The Heavens Rise Read Online Free

and realized he’d been the cause of it. In the darkness, he could just make out the white’s of Nikki’s eyes. He had taken her by both shoulders and slammed her head into the side of the pool.
    “Marshall,” she said quietly. But there was a trembling edge to her words that sounded like both a question and a challenge. Just by saying his name she was asking him how much further he was going to go. That Nikki Delongpre, nothing gets to her. Not even concrete. But he had gotten to her, all right. She was terrified. Paralyzed, hardly hysterical, but terrified nonetheless. And for a moment he thought about doing something to her, something really bad, something he’d never done before.But she wouldn’t keep it a secret, not like the other skanks he liked to play with. And if she wouldn’t keep it a secret, that meant whatever he did would have to be . . . final.
    “Marshall, I’m going to get out of the water now.” Soft, gentle and condescending, like she was talking to a man with a gun. And wasn’t she, in a way? After all, he was taking stock of certain things, like the fact that she’d kept everything between them such a secret. Had she even told anyone she was out there with him? How far away was the nearest neighbor? A ten-minute boat ride?
    Too much work.
    That’s what it came down to in the end.
    He allowed her to slide free of his grip and hoist herself up onto the flagstones. As soon as her feet were on solid ground, she grabbed for the flashlight and wheeled on him. “You son of a—” but the words died in her mouth when she saw what the beam had landed on.
    The pool was full of them.
    At first he thought it must be some kind of plankton, or maybe even sawdust left over from the construction. But these things weren’t the color of wood, they were the color of skin, and they were everywhere, clustered together in beige clumps that looked like shredded human flesh. And they were drifting through the water with determination, driven by currents he couldn’t feel.
    Then darkness descended over him as Nikki took off running, the bouncing beam marking her path toward to the driveway. He could hear the jangle of the keys she’d already pulled from her pocket, could see her furiously wiping her other arm across her shirt, too frightened of him to stop and see how many of the crawly little things from the pool were still clinging to her.
    He was still hoisting himself out of the pool when the 4-Runner’s engine sputtered to life and the headlights swung out into the swamp’s darkness and disappeared.
    He wiped his arms in the darkness for a few minutes. But he didn’tcare. And he didn’t care that she’d just abandoned him either. No, what mattered most to him, what would cling to his soul most forcefully about this night in the days to come, was the realization that he’d allowed her to escape, a realization that now felt as overpowering as discovering you had cancerous tumors all through your body.
    I decided not to kill a woman because it sounded like too much work.
    Finally he forgot about whatever the pool was full of and just stood there, letting the water run down his body and onto the flagstones. And what steadied his breaths, what chased away his memory of her flashlight beam bouncing off in the direction of her 4-Runner, was a new series of images that came to him unbidden.
    Nikki Delongpre was staring up into his eyes as he held her to the mud a few feet away from where he stood now. One hand was around her throat, the other was drawing a paring knife up the length of her torso, slicing the flesh over her breastbone, drawing a red thread past the breasts she had refused to reveal to him. In this vision, Nikki did not scream or cry out or beg for him to stop. Rather, she gazed right into his eyes as a flowing, crimson seam opened in the center of her chest, her stunned, moist-eyed expression radiating a silent, awestruck recognition of his newfound power.
    He was not a sick man. A sick