“Everett here, he wanted to watch the ballgame. Idiot’s cheering for the Dodgers. I can’t help him with that. And Oren, he likes his music. And I like to eat and smoke, just like old times.”
Dumbfounded by what Frank Moort was telling us, I choked out some words.
“Did you say, ‘Oren’?”
“I did,” Frank said, his face growing grave.
And then Frank Moort did something my eyes had trouble understanding.
He blinked.
And with his blink, his cheekbones moved down and back. His chin widened. His eyes parted and changed to dark green from black. His forehead lost some of its lines and grew a little taller. His ears moved and the shape of his mouth became new. He changed the look of himself as easily and as quickly as a man splashing water from the sink up into his face. With that one blink, his face dissolved into a new face. Or, rather, a different one.
And I was standing face to face with Oren McLeod. My father.
8.
Hollering and banging from somewhere above us. It was distinct over the multitude of cricket chirps that had become the background soundtrack these last moments.
This was a basement, I think. Some kind of underground, maybe even directly below the tower of the Pelée Lighthouse. Still down below the roof of the seawall that had led us in here, I presumed up would be considered ground level. The holler sounded human, not that different from how Frank Moort had sounded yesterday in Ma’s kitchen before he fled. But the sound we heard coming through the brick and mortar ceiling now, it died away, trailed off to nearly nothing. It might have continued but it couldn’t compete with the cacophony of crickets. I wondered if more like Frank Moort walked the island, if more hodge-podge men broke into houses and fled with canned goods. But I tried to leave that idea behind as quickly as it had come to me.
I backed away from the Moort-thing that had melted into something looking so much like my Da, it nearly made me double over and vomit. Instead I retreated, my brain failing on the obviously wrong information being fed to it by my eyes. I stepped backwards, unaware of my own feet, stumbling, staggering. A few crickets crawled up my legs again but I felt them at a distance, like in another room from the rush of noise and weight in my temples and across the underside of my scalp. “It’s okay,” he said. He spoke. He actually spoke and his voice wasn’t Frank Moort’s. This lookalike of my father’s took a step toward me, raising his hand as if to reach out, as if to reach out in a reassuring way, or, God help me, a loving and supportive way.
I crashed into Doc behind me, who stood deaf and mute.
Tearing my eyes from Da, I grabbed at Doc. “You seein’ this? Are you?”
“Yuh,” was all he said.
“Doc, you were there for Da too. At the end, with Ma. Did he go in the ground? Or was he another like Moortie?”
Doc paused a moment. He said, “Nuh, yer father went in the ground. Before I was coroner, but I remember. I remember.”
It was Da, all right, looking mostly the way he looked the last time I saw him.
That was the morning before he had evidently clawed through Ma’s spine with his hunting knife at the bottom of our stairs at home. Mac and I had been at school.
We never saw Da again, deemed too young to go in and look at our father in an open casket.
This Oren-thing spoke again. “It’s okay, David. Don’t be scared, son. It’s me. It’s yer Da.”
My breath hitched in my throat. I couldn’t yank any in. My knees gave out. Doc reached for me but then he broke away from me, and I fell to the hard block floor and a set of squirting clicks: the white crickets under my hip and leg, I imagined.
“Raving bastard lunatic,” Doc shouted as he pushed past me. The round old man moved like a blurry shadow on the leather-skinned ghost of my Da. The white-haired doctor raised fists against the man who couldn’t be my father but passed much more than a resemblance. Doc’s fists came down hard on him, one on the man’s face, one on his chest. Oren barely blinked, just looked at the ol’ Doc.
Then with one swoop of his arm he let fly an arc that threw Doc into the air and about fifteen feet off to our side. The doc crashed against the brick wall, scattering the crickets and toppling one of the man-sized rigs of construction lamps. Glass burst. Two bulbs went out. Pop-pop. He landed with a terrible crunch and then settled with a series of muffled thumps. With his eyes closed, he was even more disheveled and pathetic than yesterday afternoon under the kitchen sink.
Without thinking of Moort or Oren or the sheet of crickets, I got up and hurried to the ol’ Doc. My mind was spinning.
