So Cold the River (2010) (31 page)

“I thought not,” Campbell said. “You been up here for a good while. You’ve seen him at work. Do you know how to make that
moonshine?”

Lucas nodded, but it was hesitant.

“Whatever you’ve forgotten about it,” Campbell said, “you’d be advised to start remembering.”

He put the gun away and then dropped his hands into his pockets, hunching against the wind.

“Time for you to find a shovel, boy. I’d hurry, too. Feels like rain.”

Eric’s hearing returned before his sight. He was dimly aware of the chiming grandfather clock before the room appeared around
him, vaporous at first and then hard edged, and he found himself looking into Anne McKinney’s fascinated and fearful eyes.

“You see me again,” she said. It was not a question.

“Yeah.” His voice was a croak. She went into the kitchen and poured him a glass of iced tea and brought it back and watched
silently as he drank the whole thing down.

“You had me a little nervous,” she said.

He choked out a laugh. “Sorry about that.”

“It was plain to see you’d gone somewhere else,” she said, and then, leaning forward, added, “Tell me—what were you seeing?”

“The past,” he said.

“The past?”

He nodded. “That’s the best I can describe it. I’m seeing things from another time…. They’re from this place, and they are
not from this time.”

“This place,” she said. “You mean my home?”

There was something so excited in her voice, so
hopeful,
that he was taken aback.

“No. I mean the town. The area, I guess. But not your house.”

“Oh,” she said, disappointment clear. “Is it scary, what you’re seeing?”

“Sometimes. Other times… just like watching a movie.”

“You always have the visions when you drink the water?”

“I seem to,” he said. “They’re different when I have your water. Then I’m nothing but a spectator. When I drank from the other
bottle… then it was more like seeing a ghost right here with me. I wasn’t seeing the past, I was seeing something out of it
that had joined the present.”

She was quiet, considering what he’d said.

“Do you know the name Campbell Bradford?” he asked.

She rocked back. “That’s not who you’re seeing?”

He nodded.

“Oh, my. Yes, I know the name. Haven’t heard it in years, but he was the talk of the town when I was a girl. There’s plenty
of folks who thought he was evil, you know. Or became evil, that’s the way I remember my daddy telling it. He said Campbell
was just another mean man at first, but then something dark took hold of him and pushed him beyond mean. Pushed him until
he wasn’t even himself anymore.”

“Something dark?”

“You know, a spirit. A lot of folks believed that sort of thing in those days.”

“You remember Kellen, the guy I brought over?” Eric said, and she nodded. “Well, his grandfather worked down here in the twenties
and had some idea that the area was… not necessarily haunted, but—”

“Charged.” The word left their mouths simultaneously, and Eric pulled his head back and stared at her.

“He talked to you about this?”

“No,” she said softly, “it’s just the right word.”

“So you believe there are ghosts here?”

She frowned and looked at the window. “I’ve always connected it more to the weather myself. That’s what I study, you know.
And there’s something different in this valley…. You can
feel it in the wind now and again, and on the edge of a summer storm, or maybe just before ice comes down in the wintertime.
There’s something different. And
charge
is the best word for it. There’s a charge, all right.”

“Does that mean you believe there are ghosts here or not?”

“There’s something in this area that’s close to magic,” she said. “You call it supernatural if you want; I’ve always called
it magic. But there’s something in the place itself—in the earth, in the water, in the wind—that has power. You know, with
weather there are cold fronts and warm fronts, and when they collide, something special is going to happen. I think there’s
something about Springs Valley that’s similar. It feels the same way to me as the air does right before those fronts collide.
That probably doesn’t make sense to you but it’s the only way I know to explain it. A special kind of energy in the air, maybe
energy beyond the natural. Could there be ghosts here? Certainly. Not everyone sees them, though. That much I’m sure of. But
those who do, well, I imagine it has a mighty powerful influence.”

Eric was staring at her, silent.

