The Pines (44 page)

“…if I tie you you’ll be safe here the stateys won’t hurt you only I know Marl I found you only me but it’s me they want put your whole head in ’is mouth and bite it off an’ its wings glisten in the sunlight w-when it breaks free…”

His limbs trembled in a final convulsion, then Marl lay still.

She felt something twinge at the back of her consciousness; something like a whitish grub stirred blindly. Like a naked hatchling, fallen from the nest, it struggled to lift its head and gaze with still-shut eyes into a sky it would never know—struggled—then lay flattened on the ground.

“My friend! I can’t hear ’im anymore. I won’t! Chabwok! No! Not the chains!” He threw himself on Marl. “Please, not chains! Be good now! I’ll be good!”

“Matty! No!” She couldn’t pull him off.

He yelled and clawed at the body.

“My God, what are you doing? No, Matty!”

Sobbing, he bit it.

She tried to drag him away, but he backhanded her, knocking her down. He grunted and growled.

“Oh no, my baby. I won’t let it happen.” Soft things splashed on her, soaking the front of her shirt. “I promise you, I won’t let it happen that way to you!”

Dried reeds rattled behind them. The boy shook her off and turned from the body, dark fluids pouring from his chin. He snarled.

Steve lay a few yards away, arched to one side as he crawled on his belly through the weeds. Mud covered him. Blood covered him. And the gun in his hand was leveled on the boy.

A wail tore from Athena as she hurled herself in front of her son.

Steve jerked the revolver away at the last instant, firing into the woods, then dropped it in front of his face. Instantly, he seemed to slip out of consciousness, his head falling to the soft ground.

An acrid stench washed over them with the hot, crushing wind. She smelled the smoke then, finally understood what was happening. The woods burned.

Her strength came from somewhere beyond her ability to comprehend, and she moved as in a dream, somehow half-rousing Steve, somehow getting him to his feet. She dragged and carried him through the pines. “Keep going, Steve. Just a little farther. Don’t give up now. Stay with me, Matty. Don’t cry. Stay with me.”

Soon the pines had vanished, melting into a dense, featureless gray. Yet they stumbled onward, and many times she considered leaving the injured man and saving the boy. Somehow she led them. In silence, the boy clung to her clothing, sometimes helping her to bear the man along. They knew no direction, only movement and the effort to keep breathing.

The glow of baleful eyes filtered through the haze, though the headlights seemed to grow dimmer even as they watched.

With a final heaving effort, they reached the automobile. She got the back door open and tried to push the man onto the seat, and the boy tried to help by getting in the other side and dragging him in by the shoulders. Steve’s eyes blinked open—he saw the boy.

He screamed once, then went limp.

They locked the doors, and rolled the windows tight. She clicked off the headlights and put her head down on the steering wheel. She wanted to sleep. Only the boy’s coughing roused her.

The engine choked, then silence.

With no panic left, she tried again, turning the key, pumping the gas pedal.

Matty lay beside her on the seat. He was so very still. She drove through a world of blankness, eyes tearing, knowing she couldn’t go on, knowing she could never stop. Vaguely, she wondered if they were already dead.

The car floated through an empty universe that separated into gray currents and eddies of reflected light.

“It bit me.” Delirious, Steve gasped from the backseat. “I’m It.” Each breath an ordeal, he kept repeating the same words. “I’m It now.”

Coughing, she drove through a tunnel of smoke, the gleam of the headlights forming a bright, enveloping cocoon.

EPILOGUE/PROLOGUE

Those seriously injured had been taken elsewhere.

Filling the room, an irritating film coated their throats and burned their eyes, seeming to rise from the very clothing of the nearly two hundred refugees crowded into the high-school gymnasium. The volunteers, pot bellied men in clerical collars, matronly women and earnest teenagers from rural churches, milled about, distributing sandwiches—mean circles of cold cuts wedged into dry bread—urging their charges to try some of the soft local apples.

Most of the people hunched on cots, dazed but eating—it was after all a free lunch. Others sprawled in exhaustion; some just wandered about.

The boy slept with his mouth pressed into the canvas, the rough woolen blanket bunched about his feet. “Dooley…save…?” Some dark dream clotted in his face, and his voice held petulant wildness. “…find…” His hands clenched. “…come this way…come…”

The hall echoed, raucous with murmured complaints, with whining and crying and laughter, with the shuffling of feet and the blared chatter of a television and several radios, all amplified and distorted by the high ceiling and the polished floor.

“Old dogs are smart, baby. Dooley’s all right. You hush now.” Athena gazed down at the dreaming, rolling movement beneath his eyelids. “Just sleep.” His face still looked red and puffy. A drop of blood at one nostril smeared toward his upper lip, and she wiped it away with her sleeve.

Finally, he seemed peaceful, and she stood up, easing a sharp twinge in her leg. After getting more coffee, she drifted toward the television set. The words and images jangled in her exhausted consciousness.

“Thirty-nine fire companies on the line…some from as faraway as Newark…smoke inhalation…list now stands at twelve known dead and thirty-one missing…governor has declared…”

She felt a moment’s bitter rage at the mock-serious voice, the handsome face so composed in front of the projected image of an inferno.
They don’t even know we exist
. Other faces flickered across the screen: sooty, dead-eyed firefighters; children impressed with the drama of their situations; broken-toothed men jubilant at being interviewed. Reeling slightly, she stared at the pulsating electron colors of the screen, trying to sort out the patterns.

“…like the end of the world…thought I was dead…winds from the fire reached…barn just exploded like a bomb or something…couldn’t reach her because the flames just…including two firemen overcome by…and the roof blew over to the next house and started that one burning…like the end of the world.”

