A terrible ache began in the pit of his stomach, spreading to his chest. His face flushed, and despite the cold wind whipping through the torn vinyl roof, the back of his neck and his ears felt hot with embarrassment. Fear, yes, but the embarrassment was somehow worse.
What if he couldn’t do it?
When Maggie had asked him to bury her in Shediak, he’d imagined it a chore. A burden, if he was honest with himself. When he’d learned the truth of witchcraft, his mother a witch, and that the darkness really did hold monsters, it had made him feel as if he’d woken into some other world. The only way for him to keep functioning had been to just accept it all. If he’d tried to compare the world he was discovering to the world he’d always known, he’d have been paralyzed with shock. Going to war hadnot prepared him for the truths he’d learned, but it had prepared him to detach himself from normalcy so he could keep going, keep fighting.
When Jennie told him he’d have to reinforce the curse Maggie had put on the monsters, it had seemed ridiculous but not impossible. If this spark was in him, he could speak whatever words Jennie told him to speak. But now he knew it wasn’t that simple. There were no words unless he thought of them. Witchcraft took the old fire and mixed it with instinct and the power of intention, and Malcolm might have the first one, but he sure as hell lacked the other two.
Snowflakes slipped through the torn-up roof. One landed on his left eyelid, and he blinked it away.
“Awfully quiet back there,” Violet said. Worried, reminding him of the time without reminding him.
Malcolm nodded. “Whatever I’m supposed to feel, I don’t feel it.”
Benjy snickered.
Violet reached back and laid a hand on Malcolm’s knee. “Sing.”
He whipped around to check on dead Maggie, who watched him from her corner of the back seat with dull, glassy eyes. Snow dusted her hair and nose and clung to the orbit of her left eye, but she didn’t move.
“I didn’t mean that,” Violet went on. “She’s okay for the moment. But she gave you that suggestion, reinforced it, so when you finally realized what you had to do and you started to sing that song, it worked immediately. You must have felt something then. That’s the connection you have to make.”
Had he felt it, during those times? The old fire his mother had talked about?
Maybe he had.
Malcolm began to sing. Behind him, his mother’s corpse flinched. If this song had become some kind of spell between them, he thought there would be no harm in reinforcing that, particularly as it had already worn off once. Unlike when he’dsung it before, this time he got further than the first two lines. He didn’t have the best voice, but it sounded far better than his childhood violin experiment. As he settled into the melody, Malcolm closed his eyes.
His skin prickled. Even stung a bit, almost as if he’d gotten a sunburn. His lips moved and song emerged, but the words came automatically now. He’d stopped paying conscious attention to the lyrics and focused on how it felt to sing them, to immerse himself in that melody.
He felt a prickle inside, like something had shifted. Malcolm had heard stage actors talk about having butterflies but always thought it was a bit fanciful—how could people who loved to swan about in front of an audience have such anxieties? Now he wondered if those butterflies were similar to this sensation. He centered his thoughts, his whole mind, on that prickling and imagined it had a string attached.
The string came alive for him. His imagination had taken hold of it, but now it felt real. His body twitched as he tugged against it, and he realized there were other strings. So many of them, down into the ground beneath the rumbling Frazer, up into the storm and the sky beyond, into the trees on either side of the road.
He opened his eyes. Breathing slowly, afraid to move lest he frighten this feeling away as if it were a nervous cat. But it stayed. He felt that prickling as if it had always been there.
Benjy stared back at him.
The boy’s mocking grin had vanished, replaced by a look of confusion, verging on panic.
“What is that song?” Violet whispered from the front seat.
Had he changed the melody? He supposed he had. And the lyrics had changed as well, though he couldn’t recall precisely what he’d sung. Something of protection, of freedom. Something gentle, wrapping the boy in a blanket of that same prickling sensation, but instead of driving off the cold, the words had meant to separate him from the darkness.Breathe out the dark, Malcolmremembered singing.Bleed it from your veins. Close the door the monster blew open, and lock it tight.
There was more, but the rest had already fled like the waking wisps of a dream.
“Benjy?” Violet asked, raising her voice.
Jennie glanced in the rearview mirror. “Damn. Did it actually work?”
The boy looked pleadingly at Malcolm. “Are you going to hurt me?”
“No, kid. No way.”
Benjy searched the dark interior of the Frazer and shivered with the cold. “Where’s my mom and dad?”
Malcolm patted the boy’s knee, in shock that this had worked. “I’m sorry, buddy, we don’t know. They weren’t with you when we met you.”
Yes, he was shocked it had worked. But now that it had, Malcolm felt as if that prickling sensation in his gut had always been there and he’d been blind to it.
