So Cold the River

by Michael Koryta

  “So you’ve told me. But I’m also a man has made his money by staying away from those of your sort as much as possible.”

  “Hell, Shadrach, I don’t care about the color of your damn skin, I care about the size of your capital.”

  “You the only one talking about color,” Shadrach Hunter said in a soft voice.

  Campbell went quiet and stared at him. Just outside the wall, water streamed through a gutter and exited in noisy splatters. The wind was blowing hard.

  “You might have some dollars saved,” Campbell said, “but there are no more coming your way, Shadrach. With the way white folks around here are hurting, how you think your people will fare? Now, I got an offer that’s been made, and you can take it or leave it. You’ve tasted the whiskey. You know what it’s worth.”

  “There’s whiskey all over.”

  “You find any matches that? Shit, Old Number Seven ain’t nothing but piss water compared to that. I got connections in Chicago who’ll be ready to pay prices you ain’t even imagined for it.”

  “Then why you down here looking for me?”

  “Because,” Campbell Bradford said, “some projects require a piece of assistance. And I’ve been told you’re the only man in this valley got a heart as black as mine.”

  Shadrach Hunter showed his teeth in a grin, then said softly, “Oh, there ain’t nobody in this valley comes close to that, Bradford. And that’s a known fact.”

  Campbell spread his hands. “Car’s out front, Shadrach. I’m getting back in it.”

  There was a moment of hesitation, and then Shadrach Hunter nodded and dropped his feet to the floor and stood up. His two companions moved toward the door with him, but Campbell shook his head.

  “No. You ride with me, you ride alone, Shadrach.”

  Shadrach stopped cold at that, looking displeased, but after a long pause he nodded. Then he opened a drawer of his desk and took out a pistol and slid it into his belt. He took a long jacket, still streaked from rain, off a peg on the wall and put that on, and then he reached back in the desk drawer and took out another gun, a small automatic, and put it in the jacket pocket. He kept his hand in the pocket.

  Campbell smiled. “Brave enough yet?”

  Shadrach didn’t answer as he walked for the door. He went out and up the stairs, followed by Campbell, Lucas in the rear. The top of the stairs was utterly black, and as Shadrach Hunter stepped into it, he disappeared. Then Campbell did the same, and finally there was nothing left but a pale square from the back of Lucas’s white shirt. Then that was gone, too, and there were voices and sounds of people moving in the hotel and Eric realized he was sitting on the balcony with an empty bottle of water in his hand.

  Empty.

  He’d had every drop.

  42

  FOR THE FIRST TIME, he did not feel relief when the vision passed. Instead, he felt almost disappointed. Cheated.

  It had been too abrupt, like a film cut off in midscene. Yes, that was exactly what it was like—always before he’d gotten a full scene, and this time it had ended without closure.

  “I got the name,” he said aloud, recalling all that he’d seen. “He said the damn name. Granger. Thomas Granger. Lucas is his nephew.”

  The realization was exciting; the disappointment that countered was that the men had been bound for the spring when he lost the vision. If he could have stayed there longer, remained in the past, he might have seen the way to it. He was seeing the story, seeing more than random images, but now it was gone. Lucas and Campbell and Shadrach Hunter had been replaced by the reality of the hotel once again, and he held an empty bottle in his hand, which was astounding, because he didn’t remember drinking it. And troubling, because this meant he was out.

  The effective dose had, in the space of forty-eight hours, increased dramatically.

  “Tolerance,” he said. “You’re building a tolerance.”

  Disconcerting, maybe, but not drastic. He’d just have to keep tweaking it, that was all. Surely, his need would plateau at some point. He wasn’t going to run out of the stuff. Springs abounded in the area, filled pipes and poured from faucets down in the spa.

  Poured from faucets. Indeed it did.

  There was no need for another drink. Not now. His headache was gone; the sickness had been avoided.

  But he could see the story again if he had more water.

