“Did you notice which way our friends went?” Devin asked Vickie.
She was doing the driving; that allowed Vickie to hold the map.
“You’re referring to Charlie Oakley, Robert Merton and Isaac Sherman, right?” Vickie asked in return. “They seem a strange trio, don’t they?”
“I guess. Robert and Charlie have known each other for years. I’m sure Robert is here because he’s worried about Charlie, who seems to believe that he has to pay for what happened all those years ago. And Isaac...well, he’s latched onto them. He wants justice. Not so sure they’re a trio—other than that happenstance has thrown them together.”
“They went to a blue car,” Vickie said. “Of course, that was hours ago. Who knows where they are now.”
“Right. When they got into the car, did they go north or south, east or west?”
“I didn’t notice,” she told Devin. “I think that Griffin wishes that they weren’t out exploring, though. I believe he and Rocky are seriously worried about people running around without anything like a real plan.”
“And they don’t even know that we expect another murder in about twenty-four hours, either,” Devin murmured.
“It is scary,” Vickie said. “Hey. Some of these peaks—that look like little hilly islands now!—appeared to have been pretty high once, long ago,” she murmured. “Devin, see that little road ahead? Take that.”
“It’s a dirt road. It isn’t real anymore, Vickie. It’s one of those roads that will end up in the water,” Devin said.
They’d been driving a long time; they’d stopped several times, surveying the landscape, going over what they had heard, what they knew and what they could theorize.
“I know—I think it goes to the water and ends there, or maybe becomes a path, though I don’t see any of the paths for bikers or hikers around there. In fact...” She paused, frowning, and looked over at Devin. “That area has warnings—heavy forests and danger from bears and other wildlife.”
“You want me to go to where there is no path?”
“I think there will be a path.”
“We’re not supposed to get out of the car.”
“We’re not going to get out of the car. But look. There’s a little crossroad there, and then the dirt road continues, goes into something like a forest path.” She paused. She wasn’t sure why, but when she looked ahead—through the depth of the forest around them—she could have sworn she was seeing the same path she had seen before, over and over again, in a dream.
“Devin, I just want to get up there. I think, from the end of that path, if we look to the right, there’s...something!”
“Something like what?”
“I’m not sure, but Alex was excited. He had been eager to see me the night he didn’t show up. He said he had something cool to tell me. Devin, I think that there’s a building here. A building on the old map and...wow.” Vickie paused and looked at Devin. “The current map we used is an ‘Earth’ map, showing true landmarks. The ‘true landmark’ sits right over an old landmark. A building of some kind. Buildings were supposedly torn down in this area!”
She fumbled in her bag to find the larger tablet she carried with her, swearing softly when she couldn’t get any internet service.
“What are you doing?”
“Trying to look up the old mental institution. Oh, it may be in the Nathaniel Alden book. I have that here, too.”
“We are in the middle of the woods! I can’t even get my phone to work. How are you expecting internet service?” Devin asked her.
“Hey! Satellites are way up above everything!”
To Vickie’s amazement, one of those satellites picked up their location.
She keyed in her coordinates and discovered with amazement and elation that she could connect to the internet.
Her fingers went still.
“Devin!”
“What?”
“There’s an abandoned building on the Earth-view map!” She set aside the tablet, picked up the old book and quickly flipped to a page she had marked. “It was supposedly torn down. Apparently, it never was. That’s what we’re seeing. It was recorded as destroyed on the day it was supposed to have been demolished, but there’s mention in this record that...doctors were still placing patients! Oh, whoa! Alex did make a discovery, but I think someone made that discovery before him.” She looked back at the map on the tablet. “The dirt road ends, but there’s a smaller path, which disappears as you get to the water. But the building...it was an insane asylum! The Mariana Institute for the Mentally Unfit. That’s what Alex wanted to tell me about—that’s why he’d been so silly and secretive.”
“It’s where he’s being held!” Devin said.
Devin had slowed to a stop as they reached the crossroad; she was looking over Vickie’s shoulder at the tablet, and the map that had been created as a combination of past and present.
Neither of them saw the truck coming.
They just started to look up, aware of the sound of wheels moving over the rough terrain...
And then Vickie saw the vehicle—and the face of the man in the passenger’s seat.
Then it broadsided them with tremendous speed and force, and sent their Jeep flying and flipping into the woods.
* * *
It was a different smell, one all its own, that clung to the long dead—better, of course, than the horror smell of certain stages of decay that curled even the strongest stomach.
And still...
That smell was all around the corpse of Brenda Noonan.
