BJ shivered in Paul’s arms.
“The babysitter must have,” said the officer who’d come from the doorstep. “She was the only one left in the place when we searched it, but she was hysterical when we found her. She’s calmed down a bit now. My partner’s questioning her over at the neighbor’s. Do you want me to see what she’s learned?”
“Yes,” Melissa answered, dividing her concentration between the officer and a discharge of lightning overhead.
The other man moved closer to BJ. “How about you, son?” he asked. “You had a bit of excitement tonight, didn’t you?”
Thunder reverberated throughout the cloudbanks.
When BJ didn’t answer, the man turned his attention to Paul and identified himself. “I know he’s had a tough evening,” Frank said, “but would you allow us to ask him about what he saw?”
Paul considered the request, then looked to his son. “Could you do that, BJ? Can you tell us what happened tonight?”
When he didn’t reply, Rebecca stepped forward and ran a reassuring hand across the boy’s back, speaking to him in a soft motherly tone. “There’s nothing to be scared of, dear. This man wants to help us. He’s with the police, and if you tell him everything you can, you’d be just like a superhero helping to catch the bad guy.”
BJ looked around at all of them, his eyes still large and wet. His lower lip trembled. “It was Voodooman,” he cried. “Vermorca Azkhaneb. The Opener of Eternity. He came to get me.”
Paul’s heart sank at the fear in his son’s voice. “BJ,” he pleaded, “whoever was in the house tonight was a real person, and we need you to tell us what he looked like.”
“Where did he learn those words?” Frank asked.
Paul opened his mouth to answer, but stopped short at sight of the expression on Frank’s face. The man’s skin had taken on the complexion of a mummified corpse. Beside him, Detective Humble appeared just as pale.
“BJ can have an overactive imagination,” Paul explained. “They’re just words he made up.”
“No, they’re not,” BJ cried. His shivering continued unabated, but his eyes now radiated a look of unwavering resolve. “The Vermorca threw me in the pool because I can see him. I thought he was a voodoo doll, but he’s more like a ghost. He said that if I told anyone about him, he’d punish me even worse. He said he’d take you and Mallory away, and then I’d be left all alone, without anyone.”
Paul held BJ tight, reassuring him that neither he nor Mallory would ever go anywhere without him.
“I told Lori about him because she said she could stop him,” BJ wailed. “But she couldn’t, and now he’s going after Mallory. H-he showed me what he’s going to do to her. I saw her die, with bright light coming out of all these cuts, and, and… and Voodooman sucked all the light up, drinking it, drinking up Mallory’s life… Then she was… she was dead… all dead and empty.”
Paul stopped BJ’s horrific tale by pulling him close and hugging him, unsure of how to react. Tears swam at the edges of his eyes, and Rebecca’s, too, when he looked up at her from over his son’s shoulder.
Frank looked to Paul. “You have a daughter?”
“Yes.”
“Where is she now?”
Paul fumbled for a reply in the wake of BJ’s outburst—not once but twice—then fell into a grateful silence when Rebecca’s hand’s settled on his shoulders and she answered the question for him. “She’s at Valleyfair with my son, Tim. You don’t think she could be in some kind of danger, do you? I mean, from whoever did this?”
Before anyone could reply, the officer who’d gone over to Harry’s called to them from the garage. “There was someone else in the house,” he said. Everyone glanced in the direction of the voice while he and his partner—a slim black woman—jogged over to the group.
“There were two perpetrators?” Melissa asked.
“No,” the female officer replied. “The girl remembers another group of people coming into the house after the intruder left. Poor thing. She’s so scared, I almost couldn’t calm her down.”
“So, maybe the kids were here?” Rebecca said to Paul, her features ashen.
“Did the young lady get a look at the prowler?” Frank asked.
The officer shook her head. “I don’t think she’s sure of what she saw. She’s convinced her attacker was invisible.”
“Invisible?” Hale repeated.
Frank and Melissa exchanged glances, the look in their eyes strengthening Paul’s fear that their presence here went beyond trying to track down a common criminal.
“That’s what she says,” the officer told Hale. “At first, I thought she was on something, but her story’s the same each time she tells it. She’s genuinely terrified.”
“What about the others she heard in the house?” Frank asked. “Who were they?”
Rebecca’s hand tightened on Paul’s arm when the patrolwoman repeated Lori Hanlon’s recollection of hearing Tim’s name called out and the mention of a barn.
“She’s talking about the old farm,” Harry said. “That rickety pile in the back forty behind the neighborhood.”
“I know the place,” Hale replied. “That’s where all the underage kids do most of their partying. The damn thing’s a teen-magnet.”
“How far is it from here?” Melissa asked.
Hale shrugged. “No more than a minute or two by car.”
“Show us,” Frank ordered.
CHAPTER 47
The first bullet zipped past Tim’s head, displacing the air inches from his left eye.
Before the introductory round smacked into the barn, five successive shots boomed out of the dark, kicking up dirt and hissing past at a heart-stopping proximity.
Everyone scattered, racing for cover. Tim was already facing the barn, but the open terrain between him and the doors would’ve made him an easy target. Instead, he ran to the right, toward a bank of old hen houses.
He glanced behind just long enough to catch a view of the gunman emerging from the forest. To his surprise he saw a man. Given all he’d been through, he’d expected to see another walking gestalt of mismatched garbage, something like the grass-monster from the church cul-de-sac. Regardless of the assailant’s human likeness, he knew the creature had arrived, just in another form, and that realization made his quest to reach Mallory all the more urgent.
Suddenly something sharp cut into Tim’s legs. He flipped forward, sailing off his feet, and slammed hard to the dirt, rolling painfully. At the edge of his awareness the scrape of metal on metal reached his ears. It accented each tumble and twist, and he quickly realized that while he’d been looking over his shoulder at the gunman, he’d run headlong into a sagging barbwire fence.
Sharp spikes bit into his shins and calves, ankles and knees. He looked down to discover he’d become entangled in the fall.
Footsteps crunched through the dry weeds. He craned his head to look behind him.
Thirty feet away, the killer strode past without even a glance.
After the sixth shot, the gunfire ceased, enabling the fleeing teens to reach safety before another assault. Troy, Chris, and Elsa all made it back into the barn unscathed, but upon their arrival, Mallory discovered that Becky, Adam, Lisa and Tim had become separated from them in the frantic rush to get away.
“Oh, God, where are the others?” Mallory cried.
“And my sister?” Derrick added.
They’d come to the edge of the loft, across from the trapdoor, miserably aware they’d become instant targets if they descended the ladder with the barn’s main doors standing open.