Blackwater Lights (17 page)

“Kev, cut it out. I can’t believe that. He’s a criminal. A sick fuck. But he’s not some kind of evil wizard. He’s got your head messed up. Like they did to me, with the drugs—they mess with your head and convince you that you’re going nuts.”

Kevin shook his head. “No. No. It’s real. It’s really, really real.”

Ray stood. “But Jesus, Kev, what does he want with me? You have skills. You’re useful to him. I’m a public-school teacher. What the hell use am I to someone like him?”

Kevin’s face drained of blood. “That’s why I asked you to come here. It’s going to take a while for me to explain.”

“Fine. Start explaining,” Ray said. “I’ve waited almost forty years. No need to rush.”

Kevin blinked. “I need another drink.” He refilled his glass. “I didn’t understand it for a long time. Then I realized why I was here and all the manipulations that went into drawing me back to this place. How Crawford convinced me to buy this piece of land, and how he worked behind the curtains setting everything up. I knew that it wasn’t just my coding skills he was after. And then one afternoon, not long after he did that thing to the bird, he took me for a long walk in the woods. I was sure I was a dead man. And I saw that horrible place again.”

“The Hand,” Ray said.

Kevin nodded. “And I just figured it out. It all came back at once. Everything. What happened to us. I lost it, just fell apart. And I looked at Crawford, and he was smiling. I was screaming and whimpering in the dirt and the motherfucker was just laughing at me.”

The phone rang.

“Hold on a minute.” Kevin picked up the phone and walked to the window. “Yeah. Yeah. Okay.” He licked his lips. Ray couldn’t hear the voice on the other end of the line, but Kevin nodded. “Okay. Yes.” He hung up. Rain pelted the window.

“Who was that?”

He waved his hand. “Webcam girl. Asking for more money.” He walked back to the window.

“So why are they messing with me? What happened to us?”

Kevin turned. His gaze was stony.

“They’re not going to leave me alone, are they?”

Kevin turned back to the window. He spoke quickly, clearly, in a whisper, but with an edge that said
I’m not fucking around
. “Ray, go to the back door and get out of here. Now.”

“What?”

Kevin stared into the darkness beyond the window. “Leave—out the back door and run. Go.”

“What? What the fuck are you talking about?”

Kevin spoke without turning. “Get out of here
now
.” A shaft of light crossed his face. Headlights.

A car door slammed shut. Then another.

Kevin turned, his face covered in tears. “I love you, Ray. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry this
happened. But there’s nothing I could do.”

“What? Kevin, you—”

Kevin hurled himself backward into the kitchen table. A chair upended and slammed into the wall. Glasses rocketed off the table, crashing onto the floor, popping and exploding. He stood up and threw himself against the refrigerator, sliding to the floor. He punched himself in the face with a pale fist. And again. A bubble of blood blew out of one nostril, then a fine spray. “Go,” he whispered. He punched himself again, and his face erupted in red.

The front door buckled outward—someone strong was yanking on it. Ray ran out the back door as the front door snapped off its hinges.

“He jumped me,” Kevin was saying. “He went out the back.…”

The darkness made full-on running impossible. Ray’s feet sank in the rain-saturated earth. He stumbled, holding his hands in front of his face—if he ran blindly, he’d smack his head into a tree, shred his face, or impale himself on a sharp branch.

His foot twisted, throwing him into the dirt. Leaves stuck to his face. “Shit,” he said, and then choked. Best to be quiet.

Voices. Moving closer.

He scrambled around to his feet and stumbled onward, downhill, away from the house. A thin, whiplike branch snapped and sliced his cheek. No time to think. Just run. Lily laughed in the distance.

Ray staggered. Fire shot through his ankle with every step. He must have twisted it when he fell. A flashlight beam zigzagged behind him. Two flashlights, searching like bright eyes. If he didn’t keep moving, they’d be on him in minutes.

Laughter again.

“Ray! Oh, Ray!” Crawford’s voice, high-pitched and mocking.

Water roared ahead. The river?

“Ray, why are you running?”

The sound of the river grew louder. He was getting close. But what then? His ankle twisted again, and he couldn’t choke back a cry of pain.

The flashlight beams converged on him, casting his shadow in two directions.

Crawford called out, “Ray, come on. Stop running. Let’s go get dry and have a hot cocoa, shall we?”

“Fuck you,” Ray whispered to himself. He hobbled on his aching ankle.

The Blackwater River. Flooded and out of control, rushing by in front of him, splashing against the sides of the hill on which he stood.

The flashlights blinded him. “Ray, take it easy. Let’s get out of this rain and talk about this like grown-ups.”

Ray looked at the shadowy water below. Dark shapes bobbed by, carried by the swirling floodwaters. A river full of rocks, swollen with days of rain, bloated with fallen trees and branches. He turned to look behind him and the flashlight burned into his eyes. Purple and red blobs danced in his vision. “There’s nowhere to go.” Crawford had slowed.

And then he smelled her perfume. “Ray,” she said. “It’s okay. It’s okay now. Come with us.”

He turned and jumped, closing his eyes and falling through the nothingness below him.

