Darkness Rising (The East Salem Trilogy) (34 page)

You must never tell another soul about this letter and the contents of this book, for telling others will place them in great danger. There may be times when you feel this to be a burden, but it is indeed a sacred calling from which you cannot turn away. There is no way that I can overstate the importance, except to say that there are many in this place where you live who would kill you and everyone you love to get their hands on this book, for once they have it in their possession, the knowledge of their existence will disappear with it.

Jerome, you need to know a story that will probably
surprise you. Hundreds of years before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, a great evil came to this land. I have spent my life researching that evil, trying to understand it . . .

Her letter went on to describe how St. Adrian drove the pagans from the English shores but learned later that he’d been deceived, and how he’d commissioned Charles the Black to find out where they’d gone. Charles had created a society of pious men, scholars and historians who knew the battle against evil had not been won. She described how they’d been able to discover a group of pagans in France, but not all of them. The remainder of the group had sailed west across the Atlantic, where no one of that day could follow. Some so-called “wise men” believed the ship had sailed off the edge of the world. Some held out hope the ship had been lost in a storm. Others feared it had succeeded and made landfall.

The men charged by Charles the Black, and the descendants of those men, watched and read, studied and researched, until they learned of an account written in Norway of a Holy Man who’d traveled to America, where he encountered a group of brutal savages who practiced witchcraft, human sacrifice, and cannibalism.

Abbie’s account told the story of Hiawatha and Deganawida and how they were able to defeat Thadodaho. Villanegre read the rest of the letter out loud.

But all they were able to do was drive the Druids into hiding. They knew that if they surfaced again, they would be destroyed outright by the angels of the Lord. Then one day more ships arrived, carrying people who looked like them. Finally, enough Europeans migrated to the New World to allow the evil ones to blend back in, and then it became even more difficult to find them.

At the time of the American Revolution, the place we know as St. Adrian’s Academy was called Fort Atticus. It had barracks for the troops of the great generals, first George Washington and then Horatio Gates, who turned it into a military training facility. After the war was over, the new government moved all their training facilities to West Point across the Hudson. Fort Atticus was sold to a group of so-called academics who claimed they wanted to turn it into a college to rival Harvard or William and Mary. They proposed to name their school after St. Adrian, the medieval Archbishop of Canterbury credited with driving the darkness out of England.

Posing as an institution of higher learning, it became a school for depravity. In the name of academic freedom, they resisted governmental oversight and refused to open their rolls for review. The walls of the old fortress, fallen into disrepair, were restored and refortified. Boys from the highest ranks of society, from all over the world, were recruited and tested. Some were found lacking, and they passed through the school with a standard education without ever suspecting there were others among them receiving a second, more subversive education. Yet in all graduates the mandate for secrecy surpassed all other bonds uniting them. They were charged to aid and assist each other as they made their way in the world. St. Adrian’s graduates were to hire other St. Adrian’s graduates without question; they were to assist each other and they were to tell no one, ever, what went on inside those walls. It was always a simple choice for any St. Adrian’s graduate: follow the rules and keep the secrets, and you will become wealthy and prosper; break the rules, and you will perish and go unrecorded in the annals of time.

Jerome, please understand that these are not merely the evil deeds of bad men. The evil at St. Adrian’s Academy is the work of Satan and the fallen angels who do his bidding. They will seek to find you out and destroy you. They will destroy not only you but all who know and love you, because they seek to erase you and delete the memory of you.

You will be safe as long as you hold this book close and keep these words in your heart. I know that God will keep you safe from harm, but you must pray to him daily for guidance. And when you feel you are ready, you must choose someone to succeed you, and pass this book and the box that holds it on to him or her, along with your own letter.

But, Jerome, always remember how the devil works, by making you uncertain of all the things you think you know and believe, by sowing confusion and by planting doubt, by deceiving and inveigling. The truth is not uncertain, Jerome. The message of Jesus Christ is not ambiguous or unclear. If you learn how to practice your faith, the faith you voiced with such strength and confidence even as a child, you will see that the Lord shines a light on the truth, a special kind of light that you will begin to notice.

Villanegre stopped. The room fell silent.

“Okay,” Dani said. “That didn’t help. Who’s Jerome?”

“She talks about visiting a fourth-grade class,” Quinn noted.

“Yeah, but she’d been doing that for fifty years. Maybe longer,” Tommy said.

“Is the letter dated?” Ruth asked.

“None of them are,” Villanegre said, turning the page.

“Jerome is obviously the person she chose as her successor,” Dani
said. “I think if we find him, we can find the rest of the answers we’re looking for.”

“Perhaps this will help,” Villanegre said. He held between two fingers a small envelope he’d found tucked into the pages of the book after Abbie’s letter. The envelope was plain, cream-colored paper, without postage, the size of a thank-you note. He lifted the closing flap and removed a piece of paper from the envelope. Villanegre read the words written on the page, raised his eyebrows, and said only, “Indeed.”

He handed the paper to Dani to read.

Dear Ms. Gardener,

My name is Julie Leonard and I am a freshman at East Salem High. My father, Jerome Louis Leonard, abandoned my mother and sister and me ten years ago, but it doesn’t make sense to me because that was not the kind of father he was. I was looking for him and finally found him a year ago with the help of Google and some other stuff, and he was living in Portland, Maine. I got a ride from a friend and we went to the address. No one was there, so I left a letter under his door. In my letter I told him I wasn’t mad at him and that I hadn’t told anybody I’d come to see him but I just wanted to talk to him. About a month later I got a letter from him that said I could ask you and to stay away from St. Adrian’s Academy. So I am asking. I don’t know what I’m supposed to ask, but if you have anything you could tell me that might help explain, please let me know.

