by Dan Wells
Would a fire-based Withered need a coat in the summer? Did that make any sense at all?
I stopped for another light and looked back again. He was still there, and closer.
And talking to someone I couldn’t see. I couldn’t hear him, but his mouth was moving almost constantly.
I had to consider the possibility that he was a completely different Withered I didn’t know about yet. If Rain was gathering an army, who knew how many there were in town?
I reached another corner and on a whim, turned left, away from the main drag. If he still followed me here then it wasn’t a coincidence; he was definitely following me. I realized I was holding my breath and forced myself to breathe normally. I walked past a car dealership bathed in light, and then beyond it to a row of brick apartments and repair shops that were smothered in darkness which was broken only by a handful of scattered street lamps. Two blocks later the road ended at a wide dirt parking lot and the edge of a canal rimmed by a battered chain-link fence. I glanced behind me; the man was still there. Closer than ever.
And I’d brought myself to the middle of nowhere, without any help in sight.
I started running, and the man ran after me. All pretense was gone now. My heavy backpack bounced against my spine, and I tried to figure out where I could go. Would witnesses be enough to deter him, or would I need an actual defense? I was in good shape—I could run—but I wasn’t a fighter. That’s not how I killed them. I watched them and studied them and found out their weak points, and then used those to make them helpless. I killed with time and secrecy. In a straight-up fight with a grown man, I would inevitably lose.
I risked a look behind me but it was too late—the man was just a few yards back, his footsteps in the gravel melding with mine so I couldn’t hear them. He wasn’t calling out to me, which meant he wasn’t trying to tell me something, but as he drew closer I could hear him still muttering under his breath—short, angry growls between labored gasps for air. I lowered my head and pushed myself harder, trying to reach what looked like a bar or pool hall at the end of the road. But before I could get there, he caught hold of my backpack and yanked it backward; I lost my footing and tumbled to the ground. He jumped on me immediately, kicking me in the side of the head and then dropping to his knees to punch me three times in the stomach. I doubled over in pain, my eyes bursting with light as I reeled from his kick, and I lost track of what was happening. I regained my senses just in time to realize that he had picked me up, and I let out an incoherent cry as he tossed me over the chain link fence. I landed on sharp rocks and thistles and rolled painfully down the hill toward the canal.
“Kill you,” the man muttered. “She says I have to kill you.”
I groaned in pain, feeling like my arm had broken in the tumble. I heard the fence clank as he jumped over it, and felt a cascade of gravel against my face and arms as he started down the hill toward me. I braced my arms underneath me and pushed myself up; I guess it wasn’t broken, then, but it hurt like hell.
“She says I have to kill you,” the man repeated.
“Who says?”
He kicked at me again, but the ground was unstable and a rugged bush disrupted his footing, giving me just enough time to throw myself out of the way. I tumbled a few more feet closer to the water, as black as ink in the darkness.
“Who says you have to kill me?” I gasped.
“The Dark Lady,” he said. His voice was ragged, like he’d been screaming. He picked his way closer, through the rocks and thorns. “She said I have to do it. She said I have to drown you.” He lunged for me, and I tried to move again, but the ground gave way under my feet; I collapsed to the rocks and he clamped his hands down, one on my arm and one on my neck. “I don’t want to do it, but she says I have to.”
I swung my free hand up to beat at his face, but he ignored it and dragged me down to the edge of the water; I could hear it burbling, an innocent sound made horribly ominous by its inescapable proximity.
“You don’t have to kill me.” Was the Dark Lady Rain? Did it even matter right now? My face was pressed hard against the rocks, so close to the water I could feel the moisture through the stones.
“She told me I have to.”
“Ignore her.”
“I can’t!” he screamed. He forced me closer to the edge of the canal, millimeter by millimeter. “She’s everything!”
I pressed my free arm into the water, bracing myself so he couldn’t push me further. “I can help you,” I said. “I know what the Dark Lady is—take me to her and I can help you get rid of her.”
