“You remember Kellen, the guy I brought over?” Eric said, and she nodded. “Well, his grandfather worked down here in the twenties and had some idea that the area was… not necessarily haunted, but—”
“Charged.” The word left their mouths simultaneously, and Eric pulled his head back and stared at her.
“He talked to you about this?”
“No,” she said softly, “it’s just the right word.”
“So you believe there are ghosts here?”
She frowned and looked at the window. “I’ve always connected it more to the weather myself. That’s what I study, you know. And there’s something different in this valley…. You can feel it in the wind now and again, and on the edge of a summer storm, or maybe just before ice comes down in the wintertime. There’s something different. And charge is the best word for it. There’s a charge, all right.”
“Does that mean you believe there are ghosts here or not?”
“There’s something in this area that’s close to magic,” she said. “You call it supernatural if you want; I’ve always called it magic. But there’s something in the place itself—in the earth, in the water, in the wind—that has power. You know, with weather there are cold fronts and warm fronts, and when they collide, something special is going to happen. I think there’s something about Springs Valley that’s similar. It feels the same way to me as the air does right before those fronts collide. That probably doesn’t make sense to you but it’s the only way I know to explain it. A special kind of energy in the air, maybe energy beyond the natural. Could there be ghosts here? Certainly. Not everyone sees them, though. That much I’m sure of. But those who do, well, I imagine it has a mighty powerful influence.”
Eric was staring at her, silent.
“Thing you need to remember?” she said. “You can’t be sure what hides behind the wind.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
She smiled. “You’re too worried about figuring out what you can believe about all of this, and then figuring out how to control it. That’s how most people approach their lives. Way I feel, though, after a lot of years of living? Not much of what matters in the world is under your control. You don’t dictate, you adapt. That’s all. So stop trying to control this, and start trying to listen to what it’s telling you.”
His reaction made her frown and tilt her head. “What?”
“If there’s a single point to these visions,” he said slowly, “I haven’t been able to understand it yet. Except the first one, with the train, when he tipped his hat at me. I understood that. Campbell was thanking me.”
“Thanking you? For what?”
“For bringing him home.”
38
ONCE DANNY LEFT AND it was just Josiah up at the old timber camp, time slowed to a lame man’s crawl, the heat baking him as he sat outside the old barn and swatted at mosquitoes that approached with a mind for feasting.
He wished he’d thought to ask Danny to bring him some food and water, but he hadn’t, and now his tongue was thick from thirst and his belly knotted with hunger. Eventually the heat and mosquitoes conspired to send him into the barn.
It was a dusty wreck of a place, lined with discarded equipment and broken crates and pallets, two chipmunks coming and going through a torn board near the floor. It should have been dark, but the light bled in from a thousand cracks and holes and gaps and formed crisscrossing beams through the shimmering dust in the air that reminded him of the laser security systems you saw in heist movies.
He wandered, shoving pallets and barrels around, searching the place because it offered a distraction to ease the painful passage of time. There was a chain saw in one corner, but it was rusted and worthless. Beside it was a long metal box, padlocked shut. That struck his curiosity—anything in a lockbox might have value. He gave the lock a tug but it held. The hasp around it was rusted, though, and the metal looked thin.
There was a crowbar in the bed of the truck, and he went for it now and returned to the box and gave it a gentle tap near the hasp. The sound of metal on metal banged loudly in the barn, and the box held. It was damn foolish to be hammering away up here, risking attention, but he was curious, so he gave it another whack, harder this time. Then a third, and a fourth, and on the fifth, the edge of the crowbar bit through the metal above the hasp. Success in sight now, he swung it in again, punching a hole in the box, and then levered the crowbar up and down, working it like a water pump handle, until the hasp had split from the box and the lock was now meaningless. He dropped the crowbar onto the dusty floor and lifted the lid.
