Twenty-five.

I NO LONGER HELD THE RHINESTONE COWBOY'S IMAGE in my mind's eye. He was on this property, very close. If I sought him out with psychic magnetism, I risked drawing him to me instead of being drawn to him, as when I had been in the Ford Explorer and he had run me off the highway.

Instead, I thought of the Payton kids-Jessie, Jasmine, Jordan-and hoped that I would be drawn to them sooner than later. Wherever the Paytons were, the other kids would likely be there, too. Right now, I couldn't feel them pulling at me.

My strange talent is reliable but not 100 percent so, any more than the amazing Magic Johnson, at his peak, could lay the ball in the basket every time he tried. More often than not, yes, and some of the misses were breathtakingly close. But no matter what gifts we're given, we can never apply them to perfection because we're human, after all, and given to error.

The stable door was held shut by a hinged steel strap and a swivel bolt. I turned the bolt and, loath to make a sound, eased the strap back on its hinge.

I doubted that the children were kept in this building. If they were here, a guard would be stationed outside. But I had to check.

The door creaked slightly as it opened, and I slipped inside, leaving it ajar behind me. The darkness smelled of straw and mold and dust.

The smooth casing of the small flashlight lacked any features that would snag on the stretchy tube that secured it to my utility belt. It came out as easily as a sword from a sheath, and the on-off b.u.t.ton, recessed in the handle, brought forth a blade of soft white light, around which I cupped my hand to restrict it largely to the floor, so that it might not fall directly on the windows and be too visible outside.

Although this was a stable, with stalls to either side of the central aisle, no animals had been housed here in years. The only evidence that the place had ever accommodated horses were the few horseshoe prints embedded like fossils in the once impressional but now hard dry floor of compacted earth. In some corners were bristling wads of pale straw, like spiny sea creatures from a distant era when these mountains had been the bed of an ocean. Dust filmed everything, and the only livestock were the spiders that hung in still expectancy or crawled their silken architectures.

I walked the length of the aisle. Although there seemed to be nothing for me here, intuition told me that the appearance of the place was not the entire reality of it.

At the end of the building were two rooms opposite each other, doors standing open. One might have been a tack room. The other contained empty feed bins. Neither offered me anything of interest.

I had never been here before, but something about the stable seemed familiar.

For a moment, I stood listening, convinced that if I c.o.c.ked my head at just the right angle, I would hear something essential to my-and the children's-survival. The silence held.

Keeping the cupped light directed down, I returned along the aisle. As I was about to push open the painted plank door by which I had entered, I realized that the dirt floor had undergone a metamorphosis. It appeared to be concrete now.

Overhead, chain-hung lamps with conical shades cast down a sour light, and I saw that the board walls were also concretelike now, that same too-pristine material that composed the interior surfaces of buildings in Elsewhere. When I put a hand to the wall, it felt smooth, flawless, cool. But when I thought about the rustic walls that had been here a moment earlier, I could feel the rough texture of the lumber and the uneven joints between boards, as if my reality must be submerged and somehow accessible just below the surface of this stable in Elsewhere.

Turning, switching off the flashlight, I found that the stalls and the two rooms at the farther end were gone, the building now just one long, wide s.p.a.ce. A series of breakfronts from different design periods stood along both walls, as though stored here by an antiques dealer. No bristling wads of straw, no dust, no spiders or their webs. At the windows, where they weren't blocked by the display cabinets, the night beyond seemed darker than the night in Nevada, the blinding black in which I had struggled with the Other Odd on the roof of that industrial building.

They used Elsewhere to hide things where the best detectives and the most diligent searchers could never find them, and to meet others of their kind to discuss their dark business where no one in this world could hear them.

Because of my paranormal abilities, when I entered these way stations, I perceived the other world that, at these specific points only, was connected to mine. But if I had entered with a friend, he would have seen only the dust-mantled long-unused stable, and when I moved into Elsewhere, I would have become invisible and inaudible to him.

