So Cold the River

by Michael Koryta

  Then he pulled his lips back, the gesture a cross between a smile and the warning of a dog showing his fangs, and spit through his teeth. A stream of tobacco juice landed in the mineral bath, splattering Eric’s stomach and chest with brown drops.

  Eric shouted, the moment having just cost him any slight faith that what was happening in this room was not real. He scrambled to get out of the tub, moving to the far end, away from Campbell, and as he turned his head, Campbell laughed, a low whispering snicker of delight. Eric’s knee caught the faucet and his shin smacked off the ceramic edge of the tub and then he was over the side and on the tile floor, naked and dripping and helpless as Campbell advanced. Eric twisted to face him, thinking he’d do what little he could to defend himself.

  Campbell was gone. The second tub was gone, and the bleeding man.

  Eric sat there on the floor in a puddle of water and gasped for breath, and then the door banged again. He tried to jump to his feet but slid in the water, his heels going out from under him and dropping him back against the edge of the tub with a painful impact as a female voice floated in from the other side of the door.

  “Mr. Shaw? Are you—”

  “I’m fine!” he yelled. “I’m fine.”

  “I thought I heard you shout,” she said.

  He reached for the robe and dragged it down to cover himself.

  “No, no. I’m done, though. I’m going to be coming out.”

  He got unsteadily to his feet and slipped into the robe. The pockets banged off his hips, weighed down by the two plastic water bottles he’d filled.

  “Just another vision,” he said to himself. “Harmless as the others. You’ll get used to them.”

  He turned to lift the plug from the tub and froze with his arm extended.

  There, on the surface, floated a cloud of brown liquid. Tobacco juice.

  He stared at it for a long time. Closed his eyes and reopened them and it was still there. Straightened and stood above the tub and studied it from an angle, then turned in a full circle, making sure the rest of the room was as it had been when he entered, before looking at the tobacco juice again. Still there. Disintegrating in the water now, thinning and separating, but still there.

  How?

  It had come from Campbell’s mouth, and Campbell had been a vision, was gone completely now, just as had happened with all the previous visions. Never before had a trace lingered, never before had the visions left any mark on reality.

  “Mr. Shaw?”

  “Coming out!” he shouted, and then he opened the drain and let the tub of mineral water begin to empty. He stood there until the tobacco juice found the drain, and when it did a shiver rode high on his spine.

  For a moment, just as it swirled out of sight, it had looked exactly like blood.

  Part Four

  COLD BLACK CLOUD

  43

  IT TOOK DANNY ABOUT forty minutes to return with the cell phones. At first Josiah waited on the floor of the barn near the open door. As time passed, though, he found himself outside in the rain, leaning up against the barn wall, the weathered boards rough on his back. There was a tree that hung over the barn at this edge and kept the rain from falling on him. It was a light rain now, a gentle touch on his flesh, so he moved away from the tree and found a spot where he could sit against the barn wall and let the rain come down unobstructed. He was there when he saw the headlights of an approaching car, and though he knew he should move into the woods until confirming it was Danny, he did not. For some reason, he wasn’t all that concerned about who it was.

  The car was the Oldsmobile, though, and Danny pulled it up close to the barn and pushed his door open while the engine was still running.

  “What are you doing sitting in the rain?”

  “Passing time,” Josiah said, rankled by both the question and Danny’s expression, the way he was staring at Josiah like he was crazy. “You get the phones?”

  “I did.”

  “Well, bring them here. And shut the damn headlights off.”

  They went back into the barn and Danny set up one of those battery lanterns, filled the room with a white light.

  “Figured you could use this,” he said. He also had a few bottles of water and a bag of beef jerky, and all Josiah did was grunt a thank-you, but he didn’t like the lantern. He’d grown used to dark—almost to the point of fondness, really.

  Danny had purchased, as instructed, two prepaid cell phones and a battery charger that Josiah could plug into the truck’s cigarette lighter. He got the first phone out of the package now and started charging it.

  “I don’t understand why you needed two of them.”

  “If I’m going to be calling these people in Chicago, you think it’d be a real good idea to call you from the same number?”

  “Oh,” Danny said. “That’s good thinking. This guy you’re going to call, his number was in the briefcase you stole?”

  “Yes.”

  “I still don’t understand how you’re going to get any money out of him.”

  “Fact is,” Josiah said, “a man can get awful lost in details if he dwells too much on them. I don’t intend to have such a hindrance. The man paid someone thousands of dollars to drive down here and sit outside my home, Danny. Paid another man to come down and talk to Edgar. Hell, might have been paying that one that told me he was a student. But the paperwork I got suggests something about me was worth a dime or two to this old boy. If it was worth something last night, it still will be tonight.”

  “Last night his detective wasn’t dead.”

  “Now, that is a fair observation.”

  “Josiah, why don’t you just take the money I got and get—”

  “You gone down to the hotel yet to check on Shaw?”

  “No. You told me to get the phone first.”

  “Right. Well, now I got it.”

  Danny frowned. “All right. I’ll go. You just want to know if he’s there?”

  “And where he goes if he leaves, yes. You got the numbers off the phones you bought, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, use the first one. Don’t even think about calling the second one, just the first, got it? Call if you see him move.”

  Danny hesitated and then gave a short nod and moved toward the door. He stopped when he was just on the other side, turned back, and looked at Josiah, his face a pale moon in the lantern light.

  “So you’re going to call this guy and ask for money? Like that’s all there is to it?”

