Fear paralyzed Jane. Her brain screamed at her to lunge for the alarm but she couldn’t. Sarah’s insane glare held her in a dizzy rigor. When she gets out of that, she’s going to kill me, Jane realized, but still she couldn’t move. Then Sarah rose to her feet, shrugged out of the straitjacket. She stood bare-chested, her breasts heaving, laved in sweat and blotched by scuffmarks. Her arms flopped at her sides as if multi-jointed now, shards of bones sticking out of the skin, blood running. Her hand flexed, then she squeezed her eyes shut and raised an arm, tentacle-like, and—

  “Stop it!” Jane shouted.

  With thumb and index finger, Sarah broke off one of her front teeth and then—

  “Stop!”

  —used the jagged edge to cut herself. On the flat of her abdomen, she calmly etched the shape of a bell and a star-shaped striker.

  “Behold the Messenger, Jane,” croaked the voice that was anyone’s but hers. “The arrival of the Messenger is at hand…”

  Next, Sarah slowly inserted an index finger into her left eye socket, pushing, pushing, until the thin bowl-shaped bone snapped. Humours exuded. The finger burrowed into the brain.

  Sarah grinned a last time, then toppled over dead.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  * * *

  (I)

  Steve tucked her into bed, only the bedside lamp on. He held Jane’s hand as he sat beside her, the long day weighing on them both.

  Jane shook slightly beneath the sheets. She was tired of seeing death.

  “You look really pale, Jane. Should I call Dr. Mitchell?”

  “No,” she said. “I’ll be all right. This is just too much. I can’t handle seeing my employees kill themselves.”

  “I know.” He looked at her more deeply. “I probably should call the doctor. You might be in shock or something.”

  “No.” She gripped his hand tighter. “I want you to stay but, but—”

  “But what? Jane, I want to stay.”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  He put his chin in his hand. “Jane, I swear to God, the woman you saw me with yesterday is my sister. You’ll meet her soon, I told you.”

  Jane felt that she believed it now, but there was still too much to reckon. “I’m so confused, Steve. I—”

  “I love you, Jane.”

  The words stalled her, like a small car colliding with a large brick wall. I love you, too, she thought, but she just couldn’t say it now.

  “Let’s talk soon, okay?” he asked. “I want this to work—I want it more than anything. So many awful things have been happening lately, we can’t focus. But once this is all over…”

  “Yes,” she said. “I want things to work, too. And they will.”

  He seemed relieved, and by the look in his eyes, Jane knew he was sincere.

  “I’ll look in on the kids, make sure they’re tucked in, then I’ll take off. I’ll call you tomorrow. And if you need anything, call me on my cell or text me, no matter what time.”

  Jane nodded, squeezed his hand a final time, then let go. He kissed her on the cheek and left.

  Yes, Jane thought after he left. I love you…

  (II)

  Sergeant Stanton looked ghoulish in the dashboard lights. When he lit a cigarette, the flickering orange flame gave him a corpselike hue.

  Steve sipped a cold cup of coffee next to him. “That’s damn good work. How’d you get a line on him?”

  “Credit card, or I should say a check card. We extracted his bank records—Jesus, Chief, the guy almost never has anything in his checking account—but he used it a week ago—with thirty-five bucks in his account—to get gas at a Citgo station on St. Pete Beach. Stands to reason that if he’s on the road, he’s staying in a motel, but there aren’t any receipts from the card, either that, or he’s got cash on him.”

  “Or he’s sleeping in his vehicle,” Steve suggested.

  “Guess so. But at least we know we can track him when he uses the card. That’s the good news. The bad news is the county magistrate won’t give us a warrant to haul him in for questioning. No evidence for probable cause.”

  “Goddamn Constitution.” Steve gazed absently out into the night. You’re out there somewhere, Dhevic. I’ll find you…

  The radio crackled. Steve answered it and was instructed by the dispatcher to call an extension on his cell phone.

  “Who you calling?” Stanton asked.

  “State police.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know but it can’t be good…”

  (III)

  The voice fluttered round her head, like great black birds circling.

