For a long and terrible moment, Emily Lindstrom felt that she was losing her sight. After pushing past the partition covering the tower's downstairs window, she had climbed up over the sill and dropped down into the shifting dusty darkness of the ground floor.
Everything was fine, then. She could hear Dobyns on the steps somewhere above her. All these years of searching, of investigating, and now the time was drawing near…
But then she had started climbing the steps and it was then she became-for the first time in her years of trying to find the truth for the sake of her brother and her family-afraid.
She wasn't even sure why she so suddenly felt her chest gripped with terror and why her legs felt so wobbly and why her body was sheathed in an invisible sticky body bag of sweat…
But she continued higher, higher.
Every seventh step in the darkness, her shoes grating against the sandy surface of the steps, the staircase wound tightly around just like a… snake.
There was no light whatsoever at this point. The staircase was narrow and confining as a coffin.
Higher, higher.
The words of the incantation began to fill her mind and silently touch her lips.
What if, when she confronted him, she got scared and forgot the incantation?
What then?
Higher, higher.
At one point she stumbled and reached out a quick hand to save her from striking her face against the edge of a step.
The grainy surface of the concrete cut deeply into her hand and she grimaced, the pain playing into her and making her feel even more vulnerable now that she was frightened.
But she continued to climb.
Nothing could deter her now; nothing.
Dobyns stood in the tower's lone room, waiting.
The floor was littered with bones of various kinds, both human and animal. There had been many sacrifices up here over the years, especially back in the days when a few members of the original cult were still alive.
Dobyns could feel the snake within him pressing against the curve of his belly.
The snake, too, was excited. Waiting.
By the time she reached the final step, she was completely out of breath. She put a hand against the rough stone wall and simply held on, letting her breath rip through her lungs and chest in deep, shuddering spasms.
Before her was the dark shape of a small door. Inside, she knew, Dobyns waited for her.
In just a minute or so-
She put her hand out to the door-
— reached the knob and turned it-
— and pushed the door inward and-
There was just enough light to see Dobyns standing in the centre of the tiny, circular room.
His eyes appeared to be closed. His hands were at his side. Faintly, she could hear him breathing, as if the dust and dampness of this place had disturbed his lungs.
She stepped into the room.
And saw his eyes fly open.
The pupils were a glowing amber colour.
He spoke in a voice that could not possibly be his own, low and raspy and guttural. "Have you come to give me your pussy, Miss Lindstrom?"
My God, he-
"Or perhaps you want to suck my cock"
There in the darkness, the glow of his eyes held with a terrible power she could not break
She walked closer to him. "I came to help you."
And he laughed, the sound of it as obscene as his words. She put out a tentative hand, wanting to touch him and see if the rest of him was as inhuman as his eyes.
And then she saw the struggle taking place in his stomach and chest.
The serpent was beginning to work its way up inside his chest. So violent was this shifting, this climbing, that Dobyns began to sway with its rhythms.
"I can help you," she said.
"The same way you helped your brother?"
"No, please, you've got to believe me. I know words that can-"
And just then the snake inside him threw Dobyns back against the wall and for a moment the man's voice was his own. "Help me, Miss Lindstrom! Please! Help me!"
As Dobyns stood writhing against the wall, his entire body shaking and shimmying as the snake struggled upward inside him, she walked closer-
— and then closer still-
— and began to speak the incantation she'd found in the old diary kept by one of the cult members who'd tried to free herself of the snake's domain.
And so Emily Lindstrom began. "In the name of the Divine Saviour, I command that the evil beast within you-"
And then it burst free, the serpent inside Dobyns.
Dobyns's eyes went dark, as if he had been suddenly blinded, the amber glowing eyes belonging to the head of the huge snake that now burst free of Dobyns's mouth.
Emily continued the incantation. She knew it was the only way.
The snake, about two feet of its body uncoiling from the man's mouth, snapped its head wildly back and forth like a heat sensing device seeking a target.
"I command that the evil beast within you-" Emily Lindstrom went on.
And then the great uncoiling snake, eyes glowing an even deeper amber now, struck with a ferocity Emily could not believe.
It struck her face, more specifically her mouth, sinking its two angled teeth deep into the flesh of her tongue.
