Midnight Solitaire (10 page)

“Because if she’s still alive and hiding up on that roof all alone it’s only a matter of time before she freezes to death,” Greer responds. “Just like Doc said, no one’s coming to save us. If I can get to her and let her know we’re here, it might save her life.”

“And what if you get up there and she isn’t there?”

“I come back down and that’s that.”

“It’s your decision,” Doc tells her.

With a heavy sigh, Greer climbs up onto the front desk. “Then let me do this before I change my mind.”

Doc goes to his nylon bag and returns with a classic Commando knife in a leather sheath, both of which have been coated with a black finish. “Here,” he says, thrusting it at her. “Six-inch stainless steel blade, razor sharp. Up-close it’s about as nasty as they come.”

“Comforting.” She tentatively accepts it and slides the sheath clip over her belt until it’s securely attached.

“Take this too,” he adds, handing her his Zippo. “Keep it lit and you’ll have no trouble seeing where you’re going or what’s up ahead of you. If you go all the way to the roof, once you’re out there stay low and quiet. There’s no way to know where he is out there, but just because you don’t see him it doesn’t mean he’s not close, understand? You get to the roof, do what you can but do it fast.”

“I understand.”

“We’ll stay quiet, you do the same, but if you get into trouble or need help, bang repeatedly on the shaft hard as you can. We’ll hear it.”

“And do what?”

“Whatever we can.”

“Awesome.” Greer holds the lighter in her mouth then extends her arms until she’s able to reach the grate. With a tug, it swings open. Leaning, she grasps the opening with both hands and pulls herself up, her legs swinging momentarily above the front desk before she’s in up to her waist with a stifled grunt. It looks as if she’s been spearheaded through the wall, with half of her body embedded and the lower half sticking out. But a second later her legs and feet vanish as she wiggles into the shaft and begins inching her way along on her stomach. As she goes, the shaft echoes and amplifies her every move.

The ventilation shaft is an even tighter squeeze than Greer suspected. She’s never been claustrophobic, but the narrow quarters summon a wave of crushing fears nonetheless, particularly as the farther she goes the darker it gets. Only a few seconds in, she stops, plucks the lighter from her mouth, breathes awhile then reassures herself she can do this. She flips open the Zippo, ignites it. The flame, higher than she anticipates, nearly reaches the top of the shaft but is quite effective as it easily illuminates an area a foot or two ahead of her.

Christ, she thinks, looks like some sort of metal tomb.

Greer continues on, slowly dragging herself through the shaft until she reaches a bend in the road. Once there, she can smell colder, clearer air, but rather than being flat, the shaft proceeds upward at a fairly steep angle. She snaps the Zippo closed. “Just keeps getting better,” she mutters, her voice bouncing off the surrounding metal and reverberating all around her.

Bracing with both hands, she hoists herself up and around the turn. As she climbs up the slope she tries to figure out how she came to be here, at this moment, in this place. What she wouldn’t give to be back in that last hotel room. If she had it to do again she would stay there another few days, wait until the storm came and went, and none of this would be happening.

As if I had a choice. Never has felt like it.

Her knees and elbows are sore against the metal but she presses on, getting closer to the end. She sees well enough for her to make out a tunnel to her right, which she assumes covers the units and runs the length of them, and a larger grate up ahead which leads to the roof.

For a moment she hesitates and peers down the dark shaft to her right. Don’t think about the movie
Alien
, she tells herself. But it’s too late, and images flood her mind of a doomed and panic-stricken Tom Skerritt shooting his flamethrower down the shaft behind him. For some reason this makes her chuckle but she’s not sure why. Is this normal, simply nerves, or is she really losing it this time?

She lights the Zippo again and holds it out in front of her.

