Suffer the Children #13
“He’s gone,” Dorothy said. “With that—” Browning glowered at her, but she squared her thin shoulders and said, “He’s gone with that man. They went a-walking a while back. He says Charlie’s weak, and then he takes him a-walking. The boy has—”
“That’s enough, woman,” Browning cut in.
She continued. “The boy—my boy—has scarcely said two words to me. Too weak to converse, that man says. But Charlie can walk and converse with him, easily enough.”
“Well, I’ll leave the stone, then,” Preacher said. “And I’ll leave young Charlie with Eleazar. The man does not wish to see me, I’m certain, so I will stay clear.”
Preacher found Eleazar and Charlie. They had not gone far, just deep enough into the woods that they wouldn’t be overheard, and far enough off the path that they wouldn’t be seen.
Preacher snuck up as best he could. It would not have satisfied Addie, but the two were in such deep conversation that they did not notice him.
“Are you certain that is enough food, boy?”
“I am, sir.”
“I don’t think it is. My instructions were clear. We will be walking in this forsaken wilderness for at least two days. We need more food.”
“I have enough, sir. Much of it is dried.”
Preacher paused, shaking his head as if he was mishearing. It was not the content of their conversation. While he was startled to hear they were leaving together, that paled against surprise of the voices themselves. Of who was delivering which lines. He was hearing wrong. He must have been.
He crept forward until he could see the two figures. Charlie was bent on one knee, examining the contents of a pack, while Eleazar stood behind him.
“This money and these goods are not the full accounting,” Charlie said. “There’s eleven hundred dollars and perhaps two hundred more in goods. That’s five hundred short.”
“Yes, sir,” Eleazar said. “I imagine it is. But this is not a wealthy village. They are gathering more, but I presumed you wanted to be gone before the children fully woke.”
“Don’t be smart with me, boy,” Charlie snapped.
Eleazar cleared his throat. “Given the situation, sir, I might suggest you’ll want to stop calling me that.”
“In private, I’ll call you what I want. How long would it take to get more from them?”
“Too long. And that was not the primary purpose of this trip. We got you something far more valuable than money, did we not?”
Charlie snorted. “A child’s body is not particularly valuable. Now, a strong young man’s…”
“It will be such in a few years. We ought to count ourselves lucky that there was a boy of goodly age in the last week who died. You’d not have wanted to be brought back as a toddling child. Or a girl.”
More grumbling. When Preacher had first heard them speaking, his mind had reeled.
Then something in his gut steadied it, saying, Yes, this makes sense.
Of course, in the larger scheme of things, the fact that an old man’s soul had been put into the body of a dead boy did not make sense, but given all that Preacher had seen, it was more sensible than any explanation he’d considered.
The soul was the essence of life. Charlie’s was long gone.
In heaven, he trusted. And if one believed that, and one believed the scriptures, then a merciful God would not allow a child to be stolen back from paradise.
The body would need to be returned to life with a soul still wandering this world. The soul of someone recently departed.
It had seemed odd that Rene had been Eleazar’s assistant, but the man had been so doddering that it would have seemed more shocking to realize the situation was reversed.
Now it seemed it was indeed the case. The old man—the leader, the teacher—had been in need of a new body, and they had taken it here, in Chestnut Hill.
As for the other six children…
Dear God. The other six.
Timothy James’s soul. The souls of five others. Murdered, only to awaken in the bodies of children…children whose parents they would hold responsible for their deaths.
Preacher turned away from Eleazar and Rene. What they had done was a horrible thing, deserving a terrible punishment, but right now, there were others about to be punished even more terribly, others who’d known nothing of the murders, who’d only wanted their children—
“You do realize we are not alone, I hope,” Rene said, his voice as easy as if he were discussing the possibility of rainfall.
“What?” Eleazar said.
“Someone watches from the woods. I trust you plan to take care of that.”
Eleazar let out a curse. Preacher began to run, not caring how much noise he made, only that he got back to the village in time to warn them before—
Something grabbed his legs. He did not trip. He was certain of that. He felt the pressure, something wrapping about them as he ran, and there was no time to stop. He fell face-first to the ground.
“Preacher Benjamin,” Eleazar said, crashing through the forest behind him. “You are a persistent man. I will grant you—”
“No, you fool,” Rene exclaimed. “Not him. I meant—”
“Preacher! Run!”
