Say something, he told himself. Say anything. Tell them it’s just a story.
But it wasn’t a story, not really. It wasn’t quite the way Bobby was putting it, but—
And then, as the boat drifted slowly through the narrow channel, barely wide enough here to let it pass, one of the women let out a startled gasp.
A moment later there was another gasp, and then some of the children started screaming and pointing forward.
Michael turned.
Standing on the shore only a few yards away, a man was watching the boat.
An old man.
A man whose eyes, sunk deep into their sockets, were barely visible, but from which an evil glow seemed to emanate.
Kelly, who had turned at the same time as Michael, grasped his arm. He could see recognition on her ashen face. Yet he hadn’t needed to look at Kelly to know who the man was, for he, too, had recognized him the instant he’d seen him.
The awful sunken greedy eyes.
Evil eyes, eyes he’d seen before.
Eyes he’d seen in the face in the mirror.
The boat was passing the vile figure now, and Michael remained frozen, unable either to speak or to move in the face of the nightmare image that had suddenly become reality.
In the boat the women and children closest to Carl Anderson shrank away from him, as if they, too, felt the horror that was overcoming Michael.
And then, as the boat was about to move away from him, Carl reached out, his gnarled fingers curling like? the talons of a carnivorous bird, and snatched up the baby that lay in its carrier on the stern seat.
It happened so quickly that for a moment Michael wasn’t sure it had happened at all.
The old man was gone, disappearing into the dense junglelike foliage as if it had swallowed him up. For one happy second Michael thought that perhaps the vile apparition hadn’t existed at all, that once more it was only his mind playing tricks on him.
But the screams of the child’s mother told him he was wrong.
She was standing in the stern of the boat, ready to go after the man who had stolen her child; only the hands of the women around her held her back.
“My baby,” the woman screamed. “He took my baby!”
Michael reacted almost without thinking. “Stay in the boat!” he shouted at the woman. He cut the engine and spoke quickly to Kelly. “Keep them in the boat. Whatever you do, don’t let them get out, or they’ll all get lost.”
Without waiting for Kelly to reply, he leaped over the gunwale and dropped into the shallow water, then scrambled ashore.
“Michael!” Kelly shouted. “Michael, don’t!”
But it was too late.
Michael, too, had disappeared into the swamp.
• • •
Carl Anderson felt a sharp pain in his chest, and came to a stop, his breath coming in ragged gasps. His legs felt weak, and he let himself sink to the ground, leaning back against the trunk of a pine tree. Thick shrubbery surrounded the tree, so he would have a respite now, concealed from anyone who might be pursuing him.
He clutched the baby to his chest and waited for the pain to subside, waited for his breathing to return to some semblance of normality.
Exhaustion was spreading through him, draining away the last of his energy. He wasn’t certain how much longer he could go on.
But he had to go on. If he didn’t, he would die.
It was the shot — the shot that should have made him feel young again. But it wasn’t working this time; it hadn’t been strong enough. For a while, early this morning, he had felt better, confident that by this afternoon his strength would have returned to him. But as he’d worked his way deeper into the swamp, determined to lose himself until the shot’s restorative powers had rejuvenated him completely, he’d slowly begun to feel the weakness of age creeping up on him once more.
He’d panicked, knowing that he had to find a child.
Today.
Now.
A child whose youth Phillips could tap into and transfer to his own aging body.
By tomorrow it would be too late.
But where could he find a child?
If Ted hadn’t taken his pickup keys, he could simply have driven up toward Orlando and found a shopping mall.
There would be children everywhere, children with inattentive mothers.
Children disappeared from shopping malls every day, and by the time the child was missed, he could have been halfway back to Villejeune.
Villejeune, and Warren Phillips.
Warren Phillips, and the eternal youth most men only dreamed of.
But Ted had found him, and only the gun had bought Carl any time at all.
The gun that was still in the belt of his pants, lending him courage despite the failing strength of his body.
It was stupid to have taken the child from the tour boat, but when he’d stumbled upon it, and seen the children who filled it — plump babies with their smooth skin and supple muscles — he’d felt a surge of cold fury.
Why should they be young when he was not?
Why should they have a whole life to look forward to, while he had nothing but memories to succor his painfully failing body?
After all, it wasn’t as if Phillips killed the children.
Phillips had told him that long ago, when he’d first offered the treatment, and Carl’s own granddaughter was the proof.
“It doesn’t hurt them. All I need is the secretion from their thymus glands,” Phillips had assured him. “After I’m done with them, they grow up perfectly normally.”
Still, he should have waited, should have kept hunting through the marshlands until he found one of the swamp rats’ children, a child no one cared about, a child who had no future anyway.
Instead he’d given in to his panicked rage and lifted the baby out of the boat.
Now, cradled in his arms, the baby cried, and Carl clamped his hand over its mouth, silencing its tiny voice before its screams could betray their location.
25
Kelly knew she had to do something. A tense silence hung over the tour boat; the women, their children gathered protectively near them, watched the swamp, searching for any sign of Michael. But it was as if the marshes had swallowed him up. For the last twenty minutes they had neither seen nor heard anything at all.
And yet, though nothing had happened, the tension in the boat was mounting every second.
In the stern, the mother of the baby sobbed quietly, while two of the other women tried to comfort her. But at last the woman looked up, her eyes fixed on Kelly, who stood in the bow of the boat, desperately trying to think of something she could do.
“Take us back,” one of the other women demanded. “We have to get help!”
“I–I don’t know where we are,” Kelly said.
