“Uncle Edward,” he said. “Are you certain you’re going to be all right? I mean, the power’s still off. You can’t breathe without your ventilator.”
“The generator can run for hours and hours. It’ll shut itself off when the regular power comes back.” He waved his hand testily. “Go on, Nate. I’m fine.”
“But the strange thing,” said Nightingale, “is that when the generator came on half an hour ago, the ventilator didn’t. There must be something wrong with it.”
Arvedson went very still. “What…what are you talking about?”
“Here. Look, the little lights on it never came back on, either. Your ventilator’s off.” The room suddenly seemed very quiet, nothing but the distant sound of cars splashing along out on Jones Street, distant as the moon. “What happened to Edward?”
The old man looked surprised. “I don’t…Nate, what are you saying…?”
The gun was out of Nightingale’s coat and into his hand so quickly it might have simply appeared there. He leveled it at a spot between the old man’s two bushy white eyebrows. “I asked you what happened to Edward — the real Edward Arvedson. I’m only going to ask this once more. I swear I’ll kill him before I let you have his body, and I’m betting you can’t pull your little possession trick again on a full-grown, healthy man like me — especially not before I can pull the trigger.”
Even in the half-light of the desk lamp, the change was a fearful one: Edward Arvedson’s wrinkled features did not alter in any great way, but something moved beneath the muscles and skin like a light-shunning creature burrowing through the dark earth. The eyes fixed his. Although the face was still Edward’s, somehow it no longer looked much like him. “You’re a clever boy, Nightingale,” said the stranger in his godfather’s body. “I should have noticed the ventilator never came back on, but as you’ve guessed, this sack of meat no longer has a breathing problem. In fact, it no longer needs to breathe at all.”
“What’s happened to him?” The gun stayed trained on the spot between the old man’s eyes. “Talk fast.”
A slow, cold smile stretched the lips. “That is not for me to say, but rather it is between him and his god. Perhaps he is strumming a harp with the other angels now…or writhing and shrieking in the deepest pits…”
“Bastard!” Nightingale pulled back the trigger with his thumb. “You lie! He’s in there with you. And I know a dozen people who can make you jump right the hell back out…”
The thing shook its head. “Oh, Mr. Nightingale, you’ve been playing the occult detective so long you’ve come to believe you’re really in a story — and that it will have a happy ending. We didn’t learn new ways to possess the living.” The smile returned, mocking and triumphant. “We have learned how to move into the bodies of the recently dead. Quite a breakthrough. It’s much, much easier than possession, and we cannot be evicted because the prior tenant…is gone. Your ‘Uncle Edward’ had a stroke, you see. We waited all around him as he died — oh, and believe me, we told him over and over what we would do, including this moment. Like you, he caused us a great deal of trouble over the years — and as you know, we dead have long memories. And when he was beyond our torments at last, well, this body was ours. Already my essence has strengthened it. It does not need to breathe, and as you can see…” The thing rose from the wheelchair with imperial calm and stood without wavering. Nightingale backed off a few steps, keeping the gun high. “…it no longer needs assistance to get around, either,” the thing finished. “I feel certain I’ll get years of use out of it before I have to seek another — time enough to contact and betray all of the rest of Edward Arvedson’s old friends.”
“Who are you?” Nightingale fought against a despair that buffeted him like a cold wind. “Oh, for the love of God, what do you monsters want?”
““Who am I? Just one of the hungry ones. One of the unforgiving.” It sat down again, making the wheelchair creak. “What do we want? Not to go quietly, as you would have us go — to disappear into the shadows of nonexistence and leave the rest of you to enjoy the light and warmth.” The thing lifted its knotted hands — Edward’s hands, as they had seemed such a short time ago — in a greedy gesture of seizure. “As you said, this is a war. We want what you have.” It laughed, and for the first time the voice sounded nothing at all like his godfather’s familiar tones. “And we are going take it from you. All of you.”
“I don’t think so. Because if you need bodies to survive here, then those bodies can be taken back from you…” And even as Nightingale spoke his gun flashed and roared and the thing in his godfather’s shape staggered and fell back against the wheelchair cushions, chin on chest. A moment later the so-familiar face came up again. Smiling.
“Jenkins,” it said. “If you would be so kind…”
Something knocked the gun from Nightingale’s hand and then an arm like an iron bar slammed against his neck. He fought but it was like being held by a full-grown gorilla. His struggles only allowed him to slide around enough in his captor’s grip to see Jenkins’ blank eyes and the huge hole in the side of the caretaker’s head crusted with bits of bone and dried tissue.
“I lied about giving him the night off,” said the pseudo-Edward. “The living get impatient, but my colleague who inhabits him now was perfectly willing to stand in the dark until I needed him.” Now Arvedson’s body stood again, brushing at its clothes; the hole Nightingale’s gunshot had made in its shirt was bloodless. “Bullets are a poor weapon against the risen dead, Nightingale,” it pointed out with no little satisfaction. “You could burn the body, I suppose, or literally pulverize it, and there would be nothing left for us to inhabit. But of course, you will not get the chance to tell anyone about that.”
“Bastards!” He struggled helplessly against the Jenkins-thing’s grip. “Even if you kill me, there are hundreds more like me out there. They’ll stop you!”
“We will meet them all, I’m sure,” said his godfather’s body. “You will introduce us — or at least the new resident of your corpse will. And one by one, we will remove them. The dead will live, with all the power of age and riches and secrecy, and the rest of your kind will be our uncomprehending cattle, left alive only to breed more bodies for us. Your driver was right, Mr. Nightingale — the storm door really is open now. And no power on this earth can shut it.”
Nightingale tried to say something else then, shout some last words of defiance, but the pressure on his neck was crushingly strong and the lights of the world — the lamp, the headlights passing in the street below, even the storm-shrouded stars beyond the window — had begun leaching away into utter darkness.
His last sight was of the cold, hungry things that had been hiding behind that darkness, hiding and waiting and hating the living for so long, as they hurried toward him to feed.
The Stranger’s Hands
People in the village had been whispering for days about the two vagabonds in Squire’s Wood, but the boy Tobias was the first to speak to them.
Tobias was a somewhat wayward lad, and the fact that he should have been grazing his father’s sheep on the hill above the forest at that hour more or less assured the sheep in question would be wandering along the shady edges of the wood instead, with Tobias wandering right behind them.
It was not until he saw a drift of smoke twining like a gray scarf through the trees that the boy remembered that strangers had been seen in the wood. He felt a moment of fear: why would anyone live out of doors in the cold nights and flurries of autumn rain if they were God-fearing folk? Only robbers and dangerous madmen dwelt under the unsheltered sky. Everyone knew that. If he had been a fraction less headstrong, Tobias would have turned around then and hurried back to the hillside, perhaps even remembering to take his father’s sheep with him, but there was a part of him, a strong part, that hated not knowing things worse than anything. It was the part that had once caused him to pull the leg off a frog, just to find out what it would do. (It did very little, and died soon after with what Tobias felt guiltily certain was an accusatory look in its bulging eyes.) It was also the reason he had dented his father’s best scythe when he had used it to try to cut down a tree, and why he had dumped the contents of his mother’s precious sewing basket all over the ground — a search for knowledge that ended with Tobias spending all afternoon in the fading light on his hands and knees, locating every last needle and pin he had spilled. Once this rebel voice had even led him several miles out of the village, on a quest for the town of Eader’s Church, which he had heard was so big that the streets actually had names. His father and two other men had caught up to him an hour after sunset as he sat exhausted and hungry by the side of the road. He had got a whipping for it, of course, but for young Tobias whippings were part of the cost of doing business.
