Billy didn’t want to answer, but he was so sluggish and lazy it didn’t seem to matter. “No, they’re real.”
“I knew they weren’t faked. How could you fake something like that, in front of so many witnesses? No, no; you can see the dead, can’t you? And you can speak to them?”
“Yes.”
Krepsin ate another cookie; his black eyes gleamed with the desire to pick the secrets from Billy Creekmore’s mind. “You’ve seen life after death, haven’t you? And you can control the dead? You can speak to them and make them do as you please?”
“I don’t try to control them. I try to help them. Why are you taping all this? Why’s it so important to you?”
“It’s just…this subject excites me. And it excites Wayne, too.”
“What do you mean?”
Krepsin smiled. “You really don’t see it, do you? You don’t understand your own potential! What you’ve done up to now is important, but you can go much, much further. Oh, the secrets you could know about Death! The power you could hold! You could reach anyone on the other side, you could relay messages back and forth. People would pay a lot for that. You could find out where lost treasures were, you could bring back messages that would shock the world! You’d be a famous and powerful young man! Don’t you see that?”
“No.”
“Wayne does,” Krepsin said quietly. “He wants you to join the Crusade, Billy. He wants you to tour with him.”
“What?”
“Yes. Tour with him. Wayne would be the healer, and you would be the…the spiritual adviser! With all this publicity, it would be a simple thing! People would pay to see you summon the dead. Oh, they’d sit in awe of you, Billy! You’d have your own television show, and you’d speak to the dead right on the air before millions of people!”
Staring at the man, Billy shuddered inwardly. It would be like digging up graves so people could gawk at the bones, like a Ghost Show using real revenants, a hideous entertainment.
“Think of it!” Krepsin said. “You’ve only scratched the surface! You and Wayne, touring together! There are no secrets that would be hidden from you. Billy, you’d even hold power over the dead!”
Billy felt dizzy and sick. But he looked into the man’s black eyes and saw the truth. The man wanted power over the dead himself. The man wanted to use him like some puppet in a sideshow, pulling in the paying customers with hints of dark mysteries. He couldn’t believe that Wayne had any part in this! “No,” he said. “I can’t do that. I won’t do it.”
“And why not? Why not? Of course you may be afraid and reluctant now, but after you think about it—and after Wayne’s talked to you—you’ll see the light. Ever since I saw those newspaper articles—no, ever since Wayne told me all about you and your mother, I knew there was something special about you. I knew you had the power to—”
And then he stopped, a strangled whine bubbling in his throat.
Billy stared at him. On Krepsin’s hand a fly had landed.
The man leaped up with a scream, knocking over the chair and table as he tried to get away from the thing. He batted wildly at the air as the fly buzzed around his head. In his mind he was back on the refugee ship that had brought him and his family from Greece, and he was seven years old and watching the flies crawl over his parents’ stiffened corpses as fever killed half the people aboard.
Krepsin’s eyes bulged from their sockets. The fly had touched him. Disease had broken through his barriers. Rats cluttered in the ship’s hold, his parents’ bodies moldering and full of maggots. He screamed with pure terror as the fly danced across his cheek, and he fell to his knees.
Billy stood up and waved the fly away from his face. The men would be coming back for him, he knew, and they’d take him back to the woman with the needles. Danger was here, all around. He had to shake off the dizziness, had to find a way out of this place! He turned the doorknob and stepped out into the empty corridor as Krepsin shrieked again behind him.
He started along the corridor, trying to remember how he’d come in. Krepsin’s voice echoed behind him. Billy broke into a run, stumbled and fell, then got up and ran again. The walls around him seemed to breathe, as if he were caught inside a huge beast that was trying to consume him.
And then he turned a corner and abruptly stopped.
A young man with electric-blue eyes and a shock of curly red hair was standing in his pajamas less than ten feet away, in front of an open doorway. He had frozen when he saw Billy. The sweat of a nightmare sheened his sunburned cheeks.
“Wayne?” Billy said.
Wayne’s mouth hung half open. His eyes were glazed and dull with shock.
