Bloodstone (7 page)

Get polluted, boy. Get shitfaced, so drunk you can’t think
anymore
.

He knew one thing; he had found a way to get out of that job. Or, more accurately, it had found him. He would never go back to work for Mrs. Friedman again.

Jeb Taylor sat there for the rest of the night alone, and by
the time the barmaid came to get him he had finished the bottle of whiskey and had passed out with his head on the table, and finally, mercifully, the voices had stopped.

He awoke in the dark with the distinct feeling someone was watching him.

Disoriented, alcohol still running freely through his veins, he moved sluggishly across the bed and moaned. His eyes were gummy, painful pockets of flesh. How had he gotten home? He remembered Johnny’s and the bottle of whiskey, and then nothing. His head was spinning and he felt as if he might be sick.

The room was freezing cold. He lay shivering under the sheets, and let his gaze play about the dim surroundings. The moonlight let in through the window hardly gave him enough light. He could see only shapes in the darkness. The window was open; had he opened it before going to bed? He couldn’t remember.

Jesus, it was cold.

Something was in the room with him. He did not know how he knew it, but he did. He tried desperately to clear his head, afraid now, straining to see. The dresser in the corner, as it should be; the chair next to it, clothes thrown loosely across the seat. Nothing wrong there. But still, that feeling, eyes on him…

The closet door was open. He sat up, his stomach turning over, his heart hammering against his ribs, and stared into the blackness of the closet. Walls running together in the dark and in the middle a black hole, and someone standing at the back,
grinning
at him. The figure looked like a man. He could just see the glint of eyes and white teeth.

“Not real,” he croaked. His throat was dry and hot as a stovetop. “Drank too much, that’s all. Seeing things. You’re not real.”

The figure did not move. Jeb Taylor sat with his back against the headboard and moaned to himself.

They considered each other.

It wanted him, he could feel it. And it looked familiar somehow. God help him, even as he sat there shaking with fear, something urged him to get up out of bed and go to it, just let it take him into the darkness.

He moaned again, the fear alive in him. With a sudden lunge that turned his stomach upside down and made his head spin, he crossed the few feet of space between his bed and the closet and slammed the door closed. He waited, but the door stayed shut and he heard nothing from inside the closet.

The thing had not spoken to him, had not even changed expression. He was going crazy.

He stood, weaving on his feet, for one long minute. Finally, unable to stand the silence and the heaviness in the air, he reached out. His hands were slick on the doorknob as he twisted and yanked the door open again.

Clothes hanging near the back, slumped like a man’s shoulders, and the bit of white paper on the hanger like a slash of teeth in the dark. That was all.

The suitcase, Jeb. Come on, old buddy. Open it up and
take a peek at what’s inside
.

He closed the closet door, slammed the window shut, and stumbled to the bed. His thoughts would not come together, and he was left with a blur of images in the dark empty spaces of his mind. Mrs. Friedman, leaning into him, her skin warm and smooth, as warm as the blood running down his hands. The closet door swinging slowly open like the door of a tomb, the sound of its hinges like something ripped from the ground. Blood welling up from half circles of broken flesh. And somewhere out in the dark, the body of his father, waiting for the flames.

Then the booze took hold of him again, leaving him nauseous and weak, and his head began to thump and spin, and he gladly let it take him down, into the darkness. He did not want to think about all of that, not now.

Not ever.

As Jeb Taylor drifted off into a troubled sleep, Billy and Angel climbed into the car and drove back through the center of town, past the White Falls Church (currently filled with bowed heads and bingo boards and one soon to be discovered dead man), following the river which snaked through the darkness somewhere on their left, through the trees. The houses were close together near the road, with little screened-in porches and old vinyl chairs, flaking paint, washing lines strung out back between the pines.

