Shade of Pale

by Kihn, Greg;

  Bobby’s expression changed. His eyes showed utter terror and disbelief, rapture was replaced by panic.

  His hands, working against the desperate will of his body, dug into the sides of his mouth until blood appeared.

  Then, as if in a dream, they began to pull back the skin.

  With the Banshee’s wail reaching new heights, Bobby’s hands began the dance of death. Completely against his will, he began to destroy himself.

  While Jukes and Fiona watched in horror, Bobby ripped his mouth open, unhinged his jaw, and began peeling his skin back up over his head. His hands worked with unnatural strength, like metal pliers against his soft flesh.

  He was turning himself inside out, the bloody inner skin reversing itself like an old, bloody overcoat.

  Blood flowed freely off him, muscles glistened, and a peek of white bone showed here and there. He hadn’t quite gotten the skin flap over his head when he stopped being alive.

  He crumbled to the ground in a bloody heap, lifeless and horrible as mutilated carrion.

  The corpse belched open and spilled its contents onto the ground. All that was Bobby emptied out.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  The song of the Banshee stopped.

  It faded gently from the air, gone like a cool breeze. The effect was like a change in air pressure. The wind returned; the insects began. Things eased.

  The Banshee did not change back into a young girl again. Her face remained the same terrible mask of sorrow that had destroyed Killian, Loomis, and now Bobby. Yet her tears flowed on as if she were sorry for it.

  The grievous angel stood before them. She raised her arms into the nighttime sky and began to dissipate like a cloud.

  O’Connor had watched the Banshee closely. He wore protective goggles and earplugs, but he heard it nevertheless. It penetrated and chilled his Irish blood as cold as a Belfast New Year.

  He had waited until the Banshee destroyed Bobby, for he knew that was Bobby’s destiny and he could not interrupt it. He hunkered down, in the shadow of the tree, with the leg bones in his hands and the cylinder between his legs. He put his gun on the wet turf next to him, where he could snatch it up quickly if needed.

  He held the femurs up, uttered a string of ancient Gaelic incantations, and beat the drum with all his might.

  The sound resonated though the night, along with O’Connor’s incantation, which he shouted at the sky. The Gaelic mixed with Latin. The two languages stumbled over each other in an awkward chant, casting a conjuration.

  The Banshee stopped disappearing. She looked in the direction of the drumbeat and wailed again, but this time the sound seemed arrested by the drumbeat and O’Connor’s baleful chant.

  The drum hummed and resonated as the human bones stimulated the skin covering it.

  Ta Toooommmmb. Ta Toooommmmb. Ta Toooommmmb.

  The skins vibrated, pounding a rhythmic tattoo into the sky, and the Banshee began to descend.

  Her hair moved with the invisible suction the drum created. Her head shrank, the eyes retracted, and the skin cleared. In a twinkling, the rose of her icy beauty bloomed again, and she became young.

  The Banshee wavered, her image distorting as if being viewed through shimmering heat waves.

  Then she was in front of O’Connor. He didn’t see her move. She just winked across the space between them. She didn’t glide or walk to get there; she just materialized at the new location. Then she was closer still; another wink, and her hands were reaching toward the drum.

  “Oh, my God!” Fiona cried. She suddenly realized what O’Connor was doing.

  He’s capturing the Banshee.

  Fiona remembered that in some cultures there existed old folkloric techniques for capturing a wayward spirit in an iron drum. Ghost catchers in the sixteenth century allegedly had employed this method. Somehow the soul found the vibrating metal drum irresistible and could be tricked into entering, and there it became stuck.

  While Fiona watched, the Banshee wavered again, becoming even less distinct as she moved toward the drum. The compelling rhythm resonated like faraway cannon fire.

  The air itself began to get thick, as if the supernatural forces on display were overloading. The pressure increased with the passage of each heartbeat/drumbeat.

  The atmosphere became oppressive; the air molecules felt heavy and full of electricity. They crackled with energy. Fiona found it hard to breathe; the air seemed too thick to pass into her lungs. She sucked it in, but there didn’t seem to be enough oxygen in it to sustain her. She felt as if she were drowning. Her ears popped.

