Wildwood Road (29 page)

“Up,” Jillian said. “We have to go up.”

Her voice sounded as distant as the jump-rope girls and their giggling song, as though she was mesmerized. Jillian took another step up. Michael followed, crowbar at the ready. Though he had no idea what good it would do. He felt himself falling under whatever spell had touched his wife. The spell of perfect moments, of cherished bits of the past.

“Mom?”

Tom Barnes's voice broke the spell. There was fear in that voice, in that single syllable. Michael glanced over the railing at Barnes and his mother, where they had paused just at the threshold of the foyer. Susan had turned around, her back to Michael and Jillian. Tom put a hand on her arm, and only now did Michael hear the strange sounds coming from the older woman's throat. Not quite crying. It was a low moan, a whimper that spoke of pain with no hope of relief. Then it stopped.

“Mom, what is it?” Tom whispered.

From the shadows of the threshold, she turned at last to face her son, and the moonlight washing the foyer illuminated her features. Her misshapen, distended features, her skin now hard and smooth and gleaming in the moonlight that sifted through the windows.

No,
Michael thought, flinching.
She's one of them? How can she be one of the Virgins of Carthage?

The virgins . . . women sacrificed to their god thousands of years before, but still women. Ever since the memory he'd unwittingly tapped into, the recollection of the mythic thing that lived beneath the city of Carthage, he had assumed these hollow women were the same ones he had seen in those shadowed, subterranean tunnels. And perhaps some of them were. But others . . . this was what happened to the women whose memory, whose innocence, was stolen.
All of them, or just the ones who dare to come back, who come to this house, to the new Hall of Moloch? Oh, Jesus, Scooter. I promised I would—

Then he couldn't think anymore. He could only watch as Tom Barnes cried out, reaching for his mother, frightened for her when he ought to have been frightened of her. Susan thrust her hands into her son's face, fingers ghosting right through his flesh.

“Men,”
Tom Barnes said, but the voice was not his own. It belonged to the thing that his mother had become. His mouth moved in an obscene parody of speech as that chilling voice issued forth.
“High priests and fathers and brothers. You called our fear shameful and told us to lift our chins, to smile for the god-king, to show him our beautiful faces . . . and then you fed us to him. And this is what we became.”

Tears streamed down Tom's cheeks, his eyes wide. His mother plucked her fingers from his flesh and his eyes rolled back in his head. The man passed out, crumbling in a heap, his head striking the hardwood floor with a solid crack.

And he was still.

Michael stared at her, at the elongated face, and he knew he had failed her, failed the little lost girl who had only wanted to be found. Shaking his head in denial he moved away from her on the wide staircase, went up one more step, unable to tear his eyes away.

Then Jillian whispered his name.

He turned to her and felt his chest tighten. His lips parted but no words would come. His eyes burned but no tears would fall. Jillian was ugly, now, her features beginning to stretch hideously.

This wasn't Jillian, after all, but just a husk of her, left behind when the core of what she was had been taken away. Just a husk.

She wasn't one of them yet.

But she was changing.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

All of Michael's fear was overridden in a single moment. None of it mattered. There was no more hesitation in him, no awe, not even a hint of caution.

“Jilly!” he shouted, forgetting about Susan and her unconscious son, and about the things that shifted in the dark corners of this crumbling house. In his peripheral vision he saw silver-black figures begin to coalesce, several at the top of the stairs and others from the parlors on either side of the foyer. But he gave them no further notice.

Patches of Jillian's skin were hardening, soft flesh stretching. Her eyes were full of fear.

“No, Jilly. No, baby,” he whispered. He dropped the crowbar and pulled her roughly to him and held her close, one hand cupped behind her head, fingers pushing up into her hair. “Don't let it happen. Remember that smell, the needles from the Christmas tree and the vacuum. Remember dancing with your father. Waltzing.”

He bit his lower lip. How to get her to those memories? Her face was pressed against his cheek and he could feel it changing, stretching, becoming cold against his own flesh. She bucked against him and the fingernails of her right hand dug into the back of his neck.

“No,” he rasped. Tears began to burn the corners of his eyes. But he would not give in to grief. That would be surrender. “Listen to me. Remember Vienna, waltzing in the cathedral square on the cobblestones, you and me on our honeymoon. And you laughed because it reminded you of your father teaching you to waltz. Remember? That's how you got that memory back, by thinking of a connection you still had. Those threads are still there. You said they were all around you in the air, just out of reach. The fuckers stole them, Jilly, and you've got to steal them back. You've got to. Grab those threads. Follow them back to your memories.”

A flash of inspiration struck him, an image in his mind of the set of hardcover books between the bookends on her bureau, her favorite story of all time. She read the whole series every couple of years. “Close your eyes, Jilly. Go to Narnia. Peter and Susan and Lucy and—Jesus, what the fuck's the other one?”

She was so very still in his arms. “Edmund,” she whispered.

