John Saul - The Right Hand of Evil

"No, of course not," Janet soothed, stroking Kim's hair. "I know dreams can seem real, but they aren't. And you mustn't let them frighten you."

Sniffling, Kim sat up and wiped at her eyes with the sleeve of her nightgown. "It's just that Jared's changed," she said. "He isn't anything like he used to be." She looked bleakly at her mother. "You know how I used to know what Jared was thinking? What he was feeling?"

Janet smiled. "The Twin Thing."

Kim nodded. "It was like that tonight. It was like I knew exactly what he was doing. I could see it as clearly as if I were standing right next to him. He-He had a knife, and Scout was lying on a table, and-" Her voice broke into a choking sob.

"But it wasn't real," Janet assured her once again. She got off the bed and gently pulled Kim to her feet. "Come on. "I'll show you. We'll go down to the kitchen and get Scout, and he can come up and sleep with you tonight. Okay?"

Nodding, Kim let Janet lead her out of her room, down the stairs, and into the kitchen.

"Scout?" Janet called out softly.

There was no welcoming thump of the big dog's tail banging against the wall as he wagged it. There was only silence.

Janet switched on the light.

Scout's bed was empty.

She frowned, trying to remember when she'd last seen the dog.

She wasn't sure. "He has to be here somewhere," she said. "Come on."

But fifteen minutes later, Janet and Kim both knew that Scout was gone. Nor did he come when they opened the back door and called him.

"It doesn't mean anything," Janet insisted as she and Kim climbed the stairs back up to the second floor. "He might have gone off with Jared this afternoon."

"He doesn't even like Jared anymore," Kim said, her voice wavering. "That's why he sleeps in the kitchen now!"

"Then maybe he went with your father," Janet said. But she'd watched Ted leave, and hadn't seen the dog go with him.

But there was something else that could have happened, something that she could see had already occurred to Kim: If Scout had vanished into the woods the same way Muffin had on the night they'd moved into the house, would he be found the same way the cat had?

Just the thought of it made Janet shudder, and as if by mutual consent, neither she nor Kim even mentioned that possibility.

The cabin lay dark and hushed beneath the pale silvery light of the moon. Jake Cumberland's hound was perfectly still, flattened against the ground beneath the cabin's floor. He'd neither moved nor made a single sound since he'd first scented the two figures stealing through the darkness toward the house. Had the chain not restrained him, he would have fled away through the covering darkness rather than slunk into the meager shelter provided by his master's house.

The night prowlers had gone silent; neither owls nor bats swooped and flitted in search of prey, for every creature they might have sought had vanished into burrows beneath the ground or hollows inside the trees.

No fish jumped in the lake, no frogs croaked along its bank; even the insects they hunted had ceased their nightly feeding and mating.

The quiet of death had fallen over the night. A dark cloud scudded over the moon as if to protect even it from bearing witness to the ceremony taking place within the cabin's walls, where five flickering candles on the table struggled to hold back the descending darkness.

Luke Roberts stood next to Jared Conway, his unblinking eyes fixed on the object that lay on the table in the center of the pentagram formed by the candles.

In his right hand, Jared held a knife-its cutting edge honed to razor sharpness by Jake Cumberland's own whetstone and strop. As he clutched its leather-bound haft, the instrument itself seemed to speak to him, whispering of the creatures it had disemboweled, the hides it had slit, the flesh it had slashed. Jared lowered the knife toward the offering on the table, but just before he drove the blade into the creature's breast, he gazed one last time into its eyes.

"Don't," he heard his sister's voice whisper inside his head. "Oh, God, Jared, please don't."

Jared hesitated as Kim's voice, only dimly heard, tugged at him, tried to restrain him. It was as if he stood on the edge of a dark and fathomless abyss, feeling inexorably drawn to it. Every fiber of his being wanted to step over the edge, to drop into the darkness below, plunge deep into whatever lay within the blackness that beckoned to him.

And only Kim's dimly heard voice held him back.

"Don't," her voice whispered again. "Please, Jared. Don't."

Jared's eyes moved from the body of the creature to its head.

Scout lay on his back, his legs splayed wide as if to expose his belly in submission to some far stronger creature than he. His head lolled to one side. His mouth lay open, his tongue hung out.

And one of his eyes-his soft, trusting brown eyes-seemed to gaze up at Jared, as if joining in Kim's whispered plea.

But it was already too late. He plunged the knife into the dog's heart and Scout's life ended with a silent spasm.

Now all that remained was to carry out the ceremony, to offer his pet to his new master.

Pulling the knife from the dog's corpse, he lowered its point until it just grazed the skin of Scout's belly.

Yet still he hesitated, looking one last time into Scout's eyes, hesitating as, fleetingly, a brief, flickering doubt entered his mind, as though something within was telling him to step back-step back from the edge of the abyss.

Too late. With Kim's pleading voice fading away, he felt himself slide into the darkness. As Luke watched, Jared slipped the point of the knife through the retriever's hide and ran its edge up the center of its belly and chest to its throat. Four more slits ran up each leg, and then he began peeling the skin away from the flesh below. He worked quickly, the blade seeming to guide his hands as if the knife itself had performed the work so often, it needed no aid from him.

Deftly, he sliced through the abdominal muscles, then cut away the creature's entrails.

He cut through the rib cage and laid open the animal's chest, exposing the lungs and heart.

Raising the knife high, Jared muttered a dedication of the blood offering he was about to make, then plunged the knife deep into the heart. Dropping the knife, he plunged his hands into the blood that oozed from the punctured heart into the chest cavity. With reddened fingers he anointed Luke's forehead.

Plunging his hands again into the gore within the slaughtered dog, he moved away from the table and began tracing patterns on the cabin's wall, intricate designs that rose out of some hidden place in his subconscious, flowing from his bloodied fingertips onto the ancient wood. And as he etched the design in blood, muttered imprecations-unintelligible curses condemning the man who had lived his entire life within the cabin's shelter-flowed from his lips.

Jake Cumberland's eyes flicked open in the darkness of his cell. He felt disoriented for a moment, but slowly his mind cleared and he remembered where he was. And why.

He wasn't going to get out of jail-he already knew that. His mama had explained it to him when he was small: "Don't ever do nothin' that'll let 'em put you in jail," she'd told him. "'Cause once they gets you in, they ain't gonna be lettin' you out again. Not around here. Onliest way they ever gonna let you out is at the end of a rope. That's what they did to my daddy, Jake, when I was no bigger'n you. They came for him one night, and took him down and tied a rope around his neck, and after that I didn't have a daddy no more. So you watch yourself, hear?"

Now, in the blackness of the Halloween midnight, he heard another voice. An evil voice, whispering inside his head.

Do it yourself, Jake, the voice said. Don't wait, Jake. Don't wait for morning. Do it now.