Swan Song (59 page)

And then after him, it would be Swan’s turn.

Rusty’s body jerked and fought, but he knew he was finished. The smell of himself afire made him think of the greasy French fries at the Oklahoma state fair when he was a kid. The flame was going bone-deep now, and as his nerves began to sputter the pain locked up, as if a point of no return had been passed.

Mama said somethin’, Rusty thought. Said… said…

Mama said fight fire with fire.

Rusty embraced the man with the burning sticks of his arms, entwining his fingers at the man’s back. The fingers melded like chains, and Rusty thrust his flaming face into the man’s beard.

The beard caught fire. The face bubbled, melting and running like a plastic mask, exposing a deeper layer the color of modeling clay.

Rusty and the man whirled around the room like participants in a bizarre ballet.

“Lord God!” shouted one of two men who were looking in, drawn by the open doorway on their jaunt to the burning barn. “Lord God A’mighty!” The second man screamed, backed up and fell on his rump in the mud. Other people were running over to see what was happening, and the man in the burning rags of a brown parka could not thrust the flaming dead man away from him, and his new disguise was ruined, and they were about to see his true face.

He gave a garbled roar that almost shook the cabin and ran through the doorway out into the midst of them. He was still roaring as he ran up the street on melting legs in the embrace of a charred cowboy.

Glory helped Josh pull out of his burning coat. His ski mask was smoking, too, and before she could think twice about it, she reached up and yanked it off.

Dark gray growths, some the size of Aaron’s fists, almost completely covered Josh’s face and head. Tendrils had interlocked around his mouth, and the only clear area except for his lips was a circle in the crust through which his left eye, now bloodshot from the smoke, stared at Glory. His condition wasn’t as bad as Swan’s, but it still made Glory gasp and retreat a step.

He had no time to apologize for not being a beauty. He ran for Mule, who was bucking wildly as other onlookers scattered, and grabbed up a handful of snow; he clutched Mule’s neck and crushed out the flames in his mane. Then Glory had a handful of snow and was pressing it to the horse’s tail, and Aaron had some, too, and many of the other men and women were scooping up snow and rubbing it against Mule’s sides. A thin, dark-haired man with a blue keloid grabbed Mule’s neck opposite Josh, and after a minute of struggle they got the horse calmed down enough to stop bucking.

“Thanks,” Josh told the man. And then there was a roaring and a rush of heat, and the barn’s roof fell in.

“Hey!” a woman standing closer to the road called out. “There’s some kinda commotion back there!” She pointed toward the shacks, and both Glory and Josh could see people out in the street. Shouts and cries for help drifted to them.

Swan! Josh thought. Oh, God-I left Swan and Rusty alone!

He started to run, but his legs betrayed him and he went down. His lungs were grabbing for air, black motes spinning before his eyes.

Someone took his arm, started helping him up. A second person supported his other shoulder, and together they got Josh to his feet. Josh realized Glory stood on one side of him, and on the other was an old man with a face like cracked leather. “I’m all right,” he told them, but he had to lean heavily on Glory. She stood firm and started guiding him along the road.

A blanket had been thrown on the ground about thirty feet from Glory’s shack. Smoke curled from under it. A few people stood around it, motioning and talking. Others were crowded around Glory’s front door. Josh smelled burned meat, and his stomach clenched. “Stay here,” he told Aaron. The boy stopped, Crybaby gripped in his hand.

Glory went with Josh into the shack. She put her hand over her mouth and nose. Hot currents still prowled back and forth between the walls, and the ceiling was scorched black.

He stood over Swan, trembling like a child. She had pulled her knees up to her chest, and now she was motionless. He bent down beside her, took one wrist and felt for her pulse. Her flesh was cold.

But her pulse was there-faint but steady, like the rhythm of a metronome that would not be stilled.

Swan tried to lift her head but had no strength. “Josh?” It was barely audible.

“Yes,” he answered, and he pulled her to him, cradling her head against his shoulder. A tear scorched his eye and ran down along the growths on his cheek. “It’s old Josh.”

“I… had a nightmare. I couldn’t wake up. He was here, Josh. He… he found me.”

“Who found you?”

“Him,” she said. “The man… with the scarlet eye… from Leona’s pack of cards.”

