Darkness

25

Kelly knew she had to do something. A tense silence hung over the tour boat; the women, their children gathered protectively near them, watched the swamp, searching for any sign of Michael. But it was as if the marshes had swallowed him up. For the last twenty minutes they had neither seen nor heard anything at all.

And yet, though nothing had happened, the tension in the boat was mounting every second.

In the stern, the mother of the baby sobbed quietly, while two of the other women tried to comfort her. But at last the woman looked up, her eyes fixed on Kelly, who stood in the bow of the boat, desperately trying to think of something she could do.

“Take us back,” one of the other women demanded. “We have to get help!”

“I–I don’t know where we are,” Kelly said.

TWo of the women closest to her glanced at each other. “But you must know where we are,” one of them finally said, her voice betraying her fear. “You work for the tour, don’t you?”

Kelly shook her head. “I don’t—” But before she could finish the sentence, something stirred in her mind. A memory of being in the swamp, by herself, but not getting lost.

Not like the other night, when she’d run away from her father, anger driving her forward.

No, this was like the first night, when she’d gone into the swamp looking for the boy she’d seen from across the canal, and lost track of time.

That night, obeying Clarey Lambert’s unseen guidance, she’d found her way back to where she’d begun.

Now she concentrated, summoning that guidance once more.

“I can do it,” she said, her voice imbued with new confidence. “I can get us back.”

She gazed down at the dashboard of the boat, reaching out to brush her fingers over the unfamiliar array of instruments, grasping the key and turning it. An alarm buzzer sounded, and for a moment Kelly hesitated, but then followed the impulses that came into her mind, and pressed a button.

The engine came to life.

As she pushed the transmission forward and the boat began to slip through the water, the woman in the stem screamed.

“No! We can’t leave! He has my baby!”

The words came to Kelly’s ears as if from a great distance, and she was barely aware of them, for her mind was turned inward now, following only the invisible guidance to which she now gave herself.

The boat moved slowly through the writhing maze of channels, and though they all looked alike to Kelly, she let herself be guided, turning from one channel into another with no concern as to the direction she was going or the breadth of the passages she chose.

Ahead, the channel narrowed, and behind Kelly two of the women looked nervously at each other.

“We’re not going to get out,” one of them said. “She doesn’t have the slightest idea where we are. She’s making it worse.”

The other woman said nothing, for she could see Kelly’s face, see her eyes staring straight ahead, never wavering, never glancing around as if looking for landmarks.

Foliage closed in around the boat, choking the channel, and what little conversation had been going on died out completely as wary eyes watched the shore, certain that at any moment the frightening figure might appear again to snatch one of the other children from the boat.

Mothers tightened their grip on their children, and the children themselves clung to their mothers.

Suddenly the prow of the boat burst out of the tangling vines and the canal spread into a broad lagoon.

Ahead, directly across the lagoon, was the dock at the tour headquarters.

The invisible hand that had held Kelly’s mind released its grip, and she gasped slightly, certain she had failed, that nothing at all had happened. But then she looked around and recognized the tour headquarters only a few yards away. “I did it,” she said, almost inaudibly. “I got us here!”

As Kelly clumsily maneuvered the boat up against the dock, she saw Phil Stubbs glaring at her, his face red with fury.

“What the hell’s going on?” he demanded. “Where’s Michael? You should have been back an hour ago!”

“He’s not here,” Kelly told him, her voice distant, as if she’d hardly heard the question. Stubbs stared at her, seeing for the first time the strange look in her eyes. But before he could say anything else, a babble of voices broke out.

“My baby,” the woman in the stern screamed. “He took my baby!”

Stubbs stared at the woman in confusion. “What—”

“It was a man,” another of the women told him. “A horrible old man. He looked crazy, and he took her baby,” Her voice rose. “He just came out of the swamp and took it! The guide went after him. For God’s sake, call the police!”

Stubbs froze. A man? What were they talking about? But all the women were shouting at him now, and their children too.

“Now just calm down,” Stubbs finally called above the confusion. He turned to Kelly, who was gazing off into the swamp, her brows knit into a deep frown. “Tell me what happened,” he said.

Kelly’s head swung slowly around. Her voice held a strange, abstract quality, as if she were only vaguely aware of what she was saying. “We were going through a channel. There was a man on the shore, and as we passed him, he reached in and picked up a baby. He wanted it. He wanted a baby.”

Phil Stubbs’s eyes narrowed. “Who?” he demanded. “Who was it? Did you recognize him?”

Kelly hesitated, but then nodded. “It was my grandfather.”

• • •

Michael swore out loud as his foot caught under a mangrove root, throwing him forward to sprawl in the soft mud that bordered the island. Ignoring the pain in his ankle, he scrambled back to his feet and stood still, listening.

Carl Anderson seemed to have simply disappeared. And yet, only a moment ago, just before he’d tripped, Michael was sure he’d heard the sound of a baby crying. It had only lasted a fraction of a second, then was suddenly cut off, as if someone had silenced the baby by covering its mouth.

He looked around, searching the thickets with his eyes but seeing nothing. Everywhere he looked there seemed to be only tangles of mangrove roots, and the strange cypress knees that protruded above the water’s surface like dead stumps, and stands of pine trees.

And yet he could feel that Carl Anderson was close by, sense his presence somewhere so near that Michael felt as though he should be able to see him.

