and it sent a sour shiver running in her guts.

The look on Amy Harris' face also gave her a turn. She wore a smile of nasty contentment, as if there was pain in the offing and that she would be on the giving end.

The smile seemed to bother the man Katie thought of as Pedro as well. "I only asked cause we need to think about, ya know, gettin outta here."

Katie now shot her eyes in her mother's direction hoping that Gayle would see her, but she was looking back into the kitchen wearing a fearful expression. Katie ducked back down and searched around the edges of the carpet, a few feet away she found a paperclip and poking her head back up saw that everyone's attention was still on the kitchen. She tossed the clip at her mother.

Gayle jumped in surprise and then the mother and daughter locked eyes. It didn't seem possible, but to Katie her mother appeared to grow even more terrified at the sight of her. It was unsettling. It made her second guess herself.

'Run!' Gayle mouthed the word. 'Now, run!'

Katie shook her head, no. She would run, there was no doubting that, in fact she dearly wanted to run even then, but first she would do everything she could to free her mother. Unfortunately, there didn't seem a lot she could do.

Dropping down again, she crawled to the doorway, hoping to be able to dart around it and get into the living room quick, only it appeared impossible. Of the knot of men in the kitchen, two of them, wearing matching looks of unease were facing right at her not twenty feet away. Luckily, their attention was focused away from her. They were looking down at Pedro, who was currently lying on the ground, moaning lightly.

Just then, Amy came into view and began beating the dazed looking man with the shaft of a broom handle. Katie was so shocked at this that all she could do was stare. It was a dreadful cruel scene, devoid of any humanity and just watching it sucked almost the last bit of courage and determination out of the young girl. She pulled back again behind the low dividing wall and tried to control her breathing. She was close to hyperventilating.

With a second glance around the corner of the door, Katie began to practically pant. She had a clearer view of the men in the kitchen and saw that all of them carried weapons. Some had pistols only, but quite a few held large black military style weapons. Whether they were machine guns or assault rifles, she didn't know, yet for some reason these words began to take on an importance to her causing her fear to escalate.

There was no way that she was going to be able to save her mother. Not then. There were too many men nearby and the house's open floor plan meant that sneaking about would be next to impossible. It would be all she could do even to save herself. The door that led to the deck was in view of the men as well and though she could make a dash for it, the guns made her too terrified to even try.

"Get two men to clean him up. The rest, I want watching out for the girl. There are pictures all around this place in case these morons don't know who to look for."

The Girl! So they were waiting for her. It was one thing to guess at this, but hearing it for herself knocked the wind out of her chest. A second later, Katie heard a soft footstep approaching and a shadow fell across the doorway and with it came the scent of a woman's perfume. Amy was just on the other side of the wall, not three feet from her. Now Katie was thoroughly terrified, her heart thundered within her and an uncontrollable shaking took over her body. Moments before she had been close to hyperventilating and now it felt as if she couldn't breathe at all.

"Diablo! Get someone to move this corpse. Hey, Gayle. Where do you keep the sheets?" Amy was talking about her father, and had used the word corpse. Her father was dead. She had known it. Katie had heard the horrible scream, she had seen the body. But corpse? Was he now a corpse? That couldn't be right, could it?

The word corpse acted like a gradual eclipse in her mind, slowly shutting off all thinking so that nothing much made sense. Corpses, gypsies, swords, escape. Everything began to form into a stew of images, which whirled around inside her until her insides were a complete mush.

Thankfully for her, instinct took over.

Her instincts told her that she had to hide. She had to crawl away and find a place to cower. At the moment, it was all she was capable of doing and with only the slightest whisper of her sweat pants sliding on the floor she slithered back behind the long couch that sat up against the wall. There she curled up as best she could.

"No!" her mom whispered the word, but it came to Katie's ears clear as day. What was she saying no to? Were they going to kill her now? Was she about to be stabbed with that horrible sword? And what did the sword do? Why did Amy want it so bad? Was it magical? Did it have powers?

The sword did have a power she realized. It had turned her wonderful father into a corpse. A corpse. The word was so terribly upsetting that she felt like vomiting. And now her mother would be next. She would be just like her dad, a staring, vacant-eyed corpse.

This was too much for Katie. She yanked her hood over her head and stuffed her hands in her ears and tried not to think about anything. A stray dust bunny sat near at hand and this she focused on, crying silent tears. It helped a little and she pretended not to hear her mother's pleading voice, or the sounds of her being smacked around, or her heart wrenching sobs. She pretended instead that she was nothing. A dust bunny too.

Chapter 17

Will

A shout had Will half-awake and hearing his name a second later got his bleary eyes blinking stupidly. He had been dreaming about a river. The water of it was slow moving and it held the reflections of surrounding hills on its glittering surface.

"Huh? What?" he asked one of the bishop's men. At the moment, Will couldn't remember the man's name. The river was fading quickly from his mind, but all the same, he knew that river. It was so familiar.

"It's your sister," the man said and the words caused the river to evaporate in his mind and the dream left him.

"Will, get this priest away from me!" Talitha's voice rang out over the steady drone of the Gulfstream IV's two burly jet engines. They were riding in easily the fanciest and fastest jet Will had ever had the pleasure to sit in. Everything was leather and shining brass. It was on loan from the cardinal and Will didn't want to give it back.

"Coming," Will answered, guessing he knew what the trouble was. Before he had come back to his seat to nap, Father Vogel had begun a form of hypno-therapy on Talitha. Though it would've worked better on Will. With the humming of the engines and the priests droning voice, he had been quickly yawning.

Just as he was about to climb out of the leather chair, he saw the priest heading his way, blinking as if in surprise and holding his hand to a blazing red cheek. "Your sister is reluctant to proceed with her therapy," Vogel said, understating the problem masterfully. The purpose of the therapy had been to attempt to channel Talitha's more diabolical memories toward memories that were innocent. The idea not being to suppress the memories but to manage them. He had used the example, "Instead of picturing a lion, you will imagine a cat, and then you will envision a playful kitten." It had seemed to start well; Talitha did like kittens after all.

Initially, Will had been reluctant. While they were drinking their screwdrivers in his kitchen, waiting on the bishop, Father Vogel had broached the idea of hypno-therapy again. "I think your reasoning not to allow this, Will is no longer valid. Talitha has done what you needed her to do and with the unit the bishop is bringing with him, you no longer need a personal killing machine."

That wasn't necessarily so, but it was likely. Talitha had sniffed out a total of three other men that had left with Amy Harris and if they were anything like the four who had stayed to be killed, he wasn't terribly worried. They had the look of street toughs, and their pathetic aim suggested that they weren't trained professionals. Still, Will had hemmed and hawed until the unit showed up. There were four of them and each was slim and of average height. They carried themselves and their military style weapons with authority, running their hard looking eyes over everything around them. Will was impressed by their maturity, as much as by their bearing. Two were running grey through their hair, while the youngest had to be thirty at the least.

For the first time in a few days, Will felt the smallest reassurance. The bishop less so. Will adamantly refused to hand over the incantations since his wife and unborn daughter were still in peril. Nor would he allow the police to be called. He sensed desperation in Amy's actions as if she were gambling everything on getting that sword and he was afraid of what would happen if she were backed into a corner. Instead of involving the police, he planned to use the bishop's contacts to find out where Amy had been staying and perhaps more importantly, where she might be going.

In the mean time, Will was going to Arizona where his gut told him that he would find Amy. The reason for this was his little sister, Katie. Amy had practically told him that she wanted to bring Ba'al back by using the sword, but Amy wasn't a fool. It was very likely that due to her virgin status, Katie would be held in reserve as a backup plan to whatever Amy had in mind. After what had happened to Talitha eight years ago, Will's insides went queer at the thought. Yet this was his main hope in catching up to the witch. Having Katie and perhaps his parents as hostages meant that whatever Amy was going to do would likely be within driving distance of Phoenix.

The bishop, not wanting to implicate the church in the many illegalities that were likely going to take place, stayed behind in Maine to co-ordinate the various searches. The most important of these was the difficult job of narrowing down all the places associated with great death in and around Phoenix. Rich in old blood was how the gypsy Adrina Fortini described their home back on Governor's Island and this same concept had to be applied to a large portion of the desert state. Will tried not to think what a daunting task it would be and instead said a quick prayer every time his mind wandered over the near impossibility of the undertaking.

The initial mission that Will had laid out for the unit seemed quite simple and easy in comparison. It was most likely in vain, but they were going to Will's parent's house on the off chance they would find his family held hostage there. That was the best-case scenario, but also the least likely. The next best situation was that they would find a few more of Amy's thugs hanging around. The men of the unit were under orders from Will not to shoot to kill if at all possible, he wanted a chance to interrogate them. Unfortunately, the most likely thing to happen is that they would find the place deserted. Because the unit seemed so capable and Amy's thugs so unskilled, Will figured that the biggest problem he would come across would be controlling his sister.

This was why he had finally allowed the hypno-therapy to occur. "Being slapped in the face is a sign of reluctance?" Feeling as if he were at least partially to blame for Talitha's actions, Will tried to make light of the fact that the priest had been hit.

Vogel gave him a slight smile and then worked his jaw around a bit. "In order for this to work, she has to want it and I don't think she does. It doesn't make any sense."

"I agree," Will replied with a sigh. "Does it seem to you that she has become kinda closed off? It's been getting bad all day, but ever since she found that vodka, there's been a wall up."

"I think I need to sit down," the priest looked weary. He collapsed into the nearest seat and rubbed again at his face. "I barely know her. But I suppose...yes. She does seem quieter than she had been. It could be that she's remembering more."

"Will that trigger a change over to her worse side?"

Vogel thought for a while, looking down the back of the plane at the pretty girl. "Possibly."

Beside him, bundled in a blanket so that she looked to be just sleeping, Lisa lay as if dead. Will touched her cheek gently, "Watch her, will you? I'm going to talk to Talitha." The priest nodded and Will heaved himself up, checking his watch. He was surprised to see how long he had napped, there was only another two hours left in the flight.

"Will..." for some reason Father Vogel seemed suddenly a little nervous. "Would you mind terribly if I administered last rites to Lisa? I'm not suggesting that there isn't hope for her, by doing this."

"Go ahead, please. Anything you can do for her would be great."

Will left the priest and squeezed up the aisle, giving a smile to each of the four men as he passed. They nodded in return, but generally averted their gaze from his battered face, perhaps embarrassed for him. The men were tense and each fiddled with or cleaned their weapons and had done so almost continually throughout the plane ride.

"What kind of gun is that?" he asked the leader of the unit, a man who went by the name Abe. It was short for Abraham which itself was only a code name. All the men had biblical code names, but tended to shorten them somewhat.

The man sitting next to Abe, the youngest of the group answered for him, "It's a Caw fifteen."

Will had never heard of such a weapon. It looked like an M16 but smaller and more nimble. "A Caw fifteen? I've never heard of a Caw before. Is it new?"

All the men in the little unit laughed as if this was quite the funniest thing. Will glowered until the eldest of the group, a man with a tight set of wrinkles running from the edges of his eyes, and grey at the temples of his brown hair spoke up, "Zeke here is from Bhaaston, Massachusetts. So don't feel bad that you can't understand him. They talk weird there. It's a CAR 15. Just like an M16, only it's better in an urban setting. Less range, but better handling in close. I'm Jake."

"Will Jern." The man held out his hand and Will shook it firmly, perhaps a touch too firm since he was still a bit miffed about the raucous laughter. "You guys have any questions about what we're up against?" Will had hardly spoken to any of the men other than to outline the bare bones plan of his.

Abe, the smallest of the men at maybe just over five and half feet in height, and the second oldest looking, replied, "Yeah we have tons of questions. You really didn't give us much to go on, other than to say you expected our opposition was to consist of three men and a woman and that none were to be killed if at all possible. What kind of home are they going to be in? Bi-level? Ranch? Is there a basement? What kind of neighborhood are we going to be fighting in? "

The Bostonian, Zeke, who had a fine thick head of black hair, which set off a pair of inquisitive blue eyes spoke before Will had a chance to answer any of Abe's questions. "An' what kind of weaponry will they have? Pistols like the othah fellahs?"

"What about the demon?" Jake added, causing all the men to nod in agreement. "The bishop said there was a demon. What do we do about that?"

The fourth man added nothing; he was a dark haired Hispanic. His code name was Timothy, which in no way jibed with his coal black eyes that bored into Will; those hard eyes made the big man a trifle uncomfortable—Will tried not to look him as he spoke, "First, I don't know what kind of guns they'll have. Pistols probably. Secondly, the house is a ranch, it doesn't have a basement, and the closest neighbor is at least a half of a mile away. It borders on the Sonoran desert, which has some sand dunes, but is mostly hard baked and craggy. The house is shaped...like a capital T."

"But what about the demon?" Jake persisted. "What do we do about it?"

"Hold on, just a second," Will paused, wondering how to proceed. He hadn't thought about what would happen if the demon was there already. It would be chaos that was for sure. "If the demon is already there, you shoot to kill, everyone but the woman. Don't hesitate, just start shooting."

"But what about the demon?" Jake asked again.

"The demon? I wouldn't bother shooting at it. There will be a big column of black smoke, but that is just some weird effect. The demon will actually not be there at all; it will still be in hell. The smoke only marks where the gate to hell is."

Their guns would be useless and that meant someone would have to challenge the fiend, and that someone would likely have to be himself. Forgetting briefly about his sister, Will sat down again, feeling far older than his twenty-five years. Could he go against the demon again? Doubt struck him heavily, making his insides quiver uncomfortably and instead of seeing his past victories as a sign that he had a chance that he could win yet again, he saw instead that Talitha wasn't the only one cursed. Depression tried to sinks its ugly teeth into him, but he gave a shake to his head. "You know I could be wrong about shooting it. It won't hurt to try. But I do know that everyone will need to be baptized again and Father Vogel will need to hear your confessions. Father Vogel... do you have everything that you need? The proper vestments? Oil of Chrism?"

"I have everything I need, Will," the priest responded in a vague manner from four rows away. Just then he was kneeling in the aisle, praying over Lisa.

"The four of us have been to Mass this morning and have already confessed..." Abe began, but was interrupted by Jake who elbowed the man in the side.

"Yeah, there's nothing like confessing to a bishop! You should have seen Zeke coming out of the confessional. His ears were so red, I could've lit a cigarette on them." The four laughed easily again, yet Will couldn't find it in him to do more than crack a lopsided smile.

Will nodded. "Ok then, good. So if the demon's there, and trust me there will be no doubt in the matter if he is, then the men Amy has with her have to die. And they have to die quick. The witch will have to die as well, but she just can't be shot. You have to take her hand and the hand of...her victim." He had to pause as he felt his throat tighten up. "There will be a girl there...uh, blonde and cute. She's gonna look asleep or maybe even dead." A second time he had to stop for a moment to collect himself. "Someone will have to tie the Father's stole around her hand and that of the witch's hand and only then can you kill her. I hope that I will be the one to do it, but if I can't, then one of you will have to. And if you do, there'll be a moment where you're going to be between two worlds. Our world and hell. You have to call to Katie, the blonde girl I mean. Call her and bring her out."

"When you say witch, what do you mean exactly?" Abe asked running his hands through his thinning blonde/grey hair. "A real witch? Despite how worked up Bishop Keenan was, I'm having trouble accepting much of this." The others murmured in agreement.

"The woman who has the sword is for real, though I'm not quite sure what sort of spells she can work. She did that." Will pointed to his wife. "It's not a coma. There's nothing physically wrong with her at all, only she can't wake up. Amy did something to her."

"What are you going to do if Amy has used the sword instead of a spell, huh?"

Will jumped. Everyone jumped. While their attention had been on Lisa, Talitha had come slipping up the aisle, silent on her still bear feet. Will turned and a wave of goose bumps broke out all over. She was right behind him. Her hand came down on his broad shoulder and gripped the trapezious muscle that sloped off his neck. It was a hard grip that brought with it a sense of vulnerability; she could kill him if she wished.

Her warm brown eyes were in a state of flux and her smile was simultaneously knowing and confused. She knew she could kill him as well, only it appeared that she didn't know if she wanted to or not. This ambiguity, coupled with his clear defenselessness sent a shiver down Will's back and it broadened her smile. However, the confusion in her eyes deepened and she walked her odd smile further up the plane, exposing her back to her brother and the four men. They had fallen silent at the sudden appearance of his sister and each had tensed. The unit had been briefed on Talitha. And in an effort to instill in them a proper respect for her abilities, Will had shown them the bodies of the four thugs she had killed. Seeing them piled like a slop of human spaghetti caused some eyes to widen.

Talitha went a little further and stood staring down at her sister-in-law. "I don't know whether to be sad for her or happy." She looked back at her brother shaking her head. "Lisa gets to sleep through all of this. It almost doesn't seem fair. We take all the risks and if we prevail against Amy, then she gets to wake up all perky, like a pregnant Rip Van Winkle. But if we fail...we die horribly and she sleeps right through it."

Beneath the thrum of the jets, there was a silence in the cabin at this.

"I'm not kidding," she continued when no one spoke up. "I don't know what I'm supposed to be feeling right now. What about you guys? Is there a consensus concerning this?"

Father Vogel looked up at her from where he had been kneeling. "Talitha, you don't have to feel one way or the other. I feel a little of both."

Will nodded at this, but Talitha frowned, the corners of her full lips edging far down. "That's silly...and wishy-washy and stupid. Shouldn't you have to pick one? Sad or happy...it's only two choices. It should be just like yes or no? White or black? Is it better like this or like this?" Behind her eyes, thunderstorms began to swirl. Will fought to remain calm; a small jet, six miles in the air was no place for a battle. She continued growing louder, practically screaming. "These aren't tough choices you know. Either you're happy for her or sad. It's just stupid thinking you can be both. You can't be happily-sad or sadly-happy. Damn it! What the hell's wrong with you people?"

She was in a bizarre rage and tramped back down the aisle knocking into the men with sharp aggressiveness, looking for one of them to react.

"Maybe I should go talk to her," Vogel suggested in the middle of the embarrassed silence that had followed Talitha's tirade.

"You'll keep your ass down at that end of the plane, if you know what's good for you," the girl yelled. Will gave the priest a little shrug and started to get up. "You too, Will. I don't need your ugly face making me sick, thank you. If you're going to send anyone, send that hunky dude with the blue eyes instead."

Everyone looked at Zeke, who didn't budge. "Should I go?" he asked Will in a whisper.

"No..." Will started.

"Yes!"

"No, stay here," Will insisted, putting his hand on Zeke's arm. Talitha had been standing with her hands squarely on her slim hips, but at this, she flopped into her seat and looked out the window with a sulking air.

After a moment, Abe spoke quietly, "Your sister brought up a good point about the sword. What do we do if the demon has come through already? I mean it'll be different than with the spell, right? From what you say, the spell opens a gate and it only looks like the demon will be there, but if she's used the sword that means it'll actually be there, correct? And if so, then what?"

The question wasn't hypothetical. After his father had stabbed the sword into the gate, thinking he was actually attacking the demon, the sword had a nasty feel to it. Yet that was nothing compared to how it felt after Will had used it to kill Henny Harris. It had grown far colder and there was a voracious sucking feeling to it now. In Will's opinion, it wouldn't take too many more deaths to create an opening in it large enough for something to come through. And who knows what would happen then.

Will shrugged. "I don't know what we do. Run away maybe?"

The men were silent on this suggestion and each looked to be considering their own ideas of what would happen. Will checked his watch; they were landing in two hours. Sidling up to Father Vogel, he squatted down and asked in a hushed voice, "What do you think? What do we do if the demon is actually there? Not just the opening to the Void, but the real thing?"

Vogel sent his fading grey eyes into Will's blue ones and stared. "We don't run from it that's for certain. We fight it. That's what these men are here for. That's what I'm here for."

With an effort, Will stopped himself from rolling his eyes; the priest had no clue what he was talking about. Will had seen the thing down in the Void and just recalling the horrendous sight gave him the chills. "With what? What do we have that can fight the demon?" Fear tended to make him snappish.

"With courage. With faith in the Lord..." Will's loud groan interrupted the priest. Vogel didn't get upset however. "These are the tools that God has given us, Will. They'll be enough. You of all people should know this. You have been given gifts from the Lord and..."

"Gifts? You call what I have a gift? What about Tal? Is she gifted too? How bout Lisa? Is her eternal sleep some sort of gift as well?" Will made to get up, but the smaller man grabbed his left hand, not knowing that Will's fingers had been recently dislocated. Immediate pain shot up Will's arm and he grimaced. The priest seemed not to notice.

"Yes. Clearly you don't understand the gifts that..."

Angrily, Will jumped in. "You can't mean my visions. It's you who doesn't understand; that was part of the gypsy's curse..."

"No, I don't mean that either," the priest replied in the most calm attitude. Will was thoroughly perplexed and Vogel smiled. "The Lord has spoken through you. Remember what you told the bishop and me? You told us what occurred when you were in the Void. In order to deny Ba'al Zubel the body of your sister, the power of the Word of the Lord came from your lips. These lips right here." Vogel touched Will on the lips and he was too stunned to react and actually blushed. "And the lord has given you the power to cast out demons. Last night you cast out Ba'al Fie-ere from your sister with nothing but simple words. And then there's your dreams that you take from Talitha."

"That's no gift. That's pure and literal torture."

Vogel shook his head. "Really? I would think it was a wondrous blessing...for your sister. You don't see these things as blessing, but I do. It can't be any more obvious to me that God has blessed your sister by having you as her brother." Will made to argue this but no words came from his open mouth and Vogel went on, "And you can't deny that the Lord has touched you personally."

Will had to suddenly blink back tears. "But I don't want this. I want to be normal and live a normal life."

"That's your choice. All along you've had the option to walk away. To pass the cup from your lips. And you still can. When we land in Phoenix, the pilot will take you anywhere you want. You just have to ask."

Will closed his eyes and breathed out heavily. That would never happen. He was burdened by too much responsibility. Who would find a way to cure Lisa, or save Katie and his parents? And who else but him could control Talitha? Certainly not the priest, nor the soldiers, despite their training. And who among them could challenge the demon?

"You know I can't walk away from this."

"Yes and neither can we." Vogel indicated the other men and Will was surprised and quite embarrassed to see that the four men had been listening in on their conversation. He didn't like the looks they were giving him. They reminded him too much of the look that Father John Santos had worn minutes before he had died in Will's place. Like he was special or extraordinary. At the moment, he felt far from that. He felt tired and had a headache.

Abe spoke up, "Since we aren't going to run, it only leaves one choice; fight. We just need to know how. Will your visions tell us?"

"No. Amy...the witch, has discovered a way to block them."

Vogel spoke up with some excitement, "She used an odd looking necklace to keep him from seeing what was going on back at the house in Bangor. It had leaves and little metal dangling things hanging from it, so if you see someone with anything that looks like that, you should...uh...you know."

"We'll take care of him," Abe filled in the blank in a nice manner. "What about your sister? She was supposedly stuck in hell for all that time. I bet she knows how to deal with a demon."

Will had no clue whether Talitha would know and he was just opening his mouth to say exactly that, but Vogel stepped in, "It's too risky a subject. It might bring out her own demon."

"You mean the one that he," Jake pointed at Will, "supposedly exorcized out of the girl?"

"Yes, but it's complicated."

"I'm sure it is, Father." Jake wore an on odd expression. "All the same, the bishop, and you, and this guy here." Jake again pointed at Will. "You all think she's dangerous. Now I don't know anything about exorcisms except what I see in the movies, but if she's still so dangerous why are we bringing her along? Especially if we can't even ask her a few questions? What good is she?"

"Jake's right. I'll go talk to her," Will said, coming to a quick decision. Judging by the look on his face, Vogel wasn't happy. "Father, please. Don't give me that look. You've tried the hypno-therapy, it didn't work and we're running out of time and options." Will started to go up the aisle and just then Jake tugged at his shirt.

"Just in case?" He held out a large black pistol. Very much Will was tempted to take the gun, only he didn't think he'd be able to pull the trigger if push came to shove. Not the least reason for this was the fact that they were traveling at six-hundred miles an hour in a relatively small plane. A missed shot could realistically bring it tumbling down out of the sky.

"No thanks, but if anything happens to me, don't hesitate. Shoot for the abdomen. It'll stop her without killing her." Jake gave him a skeptical look and Will shrugged. "She heals fast."

"Sure center mass, no problem. Tell me, she do all that to your face?"

Will had avoided looking into mirrors all day. As an answer, he gave Jake his swollen, lopsided smile and went to the back of the plane. Talitha sat jiggling her legs up and down in a fury of speed.

"Just go away, Will." She hadn't turned around. "I don't know anything helpful."

"I didn't think you did." Will came and sat down across from her. It was a dangerous spot since he would have precious little time to react if she went crazy or rather if she went semi-demonic. Only he was tired and part of him just didn't care. "That came out wrong. You know lots. We both know that. It's just I doubt that you know how a demon from the Void would react on this world. The physical world I mean."

"Yep, I don't know." Talitha kept her face down. "Will? Why do you like me? And don't say it's because I'm your sister." That was exactly what he had been planning on saying. It was the standard answer to a question like that. Her eyes came up and bored into his. "I want you to really think on this. What about me was worth all the pain you've gone through?"

This was an embarrassing time for his brain to draw a blank, yet that was what happened exactly. Everything he came up with sounded lame in his mind and before he could come up with a good reason, she asked another question which had his mind turning in a different direction.

"Did I ever tell you how I escaped from the asylum?"

"Yeah." And he didn't really want to hear it again. He wondered what this had to do with her previous question, which he had still to answer.

"Then why do you still like me? I wouldn't like me. In fact I don't like me...I don't. I really and truly don't. That's why I'm wondering, why do you bother?"

She began crying softly. Her eyes were just turning red, her lips were a little puffy, and with her pretty sundress and bare feet, the overall effect was that she looked like a little kid. She looked like the kid he had grown up with. The one that was a pain in the butt and hung around him when he wanted to be alone to smooch his girlfriend. The little kid who always seemed so smart, that it made him feel stupid every time he opened his mouth. The one who got the front seat on every car ride and the better gifts on Christmas. He loved that girl and he couldn't explain why. He just did.

"I'll tell you why. I was in the first grade and you were in kindergarten, this was back before you and I were in the same class..."

"You don't have to tell me a story, Will. I can control my thinking now. It's my emotions that are getting the better of me."

"You asked why I bother and I'm telling you, so hush." She snorted in a most un-lady like manner and wiped the back of her hand across her nose. With this small display, even more she was that little girl. "This isn't a long story, only a memory. I remember coming home from school and you had raked this pile of leaves into a great mound. You were so tiny back then, that the mound was piled higher than your head. You had worked all afternoon on making that pile and then instead of jumping in it like a normal kid, you waited for me to come home and gave me the first crack at it. We had so much fun jumping in the pile and then re-raking it back up. Even to this day, I can still smell those leaves when I think about it."

"I don't remember that. I'm so stupid. I can tell you the name of every man who has served as Vice President of the United States, but I can't remember jumping into a pile of leaves with my brother." Her tears that were a light trickle came in a gush now. "I've wasted my life! Why did I do that? Why? And now..."

"And now, what?" Will coaxed.

Talitha only made a growling sound of frustration and got up to pace. "You already know what. I'm going back to the Void, and I don't want to hear it from you. No more why, why, why! Fuckin A! No more why."

"Fuckin A?" For some reason he found that humorous and began to chuckle. "Since when do you curse, Miss I can control my thinking?"

"I've explained to you that it's my emotions I can't seem to get a grip on. You should try listening."

"Have you tried meditating? It worked for you in the Void," he replied reasonably. "It might also help with your thinking. You're not in control like you say. Just a few minutes ago, you were asking hunky Zeke to come down here. Remember? That doesn't sound like the Talitha I know."

"Yeah well that Talitha is dull. She never had any fun. When was the last time she jumped in a pile of leaves?" Will's brows came down and he began to think back, but Talitha paced up to him and put her hand on his shoulder. "It was a rhetorical question, Will. And yes, I've tried meditating and all I get are new memories. Real special ones too: me killing some guy, me setting a house on fire, me fuc..." she broke off quick.

Despite an effort to not react, Will felt his eyebrows pop up. "Uh...that's why you should be talking to Father Vogel. The therapy should be able you to help redirect your memories..."

"No," Talitha interrupted plopping back down in her seat. "I have to deal with the demon in me in my own way. Suppressing or avoiding will only put that off and I don't have much time."

"Wait. First off, there's no demon in you it's all just neural paths and a personality disorder."

Talitha shook her head. "Yes, but the end effect is no different. When I become the other Talitha, when I use the neural paths that she created to form her personality, can you tell the difference?" Will's mouth came open uselessly. "By your look, you clearly cannot and no one could. I could go down into the Void and they wouldn't know either. We are the same. Ba'al Fie-ere and I are the same."

"Have you tried praying on this? You used to pray quite a bit."

"Praying is for people with hope and what's more, I'm out of time for prayer."

Will sighed. "You're being obstinate. First off, prayer gives a person hope. It's not the other way around. And second, there's always time to pray."

"According to you there isn't. I wasn't in either of your visions. Can you think of any reason I would miss the birth of your baby girl? Because I can only think of one: I'm going to die soon. And why should I pray? God has blessed me already. He gave me you, my own personal savior." She let a small, sly smile creep onto her face and Will felt his cheeks go red.

"You heard that, huh? What a bunch of malarkey, Father Vogel doesn't know what he's talking about."

Talitha stared again out of the small square of a window. Beyond the blinking light on the tip of the wing, everything was black. "I don't know, Will. You've been blessed. It's undeniable. But as much as I appreciate all that you've done for me, I can't help to think that I haven't been. I don't see anything that has occurred as a blessing. Yes, you saved me from the Void, but my judgment day has only been put off a while longer."

"I've told you that God doesn't judge."

"And you may be correct about God, but what about everyone else? All the angels and saints? What about all of my victims?" Will could see her eyes start to cloud up again, she swiped at them with the back of her hand. "They'll judge. I know it."

"And I will judge you too, Tal. And I'll tell everyone what a wonderful person you are."

"No you won't. You have no idea. Of everyone, you'll be the last to do something like that." She gave him a smile that dripped with agony. "But who knows? Maybe I'm wrong. Having witnessed the miracle of you using a word like obstinate, I now think anything is possible." The pain emanating from her was too palpable to even smile at her little joke. "Will, I think I need to be alone for a while. When I said I could control my mental state, I meant that I could control it for a little while. I think we're heading into more trouble than you realize and I need to be able to set my other side loose and then maybe get it back bottled up again."

Something was odd about his sister. Momentarily, her affect had changed from angry and fearful to something else. Embarrassment, or shame perhaps. He couldn't tell. There had been something in her eyes and he paused, staring at her, trying to fathom a sudden puzzlement within him, but she blushed and looked down.

"Do you want to me to control my personalities or not?" Talitha asked, still keeping her eyes averted. "If so, I'm going to need some time alone."

Before he got up and moved to the front of the plane, he smiled at her, warm and friendly. It was a dishonest smile however, one that was full of lies—just like her words had been. He knew it. She had lied to him about controlling her personality. But why?

Chapter 18

Talitha

Talitha felt the excitement building in her chest and it was with the greatest effort that she put a lid on it. Though it didn't quite work—a part of her was eager and the car ride couldn't go fast enough for her liking.

"You should be the one driving, Will," she commented. Her brother could drive like a bat out of hell when he needed to...or when he was forced to. She could make him drive. There was that option. The idea just popped into her head, fully formed, complete with visuals of her using her right elbow to crush...

"Stop it!" she hissed the words under her breath. Only she couldn't stop it. There was a part of her that was beyond her ability, or in fact, beyond her desire to control anymore. Her other personality, her other self...soon to be her only self had begun to lust for the pain that they each knew was coming. The four gangbangers back in Maine had all died far too quickly. It wasn't their fault, she blamed herself and her brother. His was supposed to have been the slow death, only he had started in with his dull stories and she had quite forgotten herself. Next time...

"Abe, can you please roll down the window?" she asked with a hint of desperation. "I need some air." In the back seat of a Ford Taurus, Talitha rode sandwiched between the leader of the unit and her brother.

The slim soldier gave her a long look as if unsure of her motives before replying with a tight smile, "Sure thing, Miss Jern." Without taking his eyes from her, he rolled down the window.

The desert air helped. It flowed over her open senses and she breathed in a thousand fragrances. There was more to the barren wasteland that most people realized, and she could smell the many animals hiding in and around the scrub. Even the scant vegetation was more varied than it appeared and in minutes she categorized thirteen native plants, though she knew not their names. And then there were the people. They were out there. Or perhaps they had been. She caught traces of human aromas: sweat, musk, sex, blood.

"Do you mind?" Abraham asked practically in her ear. Only then did she notice that she had leaned over to get closer to the window and was almost in his lap. He wore a strained look.

"Oh, sorry." Talitha retreated back to the middle and now her leg began jiggling again. Faster and faster, and she let it go. To try to stop it would be to have to deal with the reasons why it was going in the first place: fear and excitement. Though it was mostly excitement, there was so much blood to be had. She had been born in blood. There was so many screams to pull from so many throats. She had been born to the sound of screams. Misery was her reason for existence...her purpose. Pain was pleasure, and cruelty, her love.

"Are we almost there yet?" She began to rock in her seat. Earlier, at the hospital, it had felt as if someone had been watching her. A stranger creeping around corners to spy on what she was doing, how she was acting. Then at the house, it felt like someone was always right behind her, trying to glance over her shoulder. But now that someone was in her, trying to see with her eyes and trying to use her hands for itself. She felt like a girl crossing an iced over pond. Every step brought more and more cracks which zigzagged away. Beneath her, under that thin ice, the water was dread black and deep and oh so cold. And the ice grew thinner with each step onwards. And she was there under the ice, waiting.

"We'll be there in fifteen minutes. Are you ok?" Her brother peered his battered face at her. She had done that to him. It had been skillfully done, especially considering she had worked in complete darkness, striking blindly with nothing but the sound of his breathing to hone in on. It made her smile. She fought against the smile.

"No. I'm...nervous, about what we're going to find out at mom and dad's house." This was true, but also there was an undercurrent of the fear of death. In a manner of speaking she wasn't really afraid to die, she was just afraid to die still as Talitha—as herself.

"Me too," her brother replied evenly. His tone was calm yet his blue eyes held plenty of fear. A part of her was bothered to see him so afraid, mainly because of the way it affected her. It fed into her anticipation and she felt a little zing down low between her legs, involuntarily she rubbed herself against the seat cushion. Embarrassed, she turned away to look across Abe at the night speeding by, and wished again that she was riding with the priest. Father Vogel never seemed to show even the slightest fear. Excitement, yes, plenty of excitement, but not fear.

"Does Father Vogel remind you of dad at all? The way he seems so fearless?" Talitha asked, feeling a sudden sense of loss. It had been a few years since she last had seen her father.

For the first time since they had slid into the back of the car, Will took his eyes from his sister and glanced into the cooling desert. "No. Dad was...you can't even compare the two. First off, dad knew what he was fighting against and he still went after the demon. And when he was in the Coast Guard, he didn't just know the risks, he lived the risks. He had men swept overboard during storms, he saw helicopters crash and planes ditch in icy waters, but still he always went out. You ever see dad hesitate for a second?"

She hadn't. "You're right about dad, but Father Vogel is an exorcist and he says he has gone up against two demons. That's pretty brave."

"I'm sure it was and I'm not calling him shy. I'm just saying he's not in dad's league when it comes to bravery."

"I miss dad," Talitha said, feeling an unexpected need to cry. "I miss mom too, but right now I need dad to tell me that everything will work out. I want him to say in that big voice of his, don't worry, Tal honey. I'll take care of this silly witch that's been bothering you. You know he was the only one that I didn't..." The tears that had been threatening, fled as she bit back the horrible words that had almost come tumbling out of her mouth.

Talitha's eyes darted to her brother and her breath caught in her throat. He was peering at her with sharp intensity and his blue eyes were like drills, driving into her head, searching for her dreadful secrets. She turned away and looked across Abe toward the window yet she didn't see the desert night. She felt her brother's eyes still on her and the air from his nostrils blew across her thick dark hair. He wouldn't stop staring.

Will had powers, and she wondered, fearfully, if he could see into her memories.

Just then, she felt that someone else was looking too. That someone was looking at her secrets, looking at her crimes. Suddenly her mind opened up so that she could see herself, whipped bloody standing in the blackest dungeons, surrounded by horrible gibbering creatures. All their eyes were insane with a lust that hurt her to see. They cried out to her, urging her on. Hit him, hit him! They jeered and chanted, yet she didn't raise the whip that she held in her own hands. As she hesitated, a crack sounded across her back and she fell to the floor crying out from the pain.

Ba'al Zubel was there. He was tremendous and horrid. An ill wind, rank beyond the vilest sewer or the greediest charnel house, swept forward wherever he turned his gaze and just then, it was upon Talitha. The demon raised his whip again and she flinched and trembled in fear. Her whip was nothing compared to his. Hers looked more like a buggy whip than anything that could be considered torturous, while his was heavy and branched into three barbed and metal bound heads. Each was sharp and glistened with her blood. Straggles of her flesh hung upon the barbs and the pain it caused was like fire and acid. The fiend Ba'al drew back the whip, further.

It would fall upon her again, just as it had already to a number that was beyond count. Yet she could make it stop, if she wished. Her agony could end. All she had to do to stop the pain was to use the whip. It was very simple. Bring it back and let it fly. She had done it before.

"No!"

Talitha forced the memory away and that feeling of being watched and controlled from the inside, diminished. She saw that Abe stared at her quizzically and she realized she had spoken aloud. "Sorry. I uh, was just thinking of something." In response to her embarrassment, the capillaries in her cheeks dilated and her cheeks flushed a pretty pink.

Quickly she glanced away and saw lights in the distance far down a long sloping hill. On the south side of the road, there were a smattering of them, well spaced, some as much as a mile from their nearest neighbor. On the north side, a single light shown well away from the rest. Her brother pointed at it.

"We're down on the right. You can just see it now." For half a minute, he stared at the lights and then with a long tired sigh he faced his sister. "Really, are you going to be ok? You seem so...on the edge." She didn't answer him right away. Her death was down that hill. It will be tonight. Her mouth went dry at the thought and she swallowed and stared at the innocent twinkling lights with growing dread. Will took her hesitation to mean that she wasn't going to answer, "Tal, hey? Will I be able to count on you? Are you going to be able to control yourself?"

Her voice was a little thing, "Yes." She would keep herself under control until the timing was right. That was her biggest fear; that the timing would be off. "I'll be ok, only I don't think it would be advisable for me to be too involved in death. In light of...you know."

"I know." Will's face turned sour in the dim light. "I'm scared for you, Tal. I thought after last night, you'd be ok. But it's like the demon never left you."

She felt the presence in her mind flare up and it stared through her eyes. It made her world feel hazy and out of sorts. She had to blink a few times before her vision cleared. "There's no demon in me, but it doesn't mean I'll be ok."

"I get it. Can you please do me a favor? If we get out of this ok, will you at least try the hypno-therapy?"

To lie was a sin, but it was a sin that she could live with or more accurately, it was a sin she could die with. "I will. You should consider turning off your headlights, soon or they'll see you coming from miles away." This she added just to change the subject.

Will nodded. "Zeke, in about a mile there'll be a road heading off to your left. When you get to it slow down and turn off your headlights."

Zeke flashed his eyes to the rearview mirror and gave a little nod. Beside Talitha, Abe blew out a long breath and sat up straighter. Everyone became more tense and the silence of the next couple of minutes grew heavier than it had been. At the junction, Zeke slowed and flicked off his lights. Behind them, the glare of the following car disappeared and now the two-car parade traveled on slower. Yet still the lonely looking house on the right seemed to come closer faster than Talitha wanted. The closer they came to it, the harder her heart beat and she had to actively work to keep it at its normal thirty beats a minute.

When they were half a mile away the road sank into a trough and Will spoke up, "Ok, this is good. Pull over, Zeke." Little was said for the next few minutes as the soldiers piled out of the cars and checked their weapons. Will went back to the other car to look in on Lisa while Talitha stared up at the stars. She loved the stars and already she began to miss them. A part of her hoped to see a shooting star and if she did, she would wish upon it just as she and Will had done on so many nights in their youth. As they stood there, a wind sprang up and blew her hair back.

"A strong wind, that's a good sign," Zeke said with a nervous smile.

For some reason this bothered Talitha. "Is the wind a sign from God? Or is it just a phenomenon derived from the unequal heating of the earth's surface?"

Zeke's brows came down and his eyes showed a touch of anger, but his leader stepped in between the two quickly. Abe gave her a tight little smile and had his hands out as if to make peace. "We're just happy for it, because it will mask the sound of our guns. See those houses way down there? Because of the hills and the wind, they won't hear a thing."

Talitha knew this. She knew how far the sound of gunshots carried, just like she knew how far screams would carry and she didn't need to be told this by some stupid grunt. "Whatever," she replied and was about to turn away when she saw the hands that Abe held out to her shook a little. She also saw Zeke swallowing, like he was about to be sick. Jake was working the bolt of his CAR 15 back and forth as if it were a compulsion and Timothy sweated in the cool night and darted his black eyes all over the landscape.

