Chapter 44
When they were children, Malcolm had listened in twitching irritation as Elias tried to learn to play the violin.
The screech made him wince, and when Elias didn’t pick it up fast enough for Maggie’s taste, she’d stopped paying for his lessons.
All four of them had been relieved, and Jennie had put the pawnshop violin in its battered case and then into a closet, from which nine-year-old Malcolm had extricated it the next time he found himself home alone.
He loved music. The sound the bow made across the strings bore no resemblance to music at all.
It reminded young Malcolm of the noise made by raccoons fighting over the garbage cans in the middle of the night.
He scraped the bow on those strings again, tried to find an angle that would even suggest melody, and eventually, he did hear something sweet.
Not lovely, but certainly not any worse than the best of the sounds Elias had been able to elicit from the instrument.
Besting Elias was all he’d wanted, so that had been enough for him.
Without lessons, he felt he’d be hopeless, and so the violin went back into its case and the case back into the closet.
Witchcraft felt like that.
Hopeless.
He’d shifted Maggie over behind the passenger seat and moved himself into the middle so he could sit next to the boy.
Benjy spit on him, but only once, as if that had been statement enough.
Jennie and Violet had the courtesy to stay quiet and focus on the drive, but Malcolm felt the passage of time quite keenly.
Minutes would be hours, miles would vanish, and they’d reach Shediak with precious little time before sunrise.
“Abracadabra,” Benjy whispered.
Malcolm ignored him. He’d swiftly become expert at pretending not to see or hear the child. If he could manage this and the boy reverted to his own self, Malcolm would have a difficult time remembering that the putrid child in front of him was not the real one. But first things first.
Like the violin, he hardly knew where to begin.
No spells or incantations, no special recipes.
But he knew the old fire existed because he’d seen it work, made it work, and that was a powerful ammunition all its own.
He closed his eyes and simply breathed, listening to the wipers and the road and the engine.
The old fire had to be inside of him, and he tried to imagine looking inward, searching his heart.
Shouldn’t he be able to sense such a thing, like discovering a muscle he’d never felt before?
If he was meant to wield this power, there had to be some way to ignite it.
He imagined a button or a lever in his chest, tried to reach out into the world around him.
Perhaps he felt something, but he couldn’t be sure.
A terrible ache began in the pit of his stomach, spreading to his chest. His face flushed, and despite the cold wind whipping through the torn vinyl roof, the back of his neck and his ears felt hot with embarrassment. Fear, yes, but the embarrassment was somehow worse.
What if he couldn’t do it?
When Maggie had asked him to bury her in Shediak, he’d imagined it a chore.
A burden, if he was honest with himself.
When he’d learned the truth of witchcraft, his mother a witch, and that the darkness really did hold monsters, it had made him feel as if he’d woken into some other world.
The only way for him to keep functioning had been to just accept it all.
If he’d tried to compare the world he was discovering to the world he’d always known, he’d have been paralyzed with shock.
Going to war had not prepared him for the truths he’d learned, but it had prepared him to detach himself from normalcy so he could keep going, keep fighting.
When Jennie told him he’d have to reinforce the curse Maggie had put on the monsters, it had seemed ridiculous but not impossible.
If this spark was in him, he could speak whatever words Jennie told him to speak.
But now he knew it wasn’t that simple. There were no words unless he thought of them.
Witchcraft took the old fire and mixed it with instinct and the power of intention, and Malcolm might have the first one, but he sure as hell lacked the other two.
Snowflakes slipped through the torn-up roof. One landed on his left eyelid, and he blinked it away.
“Awfully quiet back there,” Violet said. Worried, reminding him of the time without reminding him.
Malcolm nodded. “Whatever I’m supposed to feel, I don’t feel it.”
Benjy snickered.
Violet reached back and laid a hand on Malcolm’s knee. “Sing.”
He whipped around to check on dead Maggie, who watched him from her corner of the back seat with dull, glassy eyes. Snow dusted her hair and nose and clung to the orbit of her left eye, but she didn’t move.
“I didn’t mean that,” Violet went on. “She’s okay for the moment. But she gave you that suggestion, reinforced it, so when you finally realized what you had to do and you started to sing that song, it worked immediately. You must have felt something then. That’s the connection you have to make.”
Had he felt it, during those times? The old fire his mother had talked about?
Maybe he had.
Malcolm began to sing. Behind him, his mother’s corpse flinched.
If this song had become some kind of spell between them, he thought there would be no harm in reinforcing that, particularly as it had already worn off once.
Unlike when he’d sung it before, this time he got further than the first two lines.
He didn’t have the best voice, but it sounded far better than his childhood violin experiment.
As he settled into the melody, Malcolm closed his eyes.
His skin prickled. Even stung a bit, almost as if he’d gotten a sunburn. His lips moved and song emerged, but the words came automatically now. He’d stopped paying conscious attention to the lyrics and focused on how it felt to sing them, to immerse himself in that melody.
