They crossed the bridge out of the woods and into town. Jacob grew tired of walking and Jonathan carried him for a time. More people began to appear. Other parents smiled as they passed, commented on his costume, and, naturally, Jonathan and Mary returned the compliments until, five minutes into the event, Jonathan was already exhausted with small talk. The children, dressed as any number of things both foreign and familiar, looked strange, bumping around on short legs, unsure of their own dimensions. As they reached the center of town Jonathan could see the throngs of people. The weather had been beautiful all year and tonight was no exception. There were easily twice as many people this year as usual, traveling from all over the state. The mass of decorated flesh surged in the night, and the streetlamps seemed like torches in the darkness, flickering between shadows.
The three of them were suddenly absorbed into the mass, and Jonathan felt lost in a strange world, weak and exposed. The people twirled in their costumes, stumbled drunkenly, bumped and jostled, laughed and screeched. It seemed there were more adults dressed in costume than children, bent on some form of mild debauchery, dressed as witches, goblins, ghouls and other creatures born out of myths and ancient tales, their costumes an attempt to expose humanity to the deathly fate that awaits them all. Jonathan saw children dressed as zombies, the desiccated dead risen from the grave, skin sallow or peeling, eyes blackened, bloody and evil, and he couldn’t help but wonder what awaited him the following week in Coombs’ Gulch. The boy had lain in that sealed case underground for ten years. Jonathan had never seen a corpse that had fully experienced all the ravages of death, except through the special effects of movies, but now it seemed as if all the stages of death crowded on the streets, mingling in a ritualistic gathering of citizenry. From the angelic face of a young child to the bare bones of a skeleton, a pantomime of the life-and-death process paraded down Main Street in the night.
Jonathan’s stomach curled: would they open the box? Would they need to? He didn’t know. Part of him wanted to treat it like any other piece of luggage to be thrown away, but there was something else burning in his soul, something that said he could never put it to rest until he fully confronted it, gazed into that box and communed with the reality of death.
He felt that somewhere in the crowd, somewhere in this night, the boy was dancing around him, parading and marching, waving and laughing, gray with putrescence, walking on wobbly, dead legs, hand in hand with something much larger and more terrifying in its power.
It stirred both his guilt and wonder. After weeks of researching and his phone call with the Texan, what disturbed Jonathan more were the children dressed as caricatures of familiar things – clowns, farmers, characters from cartoons or movies, and his own little mad scientist. They were real things distorted and accentuated into something other. It made him think of those strange images, the children caught on hunting cameras in the middle of the forest in the night, places not meant for people. It occurred to him that the children in those pictures appeared too perfect, like something pulled out of an advertisement, meant to show what children are supposed to look like, but rarely do. In that way, they seemed alien and even more frightening than the caricatures of death. Jacob walked beside him, his eyes wide in fright and wonder at the massive, roiling crowd of strange faces. Jonathan felt Jacob’s little hand slipping from his own.
After finally reaching Main Street, they shuffled along with the throng of parents and kids. People lined the sidewalks, waving and laughing; cameras flashed, smartphones recorded video. Perhaps when they played the video back later they would see something different, something more powerful hovering in the sky, bearing down on them all. Perhaps they would see what the ancients feared and sacrificed to during these days of descending darkness.
Jonathan heard Mary laugh – a welcome sound – and turned to look. She had her hand on Madison’s shoulder. Conner was standing, tall and lithe, beside his wife, and it took Jonathan a moment to recognize him in the strange setting. Conner nodded and they shook hands briefly. Mary was asking why they didn’t see more of each other and why they didn’t get the kids together more often. Madison nodded her perfect, pretty head in agreement.
Jonathan looked down and saw Conner’s children, Brent and Aria. Brent was dressed as a hunter, in camouflage jacket and pants, which were baggy and creased in odd angles on his small body, a bright orange cap that seemed to glow in the darkness, black makeup beneath his eyes and a toy rifle cradled in his arms. His face was smiling, pale, innocent and unbroken, and, for a moment, Jonathan thought that it was all just some tremendous joke, the boy in the woods nothing more than an elaborate prank, his life for the past ten years a reality television farce played out for some cackling audience.