Something broke inside him then. “Edmund. Yes, that's him. Just like waltzing with your father, Jilly. You're connected. It's a pipeline from now to then, to the first time you read them. You got the flu and had to stay home a few days, and you read them all in one go. The memory's here in this house somewhere, babe. You're here, the girl you were back then. You've got to grab hold of her.”

Jillian's face was still against his. Suddenly it felt warm. Damp with tears. It
shifted
against his skin.

Her voice was tremulous. Innocent. “Michael?”

He pulled back from her, stared in broken wonder at her distended face as it returned to normal, at the eyes that seemed for the first time in too long to see him, to see her husband.

Which was when he felt the cold knives of phantom fingers plunge into the back of his head, thrusting through hair and skin and bone.

Michael went rigid, and then he tumbled down into a deep well of ancient memory.

Hunger is all she knows.

She and her sisters, there in the dark tunnels that wind beneath Kart-hadasht, away from the Hall of Moloch. They are hollow, the vast emptiness inside them a constant agony. Power radiates from the god-king, a black, chaotic force that has twisted them. They are leeches now, starving for a taste of what was stolen, yearning for a moment of happiness that will bring them no pleasure, that will be bitterly digested, but that they cannot survive without.

They have become both Brides and Daughters of Moloch, infused with his essence, even as he consumed theirs.

Each time a new virgin descends the stairs to her sacrifice, they are forced to watch as the god-king takes her, penetrates her, and drains her of her joy and purity. Childhood-eater, virgin-defiler, that is Moloch. And they watch in agonizing hunger, until at last he has used up the girl, and only then are they allowed to come to him, so that he may cradle each one and let them suckle from him. One memory each he gives them. One moment of youthful bliss to sustain them until the next time.

It only whets their appetite, maddening them with hunger, now that they have the taste of it in their hearts and on their lips.

And it is not enough.

So she waits in the darkness with her sisters, maddened by hunger. And now there comes a new girl, a slender, bronze-skinned thing, draped in thin linen, perfect skin and a perfect face. Beauty that is anathema to the Daughters of Moloch.

This time they do not wait.

The hunger is too much. One memory is not enough.

The moment the girl reaches the bottom of the stone stairs they rush from the shadowed tunnels into the flickering torchlight. The girl sees them and screams, alarming Moloch, who turns to face them. The Daughters of Moloch do not pause. There is sadness in the god-king's eyes, but no surprise, as they attack, tearing at him with long, clawed fingers. There are undigested stolen memories still within him, and they tear these delicacies from his breast.

Moloch begins to wither.

The light goes from his eyes.

The god-king is dead.

The virgin believes they are her saviors. She weeps with gratitude.

They fall upon her, and steal her essence, the innocent core of her. Surfeited, the Daughters of Moloch will not need this sustenance for some time, but they have been hungry too long, and so they shall let the dark power that forged them give shape to the girl's essence.

She will be their hoard, their store, to stave off hunger . . . until the city above sacrifices another virgin.

And another.

And another.

Michael blinked and the room swam back into focus. Pain seared his back where the husk's fingers plunged into his flesh. He cried out, twisting himself around, breaking its grip and the circuit that had been created between them. It had been trying to hurt him, somehow, perhaps to overwhelm him. Maybe Tom Barnes hadn't fainted from shock, but from some harm the thing his mother had been had done to him. But Michael was certain that this creature had not intended for him to draw those images from it. Beneath those memories all he had felt was a black void, an abyss, a howling vacuum of nothingness. All he felt was its hunger.

Whether they were its own recollections or some ancestral memory, passed down through generations of these things, did not matter at all.

What mattered was that it hurt them.

Just as before, on that wooded hillside, the thing that had touched his mind had withered. It truly was a husk, now, in form as well as function. It was a wrinkled, shriveled thing. Its long arms reached out for him, skeletal fingers questing.

“No!” he snarled, and he rammed his fist into its skull, shattering it with a single blow. The silver mist that was their blood plumed in the air as that twisted woman crumbled to the ground.

Jillian was still on the steps, near the bottom. Several of the hideous things in their shapeless coats had surrounded her, and others were above her on the stairs.

“Give them back, you fuckers! I want them back!” she screamed, sneering as she glared at them with savage fury.

They were hesitant to approach her.

Michael saw the crowbar on the ground where he had dropped it and started for it. He saw the prone form of Tom Barnes, and too late he wondered where his mother had gotten to, where the creature she had become had gone. Then a shadow moved behind him, visible just out of the corner of his eye, and he felt himself tugged backward. He was thrown on his back and spikes of pain shot through him as he struck the hardwood floor.

Then she was above him. Susan Barnes. Or the thing that had been Susan and, once upon a kinder time, been Scooter. She wrapped her cold fingers around his throat and he tried to beat at her arms, but whatever dark magic had transformed her, she was too strong. His windpipe was cut off. He strained, neck muscles popping out, face burning with the rush of blood to his skin. Black dots speckled the edges of his vision as oxygen deprivation began to close in.