What was happening here?
The Doc lay with his face in a puddle of dark pooling blood and bits of glass, growing as though his nasal cavity had maybe been smashed open by his collision with the wall and floor. Crickets scoured him and I brushed at a few. But my eyes caught on something on the back of him before I could get hands under him to turn him and check.
It was a large, round mass of black, a heavy dark lump, almost like coal. And it was under the sloppy hair at the back of his skull, the part that was still thick before the crown gave way to liver-spotted scalp and the bald dome he’d worn since I was a boy.
With a quivering hand I reached out and parted the white hair. My fingers shook as I brushed it to either side. The black object was a throbbing bulb, with dark veins like dead black branches sprawling out from the centre of the mass and converging with and into the Doc’s skin. Pockets of white pus had formed where the black protrusions went under the skin, and little gobs of blood leaked like red ink in tiny balloons of skim milk. The back of his head was a patchwork of these black legs mingling with his mottled flesh. The skin looked like Frank Moort’s when I’d seen him completely uncovered about eighteen hours ago.
“What did you do to him?” I shouted, still competing with the noise but not looking back at Frank Moort, who could have been standing over me by now, readying to leap on me and sink fangs into my neck for all I knew. Problem was, I simply couldn’t look away from that throbbing black tumour burrowed deep into Doc’s skull. It was about the same size as the top of a cola can. It pulsated as if tapped into Doc’s circulatory system. It sucked out of him through a hundred of those little black straws, conjoined and drawing from him in tune with each beat of his heart. Thrum-thrum-thrum. I didn’t want to touch it. But I didn’t want to pull my eyes away from it either, like it was too ugly not to look.
I immediately thought of the wood ticks Mac and I would find on each other’s backs after we’d been playing in the tall grasses out in Predis field or the Hellegarde property when we were boys. Late May, this was. If we went a few days without a bath some of those suckers would grow as big as a thumbnail, fat with our blood, shiny black little bulbs with their eight legs dug into skin like spears shot into soft wax.
But those ticks, as icky as they had been when I was seven, they were nothing compared to the revulsion brought on by seeing this big black growth under Doc’s hair.
I flashed on the image of the crazed Moort Man in Ma’s pantry. He’d smashed the panel of glass in the door over Doc’s shoulder and I saw the up-close, compressed view of a face, one cheekbone and some forehead. It was all yellow skin, puffy and one black-centred eyed darting around like the quick movement of a bird tilting its head this way and that. Then the face moved away from the opening. Silence then, only the heavy breathing of Doc. But the silence ended.
It was the moment of silence when he’d done this to him, must have been. The moment when he’d, I don’t know, coughed something up onto Doc’s shoulder, something that had crawled up to find a warm patch of the old man’s skull and burrowed in. Maybe the tick-thing had been only a wee version of itself yesterday afternoon. Maybe it had been leeching steadily from Doc this whole time. And growing as it fed.
“Ya like m’handy work, there?”
It was Frank Moort’s voice. He stood where he had been, no closer. I looked over at him and found him to have reverted back to hi
s Frank Moort look. Face contorted and eyes coloured as they had been before the vision of my Da had taken over.
I wondered if it had been only my hallucination. I wondered if any of this was happening.
I said nothing, only choked back a mouthful of bile.
“Yeah, I’m pretty proud of that one,” Frank Moort said. “Too bad, though. I liked the Doc, Y’know. For a guy who groped my balls and told me to cough.” Moort laughed hysterically at this. “Ol’ bastard stuck his finger in your ass yet?”
He paused with his bloated lips parted. I thought I saw something crawl out and back in but at this distance and in the dim light I couldn’t be sure.
“Shh!” Moort said, not to me, I didn’t think. He rolled his eyes back and up at the ceiling so I saw their whites. “Quiet down now, Oren...” he said. “Don’t make me do what I did the last time.”
I looked back down at the doc at my feet, with all those white crickets now making their way over him. A few came up on my shoes and I shook them. I needed to get out of here. I didn’t know if I could carry the Doc. I reached under him and searched for his throat, trying not to think about there being crickets under there, or, worse, another of those big bulbous tick-things.
