Darkness Creeping (10 page)

When he crept into her room an hour before dawn, Karin was sitting up, holding the little box in her hand and staring at the button.

“I knew you’d be awake,” said Randy.

She was glad he was there, because she couldn’t go on sitting alone any longer. She just had to tell somebody. She had to talk about it.

“I can’t stop thinking about it,” she told him. “I put it back in the puzzle box, and then I put the puzzle box under my bed, but I could still see it there in my mind. It’s like a photograph that won’t go away. Then I put it in the hall, but that didn’t help, so I snuck outside when everyone was asleep and put it in our car. But no matter where I put it, I still kept seeing it.”

“So you went back out to get it?” asked Randy.

Karin nodded. They both stared at the button. Its gold face now seemed silvery blue in the dim moonlight.

“I don’t want it anymore,” said Karin. “You can have it.”

Randy shook his head. “You keep it.”

They stared at the button in silence.

I’m not going to push it
, thought Karin, although every fiber of her body told her that she was going to do just that. It was like trying not to look at her grandfather’s body when they opened the coffin in the chapel. No matter how hard she tried not to, she just had to look.

Randy seemed to read what she was thinking.

“Let me do it,” he said.

“No.” Karin pulled the box a few inches away from him. “I mean, it’s just a superstition, right?” said Karin.

“Right.”

“And if we push it, nothing will happen, and we can stop worrying about it and get back to sleep, right?”

“Right.”

Karin slipped her finger across the smooth, cold surface. She rested it on the button.

She could hear her heart pounding, and swore she could hear Randy’s as well. Silently, she cursed her grandfather for giving her the button.

“Get it over with,” hissed Randy.

Karin took a deep breath, felt the cold metal beneath her fingertip . . . and pressed.

She held the button down, gritting her teeth, closing her eyes.

But nothing happened.

No explosions, no demons, nothing. Only the silence of the night, and faint snores coming from the other rooms.

Feeling stupid, they both breathed a deep sigh of relief. This was what Grandfather wanted, Karin was sure now. He wanted to show them how weak they truly were. He had called them stupid—was this his way of proving it?

Karin stared at the button a moment longer, her finger still firmly pressing it down. Finally, she relaxed and took her finger off it.

“Well,” she said as the button snapped back up, “I guess that’s it. I guess nothing’s going to hap—”

My parents dropped me off at his house late last night.

Greaty’s house.

That’s what I call him, “Greaty”—short for Great-Grandpa. He’s the oldest in the family. He’s buried two wives, two sons, and one daughter.

His house is small: a living room, a bedroom, and a tiny kitchen. It’s really a shack in a row of other shacks, where ancient people cling to their last days.

It smells old here. It smells salty, like the sea. And Greaty’s always eating the fish he catches.

“Good to see you, Tommy,” he said to me at the door, smiling his long-toothed smile.

Whenever I see his smile, I run my tongue along my braces, feeling the crooked contour of my own teeth, wondering if one day mine will look like his, all yellow and twisted.

“Ready for a good day of fishing tomorrow?” he asked.

“Sure, I guess.”

My parents left me here to spend a night and a day. They do this every year, four times a year. It started when I was little. It had to do with my fear of water. Mom and Dad decided that the best way for me to get over it was to send me out with Greaty on his big fishing boat. Then I’d see how much fun water could be.

But it didn’t work that way.

Greaty would always tell tales of sharks and whales and mermaids who dragged fishermen down to their watery graves. Going out with him made me more afraid of the water than I had been before, so afraid that I never learned to swim. Still, I went out with him and continue to go. It’s become a family tradition. Sometimes, I’m ashamed to say, I hope for the day when Greaty joins his two wives, two sons, and one daughter so I don’t have to go out to sea with him ever again.

It is an hour before dawn now. Greaty and I always set out when everything is cold, dark, and still, and my veins feel full of ice water. I watch him as he prepares his boat. It’s an old fishing boat, its wooden hull marred with gouges from years of banging up against the dock. When a wave lifts it high against its berth, I can see the barnacles crusted on its belly. It has been years since Greaty has bothered to have them scraped off.

He calls his boat the
Mariana
, “named after the deepest trench in the ocean,” he once told me. “That trench is seven miles deep, and it’s where the great mysteries of the world still lie undiscovered.”

I sometimes think about the trench. I think about all the ships and planes that have fallen down there in wars. I imagine being in a ship that had seven miles to sink before hitting bottom. That’s like falling from space.

