Live and Let Drood

swallowed up by the fog. I could just make out the dark shape of the fake haunted house to my right. New lights were showing in the windows: dark green glows, like the phosphorescent light you find on shipwrecks at the bottom of the sea. Dark silhouettes, distorted human shapes, moved slowly past the windows. Something bad peered at me from the illuminated doorway.
    Dark shadows, slow-moving human forms, stumbling forward on dragging feet, scraping across the wooden floorboards, appeared in the fog before Molly and me. They were almost upon us now. Not ghosts, not any form of projected image or any kind of illusion. These were solid, physical things. Dead men emerging slowly out of the fog. Dead men walking.
    Once I got a good look at them, I knew immediately what they were. Not ghosts or even zombies, but spirits of the dead called up out of the sea and given their old shape and form to do their master’s will. Or what was left of them after so long in the depths. Disturbed from their rest and animated by some terrible outside will. Crow Lee. Had to be. There were dozens of the things, maybe hundreds, shuffling and stumbling forward to confront Molly and me. Grey and bloated, flesh eaten away by fishes and all the other things that live at the bottom of the sea that we don’t like to think about. Some bodies had clearly been down there longer than others; just bare bones, held together with strips of ancient flesh and tatters of decayed clothing. The faces were the worst: rotten, eaten away, eyes and ears and nose and lips just gone…but they could still see Molly and me. Every dead body oriented on us as they pressed forward. They could see us. They knew where we were.
    “Can you tell what they want?” I said to Molly.
    “No. But I could probably make a really good guess.”
    “We could be mistaken,” I said. “Let’s ask them.”
    “You do it,” said Molly. “You’re the polite one.”
    I took an ostentatiously confident step forward to face the army ofthe dead emerging from the fog, and immediately every dead body slammed to a halt. Not one of them moved. All their dead faces, their decaying heads, turned in my direction. I took a moment to make sure my voice would sound calm and confident. I doubted very much I’d be fooling anyone, but it’s the principle of the thing.
    “Who are you?” I said. “Why have you come here? What do you want? Is there anything I can do to help you? To put you back to rest again?”
    One of the nearest bodies stepped forward. Its bare feet made wet slapping sounds on the bare floorboards. With its bleached flesh and eaten-away face, its ragged clothes in rags, it could have been anyone. Only the manner of its clothes allowed me to identify it as male. It raised one half-skeletal hand to point at me, and water dripped steadily from the revealed bones.
    “We’re all that’s left of those who died in the waters here,” said the dead man in a disturbingly normal voice. “The sea is giving up its dead against its will. None of us want to be here. But then, none of us wanted to die. Accidents, mistakes, murder; we all ended up at the bottom of the sea. In the cold, in the dark and the silence. Raised and sent here by someone who had a use for us. One last crime against us. And all the rage we have…for dying, for dying badly, for not being allowed to rest in peace…all that rage has been stirred up in us, so we can take it out on you and your woman. We don’t know who you are or why someone wants you to die so badly, and we don’t care. We can’t care. We’re dead.”
    “You can’t hurt me,” I said. “I’m a Drood.”
    “Means nothing to me,” said the dead man. “Means nothing to any of us. We are here to hurt you and break you and make you die badly. And then we’ll take you back with us, drag you down into the depths of the sea, to the cold and the dark and the silence. Forever.”
    “Nothing worse than a chatty dead man,” Molly said briskly. “I don’t think that’s his voice, Eddie. I think that’s someone else speaking through him.”
    “Is that you, Crow Lee?” I said. “I’ll be coming for you soon. And all the armies of the world, living or dead, won’t be enough to stop me.”
    “Let us rest,” said a soft, wet chorus of voices. “We didn’t want to die. But this is worse.”
    “You wouldn’t think someone with the power to raise an army of the dead would feel the need for psychological warfare,” said Molly. “This is