On the floor a few feet away were fragments of dark glass. The magic mirror, Josh knew. He saw Rusty’s cowboy boots, and he wished to God that he didn’t have to go outside and see what was smoking under that blanket in the mud.

“Swan? I’ve got to go out for a minute,” he said. “You just rest, all right?” He eased her down and glanced quickly at Glory, who had seen the puddle of blood on the floor. Then Josh stood up and made himself go.

“We threw snow on him!” one of the onlookers said as Josh approached. “We couldn’t get the fire out, though. He was too far gone.”

Josh knelt down and lifted the blanket. Looked long and hard. The corpse was hissing, as if whispering a secret. Both arms had snapped off at the shoulders.

“I seen it!” another man offered excitedly. “I looked in through that door and seen a two-headed demon a-runnin’ around and around in there! God A’mighty, I ain’t never seen such a sight! Then Perry and me started hollerin’, and that thing come a-runnin’ right at us! Looked like it was fightin’ itself! Then it split in two and the other one run that way!” He pointed up the street in the opposite direction.

“It was another man on fire,” a third witness explained, in a calmer voice. He had a hooked nose and a dark beard, and he spoke with a Northern accent. “I tried to help him, but he turned up an alley. He was too fast for me. I don’t know where the hell he went, but he couldn’t have gotten too far.”

“Yeah!” The second man nodded vigorously. “The skin was meltin’ right offa him!”

Josh lowered the blanket and stood up. “Show me where he went,” he told the man with the Northern accent.

A trail of burned cloth turned into an alley, continued for about forty feet, turned left at another alley and ended at a pile of ashy rags behind a shack. There was no corpse, and the footprints were lost in the ravaged ground.

“Maybe he crawled under one of these shacks to die,” the other man said. “There’s no way a human being could live through that! He looked like a torch!”

They searched the area for another ten minutes, even squeezing under some of the shacks, but there was no sign of a body. “I guess wherever he is, he died naked,” the man said as they gave up the search and went back to the street.

Josh looked at Rusty again. “You dumb cowboy,” Josh whispered. “You sure pulled a magic trick this time, didn’t you?”

“He was here,” Swan had said. “He found me.”

Josh wrapped Rusty up in the blanket, lifted the remains in his arms and got to his feet.

“Take him to the Pit!” one of the men said. “That’s where all the bodies go.”

Josh walked to what was left of the Travelin’ Show wagon and laid Rusty in it.

“Uh-uh, mister!” a husky woman with a red keloid covering her face and scalp scolded him. “That’ll draw every wild animal for miles!”

“Let them come, then,” Josh replied. He turned toward the people, swept his gaze across them and stopped at Glory. “I’m going to bury my friend at first light.”

“Bury him?” A frail teen-age girl with close-cropped brown hair shook her head. “Nobody buries anybody anymore!”

“I’m going to bury Rusty,” Josh told Glory. “At first light, in that field where we found Swan. It’ll be hard work. You and Aaron can help me, if you like. If you don’t want to, that’s all right, too. But I’ll be damned if I’ll-” His voice cracked. “I’ll be damned if I’ll throw him into a pit!” He sat up on the wagon’s frame beside the body to wait for daylight.

There was a long silence. Then the man with the Northern accent said to Glory, “Lady? Do you have any way to fix your door?”

“No.”

“Well… I’ve got a few tools in my shack. They’re not much. I haven’t used them in a while, but… if you like, I’ll take a shot at fixing your door.”

“Thank you.” Glory was stunned by the offer. It had been a very long time since anyone had offered to do anything in Mary’s Rest. “I’d appreciate whatever you could do.”

“If you’re gonna stay out here in the cold,” the woman with the red keloid told Josh, “you’d better get yourself a fire lit. Better build one right here on the road.” She snorted. “Bury a body! That’s the damnedest thing I ever heard of!”

“I got a wheelbarrow,” another man offered. “I reckon I could run it up there and pluck some hot coals out of that fire. I mean… I got better things to do, but… sure would be a shame to let all those good hot coals go to waste.”

“I sure would like a fire!” a short man with one eye missing piped up. “It’s cold as hell in my shack! Listen… I’ve got some coffee grounds I’ve been saving. If somebody’s got a tin can and a hot stove, I guess we could brew it up.”