Clarey.

The name popped into his mind unbidden, but suddenly he could see her in his mind’s eye, sitting on the porch of her shanty, her eyes gazing into the swamp but her mind reaching much farther than her eyes could see.

Closing his eyes, he silently called out to her, willing her to answer him, willing her to reach into his mind and guide him to wherever Carl Anderson might be hiding.

And slowly an image took form.

An image of a single pine tree, taller than all the rest, standing alone, and surrounded by a dense thicket of brush.

He opened his eyes and looked around.

The pine tree stood not fifty feet away, exactly as he’d just pictured it in his mind.

He started toward it, his eyes fixed on the thicket but his mind concentrating on the image that had been summoned up when he called out to Clarey Lambert.

And in that image, he could see Carl Anderson clearly, crouched in the brush, his back to the tree, clutching the baby in his arms.

He could see the slack folds of Carl’s skin, see his sunken, fevered eyes, see his cracking fingernails.

He pushed his way into the brush, parting the grasses before him.

A moment later his eyes beheld the vision his mind had already seen.

Carl leaned against the tree, the baby held in his left arm as he clutched his gun in the trembling fingers of his right hand.

The gun was raised, its barrel pointing at Michael’s chest.

Michael paused, staring at the reality of the vision that had plagued him for so long, but now the fear he had always felt in the presence of the ancient man was gone.

“Get away from me,” Carl Anderson croaked, his voice rattling in his throat. “I’ll kill you.”

Michael’s eyes remained fixed on the old man. “You can’t kill me,” he heard himself say. “You know you can’t kill me. I’m already dead.”

Carl Anderson gasped as he heard the words, and stared up at the teenage boy whose eyes were fixed on him with a steadiness that made his heart pound.

“No,” he said, his voice taking on a pleading note now. “Leave me alone. I never hurt you. None of us ever hurt you.”

“Our souls,” Michael said. “You stole our souls.”

Carl’s eyes widened. The gun wavered in his hand as Michael came toward him. He tried to steady the revolver, tried to squeeze the trigger, but the boy’s eyes seemed to hold him in their own paralyzing grip, and as Michael moved steadily closer, Carl felt the gun slipping from his fingers. “No,” he muttered, clutching at the weapon as his heart began to race, pounding in his chest with a terrifyingly erratic rhythm that warned him of what was to come a split second before it happened.

As Michael reached out to him, and Carl’s fear turned into blind panic, a violent stab of pain slashed through his chest, shooting down into his arms and legs. The gun dropped from his fingers as his right hand fell to the ground.

The baby rolled onto the thick carpet of pine needles as Carl’s left arm went limp.

Pain tore through Carl’s head then, a blinding, searing agony that rent his sanity into shattered pieces a moment before he died.

As his mind collapsed, Carl saw demons rising up out of the nether world, coming toward him with pitchforks and torches, intent on torturing his body for eternity.

And an eternity, it seemed, in those last seconds before his death, as the demons fell upon him, ripping his skin from his muscles, jabbing sharp slivers beneath his fingernails and into his joints, tearing his limbs from his body and laying open his belly to spill his intestines onto the ground.

He screamed, flailing at the creatures that beset him, but his struggles were nothing more than the twitchings of a dying man, and though the Hell into which he had plunged seemed to him to go on forever, his body soon lay still beneath the pine tree.

In the silence that followed Carl’s death, Michael stared at the body with an odd detachment, as if it had nothing to do with him.

And then a voice spoke inside him.

Take back what is yours.

He crouched down next to Carl Anderson’s body, then ripped open his shirt to expose the old man’s sunken chest. Nothing was left of the robust figure that the man had been only yesterday, for today all the years he had stolen had come back to claim him.

His ribs, brittle and soft, crumpled as Michael touched his chest, and when the boy’s fingers tore into his flesh, the desiccated tissue gave way as if it had been cooked.

Michael ripped through the old man’s sternum, tearing open his chest cavity, reaching inside the man, finally feeling what he was searching for.

A tiny fragment of bloody tissue, resting just above the old man’s lungs, close by his heart.

Michael ripped it loose, and then, his hands covered with blood, stuffed the withered vestige of Carl Anderson’s thymus into his mouth.

He swallowed the bit of tissue, his stomach heaving as he choked, but then the spasm passed.

A strange warmth he had never felt before spread out through his body, and he remained where he was, letting the aura envelop him, letting it expand into his mind, and fill him up.

The emptiness he’d felt all his life was suddenly gone, and he felt whole.

For the first time in his life Michael began to cry.

He felt the hot tears running down his cheeks, tasted the salt of them with the tip of his tongue.

He let the tears run free, washing away the pain of sixteen years.

Only when his tears were finally exhausted did he pick up the baby, cradling it in his arms.

“It’s all right,” he whispered. “Nothing’s going to hurt you now.”

The baby began to cry, but Michael held it close, kissing it gently on the forehead, and soon its sobbing began to die away. At last, the baby calm in his arms, Michael left the thicket and went to the edge of the water.

Setting the baby gently on the ground, he washed himself clean of Carl Anderson’s blood.

Finally he picked the baby up again and started making his way through the swamp toward the tour headquarters.

He was whole again, and once the baby in his arms was safe, he knew what it was he had to do.

He and Kelly, together.