Problem was, most of the kids in town were too young to even drive a car.
Their parents, however…
“A car,” he said simply.
Stevie frowned.
“A car?”
“Yeah, a car. Tell Thomas to put up flyers around town about a car giveaway, but only parents of children presently living in Elloree are eligible. And only if their kids come to the gym.”
Stevie paused before saying, “That’s fucking stupid.”
If he hadn’t been so tired, Liam might have laughed.
Instead, he just nodded.
“Yeah, I know. Feel free to come up with something better.”
Another pause.
“Naw, that’ll do.”
“Yeah. In an hour, give Sylvie a call and tell her to start walking up and down Main Street, let everyone in on the good news. Hand out leaflets.”
Liam laid a hand gently on Stevie’s shoulder, and the man actually leaned into him a little.
“What the fuck is happening to Elloree, Liam?” he asked.
Liam shook his head.
“I have no clue. But it ends today. That’s a promise”
With that, he dropped his hand from Stevie’s back and turned away from the school. As he did, a lime green Prius pulled into the lot.
“Ah, Mrs. Ducharm is here. I’ll go let her know the good news about the giveaway.”
He hurried to intercept her as Stevie shouted after him.
“Wait, what do I do when they’re all here?”
Liam shrugged.
“I dunno. Keep them entertained. Ask Jenkins to help, the man looks like he might be able to juggle.”
***
“Did Principal Zanbar approve this, Sheriff?” Mrs. Ducharm asked in her wavery voice. “Because I need his approval if—”
Liam smiled a tired smile, and he forced visions of Zanbar’s burnt corpse from his mind.
“He said it was fine, trust me. Deputy Dwight Porter was here yesterday running things by him.”
The ancient music teacher’s steel blue eyes leveled at him.
“You sure?”
Liam nodded.
“Positive.”
“Well, okay then, I saw the deputy here yesterday, I think. And if Principal Zanbar approved of this, then it’s okay by me.”
“Thank you so much, Delores. I’ll be—”
“It’s Mrs. Ducharm.”
Liam smirked.
“Yes, of course. My apologies, Mrs. Ducharm,” Liam pointed at Stevie who stood by the front doors of the school. He was moving arms in small circular motions, curiously looking like a man who was trying to juggle invisible bowling pins.
“Deputy Johnson will be in charge when I’m not here. And, just to be clear, the contest might run late into the night. Remember, if anyone leaves, they will be disqualified for the draw for a new car.”
Mrs. Ducharm’s eyes lit up at the mention of a contest.
“A contest? Is it BINGO? Because I love BINGO.”
Liam pondered this.
“No, not BINGO. Something even better,” he said with a smile.
“Oh, well, what is it then?”
“You’re going to have to ask Stevie. Like I said, he’s in charge while I’m away.”
Mrs. Ducharm looked disappointed that they weren’t going to play BINGO, but made a valiant effort to hide her feelings in the grooves that lined her face.
“You’re not going to stay for the contest?”
Liam shook his head.
“No, ‘fraid I can’t stick around. I’ll be back later though.”
With that, he made a move toward his cruiser.
“Where are you going? I mean, by the looks of it, you could use a new car.”
Liam surveyed his ride; it was going on twelve years old, and while rust had started to form on the bottom of the door, it had suited him and would continue to suit him just fine.
“I can’t stick around, Mrs. Ducharm, because I have a very important meeting with the mayor.”
Chapter 47
“You knew about this, didn’t you?” Dwight stammered.
Hugh didn’t raise his eyes from the spot on the floor.
“Yeah, he knew. And so do you—” Brett started.
Dwight ignored him.
“That’s why you grabbed the girl, Stacey. That’s why you brought her to us, because you knew that this psychopath would kill her if you left her in the woods.”
Agent Cherry stepped forward and grabbed Dwight by the shoulders.
“Damn straight I would have killed her. And I will. I’ll kill them all,” he was so close that Dwight could smell alcohol on his breath that was more powerful than the stink of sweat and swamp.
He tried to shake the man off, but even though he outweighed Brett by more than a hundred pounds, his grip was too tight.
“Why are you resisting what you know is true, Dwight? You saw them come out of the water… you saw their eyes,” he leaned even closer until his lips were but an inch from Dwight’s own. “You saw their eyes, Dwight, their black, dead eyes. You saw their—”
“That’s enough,” Hugh barked, and Brett finally released the deputy and stepped back.
All of a sudden, Dwight felt his vision start to swirl. Not only had he lost track of the last time he’d slept, but he couldn’t remember how long it’d been since he’d had something to drink or eat. He could feel his body on the verge of slipping into hypoglycemic shock.
“What is this place?” he mumbled, leaning up against a metal table behind him. It bowed beneath his weight, but held.
The elderly woman with the crooked spine slunk toward him, using a gnarled piece of wood to support her wire frame.
“This place connects the swamp to other places like it,” she hissed.
Dwight’s hand slipped on the table, and he barely managed to stay on his feet.
“Like it?”
“Yeah, like the swamp… places that connect the living and the dead.”
This time Dwight stumbled and fell to the floor.
