Bloodstone (16 page)

“Possession?”

“In a way. They controlled him, in an effort to get what they wanted.”

“And what do they want?”

“What they have always wanted,” the old woman said simply. “Life.”

Life?
It seemed such an obvious thing, and yet it was horrible to imagine; what did that say about the afterlife? That the dead spent eternity wishing they could return? “I can’t believe that,” she said. “I won’t believe it.”

“Then you are lost.” Annie sat down again in the chair, heavily, her age returning all at once. “We are all lost.”

“Someone told me recently that the future has been set, and that we are here only to carry out the plan. But I don’t believe it. If that’s true, then there’s no real sense going on, is there? I see myself changing things every day, altering what could have happened, changing a possible future into something new and different.”

“Do you?” The old woman seemed genuinely surprised. “Or are you willing to see that as part of the plan, as you call it? How do you know you weren’t supposed to change these things, that it was all preordained? And yet no one can see the future. We can only predict, and that is not always right. Little more than guesswork.” Annie smiled again, but this time it was a tired smile, creasing her face and bringing dead white spots to her cheeks. “Remember the past, Gloria Johnson. That is written in stone. Do not try so hard to forget, and you will do well.”

“You—how do you know my name?”

Annie shrugged. “There are things you would know about me, if you looked in the right places.”

For a moment, Angel let the thoughts come. But as she did, she felt a great rush of things crowding hungrily at her, and she tightened up to shut them out because of the way it made her feel. Dirty, violated. Like she was losing control.

Annie had reached out and touched her arm. “What I have seen is not clear. You and your friend will each have to make a choice, and from these choices you will either save us, or destroy us. You will not understand what that choice is, or the role you are to play, until the end. You must trust your instincts when the time comes. It may be very painful for you,
but you must do it
. Do you understand?”

“What else?”

“The boy, Ronnie’s son. Jeboriah Taylor. Even now he is succumbing to temptation. Do not let him make your choice for you. He will have his own struggle and his own demons. Much rests on the actions he takes, but not everything.”

“And Billy?”

“Ah, yes.” The old woman paused, looked away, as if studying something far out of sight. “You and he are close, eh? You have a special bond. William Smith has his own past to confront. He will come to understand things that will make him scream—but I do not think they will break him. He is stronger than he thinks.”

When she turned to look at Angel again, her eyes were softer, filled with something like compassion. “The past is a long, flowing river. Things may be swept up and carried far downstream, and surface again in the future. Too many people forget their history, and don’t know what to do when they face it again. You need to look into the past for the answers you seek, before they come looking for you.”

“If I knew what those mistakes were—”

“I am a weak woman, old, brittle. Perhaps once I would have been able to uncover it all.” She shrugged. “I will tell you this. The dead are dangerous. They are hungry, and they are reaching out for us. Do you understand? One of them has found a way to return to this world. A portal. You must find it and destroy it, or the dead will rise and claim us. This town and everyone in it will be lost. We will see hell on earth.”

And that was all. No matter what she said, she could not get Annie to speak again. The light had died in her eyes, and she seemed to withdraw into herself, once again becoming that crazy old woman who had approached them on the square. Or at least appearing to; Angel was not so sure it wasn’t all an act, put on to fool a disbelieving world.

The dead are reaching out for us
. When she climbed the stairs again, coming back up into the light, Angel remembered
that phrase, and it kept repeating over and over again in her head.

We will see hell on earth
.

She didn’t know what it meant, but it frightened her, more than anything else she had ever heard. She thought of dead flesh in the moonlight, swollen fingers groping across a black screen, and shivered.

In the stifling heat of mid-afternoon, Harry Stowe climbed the front steps of the Taylor house and paused by the door. All was quiet inside, and he wondered again, as he had a hundred times during the past few hours, whether he was doing the right thing. Surely Ruth had to be told of her grandson’s drinking. But was it his place to tell her? He wasn’t sure.

