Darkness

28

Craig and Barbara Sheffield sat in the car, staring at the peaceful facade of the small white colonial building with green shutters that housed the Villejeune mortuary, neither of them willing to go inside, neither of them ready to face what they might find there. But at last Craig sighed, opened the door, and got out. A moment later Barbara joined him on the sidewalk. Craig gave her an encouraging squeeze. “Ready?”

Saying nothing, Barbara pulled open the front door and stepped into the unnatural hush of the funeral home’s foyer. Ahead and to the left was the viewing room in which Jenny had lain only a few days ago. It was empty now, its door standing open. To the right, across from the viewing room, was a small office, and as Craig and Barbara stepped inside, Fred Childress looked up, his eyes clouding as he recognized them and saw the strained look on Barbara’s face.

“Barbara? Craig? Is something wrong?”

“Yes,” Craig replied coldly. “Something is very wrong. I want the keys to our mausoleum, Fred.”

The undertaker’s eyes widened in shock. “The maus—”

“My mausoleum. The one where my children were buried. If they were buried at all!”

Fred Childress rose to his feet, his expression indignant. “I don’t know what you’re implying, Craig—” he began, but once again Craig cut him off.

“Get me the keys, Fred,” he said. “If you don’t, I’m going to break into the crypt without them, and if I find what I think I’m going to find, you’re going to be spending a very long time in jail.”

Childress’s mind reeled. It wasn’t possible — this wasn’t supposed to happen! “Craig, you know I can’t open a crypt without a court order—” he began, stalling for time, trying to straighten out the confusion that muddled his mind.

“I don’t have time, Fred,” Craig grated. “Now make up your mind! Do you want to give me those keys, or shall I break in?”

Childress’s jaw worked for a moment, but suddenly he found an answer.

Give them the keys!

Let them open the tombs, and then deny anything they might suggest. Surely, if he cooperated with them, they couldn’t blame him for what they found!

Quickly, he disappeared from the office, returning a moment later with a heavy ring of keys in his hand. “This is most unusual, Craig,” he insisted. “According to the law—”

“I know the law,” Craig said, taking the keys from the undertaker’s hand. “Come on, Barbara.”

Wheeling, he strode out of the office.

As soon as he was gone, Fred Childress picked up the phone and began searching for Warren Phillips.

• • •

Barbara stood rigidly in front of the mausoleum, not really seeing the stained limestone with its ornate facade. Indeed, as she waited while Craig searched for the right key, she barely saw the tomb at all. Suddenly she felt consumed by doubts. Did she really want to know?

If the coffin was empty, what would it mean?

Not only for her, but for Kelly, too. If Warren Phillips had taken her the moment she was born, and given her to the Andersons a week later, what would it mean?

What had been done to her during that week?

And now, sixteen years later, what could be done about it?

Though the afternoon was hot, Barbara felt herself shiver. For a moment she was almost tempted to tell Craig she’d changed her mind, to tell him to stop before it was too late. But before she could speak, she heard his voice.

“I have it,” he said softly.

Her eyes suddenly focused, and she saw the large key that he’d inserted in the bronze door of the crypt. His hand was still on it, but he was looking at her as if he understood the doubts that were suddenly assailing her. “Are you sure?” he asked one more time.

Barbara braced herself, then nodded. Craig turned the key in the lock. It stuck for a moment, then she heard the bolt slide back.

Craig pulled the heavy door open, the hinges screeching in sharp protest at the intrusion. For the first time in sixteen years, sunlight struck the small mahogany casket in which Sharon’s tiny body had been interred.

The wood had lost its luster over the years, and as Craig pulled the casket out of the tomb and set it carefully on the ground, an awful sadness came over Barbara.

There was something about the coffin, after its years in the mausoleum, that struck her as even more final than death itself.

As Craig began to lift the lid, Barbara turned away, unable to look at whatever might be inside. Only when Craig groaned softly did she finally force herself to look.

What she saw bore no resemblance to anything human.

Instead, lying on the yellowed and rotting satin with which the coffin was lined, was the desiccated body of an alley cat.

There was little left of it — a few fragments of skin, long ago hardened into leather, and the bones, laid out with a macabre naturalness. It was as if the creature had died in its sleep, one skeletal paw folded beneath its jaw, its tail curled up its side.

The empty sockets of its eyes seemed to stare reproachfully up at her.

Barbara’s stomach twisted, and she quickly looked away. “Put it back,” she whispered. “For God’s sake, put it back.”

Craig lifted the coffin back into the tomb and closed the door, relocking it as if it had never been disturbed at all.

Then, his own heart beating hard now, he began testing keys in Jenny’s crypt. A moment later he found the right one, but this time it twisted easily in the lock, and when the door swung open, there was no screech of protest from the recently oiled hinges.