  O’Connor began to chant higher, his voice modulating up like that of a crazed Benedictine monk, singing out the guttural phrases of two dead languages in time to the infernal drum. His voice distorted in the strange air. It sounded as if he were miles underwater, with thousands of tons of pressure per square inch closing around him.

  The incantation ended. O’Connor shouted at the Banshee in English but kept on pounding the drum.

  “We come! We come! We catch you in the iron drum!”

  The Banshee began to elongate; she was being sucked into the stainless-steel cylinder.

  “No!” Fiona screamed. “No! Don’t do it! Let her go!”

  The cadence of the bones striking the human skin had a mesmeric quality. The Banshee’s face distorted and she wailed a heartrending cry.

  Fiona saw that the Banshee was being pulled into the spirit catcher. The woman’s fear turned to pity for the Banshee, that her magical existence should stop here, at the hands of this horrible man.

  “We come! We come! We catch you in the iron drum!” O’Connor repeated, singsong.

  He shouted with his head thrown back, the veins on his neck bulging, talking in tongues, babbling his simple rhyme.

  Fiona’s fear reached a climax. Her heart pounded furiously, threatening to leap out of her chest and run away. She screamed, but the sound was instantly stifled in the turgid air.

  The Banshee continued to dissolve; her image now streamed into the drum, melting like watercolor paints down the drain. Fiona sensed a titanic unseen struggle.

  She wanted to move but couldn’t.

  O’Connor’s eyes were locked on the rapidly disintegrating form of the Banshee. His voice still clung to the drumbeats like water clinging to a windshield. He kept up the nonsense chant.

  “We come! We come! We catch you in the iron drum!”

  In a few more seconds he would have the Banshee. She would be trapped inside the drum until he let her out. It would be O’Connor’s ultimate moment of triumph. He had done what no other could.

  He had caught the Banshee!

  The bloody bitch is mine, at last, he thought.

  Just a few more seconds, that’s all it would take. Then she’d be on her way back to Ireland, where she belonged. Just a few more seconds and the deaths of his father and brother would be avenged. Just a few more seconds and the Black Rain would live again. Suppose he turned her loose on the oppressors back home? God knew they had the blood of women and children on their hands.

  Oh, the terrible possibilities!

  Revenge was at hand.

  The Banshee’s image became indistinct; it drifted into the drum like smoke being sucked through a fan.

  Jukes stared at the same place the local boy had stood so many years earlier, hitting Cathy and daring Jukes to do something about it. That was the scenario, repeated over and over again in their lives: Jukes does nothing while Cathy gets hurt. The bully challenges, Jukes backs down, ad infinitum.

  But no more.

  Except now, when he looked down at the dock he saw not the boy, but O’Connor.

  It looked to Jukes like the drum was somehow pulling the Banshee in, inhaling her, and it didn’t seem right.

  For the first time in his life Jukes felt absolutely no fear. He didn’t think but, rather, acted instinctively. Jukes bounded down the hill and launched himself at the man with the drum.

  From the corner of his eye
, O’Connor saw Jukes Wahler flying through the air at him. It all happened in the space between drumbeats.

  Jukes tackled O’Connor from the side while his arm was up, poised to strike the drum, hitting the big man in such a way that the bone was jarred loose from O’Connor’s left hand and went spinning across the ground to where it landed in front of Fiona.

  The drum rolled away, making a hollow thumping sound as it bounced downhill. It splashed into the lake, sending crazy ripples radiating over the surface. The moonlight reflected off the hundreds of shimmering little humps of water, all moving outward in formation.

  The Banshee, still attached to the drum, twisted and writhed as it rolled, struggling to free herself.

  She stopped fading. The air pressure changed.

  Jukes’s hand had been numb until the collision with O’Connor. But the impact sent a shock wave of pain through his body that threatened to render him unconscious.

  With superhuman determination, Jukes soldiered on—kept moving and stayed focused. He drove O’Connor downhill to the water’s edge.

