Neverland (35 page)

Sumter growled from the bear’s mouth, “Okay, Beau, see what happens when you disobey Lucy? Y’all broke your blood oaths, and you will pay in blood. All of y’all.”

The bear came running at me and I wanted to shut my eyes, but I knew that would do no good, so I kept them open wide. The bear’s muzzle was matted with fresh blood. I could smell my uncle’s blood on its face as it came at me. I brought down that mallet and caught the animal right in the back.

It let out one last snarl, and the stuffing flew out of it. I brought down the mallet again and again until there was not so much as a ripple from its coat, and stuffing was all over the floor.

Even then I wanted to keep battering away at it. I could barely see for the tears in my eyes.

Finally it was over.

The teddy bear did not move, did not growl.

I dropped the mallet on the floor. The noise echoed throughout the house as if it were empty.
Where I am is Neverland,
Sumter had said, so it
was easily defeated if he wasn’t around. Uncle Ralph didn’t believe in Neverland, so he hadn’t even tried to fight it. I turned around to see if Julianne Sanders and my sister were okay.

Julianne was hyperventilating, trying to stay in control, but the horror around us had gotten to be too much for her. Her face glistened with sweat, and her eyes were wild. “I’m gonna take you kids outta here, we’ll be safe outta here,” she whispered rapidly, tripping over her words.

I shook my head. “The whole island is Neverland. For all we know, the whole damn
world
is Neverland. We got to stop him. I know where he is. You can drive me down to the boathouse. We got to get out to Rabbit Lake. We got to, before he kills my brother.”

Julianne was no use: She, like the others, was just a grown-up, and even though she was also a
sinistre,
it didn’t mean much, just like she’d told me before. The fear in her eyes was crippling, just as it had been for Mama. “You’re not gonna drive me there, are you?”

“I . . . I . . . ”

“You’re scared.”

“I don’t want to
die,
not like
that.”
She was ashamed, but given the fact that Uncle Ralph was proof enough of Sumter’s powers, I can’t say as I blamed her. This was overload for any adult, even a superstitious one.

Aunt Cricket was tapping on the bathroom door.
“Bath time, kiddies, a nice hot bath to make you all shiny and new!”
Steam poured from beneath the door.

“Shadow,” Nonie whispered, so I knew she was conscious and hadn’t gone too far off the deep end.

“Nonie?” I asked.

“Shadow, tragic show, shadow in there, in there.” Nonie pointed to the bathroom.

“Mama and Aunt Cricket are safer in there than out here,” I told her. I went over to the door and knocked on it. “Everything okay?”

“Squeaky clean behind the ears,”
Aunt Cricket said.

I shrugged.

Nonie’s eyes grew wide, but she said nothing. She watched the door intently.

“When I’m done with my bath, kiddies, I am going to give each of you a nice hot, hot, hot bath.”
Aunt Cricket sniggered.

I had to laugh. They must’ve thought I was crazy, and maybe I was by that point. Aunt Cricket talking crazy like that about bath time when all hell was breaking loose around us.

“Shadow.” Nonie pointed to the steam that was rising from the cracks in the bathroom door.

“Don’t you fucking laugh at me,”
Aunt Cricket said.

It was ’round about then I felt the hairs on the back of my neck start stiffening. My aunt never said the password to Neverland—she thought it was one of the dirtiest imaginable. The voice didn’t even sound like my aunt’s—more like a bad imitation of it.

Julianne, still clutching Nonie, stepped away from the bathroom door.

Aunt Cricket was scratching at it with her fingernails. “Won’t somebody open up the door?”

“Jesus.”
I gasped.

Julianne said, “What . . . do you . . . think is in there?”

“Whatever it is, it’s in with my mama.” I bent over and picked up the mallet again and whammed it against the doorknob. Instead of the door flying open, the mallet broke just at the head, which went bouncing down the hall.

It felt like several minutes passed, although it couldn’t have been more than a few seconds. I was exhausted; there was no way to win this battle. Sumter could keep us fighting phantoms and teddy bears until the end of the world. He was the source of this. I had to get to him. All this in the house was just distraction from my main purpose.

I tried to communicate with him in my mind.

No answer.

Finally, a reply.
Don’t you take the name of Lucy in vain ever again, you hear me?

No reply.

And again silence like a stone wall.

I would have to climb that wall and enter into that playground where Sumter had lived for so long. He could enter my mind with his thoughts—I would have to enter his.

I tried the bathroom door again. This time the knob turned easily in my hand.

I took a deep breath.

Not a sound from the bathroom other than the hissing steam of the bathtub.

I only opened the door partway—who knew what was going to leap out at me?

The room was white with steam. First I saw my mother. She was still off in another world, wiping at her face and asking for her baby. I could not see Aunt Cricket anywhere, but the steam was clearing.

The bathtub was fizzing with popping bubbles—at first I thought it was Sumter’s Mr. Bubble, but it was only water. Boiling water.

Lying in the tub was Aunt Cricket, her head just above the boiling water, her skin a mass of enormous red blisters which still grew and exploded as she continued to cook. She smiled at me and said, “Ah, nothing like a hot bath to cure all of life’s little miseries.”

I could not even scream. I stood there in the doorway and watched the skin fall from her bones and muscles the way meat fell off the chicken bones when Mama would boil them for broth.

I turned back to Julianne.

Her eyes were glazed over.

What could I say to her? What could I tell any of them?
Okay. I’m gonna take my uncle’s car. The only way to stop him is to go down there. I want you to stay here. Maybe if everybody stays together, it will be okay. I don’t know what else he’ll do.
Was that going to do the trick? Would that make it better? But I knew I had to stop him from sacrificing Governor to his dark mother, if for no other reason than that I was not going to let him hurt my brother.

