The Night Parade

  David looked at Tim.

  “I never said a word to anyone,” Tim said.

  “I heard you talking,” Gany said. “And I’ve read the news and know that people are after the girl.”

  “We’ve got a whole group of people who would love to meet you,” Kahle said to Ellie.

  “We’re not going anywhere with you,” David said.

  Kahle stood. “What’s this ‘we’ business?”

  “We’re not going to hurt her, David,” Gany said. “She’ll be okay.”

  “She isn’t going with you,” said David.

  Tim leaned forward on the sofa and stared up at Gany. When he spoke, his voice was low, his tone compassionate. “Gany, honey, what’s this all about? Who are these people?”

  “We’re true Worlders, Tim,” she said. “But we’re not just going to sit by and wait to die. Someone like Ellie—someone with her abilities—might be enough to keep us healthy. She might even learn to cure the Folly in time.”

  “So you’re turning her in?”

  Kahle laughed, a series of loud barks. “Turning her in? Are you kidding me? We’ve got no moral responsibility to the rest of the world. Let them die, for all I care. Not us, though.”

  “So you’ll take her as a hostage,” David said. “Use her like a drug and hope that she can keep you all from getting sick.”

  “I can’t do it!” Ellie cried. “I’ve tried and I can’t! I can’t cure anybody.”

  “Well, maybe, sweetheart,” Kahle shouted back at her, his face suddenly cold as stone, “you’ll figure it out.”

  “You’re all mad,” David said.

  “You’re no humanitarian yourself, David.” It was Gany, a trace of anger in her voice now. As if she had been the one betrayed. “What difference does it make if she’s our hostage or yours? You’re letting the world die anyway.”

  “Don’t do this, Gany,” Tim said. “This isn’t what you really believe.”

  “Don’t tell me what I believe!” Gany shouted at him. Her eyes were fierce. “I’ve watched enough people die! I buried my whole goddamn family!”

  “Gany—”

  “Enough.” Kahle reached out for Ellie. “Come on, kid. Let’s go.”

  David wrapped her tightly in his arms.

  “Don’t make me kill you, Daddy-O,” Kahle said. “Let her go.”

  David did not let her go.

  The guy in the bandanna stepped forward and pressed the muzzle of his pistol against David’s forehead.

  “Stop this,” Tim said, but even his voice was quaking now.

  “Ain’t got no problem opening up your head right here, Pops,” Bandanna said. His voice was as deep as a drum.

  “No!” Ellie sobbed, pulling free of David’s arms. “Don’t hurt my dad!”

  “Ellie,” he said.

  She shook her head. There was terror in her eyes, but she wasn’t crying. She looked at Kahle and said, “I’ll go. Just don’t hurt him.”

  “No, Ellie,” David said.

  She hugged him around the neck, kissed the side of his face, and whispered something too low for him to decipher into his ear. When she pulled away from him, it was as if something vital had extracted itself from inside his body.

  Ellie took Kahle’s outstretched hand and got up off the sofa.

  “Ellie . . .” David said.

  She glanced at him over her shoulder as Kahle hauled her toward the doorway. And then David saw it—the slight narrowing of Ellie’s eyes on an otherwise impassive face. The terror was gone, replaced by a sharp calculation. It was tantamount to the look that had overtaken her just before she’d touched Cooper back in Goodwin.

  “You want me to shoot ’em anyway?” Bandanna said. He’d removed the pistol from David’s forehead but still had the gun trained on him, no more than two feet from his face.

  “No!” Ellie shouted. She tried to pull her hand free of Kahle’s, but he wouldn’t release her. “I’ll never do anything for any of you if you hurt them.”

  Kahle nodded at her. “Fair enough.” He turned to Bandanna and said, “You heard the little lady. Let them be.”

  They marshaled out of the room, Gany bringing up the rear with the shotgun still pointed at both David and Tim.

  “It isn’t too late to do the right thing, Gany,” Tim said.

  Gany just shook her head at him. The look on her face suggested that Tim was a fool and that she pitied him. And then she was gone, moving quickly down the hallway toward the front of the house.

  David got up and rushed after them.

  “David!” Tim called after him.

  David made it to the front porch in time to see Kahle leading Ellie across the lawn toward the SUV. Bandanna hurried ahead and opened the rear door of the SUV. He had collected David’s and Tim’s weapons from the porch and was sliding them into the SUV’s open door now. Gany hung back, the shotgun still trained on David.

  “You just stay up there,” she instructed him.

  “Shoot the tires out of their cars so they can’t follow us,” Kahle told her. “I don’t want to take any—”

  Kahle stopped suddenly and froze in midstride. Then he looked down at Ellie’s hand, which was gripping his own so tightly now that the tips of her fingers had turned white.

