The wind touches her and she shivers with a delicious chill. Her nipples are taut, erect, and she is extremely aware of them. Gently she strokes them in soft circles, glances down to see that her breasts are full and heavy with milk.
A warm light falls over her from behind, casting an erotic shadow image onto the riverbank, her own picture, a shadow of her caressing herself. Though a small twinge of fear runs through her, there is a yearning in her that overwhelms any hesitation. She hears the lap of the river against the side of the boat, then the swish of water as he slips out of the boat.
A moment later he is behind her. She can feel the rough cloth of his robe as he presses himself against her naked flesh. Tenderly, he caresses her shoulders, then her arms. His arms encircle her and with long, almost skeletal fingers, he strokes her breasts, makes soft circles on her sensitive nipples. Janine arches her back and stretches out her arms as she leans back into him, giving herself over to him just as she did in the river, for this is much the same.
Precisely the same.
He is the river.
When she leans her head back, he half turns her so that he can gaze down into her eyes. His long beard is soft as it trails across her naked chest, the steel ring tied into it cold against her skin. In his eyes there is a longing unlike anything she has ever known, save that in its way it is much like grief.
He is gentle, otherworldly, not ugly but delicate. And in the way of dreams, she discovers that she knows his name.
Charon.
“You were meant to be with me,” he whispers, his voice the cascade of the river over stone.“But you still breathe, and so I will stay here with you. Nothing will stand between us.”
Charon’s hands stroke her, but they are cold now. She shudders.
The phone rang. Her eyes snapped open and she inhaled harshly, as though for a time she had forgotten to breathe. The ringing echoed in the room. Heart fluttering anxiously, Janine began to sit up, mind still in the midst of the transition from sleep to wakefulness. The spread was bunched down at the footboard and the sheet was wrapped around her legs. She had twisted around so much while sleeping that her blue cotton nightshirt was rucked up nearly to her breasts. Otherwise she was naked, and it made her feel vulnerable. The warm tingle between her legs, arousal left over from her dream, only added to that feeling.
As the phone rang a third time, she pawed at her nightshirt to pull it down. The ring was cut off as the answering machine down in the kitchen picked up the call.
Janine blinked as she reached for the phone, peering at her alarm clock. It was after twelve-thirty. Panic and anger warred in her briefly. That late, the call could only be something bad, or someone unpleasant.
“Hello,” she rasped into the phone.
“Janine. Gosh, I’m sorry to wake you. I’d never call so late, but I’m just ... I’m pretty worried.”
Still a bit disoriented from sleep, she did not recognize the voice at first.
“When did you speak to your mother last?”
She frowned. “Larry?” she asked. Then his tone, and the question, got through to her, and alarm bells began to go off. “Larry, what’s wrong? What’s going on?”
“Have you seen her today?” Larry pressed on, oblivious to her question.
“I haven’t talked to her since last week. Maybe Thursday?” Janine said. “What’s wrong?”
But there was a sudden silence on the other end of the line.
“Larry?”
He sighed heavily. “Oh, God,” Larry whispered. “Janine, listen to me. Your mother was worried about you, after what happened with Spencer. She was going to surprise you. Last night she drove up to Boston. She checked into the Parker House late, but according to the concierge, she left shortly after that, I assume to go by to see you.As far as I can tell, no one has seen her since. The hotel manager says the bed was not slept in. You’re sure you haven’t heard from her?”
There was a desperation in his voice that made Janine want to lie, but the urge was ridiculous. Her mother. Something had happened to her mother.
“Not since last week,” she repeated, a kind of numbness creeping over her. “Are you ... I mean, you’re sure there’s no mistake at the hotel?”
“I’m sure. I’ve already called the police but they won’t do anything for another twenty-four hours. I could ... God, Janine,” he said, his voice tortured, “I could tell they were patronizing me, like they thought maybe Ruth was off having some torrid affair.”
Are you sure she isn’t?
It was the first thing that went through Janine’s mind, but she would never have said it. She was not fond of her stepfather, but she certainly did not want to hurt him. Even if she believed her mother capable of such a thing, she would not bring it up.
“I’m sorry I woke you,” he said. “I ... I should have waited until morning. I’m just ... this is too much. Ruth would never just disappear without calling me first. I’m not stupid enough to think the idea of an affair is impossible, but I know this much: if Ruth were to do something like that, no way would she let it be discovered this way. Something’s happened to her, Janine. I’m sure of it.”
“Mom,” Janine said softly. “Oh, God.”
No, she thought. Not now. Not one more horrible thing.
“I’m driving up there tomorrow, Janine. I’ll go to the hotel first, talk to the police, and then I’ll call you with an update. If anything happens, of course, I’ll call right away.”
“Thank you,” she said, a bit hoarse. “I’ll ... I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”
Janine felt as though she were still asleep. Her hands seemed a bit swollen and her body felt awkward, as if she had detached from it somehow. Her mind had become a tiny thing, lost in the immense, dull, immobile cage of flesh that was her pale, quivering form. Her throat was dry, yet so were her eyes. She felt as though she were observing herself at a distance, and it surprised her that there were no tears in her eyes.
