Destroying Angel by Michael Wallace Read Free Book Online

to her tent. When she came out an hour later, she set to work digging the canal and continued until dinner without speaking to another soul.
    That night I didn’t wake up Sister Gretta when it was her turn for watch. I didn’t want to go to sleep. Instead I stared all night at the embers of the fire. I kept seeing a dark shape thrusting obscenely. And Annabelle’s struggles—her writhing, her moaning in fear and pain.
    No, that wasn’t quite right. She had struggled, yes, but now that I thought about it, her cries sounded like a woman in the throes of passion, fighting to control her pleasure so that her husband does not think her licentious.
    I slept better the next evening. Perhaps it was exhaustion, or perchance time had dulled my memory and allowed my levelheaded nature to exert itself. I no longer believed I had seen an evil spirit. The shadow was an illusion. I had spent so much time with these women, alone in the wilderness, fueled by talk about the end of days. My feverish imagination supplied the spark.
    As for Sister Annabelle, she was given to manifestations of the spirit. In Salt Lake, her natural impulse made her talk in tongues and see visions. With a priesthood leader to calm her, this was harmless enough.
    But here, in the harsh desert sun, with no men and no priesthood, in a wilderness that stretched for fifty miles in every direction, desolate and abandoned, Annabelle’s visions induced some sort of madness.

    Again Jacob stopped reading. This time he breathed a sigh of relief. Grandma Cowley wasn’t unreliable after all. She recognized the spiritual hysteria. It was the same hysteria that infected the population of Blister Creek to this day.
    Even Jacob, trained in medical school, trained to think critically, wasn’t immune. Like his first glance at Daniel the other night. What he’d taken for a man on top of his son had been nothing more than blankets wrapped around the boy while he struggled with terrors in his sleep.
    He was about to resume reading, when a cry caught his ear from somewhere in the sleeping house. This time he recognized the sound and location at once. He slipped from the room and into the darkened hallway. The floor creaked underfoot, and what might have been a comforting, familiar sound in the daytime became sinister, like a warning to someone or something that he was coming. His heart pounded.
    I will not see an angel. Whatever it is, there is no man and no supernatural being. It’s my son, suffering a night terror.
    He came up the attic stairs in the darkness and flinched when his hand closed around the cool brass doorknob. His stomach lurched. He reached inside the room and groped for the switch, and the light came on. There was no one there but the two boys. Nephi slept soundly, head tucked into his blankets, a peaceful expression on his face, even as his older brother suffered in the next bed.
    Daniel moaned and shook his head. His blankets lay on the floor this time, and he’d opened the buttons on his pajama top. His bare chest heaved, and his eyes stared at something beyond the walls of the room.
    Jacob hurried to his side. “Shh. It’s nothing. There’s no one here. It’s only a dream.”

CHAPTER FIVE
    Eliza was the last to arrive at Krantz’s place. Jacob and Miriam stood on one side of the trailer, speaking in low, earnest tones, while Krantz carried a video camera in from his car. He smiled when he spotted her and came over.
    “You haven’t planted the roses,” she said.
    He glanced at the two pots, still sitting outside his front door where he’d put them last summer, and it was clear from his expression that he hadn’t given them much thought. “They’re still alive,” he pointed out.
    “That one sent roots right through the bottom of the pot.” Eliza was more amused than accusatory. “Need a hand?”
    “No, no, I’ll get to it. Look, there are buds. It’s doing all right.”
    “You need to get those plants out. They’re root-bound, you can