The Sign of Seven Trilogy (11 page)

“Ah.” Layla combed her fingers through her hair as she swiveled to look back. “Most of the time. I manage a boutique in SoHo. Did. Do. I don't know that anymore either.”

Nearly there, Quinn thought again.
Let's keep calm
. “I bet you get great discounts.”

“Yeah, part of the perks. Have you seen anything like that before. Like that
thing
?”

“Yeah. Have you?”

“Not when I was awake. I'm not crazy,” Layla stated. “Or I am, and so are you.”

“We're not crazy, which is what crazy people tend to say, so you'll just have to take my word.” She swung onto Cal's lane, and aimed the car over the little bridge toward the house where lights—thank God—glowed in the windows.

“Whose house is this?” Layla gripped the front edge of her seat. “Who lives here?”

“Caleb Hawkins. His ancestors founded the town. He's okay. He knows about what we saw.”

“How?”

“It's a long story, with a lot of holes in it. And now you're thinking, what am I doing in this car with a complete stranger who's telling me to go into this house pretty much in the middle of nowhere.”

Layla took firm hold on the short strap of her bag, as if she might use it as a weapon. “The thought's crossed.”

“Your instinct put you in the car with me, Layla. Maybe you could follow along with that for the next step. Plus, it's cold. We didn't bring our coats.”

“All right. Yes, all right.” With a bracing breath, Layla opened the door, and with Quinn walked toward the house. “Nice place. If you like isolated houses in the woods.”

“Culture shock for the New Yorker.”

“I grew up in Altoona, Pennsylvania.”

“No kidding. Philadelphia. We're practically neighbors.” Quinn knocked briskly on the door, then just opened the door and called in, “Cal!”

She was halfway across the living room when he hurried in. “Quinn? What?” Spotted Layla. “Hello. What?”

“Who's here?” Quinn demanded. “I saw another car in the drive.”

“Fox. What's going on?”

“The bonus-round question.” She sniffed. “Do I smell fried chicken? Is there food? Layla—this is Layla Darnell; Layla, Cal Hawkins—Layla and I haven't had dinner.”

She moved right by him, and walked toward the kitchen.

“I'm sorry, I think, to bust in on you,” Layla began. It passed through her mind that he didn't look like a serial killer. But then again, how would she know? “I don't know what's happening, or why I'm here. I've had a confusing few days.”

“Okay. Well, come on back.”

Quinn already had a drumstick in her hand, and was taking a swig of Cal's beer. “Layla Darnell, Fox O'Dell. I'm not really in the mood for beer,” she said to Cal. “I was about to order some wine when Layla and I were disgustingly interrupted. Got any?”

“Yeah. Yeah.”

“Is it decent? If you run to jug or twist caps, I'll stick with beer.”

“I've got some damn decent wine.” He yanked a plate out, pushed it at her. “Use a plate.”

“He's completely Sally about things like that,” Fox told her. He'd risen, and pulled out a chair. “You look a little shaken up—Layla, right? Why don't you sit down?”

She just couldn't believe psycho killers sat around a pretty kitchen eating bucket chicken and debating wine over beer. “Why don't I? I'm probably not really here.” She sat, dropped her head in her hands. “I'm probably in some padded room imagining all this.”

“Imagining all what?” Fox asked.

“Why don't I take it?” Quinn glanced at Layla as Cal got out wineglasses. “Then you can fill in as much of your own backstory as you want.”

“Fine. That's fine.”

“Layla checked into the hotel this morning. She's from New York. Just a bit ago, I was in the hotel dining room, considering ordering the green salad and the haddock, along with a nice glass of white. Layla was just coming in, I assume, to have her own dinner. I was going to ask you to join me, by the way.”

“Oh. Ah, that's nice.”

“Before I could issue the invite, what I'd describe as a sluglike creature thicker than my aunt Christine's thigh and about four feet in length oozed its way across the dining room, up over the table where a couple happily continued their dining foreplay, then oozed down again, leaving a revolting smear of God-knows-what behind it. She saw it.”

“It looked at me. It looked right at me,” Layla whispered.

