Swan Song (54 page)

“It’s a dowsing rod.”

“What’s that?”

She explained how a dowsing rod was supposed to find water if you held the forked ends of it just right, but she’d never found any water with it. She recalled Leona Skelton’s gentle voice, as if drifting through time to whisper: “Crybaby’s work isn’t done yet-not by a far sight!”

“Maybe you ain’t holding it right, then,” Aaron said.

“I just use it like a walking stick. I don’t see too well.”

“I reckon not. You ain’t got no eyeballs!”

Swan laughed and felt muscles in her face unfreeze. The wind brought a new whiff of a sickening odor of decay that Swan had noticed as soon as they’d entered Mary’s Rest. “Aaron?” she asked. “What’s that smell?”

“What smell?”

He was used to it, she realized. Human waste and garbage lay everywhere, but this was a fouler odor. “It comes and goes,” she said. “The wind’s carrying it.”

“Oh, I reckon that’s the pond. What’s left of it, I mean. It ain’t too far. Want to see?”

No, Swan thought. She didn’t want to get near anything so awful. But Aaron sounded eager to please, and she was curious. “All right, but we’ll have to walk real slow. And don’t run off and leave me, okay?”

“Okay,” he answered, and he promptly ran about thirty feet up a muddy alley before he turned and waited for her to catch up.

Swan followed him through the narrow, filthy alleys. Many of the shacks had been burned down, people still digging shelters in the ruins. She probed ahead with Crybaby and was frightened by a skinny yellow dog that lunged out of an intersecting alley; Aaron kicked at it and ran it off. Behind a closed door, an infant wailed with hunger. Further on, Swan almost stumbled over a man lying curled up in the mud. She started to reach down and touch his shoulder, but Aaron said, “He’s a dead’un! Come on, it ain’t too far!”

They passed between the miserable clapboard shacks and came upon a wide field covered with gray snow. Here and there the frozen body of a human being or an animal lay contorted on the ground. “Come on!” Aaron called, jumping up and down impatiently. He’d been born amid death, had seen so much of it that it was a commonplace sight. He stepped over a woman’s corpse and continued down a gently sloping hill to the large pond that over the years had drawn hundreds of wanderers to the settlement of Mary’s Rest.

“There ’tis,” Aaron said when Swan reached him. He pointed.

About a hundred feet away was what had indeed been a very large pond, nestled in the midst of dead trees. Swan saw that maybe an inch of yellow-green water remained right at its center, and all around was cracked, nasty-looking yellow mud.

And in that mud were dozens of half-buried human and animal skeletons, as if they’d been sucked down as they tried to get the last of that contaminated water. Crows perched on the bones, waiting. Heaps of frozen human excrement and garbage lay in the mud as well, and the smell that wafted from that mess where a pond used to be turned Swan’s stomach. It was as rank as an open sore or an unwashed bathroom bucket.

“This is ’bout as close as you can stand without gettin’ sick,” Aaron said, “but I wanted you to see it. Ain’t it a peculiar color?”

“My God!” Swan was fighting the urge to throw up. “Why doesn’t somebody clean that up?”

“Clean what up?” Aaron asked.

“The pond! It wasn’t always like that, was it?”

“Oh, no! I ’member when the pond had water in it. Real drinkin’ water. But Mama says it just gave out. Says it couldn’t last forever, anyway.”

Swan had to turn away from the sight. She looked back the way they’d come and could make out a solitary figure on the hill, scooping dirty snow into a bucket. Melting the gray snow for water was a slow death, but it was far better than the poisonous pond. “I’m ready to go back now,” she told him, and she started walking slowly up the hill, probing before her with Crybaby.

Once over the hill, Swan almost tripped over a body in her path. She stopped, looking down at the small form of a child. Whether it had been a boy or girl she couldn’t tell, but the child had died lying on its stomach, one hand clawing at the earth and the other frozen into a fist. She stared at those little hands, pallid and waxy against the snow. “Why are these bodies out here?” she asked.

