Darkness

27

Kelly looked fearfully at Tim Kitteridge. “It wasn’t anybody’s fault,” she insisted. She’d done her best to repeat to the police chief exactly what had happened, but with her father’s eyes on her, she still felt oddly guilty, as if somehow she’d let him down again.

“And you told Phil Stubbs that the man who took the baby was your grandfather?” Kitteridge asked.

Kelly’s eyes flicked once more toward her father. He was watching her, his eyes boring into her. If she said the wrong thing … But she couldn’t lie, couldn’t pretend she might have been mistaken.

Because she wasn’t mistaken. The man in the swamp had been her grandfather, even though he’d looked much worse than he had when she’d seen him early this morning, when he left the house. Finally she nodded. “It was him,” she breathed. “He — He looked different from the way he usually does, but it was him.”

Ted Anderson started to say something, but Kitteridge silenced him with a look. “How, Kelly?” he asked. “How did he look different?”

Kelly hesitated. If she told them the truth, they were going to think she was crazy. But there were other people who had seen her grandfather, and even though they didn’t know who he was, they knew what he looked like. “He — He looked sick,” she finally said, her voice trembling. “I mean — well, it was like he’d gotten old. I mean, really old, like he was going to die or something.” She paused, anticipating her father’s accusation that she was lying, but when her father said nothing, she went on. “It was really weird. I saw him this morning, when he went to work, and he looked funny then, too. But in the swamp it was worse. His hair was falling out, and his face was all covered with wrinkles. And his eyes were all sunken in.”

She saw the look that passed between her father and the police chief and fell silent again. But when her father spoke, he didn’t challenge her words at all.

“It’s what I told you,” Ted said. “There’s something wrong with him, and whatever it is, it has to do with the shots Phillips has been giving him. It sounds like they’ve made him go nuts or something.”

Kitteridge nodded curtly, his mind racing. “Whatever’s wrong, the first thing is to find him and get thai baby back.” He pulled his portable radio from its case on his belt and snapped it on. When Marty Templar’s voice crackled through the small speaker, he began issuing a series of orders. “We’ve got Carl Anderson in the swamp, and he’s got a baby with him. We need men, and we need them armed. Anderson’s got a gun, and we have to assume he’s willing to use it. And Marty,” he added. “The Sheffield kid’s out there, too. He went after Anderson. So make sure no one shoots the wrong person, got it?” He listened for a moment, then: “We’ll take off from Phil Stubbs’s place. Kelly Anderson can show us where the old man made the snatch, and maybe we can track him from there.” He shut off the radio, then turned back to Kelly. “Can you find your way back there?”

Kelly’s tongue ran nervously over her lower lip. “I–I don’t know,” she finally admitted.

Kitteridge frowned. “You got all those people back here, didn’t you?” he asked.

Kelly felt numb. How could she explain what had happened? How could she tell them that she hadn’t known where she was going at all, but instead had been simply following unspoken instructions that seemed to come from inside her head? At last she nodded. “M-Maybe I can,” she stammered. “But I’m not sure. I just sort of steered the boat, going whatever way looked right.”

But Kitteridge had stopped listening, his attention already shifted to the young mother, sitting in the midst of a cluster of her friends a few yards away, her face streaked with fresh tears.

Left alone with her father, Kelly looked up at him worriedly. “Daddy, what’s wrong with me?” she asked.

His daughter’s voice held a pathos that twisted Ted Anderson’s heart, and he gently put his arms around her. “Honey, there isn’t anything wrong with you. You’re a heroine — you brought all those people out of the swamp—”

Before he could finish, Kelly said, “It wasn’t me, Daddy. I can’t even remember doing it. It was like there was a voice in my head, telling me what to do.”

Ted’s arms tightened around his daughter. He wanted to tell her that everything was fine, that whatever had happened in the swamp this morning, she had been the one to bring the boat out, and that he was proud of her. But before he could say anything at all, he felt her stiffen in his arms.

“Look!” she said. “Daddy, look! It’s Michael. He’s got the baby!”