Harry Stowe did not consider himself one to meddle in other people’s business if he could help it—though, come to think of it, that was just what he had done with Billy Smith.
That was a special case
, he told himself.
Anyone could see
that man needed help
.

But what kind of help did he need? A job, certainly, and that Harry had given him. The morning’s work—Billy’s first on the job—had gone extremely well. Billy had a way with the high school kids, seemed able to talk to them better than Harry could, maybe because Billy seemed a little shy and awkward himself and could relate to them. They had spent the morning getting him acquainted with the clinic, then the kids had come in for their spring physicals, and suddenly it had been lunchtime. After that they had spent some time catching up on the paperwork. Yes, it had gone just fine.

Okay, so he had needed a job. What else?

That was an interesting question. Billy Smith was an odd duck, one of those people who always seemed to be hiding something deep inside. His eyes were deep and there was pain in them, so much so that Harry had found himself about to ask the same question time and time again; he had stopped himself before the words could come out. Billy would tell him about it when the time was right.

He needs a friend
.

Okay, that could be done. And Harry Stowe was damn well going to do it. He wasn’t sure why he felt so strongly, but he knew in his heart that Billy Smith was a decent man. He didn’t have these kinds of hunches too often, but when he did he was always right. And right now that was good enough for him.

That left only one other thing bothering him, besides his coming meeting with Ruth Taylor; the matter of the unidentified bones that had disappeared this morning from the clinic’s walk-in cooler. He had excavated the male remains from the unmarked grave with help from Bucky Tarr, and they had managed to get them out of the way in time for the reverend’s burial service, and also managed to move them, more or less intact, from the coffin to the clinic. He wasn’t sure he agreed with the sheriff’s decision to move them in the first place (disturbing a grave, even an old and unmarked one, was never a good thing to do), but he hadn’t said a word about it. He had found that dealings with Sheriff Pepper were best kept as short and painless as possible.

He had spent the next few days studying the bones and immediately made some odd discoveries. For one thing, unless he and Bucky Tarr had somehow disturbed the remains in the process of moving them (and he didn’t think they had), the bones just hadn’t been lying right in the grave. Either this mystery man had been beheaded and not put back together properly, or there had been some vandalism. As far as he could tell from the way the bones lay, the head had been turned around to face backwards in the coffin, and the hands had been severed and placed at the dead man’s feet.

So what? Maybe he was a thief, or a murderer. Maybe he
sinned against the church. Maybe he asked to be buried that
way. They had all sorts of strange rituals in those days
.

And yet, as he worked on them again yesterday and tried to get a fix on their age, alone in the empty, spacious cooler room, the strangest feeling had come over him. As if he were being watched. That was silly, of course. There was no one else in the building but him.

That’s how demons broke the necks of witches, you
know, when they had used up their usefulness. Turned their
heads completely around. And when they were found that
way the people didn’t burn the bodies, they cut off the
witches’ heads and kept them facedown in the coffin and
buried them in an unmarked grave. It was supposed to
keep them in the ground, where they belonged
. He didn’t know where he had picked up that charming little bit of folklore. Read it in a book somewhere, he figured, though he couldn’t remember exactly where. It didn’t really matter; he didn’t believe in that sort of crap. Of course, back then the people did believe in it, so maybe the mystery man in question had been accused of witchcraft. It was a place to start.

In all other matters he had been progressing quite quickly. He had pinned down the age of the male remains as somewhere around two hundred-fifty years (give or take thirty or forty), and the age at the time of death in the nineties or even a bit higher, which was extremely unusual for that time period. There was also evidence of slight deformities of the feet and hands. He thought that if he plowed through any town records remaining from the 1700s, he had a pretty good chance of putting a nametag on the unfortunate skeleton.

And then the “unfortunate skeleton” had up and walked away. Harry had gone into work early this morning, intent on cleaning things up a bit for Billy’s arrival, and when he checked the cooler the bones were gone. Who would go to
the trouble of stealing two hundred-fifty year old bones, he had no idea. Must have been some kind of nut who had gotten wind of the gruesome discovery. In any case, it raised a whole other can of worms; he would have to notify the sheriff of the theft, and forms would have to be filled out, etcetera, etcetera.

