Chapter 39 #3
Violet shouted for them to get in. Every muscle in his body that wasn’t rigid with pain wanted to follow her advice.
Whatever clock they had been racing against, it had run out.
None of this made sense. Maggie the witch had woven some kind of curse that caused Root and his kin so much pain that they’d burrowed underground and hibernated to escape it.
Why would she do such a thing if she was one of them?
Jackass, she’s not one of them. His mother? Maggie had loved a bright summer day. She’d given birth to three ordinary children. She’d been difficult and hurtful, but she’d been human.
“How?” he muttered as he slumped against the Frazer.
Jennie grabbed him by the arms, forced him to face her. “Do something!”
He blinked, realizing she’d said it before. Shouted it at him. “What the hell am I supposed to do? You’re the one who knows, so tell me!”
Anger narrowed her features. “Maybe try paying attention! Even if I could stop her, we can’t kill her! We’ve got to bury her!”
“Bury her, still?” He kept going, kept arguing.
Jennie grabbed his bloody, wounded face and turned him to look at their mother. Maggie stood in the falling snow twenty feet away, watching, creeping slowly toward them. She moved gingerly, as if they were deer she did not want to spook.
“You have it in your blood. Use it. She must have told you something, given you something. Some key, some bit of witchcraft, some curse.”
Malcolm watched his mother slide sideways in the snow, moving carefully, inching nearer before she would lunge and drag down her prey.
For all the times she’d twisted his words or treated him like he wasn’t enough, there had also been so many happy moments, trips to the lake, baseball games where she’d cheered with the other parents—and woe betide anyone who said a doubtful word about the beauty and goodness of her children.
That had been her job alone. Mother bear, protecting her cubs.
This thing might not have sloughed her skin like Elias or Root, not yet, but her hunger made her just the same. Hunger like a parasite, like madness driving her. Their mother would rip out their hearts, drink the blood from their throats, take back the life she had given to them.
How could it be, when she looked no different from how she had when they had sewn her into the canvas and nailed her into that crate?
Maggie Wise might have been a witch, but in his heart, her magic was not in cruelty or punishment but in the sweetness of piano music that played just for him, even after death.
“My God,” he whispered.
“What?” Jennie demanded. “Do you have it?”
Maggie picked up her pace, each step faster, bared her teeth through her gruesomely ruined lips, and shrieked in desperate hunger and joy.
Malcolm began to sing. I’ll be seeing you …
His mother slowed. Swayed to the music.
She shook it off, hissed, and started toward him.
Malcolm stepped backward, singing louder, relaxing into the opening bars of this beautiful, melancholy song.
The first lines echoed the beginning of Mahler’s Third Symphony and always filled his heart, but tonight, the song felt so different.
Haunting. As if the melody opened a pit in the ground between himself and his mother, or whatever she’d become.
“Sing!” Jennie shouted.
Sorrow had made him falter. Maggie stalked toward him, quickening her pace.
He remembered sweet moments in the kitchen, times she had smiled and sung happily, and he remembered catching glimpses of her singing this song when she thought she was alone, full of melancholy that seemed to flow out of her in waves that carried out into the neighborhood and beyond.
But Maggie had given him this song. It seemed mad, but now that he’d begun to sing, he felt it bridge the distance between them, felt his own voice encircle her as if he might use it to lift her from the ground and spin her into the air.
The song didn’t have that kind of magic, but it did make her stumble. The hunger and cruelty in her eyes wavered.
He reached the line about looking at the moon, and Maggie collapsed.
A gust of wind blew a layer of dusty snow over her. Malcolm and Jennie approached warily, sure the violence had not ended.
Malcolm knelt and wiped snow from her eyes.
They were open. No longer shining, but sad. Blue. Maggie’s eyes. Despite her supposed age, and in spite of the fact she’d been dead more than a day and a half, Maggie had been transforming into one of the Morák. Somehow Malcolm had stopped that, and the hideous metamorphosis had retreated.
Now she looked dead again. But something had happened, as if she were caught between death and undeath. Maggie appeared to be a corpse, but her eyes were aware, and a thick rattle came from her throat.
She mustered up words, but they came from deep inside. Her lips barely moved. Her voice sounded broken, distant, a radio with a bad antenna.
“Keep singing, Mal,” that haunting, sickly voice said. “Get me … back to the car.”
Jennie staggered, raised a trembling hand to her mouth, and began to cry. Malcolm had frozen. He swayed a bit. They’d been out in the storm for minutes, but only now did the cold bite down to the marrow.
“Dry those … goddamned tears,” Maggie Wise told her daughter. “I didn’t raise you … for tears.”
Malcolm didn’t know if she was alive, or dead and talking, but it was Maggie, all right.
Hard as ever.