Darkness (11 page)

Her, and the children.

And the Dark Man.

Clarey had been aware of such a presence before, and always known who it was.

Michael Sheffield.

She’d followed Michael for years. She’d sensed him often, feeling his way through the swamp, unconsciously searching for something of which he had no understanding. And for years she’d kept him away, refusing to reach out to him, unwilling to guide him to the tiny island at the far edge of the swamp, where the Circle gathered.

Perhaps if he knew nothing of who he was, if he took no part in the rituals of the Circle, he would be able to escape.

Escape unscathed, from the evil into which he had been born.

But last night Clarey had felt another presence, a new presence. It wasn’t nearby, nowhere near close enough to be sensed by anyone but herself, but much closer than she’d ever felt it before.

“It’s a girl,” Quint said now, and Clarey closed her eyes for a moment, hearing the words she’d been expecting.

“She’s come back,” she breathed, barely aware she was speaking aloud. “He promised me she wouldn’t. He promised me he’d leave her alone.”

She stopped speaking, feeling Quint Millard’s eyes upon her.

“But she’s one of us,” Quint said. “Soon’s I seed her, I knowed.”

“Did she see you?” Clarey asked.

Quint hesitated, then nodded, knowing he couldn’t lie to Clarey. “She tried to follow me. But she couldn’t, ‘cause she don’t know how. I kept close to her and didn’t let nothin’ happen to her.”

A heavy sigh escaped Clarey’s throat. “You done right, Quint. But I reckon the police’ll be snoopin’ around, and I don’t see no good in them talkin’ to either one of you two. So you just lay low, hear?”

Quint nodded, but Jonas’s empty eyes narrowed. “If’n they find me, what’ll I tell ’em?”

Clarey’s lips tightened bitterly. “You don’t tell nobody nothin’. Ain’t nobody’s business what goes on out here. An’ if ’n you say anything, I cain’t help you anymore’n I could help George Coulton. So you just lay low an’ keep quiet, just like always.”

Jonas was silent, staring sullenly at his lap. “It ain’t right,” he finally said.

A great wave of pity washed over Clarey. No, it wasn’t right. None of it was right. But that it wasn’t right made no difference. It was the way things were. “Go on, Jonas,” she told him softly. “Go on and find somewheres to hide. And don’t you fret yourself none. Ain’t none of it your fault.”

Jonas Cox frowned slightly, as if uncertain whether to believe her words or not. But at last he nodded as Quint Millard dipped the oars back in the water and leaned into them. Once again the little boat turned, and a moment later was swallowed up by the dense foliage.

Clarey waited until Jonas and Quint were gone, then went back into her house. The kettle of water was boiling on the stove, and she threw a handful of coffee
grounds into the pot, then poured water over them. The grounds floated to the surface, and Clarey added a pinch of salt. In five minutes or so the grounds would sink to the bottom and the coffee would be ready, just the way she liked it.

In the meantime, she had some thinking to do.

She knew who the girl Jonas had seen was, and had prayed that this day would never come. But the girl had come back, and now the last of the children was in the village.

The boy and the girl would find each other, recognize each other the minute they met.

And when they did, they would begin to understand what they were.

They would come looking for her.

Her, and their brothers and sisters.

And the Dark Man.

They would be taken into the Circle, no matter the promises the Dark Man had made.

The evil she had been able to contain for so long would finally begin to spread.

The boundaries of the swamp would no longer restrain it, and once it was loose …

She put the dark thought out of her mind. It had begun here in the swamp, and it would end here, too.

For there were things Clarey understood that even the Dark Man did not.

Tim Kitteridge pulled into the parking lot outside the clinic at a few minutes after eight that morning. He lingered in the car, putting off the moment he would have to go inside and look at the body in the back room that served as a morgue.

This was the part of the job he hated most, and it didn’t seem fair that it had cropped up only a couple of months after he’d come to Villejeune. In fact, it was one of the reasons he’d taken the job as police chief of the
little town in the first place. He’d considered it carefully, checking out the town thoroughly before making his decision. And he’d liked what he’d seen—a sleepy Florida backwater. Growing, but growing with retired people, a notoriously peaceful group. Not like San Bernardino at all, where the city was booming and the problems were growing even faster. The southern California city had changed in the years he’d been there, from a quiet farming town into yet another Los Angeles suburb. But with San Bernardino’s growth had come drug problems, and with drugs had come gangs. A year ago Tim Kitteridge had finally decided he’d had it, and begun looking for another job. He’d had two basic requirements: warm weather and little crime. The second condition had eliminated all the major cities of the South. Villejeune, though, had been perfect. Though he supposed there might be a little drug traffic in the swamp, it was just that. Little. With no good landing strips in the area, and the nearest metropolitan center fifty miles away, Villejeune held little attraction for drug lords.

Indeed, after looking over the records, he had concluded that there was little crime of any sort in Villejeune. That was fine with Tim Kitteridge.

Now, only two months later, a body had been pulled out of the swamp.

Kitteridge worked himself out from behind the wheel and wondered, not for the first time, if he should have just retired. Still, at fifty-five he had another ten years in him, and though he could have lived on his retirement pay, it would have been tight. On the other hand, retirement would have definitely precluded having to look at corpses, which was something he truly hated.

He slammed the car door shut, crossed the parking lot, and nodded a greeting to Jolene Mayhew, but said nothing else, knowing that if he spoke to the nurse at all, he would proceed to stall even further. Better just to get it over with. He passed through the emergency room, then went down the long corridor. At the end lay the
small room that was the morgue. Orrin Hatfield, the coroner, was already there, waiting for him. To his relief, the body was covered, and he made no move to remove the shroud. Instead, he picked up the clipboard on which Hatfield had made his notes and scanned it quickly.

