Hicks watched as Rhoda placed a silver-plated candlestick in the center of the table, with a tall white candle, and lit it, and arranged a sheet of paper and a pencil beside her chair. "I really don't like this, Lieutenant. I don't like Rhoda getting involved in my work. Especially when we're dealing with some kind of total freaking psychopath."
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"If she's got some kind of intuitive feeling about it, sport, I think we need to know what it is."
Rhoda said, "You can sit down now. This is only a very simple reading, so that we can find out why Decker is walking in darkness."
Rhoda switched off all the lights so that the only illumination came from the candle, and then they sat down. "Do we have to hold hands or anything?" Decker asked.
"No. It's enough that we're sitting here together."
Rhoda closed her eyes and said nothing for what seemed like forever, although it was probably no more than two or three minutes. Hicks glanced at Decker in discomfort, but neither of them spoke in case they disturbed Rhoda's concentration. There was no draft in the room, and the candle flame burned steady and bright, without wavering.
At last, Rhoda tossed the okuele onto the table. Some of the medallions fell with their shiny side upward, others with their dull side upward. All of the medallions were marked on their shiny side with the sign of the cross. Rhoda picked up her pencil and marked a line of crosses and zeroes.
She picked up the okuele and threw it again, and again she marked down the way that the medallions had fallen. She repeated this process four times.
At last she said, "Something terrible happened and you won't allow yourself to remember it. Your mind has closed its eyes and it refuses to open them."
Decker said nothing. He didn't know what she meant. What had he ever refused to remember?
Rhoda hesitated a moment more, and then she said, "It's raining, and you're standing outside a black door. Do you remember that?"
"I don't know. I don't think so. I mean, I must have stood outside hundreds of black doors."
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"It's dark. The number on the black door has two fours and a seven."
Decker uneasily sat back. "I remember, 1447 Duval Street, five years ago. We were on a drug bust."
"You're not alone. You have a partner with you."
"That's right. Jim Stuart. Just made detective first grade." Rhoda touched her fingertips to her ears. "You say some‑
thing about the back of the house."
" 'Cover the back of the house. Anyone runs out into the alley, shoot first and worry about who it is afterward.'"
Decker recited the words as if he were giving evidence. He looked at Hicks and Hicks was staring at him apprehensively, as if he were seeing a side of Decker's personality that he had never been aware of before.
Rhoda said, "You open the black door. You walk into the hallway. It's very dark inside the house."
"I can't see my hand in front of my face, that's how dark it is."
"You feel a door handle on your left. You open it."
Decker didn't say anything. He could remember opening that door because he had opened it time and time again, and wished that he hadn't.
"You enter the room. It's just as dark in here. You can smell people sleeping. You raise your gun in your right hand and your flashlight in your left. Just as you switch on your flashlight, you hear the click of a gun being cocked, right behind you. You turn round. You fire."
"It was dark," Decker said, hoarsely. "I told him to cover the back of the house. 'Anybody runs out into the alley, shoot first and worry about who it is afterward.' I specifically told him not to come inside. Specifically. A specific order."
Rhoda closed her eyes again and picked up the okuele, passing it through her fingers like a rosary, and gently rubbing every one of its tortoiseshell medallions.
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When she spoke, her voice was unnervingly whispery, as if she were making a guilty confession to a priest. She didn't even sound like Rhoda. "Saint Barbara knows what you saw."
"Saint Barbara? What are you talking about?"
"Saint Barbara is the shadow who is following you everywhere. She knows everything about you. She knows who your father's father was, and what sign you were born under, because she wants her revenge. She knows every bone in your body and she knows what you saw when you shot Jim Stuart."
"What do you know about Saint Barbara? Hicks—did you ever tell Rhoda about Saint Barbara, that thing on my wall?"
Hicks shook his head. "Come on, Rhoda. Enough of this shit."
But Rhoda stared at Decker and whispered, "Saint Barbara wants you, Decker. She knows what you saw when you shot Jim Stuart. She knows everything about you."
For a fraction of a second, Decker saw his flashlight jump across Jim Stuart's startled face. Wide-eyed, because of the dark. A little blondish moustache. But his finger had already pulled the trigger and it was bang! and Jim Stuart went down.
"It was dark. I couldn't see who it was. He had a specific order not to enter the house."
Another long silence. Rhoda's eyes were open, but it looked to Decker as if she were focusing right past him, and listening to somebody else, because she gave occasional nods of her head.
"Saint Barbara can see right into your soul," she whispered, and then, in her own voice, "Not yet." Then she turned directly to Decker and said, "There's a spirit here . . a spirit who's trying to warn you."
Decker became aware that the kitchen was gradually
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growing colder, and he had the strangest sensation that the floor was slowly sinking beneath them, and the walls stretching, like the elevator in the haunted house in Disney World. Hicks must have experienced it, too, because he looked up toward the ceiling and then down at the floor, and then back up at the ceiling again.
"I wish to speak to you," Rhoda said. "I need you to tell me more about Saint Barbara."
The kitchen was now so cold that Decker could see his own breath. He could faintly hear a high-pitched sound, like a steel wire being drawn across the back of a saw. It grew louder and louder and higher and higher, until he could feel it in the fillings in his teeth, and his saliva started to taste salty.
"Was it you?" Rhoda asked.
The candle flame burned brighter. It began to burn so intensely that it hissed, and wax begun to run down it faster and faster, pouring over the candlestick and onto the tablecloth.
"Was it you?" Rhoda repeated.
The flame widened, and swelled out, and right in front of Decker's eyes it formed itself into a fiery face, with hollow eyes and a mouth that was open in a silent scream.
"Jesus," Hicks said.
"Speak to me," Rhoda said. "Tell me what you want to say."
The face said nothing, even though its mouth was stretched wide open. But as it burned brighter, it increased in definition, so that Decker could begin to see that it was a young woman, with furiously waving hair.
"Speak to me," Rhoda encouraged her. "Tell me more about Saint Barbara."
At that instant, the young woman's eyes opened, and she stared directly at Decker with a look of utter wildness and
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agony. It was Cathy. Her face was made of fire but there was no doubt about it at all. It was Cathy, and she was screaming at him soundlessly from the other side of sudden death.
"Tell me about Saint Barbara," Rhoda insisted.
But then—with a soft whoomph—the face flared up into a fireball, and rolled up to the ceiling, and was gone. Decker and Rhoda and Hicks were left facing each other with only a small flickering stub of a candle between them, the shadows moving on their faces as if they were alternately smiling and scowling.
Hicks switched on the light. "What the hell was that?" he wanted to know. "Static? St. Elmo's fire? What?"