Spirit (13 page)

T
ess and Annette were looking for the missing blind boy away from the train, deeper into the woods. Annette had witnessed the spirit ripping away from Tess's body, and was extremely disturbed. “Are you sure you're all right?” she asked Tess.

Tess said nothing.

She felt as closed-in as if she'd been in a coffin, and she could scarcely find the air to breathe. Her throat tightened. Her skin, even the skin of her eyelids, felt taut. She felt exposed and so very far from help.

“Say something calming,” Tess asked her. “Tell me about the children you want to teach.”

Annette searched for words. “When all this is past, I'll bring you to the blind children's school. And you can see what I have done. I think the key to their lives is going to be music.”

“Music?”

“A blind child who is trained in music is useful. He or she could be employed playing piano or harp at a hotel or such. Imagine being free of charity. I have in mind that there could be an orchestra of them, world-class, all of them living quite
well on their earnings.”

It wasn't an unintelligent plan, Tess thought. It was something that could truly change lives. The surprise of it distracted Tess; she was ashamed that she'd dismissed Annette as petty and small-minded.

“I know the blind school is here to make those rich investors feel better about their greed, but it's still a good thing,” Annette added. “Those children will benefit.”

Unthinkingly, Tess said, “I'm sorry.”

“Sorry? For what?”

“For thinking so little of you. For thinking you were keeping secrets from your fiancée with Michael—”

“Michael's feelings are not to be discussed,” Annette said, incensed. “He isn't the way you might think. He's the only one who knows I can't have children, and that's because Sattler might not marry me if he found out.”

Tess felt even worse. “I didn't know that.”

“You can't know everything, Tess, whatever you may think. Judge less and help more.”

This might have been like a hard slap to the face on a different day, but Tess was still absorbing the very fact of being alive. That relief passed quickly, though: a crackling in the nearby trees silenced the girls.

Then for a long moment, there was no sound at all.

“This Thing, this witch has such power,” Annette whispered. “She seems to cross space with mere thought….”

But Tess had no reply. Her eyes were fixed forward in absolute terror.

The fog was thickening about her. She couldn't see.

It had to be the spirit out here. This was how she traveled. But not alone; Tess could now hear people getting closer, calling for help, the muted cries of survivors.

“It's…trying to get inside us…,” Annette said. “The spirit tries to hide within…”

“It's desperate,” Tess tried to explain. “It wants to reach us.”

Annette looked tearful. “Tess…I think it's inside
me…”
The mist seemed to come from behind and melt into her, as her veins and her bones glowed inside her, now her abdomen,
burning
with light, vaguely blue as the mist moved down her. Then suddenly the witch was there, throwing Annette's body back furiously against a tree.

Nauseated, Tess heard bones breaking. And for the moment the light burned within the girl, Tess could see her skeleton, and another skeleton coming against it as she saw the two merge.

The witch's claws had reached deep inside the young woman, trying to grasp the blue skeletal spirit inside her, pulling it loose.

For an instant, Malgore appeared to be holding a shimmering blue veil of light, Abigail's very soul, but the spirit slipped out and escaped her claws, gliding free. Furious, the witch pursued the spectral entity, and the two passed into the snow and mist and could no longer be seen.

Annette's lifeless body collapsed to the ground.

In terror, Tess ran the other way into the forest. Heart pounding, she came upon a spray of broken dolls—battered china girls with rouged faces and black pupils staring upward—lying in the snow. They were littered around the dead body of the thin woman,
who still clutched several of her precious recovered toys.

Tess realized that anyone the spirit tried to reach, the witch destroyed immediately, and with astonishing savagery. Over and over, Malgore had wrecked her daughter's only voice to the world….

Exhausted, Tess fell against a tree, listening, watching—as a boy ran past, his hands feeling blindly before him. Ahead of him, Malgore glided out of the frost, a flying, grinning thing dripping with ice, in animal hood and robes.

Malgore blocked the panicked child. The boy stopped, out of space. The witch sniffed at him. She reached out a skeletal finger, stopping at the youngster's eyes. A look of disgust crossed her visage, and the wretch shoved the boy to the ground, dispensing with him.

Is he no amusement for you,
thought Tess,
unless he's bait for others?

Malgore stalked away into the woods, and the downed boy slowly turned as if aware of Tess.

He panted, whispering, “Are you…alive…?”

Unable to speak, she took his hands, put them to her face, and nodded.

The two of them stayed hidden, clutched together against the tree a long time. When finally the woods grew completely quiet, Tess eased out and peered around the tree, but little could be seen through the mist. Fallen bodies could be dimly made out, but she had no way of knowing for sure who had been lost.

She slipped back to the tree.

“I don't hear it anymore,” whispered the boy.

“No.”

A little more time passed, and Tess found the courage to move from hiding. Suddenly something lunged at her from the other side.

