Der Schädelring: Thriller (German Edition)

panic she had fought so hard to overcome. The panic that she'd managed to hide from Mitchell and her coworkers and even, while they were still alive, her foster parents. The panic that rose up and swallowed her on nights when the past drew too near, when the awful fingers came clattering and clutching.
    The panic that Dr. Forrest insisted Julia could conquer.
    But Dr. Forrest was in Elkwood, eight hundred miles away, and Julia was here, alone, on her knees in the dry crumbling hay. Julia closed her eyes and pressed her forehead to the ground.
    The cloak of panic descended, swift and suffocating.
    Deep breaths , she told herself, but the thought was only one of many, crowded by death and a hot knife and the man with the skull ring and the cold stone and the bad people around her, the bad people touching her, laughing and chanting, the bad people, watching the blade touch her stomach and the silver slipping into flesh and red drops welling around its tip and the hand with the skull ring and the man with the hood and the face beneath the hood and—
    She clawed forward, hands meeting a partition. A splinter penetrated her palm, but she kept her grip and pulled herself up, forced herself to her feet. The tears on her cheeks gathered the dust she had stirred. She sucked in a lungful of dirty air, trying to ignore her rapid pulse.
    Panic is only in the mind, came her mental tape recording of Dr. Forrest.
    Julia looked wildly about, the square light from the barn door like a great gate to a promised land. She thought of yelling for Mitchell, but she wasn't sure she could summon enough air, and he likely couldn't hear her from the car anyway. She pressed her back against the wall and raised her arms, resting them on the top of the half-wall to support herself. She sprawled there like a reluctant martyr awaiting nails to flesh.
    Panic is only in the mind, Dr. Forrest repeated.
    Julia unclenched her fingers. She willed her hands to be warm balloons, balloons in the sun, balloons the colors of jelly beans. It was working, she was in a park, lying on her back in the grass, she could breathe, the air tasted of sky and life and clouds, except she coughed from the choking dust, crazy, she was in the barn, the barn , THE BARN.
    She closed her eyes again.
    The bad people circled, the candles flickered, the thick smoke from the crucibles insinuated like gray dragons under the moonlight, and her body was as cold and deadened as the stone beneath her. The man with the skull ring, the High Priest, raised the knife and addressed the rotted goat's head that hung from the inverted cross.
    "Highness of Darkness, Satan, Master of the World, accept this offering from your humble and loyal slaves, that you may continue to give us your blessings," the deep voice intoned, filling the hollow of the barn. "So mote it be."
    The knife came down, Julia screamed, her breath rushed from her lungs, her body went limp.

 
     
    CHAPTER THIRTEEN
     
    When she awoke, she didn't know where she was. She turned her head and bits of old hay fell from her hair. The floor smelled of dirt. She looked up, saw the old locust beams of the barn, the square slots cut in the hayloft, the aged tin of the roof in the dim shadows above.
    Her heart was beating steadily, only slightly accelerated. Her limbs felt as if they were filled with wet cement. She was sticky from dried sweat.
    How long had she lain there?
    She checked her watch. Even the act of raising her wrist was a great effort. 3:37. She'd been in the barn nearly twenty minutes.
    She blinked away the last wisps of memory and dragged herself to a kneeling position. The panic attacks always roared in like tidal waves and ebbed away in a slow wash, leaving her battered and drenched. This hadn't been the longest attack, but it had been among the most intense.
    She gathered her strength and stood on wobbling legs. The panic could sweep in, could crash down on her, but she wouldn't let it carry her out to the mad, gray sea. She clung to the tether of Dr. Forrest’s encouragement and experience.
    "Panic is only in your mind," Julia said to herself. The whisper died away among the wooden stalls.
    Mitchell.
    Hadn't he wondered where she went? Was he still waiting in the driveway, tapping the steering wheel with his manicured fingers? Or had he driven away, muttering under his breath?
    Julia hoped he had gone away. She didn't want him to see her like this, filthy and unkempt and shaken. A trophy-to-be had to remain nearly