The Ferryman (2 page)

She called out now. “Hello? Who's there?”

Of course there was no answer.They would not confess their presence. The mist had texture, shadows within shadows, and she imagined she saw figures there, that she was being watched not by one but by many, and that they were all people who knew her. People who knew that every step forward put her in peril and yet urged her on regardless.

She did not trust them, those shades and specters.

“I'm sorry,” she said, though she could not have said why. “I can't stay here. Can't be with you. I have to—have to go.”

Her feet had sunk so deeply into the mire that she found it difficult to move them. Once again she felt like a child, held against her will but capable only of whining and lashing out for her freedom.

“Please,” she whispered.

Tears like melting ice dripped down her cheeks, stinging her flesh. The taunting specters who lingered just beyond her vision only made her feel more lonely. More alone. She tore her right foot from the sucking mud, leaving one brown sandal behind. The other foot came loose more easily now, so that she wore only one shoe.

Get your bearings, Janine,
she told herself.
And get out
.

She forced her breathing to slow, took long, hitching breaths and managed to calm her body down.

The water. She had to get away from the water.

Whatever was coming for her, haunting her in this dreadful, claustrophobic territory, it was coming across the water. Retreat was her only option. Janine turned and blindly walked into the mist.

The sounds of the river receded behind her, and the wind rustled the leaves of the trees as she moved into denser woods. Branches swayed and seemed to dip across her path as if they were sentries warning her to turn back. But Janine did not turn back.

The prickling of her skin began to subside, the dread to recede from her heart. Even the mist seemed thinner around her and the air blowing through the trees smelled fresh, without what she now realized was the fetid scent blowing off the river.

At last the ground seemed firm beneath her feet, one bare and one still shod in brown leather. With a ponderous sigh of relief, Janine looked down to see that, even in the mist, she had begun to follow a path through the wood. Stones and roots jutted from the path, and yet it seemed familiar to her.

Somewhere in the back of her mind, the child she had once been recognized that this was the path home.

I was lost,
she thought.
Now I want to go home
.

With a smile and a shake of her head, Janine picked up her pace, unmindful of the hazards that might lie along the path for her one bare foot. A stubbed toe or a twisted ankle were a fair price for a bit of extra speed, for a single minute's less time spent in this dark and dreary wood.

Her smile evaporated. Something was not right.

Somehow the sound of the river had migrated. It was off to her left now, rushing past rocks and burbling along the marshy shore. Once again, her breath came too fast and her heart began to skim along far too quickly. Janine shook her head and took a step backward. She cast a glance back the way she had come but knew it would be foolhardy to reverse direction. Only the river lay back that way ... and whatever it was that was coming for her.

Pulling at her.

Yes,
she thought. That was the feeling she had been struggling to identify. The foreboding that filled her was not merely the presence of the thing but a kind of magnetic draw that seemed to drag at her limbs as she moved. She felt it pulling to her from the water, pulling her in.

With no other choice, Janine pressed on. She had barely walked a dozen feet farther into the mist when her bare foot touched soft, damp earth that squished between her toes. The ground had given way to mire again.

But as she walked on, her right leg plunged to the knee into blood-warm water, and she stumbled and nearly fell facefirst into the river.

Holding her breath, Janine took a step back ... and found herself impossibly deeper than she had been a moment earlier. She spun, searching through the mist for the shore, but the river rushed all around her now and she could feel it pulling at her. The water had reached her waist and she felt its undercurrents caressing her skin, tracing the lines of her legs. It felt as though something tugged on her under there, and she batted at the water around her.

Coins jangled in the loose pockets of her skirt, where the fabric had begun to float around her. Janine frowned.

A light appeared on the water, tiny but growing larger, cutting toward her across the suddenly calm surface of the river.

“No,” Janine whispered.

A step backward only plunged her deeper, and she found herself turned round, facing the light again. Metal clanked against wood, and the light seemed to swing from side to side as it grew nearer.

It was a boat. Narrower than a rowboat and roughly the length of a canoe, with a flickering lantern hung from its prow. No sail, no oars, nor even any rudder that she could see. The darkened figure that stood at the fore of the tiny boat made no effort to propel the vessel nor navigate its course.

Janine bit her lower lip hard enough to draw blood, and she tasted its copper tang in her mouth. A step in any direction would only plunge her deeper into the river. She could not escape him.

Come for her was the Ferryman.

How she knew this was a mystery to her, but she did not question it. Inescapable fact loomed before her on the rippling surface of the river. Through the clearing mist she could see him now, draped in a scarlet hood and robe, a golden sash about his narrow waist. Beneath the hood his countenance was hidden, yet she imagined some horror beneath, some grotesque visage with burning eyes in skeletal orbits.

The lantern clanked against the wooden boat. The light cast by the flame within skittered insectlike across the swirl of the river. Janine stood frozen, watching the Ferryman come. He stood as if hewn from granite upon the prow of the vessel, and reached up with narrow hands, thinly tapered fingers, and pulled back the cowl that had hidden his face.

Janine gasped, only now remembering to breathe.

The Ferryman's flesh was pale and marbled and offset by his eyes, orbs of blackest indigo set into his thin face as if each of his pupils were its own full and devastating eclipse. His dark hair hung to his shoulders and his beard was lush, though pulled to a point some seven inches below his chin and bound with a metal ring.