What had been left of her had been embalmed, but she’d been so ripped and torn by the time that she’d been found that she resembled a creature from a zombie flick.
Dr. Graves barely noticed.
He was looking for one thing.
“It’s possible, it’s possible,” he murmured, “but so unlikely... This tear, or these tears, the loss of tissue and flesh... Yes, that would have been forest creatures. Yes, and yes, but they happened after death, not before it. Some of them...vultures, crows, insects, other birds, some land creatures...they’re all waiting, all of the time. It can be difficult to tell...”
Griffin stood still, watching, not commenting.
Dr. Graves didn’t really want conversation right then. He was comparing the body to the chart in his hand, which was from the previous autopsy completed by the last medical examiner.
“Not that he was bad at his work!” Graves said, pausing to look at Griffin and Rocky. “He wasn’t looking for a wound on the throat, on the small bones, the way that I am!”
He turned his attention back to this work.
Griffin was glad that he did so.
Because he was suddenly aware of someone in the room with them.
Someone dead.
Rocky let out a small sound at his side; he tensed.
Yes, he saw her, too.
But he didn’t think that it was the spirit of the woman lying so horribly mutilated on the stainless-steel gurney before him.
There was just something too different about her.
She was tiny, for one. And her hair was long and blond, but there were delicate curls that just edged her face, reminiscent of a style from a period long, long ago.
Was she the woman Vickie saw? He didn’t know.
A tragic frown marred her beautiful face.
She definitely wanted his attention. He nodded to her, trying to let her know that he had to finish listening to Dr. Graves.
The medical examiner was still speaking, pointing out various aspects of the havoc created upon the body, and then he let out a guttural sound of both disgust and victory.
He’d found the telltale mark upon a piece of cervical spine.
Brenda Noonan’s throat had been slashed. Soft tissue was gone; the proof remained upon a tiny part of bone.
Griffin’s phone rang and he excused himself and answered it quickly.
It was Jackson Crow from headquarters.
“We’ve just gotten a call from the remote security and diagnostic car service the rental car agency uses. Vickie’s SUV was in an accident and they’re sending people out. The car was struck hard enough to flip and roll. We can’t reach Vickie or Devin,” Jackson said. “You need to get out to—”
Griffin wasn’t listening anymore; he could see that Rocky had also gotten a message and was already heading out the door.
Griffin barely explained to Dr. Graves.
“We have coordinates,” Rocky said. “I’ve got the directions on my phone.”
“How the hell do you go fast enough, or make the kind of mistake on roads like this, to flip and then roll?” Griffin asked.
He and Rocky looked at one another.
“You don’t!” they said at once.
* * *
Vickie never blacked out, not for a single moment. The air bags, however, were blinding at first, and she was so shocked that she was momentarily paralyzed, trying desperately to comprehend what had happened.
“Devin!” she murmured, struggling to reach for something sharp—anything to extract herself.
Then, just as suddenly as it had inflated, the air bag deflated.
So did Devin’s.
Her friend, however, was unconscious.
“Devin, Devin!” she called.
She realized that they were still upside down. She extricated herself from her seat belt carefully, and then reached for Devin’s wrist. There was no blood on her anywhere, and she had a pulse.
She had to get her out of the car.
That was the plan! They had been hit on purpose; someone was coming to get them!
The gun.
Devin carried a gun. She needed to find it.
She tried to find the hook on Devin’s seat belt. Even as Vickie grabbed for the buckle, Devin’s eyes opened. She blinked, then focused on Vickie. “Get out of here!” she told her. “Get away—fast! Rocky and Griffin will be on their way. Find them. Get out of here now. I can hear someone coming!”
People were coming.
Vickie could hear voices. And movement. The people who had caused the crash were coming through the woods.
“I’ll get myself out—you go!” Devin told her. “Go, hide. The car has a GPS system thing on it that notifies the rental office of a crash—our people will come. Hide, now!”
“I can’t leave you—”
“Yes, you can! Go! I’ll be all right. You won’t be! Move! Go now! I’m stuck. My belt is stuck. I’ll get out, and then I’ll be running like crazy, somewhere behind you. But now...go!”
“You’re bleeding!” Vickie told Devin.
“Just flesh wounds, honestly. I swear. I’m begging you—go!”
Agonized and torn, Vickie finally realized that Devin would be better off alone—she’d only have herself to worry about, not an unarmed civilian, as well.
She unclipped her own belt and let herself fall. The voices were coming closer and closer.
Shimmying through the crushed window, she made it out of the car.
