Night Songs (32 page)

    "Reverend Otter," he said, "how good to see you again!"

    Graham Otter tried to talk, but whatever he said sounded to Lombard like gargling.

    "Reverend Otter, are you all right?"

    The minister stumbled flat-footed down the steps, swayed with reaching hands before he fell face down. Lombard stared before running to the man's side. He knelt after a quick look around, and rolled him onto his back.

    "Jesus, Mary, and Joseph."

    Graham Otter had no throat.

    He staggered to his feet and wiped his bloody hands over his suit jacket. He knew he would throw up if he didn't look somewhere else, but the sight of the minister lying face up to the storm fascinated him, held him, until he heard stumbling footsteps inside the church.

    Christ, he thought, not liking how helpless he was suddenly feeling. Christ, where the hell is Theo when I need him?

    "Hey!" he shouted, heading quickly for the steps. "Hey, in there, I need some help! The preacher's hurt!"

    He took the three wide steps at a leap, and grabbed the frame to keep himself from plunging in when he saw the woman coming slowly toward him out of the dark.

    "Miss North, right?" he snapped. "Look, your reverend's hurt bad out here and I need-"

    He stopped when Muriel reached him, turned to run when he saw what was left of her face and what passed for a smile, screamed when her hands reached around his head, her thumbs unerringly slipping into his eyes.

    

    

    Peg stood in the doorway while Garve and Hugh positioned a sheet of cardboard over the broken window. She hugged herself and watched the sky blacken, turned and saw Matt sitting on Colin's lap, his eyes closed, his breathing regular.

    Her eyebrow lifted in a question as she nodded.

    Colin saw her and smiled, mouthed
he'll be just fine.

    Maybe where he hit his head, she thought, but what about inside?

    Garve stood away from the window, half expecting the plywood to fall. When it didn't, he crossed to his desk, picked up the phone, dialed and scowled.

    "Goddamned thing's out."

    Suddenly the wind stopped, and Peg held her breath. Her eyes were half closed when she heard, faintly, the explosion. She looked to the others, and saw they'd heard it too.

    "What?" Montgomery asked.

    Garve swore and raced out to the car, was gone before anyone could choose to join him.

    "I don't believe this," Peg said, more to herself than the others in the room. "I don't believe this."

    No one answered her; Matt stirred in Colin's lap.

    And before they were able to begin speculation, Tabor was back, his face red and his mouth set tight. "The ferry," he told them when he slapped his hat hard on his desk. "The goddamned ferry's gone."

    "But why?" Montgomery asked, bewildered.

    "It figures, doesn't it?"

    "How?" Peg said.

    "How else do you get off this island?" No way else, she thought… except the fishing boats.

    Garve saw her expression, and he grabbed for his hat again. "Yup. I think I'll make a quick run to talk to Alex. He must've heard the ferry go, too."

    "Wait," Colin said, and Matt shifted in his arms.

    "Look, Col-"

    "No. Just listen a minute. You're going out there to warn Alex, right? Well, would you mind telling me what you're going to warn him about?"

    The chief stammered a moment before saying, "Lilla, who else? She's obviously crazy, she probably killed Warren, and now she's doing things like that," and he gestured in the vague direction of the bay.

    "You don't know for sure she did it."

    "She was heading that way."

    Colin squirmed to get more comfortable. "And what about Tess, Garve?"

    No one said a thing.

    "I think before you leave, we'd better decide exactly what it is we're really facing out there."

    "You have an idea?"

    He stroked Matt's hair, and Peg wanted to cry.

    "Yeah. Yeah, I think I do. I didn't know before, but after what I saw and heard back there in the cell, I have a fair idea."

    "If it has anything to do with ghosts," Garve said, half joking, half angry, "I don't want to hear it."

    "Then don't listen, friend, because that's all I have."

    

    

    Rose Adams sat in the living room and stared mournfully at the brown class register on her rolltop desk. So many names there, she thought as she brushed a finger over her own name embossed in gold on the flexible cover. So many names. She tried to run through each of her classes for the past ten years, a trick she'd learned from an older teacher long since gone, a trick that was supposed to help her remember the new students.

    It had never worked, but whenever she was feeling depressed, whenever her family got too rambunctious and rebellious, she tried to remember every name she could. Like counting sheep, it would dull her mind to the demands it made on her.

    Not today, however.

    The wind was screaming something fierce outside the window, and Mitch hadn't returned from his search for baby Frankie, and Denise had somehow managed to sneak out of the house without her seeing. My God, when would they ever wake up and really appreciate all the things she did for them, all the sacrifices she'd made just so they could have clothes on their backs and food on the table. God knew, if she left it to Mitch they'd be on welfare by tomorrow.

    Now here it was Saturday, and tonight-she looked at her watch and realized with a silent gasp it was less than four hours away-tonight at seven there was the big party at the Clipper Run. If they didn't get home soon, they wouldn't have time to make themselves presentable.

    She sighed loudly, slapped her hands wearily against her thighs and pushed herself out of the chair. She was still in her bathrobe, but there'd been little incentive so far to get into a dress. With no one around to care how she looked, even on a weekend, why should she bother?

    She looked to the sideboard, then, and the cabinet beneath. A drink, maybe. A fortification against the battles she knew would come when they returned. No, she thought with a decisive shake of her head and a deliberate glance away. It was too soon for that, and she hadn't clung to the wagon this far with Hugh's help to fall off now. Though God knew she needed a good toot now and then when Frankie started acting up and Denise refused to listen to her advice. My God, she'd say, I'm a
teacher,
don't you know that? A
teacher!
I
know
things. I know
life,
for God's sake!

