“You did, didn’t you? You saw it. You felt it even. Now you are starting to understand, just a little bit. So, before you sit over there and sling any more accusations around, let me tell you some more.”
fifty-three
MELISSA SAT AT THE DINER and listened to Haywood spin a tale of tragedy that would have been ridiculously improbable if Lila had not told a similar tale the night before. She listened to him talk about a friend, of his dying in the woods in a mysterious way, of an old man dying an untimely death in a convenience store, of cars crashing uncontrollably. Of a sick child in the wilderness, burnt bodies at a hidden drug lab . . . the story was as inconceivable as the ramblings of an inmate at a psycho ward. When Haywood finally stopped, he looked exhausted.
“So this is why you buried him alive?” Melissa said, her voice emotionless.
Haywood looked straight at her and his eyes gave no indication of being affected by her words. “This is supposed to be a conversation,” he said, his voice steady. “Why don’t you tell me why you’re here.”
“What’s to tell? I’m here to see my brother.”
“You two must be close.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“It means that I haven’t seen you in Coldwater since he got out of prison and moved back to your parents’ plot of dead earth.”
“You keep a pretty tight watch on the town?”
“I know everything about this town. And I will know everything about this town after you two are long gone.”
“Is that a threat?”
“It’s no threat. It’s just the simple truth,” Haywood said. “I assume you won’t have a reason to stay. Michael’s gone, he ain’t coming back.”
“You seem certain of yourself.”
“Coldwater is a good town filled with good people. It’s going to stay that way.”
“Well, if I was Michael, I don’t think I would just run and hide. No,” Melissa said, “I think I’d be coming back here as soon as I could. You know, to thank all these good people for being so nice.”
A smirk slowly spread across Haywood’s face, but his eyes stayed set deep in their sockets. “Now, is that a threat?” he asked.
“The universe bends toward justice, does it not? If that is the case,” Melissa said, “then Michael’s path should lead back here.”
“Justice? Is that what you’re getting at? Michael’s trajectory of justice should have ended with him rotting away in a cell at the state prison. But no, what does the world know about justice? It has no real concept of the idea. Where is our justice? Where is the justice for Morrison, and for these poor men who died this week?” Haywood grabbed a napkin, lifted the brim of his hat, and wiped his brow.
“He had no business coming back here,” he continued. “And if the world doesn’t have the grit to do what needs to be done, then it’s left to us to do it.”
Melissa sat and let the words pour over her. She was here for the exact same reason. Justice. But Haywood had set himself up too high to presume this was his role to take. It was hers by right.
“You’ve overstepped your bounds,” Melissa said. She was calm and firm. “You might think you’re judge and jury in this town. but you’re not. You’re just a scared little man hiding behind a bluster of words.”
“So, you’re here to help him then,” Haywood said. “He call you? Tell you to pick him up?”
Melissa didn’t respond, but Haywood could read her face.
“No? You’re here for different reasons, aren’t you? Could it be that you are here for the same reason as me? Could it be that you feel the same way I do?”
“We are nothing alike.”
“I wouldn’t bet on that.”
“I’m here because I’ve been wronged,” Melissa said. “You’re here because you’re a coward. You’re afraid. You hide behind the notion of justice, but you don’t care about it. Not really. And I bet a guy like you can’t handle being afraid. You’ve never had to deal with it. Never had to learn how to hide it away, to cope. You don’t like it. You hate the feeling. So the first chance you got, you buried it . . . but you messed up. You didn’t bury it deep enough. Now, it’s come back to bite you and it’s driving you nuts.”
Melissa got up from the table and looked down at Haywood. He was looking where she had been sitting, he didn’t move a muscle.
“My advice to you,” she said. “Quit. Quit what you’re doing. Quit chasing him. Leave him alone.”
“And what, may I ask, are you planning to do?”
“My business is my own,” Melissa said as she walked toward the door. “It’s family business.”
fifty-four
THE DAY TRUDGED ON and the rain kept falling. Michael had wandered back to the barn after breakfast and sat on the old mattress. Staying in the house with Nick was unnerving, and the conversation had dried up after the breakfast sermon.
The man was crazy. There could be no doubt about that. Years of seclusion had driven him into a delirium that now passed the border of eccentricity to straight-out lunacy. His scars were just physical representations of a lacerated mind.
But what fueled the uncomfortableness of the whole situation for Michael was that he felt as if he was looking at himself several years from now. Nick was what he would become after time had slowly eroded the hope that he managed to cling to, the desire for normalcy. How long could he possibly hold on to such a notion?
Nick’s words had stung because they were true. They were outcasts now and forever. Society would never let them forget what they had done. The system might have spit them out and sent them on their way, but mankind had cast them out forever.
What was the point then? Isolation only brought madness. A slow decline into self-destruction. It was inevitable.
The rain kept falling, and Michael watched several times as Nick would walk out onto the porch, look over to the barn, and then step back into the house.
It was an odd arrangement.