But now on to the business at hand, which he simply could not put off any longer. He took a deep breath, reached out and rang the doorbell.

A long, empty silence greeted him from inside.
Okay,
so nobody’s home. Fine. You didn’t really want to do this
anyway
.

He rang the bell again. This time there was a series of thumps, a crash, and a muffled oath from somewhere upstairs. More thumps, someone coming heavily and awkwardly down the stairs. The door opened a crack and Jeb Taylor blinked out at him through a pair of red-rimmed eyes. “Yeah?”

Stowe cleared his throat. “Is Ruth at home, Jeb? I wondered if I could speak with her.”

There was a moment of silence, as Jeb regarded him with what could only be called suspicious eyes. “She’s pretty out of it today, Doc. I…I don’t know if she wants to see anyone.”

“I’d like to talk with her just the same. Can you tell her I’m here?”

Jeb shrugged and disappeared, leaving Stowe standing on the doorstep. He waited. A minute passed, then another. Finally Jeb reappeared and motioned him inside without a word. They passed through a darkened hall, past stairs leading up into the gloom. The house smelled stale. Dust lay over everything.

Ruth was in the living room, wearing a knitted red sweater and heavy skirt in spite of the heat, sitting in a chair near one of the only open, unshuttered windows. Sunlight drifted across a face that was empty and slack. He moved
across the open floor as Jeb banged heavily back up the stairs behind him, leaving the two of them alone.

“Ruth? It’s Doctor Stowe, Ruth, Harry Stowe.”

Slowly her head turned to track him, but the eyes remained blank. “Norman? That you?”

He hesitated. “No, Ruth,” he said, crouching by her side, gently taking her hand in his. “Not this time, honey. Norman’s gone out for a while.”

“Oh, yes.” She sighed, seemingly relieved. “Would you like some tea?”

“Fine. I’ll make us some.”

“In the kitchen…”

He moved across the thin patch of sunlight and the faded red rug, past a series of boxes full of books by the bookcase, through an archway and into the dark kitchen. Fumbled around a moment in the gloom, found the lights, switched them on. Another minute or so to find the tea in the lower cupboard, and then he put the pot on to boil. Only then did he allow himself to get angry. The kitchen sink was filled with dirty dishes. The house was a shambles, dirty, depressing. The house needed light, fresh air, a new attitude, and Ruth needed care. Obviously, Jeb Taylor was in no shape to watch after her; he couldn’t even watch after himself.

The water hissed, rolled inside the kettle, finally began to shriek. He filled two cups, added some milk from the fridge, and carried them into the other room. Ruth hadn’t moved, and so he pulled a small table and a chair over next to her and sat down, wondering what to say. He couldn’t tell her what he had planned to tell her about Jeb, at least not while she was in her present state. What could she possibly do about it anyway? “Honey,” he said, “I’ve brought you some tea…”

This time when she turned to look at him her eyes were more focused. “I could have gotten that myself. Don’t you feel like you have to wait on me, Harry Stowe.”

He smiled. “Good to see you, Ruth.”

“Did you put milk in it?”

“I did.”

She picked up the cup in slightly shaky hands, took a sip and put it back down. “Don’t trust myself anymore. Likely to spill it right down my front.”

“You look good, Ruth.”

“Oh, don’t lie to me. I know how I look. Like an old woman.” She frowned, a little of the vagueness coming over her again. “I just can’t seem to keep my mind on things. The sun is so nice here, isn’t it?”

“It’s a good spot. But you ought to open this place up a bit. Have some fresh air.”

“Jeboriah likes it dark.” An odd expression flitted across her face, as if she had just tasted something bitter and was not quite sure whether to swallow or spit it out. “Dark is the way he lives. Always been that way. Like his father.”

“That’s one of the reasons I came, Ruth,” Stowe said. “I’m worried about him. He’s been…drinking a bit. Down at the old schoolhouse.”

