Thaw (Night Fall ™)

by Richard Reece

  “Dani, have you thought about what I said this morning? Will you join us? Thinking that you won’t be there with me—I’ve missed you so much!”

  “I’ve missed you too, Jake.” And still do, I thought. Then—this still hurts—for the first time in my life, I lied to him. “I’m still thinking about it,” I said. “Find me in the morning.”

  “That’s fantastic!” he said. His face lit up with hope, and my heart sank.

  When he had left, I lay down and distracted myself by rehearsing the details of tomorrow’s plan. I’d meet up with Trey. I’d have the needle ready. When Jake came to us, I’d look for Vincent. When I saw him approaching, I’d jab Jake.

  What I didn’t realize was that there was another person in the compound with his own plan. And that would change everything.

  17

  The morning began just as we’d expected. I met Trey in front of the dormitory. During the prayer service there were no hoods around, but as they came out from the building where they worshipped, I thought I spotted Vincent. I felt in the folds of my robe for the syringe.

  That’s when I noticed that the cross over the church door was gone.

  Half an hour after the meeting, the main door of the lodge opened, and Jake was walking toward us. He was smiling broadly, spreading his arms in welcome.

  Suddenly an explosion rocked the grounds. I felt the pressure and the heat before I heard it. When I looked in the direction of the noise, I saw the brick building, the one with the power plant, in flames. Black smoke was already rising in a billowing column.

  Jake’s face showed panic. “What the—? The refrigeration! Father!” He turned to run toward the lodge just as a second explosion blew out its front door and flames began to consume the rest of the structure. Then we saw a man in a hood running toward the church. He threw something, and the third building exploded into smoke and flames like the other two.

  At that moment a taller figure—I was sure it was Vincent—grabbed the man from behind and tried to restrain him. The shorter man was more powerful, though. He bulled Vincent to the ground. In the struggle, his hood fell off. It was Philip Sawyer.

  “Jake,” I yelled over the roar of the flames, “I thought Scatter said he was . . .”

  “‘No longer among us.’ He escaped the compound. We’d been looking for him.”

  By now the cult members were mobilized. Jake, Trey, and I ran toward Philip and Vincent, but there was a solid wall of flame between us and the struggling pair. Meanwhile new explosions, probably the oil barrels in the first building, kept rocking the compound, spewing fiery debris in all directions. Some of it landed on the lodge, which burned now in several places.

  When the hoods reached the flames, they milled around in confusion. That’s when Philip produced a gun and started firing. Jake pulled me to the ground and covered me, but I could still see the struggle. Vincent grabbed Philip’s left arm, but Philip spun around. There was a shot, and Vincent dropped to the ground.

  “My father will die,” Jake was saying, “just as he prophesied. We will enter the next kingdom in a flash of light and a tower of fire!”

  I thought of Vincent’s words: “This world is Scatter’s dream. When the dreamer dies, everything in it vanishes.”

  Abruptly, the shooting stopped. But the flames climbed. The heat was scorching, and the buildings were roaring as if they would collapse at any moment. Where was Trey?

  “I’m okay, Jake,” I shouted over the roar. “Let me up!”

  When I stood up, I saw why the shooting had stopped. Trey must have dived straight through the flames. Now he was wrestling Philip, trying to get the gun away.

  But Philip didn’t plan to go up in smoke. He suddenly threw the gun away, and when Trey moved to get it, Philip ran instead to Vincent’s body on the ground nearby. I think Trey realized it at the same moment I did: Philip was after the paw.

  Ignoring the gun, Trey jumped on Philip again. By now, Scatter’s dream was coming apart. The sky was dark with smoke, and the power plant rumbled louder than a train as it began to collapse. In places the flames rose hundreds of feet. Cult members on fire ran screaming in all directions. Jake and I watched Trey and Philip struggling and waited for the end.

  Then, for a second, Trey got free of Philip’s grasp. Philip still had the paw, though. He held it up and looked around for an exit. But Trey tackled him before he could find one. The jolt jarred the paw loose, and Trey quickly grabbed it.

  The lodge was shaking and rumbling now. “Get out of here while you can, Trey!” I begged, but he couldn’t hear me.

  He could see me and Jake, though, shouting and waving at him through the flames. “Go!” I shouted.

  But before Philip could attack him again, he reared back and threw the paw toward us with all his might. It landed at our feet. The lodge shuddered and started to implode. There was no time to think. I pulled out the tranquilizer and stabbed Jake’s arm. His eyes widened, then he slumped to the ground. I held the paw, saw the air behind us turn to water, took one last look at Trey still fighting Philip, and dragged Jake through the gateway.

