December's Thorn Read online

  Dr. Nelson and I finished up the last of the meal, and I poured her the last of a very nice Côtes du Rhône. Despite the food and wine, I would have confessed to feeling a bit sorry for myself.

  “I mean,” I complained, slumping down in my kitchen chair, “everyone’s up in arms when they think I’ve made up some succubus from beyond, but when said animus mundi turns out to be a very real woman, where’s the commensurate relief, or affirmation? It’s almost as if my friends want me to be out of my mind.”

  Dr. Nelson leaned forward. “Maybe they do.”

  That sobered me a little. “They do?”

  “Maybe they’re more comfortable with your role as resident crazy. Seriously. Every village needs a shaman.”

  “I’m the shaman? Not really.”

  She laughed. “Not really. But the thing about any close-knit social interaction—”

  Alas, she was not to finish that sentence.

  Melissa Mathew’s voice, like a slash in the entire fabric of the night, tore through our heads and shook us both out of our wine stupor. She was screaming as if she were being murdered.

  Dr. Nelson got up so quickly that her chair toppled. I scrambled over it and we both were at my front door in time to see Melissa, wild-eyed and covered with scratches and blood, careening up my front steps.

  “Hurry, God Almighty,” she gasped, “they got Skidmore! You’uns got to help him!”

  Then she tripped over the top step and stumbled into me, nearly knocking me over.

  “What the hell is going on?” I demanded, holding her in my arms.

  “That crazy woman and the little man shot Skidmore and dragged him off down in the cave,” she gasped hysterically. “I chased after them, but I got all lost—and I got scared, tell the truth. Them people’s not right. And Skid’s all tore up. And the damn state patrol ain’t never show up!”

  I don’t know how or why, but an eerie calm overtook me. I took Melissa by the shoulders, stood her up straight, and locked eyes with her.

  “Call the state patrol again now,” I said softly. “Tell them what’s happened. Wait for them here. I’ll go get Skidmore.”

  She saw that I meant to do what I’d said, and nodded, a little trancelike.

  “You’re not going down there by yourself,” Dr. Nelson said firmly.

  “You’re not going with me,” I assured her.

  “Oh, yes I am,” she told me in no uncertain terms. “Who kicked that man’s ass once already, you or me?”

  “David? You didn’t kick his ass, you surprised him. He’s on to you now. He’ll just shoot you in the head the next time you try to mess with him. That is, in fact, what he’s already promised to do.”

  “Look,” she began.

  “I’m the one he doesn’t want to shoot,” I interrupted, “because I’m Issie’s husband, and he’s her protector. Obviously.”

  “Yeah,” she snapped, “he was her love child son a couple of hours ago. You don’t actually know what he is. Except an escapee from a mental institution.”

  “I don’t care.”

  I let go of Melissa’s shoulders, stepped inside to get my heavy coat, and was back out, heading down the steps, before Melissa finally responded.

  “Dr. Devilin, you can’t go down there by yourself,” she said as if I were an idiot. “That little man’s got a big gun and he shoots real good. I’m a call the state troopers, all right. But you wait right here ’til they come, and I mean it.”

  “Okay.” I nodded.

  She took another second to exchange looks with Dr. Nelson, then headed in toward my kitchen phone.

  The second she left the porch, I continued putting on my coat and heading into the yard.

  “Damn it, Fever,” Dr. Nelson whispered.

  But she disappeared inside in a flash, grabbed her coat from its place by the door, and followed me.

  We’d only taken a few steps before I slowed just a little.

  “Damn. I should have thought to get flashlights. It’ll be dark in those caves. I always keep several right by the door.”

  From out of her coat pocket Dr. Nelson produced not one but two flashlights.

  “They were sitting there by the door,” she said. “Seemed like the right thing to do to pick them up.”

  I took one from her. We made our way down with relative ease, trying to be as quiet as we could. As we approached the large rocks where the cave opening was nestled, Dr. Nelson took my arm and put her lips to my ear.

  “Do you have anything like a plan?” she whispered.

  I shook my head.

  “Do we just barge in and hope for the best?” she asked, skeptically, so softly that I could barely hear her.

