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She screamed again, and jerked awake.
For a moment her head swam with the dying remnants of the dream. Her heart was pounding so hard she could hear it, and her skin was clammy with sweat.
A dream! she told herself. It was only a dream!
She eased herself back down onto the pillow and tried to erase the last fragments of the dream from her memory, but the faces of her father and brother kept looming up in the darkness, leering at her, almost taunting her.
She turned over in bed, but still the dream stayed with her, only now it was the twisted face of her baby sister she saw, hanging upside down from the inverted cross, impaled by the nails, her life slowly ebbing away.
Then the earlier dream came back to haunt her, the dream in which she'd seen Jared killing Scout.
She had convinced herself that it, too, had been just a dream. But when they'd gone to find Scout, he'd vanished from the house.
As the first faint light of dawn etched the sky with silver, Kim got up from her bed and tiptoed out onto the landing. The great house lay silent around her, and as she made her way around to Molly's room, she had the eerie feeling of unseen eyes following her.
She paused before the door, shivering in a sudden chill that seemed to come out of nowhere.
Finally, her hand trembling, she reached for the knob, twisted it, and slowly pushed the door open.
The chill reached deeper into her, touching her soul.
She stepped into the room, straining to catch a glimpse of her sister in the gray light of dawn, but all she saw was a mass of rumpled bedding.
"Molly?" she whispered, edging closer to the child's crib. "Molly? Are you okay?"
There was no movement at all from the crib. Kim, standing by its side, looked down at the tangle of sheets and blankets. Please, she prayed silently. Please let her be all right.
She reached out, took the edge of the blanket, and pulled it aside.
And there lay Molly, sound asleep, her thumb tucked in her mouth.
Choking back a sob of relief, Kim bent down, gently kissed the sleeping child, and tucked the blanket back around her.
All Soul's Day
CHAPTER 33
Jake Cumberland's cabin looked peaceful enough when Cori
"Are you going to let me take a look, or are you going to try to rip my throat out?" Cori
Cori
Cori
Paint… or blood?
Feeling queasy, Cori
Twenty minutes later Ray Beckwith stood with Cori
"Looks to me like someone was out here doin' more of Jake's voodoo stuff last night."
Cori
The power of suggestion: if you believed you could be killed by magic, then you could be.
And if someone had let Jake know what kind of ritual would be performed, and when…
Cori
A Christian cross, inverted?
"What about Satanists?" she asked.
Ray Beckwith groaned out loud. "Now you're starting to sound like Father MacNeill. Next thing, you'll be trying to blame this on the Conways, just like he did with the cemetery yesterday morning." He started toward the door.
"Where are you going? You haven't even searched the cabin."
"Go
The hound made no objection as Beckwith replaced its chain a few minutes later with a strong leather lead he kept in the trunk of the squad car. But when he tried to coax it into the cabin, the animal turned recalcitrant, pulling and tugging at the leash as Beckwith tried to pull him through the front door. When the officer kept tugging, the hound snarled and snapped at him.
"Jesus!" Beckwith snatched his hand back just in time and glared at the dog. "What's going on with him?" he asked. "He musta been in here a million times before."
"Well, he's not going in now, and he didn't want me going in earlier," Cori
Beckwith scowled. "It means Jake had a stupid, stubborn good-for-nothin' animal here, that's what it means!"
"Or it means whatever happened in here last night scared him so much he doesn't want to go near the cabin," Cori
Rechaining the dog, they went back into the cabin. As Cori
Two minutes after he began, he lifted Scout's severed head from the trunk. "Oh, Jesus," he whispered. "Look at this."
As Cori