  Next thing I knew I was standing in Folly Park in Bridgewater. Jake lay unconscious at my feet. I had to go back and get Trey, even if it meant my life. But the paw wouldn’t move. I held it up and waved it like a wand, but it might as well have been some stick I’d picked up.

  Tears of frustration ran down my cheeks. Then grief. The dreamer had died. The world unlocked by the cat’s paw no longer existed.

  18

  Jake came to after a few hours. By then I’d sneaked into the locker room at the country club, ditched the robe, and dressed in my own stuff.

  I wasn’t sure how I would handle the “new” Jake or how he would react to losing what had become his dream. But Vincent had known what he was doing. Whatever I had injected into Jake was way more complex than just a “tranquilizer.” My friend had no memory of Scatter’s world or anything that had happened there. He remembered missing his parents after the storm. He also had a hazy memory of “an older guy who wanted to help me find them,” but that was all.

  Of course the police were suspicious. They had gotten calls from neighbors, the college, and the supermarket. They knew how long Jake and his parents had been missing. When Jake suddenly resurfaced, he was a prime suspect in his parents’ disappearance. The police questioned him repeatedly, and they thought his “I don’t remember” line was lame.

  When Jake passed a lie detector test, they sent him to a forensic psychiatrist. The shrink said that the trauma of losing his parents had probably caused “compensatory amnesia.” That meant Jake couldn’t deal with the trauma at first, so his memory shut down. This could have happened even if Jake had killed his parents, which is what the police suspected.

  My first days back in Bridgewater, I could have used a little compensatory amnesia myself. I walked through my life like a dead person. I had no appetite. I couldn’t sleep. And there was no one I could tell about what I was feeling. Not even Jake.

  When my parents got home from their vacation, Mom saw my raccoon eyes and realized right away that something wasn’t right with me. “Is there anything you want to talk to me about, honey?” she asked.

  “No,” I lied. “I’m okay. Just really wanting school to start.”

  That would happen in a week, and I still had that paper to finish. And a few more days of work at the club to put in. The warmth had returned, and the pool was crazy busy. It was all I could do to keep track of all the little kids tearing around and warn the middle-schoolers over and over again not to jump off the high dive till the water cleared below.

  It was my fourth day home, and I was getting ready to open the pool. Kids and their parents were already lined up at the gate. When I finally unlocked it, they just about trampled me in their rush to the water. I had turned to head for my perch when I heard a voice behind me.

  “Hey, beautiful.”

  “Trey? Trey?!” It was him! We wrapped our arms around each ot
her. I was laughing and crying and dancing around. People watching probably thought . . . I didn’t care what they thought.

  “It’s all right, Dani,” Trey said finally. “It’s all right.”

  “How?!” was all I could say.

  Trey smiled. “Vincent. When I threw the paw to you, Philip went crazy. I think he wanted to strangle me. But Vincent had crawled to the gun, and when Philip lunged at me, Vincent shot him. I went to see what I could do for Vincent, but we both knew he was dying. Just as the lodge came down he said, ‘Well done, Trey.’ Then he put his hand on my forehead and said some words I didn’t understand. The last thing he said was ‘Safe journey.’

  “I dunno. It seemed like I was back in Bridgewater right away. Apparently my ‘safe journey’ took a few days, though.”

  19

  By the time school started, the police had backed off Jake a little. They had searched his house, his cell phone records, and the family car. They brought cadaver dogs to go over the entire property. They interviewed all his friends. Fortunately, I didn’t have to face the lie detector. After all this, there was no evidence of foul play, so there was nothing to be done except keep Jake under observation. And Jake had a life to live in the meantime. So Mom and Dad arranged with the county social services to be his foster parents until he was eighteen.

  Now he lives at our house, and it’s just like having a real brother. We’re not sixth-graders anymore, though. I have something I never had before with Jake: a secret, a big one that I can never tell him about. He also will never know that I can’t look at him anymore without seeing Scatter and knowing that half of my best friend’s DNA comes from someone who was criminally insane.

  Trey’s parents were upset with him in the way parents are when you’ve frightened them. Everyone knew he had a lot of freedom, but he’d been out of touch for a week. His mom and dad had called the police and the hospitals, offered a reward for information—the whole thing. He gave them a pretty weak story about a wild party, friends from another state who needed a ride, another party, and a lost cell phone.

