Edmund Harrow's Arc

Chapter 7 of 7

Edmund did not sleep that night. He sat at the boarding house window with the children's drawings spread across the desk. Before dawn, the father from the first family pounded on his door. His youngest, a boy of seven, was gone. The bed was empty. The back door stood open. A neighbor had seen the boy walking barefoot toward the temple road, eyes half-shut, moving like he already knew the way. Edmund grabbed his coat and the flashlight and ran with the father toward the swamp. The temple sat quiet in the gray light. Edmund found small footprints in the mud leading through the collapsed wall and stopping at the edge of the interior pond. The water was black and still. The father dropped to his knees and shouted the boy's name. Edmund pulled him back and told him to search the trees. Then Edmund found an old fisherman's harpoon leaning against the outer wall, left behind by someone long dead. He waded into the pond with it, dragging the shaft along the bottom in slow arcs. On the third pass, the point caught cloth. He hauled up a sodden nightshirt, then an arm, then the boy. The child was cold but breathing. On the child's tongue Edmund found a soft pale disc, half-dissolved, flecked with brown specks. He recognized the shape from the ceremonies. The cult leader had been feeding it to the families as communion. It was laced with swamp mushrooms. Edmund carried the boy out of the temple and did not take him home. If the dreams pulled the child back tonight, the father could not stop him. Edmund crossed the low ground to a stranded riverboat wreck he had passed on his first walk out. He climbed inside the hull, laid the boy on a dry bench, and sent the father to fetch the mother and dry clothes. Then he sat with the child and waited for the drug to pass. By midmorning the boy woke, confused but whole. He remembered walking. He remembered the water calling him by his dead brother's voice. Edmund had the wafer wrapped in a handkerchief in his pocket. He had the boy alive. He had a father who would swear in front of anyone what he had seen. The fraud case was no longer only a fraud case. The cult leader had been drugging his believers into dreams and drawing their children toward the pond. Edmund told the father to keep the boy on the wreck until nightfall and to trust no one from the ceremonies. Then he started back toward town. He would not go to the sheriff yet. The other two families had children too, and the next dream was coming.