The Ferryman

by Christopher Golden

  His words were interrupted by a bright light flashing past the house outside. David started and went to the door again, peered through the windows on either side of the door.

  “Just in time,” he said, his voice tired. “That’s the police. Let’s just hope no one actually saw anything, and they don’t notice the broken window.”

  His fingers trailed along the splintered wood where the force of a dead man’s hammering had caused the dead-bolt lock to tear through the wooden frame.

  “What did you do with Kindzierski?” Janine asked again. Her eyes flicked toward Father Charles.

  The priest crossed himself, but slowly, as though he had a new appreciation for the power in that gesture of faith.

  “We put him back in the car,” Father Charles said. “We were careful not to leave fingerprints on the door handle.” The priest moved nearer to the bottom of the stairs and stared up at her, grim-faced, and yet somehow his eyes glistened with sympathy. “But that’s only half of the problem, Janine. Once the police find Detective Kindzierski’s body, they’re sure to check in and realize he was watching this house.They’ll notice the damage.They’ll want to search the house.”

  David moved up beside him, as though they appealed to some goddess or queen.

  “What are we going to do about Ruth’s body, Janine?” her lover asked. “How do we explain that?”

  She saw right away where they were going with that. “You want to dump her somewhere? In the river, right? Not going to happen, David. The police already know someone’s been terrorizing us. With Father Charles to back us up, we could easily say we found her here. The front door’s been broken in; there are smashed windows. We’ll explain it.We’ve got witnesses. But I’m not going to take my mother’s body and ...”

  Emotion choked her and she forced herself not to let it overwhelm her. “I couldn’t stand waiting around until they found her. I can’t pretend I don’t know what happened to her. Not to the cops, and certainly not to Larry.”

  The two men stood in the foyer amidst antique furniture and arched doorways, all familiar and solid, and yet Janine could not help but think of the river that had flowed within that house, the way that Charon had been able to force his own nether realm into the real world. Janine shuddered, then pushed her wavy raven hair away from her eyes and started down the stairs.

  “All right,” David agreed. “All right.”

  He met her at the bottom of the steps and they embraced. It was brief, but there was a sweetness to that moment that gave her strength and succor. Janine broke away from him and reached out to take Father Charles’s hand. She squeezed it, smiled weakly, and then let it go again.

  Janine took a deep breath, then gazed purposefully at David. In every word and glance, there hung an ominous knowledge, unspoken.

  “What about Annette?” she asked, a quaver in her voice.

  David nodded slowly, then glanced at Father Charles as though he might have an answer. The priest said nothing, as baffled as they were. These dead things Charon had drawn from the afterlife had battered their way into the house and taken Annette away with them. The image of her mother’s corpse was fresh in Janine’s mind, and she tried unsuccessfully to avoid putting Annette’s face there instead of her mother’s.

  “We have to find her,” David said softly.

  Dark circles under his eyes only punctuated the sadness in them. He blamed himself, Janine knew. Annette was his best friend, and hers as well. Finding her would have been their first priority, if they had had any idea where to look. Their helplessness was crippling.

  Father Charles cleared his throat to draw their attention. “He’s not going to kill her, I don’t think.”

  “What makes you say that?” Janine asked.

  The priest scratched his head.“His power in this world is still tenuous. It’s growing, but it’s unfamiliar to him. He may be anchored here but he’s unsure of himself. He needs you vulnerable. Charon could have had them just kill Annette right then and be done with it. But they took her instead. He wants you to come to him.”

  A chill raced through her as she relived, in an instant, the moment during labor when she had almost died, the vision of Charon and the river Styx and the afterlife she had had then.

  “I can’t go to him without dying, Father. And, for that matter, how would he get Annette there without killing her?”

  David began to pace the foyer, banging his fist unconsciously against his leg. “Not there. Not in his ... place. Somewhere in our world, but where he feels like he’s got power.”

  He stopped, glanced up at Janine.