  “I don’t think they believed me, Dani,” he told me. “But they’re so grateful I’m safe, it’s almost like they don’t want to know the details. I wonder what they think really happened.”

  After a while they stopped asking questions, but they took his car away for the rest of the summer.

  Trey and I are closer than ever now. But we never talk about our time in Scatter’s world. A few days after we were reunited, we went out to Indian Pond, a small lake in the woods outside town. Trey threw the paw as far as he could into the water. I threw my white robe into a Dumpster at school. I hope no one shows up wearing it someday. And the DVD Jake made just before he disappeared? I broke it in a dozen pieces and put it in the trash.

  Life is good. Most of the time I’m happy. I have a lot to be grateful for. But my heart, to use Vincent’s phrase, is a little heavier now. Things aren’t as simple as they used to seem. Maybe it’s not even because of Scatter. Maybe it’s just growing up.

  Just before Thanksgiving, Bridgewater had a record warm spell. That week the mystery of the cryonics lab was “solved,” according to police. Twenty miles into the woods outside town, some hikers stumbled on a scene out of a horror movie: twenty-nine decaying corpses near the site of the old Rock of Ages Bible Camp. The government had DNA from all the inmates frozen at the Institute for Cryonic Experimentation, and everyone was accounted for.

  DNA technology being what it is, and with the location of the corpses reminding everyone of the Bible camp tragedy, forensic specialists began revisiting evidence from the site and from the child victims of the seventies. The police had kept clothing belonging to one of the girls who reported being abused by the camp director. When they reexamined it, they found DNA belonging to Scatter. After thirty-some years, they knew the identity of the camp director.

  They also figured out which of the corpses, many of them by now just puddles of lumpy fluid, was his. There was a wooden cross planted in its chest.

  I understand something now that I didn’t before all this happened. We live in the present and we plan for the future. But the past—even if it isn’t our past—can reach out like a cat’s paw and change our lives.

  Everything’s fine in Bridgewater. Really . . .

  Or is it?

  Look for these other titles from the Night Fall collection.

  MESSAGES FROM BEYOND

  Some guy named Ethan Davis has been texting Cassie. He seems to know all about her—but she can’t place him. He’s not in Bridgewater High’s yearbook either. Cassie thinks one of her friends is punking her. But she can’t ignore the strange coincidences—like how Ethan looks just like the guy in her nightmares.

  Cassie’s search for Ethan leads her to a shocking discovery—and a struggle for her life. Will Cassie be able to break free from her mysterious stalker?

  SKIN

  It looks like a pizza exploded on Nick Barry’s face. But bad skin is the least of his problems. His bones feel like living ice. A strange rash—like scratches—seems to be some sort of ancient code. And then there’s the anger . . .

  Something evil is living under Nick’s skin. Where did it come from? What does it want? With the help of a dead kid’s diary, a nun, and a local professor, Nick slowly finds out what’s wrong with him. But there’s still one question that Nick must face alone: How do you destroy an evil that’s inside you?

  THE CLUB

  The club started innocently enough. Bored after school, Josh and his friends decided to try out an old game Sabina had found in her basement. Called “Black Magic,” it promised the players good fortune at the expense of those who have wronged them. Yeah, right.

  But when the club members’ luck starts skyrocketing— and horror befalls their enemies—the game stops being a joke. How can they end the power they’ve unleashed? Answers lie in an old diary—but ending the game may be deadlier than any curse.

  THE PROTECTORS

  Luke’s life has never been “normal.” How could it be, with his mother holding séances and his half-crazy stepfather working as Bridgewater’s mortician? But living in a funeral home never bothered Luke. That is, until the night of his mom’s accident.

  Sounds of screaming now shatter Luke’s dreams. And his stepfather is acting even stranger. When bodies in the funeral home start delivering messages to Luke, he is certain that he’s going nuts. As he tries to solve his mother’s death, Luke discovers a secret more horrifying than any nightmare.

  UNTHINKABLE

  Omar Phillips is Bridgewater High’s favorite local teen author. His Facebook fans can’t wait for his next horror story. But lately Omar’s imagination has turned against him. Horrifying visions of death and destruction come over him with wide-screen intensity. The only way to stop the visions is to write them down. Until they start coming true . . .

  Enter Sophie Minax, the mysterious Goth girl who’s been following Omar at school. “I’m one of you,” Sophie says. She tells Omar how to end the visions—but the only thing worse than Sophie’s cure may be what happens if he ignores it.