Chapter Twenty-one

"Well, yes, that's right, Mike."
"She's a good friend of my wife's. She was on a date with my stepson!"
Mike Banion thundered off into the churchyard. A mo­ment later his old Dodge was skidding its way out
of the muddy parking lot.
For a long time Father Harry Goodwin simply sat, staring. Then he tried to pray. His words mocked him,
and soon lost themselves in silence.
Chapter Four
They guided Jonathan to a car and took him home. They bathed him and attended him, six young
sisters in their red habits, and a grave man of perhaps thirty who was so gentle he must love him.
He laid his exhausted friend in his bed.
Jonathan dreamed of wet leaves stinging his face, snatch­ing at his arms. He raced through a vicious
jungle of grasping plants and slick, seething creatures barely seen. In this dream he ran with the strength of
a wild animal and the hunger of a ghoul. He pursued a woman.
"He's having a nightmare," one of the sisters said. "Shouldn't we wake him, Jerry?"
"Let him sleep." Jerry Cochran stroked Jonathan's sweaty forehead.
In his dream Jonathan stretched out his arms, grabbed at his dream-woman's flying hair, screamed out
his desire. She raced on through long, dripping alleys of trees, past flicker­ing candles and bloodied crosses.
"Jerry, he's suffering!"
"We have to let him sleep, otherwise the hypnosis may be permanently weakened. He mustn't be allowed
to remember what he did." He looked long at his young friend. "Or what he is."
Jonathan heard none of this. He was utterly lost in him­self, racked by his nightmare. In it he got his
fingers in her hair, he dragged her down, he sat astride her.
He tried desperately to wake up. The hands that had grabbed her were not his hands, they were ugly and
horn-hard and full of evil strength.
His watchers heard a noise downstairs, the slam of a door, the pounding of Mike Banion's footsteps. "If
he knows, we kill him," the young man said laconically.
One of the sisters withdrew a long, thin blade from her habit.
They retreated into the back hall as Jonathan screamed the broken screams of great agony.
Mike came running up the stairs, oblivious to the thick­ened shadows at the far end of the dark hall.
"Wake up, Jonathan!" Mike shouted over the roaring shrieks.
Jonathan heard the voice but it was too faint for him to make out the words. The nightmare continued.
He smoothed back the obscuring fog of his victim's hair and looked upon her face. Her mouth opened and
a scream swarmed out like a flight of wasps—and then his anger possessed him, his horrible, vicious anger,
and made him delight in the way her flesh swept from her bones as he stroked her. Beneath his scaly
palms it scraped away as skin might during the flaying of a rabbit.
This was the worst ever, the most wicked dream he had ever had. And he couldn't stop it. He watched
himself tear the skin off her knotting, twisting muscles. His own screams mingled with hers.
"Wake up! Wake Up!" A frantic voice was calling to him.
Help me! Please help me!
"Wake up!" His savior grabbed his shoulders and shook him so furiously the dream finally snapped.
"Wake up, son," Mike Banion was saying. "You and I have a big problem."
"Dad?" His own voice was a whisper. Mike had him by the shoulders, had pulled him half out of the bed.
Mike threw his arms around him. "Wake up, Johnny. This is a serious problem."
Jonathan hugged him back. He had come to love gruff Mike Banion. Although Mike could be fierce, the
cop loved him too, in his own way. Behind the tough exterior the love was there. Definitely. But in his own
way.
"I've got a hard thing to tell you, Johnny."
Jonathan looked into the detective's eyes. The intensity of the dream made even the reality of Mike seem
vague, as if he were on the other side of a dirty window. Jonathan tried to bring things into focus, to prepare
himself for whatever unimaginable tragedy had occurred. "Okay, Dad."
"Your girl is in the hospital. She got raped."