Rise the Dark (5 page)

A
wareness 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 beyond 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.

J
ay 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.

W
hen 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.

“I didn't expect you so soon,” she said. She was holding a metal bucket filled with ice and four glistening bottles of Dixie beer.

Mark nodded at them and said, “Brand loyalty, I see.”

“What? Oh. Dixie. Right. No, that's just my preference. I was going to go for a walk. Shall we walk and talk? I prefer to conduct readings in the house, but you're not here for a reading. You're here for her.”

“Her?”

“Your wife,” Dixie Witte said simply. “Did you think I wouldn't recognize your name? Honestly, I've wondered what took you so long. I'm afraid that she has too.”

Mark couldn't think of anything to say to that, because there was an element of it that seemed like the truth.

“Let's walk,” Dixie said after a pause. “We aren't going far, but the energy is better. I'll need good energy for this talk. You understand,” she said, handing him the bucket. “Here. Carry this, please.”

She headed down the street with a confident sway of her slim hips. She kept her stride fast enough to stay a full step ahead of Mark as he followed, holding the metal bucket, which sloshed water from the melted ice over his hands and numbed his fingers. Everything was still and silent and the lush smells of the oranges and rhododendrons were everywhere. In front of the moon, the scudding remnants of the storm clouds broke, re-formed, and then separated again like wet cotton.

They passed beside a still lake, not unlike the one into which Mark had thrown Myron Pate's keys earlier, but Dixie didn't stop or slow. They looped away from the park, went up the road toward the Cassadaga Hotel, and then they left the pavement and walked into a small garden.

“Medicine Wheel,” she said.

Mark froze. Every muscle tensed; every nerve hummed. He could hardly breathe.

“What did you say?”

“That's what this park is called.” She sat on the low back of a small stone bench, her feet resting on the seat.

Mark looked around the dark park and tried to find his natural voice, one that didn't betray the eerie spark he'd felt. “Officially?”

“What do you mean, officially? That's its name; I didn't make it up. There's a plaque that says it.” She shrugged. “What's it matter to you?”

What did it matter to him? He looked at her and thought about a flat mountain summit in the Bighorn range in Wyoming where rocks were laid out in twenty-eight piles that matched the lunar cycle, rocks that had been there for hundreds of years, their origin unknown but still lined up perfectly with the sunrise of the summer solstice. Rocks that were sacred to tribal nations from all over the West and where people still came daily to honor their own mix of gods, leaving behind feathers and brightly colored cloths and bits of bone and even the hair of the dead. His mother had been arrested there when she'd shown up and tried her Nez Perce spirit-guide act.

That had been one of the more lasting shames in a childhood full of them, but it was also one of the most vivid, because he'd experienced something in that spot. Something not understood, only felt. He had felt, standing on that windy peak and watching people speak in unknown tongues and worship in ways he didn't comprehend, that he was a part of something beyond himself.

And then the rangers came for his mother, and they brought handcuffs. He would never forget the eyes of the grieving couple she'd been working with.

Now, twenty-five years later and three thousand miles away, he shook his head and said, “It's a strange name, that's all,” and advanced to the bench where Dixie Witte was sitting. Something metal glittered in her hand and for an instant Mark thought,
Knife,
before he realized it was a bottle opener. She beckoned with her free hand, and he set the bucket down in the grass and passed her a sweating bottle of beer. She popped the cap and handed it to him and then he gave her another, which she opened and kept. She looked at him with a sad smile.

“I knew you'd come,” she said. “It was a matter of time, that's all. You weren't ready before, were you? You had to get ready. In another place, maybe.”

“Something like that. I didn't see the point, early on. The police were interviewing you plenty, and I read all of their transcripts.”

“The police asked the wrong questions.”

“Oh? What should they have asked?”

She didn't answer right away. She drank some of the beer and then said, “Sit.”

“I'm good.”

“No. You're putting a shadow on the road. Sit down.”

