“How frightening that must have been,” he thought aloud.
She looked at him with a confused expression. “What, doing laundry?”
He shook his head. “Ask your lab people to examine that woman’s neck, where the bruising is, and to check her clothing. I’m sure they’ll find chemicals belonging to the soap she used in the wash. I wouldn’t be surprised if you found it on the man’s clothes as well—and on the living room carpet.”
Melissa began restating what he said, rebutting his idea, but his mind drifted toward the mental reconstruction of the facts she’d given him. He put shape to a possible scenario that explained what had happened to the couple in the freezer and the reality of it terrified him.
He imagined Mrs. Damerow prior to her death, carelessly going about starting a load of wash before dinner. He could picture the look of shock on her face when the washing machine’s lid suddenly flew open, the laundry she’d just loaded exploding out and attacking her. Frank guessed the creature crushed her windpipe for a silent death so the husband wouldn’t be alerted to the danger. Then it removed itself from the machine and sloshed its way up the stairs, into the kitchen. Mr. Damerow must have been sitting in the living room, probably watching TV, so he never heard the metal-on-metal sound of the butcher knife when the killer plucked it from its drawer. Seconds later, he collapsed in a pool of his own blood. The family pet had obviously come to its master’s aid too late, or maybe it had been outside at the time. Whatever the case, even if the dog had been present during the killings, there was obviously nothing it could have done to stop the slaughter. Afterwards, the killer must’ve carried the bodies downstairs, dumping them in their freezer for safekeeping and then stuffing their dog in the empty washer.
“What was that?” Melissa asked.
Frank blinked to free himself of his self-induced daze. “Pardon me?”
“What was that last transmission?” she asked. “On your scanner, turn it up.”
Frank slid back into the driver’s seat and adjusted the knob. He raised the scanner’s volume just in time to catch the dispatcher relaying the sketchy details of an accident call involving a juvenile bicycle rider and a freight train.
“Shit,” Frank remarked. “That kid could be seriously injured, and we’re the only ones out here.”
“They said Loretto,” Melissa added.
He nodded and started the engine. “We’re less than five minutes away. Let’s go.”
Melissa called to the house and asked one of the uniformed officers to get an additional car and follow them to the call.
She joined Frank in the Blazer.
CHAPTER 41
“Soon,” the entity growled.
It paced the church parking lot, pretending to keep watch for police. Around it, the encircling trees bowed their branches in compliance with the growing wind, and their undulating shapes emulated its excited state of anticipation.
Not far away came the musical sound of shovel blades scraping against earth. It waited, listening to the harmonic excavation. Fuller and Dupree grunted and swore and gasped while they dug, heaving off load after load of soil, bringing Kane closer and closer to the surface.
The wind blew.
Thunder rumbled.
The teens cursed.
Shovels cut into the dirt.
“Soon.”
But suddenly the shovel sounds stopped. Wind-tossed leaves fluttered, filling the void with their rustle. Then, out of the waist-deep weeds enclosing Kane’s grave, the two teens emerged into the car’s headlights, slouched and empty-handed.
“Why’d you stop?” it demanded from the cemetery fence.
“Union break,” one of them said.
“Yeah,” the other added. “You try digging that bastard up while getting eaten alive. There must be a million mosquitoes in these weeds.”
Its highjacked hands tightened on the iron fence, gripping the cold bars hard enough to split flesh and break bones. It clenched its vessel’s jaws, casting off pearl-white shards of fractured teeth that sparkled in the lamplight. No pain. Only rage.
Fuller climbed over the fence. “Man, that’s a lot of work.”
It stepped to the rear of the car, letting shadow fill the sweatshirt’s hood. It wanted to rip the defiant creatures’ heads off, impale them on the fence posts, but it forced the urge away, focusing on the task of regaining Kane.
“The grave is only a week old,” it said, concentrating to keep Brad’s voice sounding human. “The ground can’t be that hard.”
“Easy for you to say, you aren’t doing any of the work,” Fuller replied. “Let’s get the hell out of here and go get something to drink. We can come back later.”
“But there’s a storm coming,” it growled. “We should finish up before it rains.”
Dupree cursed under his breath and batted away a mosquito. Smears of dark soil covered his skin and half a dozen red insect bites peppered his sweaty face. “Hey, man, you want to finish this up so bad, you go do it yourself. I’ve had a pretty shitty night so far, and I’m not going to spend the rest of it being ordered around by you.”
The two teenagers got into the car and slammed the doors, both ignoring its repeated demands to get back to work.
No other choice remained but to force them to obey.
It opened the trunk. Extracted the shotgun.
They would either retrieve Kane, or they would join him.
Returning to the driver’s side door, it tapped the steel barrel on the window.
“Get out,” it ordered.
The two teens looked up and the expressions on their faces fluctuated, morphing from fear, to skepticism, then back to fear again. In spite of the evident danger, they still saw their friend, not the being within. To alleviate all doubt of the threat, the entity fired a blast through the rear window.
The glass exploded, showering into the night.
“I said, get out of the car,” it roared.
Both teens scrambled out the passenger door, shouting and swearing.
Clear of the car, Fuller backed against the cemetery fence, babbling incoherently.
Dupree ran.
He dashed into the night, heading for the far corner of the church, probably under the impression that “Brad” would lose him in the dark. The entity leveled the shotgun over the top of the car and fired.
Dupree spun away from the church’s staircase railing when it exploded into a cloud of splinters. He threw himself to the ground.
“Oh, Jesus,” Fuller exclaimed.
The entity expelled a malicious howl of laughter over the wail of Fuller’s screams. Dupree crawled through the dirt with feverish speed, clambering toward an open gate in the cemetery fence. He lunged through it and rose into a hunched run, trying to stay concealed by the headstones. It fired again. The third shot ripped into the church wall beyond him, striking so close the buckshot must have rolled across his back.
It fired again and again.
The forth roar of the Remington obliterated a marble angel effigy seated atop a tombstone. Dupree dodged the collapsing statue, but the fifth blast caught him in the back, opening a honeycomb of red holes in his shirt. He went down hard, smashing his face on the granite arm of a cross.
It bellowed with pleasure, its concentration fixed on the bloody memorial where Dupree dropped out of sight. It plunged one hand into the sweatshirt pocket and withdrew additional shells, loading them single-handedly.
The boy’s body had disappeared behind walls of thick weeds and tall grass, but the flicker of energy departing from his dead body glowed bright and visible. It glimmered on the church wall and nearby tombstones. The entity paused in reloading the shotgun, captivated by the growing light only it could see. Concentrating, it attempted to draw the force toward it, to absorb it, to feed.