Novels 11 Adam Read online

  Daniel hesitated. What if he was wrong about all of this? But he knew he couldn’t be. He’d staked his whole life on rejecting all such childish things as heaven or hell or God or devil. One maniac didn’t change that.

  “If you do, I’ll give you my promise not to harm you in any way,” Alex said. “I’ll leave you here and go on about my business. Your friends will find you and you can continue going about your business. Hunting me. With more than enough new information to make my life difficult.”

  So this was it. A deal of sorts. Oddly unnerving despite being so childish.

  “But you have to invite Eve into your heart,” Alex said. “Ask him to be your friend. Tell him that you love him and will let him make his home with you.”

  Hearing it framed in those words brought a tremor to Daniel’s fingers. Whatever Alex Price was or had been, whatever experiences had brought him to this place, he was a true believer in the power of evil.

  And he was likely insane.

  But what choice did Daniel really have? He could refuse, for no good reason other than a sudden unreasonable fear. Or he could accept, face the consequences of another horrifying dream perhaps, and hope that Alex would keep his word and leave him.

  Then again, Alex had already insisted that he himself would not harm Daniel. Eve would do that. If Daniel refused to play his game, what harm would come to him?

  “No,” he said. “I won’t invite Eve into my heart.”

  “Because you know that he would kill you. Because you know that everything you’ve ever written on the subject is nonsense. Not to believe in the power of Satan is stupidity at the lowest level. Is that why?”

  “No.”

  “Then you have nothing to fear. If you refuse, I will be forced to leave you alone with Eve. The boy will eventually talk you into doing what he wants. By then you’ll be mentally worthless.”

  Meaning Eve, his own mind, would eventually get the best of him. The argument made perfect sense.

  “If you insist,” Daniel said.

  “No, I’m not insisting. It’s your decision, not mine.”

  “You’re forcing me. You have a proverbial gun to my head.”

  “You’re saying that the idea of inviting Eve into your heart frightens you? That you wouldn’t do it under normal circumstances? That you do believe in hell?”

  Insane, but intelligent.

  “No, I’m not saying that.”

  “Then don’t pretend you’d only invite Eve if forced.”

  Daniel knew he’d been backed into a corner, not by Alex’s arguments but by his own, made in a hundred lectures. Alex was only asking Daniel to back up his own claim that there was no substance to faith in or allegiance to the supernatural.

  Still, the whole business trumped Daniel’s poise. “The boy I met when I died—he’s a figment of my imagination. An image formed by my subconscious in a moment of crisis. You’ve heard of chasing the dragon.”

  “I don’t want to talk about hallucinogenic drugs,” Alex said. “It bores me. I want you to decide. Just satisfy a deluded psychopath. Invite Eve to be with you, and I will leave you alone with him.”

  “With myself then.”

  “So be it. Yes or no.”

  Daniel looked around the cellar and saw what he expected to see: a root cellar dug a century ago, supported by railroad ties. A table formed of wood, used to feed Alice’s sick religion. Packed earth underfoot.

  Nothing else.

  No devils or spirits or boys with black teeth who called themselves Eve.

  He looked into Alex Price’s eyes.

  “Yes.”

  THIRTY-ONE

  NIGHT HAD FALLEN AND the traffic had thinned. A single porch light brightened the front yard of the old white home off Vine Street in Burbank. The grass was thinned to dirt in spots, and the short hedge that bordered the lawn was in need of a trim. A two- or three-bedroom house, at best. This was the life that Catholic priests retired to?

  Priests like Father Robert Seymour, anyway.

  She made her way to the front door, stepping over patches of grass that had forced their way through the cracks in the concrete sidewalk. A rather hasty Internet search on Father Seymour had turned up more than she would have guessed.