Whatever the hell was inside certainly hadn’t been cause for all that effort. A weird tangle of rubber hosing, all connected but crimped in intervals of about sixteen or eighteen inches. Looked like something you’d see in a butcher shop, a long string of sausages waiting to be cut into individual links.
He reached in and grabbed one end, then hauled the stuff up close so he could see better in the dark. There was some fine print written along the casing, and he squinted and read it: DynoSplit.
“Shit!”
He dropped the stuff back into the box and took a stumbling step backward. It was dynamite, a form of it, at least. He’d been around a construction site or two, had worked for about six months at a quarry up near Bedford, knew enough to understand that dynamite wasn’t made of red sticks with wicks at the end like in some cartoon. But he hadn’t seen a long, continuous tube like that either. And here he’d been, hammering away at the damn box with a crowbar…. Maybe you couldn’t set the shit off without a detonator, but that wasn’t an experiment he wanted to try.
He closed the lid carefully and stepped back from the box, wiping sweat from his face. Best not to smoke a cigarette in this place, that was for sure. He wondered how old the stuff was. Ten years? Fifteen? More? Probably wasn’t even usable at this point. There was a shelf life to explosives, and the way he recollected, it wasn’t long. Again, something he’d just as soon not find out in person, though.
He went back to the truck and dropped the crowbar into the bed and leaned on it with his forearms, looking around the dim, dank barn and feeling the sweat drip off his face and down his spine. He felt alone, as alone as he ever had in his whole life. Wanted to check in with Danny, see what the word was down in town, but he didn’t trust the cell phone anymore. Maybe the radio would give him a sense of the situation. He got in and turned the battery to life, having no desire to start the ignition with a boxful of old dynamite not fifteen feet behind him.
There was a partial expectation in his head of hearing an “all-points bulletin,” like something out of an old gangster movie, calling him armed and dangerous. Instead, he listened to fifteen minutes of shitty country music and never heard so much as a mention of the murder. He gave up then and waited until it was on the hour, when they always did a short news update, and tried again. This time they mentioned it, but said only that a man from Chicago had been killed in a van explosion in French Lick and that homicide was suspected.
It was stuffy as hell, even with the windows down, and the heat made him sluggish. After a while he felt his chin dip and his eyelids went weighted and his breathing slowed.
Good, he thought, you need the sleep. Been a while since you had any. Last you did, in fact, was at the gulf, laying there on the rock with no reason to hide from the police, no blood on your hands…
The shadow-streaked barn faded from view and darkness replaced it, and he prepared to ease gratefully into sleep. Just as he neared the threshold, though, something held him up. Some warning tingle deep in his brain. A vague sense of discomfort slid through him and shook loose the shrouds of sleep and he lifted his head and opened his eyes. Ahead of him the closed barn doors looked just as they had, but when he exhaled, his breath formed a white fog. It was pushing on ninety degrees in here, he had sweat dripping along his spine, but his breath fogged out like it was a February morning. What in the hell was that about?
He felt so
mething at his shoulder then, turned to the right, and saw he was no longer alone in the truck.
The man in the bowler hat was beside him, wearing his rumpled dark suit and regarding Josiah with a tight-lipped smile.
“We’re getting there,” he said.
Josiah didn’t say a word. Couldn’t.
“We ain’t home yet,” the man said, “but we’re getting on to it, don’t you worry. Like I told you, there’s a piece of work to be done first. And you made a bargain to do it. Made an agreement.”
Josiah glanced down toward the door but didn’t go for the handle, knowing on some instinctive level that he couldn’t get out of this truck now and that it wouldn’t matter even if he did. He turned back to the man in the hat, whose face seemed to be coated with the same shimmer Josiah had noticed in the dust motes caught by the streaks of sunlight in the barn. Only the man’s eyes were dark.
