He knew it was wrong, knew it was stupid, knew that in his current position he could not afford to be a hot dogger anymore, that he had to be a team player. But old habits died hard, and he had not gotten where he was by playing by the rules.
He had gotten where he was by ignoring them.
he would once again be the one to crack this thing wide open, would be able to claim all the credit for himself, and would doubtlessly take yet another step up the Bureau ladder.
But what was this case?
He didn't know. Not exactly. A man in Utah had become a reanimated corpse, an Interior Department undersecretary had been murdered by some type of monster in his own garage--and forty years ago, government engineers had flooded a town of witches after constructing a damn.
Whatever it was, it was big. Not as big as what had happened in Rio Verde maybe, but plenty big enough, and if what he'd gathered from reading between the lines of McCormack's secret re oort was true, things might be coming to a head
He approached the dam from the south, passing through Rio Verde. It brought back memories not all of them good ones, and as he drove by the Chinese restaurant on his way toward the center of town, he considered stopping by the police station, dropping in on his old pal Sheriff Carter for a surprise visit. Rossiter smiled to himself. Such a tweaking would be fun--he knew Carter had no desire to see him ever again--but as much as he would like to hang around and annoy that fat bastard, he had to get to the lake. He had no idea if anything was happening there, or if it was, whether he was late or early for the fireworks, but he needed to go there first and assess the situation.
Maybe on the way back.
Outside Rio Verde the highway followed the river, and twenty miles north the road split, one heading through the desert toward New Mexico, the other winding up a series of plateaus and bluffs to the lake. The road curved around a cliff face, then narrowed to a single lane as it crossed the dam. His was the only car, and Rossiter drove carefully, aware of the inadequate railing that separated him from the water to his right and a precipitous drop to his left. On the other side of the dam, the road was dirt, and it ended at an empty gravel parking area ringed by warped and weathered picnic tables.
He got out of the car, stretching, and walked to the edge of the lake, looking back toward the dam, up the shore, then across the water.
He didn't know what he had expected to see, but he had expected.." something.
Rossiter stared out at the desert. There were no cars, no people, no vampires, nothing unusual or out of the ordinary. The late afternoon air was silent save for a whooshing rumble coming from the base of the dam where water was released into the Rio Verde.
God, he'd grown to hate this state in the years he'd been
assigned here. And two terms in D.C. had not lessened his antipathy one whit. Who the fuck would live in such a hell hole other than moronic rednecks and inbred hillbillies?
He sighed. He'd start at the dam and work his way around.
Already he was beginning to think that he'd made a mistake and acted too rashly. There was no reason for him to have come. Even if there was some sort of power in this place, he couldn't hope to exorcise it just by showing up.
The supernatural wasn't some trained monkey, jumping through hoops on his timetable, showing its face when it was convenient for him.
There was nothing to do about it, though, except continue on as planned, and he looked back at the dam, then started walking along the shore, wishing he had brought some tennis shoes.
At night, low whispers.
Miles recognized the Soft susurration, the barely audible noises he had heard in the house the night before his father had returned from the hospital. The sounds had scared him then, and he was even more frightened now. Everyone else was asleep--Garden in his sleeping bag on the ground, Janet in the backseat of the car--and Miles wanted to wake one of them, wanted someone else to hear this, wanted some sort of verification that it was not all in his mind, but he did not know either of them well enough to impose on in such a manner, and the truth was that he would have felt stupid waking them up merely because he was afraid of some noises. "
The noises were spooky, though, particularly under these circumstances, and somehow he doubted that either Garden or Janet would blame him for wanting company.
He stared into the night sky. The whispers were all around
him, coming from behind the tree, up on the rocks, from the black surface of the lake itself. As before, he thought he could make out words, names: "May. Lizabeth."
He was lying atop the picnic table, Garden's jacket wadded up under his head for a pillow, a dirty blanket from the back of the Jeep wrapped around him, mummy-like, against the surprisingly cold night chill.
"May." ..... What could it be? He didn't know and he didn't want to know. It was what he'd come here for, the reason they'd all been drawn to Wolf Canyon, but now that he was here, now that the answers for which he'd been searching were making themselves known, he realized that he didn't really want them.
"May," the whispers said, and there were other unintelligible words mixed in, backing it up. "May... Lizabeth... Lizabeth May..."
He would be less afraid if Garden or Janet were awake, but he still would not allow himself to cave in and rouse them. Instead, he closed his eyes, rolled onto his side, pulled e dirty blanket above his ears and softly hummed to himself in order to shut out the sounds.
It took awhile, but focusing on not hearing the whispers eventually tired him out. He fell asleep. He dreamed.
He'was back in Los Angeles, at Dodger Stadium, in the middle of the night. The place was empty, all halogens turned off, only the muted glow of city lights under orange-tinged smog offering any illumination whatsoever.
In the parking lot of the stadium was a small plywood shack, a makeshift home made from discarded construction materials. A man stood in the darkness of the shack's open doorway, an old man dressed in chaps and the dusty clothes of a western pioneer. He was smoking silently, and there
was something ominous about the way only his arm moved to bring the cigarette to and from his lips while the rest of his body remained as immobile as a marble statue.
The old man tossed his cigarette into the parking lot, turned, and walked into the gloom. Miles understood that he was to follow. He did not want to do so, was afraid of the man and the shack and the darkness, but he had no willpower of his own, and he obediently fell in step behind the retreating figure.
Inside, the shack was big, much larger than was possible given the confines of its outer structure. The old man led him through a debris-filled room to a table atop which was a lit kerosene lamp and a woman's head in a clear cookie jar. Sliced fruit lay at the bottom of the glass container-oranges, peaches, pears-and the head rested upon the slices, bloodless tendons and string-like veins hanging over the clean edges of the skinless fruit. The man picked up an old rusty spoon and used it to sprinkle sugar into the jar from one of two small saucers on the table. He put in another spoonful of mint leaves from the other saucer, and turned to Miles. "It keeps the head fresh," he explained. His voice was high and cracked, not at all what Miles would have expected. Miles nodded, not knowing how else to respond.
The man picked up the kerosene lamp, walking through another open doorway into a room that looked nearly as big as Dodger Stadium itself.
The flickering light illuminated only the small area immediately surrounding them. Strewn about the dirt floor were naked porcelain dolls with painted breasts and pubic hair. Miles followed the old cowboy past the dolls, stopping before a massive opening in the earth.