Sweet Dreams (25 page)

He jerked up the phone and punched out a number. “Who worked the Lisa Baldwin accident in New Madrid County? Yes, I am fully aware of the time. You just get me the information. Captain Larry Rogers. Thank you so very much, Sergeant.”

He waited for several minutes. “Come on, come on,” he muttered. “O.K. Right. Voyles and Kowalski. Where is Kowalski? Goddamn it, Sergeant, I know he's on vacation. I want to know
where.”

Another short wait.

“Fine, Sergeant. That's dandy. But I don't care if Kowalski is coon hunting with the reincarnation of Rin Tin Tin. You order a chopper and get out to that lake and get him.” Larry cursed under his breath while his wife rolled over on her stomach and tried unsuccessfully to stifle a giggle. “Goddamn it!” Larry roared. “Not Rin Tin Tin—
Kowalski
! The damn dog's been dead for years. I want Kowalski at the Holiday Inn at Sikeston at seven o'clock in the morning. You copy all that? Fine. Sorry I yelled at you, Sergeant. Yes. Fine. That's right. We all have those days.”

He hung up and reached for his pants.

“I gather you are going to the Bootheel?” his wife asked.

“You gather correctly,” Larry replied.

“At twelve-thirty in the morning,” she said. “You know”—she turned to face him—“I could have married that minister.” She pulled the covers up to her chin. “And I could have married that football player. But no,
I
had to marry a
cop.”

Larry grinned at her. “Regrets?”

“Hell, no!”

Larry laughed, kissed her, and then slipped out of the bedroom. “I might get too busy to call, Hon. So don't worry. You know how I am about losing track of time.”

“Uh-huh,” she replied.

Larry Rogers was about to lose a lot of time. About ninety years.

“But the dog was there!” Heather protested. “I patted him and he followed us down the stairs.”

“She brought him back to life,” Marc blurted, the words tumbling out of his mouth in a rush. “I saw her do it. She just crooked her finger and the dog began changing.”

“She brought that creature back to life?” Jerry said.

“How?” Voyles asked.

“I just felt I could do it,” Heather said. “Something—I don't know what—came over me. And I did it.”

“She sure did,” Marc said. “I saw it. I patted the dog on its head. But the dog had been all healed. It was like he'd returned to being what he was before he was hurt—the first time.”

The piano started playing, the keys again pressed by invisible fingers.

The drumming began anew. Slower and louder.

“I don't doubt but what she did it,” Maryruth said. “I think we're in a place where anything is possible.”

“You freed the animal,” Bud spoke from the open doorway. “And he is grateful for that freedom. You have made a friend, and that is good.”

Eyes swung to the old Indian. “Freed him?” Jerry asked. “From what?”

“Like all the others you witnessed this night, the dog was trapped between two worlds. He was not yet dead, but was not alive—as you know life. Now the animal is free to continue his journey toward his new home. But before he does, he will help you as you need it.”

The Indian stepped back into the night.

“Where'd he go?” Vickie asked.

“And why?” Janet asked. “It's . . . it's almost like he
can't
enter this house.”

The sound of a girl weeping suddenly spun them around, all of them attempting to pinpoint the location of the crying.

Then a faint cracking noise reached their ears. The cracking was followed by a grunt of pain.

“It's coming from below us,” Jerry said. “The basement.”

“You look for weapons,” Voyles said. “All of you. Search the bottom floor. I'll check out the crying.”

For a moment, all the travelers swayed slightly, putting out their hands to grip the backs of chairs or leaning against a sofa or a wall.

“What's happening?” Marc yelled.

“Time!” Vickie said, her voice trembling. “I feel like time has speeded up for us.”

“Yes,” Maryruth said, as the odd sensation began leaving her. “Yes, that's it.”

Dick struggled for balance and looked at his left wrist. Naturally, his watch was gone. Shaking his head in a mixture of fear, shock, and disbelief, he plucked a pocket watch from his vest pocket and clicked open the case. The hands were spinning wildly; then they began to slow down.

Suddenly, they stopped. “It's four in the morning,” Dick announced.
“What
morning, I haven't a clue.”

“Is it Thursday or Friday?” Maryruth asked.

No one knew.

The sensation of moving unwillingly through time slowly left the travelers.

“Let's start looking for weapons,” Jerry said.

“I'll check out the basement,” Voyles said.

He left the big room and prowled the ground floor until he found a door that he assumed would lead to the basement. Pistol in hand, he opened it. Steps leading to darkness yawned below him. The sound of weeping was louder. The cracking stopped.

