Darkness. Part 37

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.

Fred 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 pa.s.s 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sed the small ma.s.s of tissue to the waiting hands of the other children.

As Fred Childress's body finally died, the five children felt an unfamiliar warmth pa.s.s 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 cl.u.s.tered 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 h.e.l.l is that?"

Templar said nothing, his own skin p.r.i.c.kling with goose b.u.mps.

"Hounds," Ted Anderson breathed. "It sounds like the hounds of h.e.l.l, 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 G.o.d," 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.

Judd Duval no longer knew where he was nor what time it was, for since darkness had gathered around him and he'd fled toward the shelter of his cabin, something had happened to him.

Something he didn't understand.

His mind had played tricks on him.

He'd moved through the waterways, certain that just around the next bend he would find his shack and refuge from the fear that was engulfing him.

Yet as he rounded each familiar landmark, the swamp seemed to change before his very eyes, and instead of seeing the shelter of his house, he saw only another of the children-the empty-eyed, silently staring children of the swamp-gazing steadily at him.

Watching him, as if they were expecting him.

At first, each time he saw one of them he brought his boat to a stop, staring back at the child, challenging it.

But each time the child-never blinking-moved toward him, and Judd's nerve broke. Gunning his engine, he steered into one of the narrow channels, heedless of where he was going, determined only to get away from those dead, hypnotic eyes.

At last, though, he came to his cabin, and the fear began to ebb out of him as he hurried toward the safety of his home. But as he drew closer, he felt the children's presence yet again, felt their cold eyes reaching out to him, felt his skin crawling with their unseen gaze.

Then the howling began, the eerie baying that shattered what was left of his courage. The sound seemed to come from everywhere, and now, as his eyes searched the darkness, he could see them once more.

Everywhere he turned, the wailing furies stood.

He froze, watching the children, his eyes darting from one of them to another, panic growing inside him like a wild beast, gnawing at him, sapping his strength.

Then, coming toward him out of the darkness, he recognized Jonas c.o.x. The boy's face seemed to hang in front of Judd, staring at him, looming just beyond his reach.

But Jonas's eyes had changed. Their empty gaze had taken on a glowing fury, and they bored into him, accusing him, condemning him.

Judd tried to look away, but it made no difference where he turned; Jonas seemed to be everywhere, surrounding him.

Finally Judd closed his eyes, determined to face the vision no more, but Jonas's image stayed with him.

And then, as Judd's skin crawled with an icy chill of terror, Jonas reached out to him, touching him.

Judd tried to shrink away from the boy's touch, but Jonas's fingers somehow reached inside him, penetrating him, twisting and turning within him, as if searching for something.

And finally, in the center of his chest, he felt a burst of blinding pain, a pain that shot outward, paralyzing him, then twisting his muscles into knots that threatened to snap every bone in his body.

A moment later he felt the rest of the children falling upon him, tearing at him, and his mind began to close down so that all he was aware of was the pain, an agony that crept into every cell of his body.

He felt as if he were being tortured with millions of tiny needles, each of them twisting within him, jabbing at him, destroying him.

He could feel his body beginning to decay as his cells began to die.

An image of Carl Anderson came into his mind-his chest torn open, a vulture perched upon his skull as it plucked his eyes from their sockets.

As he felt the same thing happening to himself, as he understood with a terrible clarity the reason for his death, the last of his will to resist crumbled within him.

The six children led by Jonas c.o.x pulled Judd Duval's body from his boat and began tearing it to pieces, dropping fragments of it into the water, to be devoured by the gathering alligators and crocodiles. Their cries of rage began to die away as they tore their souls from Judd Duval's dying corpse, and as tears began to fill their eyes, they backed away, numbed by what they had done.

And yet, for the first time in their lives, they felt whole.