Charles Grant - Night Songs

"One more word," the doctor said, brandishing the bottle Peg had dropped, "and I'll smash this across your fucking nose."

Peg sat beside Colin and took the book gently from his hands. His fingers were trying to turn the pages, but they wouldn't work properly, and she could see his frustration building to a rage. A quick glance at the title, which meant nothing to her, and she flipped to the table of contents, then back to the index. Colin grunted and pointed.

As she searched for the proper chapter, she said, "Hattie?" without daring to look up.

"The dog's dead, Peg. Hattie is…" He swallowed. "I had to use that," and he pointed shakily at the shotgun lying by his feet.

She found what she was looking for and scanned it quickly, noting as she did how oddly detached she felt, as if she were researching a term paper or looking up something for Matt that puzzled him. But when she was finished, she realized that even Cameron was waiting for some sort of confirmation.

"Well?" Hugh asked, rubbing his palms together nervously.

"He wasn't a real priest," she said. "This calls them houngans. But he wasn't one of those."

"We know that," he said. "But real or not, he knows real stuff. Knowing Gran, and from what Lilla told us, he probably wasn't satisfied practicing his- what? magic? — in a village. He would want to strike out at the whites holding the island. And those on the other islands, too. He wanted power and he wanted gold. And they wouldn't let him subvert their religion. That's probably why they kicked his ass out."

"It says…"A look to Matt. He was standing at the back curve of the piano, elbows on the top, palms around his cheeks. So old. So old. He was watching in rapt fascination, the tip of his tongue pink at the corner of his mouth. The weariness was gone. If she didn't get this right, her son was going to die… was going to die and never be buried.

"It says you create a walking dead by stealing its soul. You hold it until it does what you want, and then you release it. The dead are allowed to rest and their souls are free to go wherever it is they believe souls go." A shuddering deep breath that passed like razors down her throat. "You get the souls at the moment of death."

"Yeah," Colin said numbly. "Yeah. Shit." He rubbed a thumb under his nose, raked his hand back through his hair. "He's got them all."

The others said nothing.

Colin nodded. "He's got them all. There's a picture in there, I think it means that the gulls were killed to provide Gran with blood to… I don't know, sustain him while he was in the water. Then Warren was killed to give him strength. He was a sacrifice, so he doesn't…" He hesitated, hating now the sure sound of his voice. "He doesn't walk, like the others. Then Gran uses the others to kill even more. And he has them now. He uses them, like he uses Lilla. He tells them where to go and what to do. They're his, and since they're dead-"

Peg dropped the book on the piano. "You can kill them by pouring salt in their mouths and sewing their lips shut. They rest, see, when the owner of their soul doesn't need them at the moment."

"You… what?" Hugh said, standing, turning in a circle, slapping a hand on a table and making Cameron jump. "You're… we can't! My God, Peg, we can't! We just can't!"

She wanted to object, but she knew he was right. They weren't simply talking about people they had lived with all their lives, people they had loved as well as hated, people who had touched them in one way or another. Quite aside from all that-and it was horrid enough-there were too many of them, uncountable at this point, and too strong. She couldn't see herself sitting on Tess Mayfair's chest while someone poured a box of Diamond down her throat and put a needle to that mouth. It was unthinkable. And she doubted that Gran had arranged for any of his slaves to rest until the entire island was taken over, and he at last had his control.

"Fire," Colin said, giving her a quick reassuring look as he pushed at the book. "Look, as long as we're talking about legends we might as well pull out all the stops, right? There's no sense holding back now, unless somebody still doesn't believe that what we have here is the supernatural."

No one said a word; Cameron shook his head.

"All right, then. Fire, silver bullets, crucifixes, all that other protection. Silver bullets we don't have, and I doubt a crucifix would do anything but make Gran laugh. But these creatures are corporeal, not like vampires or things like that. Burn their bodies and they can't hurt you."

"Impossible," Hugh objected without raising his voice. "We'd have to burn down the whole town, Col. And the storm won't help, either."

"You're all crazy" Cameron muttered, pushing Montgomery to one side and staggering to the bar.

"Then what are we going to do?" Colin asked calmly. "We can't wait for them to come to us. And they will come, you know. Maybe we can knock them off their feet and run like hell. But where? Another house? And how long do we keep going before they finally trap us?"

"Fucking goddamned crazy," Cameron declared, twisting open a bottle.

Peg closed her eyes and rubbed her forehead with her fingertips as hard as she could. She needed the pain to remind her this was real.

The wind slammed the restaurant; in the kitchen a pot fell.

Eliot Nichols felt nothing at all, heard nothing at all as he rose from a bed of sodden leaves in the woods and made his way through the underbrush toward the Anchor Inn. The wind was trapped in the boughs above him, the light like midnight beneath the dying autumn leaves. He came out of the trees behind Anna-lee's cottage, paused for a moment, then changed direction and headed for the back door.

