He wiped his hands against each other, the kind of gesture one does after a particularly filthy piece of dirty-work. “I went around to your neighbourhood, finally caught up with one of your meetings. Two years sober, they say. I had troubles with the bottle too. Like father, like sons, I guess. But you, you’ve got a couple of chips to brag about—” Kelly looked down at the half-empty bottle in his little brother’s hand. “Marriage is hard. I should know—been down the aisle twice. But you’ve only been off the mainland for a few days. And you’re already tipping off the wagon—”
Charlie broke eye contact. He was red-faced and his breathing had grown heavy. Without looking back at his brother, he cut him off. “‘I’m a reasonable man’,” Charlie said, an echo of what his brother had told him the night he sent the kid out to the island for Dennis Munn. “‘I don’t want to see anyone suffer’.” He delivered it in the mocking voice their father would use when he taunted their mother. “You remember that, Kelly? Probably not. But I do. You said some other stuff too. You said, ‘You square this for me and I’ll forget you.’ Well, get this through your skull, big brother. I did forget you. You got your debt paid back and that was it. We’re done, you and me.”
Instead of just spitting, Charlie wound up and hit his brother. It was a right hook across the older Scobie’s face. The force levelled him and sent him sprawling into the dirty, wet sand, kicking up a furl of it.
He gave out an oomph. He wasn’t surprised but he was hurt. There was blood at his lip and down his shirt. The older brother wiped at his sore mouth with the heel of his hand. Dazed, he didn’t make to get up.
Charlie felt a pang of satisfaction. He also felt dizzy. He hadn’t eaten since breakfast. And being off the bottle for two years, but now back at it, well, it gave him a case of the woozies. He teetered and closed his eyes. The dark brown world behind his eyelids swam. He saw a partial echo of the cove, the water, the sky, the sun going down. He saw a blurry white-grey line around where his brother lay a second ago.
In the darkness, he heard his brother speak a set of muffled words. “Mother of Mary.”
Charlie opened his eyes and it was a lot darker than it had been a second ago. Triple vision settled to double and then to single. Below him, as the foamy surf of a rising tide grew up around him, his big brother looked out in horror. He raised one hand and pointed at something off to the rear and side of Charlie. “It looks just like him,” Kelly said.
With a jittering echo of the world chasing itself, Charlie slowly tracked in the direction of what his brother saw. It took a moment to become real, but when it did, Charlie’s vision cleared on the form of a man only a few steps away. And coming at him—fast.
It was not the redheaded man, but it was the ghost of Denny Munn. His forehead wore the simple black hole where Kelly’s pistol had blasted him six years’ previous. His eyes were glazed in black and he was approaching Charlie like a demon of speed, superhuman in his gait. As he got close—so close—Charlie could smell his reek. The man lunged and put a middle finger up to Charlie’s throat, right beside his Adam’s apple where the skin was soft. His other arm wrapped Charlie like a hug. It happened too fast for Charlie to fight it. The impossible ghost’s finger didn’t cut off his air. Instead, it drove deeply into the soft tissue beneath his chin bone.
Charlie only got out a gurgle of sound and blood. It was a choking plea. Any power in his muscles had been instantly stolen. The finger was a sharpened pencil going right through to the back of his head. He couldn’t fight this. His muscles were long, cooked noodles. The man who might be dead-as-a-door-nail Denny Munn laid him down in the cold, wet sand, beside his brother.
The world became distant. There was faraway shouting from Kelly. Then the muffled grunts of a scuffle. An unbearable exhaustion hit Charlie as he lingered with whiteout vision and fading consciousness. The champagne had nothing on this. That sharp pencil-finger up into his throat was gone now, withdrawn, but its pain lingered—like how the dentist’s needle starts sharp and unbearable but fades as its juices begin their work. In the corner of his nearly opaque vision, the Denny Munn-Thing overtook Kelly in the surf and that long finger drove up under his chin. Then silence. Well, almost silence. The sound of breathing, then the regular heartbeat of the small, messy ocean waves coming up and over the lower halves of the Scobie boys.
