"Mommy!" Angie squirmed in my arms, so I set her to the sidewalk, and she sprinted toward her mother. They ran into each other, and Mrs. Turner swooped her daughter into her arms, both of them crying as she held Angie tightly to her chest.
I felt an arm wrap gently around my waist before I saw Melissa standing at my side. She shivered against me, and I knew it was time to get her home.
"How can I ever thank you two?" Mrs. Turner asked, wiping the tears from her eyes.
"Seeing both of you together like this is thanks aplenty," I replied.
"We're did you find her?"
I let out a short chuckle. "That's a long story. One I think your daughter can and should tell you."
"And believe her," Melissa added. "For what you're going to hear will seem so farfetched. But, it’ll all be true."
Angie gave both Melissa and me a hug, and we said our final goodbyes. I drove back to Julie’s house, as Melissa wept openly against my shoulder, letting loose weeks of pain and agony that had built up against a dam that just gave out. Neither of us said a word until we arrived at the house.
"How are we going to tell Julie?" Melissa asked, leaning heavily against me, as I turned the key and unlocked the front door.
"Well, she's safely tucked away in Milwaukee now," I replied. When Melissa looked up at me in confusion, I told her how Sly and I had convinced Julie to leave--under certain conditions. "We'll drive there ourselves tomorrow and break the news to her in person."
As I was about to plop down on the living room sofa, I noticed Sly's pipe lying on the floor at my feet. Picking it up, I turned it over and over in my hand. This was the last tie Sly had to the real world and us.
Melissa patted the couch beside her. "Will you please sit down? I need you to lean against."
Obliging, I sat and put my arm around her. I shivered with happiness. We both sighed heavily at the same time--and broke out into a long, well deserved guffaw. I’m not sure why we laughed like that, after the devastation we had experienced over the summer, but, somehow, it just felt needed.
Twenty minutes later we both slept peacefully in each other arms.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE:
Loose Ends
I awakened to the sound of a car pulling into the driveway. Rubbing my eyes and yawning, I stood and walked to the front picture window to check who decided to drop in and pay us a visit. I parted the drapes and the familiar sight of Detective Pierce's battered station wagon glared back at me. Pierce got out of the driver side door.
"Where's the gun?" I shouted to a sleeping Melissa, as I jerked my head about searching for it myself.
She bolted into an upright position, eyes wide open with new-found fear. "What?"
"The gun, the gun, where is it?"
"On the banister by the front door, where you set it." Her facial expression displayed the nightmare that was starting over again. "Why?"
"Pierce is here." The gun was where she said it was, and I checked the chambers to make sure it was still packing bullets. "He's walking up the steps right now. And he's one of them. He--"
"No!" Melissa shouted, jumping up off the couch, just as I reached for the doorknob.
I let go and turned to face her.
"That wasn't Detective Pierce you saw in the tunnel." She spoke with slow deliberate words, as if trying to cut through my emotions to my brain. "Reed made one of his followers to look just like him." She placed her hand on my shoulder. "What you saw was an illusion. That's all."
The doorbell rang.
My heart began to slow. "Are you sure?" I asked, staring blankly at her, trying to comprehend the meaning of what she was trying to get through to me.
She nodded. "Positive. Reed was scared to death, literally, of Detective Pierce, and stayed as far away as possible from all police officers." She shook my shoulder. "Think about it. Pierce had a gun."
I relaxed and handed the pistol to Melissa. "All right, but I want you to stay back with this at the ready." I knew she believed in what she was telling me, but Reed was so adept with his illusions, there was no telling anymore what was real and what wasn't. "I want to see for myself that he's warm. Just to be on the safe side."
She shot me a look of disapproval, but moved back into the kitchen anyway.
The bell rang again, twice, and I opened the door, immediately sticking out my right hand for Pierce to shake. "How's it going, Pierce?"
Pierce looked down at my proffered hand in confusion for a second, and then shook his head as he shook my hand. He was warm, and I breathed a heavy internal sigh of relief.
"Where in the hell have you been?" he asked, as I showed him into the living room. "I was here last evening looking for you, and no one was around." He sat on the couch. "You had me worried. I didn't know what--"
"Hi, Detective," Melissa said, entering the room, without the gun.
Pierce stretched his head to look past her, as if expecting others to follow. "Where's the fearsome twosome?"
Melissa and I shot each other a brief glance, mentally asking each other to tell him what had happened.
I sighed before replying. "Julie's in Milwaukee." Then, after a pause: "And Sly is dead."
Pierce's eyebrows shot up. "What?"
"Lean back in your chair, Detective," I said, sitting opposite him. "We have quite the tale to tell you."
Pierce had no comments throughout the account, though at times he'd purse his lips as if to ask a question, but only end up shaking his head in incredulity. When I touched upon the point where he himself met me in the tunnel, I thought he was going to fall off the edge of the couch. Yet, he said nothing.
Until I finished.
Pierce leaned back, sighed and shook his head one last time. "And you can confirm all this?" he asked Melissa.
She nodded. "Every last word."