  He looked at the empty bottle in his hand and thought about the conversation he’d had with Claire, her insistence that he’d always been prone toward psychic tendencies. Hell, he knew that. He’d lived through the moments, after all, from the valley in the Bear Paws to the Infiniti to the snapshot of the red cottage for the Harrelson video.

  The ability had always been there. The gift, if you wanted to call it that. The only change now was that the water gave him some control over it. He’d been scared of the stuff initially, but was that the right response? Should he fear it, or should he embrace it?

  “You’ve got to shoot this,” he said softly. “Document it and shoot it.”

  Kellen’s response to the idea had been less than enthusiastic. The look he’d given Eric had been more doubtful than any of the looks he’d offered after discussions of ghosts and visions and the rest, and what in the hell kind of sense did that make? Oh, well, Kellen didn’t have to be involved. He didn’t appreciate the possibility the way Eric did. It was the sort of thing that was so damn strange, people wouldn’t be able to get enough of it. He could imagine the interviews already—Larry King’s jaw dropping as Eric sat there and calmly explained the circumstances that had led to the film. The gift was always there… always with me. It just took me a long time to get control of it. To learn how to use it.

  He got to his feet and went back inside the room. There was an extension number for the spa listed on the card beside the phone. He called.

  The girl who answered told him the spa was closing in thirty minutes. There wasn’t enough time for a session, she explained. A session? All he wanted was to see the damn mineral bath. He told her as much, and was met with polite but firm resistance.

  “Sessions in the mineral bath run for half an hour or an hour. There’s not enough time for that, sorry. We can schedule you tomorrow.”

  “Look,” he said, “I’ll pay for a full session.”

  “I’m sorry, sir, we just can’t—”

  “And tip you a hundred dollars,” he said, the situation suddenly feeling urgent to him as he looked at the empty bottle in his hand. “I’ll be out by nine, when you close.”

  “All right,” she said after a long pause. “But you’re going to want to hurry down here, or you won’t get much time at all.”

  “That’s all right. Say, do you have any plastic water bottles down there?”

  “Um, yes.”

  He said he was glad to hear that they did.

  The spa was beautiful, filled with high-grade stone and ornate trim, fireplaces crackling. He’d routinely mocked men he knew in California who frequented such places, too much of the Missouri farm-town boyhood still in him to sample that lifestyle. Yet here he stood in a white robe and slippers, padding along behind an attractive blond girl who was opening a frosted door that led to the mineral bath.

  “It’s a complete re-creation of the originals,” she said, pausing with the door half open. “But most people these days do add aromatherapy. Are you sure you don’t—”

  “I want the natural water,” he said. “Nothing else.”

  “Okay,” she said, and opened the door. The potent stench of sulfur was immediately present, and the blond girl grimaced, clearly horrified that he hadn’t elected to go with the scent of vanilla or lavender or butterfly wings or whatever the hell it was that you were supposed to use.

  “You might feel a little light-headed at first,” she said. “Kind of giddy. That’s from all the gases that are released by the water, lithium and such. There’s a complete list of the chemical content there on the counter if you’re int—”

 
; “Thanks,” he said. “I’ll be all set.”

  She’d been on the verge of a full introductory speech, he could tell, and he didn’t want to waste time. He wanted to get to work emptying the two plastic water bottles she’d given him and filling them with Pluto Water.

  She left then, and he was alone in the green-tiled room that stank of sulfur. The tub was still filling, pouring out of the hotwater faucet only. There were two faucets, the girl had told him, both depositing mineral water directly from the spring, with the only difference being that one carried water that had been heated to one hundred and two degrees.

  There was a sink across from the tub, and he poured the water from his bottles into that, shook them as dry as possible, and returned to the tub. He turned on the cold-water faucet, cupped his hand, and caught some of the water. Lifted it to his mouth and sampled, frowning and licking his lips like some asshole wine connoisseur. It tasted different from Anne McKinney’s, crisper and cleaner. Of course, it hadn’t been in a glass bottle for eighty years. Just because it tasted different didn’t mean it wouldn’t work. He hoped.

