Celia

Prologue

To Celia, the body on the ground looked even larger in death than it had in life, huge in the thin light of the waxing moon. His arms seemed to be reaching toward her, though they hadn’t moved in the long moments she had been staring down at him. All the sounds of the swamp seemed to have stopped. The frogs that had croaked in deep voices, the unseen creatures that had dimpled the dark water with soft plops, all silent now. Even the bull gator that had bellowed not far away had grown silent. There was only the ringing in her ears. The reverberations of the gunshots in her head.

I’ll get you, Ceil. You kill me, I’ll come back as your worst nightmare and I’ll get you, and I’ll get your brats. You can't kill me, Ceil. It just don’t work that way. I’ll get you... I’ll get you, Ceil ... your worst nightmare ... me ... your worst ... nightmare.

Celia pressed both hands to her mouth to hold back her cry. Was the voice real or only part of the horror of the last two days? The memory of his threats?

She walked backward three steps and stopped again. His arms lay stretched above his head, extended toward her. His feet dropped out of sight into the black water of the swamp. His blood looked black in the moonlight, making thin rivulets into the water. Her own shadow stretched waveringly toward the creased knees of the large cypress tree.

She turned and ran, holding her nightgown up with one hand.

The house looked lonely, small, unpainted, in the expanse of unmowed grass between the edge of the swamp and the pine forest beyond. The barn in the pines was hidden, as hidden as once its contents had been.

She ran around the house and on toward the barn.

In the dark beneath the pines she found the small door on the side and went in. She could smell the dogs as if they were still here, the ghosts of all the dogs in all the small cages. There was a smell of fear and death, a horror she and the kids had never been able to clean away.

She knew where he kept the junk iron, the pieces of old pipes, rusty wrenches, anything he could use to weight the body of a dog when he threw it into the swamp. Now it was his turn.

Breathless, she felt in the dark, gathered up all she could carry, and ran back out into the ghostly silver light of the moon and stars.

She ran toward the old cypress tree, the largest tree on this north end of the Florida swamp.

When she reached the area where his body had lain she turned, whimpering beneath her breath. Where was he? Oh God, where was he? She turned again. He had risen, just as he said he would. He wasn’t dead. Not Durk. He would never allow ...

She stumbled and looked down and saw the hand in the dark grass, fingers curled upward. He was still there after all.

Working feverishly, she wired the weights to his arms, to his belt, to his legs.

On her knees, her nightgown soaking up the damp that seeped through the earth from the swamp, she struggled to turn the body, to roll it toward the water.

I’ll get you, Ceil ...

Tears filled her eyes and blinded her, and the trees of the swamp blurred into the dark of the still water. She was afraid of the swamp, afraid of everything. She didn’t have the strength to roll his body there where he had drowned the dogs, where the swamp had become a world of countless graves.

Then he was moving. In a kind of horrible cooperation the body rolled on its own.

The dark water opened as if it opened a mouth, and then closed it softly.

Celia stood up.

She paused, then with her foot she nudged the small black handgun. The water made a soft plop as the gun disappeared.

The water turned as smooth and reflecting as a black mirror. Heavy shadows of the cypress trees floated on its surface like dead bodies. Celia stared at the water as she backed slowly away.

Something beneath the surface stirred.

Chapter 1

Chapter One

On the seventh night Celia’s anxiety grew. She sensed a difference; the contrast between full moon and dark shadows was more extreme, the silence by the cypress tree more ominous.

Every night during the past week, after standing and looking into the swamp, watching for Durk to rise, Celia had gone back to the house and to the bedrooms of her sleeping children. One by one she checked on all three. Drew, so quiet always, still her baby at five. His round little face reposed in sleep was beginning to show a resemblance to his father. He was the only one of her children to have such pale blond hair and blue eyes, like Durk’s. There was a squareness in his jaw, a roundness now that would strengthen to sharp bones and tight skin when he grew older. How could a father strike that small head until the child was unconscious? How could he lift that small body and throw him against the wall and turn away with no remorse, only his own strange sense of indignation, of hatred and fury that he had in some way been crossed. Because the child had fought to defend his puppy? Well, no more. It would happen no more. The bruises were fading now. But not the fear, never the fear.