“Thing you need to remember?” she said. “You can’t be sure what hides behind the wind.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

She smiled. “You’re too worried about figuring out what you can believe about all of this, and then figuring out how to control
it. That’s how most people approach their lives. Way I feel, though, after a lot of years of living? Not much of what matters
in the world is under your control. You don’t dictate, you adapt. That’s all. So stop trying to control this, and start trying
to listen to what it’s telling you.”

His reaction made her frown and tilt her head. “What?”

“If there’s a single point to these visions,” he said slowly, “I
haven’t been able to understand it yet. Except the first one, with the train, when he tipped his hat at me. I understood that.
Campbell was thanking me.”

“Thanking you? For what?”

“For bringing him home.”

O
NCE
D
ANNY LEFT AND
it was just Josiah up at the old timber camp, time slowed to a lame man’s crawl, the heat baking him as he sat outside the
old barn and swatted at mosquitoes that approached with a mind for feasting.

He wished he’d thought to ask Danny to bring him some food and water, but he hadn’t, and now his tongue was thick from thirst
and his belly knotted with hunger. Eventually the heat and mosquitoes conspired to send him into the barn.

It was a dusty wreck of a place, lined with discarded equipment and broken crates and pallets, two chipmunks coming and going
through a torn board near the floor. It should have been dark, but the light bled in from a thousand cracks and holes and
gaps and formed crisscrossing beams through the shimmering dust in the air that reminded him of the laser security systems
you saw in heist movies.

He wandered, shoving pallets and barrels around, searching
the place because it offered a distraction to ease the painful passage of time. There was a chain saw in one corner, but it
was rusted and worthless. Beside it was a long metal box, padlocked shut. That struck his curiosity—anything in a lockbox
might have value. He gave the lock a tug but it held. The hasp around it was rusted, though, and the metal looked thin.

There was a crowbar in the bed of the truck, and he went for it now and returned to the box and gave it a gentle tap near
the hasp. The sound of metal on metal banged loudly in the barn, and the box held. It was damn foolish to be hammering away
up here, risking attention, but he was curious, so he gave it another whack, harder this time. Then a third, and a fourth,
and on the fifth, the edge of the crowbar bit through the metal above the hasp. Success in sight now, he swung it in again,
punching a hole in the box, and then levered the crowbar up and down, working it like a water pump handle, until the hasp
had split from the box and the lock was now meaningless. He dropped the crowbar onto the dusty floor and lifted the lid.

Whatever the hell was inside certainly hadn’t been cause for all that effort. A weird tangle of rubber hosing, all connected
but crimped in intervals of about sixteen or eighteen inches. Looked like something you’d see in a butcher shop, a long string
of sausages waiting to be cut into individual links.

He reached in and grabbed one end, then hauled the stuff up close so he could see better in the dark. There was some fine
print written along the casing, and he squinted and read it:
DynoSplit
.

“Shit!”

He dropped the stuff back into the box and took a stumbling step backward. It was dynamite, a form of it, at least. He’d been
around a construction site or two, had worked for about six months at a quarry up near Bedford, knew enough to
understand that dynamite wasn’t made of red sticks with wicks at the end like in some cartoon. But he hadn’t seen a long,
continuous tube like that either. And here he’d been, hammering away at the damn box with a crowbar…. Maybe you couldn’t set
the shit off without a detonator, but that wasn’t an experiment he wanted to try.

He closed the lid carefully and stepped back from the box, wiping sweat from his face. Best not to smoke a cigarette in this
place, that was for sure. He wondered how old the stuff was. Ten years? Fifteen? More? Probably wasn’t even usable at this
point. There was a shelf life to explosives, and the way he recollected, it wasn’t long. Again, something he’d just as soon
not find out in person, though.

He went back to the truck and dropped the crowbar into the bed and leaned on it with his forearms, looking around the dim,
dank barn and feeling the sweat drip off his face and down his spine. He felt alone, as alone as he ever had in his whole
life. Wanted to check in with Danny, see what the word was down in town, but he didn’t trust the cell phone anymore. Maybe
the radio would give him a sense of the situation. He got in and turned the battery to life, having no desire to start the
ignition with a boxful of old dynamite not fifteen feet behind him.