  “The river,” she said. “I saw him that day, the morning after your crash, on the other side of the river.”

  “ ‘I’ll see you on the water before long,’ ” Father Charles said. “That’s what he said to me. Perhaps he meant it literally.”

  They drove to the river in silence. Though they did not discuss it, David’s instinct led him to the spot where the revenant of Steve Themeli had driven him off the road. It was a reminder that though Charon was after Janine, these were David’s ghosts that had been raised, phantoms of hatred dredged up from his past. He wanted to believe that they were not real, that they were merely echoes cast into the world to torment him. But Maggie—or Jill, as Annette had known her—she had had emotions. That knowledge tore at him as though he were Prometheus, hung from the mountain, fodder for birds of prey.

  David held Janine’s hand as he drove. Father Charles was curiously silent in the back, a Bible in his hands. They followed the twists and turns of the road alongside the river, and as they approached their destination, the place where he had nearly been killed, a fine mist appeared atop the rolling water.

  None of them reacted to the phenomenon. David suspected it was what they had all expected to find there. It was not terribly late, but still, few cars passed them. Another vehicle was already parked on the side of the road, and he recognized it as Ruth Vale’s car. Though Janine must have known it as well, it was yet another realization that went unspoken. He pulled over onto the shoulder, across from the riverbank, and they all got out. David jogged over to Ruth’s car, but it was empty.

  Headlights cut the slowly expanding, enveloping mist and they waited for the car to pass before crossing the street. Above, even through the fog, David could see the bright crescent moon and the stars.The air was cold and crisp, despite the damp of the mist, and David shivered. It felt good, though. Awake. Alive. His senses seemed somehow sharper as tendrils of mist swirled around them. He and Father Charles flanked Janine as they crossed the road. In the soft earth of the riverbank there remained a deep rut that had been carved out of the ground by his car. The smell of the upturned soil was strong, almost rejuvenating.

  David thought of Janine’s description of her brush with death, of the river Styx, and he felt the urge to hold her. It was absurd, given their circumstances, but he had never felt the need to have her in his arms more acutely. He reached out and touched her arm, felt the smooth softness of her leather jacket. She gazed out over the mist-shrouded river. Her dark hair framed her face, made her seem almost a ghost herself.

  This, he thought. This is what’s real.

  “I don’t see anything,” she said, her voice tinged more with frustration than fear.

  “There,” Father Charles said, his voice so low it was below a whisper.

  Out on the river, in the mist, an eerie green light began to glow, diffused and refracted into the fog. Even as they watched, it began to glide closer to them, cutting across the river unmindful of the current, as though it floated above rather than atop the water.

  The smells of the earth and the river were strong, and David breathed them in, anchoring himself to the world he knew. Whatever lay out on that river, perhaps even the river itself, was something else entirely. Not a different place, not the netherworld, but perhaps a blurred place in this one, where Charon’s river—in the borderlands between tangible and intangible, between reality and faith—
flowed into this one.

  David started as Father Charles gripped his arm from behind. He spun around to find the priest gazing at him intensely.There had always been something admirably haughty about the man. That arrogance was gone, but his dignity remained.

  “Stay here. Protect each other,” the priest said, his eyes blazing beneath his heavy brows. “Janine, use him as a bargaining chip if you need to.Your companionship for David’s life.”

  Janine gaped at him, horrified. She began to shake her head. “Father, I—”

  “Lie,” the priest told her.

  “Where are you going?” David asked, his mind racing.Without Father Charles, they had no way to defend themselves. Only his blessing had had any effect on Charon.

  The priest hesitated, and David saw fear in those intense eyes. “Into the river,” he said.

  Then he turned and strode upriver along the bank, disappearing into the mist within moments. Janine reached out and grabbed David’s hand. Both of them looked out at the water, where the green light of the Ferryman’s lantern glowed brighter, floated closer. They could hear the slap of water against the boat’s wooden sides.

  “Jesus, David,” Janine whispered. “What are we doing here?”

