1987 - Swan Song v4

by Robert McCammon

  “This is ’bout as close as you can stand without gettin’ sick,” Aaron said, “but I wanted you to see it. Ain’t it a peculiar color?”

  “My God!” Swan was fighting the urge to throw up. “Why doesn’t somebody clean that up?”

  “Clean what up?” Aaron asked.

  “The pond! It wasn’t always like that, was it?”

  “Oh, no! I ’member when the pond had water in it. Real drinkin’ water. But Mama says it just gave out. Says it couldn’t last forever, anyway.”

  Swan had to turn away from the sight. She looked back the way they’d come and could make out a solitary figure on the hill, scooping dirty snow into a bucket. Melting the gray snow for water was a slow death, but it was far better than the poisonous pond. “I’m ready to go back now,” she told him, and she started walking slowly up the hill, probing before her with Crybaby.

  Once over the hill, Swan almost tripped over a body in her path. She stopped, looking down at the small form of a child. Whether it had been a boy or girl she couldn’t tell, but the child had died lying on its stomach, one hand clawing at the earth and the other frozen into a fist. She stared at those little hands, pallid and waxy against the snow. “Why are these bodies out here?” she asked.

  “’Cause this is where they died,” he told her, as if she was the dumbest old gourdhead in the whole world.

  “This one was trying to dig something up.”

  “Roots, prob’ly. Sometimes you can dig roots up out of the ground, sometimes you cain’t. When we can find ’em, Mama makes a soup out of ’em.”

  “Roots? What kind of roots?”

  “You sure ask a lot of questions,” he said, exasperated, and he started to walk on ahead.

  “What kind of roots?” Swan repeated, slowly but firmly.

  “Corn roots, I reckon!” Aaron shrugged. “Mama says there used to be a big ol’ cornfield out here, but everythin’ died. Ain’t nothin’ left but a few roots—if a body’s lucky enough to find ’em. Come on, now! I’m cold!”

  Swan looked out across the barren field that lay between the shacks and the pond. Bodies lay like strange punctuation marks scrawled on a gray tablet. The vision in her eye faded in and out, and whatever was under all the thick crust of growths burned and seethed. The child’s white, frozen hands took her attention again. Something about those hands, she thought. Something… but she didn’t know what.

  The smell of the pond sickened her, and she followed Aaron toward the shacks again.

  “Used to be a big ol’ cornfield out here,” Aaron had said. “But everythin’ died.”

  She pushed snow away from the ground with Crybaby. The earth was dark and hard. If any roots remained out here, they were far beneath the crust.

  They were still winding their way through the alleys when Swan heard Mule neigh; it was a cry of alarm. She quickened her pace, stabbing ahead of her with the dowsing rod.

  When they came out of the alley next to Glory Bowen’s shack, Swan heard Mule make a shrill whickering sound that conveyed anger and fear. She tilted her head to see what was happening and finally made it out: people in rags were swarming all over the wagon, tearing it apart. They were shredding the canvas tent to pieces and fighting over the remnants, grabbing up blankets, canned food, clothes and rifles from the rear of the wagon and running with them. “Stop!” she told them, but of course they paid no attention. One of them tried to untie Mule from his harness, but the horse bucked and kicked so powerfully the scavenger was driven off. They were even trying to take the wheels off the wagon. “Stop it!” Swan shouted, stumbling forward. Someone collided against her, knocked her into the cold mud and almost stepped on her. Nearby, two men were fighting in the mud over one of the blankets, and the fight ended when a third man grabbed it and scuttled away.

  The cabin’s door opened. Josh had heard Swan’s shout, and now he saw the Travelin’ Show wagon being ripped apart. Panic shook him. That was all they had in the world! A man was running with a bundle of sweaters and socks in his arms, and Josh went after him but slipped in the mud. The scavengers scattered in all directions, taking away the last of the canvas, all the food, the weapons, blankets, everything. A woman with an orange keloid covering most of her face and neck tried to strip the coat off Swan, but Swan doubled up and the woman struck at her, screaming in frustration. When Josh got to his feet, the woman ran down one of the alleys.

