1 The Bank of the River

by Michael Richan

  All the features were intact, even the hair. As they both watched, the jaw opened, and the corpse seemed to suck in air. Then its undamaged arm reached up and removed the wooden stick from his left eye socket.

  “The shotgun!” Steven yelled from his prone position. Roy stepped forward toward the body, raised the shotgun, and fired. The recoil took him off guard and he lost his footing under the water. He fell backwards, taking the flashlight and shotgun with him. Steven got to his feet, and recovered the flashlight, but the shotgun was somewhere under the water near Roy, who was on his back. He went to him and lifted him up. Roy was clearly in pain.

  Steven shone the flashlight toward the body. The shotgun had taken away the other arm to the shoulder, but the torso and head remained. The corpse did not rise past a sitting position. He’s still buried below the legs, Steven thought.

  The remaining eye opened, and focused on Steven and Roy. Steven knew the eye instantly – same as the ones he’d encountered at his house in what seemed like an eternity ago. This was Lukas.

  “Quick, the flares!” Roy said. Steven began removing them from his backpack, and Roy stuck the flashlight between his legs as he searched his backpack for the blowtorch.

  They felt the air around them thicken. Just like the hallway, Steven thought. This is the environment he works in. This is how he turns it to his advantage.

  Both Steven and Roy froze when they heard Lukas speak.

  “You won’t finish before I use you up,” they heard. They both turned to Lukas, unsure if they had heard it in their minds, or if the corpse had actually spoken it.

  Steven removed the first flare bundle from his backpack. “Light it!” he said to Roy. Roy had removed the blowtorch, and was clicking the igniter. He prayed it would ignite having been dampened when Roy fell in the water. It popped twice and then blew to life. Roy thrust the flame toward Steven, who held out the bundle for Roy to light.

  Three-quarters of the flares were lit when Steven saw Roy move the flame away. He glanced up at him, and knew right away that something was wrong. His father was staring blankly to the side, his hand slowly lowering the flame. Then he dropped the blowtorch into the water completely, the flashlight fell from his knees, and he fell back into the water.

  “Dad!” Steven screamed, and in an instant, he entered the flow between Roy and Lukas. He felt the cold knife enter him and slide up to his skull, much more quickly this time than last. He turned to look at Lukas. He was very much alive, looking strong and healthy despite the damage to his arm and hand. He had an amused look on his grotesque face, like he was enjoying what he was doing. No doubt this is all about retribution now, he thought. We’ve ruined his body, his plans for eternal life are fucked. Now he just wants payback.

  Steven turned his vision back to Roy, who was arched on his back in the water, in pain. Lukas was draining Roy at an alarming rate. He could see there was little life left in him.

  Steven knew he had to destroy Lukas immediately. He exited the flow, then moved toward Lukas with the flares, but again the atmosphere around him had thickened, and it was like trying to move through molasses. Hold on, Dad, he thought. He felt an overwhelming sense of desperation and hopelessness, that there was no point, that he should just give up.

  “He’s dead,” said Lukas. “You should stop.”

  “You lie!” Steven replied, taking another step. He could sense Roy was still there, far away, still alive. But he wouldn’t be for long. Steven forced his limbs to move, concentrating on each muscle.

  “You’re too weak,” spoke Lukas again. “You won’t make it. You should stop.”

  “I’m still coming,” Steven said, and took another agonizingly slow step.

  “I’m about to consume the last of your father. You’ll never see him again. You should stop.”

  He forced his legs to move again. One more step and he’d be there. “Is this what you said to Ben?” he shouted at Lukas. “Is that how you terrorized him?”

  “Every night I showed Ben how we tortured, killed and ate his son. We consumed his spirit and his soul. He watched it over and over. Soon your father will be dead, and I’ll visit you every night. I’ll show you how I sucked the life out of him, and how you let it happen! Soon you’ll be cutting your eyes out too.”