We set out, and by the time dawn arrives, we are already far from shore. I can tell that the day is not going to be a pleasant one. The sun is hidden behind clouds. There is a storm to the north, and it’s churning up the surf.

Greaty heads due north into the choppy waves. He stares at the horizon and occasionally says something to me just to let me know he hasn’t forgotten me.

“Today’s going to be an exceptional day,” he tells me. “One day in a million. I can feel it in my bones.”

I can feel it in my bones, too, but not what Greaty feels. I feel a miserable sense of dread creaking through all of my joints. Something is going to happen today—I know it, and it is not something good. I imagine giant tidal waves looming over us, swallowing us in cold waters and sending us down to the very bottom, where it’s so dark the fish don’t have eyes.

Half an hour later, the shore behind us is just a thin line of gray on the horizon. Greaty has never taken me out this far before. Never.

“Maybe we’d better stop here,” I tell him. “We’re getting kind of far from shore.”

“We’ll stop soon,” he says. “We’re almost there.”

Almost where?
I wonder. But Greaty doesn’t say anything more about it. His silence is strange. I don’t know what he’s thinking—I never do.

And then something suddenly strikes me in a way that it has never struck me before—I don’t know my great-grandfather. I’ve spent days and weekends with him every few months for my entire life, but I don’t
know
him. I don’t know what he thinks and what he feels. All I know about him is the way he baits his hooks, the way he talks about fishing. I can’t get the feeling out of my head that suddenly I’m out on a boat with a stranger.

“You know how many great-grandchildren I have, Tommy?” he asks, shoving a wad of chewing tobacco into the corner of his mouth. “Twelve.”

“That’s a lot,” I say with a nervous chuckle.

“You know how many of them I take fishing with me?” He stares at me, chewing up and down, with a smile on his crooked, tobacco-filled mouth.

“Just me?”

He points his gnarled bony finger at me.

“Just you.”

He waits for me to ask the obvious question, but I don’t.

“You want to know why I take only you?” he asks. “Well, I’ll tell you. There’s your cousins, the Sloats. With all the money they’ve got, they can buy their kids anything in the world. Those kids are set for life. Then there’s your other cousins, the Tinkertons. They’ve got brains coming out of them like sweat. They’ll all amount to something. And your aunt Rebecca’s kids—they’re beautiful. All that golden hair—they’ll get by on their looks.”

“So?” I ask.

“So,” he says. “What about you?”

What about me?
I take after my mother—skinny as a rail, a bit of an overbite. And I got my father’s big ears, too. Okay, so I’m not the best-looking kid. As for money, we live in a small, crummy house, and we probably won’t ever afford anything better. As for brains, I’m a poor student. Always have been.

The old man sees me mulling myself over. “
Now
do you know?” he asks.

I can’t look at Greaty. I can only look down, feeling inadequate and ashamed. “Because I’m ugly . . . because I’m poor . . . because I’m stupid?”

Greaty laughs at that, showing his big teeth. I never realized how far the gums had receded away from them, like a wave recedes from the shore. He should have had all his teeth pulled out and replaced by fake ones. The way they are now, they’re awful, like teeth in a skull.

“I picked you because you were the special one, Tommy,” he says. “You were the one
without
all the things the others have. To me that makes you special.”

He turns the wheel and heads toward the dark storm clouds on the horizon.

“I was like you, Tommy,” he tells me. “So you’re the one I want to take with me.”

The waves begin to get rough, rolling up and down like tall black hills and deep, dark valleys. The wind breathes past us, moaning like a living thing, and I feel seasickness begin to take hold in my gut.

Greaty must see me starting to turn green.

“How afraid of the water are you, Tommy?” he asks

“About as afraid as a person can get,” I tell him.

“You know,” he says, “the ocean’s not a bad place. When I die, I would like to die in the ocean.” He pauses. “I think I will.”

I swallow hard. I don’t like it when Greaty talks about dying. He does it every once in a while. It’s like he sees the world around him changing—the neighborhood being torn down to build condos, the marshes paved over for supermarkets. He knows that he’ll be torn off this world soon, too, so he talks about it, as if talking about it will make it easier when the time comes.

“Why are we heading into the storm?” I ask Greaty.

He doesn’t say anything for a long time.

“Don’t you worry about that,” he finally says coldly. “A man can catch his best fish on the edge of a storm.”

We travel twenty minutes more, and as we go I peer over the side, where I see fins—dorsal fins, sticking out of the water—and I’m terrified.