He slowed to a careful twenty miles an hour, and maneuvered the curve apprehensively. His headlights, turning across the vertical plane of dense pine, suddenly glinted on metal. His entire frame shook with a fear that was beyond wonder or surprise. With his hands on the wheel, unable to turn, and his foot on the accelerator, unable to slow, he was headed north, no more than a mile out of Babylon. The Styx River bridge lay just ahead.
Nathan braked. There was no mistaking his location or direction. The full moon now shone through the windshield, and on the far side of the river, he could just make out the Larkin farmhouse, glowing white among the dark pines. Sweating and suffocated, he rolled down the window. The dead moist air that hung above the Styx invaded and filled the vehicle.
A wet slap broke against a tree only a dozen feet from his open window. He pivoted his head that way, saw nothing. He lifted his foot from the brake, and made a quick turn in the road. The lights of the Scout, panning across the trees, picked out two low white spots, like phosphorescent balloons, in rapid movement toward the highway.
He slammed his foot on the accelerator, and once more turned the curve. He would return to Babylon, give himself up, and be protected by Ted Hale. If these were phantoms of guilt, then he’d be rid of them once he had surrendered,
He took the bend more quickly this time, spun around it, and barreled south toward Babylon, leaving whatever it was in the forest well behind him. The road curved slightly all the way back, three quarters of a mile, no more. He ought to be passing Nina’s house in less than a minute. His mind strayed in fearfulness, back to the bridge and what had waited for him there, and when his consciousness snapped back to the road, he looked anxiously ahead, for he knew he ought already to have passed the town limits. But the forest was unbroken on either side, and Babylon wasn’t beyond the next curve in the road—nor the one after that. The trees were towered and black and crowded the roadway; the moon shone high overhead.
Nathan checked the mileage gauge. It was just ticking off seven tenths. He drove faster, as attentive to the gauge as to the road. A full mile of the winding highway, the dense unbroken forest, and Babylon was not in sight. From the Styx River bridge to Babylon, there was no turnoff, no way of getting lost. Where was he? His mind had wandered, be had passed through Babylon without noticing, and was probably half way to the coast by now. Because of the position of the moon, he knew he was headed south. His mind played one trick on top of another.
After five or six miles more of unchanging undifferentiated forest, through which he traveled with increasing speed and distraction, Nathan was vastly relieved to come upon a dirt track that led off to the right. He slowed. Visionary landscapes didn’t have driveways, and he was somewhere, on some real road. Nathan was feverish, and all his fears for his uncertain future concentrated in the single sharp desperation to know where he was. He had told himself that if only he drove long enough, he’d come to a place or a sign that would point his location.
He stared at the house at the end of the dirt track. It was familiar, and if he could figure out where it stood, he’d know where he was, how far from Babylon, how near to Navarre.
The house was unlighted, a two-story farmhouse surrounded by tall pines. The Scout had already shuddered past it when Nathan realized that this was the Larkins’ blueberry farm. He twisted with shock back to the road. The Styx was twenty yards ahead. Evelyn and Jerry Larkin’s corpses blocked the near end of the bridge, horrible in the Scout’s wavering headlights. Jerry’s head was unrecognizable, not one feature remained intact. He stood lopsided on one whole foot, and the torn stub of the other. His dark suit made the battered corpse that inhabited it the more terrible by contrast. Evelyn, though deteriorating, was still recognizable as the woman who had quailed
before Nathan in the lobby of the bank. But her dress was ripped, and beneath it the deeply gouged flesh showed like that of a rotting animal carcass, prepared by a clumsy country butcher.
Nathan tried to brake. But a hand was laid on his arm, tiny, but bloated and wet. He turned. Margaret Larkin, her watery visage swimming with black impurities, her eyes and mouth opened wide on black nothingness, leaned forward across the seat, pressing her face against his. She still looked like a young girl, but she stank of the river.
The Scout smashed into the two corpses, then broke through the thin plank railing and plunged into the Styx.
The vehicle fell on the passenger side, and Nathan was knocked unconscious for a few seconds. The Scout slowly righted itself as it sank.
Nathan came to. The black water swirled above his waist. Somewhere in his panicked mind, he told himself that nothing he had seen had been real. Margaret Larkin was not on the seat beside him; he had imagined her hand on his arm, her rubbery face. It was only necessary that he free himself from his foundering vehicle.
The Scout was sinking slowly, he’d have time to open the door and swim away, but perhaps not more than fifteen seconds.