Carl's body slumped to the ground.

Drunk as he was, he'd gone out to help the others. She shouted as he fell, his corpse plunging into the snow.

Terrified she'd given her location away, she stood quiet, looking around. She snatched up the blind boy's hand and ran amid the trees, toward the train for shelter.

As they got closer, shadows in the car windows moved; people awake now, talking.

Tess stopped just before entering,
feeling
exactly what was happening inside with the survivors. “They're fighting. They're going to turn against each other.”

She gripped the boy's hand tighter, filled with dread.

 

At a small hill, Michael stood waiting as Tobias and Sattler caught up to him. Coughing now, with a bloodied arm, he seemed weaker than ever. Tobias looked at him and thought, Some people, even if they're timid, pull themselves together in a crisis and find the guts to go on. Not so with this one.

Sattler begrudgingly helped Michael rebandage his arm.

Looking inward, Tobias found that he had been more capable than he'd imagined. If only his mind would work as well as his body; the clues had been laid before him, but they did not quite fit properly. The dead couple; the doctor; the flashing of images; surviving the accident by some aid: what was the sum total of all these parts?

They rested, catching their breath. It was quiet. No one wanted to discuss their chances. Tobias yearned for the cleverness of Tess. The cold was seeping into him. Strange, how in a wintery place, thoughts seem to slow.

“I don't know what it is I have to do,” he said, still in a numbed state of mind, his shock wearing upon him even now.

Sattler stared.

“They've been separated. They can't touch. But I don't know how to bring them together,” he went on. “They can't expect me to kill Malgore, I wouldn't know…”

“I don't think I understand you.”

Tobias looked at him, lost. “These things are asking me to do something and I don't know what. Bring them their earthly possessions? Is that what they want?”

“You mean the box we took, with their wedding rings?”

Tobias was too deep in thought to answer, so Sattler looked at Michael for a response. “What is he talking about?”

Tobias pulled himself out of his daze and patiently explained, “These objects take on tremendous significance in the dead mind. The spirits may gain strength from them…possibly…”

“Strength for what?” asked Sattler.

“To kill the witch.”

Baffled, Sattler and Michael looked at him as if he were insane.

“We have to bring the spirits their possessions,” Tobias said emphatically. “So they can rid us of that thing. Are you listening to a word I've said?”

“I think we've all been out here too long…,” said Michael.
He'd lost consciousness during the attack, and wasn't at all sure what he had seen. Only some beast in the fog, possibly a wolf, he told himself, something that he could accept as real. “Let's just get on to safety now…”

And he looked up, carrying everyone's gaze to the winter village ahead of them on the hill. The winter carnival awaited.

O
utside, still terribly shaken, Tess and the young boy were gathered by the overcrowded parlor car. They found everyone, inside and out, wrapped in noisy debate, terrified, unsure as to what had truly happened.

Stuck outside with the bulk of the crowd, Tess watched in a dazed and ironically unhurried state of mind. Men yelled. Women shook their heads. People pointed, gestured. She forced herself to focus again.

The men had moved the bodies taken by the latest attack out onto the snow, but the grisly work had taken its toll on everyone. It was late afternoon now, and night would be hurtling toward them soon.

“This is going to keep happening until we are dead or we all lose our minds,” said one man.

Someone was muttering to himself, “Why did it only take some of us…?”

Another man outside shouted, “We want on there—we want in the train—”

“There isn't enough room for all of you!”

“Then you come out and
make
room—”

“Wait a minute.” Tess raised her hands, facing the train car. “You can't leave all of us out here in the cold.”

Alan, whom Tess remembered was a Navy man, looked at her sharply from the train, a rush of panic coming off him. “Only two of the cars offer real protection. What would you have us do?”

“There has to be a fair way to divide these cars,” Tess answered. “We cannot do this. We cannot lose all civility,” she cried.

“Look, now,” Alan growled, “no one is coming for us. I don't know what happened to those young men, but someone is going to have to go after them and get us help.”

No one in the crowd called for violence, but their faces clearly favored the idea. Tess felt their desperation. She faced Alan. “Whatever's out here is getting closer and it is getting angrier. We have to construct a barricade.”

“Barricade won't do it,” yelled an angry man, and he lunged to pull Alan off the train. But Alan kicked him back, and slammed the train door shut as the crowd surged forward, begging for entry.

Tess cried out for calm, “We can't do this—Stop—” but her voice was drowned out by the crowd. She escaped the mob, which hammered at the train everywhere, and managed to get to Ned, who was scarcely able to speak after the loss of Annette.

“I can't handle this alone,” she told him.

He looked at her with sympathy. “You don't have to. I'm with you.”

Indignantly, Tess looked back at the train. “They're not going to help us.”