Billy took a step toward the other boy, and saw Wayne cringe. “What have they done to you?” Billy whispered. “Wayne? What have they—”
A hand gripped his shoulder. Niles wrenched upward on Billy’s arm to keep him from running. Krepsin was still screaming like a madman.
Wayne was pressed against the wall. He had seen that they had even provided the Hawthorne demon boy with his clothes. They had brought him here and hidden him in the white house, and they had given him his clothes! “You said I was safe,” Wayne whispered to Niles. “You said as long as I stayed here, I was—”
“Shut up, goddamn it!” Niles told him.
“Wayne, they brought me here!” Billy said, the pain clearing his head. “They’re trying to use me, Wayne, just like they’re trying to use you!”
Niles said, “Wayne, I want you to get dressed and pack your bag. Do it quickly. Mr. Krepsin wants to leave here in fifteen minutes.”
“Demon,” Wayne whispered, as he huddled against the wall.
“Get ready to go! Move!”
“Kill him for me,” Wayne said. “Right here. Right now. Kill him like you had the witch killed.”
Billy almost got free with a sudden burst of strength, but Niles pinned him tighter.
And then Wayne knew the truth. “You did bring him here,” he said, tears in his eyes. “Why? To hurt me? To make me have nightmares? Because,” he moaned softly, “that boy’s evil…and Mr. Krepsin is too?”
“I won’t tell you again to get your fat ass moving!” Niles said, and forced Billy back along the corridor, toward where Krepsin was babbling about returning to Palm Springs because there was disease in the bunker.
It was all a trick, Wayne realized. They’d never really been his friends; they’d never really wanted to protect him. They’d brought the demon right to his door! Everything had been a trick to get the Crusade!
It was all clear to him now, and his mind crackled with wild currents. Maybe they’d even brought Billy Creekmore here, he realized, to replace him.
Even his daddy had tricked him and wasn’t his daddy. He’d been tricked and lied to from the very start. Had been told Keep healing, Wayne, keep healing keep healing even though you don’t feel the fire anymore keep healing…
His mind was cracking. The snake was winning.
But not yet! He was still Wayne Falconer, the South’s Greatest Evangelist! And there was one last way to destroy the corruption that had surrounded and finally trapped him. He wiped the tears from his face.
The eagle might still destroy the snake.
61
JIM COOMBS TOOK THE Challenger to sixteen thousand feet. He checked his instruments and turned on the automatic pilot. Below the jet, as indicated by a downward-tilted radar mechanism set in the nose, was a rough terrain of desert and mountains. A scan of the weather ahead showed clear skies. The takeoff and landing were the skillful parts of flying the Challenger, now, with the jet flying itself and visibility almost perfect, Coombs could sit back and relax. He’d been awakened in his quarters at the jet hangar about half an hour earlier, and told by Dora that Mr. Krepsin wanted to go back to Palm Springs immediately. Krepsin was a nervous wreck back in the passenger section; the man had waddled aboard wearing his white caftan, his face as pale as milk, and had started sucking at an oxygen mask as soon as he’d strapped
in. Niles and Dorn were even more quiet than usual. Wayne was silent and blooding, not even bothering to answer when Coombs had spoken to him. And there was another passenger aboard, as well: the dark-haired boy that Coombs had flown down from Chicago. The boy had a hard, shiny look in his eyes, something between fear and rage and probably a bit of both. Coombs didn’t know what was going on, but for some reason he was very glad he wasn’t that boy.
Coombs yawned, still weary from his interrupted sleep. They’d be in Palm Springs in a couple of hours.
From his seat at the middle of the plane, Billy watched Krepsin’s chest heaving as the huge man breathed through an oxygen mask. Krepsin sat toward the front, where he had plenty of room; his breathing sounded like that of a man in agony. Abruptly, he reached out and drew the clear plastic curtain around his seat, cutting himself off from the rest of the cabin. Niles sat sleeping just behind Billy, Dorn across the aisle. Across from Krepsin, Wayne sat like a statue.
