Jonathan stayed stretched out in the back seat, drinking the beer, letting his brain go numb and thoughts cloud over as they continued past Lake George. His mind softened and returned to dark ideas. Jonathan hadn’t told the brothers anything about his most recent online searches, about his insane suspicions, a line of thought he toyed with for no other reason than a lack of options. He had searched for so long, through so many missing person reports, that he’d finally veered off the well-worn path of rationality and spun a fact-based fiction. He had a creative mind; he knew he was subject to an imagination easily dismissed by someone with the opposite tendency like Michael, for whom the simplest explanation would always suffice. Jonathan could picture Michael’s response already and couldn’t blame him. Michael had been known to become visibly angry when confronted with irrationality – emotions and stupidity set him off like gasoline to fire. Conner would probably dismiss any explanation out of his need to just be done with it and get back to his life. But Jonathan needed some kind of reason, some rationale as to who the boy was or what he was doing out there on his own. It was like following a pathway as far as it would go, only to find that it led to the edge of an abyss. Was it Nietzsche who said something about the abyss staring back?
So Jonathan decided to stare into the abyss some more. While Michael rifled beers in the front, Jonathan began searching through children who went missing further in the past than any of them had bothered looking. He found websites that preserved old missing files from decades before the internet and transferred them into searchable data. He pushed further and further into the past – news articles, bulletins, photographs of ‘missing’ posters, grainy, pixilated photos on the back of milk cartons. His eyes sagged from the beer and the early morning. The images blurred. He kept scrolling and scrolling; the pictures flashed by like television commercials.
And then, like a dream, the moment came to him – the moment that had eluded him for so long. A flash of recognition, a clenching in his gut before his mind could even register the tiny image on the screen. His face. Young and flesh-colored and whole. Jonathan saw him smiling with small white teeth, boyish hands soft and curled in his lap of corduroy pants. His plaid shirt in muted, earthy colors, born out of the Seventies when every color seemed a shade of yellow and brown. It was a school photo of Thomas Terrywile, and it was attached to a newspaper article from the Desmond Dispatch out of Pennsylvania, dated 1985. The headline read, ‘Local Boy Missing, Police Find Signs of Cult Activity’.
Thomas disappeared after school on April 28 over thirty years ago. He was last seen walking home from school, setting out across the football field behind the Edward McNally Middle School in Desmond, PA. His home was a short quarter-mile walk on a path through a small, crooked finger of trees connected to an expansive forest to the north. He took the path to and from school every day, not uncommon at the time. Several other schoolchildren took the same path, all hailing from the same small neighborhood, but this day he was walking alone. Some kids noticed him leaving but paid little attention, a small figure disappearing down the path, nothing out of the ordinary. But by eight o’clock that night, his mother, Candace Terrywile, called the school, friends, neighbors and finally the police.
A search party with flashlights turned up nothing that night. The next morning came the dogs that followed his scent from the school, along the path through the woods and then somehow lost the trail. The search expanded into a massive town-wide undertaking by the third day. Helicopters brought in by the Pennsylvania State Police hovered low over the forest, and police were taking tips from anybody and everybody who could offer some kind of information.
Rumors and whispers started trickling into the police and washed like a flood across the town – people in the forest at night, the sound of chanting carried on the wind, strange glowing lights that emanated out from the trees, strange individuals clad all in black with wide eyes and ugly skin seen roaming through parking lots at the edge of the trees. It was a dark time during the history of the nation. The papers and television were rife with claims of killer cults, Satanists who would kidnap children and sacrifice them in occult rituals. The rumors and stories reached the blood-sucking media, and soon national news helicopters joined the Pennsylvania police search and ran over miles of forested land that stretched out beyond the town. Headlines splashed fantastic rumors and speculation; special detectives were called in from other counties.
The hysteria of Thomas Terrywile’s disappearance finally culminated in some grainy photos of a clearing in those woods. The supposed site of some kind of cult ritual. The leaves were clearly raked out of a circular area. Rocks, partially set in the ground, were arranged in a circle surrounding a rather elaborate geometric design, and then formed a series of crisscrossing lines – some of which extended beyond the edge of the circle, with a final, rectangular space in the center. The detectives were at a loss to explain the design. It was not the typical pentagram found on heavy-metal album covers and spray-painted on abandoned bridges. An altar was set to the side, built with stones placed one atop another and stained with a dark brown substance. Supposedly occult symbols were carved in the trees, small animal bones were piled together to form particular, peculiar designs, and there was evidence of a fire. The police found a small, ramshackle cabin beyond the clearing. Syringes on the ground, more strange symbols spray-painted on the plywood walls, candles dripping dark wax. There was children’s clothing on the floor of the cabin, but none of it matched up to Thomas Terrywile. Fingernails had carved deep gouges in the wood walls. The police did the usual for the time – rousted some of the local teenagers and weirdos with long hair and black T-shirts and questioned them, revealing sordid tales of marijuana use and rebellion against the moral majority. But there was no sign of Thomas Terrywile anywhere. No one the cops questioned could explain the symbols in the woods. None of them had any connection together, despite a desperate search for a larger conspiracy. In the end, there was nothing. Thomas Terrywile was gone without a trace.
