Nest jumped inside her burlap prison. The demon. She swallowed and exhaled quickly, noisily.
"All alone, down in the dark, in a black pit where your greatest enemies dwell. Helpless to prevent them from doing whatever they choose. You hate being helpless, don't you?"
The demon's voice was soft and silky. It rippled through the silence like bat wings. Nest closed her eyes against its insidious sound and gritted her teeth.
"Will someone come for you, you must be wondering? How long before they do? How much more of this must you endure?" The demon paused as if to consider. "Well, John Ross won't be coming. And your grandparents won't be coming. I've seen to that. So who else is there? Oh, I forgot. The sylvan. No, I don't think so. Have I missed anyone?"
Wraith!
The demon chuckled in a self–satisfied way. "The fact is, you have only yourself to blame for this. You should never have tried to follow me. Of course, I knew you would. You couldn't help yourself, could you? It was all so simple, making the suggestion to young Danny Abbott. He's so angry at you, Nest. He hates you. It was easy to persuade him that he could get even with you if he just did what I told him. He was so eager, he didn't even bother to consider the consequences of his act. None of them did. They are such foolish, malleable boys."
The demon's voice had shifted, moving to another part of the cave. But Nest could not hear the demon himself move, could not pick up a single footfall.
"So, here you are, alone with me. Why, you might have asked yourself? Why am I bothering to do this? Why don't I just… drop you into a hole and cover you up?" The demon's voice trailed off in a hiss. "I could, you know."
He waited a moment, as if anticipating her response, then sighed anew. "But I don't want to hurt you. I want to teach you. That's why I brought you here. I want you to understand how helpless you are against me. I want you to realize that 1 can do whatever 1 like with you. You can't prevent it. Your friends and family can't prevent it. No one can. You need to accept that. I brought you here so that you could discover firsthand what 1 was talking about yesterday, about1 the importance of learning to be alone, of learning to depend only on yourself. Because you can't depend on other people, can you? 1 mean, who's going to save you from this? Your mother is gone, your grandparents are old, your friends are feckless, and no one else really gives a damn. When it comes right down to it, you have only yourself."
Nest was awash with rage and humiliation. She would have killed the demon gladly if she had been free to do so and been offered a way. She hated the demon as she had never hated anyone in her life.
"I have to be going now," he said, the location of his voice shifting again, moving away. "I have things to do while the night is still young. I have enemies to eliminate. Then I'll be back for you. Danny Abbott won't, of course. By morning, he will have forgotten you are even here. So you have to depend on me. Keep that in mind."
Then the voice dropped into a rough whisper that scraped at her nerve endings like sandpaper. "Maybe it would be wise if you were to use your time among the feeders to consider what's important to you. Because your life is about to change, Nest. It is going to change in a way you would never have dreamed possible. I'm going to see to it. It's what I've come here to do."
The silence returned, slow and thick within the dark. Nest waited for the demon to say something more, to reveal some further insight. But no sound came. She sat wrapped within the hot blackness of the burlap, embittered, frightened, and alone. Then the feeders returned. When the touching began anew, her resolve gave way completely and she screamed soundlessly into the tape.
CHAPTER 24
Old Bob was finishing up the Sunday edition of the Chicago Tribune when the doorbell rang. He'd begun the paper early that morning before church and spent his free time during the course of the day working his way through its various sections. It was part of his Sunday ritual, an unhurried review of the events of the world with time enough to give some measured consideration to what they meant. He was sitting in his easy chair in the den, his feet up on the settee, and he glanced immediately at the wall clock.
Ten–forty. Late, for someone to be visiting.
He climbed to his feet and walked out into the hall, the first stirrings of anxiety roiling his stomach. Evelyn was already standing in the foyer, rooted in place six feet from the front door, as if this was as close as she dared to come. She held her cigarette in one hand, its smooth, white length burning slowly to ash, a silent measure of the promptness of his response. The look his wife gave him was unreadable. They had come home together at dusk, bidding John Ross good night and leaving Nest with her friends. They had unpacked the leftover food and eating utensils from the picnic basket, unloaded the cooler, and put away the blanket. Evelyn had barely spoken as they worked, and Old Bob had not asked what she was thinking.
"Open it, Robert," she said to him now as he came down the hall, as if he might have been considering something else.
He released the latch and swung the door wide. Four youngsters were huddled together in the halo of the porch light, staring back at him through the screen. Nest's friends. He recognized their faces and one or two of their names. Enid Scott's oldest boy. Cass Minter. John and Alice Heppler's son. That pretty little girl who always looked like she was on her way to a photo shoot.
The Heppler boy was the one who spoke. "Mr. Freemafk, can you come help us find Nest, please? We've looked everywhere, and it's like she dropped into a hole or something. And we tried to find John Ross, like she asked, but he's disappeared, too. I think Danny Abbott knows what's happened to her, but he just laughs at us."
Robert Heppler, Old Bob remembered suddenly. That was the boy's name. What had he said? "What do you mean, Nest has dropped into a hole?"
"Well, she's been gone for close to two hours," Robert continued, his concern reflected in his narrow face. He pushed his glasses up on his nose and ran a hand through his unruly blond hair. "She went off after this guy, the one who's been poisoning the trees? The one you warned her about? She thought she saw him, so she…" He bit off whatever it was he was going to say and looked at the Scott boy. "Jared, you were there; you tell it."
Jared Scott looked pale and anxious as he spoke. His words were slow and measured. "We were dancing, me and Nest, and she saw this guy, like Robert says. She gets this funny look on her face and tells me he's the one who's been poisoning the trees, and I have to find Robert and Cass and Brianna and then we have to find John Ross and tell him to go after her. Then she runs off after this guy. So we all go looking for Mr. Ross, but we can't find him."
Old Bob frowned, thinking, Someone's poisoning trees?
"So, anyway, we can't find Mr. Ross," Robert interrupted Jared impatiently, "so we start looking around for Nest on our own. We try to find where she went, going off in the same direction, and that's when we run into Danny Abbott and his friends coming toward us. They're laughing and joking about something, and when they see us, they go quiet, then really start breaking up. I ask them if they've seen Nest, and they get all cute about it, saying, 'Oh, yeah, Nest Freemark, remember her?' and stuff like that. See, we had this run–in with them just the other day, and they're still pissed off. 'Scuse me. Upset.
Anyway, I tell them this isn't funny, that there's a guy out there poisoning trees, and he might hurt Nest. Danny says something like 'What guy?' and I can tell he knows. Then he and his Neanderthal pals push me and Jared down and go right past us and back to the dance. That's when we decided to come get you."
Old Bob stood there, trying to sort the story through, trying to make some sense of it, still stuck on the part about someone poisoning trees in the park. It was Evelyn who spoke first. '