He stared at the end of his youngest daughter’s coffin, putting off as long as he could the moment when he would have to slide it out.

His hands trembled as he grasped the end of the box, but he pulled it out just enough to open the section of its lid that had been closed on Jenny’s face only a few days ago.

He lifted it up and peered inside. Staring into the empty interior of the casket, his mind reeled, threatening to shatter into a thousand broken fragments.

“I was right, wasn’t I?” Barbara whispered, seeing the anguish on her husband’s face. “She’s not there, is she?”

Craig swallowed hard in a futile attempt to dislodge the lump that had risen in his throat. He shook his head, unable to speak.

“Oh, God,” Barbara moaned. “What’s happening, Craig? What did he do to our children?”

Craig dropped the lid and turned away, leaving Jenny’s coffin protruding from the open door of the tomb. Putting his arm around his wife, he led her out of the cemetery.

• • •

Warren Phillips glanced at his watch.

In a few more hours the last batch of thymus extract would be refined, and he would be ready to leave. Once he was gone, there would be no one left to answer the questions Tim Kitteridge would have.

Within a few days Judd Duval would be dead.

So would Orrin Hatfield.

And Fred Childress.

All of them, crumbling into dust as their bodies consumed the youth he had given them.

But he, along with his research and the few vials of the precious fluid he had left, would have simply disappeared, leaving behind him the laboratory in the basement, and the empty nursery.

He almost laughed out loud as he remembered the reassurances he’d given the undertaker when he’d called an hour ago: “Stop worrying, Fred — there’s nothing they can prove! Graves get robbed all the time, and there’s nothing to lead them back to us!”

Except for the birth certificates, but he hadn’t told Fred about those. Fred, or anyone else. And even if the Sheffields had discovered the forgery, it would still take some time before they’d be able to convince anyone to issue a search warrant for his house.

At least until tomorrow morning, and tomorrow morning it would be too late.

The five volumes of meticulous notes he’d accumulated over the years, detailing the research and experimentation he’d done before he’d finally succeeded in isolating the single compound within the body that held off the aging process, was already carefully packed in the trunk of his car.

Five volumes of complicated research that, in retrospect, seemed so simple.

The thymus gland, that mysterious organ that was so large in an infant and shrank so steadily through puberty and adolescence, almost disappearing in adults, should have been the most obvious place for him to look when he’d started on the project forty years ago.

And yet, even after he’d become convinced that the thymus was the key to his search, it had still taken him years before he’d finally developed a method of extracting the secretion of the gland and refining it without destroying the precious hormone it contained.

The answer to that problem, too, seemed simple now, for in retrospect it appeared obvious that it would be impossible to extract life from that which was already dead.

The glands he’d taken from corpses in the morgue had proved all but useless, and it wasn’t until he’d begun experimenting with live animals — mice at first, and then later, dogs and cats — that he’d finally begun to find success.

Only when he’d been quite sure of his methods had he begun experimenting on children, first using only the unwanted babies of the women of the swamp, the babies they’d neither planned for nor expected to survive.

But as the work had progressed and the technique had finally been perfected, he’d known he would need more babies, for as the children began to grow up, and as their thymuses shrank, they became less and less useful to him.

And he’d seen the differences in them, the differences he’d created by tapping into them long before they’d had a chance to develop normally.

They’d grown up to be strange, quiet children, children who never cried, but rarely laughed, either.

There was an ennui about them, as if something inside them — something almost spiritual — were lacking.

They seemed to care nothing for themselves, or for anything else, either.

And yet they seemed to have developed some special form of communication, some new sense to compensate for the loss of their youth. He didn’t pretend to understand this new sense, but had nevertheless found a use for it.

He had created a cult for them, carefully nurturing it over the years, building a mystique around the children, exploiting their differences from normal children, using those differences to control them.

He’d taught them that they were special children, but special only because of the Dark Man.

The Dark Man that he’d given them almost as a god, to be respected, and obeyed. And to be provided with more children, whom they would bear themselves.

Phillips had never appeared before them without the black mask that concealed his face, never let them know who he really was.

And sixteen years ago he’d put his own son into the project, too. But his own son would be different.

His son wouldn’t grow up in the swamp, wouldn’t be a part of the cult.

Instead, his son would grow up in Villejeune, where Phillips could watch him, study him.

He had carefully chosen Craig and Barbara Sheffield to be the parents of his son, certain that they would be able to give the child every advantage. They would raise his son outside the swamp, away from the ignorance and superstition of its denizens.

Away from the other children like him.

So he’d taken their baby, replacing it with his own, but out of his own peculiar morality — and perhaps an instinctive sense that the Circle of children should always remain incomplete — he’d seen to it that the Sheffields’ little girl didn’t grow up in the swamp, either.

