Swan Song

by Robert R. McCammon

  The young couple disappeared into the gray rain.

  As Rudy said, you cover your own ass. And in this day and time, those were words to live by.

  Sheila turned her back on the dirtwart land and slipped into the tent.

  39

  “LIGHT!” JOSH SHOUTED, POINTING into the distance. “Look at that! There’s light ahead!”

  They’d been following a highway over gently rolling country, and now they saw the light that Josh pointed toward: a bluish-white illumination reflecting off low-lying, turbulent clouds.

  “That’s Matheson,” Leona said, from her bareback perch atop Mule. “Lord A’mighty! They’ve got the ’lectricity on in Matheson!”

  “How many people live there?” Josh asked her, speaking loudly over the rush and pull of the wind.

  “Thirteen, fourteen thousand. It’s a regular city!”

  “Thank God! They must’ve fixed their power lines! We’re going to have hot meals tonight! Thank God!” He started shoving the wheelbarrow with new-found energy, as if his heels had sprouted wings. Swan followed him, carrying the dowsing rod and her small bag, and Leona kicked her heels into Mule’s sides to urge the horse onward. Mule obeyed without hesitation, glad to be of use again. Behind them, the little terrier sniffed the air and growled quietly but followed nevertheless.

  Flickers of lightning shot through the cloud cover over Matheson, and the wind brought the rumble of thunder. They’d left the Jaspin farm early that morning, had walked all day along the narrow highway. Josh had tried to put a saddle and bridle on Mule, but though the horse stood docilely, Josh couldn’t get the damned things on right. The saddle kept slipping, and he couldn’t figure out how to get the bridle on at all. Every time Mule had even grumbled, Josh had jumped back out of the way, expecting the animal to buck and rear, and finally he gave the job up as a lost cause. Still, the horse accepted Leona’s weight without complaint; he had also borne Swan for a few miles. The horse seemed content to follow Swan, almost like a puppy. And off in the darkness, the terrier yapped every once in a while to let them know he was still around.

  Josh’s heart was hammering. That was one of the most beautiful lights he’d ever seen, next to the glorious flashlight beam that had speared through the basement. Oh, Lord! he thought. A hot meal, a warm place to sleep, and—glory of glories!—maybe even a real toilet again! He smelled ozone in the air. A thunderstorm was approaching, but he didn’t care. They were going to rest in the lap of luxury tonight!

  Josh turned his face toward Swan and Leona. “Lord God, we made it back to civilization!” He let out a loud whoop that put the wind to shame and even made Mule jump.

  But the smile froze on Leona’s face. Slowly, it began to slide off. Her fingers curled through Mule’s coarse black mane.

  She wasn’t sure what she’d seen, wasn’t sure at all. It had been a trick of the light, she told herself. A trick of the light. Yes. That’s all.

  Leona thought she’d seen a skull where Josh Hutchins’s face had been.

  But it had been so fast—there and then gone in an eye-blink.

  She stared at the back of Swan’s head. Oh, God, Leona thought, what’ll I do if the child’s face is like that, too?

  It took her a while to gather her courage, and then she said, “Swan?” in a thin, scared voice.

  Swan glanced back. “Ma’am?”

  Leona was holding her breath.

  “Ma’am?” Swan repeated.

  Leona found a smile. “Oh ... nothin’,” she said, and she shrugged. The vision of a skull beneath the skin was not there. “I ... just wanted to see your face,” Leona told her.

  “My face? Why?”

  “Oh, I was just thinkin’ ... how pretty you must’ve been.” She stammered at her own error. “I mean, how pretty you’re gonna be again, once your skin heals up. And it will, too. Skin’s a real tough thing, y’know. Sure is! It’ll heal up pretty as a picture!”

  Swan didn’t answer; she remembered the horror that had stared back at her from the bathroom mirror. “I don’t think my face’ll ever heal up,” she said matter-of-factly. A sudden awful thought struck her. “You don’t think ...” She paused, unable to spit it out. Then: “You don’t think ... I’ll scare people in Matheson, do you?”

  “Of course not! And don’t you even think such a thing!” In truth, Leona hadn’t considered that before, but now she could envision residents of Matheson cringing away from Josh and Swan. “Your skin’ll heal up soon enough,” Leona assured her. “Besides, that’s just your outside face.”

