The rain sluiced off them as Alfie bent and whispered something in the boy’s ear, then stood and resumed his vigil. Benjy tucked his hands into his pockets as if he might be walking home from school, and quick-stepped to the sidewalk in front of the police station. He turned left and hurried away.
“No,” Violet said.
“What’s that, hon?” The waitress had returned. She slid a glass of water onto the table.
Violet thrust her fingers down into her blouse, plucked out whatever dollars were there, tossed them on the table, and slid out of the booth, nearly knocking the waitress over.
“I’m sorry, I have to go.”
She was halfway to the door when she realized her shoes were missing, forcing her to dart back and duck under the table to retrieve them. Dirty and disheveled, she knew she must be a spectacle, but it didn’t slow her down.
“Sorry,” she said again.
The waitress wore a sad smile. “Good luck, sweetie.”
Violet rushed out with boots in hand.
The wind had picked up. The rain slashed down at an angle, so heavy it felt vengeful, as if she’d angered it by taking the time to get dry. Her feet splashed in puddles as she raced in pursuit of that little boy, but it didn’t take her long to catch up to him. He might be stronger than ordinary children, but his legs weren’t any longer. She followed along as he turned a corner, past a butcher’s and a hardware store. Back on the main street, there was a bakery and clothing store and even a little bookshop, but she’d found what seemed the more practical, rudimentary block in this little town.
The boy crossed the street toward a Union 76 gas station, cut across the parking lot, and made his way to what appeared to be a deep gully. He vanished down into the gully, and Violet broke into a puddle-splashing run to make sure she didn’t lose him, praying there’d be no broken glass in the parking lot. A man behind the counter inside the station glanced up from a magazine. He looked at her as if she were out of her mind, and maybe shewas, but when she got to the edge of the gully, she crept slowly, boots still in hand, not making a sound above the wind and rain.
A shallow brook rushed along the bottom of the gully. The water flowed into a concrete culvert, a tube about five feet in diameter. She poked her head up, trying to make out where the water might come out, but it looked as if the culvert passed under the road and then beneath several railroad tracks before running out into another gully quite a ways off.
It would be dark down there, where the water flowed. No sunlight at all.
She watched Benjy splash into the brook and dart into the culvert, so small he didn’t need to duck, and then she sat on her behind and forced her wet feet into her too-tight boots, picturing in her mind the moment Alfie had whispered instructions to that child—words that had sent him here. Sent him down into the dark.
Words for their masters.
Punished by the rain, she slid down into the gully and managed to stop herself before her boots would have splashed into the brook. They were already wet and ruined, but the water would be cold, and that would have been the last straw. She hurried along the edge of the brook, eyes narrowed against the rain, trying to peer into the utter darkness of the culvert. The concrete throat yawned wide. The first few feet allowed the dim gray daylight to enter, but beyond that, she could see nothing, and that was where the boy had gone.
Instinct had made Violet rush down after him—partly in fear for him and partly out of the need to learn more about the monsters—but her steps began to slow, and then she stopped, staring at the dark. The culvert’s mouth whispered with the voice of the brook, but something else moved in the dark, heavy and wet and waiting. A shudder of despair passed through her.
“Benjy!” she called. “Come out of there! Don’t let them have you like this.”
Back in the darkness of the culvert, something scoffed.
Flushed with self-recrimination, she took a step backward. Her right foot plunged into the brook. Violet swore, shaking the foot as she pulled it out of the water, angry and humiliated. The creatures couldn’t come out. That much must have been true or they’d have killed her by now. But they had the child in there, and even if he served them, he wasn’t one of them. Not as long as he could still endure daylight.
“Elias?” she called.
Her voice echoed around the culvert, thrown back at her from within, as had so many of the words she’d spoken to her husband. Guilt tried to slither into her heart. She pushed it away, but still it left its stain behind like the slime trail of a snail’s passage. Elias had been so charming at first, and she had fallen for him so easily. Every time he had come to the club to hear her sing, she had watched him with a fascination that reflected his own for her. His presence at any table immediately put those around him at ease, made them laugh and feel befriended, taken into the embrace of his confidence. When she’d allowed him to seduce her, it had been because he seemed to encompass both the world she knew and the life for which she’d always yearned. The perfect mate—someone whose eyes gleamed with the fullness of his love for her, and yet who shared her dreams. She thought ofthatElias, and felt ashamed at the way her love for him had withered and died, and the way her heart had danced as she’d fallen in love with Malcolm, with his face and his heart and his voice, and now with the raw humanity of him. Hands, mouth, gentleness, and exquisite roughness in equal measure.
Guilt.
She owed Elias nothing. Not that guilt, not her fidelity, not her gratitude.
But she called to him again. “Elias?”
Something moved in the darkness. Even above the sound of the rain plinking into the brook and the hush of the water flowing past, she heard it shifting inside the culvert. Maybe more than one something.
Then he spoke. “Go away, Violet. You can still run. Leave Malcolm, leave Maggie, and run. Nobody will follow.”
She smiled, barely aware it showed her teeth. Not a friendly smile. “Nothing new there. I should go away, and you won’t pursue me.”
A pause, and then, “You know this is different. Don’t be stupid. I’m not… I’m not myself now. But sometimes I can stillthink.”
Violet took two steps closer to the culvert’s opening. Something scraped against concrete, and she pictured the long fingers of the Morák. She had left the shotgun on the floor of the back seat of their stolen vehicle, thinking she couldn’t walk around town carrying it, but that maybe they could go back for it later. Now she wished like hell that she’d found a way to carry it with her. With every inch she drew nearer to that opening, the sick feeling in her gut grew. Her breath hitched in her throat. Her thoughts fluttered into dark places, the worst moments of her life, when she felt the most helpless.Evil, she thought.This is what it’s like to breathe the same air as something truly evil.