“He saw the old pictures of you guys from your hunting days and wanted to dress up like his daddy and Uncle Mike,” Madison said.
Jonathan saw Michael standing a few feet back, looking aloof and lost in the mass of families, his wife, Annie, nowhere to be seen. He came to do his duty in supporting his brother, niece and nephew, but he looked out of place and uncomfortable.
Jonathan looked at Conner. “A hunter, huh?”
Conner put on his proud-dad face. “Yeah, maybe someday.”
“Well, I bet you guys are excited to go out together again next week,” Madison said, and Mary launched into a speech about how she was always trying to get Jonathan to go out with his friends and do the things that bring him joy – a veiled admission that his life was largely joyless. “You just can’t work your whole life,” she said.
She didn’t realize that for men like them there were no friends, there was no joy.
Jonathan turned back and gazed out at the mass of costumed people streaming around them. The pitch-black sky bore down over the yellowed streetlamps with their dull coronas of electric light. They were halfway up the incline of Main Street, which drove straight toward the steep hill with the cemetery looming over them all. He looked up at the great black hill and wondered at something that escaped his mind. He turned and looked down Main Street, which plunged toward the river and the submerged dam just beyond the street. He heard Madison and Mary talking. He heard the crowds of revelers. There was movement all around, horrific, screeching faces, made up with blood and gore and alien smiles.
Far off, near the river and trees and just at the edge of the light from a streetlamp, a tremendously tall figure stood cloaked in black. Jonathan strained his eyes but could not make out its features, other than it was standing in shadow and its head reached halfway up the lamppost. It did not appear to be part of the celebration, not walking or mingling. Instead, it stood alone in the darkness – a creep, probably, one of those mentally unstable adults who wallow in gothic darkness and get a kick out of trying to convince the world they’re psychotic.
But then the figure stepped closer to the lamplight, and suddenly Jonathan could make out its features. The face was a crude mask of wood with poorly carved slits for eyes, mouth and nose and primitive designs of dull color painted on the flat face. Upon its head were the antlers of a tremendous stag, which reached like bony fingers up into the night. Its hands were raised at shoulder level as if offering up a sacrifice – a pagan priest transported from the scene of some ancient rite, his prayers and incantations rending time, existing in both realms simultaneously. A wind moved high in the trees, sweeping down from the great cemetery above, and it carried a deep and haunting dirge. The masked priest called out for them, for blood and sacrifice. He stared out from darkness, and his eyes seemed to shine in the light.
Chapter Eight
It was just after 3:00 p.m., and the sun shone bright and cold through the office windows on the twentieth floor of the Parson’s Insurance building in downtown Hartford, partially blinding Conner Braddick. He had repositioned his desk several times since his promotion, but still, every sunny afternoon, blinding sunlight poured through, reaching every corner of the room. Conner’s eyes watered with spiraling
sunspots and left him with a mild form of blindness. Twenty more years of this and he would probably lose his vision completely.
Conner pinched the bridge of his nose. A little blindness at this point was fine with him. He couldn’t look at his computer screen any longer. The wake-up call he received from his bank this morning was enough to throw him off his work for the day anyway. A month and a half behind on the mortgage; why did they have to buy that house – a house that size – anyway? He couldn’t remember at this point. Third child on the way and Madison said they needed a bigger house. Of course. Whatever. That was the way it was supposed to work, right? He had read it in various conservative journals; having children pushed men and women to work harder, to push themselves harder, to get that promotion, put in the extra hours, save and scrape so you move up the middle-class ladder toward…what? He was no longer sure. It was just what people did – what he did. It was like a trap you lured yourself into. No need for bait; delusion and hope would do just fine.
