Neverland (36 page)

Sumter,
I said,
Neverland is a bad place. Don’t put Governor in a bad place.

Lucy’s soft voice whispered,
Do what you will.

It was a Neverland commandment, and I felt a key turning in my head.

All right,
I figured,
I
will.

I opened my eyes, back in the Chevy, with Grammy Weenie’s hand on my arm.

“Beau?” Her voice was filled with panic, and I glanced back at the road: The carousel horses had their heads down and pawed the road with their
hooves. Fire shot out of their nostrils and sprayed red sparks across the windshield. The largest of the herd charged first. It reared up on its hind legs and brought its front hooves down on the hood of the Chevy. The pole that was thrust through its middle punctured the hood, and I was sure the car would die at any moment. Other horses attacked the sides of the car, rocking us back and forth. Grammy gave a shriek as one of the horses rammed her window with its head; the glass broke, and the horse spat fire at her.

The horses formed a circle around us.

It’s only Neverland,
I thought,
it ain’t real. It’s just
Sumter.

I jammed my foot down on the accelerator and rammed the car right through the lead horse. I shut my eyes for one second, figuring that we’d get burned to a crisp or stomped under their hooves, but the commandment of Neverland applied. The horses had fallen to the roadside; they writhed in pain, howling louder than the calliope and louder than the wind, for the carousel poles in their middles now impaled them to the ground. I was going to
will
us through these creatures, I was going to
get
to a boat and row us out to the island in Rabbit Lake. I was going to keep my brother from harm.

I was going to do battle with Neverland, and it would take all the imagination I possessed, all the will in me, to fight my cousin Sumter’s own imagination.

As we approached the boathouse down at Rabbit Lake, the wind died and the rain turned to a drizzle. Fog was rolling in off the bay—a thick white mist barely touching the water. What was not white fog was piss-yellow sky, but the light was not from the sun. The light, I knew, was from Neverland.

I thought perhaps the storm was finished, and this terrified me, because it would mean that he’d already sacrificed my brother. But Grammy gasped,
“Dear Lord God,” and I saw what she meant: The storm still raged, but it was all behind us—a protective calm surrounded the swamp.
A place of pure innocence.

Where the dead dance,
was what Julianne Sanders had called it.

Grammy Weenie touched her burned hand to her face; her skin had paled beyond whiteness and was now a translucent blue with the pulsing veins beneath its surface. “What must I do now, dear Lord?”

“Can you make it?” I asked, helping her from her seat. She felt like she weighed a ton leaning on my shoulder.

“I’ll just have to,” she said, but she winced with pain. Each step she took brought with it a sigh. In her hand she clutched her silver-backed brush.

Shep and Diane’s Nightcrawlers Live Bait Shop was too quiet—in fact the whole dock and boathouse were dead silent. It was deafening, having come out of the hurricane. Our shoes got sucked and slurped with mud, and when I set foot on the wood planks of the dock, it made a noise like rocks smashing. A single rowboat was tied up to one of the pylons, as if waiting for us.

“Too easy,” Grammy said.

“Huh?”

“He’s left us a boat. He knows we’re coming. He’s waiting for us.”

I knew what she meant. The world was too perfect here, too silent. It wasn’t just a boat waiting for us—it was Neverland.

“What does it mean?” I asked.

“Beauregard Jackson.” Grammy leaned harder on me as we walked across the splintered planks toward the boat. She was losing her temper with me, and when I looked at her face, I saw she was just an overgrown confused child: All those years on this earth had not taught her anything. “Beauregard Jackson, if I had answers, I would not have stuck my hand in the fire.”

I thought she was going to haul off with her silver-backed all-natural bristle brush and swat me one good, but she didn’t. I only then realized that a grown-up could be angry with me and still not want to hit me or yell at me. “Grammy,” I said, not knowing what was going to come out
next. I felt different, not just because I was wondering if the world was going to end any second now, but because I felt different inside.

I felt her weight on my shoulder.

“I love you, Grammy.”

“I know you do, child. I love you, too. We’re the same flesh. Even your cousin and you and me—we’re all blood. I love all my children and my grandchildren. But do you know something? I think I love Sumter the most, because he’s never had a chance. I wanted for him to have a happy childhood, but it is not in his nature.” I helped her into the boat and then sat down in the back and lifted the oars in my hands.

I rowed as hard as I could, and still it took forever to cut through the white fog and even see the gray shadow of the island. The only sound I could hear were the reeds scraping beneath the boat as we moved through them. As we got closer to the small island, I began picking up the radio signals of Lucy’s voice.

“Why?”
I asked silently.

The voice in my head died.

Tongues of fog licked at my face, but it was clearing, and I knew we were near the island because long, thick grasses grazed the sides of the rowboat, and clumps of sticks and leaves floated by. Something else scratched at the underside of the boat, like fingers, and Grammy Weenie whispered in my ear that I must not be afraid.

My oar scraped mud as we came into the shallows. I pushed myself over the edge of the boat and, holding it, pulled it up onto the muddy bank. Grammy managed to straighten herself up using an oar for a crutch and then stepped out unsteadily. She slid her hands down the oar, falling slowly and gracefully to the ground.

I went to help her. Sweat tickled the back of my neck. Frogs chirruped to each other like songbirds. When I offered my hand to my grandmother, she shook her head. She grasped the oar and bore down on it, lifting herself back up.

Ahead, among tamped-down stalks of wet grass, a figure came clear through the fog.

Sumter stood there, waiting for us. His face shone brightly, flushed with excitement. At his feet was Lucy’s skull.

In one arm he cradled the baby.

