1987 - Swan Song v4

by Robert McCammon

  A loose board popped out on the shack’s porch, beyond the closed door.

  Rusty looked up. He expected either Glory, Aaron or Josh to enter—but how could that be? They’d just been gone a few minutes.

  The door did not open.

  Another board popped and whined.

  “Josh?” Rusty called.

  There was no reply.

  But he knew someone was standing out there. He was too familiar with the noise the loose boards made when stepped on, and he’d already sworn he was going to find a hammer and nails somewhere when he got his strength back and tighten those bastards down before they drove him batty.

  “Anybody there?” he called. He realized somebody might be coming to steal the few items Glory possessed: her needles, her cloth or even the furniture. Maybe the hand crank printing press that occupied a corner of the room. “I’ve got a gun in here!” he lied, and he rose to his feet.

  There was no more sound of movement beyond the door.

  He walked to it on unsteady legs. The door was unlatched.

  He reached for the latch and he sensed a terrible, gnawing cold on the other side of the door. A dirty cold. He started to slip the latch home.

  “Rusty,” he heard Swan rasp.

  The entire door suddenly crashed inward, tearing off its wooden hinges and catching him squarely on his bad shoulder. He cried out in pain as he was flung backward and to the floor halfway across the room. A figure stood in the doorway, and Rusty’s first impulse was to leap to his feet to protect Swan; he got as far as his knees before the agony of his reopened shoulder wound made him pitch forward on his face.

  The man walked in, a pair of muddy hiking boots clumping on the floor. His gaze swept the room, saw the wounded man lying in spreading blood, the thinner figure curled up and shivering, obviously near death. And there it was, over in the corner.

  The printing press.

  That wasn’t a good thing, he’d decided when the flies had brought him back images and voices from all over Mary’s Rest. No, not good at all! First you had a printing press, and then you had a newspaper, and after that you had opinions and people thinking and wanting to do things, and then…

  And then, he thought, you were right back to the situation that had gotten the world where it was right now. Oh, no, not good at all! They had to be saved from making the same mistake twice. Had to be saved from themselves. And that was why he’d decided to destroy the printing press before anything was printed on it. That thing was as dangerous as a bomb, and they didn’t even realize it! And that horse was dangerous, too, he’d reasoned; a horse made people think about traveling, and wheels, and cars—and that led right up to air pollution and wrecks, didn’t it? They’d thank him for setting the barn on fire, because they could eat cooked horsemeat in just a little while.

  He was glad he’d come to Mary’s Rest. And just in time, too.

  He’d seen them come to town in their Travelin’ Show wagon, had heard that big one hollering for a doctor. Some people just had no respect for a quiet, peaceful town. Well… respect was going to be taught. Right now.

  His boots clumped toward Swan.

  Josh hit the flaming barn door with the full force of two hundred and fifty pounds, Glory’s scream still ringing in his head.

  For a bone-jarring second he thought he was back on the football field and had run smack dab into one of those huge linebackers. He thought the door wasn’t going to give, but then wood split and the barn door caved in, carrying him into the midst of an inferno.

  He rolled away from burning timbers and got to his feet. Smoke churned before his face, and the awful heat almost crushed him. “Mule!” he shouted. He could hear the horse bucking and shrieking but couldn’t see him. Flames leapt at him like spears, and fire was starting to fall like orange confetti from the roof. He charged toward Mule’s stall, his coat beginning to smolder, and the smoke took him.

  “My, my,” the man said softly. He’d stopped just past the thin figure on the floor, his attention drawn to an object on the pine wood table. He reached out with a slender hand and picked up a mirror with two carved faces on its handle, each looking in a different direction. He intended to admire the new face he’d created, but the glass was dark. A finger traced the carved faces. What kind of mirror had a black glass? he wondered—and his new mouth twitched just a fraction.

  This mirror gave him the same sensation as the ring of glass. It was a thing that should not be. What was its purpose, and what was it doing here?

