She nodded vaguely. “Maybe. But I don’t think so. I’m so tired of being responsible, Billy. Why did it have to be me. Why?” When she looked up at him, there were tears glimmering in her eyes.
“I don’t know,” he said, and he reached out to take her hand as the rain flailed against the windows. For a long time they sat together, listening to the storm, and when the rain stopped Bonnie let out a soft, despairing whisper.
51
AS BILLY SAT WITH Bonnie Hailey at the Hillburn Institute, the telephone was ringing at the Hodges’s house in Fayette. George Hodges stirred, feeling his wife’s back pressed against his own, and fumbled for the receiver.
It was Albert Vance, an attorney he’d met at a business conference in Fort Lauderdale the year before, calling from New York City. Hodges told him to stay on the line, nudged Rhonda, and asked her to hang up when he yelled from downstairs. He went down to the study, rubbing sleep from his eyes, and took the call. “Okay!” he shouted, and the upstairs phone clicked down.
He didn’t want Rhonda overhearing. His heart was pounding as he listened to what Vance had to say.
“I had to go through red tape like you wouldn’t believe,” Vance said, in a northern accent abrasive to Hodges’s ear. “Ten High owns a few companies here in New York, and on the surface they’re as clean as polished glass. No IRS trouble, no union problems, no bankruptcies. They’re real Boy Scouts.”
“So what does that mean?”
“It means I had to dig five thousand dollars deeper, and I had to cover my tracks. That’s why I’m calling so late. I don’t want anyone in my office to know what I found out about Ten High…just in case.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You will. Ten High may or may not be connected.”
“Connected? With what?”
“The organized boys. Got the picture? I said may or may not be. They’ve insulated themselves pretty damned well. But the word I get is that Ten High has sunken its claws into the West Coast porno business, the garment trade, owns a sizable slice of Vegas action, and controls most of the Mexican illegal-alien flow. Ten High is strong, prospering, and lethal.”
“Oh… Jesus…” Hodges’s hand clenched around the receiver Wayne and Henry Bragg were still out there! Wayne had missed a television taping, and now the Houston date had passed and still Wayne showed no intent of coming back to Fayette! God only knew what hold Krespin had on him! He said weakly, “I… Al, what can I do?”
“You want my advice? I’ll give you a fifty-buck warning for free: keep your ass away from those people! Whatever’s going on between them and your client, it’s not worth being made into dog food over. Right?”
Hodges’s mouth was numb. He said in a whisper, “Yes.”
“Okay, that’s it. Send me the money and a case of Jack Daniel’s, I’ll call it even. But listen to me, and I’m serious about this: you never called me to check into Ten High. I never heard of Ten High before. Got it? Those guys have very long arms. Okay?”
“Al, I appreciate your help. Thank you.”
“Sleep tight,” Vance said, and the telephone was hung up in New York City.
George Hodges slowly returned the receiver to it cradle. He was shaking, and couldn’t find the strength to rise from his desk.
For all intents and purposes, the Falconer Crusade—the foundation, the scholarship fund, everything!—Was in the grip of Augustus Krepsin, chairman of the board of the Ten High Corporation. Surely Henry Bragg could see what was happening! Couldn’t he?
No, he thought bitterly. Henry was too busy lying around that pool and meeting the young girls Niles introduced him to. Palm Springs was all the things Henry had ever fantasized about, and he was hooked as deeply as Wayne!
Hodges reached for the phone again, and dialed 0. When the operator answered, he said, “I’d like to make a long-distance call please. To Birmingham, to the Federal Bureau of…” And then he tasted ashes in his mouth, because what could he say? What could he do? Wayne wanted to be out there. Wayne felt safe in that stone tomb, hidden from his responsibilities.
Those guys have very long arms, Al Vance had said.
“Yes sir?” the operator asked.
Hodges thought of Rhonda, and of Larry in his freshman year at Auburn. Long arms. He’d seen Niles’s eyes: the eyes of a killer. His gut lurched, and he hung up.
Things had been coming loose at the seams ever since J.J.’s death. Now the whole package was coming apart. Hodges feared what might be at its dark center.
