The Skull Ring (31 page)

Julia stared into the deep red embers and wondered if that was what hell looked like. "Tell me about your wife."

The rattle of rain on the roof filled the pause. Walter said, "Her name was Rita Faye. We were married right out of high school. We knew we'd most likely be poor all our lives, but we had a little bit of land and figured other people had it a lot worse. She loved to keep up flowers. I always thought dirt ought to be used for vegetables, but I sure do miss the smell of those flowers now."

Walter leaned against the fireplace and continued in a barely audible voice. "I can picture her now, bent over her marigolds and daffodils, her hair tied back in a ponytail, the sun catching on it and making it shine. She was five months' pregnant when she disappeared."

"I'm sorry," Julia said. "I shouldn't have brought it up."

"No. It's in the past. And the past can't hurt you none unless you let it."

"It's hard to believe she just got up in the middle of the night and walked off. My father disappeared like that, too."

"In the middle of the night?"

Julia took a smoky breath. "I think he was a Satan worshipper." Somehow, the accusation sounded even more unbelievable when said out loud, beyond the safe madness of Dr. Forrest's office.

"Satan. Not many believe in him these days."

Julia crossed her arms. Walter's face was soft and kind in the firelight, with a touch of sadness in the shadows of his eyes. She could trust him. She was consumed by a sudden desperation to completely trust somebody, after the betrayals of Mitchell and Dr. Forrest.

Maybe her borderline personality disorder drove her to leech sympathy out of everyone she met, a soul vampire who needed constant affirmation. Or maybe she had always been alone, unconnected, adrift in a world where even the past wasn't reliable. She had no tether, no foundation, and Walter seemed as solid as the Appalachian granite.

Her face was hot from the fire. "He was one of them. A member of their coven. He let them take me across the field behind our house. They carried me into the barn. They were all in robes, and there was smoke in the air, and somebody had cut off a goat's head and impaled it on a stake. The bad people starting chanting, and they held me down while the man with the ring cut my stomach—"

Another long silence. "And you were just a child," Walter said softly. "Like the girl Hartley killed."

She nodded. She couldn't look at him. She hated her father, hated the Creeps, not just for the pain, but for the memories they had shackled her with. For the evil, poisonous seeds they had planted in her mind. She hated them for teaching her to hate. "The one who held the knife . . . I think it was my father. That was the night he disappeared."

"Why do you think it was your father?"

"Dr. Forrest told me."

"The shrink that pretty much said you were the bride of Satan?"

Julia gave a bitter laugh. "I know it sounds crazy. But the man with the knife wore a skull ring, with two rubies set in the eyes. I found the ring in my father's house when I went back to Memphis."

"That's the ring you were talking about."

"Someone took it from my purse."

"Does anybody know you had it?"

The bands of red and orange heat alternated in the glowing embers, hypnotic and ethereal. The rhythm of the rain had made her drowsy. She couldn't think clearly. "No. But I gave Dr. Forrest a pentagram drawing that somebody had left in my closet. Whoever it was had written 'Hello Jooolia' on it, misspelling Julia with three
O
’s in the middle. Exactly the way my father did when he was teasing me."

"So she knew someone had been in your house. Did you tell her about the ring?" Walter had moved closer, though he might have just shifted to be nearer the fire.

"I don't think so." She glanced at him. The light was golden on his face.

"Don't you remember what you told her?"

Julia shook her head. "It's not that simple. You don't know what it's like to have the past all screwed up, so that you can't tell who to hate or who to trust or just who you're even supposed to be."

Walter put his hand on her shoulder and stroked her wet hair. "One thing's been bothering me. You say you were part of a Satanic ritual when you were four. Well, if Snead was in on it, and knows that you're starting to remember, why didn't he just
kill
you? Why go to the trouble of all these tricks? The clock and the pentagram drawing and the ring and all that."

Julia put her hands over her ears. Panic crept up in the form of shadows in the cabin's corners, all dark and sharp like the fingers of the past. She didn't want to fold up again, not in front of Walter. She bit her lip hard enough to hurt.

"Hey, are you okay?" Walter asked.

Walter had lost somebody he loved, and he hadn't been driven into the dark cellars of his own head. He got on with his life, hid his scars, and kept on breathing. He clung to his faith, however simplistic she thought it. Whatever was going on between him and God, it seemed to be working. And what did she have?

She stood and paced the narrow room. Tears welled in her eyes, making her ashamed. She wasn't the only one who had suffered in this world. "I don't want be crazy."

Walter moved quickly to her side. He cupped her chin in his hand and forced her to look at him. "Snead's real. Hartley's real. It's not your imagination. I don't know what they want from you, but I'm betting it's no good. And this Dr. Forrest—how long have you been going to her?"

"Since I moved here."

"And what good has she done?"

"Well, at first we were making progress. She brought me out of my denial. She made me see . . . what really happened way back then." Julia closed her eyes to escape the intensity of Walter's gaze.

"She told you your father gave you away as a sacrifice to Satan. Sounds to me like she did you one hell of a favor."

Julia turned away from his sarcasm and sat with her back to the fire. "You can't run from the past."

"Who says? What's so great about the past, anyway? Do we have to keep rubbing our faces in the stuff we ought to forget?"

Julia said nothing. She watched the shadows dancing in the firelight along the ceiling. The rain had eased to a slow but steady downfall. If only the rain would wash the whole world away.

Walter went to one of the small windows and peered out. "I'm sorry," he said, subdued. "We shouldn't be arguing. We're supposed to be on the same side."

Maybe Walter was right. Did knowing the truth make the wounds heal, or only keep them fresh? Yet even after Dr. Forrest's bizarre behavior, Julia wondered how she'd face her problems without her therapist's help.

