I aimed the flashlight up at a black and blue sky. No chance of viewing any stars or moon. Not that it would make an ounce of difference. I shined the light straight ahead toward the trail, then turning, shined it behind me. That’s when something began to go rapidly south.
The flashlight began to fade.
The beam started to fade to a kind of yellowish half light. My pulse picked up. I opened my mouth, allowing some of the rain to fall onto my tongue.
What I would do without the light? What would I do in the pitch dark? How would I find the house? How would I find Michael?
I shook the flashlight, but it was a useless, wasted motion. Common sense told me to use whatever available power I had left in the flashlight to enter onto the trailhead and get the hell away from this place. I aimed the dim light out ahead of me, making my way across the clearing in what I could only pray was Michael’s direction.
I was standing at the edge of the chosen trail when the flashlight went dead.
Chapter 51
Rain began to pour down in sheets of painful, ice-like bullets. The heavy cloud cover surrounded the hillside like a vapor ring. Directly before me came the intermittent explosions of lightning. Without them the darkness of the woods would have been absolute and impenetrable. Because of the cloud cover, no stars shined up above. No moonbeams penetrated the low lying mist and fog.
Another quick shot of lightning caught my attention just as I began the sightless journey onto the narrow trailhead. As I was about to place boot-heel to the soft mud-covered floor, the lightning struck the ground somewhere off in the distant valley, toward the field and my parents’ house at the far end of it. Because of its flat, dark appearance, I became convinced that I was looking directly at my parents’ property.
What had seemed like a dream was now painfully real. Whalen had kidnapped Michael and I, somehow dragged us up to Mount Desolation. Michael was inside that old house in the woods. He was tied up, held hostage in the basement. If I didn’t get to him before Whalen got to me, he would die. Or maybe we would both die anyway.
I inhaled a deep breath, exhaled, tried to get my head together, tried to think logically, without fear or emotion clouding my judgment. The distant lightning strikes provided just enough light to tell me the path I was about to tread would lead downhill. Downhill toward the house.
I also knew that downhill could be deceiving. Mount Desolation wasn’t really a mountain at all. It was made up of several large hills that crested and dipped before finally the flat, heavily wooded land took over. I also knew that if the empty field behind my parents’ house was located in front of me, then so was that terrible house in the woods.
Whether I liked it or not, that was my direction. I was the blind woman forced to move by touch, one foot before the other, the rain coming down stronger now against my face and head, running down my scrunched brow in streaks.
A branch slapped me in the face and my eyes teared up. Big tears fell and mixed with the rain on my face. I tried to stay on the narrow trail. I was blind, trying to stay free and clear of the brush and the trees; trying to do it by touch, by feel, with arms and hands extended out in front of me while I moved at a slow, frustrating trot.
Another lightning bolt revealed a landscape of thick, dripping growth. The sight of it lasted only a split second. Pine trees, mulberry bushes intermixed with birches and oaks. Still another bolt revealed something else-something scattering before me. Something alive, quick and fleeting.
At first I thought it might be a dog. Maybe a deer. Instinct spoke to me, told me to drop to my knees while gripping the flashlight, holding it out before me. It was my only available weapon. Lightning struck. Thunder exploded. The concussion took my breath away, shook the ground at my feet. Lightning restored my sense of sight. It allowed me to spot the monster, if only for an instant. That single instant is all it took for me to know the truth.
Whalen blocked the trail.
Whalen, head shaved, dressed in dark clothing, smiling, eyes covered with goggles. Green tinted eyes. Green tinted, mechanical, night vision eyes. He stood in the center of the narrow trail, heavy rain water washing over his lean body.
All oxygen escaped my lungs. Blindness returned. But not for long.
More lightning lit up the night sky. Another eye view of the path came and went with the speed of a heartbeat.
Now the path was clear.
Like the lightning, Whalen had vanished in an instant.
Now you see the devil. Now you don’t.
Chapter 52
When I tried to walk, I tripped. With every step I took along the trail in the darkness came a branch slap to the face, a tree trunk to the thigh, a boulder to the shin. I caught a thorn from a thick bush that hung over the trail. It tore into my jeans, penetrating the skin on my lower calf. I knew I was cut. Not because I could feel the sting. But because I could feel the blood trickling down the calf muscle, warm and wet, the thick consistency not at all like the cold October rain.
It was a struggle to get anywhere in the dark. Five minutes of walking and stumbling, and I managed to cover no more than thirty or forty feet. Whether or not I was maintaining a straight line was a mystery to me. I might as well have been crawling.
The only way to continue with the blind trek was to drop down onto hands and knees, feel my way along the gravel trail the same way an animal might do it: by touch, by smell, by sound. By using as many senses as possible.
It’s exactly what I did.
From down on all fours I crawled over the smooth rocks and mud-covered gravel toward the sound of water. Not rain water falling from the sky, but stream water running heavily into a pool. I knew the pool from my childhood. It had to be the same one. The more I crawled the louder, more forceful it became. I knew the pool was situated close to the house in the woods. No more than a couple hundred feet separated the pool from the house.
I was closer to Michael than I thought. Just the thought of going to him, helping him, offered me a trace of hope and a trace was better than nothing at all.
I felt suddenly lighter.
I began to move along the earth floor with increased speed while the sound of rushing water became more intense. A sudden burst of energy filled my veins. But when something stung the back of my leg, I dropped down face-first onto the path like a sack of rags and bones.
My God, had I been shot?
The ground zero of pain was located in the back of my right thigh. From there it rippled throughout my body. The pain shot up and down my backbone with surprising efficiency. I might have rolled over onto my back then, bled to death.
But I attempted to move my feet, then my legs. Until I pulled myself up from off the wet ground. I leaned up straight, felt the welt growing behind my thigh. Because the wound was out of vision, I had no way of knowing if a bullet had actually lodged there or merely grazed the skin.
My gut reaction was a graze. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be able to move my leg.
Then, coming through the leaves, the quick whoosh of bullets flying overhead, slapping the foliage. Some of the rounds that pinged against the stones blew up red-yellow sparks. I dropped down hard onto my belly. My body ached while the bullets came at me fast, but missing all the time as though Whalen intended for them to miss. And I was sure he did.
Whalen had lived in these woods, hunted them for food. He knew what he was doing. The silent rounds fell short, most embedding themselves into the ground only inches from my face. Water and mud splashed into my eyes, ears, nose and mouth. The rapid fire rounds burst through the trees, but not a hint of gunfire or a muzzle flash as though Whalen were using a silencer. The scene was like something out of Michael’s manuscripts-guns, bullets, silencers. But then I was no stranger to firearms. My dad had been a trooper, a hunter, a shooter, a gun collector. I’d lived with guns for my entire childhood.