“’Cause this is where they died,” he told her, as if she was the dumbest old gourdhead in the whole world.

“This one was trying to dig something up.”

“Roots, prob’ly. Sometimes you can dig roots up out of the ground, sometimes you cain’t. When we can find ’em, Mama makes a soup out of ’em.”

“Roots? What kind of roots?”

“You sure ask a lot of questions,” he said, exasperated, and he started to walk on ahead.

“What kind of roots?” Swan repeated, slowly but firmly.

“Corn roots, I reckon!” Aaron shrugged. “Mama says there used to be a big ol’ cornfield out here, but everythin’ died. Ain’t nothin’ left but a few roots-if a body’s lucky enough to find ’em. Come on, now! I’m cold!”

Swan looked out across the barren field that lay between the shacks and the pond. Bodies lay like strange punctuation marks scrawled on a gray tablet. The vision in her eye faded in and out, and whatever was under all the thick crust of growths burned and seethed. The child’s white, frozen hands took her attention again. Something about those hands, she thought. Something… but she didn’t know what.

The smell of the pond sickened her, and she followed Aaron toward the shacks again.

“Used to be a big ol’ cornfield out here,” Aaron had said. “But everythin’ died.”

She pushed snow away from the ground with Crybaby. The earth was dark and hard. If any roots remained out here, they were far beneath the crust.

They were still winding their way through the alleys when Swan heard Mule neigh; it was a cry of alarm. She quickened her pace, stabbing ahead of her with the dowsing rod.

When they came out of the alley next to Glory Bowen’s shack, Swan heard Mule make a shrill whickering sound that conveyed anger and fear. She tilted her head to see what was happening and finally made it out: people in rags were swarming all over the wagon, tearing it apart. They were shredding the canvas tent to pieces and fighting over the remnants, grabbing up blankets, canned food, clothes and rifles from the rear of the wagon and running with them. “Stop!” she told them, but of course they paid no attention. One of them tried to untie Mule from his harness, but the horse bucked and kicked so powerfully the scavenger was driven off. They were even trying to take the wheels off the wagon. “Stop it!” Swan shouted, stumbling forward. Someone collided against her, knocked her into the cold mud and almost stepped on her. Nearby, two men were fighting in the mud over one of the blankets, and the fight ended when a third man grabbed it and scuttled away.

The cabin’s door opened. Josh had heard Swan’s shout, and now he saw the Travelin’ Show wagon being ripped apart. Panic shook him. That was all they had in the world! A man was running with a bundle of sweaters and socks in his arms, and Josh went after him but slipped in the mud. The scavengers scattered in all directions, taking away the last of the canvas, all the food, the weapons, blankets, everything. A woman with an orange keloid covering most of her face and neck tried to strip the coat off Swan, but Swan doubled up and the woman struck at her, screaming in frustration. When Josh got to his feet, the woman ran down one of the alleys.

Then they were all gone, and so were the contents of the Travelin’ Show wagon-including most of the wagon itself.

“Damn it!” Josh raged. There was nothing left but the frame of the wagon and Mule, who was still snorting and bucking. We’re up shit creek now, he thought. Nothing to eat, not even a damned sock left! “You okay?” he asked Swan, going over to help her up. Aaron was standing beside her, and he reached out to touch her gourd of a head but drew his hand back at the last second.

“Yes.” Her shoulder was just a little sore where she’d been struck. “I think I’m all right.”

Josh gently helped Swan up and steadied her. “They took just about everything we had!” he fretted. In the mud lay a few items that had been left behind: a dented tin cup, a tattered shawl, a worn-out boot that Rusty had planned to mend and never got around to.

“You leave things sittin’ out ’round here, they gonna get stole for sure!” Aaron said sagely. “Any fool knows that!”

“Well,” Swan said, “maybe they need those things more than we do.”

Josh’s first impulse was an incredulous laugh, but he held it in check. She was right. At least they had good heavy coats and gloves, and they were wearing thick socks and sturdy boots. Some of those scavengers had been a few threads away from their Genesis suits-except this was surely as far from the Garden of Eden as a human could fall.