  He’d served at Our Lady of the Covenant, a Catholic church on the south side of Pasadena, for fifteen years. Apart from serving on a number of boards, he demonstrated no political aspirations or interest in bettering his position in the church. He was a simple man—a bit of a legend on a number of blogs, known for his humility and wisdom, particularly in his later years, after he returned from an extended visit to France in 1992. He had authored a book about that time titled Dance of the Dead.

  Something profound had happened in France. What exactly, Heather didn’t know. The references were oblique, and his book was obscure. Evidently he’d gone to France to study under the tutelage of a famous bishop. But he’d been forced to step down from the program due to personal reasons. The year of study became a yearlong sabbatical, during which Father Seymour recovered from the effects of an exorcism ritual in which he’d assisted.

  Heather knocked on the door and stepped back. She’d seen pictures of a young Seymour on the Internet; the man who opened the door not only looked much older, but thinner.

  “Hello, Heather. Come in, dear. Please, come in.”

  “Father Seymour?”

  “You didn’t expect someone so young and vibrant? Come in.”

  She stepped past him. He had gaunt cheeks, but the lines etched into his face seemed to smile.

  “Sit.” He ushered her to an old Queen Anne chair opposite a brass-rimmed coffee table. The room was small, decorated with period pieces that had undoubtedly been collected and passed down. An old black piano sat against one wall.

  “Do you play?” Heather asked.

  “When it gets too quiet,” he said, pouring two cups of tea. “I assume you won’t refuse a cup?”

  “Thank you. Are you alone here?”

  “No.” Father Seymour handed her one of the white china cups. “But without other people, it sometimes feels like it.”

  She glanced around the room, half expecting to see a ghost watching them, then smiled at her own foolishness.

  “So you say that Alex Trane has taken your husband?”

  Heather returned his gaze. Staring over the china cup with bright green vines painted around the rim. Discussing Daniel’s abduction over tea.

  The cup clinked against the saucer in her other hand, suddenly unable to hold steady. She set it down.

  “It’s going to be okay, darling. If I can help you, I will. Tell me everything.”

  She sat back and crossed her legs. In the space of a few minutes, the father had managed to earn her wholehearted trust. She’d never actually talked to a priest. A Protestant pastor now and then, mostly in her teens. Yet looking in this man’s smoke-blue eyes, she knew she could and would tell him anything, everything.

  “Have you ever heard of a serial killer known as Eve, Father?”

  “Eve. I’ve read something, yes. Alex Trane is Eve?”

  Heather started to tell him about the phone call she’d received from a man she believed was Eve, but Father Seymour stopped her. “Start at the beginning, Heather. The very beginning.”

  “He’s killed sixteen women. It would take a while just to give you the highlights.”

  “Alex has killed sixteen women?” Whatever he’d read about the case, it wasn’t much.

  “Yes.”

  “Do you want my help?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then tell me everything.”

  Three days, Eve had said. They weren’t going to make it.

  “He’s going to kill my husband, Father.”

  “Then I suggest you talk quickly.”

  RECITING THE EVENTS as Heather knew them only took an hour, and that long only because the father kept stopping her with questions, mostly about Eve’s precise words and Daniel’s near-death experiences.
Father Seymour sat through the details of several victims, then asked her to summarize the gruesome details. He didn’t need to hear the same thing over and over, he said.

  So she did. The gender of the victims, the fact that each had been found underground, the nature of the disease that had killed them. The name Eve written over each victim. Daniel’s entire profile of the killer.

  But it was the words Eve had used that interested Seymour more than anything. He stared at her with glazed eyes as she haltingly told him about her encounter with Eve in the root cellar.

  Father Seymour held up his hand. “Adam? He called Daniel Adam?”

  “Yes.”

  “So he’s re-creating the birth of evil, proving that evil has true power, as with Eve in the garden. Something he rejected in seminary.”

  Heather wiped a tear from under her right eye. “We have to find him, Father. And to do that we have to know where he grew up. He’s there, I’m almost sure of it. He’s holding Daniel in the same place his mother hurt him as a child. For all we know, he’s already infected Daniel with the disease. We don’t have much time.”

