Darkness

31

Warren Phillips had been working steadily, reducing the last of the fluid he’d extracted from the thymus glands of the four children in the nursery into the life-giving element that would keep his body alive and vital.

With the three small vials he was now placing into his medical bag, he would be safe for several weeks, weeks he would use to find a place to continue his work, a place where he was unknown.

Yes, the future was bright, for everywhere in the world he would find people willing to pay anything for the magic he had discovered in newborn children.

And there were places, he knew, where babies were cheap, where children were born every day who could be bought for a few dollars.

A few dollars, without questions of the purchaser or his motives.

Next time he wouldn’t bother to keep the children alive.

Next time he would simply milk them for a year or two and then destroy them. That, at least, was something he’d learned here in Villejeune. If he left them alive, they had to be dealt with.

But after tonight, after he was gone, it would no longer be his problem to deal with.

Dispassionately, he thought about those children, wondered what might happen to them when he was gone and they no longer had the Dark Man as a center for their empty lives.

He suspected their minds might begin to shatter, as Kelly Anderson’s had only a month ago. And if they did — He froze as a feral howl of rage echoed through the subterranean chambers carved out of the limestone beneath his house.

As a second howl rose, he hurried from the laboratory, to the foot of the stairs leading upward.

There, Lavinia Carter, her face ashen and her body trembling with fear, gazed upward. Phillips shoved her out of the way. “The children in the nursery,” he snapped. “Get rid of them!” Without waiting to see if his order would be obeyed, Phillips mounted the stairs, pausing in the dimly lit entry hall. Outside, the night was filled with what sounded like the howling of wolves. Phillips knew it was not.

It was the children.

The children who belonged to him.

Black fury rose within him. He controlled them; he commanded them!

Consumed with rage, Warren Phillips threw open the front door of his house.

The scene before him made his blood run cold.

The children stood in a semicircle, their hands intertwined, their empty eyes fixed on him.

In the center of the semicircle, alone, stood Michael Sheffield.

His son.

The deathly howling of the children slowly died away as they saw the Dark Man standing before them.

But tonight he wore no mask, and they saw him clearly.

They began to move, edging forward, the fear he had always seen in their faces suddenly gone, replaced with something else.

Hunger.

Hunger, and hatred.

The semicircle spread outward, leaving him with no retreat but the house itself. But when Phillips glanced over his shoulder, he saw more of the silently menacing children, crowded into the foyer of his house, cutting him off from any possible escape. They moved forward, forcing him out into the darkness of the night, then joined hands with the others. The Circle was complete.

In its center, frozen with terror, stood Warren Phillips.

The Dark Man.

Michael Sheffield moved toward Phillips, pausing in front of him.

The eyes of the father and the son met.

“We want only what is ours,” Michael said quietly.

As an all-consuming fear filled Warren Phillips, Michael Sheffield drew a knife from his belt.

He raised it high, its polished blade glinting brightly in the moonlight.

Then, just as the knife began to descend toward the Dark Man’s throat, Michael stopped.

The knife hovered a few inches from the Dark Man’s neck.

“Do it,” Phillips said, the words rasping in his throat as his numbed mind slowly realized why Michael had stopped.

The fear — the all-consuming fear that had seized him only a few minutes ago — had drained his body of the hormones that had kept him alive so long.

Already he could feel the creeping aches in his joints, the congestion in his lungs.

As he realized what was happening to him, the fear rose up in him again, speeding his metabolism, accelerating the decay that was raging through his body.

He was dying from within, and he knew how painful it would be, for he had long ago determined that the last of the artificially supported organs to fail would be the heart, and the lungs.

And the brain.

As his skeleton turned brittle and began to collapse, he would be aware of what was happening to him.

As his liver and kidneys began to fail, and poisons began to rage through his body, he would feel excruciating agonies, agonies even the strongest of drugs would be unable to alleviate.

If he were lucky, he would go into shock, his brain refusing to accept the pain his body was feeling.

If he were unlucky …

“Please,” he begged. “Don’t let it happen this way. Kill me. Kill me now.”

But Michael Sheffield turned away, and in the silence of the night he, and Kelly, and all the rest of his children, watched as the Dark Man began to die.

As his flesh began to putrefy, and his face collapsed into the grotesque visage of death that had haunted Kelly for so long, a glowing warmth began to spread through her body.

As he collapsed to the ground, writhing in the final agonies of death, Kelly’s eyes, dry since the first few days of her life, moistened, at last overflowing.

Bursting with renewed life, Kelly Anderson joyfully let her tears flow.

• • •

Amelie Coulton crept out onto the porch of her shack. The moon was high, and the swamp was illuminated with a faint silvery light that made the water glint and the shadows dance like black dervishes that might swallow you up if you brushed too close to them.

