Warren Murphy - Prophet Of Doom

On the room's only bed a young girl, not quite in her teens, lay motionless beneath a thin cotton sheet.

"She was discovered by some campers in a forest near Ranch Ragnarok," Smith explained as they entered the room.

"One of the missing girls?" Remo asked.

Smith nodded. "The fourth," he said. "And the last to disappear before Senator Cole's daughter. They must have released her when they went to collect the next girl."

Remo watched the young child in the bed breathing rhythmically, oblivious to all external stimuli. Remo himself had a daughter, and even though he rarely saw her, he knew how he would react if he found out she had been treated like Allison Forrester. He vowed to make Mark Kaspar and Esther Clear-Seer pay dearly for what they had done to the innocent young girls of Thermopolis.

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A strong smell of sulphur exuded from her unconscious body. Smith pulled a pearl gray handkerchief from an inner coat pocket. He placed the bunched cloth over mouth and nose in a vain attempt to block out the offensive odor.

"Since her arrival, I have had a battery of tests run," Smith said, gazing down at the prone figure. "CAT scans. An MRI. All results point to near dormant synaptic activity. It is as though her brain has been completely wiped clean."

"The smoke?" Remo asked softly. He had slid a folding chair close to the bed and sat down beside it, his forearms resting on the retractable metal restraining bar. He breathed in long sips through his mouth so the stink wouldn't affect his olfactory receptors.

Smith nodded. "All children are born with some level of cognition. Even in utero a fetus is conscious of its surroundings—but all of our tests have shown that this girl has. regressed beyond that limited level of awareness. Her responses to external stimuli are back beyond prenatal. We even had to close her eyes for her. She didn't seem to know how to do it without help."

Allison Forrester was a pretty young girl, and while Remo watched her sleep on that strange bed so far away from her home, he thought she looked like some long-forgotten princess from a fairy tale, waiting for a knight in shining armor to revive her with a kiss.

Remo gently pushed a lock of auburn hair from her forehead. The girl stirred, as if awakening from a long slumber. She smiled as she stretched her arms beneath the sheets.

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Smith took a step forward, lowering his handkerchief in surprise. "What's happening?" he asked.

Remo looked baffled. "I'm not sure," he said.

He put his arm above the girl once more. She stretched again, rotating her shoulders as if she was about to awaken.

This time Remo detected a faint movement from over his own bare forearm. He peered closer and saw something that looked like steam rising from his skin. A ghostly phosphorescence. And it was yellow.

All at once the eyelids of the Forrester girl snapped open. Her mouth opened, making rubbery shapes in a desperate attempt to speak. But no sound came out.

The yellow exhalation from Remo's arm gathered and coalesced, hovering like an early-morning fog over the girl's bed. With deep, gasping breaths the girl began to breathe in the yellow mist, like a smoker craving airborne nicotine.

She fell back to the bed, her vacant eyes suddenly content.

Smith was about to say something when the girl spoke.

"Sin-an-juuu..." The voice was that of a long dead soul crying out from beyond the grave. Smith shuddered at the eerie sound. "Sinanju," she wailed. "East has met West. Your destiny will be fulfilled."

Somewhere in the back of Remo's mind, the malevolent presence resurfaced. It had been there all along, flitting at the edges of his thoughts. But as the girl spoke, he could feel the other consciousness grow in strength.

As he stared through the yellow haze, an image

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suddenly appeared in Remo's mind—the same one he had seen in the motel room in Wyoming.

It was as if he were seeing something projected on the wall of the small hospital room. He saw a limitless black expanse at the center of which two figures stood. He did not know how, but he knew that one of the figures was purely malevolent. The other figure stood immobile in his mind, paralyzed perhaps by fear. As the bizarre tableau played on in silence, Remo saw the figure of evil move toward the second, docile creature, the villain's hands raised as if to do battle.

Remo tried to focus closely, attempting to see the combatants more clearly, but the vision started to disintegrate.

All at once the blackness drained from his sight, and he was again in the Folcroft room. The Forrester girl lay before him, eyes open, breathing softly.

He felt a hand on his shoulder.

"What is it, Remo?" Smith asked in a hushed voice.

Remo closed his dark eyes once, squeezing hard. Perspiration oozed from every pore. He leaned on the hospital bed. "I don't know," he admitted. His breathing became labored and he panted, trying to catch his breath. His throat felt raw and swollen.

"Is this like the last fainting spell?" Smith asked.

"Fainting spell?" Remo turned on Smith as if the director were out of his mind. The room was dimming. He realized that the yellow sulphur smoke had somehow expanded. It was as if he were looking at everything through a veneer of yellow gauze. The rotten-egg stench filled the room, clogging his nostrils. He had forgotten to breathe through his mouth.

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"You were out for more than five minutes," Smith said.

"What are you talking about, Smitty?" Remo said.

The smoke in the room was heavy and its sheer thereness crawled with subtle menace. He felt as if there were just enough good oxygen in the room to keep him alive. No more.

"After the girl spoke, you seemed to fade off. The smoke you see was produced somehow by your own body during that interval. Perhaps you absorbed it through your skin at the Truth Church ranch."

Remo began to protest. The words died in his throat.

Both men watched in wonder as the faint yellow haze began to pulsate with the regularity of a steady beating heart. The room gradually brightened as the incandescent fog grew with each passing second.

Remo felt the sensitive hairs on his arm lift and tingle. The strange force within his mind stirred, stretching as one awakened from an ancient slumber.

The yellow smoke rose slowly toward the center of the ceiling as if it were being drawn into a black hole. Smith's blinking gaze followed it. In a matter of seconds, it had formed an odious, swirling mass that completely obscured the dingy acoustical tiles above.

The glowing cloud throbbed with a regularity that was at once familiar and frightening to Remo, for he knew that the pulsing of the living cloud matched the beating of his own heart.

It hovered there, like an octopus of mist drawing its tentacles tightly about it.

Without warning, the swirling cloud gushed down

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from the ceiling. The thick mass of smoke surged into the gently rising chest of Allison Forrester.

At its touch the girl twisted unnaturally. Her head arched back into the hospital pillow, and her mouth shot open, her cracked and swollen tongue darting forward in pain. The force within the yellow cloud passed through her thin hospital nightgown to vanish within the girl's straining bosom.

Mouth agape, Smith looked from the girl to Remo and back to the girl again, trying to comprehend what had just transpired.

Allison Forrester sat bolt upright in bed. She turned to look at Remo. But the eyes that gazed upon him were not the eyes of Allison Forrester. They were as black as beads of liquid tar.

"Why do you resist?" The voice was old and very reasonable. The eyes remained malevolent, and Remo knew that they belonged to the demon force within his mind. "You have only to ask the one you call 'father,' and all will be made clear to you. East has met West, young Sinanju. It is no use resisting. The sun god will have what is his."