CHAPTER 19
The sea calls to me.
The lighthouse is my
sanctuary in God’s mansion of many rooms.
I belong at the
lighthouse, and my soul flies there even when I am not able. But
now it is guarded closely by the robotic members of the sheriff’s
department. Guarded against me. Yet, it is my place to stand at the
edge of the world. My place on the small island where the
lighthouse stands, an island accessed only by boat or the arched
pedestrian bridge available at low tide whose braces and beams have
been worm-eaten and waterworn, condemning it for public
use.
This has always worked
in my favor, but even I cannot reach it now.
Until I find a way to
shake loose those who would capture me. Evade them. Misdirect them.
Send them away.
My mission cannot fail
this time. I will get them all. All those blond, vile witches with
their taunting, smirking lips and their condescending blue eyes.
Fling their black souls into the dark pit where there is no escape.
Leave them forever. I smile when I contemplate their
misery.
“Well deserved,” I
whisper and realize I’ve been caught in my own fantasy. Driving by
rote. With a start, I drive by the entrance to the lighthouse, a
worn track that is weed-choked down the middle. I can see the dark
hump of the patrol car. A man is smoking inside. He is bored.
Waiting. Cursing this detail that has forced him to sit while
others frantically seek me like dogs chasing their own tails.
Another one sits beside him, hat down low over his eyes. Or is it a
woman? I can’t tell, but I mustn’t slow down and
stare.
If I must, I will kill
the deputies inside the vehicle, but I will need to lure them away
first.
First . .
.
I glance at the dead
woman beside me. She is a nuisance, but I need her
vehicle.
I have people to
meet.
Her head lolls forward,
and I push her cheek to the passenger side window. She looks
asleep.
Justice . . .
My name hurtles through
the atmosphere.
What! I gasp.
Justice. The sound rings in my ears, deafening,
stunning.
She is calling
me?
No . . . never! But
there it is again. Jusssstice! shivers
through the air, a hissing sibilant sound, as if she is mocking
me.
“Bitch!” I yell,
jerking on the wheel, my view out of the windshield lost as her
face fills my mind. I nearly drive into the oncoming
lane.
“Satan’s whore!” I
shout aloud, wrenching the wheel.
Come and get me, you
bastard.
Abruptly I pull to the
side of the road, wrenching the wheel, spraying gravel as the
vehicle slides into the shoulder. A horn blasts behind me, and the
driver of a pickup with monster wheels, the cab jacked to the sky,
throws up a middle finger.
My companion keels
forward and nearly slides to the floor, but I hold her in place
with a hand that fills me with rage when I see it
quiver.
With
fear?
Never!
Just a seething,
burning rage. Oh, this one who’s called me is destined for the
flames of hell!
Lorelei. Her face comes
to me again as the car shudders to a stop and the mist rises in the
surrounding forest. How she needs to be tortured.
Burned.
But then they all must
be destroyed, I think again. All of them, burned . . .
burned.
“I will rip your black
heart from your chest, bitch!” I say it aloud as I toss it into the
airwaves, forcing it into her mind.
No sound. No ripple. No
word.
She is afraid now. I
feel myself smile in the gloom of the obscuring fog. She is
pregnant, and the last one outside.
The easiest to
smell.
The easiest to
find.
The easiest to
kill.
A new surge of
adrenaline races through my bloodstream. Soon . . . I will find her
soon. . . . New confidence fills my soul.
“Lorelei,” I say again,
sending the message through the dark corridor that reaches into her
mind. “I am coming.”
Laura’s face was white as chalk as she
sat at her kitchen table, across from Harrison, her eyes focused
somewhere in the middle distance.
Jesus, what had he done to her?
Suggesting she call a madman.
“Laura!” He reached across the tabletop
for her hand.
Her fingers were cold as
ice.
Hell!
“Laura!”
She didn’t respond. She was there in
the room, but her mind, maybe even her soul, was definitely
somewhere else. He’d half laughed at her insistence that she and
Justice could communicate, but now he had a glimmer of something he
didn’t understand, thought there was something to her
claims.
This wasn’t right.