Hugh moved to help him up, but the old woman raised her cane, stopping his forward advance.
“Why do you doubt what you see?” she asked in her scratchy voice.
Dwight tried to push himself to his feet, but slipped again.
“Believe your eyes, Dwight Porter. Believe your eyes.”
With that, the woman dropped the cane to the floor. The sound it made as it settled on the tiles was like a stick of TNT going off inside Dwight’s skull.
The woman slowly brought her arthritic hands to her face and covered her features. She pulled them back as if pushing her nose and lips through an invisible layer of fabric.
When her fingers fell away, Dwight was no longer staring at an old woman, but a young man. A young man with shoulder-length blond hair and a thin goatee.
“Believe your eyes, Dwight, believe your eyes and help us defeat this demon once and for all,” he said in a Californian accent.
But Dwight couldn’t do what was asked of him even if he’d wanted to, if he didn’t think, in that moment, that he’d gone insane.
Dwight couldn’t believe his eyes, because all he could see was darkness.
Chapter 48
As Liam drove toward the Mayor’s office, he realized that he hadn’t heard from Dwight in several hours. The last Dr. Larringer had said was that the big deputy had gone looking for evidence in the woods.
After I inform the Mayor of what the hell’s going on, I’m going back out there, he conceded. Back out to the swamp.
And yet this seemed unsatisfactory. Dwight wasn’t one to disobey an order, no matter how mundane. It just wasn’t in his nature.
Liam reached for the radio on his shoulder and pressed the button.
“Dwight, you there?”
When there was no answer, he grabbed his cell phone. It went directly to his voice mail.
“Dwight, it’s Liam. Look, I know you probably just dozed off somewhere, but
gimme a call. I need your help in town; Stevie does, too. More girls have gone missing, Dwight, and I’ve got a feeling that it’s not going to stop.”
After hanging up, he called Dr. Larringer.
“Dr. Larringer,” a sleepy voice answered.
Liam cleared his throat.
“It’s Sheriff Lancaster, just wondering if you’re still at the site or not.”
“Nope; finished about an hour ago. Bodies are in the morgue, now I’m just trying to get a little shut-eye before I start the autopsies. What can I help you with?”
Liam pulled up to the only stoplight on Main Street just as it turned red.
“When you left, was Dwight’s car still there?”
“Yeah. The man never did show up. I wonder if—”
A car stopped beside Liam’s, and the sheriff looked over at it. It was a Mercedes, one of the ones that he had seen in the Mayor’s parking lot the day prior. The man’s window was down, and he turned to face him.
He had tanned skin and a scar on his upper lip. He nodded at Liam, and for some reason, Liam nodded back.
The light turned green, and the sheriff let the man pull ahead of him. As he did, the man’s hand on the steering wheel came into view. On the webbing between the man’s thumb and forefinger was a tattoo depicting a snake eating an eyeball.
Where have I seen that before? He wondered. Liam racked his brain, but couldn’t quite place it. Exhaustion was clearly taking its toll.
“Sheriff Lancaster, you still there?”
Liam cleared his throat and pushed down the gas pedal.
“Yeah, I’m still here.”
“You want me to give him a call?”
“Who?”
“Dwight. I can ask Susan if—”
Liam shook his head.
“Naw, that’s okay. Just get some rest, then see if you can give me details about the girls and the others later today.”
“Will do, take care now, Sheriff.”
“Take care,” Liam repeated before hanging up the phone.
Less than a minute later, he pulled into the parking lot of the Mayor’s modern office building.
***
“You look beautiful as usual, Nancy,” Liam said to the secretary at the desk as he entered
She smiled out of habit, but when she looked up, a frown immediately fell over her.
“Geez, Sheriff, everything alright? You look like—”
“—I haven’t slept all night? That’s cuz I haven’t. Look, I know that the Mayor’s busy, but I really need to talk to him.”
The smile returned.
“Well, you’re in luck. The mayor just finished his morning meeting.”
Liam raised an eyebrow. This was a very different story from yesterday, which implied that the meeting with the investors, whoever the hell they were, had gone well.
Nancy pressed a button on the intercom and after a moment, the Mayor’s booming voice filled the office.
“Yeah?”
“Mayor Ross, Sheriff Lancaster is here to see you.”
“Send him in.”
Nancy’s hand fell away from the button and she stood. Liam raised a hand, indicating for her to remain seated.
“I know where his office is,” Liam said with a hint of a smile. There were only two doors, and he had been in one yesterday.
Nancy nodded.
“Mr. Ross would also like to apologize for what happened yesterday. He’s under a lot of a pressure, and he—”
“It’s fine, Nancy. And thank you.”
With that, Liam made it to the door on the left, the one he had met Bobby Lee in yesterday, when Nancy informed him that the Mayor was in the other room.
Liam chuckled.
“Of course.”
He moved to the other door and pulled it open.
“Mayor Ross,” he said, discarding the first name formalities. “We need to talk.”
Chapter 49
Hands lifted Dwight through the darkness. He could hear men grunting under the strain of his weight, and could feel cold, wet earth dragging against his knees, his hands and wrists, but he couldn’t see anything. Dwight wasn’t sure if his eyes were closed, or if he was simply surrounded by darkness.