  He filled one bottle about a third and then pulled it back from the faucet and stared at it, thinking of the last vision he’d had, of the boy vanishing up the stairs beside Campbell Bradford and Shadrach Hunter. Where had they gone? What had happened next?

  The idea that had slipped into his mind was growing legs now: if he could find ways to document this, if he could tell a tale that had been hidden from historians, hidden from the eyes of ordinary men, well, the result would be extraordinary. In the past, he’d never discussed his rare and brief flashes with anyone but Claire, because a man who claimed psychic tendencies would quickly be dismissed as a lunatic. It was the way of the world. But suppose he could prove what he’d seen as the truth. And suppose, with the water as his aid, he could do it again, on another story. A self-proclaimed psychic was the subject of ridicule, but a proven entity, a film director whose exclusive ability allowed him to shatter secrets and expose the unknown, would be something else entirely. He’d be a star. Beyond that. A legend. Famous as famous got.

  It was a fantasy. But there was also a possibility, perhaps a stronger one than he dared admit, that it could become a reality. See the story, document it, and turn to the Hollywood connections he had left. There were publicists and agents who’d salivate at the very idea. And once the buzz began…

  But first he had to see the rest of it. First he had to know what had happened. The water would provide that for him.

  In a soft voice, he said, “Show me. Show me what happened,” and drank. Drank it all. That done, he leaned back to the faucet.

  Once both bottles were filled, he put them in the pocket of the big robe, then looked around the room and watched the water cascade into that old-fashioned tub. What the hell, he’d come down here, and he’d paid for it.

  He took off the robe and his underwear and stepped down into the water, finding it the perfect temperature for soaking sore muscles. He probably had only ten minutes left, but that was all he’d need. He’d never been one for hot tubs, really.

  But this one did feel good. Felt incredible, really, like it was finding kinks and knots in his muscles and lifting them away, lifting him a little bit, too. That must be the gas from the mineral blend. It did make you a little giddy, at that.

  He flicked his eyes open and inhaled deeply, breathing in those mellowing fumes. The ceiling looked different. For a moment he was confused, unsure of the change, but then he realized—there was a fan overhead now, wide blades paddling lazily through the air. That hadn’t been there before, had it? He rolled his head sideways then, back toward the door, and saw he was no longer alone.

  There was a second tub in the room now. A long, narrow white bowl resting on claw feet. There was a man inside. He had his head laid back as Eric had a minute ago, face to the ceiling, eyes closed. He was clean-shaven and had thick dark hair, damp and glistening. His chest rose and fell in the slow rhythm of sleep.

  He is another vision, Eric thought, not moving at all, afraid a single ripple in the water would cause the man to raise his head. It’s just like the others.

  It wasn’t like the others, though. Not like watching a movie, everything distant. This time, it was here with him. As it had been with Campbell in the train car.

  He heard a click then, and the door pushed open, nothing but blackness on the other side, and Campbell Bradford stepped into the room.

  His eyes were straight ahead, on Eric. Maybe it was going to be like the one in the train car, when Campbell had spoken directly to him, when he’d had to run for the door because Campbell was on his feet and walking toward him…

  Campbell turned away, though. He flicked his eyes away from Eric and to the sleeping man in the other tub, and then he walked toward him. He moved quietly, his shoes sliding over the tile floor, his suit barely rustling. When he reached the man in the tub, he stood over him silently, looking down. Then he slid his suit coat off his shoulders and laid it over the back of a chair. Once the jacket was off, Campbell unfastened his cuff links and set them on top of the coat. Then he rolled both sleeves up past the elbows. Still the man in the tub didn’t move, lost to sleep.

  Warn him, Eric thought. Say something.

  But of course he couldn’t. He wasn’t part of this scene, he just felt like he was. Campbell couldn’t see him; Campbell was not real. Eric hadn’t taken any of the Bradford water, none of that dangerous stuff that brought Campbell out of the past and into the present. All he had to do was watch and wait for it to go away. It would end in time. He knew that it would end in time.

