She envied him that.
Janine pushed her dark hair away from her face, wiped drying tears from her cheeks, and stared at the priest.
“There’s got to be something,” she said, her voice a tired rasp.
“Something you can do. Isn’t there some ... I don’t know, some invocation or something you can do to keep him away?”
Her voice quavered and she knew how desperate she sounded. But desperate was exactly what she was.
Father Charles shook his head, the apology in his eyes before it ever reached his lips. “I’m sorry, Janine. I’m not a sorcerer; I’m a priest.”
Janine sighed. She was about to reply when, out of the corner of her eye, she saw something move up in the turret room. Her lips parted and she felt her grief welling up in her again. There came a thump and something in that room slithered across the floor with a wet squelch.
“No,” she said, shaking her head. “Not this.”
Father Charles spun toward the steps that led up into the turret room. Janine stared at the opening at the top of those steps, the half-open door. She had to turn away, knew that she could not bear to see the horrid thing, the wide-eyed, river-drenched corpse of her mother that she knew would emerge any moment at the top of those steps. But she could not move.
“Not this,” she whispered.
The priest backpedaled, reached toward her without turning around, arm waving, gesturing for her to stay behind him.
With a wet laugh, the thing came down the steps. Hot bile rose in the back of Janine’s throat but she choked it back down along with the scream that wanted to tear from her lips.
Mother?
But it wasn’t her mother.
It was a thing shaped something like her mother, but made entirely of dirty river water. But her mother would never have accepted Charon’s offer, any more than Ralph Weiss would have. It had no real cohesion, and could not even pretend to life like Maggie and the others. Just water, somehow coalesced into a monstrous form that came slowly toward them, dragging something heavy behind it.
Her mother’s corpse. The vile thing, this creature of Styx, had been forged from the water in which her mother had drowned, now pulled from her clothes and from her lungs and from the stain around her body.Yet it was still connected to her by some hideous umbilical that strung from her dead mother’s mouth to the head of the creature. It tugged her along and then Ruth Vale’s dead body tumbled noisily, wetly, down those few steps.
At last, Janine could scream. But there was rage in her cry now, not merely grief and horror. Rage.
“By all that’s holy ...” Father Charles began.
“Do something!” Janine snapped at him. “Something! You’re the one who’s supposed to have the power here. You’re the one with the faith.”
The thing flowed across the floor toward the priest. Janine knew he would be dead in an instant. Charon wanted to cut her off from anyone who cared for her, anyone who might help her. But the Ferryman would not risk her own death. While she was still alive, he might be able to sway her, but if she died ... Charon’s craft was not the only means of travel to the afterlife. Her death might put her out of his reach.
She threw herself at the undulating monster, and felt herself glide halfway through it, splashing. Then, suddenly, there was resistance. It pushed her away, but Janine blocked its path.
“You’ll have to kill me!” she cried.“Do you hear that, Charon? I’ll die first, and then where the fuck will you be?”
The filthy liquid thing drove against her, pushing her hard enough to drive her against the wall. An oceanscape painting fell off its nail.
Father Charles raised his right hand and quickly drew the sign of the cross in the air. He began to intone a prayer in Latin, rushing quickly through it but without tripping over a single word. The thing that drooled from her dead mother’s mouth lurched back; then it flowed through the air, across the hall toward Father Charles, and struck the priest like a massive wave. It spun him around, tried to force its way down his throat. He gurgled out the last few words of the blessing.
Suddenly released from its form, the water splashed to the ground and flowed across the floor, harmless and inert.
Janine stared at the priest. “How did he do that?”
Father Charles spat dirty water from his mouth and pushed his wet hair back. “I don’t know. The river he controls, Styx, isn’t part of our reality. But this ... I have no idea how far his influence extends.”
