Nathaniel (17 page)

Beside her, Potter ignored the tormented words that Laura had uttered, concentrating only on the baby that was slowly emerging from her womb.

Laura’s whole body was writhing on the bed now, and her arms flailed at the air, striking out at something that wasn’t there. “My baby was alive,” she screamed. “I felt it moving. It was alive, and you killed it!”

Amos Hall’s eyes fixed on his daughter. “Stop it, Laura,” he said. “You don’t know what you’re saying. The baby isn’t born yet.”

Laura’s agony only increased. She was moaning now, and her hands twisted at the sheets. Her words became indistinguishable, but in her mind she could see it all. It was her baby, and Dr. Potter was holding it, and it was dead, and they were telling her it had been born dead, but she knew they were lying. She knew it had been all right, and that they had killed it. She knew it. She knew …

At the foot of the bed, Dr. Potter held the tiny form that had finally slipped free from the strictures of the womb. Its eyes were closed, and there was a bluish cast to its skin.

Potter held the baby deftly in his left hand, its head down, and with his right hand, he delivered a quick slap to its buttocks.

Potter’s eyes met Amos’s, and a silent message seemed to pass between the two men. Nearby, Buck Shields stood, watching the doctor, watching his father-in-law, waiting.

“Again,” Amos Hall said, his impassive eyes fixed on the baby. “Try again.”

Potter nodded once, then struck the baby’s rump again, harder this time.

“That’s it, then,” Amos Hall said softly.

Laura Shields began screaming, and her husband quickly gathered her in his arms, holding her head against his chest, muffling her cries as best he could. She struggled in his arms, trying to work herself loose, trying to reach out for her baby, but it was no use. Buck held her immobile, and after a moment she made herself stop screaming, closed her eyes, and lay back on the pillow, sobbing softly.

Potter sighed. “This can’t keep happening,” he said quietly, as Amos Hall took the tiny body from his hands. Then he moved to the bed, and reached out, tentatively touching Laura’s hair. She jerked away from him.

“Go away,” she whispered in a broken voice. “Just go away and leave me alone.”

“It was born dead, Laura,” Dr. Potter told her. “You have to believe that. Your baby was born dead. You’ve had a miscarriage.”

She opened her eyes and tried to reconcile his words to her memories. “Miscarried?” she asked. “It was born dead?”

Potter nodded. “It was premature, and it was born dead. You have to remember that, Laura. Can you do that?”

“I miscarried,” Laura repeated in disbelieving tones. “I miscarried, and my baby was born dead.”

A few minutes later, as Potter’s sedative began easing her into sleep, Laura Shields repeated the words to herself once more, but she knew she didn’t believe them.

The baby had been alive. She was sure it had been alive. And she was sure they had killed it. They had killed it, and they had sent it to Nathaniel.

But still, she couldn’t be sure. It had all been so strange, and even as it had all been happening, and the baby was being born, she couldn’t be sure of what was real and what was memory. And now, she would never really know.

Then, in her last moments of consciousness, she came to a decision. She would try to accept what the doctor had told her. From now on, when she thought of this night, she’d tell herself that all that had happened was that she’d miscarried.

She’d miscarried, and the baby was born dead.

It would be easier that way.

Eric Simpson cocked his head and stared at Michael Hall. He looked as though he was watching something, but Eric couldn’t figure out what it was. “Somethin’ wrong?” he finally asked.

Michael started, and then his eyes slowly focused on Eric. “I thought I saw something,” he said uncertainly. “Or heard something. And I’ve got a headache.”

Eric grinned. “That’s the stuff we slopped down the floor with. It’ll go away as soon as we’re outside. Come on.”

It was nearly midnight, and the cleanup from the foaling was finally done. But Michael couldn’t quite remember finishing the job. He’d been hosing down the barn floor, and his head had begun to ache, and then he’d seen something. It had only been a flash, and it had seemed to come from inside his head, and yet he was sure he’d recognized some faces.

His grandfather, and Dr. Potter.

And Dr. Potter had been holding something, but Michael hadn’t quite been able to make out what it was.

And there had been a sound, high pitched, like the shriek of the wind, or like someone screaming.

