Suddenly Hobbamock turned his attention to the Indian. “What’s in the case, Charlie?” he asked, as if noticing only now that he was carrying something. “Another gun, Charlie? It looks like a shotgun case to me. I had a report that you came heavily armed. It appears that report was correct.”
Charlie was mute.
Hobbamock cackled. “Rifles are no use here. Why do you suppose I let you in with one? You could shoot a rifle all day and all night, and it wouldn’t bother me. You could bring a machine gun in here, and it wouldn’t trouble me in the least. Why don’t you open that case and let me see your other gun?”
They were almost to the base of the stone platform. Charlie saw the stairs and for one fleeting moment was tempted to plunge madly up them, dragging Abbie behind him, until she was close enough to touch Hobbamock. But there was no way they would make it.
“Come on, Charlie. Shoot.”
It has to be now.
“Shoot.”
“Put her down!” Charlie ordered Brad. Brad did. Abbie stood, wobbly and weak. The blood rushed from her head, and she was dizzy. Vision swimming, she looked at her father, then Charlie, waiting for one of them to speak.
Has to be.
“What’s going on, Charlie?” Hobbamock said. He sounded more curious than perturbed. “Is something not to your liking? Before I talk to Abbie, I’d like to see what’s in your case. I’ve already said that. Please don’t keep me waiting.”
Now.
Madly Charlie unzipped the case and yanked the spear out. It was exactly as it had appeared in the pniese: ash shaft painted red, orange, and green, pink granite tip, the whole weapon perfectly balanced for extraordinarily long and accurate flight. He handed it to Abbie.
Abbie stared at him, befuddled.
“Throw it,” he ordered. “At him.”
Hobbamock rose from his chair and walked to the edge of the cliff. He looked down. He was only feet away from them, close enough to see details of his face, lined and cracked like the binding on an ancient leather-spined book. Close enough to smell his breath: rhamphorhynchus and wolf breath, like mildewed garlic. He was smiling. Grinning. Sneering.
Entirely unconcerned.
“What have we here?” he asked casually. “A spear?”
“Throw it, Abbie,” Charlie demanded, frantic. “You have to throw it at him!”
She was paralyzed.
“He’s the devil, Abbie! Do it for your dad! Do it for Jimmy!”
Frozen.
“He’s right,” Brad shouted, taking her hand and motioning in Hobbamock’s direction. “Throw it. Throw it!”
She did.
Charlie’s head exploded with a burst of sudden concentration. He was searching his mind for the wire that would plug him in, that might help direct the spear. He found something, felt warmth. He seized on it, dumping all his mental current into it, hoping with all his hope. His heart, he willed. Straight into his heart, the son of a bitch.
The spear lodged in Hobbamock’s side. It drew no blood. Charlie watched with building horror as the god calmly reached down and withdrew it. He held it in his hand, examining it.
“You must take me for the most colossal of fools, Charlie,” he stated nonchalantly, “to think I would allow you in here with the very weapon your ancestors used against me. As you can see, this is not that weapon, and thank goodness for that. This is nothing but a fake. A fake I arranged to have planted when I discovered your shenanigans one of those long, sweaty nights I had one of my helpers visit inside your head.”
The group listened, terrified, as Hobbamock expounded on Quidneck folly.
This is it, Brad thought. Dear God, please make it easy on Abbie.
And then an old man materialized behind Hobbamock. A man carrying a spear identical to the one Abbie had just thrown, with one difference. The tip was all black, black as coal, black as night. And yet it appeared to shine, too, as if it were made of some strange material that alternately gave off and absorbed light.
The second man was almost to Hobbamock’s side when he called, “Son.”
Charlie heard that voice and knew immediately.
“Dad,” he answered, incredulous. “Dad!”
“You shamed me into action,” George Moonlight said. “I have learned things I did not know about the Land of the Dead. Someday I will tell you. “Here,” he said, tossing the new weapon down. “Give it to the girl.”
Charlie caught the spear. Like the other one, it throbbed and crackled with blue static. The Wigglesworth weapon had been a perfect imitation, a testimony to Hobbamock’s cleverness.
Charlie placed the spear in Abbie’s hands.