The first few feet of the shaft are illuminated. Beyond it, shadows and night. Satisfied there’s nothing hiding in the darkness, she’s just about to snap the lighter shut when a burst of air comes at her from deep in the shaft. But this is different than the air moving through the system. Warmer. Thicker. And it is accompanied by what sounds like a heavy and deliberate exhale of breath. Yet as it passes through her Greer shivers uncontrollably.

What’s that old saying some people use when they shiver for no apparent reason? She thinks a moment, her mind and heart racing.
Someone just walked over my grave.

She waits, frozen in the shaft, the flames licking the metal over her head as her labored breath echoes all around her.

Trust me, he can smell you from miles away.

Greer listens.
Is there something there, just beyond her range of vision, hiding in the darkness, something barely audible in the otherwise dead silence of the shaft?

He can see your nightmares while you sleep.

Whispers? Can she hear very faint whispers coming from the depths of the shaft? She strains to listen, the flame dancing now in her trembling grasp.

He can hear your darkest thoughts when you’re awake.

Or is it only her own breathing she hears, reverberating back to her?

They draw him to you.

Visions of his face flash before her eyes, shielded in shadow, so close to her own out on the road, that enormous blade pressed to her throat.

Defiantly, Greer snaps the Zippo shut and continues past the dark shaft and up the slope to the roof. Ignoring awful sensations of something flying up the shaft behind her that slither from her lower back, up her spine, and into the back of her skull, she struggles closer to the grate that will get her onto the motel roof, out of this metal box and hopefully one step closer to whoever Kit Piper is.

* * * *

In the quiet of the darkened office, Luke watches snow spatter against the glass wall before him. Between darkness and the increasing snowfall, visibility is reduced to a few feet at most. The highway they were able to see just moments before is now lost in a tangle of whirling snowflakes and deepening night. And somewhere out there, Evil waits. “Wind’s picking up,” he says softly. “And the snow’s getting heavier.”

Behind him, just barely visible in the sparse candlelight, Doc leans against the front desk, shotgun in hand and a cigarette dangling from his lips. “Storm’s gonna get a hell of a lot worse before it gets better.”

“I don’t want to die.”

The words hit Doc like an anvil. He’s heard them so many times over so many years, usually by those who not long after they speak them are dead and gone. He tries to forget, but in times like these their hopeless faces return to him, and he remembers. Men. Women. Children. He remembers them all, each and every one. He takes a final drag on his cigarette, drops it, steps on it. “I know.”

“Things went to shit with my girl.” Luke pulls off his knit hat, stuffs it into his raincoat pocket and runs a hand over his head. It comes back slick with perspiration. “I fucked my life up bad, you know? Just a few hours ago I was so down I thought maybe…maybe I didn’t want to live, maybe it’d be better if I died. I thought about coming to a motel like this and just doing myself. Who’d care, right? What difference would it make?”

“He feels it in you.”

“Feels what?”

“Your sorrow, the hopelessness. He feeds off it.”

He looks back at Doc. One side of the older man’s weathered face is cloaked in darkness, the other awash in candlelight. “You really a doctor?”

“Used to be.”

“What kind?”

“Surgeon.”

“No shit?”

“No shit.”

“Making the big bucks, right?”

“Not anymore. Not in a long time.”

“You just chase him?”

Doc nods.

“He killed your family?”

“My wife and daughter.”

“How’d it happen?”

“I don’t really talk about it.”

“I feel you. Just trying to understand some of this shit, that’s all.”

Doc stares straight ahead, as if in a trance. “After college I took some time off, bummed around a while. Went to medical school late, so I ended up getting married and being a father later than most. Waited my whole life for my family, and he took them away from me.”

“Always wanted a family,” Luke tells him sullenly.

“Yeah. Me too.”

“What was it like?”

“What?”

“Being a dad.”

“Best thing in the world. But my daughter was just a little girl when The Dealer found us.”

“Is he really everything you say he is?”

