The Stonefly Series, Book 1

by Scott J. Holliday

  He should have closed his goddamn eyes.

  "Come on, kid," he said. "You don't really want your old man dead."

  The boy's face contorted. He smashed his palms against his eyelids.

  Jake reached out for the boy's shoulder but stopped short. His hand came down on the dock post.

  The boy jumped up and bolted away. Through the post Jake felt the resonance of his pounding feet until he reached the dock's end and leapt down into the dirt. He dashed down a path and was swallowed by the woods.

  Jake turned around and sat on the dock. He breathed slowly, trying to still his suddenly racing heart. As with every wish to which he was bound, he was put in mind of the old grandfather clock in his mother's foyer. The clock's face was worn, the wood ornately carved, the body towering and ancient. With each of the clock's tolls there was a moment of aching tension before the chime began, a moment when the clock's internal gears awakened, groaned, and clicked before dutifully marking the hour. Jake had heard those movements and subsequent chimes throughout the early days of his youth, the days before Dover when his ears still worked. Now Jake associated the clock's memento sounds with the feeling of being bound. With simple wishes the feeling was a slight pain in his chest, much like a pulled muscle. Something to mark the beginning of his six-day limit and the onset of the quickening. But with other wishes—like the one the boy just made—the pain was bigger.

  Jake's broken ears recalled the clock's turning gears, the shifting and clicking of hidden instruments, and the seemingly interminable silence before, finally, the toll.

  The quickening surged and Jake's chest began to ache. He checked the time on his wristwatch. 5:07 p.m. He pulled up his sleeve to reveal the tattoo on the inner part of his left forearm. A poem he'd painfully inked on himself as a daily reminder of the curse that was his life, of the rules by which he lived and, most importantly, the stakes.

  Six days to grant a wish,

  Or hopeful life expires.

  Six days to make amends,

  Only through true desires.

  No friend, nor foe, nor kin,

  Nor man who lives in sin,

  Shall know that for the djinn,

  Horizon closes in.

  2

  The oversized boots of Jake's waders were loose on his feet. They felt clumsy as he followed the path the boy had taken through the forest. The woods had a dry, leafy scent. The bark of the white birch trees curled back like soap slivers.

  The forest and river were part of a nature preserve surrounding Dover Psychiatric, which Jake knew made for decent views from the asylum's bedroom windows. Trees, water, birds, squirrels, and the occasional deer. He'd spent hours and days staring out from behind Dover's shatterproof glass, his adolescent hands gripping the bars, his mind turning the pages of someone else's dreams.

  Technically, it was Jake's fellow patient and friend, Motown, who talked of fly-fishing the river. It was Motown who said, "She'll let us pull 'em out, one after another, and hold them up for all these nuts to see. They'll crowd behind this here glass, their noses mushed and their eyes wide, and we'd give 'em a show, goddammit."

  But Motown would never leave Dover. He would never be allowed past those razor-wire fences for any reason other than his own death. Not even fly fishing.

  Jake slowed his pace when the forest scents gave way to the scents of motor oil and decaying drywall. He stopped when he spotted a wall of unnatural color on T1-11 siding.

  The residence was situated on one of the scattered private lots that'd been grandfathered into the preservation before the government took it over in the sixties. The house itself was a pastel circus of blue and red and yellow—not so much painted that way, but the parts that were hovelled together happened to be of varying faded colors. The roof, where there was one, was a combination of shingles and tar, gray and cracked by the sun's constant burn. The open front door was a black hole framed by an unpainted wooden screen with a buckshot pattern of holes in the mesh. About the yard were the rusted remains of machines—a lawnmower, a tractor, an outboard motor standing curiously on its head.

  Jake moved off the path and concealed himself by kneeling behind a tree in a patch of ferns twenty yards inside the wood line. He continued his slow breathing technique, tugging at his collar in a futile effort to release the quickening's heat.

  It's my Dad. I wish someone would kill him.