They were anxious, if not downright afraid. The stranger within her surged at the knowledge and she wanted to scoff at them and spit in their faces. An unholy malevolent smile split her face wide and showed all her hungry teeth. She was so close that she could kill them all in seconds and the first that would die would be Zeke. She would send those pretty blue eyes of his deep into his skull and then...

A light, like a line in the sky, etched in a blaze across the heavens. It was there and gone again in a fraction of a second and it stopped her breath in her throat. A shooting star. The thing inside of her seemed to retreat from the sight and her mind was her own again. It was her turn to shake.

"Tal."

She jumped at her name, her body momentarily out of control. With a feeling of intense guilt she looked back to see her brother right next to her.

"Are you still ok?" He gave her an inquisitive look and it helped her mind to see that he wasn't nervous. He had his game face on and his eyes were the color of steel.

"I'm...good."

"Great. I need you to do a spot of reconnaissance. We need to know if it's really just Amy and three goons, got it?"

She nodded, but Abe stepped forward. "I want to send Jake with her. He has tons experience at this sort of thing."

It was an idea. She could bring Jake and leave his body in one of the fissures that had been ripped into the land by the hand of God...

"No. He won't be able to keep up, sorry but all he'll do is slow me down." And piss me off, and die with my fist in his chest, these words she bit back. Her hands clenched with such force that her nails dug into her palms. She had to hold on for only a while longer.

"No offence, but I think we need to keep an eye on you." Despite being far older and the actual leader of the unit, Abe looked to Will for a reply.

"No, she goes alone." The men of the unit grumbled in silence sending angry looks back and forth between themselves. Will ignored them. "Just circle the place at a distance and find out what you can. Don't try to go in; your other personality is too unstable." With a sudden move, Will sent his arms out to grab her and she was within a twitch of crushing his sternum, when she realized that he was just going to give her a hug. She felt like a cat being hugged by a wolf and it was all she could do to let it happen. "Good luck," he whispered.

"Thanks." For a moment, she was too much in shock to do much more than look at her brother. It felt like a lifetime since she had been hugged by him. It was odd. He nodded at her as way of telling her to get going and she didn't need a second invite. She ran off into the desert, happy to be away from them. Her emotions were all over the place and having to deal with Will and the unit was making it very difficult to concentrate on being herself.

The night helped. Talitha stretched out her stride, feeling better as the air flowed over and around her and in seconds, she was a hundred yards away and virtually invisible. The moon would be almost full when it rose for the evening, but that was an hour from happening and without it, the night was a dark one. Had she been anyone else, she would have stumbled a dozen times already. The land was hard baked and rugged, filled with sudden drops and sharp rocks, cacti and low thorny shrubs. Her bare feet flew by all this with nary a twinge. Though Maine was a far more gentle state, it had been years since she wore shoes to run through the woods, something that she dearly loved to do. On these runs, clothing was generally disregarded, but she kept hers on that night.

After a minute, she slowed and crossed the road to keep it between her and her parent's house. The two-lane black asphalt was too close and anyone with any sense would have posted at least a lookout facing in the direction of the road. She moved away from it, giving herself plenty of room and as she drew closer to the house, she began dodging from shrub to shrub, until she found a good vantage. To all appearances, the ranch home looked empty, it was early in the evening, yet no lights burned within it and no noise could be heard, even by Talitha.

However, she wasn't in the least way fooled. She knelt peering through a heavy bush and within a minute her eagle like eyes picked out movement in two areas of the house. There were more of them than that, only the wind that the soldiers were so happy about was playing havoc with her sense of smell. She ducked low and scurried a hundred yards further on. Here the wind ran over the house and blew directly in her face. It took a few minutes of studied breathing to pick out the scents of at least nine people for certain in the house, and one maybe.

Two were her parents and seven were unknown males, but the last, the scent of Katie was harder to judge. Her aroma came at Talitha, but though it was strong, it should've been stronger, like that of her parents. Of course, there was a chance that Katie was locked away, or perhaps hiding, or maybe buried nearby. Amazingly, Talitha had to stop and think about how she felt about the idea that her little sister could be dead.

"That's bad...or is it sad?" she asked the mute night sky. It should be both, she decided. "But why? Am I sad for her or for me?" This was harder to answer. Both were based on emotion and that was one thing that was slipping right away from her.

"You are sad because we didn't get to kill her."

With a start, Talitha spun around fully expecting to see someone behind her, but there was nothing but endless desert. Still, she stared about, feeling as if there was someone right there. "It's all in your head!" This she hissed at herself in anger. Saying the words helped. "It's all in your head," she repeated and took off in a low sprint heading further out to the west of the house. It was all in her head, for now. But too soon that wouldn't be the case. The other Talitha was coming and this one, the one who used to be so sweet was doing all she could to hold her back, again, for now.

The far west side of the house was taken up by a large pantry, a laundry room, and the three-car garage. Talitha had to scramble slowly along the slope of a hill eighty yards from the house to keep it in view, but it paid off as she saw a face framed in one of the glass panes of the garage door. It was a man's face and though she saw him clearly, she was invisible to him as she moved on to the back of the house stealthy as a cat. Here was the length of the T, it held the four bedrooms and at the first angle, she saw another two men peering from windows. Two more men were situated in a couple of different rooms facing out of the next angle, this held a wide deck that sat with a scattering of furniture upon it.

A long few minutes went by as Talitha paused to see if anyone else would show themselves and when they didn't, she dashed off for where she had left her brother. She didn't get far; unexpectedly she came upon a new scent and a large grouping of unsullied tracks. In a flash, Talitha was down on her knees sniffing at the ground. Katie had come by here, but she wasn't alone. Amy and seven or eight men had trouped along with her, heading in a northeast direction.

A long time Talitha considered where they went and why. As she did, standing staring out along the tracks, her pretty face turned into a harsh mask of anger. Amy had her sister! What a waste of a fine virgin! Useless moronic Amy was going to call the demon and knowing her, she would just screw it up. Talitha fumed in silence and had even began to sprint down the trail of footprints when another shooting star zipped by low in the horizon.

"Oh God." Talitha stopped in a daze and her hand went to her head. "It's too soon damn it." She couldn't make the change just yet. Instead, she tore off, flashing across the desert in a dead sprint crossing the half-mile of broken land in a minute and a half.

"Will!" her call had her brother scurrying from the second car and in a moment she was surrounded by men, Father Vogel among them. She gave them the layout of the house as well as the dispersion of Amy's thugs and the entire time she kept her eyes down, not daring to look into Will's or the priest's faces.

"How old was Katie's trail, could you tell?" her brother asked.

"A half an hour at least but likely closer to an hour. They could be four miles away by now."

And I'm the only one who has any chance of getting there before it's too late, before Amy goes and fucks this up. What I wouldn't give to have Katie for myself. I would force Ba'al to set me up in hell right. I would make the Void my kingdom!

The thought staggered her and she forced her face into a mask that she hoped would convey some sort of neutral look instead of the intense shame that she felt.

"An hour's a long time. Maybe Zeke and I should go with Talitha and..." Will began, but Abraham cut him off.

"No. We can't afford to split up. The layout of the home and the disposition of the bad guys, makes me worried. They'll have overlapping fields of fire no matter what direction we take. Either we all go after Amy or we all attack the house, but we don't divide our forces in the face of a superior force. That's just basic."

"I say, while we take on the guys at the house, the girl goes alone after Amy and gets a rundown on that sitch and then reports back. She wouldn't be any good otherwise, it's not like we're gonna give her a gun or anything," Jake offered.

This was exactly what Talitha wanted and it brought a thrill running down her back that she couldn't seem to stop.

Will had his eyes down to the compacted dun-colored dirt. "Fine. That's the plan then. Talitha get going and hurry back." Talitha couldn't stop her eager feet, they started off even before Will finished speaking. He grabbed her and brought her around. "Look, if the demon isn't there, do what you can to take out Amy. Can I trust you with a gun?"

She pictured shooting her brother in the eye and watching with a smile as his brains exploded out the back of his head. Her face turned a dead pale that was visible despite the night and somehow, she was able to shake her head, no.

"I understand, I think," he paused seeming unsure of himself. "Tal, it's going to be ok. You aren't going to the Void again. I won't let it happen. Do you hear me? Stay Talitha. Stay yourself. Don't change to the other girl, please." She nodded, but looked terribly unconvincing, which caused Will to have second thoughts. "Maybe you should..."

"No, I can't stay. If I waste any more time, Katie is doomed for sure. You take care of those bad guys and don't worry about me, I'm in control." The words were a shock to her own ears. They had come from her mouth, but she hadn't spoken them. And now it was Talitha that felt as if she was peering over someone else's shoulder. No! It's too early. She tried to scream this, but nothing left her lips.

Will nodded at the stranger and the stranger smiled in return, playing her part to perfection. A second later, she was racing off across the desert, sniffing the air. Talitha struggled to get control of her body back, but it was in vain and when the stranger stooped and found a round smooth rock that fit the palm of her hand so nicely. Talitha's thoughts began to dissipate beneath an avalanche of hate and malice. It felt as if she were drowning in a black evil and slowly she was being sucked under.

Chapter 19

Katie

For ages Katie laid there behind the couch with her hands stuffed in her ears, waiting for the horrible screams of her mother to creep through the cracks of her fingers, however, other than a few slaps, Amy and her thugs had left her alone. Eventually, Katie became bored and tried to listen in on the conversation of the Mexican thugs. Every ten minutes or so, the leader of the gang came around to check on Diablo and the man sitting in the family room. Pedro would usually give just a short pep talk but the thugs were nervous about Amy and the sword.

"Can you get that thing away from me?" Diablo asked in Spanish.

Pedro snorted, "I'm not touching it, and if you do, the White-witch will have your balls."

Were they talking about the sword? Was it still sitting up against the wall around the corner from her? Katie didn't like it there either—it gave her the creeps thinking it was so close.

The thug in her room asked, "How much longer we gotta stay?"

"We'll leave soon...I hope," Pedro replied. "When the witch finds the girl we take off."

The girl...they meant her! Was Amy using spells to find her? The very idea made Katie want to up and make a mad, stupid dash for the family room door. Only, that was impossible.

The thug in his chair sat eight feet from her, and wouldn't budge, not even to use the bathroom. She had to get out of there—the couch would not hide her from spells. When Pedro left again, Katie, moving with the stealth of a mouse, inched out from behind the couch and peeked into the living room and saw the top of a man's head in the chair just in front of her. Another man could be just seen standing in the deepening shadows of the kitchen.

Inwardly she cursed. Escape this way was even less likely than trying to rush past the man in the family room. She was just about to turn away when she felt the cold. It came from just to her left and turning, she saw the dread hell blade. The metal of it was black and burnt looking. Unwholesome. It repulsed her, she leaned away from it, and unknowingly her face contorted and turned pale. She wanted to creep back away from it, but a part of her realized that despite its ugly appearance, the thing was an actual weapon. One that was feared by the Mexicans as well as by Amy.

Reaching out her slim arm, she gently grabbed the sword and came very close to gasping. It was horrible. Worse than she could have imagined. It drained her arm of warmth and life. Her stomach began to churn and she wanted very badly to vomit. The blade was poison. It was death. Even so, she brought it around the corner with a cringing face and Katie's hand was near about frozen to the hilt. It hurt bad to hold, and it made her breath hitch in her throat. Very quickly, her entire body was trembling. She half slid, half-crawled back to the scant safety of her hiding place behind the couch. Once there, she set the sword down as gently as she could, so as not to make any noise and only then did she rub her hands together. Yet still she shivered. The broken hell blade had such a vicious cold to it that being so close sucked away her warmth and she began to fear that if she didn't do something, she would freeze to death.

She pushed it further under the couch, but that barely helped. In desperation, Katie slithered backwards to get as far from it as possible and saw to her delight, one of her sweatshirts she had tossed behind the couch only the day before. This she wrapped around the sword as best as she was able. It was a horror to touch, but once the cloth was between her and it the cold decreased rapidly.

Katie then laid back and went limp with relief. Going for the sword felt like the right thing to do, but it had also been terrifying and exhausting. Her hand still stung, except for where there was a numb swath that ran across her palm. She rubbed at it some more and worried that somehow the sword had tasted her and now knew her. It was a chilling thought and she scooted the sword bundled in the blue sweatshirt further from her.

A commotion from the other room reached her ears. There was a murmuring and then an odd sounding series of grunts.

Amy Harris walked into the family-room a second later. "Anything out there moving?" Although she was already snugged down into the shadows, Katie tried to borrow further under the couch. If it had been possible, she would have crawled beneath it completely, but as it was, with the room hung with growing darkness, she was quite invisible where she was. Now all she had to do was keep her teeth from chattering so loudly. In her fright, they clicked together going a hundred miles an hour, but she couldn't seem to control them, nor could she control her hands and arms and chest which shook as if an earthquake was going on within her.

Only when Amy left, breezing out of the room, did the young girl sag back onto the floor in relief. The relief lasted only a few minutes and then Amy screeched.

"Where's my sword?"

Suddenly the entire house seemed alive and people began running towards the living room. Katie didn't know what to do with herself. They would search the house for sure and it would only be a moment before they thought to look behind the couch. Grabbing the wrapped sword, she slithered to the far end of the couch and raised herself up just the tiniest amount. The man who had been sitting in the family room, stood in the doorway, he seemed very nervous, with wide eyes and hands that kept up a constant motion as if he didn't know exactly what to do with them.

Amy was screaming at her men, but Katie barely heard, she was too busy focusing on the door. It was just too far away to make a break for it with the man right there. Therefore she slunk down again, grabbed the sword and crawled across the far side of the room and came up behind the second couch and moved to the end nearest to the door. Now all she needed was two seconds and she could be out the door, booking like mad out into the Sonoran. She even knew where she'd go. There was a small trail that led...

"Diablo, let Mrs. Jern see your knife."

Katie's heart stopped, and try as she might, she couldn't breathe. It was as if her entire chest had seized up.

There was a grunt from the living room and then her mother's voice rang out, "Sure let's see that stupid knife, but don't get too close Amy. He's the one who has the sword."

"No. The beech es...lying. She es lying." Diablo sounded as if he couldn't make up his mind whether to be angry or afraid.

"Right. Why would I lie? What would I get out of it?" Gayle replied with a quivering voice. "He stuck it in the back of his pants and went out front. He doesn't look too smart to me; it's probably just in one of the cars." Katie realized her mother must have seen her grab the sword and was trying to get their attention focused away from the back door. Katie readied herself to make a run for it.

There was silence for a moment and then Amy said, "The real question is, why would you tell me the truth? Which I really doubt that you just did."

"Only because...I...I," Gayle was clearly trying to find a good lie and Amy wasn't in the mood to mess around.

"Diablo take off one her fingers. I don't care which."

"Good! Come on Diablo you stupid jerk!" Gayle screamed at him in a fear-warped fury. "Do what you want. I know which one of your men took..." She began to scream. Tears ran down Katie's face but her mind was hard like a rock. She wouldn't waste what her mother was doing for her, she would run. Only she couldn't. As she peeked, she saw that the man who had been in the doorway had turned slightly away from the scene in the living room and was partially canted toward her.

Her mother's screams seemed to tear at her vocal cords but she was still able to wail, "It was Pedro! It was Pedro. He said he would free me!"

"Stop!" Amy shouted. Gayle's scream subsided into a blubbering and soulful weeping.

"She's lying. It wasn't me."

"It had to be one of you idiots! Pedro, give me your gun."

"But..."

"Now! You...Jin put your gun on the ground, Diablo, you too. Step over there and face the window." Katie cursed to herself again. They would be able to see her easily if she ran.

"One of you three took my sword. You were the only ones on this side of the house. Now did anyone see one of these three leave se?" There was silence. "So that means the sword is still in the house and that means I'm going to find..."

Katie ran.

If she had to guess, she figured they would start their search in the family room and work their way down the house and that meant she was out of time. Noiselessly, she dashed to the door, yanked back on the knob and tore out of the house. Without looking back, she sprinted across the deck and just then, a huge sharp sound that seemed more like an explosion than a gunshot erupted behind her and glass flew around her speeding feet. A second one followed the first but then there was only screaming as she hurtled the deck's three foot railing.

Cries of "Run!" from her mother were intermingled with Amy shouting for the men not to shoot. The family room door crashed open a second later and the desert air was disturbed by the sound of heavy steps tromping across redwood boards.

Into the last of the evening light, Katie sprinted for all she was worth. Her legs pumped like mad and sandy dirt kicked up behind as she ran fast than she had ever in her life. At first she could hear them behind her gaining...gaining, but then after a few hundred yards, the sound of their feet drifter further and further back. A glance back showed there were four of them, running in a ragged line with their heads bent down low. They wouldn't be able to keep going much longer. But then neither could she. Her breath came in huge gasps and her feet started to weigh her down. No longer was she springing over the gullies with the athleticism of an antelope, instead she was down to a plodding jog.

Yet she was still faster than the out of shape bullies chasing her. With her lead over the men growing, she decided to alter her plans somewhat. Originally, she had meant to hide in the desert and loop far out before coming back to one of the homes a few miles away, where she would call the police. But now, with her huge lead, she saw she could make it to one of her closer neighbors.

At the next low rise she came across, Katie broke from her northeast route and turned sharp to the right and set off with all her dwindling strength for the road that looked like nothing more than a black stripe across the tired landscape. Past it, lights twinkled in the gathering dark. They looked closer than they actually were and five minutes of stumbling up and down ravines seemed to bring them no closer. The good news was that the four men who had been dogging her, had either given up, or had kept going in the direction that she had originally been taking.

The bad news was that as she neared the road, sucking wind and holding her hand over a stitch in her side, a black continental came idling up slowly. It was one of the two that had been in her driveway. Katie ducked down behind the nearest bush and watched as a man carrying a long gun hopped out. The road sat further down on a gentle slope and it had been a bit of a blessing for weary Katie to jog down it, but now the slope became a curse. The man with the gun was a few hundred feet off to her right, which at first seemed a good thing, but as he started up the slope, he decided against going straight up it, instead he walked slowly in a diagonal. He would pass very close to where she hid.

With little choice, she turned and started up the slope again; her legs were heavy as stone and just as stiff. It was one thing to go for an easy early morning jog and quite another to sprint for your life in this hard land. Ducking from shrub to shrub and running along the floor of the little ravines was slow work and each time she turned to see where the man with the rifle was, he seemed no further away. Though with the dark it was hard to tell. She wished she could find a cave or at least a large bush to hide beneath, but the desert was painfully barren with only the many folds and gullies giving her any cover.

The slope eventually ran out and there before her was the harsh rugged Sonoran. It had been her playground for years and she was just about to dash forward to lose herself among the hills and fissures of the broken landscape when a movement thirty feet in front of her caught her eye. A shadow moved among the low scraggling bushes: it was one of Amy's thugs and he moved with care to be quiet. Katie ducked down quick and watched as he kept going, oblivious of the girl so close to him. She could barely wait a minute after he passed to get moving again—there was the sound of someone scrambling up the slope in her rear.

The minute of rest helped and she was able to jog away to her right, once again heading northeast. Yet very quickly, she became tired again and took to plodding along. This was strange for her and at first she chalked it up to the fact that she had begun her get away with a full on sprint, however that had been practically twenty minutes prior. She should have recovered from that, not fully since she was still moving but more than she had.

It was as if she were being drained of energy. It was the sword. Even through the thick sweatshirt, the thing was cold and she took to switching hands every ten or fifteen seconds as they went numb. The night was cooling as well; Katie began to shiver despite her exorcise.

Up a head, there was a sheer outcropping of rock. It was a place she'd been to many times and was about three miles as the crow flew from her house. She staggered on towards it and ten minutes later, she pitched up panting, leaning up against the rock. Eagerly she set the sword down and after a minute of rest, she climbed as high as she could to get a good lay of the land.

Almost immediately, the young girl saw a blaze of headlights turn into her driveway. Hope that her brother had finally arrived surged in her and she turned her ear hoping to hear the crackle of gunfire that would let her know that Will was even then saving their mother. But the house was too far away and she had no way of knowing if it was him. In her heart, she didn't believe it was. There had been two cars that had pulled up and as far as she knew Will was only coming with Talitha, who couldn't drive as far as Katie understood.

She settled in, feeling relatively safe—no one could sneak up on her. Minutes ticked away and after twenty or so, a flash of light briefly lit the desert about a mile away, it was back along the route she had taken. A few seconds later, a fine crackling report of a gunshot came to her ears. This repeated itself a few more times and then stopped.

She hoped they were shooting at each other. That would be good. Yet she couldn't count on that fact and she decided to get moving. Climbing down the rock, she picked up her loathsome burden and began jogging more closely north. A dirt trail that ran east to west lay in that direction and she planned to take it east for a couple of miles and then strike again south where there were more houses. Her jog lasted for only a few minutes, after that the sword sapped her energy and she took to walking and then a few minutes later to stumbling. She didn't get close to the trail. A mile from it she saw headlights heading from the east and she stopped. Was it her brother, who could see the future and might have found out where she was, or was it Amy using some sort of spell to find her?

It was fifty-fifty. Katie ran back the way she came, reeling in fatigue and soon tears started to course their way down her cheek, she couldn't go far. Even if she ditched the sword right there she was practically done in, and she was far too afraid to throw the sword away. What would happen if they found it and killed her mother with it?

Behind her headlights grew brighter and the sound of an engine roaring came across the waste. Katie tried to hurry faster but she ended up sprawling in the dirt. Forcing herself up, she looked back in time to see the headlights click off. Where could she go? The desert was wide and empty, with nowhere to hide. The tall bare rock that she had partially climbed was the only thing in sight; it beckoned to her and she made her way back to it.

When Katie finally arrived, she climbed with frozen hands as high as she could, but it was nowhere near as high as she had climbed before, perhaps only twenty or so feet from the ground. Sheer exhaustion stopped her and she rested on a shelf of rock. It was supposed to be only a halt of a minute or so, but when she turned to move again, her muscles cramped up in her legs and she knew there would be no going any higher.

The sword she pushed as far from her as possible and she sat back, leaning against the rock shivering with fear and cold. The only good thing about her spot was that due to the angle of the shelf, she had protection from bullets, at least as long as the thugs stayed on the ground. However, there wasn't much chance of that and since there were a number of ways up the rock, she could be attacked from more than one direction at once, she felt painfully vulnerable.

With a light snick, disturbing the quiet air, she brought out her jackknife. Once she had been quite proud of it and the gleaming blade professed to this, but now it seemed pathetic and practically useless. She tested it against her thumb. It was very sharp and this was no surprise, since she had honed it herself in preparation for a day very much like this one.

She had trained to fight. She had hardened her body and her mind. She had prepared like no child her age would ever consider. Her state of readiness had been fantastic. Yet it had all been for nothing. Just then, Katie lacked the strength to run or to fight. The most that she could hope for was to have the strength to die.

Could she do it?

Suicide was a sin. An unforgivable sin according to the priests. It was throwing away God's greatest gift—in essence, throwing it back in his face. But the alternative! Sucked into the Void as a plaything of Ba'al. She wouldn't go that way.

"Katie!" Amy's voice called out. She sounded very close.

"I'm sorry, Lord." Taking the razor sharp blade in her right hand, she made to slice into her left wrist.

A sound came from just below and Amy said, "I know you're up there, Katie."

With her shaking hands and the suddenness of the voice, the blade slid into her wrist almost smack dab in the middle, missing her radial artery by almost an inch.

"Uhhh!" It hurt very badly and she had to clench her teeth to keep from screaming.

"Now what do you think you're trying to do?" Amy asked conversationally. "Are you trying to hurt yourself? Are you thinking you can get out of this by killing yourself? Don't be stupid. It'll take you too long to die. Diablo, go and fetch her."

"Si." There was a scrambling of someone climbing up the rocks.

"No stay back, or..." Katie didn't have anything to bargain with.

Amy seemed to know this. "Or what?"

Katie grabbed up the sword and shook it so that the cloth fell away from the blade. It was so cold and nasty that she had to hold it out away from her. "Or I'll use the sword on Diablo. I have it right here in my hands and I'll do it."

The sound of climbing stopped on the rocks.

"You should know that whatever you do, you're just plain fucked," Amy said with a hint of irritation. "If you try to kill yourself by jumping, you're going to hell. If you use that sword, guess what? That's right, you're going to hell. If Diablo fetches you down here, you're going to hell as well. Face it Katie, you are one fucked little virgin. But..."

With each count of how she would end up in hell, Katie's spirits sank lower and lower so that when Amy said But, despite herself, Katie felt the smallest glimmer of hope. "But what?"

"Well it's like this. I can make it real tough on your family if I want to. I can make them all suffer. I can use the sword and send them to hell, or I can I can make it quick and natural. A bullet in the back of the head."

Katie, who had been feeling small, grew quickly angry. "That's your deal?"

"Yeah. I'm going to get what I want one-way or the other. I'm going to open a gate and that's that. I'd just rather do it the easy way," Amy replied reasonably. "I would even let them live, if I could trust them not to interfere. Do you think I can? Do you think ole Willy J is gonna sit back and do nothing?"

Katie was silent at this. If Will could, he would stop Amy.

"Just what I thought. Now I'm on a time crunch. This has to be done tonight, or it's my ass heading off to hell, so what do you think? Do you want them all in hell with you or will you come along peacefully?"

Katie knew that she was indeed fucked, still it was nearly a minute before she answered. Amy had given away too much. Time crunches were made to be exploited.

"Yes, but..." She paused again dragging out the seconds. She had aces up her sleeves: Will's capacity to see the future, Talitha's superhuman abilities and she, little Katie, had her guile and her jackknife. This she slid down her sock. "You'll make their deaths quick? You promise?"

"I'll have my men shoot to kill." Almost like magic, a gun fired off to their right. It was surprisingly close, perhaps only a hundred yards or so. There was a pause and then Amy, with a little tremor in her voice, called, "Get down here now, or all bets are off."

Katie's confidence escalated. "If that's my brother then you're in more trouble than you realize."

"Why? Because he can see the future?" Amy laughed at Katie's silence. "He can't see my future, and if that's him, he's in for a rude surprise. Besides Diablo, there are seven other men surrounding this little outcropping and another up with the jeep."

Now Katie was sorely vexed and her confidence sank to a new low. Without his vision, her brother was just another man. She cast a last glance at the sword and purposely left it on the rock shelf when she climbed down.

"Where's the sword?" Amy demanded. The thought had come to the young girl that she would try to make a run for it when Diablo went for the sword, but Amy held a pistol in her hand. It was small and mean. So it was that Katie jerked her head to the shelf.

"I didn't want to have to touch it again," she said as way of an excuse.

Without being asked, Diablo climbed up for the sword. Amy called up to him, "Whatever you do, don't throw that thing down here. I don't want to get stabbed on accident. Just carry..." A man's scream of pain cut in on Amy. It came from around to their left, almost behind them. It rose up high and then cut off quick.

Though Katie felt that she should've been in some way elated that a possible rescue was taking place, the scream had chilled her. She didn't think that it was her brother out there; she had a feeling that it was Talitha. And Talitha stalking human prey at night wasn't something she wanted to see.

"What is it?" Amy hissed up at a wide-eyed Diablo.

Diablo shrugged, which could barely be seen. Seconds later a long string of automatic rifle fire lit up the sky to their right.

Amy spun. "What the hell! Is that guy even shooting at anything?" Who knew? Amy stood looking angry and confused in equal proportions. She gazed back to the north where the jeep sat parked. It seemed far away. "Get back up there. Go on get climbing," she ordered her hostage.

Katie was glad to. She had seen her sister when she was in one of her moods—Talitha could be a holy terror. The climb was short and Diablo pushed her to the side of the ledge. Suddenly she felt quite exposed and the drop very steep. To keep her mind off the nearness of the edge, she looked out into the desert. At first, nothing could be seen, but then someone began firing again. Whoever it was sprayed the surrounding landscape with bullets and then in the fading light of his gun he could be seen to turn and run.

After that, the night swallowed him up and nothing more could be seen from that direction. Amy watched nervously with eyes that couldn't get any larger. "If that's Willy J, how's he countering my spell? And if he can, what does that mean?" She gave Diablo a shrew look, but turned to her hostage and said, "Katie, skootch back from the edge a bit. You don't want to be too close."

The girl was all too happy to get away from the edge, but she wasn't happy when Amy smashed her on the back of the head with her pistol. It sent her flopping face first on the ledge and the dark desert got darker still. However, she didn't lose consciousness. Her world spun and little came into focus and less made any sense.

"Diablo, look at this in my hand."

Despite the sharp pain in Katie's head, she wanted to see what was in Amy's hand. The very idea of it was strangely demanding and she rolled over slightly to see.

"Ohh." It hurt to move and there was no question about getting up, it would be impossible to even try. So it was that Katie was disappointed and did not see what it was Amy held. Something twinkled in the witch's palm and Diablo looked quite stupid just standing there staring. He seemed frozen and moved not a muscle. Feeling let down at having missed it, Katie let her head flop to the side and groaned a second time as the darkness spun and tilted around her.

For the next few minutes, the young girl could do little but lay there trying to right her mind. She could hear as Amy crawled about the ledge, whispering in a cruel sounding language. It was unnatural and it soured the air and brought bile rising in her throat. Fearing that she would vomit, the young girl struggled to a kneeling position and began to retch like a dog.

"Not here you idiot! Over the side." Amy was in a fiery mood and this had Katie turning to look at her perplexed. She wished that she hadn't. In the past couple of minutes, Diablo had died, though he bore no obvious wounds. He was dead and that was a certainty. His eyes were open, but there not a flicker of life or intelligence in them. His skin had gone gray and now sagged from his bones, forming odd layers of wrinkles below his eyes. He smelled foul. How it was possible the young girl did not know, but Diablo smelled like he had been dead a week a more. Now Katie had to vomit, there was no stopping it. Like a sophomore after her first kegger, she staggered on her hands and knees to the edge and heaved up everything that was left to her stomach.

There wasn't much.

Amy continued through this to hiss out her venomous language, until at last the thing that had once been Diablo began to move. First, his head swung this way and that and then one by one his arms raised and lowered.

"Good," the witch said with a great deal of satisfaction as well as relief. "Now take up the sword and kill anyone who comes near to this rock." Without a word, the bizarre creature of Diablo bent and took up the short broken sword and began to climb down. Once he was out of sight, Katie felt her nausea regress.

"What did you do to him?"

"Never mind that. Just be glad that it wasn't you." Amy looked to have aged ten years and sat with her back to the pinnacle of rock, her body sagged in exhaustion. There was silence between the two for a minute before a final cry went up in the desert. It was a long harsh scream and went on and on. The person died slowly. Katie felt that she wanted to be sick again and as the scream kept going Amy didn't look much better.

"What the hell is Will doing?" the witch asked.

"That's not Will. He'd never do that to someone, he's far too good of a person. That's Talitha."

"What? How do you mean? Talitha is just...she's just a girl."

The screaming ended and then there was the sound of someone begging and the word please began to be repeated with unsettling repetition. Katie realized she was now almost as afraid of her rescuer as she was of her captor.

"No, Talitha is something a lot more. She'll tear that thing you made into shreds. Talitha's unstoppable." Katie had great confidence in her sister's ability to kill.

"Don't be too sure about that..."

"I'm quite sure. And then she'll come up here and do the same or perhaps worse to you." Katie's self-assured manner had Amy looking worried.

"Oh Aaaaameee?" A girl's voice, sweet and sounding very young, called out from the night. It sent shivers down Katie's spine. That sweet girl had just killed who knows how many people, yet it sounded like she was out after dark playing hide and go seek.

Katie leaned over the ledge and looked out, but saw nothing. "We're over here. Amy's a witch and she made some sort of thing..." she was interrupted.

"Shut up or so help me I'll shoot you through the spine." Amy had her little gun pressed against the lower part of Katie's back.

"Shooting someone in the spine? Nice...very nice." The voice had moved closer, but still remained unseen. "Well, look what you made, Amy. That's a Draugr. It's real cute, but really, do you think it will save you?"

"How does she know that's a Draugr? Is she a witch?" Amy whispered to Katie.

"I wouldn't bother whispering, Amy. I can hear you just fine. And let me tell you how I know that's a Draugr. It's because someone's dumb-ass mother was a whore-bitch and sent me to the Void. You can learn all sorts of stuff down there if you listen and watch and learn. And you can become! I've grown, bitch! Everyone else turned into the rotten filth that is trod upon and pissed upon and bled upon, but not I!" The voice was loud and triumphant. It edged nearer with each word and Amy pulled further back as it did.

"Don't come any closer! I'll kill your sister. I'm not kidding, I'll do it." Amy's fear came out in her voice, which trembled. The gun dug into Katie's back.

"I don't think you will. In fact, I know you won't—you need her. Don't you?" The voice of Talitha drew off to their right, but because of the rock, she was still unseen. "You told Will that you were on a time crunch, but I know what that really means. Ha-Ha! You were always so stupid. You made a deal with a demon and it's looking for payment. So you can't exactly just up and kill her." Amy was quiet behind Katie, breathing heavily and thankfully, the pressure of the gun relaxed. Talitha continued, "But I have all the time in the world. I can just sit out here and wait. I bet that time crunch of yours is going to expire here pretty shortly."

Katie cast a glance back at her captor. Beautiful raven haired Amy Harris had been transformed in the last few minutes. She had wild eyes, pale skin, and shaking hands. Her lips trembled and her whole demeanor was that of a trapped animal. Her little controlled world had turned upside down simply by the presence of someone more foul and evil than she.

She was desperate. Katie could see her mind working, yet there were few options left for the witch. To give up her hostage would certainly mean death. To send the Draugr after Talitha was a risk as well. The girl had killed seven armed men in the dark and whatever the Draugr was, Talitha didn't seem too worried about it. And to wait meant what exactly? That a demon would come and claim her soul? It was no wonder Amy looked to be falling apart.

If Katie had been in her shoes, she would've sent the Draugr to fight Talitha and then would have tried to make a dash for it. She dearly hoped Amy would do this since it would be her best chance at escape from both of them.

There was another choice that Katie hadn't thought of.

Amy leaned to the edge. "Diablo, run to the Jern's. Use the sword, kill everyone there. Go!" Like an automaton, the Draugr ran off without a word. Katie watched it go and it was with a shameful sense of relief; both it and the sword were horrors her young mind could barely cope with.

"Bye Draugr, have fun!" Talitha called after it. "I don't know if you can be anymore stupid, Amy. You may not be able to hear the screams and gunshots, but I certainly can. Our dear Willy J is over there with some soldier boys right now. I don't think there'll be enough people left alive to come close to freeing Ba'al. Maybe a few of the smaller demons sure, but not Ba'al, that thing is huge!"

"But..."Amy started to say but stopped, fearing that Talitha was right.

Katie feared it as well. "Tal, forget about me, I'll be alright. Go after the Draugr; don't let it kill mom and Will. Please," she begged.

"Mom and Will?" Talitha repeated with slight touch of incredulity. "I don't know. That doesn't seem worth the trip. I gotta tell you—me and Will, we get along about as well as a cat and a dog. And frankly, I would rather see him in the Void, than out of it. He's always fucking with me. Keeping me from having any fun, ya know? And mom? Eh."

"What do you mean, eh?" Katie demanded. "She's your mother, Tal."

"Well, she was always so nitpicky. I note that you didn't suggest that I go save our dad. Is he out bowling or something?" For the first time since Talitha had begun speaking there was the slightest hesitation.

"He's dead already," Katie replied. The word corpse flashed through her mind and it made her chest ache to think it.

"He's not dead yet," Amy cried; hope made her voice rise the slightest bit. "But he soon will be if Diablo gets there before you,"

"You're lying...I don't think...you can't kill my father," Talitha hesitated. "He's far too strong... and you're just..." Her voice had changed from the imperious commanding tone to one of confusion. Katie had seen her sister change from one personality to the other a few times years before and it sounded like this.

"What's wrong, Tal? Was dad supposed to be alive?" Katie strove to keep the fear out of her voice; she knew the evil Talitha thrived on it.

"Y-yes. Will was going to save him...he was supposed to..." Talitha broke off again.

Katie glanced at Amy who was slowly pulling herself back together and the young girl realized that for a second there she could've grabbed the gun from the witch, but that moment passed. "What was Will supposed to do? Do you guys have a plan?" Katie asked.

"Yes, he was supposed to save mom and dad. And I was supposed to kill Amy and take the virg..." This time Talitha didn't falter in her words—she clamped her mouth shut hard.

The word 'take' didn't register on Katie. She took a shaky breath and rallied her courage. "Tal, forget about me. Go and save mom and Will. Run!"

"No, I can't," Talitha said in a small voice. Gone was the braggadocios snarling of a minute before—she had thankfully changed. "I can't do it...I can't leave you to the same fate that I went through."

It was good to hear Talitha's voice the way she always remembered it, but it hurt Katie terribly to have to say, "No darn it, leave me! The sword is way worse than anything Amy can do me."

"I can't. You don't know how it will be. The Void is horrible beyond..."

Katie's courage had peaked when Talitha made the change to her nicer personality, but the peak didn't amount to much and was even then slowly dribbling away. With her courage went the strength of her voice and she whispered, "Tal, I'll get out of this, somehow. Please, now go."

"No, I can't," Talitha said with conviction.

Time was getting away from them. The thing, the Draugr had run off with great speed. "Do you trust me?" Katie asked the voice in the dark.

"What? Do I trust you? Katie...I don't really know you. I haven't seen you since you were six years old."

"You're right, you don't know me. I may not have your strength, or Will's vision, but I saw the demon, Tal. And I'll fight no matter what, and besides, if you save Will, he'll find me and he'll save me." Talitha was silent and seconds ticked by, and with their passing Katie grew more anxious. "Talitha! Go now or you'll lose all of us. Trust me, please."

"Ok...ok. I will, but I'll be back, ok?"

Talitha started to run away and then the last words that Katie ever heard from her sister came to her faintly: "I love you, Katie."

"Love you too," Katie whispered. She cast a look at her captor; Amy held the gun directly on her; it never wavered even for an inch.

The witch smiled in a sudden relaxed manner. "That was a close one. You did the right thing you know. Better just you in hell than your whole family, right?" It didn't feel so right, not just then. In fact, the girl felt sick but regardless, she nodded in a slight way. Amy nodded back; there was an evil glint in her eyes. "So you gonna fight, like you said?"

Unable to look the witch in the face, Katie dropped her gaze down at the rock they were sitting on. After her long fear-laden afternoon and her exhausting sprint through the desert, she was done in and just then, felt too weak to do much of anything let alone fight. She shook her head, no.

"That's what I thought," Amy replied and the smirk in her voice was audible. "Katie?" The witch paused until Katie raised her head like the scared child she was. "Look at what I have here in my hand."

Her mind screamed for her not to look, but the little thing was so very shiny in the dark night. The thing was interesting as well, so much so that her mind swelled, taking in all of its intricate details and she quite forgot about the gun pointing at her midsection, and she forgot about escape, and even the fact that very soon she would be sacrificed to a fiend from hell and that her soul would be sucked into the Void for all eternity. It was just so shiny.

Chapter 20

Talitha

To the girl flashing across the rugged night desert, the dark wasn't an issue. As plain as day, she could see the cacti, the jagged rocks and the odd, tar-smelling bushes, and she leapt or dodged them without slowing her fantastic, frantic pace. Her long brown hair drew out behind her like the pendants of an olden day frigate, flowing and dancing with the wind of her passing. Her long tan legs stretched, extending beautifully and when she sailed across a gorge of some twenty feet, it was with the grace of a gazelle. To anyone but herself she was a sight. A beautiful girl.

In her mind, she wasn't and could never be. There was blood on her hands. Literal, actual blood. There was blood in her hair as well, and a fine spray of it across the slim perfection of her neck. She had killed with ease that night. The thugs that had been arrayed around the lonely spire of rock looking to keep a little girl from escaping, had gone down one by one, unaware that something horrible had been stalking them. Unaware that is until the stranger controlling Talitha had become bored over the silent and quick manner in which she murdered. Then she had allowed for some pain, not as much as she would have wished for, but still enough to get her feeling hot and randy.

The memory of her sexual excitement over the screams and the desperate quiet begging sent a spasm of disgust across her back and shoulders. She wanted to spit. She wanted to take a very long hot shower and scrub away her guilt and sin. And most of all, she wanted to pretend that it hadn't been her. It hadn't felt like her; while the killing had been going on, it had felt as though she were deep underwater, watching helplessly as her hands had crushed throats and beat in skulls.

It had felt like her other self, the stranger, who was even now watching her again. Sometimes it seemed as if the stranger was in her and at other times it was as if she were being shadowed, only steps away, so that she wanted to turn as she ran and look back. Fear stopped her, she was afraid to see that she was alone, afraid to come to the conclusion that there was no one else culpable, that it was she who was the real killer.

Talitha sobbed aloud as she ran, confused at who she was and why she did things that she never would have ever considered. On one level, she understood that she was possessed by a second personality, but on a more basic level, the blood on her hands was still wet and stank of copper, the smell of which was driving her crazy. Yet despite her bewildered mind or perhaps because of it, she sped faster than she had ever before. The desert floor zoomed beneath her sprinting feet and after barely two minutes, she could see the Draugr far off. It had a near insurmountable lead and if it were to gain the house before she did, her family would be dead within seconds. Or at least part of her family would.

