The Ferryman (39 page)

“Jesus, David,” Janine whispered. “What are we doing here?”

He swallowed hard. “What we have to do. Even if he didn't have Annette, there's nowhere to run. We'll face him together. Somehow we'll get out of this, Janine. You have to believe it.”

“I do. I have faith.”

Ten feet from the riverbank, the rushing water began to ripple in two places, as though there were rocks just under the surface. The effect lasted only an instant before Themeli and Grandpa Edgar broke the surface. They rose slowly from the river, emerging as they strode calmly yet inexorably toward the bank, as though they had walked all the way across the river bottom at that same pace. Perhaps most disturbing was that neither of them seemed to be at all wet.

Fear and denial wrought within David a powerful temptation to simply flee, to run away like a child, like the very same little boy to whom his grandfather had always been so caustic and cruel. But he was not a boy anymore.

“Stay behind me, Janine,” he said.

Her dark eyes flashed with alarm. “David, don't—”

“They're my ghosts,” he told her. “It's time I fought them.”

The two revenants, one a grinning, hollow-eyed old man and the other a sneering teenager, stopped at the river's edge, still ankle-deep in the water.

“Getting brave now, are you, boy?” Grandpa Edgar scoffed.

Themeli snorted at that, then shook his head. “What the fuck's the matter with you, Bairstow? Just walk away. Don't you get it? He doesn't care about you, just her.”

A muscle twitched at the corner of David's eye, but there was no other outward sign of his terror. He stood firmly in the ragged grass and stared at them, not even sparing a glance at Janine.

“You're a little puke,Themeli,” he said.“I reached out to you, tried to help you, but you were so in love with how tragic your life was, being a junkie was the only identity you could hang on to. You're not pissed because I didn't save you; you're pissed because I turned you in, I fucked up your ride. Boo-hoo.”

Themeli frowned deeply and stepped out of the water, only to have Grandpa Edgar grab him by the arm and haul him back. Both of them glanced over their shoulders nervously, and David realized that they had not attacked yet because Charon had told them to wait.

“Touching,” Grandpa Edgar said. His eyes glistened and the mist seemed to caress his face, the same white as his beard. “Is it my turn now, Davey? Have you got some bullshit psychology to explain why your old grandpa would come back to haunt you? Was I a product of a different era? Did my father's cruelty prevent me from showing the love in my heart? Maybe I secretly longed to tell bedtime stories and go on fishing trips?”

“No,” David replied flatly. “You were just a prick.”

Grandpa Edgar laughed uproariously at that, nodding in agreement. Even as he did, the mist on the river began to thin a little, the curtain not to rise so much as to become transparent. All of David's focus was on the creatures in front of him, the things that wore the faces of dead men, but Janine squeezed his hand and he glanced across the river. Green light spilled through the mist and glinted off the water.

The Ferryman was there, no more than twenty feet away. Though the current washed all around his long boat, it merely rocked in place. Whatever familiarity had lingered in the world around them seemed to be extinguished by Charon's arrival. David shivered. The ground beneath his feet seemed to dampen further, almost to squelch under his weight, though he could not have said whether that was only his imagination. He dared not look up for fear that the stars might have gone red at last. The fog enshrouded them, wrapped all around them, and though he had heard several cars pass by before, he did not dare turn around to look for the road now, for fear that it might be gone.

What world is this?
he asked himself, afraid that the answer might not be what he hoped. But it had to be. They had not gone anywhere. Yet the feeling of otherness, of elsewhere, had come upon him so abruptly, as though he had suddenly become aware of being drunk.

No,
he thought, and shook his head to clear it.
Maybe nobody can see us from the road, but that's only the fog.This is the Mystic River, not the Styx. It isn't his.

Yet David could not deny that there, on the water, Charon had power.

That's why we're here,
he reminded himself.
Why he took Annette here.
For there she was, seated behind him in the boat, a black hood pulled over her head and her hands tied behind her back. The resurrected Spencer Hahn sat at her side, poking and touching her so that Annette squirmed and shied away from him.

