Swan Song (24 page)

“You… followed me? Why?”

“You got out. You were leading others out. That’s not very fair, either. You ought to let the dead lie where they fall. But I’m glad I followed you… because you have something that interests me very much.” His finger pointed to the floor. “You can put it at my feet now.”

“What?”

“You know what. It. The glass thing. Come on, don’t make a scene.”

He waited. Sister realized she hadn’t sensed his cold spoor, as she had on Forty-Second Street and in the theater, because everything was cold. And now here he was, and he wanted the only thing of beauty that remained. “How did you find me?” she asked him, trying desperately to think of a way out. Beyond the latched door at her back, the wind keened and shrieked.

“I knew if you got through the Holland Tunnel, you’d have to cross Jersey City. I followed the path of least resistance, and I saw your fire. I stood listening to you, and watching. And then I found a piece of stained glass, and I realized what the place had been. I found a body, too, and I took the clothes off it. I can make any size fit. See?” His shoulders suddenly rippled with muscle, his spine lengthening. The priest’s jacket split along the seams. Now he stood about two inches taller than he had a second before.

Artie moaned, shaking his head from side to side. “I don’t… I don’t understand.”

“You don’t have to, cupcakes. This is between the lady and me.”

“What… are you?” She resisted the urge to retreat before him, because she feared that one backward step would bring him on her like a dark whirlwind.

“I’m the winner,” he said. “And you know what? I didn’t even have to work up a sweat. I just laid back and it all came to me.” His grin turned savage. “It’s party time, lady! And my party’s going to go on for a long, long time.”

Sister did step back. The Doyle Halland-thing glided forward. “That glass circle is pretty. Do you know what it is?”

She shook her head.

“I don’t either-but I know I don’t like it.”

“Why? What’s it to you?”

He stopped, his eyes narrowing. “It’s dangerous. For you, I mean. It gives you false hope. I listened to all that bullshit about beauty and hope and sand a few nights ago. I had to bite my tongue or I would’ve laughed in your face. Now… tell me you don’t really believe in that crap and make my day, won’t you?”

“Yes,” Sister said firmly. Her voice only trembled a little bit. “I do believe.”

“I was afraid of that.” Still grinning, he reached down to the metal splinter in his leg. Its point was smeared with gore. He began to draw it out, and Sister knew what had made those wounds. He pulled the dagger free and straightened up. His leg did not bleed.

“Bring it to me,” he said, in a voice as smooth as black velvet.

Sister’s body jerked. The willpower seemed to drain out of her as if her soul had become a sieve. Dazed and floating, she wanted to go to him, wanted to reach into the bag and draw out the circle of glass, wanted to place it in his hand and offer her throat to the dagger. That would be the easy thing to do, and all resistance seemed incredibly, insufferably difficult.

Shivering, her eyes round and wet, she winnowed her hand into the bag, past the cans and the hard-frozen TV dinners, and touched the circle.

Diamond-white light flared under her fingers. Its brilliance startled her to her senses, the willpower flooding back into her mind. She stiffened her legs as if rooting them to the floor.

“Come to papa,” he said-but there was a tense, rough edge in his voice. He wasn’t used to being disobeyed, and he could feel her resisting him. She was tougher by far than the kid in the theater, who had resisted about as much as a marshmallow pie against a buzz saw. He could peer behind her eyes, and he saw leaping, shadowy images: a spinning blue light, a rainy highway, the figures of women drifting through dim corridors, the feel of harsh concrete and brutal blows. This woman, he reasoned, had learned to make suffering her companion.

“I said… bring it to me. Now.”

And he won, after a few more seconds of struggle. He won, as he knew he must.

Sister tried to prevent her legs from moving forward, but they continued on as if they might snap off at the knees and keep going without her torso. His voice licked at her senses, drew her steadily onward: “That’s right. Come on, bring it here.”

“Good girl,” he said when she got within a few feet. Behind her, Artie Wisco still cringed near the door.

