He climbed the porch steps to the front door. It was unlocked—another disturbing detail. He gave the knob a twist and nudged the door open. A quick sweep of his flashlight revealed a threadbare carpet and several pairs of shoes cluttering the front hall. Nothing alarming. He reached up and flicked the light switch. No lights. Had the power been shut off?
For a moment he hesitated near the front door, debating the wisdom of announcing his presence. He knew Jack Reid owned a shotgun, and the man would not hesitate to use it if he thought a prowler was in his house. Lincoln drew a breath, preparing to call out: “Police!” when his gaze froze on something that instantly killed his voice.
There was a bloody handprint on the wall.
The gun suddenly felt slick in his hand. He moved toward the print. A closer look revealed it was indeed blood, and that there was more of it smeared along the wall, leading toward the kitchen.
Five people live in this house. Where are they?
Stepping into the kitchen, he found the first member of the family. Jack Reid lay sprawled on the floor, his throat cut ear to ear. The arterial spray of his blood had splattered all four walls of the room. He was still clutching his shotgun.
Something clattered, rolled across the floor. At once, Lincoln’s weapon was up, his pulse roaring in his ears. The noise had come from below. From the cellar.
His lungs were like bellows, air rushing in and out in quick breaths. He eased toward the cellar door, paused for a one-two-three count, his heart accelerating, his sweating fingers clamped like a vise around his weapon. He took a breath, and with a burst of force, kicked the door.
It flew open, slamming into the opposite wall.
A set of steps dropped away into blackness. Someone was down there. The darkness seemed charged with an alien energy. He could almost smell the other presence, lurking at the bottom of those stairs. He aimed his flashlight downward, the beam quickly sweeping the cellar. He caught only the flash of movement, a shadow slipping toward cover under the stairs.
“Police!” yelled Lincoln. “Come out where I can see you!” He kept the beam steady, his weapon aimed at the bottom of the stairs. “Come on, come on. Do it now!”
Slowly the darkness congealed into a solid shape. A single arm, materializing in the beam’s circle. Then a face inched into view, peering out with terrified eyes from beneath the stairs. A boy.
“My mom,” whimpered Eddie Reid. “Please, help me get my mom out of here.”
Now a woman’s voice whispered from beneath the stairs. “Help us. God in heaven, help us!”
Lincoln descended the stairs and shone his light directly at the woman. Grace Reid stared back at him, her face white as a corpse, her expression almost catatonic with terror.
“No light,” she pleaded. “Turn off the lights or he’ll find us!” She backed away. Behind her, the circuit breaker box hung open. She had flipped off the switches, cutting all power to the house.
Eddie tugged his mother toward the stairs. “Mom, it’s okay now. We gotta get out of here. Please, please move.”
Grace shook her head in almost violent protest. “No, he’s waiting for us.” She pulled away, refusing to budge. “J.D.’s up there.”
Again Eddie grabbed his mother’s arm and dragged her toward the steps. “Now, Mom!”
“Wait,” cut in Lincoln. “What about Amelia? Mrs. Reid, where’s Amelia?”
Grace looked at him with wide eyes. “Amelia?” she murmured, as though she’d suddenly remembered her own daughter. “In her room.”
“Let’s get your mom out of the house,” Lincoln said to Eddie. “My cruiser’s parked right outside.”
“But what about—”
“I’ll find your sister. First, I’ll get you both into the car and I’ll radio for help. Now let’s go. Stay right behind me.” He turned and started slowly up the stairs. He could hear Grace and Eddie following behind him, Grace’s breath coming out in frantic whimpers, Eddie murmuring words of encouragement.
J.D. They were both terrified of J.D.
Lincoln reached the top of the stairs. There was no way around it; he’d have to lead them through the blood-splattered kitchen, right past Jack Reid’s body. If Grace was going to collapse in hysterics, it would be here.
Thank god for Eddie. The boy draped his arm around his stepmother, hugging her face against his chest. “Go, Chief Kelly,” he whispered urgently. “Please, just get us out of here.”
