Free Piercing the Darkness by Frank Peretti Page A

three spirits were with him, circling Sally, taunting her, jabbing her with their swords.
    Insanity whipped his sword right through her brain.
    Sally stared at the paper. Somehow she’d ended up on the floor. Nothing would come. What was that thought? She just had it, she was going to write it down, and now it was gone.
    Give it up. Turn yourself in.
    No one will ever believe you. You’re crazy.
    Crazy. It was a word. She wrote it down.
    Insanity, cackling his witchy laugh, grabbed her mind between his two hairy palms and dug in his talons. Death joined in the attack.
    Sally’s mind went blank. The paper began to grow into a white screen that filled her eyes like a fog, a blizzard white-out. She was floating. She kept writing: “My name is Sally Roe . . . Sally Roe . . .”
    She could hear voices in the room, taunting her, and could feel sharp claws tugging at her. They remained invisible, hiding from her, teasing, tormenting.
    Then came Fear. Sally was overcome with a numbing, paralyzing fear. She was lost and falling, spinning, tumbling in space. She couldn’t stop.
    She willed to think, to form the word in her mind: Sally. Sally. Sally.
    Come on, write it. Take the blasted pen in your hand and write it!
    We have you now. We will never let you go.
    Sally. She could feel the pen moving.
    The pen raced over the paper in circles, squiggles, jagged lines, crisscrosses.
    It was gibberish. Nonsense.
    She kept writing. She had to capture a thought, any thought.
    Chimon and Scion had seen enough. It would have to be quick. Scion slipped outside to check the perimeter. Chimon crept like a shadow through the walls, moving in close.
    All four spirits were clustered around Sally’s head, whipping her consciousness into a myriad of senseless fragments. Chimon got a nod from Scion—he would be able to shield out the spirits outside. Now for these insects inside. It had to be just the right moment, just that one instant of opportunity.
    Now. They wouldn’t see it. Chimon whipped his sword in a quick, tight circle, a shining disk of light. WHAM! The flat of the blade smacked the demons senseless and shattered their tight little cluster. Despair went tumbling backward in a blurred spin and landed outside the motel; Fear, Death, and Insanity were interlocked and fell away together, their arms, legs, and wings a spinning, fuming, angry tangle.
    The two warriors ducked back inside the walls.
    Despair righted himself with a shriek and a huff, and only then realized where he was. With a flurry of wings, he shot back through the wall into the room. His three cohorts were just recovering. All four flung themselves at Sally’s mind again.
    But it was too late. She’d slipped from their grip like a bird out of a trap. Her thoughts, though sluggish, were moving in an orderly sequence through her brain.
    Sally was suddenly able to read the words on the page. There were only six legible words at the top, “Crazy my name is Sally Roe.” The rest of the page was filled with aimless, chaotic scribbles. She got up from the floor and sat at the table to try again. She had to keep writing, first one word, then a phrase, then another word—anything that would capture her racing, fragmented thoughts before they escaped her.
    “Death and despair and fear and madness are back,” she wrote, and then another thought: “Why kill me? I died years ago.”
    Sally kept moving that pen, whether her mind stayed on it or not. She was going to whip this madness. She had to. She was going to get her thoughts down on paper where they couldn’t get away. She was going to win.

     
    BEN WAS BEGINNING to wonder about his gift for timing. He’d been out on patrol and just happened to stop in at the station to pick up some more highway flares. As soon as he stepped through the back door, he could hear Mulligan in his office, talking to someone on thephone, and using a hushed tone of voice that immediately roused Ben’s suspicion. Since when did Mulligan ever get