Katie might never die. To judge by Will's dreams from the day before, it would seem that her little sister's body might someday end up in cold storage, while her soul, used like a wedge to prop open the gate, would forever be tormented in the Void. The thought of leaving her behind made it hard to keep going, since Talitha had been there herself and knew the terrors that the girl would face.

"You might as well turn back," the stranger demanded. How badly it wanted Katie! This was the greatest reason that Talitha had abandoned her little sister to her fate. With her, the stranger would have the power to control the gate, in essence, the power to control Ba'al Zubel here on earth. That was a power indeed, a great evil power. A power that could turn Talitha into a demon just as Ba'al Fie-ere.

The stranger reared up, growing stronger at the thought.

Talitha had to forget Katie. The girl was doomed no matter what. It was sad but true. She didn't even have the option to run away, Talitha had smelled the fragrance of witchcraft all about the rock and knew that Katie was laid upon with a beacon. There was nowhere she could run that Amy couldn't track her down. She was doomed and Talitha forced herself to put the girl out of her mind. Instead, she concentrated on her own running.

Into her bloodstream, she began to pump dangerous levels of adrenaline and noradrenalin. She constricted blood flow throughout her body so that quickly her arms went numb, but her legs felt fresh and invigorated. She blazed even swifter, faster than any Olympian could hope to run. A minute passed and then two more, and still she kept up her pace. There could be no slowing. The Druagr wouldn't. Or so at first she thought, but as the minutes passed and she drew closer, she saw that it was moving in a shambling unnatural waddle and though it hadn't exactly slowed, it still wasn't as fast as it could have been. Oddly, it made detours around the large formations of bushes that she routinely leapt over without a problem. Because of this, Talitha saw that she might catch it after all, but it would be oh so close.

With the slim possibility held out before her, she threw everything she had into the final mile and was only dimly aware that she was leaving bloody footprints laid out behind her as the tough skin of her feet shredded under the blistering pace. Soon, in spite of the great control she had over her physicality, her heart thundered in her slim chest and her breathing became harsh. The cool night air burned like fire in her lungs, but she would make it, she would catch the thing. Yet at what cost? She had put her entire self into the sprint of three miles and she rightly gauged her exhausted body to be on its last reserves. She didn't think that she would have anything left to fight such a monster. Yet she had no choice.

At a little over two hundred yards from the house, she closed on the thing and with each long stride, she drew closer still, until finally, Talitha was near enough to lash out at the thing's legs and this sent it stumbling head over heels. So tired was she that the action staggered her as well and she nearly went sprawling, but managed to stay on her feet. It was a good thing she did too, for the once-human was at her with barely a pause to right itself.

The Draugr was a blasphemy. It was possessed with unholy energy giving it speed, strength, and vitality out of any proportion to that of the human it had once been. Talitha had never seen one, yet knew much about it, though she had no idea how. The knowledge just came to her in a flash and with it, the understanding that she wasn't likely to prevail against it, at least not as Talitha, not in her present state. She had a much better chance of survival if the killer inside her were to take control and undeniably it wanted to. It was large in her mind, powerful with evil and desire. Even as the Draugr sprang up and sent the hell blade slashing at her face, she felt her mind shifting between herself and the stranger.

This time Talitha fought back against the stranger.

What would it gain her to destroy the Draugr only to have the stranger, that evil beast within her, in control of the blade and so close to her parent's home? Talitha knew what the killer would do and decided that it was better to die and have her mottled soul sucked into the Void than to have her own hands further soiled with the guilt of killing her own family. Therefore, she strove in a battle of wills to retain her awareness, even as her body fought just to stay alive.

Quickly, it felt as though her body was losing.

Her chest ached with each breath and her feet stung and bled where razor sharp rocks had penetrated the skin. Her legs shook uncontrollably and when the Draugr sent the blade in a hacking slash at her face, they wobbled her backwards and only barely did the black sword miss. She felt the cold of its passing and it froze the sweat beading on her forehead. As she stepped back, Talitha stumbled in her weakness and made to catch herself with her arms, but they were dead weighs, still numb from oxygen deprivation. The best she could manage was an awkward pin wheeling.

A second later, the creature attacked again and Talitha was still not even close to being balanced. She felt quite a bit as though she were a large penguin with her arms unable to rise above her shoulders. A lurching ungainly backwards momentum was all that she had and she didn't think it would save her, especially when her feet struck one of the large creosote bushes and she fell full into it. In a panic, Talitha began kicking out, forcing herself further into the bush and amazingly the Draugr stopped, seemingly confused.

It turned its head this way and that, apparently searching for the girl who was only a step away. Next, it moved a few feet to the right, but still it couldn't seem to see the girl with the wonderful tan and the floral print sundress among the leaves and sharp stems of the bush. Eight wonderful precious seconds slipped by as the thing went to and fro searching for her. In that short time Talitha sent fresh oxygen rich blood flooding down her arms, right into her finger tips, and down into her legs. The eight seconds were a godsend, but what she really needed was five minutes resting on her back and a quart of Gatorade.

That was not to be.

Abruptly, the Draugr forgot about her, and dashed off in the direction of the house intent on its primary directive, the killing of everyone there. Talitha pulled her weary body out of the bush and stumbled after. Thankfully, a long gully detoured the creature and Talitha, after leaping over it, stood in its path, with her chest heaving and her muscles trembling. She knew the Draugr would attack with strength, speed, and endurance that was greater than her own, and she knew that it would kill her. The reason was simple; she was down to her last reserves of strength and not only that, she lacked ferocity and a killing instinct, these had always been the attributes of her other self.

As expected, the fiend attacked. It hacked left and right with the blade so that it was all Talitha could do to dodge or block the blows sailing in faster with each swing. More and more she was forced to let her instincts dictate her actions, until she began to feel a hatred for the creature. This feeling was so intense that it came as a surprise and only then did she realize that her instinct for fighting had slipped into a lust for fighting. This wasn't a desire that she had ever felt before.

Too late, she saw that the stranger had control. This other self dodged and fought with such skilled technique that Talitha worried that she might actually win the fight, but then in her exhaustion, her foot caught on a rock and she faltered to one knee. The Draugr's next attack couldn't be evaded and she brought her left arm up to block the sword from striking her. Her forearm met the forearm of her enemy and the force of the blow almost paralyzed her arm. It fell limp to her side. Now she was too close to the Draugr for any dodging and her only option was too fall back.

Down she went with the much stronger Draugr on top in a dominant position, and without pause it drove the blade down at her face again. It was a terrible sensation for Talitha to watch as if from a distance, as her body was attacked. She felt helpless seeing the black blade pass within an inch of her face as her head swung hard to the right to avoid it.

The stranger inside went wild with animalistic fury, the feeling erupted throughout her body, she bucked and heaved, but to no avail—the Draugr was to strong and she too weak—and the blade came again.

With almost no room to evade it, the blade sank into the side of her neck, just above the sloping trapezius muscle. Immediately she felt her essence, her soul being drawn along into the sword. There was no fighting it. She tried and the stranger tried, but a leaf in a tornado had more control of its destination than she, and down, down, down she felt herself being pulled into the great black Void.

Chapter 21

Will

Will wasted no time preparing himself mentally for the confrontation with Amy's thugs, but Father Vogel was another matter altogether. After Talitha sped off in search of Katie, the priest, decked out as if for Mass, began a final prayer for the men. At first, Will thought it to be a good idea, but it turned out that Father Vogel, unlike most priests, lacked eloquence. He might have been a first rate exorcist and certainly knew psychology and the workings of the human mind, but when it came to exhorting the men and comforting them in times of peril, he was a touch dull and worse, long winded.

After five minutes, Will began to fidget. At the start of the prayer he felt good, relatively calm, however as the time ticked away he started to get nervous, though judging by the four men of the unit, he shouldn't have been. They stood coolly with bowed heads as Vogel went on and on in a seemingly endless procession of words. After eight minutes, Will not only was nervous, but he also became agitated at the delay, this took the outward expression of him tapping the side of the pistol that he had picked up in Maine. Within him was the desire to check once again the number of rounds in the magazine. He had done this three times already, the first time only a minute after he had loaded the thing.

A craving for Wild Turkey came upon him, which he attempted to dismiss, though without any real success. Too many times in the past eight years he had used the alcohol as a crutch and now he felt jittery going into a battle without it. Glancing surreptitious at the men, he wondered if any of them were carting about a hip flask or its equivalent, yet nothing looked obvious and he knew he would be too embarrassed to ask.

A long and loud sigh escaped him. It was much louder than he had expected it to be and it caused Father Vogel to glance up. In chagrin, Will dropped his head back down so quickly that his chin thumped against his chest. A few seconds later the priest wrapped it up crossing himself.

"Amen," the five men said in chorus after crossing themselves.

"Ok, fellas the plan's quite simple," Abe began with some authority. "Diamond formation, Timothy takes point until we bear up to about a hundred yards. Zeke on the left. I take the right, Jake in the rear. Mr. Jern are you still coming?"

"Yeah." The word was a whisper. His nervousness was so pronounced that he didn't trust himself to speak and was glad that the dark hid his shaking hands.

"In that case, I want you off to Zeke's left by at least thirty yards. Please, don't shoot over anyone's head. If you have to fire your weapon make sure you know where each of your squad mates are before you do. We'll be attacking what you have described as the family room first, and we know where the other men are arranged about the house, so if you see flashes coming from one of the other rooms, or if you see someone come out, don't be afraid to shoot. Just whatever you do, don't shoot south to north because you may be shooting at one of us. Know what you're aiming at, got it? And one more thing, check that your safety is on till you're ready to fire."

Will nodded though no one could see it. "Yeah." His hand went to the butt of the gun that stuck in his waistband and he forced himself to pull it back without checking the load. "Can I get a moment, if you don't mind?" Will jogged over to the other car where Father Vogel stood and after giving the priest a quick tight smile he ducked in and kissed his wife on the lips. They were agreeably warm and soft. "Love you," he whispered, staring into her face.

"I'm sorry I'm not much of an inspirational speaker."

"Huh?" Will pulled his tall frame from the car. "What did you say, Father?"

Father Vogel looked odd in his Easter vestments out there in the night desert, he also looked uncomfortable. "I was just apologizing for not being such an inspiration. I was never really such a good public speaker. I think it may be why I was shipped off to exorcism school."

"There's such a thing?"

Vogel laughed quiet and dry. "No. It was just a joke. I'm sorry. I'm just a little nervous."

He wasn't nervous near enough, in Will's opinion. If Ba'al was there at the house, it would destroy the priest as soon as it could. "I think we all are, so don't sweat it. In fact, I could use some of that sacramental wine."

The priest smiled at Will's half-joke and then the two stood looking at each other in embarrassed silence. Despite the cooling night, a small trickle of sweat ran down the side of Will's face, he reached up to wipe it away and it seemed to break the moment.

"Good luck," the priest said with some solemnity.

"You too." Somewhat stiffly, the two men shook hands.

"Abraham? To whom should I give my stole to?"

Jake came up out of the dark, giving the priest a little start. To add to his dark clothing, the soldier had painted his face black as well. "I'll take it." With some ceremony, the priest removed the stole kissed it once and after folding it neatly, handed it over. Jacob stored it away neatly, tucking it in his shirt. There was another heavy silence.

"Ah we gonna do this, ah what?" Zeke called impatiently in his Boston accent.

"Yes. Timothy, get going," Abraham spoke in a low tone. He was closer than Will realized. "Watch your spacing and keep your shots tight. Mr. Jern, if you don't mind..."

"Please. It's Will remember? Not Mr. Jern."

"Right. Will it is. Get going. Keep low. Stay abreast of Zeke. You don't want to get either in front or behind. Someone can get hurt that way."

This, Will thought was actually supposed to be a joke since they were heading off to hurt all sorts of people and so he smiled in appreciation. However, Abe didn't. He just glared about with a hard face, making sure everyone was moving off into the right positions.

As Will left him, trotting to the far left of the little formation, he heard Abe giving last minute instructions to the priest, "Keep the lights off and don't move until you hear shooting. Then creep up until you hear two shots and then a pause and a third. Bang, bang...bang. Like that, got it?"

He assumed the priest got it since he moved too far away to hear the acknowledgement. "Zeke?" In the dark, the camouflaged man was impossible to see.

"Over here."

"How am I supposed to keep abreast of you when I can't see you from ten feet, let alone thirty?"

"Every few seconds, I'll make this sound." Zeke let out a little chirping noise, sweeip. "Just orient on that. Good luck Will."

"You too."

Will, slinking low, walked out toward the road for about thirty paces and hunkered down. His breath came and went heavily, his sweat continued to trickle down his forehead and his eyes were wide, straining in the dark. The need for a drink was becoming a physical force within him. He could do this with half a bottle of whiskey in him, but he didn't know if he could, dry.

Sweeip, sweeip. The noise was ahead of Will and to his right; Zeke was already fifteen to twenty paces in front of him.

Hurrying forward, he stumbled and fell, cutting his hands and dropping his gun, "Damn!" This he said aloud, but wasn't worried about the noise; the house was still a way off. It was quite dark and had a sad gloom about it and if Talitha hadn't reported that there were men in it waiting with drawn guns, he would have very much considered it vacant.

In haste, he picked himself up and after finding the gun a few feet in front of him, began again more carefully. A while later, perhaps two hundred yards, he realized he hadn't heard the chirp sound in some time. Did that mean he was too far in front of Zeke or too far behind? There was no way to know. A thrill of anxious panic swept him for a moment and he ducked down not wishing to be taken for one of Amy's men. For a long minute, he squatted, sweating beside a bush, and feeling altogether unlike himself.

The cause of his puzzling anxiety was almost certainly the Wild Turkey, or rather the lack of it and he was very embarrassed to come to that conclusion. Forgetting completely the hidden bottle of vodka that Lisa had sipped from on Saturday nights when he was with his sister, Will worried what she would think if she knew that he was at least situationally an alcoholic. He was mentally upbraiding himself for his weakness when he heard a soft noise coming from the north, not at all the direction that any noise should be coming from.

Closer it came and Will brought up the gun. Sweeip. Will practically deflated in relief.

"Zeke?"

"Yeah...sorry. I went too far to the right. I think you need to move back to the left."

Will hurried away, not wanting Zeke to see him even in the dim light. There would be nothing but shame if any of the men could see how badly his hands shook. It was strange that they did, he wasn't even that scared. The men of the unit had assault weapons and training, while the thugs he had seen so far were pathetic, and really, Will didn't see that he would be much use other than to draw some fire his way.

His only plan at the moment was to get in close and squiggle up to the border of the lawn that sloped upwards to the house. From there he could fire some shots into it, if he felt the need to distract some of Amy's men. If they fired back, they wouldn't likely hit him if he kept low, which he very much intended to do.

At two hundred yards the chirping slowed in pace, meaning that Zeke was likely crawling from bush to bush and Will emulated the idea, moving on his hands and knees. With painstaking slowness the house drew closer, as it did his anxiety increased until at fifty yards, he couldn't go further. A barren swath of desert lay between him and the equally open yard. Sometime in the last few months, his father must have cleared the area of scrub and now there was half a football field of coverless exposed ground between him and the house.

Slowly Will poked his head up and saw with further dismay that this openness extended as far around the house as he could see. What were they to do? What was he to do? He had no clue; there had been no contingency plans for this sort of thing at least that he was aware of.

Did he dare try slipping over to where Zeke was? He thought better of it. He was the least trained of them all and worried that he would give away their position. Instead, he would wait for them to come to him, which was something he fully...

From the house, a long rattle of machine gun fire sent Will sprawling face first into the hard dirt. They had machine guns! The sound of guns firing off to his right sounded next. Suddenly gun blasts were coming from everywhere in the house and the din was amazing. For seconds he hugged the dirt, but then after a short time realized that no one was shooting anywhere near him, and he lifted his head to see.

Two men in black were crouched in front of the family room, keeping low away from the shattered windows. They were men of the unit but he couldn't tell who they were. The man furthest to the right, crawled to the corner of the house and snuck a quick peek toward the wing of the ranch that held the bedrooms. He was rewarded with a burst of machine gun fire from one of the rooms. Off to Will's right a man from the unit was obviously training his gun in that direction and a short pop, pop, pop sounded and the machine gunner fell back firing his gun into the ceiling.

Now for a minute, nothing happened except for a bit of sporadic firing from inside the house and Will wondered if he should move up on the left as he had planned, but only just then, a figure in black streaked diagonally across his vision. It was Zeke. The man sprinted and dropped a bare half second before bullets tore through the air. Will was back to lying as flat as possible since Zeke was almost directly in front of him and the bullets missing him were coming uncomfortably close to Will. More gunfire from his right silenced one of the gunmen shooting at Zeke. This caused almost every gun in the house to spray the desert out to his right, giving Will the opportunity to clear the area behind where Zeke lay. His only options were forward or to move to his right.

Forward across no man's land seemed too crazy.

He crawled along to his right, toward where shots still ranged out, but didn't get too close to whoever was shooting since intermittent gunfire zinged in every few seconds. Instead, he snugged up behind a cactus and watched as the men from the unit worked as a team, popping up here and there, taking a shot or two, and then dropping again. The fire from the house dwindled with each passing minute until there seemed to be maybe only a couple men left alive and it was Will's guess they were holed up in the kitchen.

"Will?"

The way his name was spoken sent a chill down his spine. The man on his right was hurt and badly too. Will crawled as quick as he could to the man, his fear for himself having disappeared in a second. It was Jake. He lay on his side and blood that seemed altogether too black spurted from a wound high up on his chest.

"Will," the man repeated. "Is it bad?"

The bullet had entered in the hollow on the left side of his neck between his throat and his collarbone. There wasn't an exit wound as far as Will could see. "What should I do, Jake? Tell me what to do?"

"I'm not Jake. My real name is Tony...Tony." His voice faded as he spoke. "You have to find my wife...she's...she's." Will put his fingers over Tony's mouth, quieting him.

"Hey look, it's going to be ok. We'll find your wife, no problem and I'll tell her what hospital you're at, ok?" Tony nodded in a small way and Will continued, "Now I need you to keep quiet." Will bent down looking into the wound and because of the dark was unable to see a thing, so he then reached in with his finger and right away, he felt a fine pulsing spray. It wasn't huge, but there was an artery nicked.

This spelled trouble.

"Cover fire!" Abe yelled from near the house.

Will plucked Tony's knife from its sheath and cut a portion of his own shirt away. He then rolled it up and stuffed it rudely into the wound causing the injured man to groan weakly.

"Cover fire!" Abe screamed again.

"That's you," Tony whispered.

"Me?" Will looked down at the CAR 15 lying on its side like a dead fish. He grabbed it up. "What does he mean by cover fire?"

"Just shoot at the house. Don't hit any of our guys."

Will sighted down the length of the barrel and fire purposely high to get an idea what the gun would feel like. It was fantastic. It was painfully loud, as if tremendous explosions were occurring right beside his ear and yet there was almost no kick to the thing whatsoever. He lowered his sights and fired down the length of the house raking it until the gun quite unexpectedly stopped firing. A small port on the side of the gun sat open where it hadn't before and Will guessed he had run out of bullets.

"Do you have..."

Tony's eyes were closed. Will reached out to feel for a pulse and discovered one that was light and thready. He wouldn't last much longer and unfortunately there was nothing more Will could do for him. Something whispered passed his head and he glanced back to the house and saw flashes of light twinkling from deep within it. Someone was shooting at him, but oddly, he couldn't hear the gunfire and he wondered briefly, as he searched the various pouches on Tony's belt for more ammo, whether the men in the house were using silenced weapons. It didn't much matter to Will if they were.

Tony was out of ammo, which was neither here nor there with Will since he had no idea as to his efficacy with the CAR 15. With the dark, he had no clue whether he even hit the house, let alone shot through one of the windows.

"Cover fire!"

"I'm out of bullets," Will yelled back. As soon as he said it, he regretted that he had. It just wasn't something to announce to everyone. Feeling stupid at his error, Will grabbed the pistol that he had laid aside and charged forward stooping at the waist. It seemed like a very long run out in the open. Six seconds later, he came gasping up the side of the house and threw himself to the ground near Abe.

"That was real stupid!" Abe growled. "Don't ever run in a straight line like that again. Is Jake ok?"

Will shook his head. "No. He's hit and he'll die if he doesn't get to a hospital quick."

Abe and Timothy shared a look and as usual, Timothy was quiet. Abe called out, "Zeke! Cover fire!" This was met with silence. "Damn it!" Abe took a deep breath, "Ok. Timothy, I'm going to lay down some fire you go around and enter through that other door. Keep your eyes peeled. After you're in, I'll come through the glass right here. Cool?"

Timothy nodded affirming the plan, but Will wasn't in agreement. "What about me? What should I do?"

"You stay right here, and don't do a thing till I give you an order."

Abraham's terse reply angered Will, who was unaccustomed to being commanded about and who thought that waiting was a sure fire way to let Tony die. Besides, he knew the house better than the other two men and instead of waiting for who knows what, as soon as Abraham began shooting, he found the clearest area of the broken window and scrambled through it.

Coming down into his parent's family room, he landed on a body and feeling squeamish, crawled over it. Two more bodies were to his left. He didn't look for long at them. Gaping holes raged out the back of their heads and it turned his stomach to see.

The family room was full of blood and noise. Bullets zipped through the air back and forth above his head, striking walls and furniture and glass and nick-nacks. There was no other option for Will than to slither along as low as he could, and he did, making it to the half wall that divided the living room from the family room just as a lull in the firing came about. Only then did he realize how harsh and rapid his breathing came and went. For a moment he wondered if he were hyperventilating, but then he saw the body of a Hispanic man laying in the doorway of the adjoining rooms and all thoughts of his own breathing left him.

The man, clearly and undeniably was dead. There was a small hole above his right eye and another hole, large enough for Will to put his fist through, on the side of his head. Head wounds seemed to be the order of the day in the house and the very thought kept Will from venturing to peek above the wall. Yet if he didn't, and just sat there what was his purpose to coming into the house at all? He would have to rise up eventually to fire his gun, but the dead man kept drawing Will's eyes to him. The death dealing injury was strange, and morbidly his mind pictured the bullet ricocheting around the inside of the man's head before exploding outwards. He ogled the man for a few more seconds before he realized that the man had about his neck a strange necklace of beaten disks of metal and entwined plant stems.

Without hesitation, Will exposed himself to the possibility of gunfire from the kitchen and reached out to snatch the necklace. The second it broke a storm of light seared across his mind. Images flooded his consciousness and he reeled backwards, crying out in pain.

And he knew.

Yet at that moment, he didn't know what exactly. As before, the future and the present intermingled to such a degree that for long seconds where bullets tore the air and guns rattled back and forth, nothing made sense. Visions doubled over themselves until he squeezed his eyes down hard and only then was there the relief of darkness.

But this was different than how it had been that afternoon; when he had closed his eyes then, the images still had come to him. Now there was only darkness, and the darkness worried him. It was an empty darkness, devoid of thought and feeling. Quickly he opened his eyes, but for a second the darkness hung with him. It was a coming darkness.

Was he going to die? Is that what the darkness meant? He had known the possibility of his coming death all afternoon but possibilities were not the same as realities. Possibilities could be shrugged off and perhaps dealt with at another time. This was far more immediate. It would be soon.

Unless.

He could just sit there huddled behind the wall. Surely, he would be safe if he did and truly he didn't know Tony all that well. And the man could die either way no matter what he did. He could be dead already for all Will knew. And Zeke as well. Rationalizations came to him by the score and his desperate mind lapped them up without question. But then...

The door to the deck came open just to his right. A dark man with very white eyes and bright teeth crouched in the opening, it was Timothy. Only his name wasn't Timothy. And he wasn't a quiet man as he seemed. His name was James and he loved to laugh. He was a real person. James stood up and fired a short burst of gunfire over the living room couches and into the kitchen. Suddenly his face contorted and blood sprayed from his chest coating Will. He had been shot in the back. One of Amy's thugs leaned, propped up and bleeding, firing through the master bedroom window from across the 'T'. The man had been thought to be dead, by everybody.

This was about to happen. And it did far too quickly. Forgetting about any fear he had for himself, Will jumped to the door, which opened like magic in front of him and there was Timothy, or James rather, squatting down. Behind him, across the deck, a man popped up like a jack in the box, bringing a heavy black pistol to bear in a quick motion. There was no time for anything other than to grab James and yank him hard into the living room. Gunfire erupted and almost simultaneously, blood and gore drenched Will's face. James toppled over atop him with muscles that twitched and danced grotesquely for a few moments and then went still. Unfortunately, Will had saved him from being shot in the chest only to doom him to being shot in the head.

Sickened by the feel of the man's dying spasms, Will struggled from beneath the corpse and as he did, he saw another Hispanic rise from behind the kitchen counter. It was maybe two seconds from happening and he knew he had the choice to jump behind the low wall again or to fire his weapon. The safety of the wall was too alluring and he turned in that direction, yet he was brought up short by what he saw in the living room.

His once proud father, William Jern lay upon his back and stared up at the ceiling with eyes vacant of life. Across his chest, Gayle Jern laid, shielding him with her body as best she could, her eyes were terrifically red and swollen from crying, and they looked altogether desperate in her need to protect her husband.

White-hot anger leapt in Will. His mother's face had been ill-used as evidenced by dark bruises that ran along the left side of her cheek and temple. Her hands were tied and bled freely where the rope had been cruelly bound. For a moment mother and son locked eyes. With his own countenance swollen and dreadfully bruised, she didn't recognize him, yet there was no time for reintroductions or explanations because at that moment, one of the gunmen in the kitchen popped up and began firing. Will had seen it coming and made up his mind.

With the air ripping with sound of bullets tearing though it, Will calmly thumbed off the safety and fired back three times. Unfortunately, knowing the future and shooting straight were two different talents and he only possessed the one. Every one of his shots went high and to the right. He could see them causing little holes to appear in the cabinetry, but the man ducked down before he was able to correct his aim.

"Cover fire!" Abe screamed behind him. Will took this to mean that he should fire and he did, sending bullets as low as he could across the counter top. From his right more gunfire erupted and Will returned fire in that direction. Then there was a loud ringing silence. Tense seconds slipped by where nothing happened.

"Will?" It was a whisper. Without turning, Will knew Abe had been hit. He could picture the wound in his mind, Abe had been hit just above the right elbow. Unless the man was ambidextrous, the injury spelled trouble since Will had proved himself a poor shot. He glanced back to see the small soldier with a pistol in his left hand, gingerly hugging his right arm to his chest.

He nodded at the soldier with a show of bravado, but the soldier only growled in stern quiet manner, "Get your ass out of that doorway before you get shot."

It was a smart plan and Will scurried to the front of the couch that sat against the dividing wall and crouched there, looking back and forth from the door where James had been killed, to the kitchen where two gunmen remained. He kept his gun out swinging it back and forth in a short arc.

"If you want to hit anything, use two hands," Abe hissed. In a flash Will complied and wondered if that would improve his aim any. He would find out quick. One of the gunmen hopped up and began firing through the doorway he had just vacated. Will came up slightly out of his crouch and squeezed off two quick rounds. He missed both times.

A second later, the front door banged open.

"Did one of them leave?" Abe whispered. The whisper sounded very tired as if the little man was almost asleep. Will risked another glance back and saw a great stain of blood covering half his chest. The arm wound was bleeding worse that he would have guessed, and it gave Abraham a pale grey appearance.

Someone called out in Spanish from the front of the house, answering Abe's question. A return answer came from the person in the master bedroom and this was followed seconds later by the man in the kitchen. They were effectively boxed in.

"What are we going to do?" Will turned to Abe with the question, but stopped as he saw that the man had slumped over, unconscious. "Oh my..."

Surrounded by dead bodies and with the lives of at least four people dependent on him, it was no wonder that for just a second, panic swept across him like a wild fire in the wind. The gun began to jitter in his hands and just then a man with black hair and dark features poked his head up from the deck looking through the shattered window into the family room. He was there for but a second and Will wasted a bullet shooting and missing. The man called out and Will could guess that his exact location had just been announced.

Crawling over broken glass, he hurried to the bar, which sat nestled in the corner. Facing out, he had ninety degrees of room to cover. It was too much for one man, especially if they came at him all at once, which they surely would. Back and forth, he tracked the gun while his breath came loud, and fast. In and out, faster and faster, he practically panted as he waited for the men to come at him.

They would come out of the darkness and they would bring it with them. That darkness was death. He had foreseen it and it was near upon him. His hands began to shake even worse and he had to prop them up on the bar so that he had any hope whatsoever of shooting straight. A picture on the bar fell with a small clatter that ended abruptly and for some reason it made him wonder about how many bullets were left in his gun.

He had no idea and was too frazzled to even attempt to count the number of times he had pulled the trigger. Ducking down he slid the old magazine out of the pistol, and began to search about in his pockets for the second one. To his horror, the second magazine wasn't so quickly found and ten precious seconds slipped by where he was utterly vulnerable before he located it in his inner jacket pocket.

Snick. The sound of the bolt sliding home calmed his nerves a bit and he breathed a great sigh of relief before peeking out from behind the bar. The man from the deck fired two quick shots and then ducked down. Both of the thug's shots hit the bar and both went right through it, the second grazing his arm at the shoulder. The slight wound didn't hurt a lick but the fact that the bar was so flimsy scared him badly. So badly that he decided that his only option was to go on the attack, but the idea of stepping out of hiding and exposing himself to gunfire from three directions kept him from budging.

He prayed for a vision.

It was likely the only thing that would save him. With seconds slipping by, his hands grew sweatier and when no vision came to him, he wondered if he should attempt to force a vision. Only, how would he get himself out of it again? He would be lucky if he had a minute left to him and sadly, he had to put the idea aside, fearing to be still in the vision when Amy's men came. Instead, he counted in a whisper, preparing to jump up and attack three men at once.

"One...two..."

Bamn! Bamn! He jerked in surprise. Someone was shooting from off in the desert. His first thought was that Talitha was out there. The idea sent a chill down his back. If she were out there, instead of tracking down Katie it meant that there was a better than even chance that the winner of this little battle wouldn't live long enough to enjoy the fruits of their victory.

Bamn! This shot struck one of the east facing family room windows with a loud crack. She was shooting at the house? Will guessed that it wasn't his sister out there. A gun would be the last thing that she would use, her evil side preferred killing with her hands when possible.

What about Tony? Perhaps he had regained consciousness and...

"Mmmmmh! Mmmmmh!" It was his mom grunting out a warning; someone was moving through the living room. Who needed a vision when he had Tony and his mom?

Will did. Knowing the attack was coming had frozen him in place for the barest second, but then he heard a thud and a groan from the living room. The man there had kicked his mom! His anger thankfully came roaring back and he sprang from behind the bar prepared to shoot the man in the living room. Only with the dark, it was quite hard to see and it took a moment to note the slinking shadow moving toward the doorway between the two rooms.

Will fired four times and the shadow went down to the ground. Quick as a wink he turned and fired twice toward the deck and two more vaguely behind him, he then dove over the wall. Bullets seemed to chase him as he went and he fetched up hard against a chair, awkwardly he untangled himself and fired three times at the shadow that lay groaning in the corner. With that, he poked his head up just in time to see flashes from behind the wall of the family room and down he went, crawling for the kitchen.

Behind him, his mother grunted out helplessly. It hurt to leave her like that, trussed up and entirely helpless, yet there was no choice. To stay meant death for both.

More gunfire crashed throughout the house but it didn't seem to be directed at him and Will was able to scurry toward the wing of the house that was comprised of bedrooms. He took the first right into the master and went to the window and prayed not to miss. There was a man on the deck ducking up and down trying to look into the living room.

Will steadied himself and fired three times purposely aiming low. The man appeared to jump as if stung and then he crumpled and lay unmoving. Will didn't dare to waste any more ammo and ducked down as bullets headed his way. He crawled toward the hall before jumping up and doubling back in the direction of the kitchen. A great part of him felt a growing excitement, there was just one man left, and a lucky shot could end this in a second. Thus, he hurried forward just as that very last man came around the corner from the living room. At twenty paces, the two men opened fire at the same time. Will threw himself violently to the right as his gun blasted once and then twice. Both men missed and in the space of a second were both out of ammo. Now there was an awful moment between them.

The Hispanic had feverishly bright eyes and very quick hands. Will had dropped his only other clip and therefore he charged only to be brought up short when another gun flashed into his opponents hands. The darkness was coming. Will suddenly had the vision that he had prayed for, a piercing light and then darkness.

And so it went. At the last moment, Will tried to dodge, but at twelve feet, there was little chance of the man missing. The light. A brief flash of pain shattering his skull. Then darkness, only darkness.

Chapter 22

Talitha

There was no helping it, no possible way to stop the scream that tore from her throat. The scream was reflexive, born from an instantaneous terror that applied itself to her entire being and rode in a blaze across her nerves like cold dread lightning. But what was one more scream? It mingled with the millions of others and was lost in a second.

Talitha, high up on the rim of the Void, looked down into its vast stretches, and saw the multitudinous demons feigning to writhe in an ecstasy of sadistic pleasure. As well, she saw the countless souls in their self-enforced exile going through the motions, screeching and crying and begging, all for an audience consisting solely of their own little minds. Nothing had changed. The illusion of hell was as it had been, full of hate and misery and fear, but most of all, denial. After all, it was the key ingredient to self- deception and without it, where would these lost souls be?

There was the illusion of hell and then there was the great Void. The Void was everywhere and endless, and as the name would suggest there was nothing to it but emptiness and more emptiness, and still the illusion of Hell with its horrors and pain was far preferable to that emptiness. The terror of the Void was indescribable and subtle. It unmade souls. It turned them into the shadows of finality.

Talitha knew all of this, and because she had experienced the Void as no person had ever before, both from within and without, she understood it to a greater degree than any. Yet she was still subject to its horrors as much as the least soul and she trembled and cried in fearful misery. Her dual-mind split upon the idea of the Void, with the remnants of the demon that had been in her demanding to go down into the pits, demanding to be named, while the girl within her, Talitha Jern, terrified to the core, would deny the Void if she could. However, for her there was no other way and no other path, and far, far up above it all, she was monstrously afraid.

Though there was nothing around her, it was as if she clung to the side of a mountain, and a great fall awaited her were she to slip from its precipice. She had no idea how it was that she held on, but the bitter cold of the Void smote her causing her weakening muscles to quiver, yet at the same time a warm howling wind struck her from the rear, threatening to cast her off the invisible peak and dash her among the vile atrocities below.

She turned from the inevitable and looked back in the direction from which the wind coursed and was startled that she could actually see the world that she had just left. There was the Draugr, with the broken blade in its hand, the point of which was through the side of her neck. And there as well was her body, with her face contorted in an ugly portrait of misery. The scene appeared frozen, with nothing stirring as if all the world waited for the actuality of time to perform its appointed duty and move on to the next second.

Unable to shift her eyes away, Talitha stared for an unknowable span of time. Every aspect of the scene she took in, including the somewhat mystifying and embarrassing realization that she wasn't wearing underwear. The little sundress, that the saleslady at the airport had looked down her nose upon, sat very high up on her hips exposing all, and this had her worrying what people would think when her body was discovered.

The eternal scene of her last moment on earth was sad and depressing, yet what lay below her was infinitely worse so she ignored that as best she could and stared at herself and thought upon the things she might have done or at least should have done. Her mind drifted over her family, she should have loved them all more dearly, she thought of friends whom she should have treated more fairly. She had many regrets and it was these which began to spur on the stranger within her. Grief and guilt fed it so that after not too long it began demanding a return to the Void. It had a strident evil voice and it pecked and berated, incessantly. It would not be denied for long.

Talitha had looked upon her coming time in the Void with the dispassionate logic that had always defined her and she had come to the difficult conclusion that it would not make sense to enter the Void as herself no matter her current readiness to confront its evils. The Void was eternal, and eventually it would wear her down as it had before. Evil begets evil. That was nowhere more true than in the Void and it was a certainty that her own evil side, what once had been an entirely separate entity but was now only a byproduct of its creation, would prevail over her and take control.

That was a given, there was no alternative and no fighting it, that is unless she made what could only be a brief stand just to satisfy honor. But she wouldn't even do that. Common sense would prevail and instead she would hide herself away in the breast of the stranger, hoping against all reason that she would be saved a second time. Yet it would take more than a miracle to do it again, since no being in the universe would risk everything just to save a demon.

In the guise of the stranger, Talitha would be a demon soon enough. She knew the demon world. She knew their weaknesses. Their lust for power. Their tendency to gamble too much on false alliances and she knew, as well, how she would go about exploiting it. All it took was cunning and desire, both of which the stranger had in abundance.

These thoughts transfixed her and caused the stranger to grow bolder in its attempt at possession. Its will had grown strong and she could feel her fingers peeling back against the nothingness that she gripped. Despite the great height and regardless of the horrendous pain the fall would inflict, the stranger prepared to hurl herself into the Void.

"Not yet!" she pleaded, holding harder to the nothingness. The fear at the prospect of the fall, at entering again the Void, and at losing her identity, possibly forever, drove her near to hysterics. "Please, not yet!" she wailed.

The stranger emboldened to a greater degree by the pitiful begging was able to pry Talitha's left hand fully away. She pin wheeled with it in a desperate attempt to keep herself from falling.

The stranger laughed with her voice and then said with an air of casualness, "Let go. Don't waste anymore of our time. Let yourself go."

It was an odd thing to say and Talitha's mind clung to the words. There was no such thing as time in the Void. It was a word without meaning. A thousand years was the same as a second, which equaled to a month. Time had no substance and no boundaries. There was no earth to spin, so that days were undefined. There was no sun to revolve around, which meant a year had no value. A second or an hour could be as long or as short as a demon wished it to be. Talitha allowed the concept of time to flourish within her and it trailed along the synapses of her mind and as contemplation took hold, the stranger receded. It was a creature of action and death, not one of cognition.

Flush with this petty victory she cried out, "I am still Talitha!" Yet the victory was short lived.

Similar to a car crash, she felt herself flung forward in hard jolting manner and then...just like that, she was in her body again, out in the desert.

Confusion was her second sensation behind the screaming pain of the wound in her neck. The pain was all-encompassing and rendered her incapable of thinking beyond it. Nothing in her life or her death had ever compared, which was indeed something. It was as though her soul had been ripped like a sheet and each fiber that parted from its neighbor carried its own individual agony straight to her mind, where instead of being glomped in with the rest, she felt each as a singular unrelenting torture. The pain was cacophonous beyond the describing and thankfully short.

Amazingly, the Draugr withdrew the blade from her neck, whereupon the sanity destroying pain completely disappeared and in its place was blessed numbness. The nerves that ran along her left shoulder and neck were destroyed beyond any hope of repair, and after that pain, she couldn't have been more thankful.

Now came the confusion and questions. Why did the creature pull the sword from her? Why did it save her life? Why was it still night and what was the day? How long had she been in the Void, staring at her body? Weeks or days? These came to her as she watched, happily at first, as if in slow motion, the black blade drawing back from her. It raised up high, paused above her face and then without warning came plunging back down faster than she could blink.

This answered her first query, the Draugr wasn't trying to save her life at all. In its mindless attack, it knew nothing of souls, only of beating hearts and hers had never ceased its heavy drumbeat. Her soul had been snatched from her body and sucked to the very brink of the Void, but hadn't crossed over. This insight hit like a flash as did the understanding that if the blade struck her again, there would be no coming back.

Feeling remarkably composed after all that had occurred, Talitha yanked her good right shoulder hard to the side at the same time, she brought the flat of her palm across her body and just barely was able to direct the blade away from its intended course. Instead of driving down into her left eye, it sunk soundlessly into the dirt next to her ear. Time indeed was an oddity to the senses. Again, as if in slow motion the Draugr reared back to strike, this time Talitha used its momentum against it, shoving out hard with her right arm. Though the creature was possessed of unholy strength, it still weighed only one-hundred and sixty pounds and her shove almost toppled it off of her. It flailed backwards with the strength of her push, giving her another second in which to grab its leg, and this she used to catapult the Draugr into an ugly rear summersault.

In the space of a breath, the two opponents were up facing each other and Talitha had a half second to take stock of her situation—her future never looked more grim. Hours or days might have passed in the Void, but only a fraction of a second had passed on earth and so she was quite unrecovered from her long dash. She gasped for breath and wobbled on shaking legs, the ghastly wound in her neck bled freely and with her broken left wrist and destroyed nerves, her left arm was all but useless.

The Draugr was her match in strength but greatly exceeded her in its ability to absorb damage, she could punch the thing for the remainder of the night and not seriously affect it, and nor would it slow from exhaustion or blood loss. Their speed was equivalent as well, though an outside observer would have given the edge to the girl, but that was illusionary. It seemed this way because Talitha held one great advantage over the Draugr and that was in the area of intelligence, which she used to anticipate and analyze the creature's attacks.

It moved in again; amazingly fast, dreadfully strong, merciless, and vicious. Four times the evil blade hacked at her, blistering the air with its intense cold and she gave ground, dodging about back and forth, using up her dwindling reserves of energy. This couldn't last much longer. Her body was fading, but her mind, perhaps slapped into focus by the dread reality of her fate was still composed and saw in the Draugr a great oddity.