“Go! I’ll be close behind you. Get away from the car!” Devin urged her.
Away from the car, yes! Those who had hit them would be there within seconds. Help would not be so nearly close behind.
Vickie ran, hard.
Deep, deep into the trees, into the forest, into a maze of green darkness.
* * *
Griffin could see the wreck from a distance as they approached a crossroad.
One vehicle—a truck with its front end crushed in—was off on the side of the narrow road. It must have slammed into the Jeep.
The Jeep was far ahead down the road; it had been struck with such force that it had flipped and flown and landed a good distance away. Griffin had no intention of stopping by the truck; he didn’t look. He didn’t have to.
Rocky verified what Griffin expected.
“Empty.”
Griffin slammed the gas pedal, maneuvering around the truck. There was another car on the road ahead of them.
The blue sedan that had been driven by Robert Merton and carried Isaac Sherman and Charlie Oakley was stopped just behind the nearly crushed, upside-down Jeep.
He pulled alongside the vacant vehicle, aware that as he did so someone was moving off into the woods.
He’d barely put the car in Park before he and Rocky were out of their vehicle, racing for the Jeep.
By then, he heard a siren in the distance, as well.
He quickly saw that there was no one in the passenger’s seat; Devin Lyle, covered with blood and glass, was emerging from the hole left by the broken windshield, which was flush with the road.
Rocky was on his knees, screaming Devin’s name as he helped her out.
“I’m fine!” she cried. “Superficial...these are superficial. The crash was on purpose—they came at the car. They would have... I don’t know...”
Rocky was holding her.
“Where’s Vickie?” Griffin demanded. His voice was thick; his head was ringing. “They have her...oh, God! They have her—”
“No!” Devin told him. “No, she ran. A while ago. I was stuck in my seat belt. She’s in the woods. But she found it—she found something at least, their hideout—right before we were hit. We have to find it. She’s going to go there, Griffin—I know she will. She’s going to try to figure out a way to free Alex. I know it.”
Griffin spun around, his gaze desperately searching through the trees for any sign of movement, a clue to which direction Vickie might have gone. He pulled his phone out. Wendell Harper answered on the first ring.
“Vickie is out in the woods—running. Devin has a possible location on the cult hideout. Get me every officer you have. Whatever is going down, it’s happening now. We have to find Vickie. Please. We have to find her.”
“I know where you are. We’re on our way. We’ll tear the forest to shreds.”
Griffin hung up. He closed his eyes. He could hear Rocky talking to Devin; she’d seen Robert Merton and Isaac Sherman arrive. They had followed the horrible sound of the crash that had echoed all over the forest. But whoever had been driving the truck was already gone; the men had chased them into the trees.
He had to concentrate. Concentrate on Vickie.
And he saw...he thought he saw...
The blonde woman was there again, the very beautiful blonde. She was leading him along the path, the path that Vickie had followed in her dreams. He recognized the path because she had described it so vividly.
He heard a scream.
He saw an inverted cross ahead in a clearing; the woman had been hung upon the cross, and blood streamed from her down to the earth—it was everywhere.
But there was more. There was something behind the inverted cross. It seemed to grow, find substance, as he stared at it...
There were suddenly words. Words that had been written into the earth.
Satan is coming!
Was Satan coming?
Or was Satan already there?
“Griffin!”
Devin was in front of him; she had her hands on either side of his face. Her eyes were on his. “Griffin, listen. Vickie found a building with the maps. It shouldn’t be there—it was supposedly torn down. It’s at the end of the path that leads from this road once it peters out. It was an old insane asylum. She’s—”
“Gone there!” He grabbed Devin by the cheeks and pulled her close, planting a kiss on her forehead.
“Wait!” Devin cried. “Griffin, I think we saw... Hanson. He was in the passenger’s side of the truck as it came at us.
“So she was right. It is him!” Griffin said. “I’ll find him. So help me, I’ll find him. If he was in the passenger’s seat, who was driving?”
“I don’t know what I saw,” Devin said.
“What do you mean? Who was driving?”
“Satan,” she told him. “Someone with a giant ram’s head and a red hood.”
Griffin looked at her and nodded.
And then he began to run.
They would be right behind him—he trusted Rocky to have his back.
“Griffin!” Rocky cried. “When we reach it—”
“We figure out how to go from there!” Griffin said.
* * *
Vickie wished that she’d been a Girl Scout.
She hadn’t been.
It wasn’t that she’d never been hiking or never been in the woods, but she was from Boston.
She was a city girl.