  “Behold the Messenger…”

  Dhevic’s voice?

  Now, Sarah’s: “The arrival of the Messenger is at hand…”

  Jane opened her eyes but saw nothing, just a landscape of ink black. She tried to get up from wherever she lay—it felt like a trench of carved stone—but she couldn’t. She couldn’t move at all.

  “Hail, Aldezhor…”

  A dream, Jane thought desperately. She felt hosed down in warm water but then realized it was her own sweat. It’s just a dream. Wake up…

  The darker voice returned, “He will manipulate you through your fears, your weaknesses—”

  Jane stared blindly into black.

  “—and your dreams.”

  A sound, then, like a guillotine falling, and suddenly she could see. A vista of fire and rock snapped before her eyes.

  Chaos.

  The heat took her breath away. She lay, indeed, in a stone pit, coffin-shaped. When she finally sat up, more intense heat wafted against her face. She looked down at her nightgown-clad body and saw that she was emaciated from dehydration and malnourishment, arms and legs like sticks. Her once-full breasts hung as thin flaps of skin beneath her drenched gown, her stomach sucked in, her ribs showing. She had almost no strength, yet she willed herself to stand up and look out at the impossible hellscape.

  Black smoke rose in noxious billows, some streaming from abyssal crevices, some pouring off of distant piles of bodies. Fire crackled eternally, and in the air, before a luminous scarlet sky, great beaked things flew leisurely in and out of dirt-colored clouds. Wind rose and fell, deafening her, but was it really wind or just an endless gust of screaming?

  Down a stone rise, figures ambled up. Tall, gaunt, with lopsided bald heads and arms and legs as long as a normal man’s height. Their bodies were the color of curdled milk, and they were coming for her.

  Eventually the realization smacked home…

  I’m in Hell…

  Jane began to run. She slipped into a crevice and found herself running through a torch-lit labyrinth of black rock. Around each corner, a new horror appeared, heralded by screams. Jane stopped in her tracks at the appearance of two small figures…

  Jennifer and Kevin stood before her, but…

  My God…

  Her children, too, were emaciated, their faces little more than pallid skin stretched over their skulls, hollow-eyed. They grinned at her, showing nail-like fangs. Tiny horns sprouted from their heads.

  “Hi, Mom!” Jennifer greeted. “What’s for lunch?”

  “Here’s what I’m eating,” Kevin announced, and off his shoulder he plucked his rotten but still-alive horned toad. He stuffed it into his mouth and began to munch, rot showing behind his grin.

  Jane ran.

  But not for long. Along the next wall of the labyrinth, Carlton was carving the skin off of a squirming girl’s chest and abdomen. The girl had been crudely crucified, her hands nailed to the rock by iron pitons.

  “Hi, Jane,” Carlton said over his shoulder. He yanked a sheet of skin off the girl as though he were tearing down wallpaper.

  Jane screamed when she turned.

  Horned versions of her dead husband Matt and Marlene Troy welcomed her with opened arms. They were living corpses, naked, grinning at her.

  Matt rushed to her, embraced her. His stench nearly knocked Jane unconscious.

  “Sweetheart,” he whispered in glee. Jane tried to squirm away but couldn’t. She could feel his dead erection rise. “You’re not really fucking that cop, are you?”

  Jane screamed.

  His embrace tightened, then a bony hand came to her throat. Suddenly his grin switched to a drooling glare of hatred. “Do you give him head like you used to give me? Hmm? I’ll bet you do, you little tramp. Well let me show you something,” and then his other hand rose. He was holding Steve’s severed head.

  “How’s this for some good head?”

  Jane broke away, her screams pinwheeling behind her. Next came a rock cove in which a woman was being raped by the thin pale things she’d seen earlier. The things were mangling the woman, but instead of screams of terror the woman shrieked in joy. That’s when Jane noticed who it was…

  Sarah’s horns reared when she craned her neck to look up at Jane. Her suitors were taking turns with her; demonic sperm shined on her skin. The wounds she’d carved on her chest in the psychiatric cell seemed to be glowing now: the bell and star-shaped striker.

