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Jayla goes still. “What?”
“They are still moving. Her eyes opened. Her mouth moved. Her fingers moved on the wind chime.Hishand moves. His lips move. His head moves. And before you ask, they are absolutely real bodies, not some kind of animatronic horror show. But don’t take my wordfor it, Garrett. Go and check it out. She’s up on the bluff. He’s twenty paces west of the bridge, in a bush.”
I wait for him to snarl and spit and accuse us of playing a Halloween prank. Instead, he says, slowly, “Kit saw this?”
“Yes.”
“If it’s a joke… If it’s a prank…”
“Are we acting like it’s a joke? A prank?”
“I… don’t understand. What you’re saying… it’s not possible.” He rubs his hand over his mouth. Then he stops. “Those things you found. The circles. The feathers and bones. You said they were meant to look like Satanic-cult crap. But they weren’tmeantto look like that, were they? Theyarethat.”
“What?” I say.
“Satanic cults. This is clearly the work of a Satanic cult.”
I blink at him. “You’re serious. A Satanic…?”
“There’s no such thing,” Jayla snaps. “You’re a cop. You should know that.”
“I know there are people who fuck around with that shit. Circles and hexes. Even animal sacrifices.”
“Because they’re deluded or mentally ill.”
He looks at me. “You said it was this couple, this Sinclair guy and his wife.”
“We think they—”
“You figured they wanted the island. They didn’t. They were playing with…” He waves his hands. “Dark forces.”
Dark forces? I want to laugh. I don’t laugh. Neither does Jayla.
After a moment, Jayla turns, almost reluctantly, to me. “You and Kit definitely saw them moving.”
I nod. “We compared observations to be sure we were both seeing the same things. We were. Earlier, in the boathouse, when we saw the rat king, we thought it twitched, but it was only maggots. We wouldn’t risk making that mistake twice. This wasn’t a twitch. It wasn’t final misfiring electrical signals from the brain. Sinclair’shand was clawing at the ground when I ran, and it was clawing when we came back. It was like he was trying to crawl, but on autopilot. Instinct. When we talked, his face turned our way, but his eyes wouldn’t focus on us. Again, like instinct.”
“I’m going to say a word,” Jayla says. “And the first person who laughs gets smacked.”
“No one’s going to laugh,” I say.
“Yeah, not atyou,” Garrett mutters. “Because you’re a goddamn lawyer.”
I look at him. “No one is going to laugh at any suggestions from now on. It’ll only keep us from sharing information. We accept that this isn’t natural, right? That a head can’t open its eyes and try to talk long after it’s been severed? That a man can’t survive after his body has been ripped in half?”
Jayla looks sick, but I don’t regret my choice of words. There’s no room for euphemisms here. We must be one hundred percent clear what we are discussing.
“Agreed,” she says. “There’s no natural explanation for that.”
“Also agree,” Garrett says. “What word were you going to say?”
She looks at me. “Zombies.”
“Voodoo,” Garrett says.
I make a face at the word. I’d correct him, but I just said we weren’t mocking ideas, and that veers too close, so I just say, “Haitian lore of sorcerers reanimating bodies.”
“Oh, that bit I actually know,” Jayla says. “It originated with slaves. It’s a nightmare come true—even after death they’re enslaved.”
