Running with the Demon - Terry Brooks [140]
“So, here you are, alone with me. Why, you might have asked yourself? Why am I bothering to do this? Why don’t I just... drop you into a hole and cover you up?” The demon’s voice trailed off in a hiss. “I could, you know.”
He waited a moment, as if anticipating her response, then sighed anew. “But I don’t want to hurt you. I want to teach you. That’s why I brought you here. I want you to understand how helpless you are against me. I want you to realize that I can do whatever I like with you. You can’t prevent it. Your friends and family can’t prevent it. No one can. You need to accept that. I brought you here so that you could discover firsthand what I was talking about yesterday, about the importance of learning to be alone, of learning to depend only on yourself. Because you can’t depend on other people, can you? I mean, who’s going to save you from this? Your mother is gone, your grandparents are old, your friends are feckless, and no one else really gives a damn. When it comes right down to it, you have only yourself.”
Nest was awash with rage and humiliation. She would have killed the demon gladly if she had been free to do so and been offered a way. She hated the demon as she had never hated anyone in her life.
“I have to be going now,” he said, the location of his voice shifting again, moving away. “I have things to do while the night is still young. I have enemies to eliminate. Then I’ll be back for you. Danny Abbott won’t, of course. By morning, he will have forgotten you are even here. So you have to depend on me. Keep that in mind.”
Then the voice dropped into a rough whisper that scraped at her nerve endings like sandpaper. “Maybe it would be wise if you were to use your time among the feeders to consider what’s important to you. Because your life is about to change, Nest. It is going to change in a way you would never have dreamed possible. I’m going to see to it. It’s what I’ve come here to do.”
The silence returned, slow and thick within the dark. Nest waited for the demon to say something more, to reveal some further insight. But no sound came. She sat wrapped within the hot blackness of the burlap, embittered, frightened, and alone. Then the feeders returned. When the touching began anew, her resolve gave way completely and she screamed soundlessly into the tape.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Old Bob was finishing up the Sunday edition of the Chicago Tribune when the doorbell rang. He’d begun the paper early that morning before church and spent his free time during the course of the day working his way through its various sections. It was part of his Sunday ritual, an unhurried review of the events of the world with time enough to give some measured consideration to what they meant. He was sitting in his easy chair in the den, his feet up on the settee, and he glanced immediately at the wall clock.
Ten-forty. Late, for someone to be visiting.
He climbed to his feet and walked out into the hall, the first stirrings of anxiety roiling his stomach. Evelyn was already standing in the foyer, rooted in place six feet from the front door, as if this was as close as she dared to come. She held her cigarette in one hand, its smooth, white length burning slowly to ash, a silent measure of the promptness of his response. The look his wife gave him was unreadable. They had come home together at dusk, bidding John Ross good night and leaving Nest with her friends. They had unpacked the leftover food and eating utensils from the picnic basket, unloaded the cooler, and put away the blanket. Evelyn had barely spoken as they worked, and Old Bob had not asked what she was thinking.
“Open it, Robert,” she said to him now as he came down the hall, as if he might have been considering something else.
He released the latch and swung the door wide. Four youngsters were huddled together in the halo of the porch light, staring back at him through the screen. Nest’s friends. He recognized