Ashley Bell (Ashley Bell #1)(48)
After working awhile longer with the computer, Bibi took a break to use the bathroom. On the vanity, beside the sink, she found a bottle of alcohol, a packet of seamstress’s needles, and a white-cotton cloth crusted with old bloodstains and damp with new ones.
Bibi would make no assumptions about her mom and dad, neither about their interest in the occult nor anything else. She loved them and she trusted them. The silver bowl, the lettered tiles, and the blood evidence could not possibly mean what they seemed to mean. She pushed it all to the back of her mind, until some simple explanation asserted itself, which was sure to happen, some sudden understanding that presented an entirely different interpretation of the facts, some answer so blazingly obvious that she would feel stupid for not having grasped it immediately upon finding the items in the bathroom.
Exhausted after an eventful day, she got a cold bottle of beer from the office refrigerator and sat in an armchair. Maybe the beer would chill her in the good sense of the word and help her catch a few hours of sleep.
Having stopped speculating about Nancy and Murphy, she brooded now about the person whose life she was supposed to save as payment for her cancer going into remission. She repeatedly reviewed what Terezin had said on the phone. His confidence that he would kill Bibi before she got close to Ashley did not come solely from his assessment of Bibi as an easy target. The logical thing to infer was that he knew Ashley Bell’s whereabouts, and therefore he knew how hard it would be for Bibi to find her. Which seemed to point to one of two possibilities. First, maybe Ashley Bell was one of them, one of the Wrong People, and capable of using paranormal means to remain hidden if she did not want to be found. Second, and more likely, she was their prisoner, held for the usual wicked reasons…or for some purpose uniquely horrifying. If that proved to be the case, Bibi would have to descend through several levels of their homemade Hell to free her.
To free her.
To save Ashley Bell.
At her kitchen table with Calida, Bibi had insisted that she possessed neither the passion nor the skills to become the comic-book rescuer of people she didn’t even know. Yet now she contemplated that very task. Something had changed. Not necessarily for the better. Perhaps she hadn’t gained confidence in her skills, hadn’t discovered in herself a greater depth of courage than she had believed existed; perhaps instead she was finding it easier to accept unreason than to resist it.
She set the empty beer bottle on the small round table beside the armchair and closed her eyes. Fatigued to the point at which the mere idea of lifting her arms from the arms of the chair was itself physically tiring, she nevertheless doubted that she would sleep. Her tumbling thoughts had no capacity for exhaustion. From as far back as she could remember, she had been the girl whose mind was always spinning. In sleep, of course, that mental wheel still turned, and it spun forth a thread of dreams….
If the tall robed-and-hooded figures appeared in her dreams that night, they were among presences and occurrences that she didn’t later remember. The sheet-wrapped corpse that played supporting roles in her occasional nightmares, that clearly wanted to be center stage, sat now in several scenes in different places, prevented by its bound condition from a more active performance. Its immobility was curious, considering that anything should be possible in a dream; the cadaver could have split out of its cocoon at the whim of the dreamer’s mind, could have shown its face and wounds as it capered or threatened or strode the stage in a solemn soliloquy. Instead, it appeared in her hospital room as it had been before, in a chair near the window, its shroud colored by a blazing sunset, and it spoke through its fabric mask: “The forms…the forms…things unknown.” Or it sat beside her on the wicker sofa, on the bungalow porch, struggling unsuccessfully to press a hand through the cotton sheeting to touch her, whispering, “…supreme master…” and “…must be truth…” and “…nothing…nothing at all….” Or she opened a door and found the wrapped corpse standing at the threshold as it said, “…forces of nature….”
As weary as Bibi was, slumped there in the office armchair, her encounters with the corpse were not fearsome enough to break the hold of sleep. But later, a more harrowing nightmare had its way with her, more harrowing because it was more than just a dream….
She is young, not quite six, alone in her bed, where night presses at the bungalow windows. The only light is dim and largely confined to that farther corner of the room where a Mickey Mouse night-light has been plugged in to a wall outlet. Bibi is a small child, but not afraid of the dark. She has been as much embarrassed as amused by Mickey glowing over there in his yellow shoes and red pants, with his big silly smile. Her parents bought the little five-watt lamp a week earlier because they decided that all children needed reassurance in the dark. Well, Bibi is a child, but not a baby. She is so done with being a baby. Stupid Mickey watching over her is like being told she is still a baby and always will be a baby. Some nights she gets out of bed and unplugs the stupid glowing mouse. She doesn’t want to hurt her parents’ feelings. They mean well. Which is why she hasn’t thrown Mickey away or put him in the bathroom where maybe he wouldn’t upset her so much. She really, really, really doesn’t want him here. Until this night. Now she is grateful that she is not in total darkness.
She lies on her back in bed, the covers pulled up to her chin, listening intently, waiting for the thing to move. From time to time, it crawls or creeps, or slides, or does whatever the heck it does to get around. But then it goes quiet for a while, as if it’s thinking what to do next, thinking about what it wants and how to get it. This has been going on for more than an hour.