The forest was ridiculously thick. When she looked up, she realized that, to make matters much worse, it seemed that the afternoon was waning. The morning had disappeared while they had been digging up Brenda Noonan.
And then they had driven and searched, and...
She prayed that Devin was all right, and she kept running.
It was strange; when she had been in the car, she had known where she was—according to the map at least.
And she had known where she was going, and why. Now, out of the car, having run so hard and so fast, she wasn’t at all sure of where she was. She stopped, breathing desperately, not even sure of which direction she had come from. The good thing was that she had evaded whoever had been coming to the car; she was far ahead of them.
That made her worry about Devin again.
But Devin was trained. Devin was smart.
And how long had it been? Surely help had come. Devin would be fine.
If the cult members hadn’t gotten to her first.
She stopped suddenly, her heart beating at what seemed like a million miles an hour, as she heard voices.
Two voices... They belonged to two women. The women were walking along what seemed to be a path, and it was near her.
Vickie ducked low into the bushes next to a heavy oak with thick branches.
“He’ll kill us. We haven’t got her,” said the first. She had a soft voice. Straining to see, Vickie caught a glimpse of her. She couldn’t have been more than eighteen or nineteen. She was pretty, with sandy hair in a ponytail.
The girl at her side was a brunette of just about the same age.
“He won’t kill us, he’ll understand,” the brunette said.
“He wants her. It’s time. Victoria Preston. He said that the time is here, and he must have her. And he said that the first messenger failed. He needs her now. What will happen to us? Maybe...”
“Maybe what?” the brunette asked.
“Maybe we shouldn’t go back! I remember...”
“What? What?”
“I remember what it was like. Before. I mean... I had a life.”
“No, don’t forget, there is no going back,” the young brunette said worriedly. “We’ve turned our backs on God. We have given ourselves over to Satan. We can’t walk away. Carly, remember the things that we’ve...that we’ve seen?”
“Yes—things we’ve seen! I didn’t do any of it!” the girl named Carly said. “I was just...there. I was...scared. I’m scared now. We’ve failed! Darryl went to Boston and he...he failed. He didn’t come back. And Gloria went to Boston, and they said that she’s dead, too, that they killed her. They shot her down in the streets. Because she failed. Sarah, he’ll wonder why we didn’t punish ourselves. We failed. We are...done.”
“That’s not true at all! And we didn’t fail alone. The others are going to be back already. They’ll have explained what happened. Hey! We weren’t driving the truck. He was driving the truck, remember?”
He was driving the truck. The high priest? The man behind it all?
“We didn’t bring back the woman he wanted—we’ll be made to pay!” Carly said.
“Hey, we weren’t alone,” Sarah said. “We didn’t fail alone.”
“We’ve got to get back quickly. He’s going to drag out the messenger. He’s going to find Jehovah so that we may call upon the great master, Satan. We must—”
“You go back! I’m not going,” Carly said.
The two had stopped walking; they weren’t twenty feet away from Vickie.
“Carly, we’re almost there!” Sarah whispered. “Others could be watching us already.”
Almost there—almost where? Vickie tried to gauge where she was.
She was looking for a building that shouldn’t exist. The old insane asylum that wasn’t razed—because those who were supposed to have razed it had to wait, and it was written down as done.
The two stared at one another nervously, neither speaking for a minute. And then, suddenly, another voice, male and deep, broke through the forest.
“Help me!”
It was him—surely, it was him, Vickie thought.
Milton Hanson.
She’d seen his face so briefly—seen him sitting in the passenger’s side of the truck just a split second before the truck had broadsided the Jeep, sending her and Devin on a deadly roll.
He staggered toward the girls; blood was pouring from his forehead.
“Help me!” he cried again.
“No, no, oh, God, oh, no!” Sarah cried.
“Bitches! I’ll kill you!” Hanson roared.
Carly screamed; Sarah screamed. And the two were gone, racing away.
Milton Hanson came staggering on through the trees. And then Vickie realized that he saw her. He seemed to gain strength. There was a massive branch in his hand and he held it with a death grip. He was coming toward her, and he was going to bash her head in.
“There you are! You—there you are. God help me, I will make you pay!” he exclaimed.
She held no weapon; she wasn’t sure if she looked just as bloodied and torn apart herself.
She let out a cry; every bit of adrenaline in her came to the fore.
And she rushed toward him, using all her strength to shove him down. She was like a catapult, and when she hit him, it might have been comical. He staggered back and lost his grip of the branch. He went down as hard as a pile of bricks, his head cracking on a tree trunk as he fell.
