Swan Song

by Robert R. McCammon

  Swan thrust her arm out. The mirror was aimed at the left side of her face and her left shoulder. Now her head was only an outline in the glass. “I can’t see myself like—”

  There was a movement in the glass. A quick movement. And not her own.

  A face with an eye in the center of its head, a gaping mouth where the nose should’ve been, and skin as yellow as dried-up parchment paper rose behind her left shoulder like a leprous moon.

  Swan dropped the mirror. It clinked to the floor, and she spun around to her left.

  There was no one there. Of course.

  “Swan?” Rusty had gotten to his feet. “What is it?”

  Josh put the candle and saucer aside and laid his hand on Swan’s shoulder. She pressed into his side, and he could feel her racing heartbeat. Something had scared the stew out of her. He leaned over and picked up the mirror, expecting it to be shattered to pieces, but it was still whole. Looking into the glass, he was repelled by his own face, but he lingered long enough to see that there were four new warts on his chin. He handed the mirror back to Rusty. “Good thing it didn’t break. I guess that would’ve been seven years bad luck.”

  “I saw Fabrioso drop it a hundred times. Once he flung it down as hard as he could on a concrete floor. It didn’t even crack. See, he used to tell me this mirror was magic, too—only he didn’t really understand it, so he never told me why he thought it was magic.” Rusty shrugged. “I just think it looks like a smoky old glass, but since it went with the box I decided to hold onto it.” He turned his attention to Swan, who still stared uneasily at the mirror. “Don’t fret. Like I say, the thing won’t break. Hell, it’s stronger’n plastic!” He laid the mirror down on the tabletop.

  “You okay?” Josh asked.

  She nodded; whatever monster she’d seen behind her in that mirror, she did not care to lay eyes on it again. Whose face had that been, down in the depths of the glass? “Yes,” she replied, and she made her voice sound like she meant it.

  Rusty built a fire in the stove, and then Josh helped him carry the corpse out to the circus cemetery. Killer yapped along at their heels.

  And while they were gone, Swan approached the mirror again. It called her, just like the tarot cards had at Leona’s.

  She slowly picked it up and, holding it at arm’s length, angled it toward her left shoulder as she had before.

  But there was no monster face. There was nothing.

  Swan turned the mirror toward her right. Again, nothing.

  She missed Leona deeply, and she thought of the Devil card in the tarot deck. That face, with the awful eye in the center of its head and a mouth that looked like a hallway to Hell, had reminded her of the figure on that card.

  “Oh, Leona,” Swan whispered, “why’d you have to leave us?”

  There was a quick red glint in the mirror, just a flash and then gone.

  Swan looked over her shoulder. The stove was behind her, and red flames were crackling in the grate.

  She peered into the mirror again. It was dark, and she realized it was not angled toward the stove after all.

  A pinpoint of ruby-red light flickered and began to grow.

  Other colors flashed like distant lightning: emerald green, pure white, deep midnight blue. The colors strengthened, merging into a small, pulsating ring of light that Swan at first thought was floating in the air. But in the next moment she thought she could make out a hazy, indistinct figure holding that ring of light, but she couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman. She almost turned around, but did not, because she knew there was nothing behind her but a wall. No, this sight was only in the magic mirror—but what did it mean?

  The figure seemed to be walking, wearily but with determination, if as whoever it was knew he or she had a long journey to finish. Swan sensed that the figure was a long way off—maybe not even in the same state. But for a second she might have been able to make out the facial features, and it might have been the hard-edged face of a woman; then it went all hazy again, and Swan couldn’t tell. The figure seemed to be searching, bearing a ring brighter than firefly lights, and behind her there might have been other searching figures, too, but again Swan couldn’t quite separate them from the mist.

  The first figure and the glowing circle of many colors began to fade away, and Swan watched until it had dwindled to a point of light like the burning spear of a candle; then it winked out like a falling star and was gone.

  “Come back,” she whispered. “Please come back.”

  But the vision did not. Swan aimed the mirror to her left.

  And behind that shoulder reared a skeletal horse, and on that horse was a rider made of bones and dripping gore, and in his skeleton arms was a scythe that he lifted for a slashing, killing blow....

