Ghost Dance (Mark T Sullivan) by Mark T. Sullivan

Author:Mark T. Sullivan
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Suspense
ISBN: 9780380790432
Publisher: HarperTorch
Published: 1999-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

MONDAY, MAY 18

THROUGH THE RAIN-STREAKED PANES of Andie’s bedroom window, Gallagher watched a band of blackbirds land in a stand of staghorn sumac and peck at the crimson seedpods. The blood-red shells fell from their beaks like scabs picked off a fresh wound. Pewter clouds broke up behind the birds. The sun rose, flooding the sky with pink light.

Andie’s breasts swelled against his back. She made gentle noises in her sleep that struck him as the most soothing sounds he had listened to in a long time. Her hand came across his chest.

They had taken it ever so slowly. Each time Andie tensed at his kiss or his touch, Gallagher had backed off and waited for her to get through whatever barrier she had to cross. Somewhere in the middle of the night they were at last joined, and they both cried out in a release stunning in its intensity.

Gallagher knew he should have been content lying there. But instead he felt threatened Andie was capable of opening the glass boxes in his head, of making him feel in a way he had not thought was possible. And he realized that, for some reason, the swelling of that strange emotion inside him scared him as much as the thought of facing Charun again. He tried to move out from under her arm, but couldn’t; and he lay there for the longest time staring blankly at the sunrise, trying to think about the murders and Many Horses’ journal as a way to avoid thinking about Andie Nightingale.

That last message from Charun stayed with him.

Angel said there were many ways to go and return. My Persephone said we could get closest through the shaman’s mixture and the rope. She swelled deliciously tight around me. She bucked and gasped, ‘Vida!’

The mushroom took my head and I came up, arms spread wide, hard and strong with the rope. Persephone has left me behind. Blind and deaf and mute.

But now my mouth opens to taste the mystery. And the light reaches my eyes.

Who was the old man? Gallagher asked himself. Was it Charun’s father? He didn’t remember any paternal figure mentioned in the Charun myths. Where did Charun and Angel want to go and return? The smoke and the rope?

The imagery of swelling suggested sex. But why did Angel gasp ‘life’ in Spanish? Where did she go when she left Charun? Why was light reaching Charun’s eyes because of the homicides? How was all this related to the killings and the journal? And why had Charun whispered ‘Angel’ before he shot at Andie in the forest?

Playing against the back wall of Gallagher’s questions was a larger, perhaps even more disturbing, query: how had Gallagher become so involved, when he had come to Vermont hoping to escape?

Fatigue crashed over him like a wave. His eyelids drooped, blinked open, then shut finally, and despite his every effort, he drowsed into the intoxicating rhythm of Andie’s breath.

In Gallagher’s dream, fog snaked along a river bottom choked with silver-barked trees.

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