I didn’t get to find a heartbeat on Doc’s neck. I was interrupted. Not by Frank Moort, but by another holler from up above. I couldn’t make out where the shout had come from, nor what word it was. It sounded like someone was in pain up there. It sounded like Mac was in pain up there.
I turned to Frank Moort again and he was grinning ear to ear. From the pocket of his wrinkled pants he pulled out my Da’s silver lighter—the one Mac carried now—and clicked it open and then closed. I made to speak but couldn’t. He did that for me.
I could barely hear him over the rise and fall of the cricket chirping. “That’s right, son,” he said in a sly, guttural voice. “Yer brother’s with me now. Came by this af’noon. Fer a lil chat, he did.”
“What did you do to him?” I shouted as I left the doc, and ambled forward through the floor covered in white bugs. But I stopped short of him as I felt a wave of crickets move over the tops of my shoes. They seemed bigger now. I looked down and would have sworn to a judge that many of them measured as big as my palm. Their little jagged mouths ground away on the threads of my pant legs, their feelers looking abnormally long too, and snaking up into the air, caressing it and me. It’s not that they made me unable to move. It’s that I couldn’t bring myself to. The squirming, writhing mass of them no longer gave me a semicircle of clearance. A shiver ran up both my legs and I realized that at least one was up under a pant leg, maneuvering across the fabric of my sock. Then I felt a pinch to one of my leg hairs. I cringed and reached down to try to crunch it.
Frank Moort’s mood turned. His face contorted into a grimace. I thought he was going to change again, cheekbones shifting and skin moving to make him someone else. But he shut his eyes. He made like he was going to vomit, heaving to the point that his cheeks filled up. And then he did. He doubled forward, leaning vaguely towards me and vaguely to that heavy steel door, which had been closed since we came down here.
Black vomit splashed his own dirty feet and the floor, scattered the white bugs but hit many of them with chunky bits of the Moort-Man’s bile.
It steamed and then Frank Moort got down on his hands and knees, looking keenly into the pile, as if he would divine the future by looking at its slimy pattern doused on the old brick floor.
He glanced at me and shouted, “Quiet!” as he wiped his soiled mouth with the back of his hand. He started pawing through the black muck. He moved a few chunks around and then came across what he was looking for.
“A-ha!” he said, “A-ha-ha-haaaaaa!” A glint of satisfaction lit his black eyes and he picked up something from the guck.
Then he threw whatever it was over towards the steel door. It hit the door with a tinny clank and I saw it bounce once on the floor with a tink and then come to a rest. “Go,” he said, more of a grunt at me. “See f’yerself.” Then he turned back to the big TV. He shouted and threw his arm in a wave like he had done before and the chirping died to almost nothing again. I realized it had been growing and this new mode of silence was a rush of emptiness in my head, like someone switching off an untuned radio. I made my way over to the door and bent down to discover he had thrown a small gold key, mostly covered in Frank Moort’s dark liquid goop, the mashed leavings of his stomach.
I almost heaved too, but I kept my insides on the inside.
“Where is he?” I said, really wanting to ask him again, What have you done? but not ready for any answer he might give.
“Up,” Moort grunted and I could see he was chewing on something. He had sat back down in the La-Z-Boy and he had a carcass of meat in his lap fished from the floor. He had turned the Hi-Fi volume up again and was intently watching the baseball game again, now that he could hear the announcers. Hundreds of large white bugs crawled over him, but he gave no notice.
I reached down to touch the key, which looked shiny and new underneath its patchy coating. I picked it up without thinking it through. It was hot. Not warm, like it had merely been in someone’s pocket, but hot as though it had been heated in a flame. I held it loosely and threw it from hand to hand while I got used to its temperature.
I stood tall again, but hesitant. I looked around. The swarm of white crickets was closing in on me. Doc still lay under a moving blanket of them. I turned to the steel door and tried it. It had a handle instead of a knob so I pulled and it squealed open like a rusted metal ship parting ways with its moorings.