How cold it was, and how strong, and terribly dark. Something—a stick or a sharp rock—tore into the flesh near his buttocks as he sank below the surface. The harsh, oppressive current flipped and rolled him. If he didn’t get air soon he’d be smashed to pieces and drown in the blackness. He flailed, his hands paddling and clawing. Nothing. He couldn’t even tell which way was up.

Keep your legs in front of you, because it’s better to have broken legs than a broken skull
. A cute, tanned rafting guide had explained that to him years ago when Lisa had convinced him to take a trip down the Youghiogheny River. Her advice was good, but at the moment the river determined where he was going, which direction he faced, and whether it would wedge him against a tree under the water until he drowned or just hurl him face-first into a boulder. He grasped in all directions, feeling nothing. His chest ached, and water pushed into his nose like insistent fingers.

His arm snagged something—a branch? Bigger. A log. He grabbed it, his hands slipping
on the slimy bark, and pulled it to his chest. Finally some buoyancy. He rolled, and the log rolled with him, and he felt air on his face. He coughed, his lungs sucking in a deep breath, and the log rolled again, dumping him back beneath the surface.

His leg slammed into something hard, and his knee snapped. He screamed, his mouth filling with water. Gritty, cold, foul water. Water of death.

And then he was propelled up and into the cold air. He landed in a clump of brush lodged between a half-submerged boulder and the muddy riverbank. His lungs rejected their first inhalation, spewing out the water that had started to fill them. He retched violently, the river water blowing out in grunting spasms. He tried to stand, grasping at sticks and clumps of grass, but screamed as his knee buckled beneath his weight. His good leg sank into mud.

He found a tree root sticking out of the bank and wrapped his fingers around it. His other hand found a cleft in the root. He pulled. His injured leg popped audibly—whether it was cartilage or bone, he couldn’t tell—and tiny, dancing sprites swarmed his vision. It would be so easy to just slip back under the water, to close his eyes, to settle down into the muck and sleep and erase the pain.

He pulled again, his good leg sliding out of the mud. Another pull, and he rolled, careful to keep the weight off his injured leg, and rested on his back. The rain pelted his face, but he was out of the river—and alive.

Now what?

One of his shoes had come off in the mud. His hand ran up and down his injured leg, flinching as he pressed gently on the knee. Maybe it was broken—it was hard to tell at the moment, but it was going to be next to impossible to walk. His fingers probed higher up and touched sticky, hot blood. Something had ripped a gash in his leg near his right buttock. He pressed against it, hoping pressure would stop the bleeding. He had no energy to do much more at the moment but rest.

If Crawford and Lily found him now, he’d be at their mercy.

Rain splattered against his face, beating a rhythm against his closed eyelids. How long could he lie here? Crawford might assume he’d been swept to his death—as he almost had been. But probably not. They could just follow the river to find him.

And even if they didn’t show up, how long could he expect to last? He was bleeding, his leg was out of commission, and he could barely move. He’d read enough about hypothermia to
know that he’d die if he didn’t find warmth, even with temperatures far above freezing. And he was sodden, lost, and probably close to shock. The cold, thick mud felt almost … welcoming. He could sleep, just for a few minutes, in this mudluscious bed. Just a quick catnap.

He sat up slowly, needles of hot pain spreading in his knee. His eyes rapidly adjusted to the darkness, but it was still impossible to see much beyond the outlines of trees. The water churned next to him. Had it risen even higher in just the last few minutes? It was hard to tell, but it would be best to get as far away as possible. He could crawl, at least, or pull himself along on his backside, and maybe find some kind of shelter. If he could make it through the night without getting hypothermia, he might have a chance of getting to a road, or to a house, anywhere he might find help.

The only alternative was dying alone in the woods, or waiting until Crawford and Lily found him. Right now they could be torturing Kevin for letting him escape, filming everything as they committed unspeakable violations. Had Kevin’s sham—throwing himself into the kitchen table and punching himself in the face—actually worked? Crawford seemed too sharp to fall for such a lie.

Kevin. How deep did his ties to Crawford go? The phone call he’d gotten before he’d told Ray to escape had been Crawford saying he was on his way. That meant that Kevin had known Crawford was going to come—for Ray—and hadn’t said anything until the car pulled up outside.

His face stinging with rain, Ray pulled himself away from the river, his backside dragging in the mud, into the darkness.

It seemed the rain would never stop.

The violent shaking had started. Ray’s hands were cut from twigs and numb from digging into the cold, wet soil as he dragged himself along. He’d long since forgotten the direction of the river; for all he knew, he could be sliding around on his ass in circles. He had tried crawling on his stomach, but his throbbing knee wouldn’t allow it. It didn’t matter anymore where he might be going. The object was to
move
. Without movement, the scant heat his body generated would
be sucked out by the cold, the rain, and the wind.

His teeth chattered so hard it seemed they would break into pieces.

The shivering felt like a dance. The dance of the holy, of Pentecostals overcome by the sweet ecstasy of spirits. Was shivering like this the final stage of hypothermia? Did one die feeling blissful, at one with the universe, like people rescued from drowning or a heroin overdose? Hadn’t Jack London written about that—after his character contemplated slitting open his dog and shoving his frostbitten hands inside its carcass?

Hands dig into earth. Arms lift, pull backward. Legs drag. Fall back to earth. Again. The rain falls. Hands dig into earth. Arms lift the body.