The tip of the creature’s tongue touched the coin and the entire boulder-sized, corneous head of the monster winced back again, but only for the briefest moment, as though it had been shocked. The tongue, gruesome, blotted with sickly spots, touched the coin again, and touched Caleb’s hand and he heard
the dead spill noise from the throat on the stage painted chalk-white against the black nothing with rose-tipped cheek spots moving left to right rolling over the branches of sprouted blue veins above the albatross — hanging cords of the neck teeth barred silent scream I still don’t believe I will not believe I now call in my debt you owe me this life you horrible spiteful God — no sound choir chorus melting gold sun spreading over heart poured ventricles the shaman speaks “my ancient form refuses your luminescent buds - you topple like rubble whispering like whickers of cornhusks swaying in the humidity of Isaac’s buggy farm night” but over time with maggot maple leaves mashing together as the evening brood of alabaster cornices forms this blockade — I will never bow to you I will bring the marked ships of death on the marked worlds the marked ages and
voices, words, shapes. Caleb saw them all as though they were right in front of him, the mind of the beast Robian poured out in front of him, and it was as if he were floating just above the water of the pond himself, beneath a bosk of birch trees along its edge, with the young woman, sitting Indian-style, her eyes closed, the sky above clear and blue and taut as only summer skies can be and then the two young men, just about the age of the boys who had come, the diggily mans, the daddy’s friends who had sung and rhymed and offered their coins.
Those two young men were holding each other’s heads, and their eyes opened and Caleb could see that they were large and black in the center. They were talking to each other without moving their lips, then chanting, saying these things, and then throwing each other back and laughing and then grabbing each other by the ears again, sitting down now, Indian-style too, and the young woman just kept her place, chewing on a stem of seeded grass with a smile and long brown hair with bits of grass and dirt in it — Madison was her name. The Helpful Lady Who Smelled Nice.
The coin stuck to the monster’s tongue and then the tongue withdrew, faster than the cautious way it had sought out Caleb’s hand, and disappeared back into its mouth.
“Obrigado,” said the monster, but Caleb knew it was not over. The thing had its meal standing before it, and it meant to have it.
“No!” Caleb heard. A shrill cry, a mother’s cry, coming from somewhere far away. It made him smile, to hear his mother like that. It made him happy to know that she wasn’t lost forever. Maybe it had been the Helpful-Lady-Madison who had cried out, yes, maybe that, but that didn’t matter. He would think and feel and know it was his mommy.
Mobius, the azul, lowered itself down over Caleb with terrible, lightning speed. Its mouth was open again, and Caleb saw its drool quivering on either side of that long tongue. He saw the flash of the coin slipping down into the blackness of its throat, the sacs festooned in the corners of its maw, throbbing with their anxious juices. He saw these things and felt the furnace of its breath and felt the water around his ankles now, flowing steadily out of the pond. For all things evil are permitted, and Man hangs in the balance.
Caleb kept his eyes wide open as the mouth of the great monster came down on him, and clenched his fists. As Mobius took its meal, Caleb burst himself into flame.
AFTERLIFE
“Caleb,” said Christopher. “Are you okay?”
Caleb’s nose tickled, and he scratched it. “That was very cricky, Daddy,” he said.
Christopher picked him up. He hugged him close. They were both drenched. Sheriff Johnston and Rory Blaine came running around the house. Blaine leapt up onto the porch to where Tom Milliner lay, having been brought there to rest by Christopher and Maddy.
Johnston slowed now, as he approached the scene. The big Sheriff’s mouth gasped open, rainwater running from its corners. His feet sloshed through the pond water which had at last escaped. His eyes slowly took in the flames, rippling in the rain and wind out over the center of the pond, where some huge twisted mass (screaming, it had been screaming in my head, calling in its debt, something about its debt, and a gamble with God, oh dear, oh good Mother of Lord) was now charred and black, orange in places, and blue in others, still licking with flames.