He felt a prickle inside, like something had shifted.
Malcolm had heard stage actors talk about having butterflies but always thought it was a bit fanciful—how could people who loved to swan about in front of an audience have such anxieties?
Now he wondered if those butterflies were similar to this sensation.
He centered his thoughts, his whole mind, on that prickling and imagined it had a string attached.
The string came alive for him. His imagination had taken hold of it, but now it felt real.
His body twitched as he tugged against it, and he realized there were other strings.
So many of them, down into the ground beneath the rumbling Frazer, up into the storm and the sky beyond, into the trees on either side of the road.
He opened his eyes. Breathing slowly, afraid to move lest he frighten this feeling away as if it were a nervous cat. But it stayed. He felt that prickling as if it had always been there.
Benjy stared back at him.
The boy’s mocking grin had vanished, replaced by a look of confusion, verging on panic.
“What is that song?” Violet whispered from the front seat.
Had he changed the melody? He supposed he had.
And the lyrics had changed as well, though he couldn’t recall precisely what he’d sung.
Something of protection, of freedom. Something gentle, wrapping the boy in a blanket of that same prickling sensation, but instead of driving off the cold, the words had meant to separate him from the darkness.
Breathe out the dark, Malcolm remembered singing.
Bleed it from your veins. Close the door the monster blew open, and lock it tight.
There was more, but the rest had already fled like the waking wisps of a dream.
“Benjy?” Violet asked, raising her voice.
Jennie glanced in the rearview mirror. “Damn. Did it actually work?”
The boy looked pleadingly at Malcolm. “Are you going to hurt me?”
“No, kid. No way.”
Benjy searched the dark interior of the Frazer and shivered with the cold. “Where’s my mom and dad?”
Malcolm patted the boy’s knee, in shock that this had worked. “I’m sorry, buddy, we don’t know. They weren’t with you when we met you.”
Yes, he was shocked it had worked. But now that it had, Malcolm felt as if that prickling sensation in his gut had always been there and he’d been blind to it.
“Benjy,” Violet said, “we’ll do all we can to make sure you get home safe. What’s the last thing you remember?”
The boy blanched. His eyes widened, and his chin quivered.
Tears filled his eyes, and Malcolm knew memories had begun to return.
“Mommy?” he said quietly, voice breaking, heart breaking.
Then he screamed it, shrieking for his mother, sitting up and looking around like he thought they might comfort him, tell him the memory crashing into him had only been a dream.
Seconds of this desperate yearning passed, and he must have seen in their eyes that no comfort could be found, because the screams grew and there were no more pauses for breath.
Benjy screamed on and on, no matter how Violet and Malcolm tried to comfort the boy.
Malcolm caught a glance from his sister in the rearview mirror. Jennie said nothing, but she wept for the boy, lips pursed.
“It’ll be okay,” Malcolm told him. “You’re not alone, Benjy. We’ve got you.”
The boy hitched his breath, shuddering, and tried to focus on Malcolm, but then his gaze shifted past Malcolm. He seemed even paler, whiter, but a heartbeat later, Malcolm realized it was not the boy’s skin but fresh illumination. Light coming through the rear windshield.
Violet saw it at the same time.
Malcolm turned and looked back. Twin ghost lights, truck headlights approaching. As it closed the distance between them, he could make out the shape of it, looming back there in the storm.
“It’s a plow,” he said.
“How long till Shediak?” Violet asked.
Jennie kept her eyes on the road, but the headlights reflected off the rearview, making a slash of light across her face. “An hour. Maybe less.”
“Make it less,” Violet said. “Speed up.”
“I can’t. It isn’t safe.”
Malcolm glanced at Maggie, lying dead beside him, watching him from inside her corpse. The headlights grew brighter.
“It’s not safe either way, Jen,” he said.
Jennie tensed, but she began to accelerate. The wind cutting through the slashes in the vinyl roof grew fiercer, colder.
They could hear the roar of the plow’s engine.
Something landed in front of the Frazer.
The flying one, there in the road, in the storm.
Malcolm would have tried to swerve and probably killed them all.
Jennie knew better. She accelerated a bit more.
The thing shrieked and tried to take flight again, but too late.
The Frazer might not have had the weight of that plow, but Detroit steel was heavy.
Malcolm felt the flying thing go under the wheels. The suspension bounced. He doubted it was dead, but he hoped the thing was badly broken.
“Look,” Violet said.
They all turned this time, even Jennie. Even Benjy.
The plow had gained so much ground that the driver didn’t have time to slow. The big blade wasn’t touching the pavement, but it hung only half a foot above the snow, and it tore the flying thing in half.
Nobody in the Frazer celebrated. They knew the thing hadn’t come alone.
The plow closed in.