He tipped a bottle over her mouth and she gulped. Water. Lord, that tasted good.
She looked around again. “How’d I get here? I don’t remember going to bed. I—”
“You was down in the lights,” he said.
The lights! Of course.
She remembered now. She’d been down in the hole, baskin’ in them strange weird lights like a sun worshipper. But she hadn’t felt strange. She’d felt welcome, more welcome than she’d ever felt in her own home. She remembered wantin’ to tear off her clothes so the rays could go straight to her skin. But she didn’t get the chance…
Because that was when the voices began.
Whispers at first, so soft she could barely make them out. Not sounds, really. More like voices in her head, like she was a mental case or somethin’. She wasn’t even sure they was talkin’ to her. Maybe they was jawin’ at each other and their words was passin’ through her head, but she had a feelin’ they was talkin’ to her. She wanted them to be talkin’ to her.
“What happened to you down there?” Luke said. “You screamed like I ain’t never heard nobody scream, and when we pulled you up you was out cold. I thought you was a goner.”
Out cold…she jammed her hands against her temples. Damn, she wished she could remember what had happened, and remember more of what them voices had said. She did know she kept hearin’ about ‘the One.’ All sorts of yammerin’ about the One, repeatin’ it over and over again. The One what?
Suddenly she realized they was talkin’ about a person. The One was preparing the way, everything depended on the One because the One was special.
Wait, she thought, stiffening as a thrill ran through her. I’m special. I got a power like no one else. And then there’s my name…
She levered up to a sittin’ position and crossed her legs, Indian style. “Yes!”
“What is it?”
“Luke, do you know what my name means?”
“Y’mean Semelee? It means…it means ‘Semelee.’ Just like Luke means ‘Luke.’”
“All names mean somethin’. I ain’t got no idea what Luke means, but my momma told me that Semelee means ‘one and only.’ She said she named me that because I was her first and I was a real hard birth, and she wasn’t goin’ through that again. She said I was her first and last kid, her one and only.”
Luke frowned. “Okay. So?”
“I heard voices down in that hole and they was talkin’ about ‘the One.’ That has to be me. They was talking about me.” She closed her eyes. Excitement flashed like lectric shocks through her body. “And they kept on sayin’ somethin’ else too.”
What was it? It was right there, just out of reach…started with an R…but what was the rest?
And then she had it! The name popped into her head like she’d known it all along.
A strange name. She’d never heard nothin’ like it before. But then she’d never heard nothin’ like those voices before neither. Was that strange word their name for her, their name for the One? Had to be.
But who were the voices and what did they mean about “preparing the way”? What was the “everything” that depended on her, the One?
She had to find out. Maybe she’d learn tonight. But she had to do a couple of things before then. One of them was gettin’ her other eye-shell back. But first…
“I’m changin’ my name, Luke.”
He laughed. “That’s crazy! You can’t just change your name anytime you feel like it.”
“No. I got to. That’s why I was called back here. I thought the lagoon was talking to me when it said it wanted sacrifices, but it wasn’t. It was the lights—or at least the things that live in the lights.”
“Lay back down, Semelee. You’re talkin’ outta your head.”
“No.” She pushed him away. “Don’t you see? It was all to bring me here, to this place, at this time—to teach me my True Name. And now that I know it, I’m gonna use it.” She rose to her feet and looked out at the lights still flickering up from the hole into the early morning darkness. “Big changes comin’, Luke, and I’m gonna be part of them, I’m gonna be right at their heart. And if you and the rest of the clan stick by me, we’ll have our day. Oh, yes, Luke, we’ll have our day.”
“Semelee—”
“Told you: I ain’t Semelee no more. From this moment on you call me—”
The name died on her lips. She realized that she mustn’t tell no one her True Name. It was only for her and those closest to her. Luke was close, but not close enough. The man called Jack, the special one…she could tell him maybe, but not right away. He’d have to prove himself worthy first.
“Call you what?” Luke said.
“Semelee.”
Luke stared at her. “Wasn’t you just tellin’ me—?”
“Changed my mind. I’m goin’ to change my name inside, but outside you can keep callin’ me Semelee.” She rubbed her stomach. “We got anything to eat round here?”
Luke straightened. “I’ll go check by the fire.”
As soon as he was gone, Semelee stepped out onto the deck and looked up at the stars wheelin’ above her.
“Rasalom,” she whispered, lovin’ the way it rolled off her tongue. That was her new name. “Rasalom.”
2
The man who was something more than a man opened his eyes in the darkness.
His name…someone had spoken his name. Not one of the many he used in the varied identities he assumed for various purposes. No, this had been his True Name.
He’d been reveling in the continued corporal mutilation of a teenage girl named Suzanne and the spiritual ruination of the family that tortured her.
Poor Suzanne had been chained to the other side of the wall of this Connecticut home for eleven days now. She had been raped and defiled and tortured and mutilated beyond the point of her endurance. Her mind had snapped. She had no more to give. She was dying. Her brain had shut down all but the most basic functions. She barely felt the corkscrew being wound into the flesh of her thigh.
But what was so delicious here was the nature of the one twisting the corkscrew: an eight-year-old boy. For it was not simply the pains of the tortured that nourished this man who was something more than a man; the depravity and self-degradation of the torturers were equally delicious.
He’d returned to this house to bask in the dying embers of a young life’s untimely end.
But now that was ruined, the delicious glow fading, cooled by a growing anger and—he admitted it—concern.
Someone had spoken his True Name.
But who? Only two beings in this sphere knew that name: one was listening for it, and the other dared not speak it. They—
There! There it was again!
Why? Was someone calling him? No. This time he sensed that the speaker was not merely saying his True Name, but trying to usurp it.
Rage bloomed in his brain like a blood-red rose. This was intolerable!
Where was it coming from? He rose to his feet and turned in a slow circle—once, twice—then stopped. The source of the outrage…it came from there…to the south. He would find the misbegotten pretender there.
All his plans were progressing smoothly now. After all these centuries, millennia, epochs, he was close, closer than he’d ever been. Less than two years from now—barring interference from those who knew he was the One—his hour, his moment, his time would be at hand.
But now this. Someone usurping his True Name…
Never!
The man who was something more than a man strode away from the house through the dissipating darkness. He had no time to waste. He must head south immediately, trace his True Name to the lips that were speaking it, and silence them.
He paused at the curb. But what if that was just what someone wanted him to do?