The priest smiled. 'Are you saying that Jesus did not heal those with divers diseases?'
'That is not what I meant, Daniel,' the Methodist defended his position. 'And you know it.'
'I know, Byron. Byron, we could talk of Satan's seeking man's destruction—in Peter. We could discuss Satan's tempting man to disobedience—Genesis. We—'
'Yes, Daniel,' the minister cut him off. 'I know all that. That Satan blinds the unbelievers. That he incites men to evil. That he appears as the Angel of Light. That he delights in misusing the scriptures. I am very much aware of all that. The Good Lord knows you and I have spent many a night debating all that—and more. But I do not believe in demonic possession, black magic, exorcism, witches, warlocks, things that go bump in the night, Bigfoot, the Loch Ness monster—none of that. I am telling you both, before you race about town, making utter fools of yourselves, that today was only a fluke, and nothing more.'
'Like John, Byron, I feel you are about to witness something that will awe you.'
'Nonsense!'
FOUR
Worried about Little Sam and Nydia, plagued by a guilty conscience, and wanting to tell Nydia what had happened the previous night, Sam returned home. He found the note.
'Gone for a drive!' Sam said, his voice echoing around the empty house. He couldn't believe it. Of all the people in Logandale, Nydia should have known how much danger they were facing. And she calmly goes out for a drive. He shook his head in disgust and mounting anger.
The dark forces began working at him, silently, invisible, insidiously.
His anger mounted. 'All right,' he said hotly. 'If that's the way she wants to play the game, then two can play as well as one.'
Sam stood for a moment in the den, looking at the chair where Janet had straddled him, taking his hardness into her hot young depths. He vividly recalled the scene: her firm breasts, jutting nipples, and soft skin. He replayed in his mind her tongue probing his lips and mouth. He recalled her hands on him.
He shook his head, attempting to clear them of those scenes. He found he could not.
'Well, it won't happen again,' he muttered. 'I made a mistake, and I'm going to catch hell for it.' He laughed ruefully. 'More truth in that than 1 might think.'
Then the dark forces entered his mind. Their good friend at Nelson, Xaviere Flaubert. Sam had picked up vibes from her more than once. He felt she was ready for a brief fling … with him. Hell, why not? She was tall and well- built, with soft, long brown hair, lovely gray eyes. And the new girl in town, Desiree Lemieux. Both young women were gorgeous, beautiful. For a moment, Sam allowed himself the pleasure of mental eroticism, wondering how they would look naked.
He experienced such a heady feeling of lust he had to clench his big hands into fists and shake himself like a dog to clear his mind.
The forces slipped away and Sam was left with no conscious memory of what he had been thinking. But it was firmly implanted in his subconscious. And it would return … with a vengeance.
He went to his gun cabinet and took out his .41 mag, checking to see if it was fully loaded. It was. He slipped a handful of cartridges into his jacket pocket and left the house, carefully locking the front door. He looked in the glove box of his pickup. The .38 Chiefs Special was in leather, fully loaded. Sam, like his father whom he had never known, paid very little attention to current gun laws. Like so many law-abiding Americans, Sam believed he had a right to own one gun, or one hundred guns, if that is what he wished. And it was no business of the government, or of anyone else, how many guns he owned. Like his father, Sam was a conservative in much of his thinking.
Sam drove aimlessly through the small town, not liking the feeling that slowly crept over him as he drove. The Dark One was here, very close. Sam had no doubts about that. The feeling was too strong. And it was the same feeling he had experienced up in Canada, at Falcon House.
As he drove the nearly deserted streets, he noticed someone had thrown something through a window of the First Baptist Church, shattering the stained glass.
'It's begun,' Sam muttered. 'They have started. The campaign of terror will intensify.' And with a sinking feeling, he knew the helpless elderly would be the first to suffer.
The very young and the very old, Sam mused. Always the ones caught in the middle.
A teenager—Sam guessed him to be about fifteen—shot looks of hate at Sam as he drove slowly past the boy. A hard feeling of dejavu struck Sam, hitting him with such force he pulled off the road at the first intersection and parked by the curb. He put his forehead on the steering wheel as his mind catapulted back in time.
Sam viewed three men in an old pickup truck. He knew the town he was seeing. Whitfield. And there was Wade Thomas and a man he didn't know in the cab of the truck. Sam's father was behind the wheel.
Sam felt his spiritual embodiment pulled closer and closer to the slowly moving pickup. God, but my dad was a big one, Sam thought. Look at the arms and shoulders on him.
Time gripped the young man in firm hands and held him in silent invisible space. He could hear his father and the other men talking, and could, somehow, know what they were thinking. He was there, flung back in time.
In front of the drive-in, the county road was blocked by milling teenagers and their cars and trucks. The three men in the pickup truck watched as a young man openly and carelessly caressed the buttocks of a teenage girl. The young man cupped both cheeks of her denim-clad buttocks. The girl giggled obscenely, rubbing against his crotch.
'The preacher's daughter,' Wade said. 'Margaret Farben.'
'Yes,' Sam replied. He cut his eyes. 'Look at that.'
A teenage boy had a teenage girl backed up against a car, her Levi-clad legs spread wide, the boy between them, hunching, crotch to crotch.
'I believe,' Sam said dryly, 'if memory serves me correctly, we used to call that dry-fucking.'
