Had he?
“Yes, yes. That’s what the doefolmon really is. Of course, astronomers don’t call it the doefolmon—” Fredrick cragged another chuckle. “They call it a tangental lunar apogee. You’ve probably noticed over the past week or so that the moon appears pink. It’s what’s known as a straticulate refraction, the moonlight shining through the upper atmosphere at an anomalous angle. It’s very, very rare, and quite precise—a vernal equinox that occurs at the exact same moment as the moon becomes full.”
Dr. Harold’s eyes narrowed.
“And that’s the curious part,” Fredrick went on. “Even an old, skeptical atheist such as myself must admit. The last time this happened was exactly a thousand years ago, and exactly a thousand years ago was when the Ur- locs supposedly succeeded in incarnating the Ardat-Lil.”
—
Chapter 31
“It’s happening now, right now,” Erik Tharp told her in the dark confines of the basement.
He’d been talking, and she’d been listening, staring at each of his raddled words as though they were deformed faces.
“The Ardat-Lil is already here,” he was saying through the haze of her quandary. “But certain things have to take place before she can be incarnated through the host.” He paused, looked right at her. “That’s why I escaped. To make sure those things don’t happen.”
Ann felt slick in the sweat of her own dread.
“Your daughter’s a virgin, isn’t she?”
Ann nodded.
“She wasn’t born in a hospital, was she? She was born here, in Lockwood. Wasn’t she?”
“Yes!” Ann shrieked.
Tharp loaded several rounds into the shotgun. “We have to find her and get the two of you away from here. We have to do it now. The doefolmon is tonight.”
“Forget him. He’s one of them now. Forever.”
Tharp roughly grabbed her arm, yanked her toward the steps. “They’re all at the cirice now—”
“The what?”
“The church. They’re getting ready.” Tharp paused on the stairs, as if pricked by the palest vision. He was staring at nothing for a moment, or perhaps at the ghost of what he used to be. “Come on,” he said next. He was thumping up the stairs, with Ann in tow. “If we can prevent the incarnation rite itself, or even the kin sacrifice, then they’ll be ruined. They won’t be able to do this again for a thousand years.”
Ann huffed up the dusty wood steps.
“It’s like a trigger for the whole ritual,” Tharp’s ragged voice grated on. “The final offering to the Ardat-Lil. Proof of faith.”
The vermilion vertigo embraced her again, like a desperate lover. The vision of the great blade plunging down again and again into the squirming naked abdomen…
“Come on, come on!” Tharp was commanding. He slapped Ann hard in the face. She blinked at him, numb. Then he was leading her up again.
Now Ann understood it, the vertiginous visions and how they related to the nightmare.
That’s what the vertigo was trying to show her.
Again, Ann’s thoughts cloaked her. They were on the landing now; Tharp was leading her to the kitchen. “We’ll go out the back. We’ll follow the woods to where I got the van parked. You’ll wait there while I go look for Melanie.”
But at the end of the paneled hall, Tharp stopped, oddly turning to her. “Did you hear that?”
“Hear what?” Ann said, diffused.
His eyes twitched. His shredded voice croaked on, “I could’ve sworn I heard—”
Ann screamed. A chunk of the entrance molding exploded into splinters. Tharp was pushing her backward as a dark cackle issued from the kitchen. Then came another loud
A figure stepped into the hall, holding a huge revolver.
“Surprise! I’m back!” Duke Belluxi announced to them.
«« — »»
As Fredrick put away the books he’d gotten down, Dr. Harold was remembering, for no real reason, the odd coincidence. Erik Tharp was from a town called Lockwood. Yes, that was odd. One of his private patients, Ann Slavik, the lawyer suffering night terrors, was from the same town.
“I’m afraid that’s all I have for you,” Professor Fredrick said, and sat back down. “The Ur-locs were a very obscure society; there’s simply not that much information available about them.”
“But enough for Tharp to discover.”
Fredrick shrugged. “I’ve spent my entire life pursuing the remnants of civilizations whose beliefs were rooted in superstition. I’ve been from Nineveh to Knossos. From Jericho to Troy to Rhodes. And do you know what I’ve discovered? In all those places, over all those years?”
“What?”
“There are no superstitions. No credence to any subjective belief that has ever been asserted. They’re just stories, fables, people making fables in order to explain themselves.”
“Of course,” Dr. Harold said. “But it is interesting: Tharp’s escape in conjunction with an equinox that occurs only every thousand years.”
“He’s no doubt a very good researcher, that’s all. Do you suppose you’ll catch him?”
“We informed the state police that Tharp would most likely return to the geography of his delusion, but they didn’t put much stock in it. The most recent murders indicate that he’s actually moving
“That could be a ploy, couldn’t it? Tharp’s intelligence quotient is quite higher than average.”
“I know. That’s what bothers me.”
“Where exactly do you think Tharp is returning to?”
“A little town up on the northern edge of the county,” Dr. Harold answered. “It’s called Lockwood.”
Professor Fredrick subtly laughed, fingering a tiny stone statue of Xipe, the Aztec god of the harvest. “You’re