The first space, where the victim’s name should have been filled in, was blank. He glanced questioningly at Hatfield.

The coroner, whom Kitteridge judged to be in his mid-forties, shrugged helplessly. “No identification at all.”

“And neither of the boys recognized him?”

Kitteridge shook his head. “Seems like nobody here’s ever seen him before.”

Just then the door opened and Warren Phillips walked in. “Chief,” he said, nodding to Kitteridge. “Orrin. Jolene tells me we have an unidentified body.”

“Duval and Templar brought it in aground midnight. No ID, and nobody recognizes him.”

Phillips frowned, moving to the table, where he pulled the covering back from the corpse’s face. Taking a deep breath, fighting the nausea that rose in his gut, Tim Kitteridge made himself look, too.

The old man’s eyes were still open, and the rictus of fear that had twisted his features as he died remained frozen in place. But what startled Kitteridge was the man’s age. His hair—only a few straggling wisps—was snow white, and the heavily creased skin of his face was draped loosely around his skull. Most of his teeth were gone, and his body, what Kitteridge could see of it, was little more than skin and bones.

Phillips, a deep frown creasing his brow, pulled the cover farther back, exposing the wound in the man’s chest. A gaping slash, several inches long, laid the man’s rib cage open. Once again Kitteridge fought to control his churning stomach.

Phillips uttered a low whistle. “Whatever got him, it tore his whole sternum out.”

“You mean
whoever
got him, don’t you?” Kitteridge asked, looking at the doctor. To him, the cut had looked exactly like a knife wound. “Any idea who he is?”

Phillips, still examining the wound, shook his head. “No one I’ve ever seen before.” He glanced up at Orrin Hatfield. “What do you think? Is it a homicide?”

The coroner shrugged. “Probably. But offhand, I’d say the odds are pretty good we’ll never even find out who this is, let alone why somebody might have killed him. If he was poaching on someone else’s trap line, no one will ever talk about it.”

“Any identification on him?” Kitteridge asked.

“Nothing at all.” Hatfield’s eyes met Kitteridge’s. “Did Judd or Marty find anything out there?”

“If they did, they haven’t told me yet. But, Christ, how old was this guy? Ninety?”

Warren Phillips’s lips curved into a thin smile. “Hard to tell with these old swamp rats. And this is sure one of them.”

Kitteridge sighed silently. He was already well aware that the marshlands harbored a closed community of people who shared nothing of their secrets with the townspeople of Villejeune, and in fact were rarely seen in the village at all.

But the swamp sometimes seemed full of them—sallow-faced men in rotting boats, running trap lines and setting nets, scratching a living out of the wilderness. Many of them, he knew, barely existed at all. No birth certificates, no school records, nothing. Most of the women, Phillips had told him, still gave birth at home.

When Kitteridge had objected that they were running insane risks, Phillips had agreed. “But they still do it,” he’d insisted. “It’s primitive, but it’s the way they do things. If the babies die, no one ever knows about it. No one ever even knows they were born. Same with the old people. They die, and their families bury them. Sometimes they even kill each other, and nobody ever hears a word about it. Rumors, but nothing else.”

Now, in the tiny morgue, Kitteridge remembered those words, and gazed at Phillips. “You’re telling me what we have here is the body of a man who probably never existed at all?”

Phillips shrugged but said nothing.

“It’s not the first time something like this has happened, Tim,” Hatfield replied. “I know it sounds crazy, but every now and then a body turns up in the swamp, and no one can identify it. Hell, there’re probably a lot more bodies out there than we even know about. If Amelie Coulton hadn’t heard a scream, this one would still be out there, too. Except by now the animals would have finished him off, and none of us would ever have known what happened.”

Or cared, Kitteridge thought a few minutes later as he left the clinic. But as he drove back to the police headquarters next to the post office, he wondered if it was so strange after all.

Southern California wasn’t really so different. Even there, Mexicans and other illegal aliens were lost among the masses of other citizens, living outside the system, disappearing into society just as completely as the swamp rats of Villejeune faded into the marshes.

And if people had been living in the swamp for generations, neither knowing nor caring what went on in the outside world, why would they change?

Why wouldn’t they just go on living, keeping to themselves, living their lives the way they always had?

Suddenly he remembered a conversation he’d had with Judd Duval, no more than a week after he’d arrived in Villejeune. He’d asked the deputy if he’d grown up in the town, and Duval had laughed. “Not me,” he’d said. “I’m a swamp rat. Not a real one, ’cause I like a few things the swamp don’t have. Like electricity, and liquor I didn’t make myself. But I’m part of the swamp. Always was, and always will be.” He’d grinned. “And don’t ever ask me what goes on out there, ‘cause I won’t tell you. Not me, or any of my kinfolk, either.”

“Sounds mysterious,” Kitteridge had remarked.

Judd Duval’s eyes had narrowed slightly. “It ain’t no mystery,” he’d said. “Folks like us just like to be let alone, that’s all. We got our own ways, and they ain’t none of nobody else’s business.”

An attitude, Kitteridge reflected, that was apparently shared by Warren Phillips and Orrin Hatfield. As far as they were concerned, the case was closed. An unidentified man had been killed by an unidentified assailant, and that was that.

Except that Kitteridge wasn’t satisfied.

No matter who the man in the morgue was, he had died within Tim Kitteridge’s jurisdiction, and his death would be investigated.

It was time for him to go into the swamp, find some of the people who lived there, and ask them some questions.

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