But he had his family, his stocks and bonds. His house and money. He was alive.
Hodges rose wearily from his desk, and as he started across the room he thought he saw, through the picture window, a red glow in the sky when wind whipped through the trees. A fire? he wondered. In that direction lay Hawthorne. What could be burning?
Still, it couldn’t be a very large fire. And it was several miles away. It would be put out. He’d find out what it was in the morning.
“God help me,” he said quietly, and hoped he would be heard. Then he turned off the lights and climbed the stairs. He felt as if his soul had been scorched to a cinder.
52
“I’LL BE PERFECTLY HONEST with you, Billy,” Mary Hillburn said. She put on her reading glasses and opened a file folder that lay before her atop the desk. “I have all your test results right here, everything from Zener cards to biofeedback. You checked out just fine on your physical, incidentally.”
“That’s good to know.” It had been several days since Billy’s talk with Bonnie Hailey, and just yesterday morning he’d finished the last of the tests Dr. Hillburn had planned for him. It had been a long hypnosis session conducted by Dr. Lansing, and Billy had felt as if he were floating in a dark pool as the therapist tried to take him to different levels of consciousness. From the disappointment on Lansing’s face, Billy could tell it had been a dismal failure.
That same disappointment, he saw, was in Dr. Hillburn’s eyes. “Your psychological tests,” she said, “are also positive. Your Zener card tests were about average, indicating no special ESP ability. You were cooperative in hypnosis, but Dr. Lansing reports no unusual or noteworthy reaction. Your dream diary shows no thread of continuity. You scored highest on the biofeedback session, which may indicate you have a more intense power of concentration than average. Other than that…” She looked up at him over the top of her glasses. “I’m afraid there’s nothing in any of your tests that marks you as being more than just an ordinary, healthy young man with a high concentration potential.”
“Oh,” Billy said quietly. All that work for nothing? he thought. “Then…you don’t think I can do what I say I can, is that right?”
“Take on pain from the dead? I really don’t know. As I say, the tests—”
“They’re not the right tests,” Billy said.
She pondered that for a moment. “Perhaps you’re right. But then, what would the proper test be, young man? Can you come up with one? You see, parapsychology—and death survival research in particular—is a very, very tricky enterprise. It’s a fledgling science—a new frontier; we make up the tests as we go along, but even our tests have to be tested. We have to prove ourselves as being serious every day, and most scientists won’t even listen to our findings.” She closed his file. “Unfortunately, we have proven nothing. No proof of death survival, no proof of an afterlife…nothing. But still people come to us with sightings of discarnates. They come to us with precognitive dreams, with the ability to suddenly speak in different languages, or to play musical instruments that they had no prior experience with. I’ve seen individuals go into trancelike states and write in a completely different handwriting style. I’ve heard a little girl, also in a trance, speak in a man’s voice. What does it mean? Simply that we have reached the edge of a new unknown, and we don’t understand what lies before us.”
Dr. Hillburn took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes. She was suddenly very tired, and she’d so hoped this young man
from Alabama would be the one she was looking for. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t disbelieve what you’ve told me about yourself and your family. Your friend Mr. Merkle was certainly convinced. But…how can we test that black aura you say you see? How can we test someone who feels he can calm the dead? I don’t know. Until we come up with new, verifiable test procedures, we cannot. So I’m going to send your file around to some other parapsychologists. In the meantime… I’m sorry, but I’ve got a list of people waiting to come in. I’m going to have to ask you to vacate your room.”
“You…want me to leave?”
“No, I don’t want you to; but I’m afraid you’ll have to. I can give you until the end of the week, and we’ll put you on a bus back home. I’m hopeful one of the other parapsychologists who get your file can…”
Heat pulsed in Billy’s face. He stood up abruptly, thinking of all the money he’d spent to come up here. “I’ll leave tomorrow,” he said. “And nobody has to see me off. I thought you were going to help me!”
“I said we’d put you through some tests. We have. I’m groping through the dark, just as you are, and I wish I had room for everyone here who has psi potential, but we don’t. It’s not that I don’t believe in your abilities. But right now there’s only your word for them.”
