The old man looked down at his hands, flexing the knobby-knuckled fingers.
“I bundled them through the door and into the stairway without getting noticed, and it wasn’t until we got up to the classroom-looking level at the top of the stairs that they started to struggle. If they’d been sleepwalking, now it was like they were starting to wake up a bit. The girl started squawking about the ‘special ceremony’ I’d promised them, and the boy wanted to know why I was taking them away from the sacrament. The girl just seemed annoyed, but there was a desperate, hungry edge to the boy’s voice, sounding like a junkie who’d just been denied a fix he’d been waiting for for a long, long time.”
“But they were Ridden, right?” Izzie asked, leaning forward on the couch. “It doesn’t seem like they were completely under the entity’s control if you were able to trick them like that. Aren’t all of the Ridden connected, somehow?”
“Yes and no.” The old man smiled slightly as he nodded. “In his journals, Freeman talked a lot about how all of that business worked. There were those folks who’d been tainted by the Otherworld but not yet fully possessed, folks who were influenced but still had minds of their own, and folks who were pretty much nothing but puppets, with hardly anything of their original selves left in them. Tomlinson and Fuller had a touch of the Otherworld on them, and were hungry for more, but they hadn’t lost themselves to it completely yet.”
That lined up with what Izzie and the others had observed, with some Ridden able to go out into the world by daylight, and others too far gone to even step a foot outside until nightfall.
“I was able to get them on up to the ground floor before the two of them started acting squirrelly. It was coming on dark out, and neither of them was in any hurry to go outside. But I wasn’t about to let go of their arms, either, and I had the inches and weight on them to drag the both of them after me. Some of the cleaning staff saw them struggling and looked like they might be getting ready to raise some kind of alarm, and that’s when I took out that silver plated Colt .45. I kept hold of the girl’s arm, and told the boy that if he took one step wrong that I’d shoot him. Then I told the cleaners to keep their distance, but with the knack I could see that none of them were Ridden, just regular working folks, so I didn’t need to tell them twice. Then I marched those two kids out the back door and hustled them toward the spot where I’d hidden my car.”
“Wait,” Joyce interrupted, “you rescued runaways from a cult at gunpoint?”
The corners of the old man’s mouth tugged up in a slight smile.
“Wasn’t the last time, either,” he said. “But it got the job done. I had the girl drive the car while I covered her and the boy with the gun from the passenger’s seat. The farther we got away from the Eschaton Center, though, the less trouble they gave me. And by the time we got back to the city, they were jittery, but they weren’t putting up any kind of fight. I took them by my lady friend’s place, and asked her to keep an eye on them while I took care of some business. I called police dispatch from a payphone, and told them that there were a whole mess of drugged-up runaways in the basement of the Eschaton Center. I ended up getting passed around like a hot potato, transferred from one department to another while I tried to convince them that I was on the level, and that I wasn’t a prankster or some acidhead coming down off a bad trip. I finally got transferred to a detective in a bunco squad that had been trying to put together a case about Parrish and the Eschaton Center for months, and enough of what I had to say jibed with what he already knew.”
“They were already investigating him?” Izzie hadn’t heard about that angle of the case before.
“A couple of detectives had their eyes on him,” the old man answered. “A lot of money was flowing into the Center, but it wasn’t clear just where all of it was going. Some of the guys who worked the fraud unit thought there might be some dirt on Parrish, but so far hadn’t found anything they could move on. But the detective I talked to was convinced by what I told him, and his say-so was enough to convince the higher ups to authorize a full-scale raid on the place.”
“But you told them about the . . .” Joyce searched for the right word. “The rituals that were taking place underground?”
Jett shook his head. “They wouldn’t have understood if I tried. Anyway, the detective told me to hang back and let them take care of things, but I thought there was still a chance I might be able to get the other two kids I was after out of there. So while the police were still gearing up and getting ready to make their raid, I drove right back up the hill and got there about an hour before them.”
“And?” Izzie realized that she was perched on the edge of the couch cushion, but didn’t care. She was eager to hear how this played out. “Was everyone already dead? Killed by each other or by their own hands?”
The old man’s frown deepened.
“The official story was that it was a mass murder/suicide, yeah,” he said after a long pause. “But that’s not the whole picture.”
Before he could continue, there was a knock at the door. Izzie turned, and saw that the orderly had returned.
“Sorry, folks,”