  “My outside face?”

  “Yep. Everybody’s got two faces, child—the outside face and the inside face. The outside face is how the world sees you, but the inside face is what you really look like. It’s your true face, and if it was flipped to tne outside you d snow the world what kind or person you are.”

  “Flipped to the outside? How?”

  Leona smiled. “Well, God hasn’t figured a way to do that yet. But He will. Sometimes you can see a person’s inside face—but only for a second or two—if you look close and hard enough. The eyes give away the inside face, and likely as not it’s a whole lot different than the mask that’s stuck on the outside.” She nodded, looking toward the lights of Matheson. “Oh, I’ve met some mighty handsome people who had monstrous ugly faces on the inside. And I’ve met some homely folks with buck teeth and big noses and the light of Heaven in their eyes, and you know that if you saw their inside faces the beauty would knock you right to your knees. I kind of figure it might be like that for your inside face, child. And Josh’s as well. So what does it matter about your outside face?”

  Swan pondered for a moment. “I’d like to believe that.”

  “Then take it as true,” Leona said, and Swan was quiet.

  The light beckoned them onward. The highway climbed over one more hill, then began to curve gently down toward the town. Lightning jumped across the horizon. Beneath Leona, Mule snorted and whinnied.

  Swan heard a nervous note in the horse’s whinny. Mule’s excited because we’re going to find more people, she thought. But no, no—that hadn’t been a sound of excitement; Swan had heard it as distrust, edginess. She began to pick up the horse’s nervousness, to feel a little wary herself, like the time she’d been strolling across a wide golden field and a farmer in a red cap had yelled, “Hey, little girl! Watch out for rattlers in them weeds!”

  Not that she was afraid of snakes—far from it. Once, when she was five years old, she’d picked up a colorful snake right out of the grass, run her fingers across the beautiful diamonds on its back and the bony-looking ridges on its tail. Then she’d set the snake down and watched as it crawled unhurriedly away. It was only later, when she’d told her mama and gotten a rear-blistering whipping in return, that Swan had realized she was supposed to be afraid.

  Mule made a whickering sound and tossed his head. The road flattened out as it apptoached the outskirts of town, where a green sign proclaimed, Welcome to Matheson, Kansas! We’re Strong, Proud and Growing!

  Josh stopped, and Swan almost bumped into him.

  “What is it?” Leona asked him.

  “Look.” Josh motioned toward the town.

  The houses and buildings were dark; no light came from their windows or front porches. There were no streetlights, no headlights of cars, no traffic lights. The glow that reflected up off the low clouds was coming from deeper within the town, beyond the dead, dark structures that were scattered on both sides of the main highway. There was no sound but the shrill whine of the wind. “I think that light’s coming from the center of town,” he told Swan and Leona. “But if the electricity’s back on, why aren’t there lights in the house windows, too?”

  “Maybe everybody’s in one place,” Leona offered. “Like at the auditorium, or City Hall or somewhere.”

  Josh nodded. “There ought to be cars,” he decided. “Ought to be traffic lights working. I don’t see any.”

  “Maybe they’re savin’ th
e ’lectricity. Maybe the wires aren’t too strong yet.”

  “Maybe,” Josh replied, but there was something spooky about Matheson; why were there no lights in the windows, yet something at the center of Matheson ablaze with light? And everything was so still, so very still. He had the feeling that they should turn back, but the wind was cold and they had come so far; there had to be people here! Sure! They’re all in one place, like Leona had suggested. Maybe they’re having a town meeting or something! In any case, there was no turning back. He started pushing the wheelbarrow again. Swan followed him, and the horse that bore Leona followed Swan, and off to the left the terrier kept to the tall weeds and ran ahead.

  Another roadside sign advertised the Matheson Motel—Swimming Pool! Cable TV!—and a third sign said the best coffee and steaks in town could be found at the Hightower Restaurant on Caviner Street. They followed the road between plowed fields and passed a dark softball diamond and a public pool where the lounge chairs and umbrellas were blown into a chain-link fence. A final roadside sign announced the July Firecracker Sale at the K-Mart on Billups Street, and then they entered Matheson.