And then, like a shooting star, the story disappeared. The media moved on to the next big headline, satisfied with an answer that was not an answer at all. Jonathan found a final article about Thomas Terrywile – not so much about him but about his mother, left afraid and alone. It was one of those ‘still looking after five long years’ stories, and pictured in that newspaper was Thomas’s mother. She was only thirty-seven years old but looked fifty, lips caving into her dry and withering mouth, her big, Eighties-style perm translucent in an obvious and sad attempt to cover up her hair loss. Even in the photograph, Jonathan could see her scalp. A dress from the dollar-store rack hung from her shoulders. She looked like a ghost, and her words, though printed, were the words of the dead and defeated. Reporters asked her if she was still looking. “I’ll never stop looking,” she told them. “I still get people calling me every year saying they saw him. In a crowd in the city. In a park all alone feeding some ducks. Walking through a campground in Nebraska. He’s out there somewhere, I can feel it. It’s like he’s there and gone at the same time; it just depends on when you look. I just feel like the whole world blinked and he was gone. But maybe if we all blink again, he’ll be there.”
Jonathan forced Conner to pull to the side of the road. He fell out of the back seat onto the cold asphalt and the sparse, dying grass that smelled of rubber and oil, and vomited up whatever was left in his stomach. He wished he could purge more just then – organs, blood, memories.
Michael was still drinking a beer in the passenger seat, and Conner was mumbling something to himself, his normally cool facade giving way to a brooding anger and frustration. The brothers looked down at him in a mixture of annoyance and disgust. It was an impossibility; Jonathan knew they would never believe him. He didn’t believe it himself, but he knew it was the same boy – something primeval in his mind screamed in recognition. His hands dug at the pebbles on the side of the road; his mouth sucked in cold air tinged with bile. The win
d shook the trees.
Jonathan turned and looked back at them in horror.
Chapter Ten
They arrived in Pasternak a little after 5:00 p.m. with the sun inching below the western mountains and the town preternaturally dark. It was a place that seemed to grow up out of nothing, like a patch of moss on a giant rock. It was a dying place, not long for this world. Pasternak was forever losing – people, business, life. It seemed to shrink in the cold shadow of the mountains but somehow remained populated with stragglers who found ways to get by with virtually no major industry in the area. The town was originally settled in 1850 as an iron mining and timber town, but social and governmental changes ended it before it could ever really begin. The Adirondack logging industry was pursued by the government, while large and brutal corporations sought to capitalize on veins of iron that coursed through the mountains and played havoc with explorers’ compasses. The iron industry, however, never truly materialized. Only five years into opening operations and building over one hundred factory houses in Pasternak, the Witherbee-Sherman Mining Company closed up the mines and shuttered its blast furnaces. The deposits around Pasternak were too deep, the iron veins too thin to follow to their source. A small collapse, which claimed the lives of five men, finally ended operations, and Witherbee-Sherman decided to focus on their other factory towns like Mineville and Moriah. The logging industry held on for two decades before famed topographical engineer and environmental activist Verplanck Colvin issued his poetic and apocalyptic report to the state legislature, saying the Adirondack wilderness warranted preservation. The state reacted quickly and decisively, creating a state forest preserve that exists to this day. Pasternak was ruined virtually overnight, and the townspeople burnt an effigy of Colvin during a disturbing night of unrest. Old-timers, steeped in the history of the town, still sneer at the mention of his name, and the collective loathing ran as deep as the iron deposits beneath coniferous mountains, which remain untouched.
Few new houses had been built since the 1800s, and the ‘town’ consisted of Main Street and two bisecting roads that created a small square of commerce. The ‘commerce’ consisted of one gas station (there was a second by the freeway), a diner, a bar, VFW, a small supply store, and some specialty shops that sold guns and ammo, bait and tackle, musical instruments and home decor. The white steeple of a one-room church was the highest point, reaching just above the trees at the western end. The small, brick elementary school was around the corner. There were two more blocks of houses in either direction, but there wasn’t much keeping Pasternak running besides spite and a continual need to hang on to the last remnants of a forgotten life. At least an hour’s drive from any populated area that could actually give someone a career, it seemed to exist outside time and culture, a place that would probably never die but was never truly alive to begin with. If anything supplied Pasternak with lifeblood it was, in one way or the other, the wilderness itself. A river crisscrossed with small bridges ran alongside the town square. The water was low from lack of rain, shallow swirls of darkness around gray-white stones. The trees crept in from every direction. One could turn a corner and find themselves face-to-face with a vast wilderness, constantly lurking at the threshold.
Conner pulled into the parking lot of a small Piggly Wiggly, which did its best to supply everything the townspeople might need before they had to get on the highway and drive several miles south to an actual store. Pickup trucks lined the sidewalks. There were a few small cars in a Cumberland Farms parking lot. Michael was slightly drunk, Conner’s eyes bloodshot from driving, Jonathan’s face drained, withered and white. He felt like he was seeing the world – the real world – for the first time, shocked into existence by the ghost of Thomas Terrywile.