  The semantics were important. There were rules. Had the kid wished his dad were simply 'dead' there could be a freak accident and Jake would be released. But the kid had wished 'someone' would 'kill' his dad. For such a wish to come true the kid would have to know that his dad's demise was not only real, but some person's intention.

  It always cooked down to the wisher's perception. A few years back, when Jake was fresh out of Dover and thought he had his curse figured out, he lip-read a woman in a coffee shop wishing to herself she had a nice pair of shoes. Judging by the woman's department store jacket, bagged lunch, and cheap watch, she was a workhorse who'd known few luxuries. Jake bought her a pair of expensive high heels in shiny black—that brand with red soles Lori's always saving up for, but never actually buying. He tailed the woman from her downtown office to a three-story walk-up just inside Detroit's demilitarized zone, close to the city center. A few blocks farther along the bricks would have been scored with bullet holes, the windows covered with bars that'd failed to make the people who'd abandoned the home feel safe enough to stay.

  Jake waited five minutes after the woman went inside and then dropped the shoes on her doorstep. He knocked on the door and then hid in a nearby alley. A moment later the woman came out and looked around at no one, clutching a colorless robe to her freckled chest. She bent for the shoes and picked them up, but Jake wasn't released.

  Confused, Jake went out the next day and bought the woman a different pair of expensive heels. Following the same routine, he left them on her doorstep and hid in the alley. Just as before, she came out and picked up the shoes.

  Still he wasn't released.

  This shit was getting expensive. Jake had to reconsider the word 'nice.' A miserable expression. Could mean almost anything. He would have to get to know the woman, discover how she defines 'nice.'

  It's hard to get to know a stranger in just six days, particularly when they don't care to know you back. To make matters worse, Jake had already burned two days with the first two pairs of heels, leaving him with only four before the woman's life expired.

  He approached her at different times coming in and out of her office building, just walking up and talking to her like they were old friends, hoping to gain her confidence.

  Three days later, he'd gained nothing but her contempt.

  "Back off, buddy. I'll call the police."

  On the fifth evening, and with no feasible alternative, Jake was ready to give up and let the woman die. She would expire some time the next morning, probably while waiting in line for her morning coffee, but that night she limped out of her office sporting the first pair of heels he'd secretly given her. She struggled to a nearby pharmacy and picked up a pack of corn cushions.

  It occurred to Jake that, to this woman, maybe 'nice' meant 'comfortable.'

  Jake found a pair of furry Crocs hanging from a plastic hook at the end of an aisle at a shoe warehouse. He dropped them on her doorstep, rang the bell, and hid. When the woman came out and picked up the shoes he was released.

  She had no idea how close she came to her end.

  The boy from the river pinballed out of the dilapidated home's screen door, running shirtless and barefoot. A young woman was at his heels. Likely his mother. She wielded a wooden spoon like a nightstick as she chased him in a paisley-patterned muumuu that billowed out and betrayed her skinny frame.

  The boy ran around the side of the house toward the evergreens out back. As his mother rounded the same corner a deerskin slipper escaped her foot and arced across the backdrop of spruce trees and rusty things.

  She stopped when it se
emed she'd never catch the boy, shook the spoon in the air and screamed something.

  With her back turned Jake couldn't read her lips.

  The woman's shoulders sagged. She shook her head, turned around, and surveyed the yard for her wayward slipper.

  Her left eye was purple and swollen shut.

  That aching, dreadful feeling that had begun at the dock spread up through Jake's neck and into his head. Painful down to the teeth. Assuming the father was the one dishing out the brutality, changing the boy's wish was looking like a bad bet.

  Still, it was a bet Jake was willing to make. The alternative was murder, and he hadn't committed that crime since he was ten.

  The woman spotted her slipper. She squatted down and laid a shaky hand upon it, dropped to her knees and began sobbing. Her other hand fell away from her mouth as she began pounding the earth, repeatedly stabbing the wooden spoon handle into the soil. With a final thrust she drove the spoon deep and dropped her head to her opposite forearm, which was resting on the ground. Her back rippled as she cried.

  Whatever life she had dreamed, this wasn't it.

