“It seems bad now,” he said. “That was expected. That was understood. But you’ll begin to feel new things in this place soon, Sabrina. I promise that you will. You’ll begin to feel a sense of purpose stronger than any you’ve ever known. You’ll realize that you are a part of something larger than yourself, and it will please you. If you allow it to, it will please you.”
He paused, and behind him another figure shifted. Oh Lord, there were more of them.
“It’s a lonely predicament right now,” he said. “Don’t worry. You won’t be alone for long. We’ll have more guests soon, and I will expect you to demonstrate some leadership. You are, after all, the firstborn. Do you understand that?”
Sabrina didn’t speak.
“Consider it,” the faceless man said. “Consider that your old life was nothing but a womb, and a harsh, cold one at that. But now you’ve escaped it. Here you are, alive and well, your life preserved. This isn’t a bad place, Sabrina. Great things are being kept alive here, and soon they will flourish. This place is an incubator. That’s how you should think of it. As an incubator of the heart. Open your spirit and you’ll know the truth. You’ll know.”
He turned and left. All she could see of him was that he was of average height and whip-thin build with long hair tied back and pulled tight against his skull. His hands seemed unusually large for his size. He took three steps forward into the square of white light, and she thought she saw pines beyond him, and then he turned to the left and faded from view and was replaced by another figure, this one stepping in from the right and pulling the door shut. Sabrina was astonished to see this new one was a woman. Petite, with dark hair in a long braid and tanned skin. An attractive woman, probably in her fifties.
The woman said, “Baby girl, you’ll be just fine,” in a voice as tender as a mother speaking to her newborn. She knelt down, reached out, and brushed Sabrina’s hair away from her face.
“You’ll be just fine,” she said again. So kind.
“Help me,” Sabrina said. Her voice broke. “Please help me. Please let me go. I don’t know what you-”
“Shhh.” The woman put her fingers against Sabrina’s lips, softly. Her face was weathered but still pretty, and once it had surely been beautiful. “You’ll need to be quiet here, or the voices won’t find you. You’ll need to learn to put away all of that mental clutter. The fear and all the rest. Just listen. Now I’m going to get you some food and water and we’re going to make you more comfortable. When the tribes arrive, you’ll need your strength.”
She moved gracefully away, and Sabrina stared after her in horror and confusion. The man she’d expected, somehow. From the moment the handcuff became clear, the instant she’d understood even that much about her situation, she’d known that there would be a man.
She had not counted on the woman.
When the tribes arrive, you’ll need your strength.
The tribes? Sabrina worked saliva into her dry mouth and forced a swallow. She was dehydrated, and the crying hadn’t helped. Her eyes adjusting, she could see the woman moving about in the far corner. She heard the splashing of water, the rustling of plastic bags. Hopelessly, she looked back at the bolt in the log where the handcuff was anchored, but now something else caught her eye-farther down the log, maybe two feet, there was another bolt. Beyond that, another still.
We’ll have more guests soon.
9
Jay Baldwin sat at the kitchen table alone, no gun to his head. If he wanted a gun, in fact, he had only to go upstairs and take the nine-millimeter from his nightstand drawer.
The gun wasn’t going to produce Sabrina, though.
The police might. But calling the police was no longer the easy fix it would have been once. Before Eli Pate had dropped Jay off, he’d shown him an image on his phone: a map with a blinking red dot.
“That’s your truck,” Pate had said calmly, and then he’d offered Jay a small plastic square. “And this one is you. Now, I understand that this seems intrusive, but obviously you and I are a long way from developing trust. In the absence of trust, I have to monitor. You understand that, don’t you, Jay? It’s like any parent-child relationship.”
Jay took the small piece of plastic and ran his thumb over it and thought of how easy it would be to break, or microwave, or flush down a toilet. There were a million ways to destroy the signal this thing was putting out.
“There is no chance that battery will stop functioning,” Eli Pate said. “And you will not know when I will arrive. But when I do, you’d better have that with you. Just keep it in your pocket, Jay. But I’ll state this once, and very clearly: If I go to the place where the signal tells me you are, and you aren’t there? Well, I have your wife. And I’m not a kind man.”
They were the last words he offered. There was no overt threat, no guarantee of harm, but there didn’t have to be one. He had said all he needed to.
Jay had today off due to the extended stretch of repair work, and he wished that he didn’t. He’d rather be moving than sitting here alone. As he sat, he thought of every phone call he could make, of every type of law enforcement that he’d ever heard of, every agency that might come to Sabrina’s rescue.
He never reached for the phone. He turned the plastic chip over and over in his hands and went through every conceivable option, but he never reached for the phone.
I’m not a kind man.
No, Pate was not. And he wasn’t a bluffing man, Jay thought. The problem, then, was not all that different from Jay’s daily tasks. There were some simple but critical constants in high-voltage work, the most important being that before you attempted a fix, you had to understand where the power came from and how it was controlled.
Power source: Eli Pate.
System controclass="underline" Jay’s tracking device.
He would stay at home today, he would not call for help, he would be at work on time tomorrow, and Eli Pate’s computers would see all of that. They would also see something else, something natural enough for a man in his position-they would see Jay spend a full hour pacing his living room. Over and over he walked the same route, reminding himself of the power source (Pate) and the system control (electronic tracking device), mimicking the routine of a sleep-starved, terrified man anguishing over the right choice to make for his wife’s safety. It was not hard to do. When Sabrina wasn’t occupying his mind, the specter of those massive transmission towers with their nearly a million volts and the ghost of his brother-in-law slipped right in. It had been a closed-casket funeral. The electricity cooked you in your own blood, leaving nothing but a blackened, shriveled shell behind, featureless and horrifying.
It was easy to pace and worry. Very easy.
He did not go upstairs, and he did not go outside. Just paced and hoped that Pate’s computers were recording it all. When Jay arrived at work the next morning, with no police called, no attempts made to destroy his tracking device, Pate would understand that when Jay was nervous, he paced the lower level of his house.
It was critical that Pate understood this.
10
When Mark returned to Cassadaga, the red truck was gone from the lake, and it wasn’t parked outside of Dixie’s house either.
Mark had spent the hours between his encounter with Myron and his appointment with Dixie Witte in DeLand, the nearest town of any size. It was only a fifteen-minute drive away but so unlike Cassadaga it could have been fifteen hundred miles. He was surprised by the relief he’d felt at the sight of things he usually hated about Florida, the strip malls and car lots and harsh lights. After only a few hours in Cassadaga, he found all of it reassuring, a reminder that contemporary society existed, that there were places where you wouldn’t come across barefoot boys picking oranges and talking casually about the dead.