  It had been a pretty town, Josh thought as they walked along the center line. The buildings were either made of stones or logs, meant to resemble a frontier town. The houses were made of brick, most of them one story, nothing fancy, but nice enough. A statue of somebody on his knees, one hand covering what might’ve been a Bible and the other extended toward the sky, stood atop a pedestal in a district of small shops and stores that reminded Josh of that Mayberry show with Andy Griffith. A canopy flapped over a store with a barber pole in front of it, and the windows of the Matheson First Citizen’s Bank were broken out. Furniture had been dragged out of a furniture store, piled in a heap in the street and set afire. Nearby was an overturned police car, also burned to a hulk. Josh did not look inside. Thunder growled overhead, and lightning danced across the sky.

  Further on, they found a used car lot. Trade at Uncle Roy’s! the sign urged. Under rows of flapping multicolored banners were six dusty cars. Josh began to check them all, one by one, as Swan and Leona waited behind and Mule grumbled uneasily. Two of them were sitting on flat tires, and a third’s windshield and windows were shattered. The other three—an Impala, a Ford Fairlane and a red pickup truck—seemed in pretty good shape. Josh walked to the small office building, found the door wide open, and with the light of the bull’s-eye lantern located the keys to all three vehicles on a pegboard. He took the keys out to the lot and methodically tried them. The Impala wouldn’t make a sound, the pickup truck was dead, and the Fairlane’s engine popped and stuttered, made a noise like a chain being dragged along gravel and then went silent. Josh opened the Fairlane’s hood and found that the engine had been attacked with what might’ve been an axe, the wiring, belts and cables hacked apart. “Damn it!” Josh swore, and then his lantern revealed something written in dried grease on the inside of the hood: ALL SHALL PRAISE LORD ALVIN.

  He stared at the scrawled writing, remembering that he’d seen the same thing—though written in a different hand and in a different substance—at the Jaspin farmhouse the night before. He walked back to Swan and Leona, and he said, “Those cars are shot. I think somebody wrecked them on purpose.” He looked toward the light, which was much closer now. “Well,” he said finally, “I guess we go find out what that is, right?”

  Leona glanced at him, then quickly away; she wasn’t sure that she hadn’t seen the skull again, but in this strange light she couldn’t tell. Her heart had begun to pump harder, and she didn’t know what to do or say.

  Josh pushed the wheelbarrow forward. Off in the distance, they heard the terrier bark a few times, then silence. They continued along the main street, passing more stores with broken windows, more overturned and burned vehicles. The light pulled them onward, and though they all had their private concerns they were drawn to that light like moths to a candle.

  On a corner was a small sign that pointed to the right and said Pathway Institute, 2 mi. Josh looked in that direction and saw nothing but darkness.

  “That’s the asylum,” Leona said.

  “The asylum?” The word lanced him. “What asylum?”

  “The crazy house. You know, where they put folks who go off their rockers. That one’s famous all over the state. Full of people too crazy to go to prison.”

  “You mean ... the criminally insane?”

  “Yeah, that’s right.”

  “Great,” Josh said. The sooner they were out of this town, the better! He didn’t like being even two miles from an asylum full of lunatic murderers. He peered off into the darkness where the Pathway Institute was, and he felt the flesh ripple all up and down his backbone.

  And then they went through another area of silent houses, passing the dark Matheson Motel and the Hightower Restaurant, and they entered a huge paved parking lot.

  Before them, every light illuminated and blazing, was a K-Mart and, next to it, a similarly lit Food Giant supermarket.

  “God Almighty!” Josh breathed. “A shopping center!”

  Swan and Leona just stared, as if they’d never seen such light or huge stores before. Dark-sensitive photon lamps cast a yellow glow over the parking lot, which held perhaps fifty or sixty cars, campers, and pickup trucks, all covered with Kansas dust. Josh was completely stunned and had to catch his balance before the wind knocked him over. It was running through his head that if the electricity was on, then the freezers in the supermarket would be operating, too, and inside would be steaks, ice cream, cold beer, eggs, bacon, ham, and God only knew what else. He looked at the brilliantly lit K-Mart, his brain reeling. What sort of treasures would be in there? Radios and batteries, flashlights and lanterns, guns, gloves, kerosene heaters, raincoats! He didn’t know whether to laugh or sob with joy, but he pushed the wheelbarrow aside and started walking toward the K-Mart as if in a delirious daze.

