John Saul - Darkness

From her place on the center bench of the boat, where she sat next to her sister Kelly, whose arm was wrapped protectively around her, Jenny Sheffield answered her. “He’s fine,” she said. “He’s a good baby. He never cried at all until tonight.” Amelie’s breath caught, and then her eyes shifted to Lavinia Carter. “It’s you who’s been lookin’ after him?” Lavinia nodded silently, her face reflecting all the misery she was feeling over what she had done for the Dark Man.

Amelie hesitated, then spoke again. “Then mebbe you better stay with me,” she said. “It be lonely out here, an’ I don’t hardly know what I’m s’posed to do with him.” Lavinia’s face lit up in the moonlight, and she reached up to take Amelie’s extended hand. A moment later, as the boat started away from Amelie Coulton’s tiny cabin, her lips moved, forming words she would never be able to utter.

“Thank you …”

Michael and Kelly, whose arm still held her little sister close, waved wordlessly to her as they drifted away into the night.

• • •

Barbara Sheffield stood silently on the dock, Craig’s arm around her. A few feet away Mary and Ted Anderson clung together, too.

Both couples waited in the strange silence that had fallen over the swamp.

They were alone now, for Tim Kitteridge and all the others who had been at the tour headquarters had left half an hour ago, searching for the source of the unearthly screams that had struck terror into each of their souls.

They knew neither for what they were looking nor where they might find it. But they were certain that whatever it was, it was something none of them was going to want to face.

Some evil, they knew, had met its end in the swamp that night.

The Andersons and the Sheffields, though, had refused to go.

“They’ll come back,” Barbara had said, speaking for all of them. “I know our children will come back here, and we’re going to be here waiting for them.” And so the others had left, and they had remained, and the waiting had begun.

Now, at last, they heard the sound of a boat approaching, and their breathing all but stopped as they waited for it to appear.

It was nothing more than a shadow at first, moving across the lagoon, a dark form all but invisible in the night.

It began to take shape, emerging finally from the darkness into the bright light of the moon, and they instantly recognized the three people in it.

Their children.

But changed, somehow, for as the boat drew near, all four parents could feel the difference.

Somehow, in a way they weren’t certain they would ever understand, Kelly and Michael were not the same as they had been this morning.

It was as if they, like the boat in which they rode, had just emerged from a lifetime of darkness.

As they gathered their children into their arms, Mary Anderson and Barbara Sheffield heard their children cry for the first time.

And their children’s tears filled their souls with joy.

On the island at the far edge of the swamp, the last candles on the altar flickered out, the last of the dolls began to weep.

Clarey Lambert watched them for a moment, a soft smile lighting up the weathered planes of her face. And then, as the moon reached its zenith and the night began to wane, Clarey laid her body on the ground and let herself rest.

At last, after all the years of struggle, she closed her eyes for the last time and surrendered herself to the welcome darkness.