“You don’t look grateful,” the man said. “You ought to be, boy. Didn’t have to be you that I selected for the task. Nothing requires it. I’m bound by no laws, bound by nothing your sorry mind can even comprehend. But I came back for you, didn’t I? Because you’re my own blood. All that’s left of it. This valley was mine once, and will be again. You’re the one who’s going to see to it. Time to start showing gratitude, because ain’t a man alive can help you now but me.”
The man turned from Josiah and gazed around the barn, shook his head and let out a long, low whistle.
“It’s a fix you got yourself in now, ain’t it? There’s a way out of it, though. All you got to do is listen, Josiah. All you got to do is listen to me. You can count on me, yes, you can. Ask anybody in this valley, they’ll tell you the same. They’ll tell you that you can count on Campbell. Consistent as clockworks, boy. That’s me.”
His head swiveled again, dark eyes locking on Josiah’s.
“You ready to listen?”
Wasn’t nothing Josiah could do but nod.
The rain had stopped but the clouds were still winning the bulk of a struggle with the sun, allowing the occasional insurgency but then stomping it out quick, when Eric left Anne McKinney’s house to go back to the hotel. She followed him out onto the porch and pressed the bottle of Pluto Water into his hand.
“Thank you,” he said.
“Of course. Doesn’t take much brains to see you need it bad. But it isn’t going to work forever. So…”
“I’ve got to figure something out before you run out of bottles. Because then there’s none of it left.”
“Sure there is,” she said. “Hotel’s got it coming in through pipes.”
“What? I thought they stopped making the stuff decades ago.”
“Stopped bottling it, not making it. Shoot, never was something you made. Comes out of the ground, nothing else to it. There’s still springs all over the area. They got one piped into the hotel, use it for the mineral baths.”
“You can still take a mineral bath?”
She nodded. “One hundred percent pure Pluto Water.”
“Maybe I’ll sneak some gallon jugs in there, fill them up, and go the hell home. Pardon my language.”
“Son,” she said, “I was having your sort of week, I’d be saying a lot worse.”
“You saved me today,” he said.
“Held it off. You ain’t saved yet.”
That was true enough. He thanked her again and went to the car, felt the water soak instantly into his jeans when he sat. The seat and dashboard were drenched, but his cell phone, dropped onto the passenger seat and forgotten, was dry. He picked it up and saw nine missed calls, ignored them all, and called Alyssa Bradford. Got no answer. Hung up and dialed again, and then a third time, and this time she picked up on the first ring.
“I’m sorry,” she said. Her voice was hushed, and he was so surprised that she’d actually answered that for a moment he said nothing.
“Sorry,” he got out at last. “You’re sorry. Do you understand that I’ve spent my day with police because a man is dead?”
“I don’t know anything about that,” she said, and now it was clear that she was whispering intentionally. Someone was probably in the room with her or nearby, and she didn’t want this conversation to be overheard. “Listen, I can’t talk to you. But I’m sorry, and I don’t know what to say except that you should leave that place—”
“Why did you hire me?”
“What?”
“You didn’t send me down here to make a happy little memory film, damn it. The bottle was part of it, but I want to know what you really were hoping to find out.”
“I was tired of the secrets.” She hissed it.
“What does that mean? What secrets?”
“It doesn’t matter anymore. Not to you. Just—”
“Don’t tell me it doesn’t matter to me! I’m the one down here dealing with murders, not to mention the effects of that fucking water! Someone from your family knows the truth, and you need to find it out. I don’t care if you have to go into that hospital and electroshock your father-in-law back into coherence, I want to know—”
“My father-in-law is dead.”
He stopped. Said, “What?”
“This morning, Eric. About four hours ago. He’s dead, and I need to be with my family. I don’t know what else to tell you. I’m sorry about everything, but let it go. Leave that place and get rid of that bottle and good luck.”
She disconnected, and he was sitting with a dead phone at his ear and Anne McKinney watching him from the door. He lowered the phone and started the car and gave her a wave, tried to put some cheer into it.
