As soon as she read the words, she imagined the headstone actually
“This is like something out of a bad horror movie,” she said out loud, and then laughed again.
Then she turned away from the graveyard and a sudden, mindless panic gripped her, squeezing her heart, it seemed. She felt a horrible tightness in her chest and an overwhelming urge to escape. Without thinking, she ran as fast as she could, tripping over the gate, and then stumbling over branches and undergrowth as thorns bit at her legs. She ran with her head down, mute with terror and totally unaware of her surroundings. She imagined the thing-a nameless, horrible thing-watching her, chasing her….
Only after it was too late did she realize she had run off into the woods. By then she was already hopelessly lost.
5
Erik was astounded that there were over 4,000 entries under “Satanic Cults” on the search engine. Some were reputed cases of ritual child abuse by cultists. Some appeared to be the lunatic ramblings of paranoids who claimed that either (a) the government was a Satanic plot, or (b) they were personally being tracked down, chased, and persecuted by Satan and his minions. There were some “official” Satanic church sites that claimed that Satanists were really just rugged individualists who worshipped a god that favored “unique individuals,” a redundancy in Erik’s mind, and that these people used harmless magic to advance themselves and their personal causes, like getting rich, having lots of sex without shame, and obtaining power and control over themselves and their environment.
Then there was the site that required you to be “registered.” With some trepidation, Erik applied for a username and password, thinking that this would probably get him put on some sort of FBI hit list. He received the confirming e-mail, but still couldn’t log on until he verified his existence twice, confirmed his e-mail address again, and submitted to an age verification. He was just about to give up and move on when the password finally worked and he was able to find his way onto the message board.
There were literally hundreds of posts onto the message board, ranging from satanic theology to a discussion of when a child might be old enough to choose his religion for himself (16 years old seemed to be the consensus). Most of the messages were rather silly, and Erik had the impression that most were written by adult children who were playacting rather than serious.
However, buried deep within the archives of one of the threads he found a disturbing message from a man with the username of “Seti the First” who claimed that the voice of the Master was calling him home, calling him to the east and that he needed 12 disciples to follow him. Erik followed the thread and replies as this Seti plotted his course through the south and through New York and Connecticut. The writer claimed to have been sanctified in the blood of the innocent, and that he was personally going to set the Master free. Some of the replies treated him like the nut case he seemed to be, but there were some who seemed to be cheering this guy on, acknowledging his ideas about the flesh and blood of the innocent, and claiming to also hear voices.
Erik might have dismissed the entire thing as irrelevant were it not for Seti’s last post. He read it again.
“The voice is very close now,” Seti wrote. “I will find him before the full moon and set him free using the flesh and blood of the innocent. All who follow Him will be rewarded. Those who oppose Him will suffer misery and death at the black stone.”
The last entry was datelined Chepachet, Rhode Island.
6
Dovecrest turned off the six o’clock news and sat by the window, listening to the chirping of the crickets in the woods. He disliked the television news, and hadn’t even had cable TV connected until a few months ago. Now that it had all started again, he watched out of a sense of duty. He especially disliked the news reporters, who made a drama out of everything, and tried to look grim as they reported tragedy, but were secretly hiding their delight in covering other people’s misfortunes. This had been a particularly good news night, he thought, looking out into the woods and wistfully yearning for earlier, less complicated times.
He sighed and wondered how so many years could have passed so quickly, how he could have grown so old and so weak. He was tired of it all. Tired of the waiting and now tired of the responsibility. He felt like he had already lost the battle before it had even begun. If only he could just pack up and move and leave the worries to someone else. But as Medicine Man of the tribe, it was his responsibility, and had been for so, so many years. No one else would take over. No one else even believed. So he shouldered the burden alone.
He sat back in his chair and remembered that time so long ago when Running Deer lay dying in his hut, and how Dovecrest had sat beside his bed to obtain his wisdom. Running Deer had seemed older than the earth itself, then, and Dovecrest had wept to see him dying. But Running Deer smiled and welcomed death.
“It’s all right, my friend,” he said. “My time has come. I am old and worn out by time as the rock is worn away by the river. It is my time to go and I face my death with joy. It is your time to take over my burden. I give my medicine to you. You will be the watcher now, the guardian of the tribe and of the people.”
And when his spirit passed on later that night, his face glowed with the joy of death, as if a great weight had been lifted from his shoulders.
Now Dovecrest understood how Running Deer had felt. He, too, would be happy to lie down and die, to let his spirit go to the Great Beyond in peace. It had been long overdue; the years had drained both his spirit and his will. And now, after his last trip to the terrible place of death, he felt even more drained, as if he had been poisoned by his enemy.
This was not good medicine. Not good at all. And worst of all, he could not give up, could not even die, for he had no one to come after him, no one who would take up his heavy yoke of responsibility.
Reluctantly, he flipped the television back on again and channeled to a different station. The news was just going off and the anchor recapped the day’s top stories: a three car wreck on I-95 that left two people dead; a murder-suicide in Barrington; and an apartment fire in Cranston.
It had been a good day for the news-a busy day with plenty of human tragedy. The newscaster almost gloated in his good fortune. And already the first call had been put in about a single teenage girl missing from a Dairy Mart in Chepachet.
7
Seth was daydreaming when it happened, remembering a time that seemed like a lifetime ago. In the daydream, he was back in high school, a skinny, pimply-faced kid with thick glasses and no dates. This particular daydream had haunted him often, as he recalled just one of the painful incidents of his teenage years.
He was in gym class, which was bad enough by itself, but this was worse-this was gymnastics and, his worst nightmare, the parallel bars. He stood beside the bars with a half-dozen kids, all of whom hated his guts. They were spotting for Jeff, the school jock and his most-hated enemy, who was showing off all the tricks he could do on the apparatus. The kid moved across the bars as effortlessly as a chimpanzee. And, Seth recalled, he had about the same I.Q. as well.
Seth was useless as a spotter, of course. If the kid did fall he had about as much chance of catching him as he would have had being inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. At best he would get in the way just enough to break Jeff’s fall, probably killing himself in the process. Not that Jeff was likely to fall. And not that he was likely to even try to catch him if he did.
He snuck a glance over to the girls’ side of the gym and saw Jennifer, blonde, blue-eyed, the head
