Shade of Pale (28 page)

Fiona pointed to the left. “Look! Isn't that Cathy?”

Before Jukes could say anything to stop her, Fiona ran down the hill to Cathy's side. Jukes watched as she knelt by Cathy's side.

“She's alive!” Fiona shouted.

In the stillness of the moment, the words reverberated Jukes's heart like a church bell.

The Banshee pointed at Bobby and began her final song. Her mouth opened, and the most ungodly, mournful sound that Jukes had ever heard came out. Different from the shrieking hurricane that had preceded it, which sounded like a choir of anguished voices, this was a solo. One single, mournful voice rising in the night, expressive in a way a group can never be.

The tone was something no human voice could ever hope to create: part wolf howl, part siren, part screaming baby, part Jimi Hendrix guitar squeal, it floated upward with hair-standing, alien dissonance.

“Banshee,” whispered Jukes, though none could hear. “You came back.”

The Banshee's head turned and she looked at Jukes. It didn't actually turn; it rotated unnaturally, swiveling on her neck like a doll's head. Her face vibrated, changing expressions faster than the eye could follow.

Jukes saw the look in her eyes and felt a stab in his heart. In that brief second when their eyes met, just like the first time he saw her through the window of the delicatessen, Jukes felt some understanding pass between them.

He realized instantly that she would destroy Bobby. He also understood she had a soul full of torment so vast she could never express it to any living creature. Jukes felt the weight of her burden in his heart and sensed the undying passion for revenge she'd held inside for centuries.

He looked inside her.

It was there, in the dark ocean of the Banshee's soul, that he saw himself.

Himself!

Jukes shuddered against the night. His damaged hand was swollen and screamed with pain, but somehow, in the Banshee's presence, it didn't matter anymore. Nothing mattered.

Numbed, he stood there gaping at the grievous angel, with a mind anesthetized by what it had witnessed.

Jukes struggled to concentrate, but the great and shocking revelation lingered. He had seen himself in her.

The sound of her solo wailing penetrated the woods like a beacon. A song of terrible, destructive beauty began.

The Banshee turned her attention back to Bobby.

Her mouth opened wider. The notes of the song she sang became impossibly high and dissonant. It broke the threshold of pain, vibrating his eardrums violently. Bobby Sudden put his hands to his head and screamed, but no one heard.

Jukes also brought his own hands up. He wondered how long the sound would continue and how high it would modulate before it damaged his brain. Surely it would make them deaf. Or kill them.

Jukes wondered if anyone had ever heard the song of the Banshee and lived.

Then, he saw something that made his heart stop beating. It disturbed him in a way that nothing ever had.

The Banshee changed.

It happened quickly, in the space of a heartbeat. But to Jukes it seemed much longer, now that time had become distorted. He watched as she mutated before his eyes and all the while the ungodly sound increased.

Her young, pale face stretched, aging incredibly in a matter of seconds, like rubber—a latex contortion of pain and sorrow. Her skin became wrinkled and her eyes seemed to protrude from her eye sockets.

Her head swelled, the space between the eyes increased, and the entire grotesque visage appeared to pulse as it expanded. She seemed to be changing not only on the outside but on the inside as well. Jukes sensed the storm clouds gathering across her soul.

The song had become pure vibration, a powerful, immobilizing ringing in their ears.

They were all locked in a moment that couldn't be. Impossible, yet it was happening.

A vortex of energy swirled around them, emanating from the Banshee. It sucked them in, pulling at their bodies and souls.

The Banshee was now a monstrous hag, like Medusa of mythology, something so hideous, to look upon it meant death.

Her head tilted back; her mouth opened wider than human skin and jawbone could stretch. Her song jumped another octave.

Her shriek filled the valley like a jet engine.

The trees shook and bowed to the sound. Animals fled for miles around. All around the lake the eerie siren soared and peaked. The Banshee, her transformation complete, stood before Bobby a heinous, wailing specter, calling out for justice from beyond the grave.

Her mournful cry intermingled with a new sound, far off in the distance, the sound of approaching police sirens. The combination of the two created a skin-crawling dissonance that echoed across the still water like some nightmare electronic effect.