  “You’re—” Kahle began.

  Fear ghosted like a quick shadow over his face. He tried to jerk his arm away from Ellie’s grip, but she did not release his hand. For a split second, it was as if Kahle was fighting off a laugh, or at least a smile . . . but then something changed, and that laugh, that smile, never came. Instead, his mouth stretched to an impossible length, as though his jaw had become unhinged, and then there was the sound of a teakettle whistling on a stove top. It took David a moment or two to realize that sound was coming from Kahle.

  And then Aaron Kahle began screaming.

  Gany spun around. Beside the open door of the SUV, Bandanna stood, trying to comprehend what was happening.

  Ellie reached up and placed her other hand on Kahle’s forehead.

  “Hey!” Bandanna yelled, though he looked suddenly terrified and did not move away from the vehicle. “Hey! Aaron, what’s—”

  Kahle began thrashing his head from side to side, though whether this was to loosen Ellie’s grip on him or simply out of sheer pain, David could not be sure.

  Bright red blood burst from Kahle’s right nostril. A second later, crimson tendrils spilled out of his mouth and dribbled down his chin. The high-pitched keening that was emanating from his throat suddenly took on a wet, clotted sound before dying out altogether.

  Ellie kept her hand firmly against Kahle’s forehead, her other hand still clutching one of his, as Kahle dropped to his knees. He was shrieking and tearing at his hair now, his eyes rolled back to their whites. Blood whipped from his nose and spattered across Ellie’s face.

  She didn’t even blink.

  Gany suddenly broke her stupor and ran toward Kahle and Ellie. At the same time, Bandanna peeled himself off the SUV and took a few timid steps in their direction, too.

  David sprung up and jumped over the porch railing.

  Gany reached out, grabbed Ellie’s wrist, and tried to wrench the girl’s hand off of Kahle’s face. A second later, Gany withdrew her hand, recoiling as if shocked by a jolt of electricity. Ellie whipped her head around to watch Gany take a step backward, a look of abject horror now etched across Gany’s face.

  Suddenly, the air was sucked from David’s lungs again. He froze, his sneakers skidding in the dirt. His flesh began to tingle.

  Ellie released her hold on Kahle; the second she did so, Kahle’s body dropped face-first into the dirt. She turned and clamped both hands overtop Gany’s, which were still clutching the shotgun. Gany screamed and the shotgun went off, blowing a crater into the earth at their feet. She tried to wrench her hands free, but Ellie wouldn’t let her go. She fell quickly to her knees while simultaneously throwing her head back. Her screams became operatic, taking on a frequency David would hav
e thought impossible for human vocal cords. Blood began streaming out of Gany’s ears.

  A second gunshot rang through the air. David turned and saw Bandanna firing his pistol at Ellie. He was shooting erratically, his face full of terror. David rushed him, and Bandanna swiveled and got off one more shot before David collided with him and they both went crashing to the ground. The pistol exploded again, the blast so close to David’s left ear that all sound was instantaneously sucked out of the world. Bandanna struck him in the face, knocking him onto his side in the dirt. David rolled over and climbed to his feet, the absence of sound quickly replaced by a shrill, sonorous whistle. He tripped over his feet and fell backward onto the ground, his teeth gnashing together in his skull.

  Bandanna loomed above him, a shifting silhouette against the row of floodlights that now partially blinded David, a silhouette that swung its pistol toward him. Faintly, over the ringing in his ears, David heard the roar of a gunshot . . . and in that same instant, his attacker’s silhouette was swept away from the floodlights. David felt no pain.

  (sleep you can sleep you can fly you can sleep)

  (so cold)

  Consciousness threatened to leave him, but he fought to hold on to it. There was nothing but the burning stench of gunpowder in the air, the blinding floodlights that were rapidly pixelating, and the incessant tonal ringing at the center of his head. Even when the smell of gunpowder faded and the floodlights turned dark, he could still hear that ringing, ringing, ringing.

  60

  He wasn’t sure if he ever truly lost consciousness, though he was aware of his senses rushing back to him at one point, so he must have been close. He smelled the burning early morning air and heard the ringing in his ears. He sat up and saw a dead man with a red bandanna askew on his head not two yards from him, a gaping, sodden wound in his chest.

  David crawled to his feet and stood there, wavering like a drunk.

  Ellie stood facing him, her eyes wide, her lower lip trembling. She held her arms away from her body, like a child pretending to have airplane wings, and there was blood on her nightshirt, her arms, her face. She wore no expression, as if a part of her mind had fled during the melee. Only her eyes showed any sign of life—two blazing orbs that seemed to be seeing everything and nothing all at once.

  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.”

  “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 anyo
ne 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.