by Dan Chaon
This kind of thing has happened before. These sudden, hard jolts of memory—or half memory—the way you lift out of them dazed, in a state of vague, disconnected adrenaline.
Look behind you. No, don’t look behind you!
—
You want to think that it must mean something. This dream, this memory—you have a temptation to do a sort of Freudian analysis. Is your subconscious trying to tell you something? And if so, what?
He could do a lot of damage. He could do a lot of damage in a short time.
Have you told Aaron and Dennis?
—
Debbie McCrae in the break room at noon, sitting there eating a vegan meal from a bento box and she smiles at me kindly. “Oh, Dustin, how are you doing,” she said, in a voice that performed kindness and sympathy. She tilted her head and gave me a concerned, therapeutic look that was obviously practiced but not necessarily un-genuine.
“Good!” I said. And then I didn’t want to seem too glib, I didn’t want to seem like I was brushing off her gesture, so I shrugged and showed my palms, I grimaced wryly but let my eyes go sad. “It’s a complicated process, of course,” I said. “But I’ve got a good support system, and I’m working, and…”
“If you need to talk…” she said. She made her eyes larger, and it seemed that there was a very thin, moist layer over her pupils, like a contact lens made of water—not that she was going to cry, but that her eyes were welling with empathy. Such an expression, I thought, must be extremely effective during therapy.
“Sure,” I said. “Yes. Absolutely.”
Jill hated Debbie McCrae so much.
Debbie McCrae had once been a cheerleader for the Ohio State University Buckeyes football team, and she was still a very hearty, athletic-looking woman. She was a well-regarded grief counselor, with a number of lucrative gigs at hospices and intensive-care units in the area, and every time they’d met socially, Jill had a negative reaction.
“The cheerleader who became a grief counselor,” Jill said. “It’s just so exquisite that it’s almost unbearable.”
“Exquisite?” I said.
“Give me a D!” Jill said, and shook imaginary pompoms over her head. “Give me an E! Give me an A! Give me a D! Your husband is dead!”
“Oh, come on,” I said. “She’s really nice!”
“I’m sure she is,” Jill said.
—
And then I woke up and it was night and there was the sound of a skateboard rolling along the street outside my house. The very distinctive sound of small wheels on asphalt. And then the wooden click as the skateboarder jumped off the ground and landed.
I sat up in bed and pulled aside the shade and peered down. There was a halogen streetlight right in front of the house, and I could see the kid in that washed-out light. Caucasian, blond, his hair in dreads. He was shirtless, wearing pants that had been cut off just above the ankle and big white high-tops. Maybe fifteen years old?
He skated down the street in front of my house, then jumped. Then he went back and did it again. There was a little slope bump in the street, and he was using it for practice.
I took my phone off the nightstand and looked at the time. 2:27 A.M.
Really? There wasn’t snow on the ground, but it must easily have been below freezing.
I got out of bed groggily and went to the bathroom, and even then I could hear the sound of the skateboard: Rooooll. Slap. K-chint. Then back to the beginning. Roooooooll. Slap! K-chint!
I padded from the bathroom to the edge of Aaron’s room and stood there in the threshold of the doorway. He was curled up, his face turned away, but I could see him breathing.
No one is skateboarding in front of the house, I told myself. Not in the middle of winter.
I went to Aaron’s bedroom window and pulled aside the shade. The big maples in our yard bared their naked branches like fangs or claws. Sleet swirled around.
And Aaron stirred irritably, shifting under the covers. “What?” he mumbled. “What are you…?”
“Are you awake?” I said. “I thought I heard something.”
He sat up and palmed his eye. “What?” he said.
“Do you hear something?” I said. And he squinted.
I felt like I could clearly see the skateboard rolling riderless down the street, the soft gargle of wheels rolling along asphalt, clear and sharp.
In a circle, with their hands behind their backs
—
But Aaron only sighed and settled back into the covers.
“There’s some things I need to talk to you about,” I said.
“Mm,” he said.