“Might as well. All this excitement’s got me as jumpy as a flea on a griddle.” The woman with the red keloid brought a small gold watch from the pocket of her coat, held it with loving reverence and squinted closely at the dial. “Four twelve. First light won’t show for five hours yet. Yep, if you’re gonna watch over that poor soul, you’re gonna need a fire and some hot coffee. I got a coffee pot at my mansion. Ain’t been used in a while.” She looked at Glory. “We can use it now, if you like.”

Glory nodded. “Yes. We can brew the coffee on my stove.” “I have a pickaxe and shovel,” a gray-bearded man in a plaid coat and a tan woolen cap said to Josh. “Part of the shovel blade’s broken off, but it’ll do to bury your friend.”

“I used to be a wood carver,” someone else spoke up. “If you’re going to bury him, you’ll need a marker. What was his name?”

“Rusty.” Josh’s throat choked up. “Rusty Weathers.” “Well?” The feisty woman put her hands on her hips. “We got things to do, seems like. Let’s quit shirkin’ and get to workin’!”

Almost three miles away, Robin Oakes stood in the twilight at the campfire’s edge where the three boys slept. He was armed with a rifle and had been carefully watching for the movement of animals too close to the fire. But now he stared toward the horizon, and he called out, “Sister! Sister, come over here!”

It was a minute or so before she made her way to him from her sentry post on the other side of the fire. “What is it?”

“There.” He pointed, and she followed the line of his finger to see a faint orange glow in the sky above the seemingly endless expanse of forest. “I think that’s Mary’s Rest. Nice of them to start a fire and show us the way, huh?”

“It sure is.”

“That’s the direction we’ll be headed when it gets light enough to see. If we keep a good pace, we ought to make it in a couple of hours.”

“Good. I want to get there as fast as we can.”

“I’ll see to it.” His sly smile promised a rough march.

Sister started to return to her area of patrol, but she had a sudden thought and stopped at the edge of the firelight. She took the CrackerJack compass from her pocket, lined herself up with the glow on the horizon, and checked the needle.

It was far enough off southwest that they might have bypassed Mary’s Rest by six or seven miles. Sister realized that they’d been very close to being lost if Robin hadn’t seen that glow in the sky. Whatever it was, she was thankful for it.

She continued her patrol, her eyes searching the darkness for any lurking beasts, but her mind was on a girl named Swan.

Daughter of Ice and Fire

Thy Passin’ Guest /

The Empress /

Things That Could Be /

It’s a Man’s World /

The Job’s Mask Cracked /

The Kiss/

Sixty-Four - [Daughter of Ice and

Fire]

First light came shrouded in a dense fog that lay close to the alleys and shacks of Mary’s Rest, and a funeral procession moved quietly through the mist.

Josh led the way, carrying Swan in his arms. She was protected from the chill by a thick sweater and coat, her head resting against Josh’s shoulder. He was determined not to let her out of his sight again, for fear of whatever had come after her the night before and set Rusty ablaze. Man with a scarlet eye, Devil or demon-whatever it was, Josh was going to protect Swan with his final breath.

But she was both shivering and hot with fever, and Josh didn’t know if he could save her from what was killing her from the inside out. He prayed to God that he wouldn’t soon have to dig a second grave.

Glory and Aaron followed behind Josh, and right behind them the handyman with the Northern accent-whose name was Zachial Epstein-and the gray-bearded man in the plaid coat-Gene Scully-carried between them a crudely constructed pine wood box that resembled a child’s coffin. All that remained of Rusty Weathers had fit inside it, and before the lid had been nailed shut Josh had put his cowboy boots in with him.

Others who’d watched over Rusty’s body during the night followed as well, including the woman with the keloid-scarred face-an ex-carnival roustabout from Arkansas named Anna McClay-and the man who’d provided the coffee grounds, whose name was John Gallagher and who’d been a policeman in Louisiana. The teen-age girl with close-cropped brown hair had forgotten her last name and just went by Katie. The young man who’d been a wood carver in Jefferson City was named Roy Creel, and he limped along on a crooked left leg that had been badly broken and never properly set; in his arms he carried a pine wood plank that had RUSTY WEATHERS carved into it in scrolled letters. Bringing up the rear was Mule, who stopped every few yards to sniff the air and paw at the hard ground.