  Then they were all gone, and so were the contents of the Travelin’ Show wagon—including most of the wagon itself.

  “Damn it!” Josh raged. There was nothing left but the frame of the wagon and Mule, who was still snorting and bucking. We’re up shit creek now, he thought. Nothing to eat, not even a damned sock left! “You okay?” he asked Swan, going over to help her up. Aaron was standing beside her, and he reached out to touch her gourd of a head but drew his hand back at the last second.

  “Yes.” Her shoulder was just a little sore where she’d been struck. “I think I’m all right.”

  Josh gently helped Swan up and steadied her. “They took just about everything we had!” he fretted. In the mud lay a few items that had been left behind: a dented tin cup, a tattered shawl, a worn-out boot that Rusty had planned to mend and never got around to.

  “You leave things sittin’ out ’round here, they gonna get stole for sure!” Aaron said sagely. “Any fool knows that!”

  “Well,” Swan said, “maybe they need those things more than we do.”

  Josh’s first impulse was an incredulous laugh, but he held it in check. She was right. At least they had good heavy coats and gloves, and they were wearing thick socks and sturdy boots. Some of those scavengers had been a few threads away from their Genesis suits—except this was surely as far from the Garden of Eden as a human could fall.

  Swan walked around the wagon to Mule and settled the old horse down by calmly rubbing his nose. Still, he continued to make an ominous, worried rumbling.

  “Better get inside,” Josh told her. “Wind’s picking up again.”

  She came toward him, then stopped when Crybaby touched something hard in the mud. She bent down carefully, groped in the mud and came up with the dark oval mirror that somebody had dropped. The magic mirror, she thought as she straightened up again. It had been a long time since she’d peered into it. But now she wiped the mud off on the leg of her jeans and held it up before her, grasping it by the handle with the two carved masks that stared in different directions.

  “What’s that thing?” Aaron asked. “Can you see y’self in there?”

  She could only see the faintest outline of her head, and thought that indeed it did look like a swollen old gourd. She dropped her arm to her side—and as she did something flashed in the glass. She held it up again and turned so the mirror was facing in another direction; she hunted for the flash of light but couldn’t find it. Then she shifted, turning a foot or so to the right, and caught her breath.

  Seemingly less than ten feet behind her was the figure holding the glowing circle of light—close now, very close. Swan was still not quite able to make out the features. She sensed, however, that something was wrong with the face; it was distorted and deformed, but not nearly like her own. She thought that the figure might be a woman, just from the way whoever it was carried herself. So close, so close—yet Swan knew that if she turned around there would be nothing behind her but the shanties and alleys.

  “What direction is the mirror facing?” she asked Josh.

  “North,” he answered. “We came in from the south. That way.” He motioned in the opposite direction. “Why?” He could never understand what she saw when she looked into that thing. Whenever he asked, she would shrug her shoulders and put the mirror away. But the mirror had always reminded him of a verse his mother liked to read from the Bible: “For now we see in a glass darkly, but then face to face.”

  The figure with the glowing ring of light had never been so close before. Sometimes it had been so far away that the light was barely a spark in th
e glass. She didn’t know who the figure was, or what the ring of light was supposed to be, but she knew it was someone and something very important. And now the woman was close, and Swan thought that she must be somewhere to the north of Mary’s Rest.

  She was about to tell Josh when the face with the leprous, parchment-like flesh rose up over her left shoulder. The monstrous face filled up the whole glass, its gray-lipped mouth cracking open in a grin, one scarlet eye with an ebony pupil emerging from its forehead. A second mouth full of sharp-edged teeth opened like a slash across its cheek, and the teeth strained forward as if to bite Swan on the back of the neck.

  She turned so fast that the weight of her head almost spun her like a top.

  Behind her, the road was deserted.