  The crying woman's body went still. She lifted her head and appeared to turn an ear to a noise. She came up to her knees and looked into the distance, searching with her unswollen eye.

  Jake was often surprised by how well he had adapted to hearing loss. He'd learned sign language, learned to read lips, and just got on. Deafness was a part of him now, and he forgot about it in the same way you may forget about your own eye color. Technically you never forget such a thing, but you might not think about it for weeks or months, maybe years, until you meet someone with candy green eyes and are reminded that yours are pedestrian brown. In Jake's deafness there were moments like that. Moments when he saw something he desperately wanted to hear, but couldn't, and was forced to recall the consequences of his actions.

  This was one of those moments.

  The woman stiffened as though she'd been stung by a cattle-prod. Jake felt like he was watching a horror film and the woman was caught in the instant before the audience's first glimpse of the monster, the instant before the safe people in the theater squeal while someone gets their skin ripped off on the celluloid. He wanted to turn his head and follow the woman's sightline, wanted to know what struck her so, but his body was locked down. It wasn't fear that froze him, but a spark of familiarity. He'd seen the woman's look before—that terrified, unpredictable look of a human on the brink. Moreover, he felt he knew this woman, knew her look explicitly.

  The sound to which the woman had reacted—and that Jake couldn't hear—was apparently a pick-up truck's engine. The vehicle pulled up the two-track driveway into Jake's line of vision as it cruised to a stop in front of the house. It was a full-sized Ram 3500 Dually sparkling fresh from the wash. The scents of exhaust fumes and auto body soap invaded the forest air.

  A man opened the truck door and dropped out of the cab from the driver's side. He was clad in beat up blue jeans and a black, button-down shirt under a Carhartt jacket worn dark and smooth at the elbows and edges. His cowboy boots were snakeskin. He had pancake cheeks over a soft chin and the back of his neck was burn-scarred with damage reaching up and over the crown of his head to his eyebrows. Tufts of hair populated his scalp in archipelagian patterns. His ears were lumps of melted flesh. His body was bulky and his hands seemed as big as baseball mitts. They were burn-scarred, too—a pink-red-white discoloration that resembled the flame from which it undoubtedly came. He had roving, disinterested eyes that sharpened when they settled on the woman.

  She wrung the slipper in her hands.

  The man lifted his arms from his sides, palms up, as if to ask, 'what the hell are you doing now?'

  The woman came to her feet, pulling on the recovered slipper as she rose. The spoon was left behind—a little wooden headstone in the rusty machine graveyard. She walked back toward the house while the man's eyes tracked her across the yard, through the screen door, and in.

  Jake took the moment to memorize the truck's license plate: BXC 183. He noted the truck's bed was low on the suspension. Something heavy in the back.

  The man walked around behind the truck to the tailgate. He put his hand on the handle and seemed ready to pull the tailgate open, but he paused. He turned his head slightly, aiming a melted ear in Jake's direction.

  Jake held his breath.

  The man pulled the handle and eased the tailgate down. He flicked up the hydraulic tonneau cover. It worked open to a thirty-degree angle and halted with precision.

  From his vantage point in the ferns, Jake couldn't see inside the truck bed, but he could read the man's face. A sneer played on his lips as he reached inside the bed and dragged out a long, flat case about two feet wide at the middle and half-moon shaped on one side, maybe five inches thick and four feet long. The man opened the case, reached inside, and pulled out a compound hunting bow.

  He looked in Jake's direction.

  Jake's joints turned to stone. A tingle washed over his skin. He'd hidden well and hadn't moved. He didn't believe he'd made a sound. And yet this man had somehow detected him?

  The man swiftly knocked an arrow and brought the bow up. His arm drew back and the bow's powerful gears recoiled smoothly. The stabilizing weight pointed out like an accusing finger.

  Jake closed his eyes. He expected the days of his life to flash through his mind, as lore suggested. Some high-speed scrapbook of significant moments.

  It didn't happen that way. There were visions, but only two.