  “I’ll just look inside to see if they’re, you know, right there,” I whispered back. “If they are, we’ll announce ourselves and enter as if we’ve been invited. If they’re not there, we’ll slip in and see what’s what then.”

  She nodded without comment on the insanity of my proposal.

  We inched our way down the rest of the slope to the rocks, only skidding and sliding a little in the snow. We ended up right at the mouth of the cave, the canvas curtain pulled tightly down to the ground and covered, at the hem, with snow.

  I moved as silently as I could manage, and pulled the canvas ever-so-slightly to one side. The fire pit was burning brightly, and Issie was lying on one of the cots with her back to me. I didn’t see anyone else, but I couldn’t pull the canvas far enough to get a good look at the entire interior. Someone might have been sitting close to the fire, or at one of the makeshift tables.

  I turned back to Dr. Nelson and whispered, “Issie’s right there. Don’t know about anyone else.”

  Dr. Nelson held out her hand with a flourish, as if she were inviting me into a nineteenth-century parlor.

  I shrugged, took a breath, and called out, “Hey, Issie? It’s Fever. Can I come in?”

  She nearly jumped out of the cot. There was shuffling elsewhere, enough to indicate that someone else was, indeed, in the cave with her.

  A second later David snapped the canvas back, gun first, and lowered his face.

  “Dr. Devilin,” he simmered. “Here to see Issie, or your friend the sheriff?”

  “Skidmore!” Dr. Nelson called out.

  David’s arm shot forward and the barrel of his rifle poked me hard enough in the stomach that it tore my coat and brought me to my knees.

  “You’d best tell her to shut up,” he seethed.

  “Do you have the sheriff in there?” Dr. Nelson demanded.

  David pointed the rifle directly at her head, and then called out over his shoulder, “Sheriff? You in there?”

  “Fever,” Skidmore groaned. “Get away, get away from here!”

  “They can’t,” David answered matter-of-factly.

  He motioned with his gun for us to step into the cave. Dr. Nelson helped me to my feet, and we stepped inside.

  Issie was wildly distraught. Upon closer examination in better light, it appeared that she might have been clawing her forearms with her own fingernails. Thin tracks of blood raked her skin, and her eyes were rimmed in rouge. She looked more like a ghost than ever.

  But that wasn’t the sight that burned my brain to a cinder.

  Skidmore’s body was covered in blood, tied to one of the cots with baling wire that bit into his arms and legs so severely that it cut into his clothes and his skin. He was blindfolded with more wire, strands wrapped thirty or forty times around and around his head and eye sockets, a demon’s halo.

  Dr. Nelson took in a sharp breath, just short of gasping. I felt the pit of my stomach churn.

  “If there is any permanent damage to Skidmore Needle,” I said, my voice cold as iron, “I’ll kill you in a way so painful that even you can’t imagine it.”

  “Not if I kill you first,” he said, smiling.

  “Oh yes,” I kept on. “Even if you kill me first. Especially if you kill me first. I’ve been dead several times, and I don’t mind it at
all. I’ll absolutely come after you then, and there won’t be anything in this world you can do.”

  “Hush!” Dr. Nelson barked.

  The sound of her voice echoed in the cave, and it was a genuinely supernatural sound, not a human voice at all. The persuasive hypnotic tones I’d heard her use before were amplified by a factor of a hundred. Issie froze dead as a statue, I lost most of my muscle control, and David recoiled in horror, dropping his gun.

  In the split second after her eerie shout, she snatched up the rifle, thrust it to me, and flew to Skidmore’s side. My mind was clearing just as I saw David recover. Issie collapsed onto her cot.

  I checked the rifle. The safety was off and the bolt had been set. All I needed to do was pull the trigger. I took a few quick steps in David’s direction and the gun was nearly resting on his chest.

  “I can’t get this wire undone,” Dr. Nelson said, her voice desperate, close to hysteria. “God.”

  “David,” I said, barely controlling my urge to fire the rifle, “do you have wire cutters?”

  He grinned maniacally. “Somewhere or another.”

  “Get them.”

  “No,” he said. “I don’t think I will.”