The road dipped and branched off to the left where it crossed the river, and that was the way they had come into town; Route 27, running down through Bath and Brunswick and connecting onto the Maine Turnpike. The river ran along the side of the town like a moat, cutting White Falls off from the rest of the world. If the two bridges ever went out (and they were low; during the spring rains the water must almost touch the girders), the town would be, for all intents and purposes, an island.

They did not take Route 27 and instead continued on the right branch, which wound out through the trees and into a part of the town they had never seen before. Billy Smith felt like a hand had suddenly tightened its grip on his bowels. The road narrowed and began a gentle upward climb, the
car’s headlights cutting into the darkness and illuminating a desolate scene of alders and brush clumped close along the shoulder. They passed no other cars. When Angel turned to him her eyes looked even larger than normal, two deep pools that appeared black in the dim dashboard light. “What are we doing out here?”

“Exploring. It’s what we decided to do tonight, isn’t it?” What they had been
commanded
to do, he almost said, but kept his mouth shut. The less spooked they both got right now, the better.

“I—I feel like we’re being watched all the time, like there’s a pair of eyes out there. Someone that sees everything we do.”

“We’ll be fine.”

“Are you sure? How can you know that?”

“We were picked, you and I. We’ve been brought here to do something. I don’t know exactly what, but there’s a reason for it, Angel. I have to believe that.”

But did he, really? He was reminded of his mother’s religious faith in all things destined to be, of lives that had been planned long before birth by some higher power. As much as he’d like to, he didn’t believe any of that stuff. And yet here he was, driven to some unknown purpose by nightmares and voices he did not understand, driven to crimes he had not thought he’d been capable of committing.

“I find it hard to believe I’ve been picked for anything good.”

“Come on. Kidnapping you was the best thing that ever happened to me.” He tried to grin, but his facial muscles wouldn’t seem to cooperate.

The darkness stretched out before them like an unexplored wilderness.

“I’m glad you’re here,” she said simply, and took his hand. Her touch was cool and light, so fragile, and he was reminded of how he had held her hand on the square earlier that afternoon, a gesture that had come almost without thought. When
faced with something as bizarre as crazy Annie, they had quickly and easily come together, supporting each other as if they had been friends for years. It made no sense and yet it felt absolutely
right
. He felt an overwhelming surge of…something. He wanted to protect her, shield her from whatever they had to do.

“I feel so far away from everything,” she was saying. She had turned to look out the windshield now, but her hand remained nestled in his palm. “It’s almost like that other life never even happened at all. I can barely remember how I felt, what I did. Who I was.”

“None of that stuff matters anymore.”

“But it does, doesn’t it? I mean, I have to try to understand it. Why I did what I did. I never wanted to come down and get sober because then I would realize what I was doing with those men.” She shook her head. “I can’t remember any faces.”

“Give it time. It’s barely been a week.”

“That’s just it.” She shrugged her narrow shoulders. “It feels like forever. I don’t know why, but I can hardly remember any of it.”

Then something in the air seemed to change as the headlights picked up another road on their left. He slowed the car and turned into it, navigating by feel more than anything else. His heart had begun to beat faster. Angel seemed to feel something too; her hand tightened against his until he felt the little bones. It was like holding a bird in his palm. They had agreed to leave the hotel together tonight, and see what they could find, but he didn’t think either of them really believed they would know where to go, or that they would find anything at all. Yet it didn’t seem strange to him now that he knew exactly what to do, exactly where to turn.

Why did he feel like they were about to regret ever leaving their room, he wondered. And yet he felt compelled to continue over his own silent objections.

The new road was little more than a tunnel into the woods.
It was filled with potholes and ruts and the ground seemed to catch at the car’s tires so they were constantly sliding and bumping and slipping about. The headlights refused to reveal anything farther than a few feet. Above the car, the tree branches had grown in and hung down like arms, a few of them scraping the roof. Thick swarms of bugs filled the air and attacked the glass from the outside. He could hear them clicking softly as they hit. They lit up in the headlights like dust particles, forming two long narrow beams of dancing light. He had the strangest feeling, as if he had just driven out over an open drop, as if the ground beneath the car had fallen away, and they were floating through this tunnel of trees and bugs and blackness, doing a silent, weightless free-fall like a crippled satellite tumbling through space. And then a pothole cracked his teeth and brought him back to earth again.