It all went by in a blur, like running as fast as you can until your legs are dead and you’re out of breath and there’s nothing left and you look around and realize that you’re lost and a long, long way from home.
It had all seemed so easy at first, like everything was falling into place. He got that promotion, up here to the twentieth floor, now assistant to the vice president of investments for Parson’s. He had worked for that promotion. Not in the usual way one worked for a promotion, but the real way – schmoozing with the managers, long lunches with a lot of backslapping, and junkets to Saratoga Springs and Boston for meetings, which generally consisted of some ‘expert’ selling his latest theory and everyone sitting around lauding it as the new way forward. For all the media’s focus on social progress, insurance was still a good ol’ boy club, where promotions were earned through ‘lunches’ that became late-afternoon booze fests and everyone got sloppy. Those trips to Saratoga and Boston were merely excuses to do what men actually wanted to do: avoid work and get stupid. Everyone sat through eight hours of experts and charts and graphs for the big payoff of an open bar with attractive waitresses. Nothing concrete ever came from those meetings. No plans were ever made. They just stumbled from one place to another in a new city, pretending to know how this business worked, how investments worked, how life in general worked. They had their statistics and algorithms, computer programs that spit out answers, which Conner and his colleagues used to impress everyone with their vast knowledge of how it actually works, as if they could simply solve problems with a snap of their fingers. The problem, which had been slowly dawning on Conner, was that all those equations and algorithms, the investment software, the charts and graphs, were merely descriptions. They were like paintings – nice to look at, but changed nothing in reality. They were all, himself included, sitting around looking at and discussing descriptions of how it worked without actually understanding how it worked. And because of that, they lacked the ability to change anything. The industry was too big. There were too many people. The entire company and everyone in it were being rolled along by forces bigger than they could imagine and too complex to be understood. Those forces certainly couldn’t be changed or influenced as much as the wizards of smart at these meetings thought they could. No. Conner and his colleagues were all just small cogs in a vast machine who thought they were actually running the show. More and more, Conner felt like a fraud. And, he suspected, so did the other corporate executives. That was why these out-of-state trips devolved into such pathetic drunkenness – all these ‘powerful’ men were sitting in a room, staring at each other and realizing there wasn’t shit they could do that would make an ounce of difference in the long run. It was actually scary to witness. He could see it roll over their faces – the sudden realization that you are ineffectual, impotent and small. That the vast machine was terrifyingly large and defied explanation from the likes of you. They realized their own pathetic mortality while staring at pie charts and Venn diagrams.
So, like any competent executives, they pretended to have the answers, pretended these meetings were essential to operations and then drowned their dread in booze. Allusions to plans were discussed, but no one ever wanted to take the reins. In the end, all the money spent on parading everyone out to these meetings resulted in a change of interdepartmental language at best: refer to this as that and refer to that as this and somehow profit margins will increase. The structure always remained the same and business remained the same – failing.
Their auto insurance line had been tough lately. They were losing money big-time. The new cars were all now equipped with rear-end cameras, sensors, automatic braking, alert systems. The average car now contained computers more advanced than anything people had in their homes ten years ago. The cost of the cars went up. The cost of insurance claims went up. Now your average fender bender involved replacing a myriad of cameras and sensors, rather than just a piece of plastic. But, of course, no one wanted to pay for it. The insurance industry was plagued by pirates, little companies that operated out of strip-mall offices or – even worse – online, with virtually no overhead. Not like the millions it took to keep this tower running. These pirates offered minimum-cost insurance plans that undercut the bigger companies, deflated the prices, left every customer looking for less. Of course, those pirate companies came with risks, but most people don’t factor in the risk of your piddly, little, no-name insurance company not paying out a claim. Most people don’t plan for the accidents. They just go about their lives confident that today they will wake up and go through their usual routine unencumbered by the possibility of death and destruction. Until it’s too late, and then they’re left holding the bag, so to speak.