“Don't be stingy with the wine, Cal.” Quinn stepped over to rub a hand on Layla's shoulder. “We were the only ones who saw it, and no longer wishing to dine at the hotel, and believing Layla felt the same, we booked. And I'm now screwing my caloric intake for the day with this drumstick.”

“You're awfully…blithe. Thanks.” Layla accepted the wineglass Cal offered, then drank half the contents at one go.

“Not really. Defense mechanism. So here we are, and I want to know if either of you have ever seen anything like I just described.”

There was a moment of silence, then Cal picked up his beer, drank. “We've seen a lot of things. The bigger question for me is, why are you seeing them, and part two, why are you seeing them now?”

“Got a theory.”

Cal turned to Fox. “Such as?”

“Connections. You said yourself there had to be some connection for Quinn to see it, to have the dream—”

“Dreams.” Layla's head came up. “You've had dreams?”

“And so, apparently, have you,” Fox continued. “So we'll connect Layla. Figuring out how they're connected may take a while, but let's just go with the hypothesis that they are, and say, what if. What if, due to this connection, due to Quinn, then Layla being in the Hollow, particularly during the seventh year, gives it some kind of psychic boost? Gives it the juice to manifest?”

“That's not bad,” Cal replied.

“I'd say it's damn good.” Quinn cocked her head as she considered. “Energy. Most paranormal activity stems from energy. The energy the…well, entity or entities, the actions, the emotions thereof, leave behind, and the energy of the people within its sphere, let's say. And we could speculate that this psychic energy has built over time, strengthened, so that now, with the addition of other connected energies, it's able to push out into our reality, to some extent, outside of its traditional time frame.”

“What in God's name are you people talking about?” Layla demanded.

“We'll get to that, I promise.” Quinn offered her a bolstering smile. “Why don't you eat something, settle the nerves?”

“I think it's going to be a while before food holds any appeal for me.”

“Mr. Slug slimed right over the bread bowl,” Quinn explained. “It was pretty damn gross. Sadly, nothing puts me off food.” She snagged a couple of cold fries. “So, if we run with Fox's theory, where is its counterpoint? The good to its bad, the white to its dark. All my research on this points to both sides.”

“Maybe it can't pull out yet, or it's hanging back.”

“Or the two of you connect to the dark, and not the light,” Cal added.

Quinn narrowed her eyes at him, with something glinting between her lashes. Then she shrugged. “Insulting, but unarguable at this time. Except for the fact that, logically, if we were more a weight on the bad side, why is said bad side trying to scare the living daylights out of us?”

“Good point,” Cal conceded.

“I want some answers.”

Quinn nodded at Layla. “I bet you do.”

“I want some serious, sensible answers.”

“Thumbnail: The town includes an area in the woods known as the Pagan Stone. Bad stuff happened there. Gods, demons, blood, death, fire. I'm going to lend you a couple of books on the subject. Centuries pass, then something opened it up again. Since nineteen eighty-seven, for seven nights in July, every seventh year, it comes out to play. It's mean, it's ugly, and it's powerful. We're getting a preview.”

Gratefully, Layla held out her glass for more wine as she studied Quinn. “Why haven't I ever heard of this? Or this place?”

“There have been some books, some articles, some reports—but most of them hit somewhere between alien abductions and sightings of Bigfoot,” Quinn explained. “There's never been a serious, thorough, fully researched account published. That's going to be my job.”

“All right. Say I believe all this, and I'm not sure I'm not just having the mother of all hallucinations, why you, and you?” she said to Fox and Cal. “Where do you come in?”

“Because we're the ones who opened it,” Fox told her. “Cal, me, and a friend who's currently absent. Twenty-one years ago this July.”

“But you'd have been kids. You'd have had to have been—”

“Ten,” Cal confirmed. “We share a birthday. It was our tenth birthday. Now, we showed some of ours. How about seeing some of yours. Why did you come here?”

“Fair enough.” Layla took another slow sip of her wine. Whether it was that or the brightly lit kitchen with a dog snoring under the table or just having a group of strangers who were likely to believe what she was about to tell them, her nerves were steadier.