    But Frankie would only shrug and look sullen, and Denise would just smile and wiggle her ass out of the house.

    Rose looked at her watch. Not time for the first drink yet, but what she should do is take a shower, be ready when Frankie or Mitch or Denise finally came home. That would show them. That would teach them a lesson, that planning in the home is just as important as planning in the classroom. She'd be all ready and sitting properly in the living room while they were all running around swearing and screaming and working up a sweat that would stain their good clothes.

    Oh, God, she thought as she headed up the stairs, isn't it bad enough I got this sickness without having this family, too?

    A hour later she wrapped a pink terrycloth towel around her and scuttled out of the bathroom, laughing to herself as she stumbled into the bedroom and switched on the vanity light. God, she loved that massage thing Mitch had installed at the beginning of the summer; it did things to her she thought were almost sinful.

    A look at the gold watch placed carefully on the dresser, and she went to the closet to choose the dress she would wear. At the window, however, she stopped and looked out. She expected to see the fog that was giving her a case of nerves she didn't need.

    What she saw was Mitch, Denise, and Frankie standing in the middle of the backyard.

    She rapped a knuckle on the pane.

    They looked up, one by one.

    Thank God, she thought in relief and annoyance, and turned to hurry from the room when something about them made her look out again. It was Denise; she was naked, and there was a stick or something clinging her to shoulder. Oh, God, she prayed in furious resignation, what are they doing to me now? What if the neighbors… she clenched her fists until the spasm of rage subsided, then rushed to the stairs so she could give them all hell when they came in to explain.

    The wind toppled a patio chair and tore a shingle from the roof.

    She changed her mind and headed straight for the kitchen, where she could face them squarely, the queen of this damned house and they'd better not forget it.

    Denise was the first to come through the door.

    

    

    

    

    

    Colin stood in the front of the boarded window, a lighted cigarette in his right hand, his left jammed into his hip pocket. Crushed butts littered the floor at his feet, and his hair was a slick tangle over his brow from constant tugging and violent shakes each time the enormity of what he was saying thrust itself home.

    "We saw the signs of what was happening a hundred times." He stopped, changed his mind, "f saw them, but didn't know what I was looking for, so didn't know what I was seeing. But they were all there-Lilla's reluctance to have Gran buried in the usual way, her insistence that he was furious at us for imaginary evils… I kept assuming her grief had mixed up her time sense. What else was I going to think?

    "But at my place yesterday, just before Peg came over, Lilla was telling me straight out he'd not died at all, or he'd come back somehow, and he was out to get what he believed was his due. He was using some… some power of his to get what he thought we had cheated him out of.

    "He was dead, and now he's back.

    "Needless to say, I didn't believe a word. Power like that belongs in dreams and movies."

    "It doesn't exist," Montgomery said simply. Seated at El's desk, he looked at Garve first, then at Peg and

    Matt who were in a chair at the back of the room, Matt still asleep and sprawled in her lap.

    "It
does
exist," Colin insisted without heat. "I don't know what's behind it, how it does what it does, but it damn well exists and Tess Mayfair's walking is the proof. What Garve and I saw there in the cell block was just icing on the cake.

    "And now that I think about it, I'm sure that what I saw at the shack was Gran's shroud. After the funeral, after she was sure we were all in bed, Lilla went into the water and brought him out. She had to have done it, she must have-there was no one else to help her."

    An hour had passed since he'd begun, speaking quickly, not giving himself a chance to think, and therefore backtracking several times. But the more he argued, the more he believed-and the horror of it was, he could see them believing as well.

    And then he had offered what, for him, was the best argument outside any physical evidence: If he had been able to convince himself that the entire world had misunderstood him, had stacked deck and arrayed enemy against him to the extent that the only way he could win would be by ending it, why couldn't someone like Gran hate just as much? And it had been hate. Hatred for those fools who should have known, and didn't; hatred for those so-called friends who should have cared, and didn't. Colin had hated without understanding that his self-pity was blinding and the people he railed against were the very people trying to help him. His hatred had created a world beyond the real, and the only person who inhabited it was him.

    Gran had hated the same way.

    The difference had been in the final step.

    Colin had slashed his wrists, and the pain had shocked him into the recognition of folly, into the realization that his so-called beliefs were false and falsely based. Gran, however, found himself dying and took a claw-hold on all those ancient beliefs and rituals he had brought from a home that had exiled him summarily. He took hold and refused to release them, and in that refusal made them as tangible as the shack in which he was ending his life-his rage had shredded the fragile curtain between the supernatural and the present.

    "The point is," Colin said-he paused and looked at Hugh-"the point is, we're not in our world anymore. We're in Gran's now. And for the moment he's calling all the shots." His expression was grim. "All bets are off now. The rules we used to know aren't the rules anymore."

    "What about Lilla?" Garve asked, though he needed no convincing.

    "I don't know. I wish I did, but I just don't know."

    "She isn't Lilla anymore," Peg said quietly, and they turned as one to stare. "She's not. Not the Lilla we used to know, that is. Maybe not Lilla at all. She was when she tried to warn us, she was when she tried to talk with Matt at the marina. But not anymore. Something happened, and if that business in the cell is any indication, she's… not. Right now, I don't know any other way to put it.

    "Matt was right all along, too," Peg continued. "It was the songs. The ones we heard every night. She must have been using something-spells, maybe, or whatever you call them-that Gran taught her, to… I don't know, to bring him back, do something more? But I do know I'm right. She's either been driven crazy by Gran's influence and is doing these things without knowing what she's doing, or she's totally possessed.