A sudden squeal of strained wood and metal filled the hallway, accompanied by loud pops in the walls. Together, they turned toward the open bathroom door at the end of the hall, just in time to see the toilet and sink shattered as the pipes exploded. Porcelain tumbled down and cracked the floor tiles as water gushed from the exposed pipes.
Too much water. Too fast.
The lights flickered and went out, and Janine felt certain that the electricity had been shorted by water somewhere.The gleam from the streetlights came through the windows at the end of the hall, but then another light seemed to flicker to life, illuminating the third floor.
The water flowed, spread, became a river. Where the bathroom had been, the entire hall seemed to disappear, no longer a part of the house. It was a river that flowed beneath red stars like bloody wounds in the sky where the roof used to be. The house was still there, around Janine and Father Charles, but only ten feet away the floor became a river, water gushing up over the edge and soaking through her shoes.
Mist rolled across the surface of the river and within it, the sickly green glow of the Ferryman’s lantern. Janine could hear the clanking of the lantern against the prow of the boat as he came near.
She squeezed her eyes closed. “It isn’t real,” she said. “He can’t do this. No fucking way!”
She felt Father Charles’s hand grip her arm. “What if he can? Maybe we’re not even in our world anymore.”
Janine opened her eyes.The river still flowed.The mist parted and Charon became visible, though still a distance away. Somehow, in spite of that distance, she could see the burning coronas around his enormous black pupils, and the blue lines marbling his flesh. She remembered the dreams of his hands on her, his cold lips suckling her breast, the way she had yearned in her dreams.
This wasn’t a dream. But she would not allow it to be real, either.
Charon raised an arm and pointed at Father Charles. “You try my patience, priest.”
His voice was cold, dead ... but he came no closer. And that was when Janine knew.
“He’s afraid,” she said.
Father Charles started and glanced at her. “What?”
“You freaked him out!” she said, excited. “He’s afraid.”
“Soon, Janine Hartschorn,” Charon said. “Soon we will be together.”
“You’re not even here!” she snapped.
Forget the water. Forget the mist. It’s solid floor, a house, rooms I’ve been in a thousand times.
Janine ran toward Charon as though she could shoo him away like a flock of birds.Water soaked her feet, flowed past her ankles, but it was just the water from the pipes. She was certain.
She ran to the edge where the floor gave way to the river, and she fell, went under, arms lashing out around her, splashing and trying to find some purchase. Water filled her lungs quickly. Her fingers caught hold of the edge of the wooden floor and she pulled herself up, gasping.
The water surged up out of the river in ropy tendrils that snatched Father Charles and dashed him against the wall.The priest cried out in pain, but then he began to pray aloud in Latin.
“No!” Charon thundered.
Janine screamed for David.
The box windows in the front parlor on the first floor shattered and glass rained down on hardwood and carpet, along with a dull thump. In the foyer, only steps from the bottom of the grand staircase, David swore again.
“They’re in,” he said softly, mostly to himself.
Annette stared at him for jus
t a second, alarm flaring in her eyes. Then she reached out to grab his hand and together they sprinted back up the stairs. On the second floor, they glanced back down. Grandpa Edgar stood in the foyer, staring up at them. The old man shook his head as though his grandson had performed some small, aggravating misdeed.
“Hello, Davey,” he said, his voice deep and resonant, just as it had been when he was alive. “Might as well quit now, boy. Don’t you think you’ve pissed me off enough as it is? You’ve never been much for the nasty stuff. Just all that goddamn whining.”
In that moment, Spencer Hahn emerged from the front parlor. Steve Themeli appeared in the hallway coming out of the kitchen. It had been him smashing a window at the back of the house.
“Tell ya something, gents, when Davey was a kid, he whined so much he coulda driven Christ off the cross,” Grandpa Edgar added.
All three of them grinned cruel, empty grins. David put an arm behind Annette and took off along the balustrade, hustling her along, headed for the door to the third-floor stairs. It hung open. Annette nearly fell as David rushed her up the stairs, then followed. He slammed the door closed, then slipped the dead bolt that locked it. He had installed the lock in high school, when he had wanted privacy up there on the third floor. With an errant mental whisper, he thanked the teenage boy he had once been.