“Let’s have dinner together,” I said, and then I lifted my head again and listened.
—
It was possible that something had been looking for you for a long time, and at last it was drawing near.
DECEMBER 11, 2012
DECEMBER 11, 2012
I GOT INTO the passenger seat of Aqil’s car and I hesitated.
Some strange things had happened to me in the past twenty-four hours, but none of them felt as if they could be discussed.
I could ask him, I thought. How can I explain to the boys about the murders? And about Rusty? Should I?
I could tell him about the
What could I say about the skateboarder that wouldn’t sound—
Or the gibbeners? The hands behind the back? The flat reflection of the water in the irrigation ditch?
—
He would make too much of it, I thought. He was still in a state where he could be led into confabulation and wild theories; he was susceptible to paranoia. You could both go further down that path. Wouldn’t it be better if one of you still hewed to the path of reason and logic?
If Jill were here, I thought, I would know what was real and what was not real. But now I wasn’t sure. I could feel a strong thrum in my chest, right in my breastbone, as if I knew something, as if I was certain, but was I?
Sometimes Jill would say, that seems reasonable. Sometimes she would say, that doesn’t really make sense. And that had been my guidepost for the better part of my life. Now there was no one to tell me the difference, and so my thoughts bobbed uncertainly as Aqil drove.
DECEMBER 11, 2012
THERE WAS A little park that ran along the eastern bank of Grand River, and when we pulled in, there was a chain barring the lot. A sign said:
GROUNDS CLOSED
during hours of darkness
And Aqil said, “We’ll just park the car here.” And he turned off the ignition and we got out into the purple-skied gloaming. He took a small flashlight out of his jacket pocket and handed it to me; then he retrieved another for himself. The flashlights were about the length of a hand and the width of a finger, smooth black metal—the kind you’d imagine a cop used to shine down onto a pair of teenagers in the backseat of a parked car. He flicked his on, and I did the same.
“Let’s just walk down this way a bit,” he said, and gestured. “Don’t worry, we’re not going to get in trouble. If security boys come, we’ll tell them we’re looking for a lost wallet.”
We walked along the wood-chip-covered path that ran curving along parallel to the river. I passed my light across a tall, blackened bare tree that had been struck by lightning.
Here was a plaque that had pictures of PLANTS OF THE FLOODPLAIN. Wild Rye. Bladdernut. Toothwort. Loosestrife. River Oats.
Aqil pointed his light across the river. “You see that?” he said.
On the other side of the river, up an embankment, there was the vague glow of civilization.
Streetlights, the backs of buildings. “That’s the back parking lot of Nemeth’s Lounge. That’s where our boy was last seen.”
The trail continued along the river, winding northward toward Lake Erie, which lay about four or five miles distant. Sections of the bank were thickly sheltered by high cattails and reeds. “I just want to patrol up this way about a m
ile or so,” Aqil said. “I don’t even know what I’m looking for. But most of them tend to be found near the site of disappearance.” He passed his light along an old gravestone. GAGE, it said. The dates worn away. “I mean, you’ve read the dossiers. That’s another crazy thing, how they suddenly show up in the exact place where people were searching when they went missing. They weren’t there then, but suddenly they’re there now? That doesn’t make any sense, does it?”
“I noticed that, too,” I said. I spoke in a low voice, because Aqil, I thought, was talking a little loudly, and he was walking at a pace that was almost bouncing, brisk, when it might be better to be a bit more cautious.
But he didn’t get quieter. He was keyed up—manic?—and he looked back at me and showed his teeth in that way, not really a smile. “I had an amazing revelation,” he said. “This is something I forgot to tell you.”
“Yes?” I said. The river was a ripple of moonlight, and I kept my eye on it.
“The moccasins. Peter Allingham’s moccasins. What were they doing on his feet?”
“I don’t know what you’re saying.”
“You fall in the water and you don’t thrash hard enough to kick off slip-on leather moccasins? Are you kidding me?”
