Ted Dekker - The Bride Collector

No streetlights back here. No moon tonight.

Tempted to whistle but refraining from the indulgence, he placed the shower cap firmly over his head, pulled on the same boots he’d worn during each taking, and slipped on fresh rubber gloves.

He stepped out of the truck and pressed the door closed with hardly more than a click. Locked it with his key. An overgrown walking path wound between scattered trees, thin paltry apparitions that looked like they’d been planted by the developer when the subdivision first opened. Houses hid behind the trees on either side; he could see their fences and darkened rear porches.

He felt as one with all of nature at moments like this, as invisible as a midnight breeze and just as perfectly matched to his mission. No mere mortal could see him there, floating through the darkness, and no insane human could possibly stop him.

Quinton stepped up the path quietly, keeping his senses finely tuned to his environment. Did any of the residents suspect that a man had been walking behind their house for several weeks now, watching from the dark?

Likely not. They were favorites, yet they were stupid and entirely too trusting of their own flesh. Melissa’s house came into view ahead, on his right, and a vast surge of satisfaction rose within him. He peered, exulting. Dark windows. She was sleeping already.

An image of her heel with his bit pressed lightly into her callused skin spread goose bumps over his neck and shoulders. The base of his spine tingled and his breathing quickened.

Bless me, bless me, bless me, bless me, bless me, bless me, bless me, Father.

He approached the edge of Melissa’s blue house, hardly more than a shadow on a moonless night. From the Google satellite, the house was indiscernible. From God’s vantage point, it was nothing more than a speck, than a flake among a million flakes, hardly distinguishable from a tree. Then-zooming in-a computer chip, then a postage stamp, and only finally a house. A black car was driving past when the satellite had taken its last image.

No one peering down, no one except God, could possibly know what slept in the bed inside the tiny house. Just one in six billion, but tonight the only one.

Selected by none other than himself, Quinton Gauld.

He stood still, like a small tree in the dark, and watched for a moment so long that any other person would have found the stillness impossible to maintain. Finally, he unzipped his pants and urinated into a small plastic jar, which he then returned to his pocket.

For a long time he stood and stared, rehearsing details, resuming his inward deliberations.

Brad Raines. Nikki. Nikki, Nikki, Nikki.

His mind shifted to the seventh. You know, don’t you Brad? That I’m going to take her because she belongs to me, not to you? That she will come to me because she is the seventh?

What the FBI agent couldn’t possibly know was that he was nothing more than a puppet on a string. He’d reacted to the note precisely as intended. Smart, Quinton would give him that. Even brilliant. But Quinton depended on exactly that level of intelligence.

Brad would likely have to die to make eight, but this was a small sacrifice. One even the agent would willingly make, once he understood just how beautiful she was.

Quinton set the thoughts aside and let his mind walk around the bed inside the house. He mentally placed himself mere inches from his choice, so close now that his presence would be deemed by the world as an illegal intrusion, a trespass. A violation brash enough to earn a scream from her, should she awaken early. Yet he belonged there, waiting in the dark, savoring the bittersweet pause before her taking.

No longer willing to wait, Quinton decided that he would fetch the bride half an hour early. He retraced his steps to the truck, set his plastic bottle of urine under the seat for disposal later, and withdrew the chloroform. Before she understood what was at stake, she might be frightened by his appearance. He had to transport her safely to the place he’d chosen near Elizabeth, where he could begin his work.

Ten minutes later, he stood at the edge of her back lawn. Not a sound of objection. No new pet, no sleepwalker or insomniac, no barking neighbor dog. Perfect. He walked up to her bedroom window and peered in past the slats. Did Melissa realize there was a thin gap between her mini-blinds and the window frame that allowed anyone to see a sliver of the room, including part of her bed? Perhaps she had known and dismissed the concern, confident that she was special, immune to the outside world.

He made out long lumps in the half-light. It took a full minute for him to understand that he was seeing her legs under the floral bedspread. She was home, as he knew she would be, but seeing her helped him relax.

Though Melissa used deadbolts and had an alarm system with adequate contacts on all windows and doors, cutting the glass on the closet window, though time consuming, raised no alarm. He climbed in, careful not to dislodge the frame and activate one of the contacts.

Using a small penlight to give him enough light to work by, he applied a few tacks of superglue to the edges of the cut glass and replaced the pane. From the outside, no passersby would ever see it had been cut.

Now safely inside the favorite’s house, Quinton took a few minutes to calm himself. He breathed in the warmer air, redolent with the unique smells of the fifth one’s daily existence. He smelled a savory fragrance wafting from the kitchen: some sort of late-night take-out dinner. He smelled dust stirred up by a hidden ceiling fan, whirring in the dark. He even caught a whiff of her perfume, its profile unforgotten since that first encounter weeks before.

At last, he stood, careful not to let his knees crack. He’d studied the house from every window and knew the layout well. He was in the spare bedroom’s walk-in closet on the north side. A hall ran past the living room to the master bedroom, where Melissa now dreamed of anything except the wondrous fate poised to engulf her.

He pulled the small bottle of chloroform and rag from his pocket, cracked the door, and then eased into the spare bedroom. He’d measured the spaces and walked them on the bare ground a dozen times, so even now encased in pitch darkness he knew how many steps to the door, how many down the hall, how many to her bed.

Quinton took them all on slow, padded feet. He waited a moment outside her bedroom door, then turned the knob.

No lock. Of course not. Melissa might be favored and stunning, but she was still quite stupid. Still, he loved her the way God loved her.

Easing the door wide enough to accept his body, he slipped inside. A slight gray glow from the city outside worked past the mini-blinds and offered a hint of light. Enough for Quinton to see her form, slowly rising and falling in peaceful slumber.

He was there now, in the place he’d obsessively fantasized about for the past several days. He let the vast smile within him swallow up the infinite details of his success: the delicious proximity, the sense of power, the barely tolerated anticipation.

It always amazed him how unsuspecting they were. Asleep in their own dull comforts, unaware that there was a higher calling to life. Like sheep wedged together in the pen. Six billion of them.

But he would go after the one.

Quinton doused the rag, returned the bottle to his pocket, and took two steps when the room erupted with light.

He pulled up sharply, stinky rag in his right hand. Melissa stared at him with round green eyes, hair tangled and flung over her left cheek. Her hand was still on the lamp switch.

She wore a white mask of horror that seemed to have muted any scream. But Quinton knew her silence wouldn’t last. Now what? He’d never found himself in this situation. She must have been awake all along.