Mark slammed the door against the heat, and the cellar returned to blackness, but there was heavy smoke already, and he knew time was short.
He left the stairs and stumbled to the window. It had an iron lock, rusted shut. He hammered on it with the butt of the.38 but made no progress, and the smoke was thickening already, so he gave up on the lock and bashed the butt of the gun into the center of the glass. The old pane fractured but didn’t give, and he swore and smashed it again and this time it broke and he put his hand through the window and over the glass, razoring his thumb open. He balled his jacket in his fist and used that to clear the remains of the glass, then he put his right foot on the old generator nearby, the massive hunk of rusting steel, and stepped up high enough to reach through the small window and get a grip on the exterior wall.
It was tight, but he’d wormed through tighter spaces in caves in Indiana, and with the fire crackling just behind him, motivation was not an issue. He dragged himself through, leaving thin ribbons of flesh behind as he swept over remnant teeth of glass, and he was on his belly in the grass, gasping for air, when he saw a figure just ahead. He fumbled to get his gun upright and had nearly pulled the trigger when he recognized the boy from the orange tree, illuminated by the flames. He was offering a hand.
Mark accepted it and the boy helped him to his feet and they stumbled away together as a window blew out somewhere upstairs and the fire roared through the old house.
“It wasn’t me,” Mark said.
“I know.” The boy released him and stepped aside, regarding the burning home with curiosity but no evident fear. “I saw them. I didn’t know you were inside, though. I saw them with the gas cans.”
A siren rose over the sound of the flames and they both turned toward it. No emergency lights were visible yet, just the sound. The flames cast flickering orange glows over the palm leaves but out beyond the village was dark.
“I think they hurt Dixie,” the boy said.
“Yes,” Mark said. “They hurt her.” He rubbed his eyes as if to remove the image of the woman’s body jammed indifferently under the cellar stairs. “Do you know who they are?”
The boy shook his head. “No, but they said the name you asked about before. The strange one.”
“Garland?”
“That’s it. They’re going to him now.”
“Where?”
“They didn’t say a place. And they said another name too. Eli.”
Eli. It meant nothing to Mark. He said, “Do they work for Garland, is that it? Is he in charge?”
“No. The one named Eli is in charge.”
“How can you be sure?”
“I just am. I know things, sometimes. Everyone here does. One day I’ll be better at it than I am now. But I know some things already. Eli is the worst one.” The boy was backing up as the flames grew taller and hotter. “He’s very bad.”
Mark had trouble imagining anyone worse than Garland Webb, but he nodded and said, “Okay. Thank you for telling me. And wait, please. I need something from you. Please, it’s important.” He fumbled in his pocket with a bloody hand. “Son, I need you to take something for me and keep it until I’m back. Can you do that? It’s very important. It will help me find them and stop them from hurting anyone else.”
He extended his cell phone with its photographs of the red truck’s license plate from earlier in the afternoon. He didn’t want to have it on him when the police came, didn’t want to have to explain any of the photos. He needed a head start. The boy regarded it suspiciously.
“Why don’t you give it to the police?”
“Because I need to find those people before the police do.”
The boy looked into Mark’s eyes for a second and then turned his chin slightly, his gaze drifting up and over Mark’s shoulder.
“I shouldn’t do it, but Walter says it’s fine.”
A few short hours ago Mark would have told the boy to stop telling his tales about ghosts. Now he said, “Listen to Walter, son. It sounds like he knows something about what happens when bad people stay out of prison.”
By the time the police arrived, the boy had pocketed the phone and was standing in the shadows just outside the circle of firelight, where a crowd of onlookers had gathered.
“Is there anyone inside?” an officer asked.
“Yes. But you’re not going to be able to help her now,” Mark said, and then he glanced back for the boy, but he was gone.
Part Two: The High Country
14
Doug Oriel, known in Cassadaga as Myron Pate, had driven through the night and Janell slept as Florida fell behind them and they carved into the Georgia pinewoods. She had dreamed often and well in Cassadaga. Sometimes, they were memories of the Netherlands, her first days with Eli. Other times, visions of the dark world and the horrified faces of the foolish people who feared it. In the truck, though, she struggled to find deep enough sleep for dreams at all, and when they came, they were more like flashes of recent memory, Novak behind his circle of light, shining it into her eyes.
Their first stop was well north of Atlanta, an obscure spot on the map that would have been forgotten completely if not for the interstate that ran through it. Doug pulled into a gas station beside a pump, shut the engine off, and looked at her.
“It’s your role,” he said. “I can call him, but he will say that-”
“No. I’ll call. I’m senior.”
Usually this grated on him, but today he was relieved. This was the very reason he hadn’t been granted leadership. He was a weapon, nothing more. An operator. Without her guidance, useless.
“If he needs to hear from me, I’ll back up your story.”
“Just pump the gas,” she said, and got out of the truck.
In the backseat was a black bag designed to hold a laptop computer, innocuous-looking, invisible. She unzipped it and selected one of the forty cell phones inside, then powered it up for the first time. The gas was pumping, but she could see Doug watching her, and she walked away from the truck and into the shadows at the far end of the parking lot. Then she dialed the first of three carefully memorized numbers. Each one asked for a new number, rerouting her, rerouting her, and rerouting her again. Then, finally, a ring.
Her throat was tight and her skin prickled. When he spoke, she thought she would not be able to answer. It was that wonderful to hear his voice again. For months, their only communication had been short e-mail messages.
“It’s me,” she said. “We are in motion.”
“But Novak is alive?”
“I believe so.”
“You believe so?”
“It is my understanding he escaped the house unharmed.”
“Then this is not a question of belief. This is a fact.”
“Yes.” The fact that she had failed.
“What does he understand?”
“Nothing.”
“That seems impossible.”
“It’s true. His interest is only in Garland.”
“He can’t see beyond that?”
“His whole world exists in that ditch where his wife died. It is all that he sees. I spent extra time with him to assess this. Now I wish I hadn’t.”
“It’s important to know.” He sighed. “But Garland taunted him. If he can possibly track Garland here, we will have to deal with him.”
She was unaware of the taunt and wanted to know more about it, but he didn’t like questioning or prolonged phone calls, so she stayed silent. For a time, so was he. Thinking, no doubt, about her failure. She could picture Novak in the darkness, his hands in hers, and the memory made her wince. She’d been so close. A few seconds faster, that was all she’d needed to be. She hadn’t expected him to move so swiftly. Hadn’t expected him to move at all. He’d obliged her every request to that point, so there had been no sense of a rush.