The bottom line was that somebody was trying to do something to me, and they were getting closer and closer to doing it.
I found myself unwilling to consider the idea that a real live ancient god was trying to kill me. To begin with, they don’t exist. And even if they did, why would one bother with me? Clearly some human being was using the whole Moloch thing as a costume in order to feel more powerful and important, and to make his victims believe he had special magical powers.
Like the ability to invade my sleep and make me hear music, for instance? A human predator couldn’t do that. And it couldn’t scare away the Dark Passenger, either.
The only possible answers were impossible. Maybe it was just the crippling fatigue, but I couldn’t think of any others that weren’t.
When I arrived at work that morning, I had no chance to think of anything better, because there was an immediate call to a double homicide in a quiet marijuana house in the Grove. Two teenagers had been tied up, cut up, and then shot several times each, just for good measure. And although I am certain that I should have considered this a terrible thing, I was actually very grateful for the opportunity to view dead bodies that were not cooked and beheaded.
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It made things seem normal, even peaceful, for just a little while. I sprayed my luminol hither and yon, almost happy to perform a task that made the hideous music recede for a little while.
But it also gave me time to ponder, and this I did. I saw scenes like this every day, and nine times out of ten the killers said things like “I just snapped” or “By the time I knew what I was doing it was too late.” All grand excuses, and it had seemed a bit amusing to me, since I always knew what I was doing, which was why I did it.
And at last a thought wandered in—I had found myself unable to do anything at all to Starzak without my Dark Passenger. This meant that my talent was in the Passenger, not in me by myself.
Which could mean that all these others who “snapped” were tem-porarily playing host to something similar, couldn’t it?
Until now, mine had never left me; it was permanently at home with me, not wandering around in the streets hitchhiking with the first bad-tempered wretch that wandered by.
All right, put that aside for the time being. Let’s just assume that some Passengers wander and some of them nest. Could this account for what Halpern had described as a dream? Could something go into him, make him kill two girls, and then take him home and tuck him into bed before leaving?
I didn’t know. But I did know that if that idea held water, I was in a lot deeper than I had imagined.
By the time I got back to my office it was past time for lunch, and there was a call waiting from Rita to remind me that I had a 2:30
appointment with her minister. And by “minister” I don’t mean the kind with a position in the cabinet of a foreign government. As unlikely as it seems, I mean the kind of minister you will find in a church, if you are ever compelled to visit one for some reason. For my part, I have always assumed that if there is any kind of God at all He would never let something like me flourish. And if I am wrong, the altar might crack and fall if I went inside a church.
But my sensible avoidance of religious buildings was at an end now, since Rita wanted her very own minister to perform our wedding ceremony, and apparently he needed to check my human credentials before agreeing to the assignment. Of course, he hadn’t 216
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done a very good job of it the first time, since Rita’s first husband had been a crack addict who regularly beat her, and the reverend had somehow failed to detect that. And if the minister had missed something that obvious before, the odds of him doing better with me were not very good at all.
Still, Rita set great store by the man, so away we went to an ancient coral-rock church on an overgrown lot in the Grove, only half a mile from the homicide scene I had worked that morning. Rita had been confirmed there, she told me, and had known the minister for a very long time. Apparently that was important, and I supposed it should be, considering what I knew about several men of God who had come to my attention through my hobby. My former hobby, that is.
Reverend Gilles was waiting for us in his office—or is it called a cloister, or a retreat, or something like that? Rectory always sounded to me like a place where you would find a proctologist.
Perhaps it was a sacristy—I admit that I am not up on my terminol-ogy here. My foster mother, Doris, did try to get me to church when I was young, but after a couple of regrettable incidents it became apparent that it wasn’t going to stick, and Harry intervened.
The reverend’s study was lined with books that had improbable titles offering no doubt very sound advice on dealing with things God would really prefer you to avoid. There were also a few that offered insight into a woman’s soul, although it did not specify which woman, and information on how to make Christ work for you, which I hoped did not mean at minimum wage. There was even one on Christian chemistry, which seemed to me to be stretching the point, unless it gave a recipe for the old water-into-wine trick.
Much more interesting was a book with Gothic script on the binding. I turned my head to read the title; mere curiosity, but when I read it I felt a jolt go through me as if my esophagus had suddenly filled with ice.
Demonic Possession: Fact or Fancy? it said, and as I read the title I distinctly heard the far-off sound of a nickel dropping.
It would be very easy for an outside observer to shake his head and say, Yes, obviously, Dexter is a dull boy if he has never thought DEXTER IN THE DARK
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of that. But the truth is, I had not. Demon has so many negative con-notations, doesn’t it? And as long as the Presence was present, there seemed no need to define it in those arcane terms. It was only now that it was gone that I required some explanation. And why not this one? It was a bit old-fashioned, but its very hoariness seemed to argue that there might be something to it, some connection that went back to the nonsense with Solomon and Moloch and all the way up to what was happening to me today.
Was the Dark Passenger really a demon? And did the Passenger’s absence mean it had been cast out? If so, by what? Something overwhelmingly good? I could not recall
encountering anything like that in the last, oh, lifetime or so. Just the opposite, in fact.