  She lowered the mirror; she had seen enough for one day. If what the magic mirror showed her was true, the figure bearing the ring of light was very near.

  But nearer still was the thing that reminded her of the Devil on Leona Skelton’s tarot card.

  Josh watched Swan as she went up the cinder block steps into Glory Bowen’s shack, then looked north along the road. There was no movement but chimney smoke scattering before the wind. He regarded the wagon again and shook his head. He figured that Mule would kick the sauce out of anybody who tried to steal him, and there was nothing left to take. “That’s all our food,” he said, mostly to himself. “Every damned bit of it!”

  “Oh, I know a place you can catch some big ’uns,” Aaron offered. “You just gotta know where they are, and be quick to catch ’em.”

  “Quick to catch what?”

  “Rats,” the boy said, as if any fool knew that was what most of the people in Mary’s Rest had been surviving on for the last few years. “That’s what we’ll be eatin’ tonight, if you’re stayin’.”

  Josh swallowed thickly, but he was no stranger to the gamy taste of rat meat. “I hope you’ve got salt,” he said as he followed Aaron up the steps. “I like mine real salty.”

  Just before he reached the door, he felt the flesh at the back of his neck tighten. He heard Mule snort and whinny, and he looked toward the road again. He had the unnerving sensation of being watched—no, more than that. Of being dissected.

  But there was no one. No one at all.

  The wind whirled around him, and in it he thought he heard a squeaking sound—like the noise of wheels in need of grease. The sound was gone in an instant.

  The light was quickly fading, and Josh knew this was one place he wouldn’t walk the alleys at night even for a T-bone steak. He went into the shack and shut the door.

  Ten

  Seeds

  The hand revealed / Swan

  and the big dude / A decent

  wish / The savage prince /

  Fighting fire with fire

  Fifty-nine

  The hand revealed

  Swan awakened from a dream. She’d been running through a field of human bodies that moved like stalks of wheat before the wind, and behind her advanced the thing with the single scarlet eye, its scythe lopping off heads, arms and legs as it sought her out. Only her head was too heavy, her feet weighted down by yellow mud, and she couldn’t run fast enough. The monster was getting nearer, its scythe whistling through the air like a shriek, and suddenly she’d fallen over a child’s corpse and she was looking at its white hands, one clawing the earth and the other clenched into a fist.

  She lay on the floor of Glory Bowen’s shack. Embers behind the stove’s grate still cast a little light and a breath of heat. She slowly sat up and leaned against the wall, the image of the child’s hands fixed in her mind. Nearby, Josh lay curled up on the floor, breathing heavily and deeply asleep. Closer to the stove, Rusty lay sleeping under a thin blanket, his head on the patchwork pillow. Glory had done a fine job of cleaning and stitching the wounds, but she’d said the next couple of days would be rough for him. It had been very kind of her to let them spend the night and share her water and a little stew. Aaron had asked Swan dozens of questions about her condition, what the land was like beyond Mary’s Rest, and what all she’d seen. Glory had told Aaron to stop pestering her, but Swan wasn’t bothered; the boy had a curious mind, and that was a rare thing worth encouraging.

  Glory told them her husband had been a Baptist minister back in Wynne, Arkansas, when the bombs hit. The radiation of Little Rock had killed a lot of people in the town, and Glory, her husband and their infant son had joined a caravan of wanderers looking for a safe place to settle. But there were no safe places. Four years later, they’d settled in Mary’s Rest, which at that time was a thriving settlement built around the pond. There’d been no minister or church in Mary’s Rest, and Glory’s husband had started building a house of worship with his own hands.

  But then the typhoid epidemic came, Glory told them. People died by the score, and wild animals skulked in from the woods to gut the corpses. When the last of the community’s stockpile of canned food gave out, people started eating rats, boiling bark, roots, leather—even the dirt itself—into “soup.” One night the church had caught fire, and Glory’s husband had died trying to save it. The blackened ruins were still standing, because nobody had the energy or will to build it back. She and her son had stayed alive because she was a good seamstress, and people paid her with extra food, coffee and such to patch their clothes. That was the story of her life, Glory had said; that was how she’d gotten to be an old woman when she was barely thirty-five.