“I can’t stop myself!”
“Hey!” a new voice shouted down from the road above us. And another followed: “What’s going on down there?”
“Somebody help me!” The plea came not from my throat, but from my attacker’s. “She wants me to kill him!” He shoved me closer to the water, the sharp rocks scraping across my face. I forgot all hope of talking and simply fought back with all my strength, kicking and wriggling and doing everything I could to escape. He slammed my head into the gravel, and then shoved me in the water. Sight and sound seemed to disappear, and I choked on the water that flooded my mouth midscream. I flailed helplessly, my head trapped in an iron grip below the water—and then suddenly the hands that held me disappeared. I exploded out of the water in a desperate lunge, spitting out filth and gasping for air. A cluster of figures stood around me, and I struck at them blindly, but one of them caught my arms.
“Easy, pal, easy. We’re here to help you.”
“What?”
Another man grabbed my backpack and hauled me up onto dry land. I smelled smoke. Something was beating at the water, splashing wildly in the middle of the canal.
“He ran away when we got down here,” said the man beside me. “Dove right in the water before we could grab him.” Strong hands slapped me on the back, and I coughed up more water. “You okay?”
I coughed again. “I think so.” My attacker reached the other side of the canal and climbed up on the opposite bank.
“Bastard got away,” said another man. “What was he doing, trying to kill you?”
“I don’t know,” I said. Could I tell them the truth? “Just mug me, I think.”
“You gotta watch out in this neighborhood,” said a man.
“You get a good look at him?” said another. “I’m calling the cops, you can give ’em a statement.”
“No,” I said quickly, easing myself to my feet. “No cops.” If this was a Withered, I’d rather investigate it myself—not to mention that I didn’t have any ID. “It was nothing, we don’t need to report this, I’m fine.”
“You nuts?”
“I’m fine,” I said again. I tried to see my rescuers in the moonlight, but it was too dark to make out anything more than a few pale silhouettes. At least one of them was dressed like a biker, and I guessed that they’d come from the bar I hadn’t quite reached in my sprint to escape. “I’d rather not, um, get the law involved in this.”
The man beside me grew suddenly wary. “You mixed up in drugs or something?”
“It’s not that,” I said, “I just don’t have any ID, you know?” Maybe they’d understand drifting, if nothing else. “Just staying off the grid.”
“I hear that,” said another man. “Come on, let’s get you back up to the road.”
They helped me up the hill, and the climb convinced me that I hadn’t broken anything. I was soaked, though, and probably scraped all to pieces. They walked me to the bar, and I got a better look at them—all adult men, all from various walks of blue-collar life. They tried to buy me some food to warm me up, but all the bar had was hot wings, so I ate the carrot sticks and assured them that I was fine. I could walk, and I had a place to stay. They gradually accepted my thanks, and when they finally wandered back to their own disparate business I left the bar and walked the rest of the way back to the mortuary. No one followed me.
It wasn’t until I reached my room and stripped of
f my wet clothes that I saw the back of my backpack:
Two handprints, right where one of the men had grabbed it to pull me from the canal, burned into the nylon fabric, as clear as day.
CHAPTER 4
There is a subset of serial killers called the “visionary killers”: men and women who kill not out of greed or hunger or vengeance or lust or anything else that drives us, but because they believe that a higher power told them to. David Berkowitz, better known as the Son of Sam, was one of these. He killed eight women in New York City in the summer of 1976. He believed that his neighbor Sam was a demon, sending messages through a dog, forcing Berkowitz to kill. He didn’t want to—he sent letters to the police begging them to stop him—but what else was he going to do? The dog told him to kill, so he killed. There was nothing he could do about it.