She checked on Blair, who at nine had grown even more silent than Drew. He had learned it was better that way. The more silent you are, the less you are noticed. He had learned to walk as softly as a kitten when his father was around. What relief she had felt when he was born and she saw that he, like her firstborn, Jonie, had taken after her family, with their dark brown curls lying moistly on their small heads, and their dark eyes. They were like her father, and she was thankful. Yet when Drew was born, and she reached for his slippery little body and saw he was so much like Durk, it had only made her more protective of him. God, don’t let him be like Durk. God, make him gentle. Though he looks like Durk, and he can’t help that, God please help his soul. And Drew had cried for his puppy, and handled all little living creatures with such gentle care that she now wondered if God had made him too caring, too easily hurt.

But it was Jonie who had suffered most, though it was she who was clearly Durk’s favorite. It was a partiality that worried Celia from the beginning. Only Jonie was asked to wait on him, to come near. Call me Daddy, he had said to her when she cringed away, reluctant to call him anything, intense fear in her eyes. Celia saw him looking at Jonie with that smile Celia remembered when he had said the same thing to her. Celia knew the cringing within her daughter, she felt it, like a hand squeezing, pulling her skin tightly around her, pulling it in, as if she could hide within it. He had at last brought her a beautiful doll, the only gift he had ever given one of the children. The doll was eighteen inches tall, made of fine porcelain with real eyelashes and golden hair, dressed in pink antique satin and lace. It smiled beneath a pink hat with delicately fringed feathers. And Celia knew her protection of Jonie must increase.

They had no one but her. No one.

Even the law had failed them, when at last they had succeeded in running away. It was safe now, they had said, safe to go home. Back to the house on the northern edge of the swamp, the only place in the world for them. But nothing, no one, could make Durk leave them alone. He had come home in the silence of the night, like a thief sneaking into the house. But the law didn’t know, and there was no way Celia could get away to let them know. Nor could she send a message. Durk had never allowed a telephone, and the house was more than a mile from the highway.

When the children woke two days later to find their father gone, they hadn’t asked where he was. It was not a question any of them would ever ask.

The nights were the bad times since then. During the day they could be together, going out to pick berries or walking to the mailbox to see if the mailman had left something. Such things as mailboxes delighted Drew. And Jonie read every catalog, every sales bill avidly.

Or they went out to look at the flowers that grew in the unmowed yard.

Some people might call them weeds, but to Celia and her children they were flowers. Drew picked a bouquet of dandelions every day and gave them to her, and they were more beautiful than the world’s finest orchids.

But at night, as soon as the children were asleep, the uneasiness grew to a terrible intensity, as she felt again that same frantic urgency she had felt the night she carried the weights from the barn to his body at the edge of the swamp. Rest was not for her. She slipped out of bed, out of the dark house, and stood for long hours on the screened porch looking toward the swamp, looking toward the big bald cypress tree in the edge of the black water, seeing the grass beneath the light from the rising moon and the almost invisible path she had made between the porch and the water at the base of the tree.

Even from the porch it seemed she could see something moving beneath the water.

On the seventh night she left the porch, just as she had done every night during this past week, and went slowly along the path, her footsteps whispering in the long grass. The brightening moon cast a shadow twice her length ahead of her. The shadow of the big cypress tree became part of the swamp, a solid and impenetrable mass of darkness that left the water at its base as black and reflecting as the depths of a molten volcano. She slipped up on it silently and stopped, her bare toes feeling the dampness of the water-soaked earth beneath the grass.

The water in the swamp wasn’t deep, Durk had told her. If she dared, she could wade through it for miles. But she knew he lied. He had tried to push her in, long ago, before the children came. Try it, he’d say. I grew up swimming in the swamp water, and I don’t want a woman too chicken-shit scared to go in.

Here, near the bank of grass, the water was shoulder deep, and the ground beneath the water was soft, muddy sand. She knew, because once he had pushed her into it, and she had floundered, feeling something tangling round her legs, invisible in the dark water. He had finally put his hand down and helped her out, laughing at her screams. She knew it was deep here, shoulder deep. She had felt the slope of the watery bottom beneath her feet, and suspected there were holes hidden deep in the dark water. It should have made a safe and quiet burial place, even for a body as large as Durk’s. Two hundred and forty pound? Six feet two.

