He thought that if the Gray Men came now, alerted by the noise and maybe the smell of blood, everything would be over. As it was…the Panther Ridge Apartments were finished as a refuge. The survivors were going to have to move, whether they wanted to or not.
The White Mansion, he thought.
Refuge or not, it was pulling at him harder than ever. He had to get there. Had to…but how? Who would help him on that journey, which seemed impossible? And he didn’t know what he would find there, but…
I just blew up a Gorgon, he thought. With my mind. Because I wanted to.
And he remembered John Douglas, in the hospital, sitting in that chair and asking What exactly are you, because I don’t think you’re human.
“I am,” said the boy, to no one, and Olivia was listening only to distant screams and cries for help and realizing she had come to her end as the leader of this sad fortress. “I am,” he said, and again with more force, “I am.”
But at the same time he knew.
No human could cause earthquakes by wanting them to happen. No human could destroy a horror as he had just done, by willing it hard enough.
Ethan began to cry, silently. He was lost, even as he guided Olivia onward. He was lost, and somehow…someway…
…he must find out who and what he was, or die trying.
Two.
The
Ant Farm
Eleven.
Even though they slept in separate beds, she knew when he got up. She knew why, without looking at the clock. She heard him draw a long, shuddering breath that spoke volumes. She kept her eyes closed, because she did not want to look at him, did not want him to know she was awake. She hated him. He was on his own.
The man who was known as Jefferson Jericho walked into the bathroom and closed the door before he turned on the light. His wife, Regina, remained exactly where she was. Maybe she squeezed her eyes shut a little tighter. She was remembering that morning in April, two years ago, when she decided she could take no more of it, not a minute more. He was out sitting in his blue Adirondack chair on the lawn, under the big oak, with his mug of coffee that had god is a high roller imprinted upon it. He drank his coffee black, with a half-spoonful of sugar. As always, he was sitting in that same place where the shadows cooled the Tennessee pasture. Horses pranced for him beyond the fence. She watched him stretch his legs out and grin at the sun and she thought I can’t take this anymore, not a minute, not a second.
So she left the porch that wound around the big English-styled manor of a house and she went to his office and opened the drawer where he kept his Smith & Wesson .38. She had watched him at his target practice, and she knew where the safety was and how to load the cylinder. She had been born on a farm, had come up the hard way into these riches that now tormented her, and by Christ she could fire a pistol if she had to.
And now Regina figured she had to.
With the gun loaded and ready and her yellow silk nightgown flagging around her in the morning’s sweet breeze, she walked off the porch and along the flagstone path that led past the decorative well and the gazebo. She dimly remembered that it was the third day of April and she had some dry cleaning to pick up, but fuck that.
Today was the day she was going to kill the preacherman.
The liar. The bastard. The twister of truth until you thought yourself a liar, and that your eyes and ears were no more than broken tools. She hated the way he grinned, hated the way he won everything, hated his luck and his handsomeness and his hand always outstretched to make some wayward young girl into a better Christian. And if she was pretty enough and pliable enough he could show her a glimpse of Heaven, but she had to be a High Roller, just like himself. Had to be a Dreamer and a Dare Taker and all those other buzzing buzz words and names and phrases meant to make people feel more important so they could be controlled just that much more easily.
Preacherman, Regina thought, and realized she was maybe crazy and maybe a little drunk still from the bourbon binge last night, my loyal husband and lover, companion and fiend of the night…it’s time for you to pack that fucking grin away.
But most of all she was disappointed and destroyed, and she could not live like this or let him live another day. It was right, maybe, that they went together. The sixteen-year-old girl, the one who had the meth problem and had committed suicide, was the worst. That sad tear-stained piece of notebook paper Regina had found when she’d been gathering his suits for the dry cleaning. Had he wanted her to find that? Had he placed it there in the inner pocket so she would find it and realize how little she meant to him, and that she had better keep her mouth shut or all these High Roller riches would turn into smoke and ashes? And to find out he had been looting those girls and women, the ones who came to him burdened and life-beaten and begging his help? The ones from the drug program, and the unwed mothers, and the abused girls with the bruised eyes and the bleeding hearts that needed love?
Regina had known that girls who had trouble with their fathers were always looking for love, wherever they could find it. They were starved for it, and they needed to be filled. She knew, because she was one of them. And there grinning at the morning and all he surveyed from his favorite blue Adirondack chair sat the oh-so-handsome and oh-so-holy and oh-how-fucking-fatherly Jefferson Jericho, whose walls were about to fall because his farmgirl wife—older now, in her late thirties, ridden hard and put to bed wet—had suddenly found religion.
These walls were diseased. They were tainted and ugly, they were riddled with cracks and infested with vile creeping things.
A bullet would clean things right up. And then Regina would go back into the house, sit at the master’s desk and write the story of why she had done this and every dirty thing the detective agency had told her after their investigation, and at the end she would write down Jefferson’s real name so the world would know how the sins of Leon Kushman had taken him to a slab in the morgue.
She walked barefoot across the emerald Bermuda grass and came up silently behind him. She saw the vista he was seeing: below the hillock on which the Jericho house sat and beyond the pasture where the horses played was the town. His town, the one he’d envisioned and built. It was bathed this morning in sunlight and its copper-accented roofs glowed like heavenly gold. The town was named—appropriately for the woman who was about to cast the man out—New Eden. It was built to resemble an American town of the 1950s, though hardly anyone remembered what they had looked like anymore; it was a fantasy state of mind, if anything. The houses came in several different styles and sedate colors. They sat on small but expensive lots on streets that made radials all leading to the central, largest and most elaborate building, the Church of the High Rollers. From here, it seemed to Regina that the building was made not of milk-white stone but of milk-white wax, and to her it was worth about as much as a puddle of goo.
New Eden sat on what had been rolling hills and farmland thirty-six miles south of Nashville, Tennessee. Occasionally an entertainer who had been paid big bucks to embrace the High Roller doctrine came to give a concert on the equally big stage. That usually pulled in more of the artist’s fans. There was a waiting list to get into New Eden as long as a country road. There was even a waiting list to be hired as part of the groundskeeping service or the security patrols. Everybody, it seemed, wanted in through the gilded gates.