As if on cue, my cell phone rang. The ID verified what I already suspected. “Hey,” I said in answer.
“Hi, it’s me. Just wanted to let you know Lou is fed and we’re hanging out for a few. He’s purring away, happy as a clam.”
“He misses you.”
“I miss him, too.” She cleared her throat. “Anyway he’s fed, so…”
Dead air hung between us like a gutted corpse. Silence. I’ve never been able to figure out if I love or hate it.
“Are you there?” she finally asked.
“Yes, sorry.” I rose from the bed and walked over to the window. With all the rain and darkness it was impossible to see much of anything out there. “I’ve got a room at a local place here, should see Caleb tomorrow.”
“Is he all right?”
“Far as I know, yeah.”
“And you? Are you all right?”
“Do you care?”
“Can’t imagine why I’d ask if I didn’t.”
I squeezed shut my eyes in an attempt to ward off the memories. “I’ll be OK,” I told her. “If I can survive the last few months I can get through anything.”
“It hasn’t exactly been easy for me either, you know.”
“You’re the one who wanted this Jill, not me.”
I could hear her breathing into the phone and pictured her closing her eyes and pinching the bridge of her nose with her free hand the way she so often did when she was stressed out or frustrated. “OK, I didn’t mean to get into a deep discussion.”
“I know. God forbid we have one of those, right?”
“I was simply asking if you were all right, I’m concerned about whatever the hell it is you’re doing up there with Caleb and—you know what—forget it, I should get going anyway, I’ve got things to do at home. I’ll stop by again tomorrow and—”
“Jill,” I heard myself say, my hand clutching the cell so hard it hurt, “I need…”
She waited, hopeful perhaps, that I might find the right words.
I hoped just as hard and right along with her, but they never came.
“I should go,” she said softly.
“I’ll be back soon as I can.”
“Be careful. Caleb, he’s sick, Derrick. He’s dangerous.”
“Caleb wouldn’t hurt a fly.”
“But then you’re not a fly, are you?”
Sadly, this was the longest and most civil conversation I’d had with my wife in months. It was always somewhat easier talking on the phone, I suppose, can’t see the scars like you can up-close and personal, but you still hear and feel the pain you’ve inflicted on each other because you carry it with you always. I found myself longing for the days when we were still all right, when if I missed Jill I could find solace in the knowledge that it was always just a matter of time before I’d be back in her arms and safe in her love. Now she seemed lost to me across impossible distances, alive but beyond reach.
“How the hell did this happen?” I asked. “How did we get here?”
“We got tired.” Her voice caught in her throat. “I think we just got tired.”
“We didn’t come all this way to throw it out now, did we?”
“It’s not that easy.”
“Yes it is.”
“No, it isn’t.”
“I want to come home, Jill. Let me come home.”
“Derrick…”
“You really don’t want me back? Really?”
“I can’t do this right now. I’m sorry, I just can’t.”
I turned away from the window and gave the storm my back. “OK.”
“I heard about the murders up there, you know,” she said rather abruptly. “They were all over the news. Do you think Caleb had something to do with them?”
“Of course not. For God’ sake, you’ve known Caleb almost as long as I—”
“So it’s just coincidence that you’re meeting him there, in Sheppard Beach. You honestly expect me to believe that?”
I’d always kept Jill away from all this, or thought I had. “Let me worry about Caleb. I thought we were talking about us.”
“We are,” she said evenly. “But that’s what you’ve never quite been able to grasp when it comes to him. When we’re talking about Caleb we’re talking about us too, it’s impossible not to. He’s a part of you just like I am.”
“No, not just like you are.”
“This infatuation you two have had all these years about the murders in town and The Ragman and all that foolishness from your grandfather’s old boogieman stories, none of which had anything to do with the rest, it’s morbid and strange and always has been. And Caleb, he’s been obsessed with this shit for years. There were nights you spoke with him on the phone for hours and that’s all he talked about, you told me so yourself. All this death and horror, it’s sick, Derrick. What’s he doing there? Is he some sort of murder groupie or something? He’s one of those freaks now, is that it?”
“He’s a junkie,” I told her. “And he’s probably dying.”
“Has he really gotten that bad?”
“Yes, he’s really gotten that bad.”
“Then maybe you should bring him home.”
I tried to fight it but smiled a little anyway. There she was, the woman I’d fallen in love with, the woman who brought home stray cats and lost dogs; who volunteered at soup kitchens and homeless shelters and was so sure she could change the world through one act of kindness and selflessness at a time. “We’ll see,” I said. “I need to find out what’s happening first and then make an assessment from there.”
We listened to each other breath a while.
“Do what you need to do,” she said. “We’ll talk more when you get back.”
“Tell Louie I’ll see him soon. Tell him I love him.”
“He already knows.”