Yet ... she couldn’t be sure. During the day, in the light of the sun, she could tell herself, It’s okay. We’re safe now. But at night she could hear the rise of the voice of the swamp everywhere but there—by the tree. Here it was silent. Where were the frogs that once had lived here? Where were the fish that used to break the surface with a soft, whispering plop?

She stood looking into the water, aware that something moved just beneath the surface, something silent and deadly, perhaps a gator, hunting ... searching for prey? Or the piranhas, swimming in schools, waiting. Or ... Durk’s face, hidden by the water, his eyes open and looking at her, watching her. Durk coming back, as he had said he would, not as a man, but—

She stared, unable to step back.

The water opened, and a long, black snake-like appendage rose toward her, glistening in the moonlight with swamp slime, sliding into the grass, separating it, easing closer, its sound like the gliding of a snake, steady and almost inaudible. Then another and another, coming out of the water with only whispers of sound. But it was a sound she had heard before, in the darkest of her dreams, in the depths of nightmares. Sounds he had described to her as he held her in his arms early in their marriage. "It will come out of the swamp, Celia, at night. You must not leave the house when I’m gone. I can’t protect you then. When I become this ... thing, I forget that once I was a man. And then he had laughed and laughed at the horror on her face, and said, You’re really a naive little thing, aren’t you? You’d believe anything."

Celia stared, paralyzed in her fright, seeing it was real after all ... her nightmare ... just as he had told her it would be. It would rise above the water, like a huge aquatic spider, its dozen of legs as supple as arms, its round head bulging with eyes, and it would come after her, moving in slippery silence across the bare floors of the bedroom. After devouring her it would go after her children. Every night in her dreams she could hear the screams of her children.

Now she watched it rise above the water, one inch, five, ten, and saw the eyes reflecting the light of the moon. She heard the feelers slithering through the grass toward her. As she stood turned to stone in her fear, she felt the cold touch on her foot. In the water she saw the rise of the round, black, oily head, and the bulging eyes, staring, trapping her.

They had never left her, she knew now. Every time she had come to stand at the edge of the water, those open eyes had been watching her with the coldness and the steadiness of a reptile.

She felt the cold grasp sliding around her ankle and saw the black tentacles reaching through the weeds like a dozen black serpents, made of the black water, the swamp, the horrors of death, the terrors of her life here.

I’ll get you, Ceil. I’ll come back as your worst nightmare.

She felt its touch, and knew it was true.

Only then did she move. In silence, the scream of horror swollen and trapped in her throat, she struggled for her freedom. With her fingernails she pried the cold and slimy thing from her ankle, and felt its utter inhumanness, the deadliness.

Unable to scream her terror, her voice as silent as the thing that had risen from the dead, she ran, through the knee deep grass to the screened porch. Her children were in their beds, protected only by screens on windows, screens on doors.

As she paused to fasten the hook on the screen door she looked back across the expanse of moonlight.

It was coming, throwing many shadows, standing taller even than it had in her nightmares. Horrifying in the waning light of the moon, it was coming after her and her children, filling her with such fear that she moved at last without thought.

She ran through the uncarpeted house, her bare feet causing the old boards to creak. She gathered her children, Jonie first, so alone in her bedroom, then the boys. She jerked them awake without explanation. They didn’t cry out, not even Drew. They had learned early to cry in silence. She felt Jonie pause. Moonlight touched the pink and white face of the doll, playing through the silk fronds of the feathers. She understood, even in her urgency. It was the only doll Jonie had ever owned. Celia reached for it and put it into Jonie’s hands.

She pulled them through the kitchen at the back of the house and out to Durk’s old car.

Had she really thought they could ever escape from him?

Oh God, Flint, where are you? she whispered in the silence of her mind, begging for the only creature who had ever dared defend her. But she knew where he was, his faithful body limp with death, a part of the swamp for a long time now. The chain that had killed him still strangling, holding, buried with him in the mud of the swamp.

She heard again the mocking laugh of Durk. You think your goddamned dog can save you from me, Ceil? Well, look at him now.

She pulled the car door shut, not trying to be quiet, to slip silently away so they wouldn’t be heard. Her voice came startlingly loud, even to her own ears, as her hands pushed her children down.

Get down! Stay down! Don’t sit up until I tell you!