“I see,” Billy said, confused and angry. All this time, wasted! “I shouldn’t have come up here. I was wrong, I know that now. You can’t understand or help me, because you look at everything through machines. How can a machine know what’s in my mind and soul? My mother, and her mother before her, never needed machines to help them do their work—and I don’t, either.” He glowered at her and then stalked out of the office.
Dr. Hillburn couldn’t blame him. She turned her chair toward the window to look at the park in the gray midafternoon sunlight. She hated to let Billy Creekmore go, because she sensed something about him—something important that she couldn’t quite understand. But she needed the space he was occupying, and that was that. She drew in a deep breath and turned to her next priority, Bonnie Hailey’s dream diary. Bonnie was still having dreams about a burning building, and her messenger was still trying to impress a word on her. Something that sounded like “spines”? She reread Bonnie’s latest dreams—all of them similar except for minor details—and then took a Chicago street map from a bookshelf behind her desk.
53
THEY CAME FOR HENRY Bragg at a quiet hour, just before three in the morning, and turned on all the lights in his mirrored bedroom.
Niles was standing over the bed when Bragg got his eyeglasses on. “Mr. Krepsin would like to see you,” Niles said. “You won’t need to get dressed, just your robe and slippers will do.”
“What’s going on? What time is it?”
“It’s early. Wayne’s repaying a debt to Mr. Krepsin. It’s important that you be there.”
Niles and a sturdy blond bodyguard named Dorn escorted Bragg into the east wing of the house, Krepsin’s private domain. In the week since George Hodges had been gone, Bragg had felt as pampered as a prince. He was getting a good suntan and becoming addicted to piña coladas. When the young girls that Niles introduced to him fawned over him, he conveniently forgot about his wife, children, his house and legal practice. He’d begun wearing a chain around his neck with his zodiac sign on it. He was doing his job: staying close to Wayne. If there just happened to be one hell of a lot of fringe benefits, was it his fault?
Niles pressed the button outside Krepsin’s study. The doors unlocked, and Bragg stepped into the room. Track lights were aimed on him, and the mounted skeletons threw dark slats upon the walls. Krepsin sat behind his desk, his hands folded before him, his head in a pool of light.
Bragg had to visor his hand over his eyes because the light in his face was almost painful. “Mr. Krepsin? Did you want to see me, sir?”
“Yes. Step forward, will you?”
Bragg did. The feel of the Persian carpet under his feet changed. He realized he was standing on a wide piece of thin, clear plastic that had been laid down over the carpet.
“That’s fine,” Krepsin said. “Right there, if you please.”
“What’s going on?” Bragg grinned.
“Wayne?” Krepsin looked to his left, at the figure sitting in a high-backed chair. “Are you ready?”
It took Bragg a few minutes to recognize Wayne. The boy’s face was pallid, haunted-looking. It had been several days since he’d last seen Wayne, and the boy looked like a stranger. Wayne held a small box in his lap and was rubbing something between his fingers. Was it…hair? he wondered.
“I don’t know,” Wayne said softly.
“What did I tell you before, son? You’re either ready or not for your test.”
“Hey,” Bragg said, “is anybody going to tell me what’s going on?”
Dorn was covering some of the skeletons nearest Bragg with clear plastic sheets. He moved a coffee table and chair to the far side of the room. Wayne sat staring at the hair in his hand; most of it was gray, and it had a luster that shone like starlight. He got a strange feeling from holding it. The Creekmore boy’s face was fresh in his mind, and for an instant it didn’t look evil at all. But then he remembered what his father had told him, about things of the Devil not always looking black as sin. “I’m ready,” he said, and let Ramona Creekmore’s hair slip back into the box. He could call it up from deep within, he knew he could. He rose to his feet, clenching and unclenching his fists at his sides.
“Let’s begin,” Krepsin said.
Before Bragg could turn, Dorn gripped his wrists and pinned his arms behind him. Bragg cried out in pain as Dorn held him so tightly he could barely breathe.
“Mr. Niles?” Krepsin said softly.