His left arm was stretched out to us.

In that hand he held the trowel.

“So, Weenie, tell me,” he said, “where’d you put her bones?”

Grammy knelt down on the mud; her face was tense with the pain of movement. “Her bones must be dust.”

“I can call her up. I got her skull. It ain’t dust.”

“It’s your mind, child, all of this is from you.”

“Don’t you say that, it’s from her—her and Neverland.” Sumter stomped on the ground like a two-year-old having a fit. The whole island trembled, and I heard the distant thunder from the storm on the other side of Rabbit Lake. “And my daddy—I want to see my daddy, I want him to come to me!”

“No, it’s you. You have what she had. But she only lives in your mind. It’s you who’s doing all of this. It’s you hurting people,” Grammy crept closer to where he stood, and Sumter took a step backward. “And you must stop, child, for in this world, what you do is bad.”

“I will drain every ounce of blood from you for what you did to Lucy,” he snarled.

“Then come, child, come. I will give it to her.”

“First, the baby,” he said.

In my mind I whispered,
Sumter, no, don’t
—

I CAN’T! IT AIN’T ME ANYMORE! IT’S SOMETHING ELSE! IT AIN’T MY FAULT, I CAN’T HELP IT! EVERYTHING FEEDS ON EVERYTHING, AND MY DADDY’S HUNGRY, HE’S BEEN WAITING FOR THIS, AND I WANT HIM TO EAT!
I heard his voice in my head, but when he moved his lips, he snarled, “I
hate
you, Beau, I hate you and your damn family. I
hate
your pukin’ baby brother!” Something dark and shadowy rose up like smoke behind Sumter, something that for a moment I was sure was his father. The One Who Walks in Shadows. The Feeder. Nonie’s voice, at the bathroom door in the Retreat, “Shadow.”

The shadow was cast against nothing but air and moved its arms the way Sumter moved his. My cousin said, “I hope you never leave this place. You’ll always have to play what I want, live the way I want, die the way I want you to die!”

But in my head his voice was shrieking,
IT AIN’T MY FAULT! I CAN’T CONTROL IT! AIN’T MY FAULT!
The screaming inside me was like a frozen knife cutting through my gray matter; my eardrums seemed ready to burst.
YOU GOT TO HELP ME! I CAN’T CONTROL IT!
I felt the tremendous pressure of something moving in my head, and in my mind’s eyeball I saw what he was trying to do: He was trying to get inside my brain completely, out of his own body. It was like I was physically being pushed out of my body.
Flesh is the cage for the spirit.
My nose ran with blood as the pressure built. I was thinking: I’m going to explode, he’s going to make me explode.

“Sumter,” I gasped, “don’t . . . ”

I turned to Grammy Weenie for help. “Grammy, we can do this. All three of us. We can stop Neverland. We can put it someplace safe again.”

She shook her head, her eyes avoiding mine.

“No, we
can
. It’s like you told me, like blue eyes, like inheritance, we all got this . . . thing. Like you told me,
you told me
, only he’s got it stronger and different, is all. But we can put it back, put it someplace safe.”

“Too late,” she said, “once out, it cannot go back.”

“There must be a way, there’s
got
to be.”

Can’t control it.
His voice was getting weaker inside me.

Sumter held the trowel up over Governor’s face. There were tears in his eyes. The shadow behind him reached around and hugged him tight.

I felt nightcrawlers slithering along the undersides of my feet and looked down.

Faces of Gullah slaves embedded in the earth, grass growing from their eyebrows and nostrils; their fingers sprouting in the moss. Their mouths, opening and closing, gasping for air.

Sumter cried, “I don’t got a choice. I’m doing this ’cause Neverland
wants
it. Governor ain’t never gonna hurt again.” His arm moved like lightning, and the faces in the earth screamed.

My baby brother cried out just before Sumter brought the tool down to the top of his head.

Please,
Sumter called to me as if from a great distance,
don’t let it make me.

Sumter hesitated in that moment.

Something had caught his eye.

There, among the reeds by his feet, was a small, white rabbit.

Pure innocence.
His voice was faint.

The bunny screams,
another voice intruded, and I recognized it as Lucy’s,
because it is alive.

The rabbit at his feet wiggled its tail, sniffed the air. Then it began howling as if it were being skinned alive. The noise was almost human. It was that part of all living things that could express pain, it was a noise that we all would make one day. The sound was stronger than the cries of the faces in the earth.

Not pure innocence,
Lucy said,
pure pain
,
pure pain. All hurt
.

The rabbit sat up on its haunches as its keening continued, and then fell over stone dead.

With whatever telepathy I had, I screamed,
SHE WAS GONNA LET ME KILL YOU, SUMTER, INSTEAD’A GOVERNOR! DON’T YOU BELIEVE A WORD LUCY SAYS! LUCY IS A LIAR. LUCY AND NEVERLAND ARE LIES! IT’S HER THAT MAKES THE BUNNY SCREAM! BUT YOU GOT THE POWER NOW, YOU’RE THE ONE WHO’S ALIVE, NOT HER AND NOT NEVERLAND! SHUT IT DOWN, SUMTER, PUT IT SOMEPLACE SAFE!

But Daddy, my daddy, wants me, he
wants
me,
the voice in my head whimpered.
Daddy, I want to see you, I want you, I want, want, want
. . .

I made a leap toward Lucy’s skull at his feet. My cousin stepped back, holding tight to Governor. I picked up the skull and threw it like a football out into the marshes.

I heard the splash a few seconds later.

The light of the world wavered and switched off with that splash, and then came up again, blinding and white.