The sky was the hue of an inferno — red and orange over the trees, a thick cloud of cloying gray smoke. Johnston pulled his eyes away from that scene. He sniffed the air and recalled the smell of his own propane stove, and he saw himself at the griddle, cooking eggs for his wife, sick with cancer.
Johnston turned his attention to the baby boy on the porch. The one, he was learning, this whole mess was somehow about. Caleb was looking down at his hand, where something had left a small mark, and he was scowling. Johnston glanced at the pond once more, as the hulk of mottled tissue there began to sink.
Then the Sheriff asked, “Is it gone?”
“For a little while.” Christopher stood near him, looking out. Johnston followed the young man’s gaze. He thought he couldn’t look any more, or shouldn’t, but he did. With the blaze in Red Rock Falls (mercifully abating, thanks to the efforts of three counties) painting the sky orange, and the rolling clouds of smoke thick as canvas, the sky alone was quite a picture. But what occupied the sky was something else.
Huge birds soared and flapped above the pond, heading west. Their wingspan and their oddly-shaped bodies — they seemed too big and round to fly, it weren’t for the enormous wings lifting them — made them look decidedly prehistoric. With the mass of charbroiled Loch Ness, or whatever the hell it was, stinking and sinking in the middle of the goddamned water, well, that just completed the picture. Johnston felt like he was looking into the past, deep into a time far more predatory, more red of tooth and claw than he cared to ever know. It hurt his mind to look at that sky, those birds (he hoped to God they were leaving the scene for good), and so he turned away.
The kid, Christopher, was watching him. He looked old, thought Johnston, much older than a kid in his early-twenties should look. Johnston was about to say something when Blaine called out, “Bus is coming through!”
It was miraculous, Johnston thought, they had got an ambulance in all this mess. It was a good thing they’d had it from the beginning. The paramedics would be here momentarily. He felt relief.
The Feds came running first, slopping through the water, squinting through the rain that, yes, looked like it could be at last tapering off some. Then again, who knew? The Feds stopped and gaped at the pond and the people. Tom was trying to sit up.
“Stay down, Milliner. You’ve had a heart attack.”
The boy, Caleb, cried out. Johnston looked at the child, who was reaching out towards the pond.
Johnston followed the arc of the boy’s outstretched arms until his eyes found the mother. She was still in the chair, and the water threatened to float her away.
Caleb wriggled free from Christopher, and made for her, but the Sheriff caught him by the shoulder.
Two Feds stirred into action, wading over to her, but it was Christopher who got there first. Whether he looked fatigued or not, the kid was fast, thought the Sheriff, and then realized that the boy he was holding onto was damn hot. Feverishly hot. Just who in the hell were these people?
The girl appeared unresponsive, indifferent to her imminent drowning. Christopher picked her up, like a husband lifting his wife over the threshold. He was up to his waist in the water. The girl’s mouth was closed, Johnston saw, but her eyes were open and clear.
“Mommy!” The boy was screaming. Throughout the entire ordeal Johnston had been told, the child had been remarkably calm. A real trooper. Now, he seemed to be at last unraveling, and Johnston couldn’t blame him.
“Caleb!” Christopher called over. It sounded both authoritative and reassuring. The Sheriff watched as Christopher waded back through the deep water towards the porch, the Feds either side of h
im trying to help, but struggling to get through the powerful water themselves. The water was starting to run towards the center of the pond, as though draining there, following that terrible thing back to the depths from where it had sprung.
Tom Milliner was being carried into the house, out of the cold, anyway. The Sheriff called out. “Get her out of there!”
But it was too late. The Feds who had gone into help were losing their own battle.
One of them thrashed with a panicked overhand stroke after his feet gave way. He swam desperately from where he was being dragged. The other had gone under but bobbed up again. He was treading water in a panic. Christopher was succumbing to his own struggle. If the girl didn’t wake up, he would lose her.
“Stay with us, Tommy!” Somehow the young man managed to shout, imperiled as he was. The Sheriff turned as Tom Milliner was taken into the house, Maddy Kruger was by his side. Johnston had no choice but to follow them in with the child. It would be dry in there, at least for now.
