The Darkening Dream (9 page)

With the sun a memory, the park was now bathed in light thanks to hundreds of electric bulbs — an ethereal glow, as Sarah experienced it. Despite Alex’s unexpected swim and her soggy clothes, she was having a fantastic time. They rode the carousel, which made Sarah feel a little silly, but Emily still liked it. She really was on the cusp, very grown-up, very much a child.

“Hey, Alex,” Sam said as they walked away from the ride, “you ever had an ice cream cone?”

“I’ve had ice cream,” Alex said. “What’s a cone?”

“You don’t know?” Emily said.

“Actually,” Anne said, “they’re pretty new. I remember when Hobbs over there first introduced them. They even make a big deal about being the first.”

“Well, Alex should try one,” Emily said. “I want chocolate.”

As the initiate, Alex had to get his cone first. He chose vanilla.

“I don’t know about the cone part, but the ice cream sure is good,” he told Sarah. “You want some?”

“I do… but I can’t.”

“Oh, I forgot.” He smiled. “But I don’t see any meat here.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s lard in the cone — it’s used so often in baking,” she said. “Still, I wish I could eat all this stuff, it looks so good.”

Kosher ice cream was hard to find. Mrs. Hoffmann, the wife of Papa’s friend, had made some when Sarah’s family visited Boston.

“Do you think God will send you to hell if you eat it?”

She laughed. “I don’t even believe in hell, but
Hashem
— that’s God — keeps the accounts in balance. Not that life doesn’t sometimes seem unfair.”

“Like Emily’s friend?” Alex said. “I don’t know what Charles did or didn’t do, but he got the bum side of the scale.”

Or Judah, who a week before he died, had been thrilled by a toy train Papa made for his sixth birthday.

“And Job,” Sarah said. “He was tested with heavy sorrow, even though he was a righteous man.” She reached over and poked Alex’s jacket. Merely damp. He prodded her padded sleeve in retaliation.

“I seem to remember Satan as being the instigator of Job’s suffering.”

“I don’t believe in the devil, either,” Sarah said.

“I do.”

Most Christians did, she supposed. The conversation was so delightful it hurt. But Anne had brought her a paper cup of water from the ice cream stand, and she enjoyed watching the carousel while her friends enjoyed their cones. Horses, camels, and lions spun around and around. Each one was different, with manes and tails of real hair. In the center of the contraption was a miniature village, complete with little wooden houses, churches, trees. She’d never noticed all the detail before.

The steam calliope attached to the carousel wound down its boisterous tune, finishing on a single extended note. A long mournful whistle blast Sarah knew all too well.

Nervously she sipped her water. It tasted meaty, salty, perfumed. Not like water at all. The liquid in the glass was dark—

She flung the cup away, spitting to try and clear her mouth. Her friends turned to her, concerned.

Then she saw him.

He stood on the other side of the carousel, appearing and disappearing in the gaps between the horses. It was Charles, the boy from the Williamses’ parlor, the boy from the pond.

The dead boy.

He wore a dark Sunday suit. His light brown hair was disheveled and his face gaunt and streaked with dirt. The little hairs on Sarah’s arms stood up as if electrified. The steam-powered organ note droned on.

Beside her, Emily gripped Sarah’s arm and pointed across the spinning horses.

“It’s Charles,” she said. “He’s not dead.”

Everyone else stopped eating and turned to look, but the boy was gone, vanished into the night. The music had resumed its usual cheerful melody.

“I don’t see anything,” Sam said. “I know this has been a hard week, Em, but Charles is in heaven now. You went to his funeral, so—”

“I saw him!” Emily yelled. People were looking at her. “Sarah, you did too, right?”

As surely as she’d seen the silhouetted tree branches, red with blood. And heard the horn.

“I don’t think Charles made it to heaven,” she said. “Yes, I saw him.”

“See!” Emily looked excited, not scared.

“Sarah,” Anne said, “don’t encourage her. It must’ve been another boy.”

“It was him, I know it!” Emily said. “The far side of the carousel.”

“Calm down, ladies.” Alex spread his hands. “Let’s just go look — but together, all right? When people get excited and run off alone, bad things happen.”

The other side of the carousel was closer to the big pavilion with the skating rink and restaurant. They milled around the crowded area, which looked perfectly normal to Sarah. No dead boys here.

Sam was gripping Emily’s hand. Suddenly, she lunged against it, straining like a dog on a tether.

“Up there!” She pointed. “On top of the restaurant!”

Rows of tiny electric lights ringed the two-story pavilion, giving enough illumination to the roof to reveal a pale figure scrabbling sideways like a crab across the beach. He scurried, starting and stopping, clinging between starts to the vertical eaves. Then he was up and over, out of sight behind the lip.

“What the hell was that?” Anne said. “Let’s get out of here.”

“We have to find him!” Emily tugged at her brother’s grip again.

“I don’t know what was up there,” Sam said, “but it can’t be Charles. Dead boys don’t scurry across restaurant roofs.”

“Unfortunately, sometimes they do,” Alex said.

Sarah looked away from the roof to Alex. What did he mean by that?

