Rise the Dark Page 5

  The big man sucked air in through his teeth as blood ran down his lips and splashed shining and red over the dock boards.

  “You shouldn’t have smiled when you spoke of my wife,” Mark said. “That was a very bad decision. I’m going to give you the chance to make some better ones now. What’s your name?”

  “Pate.” The word came from the back of his throat. He was fighting the pain hard, and fighting it well, and Mark knew it would be prudent to remember that.

  “Full name.”

  “Myron Pate.”

  “Okay, Myron. How long have you lived in that gem up the road?”

  He hawked blood into his mouth and spit it at Mark’s shoes. Mark pushed the muzzle of the gun hard against his forehead and drove his skull back until his chin was tilted up and Mark could see his eyes.

  “How long?”

  “Nine months.”

  “If that’s a lie, I’m going to learn it fast.”

  “Nine months.”

  “Who was there before you?”

  “Dunno.”

  “Don’t believe you.”

  He shrugged.

  “Garland Webb,” Mark said.

  “Don’t know him.”

  “I’m going to find out if that’s the truth.”

  He shrugged again. Mark couldn’t see a lie in his face, couldn’t see anything but hate, but there was a problem with a man like Myron occupying a house previously rented by Garland Webb and coming on so strong with Mark now, ready to swing a piece of rebar at him for wandering the property. Coincidences happen, yes, but causation happens more often.

  Myron Pate spit more blood. There were tears in his eyes now, but it wasn’t because he was scared. He was hurting. Myron was going to need doctors, and depending on what he said to them, Mark could end the day in jail. His gut told him that Myron wasn’t the type who was real interested in calling the police.

  Mark stepped farther from him and used his foot to roll the rebar off the dock and into the water. It landed with a gulping sound, as if the lake were eager for it. He walked down the pier and around to the red truck, used his phone to take a picture of the license plate, then opened the driver’s door and removed the keys from the ignition. He carried them back and stood by the water’s edge and watched Myron struggle to his feet. He needed to use both hands and the railing to make it.

  “I thought about shooting those stupid tires out,” Mark said. “But they probably cost you three months’ pay, and I’m in a generous mood. You can take two key points from today, Myron. One is that it is very unwise to take pleasure in someone else’s pain. Show some respect for the dead if you don’t want to join them. The second is that if you know Garland Webb, you can tell him I’m coming.”

  He holstered the .38, jingled Myron’s keys as if calling a dog for a car ride, and then tossed them out into the shallows of the lake.

  “While you’re getting those,” he said, “pick up the chip bags, the beer can, and the used rubber. This is a beautiful place, Myron, but somebody’s letting it go to hell.”

  8

  Awareness flickered in Sabrina’s mind like matches in a deep, dark valley. Snapped to life, then snuffed out. She knew that she should have wanted more of them, that the light was the part of the world she needed, the part to which she belonged, but as the matches multiplied and their glows lingered, she was more afraid of them than the dark.

  This is not my home. I do not know where I am. I was taken from my home. I am alone. Where am I, and why am I alone? What happened?

  Snap and burn, snap and burn. Eventually the match glows began to blend together and flame came with it and then light and for the first time Sabrina felt the weight on her wrist and looked at it with uncomprehending eyes.

  There was a metal bracelet on her wrist. No. Not a bracelet. There was a word for it, and the word was scary. The word was terrible, the word was—

  Handcuff.

  It was in that moment of recognition that she slipped fully out of the dark fog and into understanding, and her fear poured forth like blood filling an open wound.

  She cried out then. Said the only word that came to mind: Help. She cried it again and again, and her mouth was dry and her tongue felt strange, hard to maneuver, but the effort of shouting and the intensity of her fear were scrubbing the haze from her brain and she saw more of her surroundings, or at least understood more of them.

