Ashley Bell: A Novel (23 page)

Bibi would make no assumptions about her mom and dad, neither about their interest in the occult nor anything else. She loved them and she trusted them. The silver bowl, the lettered tiles, and the blood evidence could not possibly mean what they seemed to mean. She pushed it all to the back of her mind, until some simple explanation asserted itself, which was sure to happen, some sudden understanding that presented an entirely different interpretation of the facts, some answer so blazingly obvious that she would feel stupid for not having grasped it immediately upon finding the items in the bathroom.

Exhausted after an eventful day, she got a cold bottle of beer from the office refrigerator and sat in an armchair. Maybe the beer would chill her in the good sense of the word and help her catch a few hours of sleep.

Having stopped speculating about Nancy and Murphy, she brooded now about the person whose life she was supposed to save as payment for her cancer going into remission. She repeatedly reviewed what Terezin had said on the phone. His confidence that he would kill Bibi before she got close to Ashley did not come solely from his assessment of Bibi as an easy target. The logical thing to infer was that he knew Ashley Bell’s whereabouts, and therefore he knew how hard it would be for Bibi to find her. Which seemed to point to one of two possibilities. First, maybe Ashley Bell was one of them, one of the Wrong People, and capable of using paranormal means to remain hidden if she did not want to be found. Second, and more likely, she was their prisoner, held for the usual wicked reasons…or for some purpose uniquely horrifying. If that proved to be the case, Bibi would have to descend through several levels of their homemade Hell to free her.

To free her.

To save Ashley Bell.

At her kitchen table with Calida, Bibi had insisted that she possessed neither the passion nor the skills to become the comic-book rescuer of people she didn’t even know. Yet now she contemplated that very task. Something had changed. Not necessarily for the better. Perhaps she hadn’t gained confidence in her skills, hadn’t discovered in herself a greater depth of courage than she had believed existed; perhaps instead she was finding it easier to accept unreason than to resist it.

She set the empty beer bottle on the small round table beside the armchair and closed her eyes. Fatigued to the point at which the mere idea of lifting her arms from the arms of the chair was itself physically tiring, she nevertheless doubted that she would sleep. Her tumbling thoughts had no capacity for exhaustion. From as far back as she could remember, she had been the girl whose mind was always spinning. In sleep, of course, that mental wheel still turned, and it spun forth a thread of dreams….

If the tall robed-and-hooded figures appeared in her dreams that night, they were among presences and occurrences that she didn’t later remember. The sheet-wrapped corpse that played supporting roles in her occasional nightmares, that clearly wanted to be center stage, sat now in several scenes in different places, prevented by its bound condition from a more active performance. Its immobility was curious, considering that anything should be possible in a dream; the cadaver could have split out of its cocoon at the whim of the dreamer’s mind, could have shown its face and wounds as it capered or threatened or strode the stage in a solemn soliloquy. Instead, it appeared in her hospital room as it had been before, in a chair near the window, its shroud colored by a blazing sunset, and it spoke through its fabric mask:
“The forms…the forms…things unknown.”
Or it sat beside her on the wicker sofa, on the bungalow porch, struggling unsuccessfully to press a hand through the cotton sheeting to touch her, whispering,
“…supreme master…”
and
“…must be truth…”
and
“…nothing…nothing at all….”
Or she opened a door and found the wrapped corpse standing at the threshold as it said,
“…forces of nature….”

As weary as Bibi was, slumped there in the office armchair, her encounters with the corpse were not fearsome enough to break the hold of sleep. But later, a more harrowing nightmare had its way with her, more harrowing because it was more than just a dream….

She is young, not quite six, alone in her bed, where night presses at the bungalow windows. The only light is dim and largely confined to that farther corner of the room where a Mickey Mouse night-light has been plugged in to a wall outlet. Bibi is a small child, but not afraid of the dark. She has been as much embarrassed as amused by Mickey glowing over there in his yellow shoes and red pants, with his big silly smile. Her parents bought the little five-watt lamp a week earlier because they decided that all children needed reassurance in the dark. Well, Bibi is a child, but not a baby. She is so done with being a baby. Stupid Mickey watching over her is like being told she is still a baby and always will be a baby. Some nights she gets out of bed and unplugs the stupid glowing mouse. She doesn’t want to hurt her parents’ feelings. They mean well. Which is why she hasn’t thrown Mickey away or put him in the bathroom where maybe he wouldn’t upset her so much. She really, really, really doesn’t want him here. Until
this
night. Now she is grateful that she is not in total darkness.

She lies on her back in bed, the covers pulled up to her chin, listening intently, waiting for the thing to move. From time to time, it crawls or creeps, or slides, or does whatever the heck it does to get around. But then it goes quiet for a while, as if it’s thinking what to do next, thinking about what it wants and how to get it. This has been going on for more than an hour.

Earlier, before the bad thing started to happen, there were the voices and music of the TV, turned low in the living room, which had been nice. If there were those sounds now, Bibi would feel much braver than she does. But the house is quiet, so that when the thing decides to start moving again, there is nothing else she can listen to other than the little noises it makes. This wouldn’t be so bad if it were a mouse like Mickey, scurrying around, making mouse sounds. Then she would get out of bed and try to win its trust, catch it gently and carry it outside to let it go free. Mouse sounds were cute, and a mouse would be scared, not dangerous, just frightened. This is not a mouse, however, and she doesn’t think it is afraid.