“There has to be some explanation,” Sam said. “Maybe an Italian acrobat practicing his trade.” He released Emily and mimed a tightrope walker.

“Charles is my friend,” Emily said.

“
Was
your friend, Emily.” Alex loomed over her. “If you want to see the sun tomorrow, stay away from him.”

“Who are you to boss me around?” It was hard not to laugh at Emily’s angry stance, hands balled up and placed on her not quite straight hips.

“Do you know something we don’t, friend?” Sam asked Alex.

Emily dashed off into the night.

“Damn it!” Sam bolted after his sister.

The rest of them wove after him through the thinning crowd. Sarah glanced at the pavilion roofline, looking for any sign of the apparition. Nothing. Inside the building, people danced to the orchestra’s rendition of
The Garden of Roses
.

It was darker here, less public. No more well-lit kiosks — utilitarian sheds now lurked in the blackness, which was pierced by a wail that sounded distant, inhuman.

Emily was fast, much faster than Sarah and Anne, but her brother caught up with her as she passed through the doors of a wooden shed. Sam tackled her, tumbling them both into a heap of limbs and straw. On their heels, first Alex and then the older girls careened through the doorway.

Inside, it was dark but by no means quiet. Sarah smelled horse, hay, and manure. She heard some of the big animals shuffling and snorting. Worse noises reverberated from the dark depths: slurps, squeals, heavy thrashing thumps. Something was eating, gorging itself. It all sounded very wet.

“We should go back and get the police,” Anne said.

Alex grabbed a pitchfork and shovel leaning against the wall.

“This isn’t a matter for the police.”

Sam took the shovel Alex offered, but first he placed Emily’s hand in Anne’s and folded the older sister’s fingers around the younger’s, pressing hard.

“Do
not
let her go. Emily, am I going to have to tell Mom you died a silly little girl?”

Emily cocked her head, listening to the awful wetness.

“I’ll behave. Promise.”

“We need some light,” Alex said.

“How about this?” Anne flipped a switch.

With a pop and hum, dangling electric bulbs sparked to life one by one. The slurping noises briefly gave way to a growling hiss.

Alex and Sam crept forward, makeshift weapons in hand. Sarah tiptoed behind. White-faced, Anne stood with Emily by the door. No agitated horse head poked from the last stall, and it was here that the boys stopped. The pony in the adjacent pen reared and bucked, wild with terror, its muzzle streaked with foam.

Alex gestured to Sam to make ready, then pulled the stall door open.

The thing inside struggled with a thrashing horse, crouched low over its long neck and head. The boy’s skin glowed milky in the dim light. His church jacket was muddy and his white shirt soaked red. Bone-colored nails grown into long talons gripped the dying animal. The boy’s face, buried in living flesh, lifted to reveal features roughhewn in approximation of life. He resembled Charles, or perhaps his ghoulish
doppelgänger
. Black lifeless eyes bored into Sarah’s soul. His bloody distended mouth snarled, long canines protruding from rows of teeth too numerous for the jaw, then he bent back to his meal.

Sam stepped into the stall, raised the shovel high, and brought it down sideways onto the creature’s skull with the full force of his weight. There was a sickening crunching sound and a spray of blood as the steel blade chopped into the boy’s cranium and sheared off a huge flap of skin, hair, and ear.

The creature emitted a hideous shriek and reached to yank the shovel from Sam’s hands, nearly toppling him. Moving unnaturally fast, he broke the wooden shaft in two and sprang upward. A mixture of fluid and bone rained downward.

Sarah looked up to see the thing scuttle across the ceiling, leaping from rafter to rafter. In seconds, he’d traveled past them to the door. Anne threw herself and Emily into a bale of hay as the thing dropped, then fled outside into the night.

Sarah’s breath burned in and out so hard her throat hurt. Her worldview churned around the inside of her skull. She tried to readjust and realign, to make sense of it. Now she knew, with total and complete certainty, that monsters were real.

Everyone else seemed just as dazed. By the exit, Anne rose, dusting hay from her skirts.

“Oh my God, blessed Jesus, what kind of crazy man was that?”

“Let’s go after it!” Sam said.

“No need right now,” Alex said. “I know where we can find it later.”

They all looked at him.

“What aren’t you telling us?” Sarah said.

Alex sighed. “That was a
vrykolakas
, what you’d call a vampire. A young one, buried only yesterday, risen for the first time this night or the last.”

“Huh?” Sam said.

“Like Dracula?” Emily asked.

“Perhaps, but this one is so young it’s feral, like a rabid dog.” Alex was looking at Sarah. “The hunger for blood has driven it mad, so it doesn’t talk or think. It only kills and feeds. Evil is like a seed: it needs time to grow after it’s planted.”

“What are you even
talking
about?” Anne said.

“Dracula’s the villain from this great novel the librarian thought I’d like,” Emily said. “He’s an evil Romanian count who’s dead but drinks the blood of beautiful—”

“Mom would be furious to find you reading that nonsense,” Anne said.

“Nonsense?” Alex said. “Do you believe your eyes? Is the blood in our hair a figment of your imagination? Vampires are rare, perhaps, but they’re real enough. The world is full of the unknown, swimming like fish under the surface of normalcy.”