The Sleepwalkers (23 page)
Running is what he always does when he needs to think about a really important problem. His mind is clear, his thoughts are sharp.
I can’t get lost. Can’t make any turns. I’ll just go up and back.
I have to get out of this town. This place is—
I have to find Bean. But how? He’s gone, taken. Or worse. . . .
And Christine, too.
I need help.
I have to get that guy out of jail, that—Ron—I’m pretty sure that
was his name. He didn’t know what trouble he was getting into, giving
me a ride. Or maybe he did. He followed me to the Dream Center. No,
the asylum, because that’s still what it is, isn’t it? How many others are
locked up in there? Maybe my father even. But not me. Why?
Too many questions.
But then there’s the other good thing about running: you can shut your mind off. That’s what Caleb does now, and he kicks out harder.
The soles of his shoes slap the pavement, his legs feel free like they’re running on their own. The forest dissolves all around him and there’s only the sound of his breath, the
simplicity
of his breath.
And he thinks of Bean and how he lost him.
And he thinks of Anna and how he lost her.
He thinks of how he might lose Christine.
And his father.
And he runs his ass off.
When he gets back to the house, the dark is just coiling itself around the world. He walks up the squeaking boards of the front steps and into the living room. He’s dripping with sweat and his legs ache, but it’s a good pain. His wrist aches too, and that’s not so good, but he bites his lip and ignores it. A terrible thought comes to him, that there might be no hot water—after all, who pays the bill at an abandoned house? And of course, there’s no electricity. But after rummaging through a broom closet and finding a match and some candles to light his way up the stairs, he finds a working bathtub; one mercifully void of raccoons. He sets the candles up on the basin and disrobes. The shower actually works, and once rust runs itself out, the water is clear enough. The shower curtain is hopelessly moldy, but he leans as far away from it as possible as he climbs his way in. He finds an old, hard sliver of soap and makes do.
If somebody paid the water bill, they certainly forgot the gas, because the water is by no means hot. It isn’t cold enough to make Caleb cry, though, so he bears it.
He keeps thinking he hears something and cranes his head around the shower curtain, but all he sees is the back of the closed bathroom door. As he scrubs himself down, growing numb with cold, he asks himself the hard questions:
Do I leave?
Christine is still locked up, and even though that director let me go,
I know there’s something wrong at that place. There always has been.
And maybe Bean is still alive; maybe he’s locked up there. It’s too much
to hope for, but still. If he’s alive, I can’t leave him. And either way, if I
don’t help Christine, then he suffered, probably died, for nothing. So I
stay.
And do what?
. . . I don’t know. I have no friggin’ clue. Help that guy Ron get out of
jail? How? Bail him out, I guess. Then what? Find my father. Where?
In Atlanta? But I know he’s not really in Atlanta. I don’t know how I
know that, but I do. He’s probably locked up in the Dream Center too.
He probably tried to fight it, probably sued or something. There are too
many people who need rescuing.
So . . .
Bail out Ron, try to rescue Christine, find my dad, in that order.
Not much of a plan, but . . . what the hell good are plans anyway? I’m
supposed to be in Africa. Dealing with simple things like starvation
and AIDS. I’d give anything if all I had to worry about was writing a
crappy article about starvation and AIDS right now. God, this water’s
getting cold. . . .
Caleb climbs out and gets dressed. He keeps looking over his shoulder, half expecting a sleeping demon to appear out of the shadows and claw him to death, but none do.
Night is deepening and the air is still as Caleb walks out to the car, starts it up, and drives to the sheriff ’s station—or the “Trailer O’Justice,” as it might more aptly be called. He cracks a tiny smile at his own wit, but when he dwells on the fact that his friend isn’t there to share the joke with him, the smile on his face quickly melts into resolve. He has to focus. There is somebody he can save tonight. It might not be Bean, but at least it’s somebody.
He goes over it in his mind the whole way there, the plan, everything he’s going to say. He’s going to tell them that Ron is his uncle, that he was under the influence of medication so he said the wrong thing. He’ll tell them that the whole situation was just a misunderstanding and that he’ll be glad to make a statement or even testify on Ron’s behalf. And then he’ll take his mother’s credit card (just thinking of the shit storm that’ll rain down on him when that credit card bill with “Calhoun County Sheriff, $500” written on it comes in the mail makes him wince). And then what? He’ll cross that bridge when he comes to it. Maybe Ron will know—whoever Ron is.
But his plans are laid to waste, as most plans are, when he rolls into the police trailer driveway and finds the windows dark and the driveway empty. He gets out and knocks on the door, even waits for ten minutes for somebody to come, glancing over his shoulder the whole time, but in the end he simply walks back to the car. As he sits in the driver’s seat, he sees a sign in the window that simply reads closed. Apparently in Hudsonville no crimes are committed after six pm.