Several times Michael thought of gathering his things and getting on his way, but there was an attraction to this place that he could not deny. He was tired of being on his own. Deep down inside, he was sick of it. Here, beyond the ramblings of a twisted mind, was a person who knew how he felt. Who knew of the sad existence and could, at the least, understand. This was not so much an oasis but an asylum for the likes of him.
By midday the rain began to ease and Nick came out on the porch and sat down in his chair and began rocking. The noise floated across the yard and into the barn.
The sound settled on Michael’s ears like the slow ripping of paper. A steady timekeeping of the winnowing away of hours.
Michael stepped out onto the wet grass.
“It’s almost lunchtime, if you’re hungry.”
“Sure,” Michael said.
Nick got up and went inside, the screen door slamming on the doorframe.
Michael walked up onto the porch and put his hand to the door.
He would not become this. He would not become Nick. But his anxiety rose as he entered the house, each step forward making that future reality all the more certain.
fifty-five
THE RAIN WASHED THE DAY AWAY as Melissa sat in the motel room. With the blinds open, she could see the trucks that would occasionally drive into the parking lot of the diner or Gilly’s pub. As the afternoon wore on, the dominance of the diner crowd gave way to the desires of the bar patrons. Holed up in this room, Melissa found her mind jumping between two separate but related thoughts.
The conversation between her and Haywood had not settled well. Her impressions of Haywood and what his crew had done were now forcing her to evaluate her own intentions. She had always felt justified in her plans, in her right to seek retribution, but as she observed them played out before her by a different agent, her anger turned from Michael, and she caught herself dwelling on the Coldwater vigilantes.
Haywood disgusted her.
He was the quintessential hick-town mafioso. A self-right
eous blowhard who found an abandoned fiefdom and set up residence as the leader of the ignorant. In South Falls he would have been a nobody. A person ignored. Dismissed.
But here in the backwoods of the world, he had convinced the easily swayed that he was the arbiter of right and wrong.
He had no right to stick his nose in this. Michael owed him nothing. Her brother’s remorse, his repentance, belonged to her. Haywood had no claim to it.
“We are nothing alike,” she whispered to herself. She should be focused on the task at hand, the task that she came to Coldwater to perform. But Haywood’s smug face kept popping up in her brain, driving her to the point of distraction.
“We are nothing alike.”
She repeated the words over and over until the phrase turned from a rebuke to a questioning plea to convince herself that she wasn’t at all like him. She sought closure to pain that had been poured on her, Haywood sought freedom from fear. His was the way of the coward. Hers was the way of the righteous.
Her old bedroom in the abandoned house mixed in with her thoughts as well.
Michael had done the work of restoring it. That could be the only possible conclusion. In his own way he must have been seeking a means to atone for his actions by reconstructing the world that he had destroyed. A replica of memory and happier times. Before the fall.
It was a poor imitation. A place that could never be brought back to life no matter how much paint was splashed on the walls. The soul of the place was gone forever.
Gone.
No action could change that.
No building up could ever fix what was torn down.
Gone.
“We are nothing alike.”
What could more destruction do?
Melissa stood and walked over to the mirror. She had come to Coldwater to kill Michael.
“We are nothing alike.”
We are everything alike.
fifty-six
THE SPIDER SAT ON ITS WEB in the corner of the barn, its deformed body all but still, save for its tapping leg on the web like the pendulum of a grandfather clock. Its offspring gathering around, their tiny bodies masking the predators they were about to become. One by one they climbed on their mother’s back and sank their fangs into her, devouring her, their instinct and nature kicking in as they consumed where they came from and would become who she was.
Michael watched the matriphagy from the mattress in the corner as moonlight drifted in through the slats, his own past and future days reflected in the scene before him.
He was his past, and his future days would be children always feeding on the event that had set his life in motion. There was no stopping it. It was nature. It was the continual perpetuation of his deed. Generation to generation the spider hatchlings would never spare their life source, in turn themselves becoming the food of their offspring. On and on, never ending, until the end of time.
And so, too, Michael’s days would feed on his murderous past, becoming another iteration of himself, but always the same.
There was no escaping it. It was inevitable. The choice he had made as a child was a constant variable in each and every action he would commit. The world would not allow otherwise. He would never be able to wipe the slate clean and start as a new creature untainted by past crimes, just as the spider hatchling would never question the devouring appetite that spurred it on in its feast.
The future was set in stone. Hardwired.
The judgment passed by man was temporal, but as Michael lay in the dark, the eternal curse that weighed down on him was unending. Only death would relieve him of that burden, and death was something that no one else seemed capable of delivering to him. And so he would go on. Tomorrow. The next day.
Michael wondered if the spiders knew what they were doing or if it was pure instinct, free of remorse and empathy, free from regret, as the parent who introduced them to life now coursed through their tiny mouths. He wondered if he would ever get to the point of living his life free of such regret.