A twinge of pain cramped her stomach and she brought her hands to her belly and bent over slightly on the bed. She stayed like that a moment, then sat up again. Now she felt cold. Alone and helpless, just as she had so often in her dreams. Terrible things were happening in the world around her and yet she could do nothing to stop them, to influence the outcome, nothing even to slow the dark current that seemed to be carrying her along.
“Oh, Mom,” she whispered, squeezing her eyes shut tight, covering them with her hands.
When she dropped her hands and opened her eyes, she froze, her mouth open in shock, her breath coming in hitching gasps. The room was bathed in a dim green light.
Charon the Ferryman stood at the foot of the bed.
Dream and reality shifted and seemed to merge. Charon was a figure of hallucinations and nightmares, a mirage, Janine thought. Or she had never woken up at all. Though she had always thought she knew the difference between the tangible world and the subjectivity of dreams, all the skeins that tied her to what she knew were coming unraveled.
The Ferryman was so tall he nearly reached the ceiling. In his left hand he held the lantern that she had seen—when had she seen it?—clanking against the prow of his boat. A green flame flickered within, casting warped shadows through ancient, hand-blown glass. He stared at her with those eyes—enormous black pupils, rimmed with fire—each one a solar eclipse.
The air shimmered with the dream light, the death light from that lantern.
It isn’t real, Janine thought. And yet it was hyperreal. She felt the cold that seemed to emanate from him and she blinked away the light from the lantern. Her eyes could pick out every detail of the room around her, every chip in the paint, every uneven slant of a picture frame; just as she could also see each fold of his robe, and the bit of tarnish on the iron ring he wore in his beard.
Charon gazed at her. The suggestion of a smile appeared at the edges of his mouth and he tilted his head to one side.
“Janine,” he said. “Do not fear simply because you do not under
stand. You have welcomed me in your dreams. I know the essence of your being. I have dared much for you.”
Though she heard the words, she could not make sense of them. Bathed in that ethereal light, she found herself unable to move. Perhaps that was Charon’s doing, or perhaps it was simply her fear, her terror that what she was seeing and hearing might be real.
Charon opened his robes and slipped the lantern inside. It disappeared there, though the Ferryman himself was suffused with its green glow. He crossed the room toward her with a swish of robes that sounded like the surf, a confident stride that bespoke his power, the arrogance of a king.
Janine tried to inch backward on her mattress. She tried to close her eyes to blot him out. She tried to open her mouth to scream. Tried, but failed. Instead, she sat paralyzed as the creature leaned toward her, long robes brushing her face. Skeletally thin fingers, long and sharp, reached out to caress her face.
They were cold and damp.
Her eyes were wide. They burned, as though tears would fall, but even that she seemed incapable of. Her heart thundered wildly in her chest. She could hear its manic rhythm inside her head.
The Ferryman’s skin was like stone polished clean by the river, lined with blue veins and shadowed by his long mane and beard. He brushed her own dark locks away from her face, ran his fingers through her hair.
His breath was the breeze off the river. Those burning black eyes seemed to widen as though they might drink her in.
“So strong. So defiant. Though you had no reason to stay, though your body was ready to give in, you fought.You threw the coins back at me. Others have seen me and not crossed the river, but none have ever done that before, thrown away the fare for their passage.You would not come to me, but having seen that fire in you, that life, I knew that I could not forget. I had to taste it. So I have come.
“You fear. But you have left this world once already.You know there is more than this. Life exists beyond what you know. Remember what you have already seen, and you will learn. Oh, the things I can offer you, Janine. No more fear.
“You do not belong among these, the living.They can never feel for you as I do.What I offer ... is eternal.You will see that their love is not worthy of you. An ephemeral, gossamer thing.Then you will realize that I speak true.
“One way or another, you belong to me.”
He leaned over her further, hair brushing her face, and cold lips touched her forehead. Charon kissed her above each eye. His talons slid down her face, her throat, her nightshirt, and skeletal fingers traced lines along the roundness of her breasts.
It was like the dream.
But not the dream. She did not yearn for him. The twisting in her stomach was fear, not desire.
Above her, so close, those blazing eclipse-eyes stared down into hers. A tear slipped from her right eye and ran, hot and salty, down the side of her face.
“No,” she whispered softly.
She could speak. She could cry. She could move.
Janine screamed as she thrust her hands out and shoved him away. Under her touch, his robes felt like damp, slick moss, and she shuddered with revulsion even as she tumbled out of bed and staggered backward, away from him.
“My God, what are you?” she rasped, her chest heaving with panic.
But she knew what he was. Impossible, but she knew.
Charon rose to his full height. For the first time, his huge black pupils diminished and the fiery corona around each one expanded. His body still glowed with the infernal light from his lantern, and the Ferryman extended one long finger to point at her in accusation.
“You belong more to me than to this place.You will be with me.Your precious few shall only suffer should they stand between us.”
The voice was like the cry of a drowning man.
Janine stood with her back to the bedroom wall, trapped.
