The Ferryman

by Christopher Golden

  “Fuck.”

  Something in his tone forced Janine to glance his way. The Ferryman turned toward him as well, rage simmering. But Grandpa Edgar was not looking at either of them. He was staring farther out on the river. Janine gazed past the Ferryman, trying to see what had so astonished this dead man.

  Amidst the swirling mists, Father Charles stood in the prow of Charon’s ferry with Annette seated behind him in the boat. Spencer Hahn was gone. Annette’s short-cropped blond hair looked unruly, even wild, and in that moment Janine thought she looked like some elfin warrior, eyes blazing with rage. In Father Charles’s outstretched hand, she saw a glint of metal. The boat was forty-five or fifty feet away and it was dark, but Janine thought perhaps it was a cross on a chain.

  The Ferryman thundered his rage.

  Father Charles lifted his chin defiantly. “You said you would meet me on the water. Here I am.”

  The river seemed to boil beneath Charon’s feet and then it rose up, a spout of frothing water that hoisted him aloft and bore him toward the ferry.

  “You are in my realm now, priest,” Charon said in a snarl, his voice now the torrent of rushing rapids. “I’ll take your soul across the river without a single coin in payment.”

  The water to either side of Charon rose up and he moved his hands as though conducting an orchestra. Tentacles of river water lunged in long arcs toward Father Charles and Annette.

  The priest sketched the sign of the cross in the air.

  The water splashed harmlessly down again to mix into the river.

  “It isn’t your realm,” Father Charles called across the river. “You don’t belong here. This water isn’t part of your world, but man’s. God’s.”

  The Ferryman roared furiously and attacked again, waves growing on either side of the boat, rushing toward it as though they were enormous hands about to slap together, crushing the vessel and the humans between.

  Father Charles blessed the waves and they fell.

  A smile of wonder spread across Janine’s features. “Faith,” she whispered.

  With a rumble that shook the entire river, Charon moved toward the boat, but slowly now, cautiously. Father Charles blessed the water around the small craft, and it began to float away, moving down river.

  “Impossible!” the Ferryman said with a snarl.

  “Apparently not, you ugly fucker!” Annette cried happily from the boat.

  Then she jumped into the river with Father Charles close behind. They stayed near one another and began to swim, moving toward shore—toward the Ferryman—rather than away.

  Father Charles began to shout so loud it sounded as though his voice was going. The words were Latin. Janine had heard them before. She laughed and turned to see that David was still held fast by the dead things, the ghosts of his past. But Edgar and Themeli were staring in horror and awe at the priest in the water, at their master’s fruitless attempts to harm him.

  She wondered.

  As the priest intoned the words in Latin, Janine repeated them to herself, though she had no idea what they meant. Shuddering with the cold of the spring-evening breeze and the chilly river, she waded closer to shore, moved right up next to David and his captors. So intent were they upon their master that they did not even notice her.

  Her lover stared at her, silently urging her to stay away.

  Janine reached out and, with her thumb, made the sign of the cross on Steve Themeli’s forehead.

  He spilled into the water and was washed away.

  Grandpa Edgar sensed her then. He turned, alarmed, and he lashed out with a vicious backhand that caught her across the face. Janine felt her lip split, tasted blood, but she smiled as she fell backward into the cold river.

  David had watched it all unfold in silent amazement, paralyzed with the magnitude of his emotions, each one like a separate string attached to his limbs, and he dangling there like a helpless marionette. When Janine blessed Themeli, destroying the creature, he wanted to laugh. Then Grandpa Edgar hit her and all the emotions that had strung him up fell away.

  “Bastard!” David cried, and he struck out.

  His fist connected solidly. Edgar Bairstow’s head rocked back and he stumbled in the water, then turned to stare at his grandson.

  “How ...” the old man muttered.