  She was on a cold wooden floor, and the chain of the handcuff on her right wrist ran to an anchor bolt in the log wall, where the other cuff was clipped, holding her fast. The room was dim and though she could make out shapes, it was hard to get a sense of the place beyond the floor, the wall, and the chain between them. She turned her attention to herself then and saw her bare legs and felt the light fabric over them and understood that she was wearing her nightgown. She’d gotten out of the shower and put on her nightgown and she’d been ready to go to bed early, expecting to fall asleep alone, knowing that Jay might be many hours at work yet because the power was out in a lot of places and there was no telling how quickly he’d get it back on.

  And then?

  The large man. An intruder. He’d spoken to her. Said something about air, though she couldn’t remember exactly what, just that it had been strange. She didn’t have any clear memory of him, just knew that he’d been there, that there had been an intruder and she had been afraid. The lack of clarity in the situation told her that this should be a dream.

  But it wasn’t. The cold floor was real, and the prickling flesh of her bare legs under the nightgown was real, and, more than anything, the biting weight of that handcuff was real.

  She pulled at the cuff, using her free hand to get a grip on the links of chain that led to the wall. She tugged with all her might, rotated so that she could use her feet to push against the wall, and all she achieved for her efforts was pain.

  She was curled against the wall and crying softly when there was the sound of a lock working and then a door opened and light spilled into the room. It fell across the floor to Sabrina like an extended hand.

  A figure stepped in and blocked the light.

  “You may make all the noise you wish, but it won’t change your circumstances, and I would prefer not to hear it.” His voice was emotionless. She couldn’t see his face because the light was behind him.

  She didn’t think he was the same man who had been in her home. He wasn’t large enough and his voice wasn’t deep enough. At first this seemed good, but then she realized what it meant—there were two of them. At least two.

  “It seems bad now,” he said. “That was expected. That was understood. But you’ll begin to feel new things in this place soon, Sabrina. I promise that you will. You’ll begin to feel a sense of purpose stronger than any you’ve ever known. You’ll realize that you are a part of something larger than yourself, and it will please you. If you allow it to, it will please you.”

  He paused, and behind him another figure shifted. Oh Lord, there were more of them.

  “It’s a lonely predicament right now,” he said. “Don’t worry. You won’t be alone for long. We’ll have more guests soon, and I will expect you to demonstrate some leadership. You are, after all, the firstborn. Do you understand that?”

  Sabrina didn’t speak.

  “Consider it,” the faceless man said. “Consider that your old life was nothing but a womb, and a harsh, cold one at that. But now you’ve escaped it. Here you are, alive and well, your life preserved. This isn’t a bad place, Sabrina. Great things are being kept alive here, and soon they will flourish. This place is an incubator. That’s how you should think of it. As an incubator of the heart. Open your spirit and you’ll know the truth. You’ll know.”

  He turned and left. All she could see of him was that he was of average height and whip-thin build with long hair tied back and pulled tight against his skull. His hands seemed unusually large for his size. He took three steps forward into the square of white light, and she thought she saw pines bey
ond him, and then he turned to the left and faded from view and was replaced by another figure, this one stepping in from the right and pulling the door shut. Sabrina was astonished to see this new one was a woman. Petite, with dark hair in a long braid and tanned skin. An attractive woman, probably in her fifties.

  The woman said, “Baby girl, you’ll be just fine,” in a voice as tender as a mother speaking to her newborn. She knelt down, reached out, and brushed Sabrina’s hair away from her face.

  “You’ll be just fine,” she said again. So kind.

  “Help me,” Sabrina said. Her voice broke. “Please help me. Please let me go. I don’t know what you—”

  “Shhh.” The woman put her fingers against Sabrina’s lips, softly. Her face was weathered but still pretty, and once it had surely been beautiful. “You’ll need to be quiet here, or the voices won’t find you. You’ll need to learn to put away all of that mental clutter. The fear and all the rest. Just listen. Now I’m going to get you some food and water and we’re going to make you more comfortable. When the tribes arrive, you’ll need your strength.”

