“This is the man I was telling you about earlier this evening,” Rebecca told Hale. “Paul Wiess, the one who just moved here from Minneapolis.”
The trooper blinked, looking as if he’d suddenly made a startling discovery.
“Tim knows better than to play chicken with a train,” Rebecca continued. “Are you sure all the phones are out? I bet if we call over to Paul’s on his cell phone, we’ll find Tim is there with Mallory.”
Rather than answer, Hale looked at Paul and asked, “Is your son’s name Benjamin Wiess?”
“Yes.”
“I think you’ll want to come with me.”
“Why?” Paul asked.
Hale’s eyes flicked to Rebecca before answering—only for an instant, but long enough for Paul to catch a glimpse of the trepidation in the man’s otherwise unyielding expression. “I’m afraid there’s been a break-in at your house. I heard it over the radio just a little bit ago. Lori Hanlon was over there, right?”
“She’s babysitting his son,” Rebecca answered for Paul.
“A break-in?” Paul repeated. “Are they—”
“The kids are fine,” Hale assured. “Benjamin got out and made it to one of your neighbors, who called the police on a CB. I’ll escort you out there. We can see if Tim’s shown up, too.”
CHAPTER 44
Storm wind gusted into the treetops, fluttering dark leaves in chaotic waves, causing their boughs to creak with the sound of stretched ropes.
Melissa hurried after Frank with only the slashing beam of his flashlight to help her keep him in sight. He was almost forty yards ahead now. She increased her pace.
Lightning pulsed overhead, causing the woodland plant life to turn the ashen-gray color of dead worms drowned in a storm puddle. Amongst those trunks, a hundred shadows shifted location, trying to hide from the flash, or from her sight. The idea halted Melissa in her tracks and prompted her to bring up her pistol.
She turned in a circle, trying to cover every direction at once.
Regardless of his eccentricities, Frank had been right about the killer—no doubting that now. And with that fact in mind, she couldn’t help but wonder if one of the dark forms in the forest was actually the monster from the roadside, the beast that had been inside the gunman’s corpse.
The lightning blinked out once more and darkness fell in behind it. Nothing unearthly appeared.
Monsters. What a ridiculous thought that would have seemed yesterday, or even hours ago. Now she expected them.
Melissa raced on through the prevailing dark, using a subsequent flash of lightning to guide her final steps to Frank’s side, not glancing at the trees again.
They’d come to the end of the road, where the gravel-packed stretch of land widened into a clearing, perceived at first only by the lack of hindrance to Frank’s flashlight beam when he panned it left and right.
They hadn’t been in the opening long enough to catch their breath when a third naked tree of electrical light spread its bright branches across the sky, revealing a church and cemetery in front of them.
“How appropriate,” Melissa said, catching her breath.
Frank stared ahead and seemed to think aloud, saying, “We’ve found it.”
Before she could respond, he started moving again. She dashed after him, not resisting this time, and together they rushed across the dirt lot toward the cemetery.
A low fence surrounded the graveyard, and the gate’s hinges squealed when Frank swung it open.
He waded into the weeds of the churchyard ahead of her, shining his light on the half-hidden tombstones. Melissa followed, keeping her attention on the darkened windows of the cadaverous sanctuary.
Frank stopped two steps in front of her, and she bumped into his back.
She looked forward and discovered why he’d stopped.
In the circle of his flashlight beam, Melissa saw another teenager’s body. A sinkhole of gore marked the location of his left eye socket, and when Frank panned the light lower over the body, it revealed a score of ugly holes in his chest that looked like exit wounds.
She snapped up her gun.
Frank swung the light off the corpse and pointed it at the greater portion of the graveyard to their left.
“What the hell?” she exclaimed, watching the body all but vanish from sight. “Point that thing back over here. What if this one—”
“It won’t,” Frank cut in, speaking in words that seemed much too calm. “The entity can’t come in here. We’re safe.”
“Bullshit.”
“Trust me on this,” he responded, then started off to where he had angled his light.
Melissa stayed put, dividing her attention between the graves and the shaded body at her feet. Then Frank shouted her name with an urgency that compelled her to put aside her fear and join him.
“Melissa, look.”
She found him facing one of the newer gravestones, his flashlight ray gleaming on its finished surface and blinding the words inscribed on it. More noticeable, however, were the piles of fresh earth heaped to each side of where the resident’s coffin should’ve been buried.
She opened her mouth to comment on the scene when her vision adjusted to the glare and focused on the headstone’s name. “Oh, my God. This is Kane’s grave.”
“Yes, it is.”
Melissa stared at the open ground. The hole’s depth measured less than three or four feet, she guessed, not enough to have excavated a coffin, which meant the madman’s remains still rested at the bottom, under a moderate covering of dirt.
“What now?” she asked, repressing a shudder.
“It wants him back, all right,” Frank mumbled.
“What?”
“It wants him back,” he repeated, still talking to the stone. “It must be true, then. There must be a connection between them. That’s why it killed the Pattersons. Don’t you see? They were the closest people it could find to help it dig him up, the most accessible. But they must have resisted, so it killed them for their energy and moved on to the next closest place where it could find servants: the Andersons.”
“Help dig him up?” she echoed. “I don’t get it. Why would it need help to get at Kane if it can make its own body out of whatever it wants? And even if it did dig him up, what good would that do for either of them? Kane’s got to be halfway to being a worm-circus by now.”
Frank licked his lips before speaking. He appeared to be teetering on the brink of a great revelation. “This is holy ground,” he said. “The entity is a profane spirit; it can’t enter the cemetery itself, so it needed someone else to retrieve Kane’s body.”
“But why bother?”
“Like I said earlier, I think it wants to finish what they started five years ago, to bond together somehow. Oh, Lord, what if it has the power to bring him back? What if it can resurrect his soul somehow, because of their tie to one another?”
Frank swept a layer of sweat off his brow and rushed on, sorting out his sudden storm of ideas. “For five years, it’s been stuck in Kane’s half-dead body,” he said, “kept alive on life-support in the lockdown ward at the St. Peter’s Asylum, utterly powerless. But now the body’s dead, and it’s free again. It must have hung around the hospital for a few days, gathering its strength, using what energy it could get to cause other peoples’ deaths, probably by manipulating other medical equipment. I bet if you checked with the staff, they’d tell you there was an unusually high death toll the day Kane’s body died. After that, once it was strong enough, it must have come here to find Kane, homing in on him through whatever link they’d forged together all those years ago. Only it couldn’t get to him.”