Charlie fought the urge to sleep, forced his eyes open. His brother was cheek-down in the dark wet muck. His one staring, glassy eye and his bloodied face brought to mind the image of a dead squirrel on the side of lane #94 when they were boys. He didn’t know if Kelly had met a similar fate but it looked like he had. Charlie’s second-to-last thought was that this must be how it feels to get maced by a cop. He wondered if Police Chief Birkhead, this island’s two-bit security force, carried a can of that stuff.
And his last thought:
Best make sure a man’s dead before you up and run.
8.
The next moments were vignettes. Like the memories of a drunken night from his past, where he only swam into distant consciousness, experienced something hilarious or wretched, then swam back out.
This was different. Prickly static dribbled through him. It felt like it went down into the core of his bones, like the numb emptiness when a leg falls asleep. But this was his whole body. And it didn’t let him move. He was paralyzed from the pencil-point in his neck downwards to his unfeeling toes.
His skin still held sensation. He felt hands grabbing at the waist of his wet pants. He wasn’t certain, but thought he was still lying in the surf as it surged up on the beach a few hundred paces from the front deck of the B and B where he and his wife were supposed to be having a romantic honeymoon away from their regular lives. It had been encroached upon by Charlie’s past life and its labours weren’t dissipating anytime soon, it seemed.
The hands worked and worked. Finally, working against whatever venom had been spiked into him by the ghost of Denny Munn and his pencil-tipped finger, Charlie managed to lift his head up off the wet sand and saw that ghost. It was working away at pulling down Charlie’s pants. Charlie made to protest but only a croak of noise escaped his throat. He was frozen, just a lifeless log with only blinking baubles for eyes. The ghost-Denny bent over him. He had the waist of Charlie’s pants inched down to the crook under his ass. The ghost tore his boxers and let Charlie’s privates out for display to the nighttime moon, the sky and the cove. Oh how Charlie wished someone would happen by and stop this madness.
Denny Munn looked up once, still mute, at Charlie watching him. Then he put his head down into Charlie’s lap and took a long whiff. He seemed to ponder the odour. Then, abruptly, he left.
He went over to Kelly, still beside Charlie, like two brothers sharing a hotel bed. Only this was no mattress. It was the shallow angle of the beach, chilled with each surge of ocean. It crawled up around Charlie’s neck and he faded out again as he dropped his head back down in the sopping sand.
When he came back, he propped his head up once more. Beside him, Kelly was convulsing, like a man suffering a seizure. His one eye, obscured by grains of sand, was swollen shut. His other stared blankly while his body bucked and tremored.
At Kelly’s waist, Denny Munn was hunched over and, for the first time since they went swimming in the Blue River as boys, Charlie saw his big brother naked from the waist down. Kelly was a carbon copy of his little brother down below. Same size, same colouring. In fact, from the neck down, once they’d reach the same size, the boys could have been twins.
Denny took a long draw of the older brother’s scent. He considered it and then got up.
Charlie tried to speak. He croaked out some sounds but nothing sensible came. His vision blurred and watered. Another ocean wave blew up and around the two paralyzed figures. Kelly’s tremors faded to a steady shiver. He was still alive when something unseen started dragging him out of Charlie’s sight.
In a dull sound of grating sand, the older brother was pulled away. He didn’t protest, did
n’t even blink. Just slid down into the water. His staring eye—the one that looked remarkably like the memory of a dead squirrel on the side of the road—was swallowed by the ocean.
Both he and the ghost of Denny Munn were simply, silently, gone.
9.
Fade in. Fade out. Form. Dissipate. Form. Dissipate.
Consciousness—real consciousness—finally started to fill Charlie Scobie.
He blinked against the coming light. How long had he been out here?
Off to the side, the markings where his older brother had been laying were now gone, swept clean by the tide which had since retreated. Beyond that, an empty champagne bottle, dirty with sand, label wet and wrinkled, ink running.
