Darkness. Part 32

But the screams of the child's mother told him he was wrong.

She was standing in the stern of the boat, ready to go after the man who had stolen her child; only the hands of the women around her held her back.

"My baby," the woman screamed. "He took my baby!"

Michael reacted almost without thinking. "Stay in the boat!" he shouted at the woman. He cut the engine and spoke quickly to Kelly. "Keep them in the boat. Whatever you do, don't let them get out, or they'll all get lost."

Without waiting for Kelly to reply, he leaped over the gunwale and dropped into the shallow water, then scrambled ash.o.r.e.

"Michael!" Kelly shouted. "Michael, don't!"

But it was too late.

Michael, too, had disappeared into the swamp.

Carl Anderson felt a sharp pain in his chest, and came to a stop, his breath coming in ragged gasps. His legs felt weak, and he let himself sink to the ground, leaning back against the trunk of a pine tree. Thick shrubbery surrounded the tree, so he would have a respite now, concealed from anyone who might be pursuing him.

He clutched the baby to his chest and waited for the pain to subside, waited for his breathing to return to some semblance of normality.

Exhaustion was spreading through him, draining away the last of his energy. He wasn't certain how much longer he could go on.

But he had to go on. If he didn't, he would die.

It was the shot-the shot that should have made him feel young again. But it wasn't working this time; it hadn't been strong enough. For a while, early this morning, he had felt better, confident that by this afternoon his strength would have returned to him. But as he'd worked his way deeper into the swamp, determined to lose himself until the shot's restorative powers had rejuvenated him completely, he'd slowly begun to feel the weakness of age creeping up on him once more.

He'd panicked, knowing that he had to find a child.

Today.

Now.

A child whose youth Phillips could tap into and transfer to his own aging body.

By tomorrow it would be too late.

But where could he find a child?

If Ted hadn't taken his pickup keys, he could simply have driven up toward Orlando and found a shopping mall.

There would be children everywhere, children with inattentive mothers.

Children disappeared from shopping malls every day, and by the time the child was missed, he could have been halfway back to Villejeune.

Villejeune, and Warren Phillips.

Warren Phillips, and the eternal youth most men only dreamed of.

But Ted had found him, and only the gun had bought Carl any time at all.

The gun that was still in the belt of his pants, lending him courage despite the failing strength of his body.

It was stupid to have taken the child from the tour boat, but when he'd stumbled upon it, and seen the children who filled it-plump babies with their smooth skin and supple muscles-he'd felt a surge of cold fury.

Why should they be young when he was not?

Why should they have a whole life to look forward to, while he had nothing but memories to succor his painfully failing body?

After all, it wasn't as if Phillips killed the children.

Phillips had told him that long ago, when he'd first offered the treatment, and Carl's own granddaughter was the proof.

"It doesn't hurt them. All I need is the secretion from their thymus glands," Phillips had a.s.sured him. "After I'm done with them, they grow up perfectly normally."

Still, he should have waited, should have kept hunting through the marshlands until he found one of the swamp rats' children, a child no one cared about, a child who had no future anyway.

Instead he'd given in to his panicked rage and lifted the baby out of the boat.

Now, cradled in his arms, the baby cried, and Carl clamped his hand over its mouth, silencing its tiny voice before its screams could betray their location.

25.

Kelly knew she had to do something. A tense silence hung over the tour boat; the women, their children gathered protectively near them, watched the swamp, searching for any sign of Michael. But it was as if the marshes had swallowed him up. For the last twenty minutes they had neither seen nor heard anything at all.

And yet, though nothing had happened, the tension in the boat was mounting every second.

In the stern, the mother of the baby sobbed quietly, while two of the other women tried to comfort her. But at last the woman looked up, her eyes fixed on Kelly, who stood in the bow of the boat, desperately trying to think of something she could do.

"Take us back," one of the other women demanded. "We have to get help!"

"I-I don't know where we are," Kelly said.

TWo of the women closest to her glanced at each other. "But you must know where we are," one of them finally said, her voice betraying her fear. "You work for the tour, don't you?"

Kelly shook her head. "I don't-" But before she could finish the sentence, something stirred in her mind. A memory of being in the swamp, by herself, but not getting lost.

Not like the other night, when she'd run away from her father, anger driving her forward.

No, this was like the first night, when she'd gone into the swamp looking for the boy she'd seen from across the ca.n.a.l, and lost track of time.

That night, obeying Clarey Lambert's unseen guidance, she'd found her way back to where she'd begun.

Now she concentrated, summoning that guidance once more.

"I can do it," she said, her voice imbued with new confidence. "I can get us back."

She gazed down at the dashboard of the boat, reaching out to brush her fingers over the unfamiliar array of instruments, grasping the key and turning it. An alarm buzzer sounded, and for a moment Kelly hesitated, but then followed the impulses that came into her mind, and pressed a b.u.t.ton.

The engine came to life.

As she pushed the transmission forward and the boat began to slip through the water, the woman in the stem screamed.

"No! We can't leave! He has my baby!"

The words came to Kelly's ears as if from a great distance, and she was barely aware of them, for her mind was turned inward now, following only the invisible guidance to which she now gave herself.