The Doyle Halland-thing reached slowly out to take the glowing glass circle. His hand paused, inches from touching it. The jewels pulsed rapidly. He cocked his head to one side. Such a thing should not be. He would feel much better about it when it was ground to bits under his shoe.

He snatched it from her fingers.

“Thank you,” he whispered.

The ring of glass changed.

It happened in an instant: The rainbow lights faded, became murky and ugly, turning swamp-mud brown, pus-gray, coal-mine black. The glass circle did not pulse; it lay dead in his grip.

“Shit,” he said, amazed and confounded, and one of his gray eyes bleached pale blue.

Sister blinked, felt cold chills running down her spine. The blood tingled in her legs again. Her heart labored like an engine straining to kick over after a night in the cold.

His attention was directed to the black circle, and she knew she only had a second or two to save her life.

She braced her legs and swung the leather bag right at the side of his skull. His head jerked up, his lips twisting into a grimace; he started to juke aside, but the Gucci bag full of cans and frozen dinners hit him with every ounce of strength Sister could summon. She expected him to take it like a stone wall and scream like hellfire, so she was astounded when he grunted and staggered back against the wall as if his bones were made of papier-mâché.

Sister’s free hand shot out and grabbed the ring, and they held it between them. Something akin to an electric shock rippled through her arm, and she had the mental vision of a face studded with a hundred noses and mouths and blinking eyes of all shapes and colors; she thought it must be his true face, a face of masks and changes, tricks and chameleonic evil.

Her half of the circle erupted into light, even brighter than before. The other half, in his grasp, remained black and cold.

Sister ripped it away from him, and the rest of the ring blossomed into incandescent fire. She saw the Doyle Halland-thing squint in its glare and throw a hand over his face to avoid the light. Her heartbeat was making the ring pulse wildly, and the creature before her recoiled from that fiery light as if he was stunned by both its strength and her own. She saw what might have been fear in his eyes.

But it was only there for an instant-because suddenly his eyes were sucked down into hoods of flesh, his entire face shifting. The nose collapsed, the mouth slithered away; a black eye opened at the center of his forehead, and a green eye blinked on his cheek. A sharklike mouth yawned over the point of the chin, and exposed within the cavity were small yellow fangs.

“Let’s panrrrty, bitch!” the mouth howled, and the metal splinter flashed with light as he lifted it over his head to strike.

The dagger came down like vengeance.

But Sister’s bag was there like a shield, and the dagger punched through but couldn’t penetrate a frozen turkey dinner. He reached for her throat with his other hand, and what she did next she did from street fighting, down-and-dirty ball-kicking experience: She swung the glass circle at his face and buried one of the spikes in the black eye at the center of his forehead.

A scream like a cat being skinned came from that gaping mouth, and the Doyle Halland-thing’s head thrashed so quickly that the glass spike broke off, still full of light and imbedded in the eye like Ulysses’s spear in the orb of the Cyclops. He flailed wildly with his dagger, the other eye rolling in its socket and percolating through the flesh. Sister shouted, “Run!” to Artie Wisco and then turned and fled herself.

He fumbled with the latch and almost took the door with him as he ran from the house; the wind caught him, knocked his legs out from under him. He slid on his belly, still gripping the bagful of wood shards, down the steps to the icy curb.

Sister followed him, also lost her balance on the steps and went down. She shoved the glass ring deep into her bag and crawled along the ice, skimming away from the house on her belly like a human sled. Artie scrabbled after her.

And from behind them, tattered by the wind’s scream, came his maddened roar: “I’ll find you! I’ll find you, bitch! You can’t get away!” She looked back, saw him through the storm; he was trying to pull the black spike out of his eye, and suddenly his feet went out from under him and he fell on the front porch. “I’ll find you!” he promised, struggling to get up. “You can’t get a-” The noise of the storm took his voice, and Sister realized she was sliding faster, going downhill over the tea-colored ice.

