But Joseph Stein was several
thousand
miles away. From that distance, the Prisoner might give him dreams and visions, as he had when he'd wanted Joseph to come and free him. But there would be no point. It would only warn Stein of his approach.
No, better just to proceed, to go east and find him. Then he would use Stein's knowledge as best he could, to spill as much blood as he could.
I
t was a few hours after dawn when Joseph awoke with a shout. He heard footsteps coming across the small hall that separated his bedroom from the others, and Laika and Tony opened the door and looked in at him.
"You okay?" Tony said.
Joseph nodded. "Another goddamned dream," he said, falling back against the headboard. "Hope I didn't wake you guys up."
"We were both up," said Laika. "What was the dream?"
"Him. The sonofabitch himself. Mr. Antichrist-Prisoner-Bad Guy Supreme. It was like he was standing right there at the foot of the bed, just looking at me. I opened my eyes and for a second I swear I still saw him." Joseph rubbed his eyes. "Dream afterimage, probably."
"Maybe not," Laika said. "We know he's out there somewhere. Maybe he's getting into your head again."
"Why would he?" Joseph said. "He's free now."
"I don't know. But I think he's coming. He's getting ready for a move. To what or on whom we don't know. The other dream you had a few days ago, the one where you were in a box?"
"That was
just a dream
," Joseph said. "The Prisoner wasn't in it at all. I'd expect to have a dream like that, thinking about the Prisoner being held in boxes and caskets as much as I have."
Besides, he thought to himself, there had been no punchline to the dream. He had screamed, the box had opened, and he had surged into bright light and woken up. That was it. No Prisoner, no priests, no nothing.
"Still, he's out there somewhere, Joseph," Laika said. "And I don't think it unlikely that he would try and get into contact with those people with whom he knows he has a link."
"It takes two to make a link, Laika. And I don't want to play."
D
uring the next few days, the Prisoner moved eastward. He amused himself as he went, careful not to do anything too splashy or obvious.
It was very easy to hitchhike. All he had to do was to command a driver of an oncoming car to stop for him, and one out of every three or four would, often acting surprised and telling him that they normally never stopped for hitchhikers. He would smile and say that it must just be his honest face, and then he would talk to them until they had come to their destination. He did not try to force them where they didn't want to go, nor did he implant any killing commands in them. That way, he felt, he would not be connected with any violent acts. Those he saved for the evenings.
He found that families in campgrounds were ideal for his purpose. He would simply walk into one after dark and feel about mentally until he came across a trailer with a family whose members he could control. He preferred trailers over pop-up campers or tents. The sounds of slaughter carried too easily through canvas. Sometimes he afflicted the father, sometimes the mother, sometimes a grown son, and sometimes all. It really didn't matter. Everyone inside would be dead within minutes, the last person by his or her own hand.
He did this every few nights, when the hunger was great and the opportunity perfect. Afterward, he would walk into the night, with no connection between him and the family who would be found dead the next morning, victims of a tragic murder-suicide. There was no danger of his being discovered. He never set foot inside the trailers, and after all, how could there be such a thing as a serial suicide? Copycat killings, that was all. Sometimes people just went mad, and sometimes it was contagious.
A
nd sometimes, when people who knew what to look for were looking, a connection, a pattern, a modus operandi, were all too obvious.
"It's him," Colin Mackay said, setting down the sheets of paper that showed a definite eastward progression of the murder-suicides that had been taking place in campgrounds. "Copycat killings, my arse. Only reason they say that is because they don't know what we know. Look . . ." The other three men in the room looked over Colin's shoulder as he punched his finger at different points on a map of the United States. "First one in Farmington, New Mexico, then three days later outside of Denver, then Omaha, then Davenport, Iowa. He's not going fast, he's taking his own sweet time, and he's having his fun along the way."
"What the hell's he goin' east for?" asked Angus Gunn. His voice rumbled within his massive body.
Rob Lindsay clapped a hand on his big friend's shoulder. "'Cause there's something or someone he's after there. So what we've got to do is intercept him."
"How we gonna do that?" Angus asked.
Colin Mackay leaned back in his chair and looked at Angus. "Well, lad, we could put a man in every single campground on the main motorway between Joliet and Pittsburgh, say, but being that there's nae but the four of us, I think we'd better depend on our secret weapon. How about it, James?"
James Menzies, perpetually glum, nodded in agreement. Colin knew that James hated to use the damnable link that he shared with the Deil, which was how they referred to the one Colin's father, Sir Andrew Mackay, and his fellow Knights Templar had believed to be the Antichrist. He was not that, surely, but he did have the potential for great evil, so the "Deil" or devil he had become for them.
Over the past few months, James had begun to feel, tentatively at first, and then more certain of it, that he could tune in to the Deil's thoughts somehow, something that they all knew was possible from what Sir Andrew had told his son over the years. James had so far felt them only in bits, glimpses, and shreds of presence, brief and faraway.
"I think it's him," he had told Colin, when he had first become aware of it.
"How?" Colin had asked. "How do you know it's him?"
"Because it feels . . . bad. It feels
sick
."
"Would it be stronger—if you were closer?"
"Aye. But Colin . . . I don't want to get that close."
"You may have to, brother. For the cause."
"Aye. I'd do it for the cause. But for nocht else."