Shower 5 and the bas.e.m.e.nt room at Star Truck, the abandoned industrial building near Los Angeles, and this place did not phase randomly back and forth between worlds, as until now I had thought might be the case. I could neither be kept out of Elsewhere nor be trapped in it. These places existed in both worlds at all times. Unconsciously I had opened this other realm-and closed it away-with an act of will.

Interesting.

And what were they hiding here other than antique furniture?

The lamps dangled along the center of the building, their light pooling on the gray floor between swaths of shadow. Against the long walls, the polished mahogany and pecan and walnut and cherry of the hulking breakfronts glimmered here and there, but I couldn't see what, if anything, the cabinets contained behind their wood-framed gla.s.s doors. I had no reason to suppose that anything was on display in them, yet even as dread seemed to shrink my heart within my chest, I felt compelled to take a closer look.

I chose the array of cabinets on the left. The first two were empty, and my flashlight revealed that the shelves and back walls were upholstered in dark-blue velvet, the better to present select pieces of the finest china-Limoges, Dresden, Minton, Royal Doulton, Pickard-as if they were works of art.

Approaching the third cabinet, I saw that it was likewise darkly lined, but neither empty nor laden with china. I opened a pair of doors and found that the shelves held a series of wide, thick gla.s.s jars, almost crocks, with lids that had been fused in place with an annealing torch. The jars were filled with clear liquid, no doubt a preservative. Submerged in each jar waited a severed human head.

The nature of my life is such that I have discovered on several occasions various abominations hidden away by collectors who would not be satisfied with rare coins or postage stamps, or b.u.t.terflies pinned to boards. They say that familiarity breeds contempt, but familiarity with the death trophies of demented sociopaths breeds not apathy, not an absence of feeling, but instead a composure that is feeling without agitation. To an extent, I could regard these heads as evidence, in the calm way that a police officer can study the most terrible aftermath of violence at a crime scene. I could soberly a.s.sess the threat of which these trophies warned me, for anyone who could harvest such a cruel collection would require from me absolute ruthlessness if I were to defeat them and safely shepherd the children out of this place.

I moved to the next breakfront and found more heads, eyes fixed open in every case except for three, where one or both eyes had been gouged out. A few other faces bore the marks of torture, which I will not describe, because the dead deserve their dignity no less than do the living. Most of the specimens bore no wounds except for where the necks had been severed, and if they, too, had been tortured, their suffering had involved violence to the body.

On the forehead of each trophy were hieroglyphics apparently drawn with an indelible felt-tip pen, still black in spite of being submerged in a preservative liquid. The script, written horizontally instead of vertically as the ancients would have done, looked like Egyptian to me but might not have been. Although the language was pictographic, I couldn't guess what many of the symbols represented, though in each instance they included the stylized silhouette of one animal, most often one kind of bird or another, or groups of birds in strange arrangements, but also cats, rabbits, goats, bulls, snakes, lizards, scarabs, and centipedes. I couldn't guess the reason for these pictographs, but they seemed to confirm that the murders were ritualistic.

The collection included more women than men, although the male s.e.x was well represented. More of them were white than black, each about in proportion to the percentage in the population, but there were Asians and Hispanics well represented. These collectors-for this could not be the work of one maniac-were equal-opportunity killers. The fat and the thin, the beautiful and the unattractive, twenty-somethings and retirees had met their end on this isolated property and been preserved so that the murderers might stroll this grisly gallery, admiring their acquisitions and waxing nostalgic over gla.s.ses of fine Cabernet Sauvignon.

The hair of the dead floated freely in the preservative, and in some cases formed veils across portions of their faces. Sometimes the fright-wide eyes peering through those cloaking tresses seemed to turn to follow me as I moved along, but I knew that I imagined their interest in me, and I could not fear these dead as I feared those who had murdered them.

Suddenly I realized that the most extraordinary thing about the scene was the absence of lingering spirits wanting justice for their murderers. Had I imagined such a place before finding it, I would have expected it to be crowded with ghosts tormented by what had been done to them in the last hours of their lives, haunted and haunting.