But tonight Amelie felt no fear of the shadows, for there was something different about this night. It wasn’t like the other nights, the nights when everyone in the swamp sensed danger in the air and stayed indoors, unwilling to venture out into the waterways, certain that some evil they didn’t quite understand lurked in the shadows, waiting for them.

Those were the Dark Man’s nights, the nights when the black-clad being was in the swamp, working his magic on the children who served him.

But tonight she hadn’t sensed his presence at all, even when she’d looked out her window and seen boats slip silently by her shack, boats rowed by the Dark Man’s children, making their way through the darkness toward some unknown place.

Then had come the howlings that had rent the night over and over again, rising up first from one place, and then from another.

The screams of demons were what they had sounded like to Amelie, but for some reason she didn’t understand, the sounds that should have chilled her blood had comforted her instead.

The Devil, that’s who Amelie had been taught the Dark Man was. Even now, in the silence that followed the unearthly howls that had finally died completely away, she could hear her mother’s voice: “He be out there, Amelie. He takes them when they’s babies, and he changes ’em. You stay inside, hear? You go out on his night, and he be takin’ you, too!” But Amelie didn’t believe in the Dark Man anymore, for in her own mind she knew he wasn’t the Devil at all.

He was Dr. Phillips.

And the night she’d listened to old Clarey Lambert talking to Kelly Anderson and Michael Sheffield, she’d known what had happened to her baby.

Dr. Phillips had taken him, hiding him, to do to him what he’d done to the other children.

But tonight, as darkness gathered and the children began to move, Amelie somehow knew what they were going to do.

And so she waited in the silence, until, in the distance, she heard the soft putting of an outboard motor.

Her body tensed and her eyes strained in the darkness as a boat emerged from a narrow channel.

Her heart began to pound as the boat bumped gently into the rotting pilings that supported her house and Michael Sheffield stood up.

From Lavinia Carter’s arms he took a tiny baby boy, wrapped in a blue blanket, and held it up to Amelie.

“We brought him home,” Michael said as Amelie took her son from him.

Amelie’s eyes flooded with tears. “An’ he be all right?” she asked, her voice choked.

From her place on the center bench of the boat, where she sat next to her sister Kelly, whose arm was wrapped protectively around her, Jenny Sheffield answered her. “He’s fine,” she said. “He’s a good baby. He never cried at all until tonight.” Amelie’s breath caught, and then her eyes shifted to Lavinia Carter. “It’s you who’s been lookin’ after him?” Lavinia nodded silently, her face reflecting all the misery she was feeling over what she had done for the Dark Man.

Amelie hesitated, then spoke again. “Then mebbe you better stay with me,” she said. “It be lonely out here, an’ I don’t hardly know what I’m s’posed to do with him.” Lavinia’s face lit up in the moonlight, and she reached up to take Amelie’s extended hand. A moment later, as the boat started away from Amelie Coulton’s tiny cabin, her lips moved, forming words she would never be able to utter.

“Thank you …”

Michael and Kelly, whose arm still held her little sister close, waved wordlessly to her as they drifted away into the night.

• • •

Barbara Sheffield stood silently on the dock, Craig’s arm around her. A few feet away Mary and Ted Anderson clung together, too.

Both couples waited in the strange silence that had fallen over the swamp.

They were alone now, for Tim Kitteridge and all the others who had been at the tour headquarters had left half an hour ago, searching for the source of the unearthly screams that had struck terror into each of their souls.

They knew neither for what they were looking nor where they might find it. But they were certain that whatever it was, it was something none of them was going to want to face.

Some evil, they knew, had met its end in the swamp that night.

The Andersons and the Sheffields, though, had refused to go.

“They’ll come back,” Barbara had said, speaking for all of them. “I know our children will come back here, and we’re going to be here waiting for them.” And so the others had left, and they had remained, and the waiting had begun.

Now, at last, they heard the sound of a boat approaching, and their breathing all but stopped as they waited for it to appear.

It was nothing more than a shadow at first, moving across the lagoon, a dark form all but invisible in the night.

It began to take shape, emerging finally from the darkness into the bright light of the moon, and they instantly recognized the three people in it.

Their children.

But changed, somehow, for as the boat drew near, all four parents could feel the difference.

Somehow, in a way they weren’t certain they would ever understand, Kelly and Michael were not the same as they had been this morning.

It was as if they, like the boat in which they rode, had just emerged from a lifetime of darkness.

As they gathered their children into their arms, Mary Anderson and Barbara Sheffield heard their children cry for the first time.

And their children’s tears filled their souls with joy.