  “Have you considered the possibility that it’s not a disease?”

  “We have solid medical data that identifies the cause of death. A form of meningitis.”

  “A form of?”

  “Yes, well, it’s not certain. A new strain.”

  “Then it may have another explanation,” Seymour said.

  “Not one identifiable to the medical community.”

  “And what would the medical community have to say about a woman born blind who can describe objects in a room after dying?”

  “Nothing.”

  “No, my dear. They would say it is impossible, never mind that it happened.”

  “You’re saying it’s not a disease?”

  Father Seymour stood and walked to the bookcase behind Heather, then returned with a thick leather-bound book. He set it down and withdrew a black-and-white picture, which he laid on the table.

  “What do you see?”

  The picture showed the side of a woman in a dress, lying on a couch. Her arm, stretched out by her side, was lumpy and badly bruised. A cut by her elbow was bleeding.

  “A woman with a disfigured arm,” Heather said.

  “I didn’t take the picture, but I was there. Her name was Martha. She was twenty-six years old and lived in Monte Carlo. Twenty minutes before this picture was taken, her arm was as normal as yours. The cut on her elbow was made by a book that had been sitting on a table ten feet away.”

  Heather knew where he was headed.

  “What would the medical data lead you to conclude in regards to Martha’s disfigurement?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “She spent a week in the hospital after the exorcism. The evidence showed that she’d suffered some kind of bad fall or been smitten by one of several rare diseases that result in heavy internal bleeding and bruising. It’s one of three exorcisms I’ve witnessed—I have no desire for a repeat performance. Father Gerald, the attending exorcist, spent two months recovering.”

  Heather looked at the picture again and tried to imagine the events Father Seymour was suggesting. She couldn’t.

  “I’m not sure this helps us find Daniel,” she said.

  “It helps us understand Alex,” he said, sliding the picture back into the book. “I’m not saying that each of his victims didn’t die of some rare form of meningitis, as you assume. But I am suggesting that Alex himself may be drawing on more than medicine. You yourself said that he claims that Eve, not he, is doing the killing.”

  “He’s mentally unstable, Father.”

  “I doubt it. The Alex I knew was very sane. I saw the signs back then, and honestly, I’ve prayed more than once that this day would never come. I find myself culpable.”

  “I still don’t see how any of this leads us any closer—”

  “Because you don’t understand how a person becomes possessed, Heather.” He swiveled one hand in dismissal. “I can’t speak for those who see demons under every tree. Frankly, I suspect that most cases of possession are psychosomatic expressions of human evil. I don’t know. But there are cases of genuine possession that defy anything science can throw at them. And only a few ever get flushed out.”

  “I’m sorry, Father, I just . . .”

  “Trust me, unlike some churches, the Roman Catholic Church has no interest in encountering or publicizing any of this. Most bishops find the whole business an embarrassment, for good reason—most people find it preposterous. But even those bishops can’t ignore the evidence once presented with it. Neither can most ordinary people.”

  She found his methodical, reasoned explanation fascinating. “And?”

  “In most cases possession is a gradual process, hardly understood by the victim. Contrary to what many assume, most victims are intelligent. But their possession usually revolves around a single fixation. Denial of morality. Obsession with gender. Profound disbelief. Any one of a number of ideas that start in the mind and work their way into the heart.”

  “Eve’s fixation, that’s what you’re after.”

  He frowned. “Find Alex’s fixation and you find the man. Isn’t that the mantra of every good forensic psychologist?”

  “We have found him. His name, his history, his motivations—”

  “No, not his name or his history. There is no Alex Trane. I know, because I’ve searched. They came to us with a story about losing their parents in an automobile accident, but there was no accident, not in the police files anyway.”

  “They?”

  “Alex and his sister, Jessica. Two wounded souls with a hidden past that they tried to dismiss. But Eve has found them and made them his own. At least Alex.”

