almost made him slap her earlier, when she’d once more made him repeat his promise.
“He ain’t gettin’ my baby,” she’d said, her voice quavering as she spoke the words. “You ain’t givin’ him away like Tammy-Jo an’ Quint gave theirs!”
“You’re crazy,” George had told her a month ago, when the argument had begun. “You didn’t see nothin’ out there. That baby just died, Amelie. Ain’t nothin’ else happened to it at all!”
Then he’d told her she hadn’t seen anything out at the island at the far side of the swamp, that she must have dreamed the whole thing. And sometimes she’d half believed him, for when she went looking for the island, she wasn’t able to find it. But still she’d made him promise not to give her baby to the Dark Man.
“I cain’t promise nothin’,” he’d said at first. “Even if’n he’s real — an’ he ain’t — ain’t nothin’ I can do about him.”
“You promise,” Amelie had told him, her voice implacable. “You promise, or I’m gonna kill you myself. See if I don’t!”
And finally he promised. But ever since he’d made the promise — and she’d made him do it in front of Tammy-Jo, whose face had gone so pale Amelie had known right away she hadn’t dreamed anything at all — he’d been acting so scared, she’d almost been afraid he was going to run off and leave her alone.
And tonight, when she made him repeat the promise one more time, she thought he was going to hit her, just the way her daddy always did when he accused her of being sassy. But he hadn’t. Instead he just nodded his head, as if afraid to say the words, and had not said anything else. Now, as he stood on the porch, she could feel his anger turning into fear.
“Someone be comin’,” he murmured.
Amelie frowned, her eyes scanning the darkness, her ears searching for the sound of a boat in the strange silence of the evening. Though she saw nothing, a sense of dread began to fill her soul, and she felt her skin crawling.
At last, from the depths of the darkness, a shadow even blacker than those surrounding it emerged from the night.
The shadow became a boat, rowed silently by Jonas Cox, a boy Amelie had known all his life. But in the prow, standing erect, was the tall figure of the Dark Man, clad in black, his face obscured by his black shroud, the cloth pierced only by the holes through which he gazed. Amelie’s breath caught in her throat, and she thought her heart might stop beating.
The boat drifted to a stop in front of the shanty. For several long minutes time seemed to stand still as the black figure gazed steadily at George Coulton. Finally the Dark Man’s right arm came up, his black-gloved finger pointing at George.
Saying nothing, moving with the steady rhythms of an automaton, George Coulton climbed down from the porch of the shack and stepped into the boat. A moment later the boat disappeared back into the blackness of the night, the Dark Man still standing silently in its prow, and except for the fact that George was no longer there, Amelie wouldn’t have been certain that anything had happened at all.
Refusing to think about what it might mean, terror beating louder in her heart with every passing second, she forced herself to begin working once more on the tiny garment in her hands.
But even as she worked on it, the certainty grew within her that her baby would never wear it.
Unless …
A thought flickered in her mind, but she turned away from it as quickly as it came. Despite what she’d said, she didn’t want George to die.
• • •
The boat drifted to a stop, and Jonas Cox shipped the oars. He looked up at George Coulton, seated in the stern, seeing George’s bloodless face glowing ghostlike in the first light of the rising moon. Jonas could feel the fear that had seized George, and knew that the Dark Man, standing behind him, still had his eyes fixed on the boy Jonas had known all his life.
“You have disobeyed me,” the Dark Man said, and though he spoke softly, the words chilled Jonas.
“I didn’t—” George Coulton began, but before he could go on, the Dark Man spoke again.
“You belong to me. You do what I tell you. I did not tell you to marry Amelie Parish.”
“She were havin’ my baby,” George whimpered.
“An’ I’m givin’ him to you,” George whined, desperate now.
“You promised your woman you wouldn’t,” the Dark Man stated. “You belong to me, and your children belong to me. It is why you live.”
George said nothing, his eyes widening as he began to realize what was going to happen to him.
“I will not be disobeyed. My children will not promise that which is not theirs to give.” The Dark Man opened his cloak and drew a long knife from a sheath at his belt. Leaning over, he placed it in Jonas Cox’s hand. “Release George Coulton from the Circle,” he said.
George gasped as he saw the knife, but it was already too late. Before he could utter even a single word, the knife in Jonas Cox’s hand flashed in the moonlight, and its blade, razor-sharp, plunged deep into George’s chest.
A scream rose from George’s throat, rending the silence of the night, building as pain shot through his body, then fading into a low, horrible gurgling sound as blood bubbled from his lips.
As the life drained from his body, he began to change.
His eyes sank into his skull, and his skin withered into leathery folds. His muscles, lean and firm only a moment ago, turned flaccid, and his strong young bones turned suddenly brittle, his hip breaking under the weight of his own body.
Jonas Cox twisted the knife in response to a quiet order from the Dark Man, plunging it deeper, then ripping it upward to slice through George’s heart.
George’s body toppled from the stem of the boat, dropping into the shallow water.
Jonas, ignoring the corpse in the water, washed the blood from the blade of the knife, then returned it to the Dark Man. He put the oars back into the water, and the boat slipped away, disappearing once more into the darkness.
• • •
At first it was nothing more than a faint gasping sound, as if somewhere nearby in the darkness some unseen creature had been taken by surprise. Then, in an instant, Amelie heard the gasp turn into a scream of utter terror. It built, rising to a crescendo, then was suddenly cut off.
For a moment Amelie thought it was over, until she became aware of an agonized gurgling sound, a sound that died slowly.
Silence once again hung over the swamp. Amelie sat still, not daring to move until slowly, tentatively, the night sounds began to rise again.
For the creatures of the bog, whatever had happened was over.
For Amelie it had just begun, for as the scream had risen in the night, she had been seized by a gripping certainty about what had happened.
She put her sewing aside and moved into the small house, emerging a moment later with a lantern held high, its wick glowing softly. She climbed clumsily down off her porch into the canoe that was tied to one of the pilings supporting the house, and set the lantern in the prow. Untying the line, she cast the boat adrift, then began moving it forward, a single oar slipping silently in and out of the water.
She followed her instincts, moving through the narrow channels of the bayous. After a few minutes she found what she was looking for. Holding the lantern high, she peered down into the water.
Lying faceup on the bottom of the shallow channel, its face only an inch or so beneath the surface of the water, was a body.
The open eyes stared up at Amelie, but she could see there was no life in them.
The eyes were wide. The mouth was still open in a silent, flooded scream, the lips drawn back in an expression of frozen terror.
And from the wound in the chest, ripped wide nearly to the throat, blood still flowed, staining the water around Amelie’s boat a ghastly shade of pink.
