The Night Parade(115)

Kahle’s body lay at Ellie’s feet, the twisted agony on his face and his swollen, bloodied eyes all David needed to see to know he was dead. Gany’s shotgun lay beside Kahle, but Gany herself was nowhere in sight.

David staggered toward his daughter, and it seemed to take forever to close the distance. When he reached her, he pulled her against him and hugged her hard. She felt as stiff as petrified lumber, and for one terrible second, he couldn’t even feel her heart beating through her chest, couldn’t hear whether she was breathing or not.

“Are you okay?” he said, his face pressed against hers. Her face was hot and moist with tears. When she didn’t answer, he held her out at arm’s length and spoke directly into that blank, unregistering face. “Are you okay, Eleanor?”

“Yessss,” she said, her stare jittering in his direction. The word sounded like the perfect hybrid of a child’s sob and a serpent’s hiss.

*

Dawn broke fifteen minutes later. To the east, fingers of daylight crept over the horizon and threw javelins of pink light through the trees. The forest insects continued their chorus, unabated and unafraid of the encroaching daylight.

Back in the house, David helped Ellie clean up, washing the blood from her face and arms in the bathroom sink while she stood there, her face registering no emotion, the pupils of her eyes tiny and insignificant black dots. Something inside her had changed.

“Baby,” he said, using a warm washcloth to rub away the streaks of blood from her arm. “Talk to me.”

“It’s getting stronger,” she said. Her voice sounded different, although he couldn’t tell why. Something about her was different now.

“Are you gonna be sick?”

“No. Not this time. Not anymore.”

“Are you afraid?”

She looked directly at him. Her pupils widened. “No,” she said simply enough. “Are you?”

He summoned a smile for her, though he felt devoid of any good feelings. He was terrified. The blood did not want to wash off Ellie’s face.

“Dad . . .”

“Yeah, baby?”

“I killed those people.” That flat, toneless voice. He could see himself reflected in the dark pools of her eyes.

“Shhh,” he told her, and brought her close against him. Hugged her.

He wished she would cry on his shoulder, would open up and let it all out. But she didn’t. It felt like hugging a wooden puppet.

Afterward, he carried her back to her room and laid her in the large bed. She was already asleep before her head hit the pillow. David stared at her impassive face for countless minutes, studying her, hoping he’d be able to discern what had changed inside her by such superficial scrutiny. He even touched her, gently and on the side of her face, and closed his eyes. Concentrated. Tried to suck all the bad out of her just as she had done to him. But he couldn’t. He was helpless.

Before leaving the room, David kissed her forehead. Her flesh was cold against his lips.

*

Tim was standing at the far end of the property, at the cusp of the dark woods that swelled up the mountainside, looking down at something on the ground. In the light of morning, the bodies of Kahle and Bandanna looked surreal.

David climbed down the porch steps, and started across the yard to join Tim at the edge of the woods. At one point, he saw pieces of the ground move—small mounds of dirt appearing to respire, to swell up in a mound then collapse again. He paused and examined one such area, a crumbly molehill surrounded by a patch of dark grass. The mound bulged one last time, and something began to emerge from the apex. It emerged headfirst, its head outfitted in oversized, multifaceted red eyes. Its body was ashy white, bullet-shaped, with two translucent, ovoid wings fixed to its back. Once it was fully free of the dirt, it scuttled halfway down the side of the mound, then paused. David got the sense that this large insect—roughly the size of a mouse—was staring up at him. The thing emitted a machinelike buzzing sound that David felt vibrate in his back teeth before it flared its wings—they were as decorative as stained glass—and lifted off into the air. It moved with the labored, weighty lassitude of a carpenter bee. David watched it climb in the air until it disappeared over the roof of the farmhouse.

Moments later, he joined Tim at the edge of the woods. He realized Tim was staring down at Gany’s body. In the stark light of morning, she was almost unrecognizable. A network of black blood vessels had burst along both of her cheeks. The tendons in her neck stood out like hydraulic cables. It looked as though she had screamed with such force that her lower jaw had actually come loose. Blood had spurted from her nose, mouth, and ears, and was now smeared across half her face. And her eyes . . . Christ, her eyes . . . The irises were no larger than pinpricks, the sclera filled with blood.

Insects were already working her over . . .

“After Ellie touched her, she ran off toward the woods,” Tim said. “She was screaming like a madwoman.”

“So then it lingered,” David said. “Even after Ellie stopped touching her.”

Tim looked at him. “Is Ellie okay?”

It took him a while to answer, unsure of the right words. “I don’t know, Tim. She’s changed.”

“I’m sorry about this. Jesus Christ, David, I’m so sorry about this.”

“There’s no way you could’ve known.”