Authors: Sarah Pinborough

The Taken (32 page)

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was almost nowhere. She stared at him with the same horror with which the children were looking at her.

Her mouth felt as if she had been sucking on dry ice, and she wondered if it would ever feel moist again. Looking down at her arms, at the blue veins which ran all the way along them now, the nails at her fingertips translucent black as if gateways to the emptiness inside and around, sorrow overwhelmed her as the reality of what had happened sunk in. What was it he had said, so calmly, so devoid of emotion? I’m ending. You’re beginning. Why hadn’t she thought harder about it?

The children were coming toward them, and she knew there wasn’t much time.

Sitting beside him, her mother’s dress spreading out around them on the damp ground, she leaned forward and held his now delicate hand once again. His existence fluttered inside her in its death throes.

I think I understand now. She said the words without speaking, and his eyes flickered open, the blackness of his matching hers as they locked gazes.

I don’t get to go into the light, do I?

His lids slipped down for a second, then opened again.

I don’t get to go home and I don’t get to die.

Her heart crumbled with the memory of the light. So much understanding tore at her soul that she screamed inside, making them both flinch. I have to stay here alone, don’t I? Stay here alone and take the deaths. Already, in the distance of her mind she could hear terrified voices calling out to her. And she had a feeling that when he had gone it would get worse. Much worse.

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He didn’t answer; not silent from any sense of pity, that was an emotion he didn’t understand—she knew that he was saving the last of his strength for Callum. For what they had to do for him. Three pairs of children’s feet appeared cautiously in her range of vision and she looked up, smiling.

“Can we go home now, Alex?” Laura’s voice was a whisper, her disbelief that Alex was still the same person clear in her voice, and Peter barely peered out from behind the girl’s legs. I must look like a monster to him now. The stuff of myths and legends. The bogeyman. She tried to smile, but the expression felt uncomfortable on her tightened skin, the blue veins there not having the give in them for humanity.

“In a minute, sweetheart. We have to send Callum after the others first.”

The little boy shook his head vehemently. “I don’t want to go. I don’t want to go back there. And I don’t want to leave you here.”

Inside her, Alex could feel the Catcher Man slipping out of existence. There were only minutes left, ticking away. His clock was almost unwound. Staring at the children, the ocean of sorrow inside her roared out her grief. Oh, how easy it would be to let the boy stay with her. To keep her company in the lonely forever that stretched out ahead. She looked into his young face and lied.

“But you’re the last, Callum. And you know what that means, don’t you?”

He shook his head, and she was pleased to see that he didn’t look at her differently. Not like Laura and Peter. To him she was just the same as she had been

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when he’d took her hand in the bathroom, or held his finger across her lips in her bedroom.

“This time I get to come with you. We’ll go into the light together and forever.

Won’t that be wonderful?” Tears that she was no longer able to cry flooded her insides as he smiled.

“Really? That’s really what happens?” She nodded, and then his expression darkened. “But Mr. Wentworth will bury me in the cellar and leave me there. …”

Reaching out one of her alien hands, she stroked his soft cheeks. “Trust me, Callum. None of that matters. Only getting to the light. That’s where you should be. Where you belong.” Her voice was all wrong, high-and low-pitched at the same time. The boy didn’t notice.

“And you’ll come with me? You promise?”

The universe shook inside, cracking her heart. “I promise.”

For a moment he paused, looking at the empty storm that had held him for so long. He smiled, happily. “I think I’m ready.”

Summoning the very last of his strength, the Catcher Man whispered the boy’s name, and for the last time, the in between froze.

When she finally came to on the forest floor, her head resting on the empty coat that was all that was left of the Catcher Man, Alex knew she had left the worst behind her. Mr. Wentworth had not strangled Callum, but killed him slowly and brutally, and despite the receding pain, she knew in the cold core that was what was left of her soul a part of her would always be screaming from the death and humiliation she took for the boy.

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But that wasn’t the worst part. In all its awful glory the dying wasn’t what had broken her heart. No, her heart broke before she was dragged back from the edge of death. It shattered when he ran into the light. Ran into the light and left her without looking back. Not once.

Looking up at the live children, she sighed, causing the forest to tremble, and the incessant rain slithered down the trees.

“You have to go home now.” Taking them by the hand, she wondered if her voice sounded as empty as her heart felt.