She doesn’t want to scream or call for help. That is total baby behavior. And if her mom and dad come running, maybe they won’t find anything. Then they will tease her forever and ever. Something is here in the bedroom with her, for sure, but maybe only she can see and hear it. That’s how it sometimes is in stories and on TV. And there is another worry. Maybe her parents
will
see and hear it. And maybe it will hurt them. If it hurts them, that will be Bibi’s fault. Instead of screaming, she wishes the thing away, and every time it becomes quiet, she thinks it is gone. But it is not gone. Aunt Edith, who sometimes visits from Arizona, says if wishes were fishes, no one would go hungry, but Bibi wishes anyway, uselessly, hopelessly.

In addition to wishing the terrible thing away, she wishes that the captain already lived in the apartment above the garage, so she could run to him and get his help. He won’t move in for a long time, until two weeks after her sixth birthday. She hasn’t met him yet. She doesn’t even know the captain exists. But dreams have no respect for the proper order of past, present, and future. As she dreams of the very young Bibi, adult Bibi would love nothing better than to have the captain in her present-day life as well as in her life on this long-past night of terror in her bungalow room.

When next the quiet ends, she hears the thing questing along a wall. The distinctive rattle of the cord from the nightstand lamp suggests that it is finding its way to her. She turns her head to the right, dreading that she will see the thing ascend into view, hardly more than two feet from her face. But the lamp cord ceases rattling between wall and nightstand, as the thing explores farther. This time, when it falls silent, it is without doubt under her bed.

If she wanted to scream now, she could not. She breathes, but has no breath to cry out. If she wanted to run, she could not. Her heart beats fast and hard, she is vital and acutely alive, it beats fast then faster, hard then harder, but it beats her into a strange submission, a kind of paralysis, in which the cardiac lub-dub sounds to her like two words relentlessly repeated: my fault, my fault, my fault….

Quiet pools throughout the bungalow bedroom. The quiet is a drowning weight, fathoms of ocean pressing down. A deep stillness heavy with expectation, in which Bibi can almost hear the thing’s thoughts, its needing and wanting and feverish scheming.

Perhaps its silent progress was a matter of stealth or maybe the blankets muffled what sounds it made, for she didn’t realize that it was in bed with her until, under the covers, it touched her left foot.

Bibi erupted from the office armchair, flung to her feet by the touch of the malignant creature in the dream. Wild-eyed, gasping, she looked around, half expecting to see dream and reality become one and herself no longer alone or safe. She was cold to her bones and so emotionally wrung out that she felt hollow.

The reason for the nightmare’s singular effect did not escape her. Of all her dreams, this was the only one that was also a memory. Although she had long forgotten, she remembered now that she had been there for real, in that place and on that night—and the crawling thing she so feared had been there, too.

Paxton expected a medium-lift helicopter with a two-man crew to extract them. When the monster Sea Dragon clattered down the sky and landed west of the town—no street was wide enough to accommodate its seventy-nine-foot-diameter rotor—he realized that new orders had modified the mission. He and his guys arrived in the meadow as the last of the three big turboshaft engines died, the rotary wing wheezed to a stop, and the final flush of downdraft threw dust and chaff in their faces.

In addition to two pilots and an aircrewman, the helo carried two demolition specialists, two search-and-rescue specialists, four Marines to defend the craft when it was on the ground, and a ton of equipment.

Marines were always welcome, even if their presence meant that a firefight previously thought unlikely might now be expected. Most concerning was that the Sea Dragon, used primarily for mine-sweeping operations, was dressed for assault-support with a ramp-mounted GAU-21 .50-caliber machine gun.

Marine Corporal Ned Sivert, with a straightforward manner and an amused contempt for standard-issue politicians, which had been raised into him in Heflin, Alabama, succinctly explained the new situation: “Some shit-for-brains White House aide, lookin’ for glory, leaked just enough so the local drag-ass military could decide to ride in here and make themselves an incident if they want to bad enough.”

“Then we should get out twice as fast,” Pax said.

“Yessir, you’d think so. But some plainclothes general in the West Wing now wants al-Ghazali’s body, not just a smidge of DNA and a picture for the scrapbook. Fact is, he wants all seven bodies.”

“At the last minute? Why?”

“I never ask why of my betters. They might tell me, and I might see as how I’m workin’ for even bigger fools than I thought.”

Among the equipment on the helo were two gas-powered portable generators, compressors, hydraulic jacks, and large inflatable bags of tough material that could lift thousand-pound slabs of concrete rubble.

“We’ll be going home in a flying morgue,” Pax said.

Gibb, whose mother sometimes saw his father’s spirit lingering around their property in Georgia, who himself believed in ghosts and hauntings, said, “No big deal, Pax. Valiant boys like us don’t spook easy.”

Pax smiled. “Valiant boys never spook. They do the spooking.”

“Won’t always be true,” Gibb said. “But mostly.”