Chapter 19
"I hope you're coming to the Hallowe'en party, Mrs. Creighton."
Marcia jerked around, horrified, staring. It took her a moment to sort out her thoughts and recognize the nurse, Miss Durkin; another moment to ascertain that Miss Durkin had asked that singularly tactless question in innocence. At least she looked innocent, with hazel eyes that seemed frank, a smile that held no malice. But you could never tell. She had once trusted her neighbor, what's-her-name, and that farmer who looked like Gary Cooper. They had both betrayed her. They had hurt her dog.
"When can I see my dog?"
Miss Durkin's smile lost its spontaneity, and some of the luster left her eyes.
"Now, you've talked to Doctor about that. You know that your dog is dead. You can have another one when you go home, perhaps."
"I don't want another one," she said, but she could put no force into her petulance. She turned away from the nurse and looked out across the sun-dappled lawn, its greenness shading to brown at the trees, like multicolored lollipops. "I don't want to go home, either."
"Well, you have a visitor who wants you to come home, m send her out. And I do hope you'll come to the party."
"I don't want any visitors," Marcia shouted after her, "and the last thing I need is a fucking Hallowe'en party!"
Miss Durkin's back stiffened, but her step didn't falter as she went off like a pigeon on parade in her starched white uniform.
Marcia sank back in her chair and shaded her eyes from the bright sun. Lucifer was dead, of course. She kept forgetting certain details, but an effort never failed to restore them to her mind. She had been found in a field near Alvin Walker's farmhouse, which had been struck by lightning-a highly discriminating bolt that had wrecked the basement and killed her dog. She had no idea how so much time had elapsed unnoted since then, but she accepted the fact that it was October. It looked like October.
"Hi, Mom."
She started. She twisted in her chair to look at Melody. She studied her daughter coldly for a long moment, then turned and shut her eyes. "Oh, God," she said.
"I sort of thought you'd be happy to see me," she said, and Marcia could hear her drawing up a chair.
Melody was outrageously pregnant. It made her look even younger than she was.
"The nurse just invited me to a Hallowe'en party," Marcia said.
Melody laughed.
"I thought you'd get a kick out of that," Marcia said dryly. "Why haven't you been to see me?"
"I thought you might be ... well, mad at me."
"And Ken? I haven't seen him, either."
"He's pretty badly messed up. He still wants Nora, but she never really wanted him at all. She just wanted him out of the way, that one night."
"She was one of them?"
Melody nodded. "One of us."
Marcia looked across the lawn, watched people moving in slow groups, patients and their visitors. Most of those patients were genuinely insane. She wasn't. She had glimpsed the chaos that lay beneath the physical universe, that was struggling even now to enter it, but it hadn't driven her mad. She was certain of that.
"I don't really understand all of it," Marcia said at last. "Lucifer-what was he?"
"He was just a dog. But my brother-your son-needed a body. My dream was right, you see, it wasn't a dream at all. He tried to get inside my head, to merge with me, but he wasn't strong enough. He couldn't overcome my natural defenses. And I was scared, of course, so I resisted."
"My son." Marcia shuddered.
"Yes. I was a twin, only my twin brother had no physical form. He could control energy, though, sometimes-like when we had the ghost? Then, when he got older and smarter, he tried to force his way into the material world in other ways. He tried to take over the body of a dead man, but that didn't work. Then he tried with Lucifer, and that was better, but the mixture of personalities did crazy things-the dog's instinct to kill was brought out by all the strength and size."
"Who told you all this?"
"Nora, mostly."
"I hope you'll explain it all to my doctor on your way out. He thinks I'm nuts."
Melody laughed. "I wouldn't say a word to anyone who didn't understand. You already know a lot about it"
"And you're telling me because no one will ever believe me, if I tell them what you've said."
Melody smiled. "That's true, too."
"What happened to-your brother?"
"You really screwed that up. That was what the Sabbat was going to be for. Once it was all explained to me, I agreed to let my brother merge his personality with mine, to create one perfect being. We should have been born that way in the first place, as one individual, but something went wrong. So the Sabbat was supposed to generate the psychic energy we needed to merge, to become one."
"How did I screw it up?"
"My brother-that word isn't exactly right, you know. He was more like a big chunk of me that couldn't get a foothold in this world. But it's handy, so I'll keep calling him that-my brother went and took over the dog again. He knew you were in trouble, and he wanted to help you. But you hit him with that motherfucking medal, and it destroyed him. The shock of it all killed the dog, too."
"I'm sorry about Lucifer."
"It doesn't matter," Melody said, patting her swollen belly. "We held the Sabbat anyway, and I was the altar. My father came to me, as he once came to you. It was ... glorious. This time nothing will go wrong. This time it's going to be one perfect child. Not twins. I know."
