Darkness Falls (19 page)

Caitlin’s smile was that of someone sharing a private joke. At this point, Matt didn’t really care what the joke was, he just wanted to get a move on before the lanterns died.

As they walked down the stairs, Walsh said, “If anything happens to me, don’t look back. Just get up here and keep that thing off them, okay?”

“Okay.” Matt let out a very long breath. “Same goes for me.”

And you’re the one who took an oath to serve and protect.

Matt extended a hand. Walsh shook it.

He held up the lantern.

“You want the light, or—”

“No, you carry it.”

Matt bent down to pick up his father’s twelve-gauge. He racked a shell into the chamber.

Then he looked at Walsh.

“This thing’s gonna kill us, isn’t it?”

“No, it isn’t,” Walsh said with the same certainty with which he seemed to say everything. “We’re gonna live through this. We’re gonna grow old and have kids and send Christmas cards to each other every year.”

Matt almost laughed at the sheer absurdity of the image Walsh had concocted. But then, maybe the loony bin they were all going to be put in when this was over would occasionally undo the strait-jackets long enough for them to write cards to each other.

“Christmas cards. Okay.”

He held the shotgun at the ready.
This one’s for you, Pop.

“Ready?” Walsh asked.

“No. You?”

“No.”

That damned certainty again. Mixed with honesty. Kept things a bit spookier than Matt liked, but this whole thing was already well beyond Matt’s wildest conceptions of spookiness.

As they worked their way downstairs, the moldy, decrepit smell that permeated the old lighthouse was replaced by something more insistent.

“You smell that?” Walsh asked.

Matt nodded.

“Gas all over the place.”

Walsh now had a death grip on the lantern. If the flame in that thing got out, the whole lighthouse would blow.

Of course, if worse came to worse, he thought, that might be a viable option for getting rid of the big bad monster.

“She comes at you fast,” Walsh said, “so be ready.”

Matt did a double take. “ ‘She’? You sound like you know her.”

“She’s been in my life a long time.”

Matt filed that away in his mental things-I’ll-deal-with-if-and-when-the-world-gets-back-to-normal compartment right next to the how-do-I-tell-Mom-what-happened? file and the Walsh-said-that-thing-killed-his-mother file.

They got to the bottom of the spiral staircase—one flight below the decaying apartment—and found the eight-foot-tall backup generator.

On top was a pipe, meant to feed the gas to the ignition. Said pipe was broken in the middle.

“See it?” Matt asked.

“Yeah.” Walsh handed Matt the lantern. “Give me a boost.”

Cradling the lantern with one arm—putting a flaming lantern on the gas-covered floor right now would not be wise—and setting the twelve-gauge down against the generator, Matt interlaced his fingers, providing a “strap” for Walsh to use as a stepping stone to the top of the generator.

As soon as Walsh had clambered up to the top, Matt retrieved the shotgun and held the slowly dying lantern up to provide Walsh with as much light as possible.

“I need some more light,” Walsh said after a minute.

Matt looked down at the lamp, which was dying, and then moved it closer, hoping that the info Walsh remembererd from his third-grade lighthouse report was accurate.

“Just a little more . . .”

Switching the lantern to his other arm to keep it from cramping, Matt listened as he heard Walsh muck around with the pipe, trying to get it mended before all the gas they brought leaked out. It was starting to smell like the underside of a gas station.

It was deathly quiet.

And it was getting darker, as the lantern continued to die out.

Then it stopped being deathly quiet.

Matt heard a strange buzzing sound.

The last time he had heard that sound, his father was dead ten seconds later.

“Walsh?”

“Don’t move.”

Then Matt noticed that his left foot was out of the light.

Before he could move it, something grabbed his leg and yanked him into the darkness, forcing him to lose his grip on both the lantern and Pop’s twelve-gauge.

As the talons ripped into his chest, his final thought was,
Sorry I let you down, Pop.

seventeen

Kyle managed to keep the lantern from falling onto the floor, which was good, since if it did, it would break, and they’d all die a flaming death.

He’d spent the last two days trying
not
to get killed. It would be embarrassing for it to happen now.

Michael deserved to live.

More to the point, Michael deserved to have the life Kyle never got to have.

And Caitlin deserved to have the life that thing out there had denied Kyle’s mother.

So many dead already—Ray, the cops, Matt, the two nurses, Murphy, Larry. Not to mention Kyle’s mother, and all the others who had died, just so Matilda Dixon could have her revenge.

Because it
was
her. Somehow.

This town had been paying the price for lynching an innocent woman for almost a century and a half.

It was time for it to end.

The lantern light was dying.

He needed to move closer to it.

But if he did, he risked himself and/or the lantern falling over. If the former, he’d die. If the latter, they’d all die.

He’d promised Michael he’d come back.

He hated breaking promises.

Maybe he could catch the lantern before it would fall.

Maybe, if he did fall, he’d be able to keep the lantern from breaking.

Maybe pigs would fly out of his butt, and Larry, Matt, the hospital staff, the cops, and Ray would all magically come back to life and they’d all live happily ever after.

Kyle wasn’t about to lay money on any of those things—in fact, just at the moment, he considered the third possibility to be the most likely.

He went for it.

The lantern fell.

So did Kyle.

His last thought before his head collided with the gasoline-covered floor was an apology to Michael for breaking his promise.

Another one saw her.

Another one died.

It was almost routine now.

Still, it was fitting that they had come back here, to the place where it all started.

