The Ferryman (38 page)

“That makes sense,” Janine put in. “I mean, if he's got some anchor here now, like you said, that's got to be new to him. He's testing his boundaries.”

“And ours,” Father Charles replied with a grave nod of his head. “I'm beginning to think that every time he touches this reality, his ability to influence it grows a little stronger. He's trying to blur the lines between our world and his.”

David was still reeling from what he had seen. He leaned against the wall and nodded slowly. “Oh, yeah, I'd call that a pretty major blur.” Both hands came up and he covered his face, then slapped his cheeks as though trying to keep himself awake.

“Where's Annette?”

His head snapped up and he stared at Janine, then turned to look at the steps leading down to the second floor. David pushed off the wall and ran to the top of the waterfall stairs.The narrow stairwell itself was dark, but in the wan light from the windows on both floors he could see that the door was splintered in two, had been caved in, and lay in awkward ruins on the steps.

Annette was gone.

Janine knelt by her mother's body and stared into her dead eyes. A tear slipped down her cheek and she wiped it angrily away. She was through with crying. Her fingers encircled her mother's cold, still hand, and Janine simply sat like that, alone, for several minutes.

Through with crying. It felt as though she had made one simple mistake in judgment: she had trusted Spencer Hahn. And she had been paying for that error ever since. Her heart and mind had been ravaged by cruelty and tragedy, terror and loss. Until now, she had thought that her survival alone was an achievement. But that wasn't enough now. All this time she had struggled to withstand a maelstrom of emotion, but it had never occurred to her to strike back.

That time had come.

Charon.
The fucker had murdered her mother, had tormented David in a way that still had him questioning his own worth, and now the Ferryman had taken Annette. If she closed her eyes, she could still recall the dreams she'd had of Charon, his hands upon her, his lips.... Janine shuddered now as she remembered the pleasure she had taken from those dreams. Her entire life had been out of focus, a sort of fugue of grief and despair, and Charon had used that, played with her, tried to coerce her into seeing him as an escape from her pain.

But all was in focus now. Janine saw with perfect clarity how she had been invaded, violated.

She squeezed her mother's rigid fingers; then she rose and went down to the second floor, where she stripped the spread from the bed in the guest room.Water had seeped through the ceiling from the burst pipes above. David had succeeded in shutting off the flow, but the damage was done.Tens of thousands of dollars in damage to his family home. Yet that was the last thing on any of their minds at the moment.

It infuriated her that they were still reacting. But there were things that had to be done.

With the bedspread in her arms, Janine walked back up to the third floor. She glanced once at the turret room, then draped the spread over her mother's corpse and left Ruth there. At the bottom of the steps, where the remnants of the shattered door still lay in the hall, she thought again of Annette, and wished that David and Father Charles would hurry.

Almost as though summoned by her thoughts, the front door opened downstairs.

“Janine!” David called.

“Up here!”

From the top of the grand staircase she could see them both. David had put on dry blue jeans and a knit sweater, his hair had been wet and dried wild, and he had a bit of stubble on his chin. He looked older, somehow, gaunt and haunted, and yet he walked with a determination that reflected what she felt in her heart. Father Charles was all in black, his priestly garb still damp. He seemed almost skittish, glancing into the parlor as he passed it, his eyes roving around, peering into every shadow.

“Did you find Kindzierski?” Janine asked, her voice echoing, hollow and cold in the large foyer.

David nodded. “He's dead. I ... I don't know how many people heard those gunshots, or if they called the police, but we couldn't take any chances.”

Janine kept her hand on the banister, her gaze locked on them. “What did you do?”

“There's a Toyota parked a couple houses down with magazines and empty Doritos bags in it. It was unlocked. I'm guessing he was watching the house. We—”

His words were interrupted by a bright light flashing past the house outside. David started and went to the door again, peered through the windows on either side of the door.

“Just in time,” he said, his voice tired. “That's the police. Let's just hope no one actually saw anything, and they don't notice the broken window.”

His fingers trailed along the splintered wood where the force of a dead man's hammering had caused the dead-bolt lock to tear through the wooden frame.

“What did you do with Kindzierski?” Janine asked again. Her eyes flicked toward Father Charles.

The priest crossed himself, but slowly, as though he had a new appreciation for the power in that gesture of faith.

“We put him back in the car,” Father Charles said. “We were careful not to leave fingerprints on the door handle.” The priest moved nearer to the bottom of the stairs and stared up at her, grim-faced, and yet somehow his eyes glistened with sympathy. “But that's only half of the problem, Janine. Once the police find Detective Kindzierski's body, they're sure to check in and realize he was watching this house.They'll notice the damage.They'll want to search the house.”

David moved up beside him, as though they appealed to some goddess or queen.

“What are we going to do about Ruth's body, Janine?” her lover asked. “How do we explain that?”

She saw right away where they were going with that. “You want to dump her somewhere? In the river, right? Not going to happen, David. The police already know someone's been terrorizing us. With Father Charles to back us up, we could easily say we found her here. The front door's been broken in; there are smashed windows. We'll explain it.We've got witnesses. But I'm not going to take my mother's body and ...”

Emotion choked her and she forced herself not to let it overwhelm her. “I couldn't stand waiting around until they found her. I can't pretend I don't know what happened to her. Not to the cops, and certainly not to Larry.”

The two men stood in the foyer amidst antique furniture and arched doorways, all familiar and solid, and yet Janine could not help but think of the river that had flowed within that house, the way that Charon had been able to force his own nether realm into the real world. Janine shuddered, then pushed her wavy raven hair away from her eyes and started down the stairs.