“Annette!” Janine cried out, and started to move toward the water.

“Yeah. Come for a swim, girl,” Grandpa Edgar said with a grunt.

Janine flinched and drew back. On her face David could see how much it hurt her to be so helpless. Though he knew Father Charles must have some plan, in that moment he was furious with the priest. A tiny sliver of doubt cut through him as he considered the possibility that Father Charles had simply walked away.

No,
he thought.Then, without looking around, David sent a small prayer out into the ether.
Whatever you're going to do, Hugh, make it good.

The Ferryman swayed with the motion of the water beneath the boat. His cowl was drawn back to reveal the twin eclipses in his eyes. More than ever, his blue-veined flesh seemed to have been carved from cold white stone. His beard swung ponderously, anchored by the metal ring tied near the end of its length.The lantern that sometimes hung from the prow of the boat was in his hand, its green flame flickering in the mist.

“Damn you!” Janine railed at him, biting off every word as though a sob hid just behind her teeth. “The only reason you still exist is because you have a job to do! Why don't you go and do it and leave us alone!”

Charon did not smile, but his eyes opened a bit wider. He raised the lantern a bit higher so that his face took on its greenish tint.

“This is not the first time I have abandoned my purpose for another,”
the Ferryman said, his voice insinuating and arrogant.
“I have always returned and so shall I do this time. But I will not return alone. How could I go if my heart is here?”

Something unraveled in David. All the hesitation, all the contemplation, all the fear and doubt and sadness in him simply seemed to give way, washed downriver in a torrent of adrenaline and emotional debris.

“You don't have a heart, you dumb fuck!” he roared. “You're a myth!”

Janine hissed air in through her teeth. Grandpa Edgar laughed, but Themeli's eyes went wide with surprise. Out in the boat, Spencer Hahn turned his gaze downward so he would not have to look at Charon in that moment.

The Ferryman's black pupils shrank to pinpoint dots then, and the burning coronas that surrounded each of them flared like dueling suns. The stretch of river that separated him from the shore began to churn. David steeled himself for retaliation.

Yet before that retaliation could come, a jet of water surged up just beyond the boat. It took form in the air. First it was a silhouette, a sculpture made of water. Then it had color and weight and real shape.

“Maggie,” David whispered.

Whatever dark power Charon had used to give Maggie Russell's soul new form, it remained. She had fled when confronted, but now she had returned. From the river water, she twisted herself into life yet again, landing on her feet in the boat with enough weight to rock it heavily to one side. Spencer had to grab the creaking wood to keep himself from going over.

The Ferryman rode the swaying vessel without effort, and laughed when he saw her.

“I wondered where you had gone,”
the creature said.

“I won't let you hurt her,” Maggie told him.

She had shed the identity she had used when she had seduced Annette. In that moment, she looked to David precisely as she had on the night she died, the night his drunkenness had cost her her life. Of all of his ghosts, Maggie was the only one whose enmity he could not dismiss.

On the boat,Annette bucked against her bonds and shouted something beneath her hood that was muffled by the cloth and dulled by the distance and the rumble of the river.

“This is it,” Janine said at his side.

David turned to gaze at her, saw the intensity in her countenance and her carriage, and knew that she was right. At the house they were only trying to defend themselves. But now Annette's life was at stake and there would be no hiding, no running away. Not anymore. This was the time. Perhaps the only chance they were going to get at surviving this thing. Themeli and Grandpa Edgar had turned to stare in astonishment at events unfolding on the boat twenty feet away. Themeli had even begun to wade into the river again as if to go to his master's aid.

This was the time.

With a nod, David ran the three steps to the river's edge and careened into his grandfather's back. The old man grunted and went down.Went under, with David on top of him. As they fell, David saw Janine leap on Themeli's back, one arm around his neck, choking.