The vile thing attacked with horrendous power, yet also with one-dimensional unvarying repetition. With its last swing, she had been too slow and exhausted to dodge far enough away and there had been an opening for the Draugr to reach out with its left hand and tear out her throat as she slipped away from the blade, but it didn't avail itself to her destruction. This she puzzled over until the order Amy had given came to mind. "Diablo, run to the Jern's. Use the sword, kill everyone. Go!"

That was the reason she was still breathing in the desert air. Had the creature used all of its not insubstantial abilities, she likely wouldn't have lasted more than seconds against it. And there also was her single slim chance, and if she were to live past the next few minutes, she would have to find some way to exploit it. Only the Draugr pressed her so closely and with such blazing speed that not once could she see an opening to strike back.

Still she had the resource of her mind at her disposal and she determined that if an opening didn't present itself then she would have to create one. Without waiting for the next attack, Talitha turned and ran. Hot after, the Draugr came and in her exhaustion, the thing was within a second of catching her when she spied the good-sized bush that she had hid in only a minute before. This she jumped full over.

The Draugr charged around it, only to come upon a completely naked Talitha Jern. It cared not for such things, as she knew, and slowed not a bit while it brought the broken blade back for another great swing. Though it strained at the weaken fibers of her courage, Talitha waited the onslaught and only at the last minute did she fling the balled up sundress at the fiend's face. With ease, it slashed the dress aside with the blade.

Talitha struck. The blade had flashed right to left and as it passed she leapt in with a bone crushing roundhouse. Now, the Draugr could in no way feel pain, nor would a fractured bone do much to slow it, yet for all its hell bound ruggedness, its human body still operated along the normal laws that govern our world. Talitha's kick was sent at the things left knee, cracking it square in two and torqueing it off to the side. No longer was the simple pulley action of the opposing muscles of its leg capable of moving it in anything close to a normal gait.

Ecstatic for the moment, she skipped back out of reach of the blade as it swung back at her and looked for another opening, while the creature lurched after. With the gunfire dying out in the house, she felt a growing sense of urgency but she couldn't leave the Draugr even as debilitated as it was. There was no guessing at what rate it might heal itself, she would have to brave the blade and destroy her enemy as fast as possible. In front of her, a rock the size of a baseball sat partially embedded in the dirt, in a second she yanked it out and stood poised to hurl it with all of her considerable force.

Indifferent to its body, her opponent staggered on and she waited until it was almost upon her before she threw it pointblank into the things face. Her aim had been to take out its left eye and she succeeded so admirably that after retreating again she stooped to find more rocks. The rugged landscape had birthed millions of rocks so that ammunition was plentiful and soon she had blinded the creature and crushed in part of its skull. It kept coming.

Since its joints were the closest thing to a vulnerable area that it possessed, she moved in like silent lightning and destroyed its other knee with a driving sidekick. After this, with the creature flopping about blind, lashing out robotically with the sword, she went to work on its elbows. A bit of patience and deft strikes had them both broken in a minute and after that, it was only a simple yet disgusting matter of breaking all the bones in its right hand for it to release the sword. Pathetically, it still squirmed in complete silence, attempting to come after her; she withdrew from it with a great deal of disgust contorting the beautiful features of her face.

The look wasn't singularly for the Draugr, the sword too added to her discomfort. Not only was it blistering cold, its foul touch reminded her of the Void, and that sparked the return of the stranger, who grew in her mind becoming larger in seconds. Never in her life had Talitha been more worn down, this wasn't just physical, though she still breathed in and out like a furnace bellow, and her muscles shook—fatigue struck her mentally and spiritually as well. Her mind was drained, and she felt depleted and empty to the core. The stranger knew all this and decided that right then, it would challenge her for control. Ultimate control.

For the last eight years, it was she, Talitha who was the dominant personality within her. On a daily basis, she was in charge and the other soul that had resided in her had to resort to trickery or fatigue, or chance, to gain control. But now, the stranger wanted it all. She wanted to call the shots and make decisions and more than that, she wanted to live! She demanded to live.

The onslaught in Talitha's mind was an avalanche of consciousness. It struck her brain like a seizure and she collapsed, twitching, the sword dropping from her hand. Synapses began firing at an unprecedented tempo so that facts warred upon supposition, ideas and opinions surged against each other, hypothesis encountered refutation and all clamored to be deliberated upon. For every up, there was a down, a black for every white. The two personalities clashed striving for dominance and her physical self was caught in the middle. Talitha's hands became hooked claws and she began to bubble and froth at the mouth.

What such a clash came down to was desire. Which personality wanted to live more?

The stranger had a hunger for life. Yes, it wanted to go to the Void and become named and contest for supremacy there, but it also wanted this life, the real one. She thought of it as being wasted and it was this more than anything that spurred her on.

On the other hand, Talitha seemed to be living, simply to delay her coming time in hell. She was alive because she was afraid of death and this was why she was losing the silent battle. There was no denying that deep inside she had long ago let go of her life.

The stranger grew stronger with every passing second, crushing the girl's will and she barely fought back, she was done.

And then she heard—as if through someone else's ears—pop, pop, pop of gunfire. It had been going for some time, but now that she was no longer brawling the Draugr for her life, or sprinting across the desert or battling to save the last vestige of herself, she understood what it meant. A gunfight was raging room to room throughout her parent's house. But in truth it meant more than that, it meant her brother was in trouble. And she loved him.

And just like that, she realized she had a reason to live.

The tables were turned on the stranger, who fought back resolutely, but Talitha was too powerful and sent it scurrying once again to hide in the crevices of her mind. There was no rejoicing over her triumph, since it was a shoddy triumph indeed, both Talitha and the stranger knew what had really occurred was simply a postponement that couldn't last much longer.

Not only that, she lacked the strength to rejoice, she barely had the strength to stand. The battle had left her wilted and damp with sweat and drool, her insides quivered as if she were about to be sick and her muscles protested even holding up  her slight frame.

Reeling like a drunk, she went first to her dress, but didn't slip it over her head. Instead, she wrapped the sword in it and doing her best to ignore the fantastic cold she staggered off in the direction of the gunfire.

Strobe lights looked to be going off within the ranch house, back and forth they seemed to duel, but when she was fifty or so yards away it ended with a long pause and then a single flash. A second later the dampened rumble of the last gunshot rolled down to meet her and she stopped, scanning in the windows for movement, but the house, at least from her angle, looked remarkably still. And foreboding. Without the gunfire, the house lay cloaked in an eerie darkness. The last gunshot hung in the desert air with a depressing quality. She waited for more, yet none came and the thought that the final bullet fired had come from an executioner had her running again. It wasn't anywhere near her normal running style. There was no grace to it at all, her legs felt like broken stilts that had been taped together in the middle.

But she staggered on. Bloody prints following after her as did dead silence, she was a shadow tottering across the landscape, moving as quick as possible despite the pain in her torn up feet. They were in poorly suppressed agony and when she hit the thick green grass that bordered the house, she had to hold back a sudden cry of pleasure. Nothing had ever felt so cool and comforting in her life. She couldn't pause to enjoy it. Instead, she leapt through a partially destroyed bedroom window, almost stumbled on a body, and sliced her feet even greater on broken glass.

In the shadowed room, her senses came alive: she heard the sound of a gun being loaded with a fresh clip, she saw the bodies strewn about, she smelled the blood and the pungent fumes from spent bullets, and she felt even the small vibrations of a man walking upon carpeted floor. He was working his way from room to room and she had his position fixed in what she took to be the family room. Exiting from the bedroom, her fatigue caused her to trip and she thumped, first into one wall before ricocheting off onto the opposite. This she clung to and it held her up as she wobbled her way toward the kitchen, but a sight there stopped her.

Her brother lay in a heap at the junction where the kitchen and hallway met. His head was soaked with very bright fresh blood and covering his face and chest was a thick chunky looking grey substance. She knew very well the odd metallic smell of human brain.

A tiny whisper escaped her numbed lips, "Oh, no."

She wanted to go to him and cry over him, but there was still a killer to deal with and her mother could possibly be alive. Though this seemed like a long shot. Talitha forced her eyes from the body of her brother, but as she turned the corner and looked into the living room she had to stop once again, stunned by the sight.

More bodies, more blood, more brains greeted the girl. The room was such a nightmare of death and carnage that for a moment Talitha had to check her hold on reality. It looked like a scene from the nastiest pits in hell and it was with an effort of her crumbling will that she pushed herself on.

The one man left alive, whom she had heard walking about, stood over the body of another. She knew the man's scent. He had been at her brother's house, and now he was here, killing, murdering, executing. Without a thought to her state of undress and in complete silence, she ran in a shambling stride through the living room before vaulting the low wall; and the man was unaware. His focus was on aiming down the length of the assault rifle that he carried. Talitha struck it with the hell blade and sent it spinning away before he knew what sort of terror was upon him.

In the dark, with her wild hair looking black and skin that glistened with the blood of many men, her teeth shown fiercely white and hungry. No succubus or vile Huldra of the lower planes could have caused any more fright in the man and a fear induced mania seemed to light the man's eyes from within.

Perhaps this was why he fought with greater speed and strength than she had experienced from a normal human in a long time. He was on her in a flash striking wildly, hitting her twice, and sending her sprawling. She could barely protect herself, her body was worn, broken, and bleeding, she had no use in her left arm, and her right was numb from carrying the sword, and this she no longer held, it had thunked heavily to the carpet after she had hit the man's gun.

With no real way to protect herself she started kicking backwards to give herself room, but he jumped full upon her and easily pinned her arms over her head. And then he very stupidly paused. Shock crept into his eyes at her nakedness, but amazingly the shocked look evolved into a leering one. Up and down her slim body, he gazed and she felt the depravity within his soul as his manhood gave a forceful pulse against her thigh.

Talitha went limp. Other than her heaving chest, she let all of her muscles relax. It was precious seconds that she needed. Seconds where her body could recoup just the smallest amount and the perversion atop her gave her just that as he fumbled with his belt. More seconds were a gift as he struggled his pants down one handed. He paid for those seconds with the loss of his left eye.

Just as he thought he would slip into her, she yanked her right hand out of his loose grip and punctured his eye with her thumb. It went into the socket, right to the webbing of her palm. He screamed and with the last of her strength, she toppled him sideways, rolled and ended up atop him. The charred black hell blade was right there; she snatched up the horrid thing and brought it up for the killing stroke.

But she was stopped with a word, "Talitha."

The voice was ragged and unpleasant and barely human. Turning, she saw a lurching bleeding man heading into the living room and instantly thought it was the Draugr coming for her again.

"Where's Kay...where's Kay..." The man stumbled against the couch and then fell over it, to lay on the ground unmoving. It was her brother.

The shock of seeing him alive sent her mind reeling, "Will? Is that you?" She had trouble believing her eyes. "Will?" He didn't answer. Unthinkingly she tossed aside the sword and crawled off the moaning thug and went to her brother.

The outward appearance that he presented was far, far worse than the actuality of his injuries, which apart from a minor scratch along one shoulder, consisted entirely of a deep nasty wound—a long furrowing gash along the side of his skull. On closer examination, her questing fingers discovered his skull to be intact and she almost wept with relief. The grey matter drying on him was not his at all.

"Miss?" Behind her.

Suddenly she became aware of her nudity and grabbing up her fallen dress she spun about, pressing it to herself. Abraham, looking dead pale with eyes that were half closed said, "Jake is out there...in the desert. Please go find him."

The man appeared so far gone that modesty was no longer an issue. Talitha yanked the torn sundress over her head and went to him first.

"No..." With mouse like strength, he tried to push her away.

"Shush," she ordered in a kindly voice gently putting his hand down by his side. "I'll make sure that you're going to live first." Abraham's wound had perforated his upper arm, completely passing through the bicep and she didn't need to feel about in the wound to know that his brachial artery had been damaged. The spray pattern of blood was like writing on the wall, literally. With him still protesting weakly, she took from his military style web belt a sterile field dressing. This she stuffed into the wound without regard to his pain and then cinched it down tight with the light green sling that came with it. He groaned in response and she only pulled it tighter, before tying it atop of the wound. She then laid him on his back and propped a couch cushion under his feet to lessen the degree of shock that he was very likely even then experiencing.

Now she would go check on Jake, or so she thought.

"Mmmmmh!" Gayle Jern had worked herself to a kneeling position and was looking over the wall.

"Mom!" Jake was forgotten momentarily as Talitha hopped over the wall. A long dreadful looking knife lay on the floor and she used it to unbind her mother. "Are you ok? Are you hurt at all?"

"Only my hands...I think they're...never mind. Are you alright? You're all..." Gayle looked at her daughter with wonder and dismay. Talitha couldn't have looked too good.

"I'm..." she was about to say fine, but in truth she was nowhere close. The wound in her neck wasn't natural, the edges of it felt dead and she feared that it would never heal. However, she wasn't going to burden her mother with that information, at least not then. "I'll be fine. I'm a little worried about Will. A bullet grazed his head, but he's got tough skull. You know how hardheaded he's always been." Talitha's pathetic attempt at humor had been predicated on how her mother had looked to almost faint at the news of her son being shot.

"And Katie? Do you know where she is?"

If her mother's desperate imploring tone hadn't been that of one begging for good news, she might have told the truth. Instead, all she could stutter was, "I, uh... I, uh..."

"What? Where is she, do you know?"

Talitha was able to answer this with honesty and she shook her head, no. "Mom...listen to me. There's a man in the desert. One of the soldiers. He may need my help, ok? Wait here. Keep an eye on Will and that man there." She pointed at the Hispanic, who lay curled in a ball clutching his face.

When her mother nodded, she ran off in a stumbling manner, thankful not to have to answer the question concerning Katie, because just then it felt like a mistake having traded lives the way she had. Talitha feared how her mom would react when she heard the news about her youngest daughter. The little girl was special to Gayle...to all of them.

"Jacob?" she whispered, tracking the scent of the man. Behind a glump of bushes she found the man on laying on his side. He didn't look good, even worse than Abe. "It's Talitha," she said kneeling down next to him.

"Did we win?" came his whispered reply.

"Yeah. Quiet down, don't talk." She tried to examine his wound, but there wasn't anything to see. Other than a little hole in the hollow of his neck, his injuries were all internal.

"My chest... it feels full. I'm having a lot of trouble breathing...and I can barely talk."

"I know, that's why I told you to hush." Talitha looked at the wound again, but had no idea what to do. Though she knew anatomy and physiology, she was clueless past the basics of first aid. "I think it would be best if I moved you to the house. I think..."

Just then, two gunshots went off in the house. Talitha was up in a flash, but Jake stopped her, "Wait."

"No. I'll be right back." Another gunshot thundered out, and with it, Jake looked to relax. "Was that a signal?" she asked and Jake nodded. As if to affirm his answer, headlights flicked on in the direction of the road and an engine roared into life.

"It's the priest," Jake whispered.

This response was a bit of a letdown. Though Vogel was a smart and competent man, the wounded men needed a surgeon and fast. "This may be uncomfortable." Talitha bent down with her good arm, grabbed the harness of Jake's web gear and began dragging the man at the quickest pace that she could manage back to house. After the night she had, the fifty yards felt like a thousand and she was huffing and light headed by the time she had her charge pulled into the blazingly bright living room. Father Vogel had beat her to the house and was in the process of examining Abraham's wound.

"Tal," Will was sitting up against the couch looking slightly cross-eyed and dazed. "Where's Katie?"

"Not...now." Her breath was ragged in her chest. "Where's the...phone? We have to call an ambulance." This was greeted with an awkward silence. An ambulance meant the police would soon be involved and there were plenty of ramifications to that. "Jake is going to die if he doesn't get help soon."

"I'll call," her mother volunteered before hurrying from the room.

As soon as she had left, Will whispered, "Tal, where's Katie? Is she alive?"

Her heart seemed to shrivel at the question, yet stoutly she relayed her story, watching all the while as her brother's head sunk lower upon his chest with each passing syllable. She finished lamely with, "I'm sorry."

"My soul for Katie's?" Will asked in misery, ignoring the fact that his wasn't the only one that had been saved in the bargain. "You don't know what a bad trade that is. Katie was so smart and sweet and beautiful...and fun...and ..."

"And so are you, and so is mom!" Talitha, who never liked her judgment questioned, began to get angry. "Also what about Jake and Abraham, what about them and their souls? That's four souls for one and besides...we still have a chance to save her. It has only been what, twenty minutes since I left her? More than likely we still have time to save her."

"Amy has my baby?" Gayle stood letting the wall hold her up. She looked on the verge of collapse.

Talitha only glanced her way for a second before dropping her eyes, nearly overwhelmed with guilt. "Yes. But you would've been so proud of her. She was very brave and strong."

"I am proud of her, just like I'm proud of you, Talitha."

The words struck her like a slap and she blinked in surprise and then she blinked harder to fight off the tears that began doubling her vision. They came regardless and as she cried, her mother came and held her. This only made her cry harder.

A minute passed and then Will called them to their senses, "We have to leave. The police are coming. Many of them, and if they catch us here, we'll never save Katie. Mom, I'll call later when..."

"I'm coming too. No don't give me that look!" Gayle was suddenly angry. "You don't see yourself the way I do. Look around us. Look at your poor father! Look at your sister! Look in a damn mirror! My family is being beaten down, one after another and there's no way I'm going to sit by all helpless and let it happen any longer."

"Yes, Mom, you're right," Will replied. In a much quieter voice he asked, "What's wrong with dad? Did he get stabbed with the sword?"

Talitha had known right away he had. She could smell the wound from the moment she walked in. The odor of corruption was as peculiar and singular as it was stomach churning; it matched the sick smell that emanated from her own neck. Her mom nodded, confirming what had been obvious to her.

"Then he's coming as well," Will declared in a commanding tone. "No hospital will be able to save him if we can't. Father Vogel, please help Talitha with moving my dad. Go to the garage, right through there," he pointed past the kitchen. "We'll take the Jimmy. Abe, the first ambulance will arrive in eleven minutes, will you and Jake be ok for that long?"

Though he looked as though he were about to pass out again, the man nodded. "Yeah, Jake is one tough guy, don't worry. I need two things before you go. My real I.D. is in the car... I'm CIA and the I.D. will save me a bunch of tough questions. And...Zeke is out there still. If he's still alive, please bring him in here."

Will agreed that he would honor these two requests, but as he could barely walk without falling over, it was Gayle who fetched the I.D. and Talitha who found Zeke. He was quite dead, having been shot through the heart. He was a sad sight and it affected Talitha more than she had expected. She closed his once pretty blue eyes and since there was no one about, kissed the man on his cooling lips. It seemed like a fitting farewell.

Chapter 23

Will

Six minutes later: "Pull over...there's a dirt road. Do you see it? Go up it a bit and then kill the engine and shut down the lights." Will knew the emergency vehicles would be led by a state patrolmen and sure enough within seconds, red and blue lights danced in the desert night looking gay and festive rather than urgent. More lights were strung out in a long line behind the first and the Jimmy sat dark against the dark and all but invisible.

"How do we find Katie? Can you see where she's going to be, Will?" his mother asked. She sat in the front seat next Father Vogel, rubbing her hands together constantly. This had as much to do with anxiety as it did with pain. Where the numbness hadn't faded, pins and needles of returning circulation burned her miserably.

In the back seat, next to a scary looking, blood covered Talitha, Will answered, "No, Amy has placed some sort of spell over herself to keep me from seeing her future and that seems to extend to anyone near her." He spoke in a whisper. Everyone else's voice seemed normally pitched, but his own was like a shriek in his mind. So far, this was his only real after effect of being shot in the head, that is except for the double vision, nausea, dizziness, and whomping migraine.

"Maybe she didn't put a spell on herself, maybe she put a hex on you or us," his mother replied with a touch of mania raising her voice. "I think she cursed us, or maybe her mom did. Can't you feel it? Nothing has been right for years. I mean, take your father for instance and Talitha. All this time they've been under some horrible curse. And now Lisa too! And you also, Will. Your poor face..." she began to cry and seemed near to hysterics.

"Mom! We'll figure this out, ok? Calm down." Will looked around for support, but no one else said anything. Talitha was oddly quiet and sat with her eyes closed looking as if she were meditating rather than asleep, while Father Vogel looked completely stunned and had from the moment he had walked into the house and had seen the place littered with bodies and sprayed with blood.

"I don't know if I can be calm." Gayle hugged her hands to herself. "I can't stop thinking about my little Katie and what's happening to her. It feels like my chest is going to explode. We have to find her and save her, please. Can you do anything?" She touched the priest on his arm and he looked away from the dwindling lights at the woman.

The priest was very pale. Even in the dark his skin seemed to stand out as whiter than anyone's. "There are people working on finding out where Amy may be going. We should find a phone as soon as possible."

"It's safe now to go," Will whispered. "Keep heading east and in about ten miles, on the right is... a, uh..." In his mind, Will could picture the gas station but the name escaped him.

"Texaco," Talitha supplied, still with eyes closed. "And don't touch that. Just leave it alone."

Will's hand had gone to the makeshift bandage that his sister had wrapped around his head. It felt heavy, like a water-laden log sat upon his shoulders. "Texaco, right. They have a phone booth there."

For the rest of the trip to the gas station, no one spoke, or so Will assumed. He fell asleep, resting his head on his sister's slim shoulder and only woke when the priest exited the car and Talitha called out to him, sounding very much like a kid begging to her dad, "Can you please get some milk and a sandwich and Doritos, if they have any?" Gradually and with small groans escaping from his throat, he pulled himself up; Talitha gave him a guilty smile. "I need nutrients."

"It's ok." There was no way Will could eat.

From the front seat, their mother looked back. "Will? I don't trust myself to stand just yet; can you look back and check on your father?"

Turning his head was a chore and elicited more groans. In the cargo area behind the second row of seats, William Jern's long slim form lay curled around Lisa's small one. He looked so terribly old, while she, in the longest sleep of her life, appeared younger than her years. The dichotomy in their appearances didn't end just there. She seemed at peace and looked as if he could wake her with just a kiss, while his features held pain. The muscles in his face were taunt, frozen into a grim expression of agony.

Will could only look for a second before turning away. "There's no change."

"What about his wound?" She seemed afraid of her own question.

With a grunt, Will turned back and lifted up his father's shirt, "It doesn't look good. The black around the edges is spreading." The hole where the blade had torn into him gaped large and ugly, all about it the skin was blackened. He couldn't look on it for long either and after only a second covered the wound again.

"Necrosis," Talitha whispered. Her face told Will plainly that she feared greatly for her father.

Gayle saw the look as well and doubled down on it. "What does that mean?"

Talitha took a deep breath before answering, "It's simply the death of tissue, such as skin or muscle and once it's dead it can't heal itself. But the wound can be debrided and once it's done then healing can occur. Will, the necrosis bordered the wound by about an inch before, how much is it now?"

"At least double that."

Shock widened his mother's eyes and etched a line across her brows; mutely she turned back in her seat. For many minutes, the Jimmy was quiet until a faint siren came to them. An ambulance followed a minute later by another came streaking across the desert heading off to the east. The silence and tranquility of the night settled again on them and they each sat back lost in thought. Will glanced at Talitha...she looked to have bathed in blood. Could some of it be Katie's? With a shiver at the thought, he asked his sister. "What happened to your neck?"

"There was a Draugr...do you recall the thing last night that Luke had become? Amy created one of those and it stabbed me with the sword."

This didn't ring true and it showed on his face and in his words. "Tal, that thing last night was tough, but...but I can't believe that it could do that to you."

"It did. The power of the witch determines the power of the Draugr. I get the feeling that the witch from last night was nothing more just a fortune telling gypsy than any sort of real witch."

During this short conversation a frantic excitement began to light a fire in their mother's eyes. "Tal, how did you live when you were stabbed? I mean you're awake and talking, is there a spell or whatever you can use on your dad? He was stabbed too and...he's not dead, go feel him, you can hear his heart beating and everything. He's still alive, but he's gone at the same time..." Gayle's voice just sort of trailed away as Talitha lowered her head shaking it back and forth.

"No, I only lived by accident. The Draugr stabbed me but pulled the blade out before my soul could be fully torn from me. I'm sorry about dad. I'm sorry for everything." Tears ran across the dried and cracked blood on her face.

Will reached out and held her hand, and was just about to speak when Father Vogel emerged from the store carrying two large brown bags and wearing a grim look. All eyes were on him and it seemed as if none in the car dared to breath.

"I got you a ham and cheese, it was the freshest looking one," he said handing back both of the brown bags. He then gripped the wheel with both hands and stared out the front windshield it was a moment before he spoke and they all expected the worst. "According to the bishop, there are forty-six possible sites within an hour of our location that Amy could have taken Katie."

"Forty-six!" Will exploded, sending a dagger of pain deep into his head.

"Yes and if we expand that further to two hours, the number almost triples. Of course, we don't know for certain if the criteria we have established is..."

"Shut up. Just shut up," Will growled. "There's no way. Forty-six places in three hours and thirty-six minutes. It can't happen."

His mother looked practically dead from defeat but said, "You don't know that, Will. We could get lucky."

A laugh of derision leapt from his throat and he didn't even try to stop it. "Lucky? Since when have we ever been lucky? We're cursed. You said so yourself, and I for one believe it. Talitha does too and I bet wherever Katie is, she would agree as well."

Oddly, Father Vogel smiled. "We both know you're not going to give up hope. Now look at this list I jotted down. Which should we go to first?"

How badly Will wanted to shred up the list, instead he closed his eyes for a second before speaking in the calmest voice he could manage. "Talitha, when Henny opened the gate, how long did it take, do you remember?"

She shrugged. "It was so hard to tell, she had this shiny thing and I was forced to..."

He held up a hand. "Just ballpark it for me, please."

"Twenty, maybe twenty-five minutes?"

"I was wrong then. At the most, we have an hour and a half to check forty-six places. You see now why, I'm so upset? Amy's not going to wait till the stroke of midnight just so we can swoop in and save the day. She's gonna get this done as soon as possible!" Will's voice had crept up and he ended practically shouting.

"So you're saying we should try one of the closer ones," Vogel replied with annoying calm. Will put his head in his hands, feeling the pounding of his blood increase in tempo.

Talitha piped up in a small voice, "It's worse than you realize, Will. Amy has at least a thirty-minute head start on us, which means we have only an hour to find her. But..." she paused and glanced at her brother. "We still have you. Could you try to look at the future of these addresses? You should be able to see all but the one she is at. We'll use the process of elimination."

"I could try," Will said excitedly. "Let's see, twenty-thirty Valencia court... twenty-thirty Valencia court," he closed his eyes and reached out thinking twenty-thirty Valencia court. Nothing happened. He tried to relax, rolling his shoulders a few times and then made a second attempt. Still it was only blackness or maybe blankness that he was able to view. "It's not working, I can't see anything," he said dejectedly.

Talitha tried a good-natured smile, not realizing how fiendish she appeared layered in blood as she was. "Perhaps we got lucky and that's the address she's going to. Try another, if you can see that one then we'll know."

He tried the next address, but it was as black as his mood. "Nothing. I don't know if I'm being blocked or if I just can't look to a place I really know nothing about. I mean these are just words to me."

"Then what do we do?" Gayle chimed in. "Can the Church do anything?"

Vogel's calm became strained with embarrassment. "Very little just yet, but by tomorrow or maybe the following day we might be able to narrow down where Amy has gone. I know that won't do that much for your daughter now, but..."

But nothing. The priest could only do so much and everyone knew it. A heavy sigh escaped Will. He didn't blame the priest, and he tried not to blame God, he just wished for a break.

His sister sighed as well. "Tomorrow will be too late. According to a vision Will had yesterday, Amy will move the body. I mean Katie, she'll move Katie and hide her. We might still be able to find the gate, but without Katie and Amy present it would be a waste."

"So what do we do? My baby and my husband, how do we save them? Just tell me and I'll do it, I'll do anything," Gayle turned her pleas to each of them. They all looked away. "Could we find another gypsy? One that could find Katie with magic or something?"

Talitha answered, "No, it would have to be a witch who is stronger than Amy. We would never be able to find one before..."

Will cut across her, "There's a gypsy who may help us...Adrina. Maybe the dead have the answers. I heard that was a thing, communing with the dead."

Talitha's eyes narrowed. "It is, but she's in the Void. How do you plan on speaking to her, Will? You won't be able to look into the future to do this. There is no future in the Void, time is meaningless."

"I'll do it the same way you split your soul in half."

Vogel was all interest. "How did you do that?" he asked Talitha.

"I just did." There could be no explanation for such a thing, beyond the one she had given. Now, there was real concern in her eyes. "If you do this, you might not make it back; in fact it might be impossible to make it back."

"You told me hell is voluntary."

"Not if you're being held against your will! Adrina challenged Ba'al Zubel, it's not something he will likely ever forget and that means she's in the Pits at Rek." Her body flared with goose bumps at the name and a shiver went down her back. "There is no escape from those foul dungeons."

She didn't need to tell him about the Pits. The cold black holes where torture and pain had been first conceived were well known to Will Jern and were such a terror that they couldn't be risked. She was right about that.

"What about Henny Harris?" he asked. "We know Amy has been using her mother for information. Henny wouldn't be in the Pits, would she?" There was a lot of hope in his question.

Talitha was slow to respond, but finally declared, "Maybe not...maybe not. In fact, probably not. Souls are traded for all the time. In your dream, Will, were you sure that the demon that was trying to come through the portal was indeed Ba'al?"

"No I guess not, but it was very big."

"The size of it in your dream is irrelevant since clearly whichever demon it was had been feeding on the light of the world directly through the gate. In fact, just like the thrust to weight ratio limitations placed on engines in space travel, where the point of diminishing returns is..."

"Talitha!"

"Sorry," she replied sheepishly. "What I mean is that the demon sucking on that gate grows constantly, making it just that much harder for it to fit through. With that said, the demon could be any of the many thousands and not necessarily Ba'al Zubel."

"Then I'm doing it."

Gayle looked confused. "You're doing what exactly? Going to hell? No, I forbid it. You'll just have to find another way. I... I might have lost two members of my family tonight, I'm not going to watch you die simply on a hunch."

Will tried to explain, "I'm not going to die, ok? It'll look just like I'm asleep..."

"Like your father?"

"No, nothing like that. I'm going to slip down there on the sly, find Henny and...and I don't know what, but I'll think of something. And then." Will snapped his fingers. "I'll pop right back."

"And you two think this is a good idea?" she asked looking from her daughter to the priest. Talitha averted her eyes, but nodded.

Vogel clasped his hands beneath his chin and gave the impression of pondering on the idea in depth. "I can't say if it's a good idea or not, however I don't have another and time is getting very short." Silence greeted the truth of this until Gayle started nodding with great reluctance.

"Ok. Do it but please be careful." She put her arms over the seat for a hug and though it hurt to oblige her, he did and happily so. Hugs may not be so frequent in his future.

"Alright then, I suppose I'm going to do it...Father, head north. Most of the addresses on that list were in Phoenix and if I know Amy, she'd rather open a gate where there's at least the possibility of good dining nearby rather than in one of the dusty little towns around here."

Talitha looked grave. "You make too many assumptions. Amy may not have access to this list. She may know of only a single place and for all we know that could be in Alaska. While you're in the Void, make no assumptions, question all that you see or feel. And...and..." Tears sprang up with a surprising suddenness. "Come back to me, please. I won't last a day without you. Please say that you will?"

She was again that small little girl, his sister from a long time ago and despite his monster headache, he felt tears brewing as well. "I will, Tal. I promise. I promise to come back, heck you know that I don't even want to go. Now... how long should I stay under?"

"Thirty minutes?" Talitha replied.

The answer was like a kick in the stomach; he had been considering half that. "Thirty minutes is a long time in the Void."

"It is, but if you're not done and I try to pull you out, are you likely to go back?" Her logic as always was unassailable, there would be no going back for seconds.

He breathed out loudly and tried not to appear as terrified as he really was, for his mother's sake. "Fine, a half hour then." The brother and sister looked at each other and both knew that thirty minutes could not only feel like an eternity, but might become one as well. His insides began to quiver in fear. "Ok, I better start... or I might, you know, not start." He gave his sister a quick kiss on the cheek and then did the same for his mother all the while diverting his eyes and holding the fake smile of a seasoned politician on his lips. "Love you two." He swallowed and every one could hear.

"I love you, hon," his mom replied through a strained smile of her own. "Be careful, and if you find your father..." The smile slipped away from her face and was replaced by pain. "Set him free. I don't think he can come back here, not after all this."

Will nodded, blinking rapidly, fighting tears. He turned to his sister and watched as Talitha took command of her own features, which had been starting to warp from her fear for her brother. "Love you, Will. Remember that and remember as well, hide your light. It's all an illusion down there, become a part of it, at least outwardly."

He nodded to her, though he was unsure of exactly what she meant. After giving his wife a quick kiss and touching his father on his skinny arm, Will leaned back against the door of the Jimmy and prepared to head into the very worst place imaginable, but he couldn't, not with his mom, sister and a priest staring at him.

"Do you mind? This is kind of a private thing."

They each looked away and he settled in more deeply and closed his eyes. Unlike the house on Valencia that he had tried and failed to see, he knew the Void well. Countless times he had stumbled through it during his dreams, walking with trembling legs to his next torture. That was a torture in itself and the demons knew it and enjoyed the spectacle. He had also seen the Void in person, standing high above it on the great blade. So it was that as he closed his eyes, his mind was easily able to reach out and feel the dire cold of its boundaries. Yes, entering the Void wasn't the problem.

Chapter 24

Katie

The little sparkling light stayed with Katie, dancing, glowing first brighter here and then running brighter there, changing colors in the most delightful manner; it was all that she cared about. Distantly she was aware of other things about her. For instance, she knew she'd been carried down from the rock and then lugged across the desert by a scary, dangerous looking man with thick eyelids which covered pitiless eyes.

She knew as well that the jeep they were bouncing around in was her father's. Amy had need of a four by four to track her down out in the desert and had stolen it without a second thought. And Katie knew that Amy still had in her hands the small, but deadly looking gun, and it had been pointed at her ever since the big Mexican had dumped her into the back seat of the jeep. But none of this mattered to Katie as long as she had her sparkly light.

The light was like an intriguing maze or a puzzle that compelled her to find its hidden origin and she chased its many dazzling tangents only to be led astray and forced to start again. At length, it seemed to her that she had been down every streak and had hunted down every waltzing mote. After this, the patterns began to repeat and she became bored and instead of studying the light, she looked to the negative image that surrounded it.

Initially this consisted of only a tiny black margin, a bare outline only and then as she investigated it further, the margin grew until the light shrunk smaller and smaller, and seemed but a dot. And then she blinked and was aware again.

She found her face pressed up against the window of the jeep, it was very cold and soon annoyingly so. Yet Katie refused to budge. She tried her best to remain still and take in everything around her with just her periphery, only there wasn't much to see. The desert at night was empty and one cactus looked very much like another. Minutes passed and they zipped by a road sign that proclaimed Tucson in eight miles. Her neck stuck at an angle for so long, began to hurt. Still she refused to budge, but then the jeep struck a good-sized pothole or perhaps an armadillo and bounced enough for her to shift her head as if by accident.

"Katie?" Amy leaned in closer and gave the young lady a keen eye, before sitting back. "You can stop your playacting. I can tell the spell fizzled."

Katie's head had fallen at an odd angle and since she was getting quickly car sick, she straightened and glared over at her abductor. Her urge to be sick grew worse, and Amy noticed.

"You look a little green in the gills."

"Yeah well, you look a little stupid," Katie wasn't proud of the remark, but she was very afraid and it was the best she could do.

It made Amy smile though. "You don't have to be that way. This is going to happen. No one can stop it, not Will, not Talitha...you know, you never did finish telling me about your sister. About how she got all strong."

"She's just PMS-ing. You know with the cramps and the bloating, she can be real bitchy. I'm sure you understand that."

Amy's smile drooped. "Fine. Be a pain in the ass." She turned to the window and stared out for a few moments. It was just long enough for Katie to drop her hand down to the side of her leg, but not long enough for the girl to grab the knife hidden in her sock. Amy was nervous and talkative. "I could make this much harder on you. You know that, right? I could have Pedro come back here and bash your face in. He'd do it in a heartbeat and probably smile the whole time."

"Then do it." Katie was determined to be obstinate. Her reasoning was that any action that diverted her fate in even the slightest way had to be good, and that included a beating by Pedro. Perhaps a police officer would happen by, or a concerned motorist would stop to help and she could escape out into the desert. "I dare you. Hey Pedro, why don't you show me how tough you are? Come beat up a little girl."

Pedro only drove, silent and watchful, flicking his hooded eyes to the rear view mirror every few seconds. He would be a hard one and Katie worried that her knife wouldn't be near enough to kill him.

Amy only shook her head in disbelief at her little outburst. "I think it's about time I gag you."

"I think it's about time you try. I'm not afraid."

This brought another derisive laugh from Amy. "Oh yeah you are. You're sweating, your voice is pitched way up high, and your eyes are all crazy. But that's ok, that's normal. I'd be afraid too."

"You are afraid," Katie shot back. "All that you just said sounds like you described yourself." She glared hard at her captor for a moment and then dropped her eyes, her determination was granite-like, but it was built on a foundation of fear and was even then being undermined. "What...what's going to happen?"

"Well, physically you won't be hurt at all," Amy replied, trying to put the best possible spin on the horror that Katie would face. "The spell itself is very quick, a couple of minutes only. Setting up is the longest part."

"I meant what happens when the spell starts."

Amy tried to mask the truth in her eyes with a big fake smile. "Oh, right. Well...a demon will come. Wait, I'm getting this backwards. The spell is two parts, one part opens a gate, and the second summons the demon. Your part is actually very important. Your soul is what maintains the gate, so that means you won't be hurt, but at the same time you won't be let go either, sorry." Her condescension was nearly as poorly done as her lying. Clearly, there would be lots of pain.

"And me being a virgin? Does that really matter? Wouldn't the demon want someone more like you? Someone skanky?" Katie actually wanted to know, but the dig just came to her and she didn't really try to stop it from coming out. In the front seat, Pedro's shoulders twitched.

The witch glowered looking ready for a nasty catfight, but after a moment she forced the sham smile back on to her face. "Look, I don't make the rules and believe me, I wish it could be just anyone. This would have all been so much easier if I could just pick up any old girl, but that's not the way it is. It has to be a virgin."

"Oh," Katie looked out the window, poorly lit suburbs whizzed by but went unnoticed. Depression had slipped over her in so stealthy a manner that she didn't realize it until her shoulders had slumped and her forehead had thumped against the cold window. But it didn't last more than a few minutes and her fear returned at Amy's next few words.

"Pedro, your exit is coming up. We're almost there and soon this will be all over," Amy said in a soothing tone, but it sounded like she was trying to convince herself rather than Katie. It would have been near impossible to sooth the young girl just then. Perhaps the only thing that could was if her brother was to show up, riding a white horse.

"When my brother comes to rescue me? Will the demon still... arrive?" she asked.

Before answering, Amy took a nervous glance out the back window, there were no headlights to be seen, not even tiny distant ones. "He's not coming and if he were, he'd be way too late to do anything."

"But if he..."

"He won't!" Amy barked and the gun in her hand gave a little twitch. "I'm sorry but Willy J isn't coming to save you. Even if the Draugr hasn't killed him, he has no way of knowing where we are and even if he knew, he won't be able to catch up in time."

"Could you just humor me?" Katie pleaded. Pedro had just turned off the highway and her fear had escalated. It thrummed in her chest and without realizing what she was doing, she began cracking her knuckles, one after another.

"If you stop doing that, I will," Amy said, indicating the finger popping. Looking sheepish, Katie stopped immediately. "That's so freaking annoying."

"I stopped."

"At the light turn right," Amy ordered and then looked over at Katie. "Really, I don't know what would happen. It won't be good for any of us, that's for certain."

"But..."

"Look, I don't know," Amy snapped. "Let's just see what happens. Now if you don't mind please shut the hell up. I have to concentrate." Yet she didn't concentrate, she fretted. Over the next ten minutes, Amy checked her watch a hundred times, looked back to the streets behind them on a dozen or more occasions and jounced her knee up and down nervously in rhythm to an unheard jackhammer. She even took to checking the pistol in her hands, pulling out the clip and eyeing the bullets lying snugged up close to each other.

All of this did nothing to help poor Katie's own growing fear. By degrees, it increased, until she was sure that her heart would straight up burst. Only Pedro seemed calm, taking turn after turn until Katie had no clue in what direction the highway lay. Eventually they pulled up in front of what looked like an abandoned ranch. There were a few dilapidated and dusty outbuildings that sagged or leaned waiting only on the right gust of wind to send them toppling.

At Amy's direction, Pedro pulled the jeep up to what appeared to have been a barn at some time, the boards that remained to the structure had long before turned an ugly grey. Its windows were broken and jagged and behind these the dark was an impenetrable black, the overall impression was that the barn had many gaping hungry mouths. Even Amy paused at the sight, her eyes very wide.

"Keep her here, keep her quiet. I've got to consult with the spirits and make sure this is the right place," Amy commanded.

Pedro and Katie watched the woman walk to the building, in silence. But silence was not what the young girl needed. "You should get a better name. Pedro is kinda...stupid. It's not tough sounding at all. You could be Diablo." As she spoke her hand slid down her sweats in the most casual fashion she could affect, her knife was inches away.

Pedro turned to her, freezing her questing hand. "That won't work. I have a friend named Diablo."