Mentally, Charlie reached out to his extremities. He wiggled his toes and moved his fingers. His heart rate was low and relaxed. The tingle from before was still in him, but distant. Its grip had relaxed.
Labouring, he managed to sit up. He looked down the beach to where the B and B was shrouded in a heavy stand of trees.
“It’s a bit like a spider bite.”
The voice startled Charlie and he whirled his head around so fast it stung him with pain and triple-vision. There, sitting beside him in the sand, wrists propped on his own knees, was the red-headed man from last night.
“How did you—?”
The redhead was looking out at the water. It wasn’t light yet, but from behind the two men, there was a sunrise working its way in the east beyond the trees.
He said, “That needle you got stuck with, it’s a bit like a spider bite.” Then he turned and looked at Charlie. They were only a few feet from each other.
Stunned, Charlie sat and stared at him.
“It’s like when a spider snaps its prey and then webs it up for a carry-home meal. You got snapped, friend.”
Charlie spoke. His mouth tasted like the sand he was sitting in. His words were slurred.
“Where’s—?”
“Oh, he’s with us.” The redhead’s eyes flickered with something. A warning maybe. “Thing is, that friend of ours—that mutual s.o.b. with the crater in his noggin, he gots himself some special talents now. He’s been wiped clean. But the disease in him, well, it emptied a good lot of what we were after. And to kill it, we had to empty a good lot more. He’s not really a man no more—as you can attest, he shot you full of some shit through his middle finger, didn’t he? Screwed you with it, you could say…”
Charlie didn’t answer. He didn’t know what response he could utter. His hungover head was reeling.
“Yeah, shore he did,” the redhead said, matter-of-factly. “But what he can do is he can sniff stuff out. And your brother there, he fits the bill. Seems like you don’t.” The redhead looked down at Charlie’s lap and Charlie followed his look. His pants were still pulled down and his pubic hair wore a fine coating of beach sand. “Hate to break it to you, friend, but you’re not equipped. I mean, you are, look at you, but you’re shooting blanks. If you and the missus ever want to try for kiddies, you’ll be wise to start with a Bic pen and a stack of adoption forms.”
Charlie blinked. He thought of the Munn-ghost drawing the smell of his crotch into his nose and let it sit in him while he pondered it. The thing, the ghost, whatever it was, had taken a hit off Charlie first, then his big brother. Charlie didn’t fit the bill, Redhead said. But Kelly did. Same paint job, but different under the hood.
The world was starting to settle. It was swimming around, for sure, but he could think a little clearer. He had some semblance of understanding and got out another partial question.
“Who are—?”
“Me? Oh, I’m just the recruiter. And the crater-head? He would have had a bigger part to play in the boss’s plan. For sure, he woulda, but someone went and blasted a shell through his brain pan.” The redhead winked at Charlie like they were down at the pub trading fishing whoppers. “His brain can’t hold water since that hole been punched in it. Oh I know because he can still play it all back like videotape. I saw you pull the trigger. Like I said, you should best make sure a man’s dead before you up and run. So now, between a bullet and his disease, he’s useless. Just a husk. The boss’ll use some parts here and some parts there but, crater-head, he’s done his job.
“Boss is mad though. Madder’n mad.”
Redhead glared at Charlie. “Don’t be so surprised,” he said to Charlie like he was delivering the evening news. “We all report to someone.”
He looked back at the beauty of the sky and the water. “We’s all connected. Think of it like a radio signal going right into the antennae in my skull. Boss knows what I know when it’s turned on. And he shorely wishes you and your bro there woulda been more in tune. If your parts all worked the same, we’da been done looking. Boss is building an army, you see. And brothers are gonna be our first line o soldiers.”
It was all madness. Charlie reached out to the redhead. He didn’t know what he was going to do. Throttle him? Grab hold of him and get him to make sense? Force him to say where Kelly was?
Instead of getting a hold of him, he fell forward, face into the cold sand. It was as if the redhead was twenty feet away instead of two now.
