The Taken (31 page)

don’t leave me!—bursting into her very core. The terror in them was awful. How could the women have left her there? How could Mary have left her there?

The Catcher Man must have felt her thoughts, because he turned to her. His mouth didn’t move. “I can make it stop. I can give her the choice.”

Alex stared at him. He was in her head and she in his. “Is this how it is for you? Every time? Is this what you feel?”

He shrugged, “Only until they make the choice. And then it stops.”

The idea of this filling his head constantly made her stomach turn. “Surely that would be too much to bear. Surely it must drive you insane.” Alex stared at him, uncomprehending of his existence, and she felt his confusion at her words.

“I don’t understand insane. This is what is.” He turned to the ravine. “I can make it stop. I can give her the choice.”

Alex stared at him and then at the ravine. She thought of the girl’s terror and pain, and she thought of the children stuck in between. She thought of her own cancer eating away at her. All of these things were worse than death. It was only fear that held them back.

“No,” she whispered, and this time she saw the Catcher Man flinch beside her.

“No more choices.”

She squeezed his hand tight before releasing it, sucking his electric power into herself, adding to that which she knew had seeped into her already, changing her, and then shut her eyes.

When she opened them again, she was on the small ledge far below the clearing, sitting on the edge, her legs dangling over the side into the torrent of the rising

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river. She was almost level with the rocky outcrop now, Alex’s dress floating on the surface. It was icy cold, but somehow, although she could feel it on her skin, it didn’t make her shiver. She looked down at the twisted girl next to her. Her back was broken, her legs sticking out at nauseating angles. Melanie gazed up at Alex. “I can’t move my legs. I can’t feel them.” Water lapped across the surface of the rock, and the little girl mewled. “They left me. They left me. I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to die. I can’t die. …”

Alex smiled at her, gently stroking the golden hair that had been muddied in the rain. “Shhh. Everyone can die. Everyone has to. It’s not so very terrible a thing.”

Melanie’s lips were turning blue as the water rose. “I’m scared.” The words were barely audible, but they cut into Alex.

“I know.” Reaching down, she took Melanie’s cold hand and squeezed it. “But you don’t have to be scared on your own. I’m here. I’m with you.” Allowing the power to do its work, she slipped right inside Melanie, filling her form.

The girl’s fear almost overwhelmed her, almost pushed her out, but she absorbed it, caressing the child from the inside. See? I’m here with you. Give me your fear. Give me your pain. For a moment the girl stiffened against the presence in her mind and then relaxed, letting the other take from her, taking comfort in Alex’s grip. For a while, the child and the woman were one and Alex saw her past and her present, all her badness and some good, and all the time she absorbed the awful blackness of that fear.

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She could feel the water against her cheek and her chin, Melanie’s cheek and chin, and when the little girl struggled and panicked she soothed her.

We’re going together. Trust me. Don’t fight it.

But I’m so scared, I can’t breathe.

I’m here, right here with you. I’m coming with you, can you feel me? Right in here with you?

Yes. Yes…

Alex could feel the water pouring into her lungs and she breathed it in for both of them. She was dominant here now, Melanie just the passenger, safe and warm inside.

Are you an angel?

The voice was soft and sweet and everything a child should be. Alex smiled. She could feel something happening to them, a lightheadedness, a distance between them and the water that filled them up. The clock was stopping.

Maybe something like that. Maybe I’m the angel of death. She smiled a little at the thought and Melanie giggled, the blackness that swallowed them almost comforting as Alex led them into it.

Suddenly the water was gone. Alex felt heat, a good heat pour through them and a strange popping sensation inside. They weren’t breathing anymore. Opening her eyes, their eyes, she gazed into the bright white light. The ledge was gone. The ravine was gone. There was nothing but warmth and light surrounding them like a blanket made from love, pure love, uninterrupted by human greed and jealousy.

Eager and excited, Melanie moved, wriggled away inside, and suddenly they were separate, somewhere and nowhere, in a different kind of in between.

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What do we do now ?

