“I want to go out there with you,” Brad said.
“Sure,” Jeremy said. “Two sets of eyes, you know how that goes.” He frowned. “But, Rowenna, wait for me there this time, all right?”
“I will,” she promised.
When they were leaving, she slipped an arm through his. “I need to talk to you,” she whispered.
“What’s up?” he asked. She hesitated. Brad was hovering just a few feet away.
“Can it wait till tonight?” he asked.
“Can you come get me by four-thirty?”
“All right.”
She nodded.
Joe bade them goodbye and headed for his office, and Brad and Jeremy walked Rowenna to the museum. June wasn’t at the desk this time, but Rowenna knew the coed who was—Lily Valentine—and Lily handed her the key and sent her back to the reading room, explaining that Daniel had popped out for lunch but would no doubt come join her when he got back.
Rowenna was actually glad to be alone. She started reading about the four killers who all seemed to have followed the pattern set by the Harvest Man, jotting down notes as she went, paying special attention to the number of victims each killer had claimed. Three in one case, four in another, then three again.
Hank Brisbin, the most recent link in the murderous chain, had also been the most prolific. Five corpses had been laid at his door, all of them found in the cornfields, one down to nothing but bones strewn by a bare stake. He’d given a newspaper interview shortly before his execution, and he’d told the reporter, “Seven must come and seven must go, and thus wilt thou Satan forever know.”
Seven.
Was it possible, she wondered, that in each case the killer, the incarnation of the Harvest Man, had been trying to make seven sacrifices but had been stopped before he succeeded?
She leaped up, hurrying toward another bookshelf. She glanced past the volumes on paganism and wicca until her eyes lit on a book with the ridiculously long title of When Worlds Collide: Satanism and the Practice of the Ancients, Runes, Gods, Goddesses, Devils and Demons.
She took it back to the table with her and started reading.
The number seven was often associated with magic, the book said. It was considered a lucky number by some, but according to some of the primitive peoples who had inhabited Europe before the advent of Christianity, it was also the number of sacrifices that needed to be made in order to gain the approval of the harvest gods. Seven goats were still slaughtered at each fall’s harvest festival in certain remote villages on the continent. The seventh son of a seventh son was still widely supposed by many to be a magician, a god or a man possessed of godlike powers.
She turned the page to see a sketch, rude, poorly crafted, hundreds of years old, of a red devil seated upon a high throne, horned and stroking his goatlike beard. His feet were cloven hooves, and his tail—with an arrow-shaped spike at the end—protruded from beneath him.
His other arm was stretched out, his fingers sporting ridiculously long talons and curling around the throat of a woman wearing a crown of leaves and a golden cloak with vines growing from it. The devil’s head was cast back; he was strangling her with one hand alone.
In front of him, upon a black altar, in sheer white gowns, their eyes and mouths opened in their final terror, six young women lay slaughtered, blood pooling around them. The caption beneath the picture read, He must come to know them, and to love them. And so shall he be fed to new life by the blood of the seven he has cherished and taken. Seven, and he will reign over all, for all time, the God of Fornication.
She pushed the book away, feeling ill. This was the New World. This was the here and now. But it didn’t matter.
They might not have found them yet, but there were more bodies out there.
And more to come.
The Harvest Man believed that he had to sacrifice seven women to the earth, to nature, to ensure the harvest and his own eternal power.
And he needed to complete his bloody work before Thanksgiving Day.
17
The road that led northwest of the MacElroy house was in bad shape, forcing Jeremy to drive slowly. Not that he had planned to speed, since he and Brad needed to look carefully at everything they passed, looking for anything suspicious.
All he knew for sure was that if the killer was seizing women and keeping them somewhere, it had to be a quiet somewhere. And if Ginny MacElroy was seeing lights where there shouldn’t be lights…