David could feel Annette’s hot, sweet breath on his neck. He glanced up at her. Her skin was pale, her eyes wide, and he thought she looked like a porcelain doll. But there was something there in her gaze, her pupils sharp as pins, that belied that apparent fragility. Annette was anything but fragile.
“What now?” she asked.
His eyes flicked upward, toward the third floor, where Father Charles and Janine waited with Ruth’s corpse. Their situation was desperate. From where they were, there was no way out. Detective Kindzierski was likely dead, or at least so badly injured that he could not help them, and he had just locked them away from every phone in the house.
Desperate, he gripped the doorknob. “We hold them here. If we can’t do that ...”
“We’re done,” Annette said softly.
“Yeah.”
The entire house seemed to groan and creak. A loud knocking in the walls made them cringe, and David held on to the knob even more tightly. A loud clamor came from upstairs, a crash and a clatter, and the sound of rushing water.
Just as David turned to look up toward the third floor, water spilled over into the stairwell and began pouring down the steps in a small but powerful waterfall. A wave became a gush and soon it sprayed them as it fell, though they were all the way at the bottom.
With a loud pop, the house went dark, all the power going out at once.
“David,” Annette said through gritted teeth. “I can’t stand the dark.”
A strange glow seemed to come down upon them from above then, and when they looked up, they could see that water flowed past the top of the stairs. Janine shouted something angrily, and Father Charles began to recite in Latin.
Which was when the dead men, the hate-filled ghosts of David’s past, began to pound on the locked door. The knob twisted, and he was not strong enough to hold it. It was banged upon, kicked, but the dead bolt held.
More water poured down the stairs.
From above, Janine screamed his name.
David glanced at Annette.
“Go!” she shouted.
For only a moment, he hesitated.Then Annette shoved him out of the way and gripped the doorknob herself, her jaw set with anger and determination. The echo of Janine’s scream seemed fresh in his mind as David turned and ran up the steps to the third floor. At the top, his eyes were met with a sight that stopped him cold, forced him to grab the door frame to steady himself.
One half of the third floor had been sheared away and a river flowed in its place. Mist rolled across the floor and crimson stars burned in the sky. The Ferryman stood in the prow of his boat, one arm up as though to shield himself somehow.
Janine pulled herself out of the rushing river, dragging her body onto the sodden floor of the hallway. Father Charles stood over her, bruised, bleeding from a large welt on the left side of his face. The priest called out in a hoarse voice, Latin words that seemed vaguely familiar to David. Then Father Charles made the sign of the cross in the air before him.
“I’ll see you on the water before long, priest!” Charon rumbled.
But the river slowed, began to recede, revealing the floor again, not so much beneath it as instead of it.
The Ferryman lifted the lantern from the prow of the boat and raised it high. Its green flame blazed up, and David, who had seen what it could do, cried out to Janine and Father Charles to take cover. But this assault was over. Charon blew out the green flame and they were all thrown once more into darkness broken only by the gleam of streetlights outside.
The river was gone. The mist. The Ferryman himself. Water still flowed uninterrupted from the burst pipes in the bathroom, spreading across the floor and spilling down the stairs, but it was merely water now.
David helped Janine up. She leaned on him as she gazed around in amazement. Then she stared at Father Charles.
“You did it,” she said. “You drove him away.”
Father Charles nodded. “For now.”
“How?” David demanded. “I mean, what did it?”
The priest shook his head. “I’m not sure. This isn’t his world. I don’t understand how he can intrude upon it so much. The only answer that makes any sense is that he’s anchored here somehow, and it isn’t just his obsession with Janine.Whatever this anchor is, it’s allowing him not only to be here, but to have a physical effect on our world. The way he can control the water like that. There’s no way to know how powerful he is, but I get the feeling it’s new to him, too, like he’s just finding out.”