  The painful hole Bobby had bored into Jukes’s hand seemed to radiate energy now. He transcended the pain.

  Jukes Wahler fought like a man with nothing to lose and the world to gain. He rammed his good fist into O’Connor’s face, putting the full weight of his body behind it. O’Connor turned and deflected a portion of the blow, and Jukes couldn’t swing his other hand.

  Jukes’s heart sank when he realized that his initial attack had done little but jar the drum loose. He hadn’t hurt O’Connor at all.

  Padraic recovered from the surprise quickly. He was, after all, a trained killer, a guerrilla commando with years of life-and-death experience, and Jukes, the good doctor, was no match.

  O’Connor kicked Jukes in the stomach and, when he doubled over, chopped down hard on the back of his neck.

  “You bastard!” O’Connor screamed. “Do you have any idea what you’ve done? I nearly had her! You fucking ruined everything!”

  Jukes fell and rolled into the water. O’Connor was on him instantly, raining blows.

  “I’ll kill you for this!”

  In water up to their waists, O’Connor held Jukes down.

  Stars swirled before his eyes like tiny tropical fish and he couldn’t breathe. Jukes faced death. Somewhere in his mind, the Banshee sang.

  Fiona ran toward Jukes and O’Connor. It all happened too fast—Jukes came out of nowhere; then he and the Irishman were in the water struggling. Jukes was hurt.

  Fiona charged toward them.

  Her rage was channeled by a single thought; it focused on saving Jukes.

  She watched as O’Connor held Jukes’s head under. She reached the water’s edge and splashed toward them desperately.

  She was distantly aware of the Banshee, rising above them with her hair streaming, watching O’Connor. Her mouth came open to sing.

  O’Connor heard the first notes of the Banshee’s death song and cringed. His earplugs had been knocked out in the struggle, the goggles were gone, and the drum now rolled in the lapping waves twenty feet away.

  Fiona punched O’Connor’s face. Then again, and again. She tore at him with her fingernails, but O’Connor held Jukes down like a machine. He endured Fiona’s blows, single-minded in his pursuit of drowning Jukes.

  Fiona used every pound of courage in her body and hit O’Connor as hard as she could in the nose. She thought she felt something break.

  Jukes had been under now for almost a minute. Fiona panicked and tried to pry O’Connor’s hands loose, but they were like iron.

  The Banshee sang high and clear, like an operatic declaration of vengeance. Her voice became excruciatingly loud in a matter of seconds.

  In one soaring, unreal glissando, she peaked.

  O’Connor’s heart exploded. His chest blew open in a red eruption that rocked the water. Fiona, sprayed with blood, frantically dived for Jukes, who’d gone under and stayed there.

  She found him immediately, bobbing just below the surface. Where O’Connor had been standing a moment ago now there were only parts of him, floating in the black water streaked with red.

  The Banshee was gone.

  George Jones and the local sheriff arrived just ahead of the ambulance. As they rounded the lake they saw a blinding light in the sky, hovering just above the lake. An unbelievable sound came from it, like a woman wailing as loud as a jet engine. As they drove closer it drowned out the sound of their own sirens.

  Now George could see the image of a luminous woman, hovering above the water, casting a blinding light. Two figures were plainly visible: a woman struggling with a man.

  “What the hell is that?” George said.

  The sheriff shrugged. “I don’t know, but it sure is loud.”

  They stopped their vehicles and ran toward the lake, despite the sound and light.

  George looked up just in time to see the man’s chest explode as if it had been hit with a hollow-point .57 Magnum slug. The man’s upper body disintegrated as the woman dived under the water.

  By the time George was close enough, he could recognize Jukes Wahler, bobbing to the surface in the woman’s arms.

  Fiona pulled Jukes toward the shore and looked up to see George Jones coming toward her.

  “Help me!” she cried. “He’s not breathing!”

  The paramedics from the ambulance were right behind George, and they carried Jukes to safety. Fiona followed them in a willful frenzy; George had to hold her back while the paramedics administered critical aid. Time stood still for her while Jukes struggled for life.