  Heather stood and paced, rubbing the right side of her neck. Regardless of the veracity of Seymour’s suggestion that Eve was some devil haunting Alex, the priest had just opened a new can of worms. She couldn’t help thinking that somewhere in that can lay a clue to the location of the root cellar.

  “Alex’s fixation . . . He was expelled for his arguments against faith. Do you have anything he wrote?”

  “I think I know his fixation,” the father said. “But, yes, I asked for his papers. They’re in a shoe box somewhere around here.”

  He stood and started for a coat closet near the door.

  “And what is his fixation?” Heather asked.

  He opened the closet door and rummaged around. “It was here . . .” he mumbled, then withdrew empty-handed. Headed for the kitchen.

  “What was it?” Heather asked again.

  Father Seymour stepped from sight and began opening and closing cabinets. “His fixation?”

  “Yes.”

  “Here it is.” He came around the corner holding a brown boot box. “What’s the one thing Alex keeps going back to?”

  She thought a moment. “Eve.”

  “And who was Eve? Whose holy coven?”

  “Eve’s,” she said. “His mother.”

  “His mother, whom he hated. Whom he was forced to either kill or abandon, but whom he could not escape. What was it he said to you in the courthouse? ‘They took me from my daddy, my sister, my priest’? Who separated Alex from his father, his sister, his ambition to become a priest?”

  “Eve did.”

  “Eve, his mother. His mother—”

  “Took him from his father.”

  “His real father,” Father Seymour said.

  Heather felt her pulse surge. “Alex and Jessica were kidnapped.”

  “I’ve been living with Alex and Jessica for fifteen years”—he tapped his head—“up here. After hearing what you had to say tonight, it’s the only thing that makes sense. A lot of it.”

  Heather dug into her pocket for her phone and called Lori, who picked up on the first ring.

  “This is Lori.”

  “He was kidnapped. Trane isn’t his real name. He was kidnapped and changed his name.”

  S
he could practically hear Lori’s mind spinning. “The priest knew that?”

  “Not exactly. That’s his guess after hearing me out. Why?”

  “He’s right, Trane is a falsified name. No record of Alex Trane before 1983. He was taken from his daddy, you said. Brit’s running a systemwide search for abduction cases involving a brother and sister going back fifty years.” She paused. “Smart priest.”

  “This could be it. How long will it take?”

  “If it’s an FBI case, not long. If they have to make requests from other jurisdictions, longer. And this is all assuming there was a kidnapping, of course.”

  “I hope so. Call me.”

  “I will.”

  She closed the phone. Father Seymour stood holding the box, eyes fixed on her. He held the box out.

  “It’s got ten or so of his more memorable papers, some poetry, notes, etc. If you believed, I might warn you that reading them could tempt you to toss your faith out the window. I don’t know how it works for Alex, but Eve isn’t his only fixation. Somehow all tied up in Eve is the knowledge of good and evil, belief in the supernatural, God, Lucifer, the snake.”

  Heather took the box.

  “I would be careful,” he said. “Don’t let that snake bite you.”

  “Thank you, Father. I’m very grateful.”

  He crossed to the bookshelf. “One request, if you don’t mind.”

  “If I can.”

  “You can and I insist.” Father Seymour withdrew a book and handed it to her. “Hostage to the Devil by Malachi Martin. Please read it. Read it soon.”

  She took the book and looked at it politely.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” he said. “The book contains five documented cases of contemporary possession that will help any readers—agnostics, Protestants, Catholics, Muslims, anyone—reconsider everything they think they know.”

  THIRTY-TWO

  IF EXHAUSTION HADN’T overwhelmed Heather, she would have read all of the pages spread out on her kitchen table last night. But the concepts were heavy, and no amount of determination could keep her tired mind focused after several hours.

  Heather walked around the table in the morning, coffee in hand, staring at the stacks of pages. The clock on the wall read seven fifteen. No call from either Brit or Lori yet.