Malice (26 page)

A shuddering jolt shot through his body, no less violent than if he’d stuck a finger into an electrical socket. His chest and hips surged upward with what felt like 10,000 volts of electricity. He hung there for a moment, wiggling, before falling back down into convulsions. The room went black and then returned a moment later somehow very different.

No longer was Lysander sitting, facing the reverend. He was above him now, looking down on them both. The reverend craned his head skyward and smiled at what must have been for him thin air. Lysander’s spirit bobbed helplessly against the ceiling as the reverend reached out with his other hand, grasping both sides of Lysander’s physical head and then slumped forward. Over by the desk, sprawled on the floor was Avery—his hands nearly amputated. The handle of a kitchen knife protruded from an empty eye socket. The sight filled his belly with a sick feeling.

He turned back just in time to see a long, wispy trail of dark vapor slither out from the reverend’s solar plexus. It snaked its way along the floor and up the leather chair toward Lysander’s body. The mist stopped momentarily and then crept into Lysander’s nostrils the way smoke from a cigarette might hover before being drawn in.

Then Lysander saw his physical eyes flip open. Even floating as he was against the ceiling, he could see that his eyes had become milky white. The reverend extended a hand—one of Lysander’s hands—and examined the arm stretched out before him.

A single terrified thought was jack hammering inside Lysander’s weary mind:

If Reverend Small leaves with my body, it’ll be the last time I see it
.

Lysander drew his legs in and planted his feet against the ceiling. He would use it as a kind of springboard and shoot himself back into his body. If his momentum didn’t fail him, he would jump back in and expel the reverend back to his own aging husk, now slumped in the chair, a red stain at his left knee. With a jerk, he sprung himself straight for his forehead and bounced off it. The effect was like putting two negative ends of a magnet together. He couldn’t even get close.

As the reverend rose and went to the phone, Lysander hovered over him, panic stricken.

His body, that intricate webbing of tissue and liquid, the body that he had always taken for granted as his own, now belonged to someone else. Someone intent on throwing it off a cliff…or mutilating it…or—

Didn’t that go against the rules of nature? he thought bitterly.

Think, goddammit. Think
.

The reverend hung up and dialed another number. Finally someone answered.

“Samantha, please.”

The surreal quality of hearing his own voice in the third person was overshadowed by the sudden realization that he knew what the reverend was up to. Rank fear gripped him. Yes, there was a fate worse than death. That old fuck was going to kill Samantha and leave Lysander’s battered and barely breathing frame at the scene of the crime, a bloodied knife in his hand. Charged, tried and convicted of a crime he did not commit. But what could he do?

“Listen very carefully, Samantha,” Small was saying. “Meet me at James McMurphy’s. II know, but there’s not a lot of time.” A tentative silence followed and Lysander sensed the apprehension on the other end of the line.

“Whadoyamean, I sound different?” Small laughed, but it had none of the qualities of Lysander’s laugh. This laugh sounded flat and lifeless. “Of course it’s me. Same as always. One hour?…No, I can’t say over the …”

The crushing finality of Lysander’s circumstance was becoming clear to him now. He was a ghost and would remain a ghost unless he did something fast.

Each frantic thought sent him careening around the room at quantum speed. He moved with the speed of thought. He could pass through walls, but controlling it was like being at the helm of a tall ship with no rudder and no compass, where up was down and down was up. His first order of business: learn to control this thing. His number one obstacle to doing that: frantic thought patterns.

Concentrate, Lysander!

Lysander tried to narrow his maelstrom of thoughts down to a single point. He pictured Avery’s desk, and himself sitting at that desk, and when he opened his awareness to the room around him, he was there. Just when he thought he was getting somewhere panic seeped in again.

There had to be a way out of this! Had to be!

And he was sent reeling across the room toward the door. He stopped himself, floated up to the ceiling and searched ...

The reverend, wearing Lysander’s body, was still on the phone. Lysander glanced over at the reverend’s shed skin. It lay slumped forward in the leather chair. A flap of his gray wispy hair had fallen into his face. Lysander examined the reverend’s body. Why not? he wondered, turning the idea over and over the way a jeweler might appraise a precious stone. It had been done to him. Why would the reverse not be true? It wasn’t pretty, he knew that, but no other solution came to mind. He shifted his awareness behind him.

Yes, still on the phone.

Lysander made the sign of the cross, stretched his hands out before him and dropped from the ceiling. He slid into the reverend, feeling no resistance, bracing himself as one might brace themselves entering a freezing lake.

His head and shoulders jerked upright at once. A terrible pain was suddenly throbbing in his left knee. His mouth, dry and pasty, tasted like…an ashtray. He opened his eyes. The room was darker than it had been a second ago.

He stood on legs that felt as though they had been dipped in concrete. He tried to walk across the room. Each step accompanied by a blast of pain in his left knee. He became dully aware that it was dragging behind him. Working the reverend’s body meant a lot more effort, Lysander realized. It was much older than his own and stiffer in places he never even knew existed. Floating on the ceiling, his mind had been far clearer, but now a new layer of conscious thought was yammering away at him. It wanted him to kill and destroy. It knew that a new resident had entered and it was resentful of the intrusion. The reverend’s body wanted him out.

He limped up behind the form just now hanging up the phone, unable to make his leg cooperate unless he pulled it along behind him. He saw himself—the real Lysander—turn around. The look of surprise and the sudden flash of fear in his eyes was unmistakable—worth the price of admission. That vivid display of fear excited him. Sexually. In that split nanosecond of time he was reminded of that first moment when Samantha had nudged her lips up against his own. His pants suddenly grew tighter, filling with an erection—a stubbier version of his own. That memory of his first night with Samantha was playing back to him, but not as it had actually happened. No, this was different. He was standing over her, slapping and biting. She was begging for him to stop. His hands, the reverend’s hands, crawled up and clasped tightly around her tiny neck. Her body tensed as she slapped at his hands and dragged her nails across his face, across his neck. Those hands gave one final shuddering squeeze, and she folded like a rag doll beneath him.

