Darkness by John Saul

But come home before it gets too dark, okay? And stay away from the swamp.”
    Kelly nodded, hurrying out of the house before her parents had time to change their minds. She crossed the lawn, paused when she came to a narrow footpath that edged the canal, then turned right. She walked slowly, studying the houses strung along the waterway. They were much smaller than her grandfather’s, occupied by retired people who didn’t need nearly as much space as her grandfather had.
    “I don’t need it either,” he’d said that afternoon. “I guess I built this big place just because I could afford it, and I’ve been rattling around in it ever since. No fool like an old fool. Still, it seems like it’s finally come in kind of handy.”
    She walked about a quarter of a mile, slowly realizing that the houses were all alike—there were only four models, and two of those were simply mirror images of the other two. Bored with the houses, she turned her attention to the swamp on the other side of the canal.
    She’d heard about it from her parents all her life, butnow that she was actually seeing it, it didn’t look at all as she had imagined. She’d always thought of it as a scary place, filled with a tangle of vines and infested with snakes and insects. But now that she was close to it, it didn’t appear frightening at all. There were vines, all right, twisting up into the cypress trees, and the mangroves looked strange with their branching roots, but there was something about the swamp that struck her as vaguely familiar.
    As if she knew it, although she’d never seen it before.
    Her pace slowed as the hypnotic drone of tiny creatures drifted out of the wilderness. Finally she stopped walking altogether and stood listening, beginning to sort out one sound from another. There were bird songs rising above the drone of insects, and the high whistles of tree frogs contrasted sharply with the lower tones of the bullfrogs.
    A flicker of movement caught her eye. She peered across the canal, straining to see through the failing light. Then, almost hidden in the foliage, she saw a face.
    As quickly as it appeared, the face was gone. For a moment Kelly thought she had imagined it.
    Had the man—the man she’d seen in her dreams, and in the mirror that night a month ago—followed her here?
    No. This face had been younger.
    A boy’s face.
    And it had been real. Real, and somehow—in a way she didn’t understand—connected to her.
    Her eyes swept the area again, and she caught sight of a footbridge a few yards up the canal. Without thinking, she hurried up the path and crossed the bridge.
    She paused on the other side. There was still enough light so she could clearly make out a narrow track leading through the foliage. She hesitated, then made up her mind. It wouldn’t be fully dark for at least another half hour. Certainly it couldn’t take her more than a few minutes to find the boy.
    She started along the path.
    As she walked, a new sound came to her.
    A sound that seemed to lead her on.

    Amelie Coulton sat in the rocking chair on the porch of her shanty, a worn baby’s dress in her lap. Her fingers, nowhere near as clever as her mother’s, worked uneven stitches into the tear in the material—a tear her mother had told her she herself had put there seventeen years ago. As she gazed at the work, a feeling of hopelessness came over her. She was going to have to start all over again, and there were still so many holes in the garment that by the time she finally finished mending it, her baby would already be a year old.
    If it survived being born, which would be any day now.
    And if George kept his promise.
    Usually, evening was Amelie’s favorite time in the marshland. At the end of the day, when she’d finished all her chores, and George had gone off to get drunk on moonshine with one of his friends, she could sit in her chair and listen to the wilderness around her. She never got lonely, even when George didn’t come