An ice-covered car loomed in front of her. There was no way to avoid it. She scrunched herself down and went under it, something snagging and ripping her fur coat as she shot beneath the car and continued down the incline, out of control. She looked back and saw Artie spinning like a saucer, but his course took him around the car and out of danger.

They sped down the hill, two human toboggans passing along a street lined with dead and crumpled houses, the wind thrusting them onward and sleet stinging their faces.

They would find shelter somewhere, Sister thought. Maybe another house. And they had plenty of food. Wood to start a fire. No matches or lighter, but surely the looters and fleeing survivors hadn’t carried off everything that would throw a spark.

She still had the glass ring. The Doyle Halland-thing had been right. It was hope, and she would never let it go. Never.

But it was something else, too. Something special. Something, as Beth Phelps had said, magic. But what the purpose of that magic was, she couldn’t yet fathom.

They were going to live, and they were skidding further and further away from the monster who wore a priest’s suit. I’ll find you! she heard it bellowing in her mind. I’ll find you!

And she feared that someday-somehow-it just might.

They skidded down to the end of the hill, past more abandoned cars, and continued along the thoroughfare about forty more yards before they bumped the curb.

Their ride was over, but their journey had just begun.

Twenty-Eight - [Wheel of Fortune

Turning]

Time passed.

Josh judged its passage by the number of empty cans that were piling up in what he thought of as the city dump-that foul area over in the far corner where they both used the bathroom and tossed the empties. They went through one can of vegetables every other day, and one can of a meat product like Spam or corned beef on alternating days. The way Josh calculated the passage of a day was by his bowel movements. He’d always been as regular as clockwork. So the trips to the city dump and the pile of empties gave him a reasonable estimation of time, and he figured now that they’d been in the basement between nineteen and twenty-three days. Which would make it anywhere between the fifth and thirteenth of August. Of course, there was no telling how long they’d been there before they’d gotten semi-organized, either, so Josh thought it was probably closer to the seventeenth-and that would mean one month had passed.

He’d found a packet of flashlight batteries in the dirt, so they were okay on that account. The light showed him that they’d passed the halfway point of their food supply. It was time to start digging. As he gathered up the shovel and pickaxe, he heard their gopher scrambling happily amid the city dump’s cans. The little beast thrived on their leftovers-which didn’t amount to much-and licked the cans so clean you could see your face reflected on the bottom. Which was something Josh definitely avoided doing.

Swan was asleep, breathing quietly in the darkness. She slept a lot, and Josh figured that was good. She was saving her energy, hibernating like a little animal. Yet when Josh woke her she came up instantly, focused and alert. He slept a few feet away from her, and it amazed him how attuned he’d become to the sound of her breathing; usually it was deep and slow, the sound of oblivion, but sometimes it was fast and ragged, the gasp of memories, bad dreams, the sinking in of realities. It was that sound that awakened Josh from his own uneasy sleep, and often he heard Swan call for her mother or make a garbled utterance of terror, as if something was stalking her across the wasteland of nightmares.

They’d had plenty of time to talk. She’d told him about her mother and “uncles,” and how much she enjoyed planting her gardens. Josh had asked her about her father; she’d said he was a rock musician but hadn’t offered anything else.

She’d asked him what it felt like to be a giant, and he’d told her he’d be a rich man if he had a quarter for every time he’d bumped his head at the top of a doorway. Also, it was tough finding clothes big enough-though he didn’t tell her that he’d already noticed his waistband was loosening-and that his shoes were specially made. So I guess it’s expensive to be a giant, he’d said. Otherwise, I guess I’m about the same as everybody else.