Katie knew this of course. "Yeah, but he's dead now. Didn't you know? Amy turned him into some sort of zombie thing. It was real gross and I'm sure my sister has shredded him up by now."

The man's hooded eyes narrowed even more. There was danger behind those implacable eyes, but not berserk mindless danger. Pedro was clearly a killer, but didn't seem to be a pure psychopath. "You seem very brave," he said. "You know she's going to sacrifice you? That you're going to die? Perhaps you should be praying," he advised.

"Yeah, but what about you? You think this is all going to end well for you? If my sister and brother don't hunt you down, I bet Amy will turn on you next. If you were smart, you'd take off right now. Just ask yourself, do you truly trust the witch?"

He gave a little snort as a way of an answer, clearly he didn't.

It wasn't much to hang her hat on, but the girl knew desperation intimately. "Yeah me too. I know she was lying about the pain and all. I saw what it did to my sister...it's going to be..." Katie broke off. "But maybe it won't happen the same, I can still be rescued."

"No, your brother's walking into a trap. Ms Harris has powers; she seemed to know all about him and how many men he was bringing along. Somehow she knows everything."

A pain struck her deep in the chest. It was so bad that Katie wondered if it was possible for a fourteen-year-old to have a heart attack.

"She doesn't know everything. She doesn't know that you're second-guessing yourself. I know that you're just as afraid of Amy as I am, and I know that you want to help me." In truth, she didn't know this, but it was her only hope. "Please help me. We can be gone before she even knows, ok? Look, if you don't we're both doomed. Your soul is going to be right there next to mine burning in hell, is that what you want? If not then drive, please."

Pedro looked thoughtful for a time and then turned to the steering column. The cold in the jeep grew and minutes ambled slowly on and still the big man just stared at the leather bound circle.

"Pedro, are you all evil? Is there nothing about this life that you care for? Not even yourself? You know that when you're in hell, you'll have nothing, you'll be nothing. But it's not too late for you." Katie heard the fear in her voice. The words gushed out of her in a rush. "All you have to do is put the car in gear and drive away. Leave Amy behind, leave your past behind. You can do it. I know you can...God knows you can. God has given you a great opportunity. He's put my life in your hands; he's giving you a final chance to turn from the path that leads straight to hell. Drive away, please. Save me, please! If you do you'll be saving yourself as well."

Briefly, Pedro looked back, his eyes now full of doubt. However, he didn't drive away.

Now Katie had a terrible dilemma on her conscious. Her hand traced the outline of the knife in her sock, she could have it out in a matter of seconds and she guessed her chance at killing Pedro with it hovered well below fifty/fifty. With his huge thick neck, the target if she were to make the attempt, the possibly could even be as low as one in ten.

Did she strike now while she had a chance, even a poor one, or did she wait to see if he would come to the right decision and drive away? Did she kill in cold blood or did she give the man a chance at repentance? Her hand slipped into her sock and felt the hard unforgiving steel and just then, Pedro shook his head as if he were in the middle of some internal battle. It was only a slight movement, but it was a start.

"Pedro, please. Make the right choice. I need you." The words were an admission on her part. She wouldn't strike down a man poised to turn from evil. She put both hands on his shoulders, "Please."

The knife remained hidden.

Chapter 25

Will

Will closed his eyes. Leaving his body behind, he stepped down into the Void and was immediately surrounded by beings and creatures, which pawed at him and his light.

They were everywhere, above and below, hands reaching for him, some were clawed spectacles of horror, others were human, but grey and rotting. Many of these last would crumble at his touch and cries of pain would erupt when they did. He was pressed in upon. Pulled and pinched and bitten. It was all too much and all too unnatural. Panic had his chest in a flutter, and in seconds, the closeness of the souls was too much for him and he tried to run—it was like running underwater. Slow and pointless, for as soon as he left one set of miserable begging hands another found him.

Even his breath was sought after, and creature after creature fought to force their face into his and drink up the fear that came panting out of him.

A terrible thing that sprouted many heads threw down the last of the others and came before him. All the heads had dead blank eyes, many of which were ruptured and ran with a viscous milky substance, but the heads weren't entirely devoid of life. Each had active hungry mouths, the lips of which were black and blistered and they opened wide to him. A harsh rotting stench smote Will, tipping his mind over, sending him screaming in hysterics.

This excited the many-headed thing and it pressed itself onto Will and now he felt the mouths sucking and biting on his flesh. Will went wild in panic and thrashed and kicked but the creatures only bit or sucked harder and he was pinned beneath it. Madness began to overwhelm him and he screamed again but this time pathetically, blubbering to be let go, crying to be released. Over and over he begged but to no avail and he felt himself dwindling beneath the many teeth, he was being eaten alive.

Still his cries were not unanswered.

A greater darkness came forth and the dreadful head-creature fled before it, as did all the rest. It was a demon. It came upon Will in a rush like a giant black shadow and it completely engulfed him. It was everything he was not and he was everything that it wanted. The demon brought Will in close and the horror that was the demon's face made the many-headed creature seem angelic in comparison and Will screamed again in harsh misery and madness. His world above, his family, his coming baby, Amy and the sword were all forgotten in that time. Only the demon and its overpowering evil mattered to Will. It was everything and he desperately wanted to die to free himself of it.

The demon, however didn't want that. It loved its newfound soul in the hateful way of demons, and wanted the misery to last, so it withdrew it face. Will immediately went limp and found himself in an odd partial consciousness. He could see and hear but couldn't move. The demon carried him in one of its great clawed hands through the Void and Will saw many visions that threatened to break his mind wide open—so he closed his eyes and was surprised to find that this did nothing to stop him from being able to see. At first, he thought this was just how it was in the Void, but then he recalled his sister. Her beautiful face came clearly to mind and he remembered her telling of her time in the Void and never had she been able to see with her eyes closed.

Will closed his eyes again and still was able to see all, just as before and he wondered if this was a form of his vision, his special talent. Foolishly, he tried to see the future. In a flicker, his body went into spasms and for long seconds he screamed with an inhuman voice until his throat shredded from the violence and his mind clicked over. It was like a circuit had blown and he ceased to think or to see and he lay there without knowledge of anything. After some time, he felt a stirring and a cold painful touch on his face. He recognized the demon whose countenance held the closest thing it possessed for concern, which happened to be anger. Its rage was familiar, leading Will to begin to remember all that had happened to him, including his vision of the future.

His future was all misery and pain. Endless misery and pain.

Depression smote him like a hammer and he lolled again in the grip of the demon, which infuriated the thing even more. Apathy was perhaps the only sin in the Void. The demon demonstrated its rage by shaking him and squeezing him until Will felt his ribs snapping, he was then flung down and stomped upon by the beast.

"Please stop, please," he begged in a tiny voice. The demon didn't, yet it didn't stomp him to death either. It was too cagey for that. Only when Will began crying like a child in his pain did the demon relent and it scooped him up again to recommence its journey. For a long time, Will moaned as his broken limbs jarred and grated against themselves, the pain was intense of course, but Will, who generally wasn't effusive when it came to such things made sure not to hold back. He was learning.

He realized that he would have to hide his true feeling if her were in any way to survive.

Just then, Will remembered what his sister had advised about hiding his light. How long ago that felt. It had been hours at least and the idea that he had dallied in his panic and had failed his sister threatened to sink him again. Out of fear of the demon, he rallied the remnants of his spirits and as he did the black of the Void shrank back in the slightest. This amazed him and he brought his hand before his face and saw that he did in fact glow. The warmth of the light filled him and he was glad for it and he wished to bath in its soft radiance, but the demon saw it also and gloating over the light, brought him up to its horrid face. The face was terrifying and Will didn't so much as hide his light as much as it fled within him.

The demon chuckled at this, happy at the display of fear. Will was happy as well, not only did the demon go back to its journey, but also he had felt the light. Long ago, Talitha had told about the physical properties of light and how that it was actually made up of matter, that it had weight and something called "rest" mass. All that he had got out of the explanation was that there was more to light than met the eye, but now, he could feel the light. It was like warm water inside of him.

Gently he drew the light deeper into him and as he did, the Void seemed to gather about him thick and viscous. The demon was oblivious and failed to notice until after Will had the light of his soul balled into the tiniest knot and this he covered over in darkness of his own creation. All that remained of him was his shadow and it was nothing to slip between the great claws of the demon and slink away, blending in with the darkness. Behind him, the fiend suddenly raged in an unintelligible language and searched high and low, but soon Will could no longer see the beast.

Blessedly alone, he wandered in a daze, pondering the possibilities left to him. They were only two, flee the Void as fast possible and find some way to live with his guilt, or stay and find Henny Harris. He glanced around, the cold was eternal and absolute, the dark infinite, the fear all-encompassing, and the screams innumerable, he despaired. There seemed to be no way he could accomplish his task even if he wished to.

Some time passed and Will began to walk faster through the gloom. It was silly, but he was afraid to be alone. Every shadow bore the resemblance of a demon and apparitions hung on his periphery, disappearing every time he turned his head. Strange sounds came to him as well. Whimpers and wailing, every sort of misery, his loneliness was so great that he chased the noises but it was like pursuing echoes.

Another noise came to him, different than the rest. Water on water. It was a tiny drip, drip, drip noise and he followed it to the source. It was a man. The little skin that remained on his body showed that he was a white man of middle age; his eyes were a deep red and tears descended from them without effort, dropping to a pool of them that had gathered at his feet. Beyond the trickling from his eyes, the man didn't move and could have been a statue, so still he remained.

Will didn't know what to think. "Excuse me?"

Never before had Will seen a man react with such a passionate fear. As if attacked, he screeched like a girl child and tore off into the dim, caterwauling horrendously. Will loped along after, easily keeping pace. Now the Void was a maze of shadows, some deeper than others, some thicker as if they were made from black silk and all came together in the most bizarre kaleidoscope of shapes. At times these resembled the night forest and at others a craggy desert, but mostly it felt to Will that he was underground—so it was when following after the skinless man.

Around shadows that loomed from the black floor like stalagmites and over sudden and alarming drops into nothing, Will stalked after the man, only to lose him quite unexpectedly. One moment he was there, the next, only empty shadows surrounded him. Will tore at them, but they only shifted like fog and after a few moments, he was quite turned around and had no clue which way he had traveled from.

A sigh escaped him, and renewed despair had him sitting amongst the shadows.

Drip, drip, drip. Off to his right the same sound as before. Hurrying after it, again Will came upon the man, but now he looked much changed, his skin was healed nearly completely. It was as if years had slipped by in seconds.

"Hey there. Wait, don't..."

The man took to his heels a second time, but on this occasion, Will was more prepared and due to the man's newly grown skin, far less squeamish. He tackled the man, who was surprisingly light, as well as weak and held him pinned.

"Just relax, I won't hurt you."

These words were lost on the man who continued to squirm and wiggle beneath him. Will attempted to wait the fellow out patiently, yet ages seemed to pass and still the man bucked in a most annoying fashion. It was all Will could do not to punch him in the face and finally he barked, "Stop it damn it!"

The man wilted into acquiescence, staring up at Will with teary eyes. "Tell me your name," Will demanded, lightening his tone only by the barest margins.

"Uh...Uh, I'm..." The fellow looked stumped by the question. "I don't know. I don't remember."

"You don't remember? How long have you been here?" Almost immediately, Will realized the question to be intolerably foolish. Time was meaningless in the Void. After a few more seconds of sputtering, Will waved his hand in dismissal. "Never mind how long. Can you at least tell me does the name Henny Harris sound at all familiar?"

With a great deal of skepticism the man asked, "There's a demon with that name?"

"No, she's a person, a soul."

"A real person? With a name?" For a time the man looked thoughtful. "Henny Harris, Henny Harris. I don't think so. Why do you want her? Did you kill her? Or did she kill you? Are you on revenge? What are you going to do to..."

His questions were asked with a hungry malicious tone and Will was considerably irked by them. "Shut up! Why I'm looking for her is my own business."

"She did something to you, didn't she?" The man's look was insufferable and before he knew what he was doing, Will smashed his fist square into the man's leering greedy face.

In the time it took for Will to draw his fist back a second time, guilt struck him heavily, yet he held back the apology that had formed on his lips. Instinctively he knew it would be taken for weakness. Instead, he held his fist up threateningly. "How would I find her? What would you do to find someone?"

The question was beyond the man. He simply couldn't conceive of any reason to ever purposely look for another individual. This was transparent, but so too was his childish conniving mind. "You could, I suppose, ask a demon. I know where one is, Zoderath, Lord of the Chrystal Plain...it could tell you for sure. Here give it this," the man tore at the new flesh of his thigh and pulled a long peel of skin and blood from his leg. "Tell him I sent you...he's so...uh, nice, he'll tell you."

Murder grew in Will's heart and he fought back against the unfamiliar desire. "And how would I find..." He was loath to name a demon; it seemed filled with dangerous potential. "How would I find this demon?"

"How? What do you mean how? How do you think?"

Oh the savagery that welled in William Jern Jr. at the man's impertinence. This time it couldn't be denied, his fists brutalized the man's face, turning it into a bleeding mush. When Will could finally stop himself, he stared in horror at the creation of his unbridled lust to destroy. Where this need came from, he didn't know, but it was now a part of him. He hated it and now he hated himself and he hated the miserable little creature cringing and mewling before him.

"Sorry, please no more, no more," the man begged unintentionally throwing fuel on the fire burning in Will. With an effort, he got off the man and stomped around, concentrating on the shadows until he felt that he could face the soul.

"Tell me plainly right now, how do you find a demon?"

"Well its easy...you just...uh, you just," the man now looked perplexed not to be able to put into words what he had considered so simple. He started again, "All you have to do is say the demon's name and then head off, you'll find the demon sooner or later, or it will find you if you take too long."

Will tried to recall if that was how it had been when he had dreamed Talitha's dreams of her time in the Void, he didn't think it was. In his vague fading dream memories, he saw himself as his sister, dragging her feet along with great reluctance and usually crying over what was to come. He never remembered calling any names out, and for that reason, he eyed the man with suspicion. "And this Lord of the Plains demon, are you going to run into him now that you've said his name?"

The man lowered his chin, "No, Zoderath has sold me. I'm to go...to go..." the rest of his words stuck in his throat along with a strangled cry. A moment of sympathy swept over Will and he grabbed a hold, it was the closest thing to his old self that he had felt so far while in the Void.

"Never mind, I think I get it," Will said in kindly response to the man's painful silence. With the ever-changing landscape, there had to be some way to navigate the Void, yet the overwhelming background din of screams and cries had Will guessing that the physical act of saying the name was little more than a device to focus the mind on the particular demon a person sought. This information was interesting but his problem, of course was that he wasn't searching for a demon, but for a soul and from what he had learned from the demon Ba'al Fie-ere and what had been reinforced by the naked man, souls in the Void were nameless.

Henny Harris was no longer Henny Harris in the normal sense. Will tried to wrap his head around the concept, only to find it beyond him. How did a demon trade for a soul if that soul couldn't be named? Did they use numbers instead or vague descriptions? It was stupid system, whatever it was. Thinking down this line made him lose whatever sympathy he had been feeling and now he felt irritated and snappish.

He turned to the nameless man. "Thanks, you've been a great help. See ya." In his foul mood, Will had meant this to come across as sarcasm and he was sure he had said it in as rude a way as possible, but the man seemed not to notice one bit.

He jumped up and pawed at Will. "Hey don't go. We were just talking... hey, I got an idea! Maybe you could take me with you."

Will shrugged him off. "Why would I want to do that? Look at you! You don't know who you are or what you're doing. You don't even have clothes on for goodness sake."

"Neither do you!"

It was a shock to look down and see that the man was correct. It took the steam out of his anger, "You're right...I never noticed." For a while, he could only stare at himself and couldn't help but think that something wasn't quite right. His skin was grey and pale, but other than that was unblemished and appeared as it always had. Holding his hands up he examined them front and back, noting that other than his wedding ring no longer wrapped about the ring finger on his left hand they appeared normal. He flexed them and balled his hands to fists, they stretched and curled in a completely ordinary fashion. And that was the problem.

Two of his fingers on that left hand should have been shooting pain from the small movements, since only the day before they had been dislocated defending himself from Talitha. Yet they were completely healed, as were the ribs that he had heard snap when the demon had grabbed him. A quick check of his head and face, had his puzzlement complete. There was nothing physically wrong with him.

He should have been glad for that, but his spirits couldn't reach that far. Wasn't hell supposed to be all about pain and suffering? One would think that his pain would have been greater not gone altogether. He pondered on this for some time until the unnamed man interrupted his thinking by grabbing his hand suddenly.

"Hey...uh, mister? So what do you say, can I come along with you? I'm so lonely...no one's talked to me at all since I got here, except the demons that is." On his knees, the man pawed and touched, stroking the skin of Will's hand as if he were a king. Will yanked it away, disgusted by the sin-filled feel of the man.

"Don't touch me...don't ever touch me!"

How quick his emotions leapt to mountainous rage. Inside Will, the urge, the want, and the need to hurt the man bloomed like the deadliest flower. The man saw it in his eyes and began to back away with his hands out in supplication, but Will couldn't hold his anger in check and if he had a belt, he would've whipped the man bloody with it, just as if he were his own child. His hand came up to strike and a belt appeared looped in his palm, it whipped back in a fine satisfying imitation of cat's tail.

Will paused just as the belt slapped against his own back. There was a slight pleasurable sting to it, almost an erotic feel. Suddenly he recalled what Talitha had told him in the parking lot of the church back in Maine, I like hurting people, I get off on it. You see in the Void, there is only one pleasure allowed and that is the pleasure in causing pain.

Desire and cold reasoning split Will in two. To give in to this lust and whip the man who had done nothing wrong seemed absurd, but a part of him couldn't help rationalizing—clearly the man had done something wrong, he was in hell for a reason after all.

"What are you here for?" Will asked.

The man was anxious to please. "Because you chased me here."

Will's hands fists became as stone. "No, I meant what are you in hell for? What did you do to get here?"

"You don't know? Really? You haven't heard? No one told you? Then it was nothing... uh, uh, uh, it was nothing. An accident is all it was. And...and, I didn't even do that, I was framed, right? I was framed, that's what happened. It was an accident and I didn't do nothing, and I was framed...so I didn't do nothing."

This only piqued Will's curiosity all the more. "I don't believe you. You did something. What was it?"

Deathly pale as he was, the man suddenly went flat white and looked as if he was close to being sick. "Like I said, it was an acci...I mean I was framed. I wasn't..."

Rage washed over Will, and he reached out taking a hold of the man's hair and forced him to his knees. The belt was back in his hand, but this time the buckle was huge, it would shred the man's face with barely any effort on his part.

"You are a liar!" Will filled with self-righteous fervor seethed at the man, "And a murderer! I can smell the blood all over you. The blood of innocent little girls. What do you have to say for yourself?"

"It's not what you think... if you had seen them flaunting it. They wanted it. And besides they weren't that young, ten isn't young..."

The fire of hatred burned out of control in Will and he silenced the man using his belt. It felt so good. After a dozen lashes, he paused to see the ruin he had created. It was a good start, but the man certainly deserved more.

"No please, please stop," the man entreated. "I didn't do nothing wrong."

"Nothing wrong? Look around you jack ass, you're in the black pits of the great Void. You had to have done something to belong here." Will's logic was impossible to deny and the man didn't try, instead he sidestepped it and threw Will into turmoil with a question of his own.

"What about you? What did you do? You're here too, so you must have done something."

How dare the man question Will! He wanted to rip the man's smug face off with the belt, but just as he brought the belt back again, a perfectly preserved memory came to Will. It was like movie it was so clear. In fact, it was better than a movie, he could feel the cold biting at his exposed skin, and he felt the air whistling by, snatching at his hair. There he was in the attic of their house on Governor's Island and there was the gate to the Void and beyond that was the demon, Ba'al Zubel. He could see it all just as it happened eight year ago. There was Adrina Fortini and he hid behind her like a coward and he could feel her bony, old lady shoulders as he pushed her forward, against her will. She shivered in tremendous fright. He could hear plain as day, her pleading with him, begging for her life, begging not to be killed in so horrible a manner.

And he watched as he shoved the lady at the demon and he stared as her limbs were rolled up, crackling and popping, breaking in a thousand places. Her face was the perfect rendition of pain...and he saw every terror writ line etched deep upon it.

It was all such a clear crisp undeniable memory that he was thrown down by his guilt. The man came and towered over him and judging by the look in his eyes, somehow he seemed to know all about what happened. Will went to his knees beseeching the man for understanding and compassion.

"No...that was the way it was supposed to be. She wanted me to... to... she was supposed to face the demon. She wanted that."

"Oh right! Sure, she wanted to be killed in such a horrible manner. You're as guilty as the rest. You're the one that should be punished." The naked man now held a whip of his own. Its many heads glinted and gleamed with the razors attached to the ends. It was a very menacing thing and Will began edging backwards away from it.

"Really you don't understand. It had to be that way..."

The man lashed out with the whip, it came flying at Will and there was no way it could miss. He tried to scramble away, but the many heads tore into him. He screamed, surprised at how bad the pain was.

As the man drew back the whip again, he asked, "What about the witch, you nasty bastard? Smashing her head into the wall? Was that fun for you? Do you enjoy torturing people, you sick, sick bastard?"

The man's words dredged up a full clean memory that Will had long ago suppressed. He saw himself carrying the prostate body of Henny Harris and he heard the vile words coming from her possessed lips. Mountainous goose bumps covered his skin and he could feel the complete revulsion that had turned his face into a mask of horror. He watched as the memory played itself out, how he slammed the woman's head against the wall. It was sick. Far more grotesque than he could ever have imagined and it paralyzed him long enough for the man with the whip to strike again.

Will screamed in pain, but also in misery over his terrific guilt. He fled into the shadows with the man hot on his heels, but Will wanted to hide and the dark took a hold of him and soon he was nothing. Black on black. Ages he hid, reliving his sins. How many and how enormous they seemed to him. They were anchors around his neck and for a long span of timelessness, he could do nothing but dwell on their every detail. And always in his memories, the great demon, Ba'al Zubel, lingered about the edges as the ultimate cause, and Will affixed all of his sins to the fiend.

At first, he raged in defiance, "It wasn't me! It was Ba'al. It was all its fault!" Yet despite the rationalizing and the blame, the weight of his transgressions never grew less, they swelled even greater and brought him lower in spirits. As the rage wilted, he became covered over in the dark matter that made up the Void. It was like the web of a great spider and in its wicked strands, he became entrapped. Struggling did nothing, nor did crying, yet he couldn't help himself and did both, fluctuating between harsh anger and pitiful blubbering over the injustice of his predicament. The tears that fell from his eyes were pure globes of misery and as they rained down on the shadows, the shadows fed upon them and grew even greater about him, binding him so that all movement was impossible.

Panic over his virtual imprisonment now added its grip on his soul. He began screaming for help, "Is anyone out there? Hey! Anybody? I'm stuck, please...I need some help. Anyone? Please, I can't get out of these..." Will's voice trailed off as movement caught his eye.

Distant shadows appeared to sway like the tops of trees billowing in a storm as something vast brushed them aside. It was a terrible something, a ponderous leviathan of tremendous proportions and it ranged about the gloom. Its size dwarfed the man making him feel tiny and weak so that instead of struggling to free himself of the shadows, he now burrowed deeper into them, purposely covering himself over. Only his eyes could be seen and they were large white circles in his pale face, they watched in horror as the thing circled about, searching. Even compared to the perpetual dark of the Void, the thing was deep, deep black and it made all the shadows seem lighter than they were.

It was the purest evil. An ill wind flowed off of it and brought with it a horrid stomach-churning stench that Will recognized. The creature was Ba'al Zubel. It was out there, searching, hunting for the soul that had dared to say its name. This was the way it was and this is the way that it is. The Void is infinite. Its boundaries all but unknowable, and a soul could lose itself forever if it wished, but to think on a demon, or worse, to say its name was an invitation. Or in some cases, like to that of the greatest of demons, it was a challenge.

No being in the Void ever spoke the name Ba'al Zubel. No one dared.

Cowering in the rat's nest of his own making, Will began to understand what a fool he was to have said the demon's name. Deeper he slunk, trying his best to be small and inconspicuous, but all the while the beast drew closer. Nearer it came, until it stood nearly above him and the black steel of its clawed feet rung out as if they had clashed metal against metal. In the greatest fear, Will quaked and trembled. Fear defined him. Fear of the demon. Almost too late did he realize that his fear of the demon was what was had drawn it in. He was still thinking about Ba'al Zubel.

Yet how could it be otherwise?

How could he not think about anything else? Especially since it was so close. In desperation, Will tried to push his mind away to another topic, but always the demon forced its way into his thoughts. He could feel what passed for its mind prying about the shadows for him. It was like a dentist probing in a rotten tooth. He could think of nothing else and he knew that he was doomed. He had called the prince of demons to himself and he deserved the fate of a fool.

What an idiot! He chided himself in silence. If only he had called out to a different demon, he might've stood a chance, he had escaped the other demon after all. Perhaps it wasn't too late. Perhaps he could still call one and maybe they would fight and he could make a run for it. Nervous excitement had him breathing again and he bent his mind on a demon and wished so hard that it bordered upon praying. He wished for it to come to him with all possible speed.

Zoderath, Lord of the Chrystal plain, please come to me. Zoderath! Zoderath! His mind sung out with the repetition of religious fervor. It felt blasphemous in the extreme, but just then, Will couldn't have cared less. Over and over, he called to the demon, but in vain.

Zoderath did not show itself. The plan was stupid, Will concluded, feeling fresh tears bind him to the shadows. No demon probably had ever attempted to come between Ba'al Zubel and its victim. No demon, except perhaps his sister, Ba'al Fie-ere. She had defied the great demon once and earned her name. It was at least a hope.

Ba'al Fie-ere! Ba'al Fie-ere! Come to me. His mind intoned.

Above him, he felt the shadows suddenly swirl about, it was similar to smoke in a wind. Looking up he saw Ba'al Zubel raking back the layers of shade, searching. With tremendous fortitude, Will bit back the childish scream that rose to the top of his throat. He ducked his head and closing his eyes, pictured Ba'al Fie-ere at the second he had sent her back to the Void. It was a moment he would never forget. Her look of hatred snarled her pretty features, turning her brown eyes to black pits and her white teeth into fangs.

Ba'al Fie-ere! Ba'al Fie-ere! Come to me.

Ba'al Fie-ere did not come either, however, the more that he thought about her, the more the shadows loosened around him, until finally, he felt himself drop. Through many murky layers of the Void he passed, seeing bizarre half-formed images before finally he landed. Again, it seemed as if he was under ground and he stood in a rough-hewn tunnel of black earth. Above him and far away, the great demon, perhaps feeling him slipping away, roared in a fury. The sound was tremendous and was still too close for Will's liking and so he began jogging down the passage that seemed to take him most clearly away from the beast.

As he ran, he put thought to his many problems. The first being that the tunnel he was currently jogging through very likely would bring him either to Zoderath, Lord of the Chrystal plain or to Ba'al Fie-ere. Neither destination appealed to him, and so he stopped and stood wondering what he should do. He was supposed to be looking for the soul of the gypsy Henny Harris.

"Henny Harris, Henny Harris," this he took to chanting to himself and with the picture of the witch in his mind, he set off once again down the tunnel. Soon the tunnel branched, which gave him a spark of hope that he was heading away from the two demons, but then he came to another spot where he was forced to choose a left or right tunnel. To make it simple, he went right and for the next few minutes he came to series of forks in the passage  and always he went right and as he did, the tunnel grew less rough and eventually, it became made up of dusty heavy square stones.

This all made him very nervous. It felt as though he was walking along in a sprawling dungeon and the feeling became a certainty when he came upon a large iron gate. It very nearly blocked the passage, but it was open enough to allow Will to slip through if he wished. Yet Will did not wish it. He was quite certain that if he were to walk through the gate that it would close behind him and for a long time he stood indecisively just outside of it. Finally he came to the conclusion that the gate represented too much of a risk and he turned away from it.

A second later, it clanged shut behind him. The noise sent Will's heart into his throat, yet he was for the moment relieved at his decision, thankful that he hadn't been trapped on the wrong side. Going back to the gate, he gave it a hard shove just to satisfy himself. It didn't budge. A heavy breath of relief escaped him, but it was a momentary thing.

"Oh jeez!"

From where he stood, he could see a trail of footprints in the dust. They had been made by a human and he didn't need to match them to his own bare feet to know that he had left them. Somehow, he was now on the wrong side of the bars. In a flash, he spun around and stared down the passage, but he could only see into the gloom so far.

"Henny Harris. I want Henny Harris," he whispered. Henny Harris came whispering back. It seemed too clear to be a proper echo, and he froze in place with his back to the bars, expecting to see something coming at him. Nothing did. He was alone with his fear and his heavy breathing.

" Henny Harris," this came out barely above the sound of his breath and when he had waited many seconds and no echo was returned, he was able to relax the tiniest amount. Next came the hard part, letting go of the bars and heading down the corridor. This took a while, but once he did, he scurried forward and didn't look back. The stone hall went on straight for a very long time and ended eventually in a T. Will looked both left and right and was surprised to see that in both directions there were doors leading from the hall.

Going to his right once again, he went straight away to the nearest door and high up on it was a small set of bars so that he was able to look into a room. The door was thick and the lock and hasp that sat upon it were constructed of heavy metal so that even before he looked in, Will knew he was about to see into a prison cell. It could be nothing else.

In the room, lying on its side was a creature that was vaguely human in appearance. It was mottled grey in color and had a long sloping pig nose and very small black eyes. These looked at Will with what he took to be deep suspicion and for a time both stared at the other. There were other doors to look into and Will glanced away first, feeling slightly rude for having stared at the thing for so long. With quick light feet, he crossed to the next door and saw that the lock of this one was undone, unsurprisingly the room was empty. The next held the remains of some poor creature and since the stench was so overpowering Will stayed only long enough to wrinkle his face.

After that, he found one that held a human, a man. He was in his early thirties, blonde and blue eyed, tall and broad, he was strikingly handsome. Looking at him made Will feel inadequate and he subconsciously touched his face where he had been beaten by his sister so badly, however the swelling had disappeared altogether. This gave him a slight boost to his confidence.

"Excuse me? I'm looking for a woman named..." Too late he recalled how no one had names in the Void. "Uh... she was a witch and she lived in New York. She was a about five and half feet tall..."

The man interrupted, "What did she do to you?" His chiseled features had formed themselves into an unpleasant knowing smile. He even raised an eyebrow in anticipation of a juicy story of murder.

Anger immediately leapt up in Will's breast, but he swallowed it back. "Nothing. She didn't do anything to me. I'm looking to her for help. Now, she was around thirty-eight when she died so she's about middle-age now."

"Middle-age? Are you stupid, or what?"

"I'm new here."

The man sat back with a big grin. "Fresh meat, huh? Well you've come to the right place because I know all sorts of information, but you have to give me something first. What year did you die?"

Will was most eager to answer, but another voice, the exact match of the blonde man's spoke up from the next-door down, "Don't listen to that liar. You trade information down here and he'll suck everything out of you and give back nothing. I know because he did it to me."

The blonde became strident, "He's the liar. You shouldn't listen to him. Now, since this is a private affair, I suggest that you whisper. What year was it that you died?"

Will stepped back from the door and looked upon the blue eyes that stared out from the little bars with suspicion. The two voices were so alike that he had to assume that he was speaking to the same person somehow. To satisfy his curiosity, Will went to the next-door down and was amazed to see another of the grey pig-nosed beings.

"You were smart to come to me," the pig-nose said, sounding exactly like his fellow prisoner. "I have a great deal of information that I've been holding back for..."

Rudely, Will walked away. When the grey creature spoke, his long nose flapped upwards and it had caused him to get sick to his stomach in an amazingly short time. He made his way back to the blonde and spoke to him with authority, "We will trade information. I came here in nineteen-eighty-eight. Do you know the gypsy I was referring to? She died eight years ago and like I said she was about thirty-eight at the time."

"All gypsies deserve hell and I would never purposely speak to one. Are you a gypsy?"

The man's condescension grated. "What a waste of a question. No, I'm not a gypsy. My turn. How is it that you and that thing sound so much alike?"

The loss of the question angered the man. "You're the one that sounds like that thing, not me. Maybe you two are related. That's not a question, just a guess." The man paused to see if his jibe had angered Will, but it didn't and Will only stared patiently awaiting, until the blonde continued, "I know that in nineteen forty-five, the Furhur was forced to commit suicide, but was he alone when he did? Was there anyone with him, anyone that might know where he is now?"

"I won't answer that until you answer my last question." In truth, Will didn't know if he could answer the man's question, he remembered that Hitler had a girlfriend of some sort and that she had died with him, but he was pretty sure there might have been others, but who they were he didn't know.

"I answered your question," the blonde said with some defiance and an even greater portion of anger.

Will didn't like the man. "Hardly to my satisfaction."

"That's not my issue. It's yours."

From the next room the pig-nosed thing called out, "I can tell you why we all sound alike."

Despite his revulsion, Will went to the thing. "I'm afraid, I won't have much information that you can possibly desire."

"You could tell me a story...anything would do. Do you have offspring?"

Will was loath to mention his coming child to any being from the Void, but he was also reluctant to go back on his word. "I have a baby girl on the way. Two months."

"Is two months a long time?"

Suddenly, he feared that he had been down in the Void well past sixty days and in desperation, he tried to calculate how long he had been there. It was impossible to know. Feeling lower than he had yet felt, he mumbled, "It's not long at all." There was a silence between them.

"I have heard that human offspring are grown inside another human and that they eat their way out. Is that true?"

"No."

"You are an idiot!" the human in the other cell called out. "He's asked you three questions and hasn't answered a single one of yours. He sounds like a Jew. Ask him if there are any Jews where he's from!"

The creature's large nostrils flared wet and pink, and it spoke with its tiny eyes downward, "Well it is true that my information is likely worth quite a bit more than your simple anecdotes. I would think another couple of..."

Will had enough. In a blink of the pig-nosed creature's beady little eyes, he shot his arm through the bars and grabbed the long nose with one hand and pulled back with vicious strength. The thing made a small strangled trumpeting noise.

"Why do you two guys sound alike?"

"Oh! That hurts...stop please and I'll tell you."

"You'll tell me right now," Will replied and added a twist to his wrist for emphasis.

"Oh! All the lower creatures speak the same language and sound the same. The demons don't want to bother themselves with translations or dialects."

"The girls too? They sound like the guys?" For some reason this struck Will as very strange.

"Oh! Please stop...please." Will squeezed harder in response to the request. "Oh! No the females all sound like females. There is one in the next cell. She is young and tasty, you can ask her to prove that I'm not being dishonest."

A young girl?

The vision of his wife flashed in Will's mind and letting go of the long nose, he raced to the next cell, yet despite the fact that it was locked, there didn't appear to be anyone in the little room. Jumping up to the bars Will pulled himself up so he could see in properly. A girl, young and blonde was doing her best to hide against the wall, it wasn't Lisa. Yet the little that Will could see of her was painfully familiar.

"Katie? Is that you?"

"Go away! You're nothing but an illusion and I don't believe in you."

"No Katie, it's really me...it's Will."

"La,la, la! I'm not listening. La, la, la."

Will's arms grew tired and slumping down he inspected the lock closer. It was large and crude, strong but possibly easy to pick if he could find something to pick it with. Glancing around the hall, he saw nothing that he could use.

"Hey Katie..."

"La, la, la, I'm not listening!" she began again drowning him out. It was annoying and it set his teeth on edge.

"You shouldn't listen to him, little girl," the grey pig-nosed creature called out to Katie. "He's the demon in disguise."

Now Will was truly angered and he launched himself in a fury at the cell door that held the nasty looking beast. His shoulder slammed into it, causing it to rattle appreciably, so much so that it had practically come crashing down. Immediately he forgot the beast and ran to Katie's cell and threw his shoulder against it. Three times, he repeated this before the hinges snapped and the door fell in awkwardly, still hanging by the heavy lock.

Katie, clearly believing him to be the demon, went mad with fear. Around her neck she wore a thick metal collar and from that, a chain went to the floor. Once Will had seen someone walking a cat on a leash as if it was a dog. It was a sad thing to see, as the cat was quite incapable of understanding the concept of a leash and hurled itself about in the most extreme manner in an attempt to free herself. Katie looked eerily similar to that cat and Will worried she would hurt herself.

Will jumped on her, easily pinning her. She felt so light and weak, also her face seemed younger than he remembered and briefly he wondered what his own face looked like. "Katie, it's really me, your brother. I'm no demon. Look me in the eyes, ok?"

She barely glanced. "Liar!"

Will was desperate to get her to see the truth, and he showed her in the only way he could think of to convince her. For the barest second, he allowed a little of his light to show forth. Just a glimmer, but it was enough to blind them both for a few seconds. When he could see again, he noticed that the little girl had latched onto him and was sobbing into his chest. Her grip about his waist was formidable.

"Are you dead, too?" she asked him.

"No, I'm not and neither are you." Sadly, Will explained what was happening and what his purpose had been in coming to the Void. As he spoke, he grew more glum, his purpose was now useless. Katie had already been sacrificed to the demon.

"I'm not dead? Shouldn't I be happy?"

Will tried to smile to reassure her, but couldn't. Being trapped in the Void, meant happiness would be beyond her forever. Her best hope was for Will to go back to his body and then rescue her as he had done with Talitha. Yet after all the pain and death, as well as the evil, malicious insanity affecting his sister, he wasn't at all eager for the opportunity. In fact, in his heart he knew that if he had to do it all over again, he wouldn't. After every sacrifice that had been made for her, Talitha wanted to go back to hell. What a waste. What a waste of lives and pain.

He loved his little sister, but he wouldn't—couldn't do it again.

"Come on, I'm going to get you out of here."

"We're going back to...earth? How?"

"No, not earth, not back to your body. I'm taking you to heaven." He was shocked when she pulled back suddenly on his hand.

"What? You're not going to rescue me properly? You rescued Talitha, but you won't rescue me? Why? Is it because you love her more?"

"No, it's because I love you so much that I won't put you through what she went through. To save you means to leave you here, alone. It'll feel like thousands of years before I get back and Ba'al Zubel will torture..."

"Don't say that name!" she hissed. "We're not in those dungeons...we're trapped by Ba'al Fie-ere."

"Ba'al Fie-ere? How is that possible?"

Katie only shrugged. Was being trapped by Ba'al Fie-ere worse or better, or did it matter at all? Will started pacing in the small cell, back and forth. "I guess it doesn't matter what demon is holding us, we still have to escape."

"But my body?" Katie clutched herself and it was then that Will first noticed that she was just as naked as he was. He looked away.

"I'll find your body back on earth and I'll find a way to close the gate. Now come on, before she knows I'm here." Will took his littlest sister by the hand and pulled her into the hall. Faces strained at the bars of the other cells as their occupants pushed themselves up to get a peek at them and soon whispers came.

"Take me with you, please."

"Take me! I know the way out."

Take me. Take me. Take me. Up and down the corridor voices cried in hushed tones.

"Don't listen to them, Will. They're all liars," Katie informed him. Her pretty face looked savage as she glared at the different prisoners.

He didn't need her advice. The begging of the other prisoners rankled him to no end and he felt a good deal of hate building in his soul. It bothered him that he liked the feeling and it made him wonder how any part of Talitha was still good after all the time she had spent here. He began to run, pulling his little sister along. She began to bother him as well. Katie was slow, huffing, and puffing, stumbling.

"Come on, faster! It's all in your mind, your body isn't even here, and besides you told me you ran track. This should be nothing."

"In my mind?" Katie frowned a little and looked to be concentrating, soon she began running as fast as Will. In the end, it hardly mattered. It was all a set up. One second, he was dashing along the passage, taking left after left and the next, just as he saw the beginning of the shadow lands outside the dungeons, he was thrown to the ground and Katie's hand was separated from his.

In a daze, Will climbed to his feet and saw that a heavy barred door has sprung up between him and his sister. Her hands reached out for him between the bars in a pleading fashion, she was crying in miserable fear.

"Will, please...break the door! Break the door! I feel her coming."

Somewhere behind her in the dark, a high cruel laugh rolled down the stones of the corridor. Without hesitation, he launched himself at the door, but this time it didn't budge. He attacked it in a fury of anger and frustration, and still nothing. His sister was trapped.

"Don't leave me," she begged. "She's coming...she's coming. Can't you hear her? Can't you feel her?"

"Quiet down!" Will snapped, his own fear making him angry. "You need to calm down right now. If I can't get you out of there, you'll have to do it yourself."

"I don't know how."

"Shush! I'm going to tell you. Somewhere near or maybe in the Void, there's a river that you can go to. While you're there nothing can happen to you, no one will hurt you. Just don't look in the water."

"Why not? What happens?" Katie had settled down with such rapidity that Will looked at her sharply. Large endearing tears hung from her eyelashes and they sparked a distant memory of her that was just out of his grasp.

"I'm not sure exactly what happens, but it appears, well, rather dreadful. There's something in the water or actually on top of the water that caused..." Will had to stop. Katie was leering at him with such intensity that she barely looked like herself. A faint whiff of suspicion suddenly drew him back from the bars.

"What?" she demanded. "What's wrong? Why'd you stop?"

"I don't know," Will said with honesty. Something wasn't right.