He closed his eyes. These were his memories, cherished possessions, and now somehow, the reverend, or at least some part of him, had gotten his grimy hands on them and was remaking them to his liking.

In a dim pool of light, two shadowy forms faced one another. An older man, with a head of disheveled white hair and a young man with a pale face and fine features.

In a blur of movement two hands clamped firmly around Lysander’s neck. These hands, his own hands, surprisingly strong and powerful.

“I hope you’re enjoying all of this,” the voice asked. It was his own, but mixed now with something more feminine. “I know how much McMurphy did. Should have seen the look on his fat face when I gave him his body back—a wretched thing too, filled with perverted thoughts. Little boys in all manner of compromising positions. A pity really. Came to and found the whole family chopped up.” An insane burst of laughter bellowed out of him. “And the best part? The poor sod thought he had done it. Million dollars if you can guess what he did then.” He pulled a hand away long enough to mimic placing a gun in his mouth and pulling the trigger. He rocked his head back slightly and grinned.

Then the reverend’s hands were back and his fingers tightened. A low gurgle emanated from deep within Lysander’s throat.

The reverend’s voice dropped to a whisper. “None of this was my doing, I just want you to know. The incident with that Thomas boy was especially tragic. Derek, I think you called him. He had no part in this dirty business. By now I’m sure you know that. If you had only come through that door as you were supposed to, things would have turned out quite differently, I can assure you.”

With lightning speed, Small retracted one of his hands and punched Lysander in the stomach. He doubled over. A string of saliva trailed from his mouth and dangled to the ground. The reverend lifted Lysander’s head, wiped away the dribble with the back of his hand, combed back a plume of gray hair with his fingers, then socked him in the face, sending him reeling into one of the leather chairs.

The room was spinning in circles that threatened to swallow him whole. Through that swirling confusion a bolt of pain bore through. His nose had been broken. No, correction: the reverend’s nose had been broken.

Stay down
! an internal voice cackled.
You’re beaten. Be a good boy and it’ll all be over soon enough
.

But this was not Lysander’s own inner voice speaking to him now. He knew the difference. That voice belonged to the reverend. Slipping into this body was a lot like renting a fully furnished apartment, piss-soaked carpet, bed bugs and all.

Regardless of what had happened in the past—actions he couldn’t change even if he wanted to—he would not just roll over and play dead. No sirree. His face felt like a squashed tomato, but there was still some gas left in him. He tried to get up, his hands outstretched and ready to grapple, but something hard hit him on top of the head and the next thing he knew he was swimming again. Swimming in a sea of blackness.

Samantha couldn’t shake the uneasy feeling that had been bothering her ever since she arrived at the police station. Everything about her surroundings vouched for her safety. She was with her father and Deputy Morgan. They had picked her up, and her hands were curled thankfully around a hot cup of tea. But still something seemed terribly wrong. Lysander had called moments before and he had sounded strange. She told her father and Alex what had happened that night, why they had broken into the reverend’s house, but that sickening feeling would not go away. She looked down at her hands and saw that she had scratched the edges of her fingers raw.

Alex said, “I think it’s time we picked this guy u—”

“I don’t wanna hear anything out of you right now!” the sheriff roared. Alex recoiled. The sheriff was still ripping over the newspaper article that had appeared this morning in the
Millingham Gazette
.

Serial Killer in Millingham?

Tobey Fallen

An anonymous source close to the sheriff’s department today said Millingham police may be looking for a serial killer. For several months now, the source alleges, Millingham’s chief deputy, Alex Morgan, and Medical Examiner Dorothy Olsen, have been investigating the deaths of Derek Thomas, Peter Hume and the purported suicide of the sheriff’s own wife, Diane Crow, for the possibility they may have been the work of one man.

The source refused to comment on how they had come by the information, other than to say they had intimate knowledge of the inner workings of the investigation. This information flies in direct contradiction to Sheriff Crow’s earlier assertion that none of the deaths were in any way related
…

The fallout from the article had been cataclysmic. Within hours, Alex had seen the switchboard at the sheriff’s office lit up like Yankee Stadium. The town had been a powder keg of tension for weeks, and now with their worst fears realized, the seams of civility and control were beginning to break down. Jack Frazier, a high school substitute teacher and gun enthusiast, had organized a vigilante force to hunt down the killer, only to find himself in a three-hour-stand-off with Crow, Alex and Jeff. Crow had been on the phone with the mayor three times today and during more than one of those times the blinds to his office had snapped closed. Still Alex had heard the shouting and knew that the worse it got for Steve, the worse it would be for him. At first Alex had been certain Jeff had sprung the leak, but even Jeff wasn’t that stupid. An anonymous source close to the investigation could only mean one of three people—Crow, Jeff and himself. That was when it dawned on him who the real culprit was: Sheila Evans. Somehow she had gathered up all the rumors in town and spun them into a dark cloud over Steve’s head. And was it any wonder? He had left her cold for Dorothy with hardly a word of explanation.

Sheriff Crow was still staring at him when Samantha spoke. “I’ve gotta meet Lysander in twenty minutes—” she began, battling that uncomfortable feeling that still hadn’t left.

“You’ll do no such thing,” her father barked. “Alex will go and pick him up. This is police business. You almost got yourself killed tonight.”

“There’s no fucking way I’m staying here!”