He put away his notebook, tucking it in his shirt pocket after missing three times. "This is going to be tough for not just me to swallow; you understand that?" He gritted his teeth at the both of us. "But it'll be easy enough to verify that--what did you call it, Wickerman's?--is in the present condition you claim it to be." He stood, pulling down his on his pants legs. "What do you say we head out that way right--"
"NO!" Melissa and I both said at the same time.
"No thanks," I added. "I think you understand."
He nodded, as if he did, and we walked him to the front door. "What about you two?" he asked on the steps once outside. Overhead, a puff of cumulus cloud covered the sun. "Where to from here?"
"To Milwaukee," I replied. "At least for a little while. Julie doesn't yet know about Sly, and I think the three of us are going to need some time to put this whole damn mess behind us." The sun came out from behind a cumulous cloud, and I had to squint. "After that, your guess is as good as ours."
He shook my hand, and then Melissa's. "Well, all I can do is wish you good luck." He stopped before getting into his station wagon, and turned to say something, but the thought never crossed his lips. He waved, and drove off--down the deserted road.
Putting my right arm around Melissa, I said, "You know what I really want to do right this moment?"
She smiled. "No."
"Get out of these sticky pants. On that imaginary cross I--
She patted my stomach as she walked me back inside. "I know," she said. "I know."
* * *
When Julie opened the door of my grandmother's house later that evening to let us in, she broke out into a smile I thought would break her face when she saw Melissa. She hugged Melissa, but when she opened her eyes to look behind us for Sly, that smile wavered, and then died.
"He's gone," I said, before she had the chance to ask.
She didn't cry at first as I told the story from the point we watched her drive off to Milwaukee, and she didn't interrupt even once. I made Sly out to be the hero he really was--no chance to tarnish that image--but I rearranged the facts when I got to the point where Melissa shot him. In my version, Reed was the killer, and Melissa
said nothing to contradict. It was better that way.
When I finished she put her head on my shoulder and let out all her grief. Putting my arm around her, I held her until the spasms quit and the tears began to dry.
After Julie went off to bed, Melissa crawled into my arms, and that was the way we spent the remainder of the evening.
"I love you, Stephen," she whispered in my ear.
And it was all worth it, I thought.
EPILOGUE
Now that time has put enough room between me and those events back in Dodsville--five years--my mind only wishes to blot them out. Which, I guess, is good. The nightmares have died down to what probably I should consider a normal rate of occurrence. Yet, sometimes I awaken in the middle of the night, drenched in my own sweat, and shaking from a dream I can't quite remember. But I know what those dreams are about.
Melissa and I stayed together for a little over a year after the madness of Dodsville was left behind us. We resided under the same roof at the house in Milwaukee left to me by my grandmother, but during that time we only seemed to grow further apart. The memories of Dodsville built up a wall between us, and no matter how hard we tried to break down the bricks, new ones replaced them even faster. Only while making love did the wedge between us lift. But, afterwards, as we lay together, her eyes would never meet mine. Not until morning.
Three years ago she married some guy she met in California while working at her new job. Last I heard from Melissa was about six months ago, Christmas, when we exchanged cards. She stated in the card she was pregnant again (third time), and was praying that this one would go full term. She had lost the other two.
I called her once before the card, and her tone sounded as though she wished I hadn't. To her, I suppose, I'm a reminder of a horrifying past, and am better left as a memory.
As for me, I quit teaching after one more year (I kept looking into the eyes of my students, as if somehow they weren’t real anymore), and took a sales position with a local factory. Not exactly what I want to be doing with my life, but, then, I left a good part of me behind that mirror.
This past summer I went back to Dodsville to visit Julie. She, too, is still alone. Staying only a week, I returned to Milwaukee; however, I left with no regrets. While I was in Dodsville, I drove past where Wickerman's house used to be, and even got out of my car to look around. The basement was still there, though filled with weeds and broken bottles. The barn in back was still standing also. The words "Wood Tick" were still apparent against the washed-out red backdrop, though barely legible now, as the sun had done its damage.
I remember wondering, kicking an empty pop can into the foundation, if maybe there had been another way out of those tunnels. After all, they must have had a contingency plan in case the house burned down on its own. Right?
Getting back into my car, I took one last look in the rear view mirror, put the transmission in drive, and headed out of Dodsville forever.
I had been through enough.
THE END
(for now)
The Haunting of Stephen Wells
Author’s Note: There is no publication date yet, but by hopefully summer ’10. Enjoy the first chapter.
CHAPTER ONE:
The Cabin
The first raindrops hit my windshield just as the sun set below the horizon for the day. Big, fat drops that splattered like unexpecting June bugs flying lazily into a bug light on a quiet summer’s eve. “Fuck,” I muttered under my breath, though quite colorlessly. I reached to turn on both the wipers and the headlights, as daylight was fast receding. This was all that I needed.
I was lost deep in Wisconsin country, driving down a gravel road, with the forest crowding me on both sides, in search of a grass driveway that would lead to a lone cabin on a secluded lake. The cabin belonged to my childhood best friend, Travis McCarthy. He agreed to loan it to me since he now resided in San Francisco and wasn’t planning on using it this particular summer. He was simply too busy with work, attempting to make partner in his law firm.