A few hundred feet farther the car began to hitch and buck, cough, and finally it died. Smith turned the key and the starter ground but would not catch. The lonely noise was swallowed up by the thick trees.

He looked across at Angel in the dark interior and put the hazards on, listened to them clicking and saw the orange light bouncing off the trees like a neon sign, and turned them off again. “I think there’s a flashlight in the glove box. You want to get it out?”

“But the bugs will eat us alive…”

“I don’t think so.” He opened the door and stepped from the car. All the bugs were gone. He thought suddenly of a corpse opening its mouth wide, bugs swarming all around, being taken in until the thing’s purple skin bulged and crawled with them. He shook his head free of the image and closed his eyes tight, opened them to ordinary darkness. “It’s okay,” he said firmly. He clenched his hands into fists until he felt pain. “We’re stuck. Might as well see what’s at the end of the rainbow.”

For a moment he thought she would protest, refuse to
come with him. But Angel found the flashlight and handed it to him, and he flicked it on. The beam was strong and steady. He had checked the batteries three days before.

The muck was heavy and wet and sucked at their shoes. He held the flashlight in his left hand, her cool fingers in his right. They lost the car’s headlights quickly and then there was only the beam of the flashlight, bouncing and wobbling and throwing shadows across their path. The night air was cool and there was no breeze. No sound, only their breathing and their shoes in the sucking mud. Tree branches hung down on either side like ghost fingers above their heads, in their hair, brushing their faces. As they walked, Smith found himself thinking of silly, pointless things, a free-for-all stream of thought that went on and on;
got to find someone
to take a look at the car get it fixed and find Angel some
clothes she’s been wearing the same thing since (I took her)
we left and I’ll have to find something to give us extra money
so we won’t starve to death how long will they let us keep
the room before they throw us out on our asses I wonder if
the plugs are dirty in the car yes that’s it the plugs are dirty
not firing right gotta get new plugs
…

Then, very suddenly, the road ended in a small clearing, perhaps one hundred feet across. At the far edge the land fell off and joined a stretch of black water. He flashed the light on a broken old hand-painted
NO SWIMMING
sign nailed to a post about ten feet in front of them. The words peeled and blistered and ran down the cracked wood; a vine had wound itself up the post and clung to the sign like a spidery brown fist.

He thought about someone sitting down on the muddy bank, taking off his shoes, peeling off shirt and pants, and diving into that black water. That sign had to be a joke. “Christ. What is this place?”

His words were too loud in the quiet of the woods. Angel didn’t answer. A bitterly cold breeze touched their faces. Smith’s bones ached with it. He caught a whiff of something
that smelled like garbage, or worse. Angel seemed to draw into herself and become smaller in the face of it.

“This is a terrible place,” she whispered. “Something happened here, but I don’t want to know what.” Then she stiffened, and touched his arm. She was looking to her right, and he followed her gaze with the flashlight, knowing already what he would see.

A cabin sat on the edge of the clearing, surrounded by dead brush. Its front steps had rotted and fallen in, exposing a hole like a rotten tooth. The door hung by a single hinge. A portion of roof had collapsed. The light caught a lonely crossbeam that stuck up like a broken bone. Next to the cabin was another structure, maybe a garage or storage shed, and between them was a square bit of fencing that might have been a garden at one time.

Nothing growing there now. This place is dead
.

He stepped forward, pulling Angel along after him until he was in the center of the clearing. The grass growing up around the base of the shack rustled as the wind picked up, turning the surface of the pond into ripples of oily blackness. The flashlight beam disappeared about ten feet out over the water. The dim shape of a tire swing hung from a high tree branch, rocking in the breeze.

