Strangewood (17 page)

The scarecrow came for him.

Grumbler lifted the Colt and fired, and rotten squash
splashed across the rear of the boat and into the water. What was left of
Gourdon stumbled back with the impact, fell, and then slid over the side into
the water.

Nathan screamed and began to babble incoherently. Something
was coming from his mouth, but it didn't make sense, even to him. Grumbler
holstered the Colt and went to the oars. He got them back into the middle of
the river and then put the oars up again. Cautiously, he approached Nathan, and
the boy drew back from him, whimpering. But slowly, the dwarf was able to pull
Nathan into his arms, and then he just held him tightly as he cried.

"I'm sorry, Nate," Grumbler whispered, voice
scratchy and low. "But it's gotta be like this. There ain't no other
way."

As the river held on straight for a while, and there weren't
many obstacles in the water, Grumbler sat that way with the boy for quite some
time. The morning came on fast after that, the orange sun bright in the sky and
the trees — here at least — as green as ever. The mountains rose
around them and the river swept up, up and up until it began to get cold.

Grumbler took off his cashmere jacket and slipped it on
Nathan, and the boy lay down and cried in the prow of the boat. Grumbler rowed.
After a time, the crying stopped, and the dwarf realized the boy was asleep. He
was glad for Nathan. The boy had likely had precious little sleep since
arriving in Strangewood, and it would be a blissful escape for him.

Before the real horror began.

Before he met the Jackal Lantern.

* * * * *

The cot was almost unbearable. Thomas was reminded of a
floral-print cot mattress his parents had kept on a wire mesh frame in the
basement when he was a child. For sleepovers, his friends always had to use the
thing, which resembled an arcane torture device, even to a boy who knew little
of such things. What was worse, however, was when a relative might come to
stay, which meant Thomas would have to "take the cot."

What the hospital provided for him to sleep on was a bit
closer in appearance to a bed than that sadistic bit of fluff and wire from his
childhood, but it was hardly more comfortable. Had he been anything less than
completely exhausted, he would have been up all night.

Instead, he was asleep before the ten o'clock news.

Nineteen minutes after his eyes closed, Thomas was awakened
by the most peculiar sound. At first, he thought the television was
malfunctioning, but when he looked up, he saw that the news was still on,
though the volume was low. No, the white noise was coming from somewhere else
in the darkened room.

Turning to face the wall, pulling his legs up into a fetal
position, he tried to ignore the sound at first. But it was annoyingly
insistent. Almost like whispering, if mosquitoes could whisper.

When he realized he would not be able to sleep until the
noise had ceased, Thomas surrendered to destiny and sat up on the cot. He
glanced around the room, trying to pinpoint the origin of the noise. Maybe the
phone was off the hook. But no, the sound seemed to be coming from all over the
room.

"What the . . .?" he began, and stood up, his bare
feet cold on the ammonia-stripped tiles of the hospital room.

Something moved up in the blue glow of the television
screen. Thomas glanced at it, tried to focus.

Finally, truly, he came awake.

He'd been an idiot not to recognize the sound. Now, as he
saw one of them crawling across the screen, crackling with static electricity
from the set, his eyes went wide and he froze.

Bees.

There was no way to tell how many there were, but they were
growing louder. Thomas hated bees and always had. But Nathan was in the room as
well, breathing softly on his bed, and protecting his son was more important
than trying not to get stung.

How in the hell did they get in here?
he thought, as
he shuffled silently across the tile toward the light switch on the wall. But
how was secondary to what to do about them.

At the wall, Thomas reached out, found the switch, and
paused a moment before flipping the lights on. A part of him had expected the
room to be blanketed in bees — the part that was slowly slipping away
from reality. That part was relieved at what the lights revealed. The rest of
him was horrified.

"Oh, Jesus, Nathan," he whispered.

Thomas was at the door a second later. He opened it quickly
but quietly and stepped out into the hall. The nurses' station was abandoned. He
gazed up and down the hall and heard someone laughing a short way down, around
a corner.