  She moved gracefully away, and Sabrina stared after her in horror and confusion. The man she’d expected, somehow. From the moment the handcuff became clear, the instant she’d understood even that much about her situation, she’d known that there would be a man.

  She had not counted on the woman.

  When the tribes arrive, you’ll need your strength.

  The tribes? Sabrina worked saliva into her dry mouth and forced a swallow. She was dehydrated, and the crying hadn’t helped. Her eyes adjusting, she could see the woman moving about in the far corner. She heard the splashing of water, the rustling of plastic bags. Hopelessly, she looked back at the bolt in the log where the handcuff was anchored, but now something else caught her eye—farther down the log, maybe two feet, there was another bolt. Beyond that, another still.

  We’ll have more guests soon.

  9

  Jay Baldwin sat at the kitchen table alone, no gun to his head. If he wanted a gun, in fact, he had only to go upstairs and take the nine-millimeter from his nightstand drawer.

  The gun wasn’t going to produce Sabrina, though.

  The police might. But calling the police was no longer the easy fix it would have been once. Before Eli Pate had dropped Jay off, he’d shown him an image on his phone: a map with a blinking red dot.

  “That’s your truck,” Pate had said calmly, and then he’d offered Jay a small plastic square. “And this one is you. Now, I understand that this seems intrusive, but obviously you and I are a long way from developing trust. In the absence of trust, I have to monitor. You understand that, don’t you, Jay? It’s like any parent-child relationship.”

  Jay took the small piece of plastic and ran his thumb over it and thought of how easy it would be to break, or microwave, or flush down a toilet. There were a million ways to destroy the signal this thing was putting out.

  “There is no chance that battery will stop functioning,” Eli Pate said. “And you will not know when I will arrive. But when I do, you’d better have that with you. Just keep it in your pocket, Jay. But I’ll state this once, and very clearly: If I go to the place where the signal tells me you are, and you aren’t there? Well, I have your wife. And I’m not a kind man.”

  They were the last words he offered. There was no overt threat, no guarantee of harm, but there didn’t have to be one. He had said all he needed to.

  Jay had today off due to the extended stretch of repair work, and he wished that he didn’t. He’d rather be moving than sitting here alone. As he sat, he thought of every phone call he could make, of every type of law enforcement that he’d ever heard of, every agency that might come to Sabrina’s rescue.

  He never reached for the phone. He turned the plastic chip over and over in his hands and went through every conceivable option, but he never reached for the phone.

  I’m not a kind man.

  No, Pate was not. And he wasn’t a bluffing man, Jay thought. The problem, then, was not all that different from Jay’s daily tasks. There were some simple but critical constants in high-voltage work, the most important being that before you attempted a fix, you had to understand where the power came from and how it was controlled.

  Power source: Eli Pate.

  System control: Jay’s tracking device.

  He would stay at home today, he would not call for help, he would be at work on time tomorrow, and Eli Pate’s computers would see all of that. They would also see something else, something natural enough for a man in his position—they would see Jay spend a full hour pacing his living room. Over and over he walked the same route, reminding himself of the power source (Pate) and the system control (electronic tracking device), mimicking the routine of a sleep-starved, terrified man anguishing over the right choice to make for his wife’s safety. It was not hard to do. When Sabrina wasn’t occupying his mind, the specter of those massive transmission towers with their nearly a million volts and the ghost of his brother-in-law slipped right in. It had been a closed-casket funeral. The electricity cooked you in your own blood, leaving nothing but a blackened, shriveled shell behind, featureless and horrifying.

  It was easy to pace and worry. Very easy.

  He did not go upstairs, and he did not go outside. Just paced and hoped that Pate’s computers were recording it all. When Jay arrived at work the next morning, with no police called, no attempts made to destroy his tracking device, Pate would understand that when Jay was nervous, he paced the lower level of his house.

  It was critical that Pate understood this.

