So Cold the River (2010) (36 page)

There was a second tub in the room now. A long, narrow white bowl resting on claw feet. There was a man inside. He had his
head laid back as Eric had a minute ago, face to the ceiling, eyes closed. He was clean-shaven and had thick dark hair, damp
and glistening. His chest rose and fell in the slow rhythm of sleep.

He is another vision,
Eric thought, not moving at all, afraid a single ripple in the water would cause the man to raise his head.
It’s just like the others
.

It wasn’t like the others, though. Not like watching a movie, everything distant. This time, it was here with him. As it had
been with Campbell in the train car.

He heard a click then, and the door pushed open, nothing but blackness on the other side, and Campbell Bradford stepped into
the room.

His eyes were straight ahead, on Eric. Maybe it
was
going to be like the one in the train car, when Campbell had spoken directly to him, when he’d had to run for the door because
Campbell was on his feet and walking toward him…

Campbell turned away, though. He flicked his eyes away from Eric and to the sleeping man in the other tub, and then he walked
toward him. He moved quietly, his shoes sliding over the tile floor, his suit barely rustling. When he reached the man in
the tub, he stood over him silently, looking down. Then he slid his suit coat off his shoulders and laid it over the back
of a chair. Once the jacket was off, Campbell unfastened his cuff links and set them on top of the coat. Then he rolled both
sleeves up past the elbows. Still the man in the tub didn’t move, lost to sleep.

Warn him,
Eric thought.
Say something
.

But of course he couldn’t. He wasn’t part of this scene, he just felt like he was. Campbell couldn’t see him; Campbell was
not real. Eric hadn’t taken any of the Bradford water, none of that dangerous stuff that brought Campbell out of the past
and into the present. All he had to do was watch and wait for it to go away. It would end in time. He knew that it would end
in time.

For a long moment, Campbell stood above the man in the tub and watched him, almost serenely. When he finally moved, it was
with sudden and violent speed. He lunged out and dropped the palm of one hand on top of the man’s head and put the other on
his chest, near the collarbone, and then slammed his weight behind them and drove the man into the water.

The tub exploded into a frenzy of water and both of the man’s feet appeared in the air, flailing. His hands clenched first
on the
edges of the tub and then grappled backward at his antagonist. Campbell appeared not to notice.

He held him down for a long time, and then straightened and hauled back. His right fist was wrapped in the man’s hair now.
Once he cleared the water, gurgling and gasping, Campbell slammed him down again. This time he held him even longer. Held
him until the frantic motions slowed and almost ceased. When the man’s hands had lost their grip on Campbell’s jacket and
drifted back toward the water, he let him up again.

They do not see you
.
Cannot see you
. It was a frantic mantra, the desperate reassurance of someone in a plane hurtling toward the earth—
the pilot will fix this
.

Campbell had released the man in the tub and stepped aside and was only a few feet from Eric now. The man hung on to the side
of the tub, gasping and choking, water streaming from his hair to the tile floor.

“There are debts to be paid,” Campbell said. His voice was eerily calm. “I’ve established this with you in the past. Yet they
remain unpaid.”

The man looked at him with disbelieving eyes, chest heaving. His face was wet with water and tears, and there was a smear
of blood-tinged mucus beneath his nose.

“I don’t have any money!” he gasped, pulling back to the edge of the tub, dragging his knees up as if to protect himself.
“Who does right now, Campbell? I lost my savings. You see how empty this hotel is? That’s because nobody has any money!”

“You seem to think that your circumstances affect your debt,” Campbell said. “That is not an idea which I share.”

“You’re crazy, trying to collect now. Not just from me—from anybody. There’s no money left in this valley. The whole thing’s
going to disappear in a blink. Don’t you read the papers? Listen to the radio? This country is going to hell, man.”

“I’m not concerned with this country,” Campbell said. “I’m concerned with what’s owed me.”

“They’re not even going to be able to keep this hotel open, I can promise you that.” The man was babbling now, his voice nearly
hysterical. “Ballard might try to force it along, but it’ll close and they’ll be broke, too. Everyone will be. Everyone in
this whole country will be broke soon, you wait and see. It’ll come for us all.”

