Darkness (52 page)

Clarey Lambert watched the candles on the altar. They burned bright, their flames steady in the stillness of the night. She was alone now, the Circle of children
departed, following Michael as he led them through the darkness.

She knew where they were going and what they were going to do, but she chose not to think about it. Rather, she preferred to sit by herself, close to the glowing embers of the bonfire, feeling its warmth penetrate the chill in her ancient bones in a way that the heat from the sun never could.

Tonight, she knew, was the night she would die.

But not yet.

Not until the last of the candles went out, not until the eyes of the dolls on the altar flooded with tears and she knew that all the children were whole again.

Only then would she let go of the life within her, the life she had clung to with a will that defied the vows of the Dark Man, who had sworn to live forever.

Clarey Lambert would outlive him, and laugh at him when she met him beyond the grave.

Tonight was a night she had long dreamed of, long prayed for. In her dreams she had always been there to watch the Dark Man die, watch him suffer as he had made the children suffer. But tonight, when at last the time had come, she found her hatred of him draining away, replaced by a pity she didn’t quite understand.

So she had stayed by herself on the island, content to tend the fire, certain in her own mind that when the time came for the Dark Man to die, she would know about it.

Just as she would know when each of the children regained his soul.

A faint sound drifted to Clarey’s ears, interrupting her reverie.

Barely audible at first, it slowly rose above the steady drone of the tiny night creatures until it filled the night with a scream of pent-up rage, a rising wall of sound that swept across the swamp, finally culminating in a shriek of anguish that shook Clarey’s body like a physical blow.

The end, Clarey knew, was finally beginning.

30

F
red Childress had left the mortuary immediately after calling Warren Phillips. He’d gone home to the empty house he’d lived alone in ever since his wife had died fifteen years ago. All afternoon he’d paced nervously around the house, every instinct in him telling him to pack a few clothes into a suitcase and drive away from Villejeune.

But he knew he couldn’t, for if he left Villejeune, he would also leave Warren Phillips and the magic injections that had kept him young for nearly twenty years.

Without the injections …

He put the thought out of his mind, remembering the sight of George Coulton’s body when he’d taken it from the morgue to inter in one of the crypts in the cemetery.

“That’s you, Fred,” Warren Phillips had told him. “That’s you, without the shots I give you.”

Fred Childress had said nothing, but for the first time he’d truly understood what would happen to him without Warren Phillips. So he wouldn’t leave town. He would
do as Phillips had told him, saying nothing, admitting nothing about the empty tombs in the Sheffields’ mausoleum.

And it would be all right.

Warren Phillips would take care of him—him, and Orrin Hatfield, and Judd Duval, all of them—just as he had for nearly two decades.

But as night began to fall, he’d grown increasingly nervous. His skin had begun to crawl, as if thousands of ants were creeping over his body, and he’d begun to imagine that he heard sounds outside in the night.

Sounds of children, coming out of the darkness, creeping up from the depths of the swamp, surrounding his house.

Watching him through his uncurtained windows.

He scurried around the house, turning off all the lights, and then sat in the darkness, telling himself that he was only imagining the demons that filled the night.

And then he heard the howling outside the door.

He froze, fear drying his mouth and clutching at his belly.

The howl came again, rising out of the marshes, reaching out to him, and Fred Childress, unable to resist the keening in the night, moved toward the door.

Against his will, he opened it.

He saw nothing for a split second, but then there was movement in the darkness, shadows beginning to move out of the pine trees.

Fred Childress’s heart began to pound once more as he saw the children emerge from the trees.

There were five of them, two of whom Fred recognized.

Quint and Tammy-Jo Millard, their hands intertwined, stopped at the bottom of the steps to his porch, gazing up at him.

Their empty eyes glittered coldly in the moonlight.

As the other three children joined them, and Fred Childress’s fear blossomed into panic, he felt a white-hot surge of adrenaline race through him.

For he knew what they wanted from him.

They wanted what was theirs.

They wanted the youth he’d taken from them.

Tonight, they intended to have it.

Fred Childress’s fear grew into abject terror as he felt the shadow of death begin to pass over his soul.

He felt them reaching out to him with their minds, boring into him, as if examining every corner of his being. And then grasping something deep within him.

Grasping it, and tearing it loose.

Fred screamed as a searing pain passed through his chest. The agony grew, as if a hot knife had been plunged into him, and he could feel its heat radiating through his body, slowly destroying him.

He raised his hands to his face and felt a rough scaliness on the folds of his skin.

The folds that had not been there only a few seconds ago, before he’d opened the door to face the children.

The children moved closer, and though Fred Childress tried to back away, tried to retreat into the shelter of his house, his body refused to obey his mind.

He felt the hands of the children on him now, pulling him off his porch, clutching at him, tearing at him.

They lifted him up, his quickly weakening body no longer able to resist at all, and carried him off into the night.

They came at last to the edge of the swamp, where they hurled the dying man to the ground.

Quint Millard threw himself on the twitching ruin of the undertaker, his strong hands tearing at the old man’s chest, ripping it open to seize the shrunken vestige of a gland that was all but lost within the desiccating tissues of Childress’s lungs.

Ripping a fragment of it away, Quint passed the small mass of tissue to the waiting hands of the other children.

As Fred Childress’s body finally died, the five children felt an unfamiliar warmth pass into their bodies.

And felt tears form in their eyes.

Tammy-Jo Millard, her eyes glistening, put her arms around Quint. “I’m scared,” she whispered. “I ain’t never been so scared in my life. I feel like maybe I be dyin’!”

Quint held his wife close. “Not dyin’,” he whispered. “Not dyin’ at all. We’re alive. We’re alive, and we’re free.”

On the island where Clarey Lambert waited, five of the candles on the altar were suddenly snuffed out, though not a breath of air had moved in the night.

And the eyes of five of the dolls overflowed with tears.

“Nothing,” Marty Templar said as he stepped out of the boat into the knot of people clustered on the dock at the tour headquarters. “All I could find was a bunch of swamp rats, and you know how they are—they’d as soon spit at you as give you the time of day.”

Tim Kitteridge nodded grimly, wondering why the swamp rats clung so tenaciously to their own ignorance. But if they wouldn’t talk, there wasn’t anything he could do about it. “What about Judd Duval?” he asked. “Did you see him?”

Templar shook his head. “Not a trace. I even swung by his house a while ago, but no one’s there. You ask me, we’ve got one more person to start lookin’ for.”

A muted howl erupted out of the darkness, then began to build into a chorus of fury that chilled Kitteridge’s blood. The hair on the back of his neck rising, he spoke to Marty Templar, though his eyes searched the night for the source of the baleful din. “Jesus,” he whispered. “What the hell is that?”

Templar said nothing, his own skin prickling with goose bumps.

“Hounds,” Ted Anderson breathed. “It sounds like the hounds of Hell, baying.”

As quickly as it had come, the clamor died away, and for a moment there was a deathly silence over the wilderness.

Then another scream rose, this one driven by pain and agony, cutting through the night like a ripping blade.

As the screams built, the swamp came alive with the wingbeats of birds bursting out of the trees into the air and insects swarming up from the water’s surface.

The water itself began to roil as the basking alligators and crocodiles caught the first faint scent of blood spreading through the channels and drifting on the wind. Coming fully awake, they slid off the muddy banks, their tails lashing furiously as they raced toward the source of the pungent aroma.

More screams filled the night.

“Dear God,” Barbara Sheffield breathed. “What is it? What’s happening out there?”

But there was no answer as everyone on the dock listened to the still-mounting cries of anguish.