  A smile crept across David’s features. In a single instant, a sequence of deductions skittered across his mind. Charon had created solid-water constructs to house these souls, to draw them from purgatory. Without his immediate influence, what control did they have over these bodies?

  The answer was, apparently very little.

  Grandpa Edgar rubbed his chin, but then he grinned as well, and David saw with horror that this white-bearded Ernest Hemingway face would likely be his own reflection in the mirror thirty or forty years hence.

  “All right, Davey,” Edgar said with a grunt. “Let’s see what kind of a man you are, once and for all.”

  David steadied himself, ready for the old man to attack him. He could hear Hugh Charles’s voice resonating over the noise of the river, Latin words, but more than words. Ritual. Belief. It was all about faith. Not God, but faith in his world and himself and the love that he felt.

  “Come on, then,” Edgar said, fists up, beckoning with them.

  David dropped his hands and stood up straight. With pity in his heart, he looked down upon the ghost of his grandfather and shook his head.

  “I’ve got nothing to prove to you, old man,” he said. “I forgive you. And in the name of God—whatever God may be—I bless you.”

  Grandpa Edgar dropped his fists and stared at him, wide-eyed with surprise. A kind of sadness crept into the old man’s features. Then he fell away into the water like a cascade of tears.

  David turned quickly and saw Janine standing just behind him. With a soft smile, she reached for him. He touched her outstretched hand. She was warm.

  Hand in hand, they turned to see Charon sweeping down upon Father Charles and Annette. The Ferryman had ceased his attacks and now went at them himself. Green fire arced from the lantern in his hand. Father Charles continued his Latin chant, but the emerald flame did not dissipate. It did not turn away.

  The priest tried to shield himself, there in the water, but the otherworldly flame seared his arms and set his auburn hair alight. Annette screamed and reached for him, drove him under to douse the fire. For a moment the green flame could be seen burning even under the water, but then it was out and they were drifting away on the current. They came up perhaps seven feet from where they had gone under, Annette holding on to the priest, who coughed water from his lungs.

  Father Charles was alive, but they were no longer able to swim toward shore, and the Ferryman pursued them downriver, walking across the roiling surface of the water with an ominously purposeful gait.

  “Swim,” Janine said.

  David did. He did a ridiculous, high-stepping run deeper into the river and dove, and she was beside him the whole way. He was submerged for a long moment and then he broke the surface, blinking water from his eyes. The current had him now, and Janine as well, and together they swam after Annette and Father Charles.

  Hugh. Jesus, Hugh, be all right.

  “Hey!” Janine screamed after the Ferryman. “What’s the matter, you bastard? You don’t love me anymore?”

  With a flourish that sent a fan of water slicing up into the air, Charon turned toward them. His eyes were all black now, gleaming and dark, no more blazing coronas, no more eclipse. Or rather, a full eclipse now. All the light had gone from them.

  David wanted to stop, to back away, but he could not. Janine swam on, right for the Ferryman, and David followed. The river carried them with all the inexorable strength of the natural world. Of time. Beyond the Ferryman, this monster who had so cruelly scarred their lives, David saw Annette swimming toward a bend in the shore. Father Charles paddled weakly beside her, one side of his face charred, his hair singed to ragged stubble.

  But the
priest began to chant again, his voice strong and clear.

  And at last David began to realize what he was doing, over and over and over again.

  Hugh Charles was blessing the entire river. He was turning the Mystic River itself into an unending flow of holy water.

  Ahead, the Ferryman raised his lantern again, but now when David looked at the creature standing there above the water, his unwillingness to let it flow over him took on new meaning. Before it might have been to show his mastery of the river. But now? He wasn’t part of this world. Didn’t want it to touch him, except in the form of Janine’s hands. Charon had been forced to create hard-water forms for the souls he dredged from purgatory, but what of his own form? What had it required for him to exist here? He thought of what Father Charles had said, about Charon needing an anchor here, and wondered just what that anchor was.