The child struggled against him, straining towards the people trying to stay afloat. People, who, as Johnston turned back and saw, were not actually above the turgid water anymore at all.
They had been overcome and disappeared beneath its pewter surface.
***
In his dream, Tom trudges up the embankment from a shallow, not overflowing, Macmaster pond. He smiles to himself, because in the dream Tom is a teenager, in the thick of the summer before his senior year. He’s smiling about a covenant he’s made with his friends, Jim and Maddy, after they’ve had something of a bad trip, and each of them, in their own way, has decided to dedicate their lives to service.
Yet, in front of him, Christopher leads the way, Caleb in his arms, the small boy reaching for his mother with both arms over his father’s shoulder, who tows her behind his back. Tom catches the scent of her limp body in the air; nothing unpleasant, only slightly sour, mostly sweet, but still shocking him into memories of people throughout the years since Jim and Maddy and the covenant. Memories of victims and perpetrators alike, hurt in some way that they had become comatose or semi-conscious — they’d all had that faint smell about them. It was like something left on the windowsill just long enough to spoil, or the stale air inside a sealed container.
Tom was not an educated man, no, not academically, and he knew it. Not a college man like his brother Charlie, or like DA Rory Blaine, and not a veteran, either. Tom was a local man, something he had felt stupidly ashamed of for years, as though he should have been better, gone somewhere better, but hadn’t, he had remained. A person learned things over the years, and what they might not have learned firsthand, they learned from watching. Tom learned a good deal during his many sleepless nights in the Acres, or in shady motels, or passing time in the Blazer, staking something or someone out, watching the town sleep and then stir awake in the early hours.
Tom knew that there were three distinct kinds of energy in this grand world. There was thermal energy, chemical energy, and electromagnetic energy. What he has witnessed (whether dreaming or awake he can’t be quite sure) between the boy and the terrible thing he’d seen coming out of the pond and over to the Kingston house had been the last form of energy, the electromagnetic kind. The thing’s head hovered there over the dock, glinting and silver, as though covered with a morass of crawling, shifting bottle flies.
It was what they had all seen, each in their own way, that summer of 1970.
And then Tom had seen the baby boy, with those tiny white lights, like seeds, moistened and blurred by the rain, or by the tears that had formed in Tom’s eyes, floating around the child’s head, dancing there. Motes, like a dancing crown.
And then the boy had combusted, like the young man on Tom’s lawn in the acres, into a bright and prismatic fire.
Being in the boy’s presence now, and being back here at the pond with the boy, and with Christopher and with the Goldfine girl and Jim Cruickshand all at once must have been a powerful set of ingredients, Tom thinks. His semi-conscious mind is alive, charged, as though he’s had three cups of the strongest coffee, but, of course, so much more than that. He is pellucid, he is sharp, doing the kind of thinking he had tried to do before but was unable, had been either too tired and weary or too mentally confused — now he feels as though he’s been rebooted, and anything that had been sick or looping or defective in him has gone, and he is fresh as a daisy now, like the rain.
At the same time, he is being carried. Carried away from the pond, away from the people still there. Away from the reality of what’s happening now.
They are helped up the rest of the way by policemen in neon-striped slickers. Rory Blaine is there, and Sheriff Blake Johnston. They fight the water and watch the last of the flames die out. It’s happening all over the county, an incredible reversal, Tom hears someone say; the water is receding somehow, rushing back into the aquifers, sucking out the fires as it goes.
Tom opens his eyes and sees a woman from Child Protective Services, not one who’d been in Burlington, inching closer to the boy through the rabble of cops, staties, deputies, firemen, EMTs. The boy is crying, crying for his mother and father. They’re still out there, Tom wants to say, but he can’t speak. He can only think of the payphone dangling from the cord. He can only think of the boy who had called for help, and for whom none came.
Johnston has got everyone that can be spared from the mayhem in town, but it’s still not many people. Tom tries to sit up, but they press him gently back down. He wants to see. He wants to see out to the pond. To see Christopher again. To see the Goldfine girl, Liz.
