Headlights(77)

“Did you go see Ryder Smith?” he asks.

I nod, slowly. The shadow lingers. Another appears, on the other side of the dome. Hannah’s eyes flick toward it, and Theo’s attention fixes on her. He smiles again. “You’re going to ask me about the boogeyman,” he says, his gaze cutting to me.

Hannah tenses.

“Do you know who is responsible for these killings?” I ask.

“I know that it knows you,” he says to me. And the shadows go still. Hannah does too. It feels suddenly very stagnant in here, the air thick, the walls tight. Silence.

“The way you scream,” Theo says. “It’s so loud. So bright.”

“What do you mean,” I say slowly. “It knows me?”

“I mean you’ve met it, of course.”

“The boogeyman.”

He nods that slow strange nod. That predatory smile. “You know the boogeyman.”

“I’ve met the person responsible for all of this?”

He nods again. Glances to Hannah, then back to me, smiles again. “You get it yet?”

“If you have any information that could lead us to someone, even if you’re involved in it, we can work out a deal. A pardon, some kind of immunity. We do it all the time. All we need—”

“We’re all involved. Don’t you see? You, me. Hannah Lawrence.” He winks at her. “Even Nat Tillman and Josie Maynor. Even Jack Murphy.”

“How do you know my name?” Hannah says. It comes out more like a whisper.

“I’m telling you, I know. It told me.”

“Who told you?” I say. “What did?”

Behind Hannah, behind both of us, more shadows gather, drift around the space as though in a procession. More of them pouring in from outside, through the closed doors. We have to be imagining this.

“Hannah Lawrence, afraid of shadows?” Theo says. “You are the night. You are the dark and the—”

I glance to the corner. That thick incense swirling from the edges of the room, crawling up and over the low ceiling and coming to fall on us from above.

“What are you burning?” I ask. “What are we breathing in?”

Father Sky smiles. The room starts to sway, a little, and I turn to find every one of the shadows now sitting in rows on the benches. Entirely still. More than a hundred of them packing the space. All the shadows from outside, a congregation in their seats.

“Daniel,” Hannah whispers, a look of terror on her face.

I turn back to Father Sky, Theo Wharton, where she’s looking. And …

He’s standing, on the edge of the dais, facing us. His gaze has gone blank. Eyes glassy. I saw Jack’s daughter have a seizure once. She looked like this, right before.

I tense, don’t know what to do. As Theo Wharton, Father Sky, in the stream of white light shining in from above, starts to convulse on the dais.

His eyes roll back in his head, his face cast up to the sky, arms outstretched, and— Faster than I can track, his body folds in half.

Backward.

Feet still on the mat, the top of his head hits the floor behind him. Hannah jumps. His stomach up toward the ceiling. Arms outstretched wide above the ground as music starts to play, from somewhere. I don’t know where. Hannah is frozen, eyes wide in shock.

Music. Discordant flute or wind instrument plays from nowhere. And Father Sky starts to sway. Slowly. His head making an arc on the floor, face coming around on each side to look up at us, out at the audience of shadows that do not exist. In a daze, I think, this must be what it’s like to go to the circus. This is his show, what people come to see. It has to be. Right? The incense some kind of hallucinogenic. Smoke and mirrors. A contortionist. It can’t be actually— He snaps upright.

Hannah and I both take a step back. I reach for my gun.

Father Sky stands before us and looks out at nothing for a moment, above our heads.

Then, as if something huge is shoved to his chest, he is thrown back, trips over his feet. He collapses on the floor behind his mat, in front of the eagle statue. He knocks over one of his singing bowls, the sound of it clanging through the space with the music, reverberating, echoing around us, as it clatters off the dais.

Father Sky blinks, tilts his head one way and then another, cracks his neck, slowly, strangely. His movements different than before. Less fluid, more jerky.

He looks up. And I know even in my head that it sounds insane. I hardly believe it even as instinctually I know it to be true.

He is no longer Theo Wharton. No longer Father Sky.

It’s Father Sky’s body. But the person before us is now someone—something—else.

Hannah gasps. I look to her. Eyes panicked. A whimper in her throat. I think …

She’s trying to move. But she can’t. She’s frozen to the spot.

I can’t move. I can’t—

Father Sky opens his mouth, and when he speaks, it is a new voice, an inhuman one. One that seems to come from all corners of the space, from outside, from the earth itself. So low and rasped and strange that I think it isn’t possible. It’s ten voices. It’s a hundred. It’s whatever’s in that incense burning in the corner, whatever Theo Wharton has drugged us with. It’s the sound of every loss in a life and every moment of pain.

“DANNY.” it says.

And I am here, but not here.