• • •

Michael, the baby held securely in his arms, stepped into the shallow channel that separated the island from the mainland and the tour headquarters.

“Wait!” someone shouted from the other side. “We’ll come over in the boat!”

Michael paused, then acknowledged the call with a wave of his hand. But while he waited for the boat to come and pick him up, he wondered what he was going to tell them.

He could see the police chief in the boat, and knew there were going to be questions.

Questions he couldn’t answer.

They were going to want to know where Carl Anderson was, and how he had gotten the baby away from him.

And he could tell them that.

But what could he tell them about the way Carl Anderson had died, and what he had done to the corpse?

Nothing.

His mind had been reeling ever since the moment he had felt that first flush of warmth spread through his body, first felt those hot tears stinging his eyes and running down his cheeks. From that moment everything about the world had looked different to him, and felt different, and he knew why.

Somehow, in that moment when Carl Anderson was dying, Michael had recovered his soul.

And he knew now what he had to do.

As the boat reached him and he handed the baby into the waiting arms of its mother, then let Tim Kitteridge help him into the boat as well, he said nothing.

Nor did he speak as the questions began to come at him from every direction, first from the baby’s mother, then from the police chief. But at last, after the boat was docked, he told them what happened.

“I followed him, and finally I caught up to him. He had a heart attack, or something. He didn’t try to hurt me, or the baby, or anything. He just ran as long as he could and then collapsed.”

“Collapsed?” Kitteridge asked.

Michael nodded. “He was under a tree. A tall pine— the tallest one around. He was trying to hide in some bushes, but I could see him. And he saw me, too.” Michael’s voice took on a hollow quality. “He died. He just died.”

Kitteridge’s frown deepened. “And you just left him there?”

Michael nodded distractedly, as if he was having trouble even remembering what had happened. “I had to bring the baby back,” he said. “I had to bring it back to its mother.”

Though Kitteridge was certain there was more to the story than Michael had told him, he decided that any more questions could wait until later. The boy’s face was pale and his eyes looked glazed. “All right,” he said. “You just take it easy for a few minutes. Then maybe you can take us back to where you left him. Think you can do that?”

Michael’s head moved in assent, and the police chief’s attention shifted to Marty Templar, who had just arrived with four other men. But while Kitteridge talked to the deputy, Michael quietly went in search of Kelly Anderson.

He found her near the dock, looking out uncertainly at the swamp. “You okay?” he asked, standing beside her.

Kelly shook her head. “Th-They wanted me to take them back to where we were when my grandfather took the baby. But I didn’t think I could.” She turned to face Michael. “I don’t remember how I got back.”

Michael took her hand in his own. “It doesn’t matter. They want me to take them to where I left your grandfather, but I’m not going to.” Kelly frowned but Michael kept talking, and for the first time she noticed that he’d changed, somehow. His eyes burned with indignation. “I know what’s wrong with us, Kelly,” he said, his voice dropping so no one but she could hear him. “I know what’s wrong with all of us, and I know how to fix it.”

Ten minutes later, when Tim Kitteridge went looking for Michael, he had disappeared.

He, and Kelly Anderson as well.

• • •

Clarey Lambert opened her eyes, blinking in the bright sunlight. She was sitting on the porch of her house, her body erect in the rocking chair. She felt tired from the effort it had taken her to reach out first to Kelly’s mind, and then to Michael Sheffield’s, but now it was over, and she could hear the soft throbbing of the outboard engine as the boat bearing the two teenagers drew near. She turned in her chair, feeling the ache of her protesting muscles, and smiled at Jonas Cox. “They be coming. You hear?”

Jonas said nothing, his eyes searching the waterways in the direction from which the low sound drifted. Only when the boat came around the end of the next island and he recognized Michael and Kelly sitting in the stem did he finally relax. When he’d first heard the boat, he’d been certain that it was the Dark Man, coming for him.

As the boat bumped against the pilings beneath the structure, Jonas reached down, taking the line that Kelly held up to him, and tied it to the railing. Then Kelly and Michael climbed up the short ladder, coming to a sudden stop when they saw Clarey’s eyes fixed on them.