“Lorelei,” he said, squeezing lifeless
fingers with his own. “Okay, you win. You’re scaring
me.”
Nothing.
“Laura!” He was on his feet now,
rounding the table.
She came back with a sharp gasping
inhale of breath, tears filling her eyes. “Oh, God . .
.”
“You okay?” he asked, not liking the
fear that was inching up his spine. What the hell had just
happened? “Jesus. You really had me going.”
“After today . . . I . . . I almost
forgot how evil Justice is.” Her shoulders sagged and she closed
her eyes tightly, only to blink them open.
“After today?” He frowned.
“Being with you in Seaside was . . .”
She stopped herself for a moment, then let out a long breath.
Finally, her eyes were clear again, warmth returning to her
fingers. “Being in your world, even with its own dangers, was . . .
I don’t know . . . a relief.” Her eyes searched his as she looked
up at him. “It was . . . normal, I guess, in its way. Teenagers
seeking a thrill, or revenge, high drama, whatever, but this . . .
it’s really vile.”
“So, you . . . reached him?” Harrison
asked, dropping her hand but still standing over her. She made a
sound of acquiescence that was almost a sob. She was having trouble
talking to him, and though Harrison understood she was emotionally
wrenched, he needed to know what had happened in those few moments
when she was staring blankly into space. “And?”
“I challenged him,” she said in a small
voice. “I told him to come and get me.”
“Oh, for the love of God.”
“Isn’t that what you
wanted?”
“I want us, make that me and the
police, to find him. I didn’t want to put you in harm’s
way.”
“I’m already there,” she admitted. “You
had nothing to do with it. Calling to him might have forced the
issue, but trust me, it was already there.” Her lips twisted wryly.
“At least it gave him a little of his own back.”
“So he responded?”
“Oh, yeah. He responded.” Her smile
fell away. “He said . . . and I quote”—her voice lowered—“ ‘I will
rip your black heart from your chest, bitch.’ ”
Christ!
Harrison nearly recoiled. Her voice
wasn’t her own. It sounded nothing like Laura herself, and he could
almost be swept up in this strange scenario where Laura and her ilk
apparently talked to each other without speaking.
When she looked up at him almost coyly,
he wondered if he was seeing Lorelei or one of the others, even
Justice himself.
He’d pretended to believe. Hell, he
kinda wanted to. He liked Lorelei. A lot. He could imagine sleeping
with her, being with her, maybe even loving her a
little.
But he couldn’t quite make that leap
into believing in this communication. Yes, she feared Justice and
she had reason to, since she was part of the cult family, but
really? Mental communication? Couldn’t it just be more a form of
fear and suggestion?
I will rip your black
heart from your chest, bitch.
No, this was real. At least to
her.
“I just shut myself off then,” she
said, unaware of Harrison’s inner dialogue, her face relaxing into
that of the woman he found so fascinating. “But it’s clear he got
the message, and now . . . he’s going to come straight for me.” She
said it with surprising calm, as if she were finally ready for the
showdown she’d expected all her life.
“He has to find you first,” Harrison
reminded firmly.
“He knows where I am. He can sense
me.”
“Sensing someone and really knowing
where they are, are two separate things, right?”
“Not with Justice.”
“Well, I’m not leaving you alone, in
any case,” he stated positively, even though a rational part of
him, the journalist in his soul, still said this was some weird,
dark fantasy brought on by Justice Turnbull’s escape. Nonetheless,
Laura believed it. “Look, I’ll be your bodyguard, for better or
worse. I can’t believe I’m going to say this, but maybe we should
call the sheriff’s department and talk to them.”
Laura looked at the clock, and Harrison
noted it was going on eleven. “I’ve got work tomorrow,” she said,
practical again. “I don’t want to call the police and make this
night any longer.”
“You have work in the afternoon,” he
reminded her. “See. I listen.”
“I’m not calling them tonight and
trying to explain this thing I’ve got with Justice. They’d talk to
me for hours, then chalk me up as just one more of the . . . Let’s
see, the kind word for it would be ‘eccentric’ women of Siren Song.