“You think he loves me back?”
“Yes, I do. And I think he always will.”
Before I could take things any further, she said goodnight, and with a quick and final click she was gone, swallowed back into the silence from which she’d come.
Not long after Jill and I split, when I finally dragged my ass out of that motel room chair, I called Caleb. His apartment number had been disconnected and his cell didn’t answer. I left a message. Two hours later some stoned-out hippie chick named Jane called me back to tell me it wasn’t Caleb’s phone anymore. He was hurting for money, she explained, and had sold it to her a few weeks before. She’d assumed the monthly payments and planned to keep the number until the contract ran out. When I asked if she knew where I could find him she’d laughed and said, “Dude, who ever knows where Caleb is? He’s like the wind, kid.” I asked her if he was all right. He’s fucking paranoid, she said. Thinks The Devil’s following him and spying on him, trying to destroy his life and listening in on his phone calls, watching his every move. She told me he thought he was being tracked and kept under surveillance by The Devil to make sure he kept his secrets to himself. What secrets? Who knows, she said. He’s fucking crazy, dude. I figured I had nothing to lose so I asked her to tell him to call me if or when she saw him again. It’s important, I told her. Sure, she said, groovy. No problem-o.
A week or so later my cell rang in the middle of the night. Caleb was on the line, calling collect from a payphone in New York City. I accepted the charges, and as the call connected, realized he’d already started talking and was halfway through whatever conversation he’d planned on having with me. I’d seen him do this before when he was high or drunk. He’d start talking then pick up a phone and dial, so by the time the person on the other end answered Caleb was already well into the conversation and they’d have no idea what the hell he was talking about. It took me a moment but I got the gist of his rant, something about evil and how it was stalking him, draining him and slowly destroying him. “I try to stay high,” he said, weeping suddenly. “I—I have to stay high, it—it’s the only way but I still see the fucker, I—he’s always there. I…”
&nb
sp; “The Ragman’s not real, Caleb. He’s a myth, a nightmare, a story. That’s all.”
“I saved you,” he said through his tears. “Do you know that? I saved you.”
“Why don’t you let me send you a bus ticket? Come stay with me a while, I—”
“I can’t, you don’t understand.”
“Neither do you. I have some bad news to tell you, Jill and I—”
“I saved you,” he cried, slamming the phone down before I could respond.
I hadn’t spoken to him since, but those words still haunted me. Something in the way he said them chilled me to the bone, then and now, and although I wasn’t sure if they had actual meaning or if it was just another of his drugged-out tirades, my marriage was imploding; I couldn’t focus on Caleb’s problems. So I dismissed the entire thing as more of his usual dramatics and crawled back into my own despair.
But who was I to dismiss him or his problems, his fears, his pain and terror?
My heart was broken. He was dying.
The rain kept on, whispering its secrets through blurred glass, tapping them out in code as if on the other side of that black window the Ragman was drumming his bloody fingers against the pane.
Maybe he really was out there somewhere.
I headed back down to the bar. A few shots weren’t going to get it done.
Not tonight.
* * * *
Listen to that rain. Can you hear it?
I hear it, Grandpa.
Then tell me what you hear. Listen real good and you’ll hear it whispering to you.
The rain doesn’t whisper to people, Grandpa.
You’re just a little boy, you don’t know nothing yet. But one day you will.
What does the rain say?
It tells you things you need to know. You can’t just see and hear the rain. You got to feel it. There’s more there. Things behind the rain…inside it...
Like monsters? Mommy and Grandma said there’s no such thing as monsters.
And what do you think?
I don’t believe in monsters, either.
Sometimes I think that’s all I believe in.
I don’t understand, Grandpa.
I know, son. I don’t either. I never have.
I vaguely remembered wearily climbing the stairs back to my room, and had even blurrier memories of sitting down in the bar drinking with Maggie until the wee hours of the morning. I know at one point she’d told me to go to bed and that she’d be crashing in her apartment out back, but I couldn’t remember much of what we’d talked about. Ironically, older memories were much clearer that night, fresher somehow, flooding my mind and senses the same way my grandfather’s stories once had.
After kicking my shoes off and collapsing on the bed, I closed my eyes a moment but promised myself because it was too dangerous to be vulnerable in a place like this, I wouldn’t sleep. But then, I’d also promised myself I wouldn’t drink to excess, so what was one more broken promise on a night of lies where creeping devils from the darkest nightmares of my childhood had returned? Perhaps they’d never really left, but like the secrets in the rain my grandfather spoke of, had been there all along.
Maybe I’d only begun to hear them again because I was listening closely enough.
Whispers in my mind assured me all I needed was a little rest.
I never meant to sleep, never meant to dream.
But when that rainy night reached out and touched me, I did both.