It was a startlingly good point, and it gave me pause. “Unless they were very tight,” I said.
Aqil laughed. “Very tight,” he said. “That’s rich.”
“I didn’t mean to discount your observation,” I said. “It’s actually…very astute.”
“Thank you,” said Aqil.
He doesn’t seem nervous enough, I thought, and I looked ahead where the shadows of trees appeared to be a pair of large cupped hands. And I observed as he shined his light on another plaque posted at the trailhead—this one about the importance of floodplains, written in the language of friendly grade-school science textbooks.
The floodplains between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers are home to some of the world’s earliest civilizations and first cities, including Ur, Aqil read aloud. He looked at me, raising an eyebrow. “Doesn’t that sound weird to you?” he said. “Ur. That’s like the name of a demon.”
“It’s an ancient city,” I said. “Sumerian, I think. It was somewhere in the south part of what’s now Iraq.”
“Mm,” Aqil said doubtfully. “I don’t like it.”
The trail tended upward, but not too steeply. The river was now below us, down an embankment, and Aqil kept his light pointed low, a pool at his feet. He was circumspect suddenly.
At last he said, “What do you think we’re looking for?” His voice was much softer. Not quite a whisper. “What’s your intuition, Dr. Tillman? If you’re going to do a ritual murder…a human sacrifice? Where do you do it?”
“Well,” I said, and I couldn’t help but think of
“Well,” I said, “there is generally some kind of sacred site, something that can be desecrated. It depends. It might be a graveyard. An abandoned church? It might even be some spot an underpass for example that has been tagged with graffiti that represents the cult’s symbols and that has been consecrated by animal sacrifice. Often dogs or cats”
Aqil peered at me. “Sacred sites,” he said. “I like that.”
Down the embankment, on the branch- and rock-cluttered shores of Grand River, a black-pelted rodent bigger than a rat scurried into the water.
“They’re going to kill him tonight, I think,” Aqil said at last. “Or tomorrow afternoon. That’s my crazy stuff with the dates, I know, but…yeah. My guess is they want to kill him at 12:12, on 12/12/12. That has some power, doesn’t it? Even thinking about it as a nonbeliever, you have to say that you’re going to at least notice it! Right?”
“Maybe,” I said. “It seems like it would attract the superstitious. There’s twelve signs in the zodiac. Twelve disciples—not just in Christianity, but in many occult sects.”
I tried to say this blithely. I tried to banter like Aqil bantered, but my hands felt cold, and I shined my flashlight around because now it was coming on full darkness.
“Plus we’ve got that Mayan apocalypse coming up in a couple of weeks,” Aqil said. “Did you read about that?”
“Yes,” I said. “A kind of pop-culture eschatology. I wouldn’t think anyone who’s truly invested in occult practices would take it seriously.”
“Eschatology, eh?” Aqil said. “I love your vocabulary.”
I cleared my throat, blushing a little. “I’m just trying to understand your conception of this supposed cult. Are you expecting people to show up in black hooded robes?” I said. “And they’ll—what—sacrifice the victim in front of the tomb?”
—
And even as I said this, I was hit by a vivid bullet of memory.
That night in the graveyard—
Me. Kate and Wave. Rusty and his friend. Rusty drawing the pentagram on the gravestone in chalk. I watch as he slowly unzips his backpack and spreads it open and the baby rabbits are inside, squirming and blind and pink, and he lifts one out and Kate says, “Guland, do not make us go to Yellowstone National Park. Let us stay here and celebrate your glory with our friends—” and that’s when I see the figures. They are standing at the edge of the trees that circle the cemetery, and they are not robed and they are not necessarily even there, they are just a flicker, barely more than silhouettes. A tall man with a cape and a three-cornered hat. A short man with an unnaturally long nose, like a proboscis.
—
A dollop of water fell onto my glasses. And then a few more drops hit my face and I looked up. “Is it raining?” I asked Aqil.
Aqil looked up at the sky suspiciously. “I don’t think so,” he said.