  “These wires are so tight around his head,” Dr. Nelson said, trying to collect herself, “it’s going to be very difficult to cut them off him without really hurting Skidmore.”

  “Don’t care,” Skid said weakly. “Get this off my head. ’Bout to pass out.”

  “Do you think,” I said to Dr. Nelson, inching my way around David to get to the cot where Skid was lying, “that you might hold this gun on David?”

  “What?” She looked up at me, suddenly lost.

  “I understand what David has done,” I said. “It’s actually a variation of an Inquisition technique. He’s twisted the wire somewhere, maybe under Skidmore’s head, so that it would tighten slowly. If you’ll hold the gun on David, I’ll find the twist and undo it.”

  “Oh.” She stood.

  I looked David dead in the eye. “I want you to remember that Dr. Nelson is the one who kicked the snot out of you a little earlier in the day. She might not mean to kill you with this rifle, but she’s not as used to guns as you are. She might slip.”

  I handed the gun to Dr. Nelson. David maintained his manic grin.

  I knelt beside the cot.

  “Skid?” I said softly. “I’m going to try to raise your head up. It’s probably going to hurt because the rest of the wire around your arms and legs is very tight, but getting this thing off your head is the first priority, right?”

  “Right,” he whispered, out of breath.

  I cradled his neck, which made him wince. I raised up his head a half an inch and he screamed so forcefully that he began to cough. Each cough brought spasms of twitching pain.

  But as he was quaking, I managed to ease my hand behind his head. I found a small knot of wire and began to twist it counter clockwise with my thumb and finger. The sharp ends of the bailing wire cut me like thorns, but I could see that the wire was loosening, ever so slightly, around Skidmore’s head.

  He was still gasping and began crying, heaving, wrenching. Slowly, slowly, the bloody blindfold unwound. I have no idea how long it took. Time was meaningless. But finally the wire was lax enough for me to slide it away from his eyes, over the ridge of his eyebrows, ripping a little of the flesh of his forehead, but getting it off. I tossed it into the fire.

  Skidmore passed out.

  I shot up, snatched the rifle from Dr. Nelson, and jumped forward, jamming the barrel into David’s Adam’s apple. It drew blood and I was glad.

  David’s face, at last, lost its grin and he clawed at the air as he fell backward, gurgling. At that moment I actually hoped that I’d opened up his esophagus.

  “Fever!” Dr. Nelson snapped.

  “Find wire cutters,” I managed to say to her in an animal voice.

  The sound of those words frightened me, and made Dr. Nelson step back from me.

  “Cut those wires off Skidmore now.” My voice was still not human.

  Issie began to whimper.

  Dr. Nelson took a few deep breaths, and then, very suddenly, began to look around the cave. Under one of the cots she found a tool kit. In it, she found electrician’s cutters, and used them to snap the baling wire, one strand at a time, first around Skid’s arms and chest, then around his hands and waist, down to his thighs, and finally his ankles. Skid remained unconscious. David remained on the floor.

  Issie, however, sat up.

  “I knew you wouldn’t let us be,” she said, sobbing.

  “Let you be?” I exploded. “Let you torture my best friend?”

  “Not that,” she answered, shaking her head in horror at the sight of Skidmore’s blood-soaked body. “Not that. I knew you’d never understand. I hoped against hope, but it’s always the same. The story is always the same, no matter how many times I tell it, the ending is always the ending, and Tristan is dead.”

  Dr. Nelson shot up and came to my side, her hand on my arm.

  “We have to get Skidmore to a hospital,” she said. “I don’t care what happens to these two at the moment. I care about you, and I care about Skidmore. Leave them. Help me get Skidmore out of this place.”

  “Leave them?” I asked, a little too wildly.

  “Fever,” she said desperately.

  I stared down at David. He was up on one elbow, his eyes heavy-lidded, as if he were groggy or drugged. I kicked his foot to wake him up so that he would see what was coming his way. His eyes widened. Lightning fast I took the rifle by the barrel. I raised it high above my head and let out a primal bellowing anguish, a prehistoric rage. David saw what was coming, brought his arm up reflexively, shrieking with terror. I brought the gun down on the rock floor right next to him so violently that the gunstock splintered into a hundred pieces, the metal bent, and a gunshot exploded. The bullet nicked my right ear ever so slightly. I didn’t care.