And then it began to snap its head back and forth again, ripping her tongue out from its roots as it did so.
She screamed as she saw her own tongue torn free from her mouth, the snake holding it bloody in its teeth, and finally flinging it across the room against the wall.
Emily fell to the floor, uselessly covering her mouth with her long, lovely hands. She was trying to stop the blood that poured from her mouth now. But of course it was no use.
The snake began to go back inside Dobyns. And eventually the dead dark eyes of the man filled once more with the shining amber light and the snake coiled again around his intestines.
He left the sobbing, hysterical woman on the floor and quickly ran down the steps deeper, deeper into the darkness of the tower.
He had one more thing to do tonight.
His mind was filled with Marie Fane's melancholy, pretty face.
O'Sullivan said, taking her hard by the wrist, "You've got to tell them, Holland. And right now."
"But her brother. She's-"
"To hell with her brother. Dobyns is a very dangerous man. If you really think he's up there-"
"Shit," Chris said. "You're right. As usual."
They were standing in the middle of it, all the craziness, the big emergency vehicles that looked like giant electronic bugs.
The cop people and the Hastings House people and the press people and the just-plain-gawkers people running back and forth between various buildings of the institution and the driveway that was packed with official cars.
After Emily Lindstrom had walked over to the tower, Chris had found O'Sullivan and asked him about his interview with the retired janitor. O'Sullivan had rolled his nice blue Irish eyes and told her about the pet rat the guy carried around on his shoulder and the way he shared his Oreos with the rat and how Oreos made him fart.
"Oreos make him fart?" she'd said.
"That's what I'm telling ya, Holland. The guy's a fucking fruitcake."
"So you didn't believe his story about the cult and all that?"
And he'd looked at her directly-accusingly, actually-with those nice Irish blue eyes and said, "You mean to tell me you do believe him? The Lindstrom woman is one thing but this guy-"
"Well," she'd said, "Not exactly believe him but then not exactly not believe him, either, if you know what I mean."
So now, standing beside her with red and blue lights lashing across the brick buildings, and a fine cold mist starting to come down, and the people moving in every direction-all this going on, O'Sullivan said, "You've got to find the cops and tell them."
"I'm sorry, O'Sullivan. I wasn't thinking very straight, was I?"
"No, you weren't. Now go find the fucking cops."
"The fucking cops," she said. "I'll go find them."
And that's just what she did.
"Hi," she said to Detective Staley, a chunky guy who still wore Wildroot (she wanted to point out to him sometime that he'd shown great wisdom in keeping his hair greasy right through the sixties and seventies and eighties, seeming to know instinctively that the look would be back in the nineties).
"Hi," he said. He was watching the last body bag and shaking his head. "I'm kinda busy, Chrissie." He always called her that. He'd told her he had a daughter that name.
"I know you're looking for Dobyns, Hal."
"No shit, we're looking for Dobyns. You should see what he did to those three guys in the garage down there." He shook his head again.
"I think I know where he is."
And right then Detective Hal Staley did a double take that Shemp would have been proud of. "You know where Dobyns is?"
"Yeah," she said, sorry now she hadn't told him ten minutes ago. "Yeah, I do."
She went back to O'Sullivan who was shouting instructions to two young reporters who'd clearly got their Ph D's in hair spray.
"So you tell 'em?"
"So I told them," she said.
She pointed to two uniformed cops pushing the big searchlight rightward, toward the tower.
"They're going to go looking for him," she said.
O'Sullivan smiled at her. "I don't know whether to give you a kiss or pat you on the ass."
She smiled back. "Later on, why don't you try a little of both?" Goddamn, could she get corny about this guy, she thought.
And then, moments after the searchlight splashed acrdss the top of the stone medieval tower, somebody shouted, "Look, there's a woman in the window."
Chris turned to see and immediately got her first good look at Emily Lindstrom up there in the lonely tower window, the same kind probably that Rapunzel used to let her hair down.
And Chris screamed because this wasn't the Emily Lindstrom she knew at all.
Not with blood pouring out of her mouth and her hands fluttering wildly about her blood-splashed hair.
"Oh, God," Chris said, "Oh, God."