It was unlocked.

He went in.

There was no need to turn on a light.

Rose sat up without a sound, her blood-spattered legs tangled in a kitchen chair. She kicked it clumsily, used the table to haul herself to her feet. She paid no attention to the tatters of her bloodied housecoat, or the straggles of her hair, or the purple-yellow bruises that formed a necklace around her throat. She walked into the living room, waited, turned and headed for the front door.

Her family walked behind her.

They were swayed by the wind as they left the porch, then walked down the street toward the woods, toward the last house.

An ax was still embedded in Denise's shoulder.

There was no blood.

Carter Naughton knocked on Bill Efron's door, slammed it in with a forearm when nobody answered. Efron was on the staircase when Carter looked up, and smiled.

At the Haven's End landing of the Sterling Brothers Ferry, Lilla D'Grou walked out of the water.

"The boats!" Peg exclaimed suddenly, smiling for the first time in what seemed like years. "We've forgotten about the boats. My God, think! All we have to do is take one of the boats from the marina! Lord, we could be safe on the mainland before we know it."

"In this weather?" Hugh said skeptically.

"You'd rather die?" she countered.

"Hold it," Colin said, a hand on her wrist. "Hold it just a minute and think, you two. Sure we can get off, like Peg says, but then what? We hike into Flocks and go to the police? Tell the police, 'Hey, fellas, we have a problem out there on Haven's End, see, and we're going to need a few dozen of you to help us kill off a few dozen dead people.' " He lifted a hand, drummed it on the keyboard lid.

"We can try," Hugh said.

"We can get ourselves locked up, too."

She hated him, then, for trying to steal her escape.

"And we can't just run away either," he continued as though he regretted it. "This salt thing that Peg said, I'll bet that'll keep them away from the water, but sooner or later someone else will come out here, and…"

She hugged herself and rocked on the bench. "You're saying we can't leave until we do something about them."

"I'm saying… yes. Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying."

She looked at him steadily for a long, unpleasant moment, then rose and began wandering among the* tables.

"Besides," Colin added, "how can we leave our friends here like this?"

She hated him even more; it just wasn't fair, making her feel guilty about creatures like that.

"Lilla," Hugh suggested. "If we get hold of Lilla, maybe she can help us. Maybe there's some way we can get her away from whatever influence Gran has on her." He stopped when he realized they were looking at him. "I… I've been thinking. I mean, it seems to me that Gran is able to do more than control her, take hold of her mind, as someone said before. I think-oh, God, listen to me-I think it more likely he's in in her mind. All that business about the salt water seems to keep him from walking around or we would have seen him before this. He would want to take care of us himself, right?"

They watched, and Peg swallowed a sudden bubble of bile.

"So he has Lil. Literally. She isn't Lil anymore, she's Gran, and that's the way he does it. So if we can get her, try to get through to the part of her that's maybe still the real her, maybe we… well, what the hell, it's worth a try, isn't it?"

"Uh-uh!" Matt said with an emphatic shake of his head.

She turned abruptly, her mouth open and the tip of one finger pressed against her lower lip. Matt. All this time she'd been talking about destroying a horror as if she were planning strategy for a high school football game, and her son had been standing there quietly, listening. Feeling God knows what, and she had ignored him completely.

She felt the tears and blinked them away angrily. Then she heard Colin say, "Why not, pal?" as if Matt were an adult with an equal voice in destruction. She ran to him and pulled him away from the piano.

"Leave him alone!" she said, shoving him behind her. "He's a boy! Leave him alone!"

"But, Mom!"

"Matthew Fletcher, don't you say one more word!"

"But Mom, you said that the guy has the souls, and the people stay dead when the souls go back, and if Gran has the souls then why chase Lilla?"

"Matthew, damn it," and she slapped him, once, hard, refusing to release him when he rocked away from the blow. He whimpered and yanked angrily at her arm, and she raised her hand to slap him again when Colin snapped her name, and she froze. She saw her son cringing, saw Hugh staring down at his shoes, saw Cameron grinning at her from behind a tall glass of scotch. Her hand burned. She pulled the boy roughly against her and held his face against her chest, stroked his hair desperately and waited for Colin to save her.

He said nothing.

"I'm sorry," she whispered. "Matt, I'm so sorry."

"You're right again," Colin said, and Matt turned to stare. "We can't do any of the things we've been talking about, but by God, we can get Gran. And I know where he is."

"The fish ate him," the boy protested.

"No, I don't think so." He explained quickly about his attempt to get into the shack to find Lilla, about the light he saw and the stench that drove him back. And what he thought was the deadweight in the front room. "He's in there. I'd bet on it. I bet Lil went back out after the funeral and got his body. It's the only explanation, because she isn't a witch."