With that final statement the tape ended.
The screen in front of Jake went blank.
Holy Shit!Jake thought a few moments later, once his mind had managed to digest everything the old man had said.Nightshades? Civilizations long before the rise of man? And that shit about chasing the Dark One down through the centuries, that’s rich. The guy was a certifiable loon, that was for sure, but hell, he had one heck of an imagination, you had to give him that.
No wonder Sam liked him.
Shaking his head in amazement, Jake flipped off the set and headed back to bed, intending on catching some sleep. He could talk to Sam about things in the morning.
He was in the process of double-checking the lock on the front door when something clicked in the back of his mind.
Jake stiffened and his eyes widened involuntarily. His mouth opened, but no words came out.
Images flashed inside his head, one after another, coming so fast that they seemed to blend together into a hideous collage.
Halloran’s corpse.
The statue they’d found inside the crypt.
The news reports about the murders.
The butler’s body.
The visions Katelynn had been having.
Gabriel pleading with Sam to stop the thing from killing again.
Good Lord!Jake thought.Could everything Gabriel had said be true?
At that moment Jake felt a mental hinge beginning to let go in the back of his mind. With it, his entire foundation of rational thought began sliding down a long dark ramp.
All right, Jake. Don’t freak out on me here,he told himself.Get a grip and just think this whole thing through logically. There’s got to be a better explanation for all this. There has to be!
There wasn’t.
A part of him deep down inside knew it.
Calming himself, Jake went into the kitchen and sat down, considering the whole situation step by step.
The killings had begun Tuesday afternoon or evening, only a short time after Kyle Halloran’s body had been discovered in Sebastian Blake’s crypt. Since then all hell had broken loose. In the space of forty-eight hours, five, possibly six, people had been hideously murdered. Jake knew from the news reports that the bodies had been ravaged as well. In one case, the death of an elderly couple, the victims had been mutilated so badly that the police hadn’t been certain how many bodies they were actually dealing with when they first arrived at the scene. Jake had even heard rumors that parts of the bodies had been eaten.
Judging from the frantic pressure the papers were putting on the sheriff’s department, Jake suspected that the authorities were no closer to catching the killer than they had been from the very start.
Why?
Because they were looking in the wrong place?
Because the killer wasn’t human, as they so naturally assumed?
While the logical side of his mind was telling him to knock off the bullshit and go back to bed, the other half—the one that loved to read horror novels and play Swords and Sorcerers—was saying,Why the hell not? Weirder things happen all the time, right? Take a look around. How many UFO sightings were there last year? What about the Loch Ness monster? Sure, and the National Enquireris up for the Pulitzer Prize this year.
Suppose the creature did exist.
That would account for the police having so much trouble finding the killer, wouldn’t it? A demon, or whatever you wanted to call it, wouldn’t leave the usual sort of evidence that police investigations relied upon. There’d be no motive, no connections between the victims. There wouldn’t be any fingerprints, or fiber traces, or paper trails for them to follow. There’d be no murder weapon; no pistol, no knife, no lead pipe or candlestick. Any blood or tissue samples the police recovered wouldn’t do them any good. What could they match them to? The same went for teeth marks on the victims.
The creature could leave behind a trail of corpses and still be practically untraceable!
This is crazy,he told himself, but he wasn’t quite ready to let it go.
Not yet.
His theory would also go a long way to explaining what it was that Katelynn was seeing in her “visions.” Once he made the simple jump in logic that said such a thing might be possible, everything else fell solidly into place.
Okay.
Say it does exist.
How can I prove that?
Jake got up and poured himself some coffee. He had a hunch he was going to need it. He crossed to the junk drawer and dug around until he found a clean sheet of paper and a pen. He took them both back to the table.
After a couple of minutes, he began writing.
27
CONNECTIONS
While Jake was wrestling with the idea that something paranormal was happening around him, Katelynn was pacing her living room, lost in thought.
Blake’s Bane,she kept repeating to herself as she moved about the room.
Blake’s Bane… Blake’s Bane… Blake’s…
She tried to sleep, but after lying in bed awake for half an hour she’d given up and gotten to work. The innate curiosity that had led her into a life of research assumed control and pushed her emotions back where they couldn’t interfere with her work. There they could simmer until she was ready to deal with them.
For the time being, Jake was forgotten.
Katelynn had bigger fish to fry.
Blake’s Bane… Blake’s Bane…
Father Castelli’s phrase had rung a bell somewhere in the dark recesses of her mind. Katelynn was positive she had heard it before. It didn’t even occur to her to doubt that the phrase was genuine; she was convinced that they had, indeed, been speaking to the deceased priest.
But when had she heard it? And where?
She had a hunch that if she could find the answer to either of those questions, then she’d also discover the answer to what had been happening to her lately.
Back and forth…
Back and forth…
Blake’s Bane…
With a sharp cry she dashed across the room to her desk and frantically dug through the stacks of books piled haphazardly on the floor, at last pulling forth a small, leather-bound volume that had seen better days. The book’s cover was torn, the corners bent, even the pages had taken on the yellowish brown hue that belied old age.
She seated herself behind the desk unconsciously and, after turning on the light, began slowly scanning page after page of the small work.
I know it’s here somewhere,she told herself over and over again.I know it is.
Indeed it was.
On page 243, to be exact.
The volume itself was the traveling diary of Edward Beckett. It was a slim volume, one she’d found only after acting on Gabriel’s advice during her fourth search of the library’s rare books collection. Beckett had been a circuit-riding minister who traveled from settlement to settlement in the country’s early years, bringing the word of the Lord to any and all who would listen. Beckett had passed through Harrington Falls several times in the 1760s and she had been using his firsthand observations of the area as a sourcebook for her thesis. Harrington Falls had been well established by then, having swiftly spread into the surrounding countryside as the Blake family’s wealth brought more people into the region. Beckett’s observations provided a clear and accurate picture of life on the frontier. He apparently rode several hundreds of miles a year, preaching as often as possible.
A meticulous man, he recorded every little detail in the volumes of travel diaries he prepared along the way.
As chance would have it, he arrived in Harrington Falls on a cold evening in October of 1763, the same evening Sebastian Blake was accused of practicing witchcraft and wizardry.