The crackle of supernatural energy in the room, the surreal tension that connected them, was interrupted by a sudden buzzing in the room. Janine blinked several times before she could turn her gaze away from Charon. Her mind backtracked to that sound, tried to put it in a real-life context.
The door.
It was going on one o’clock in the morning, but someone was down at the first-floor landing, buzzing for her to let them up.
The buzz came again.
Charon snarled softly, then reached into his robes to retrieve the lantern. Its iron and glass cage barely contained the green flame within, which roared up as he retrieved it, as though it had been waiting to be free again.
The light flashed so brightly that Janine had to cover her eyes. When the light subsided and she looked around the room, the Ferryman was gone. Janine gasped for breath, certain that at any second he would appear again, his image still outlined against the backs of her eyelids.
It can’t be, she thought. I’m losing it. But she knew that was not the truth, that the truth was something she was incapable of confronting alone.
The buzzer sounded a third time.
Her fear remained upon her like a morning frost, and Janine tried to shake it off as she ran for the door.Anything to be out of that room, away from the moist echo of him that seemed to linger on the air. Her gaze flicked from side to side, searching for some sign that Charon was still in the apartment. In a frenzy, she brushed her hand through her hair ... and found it wet.
Charon had touched her there, and now her hair was damp as though from a shower. Disgusted, and frightened by this lingering evidence of his presence, she glanced down in the dim hall light and saw that the front of her shirt was also wet, where he had fondled her.
“Jesus,” she whispered.
At the door, she pressed the speaker button.
“Who ... who is it?” she asked, her voice cracking.
“Hey. Sorry to wake you. Can I come up?”
David!
A hand flew to her mouth and she felt something crumble inside her.
“Oh, thank God,” she whispered, then flinched, startled by her own voice in the darkened apartment.
Janine had never been so happy to hear the voice of another human being in her life. Though the warnings and vague threats of the Ferryman echoed in the back of her head, she needed nothing so much at that moment as her lover’s arms around her. Her true lover, not some nightmare suitor.
She did not even bother to reply. Instead she buzzed him in, then feverishly worked the locks. Without thought as to how little she was wearing, Janine threw the door open and rushed down the stairs.
David stopped short halfway up and stared at her. His hair and clothes were disheveled and his eyes were bloodshot. There was a frightened, lost expression on his features that she knew must be at least the match of her own.
“David,” she said again, voice barely above a whisper.
“Janine, I ... What happened?” he asked.
With abandon, she threw herself into his arms, nearly knocking him back down the stairs. He used the railing to steady himself, and then he held her as she wept in great, heaving sobs, her face buried in the wonderful warmth of his shirt. It had the smell of him, and that was an enormous comfort to her.
That was real. David, and what she felt for him.That was real.
“Janine?” His voice was gentle, but there was a quaver to it as well.
She pulled back and gazed into his red-rimmed eyes. Though she wanted to ask what had happened, why he was there in the dead of night, why he seemed so distraught, she could not even begin. Her own fears were too fresh, nearly spilling over with the urgency she felt.
Dreams. She had fooled herself into thinking they were just dreams. And that day by the river, she had seen him. It was not in her mind. She knew that now.
“I had ... an intruder,” she ventured.
Immediately he tensed, muscles flexing. David was not an inordinately large man, but he was powerful and quick. Absurdly, it made her feel immediately safer, though what he could do against the nightmare that had visited her she had no idea.
>
“Is he still—”
“He’s gone,” she said, unsure how to begin. “I ... I think he’s gone.”
Together they went back up the stairs. David led the way, alert for any sign of an intruder. One by one, they turned on all the lights. Soon they were both satisfied that the apartment was empty save for the two of them.
At last, David seemed to deflate. They sat down together on the couch in the living room. He ran a hand through his hair and she saw a bit of gray there she had not really noticed before.
“Did you get a good look at him?” David asked.
She bit her lip and nodded.
“You need to call the police.”
“There’s nothing they can do,” she said.
Perhaps it was something in her tone, but he looked up sharply and a kind of shock spread across his features, as though he had just realized a horrible truth.
“Tell me,” David demanded.
So she did.
When she was through, she was shaking all over. He slid closer to her and held her, but she shook her head.
“I know you probably think it’s all in my head—”
“No. No, I don’t,” he assured her.
Stunned, she gazed up at him. “I don’t understand.”
“I’ve seen him, too,” David explained. He glanced away, the memory causing him to flinch. “But there’s more. A lot more to this than you realize.”
The things he told her, about ghosts and walking dead men, cultivated a new terror that blossomed even colder in her heart. But when he told her that one of the intruders in his own house had been his grandfather, that his Grandpa Edgar had tried to kill him, a deep, abiding sadness settled into her bones with an ache she doubted would ever go away.
“And Jill?”
“It’s Maggie,” David said firmly. “I was sure last night, but how could I have said anything? You would just have thought—”
“You should have,” she told him.
“We both should have,” David replied softly.
“So what do we do now? These ... the people he’s sent after you. They may be trying to kill you, but he hasn’t tried. You’re still in danger.”
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