  “What’s he made of?” David muttered, even as he kicked and thrust himself through the water.

  He ducked his head under, reached out with his arms. and pulled, swimming as fast and far as he could beneath the surface. He opened his eyes and looked up and above him he could see green light shimmering on the water.

  Despite the water soaking his clothes, bogging him down, David kicked and pulled and thrust himself out of the water. The Ferryman was above him, emerald fire arcing all around his lantern, his power. David grabbed him, felt the tug of the river as he held on to this new anchor. Charon roared his outrage at this blasphemy, but David held on with one hand and reached out with the other.

  He snatched the lantern from the Ferryman’s hand, cocked it back, and shattered the blazing light across the creature’s face. For a second, David thought he saw the ghost of Ralph Weiss silhouetted in that flash of brilliance, but then it was gone. Liquid fire showered bright green across the water and all over Charon himself. His robes began to burn, but only for a moment.

  Water shot from the river and doused the flames.

  David let go and began to swim toward shore, toward Annette and Hugh. Not all of the river was blessed, of course. It had to be constantly redone, replenished. But it was a matter of faith.

  As Father Charles shouted out the blessing in Latin, David repeated it. He heard Annette doing it as well.

  Without the lantern, there was only starlight now. The mist that had surrounded them like the eye of the storm began to thin, to spread toward them all now.

  Charon turned on Janine, who swam toward him. “I loved you, wretched thing!” he cried.

  “You wanted me,” she snapped. “That’s all. And you can’t have me.”

  The Ferryman gestured toward the river and the water came up in crashing waves again. This time they did not fall away, but drove down upon Janine, forcing her under, pushing her with such power that she was forced upriver, back the way she’d come, against the current. David saw this and screamed her name. He stopped in the river, floated right by the spot where Father Charles and Annette watched, horrified, from the shore. David caught Annette’s eye, and together they began to repeat the priest’s Latin words again.

  The water, David thought. It’s not his.

  When he looked again, the Ferryman was shouting his rage. The river would not respond to his commands. Janine surged up from the current, splashing and flailing and choking. But that lasted only a second. She had been forced upriver, but now she swam with the current again, her hair slicked down her back, her eyes glistening with anger.

  She grabbed hold of the Ferryman, and she pulled him down.

  Charon cried out again, alarmed by this loss of power, but then Janine clutched at his long beard and she drove him under the water.

  The river swept Janine along, but she held on to the Ferryman. His eyes stared up at her from beneath the water, wide and enraged. Then they began to whiten. He tried to pull her hands away from his throat, but she held on until the flesh gave way, soft and rotten, and she realized that somehow this was a corpse in her grasp.The remains of some poor dead creature that had provided an anchor for Charon on this plane. Now the Ferryman’s anchor was crumbling. And still he fought her.

  Drowning.

  Charon, the Ferryman of the Styx, was drowning.

  In that last moment, she thought to pull him up, but he stopped fighting. As though scoured by the river, the flesh seemed to flake and peel from the bones, and the bones themselves turned to powder and the robe was little more than a rag that began to sink.

  The river had swallowed him, and now it bore away what little remained.

  Janine let the current drag her for several moments, elated and yet somehow also horrified. Then she glanced back up the river, where Annette and Father Charles sat on the shore. She heard a shout and looked up to see David running along the riverbank near her. The mist had cleared enough that she could make him out fairly well, and beyond him, she thought she saw headlights speeding by on the road.

  The water swirled around her, tugging at her still, hoping to carry her along forever.

  With a kick of her feet and a stretch of her arms, Janine began to swim for shore.

  EPILOGUE

  The third Saturday in May, Annette drove out to Bookiccino in Arlington. It was still early in the season, but the owners had put a few tables outside the door, creating a sort of faux café, trying to take advantage of the beautiful weather. It was in the mid-seventies and the air was crisp and clean, the breeze carrying the threat of sweltering summer days right around the corner. Days when only the ocean or the air conditioner could relieve the prickling heat of the sun on your skin.

