Chapter 39
Malcolm took it slow, worried about keeping the Frazer’s tires on the road.
He didn’t like traveling slowly. The things behind them were fast when they needed to be.
The snow made it difficult to make out the writing on road signs, but they had passed the New Hampshire border a while ago, and he wondered how long it would be before they entered the state of Maine.
Violet had tried to take his hand several times, but the wind forced him to keep both of his hands on the wheel.
She played with the hair at the back of his head for a few minutes, but that made him sleepy.
Malcolm caught Jennie’s eye in the rearview mirror and knew she had been paying attention.
He was grateful that she had decided to stay silent on the matter.
They had other conflicts to worry about.
The road rumbled beneath them, muffled by packed snow. Plows were out, but not enough. The tires on the Frazer seemed adequate, but if the snow kept up, that wouldn’t remain true forever.
“She sleeping?” Jennie said.
The dashboard light cast Violet in a spectral glow. Malcolm glanced at her, then into the rearview. “I think so. I’m struggling to stay awake myself.”
Jennie’s eyes flared. “Don’t joke. Watch the road.”
He obeyed, sitting a bit straighter. Jennie had been gone a long time, but some things were simply ingrained in him, like believing his big sister had a certain wisdom he would never possess.
As tired as they all were, it had surprised him that Violet could fall asleep.
They had wrapped Maggie’s body in the canvas and rubber as best they could, but they didn’t have Paxson Keates’s tools or his skills.
She wasn’t sewn inside her shroud anymore but bundled in the fetal position on the seat right behind Malcolm.
If the peculiar weight of the presence of the dead had not been enough to unnerve him, the smell did the job.
Dead things stank when they began to decay, but Maggie hadn’t been dead long enough for that.
Still, there was a smell like milk beginning to spoil, along with an acrid chemical stink, and the knowledge that these odors came from his mother’s remains made it all seem somehow more real and more tragic.
Maggie Wise would never have the chance to understand why her children kept her at a distance, sometimes physical and sometimes emotional.
She’d never have the chance to close that distance.
Not that she had seemed inclined when she was alive. But never seemed like a sledgehammer of a word now. Malcolm wondered how many other words would be redefined by living, or by others dying.
In the back seat, Jennie said his name. He glanced in the rearview again.
He didn’t really like to look in that mirror, because while he could not see his mother’s body or the way one of her arms jutted from inside the canvas, he could see the passenger who sat between his sister and their dead mother.
Benjy didn’t move. He shook along with the car, the same way cargo would have, but he hadn’t moved of his own accord since minutes after Jennie had sprinkled him with her pixie dust. He sat with his hands cuffed behind his back and stared, unblinking, at Malcolm in the rearview.
“Yeah,” Malcolm said, returning his focus to the snow falling in front of the headlights.
“What was that in the funeral home?” Jennie asked. Quietly, so as not to wake Violet.
He didn’t feel like talking. He especially didn’t feel like talking about this. But it would help him stay awake, and he had never been able to keep anything from her.
“I asked you if you heard music,” he reminded her. “Piano music. ‘I’ll Be Seeing You.’”
“Billie Holiday? That’s not piano music.”
“It can be played on the piano.” He knew that for sure.
“Go on.”
“I thought I was losing my mind. I’m hearing it. Been hearing it since not long after Maggie died. Sometimes—most of the time—it seems like it’s coming from her.”
He watched Jennie in the rearview, trying not to lock eyes with Benjy. Jennie glanced past the kid, looking over at their mother’s corpse in its fetal bundle.
“Elias could hear it a little,” he added.
Jennie shook her head. “Elias, too.”
“A little.”
“And back at the funeral home, the little guy.” Jennie spoke to him, but she kept her eyes on Maggie’s body. Her chin drooped, her expression a battle between love and disappointment.
“What’s it mean?” Malcolm asked.
She saw him watching her in the mirror. “It means watch the road, baby brother.”
He straightened again.
“You’re going to get us killed long before we reach Maine,” she said.
“What’s it mean, Jen?”
“You’re smart, soldier. I know you’ve worked it out by now.”
He did have a guess. A pretty good one, he thought. But she had traveled and studied and knew a hell of a lot more about any of this than he did.