And now he was holding the bag, too. Conner’s income was tied to his performance, which was great in the good times and horrible in the bad. He and Madison planned for the good. Everything in their lives had seemed on the upswing. Now, for the second year in a row, the returns for Parson’s were coming in low, and that left him in a bad spot. Conner had managed to squirrel away enough money to make up the difference for a while, but now he was looking down the barrel of a financial gun and the hammer was dropping.
Naturally he kept Madison in the dark. She was from a family of ‘means’ – as her father would refer to it. Where Conner was from, they were just called ‘rich’. She had never wanted for anything, and Conner had to admit, it was part of his attraction to her in the beginning. Seeing her house, the way she lived, the way her parents lived. He hoped that success would rub off on him, that he would be absorbed somehow into a social level where he’d be insulated from situations like this.
Madison had always wanted to be a stay-at-home mother, something that was virtually unheard of these days. But she wanted to emulate her own upbringing for their children. She had gone to college and become a nurse. Her father’s world of finance had no appeal for her. Madison didn’t want to know where the money came from; she just wanted to live her life as she saw fit. She left the nursing job – an easy $60,000 per year – after Brent was born and stayed home with Conner’s awkward and often veiled assurance that everything would be fine. They bought nice cars. They entertained friends and family on holidays. He had to buy a $10,000 lawnmower just to do the yard, which was two acres of beautifully arranged ‘butterfly garden’ engineered by the previous owners.
Madison was a great mother; he couldn’t have asked for anything more. She treated their two children – and the third unborn – as a full-time job with the utmost alarm and seriousness. Every cough or sneeze or symptom other parents would dismiss warranted a trip to the doctor’s office. The medical copays grew, and Conner’s patience decreased. Now he felt on the precipice of a fall and it was getting hard to breathe. How do you tell the woman you love that the easy ride was over? The dreams of that perfect, upper-middle-class existence might be coming to an end? The penalty payments on the mortgage would continue to rack up. How do you choose between food and housing? The
food you need now, and, well, the housing will have to wait. Just keep the lights on, keep telling yourself somehow the rest of it will work out. But in truth, he was trapped by the life he’d built. They all were.
And yet he was struggling, killing himself, to hold on to that trap, to stay alive in it just a little longer. Once, while hunting in his early twenties, Conner happened upon a coyote with its paw caught in a spring trap. The use of spring traps was illegal but the coyotes had been running rampant throughout the area and some people just hated them. The animal was thin, shaking, its fur falling off in spots from mange, and it raised such a terrible, high-pitched noise in the early-morning darkness that Conner recalled old Irish tales of banshees floating through the trees wailing their death-cries. He saw it there, pulling and pulling against the trap and then, leaning its sharp, thin head down and gnawing at the joint of its trapped paw. It was bloody and worn through and the coyote bit down harder, chewing through the bone. He watched it there for a while, the creature’s head pulling back and forth at its own front leg. Conner finally took out his handgun, aimed from a short distance and put a bullet in its head.
Conner thought about that coyote now. Man was an animal, he figured, so that strength to survive coursed through his veins as well.
And now there was the business of Coombs’ Gulch. An accident for which there was no insurance, something that couldn’t be guarded against with money or an algorithm or a plan. It couldn’t have come at a worse time. The final quarter reports would be coming due soon and they were all bad. This trip – trying to keep the lid on something that would ruin him, ruin his family and everything he knew – was smack dab in the middle of his executive downturn. But there was no choice in the matter. History had a way of holding on with long tentacles. Gene’s death had garnered him a little sympathy from the bosses and, more importantly, an excuse for them to make their way up into the mountains and finally put an end to this thing hanging over their heads. He was sure of his plan. That lake, deep in the mountains, would keep the secret forever. He knew it would be a tough hike, possibly even dangerous, but it was worth it. He wasn’t going to give up. He would push himself beyond his limits to see it through.
Boy in the Box Page 7