"Look," Walter said, sitting down beside her. He fumbled in the backpack and took out the baseball cards that had been lying on her coffee table. "I brought these. I wasn't thinking too clearly, or I'd have grabbed something useful. I got kind of scared when I saw Hartley snooping around."

Julia took the cards and flipped through them. The ludicrousness of their situation struck her like a cold slap. Holed up in a tiny cabin in the woods, not knowing whom to trust, unable even to call the cops because the cops were Creeps. Nothing to do but wait for the boogeyman to come claim her. Unless she went insane first.

She moved aside so Walter could put more wood on the fire. Exhaustion hit her all at once, and she yawned.

"Go on up in the loft," Walter said. "Might as well get some sleep."

Julia wondered if he would try and join her in the tiny loft. She didn't want to deal with any more emotional entanglement than they had already been thrown into. Still, it would be nice to have someone close by, just in case the bad dreams and panic came in the night. And maybe, just maybe, she could summon up some small comfort and warmth to offer Walter. "What about you?"

"I'm going to stay up a while," he said. He went to an old cedar chest in the corner and took out some quilts. He shook them and tossed them up on the loft. "I'm pretty sure they wouldn't be able to follow us in the dark and the rain, but I'm not too sleepy, anyway. I'll just keep the fire going for a while. Got my sleeping bag here if I need it."

Julia moved wearily to the ladder and climbed as if someone else were controlling her tired muscles. The quilts were spread over what felt like a thin foam pad at the top of the loft. The bedding smelled faintly of smoke and leaves. Julia rolled onto the quilts and bundled herself up.

She inched to the edge of the loft and looked down at Walter. He was turning their wet clothes over so they could finish drying. His hands were oddly gentle with her clothes. When he finished, he returned to his vigil at the hearth and opened his Bible.

"Walter?" she murmured.

"Yeah?"

"Thanks. For everything."

He looked up at the loft. "It ain't nothing. Sweet dreams."

She recalled the image of the meadow that Walter had helped her summon when she panicked at the gas station phone. She watched the shimmering clouds floating around in her imagination, and her breathing fell into a slow, even rhythm. Once, she saw the barn of her childhood rise in the midst of the meadow, but she was able to drive that horror from her visions.

I am a mountain. They can't break me
.

And behind the mountain was a face, swirling in mists and clouds. She tried to focus, to believe, and though its features were veiled, she sensed a gentle smile.

Sleep soon drifted over her like a thick fog.

A noise awoke her in the night, the creak of wood. She opened her eyes to utter darkness. Her feet were cold. Something was touching her, tugging the quilts from her body.

Some
one
was touching her.

She tried to sit up, but her arms were pinned. Then the thing was on top of her, crushing her breath from her lungs. She couldn't even cry out. Two glowing red specks appeared in the darkness inches from her face, and the smell of rotten eggs and matches flooded her nostrils. The specks grew brighter, and in their glow she could see the face that wore those impossible eyes.

The skull ring.

The skull had taken flesh and now was coming to get her for good. She wrestled an arm free and clawed at the eyes. Her fingernails sank into meat and she ripped. The face came away in her hands, like a rubber mask, but still the eyes blazed.

Beneath that face was her father's, unshaven, cruel, leering, the way Dr. Forrest had made her remember him. His tongue snaked in and out between rotted teeth. A goatish scrap of beard sprouted from his chin, and his hot breath slavered across her cheeks. She raked her hand again and grabbed the cloth of his hood.

She yanked the cloth away and this time it was Mitchell who was on top of her, his hands groping and pinching, his expression simultaneously desirous and wicked. He laughed at her struggles, smug in his power. She closed her eyes against the intensity of his red stare and slashed at his face.

More skin and muscle came away, and a voice at her ear said, "He owns you, whore," and it was Snead's voice, a voice she knew from 23 years ago.

Snead. The man in the hood. The monster with the knife.

Julia opened her eyes to look at him, but now it was Walter who was above her, his cheeks burning with hate, saliva leaking from between his sharp teeth, the hands gripping her now even more powerful and cruel, bruising, twisting, taking what he wanted. The face shimmered, the features bulged and became the decapitated goat's head of her childhood.

"You're mine, Judas bitch. And I take what is mine."

She screamed as the sinister animal face pressed close and flickered its tongue across her lips. Its foul breath poured into her, burning her from the inside, arousing agony in her scars, awakening every bad memory and switching on the circuits so that pain spasmed through her body. She moaned in disgust as the creature's feverish flesh pressed against her.

"Julia?"

Walter's voice, from somewhere behind the goat-thing.

But Walter was
in
this thing, wasn't he? Part of it. All of them the devil.

Fingers clutched her ankle, shaking her. She kicked and clawed blindly.

"Hey!" he called again.

She opened her eyes. No darkness, no twin red specks, no goat-creature. The room was suffused with orange light, the fire down to embers.

Walter stood on the ladder, looking at her. "You okay? You were yelling out in your sleep."

She tried to blink away the nightmare. But her nostrils held the memory of the hellish stench and her flesh was warm from the imagined assault. "Are you one of them, Walter?"

"Shhh. You were having a bad dream, that's all."

"Tell me you're not one of them."  She pulled the blankets to her chin.

"No, I'm one of
us
." He patted her leg. "You're safe here. They won't get you."

"I'm scared." She felt almost as helpless and lost as she had felt as a four-year-old.

The ladder creaked, and then his body lay alongside hers. "It's going to be just fine," he whispered.

His arms went around her. She accepted the embrace, snug in the blankets, and drifted back to sleep. This time, no Creeps stalked her dreams.