  For a long moment, Campbell stood above the man in the tub and watched him, almost serenely. When he finally moved, it was with sudden and violent speed. He lunged out and dropped the palm of one hand on top of the man’s head and put the other on his chest, near the collarbone, and then slammed his weight behind them and drove the man into the water.

  The tub exploded into a frenzy of water and both of the man’s feet appeared in the air, flailing. His hands clenched first on the edges of the tub and then grappled backward at his antagonist. Campbell appeared not to notice.

  He held him down for a long time, and then straightened and hauled back. His right fist was wrapped in the man’s hair now. Once he cleared the water, gurgling and gasping, Campbell slammed him down again. This time he held him even longer. Held him until the frantic motions slowed and almost ceased. When the man’s hands had lost their grip on Campbell’s jacket and drifted back toward the water, he let him up again.

  They do not see you. Cannot see you. It was a frantic mantra, the desperate reassurance of someone in a plane hurtling toward the earth—the pilot will fix this.

  Campbell had released the man in the tub and stepped aside and was only a few feet from Eric now. The man hung on to the side of the tub, gasping and choking, water streaming from his hair to the tile floor.

  “There are debts to be paid,” Campbell said. His voice was eerily calm. “I’ve established this with you in the past. Yet they remain unpaid.”

  The man looked at him with disbelieving eyes, chest heaving. His face was wet with water and tears, and there was a smear of blood-tinged mucus beneath his nose.

  “I don’t have any money!” he gasped, pulling back to the edge of the tub, dragging his knees up as if to protect himself. “Who does right now, Campbell? I lost my savings. You see how empty this hotel is? That’s because nobody has any money!”

  “You seem to think that your circumstances affect your debt,” Campbell said. “That is not an idea which I share.”

  “You’re crazy, trying to collect now. Not just from me—from anybody. There’s no money left in this valley. The whole thing’s going to disappear in a blink. Don’t you read the papers? Listen to the radio? This country is going to hell, man.”

  “I’m not concerned with this country,” Campbell said. “I’m concerned with what’s owed me.”

  “They’re not eve
n going to be able to keep this hotel open, I can promise you that.” The man was babbling now, his voice nearly hysterical. “Ballard might try to force it along, but it’ll close and they’ll be broke, too. Everyone will be. Everyone in this whole country will be broke soon, you wait and see. It’ll come for us all.”

  Campbell used his index finger to push his hat up on his head, and then he reached into his pocket and came out with a chaw of tobacco, worked it in behind his lower lip. The man in the tub watched warily, but Campbell’s silence and cool demeanor seemed to have soothed his panic. When the man spoke again, his voice was steadier.

  “Hand me that robe, will you? You could’ve killed me earlier. All to try and get money that I don’t have. Now what would the point of that have been?”

  “The point?” Campbell said. “I don’t understand your confusion. There’s nothing difficult to this situation. The world breaks some men. Others, it uses for the breaking.”

  He tilted his head and smiled. “Which one do you figure I am?”

  The man in the tub didn’t answer. When Campbell walked toward him, he did not speak or cry out in alarm. Instead he watched, silent, until he saw Campbell’s hand dip into his pocket and come out with a knife. Words left his mouth then, left in a harsh whisper of terror, just two of them: “Campbell, no—”

  Campbell’s hands flashed. One caught the man’s sopping wet hair and jerked backward, exposing the throat; the other dropped the blade and cut a ribbon through it. Blood poured into the water.

  Eric’s body seized at the sight. He couldn’t get a breath, couldn’t do anything except watch the blood drip into the tub, the sound like a water glass being refilled from a pitcher. They can’t see me, he thought. Had to remember that. Had to remember…

  Campbell turned and looked at him. Those watery brown eyes found his, and when they did, the wild thoughts died in Eric’s brain and even the sound of the blood seemed to disappear.

  “You wanted me to show you,” Campbell said. “Now you’ve been shown. There’s plenty more on the way for you, too. I’m getting stronger, and you can’t stop it. All the water in the world ain’t going to hold me back now.”