Up the street he stops at the only gas station in town and buys a couple of PowerBars and a cup of coffee from a polite (but not friendly), old black guy and drives back over the desolate, carless streets to his father’s empty house. He goes into the living room, builds a fire, stares at it, and is lost.
After maybe half an hour letting the fire’s light burn into his brain, listening to the tiny sounds of the house, he walks over to his duffel bag on the dusty, old couch, and takes out a small leather-bound book. He goes back to the fire, worms his way into his sleeping bag, then sits, staring at a blank page of his journal. He clicks his pen, clicks it again, and clicks it again.
Come on,
he tells himself,
you’re a journalist; one day you’ll be a
famous one. And here it is, the biggest, most horrifying, most important
story you’ll ever have the chance to write. Maybe you can get the
FBI to come here. Maybe you can spark a national investigation. That
Dream Center must be licensed; who oversees the licensing?
But even as he thinks that thought, he’s disgusted with himself. Who gives a crap about licensing or pointing fingers at some bureaucrat? This is about
lives
. Bean’s life, Christine’s. This is about evil, real evil like Caleb never imagined could exist. But it does exist. And the world has to know. So he takes his pen, and in the firelight he writes:
The children of Hudsonville, Florida, are missing.
He crosses it out. Below it, he writes:
Deep in the woods in the small town of Hudsonville, Florida, something
horrible is happening: people are disappearing.
He goes to cross it out, but then he continues.
The police, those assigned with investigating the disappearance of
these people, are interested in nothing but . . .
He stops and crosses it all out. It’s hopeless. Even if he could write it, it would sound more like a Stephen King book than a
Newsweek
article. And he wonders if that’s how all truly horrific acts come to pass: nobody can, or will, believe until it’s too late. If somebody had come to him in Malibu and told him that there were sleepwalking ghosts in northern Florida who lived underground and kidnapped people, would he have believed it? Never.
Except maybe for the part of him that never stopped thinking about Anna Zikry. That part would believe it, whether he liked it or not.
He closes the book and lays it under his head like a pillow. He doesn’t have enough facts yet to write this story, and even if he did, exhaustion is too near to let him get any work done tonight. He pushes his feet deeper down in the sleeping bag. This is still somehow like camping. But lonely. The house doesn’t seem horrible anymore either. Just sad. And empty. He sighs. He’s about to close his eyes, then thinks twice. He reaches over and grabs the poker out of the fireplace rack, making a thick “tung” sound, then closes his eyes with one hand wrapped around the wrought-iron handle. Better safe than sorry.
T
HE CLATTER ’CROSS THE RAILROAD TRACKS
MEANS
two-thirty
AM
. Wakes Margie up and pisses her off every night without fail. ’Course this morning Margie hasn’t even been to bed yet. Which is unusual. She normally goes to bed early, wakes up at two-thirty, closes her eyes again, and sleeps like a stone until the four-thirty freight goes by and rattles her kitties (thousands of tiny, ceramic cat figurines adorn every flat surface of her little house), then she wakes up, runs a brush through her hair, and walks the half a mile to the diner.
The plates won’t wait,
she always tells herself. That’s a funny little phrase she made up herself, and she’s proud of it. The plates won’t wait, and neither will the grouchy, old regulars like Red Delaney or the truckers passing through. Nobody has an ounce of patience anymore, or a sense of humor either. Maybe that’s as it should be. Not much worth laughing about in Hudsonville these days.
In any case, when the train blazes past today, blowing its whistle as it sometimes does (just for spite, it seems to Margie), she is already dressed, sitting at her kitchen table, staring at the phone for no other reason than that it’s right in front of her, hanging on the wall. Certainly, she isn’t expecting it to ring. Time was when it might have, when certain truckers passing through would get an appetite for a mouthful of something besides eggs and grits, and they’d look to Margie for that. Hell, she was right good-looking in her time. Wouldn’t say beautiful, nobody would say that, but she’d given her share of truckers a swell in their jeans, there was no denyin’ that.
She looks over at the stove. Minute and a half left. She gets up and opens the oven, peers inside. Well, it’s getting pretty brown, no need to keep it in longer. Might get too crisp. She pulls it out, sets it on the stove, and stares at it.
She wonders what’s gotten into her, sitting up in the middle of the night like this, baking a pie of all things.
Her daddy, rest his soul, always used to say the best remedy for restlessness is hard work. Well, that’s what waiting tables for twelve hours a day, six days a week amounts to, she imagines. Usually, she sleeps like the dead, wakes up as her duty calls, and nods off again the minute her head hits the pillow once her day’s work is done.
But not tonight. Tonight sleep seemed to be passing her over –completely. Is it the guilt?