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Chapter Thirty-five

At the edge of the woods she releases them, pulling the blue fire back into herself, and it seems to her that they step through the walls of a bubble, out of the gloom of the in between and into the cobbled road of the village where the rain has finally stopped. Watching through the overhanging branches, she sees so many things, drinking it all in. The lights in the windows of the pub are bright, almost too bright for her black eyes to look at, and through them she can see figures moving, rushing out to greet the two children running toward the building.

She knows that the two missing men will soon come down from the Tucker’s farm and they will have stories of their own to tell of children in the woods. They will sit by the comfort of their fires and tell their tales, tales of ghosts traveling in the storm and a night of murder and madness. One day, a blink of an eye in time away, Peter will be an old man, the only one left to remember, and after he is gone it will all become folklore, more country stories and secrets whispered at bedtime.

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Staring at it all, all the bright light and life, she wonders if it was like this for the Catcher Man when he began. Did he carry this sadness? Or was he saved from it by never being human? She wonders how long it will take for her humanity to fade. A century? A millennium?

Although it is still wet and cold in the wood, over the village the clouds are breaking, a burst of sunshine flooding through, highlighting the small crowd gathering the children to them. She sees Emma Granville holding the small boy up, smothering him with kisses, raising him above her head and laughing, as if he were a sacrifice to an ancient god.

Two men move away from the group, staring out toward the wood, and she drinks their image in as they call her name. Paul looks thinner and tired, and she knows that Mary is dead, and she knows that Simon will go back to London and slowly recover, maybe haunted by dreams of the past and of her, and of the tales Laura and Peter will tell of their adventure in the forest, but he’ll be able to live with them. In the comfort of the concrete and glass city, he’ll persuade himself that she is dead and gone, and he will learn to live with it.

Simon is starting to jog toward the bank of trees, and for a moment she just watches him and allows herself to think of what could have been, if only for the few months she had left when time was still important. The trees shake and above her thunder screams for her. She doesn’t want to see how in the future, when he has recovered and married and had children of his own, and a storm breaks overhead, he will pause in what he is doing and allow himself to recall the bittersweet memory of her and their one night together.

She takes one long last look at life and love before 323

turning her back on it, bare feet walking strongly on the forest floor, the long leather coat almost reaching the hem of her dead mother’s dress. In her head the screams of the lost and dying children are becoming too painful to ignore, and accepting the legacy left to her, she gathers the storm and moves it on toward them, to their deaths and to their journeys into the light.

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Breeding Ground

Sarah Pinborough

Life was good for Matt and Chloe. They were in love and looking forward to their new baby. But what Chloe gives birth to isn’t a baby. It isn’t even human. It’s an entirely new species that uses humans only for food—and as hosts for their young.

As Matt soon learns, though, he is not alone in his terror. Women all over town have begun to give birth to these hideous creatures, spidery nightmares that live to kill—and feed. As the infestation spreads and the countryside is reduced to a series of web-shrouded ghost towns, will the survivors find a way to fight back? Or is it only a matter of time before all of mankind is reduced to a … Breeding Ground

Dorchester Publishing Co., P.O. Box 6640 Wayne, PA 19087-8640

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THE

Freakshow

BRYAN SMITH

Once the Flaherty Brothers Traveling Carnivale and Freakshow rolls into Pleasant Hills, Tennessee, the quiet little town will never be the same. In fact, much of the town won’t survive. At first glance the freakshow looks like so many others—lurid, run-down, decrepit. But this freakshow is definitely one of a kind. …

The townspeople can’t resist the lure of the tawdry spectacle. The main attractions are living nightmares, the acts center on torture and slaughter…and the stars of the show are the unsuspecting customers themselves.

Dorchester Publishing Co. Inc.

P.O. Box 6640 5827-8

Woyie, PA 19087-8640 $6.99 US/S8.99 CAM

Please add $2.50 for shipping and handling for the first book and $.75 for each additional book. NY and PA residents, add appropriate sales tax. No (ash, stamps, or CODs. Canadian orders require an extra $2.00 for shipping and handling and must be paid in U.S. dollars. Prices and availability subject to change. Payment must accompany al orders.

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CHECK OUT OUR WEBSITE! www.dorchesterpub.com 326

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