“There was no time,” he said against her curly hair. “No time to bring you in. Jesus, I scared myself, but I had no choice. And then those howling wind things were there. I honestly can’t say which scared me more—Tammy Tuttle or whatever it was she called the Ghouls.”
She pulled back a bit. “I really don’t understand any of that. You described it all so clearly I could almost see them whirling through those barn doors. But Ghouls?”
“That’s what the Tuttles called them. It was like they were acolytes to these things. I’d really like to say it was some sort of hallucination, that I was the only one who freaked out, but the boys saw them, too. I know it sounds off the wall, Sherlock, particularly since none of you guys saw a thing.”
Because he needed to speak of it more, she just held him while he again described what had burst through the barn doors. Then he said, “I don’t think there’s anything more to do about this, but it was scary, Sherlock, really.”
Jimmy Maitland walked into the men’s room.
“Hey, where’s a man to piddle?”
“Oh, sir, I just wanted to check Dillon out, make sure he was okay.”
“And is he?”
“Oh, yes.”
“Ollie caught me in the hall on my way to the unit, Savich, said you were getting the bejesus whaled out of you in the men’s room. We’ve got a media frenzy cranking up.” Jimmy Maitland gave them a big grin. “Guess what? No one’s going to pound on us this time—only good news, thank the Lord. Great news. Since you were the one in the middle of it, Savich, we want you front and center. Of course, Louis Freeh will be there and do all the talking. They just want you to stand there and look like a hero.”
“No mention of what we saw?”
“No, not a word about the Ghouls, not even speculation about whirling dust. The last thing we need is to have the media go after us because we claim we were attacked by some weird balls of dust called into the barn by a couple of psychopaths. As for the boys, it doesn’t matter what they say. If the media asks us about it, we’ll just shake our heads, look distressed and sympathetic. It will be a twenty-four-hour wonder, then it’ll be over. And the FBI will be heroes. That sure feels good.”
Savich said as he rubbed his hands up and down his wife’s back, “But there was something very strange in there, sir, something that made the hair stand up on my head.”
“Get a grip, Savich. We’ve got the Tuttle brothers, or rather we’ve got one brother dead and one sister whose arm was just amputated at the shoulder. The last thing we need is a dose of the supernatural.”
“You could maybe call me Mulder?”
“Yeah, right. Hey, I just realized that Sherlock here has red hair, just like Scully.”
Savich and Sherlock rolled their eyes and followed their boss from the men’s room.
The boys claimed they’d seen the Ghouls, could speak of nothing else but how Agent Savich had put a bullet right in the middle of one and made them whirl out of the barn. But the boys were so tattered and pathetic, very nearly incoherent, that indeed, they weren’t believed, even by their parents.
One reporter asked Savich if he’d seen any ghouls and Savich just said, “Excuse me, what did you say?”
Jimmy Maitland was right. That was the end of it.
Savich and Sherlock played with Sean for so long that evening that he finally fell asleep in the middle of his favorite finger game, Hide the Camel, a graham cracker smashed in his hand. That night at two o’clock in the morning, the phone rang. Savich picked it up, listened, and said, “We’ll be there as soon as we can.”
He slowly hung up the phone and looked over at his wife, who’d managed to prop herself up on her elbow.
“It’s my sister, Lily. She’s in the hospital. It doesn’t look good.”
2
Hemlock Bay, California
Bright sunlight poured through narrow windows. Her bedroom windows were wider, weren’t they? Surely they were cleaner than this. No, wait, she wasn’t in her bedroom. A vague sort of panic jumped her, then fell away. She didn’t feel much of anything now, just a bit of confusion that surely wasn’t all that important, just a slight ache in her left arm at the IV line.
IV line?
That meant she was in a hospital. She was breathing; she could feel the oxygen tickling her nose, the tubes irritating her. But it was reassuring. She was alive. But why shouldn’t she be alive? Why was she surprised?
Her brain felt numb and empty, and even the emptiness was hazy. Maybe she was dying and that’s why they’d left her alone. Where was Tennyson? Oh, yes, he’d gone to Chicago two days before, some sort of medical thing. She’d been glad to see him go, relieved, just plain solidly relieved that she wouldn’t have to hear his calm, soothing voice that drove her nuts.