AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Clutching her baby to her, Bessie Timmons ran over to the outboard motor and pulled the string. “Tired of this nonsense,” she said and steered a path out toward the swollen expanse of the Mississippi River, leaving the dead behind.
“Is Remy hurt real bad?” Moses asked.
Remy’s muscles contracted involuntarily, reminding Memphis of the worst of Isaiah’s fits. Remy’s face was a mask of fear. His eyes were wide and he was pale, nearly gray. Puncture wounds marred his arms where the ghosts had bitten him. Thick dark veins crawled up the man’s arms.
“What is that?” Henry asked.
“I don’t know,” Memphis said. “But it’s moving fast. He’ll be gone in minutes if we don’t do something.”
Memphis moved toward Remy, but Bill grabbed hold of his arm. “That ain’t no ordinary healing, Memphis. You don’t know what that is. Best to let me lay him down gentle.”
Memphis was afraid. He didn’t know this otherworldly infection that was taking over Remy’s body. He was afraid to touch his hands to it. Maybe Bill was right. He didn’t have to take it on, even though Remy had been very brave. Even though he had saved them twice with his boat. In the corner Moses was crying softly. “Nonk Remy,” he said.
Memphis shook off Bill’s hold. “I can do it. I’ve got to try.”
Memphis kneeled beside Remy. Under those spreading, twisting veins of rot, Remy’s flesh had gone gray. The wounds seemed to be choking him from the inside. Memphis could see clear through to the bones under the man’s skin. Remy was trying to talk, his voice no more than a whisper. “I… see… everything… Too… much… too… much.”
Memphis placed his hands on Remy’s chest. “I’m gonna help you, Remy. Just let me—”
“N-no. D-don’t,” Remy whispered.
Don’t try to heal me, son.
But already, Memphis was drawing the sickness into his own body. It curdled inside him, rot and decay and hunger. His eyes turned the black of the dead. And then he was falling down into an endless grave. He saw Marlowe’s golden Eye taking the screaming soldiers up into its mechanical heart to play out the same pain endlessly. He saw Adelaide Proctor nearly swallowed up by a giant oak that imprisoned her. He saw a dying town of dried rivers and topsoil gone to dust and a half-starved child pawing at the ground for the last turnip. The King of Crows’s disembodied face loomed, moving closer and closer. Vines of the grave slithered through his eye sockets and still the King of Crows laughed, and in the next flash, it was Memphis’s own face he saw atop the King of Crows’s stiff collar. The snakes encircled his head like a scaly crown. A skittering disturbed the fine white linen of his sleeves. Something moved fast under it, and then beetles peeked out from the lace-trimmed cuffs, pouring out in streams of black-backed shine, swarming his body. He walked across a carpet of ash. Bony hands reached up from that carpet, scrabbling for Memphis’s ankles, tearing at his trouser cuffs. He yelped and kicked them away. He opened a door and saw the hungry dead descending on town after town until there was nothing left. The pain was suffocating. As if Memphis were absorbing hundreds of years of it. It lashed him. He was breaking. He cried out in agony. The voices swirled inside him: You’ll never heal this. You cannot heal. Never. Never heal this. We will pull you under with us. With us. Memphis was losing his strength. Remy had been cursed. He was dying and taking Memphis down with him.
“Memphis, let go!” Bill Johnson yanked Memphis free seconds before the rot overtook Remy, turning him into a petrified man. The boat was silent with horror. There was only the sluice of water, the purr of the motor.
“Memphis,” Henry said.
Memphis shook all over. He bent over the side of the boat and vomited. He had never experienced a healing like that. Nothing he could have done would stop the rot.
Bill Johnson let Remy slip into the flood. His body crumbled into the churning water and was gone. They hung their heads and said a prayer for their dead friend. The boat sailed up the Mississippi, headed north. Nate took over the steering so Bessie could nurse the baby and get some rest. The boys, exhausted, slept inside the little house.
“What was that that got Remy?” Nate asked once he knew the boys were sleeping.
“I don’t know,” Memphis said. “I never felt anything like it.” He’d seen and felt terrible things. Still saw them. “I’m sorry I couldn’t save him.”
Nate was quiet for a long time. “Nothing to be done.”
The sky had begun to clear. The sun was poking through clouds.
“Won’t be no crop. Water took it all,” Nate said, breaking the silence. “Me and my family moving north. Gonna start over, start clean. We’d be proud to take you far as we can.”
“Thank you,” Memphis said.
Nate put a hand on Memphis’s shoulder, looking from him to Henry and Bill and back again. “You get in there and fight this wickedness. Know that we’re with you, you hear?”
“We know,” Henry said.
The river carried them forward. It was a thing of destruction and a thing of awe, a proud spirit winding through the country.
“That wasn’t an ordinary ghost,” Henry said. “Usually the ghosts have a deal with the King of Crows—they suck up some power and give most of it over to him. But these ghosts didn’t seem aware of those rules. Or they didn’t care. They just wanted to take as much life as they could. They wanted to hurt us.”
“I know,” Memphis said, and it made him anxious about what might lie ahead.
Nate steered the boat straight, chasing sun for as long as they could.
YOU WILL BE SORRY
