“I did nothing,” he said. “I hadn’t even finished. I don’t know if my prayers did anything at all. I may not be strong enough.”
Kim backed away from them. “But you said it was gone.”
“I think it is,” the priest replied, the pain of apology in his eyes. “But I didn’t drive it… and I don’t know where it went.”
Dr. Dwyer gasped as his eyes fluttered open, less startled to be woken in the night than by the fact that he’d managed to nod off in the first place. The last time he’d glanced at the clock in the infirmary it had been nearly two a.m. and his skin had been crawling with anxiety. Father Cornelius had admitted that they intended to attempt an exorcism and it had felt both unreal and terrifying. He had lain on a cot, warmer and safer than the rest of the staff, he felt sure, but he hadn’t felt warm or safe. Somehow he’d fallen asleep.
Now he groaned and tried to curl into a slightly more fetal position to take the pressure off of those knotted muscles, hoping to find his way back to sleep.
Something scuffed the floor behind him.
He froze, his face to the wall and his back to the rest of the infirmary. The pain in his back crept into his neck and he knew he needed to exhale and stretch, but instead he could only listen. Outside the infirmary, the wind made the plastic sheeting flap. Not for the first time, he imagined the whole cave inhaling and exhaling, the ark breathing.
The doctor squeezed his eyes shut. Distant voices reached him as whispers, members of the staff camping just along the passage, where many had relocated tonight so they could be closer together, farther from the open cave mouth and the merciless storm.
From behind him there came the rustle of clothing. He wanted to ask who it was, but a smell filled the infirmary, a rich, earthen scent with a hint of rot beneath it. Suddenly he was eight years old again, trying to be brave now that he and his brother finally had separate rooms, but scared… so scared of the skeletal hand of the ash tree whose fingerlike branches scratched at the window with every gust of wind.
Dr. Dwyer blew out a breath and forced the memory away. For a second it had been so vivid, the fear in his heart so familiar from his childhood, that it felt as if he’d been back there, home in his bed. Some nights he’d get so frightened that he would go into his brother Teddy’s room and shake him awake. Teddy, two years his elder, would punch him in the arm and tell him not to be a pussy.
Don’t be a pussy, he thought.
Teddy would have been on target tonight. Dr. Dwyer exhaled again. In a sleep-fog, he’d forgotten he had patients in here tonight. They had taken Adam away, and Professor Olivieri had gone off as well, but Zeybekci and Dev Patil were still here.
Idiot. Laughing at himself, trying to shake off the fear that still clung to him, Dr. Dwyer rolled over on the cot and saw Zeybecki rising from his own cot, on the other side of the infirmary. With only one light on, a soft glow in the corner, the young Turkish monitor almost seemed as if he might be sleepwalking. Zeybekci hung his head, sniffed once, then wiped his hands on his sweater.
“You feeling all right?” Dr. Dwyer asked quietly, not wanting to wake Patil, whom he’d given antibiotics and a heavy dose of anti-anxiety meds that would also help him sleep. Whatever he’d inhaled when moving the cadaver had sickened Patil, but although more tests would be necessary, Dr. Dwyer didn’t think the paleopathologist had suffered any lasting damage. He’d managed to go down to the mess with Zeybekci and eat a little something. Now the man needed rest and further observation.
Zeybekci, though, could leave anytime he felt up to it.
“It’s still night,” Dr. Dwyer said, trying to get a look at his face, wondering if the man might be sleepwalking after all. “Dawn’s hours away. Maybe you should try to get some more sleep, stay in here till morning.”
“His were the hands I used at first,” Zeybekci said, holding up his own hands as if seeing them for the first time. “I whispered into his head so softly, he never even knew I was here. Never knew what he’d done. But I don’t need to whisper anymore.”
Zeybekci took two steps, then stood staring down at Patil.
“Mr. Zeybekci?” Dr. Dwyer ventured, thinking, maybe he has to piss. That must be it. But if so, why was he just—
Zeybekci reached down—it must have been quickly, but it seemed to happen slowly, so slowly, as if the infirmary were a fishbowl and they were moving under water. He put one hand over Patil’s face, clamped him down against the cot. With the other hand, Zeybekci thrust his fingers into Patil’s mouth, grabbed hold of his lower jaw, and ripped it off. Bones cracked and flesh tore and blood sprayed onto the cot and the floor.
“Jesus Christ!” the doctor screamed, staggering backward.
The words made Zeybekci flinch. He sneered, glared up at Dr. Dwyer with a sour scowl on his blood-spattered face, and then began to stab and claw at Patil’s face with the broken edge of bone jutting out from the bloody piece of his own jaw. Patil’s hands came up, trying to protect himself, and that was the worst of it. Worse even than the savagery of the attack. For a time, Patil was awake and aware, and screaming in a wordless moan that was all a man with no lower jaw could manage.
Then his hands fell away and his body went limp. Blood pulsed and sluiced to the floor, soaking through his clothes and sheets. Moments from death.
Zeybekci looked up at the doctor again, shuddered with obvious pleasure, and took a step toward him.
The hot stink of urine filled the doctor’s nostrils. Only when he felt its heat drooling along his legs, soaking his pants from within, did he know it was his own piss.
It broke the little boy in him. There was no big brother Teddy to protect him now.
Screaming, he ran from the infirmary, skidding in the puddle of his piss. Zeybekci lunged for him, and missed. The doctor slammed into the doorframe, then stumbled into the passage and into the embrace of the icy wind gusting through the ark.
“Jesus… holy shit,” he rasped.
Off to the right, he heard the voices of some of the staffers. Shaking, numb with the horror of what he’d seen, he stumbled in that direction, picking up speed as he went. Zeybekci lunged into the passage and crashed through some of the plastic sheeting, and the doctor began to scream for help.
A thick sheet of slashed plastic blocked the passage ahead. When he pushed through that hanging plastic, the voices seemed farther away. A bright bulb on the wall to his left made him cringe and blink, and then someone grabbed his arm and he lashed out, shoving the man away.
“Doc! Hey, calm down!”
Hands grabbed him again, by both wrists, a strong grip that made him snap his head up and meet the other man’s gaze. One of the American grad students, young and good-looking, something Italian for a name. Bellucci. No, Belbusti. Steve.
“It’s in Zeybekci,” Dr. Dwyer said. “Let’s move. We need weapons. Something to protect ourselves.”
Others poked their heads out of stalls farther along the passage, men and women who were tired and afraid but who felt safe together. There were tents and clusters and right there in the passage, four people knelt on the floor with a space heater and had been caught in the middle of a card game—anything to while away the storm.
“Get up!” Dr. Dwyer shouted at them. A voice down inside him reminded him they couldn’t understand, but didn’t they see his fear? Did they think him just another member of the expedition whose sanity had become momentarily unmoored?
“Damn it, listen! He’s coming! We’ve got to—”
“Doc, hey!” Belbusti said, gesturing to the others. “We’re not stupid. Demon or no demon, we’ve got weapons.”