  He didn’t like it. Not at all. He lifted his arm and smashed the mirror to pieces against the table, and then he twisted the double-faced handle and flung it aside. Now he felt so much better.

  But there was another object on the table, too. A small leather pouch. He picked it up and shook its contents into his palm. A little kernel of corn, stained red with dried blood, fell out.

  “What is this?” he whispered. A few feet away, the figure on the floor quietly moaned. He gripped the kernel in his hand and slowly turned toward the sound, his eyes red and gleaming in the low firelight.

  His gaze lingered on the figure’s bandaged, clawed hands. A swirl of heat shimmered around the man’s right fist, and from within it there was a muffled pop. He opened his hand and pushed the bit of popcorn into his mouth, chewing thoughtfully on it.

  He’d seen this figure yesterday, after he’d watched their wagon being torn apart. Yesterday the hands had not been bandaged. Why were they bandaged now? Why?

  Across the room, Rusty lifted his head and tried to focus. He saw a tall, slender man in a brown parka approaching Swan. Saw him standing over her. Pain wracked him, and he was lying in a puddle of blood. Gonna pass out again, he knew. Gotta move… gotta move…

  He began crawling through his blood.

  His good eye almost blinded by the smoke, Josh saw a swirl of motion ahead. It was Mule—panicked, rearing and bucking, unable to find a way out. The blanket on his back was smoking, about to burst into flames.

  He ran to the horse and was almost trampled under Mule’s hooves as the horse frantically reared and came down again, twisting in one direction and then the other. Josh could only think of one thing to do: He lifted both hands in front of the horse’s muzzle and clapped them together as hard as he could, like he’d seen Swan do at the Jaspin farm.

  Whether the noise brought Swan to mind or just snapped his panic for a second, Mule stopped thrashing and stood steady, his eyes watering and wide with terror. Josh wasted no time; he grabbed Mule’s mane and pulled him out of the stall, trying to lead him to the door. Mule’s legs stiffened.

  “Come on, you dumb fool!” Josh yelled, the heat scorching his lungs. He planted his boots in burning straw, his joints cracking as he hauled Mule forward. Pieces of flaming wood fell from above, striking him on the shoulders and hitting Mule’s flanks. Cinders spun before his face like hornets.

  And then Mule must have gotten a whiff of outside air, because he lunged so fast Josh only had time to throw his arms around the horse’s neck. His boots were dragged across the floor as Mule powered through the flames.

  They burst through the opening where the barn door had been, out into the cold night air with sparks trailing from Josh’s burning coat and the flames in Mule’s mane and tail.

  The man in the brown parka stood looking at those bandaged hands. “What have y’all been up to while my back’s been turned?” he asked in a deep-South drawl. The printing press was forgotten for the moment. A mirror that showed no reflection, a single kernel of corn, bandaged hands… those things bothered him, just like the glass ring did, because he didn’t understand them. And there was something else, too; something about the figure on the floor. What was it? This is a nothing, he thought. A less-than-zero. A piece of shit passing through the sewage pipe of Mary’s Rest.

  But why did he sense something different about this figure? Something… threatening.

  He lifted his right hand. Heat shimmered around the fingers; one of them burs
t into flame, and the flame spread. In another few seconds his hand was a glove of fire.

  The solution to things he did not understand was very simple: Destroy it.

  He began to reach down toward the growth-encrusted head.

  “No.”

  It was a weak whisper. But the hand that clamped around the man’s ankle still had strength in it.

  The man in the brown parka looked at him incredulously, and by the light of the flaming hand Rusty saw his face: heavily seamed and weather-beaten, a thick gray beard, eyes that were so blue they were almost white. Touching the man sent freezing waves through Rusty’s bones, and he wanted more than anything on earth to draw his hand back, but the cold shocked his nerves and kept him from passing out. Rusty said, “No… don’t you touch Swan, you bastard.”

  He saw the man smile faintly; it was a pitying smile, but then it passed the point of pity.

  The man reached down and clamped his burning hand to Rusty’s throat.

