John Saul - Black Lightning

The voice that only today had wanted him to open Kevin’s chest and hold his son’s heart in his hands.

No!

He couldn’t give in to it — he wouldn’t! He struggled against the blackness, forcing it back, willing himself not to disappear into the dark pit that yawned around him. Then he heard something else. A low rumble, slowly building, drowning out the mocking laughter. He concentrated on that sound, shutting out the laughter until the blackness began to recede. His vision cleared and slowly he realized the pain had vanished.

Not simply eased — it was completely gone.

But he felt exhausted, as if he’d just run a marathon. His legs felt rubbery, but as he climbed slowly back to his feet, gripping the rail with one hand, resting part of his weight against the wall with the other, they began to feel stronger, and finally he was able to make his way up to the kitchen. As he emerged from the basement door, he saw rain slashing against the window, and then there was a sudden blinding flash of lightning.

Once again pain slashed through Glen’s head like a hurled spear, and once again he was dropped to his knees by its blinding force. When the lights in the kitchen dimmed briefly as the lightning died away, Glen didn’t see it, for again the black abyss had opened before him. The clap of thunder that burst over the house a second later with enough force to rattle the windows sent him whimpering to the floor while from deep within him the terrible laughter once again erupted.

A visage of evil now appeared before Glen in the darkness, a face whose features radiated such heinous inhumanity that Glen recoiled from it. As the terrible pain in his head grew more intense, Glen cowered into the black shroud closing around him, no longer battling the blackness and the pain, but only seeking refuge from the torture being inflicted upon him.

And as Glen Jeffers’s spirit steadily weakened, the spirit of Richard Kraven — seeming to draw strength directly from the electrical storm that raged beyond the confines of the house — burst forth to take total control of the body that until this moment it had been forced to share. Now, seeming to draw more power with every bolt of lightning that flashed across the sky, Richard Kraven drove Glen Jeffers deeper and deeper into the abyss.

So deep that soon there would be no trace of Glen Jeffers left.

Never again would Richard Kraven have to wait for Glen Jeffers to sleep, nor would he have to steal quick moments when rage — the kind of rage only his brother and his mother had been able to inspire — gave him the strength to overcome Glen, at least for a little while.

Now, finally, Richard Kraven was utterly free to do as he pleased.

Rising from the floor, exhilarating in his liberation, Richard Kraven moved leisurely through the house.

Coming to the computer in the den — Anne’s computer — he quickly manipulated the mouse to trace the history of the files she had been studying.

Obviously she’d had no trouble figuring out to whom the pocketknife must have belonged.

Had she figured out how close to the truth Maybelle Swinney had come when she’d tried to make a joke?

Probably: unlike Maybelle Swinney, Anne was smart.

But where had she gone?

To Mark Blakemoor, probably. Even if she wasn’t with him right now, she soon would be.

But neither of them could yet suspect the truth, and in the end, when finally he lost this body as surely as he’d lost his own, at least his reputation would be restored.

Glen Jeffers would be convicted of all of it.

For Glen Jeffers, Richard Kraven had decided, would be caught in the act. Indeed, the only thing he’d changed his mind about was whom he would choose to be the subject of his final experiment.

Anne had been his first choice, of course. But now he’d come to a new decision.

An elegant decision.

The kind of decision that was worthy of a man of his intellect.

Anne would stay alive.

And in his own final moment — or at least in the moment before he left this body to find a new one — he would see the expression on her face as she watched her husband clutch her daughter’s heart in his hand and tear it from her breast.

For the rest of her life Anne would live with that memory.

Richard Kraven’s reputation would be totally restored.

And Anne Jeffers’s entire life would be utterly destroyed. Justice would be served.

Sitting down at Anne’s desk, Richard Kraven began writing one last note. And this time he made no effort to keep from leaving Glen Jeffers’s fingerprints all over it. Then, leaving the note where Anne would be sure to find it, he left the house. There were preparations to make for his final experiment.

The one he would perform on Heather Jeffers.

The worst of the thunderstorm had moved eastward, and the dismal gray of the rainy afternoon had given way to a glittering darkness. The wet pavement shimmered brightly beneath the streetlights. As Anne turned left from Highland onto Sixteenth, she braked a little too sharply and felt the rear end of the car drift slightly to the right. It wasn’t until she’d recovered from the brief skid that Anne noticed the empty spot on the right that had still been occupied by the motor home when she and Kevin had left the house nearly two hours before. At least they wouldn’t have to walk too far in the downpour. Locking the car, she followed Kevin up the sidewalk, then climbed the flight of steps to the house, arriving on the porch just as Kevin was opening the door. “Glen?” she called. “Heather? Anybody …” Her call died on her lips as she felt the emptiness within the house, the same kind of emptiness she’d experienced while Glen had been in the hospital.

Today, though, something had changed. Always before when she’d been alone in the house, the place was still filled with the vibrancy of her family. This evening that vibrancy was gone; the house had taken on the dead feeling that had pervaded it the first day they had walked in.

Trying to banish her rapidly growing uneasiness, Anne strode quickly through the dining room to the kitchen. No note posted on the refrigerator door; the message light on the answering machine was not flashing. But the door to the basement stairs stood open. Not quite certain why the open door struck her as foreboding, Anne went to the top of the stairs and peered down into the work area below. The white glare of the fluorescent light shone down on the cleared surface of the workbench. Frowning, Anne started slowly down the stairs, her gaze fixed on the workbench. Only when she’d come to the bottom of the stairs did she notice the other things that had been done.

The meticulously sorted containers of hardware.

The perfectly vacuumed floor.

For nearly two decades neither she nor Glen had even bothered to complain about the mess on the workbench, let alone clean it up.

Now it looked as pristine as an operating room.

Turning away from the workbench, Anne remounted the steps, searched the refrigerator door once more for a message from Glen, then went to the den. Maybe he’d left a Post-it on her monitor. But it wasn’t a yellow square that she found. It was an envelope with her name written on the outside.

Written in a familiar spiky script.

Recoiling from the envelope as if it were a coiled viper preparing to strike, Anne snatched up the telephone, her fingers punching at the buttons even as her mind tried not to imagine what the message inside the envelope might be, much less the terrifying significance of its presence on her desk. “Can you come over here?” Anne asked, the instant the phone was picked up at the other end. “Something’s happened—”

“Five minutes,” Mark Blakemoor replied. “Is that soon enough? Do you need me to call 911 for you?”