The Burning

grandson, not just a monument to the barbarity of the man but a living repository of his evil deeds. Williams himself was still there somehow, not as a ghost, not exactly, but woven into the fabric of the building itself: the walls, the floor, the ceiling. It was the house that was keeping his presence alive, and it was the house that served as the focus of hatred for all the victims of his hideous crimes. They had been waiting for a long time, in a place as dark as this, for the chance to strike back at the man who had rallied mobs against them, who had tortured them and had them killed, and now they had a mob of their own, an army of the murdered, who had finally been able to connect with each other and now had the means to exact revenge not only on Williams but on the society that had condoned his actions.

'Destroy the house,' the voice repeated, and Skylar understood that this would help stop the old Chinese man and his brethren by taking away the focus of their anger. It was the anger that drove them, that had kept their spirits alive all these years. Without it, they had no purpose, no meaning, and would undoubtedly dissipate, fading away into wherever it was that the dead normally went.

A muscle in his arm twitched at the memory of the string that had controlled him.

'Why me?' Skylar asked.

The answer was not clear. There were more images: his mother in her border patrol uniform discovering a family of corpses in a ditch in the desert; a group of huddled Chinese workers from long ago, dead in a tunnel, looking very similar to the family in the ditch; Skylar himself playing with Carlos, his best friend back in Yuma; Skylar again, walking by the mother-daughter grave site. There was a message he was supposed to take from that, but he had no idea what it was. 'You were chosen,' the voice said, but he didn't really know what that meant, and he wondered if what it really came down to was that he'd been in the right place at the right time.

Or the wrong place at the wrong time.

'Who . . . who are you?' Skylar asked the disembodied voice.

There was a lightening of the darkness as the entity showed itself.

And Skylar awoke screaming.

Jolene held her son tightly. Her mother had awakened as well, shocked instantly out of sleep by Skylar's primal piercing cry, and Jolene was both heartened and surprised to see that the expression on her mom's face was one of ferocious protectiveness. She did not know this woman. This was not the mother with whom she had grown up-although it was the mother she had always wanted-and for the first time she was filled with the hope that her son might finally have the grandmother he deserved and that she herself might eventually be able to forge a real relationship with her mom.

If they made it out of this alive.

Skylar's screams had turned to sobs, and she murmured generic reassurances in his ear. 'It's all right. . . . It's okay. . . . Mommy's here. . . .'

There was a knock at the front door. She assumed at first that it was Leslie, home from work, but the knock came again. Leslie wouldn't knock. She had a key. 'Who is it?' Jolene called out, heart pounding. She passed Skylar to her mother and went into the living room, looking around for the carving knife she'd been keeping close by, just in case.

'Agent Anthony Saldana. FBI.'

That was the last response in the world she had expected to hear, and it came so far out of left field that she was too stunned to respond.

'Are you Jolene Connor?' the man asked.

'Yes,' she answered through the closed door. She looked back at her mother, who was staring with wide frightened eyes. Skylar had stopped crying and was wiping the tears from his face, his gaze focused and

alert.

'May I speak with you?'

'Go right ahead.'

'I need to talk to you about your experience in the Williams house. I interviewed Chief Tanner about an hour ago and just finished talking to your friend Leslie Finch, who told me where to find you.' There was a pause. 'Would you open the door, please?'

The voice belonged to someone used to being obeyed, and she was not sure if that was a request or an order. She was still suspicious and didn't want to let anyone in, but with trembling hands she turned the dead bolt and opened the door a crack, peeking out from beneath the chain lock. The gray-suited man on the front porch was holding out a sheathed badge and ID card. In the drive-behind him, another man was waiting in a black car. She thought of bringing up the fact that until recently she'd been a border patrol agent and so was a fellow alumnus of federal law enforcement, but she didn't think it would carry much weight.

'Open the door, please,' the agent said.

Jolene obeyed, although she remained standing in the doorway, refusing to invite him in.

'I understand that you were in the house when Anna May Carter was killed and that your son was found in the basement hysterical and in a state of undress. Is this true?'

Jolene nodded.

Saldana looked over her shoulder at Skylar, who had come out of the bedroom with his grandmother. 'Is that the boy?'

'What is it exactly that you want to know?'

'You have in your possession a series of journals kept by Chester Williams, journals in which he describes in detail killings and acts of violence committed by himself and his followers. You're also the one who discovered severed body parts that Williams cut off of his victims for his own personal use.'

'Yes,' she admitted.

'Can you tell me of any unusual or unexplained occurrences that have happened in or around the Williams house recently?'

She frowned. 'What is this? What's going on?'

He looked her in the eye as the other agent got out of the car. 'Have you seen any ghosts or spirits, Mrs. Connor?'

She paused for only a second. 'Yes.' Jolene exhaled deeply. It was a relief, somehow, to be able to unburden herself, to explain what she'd seen and experienced to someone in a position of authority. Both agents came inside and sat down, and although she had done her best up until this point to keep the worst of it from Skylar, she spoke freely now in front of him, knowing that it was time for him to learn what was going on. She handed the diaries over to Saldana when she was through describing what was in them. 'Here,' she said.

'I would like you to accompany us to the house of Chester Williams,' the agent told her. 'I want you to show us where everything occurred.'

'I'm going, too!' Skylar announced.

'No, you're not,' Jolene told him. 'You stay here with Grandma.'

'I have to go. I have to be there. I'm the one it talks to.'

I'm the one it talks to.

She suddenly felt chilled. 'I don't want you anywhere near that house, do you understand me? You-'

'Who is 'it'?' Saldana asked Skylar.

'I don't know. But I dreamed about that old Chinese guy who kidnapped me, and I dreamed about that Williams guy, and then I was in this dark place and this really big ... thing'-Jolene saw the shadow of fear pass over his face-'talked to me and said the only way to stop all this was to destroy the house.'

'All 'this'? All what?'

'I don't know. All the stuff you're here about, I guess. All the stuff you're supposed to stop.'

The two agents looked at each other. 'He's coming with us,' Saldana said.

'No, he's not,' Jolene insisted.

'He's coming with us.'

Thirty-two

In the Passenger Car

Time was fluid in here. Dennis knew, objectively, that it shouldn't take more than a day to reach their