With a growing sense of urgency, I toured what remained of the display, and though some faces might have been those of teenagers, none were those of children. I could only a.s.sume that this murderous cult, whatever its nature, must be methodical in its depravity, adhering to a policy of progressive outrages, only this night at last arriving at its most extreme transgression to date: the abuse, torture, and murder of the most innocent of victims.

In the last cabinet that contained trophies, the faces were to one degree or another charred, blistered, melted, and I knew beyond doubt that this was the recent work of the rhinestone cowboy. Judging by the size of the skulls, these people had all been adults, but soon he would turn his flamethrower on more diminutive targets.

In the presence of such unspeakable horror, I couldn't any longer maintain my composure, that "feeling without agitation" that I previously described. Even the most experienced policeman and the battle-hardened soldier, courageously and of necessity repressing their anguish at the human condition, can sometimes repress it no longer, and the emotional pain threatens for a while to break them, before they suppress it once more.

Among the nations of Earth in all its history, ours is one of the precious few that has not brought forth its. .h.i.tler, its Stalin, its Pol Pot, its Mao Tse-tung, its Vlad the Impaler, the one who is never satisfied to have every knee bend to him but wants also to be the architect of a new world by destroying the existing one. But something is afoot. Atrocities like this, once rare but ever more frequent, would have at one time shocked the country but now seem to t.i.tillate as many people as they shock. My vision on the freeway in Los Angeles, others that have come in dreams, and things like this collection lead me to fear that our turn on the rack and wheel is coming. In this age when innocence is ever more mocked, when truth is aggressively denied if not actively hated, when so many people despise those with whom they disagree, when priests and teachers molest those whom they should protect, when power and fame are celebrated but true law and modesty are disparaged, what fire wall remains between the people and the forces that would devour them?

I am just one fry-cook with a special talent, not David certain to bring down Goliath, one mortal man trying to make his way through a storm in which swarm uncountable leviathans. I am only you, like you, born of man and woman, but with this gift or burden. In that stable in Elsewhere, I felt as you would have felt, overwhelmed and terrified of failing.

At the door, I almost crossed the threshold before I realized that I would be stepping not into the Nevada night where three dogs slept and snored, but into the blind-black wasteland that surrounded buildings in Elsewhere. And waiting in that blighted place was the Other Odd who had wanted to kiss me, who'd said Give me your breath, piglet, your breath, and the sweet fruit at the end of it.

Twenty-six.

HESITATING AT THE DOOR, I HAD NO WAY OF KNOWING how long I might have to wait for this dust-free and lifeless stable in Elsewhere to become again the dirty and spider-ruled building in my reality. A minute or two? An hour? Until all the children were dead?

Should the fabled Headless Horseman come here seeking to repair himself, he would have scores of heads to choose from, and if I again encountered the Other Odd, my head also might be available for the horseman's consideration.

Thinking about the Other might quickly draw him to me, but he remained a figure of such dark fascination that I couldn't banish him from my mind. I remembered the disgusting tone and texture of his cold, flaccid flesh, like that of a corpse after rigor mortis had come and gone, when the minions of Death were busy within. Yet he had been strong, unstoppable, and ten rounds of 9-mm ammunition had done no damage to him. Now I had two pistols with fifteen-round magazines, plus four spare magazines, nine times the ammo that I'd had before; but considering that ten shots had zero effect, nine times zero wasn't a calculation worth making.

In that industrial building in Elsewhere, back in that suburb of Los Angeles, there had been a moment when I stared at one of the chain-hung lamps, questioning its existence-whereupon it began to lose substance and to dim. I was certain now that, by an act of will alone, I could cause Elsewhere to wane and my world to emerge once more around me.

Previously this door had been made of vertical planks with a Z of cross braces on the inside, knotholes visible through the white paint, here and there raw wood revealed where a splinter had been gouged out. The evenly white door before me looked and felt smooth, flawless, like a plastic panel, the half-formed idea of a door.