She saw Jonie was no longer carrying the doll. It was lying on the ground in the moonlight. Jonie had dropped it. They couldn’t take time to go back.

Celia pushed them down so they wouldn’t see the horror that had risen from the dark water. Its shadows, thin and twining, yet enormous, stretched forward from somewhere at the back of the car and whipped across the hood as she ground the starter and pushed the accelerator to the floor.

The car roared and jerked forward, and she heard Drew’s forehead strike something beneath the dash. She reached down briefly to touch him, to feel his smooth forehead for injury.

As she drove away she looked back once more. The house stood isolated, a hundred yards from the swamp, the shadow of it filled with the thing that had risen.

Then she thought she saw something else ... a fleeting glimpse of a sleek, wet body at the edge of the swamp.

And she thought she heard the rattle of Flint’s chain.

Jonie lay on the floor between the backseat and the front, feeling the swing of the car along the sandy lane that reached a mile from the house to the highway. With each jerking movement of the car her head bumped the door. On the seat above her lay Blair. In the dim light cast back from the dash, she saw his white hand gripping the edge of the seat.

She could sense her mother’s fear, as tangible as ice coating her skin, as a strong odor that shocked the senses. She wanted to sit up and look, yet she stayed down. Above the seat she saw the top of her mother’s head outlined by the lights on the dash. There was no sound beyond the roar of the engine as they raced along the winding, narrow road. Shadows of trees flitted by, like pages of a book being closed.

The car didn’t stop at the highway but swung sharply to the right, throwing Jonie against the door. It speeded up, the transmission grinding through low to high speed before racing smoothly forward.

Jonie slowly sat up. She looked down upon her brother’s face and saw the round, fearful eyes, the parted lips. He looked white as a ghost.

It was him, he whispered. He was coming back again, wasn’t he?

Jonie didn’t answer.

She saw they were headed away from the town where they sometimes went for groceries. They were going east on the highway, and she knew only that it led to the interstate, to big cities, to the place they had gone the day Celia had dragged them to their dad’s car the first time.

She still remembered her own fear that day, just over a month ago. He, their dad, lay sleeping on the couch. One arm and both long legs lolled off. On the floor beside his limp hand, lay an empty bottle. He was drunk, and Jonie and her brothers had moved cautiously in the house, making sure the doors didn’t squeak when they went outside. The day before he had hurt Drew, and he had killed Flint, and they were afraid of him.

They had gone to play in the sand at the back of the house when they heard the door squeak. They looked up. Even now Jonie remembered the look on her mother’s face, that pinched, white, half-dead mask, with only her eyes alive with something Jonie had never seen before. At that moment she was almost as afraid of her mother as of her dad.

Come on, Celia whispered. She pulled Blair up by one arm, and reached down with her other arm and lifted Drew. Carrying him, she had gone to the car and opened the door, all the time looking over her shoulder toward the house.

Looking for Dad, Jonie knew. Always looking for Dad. She wished then, as she had wished since as far back as she could remember, that he would go away and never come back. But he was in the house, and they were getting into the car without him. She was afraid. They never went anywhere without their dad driving them. She didn’t even know until that day that her mother could drive a car.

They had run away without anywhere to go. Not until they reached the highway and Celia turned the car to the right, toward the freeway, did Jonie realize what was going on.

They had driven and driven until they ran out of gas and the car sputtered to a stop at the side of the long, four-lane strip of pavement. Then they had stood in the hot sun and watched the large trucks go by, and Jonie could still feel the wind in her hair as they passed.

It was almost dark when the highway patrol car stopped.

A tall man got out of the car. He was wearing a hat that reminded her of the wide-brimmed hats men wore in old Westerns. His eyes were dark and quick, and looked from one to the other of them before he smiled. Trouble?

Yes sir, Celia said, sounding as if she were talking to Durk. We’re out of gas.

No problem, the patrolman said. "There’s an exit about a mile north, and a service station down the ramp. You and the kids ride with me; we’ll get you some gas.

Celia hesitated. None of them moved. Then she said, I don’t have any money.

The patrolman said nothing for a moment, then with one finger, his quick eyes taking them all in again one by one, he pushed his hat higher on his forehead. Where you live, lady?