But even if his eyes were closed, it didn’t prevent him from seeing.
Dwight saw the bodies at the burned house, only they weren’t lying down anymore. As he watched, the corpses, blackened, crispy, started to sit up. Their movements were awkward, almost robotic, and as they twisted, much of their skin flaked away. The entire half of one girl’s face slid off in a black sheet like an ashy ice float. Beneath this layer was a bright red network that reminded Dwight of a lava flow he’d seen on Planet Earth years ago.
He gasped, or maybe he moaned, and all of a sudden, all of the eyes of the now sitting girls turned to him.
Even though their bodies were completely black, their eyes… their eyes were somehow blacker than black, like blocks of coal sitting at the bottom of a well. As he stared into their eyes, time seemed to stutter, and he felt himself being sucked into them. Now they weren’t so much at the bottom of a well, but a pit, a never-ending chasm that led to the center of the earth, or maybe somewhere else entirely.
This place leads to others like it, places that connect the living and the dead.
He groaned.
The Marrow.
“We can’t just leave him here,” he heard Hugh plead, snapping him out of his nightmare.
“He’s only going to get in the way, or worse,” Brett replied.
With a final grunt, Dwight felt his body being lowered to the ground.
“If we leave him here, they’ll take him, you know that. And the things they’ll do—”
“Oh, I know. Just like I knew that when you ‘saved’ the girl, that she would come back to the woods. That’s the thing you don’t seem to get Hugh, that you still haven’t grasped. No matter how much time passes, no matter how far away the girls get, they always come back.”
There was a pause, and this time Dwight managed to open his eyes a sliver.
Although his perspective was off—he was apparently lying on his side in the mud—Dwight saw Hugh standing several feet away from Brett, locked in an intense stare.
“They brought Kendra back after more than three decades. The demon in the swamp calls for the girls, and they can’t help but come running. You know this, Hugh. And you know that there is only one way to stop it.”
Hugh’s head sagged, and if it weren’t for the rhythmic clenching and unclenching of his fists, Dwight might have thought the man sleeping.
“I know what you’re saying is true, Brett. I was there at the Orphanage, remember? I’ve seen things… I saw my partner Ed die. But I just can’t… this is a good man, Hugh. We can’t let them have him.”
“Then you’ve made your choice,” Brett said abruptly. “And I’ve got work to do.”
Dwight shut his eyes, and to his surprise, he fell asleep.
***
At most a few hours had passed—the sun had just started to rise, sending shafts of dewy light scattering between the trees—when Dwight awoke with a groan. He managed with some effort to force his girth into a seated position. His entire body ached from the only exercise he’d gotten in months.
He wasn’t built for running, let alone trail running through the woods in the pitch of night. His arms were covered in scrapes, but so far as he could tell, nothing was broken or even badly bruised.
Rubbing the sleep from his eyes, he looked around and tried to catch his bearings. As he did, Dwight started to feel better than he had in months.
Years, maybe.
He felt better, because he was in the process of convincing himself that what had happened last night was just a nightmare. After leaving Susan and Dr. Larringer, he had made his way into the woods, and then maybe rested his back against a tree. After that, well, he didn’t need to be a detective or even a deputy to know what happened next.
The big man had gone f
or a snooze.
Dwight wasn’t proud of it, but nobody could really blame him, either. After all, he was a two-hundred-pound out of shape police officer with hypoglycemia.
“Fuck,” he grumbled as he tried to stand. His legs were sore and his muscles weak, but eventually he managed.
That’s all this was, Dwight thought, just a fucked up dream. None of it was true, not the girls with the black eyes coming out of the water, not the strange laboratory or whatever the fuck it was, not the woman with the shape-changing face, not the—
The sound of small feet plodding in the mud drew his attention.
Dwight swiveled and stared.
A girl clad only in a nightgown, a tall, pale sixteen-year-old took a barefooted step forward, hesitated, then took another.
Dwight started to weep.
It was no dream.
Chapter 50
“I’ve got some terrible news, Mayor,” Liam said, fiddling with his hat that he held in both hands. “And I hate to mix this with the other matter, but—”
“Spit it out, Sheriff,” Bobby Lee said. While their initial interaction had been more cordial than the day prior, it was clear that the Mayor was suddenly uncomfortable in his presence.
And why would that be? Liam wondered.
“It’s about Tommy Ray; I’m afraid that something bad has happened to him—something bad is happening to this entire town,” Sheriff Lancaster began. He wasn’t normally so long in the tooth, but something nagged at him, something that he couldn’t quite place.
Bobby Lee suddenly stood and jammed two meaty fists down on the desk in front of him.
“What’d that prick do now? Skip school again? Get into another dust-up at the Crown and Anchor?”
Liam shook his head.
“No, I’m afraid that he was into something, something that cost him his life, Bobby Lee; I’m sorry to tell you this, but Tommy’s dead.”
Bobby Lee’s face changed then. It didn’t go red, so much as a deep scarlet. Only to Liam, it didn’t seem like sadness came over the man’s doughy features, but more like anger.
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