Parsons knew he’d put one over on me. He flipped his ponytail over his shoulder and smiled, a living mockery of Whistler’s deathgrin. “Of course, I didn’t really see the light until I met Circe. She provided me with a retirement job, financing my funeral home with funds from one of her less controversial corporations. I’ve always had a certain aptitude for mortuary science, but I find it best to keep my religious affiliations to myself. That’s the prudent policy for a man in my business. I’ve always found that it pays to be prudent.”
“Prudent doesn’t always cut it,” I said.
Parsons arched an eyebrow.
A fraction of a second, a fraction of an inch.
The same amount of time it took to bury Spider Ripley’s crucifix in the undertaker’s eye.
Parsons got off one shot before I could finish him, of course. The prudent ones always do. I was lucky. The bullet missed me.
It didn’t miss Spider Ripley, though. The slug splattered his face like a ripe melon.
I dropped the bloodstained crucifix on Spider’s chest.
On the stereo, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom sang of loneliness and desire. I stood on one side of the table, staring down at Spider’s corpse. Ripley’s ghost stood on the other. I asked him a few questions, hoping he really did know something about Circe, but he didn’t seem to hear me at all.
The wispy revenant Spider Ripley had left behind didn’t say a word. That thing was no heavier than a breath, and it stared down at its own bloody corpse, at a crucifix covering an ankh scar.
Spider’s ghost tried to pick up the cross. Again and again and again, spectral fingers dipping through dead flesh and bloodstained silver.
I watched him do it. Maybe the angels in heaven watched him, too. Maybe the devils in hell had ringside seats.
But if they were there, I didn’t see them.
I only saw Spider Ripley.
A dead man scooping up handfuls of nothing.
3
As I drove, Whistler’s coffin did the shake, rattle, and roll in the rear compartment of Parsons’s Cadillac hearse. I didn’t take it as a sign of life.
I took it as a sign that the hearse wasn’t designed for four-wheeling. But the black Caddy got me where I wanted to go-down the bumpy dirt road that cut through the forest where I’d first met the little girl and across the beach that led to the bottle house.
Dark combers licked the whitewall tires as I traveled a hard-packed strip of concrete-colored sand, following the familiar curve of the scythe-shaped beach. I downshifted as I crossed the dunes at the southern end of the beach, but it was still rough going.
Another fifty feet and the whitewalls threatened to dig their own graves in the softer sand. I pumped the brakes and the Caddy slid to a stop. As far as I was concerned, one spot was as good as another for a funeral.
Outside, the rain had returned to a steady rhythm. Beach grass clawed the cliff like angry fingers, whipped by a wind that promised more violence.
It seemed inevitable. Violence, leaving pain in its wake So far I’d gotten off easy, with a rack of sore ribs and a bullet crease on one arm. But I wasn’t out of the woods just yet.
The undertaker’s trench coat wasn’t much of a fit, but at least it was dry. I slipped it on as I climbed out of the hearse. Then I opened the rear door and pulled Whistler’s coffin off the rolling slab that held it in place.
The coffin thudded onto the sand. It was heavy, but I managed to drag it around the front end of the hearse. There, in the glow of the Cadillac’s headlights, I opened it, glad that the whipping wind spared me the stink of Diabolos Whistler’s remains.
As far as I could see, the trip hadn’t done the old boy much good. Whistler still wasn’t showing any signs of life. His body lay twisted-knees cocked south, shoulders hunched toward the north. But Whistler’s head was the big problem-it lolled on his neck, frayed as a worn doll’s.
Parsons’s unfinished stitchery lay in a tangle on Whistler’s Adam’s apple like some horrible spider-web tie, while the undertaker’s threaded needle speared in the dead Satanist’s cheek as if it were a meaty pincushion.
I jerked the needle free and set to work. After all, a deal was a deal. I intended to keep my end of the bargain. I could only hope that Whistler’s shade would do the same.
Whistler’s corpse didn’t so much as twitch while I worked. I glanced at up at the bottle house, looming on the cliff like the last loose tooth in a skeleton’s jawbone. The bottles twinkled weakly and an orange glow was slowly swallowed by the blackening entranceway-a trick of light as the fire I’d built earlier died in the hearth.
Diabolos Whistler’s ghost was up there somewhere. I was sure of that. So were his daughters-Lethe and Circe-at least the part of Circe that I cared about.
I finished my preparations. There was no way I could drag Whistler’s heavy coffin up the twisting trail. Anything that was going to happen would have to happen here on the beach. I tried to rouse Whistler’s shade. My shouts rang in the night, but the wind brought me no answer.
I wondered if Whistler waited in the temple he had helped build with his own hands, watching for the first sign of the dark miracle he saw as his destiny. I didn’t doubt that Whistler truly believed his own prophecy, as did Spider Ripley and so many others who had surrendered themselves and their faith to the old man.
But faith could only take you so far. No matter what you believed, no matter what god you worshipped. Sooner or later you had to trust your eyes and not your heart.
For Diabolos Whistler and his followers, that moment was now. Whistler’s remains lay in a coffin like any other, a big metal box with a heavy lid designed to hide the truth. But the lid of Whistler’s coffin was open, and the rain beat down and made puddles of his hollowed eyes, spilling trickles that traveled his deeply lined cheeks like tears.
Behind me, I heard a sob.
I turned and saw Whistler’s ghost, that spiked collar of shadow still holding his severed head to his body like a twisted crown.
Our eyes met. For the briefest moment I saw everything Whistler hid there-the wounded pride, the hurt, the shame and the anger. All of it roiling inside a body that was as substantial as a child’s breath lost on the wind.
By the time the next raindrop struck my face, Whistler managed to mask his pain. He stared into the box that held nothing resembling a miracle, and his voice rang out as if he were preaching from his iron pulpit. “I have spent a great many years waiting for the dark one to choose His moment,” he said. “I can wait a little longer, if need be.”
“I can’t,” I said. “I kept my end of the bargain. Now it’s your turn.”
“Very well.” Whistler’s tone was dismissive. “Take what you’ve come for.”
He didn’t have to tell me twice. I grabbed a flashlight from the hearse and slammed the door, but Whistler only had eyes for his corpse. Even now, his faith refused to die. “It won’t matter what you do,” he said. “Very soon, it won’t matter at all. Take the child, if that is what you want. Take her and be done with it-”
“No!”
It was a single word, but it sounded like a scream, and it came from a thicket of beach grass near the trail. Lethe Whistler’s ghost crossed the hard wall of light thrown by the hearse’s headlights, a nightmare of bone and gore on stark display.
“He takes nothing,” Lethe said. “Not until we have what we want.”
Whistler’s gaze did not stray from his casket. “Satan will choose His own time, daughter,” he said.
Lethe stared at her father’s corpse as he rambled on. She was dead and I was alive, but we saw the same
