“The timing?” Dr. Harold queried.
“The doefolmon. Astronomers have recently identified it—a peculiar astronomical configuration. You’ve probably been hearing about it on the news lately.”
Had he? The equinox, he thought. “I’ve heard something on the weather channels about the equinox.”
“Yes, yes. That’s what the doefolmon really is. Of course, astronomers don’t call it the doefolmon—” Fredrick cragged another chuckle. “They call it a tangental lunar apogee. You’ve probably noticed over the past week or so that the moon appears pink. It’s what’s known as a straticulate refraction, the moonlight shining through the upper atmosphere at an anomalous angle. It’s very, very rare, and quite precise—a vernal equinox that occurs at the exact same moment as the moon becomes full.”
Dr. Harold’s eyes narrowed.
“And that’s the curious part,” Fredrick went on. “Even an old, skeptical atheist such as myself must admit. The last time this happened was exactly a thousand years ago, and exactly a thousand years ago was when the Ur-locs supposedly succeeded in incarnating the Ardat-Lil.”
—
Chapter 31
“It’s happening now, right now,” Erik Tharp told her in the dark confines of the basement.
He’d been talking, and she’d been listening, staring at each of his raddled words as though they were deformed faces. Incarnation, she thought. Fulluht-Loc. Ardat-Lil. It was insanity, and this was supposed to be an insane person. Yet the things he’d told her rang of a spectral memory, inklings dripping like a wound in the back of her mind. Ann’s confusion amassed. It was the confluence of it all, what Tharp had disclosed, plus the dream and what she’d seen in the albums—that left her unable to reckon anything.
“The Ardat-Lil is already here,” he was saying through the haze of her quandary. “But certain things have to take place before she can be incarnated through the host.” He paused, looked right at her. “That’s why I escaped. To make sure those things don’t happen.”
Ann felt slick in the sweat of her own dread. Melanie, her mind tolled again and again. That’s what the dream meant: Melanie’s birth was the birth of the host. They want my daughter to serve as the physical body for this…thing.
“Your daughter’s a virgin, isn’t she?”
Ann nodded.
“She wasn’t born in a hospital, was she? She was born here, in Lockwood. Wasn’t she?”
“Yes!” Ann shrieked.
Tharp loaded several rounds into the shotgun. “We have to find her and get the two of you away from here. We have to do it now. The doefolmon is tonight.”
Martin, Ann thought. “What about my fiancé?”
“Forget him. He’s one of them now. Forever.”
Tharp roughly grabbed her arm, yanked her toward the steps. “They’re all at the cirice now—”
“The what?”
“The church. They’re getting ready.” Tharp paused on the stairs, as if pricked by the palest vision. He was staring at nothing for a moment, or perhaps at the ghost of what he used to be. “Come on,” he said next. He was thumping up the stairs, with Ann in tow. “If we can prevent the incarnation rite itself, or even the kin sacrifice, then they’ll be ruined. They won’t be able to do this again for a thousand years.”
Ann huffed up the dusty wood steps. What did he say? “The kin sacrifice? What’s that?”
“It’s like a trigger for the whole ritual,” Tharp’s ragged voice grated on. “The final offering to the Ardat-Lil. Proof of faith.”
Kin sacrifice, Ann was still thinking. Suddenly on the stairs her joints locked up. Her mind blanked, and—
slup-slup-slup…
The vermilion vertigo embraced her again, like a desperate lover. The vision of the great blade plunging down again and again into the squirming naked abdomen…
“Come on, come on!” Tharp was commanding. He slapped Ann hard in the face. She blinked at him, numb. Then he was leading her up again.
Now Ann understood it, the vertiginous visions and how they related to the nightmare. Kin sacrifice, she realized more fully. She tried to assimilate. They want Melanie to be the host. For the host to become the Ardat-Lil, she must first sacrifice her own kin. Me.
That’s what the vertigo was trying to show her.
Melanie must murder me before she can become the demon.
Again, Ann’s thoughts cloaked her. They were on the landing now; Tharp was leading her to the kitchen. “We’ll go out the back. We’ll follow the woods to where I got the van parked. You’ll wait there while I go look for Melanie.”
But at the end of the paneled hall, Tharp stopped, oddly turning to her. “Did you hear that?”
“Hear what?” Ann said, diffused.
His eyes twitched. His shredded voice croaked on, “I could’ve sworn I heard—”
Ba-BAM!
Ann screamed. A chunk of the entrance molding exploded into splinters. Tharp was pushing her backward as a dark cackle issued from the kitchen. Then came another loud ba-BAM! as they dove across the foyer. A hole the size of a fist blew into the wall.
A figure stepped into the hall, holding a huge revolver.
“Surprise! I’m back!” Duke Belluxi announced to them.
«« — »»
As Fredrick put away the books he’d gotten down, Dr. Harold was remembering, for no real reason, the odd coincidence. Erik Tharp was from a town called Lockwood. Yes, that was odd. One of his private patients, Ann Slavik, the lawyer suffering night terrors, was from the same town.
Coincidence, he thought. How could it be anything else?
“I’m afraid that’s all I have for you,” Professor Fredrick said, and sat back down. “The Ur-locs were a very obscure society; there’s simply not that much information available about them.”
“But enough for Tharp to discover.”
Fredrick shrugged. “I’ve spent my entire life pursuing the remnants of civilizations whose beliefs were rooted in superstition. I’ve been from Nineveh to Knossos. From Jericho to Troy to Rhodes. And do you know what I’ve discovered? In all those places, over all those years?”
“What?”
“There are no superstitions. No credence to any subjective belief that has ever been asserted. They’re just stories, fables, people making fables in order to explain themselves.”
“Of course,” Dr. Harold said. “But it is interesting: Tharp’s escape in conjunction with an equinox that occurs only every thousand years.”
“He’s no doubt a very good researcher, that’s all. Do you suppose you’ll catch him?”
“We informed the state police that Tharp would most likely return to the geography of his delusion, but they didn’t put much stock in it. The most recent murders indicate that he’s actually moving away from the seat of his original crimes.”
“That could be a ploy, couldn’t it? Tharp’s intelligence quotient is quite higher than average.”
“I know. That’s what bothers me.”
“Where exactly do you think Tharp is returning to?”
“A little town up on the northern edge of the county,” Dr. Harold answered. “It’s called Lockwood.”
Professor Fredrick subtly laughed, fingering a tiny stone statue of Xipe, the Aztec god of the harvest. “You’re kidding me, right? He’s from a town called Lockwood?”