When I pressed the palm of my left hand against that surface and thought hard about its previous appearance, I began to feel the planks, the screw heads, the knotholes partly swollen out of the wood around them.

The lamps hanging from the ceiling went out, and I was left with only the frosty beam of the LED flashlight, which revealed the planks as they should have been, the floor of hard-packed earth, the empty stalls, the spiders poised in their gossamer traps, but nothing of the collection of heads.

I stepped into a night that was not a lightless wasteland, in which the heavens were not as black as the ceiling of a coal mine. Indeed, the storm, which I had a.s.sumed would catch up with us once more, must have been so drained by the thirsty desert to the west that it had nothing more to offer. The clouds were tattering and lifting, as though within the hour they might, at least in places, peel away like bandages and reveal a healed and vibrant sky.

I put away the canister of pressurized sedative and drew one of the two Glocks. That seemed the wise thing to do.

Jessie, Jasmine, Jordan ...

Remaining close to the tree line, I approached the stone-and-timber building that had a steep and beetling roof. From the moment I first glimpsed it, even from a distance and in the dark, it had seemed to be an ominous structure. Now as I circled it, on closer inspection, that first impression ripened, grew darker, and I felt that herein I would find corruption and depravity that explained the collection of heads.

The sixty-by-forty-foot block stood like a fortress, forbidding and windowless. Even a medieval castle would have featured arrow loops, narrow openings from which archers could defend against the barbarians, or high clerestory windows to admit natural light. But I sensed that nothing natural was wanted within, that this building had been constructed to celebrate barbarism, that its builders felt no need for arrow loops or gun ports, for they knew that civilization, in its current and foreseeable state, would have no interest in mounting an a.s.sault against them.

Three broad and shallow steps led up to the only door, which was at what seemed to be the back of the building, out of sight from the main house. I dared the flashlight and saw a bronze slab, green with time, featuring a pattern of scores of little arrowheads in many lines radiating out from a central hub, on which was a word in raised bronze letters-CONTUMAX.

I had no idea what the word contumax might mean. It sounded like an over-the-counter laxative or a drug to treat cold sores, although it was certainly neither. Whatever the word meant, the pattern of arrowheads suggested militant hostility to something.

Perhaps the door was most often locked, although not on this night of celebration. When it eased inward, I discovered a shadowy vestibule. Opposite this first door, a second stood a quarter open to a more well-lighted chamber.

I did not want to go inside, to risk being trapped in a place that had one exit, but I sensed that what waited to be learned here was something I must know if I were to be of any use to the children. I stepped inside and eased the outer door shut behind me.

After crossing quietly to the inner door, I stood listening, but heard nothing. I held my breath, the better to hear, but the silence remained absolute.

When I inhaled, a peculiar bitter smell, faint but unpleasant, caused me to grimace. It registered as a taste, too, even fainter than the scent. The flavor reminded me of ipecac, the syrup that doctors use to induce vomiting when someone has been poisoned, but in this case disguised-inadequately-by mint.

I pushed open the inner door, crossed the threshold, and was halted by the drama of the s.p.a.ce.

Stone-and-timber walls as outside, cobblestone floor, without a piece of furniture, the room must have been forty feet wide and fifty end to end, the raftered ceiling forty feet overhead. Along the wall to the left and along the wall to the right stood seven concrete pedestals, fourteen in all, each perhaps seven feet high. Mounted atop every pedestal, lit from above by pin spots, angled to peer down imperiously, were the bleached-white skulls of what might have been Rocky Mountain bighorn rams, identifiable by their enormous, curved, and deeply grooved horns.

The cobblestones were flat, without rounded edges, with minimal grout lines, set in a circular pattern that swirled around the room, ring after diminishing ring, leading to a large round stone at the center. With growing alarm, I walked to that medallion and read the word carved into it: POTESTAS. Here was another test of my knowledge-and additional proof of my ignorance.