  “Remember what I told you?” Sarah slurred.

  “This is a dream! This is just a dream!” Jane yelled.

  “That’s right, Jane, a dream of what awaits you. The Messenger likes you, he admires you. He’s keeping an eye on you, Jane.”

  “And so am I,” another voice guttered.

  Martin Parkins staggered forward from the other direction, his postal uniform hanging in rotten shreds. The pen remained stuck in his eye, and then he torqued it upward, unseating the eyeball from the socket. “Yeah, bitch, I’m keeping an eye on you, too,” he said. He held the eyeball up to look at her.

  It’s just a dream, just a dream! Jane kept screaming at herself.

  “Oh, God, that feels so good,” Sarah cooed. Jane made the mistake of looking down, to see one of the pallid figures kneeling intently. It was drawing its foot-long index finger in and out of Sarah’s brain, through the hole she’d made through her eye socket in the psych cell.

  “Run! Run!” another voice was suddenly bellowing at her. A large figure, dressed in black this time. The bearded face loomed—Dhevic now—with the largest horns of all erected from his forehead. He was pointing towards another crevice…a crevice which was slowly grinding closed, like a great stone door. Dhevic shoved her away, and bellowed “Run! Hurry! Go and see it!

  Jane was nearly mindless now. Her feet stomped through steaming hot muck to the crevice. One of the pallid creatures was right behind her, pawing at her with its monstrous hand, when Jane sucked in her gut and squeezed through the crevice. She made it all the way through only to see that her follower had not. The crevice ground closed on the thing, which had only squeezed through to the waist. Bones crunched, and from its doglike mouth came a hail of gelatinous vomit.

  Jane staggered backward, leaned against a high flat rock. Just a dream, just a dream…but then she inched her face to the rock’s edge, and peered out.

  More scalding-hot air blasted her face; it singed her eyebrows off, reddened her cheeks. She knew she must pull away from the pain, but for whatever reason she was too intent…

  …on seeing what was out there.

  She was looking down into a valley, and in the valley sat a church. The church was black, and vast stained-glass windows were set into its outer walls. Light throbbed from within, brightening the stained-glass scenes which depicted all manner of demonic orgy and mutilation. Jane’s eyes dragged up the face of the church, to its looming black steeple, and the inverted cross erected there.

  Just a dream, just a dream, she kept thinking, suffocating in the blast of heat. Behind her, the crevice was reopening, greedy waxlike faces seen in the gap—but Jane didn’t care. She’d either wake up, or she’d die.

  Her heart was missing beats. Her eyes remained wide on the church steeple. Just beneath the cross was a bell tower.

  The bell began to ring.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  * * *

  (I)

  “I don’t know why I’m here,” Jane said in the open door.

  “I do,” Dhevic said. “Please come in.”

  “I—” She stepped back, hesitant. It was broad daylight, yes, the sun on her back, normal traffic coursing back and forth on the main road behind her. It was a normal day, so what was she afraid of?

  “I apologize,” Dhevic said in his crisp accent. “What I told you earlier, about my…”

  “Benefactors,” Jane finished.

  “They sometimes forget about me. The least expensive motels in the worst parts of town are generally a necessity. It’s clean, though. I’ve sprayed it for bugs and caught all the rodents with traps.”

  How delightful, Jane thought, and walked in. He repocketed the slip of paper he’d given her with the motel address.

  Several bags of groceries sat on the small desk; Dhevic had obviously just returned from shopping. Through the front window, Jane could see a new silver Ford SUV parked there.

  “I knew you’d come,” he said.

  “Oh, sure. I forgot, you’re psychic. You’re an…augur.”

  Dhevic only smiled in response. “I understand your sarcasm, but still…you’re here, aren’t you?”

  “Yes. There were more murders yesterday. Another one of my employees—”

  “Another messenger,” Dhevic corrected. “Yes, I know about that.”

  “How much do you know?”