  10

  When Mark returned to Cassadaga, the red truck was gone from the lake, and it wasn’t parked outside of Dixie’s house either.

  Mark had spent the hours between his encounter with Myron and his appointment with Dixie Witte in DeLand, the nearest town of any size. It was only a fifteen-minute drive away but so unlike Cassadaga it could have been fifteen hundred miles. He was surprised by the relief he’d felt at the sight of things he usually hated about Florida, the strip malls and car lots and harsh lights. After only a few hours in Cassadaga, he found all of it reassuring, a reminder that contemporary society existed, that there were places where you wouldn’t come across barefoot boys picking oranges and talking casually about the dead.

  You ever seen something like that?

  He drank a few beers in DeLand and tried to prepare himself to take Dixie Witte seriously, to grant her the patience and respect that Lauren hadn’t believed he was capable of showing to someone who claimed psychic abilities.

  You’ve got to let her be herself, Mark thought. Do not challenge her or dismiss her. Not at the start, at least. Just get her talking.

  When he returned to Cassadaga it was past dusk, and the lack of streetlights enhanced that sense of driving out of one era and into another. He passed Dixie’s house, noted the continued absence of the red truck, and then checked the park by the lake, which also remained empty. He left the Infiniti there, not wanting to make it easy for Myron to find him if he came back loaded up on painkillers or meth or whatever the hell made a guy like him tick. When he was sure that nobody had followed him or was watching, he got out of the car and began the walk back to the property once owned by a man who’d had his hands severed and placed in a cigar box.

  The streets were empty and the moon hung in a perfect crescent and you could see a good number of stars for inland Florida, but he’d never seen stars in his life the way he’d seen them growing up amid the high peaks and open plains. Once on a dive boat on open water, there’d been something close, perhaps. Lauren had been with him then. That was in the Saba National Marine Park. He still carried her dive permit from that trip with him, putting it in his pocket every day, a talisman.

  The afternoon rain had been swept away by a steady western wind and though the sun was down the temperature continued to rise. The moist streets steamed. The main house, Myron’s den, was dark, but there were lights
on inside the guesthouse where Dixie waited. When Mark stepped inside the fence, the wind seemed to die. He looked around and saw fronds moving in all directions, and overhead, a clump of Spanish moss that looked like a dead woman’s hair waved steadily, buffeted by a breeze that he could no longer feel. The air around him was as still as a tomb and he could hear again that odd sound that seemed to come from inside his own skull, the dull popping of a rubber band.

  He shook his head, readjusted, and that was when he saw his dead wife on the porch of the main house.

  For a moment, a long and fine moment, he was certain that it was Lauren. She was standing in a pool of moonlight that silhouetted her lean frame and behind her, banyan leaves threw shadows that climbed into the starlit sky. She wore jeans and a black sleeveless top, and her blond hair just reached her shoulders. The visual cues were close, yes, but they were also generic. The catch-your-breath quality was in presence. There was just something about the way she stood, about the quarter tilt of her head as she looked at him, that said Lauren.

  Then she stepped forward, off the porch and down into the yard, and the motion broke loose the bizarre sensation in his mind and he understood that this was a living woman and not a specter. She was holding something in her hands that looked like a bucket. “Who’s there?” she said, and her voice was not even close to Lauren’s. Mark shouldn’t have needed that confirmation, but for some reason, in this place, he did.

  “Markus Novak. I’m here to see Dixie.”

  “I’m Dixie. And you’re early, Markus.”

  He didn’t respond, couldn’t. She walked toward him with confidence, and suddenly, foolishly, he wanted to have his gun in hand. When she got close enough that he could see her face clearly, it was obvious that she didn’t look that much like Lauren. Her features were more delicate, almost fragile, and her lips were fuller, at odds with the bone structure, mismatched. There was a dimple in her chin, and her ears were lined with piercings, small silver hoops that ran from bottom to top. Up close, nobody would confuse them. But from a distance…he was still rattled from that moment in the moonlight.