Katie swung her head around to look down the tunnel behind her. There was nothing but unconquerable darkness in that direction. She turned back. "Will, I don't think we have much time. I need you. Please, tell me about the river. How do I get there?" Despite her vigorous movement, her tears still hung on to eyelashes as if they were glued there and suddenly Will remembered where he had seen those tears before.

Years ago, long before the coming of the demon, he had let slip to Katie about the truth of Santa Claus. She had not believed him, and had gone, not to her parents, but to Talitha whom she revered for her knowledge. Talitha told her the painful truth and those tears had slid to the edge of her lashes, but hadn't fallen.

Her look there in the dungeon on the edge of the Void was identical. Too much so. Will stepped back even further and like a cold mist, the shadows of the Void began to curl about his ankles.

"Since when do you call me, Will?" he asked and now the shadows covered his knees.

"Aw shit," the little girl cursed. She stood and waved away the bars as if they were smoke. "What gave me away?"

"Just the fact that you're an evil bitch and Katie isn't. Ba'al Fie-ere, right?" Surprisingly, Will wasn't all that afraid, but all the same, he took another step back.

"Ba'al Fie-ere in the flesh...so to speak. Do you like it? The skinny nubile look?" She posed in a sick erotic manner wearing the guise of their young sister.

"Please stop it. It's just annoying is all," Will asked the demon as nice as he could. "Do you have Katie? Here?" He tried to put a placating smile in his voice.

"Not yet, but soon...very soon and what's more, I will have a gate to the world. My very own gate. Thanks to that moron, Amy Harris and our dear little virgin sister. Truly, I haven't been this happy in an age." Ba'al Fie-ere stretched and as she did the tan skin of Katie tore into sick bloody ribbons and a great black beast erupted up and up. She towered high above him and he barely stood as tall as her knee. Her skin was velvet jet and looked deep and soft. An irrational part of him longed to reach out and touch her, but he fought the urge, afraid of what would happen. She was very beautiful, breathtakingly so, and he stood perfectly paralyzed in awe of her, all he could do was stare.

She chuckled at the stunned look on his face and the sound of her laughter was vaguely musical, a combination of tubas and bass violins and deep thrumming drums. "Do you like the new me?" Will could only nod slightly and her smile broadened so that he could see the rows of tremendous white teeth filling her hungry mouth. "You are looking at the new tyrant of the Void, well almost. As soon as I get my gate, it will happen."

There was a pause and it seemed to him that she wanted him to clap or cheer. He could bring himself to do neither and when he only stood there feeling lost, she glowered and then swatted him into the shadows as if he were a fly. It hurt terribly bad, but he still had the presence of mind to limp deeper among the dark trees of the shadow forest that surrounded her dungeon.

"Don't bother trying to hide, Will. I can feel your thoughts. You can't stop thinking about me, which is very flattering, but also rather stupid. There you are..." A hand the size of a loveseat grabbed him about the middle and hauled him above the tops of the shadow trees. "That was fun and here is your reward."

Her skin, when she first picked him up, was as soft as he had expected, but now it became hard as tree bark and she squeezed. Odd sounds came from his crushed chest and ruptured lungs; she smiled down at him in a motherly way. "Now don't go thinking you're going to die so easily. Here in the Void, you can be readily healed. Now if we were in my dungeons, it would take quite a bit longer. The difference is that out here, we're in no man's land and each individual can command the shadows to a degree and really what are we if not shadows?"

The reality for Will was that he was now almost beyond thought. His mind was all about the racking pain in his chest, as his broken ribs slid against themselves with each of his shallow breathes and her words were wasted on his ears. Ba'al Fie-ere didn't notice or care, she blew gently into his face and he could feel his lungs re-inflate and his breathing become easier. It was such a relief, that he almost thanked her.

"Tell me about the river," she asked gently. "How do the souls get there and how do I get them back?" She waited with quiet expectation as if she was just curious, but Will could see the eagerness behind her eyes.

"I... I...the river is... is," his words came stumbling from his mouth. He hadn't been afraid before, but now he was very much so. He had a feeling that no demon knew about the river and that to give away its secret would be to give away his only chance at escape. "I... there is, uh...uhh-ooooh! Stop, please." The demon had squeezed again at his delay. "I've only been there in my...your old dreams. I'm trying to remember how she got there." The demon's eyes narrowed slightly, but she relented and her hand opened up slightly and the phantom air of the Void rushed into his lungs.

Will thought about the river and its gentle flowing water. He pictured its neutral grey sky and the surrounding hills garbed in their uniform of verdant greenery. The image in his mind was very real and in moments, he realized that if demon hadn't been holding him so tightly, he would be able to go to the river right then. This was his chance at escape and all it would take was for him to get her to relax her grip but he didn't see her doing that voluntarily. Moreover, there no way he had the strength to force her hand, and again, she was too cagey to be tricked into doing it.

But he did have something that might work. He had his light.

Chapter 26

Will

When he released it, the light was beyond blinding. It was far greater than the glimpse he had shown the masquerading demon. In the sightless Void it was an explosion of radiance. Ba'al Fie-ere didn't just open her hand, she practically threw him from her and this was perfectly fine with Will. His body floated out into the shadows, but his mind was on the river and in what seemed like seconds he felt the sand of the shore against his skin.

It was grating and coarse and warm. It was wonderful. Will laid upon the sand for a time and tried not to think about much of anything. However, that could only go on for so long and when his mind began to operate again, he began to worry. How long had he been gone from the world? How long before Katie was sacrificed? Where was his father? Will pulled himself up, making sure to keep his eyes from the river, it was terribly calm and dangerously glassy, almost as if it were a millpond rather than a river.

A number of souls were scattered at wide intervals along this near bank. They kept to themselves, not fearing their neighbors but fearing what their neighbors would see. Most were women, but there was also a smattering of men among them and they all, men and women alike, worked steadily, mindlessly keeping to their chores. Some washed clothes, while others cleaned endless piles of dishes. Will watched one young lady who had only a small pile of plates on the sand next to her. Perhaps no more than eight all told, yet that stack never diminished though he stared for what had to be ten minutes.

She looked very sad, but in fact, it was remorse that she was feeling mostly.

He turned his back on her. All the souls along the river had that look. Their guilt permeated the air, something he hadn't noticed in the one dream he'd had of the river. After the fear and hate of the Void, the guilt was like a vacation. At first that is, then it began to settle on him as well. It began like a barely perceptible layer of dust but gradually it came to weigh on him like a heavy blanket of soot that ate away at his calm. Walking and seeing the other souls, helped. He was like a sheep in a herd among them. Their culpability and remorse matched his own and he strolled along, walking forward but never looking straight ahead. No, he kept his eyes up the bank and used his periphery not to stray too close to the water.

As he passed them, he would turn and smile at the people and frequently they smiled back, especially if their water was good and stirred. They desperately wanted to be normal again and so did he. One man in particular looked very normal. Instead of cleaning anything, he fly-fished. It seemed a nice way to keep busy and to keep the water rippling as well. Will watched him for some time, secretly wishing he could take a try with the pole.

"Have you ever caught anything?" he asked the fisherman. At the river, people wore clothes and this man wore a vest with a good hundred tiny pockets worked about the material. He also had a hat that was dutifully covered with many tiny flies.

"Nope."

"You look to cast that fly pretty good. Did you used to do this... you know before?"

The man's jaw clenched at the question. Bringing up before was clearly something that should be avoided, "Nope."

"You would never have known..."

The fisherman interrupted, "Fishing is supposed to be a quiet sport."

"Right." Will took the hint and moved on. The river seemed endless and he began to fret over the time he was losing. He was still at the river, strolling along its sandy banks for just one reason, he was afraid to go back into the Void. The demons and quasi-demons, the evil souls and the bizarre creatures all made his stomach churn and the very thought of going back would stop him in his tracks. He had another fear as well, he was afraid he was imperiling his soul for nothing. He was after one nameless soul out of billions and even if he did find Henny Harris there wasn't much of a chance that she would help him.

"If only I could find, Adrina," he said

Finding Adrina was another impossibility. Feeling low he dallied, shuffling the sand with his toes near a young woman. She was small with delicate hands. They were likely the hands of a killer, yet he walked past, putting his back to her, unafraid of this murderess. This idea struck him as strange. While in the Void he had feared or hated the least soul, but at the river he smiled at people whose sins had to be very great indeed. Why was it so?

He turned back. "Excuse me ma'am? Who did you kill?" It was a great assumption on his part.

"Lots of people." That she even answered was a surprise.

"Why? Did you like killing?"

A short bitter laugh, an expression of the vast pool of misery within her, barked out before she replied, "No. Not once. I hated it and I hated myself."

"So you are sorry for your sins?"

"With all my heart."

"Then walk away from here and go to heaven."

She laughed with a great deal of mirth over this. "Are you a demon who's lost his way, and have come to torment me? I can't go to heaven. There's no place for me there."

"I'm not a demon, I'm just a..." he nearly said that he was just a boy, but stopped himself. Sometimes he forgot that he had grown up at some point. "I'm just a man, just a person like you. I've killed as well. Twice, and like you, I'm very sorry that I did, but..."

"But? You're sorry, but...but what? You are either sorry or you're not. There is no but."

"I killed an evil person once, to save the life of another. I'm sorry that I had to do it, but I would do it again without hesitation."

"I suppose that's a good but. What about the other life, though? Was that person evil as well? Would you kill that person again if you had to?"

Their conversation was quite a surprise to Will. He didn't think that he could open up so easily to a stranger in this way. However, her last question froze the words on his lips. Would he still kill Adrina in the same grisly fashion if he had to do it all over again? "I think so. But...but only because the outcome couldn't be guaranteed any other way. You see, it was very complicated."

"Are you sure it was all that complicated? Murder rarely is," the lady replied. "We make excuses, sometimes outlandishly stupid excuses. And we rationalize and justify and in the end, all we are, simply put, are murderers."

"I don't know if I am one," Will said in a voice so quiet, he didn't think that the woman heard.

She laughed, this time with more actual conviction that she found something humorous. "Then you are the one who should walk away. Just be prepared to face your victims once you arrive in heaven. It's not easy."

"What? You've been to heaven? And if so, why are you here?"

There was no laugh in her this time, only a long drawn out breath that gave hint at the defeat in her. "I never actually made it all the way. I crossed the Void, hiding myself from the innumerable demons and avoiding their web of lies and deception. I crossed the endless Void only to end up here. Of course, I was amazed at the hills and the light and the river. I stood in awe of all of it and I knew on some basic level that heaven lay waiting for me just across the river. I knew it. I could feel it. So I went down the banks... and ...you know the rest."

Will knew. There was a compelling need to go near the water, to look into it. Even then, with his back to the woman, as he faced up the bank at the wooded hills, he felt the tremendous urge to turn and look. It was almost like a deep thirst that could be quenched only by the sight of the water. He swallowed feeling his throat tight and dry and nodded in understanding.

She took up her story with the movement of his head. "I looked once in the water and after that I couldn't force myself to look again. Still, I couldn't go back to the Void, not to those horrors, so I did what everyone else did, I cleaned and for as long as I could, I delayed the inevitable. But eventually, by chance or by accident I would see into the water when it calmed and I would see my crimes. The water never lies or distorts, it always shows the truth. Over time, I began to come to grips with my sins, bit by bit, image by image and I believed myself ready.

"Steeling myself for whatever was to come, I strode into the water and at first it was simply water, warm and wet, a complete delight. I made it halfway and suddenly the water became very shallow, perhaps only an inch in depth, and I stood with just the soles of my feet covered over. Raising my head, I saw that the light had grown brighter, fuller and I cried out in joy. I even turned and cried out to the other souls on the far bank to join me. It was then I saw that the river all about was flatter than I had ever seen it. My joy turned to anguish as every sin that I had ever committed reflected up at me all at once...and...and I was forced to take them in and I relived each of the horrors that I inflicted on others. Now I cried out in the most dreadful misery. But even then, I couldn't go back, and sobbing, I fled toward heaven.

"By the time I gained the further bank, I had destroyed myself. I was a pitiful thing not worthy of the least pity, I consisted solely of fear and remorse. Unfortunately, the fear in me was the greater. I began toiling up into those hills and the sensation of being so close to heaven was wonderful, but also terrifying and it took so, so long to climb. Not because it was a great distance, but because I dragged my feet every step of the way, afraid of what they would think of me. Afraid of the looks that I would get. Afraid that I would hear the whispering behind my back when I passed. Afraid that of all the souls, I would be the only guilty one. And as I trudged, I realized that there was no way I could look the victims of my atrocities in the eye.

"How could I have possibly done the things that I had done to my victims? And their children? What misery did I cause them? And all their friends and family... they would all know what I've done as well and they would judge. I couldn't take another step onward and I couldn't stay there since I didn't deserve the light that had been warming my face, therefore, I turned back. I've been here at the river ever since."

Her story was story was dreadfully sad. "Do you think you'll ever make another try?"

"Yes...when I can face the river again. When I can look into it unblinking...when I can find the courage to look my victims in the eye. Only then will I try. And when I do, I will crawl up those hills naked, on my hands and knees, begging for forgiveness and praying for mercy."

They were silent together for a long time and Will knew that the river was flat behind them, he was afraid to turn.

"So are you ready to face your victims?" she asked in a throaty little whisper. "Are you even ready to face the river?"

"I'm not here for that. I don't have the time to waste."

Again, her laugh came and this time it was biting and cruel. "You think it is a waste of time to say you're sorry?"

"No, that's not what I mean. I'm not here for forgiveness, I'm here looking for someone."

"And you have found someone, me." Will began to interrupt, but she laughed over him. "I don't think it's possible to find anyone in particular in the Void. For starters, no one wants to be found, especially by any old acquaintance. And then there's the fact that we are all nameless. It's one of the first things a new soul does. They try to forget who they were and what they did to deserve hell. Sorry."

"It's not your fault."

"Was this person you're looking for a victim of yours?"

"In a manner of speaking."

She made a little scoffing noise. "Humph! Either they were or they weren't. Why do you want to see this person?"

"I need her help, badly."

"You want help from someone you killed? That's nuts. And you think there is someone here, in the Void, who would bother to help you? What do you have to trade for this help? It better be good."

"I have nothing."

Behind him, she laughed very hard and he could see her shadow drop down. Careful not to look at the river he glanced back and saw that she was rolling on the ground crying and laughing. Will walked away in frustration and anger.

Running up behind him, she called out, "Wait! Wait! I didn't mean to laugh at you. It was just..." she began to chuckled again. "I'm sorry. It's just funny. You don't see how funny this is?"

"No. To me it's very serious. Lives are at risk, souls are at risk."

"Ok...ok, that is serious. I'm sorry, I won't laugh, I promise." In good faith, she took a few deep breaths to show how calm she was. "And besides, maybe I can help. I've seen all the people around the river, you could describe this lady to me."

It seemed like the best plan he had heard yet. Will described Adrina down to the smallest wrinkle, omitting nothing and all the while, as he spoke, he kept his back to the woman. So far, he liked her and was afraid that if he were to look too closely into her eyes, he would see her evil murdering soul hiding there.

"I'm afraid your description isn't very helpful. There are very few souls who want to be seen as old, it's a subconscious thing. People take on the appearance of themselves at the age they thought they looked best at. Stupid, huh?" She didn't wait for a reply, "Did you know her when she was younger?"

Feeling dejected once again, he shook his head. "No, thanks anyways."

"Wait, hold on. There's still one way I might be able to help...but, it's... it's really personal." She paused in obvious embarrassment and stuttered when she got going again. "I...I...you could... Darn it! It's like this, despite how a person might alter their age, their eyes never really change. If you are up to it, I could look into your water and see if I recognize your victim's eyes."

Will was almost speechless at her intrusive request and for a while, the most he could do was shake his head. "No way, that's too much. You're asking way too much."

"I know, but if the situation is as dire as you say, you may not have another choice."

She would see his murders, she would know everything! Will grew suddenly suspicious. "What do you hope to get out of this?"

"Just what you are offering, nothing. Look, I'm trying to get to heaven. My husband is there and so are my two sons...at least I think they are, I hope they are. And I would do anything to be with them. You see? I'm just trying to be good."

Could he do this? She would see and know everything. Will was suddenly more nervous than he had ever been in his life. "You won't like what you see... and you won't like me much either...just try not to judge." He wanted to go on, for there was a terrific need within him to explain his actions, to justify his weaknesses.

She wouldn't let him. "Don't say any more. The water is flat, just walk up to it, and look for as long as you can. If I know her, I should be able to recognize her quickly. Go on."

Will was somewhat soothed by the tone of her voice. She was authoritative and knowledgeable and so he turned finally to the water. All the length of the river was flat as a picture, except just in front of the few souls in sight, where tiny ripples tickled its surface. The ripples died out quickly and none reached the water in front of Will. His head was up and he looked far out at the water in the distance, trying for the moment to ignore the motion below him. Just feet in front of him, colors swirled on the water. They drew his eyes impulsively; he had to look, it was impossible not to.

Yet he dallied, sweating despite the neutral air until the lady came and stood next to him. A small gasp, hardly more that a sharp breath, sucked between her teeth. She had seen something and his shame was complete. Now she knew what sort of man he was. Against his will, his chin pivoted downward and he saw too.

The water was so smooth it could've been a pane of glass and the reflections on it were not just vibrant, but alive. It was like a parade, it was so captivating. He saw himself carrying the prostate form of Henny Harris and he knew what was about to happen and he had to choke back a sob as he began to bash her head against the wall. It was horrible, he was totally without mercy or justification and the only feeling that radiated from his younger self was an abundance of sickening cowardice. It was writ all over his face, and Will wanted to scream at his younger self and condemn him, and call him out for the weak thing that he was.

But he couldn't. His chest was completely locked and not a sip of air could go either way. He barely noticed. Next to him, the woman watched Will's most contemptible moments in silence. The lack of critique was mocking and judgmental and he began to hate her, but then the river showed the last painful moments of Adrina Fortini and she broke her silence.

"Oh my God!" In his periphery, he saw her move away and his shame and disgrace was so great that he stayed and saw the horrors that he had committed rather than go to her. It was his hope that when he was done witnessing all that there was to see, she would be gone. In the water Adrina died, the breaking of her bones was loud in his ears and he wanted to vomit. The next scene was of Henny Harris laying defenseless and he watched as he plunged the hell blade straight into her chest.

After that his shoulders drooped, he thought that the memories were over, however the water began the scenes anew.

"No!" The word came out in a single loud desperate gasp. Stumbling forward into the water, he splashed down onto his knees gasping and crying like a wretch. The spell broke and the water was only water. He hammered it with his fist.

"You fucking coward! You God-damned coward!" he screamed as his own wobbly reflection. Anger and humiliation infused his soul and he dripped tears into the river, one after the other. He sat there afraid to look around—afraid that everyone had seen the dreadful show.

Only the urgency that time was slipping away made him look up. The woman had left him, but hadn't gone far enough away. She knelt in the sand with her back to him, her shoulders were shaking and he could hear her sniff every couple of seconds. Knowing that he did that to her brought back the remorse and he dropped his eyes back to the water, which was a mistake, another vision had begun brewing. It was a rerun and he lurched out of the water to escape it, heading away, hoping that he'd never see the woman again.

"I'm so sorry," she called out to him. It was practically yelled and he stopped for a moment wondering what could she be apologizing to him for. Behind him, he heard her walk across the sand and then a slight crunch told him she had again sunk down. The word 'sorry' was strange to hear. Perhaps it was the way she had said it, but it held more consequence than he had ever attributed to it before. Almost as if compelled by the word, he turned to look at the kneeling woman, she had finally faced him, however her hands were pressed to her face.

She seemed so small while he felt gigantic, and powerful. Only a moment before he had been a pathetic cringing wretch, now he loomed above the girl with the authority to add to her misery or to reduce it. She had given him that power.

"What are you sorry for? I don't understand." Her face was buried in her hands and tears slipped from between her fingers. The woman was truly sorry for something. It began to make Will uneasy.

"In the water, I saw the true coward and it wasn't you. I was the coward and it was because of my fear that you had to...do that."

"What? Who are you?"

"I'm... I'm...I don't know."

Will had to pry her hands from her face, which was young and completely unrecognizable to him. All except the eyes. She hadn't been lying about that. He was looking at Adrina Fortini. A young Adrina Fortini.

Unable to draw breath in properly, Will could do little but whisper, "You're Adrina, I...I killed you."

"I remember now. I'm Adrina."

Silence.

Neither looked at the other but only down at the sand. For his part, Will was waiting on the inevitable. Blame, condemnation, accusation, he would accept them all without denial. How could he not? The water had shown them both what he had done and there had been no lie to it. He waited for the charges that she would level against his soul, yet the wait drew out and as it did, he began to feel faint.

"I was ready to forgive you, Will." This was how she started and it was like his heart shrunk with each word, collapsing in on itself. "I wasn't at first. At first, I raged against you and blamed you for everything. And...and I even thought I wouldn't have been in hell if it wasn't for you."

Will nodded. This was what he had been expecting. It would get worse. You don't use a little old lady as a human shield and expect gratitude from her.

"It took me a long time to forgive you in my heart, but now..." she let the words drift away.

Here it comes. Damnation. She would rightly damn him for his crimes. He just wished that she would get it over with, but she began to cry again and he didn't blame her. The scene in the water had been horrible.

"But now, after seeing that. I'm the one who has to beg forgiveness. What happened was my fault. I was supposed to confront the demon first, only I was so afraid, that I couldn't. I was..."

Will had to interrupt. "Stop! That's complete nonsense. You did what anyone else would have done. It's no sin to be afraid."

Adrina's eyes flashed. "You're right. I did what anyone would've done, I cowered like an idiot and nearly got us all killed. That's why I'm the one asking for forgiveness. You did what you had to do, and it was the right thing to do. And the only reason you had to do it was because I failed. After all my talk, I let you down. So I'm not going to forgive you for anything, Will. Instead, I'm going to thank you for your bravery and for making the hard choice. You made my pain and sacrifice worthwhile."

"But..."

Adrina was as feisty as she ever was. "No buts. I mean it, there's nothing for me to forgive."

In silence, Will stood stunned as his emotions spun about inside him. The chief of which was a joyous euphoria and it was an effort not to break into a little dance. Forgiveness was the rarest thing in the Void, it was a gift of the greatest value and was never given lightly. Quite literally, he felt a burden lift from his soul; it was almost as if he could fly across the river had he wanted to.

"Thank you, Adrina. This means a lot to me." A smile came to her lips but it wasn't matched in her brown eyes, these showed signs of strain. And now there came between them an uncomfortable silence. They stood facing each other, yet she wouldn't meet his gaze, Will couldn't understand what was bothering her. "Are you ok?"

Her lips grew tighter against her teeth, she shrugged.

"No really, what's wrong?" he asked as he scanned her face for a clue. Only a second ago, she was what he had always thought of as her normal self, then she had forgiven him and now this. There was pain in her bearing. He wanted to press her for an answer, but by the way she was acting, he knew it would be useless. She shrugged again in answer to his question.

More silence followed, which became unbearable to the young man. "Thanks again for forgiving me. I don't think I can ever...oh!" The answer came to him. She had asked...no, begged him for forgiveness too, and he had done nothing. "Are you worried about forgiveness? Adrina, look, you did everything you could, and more. You stood up to the demon and...I would have died if you hadn't, he was killing me, seriously. I can't even believe this is an issue. The fight wasn't even yours!"

"It is an issue, Will. You suffered because of me. If..."

"Ok, ok. Fine. Adrina, with all my heart I forgive you. Look me in the eyes if you doubt me." She was so small that she had to crane her head way back to see his face. A moment later she smiled a giddy little smile, he did the same. "Was that really necessary?"

With a glance to the river, her smile faded and she became serious again, "Yes it was. Never assume forgiveness." Adrina turned from the river and wrapped her arm in Will's without asking. "So, big strong Will. Why do you need my help?"

Despite her younger looks, he couldn't help feeling as if he were walking with his grandmother. "Would it surprise you that I have demon troubles again?"

She answered this with a laugh. It was wonderfully cruel free and made him feel giddy again. "Don't we all."

It was his turn to laugh and for the moment, it was though they were strolling down a Carolina beach, looking for the perfect seashell. Unfortunately, it didn't last. Will began to tell the story of the last few days, about Luke and poor Father Alba. About the sword and the dead children, about Talitha and Amy Harris; as he spoke, he grew cold as if the words were leading him closer to the Void. When he was done Adrina began to pepper him with questions, one after another, many of which dealt with how he came to be in the Void, without having died, something which fascinated her. The questions concerning Talitha's situation were saved for last, it was something she had trouble grasping.

"You say she split her soul in two? One part all good, the other all evil, how?"

A shrug was his response. "Even Talitha doesn't know. She just did it."

"And now instead of an evil soul fighting for control of her body, she has a split personality, one of which is totally evil?" Adrina shook her head in disbelief. "Your Talitha either bears the greatest curse of all of us or she's part of one those television soap operas. She's doomed either way."

The attempt at humor earned her a small crooked smile from Will, who only displayed it as a courtesy, his good mood had all but disappeared with the recounting of his story. "So any clue how we can find out where Amy is taking my sister, Katie?"

"I wish that was your biggest problem. Don't be mad, but the sword is by far, more important than your sister right now. The danger to the world posed by a gate created through a spell of Amy's will take years to materialize, but the sword, that is something else all together. If a demon hasn't already, one will find that opening in the Void very soon and feed off of its light, its heat, its energy! It will fast become powerful enough to influence both this world and yours."

Will stopped walking. "That may be, Adrina, but I can't let what happened to Talitha, happen to Katie also. I won't." Their eyes met in hard stare, Adrina dropped hers first.

"Will, please..."

"No. First off we don't know how to destroy the sword, so what you're asking is moot anyways."

"I have an idea on how to do that."

Will's anger began to bubble up. "Good and I'll listen to it, but first tell me how I can find where Amy has my sister. And don't even think about lying right here so close to that river."

Her eyes, which had been a warm brown, flashed darkly. "How dare you! I don't have to give you any answers if I don't choose." Another silence came between them, a hard seething quiet. Will was first to break it.

"I'm sorry about accusing you like that. It was stupid and wrong." Asking for forgiveness so near the river was a strain unto itself. Adrina was thankfully quick to reply.

"You're forgiven, Will. We both know I have a history of withholding certain information," this she said with a sad little smile. "But not this time. I swear." Now her expression became one of pain. "I don't think I'll be any help in finding your sister. I'm sort of trapped here. If I go back to the Void... I go back to the pits at Rek. I can't do that. It's so horrible." The pain in her face increased.

Will put his hand on her arm. "Could I find out the information about Katie myself? What would I have to do? Is there a spell or something?"

"There is, but you told me Amy was countering your visions and you told me that she is short on time. This means she's gone all out protecting herself from any sort of clairvoyance, unless she's very, very stupid that is, which I doubt. The time issue is the other reason I won't be able to help you. Without spells, the only other way to find information about the living is through the dead. You would have to find someone who is recently deceased who knows where she's going. Would her thugs know?"

"They might." His stomach suddenly flared in nauseas pain—the chances that Amy would tell her thugs where she was going next were close to zero. "Her mom would know, I bet."

Adrina's head nodded in agreement, but her face registered more defeat. "Yes, likely. But would she tell you? Hardly, and then there's the issue of even finding Henny in the Void, which is nearly impossible. And even if you do, you'll have to get past her demon captor, Ba'al Zubel probably..."

Will interrupted, "No, it's  Ba'al Fie-ere...my sister, kind of. I think she has Henny."

"This demon has Henny Harris?"

"Yeah. Ba'al Fie-ere said she was going to get a gate using Katie and since Amy has Katie..."

"Then Fie-ere probably has Henny," Adrina finished. "There must have been a trade, but a really bad one, I'm thinking. Or the demon lied to you. They do that, you know. But it doesn't matter, since getting around any demon in this situation will be practically impossible. The demon will keep Henny very close until the gate is open and once it is, that will mean your sister will probably be beyond your help or mine."

"So there's no hope in finding Katie?"

"I don't think so. Not before the gate opens. But maybe she can come here and cross over."

A sharp pain lanced through Will's stomach. "I accidentally told Ba'al Fie-ere about the River. I'm sorry; I thought I was talking to Katie. Do you think a demon can come here?"

Adrina shook her head. "No, but it might make it imposs...very difficult for Katie though. Ba'al Fie-ere will try to corrupt her as soon as she can." Will's head drooped and Adrina grabbed his arm. "There's still hope. If a soul dies in the dungeons and pits of hell, it will re-emerge in the Void. Maybe she can come here then. Does Katie, the real Katie know about the river?"

When Will shook his head, Adrina's face fell and there was silence between them. Will's stomach began to hurt with ever-greater intensity and in seconds, he was sitting on the ground clutching himself. "I can't give up on her. There's no way."

"You have to. Katie will have to save herself. She will have to find a way to come here on her own and you have to let her go. Destroying the sword is more important just now. Let Katie go, for the greater good."

"What about Lisa and my baby? Do I sacrifice them also for the greater good? And my father's soul? Just leave it down here as a plaything of some demon? How many of my friends and loved ones have to die before I become part of the greater good?" Will's words were venom and a small part of him was ashamed, the rest, however, was simply furious that Adrina was correct.

"Who else can destroy the sword? If you don't close that tiny gate now, over time it will become impossible. You have to see that."

"I don't!" Will's fury mounted. "We can throw the blade into the deepest part of the ocean or...bury it down a bottomless..."

"No!" With a quick step, she was right on top of Will and gripped his arm tight with nails that dug into his skin. "None of that will matter. You could send the blade into space if you wanted, but still the demon would feed on the light of a billion stars and over time it would grow and put forth its will and the blade would be found. The longer you wait, the harder it will be."

"I can't."

"Please?"

"Look..." There was no use arguing with her. "How bout this, I make an attempt at finding Henny, if I can't get anything out of her, it'll be a lost cause either way and I'll do what I can to destroy the sword."

Like magic, Adrina released her claws from Will's flesh. "Ok, but don't dawdle, Ba'al Zubel is strong enough without being fed pure energy."

"How do you know Ba'al is in control of the gate?"

A smile came to her. "My gut, mostly. The great demon keeps close watch upon its rivals, it will know if one becomes inordinately powerful and it'll move to confront it quickly." For some reason she turned from him and faced away downstream. "Now about destroying the sword...you'll need a virgin girl and a gypsy."

"What? No, no, no!" Will spun her around, something that was very easy since she was so tiny. "You're not going to ask me to sacrifice some poor girl!"

She wouldn't look up into his face. "Maybe you won't have to. She might live, you never know." This was said without enthusiasm and Adrina pressed on quick, "Listen, find a gypsy, you know what they look like. There are more around you than you realize and don't be fooled if they have a last name like Jones or Smith. We've been hiding our identities since the days of Moses. Second, find a virgin and remember the spirit has to be pure...even a nun will do, the younger the better, or at the least find someone who attends church weekly. Third...you have the incantations of Henny's, use them to open the gate and once it's open simply stab the blade into it."

He had listened to her go on, stunned into silence at the idea of perpetrating such evil against an innocent girl, but the last part about sending the sword through the gate struck him as insane. "That's your plan? Hand over the blade to the very demon that wants it most?"

Adrina nodded. "It's a gate into the Void itself. Once it's in the Void, it'll be useless. Picture the front door of a house. Go through it and you move from outside to inside the home. You go from rain or snow, to warmth and light, you see? Take the same door and put it here on this beach, you go from sand to sand, it serves no purpose whatsoever."

The two were silent for long spell, neither looking at the other. Nor did they look into the water. Will grew more depressed the longer he stood there. How could he open a gate? How could he ruin some poor girl? "I have to go," he said eventually.

"You do, time is tricky in the Void, and it almost always runs against you. I'm sorry I wasn't more help and I swear, if I could tell you how to find Katie, I would."

"I believe you. Good bye Adrina."

For her, it wasn't quite time. She leapt toward him and hugged him tight and he returned the embrace, again marveling how small and insubstantial she was. When she looked up at him, her eyes were red and wet. "Come visit me again, please. It's lonely here...I mean it's better than the Void yeah, but it still is lonely."

"No. I won't. You're going to cross this river again. Put your trust in God and you'll be fine." Will detangled himself from her. "Now, I really have to go. Thanks for your insight and uh, the suggestion." He didn't see himself damning a young girl to hell no matter what.

Adrina saw it in his eyes. "You trust in God. You've made hard choices before, you're going to have to do so again."

Will nodded and gave her a last smile before he turned away. The hills were in front of him, but they were illusionary. "Goodbye and good luck... I'll try to come here, if..." If he was killed, that is.

"Ok good, that sounds real good." She was crying, perhaps in relief, perhaps in sadness of his leaving. "Be strong, Will."

"I'll do my best," he replied, and gave only a quick look back, worried that he had wasted far too much time already. With a single step, the warm sand turned to deadly cold shadow.

Chapter 27

Will

The cold that struck him like an icy gale was depressingly familiar, as were the shifting shadows that danced in rhythm to his fear. Those shadows hid things. But just barely. They gave him glimpses of tortures and pain, like an evil strip show. They showed only enough to bring his fright to a crescendo and for a moment, his heart quailed in fear, and he froze in place with his eyes darting about. However, this was familiar too.

Fear was nothing new to Will Jern.

The emotion had been an acute intense companion of Will's for days, and chronically, for years. Off and on, for eight long dreary years, it skulked in the depths of his mind to come rearing up at his weekly visits with his sister. This had inured him to a degree and after a few minutes of his heart pounding in his chest, he forced his fear into the background of his subconscious and started walking into the dark Void, ignoring the sights, the screams, the feel of blood suddenly splattering him or squishing beneath his bare feet. Even if he had the time, there was nothing he could do for any of the poor wretches around him.

Time was his biggest issue. There was no way to judge it in any way other than to realize that Adrina was correct. In the Void time worked against a person. If there was pain, it would draw out. If there was a deadline, it would speed up. Will forced himself to relax. He would find Henny, or he wouldn't and worrying would only hurry time along.

Fixing his enemy's face firmly in his mind he began whispering, "Henny Harris, Henny Harris." Much faster than he expected, the shadows turned into wicked black trees and thorned bushes, a path twisted among them. He followed as quick as he dared and soon he came to a castle of immense proportions.

Against a midnight sky, tall straight spires stretched away beyond heavy stone battlements and closer, just at his feet a terribly dark moat opened up. Its depth was immeasurable. Off to his right, a bridge extended across the moat and as Will came to it, he saw that it stood quietly unguarded. In fact the entire structure seemed empty without a trace of motion or noise, but all the same Will knew that eyes were everywhere upon him.

His relaxed mood began to crumble at the sight of the dark castle and he hesitated, afraid to set foot upon the bridge. But across it was his destiny for good or for evil and resolutely, with his face set in hard lines, he practically sauntered over it, daring the demon. Once across he wondered how easy it would be to go back, but as he watched, the bridge faded to nothing leaving only a very long fall behind him. Onwards then. Upon gaining the castle proper, he took the first door that lead to stairs. Stairs that led downwards, that is. Henny would be nowhere else beside the dungeons.

Down the fearfully steep staircase and then along a low ceilinged black tunnel, Will walked, knowing his goal would be soon upon him. He didn't hurry, though he very much wanted to, instead he reminded himself of the courage his father had always shown and pressed on, until actual light could be seen up ahead. This was no illusion. After the varying shades of black, it was a marvel to look upon and by the warmth of the light, he knew he had found a living person.

He also knew that he had found his father. Now Will moved with more haste and slipped quietly up to the chamber where his father lay. The man no longer looked so dreadfully skinny, nor as old, quite the opposite. His shoulders were thick and wide, his arms bulged with muscles, and his eyes were a startling blue.

They were a skeptical blue however.

"What now?" William Jern wasn't quiet in the least.

"Shush," Will whispered, darting to the edge of the room, which was circular and decorated in mottled shadows all along its walls. Other than his father, the place seemed deserted, but Will was loath to step in to the room fearing a trap. "It's Will. Are you ok? Can you get up?"

"I'm fine, Will. Thanks for asking, now why don't you tell me what you want?" His manner was strange enough to keep Will from entering the room.

"Dad, please. We have to get out of here."

"Sure, just unchain me and off we go," William held up his leg and showed off a large chain that ran to an eyebolt on the floor. Without hesitation, Will charged into the room and threw his strength against the chain. It seemed about to stretch when a loud clang rent the air behind him, he didn't bother looking back. As he had suspected, his father was part of a trap. Instead of panicking Will got his legs under him and pulled at the chain with all the strength he could muster.

Tunk, the bolt snapped off and he was thrown back to the ground. In a second, he was up again, facing whatever menace had trapped them.

The shadows, filling out into the three dimensional likeness of men, came off the walls and formed ranks around the father and son. In their hands, the shadow-men carried thick spears, which they leveled inwards. Will was surprisingly unfazed and his father was so relaxed, he hadn't bothered even to get up.

From the floor, William drawled out, "This is the worst play ever. I can't tell if this is supposed to be Cats or The Sound of Music. Just please tell me you'll be serving drinks at intermission." This was so odd that Will had to look back at his father a second time just to make sure that it was indeed him.

"Always the brave Commander. You know I enjoy that so much." This was spoken by a slow heavy voice; it stirred the air so that the shadow men seemed to flicker as they stood and as the wind of the words struck Will, he went cold and couldn't suppress a shiver.

"Who are you?" he called out. The originator of the voice lurked back behind the phalanx of spearmen and had yet to be seen.

"Oh, shut up!" William cried and Will was shocked to the core when he realized that the words were directed at him. William went on indignantly, "This is your worst attempt yet, Ba'al. Why don't you just torture me and get it over with?"

Ba'al? Worst attempt? What was happening here? Will's mind ran around in circles trying to play catch up, he wasn't nearly successful. "What's going on?" he demanded after a moment.

His father ignored him, but the creature he referred to as Ba'al explained, "William doesn't believe you are his son. He thinks you're nothing but an apparition, which is understandable since I've been playing so many fun games with him. He's quite a distraction."

Father and son looked at each other; William shook his head still disbelieving. "Have him put on his little show. Are you supposed to be here saving me from the evil demon? If you are, get to battling."

Confusion had Will stammering, "I am...I think, or at least I thought I was." His mind was suddenly all turned around. The demon strode closer, it was Ba'al Fie-ere and her skin was still as black as jet. She was a bit of a shock to Will. He had been expecting Ba'al Zubel, the tyrant. Yet it hardly mattered, he could no more defeat this demon than any other. At least not without the power that he had once felt burning inside him. The power that he had used to defeat the great Ba'al.

The power of the Word of the Lord.

It was something that he was acutely aware of not feeling and it left a hole in his heart. Did this lack of power mean he was abandoned by the Lord? Was it a one-time shot and he would now have to win out on his own?

Ba'al Fie-ere intruded upon his thoughts before he could come to any sort of conclusion, "My dear brother, of course you're here to do battle. Where would the fun be if you weren't?" Her voice was now that of her twin back on earth, Talitha. This more than anything else fired his blood.

"Then step out from behind your little phantom men and face me!" It was an empty threat, but for some reason Ba'al hesitated and without saying a word of direction, the shadow men advanced.

"No. Sorry, Will. We've tried that before. You'll flash your little light and run away. But don't worry, these creatures won't hurt you, they'll just drain you so you can't pull any little tricks."

Now William looked concerned. "You have light? Let me see it." His ability to command with his voice was still impressive enough for Will not to hesitate. A weak stream of light gently blew back the shadow men, he could've done more, but he held back. William's blue eyes were ablaze. "Will, are you dead?"

Before he could answer, Ba'al spoke in a voice that shook the gloom with her sordid happiness, "He's not! Isn't that great? His body is somewhere else and his soul is mine! Ha ha! This is far greater than even I imagined. Your souls are wonderful. Look how bright you are! And soon I'll have Katie as well. Who would have thought Amy Harris could have been so handy."

"And the tyrant? Henny was Ba'al's witch. Is he going to sit back and let you take her?" Will asked, hoping to find a flaw in her thinking.

"Who do you think I had to trade with to get Henny?" The fifteen-foot tall demon looked to be getting worked up, not in exasperation, but in exaltation. Ba'al Fie-ere wanted them to know how clever she was. "And do you know what I gave up for Amy and her mom?" Both Will and William looked at each other, and shrugged. All Will knew was that it had to be something big. She gave a little laugh. "I gave up the gate that opens onto the sword. You know the one that sucked you into the Void, Father."

This produced a low growl in William's throat. Will on the other hand was almost, but not quite, speechless, "That was the dumbest trade in the world. That sword is a source of eternal power."

"Despite what you think, I have to assure you the trade was brilliant. Think about it, now that you...or rather Talitha has the sword, how many more souls are going to come through? I'm thinking none. I'm also thinking that very soon the sword will go into a lead lined box and be placed into cold storage as close to absolute zero as humanly possible. Ba'al is going to be dreadfully angry just how little he got for this trade."

William spoke up, "You don't look too worried."

More laughter from the demon. It made Will remember and miss Adrina whose laughter had been soft and musical.

"Why should I be worried? Look at your little girl now, Father." The demon suddenly grew sixty feet and became a vile monstrosity to look upon and her voice was a cacophony of harsh discordant notes. "Not only did I force the great Ba'al to name me, but in a short time I've become very near its equal." This brought on another booming laugh and the two men cowered, clutching their ears. The demon quieted and diminished back to her giraffe size. "Not yet," she admonished herself. "I can't reveal myself just yet. Not until I have Katie and the gate."