He pulled out his left hand from where it had caught behind him, and felt for the door handle. His legs churned slowly in the deepening water beneath the dash. He had caught the handle and was pulling up, when an arm, a human arm, was driven through the window and against his face with such force that he was knocked away from the door. He fell beneath the water, and when he came up struggling, he saw that it was Jerry Larkin’s corpse that flailed outside the window, both black-clad arms reaching in and blindly grasping. The pulpy featureless head was detached from the straining corpse, and bobbed against the windshield.
Water slapped through the open window around Jerry’s arms. Nathan scrambled away from the sightless reach of his victim’s corpse, and frantically jerked the handle of the passenger door behind him. It wouldn’t give. He started to lower the window, but another hand, mealy and stinking of death, was jammed into his face. Evelyn Larkin was pushing wildly through the slightly opened window. Her ragged broken fingers clutched at Nathan’s face. The full moon was reflected dully in the filmed pupil of her single eye, as she urged her rotting face forward. Her jaw sagged open, and a gleaming black snake twisted up out of her throat, and slithered through the window, falling into Nathan’s lap.
At the same time, her hand caught at the side of Nathan’s head, but he pulled away, and sustained searing pain for the effort. He dropped below the reach of the two corpses’ flailing arms, onto the floor of the vehicle, and held himself there until he was drowned.
Ted Hale rode in the ambulance that took his daughter to the hospital in Atmore. She had sustained a bad concussion, which left her unconscious for almost two days. When the wounds in her face healed sufficiently, they might begin to think of plastic surgery to deal with the scars.
Within an hour of Charles Darrish’s death, and even before Ginny had been told of it, Deputy Jay Neal discovered what had become of Nathan Redfield. The damaged bridge, and the Scout, only half submerged in the Styx, gave evidence of that. Why he had been heading south, toward Babylon, and why he had drowned when escape would have been so easy, were mysteries much speculated upon.
The corpse was charged with five murders: Margaret Larkin, Evelyn Larkin, Jerry Larkin, Benjamin Redfield, and Charles Darrish; and Warren Perry was immediately released from jail. The motives for the crimes were obscure and ambiguous, but with what turned up only a day later, everything was laid to insanity.
The badly decomposed corpses of Evelyn Larkin and her grandson Jerry were washed up on a sandbar near the junction of the Styx with the Perdido. What was taken to be Jerry’s head was deposited only a dozen feet away.
Of all Nathan Redfield’s crimes, this was the most disturbing and incomprehensible. Evidently he had dug the corpses of his victims out of the graveyard, maliciously destroyed the coffins, and thrown the bodies into the Styx. When Ted Hale came to identify Evelyn and Jerry Larkin, he had asked the county coroner if he knew what the strange black grainy residue was that coated them. Dr. Dickinson said it was no more than river silt.
However, no one could t
ell how it came to be that when the county coroner pried apart the tight rotting fingers of Evelyn Larkin, he found Nathan Redfield’s severed ear resting on the blackened palm.
It passed
from the dead
to the living, a beautiful gift
with a frightening power
THE AMULET
A sweltering southern town...a mysterious necklace...a family’s burning house...a doomed policeman...a jealous woman turned killer...a babysitter enraged at a crying child. Where did it come from? Who would it strike next? And why? The horror was unspeakable, the terror unstoppable, and the chain was unbroken...
A Novel of Pure Terror
By Michael McDowell
"A MIXTURE OF HORROR AND OCCULTISM
TOLD WITH DRIVING FORCE …A STORY
THAT TAKES YOU WITH IT ALL THE WAY.”
The New York Times
Novels have been written about children possessed. Novels have been written about unnatural evil— in most of its disguises. But nothing can prepare you for the unspeakable frenzy of this ...
Dolls move. Scarcrows animate and kill. Toys wield axes against parents. Cats band together and attack humans in a fury of fur, claws, and teeth. And in a terrifying dimension beyond anything before explored in fiction, a lone father battles a demonic force—a new kind of evil—for his daughter’s life...and his own.
"EERIE, SCARY ... UTTERLY FASCINATING
THIS IS NOT GOING TO BE WHAT YOU THINK.”
Publishers Weekly
Also by William H. Hallahan:
The Edgar Award Winning Novel,
CATCH ME: KILL ME (Avon/37986/$1.95),
THE SEARCH FOR JOSEPH TULLY (Avon/33712/$1.95),
THE DEAD OF WINTER (Avon/24216/$1.75).
Michael McDowell, Cold moon over Babylon
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