Rotted rubber and twine. Everything was rotting here. He could see his breath now in the freezing cold, as it was ripped away from his face by the sudden, growing wind. Jesus, he thought,
what’s happening? What is this place?

When the voice spoke it was like a thunderclap in his head.
Where the cancer began to feed. It all has to start
somewhere, don’t it? You get a couple of bad cells and they
make a couple more, invite a few friends, all of a sudden you
got a lump and it just grows and grows, my man, eats and
eats until your legs swell up and your hair falls out and one
day you look in the mirror and see a dead man looking back
.

A movement, off to his left. He swung the flashlight around at the darkness. Branches swinging back into place,
as if something very large had just passed through. Something very large, indeed.

“Billy,” Angel moaned. Her hand was a vice-grip around his own. The wind was whipping now, tossing the treetops about and turning the surface of the lake into froth. The tire swing was bashing itself into the tree trunk, spinning around out over the water, then in over the bank again.

He took another step forward as if hypnotized. The cabin door banged against the support post, a sound as loud as a gunshot. He swung the light on it again, caught a part of a window.

And something else, grinning back at him through the dirty glass.

It hovered there a moment, its eye sockets two empty black holes. Then it dipped out of sight.

Angel shrieked and turned to run, and he was running with her back up the narrow road, slipping and stumbling to his knees and up again, the flashlight turning everything around them into ghosts with reaching fingers. Tree branches slapped at his face, stinging his raw skin. The air was as cold as a meat locker, burning his lungs and turning his fingers to ice, the bugs were swarming all around him again, getting in his eyes, his mouth, up his nose. He heard the cabin door bang open and he thought of something coming out of it and down the steps, something with a slack, rotting face, and as he ran he could hear it coming up behind them, lurching with a heavy, lifeless tread through the darkness and the mud.

Come out and play, Billy-boy. I’ve been waiting a long
time for you
. A hand made of bone-fingers reaching out for his shoulder. Closer…

He turned wildly to face it, breath catching in his throat. The beam of the flashlight showed nothing behind him but empty road. He swung the light from one side of the road to the other, gasping, his heart hammering in his chest until he thought he might faint. Nothing. Even the bugs were gone.

He took several deep, cleansing breaths and waited for his heart to slow down.

Nothing but an abandoned cabin and a filthy pond in the middle of the woods. Somebody used to live out there and then they left, for whatever reason, perfectly rational; their grandfather died, or somebody got a promotion, or they moved to another state. That face he had seen was a reflection in the glass, the rest of it overactive imagination. Nothing more than a perfectly rational explanation.

When the voice spoke again in his head he almost screamed.
That all, Billy-boy? You don’t really believe that horseshit,
do you? Why are you out here in the middle of the night?
Taking in the scenery? Killed the reverend tonight, by the
way. Who’s next? Barbara, that fat stinking bitch? Bob
Rosenberg? Or is it you, Billy?

Stop it!
He clapped his hands to his head and pressed, hard, until the voices died away, and when he took his hands down the wind had completely disappeared and the smell with it, leaving nothing but cool dead air again. He smelled pine and the thick, earthy scent of the mud under his shoes. The trees were still.

He turned and forced himself to walk slowly back to the car.

Alone in bed an hour later, he opened his eyes wide against the darkness, and blinked until shapes began to swim into life. The light from the window was a pale silver, with barely a sliver of moon in the sky. He could see the bulky forms of the antique desk and chair in the corner, the table near his bed hunched like a three-foot troll. The shadows cast by the window frame were sketched across the wall in the form of a lopsided cross. He heard Angel shift and turn over in her bed in the other room, and thought of her lying there as he was, eyes wide, unable to sleep. He wondered what she had seen in that dusty shack window. Had it been the same dead face he saw (his mother’s face, he was almost
sure of it), or had it been someone else? Her brother, maybe?