  Swan listened to the sound of the roving wind. Was it bringing the answer to the magic mirror’s riddle closer? she wondered. Or was it blowing it further away?

  And quite suddenly, as the wind faltered to draw another breath, Swan heard the urgent noise of a dog barking.

  Her heart thudded in her chest. The barking ebbed away, was gone—then began to swell again, from somewhere very near.

  Swan would know that bark anywhere.

  She started to reach over and rouse Josh to tell him that Killer had found his way, but he snorted and muttered in his sleep. She let him alone, stood up with the aid of the dowsing rod and walked to the door.

  The barking faded as the wind took a different turn. But she understood what it said: “Hurry! Come see what I’ve got to show you!”

  She put on her coat, buttoned it up to her neck and slipped out of the shack into the tumultuous dark.

  She couldn’t see the terrier. Josh had unbridled Mule to let the horse fend for himself, and he’d wandered off to find shelter.

  The wind came back, and with it the barking. Where was it coming from? The left, she thought. No, the right! She walked down the steps. There was no sign of Killer, and now the barking was gone, too. But she was sure it had come from the right, maybe from that alley over there, the same alley Aaron had taken her along to show her the pond.

  She hesitated. It was cold out here, and dark except for the glow of a bonfire a few alleys away. Had she heard Killer’s barking or not? she asked herself. It wasn’t there now, just the wind shrilling through the alleys and around the shacks.

  The image of the child’s frozen hands came to her. What was it about those hands that haunted her? she wondered. It was more than the fact that they belonged to a dead child—much, much more.

  She didn’t know exactly when she made the decision, or when she took the first step. But suddenly she was entering the alley, questing with Crybaby before her, and she was walking toward the field.

  Her vision blurred, her eye stinging with pain. She went blind, but she didn’t panic; she just waited it out, hoping that this wasn’t the time when her sight would go and not return. It came back, and Swan kept going.

  She fell once over another corpse in the alley and heard an animal growling somewhere nearby, but she made it through. And then there was the field stretched before her, only faintly illuminated in the reflection of the distant bonfire. She began to walk across it, the odor of the poisonous pond thick in her nostrils, and hoped she remembered the way.

  The barking ret
urned, from off to her left. She changed her direction to follow it, and she called, “Killer! Where are you?” but the wind snatched her voice away.

  Step by step, Swan crossed the field. In some places the snow was four or five inches thick, but in others the wind had blown it away to expose the bare ground. The barking ebbed and faded, returned from a slightly different direction. Swan altered her course by a few degrees, but she couldn’t see the terrier anywhere on the field.

  The barking stopped.

  So did Swan.

  “Where are you?” she called. The wind shoved at her, almost knocked her down. She looked back at Mary’s Rest, could see the bonfire and a few lanterns burning in windows. It seemed a long way off. But she took one more step in the direction of the pond.

  Crybaby touched something on the ground right in front of her, and Swan made out the shape of the child’s body.

  The wind shifted. The barking came again—just a whisper now, from an unknown distance. It continued to fade, and just before it was gone Swan had a strange impression: that the sound no longer belonged to an old, weary dog. It had a note of youth in it, and strength, and roads yet to be traveled.

  The sound was gone, and Swan was alone with the corpse of the child.

  She bent down and looked at the hands. One clawing the earth, the other clenched into a fist. What was so familiar about that?

  And then she knew: It was the way she herself had planted seeds when she was a little girl. One hand digging the hole, the other—

  She grasped the bony fist and tried to pry it open. It resisted her, but she worked at it patiently and thought of opening a flower’s petals. The hand slowly revealed what was locked in its palm.

  There were six wrinkled kernels of corn.

  One hand digging the hole, she thought, and the other nestling the seeds.