Norman Partridge - Wildest Dreams

The coffin thudded onto the sand. It was heavy, but I managed to drag it around the front end of the hearse. There, in the glow of the Cadillac’s headlights, I opened it, glad that the whipping wind spared me the stink of Diabolos Whistler’s remains.

As far as I could see, the trip hadn’t done the old boy much good. Whistler still wasn’t showing any signs of life. His body lay twisted-knees cocked south, shoulders hunched toward the north. But Whistler’s head was the big problem-it lolled on his neck, frayed as a worn doll’s.

Parsons’s unfinished stitchery lay in a tangle on Whistler’s Adam’s apple like some horrible spider-web tie, while the undertaker’s threaded needle speared in the dead Satanist’s cheek as if it were a meaty pincushion.

I jerked the needle free and set to work. After all, a deal was a deal. I intended to keep my end of the bargain. I could only hope that Whistler’s shade would do the same.

Whistler’s corpse didn’t so much as twitch while I worked. I glanced at up at the bottle house, looming on the cliff like the last loose tooth in a skeleton’s jawbone. The bottles twinkled weakly and an orange glow was slowly swallowed by the blackening entranceway-a trick of light as the fire I’d built earlier died in the hearth.

Diabolos Whistler’s ghost was up there somewhere. I was sure of that. So were his daughters-Lethe and Circe-at least the part of Circe that I cared about.

I finished my preparations. There was no way I could drag Whistler’s heavy coffin up the twisting trail. Anything that was going to happen would have to happen here on the beach. I tried to rouse Whistler’s shade. My shouts rang in the night, but the wind brought me no answer.

I wondered if Whistler waited in the temple he had helped build with his own hands, watching for the first sign of the dark miracle he saw as his destiny. I didn’t doubt that Whistler truly believed his own prophecy, as did Spider Ripley and so many others who had surrendered themselves and their faith to the old man.

But faith could only take you so far. No matter what you believed, no matter what god you worshipped. Sooner or later you had to trust your eyes and not your heart.

For Diabolos Whistler and his followers, that moment was now. Whistler’s remains lay in a coffin like any other, a big metal box with a heavy lid designed to hide the truth. But the lid of Whistler’s coffin was open, and the rain beat down and made puddles of his hollowed eyes, spilling trickles that traveled his deeply lined cheeks like tears.

Behind me, I heard a sob.

I turned and saw Whistler’s ghost, that spiked collar of shadow still holding his severed head to his body like a twisted crown.

Our eyes met. For the briefest moment I saw everything Whistler hid there-the wounded pride, the hurt, the shame and the anger. All of it roiling inside a body that was as substantial as a child’s breath lost on the wind.

By the time the next raindrop struck my face, Whistler managed to mask his pain. He stared into the box that held nothing resembling a miracle, and his voice rang out as if he were preaching from his iron pulpit. “I have spent a great many years waiting for the dark one to choose His moment,” he said. “I can wait a little longer, if need be.”

“I can’t,” I said. “I kept my end of the bargain. Now it’s your turn.”

“Very well.” Whistler’s tone was dismissive. “Take what you’ve come for.”

He didn’t have to tell me twice. I grabbed a flashlight from the hearse and slammed the door, but Whistler only had eyes for his corpse. Even now, his faith refused to die. “It won’t matter what you do,” he said. “Very soon, it won’t matter at all. Take the child, if that is what you want. Take her and be done with it-”

“No!”

It was a single word, but it sounded like a scream, and it came from a thicket of beach grass near the trail. Lethe Whistler’s ghost crossed the hard wall of light thrown by the hearse’s headlights, a nightmare of bone and gore on stark display.

“He takes nothing,” Lethe said. “Not until we have what we want.”

Whistler’s gaze did not stray from his casket. “Satan will choose His own time, daughter,” he said.

Lethe stared at her father’s corpse as he rambled on. She was dead and I was alive, but we saw the same thing when we looked into Diabolos Whistler’s coffin-the rot, the haphazardly stitched neck-all the cruel rewards of a prophecy that would never be fulfilled.

Lethe had no more patience for her father’s words.

The moment had arrived, and she’d reached her own conclusion.

She said, “You lied, father.”

Lethe started toward me, cleaved cheekbones gleaming in the flashlight’s glow. “I don’t know what your game is,” she said. “I don’t know what’s between you and my sister and that little girl, but you’re not walking out of here, and you’re not taking her with you.”

“My bargain was with your father,” I said. “Besides, there’s nothing you can do to stop me.”

“But I can do something to that little girl. I’ll finish the job I started, only this time I’ll rip her to shreds.”

“You’ll do nothing, Lethe,” Whistler commanded.

Blue irises flashed in her bloody face. “Quiet father,” she warned, “or you’ll go first.”

She started up the trail. The beach grass lashed her like long knives, like the deep pain of disappointment and betrayal that sliced her heart.

There was nothing I could do to stop her.

But Whistler could. A cold gust of wind blasted over the waves and the beach, and Whistler welcomed its gray embrace. His bristling cloak flared like a catclaw thicket come to life as he rose on the storm, and he closed on his daughter from above, gathering the cloak around her like a net of midnight, wrapping her in his unforgiving embrace.

Lethe fought him, and the sound was the scream of a hurricane. Bony gullies appeared in Whistler’s cloak as she struggled, scratching for freedom, tearing a window in blackness darker than midnight.

The wind tumbled them both. A vein of scarlet spouted from the shroud-Lethe’s arm, skinless fingers scrabbling a brutal path to her father’s spiked neck. Something spilled from Whistler’s wounds, something as dark and shiny as blood, and father and daughter were caught in a twister of it, a razored whirlwind of lashing nettles that sliced the dead deeper than the truth, so much deeper, slashing a relentless path until the only thing that remained was a tattered black vapor that whipped through the beach grass like a shadow fleeing the light.

The storm was the master now. It carried father and daughter into the night and past it, leaving behind the beach and the hearse and the boxed thing that would never move.

I stood alone in the rain.

I didn’t know where Whistler and his daughter had gone. I didn’t care.

I only cared about what they had left behind.

The little girl waited for me in Whistler’s ruined chapel, still hiding behind that cobwebbed cross. “I knew you’d come back,” she said.

“I always keep my promises.”

“Then you’ve got one more promise to keep.”

“What’s that?”

Circe smiled. “Take me away from here.”

Her delicate fingers crossed through the cobwebs without rustling them, but I hardly noticed. I was so happy to see a smile on her face, so happy that she was safe, that I reached out for her hand without thinking.

Our fingertips came together like magnets. Circe’s hand passed through mine. There was nothing I could do to stop it.

The chill of her fingers sent an ache through my bones. I curled my fingers into a fist. Blood pounded in my hand, but there was no warmth in it.