"How did you do this? How did you get so big?" Will asked.

"Oh, I bet you of all people are shocked, after how terribly you screwed me over." Her gaze was hard, full of malevolence, and Will took an involuntary step backwards. "You have no idea what you did to me when you cast me out of Talitha. You left me the weakest of demons. I had nothing. Nothing except my wits, and I needed all of those just to survive, especially when I humiliated the tyrant for a second time by stealing the souls of Jim Anderson and that pathetic Brabec girl right from under his nose." She laughed in joy at her triumph and grew giant-like a second time, however it was only for a moment and then she returned to her normal large size. "Ba'al was in the greatest fury and hunted me to all ends of the Void, yet always I managed to slip away and this was mainly due to the fact that I didn't really want to stay in one place either way. I was hunting too, you see.

"I was after the sword's gate. From the moment you sentenced me to hell, I knew that I had to control it. I thought it was an everlasting supply of power and with it, I could become the greatest of demons. My problem was that I couldn't find it; I search everywhere and in truth for a while I was truly stumped. It should have been more obvious, it should have stood out against the black as the tiniest star. But, there was nothing. So I changed tactics. Perhaps I had misunderstood the mechanics of the gate. I now searched out the blackest sections of the Void and was quickly rewarded for my efforts. The gate had been completely covered over by muck!"

Her knowing look was lost on the two men. "Muck? What do you mean?" William ventured.

"Uhg, this!" Reaching down she brought up a handful of the ever-present shadows that swirled about their feet. "This is muck... it's like hell mulch. This is what happens to your soul when demons no longer can have any fun with you. You just sort of wear out as an individual and become, muck."

"And that doesn't bother you?" William's face was set and a heavy pulse beat in his temple.

"Of course it does," the demon rejoined. "It happens to some of the best souls. You get a good screamer one who really feels the pain and then poof...it's like they suddenly don't care." William went red over this and the demon only laughed. "Stop being such an idiot, Papa. This is the way it is and you aren't going to do squat to change it." She drew herself up menacingly and Will stepped in front his father.

"Ba'al Fie-ere, you were telling us how you found the gate?" Will was still in desperate need of information. Nothing she had said so far had been of any help.

The demon smirked showing teeth the size of sabers. "Always the peace maker, Will. Always the hero. Do you think you will actually be able to escape this time?"

It didn't look like it, just then, but he had his light still and it gave him hope. "I'll try. You know I will, but right now, I'm interested in your story. How come the...muck had covered the gate over? Was another demon trying to hide it?"

At his admission, she smiled. "Try is the crucial word, because there will be no escape." She paused but Will held his tongue and forced an expectant look on his face as if her story couldn't be any more exciting. With a shrug, she continued, "I actually worried about another demon as well. It's without shame when I tell you that as the newest demon in the Void, I was one of the weakest. I would be a plaything for any other demon who happened upon me, so I nosed about the web of muck with trepidation, but it turned out that like bugs to a light, the muck just sort of gravitated to the gate. It was a perfect situation. I was hidden by endless layers of darkness and I controlled the gate. I grew very strong, very fast and soon I didn't fear any of the lesser demons. Yet, my growth hit a point of diminishing returns.

"I continued to grow, but at such a slow speed that it was almost a waste of time to sit huddled around the gate...but then Dad came popping out!" The demon offered William a large benevolent smile, which he refused to respond to. "At that point, the gate bloomed with energy and I took it all in! It was amazing, and I wanted more. It was like a drug. And then Talitha came, and with her another blast of energy, but it was smaller than before and my growth was far less. And what's worse, she stood poised at the gate and was somehow able to go back into the world.

"All of this made me realize that though the gate was a great thing, it was a dead end. I had to assume that Talitha now possessed the sword and that no more souls would be coming. And when, Daddy dearest told me about how Amy was after our sweet innocent little Katie, bam! My little plan was hatched. The tyrant, having been burned twice now in its dealing with the Harris' was eager to make the trade. What a moron."

"You're not so smart as you think," William jumped in. "You don't know Katie; she's tougher than you were at her age. Not only that, you have misjudged your brother before and I think you're misjudging him now. He will escape, and he will find Amy and stop her."

Remarkably, the demon didn't fly into a rage. "Wrong on all accounts. Even as we speak, Amy is in the middle of the incantations to open the gate. So even if Will does escape back to his body, he'll have what? Twenty minutes to find Amy. I doubt that's enough time."

Will doubted it as well. It meant that they had to be traveling, right that second to the exact right location and that any deviation or delay would mean failure. "Tell me! Where is she?"

The demand brought a cruel smile to the demon's lips. "First tell me, where are you? Where's your body?"

"We should be in Phoenix by now," his reply was far more quiet, little more than a whisper.

"Oh, that's too bad. You're going the wrong way, she's in Tucson."

Ba'al Fie-ere's fake pity lit a fire beneath Will. "You're a liar! Where is she?"

"Me? A liar? I guess I am, but unfortunately for our little Katie, I'm not lying about this. But if you don't believe me, you can ask another source...Henny?" To their left, the phantom soldiers drew back and Henny Harris appeared, rising out of the shadows; she was younger and more beautiful than Will remembered, yet her eyes were haunted and afraid. The demon gave her large fake smile. "Henny, where's your daughter?"

"Where would the great Ba'al like her to be?" Henny's voice quivered and she kept her large brown doe eyes stuck to the shadows that made up the floor beneath their feet.

"I want the truth, Henny. What city?"

"Tuscan."

If Henny was lying, she was an actress without equal. Will felt so weak, he almost sat down, instead he looked to his father.

"We'll figure something out," William whispered, his own face looking grey beneath his hardy tan. It didn't seem likely that they would. There had been fifteen or sixteen addresses scattered around Tucson that had fit the criteria, and Father Vogel was currently driving directly away from all of them. By the time Will was awakened, if that was even now possible, they would be an hour away. He had failed. Remorse struck him just it had at the river and the feeling made it hard to care too much about his own coming tortures. They would be horrible, he was sure, but just at the moment he couldn't bring himself to care.

Will turned back to Henny and found that she stared at him with an intense hatred, something he really couldn't blame her for, especially after having seen what he had done to her on the staircase. "This may sound stupid, but I'm sorry about knocking your head into the wall as hard as I did. I was scared to death and I wasn't thinking about the pain I was causing you."

The apology baffled her and her mouth came open a few times before she got her emotions squared away. "Fuck you! Your apology doesn't mean crap to me. You're going to pay for what you did and I'm going to laugh along with your every scream." Henny grew larger and more fierce looking as she spoke, but then she twirled and threw herself on her knees in front of the demon. "Please, I beg you. Let me torture him first. I've earned it, helping to get Katie for you."

"Earned?" The demon laughed and grew again. "Tell me, what is the going wage for a slave?" Ba'al paused as if Henny could give a satisfactory answer to this and when none came, the demon reached out with one of her oak tree sized arms and snatched Henny from the floor and held her high over their heads, her arms pinned, and her legs kicking. "The answer is no, Henny. But here is the payment you deserve for your insolence."

The monstrous demon turned the struggling woman on her side and with a hungry greedy look in her eyes bit off Henny's legs and chewed on them in ghastly pleasure. Screams and blood rained down on the two men, who stood stoically with matching looks of horror, until with easy indifference the demon tossed aside the body. Henny lay crumpled and disfigured, whimpering in the shadows and Will, despite knowing what an evil person she was, wanted to go to her, but his father put out a hand and stayed him.

Ba'al smirked at this and then spat out a long thighbone. "Watch over your daughter, Henny. Make sure Amy doesn't screw this up, or else."

"Y-y-yes g-great Ba'al," the woman stammered. She then very slowly dragged herself away, leaving a long nasty trail behind.

With satisfaction, Ba'al watched until she disappeared in the dark and then she shrunk back down, this time becoming her normal height so that the shadow men hid her completely. She couldn't be seen, but her presence could be felt and her voice heard easily, "I think it's time we had some fun with you, Will. Get you primed for your sister."

Will had a second for this to register before the shadow men charged with black spears leveled, their grim faces pitiless. A brilliant flash of his hidden light, staggered the first wave and they seemed to come apart, falling to pieces in silent agony. Unfortunately, behind these, a second line charged through the debris and though Will was able to destroy those in front, spears from a third line flew through the air striking him and knocking him to his knees.

The spears weren't designed to puncture his flesh and organs, rather they absorbed his light and drained his strength. The fight was short and bloody, both men were beaten until they could barely move. Will's light was no longer the bonfire that it had been, it felt like little more than a candle, and he was afraid what would happen if it went out altogether.

"Enough!" the demon cried. "We don't want to kill them." At some point, she had grown again and now that Will was no longer even a tiny threat, she loomed over the two men. "Still think you're going to escape, Will? You still think that I'd allow that to happen?"

"I will." He had meant it to come out as a challenge, instead it was a whisper that only had the demon smiling larger. He struggled to his feet and then helped his father up. "I will escape. I know about the river and I can cross it...I think."

"Oh really? You think so?" Ba'al didn't look too worried. "While you were gone, I made inquiries about this river. You ever wonder why Talitha didn't cross?"

"What river are you two talking about?" William asked.

Will answered his father before he answered the demon. "Somewhere on the border between heaven and hell, there's a river...it's got trees and hills and everything. In order to cross into heaven, you have to get past this river, but..."

The demon jumped in, craning her long neck down to put her giant head close to Will's face, "But the river shows you all the evil that you've committed. That's why Talitha couldn't cross it. She's far more nasty that either of you realize. Your little girl, William, can swing the whip with the best of them." William's lips pressed together and his brows came down to rest just above his eyes, but he said nothing.

"Sins committed in hell aren't sins at all," Will rejoined in defense of his sister, not at all knowing the truth of his statement. Common sense seemed to dictate the fact, however.

"Not sins? Are you on a 'time out' from morality here? Is that what you think? So by your pathetic reasoning, it will be ok with God, if I boil you two alive. I won't have to be worried about forgiveness, since it wouldn't be a sin, right?" She chortled over this for some time and Will began to worry that she was correct. "Even for you, Will that's kind of stupid. You had to wonder why Talitha always had trouble looking you in the eye."

Will had wondered that exact thing on many occasions, but he wasn't going to give the demon any satisfaction. "Whatever she did, I'm sure she was coerced."

"Of course she was! She was beaten to bloody pulp, roasted over a fire like she was a hotdog, she was given the works, and she became willing to do or say anything to stop the pain—though she did take a lot of punishment before she finally gave in...the first time. After that it got easier and easier to break her."

"So...what? She was made to torture people? Why? Are you demons so lazy that you can't do it yourself?" William's umbrage looked to be a source of amusement for the demon, who laughed her wall-shaking laugh.

"No, not just any people, she tortured family and friends. She took such delight tearing the skin from loved ones you'd have thought that she was a demon herself and you Will popped her cherry. She held firm despite the pain for a long time but it was on an illusion of you that she first gave in to temptation. And as for why Ba'al Zubel made her do this, it was for fun, simply for a laugh."

"That's a lie," Will said with a short hard laugh of his own. "There's way more to it than just fun. Demons like you and Ba'al Zubel can't stand even the least bit of goodness in a person. You're embarrassed by it, because you know that its contrast makes you look small and petty and pathetic." The demon bared her long teeth in a smile. It was a deadly smile that spoke of revenge for his audacity and Will took an involuntary step back, practically hiding behind his father. "There was another reason as well that she was made into a torturer. The tyrant was afraid to lose her, right? She told me once that hell was voluntary..."

William interrupted, turning to his son with skepticism, "What? That can't be right."

"It is, Dad. If you can escape from her," he pointed, indicated the looming demon. "You could search out the river if you wanted and cross over. That's why Ba'al Zubel forced her to do such terrible things. He chained her to the Void with her own sins."

"Finally you show a spark of intelligence," Ba'al Fie-ere rumbled. "And as a reward, I'll let you go first." From seemingly nowhere, she produced a long handled whip. "Let's start with a classic. Come on and take it, Will. Don't be shy." When it was clear that he wasn't going to budge the demon tossed it in front of him. A moment later, she produced a second whip, this one was long and mean, barbed with shining metal. It made Will shudder in fear just looking at it, this brought a smile to the demon's lips. "Time to get your hands dirty, Will. I can't have you running off to heaven if I get overzealous and accidentally kill you. Now since this is your first time, I'm going to give you a very fair deal. You'll give your father a hundred lashes with that tiny little whip or I give him two hundred, with this. Now isn't that fair? Won't you be doing him a favor?"

His mouth came open and hung there. She took that as a yes. "Good. I'm glad you're being reasonable. One other thing however, if any of your lashes fail to draw blood, you'll be whipped twice by mine."

William stepped in front of his boy, looking remarkably composed. "Your little scheme won't work, Ba'al. I love my son and I forgive him for anything that he may be forced to do." The man then turned and actually smiled. "I hold you entirely blameless, Will. Let none of what's going to happen, hold you back. I want you to go to heaven no matter what. Now let's get this over with." He gave Will a gentle push toward the whip.

How could the man be so calm? With the fear drenched gloom and the shadow men standing all around them with spears ready and the demon leering in, a spectacle of vile perversity, Will was a bundle of nerves. His body shook so badly that it took an effort of will just to stumble over and pick up the whip.

"I don't think I can do this," Will said, speaking mostly to the fifteen-foot long strip of leather that sat with unnatural comfort in his palms, he was afraid to look up. And this was for a number of reasons. The first was he feared that the demon, as a master deceiver herself, would see the deception in his eyes. Just as he had bent down to pick up the whip, a plan had come to him, unfortunately not a very good one. He decided that if he could accomplish nothing else, he would free his father. And that meant killing him, something that even if the demon wasn't standing so close, wouldn't be an easy thing to do. In his prime, his father was a bull of a man, but that was nothing compared to the fact that Will loved him with all his heart. It would be a mercy kill he had to remind himself.

The second reason he feared to look up was he knew that if he hesitated any longer, the dreadful whip that Ba'al Fie-ere held would come lashing at him. Purposely he waited as if in indecision and clenched his jaws in anticipation.

"Will, look out!" His father's warning came a half second before the whip struck.

The pain was an incomparable fire that ran a line from his left ear, which tore completely away, and down his back diagonally. He gasped at the intensity and went weak, dropping to his knees, but before he could scream, the whip struck again and then again, and he writhed on the ground in a vain attempt to avoid the blows. Ten lashes of unimaginable pain left him a whimpering bleeding wreck.

"I don't have all night. Your sister is coming soon and I haven't even picked out something to wear." The demon sat reclining on a tremendous throne, which had appeared from nowhere. She looked to be in no hurry. "Now, get up and give it a try. I think that soon you'll come to like it." As she spoke, she ran her whip through her lips tasting his flesh and blood. It was all Will could do, not to vomit at the sight.

"Y-y-yes ma'am," he said with a voice that shook and got to his feet as hurriedly as he could, though his legs threatened to buckle beneath him.

"Address me as the Great Ba'al!" she thundered and he cowered with his left arm up, very afraid that she would whip him again, if she did, he worried he would lack the strength to kill his father.

"Y-yes Great Ba'al," he shook and swayed and cringed in real fear. So far his plan wasn't working so well, his father had just stood there as he had been whipped, the opposite of what Will needed. He had to somehow get close to his father without rousing suspicion. There would be only one chance at this.

The Great Ba'al liked what she saw and smiled benignly. "Good. Now, Daddy has been naughty. Punish him, or else."

Will looked at his father and was surprised at the hard look that William had for him. "Stop messing around, Will and swing the whip, damn it!"

"I..." Will began.

"I said, swing the whip, now!"

This is going to hurt, Will thought to himself and sent the leather lash past his father's right arm. He missed. Purposefully. There was barely enough time for him to grimace in fear and cast his left hand up to protect his face, before Ba'al's whip descended down upon him. It was like a lightning strike. The pain seared into him yet he stumbled forward, trying to get near enough to his father on the off chance that he would have the strength and will to kill the man. By his fourth step, the demon lashed his legs, dropping him to the ground, after that there was only agony.

"Stop! Stop it now!" A familiar voice roared out. The whipping stopped, but the pain stayed and he cried on the floor among the shadows, embarrassed, but only vaguely so. The pain was that great. "Pull it together, Will. Don't let her win." William was a red blur above him. "Come on be strong."

There was almost no strength left to him, he shuddered and whimpered, and the demon sat enjoying the misery and William came down on one knee and held him close. There was something wrong with Will's vision and when he touched his own face, he found that his left eye was missing, as was a great deal of his skin. The pain was too much for him to care.

Eventually the demon spoke and when she did, it seemed to clear his mind and he was able to think past the pain, "We all know what you are up to, Will." He swallowed hard, afraid that she actually did. "You just want to take the punishment; you're trying to protect our father. I would call that noble, but just look how it makes him seem? He looks like a pathetic coward. You're all bloody and crying like a bitch and he looks as good as new, almost like he's using you as a shield."

"Will, please...you're going to have to use that whip on me. I-I can't stand to see you in this much pain," William whispered, his voice cracking with emotion. "Please, do it for me?"

Will nodded and put out a hand to be helped up, but when his father hauled him up, he could barely stand. Fortunately, Ba'al gave him another minute before she became impatient.

"Enough stalling! Whip him good, Will. I wanna see you bloody up his pretty face." Ba'al threw one of her huge legs over the armrest of the throne and smiled down on her prisoners.

"Yes, great Ba'al." Will turned to his father, "Could you kneel down, please? And just try not to move, ok? No matter what... don't move." With his one good eye, he gave his father an exaggerated wink, after a flash of puzzlement, William nodded.

Now was Will's only chance. Another whipping would take too much out of him. Taking a deep breath, he ran the leather through his hands, formed it into a coil and before his soul could protest the patricide he was about to commit, he dropped it over his father's head and yanked it as tight as he could around his neck.

Chaos erupted around the two men. Ba'al leapt to her feet and the shadow men charged with black spears pointed square at his chest. Will wasn't entirely defenseless, he still had some light left within him, and he released it in a blinding silent explosion. The radiance of it wasn't much compared to how powerful it had been, but it still smote the rushing shadows, sending them scattering.

"Go to the river, go to the river," Will grunted through his clenched teeth, pulling for all he was worth. For a moment, he thought that he would succeed. His hands stung from the amount of pressure he was exerting and his father's face went from pink to red and then to a deep purple and just when he was sure the great man would finally succumb to asphyxiation, the leather whip turned to smoke in his hands and Will toppled backwards.

Ba'al laughed hard. "These are my shadows, my playthings. I command them, they obey me. I created them and I decide what shape they form. Oh, but what fun that was, watching you play the part of the hero. Now get on up, don't just lie there crying. I think that since you were so bad, your father should spank you."

Will stood, tears of frustration did indeed drip from his chin, and his heart was heavy with defeat. "You may control the shadows, but you do not control me."

"Are you going to strangle your dad with your bare hands?" she asked standing. Ba'al rose to her full height now and he barely came to her knee. "Do you think that I would allow that? You think I would sit by and let you kill such a prize?"

Instead of answering her, Will looked at his father, who knelt in front of him with his back ramrod straight, his shoulders out, and his head up. It seemed as though the man would never be cowed. Except that he would. In the end, the infinite grinding hate and the constant fear and pain would wear down even this heroic man, turning him into just so much soul mulch. Will couldn't allow that to happen, he would kill him in any way he could.

By training, he was indeed a killer, he had learned from the best, by the very demon that stood above him.

Every week, while in the body of his sister, she had sought ways to strike him down, though many of these attacks he had seen coming by way of his vision and had avoided them without the need to fight. But he had learned nonetheless. He had seen the thousand moves, the precise angles of attacks, the ferocious focused power that could kill in a blink of an eye.

It would need to be a clean death and a very fast one.

"I love you, Dad." It was all Will had time for. He took a large step back and then pivoted, before driving his right leg out, throwing his entire weight behind a bone crushing side kick. His foot smashed into the back of his father's neck with the force of a sledgehammer. There was a horrid cracking noise and his father flung out his arms and pitched forward onto his face, spasmed once and then lay there in shadows unmoving.

"No!" Ba'al's scream of outrage surged through the shadows sending them spiraling around him in a froth. A second later, Will was struck by something and went sprawling, he was unaware of pain or any emotion. Curiously and blessedly, he felt completely numb.

The vast figure of Ba'al Fie-ere stooped and picked up the body of William Jern and it lolled in her hand, its head looking like only strings were keeping it from dropping away. Fire grew behind the black of Ba'al's eyes. "You will pay! You'll pay, you'll pay, you'll pay!" She stamped her foot like a toddler in a fit and then threw down the body as if it were a broken toy.

Her deadly whip lifted and came at Will, the sound, a powerful crack, woke him from his numbness and pain shot across his body. Soon his whole world was only pain and the one thing that Will could care about was saving the one eye he had left. Above all else, he had to see for himself that his father had died, that William was really and truly free. But that eye was in jeopardy. Ba'al seemed determined to shred every inch of skin from his body and already he had lost his fingers off both hands.

Just then, a new sound blasted through the hell that Ba'al Fie-ere had constructed. It was as if two pieces of metal had thundered together in a massive clash. The sound was like electricity and vibrated and tingled the very shadows. Ba'al's whip stopped half drawn back and she stood as a statue.

"The Gate!" she cried.

Before he knew it she strode away, leaving him penned in the circular room that he had first found his father in. Gone were the shadow men and the throne. A body lay in a heap near one of the heavy brick shadow walls, and just as Will focused on it with his single eye and saw that it was his father, it faded into nothing.

Will wept in joy that his father was now free and he wept in misery from the scores of wounds that covered his body, but above all else, he wept in sadness. He might have saved his father, but he lost him as well, gone from his life was the one man that he had ever loved and the one person that he respected over all others. A thousands tears fell from his one eye, before he was able to think on his current predicament: Katie would surely be joining him soon. This dread thought brought a fresh wave of tears.

Poor Katie. She was doomed and that was almost certainly unchangeable, the gate was being opened even then and after that, her body could be hidden anywhere. Perhaps worse, her soul would be Ba'al Fie-ere's plaything for an eternity since there was no way that the demon would fall for any of Will's little tricks now.

But that didn't mean he wouldn't stop trying, nor would he stop trying to escape.

Unfortunately, that wasn't going to happen just then. Will dragged his body to the nearest wall. On some level, he knew that it was little more than shadows and illusion, but his reality told him that it was concrete, heavy and thick. He tried to will himself past it as he had before, but it remained solid. When that didn't work, he tried meditation, only his pain was too great to concentrate on anything else. After that, he laid there on the frozen concrete, clueless at what to do. Depression laid such a good hold of him that now the idea of escape seemed ludicrous, but it was just then, that Will heard a sound. It was very faint and seemed to come from all about him.

"Huh?" It hurt terribly even to make that one noise, his bottom lip had been nearly sheared away and it dangled grotesquely.

"Will?" His name floated out of the shadows and he grew afraid again, certain that it was a gypsy calling him as part of some evil spell.

Hands shook him, "Will?" Now the gypsy was louder, more urgent, and Will suddenly recognized the voice.

"Mom?"

"Yes," Gayle said. She leaned over him, shaking his shoulders and staring into his blue eyes with her big brown ones. He was back, back in the world.

Chapter 28

Will

The air in the back of the SUV felt like it had come straight from an oven, all the same, Will shivered violently and his skin sprung armies of regimentally aligned goose bumps.

"Will! Are you ok?" Gayle was practically shouting. She turned to her daughter and asked her, "Is he going to be ok? Is this normal?"

Before Talitha could answer, Will managed to blurt out, "I-I'm ok. W-w-where are..."

"We're in Phoenix. The first address on the list is right there." Talitha, looking listless and pale, pointed out the window, however Will didn't look. They weren't even close to where Amy held Katie. Talitha leaned her face next to her mother's. "What happened? Did you find Mrs. Harris? Did you see dad at all?"

Due to his many wounds, being back in the world was nearly as painful as being tortured in the Void and Will, with some urgency, struggled to get up and only answered his sister with a vague, preoccupied, "Yeah." He then turned to look at his father, lying curled around Lisa. The man looked dead, but also more at peace, no longer did his mouth gape and the lines of fear had relaxed. He looked younger than he had. Will checked, but there wasn't a pulse to be found.

Everyone watched him in silence. "I found dad down there, he was trapped by Ba'al Fie-ere and I...I freed him." A lump the size and consistency of a pinecone lodged in his throat and it was a moment before he could go on. "It was so terrible there and he was very brave and...and so strong. But...but he's no longer in the Void. I think he's in heaven now." Will felt an almost uncontrollable urge to break down and cry like a child, but his mother hugged him close and he was able to hold it down inside of himself.

"You did great, Will," she said, pulling back and leaving the side of his face wet from her tears. "What about Katie? Did you find out about her?"

He told them what he had learned, and the news about Katie stunned the little group, each stood mutely save for the constant sniffling. Finally Father Vogel spoke up, "We should check the building either way. After all. I'm sure demons are notorious for lying."

"Sure it wouldn't hurt," Will agreed. In his heart, though, he was only putting off the very difficult choice he had to make. "Tal can you smell Katie or Amy."

"No, there's nothing."

"But we're still so far away," Gayle pleaded, unable give up hope. Her eyes were almost black with the dark of the night and her Arizona tan very deep, Will tried not to stare or even think about what she looked like just then.

"Tal and I will go and check the place out, Mom. Please stay here with Father Vogel, just to be on the safe side." He gave her another hug and sat her back down in the front passenger seat before turning to the building they were supposed to check out. They were in a low rent office park, where storefronts faced the street and goods were warehoused in the back.

After a single glance, Will's stomach rolled over. A killer had worked as a welder there and had used his arc torch for horrible purposes, the man had been dead three years, but the smell of burning flesh was fresh in Will's nostrils. It wasn't the only thing that he saw. He knew that the building was empty, yet he went to it regardless.

"We both know Amy and Katie aren't here. Why are you wasting our time?" Talitha asked when they were still twenty yards away. "Shouldn't we be trying to get in touch with the bishop and maybe the police, to try to track them down?" Her mannerisms were odd, jumping slightly from personality to personality. She looked on the verge of giving up the fight against her evil side and Will knew that he would have to tread carefully despite the sensitive questions that he had to ask.

He kept silent until they got to the front of the abandoned business and then he asked in a soft voice, "You're a virgin aren't you?"

At first Talitha looked shocked at the question, but hot anger was quick to follow, and it made her voice quiver, "You know that I'm not. Why do you want to know? What did Ba'al Fie-ere show you?"

The place was deserted as he knew that it would be and he waved the priest and his mom over, only then did he answer, "I'm not talking about Ba'al Fie-ere or whatever you want to call the other being that lived inside you all those years, I'm talking about you, my sister. Did you ever make love to a man, by your own volition?"

"Yes...I mean no. Damn it! I never did. It was always her, the other one."

"Why didn't you?" She started to protest and he repeated himself, as calm as he could, "Why didn't you Talitha? I need you to concentrate."

Talitha took a long deep breath and closed her eyes before answering, "Before, I was too young. Sex is supposed to be the physical aspect of love itself, not a way to inspire the emotion, which so many people wrongly presume. With Brian, I was just about ready and then the demon came and when I returned, it was with my other self along. She made even the idea repugnant."

As she finished speaking, the priest rolled the Jimmy up and Talitha buttoned her lips on the subject with embarrassment. Their mom hopped out quick and peeked nervously in the window, her reflection was so black that it reminded Will of Ba'al Fie-ere. This left a bad taste in his mouth and he walked away to look at his wife one more time.

"No one's in there," Gayle said coming around to Will. "What are we going to do now?"

"Katie is beyond our help, Mom."

Gayle sunk to the pavement. "No! You've got magic powers, use them. You too, Talitha. Go find my baby girl, go find your sister."

Will half expected this to set off Talitha's other personality, however his sister only looked more weary than he had ever seen and sat down against the building with her chin dragging on her chest. They all looked done in, save for the priest, who hovered nearby keeping silent. Will was quiet as well. He was afraid that he was now at the cross roads of his earlier visions, whichever way he turned from here would decide if his wife would wake, or die years from now in her endless sleep.

He was in possession of the hell blade and it was his clear duty to destroy it. At the same time, he had an obligation to his sister and an obligation to destroy the gate that was being created through the energies of her body and soul. It seemed impossible to decide which route to take, but only because one choice was hopeless and the other would likely mean his death. Remembering Adrina's death, he shivered and a real heavy need to pee came over him.

"I will find Katie, but not just yet. We have work to do here." He knew the direction he had to go, because it was the one his father would have chosen. "Here's what we are going to do..." In a minute, he outlined his painfully simple plan of opening a gate onto the Void.

"But I'm not a gypsy!" his mother protested.

"And I'm..." Talitha paused in the middle of her outburst and shot a look at her mother and then at the priest, before continuing in a quieter voice that was practically a whisper, "And I'm not a virgin."

"And I'm not a hero," Will replied. "I'm scared to death. You guys don't know what Ba'al Zubel did to Adrina... it was horrible. But I'm going to risk it, because this has to be done."

Father Vogel, who had stoically listened to his part in the action without flinching, said, "I agree that it has to be done, but that doesn't change the fact that essential elements to opening a gate and summoning the demon seem to be missing here."

"Then we lose nothing," Will countered.

"I'm Italian, not a witch," Gayle insisted.

"Adrina hinted broadly that gypsies were nearer than I knew, I think she was worried that I would take offence if she came right out and said it. And she also said not to be fooled by a non-gypsy sounding name. And," Will looked next at his sister, "Adrina said when finding a virgin to find one with the purest soul and yours may be the purest there is, after all you stripped away all the evil in you to make...your other self."

Talitha had grown more pale as they had spoken, "Let's suppose that your conjecture concerning our ancestry is correct, and mom is able to open the gate. If the demon doesn't buy off on my being a virgin, you may doom her. You know about the connection. You know there will be a link between their souls. There is even a chance that the demon will posses mom. Are you willing to take that risk with what you know about... my physical history?"

"Yes, because I don't think it'll be a risk at all. The demon we're summoning is Ba'al Zubel and he hates you so much I'm sure he will accept you as an adequate offering." He said this as gently as he could, but Talitha still blanched.

"Ba'al? Does it have to be Ba'al?"

"I'm afraid the summoning spells are specific and this is the one that we got from Luke and he got it from Amy, who got it from Henny."

Vogel spoke up, "But why summon a demon at all? Why not just do that part of the spell that opens a gate?"

Talitha sighed before answering, "These spells come from demons who would gain nothing if any old gate was opened. I'm sure the spells are interwoven. Will, can you look at my neck? I'm feeling pretty weak."

The necrosis looked to be spreading and the wound itself had not closed and was oozing fluids that looked just like blood except that it was grey.

When he told her, she tried to put on a brave smile. "Pretty soon, a sacrifice is all that I'll be good for."

"You're not going to be sacrificed, that's not how it's going to work. When mom summons Ba'al, I'll challenge it. All I have to do is hold on for seconds, two or three at the most and while that's happening, Father Vogel will simply stab the blade into the opening and bam! Mom closes the gate and brings you with her. With Ba'al focused on me and then with the sword flying passed him, he'll be too preoccupied to worry about you two." He paused looking around at the three of them. They were a sad looking lot, even the priest who's lips were now drawn too tight to be anything else but a show of nerves.

"You forget, Will. The incantations are magically encrypted," Vogel replied.

Like an autumn tree in an early storm, whose limbs droop and fail under the weight of unexpected snow, Will sagged at the pronouncement. His plan, his only plan was all he had. There was nothing else rattling around in his brain in the way of an idea. That is, other than praying, which seemed his only option, but just then, he knew.

"Wait! You're wrong, Father. Luke did something to this incantation. I just had a vision: Luke was bent over the papers. He said Ixino Ianai and then there was this green light... I think it was a counter-spell or something, so that the gypsy from last night could read it." As he spoke, he hurriedly pulled out the coffee stained paper. "Mom, try it."

Gayle took the papers, looking timid and shy. She said the words in a whisper, " Ixino Ianai ."

Green light blazed briefly and then she stared at the papers in disbelief. "I can read this," she said in surprise. "I'm really a gypsy?" Gayle asked, stunned.

Talitha held her hand. "If you're a gypsy, then I'm one too, mom."

Gayle gave her a little smile. "Ok, us gypsies have to stick together. What do I do?"

"Let me see," Talitha said, taking the papers. In minutes, she'd read over the incantation, frowning nonstop, as she did, "This shouldn't be so easy. These papers should be burned as soon as possible." No one disagreed. "I'm going to need a sharp knife and some blood, sorry Father, but yours would serve the purpose the best."

No one had a knife, but since glass had to be broken to gain access to the building, its shards were used instead; one shard for the priest's blood and another for the ceremony. Talitha went to work drawing the diagrams on the empty floor while her mother sat near, mumbling over the words to the spell, trying to wrap her tongue around the demonic language. It made Will physically sick to hear and he went to the car and sat with Lisa. With no one around, he began singing to the baby inside of her, hoping that she at least could hear him.

A few minutes later, Gayle came out, "We're ready."

Will's butterflies had been bad before, but now they kicked into high gear and he suddenly remembered how he had needed to pee. It would have to wait, his mom looked like she was about to vomit and he didn't want to delay the spell any more.

Still, he did pause to kiss his wife one last time and then hurried into the darkened building. The diagrams had been drawn very close to the front window of the building where the light from the nearly full moon and the street lamps gave them some visibility. Talitha lay in the middle of the diagram and her shaking hands she held close to her chest. His mother knelt beside her just outside of the drawing. She looked dead pale in her fright. Father Vogel stood to the side and in his hands he held the hell blade wrapped in a towel.

Will went to the circle opposite him. "Ok, Mom."

This was the extent of their preamble. The four of them looked back and forth at each other, but no one could find even the simplest words of encouragement and Gayle's lips seemed incapable of anything but quivering until she saw that the other three were staring at her, waiting.

She read from the paper in a stuttering voice, but all the same, the words were demonic in nature and Will felt them grating on his soul. It was as if sand had been poured into his chest and scritched annoyingly as he breathed. Quicker than expected Gayle finished and looked around, breathing rapidly, panting like some long forgotten hound.

"The blood! Cut your left hand and then cut Tal's and press your hands together. Hurry." Will ordered, remembering his dream from the day before. Had it only been the day before? This thought staggered him. So much had happened since then.

His mom acted as though her hand was without feeling. Very quickly and without the least grimace she slashed open her palm and then did the same for her daughter. Only then did she pause. Drawing in a deep breath, it looked as though she were about to speak, but instead she grabbed her daughter's hand and squeezed.

"Uhhh!" Talitha gasped, and then gritted her teeth, somehow able to cope with the pain that Will knew from his visions had to be extreme.

Bamn! The sound of metal on metal boomed throughout the building sending echoes chasing each other around the empty rooms. Will and Father Vogel both jumped at the noise and Talitha began to writhe in misery still holding on to her mother's hand. Gayle's eyes bugged and she looked about, unsure of what to do and Will was just about to reassure her, when a great rush of air whipped passed him in a sudden soundless fury. Black vapors began to churn six feet above his sister. They started small, twisting and boiling, but very quickly they grew into a great frothing cloud.

The gate was open!

Will clutched his chest with both hands as fear grew inside him, and then another metallic sound rang out. It smote the air, running along in hard fast waves like a heavy wind, sounding more like a death knell than anything else. This sound meant that the demon had accepted the offering of Talitha and was coming to claim the gate, but for the moment it felt to Will that the opening was still unattended.

Childish hope surged in him. Pushing aside the painful responsibility that he had taken on he cried, "Now Vogel! The sword!"

The room, in the space of seconds, had become fantastically cold and the priest didn't so much as dart forward, but lurched instead, honest fear touching his face for the first time. His eyes however, were determined and he yanked out the broken sword, when at that moment the demon, Ba'al Zubel arrived and sent his mind through the gate. The creature immediately discerned the priest in all his goodness and attacked. Father Vogel screamed and then began jittering in place as if he were being electrocuted; the sword dropped from his hands and clattered on the cement.

Twelve feet away, Will saw the sword bouncing on the floor and it seemed to be dancing on his heart. He knew a desperate need to make a dash for it and destroy it, and he even took a half step in its direction before he stopped, gripped by a chaos of uncertainty. On one hand, the poor priest was giving him precious seconds by enduring what looked like a horror of pain, but Will had been down that road before. He knew that if the demon went unchallenged, it would torture each of them in turn and he would get no closer to the sword than Ba'al would permit.

Yet Will paused in shock, in dread fear and fascination. Sudden lines, fine and red as if drawn from a pen, appeared on the priest's face. These split open and blood poured from the thin wounds, drenching the man. The lines then started to trace downwards running beneath the man's clothes and Vogel began tearing at his shirt, ripping it away.

It was then that another muffled scream caught Will's attention. It was his mother. Gayle hadn't let go of Talitha's hand and was now jerking about trying to free herself, her eyes were wild with panic.

"It's taking me too, Will! Oh God, help! Eeeiiieee!" The scream went right to Will's soul.

Everything had gone dreadfully wrong and all because Will had hoped for an easy victory. He should not have sent the priest at the gate; rather he should have waited for the demon and challenged him as he had planned. But he had known the pain involved and had so badly wanted to pass the cup from his lips that he had hesitated. And now his misery would be a hundred fold worse.

"Ba'al," his voice cracked. In his mind, he saw the image of Adrina's arms being rolled up and heard the terrible snapping of her bones. "Ba'al I challenge you." This was louder, but went ignored as the priest fell to floor and looked to be attacking himself. "Ba'al Zubel! Do you fear me? Are you afraid of Will Jern?"

This last could not be ignored and the demon turned on Will and their minds clashed.

It was not an epic battle of titanic forces, rather it was one man looking small in the presence of his foe, the dread Ba'al Zubel, ruler of the eternal Void.

The world and the room around Will went black and became at first intangible and then distant, as if it no longer mattered. The one thing that did was the demon. It had grown to magnificent proportions, a tremendous fiend with jet-black wings that stretched beyond into the darkness that surrounded them. Its greedy mouth was filled with long sharp, rapacious teeth and its hunger for Will's soul was undeniable.

Without a sound the thing pounced on the seemingly defenseless man, but Will was not quite so. In his heart, he felt the power of the love that his God had bestowed upon him. It was a white-hot fire compared to the darkness and when he opened his mouth to rebuke the demon, the Word of the Lord exploded from him in a blinding flash. It was almost like the light that had poured from him when he had been trapped by Ba'al Fie-ere in the Void, but whereas then he was only part of a vision, now he had an actual connection to his body and its warmth fed the energy of the Word.

The demon was lit by the power for a moment and then in a great deafening explosion was destroyed so thoroughly that nothing remained. Black wisps eddied throughout the air, yet strangely, the darkness continued. Will stepped back unnerved despite the ease of his victory and just then, a barking, hacking laugh came to him. It turned his insides cold.

"You are a fool and see not through the simplest illusion." These words did not come from a human mouth, but from something not at all natural. They hung in the darkness for only a second and were followed by the appearance of the demon once again. "You are nothing and Ba'al Zubel is all."

Too late, Will realized his mistake. The Word had left him—he had wasted its energies on an illusion! And without the power of the lord Will was nothing. He saw before him only despair and pain. There would be no challenging the mighty demon—there would be no buying time for the priest. There would be no victory. The despair and the fear were crushing.

"Run! You are afraid. You fear pain."

The demon, so dreadful, was right. Will wanted to run but there was nowhere to go. This wasn't the Void or the earth—this was different. He was part of the connection that had summoned Ba'al and there was nowhere to run. His fears escalated to such a point that he began to back away.

"This is how you fight the great Ba'al?" The demon's voice betrayed its disappointment. "You are nothing and never defeated the great Ba'al. This you will learn." For the demon, their pathetic battle of wills was over. Ba'al bent over and swallowed Will Jern whole, taking his soul as captive and then the creature turned back to the portal.

Ba'al peered through the gate and saw the priest on his hands and knees, bleeding and moaning, it saw the bodies of Will and Talitha Jern lying full out on the concrete, unmoving. Finally, it took in Gayle Jern, who looked close to passing out, yet still clawed feebly at the hand of her daughter. The demon began sucking the life out of her and Will knew that the beast would leave her alive, but barely so, just enough to keep the gate open.

Will was utterly defeated. His will, his sense of being was only a vague memory. He saw what Ba'al wanted him to see and felt what Ba'al wanted him to feel. Right then Ba'al was happy to show him the souls of his mother and sister, Talitha. For now, the souls still resided in their respective bodies, but Will knew that Ba'al could take them at any time it pleased. The demon was connected to them, Will could feel it since in a way he was connected as well.

He could feel their life and knew a moment of jealousy, their bodies would live forever, while his had already stopped breathing and his heart was counting down its last beats. Ba'al turned away from the women and looked upon the priest, who keeled over immediately and began to twitch and kick.

Strangely, unlike the demon who was enjoying torturing the priest, Will didn't turn from the women. He had no will of his own, but he had desire and like a moth to flame, he was drawn involuntarily to the connection that he shared with Ba'al and his mother. She was alive. Very alive and warm. And alive with the Word of the Lord, the love of God. The power was in her, only she didn't seem to know it or recognize it, but Will did and he craved it and he reached out along the connection with a part of himself that wasn't in any way physical, but was all together spiritual. That part of him touched his mother's heart, releasing the word.