Not the grotesque she had feared. But chilling just the same.

The ferry drifted to a stop perhaps a foot from where she stood, an island to herself in the river, and it floated no farther but instead remained there as if hovering just above the water.

The eclipsed stars that were the eyes of the ashen creature turned upon her, and Janine felt for the first time that perhaps its desire for her to accompany it might not be an end to things but a beginning.Yet even as the thought dawned upon her, she also felt a new magnetism tugging at her from behind. Some other force had touched her, and it was powerful indeed.

She gazed across the river, squinted to see the land from which the Ferryman had come, but she could see nothing.

The slim, dreadful figure held out its right hand, palm up. It gazed down upon her and it made its single demand in a voice that seemed to ripple with the flow of the river.

Janine shook her head. Any hesitation was gone. “No,” she said, barely a whisper at first but then more powerfully. “No.”

The Ferryman narrowed its gaze, the burning rims of fire around the black centers of its eyes disappearing now to leave only wells of darkness there.

“The coins.”
More insistent.

Nausea roiled in Janine's gut and bile rose in her throat. She choked it down and took a step backward ... and did not slip deeper into the river. Another step, and she knew she was moving closer to the shore, though she dared not turn her back on the Ferryman.

“The coins?”
A question now, accompanied by an expression that might have been amusement.

Janine snaked a hand into the sodden pocket of her skirt and withdrew three silver coins. With a powerful snap of her arm, she tossed them out across the river as though she were skipping stones. But they did not skip. They sliced the water's surface and then sank quickly below.

The Ferryman's expression changed instantly. Fury rippled across his white-stone features and his eyes went wide, revealing the twin suns behind the eclipsed irises.They flared and seemed about to burn her.

She ran.With great effort she surged up out of the water onto the muddy banks of the river.

A tug from behind, and Janine turned one final time.

The Ferryman had not moved. He only stood in the prow of the ship, glaring at her. In one arm he held a squalling bundle wrapped in white cloth close against his slender form.

Janine tripped. She went down facefirst into the sucking mire and it covered her face, pushed up her nostrils and into her mouth, and she found she could not breathe. Nor could she see. The mist and the filth that covered her eyes had made her effectively blind. She tore at her mouth, struggling to take a breath.

Her chest burned with the need for air, and her lungs felt as if they were about to explode.

I'm going to die,
she thought.

Then, simply,
no
.

Janine gasped.
Air. Sweet Jesus, air.

Her eyes fluttered open.

D
avid Bairstow was at war.

A warm breeze blew in through the open windows, but the smell of chalk lingered defiantly in the air. The clock ticked off the seconds with an almost petulant persistence, but David did his best to keep from even glancing at it. It was a bad precedent to set, but worse, it might be seen as a form of surrender.

He stood at the head of the classroom, his back to the blackboard, and faced his students. His hands were thrust casually into his pockets and he stood with his head cocked at a devil-may-care angle, eyebrows raised.

“Anyone?” he prodded.

The response was less than overwhelming. David sighed and straightened the tie he wore only because he felt it would not be fair to go without one when the boys of St. Matthew's did not have the option. He scanned the forty-two faces before him, hoping to stumble across one—only one—that seemed alert and interested.

Nothing.

David Bairstow was at war.

But his students were not the enemy. Rather, he faced a disembodied creature known by various names: Senior Slump, Spring Fever, Senior Slide. It was late April. They had already applied to colleges and been accepted or wait-listed. Whatever they did in these last two months of school would not change the fate each of these seniors had waiting for them in the fall. The result, whatever cute name one wanted to put on it, was nothing short of apathy.

David smiled thinly. “You guys are unbelievable,” he told them, abandoning the pretense that nothing had changed in their demeanor.

After all, this was an Advanced Placement English class. The kids in here were the brightest St. Matthew's had to offer. But they all had a swagger now, the smart ones even more so, that said they cared not a whit about anything but gliding toward graduation on whatever little updraft would carry them the rest of the way.

The thing was, that was not good enough for David. His job was not to get them into college; it was to teach them. Though some of his colleagues would have joined in the slide, David simply was not built that way. He loved to teach. One of the reasons he had worked so hard at getting the AP classes was that he wanted students who actually had a desire to learn. But every spring . . . he had to take drastic measures.

“All right, listen up, folks,” David said, his voice growing louder.

A number of students snapped out of the malaise that had set in. Christi McCann even had the decency to look embarrassed at the way her eyelids had been drooping, though David noticed that Brad Flecca's did not so much as flinch. The kid was slumped in his seat, eyes closed, a bit of drool at the corner of his mouth.

David wanted to toss him out the window. On the other hand, he could remember his own senior year at St. Matthew's, could recall with startling clarity how it felt to walk the corridors in those last few weeks, feeling on top of the world, and bored by anything that might kill that buzz.

So ... no killing the students. At least not this time.

“One last time,” he announced. “Can anyone ... and I do mean anyone ... tell me about the dichotomy between language and structure in the presentation of the roles of protagonist and antagonist in
Moby Dick
?”

They were paying attention now. All except for Brad Flecca, of course. But still no answer was forthcoming.

“Did anyone actually read
Moby Dick
?”

So quickly he was literally startled, all but half a dozen or so hands shot up. David shook his head and laughed, which seemed to take several of his students aback.