Another visionary killer was a man named Herbert Mullin, who heard voices telling him that the Earth needed blood sacrifice to prevent a devastating earthquake. He called this “singing the die song,” and believed that some of the voices came from his father, some from heaven, and some from the victims themselves. He didn’t want to kill, but if he didn’t then the whole continent would fall into the ocean and millions more would die instead. When the voices told him to kill, he killed. And there was nothing he could do about it.
And now a man had tried to kill me.
What if the Dark Lady my attacker had talked about was Rain? What if she was a Withered with some kind of mind control, who drowned people not through some crazy, impossible, supernatural method, but simply by telling this man to drown people in the canal, and then return them to their homes? Why? Who knows? Obviously they gained something valuable by doing so. The problem that made Withered so hard to hunt was that the things they gained were so different, and through such different means, than a regular human. The first one I’d met, my neighbor Mr. Crowley, had been replacing his failing body parts by stealing them from other people. How was a police officer with no knowledge of the supernatural supposed to figure that out?
And how did the fire fit into it? My backpack had two perfect handprints burned into it, a right and a left, but the man who attacked me had never grabbed my backpack with both hands—his left hand had always been solidly on my neck. The man who’d used two hands had been one of my rescuers. Had I been saved from one Withered by another one? Had he known what he was doing? Had either of them known who I was? Then why hadn’t he identified himself? Or was it all some implausible coincidence?
I needed to find them. I’d gotten a brief look at my attacker, at least from a distance, and I’d seen all four of my rescuers up close. Was only one of them a Withered, or were they all working together? What in the bloody hell was going on in Lewisville?
I couldn’t just run off and spend the day looking. I had a job now, and I needed to keep it if I wanted to maintain my access to the dead bodies that were sure to start appearing all over the city. I had to keep Margo happy, and that meant I had to be a model employee.
One of the two doors in my side room led outside, and the other led into the mortuary. I let myself in early the next morning and showered in the back room before getting dressed and showing myself around. It was hard to move after the last night’s beating, but my bruises were all covered by clothes or my longish hair, so at least I wouldn’t have to answer any hard questions. The mortuary had a different layout than the one I’d grown up in, but even so, it was achingly familiar. The chapel, the embalming room, even the supply closet was a tangible, almost delectable reminder of my life growing up, and the times I’d spent in silence and solitude, carefully grooming the dead on their way to whatever awaited them beyond the grave. I hoped it was nothing, because that was exactly what I longed for: silence, blackness, and peace. An end to all trouble.
I pulled Kathy Schrenk’s body out of the refrigerator and examined it, looking for any evidence I could find of how she had died, or that suggested a Withered might have done it, but I didn’t see anything. I double-checked everything, just to be sure, even going so far as to cut a few slits on the body’s back to take a look at the pooled, dead blood, but there was nothing out of the ordinary. I shook my head and put her back in the fridge. It was almost time for the workday to start, and there was no sense being caught messing with corpses on my very first day on the job. I found the custodial closet, neatly arranged, and got to work in the embalming room, wiping down all the counters and scrubbing all the tools until they shined. I washed the tables, the walls, and the handles on the doors, and was halfway through a meticulous mopping of the floor when Margo arrived.
“Morning, Robert.”
“Morning,” I said.
She surveyed the spotless room and nodded, obviously satisfied but seeing no apparent need to state it out loud. “When you’re done in here, help me out in the chapel. Kathy’s funeral’s at noon.”
We vacuumed the chapel and dusted the pews and curtains, and when Jasmyn arrived she and I washed the windows while Margo finalized and printed a stack of paper programs, folding them in half with a ruler for a crisp, perfect edge. Harold arrived at 10:30 with flowers, and Kathy’s family a few minutes later—no husband or children, as she’d had none, only the one sister, just as single as Kathy had been. Carol Schrenk. They’d been twins, like my mom and my aunt, and I helped as she and Margo gave the final, reverent touches to Kathy’s hair and makeup and clothing. At eleven I went back to my room to change into my suit, only to realize that I’d still been wearing it when the Dark Lady’s acolyte had thrown me into the canal, and it was still torn and muddy. I found my best jeans and my only other collared shirt and hoped that Lewisville was enough of a redneck town for that to count as fancy clothes. Margo frowned when she saw me, but nearly half of the men who arrived for the funeral were wearing the same, so I fit in well enough.
