He could see the slack folds of Carl’s skin, see his sunken, fevered eyes, see his cracking fingernails.
He pushed his way into the brush, parting the grasses before him.
A moment later his eyes beheld the vision his mind had already seen.
Carl leaned against the tree, the baby held in his left arm as he clutched his gun in the trembling fingers of his right hand.
The gun was raised, its barrel pointing at Michael’s chest.
Michael paused, staring at the reality of the vision that had plagued him for so long, but now the fear he had always felt in the presence of the ancient man was gone.
“Get away from me,” Carl Anderson croaked, his voice rattling in his throat. “I’ll kill you.”
Michael’s eyes remained fixed on the old man. “You can’t kill me,” he heard himself say. “You know you can’t kill me. I’m already dead.”
Carl Anderson gasped as he heard the words, and stared up at the teenage boy whose eyes were fixed on him with a steadiness that made his heart pound.
“No,” he said, his voice taking on a pleading note now. “Leave me alone. I never hurt you. None of us ever hurt you.”
“Our souls,” Michael said. “You stole our souls.”
Carl’s eyes widened. The gun wavered in his hand as Michael came toward him. He tried to steady the revolver, tried to squeeze the trigger, but the boy’s eyes seemed to hold him in their own paralyzing grip, and as Michael moved steadily closer, Carl felt the gun slipping from his fingers. “No,” he muttered, clutching at the weapon as his heart began to race, pounding in his chest with a terrifyingly erratic rhythm that warned him of what was to come a split second before it happened.
As Michael reached out to him, and Carl’s fear turned into blind panic, a violent stab of pain slashed through his chest, shooting down into his arms and legs. The gun dropped from his fingers as his right hand fell to the ground.
The baby rolled onto the thick carpet of pine needles as Carl’s left arm went limp.
Pain tore through Carl’s head then, a blinding, searing agony that rent his sanity into shattered pieces a moment before he died.
As his mind collapsed, Carl saw demons rising up out of the nether world, coming toward him with pitchforks and torches, intent on torturing his body for eternity.
And an eternity, it seemed, in those last seconds before his death, as the demons fell upon him, ripping his skin from his muscles, jabbing sharp slivers beneath his fingernails and into his joints, tearing his limbs from his body and laying open his belly to spill his intestines onto the ground.
He screamed, flailing at the creatures that beset him, but his struggles were nothing more than the twitchings of a dying man, and though the Hell into which he had plunged seemed to him to go on forever, his body soon lay still beneath the pine tree.
In the silence that followed Carl’s death, Michael stared at the body with an odd detachment, as if it had nothing to do with him.
And then a voice spoke inside him.
Take back what is yours.
He crouched down next to Carl Anderson’s body, then ripped open his shirt to expose the old man’s sunken chest. Nothing was left of the robust figure that the man had been only yesterday, for today all the years he had stolen had come back to claim him.
His ribs, brittle and soft, crumpled as Michael touched his chest, and when the boy’s fingers tore into his flesh, the desiccated tissue gave way as if it had been cooked.
Michael ripped through the old man’s sternum, tearing open his chest cavity, reaching inside the man, finally feeling what he was searching for.
A tiny fragment of bloody tissue, resting just above the old man’s lungs, close by his heart.
Michael ripped it loose, and then, his hands covered with blood, stuffed the withered vestige of Carl Anderson’s thymus into his mouth.
He swallowed the bit of tissue, his stomach heaving as he choked, but then the spasm passed.
A strange warmth he had never felt before spread out through his body, and he remained where he was, letting the aura envelop him, letting it expand into his mind, and fill him up.
The emptiness he’d felt all his life was suddenly gone, and he felt whole.
For the first time in his life Michael began to cry.
He felt the hot tears running down his cheeks, tasted the salt of them with the tip of his tongue.
He let the tears run free, washing away the pain of sixteen years.
Only when his tears were finally exhausted did he pick up the baby, cradling it in his arms.
“It’s all right,” he whispered. “Nothing’s going to hurt you now.”
The baby began to cry, but Michael held it close, kissing it gently on the forehead, and soon its sobbing began to die away. At last, the baby calm in his arms, Michael left the thicket and went to the edge of the water.
Setting the baby gently on the ground, he washed himself clean of Carl Anderson’s blood.
Finally he picked the baby up again and started making his way through the swamp toward the tour headquarters.
He was whole again, and once the baby in his arms was safe, he knew what it was he had to do.
He and Kelly, together.
26
Mary Anderson was in her bedroom, staring at the last box that still remained unopened from the move from Atlanta. She knew what was in them — old albums, ledgers remaining from Ted’s failed attempt to start a business three years ago, her own report cards from grade school and high school — all the things everyone always saved but rarely looked at. She toyed briefly with the idea of sorting through the box, but quickly realized that in the end she would simply repack it anyway. She picked it up to take it out to the garage, where it would join her father-in-law’s own collection of memorabilia on the metal storage shelves that lined the south wall. But as she passed through the living room, the doorbell chimed softly, and she set the box down next to the sofa. She opened the door to find Barbara Sheffield standing on the porch, an air of anxiety surrounding her that made Mary’s welcoming smile fade quickly into a worried frown. “Barbara? What is it? What’s happened?”
Barbara fleetingly wondered if she shouldn’t simply turn around and go back home. But after last night and this morning, when the thoughts that had been growing in her mind ever since Jenny’s funeral had coalesced into a deep-seated conviction, she’d known she had no choice.
She had to talk to Mary Anderson, had to find out the truth of Kelly’s origins.
If Mary even knew.
She hadn’t called first, hadn’t wanted to tell Mary why she was coming. After all, how would she feel if one of her friends called her up to announce that she was Michael’s real mother?
A stranger calling with such an announcement would be one thing — indeed, ever since she and Craig had adopted Michael, she’d always been prepared for the possibility that at some point her son’s natural mother might appear. She would have been able to deal with that, for at least she would know that Michael had no relationship with such a person.
But this was different, for Barbara had a relationship to Kelly. What if Mary thought she was planning to lay claim to her daughter?
Still, Barbara felt she simply had to know, had to lay all the doubts in her mind to rest.
“I need to talk to you, Mary,” she said at last. “I know it’s going to sound crazy, but I’ve been having the most awful thoughts. I can’t seem to shake the idea that Kelly might be my daughter, that maybe Sharon didn’t die when she was born.” Speaking the thoughts out loud for the first time, she realized how bizarre they sounded. “I know it sounds crazy,” she went on, stumbling on her own words now. “It’s just — well, there’s so many little things — the way she looks … And Amelie Coulton … you know what she said at the funeral—” Her eyes flooded with tears and her voice turned into a choking sob. “Oh, Mary, I don’t know. It’s all just so awful for me. I feel like I’m coming apart, and I don’t know what to do.…”