Celia licked her lips and looked down at her feet. We ... uh we ...

A big truck roared past, and Jonie’s hair whipped across her face, blinding her. She spun round with her back to the traffic. If Celia told the patrolman where they lived, Jonie didn’t hear.

Could I see your driver’s license, please, ma’am?

Celia lifted her head. I don’t have one.

There was a staring match, it seemed, in the brief silence as traffic thinned on the freeway. The patrolman looked at Celia for a long time. Jonie’s heart beat heavily and slowly. She could feel it in her throat. She was afraid he was going to take them home, back to Durk. Durk would talk to him, act as if nothing was wrong, and then when the man was gone ...

Jonie trembled and hugged her arms against her chest, staring at the man, beseeching him not to send them back. Why don’t we run away? she had asked her mother so many times in the past, but then Celia had only shaken her head. Jonie only partly understood. They could walk. They could hide in the woods where he would never find them.

The patrolman went around to the rear of the car and looked at the license plate. Then he went to the driver’s door and opened it and looked in. He reached into the car and opened the glove compartment. Jonie heard it slam, a tinny sound. The man came back from the car. Whose car is this? he asked.

My husband’s, Celia answered, then suddenly she was talking so quickly Jonie missed part of her words. If he finds us he’ll kill us. I need help, sir, to get my children away from him. He was lying drunk when we left. I can’t go back. I can’t take my kids back. Please, I don’t have any money, I don’t have a license, but I can’t go back.

The man pursed his lips and looked over their heads, squinting into the red sky where the sun had set. Family? he asked.

No.

He looked at Celia again, eyes squinted. It was almost as if he doubted her word.

None at all?

No, no family.

The patrolman took out a small notebook from his pocket and wrote something.

Then he began to question Celia again, but the cars were going by, and the trucks, and Jonie took both her brothers by their arms and pulled them farther away from the edge of traffic. She didn’t hear what their mama told the policeman, but she saw him go to his car and talk into the radio. He stood with the door open as the night grew suddenly darker around them. When he came back she saw he wasn’t angry with them after all.

It’s all right, Jonie heard him say to Celia. We’ll get you a place to stay.

For several weeks they stayed in town at a place where other women and children also lived. It was called a halfway house for battered women and children.

Jonie knew her mother had talked to a lot of people while they were in the halfway house, people who had something to do with the police, or with the people who ran the kind of houses they were living in. Shelters, some of the kids told her. They were called shelters. And one of the kids told her the shelter was built by God and his angels.

Jonie worried about her dogs, about all the dogs out in the barn in the cages. Would her dad feed them? Water them? No, he would not. Watering and feeding had been her job, and her brothers’ and mother’s. Then she learned that the law was taking the dogs away where they would be safe, and everything was going to be all right, because her mother was getting a divorce.

They were going home, because it was the only place they had to go. But their father was never allowed to come there anymore. So they were told.

It had seemed so strange, going home that day. Although they had been gone only about a month, the house looked different. Abandoned. Smaller. It stood in the yellowed grass like a funny square toadstool, all alone between the pines that dotted the area back toward the road, and the dark green of the cypress in the swamp.

It sounded different too. There was silence in the barn and sheds where the dogs were kept, but she had to go see for herself that all the cages were empty. Even her puppies were gone.

She stood in the still shadows of the barn and wept, her heart lonely for all the dogs and puppies that were no longer there. Although Dad had never let them stay very long, she had always grown to love each one, and she missed them. Even in her loneliness she was glad it was over. There would be no more little scared dogs, no more stolen pups ... That was what they said he did—stole them. He stole them from people’s yards, from the street, from wherever he found them. He answered ads for dogs to give away free to good homes. He bought them from the pounds and from the animal shelters, and brought them here and kept them only until he sold them to the labs that needed dogs for experimentation.

They were gone, and though she missed them, she was glad.

She would never have to live with her dad again, because the lady lawyer who had come to talk to her mother had promised he would not bother them. They had a court order that he was to stay away from the house, from them.

Yet he came back and stayed for two days. Two terrible, horrible days and nights.

Then something happened. She had tried since then to remember, but each time she thought about that night she began to shake all over, and she had to stop thinking about it. It was as though something in her brain didn’t want to know. It was like hundreds, thousands of nightmares all mixed up, jumbled, so there was no picture, just colors and feelings.