The boat moved slowly through the writhing maze of channels, and though they all looked alike to Kelly, she let herself be guided, turning from one channel into another with no concern as to the direction she was going or the breadth of the pa.s.sages she chose.

Ahead, the channel narrowed, and behind Kelly two of the women looked nervously at each other.

"We're not going to get out," one of them said. "She doesn't have the slightest idea where we are. She's making it worse."

The other woman said nothing, for she could see Kelly's face, see her eyes staring straight ahead, never wavering, never glancing around as if looking for landmarks.

Foliage closed in around the boat, choking the channel, and what little conversation had been going on died out completely as wary eyes watched the sh.o.r.e, certain that at any moment the frightening figure might appear again to s.n.a.t.c.h one of the other children from the boat.

Mothers tightened their grip on their children, and the children themselves clung to their mothers.

Suddenly the prow of the boat burst out of the tangling vines and the ca.n.a.l spread into a broad lagoon.

Ahead, directly across the lagoon, was the dock at the tour headquarters.

The invisible hand that had held Kelly's mind released its grip, and she gasped slightly, certain she had failed, that nothing at all had happened. But then she looked around and recognized the tour headquarters only a few yards away. "I did it," she said, almost inaudibly. "I got us here!"

As Kelly clumsily maneuvered the boat up against the dock, she saw Phil Stubbs glaring at her, his face red with fury.

"What the h.e.l.l's going on?" he demanded. "Where's Michael? You should have been back an hour ago!"

"He's not here," Kelly told him, her voice distant, as if she'd hardly heard the question. Stubbs stared at her, seeing for the first time the strange look in her eyes. But before he could say anything else, a babble of voices broke out.

"My baby," the woman in the stern screamed. "He took my baby!"

Stubbs stared at the woman in confusion. "What-"

"It was a man," another of the women told him. "A horrible old man. He looked crazy, and he took her baby," Her voice rose. "He just came out of the swamp and took it! The guide went after him. For G.o.d's sake, call the police!"

Stubbs froze. A man? What were they talking about? But all the women were shouting at him now, and their children too.

"Now just calm down," Stubbs finally called above the confusion. He turned to Kelly, who was gazing off into the swamp, her brows knit into a deep frown. "Tell me what happened," he said.

Kelly's head swung slowly around. Her voice held a strange, abstract quality, as if she were only vaguely aware of what she was saying. "We were going through a channel. There was a man on the sh.o.r.e, and as we pa.s.sed him, he reached in and picked up a baby. He wanted it. He wanted a baby."

Phil Stubbs's eyes narrowed. "Who?" he demanded. "Who was it? Did you recognize him?"

Kelly hesitated, but then nodded. "It was my grandfather."

Michael swore out loud as his foot caught under a mangrove root, throwing him forward to sprawl in the soft mud that bordered the island. Ignoring the pain in his ankle, he scrambled back to his feet and stood still, listening.

Carl Anderson seemed to have simply disappeared. And yet, only a moment ago, just before he'd tripped, Michael was sure he'd heard the sound of a baby crying. It had only lasted a fraction of a second, then was suddenly cut off, as if someone had silenced the baby by covering its mouth.

He looked around, searching the thickets with his eyes but seeing nothing. Everywhere he looked there seemed to be only tangles of mangrove roots, and the strange cypress knees that protruded above the water's surface like dead stumps, and stands of pine trees.

And yet he could feel that Carl Anderson was close by, sense his presence somewhere so near that Michael felt as though he should be able to see him.

Clarey.

The name popped into his mind unbidden, but suddenly he could see her in his mind's eye, sitting on the porch of her shanty, her eyes gazing into the swamp but her mind reaching much farther than her eyes could see.

Closing his eyes, he silently called out to her, willing her to answer him, willing her to reach into his mind and guide him to wherever Carl Anderson might be hiding.

And slowly an image took form.

An image of a single pine tree, taller than all the rest, standing alone, and surrounded by a dense thicket of brush.

He opened his eyes and looked around.

The pine tree stood not fifty feet away, exactly as he'd just pictured it in his mind.

He started toward it, his eyes fixed on the thicket but his mind concentrating on the image that had been summoned up when he called out to Clarey Lambert.

And in that image, he could see Carl Anderson clearly, crouched in the brush, his back to the tree, clutching the baby in his arms.

He could see the slack folds of Carl's skin, see his sunken, fevered eyes, see his cracking fingernails.

He pushed his way into the brush, parting the gra.s.ses before him.

A moment later his eyes beheld the vision his mind had already seen.

Carl leaned against the tree, the baby held in his left arm as he clutched his gun in the trembling fingers of his right hand.

The gun was raised, its barrel pointing at Michael's chest.

Michael paused, staring at the reality of the vision that had plagued him for so long, but now the fear he had always felt in the presence of the ancient man was gone.

"Get away from me," Carl Anderson croaked, his voice rattling in his throat. "I'll kill you."

Michael's eyes remained fixed on the old man. "You can't kill me," he heard himself say. "You know you can't kill me. I'm already dead."

Carl Anderson gasped as he heard the words, and stared up at the teenage boy whose eyes were fixed on him with a steadiness that made his heart pound.

"No," he said, his voice taking on a pleading note now. "Leave me alone. I never hurt you. None of us ever hurt you."