It was Travis who suggested I use the cabin in the first place. I had called him shortly after my divorce. I was depressed and who better to talk to when you’re feeling down than your childhood best friend? The friend you had when times were innocent—and near perfect. Before you became an adult and everything got all screwed up. “Come back home to Dodsville,” he said, “and spend some time at my cabin. You’ll be all alone, no one at all to bother you, and you’ll be able to get your shit back together.” It seemed like the perfect idea from the very moment he had mentioned it as I had also recently lost my job, which, on a positive note, now allowed me plenty of unrestricted free time. I even looked forward to a stretch away from Las Vegas, where I currently resided, to spend time alone in a cabin deep in the Wisconsin forest on a secluded lake—away from all civilization and its inane problems.
And now I was lost, and the darkness of country night was fast closing in. Travis had told me I would find the driveway in a patch of natural grassland that made a break in the solid wall of trees. The lady in the green floral dress, and crooked yellow teeth, at the Little Country Store, where I stopped an hour ago to buy a couple of bags of groceries and finalize the directions, told me it would be down this particular road about fifteen minutes away. And now it was raining.
And getting dark.
I checked my cell phone one last time for any signal. There, of course, was none. That would have been too easy—to simply dial Travis’s number and have him tell me from the other side of the country on how to get out of this situation. I had already tried to go back to the country store, but it wasn’t where I thought it was. The lady had told me to drive past two intersections and take the third right. Maybe I had daydreamed my way past one of the intersections. After all, my mind was deeply preoccupied on other matters most of the time. My wife. My daughter. My job.
My entire life.
I did a u-turn on the gravel road, spinning out the back tires to finish the turn on such a narrow road, and drove until I found the next intersection. The rain came down even harder as I made a right turn, and with the increasing darkness, I wondered bleakly if I would even be able to see the grassy interlude as I passed it.
Suddenly the rain stopped as fast as it began, as though I had driven under a glass dome, just as I reached an edge to the line of trees. To my right, grass, about waist high, now occupied the landscape. I slowed and subconsciously pressed the button to roll down the passenger-side window. The sky lightened a bit, and I noticed a narrow patch of much shorter grass in the middle of the ubiquitous longer grass. I stopped the car, backed up to the narrow patch and saw that the shorter grass was about a car’s length wide and flowed up to the top of a hill.
“This has to be it,” I muttered to myself gloomily. At least it had better be. Thoughts of being lost out here during the night had been nagging me for the last half hour.
I turned the car and drove through a shallow ditch, barely filled with water, and continued to the top of the hill. Once there, I stopped the car and got out to see what was ahead before driving blindly into it. The grass path took an abrupt turn to the right and continued back into the forest, disappearing into the increasing shadows. The trees seemed to swallow the driveway.
With a sigh I got back into driver’s seat and continued into the forest. I looked out the open passenger window but I couldn’t see farther than ten feet into the dense bank of trees. Anything could be lurking just beyond my sight, watching me pass with silent eyes. I again pushed the window button, this time to roll it back up. And just to be safe, I hit the door lock button, too.
About a minute later, though it seemed longer, my headlights lit up the cabin in the distance. The narrow drive opened into a small gravel parking lot. I shut off the engine and exited the car. The mosquitoes discovered me instantly, and I batted them away as I started my way to the cabin’s door. But I stopped suddenly before getting there, noticing the lake below. The cabin rested on a hill about fi
fty feet above and about 100 feet back from the open waters.
There were a few trees scattered here and there between the cabin and the lake, but the lake surface could easily be seen between them. Travis must have spent a month of weekends clearing all those trees to get the perfect view. The surface of the lake was completely calm. The surface was also completely black—eerily black, with only a small ripple here and there from a fish rising to the surface to nab an insect that had the misfortune on landing on the water. The lake was only about 200 yards across but I couldn’t see either end from left to right. The forest and the encroaching darkness blocked the view.
On the other side of the lake was more forest, with a break almost directly across from me where another cabin stood. There was just enough brightness left to see the shore of the other side. There were no lights on in any of the windows and no cars in the parking lot next to it. Travis had said I would be completely alone out here. He didn’t say anything about another cabin. Anyway, no one appeared to be there.
I slapped at a mosquito on the back of my neck but missed. It flew lazily off with some of my blood filling its belly—ready now to mate and make more damn mosquitoes. The air smelled of wet vegetation. I had almost forgotten about the Wisconsin air after a rain storm. The atmosphere smelled refreshing and felt purged. Another mosquito bit me on the arm, but I was quick enough this time to splat it before it got away. I flipped the corpse off my skin and decided it was time to head indoors. When I was a kid here in Wisconsin years ago, the only problem with a mosquito bite was the itching that followed. Now I recalled hearing on the news about some sort of West Nile Virus. Just the sound of it gave me the creeps.
The Revenant: A Horror in Dodsville Page 46
