The Haunted Air Part 55

"Easy," Strauss said, the edge still on his voice. He leaned forward and jutted his head over the back of the front seat. His breath reeked of garlic. "Somebody talked."

"No one talked," Eli said. "I've spoken to our other members, all ten of them, since this afternoon. No one has been kidnapped and tortured into a confession. Everyone is fine and looking forward to the next Ceremony. And think about it: If someone did talk, why talk about Tara Portman? Why not last year's lamb, or the year before? Tara Portman was ages ago."

"Perhaps," Adrian said. He'd been strangely silent all day. "But she was the first lamb we sacrificed in Dmitri's house."

"You're right," Eli said. "And oddly enough, I found myself thinking about Tara Portman just the other night."

That was why he'd been so shocked when the stranger had mentioned her name. It had to be a coincidence, but what a strange one.

"Really?" Adrian said. "Out of so many lambs, why her?"

"I've been asking myself that same question since my talk with our attacker this afternoon."

"Maybe it was because this mystery man tried to buy the key ring."

"No, that wasn't it. At the time I'd forgotten who that key ring belonged to. To tell the truth, I doubt I could match many of the little souvenirs in that cabinet to their original owners. And besides, I'd thought of Tara Portman days before."

"When?" Strauss said.

"Friday night."

He remembered he'd been reading in bed, deep into Proust's Remembrance of Things Past Remembrance of Things Past, and feeling drowsy, when suddenly she leaped into his mind. The briefest flash of her face, calm in the repose of deep anesthesia, and then her thin pale etherized body, still and supine on the table, awaiting the caress of Eli's knife. As quickly as the memories had come, they fled. Eli had written them off as random reminiscences, triggered perhaps by Proust's prose.

"There's the house now," Adrian said.

They lapsed into silence as they glided past Menelaus Manor. The lights were on. Who was home?

With a pang of melancholy Eli experienced a Proustian moment, caught up in a swirl of memories of Dmitri Menelaus, the brilliant, driven, tortured man he had brought into the Circle back in the eighties.

Dmitri had started off as just another customer in Eli's shop, but soon proved himself a man with a connoisseur's eye for the rare and arcane. He began to suggest sources where Eli might order rarer and stranger objects. As he and Eli got to know each other socially, Dmitri told of how he'd traveled the world investigating what he termed "places of power." He'd been to the usual locales-the Mayan temples of Chichen Itza in Yucatan, Macchu Picchu in the Andes, the tree-strangled temples of Angkor Wat in Cambodia-but had found them dead and cold. Whatever power they'd once held had been leached away by time and tourists. Along the way he'd heard tales of other places, secret places, and had also searched them out, all to no avail.

But then came whispers that fired his imagination, tales of an old stone keep in an obscure alpine pa.s.s in Romania, an ancient fortress that once had housed unspeakable evil. No one could give him the exact location of the pa.s.s, but by collecting and comparing notes based on the whispers, Dmitri narrowed his search to an area where these tales appeared to converge. He followed old trails through steep gorges, fully expecting this search to end as had so many others over the years, in despair and disappointment.

But this time was different. He found the fortress in a ravine near the ruins of a peasant village. As soon as he stepped through a gap in its crumbling foundation and let its walls enfold him, he knew his search had ended.

Immediately he'd arranged for a quant.i.ty of its loosened stones to be shipped back to the States and installed in his bas.e.m.e.nt. He said the stones had absorbed the power of the old keep and now he had some of it for himself. His own home was now a place of power.

Eventually Eli learned the reason for Dmitri's obsession with these matters: He was terrified that he would die of pancreatic cancer like his father. He'd watched the man rot from the inside out and had sworn that would never happen to him.

Eli knew a better way to protect him, far better and more reliable than importing stones from Old World forts. Slowly, slyly, he felt out Dmitri about how far he'd be willing to go to protect himself from his father's fate. When he'd ascertained that there was nothing Dmitri would not do, no lengths to which he would not go, he introduced Dmitri to the Circle. He became Eli's twelfth disciple.

Dmitri quickly evolved into Eli's right-hand man, for Eli sensed that his motives were pure. For too many members of the Circle, Eli suspected that the abducted children and what was done to them were almost as important as the Ceremony and the immortality they'd eventually gain from it. They might be men in high places, but he sensed their motives were low. Year after year he'd seen the lascivious light in their eyes as the deeply anesthetized lamb was stripped naked upon the ceremonial table. It had disturbed Eli so deeply that he'd begun leaving the lambs fully clothed, baring only the minimum amount of flesh necessary to slit open the chest and remove the still beating heart. None of the Circle looked away during the b.l.o.o.d.y procedure. Some went so far as to suggest that the lamb be strapped down and conscious during the Ceremony.

