The Night Parade(116)

“I don’t know what happened to her,” Tim said, and he bent down before Gany’s twisted body. He looked like he might reach out and touch her—perhaps attempt to slide her eyelids down over those bulging, bloodied orbs—but he didn’t.

“Sometimes people lose their way,” David said. He was thinking of Kathy as he said it. “I just hope she didn’t tell anyone else that we were up here.”

Tim glanced up in his direction. The expression on his face suggested he had already considered this. Then he looked back down at Gany’s body and said, “Let’s clean this shit up.” He rubbed at one moist eye with the heel of his hand, then stood up.

David agreed.

*

They dragged the bodies deep into the woods and buried them in shallow graves. David only gagged and vomited on the ground once, when a large brown beetle trundled out of Gany’s distorted mouth and clattered into the underbrush. He was grateful when the chore was done and they finally returned back to the farmhouse.

For several minutes, they sat on the porch steps smoking cigarettes. When they were done, Tim said he was taking the Tahoe down to the main road to see if he could reset the alarm.

“What should I do?” David asked.

“Get some sleep,” Tim told him.

*

David showered, dressed in clean clothes, and crawled into bed next to his daughter, where exhaustion wasted no time dragging him into unconsciousness.





61


He roused to a soft cooing somewhere nearby. And for a time, he allowed the sound to be incorporated into his dream. But when his eyes opened and he rolled over in bed, Ellie’s slight form pressed up against him, he turned toward the partially opened window. A pale block of daylight stood against the windowpane, nearly iridescent. Listening, it took him several seconds to place the sound.

Birdsong.

He sat up, his neck aching, his headache throbbing steadily in the center of his skull. He crawled over Ellie and slipped off the bed, crossing to the window while shielding his eyes from the early morning light. The cool air pricked at his flesh. The sound had vanished, but there was no denying what it had been.

Impossible, he thought.

“Ellie. Ellie.”

The girl did not stir.

He crept down the hall in silence. He crossed into the kitchen and saw dishes and glasses on the counter and in the sink. The bottle of moonshine and the lowball glasses were still on the table. Through the wall of windows that looked out onto the screened-in porch, he could see the remnants of last night’s bonfire. In the distance, the fir trees swayed in the wind.

He went out through the back porch, descended the few steps, and walked backward through the tall, colorless grass. He was looking up toward the peaked roof, at the peeling black shingles and the clumps of bright green moss. There was the bedroom window, partially opened.

And then he saw it: a sleek black bird with oily feathers perched on the cusp of the eave. It was a blackbird, a raven, with oil-spot eyes and a tapered beak like the blade of a pocketknife. As David stared at it in disbelief, the bird cocked its head so that one of its eyes focused on him. It unleashed a shrill caw, then cranked open its wings. Its feathers were so black and slick and iridescent, they were practically blue.

He took another step backward, unable to pull his gaze from the bird.

The bird cawed a second time, the sound of its cry echoing out over the valley, and then its wings began to flap. It lifted off the roof and coasted clear across the field, cutting over David’s head, its shadow passing quickly over his face.

He found himself laughing at the sight of the creature.

He followed it with his eyes as it darted over the field and vanished among the branches of the nearest trees.

A figure stood in the middle of the field. It was a man, and he was wearing the same mask that he’d worn when David had first glimpsed him in the library in Missouri, then in the field beyond the burger joint in Kansas, and then later at Funluck Park in Colorado.

The figure did not move; he simply stood there, the broad shoulders silvered with early morning daylight, the querying cock of his head reminiscent of a curious dog. The blank white mask had been outfitted with eyeholes that resembled empty sockets in a skull.

It took David a moment to find his voice. Once he did, he managed to eke out, “Who are you?”

The figure said nothing. The head cranked toward one shoulder incrementally, the movement that of a somnambulist.

David took a step toward the figure.

“Who are you? What are you doing here? What do you want?”

The figure reached up and removed the mask, revealing a round and doughy face reddened by the sun and glistening with perspiration. The top of the head was hairless and shiny, like a globe slickened with petroleum jelly.

It was Burt Langstrom.





62


Six days earlier


Something inside him—some animal instinct—caused him to slow almost to a stop at the top of their street. Everything was as it should be—the soft lights in the windows of his neighbors’ houses, the radiant white glow of the street lamps, the cars parked silently in driveways—but he was overcome with such apprehension that he began to clench his jaw. At the far end of Columbus Court, the white van was still parked against the curb, just as it had been for the past several nights. He had inquired about the van to some of his neighbors, but no one had claimed it, nor had they any idea to whom it belonged.