All I said to Julianne was, “Watch them for me.”

“What are you gonna do?”

“Whatever it takes,” I said, sounding strangely like my father.

How deep does a child’s imagination go? The rain battered at our house, and I was sure Sumter had called that rainstorm up; but over and above the thunder and rain, I heard the sounds of music: a calliope playing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.” Was it my imagination or
his?
My cousin and I had become tied to each other through the warped passages of his mind; he could speak in my head, and he could project a movie of his own making on the world. What would we find there—more corpses rising from graves? More bunnies screaming? More demons to torture us?

Although my fear didn’t exactly evaporate, I had only one purpose: to make sure Governor didn’t get hurt. It was the only thing I saw before me, in spite of the storm he’d conjured, in spite of my dead uncle and aunt at the top of the stairs and my mother off in her own fevered mind. Nothing else mattered, not even the fact that I knew I might have to kill Sumter in order to keep Governor from hurting.

Grammy insisted on going with me, and I felt that was right. I grabbed Uncle Ralph’s keys from the key rack and ran out and got soaked again. I was afraid to look out at the bluffs because of the dead children that may or may not have been out there. I got behind the wheel of the car and tried every key in the ignition until I got the right one. I started the car, having to stretch my leg down until I thought it would pop out of its socket just trying to push the gas pedal. This wasn’t that much different than driving the family wagon up and down the driveway at home. I wasn’t really panicking anymore, either. The way panic works is you have about a minute or two of it, when you can’t do anything right, and then you experience a calm because it begins to sink in that you really
can’t
do anything right, so you just go ahead and do what needs to get done.
In life, Beau, you just do what needs doing and leave the rest, the rest can wait.
I could hear my father’s voice from times past, instructing me as to turning the wheel and when to give it gas and how smoothly to brake. Daddy had been sitting me on his lap from the time I was two, putting his hands over mine on the wheel, and when I was eight he taught me the rules of the road. So I let my body take over—I went into automatic.

I brought the car around to the porch, skidding in the gravel and mud. Julianne was helping Grammy down, and I left the car idling and ran around to help her in. Grammy could walk only just a little; she leaned on our shoulders for support. When we got her settled in the front seat, she reached in the pocket of her apron for something, although I couldn’t tell what it was.

I said to Julianne, “You watch. The storm’ll end. You’ll know things’re just fine if it does. If . . . we make it to him okay . . . I may need you, then. To help. But only when the storm ends. Stay here and watch my mama and sisters. When the storm ends, you’ll know we’re okay.” I didn’t know if this was a lie or not. I wanted it to be true. I wanted things to turn out just fine. “But Julianne,” I shivered, and her eyes seemed to be wearying of this nightmare, “if it ends, come down to the boathouse. We may need help.”

“And if it don’t end . . . ” she said, and did not finish the thought.

As I skidded the Chevy across the flooded lawn, out to the road, I caught a glimpse of something in Grammy’s hands—something hard and silver—and at first I thought it was a knife, but then I saw the bristles, the stiff tacklike bristles of her brush. She held it fast in her good hand.

As fast as the wipers sliced across the windshield, the rain sprayed across it and blinded me. The sky was lighter than it had been, though, and the occasional flashes of lightning lit up the road ahead for at least a few yards at a time.

“You hear the music?” Grammy asked.

“Uh-huh.” We were being treated to another round of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.”

“What do you think it is?”

Up ahead, in my lights, there was a downed telephone pole. A wire was spitting and sputtering orange and white light from its tip. I swerved the car up the side of a slight hill to get around it. We came down with a
whump!
and skidded back onto the road.

Lightning burst across the sky, and for a second the rain froze in midair and the landscape shifted as if one slide were being stuck in the projector over another slide. There were fires all along the hills where trees and houses had been struck with lightning and now seemed to be lighting our path.

The calliope music was getting louder, and as I drove down the rest of the way to the boathouse, the road was blocked by what I figured were several horses, having escaped some stables nearby.

But the horses had lances through their backs.

As my headlights lit them better, I saw that the horses were painted various colors.

They were from the carousel at Sea Horse Amusement Park.

Sumter had brought them to life.

One horse stood there right in front of the car, scraping its right front hoof against the road.

From its flared nostrils came breath of fire.

Sumter called to me.
I don’t want to hurt you, cuz, but don’t try to stop me, ’cause I’m gonna do what I gotta do. If you get in the way, I’ll stomp you.

My mind’s eyeball went crazy, like somebody was switching channels on a TV at a rapid pace. He was sending me images now; I was picking up what his mind was producing.
Aunt Cricket holding him so close to her breast, kissing the top of his head; Uncle Ralph unlooping the belt from his pants and curling it double, swatting it at the back of Sumter’s unprotected leg; a summer day on the island, and Sumter looking all of six years old, crying by a tree stump
—
in his left hand he held a jagged piece of glass, and he shut his eyes tight and thrust the glass into his right arm and sliced the flesh up; Sumter sticking the trowel into the kitten, and that wild look on his face; and then a place I didn‘t recognize, a place of vast fields of ice and red sky, and Sumter walking with the woman I knew to be Lucy, and there were other children there, too, playing games of freeze-tag, but there was something not right about the picture: It wavered—the word Neverland whispered across the barren white land—black-and-white bunnies sniffed the air; Bernard the teddy bear lumbered out from behind a tree carrying a dead bunny in his mouth, still shaking its hind legs even as blood stained its fur; whatever Neverland was exploded across this vision, and the ground that Sumter walked on began bleeding, until both he and Lucy were up to their ankles in a dark crimson marsh, and I heard cries of animals and children; and the creature in Bernard’s jaws was not a bunny after all, but my brother Governor, his small hands reaching out for a mother who was not there, his mouth opened but with no voice left with which to cry.