The water was cold and soaked through his clothes as David grappled with his grandfather. He scrambled to get his feet beneath him, then hauled the old man up by his clothes. Edgar Bairstow's eyes glistened ice blue and he smiled with jagged, yellowed teeth. So real, so nightmarishly true, this grinning ghoul forced David to feel again all the humiliation and self-loathing the old man had drummed into him as a child.

He held on tight with his left hand and struck out with his right, the desire to shatter that smile so savage and primal in him that he had lost all control. But Grandpa Edgar's face collapsed around his fist, flowed around it. David cried out and withdrew his hand and the old man's face reformed, just as it had been.

“You really are as stupid as I remember,” the old man croaked.

Themeli shrugged Janine off, her arm sliding through the liquid of his throat, and she fell to her knees in the river.

In the boat, Charon held up his lantern. The mist had always been thinner in the area around the boat, but now it dispersed almost completely, as though they were in the eye of a hurricane, the fog encircling them all around. A green light arced from the lantern and struck like lightning at Maggie's chest. She stiffened a moment, and then she was only water again, splashing all across the boat as the emerald energy sizzled, then returned to the lantern. Spencer laughed.

Suddenly David could hear Annette's muffled cries more clearly, could make out her voice.

“Jill?” she cried out. “Jill!”

Grandpa Edgar hit him then, drove him down into the water so he was on his knees only a few feet away from Janine.

Damn you, Hugh Charles,
he thought desperately.
Where are you?

David nearly lost faith then. It would have been so easy. He had been responsible for cutting Maggie's life short, and ever so briefly she had been given another chance at life. At love. Now she'd lost it all again.

They could not destroy Charon. Hell, they could not even touch his creations if they did not allow it. Not here on the water. In their element.
His
place. And where was the priest, his friend, who had the power at least to deprive Charon of his servants?

“David.” Janine coughed, spitting river water.

He looked at her, saw in her eyes all that she felt for him.Though he loved her and knew she cared for him, David had always harbored doubts about the depth of her feelings. In an instant, that changed. He reached for her, and his grandfather kicked his arm away. David would not grant him the satisfaction of the merest grunt of pain.

“That will do,”
Charon said simply, his eerie voice now a rush of sound, as though the river itself were speaking.

The Ferryman stepped out of his vessel and walked across the surface of the swirling water. The river held him up, solid beneath his stride. Janine moved closer to David, and this time the revenants did nothing to prevent it. Grandpa Edgar and Themeli moved aside as Charon arrived before them.The creature's otherworldly gaze fell only upon Janine, and as David watched, she lifted her chin to stare back at him as though she could not resist his presence.

“I know that you think me a monster. I would show you other worlds, magic things. I would prove otherwise,”
the Ferryman promised, long robes whipping about him with the chill wind.

The mist enveloped them all, then, closing in, creating an unwelcome intimacy.

“No,” Janine said simply, softly.

Yet the word rippled the mist around her.

Charon touched the metal ring on his beard, twisted it as he considered that response. Bargaining. Yet what, David wondered, could a creature like this bargain with? The thought was harrowing. The wind and the mist and the river went on, but everything else seemed to pause in that moment. Then, at length, Charon inclined his head toward her and nodded.

“Accompany me from this place,”
the creature said,
“and I will return your infant to you.You never held him in your arms. I can give him back to you.”

H
ugh Charles was a man of God. A man of faith. But he could not keep the doubt from rising within him as the Mystic River swept him up in its current. Though spring had arrived, the water was cold, and as it saturated his clothes, weighing him down, Father Charles felt sluggish and heavy and very, very old. He had removed his shoes on the shore before slipping into the water and swimming out away from the bank, but now he wished he had removed most of his clothing as well. It was not modesty, however, that made him stay dressed in his black garments, his white collar. Rather, it was that, clad in the vestments of the clergy, he felt like more than he was, like a soldier of his faith. It was a uniform, in its way, and it lent him a confidence he feared he might not otherwise possess.