How dare they? The Ceremony was to be performed without pain to the lamb. That would debase the ritual. The point was not pain but to gain life everlasting. The annual death of a child was an unfortunate but necessary price that had to be paid.

How lamentable that he had to ally himself with such creatures, but in these increasingly Big Brotherish times, he needed their power and influence to safeguard the Ceremony and guarantee its annual performance.

But Dmitri was different. His focus was on the end, not the means. He soon became an indispensable member, especially once the Ceremony was moved to the bas.e.m.e.nt of his home. It was perfect. The stones did indeed resonate with a strange power, and the dirt floor was a perfect resting place for the lambs. Disposing of a body, even once a year, had always been a perilous ch.o.r.e.

Eli would be performing the Ceremony at Menelaus Manor to this day were Dmitri still alive. But his doctors discovered that he had his father's cancer-too early to be helped by medical science, and too early to be saved by the Ceremony, for Dmitri had partic.i.p.ated in nowhere near the twenty-nine he needed for immortality and invulnerability.

Unable to face the same agonizing death as his father, he'd seated himself on the dirt floor of his cellar and put a bullet through his head. What a loss... a terrible, terrible loss. Dmitri had been like a son to Eli. He still mourned his pa.s.sing.

"I wonder who's living there now?" Adrian said as he drove on.

"I checked that out already," Strauss said. "Couple of brothers named Kenton. Bought it a year ago."

Eli felt a surge of excitement. Could they have tracked down his nemesis? "Do you think one of them could be our 'Jack'?"

"Doubt it. I ain't got much in the way of contacts here in the one-fourteen, but I did learn that not only are these two guys brothers, but they're also brothers brothers-if you know what I mean."

Excitement dipped toward disappointment. "They're black?"

"'S'what I'm told. You said your attacker was white. No chance you could be wrong?"

"I wouldn't know," Adrian said. "I can't remember. The last thing I remem-"

"He was white," Eli said, jumping in before Adrian could launch into his litany. "So that leaves them out."

"Who knows?" Strauss said. "A guy who can raise Tara Portman from the dead can maybe turn himself white too."

Eli was about to tell Strauss that this wasn't a joking matter when Adrian spoke.

"I don't care who they are as long as they don't dig up the cellar."

The remark brought silence to the car. That had been the great fear after Dmitri's death: the new owners would excavate the cellar. Eli had wanted a member of the Circle to buy the place so they could go on using it, but no one wanted his name connected with a house that held the remains of eight murdered children.

"The possibility of that is so small," Eli said, "I've ceased to worry about it. Step back and consider it objectively. How many homeowners, no matter how extensively they renovate a home, tear up their cellar floor?"

"Virtually none," Adrian said.

Strauss said, "Just lucky for us the people who bought it poured a cement floor over the dirt down there."

"It didn't bring them much luck, though," Eli said.

Strauss barked a laugh. "Yeah! Two slit throats and still n.o.body has a clue. If you don't close a murder in forty-eight hours, chances are you'll never close it. It's been years for that one. Guess by now you could call it a perfect crime."

Eli had been shocked when he'd read about the dead couple, and worried that the crime scene investigation might venture too deeply into the cellar.

And then there'd been the mutilation of the little boy adopted by the next owners. Eli had begun to wonder if a combination of the Ceremony and those strange stones lining the bas.e.m.e.nt could somehow have laid a curse on the place.

"The other thing I'm worried about," said Adrian, "is that key ring."

"So am I, Eli." Strauss tapped Eli on the shoulder. "It connects you to the girl, and you can be connected to me. That's not good. Not good at all."

Adrian stopped at a red light. He continued to stare straight ahead as he spoke. "I've had nightmares about something like this happening because of that trophy cabinet of yours, sitting out there in your store for all to see. I always thought it was risky and... and arrogant as well."

Eli stared at him. Had he just heard correctly? Had Adrian, so deferential despite his size and strength, actually dared to call him arrogant? He must be furious, and very frightened.

Arrogant? Eli couldn't dredge up any anger. Adrian was right. Displaying the trophy cabinet had been arrogant and even foolhardy, but not half as arrogant and foolhardy as what Eli had done on Sat.u.r.day.

Maybe the impetus had been the unbidden thoughts of Tara Portman the night before, perhaps it was nothing more than mere ennui, but whatever the reason, Eli had yielded to an urge to flaunt his invulnerability. So on Sat.u.r.day afternoon he had told someone that he had killed hundreds of children, and that another would die with the next new moon, all but daring him to do something about it.