SEVEN
When I was seven I had a friend named Adam who loved trains. His father had transformed his entire cellar into another world, a magical place where numerous trains slithered along foot after foot of plastic track. An entire town, various stations, people and cars, grass and hills and parks and tunnels all resided there, the tracks winding through all of it, from one corner of the basement to the next. While I’d never been a train fanatic myself, I quickly became one. In my brief seven years, his trains were without question the most amazing thing I’d ever seen. I longed to have something similar, so when Christmas rolled around I asked for a train set. Santa Claus got me one, but all the hard work of his elves went to waste because it never made it out of the box. My grandfather had promised to set it up for me but never did, and it all slipped away, forgotten in time. And then Adam and his family moved out of state. As I stood in our yard the morning they left, waving goodbye to my best friend, I was certain I’d never again see anything as magnificent as Adam’s world of trains. In time, my interest diminished, but trains continued to hold a certain appeal to me—the power, size, the sound and motion—and I always made it a point to take notice of the real trains that moved through town on a regular basis. They were mostly trash trains, of course, but I imagined they were something far more romantic and exciting, and when you’re a child, imagining makes it so. Imagining is enough.
Years later, as a jaded teenager, I found myself in a field one afternoon with Caleb, waiting on a train. Like train robbers, we crouched in the untamed, waist-high grass, listening and watching for a train we knew would eventually cross our path. But the train wasn’t our main focus. We were more concerned with who else might be waiting on that train.
In my drunken slumber, I dreamed of the trains that night. Out cold in my seedy little room above an empty barroom, I rode the trains with Caleb the same way we had all those years before. Running, the wind blowing, the train rumbling down on us like an angry beast, we latched on and pulled ourselves up, climbing the footholds along the side of the boxcars to the top, adrenaline and fear surging through us, our nervous though triumphant laughter muffled by the deafening whistle blasts as the train barreled closer to downtown.
I remembered hanging on for dear life and looking over at Caleb. He looked back with a wide smile and big eyes, more alive and free than I’d ever seen him before or since. We were like superheroes, gods capable of anything, and to us, hopping trains proved it. My grandfather had only been dead a few months, and while I knew he’d have never approved of our behavior, it was the first time since his death I’d felt happy, up there on top of that train, risking my life and loving every minute of it.
Within a few weeks, Caleb and I had become quite proficient at train hopping, and did so nearly every day. Sometimes we’d ride the rails all the way up to the yards in Boston, and then hang around until we found one headed back toward Cape Cod. But normally we’d ride for a short while, maybe until we were a few towns away, then jump off first chance we got.
And all the while, we kept a lookout for The Ragman, the hobo killer.
We never did see him.
“I don’t even like trains,” Caleb told me one night while we lay in that same field waiting on a train and gazing up at the starry skies above. “At least not this kind, I mean, maybe something romantic and classy like in old black-and-white movies where people are crossing Europe or something and there’s spies and all sorts of dashing characters all over the place. But these old trash trains are loud, brutish and inelegant, if you ask me. Just the same, when we’re there, up top, it’s so exhilarating! And just the possibility that The Ragman could be there too, hidden nearby…”
“Do you think he knows who we are?”
“I don’t know. But if he’s still around and still riding these rails, it’s only a matter of time before he does.”
“And then what?”
Caleb never did answer me that night.
The dreams shifted from trains and happier times, when this all seemed like fantasy, an escape from the harsh realities of our everyday lives, to something more sinister and disturbing.
My father…standing in a dark empty room, largely concealed in shadows and what appears to be fog of some kind…his head bowed. He glances up at me but says nothing. His face is so full of sorrow he looks as if he may cry. “I never wanted this for you, son. It should’ve been me.”
I don’t remember his voice. I don’t remember him. “Grandpa said—”
“Stay away from him.”
“All the more reason.”
“Grandpa would never hurt me.”
“No, he wouldn’t. But there were others, son…” He clenches shut his eyes. Somewhere behind him, in the shadows, water drips in a slow but steady stream. “Go home and forget all this as best you can. Go home, Derrick. Run.”
“But Caleb, he—”
“Caleb’s doomed.”
“He’s my friend.”
“Yes, he is. More than you’ll ever know. He saved you.”
“From what?”
“Destiny.” My father opens his eyes, and at first I think he’s crying. Only it isn’t tears leaking from the corners of his eyes. It’s blood. “The Ragman can’t be stopped.”
“He’s just a nightmare.”
“He’s forged by nightmares. There’s more than one kingdom, son.” He slowly raises his arms, holds them up and out to either side, like a victim of crucifixion. When he speaks again, blood pours from his mouth as well, slurring his speech, spattering the cold cement floor and drowning out the sounds of distant running water. “And like all the others, his kingdom comes…his will be done.”
Dreams The Ragman Page 5