In telling her about Rose and the boys, he’d tried very hard not to let his voice break. He could have been talking about strangers, people he knew only as pictures in somebody else’s wallet. He told Swan about his football days, how he’d been Most Valuable Player in three games. Wrestling wasn’t so bad, he’d told her; it was honest money, and a man as big as he couldn’t do much else that was legal. The world was too small for giants; it built doorways too low, furniture too flimsy, and there wasn’t a mattress made that didn’t pop and squall when he lay down to rest.

During the times they talked, Josh kept the flashlight off. He didn’t want to see the child’s blistered face and stubble of hair and remember how pretty she’d been-and also, he wanted to spare her the sight of his own repellent mug.

PawPaw Briggs’s ashes were buried. They did not talk about that at all, but the command Protect the child remained in Josh’s mind like the tolling of an iron bell.

He switched on the flashlight. Swan was curled up in her usual place, sleeping soundly. The dried fluids of burst blisters glistened on her face. Flaps of skin were dangling from her forehead and cheeks like thin layers of flaking paint, and underneath them the raw, scarlet flesh was growing fresh blisters. He gently prodded her shoulder, and her eyes immediately opened. They were bloodshot, the lashes gummy and yellow, her pupils shrinking to pinpoints. He moved the light away from her. “Time to wake up. We’re going to start digging.”

She nodded and sat up.

“If we both work, it’ll be faster,” he said. “I’m going to start with the pickaxe, then I’d like for you to shovel away the loose dirt. Okay?”

“Okay,” she replied, and she got on her hands and knees to follow him.

Josh was about to crawl over to the gopher hole when he noticed something in the spill of light that he’d not seen before. He shifted the beam back to where she’d been sleeping. “Swan? What is that?”

“Where?” Her gaze moved along the light.

Josh put aside the shovel and pickaxe and reached down.

Where Swan customarily slept were hundreds of tiny, emerald-green blades of grass. They formed a perfect image of a child’s curled-up body.

He touched the grass. Not exactly grass, he realized. Shoots of some kind. Tiny shoots of… were they new cornstalks?

He shone the light around. The soft, downlike vegetation was growing in no other place but where Swan slept. He plucked up a bit of it, to examine the roots, and he noted that Swan flinched. “What’s wrong?”

“I don’t like that sound.”

“Sound? What sound?”

“A hurting sound,” she answered.

Josh didn’t know what she was talking about, and he shook his head. The roots trailed down about two inches, delicate filaments of life. They’d obviously been growing there for some time, but Josh couldn’t understand how the shoots had rooted in tainted dirt without a drop of water. It was the only bit of green life he’d seen since they’d been trapped here. But there had to be a simple explanation; he figured that the whirlwind had carried seeds in, and somehow they’d rooted and popped up. That’s all.

Right, he thought. Rooted without water and popped up without an iota of sunlight. That made about as much sense as PawPaw deciding to emulate a Roman candle.

He let the green shoots drift down again. At once, Swan picked up a handful of loose dirt, worked it between her fingers for a few seconds with single-minded interest, and covered the shoots over.

Josh leaned back, his knees up against his chest. “It’s only growing where you lie down to sleep. It’s kind of peculiar, don’t you think?”

She shrugged. She could feel him watching her carefully.

“You said you heard a sound,” he continued. “What kind of sound was it?”

Again, a shrug. She didn’t know how to talk about it. Nobody had ever asked her such things before.

“I didn’t hear anything,” Josh said, and he reached toward the shoots again.

She grasped his hand before he got there. “Like I said… a hurting sound. I don’t know exactly.”

“When I plucked them up?”

“Yes.”

Lord, Josh thought, I’m just about ready for a rubber room! He’d been thinking, as he looked at the pattern of green in the dirt, that they were growing there because her body made them grow. Her chemistry or something, reacting with the earth. It was a crazy idea, but there they were. “What’s it like? A voice?”

“No. Not like that.”

“I’d like to hear about it”

“Really?”

“Yes,” Josh said. “Really.”

“My mama said it was ’magination.”

“Is it?”