Alex smiled at the girl, her hair bright, one shoe on, one shoe off. Well, if you believe the stories, then I think we’re supposed to walk into the light.

It’s beautiful.

Beside her, the little girl glowed.

And so are you.

She watched as Melanie ran into whatever was causing the radiance ahead, and still smiling, she took a step to follow her.

It was like hitting a brick wall, and as the light turned to blackness, the blackness of rushing water, Alex felt herself being pulled back.

What is happening, what is happening? She tried to call out to Melanie to wait, for someone to help her, but the water was filling her lungs as she lay on the ledge, choking her, and she couldn’t move her legs, and the blackness and the panic and the fear were filling her up and all she wanted was to breathe but she was choking, drowning, and it was so terrible and she was so terrified.

Panicked, she fought and fought, clutching at life until the cold blackness, no comfort in it, overwhelmed her.

When she opened her eyes, she was back in the clearing, gasping for lungfuls of the stagnant in between air, the children and the Catcher Man all staring at her. She looked at him, her lungs raw, but the pain fading fast. The in between.

Things are different here. In seconds, her breathing was normal. “What the fuck happened there?”

The Catcher Man seemed slightly diminished, thinner in the gloom. He was looking at her with interest. “You took her death. You took her death for her.”

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“But why didn’t I die too? I was there, I saw the light. …”

He tilted his head slightly, bemused at her reaction. “But you’re in between.

You are the in between now. Look.” Reaching forward, he lifted her hand so that their palms were touching, then tilted them toward him and then her, making both sides visible. She stared. His hand was smooth and soft, and thick blue lines, like the veins that covered his skull, were rippling under the surface of hers, fading at the wrist where the skin returned to normal, and his became patterned.

Oh Jesus, Jesus Christ. “What is it? What’s happening to me?”

“Things are changing.” His black eyes were expressionless. “I’m ending. You’re beginning.”

“I don’t understand.”

He looked at the children, who were edging toward them and sighed. This time the trees barely trembled. “You will.”

The girl with the tunic reached them first, and behind her Alan Harrison and then the two boys who had been helping Melanie. They all stared at her, their eyes full of wonder.

“My name’s Annie.” The girl with the tunic was almost shy, one hand twisting into the other. “We saw… we saw what happened when you were with Melanie. We saw the light. We heard her laughing.”

Alan Harrison slipped his hand into the girl’s. Alex wondered how long had they been there together. A marriage-length of time spent in this purgatory. No growing up. Nothing but stagnating in a storm.

“It was a good laugh. She didn’t sound like that before. We want you to do it for us.” The boy’s baseball

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cap made him look so young as his eyes flitted from Alex to the Catcher Man and back again. “We want you to put us back. Take the choice back.”

Alex stared, the memory of Melanie’s drowning too raw and real and terrible. How could she face the beauty of that light again, knowing that she was going to be pulled back to relive the death she saved them from? Didn’t they realize what they were asking of her? How many of them were there? Twenty? Thirty?

Across the clearing she could see Laura and Peter waiting for her to take them home, to end this nightmare, little Callum standing alongside, pale and faded beside their bright colors. Her heart ached and she looked back at the pleading children in front of her. Of course they didn’t realize what they were asking of her. They were just children. Children who’d been afraid for a long, long time.

Looking back up at the Catcher Man, she let out a sigh of her own and watched his skin ripple with it.

“We have to do this together. You have to take the choice back before I can do anything.”

He nodded and turned to face the girl in the tunic. “Annie.”

And then the world froze again.

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Something was happening in the storm. They could all see it, peering out of the pub windows and into the mist that was settling in waves across the cobbled road. Thunder and rain still raged in the sky, but flashes of light broke through, the heat from the brightness turning the rain around it into clouds of steam.

“What is that?” Simon could feel Paul’s warm, stale breath brush against his cheek as he spoke. They’d all gathered in closely, bodies touching gently. It had been a subconscious movement, strangers seeking comfort from the heat and proximity of others, the windows and old door seeming little protection against the strangeness outside.