Here was where she and Sonny had chosen to build their life together.

Here was where Sonny had assured her that they would start a family after “just a few more trips at sea.”

Here was where Mr. Jefferson and Mr. Turley had told her that her darling Sonny was dead.

Here was where the children had come to her, offering their teeth for sweets.

Here was where the kitchen fire had destroyed her face.

Here was where Mr. Ames and Reverend Pitman and Mr. O’Donnel and Mr. Delacroix and the others had killed her for something she did not do.

And here was where it would finally end.

Kyle’s lantern had fallen beside him on the floor. It had cracked but not broken. He was still in the light.

So she would go for the other boy. He would die, like the others.

As would his sister.

As would all of them.

She arrived upstairs to find that the boy and his sister were also in the light.

But the light was dying.

When it died, so would they . . .

Caitlin tried not to think about anything.

So, naturally, she thought about everything.

The screams of Alexandra and Dr. Murphy and the other nurse echoed in her mind.

The lantern grew dimmer.

As soon as it went out, they were vulnerable to the monster.

“Please, please no, come on . . .”

She chanted it like a mantra, as if somehow pleading with an inanimate object would violate all known laws of chemistry and make the lantern stay lit after the kerosene all burned away.

A snapping sound startled her, and she saw that Michael was holding the cracked glow stick over his head.

It provided an oddly comforting green light just as the lantern went out for good.

Now all that stood between the Greene siblings and a vicious death was a tiny neon green stick.

Then the world exploded.

First one window, then the other, then the third shattered. The noise was deafening.

Instinctively, Caitlin ducked down, covering her face with her arms as shards of glass flew through the room, slicing through her cardigan, her jeans, her arms, her shoes, and her skin.

She would have expected more pain. Perhaps she had gone numb.

Once the glass settled, she uncovered her face.

It was dark.

Michael was reaching down toward the floor. The glow stick had fallen into the grating.

But now it was too late.

The creature looked more like a corpse than anything. Actually, it reminded Caitlin of a zombie in a movie that she had never forgotten. It had scared her to death when she was five.

And now it was heading right toward her.

Michael screamed.

It grabbed Caitlin’s leg.

All at once, her leg went numb.

She knew she was going to die. The crunching sound that had signaled the deaths of the two nurses and later of Dr. Murphy would now resound in her own ears.

Just before she died.

Then the world exploded again.

It wasn’t a window this time, though, it was a lantern, and it had been thrown from the staircase and landed right below the creature.

The monster shrieked as the breaking glass freed the fire that burned inside the lantern to spread around the floor.

Then a pair of arms scooped Caitlin up and dragged her away from the monster, who was still shrieking from the light of the flames.

It was Kyle.

Unfortunately, the triumph was short-lived. The fire from the lantern wasn’t much to start with, and with the windows shattered, the wind was blowing them out.

The monster flew into the air.

The fire started flickering down.

When it died, they were dead.

Caitlin took some small solace in the fact that she had thought that before and was still breathing.

The three of them all ran for the switch.

The creature leaped toward them.

Kyle got to the switch first.

He hit it.

The lighthouse beam, a beacon meant to guide sailing ships miles away in darkness and foggy weather, came to life.

The creature screamed as it fell to the ground. It started to disintegrate.

Then it grabbed Kyle’s leg. Somehow, it was still alive.

“Hit the mirror!” Kyle cried.

Frowning, Caitlin was about to ask what he was talking about, but then Michael moved.

Reaching down to grab a piece of the broken lantern, Michael heaved it and smashed it into the mirror.

That mirror had focused the light from the beacon into a beam.

Without it, the light lost direction—or, rather, gained every direction, as now it was
everywhere.
Barely a shadow remained as the intense light spread in every direction.

Caitlin had to avert her eyes . . .

Kyle blinked his eyes several times. Purple, green, and yellow spots flew before his eyes as he tried to clear his vision in the wake of the lighthouse’s onslaught.

The demon was nowhere to be seen.

On the one hand, Kyle was grateful. Perhaps it was all finally over.

On the other hand, Kyle knew things couldn’t be that simple. In the blinding glare of the beacon, he had not been able to make out what happened to the creature. And he’d seen enough movies in his time to know not to be sure that the monster was dead until he saw a body—and not necessarily then.

He peered around the beacon, trying to find some sign of her.

Then he heard the buzzing.

Once again, the creature swooped down and grabbed him. She started to pull him into the shadows under the beacon’s terrible glare.

Somehow, she looked even worse than before. The female form that he had described to Matt Henry as looking like a cross between a drowned rat and a burn victim now looked far more like the latter than the former. Her grip was far weaker than it had been at the hospital; she moved more slowly.

She was hurt.

That gave Kyle a chance.

One of the lantern fires was burning near his arm. That arm was still covered with kerosene from the lamp that shattered when he fell from the generator shortly after Matt’s untimely demise.

Kyle reached out desperately, trying to light his arm on fire—all the while trying not to think about what the (many) psychiatrists he’d seen over the last twelve years would make of his attempt of self-immolation.

Time slowed to a crawl.

The demon pulled Kyle close.

Straining against her grip, Kyle reached out to the flame.

His arm alighted.

He turned and smiled. “I see you—bitch!”

Then he shoved his arm into her chest.

The buzzing noise was overwhelmed by a deafening scream as the creature let go of Kyle—who fell to the ground with a bone-crunching thud. He quickly wriggled out of his jacket before the fire spread to parts of his anatomy less protected by textiles.