“The baby?” the old woman asked.

“He’s all right,” Michael told her. “I got him back to his mother.”

“It was my grandfather who took him,” Kelly said. “Why did he—”

Before she could finish her question, Clarey’s voice, crackling with anger, cut her off. “Not your grandpa,” the old woman declared. “Don’t you never think that man was your grandpa. And it don’t matter now — he be dead.”

Jonas Cox’s pinched face paled. “Michael killed him?” he asked, his voice trembling.

“No!” Clarey replied. “Michael didn’t kill Carl Anderson. Carl Anderson died a long time ago. Only his body stayed alive.” Her glittering eyes shifted away from Jonas, boring into Kelly. “You saw him — you saw him in your dreams, and in your mirror. Both of you did. But it warn’t just him you saw. It was all of ’em — all the old men whose souls died but whose bodies stayed alive, sucking up the lives and the souls of the young ’uns.” Clarey’s gaze shifted toward Michael, and now she noticed the difference in his eyes.

The empty gaze of the children of the Circle was gone, and Michael’s eyes smoldered with anger.

“It’s what he wanted that baby for. Gonna take that little child to the Dark Man, so he could suck the life out of it, that’s what that evil man was going to do.” She smiled again, and chuckled softly. “But you didn’t let him, did you? You took that baby away from him, and took your soul back, too, didn’t you?”

Kelly gasped, her eyes widening as she turned to Michael. “But if you didn’t kill him—”

“I didn’t have to,” Michael told her, knowing what she was thinking. He hesitated, seeing once more the scene at the foot of the pine tree, when Carl Anderson had watched him coming close and known what he was going to do.

Known, and been unable to stop him.

“I would have killed him, though,” he said at last, his voice quiet. “If he hadn’t died, I would have killed him.” His eyes, glistening with tears he made no attempt to wipe away, held steadily on Kelly as he told her what had happened.

“It was something inside him,” he concluded, after describing his attack on Carl Anderson’s corpse. “I could feel that there was something there, something I had to find.” He hesitated, then went on. “It was something that was mine, that I knew he’d taken from me. And when I found it—” His voice broke, and he couldn’t tell her what he’d done.

The memory of stuffing that bloody piece of atrophied tissue into his mouth, then forcing himself to swallow it, was still too fresh in his mind.

He smiled at Kelly, feeling once more that welcome warmth within him that until a little while ago he’d never experienced, nor even missed. “I’m free now,” he went on. “I know what’s wrong with you. And Jonas, and all the rest of us, too. I know what he took from all of us. And I know how to make us well again.”

Jonas Cox’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. “Ain’t no way to do nothin’ to the Dark Man,” he said. “Ain’t nobody even knows where to find him. An’ if he wants you, ain’t nowheres to hide.”

Michael shook his head. “It’s over,” he told the frightened boy. “He can’t make us do anything. Maybe he never could. All he could do was frighten us. But we’re all together, and we’re stronger than he is.”

He turned to Clarey Lambert, their eyes meeting. “Call them, Clarey. Call everyone.”

Clarey turned and went back into the house, the three children following her. “I knew the time were comin’,” she muttered softly, almost to herself. “Ain’t nothin’ bad gonna happen anymore, after tonight.”

She moved to her worn chair and let herself sink into it, closing her eyes. Silence settled over the room, and then Kelly began once more to hear the strange melody inside her head. As its intangible threads began to wind around her, she turned to Michael, her eyes questioning.

“She’s calling the Circle,” he said. “She’s calling us together for the last time.”

As Kelly gave herself to the haunting strains that seemed to come out of nowhere, she felt a pang of fear.

What if she wasn’t strong enough?

What if she couldn’t find the will within herself to do whatever it was that Michael had done?

But she put the thoughts aside.

She would do whatever was necessary, if it would free her from the awful terror of her nightmares, and from the chilling emptiness that had always yawned within her, threatening to swallow her up as if she’d never existed at all.