I went out the unlocked front door into the warm humid air, down the steps and away from the light, and I walked back behind the house and over to the far right where the bungalow stood in which Jasmine and Big Ramona and Clem lived.
It was lighted cheerily. And only Clem was there, sitting on the front porch, rocking and smoking a very aromatic cigar. I gestured for him not to get up on my account, and I walked back behind the house and along the treacherous soft bank of the swamp.
I could hear Tommy singing. I sang the words along with him, soft, in no more than a whisper. I tried to picture Patsy as she had been in her heyday-country-western star, in her leather jackets with fringe and skirts and boots, with teased and bouffant hair, belting her original songs. It was the image that Quinn had given to me. Grudgingly he had said she could truly sing. Even Aunt Queen had mentioned to me with some reserve that Patsy could really sing. Ah, there hadn't been a single soul in the world of Blackwood Farm who had felt love for Patsy.
And all I'd glimpsed was the sick Patsy, bitter and full of hate, sitting on the couch in her white nightgown, knowing she'd never be well enough to perform anymore, hollering for Cyndy, the Nurse, to give her another shot, hating Quinn out loud and with her soul, her pinched and twisted soul, Patsy, who'd caught the plague from drug needles and didn't care how many times she'd passed it on.
And Quinn had done her in just exactly as he'd described it to the sheriff.
I walked on, with the swamp beside me. I let my vampiric hearing rove. Nash had begun to play Patsy's song, with more notes and a bolder expression. He and Tommy were singing it together. Sadness. Jasmine cried. Jasmine whispered, "Ah, the pure pitifulness of it. "
The rural dark fell down around me. I let go of the music.
The swamp seemed the most savage and devouring place, with no pastoral symmetry or harmony to it. What thrived there was ravenous and battling to the death, and would never find a safe haven for itself-a landscape eating itself alive. Quinn had told me it was like that. But how could I not have known it?
Centuries ago, I'd been dumped for dead in the swamp by my fledglings, Claudia, the murderer, Louis, the coward; and I, a hideous and grasping thing, had survived in those stagnant, polluted waters, survived to come back and take my battered and shapeless revenge, sharpened to a fatal point by others.
I don't care about that.
I don't know how long I walked.
I took my time.
Patsy. Patsy.
The night sounds were at once particular and at the same time a deep hum on the warm breeze, and the moon was high, sometimes penetrating a break in the swamp that only revealed its jagged hateful chaos more harshly.
Now and then I stopped.
I looked at the scattered stars-so cunningly bright in the country night. And I hated them, as usual. What comfort was it to be lost in the endless universe, a simpleton on a tiny speck of revolving dust, whose forefathers had read patterns and meanings into these countless unknowable points of cold white fire, which only mocked us by their unchanging indifference?
So let them shine over the vast pastureland to my right, over the distant clusters of oaks, over the warmly lighted houses now far behind me.
My soul was with the swamp tonight. My soul was with Patsy.
I walked on.
I hadn't known so much of Blackwood Farm bordered on the swamp. But I wanted to know. And I kept as close as possible to the water without slipping right into it.
Soon I knew Mona was somewhere near me. She was doing her best to conceal herself, but I heard the little sounds that she made, and I
could smell a faint perfume from her that had clung to Aunt Queen's dresses, a scent I hadn't noticed before.
After a little while, I knew Quinn was with us, too, staying behind me with Mona. Why they so faithfully followed I didn't know.
I used my strongest vision to penetrate the reeking darkness to my left.
A strong chill came over me, moving down my back, a chill such as I'd felt when Rowan Mayfair and I had first met, and she had used her power to study me, a chill that was from a source outside of me.
I stopped, and I faced the swamp, and at once I perceived that a female figure was right before me. It was so close that I could have touched it without extending my hand more than a few inches.
It was tangled in the moss and creeper vine, still and lifeless as the cypress tree which appeared to support it, and it was soaked through and through, its hair in dank rivulets on its filthy white gown, and gleaming faintly in a light mortal eyes could not have seen, and it was staring at me.
It was Patsy Blackwood.
Weak, silent, suffering.
"Where is she!" Quinn whispered. He was at my left shoulder. "Where? Patsy, where are you?"