  Annette looked forward greedily to July and August, to lying on the sand and letting herself be cleansed by that heat.

  Still, a day like today was a nice beginning. The sun glinted off her windshield and she had to hide her eyes behind silver-rimmed specs Janine had left in her glove compartment the previous summer.When she climbed out of her car on Massachusetts Avenue and went up into Bookiccino, it felt, in some ways, behind those flashy sunglasses, that she was a stranger to this place, coming to it for the first time.

  The feeling took her by surprise, but she relished it.

  Inside, the sound system filled the store with lilting old blues riffs. The song was one she recognized. “Trouble No More,” it was called. Annette smiled at the refrain.

  She took her time roving through the new releases and the mystery section, but in the end she felt the need for a change. The book she plucked off the shelf was Lonesome Dove, a Pulitzer Prize winner by Larry McMurtry. It was over a thousand pages long, and it was a Western, and if anyone had ever told her that she would someday read such a book, Annette would have laughed right out loud.

  But the title drew her, and the images in her head of men off on the range somewhere, in a simpler time when people had the courage to shake off the tragedies that befell them and soldier on.

  What a strange choice of words, she chided herself. Soldier on. This isn’t a war. It’s your life. And yet sometimes it did feel a little like a war. An eternal struggle against the passage of time and the shadows that lingered in the corners of life, a fight to find some way to endure, someone to endure with.

  Annette took the book to the counter and bought it, along with a cappuccino of enormous proportions. The woman who made the cappuccino was a fortyish redhead who offered Annette a tired smile when she handed the enormous mug and saucer over to her.

  “There you go,” the woman said. “Nice to see you in here again. Don’t be a stranger.”

  “Huh?” Annette mumbled, surprised. It took her a moment to replay the words in her mind, so distracted had she been, and when she did, a smile spread across her face.

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “I can’t stay away from here for long.”

  They both smiled politely and then Annette took the cappuccino and her book to an inside table—none of that sidewalk café stuff for her until summer finally arrived.As she began to read the first few pages of the book, she was warmed again by the woman’s kindness to her. T
here wasn’t anything to it but courtesy, a pleasant demeanor, but still it touched Annette. She had been recognized here, and she was welcome.

  A tiny thing, but it made her feel just the slightest bit less alone.

  On the way back through Medford she took a detour, and drove down toward David’s house to the spot on the Mystic River where it had all come to an end. Annette parked on the soft shoulder, but she did not get out of the car. Instead she merely sat and stared out at the river flowing by and she let the tears come again.

  She hoped that if she cried now, she could be strong for Janine.

  After perhaps twenty minutes she pulled away from the shoulder, turned around, and then drove out to Oak Grove Cemetery.

  The gathering was small, and Janine was glad. Her mother’s funeral had taken place two weeks before in Scarsdale, and she had been in-undated with sympathy from what seemed to be hundreds of people she had never met but who somehow thought they knew her. Clients and coworkers of her mother’s, relatives of her stepfather’s who clung to her as though it had been their mother who had drowned.

  Drowned.

  If only it had been as simple as that.

  Janine had been as patient with the mourners at her mother’s wake and funeral as she could manage, if only because she had to be strong for Larry. Other than his work, Ruth had been everything in his life, and he admitted to Janine in the funeral home after everyone else had left the wake, with her mother’s body only a few feet away, that work was going to be hollow now without her there.

  For the first time since her mother had married him, Janine found that she loved Larry Vale. The irony was cruel, but she took the result for the precious gift it was. She would keep in touch with Larry now, would check in with him regularly, would take care of him one day if it came to that. He was really the only family she had.

  Now, weeks later, they stood in another cemetery. Larry stood to her left, eyes rimmed with red but grimly fighting back tears, trying to be strong for her. Annette was with him, her arm linked through his, and Janine silently thanked her.