  Swan turned.

  She was alone. All alone.

  She was trembling, and she set the mirror glass side down on the desk. She’d had enough magic to last her a while.

  “Everything’s changed now,” she remembered Leona saying. “All that was is gone. Maybe the whole world’s just like Sullivan: blowin’ away, changin’, turnin’ into somethin’ different than it was before.”

  She needed Leona to help her figure out these new pieces of the jigsaw puzzle, but Leona was gone. Now it was her and Josh—and Rusty Weathers, too, if he decided to go with them to wherever they were headed.

  But what did the visions in the magic mirror mean? she wondered. Were they things that were going to happen, or things that might?

  She decided to keep the visions to herself until she’d thought about them some more. She didn’t know Rusty Weathers well enough yet, though he seemed okay.

  When Josh and Rusty returned, Josh asked the other man if they could stay for a few days, share the water and Gravy Train—and Swan wrinkled her nose, but her belly growled.

  “Where do you two figure to be goin’?” Rusty inquired.

  “I don’t know yet. We’ve got a strong-backed horse and the gutsiest damned mutt you ever saw, and I guess we’ll keep going until we find a place to stop.”

  “That could be a long time. You don’t know what’s out there.”

  “I know what’s behind us. What’s ahead can’t be much worse.”

  “You hope,” Rusty said.

  “Yeah.” He glanced at Swan. Protect the child, he thought. He was going to do his damnedest, not only because he was obeying that commandment, but because he loved the child and would do all in his power to make sure she survived whatever was ahead. And that, he realized, might be like a walk through Hell itself.

  “I reckon I’ll tag along, if you don’t mind,” Rusty decided. “All I’ve got are the clothes on my back, my magic jacket, the box and the mirror. I don’t think there’s much of a future here, do you?”

  “Not much,” Josh said.

  Rusty looked through a filmy window. “Lord, I hope I just live long enough to see the sun come out again, and then I’m gonna kill myself with cigarettes.”

  Josh had to laugh, and Rusty cackled, too.

  Swan smiled, but her smile faded fast.

  She felt a long way from the little girl who’d walked with her mother into PawPaw Briggs’s grocery store. She would be ten on the third of November, but right now she felt real old—like at least thirty. And she didn’t know anything about anything! she thought. Before the bad day, her world had been confined to motels and trailers and little cinder block houses. What had the rest of the world been like? she wondered. And now that the bad day had come and gone, what was left?

  “The world’ll keep turnin’,” Leona had said. “Oh, God gave this world a mighty spin, He did! And He put mighty tough minds and souls in a lot of people, too—people like you, maybe.”

  She thought of PawPaw Briggs sitting up and speaking. That was something she hadn’t wanted to think about too much, but now she wanted to know what that had meant. She didn’t feel special in any way; she just felt tired and beat-up and dusty, and when she let her thoughts drift tow
ard her mama all she wanted to do was break down and cry. But she did not.

  Swan wanted to know more about everything—to learn to read better, if books could be found; to ask questions and learn to listen; to learn to think and reason things out. But she never wanted to grow up all the way, because she feared the grown-up world; it was a bully with a fat stomach and a mean mouth who stomped on gardens before they had a chance to grow.

  No, Swan decided. I want to be who I am, and nobody’s going to stomp me down—and if they try, they might just get themselves a footful of stickers.

  Rusty had been watching the child as he mixed their dinner of dog food; he saw she was deep in concentration. “Penny for your thoughts,” he said, and he snapped the fingers of his right hand, bringing up between his thumb and forefinger the coin he’d already palmed. He tossed it to her, and Swan caught it.

  She saw it wasn’t a penny. It was a brass token, about the size of a quarter, and it had Rydell Circus written on it above the smiling face of a clown.

  Swan hesitated, looked at Josh and then back to Rusty. She decided to say, “I’m thinking about ... tomorrow.”

  And Josh sat with his back against the wall, listening to the shrill whine of the wind and hoping that somehow they would survive the forbidding corridor of tomorrows that stretched ahead of them.