I looked left and right at the totems on the fourteen pedestals. Set on the sides of those narrow heads, twenty-eight eye sockets, though empty, though black and hollow, seemed to watch and menace me. The builders of this house of the profane did not mean for the skulls to be seen simply as what they were, did not intend for them to be thought of as mere rams' heads, but placed them here as symbols of the great horned serpent who was the prince of this world. Fourteen goatish mouths were fixed open, perhaps to express the insatiable appet.i.te that the prince encouraged and that he promised to feed generously.

I proceeded no farther, but I saw at the front of the room a large slab of what might have been black granite elevated on thick black-granite legs. On the wall directly behind the slab, hanging from two points on a rafter, a long loop of glossy red beads, each as large as a plum, had been threaded through five evenly s.p.a.ced human skulls that I knew must be as real as those of the bighorn rams.

A miniature version of this macabre construction had hung from the citizens-band radio in the cab of the cowboy's eighteen-wheeler.

From the first encounter that had led me here and in many other moments of the day, I had been given clear clues to the nature of my adversaries. On some level, I noted all those jigsaw pieces, fitted them together-and then refused to acknowledge the picture that they formed.

Patterns exist in our seemingly patternless lives, and the most common pattern is the circle. Like a dog pursuing its tail, we go around and around all our lives, through the circles of the seasons, repeating our mistakes and pursuing our redemption. From birth to death we explore and seek, and in the end we arrive where we started, the past having made one great slow turn on a carousel to become our future, and if we have learned anything worth learning, the carousel will bring us to the one place we most need to be.

My journey had so far taken almost twenty-two years, but it had become a far more profound voyage nineteen months ago than it had been previously. I have often said that in a quest for the purpose of my life, I learn by going where I have to go. And I do learn. But I realized here, only now, that learning had not been my primary motivation, that since the mall shootings in Pico Mundo, I had been on a pilgrimage to seek the sacrament of penance, in search of forgiveness for a failure that I refused to believe could ever be mitigated by ordinary confession and contrition. And I had come now full circle to the same adversary that I had not entirely defeated back then, the same implacable adversary from which I had perhaps saved many people, but not all, not nineteen who died, including she whose heart was one with mine.

The killers at the Green Moon Mall had been members of a satanic cult. And so were the cowboy trucker and the people gathered in this place, this night. Different people, different cult, same enemy. I'd known the truth hours earlier but had striven to repress it.

Denial couldn't be maintained. The skulls of fourteen bighorn rams were positioned, mockingly, where in a Catholic church the fourteen stations of the cross would be. The red beads and the five human skulls insulted the rosary and its five joyful, five sorrowful, and five glorious mysteries.

The enemy was the same, but I was in a darker and far more desperate place now than I had been on that day in Pico Mundo.

The men in that cult nineteen months earlier had made a game of evil, committing murder primarily for the excitement of it, playing at satanic faith the way that boys might play at being vampires, with wax fangs and with capes made from blankets. The cultists in Pico Mundo never committed entirely to their faith, not intellectually or emotionally. When the confrontation came between me and them, they had their boldness and their viciousness, but they did not have any genuine power beyond that of other sociopaths. In the end, though deadly, they had been nothing more than thrill killers.

But the pilot of the ProStar+ and the congregation to which he belonged were true believers, so diligent and so pa.s.sionate in the practice of their faith that they were rewarded with the ability to open doors to Elsewhere. They enjoyed the capacity to blind others to their actions, as the cowboy blinded the people in the supermarket to the fact that he had fired a pistol and threatened to kill innocent shoppers if I didn't come with him quietly.

In this new and pending confrontation, these darksiders greatly outnumbered me. And although my paranormal gifts usually gave me an advantage, their gifts made them at least my equals.

My eyes had adjusted to the lighting, and now I saw that on the black-granite table at the front of the room lay what might have been a thick black book. I was loath to approach that altar, but I knew that I must do so.