Then it was gone.

Now, outside in the cool night air, Michael couldn’t even quite remember what it had been like, except for the scream.

The scream was still echoing in his head, and despite what Eric had said, his head still ached.

“It’s Nathaniel,” he muttered. “I bet it’s Nathaniel.”

Suddenly the sound of a screen door slamming jarred his reverie, and he heard Eric’s mother’s voice.

“You boys all done? Want something to eat?”

Michael looked up at Mrs. Simpson. She seemed to be a long way away, and he couldn’t really see her very well. He shook his head. “I—I better get back to Grandpa’s house.”

“Would you like a ride?” Mrs. Simpson asked. “It’s past midnight.”

Again Michael shook his head. “I can ride my bike. I’ll be okay.”

His head still pounding with pain and his vision oddly blurry, Michael mounted his bike, whistled to Shadow, and rode off into the night. When he was gone, Ione Simpson put an arm around her son’s shoulders and started toward the house. “Is Michael all right?” she asked. “He seemed sort of—odd, just now.”

Eric frowned up at his mother. “He was weird,” he said emphatically. “Out in the barn, he started acting funny, and then he said he had a headache.” Michael had said something else, too, Eric thought, something about Nathaniel. He considered telling his mother that as well, then changed his mind. No point in getting his mom all riled up over that old ghost story. But it really was weird. And a little scary. Eric felt a shiver start crawling up his spine.

It was as he came around the curve between the Simpsons’ farm and his mother’s that Michael first became aware of the lights.

Far off to the left, dimmed by the distance, he first thought they were fireflies. He slowed, then stopped the bike, dropping one foot to the ground to maintain his balance. Shadow, his hackles slightly raised, crouched beside him. Michael squinted into the darkness, trying to determine shapes and forms, but there were none. Only a faint glow, broken every now and then as something passed between himself and the source of the lights. Frowning, the pain in his head increasing by the moment, he started the bike moving again, concentrating on the lights until the dark shape of his mother’s house cut them off. And then, as he came to the driveway, they reappeared, and he suddenly knew where they were.

Potter’s Field.

His mind flashed back twenty-four hours, and he saw what his grandfather had described—a woman, her back bent as she stooped over, wandering in the night, searching, constantly searching for what she would never find.

He remembered the tale, and as his headache worsened, he tried to shake it from his mind. He couldn’t.

He dismounted the bicycle, and began walking it up the driveway until he stood in the shelter of the house, concealed from whatever might be lurking in the field. Still, whatever was there was too far away for him to see clearly. He stayed where he was for a moment, indecisive. Then Shadow, whimpering softly, slunk away into the darkness. Michael made up his mind, leaned the bike against the side of the house, and followed the dog.

He came to the fence that separated his mother’s property from Mr. Findley’s. Barely pausing, he slipped between the strands of barbed wire; then, crouching low in the dim moonlight, he scurried across to Findley’s barn. His head was throbbing now, but it seemed to him he could begin to make out forms in the faint light emanating from the field.

And then, as he and Shadow slipped into the darkness next to the barn, he heard the voice, the same voice he’d heard before: flat, toneless.

“Michael.”

It wasn’t a question, and Michael knew it. The possessor of that voice knew who he was. He pressed closer to the barn.

“Nathaniel?” he whispered.

“Come in,” the voice urged him. “Come in.”

As if in a trance, Michael moved around the barn and lifted the bar from its brackets. Swinging the door open just enough to let himself through, he slipped inside, then pulled the door closed behind him.

“Over here.” The voice drifted eerily out of the darkness, seeming to come from nowhere and everywhere. “Over this way.”

And then, though the voice had not told him which way to go, though he could see nothing in the pitch blackness of the barn, Michael began moving through the darkness, knowing with the passage of every second that he was coming closer to Nathaniel. It was as if Nathaniel was reaching out to him, guiding him, showing him the way through the darkness with his own eyes.

And Michael’s headache was suddenly gone.

He drifted down the aisle between the rows of stalls, his footsteps echoing in the emptiness. Then he paused. Though he could still see nothing, he reached out a hand, and immediately touched a door handle. Lifting the latch, he pulled the door open and stepped into the tack room that lay beyond. He was close now, very close. He could feel Nathaniel’s presence.