It had been over twenty years since he had committed his crime. He had not yet arrived at such a state of being, and as the hatchlings finished their meal and scurried off to begin their own narratives, Michael doubted that he ever would.
fifty-seven
MICHAEL WAS AWOKEN by the sound of yelling out in the yard. It was the small hours of the night and it took him a moment to realize where he was. He looked through the slat in the wall and saw Nick halfway between the house and the barn, yesterday’s rain turning the yard into a quagmire. He was wobbling in place, an almost empty bottle in his hand. He was yelling for Michael.
“Hey! I know you’re awake!” Nick screamed in between sips from the bottle. He bared his teeth after each swallow. “Let’s get this over with!”
Michael stood frozen, his eye to the gap in the boards, watching.
“I know why you’ve come! I’ve been waiting a long time for you! I’m ready!”
Michael thought about what to do next. He looked around the barn, but the same imprisoned feeling he had when Haywood had driven up now resurfaced. The door was the only way out. He had no doubt he could outrun Nick, but the sight of his host’s madness had him second-guessing every action he might take.
“I know you! I could tell from the moment I laid eyes on you! You’re my deliverer! My salvation! Come out! Now!”
Nick took another sip, his head flared back. He lost his balance and fell down, his face in the mud, and the bottle went flying. Michael gathered his things and stepped out into the night. He looked east and plotted his route into the dark woods. As soon as he stepped by Nick, he heard him speak.
“Wait . . . please. Don’t go. I’ve waited too long . . .”
Michael stopped and looked down at the man. His face was half obscured by darkness, but it looked tormented, almost as if he was crying.
“What are you talking about?”
“You. I’ve been waiting for you. You’re here to kill me.”
“You’re insane!”
Nick sat up and started searching for his bottle of moonshine. “No. I could feel it when I saw you. You are marked like me. We are the same. I could feel it. I knew that you would come someday. Someone who knows what it’s like. The torment. The isolation. Someone who knows and could look at me not with fear, not with hatred, but with the one thing that can save both of us.”
“And what is that?”
“Mercy.”
Michael watched as the man located the bottle, put it to his lips, but found nothing left inside. He then threw it at the barn and the sound of its shattering cut the silence.
“This world knows nothing of mercy. It never has. I’ve paid my dues. I’ve paid more than they asked for. But do you think for one minute they will ever forgive? Do you think they’ll ever let me walk among them again? This world, this whole godforsaken world, knows nothing of mercy. They pay lip service to it. Speak it with their mouths but it’s just hollow breaths.
“There are those who dream of living apart, but they’ve never done it. Felt the real detachment from the world. They don’t know what the darkness is like.
“But we do. We do! You and me. We know, don’t we. We know what it’s like to be ignored, forgotten, invisible. To be despised, hated, feared.”
Michael stared at Nick. This was another rehearsed speech, one the man had been crafting for years. Inebriated, Nick’s thoughts came pouring out of him without reservation. He was broken, sitting in the mud. Michael saw his future—their future—and understood. He felt what Nick said and he pitied him.
“They fear us, and that is why they need us. Fear is what makes us human. When was the last time you felt fear? Huh? I don’t even remember. But I know they fear us. They need us, because without us they have nothing to pin their nightmares on. They fear us because they know—they know!—that with one momentary lapse of reason they could be us. We are the reminders of what they could be if they let themselves slip. Yes, yes, that is why they hate us. Why they do not
want us in their company.
“I’ve killed . . . just like you. Does it matter why or does it matter who? I’m marked forever to be alone. From the time I cracked till my last breath, but my last breath won’t come, not until nature stops my heart. I’ve been waiting all these years, praying that it would stop, but I keep waking each morning to the isolation that is this life we have been given. How I’ve wished it to end. But I’m not given that satisfaction.
“Tell me, how many times have you tried to end your life? Once, twice, a hundred times? You can’t, can you? Not that you can’t, but fate won’t allow it. I know, I’ve tried more times than can be counted. It’s as if the world knows what we want but won’t let us have it until it’s good and ready to let us go. It wants us to suffer. It wants us to be tormented till the bitter end.
“Which is why . . . is why you’re my salvation. You are here, finally, you are here. You know what I speak is true. We cannot be killed by those who fear us. Those who hate us. You know I’m right, you know what I say is true!”
Michael knew. He thought of the inmate from prison, Old Man Jackson, James, everyone who meant to kill him had ended up dead themselves. The drug runners the day before. All of them. The shadow inside him guarded his life like a force field, kicking back their actions and revisiting it on them.
“But you, you are different. You know what it’s like. Your action would not be driven by fear, but mercy. Mercy is the only thing that can save us.”
“I’m not going to kill you,” Michael said again.
The man crawled over to Michael and grabbed his legs. He was too drunk to stand. “Please! You must! It’s why you’re here, it’s why you’ve come! I beg you!”
“Get off me!” Michael yelled, kicking Nick in the stomach, sending the man sprawling in the mud. Instantly, Michael felt a sharp pang in his gut—the first time he had experienced the eye-for-an-eye reprisal. This is what people felt who attacked him. They felt everything he did, returned on them with more vengeance. He doubled over and nearly vomited until the pain subsided. He could feel blood in his mouth.
Coldwater Page 16
