Jeffery Deaver - Speaking In Tongues

Now Megan screamed-an insane wail-and as the doctor groped for his wound she slammed her open palm into his face. A huge pop as his nose broke and blood spurted. He went down on his knees. She kicked him near the knife wound and his vision went black from the astonishing pain.

She came forward but he swam back to consciousness quickly and now it was his fist that connected hard-slamming into her jaw, sending her backward into the wall. By the time he was on his feet she was disappearing down the dark corridor.

He touched the wound. The pain was bad. But it was nothing compared with the feeling of shock that raged through him. She’s the one who fooled me! Suckered me in nice and close, got my defenses down. My God, the whole time I thought I was playing her but she led me right into the trap…

Her father’s daughter, Matthews thought in fury and disgust.

He dropped to his knees and began working the fragments of glass out of his wound, actually savoring the pain; he wanted to remember it. He wanted to feel what Megan was about to experience.

The basement…

She plunged into the dim corridors of the hospital, looking for the basement door she’d seen earlier.

Her jaw ached and the back of her head too-from where she’d slammed it into the wall after he hit her. For just a moment she’d thought about leaping on him again-seeing him lying there, blood filling his shirt, blood dripping from his nose. He’d looked half dead. But she wasn’t sure that he was hurt as badly as he seemed. He might have been faking. If he lied with words, he’d lie with actions.

So she ran-to find the basement door.

She heard Matthews’s unearthly scream-it seemed to shake the walls-and then footsteps.

Making slow circles through the corridors, she finally found the door, the one leading to the basement. She grabbed a cinder block and smashed it down on the hasp and lock, which snapped off easily.

Megan flung the door open, looked down into the musty place. For a moment she was paralyzed.

No choice, girl, Crazy Megan the tour guide shouts. Move, move, move.

But Josh, she protested silently, I can’t leave him.

Hey, if you die, he dies. Go!

She clomped down the stairs and found herself in a dimly lit warren of corridors. Trotting slowly from room to room, she took care to avoid the standing water so she wouldn’t leave footprints he could follow.

Please, a door, a window… Oh, please.

She heard the creak of footsteps from the ceiling above her as Matthews made his way to the door she’d just broken open. She found a door leading outside. It was locked. And the windows too were sealed. Another door. Nailed shut.

Goddamn him! C.M. blurts. Why’d he padlock the fucking door upstairs if we can’t get out this way?

Megan didn’t bother to answer. She couldn’t figure it out either. She returned to a room near the base of the stairs and glanced again at one of the windows. The bars on these were wider than the ones on the main floor but she doubted that she could get through.

Fucking hips.

Don’t start! Megan muttered silently and started to turn away. Then she paused, looked back. Thinking: Okay, maybe I can’t get through the bars. But I can make him think I did.

She smashed the glass and pushed an overturned plastic bucket beneath it so that it looked like she’d climbed out.

Then she ran back into the warren of dark storerooms to find someplace to hide.

Most of the cardboard boxes piled in the rooms were too small to conceal her. And she didn’t have the strength to pull herself up into the pipes that ran along the ceiling.

His steps were approaching the door upstairs. Then he started down.

Megan ran into a cluttered storeroom, the farthest one from the stairs. It was filled with cartons, small ones like the others. But over to the side of the room, in the shadows, was a long metal box. It was almost too obvious a choice to hide in but this room was nowhere near the window where she’d faked her escape. And it was pitch dark in here. Matthews might not even see the box if he bothered to look.

Could she get it open? And was it empty?

But Megan stopped asking questions. Matthews was now in the basement. A shuffle of footsteps, a moaning wheeze from the pain of the wounds, words muttered to himself.

Now! Crazy Megan prods her. Go, girl!

Megan unlatched the trunk. It took all her strength to lift the thick lid.

And it took all her willpower not to scream as she looked inside and saw the blue-white flesh, the limp hair, the closed eyes, a dark, shriveled penis, the long yellow fingernails… Cuts and gouges covered the young man’s entire torso, which was further mutilated by the large Y incision from the autopsy. An ear and an arm had been crudely stitched back onto his body.

It was Matthews’s son, Peter. She recognized the eerie face from the newspaper clipping.

Oh, God… My God… Tate, Bett… Somebody!

The footsteps were closer now. They sounded only thirty or forty feet away.

Go on, Crazy Megan urges. Do it.

I can’t do it, Megan thought. No way in hell.

Get inside, C.M. chokes. You have to.

Either you fight him with your fists, she told herself, or you hide in here, Those’re your choices. A moment’s pause. The doctor was now right outside the doorway, it seemed. Then Megan closed her eyes- as if that would lessen the horror-and climbed into the box, lying down on the corpse, on her back, shivering fiercely. She let the lid down. The air reeked of sweet formaldehyde, pickled flesh-she recalled the scent from biology class, hating to be in school at the time but now praying that she could somehow be transported back to that time and place.

And beneath her, terrible cold.

Nothing’s colder than cold flesh.

Then she heard, faintly, a moan very near. Aaron Matthews was in the room.

Crossing a gap in the Shenandoahs, Tate glanced out the window of Bett’s car at the darkened bungalows and ramshackle farmhouses, abandoned barns, the black pits that opened into the network of caverns that laced the earth beneath the Shenandoahs and the Blue Ridge.

They sped past walls of ominous forest-the stark pines, the scrub oak, the sedge, the young kudzu and Virginia creeper. Tate imagined dozens of eyes peering at them and he thought of the Dead Reb once again.

Ten minutes later, well into the Blue Ridge, Tate pulled Bett’s Volvo into an all-night gas station. The elderly attendant glanced at them cautiously when he asked about the mental hospital.

“That old place? Phew” The man cast a dark look westward.

“Where is it?”

“You get back on the interstate and go one more exit..

“We’d rather stick to back roads, if we can.” The state troopers would be looking for him on the highway, a fact Tate didn’t share.

The man cocked his head, shrugged. “Well, that road there. Route one seventeen? Take it west ten, twelve miles till you see a Buy-Rite gas station. Then go left on Palmer and just keep going.”

“We’ll see the hospital?”

“Oh, you’ll see it. Can’t miss it. But I’d wait till sunup. You don’t wanna go there this time of night, no sir. But you asked for directions, not opinions.”

Tate handed him a twenty and they sped off down the road.

They’d driven several miles when a no-nonsense siren burst to life a quarter mile behind them. It was a county trooper. The light bar flashed explosively in Tate’s rearview mirror. He accelerated hard.

“You think he knows it’s us?” Bett asked.

“If he doesn’t he will when he calls in your tags.” Tate’s foot wavered. “What do I do?”