Yours truly,

Julie Leonard

The letter ended with her cell phone number and e-mail address.

“That explains what Julie was doing at the party,” Tommy said. “The surest way to get teenagers to do something is to tell them not to.”

“She saw Amos as her way in,” Dani said. “She was trying to find out what happened to her father. Do we know if she ever talked to Abbie?”

“We can ask at the nursing home,” Tommy said. “She might have visited.”

“The question is, how much could Abbie have told her? How much was Abbie even capable of telling her?”

“Something must have gone wrong,” Quinn said. “She chose her successor, but her successor didn’t step up.”

“That’s why I’m here,” Villanegre said. “We hadn’t heard from the Guardian in some time. The last thing we heard was a cryptic message: ‘St. Adrian’s is moving.’ We didn’t know what it meant.”

He turned several blank pages and came to the third section of the book, separated from the first two sections with a title page that read
Curatoria
. He read a bit of the next page, then shut the book.

“This is what I feared,” he said. “The Guardian has always been the keeper of the names. I imagine my name is on that list toward the end. I can’t read it because I don’t want to know. Only the Guardian can know the names of the Curatoriat. You can imagine how eager the fiends would be to get their hands on such a list.”

“When was the last time Abbie visited the archives at the library?” Tommy asked his aunt, who paused to think.

“I’m not sure of the exact date,” Ruth said. “But I know it was the day before George took her to High Ridge Manor. I know because I said to one of my volunteers, ‘I don’t believe it—she was just here yesterday, fit as a fiddle.’”

“Now we know why Amos Kasden killed Julie Leonard,” Tommy said. “The question is, how did they know? Did Julie do something to give herself away? We didn’t think Julie fit some sort of demented fantasy Amos was having, but we didn’t think she was chosen at random either.”

“Tommy thought somebody had put Amos up to it,” Dani said.

“Like the mystery man in the cave,” Villanegre said. “The dark conspirator who whispers ‘murder’ in the madman’s ear.”

“I’ll call Casey and see if he can find anything out about Jerome Leonard, recently of Portland, Maine,” Dani said.

“We really need to find George Gardener,” Tommy said.

“Why don’t you just track him?” Ben said.

“I appreciate the suggestion, Ben,” Tommy said, “but this isn’t one of those Westerns where the outlaws ride horses that leave hoofprints on the riverbank.”

“No, it’s not,” Ben said. “These days it’s even easier to track somebody because they drive cars that leave prints that never stop. I told you before, I’m a really good tracker. And unless I miss my guess, that wonderful creature sleeping in front of the fire is an even better tracker than I am.”

“Otto?” Quinn said. The dog raised his head at the sound of his name.

“Do you think he could do it?” Tommy said.

“I’ve been training him,” Quinn said, “but I’ve never actually tried to track with him. It’s worth a shot.”

“He’s a smart dog,” Ben said. “Big one too.”

“We’ll go first thing in the morning,” Tommy said. “I’ve got NVGs and some Luminol that’ll show blood, if there is any. And a metal detector. Now that there are eight of us, I think we should keep watch in pairs.”

“Why don’t I take the first watch alone, and then two of you can relieve me?” Carl said.

“You need some rest,” Tommy said. “You and Dr. Villanegre can go last.”

“I’ll take the first watch,” Dani said.

“I’ll take it with you,” Cassandra said. “My body is still on LA time anyway.”

“I thought you said you’re doing a show on Broadway,” Tommy said. The idea of Cassandra and Dani talking into the wee hours, just when he and Dani were on the mend, made him uncomfortable. Then again, he had nothing to fear from the truth. Maybe they’d sort it out, whatever it was, and things would be better in the morning.

“I am,” Cassandra said. “But rehearsals don’t start for another week.”

“Okay, then,” Tommy said. “Everyone get a good night’s sleep, because . . .”

“Because what?” Ruth said.

“I don’t know,” Tommy said. “That’s just what people say at times like this.”

“He’s right,” Cassandra said. “I’ve said it in three movies. Once with a British accent.”

“Which was quite good,” Villanegre said.

“Thank you,” Cassandra said, putting on a British accent. “I should have been born the Queen of England. I would
so
rock those hats.”

“One thing,” Tommy said to all of them. “Abbie was right when she said the more people who know about the book, the greater the danger. That just multiplied times eight.”

“Can I make a suggestion?” Ben said. “You should let your chickens out of the coop. They’re very sensitive creatures. If the power goes out, they’ll make a good alarm system.”

30.

Dani pulled a book off a shelf in Tommy’s library, a collection of passages by Carl Gustav Jung. He was the founder of analytic psychology, but he’d also been a bit of a mystic, a man of science who nevertheless believed that man’s fundamental nature was spiritual and religious. His quest for knowledge was never-ending and as open-minded as any intellect she’d ever encountered, which is why he’d long been a personal hero of hers. After a brief search, she found the passage that had convinced her she needed to go to Africa to work for Doctors Without Borders:

Anyone who wants to know the human psyche will learn next to nothing from experimental psychology. He would be better advised to abandon exact science, put away his scholar’s gown, bid farewell to his study, and wander with a human heart throughout the world. There in the horrors of prisons, lunatic asylums and hospitals, in drab suburban pubs, in brothels and gambling-halls, in the salons of the elegant, the Stock Exchanges, socialist meetings, churches, revivalist gatherings and ecstatic sects, through love and hate, through the experience of passion in every form in his own body, he would reap richer stores of
knowledge than text-books a foot thick could give him, and he will know how to doctor the sick with a real knowledge of the human soul . . .

Cassandra was standing in the doorway, holding a copy of
People
magazine she’d found in what Tommy told her was Chick Room 2.