As quickly as it appeared, the face was gone. For a moment Kelly thought she had imagined it.
Had the man — the man she’d seen in her dreams, and in the mirror that night a month ago — followed her here?
No. This face had been younger.
A boy’s face.
And it had been real. Real, and somehow — in a way she didn’t understand — connected to her.
Her eyes swept the area again, and she caught sight of a footbridge a few yards up the canal. Without thinking, she hurried up the path and crossed the bridge.
She paused on the other side. There was still enough light so she could clearly make out a narrow track leading through the foliage. She hesitated, then made up her mind. It wouldn’t be fully dark for at least another half hour. Certainly it couldn’t take her more than a few minutes to find the boy.
She started along the path.
As she walked, a new sound came to her.
A sound that seemed to lead her on.
• • •
Amelie Coulton sat in the rocking chair on the porch of her shanty, a worn baby’s dress in her lap. Her fingers, nowhere near as clever as her mother’s, worked uneven stitches into the tear in the material — a tear her mother had told her she herself had put there seventeen years ago. As she gazed at the work, a feeling of hopelessness came over her. She was going to have to start all over again, and there were still so many holes in the garment that by the time she finally finished mending it, her baby would already be a year old.
If it survived being born, which would be any day now.
And if George kept his promise.
Usually, evening was Amelie’s favorite time in the marshland. At the end of the day, when she’d finished all her chores, and George had gone off to get drunk on moonshine with one of his friends, she could sit in her chair and listen to the wilderness around her. She never got lonely, even when George didn’t come home all night. She had the swamp to keep her company, and she never tired of watching the animals. Sometimes alligators would drift up close, haul themselves out on the mud next to the house and bask for a while. She would talk to them, and though she knew it was silly, sometimes she imagined that they were actually listening to her, understanding her.
Sometimes, if she had a little extra food, she’d toss one of the ’gators a bit of chicken, then watch as it contentedly crushed the bones and swallowed the whole thing.
But it was the sounds of the evening she liked best, and each day she looked forward to the setting sun, and the short minutes of quietude after the day creatures had gone to sleep but before the swamp’s nocturnal inhabitants had begun their own songs. Then the night music would begin, and Amelie would sit still, enjoying it, before picking up her endless mending.
Tonight, though, there was something different in the air, an expectant stillness that suggested that something was going to happen.
George must have felt it too, for he suddenly stepped out of the shanty’s door to stand beside her on the porch, his lifeless eyes peering out into the darkness. Amelie could feel the anger inside him, the anger that had almost made him slap her earlier, when she’d once more made him repeat his promise.
“He ain’t gettin’ my baby,” she’d said, her voice quavering as she spoke the words. “You ain’t givin’ him away like Tammy-Jo an’ Quint gave theirs!”
“You’re crazy,” George had told her a month ago, when the argument had begun. “You didn’t see nothin’ out there. That baby just died, Amelie. Ain’t nothin’ else happened to it at all!”
Then he’d told her she hadn’t seen anything out at the island at the far side of the swamp, that she must have dreamed the whole thing. And sometimes she’d half believed him, for when she went looking for the island, she wasn’t able to find it. But still she’d made him promise not to give her baby to the Dark Man.
“I cain’t promise nothin’,” he’d said at first. “Even if’n he’s real — an’ he ain’t — ain’t nothin’ I can do about him.”
“You promise,” Amelie had told him, her voice implacable. “You promise, or I’m gonna kill you myself. See if I don’t!”
And finally he promised. But ever since he’d made the promise — and she’d made him do it in front of Tammy-Jo, whose face had gone so pale Amelie had known right away she hadn’t dreamed anything at all — he’d been acting so scared, she’d almost been afraid he was going to run off and leave her alone.
And tonight, when she made him repeat the promise one more time, she thought he was going to hit her, just the way her daddy always did when he accused her of being sassy. But he hadn’t. Instead he just nodded his head, as if afraid to say the words, and had not said anything else. Now, as he stood on the porch, she could feel his anger turning into fear.
“Someone be comin’,” he murmured.
Amelie frowned, her eyes scanning the darkness, her ears searching for the sound of a boat in the strange silence of the evening. Though she saw nothing, a sense of dread began to fill her soul, and she felt her skin crawling.
At last, from the depths of the darkness, a shadow even blacker than those surrounding it emerged from the night.
The shadow became a boat, rowed silently by Jonas Cox, a boy Amelie had known all his life. But in the prow, standing erect, was the tall figure of the Dark Man, clad in black, his face obscured by his black shroud, the cloth pierced only by the holes through which he gazed. Amelie’s breath caught in her throat, and she thought her heart might stop beating.
The boat drifted to a stop in front of the shanty. For several long minutes time seemed to stand still as the black figure gazed steadily at George Coulton. Finally the Dark Man’s right arm came up, his black-gloved finger pointing at George.
Saying nothing, moving with the steady rhythms of an automaton, George Coulton climbed down from the porch of the shack and stepped into the boat. A moment later the boat disappeared back into the blackness of the night, the Dark Man still standing silently in its prow, and except for the fact that George was no longer there, Amelie wouldn’t have been certain that anything had happened at all.
Refusing to think about what it might mean, terror beating louder in her heart with every passing second, she forced herself to begin working once more on the tiny garment in her hands.
But even as she worked on it, the certainty grew within her that her baby would never wear it.
Unless …
A thought flickered in her mind, but she turned away from it as quickly as it came. Despite what she’d said, she didn’t want George to die.
• • •
The boat drifted to a stop, and Jonas Cox shipped the oars. He looked up at George Coulton, seated in the stern, seeing George’s bloodless face glowing ghostlike in the first light of the rising moon. Jonas could feel the fear that had seized George, and knew that the Dark Man, standing behind him, still had his eyes fixed on the boy Jonas had known all his life.
“You have disobeyed me,” the Dark Man said, and though he spoke softly, the words chilled Jonas.
“I didn’t—” George Coulton began, but before he could go on, the Dark Man spoke again.
“You belong to me. You do what I tell you. I did not tell you to marry Amelie Parish.”
“She were havin’ my baby,” George whimpered.
“My baby,” the Dark Man corrected him. “Your children are mine, as you are mine.”
“An’ I’m givin’ him to you,” George whined, desperate now.
“You promised your woman you wouldn’t,” the Dark Man stated. “You belong to me, and your children belong to me. It is why you live.”
George said nothing, his eyes widening as he began to realize what was going to happen to him.