out.”
I shook my head. “The way I look at it, if everything you say is true, they would be dead anyway if they needed air down there all this time. I only need enough to get down there and check it out.”
“It’s an unnecessary waste,” she began, and argued at length. I held my ground, and in the end, she snatched the bottle I offered at random out of the ones she had given me and tossed it down. She glared at me, gestulating with her arms in exasperation.
“There, are you happy? You’ve gotten me to waste a half-week of work and possibly killed one of the last good men in Redmoor.”
I nodded slowly, watching her. She didn’t seem to be getting any more hideous. “I’m happy.”
“When you drink one, have a care,” she said, “it takes a few minutes to work. A brief span, but long enough to be a problem if you are in a hurry. I think it is due to the changes the liquid must work upon your system.”
“I feel I was right to exile you and your dangerous work to this place,” I told her. “I really hope your work helps us. But I don’t trust it, and will not, until it has been proven.”
“My work will pass your test, boy,” she said. “One last thing.”
“What?”
She looked, for once, very hesitant. She chewed at her lower lip and sucked in a breath before going on. “I’ve seen some
“I always keep on my guard, but thanks for the warning.”
Thirty
I exited into the fresh air again and breathed deeply. I gave a shudder that was more from relief than from the cold breeze coming off the lake. I turned north around the building and headed toward the lakeshore. Like most big lakes, Lake Monroe had a thin brown sandy beach that wound around it. I passed the little private jetties and the Marina and walked along the beach itself. A squad of ducks quacked at me in annoyance and swam away.
I thought about going back to the center, but decided against it. Maybe I could get Vance to come with me, but probably not. He had not wanted to go visit the pharmacy, why would he want to drink some foul concoction and attempt to drown himself under the lake while looking for a devilish Hag? I also didn’t want to wait any longer. Arriving an hour or a minute too late to help would worse than useless.
I stopped at a nice little sailboat that had survived the storm. I was a fair sailor in calm weather, and one quick way to check out that strange light in the lake would be to glide over it and have a look. I decided against it, however. How would that be better than swimming down? If something was down there, it would see me as an object floating above, not really the safest position to be in. I sighed, not knowing really what to do. I wasn’t sure what it was that I was going after and the lack of information was critically important. I wasn’t even sure that the potions would work, or where the Preacher was, or if this wasn’t just some elaborate hoax. Maybe these two hags had cut a deal to send each other gullible fools every Tuesday as raw materials.
I drew out my saber and checked my pistol, which was loaded and ready to go. I sensed I might be needing it. When I fished in my pocket for extra bullets, I found the Hag’s stone. I drew it out, and knew it for what it was, a magic rock. Had she left it for me, or had she made it by accident? I decided I might as well use it, and spent a few minutes stroking the edge of my weapon. Orange and white sparks popped as I did so, and when I was done, I knew it was much sharper than before.
My boots kicked up wet sand and I trudged down the beach leaving the sailboat behind. Soon I was leaving Redmoor proper and getting into the rental cabin area where summer people came up to spend a week or two on the lake. I passed one log cabin mock-up that I knew inside had a modern kitchen and central air. Just after I’d passed it, I heard a screen door creak open and then slam shut.
“Hello?” I called.
Nothing.
I stopped on the beach, eyeing the cabins nearby. I saw no one come out. It could have been a backdoor, or it could have been the wind. Some of the windows were broken, perhaps from the recent storm or perhaps from worse things. Thinking about Wilton’s words, I decided against investigating and continued plodding down the beach. I figured I had only about a mile to go.
After another few hundred yards, I chanced a look over my shoulder. I froze in my tracks. A figure was on the beach behind me, following. It looked like a normal man, but he moved with some difficulty, limping. He seemed to be missing a shoe on that foot, although at a distance of a few hundred yards, I was hard to be sure.
“Hey there,” I called out to him. I expected him to halt or wave or shout back. He did none of these things but rather continued to approach with that odd, stumbling gait. I watched him for a few seconds more, and then decided I didn’t really want to get a closer look at him. I hurried on up the beach.
I was gaining ground, I was sure of it, and after another hundred yards I looked back again and there were three of them now. One appeared to be a large woman and the third was a child. The child seemed to be crawling rapidly on all fours like a kid pretending to be a spider. Perhaps, I thought, this kid wasn’t pretending. I hurried on up the beach, sure I had no more than a half mile to go.
In the middle of one long look back at those that followed me, I almost walked into the fourth one. He was dressed in a bathing suit with red flowers on a black nylon background and was dripping wet. Clearly, he’d been in the water a moment before and now had risen up out of the waves. He had his arms up as if to embrace me.
I shoved him back and his cold, bloated, purplish skin ripped open like tissue paper. I could see right off he was dead. I made an odd croaking sound in my throat in shock and disgust. I shoved him back and he made no utterance, but simply reached for me again. I had my saber out in a smooth motion and slashed at his reaching arms. Flesh peeled back to reveal bones and his left hand hung at an odd angle but still he tottered after me.
I ran. More of them came. I don’t know how many, but they were coming out of the summer cabins and floating in the water. By the time I reached the pile of stones I’d built to mark the spot that led down into Elkinville there had to be more than a dozen of them, coming from both directions along the shore and from out of the forest as well. They were slow, but if one of them got a good grip on me and the others piled on… I ripped the top off of one of potions Wilton had given me and tossed it down. I tasted like urine mixed with bathroom cleanser. My stomach hitched and I fought not to sick it up.
Looking both ways at the approaching swarm of dead things, I realized that if she had meant to trap me, she’d done a good job after all. I grabbed up the rocks from my marking pile and shoved them in my pockets for ballast. I found my pistol there and took aim at the closest group of silent shambling monsters and emptied the only clip I had into them. I saw them rock back, I saw bones shatter in their legs and I watch the side of one woman’s skull pop, but they still kept coming. All of them.
I waded out into the waters of the Lake and put the empty pistol into my pocket for more weight.
I was ten feet from shore and the cold waters of the lake had filled my boots and begun to sting my legs. I gasped when the shocking cold reached up to my waist. About then, the things on the beach finally reached the shoreline. The first ones there were the crawling kid and the very first one I’d seen. I realized now that he had no foot on the end of one leg. He’d been walking on a shard of shinbone and had made pretty good time for all that. He wore a nice shirt and a tie and, incredibly, still had sunglasses on. I could only imagine what kind of vacation he’d been enjoying when some ghastly fate had befallen him in the beach house he’d paid good money for had turned into an abattoir.
The crawling kid came out in sort of a dog-paddling motion and I laid into him with my saber. He never complained, but simply took the strokes. I grabbed his hair, finally, to keep his snapping teeth away from the meat