What had they done to him? Billy wondered. How had these people gotten control of the Falconer Crusade? There had been madness and terror in Wayne’s eyes, and Billy feared his brother was beyond help. But still, somehow, he had to try. He saw that, too, as part of his Mystery Walk—breaking through the barrier of fear that kept them apart, that had put Wayne on a twisted path leading into the clutches of Augustus Krepsin. His mother—their mother—was probably dead. Wayne’s madness had wanted it done, and Krepsin had obliged. Fear and hatred had been Jimmy Jed Falconer’s legacy to his adopted son.
And now Billy recalled something his mother had told him: that Wayne wouldn’t be able to recognize true Evil when it reached out for him. That Wayne might be his weak link, that the shape changer might be able to work on Wayne to get at Billy. He leaned his head back, squeezing his eyes shut. What would she want him to do now? When he opened his eyes, he saw Wayne looking back at him over his shoulder. They stared at each other for a long moment; Billy thought he could feel electricity passing between them, as if they were batteries feeding off each other: Then Wayne rose from his seat and came back along the aisle, averting his gaze from Billy.
“What is it?” Niles asked him, when Wayne had prodded him awake.
“I want to go up to the cockpit,” Wayne said. His eyes were glassy, and a pulse beat rapidly at one temple. “Can I?”
“No. Go sit down.”
“Mr. Krepsin always lets me,” Wayne told him. “I like to sit up front, where I can see the instruments.” One side of his mouth hitched up in a slight sneer. “Mr. Krepsin wants me to be happy, doesn’t he?”
Niles paused for a moment. Then he said irritably, “Go on, then. I don’t care what you do!” He closed his eyes again.
“Wayne?” Billy said, and the other boy looked at him. “I’m not your enemy. I never wanted things to be like this.”
“You’re going to die.” Wayne’s eyes flared, two hot bursts of blue. “I’m going to make sure of that, if it’s the last thing I do. God’s going to help me.”
“Listen to me,” Billy said; it was burning to come out of him. He had to tell him, right now, and he had to make him understand. “Please. I’m not evil, and neither is…was my mother. Didn’t you ever wonder where your healing power came from? Didn’t you ever wonder, why you? I can tell you why. Don’t turn away! Please! The Falconers weren’t your real parents, Wayne…”
Wayne froze. His mouth worked for a few seconds, and then he whispered, “How did you know that?”
“I know, because my mother—our mother—told me. I’m telling you the truth. Ramona Creekmore was your mother, Wayne. John Creekmore was your father. You were born the same day as me: November 6, 1951. Jimmy Jed Falconer bought you from a man named Tillman, and he raised you as his son. But it wasn’t because our parents didn’t love you, Wayne. They did. But they wanted you to have a good home, and they had to—”
“Liar!” Wayne said in a strangled voice. “You’re lying, trying to save your own life.”
“She loved you, Wayne,” Billy said. “No matter what you did. She knew who you were from the first time she saw you, at the tent revival. But she saw you were being used, and she couldn’t stand it. Look at me, Wayne! I’m telling you the truth!”
He blinked, touched his forehead. “No. Lies…everybody’s lied to me. Even…my own daddy…”
“You’ve got Creekmore blood in you. You’re strong; stronger than you think. I don’t know what they’ve done to you, but you can fight it. You don’t have to let them win!”
Niles, who’d been dozing in his seat, stirred and told Billy to shut his mouth.
“You’re going to burn in Hell,” Wayne told Billy. And then he turned away, and walked toward the flight deck. He stood staring at Augustus Krepsin for a moment; Krepsin’s eyes were closed, the breath rasping in and out of his lungs like a bellows. “You’ll see,” Wayne whispered, and then he stepped through onto the flight deck, where Jim Coombs sat half dozing in the pilot’s seat.
Coombs yawned and sat up, quickly checking the instruments. “’Lo, Wayne,” he said.
“Hi.”
“Glad you came up. I was just about to ask you to sit in for me while I go to the John. We’re on auto, you don’t have to touch a thing. Pretty moon, isn’t it?”
“Sure is.”
“Well…” He stretched, then unstrapped his belt and stood up. “I’ll be as quick as I can. Listen to those engines hum. Man, that can just about put you to sleep!”
“Yes sir.” Wayne eased into the co-pilot’s seat, fastened his belt tightly, and glanced over the instrumentation panel. Airspeed 431 knots. Altitude sixteen thousand. Compass showing a northwest heading.