  “Wait!” Leona called. She got down off Mule and hobbled after Josh. “Hold up a minute!”

  Swan set her bag down but kept hold of Crybaby and followed Leona. Behind her, Mule plodded along. The terrier barked a couple of times, then slipped under an abandoned Volkswagen and stayed there, watching the humans moving across the parking lot.

  “Wait!” Leona called again, but she couldn’t keep pace with him, and he was heading for the K-Mart like a steam engine. Swan said, “Josh! Wait for us!” and she hurried to catch him.

  Some of the windows were broken out of the K-Mart, but Josh figured the wind had done that. He had no idea why the lights were on there and nowhere else. The K-Mart and the supermarket next to it were akin to waterholes in a burning desert. His heart was about to blast through his chest. Candy bars! he thought wildly. Cookies! Glazed doughnuts! He feared his legs would collapse before he reached the K-Mart, or that the entire vision would tremble and dissolve as he went through one of the front doors. But it didn’t, and he did, and there he stood inside the huge store with the treasures of the world on racks and displays before him, the magic phrases Snacks and Candy and Sporting Goods and Automotives and Housewares on wooden arrows pointing to various sections of the store.

  “My God,” Josh said, half drunk with ecstasy. “Oh, my God!”

  Swan came in, then Leona. As the door was swinging shut a blurred form darted in, and the terrier shot past Josh and vanished along the center aisle. Then the door shut, and they stood together in the glare while Mule whinnied and pawed the concrete outside.

  Josh strode past a display of outdoor grills and bags of charcoal to a counter full of candy bars, his desire for chocolate fanned to a fever. He sucked three Milky Ways right out of their wrappers and started on a half-pound bag of MaMs. Leona went to a table piled with thick athletic socks. Swan wandered amid the counters, dazzled by the amount of merchandise and the brightness of the lights. His mouth crammed with gooey chocolate, Josh turned to a display of cigarettes, cigars and pipe tobacco; he chose a pack of Hav-A-Tampa Jewels, found some matches nearby, stuc
k one of the cigars between his teeth and lit it, inhaling deeply. He felt as if he’d stepped into paradise, and the pleasures of the supermarket were yet to be experienced. From far back in the store, the terrier yapped several times in rapid succession. Swan looked back along the aisle but couldn’t see the dog. She didn’t like the sound of that barking, though; it carried a warning, and as the terrier began to bark again she heard it yip as if it had been kicked. A barrage of barking followed.

  “Josh?” Swan called. A cocoon of cigar smoke obscured his head.

  He puffed on the stogie and chewed more candy bars. His mouth was so full he couldn’t even answer Swan; he just waved to her.

  Swan walked slowly toward the back of the store as the terrier continued to bark. She came to three mannequins, all wearing suits. The one in the middle had on a blue baseball cap, and Swan thought it didn’t go at all with the suit, but it might be made to fit her own head. She reached up and plucked it off.

  The entire waxen-fleshed head toppled from the mannequin’s shoulders, right out of the stiff white shirt collar, and fell to the floor at Swan’s feet with a sound like a hammer whacking a watermelon.

  Swan stared, wide-eyed, the baseball cap in one hand and Crybaby in the other. The head had thinning gray hair and dark-socketed eyes that had rolled upward, and on its cheeks and chin was a stubble of gray whiskers. Now she could see the dried red matter and the yellow nub of bone where it had been hacked off the human neck.

  She blinked and looked up at the other two mannequins. One of them had the head of a teenage boy, his mouth slack and tongue lolling, both eyeballs turned to the ceiling and a crust of blood at the nostrils. The third one’s head was that of an elderly man, his face heavily lined and the color of chalk.

  Swan stepped back across the aisle—and hit a fourth and fifth mannequin, dressed in women’s clothes. The severed heads of a middle-aged woman and a little girl with red hair fell out of the collars and thumped to the floor on either side of her; the little girl’s face was directed up at Swan, the awful blood-drained mouth open in a soundless cry of terror.