Darkness

13

Kelly was waiting for Michael when he finished work. At first he barely recognized her, but as he approached the motorcycle — on which she was seated — he gazed at her quizzically. “What’d you do to your hair?”

She grinned uncertainly. “I dyed it. Well, actually your mom dyed it.”

Michael’s mouth dropped open. “My mom?” he repeated.

Kelly explained what had happened, and listening, Michael rolled his eyes. “Weird,” he pronounced when she had finished. “I mean, that doesn’t sound like my mom at all.”

Kelly giggled. “I like her. She’s nice, and—” Abruptly, she fell silent.

“And what?” Michael pressed.

Kelly’s eyes shifted to the ground. “She … well, she doesn’t make me feel like a freak,” she finished.

“Who said you’re a freak?” Michael asked.

Kelly looked at him impatiently. “I didn’t say anyone said I was a freak. It — It’s just the way I feel sometimes. I mean, don’t you ever feel like that? Like maybe you’re going nuts or something?”

Michael slowly nodded. In fact, it had happened just this morning, when he’d awakened with a vivid memory of a dream.

So vivid that he was afraid it hadn’t been a dream.

Then, when he’d looked at himself in the mirror this morning and seen the angry red mark on his chest, he’d become frightened.

Had everything he’d remembered really happened? Or was he going crazy?

All day, as he’d gone about his job at the swamp tour, he’d kept thinking about Kelly and wanting to talk to her. He’d put his thoughts aside, sure that she’d think he was crazy. But after what she’d just said …

Now it was he who found himself unable to meet her eyes. “I–I had a dream last night,” he said. “It was really weird. It was about what we did in the swamp last night.”

Kelly’s pulse quickened. If he remembered the same thing she did — She stopped herself, not even wanting to think about what it might mean.

Michael’s eyes met hers. Even before he spoke, she knew what he was going to say.

“There’s a spot on your chest, isn’t there?” she asked. “Like a mosquito bite, only bigger.”

Michael nodded slowly. “It’s … well, it’s like someone stuck a needle into me. And it’s sore.”

Kelly glanced nervously around. There were still a few tourists coming out the gate, and she suddenly felt self-conscious. “Can we go somewhere?” she asked. Sliding back onto the buddy seat of the bike, she made room for Michael.

“Where do you want to go?” Michael called back over his shoulder as they took off.

“I don’t know. Just someplace where we can talk, I guess.” Her arms tightened around his chest. “Michael, I’m scared.”

Michael made no reply, unwilling to admit that he, too, was frightened. If she also had a mark on her chest, then the dream hadn’t been a dream at all.

• • •

An hour later, as they sat side by side on the edge of one of the ubiquitous drainage canals, staring across at the swamp, Kelly slid her hand into Michael’s.

Today, unlike last night or the night before, the swamp had taken on an eerie look, with its moss-laden cypresses and clumps of palmetto lining the shallow bayous that seemed to lead off into nowhere. Kelly gazed into it, wondering how they could have felt so comfortable in its depths the night before, drifting through the darkness in Michael’s boat. Even now she could glimpse snakes coiled in the trees, and see alligators basking in the mud, lying still, as if waiting for something — anything — to cross their path. Right now, with the sun still high in the sky, she couldn’t imagine wanting to go into the suddenly terrifying wilderness.

They’d talked about what had happened last night, slowly and tentatively at first, but soon established that both of them remembered the same thing.

The ceremony, and the Dark Man, clad all in black, and the needles that had been inserted into their chests.

And the other kids.

The children who were nothing like either of them, who neither of them even remembered having seen before. Children with whom both Kelly and Michael somehow felt a strange kinship.

“But they’re swamp rats,” Michael had finally said. “They’re not like us at all.”

But what if they were? Kelly wondered, a thought suddenly coming to her. What if that was where she’d actually come from? She found herself cringing at the thought. In her fantasies, her natural mother was beautiful, not like the women in the swamp, with their pinched faces and stringy, lank hair.

“Did you ever think about being adopted?” she asked Michael now.

Michael frowned, looking at her in surprise. “ ’Course I did,” he said. “I am adopted.”

Kelly stared at him. “S-So am I,” she said. “And I was just thinking. D-Do you suppose that’s where we came from?”

Michael’s frown deepened as he watched Kelly staring across at the wilderness a few yards away. “The swamp?” he asked. “What do you mean?”

Kelly bit nervously at her lower lip, and when she spoke, she selected her words carefully. “I–I’m not sure. But those kids last night. I mean, what if we felt like we belonged with them because we really do? What if that’s where we came from? What if that’s where our parents got us?”

“But that’s crazy,” Michael protested. “Those people out there are all weird. Half of them don’t even know who their fathers are—”

“But maybe that’s it,” Kelly said. “Maybe our real moms live out there somewhere. Maybe they didn’t want us to grow up like those kids, so they gave us away.”

“But all those people are half crazy—”

Kelly’s eyes fixed on him. She did not speak. She didn’t have to.

Michael said nothing for a few moments, Kelly’s words echoing in his mind. Was that where the strange image in the mirror had come from? Some dark place in his own mind that he knew nothing about? When he finally spoke, he couldn’t look at Kelly. “Do you ever see a face in the mirror?” he murmured, more to himself than to her. “An old man, who looks almost dead, and who’s reaching for you?”

Despite the cloying heat of the afternoon, Kelly felt a chill race through her. “He’s over your shoulder,” she breathed. “Staring at you. But when you turn around, there’s no one there.”

Michael turned to her, his face ashen. “You have seen it.”

She nodded.

“It’s what I saw yesterday,” Michael went on. “When I fell off the motorcycle. It wasn’t the car that scared me. It was that face. It was in the mirror of my bike.”

“I saw it the night I tried to kill myself,” Kelly said quietly. Slowly, haltingly, she told Michael exactly what had happened that night, about how she’d seen the man in her dreams since she was a little girl, and how terrified she was of him. “I thought he’d made me pregnant,” she finally admitted, telling Michael what she’d been too frightened even to tell the doctors. “That’s why I did it. I thought I was going to have his baby.”

Michael gazed at Kelly. “But that’s not it, is it?” he asked.

Kelly shook her head. “It’s something else. He wants something from us.”

Michael’s voice went hollow. “What if he doesn’t?” he asked. “What if he already has it? What if he already has it, and is afraid we’ll try to get it back?”

Kelly’s hand tightened in his. “But what?” she breathed. “What could he have taken?”

For that question, Michael had no answer, but his fingers unconsciously moved to the mark on his chest.

• • •

Craig Sheffield glared at his son as Michael came into the dining room and slid into his chair, then he looked pointedly at his watch. “You were supposed to be home an hour ago,” he said. “The rest of us are almost done with