This time she understood her mission.
She cocked her arm.
Hobbamock had been caught completely off guard. George Moonlight had been nowhere in the plan. He was supposed to stay where he belonged: in the Land of the Already Dead. “When I get through with you,” Hobbamock screamed at Charlie’s father, “you’ll spend eternity in—”
It was too late. Abbie had the spear now.
“Throw it,” Charlie ordered.
Abbie drew a deep breath.
“Now,” Brad urged. “Now!”
Abbie stopped cold.
It was not Hobbamock up there anymore.
It was Jimmy.
Healthy Jimmy. Jimmy dressed for the first day of school. Jimmy discovering the new girl who lives just down the road. Jimmy saying: “Why do you want to do this to me, Abbie? Why do you want to hurt me? I never hurt you. I thought we were friends.”
“Jimmy!” Abbie shrieked.
“Best friends! I thought we were best friends!”
“It’s not Jimmy!” Charlie yelled. “It’s a trick, like the doctor was a trick! Throw it! Throw it!”
Abbie hesitated.
The thing had changed again. It was not Jimmy now.
It was Heather.
“Mom!” Abbie screamed.
“Throw it before it’s too late!”
“Abbie,” the Heather illusion begged. “Don’t listen to them. You know how Daddy has tried to keep us apart.”
“She hates you, Abbie,” Brad hissed. “Throw it!”
Abbie closed her eyes and complied. Charlie concentrated, willing the new weapon to its target. It flew straight and true, piercing the Heather illusion at heart level.
This time Hobbamock did not calmly retract the weapon. This time the Heather illusion began to yowl. It clawed wildly at the spear, twisting, turning, like a moth pinned to a board. It clawed, but it could not touch the weapon. Every time its hands drew near, the weapon arced, like a broken transmission line. The yowling grew in intensity until it filled the cavern.
As they watched, the Heather illusion was transformed. Jimmy for a second. Then the dog. The rhamphorhynchus. A bear. The ghoul-doctor. All of its manifestations. Its entire bag of tricks, parading across the screen in one final, monstrous blowout.
When it was over, only a skeleton remained.
The skeleton of a snake, long and winding and bleached white.
Charlie looked for his father, but he had gone. Weeping, Charlie mustered the group.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-TWO
Wednesday, December 24
Late
The code team was working feverishly and getting nowhere. Ginny watched vacantly from the doorway, her mother clasping her hand. The medical lingo was blowing right by her, but she understood too well the mood in the room, a mood of bitter determination tinged with a growing sense of futility. Mrs. Fitzpatrick was praying—the most fervent prayers of a life prayer had never been a stranger to. Praying that if God was going to save Jimmy, he do it soon, because his family couldn’t take much more of this. Praying that if he was going to take the boy, he do it painlessly, without her grandson regaining consciousness.
“What is he?” team chief Dr. Jefferson asked the EKG technician.
“Still flat line.”
“Shit,” the doctor swore. “Continue pumping.”
Jefferson was running out of tricks. “More epi,” he barked.
“Epi,” the critical care nurse confirmed, injecting another dose of epinephrine into the second IV she’d run into Jimmy’s left ankle. “Anything?”
“Nothing,” the EKG tech said.
“Try atropine.”
“Atropine in ankle line,” the nurse said obediently.
“Come on, Jimmy,” the doctor coaxed. “Come on, boy! You can do it! Come on! Respond, goddamn it! Respond!”
Because if you don’t in the next few seconds, he thought, the brain damage will be permanent and irreversible even if you should happen to make it somehow . . . and God only knows how.
“Flat, doctor,” the EKG tech said.
Jefferson was down to one last trick. He’d pulled it only once on a child this small, a child he’d lost as a greenhorn resident working his first Friday night shift at Boston City Hospital. He was never really sure the paddles hadn’t actually killed the kid, a girl of seven who’d been shot in the stomach and kidney and bowel one hot August night during a dispute between mother and boyfriend.
But what other choice do I have? The family’s already said they want every measure used, no matter how ordinary or extraordinary it is.
“We’ll zap him,” Jefferson announced.
“How many volts?” the critical care nurse said.
“Two hundred.”