I held out my hand but no more water hit it. Weird, I thought, and I put images of the graveyard to the back of my mind. The memory, which had been acute, had now begun to desaturate and fade back, thankfully.
“I don’t think they’ll sacrifice him here,” Aqil said. “They’ll want to do that in a more private place, so they can take their time with it. But I’m thinking that they may have marked the area where they’ll dump him with some kind of…like you say, an animal sacrifice, or graffiti.”
I considered this. It made sense, of course. But I realized that there was some part of me that was imagining we had come here to stop them. To catch them before they killed the boy.
“There’s not really any way to save him,” I said. “Is there?”
But he wasn’t paying attention. “Shh,” he said abruptly. He had gone to the edge of the embankment, his body suddenly tensed, and he shined his flashlight down toward the river. Aqil’s light passed through a long strip of scrub trees, and the shadows of their trunks stretched out, extending grotesquely, and he took a step down.
“Careful,” I said.
It was quite a steep drop-off, not what you would call a cliff, but still not something you’d want to lose your footing on.
But instead of watching his step, he turned off his flashlight and motioned fiercely for me to do the same. “Shh,” he said, and pointed.
A figure was standing in the silvery, shallow water of the river. The river was about as wide as a two-lane highway, with ambling curves and eddies running over large stones, and the shape—the person—appeared to be standing knee-deep in the middle.
He was fly-fishing. We watched him swing his pole, cast his line, reel it back. And then he repeated.
Aqil took another step down and put his foot in a gullet of leaves. He stumbled briefly.
“Careful,” I said.
“Shh,” he said.
There was something mechanical about the figure’s movements—an uncanny sort of repetition, a stuttering quality to it, like a hologram or a splice of projected film that was being looped over and over. Was it possibly an optical illusion? Maybe, I thought, it was just a cluster of shadows—a tree stump, with a caught piece of string that was blowing behind it in the wind—that looked exactly like a fishing man?
<
br /> And then, abruptly, there was movement at the periphery of my vision. It startled me, and I turned to glance back. In the distance, a collection of moving shadows was pacing around the circumference of my parked car. A velociraptor? It was taller than my car, with a hunched, tiptoeing movement.
There was the possibility of dopaminergic neurotoxicity with some of the medication that I had been taking. Possibility of acute amphetamine psychosis—paranoia, delusions.
I heard the soft, slow beat of hooves. Clip, clop, clip, clop.
“Aqil,” I said.
I turned on my flashlight and pointed it in the direction of the thing, and that was when I realized that it was a person on a horse.
This appeared to be illuminated in my flashlight beam. There was a black horse and a rider in a uniform: a wide-brimmed hat like a Mountie, the glint of a yellow shoulder-sleeve insignia. A soldier from World War I on horseback? It seemed certain that I was hallucinating.
“Aqil?” I said.
And then the light hit me. Aqil turned now, but he was a few feet down the ravine, and it was steep enough that he struggled to climb upward.
The flashlight trained on me was blinding—police grade, military grade, I thought—so I put my hands up to shield my eyes. Glowing, dazzling coronas expanded across my vision, but I could see the figure of the horse stepping lightly along the path toward us. Clip clip clip. And the rider swaying sleepily in the saddle.
“Are you lost?” a brightly Midwestern female voice said. “Sorry, this park closes at dusk!” she said, swaying closer, and I felt Aqil at my shoulder.
Aqil shaded his eyes with his palm and peered upward. “Officer?” he said, and grinned ingratiatingly into the light. “Or—I’m sorry—Ranger? We’re looking for a lost wallet,” he said. “We dropped a wallet somewhere around this area.”
“Oh! That’s unfortunate,” the woman said. She’d stopped about ten yards away from us, and I couldn’t see anything but her silhouette. The horse’s hooves tsked a couple of times on the asphalt road, and it lifted its head as the woman pulled on the bridle. “Well, you’ll probably have better luck looking for it if you come back in the morning.”