“That makes sense,” Janine put in. “I mean, if he’s got some anchor here now, like you said, that’s got to be new to him. He’s testing his boundaries.”
“And ours,” Father Charles replied with a grave nod of his head. “I’m beginning to think that every time he touches this reality, his ability to influence it grows a little stronger. He’s trying to blur the lines between our world and his.”
David was still reeling from what he had seen. He leaned against the wall and nodded slowly. “Oh, yeah, I’d call that a pretty major blur.” Both hands came up and he covered his face, then slapped his cheeks as though trying to keep himself awake.
“Where’s Annette?”
His head snapped up and he stared at Janine, then turned to look at the steps leading down to the second floor. David pushed off the wall and ran to the top of the waterfall stairs.The narrow stairwell itself was dark, but in the wan light from the windows on both floors he could see that the door was splintered in two, had been caved in, and lay in awkward ruins on the steps.
Annette was gone.
CHAPTER 17
I’ll see you on the water before long.
Janine knelt by her mother’s body and stared into her dead eyes. A tear slipped down her cheek and she wiped it angrily away. She was through with crying. Her fingers encircled her mother’s cold, still hand, and Janine simply sat like that, alone, for several minutes.
Through with crying. It felt as though she had made one simple mistake in judgment: she had trusted Spencer Hahn. And she had been paying for that error ever since. Her heart and mind had been ravaged by cruelty and tragedy, terror and loss. Until now, she had thought that her survival alone was an achievement. But that wasn’t enough now. All this time she had struggled to withstand a maelstrom of emotion, but it had never occurred to her to strike back.
That time had come.
Charon. The fucker had murdered her mother, had tormented David in a way that still had him questioning his own worth, and now the Ferryman had taken Annette. If she closed her eyes, she could still recall the dreams she’d had of Charon, his hands upon her, his lips.... Janine shuddered now as she remember
ed the pleasure she had taken from those dreams. Her entire life had been out of focus, a sort of fugue of grief and despair, and Charon had used that, played with her, tried to coerce her into seeing him as an escape from her pain.
But all was in focus now. Janine saw with perfect clarity how she had been invaded, violated.
She squeezed her mother’s rigid fingers; then she rose and went down to the second floor, where she stripped the spread from the bed in the guest room.Water had seeped through the ceiling from the burst pipes above. David had succeeded in shutting off the flow, but the damage was done.Tens of thousands of dollars in damage to his family home. Yet that was the last thing on any of their minds at the moment.
It infuriated her that they were still reacting. But there were things that had to be done.
With the bedspread in her arms, Janine walked back up to the third floor. She glanced once at the turret room, then draped the spread over her mother’s corpse and left Ruth there. At the bottom of the steps, where the remnants of the shattered door still lay in the hall, she thought again of Annette, and wished that David and Father Charles would hurry.
Almost as though summoned by her thoughts, the front door opened downstairs.
“Janine!” David called.
“Up here!”
From the top of the grand staircase she could see them both. David had put on dry blue jeans and a knit sweater, his hair had been wet and dried wild, and he had a bit of stubble on his chin. He looked older, somehow, gaunt and haunted, and yet he walked with a determination that reflected what she felt in her heart. Father Charles was all in black, his priestly garb still damp. He seemed almost skittish, glancing into the parlor as he passed it, his eyes roving around, peering into every shadow.
“Did you find Kindzierski?” Janine asked, her voice echoing, hollow and cold in the large foyer.
David nodded. “He’s dead. I ... I don’t know how many people heard those gunshots, or if they called the police, but we couldn’t take any chances.”
Janine kept her hand on the banister, her gaze locked on them. “What did you do?”
“There’s a Toyota parked a couple houses down with magazines and empty Doritos bags in it. It was unlocked. I’m guessing he was watching the house. We—”
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