“I've been having dreams for the last several nights. Nightmares or night terrors. Sometimes I'd wake up in my bed, sometimes I'd wake up trying to get out the door of my apartment. You said blood and fire. There was both in the dreams, and a kind of altar in a clearing in the woods. I think it was stone. And there was water, too. Black water. I was drowning in it. I was captain of the swim team in high school, and I was drowning.”

She shuddered, took another breath. “I was afraid to sleep. I thought I heard voices even when I wasn't asleep. I couldn't understand them, but I'd be at work, doing my job, or stopping by the dry cleaners on the way home, and these voices would just
fill
my head. I thought I was having a breakdown. But why? Then I thought maybe I had a brain tumor. I even thought about making an appointment with a neurologist. Then last night, I took a sleeping pill. Maybe I could just drug my way out of it. But it came, and in the dream something was in bed with me.”

Her breath trembled out this time. “Not my bed, but somewhere else. A small room, a small hot room with a tiny window. I was someone else. I can't explain it, really.”

“You're doing fine,” Quinn assured her.

“It was happening to me, but I wasn't me. I had long hair, and the shape of my body, it was different. I was wearing a long nightgown. I know because it…it pulled it up. It was touching me. It was cold, it was so cold. I couldn't scream, I couldn't fight, even when it raped me. It was inside me, but I couldn't see, I couldn't move. I felt it, all of it, as if it were happening, but I couldn't stop it.”

She wasn't aware of the tears until Fox pressed a napkin into her hand. “Thanks. When it was over, when it was gone, there was a voice in my head. Just one voice this time, and it calmed me, it made me warm again and took away the pain. It said: ‘Hawkins Hollow.'”

“Layla, were you raped?” Fox spoke very quietly. “When you came out of the dream, was there any sign you'd been raped?”

“No.” She pressed her lips together, kept her gaze on his face. His eyes were golden brown, and full of compassion. “I woke up in my own bed, and I made myself go…check. There was nothing. It hurt me, so there would've been bruises, there would've been marks, but there was nothing. It was early in the morning, not quite four in the morning, and I kept thinking Hawkins Hollow. So I packed, and I took a cab out to the airport to rent a car. Then I drove here. I've never been here.”

She paused to look at Quinn now, at Cal. “I've never heard of Hawkins Hollow that I can remember, but I
knew
what roads to take. I knew how to get here, and how to get to the hotel. I checked in this morning, went up to the room they gave me, and I slept like the dead until nearly six. When I walked into the dining room and saw that thing, I thought I was still asleep. Dreaming again.”

“It's a wonder you didn't bolt,” Quinn commented.

Layla sent her an exhausted look. “To where?”

“There's that.” Quinn put a hand on Layla's shoulder, rubbing gently as she spoke. “I think we all need as much information as there is to be had, from every source there is. I think, from this point, it's share and share alike, one for goddamn all and all for goddamn one. You don't like that,” she said with a nod toward Cal, “but I think you're going to have to get used to it.”

“You've been in this for days. Fox and I have lived with it for years. Lived
in
it. So, don't put on your badge and call yourself captain yet, Blondie.”

“Living in it for twenty-one years gives you certain advantages. But you haven't figured it out, you haven't stopped it or even identified it, as far as I can tell, in your twenty-one-year experience. So loosen up.”

“You poked at my ninety-seven-year-old great-grandmother today.”

“Oh, bull. Your remarkable and fascinating ninety-seven-year-old great-grandmother came up to where I was researching in the library, sat down, and had a conversation with me of her own free will. There was no poking. My keen observation skills tell me you didn't inherit your tight-ass tendencies from her.”

“Kids, kids.” Fox held up a hand. “Tense situation, agreed, but we're all on the same side, or are on the same side potentially. So chill. Cal, Quinn makes a good point, and it bears consideration. At the same time, Quinn, you've been in the Hollow a couple of days, and Layla less than that. You're going to have to be patient, and accept the fact that some areas of information are more sensitive than others, and may take time to be offered. Even if we start with what can and has been corroborated or documented—”