Dark Debts (35 page)

They exchanged amenities for a couple of minutes, then Michael's tone shifted.

“Listen, Danny. I need your help with something.”

“Sure, anything.”

“Okay.” Michael sighed, not sure how to proceed. “When this all started . . . you know, the way you described it to me . . . when you first began to hear the voice.”

“Yeah?”

“Did you . . . was there anything before that? Something that might have triggered it?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, you know—when I was reading about all this stuff, during the trial, I remember reading about how . . . how demons attach themselves to people.”

There. He'd voiced the preposterous.

“Uh-huh.” Danny's tone was as flat as if he were responding to a perfectly normal statement. But then, Michael reminded himself, Danny would be the last person to laugh.

“I need to know if there was anything you did. Anything that might have brought this thing on.”

Silence on the other end. Michael had never asked before, because it wouldn't have made any difference. He wasn't sure what difference it made now, except to give credence to Charlotte's story.

“Danny?” Michael prompted.

“Yeah?”

“I'm not asking because of anything that has to do with you.”

“Then what's it got to do with?”

“I'll tell you all about it when I understand it better. Just tell me, was there anything? Ouija board? Séance?”

“Okay, there was something.” Danny's voice was softer.

“What?”

A pause, then: “This friend of mine had this book. He bought it at some weird bookstore in Chelsea. Anyway, it had these—spells—you know, like black magic—”

“Rituals?”

“Yeah. Like devil worship.” Danny didn't go on.

“And?”

“A bunch of us . . . four guys, counting me, and a couple of girls . . . we got together one night at midnight and, you know, acted out one of the rituals. It was just supposed to be a joke, though. I mean, we were giggling all through it.”

Rituals. Again. “How soon after that did you start to hear the voice?”

“Pretty soon. A couple of days.”

Rituals as a doorway. That made some sort of sense. If there was one thing on earth he knew he believed in, it was the power of ritual. He didn't understand the mechanics, but he'd felt it, time and again. And if one person could conjure Jesus, what would stop another from conjuring Satan? But this wasn't a Satanic high priest. This was a bunch of kids playing around.

“Why didn't any of this come up at the trial?” Michael asked, more to fill in the dead space than because it mattered.

Danny sighed. “I don't know. I just . . . I knew I wasn't going to get off anyway, and I didn't want to sound so . . . stupid. Besides, I might have gotten the rest of them in trouble.”

The rest of them. What about the rest of them?

“Here's what I don't understand, though,” Danny went on. “If that's what caused it, how come nothing happened to anybody else?”

The answer shot through Michael.

Because Danny was the one with a connection to me.

“You know?” Danny's voice sounded cloudy.

Michael didn't answer.

“Father?”

“Yeah. I'm here.” Michael fought to regain his composure. “Okay. There's just one more thing. When you were hearing this voice . . . and it was telling you things . . .”

“Yeah?”

“Did the voice ever say anything about me? Specifically?” A long pause. Michael could feel all his muscles tighten.

“It didn't say your name or anything. But I think maybe.”

The room was suddenly filled with an odor. Putrid. Like someone had just smashed a carton of rotten eggs. Michael covered the phone receiver to stifle his gagging. He looked around, though he already knew he wouldn't see anything.

“Danny . . .” He forced himself to remain calm. “I need to know.” Michael could feel the air bearing down on him, just like before. He shoved a window open, but it didn't help.

“I think it told me not to hurt you.”

Michael had his nose against the window screen, fighting for fresh air.

“Not to hurt me?” That was as far as possible from what he'd expected.

“It said, ‘Don't ever hurt the priest.' ”

“That doesn't make any sense,” Michael said, more to himself than to Danny.

“Well, then it said something else. It said, ‘He's mine.' ”

The line went dead. The message delivered, the smell began to fade.

H
e'd gone to bed around two a.m. He knew he wouldn't be able to sleep, but he was so exhausted he needed to at least lie down. He stared at the ceiling and took stock.

Okay. There's a demon after me. It sounds insane, but that doesn't change the fact that it's also true. “His body isn't in the tomb” probably sounded pretty insane to the first person who heard it, too.

Unless no one ever heard it . . .

Shut up!!

No one ever heard it . . . No one ever said it!

“Stop!” he said out loud, embarrassing himself. He rolled over and went back to reliving the conversation with Charlotte, trying to fit all the insanity into some sort of context. He wondered if this information might explain a lot of things that had always puzzled him—chiefly, the fact that he'd always felt like a bad person without knowing why. He'd always felt that something was fundamentally wrong with him. At the same time, he'd always liked himself, which made him feel guilty for liking a bad person.

What was the truth? Never mind what had been summoned and attached to him; what was in his blood? What was there in Andrew that had made him such a vile person? Whatever it was, had any of it filtered down to Michael? Did that explain his restlessness? His anger? His pervasive sense of disquiet? Did it explain his inability to function from a place of serenity and kindness and charity? His tendency to put up walls, even with the people he loved?

In a very real way, Vincent had been Michael's spiritual lifeline. Michael had told himself there was enough goodness in Vincent for both of them. He'd told himself that, ultimately, the blood that ran in his veins was Vincent's, so all the negativity must be superficial garbage that he'd eventually work his way out from under. Now he realized that Vincent's blood was not going to save him. He couldn't even be sure he'd ever known Vincent. Hell, for all Michael knew, Vincent could have still been meeting in the woods with fellow Satan worshipers, doing God only knew what horrible things. The exterior Vincent could have been a façade, just like Andrew Kinney, the friendly town mortician and devout Catholic. Or maybe Vincent had just hidden in the Church, building a fortress out of icons and rituals and charitable works. Maybe his goodness had been nothing more than a torch to ward off the circling wolves.

