Wildwood Road (31 page)

Her wild eyes were full of hope and life, and she shook her head in agreement. “No. Not yet.”

They were alone there in the foyer save for the twitching form of Susan Barnes. Her face had begun to revert now, something that had not happened to any of the others. It was less distorted; there were places where her skin seemed ordinary pale human skin. But he didn't know her. Not really.

He knew Scooter.

Michael turned to the lost girl, and his heart filled with sorrow. Once she had been an angel with a halo of blond hair, a pretty little girl with a precious smile, innocent in her peasant blouse and jeans. Now her presence was so faint that he had to focus to find any details, to see her eyes. This was all that was left of the girl Susan Barnes had once been.

In his mind he held an image of the way she had looked that night after the masquerade when he had nearly hit her. On the road, her face washed in red from his taillights. Wide-eyed and lost. How much of her remained he did not know.

“Scooter,” he whispered. “I'm so sorry.”

The wraith, little more than an outline in the moonlight, tilted her head and gazed at him with no recognition.
She doesn't remember,
Michael thought. He reached out to touch her, but his hand passed through her silhouette.

Jillian stood by him, and now she stretched out her own hand. Her fingers twined with the wisps that were Scooter's fingers, and Jillian led her across the moonlit foyer. With one hand touching the tattered essence of the woman's memories, Jillian pushed the fingers of her other hand into the still-flinching form of Susan Barnes, and the specter that had haunted his dreams and his waking life seemed to flow
into
Jillian and then on down her arm into the body on the floor.

Susan's face was even less distorted now, and one half of her face had returned to its natural flesh. The crack in that mask had now become a deep gash in flesh and, Michael was horrified to see, in bone as well.

The shattered woman drew a deep, shuddering breath.

Jillian's eyes had returned to normal. “They're together again now. And so am I, Michael.”

Hope rose, quickening his pulse. “Really?”

She glanced at the floor. “Parts are missing. Things they've already . . . things that are gone forever. But I'm mostly me again. There were escaped memories in the house, bits of different girls. Echoes. I . . . I put them all in
her
. They took so much, I thought it might help.”

A rasping breath came from Susan's lips.

“Upstairs, Michael,”
she rasped, her eyes unfocused.
“The others . . . I hid from them as long as I could, so they punished me, took without hunger. But you have to help the others.”

Michael tried to understand.

“But you and Jillian . . . you were here. The others . . . they've got nowhere to go.”

“Better to be free . . . to become nothing . . . than to be torn apart, piece . . . piece by piece. You have to hurry. They'll try to take them all at once, now.”
Even shattered and aged, he could see Scooter in Susan's eyes, the fear there.
“They'll eat the girls all up.”

Michael shook his head, cursing again. He glanced at the stairs, gripping the crowbar, then at Jillian.

“Let's go.”

Together they hurried up the stairs, images from his first visit flashing through Michael's mind. The shadows moved on the second floor. He pulled Jillian to the top of the stairs and was assaulted by the smells . . . cinnamon and apple pie, the salt spray of the ocean.

Michael stumbled once but caught himself. Jillian grabbed his hand and they ran side by side.

A corridor branched off to the right, and there was another staircase going up to the third floor, but the heart of the house was the main hall straight ahead. The same hallway he had found himself in after the masquerade. But his head was clear tonight. His throat was raw and he was desperate, but his mind was clear. There were nine doors leading off of the corridor, four on the left and five on the right.

Eight of them were open, letting moonlight spill in, flooding the place in a brassy gloom. The shadows had fallen still. It looked for all the world like an ordinary house. But the smells were still there, along with a ripple of distant laughter, the hushed, intimate, shared giggling of little girls.

With utter clarity he heard the voices.
One, two, buckle my shoe. Three, four . . .

Jillian shuddered. Michael saw that she was crying. Crying for the lost girls.

He hurried her down the hall. Even if that one door—that one goddamned door—hadn't been closed, he would have guessed it. Would have known it. For of all the vague, disoriented bits of memory in his mind, that one was crystal.

