by John Saul
His son wouldn’t grow up in the swamp, wouldn’t be a part of the cult.
Instead, his son would grow up in Villejeune, where Phillips could watch him, study him.
He had carefully chosen Craig and Barbara Sheffield to be the parents of his son, certain that they would be able to give the child every advantage. They would raise his son outside the swamp, away from the ignorance and superstition of its denizens.
Away from the other children like him.
So he’d taken their baby, replacing it with his own, but out of his own peculiar morality—and perhaps an instinctive sense that the Circle of children should always remain incomplete—he’d seen to it that the Sheffields’ little girl didn’t grow up in the swamp, either.
She would grow up in Atlanta, and though he wouldn’t be able to keep as close track of her as he might have liked, still he would be able to find out what he needed to know.
Those two children, growing up in the normal world, would provide him with yet more knowledge.
But Carl Anderson had let his son bring the Sheffields’ daughter back to Villejeune.
And now it was all coming apart.
The Circle, completed, was discovering the truth.
Even before Fred Childress had called him today and told him of Craig and Barbara Sheffield’s visit, he’d known that it was time to leave.
But it was all right—there were other places he could go, other places he could find where there would be babies available to him. He could begin again.
But until he could find that place, he would need enough of the hormone to keep himself young, to stave off the ravages of his own mortality.
He moved into the nursery, ignoring Lavinia Carter, and took the bottle from the IV rack above the crib in which Amelie Coulton’s baby lay, its eyes staring up at him, almost as if it knew what was happening to it.
Then he moved to Jenny Sheffield’s bed. Jenny, too, was awake, and she shrank away from him as he approached, her eyes suspicious.
“I want to go home,” she said. “I’m not sick, and I want my mother.”
Phillips replaced the bottle that was attached to the tube in Jenny’s chest with a new one, then looked coldly down at the little girl.
“You’re not going to go home, Jenny,” he said. “You’re sick. You’re very sick, and tonight I’m afraid you’re going to die.”
Leaving Jenny staring after him, her eyes wide with terror, he turned and left the room.
Barbara and Craig listened numbly as Ted Anderson told them what had happened. “I don’t know what happened to the kids,” he finished. “Kelly brought the tour boat back, and a little while later Michael showed up with the baby. And then they just disappeared. We don’t know where they went, or why. No one even saw them go.”
Barbara sank down onto a wooden bench on which Mary Anderson, called out to the tour headquarters an hour ago, was sitting. She saw Tim Kitteridge working his way through the crowd toward them, and tried to stand up to meet him, but couldn’t.
“I’m sorry about this, Craig,” he said, then turned to Barbara. “I’m sure the kids are all right,” he went on. “God knows, they seem to know the swamp better than anyone else. We’ll find them.”
“You’d better find Warren Phillips, too,” Craig broke in. “It wasn’t the kidnapping that brought us out here, Tim. We were just at the cemetery, and something’s very wrong around here. Neither of our daughters’ bodies is in its crypt.”
Kitteridge stared at him blankly. “What the hell—”
“It’s Warren Phillips!” Barbara blurted, her voice ragged with the beginnings of hysteria. “He took Sharon, and he took Jenny, too! They didn’t die! They never died at all! He’s doing something with children! That’s why Carl took that poor baby!”
The color drained out of Mary Anderson’s face. “You mean Kelly—”
Barbara nodded. “It’s the only thing that makes sense. Michael’s birth certificate was forged, too. For some reason, Warren Phillips is taking babies, and he’s been doing it for years!” Her pent-up emotions spilling over, she collapsed against Mary Anderson. “What are we going to do?” she sobbed. “What has he done to them?”
Kitteridge, still uncertain about what Barbara meant, turned to Craig. “Can you tell me what this is all about?”
As calmly as he could, Craig tried to explain to the police chief what first Barbara, and then the two of them, had discovered that morning. “We don’t have any idea what it’s all about,” he finished. “But we know that there seem to be a lot of men around here who don’t look nearly as old as they are. I’m talking about men who don’t seem to have aged a day in the last fifteen or twenty years.” He ticked off half a dozen names. When he came to Carl Anderson’s, Kitteridge suddenly stopped him.
“Carl had changed this morning,” he said. “According to Ted, he’d gotten old overnight. I mean, realty old. When Ted saw him this morning, he looked like he was ready to die.”
Suddenly, for the first time in weeks, he remembered George Coulton. George Coulton, whose body—if it was his body—even Amelie had been unable to identify.
He warn’t that old, she had said. He warn’t much older’n me.
But the body—the body he was certain in his own mind was George Coulton—had looked at least eighty, maybe even older.
“What the hell is going on around here?” he said almost under his breath. “It sounds like Phillips must have found the fountain of youth or something.”
In Craig Sheffield’s mind it all came together. “No,” he said. “It’s worse. He’s found out how to take the youth away from our children and sell it to his friends. That’s what he needs the babies for. To take something out of them and use it himself.” Suddenly he remembered one other name, a name he’d left off the list he’d just recited to Tim Kitteridge.