It was Addie. Eleazar spun toward her voice, back toward the clearing where Rene stood. Preacher clambered to his feet. He could see no sign of Addie, but he had heard her. He had very clearly—
The twang of a bow. He saw the arrow. Saw it heading straight for Rene. Saw it hit him square in the throat.
Eleazar let out a howl of rage and ran for the girl, now standing ten paces away, stringing her bow again.
Addie
Addie couldn’t ready her bow fast enough.
She ought to have been able to—she’d made sure she would have time to fire two arrows.
One for the monster that had stolen Charlie’s body and one for the monster that had helped him.
Yet as she strung the second arrow, the ground seemed to fly up under her feet, as if by magic.
She toppled backward, and Eleazar was on her, wrenching the bow away with one hand while grabbing her coat with the other. She went for her knife, but before her fingers could touch the handle, he’d grabbed it himself. Then he whipped her around, knife at her throat, shouting at Preacher to stop.
Preacher halted in midstep, and stood there, his eyes wild with fear, breath coming so hard she could hear it.
I’m sorry, she thought. I ought to have shot Eleazar first. Let you escape. But all I could think about was Charlie. That monster in his body.
The monster that was dying now. Lying on the ground, wheezing its death rattle, arrow lodged in its throat.
“Let her go,” Preacher said.
“I cannot,” Eleazar said. “I need—”
“I know what you need. And I know that what you have isn’t satisfactory. What you had wasn’t either. So I’m offering you a trade.”
“Are you? Interesting…”
“Take it,” Preacher said. “It’s what he’d want. You know it is.”
Addie struggled to figure out what they were talking about. Preacher was making sure she didn’t. She could tell that, and a knot of dread in her gut grew bigger with each passing moment.
“Take it,” Preacher said. “Quickly.”
Eleazar seemed to be considering the matter, but then, without warning, he grabbed Addie by the hair and whipped her against a tree. Her head hit the trunk hard, blackness threatening as she fell. She lay there, fighting to remain awake, as she heard them continue.
“You did not need to do that,” Preacher said.
“Oh, I believe I did. She’s a feisty little one, and I don’t think she’ll like what I’m about to do.”
“Just get it done. Quickly please.”
Addie managed to raise her head and saw Eleazar walk to Preacher.
She saw his hands go to Preacher’s neck, wrapping around it, and she understood what he’d meant.
That with Charlie’s body dying, the monster—Rene—needed a new vessel.
Eleazar had been going to take hers. Preacher had offered his instead.
“No,” she whispered. “Please no.”
She could see her bow there, only a few paces away. She dug her fingers into the dirt and pulled herself toward it and—
And she passed out.
Preacher
As Preacher watched Addie lose consciousness, he had a sudden vision of her death, of Eleazar killing him for his master and then walking over, kneeling and wrapping his fingers around the girl’s neck. Preacher’s hands flew up, catching Eleazar’s, stopping them as they squeezed.
“Wait!” he said.
He held the man’s hands still as he looked at him.
“You’ll not hurt her,” he said. “After it’s done.”
“I have no cause. You’ll have given me what I want.”
“It was not a question,” Preacher said, locking eyes with the man.
“You are accustomed to bodies where the soul is long departed. If Rene’s soul still lingers now, then so will mine, for a time.
If you hurt the girl…I cannot lie and say what I will do, because I do not know what I may do.
But I am certain I can do something, and so I will, if she’s harmed. ”
“As I said, I’ll have no cause once Rene has his new body. A girl child is no threat to me. As for telling anyone, I’m quite certain that by now, your village has already realized something has gone very, very wrong.”
The village. The other children.
“No,” he said. “You—”
Eleazar’s grip tightened. Preacher tried to stop him, to say more, but the man squeezed with inhuman strength and then—
Darkness.
Preacher jolted upright. He was lying on the forest floor, Charlie’s body beside him. He scrambled to his feet and looked around, but there was no sign of Eleazar.
Something had gone wrong. He’d been tricked.
Addie.
Preacher whirled, searching for his foster daughter, seeing no sign—
No, there she was, across the clearing, still on the ground. He raced over and dropped beside her. He put his hands to her thin chest and—
His fingers passed through her. He stumbled back, falling on his rear. Then he looked down at his hand, the grass poking through it, undisturbed.
Nothing has gone wrong.
I’m dead.
He gasped, the sudden realization as agonizing as a bullet to the heart.
I’m dead. I’m gone.