"Hello?" he called, afraid to shout in case he
riled the bees.

For a moment, he stood on the threshold, wanting desperately
to get help, and yet unwilling to leave Nathan's side. There would be a nurse
back any second, he knew it. If he just left the door open, help would arrive. What
decided if for him was the sudden image that came into his mind of the cord
with the nurse call button on it. If he pressed that, they'd come quickly.

Thomas turned back into Nathan's room, and bit his lip as he
saw his son again. The bees were crawling across Nathan's sheets, buzzing
around the bed, alighting on the window and in the corners of the room. A few
dozen, that was all. But it was more than enough to cause Thomas to cease
breathing for a moment as he stared at them. At Nathan. There didn't seem to be
a single sting on his exposed flesh, and that calmed Thomas somewhat. But he
couldn't just let them stay there. He had to do something, but what? Once he
began to attack them, the bees would likely retaliate, stinging him time and
again.

Thomas was allergic to bee stings. He would swell, perhaps
enough to close off his breathing passages. In which case, he might die. His
only positive thought was that he was in a hospital, so at least someone might
get to him in time.

Someone.

His eyes found the white cable and small plastic button that
he was supposed to press to call a nurse. It lay across Nathan's bed, next to
the boy's legs. To reach it, he would have to put his hand on the sheet with
the bees.

It had grown more difficult to breathe, as if he had already
been stung, and Thomas tried to push it away. Anxiety, that's all it was, he
assured himself. But still, he did not know what to do. He stared at the bees
crawling on his son's bed, watched Nathan's face carefully, looking for any
sign that his son might awaken, feeling the tiny pressure of the bees on him.

As Thomas watched, a bee crept out of Nathan's right nostril
and rested on his upper lip.

The sound that came from Thomas then was not a word, really.
More a simple exhalation of breath, but every bit of his fear and despair was
expressed in that single syllable. Slowly, he took a step toward Nathan.

The buzzing stopped. The bees fell silent. All of them, in
an instant. Thomas blinked, shook his head, wondering if he were deaf now,
because deaf was so much more acceptable than crazy, which was what he'd been
thinking so much the past two days. It might not be happening at all, that was
the problem. It might just be him, and what then?

A pair of bees emerged single file from Nathan's slightly
parted lips.

"Stop it!" Thomas screamed. "Stop it! Get
away from my son! Get out of here!"

Raving, he flapped his arms as though he were shooing cattle
and screamed at the bees. As one, they rose from their roosts, moved into a
tight knot in the center of the room, and buzzed there. There came a light rap on
the open door and a worried male face poked inside. As if on cue, the bees
moved for the door.

"Oh, shit!" the nurse exclaimed, losing his
professional cool as he scrambled backward across the hall and stared at the
small swarm of bees as it buzzed from the room and then swept down the hall
before dispersing into various rooms and dark corners and crevices.

Thomas stared at the nurse. The man stared back at him.

"You saw them?" Thomas asked, and realized
immediately how asinine the question must have sounded.

"Where did they come from?" the nurse asked.

Thomas thought of the bees creeping from Nathan's open mouth
and shook his head, denying the thought even the beginning of entry into his
head.

"I don't know," he said. After a moment, he
believed the lie and tried to figure out who might have been able to release
the bees into the room.

The stalker? He determined to call Detective Sarbacker first
thing in the morning. For the moment, he was too rattled to talk to anyone.

"Look, I'm sleeping in my son's room," he said. "But
after that, I really need some fresh air. I'm just going to take a walk out
front, and then I'll be back. Is that all right?"

"Just tell the guard on your way out," the nurse
said, now standing at the door to Nathan's room and staring around inside. "If
he has any questions, tell him to call LaMarre and I'll back you up."

"Thanks," Thomas said, and with one glance at the
peaceful form of his son, he moved swiftly for the elevator. He had to get out.
Behind him, LaMarre was muttering something under his breath. Something about
the bees.