The avenging angel focused on Bobby. His eyes rolled back into his head until only the conjunctiva showed. He slapped his hands to his ears in a futile effort to block out the sound.

Blood ran from his nose, his eyes, and his gaping mouth. His tongue bulged, the soft tissue there splitting open. The vibrations shook him to the bone, rattling his flesh, vibrating his very atoms to the point of combustion.

The otherworldly nature of the sound penetrated everything, distorting the laws of nature. Jukes and Fiona, now trying to protect their ears, were miraculously not affected by the higher frequencies that threatened to destroy Bobby.

It was like standing next to a tornado intent on destroying the house next door yet leaving your home untouched.

The Banshee directed her song in a concentrated beam at Bobby Sudden.

The hands on Bobby's ears began to move. They inched across his face like fleshy spiders, working their way into his mouth.

Bobby's expression changed. His eyes showed utter terror and disbelief, rapture was replaced by panic.

His hands, working against the desperate will of his body, dug into the sides of his mouth until blood appeared.

Then, as if in a dream, they began to pull back the skin.

With the Banshee's wail reaching new heights, Bobby's hands began the dance of death. Completely against his will, he began to destroy himself.

While Jukes and Fiona watched in horror, Bobby ripped his mouth open, unhinged his jaw, and began peeling his skin back up over his head. His hands worked with unnatural strength, like metal pliers against his soft flesh.

He was turning himself inside out, the bloody inner skin reversing itself like an old, bloody overcoat.

Blood flowed freely off him, muscles glistened, and a peek of white bone showed here and there. He hadn't quite gotten the skin flap over his head when he stopped being alive.

He crumbled to the ground in a bloody heap, lifeless and horrible as mutilated carrion.

The corpse belched open and spilled its contents onto the ground. All that was Bobby emptied out.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

The song of the Banshee stopped.

It faded gently from the air, gone like a cool breeze. The effect was like a change in air pressure. The wind returned; the insects began. Things eased.

The Banshee did not change back into a young girl again. Her face remained the same terrible mask of sorrow that had destroyed Killian, Loomis, and now Bobby. Yet her tears flowed on as if she were sorry for it.

The grievous angel stood before them. She raised her arms into the nighttime sky and began to dissipate like a cloud.

O'Connor had watched the Banshee closely. He wore protective goggles and earplugs, but he heard it nevertheless. It penetrated and chilled his Irish blood as cold as a Belfast New Year.

He had waited until the Banshee destroyed Bobby, for he knew that was Bobby's destiny and he could not interrupt it. He hunkered down, in the shadow of the tree, with the leg bones in his hands and the cylinder between his legs. He put his gun on the wet turf next to him, where he could snatch it up quickly if needed.

He held the femurs up, uttered a string of ancient Gaelic incantations, and beat the drum with all his might.

The sound resonated though the night, along with O'Connor's incantation, which he shouted at the sky. The Gaelic mixed with Latin. The two languages stumbled over each other in an awkward chant, casting a conjuration.

The Banshee stopped disappearing. She looked in the direction of the drumbeat and wailed again, but this time the sound seemed arrested by the drumbeat and O'Connor's baleful chant.

The drum hummed and resonated as the human bones stimulated the skin covering it.

Ta Toooommmmb. Ta Toooommmmb. Ta Toooommmmb
.

The skins vibrated, pounding a rhythmic tattoo into the sky, and the Banshee began to descend.

Her hair moved with the invisible suction the drum created. Her head shrank, the eyes retracted, and the skin cleared. In a twinkling, the rose of her icy beauty bloomed again, and she became young.

The Banshee wavered, her image distorting as if being viewed through shimmering heat waves.

Then she was in front of O'Connor. He didn't see her move. She just winked across the space between them. She didn't glide or walk to get there; she just materialized at the new location. Then she was closer still; another wink, and her hands were reaching toward the drum.

“Oh, my God!” Fiona cried. She suddenly realized what O'Connor was doing.

He's capturing the Banshee
.