A soft, lisping, baby-girl voice sings
“I'm a Little Teapot.”
He steps into a child's bedroom. Pale and bleached of life, washed in moonlight. “. . . Here is my handle, here is my spout . . .”Graffiti scrawled on the wall. Ruthie Loves Adam. Nikki and Danielle were here. Miss Friel Cuts the Cheese. Lizzie & Jason, TLA.

True Love, Always.

He held Jillian up and she leaned into him the way she curled under his arm, conforming her body to his, every night in their bed.

With a roar he kicked the door in. It crashed open and they went together over the threshold into that pale, faded bedroom with its pretty white furniture. Some of the hollow women were there—eight all told. Five of them stood in a line across the room, herding the memory-wraiths of little girls against one wall. In the moonlight they were mere shapes, though some seemed more solid than others.

Then he was wading into the hollow women, the crowbar falling, cracks splitting in misshapen skulls, shards of faces crumbling to the floor. He had driven two of them to the ground and kicked a third, knocking it toward the same broken window he himself had crashed through once upon a time. Then he felt fingers twine in his hair and a powerful hand grip his wrist, and they had him.

Four of the husks. Hungry mouths wide open above him, they slammed him to the floor. His head banged the wood and blackness swam in his eyes. Michael tried to swing the crowbar again, but it was plucked from his hand. Cold knife fingers plunged into him—

You don't want this,
he warned.
I'm not afraid of you, anymore. Not when I can look into
your
core, steal
your
past.

The fingers left him. It was cold where they'd penetrated his flesh, but this time he did not feel dirty or tainted. The husks staggered back from him and Michael grinned. This time he was the one who had tainted them.

Against the wall, the lost girls—no, the
stolen
girls—huddled. One of the husks grabbed the nearest girl, barely a shadow now, and plunged its face into her chest, baring grotesque teeth from that distended jaw. It came back with pink ribbon squirming in its mouth like some animal at a trough.

He raised the crowbar.

“Die, damn you!”

It was Jillian's voice. He glanced over to see her struggling with one of the hollow women. Rage flushed his wife's face red. The husks on the floor began to stir, still alive, scratching at the wood, trying to drag themselves back up.

At the door to that faded bedroom, other broken husks appeared.

All of them hungry.

The lost girls who were herded into one end of the room began to scream. Some of the broken ones were reaching for them. Michael raised the crowbar again, ready to shatter the husks, to tear them apart . . .

“No,”
whispered one of the girls, a wraith so slight that he had not noticed her before, barely a glimmer of a memory.
“There are too many. You can't save us all that way.”

Michael hesitated. Then he turned and ran to Jillian. One of the husks was almost upon her and he crashed into it, driving it hard against the wall. He grabbed her by the arms and gazed into her eyes.

“You collected some of their memories before. Lost ones. Do it now! Share with them! Let them
all
in!”

Once more terrible fingers clawed at him, tried to burrow into his flesh and his soul. Michael shattered a malformed face.

“Yes,” he heard Jillian say. “Come in. Come in, girls.”

The spectral girls swept toward her, one of them shaking loose the grasp of a husk that tore one final bit of memory from her. One by one they struck Jillian like a gust of wind, blowing her back, disappearing into her chest. Jillian's eyes went wide with each entry, each impact. When it was over Michael shoved her into a corner and put himself between her and the rest of the room.

There was the window, that shattered window. But he was not going out that way again.

“Back off!” he shouted at the husks that shambled and crawled toward them. Only one was uninjured. The others were a nightmare vision, with their shapeless gray coats and their fingers curled into claws, their faces broken and impossible darkness beyond.

He grabbed the one that was nearest him. It clawed his arm, cutting deeply. Michael forced its hand against his chest; at first, nothing happened.

“Do it!” he screamed. “
Touch
me!”

It fell limp, its fingers slipping through his flesh.

Almost instantly, it began to wither. Michael shuddered with the contact, nearly slipping into the fugue state that had overcome him when they had touched him in the past. But he would not let himself succumb. Instead he only held the hollow woman as she shriveled, skin hanging on her cadaverous form.