She hesitated, and then she said firmly, “No.” Her fingers touched the new shoots tenderly, barely grazing them. “One time my mama took me to a club to hear the band. Uncle Warren was playing the drums. I heard a noise like the hurting sound, and I asked her what made it. She said it was a steel guitar, the kind you put on your lap and play. But there are other things in the hurting sound, too.” Her eyes found his. “Like the wind. Or a train’s whistle, way far off. Or thunder, long before you see the lightning. A tot of things.”

“How long have you been able to hear it?”

“Since I was a little girl.”

Josh couldn’t help but smile. Swan misread it. “Are you making fun of me?”

“No. Maybe… I wish I could hear a sound like that. Do you know what it is?”

“Yes,” Swan answered. “It’s death.”

His smile faltered and went away.

Swan picked up some dirt and slowly worked it, feeling its dry, brittle texture. “In the summer it’s the worst. That’s when people bring their lawn mowers out.”

“But… it’s just grass,” Josh said.

“In the fall the hurting sound’s different,” she continued, as if she hadn’t heard him. “It’s like a great big sigh, and then the leaves come down. Then in winter, the hurting sound stops, and everything sleeps.” She shook nuggets of dirt from her palm, mixed them with the rest. “When it starts getting warm again, the sun makes things think about waking up.”

“Think about waking up?”

“Everything can think and feel, in its own way,” she replied, and she looked up at him. The eyes in her young face were very old, Josh thought. “Bugs, birds, even grass-everything has its own way of speaking and knowing. Just depends on whether you can understand it or not.”

Josh grunted. Bugs, she’d said. He was remembering the swarm of locusts that had whirled through his Pontiac the day of the blast. He’d never thought before about the things she was saying, but he realized there was truth to it. Birds knew to migrate when the clock of seasons changed, ants built anthills in a frenzy of communication, flowers bloomed and withered but their pollen lived on, all according to a great, mysterious schedule that he’d always taken for granted. It was as simple as grass growing and as complex as a firefly’s light.

“How do you know these things?” he asked. “Who taught you?”

“Nobody. I just figured it out.” She recalled her first garden, growing from a sandbox at a nursery school playground. It had been years before she found out that holding earth didn’t make everybody’s hands tingle with a pins-and-needles sensation, or that everybody couldn’t tell from its buzz whether a wasp wanted to sting or just investigate your ear. She’d always known, and that was that.

“Oh,” he said. He watched her rubbing the dirt in her hands. Swan’s palms were tingling, her hands warm and moist. He looked at the green shoots again. “I’m just a wrestler,” he said, very quietly. “That’s all. I mean… damn, I’m just a nobody!” Protect the child, he thought. Protect her from what? From whom? And why? “What the hell,” he whispered, “have I got myself into?”

“Huh?” she asked.

“Nothing,” he said. Her eyes were those of a little girl again, and she mixed the rest of the warm dirt into the ground around the shoots. “We’d better start digging now. Are you up to it?”

“Yes.” She grasped the shovel he’d laid aside. The tingling, glowing sensation was slowly ebbing away.

But he wasn’t ready, not just yet. “Swan, listen to me for a minute. I want to be truthful with you, because I think you can handle it. We’re going to try to get out of here, but that’s not saying we can. We’ll have to dig a pretty wide tunnel to squeeze my blubber through. It’s going to take us some time, and it sure as hell won’t be easy work. If it caves in, we’ll have to start all over again. What I’m saying, I guess, is that I’m not sure we can get out. I’m not sure at all. Do you understand?”

She nodded, said nothing.

“And one more thing,” he added. “If-when-we get out… we might not like what we find. Everything might be changed. It might be like… waking up after the worst nightmare you can think of, and finding that the nightmare followed you into daylight. Understand?”

Again, Swan nodded. She’d already thought about what he was saying, because no one had ever come to get them out like her mama had said. She put on her most grown-up face and waited for him to make the next move.

“Okay,” Josh said. “Let’s start digging.”