Fiona remembered that in some cultures there existed old folkloric techniques for capturing a wayward spirit in an iron drum. Ghost catchers in the sixteenth century allegedly had employed this method. Somehow the soul found the vibrating metal drum irresistible and could be tricked into entering, and there it became stuck.

While Fiona watched, the Banshee wavered again, becoming even less distinct as she moved toward the drum. The compelling rhythm resonated like faraway cannon fire.

The air itself began to get thick, as if the supernatural forces on display were overloading. The pressure increased with the passage of each heartbeat/drumbeat.

The atmosphere became oppressive; the air molecules felt heavy and full of electricity. They crackled with energy. Fiona found it hard to breathe; the air seemed too thick to pass into her lungs. She sucked it in, but there didn't seem to be enough oxygen in it to sustain her. She felt as if she were drowning. Her ears popped.

O'Connor began to chant higher, his voice modulating up like that of a crazed Benedictine monk, singing out the guttural phrases of two dead languages in time to the infernal drum. His voice distorted in the strange air. It sounded as if he were miles underwater, with thousands of tons of pressure per square inch closing around him.

The incantation ended. O'Connor shouted at the Banshee in English but kept on pounding the drum.

“We come! We come! We catch you in the iron drum!”

The Banshee began to elongate; she was being sucked into the stainless-steel cylinder.

“No!” Fiona screamed. “No! Don't do it! Let her go!”

The cadence of the bones striking the human skin had a mesmeric quality. The Banshee's face distorted and she wailed a heartrending cry.

Fiona saw that the Banshee was being pulled into the spirit catcher. The woman's fear turned to pity for the Banshee, that her magical existence should stop here, at the hands of this horrible man.

“We come! We come! We catch you in the iron drum!” O'Connor repeated, singsong.

He shouted with his head thrown back, the veins on his neck bulging, talking in tongues, babbling his simple rhyme.

Fiona's fear reached a climax. Her heart pounded furiously, threatening to leap out of her chest and run away. She screamed, but the sound was instantly stifled in the turgid air.

The Banshee continued to dissolve; her image now streamed into the drum, melting like watercolor paints down the drain. Fiona sensed a titanic unseen struggle.

She wanted to move but couldn't.

O'Connor's eyes were locked on the rapidly disintegrating form of the Banshee. His voice still clung to the drumbeats like water clinging to a windshield. He kept up the nonsense chant.

“We come! We come! We catch you in the iron drum!”

In a few more seconds he would have the Banshee. She would be trapped inside the drum until he let her out. It would be O'Connor's ultimate moment of triumph. He had done what no other could.

He had caught the Banshee!

The bloody bitch is mine, at last
, he thought.

Just a few more seconds, that's all it would take. Then she'd be on her way back to Ireland, where she belonged. Just a few more seconds and the deaths of his father and brother would be avenged. Just a few more seconds and the Black Rain would live again. Suppose he turned her loose on the oppressors back home? God knew they had the blood of women and children on their hands.

Oh, the terrible possibilities!

Revenge was at hand.

The Banshee's image became indistinct; it drifted into the drum like smoke being sucked through a fan.

Jukes stared at the same place the local boy had stood so many years earlier, hitting Cathy and daring Jukes to do something about it. That was the scenario, repeated over and over again in their lives: Jukes does nothing while Cathy gets hurt. The bully challenges, Jukes backs down, ad infinitum.

But no more
.

Except now, when he looked down at the dock he saw not the boy, but O'Connor.

It looked to Jukes like the drum was somehow pulling the Banshee in, inhaling her, and it didn't seem right.

For the first time in his life Jukes felt absolutely no fear. He didn't think but, rather, acted instinctively. Jukes bounded down the hill and launched himself at the man with the drum.

From the corner of his eye, O'Connor saw Jukes Wahler flying through the air at him. It all happened in the space between drumbeats.

Jukes tackled O'Connor from the side while his arm was up, poised to strike the drum, hitting the big man in such a way that the bone was jarred loose from O'Connor's left hand and went spinning across the ground to where it landed in front of Fiona.