  When he finally reached him he brought the flare bundle up to Lukas’ face. Lukas moved backward defensively, towards the water. Steven followed him with the flares, moving in an agonizingly slow motion arc. When Lukas’ head slipped below the surface he felt the thickness in the air evaporate. With all of his might he used both hands to shove the bundle down into the water and into the flesh of Lukas’ face.

  The water erupted with bubbles and the spit from the flares. The smell nauseated him as the flesh from Lukas’ face was burned from his skull. The flow is still occurring, he thought. He’s still draining Roy. I have to speed this up.

  He let go of the bundle with his right hand, using the left to keep it firmly pressed against Lukas’s head. With his free hand he removed another flare bundle from his backpack.

  The blowtorch was too far away, and under water somewhere. How am I going to light it? He wondered, feeling panic and frustration well up inside him. Improvise. Don’t second guess.

  He pulled the burning flares from the water. They were still sputtering brightly. He could still feel Lukas’ body shifting under him. He used the burning flares to light the new bundle, like a chain smoker. Then he returned the first bundle to Lukas’ face and pressed the new bundle into his chest.

  Lukas’ body reacted strongly to the new flares and Steven felt pressure back, pushing him upward. But the more Lukas pressed to be free of the burning flares, the more Steven held them firm. Steven looked over his shoulder at Roy. He was prone in the water, on his back. His face was just above the water’s surface. There wasn’t enough light to see if he was still breathing.

  He pressed harder on the bundles, feeling them make progress into the burning flesh below. Burn, you motherfucker, burn! he thought.

  Then, as though Lukas had given up, he felt the resistance from the body below him stop, and he sensed the flow between Lukas and Roy drop. He resisted the urge to drop the flares and go check on Roy. Instead, he held the bundles in place, moving them slightly towards other unburned parts of Lukas’ body.

  Please be OK, he thought. He hoped he’d finished off Lukas before Roy was gone, but he had no way of knowing. He held the flares as they continued to burn in the water. As the first ones started to sputter out, he decided it was enough. He pulled the flares from the body, and dropped the bundles in the water next to him. Then he reached down to the corpse, and bent it upward, sitting it back up.

  Most of the hair and flesh from the head was gone. In the torso, two large holes had burned through most of the body. The shoulders and arms were still intact. He couldn’t see anything below the waist, where the body was still covered by water.

  It wasn’t moving, and Steven sensed no life – of any kind – in it.

  He stood and walked over to Roy, calling to him. Roy was unresponsive. He reached for Roy’s neck and felt for a pulse.

  It was there, but it was very weak.

  He tried to lift his father’s body, and was able to drag him to the dry area of the cave, near the lantern. He observed him for a few moments. He was breathing, but very shallowly. He needed to get Roy out of the cave and to a hospital.

  He walked back into the water and retrieved the shovel. They were not finished with their plan, which called for removing the body from the water, dousing it with lighter fluid, and burning off all remaining flesh, then reburying the bones. But Steven decided it was enough for now. Lukas was dead, and if not dead, he was too damaged to move. It was more important now to get help for Roy. He could return and finish later.

  Steven consolidated the contents of the backpacks into one, slung Roy over his shoulder, grabbed the lantern, and walked out of the cave.

  Chapter Twenty

  “The doct
ors tell me they have to administer all your drugs intravenously because you won’t swallow any pills.”

  “Goddamn right,” Roy said. “Since when in this country do you have to swallow something you don’t want to?”

  Roy sat upright in his hospital bed, nervously fidgeting with the TV remote control.

  “Doesn’t matter that the drugs probably saved your life?” Steven asked.

  “I know who saved my life,” Roy said, looking at Steven. Steven looked down, embarrassed to look back at Roy.

  “I’m glad you’re finally awake,” Steven said.

  “How long was I out?”

  “Three days,” Steven replied. “And you slipped into a coma twice. The doctors didn’t think you would make it after the second coma.”

  “Shows you what they know,” Roy said. “Am I alone in this room? Any other people in here?”

  “It’s a private room,” Steven said.