  And Rusty’s neck was encircled with a noose of fire. The man lifted him off the floor as Rusty screamed and kicked, and the fire pumped out of that hand and arm like napalm, sizzling Rusty’s hair and eyebrows. His clothes caught, and he realized at a cold center within his pain and panic that he was becoming a human torch—and that he had only seconds to live.

  And then after him, it would be Swan’s turn.

  Rusty’s body jerked and fought, but he knew he was finished. The smell of himself afire made him think of the greasy French fries at the Oklahoma state fair when he was a kid. The flame was going bone-deep now, and as his nerves began to sputter the pain locked up, as if a point of no return had been passed.

  Mama said somethin’, Rusty thought. Said… said…

  Mama said fight fire with fire.

  Rusty embraced the man with the burning sticks of his arms, entwining his fingers at the man’s back. The fingers melded like chains, and Rusty thrust his flaming face into the man’s beard.

  The beard caught fire. The face bubbled, melting and running like a plastic mask, exposing a deeper layer the color of modeling clay.

  Rusty and the man whirled around the room like participants in a bizarre ballet.

  “Lord God!” shouted one of two men who were looking in, drawn by the open doorway on their jaunt to the burning barn. “Lord God A’mighty!” The second man screamed, backed up and fell on his rump in the mud. Other people were running over to see what was happening, and the man in the burning rags of a brown parka could not thrust the flaming dead man away from him, and his new disguise was ruined, and they were about to see his true face.

  He gave a garbled roar that almost shook the cabin and ran through the doorway out into the midst of them. He was still roaring as he ran up the street on melting legs in the embrace of a charred cowboy.

  Glory helped Josh pull out of his burning coat. His ski mask was smoking, too, and before she could think twice about it, she reached up and yanked it off.

  Dark gray growths, some the size of Aaron’s fists, almost completely covered Josh’s face and head. Tendrils had interlocked around his mouth, and the only clear area except for his lips was a circle in the crust through which his left eye, now bloodshot from the smoke, stared at Glory. His condition wasn’t as bad as Swan’s, but it still made Glory gasp and retreat a step.

  He had no time to apologize for not being a beauty. He ran for Mule, who was bucking wildly as other onlookers scattered, and grabbed up a handful of snow; he clutched Mule’s neck and crushed out the flames in his mane. Then Glory had a handful of snow and was pressing it to the horse’s tail, and Aaron had some, too, and many of the other men and women were scooping up snow and rubbing it against Mule’s sides. A thin, dark-haired man with a blue keloid grabbed Mule’s neck opposite Josh, and after a minute of struggle they got the horse calmed down enough to stop bucking.

  “Thanks,” Josh told the man. And then there was a roaring and a rush of heat, and the barn’s roof fell in.

  “Hey!” a woman standing closer to the road called out. “There’s some kinda commotion back there!” She pointed toward the shacks, and both Glory and Josh could see people out in the street. Shouts and cries for help drifted to them.

  Swan! Josh thought. Oh, God—I left Swan and Rusty alone!

  He started to run, but his legs betrayed him and he went down. His lungs were grabbing for air, black motes spinning before his eyes.

  Someone took his arm, started helping him up. A second person supported his other shoulder, and together they got Josh to his feet. Josh realized Glory stood on one side of him, and on the other was an old man with a face like cracked leather. “I’m all right,” he told them, but he had to lean heavily on Glory. She stood firm and started guiding him along the road.

  A blanket had been thrown on the ground about thirty feet from Glory’s shack. Smoke curled from under it. A few people stood around it, motioning and talking. Others were crowded around Glory’s front door. Josh smelled burned meat, and his stomach clenched. “Stay here,” he told Aaron. The boy stopped, Crybaby gripped in his hand.

  Glory went with Josh into the shack. She put her hand over her mouth and nose. Hot currents still prowled back and forth between the walls, and the ceiling was scorched black.

  He stood over Swan, trembling like a child. She had pulled her knees up to her chest, and now she was motionless. He bent down beside her, took one wrist and felt for her pulse. Her flesh was cold.