  In the first vision he was sitting on the floor in a corner of the day room at Dover Psychiatric, his right ear sticky with blood, warm drops falling on his cheek and neck. Across the room, Motown moved in the slow motion of memory, getting up from his windowsill perch, the television behind him broadcasting a daytime TV judge show. His eyes were wide, his skin pale. One hand reached out as he said, "Jake, don't!"

  The second vision was of Lori. It wasn't the first time he saw her or even the second or third. It was a few months after they met, long after he'd granted her wish. He had worked up the nerve to ask her on a date and went to the bookstore where she worked. Kneeling in the woods with his eyes closed and an arrow aimed at his chest, Jake recalled the smell of the books from that moment, the herringbone pattern of the bookstore's hardwood floors, the Sienna-stained shelves. He recalled the helplessness that brought him to the bookstore in the first place, the need for her that possessed him. He had walked in slowly and stopped just inside the threshold. She was behind the cash register and hadn't seen him yet. Her head was down to the old paperback copy of 1984 she was always reading. She was into it. Lost in the text. One hand twirled a lock of blonde hair. Her lips mouthed the words as her eyes moved back and forth across the sentences. Jake was paralyzed.

  Just like now.

  He opened his left eye, then his right. The burn-scarred man was packing away his bow. He clicked the case's latches shut, slammed the tailgate, and impatiently shoved the tonneau cover down against the hydraulics. He walked toward the house carrying his weapon. When he got to the screen door he stopped, looked up into the trees, shook his head, and went inside.

  Jake released his breath. He took a few beats and then moved out from behind the ferns in a crouch. Three feet in front of his hiding spot was a birch tree with an arrow stuck in it. The bark was split, the tree meat exposed. One of the arrowhead's blades was streaked with blood and a few gray hairs.

  Jake scanned the canopy above. He caught sight of a squirrel limping over a branch with a trickle of blood dripping from its hindquarters. It moved around a trunk and was gone.

  Still crouching, Jake crossed the two-track and knelt behind the pick-up truck. He applied upward pressure on the tailgate handle until he felt it click. He backed up and lowered the gate slowly. No way to know if it was creaking and drawing the attention of the people in the house. Once the gate was down, Jake peered into the darkness of the covered truck bed.

  Inside there was a load
of sugar beets.

  3

  The water around the crooked dock resembled pea soup mixed with strands of brown and yellow—the colors of coagulated blood and pus. Evening sunlight gleamed on the water's surface around where Jake's shadow blocked it out. He was kneeling at the dock's edge, his hands trembling, his mind flashed back to that woman's face—the bulbous purple knot that was her eye, her look of terror when the pick-up truck arrived.

  No wonder the boy wished his father not just dead, but killed.

  Jake felt the boy's pain as though it were his own. The quickening spread like wildfire through his organs, through his bones. He balled his hands into fists. He ached to punch, to kick, to bite. His head thumped. His shoulders heaved with each rattling breath. He sat back on his haunches and clamped his hands together before his waist, peered out through the trees, caught glimpses of his horizon in the distance. It was deep red now that the sun was sliding sleepily away, blissfully ignorant to the concept of darkness.

  "The on-stage acts were fine," Jake said aloud, though he was unable to hear his own words, "but they paled in comparison to the up-close magic of The Great Vincent Kali. Any oaf can step on stage wearing tight black clothing, dance around a contraption, and theatrically cut a pretty girl in half."

  Jake swallowed, felt dizzy, but the words he spoke had a calming effect.

  "Kali's work defied logic," he continued. "The magician made his own eyes disappear. He levitated. He didn't pull a quarter from behind a kid's ear—he pulled the kid's ear right off, leaving a clean, scarless strip where the ear had once been. We all stood in horror until the magic man put the ear back on."

  Jake's hands stopped shaking. The thumping in his head began to recede. His equilibrium returned.

  "Vincent Kali wasn't a showman. No. Truth told, he was downright terrifying, but he possessed a skill like none I've ever seen. The carnival moved on from Detroit into Windsor that summer, and there's no record of where the sideshow went from there, but several years later the same major acts were found traveling together in California. Vincent Kali was no longer with them."