  Dhevic made two cups of instant coffee from a portable burner he’d plugged into the wall. There were stains on the wall that appeared to be handprints, and a hole, too. Jane didn’t want to think that it might be a bullet hole.

  “Did you dream last night?” he asked, and handed her a cup.

  “Yeah, I dreamed. Of a black church, with a bell tower. And the bell was ringing.”

  “The Cymbellum Eosphorus? Do you believe in it now?”

  “The dream was just stress related, Professor Dhevic,” Jane snapped. “I had the dream based on the power of suggestion, because of what you told me in my office. But you believe in it, right? You said so the other day.”

  Dhevic didn’t respond, at least not vocally. Jane tried to keep focused on his face. “The other day, you said something about this demon—”

  “Not a demon, a Fallen Angel,” Dhevic corrected. “Aldezhor, Lucifer’s messenger; Hell’s equivalent of the Archangel Gabriel—”

  “Fine. So then there’s this cult,” she clarified, “and the members of this cult believe in Aldezhor?”

  “They are his heralds. They proclaim his prophecy. They are his messengers.”

  Jane frowned. “Is that a yes?”

  “Yes. There is…a cult.”

  “They believe this myth, and they act on it, as though it were true?”

  Dhevic looked at her, said nothing.

  “They kill because they believe they’re—what?—paying homage to Aldezhor? Making sacrifices for him?”

  Dhevic nodded. “It’s more complicated than that, but yes. You can think of it that way.”

  “Are drugs involved?”

  “No drugs.”

  “Hypnosis? Brainwashing?”

  “No. Only the power of faith played against weakness and innocence. Almost anyone can become an acolyte of Aldezhor.”

  Jane disregarded the obscurity of the response. “Martin Parkins is an exception, I suppose, but my other employees—Carlton Spence, Marlene Troy, and Sarah Willoughby—were all level-headed, conscientious employees and quality people in general. None of them was the type to join a cult. How did they get mixed up in it? How did they get recruited?”

  “No recruitment,” Dhevic explained. “They were seduced. They were taken. You can think of it as something akin to demonic possession—”

  “Oh, come on,” Jane complained.

  “They were machinated.”

  The strange word stretched a pause across the room. “What’s that mean?” Jane asked, exasperated.

  “Aldezhor gets people to do his bidding by tricking them, by preying on their fears and obsessions, making them believe they’re true. He amalgamates lies with truth, so that he is believed. Keep in mind, his ultimate purpose. Aldezhor is the mouthpiece of Satan, the greatest liar in history. All of his messages, therefore, are lies.”

  “What’s that got to do with—”

  “Machination—it’s an occult term, relative, as I’ve said, to possession. Aldezhor is an incubus; when he becomes discarnated—when he machinates—his sexual persona emanates. He possesses his victims through a process called discarnate machination. He walks behind the possessant almost as though the possessed is a life-sized marionette. He controls everything, a puppeteer, sees everything, feels everything. You can see him in smoke, rain, and in mirrors. Sometimes, when the auras are correct, you can see him standing right behind the possessed.”

  Auras. Great. “And you believe this?” she finally pressed him. “Tell me. The other day you went into a trance, or something like that. And you said you believed it.”

  Dhevic’s voice seemed to resonate. “It wasn’t a trance. It was the side effect of a vision. I have visions. It’s my heritage; it’s been passed down to me from my ancestors over centuries.”

  The air stilled. Jane tried to contemplate a way to deal with it. Visions? Machination? She didn’t know of such things. But was it possible for her to believe in them?

  She thought harder. She remembered what she’d seen in Dhevic’s eyes two days ago. And she remembered what she’d seen last night at the psychiatric wing…

  “Let’s just say it is true,” she began. “What do you want? Why did you come here? The police think the only reason you’re here is to exploit the situation for these tabloid shows.”

  “Then the police are wrong, and that’s regrettable.”

  “So answer the question. Why are you here?”

  “To recover the icon,” Dhevic said. “The icon is the nimbus of Aldezhor’s power to become incarnate. The recent sacrificial murders have all been perpetrated by your employees—postal employees, through the force of the icon—”