Doc swallows the rage, does his best to wrestle it back into something he can control and handle. “He cut her tongue out of her head and ate it right in front of her. Then he slit her throat from ear to ear and raped her while she bled out on our kitchen floor, her mother’s body gutted and beheaded not ten feet away. Her name was Jodie. She was nine years old.”

For the second time that evening, Luke finds the crucifix around his neck and clutches it for comfort. “How’d you survive?”

“I died that day too.”

“You know what I mean. Why’d he spare you?”

“He didn’t. Wasn’t me he wanted, it was them. He shot me once in the chest, once in the stomach, figured I’d be dead soon enough. But I lived. Was all over the news, cops swore they’d get the killer, bunch of politicians paraded around saying justice would be done, but he was long gone, just like always, and they had nothing. I did almost a year in the hospital, another year in physical rehab. Then I learned everything I could about him, about the markings he’d left behind all over our house, his rituals, what they meant and what they led to. I liquidated everything. We had a good amount of money ahead of us as it was, so I took off, traveled the country tracking him, trying to find him, learning more and more the harder I looked, the deeper underground I went. That’s when I learned how this life really works, what’s real and what isn’t. I keep going for my wife and child, for all the others over all the years. And I won’t stop until he kills me or I end him. I’ve been living off old money for years. Won’t last much longer, but now I know it won’t have to. It’s all been leading up to this.”

Luke moves closer, his face stern and tight in the darkness. “We need to kill this motherfucker. Tonight.”

Can’t kill something that’s never been alive. But we can stop it.

Doc gazes up at the vent then closes his eyes. In the darkness of his mind he sees blood, fire, smoke and black magic…the cards falling from The Dealer’s bloody hands, spiraling down into darkness, into a pit of screams where souls go to die and await their master.

And somewhere nearby, hidden in the snow and wind and boundless night, Doc hears the faintest trace of musical chanting, like the Gregorian chants he loves so much and listens to when he’s alone and quiet. These are not the growls of demons but the breathtaking songs of angels, a choir of ancient warriors, a helpless tribunal bound by ancient decrees to watch the struggles of Man without intervening unless otherwise instructed to do so. They watch these poor, relatively helpless creatures, unequipped to battle the darkness as they can, left to their own devices in a world gone mad, knowing that only a select few can truly hear them sing their beautiful hymns while they await their chance to bludgeon and destroy those who seek to topple their master.

The sound is so beautiful it makes Doc want to weep. But even in beauty there is violence, madness. The line between the divine and the damned, the living and the dead and the real and the imagined, is often painfully thin.

“It’s bigger than all of us,” Doc says. “Whether we want it to be or not.”

Luke nods, though he doesn’t fully understand and probably never will.

I wish you could hear it too, Doc thinks.

Memories come to him, beautiful memories of his wife Karen and their daughter Jodie. He crushes them, sweeps them back into the darkness from which they came.

There is work to be done, destruction to be wrought.

He clutches the shotgun, holds on tight and watches the storm grow more powerful and deadly with each passing second.

THIRTEEN

Greer manages to push the grate free and drop it down without making too much noise. She hopes the wind helps to mask the sound as she climbs through and drops down onto the roof. Her palms hit the cold slushy snow and she slides down onto her knees, the wetness seeping through her jeans and sending a chill through her entire body. There’s already at least three or four inches of snow accumulated on the roof. The freezing air hits her like a slap to the face as tiny particles of ice ride the snowflakes and tickle her eyes. The flakes are so big and blowing about with such ferocity that she cannot see more than a few feet in front of her. Above her, patches of black sky slip through the curtains of snow, reminding her again how dark it’s become. She scrambles up into a crouch and tries her best to get a look at the roof. It’s not terribly large but is cluttered with other vents and utility units. Hunched over, she hurries along the center of the roof toward the next closest structure; a large vent she quickly realizes is a heating duct, as hot air leaks from it in a steady wave. It makes perfect sense. If one were to hide up here under such conditions, this is the logical choice, perhaps the only choice where one could survive the elements.