  David was still screaming when I threw down the wreckage of the gun, now useless.

  Issie was up. She flew toward David, or so I thought. I was astonished to find that she flew into my arms, sobbing and clutching, her face buried in my chest.

  “Fever, take me, too. Take the sheriff and let me help you and take me, too. I don’t want to be here in this cave a second longer. Not with him. He’s not Tristan. Please take me with you!”

  Skidmore groaned then, and Dr. Nelson and I both looked. David took advantage of our momentary distraction to skitter like a spider into the shadows and then run into the depths of the cave.

  I tossed Issie aside and started after him, but Dr. Nelson caught me by the arm. I nearly dragged her along with me before my mind cleared a little and realized that we really did need to get Skidmore out of the cave and into an ambulance.

  I whirled, strode to Issie, grabbed her elbows, and shook her. “How did this happen?” I demanded. “What did you do?”

  “David did it! David did it!” she squealed.

  “Tell me what happened!” I raved.

  “The—the sheriff, the sheriff,” she stammered, “he and the woman, they came in. No warning. David shot. Then he ran. Down the caves. The sheriff chased him. I sat down. The woman came at me. She meant to do me harm, Fever. She meant to do me harm. I took out my penknife. I cut her good. I would have cut her up, all up, but there were more gunshots, and she took off down the caves. Next thing I know, there’s David dragging the sheriff by his boots. Sheriff’s dead, I thought. I thought, David and me, we get the body onto the cot. But the sheriff wakes up, so David, that’s when David got the wire and all. And I sat down. I was very, very tired.”

  Then she started laughing, her shoulders shaking.

  “David’s not Tristan.”

  “What happened to Melissa?” I snapped.

  “The woman? The sheriff’s woman? I don’t know. She never came back.”

  “Fever,” Dr. Nelson said urgently, “we have to get Skidmore out of here.”


  I glared at Issie another moment, and then nodded once. “Right. You’re right. The rest of this can wait.”

  I let go of Issie and headed toward the cot where Skidmore lay groaning before I heard the first siren.

  Sound on the mountaintop is tricky—sometimes you can hear an owl that’s five miles away but you can’t hear someone step onto your front porch. My mother always told me, when I was quite young, that the trees and the rocks and the air all conspired at night, and if they liked a sound, they allowed it to pass, but if they didn’t, even if it were a cannonball or dynamite, they wouldn’t let it be heard at all.

  I thought of that because it sounded as if the sirens were already up to my house, but they could very well have still been on the highway, not even yet to the gravel and dirt road that wound its way up the steep slopes to my front door.

  Dr. Nelson heard the sirens, too.

  “Police,” Issie whispered desperately.

  “And ambulance,” Dr. Nelson said. “Maybe we should just wait here for them?”

  I was suddenly plunged into doubt. The force that had maintained me, protected me from fear and common sense, while charging into the cave of the lunatics—that power was gone. I was more or less myself again, and uncertain about how to proceed. If we moved Skidmore, we might do more harm. If we stayed, David might come back and kill us all. Then I realized that Skidmore was probably shot, and my head snapped in his direction.

  “Skid, can you hear me,” I said, trying to seem calm. “Are you shot? Did David shoot you?”

  I knelt beside the cot.

  “He did,” Skid affirmed. “But he got me in the jacket.”

  He managed to point to a place in his flak jacket close to his heart, and I could see that it was ripped and exploded.

  “The jacket,” Skidmore gasped, “it keeps the bullet from going into you? But it surely does hurt like hell when the bullet hits. Like being stung by a five-hundred-pound bee. Knocked me down. That little bastard hit me in the head with a rock and dragged me back into here before he started with this wire mess. He did it fast too, like he’s had practice. Fast. Damn. I hurt all over. Where’s Melissa?”

  “She’s safe,” I said instantly. “I think she must have found another entrance to this cave—she found her way out without coming back through here. She’s up at the house, called the state, they’re here now, on their way down.”