Outside, under the stars, with a light breeze blowing cool
across his face and in the trees above, Thomas tried to shake the horrible
feeling in the pit of his stomach. He couldn't do it. He was more convinced
than ever that someone was stalking him, and Nathan. Even now, he might be in
danger. And yet, he was much more concerned about his son. The doctors had
turned nothing up, but Thomas was going to demand a second opinion about the
toxicology report. There must be some kind of poison, some reason for the
scents in the room.

The bees hadn't just appeared there by magic, that much was
certain.

Out of the hospital, with the fresh air clearing his head,
he also began to wonder if his own weird hallucinations that day might not also
have some kind of chemical origin. It was possible that he had also been
poisoned somehow. In which case, he ought to have his blood tested right away. Thomas
had a history of seizures, ever since he was a child. He hadn't had one in
years, but he kept that bottle of phenobarbital in the medicine cabinet, just
in case.

The thought of having another seizure, after all those
years, was enough to make him forget the bees. They were terrifying, when they
came. With a shiver, Thomas made a mental note to have that blood test.

Some kind of poison. The more he considered the possibility,
walking along the grassy hill in front of the hospital, hands jammed into the
pockets of his jeans, the more he realized that it had to be true. It was the only
answer that made any sense whatsoever. The only sane answer.

Thomas had loved Sherlock Holmes as a boy, and he'd always
sworn by one of Holmes' greatest maxims. Once you had eliminated the
impossible, Holmes had believed, whatever remained, no matter how improbable,
had to be the truth.

Well, Thomas had decided that very night, breathing in the
clean air and hoping to purge his system, that it was time he eliminated the
impossible.

He'd talk to the doctors in the morning, but he wasn't going
to wait that long for the cops. No, the moment he got back inside, he planned
to call Walt Sarbacker.

He turned to walk back toward the hospital. He'd been told
to come in through the emergency room, since the main lobby was shut down for
the night. He stepped off the grass onto the pavement of the parking lot and
headed for the massive electric doors to the ER. It seemed very quiet, even for
a Tuesday night. He thought about ambulances.

And because he was thinking about ambulances, his first
thought was that the high, rhythmic sound was a siren.

But it wasn't a siren. It was a sound he'd thought he'd
heard on Sunday night outside Nathan's room. Now he heard it again, like
someone playing the violin seductively, while the breeze tickled a large set of
wind chimes.

Thomas stopped. Shook his head, whispered "no,"
and then began to weep.

It simply couldn't be. He'd had it all worked out just
seconds earlier. It just could not be possible.

Slowly, Thomas looked up into the sky, leaves rustling with
the breeze through the trees nearby. But there were no trees above his head
just now. Only the stars and the sky, and soaring above the parking lot, a
little green dragon with an orange belly, whose wings made a beautiful music
when he flew.

Fiddlestick circled twice, far above the lot. His wings had
never sounded so beautiful in Thomas's mind.

As Thomas drove to the house he had once shared with Emily
and Nathan, thunder rumbled across the sky. With a sound like the night being
torn in half, the storm began in earnest, assaulting Tarrytown with a dense,
punishing rain. The wipers on Thomas's Volvo had needed replacing for several
months, but he had always conveniently forgotten to get around to it as soon as
the sun came out again.

Now he regretted it. He could barely see past the windshield
enough to notice that the light thrown from his headlamps was splintered and
refracted by the curtain of rain. Turning up toward Tappan Hill, he bumped over
the curb, nearly hitting a fat blue mailbox.

A year ago, his life had been as close to perfect as anyone
could ever hope to get: a beautiful home, a wonderful wife, a sweet little boy
playing in the back yard, and a burgeoning career in a creative yet brutal
field that crushed most of those who ventured into it. Everybody wanted him.
Time
magazine had called him "the A. A. Milne of the new millennium."

A week ago, he was still the envy of nearly everyone he
knew. Divorced, yes, but at peace with his ex, spending time with his son, with
his pick of movie and television deals and the luxury to consider resting on
his laurels.