Their world was divided between those on the train and those left out. None of them were safe, but she felt betrayed, watching
Alan and the others, locked behind the car windows. They looked back at her with only worry in their eyes. They were used to little hardships, perhaps, but nothing worse.

It felt like the woods behind her were moving in, the earth slipping under her feet, a near vertigo clouding her mind.
What insanity ever to travel here.
Trying to catch her breath, Tess saw Lucinda moving out of the crowd.

“Where is Elaine?” the Southern woman asked. “I can't find her. I think she's gone.”

“Lucinda,” Tess said, vacantly, as though in a daydream.

“Tess, wake up. We need you. We need to know who's left. What are we going to do for the wounded?”

There were still badly injured survivors in damaged train cars, far from the main body of the train. They were the ones who couldn't be moved at all, and there was no one to help tend to them.

Just over half the original survivors remained alive now, Tess realized in shock. Perhaps a hundred people left in all? From where she stood, she counted perhaps two score, outside with her, unprotected. It had been a massacre.

She pulled in a bracing breath of cold air, thinking she'd rather run away than face all that needed to be done. She had a confused longing to turn into the forest and leave it all behind no matter what the risk, to leave the people here as bait for the witch, and escape in the chaos.

It seemed now that a riot was erupting. Ned pulled her and Lucinda away from the growing mob trying to break into the train. Rocks were being thrown. There was nothing Tess could do;
it was like a dream. She could only stand there with her newfound allies and watch everything fall apart.

The wind picked up and ice scraped over the snow. No one was sure if this somehow meant Malgore was near, but Tess felt nothing stirring her deep senses.

“It's getting colder. I'll bet we don't have much more than an hour left of light,” Ned said.

They huddled together. Tess felt the softness of his wide stomach against her elbows, as she held her arms clutched against her chest. He looked down at her worriedly. “What do we do? How long can we withstand this?”

“I don't know.” Tess sighed.

Lucinda watched the crowd silently, ashen, unable to say anything.

“I feel like the cold is coming from my insides out,” Ned uttered thoughtfully.

Tess was now distracted, for the angered crowd was breaking up; strangely enough, she was seeing people moving away, toward the icy lake. Her eyes began watering, tears coming to them in some premonition of some great sadness she couldn't make clear in her head. Suddenly, there was a shattering sound of ice. People yelled, pointing.

Then the cause of her strange pain became more clear. Out of the frozen lake the buried train car was emerging, bursting out of the ice with a kind of electrical crackle. There was a sudden billowing of energy from the panicked survivors all around Tess. And they started moving in the direction of the lake, leaving the train to help. Tess trailed them, feeling sure that it was wrong to go.

And then she stopped. Knowing. The others rushed forward, while Tess stood watching, afraid, as they closed in, and the watery door fell open.

The rescuers suddenly slowed, confusion played out on their faces, struck by disbelief and horror. The storm was building, snow whipping around them—as Tess hung back, fearing what it was in the car.

“What is it? What do you see?” She had to scream to be heard over the wind.

Behind her, Lucinda was yelling; the weather, the elements, raging around her even more fiercely now…as the men up ahead saw into the train car. And they were looking at their own bodies. Leo and Alan and all of them, dead, looking at their own remains, and Tess saw it happening, saw it all so slowly unfolding and now the snow came charging across the angry landscape, and they began to vanish with it, swept away by the wind.

Tess turned back, looking to the train.

Lucinda was calling out, “Oh God…”

She and others stood staring back at Tess—and then slowly faded away. Tess saw them vanish from afar, leaving the train a solitary darkness, a collection of black objects in a long broken line. Snow swept across the landscape, wiping it clean of life….

They were gone.

Tess felt her heart trembling. Her breath held half-started prayers; she could not bring herself to move, and everything in her rejected what she was seeing. These people were not dead. It was impossible. She had seen them, held their hands, spoken to them, for hours. She needed them, she could not get through this
alone. She looked around in terror, abandoned.

Ned was stumbling toward her, his face pained and disoriented.

The body he was carrying was his own.

The snow lashed around him and behind it his dark shape vanished, the body collapsing to the ground. Then he was gone.

Tess was in absolute shock.
God help me. This is real. This is real….

Somewhere behind her, a boy stood terrified in the snow in front of the train, unable to move. “THEY'RE GONE—HELP ME—SOMEONE!” His screams were being eaten by the winds.

And Tess truly comprehended. They were no longer alive, but they could not accept it; they had lived on, believing themselves to be survivors. They had warped nature around them, the signs had been there. Everyone around her was fading away in the dim light of winter. They had been killed by the wreck, the storm, or the Thing itself; but they had been killed one by one. They were gone, all of them.

The snow charged across the land, and the trees, and the lake, and took every last ghostly breath from the place, erased the other travelers from existence, for they now knew what they were.

Phantoms.