Lincoln led them through the kitchen, into the hallway. There he halted, every nerve suddenly giving off panic alarms. By the beam of his flashlight, he saw that the front door hung open. Did I close it when I came in the house?
He whispered, “Wait here,” and he inched toward the front door. Glancing outside, he saw moonlit-silvered snow. The cruiser was parked about thirty feet away. Everything lay still, as silent as air trapped in a bell jar.
Something is wrong. We are being watched. We are being stalked.
He turned to Eddie and Grace and whispered: “Run to the car. Now!”
But Grace didn’t run. Instead she backed away, and as she stumbled past a moonlit window, Lincoln saw her face was gazing upward. Toward the stairs.
He pivoted, just as the shadow came hurtling down at him. He was slammed backwards so hard the breath whooshed from his lungs. Pain sliced across his cheek. He staggered sideways, just as the knife blade came down again, stabbing deep into the wall near his head. His weapon had fallen, knocked from his grasp by that first tackle. Now he scrabbled frantically on the floor, trying to locate the gun in the dark.
He heard the squeak of the knife being pried free from the wood, and spun around to see the shadow rushing at him. He brought his left arm up just as the knife came stabbing down. The blade struck bone, and he heard his own gasp of pain like a distant, foreign sound.
Somehow he grasped the boy’s wrist in his right hand and twisted the knife free. It thudded to the floor. The boy wrenched away, stumbling backwards.
Lincoln dropped down and grabbed the knife. His sense of triumph lasted only for an instant.
The boy had risen to his feet as well, his silhouette framed by the window. He was holding Lincoln’s gun. He swung it around, aiming the barrel straight at Lincoln.
The explosion was so loud it shattered the window. Glass blew out in a hail of shards, raining down onto the porch.
No pain. Why was he feeling no pain?
Frozen in bewilderment, Lincoln watched as J.D. Reid, backlit by moonlight through the broken window, slowly crumpled to the floor. A footstep creaked behind him, then he heard Eddie’s tremulous voice ask:
“Did I kill him?”
“We need light,” said Lincoln.
He heard Eddie stumble through the darkness into the kitchen and down the cellar steps. Seconds later, he flipped the circuit breakers, and all the lights came on.
One look at the body told Lincoln J.D. was dead.
Eddie came back out of the kitchen, still holding Jack Reid’s shotgun. He slowed, halted beside his stepmother. They were both unable to pry their gazes from the dead boy, unable to utter a sound, as the terrible vision of J.D. Reid, collapsed in a pool of blood, burned its way forever into their brains.
“Amelia,” said Lincoln, and he glanced up the stairs, toward the second floor. “Which bedroom is hers?”
Eddie looked at him with dazed eyes. “The second one. On the right …”
Lincoln ran up the stairs. At his first glimpse of Amelia’s bedroom door, he knew the worst had already happened. The door had been hacked open, and splinters of wood littered the hallway. The girl must have tried to lock J.D. out, but a few swings of an ax had shattered the wood. Dreading the scene he knew lay within, he stepped into the girl’s room.
He saw the ax, embedded in a chair, almost cleaving it in two. He saw the shattered mirror, the ripped dresses, the closet door hanging askew on a broken hinge. Then he stared at the girl’s bed.
It was empty.
Mitchell Groome was behi
nd the wheel of Claire Elliot’s Subaru as he drove slowly down Beech Hill. He had waited until midnight, an hour when no witnesses would be awake, but unfortunately the sky was clear, and the light of the full moon reflected with alarming brilliance off the snow. It made him feel exposed and vulnerable. Full moon or not, he had to finish this tonight. Too much had already gone wrong, and he had been forced to take far more drastic measures than he’d planned.
His job had started off as a simple assignment, to keep an eye on Dr. Tutwiler’s work, and, posing as a journalist asking questions, to quietly and discreetly assess the natural course of parasitic infection in the youth of Tranquility. His job had suddenly become complicated by Claire Elliot, whose suspicions had veered dangerously close to the truth. Then Doreen Kelly had added an even worse complication.