  46

  THE HOMEWOOD HIGH SCHOOL gymnasium had become a hospital, and Red Cross and army personnel had rigged up generators that kept the electricity going. A haggard Red Cross doctor named Eichelbaum led Sister and Paul Thorson through the maze of people lying on cots and mattresses on the floor. Sister kept the duffel bag at her side; she had not gone more than five feet from it in the three days since their gunshots had been heard by a group of sentries. A hot meal of corn, rice and steaming coffee had tasted to Sister like gourmet delicacies.

  She’d gone into a cubicle in a building marked INCOMING and had submitted to being stripped by a nurse in a white suit and mask who had run a Geiger counter over her body. The nurse had jumped back three feet when the counter’s needle almost went off the scale. Sister had been scrubbed with some kind of white, grainy powder, but still the counter cackled like a hen in heat. A half-dozen more scrubbings brought the reading down to an acceptable level, but when the nurse had said, “We’ll have to dispose of this,” and reached for the duffel bag, Sister had grabbed her by the back of the neck and asked her if she still liked living.

  Two Red Cross doctors and a couple of army officers who looked like boy scouts except for the livid burns across their faces couldn’t pry the bag away from Sister, and finally Dr. Eichelbaum had thrown up his arms and shouted, “Just scrub the shit out of the damned thing, then!”

  The duffel bag had been scrubbed several times, and the powder had been sprayed liberally over its contents. “You just keep that damned bag closed, lady!” Eichelbaum fumed. One side of his face was covered with blue burns, and he had lost the sight in one eye. “If I see you open it once, it goes in the incinerator!”

  Both Sister and Paul Thorson had been given baggy white coveralls. Most of the others wore them, and rubber boots as well, but Eichelbaum informed them that all the “antiradiation footgear” had been given out several days before.

  Dr. Eichelbaum had put a Vaseline-like substance over the burn marks on her face, and he had examined closely a thickened patch of skin just underneath her chin that looked like a scab surrounded by four small, wartlike bumps. He’d found another two warts at the jawline under her left ear, and a seventh right at the fold of her left eye. He’d told her that about sixty-five percent of the survivors bore similar marks—most probably skin cancer, but there was nothing he could do about them. Slicing them off with a scalpel, he’d told her, only made them grow back larger—and he showed her the angry black scablike mark that was creeping up from the point of his own chin. The most peculiar thing about the marks, he’d said, was that they appeared only on or near the facial area; he hadn’t seen any that were below the neck, or on a survivor’s arms, legs or any other area of skin exposed to the blasts.

  The makeshift hospital was full of burn victims, people who had radiation sickness and people in shock and depression. The worst cases were kept in the school auditorium, Eichelbaum had told her, and their mortality rate was about ninety-nine percent. Suicide was also a major problem, and as the days passed and people seemed to understand more about the disaster’s scope, Dr. Eichelbaum said, the number of people found hanging from trees increased.

  The day before, Sister had gone to the Homewood Public Library and found the building deserted, most of the books gone, used as fuel in the fires that kept people alive. The shelves had been ripped out, the tables and chairs carried off to be burned. Sister turned down one of the few aisles where shelves of books remained and found herself staring at the antiradiation footgear of a woman who had climbed up a stepladder and hanged herself from a light fixture.

  But she’d found what she was looking for, amid a pile of encyclopedias, American history books, Farmer’s Almanacs and other items that had been spared burning. And in it she’d seen for herself.

  “Here he is,” Dr. Eichelbaum said, weaving through a few last cots to the one where Artie Wisco lay. Artie was sitting up against a pillow, a tray-table between his cot and the one to his left, and he was engrossed in playing poker with a young black man whose face was covered with white, triangular burns so precise they looked like they’d been stamped on the skin.

  “Hiya!” Artie said, grinning at Sister and Paul as they approached. “Full house!” He turned his cards over, and the black man said, “Sheeeyat! You cheatin’, man!” But he forked over some toothpicks from a pile on his side of the tray.

  “Look at this!” Artie pushed the sheet back and showed them the heavy tape that crisscrossed his ribs. “Robot here wants to play tic-tac-toe on my belly!”

  “Robot?” Sister asked, and the black youth raised a finger to tip an imaginary hat.