Darkness inside, but I made out a room and then metal stairs. I went in. What else could I do? If Mac was up here somewhere, I couldn’t leave without him. Not without my brother.
Two flights of clanging footfalls, give or take, and then I came to a landing. More stairs went up but a wire door stood off to the side. Beyond it, cowering in darkness was a huddled figure that looked like Mac. “Mac,” I said. He was quietly sobbing. He looked up as I approached. “Oh jeezus Christ in heaven, thank the lord you’re here, Dave…” Mac stood and covered the distance to me, then wrapped fingers into the coils of the wired door, pulling on it as if he could bend it. He probably couldn’t. If he could, he’d have been out of here already.
I fumbled with the hot key in my hand and tried to get it into the glazed metal box built into the wire door. I dropped it and then got down to retrieve it. My hands wouldn’t steady. Mac looked okay, but his face was wet. He looked dirtier than when he’d driven off this morning.
Mac was rambling. He said, “Crazy S.O.B....he was messing with my head...or something. I thought it was Da. I knew it couldn’t be but he looked like him, sounded like him. That’s how I got in here. I thought Da was hurt. My dream, Dave, you remember that? I was thinking about that and I let my guard down. Can you get me outta here?”
I was still struggling to get the key in, thinking that Frank Moort would be climbing the stairs behind me before I could get Mac out of this storage locker or whatever it was. I didn’t even know if this key fit this old lock. Finally, I took a breath and got it pointed the right way. It slid in with a chunky heft and I turned it. Mac pushed the door towards me in a hurry, nearly bowling me over. “Let’s get out of here,” he said.
“The Doc,” I said.
“Jeezus, Dave, you brought Doc,” Mac said, stopping to look at me. It was less of a question than it was a statement of disbelief.
Not that it mattered now, I said, “Dad’s Buick is gone. I had to.” Then a thought of my own. “Where’s your truck?” I felt like I was whispering, as if we needed to be quiet. The chirping of the crickets faded up here inside the base of the lighthouse, but Frank Moort couldn’t hear us. I think it was fright that got into me and lowered my volume, nothing more.
“Up on the hill,” Mac said. He had gone to the stairwell and looked down into the darkness of it. “I walked down here...like in my dream. Da was standing out front. Just like the
dream. I didn’t know if it was real...or my delusion, Dave. I followed him. He ran. I chased him in here...”
Mac looked back at me. “You okay?”
“Nuh,” I said. “I’m not. I saw Da too. Whatever that is down there, it’s not...right.”
“That’s just it,” Mac said, looking like he was rolling things around in his head, coming to some conclusion or another. “It ain’t right at all. Let’s get the doc and go.”
9.
After re-treading one flight of metal stairs in the dark, I moved to what I thought might be the lighthouse’s main doorway. The thought of just slipping out onto the top of the breakwater wall filled my chest with air and I stood taller as I approached. The blackened steel was ice cold to my touch. I leaned on it and groped for a handle. Behind me, breathless, Mac said, “No use. After he got me locked in I could see ‘im through the grates in the floor. He set up a lighting rig and welded it shut. Could see the blue flame and heard it clear as day. Doubt we’d get that door cracked by hand.” I ran my fingers along the edge in the darkness and felt the tell-tale bubbled scar of metal, now cold. A half dozen spot welds bulged along each edge of the old metal frame. My shoulders sank and my chest deflated.
We’d have to go out the way we’d come in. Underground. And along the breakwater corridor.
I turned from the false hope of the steel doorway and followed Mac quietly down another flight of grated stairs to the basement doorway, pushing it wide to give us the broadest possible vantage point. Moort was still in his La-Z-Boy, his back to us. The commentator was excitedly talking up the Yankees and recapping the last run. Mac went off to my left, eyes gaping at the floor covered with white insects, some as big as baseballs, I saw now. Clearly, the bugs were news to Mac. Maybe he’d been upstairs in that storage rack for hours and maybe nothing more had happened after the Moort-Man had put away his stolen acetylene torch.
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