  “Good,” Roy said. “Then tell me about Lukas.”

  “What’s the last thing you remember?” Steven asked.

  “I remember lighting the flares you were holding,” he answered. “Then nothing until here.”

  Steven retold the story to Roy, up to the point where he brought Roy to the hospital.

  “And then you went back?” Roy asked.

  “Yes, once you were situated here, I drove back. Went to the cave, intending to dig the rest of the body out, and burn what was left.”

  “It was gone,” said Roy.

  “How’d you know?” Steven asked.

  “Didn’t, it was a guess.”

  They both sat in silence for a moment.

  “So,” Steven sighed, “I cleaned everything up. There wasn’t much to do. I took the cabin keys back to John and Debra. John asked me if I had been successful. I told him I thought so.”

  More silence.

  “What do you think?” Steven asked. “Were we successful?”

  “Well,” Roy said, “I don’t think Lukas got up and walked out. Not without a head or most of his torso.”

  “Everything is back to normal at the house,” Steven said. “I slept there the last three nights, and no nightmares, no visions, no Ben. As far as I can tell, no Lukas either. I don’t feel anything there, I don’t feel like I’m being drained. I think he’s gone.”

  “You’re probably right,” Roy said.

  “Either that,” Steven said, “or he’s so severely damaged that he can’t make the connection anymore.”

  “No, you’re right,” Roy said, “there’s no connection. I could feel it constantly before. I don’t feel it at all now.”

  “Might be the drugs,” Steven said.

  “That’s why I don’t like them!”

  More silence. Steven paced around the base of Roy’s hospital bed.

  “There is one other possibility,” Roy said.

  “Yes?”

  “Michael.”

  Steven looked at Roy. “Michael? What, he dug up the body? How did he know where it was?”

  “He followed us,” Roy said. “I felt he’s been watching us ever since we confronted him, waiting to be there whenever we would eventually find Lukas.”

  “You think he went into the cave after I hauled you out,” Steven asked, “and took Lukas’s body?”

  “Maybe.”

  “But Lukas was dead, it was over for Michael’s plans. Why not just abandon the body?”

  “Two reasons I can think of,” Roy answered. “It could be that he’s able to do something with what remains of Lukas.”

  “Regenerate him?”

  “No, that’s not going to happen. He might feel that the body still has some power, for some other purpose. It might act as an ingredient in some other recipe.”

  Steven hadn’t considered this; there was so much about Roy’s world he didn’t know. “What, continue the transformation? Michael complete the ritual himself?”

  “No, he can’t do that,” Roy said. “Michael is human, he doesn’t have the DNA Lukas had. It could be some other process, to reclaim some of the power left in Lukas’s body. That, or the other possibility, he just wished to honor the remains. Fifteen years of waiting, he was obviously attached to the guy. He might have just wanted to give Lukas a better resting spot than the watery grave Ben arranged.”

  Steven considered this. “Do we hunt down Michael?” he asked Roy.

  “Why? If the hauntings and the draining have stopped, it’s over.”

  “But,” Steven protested, “four young kids were killed. He was involved.”

  “True,” Roy said. “What do you propose?”

  “We could go to the cops.”

  “Let me tell you something,” Roy said. “In our line of work, you never go to the cops. Never, unless what you’re taking to them meets their idea of how things work, and you’re sure of how they’ll handle it, based on their rules, not yours. Otherwise, they will peg you as a lunatic and you’ll never be able to use them when you need them. Remember that. In this case, what would you do, tell them Michael kidnapped those kids?”

  “Yeah,” Steven said, “but you’re right, I have no evidence.”

  “Exactly,” Roy said, “you have to think like they think. It would be your word against his. And when the cops start asking why you’ve targeted him with these accusations, you won’t be able to tell them how we found out without coming off like a crazy, unless you make something up, and then they will catch you in the lie. Trust me, I know how this works. Only deal with the cops when you’re sure how they will react.”

  “We could take Michael on ourselves,” Steven said.