He was out, she thought, looking at him. Out cold, like a prizefighter taken down with a surprise right hook to the jaw.
She gasped in a slew of air, stood over him a second and then looked for where the girls had gone.
Close, she was so close. She stepped over Milton. And there was a path. She went in the direction that the girls, Carly and Sarah, had gone.
It would lead, she was certain, to the old insane asylum. And once she was there, she would find Alex, and she would learn if Helena was, by any prayer, still alive.
She started to move. It wasn’t much of a path, but she could begin to make out the fact that it had been used often enough lately. It meandered through the rich growth of trees and seemed to elevate as she kept moving. At one time, she thought, she would have been leaving the valley below; she would have been heading up a slope.
Then suddenly, there was a break in the trees; an expanse appeared before her. Bushes and brush had grown about haphazardly, but she had reached what had once been a yard...some kind of a garden or a patio.
What had probably once been a garden table had been draped in black fabric and adorned with black candles. Around it, the trees, as well, had been dressed with skulls—from rams, or goats, she believed.
Real skulls.
Torches were stuck into the ground; fires burned already.
And on the stone garden table, shimmering in the torch light, was a knife. A large, curved knife.
A sacrificial knife!
Vickie held fast where she was, trying to judge where people were.
She was here! She had found it. And she was, of course, an idiot if she tried to go into any of the decaying buildings to find Alex or Helena on her own. She had to get back. If she could just find the road she had come from, Griffin and Rocky and a score of officers would be there.
She barely stopped herself from crying out as a door to the building opened, and people emerged.
They were wearing long red robes, and conical hats, and had red scarf-like face masks that fell from the hats, leaving nothing but their eyes visible. She couldn’t help but think that they resembled a flock of blood-drenched KKK members, the apparel was so similar—other than the color.
Two emerged from the building...
And then two more, dragging someone along behind them. Someone barely able to walk...
Alex!
For a moment she stood there, wishing that she’d gotten a branch and made sure that she’d bashed in Milton Hanson’s head. He was the leader here. And whatever he had planned was for tonight—not tomorrow night!
Hanson! He’d been coming out here...for how long? Years—thirty years? Would they find that they had been blind for too long, and that Hanson had been killing and killing and killing?
Well, she’d hit him pretty good. But his followers were all here, without him, getting ready...
Two more of the figures came out of the building. They were also in the crazy red costumes. And they were half leading, half carrying a woman. A blonde woman...
But not the woman from Vickie’s dreams.
Vickie didn’t know her, but she had seen her picture often enough.
It was Helena Matthews.
Vickie forced herself to remain still. The two were led out to the garden table.
The sacrificial table!
They were being forced down upon it.
Vickie’s breath caught in her throat. It wasn’t so much a matter of force. The two were so weak they obeyed. They needed help, even, to obey. They appeared to be half dead already.
Drugged? What was it?
Helena lay, faceup, in one direction. Alex lay, faceup, in the other. One of the red-cloaked thugs picked up the sacrificial knife.
Vickie’s heart seemed to stand still. She tried to tell herself that they were just being prepared for the rite.
The rite that couldn’t take place now, because Milton Hanson had gotten hurt. He wasn’t there to conduct the rite. They would just be prepping...
One of them was behind the altar. He had the knife, the giant knife.
Vickie had to do something. There wasn’t time to wait. She backed against the tree, trying to think, trying to breathe. And then one of the girls she had seen earlier stepped by her. She was making her own way through the trees, trying not to be seen.
It was the very scared one named Carly.
Vickie crept up behind her, praying that she had what it took to make her plan work.
She caught the girl from behind, forcefully grabbing her, a hand over her mouth.
“You failed your master, but you can live. Help is coming. The law is coming. You can survive. You have to get the hell out of here, do you hear me?”
The girl nodded, swallowing hard.
“They’ll come with guns, so you need to be far away. Take this trail, until you’re out—far, far from here. Do you understand me?”
“Yes.”
“First, I need one of those.” And Vickie pointed.
The girl nodded strenuously. Vickie eased her hold and Carly turned to her. “My...my cloak is in the building. You’re...you’re her. You’re the true messenger. You know where Jehovah is.”
“Yes, actually, I think I do,” Vickie said.
“You can’t go in. Everyone has seen pictures of you. I’ll... I’ll get a cloak.”
The girl was shaking.
Vickie knew that it could go either way.
The girl could bring her out a cloak.
Or she could bring all the cultists down upon her.
But she couldn’t wait. Alex and Helena already lay on a table.
“Get me a cloak. Please.”
She prayed that she knew what she was doing.