“Where’s Judd Duval?”
Kitteridge looked at him blankly. “He’s in the swamp,” he said. “He’s looking for Carl Anderson and the kids.”
Craig was silent for a moment. Then, his voice hollow, he said, “You’d better hope he doesn’t find them.”
29
As dusk began to settle over the swamp, Judd Duval felt the first icy fingers of fear brush against him, making the hairs on the back of his neck rise up and his skin crawl as if tiny insects were creeping into his pores. He’d been in the swamp most of the afternoon, and as the day had worn on, an intangible sense of impending danger had come over him. Part of it, he knew, was simply the swamp itself. Despite having lived in it all his life, his fear of it seemed to grow steadily, and today he felt its thousands of eyes watching him from every direction.
Yet no matter where he looked, he saw nothing.
Nothing except the moss-laden trees, the twisting vines, the black impenetrable water.
And the creatures.
Water moccasins slithered silently through the waterways, leaving only the faintest ripples behind them, and the ever-present alligators and crocodiles basked in the mud, their cold, glittering eyes seeming to fix hungrily on him as he passed.
An hour ago he’d wound his way through the swamp rats’ scattered settlement, and found a difference there, too.
The houses had seemed deserted, with no women sitting on their porches, no children playing at their feet.
He’d seen no men mending their fishnets or patching their boats.
Yet he’d sensed their presence inside the houses, felt them watching him.
It was as if they knew something, were hiding from some unseen danger that, though invisible, lay like a palpable force over the wetlands this afternoon.
Now, as the light began to fade, Judd found himself staring at a small island that loomed ahead of him. A single dying pine tree rose up out of a thicket of undergrowth, its branches silhouetted against the reddening sky like beckoning arms. Judd slowed his boat, letting it drift forward on the slow-moving current until the prow scraped against the bottom.
Judd’s eyes left th
e tree, scanning the soft land along the shore line.
Reeds were broken, and footprints showed clearly in the mud.
Footprints that led toward the thicket around the soaring pine.
His heartbeat quickening, his sense of dread gathering around him like the cloak of darkness that was falling over the swamp, Judd got out of the boat and followed the tracks.
He came to the tangle of brush around the pine tree and paused, his skin prickling. Every nerve fiber within him sensed that something vile was hidden within those bushes.
A memory flashed into his mind, an image of the body in the swamp, to which Amelie Coulton had guided him.
He pushed the memory aside and thrust himself into the dense foliage, forcing the branches aside.
And saw Carl Anderson’s body, stretched out on its back, already crawling with insects. A vulture, perched on Carl’s face, one of his eyeballs clutched in its beak, screamed with indignation at the interruption of its feast, then leaped upward, its wings beating as it scrambled into the sky.
Judd stared at the carnage that had been Carl Anderson’s chest, torn open, congealing blood filling the cavity with a reddish brown ooze.
He gazed at the ruin of Carl’s face, the eyes torn from their now empty sockets, only a few remaining scraps of skin still clinging to the bones of the old man’s skull.
Knowing now the truth of the danger he sensed, Judd backed away, then turned and fled to the safety of his boat. Starting the engine, he pulled away from the island, the image of the defiled corpse still fresh in his mind.
He turned the boat homeward, intent only on reaching his cabin, where, perhaps, he could lock the doors and windows against the terrible fear that was building within him. But even as he left the island where Carl Anderson lay, his panic began to peak, for moving through the gathering darkness, there were boats.
Not boats filled with the other men who had come out with him to search for Carl Anderson’s body.
Boats filled with children.
Strange, silent children, their eyes staring straight ahead, as if they were following some invisible beacon that only they could see.
As they passed him, Judd Duval’s heart began to pound, and an icy knot of pure terror took form in his belly, spreading slowly outward, threatening to paralyze him.
Only when the last of the boats had finally passed did he start the engine of his own skiff and turn the other way, intent only on getting away from those mute, menacing children with their empty eyes.
Barbara Sheffield felt her frustration reaching the breaking point. All afternoon she had tried to convince Tim Kitteridge that he should be searching Warren Phillips’s office—his house—anyplace where they might be able to find proof of what she was certain he had done.
But the chief had been adamant. “I can’t do it, Mrs. Sheffield,” he’d told her only half an hour ago, with a patronizing tone of long-suffering forbearance in his voice that had made Barbara want to slap him. “Right now I have other things to worry about. According to your own son, there’s a body somewhere in the swamp, and now we’ve got those two kids missing as well. When we’ve taken care of that, I’ll start looking into Warren Phillips.”