  “Why?”

  “Because he killed those kids,” Steven said, “and he has to pay. Because he’s pissed that we killed Lukas, destroyed his grand plan, and he’ll come after us for revenge. Because he’s a bad man and needs to be removed from society, and if the cops won’t do it, someone needs to. Are those reasons enough?”

  “You’re forgetting how he caused my gun to jam,” Roy said. “Are you prepared to deal with that?”

  “Doesn’t your book have a death spell or something? Something we could use on him surreptitiously?”

  “No, it doesn’t,” Roy answered. “Nothing like that. I don’t see why we need to pursue Michael. All your reasons are fine, they’re good reasons. But I don’t think he’s coming after us. And there are more threats to society than you and I can do anything about. Sometimes things don’t wrap up cleanly, like in a movie. I keep trying to tell you this, you have to go with what happens. It’s over, we did what we needed to do. You can go back to living a normal life, your house will leave you alone. I can sleep at night without the fear of being drained. We’re good. Accept the fact that you won.”

  “It seems like a loose end,” Steven said. “Like a dangerous loose end.”

  “I’ve got a lot of those,” Roy said. “All over. It’s not always a clean victory. Most of these situations wind up with some kind of stalemate. If Michael decides to come after us, then we can deal with him. But for now let the sleeping dog lie.”

  -

  Once he was awake, Roy recovered rapidly, and Steven drove him home from the hospital in a couple of days. Roy bitched about the hospital in the car all the way home. He seemed to be able to move around and function normally, and Steven developed some comfort watching him walk around his home as though nothing had happened. Apparently once the batteries were recharged, Roy was right back to normal.

  Steven sat at the kitchen table while Roy puttered around the house arranging things. The book was still there, opened to the last page Roy had been reading. He could see the instructions on the preparation of the wood that was used to pierce Lukas’ eye. It made sense to him. He realized there was more to the act than just blinding Lukas. The wood itself was damaging to him, would have dampened his ability to attack. If it had stayed in long enough, Steven thought.

  He flipped through the book again. He found the section on protection, and yes, he could read some of it
. He found the recipe for the potion Roy had given him. There were several items on the ingredients list he did not recognize, but none of them looked like rat shit. He was grateful.

  As he continued to flip through the pages, some items jumped out at him. Many seemed to be related to creatures that transform. He read about a few of them. Some mimicked insects, and Steven wondered how many might be crawling or flying around in the world right now. Several were about small animals, the size of mice, that eventually formed a type of cocoon and slowly faded into invisibility, emerging as a ravenous bird that went about devouring other invisible creatures in the river. A couple of them were about entities that looked like humans, but evolved into something more evil, like Lukas. The idea that there were more Lukases out there, waiting to be dealt with, chilled him. There are an awful lot of children that go missing every year, he thought. How horrible if any are consumed by these things.

  He shut the book, exhausted from just the short time he’d spent in it.

  “Not for the weak hearted, is it?” Roy asked.

  “No,” Steven replied, “it isn’t. There’s some horrible stuff in here.”

  “And some good,” Roy said. “You just haven’t run into those parts yet. You will.”

  “Really?” Steven asked. “Is this something you think I should learn?”

  “I don’t know, you tell me. Should you?”

  Steven thought this over. He didn’t think this was a take-it-or-leave-it moment, but he knew Roy was hopeful he’d say yes. He didn’t want to disappoint him, but at the same time he was unsure. There were a lot of questions.

  “Tell me how you decided,” he said to Roy.

  “OK,” Roy said. “Sure.” He pulled up a chair next to Steven.

  “I first saw this book when I was fourteen. I discovered it in my father’s closet when I was trying to find his guns, which weren’t in the closet because he kept them locked up in a cabinet, but I didn’t know that. I stole it out of his room and took it to my own. I was fascinated by the workmanship of it, and its age. I couldn’t make heads or tails of any of it, but there were a few drawings that caught my attention and I knew I was drawn to it. I forgot to put it back.