began to fall, he’d grown increasingly nervous. His skin had begun to crawl, as if thousands of ants were creeping over his body, and he’d begun to imagine that he heard sounds outside in the night.
Sounds of children, coming out of the darkness, creeping up from the depths of the swamp, surrounding his house.
Watching him through his uncurtained windows.
He scurried around the house, turning off all the lights, and then sat in the darkness, telling himself that he was only imagining the demons that filled the night.
And then he heard the howling outside the door.
He froze, fear drying his mouth and clutching at his belly.
The howl came again, rising out of the marshes, reaching out to him, and Fred Childress, unable to resist the keening in the night, moved toward the door.
Against his will, he opened it.
He saw nothing for a split second, but then there was movement in the darkness, shadows beginning to move out of the pine trees.
Fred Childress’s heart began to pound once more as he saw the children emerge from the trees.
There were five of them, two of whom Fred recognized.
Quint and Tammy-Jo Millard, their hands intertwined, stopped at the bottom of the steps to his porch, gazing up at him.
Their empty eyes glittered coldly in the moonlight.
As the other three children joined them, and Fred Childress’s fear blossomed into panic, he felt a white-hot surge of adrenaline race through him.
For he knew what they wanted from him.
They wanted what was theirs.
They wanted the youth he’d taken from them.
Tonight, they intended to have it.
Fred Childress’s fear grew into abject terror as he felt the shadow of death begin to pass over his soul.
He felt them reaching out to him with their minds, boring into him, as if examining every corner of his being. And then grasping something deep within him.
Grasping it, and tearing it loose.
Fred screamed as a searing pain passed through his chest. The agony grew, as if a hot knife had been plunged into him, and he could feel its heat radiating through his body, slowly destroying him.
He raised his hands to his face and felt a rough scaliness on the folds of his skin.
The folds that had not been there only a few seconds ago, before he’d opened the door to face the children.
The children moved closer, and though Fred Childress tried to back away, tried to retreat into the shelter of his house, his body refused to obey his mind.
He felt the hands of the children on him now, pulling him off his porch, clutching at him, tearing at him.
They lifted him up, his quickly weakening body no longer able to resist at all, and carried him off into the night.
They came at last to the edge of the swamp, where they hurled the dying man to the ground.
Quint Millard threw himself on the twitching ruin of the undertaker, his strong hands tearing at the old man’s chest, ripping it open to seize the shrunken vestige of a gland that was all but lost within the desiccating tissues of Childress’s lungs.
Ripping a fragment of it away, Quint passed the small mass of tissue to the waiting hands of the other children.
As Fred Childress’s body finally died, the five children felt an unfamiliar warmth pass into their bodies.
And felt tears form in their eyes.
Tammy-Jo Millard, her eyes glistening, put her arms around Quint. “I’m scared,” she whispered. “I ain’t never been so scared in my life. I feel like maybe I be dyin’!”
Quint held his wife close. “Not dyin’,” he whispered. “Not dyin’ at all. We’re alive. We’re alive, and we’re free.”
On the island where Clarey Lambert waited, five of the candles on the altar were suddenly snuffed out, though not a breath of air had moved in the night.
And the eyes of five of the dolls overflowed with tears.
“Nothing,” Marty Templar said as he stepped out of the boat into the knot of people clustered on the dock at the tour headquarters. “All I could find was a bunch of swamp rats, and you know how they are—they’d as soon spit at you as give you the time of day.”
Tim Kitteridge nodded grimly, wondering why the swamp rats clung so tenaciously to their own ignorance. But if they wouldn’t talk, there wasn’t anything he could do about it. “What about Judd Duval?” he asked. “Did you see him?”
Templar shook his head. “Not a trace. I even swung by his house a while ago, but no one’s there. You ask me, we’ve got