“You sure?”
“Do it!”
The nurse pressed the charge button on the defibrillator, then set the dial to two hundred. There was no sound. In four seconds the red light blinked.
“Ready,” the nurse said.
“Clear the bed,” Jefferson ordered. The team moved back in a wave. Metal-frame beds are fine conductors of electricity, a fact taught in every emergency medicine course.
“Clear,” the nurse said. She stood over Jimmy, a plastic-handle paddle in each hand.
“Zap him,” Jefferson said.
The nurse reached down, burrowing the smooth stainless steel surface of the paddles into his chest. She pressed the button. Two hundred volts shot through Jimmy. His arms and legs scarecrowed into the air, then flopped back to his side with a thud like meat hitting a floor. It was a muscular response Jefferson had first seen in high school biology, touching battery wires to the exposed leg muscles of a freshly pithed frog. Gruesome. It had not become any more pleasant in all the times since that he’d seen it in humans.
“Good lord,” Mrs. Fitzpatrick said. Ginny screamed, unsure if the grisly spectacle meant her son was coming out of it or going under for good.
On the monitor the green line blipped momentarily, then went flat again.
“Zap him,” Jefferson said.
The nurse did. This time Jimmy’s body seemed to levitate several inches before crashing back down.
“Again.”
She did. The green line was as straight as a ruler’s edge. “Once more.”
Nothing.
Jefferson was grappling with the hardest question that can be put to a doctor—when is enough enough?—when the needle on the EKG machine jumped and then started squiggling. On the monitor the green line fragmented, then reassembled in the anthill-and-tepee shapes of a healthy heart’s normal sinus rhythm. Through her fingers, still clasped tightly around the ambu bag, the nurse felt the draw of his breath. His chest rose and fell, rose and fell, reestablishing the familiar pattern as if it had never been interrupted. The purplish tint that had developed in Jimmy’s skin was being flushed away by a more normal flesh hue. The team could actually see his color returning.
They were stunned. They’d all seen dramatic turnarounds . . .
. . . but this?
“I’ll be damned!” Jefferson exclaimed.
“Looks good,” the EKG technician, a normally dour individual, said enthusiastically. “Mighty darn good.”
“You’re telling me. What’s his pressure?”
“Ninety over sixty.”
“Pulse?”
“One-ten.”
“He breathing on his own?”
“Yes, Doctor.”
“You’re kidding.”
“I’m not.”
“His functions look . . . completely normal.”
“They certainly do.”
“I’ll be damned. I’ll be goddamned.”
The draw of oxygen through the intubation tube into his larynx was regular, reassuring. He was breathing on his own again. Jimmy’s eyes did not flutter, but beneath his eyelids there was rapid movement. Jefferson clapped his hands an inch from Jimmy’s right ear. His eyes flew open, then shut again. With his thumb and forefinger, the doctor pried Jimmy’s left eye open and flashed a flashlight in it. The pupil constricted. It dilated when he shut the light off. Fluid gurgled in Jimmy’s throat; the anesthesiologist suctioned it. Jimmy’s toes and fingers flinched in protest. The doctor withdrew the tube, and Jimmy coughed. A subdued, purely functional, throat-clearing cough.
“I’ll be goddamned.” Jefferson whistled, daring at last to hope.
In five minutes the team’s work was done; James Ellis was a case for ICU now. A nurse swabbed splotches of blood and saliva off Jimmy and replaced his johnny. An orderly with a broom started to mop up. Jefferson stood by the patient, making notes on his clipboard. It had been a remarkable turnaround, nothing less. One for the books. He’d like his team to get the credit, and it would, tomorrow, when he briefed Bostwick. But he wondered if he’d ever be able to shake the gut feeling that it hadn’t really been them, after all, but some outside force. A religious force, stray energy from another galaxy—he couldn’t articulate it. He decided he wouldn’t try. In emergency medicine it wasn’t necessarily how you played the game, but whether you won or lost.
Ginny approached the perimeter of the area around Jimmy’s bed the team had claimed. Wrappings for needles and medications littered the floor. Jimmy’s old johnny top, scissored from his body by the orderly, was crumpled in a ball. Cords and plastic tubes ran everywhere. The paddles, IV poles, portable monitor, standby suction machine, respirator, oxygen tank—a tangle of technology. Their work had been too urgent for tidiness.