“Put your pistol away,” Bud's voice came to him. “You are allowed to use the weapons of your choice in defending yourselves, but you may not and cannot alter what has already occurred. To do so would be to change history, and that is not allowed.”

“Where are you?” Voyles whispered the question. He wasn't quite certain he wanted to know the answer.

“Watching. Waiting.”

Bud's voice faded away. Voyles stood in the gloom, looking down at the shrouded steps, trying to see through the gloom. Reluctantly, he put his pistol away, sticking it in his waistband, then he stepped down into the unwelcoming and unfriendly darkness. The first step creaked under his weight. Voyles froze.

A grunting sound drifted up to his ears; that and the slap of flesh against flesh.

Voyles knew what was producing that sound.

The strange cracking noise had ceased. Now a moaning took its place.

He slipped farther down the steps and became an unwilling voyeur.

The teenager, Charlotte, was naked. A whip had made crisscrosses on her very pale skin. The whip lay, like a dead black snake, on the floor. Its wooden handle glistened with moisture.

Strange, Voyles thought.

Voyles lifted his eyes and saw steel wristbands chained to the brick wall of the basement. The welts on the girl's slender wrists confirmed that she had been chained and beaten. But had it been done against her will?

Voyles somehow doubted that. But at least the cracking sound had been identified.

The girl now lay on her back, atop a wooden packing crate, her legs spread wide. Clint stood naked between her shapely legs, his big hands under her knees, holding them wide apart. He pumped his long erection in and out of the girl. She grunted with pleasure each time he bullishly rammed into her hot depths.

The girl was alternately screaming and laughing and moaning with pleasure; obviously she was as twisted, mentally and sexually, as Clint. She cried out, “Hurt me, Clint! Punish me!”

His strokes became savage. He pulled himself out of the girl until just the tip of the head of his penis remained, then he slammed into her, producing a long groan of pleasure with each deep penetration.

“Now, Clint!” Charlotte cried out. “Now hurt me the way I like it.”

Voyles watched as the man withdrew from the girl, his erection, stiff and heavy, jutting out from his hairy lower belly. Clint repositioned the young beauty, turning her onto her stomach atop the crate. Her rich, full breasts pushed against the rough wood of the packing crate.

She wriggled her buttocks at the man and said, “Hurry, Clint!”

Clint positioned himself, and his big hands gripping the flesh of the teenager, he bulled his way into her, brutally taking her anally. She screamed out her pain and shock and pleasure.

“Daddy, Daddy, Daddy!” the girl screamed. “It's wrong, it's wrong. Don't do this to me.”

Daddy
, Voyles thought. Is Clint her? . . . Then it came to him. The girl's father had obviously abused her when she was very young; perhaps he still abused her. Feeling that was her fault, she was punishing herself by doing this with Clint.

God, what a twisted world, Voyles reflected sourly.

Clint was speaking pure filth to the girl, obscenities rolling from his mouth like raw sewage.

Voyles turned away from the sight. He felt sick. He wondered if the creepy son of a bitch who abused his sister had done these things to her. Rage filled him. He stood, stunned and motionless. When the man called out his name, Voyles slowly turned around.

Clint looked straight at him and said, “Would you like to have your way with the girl, Lieutenant Voyles? I assure you, it is not only permissible, but possible.”

Voyles could not find his voice to reply. He had never wanted to kill as badly as he did now. He slowly shook his head.

Clint laughed as he flipped the naked girl over onto her back. He caressed the girl's pubic area, thick and rich with damp hair; then he moved his hand upward, to cup her full breasts. He squeezed them savagely, making Charlotte scream with pain.

“She thrives on pain,” he told Voyles. “There is nothing you or I could do to her that she would not enjoy immensely. Thank her good father for that. Her father enjoys watching her older brother have sex with her. You think
I'm
twisted?” He shrugged his shoulders. “But that is neither here nor there. Come,” he said, motioning for Voyles to come closer. “Come have your way with the girl.”

Charlotte looked at the cop through sick and pain-filled eyes. “Hurt me, Daddy,” she begged him.

Voyles felt like puking. “How can you? . . .”

“Converse with you?” Clint finished when Voyles could not. “Easily. And I am not alone in that. Oh, no. Not at all. You will see as your time here begins to ebb. Oh, yes. Very soon, now.”

Clint pulled the girl from the crate and pushed her to her knees, forcing his half-hard penis into her mouth. “Get me hard again, bitch,” he told her.