Not a lot of people know I’m from there, and I’d like to keep it
that way for as long as I can.”
“That’s going to be
impossible.”
“I know, but I’m dead on my feet.
Really. No police. Not tonight.”
Her face had regained most of its
color, and he recognized the stubborn set of her chin. She had a
faint resemblance to his niece, Didi, at that moment, and he felt a
stab of protectiveness meant for both of them.
“Okay,” he said.
Laura got up from the table and seemed
lost on how to proceed. After a moment, she stuck out her hand.
“Well, then, good night . . . Mr. Frost.”
“Mr. Frost. Really?”
She looked away, and he could almost
swear she almost smiled. “Harrison,” she said, scraping her chair
back and getting to her feet.
“Good night, Lorelei.”
“You know, no one calls me that except
my family.”
As she stood in profile, her hair
sweeping her shoulders, her full lips curving into a shadow of a
smile, he was reminded of their kiss. Oh, he knew she’d looked at
him, and he suspected she wondered if he wasn’t affected somewhat.
The truth was, yes.
And he wanted to kiss her again. Right
now.
“I like Lorelei,” he said, both of them
aware of the double meaning.
He half reached for her again, but she
was already moving away, toward the bedroom. “There are blankets
and a pillow on the couch,” she said, her voice drifting toward
him. “Help yourself.”
He took one step after her, toward the
bedroom, then thought better of it. What the hell had he gotten
himself into?
Justice pulled into the parking lot of
the nursing home, gazing at all the blank windows that faced into
the night. Most of the lights were off. It was after 10:00 p.m. and
the patients, those he thought of as inmates, were
asleep.
He sat in the car for long minutes,
still reeling a bit from the challenge that slithery bitch had sent
him. Lorelei . . . oh, he knew her well. She could block him at
will, but he could always find a way back in. She was the one he
could communicate with the easiest, for reasons he didn’t fully
understand or care about. It just was.
And now that she had the filth growing
inside her, he could smell her. Over the damp scent of the
surrounding forest and a hint of wood smoke.
His sense of smell was
refined.
His nostrils twitched. He could almost
pinpoint her. Somewhere to his south. Close to the
sea.
Nearby.
But first . . .
He flexed his gloved hands on the
wheel, then started to slide from the car. Suddenly he felt eyes on
him. Prying, searching eyes! He froze, his gaze delving into the
darker shadows along the building’s perimeter. Something by the
north side? Something crouching? Something human?
He waited, senses
heightened.
No one.
Nothing.
The bitch had really gotten to him, and
it was a new, and unpleasant, experience. Pushing the driver’s door
open, he glanced back and got a distinct shock. His companion’s
eyes were open, and she was staring straight at him!
Alive?
A strange terror welled inside him. He
stayed frozen, stock-still, rooted in place.
A slight rise and fall to her
chest.
How had he missed
it?
Moisture glinted in her eyes from the
illumination off the security lights.
Justice stared at her until his own
eyeballs were dry and burning, yet she didn’t move, didn’t so much
as blink as much as he did.
Alive, but not by much.
He calmed down immediately; she could
not hurt him. She was mere breaths from oblivion. Still, she
represented a problem.
As he considered throwing her body into
the bushes that ran from tended to wild as they fanned out from the
sides of the building, an answer presented itself. An older model
Ford Taurus wobbled up the drive and slid to a stop beneath the
portico that was the front of Seagull Pointe. A gentleman wearing a
gray fedora and overcoat climbed out and walked heavily toward the
doors. There he punched out a code onto the keypad. His efforts
failed him, and after a moment he pushed the bell beside the pad
several times in a row, stabbing at the thing in frustration.
Finally, a heavyset woman in purple stretch pants and a printed top
came to the doors. She pressed a button on the inside, which slid
the doors open.
“What’s that code?” he growled,
standing outside, refusing to enter.
“You can come in, Gerald,” she
invited.
“What’s that damn code?”
“Two-one two-one. We changed it last
month, remember?”
Instead of entering, he jammed his
finger at the button again, which closed the doors, leaving her on
the inside and him on the out. With a huge sigh that Justice could
see, she pressed the button one more time and the doors reopened.