She would grow up in Atlanta, and though he wouldn’t be able to keep as close track of her as he might have liked, still he would be able to find out what he needed to know.

Those two children, growing up in the normal world, would provide him with yet more knowledge.

But Carl Anderson had let his son bring the Sheffields’ daughter back to Villejeune.

And now it was all coming apart.

The Circle, completed, was discovering the truth.

Even before Fred Childress had called him today and told him of Craig and Barbara Sheffield’s visit, he’d known that it was time to leave.

But it was all right — there were other places he could go, other places he could find where there would be babies available to him. He could begin again.

But until he could find that place, he would need enough of the hormone to keep himself young, to stave off the ravages of his own mortality.

He moved into the nursery, ignoring Lavinia Carter, and took the bottle from the IV rack above the crib in which Amelie Coulton’s baby lay, its eyes staring up at him, almost as if it knew what was happening to it.

Then he moved to Jenny Sheffield’s bed. Jenny, too, was awake, and she shrank away from him as he approached, her eyes suspicious.

“I want to go home,” she said. “I’m not sick, and I want my mother.”

Phillips replaced the bottle that was attached to the tube in Jenny’s chest with a new one, then looked coldly down at the little girl.

“You’re not going to go home, Jenny,” he said. “You’re sick. You’re very sick, and tonight I’m afraid you’re going to die.”

Leaving Jenny staring after him, her eyes wide with terror, he turned and left the room.

• • •

Barbara and Craig listened numbly as Ted Anderson told them what had happened. “I don’t know what happened to the kids,” he finished. “Kelly brought the tour boat back, and a little while later Michael showed up with the baby. And then they just disappeared. We don’t know where they went, or why. No one even saw them go.”

Barbara sank down onto a wooden bench on which Mary Anderson, called out to the tour headquarters an hour ago, was sitting. She saw Tim Kitteridge working his way through the crowd toward them, and tried to stand up to meet him, but couldn’t.

“I’m sorry about this, Craig,” he said, then turned to Barbara. “I’m sure the kids are all right,” he went on. “God knows, they seem to know the swamp better than anyone else. We’ll find them.”

“You’d better find Warren Phillips, too,” Craig broke in. “It wasn’t the kidnapping that brought us out here, Tim. We were just at the cemetery, and something’s very wrong around here. Neither of our daughters’ bodies is in its crypt.”

Kitteridge stared at him blankly. “What the hell—”

“It’s Warren Phillips!” Barbara blurted, her voice ragged with the beginnings of hysteria. “He took Sharon, and he took Jenny, too! They didn’t die! They never died at all! He’s doing something with children! That’s why Carl took that poor baby!”

The color drained out of Mary Anderson’s face. “You mean Kelly—”

Barbara nodded. “It’s the only thing that makes sense. Michael’s birth certificate was forged, too. For some reason, Warren Phillips is taking babies, and he’s been doing it for years!” Her pent-up emotions spilling over, she collapsed against Mary Anderson. “What are we going to do?” she sobbed. “What has he done to them?”

Kitteridge, still uncertain about what Barbara meant, turned to Craig. “Can you tell me what this is all about?”

As calmly as he could, Craig tried to explain to the police chief what first Barbara, and then the two of them, had discovered that morning. “We don’t have any idea what it’s all about,” he finished. “But we know that there seem to be a lot of men around here who don’t look nearly as old as they are. I’m talking about men who don’t seem to have aged a day in the last fifteen or twenty years.” He ticked off half a dozen names. When he came to Carl Anderson’s, Kitteridge suddenly stopped him.

“Carl had changed this morning,” he said. “According to Ted, he’d gotten old overnight. I mean, realty old. When Ted saw him this morning, he looked like he was ready to die.”

Suddenly, for the first time in weeks, he remembered George Coulton. George Coulton, whose body — if it was his body — even Amelie had been unable to identify.

He warn’t that old, she had said. He warn’t much older’n me.

But the body — the body he was certain in his own mind was George Coulton — had looked at least eighty, maybe even older.

“What the hell is going on around here?” he said almost under his breath. “It sounds like Phillips must have found the fountain of youth or something.”

In Craig Sheffield’s mind it all came together. “No,” he said. “It’s worse. He’s found out how to take the youth away from our children and sell it to his friends. That’s what he needs the babies for. To take something out of them and use it himself.” Suddenly he remembered one other name, a name he’d left off the list he’d just recited to Tim Kitteridge.

“Where’s Judd Duval?”

Kitteridge looked at him blankly. “He’s in the swamp,” he said. “He’s looking for Carl Anderson and the kids.”

Craig was silent for a moment. Then, his voice hollow, he said, “You’d better hope he doesn’t find them.”