The sheriff was silent for a moment.
What do you think happened?”
“I really don’t know. Todd’s not the kind of kid to make up things like that. He’s a pretty practical kid, usually. But it just sounded so farfetched. I mean, a rock trying to get him. I thought it was all in his imagination. Then I heard about that gravestone in the historical cemetery. I wonder if there’s a connection. I don’t think he could have wandered that far, but….”
His voice trailed off into silence. The sheriff pulled into Erik’s driveway and parked the car.
“There have been some weird goings-on since they dug up that cemetery,” the sheriff said.
“Like what?”
“Well, nothing I can really put my finger on. Just weird stuff. Like people reporting voices from the woods. Pets disappearing. And just…well…I don’t know how to say this….”
“Just try.”
“Well, it’s a creepy feeling. Like I said, I can’t put my finger on it. Just a creepy feeling. And now your boy going off into the woods and getting lost. And this teenager disappearing. I don’t know. It just feels wrong.”
“Yeah,” Erik said. “I think I’ve felt it too. I thought it was because I just moved into the place and it wasn’t familiar. But now I’m not so sure.”
He stopped and waited a moment before he opened the car door.
“Sheriff, have you heard any reports of a Satanic cult in the area?”
“Hmmm. There’s been rumors for as long as I can remember about things going on in the woods. Mostly the Indians get blamed. But it’s just urban legends. There hasn’t been a kidnapping or a murder in this town for fifty years, at least. I think every small town has rumors. I don’t pay any attention to them.”
“I heard there was a Satanic cult traveling east and they were in Rhode Island.”
“I’ll check into it. But my guess is that the devil hasn’t got anything to do with this girl’s disappearance. I suspect we might just have your run-of-the-mill pervert. Or it might even turn out to be a relative. I think the father ran off and left. Maybe he’s come back.”
Erik nodded. “You’re probably right.”
“Still, though, I’ll check with the State Police on your cult. If there is one around, I want to know about it.”
“Thanks,” Erik said, and climbed out of the car.
6
Johnny Dovecrest hadn’t answered the door when the police knocked. He’d pretended not to be home, and since the place was completely dark anyway, they had believed it, too.
Dovecrest didn’t need the police to tell him what was going on. Another child had disappeared, this time a sixteen-year-old girl. He’d heard it on a news bulletin, and even if he hadn’t, he would have known. He had felt the girl’s fear this time. It had been strong and close. He wondered if he could have helped her. He felt guilty for not trying, but he was convinced there was nothing he could have done. The entity had a human helper now, someone who was strong and swift, and guided by a power beyond anything that could be imagined on earth.
Dovecrest knew that his power was limited. Very limited. The entity might play with him and let him live, at least for now. He could almost hear the thing taunting him in his brain, daring him to come out and try to stop things.
No, Dovecrest knew that he couldn’t stop the nightmare by himself. But he didn’t know where to turn to for help. His own people were useless. And the white man would just think he was crazy-and why wouldn’t he? The story was certainly beyond anything in modern culture-the kind of things that bad movies were made about.
The boy was the only one who would believe him. The boy knew, and Dovecrest sensed it. But what good would one little boy be against this? Unless the boy could make others believe. Maybe his father. Maybe the preacher. Maybe even the sheriff.
Dovecrest was torn. Part of him felt that he should rush out into the woods right now and confront this thing before it became more powerful-and its power was increasing each and every day. And part of him felt that he needed to wait, recruit others and develop a plan.
He feared that by the time he could do that, though, it would be too late.
Whatever he decided, he needed to do something and do it fast. He felt his window of opportunity leaving him. It was already too late to help the girl, he realized. She was gone, taken away to some place where she would be dealt with later, at a time and place of the being’s own choosing. He knew the place. The time was less certain.
Tomorrow would be the day when he would begin his recruitment efforts. He would go and see the boy and his father, and try to make the man understand the truth of what the boy had seen in the woods. He would make him understand what was happening-what had happened and how history was poised to repeat itself in a new and improved version. The man-Erik Hunter-had seemed intelligent. He could make him understand. He could make him believe.
Then he would at least have an ally. Together they could perhaps recruit others and make a plan.
Otherwise, Dovecrest feared that this sleepy little town would never be the same again.
CHAPTER TEN
1
The Chepachet Public Library was something right out of a Norman Rockwell painting. The small, stone building was well over 150 years old, with ivy crawling up the sides like ancient weeds. The place even smelled like an artifact, Erik thought, as he opened the heavy oak door and stepped inside.
The library itself was smaller than many executive offices Erik had seen, and as he looked at the two men standing behind the reference desk he wondered why it took two people to run the place. He’d met them both before on a previous trip, though, and had taken an immediate dislike to them. When he’d asked them to order his book for the library, they had given him a hard time. The acquisitions guy, it seemed, didn’t read fiction and, therefore didn’t order any.
“What do you read?” Erik had asked.
“Magazines,” he had snapped, and walked away.
The director, a thin, fragile-looking man, always looked like he was going to cry, and when he wasn’t crying he was constantly whining about something. He hadn’t been much help either about ordering the book.
This time he avoided the two and went right to the reference shelves. They didn’t even acknowledge him, and Erik understood why the library was always empty. Although the library in Foster was a good five miles further down the road, it was well worth the investment of time to deal with librarians who actually liked helping people.
But this time he knew the information he needed could only be found here, in the local village vaults. He found the section on local history and began his search.
Most of the published history books weren’t much help, except for some pictures of the village from the past century. He found a couple of pictures of the old library-it really hadn’t changed in the last hundred years, and Erik suspected that Jane Austen was still catalogued under “new fiction.” He found some old pictures of the village, and even of some of the woods along Route 102, where the new road had been cut. He also found some pictures of the Narragansett Indian tribe, and one of Dovecrest. Although the picture was a hundred years old, Dovecrest looked exactly the same. It must be his father, Erik thought, but the name in the caption was clear enough. It had to be a misprint.
He rummaged through the ancient card catalogue-although the library system was on computers, no one had bothered to computerize the local records. Erik did ask the director about that.
“Oh, we haven’t gotten to that yet. We’re too busy cataloguing the video tape collection.”
“Won’t the videos be obsolete now that people have DVD players,” he’d asked, but the director merely shrugged and went on to complain about the burning pain in his stomach, so Erik merely threw up his hands and went back to the musty card catalogue.