Bound in black leather, the volume contained a thousand numbered pages, which must have been blank when it was bound. On the top of the first page someone had printed these words: This coven of the demon Meridian, founded to glorify his name, on the 7th day of October, in the year 1580, in Oxford, Oxfordshire, England.

Each of the next 433 pages was dedicated to one year in the coven's existence. The heading of the page featured the year, a name followed by the words high priest, and the location. Each page also contained a handwritten meditation on the beauty and the necessity of evil, apparently composed by the priest. As I paged through, I saw that some priests served decades, others a few years. I didn't have time to examine the book carefully enough to determine when they had moved their little cult to America. On page 433 was the current year and the name of the high priest, Lyle Hetland; otherwise that page was blank, for he had not yet written his meditation.

Over four hundred years and numerous generations of madness and murder. They were not the first of their kind and would not be the last. Accounts of such groups dated back to the earliest fragments of written history. If the world survived long enough, accounts of the activities of their latest iterations would be reported on the Internet or by whatever medium might one day replace it. The human heart may choose truth or lies, light or darkness, and even if the world were to become a universally prosperous, totally materialist sphere where everyone claimed to be scientific rationalists, some would secretly worship evil-and commit it-even if none were left who believed in the existence of absolute good. Good people are from time to time exhausted by the relentless nature of the enemy and need some period of peace, but those who worship darkness thrive on the battle, on violence and hatred, and have no taste for peace.

I'd gone where I had to go, and I'd learned what I resisted learning. And now there was only one place left for me: the house, where the children were being held, where the killing would soon begin.

The rams' skulls were only that to me, no matter what they might be to others here, and I turned my back on them.

Twenty-seven.

OUTSIDE, THE NIGHT LAY AS STILL AS IF THE WORLD had lost its atmosphere. A wind must have been ripping along at a higher alt.i.tude, because the clouds continued to tatter, unravel, and disintegrate before my eyes.

I rounded the church and stood looking at the house, wondering if security would be any better there than at the entrance to this property. I didn't think it would be.

They knew that their fellow citizens, in this brave new century, chose to be unaware of them, to consign their master and them to the realm of myth. No one would come looking for them because no one believed in their existence. Who arms himself and goes hunting for the frumious Banders.n.a.t.c.h or leads an expedition to the North Pole with the serious intention of interviewing Santa Claus?

In addition, the cult might have cast a simple spell upon this property, a spell to blind people to its existence, as the shoppers in the produce section of the supermarket had been unable to see the silencered pistol with which the cowboy shot the cantaloupe. No self-respecting modern person would believe in the effectiveness of such a spell, but it worked just the same without their belief.

The Dobermans might be the extent of their precautions. And perhaps those creatures had been trained to patrol and kill less for security than for the pleasure that their trainer took in corrupting three dogs. Dogs are innocent by nature, and people such as these prized nothing more than the corruption-and destruction-of the innocent.

If the rhinestone cowboy thought I might be alive, perhaps guards would have been posted. But he believed that he had killed me in the Elsewhere version of Shower 5. I, too, thought he had killed me. It had sure felt like death, but then everything since had felt like life.

At the front of the house, lights had glowed behind uncurtained windows on all three floors. Back here, the third-floor rooms were dark. Even on the lower levels, fewer people were evident here than had been on the lake side of the building. In fact, on the ground floor, I could see no one anywhere but in the kitchen.

Pistol ready, I crossed the lawn. I sensed that I didn't have time for excessive stealth, but I stayed away from the house until I was past the kitchen windows, through which I could see four people toiling.

Jessie, Jasmine, Jordan ...

I pa.s.sed French doors with lights beyond, went to a solid door, hesitated, tried it, opened it. Beyond lay a lighted mudroom: pegs on which to hang coats, benches on which to sit to take off or put on boots.

The mudroom offered two interior doors. I heard voices beyond one of them and figured it opened into the kitchen. The other door presented me with a set of softly lighted back stairs, one flight leading up to a landing, another flight leading down, no sound of footsteps above or below.