Campbell used his index finger to push his hat up on his head, and then he reached into his pocket and came out with a chaw
of tobacco, worked it in behind his lower lip. The man in the tub watched warily, but Campbell’s silence and cool demeanor
seemed to have soothed his panic. When the man spoke again, his voice was steadier.

“Hand me that robe, will you? You could’ve killed me earlier. All to try and get money that I don’t have. Now what would the
point of that have been?”

“The point?” Campbell said. “I don’t understand your confusion. There’s nothing difficult to this situation. The world breaks
some men. Others, it uses for the breaking.”

He tilted his head and smiled. “Which one do you figure I am?”

The man in the tub didn’t answer. When Campbell walked toward him, he did not speak or cry out in alarm. Instead he watched,
silent, until he saw Campbell’s hand dip into his pocket and come out with a knife. Words left his mouth then, left in a harsh
whisper of terror, just two of them: “Campbell, no—”

Campbell’s hands flashed. One caught the man’s sopping wet hair and jerked backward, exposing the throat; the other dropped
the blade and cut a ribbon through it. Blood poured into the water.

Eric’s body seized at the sight. He couldn’t get a breath, couldn’t do anything except watch the blood drip into the tub,
the sound like a water glass being refilled from a pitcher.
They can’t see me,
he thought. Had to remember that. Had to remember…

Campbell turned and looked at him. Those watery brown eyes found his, and when they did, the wild thoughts died in Eric’s
brain and even the sound of the blood seemed to disappear.

“You wanted me to show you,” Campbell said. “Now you’ve been shown. There’s plenty more on the way for you, too. I’m getting
stronger, and you can’t stop it. All the water in the world ain’t going to hold me back now.”

Then he pulled his lips back, the gesture a cross between a smile and the warning of a dog showing his fangs, and spit through
his teeth. A stream of tobacco juice landed in the mineral bath, splattering Eric’s stomach and chest with brown drops.

Eric shouted, the moment having just cost him any slight faith that what was happening in this room was not real. He scrambled
to get out of the tub, moving to the far end, away from Campbell, and as he turned his head, Campbell laughed, a low whispering
snicker of delight. Eric’s knee caught the faucet and his shin smacked off the ceramic edge of the tub and then he was over
the side and on the tile floor, naked and dripping and helpless as Campbell advanced. Eric twisted to face him, thinking he’d
do what little he could to defend himself.

Campbell was gone. The second tub was gone, and the bleeding man.

Eric sat there on the floor in a puddle of water and gasped for breath, and then the door banged again. He tried to jump to
his feet but slid in the water, his heels going out from under him and dropping him back against the edge of the tub with
a
painful impact as a female voice floated in from the other side of the door.

“Mr. Shaw? Are you—”

“I’m fine!” he yelled. “I’m fine.”

“I thought I heard you shout,” she said.

He reached for the robe and dragged it down to cover himself.

“No, no. I’m done, though. I’m going to be coming out.”

He got unsteadily to his feet and slipped into the robe. The pockets banged off his hips, weighed down by the two plastic
water bottles he’d filled.

“Just another vision,” he said to himself. “Harmless as the others. You’ll get used to them.”

He turned to lift the plug from the tub and froze with his arm extended.

There, on the surface, floated a cloud of brown liquid. Tobacco juice.

He stared at it for a long time. Closed his eyes and reopened them and it was still there. Straightened and stood above the
tub and studied it from an angle, then turned in a full circle, making sure the rest of the room was as it had been when he
entered, before looking at the tobacco juice again. Still there. Disintegrating in the water now, thinning and separating,
but still there.

How?

It had come from Campbell’s mouth, and Campbell had been a vision, was gone completely now, just as had happened with all
the previous visions. Never before had a trace lingered, never before had the visions left any mark on reality.

“Mr. Shaw?”

“Coming out!” he shouted, and then he opened the drain and
let the tub of mineral water begin to empty. He stood there until the tobacco juice found the drain, and when it did a shiver
rode high on his spine.