As his vision began to dim, Michael saw something bright move in his peripheral vision and let his eyes drift that way.

The little lost girl. Or what remained of her. She was little more than a suggestion now, a sketch of blond hair and a silhouette against the shadows. In her blue jeans and peasant blouse, the little phantom girl stood just inside the foyer staring down at unconscious Tom Barnes. Her head was tilted to one side as though she felt something, some sadness, but did not understand why she should feel such a thing. She was a wisp now, almost nothing. If they caught her, she would be consumed.

Only her husk would continue, eternally hungry for what she had lost.

Michael's legs twitched and his whole body spasmed. The back of his head hit the floor, hard. His vision began to fade.

J
ILLIAN SCREAMED AGAIN AT THE
hideous women who now surrounded her. They hated her, but she gave them pause as well. With Michael’s help, she had found scraps of her memory. The house was full of tattered bits of stolen innocence. These things consumed them. But the memories she had regained, though few, were enough to give her a tether to what she’d lost, to the girl she’d been. And she was not going to let go now. No matter what kind of terrible power there was in this place, in these creatures, she was not going to surrender to it now that she had regained even those precious few moments.

“Give them back!” she shouted again. Her hands trembled as she reached up to touch her own face, to feel her skin. All around her she could sense the memories. It seemed to her that if she squinted her eyes a little she might be able to see them, images flashing in a tornado just the way they had when Dorothy's house had been sucked up into the storm and dropped down in Oz. She could taste coconut ice cream on her tongue the way they had made it at Hanrahan's when she was a little girl, the way it tasted there and nowhere else. But Hanrahan's had been closed for twenty years.

They're here. They're all here.
If she could only focus hard enough she could recall them, just the same way it felt when she'd misplaced her keys and was trying to remember where she'd put them.

Michael had fought off one of them, destroyed it. But now she heard him shout again and turned to see the thing that had been Susan Barnes grab him and drag him down. He was being choked. Strangled. Michael tried to tear the woman's arms away but could not. All around Jillian the others began to close in. Jillian felt a kinship with them. She shared their hunger.

But she remembered waltzing with her father.

Huddling under her blankets with the flu reading
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

You're not one of them,
she thought.
They'll kill you to taste that coconut ice cream on your tongue.

The hollow woman straddled Michael. He stared off to the left, toward the hall that led to the back of the house. There, above Tom Barnes's fallen form, was an apparition. A haunting trace in the air that might once have been a little girl. She was staring at the unconscious man, but now she looked up at Jillian.

So afraid.

She's afraid of me,
Jillian thought.
Of all of these women, and of me.

A flash of memory burst abruptly into her mind.
She is eight and it's Thanksgiving at her grandmother's house in Vermont. Everyone is there. Dozens of aunts, uncles, and distant cousins she has never even met. It is the most amazing Thanksgiving of her life. Her grandmother and her aunt Betty are in the kitchen cutting pasta for the last of the hundreds of ravioli they have made from scratch. Her cousin Jamie, who is in the fourth grade, has been wrapped completely in aluminum foil by his sisters, who are pretending he is a space alien. And they've invited Jillian to play. Space Alien Jamie chases the girls and they shriek with delight; the smell of meat sauce cooking in a pot, to be used for the ravioli later, fills the house along with the voices of her family and their families and their families, and she can smell her great-uncle's pipe.

“Uncle Bull,” she said to herself. “We called him Uncle Bull, even though his name was Bill.”

He died of cancer the year after, but I didn't know it then. Didn't know it was coming. And it was perfect.

The mouths of all of the hollow women hung open like the beaks of baby birds, snapping at the nearness of a worm. She had gotten this memory back and they wanted it. Even the one on top of Michael stopped strangling him a moment and twisted her head around to stare at Jillian with hard, black eyes.

Jillian grabbed another memory out of the air. Sitting on a beach in Mexico drinking a piña colada with her mother—hers without the rum—while “Margaritaville” played on the radio.

She shook her head violently. More memories started to flicker across her mind, touching her, questing, as though they were moths and she had become an open flame.

The hollow women on the stairs hissed, openmouthed, and turned away from her, looking back up the way they had come. Jillian glanced around to be certain the others were still hesitant, then looked to see what had drawn their attention.

She could not breathe. Her eyes were wide. A smile of wonder touched her lips. For there, coming slowly down the stairs, she saw herself: Jillian Lopresti at nine years old, her hair tied back in a ponytail, in a purple tank top and beige capri pants with flowers embroidered on the legs.

The girl . . . the lost heart of her . . . hugged herself as she looked at the stooped, cruel forms of the hollow women. That shaped essence of Jillian, that little girl, took another step in spite of the terror in her eyes and the trembling of her lower lip.

The husks reached for her.

“No!” Jillian screamed.

With all the strength she had, she rammed her elbow into the head of the nearest one, then slammed into another, knocking it over the railing. She pushed past the third even as it scrabbled at her waist and legs, tried to stop her, fingers digging into her flesh.