Ashley Bell (Ashley Bell #1)(110)

“Hang in there, Beebs,” he said, and Pogo asked if he thought she could hear him, and he said, “No. But it’s not the first time I’ve talked to her out loud when she wasn’t there to hear.”





While Bibi made her way down through the house from which Ashley had been kidnapped, sidling around the gruesome corpses, two spirits of different sizes darted initially at the periphery of her vision, as quick and elusive as bats, although the size of people. They were as silent as before, and again she sensed that they flung themselves through the house in a state of torment, not fury. They moved even faster than before, in a frenzy. With sudden unpredictable lunges, they began exploding from the periphery into her immediate presence, startling her even after she came to expect these assaults on her nerve. She began to think that they wanted something from her and that it was something she could not—must not—give. Repeatedly, with growing boldness, these featureless figures brushed her in passing. Because they lacked substance, she could not feel the pressure or texture of their touch, but each time a chill shattered through her, a chill that didn’t arise from within, as earlier, but burst through her in distinct shards, like a shrapnel of ice, so that in spite of the absence of pain, she half expected to see bloodstains spreading through her clothes.

Overcome—in truth, slammed—by an urgent need to be out of the house, alarmed but not terrified, rising to the challenge of the alarm rather than fleeing in response to it, she holstered the pistol to free both hands. As she descended the stairs from the second floor and crossed the foyer to the front door, she swung her arms at the spirits when they leaped upon her, as if to warn them to stay clear. Because they were as weightless as shadows, she was powerless to throw them off or backhand them aside. She felt foolish, clumsy, but she was convinced that if she didn’t mount a resistance, they would become more aggressive and perhaps gain the power to pose a real threat.

She erupted from the front door, across a simple brick stoop, and into the yard, an expanse of sandy earth and stones and clumps of pale weedy grass that had perhaps never been green, all dimly illumined and heavily shadowed by the moon. As she had hoped, the spirits did not follow her out of the house, remained tethered to its rooms, in which they had lived and died and lived again in grief.

Bibi ran and stumbled and almost fell more than once before she reached the graveled shoulder of the state route, where she turned to look back at the house. The residence still appeared to be misplaced in space and time. She gasped for breath, waiting for the place to sink as Poe’s House of Usher had sunk. But there was no black and lurid tarn here, as there had been in the story, no muck into which the structure could be submerged.

With no need to return overland, she followed the pavement to the east, where Pogo’s Honda was parked alongside the road. As she walked, she thought of the spirits in the house, about what they might have wanted from her.

Of the several wants that came to mind, there was one she knew must be true the moment that it occurred to her: They wanted to delay her, hinder, hamper. Which meant they had not been, as she’d thought, the spirits of Ashley’s dead parents, the shot woman and the beaten man. She had been spared from brain cancer in order TO SAVE A LIFE, Ashley’s life; but there were forces, both human and supernatural, that wanted Ashley dead.

If the girl was murdered, perhaps Bibi’s cancer would return, for she would have failed to earn its remission.

The walk back to the Honda seemed longer than it should have been, and she began to worry that she had already passed the place where she had parked it, that the car had been stolen, leaving her with no choice but to continue on foot to Sonomire Way.

Delay. Hamper. Hinder. The ink-black bat-quick spirits in the house had not been the only entities that had sought to impede her since all of this had begun. When she had been at the small table in the motel room, making new street names from the lettered tiles that spelled MOONRISE, something had knocked on the door, had scratched at the door, had tapped at the windows, distracting and delaying her word search before at last she found SONOMIRE WAY. The fog! The first night, the hampering fog billowed in from the sea, slithered inland, and the following day, it retreated only to repeatedly return, until with sunset and this second night, it thickened into a blinding mass that had slowed her significantly. Now it seemed to her that the fog had been unnaturally dense and persistent, that it had been settled upon her not by Nature but by whatever power Terezin could command to oppose her actions and retard her progress.

Still no Honda.

She began to run.

Maybe the greater rush of blood from her laboring heart shifted gears of thought in her brain, because as she sought the car, a new and disturbing possibility demanded consideration. Maybe her enemies were not as devious and numerous as they seemed to be. She could have imagined the knocking-tapping-scratching at the motel, for when she had opened the door and ventured outside, there had been no threat.

If the inky spirits had not been real, they had been hallucinations, which represented a level of self-deception suggesting derangement. After all, she had earlier turned traitor against herself, cutting the lines from the books by O’Connor and Wilder and London, burning them in the motel-bathroom sink, to prevent herself from confirming some suspicion she’d had about Chubb Coy.

Of course she could not be her only enemy. For one thing, she couldn’t imagine a massive fog bank into existence. The fog had to have been conjured by Nature or by Terezin using his occult power.