“Here,” the voice of Nathaniel told him. “You can see from here.” Michael crossed the room, his senses vibrating with a strange kind of awareness, a feeling of sharing himself with another, and sharing that other as well. Then he was standing near the outer wall of the barn, and Nathaniel was with him.

“Closer,” Nathaniel urged him, his voice no longer filling the little room, but seeming to emanate from inside Michael’s own head. “Stand closer, and see with me.”

There was a tiny gap in the barn siding, and Michael pressed his eye against it. The moonlight outside seemed to have grown brighter, and suddenly Michael could see clearly across the fields to the cottonwoods along the river.

And near the cottonwoods, he could see the lights. Three of them, oil lanterns, their wicks turned low, set in a triangle. And inside the triangle, the form of a man.

“Who is it?” Michael whispered in the darkness.

“My father.”

“What’s he doing?” he asked.

“Do not speak,” Nathaniel’s voice commanded. “If he knows you are with me, he will try to kill you.”

Michael fell silent, knowing deep within himself that the words, though incomprehensible, were the truth. He waited. In a moment the strangely toneless voice came to him again. “I have been calling you. Why did you not come before?”

Michael was silent, but his mind was working, remembering.

His father’s funeral, when he had seen this barn, seen something here that no one else had seen.

Watching the barn from the window of the room that would be his, knowing what it looked like inside, though he’d never been here.

Night before last, when he’d come to the barn, knowing that there was something waiting for him.

And now, tonight.

When finally he spoke, he spoke only within himself. “I couldn’t hear you. Did you call me tonight?”

And the answer came back, also from within. “Yes. I saw him in the field and felt you near. I called you here so he would not see you.”

“But what’s he doing?”

“Sending one of us away. One of us was born tonight, and he is sending him away. Just as he sent me away. He does that to all of us … if he can.” And in those words that sounded only in his head, Michael could feel a terrible loneliness. Then the voice came again. “I have been waiting for you a long time.”

“Why?”

“I need you. And you need me. We are alone, Michael. There is no one else. Do you never feel the loneliness?”

Michael trembled in the darkness, but then Nathaniel touched him, and he felt calm again.

“Will you take me outside?”

Michael frowned in the darkness. “Now?”

“Yes.”

“He’ll see us.”

“It does not matter. He cannot hurt us, if we are together. He hurt that one, though.”

“Who?”

“The one who was born tonight. I felt it coming, and called out to it. It was a little boy.”

“There was a foal …” Michael whispered, then fell silent. Once again, that strange vision flashed into his head, only now the faces were clear, and he could see what was in Dr. Potter’s hands.

“Not a foal,” Nathaniel’s voice came. “A boy. A little boy. But he knew that the boy was mine so he brought him here. Now he is burying him. Look.”

Michael gazed out into the night, but the light seemed to have faded slightly, and he couldn’t see exactly what was happening.

“Take me out there,” Nathaniel’s voice echoed in Michael’s head. “Take me out there, so we can kill him.”

“K-kill him? Why?”

“Because he kills. It is for us to punish him, Michael. He hates us, and he fears us, and he will kill us. If he finds us, and if we are alone.”

“But—”

The oddly disembodied voice seemed not to notice Michael’s interruption. “He does not know about you yet, but if he finds out about you, you will die. Unless you stay with me. Stay with me, Michael.”

Michael turned and for the first time saw Nathaniel’s face, lit softly by the moonlight filtering through the weathered siding of the barn.

It seemed to be his own face—the same dark blue eyes and wavy brown hair, the same angular cheeks and strong jaw. But the blue eyes were without light, and Nathaniel’s skin was pale, almost translucent, like his father’s had been at the funeral, and his face was as expressionless as the voice Michael had been hearing in his head.

“How long have you been here?” Michael asked.

“A long time,” Nathaniel told him, his voice resonating softly through the large, empty barn. “As long as I can remember. Will you take me outside?”

“Why can’t you go out by yourself?” Michael asked with no note of challenge in his words.