particular brand of spiritual illumination as if I were some new convert, he’d gone wherever dead cult leaders go to ponder immortality.
For my part, I wished that Whistler’s spiritual illumination gave off a little heat. Meaning a dead thing that crawled out of a grave was warmer than me. I was wet and cold…and more than a little tired.
A stack of dry tinder was heaped by the stone fireplace-wood gathered in daylight and abandoned in darkness. I said a private thank you to the skittish trespassers as I heaped twigs and branches on the old steel andirons.
I took the torch from the wall and jammed it under the nest of dry wood. The tinder crackled alive. I sat on the hearth, as near the growing flames as I dared. There was no sense going anywhere. Not yet. I needed some time to dry out, and to warm myself, and to think.
And that was what I did. My thoughts rambled. Places they didn’t usually go. Places I wouldn’t allow them to linger.
In the end, it all came down to a question of belief.
Diabolos Whistler’s faith ran deep. There was no question about that. He saw himself as a collector of souls, a dark shepherd destined to be the devil incarnate.
His chosen successor couldn’t have been more different. Circe didn’t believe at all. Or so she claimed. But her claim rang true. For if she truly believed her father’s gospel, would she have left the bottle house unprotected?
I didn’t think so. If Circe Whistler’s soul were contained in a bottle, it was my bet that she would have guarded it as zealously as her father guarded his beliefs.
I ran it around and around in my head. Circe’s words. Her father’s words. And all of it led me nowhere. I didn’t know what or whom to believe, and I didn’t like thinking about it. Cynicism had always been my shield, but now that shield was bent and battered.
I rose from the hearth. Maybe it was time to test my cynicism…and the tenets of Diabolos Whistler’s faith.
A single test had occurred to me in light of Whistler’s sermon, and it was a test that I was peculiarly suited to perform.
Because I was alive, and I could hold a knife, and I could see the dead.
I carried the torch to the far wall. At least a hundred open bottles waited there, along with three still stoppered with corks.
I sliced the neck off one of the corked bottles-sliced it clean, the same way a saber-wielding cavalier beheads a full magnum of champagne.
I waited, but nothing poured from that severed glass neck.
Not so much as a whisper of shadow.
Not so much as a trickle of ectoplasm.
Certainly no champagne.
I tried a second bottle, and a third, with the same result.
A soft wind filled the empty throats and gave them voice. Voices that did not speak, but told a truth that Diabolos Whistler would never believe.
I smiled.
I was no longer wary of empty bottles. I had no reason to be.
PART THREE:
FUNERAL IN THE RAIN
And we are here on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
1
I slept by the fire.
Long enough for my clothes to dry. Two hours, maybe three. Not good sleep. Sleep haunted by too many dreams. Apart from a few vague and troubling images, I couldn’t remember most of them. But I remembered the last one all too well, the one that had brought me sharply awake.
In that dream Circe Whistler strode the grounds of her father’s estate, dragging the little girl she’d once been behind her-one hand fisted in the little girl’s hair, the other clutching a wrought-iron hammer with a bristling claw that looked like a monster’s fang.
The little girl screamed in pain and in horror of the woman she’d become. But dark-haired Circe did not slow her pace. She did not spare her younger self a glance as they crossed a wide lawn, empty and still, like a cemetery without headstones.
No headstones, but a freshly dug grave waited there. Open and deep, with Spider Ripley at the bottom shoveling dark earth at the very blue sky above.
Circe grabbed Ripley’s shovel and left his big hands empty and useless. She laughed at the crucifix hanging around his neck, and Spider shrank away to nothing. His neck narrowed, his muscled shoulders drooped. The crucifix slipped down the length of his body, knifing the turned soil like a miniature grave marker, and all that remained of Ripley was a white carrion grub snared in a tangled rawhide necklace, writhing to be free.
Circe brought the girl to her knees at the foot of an open coffin that waited at the lip of that grave. “We’re all alone,” Circe said. “Just like Hansel and Gretel.” The child screamed and struggled, but Circe was too strong for her. She forced the little girl into the coffin, slammed the lid, and drove spiked nails deep into the wood with the claw hammer. Then she slid the coffin into the grave and took up the shovel. Earth rained down, smothering boxed screams that didn’t end until I opened my eyes.
By the time I awoke, the embers in the fireplace glowed a dim yellow. Blackened ribs of wood crackled and collapsed as the fire slowly died. I didn’t want to think about the dream, or what it might mean. What was important was saving the little girl. To do that, I had to give Diabolos Whistler what he wanted. I already had his head, though he didn’t know it. I had to find his body, and join the two.
That was the deal I’d made with a dead man. His mortal remains for a little girl’s ghost, a ghost I still couldn’t explain. But I’d keep my part of the bargain. It was my only chance to rescue the little girl. I could only hope that Whistler would do the same.
If answers were to come, they would have to come later. I knew that much, just as I knew that those answers would come from the lips of a woman who boxed and buried a little girl’s screams in a nightmare I couldn’t escape.
I clicked on Janice Ravenwood’s flashlight and stepped outside. There wasn’t a star in sight, but at least the rain had slacked off. I made my way along the beach and into the forest. I saw no one-living or dead-at the bridge, so I kept moving.
Janice’s Ford Explorer was just where I’d left it. That wasn’t a surprise. I had the keys. Even if Janice were still alive, I didn’t think she was the type who’d know how to hotwire a truck.
I slipped behind the wheel and drove to the vacant lot and got Diabolos Whistler’s head. Next stop, the Cliffside Motor Court.
The NO VACANCY sign shone like a beacon, and the office door was locked. I knocked and kept on knocking