Why the shadow mattered, he had no idea, but he sat. He took the actual bench, so that Dixie was sitting above him, perched up by his right shoulder. He didn't like that; he liked to be able to see her, to have the best vantage point and the freest movement possible. That was a consistent desire for Mark. Some would call it obsessive-compulsive, but he called it practical. Wild Bill Hickok didn't get shot until he broke his own rule and sat with his back to the door.

Dixie Witte said, “Your wife had death all around her that afternoon.”

Mark didn't speak, didn't move.

“You, um…you were able to see this,” he finally said, thinking of a hypnotist he'd known in Indiana and trying to be accepting of things he knew better than to believe. To be tolerant of them, at least. That wasn't so much to ask, but still, his own wife hadn't thought he was capable of it on the day she'd made her drive to this place.

“Yes,” Dixie said. “Death arrived with her. It was very close. Unnerving, because I'd felt that before, but always in situations when it was anticipated. Home visits, usually, dealing with the terminally ill. Those things. But your wife, she was so vibrant. Her body was strong, her spirit was clean. Illness was not present.”

Mark had nothing to offer to that.

“I was relieved that she didn't ask for a reading,” Dixie said. “Because I knew what I'd have to tell her. Then she told me the purpose of her visit, and I made a mistake. I've regretted it every day since. I mean that. Not one day has passed that I have not thought of her with regret.”

“You and me both,” Mark said. “I understand my regrets, Dixie. What are yours?”

“I let her leave without a warning.”

“What would you have said? What would the warning have been?”

“That death was close. Perhaps she would have laughed and gone on her way. I don't know. But if I'd said it? Perhaps even if she didn't take me seriously, it would have lingered in her mind just enough. The words linger, and sometimes, the words affect choices. And so I think of her, and I wonder, would she have had her guard up? Would it have mattered?”

“Yes,” he said. His voice was scarcely audible.

Dixie looked pained. “She had that quality. Skeptical but not aggressively so. That was something you shared, of course. You both wanted to believe in challenging things, but you kept that desire secret.”

“I just need facts, Dixie. Not mysticism.”

“You're not going to succeed with that attitude, and you already
know
that. If what you've experienced recently hasn't taught you that, what will?”

There was a tight tingle at the back of Mark's skull, and he had a sudden vision of an accused murderer, Ridley Barnes, vanishing into dark cave waters, and he heard an echo of a hypnotist's voice, revenants of the last case he'd worked, an experience that had taught him more than he'd wished to learn. He gave a small shake of his head, and Dixie watched him knowingly.

“You don't care for coincidence, do you?” she said.

“No.”

“But you don't believe in fate either.”

“No.”

“Do you realize there are no other options?”

“Sure there are.”

She shook her head. “It's either coincidence or fate, Markus. You're going to have to decide.”

“I don't think my wife was fated to die here. I think someone made a choice to kill her.”

“Of course. But there's one element in the mix that you
do
believe in already. At your core.”

“And what might that be?”

“Purpose,” she said. “You believe in purpose. You believe that it all fits, that opposing forces will find balance, and that your role in all of it matters.”

She put her left hand over the top of his right. Her eyes had the tender but firm expression of a good mother assuring her child that there were no monsters, and it was time to trust the dark and get some rest.

She said, “You are correct, Markus. Your role in all of it matters. It will matter—and it already did.”

Her touch put an electric heat through him that he wanted to deny, but he didn't move his hand away. She was leaning forward, a posture that pressed her breasts high against her tank top.

“The answers you need won't come from me,” she said. “You've got to believe that. But I can still provide them.”

“How does that work?” Mark said. His voice sounded the way steel wool felt.

“They'll come from your wife,” she said. Then she squeezed his hand tighter. “I'll need to let her enter me, do you see? Once she makes contact…I become the conduit. And you'll have all that you want then.”

She leaned closer, her chest nearly touching his face. “You don't want to believe in that, I know. It's not your way. But you'll have to. I can't tell you anything about Garland Webb. I can't tell you anything about what happened. But Lauren can. Of course she can.”