He felt relieved that he would be getting some help on this, that he could give up some of the responsibility he had been shouldering single-handedly up until now, but he felt guilty about abandoning his own investigation, about not following up on his own train of thought, not acting on what he knew to be the real facts, or the truth behind the facts. He felt, in some way, as though he was deserting Don, as though the boy had died needlessly, uselessly.
But all deaths are needless, he reasoned. All deaths are useless.
But he was pushing everything under the carpet, whitewashing it, not trying to find out the real reasons behind all this.
Don would be ashamed of him.
He was a coward.
"Is that all, Sheriff?" Pete's voice sounded anxious to get off the line.
"Yeah," Jim said. "That's it. I'll see you in the morning." He hung up the phone and stared out the family-room window at the darkened house on the acre lot across the street. He imagined he could hear the river, though it flowed through the opposite end of town. So what if Don Wilson wouldn't approve of his actions? He didn't even know the boy. He only met him the one time and talked to him once after that over the phone. What did he owe him?
He walked slowly down the hall and peeked into Justin's and Suzonne'srooms before going back to bed, checking on them to make sure they were all right. He crawled carefully into bed next to Annette and lay awake for a while, staring at the dark ceiling, listening, thinking.
Finally he fell asleep.
He had nightmares.
Father Donald Andrews took the small teapot off the stove and poured half a cup of Earl Grey into his ceramic mug. The oldErron Garner record playing on the stereo in the living room suddenly got stuck, the same three notes repeating over and over again, and the reverend put his tea down on the counter, rushing out into the other room. He lifted the stereo's dust cover and pressed down on the needle with his forefinger. The song skipped over the rough section andErron resumed playing "Afternoon of an Elf." He went back into the kitchen to get his tea.
When the bishop had ordered him to take over the congregation in Randall until Father Selway returned or a new reverend was permanently assigned, Andrews had jumped at the chance. For a relative novice, who had until now assisted other priests, the opportunity to preside over an entire congregation, even for only a short while, was a major coup.
And when the bishop had offered to let him stay inSelway's house, he had gratefully accepted. The church owned the home and would allow him to stay rent free, thus saving him money on lodgings.
But he had been here for four days now and, truth to tell, he did not like the house. Father Selway had disappeared and his entire family had been murdered--that in itself was enough to start someone thinking unpleasant thoughts in the dead of night. But aside from that, below all that, there was something wrong. The house gave off--what did they used to call it in the sixties?--bad vibes.
It was not a friendly house.
Andrews carried his cup into the living room and turned the record up a little louder before settling down into his chair, hoping to drown out the subtle creaks and cracks made nightly by the old house. The reverend was by no means an easily frightened man, but he had joined the church precisely because he had known, had realized, that there was such a thing as good and such a thing as evil, that these were not nebulous concepts dreamed up by philosophers and religious prophets but were actual concrete realities, facts of life.
And this house was not good.
Andrews considered himself "sensitive" to auras, to feelings, to "vibes." Perhaps he was a trifle psychic. He wasn't sure. But he had always had bad feelings about certain spots and certain people and good feelings about others. Once, as a college student traveling through Germany, he had been unable to enter a restaurant. The restaurant was a popular spot on a guided tour, but the wave of nausea, fear, and revulsion that had swept through him upon nearing its door had been too strong to allow him to enter. He had learned later that hundreds of gypsies had been murdered in the building in the first wave of killings prior to the outbreak of World War II.
The feeling here in Father Selway's house was not quite as strong as it had been in the restaurant, but it was similar.
Andrews shifted uncomfortably in his chair. Only one light was on in the room--a freestanding lamp between his chair and the couch--and the rest of the room seemed suddenly bathed in shadow, considerably darker than it had been a few moments ago. He had to stop thinking about things like this. He forced his mind to concentrate on something else.
The sermon he was going to give Sunday. He picked up the black-bound Bible from the small walnut table next to him and opened it to the page he had marked before dinner; a chapter in Job. Out of the corner of his eye he thought he saw something move, and he looked up. The light was still on in the kitchen and he could see nothing there, but the hallway was completely dark. No lights were on in the back of the house at all.
He heard a strange shuffling noise from somewhere back in the hallway.
Andrews jumped slightly, startled, spilling his tea on the Bible lying in his lap. The already thin andtransluscent pages became instantly transparent, backward letters from the next several pages soaking through the words on the open page, blending to form one unreadable black mass.
Black Mass.
Stop it, he told himself.
He was an adult now, not a little child afraid of the dark. And he was a priest, a man of the cloth, a man with the power of the church and the Lord behind him.
Then why were his muscles tensed? Why was he staring into the dark hallway as if looking for signs of movement? Why was he straining to hear strange sounds over the rhythmic cadences ofEr roll Garner's piano?
Andrews closed the Bible, folded his hands atop the smooth black surface, shut his eyes and began to pray. "Our Father .. ." His mouth formed the words, but his voice was silent.
The record ended and there was a sound of tearing paper from one of the back rooms of the house. He could hear it clearly in the sudden stillness.
Adult or no adult, priest or no priest, he wanted to run. His instinct was to throw open the front door, and dash into the street, jump into his car parked next to the curb, take off and spend the night in a nice, clean, modern hotel with well-lit rooms and a peopled lobby. And his instincts were usually good.
He had not been this scared in years.
That's why he had to stay.
Andrews pulled lightly on the chain around his neck and fingered the gold crucifix that hung on the end of the chain. He closed his eyes and again said the Lord's Prayer. When he reached "Deliver us from evil," he said it aloud.
He opened his eyes and sniffed. There was the smell of something burning--charred flesh?--in the air.
No, it couldn't be. He was overreacting, making himself hysterical.
His brain was overloading on imagination. He wasn't approaching this logically, rationally.
But there was a definite burning smell.
What was it? Sulfur? Cinders? The fiery pits of hell?
Nothing. It was nothing. He was just imagining The smoke alarm went off.
He jumped from his chair this time. The alarm was loud, a piercing shriek that cut through the quiet like a sledgehammer through ice cream and which would have blotted out even the loudest noise.
Now he was no longer worried about the house's vibes or the strange noises in the dark. Here was something real--a fire. He ran toward the hallway, no longer afraid. He flipped on the hall light as he dashed past it. The smell was horrible, almost an emetic, and it was getting stronger. The air was beginning to cloud up with a thick brown smog like smoke.