Love and light ignited the world of darkness in a blinding flash and now a scream of rage and pain erupted from Ba'al.

In an instant, Will blinked his eyes, amazed and overjoyed to find that the black world that he had shared with the demon was gone and that he was back in his body. He felt so good he wanted to dance and sing; only the nearness of the gate stopped him. Imbibed with sudden energy, Will leapt up and took stock of their situation. The gate still boiled away and the demon was just beyond it but it hesitated, perhaps still reeling from the shock of what had just happened. Father Vogel, a man of proven courage, but finite strength was just getting to his hands and knees, moaning and bleeding as he did and looked on the verge of collapse. Talitha lay unconscious, and next to her Gayle knelt, blearily staring about, massaging the hand that had only very recently grasped her daughters.

The broken and burned sword sat on the ground, looking ugly and forgotten. It was a bleak reminder that though Will yet lived, he had won nothing. Temptation pulled him to it; with Ba'al delaying his return to the gate this may be Will's best opportunity to destroy the hell blade. No one else seemed to have his energy or focus, but Will held himself in check. To go for the sword was the same mistake he'd made only a bare minute earlier.

"Ba'al Zubel!" This time his voice was a strong bellow and it was with a touch of sadness and a great deal of pride that he heard himself sounding like his father. "Ba'al face me, you coward." A second slipped away and then another and Will could only hope that more would slip by since Father Vogel could barely make it to his feet. "Ba'al!" he roared again.

The demon could not long ignore such a blatant challenge and it sent its mind through the gate and Will again felt his world go shadowy and black. He stared up into the dark, but the demon was nowhere to be seen.

"Ba'al?"

"You are nothing. You hide behind your mother. You are coward and weak."

Will almost jumped out of his skin, the voice, small compared to the powerful one that he had heard before, came from very near him and much lower than he expected. A grizzled creature of roughly eight foot in height stalked out of the gloom. It was thin, hard, and pitiless. Its figure looked to be made from sharp black quartz and had edges that were jaggedly cruel.

"You are small. You are weak. You are nothing." Ba'al continued on, coming closer as he spoke and Will took a step back with every word. "I have beaten you. You have never won against the great Ba'al."

The words suddenly struck Will as affirmations and he countered them, "I have won every time. I am not weak. I have grown stronger. It is you who are weaker than before." Despite his words, Will felt fearfully nervous and wished that the priest would hurry up and grab the sword. Foolishly, he cast a look back into his world and saw the priest moving as if wading upstream through a river of molasses. Time as always was against Will.

When he brought his distracted mind back to bear on the demon, he was shocked to see the creature flashing toward him and a split second later the demon had him by the throat. Its skin was jagged but slick like barbed and oiled marble and though Will beat on its arms it was like beating on the side of a mountain.

"You lose. You are weak. You are flesh." The demon grunted into Will's red straining face. He was starting to see flashes before his eyes and knew he was just about done and decided to change tactics. Instead of hammering on the creature's great arms, he exerted all his strength on a single one of the demon's thumbs and was able to pry it back enough to breath.

Will gulped in air and felt his energy renew, but instead of looking to attack the demon, or scramble away, he hugged the thing close. This wasn't a fight that he necessarily had to win, he just had to keep the demon occupied long enough for the priest to do his part. It wasn't easy however. The touch of the demon was dreadful. It was as if Ba'al was constructed from infinite layers of sin that had stratified over eons to create its form. Nothing Will had ever touched was more miserable.

The demon sensed the shift in its opponent's tactics and changed as well, it brought it arms together and squeezed. Air shot from Will's lungs. The demon squeezed harder. Ribs began to snap in his chest and horrifyingly Will felt something burst within him like a balloon filled with grease. He let out a garbled choking scream. The sound only lent more energy to the demon and it began to crush the life out of the man. Will didn't care as long as he held on long enough. The pressure of the demon forced his head back and he was able to watch as Father Vogel slowly raised up the hell blade. Unhurriedly, as if time had lost meaning and his death unimportant, Vogel seemed to pause with the blade held up high.

Despite the fantastic pain, a smile came to Will's lips, "You...lose."

Ba'al cranked his head around and Will was gratified to see something close to shock in its dead eyes, "No!" the beast cried out in his fell tongue and then it made to turn on the clergyman, but Will Jern hadn't lost the battle of wills yet, nor had he lost sight of his objective: delay. With renewed vigor at the proximity of his objective, he held onto Ba'al tooth and nail, until time finally drew against his opponent. Ba'al was too late.

The priest slammed the blade into the gate and literally all hell broke loose. It was as if two black holes had smashed into each other. Smoke and howling wind rent the air and the cold grew so intense that Will felt his arm's stiffening around the demon. What he took for the floor heaved and buckled, before suddenly turning fluid, becoming like a storm tossed ocean. The wild action under the two combatants, flung them apart and Will was down among the rearing shadows, but he feared for his mother and sister and was up again in a blink and threw himself on the demon's back.

Above, the room looked remarkably tranquil and he saw his mother right herself before reaching for her daughter's hand. The gate would be closed in moments.

The demon did not seem to realize. It threw Will to the rolling floor and raised his stone hard foot to crush the man.

"Look!" Will pointed and the demon turned to see Gayle closing her eyes and now they both knew that she was about to close the gate and end the connection. The floor bucked again abruptly, turning a cartwheel and suddenly Will was up standing over the prostrate demon. "I have won. Go back to your hell and know who it was that beat you...Will Jern."

The demon opened his mouth to speak, however Will demonstrated his supremacy by turning his back and commanding his spirit to return to his body.

The change was dramatic. He went from the tempest of a tornado to the open floor of an empty building in a heartbeat. Surprisingly his body still stood, just as he had left it and he wobbled slightly on his feet as his mind adjusted to the sudden calm.

After a second, the realization that they had won sunk into him and he made to shout for joy, but then he saw his mother kneeling over the still form of Talitha. "Mom?"

Gayle's tears were a warm rain on a cold body. "She wouldn't come back. I tried to bring her out, but she wouldn't come. She...she kept insisting that she was evil and not worthy of..." Gayle broke down and couldn't go on.

Despite the fact that he wasn't surprised by the news, Will felt like he had been kicked in the stomach. His legs went weak and he sat down hard. "I'll find her, don't worry. Just give me a few minutes." The strength that he had felt a few seconds earlier was gone completely and he started to get the shakes.

"Oh...oh my. This rather hurts," Father Vogel sat down next to Will grimacing and wincing. "I take it we won." The man was a disgusting bloody mess, however his wounds weren't gory, but razor thin and only a few bled still.

"Yeah...except that Tal refused to come back."

The priest nodded, commiserating, "I heard and I'm very sorry. When you go to the Void, will you need any help?"

Will was about to answer, when his mom jumped in. "You're not going." She held up a hand to silence his protest. "I...I can't risk it. Not again. You've done great, Will, but your luck is going to run out. And don't be mad, but there is no 'Good Talitha' anymore. She changed in the Void. When we were there watching what was happening, she transformed and seemed to go crazy. It was just how she was back in the hospital. I tried to bring her back around, and then...and then," Gayle paused as her chest hitched. "And then, she threw me down and she smiled this insane smile as she did, but just as the sword went into the gate, she became confused and then calm again and turned back to her normal self. She was sad and full of remorse for what she had done to me but she explained that she wasn't going to fight her evil side any longer. She told me that it had finally won and this was the last anyone would see of the 'good' Talitha."

"I don't believe that," Will said with quiet conviction.

"I didn't want to believe it either, but there was nothing good about her. She was evil to the core and so dangerous. And...and the demon Talitha has to be far worse."

Will felt a little put out over his mother's lack of faith in him. "I beat the demon before. I saved dad and escaped, didn't I?"

"Yes, you did great, but Talitha...the demon Talitha, Ba'al Fie-ere. She has Katie and she knows you. She knows you'll be coming for her. Do you think she'll let you waltz in and take Katie? Do you think she isn't right now plotting to trap you in some fashion?"

He hadn't thought about any of that and it drained the impetus out of his zeal to find either of his sisters. "Then what do we do?" At that moment, he missed Talitha so terribly it hurt. She would've had an answer, she would know what to do.

Father Vogel spoke up in a solemn manner, "We put our faith in God."

Chapter 29

Katie

The jeep grew cold, only the girl was so keyed up that she didn't notice. She waited with her life on the line for Pedro to answer her, to come to a decision on whether or not he would save her and by extension perhaps save himself. Long seconds passed as the Mexican sat staring straight ahead and it was all the girl could do not to fidget or reach for her knife.

"Pedro, I think there's still time for you," Katie whispered. His head moved up and down in a tiny nod and for a one wild moment, jubilation rocketed through the girl's heart, but just then a knock sounded on the window next to her ear.

"Let's go, Katie."

The blonde girl started in fright and turned quick to see Amy standing next to the jeep. The witch shook her head smugly as if she had guessed all that had gone on between the two and wasn't worried in the least. She then opened the door and stood well back, like she suspected Katie of something. She had every reason to. If Amy had been any closer, Katie would have tried to gut her with the knife.

Katie paused. "Pedro?"

Amy laughed. "What? You think you can turn Pedro? His soul is every bit as black as mine. He is doomed to hell no question, but if he follows me, he'll at least have power. What can you offer him? Nothing! Sorry, but after all the sin that has stained his soul, Pedro is mine." Amy flourished the gun and stood further back. "It's time, Katie. No more dawdling, but before you get out, leave the knife on the floor."

"I...I..." Katie was practically speechless. How had she known about the knife? Even then it sat hidden under two layers of clothes

"It's in your right sock, now take it out and drop it on the floor, or I shoot off your knee caps. You won't die but it'll hurt so bad that you will wish you had."

There was nothing for it. Katie reached down and took out the knife, but she didn't drop it. The girl brought it up for Pedro to see and when she flicked the well-oiled blade out with the easiest motion, his puff-adder eyes finally opened wide. They both knew she could have attempted to kill him at any time in the last few minutes.

"There is another option left to me, I could kill myself," Katie brought the razor sharp knife to her throat. She knew she wouldn't, there were still cards to play after all. Her brother could still rescue her, Pedro could still turn to her side, Amy could still mess up. But it was satisfying to pretend and watching Amy's eyes go very wide was worth the little charade.

"No... if you kill yourself, it's a one-way ticket to the Void and it won't save you from the demon. She'll be madder than ever and it'll be worse on you, I can guarantee that." Amy looked frantic and lowered the gun slightly in order to pacify her captive. "You don't want to do this, Katie. I mean you never know, right? Maybe your brother will show. He's quite the hero."

"Or maybe you'll mess this up, like your mom did." Katie liked the little bit of power she had. It helped calm her ragged nerves.

"Yeah, I could fuck up. It's true and then I'd be the one that the demon would be after," Amy agreed nodding her head emphatically.

With a sneer, Katie tossed the knife into the car. "You already messed up. You should've gone after another girl."

Where she had been a nervous wreck a second before, Amy's face lit in triumph. "Wrong, bitch. I haven't messed up at all. I've got this all under control. Your brother is currently driving hell bent for Phoenix. That's the wrong way, in case you didn't know, so I don't think he'll be saving you. As for me screwing this up? Fat chance! This spell is so easy, it's freaking scary. Anyone could do it—you could do it and you're a moron. And as for Pedro turning against me..."

With stunning indifference, Amy pointed the gun at the big Mexican who had just come around the jeep. His eyes grew wide for the second and last time as she pulled the trigger twice in quick succession. Pedro flopped over onto the ground, turning and twisting in agony, making a choking gurgling noise. Amy aimed the gun again, but Katie couldn't watch and turned away in horror. That third gunshot was violently loud and stayed with the young girl for a long time, pulsing and vibrating, running up and down her insides, turning her brain numb.

Even minutes later, after Amy had drawn her symbols with the Mexican's blood and pointed for Katie to lie still in the middle of them, she felt the sound of that final gun shot. It shook her soul. It made her weak. It robbed her of the will to resist and she laid there in dreadful fear, wondering if she had been wrong not to kill herself. But the sound of the gunshot was nothing compared to the words that Amy began chanting. These were not made for human mouths to utter, nor for human ears to hear.

Katie felt her soul rebelling against the sound. It grated horribly against nature and she wanted to scream and drown them out. This went on for the longest few minutes of her short life, but then abruptly, Amy stopped and as she did, she laid aside the gun. For just a fraction of a second Katie saw an opening to make a grab for it but just then, in Amy's hand, as if by magic, a silver knife materialized. It was a long curved dagger and when the witch brought it up, Katie felt her breath stop in her throat, but Amy only slashed her own palm open.

"Give me your hand." Amy commanded.

This was it.

Katie believed in heaven as fervently as she believed in hell, but all her young life, she had refused to put her faith totally in God's hands. God helps those who help themselves, her father was fond of saying, but just then his adage was no longer applicable. She had done everything she could think of to keep this exact moment from happening and still it had occurred. Now she would to turn to God in prayer and supplication. She would beg him for all the help he could give.

That was her intention anyway, but when Amy slit open her palm and grasped her hand so that their blood co-mingled and a connection was made, it was too late for prayer. The pain was so intense all thoughts of God or anything else for that matter flew from her mind.

Katie screamed as if her soul was being ripped from her body. It was a throat-tearing scream, but no human besides the witch was anywhere near enough to hear. And it was drowned out a moment later when the sound of a tremendous collision of metal boomed throughout the ancient barn; windows shattered and boards dropped from the ceiling. The ringing crash drove down deep into both Katie and Amy, like a summons.

Even as the last of the echoes drifted out into the barren desert, a new sound fell upon the stunned girl's ears. It was the sound of a great wind, and a rush of air swept the barn, causing it to sway alarmingly. More boards shook themselves free and more windows came crashing down. Above Katie's head, a cloud of black appeared and became the focal point of the wind; from all points the wind raced to it and the cloud sucked it in and grew at a greedy pace. Now Katie felt the avaricious pull of the wind come even into her own lungs, where there started a furious tugging at something that physically she had never felt before, but knew all the same.

Her soul began to draw from the shell of her body.

The pull was undeniable but so too was her valiant resistance, she fought with frantic desperation to hold on, yet still her soul drew out of her body, stretching out of her like diaphanous taffy. That gossamer part of her true self, governed by the hell words, began to form the gate. She became structure, warping nature to fit the needs of a command.

And the beast that dictated that command, lurked just beyond, its eagerness insuppressible, its hunger insatiable, its malice unbearable. The closeness of the fiend drove the girl near to madness and she tried to scream, but her hold on her body had become too tenuous to command. She could look down and see only the faintest sheer strands of her soul still clinging desperately, but one by one, they tore away.

Beyond, the portal was near complete.

"Yes! I have opened the gate, great Ba'al!" Amy Harris, witch of Ba'al Fie-ere screeched her victory and raised her arms in triumph, the shining metal of the knife still clutched in her hand. Her malevolent felicity ran through Katie, and became knowledge in the demon's wicked mind. Ba'al gloated in fiendish jubilation and its joy was a sickening horror. The young girl knew the feelings of both witch and demon—she had become part of a connection. She was linked to them and could sense their delight at the prospect of the gate being completed.

Their goal was seconds away from happening and Katie's mind was irresistibly drawn to watch as her soul was spun and woven into a bizarre kaleidoscope of repeating patterns centered around a circular area of utter blackness. On the whole, the construct had the semblance of a fantastically intricate spider's web. It was a wonder to behold, but all the same, it lacked perfection. Infinitesimal elements of the structure began to change, turning from a glowing milky white to a dull grey, and these would then crumble away to nothing.

When she saw that happening, it was Katie's turn to gloat.

Only the purest souls can withstand the unrelenting decay of sin to form a permanent bridge between the world and the Void. The truth of the matter was that Katie's soul was not exactly pure. She had feared the coming of a day such as the one that she had just lived through, for eight long years. And she had prepared.

Katie was only fourteen years old, but she was no virgin.

Purposely she had sought out a boy from her neighborhood and with grim determination, rather than anything resembling romance, had compelled him to make love to her. It had not been difficult.

From that point on her soul had been just the slightest bit tainted—but it was enough. The Void was the ultimate corruptor and where there was a microscopic imperfection, it gnawed until the flaw grew. All along the edges where the gate came in contact with the Void, segments turned grey. This happened time and again, until larger sections detached and drifted into the ether before disappearing altogether. The gate was crumbling away.

The demon, sensing that its triumph was collapsing along with the gate made a wild rush to force itself through, but this only exacerbated the deterioration and sped its destruction. The gate could last only seconds longer.

Katie felt the onrushing demon and in a panic, realized that her body was exposed and empty, a perfect receptacle for the beast. If the demon beat her to it, not only would her body be possessed, her soul would be stranded in the Void. Terror filled desperation lent strength to a frenzy of clawing and scrambling and she forced her way back into her body. It was like being reborn. Katie came alive with a tingling sensation running along her skin and laid there among the blood runes and breathed the cold air and looked up through the gaping holes of the roof and saw the stars, and she rejoiced. If nothing else, she had denied the demon its gate and what's more, she had denied it her body.

"You bitch! Whore! Slut! Skank!"

Katie jumped in shock and also in fright. The voice was not that of Amy Harris. Rather it was very deep and horribly throaty, so that Katie feared that when she turned her head she would see some sort giant demonic toad.

But it was Amy, only not how she had been. It was Amy, possessed. The demon had Amy's body and wore her skin like an ill-fitting suit. Cracks and fissures, bubbling and oozing blood ran helter-skelter along her face and neck and all her exposed flesh. Her eyes had changed as well. They had gone almost completely white as if the sclera had absorbed all the color of the iris, and the pupils had transformed from their normal circular shape. They were now tall and slim and looked for all the world like a cat's eyes.

"You did this to me!" The demon croaked. The noise made Katie's throat tighten and she swallowed involuntarily. "You set me up! You knew this would happen, but did you think I would sit by and let you get away with it?" The possessed woman raised the knife with a smile. It was the most horrific smile ever. As the corner of her lips went up, her eyes seemed to roll on their sides and they went from looking like cat's eyes to like those of a goat. The effect was wholly unnatural and Katie began to back away, barely holding in a scream.

The movement made the nasty goat eyes come alive and the demon charged with inhuman speed. Katie leapt up to run, but just then, her eyes fell on the pistol that Amy had laid aside and in a flash she had it and spun, bringing it to bear.

The demon was right on top of her and before she could pull the trigger, the fiend slashed down with the knife, laying open her face in a long diagonal that went from her temple to her chin. With the demon's momentum unchecked, their bodies clashed together sending them into a mish mash of arms and legs. Pain screamed from her wound, but Katie gritted her teeth against it, fighting to clear the gun to get a shot in that would count, at the same time desperately holding back the knife. However, she was too weak and the demon sent a knee onto the arm that held the gun and pinned it to the cement. After this, it was nothing for the demon to tear its knife hand free and stab at Katie's face, looking to run the blade through the blue of her eye.

The girl twisted away and the cold edge of death sheared through hair and skin driving a long line of across the side of her head. It hurt terribly, but Katie, who had prepared for this moment for so long, ignored the pain and she ignored the fact that she was about to die and she ignored the knife as well. Her right hand held the gun and the wrist of that hand was still slightly mobile. She gave it an easy flick and the gun arced gently over her budding chest and landed neatly in her left hand. Just as the demon struck again, she fired the gun. And despite the fresh pain from cruel sharpness of the knife's edge, she fired again. And fired. And fired. And fired. And in her mind, she knew she was in race to see if she would run out of blood before she ran out of bullets.

Chapter 30

Will

A leaden depression settled over the little group.

Each was mentally exhausted and physically they exhibited the wounds and scars of their ordeal, yet bore them in silence. That is, save for the occasional groan or accidental gasp from Father Vogel.

His wounds weren't life threatening, but were egregiously painful and it was decided their first stop would be to the nearest emergency room to drop him off. Their next stop...unknown.

No one had any idea what to do or which way to turn and none could think beyond the necessity of helping the priest. Spiritually, Gayle was shattered. Her family, the most important thing to her had been destroyed over the last eight hours. Her husband was dead. Both of her daughters consigned to an eternity of hell, her daughter-in-law comatose and the fate of her only grandchild unknown.

Yet despite all of this, she was literally the only one capable of driving. Father Vogel seeped blood from every pore, and after four days of torture and hellish stress, Will staggered under the weight of an intense fatigue. He had barely the strength to lift the slim form of Talitha into the Jimmy and within minutes, as Gayle took a series of wrong turns, he slumped over onto the still breathing corpse of his sister and fell deep into a slumber.

Dreams came quick.

Most were black and cold and he knew that he was in the Void. The images there pained him physically and to escape them, he fled to the river. He knew the way and quickly the sand filled the spaces in between his toes and crunched softly as he walked. The river hadn't changed; it was placid and serene, edging by almost imperceptibly. Even the people seemed the same.

He saw the dishwashers and the ladies doing their laundry, and he even saw the fisherman casting his flies with an expert snap of his wrist. However, of Adrina, there was no sign and he didn't know whether to be glad for her or afraid. Still, he searched, going along the river for a long while, but of the gypsy there was no mention, no whisper, no knowledge.

Will did find a newcomer. She was the saddest thing and by the looks of it, she had only just discovered the horrors of the river. The girl stood with her toes in the water, staring and crying as the images unfolded before her. There seemed to be a great many.

He decided it would be best not to get too close and skirted wide around her, figuring that anyone with that much sin could only be trouble. However, her sadness was of such intensity that it was apparent even from behind; this was unusual for the river. The multitude of others along its banks only rarely saw their most horrible sins and so only rarely grew this sad. They, as a group, tried to reconcile their sins slowly, incrementally. This girl looked to be punishing herself with them.

This intrigued him and he cast a look back, not realizing what horror he would see accidentally in the river before her. It stopped him in his place. The water showed a young man, tall, muscular, and handsome with straight features and a strong jaw, he was being burned by a torch until his skin grew black and fell away.

The man screamed and then begged, crying pitifully and then screamed more. It was an obscenity, painful and terrible to see, especially for Will because he was watching his own torture. That was his face twisted ugly by pain and those were his fingers, burned down to nubs. A scream rose in his throat and he nearly turned away to run as far away as he could, but then he took in his torturer. Talitha Jern's image was plain on the water.

If anything, her misery was greater than his. Her tears were nonstop. Every scream of his, she matched and if he begged for her to stop, she begged louder for forgiveness. At intervals, she would have to stop, the torture being too much for her, but when she did, the demon, Ba'al Zubel would whip her or beat her until bloody and she would be forced to take up the torch once more.

Watching the beating she took, stayed the horror that Will felt and he was moved to pity. It broke his heart to see his sister, a girl he loved, being warped into something she wasn't. Painfully, Will realized he had a duty to perform, so he did not interfere with Talitha and stood behind and to the side and watched as torture after torture befell the illusion of himself. It was a horrid sick task and he stayed with it until the images began to repeat.

Only then did he step forward, he put his hands on her shoulders and turned her about and looked into her red and puffy eyes, "Talitha, I forgive you." She could say nothing at first. Her eyes were wide in shock, aghast that he had seen her most vile sins, nothing had been held back. Talitha tried to turn away, but by this river he was far stronger and easily and gently turned her face to his. "My darling sister, you cannot deny my forgiveness. I have seen it all and hold you blameless."

"No...these are just pictures on the water, they mean nothing. It was worse...far worse...and...and." She looked around as if she wished to run far away and there was deepest misery in her wild eyes. "And you begged me. You begged me and I wouldn't stop."

"I know, I saw and that's how you should've know that it wasn't actually me you were torturing. I would've begged you to keep going," Will replied, remembering how his own father had been angered over Will's refusal to whip him. "Every time you stopped and Ba'al hurt you...that was the only thing that truly hurt me."

Talitha listened for a moment frozen with her mouth open, but then began shaking her head. "No! I can't accept your forgiveness. I am beyond evil. I am nothing."

"I'm sorry, Tal, but you don't make the rules here. You can't deny my forgiveness."

A small flare of hope came into her eyes. It didn't last, she dashed it with painful reasoning. "Perhaps not, but there were others that I hurt, you weren't the only one."

"Yes and they were illusions as well. You tortured illusions only. Remember that."

"But it was all so real."

"I'm sure at the time it felt that way and even now it might, but you of all people know that the Void is all about deception. Look at the water now. Don't be afraid." He turned her around and faced her at the water, which had grown more still than ever and the images on it could have been real people. The water showed two people and one was easily recognizable as Will Jern, however the second person had no face. Her features were smoothed away, blank.

"My face?" Talitha reached up and touched her slim nose and traced her strong jaw and high cheekbones. Her reflection only ran its hand over the nothingness.

"That's you, Tal. You haven't forgiven yourself. You are denying your true self."

"But..."

Will became stern and rather fatherly. "No buts! The water shows that I've forgiven you. Now you have to accept it. See yourself the way I see you. Talitha Jern is a lovely, sweet, smart woman, who is beautiful, and not just on the outside, but on the inside too."

Now, her face materialized in the reflection and she gasped before falling to her knees crying and staring at herself in wonder. "Oh my Lord. Thank you, Will." He refused to reply to that, instead he smiled and watched his sister continue to touch the fine features of her face, eventually she shook her head as if seeing something new and laughed and cried at the same time. "I'm pretty."

"Finally you can admit the truth!" he said with a laugh of his own. Coming down to her level, he thought about squatting next to her, but changed his mind and plopped down letting his long legs stretch out. "After twenty-four years, finally. What's with pretty girls? I've never met one who will come right out and admit that they're pretty?"

She laughed at this and shrugged, but then a tinge of pink hit her cheeks. "Is mom angry? That I wouldn't come back with her?"

"Yeah, but I don't think it was so unexpected," Will's eyes narrowed. "Though it is a little unexpected to see you here. I thought you were supposed to be in the Void in the guise of your other self? I thought you would be all bad-ass, rampaging through hell looking to be named."

The pink of her cheeks blossomed into apple red, and she turned away. "That was the plan. I never thought that I could be forgiven for my sins so I decided to come into the Void as a conqueror, and not as a victim, but that didn't work out so well. Father Vogel was right. Without the demon in me, that evil personality which kept coming out was only fading synaptic paths, which, I'm sorry to say, I nursed and kept alive. But that wasn't the real me and when I came to the Void, I found I couldn't hurt anyone, which is very un-demon like behavior. So, I came here and tried to cross the river. Didn't get so far, did I?"

"You could go further now, there's nothing stopping you," Will suggested. In his heart, he selfishly wished that she'd not go. "Or... you could come back with me, it would make mom so happy."

Talitha sighed and shook her head. "As much as I want to, I can't go back. My body is dying. That hell blade was like pure venom, or poison. I could hold on for weeks or maybe a couple of months at the most, but eventually it'll kill me."

Will crinkled up his face into a semblance of a smile, but his eyes were wet. "Oh, well there you go. Your choice is all set for you then. I know you'll be happy, I mean it is heaven. Who couldn't be happy there?"

"Maybe me. I don't want to go yet. I never really got a chance to live." She pulled herself up and walking away from the water, stared up into the hills. "You know what I really want? I want a do over. I want to be able to go back and do it right and have fun. I want to be... me. I never really finished finding out who I could be and what I could do."

"Why don't you ask God when you cross over? Babies are born all the time and one of them could be you, and there is no one who deserves another chance more."

Talitha shook her head and sighed. "I don't think there's any going back. And besides, I wouldn't be me without you." She came back to the beach, but didn't approach too close to the river as if she couldn't decide between the opposing forces of earth and water. For a while, she was silent and sad, and an awkwardness came between them, but then she perked up and Will could tell that she was trying to put on a happy face. "Speaking of babies, what kind of father will you be, do you think?"

The image of William Jern came to him and brought with it an equal mixture of sorrow and delight. "Like dad, I hope."

"If you are, then your baby will be very lucky." She gave him an odd shy smile. "You know, I sort of wish that I could go back as her, your little girl."

His mind strayed to an image of Lisa, lying in her long sleep and he ached deep inside. He was so afraid for her, but he didn't let it show on his face. "Why don't you? If we can wake Lisa up, I'm sure she'll be happy to have you."

"I can't, your baby's soul has been chosen already."

"It has? Oh, well there you go," he said again. The two smiled at each other and their previous happiness was tinged with melancholy. "I guess..."

A sudden thunderous shout seemed to shake the air.

WILL!

His name had been called out so loudly, with so much force that he jumped, startled and quite a bit frightened. "What was that?"

Talitha frowned. "What? What was what?"

"I just heard..."

HEY, WILL!

With eyes that had grown huge, he scanned the dull sky and the hills and all about them. "I just heard my name being called. It was so loud that you had to have heard..." he left off with the realization that he knew the voice. "It's mom, I can hear her voice. She's calling me."

Talitha smiled with thin tight lips and pain in her eyes. "I suppose that means you better go back. She probably needs you."

"But you need me too..."

"No, I'm dead, or practically so. It's people with life or... a chance at life who need you, Will." Before he could say anything else, she gave him a kiss on the cheek and then a little shove. "Go on...but you can visit me again, if you want to."

WAKE UP!

His head rang with the words, causing him to stagger. "I will, I'll come back."

Talitha smiled and then she began to fade very much how the Cheshire Cat had done, leaving her sad smile for last. All the lands of the river faded as well and in a moment, he came to, lying in the back seat of the Jimmy, slumped over the dying body of his sister. Confusion and exhaustion made him slow and dull witted, so that it was a few seconds before he realized someone was shaking him.

"Will! Hey, Will. Wake up."

"I'm awake," Will said sitting up and blinking like a wide-eyed toddler disturbed from a nap. "I'm up, what's wrong?"

Gayle was still in the process of pulling over while at same time she leaned around from the driver's seat and shook him. "Listen."

There was nothing to hear. "What?" He was a little perturbed to have been woken from his dream of his sister. Or had it been real? One of his visions. Just then, he couldn't tell and he wasn't really in the mood to make the mental effort to try to figure it out. "I don't hear noth..."

Behind him, a small voice stopped his words. "Will?" It sounded like a child lost in the dark, one who was afraid to draw attention to herself and called out only in a tiny whisper, "Will?"

Frantically, Will tore off his seat belt and while his heart withheld its life giving beat and his lungs stayed in mid swell, he turned to look back. Lisa was lying in a ball with the dead body of his father curled protectively around her. Astonishingly she was awake. Her beautiful green eyes sparkled in the dim light looking more like emeralds than any emerald ever had.

"Will, is that you?" She peered up at him, her eyes struggling to make out his features behind all of the bruising.

Tears wanted to jump from his eyes and in vain, he tried to hold them back, but there was no stopping them, joy of that magnitude couldn't be contained. "Yes, I'm right here. I'm right here." By way of explanation for his face he added lamely, "I sort of got in a fight."

Her eyebrows came up slightly. There were a light gold in color and thin but perfectly formed in an elegant arch. "Oh." She didn't look capable of much more, overwhelming confusion appearing to be her chief emotion. Despite that fact being indisputable, in his excitement Will was unable to repress the multitude of questions that filled his mind.

"Are you all right?" he asked, as he looked her up and down, for some reason expecting to see the cause of her slumber. "What happened to you? Did it hurt? Do you think the baby is ok?" She was able to blink twice between each question and then nod vaguely to the last one. "Oh, that's great," he continued, enthusiasm had him bent over the back seat and he stroked the golden curls from her face. "How did you wake up?"

This brought her to her first moment of concentration and her mouth came open as she thought. "Your little sister did it. She was able to do something to...to Amy Harris, I think it was."

"Talitha? What did she do? Was she in the Void or in..."

"No not Talitha. It was Katie. And..." More confusion had her blinking slowly as her mind tried to focus after her long ordeal, "And she had a message or wanted me to tell you something. We had a connection for a little while."

The air was suddenly gone from Will's lungs and no longer could he feel his body. He was completely numb from the neck down. His mouth went dry as well and he was only just able to spit out, "Is Katie, ok?" Lisa shook her head and Will couldn't tell whether it meant that Katie wasn't ok or that Lisa was still bewildered. "Can you at least tell me what she said?" he tried.

"Katie wants to know if you can give her a ride home."

Epilogue

"You're having a contraction." Will said in a tired voice.

"Oh really? I didn't know," Lisa's face was very white and was lined with a grimace of pain. Her mass of blonde curls sat tied up in a great blob atop her head and she wore a garishly flowered gown, which was in need of changing, the flowers looking ready to wilt right off of it.

She breathed in and out quickly, but nothing like how they had been taught in their lamaz classes. Many hours ago, Will had given up trying to remind her of the proper technique, it only caused her to glare at him. The contraction was brief and when it was over, Lisa picked up the magazine that sat in her lap. The cover, a glossy picture of some young starlet shown out at the world, smiling because her life was perfect. Lisa gave it a dull look and dropped it again.

"Would you like some ice?" Will asked as the dutiful and doting husband.

"No thank you," she sighed, bored. "Remember back when we were excited to have this baby?"

Will couldn't think that far back. "No."

"Me too. Uhg! Who ever heard of labor lasting so stinking long? Twenty-eight hours...maybe she's stuck, got turned around or something."

"She's probably..." Will became temporarily immobilized by tremendous yawn, "...she's probably going for the world record."

Lisa gave him a half smile, the most effort she could make and looked around the room with eyes that were vibrant in color. They were bloodshot from lack of sleep and the green stood out, and as always, they were her best feature. "How long is the record?"

"Nineteen months, it was set by a Tibetan monk, who ate nothing but moss the whole time."

"I thought monks were all men."

Will nodded. "Yeah, they're weird in China." An exhausted silence followed this; their conversations were getting shorter as the hours progressed. After a time, he found himself watching the line of paper spilling from one of the machines. There was little else to do and after thirty seconds or so, the running blue line on the paper edged upwards. Next to him, Lisa gasped.

"You're having another contraction, dear," he said in a pleasant helpful conversational tone.

"Thank God you're here to tell me these things," Lisa replied in between gritted teeth.

Feeling useless, Will could only watch as his wife panted and then grimaced and then panted some more. Gradually she began to calm. "Was that a big one? Did she come out a little?" he asked and then tried to peek beneath the sweat-dampened sheet, but Lisa held it down.

"Stop being a naughty boy," she glared, yet wasn't at all angry. "Oh, my, I'm so tired. At this rate, I'm going to be too tired to push when it's time. The baby is going to have to crawl out."

"This is taking so long, she's probably going to be able to walk out." He gave her a smile and felt grit in his eyes. "Speaking of walking, do you mind if I..." He nodded at the door.

"Sure, go check on your sister, but if she has her baby first, I'm disowning the lot of you."

He left her with a kiss, and stepped out into the hallway, where soft pastels ruled. They were at the very end of the Labor and Delivery ward and the area had been purposely left secluded. Father Vogel, who was supposed to be surreptitiously regulating who had access to the rooms, was instead sleeping uncomfortably in a very stiff chair. Will couldn't blame him a bit.

Stepping as lightly as his big frame would permit, Will eased by the priest and slipped into his sister's room. "Hey, how're the contractions coming along?" he asked Katie. In spite of her fatigue, the blonde sat pertly on the side of the bed, she gave her brother a shrug.

"They're picking up steam, it'll be soon," Katie yawned and stretched. As she turned her neck at different angles to work out the kinks, a wide scar, low down on the left side became visible, Will turned away and looked at a picture of some unknown baby dressed as a bug. His little sister was self-conscious of her scars and didn't care for people staring and he was the worst when it came to that.

The scars always brought back images of her lying in a great pool of blood shoving her fingers into the wound to keep from bleeding out. With the death of Amy, all of her spells had come unraveled and he had seen his sister, she had needed far more than just a ride home and had been within an ace of needing a ride to the morgue instead.

Thankfully, the demon-possessed witch had attacked her with the fancy ceremonial dagger instead of a normal knife. On her third strike, she had sent the curved blade into Katie's neck with such force that it passed all the way through and snapped in half against the cement beneath. After that, the blonde had received only nasty defensive wounds on her right arm and had succeeded in placing a number of bullets through the demon's heart and lungs, as well as the coup de gras that went out the top of her head creating a horrid fountain of blood and brains.

Will blinked away the image. "Where's mom?"

"Just getting more coffee, only she's doing it at record speed. She's so funny. She acts like she's the first grandmother on earth and doesn't want to miss anything." Katie smiled her bi-polar smile and Will saw it; she had turned too late. Normally, she only presented her right side to people, especially when smiling. That side had a dimple. The other side, her left, had a long wicked scar that became especially pronounced and sinister when she smiled.

As always, Will pretended not to notice. "I don't blame her, she's had a rough time of it. So, how's the baby?"

"Kicking like crazy, she definitely wants out. Here, you want to feel?" Katie hopped down from the bed with the easy grace of youth. Will advanced, but was slow to touch, he gave Katie a sheepish look. She forgot herself again and smiled without hesitation or turning. "Just touch the outside of the sheet. That's what I do. All that other stuff, I don't even look at."

"That's probably best," Will touched the small swell of his sister's belly and as if the baby was waiting for just that, it jumped and kicked.

"See, just don't think about it and it's like a normal mom and baby," Katie said, going through a series of stretches. To Will, she looked to have grown another inch and stood tall and athletically slim.

The baby kicked again and he turned from his little sister and stared down at what was left of the body beneath the sheet—what once had been Talitha Jern. There wasn't much left to her now, the venom driven necrosis of the hell blade had taken her extremities and much of her skin. She no longer had a face and her organs were pared down to a minimum, and even these wouldn't last another day, but her womb was an untouchable vault. It was there that she was giving herself her second chance, her do over.

Bishop Keenan had wanted to call the virgin birth a miracle. When Will mentioned this to Talitha she had bored him silly with a long-winded lecture on the wonders inherent to binary fission, mitosis, and cellular division in general. Will hadn't bother to follow along. All he knew was that instead of one baby, he would be having two and he couldn't be happier. And besides, he didn't need a bishop to pronounce the upcoming birth miraculous.

Talitha had never considered herself blessed, yet to him, she was a straight up miracle. No one had ever gone through what she had and no one ever could, at least not with so much courage. Had it been him, Will would never have made the choice to come back for a second shot at life, not after all she had gone through. He would've dashed across that river at the first opportunity.

But not her. Two months before, just after she had told him of her decision to come back, he had asked her if she was certain that it was a good idea. They were standing by the river and she turned her heavy gaze upon him and she knew what he meant.

"Yes, it's imperative that I go back. Otherwise for me heaven at best would be just a refuge from the possibility of danger, and at worst, it would become a prison. Don't you see? I would be prisoner of heaven and the walls of that prison would be made up of all my fears. That's not what heaven is about. I can see that now."

She had a way with logic, but in his heart, he still worried for her. "There's so much that could go wrong...even in a normal life. You could get married too young or end up with the wrong man or no man at all. You could get in a car accident and be paralyzed—your driving is atrocious, and we both know it. You follow so closely that you could..."

She stayed his increasingly strident worries. "You sound like a dad. In point of fact you sound like someone who could be my dad. I'll need one, you know. I've decided to start completely over and I'll have no memory of any of this. I'll be a baby like any other."

"And you want me to be your father?"

"I know you love me. I know that you'll lay down your life for mine. I know you'll stay up worrying when I'm out late and I know you'll ground me when I do. And I know you'll be the first to tell me when I'm messing up." They grinned at each other over the truth of that. "And I know that I love you and respect you and I always thought that you'd be great dad to your baby. You could be a great dad to me too."

"Will I get to spank you?" he asked thinking to make a joke. "Wait...that's too weird. How bout we have Lisa be in charge of spankings? Deal?"

"Deal."

The End

*

Author's Note

Thank you for reading The Trilogy of the Void. My goal when writing these books was not only to thrill and entertain my readers, but also to explore the possible nature of hell and purgatory(heaven being somewhat self-explanatory, I saw no need to go down that road). I tried to portray the two alternatives to heaven from the point of having a fully good and just God, one who does not create evil but allows it to exist only as an unfortunate side effect of free will.

If you enjoyed this series may I suggest A Perfect America and The Sacrificial Daughter. Both of these are not only compelling stories, they are also vehicles for delving into philosophical paradigms that most of us take for granted.

Finally, on a self-serving note, the review is the most practical and inexpensive form of advertisement an independent author has available in order to get his work known. If you could put a kind review on Amazon and your Facebook page, I would greatly appreciate it.

Peter Meredith

Fictional works by Peter Meredith:

A Perfect America

The Sacrificial Daughter

The Apocalypse Crusade War of the Undead Day One

The Horror of the Shade Trilogy of the Void 1

An Illusion of Hell Trilogy of the Void 2

Hell Blade Trilogy of the Void 3

The Punished

Sprite

The Feylands: A Hidden Lands Novel

The Sun King: A Hidden Lands Novel

The Sun Queen: A Hidden Lands Novel

The Apocalypse: The Undead World Novel 1

The Apocalypse Survivors: The Undead World Novel 2

The Apocalypse Outcasts: The Undead World Novel 3

The Apocalypse Fugitives: The Undead World Novel 4

The Apocalypse Renegades: The Undead World Novel 5

Pen(Novella)

A Sliver of Perfection (Novella)

The Haunting At Red Feathers(Short Story)

The Haunting On Colonel's Row(Short Story)

The Drawer(Short Story)

The Eyes in the Storm(Short Story)