  After several anxious moments they revived him. The sound of his coughing brought tears of joy to her face.

  “Oh, God! Oh, my God,” she sobbed and fell into George’s arms. He comforted her.

  “Did you see Cathy?” she asked.

  George nodded. “They found her back up the hill. They’re taking care of her now. I don’t think she’s hurt too bad.”

  “The Banshee saved Jukes’s life She killed Bobby Sudden … and him.” Fiona pointed at the human debris floating in the water.

  “What was that thing in the sky? Did I really see that?”

  Fiona looked at George, her eyes glistening with tears. Her lower lip trembled, and she began to sob.

  The sheriff’s men gathered around Bobby Sudden; his steamy ruins had already begun attracting insects.

  Flashing red and blue lights filled the night.

  Jukes Wahler opened his eyes and looked down at himself surrounded by paramedics. He watched and wondered if he’d died. He was floating above the scene, out of his body, as light as air.

  He saw Fiona crying.

  I must be dead, he thought.

  The Banshee appeared next to him, a beautiful young girl again, the eternal tear glistening in her eye. She looked at Jukes and shook her head.

  Jukes realized that he was alone with the Banshee in her own universe. He’d left his body behind and entered the spirit world.

  She gazed into his eyes, past his heart, and into his soul. Jukes returned her gaze and saw himself clearly in the reflection, pitiful and helpless, and profoundly longing to be alive.

  That’s what she sees, he thought. She sees the real me, all of me. She sees the dark side. The hypocrite, the coward, the liar, the fool, everything.

  He panicked for a moment, realizing that everything about him was suddenly laid bare. His own fears and doubts were revealed to her as if they were nothing but an inconsequential passing cloud. To her, with the weight of centuries on her shoulders, that had to be what they seemed, as formless as clouds, drifting through one small corner of time. Insignificant. One microscopic frozen moment held against the infinity of her domain.

  But she also sees the good. That’s the saving grace.

  Jukes thought, Why do you walk the earth? Why can’t you be free?

  The mighty Banshee, the eternal avenger of womankind, silenced him with her soundless command.

  S
elf-realization flooded Jukes.

  The time had come, he realized, and he’d faced his own failures and fears. For so long he had tried to help others; now he was finally able to help himself.

  Physician, heal thyself.

  He realized the monstrous thing O’Connor had almost done. Destroying the Banshee would be destroying nature. She was the uncomplicated truth, unspoiled by logic, simple as fate.

  She pointed down at his body, and he understood it was not time for him to die yet. He had to return.

  Then she disappeared, a shadow exposed to light.

  Come back!

  But she was gone on a wisp of smoke, and there was nothing left but the hushed sigh of the wind across the water.

  Come back!

  Someone shouted, “He’s comin’ around! Looks like he’s gonna make it!”

  Jukes opened his eyes and saw Fiona elbowing her way through the paramedics.

  “Is Cathy OK?” he asked.

  Three people answered in unison, yes, she was.

  Fiona threw her arms around Jukes and said, “I love you.”

  Jukes managed a smile. “I love you, too. Can we go home now?”

  EPILOGUE

  After hours of surgery to repair his hand and an eternity in the recovery room, Jukes now had his chance to talk to Fiona and George.

  Fiona stood next to his hospital bed and explained to George and Jukes what she could. “Cathy’s already in detox,” she said.

  “Detox?”

  “Yeah. Bobby had addicted her to heroin. The medics found out when they treated her for her other injuries.”

  Jukes said, “Jesus. No wonder he could control her so easily.”

  “Well, it’s over now. Thank God she’s OK, and thank God you’re still alive.”

  “It must be our luck,” Jukes said.

  Fiona shook her head. “Luck had nothing to do with it. It was fate. Fate and the Banshee.”

  George raised an eyebrow. “You’re losin’ me. What does fate have to do with it?”

  Fiona held Jukes’s good hand. Her voice was warm and soothing.

  “The Banshee is a creature of destiny; she follows the lines of fate. You’ve heard that old saying that a butterfly flapping its wings in China affects the weather in New York. Well, that’s actually true in certain respects.