“I don’t want you to fit in,” said Margo, taking me aside. “You’re an employee of my mortuary, and I want you to stand out as a formal and respectful representative of that business.”
“My suit got a little messed up,” I said. “First paycheck I get, I’ll buy a new one.”
“I can find you a new one,” she grumbled. “Just next time give me some warning.”
Jasmyn and I stood in the back while Carol gave a tepid eulogy, and then an ancient friend of Kathy’s stood up to give a warbling rendition of “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” At the end, Margo stood up to give some closing remarks, which apparently she never does. Jasmyn’s jaw practically dropped to the floor.
“I suppose you could say that most of these funerals are for friends of mine,” said Margo. “I probably shouldn’t get up and talk at any of them, but Kathy was an employee, and a good one, and I respect that.” She held the sides of the lectern—not tightly, like she needed it for support, but firmly, almost as if the lectern needed her. “Kathy never missed a day of work when it counted. She had a way of knowing, like some kind of sixth sense, exactly when we’d be busy and when we wouldn’t, and somehow she managed to be healthy on all the right days. Kept your friends and neighbors looking pretty for their funerals. She was here when you needed her.” Margo looked out over the audience, and I thought she might be searching for somebody specific. She didn’t find the person, and sighed. “But all things have to end eventually, I guess. We just do the best we can until it happens.” She paused again. “Thanks for coming. We’ll see you at the cemetery.”
In the movies it’s always raining at the cemetery, and everyone’s dressed in black with big black umbrellas. We drove there in the scorching Arizona sun and stood by the grave while the wind whipped curled flurries of dust around our feet. The open grave was surrounded by green carpets of fake grass and topped with a lowering device: an open metal frame with a pair of straps across the middle to support the casket. My mom always used to make fun of the name—couldn’t they come up with something better than “lowering device”—but it never bothered me. What else were they going to call it? It was a device that lowered caskets.
A few feet away, the cemetery had set out twenty or thirty folding chairs, and the small crowd of mourners sat in the sun and the wind while a local pastor said some basic stuff about life and death, and then ended with a prayer.
Why do we do graveside services? We just got out of the funeral literally fifteen minutes ago; we’ve said all the same things, spouted all the same trite homilies, invoked all the same blessings of all the same deities. It’s unnecessary, but I suppose that’s not the same thing as being pointless. We’re human beings—we need ceremony. We need to commemorate things. Just as I liked to brush a dead body’s hair, trim its nails, and prepare it for the end, other people liked to stand by the grave and bid the body farewell.
The pastor prayed, and the sister cried, and Jasmyn put her hair into a bun with a pen from her back pocket, and the groundskeeper waited about forty yards away, leaning on the side of a faded yellow backhoe and sipping a soda from a fat white cup from a gas station. The wind blew, and the clouds moved, and somewhere in the distance trucks hurried down a highway. The graveside service ended, the mourners trickled away, and I cranked the lever on the lowering device so the bars in the frame turned, and the straps unspooled, and the casket lowered into the cement box waiting at the bottom of the hole. When it reached the bottom we disconnected the straps from one side of the frame and pulled them out the other side; the casket sat on raised bumps in the box, so the straps could slide out easily from underneath it. We stowed the lowering device and the folding chairs in a flatbed truck, and pulled away the green carpets to expose the bare dirt around the top of the grave. I rolled them carefully, keeping the dull red dirt from smearing the clean top surface. The groundskeeper brought the backhoe, lowered the lid of the cement box down into the grave, then threw his empty soda cup in after it and started filling the hole with dirt. Harold and Margo rode home in the hearse while Jasmyn drove me in her car. We never said a word.