Fog shrouded the field and clung close to the earth, and the wind was still. The reek of the pond didn’t seem so bad today, Josh thought-or maybe that just meant he was getting used to it. Walking through the mist was like entering a ghostly world where time had halted, and the place might have been the edge of a medieval settlement six centuries before. The only sounds were the crunching of boots in the snow, the rush of breath pluming from their mouths and nostrils and the distant cawing of crows.

Josh could barely see ten feet ahead. He continued up through the low-lying mist into the field for what he took to be about forty or fifty yards before he stopped. This was as good a spot as any, he decided, and a whole hell of a lot better than the Pit. “Right here will do,” he told the others. He carefully laid Swan down a few feet away. Anna McClay was carrying the shovel and pickaxe; he took the shovel from her and scooped the snow away from a rectangular area a little larger than the coffin. Then he took the pickaxe and began to dig Rusty’s grave.

Anna joined in the work, shoveling the earth to one side as Josh broke it loose. The first six or eight inches was cold and clayey, full of a network of thick roots that resisted Josh’s pickaxe. Anna pulled the roots up and tossed them aside, to be boiled in soup. Beneath the top layer of earth the dirt became darker, crumbly and easier to move. Its rich odor reminded Josh, oddly, of a fudge cake his mother had baked and left to cool on the kitchen windowsill.

When Josh’s shoulders got tired, John Gallagher hefted the pickaxe and took over, while Glory shoveled the dirt aside. And so they alternated the work like that for the next hour, digging the grave deep enough so that the wild animals wouldn’t disturb it. When it was ready, Josh, John and Zachial lowered the coffin into the earth.

Josh looked down at the pine wood box. “Well,” he said, quietly and resignedly, “I guess that’s that. I wish there was a tree out here to bury you under, but there’s not enough sunlight to throw shade, anyway. I remember you told me you dug graves for all your friends back at that train wreck. Well, I figured it was the least your friend could do for you. I think you saved Swan last night; I don’t know from who-or what-but I’m going to find out. That I promise you.” He lifted his gaze to the others. “I guess that’s all I’ve got to say.”

“Josh?” Glory had gone into the shack to get something from under her mattress before they’d come out here, and now she drew it from the folds of her coat. “This was Jackson’s Bible,” she told him, and she opened the dogeared, battered old book. “Can I read something from it?”

“Yes. Please.”

She found the part she was looking for, on a page that was crinkled and hardly legible anymore. “Lord,” she began reading, “let me know my end, and what is the measure of my days; let me know how fleetin’ my life is! Behold, Thou hast made my days a few handbreadths, and my lifetime is nothin’ in Thy sight. Surely every man stands as a mere breath! Surely every man goes about as a shadow! Surely for nought are they in turmoil; man heaps up, and knows not who will gather.”

She rested her hand on Aaron’s shoulder. “And now, Lord, for what do I wait?” she read. “My hope is in Thee. Deliver me from all my transgressions. Make me not the scorn of the fool. I am dumb, I do not open my mouth; for it is Thou who hast done it. Remove Thy stroke from me; I am spent by the blows of Thy hand. When Thou dost chasten man with rebukes for sin, Thou dost consume like a moth what is dear to him; surely every man is a mere breath!”

Josh heard the crows cawing, way off in the distance. The mist was undisturbed by wind, and Josh could only see the immediate area around Rusty’s grave.

“Hear my prayer, oh Lord, and give ear to my cry; hold not Thy peace at my tears! For I am thy passin’ guest, a sojourner, like all my fathers. Look away from me, that I may know gladness, before I depart and be no more.” Glory hesitated for a few seconds, her head bowed, and then she closed the Bible. “That was the 39th Psalm,” she told Josh. “Jackson used to like for me to read it to him.”

Josh nodded, stared down at the coffin a moment longer-then scooped up the first shovelful of earth and dropped it into the grave.

When the grave was filled and the dirt was packed tight, Josh tapped the pine wood marker into the ground. The young wood carver had done a good job on it, and it would last a while.

“Mite cold out here,” Anna McClay said. “We ought to be getting back.”

Josh gave the pickaxe and shovel to John Gallagher and walked over to where Swan lay sleeping in the folds of her coat. He bent down to pick her up, and he felt a chill breeze sweep past him. The walls of mist shifted and swirled.

