Chapter 57
Malcolm saw it happen. Couldn’t stop it.
Swung the shovel hard enough to shatter Elias’s arm, which would mend itself if he let up.
So he swung again, cracked his brother in the skull, spun, and really wound up this time, smashed Elias’s knee.
When Elias fell, he seemed almost grateful to be lying down.
Malcolm no longer felt any hesitation about killing this thing.
If any of Elias Wise remained inside him, he was still a monster.
Malcolm wanted to finish the job, rip his heart out, but he didn’t have time …
not with Maggie coming up the sand toward them.
Not Maggie, he thought. She’s dead. Elias is dead. And Jennie …
Grief erupted from him in a scream of such anguish, such bitter resentment, that he wanted God himself to respond. To come down onto this fucking island and explain himself.
Maggie laughed at his pain, even as her own pain slowed her to a limping, predatory shuffle.
“Get up, Elias,” she said. “The sun’s almost here. We need to find the darkness.”
As Elias tried to rise, Malcolm took the shovel and backed away from these dead things that were all that remained of his family.
He hastened back to the narrow road separating the beach from the pine woods, getting Maggie closer to her grave.
Her eyes narrowed as she stepped onto the road, and she hesitated, reluctant to get any closer to the hole he’d dug for her.
He started to sing.
“I’ll be seeing you…”
Maggie felt it instantly. Shook her head like she was trying to stay awake.
Fell to one knee. She spat her own daughter’s blood on the snow-covered pavement and began to tremble.
The spell in that song, the power of it, was something she’d woven herself.
However she’d managed it, whatever intricate magic it required, she couldn’t fight—couldn’t fight herself—for long.
The thing in Maggie’s body slurred her speech as she turned to the thing that had once been her eldest son. “Elias … kill him quickly. Not another note of that song. Kill him for Momma.”
Malcolm flinched at her use of that word again. He hadn’t needed another reminder that this was not Maggie Wise, but there it was. Her corpse needed to be in the dirt.
Elias obeyed his mother for once. As the sky lightened and the ocean turned pale, he hurled himself at Malcolm, roaring with a ferocity that seemed more to do with the pain in his bones than hunger or rage.
Malcolm whipped the shovel around, but Elias caught his arm, snatched at the shovel, and ripped it out of his hands, tossing it aside.
It clanged to the pavement and skidded to the side of the road, only a dozen feet from the grave it had dug.
Elias faltered. One shoulder hung lower than the other, as if he’d begun to melt.
He sagged, teeth grinding together as he fought the curse.
Maggie had wanted to stop Malcolm from singing, but he kept going.
His voice cracked, butchering Billie Holiday, but he sang louder, words echoing across the waves.
“Little bastard,” she said. This thing that had been his mother.
She fell on her face. Every other time he’d used the song on her, she’d been dead again, but this time, the body kept twitching and jerking like an inchworm trying to crawl toward him. Still trying to kill him.
Elias attacked. Malcolm feinted left, tried to dodge him, but exhaustion made him no more agile than these contorted monsters.
Elias clawed his arms, dragged at Malcolm’s coat sleeves.
Malcolm slipped out of the coat and stumbled away, turning to defend himself again, still singing, desperately aware of the rim of fire beginning to burn a tiny point out on the horizon.
Time had run out. Malcolm began to change the song, thinking of the things his mother had told him.
The witchcraft, the old fire, already existed within him.
What mattered here was the intent of the witch, the strength of the need, the emotion behind it.
The words came to him as if they’d been waiting on his lips, about protecting both the night and the day from these monsters, from the hunger of the darkness, from malignant beasts.
He sang of the woman she had been, of her strength but also her selfishness, and about her death being the final part of this curse, locking a door that would keep the monsters from walking this world ever again.
Elias hit him so hard that, for a few seconds, all the lights in his head went dark.
He blinked, realized he’d fallen over, and saw Elias stalking toward him, nostrils flared in contempt.
Malcolm had gotten so close, had brought their mother’s body within feet of her grave, but he’d spent his last bit of strength.
Numbness spread through him, a hollow sort of horror, the clarity that came with accepting that his world had come to this—his family destroyed, the seething truth of evil’s existence, and the fact he hadn’t been enough.
That his mother’s faith in him had been misplaced.
He kept singing, quietly now, as he tried to find a last spark.
At least Violet would live another day. He wished he’d had more life with her.
Headlights popped on. Caught Elias as if he were on a stage.
The Frazer’s engine roared, its horn blaring. With only an eyeblink to spare, Malcolm realized the horn meant he had to get out of the way. He threw himself off the narrow road as the Frazer blew past him, thumped into Elias, and skidded to a halt.
Violet at the wheel.
Elias started to rise. Violet ran him down, put it into reverse, backed up over him so that the right front tire sat atop his deflated chest, broken ribs jutting through sickly pale, mushroom skin.
The passenger door opened, and the boy, Benjy, spilled out.
So little, so young, eyes wide with fear, he raced around the car and ran for the shovel.
Malcolm started toward him, but Violet stood in his way.
“Get Maggie!” she shouted at him.
He turned, saw his mother on hands and knees, crawling toward him. Beyond her, the horizon had a line of red and orange. The burning point at its center had begun to spread, as if the edge of the world were on fire.
Singing his new song, his witchcraft, her curse, he ran to Maggie and grabbed her wrists.
As Malcolm dragged her across the road, sliding her on a layer of snow, she looked up at him, and he saw the pitiful creature she’d become.
His song faltered, but only for a moment.
The changes in her face and body remained.
She’d become one of them, with the strange skin, mottled and tough, and a narrow jaw with barely room to hold so many long, black teeth.
Her eyes were pitiful. She looked the part of the monster, but something about those eyes made him think a bit of Maggie Wise still looked out from within. A flicker of soul. Probably just the pain of her curse, the sorrow of any suffering beast. Probably.
From beneath the front tire of the Frazer, Elias shrieked and spat and cursed them all.
Malcolm dragged Maggie off the road and toward the pines. Toward her grave. Benjy sat on his knees in the snow, watching as Violet dug out more dirt, deepening the hole. When she saw Malcolm, she tossed the shovel aside and ran to grab Maggie’s legs.
Together, Malcolm and Violet hoisted her off the ground and tossed her into the grave. She landed in a tangle of limbs, partly on her side, one eye staring up at him. Maybe it was his song or the coming sunrise, but she only twitched and whimpered as he went to get the shovel to fill her grave in.
The first shovelful was the hardest. After that, Benjy got down like a dog and started using his hands to scoop dirt back into the grave, showering snow and soil onto her legs and chest, and Malcolm felt no hesitation.
That one eye remained open as they spread the first layer of dirt on top of her.
He thought maybe she’d say something, that if some of his mother remained, she might thank him for fulfilling his promise or tell him he’d done well.
Or that she loved him. Which was foolish of him.
Dead or alive, this was still Maggie Wise.
Maggie the witch.
She was in pain, and if she was in pain, she’d always strived to make sure the people who loved her felt that pain even more than she did.
Maggie Wise would take your eyes.
Malcolm wiped away tears and kept shoveling. He paused his song long enough to tell his mother that he loved her, because he’d worked to become something more than what she’d made him, and he wouldn’t surrender that part of himself now, or ever.