For a moment, just as it swirled out of sight, it had looked exactly like blood.

I
T TOOK
D
ANNY ABOUT
forty minutes to return with the cell phones. At first Josiah waited on the floor of the barn near the open door. As time
passed, though, he found himself outside in the rain, leaning up against the barn wall, the weathered boards rough on his
back. There was a tree that hung over the barn at this edge and kept the rain from falling on him. It was a light rain now,
a gentle touch on his flesh, so he moved away from the tree and found a spot where he could sit against the barn wall and
let the rain come down unobstructed. He was there when he saw the headlights of an approaching car, and though he knew he
should move into the woods until confirming it was Danny, he did not. For some reason, he wasn’t all that concerned about
who it was.

The car was the Oldsmobile, though, and Danny pulled it up close to the barn and pushed his door open while the engine was
still running.

“What are you doing sitting in the rain?”

“Passing time,” Josiah said, rankled by both the question and Danny’s expression, the way he was staring at Josiah like he
was crazy. “You get the phones?”

“I did.”

“Well, bring them here. And shut the damn headlights off.”

They went back into the barn and Danny set up one of those battery lanterns, filled the room with a white light.

“Figured you could use this,” he said. He also had a few bottles of water and a bag of beef jerky, and all Josiah did was
grunt a thank-you, but he didn’t like the lantern. He’d grown used to dark—almost to the point of fondness, really.

Danny had purchased, as instructed, two prepaid cell phones and a battery charger that Josiah could plug into the truck’s
cigarette lighter. He got the first phone out of the package now and started charging it.

“I don’t understand why you needed two of them.”

“If I’m going to be calling these people in Chicago, you think it’d be a real good idea to call you from the same number?”

“Oh,” Danny said. “That’s good thinking. This guy you’re going to call, his number was in the briefcase you stole?”

“Yes.”

“I still don’t understand how you’re going to get any money out of him.”

“Fact is,” Josiah said, “a man can get awful lost in details if he dwells too much on them. I don’t intend to have such a
hindrance. The man paid someone thousands of dollars to drive down here and sit outside my home, Danny. Paid another man to
come down and talk to Edgar. Hell, might have been paying that one that told me he was a student. But the paperwork I got
suggests something about me was worth a dime or two to
this old boy. If it was worth something last night, it still will be tonight.”

“Last night his detective wasn’t dead.”

“Now, that is a fair observation.”

“Josiah, why don’t you just take the money I got and get—”

“You gone down to the hotel yet to check on Shaw?”

“No. You told me to get the phone first.”

“Right. Well, now I got it.”

Danny frowned. “All right. I’ll go. You just want to know if he’s there?”

“And where he goes if he leaves, yes. You got the numbers off the phones you bought, right?”

“Yes.”

“Well, use the first one. Don’t even think about calling the second one, just the first, got it? Call if you see him move.”

Danny hesitated and then gave a short nod and moved toward the door. He stopped when he was just on the other side, turned
back, and looked at Josiah, his face a pale moon in the lantern light.

“So you’re going to call this guy and ask for money? Like that’s all there is to it?”

“That’s all there’ll be to the start of it,” Josiah said. “I figure there could be a twist or two along the way.”

Evening came on and settled and the rain fell soundlessly but unrelenting. Anne sat in the living room with a book in her
lap but didn’t read. The depth of her desire was surprising to her, the sense of urgent anticipation she had as she watched
the clock tick minutes off the day and waited for the water to take effect.

Come on,
she thought,
let me see what he is seeing. Let me go
back to those times I never appreciated enough when I was in them, let me see those faces and hear those voices again.

Nothing happened. The short hand found seven and then eight and then nine, and she saw nothing but the achingly familiar walls
of the house. She considered going for more water, but the stairs seemed so steep and the results so uncertain that she stayed
in her chair. She’d seen how much Eric Shaw had to drink before the visions came for him and was sure she’d had at least an
equal amount. Why, then, was he allowed to see the past and she was not?