“Out of the way, or I swear to God I'll do the same to every last one of you, even if it kills me.”

They were unsure. Could he destroy them all? It seemed unlikely. There were more of them. How many more he did not know; others moved in the shadows outside that room. But they hesitated.

That was all he needed.

“Come on,” he growled, grabbing Jillian's hand.

They knocked husks aside as they fled the room.

For the moment, the hollow women did not pursue them. The hall was suddenly empty, only silver blurs in the air to indicate that they were not alone. Downstairs they found Susan Barnes still alive, but only by a breath or two. Her body had reversed its own metamorphosis but her injuries were so severe it was miraculous that she was still breathing. Michael held Jillian's hand tightly as they walked over to her.

“Oh, no, Scooter,” he whispered. “Oh, no.”

Susan attempted a smile, and blood ran from the hatchet-split in her face. “Scooter,” she said, her voice gurgling. “That's right. That's what they all called me.” The woman laughed, a wet sound, filled with fluid that didn't belong in her lungs. “Hilly could never say Susan.”

Her brow knitted into a frown. “I don't remember Hilly. What she looked like. I don't . . .” Her eyes were filled with despair.

Jillian crouched beside the dying woman. One by one the lost girls slipped out of her again. They made a circle around Susan, touched her, fingers slipping into her flesh, passing through her as though she was the ghost among them. Jillian could not perform this trick, but she brushed Susan's hair from her eyes.

Michael caught those familiar scents again. Cinnamon apple pie. The ocean. Others as well. Memories drifting off of these girls. He looked around, afraid it would bring the hollow women, but there was no sign of them yet. Just moonlight and dust in the crumbling foyer of the house on Wildwood Road. Moonlight and dust, and the ghosts of women who had never died.

“One from each of us,” Jillian whispered to Susan, holding both of her hands. “The best memories. The happiest ones. Because if not for you—”

The thought went unfinished.

The smell of a Thanksgiving feast filled the house.

“Uncle Bull,” Susan Barnes whispered, and a smile of love and wonder blossomed on her ruined face.

The wraiths began to leave, then. Passing out through the walls and windows like true ghosts. Lost girls searching for their future, memories set free. Some of them were dead now, the lost memories only ghosts that he supposed would slowly fade. But for the others, Michael wondered what would happen. Would the women they had been stolen from wake up different in the morning, completely changed? Would they think suddenly of something from their childhood, something that hadn't occurred to them in a very long time, and smile? He would not like to think that these others were now just lost girls as well, wandering in search of their shells, searching for completion. Or disappearing forever into nothing.

The thought would haunt him.

Alone at Susan's side now, Jillian beckoned to Michael. He went and knelt with her and took one of Susan's hands in his own. Her eyes were unfocused, lids fluttering, but for a moment they cleared and he could tell that she saw him. The flicker of recognition was impossible to mistake.

“Scooter—”

“It's you. D'Artagnan,”
Susan whispered, tears in her eyes.
“I'm sorry about your hat. I crushed it—”

“Sssh. It's okay,” he said, holding her hand tightly. “It's nothing.”

She took a long, ragged breath. A tremor of pain crossed her face, but then she focused on him again and her smile returned.
“You came. You found me.”

“I made a promise,” Michael told her.

A faint smile creased her lips. He could see cracked bone right through the torn flesh of her face.
“I . . . remember.”

And she was gone.

T
OM
B
ARNES HAD STRUCK HIS
head hard on the wood floor. Hard enough to bring a trickle of blood across the boards. Even so, he stirred as Michael grabbed him beneath the arms and dragged him out of that house. His feet bounced on the steps going down to the front lawn.

When Michael emerged yet again from the house bearing the body of Susan Barnes, Tom was awake. Unsteady, he crawled over to her as Michael set her down, and he cradled his mother in his arms, weeping silently.

He was still holding her that way when the sound of an engine cut the night. Jillian had set off on an errand . . . a short drive to that elegantly antique gas station, so well preserved, an echo from another era.