It was like the vague, strange light of the setting moon that was absorbed by the landscape outside the swiftly moving car, like all the unidentifiable shapes in the night.

She saw Drew’s head over the front seat and heard his timid, half-whispered question. Where are we going?

She listened for the answer that didn’t come.

Where were they going? she wondered too, the car lights reaching like two feeble hands into the darkness ahead of them.

Drew didn’t ask again.

Beside her Blair sat up, and for the first time Jonie realized they were all wearing their nightclothes. They were running away again, taking nothing, with nowhere to go, and Jonie didn’t understand. In the reddish light of the dash she saw the white shoulder straps of Celia’s nightgown.

Jonie turned and looked out the rear window. Darkness swallowed the world behind them.

This time, when they ran out of gas, she prayed her mother would keep going, on and-on. They could walk. They could hide.

They could never go back.

Chapter 2

The sound of an ax splitting wood rang through the Georgia pines, a comfort to Mel’s ears. There was a special sound to a block of wood splitting. The feel of the ax against the solid grain of wood, jolting through the muscles of his back, his shoulders, his arms, released most of the tensions that had built up in him during the past week. He had spent the past eight days and some of the nights driving, carrying with him the most precious cargo in the world, a mother and her children, trying to get them to a place where they would be safe from a husband and father who wanted to hurt them, at best. Away from a judicial system that couldn’t protect them.

If anyone had told him, eighteen years ago, when, at the age of twenty-one, he had joined law enforcement, that one day he would be operating on the opposite side of the law, he would have slugged them, or wanted to. Him, a lawbreaker? No. At that time it wasn’t conceivable.

He had arrived home at midnight and had thrown himself across the bed still fully dressed. He hadn’t awakened until almost noon. He had drifted awake to the sound of frogs in the pond, birds in the trees, and Cress scratching on the back door for attention. And for just a moment, before memories set in, he had felt a sense of peace, of coming home where everything was right and good.

After getting up, stretching, going out to see his dogs, and seeing that their automatic feeder still had plenty of dry food and the waterer was full, he stood on the back step of his house, looked at the pines that surrounded the two acres he had cleared for house, garden and pond, and gave thanks for his ten acres of privacy.

Peace. The only place on earth that held that special meaning for him.

And yet ... there were the memories. The little faces that collected like ghosts in front of his eyes when they were closed, even when he stood looking at the beauty of his ten Georgia acres, the pines, the clear water in the pond, the flowers, the grass.

He wished everyone could have as much. Especially those little kids who cowered when you looked at them, and the wives who couldn’t smile, who still bore the scars of unhappy marriages, and perhaps always would.

There was the memory of his own young daughter after she had taken an overdose of drugs, the note clutched so tightly in her hand her fingers had to be pried open.

I’m sorry, Daddy.

Her last message to him. He who had failed her after all.

And the faces of the two adults who were responsible. Her mother and her stepfather. A man he wanted to kill but could not. A man the law hadn’t been able to touch.

Using an ax to split wood for his heating stove was one of the best ways to keep his mind busy, to keep from thinking about the past, about the fact that he had been unable to help his daughter.

He paused, and used a handkerchief from his hip pocket to wipe the sweat from his forehead and cheekbones. A short beard covered his chin and lower face. There were times when he wouldn’t have a chance to shave for two days, three, sometimes more, and with the kind of black, rapid growth he had, the beard was the wisest way to go. Another thing about a beard and mustache was identification. Bearded men tended to look more alike. They were harder to identify.

He sat down on the chopping block, and his two dogs came up to have their ears scratched. One of them was a black and white hound mix, the other was smaller, with a touch of cocker spaniel maybe, and some beagle, maybe even German shepherd or Chihuahua, to explain its pert, pointed ears.

Hi, guys, did you get lonely? Sorry. Elvin treat you okay? Did he come to see you while I was gone?

Of course Elvin Cross treated them good, and he knew that sometimes when he was gone longer than he expected to be, the dogs would go over to Elvin’s place and lie around while they waited. Elvin, a widower in his sixties, would walk the path that joined the two places, bringing the dogs home to be fed so they wouldn’t forget where they lived.

Elvin picked up his mail twice a week and put it on his