“Don’t worry,” the redhead said. “We tagged you. That’s the ringing in your ears and the hazy look of the world. We tagged you. And if’n the boss thinks we can make use of your parts, well, we’ll find you. Trust me. We’ll find you.”
Then another voice. Calling from a distance. “Charles! Charles, is that you?”
Charlie whirled around. There, in a long white dress of a floral print, hiking it up as she ran down the beach to him, was Chrissy. His wife Chrissy.
He looked back to the redhead, but the redhead had eased forward. Redhead said, “Thing is, friend, I might not even be here. I might be all in your head. Or, more likely videotape playing back from two hours ago.” He gave Charlie one last twinkling look and then dove into the shallow surf, letting it swallow him as if it was twenty feet deep and not a mere one or two.
Charlie swallowed. He tried to call out but it was just more of his noises. Then Chrissy was with him. So many words, so much energy. She was out of breath. Where were you, oh my god, have you been here all night. On and on.
“Did you see him?” he choked out, then frantically looked out at the surface of the cove for any sign of him.
I might be all in your head.
“Who?”
“The man. The man here with me. The one with the bright red hair. Did you see him?”
“Honestly, Charles, you’re sounding like a mad man.”
And when she spied the two bottles of champagne on the beach, her tone changed. “You swore, Charles. You swore you were done. I’d-a never married you if you were still drinking. I can’t believe you did this.”
And then, as she grudgingly got his trousers re-set and his heaving form up to his unstable feet and started helping him back in the direction of the B and B, she said one last thing before falling silent.
“The honeymoon’s over. We’re going home.”
10.
The ferry had left port in Dovetail Cove at a quarter-past-eight in the morning on May the fourth, 1973. By nine, Charlie had spied Chief Birkhead and another man wheeling a large trolley across the seating area to a room at the back. Charlie patted his wife’s knee—she was reading a magazine in the seat next to him—and got up to go and talk to the chief.
He peeked his head into the room, one of these with a thick steel door that has rounded corners, rivets and a big turning wheel in the middle, presumably to seal it off in the event of a capsize.
“Chief,” Charlie said. Chief looked up from the trolley. He had just set the wheel brakes. It looked like the trolley was loaded with luggage, then tarped. All the corners were neatly and securely fastened down.
“Uh,” he fumbled for Charlie’s name, rubbing his head as though it would come to him. It was clear he remembered he knew him.
“Scobie,” Charlie said, helping him out
.
“Right,” Chief said, with a point of a finger that said, Bingo. “Mr. Scobie. Has your wife decided what she intends to do about that...little incident, few days back up at the hotel?”
“Certainly has,” Charlie said, stepping fully into the room. The man with the chief gave a solemn smile and moved past him out into the main seating area. “She’s going to let it go. No real harm done.”
“Good. Good,” Chief said. “One less hassle I have to contend with. Now if you’ll excuse me—”
“Heading to the mainland?” Charlie said.
“I am. Unusual for me, ‘specially midweek. But our coroner’s away. He’s also the town doc, y’see and I need some expertise.” He looked down at the bulging tarp on his trolley.
Understanding started to creep in to Charlie. He blinked and saw an image of his brother getting dragged away from him in the wet, clumping sand.
“I see.” He turned to go, sweat springing out under his arms and down the middle of his back.
“Hey, listen,” said the chief. “’Fore you go. Did you see anything—or anyone—doing anything, I don’t know, unusual up the beach while you were staying out at the B and B?”
“Unusual?” Charlie repeated, turning back and feeling his face fill with warmth.
“Yeah,” Chief said, looking down into the notepad he produced from his chest pocket and not at Charlie anymore. “Couple fishers caught something in the mouth of the cove yesterday. Put their nets out and there it was.”
“Oh?” Charlie said, wishing he’d sat with his wife and kept staring blankly out the window—even if all he’d seen was a videotape replay of both his brother and the redhead slinking into the sea foam. He’d convinced himself the whole episode on the beach had been nothing but a battered head, soaked in cheap booze playing mean tricks on him. Under stress, the mind could play awful tricks. He knew that.
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