He heard something rustle in the breeze.

A noise like leaves being disturbed, somewhere off through the mist to his right.

The breeze faltered and died, and the sound was gone. Josh stood up, staring in the direction from which it had come. There’s nothing out here, he thought. This is an empty field.

“What is it?” Glory asked, standing beside him.

“Listen,” he said softly.

“I don’t hear anything.”

“Come on!” Anna called. “You’re gonna freeze your butts solid out here!”

The air moved again, a breath of cold wind slanting from a different angle across the field.

And then both Josh and Glory heard the rustling noise, and Josh looked at her and said, “What’s that?”

She couldn’t answer.

Josh realized he hadn’t seen Mule for a while; the horse could be anywhere out on the field, hidden by the mist. He took a step toward the rustling noise, and as the wind ebbed the sound ebbed as well. But he kept walking, and heard Zachial shout, “Come on, Josh!” He continued on, and Glory followed with Aaron right at her side.

The wind turned. The rustling sound was getting nearer. Josh was reminded of a hot summer day when he was a boy, lying on his back in a field of high grass, chewing on a weed and listening to the wind sing like a harp.

The mist was tattering apart like old cloth. Josh vaguely made out Mule’s shape through it, about fifteen or twenty feet ahead. He heard the horse whinny-and then Josh abruptly stopped in his tracks, because right in front of him was something wonderful.

It was a row of plants, all about two feet tall, and as the breeze stirred the mist away the long, slender fronds swayed and rustled together.

Josh reached down, gently running his fingers over one of the delicate stalks. The plant was a pale green, but scattered on the fronds were dark red splotches that almost resembled blood stains.

“My Lord,” Glory breathed. “Josh… that’s new corn growin’!”

And Josh remembered the dried kernel that had been stuck to the blood-caked palm of Swan’s hand. He knew what she’d been doing out there in the cold and dark.

The wind picked up strength, shrilled around Josh’s head and made the young cornstalks dance. It punched holes through the gray walls of mist, and then the mist began to lift, and in the next moment Josh and Glory could see most of the field around them.

They stood amid several irregular, weaving rows of pale green stalks, all about two feet high and all spotted with what Josh realized could very well have been drops of Swan’s blood, absorbed right into the dirt and the dormant roots like fuel into a thirsty engine. The sight of green life in that devastated, snow-swept field almost knocked Josh to his knees; it was like seeing color again after a long blindness. Mule was nibbling tentatively at one of the plants, and a few crows swirled over his head, cawing indignantly. He snapped at them, then chased them between the rows with the exuberance of a colt.

“I don’t know what’s inside that girl,” Josh recalled Sly Moody saying, “but she’s got the power of life!”

He shook his head, unable to find words. He reached out to the stalk in front of him and touched a small green nub that he knew was an ear of corn, forming in its protective sheath. There were four or five others just on the one stalk alone.

“Mister,” Sly Moody had said, “that Swan could wake the whole land up again!”

Yes, Josh thought, his heart pounding. Yes, she can.

And now he understood at last the commandment that had come from PawPaw’s lips back in the dark basement in Kansas.

He heard a holler and whoop, and he looked back to see John Gallagher running toward them. Behind him, Zachial and Gene Scully followed. Anna stood, staring with her mouth open, next to the teen-age girl. John fell down on his knees before one of the stalks and touched it with trembling hands. “It’s alive!” he said. “The earth’s still alive! Oh, God… oh, Jesus, we’re going to have food!”

“Josh… how can… this be?” Glory asked him, while Aaron grinned and poked at a stalk with Crybaby.

He inhaled the air. It seemed fresher, cleaner, infused with electricity. He looked at Glory, and his deformed mouth smiled. “I want to tell you about Swan,” he said, his voice shaking. “I want to tell everybody in Mary’s Rest about her. She’s got the power of life in her, Glory. She can wake the whole land up again!” And then he was running across the field toward the figure that lay on the ground, and he bent down and lifted her in his arms and squeezed her against him.

“She can!” he shouted. His voice rolled like thunder toward the shacks of Mary’s Rest. “She can!”

Swan shifted drowsily. The slit of her mouth opened, and she asked in a soft, irritated voice, “Can what?”