There was a partial expectation in his head of hearing an “all-points bulletin,” like something out of an old gangster movie,
calling him armed and dangerous. Instead, he listened to fifteen minutes of shitty country music and never heard so much as
a mention of the murder. He gave up then and waited until it was on the hour, when they always did a short news update, and
tried again. This time they mentioned it, but said only that a man from Chicago had been killed in a van explosion in French
Lick and that homicide was suspected.

It was stuffy as hell, even with the windows down, and the heat made him sluggish. After a while he felt his chin dip and
his eyelids went weighted and his breathing slowed.

Good,
he thought,
you need the sleep. Been a while since you had any. Last you did, in fact, was at the gulf, laying there on the rock with
no reason to hide from the police, no blood on your hands…

The shadow-streaked barn faded from view and darkness replaced it, and he prepared to ease gratefully into sleep. Just as
he neared the threshold, though, something held him up. Some warning tingle deep in his brain. A vague sense of discomfort
slid through him and shook loose the shrouds of sleep and he lifted his head and opened his eyes. Ahead of him the closed
barn doors looked just as they had, but when he exhaled, his breath formed a white fog. It was pushing on ninety degrees in
here, he had sweat dripping along his spine, but his breath fogged out like it was a February morning. What in the hell was
that about?

He felt something at his shoulder then, turned to the right, and saw he was no longer alone in the truck.

The man in the bowler hat was beside him, wearing his rumpled dark suit and regarding Josiah with a tight-lipped smile.

“We’re getting there,” he said.

Josiah didn’t say a word. Couldn’t.

“We ain’t home yet,” the man said, “but we’re getting on to it, don’t you worry. Like I told you, there’s a piece of work
to be done first. And you made a bargain to do it. Made an agreement.”

Josiah glanced down toward the door but didn’t go for the handle, knowing on some instinctive level that he couldn’t get out
of this truck now and that it wouldn’t matter even if he did. He turned back to the man in the hat, whose face seemed to be
coated with the same shimmer Josiah had noticed in the dust motes caught by the streaks of sunlight in the barn. Only the
man’s eyes were dark.

“You don’t look grateful,” the man said. “You ought to be, boy. Didn’t have to be you that I selected for the task. Nothing
requires it. I’m bound by no laws, bound by nothing your sorry mind can even comprehend. But I came back for you, didn’t I?
Because you’re my own blood. All that’s left of it. This valley was mine once, and will be again. You’re the one who’s going
to see to it. Time to start showing gratitude, because ain’t a man alive can help you now but me.”

The man turned from Josiah and gazed around the barn, shook his head and let out a long, low whistle.

“It’s a fix you got yourself in now, ain’t it? There’s a way out of it, though. All you got to do is listen, Josiah. All you
got to do is listen to me. You can count on me, yes, you can. Ask anybody in this valley, they’ll tell you the same. They’ll
tell you that you can count on Campbell. Consistent as clockworks, boy. That’s me.”

His head swiveled again, dark eyes locking on Josiah’s.

“You ready to listen?”

Wasn’t nothing Josiah could do but nod.

The rain had stopped but the clouds were still winning the bulk of a struggle with the sun, allowing the occasional insurgency
but then stomping it out quick, when Eric left Anne McKinney’s house to go back to the hotel. She followed him out onto the
porch and pressed the bottle of Pluto Water into his hand.

“Thank you,” he said.

“Of course. Doesn’t take much brains to see you need it bad. But it isn’t going to work forever. So…”

“I’ve got to figure something out before you run out of bottles. Because then there’s none of it left.”

“Sure there is,” she said. “Hotel’s got it coming in through pipes.”

“What? I thought they stopped making the stuff decades ago.”

“Stopped
bottling
it, not making it. Shoot, never was something you
made
. Comes out of the ground, nothing else to it. There’s still springs all over the area. They got one piped into the hotel,
use it for the mineral baths.”

“You can still take a mineral bath?”

She nodded. “One hundred percent pure Pluto Water.”