And now it was time for James to do what he had said he would.
The four Scots drove out of New York City within the hour, heading west. If the Deil maintained the direction and the relaxed speed at which he seemed to be moving, they could expect him along routes 80-90 on the Ohio-Michigan border. They went nonstop, driving in shifts, and finally got off and back on near Toledo, so that they would be in the eastbound lanes, the ones in which the Deil should pass by.
They pulled off at a rest stop with a picnic table, and there they waited, with a food chest full of sandwiches and several thermoses of coffee. The main task would be to keep James awake until—and
if
—the Deil came within sensing distance, for want of a better term. And James had to be not only awake but alert all the time.
They sat there for twelve hours. At 4:00 A.M., they heard a story on the car radio about a man who had murdered his wife, then taken his own life in a campground in South Bend, Indiana. "Not too far away," Colin said, consulting the map. "He'll probably hole up somewhere for the night, then grab another ride in the morning. I think you can get a few hours of sleep, James."
Colin woke James up at 7:00 A.M., and they sat together as the day brightened. If it was tedious for Colin to watch the traffic roll by, how much more so, he thought, must it have been for James, who stared at and studied every approaching vehicle.
Shortly after noon, James stiffened in his seat, and although Colin looked down the road, he could see no cars approaching them. "What is it, lad?" he asked. But James only shook his head slightly, as if trying to throw off an unpleasant thought.
Angus and Rob in the backseat leaned forward, and Angus shook James's shoulder. "You all right, then?" Still, James did not respond.
Then his eyes widened, and Colin could actually see the hair on the back of his neck stand up as if from static. Down the road Colin saw the approaching vehicle. "There . . ." James whispered. "He's in
there
. . ."
"Hell almighty," said Rob softly. "A police car."
The black-and-white markings and the bubble top made it unmistakable. It shot past them at 70 mph, and Colin got a glimpse of the people riding inside. He started their car and pulled it onto the highway, following the police car.
"What are ye doin'?" Angus asked. "Colin, that's a police car, for God's sake. They've
arrested
the bastard!"
"If they'd arrested him," said Colin, "he'd be in the back. But he's riding up front, as gay as you please. He's just bummed a bloody ride, that's all—with a state trooper."
"That's just stupid," Angus protested. "Coppers don't give hitchhikers rides here, they
arrest
'em."
"Well, maybe the Deil was just a little too persuasive for the copper to refuse," Colin said.
It finally dawned on Angus. "Y'mean the Deil
took
him?" He shook his head in admiration. "Quite a lad. But what you goin' to do, Colin? Ye cannae pull over a copper!"
"If the Deil did, then so can we," Colin said, stepping on the accelerator. When he caught up with the police car and was directly behind it, he turned on his flashers and honked his horn several times. When it continued on, he pulled up into the passing lane beside it, and glanced over.
The policeman behind the wheel was looking straight ahead, but the man in the passenger seat was watching Colin and his colleagues with what looked like amusement. He was smiling, and Colin smiled back. After all, he wanted cooperation from the creature.
Colin took his eyes off the road again, just long enough to look over at the Deil and lift his left hand, middle fingers down, thumb and little finger extended, and waggle it. It was the horns, the sign of the cuckold, but also the sign of the devil, and he hoped the Deil would realize that they knew who he was. Then he turned back to the motorway ahead, ready to flank the police car all day, if need be.
I
n the police car, the Prisoner's decision took only a fraction of a second. Here were some who knew who he was, and weren't shooting at him, or blasting flamethrowers through their car window. He was intrigued, even more so when he had shot out a bolt of pure thought at the driver at a range of only a few yards and felt no contact whatsoever. Such men were rare. Most he could at least touch, if not affect, but there was a barrier around this one.
"Pull over here, please, Officer," he told the policeman, who obeyed immediately. The Prisoner got out of the car, as did the four men inside the other car. The policeman merely sat there, waiting.
"Is it him?" the driver, a tall, red-haired man, asked another in his party, a man shorter than himself.
The little man nodded. "Aye, it's him, all right."
"You're Scots," the Prisoner said, hearing the burrs in the Rs. Scots, like the twelve Scots who had dogged his contacts, followed his works over the centuries, the Templars.
The red-haired man nodded. "Aye. And we have a proposition for you. Deil."
"What kind of deal?" said the Prisoner.
"No. Deil as in devil."
"Ah. You'll forgive my ignorance of the vernacular. It's been a . . .
lang
time since I've had any contact with Scots. Eighteen-oh-four, when I was held in Inverness for a few months. A wet and nasty country, I recall, but picturesque. At least, that was the feeling I got from those whom I could . . . communicate with. Physically, I was . . . incommunicado."
He shot thoughts like quick bullets of lights at the other three men. It took only an instant for him to realize that he could easily control two of them, and reach the third with some slight effort. There was nothing to fear then. "Perhaps," he said, "we could continue this conversation as we ride." He nodded toward the Scots' car. "I see you're also heading east."
"We'd be glad for your company," said the tall man, who then nodded toward the policeman. "And what about him?"
"Well, normally," said the Prisoner, "I'd have him wait a few hours and then blow his brains out with his service revolver, but since some passing motorists might have noticed your car here, I'll just have him drive on."