“What about the… um… other?”
“The manitou?”
“I guess maybe we’re both in here. Don’t know how that’s going to work out, but for right now I’m calling the damn shots. Me and nobody else.” He tapped his own chest. “Heart’s still beating. Wounds heal pretty darn fast. Don’t ask how. Guess we’re alive or close enough. And I guess we’ll try and figure some way of getting along. Both of us sharing the same suit of skin and bones. Funny old world. Point is that this man — your friend here — saved us both. Me and the manitou. He could have killed us, but he didn’t. And he tried not to kill any of us. He offered us a chance.”
Lucky Bob stood up, and as he did so his smile went away as he looked around at the last of the undead. There were eleven of them, and each was covered with blood. Their eyes blazed with unbanked hatred.
“Well, come on, you yellow-bellied sons of whores,” growled Lucky Bob. “This is my goddamn town.”
The undead howled with blood fury and rushed toward him.
Grey could not believe what he saw, what he witnessed. The Harrowed Lucky Bob Pearl brought the guns up and fired.
Fired.
Fired.
His guns bucked in his hands eleven times. And eleven undead heads snapped backward from the impacts. Eleven pairs of feet lost all sense; eleven bodies crumpled to the ground. And all of it in the space of a few ragged heartbeats. The gunshots echoed like thunder and then faded to a ghastly silence.
“My goddamn town,” repeated Lucky Bob.
Then the Harrowed turned from the pile of corpses and walked over to where Aleksander Deray lay crushed and broken. Ruined, but still alive, and Grey could see that the terrible damage was already healing. Soon the necromancer would rise once more.
“Tell me, you miserable piece of cow shit,” said Lucky Bob, “how does one kill a necromancer? Hmm? ’Cause I aim to do it if I have to cut you to pieces or burn down this whole town around you. I will do it, I swear to whatever gods there may be. You made me kill my own daughter, do you know that? You made me shoot my Jenny in the heart.”
Grey wanted to tell him — to insist — that Lucky Bob had not done that. The whalebone corset had deflected his bullet. But he looked at the ragged scar on Lucky Bob’s chest. And he remembered the scar on Jenny’s chest. It had been between her breasts, and in the heat of their passion Grey had kissed that scar.
That’s when he understood. That’s when he understood so many things.
Death isn’t the end, she had said.
At the point of death a manitou could enter a body and take possession of it. Heal it. Restore it to life, and then share it with the soul of the murdered person.
A manitou could do that. He’d seen it firsthand with Lucky Bob.
Was that it? Like father like daughter? The indomitable Pearls? Both of them… Harrowed.
And Annabelle? How did she fit into the picture?
Even as he wondered about it, Grey knew. She was every bit as strong as Jenny. And she was so much like her. In personality, perhaps in spirit. Had they bonded somehow? Become one woman? If so, then no possessing manitou stood a chance.
It had to be. After all, hadn’t those lips spoken with the voice of both Jenny and Annabelle? Even as he thought that, he saw a pale shape rise from the mud behind Looks Away. Her face and hair were filthy and her clothes were torn, but her eyes were filled with a light that even death could not dim. She came to him, and Looks Away and Lucky Bob fell back in surprise. The Sioux looked close to breaking. Lucky Bob’s eyes filled with tears.
Jenny paused and touched her father’s face. “No,” she said in a voice that was equal parts Jenny and Annabelle, “we will deal with him.”
Deal with him.
“Annabelle…,” Grey said weakly. “It’s okay… I’m ready…” He coughed up a gout of blood. “Whatever you… need to… do… I deserve it.”
The Harrowed that was both Annabelle and Jenny stood there and smiled down at him. The other ghosts appeared around her. His soldiers, his men. His friends who he had failed. They were all smiling.
Those smiles were a terrible thing to see. They were without mercy. They were the smiles of beings that had walked too long in the valley of the shadow. They were the smiles of the dead.
“Take him,” said Annabelle/Jenny. “Take him. Make it hurt. Make it terrible. Make it last.”
The ghosts let loose a dreadful howl as they rushed forward. Grey wanted to close his eyes but he did not. After all the betrayal he could not deny them that. He nodded to them as they reached with cold, dead hands. The ghosts rushed past him. Aleksander Deray screamed as the ghosts fell upon him. The scream rose and rose and rose, filling the air, shattering the storm, tearing apart the clouds, rending the fabric of the world.
The ghosts did not touch Grey. But they tore the necromancer’s soul from his body and dragged it down through the mud into the earth and down to Hell itself. Deray’s scream lingered for a long time, a stain on the day.
It was done.
Done.
And Grey knew that he was done, too. Now it was his time to make that long journey down into the burning Pit. Like Deray, his time had come to pay for his crimes.
In his shattered chest, Grey’s heart beat once. Twice.
A third time. Like the ringing of a fractured bell. Slower with each beat.
Brother Joe knelt beside him and made the sign of the cross in the air. He was weeping.
So was Looks Away.
And behind him was another figure, another woman. Voluptuous, with dark hair and emerald green eyes, and an inner light that burned with blue-white purity. Veronica.
Then she came and knelt down, pushing Brother Joe out of the way. She. Annabelle. Jenny. Both of them in one. She bent down to kiss his face, his eyes, his lips.
“Death isn’t the end,” she whispered, and then she said, “I love you.”
He could only manage one more word.
“Love…”
It was enough. His heart beat again. And again.
And then no more.
Grey Torrance felt himself float free of the broken shell, and a curtain of darkness fell over him, over the world, over everything.
Epilogue
The summer burned away and fall came early to Paradise Falls. It was short and harsh and followed by a bitter winter. Snows fell deep and often and winds howled through the canyons and clefts.
But the winds were the winds. No spirits or demons lent their voices to those screams.
When spring came, it too was early. Rains fell heavily. No frogs or snakes. By mid-April there was green grass in the fields and flowers exploding along the sides of the trails.
The new bridge was strong and wagons rumbled across it every day, bringing supplies from all over the region. Bringing families of farmers. Bringing miners and a legion of scientists and their apprentices to work at the big factory Doctor Saint had built. Every store and building and house in Paradise Falls wore new coats of paint, and every person wore the finest of clothes. Larders were full and no one wanted for a thing.
The story of the richest find of ghost rock, gold, platinum, and other precious metals was news around the world. Hopeful prospectors flooded the town, but not a single one of them seemed able to find a good place to stake a claim. And no one in town seemed willing to explain just exactly where they’d dug up all those rocks and metals. Paradise Falls was a happy town, but a secretive one. It kept itself to itself.
Of a Sunday, though, everyone in town was in church, weeping for the dead, and thanking God for their salvation, and their bounty.