  “How’re you doing today?” the doctor asked Artie. “Did the nurse take your urine sample?”

  “Sure did!” Robot said, and he hooted. “Little fool’s got a cock that’d hang from here to Philly!”

  “There’s not much privacy here,” Artie explained to Sister, trying to keep his dignity. “They have to take the samples in front of God and everybody.”

  “Some o’ these women ’round here see what you got, fool, they gon’ be prayin’ on their knees, I be tellin’ you!”

  “Oh, Jeez!” Artie squirmed with embarrassment. “Will you shut up?”

  “You look a lot better,” Sister offered. His flesh was no longer gray and sickly, and though his face was a mass of bandages and livid scarlet burn marks—keloids, Dr. Eichelbaum called them—she even thought he had healthy color in his cheeks.

  “Oh, yeah, I’m gettin’ handsomer all the time! Gonna look in the mirror one of these days and see Cary Grant starin’ back!”

  “Ain’t no mirrors around here, fool,” Robot reminded him. “All the mirrors done broke.”

  “Artie’s been responding pretty well to the penicillin we’ve been pumping into him. Thank God we’ve got the stuff, or most of these people here would be dead from infections,” Dr. Eichelbaum said. “He’s still got a way to go yet before he’s out of the woods, but I think he’ll be okay.”

  “How about the Buchanan kid? And Mona Ramsey?” Paul asked.

  “I’ll have to check the list, but I don’t think either one of them is critical.” He looked around the gymnasium and shook his head. “There are so many, I can’t keep up with them.” His gaze returned to Paul. “If we had the vaccine, I’d put every one of you into rabies shots—but we don’t, so I can’t. You’d just better hope none of the wolves out there were rabid, folks.”

  “Hey, Doc?” Artie asked. “When do you think I can get out of here?”

  “Four or five days at the minimum. Why? You planning on going somewhere?”

  “Yeah,” Artie replied without hesitation.
“Detroit.”

  The doctor cocked his head so the one good eye was fixed firmly on Artie Wisco. “Detroit,” he repeated. “I’ve heard Detroit was one of the first cities hit. I’m sorry, but I don’t think there is a Detroit anymore.”

  “Maybe not. But that’s where I’m going. That’s where my home is, and my wife. Jeez, I grew up in Detroit! Whether it was hit or not, I’ve gotta go back there and find out what’s left.”

  “Prob’ly the same as Philly,” Robot said quietly. “Man, there ain’t a cinder left in Philly.”

  “I have to go home,” Artie said, his voice resolute. “That’s where my wife is.” He looked up at Sister. “I saw her, you know. I saw her in the glass ring, and she looked just like she did when she was a teenager. Maybe that meant something—like I had to have the faith to keep going to Detroit, to keep looking for her. Maybe I’ll find her ... and maybe I won’t, but I have to go. You’re gonna go with me, aren’t you?”

  Sister paused. Then she smiled faintly and said, “No, Artie. I can’t. I’ve got to go somewhere else.”

  He frowned. “Where?”

  “I’ve seen something in the glass ring, too, and I’ve got to go find out what it means. I have to, just like you have to go to Detroit.”

  “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” Dr. Eichelbaum said, “but where do you think you’re going?”

  “Kansas.” Sister saw the doctor’s single eye blink. “A town called Matheson. It’s on the Rand McNally road atlas.” She had disobeyed the doctor’s orders and opened her bag long enough to stuff the road atlas down into it, next to the powder-covered circle of glass.

  “Do you know how far it is to Kansas? How are you going to get there? Walk?”

  “That’s right.”

  “You don’t seem to understand this situation,” the doctor said calmly; Sister recognized the tone of voice as the way the attendants had addressed the crazy women in the asylum. “The first wave of nuclear missiles hit every major city in this country,” he explained. “The second wave hit air force and naval bases. The third wave hit the smaller cities and rural industries. Then the fourth wave hit every other damned thing that wasn’t already burning. From what I’ve heard, there’s a wasteland east and west of about a fifty-mile radius of this point. There’s nothing but ruins, dead people and people who’re wishing they were dead. And you want to walk to Kansas? Sure. The radiation would kill you before you made a hundred miles.”