“Can I see him now?” Ginny asked, her voice a hollow tin thing.
“Yes,” Jefferson said. “For a moment.”
“Me, too?” Mrs. Fitzpatrick asked.
“You, too.”
“It’s a miracle, isn’t it, doctor?” the grandmother said wondrously.
“I don’t think it would be too much of an exaggeration to call it that.”
“I could never be able to thank you enough, doctor,” Ginny said.
“He isn’t out of the woods yet, Mrs. Ellis. Not by a long shot.”
“No, but he’s on his way. I know he is.”
The women approached. Jimmy sensed their presence almost immediately. His eyes opened, and there was a clear, thankful recognition sparkling in them. He licked his lips and opened and closed his mouth several times, as if making sure it still worked. Then he spoke.
“Mommy” was all he said. But it was enough—more than enough.
“Jimmy,” Ginny gushed, “oh, God, I love you. I love you, I love you, I love you!”
“Easy, Mrs. Ellis,” the doctor said. “Your son’s been through a very tough ordeal.”
“I’ll be careful,” she said obediently. “Can I kiss him?”
“If you’re gentle.”
“I will be!” She bent over him, placing a kiss on his cheek. It was a surprisingly flush cheek, full of color and new warmth. Jimmy smiled then.
Smiled, for God’s sake.
Smiled!
Ginny wept. She was still weeping a half hour later when word
filtered into their room that several other children, also victims of the Mystery Disease, seemed to be improving.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-THREE
Wednesday, December 24
Near Midnight
“I don’t know,” Charlie answered when Brad asked how long it would be before Hobbamock recovered from his injury.
Maybe months. Maybe years. Maybe only a matter of minutes. No one knows because no one ever stuck around to find out. They sealed him back up as fast as they could and prayed to Cautantouwwit no one ever let him out again. Because the next time might be the time he decides to move. To someplace like Chicago or New York or Paris, he thought ridiculously.
“You’re sure sealing the cave will contain him?” Brad asked, seeking reassurance.
“It should. If we get out in time.”
“We’ll make it, won’t we?” Thomasine said.
“That’s what I’m planning on,” Charlie said. Thomasine would have liked more confidence in his voice.
And so they moved as fast as they could, Brad and Charlie taking turns carrying Abbie, Bostwick clutching his broken arm but not complaining, Thomasine leading the way with her light, one of only two that still worked. They moved, exhausted, intent only in getting the hell out of this place. Back through the cave, along the banks of the stream, as dark and still and deep-running as always, to where they had come in.
Charlie’s pulley-and-rope rig was where they’d left it, dangling from the old mine shaft into the cave like the string to a kite. The Indian hoisted Thomasine up first. Brad went next, to handle Abbie. Bostwick stayed with Charlie. Like Abbie, he was going to need a stretcher ride.
“You ought to warm the snowmobile,” Charlie yelled up as he secured the rope around the stretcher for Abbie’s turn. “It’s been sitting an hour.”
“Can’t it wait?” Brad rejoined, his question floating down into the cave like words in an empty auditorium.
“It’ll take two minutes. I’ll need that much time getting her strapped in.”
They looked at Abbie—Charlie and Bostwick from a distance of three feet, Brad from his cavetop perch. She was sitting where Brad had gently put her down, on the cave floor, her back to a small boulder, her head propped onto her arms. Bostwick’s medical magic had almost completely worn off, and her posture suggested deep sleep was none too far away. But simultaneously a change was under way. Charlie and Bostwick could see it in her face: the glimmer of a smile traced with a delicate touch across her lips; the new luster in the pinpoint pupils of her eyes; the rose tint to her cheeks that had been missing since late autumn. The confusion, that unsettling combination of fear and resignation and pervasive pain, the dying young girl they’d brought into this chamber of horrors had taken their leave. Abbie felt it, too, more powerfully than either man. In her mind, the shadow place was only a memory now, receding fast, like an endless night finally chased away by dawn of a clear day. They had gambled, and they had won. The spell was broken.
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