What he hadn’t told her was that he also had nothing with which to justify a search of Warren Phillips’s premises. Until he’d had an expert study the birth certificates that Barbara and Craig Sheffield claimed were forged—and who might give him some evidence that Phillips had been the forger—he couldn’t even go to a judge for a search warrant. And despite the pleas of the Sheffields, he wasn’t about to commit himself to an illegal search of anything. That, he was certain, would leave him defending himself against a lawsuit for the rest of his career.
But when Carl Anderson’s body was found, it might be a different story. For if Carl looked as Kelly and Michael—and even Carl’s own son—said he did, Kitteridge would have sufficient reason to talk to Phillips about what condition he might have been treating Carl for, and what drugs he had administered. But until the body was found, he had only secondhand impressions of Carl’s condition.
“Does he really expect us just to wait here?” Barbara demanded of Craig as night began to gather over the swamp.
Craig, no less frustrated than his wife, sighed heavily. “I wish I could tell you there’s something else we can do, but he’s right. What we think we know just doesn’t matter, honey. Not to the law. He’s only protecting himself, and if it weren’t our own children involved, I’d have to agree with him. Two empty crypts and a couple of birth certificates we don’t think are real just isn’t enough. But when Carl Anderson’s body turns up—”
“If it turns up!” Barbara interrupted him, her voice quavering. “And what about Michael and Kelly? Where would they have gone? And why?”
Craig Sheffield could only shrug helplessly. But if another hour passed and the searchers had still turned up nothing, then despite the objections of Tim Kitteridge, he and Ted Anderson intended to join the search.
Not that they had much hope of finding anything—the memory of his last search of the swamp was still all too fresh for him to delude himself about that—but at least he would be doing something.
And doing something, at this point, would be better than waiting.
Waiting and wondering.
Michael rose from the sagging sofa and went to the door.
Though it was dark out now, he couldn’t remember the sunset at all. Indeed, the afternoon seemed to have disappeared, passing without a trace, as Clarey’s silent song had filled his mind.
But this time—unlike those days and nights in the swamp when he’d lost track of time, and been left with nothing more than empty gaps of hours gone from his life—he knew what had happened.
The memories were sharp and clear.
Once more he’d seen the man who until today had come to him only in his dreams, or haunted him in the mirror as he gazed at his own image.
But now he understood that it was not just one man he’d seen, but many.
Every man who had partaken of his youth had been in those dreams, but the visions he had seen of them since he was a child were as they truly were, stripped of their masks of stolen youth.
Old men, ravaged not only by time, but by the evil that had consumed them, preserving their bodies even as it rotted their souls.
This afternoon he had seen them again, and this time he’d seen them for what they were, recognized clearly the corruption within them.
But today he felt no fear of them. Indeed, he felt their own fear, sensed their terror, saw them cowering away from him, knowing he was there, knowing what he intended to do.
And knowing they had nothing left of their own with which to defend themselves.
In each of them he had recognized tiny fragments of his own being, fragments that had reposed within them for years, waiting for him to claim them. And now the time was at hand.
Turning away from the darkness outside, Michael went back into Clarey’s house.
The old woman’s eyes opened. It was fully dark now, and she lifted herself out of her chair, feeling once more the stiffness of her years. With trembling fingers she struck a match and lit the wick of the oil lamp on the table. A soft glow of light diffused the darkness of the room, and Jonas Cox, dozing on the sofa next to Kelly Anderson, stirred at the sudden light. Clarey went to the stove, opening the door to poke at the embers glowing within, and added a couple of sticks of wood from the pile on the floor next to the stove, then put a kettle of water on the burner. As the water heated, and she added coffee grounds to the kettle, she turned to the three teenagers, who were watching her uncertainly.
Kelly still sat on the sofa, her face pale even in the warm lamplight, her eyes expressionless.
Next to her was Jonas Cox, fully awake new, his body as tense as a ferret’s, ready to dart away at the first hint of danger.
Michael was near the door, and as Clarey’s ancient eyes fixed on him, she could see the difference in him, the ch
ange that had taken place inside him when he’d come to her, and since then, during the long hours of her summoning of the Circle.
“They be comin’ now,” she said, knowing he would understand her words. “The children be comin’. They be nearby.”
She went back to the stove and poured the steaming brew from the kettle into four cups, handing one of them to each of the children. As if they knew that the night ahead might be long, they drained the thick mugs of the bitter liquid and felt its heat spread through their bodies.
At last, when the kettle on the stove was empty, Clarey turned the lamp so that the wick burned low, leaving nothing more than a faint glow to soften the shadows in the corners of the room.
“It be time,” she said.
She went out to the porch, then waited while first Kelly and then Jonas Cox climbed into the waiting boat. Finally Michael helped her down the ladder, and she carefully seated herself in the small skiff.
As Jonas Cox dipped the oars into the water, Michael cast loose the line and stepped into the boat. It drifted out into the quiet lagoon.
The moon began to rise as the skiff moved slowly across the water, disappearing at last into the twisting channels, joining the flotilla that was already silently converging on the small island on which stood an altar in the center of a clearing.
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.