Eli permitted himself a fleeting smile. Adrian would s.h.i.t his pants if Eli told him.

Instead Eli said, "Be that as it may, the trophy cabinet had nothing to do with our current predicament."

Strauss leaned back and returned to his slouch in the rear seat. "Maybe it did and maybe it didn't, but it was a bad idea all around. That kind of in-your-face s.h.i.t threatens us all. Maybe you don't care, but we do."

"I sympathize, and I'll try to take your feelings into account in the future," Eli said. If the Circle had a future.

They lapsed again into silence as the car moved into traffic, then Adrian cleared his throat.

"Eli, am I the only one bothered by you thinking of Tara Portman for no good reason on Friday night, and then this stranger popping into your shop on Sunday to try and buy the key ring? Then someone-possibly the same man-attacks us Monday night, and steals Tara's key ring on Tuesday. And today he claims that Tara is 'back'-whatever that means. Could he have brought her back on Friday night?"

"She's not back!" Eli said, his voice rising of its own accord.

"Then why, of all possible lambs, did you think of Tara Portman?"

"What time was this?" Strauss said, leaning forward again and refouling the air of the front seat with his breath. "That you thought of her, I mean."

"I don't know. I wasn't watching the time. Late, I'd say."

"You know what else happened late Friday night? The earthquake."

Eli remembered reading something about that. "I didn't feel a thing."

"But locals around here did. The paper said it was centered in Astoria."

"Dear G.o.d," Adrian whispered.

"Oh, come now," Eli said. "You can't seriously believe one has anything to do with the other. That's absurd!"

But was it? Eli felt an Arctic chill blow through the chambers of his heart. He couldn't let on how deeply the scenario Adrian and Strauss were describing disturbed him. It only heightened his feelings of being at the mercy of chance as well as the forces of nature itself.

"Perhaps it is," Adrian said. "But you can't help wondering, can you."

No, Eli thought. You can't.

He realized the only thing that would a.s.suage this mounting malaise and uncertainty was another Ceremony to bulwark his defenses.

"For the moment," he said, "let's turn away from lambs of the past and focus on a lamb for the present." He glanced at Strauss. "Any progress in the matter of Ms. DiLauro's child, Freddy?"

"Some. I spent a little time watching her place today." He laughed. "I was wearing my old blues-they still fit me, y'know-and I waltzed them up to her door after I seen her leave her place alone. I figured if the kid was there, I'd pull the old your-mommy's-been-hurt routine, but she wasn't home. Learned from a neighbor's maid that she's away at camp."

"Really?" Eli said. He felt a surge of hope.

"Why are you fixated on her?" Adrian said. "We can s.n.a.t.c.h a child anywhere-"

"We've succeeded in lasting this long because we don't take chances. This situation has interesting possibilities. Think: A child disappears from a camp in the woods and the first thing everyone a.s.sumes is that she wandered off. They waste precious time beating the bushes for her when all the while she could be miles away, unconscious, in a car speeding toward the city..."

"Yes," Adrian said, nodding. "I see. Which camp?"

"That's the problem. This maid didn't know."

Adrian groaned. "Do you know how many summer camps there are in the tri-state area? We'll never find her."

Eli's mood sank. Adrian was right. There were hundreds, maybe thousands.

Strauss slapped the back of the front seat. "Never say never, my friend. I'm working a few angles. I've already recruited Williamson. He'll be full speed on the trail of little Victoria Westphalen tomorrow."

Wesley Williamson was a longtime member of the Circle and deputy director of the state banking commission. Eli didn't know how he could help, but he'd leave that to Strauss.

"He'd better hurry. If we don't complete the Ceremony by midnight Friday, we'll have to wait until next month."

Eli couldn't bear the thought of spending a whole month in his current state. Not just the fear and uncertainty, but the vulnerability, which was so much worse. His nameless enemy would have all that time to move against him.

"I'm doing my best, okay? This is short notice, but we'll get her. So sharpen up your knife for Friday night."

IN THE IN-BETWEEN.

The ent.i.ty that was Tara Portman floats in darkness and frustration. The one she was sent for has stayed away. She has something Tara wants, something Tara desperately needs.

She must find a way to bring her here. She thinks she knows a way. Tara touched her while she was here, perhaps she can touch her in another way, beyond these walls. Touch her and make her return.

And then what? What will happen to Tara after her purpose is finished? Will she be returned to nothingness? Anything, even this half-existence, is better than that.

Stay here. Yes... but not alone. She does not want to stay here alone...

THURSDAY.

1.