In that way he resembled the residents of Pasternak – at least the few who were wandering the aisles of the small grocery. Obviously single, unshaved older men limped slowly with handheld baskets; abandoned women leaned heavily on wire shopping carts with chattering wheels to support their aged bulk. They all seemed in a similar state of shock, as if the bottom had dropped out from beneath them and they were lost in a new weightless, worthless world. The only sign of life was the girl working the checkout register, waiting for a customer, her thumb swiping at a smartphone.
Jonathan and the brothers bought food they could carry – jerky, candy bars, trail mix – and then food for the cabin – eggs, bacon, bread, peanut butter. Conner planned on a massive breakfast before setting out in the morning. The girl at the register was probably sixteen, blond hair in a ponytail and disinterested eyes. She could have been found anywhere in America, but she was here and resented that most of all.
Michael stopped briefly at the neighboring liquor store and bought three bottles of whiskey, mumbling, “We’ll need these.” Stress fractures were beginning to show on his stony face. Conner remained business as usual, keeping up his slick demeanor, but Jonathan suspected that by the end they all would be revealed, stripped of their phony facades, like a gutted deer, opened to show its inner workings to the world.
Bill Flood’s apartment was just above the Olde American Diner on the corner of Main and Black Bridge Road, which crossed the cold and frothy Wilbur Creek. Darkness came early as the sun dropped below the mountains, and light from the diner showed a few couples seated in Fifties-style booths and men in trucker caps drinking coffee. A hastily constructed wooden staircase climbed the side of the diner to a small landing outside Bill’s apartment. Conner knocked while Jonathan and Michael waited a couple of steps below. They waited and knocked again and waited.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” Conner said.
“He knew we were coming?” Jonathan asked.
“I talked to him last week,” Conner said. He took out his phone and called. They could hear the phone ringing just beyond the door. He then tried Bill’s cell phone, but it went straight to voicemail.
“Goddammit,” Conner said. “I just want to be there already.”
“Does anyone remember how to get to the cabin? Maybe we could go out there without him,” Jonathan said.
“Hell if I remember. The road isn’t even on the map, and even if we found it, what are we going to do, break in?” Conner said.
They stood for a moment longer, looking around the dark, lonely town accented with streetlights. It was cold, approaching freezing. Trucks and cars rolled down Main Street; figures with thick jackets and jeans trundled along the sidewalk in and out of the glow of shop windows and the Olde American Diner. From only the second floor, they could see over the tops of the century-old buildings to the surrounding mountains.
“We’re going to be out there with all that,” Jonathan said.
“With all what?”
He nodded toward the heavy darkness. The brothers looked and understood, on some level. At least at home there was the knowledge that civilization was right around the corner, but here there was no such refuge. In the mountains, night was still as ancient as when man first sparked fire and prayed to strange gods. And now they were here, dressed as hunters like Conner’s young son at the Halloween parade, pretending they could go out and live that dark life, complete their sacrifice. New fools in an old world, staring into the immense black of a moonless night.
There was no sign of Bill in the diner, and the waitress said she hadn’t seen him all day, but that he was a regular in the mornings. She suggested trying a tavern just down the street where he was known to frequent. Conner kept shaking his head and cursing Bill beneath his breath.
Jonathan called Mary to check in and tell her they had arrived safely but were still waiting on the cabin owner. He talked with Jacob and told his only son that he missed him. It was true; he missed them both terribly, the purpose of the trip adding to his burden, his fear of losing the only good things in his life if the plan went awry. Already the signs were not good. They were all tense. Everything needed to function perfectly in order for them to complete
their task and return home before the weather set in. Jonathan told Mary cell coverage was limited at the cabin, so this was probably the last he’d speak to her or Jacob for three days. He told her he loved her and then told himself it was all for her and Jacob. It was both the truth and a lie.
Finally, Michael said, “Fuck it, let’s get some food and beers. Maybe we can find that old bastard at that bar.” Conner drove the SUV across the small town and parked outside The Forge, a tavern with small windows shining Pabst and Budweiser neon into the night. The Forge was a small place. It looked ramshackle even in a place as poor as Pasternak, the kind of place that probably spurred numerous public safety complaints but would never be touched because all the men drank there.
The inside was all dim light and smoke, New York’s anti-smoking laws ignored in this quiet cave. There were several tables in the front, and the bar ran the length of a narrow, wood-paneled interior. Men wrapped in shade and flannel, with thick hands and forearms, sat in booths and on barstools. The bartender was bone thin, scraggly hair dripping down his skull; he wore only jeans and an undershirt. The air inside was hot and stale and smelled of old grease and beer. A group of five men were talking at the corner of the bar, laughing loudly, beers in hand, looking up occasionally at a television running football highlights. They went silent when Conner, Michael and Jonathan walked through the door. It was right out of an old Western. Some things never change; in a neighborhood bar, when strangers walk in they get looked up and down. Ten or twelve years earlier it would have been the three of them back at home standing in the corner of the East Side Tavern, swilling cheap beer and staring down the newcomer. Yet this seemed different. The place literally went silent, and it wasn’t until after they sat down at a table that the talking began again, this time in slow and low murmurs.
Boy in the Box Page 10
