Der Schädelring: Thriller (German Edition)

pockets of the backpack and slid the can opener in, but decided the sharp edges might make a tear. She should wrap it in something. She reached into the pocket and her fingers touched a warm, round shape.
    It felt familiar, and a shiver raced up her arm. Her heart skipped a beat as she pulled out the object, feeling its strange pulse even before she saw the twin rubies.
    The skull ring.
    The silver face leered up at her, the rubies gleaming in the firelight.
    Something stirred in the loft. A voice came, muffled by the quilts.
    " Hello, Jooolia ."
    She recognized the voice from her childhood. An icicle speared her chest.
    The quilts rose in the darkness. Julia looked away from the shadowy loft before the nightmare could come fully into view. She flung the ring into the fire and ran for the door.
    As she fled the cabin, dark laughter chased her, crawling from both the fireplace and the loft. Walter was out of sight. She was going to call him, but was afraid they would hear. The thing in the cabin called her name again.
    Creep , her mind screamed at her as she ran. Creep, creep, creep. Devil made flesh.
    She ran toward the high rocks along the peak. The granite protruded from the Earth like the bow of a sinking ship, its gray mass cracked by eons of wind and weather. The trees blurred by, branches slapped at her face. Her breath burned in her lungs and she was dizzy, in danger of collapsing at any moment. Fear served as fuel, though, and kept her legs moving.
    She reached the rocks and peered back through the bare trees. No one was chasing her. Had she imagined the voice, the figure in the cabin? Oh, God, she wasn't going to start having delusions out here , was she?
    She hugged the backpack to her chest, fighting for breath. Below her, the rocky slope dropped off a hundred feet or more, broken only by moss and a few stubs of pine that sprouted from cracks. She leaned against the sun-warmed stone and closed her eyes.
    Two steps forward into the air and she would be rid of them. Now and forever. Satan couldn't chase her beyond the grave. The pain, the past, the tricks and lies, nothing would be able to touch her.
    But that would be a different surrender, and she was sick of surrender. She was a mountain. They couldn't break her.
    And she didn’t know what lay waiting on the other side. A ceaseless darkness promised peace, but that suicidal leap might end in the roasting pit of the one who had owned her all along.
    She edged along the granite shelf, pushing the panic away from her mind. The wind was stronger here, shaking the stunted balsam trees below. A few clouds had spun their gray threads together, with another storm pushing in from the west. It was as if Satan were controlling the weather just to play with Julia's moods.
    And why shouldn’t he? Even God and Jesus acknowledged Satan was the master of this world, according to Luke’s little chapter in Walter’s Bible.
    Voices came from somewhere in the forest. She ducked into a crevice and eased back into the shadows. She held perfectly still for what might have been minutes or an hour, hardly daring to breath, thinking that at any moment the shadows would swell and turn into the fingers of panic, to clutch her heart until it stopped.
    Her legs were asleep from crouching, so she stood and leaned against the walls of the narrow cave. Julia pressed her back against the granite as footsteps came up the rocky trail.
    Walter .
    She stepped out of the crevice, but the footsteps had faded. The wind between the black trees was the only sound.
    Except for the harsh breathing behind her.
    She spun, dropping the backpack. Snead stood there, wearing a crooked smile.
    "Are you ready, Judas?" he said.
    He had crept up on her without a sound. Or else popped out of thin air. How could she fight the master of the world?
    "Did you find her?" shouted a man's voice from somewhere below. Julia recognized it from her house, from the cabin, from the night her father disappeared. Hartley.
    "She's here." Snead tugged her arm. "Come along, Julia. He's waited far too long. You've made him very angry, you know."
    As if to support Snead's words, thunder rumbled over the far hills. The sky had gone from sunny to dismal in scarcely half an hour. The wind gained force, and branches creaked on the slopes below. More clouds massed overhead, black and gray rags torn in anger.
    Julia allowed herself to be led along the cliff. She was numb, as if her blood had stilled itself in her veins. A lamb to