The old man was dead. Not that it mattered—he’d been as good as dead anyhow, but, still…
He thought of Anne’s words about the supernatural being just like the weather, ebbing and flowing, fronts colliding, one side winning at least a temporary victory. When that old man in the hospital died, the one who’d been keeper of the bizarre damn bottle for so many years, what did it mean? Would it have any significance? Did it matter?
Stop thinking like that, Eric thought. Stop buying into the idea that whatever is happening down here is real. You’re seeing visions, but the people in them can’t affect this world. They just can’t do it.
“They can’t.” He said it aloud this time, hoping the sound of his voice would add strength of conviction in his mind. It did not.
39
THE MAN IN THE bowler hat disappeared in a blink. Just that fast. He was in the passenger seat at Josiah’s side, real as the truck beneath him, and then he was a memory. A memory that had every muscle in Josiah’s back tight as winch cables.
He actually put his hand out and waved it around the cab. Caught nothing but air. Then he puffed out a deep breath and waited to see if it would fog again. It did not.
The man in the hat, that’s how Josiah still thought of him. But this time he’d identified himself. Had called himself Campbell, had told Josiah that he was all that remained of the family blood.
Didn’t have to be you that I selected…. Nothing requires it…. All you got to do is listen, Josiah. All you got to do is listen to me.
It had been another dream, that was all. Just yesterday Josiah had wondered if the man in the dream could be Campbell, and his heat-addled brain had grabbed on to that and worked it into this latest dream. Odd thing was that all his life Josiah had been a man of deep, dreamless sleep. What had changed?
Hadn’t been a thing strange going on until the men from Chicago had shown up in town. The first of the strange moments had been the dream he’d had yesterday morning after the fight the night before…
No, it hadn’t been then. The first strange thing had been what happened when he went to wash Eric Shaw’s blood off his hand. The way the water had gone from hot to ice cold when it touched the blood. He’d never felt anything like that before. The house was still on a well, had an electric pump bringing in water from the same ground that produced the springs and the Lost River and the Wesley Chapel Gulf, and Josiah had al
ways liked it that way. Didn’t need any treated city water.
But, still… that had been strange. Then the dreams began, culminating in this last experience which should have been a dream but absolutely was not. It was like the man in the bowler hat snuck up on him only when Josiah let his conscious mind down a bit, when he was asleep or close to it. And strange as it was, the man felt familiar. Felt connected, the way old friends did. The way family did.
He popped the door handle and crawled down, his legs numb from the long stretch of sitting, looked all around the dark barn and saw nothing but shadows. Even the streaks of sun were gone, and that realization unnerved him, sent him toward the doors. When he slid them back, he saw the sky had gone the color of coal and rain was beginning to fall. There was even thunder, and how in the hell he’d missed that, he couldn’t guess. Maybe this was proof that he had fallen asleep, that it had been another dream.
As he stood in the open barn door and let the rain strike his face, though, he knew that wasn’t it. He’d had dreams with the man before, and this had not been one of them. This time, the man had been here. He’d been real.
He stepped out into the rain, heedless of the storm, and walked toward the trees. He felt strange, off-kilter. As if some worries had been lifted, not from his memory but from his ability to care. The rain and the thrashing trees and the lightning didn’t bother him, for example. Neither did the murder warrant they were probably filing for him right now. That was strange. He should have been concerned as hell about that.
But he wasn’t.
The rain soaked his clothes and made a flat wet sheet out of his hair, but he figured, what the hell, he’d needed a shower anyhow. He walked on into the woods, moving along the top of the ridge, the saturated ground sucking at his boots. He was out of sight of the timber camp and Danny was due back at any time, but the hell with Danny. He could wait for Josiah.
He came out to the edge of the ridge and stood in the open, looking out over the wooded hills that stretched away from it, a few cleared fields in the distance, the towns of French Lick and West Baden somewhere beyond. There was a sturdy sapling near the steep side, and he wrapped his hand around it and then leaned out over the drop.
So Cold the River Page 24