He would definitely have some explaining to do when he returned to Boston.
He felt certain he could come up with a reasonable explanation for Max Tutwiler’s disappearance. He could hardly tell his superiors at Anson Biologicals what had actually happened: that Max had wanted to quit after he’d learned how Doreen Kelly really died. I was hired to find the worms for you, Max had protested. Anson told me this was nothing more than a biological treasure hunt. No one said anything about murder, and for what? To keep this species a corporate secret?
What Max refused to understand was that the development of a new drug was like prospecting for gold. Secrecy was paramount. You cannot not let the competition know you are closing in on a fresh vein of treasure.
The treasure, in this case, was a hormone produced by a unique invertebrate, a hormone whose defining effect was the enhancement of aggression. A minute dose was all it took to hone the fighting edge of a soldier in battle. It was a killing potion with obvious military applications.
Only two months ago, Anson Biologicals and its parent company, Sloan-Routhier Pharmaceuticals, had learned of the worms’ existence when the teenage sons of a Virginia couple were admitted to the psychiatric wing of a military hospital. One of the boys had expelled a worm—a bioluminescent species that none of the military pathologists could identify.
The family had spent the month of July in a lakeside cottage in Maine.
Groome turned onto Toddy Point Road. In the seat beside him, Claire groaned and moved her head. He hoped, for her sake, that she didn’t fully regain consciousness, because the end that awaited her was not a merciful one. It was another unpleasant necessity. The death of a woman as pitiful as Doreen Kelly had raised few eyebrows in town. But a local doctor couldn’t simply vanish without questions being asked. It was important for the authorities to find her body, and to conclude her death was accidental.
The road was only gentle rises and dips now, a lonely drive at this hour of night. Groome’s headlights skimmed across deserted blacktop crusted with ice and road sand, the beams illuminating an arc just wide enough to see the trees pressing in on both sides. A black tunnel, the only opening a swath of stars overhead.
He approached another curve, where the blacktop veered sharply left, and braked to a stop at the top of the boat ramp.
Claire groaned again as he dragged her from the passenger seat and positioned her behind the steering wheel. He buckled her seat belt. Then, with the engine still running, he put the car in gear, released the hand brake, and let the door swing shut.
The car began to roll forward, down the gentle grade of the boat ramp.
Groome stood on the roadside, watching as the car reached the lake and continued rolling. There was snow on the ice, and the tires slowly churned through it, the headlights jittery on the barren expanse. Ten yards. Twenty. How far before it reached thin ice? It was only the first week of December; the lake would not yet be frozen thick enough to support the weight of a car.
Thirty yards. That’s when Groome heard the crack, sharp as gunfire. The front of the car dipped down, its headlights suddenly swallowed up by snow and fracturing ice. Another crack, and the car tilted crazily forward, the red glow of its taillights pointing toward the sky. Now the ice beneath the rear wheels snapped, disintegrated, and the car splashed through. The headlights died, the circuits shorted out.
The end was played out in the glow of moonlight, in a landscape silvered by the luminous whiteness of snow, the car bobbing for a moment, engine flooding, the water dragging it down, claiming it as its own. Now the sound of splashing, the liquid turmoil as the car slipped deeper and began to turn over, rotated by the buoyancy of the tires. It sank upside down, its roof settling into the mud, and he imagined the swirl of dark sediment, blacking out the watery moonlight filtering from above.
Tomorrow, thought Groome, someone will spot the break in the ice and will put two and two together. Poor tired Dr. Elliot, driving home in the dark, missed the curve in the road and veered onto the boat ramp instead. A tragedy.
He heard the distant wail of a police siren and he turned, his pulse suddenly racing. Only when the siren passed and then faded did he allow himself to breathe easier. The police had been called elsewhere; no one had witnessed his crime.
He turned and began to walk at a brisk pace up the road, toward the blackness of Beech Hill. It was a three-mile hike back to the cave, and he still had work to do.
25
She felt the darkness lurch around her, felt the shocking embrace of icy water as it engulfed her body, and she jolted awake into a reality far more horrifying than any nightmare could be.