“Witchcraft, obviously,” he said. “But the guy in the funeral home looked more like a math teacher than a witch.”
“I told you, the important part of this stuff is either in you or it isn’t,” Jennie said. “It’s in you, obviously. I guess a little bit in Elias. And the funeral home guy. He’s probably had weird things happen to him all his life and never put two and two together.”
“So, not a math teacher, then?” Malcolm smiled.
Jennie punched the back of his headrest. “The road!”
A cluster of pine trees loomed ahead, beautiful in the snow, caught in the headlights.
Malcolm’s heart raced as he tapped the brake, turned the steering wheel just a little, tapped the brake again.
The road had curved to the right. He couldn’t correct enough without losing control, so he let the Frazer bump over the low wall of snow on the roadside.
The brake tempted him, but he knew if he slowed down or skidded, they would get stuck.
Instead, he turned just a bit more and gently pressed the accelerator.
His heart kept skidding out of control, but with a shudder and a thump, they were on the road again.
“Did you fall asleep?” Violet murmured, rubbing her eyes.
“I’m okay,” he said. “We’re okay.”
Violet sat up and looked around. “It’s dark.”
“It’s been dark,” he said.
“Nighttime, I mean.”
“We’re okay,” Malcolm told her. “We had a head start, and they can’t track us now.”
Violet turned in her seat to look back at Jennie, perhaps for confirmation. Jennie said nothing, but Violet seemed momentarily content. He suspected they were all unwilling to trust any sort of optimism—not until the task had been completed—and that was for the best.
As if to underscore his caution, a single piano note rang out in the Frazer. Crisp and clear in spite of the engine and the wipers and the road, it was followed by several further notes, played as if by an idle drunk preparing to entertain.
Then the song began. His pulse quickened with the music. The melody felt too rapid, and sped up. He glanced at Violet and back at Jennie. Neither of them reacted.
“The music again,” he rasped. “Her song.”
Jennie shot a look over at Maggie’s corpse. Malcolm watched it happen in the rearview mirror, and so he and his sister saw the boy move at the same time. He’d been frozen in silence. Now he smiled and began to rock in time with the music, laughing.
“Close! So close!” Benjy cried in delight. “You wanted to know when they were near, and now you know!”
He thrust upward as if to celebrate, even to dance.
His head skidded off the interior of the convertible top, and he fell forward, halfway over the Frazer’s front seat, jerking with seizure even as his laughter continued.
He thrashed so hard he knocked into Malcolm’s elbow, nearly driving them off the road again.
Malcolm slowed the car. “Damn it! Get him under control!”
Violet moved to help Benjy. The boy’s hands were still cuffed behind his back. Malcolm knew she would hate every second of this, but she put her weight on him and whispered reassurances. The seizing tapered off, but the laughter continued.
Jennie had a hand on his back as well. “How far, Benjy?”
That only made him laugh. The monsters were coming, but knowing that might not make a difference if they didn’t know what kind of time they had.
“Don’t you feel it?” Malcolm asked. “It’s like the air is full of despair. Like I’m breathing grief into my fucking lungs. Can’t you—”
“It’s evil,” Violet said. “It makes you want to crawl off somewhere and hide. But there’s nowhere to go.”
Malcolm glanced at her. Violet’s hands were trembling.
“Find a place to pull off the road,” Jennie said sharply.
“How did they find us? You said they wouldn’t be able to track us now.” Malcolm craned his neck, trying to see through the rear windshield. “The side roads are barely plowed. How am I supposed to get us somewhere safe?”
Benjy went stiff. The Frazer slid to a halt. Malcolm glanced over at the kid where he lay still draped over the seat, twitching. Benjy wore the smile of an eager addict, obscene on a child’s face.
Violet whispered, “There’s nowhere safe.”
Her voice merged with the sound of the wipers shushing snow, so he’d almost missed the words until he saw the expression on her face and the angle of her eyes, which stared into the shadowy place behind the driver’s seat. The place where Maggie’s body lay.
The wipers shushed. But there were other sounds in addition to Violet’s whisper.
Jennie muttered something like a prayer. Her eyes were damp. She’d let go of Benjy and slid back into her seat, staring into the same shadows as Violet.
“I’ll Be Seeing You” had gone silent.