He locks eyes with Blaine. Tom raises his eyebrows, but Blaine blinks and gives him a look, conveying with his gravestone-colored eyes that it’s okay, that the shock will pass, that somehow order will trump chaos again. He watches as Blaine and Maddy allow the EMTs to take the boy, crying now, his arms stiffly waving in the air in the direction of the pond, his person being examined for cuts and bruises and contusions, the CPS caseworker hovering near him. The rain covers everything, everyone, making the whole scene seem small to Tom Milliner, somehow less important, less real than it should have been. Rolled away with Rory Blaine’s hand gripping the meat of his arm, Tom thinks that it all looks like a dance, choreographed long ago, and each person was simply carrying out their role, some under its spell, some watching it, as if from the wings, or even above.
And in the middle of it all, Maddy. She turns from the boy briefly to smile at Tom, and in that moment, she is radiant.
***
Water, everywhere. Rushing around them. An eddy of bubbles. Christopher’s arm around her. His body whipsawing through the water, pulling her up behind him, trying to break the surface. But she sinks. Oh, sink and be done.
She had been gone. She had watched everything happen, she could even still see herself: standing there. She’d screamed, but no sound came from her throat, and she had sunk to her waist. She was going to get taken with the rest of it, the mud, the marsh, bits of bottle flies, dragonfly wings, the detritus of sticks and rocks and stumps and fish skeletons.
She shouted and screamed — it made no difference. She saw them all up there on the high edge of the pond, and she could see the child crying for her, calling her, reaching for her, as the men and women examined him. She stood there, that numb body of hers shut down, that shutdown soul, the others probing her too, looking into her eyes with lights, all of them in the drenching, interminable rain.
Then what was she; this, here, now? She realized that it didn’t matter. Perhaps this was consciousness, her consciousness that had evaded and escaped, at last. Stuck now, threatened to be swallowed with the rest of the draining water, water that was now suddenly, everywhere around her, in full Cambrian force, trying to pull her under, trying to suck her down to the depths.
Down to where she could be free of it all at last. But she held onto Christopher’s hand, and she stayed. She stayed with him, her lungs burning, her every muscle stretched.
Eve
n when they wheeled her into the back of the waiting ambulance, IV in her vein, bouncing over the bumpy road and away, away from the Kingston house and its many nightmares, she stayed.
She could even still see him there, Christopher, in the water with her, his face a ghost but his eyes like cut stones. At last she could see his eyes.
***
It was summer. He knew that. Everything was different. What felt the same was only a shadow, a memory, or a theory about the future. How could things be so inconclusive? Tom wondered, but then thought to himself: that’s the way things are. You know that by now.
The Goldfine girl remained mostly as she was, though she was said to be improving, showing responsiveness, by the doctors. He visited her two or three times a year, not like clockwork, but something he did still try and keep up a kind of regimen about. Because he didn’t like to slide, not at all. Not anymore; he knew too well what it was. Letting one day go by became two, and so on, until he was just someone else who had faded away.
They kept her at Mount Sinai, in Manhattan. The trip was a bit arduous for Tom, he didn’t like to travel, especially not outside of the region. It wasn’t the hotels he minded so much, not their walls, or what they contained, but it was just the physical strain of it. He was getting old.
He often had dreams of that spring morning at the Kingston place, and of falling down, his breath taken from him, his limbs and lips numb, staring up into the rain. Sometimes, when he thought about it, which he usually chose not to, he would swear that he had heard the kid, Christopher, swirling away in all that water, shout to him, “Stay with us, Tommy!”
Stay with us.
Years went by, and Tom retired. Never having been the police officer with a highfalutin education, thank you, having come into the whole mess with a kind of premature calm, Tom left the force with the same lack of fuss. Just paperwork and handshakes and driving himself along in the Blazer, drinking his coffee, chewing his nicotine gum and thinking about things.
HIGHWATER: a suspense thriller you won't be able to put down Page 35