Voyles turned away and slowly climbed back up the steps. He was very glad to be leaving that place of perversion and pain and sickness. Clint's laughter followed him. It was a taunting, evil bark. Upon reaching the top of the stairs, Voyles turned around. The man and the teenage girl had vanished. But the long blacksnake whip still lay on the dirty floor.

“Help me!” A child's voice reached him. A young girl's voice. “Oh, please, God. Send someone to help me. It hurts, it hurts. I can't stand the pain.”

Voyles looked frantically around him. He could see nothing. But the voice was real.

“I can't breathe,” a young boy's voice came to his ears. “Please, please, somebody come and let me out.”

“How can I help?” Voyles screamed the question. “Tell me, for God's sake, and I'll help you both. But you'll have to tell me how.”

The heavy, oppressive drumbeating began. Laughter was the only response to his question.

Exhaustion suddenly swept over Voyles. He could not remember ever being so tired. He slumped to the hall floor, and with his back to a wall, he closed his eyes.

In other rooms, the rest of the time travelers were doing the same, as time caught up with them. One by one, they slumped to the floor and slept. As Heather and Marc sank to the expensive carpet and closed their eyes, the big shepherd appeared from out of a sparkling mist. The huge animal stood over Heather, keeping a lonely watch over the small person who had freed him from his entrapment between life and death.

The dog watched the children sleep. If he could have communicated with them, he would have told them he would do everything within his power to protect them, but even he would not be able to spare them the pain that was forthcoming. Still, he would try.

The animal watched the children sleep.

 

Captain Larry Rogers, in plainclothes, sat in the dining room of the motel, eating breakfast. He glanced at his watch just as the sound of a helicopter flying overhead filled the room. Seven o'clock. He lifted his eyes to Chief Deputy Bob Vanderhorn.

“Right on time, Bob.”

“Yeah.” The two men had know one another for years, and neither pulled any punches with the other. “Larry, ol' buddy. All this stuff you just told me—you don't really believe any kind of supernatural business is behind it, do you?”

Larry had been waiting for that. Ever since he'd told Bob of his theory—his and Doctor Finley's—the deputy had been silent, concentrating on eating his breakfast. “I'm a cop, Bob. Just like you. But to tell you the truth, I don't know what to believe. Our first order of business is to keep the press out of this. You agree?”

“Yeah. With that. No point in starting a panic and having a bunch of ghost hunters swarming all over the place.”

“My opinion exactly. Next we talk to Kowalski. Then we head on down to Good Hope to speak with the sheriff and the chief of police. Nose around some on the q.t. Test the waters, so to speak. It all ties in, Bob. I'll bet a month's pay on it.”

Kowalski came in, sat down, and ordered coffee, black, one sugar. Under questioning, he confirmed many of Captain Rogers' suspicions.

He ended with, “Traffic accident? Hell, that was no traffic accident.” He told the men what he had witnessed. When he stated that Lisa's head had been cooked and all the blood had been drained from her body, Bob belched softly and pushed his breakfast plate away.

Bob said, “Damn, Kowalski! I could have done without that.”

“I see,” Larry said softly. “No. No, I really don't see; but I'm going to. What was the other coroner's name?”

Kowalski consulted a small note pad. “Man by the name of Doctor Everett, sir.”

“I know the man,” Bob said.

“See if you can reach him by phone, Bob,” Larry said. “Ask him to meet us or we'll go over there. Either way is fine.”

Vanderhorn excused himself and left the table, heading for the phone in the lobby. He returned in a few moments, walking like a man stepping lightly through a minefield.

Larry noticed his strained expression and said, “I know something is wrong, Bob. Let me have it.”

“Both Doctor Everett and the chief deputy are dead, Larry. Both of them died in fires. Very intense house fires. The fire chief said he had no idea what could have caused brick houses to go up like tinderboxes.”

“Both fires are under investigation?”

“Yes.” Vanderhorn sat down and poured more coffee from the carafe on the table.

“Now you see what I mean?” Larry asked.

“Beginning to,” the deputy admitted. “Damned strange goings-on, for sure.”

Before either of them could add anything to that, a man and woman walked by the table. The man said, “I still can't get over us driving right past Good Hope and not even-remembering doing so. Damn! And I wanted to see my ol' buddy. We soldiered together in World War Two. I'm told he retired from teaching a couple of years ago. Be fun to see him again and chew the fat for a few hours. I haven't seen him in about fifteen years.”

“We'll catch him on the way back,” his wife said. “But you're right. That was the oddest thing.” They stopped to let other customers past. “And then,” she continued, “two or three miles up the road,
bang
, everything came clear again. Very odd.”