Chapter 71
Heather felt as if she were drowning.
She could barely breathe, and her mind felt fogged.
But she could hear something.
A steady rumble, as if a train were going past.
Suddenly there was a flash of light, and a terrible crash, and the fog began to disperse.
The motor home.
She was in the motor home with her father—no, not her father!—and there was a storm.
Frightened. She was terribly frightened. So frightened she hadn’t even been able to move when the man had held the rag over her mouth.
All she’d been able to do was take a single, deep breath, hold it as long as she could, then let herself go limp, as if she’d passed out. But it hadn’t worked. The man kept the rag over her face, and finally she had to breathe in the fumes, and she felt herself starting to pass out. Somehow, she’d managed to hold still, not to struggle, not to give any sign at all that she was still even half conscious.
More of the fog lifted, and finally she could open her eyes a tiny bit, just enough to see.
The motor home had changed. Everywhere she looked, everything was blurry, as if covered by some kind of thick not-quite-transparent plastic.
A movement caught her eye, a movement just below her range of vision. She shifted her eyes slightly, and then she saw it: poised above her breast was a hand.
The hand held a knife.
A razor-sharp knife that was moving closer and closer to her.
Her eyes refocused on the face beyond the knife. Her father’s face!
A scream rose in her throat and instantly erupted from her mouth. “No! Dad! Oh, God, no! Dad, don’t!”
As Heather’s howl of terror crashed against his eardrums, Richard Kraven froze, the knife with which he’d been about to make the first perfect incision into Heather Jeffers’s flesh hovering a fraction of an inch above the pale skin of her breast.
Deep within his mind, something stirred.
As the girl on the bed screamed again, the being inside him, the being he thought he’d succeeded in crushing, surged back into consciousness.
For Glen, it was like being jerked out of a deep sleep. One moment there was nothing, and the next he was fully awake. Then, as Heather cried out to him again, all the nightmares he’d had since his heart attack came rushing back to him. All the fleeting images coalesced into a terrible picture of blood, carnage, and death.
And now, in his hand, he held a knife, poised above his daughter’s naked breast, and even as he struggled against the terrible force inside him, he felt an almost irresistible urge to use the knife.
To cut Heather’s skin and flesh.
To expose the bone beneath.
Do it! Richard Kraven’s voice screamed inside his head. Do it now, before it’s too late! As Richard Kraven recovered from the shock of Heather’s sudden scream, Glen felt the power of Kraven’s evil begin to take him once again. Gathering himself together, he seized control of his body for a moment, and hurled himself away from the bed into the farthest corner of the tiny bedroom. “Run!” he screamed. “For God’s sake, Heather, get away from me!”
Instinctively responding to her father’s voice, Heather scrambled off the bed, darted down the narrow passage to the salon, then fumbled with the door for a moment before she managed to yank it open and stumble out into the night. From behind her she heard a great bellow of rage, and then, ahead, a pair of headlights suddenly went on, trapping her in their beam like an insect caught on a pin. For a split second she felt a wave of panic rise up inside her, but then, over the howling wind, she heard a voice calling to her. “Heather! Oh, God, Heather!” Sobbing with relief, Heather broke into a lurching run, and a second later felt her mother’s arms close around her.
Howling with rage, Richard Kraven hurled himself after the fleeing girl, then stopped short in the door to the motor home as the glare of headlights momentarily blinded him. Instinctively ducking away from the light, he retreated back inside, but almost instantly realized his mistake.
The motor home was a trap with no way out except the door he’d just jerked shut!
Leaping back to the door, he shoved it open, then raced out into the blackness of the night, escaping the twin cones of light coming from the automobile just as the first shot was fired, the crack of the exploding shell sharp in his ears, the dull sound of it slamming into the flimsy wall of the motor home almost lost in the wind. “Freeze!” he heard a voice shout, but he ignored the command, racing away into the darkness.
Suddenly another beam of light hit him. He tried to dodge away from it, but it held steady on him no matter which way he turned. Following his instincts, he ran directly away from it, but now was aware of someone following him, chasing him.
He feinted to the right, then cut left, and for just a second he was out of the light. But he was running blind now, his pupils not yet dilated, and then he slammed into something.
His hands groped at it, and just as the white light of the halogen flashlight found him again, he realized what it was. A fence, its wire mesh rising up eight feet from the ground. On the other side was a narrow ledge of rock before the steep bank fell away to the river below.
If he could get over the fence, put it between him and his pursuer, he might still escape. Ignoring the pain as the wire cut into his fingers, Richard Kraven began climbing.
He was at the top, one of his legs already swung over to the other side, when Mark Blakemoor caught up to him, leaping up onto the fence to grab at the one leg that still hung just within his reach. The fingers of both Mark’s hands closed on Richard Kraven’s ankle, and then a scream of agony erupted from Kraven’s mouth as he was jerked down onto the top of the fence, the twisted ends of the wire digging into his testicles, sending spasms of agonizing pain throughout his body. His back went rigid and he thrust his arms toward the sky. Suddenly the night was illuminated by one more bolt of lightning, reaching down from the clouds, searching for the closest point to the ground.
It found Richard Kraven, flashing down to strike his hands, burning its way through his body as it raced down into the fence.
Mark Blakemoor’s body went rigid as the voltage shot through him, but as the electricity finally found the ground it sought and faded into the earth, he dropped to the ground and lay still.
As the roll of thunder the lightning had generated faded, a new sound could be heard above the whistling of the wind through the trees. The wail of sirens grew louder, and then, as flashing red and blue lights raced toward the picnic ground, the rain finally began to ease and the wind to die away.
A moment later two police cars pulled to a stop, their headlights illuminating the macabre scene at the fence. As their doors slammed and their occupants raced toward the body that lay on the ground, Anne Jeffers stood next to Heather, holding her daughter close.
She barely heard the questions someone was asking her, was only dimly aware of the men kneeling by the still form of Mark Blakemoor.
Her own eyes were still fixed on the top of the fence where the body of the man who had been her husband still hung. Then, as she watched, the weight of the body tore itself loose from the fence, dropped to the other side, and disappeared over the edge of the bank. If it made any sound as it fell into the river below, Anne didn’t hear it.
The last of the rain stopped falling, and the wind finally fell completely still. An eerie quiet came over the night. Her arm still wrapped protectively around Heather, Anne made her way through the crowd of people crouched around Mark Blakemoor. She gazed down at him, and for just a moment she was certain that Mark, too, was dead. But then his eyelids fluttered briefly and opened.
His eyes met hers. Their gaze held for a moment, and for just an instant Anne thought she saw exactly the same kind of twinkle in Mark’s eyes that had so often been in Glen’s, back before his heart attack. Then the look disappeared and she was once more looking into the eyes of the detective who had just saved her daughter’s life.
“He’ll live,” she heard someone say as Mark managed the tiniest of smiles, then let his eyes close again.
“It’s over,” Anne murmured into her daughter’s ear. “It’s over, darling, and we’re all right. All of us.”