“It will not be long now . . .” Samhain said, in wonder. He moved up over the foot of the bed to hover above the birthing woman.
Grant took a deep breath and pushed himself back against the doorjamb. With a supreme effort he stood. For a moment the world went black, but he held his position and when his sight cleared he urged himself forward.
“Don’t try to interfere, Detective,” Samhain snapped.
“That thing could bring death into this world. I can’t let that happen.”
“I said don’t interfere . . .”
Grant took two halting steps forward and then the pain in his left side flared to broiling heat. He stumbled, reaching out to clutch at the side of the bed as he fell to his knees. He pulled himself up, fighting for breath, to see the crown of a baby’s head appear between Marianne Carlin’s legs.
“Good, Marianne—good!” Samhain urged, as the young woman screamed and arched and pushed.
Grant took a long shuddering breath, put his right hand into his coat pocket, resting it on the butt of his 9mm handgun.
Samhain moved up and closer over the woman, almost alive with excitement.
“Push, Marianne! Push!”
Marianne Carlin screamed. The baby’s head appeared, a gray wrinkled thing with closed eyes and a puckered mouth.
It was followed in a rush of blood by the rest of the body, tiny hands and skinny legs and tiny feet.
Samhain moved over the baby, straightened, his head thrown back, his red mouth opened wide.
“Mine!” he cried.
The thing on the bed kicked, and then its tiny mouth opened and then its eyes.
It looked up at the thing hovering overhead.
Grant tightened his grip on the 9mm.
The baby wailed, a hollow, long, hoarse shriek.
It held its tiny hands out to Samhain, and opened its mouth again.
As Samhain tentatively reached out to touch it, the baby turned to dust, head to foot, the blood surrounding it and the umbilical cord also.
Its dying empty moan echoed to silence.
“Nooooooooo!” Samhain wailed, throwing his clawed hands down to the empty spot on the bed where the baby had been. “Nooooooooo!”
Grant’s grip loosened on the handgun, and he saw black, and fell to the floor . . .
TWENTY-FOUR
Sunlight made Bill Grant wince. He opened his eyes, feeling a hot sharp pain in his right side, which abruptly tapered and subsided. He was in a hospital bed, a white sheet pulled up to his chin, a lightly curtained closed window to his right. It was broad daylight, the sun high in a sapphire blue cloudless sky over the rooftops outside.
“Welcome to November,” a sarcastic voice said.
He pushed himself up as Marianne Carlin’s sister Janet appeared at the foot of his bed, hands on hips.
“You . . .” Grant said.
Her cheeks colored slightly. “Let’s just say I felt guilty as hell over being such a chickenshit,” she said. “I started for home right after I talked to you on the phone. Said my last good-byes to Chuck and Baby Charlie and got to Marianne’s house just in time to find it crawling with police. I followed one of them to your house. It seems some trick-or-treater found a handgun on your front lawn and put it in his bag. When the police got there they found you and my sister both half-dead in your guest bedroom.”
“How—” Grant began.
“Marianne’s fine. She doesn’t remember anything that happened the last few weeks. But what everyone wants to know is, what happened to the baby?”
“The—” Grant said, but was again cut off, this time by Doc Williams, who appeared next to Janet. He looked no better than the last time Grant had seen him.
“There was no baby,” Williams said. “It was an hysterical pregnancy after all.” He glanced at Grant briefly, his eyes hooded, and cut off Janet Larson when she tried to speak.
“The investigation is complete, Mrs. Larson. There was no fetus, no placenta, no cord, no blood.”
For a moment their eyes met, and then Janet said, “Oh. So you had a little visit from our friend in the black cape, too.”
“He won’t bother you anymore,” Grant said.
They both looked at him, with a mixture of hope and dread on their faces.
“It’s over. Forget about it,” Grant added.
“Is it?” Janet asked.
“For you two, it is. He’s got plenty else to keep him busy. And Halloween is over.”
Later, much later, after they all had gone, and the sun was sinking into the purple west toward another dark night, Grant thought, just before he slept a blessedly dreamless sleep, “Until next year.”
Halloweenland Page 22
