This Present Darkness (63 page)

Bernice wanted the end of the story. “Susan, do you know how my sister really died?”

Susan said angrily, “Your sister Pat was methodically and viciously done away with by the Universal Consciousness Society, or I should say, the forces behind it. She made the same fatal mistake I’ve seen so many others make: she found out too much about the Society, she showed herself to be an enemy of Alexander Kaseph. Listen, what Kaseph wants, he gets, and he doesn’t care who has to be destroyed, murdered, or mutilated to make sure of it.” She shook her head. “I had to be blind not to have seen it happening to Pat. It was right out of the textbook!”

“So what about some man named Thomas?”

Susan answered directly, “Yes, it was Thomas. He was responsible for her death.” Then she added rather cryptically, “But he wasn’t a man.”

Bernice was slowly catching on to this new game with its very weird rules. “And now you’re going to tell me it wasn’t a woman either.”

“Pat was taking a psychology class, and one of her requirements was that she be in a subject pool for psychology experiments—it’s in the diary, you’ll read it all. A friend persuaded her to volunteer for an experiment involving relaxation techniques, and it was during that experiment that she had what she called a psychic experience, some kind of insight into a higher world, she called it.

“I’ll make it short; you can read it for yourself later. She became extremely
enamored by the experience and saw no connection between this ‘scientific’ exploration and the ‘mystical’ practices I was into. She kept going back, kept taking part in the experiments, and finally contacted what she called a ‘highly evolved, disembodied human’ from another dimension, a very wise and intelligent being named Thomas.”

Bernice struggled with what she was hearing, but knew she held the documentation for Susan’s account, her sister’s diary. “So who was this Thomas really? Just a figment of her imagination?”

“Some things you’re just going to have to accept for now,” Susan replied with a sigh. “We’ve talked about God, we’ve toyed with the idea of angels; now let’s try evil angels, evil spirit entities. To the atheistic scientists, they might appear as extraterrestrials, often with their own spaceships; to evolutionists they might claim to be highly evolved beings; to the lonely, they might appear as long-lost relatives speaking from the other side of the grave; Jungian psychologists consider them ‘archetypal images’ dredged from the collective consciousness of the human race.”

“What?”

“Hey, listen, whatever description or definition fits, whatever shape, whatever form it takes to win a person’s confidence and appeal to his vanity, that’s the form they take. And they tell the deluded seeker of truth whatever he or she wants to hear until they finally have that person in their complete control.”

“Like a con game, in other words.”

“It’s all a con game: Eastern meditation, witchcraft, divination, Science of Mind, psychic healing, holistic education—oh, the list goes on and on—it’s all the same thing, nothing but a ruse to take over people’s minds and spirits, even their bodies.”

Bernice reviewed memory after memory of their investigation, and Susan’s claims fell right into place.

Susan continued, “Bernice, we are dealing with a conspiracy of spirit entities. I know Kaseph is crawling with them and takes his orders from them. They do his dirty work. If anyone gets in his way, he has numberless resources in the spiritual realm to clear away the problem in whatever manner is most convenient.”

Ted Harmel, Bernice thought. The Carluccis. How many others? “You’re not the first person to try to tell me all this.”

“I hope I’m the last person who will have to.”

Kevin piped in. “Yeah, I remember how Pat talked about Thomas. He never sounded like he was human. She acted like he was more of a god. She had to ask him before she’d even decide what to eat for breakfast. I—I thought she’d found some guy, you know, some male chauvinist type.”

Susan eased into the bottom line of the story. “Pat had given her will over to Thomas. It didn’t take long; it usually doesn’t once a person really submits to a spirit’s influence. No doubt he took control of her, then terrified her, then convinced her that—well, the Hindus call it karma; it’s the delusion that your next life will be better than this one because you’ve earned enough brownie points. In Pat’s case, a self-inflicted death would be nothing more than a way to escape the evil of this lower world and join Thomas in a higher state of existence.”

Susan gently flipped the pages of the diary still in Bernice’s hands, and found the last entry. “There. The last thing in Pat’s diary is a love letter to Thomas. She planned to join him soon, and she even mentions how she’ll do it.”

Bernice could feel revulsion at the thought of reading such a letter, but she began to work her way through the last few pages of her sister’s diary. Pat wrote in a style of someone under a very strange, lofty-sounding delusion, but it was clear she was also disoriented by an irrational fear of life itself. Terrible pain and spiritual anguish had taken over her soul, changing her from the happy-go-lucky Patricia Krueger that Bernice had grown up with to a terrified, aimless psychotic completely out of touch with reality.

Bernice tried to read on, but she began to feel old wounds reopening; emotions that had waited for this very moment of final revelation burst from their hiding places like a river through an opened floodgate. The scrawled and ambling words on the pages blurred behind a sudden cascade of tears, and her whole body began to quake with sobs. All she wanted to do was shut out the world, disregard this gallant woman and this poor, disheveled logger, lie down on the bed, and cry. And she did.