  But her pulse was there—faint but steady, like the rhythm of a metronome that would not be stilled.

  Swan tried to lift her head but had no strength. “Josh?” It was barely audible.

  “Yes,” he answered, and he pulled her to him, cradling her head against his shoulder. A tear scorched his eye and ran down along the growths on his cheek. “It’s old Josh.”

  “I… had a nightmare. I couldn’t wake up. He was here, Josh. He… he found me.”

  “Who found you?”

  “Him,” she said. “The man… with the scarlet eye… from Leona’s pack of cards.”

  On the floor a few feet away were fragments of dark glass. The magic mirror, Josh knew. He saw Rusty’s cowboy boots, and he wished to God that he didn’t have to go outside and see what was smoking under that blanket in the mud.

  “Swan? I’ve got to go out for a minute,” he said. “You just rest, all right?” He eased her down and glanced quickly at Glory, who had seen the puddle of blood on the floor. Then Josh stood up and made himself go.

  “We threw snow on him!” one of the onlookers said as Josh approached. “We couldn’t get the fire out, though. He was too far gone.”

  Josh knelt down and lifted the blanket. Looked long and hard. The corpse was hissing, as if whispering a secret. Both arms had snapped off at the shoulders.

  “I seen it!” another man offered excitedly. “I looked in through that door and seen a two-headed demon a-runnin’ around and around in there! God A’mighty, I ain’t never seen such a sight! Then Perry and me started hollerin’, and that thing come a-runnin’ right at us! Looked like it was fightin’ itself! Then it split in two and the other one run that way!” He pointed up the street in the opposite direction.

  “It was another man on fire,” a third witness explained, in a calmer voice. He had a hooked nose and a dark beard, and he spoke with a Northern accent. “I tried to help him, but he turned up an alley. He was too fast for me. I don’t know where the hell he went, but he couldn’t have gotten too far.”

  “Yeah!” The second man nodded vigorously. “The skin was meltin’ right offa him!”

  Josh lowered the blanket and stood up. “Show me where he went,” he told the man with the Northern accent.

  A trail of burned cloth turned into an alley, continued for about forty feet, turned left at another alley and ended at a pile of ashy rags behind a shack. There was no corpse, and the footprints were lost in the ravaged ground.

  “Maybe he crawled under one of these shacks to die,” the other man sai
d. “There’s no way a human being could live through that! He looked like a torch!”

  They searched the area for another ten minutes, even squeezing under some of the shacks, but there was no sign of a body. “I guess wherever he is, he died naked,” the man said as they gave up the search and went back to the street.

  Josh looked at Rusty again. “You dumb cowboy,” Josh whispered. “You sure pulled a magic trick this time, didn’t you?”

  “He was here,” Swan had said. “He found me.”

  Josh wrapped Rusty up in the blanket, lifted the remains in his arms and got to his feet.

  “Take him to the Pit!” one of the men said. “That’s where all the bodies go.”

  Josh walked to what was left of the Travelin’ Show wagon and laid Rusty in it.

  “Uh-uh, mister!” a husky woman with a red keloid covering her face and scalp scolded him. “That’ll draw every wild animal for miles!”

  “Let them come, then,” Josh replied. He turned toward the people, swept his gaze across them and stopped at Glory. “I’m going to bury my friend at first light.”

  “Bury him?” A frail teenage girl with close-cropped brown hair shook her head. “Nobody buries anybody anymore!”

  “I’m going to bury Rusty,” Josh told Glory. “At first light, in that field where we found Swan. It’ll be hard work. You and Aaron can help me, if you like. If you don’t want to, that’s all right, too. But I’ll be damned if I’ll—” His voice cracked. “I’ll be damned if I’ll throw him into a pit!” He sat up on the wagon’s frame beside the body to wait for daylight.

  There was a long silence. Then the man with the Northern accent said to Glory, “Lady? Do you have any way to fix your door?”

  “No.”