Page 76 of The Instruments of Darkness

“I usually hate that word, ‘frankly,’ but I’m prepared to make an exception in your case because I don’t doubt your essential probity.”

“Perhaps we can set all this aside for a moment,” I said. “Does it matter if I need time to consider the implications of what you’re telling me?”

“Actually, it does. It’s pertinent to the second reason I came here, and the whereabouts of Henry Clark.”

“Go on,” I said. “I’ll try to keep an open mind.”

I could sense her frustration. She’d emerged from seclusion to present her case to someone she hoped might be willing to listen, but the more she spoke, the less likely it seemed that its substance might be accepted. Yet she had come this far, and no purpose would be served by stopping before the end.

“The presence,” she said, “the intelligence that misled me about Edie Brook, I’ve felt it again, for the first time in years.”

“Where?”

“Gretton. I hear Henry Clark crying in the night, but behind it I can make out—well, I can only describe it as a sonic distortion, with the echo of a voice, a murmur, buried deep in its patterns. The last time I heard that murmur was when I thought I was in contact with Edie Brook.”

“And for obvious reasons,” I said, “you can’t go to the police with this.”

“They’d have even less reason to believe me than you do.”

“And suppose I did believe you? I can tell you that I don’t have the resources or the authority to go scouring Gretton for the body of a child. Even if you—or we—did manage to convince the police that Henry Clark might be there, based on whatever evidence was sufficient, any search would have to be narrowed to a manageable area.”

“I know,” she said. “I’ve had to explain in the past how hard it is for me to do that.” She rubbed at her temples with her fingertips, her eyes squeezed closed as though enduring a headache. “But that’s not the only difficulty I have with Gretton. You see, I drove to the town line, but couldn’t go any farther.”

“Why not?”

She looked up at me, her hands still cradling her head.

“I told you. I was afraid.”

“Of whatever you think is there?”

She nodded.

“It’s old. I can apprehend its antiquity. I think it sleeps for years, decades, but it always wakes hungry, and it likes the taste of children. It’s feeding on Henry Clark now, eating his light, and when it’s finally consumed the last of him, it’ll hibernate again. This is a cycle, one that’s persisted for a long, long time. When Henry succumbs, any hope we might have of locating it will be gone. By the time it wakes again, who knows, I could be dead. If I’m not, it may be that I won’t hear the next child crying. Either way, the entity will survive, but the child won’t.”

“How did it get to Henry?” I asked.

“With help, I assume. Evil finds its own. It forms clusters.”

She checked her watch.

“I’m tired,” she said. “I don’t often stay up this late, and I’m not used to people and bars. My brain feels as though it’s being pricked with needles.”

She rose and put on her coat, before remembering the check. She rummaged in her purse, crumpling bills in her hand as she counted them out.

“I’ll take care of it,” I said. “You came all this way, so it’s the least I can do.”

“You listened,” she replied, “and that’s the least you could have done, but I don’t know what else I expected from you. To ride in like the cavalry with guns blazing, all on the word of a solitary woman who still claims to hear departed voices, even after she was denounced as a liar and a fraud? What was I thinking? Such foolishness.”

She tossed some bills on the table and moved past me.

“Do you need a ride?” I asked.

“My car is outside and I have a place to stay in town.” She paused, and her hand brushed my shoulder. “I hope your daughter finds peace, Mr. Parker. I hope you do, too. There just isn’t enough of it—in this world, or the next.”

And she gave herself to the night.

CHAPTER L

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