Swan walked around the wagon to Mule and settled the old horse down by calmly rubbing his nose. Still, he continued to make an ominous, worried rumbling.

“Better get inside,” Josh told her. “Wind’s picking up again.”

She came toward him, then stopped when Crybaby touched something hard in the mud. She bent down carefully, groped in the mud and came up with the dark oval mirror that somebody had dropped. The magic mirror, she thought as she straightened up again. It had been a long time since she’d peered into it. But now she wiped the mud off on the leg of her jeans and held it up before her, grasping it by the handle with the two carved masks that stared in different directions.

“What’s that thing?” Aaron asked. “Can you see y’self in there?”

She could only see the faintest outline of her head, and thought that indeed it did look like a swollen old gourd. She dropped her arm to her side-and as she did something flashed in the glass. She held it up again and turned so the mirror was facing in another direction; she hunted for the flash of light but couldn’t find it. Then she shifted, turning a foot or so to the right, and caught her breath.

Seemingly less than ten feet behind her was the figure holding the glowing circle of light-close now, very close. Swan was still not quite able to make out the features. She sensed, however, that something was wrong with the face; it was distorted and deformed, but not nearly like her own. She thought that the figure might be a woman, just from the way whoever it was carried herself. So close, so close-yet Swan knew that if she turned around there would be nothing behind her but the shanties and alleys.

“What direction is the mirror facing?” she asked Josh.

“North,” he answered. “We came in from the south. That way.” He motioned in the opposite direction. “Why?” He could never understand what she saw when she looked into that thing. Whenever he asked, she would shrug her shoulders and put the mirror away. But the mirror had always reminded him of a verse his mother liked to read from the Bible: “For now we see in a glass darkly, but then face to face.”

The figure with the glowing ring of light had never been so close before. Sometimes it had been so far away that the light was barely a spark in the glass. She didn’t know who the figure was, or what the ring of light was supposed to be, but she knew it was someone and something very important. And now the woman was close, and Swan thought that she must be somewhere to the north of Mary’s Rest.

She was about to tell Josh when the face with the leprous, parchment-like flesh rose up over her left shoulder. The monstrous face filled up the whole glass, its gray-lipped mouth cracking open in a grin, one scarlet eye with an ebony pupil emerging from its forehead. A second mouth full of sharp-edged teeth opened like a slash across its cheek, and the teeth strained forward as if to bite Swan on the back of the neck.

She turned so fast that the weight of her head almost spun her like a top.

Behind her, the road was deserted.

She lowered the mirror; she had seen enough for one day. If what the magic mirror showed her was true, the figure bearing the ring of light was very near.

But nearer still was the thing that reminded her of the Devil on Leona Skelton’s tarot card.

Josh watched Swan as she went up the cinder block steps into Glory Bowen’s shack, then looked north along the road. There was no movement but chimney smoke scattering before the wind. He regarded the wagon again and shook his head. He figured that Mule would kick the sauce out of anybody who tried to steal him, and there was nothing left to take. “That’s all our food,” he said, mostly to himself. “Every damned bit of it!”

“Oh, I know a place you can catch some big ’uns,” Aaron offered. “You just gotta know where they are, and be quick to catch ’em.”

“Quick to catch what?”

“Rats,” the boy said, as if any fool knew that was what most of the people in Mary’s Rest had been surviving on for the last few years. “That’s what we’ll be eatin’ tonight, if you’re stayin’.”

Josh swallowed thickly, but he was no stranger to the gamy taste of rat meat. “I hope you’ve got salt,” he said as he followed Aaron up the steps. “I like mine real salty.”

Just before he reached the door, he felt the flesh at the back of his neck tighten. He heard Mule snort and whinny, and he looked toward the road again. He had the unnerving sensation of being watched-no, more than that. Of being dissected.

But there was no one. No one at all.

The wind whirled around him, and in it he thought he heard a squeaking sound-like the noise of wheels in need of grease. The sound was gone in an instant.