Chapters (34)
And, Luce realized, he wasn’t the only one that heard her. The cloud of voices was spinning faster, fizzling with agitation. Luce suddenly remembered the sound of wasps drunk on the fermented apples in autumn at a campground where they’d stayed. The windy gibbering got louder as if it wanted to drown her out, and then to her horror Luce suddenly recognized one of the voices in that tangled muttering. It was her own voice, but higher, fresher and more childish than it was now: the voice she’d had as a much younger girl. Luce listened, mesmerized and sickened, trying to catch what her voice was saying, what evil things it might be murmuring into his ears—
Andrew Korchak pitched a rock. It just missed Luce’s shoulder and splashed down in the water behind her, jarring her from the dark dreaminess that had flooded her mind. “I’m warning you!” her father snapped in exasperation. “Now, I know you need to keep me alive. How long would you have to wait to get yourself a new sucker way out here? So don’t push me!”
He started to stand up. Luce gaped up in desperation. Would he ever let her talk to him again? She cast around wildly for something she could say, anything that might convince him . . .“I’ll prove it to you! I’ll tell you something only the two of us could know about, something we both remember . . .”
That seemed to surprise him, and he stared straight at her for the first time. A look of furious incredulity burned in his eyes. “Now that’s a joke,” her father snarled at last. “Like there’s anything I remember that you don’t know about, when you’ve been feeding off my brains for the last two years!”
Luce stared back and saw that tears were streaming into his snarled beard. He stood up, breathing hard, and scowled around at the empty sea. He looked dazed, and Luce saw him teetering as he walked off into the woods, knocking into the snow-laden trees so that clumps of white dropped to the earth behind him.
Then Luce was left alone with the invisible voices. They hummed toward her in a rattling cloud, throwing up flecks of snow and dead grass. Voices tore at the air like a hawk ripping into a still-struggling rabbit, then poured down over the shelf of rock to jostle around Luce’s head and scream straight into her mind.
They were enraged.