“Jeboriah doesn’t drink,” she said sharply. “He knows better.”

“I’m afraid it’s true. I saw him there just last night. Looked like he’d been at it for a while.”

“Is it the whiskey?”

“I think it is.”

This time the expression on her face was of fear; she seemed to sink deeper into the chair. “He’s found it,” she whispered. “I can’t fight it, Lord, not again, I won’t—”

“I just want him to be careful,” Stowe said, as gently as he could. “Believe me, I don’t mean to hurt you with this or get Jeb into trouble. That’s the last thing I want to do. I would have talked to him about it directly, but I didn’t feel it was right without your permission. This is your business, and Jeb is a special case.”

She kept muttering to herself, and he feared he had lost her. When the words finally trailed away and she took up her
cup, her hands were shaking more violently. A bit of the tea slopped over the edge onto her wrist, and she gasped, before seeming to come to herself again. “Jeboriah’s a good boy,” she said.

“I know he is, Ruth—”

“I won’t hear it!” she shrieked, her mouth opening and closing like a fish out of water. “I won’t!” Her hand, which had been holding the cup of tea, jerked to the right, sending milky brown liquid splashing across the tabletop and onto the rug. Stowe moved to take the cup from her, but she held it in a grip so strong her bony knuckles had turned white. Little drops of tea were splattering across her wine-colored sweater and the back of her hand, blending with her mottled skin. Her breath was coming in shallow, rattling gasps.

“Take it easy, now,” he said, wishing he had brought in a sedative. He wondered what kind of doctor would come in here and drop such a load on an old, feeble woman. How had he so badly underestimated things?

Just as he was thinking about bringing her into the clinic, her breathing began to ease and her grip on the teacup loosened until finally he was able to take it from her. She stared out into space, cocking her head as if listening to someone, then nodding. “Yes, Dear…”

He felt a chill in spite of himself. Fear was a funny thing, creeping up on you when you least expected it. He had seen plenty of people in various stages of senility, and many of them spoke to dead relatives or friends or even pets, but somehow with the dark, quiet house settling heavily around him, and the way she said it, as if her dead husband were hovering right here over his shoulder…

He touched her hand and then went quickly out to the car to get his bag, and as he passed the dark stairs to the second floor on his way back inside he stopped suddenly. Jeb Taylor was standing on the top step, unmoving, his face obscured by shadows. “How long has she been like this?” Stowe said angrily. “You should have called me.”

He continued through the house without waiting for a reply, back into the living room where Ruth sat, muttering to herself. He prepared a light sedative. When he took her hand her flesh was cold and moist.

After the injection she seemed to quiet a bit more, her mouth moving now without speech, her eyes gaining that loose, vacant look they had held when he had first arrived. He grabbed some paper towels from the kitchen and mopped up the tea as best he could. As he was scrubbing uselessly at the rug he heard the front door slam and a car start in the drive, and then gravel thrown up by spinning tires.

There was no way to know how much of their earlier conversation Jeb had overheard. But did it really matter? After all, Jeb needed to know people were worried about him. Stowe didn’t want to be the bad guy here, but something had to be done. The boy was on the edge of something very bad, he could sense it. A feeling of unease came over him, all the more unsettling because he couldn’t get a handle on it. The feeling of a train coming at him down the tracks, a long way from him yet, but coming fast.

And then there was Ruth. Giving up on the rug, he moved to the chair next to her, and sat holding her hand. She gave no sign that she had felt his touch, and continued to move her mouth noiselessly, pleading with a man who had been dead ten years or more.
True love never dies
.

But was that an expression of love passing across her face just now, or fear?

He sat with her quietly in the patch of afternoon sun, wondering what in the world he ought to do.

When Jeb Taylor arrived at Johnny’s, the bar was almost empty. He took a seat and ordered a double shot of whiskey, then ordered another. His brain was on fire.
How
dare he come into my house and stick his fucking nose into
my business?