HANK SLEPT PEACEFULLY
on his cot in the cell. Marshall was not sleeping at all. He sat up in the dark, his back against the cold, hard
bars of the cell, his head drooping, his hand making nervous little trips around his face.

He had been shot through the guts. That’s what it felt like. Somewhere he had lost his armor plating, his strength, his strong and tough facade. He had always been Marshall Hogan, the hunter, the hound, the stay-out-of-my-way getter of whatever he wanted, a foe to be reckoned with, a guy who could take care of himself.

A lump, that’s what he was, and nothing but a fool. This Hank Busche was right. Just look at yourself, Hogan. Don’t worry about God dropping the ball; you dropped it a long time ago. You blew it, man. You thought you had everything under control, and now where’s your family and where are you?

Maybe you’ve been tricked by these demons Hank’s been talking about, and then maybe you’ve even fooled yourself. Come on, Marshall, you know why you shortchanged your family. You were copping out, singing the same old tune again. And you enjoyed working with that good-looking reporter, didn’t you? Teasing her, tossing paper wads at her, for crying out loud! How old are you, sixteen?

Marshall let his own mind and heart tell him the truth, and much of it felt as if he had known it somewhere but had never listened. How long, he began to wonder, had he been lying to himself?

“Kate,” he whispered there in the dark, his eyes glistening with tears. “Kate, what have I done?”

A big hand reached across the cell and nudged Hank’s shoulder.

Hank stirred, opened his eyes, and said quietly, “Yeah, what’s up?”

Marshall was weeping and he said very quietly, “Hank, I’m just no good. I need God. I need Jesus.”

How many times in his life had Hank said the words? “Let’s pray.”

AFTER SEVERAL MINUTES
had passed, Bernice began to feel the flood subsiding. She sat up, still sniffling, but trying to get back to the business at hand.

“That’s what woke me up,” Susan reiterated. “I thought these beings were benevolent; I thought Kaseph had all the answers. But I saw them all in their true form when I read what they did to my best friend, your sister.”

Kevin asked, “So is that why you came up to me at the carnival and got my number?”

“Kaseph had a special meeting in town with Langstrat and some other vital conspirators, Oliver Young and Alf Brummel. I came to Ashton with Kaseph, tagging right along as I always did, but when I got the opportunity I sneaked away. I had to take the chance that maybe I’d see you somewhere. Maybe it was God again; it was nothing short of a miracle that I spotted you at the carnival. I needed a friend on the outside I could confide in, someone obscure.”

Kevin smiled. “Yeah, that describes me pretty well.”

Susan continued, “Kaseph never liked to feel that he didn’t have complete control of me. When I slipped away to the carnival, he probably told the others that he’d already sent me there and that they would meet me. When he found me and dragged me behind that silly booth, he talked to them like I had gone ahead and picked out that spot.”

Bernice said, “And that’s when I came across you and snapped your picture!”

“And then Brummel slipped some bills to those two hookers and some instructions to a few of his Windsor friends, and you know the rest.”

Susan went to her suitcase. “But now for the really big news. Kaseph is making his move tomorrow. There’s a special meeting scheduled with the Whitmore College regents at 2 in the afternoon. Omni Corporation—as a front for the Universal Consciousness Society—plans to buy Whitmore College, and Kaseph is closing the deal.”

Bernice’s eyes widened with horror. “Then we were right! He
is
going for the college!”

“It’s good strategy. The whole town of Ashton is practically built around that college. Once the Society and Kaseph get established there at Whitmore, they’ll have overwhelming influence over the rest of the town. Society people will come in like a swarm and Ashton will become another ‘Sacred City of the Universal Mind.’ It’s happened enough before, in other towns, in other countries.”

Bernice pounded the bed in frustration. “Susan, we have records of Eugene Baylor’s financial transactions, evidence that might show how the college was undermined. But we haven’t been able to make any sense of it all!”

Susan pulled a little canister out of her suitcase. “Actually, you only have half the picture. Baylor’s no fool; he knew how to cover his tracks so his embezzlements on behalf of Omni wouldn’t be noticed. What you need is the other side of those transactions: Kaseph’s own records.” She held the canister out for them to see. “I didn’t have room for all that material. I did photograph it, though, and if we could get this film developed—”

“We have a darkroom at the
Clarion.
We could print that film right away.”

“Let’s check out of here.”

They scrambled.

THE REMNANT CONTINUED
to pray. None had been able to see or even hear from Hank since his arrest. The police station was manned at all times by strange police no one had ever seen in Ashton before, and none of these officers knew anything about how to visit anyone in jail, or how to bail them out, nor would they let anyone in to find out. It seemed Ashton had become a police state.