“Good boy,” Coombs said, and left the cockpit.
Wayne listened to the headphones, hearing signals floating through space from navigational beacons. He watched the control yoke, moving at the command of the autopilot. A sense of power thrummed through him, setting him on fire. He had them all now, right where he wanted them; he knew he couldn’t let them take him back to Palm Springs. He’d failed the Crusade, failed in his healing mission, failed, failed…
But now, up here in the sky, he could forget all about that. He could be in control. He lifted a trembling hand and cut off the autopilot.
“Don’t do it, son.” Jimmy Jed Falconer, in his bright yellow suit, was sitting in the pilot’s seat; there was an earnest, concerned look on his face. “You can trust Mr. Krepsin; he cares about you, son. He’ll let you do what you like with Billy Creekmore. Anything you like. But don’t do what you’re thinking. That’ll…that’ll ruin everything…”
Wayne stared at him, then shook his head. “You lied to me. All the time. I’m not your son, am I? I never was…”
“Yes you are! Don’t listen to that shit! Listen to me! Trust Mr. Krepsin, Wayne. Don’t do what you’re about to try…”
Wayne saw the frightened look in the man’s eyes. It pleased him. “You’re scared,” he said. “You’re scared to death, aren’t you? Why? You’re already dead…”
“DON’T DO IT, YOU LITTLE FUCK!” Falconer’s face began to crack like a waxen mask. One red, animalish eye glared out at Wayne.
In the cabin, Billy felt a cold chill and opened his eyes. The pilot was just moving past him, on his way to the bathroom at the rear of the plane. Billy jerked his head up and looked around, because he’d seen the thing that had made his heart hammer in his chest.
The pilot stopped and looked back, his forehead creasing. “What’s wrong?” he asked uneasily.
Billy stared. The man’s body was surrounded by a malignant purplish black haze; stubby, vaporous tentacles undulated around him.
“What’re you looking at?” Coombs asked, transfixed by Billy’s dark, intense gaze.
Billy turned his head and looked across the aisle at Dorn. The black aura clung to him like a shiny, dark skin. Niles’s hand came over the seat and grasped Billy’s shoulder. The hand was coated with the black harbinger of death. Niles’s face, surrounded by the roili
ng black aura, thrust forward. He said, “What’s your problem, kid?”
They were all about to die, Billy realized. And possibly himself, as well. The jet. Who was at the controls? Wayne? Suddenly Death’s cold chill had filled the cabin. When Wayne had entered the cockpit, things had abruptly changed. Wayne was going to do it. Wayne was going to kill them all.
“NO! DON’T DO THAT, YOU LITTLE SHIT!” the thing in the pilot’s seat roared. “DON’T DO IT!” Its J.J. Falconer mask had melted away, and now Wayne saw it for what it was: a bestial thing with flaring red eyes and the hideous snout of a wild, savage boar. Wayne knew he was seeing Evil for what it was. The thing made a garbled, babbling noise as Wayne gripped the control column, his foot finding the rudder pedals. Then he whipped the Challenger to the right and upward, at the same time throttling more fuel to the engines.
Billy heard the shape changer’s roar an instant before the jet’s nose lurched upward; the plane veered over on its right side, its engines screaming. Billy’s body pressed backward in his seat, the pressure so great against his chest he couldn’t draw a breath. Everything that wasn’t strapped or bolted down in the cabin—briefcases, glasses, bottles of Perrier—took dangerous flight, slamming and crashing against the bulkheads. Jim Coombs was jerked upward so fast he never knew what had happened; his head hit the cabin roof with a sharp sound of cracking bone, and his body stayed glued in place until the jet rolled over and leveled off. Then Coombs slithered into the aisle, his eyes open and his teeth clenched through the bloody stub of his tongue. His hands twitched as if he were trying to snap his fingers.
Billy gasped for air. The jet rolled suddenly to the left and went into a steep dive. A bottle of Perrier whirled past Billy’s head and exploded against the wall. Krepsin was screaming through his oxygen mask. Dorn’s face was marble white, his hands gripped deeply into the armrests of his seat; he was squealing like a child on a scary fairgrounds ride.