Only then did the older man deign to walk inside.
Just within the double doors sat
several wheelchairs. Justice noted them as Gerald and the woman
moved from the glass-fronted reception area and out of sight. A
moment later he climbed from the car, then strode, head bent,
toward the entry doors, sliding a look around the building. There
were no security cameras, as far as he could tell. Seagull Pointe
looked as if it had been built fifty years earlier and hadn’t done
much in the way of upgrading. It was a low, cinder-brick building,
painted white, with jutting wings that had probably been added on
as need be.
Touching in the code, Justice waited
impatiently as the doors slid open again. He quickly grabbed one of
the wheelchairs, then raced it outside to his Nissan compact.
Opening the passenger door, he lifted his companion’s lax body into
his arms; her head lolled toward him, and she glared at him with
that fixed stare.
He barely noticed. What had bothered
him earlier no longer did. Situating her in the wheelchair, he then
pushed her back toward the building, feeling as if unseen eyes were
watching him. Shaking that off, he punched in the code once again
and entered with no fanfare. He could hear faint noise emanating
from down one hallway, a television, and he avoided that direction,
turning to the right.
To his happy surprise the rooms had not
only numbers but names listed on plaques outside their doors. It
took less than three minutes to find Madeline Turnbull, and he
wheeled his companion’s chair into the darkened room, letting his
eyes adjust to the dim light.
The old hag herself lay in the bed,
eyes pointed toward the ceiling, as if she were praying to the Lord
himself.
“Mother,” he snarled.
The eyes blinked but didn’t stop their
staring upward.
He wanted to gouge them out! Was
consumed with the thought. His fingers flexed. But then his
sensitive nose caught the whiff of death. She was almost gone,
too.
Almost of their own volition, his
gloved hands moved upward and he stepped toward her. His hands were
claws but they aimed for her throat, not her eyes. Suddenly those
eyes opened and snapped sideways. Gleaming in the light from the
window. She cackled, a noise that rattled in her chest and shook
her frame. “You are doomed,” she whispered on an exhale of
breath.
“Shut up, whore!” he
hissed.
“You are the
true devil’s spawn.”
“Shut
up!”
“You know it. He’s inside you,” she
said with relish. “You . . .”
His hands clamped lightly on her
throat. He wanted a knife. Needed a knife. Needed to cut her dead! Or burn her. Watch her flesh turn black
and melt!
“Burn in hell!” he cried
softly.
“Are . . . doomed . . .” The words were
more mouthed than spoken, but he heard them as if they echoed and
echoed through a canyon of granite, bouncing off ridges, gaining
strength, resounding, blasting his eardrums.
His hands shook, clamped lightly. He
wanted to squeeze with all his might. Tight. Tighter. Squeeze!
But no . . . he couldn’t. Didn’t want
his handprints on her throat. He needed time . . . a way to make
them think her death had occurred naturally . . . at least for him
to make his escape.
Yanking the pillow from beneath her
head, he placed it over her face and pressed down. Garbled noises
sounded. She thrashed around, one clawlike hand scrabbling at his
arm just where the other woman had scratched him. He pressed
harder. Harder!
Minutes later . . . she fought him with
more strength than he’d believed possible. Her thin body humping
upward, faint mewling noises sounding.
Slowly he surfaced. It felt like eons
had passed. There was pain in his cramped fingers from the grip of
the pillowcase crushed between his hands. Releasing his clutched
fingers was a superhuman effort.
He turned, breathing hard.
His companion in the wheelchair was
staring at him from her lopsided head. Was she smiling?
He raised his arm to backhand her with
all his strength just as her head dropped forward to her chest and
she exhaled a last breath. Staring at her a moment, he waited, but
this time she was truly gone.
He went back to the bed, removed the
pillow from the old hag’s face, and placed it under her head once
more.
His mother. Gone. Finally
gone.
For good.
Closing his eyes, he reached into the
netherworld, where thoughts moved like rivers.
I’m coming for you,
bitch.
You . .
.
Lorelei.