  He swallowed hard. “What we have to do. Even if he didn’t have Annette, there’s nowhere to run. We’ll face him together. Somehow we’ll get out of this, Janine. You have to believe it.”

  “I do. I have faith.”

  Ten feet from the riverbank, the rushing water began to ripple in two places, as though there were rocks just under the surface. The effect lasted only an instant before Themeli and Grandpa Edgar broke the surface. They rose slowly from the river, emerging as they strode calmly yet inexorably toward the bank, as though they had walked all the way across the river bottom at that same pace. Perhaps most disturbing was that neither of them seemed to be at all wet.

  Fear and denial wrought within David a powerful temptation to simply flee, to run away like a child, like the very same little boy to whom his grandfather had always been so caustic and cruel. But he was not a boy anymore.

  “Stay behind me, Janine,” he said.

  Her dark eyes flashed with alarm. “David, don’t—”

  “They’re my ghosts,” he told her. “It’s time I fought them.”

  The two revenants, one a grinning, hollow-eyed old man and the other a sneering teenager, stopped at the river’s edge, still ankle-deep in the water.

  “Getting brave now, are you, boy?” Grandpa Edgar scoffed.

  Themeli snorted at that, then shook his head. “What the fuck’s the matter with you, Bairstow? Just walk away. Don’t you get it? He doesn’t care about you, just her.”

  A muscle twitched at the corner of David’s eye, but there was no other outward sign of his terror. He stood firmly in the ragged grass and stared at them, not even sparing a glance at Janine.

  “You’re a little puke,Themeli,” he said.“I reached out to you, tried to help you, but you were so in love with how tragic your life was, being a junkie was the only identity you could hang on to. You’re not pissed because I didn’t save you; you’re pissed because I turned you in, I fucked up your ride. Boo-hoo.”

  Themeli frowned deeply and stepped out of the water, only to have Grandpa Edgar grab him by the arm and haul him back. Both of them glanced over their shoulders nervously, and David realized that they had not attacked yet because Charon had told them to wait.

  “Touching,” Grandpa Edgar said. His eyes glistened and the mist seemed to caress his face, the same white as his beard. “Is it my turn now, Davey? Have you got some bullshit psychology to explain why your old grandpa would come back to haunt you? Was I a product of a different era? Did my father’s cruelty prevent me from showing the love in my heart? Maybe I secretly longed to tell bedtime stories and go on fishing trips?”

  “No,” David replied flatly. “You were just a prick.”

  Grandpa Edgar laughed uproariously at that, nodding in agreement. Even as he did, the mist on the river began to thin a little, the curtain not to rise so much as to become transparent. All of David’s focus was on the creatures in front of him, the things that wore the faces of dead men, but Janine squeezed his hand and he glanced across the river. Green light spilled through the mist and glinted off the water.

  The Ferryman was there, no more than twenty feet away. Though the current washed all around his long boat, it merely rocked in place. Whatever familiarity had lingered in the world around them seemed to be extinguished by Charon’s arrival. David shivered. The ground beneath his feet seemed to dampen further, almost to squelch under his weight, though he could not have said whether that was only his imagination. He dared not look up for fear that the stars might have gone red at last. The fog enshrouded them, wrapped all around them, and though he had heard several cars pass by before, he did not dare turn around to look for the road now, for fear that it might be gone.

  What world is this? he asked himself, afraid that the answer might not be what he hoped. But it had to be. They had not gone anywhere. Yet the feeling of otherness, of elsewhere, had come upon him so abruptly, as though he had suddenly become aware of being drunk.

  No, he thought, and shook his head to clear it. Maybe nobody can see us from the road, but that’s only the fog.This is the Mystic River, not the Styx. It isn’t his.

  Yet David could not deny that there, on the water, Charon had power.

  That’s why we’re here, he reminded himself. Why he took Annette here. For there she was, seated behind him in the boat, a black hood pulled over her head and her hands tied behind her back. The resurrected Spencer Hahn sat at her side, poking and touching her so that Annette squirmed and shied away from him.