“I don’t know.” Another burst of brightness filled a patch of sky above some distant trees. Even from where they stood the purity of it hurt the back of Simon’s eyes, leaving pink and purple spots behind when he shut them. “But I do know that it’s coming up from the ground rather than down from the sky.”

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Paul paused, and watched. “Are you sure? Look again.”

Simon tried, but had to turn away. “It’s hurting my eyes.”

“It’s not coming from the ground or the sky. It’s coming from both at once. Or somewhere in the middle. Whatever it is, it’s not natural.”

“I don’t know about that.” Alice Moore’s voice was like a butterfly’s wings.

“It’s beautiful. So beautiful. I think something that beautiful must be natural.”

“Look! Look at the woods.” Crouch’s voice made them jump.

“We are looking at them.” Simon turned. “What’s the matter?”

“Don’t look at the sky. Look at the woods. Look. The children are going.”

The older man was right. Where the children had been evenly spaced, regimented in their surly observation of the living, there were now gaps, gaps that were getting bigger as each of the watchers turned and slid into the trees, some taking others hands and arms, just like normal children. Just like living children.

“Where are they going?” Paul squeezed Simon’s arm.

“I don’t know. It must have something to do with those lights.”

“Do you think it has something to do with Alex?”

Thinking of her, Simon paused, his breath hitching against his heart. “I don’t know, but it wouldn’t surprise me. Nothing about your cousin would surprise me.”

“Shall we go after them?”

The children had all gone within the space of a minute or two, but staring out at the storm, Simon shook his head. “We can’t. That blue electricity is still all over the trees. We won’t get past it.”

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Another flash of light burst through the sky.

“Do you think that maybe the storm is passing? Maybe it’s nearly over?” Paul sounded like a child himself.

“I hope so, mate. I hope so.” It was what would be left of them at the end of the storm that worried him.

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There was a time, she wasn’t sure when, time having lost all meaning to her, when she thought that the deaths were going to drive her mad. She was sure they would. She hoped they would; anything for some relief. Going into the children was bearable, she could live with it, or exist with it; it was a good feeling and it stopped the screaming and the fear in her head and the Catcher Man’s. The real agony came from facing that beautiful light and feeling its potential touching her soul, oh so briefly, before she was sucked back to take each death isolated and alone.

Her soul aged each time the Catcher Man called a child’s name, sending her back into their pasts to soothe them in their departure. It was ironic how much she had feared death. She could see it now all too clearly. Death was beautiful.

Purifying. Comforting. It was the dying that was terrible. Terrible beyond her comprehension. Perhaps that was the cost for the beauty of death. The yin and the yang. Perhaps it was

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in the dying that hell existed, the awfulness of it cleansing sins and reducing each person to the essence of everything they could be. She thought she had felt pain and fear with her cancer, but it was nothing compared to this, coming out of each child’s terror curled up on the ground, gasping for breath, for life, and all the time aching for the light, to follow the children into its comfort.

It had been an eon or maybe a second or maybe a length of time not quantifiable by normal measures, in between time, a paradox only understood without words, but when she finally opened her disoriented, panicking eyes, her mouth sucking at the filthy air, her whole body desperately shaking off the previous torment, the in between was almost empty of inhabitants. Pulling her body upright, readjusting to its proportions, she could feel its void reflected inside her.

The cold that had filled a tiny part of her such a short time ago now ran from the pit of her belly up to the back of her throat, creating a hollowness in her, filled with the memories of the deaths.

She turned her head slowly, expecting to see the looming bulk of the Catcher Man, impassive at her side, ready to call the next child, the only in between child left, little Callum, who was staring at her, one hand in Laura’s, one in Peter’s. She didn’t like the way they were looking at her. As if she were a stranger. And she didn’t like the way that looking at Laura and Peter made her eyes hurt, their brightness too much to bear. Her eyes sought out the Catcher Man and they found him curled up on the clearing ground, his coat now way too large for his form, his presence fragile like a jarring hologram, as if he was almost not in between. He