She was trapped in blackness, in a coffinlike space, and was so disoriented she had no sense of up or down. All she knew was that water was creeping up around her in a numbing flood, lapping at her waist, now her chest. She flailed out in panic, instinctively craning her neck to keep her head above it, but found her body was strapped in. She tore at the restraints but could not free herself. The water was licking at her neck, now. Her breathing turned to frantic gasps and half-sobs of panic.
Then it all turned upside down.
She had time for one deep breath before she felt herself rolling sideways, before the water rushed over her head, flooding into her nostrils.
The darkness that swallowed her was total, a world of liquid blackness. She thrashed, trapped head-down underwater. Her lungs ached, straining to hold on to that final breath.
Again she clawed at the strap across her chest, but it would not loosen, would not release her. Air. I need air! Her pulse roared in her ears and streaks of light exploded in her brain, the warning flashes of oxygen depletion. Already she was losing strength in her limbs, her efforts reduced to tugging uselessly at the restraint. Through thickening layers of confusion, she realized she was grasping something hard in her hand, something she recognized by its contours. A seat belt buckle. She was in her car. Strapped in her car.
Thousands of times before she had unbuckled that belt and now her fingers automatically found the release button. The strap fell away from her chest.
She kicked, limbs thrashing, battering against the inside of the car. Blinded by water, disoriented in the darkness, she could not even tell which way was up. Her frantically clawing fingers brushed against the steering wheel, the dashboard.
I need AIR!
She felt her lungs rebel and begin to draw in a fatal breath of water when she suddenly twisted around, and her face popped through the surface, into an air pocket. She gasped in a breath, then another, and another. There were only a few inches of air, and even that was rapidly filling with water. A few more gasps, and there would be nothing left to breathe.
With the fresh inrush of oxygen, her brain was functioning again. She forced back the panic, forced herself to think. The car was upside down. She had to find the latch—had to get the door open.
She held her breath and plunged into the water. Quickly she located the door release and gave it a tug. She felt the latch pop free, but the door wouldn’t swing open. The roof of the vehicle was sunk too deeply in mud, miring the door shut.
Out of breath!
She surfaced back in the air pocke
t and found it reduced to a bare six inches. As she gasped in the last of the oxygen, she desperately tried to reorient herself to an upside-down world. The window. Roll open the window.
Last breath, last chance.
She sank back underwater, feeling frantically for the window crank. By now her fingers were so deadened from the cold, she could barely feel the handle, even when she finally managed to grasp it. Each revolution seemed to take an eternity, but she could feel the glass slide open, the gap widen. By the time she had cranked it all the way open, her hunger for air was growing desperate. She wriggled her head and shoulders through the opening, and suddenly could go no farther.
Her jacket! It was snagged!
She thrashed, trying to squeeze all the way through, but her body was trapped, half in, half out of the car. She reached for the zipper, loosened the jacket.
All at once she slithered free, and suddenly she was shooting toward the surface, toward the faint glow of light far above.
She burst through into the air, water splashing like a million diamonds in the moonlight, and grasped the nearest broken edge of ice. There she clung for a moment, shaking and wheezing in the frigid night. Already she’d lost feeling in her legs, and her hands were so numb she could barely grasp the ice.
She tried to pull herself out, managed to lift her shoulders a few inches, but immediately fell back into the water. There was nothing to hold on to, nothing to pull against, only slick ice covered with powdery snow. Scrabbling uselessly at the ice, she found no purchase.
Again she tried to lift herself out; again she slid back with a splash, sinking in over her head. She resurfaced, sputtering, coughing, her legs almost paralyzed.
She couldn’t do it. She couldn’t pull herself out.
Half a dozen times more she struggled to climb out, but her clothes were soaked, dragging her down, and she was shaking so hard she could not even hold on to the ice. A profound lethargy was taking hold of her limbs, turning them wooden. Dead. She felt herself go under again, the blackness sucking her down, welcoming her into a cold sleep. All her energy was spent. Nothing was left.