Niles had taken what looked like a set of brass knuckles from a black leather pouch. He slipped the weapon on his right fist, and Bragg whined with fear as he saw the wicked glint of broken razor blades studding the weapon’s surface.
“Wayne!” Bragg screamed, his glasses hanging from one ear. “For God’s sake, don’t let them kill me!” He tried to kick out at Niles, but the other man neatly sidestepped. Niles gripped his hair and jerked his head back while Dorn increased the pressure on his lockhold.
And then Niles’s arm swept outward in a blurred arc, across Bragg’s exposed throat. Fountains of bright red blood leaped into the air, jetting upon the plastic sheets. Niles leaped aside, but not in time: his gray suit was splattered with scarlet. Bragg’s face had gone marble white.
“Let him go,” Krepsin ordered. Bragg crumpled to his knees, his hands clasped around his throat, blood streaming between the fingers. Krepsin had clicked a stopwatch on when Bragg’s throat was slashed, and the seconds were running; he inclined his head toward Wayne. “Now heal him,” he said. “You have about three minutes before he bleeds to death.”
Wayne had had no idea what the test was going to be. He was transfixed by the sight of all that blood.
“Please,” Bragg whispered, and reached a gore-covered hand out for him. “Oh Jesus, oh Jesus don’t let me die…”
“Hurry, Wayne,” Krepsin urged.
Gripping the man’s slippery hand, Wayne got on his knees beside him. Red tides rippled across the plastic. Wayne clamped his free hand over the gushing, ragged wound. “Be healed,” he said, his voice shaking. “I…command you to be healed!” He tried to visualize the veins and arteries melding together as if by a cauterizing torch, but he knew it wasn’t working. “Please,” he whispered. “Please be healed!”
Bragg moaned hoarsely and fell on his side.
The stopwatch on Krepsin’s desk continued to ticktickticktick.
Wayne felt trapped in rust. He had felt the healing fire when he’d touched Toby; he had felt it when he’d healed a little girl’s numbed legs; he had felt it a hundred times in those old days, before he felt so pushed and squeezed and pressured to keep doing it day after day. But he couldn’t pretend anymore, not with Henry dying in front of him. He had to find the
blue fire again, and he had to find it fast. When he looked pleadingly up at Krepsin, he saw the man’s impassive face like a huge chunk of eroding stone. Krepsin had put on a surgical mask.
“Wayne…” Bragg whispered.
He clamped both hands to the wound. “Be healed be healed dear God heal this man please heal him.” He squeezed his eyes shut. It wouldn’t happen! Where was the blue fire? Where was the power? “Burn it shut!” he shouted. Still nothing. He thought of the Creekmore witch, scorching in Hellfire. He thought of the Creekmore boy, still out there roaming the earth. One had been dealt with, the other must follow. “BURN IT SHUT!” he screamed, his mind turning toward revenge for the death of his father.
A faint jolt shuddered through his hands, like a spark plug misfiring. He was covered with blood and sweat, and as he concentrated he bowed his back and screamed for his daddy to help him heal Henry Bragg.
Spark plugs fired. Fired. Fired. “Yes, I command you to be healed! I command you to be heal—” a terrific pain suddenly ripped across his head. His brain felt as if it were about to explode. “BE HEALED!” he shouted, as blood oozed from his nostrils. His eyes bulged from his head.
Bragg’s body writhed, his mouth opening in a moan.
Krepsin, breathing hard, began to rise from his chair.
Pain crisscrossed Wayne’s head in savage waves. His hands, curled into rigid claws, were locked against Bragg’s throat. A fire was coming up from his soul, sizzling through sinew and muscle and flesh. With it there was an agony that made Wayne throw back his head and shriek.
Krepsin thought he smelled charring flesh.
Wayne shook violently, the eyes rolling back in his head, as his hands convulsively twitched around Bragg’s throat. The man’s body was shaking too, his mouth making low gasping sounds.
And then Wayne fell backward as if thrust away by a physical force. He lay curled up on the bloody plastic. Agony throbbed through him like the vibration of a bass fiddle.