Marcia pretended to shade her eyes from the sun once more, but she was trying to hide her face from Melody's searching, intelligent gaze. Her daughter was lying. Marcia had known Lucifer inside out, and his nature hadn't been responsible for the evil, the savagery. After Ron Green and Peachtree, who had been in the wrong places at the wrong times, the killings had a sickening logic. Melody had subconsciously wished her stepfather's mistress dead, her own siblings dead. That "big chunk of her" had granted her wish. It was pure evil. As Father Collins had said, its triumph would mean the end of humanity in human beings.
She carefully calculated some odds. She had no weapon. She could try to kick her daughter in the belly with all her strength, but she would get only one chance: nurses and attendants, working hard at being unobtrusive, were everywhere, and they were prepared for just that sort of emergency. Wearing soft slippers as she was, it might not work. She decided to pursue a different strategy.
"Maybe I've been wrong about all this, honey," she said, looking earnestly into her daughter's inscrutable, cold eyes. "I don't know. There's a lot I don't understand, but I'm willing to learn, to be taught. You see, no one ever took the trouble to explain it all to me. I guess I've made some terrible mistakes."
"You have," Melody said quietly.
"But the fact remains that you're still my daughter, that you need my help at a time like this. I'm going to make a real effort to pull myself together, to agree with the doctor's version of the truth and try to get out of this place. I want to be with you and help you take care of ... your child."
"I'm sorry, Mom." Melody rose from her chair and began drifting backward, away from her. "I should have told you, I guess. But-well, I inherited certain abilities from my father. Nora and the others have been coaching me, showing me how to use them. I always knew I was a remarkable person, a truly superior person, and now I know why."
"Abilities? What do you mean?"
"Well, for one thing, the ability to read minds. I'm sorry that your mind is so sick and twisted that you can't begin to grasp the glory and the wonder of all this. You'd better get used to the idea that you're going to be in this place for a long time, at least until my child can take care of himself. And by that time-can't you see? There won't be any more prisons, any more madhouses, because there won't be any more crime or madness. We'll all join together at last as brothers and sisters, singing the praises of the Older Gods, opening the path for them as they come triumphantly into their inheritance at long last!"
"You little witch!" Marcia cried, rising, but Melody was already running at an ungainly but highly efficient gait that took her far out of reach across the parched October lawn. She flung one laughing glance over her shoulder, her gold hair catching sunlight that now seemed oddly dimmed. Marcia sank back into her chair as the scene before her wavered in a lens of tears.
"Mrs. Creighton! I had no idea you were here."
She rubbed her eyes briskly and looked up. For a moment she failed to recognize him. He was thinner than she remembered, and he now wore his salt-and-pepper hair in a crew cut that compounded the rather ghastly suggestion he gave of a middle-aged boy. He wore a baggy gray sweatsuit, too, instead of a clerical collar, but it was Father Collins.
"Why are you here?" she asked.
"Visiting the sick is one of my principal duties," he said, smiling.
"You saw-?"
"Your daughter? Yes," he said, his smile fading. "They've pinned all their hopes on her. They guard her closely. I have no doubt that some of the people you see near us, engaged in apparently innocent pursuits, are members of her hand-picked bodyguard. It was wise that you made no move to ... rectify the evil."
"But what can we do? She told me that I'm never getting out of here, not until it's too late. You have to do something. You're the only person who can, the only one who believes."
"Calm yourself, Mrs. Creighton. They've tried then-worst with me, and I still draw breath. I still fight them. I told you, the old fox has more than one trick."
"Then why haven't you done something before-"
He made a quick, surreptitious gesture to silence her. "Here comes one of them now," he said, barely moving his lips. "Be careful. Don't seem alarmed by anything I may say or do."
Marcia looked beyond him to see Miss Durkin bustling toward them. Her professional smile couldn't mask her obviously deep concern. Perhaps he was right, and the nurse was one of the cultists, planted here to make sure she achieved no contact with possible allies in the outside world.
"So here we are!" Miss Durkin said in a tone of genial reproof. "And how did we get out of our room this time, I'd like to know?"
"One of my little secrets," Father Collins said with a chuckle.
"But you know you're not supposed to be out here, Your Holiness-"
"Please!" he interrupted. "Be more careful. This good lady, Mrs. Creighton-an old friend, by the way-she has no knowledge of my true position in the Church. I've been traveling incognito, you see. I guess the cat's out of the bag now, though." He chuckled again. "You won't tell anyone, will you, Mrs. Creighton?"
Marcia shook her head slowly, unable to speak.
Miss Durkin gently but firmly led Father Collins across the lawn to the big gray building beyond it. He turned once, smiling benignly, and made the sign of the cross at her.