Larry and Jack
. The thought brought her out of her stupor.
They’re out there somewhere
. They’d be on the line, ditching with pick and shovel, racing before the blaze as it topped trees and leaped defense lines.
Was it really just a week ago I saw them last?
They seemed like people she’d known in another lifetime.

“…already an estimated nine thousand acres have been…”

She wandered away. A placard at a table set up in a corner read INFORMATION. Behind it, a tight-faced man talked on a telephone. When he saw her again, he shook his head. Most Munro’s Furnace residents remained unaccounted for. A stack of papers marked with scribbled lists, names of survivors, the missing, the dead covered the table in front of him. She turned away.

Scanning faces in the crowd, she realized with a shock that most looked to some extent familiar, so strong were the similarities. Yet she recognized no individuals.

More people, some bent over with the weight of their possessions, shambled in through the double doors. She spotted one group and threaded through the crowd to reach them as they made their way toward a row of vacant cots along one wall. Wandering after their parents, the children hung together, silent, awed by their surroundings.

Manny set down the stuffed sack and began to rummage through it. She caught up with him just as he uncapped the jar.

“Where’s the little girl?” She scanned the grimy faces of the other children. “The little blind girl?” The mother seemed furtive and scared as she fumbled with a snarl on one of the hastily tied bags. Athena couldn’t tell if she was trying to open or tighten it.

“Where is she?” She stared at the bundles. Had they gathered up every scrap of trash they could find? Had they stopped to loot a neighbor’s home?

“Hey, Miz Monroe. We made it, see? Thought we was burned for sure.” Manny tilted his head back and let the jack run down his throat in a steady stream. “Damn shame ’bout the town.”

“Answer me.”

“Oh.” He looked surprised. “Molly. Wasn’t no time to get ’er. Happen so fast. Think it’s true ’bout it startin’ at the gin mill?”

“No time?” She heard her own voice rising. “No time?” The faces blurred. She pressed her fists roughly against her eyes. Burning. Melting. Release. She saw her hand strike at Manny’s jaw. Stinking liquid sloshed across his chest as she knocked the jar away. She heard herself yell above the shouting all around her, saw herself punch the stupid, sullen face again and again. She caught him off guard, knocked him against the wall. She sobbed as she struck him.

And suddenly Doris was there, leaning unsteadily on one crutch, pulling her away.

Around them, people cursed, but Doris pushed through them. “Excuse us. Out of the way, please. Nothing to see.” To Athena, all the faces seemed uniformly hostile. “Honey, what the hell are you trying to do? What was that all about? I said, out of the way. Show’s over.”

They glimpsed white jackets with Red Cross insignias, and Doris waved a greeting to someone.

“Come on, honey, let’s go outside for a while, get some air.”

The wind hit them, rolling over them in invisible waves, buffeting them and blowing sand around their legs, sand pure as snow. The air felt cool in lungs that still ached with the memory of smoke. They walked in silence for a time, around the building, then across the shaggy road and into the trees.

“The heat’s broken,” Athena murmured, looking up at the sky. “Like a fever. I didn’t think there’d ever be a morning like this again. And look at me. I’m crying. I’m really crying.” The cooling tears still glistened like snail tracks on her cheeks.

“You feeling better now, honey?” Her leg in a partial cast, Doris hobbled beside her.

No sound hazed the crispness of the air; empty cicada husks clung hollowly to the nearby trees. “The summer’s finally burned itself out,” said Athena.

Doris stared. Her friend’s face seemed almost colorless from strain, and she detected a weary sway to her movements. “Are you sure you’re all right?”

“My leg hurts. My leg often hurts.” She moved on. The pines held no menace for her now. “How are you?”

“Oh, I’m all right. I’ll be out of this thing in a couple of weeks.” They came to a slight rise in the ground. “I stopped off at the hospital to see Steve. He’s stable now. They say he’s doing real good.”

She gazed off through the trees. “Thank God,” she barely whispered. “When Matty wakes up, will you take us to see him?”

“They asked me a lot of questions. ’Thena? What did you tell them at the hospital?”

“The truth. That he was maimed by the Jersey Devil.”

“And you…you killed it?”

She didn’t answer, only watched the highway down below them. “Sometimes, when I see that road, I just want to go down there and get in the first car that stops and never look back.”

“ ’Thena?” They walked on.

“I’m not leaving, Doris. I thought you’d want to know. I’m staying in the barrens.”

“Honey, Steve was pretty sedated still when I saw him. Really out of it. He said things. About the boy.”

“It doesn’t have to be a curse. Do you understand? You should’ve seen Steve’s face. In the car, he came to for just a minute and saw Matty. He looked so terrified. But it could be a gift. I know it, feel it.” She stopped walking. “The Spencer boy was one. It seems to happen when they reach puberty. One or two in every generation, down through the centuries. What happens to them in the end? Are they always killed or driven crazy? Do you see what I mean? What if they can be helped? Will the wildness pass in time? As they grow older? And then what?”

“I don’t understand.”

She made a noise like a laugh. “The funny thing is, it was all true, all those books we read, each with a little piece of the truth. Maybe that’s all we ever get.” She peered into the blue silence of the sky. “It doesn’t have to be a curse, Doris. I…I sense it. They have, I don’t know, abilities. They can move things with their minds. It happened in my kitchen, and I used to hear stories about Spencer’s. They don’t control it. It just seems to happen around them. That’s one of the stages. And they can hear each other’s thoughts. I felt that, heard it pass between them. And in the shack, I felt Matty try to warn me. He must have known all about Marl. Since he was a baby. Felt him as another part of himself. An imaginary playmate.” She faltered, her voice low. “If the madness can be released somehow, controlled…”