The fire. Was Charlotte right about the fire? He knew Vincent had harbored a lot of guilt about it, but he'd always thought it was because it had been Vincent's idea for them to stay at the hotel. Had Vincent known he was responsible in an even more direct way? Had there been a supernatural component to the fire? Michael remembered quotes from arson investigators he'd read in the newspaper clippings:
“
. . .
the flammable materials in the hallway (carpet, wainscoting, a folding mattress left out on the third floor) absolutely would not account for the effects produced by this fire . . . the speed with which the blaze spread has baffled officials.”
Maybe the fire had spread unnaturally because it was an unnatural fire. Because it had supernatural help.

Michael continued to pummel himself with unanswerable questions until finally, sometime in the hours before dawn, he fell into a haunted sleep.

He dreamed he was running through a thick forest. Briars were scratching his arms, his legs, his face. He knew he was being chased by something odious, and that he had to escape it at all costs.

He saw a cave up ahead and ran into it, seeking shelter and a place to rest. He found neither. Inside the cave were sinister-looking men in black robes, standing in a circle around a small fire. The leader looked at Michael and his mouth formed a smile, but it was devoid of any warmth or humanity.

“Welcome home,” he said.

Another man, who'd had his back to Michael, turned around. It was Vincent. He smiled, too, but his eyes were cold and dead.

“I told them you'd be here,” he said.

Michael opened his mouth to scream, but no sound came out. The men all started to howl with laughter. Michael turned and ran out of the cave. He ran back through the forest, stumbling and picking himself up over and over. Ahead he could see a light. It was a brilliant green. He couldn't tell what it was, but he felt compelled to run to it anyway. By the time he got close, he was out of breath. He collapsed into the light. When he was able to look up, he found himself in a large meadow. The soft spring grass was dotted with orange and yellow poppies.

A lone Georgia pine stood in the middle of the field. There was a guy leaning against the tree. He was wearing jeans, a flannel shirt, and work boots. His shoulder-length hair was a reddish gold and slightly windblown. His eyes were a strange gray-blue, startlingly clear, and fixed on Michael in a gaze that was unsettling in its intensity. There was something beyond ethereal about him. A sense of calm, and a transcendent sadness his slight smile couldn't mask.

“Hi,” he said.

“Do I know you?” Michael asked.

The smile turned into a bemused expression. “That's a tough call,” he said.

Michael searched his memory, but nothing came to him, even though the face in front of him was vaguely familiar.

“Michael . . .” the guy said.

And then Michael knew. He couldn't breathe. He opened his mouth to speak, but nothing would come out.

“All right,” Michael said. He took a breath, then unleashed the mental floodwaters: “All right. If it's really you, then I don't know how long you'll be here and I don't want to waste the time being paralyzed by the scope of it . . . I have too many questions.”

“What questions?”

“I don't know where to start.”

“Start with one.”

Michael racked his brain. Which one? Is this real? Is this more than a dream?

“Yes.”

“Are you . . . here . . . because of what is happening to me?”

“Yes.”

“What do I have to do to make it stop?”

No answer this time. The guy just stared into Michael's eyes, as if that would communicate some message. Michael tried again.

“I need help. I'm lost.”

“You shouldn't be.”

Suddenly he was gone, fading like a whisper. Michael felt a cool breeze blow by his face. And then nothing.

He woke, trembling. Aching. Smothering in an unbearable sense of loss.

He lay awake for hours, waiting for the sun to come up. Trying desperately, without success, to remember the guy's face. His steady voice. His strange demeanor. The look in his eyes. Warm, but demanding as hell. A thousand times more frightening than anything in the dark forest.

When he went down to breakfast, Barbara was sitting at the table, reading the paper.

“Good morning,” she said, glancing up at him. “You look like hell.”

“Good. That's what I was going for.”

“Did you sleep at all?”

“Yes.”

“You don't look like it.”

Well, maybe that's because my great-grandfather was a Satan worshiper and Vincent was a teenage Satanic ritual rapist; there's a demon with a vendetta against me; and I spent five minutes in a dream with Jesus, got scolded, and woke up wanting to throw myself off a cliff  !

“What are we doing today?” he asked, hoping to change the subject.

“This morning we're going through the rest of the stuff in Vincent's office. I want to get it all sorted before we call Saint Vincent de Paul to pick it up. And for the record, I look a lot better than you do early in the morning.”

“That's the beauty of my life. I don't have to look good for anyone early in the morning.” He got a mug out of the cabinet and headed for the coffeepot. “Tell me this isn't some weird esoteric decaffeinated crap.”

“It's high octane. It'll keep you going until at least lunchtime.”

He filled the mug with as much coffee as it would hold. He looked out the window. The sky was a pale pewter and he could hear thunder rumbling in the distance. It had been storming off and on all week. Even one thunderstorm would have been strange for this time of year.

Barbara suddenly put the paper down and looked at him. “Michael, are you not sleeping because of Vincent, or is it more than that?”

“Isn't that enough?

“It would be. But whatever is radiating from you feels like more than grief.”

He didn't respond, hoping she'd let it go. She didn't.

“Who is Tess?”

Oh, crap.

“What?”

“Someone named Tess sent a very nice wreath. I know everyone in Vincent's life, and there is no Tess.”

He sighed. “Would you also like to know when I stopped beating my wife?”

“Michael, is there a woman in New York?”

“There are a lot of women in New York.”

“Yes, but how many of them are you sleeping with?”

Michael almost dropped his coffee mug. “Barbara!”