  “Annette!” Janine cried out, and started to move toward the water.

  “Yeah. Come for a swim, girl,” Grandpa Edgar said with a grunt.

  Janine flinched and drew back. On her face David could see how much it hurt her to be so helpless. Though he knew Father Charles must have some plan, in that moment he was furious with the priest. A tiny sliver of doubt cut through him as he considered the possibility that Father Charles had simply walked away.

  No, he thought.Then, without looking around, David sent a small prayer out into the ether. Whatever you’re going to do, Hugh, make it good.

  The Ferryman swayed with the motion of the water beneath the boat. His cowl was drawn back to reveal the twin eclipses in his eyes. More than ever, his blue-veined flesh seemed to have been carved from cold white stone. His beard swung ponderously, anchored by the metal ring tied near the end of its length.The lantern that sometimes hung from the prow of the boat was in his hand, its green flame flickering in the mist.

  “Damn you!” Janine railed at him, biting off every word as though a sob hid just behind her teeth. “The only reason you still exist is because you have a job to do! Why don’t you go and do it and leave us alone!”

  Charon did not smile, but his eyes opened a bit wider. He raised the lantern a bit higher so that his face took on its greenish tint.

  “This is not the first time I have abandoned my purpose for another,” the Ferryman said, his voice insinuating and arrogant. “I have always returned and so shall I do this time. But I will not return alone. How could I go if my heart is here?”

  Something unraveled in David. All the hesitation, all the contemplation, all the fear and doubt and sadness in him simply seemed to give way, washed downriver in a torrent of adrenaline and emotional debris.

  “You don’t have a heart, you dumb fuck!” he roared. “You’re a myth!”

  Janine hissed air in through her teeth. Grandpa Edgar laughed, but Themeli’s eyes went wide with surprise. Out in the boat, Spencer Hahn turned his gaze downward so he would not have to look at Charon in that moment.

  The Ferryman’s black pupils shrank to pinpoint dots then, and the burning coronas that surrounded each of them flared like dueling suns. The stretch of river that separated him from the shore began
to churn. David steeled himself for retaliation.

  Yet before that retaliation could come, a jet of water surged up just beyond the boat. It took form in the air. First it was a silhouette, a sculpture made of water. Then it had color and weight and real shape.

  “Maggie,” David whispered.

  Whatever dark power Charon had used to give Maggie Russell’s soul new form, it remained. She had fled when confronted, but now she had returned. From the river water, she twisted herself into life yet again, landing on her feet in the boat with enough weight to rock it heavily to one side. Spencer had to grab the creaking wood to keep himself from going over.

  The Ferryman rode the swaying vessel without effort, and laughed when he saw her.

  “I wondered where you had gone,” the creature said.

  “I won’t let you hurt her,” Maggie told him.

  She had shed the identity she had used when she had seduced Annette. In that moment, she looked to David precisely as she had on the night she died, the night his drunkenness had cost her her life. Of all of his ghosts, Maggie was the only one whose enmity he could not dismiss.

  On the boat,Annette bucked against her bonds and shouted something beneath her hood that was muffled by the cloth and dulled by the distance and the rumble of the river.

  “This is it,” Janine said at his side.

  David turned to gaze at her, saw the intensity in her countenance and her carriage, and knew that she was right. At the house they were only trying to defend themselves. But now Annette’s life was at stake and there would be no hiding, no running away. Not anymore. This was the time. Perhaps the only chance they were going to get at surviving this thing. Themeli and Grandpa Edgar had turned to stare in astonishment at events unfolding on the boat twenty feet away. Themeli had even begun to wade into the river again as if to go to his master’s aid.

  This was the time.

  With a nod, David ran the three steps to the river’s edge and careened into his grandfather’s back. The old man grunted and went down.Went under, with David on top of him. As they fell, David saw Janine leap on Themeli’s back, one arm around his neck, choking.