“All right,” David agreed. “All right.”

He met her at the bottom of the steps and they embraced. It was brief, but there was a sweetness to that moment that gave her strength and succor. Janine broke away from him and reached out to take Father Charles's hand. She squeezed it, smiled weakly, and then let it go again.

Janine took a deep breath, then gazed purposefully at David. In every word and glance, there hung an ominous knowledge, unspoken.

“What about Annette?” she asked, a quaver in her voice.

David nodded slowly, then glanced at Father Charles as though he might have an answer. The priest said nothing, as baffled as they were. These dead things Charon had drawn from the afterlife had battered their way into the house and taken Annette away with them. The image of her mother's corpse was fresh in Janine's mind, and she tried unsuccessfully to avoid putting Annette's face there instead of her mother's.

“We have to find her,” David said softly.

Dark circles under his eyes only punctuated the sadness in them. He blamed himself, Janine knew. Annette was his best friend, and hers as well. Finding her would have been their first priority, if they had had any idea where to look. Their helplessness was crippling.

Father Charles cleared his throat to draw their attention. “He's not going to kill her, I don't think.”

“What makes you say that?” Janine asked.

The priest scratched his head.“His power in this world is still tenuous. It's growing, but it's unfamiliar to him. He may be anchored here but he's unsure of himself. He needs you vulnerable. Charon could have had them just kill Annette right then and be done with it. But they took her instead. He wants you to come to him.”

A chill raced through her as she relived, in an instant, the moment during labor when she had almost died, the vision of Charon and the river Styx and the afterlife she had had then.

“I can't go to him without dying, Father. And, for that matter, how would he get Annette there without killing her?”

David began to pace the foyer, banging his fist unconsciously against his leg. “Not there. Not in his ... place. Somewhere in our world, but where he feels like he's got power.”

He stopped, glanced up at Janine.

“The river,” she said. “I saw him that day, the morning after your crash, on the other side of the river.”

“ ‘I'll see you on the water before long,' ” Father Charles said. “That's what he said to me. Perhaps he meant it literally.”

 
They drove to the river in silence. Though they did not discuss it, David's instinct led him to the spot where the revenant of Steve Themeli had driven him off the road. It was a reminder that though Charon was after Janine, these were David's ghosts that had been raised, phantoms of hatred dredged up from his past. He wanted to believe that they were not real, that they were merely echoes cast into the world to torment him. But Maggie—or Jill, as Annette had known her—she had had emotions. That knowledge tore at him as though he were Prometheus, hung from the mountain, fodder for birds of prey.

David held Janine's hand as he drove. Father Charles was curiously silent in the back, a Bible in his hands. They followed the twists and turns of the road alongside the river, and as they approached their destination, the place where he had nearly been killed, a fine mist appeared atop the rolling water.

None of them reacted to the phenomenon. David suspected it was what they had all expected to find there. It was not terribly late, but still, few cars passed them. Another vehicle was already parked on the side of the road, and he recognized it as Ruth Vale's car. Though Janine must have known it as well, it was yet another realization that went unspoken. He pulled over onto the shoulder, across from the riverbank, and they all got out. David jogged over to Ruth's car, but it was empty.

Headlights cut the slowly expanding, enveloping mist and they waited for the car to pass before crossing the street. Above, even through the fog, David could see the bright crescent moon and the stars.The air was cold and crisp, despite the damp of the mist, and David shivered. It felt good, though. Awake. Alive. His senses seemed somehow sharper as tendrils of mist swirled around them. He and Father Charles flanked Janine as they crossed the road. In the soft earth of the riverbank there remained a deep rut that had been carved out of the ground by his car. The smell of the upturned soil was strong, almost rejuvenating.

David thought of Janine's description of her brush with death, of the river Styx, and he felt the urge to hold her. It was absurd, given their circumstances, but he had never felt the need to have her in his arms more acutely. He reached out and touched her arm, felt the smooth softness of her leather jacket. She gazed out over the mist-shrouded river. Her dark hair framed her face, made her seem almost a ghost herself.

This,
he thought.
This is what's real.

“I don't see anything,” she said, her voice tinged more with frustration than fear.

“There,” Father Charles said, his voice so low it was below a whisper.

Out on the river, in the mist, an eerie green light began to glow, diffused and refracted into the fog. Even as they watched, it began to glide closer to them, cutting across the river unmindful of the current, as though it floated above rather than atop the water.

The smells of the earth and the river were strong, and David breathed them in, anchoring himself to the world he knew. Whatever lay out on that river, perhaps even the river itself, was something else entirely. Not a different place, not the netherworld, but perhaps a blurred place in this one, where Charon's river—in the borderlands between tangible and intangible, between reality and faith—flowed into this one.

David started as Father Charles gripped his arm from behind. He spun around to find the priest gazing at him intensely.There had always been something admirably haughty about the man. That arrogance was gone, but his dignity remained.

“Stay here. Protect each other,” the priest said, his eyes blazing beneath his heavy brows. “Janine, use him as a bargaining chip if you need to.Your companionship for David's life.”

Janine gaped at him, horrified. She began to shake her head. “Father, I—”

“Lie,” the priest told her.

“Where are you going?” David asked, his mind racing.Without Father Charles, they had no way to defend themselves. Only his blessing had had any effect on Charon.

The priest hesitated, and David saw fear in those intense eyes. “Into the river,” he said.

Then he turned and strode upriver along the bank, disappearing into the mist within moments. Janine reached out and grabbed David's hand. Both of them looked out at the water, where the green light of the Ferryman's lantern glowed brighter, floated closer. They could hear the slap of water against the boat's wooden sides.