  “That’s all there’ll be to the start of it,” Josiah said. “I figure there could be a twist or two along the way.”

  Evening came on and settled and the rain fell soundlessly but unrelenting. Anne sat in the living room with a book in her lap but didn’t read. The depth of her desire was surprising to her, the sense of urgent anticipation she had as she watched the clock tick minutes off the day and waited for the water to take effect.

  Come on, she thought, let me see what he is seeing. Let me go back to those times I never appreciated enough when I was in them, let me see those faces and hear those voices again.

  Nothing happened. The short hand found seven and then eight and then nine, and she saw nothing but the achingly familiar walls of the house. She considered going for more water, but the stairs seemed so steep and the results so uncertain that she stayed in her chair. She’d seen how much Eric Shaw had to drink before the visions came for him and was sure she’d had at least an equal amount. Why, then, was he allowed to see the past and she was not?

  She went to bed after taking her last round of readings, turned off the light, and watched the shadows shift as the moon struggled for a space amidst the clouds. The water had not worked for her. She’d felt vaguely nauseated since taking it, but she had seen nothing. A wasted risk. How could she have allowed herself to do such a thing? The water could have poisoned her. Or, worse, wreaked the sort of havoc it had with Eric Shaw, putting her into the throes of pain and addiction.

&nb
sp; Logical as all those thoughts might be, she couldn’t make herself care about them. She’d understood the risk well enough at the start, but the reward had seemed so tantalizing… and still did.

  Maybe it started with his bottle, the bottle he claimed came from Campbell Bradford. Maybe you wouldn’t see anything until you’d tried some of that. She’d have to call him in the morning, see if he’d gotten the Bradford bottle back yet, hope it would work with her as it had with him. It seemed worth a try.

  She had a sense, though, that it would not work. She could drink his water and still see nothing, still be trapped here in the present, the lonely present of this empty house, and the ones she’d loved would continue to exist merely as memories and fading photographs. Why was Eric Shaw allowed to see the past and she was not? Why was some of the world’s magic presented to only a few and hidden from others?

  The visions would not come to her, no matter how much of the water she drank. She would wait for them without reward, just as she’d waited for the big storm, waited with faith and patience and a confidence of purpose that she would be needed, that there was a reason she remained here. They’d need her someday; they’d need her knowledge and her trained eye and her shortwave radio. She had been certain of it.

  But maybe not. Maybe it was all a charade, a silly girl’s notion that she’d never let die. Maybe the storm was never coming.

  “Enough,” she whispered to herself. “Enough of this, Annie.”

  Sleep swept over her then, descending with the speed and weight of a long day filled with unusual activity. She had a dim realization, just before it took her, of a light whistling sound.

  The wind was coming back.

  44

  I’M GETTING STRONGER, and you can’t stop it. All the water in the world ain’t going to hold me back now.

  The memory chased Eric up the stairs and back to his room, the words echoing through his brain.

  He’d been real again. Without so much as a drop of the Bradford water passing through Eric’s lips, Campbell had been made real again. This time the vision had been a sort of hybrid, actually—a moment from the past again, yes, but this time Eric had been a participant as well as a spectator.

  What in the hell had happened? What had changed?

  He called Kellen. The first thing he said was, “He spoke to me again.”

  “Campbell?”

  “That’s right.”

  “He spoke to you in a vision?”

  “Well, it wasn’t on the elevator.”

  Quiet again. Eric said, “Sorry, man. I’m just a little—”

  “Forget it. What did you see?”

  Eric told him about the murder of the nameless man in the mineral bath. He was sitting in the desk chair in the room, hair still damp, muscles still tight and stomach trembling from what he had seen.

  “At first it was like they have been recently, you know, a scene from the past. Only there wasn’t any distance; I was right there for it. It didn’t involve me, though. Not in the beginning. When it was done, after he’d killed that guy… he turned and spoke to me. He spoke directly to me and spit tobacco juice into the water, and the tobacco juice was still there after he was gone. It was real, damn it. It was—”

  “Okay,” Kellen said, his voice soft, calming. “I get it.”

  “I don’t know why it changed,” Eric said. “I can’t figure out why it would have changed. Maybe because I was in the water, you know, immersed? But the only times I’ve seen him like that before were after drinking from the original bottle, and that thing’s nowhere near me now.”

  “He said he was getting stronger?”

  “Yeah. And that all the water in the world wasn’t going to stop him.”

  “So the water’s been helping you.”

  “Helping me?”

  “You know, protecting you.”

  From what? Eric thought. What in the hell is going to happen if I stop drinking the water? And what if he wasn’t lying—what if he is getting stronger? Does that mean the water won’t work anymore?

  “You said that was your second vision,” Kellen said. “What was the first?”

  So he told him about the Shadrach vision, realizing halfway through that he’d completely forgotten that he’d been given the name of the boy’s uncle. Somehow such details seemed insignificant after the scene in the spa.

  “Let me ask you something,” Kellen said. “What did Shadrach Hunter look like?”

  Eric gave as much detail as he could and then described the bar.

  “I’ll be damned,” Kellen said, voice soft. “It’s real. What you’re seeing is real.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’ve found a few pictures of Shadrach. Very few. Aren’t many that exist anymore. You just described him to a T. And that bar, that’s one of the old black clubs, the one they called Whiskeytown. That’s Shadrach’s club.”

  “I’ve got to find that spring, Kellen.”

  “Why?”

  “I think it matters,” Eric said. “Check that—I know it matters. You were right with what you said earlier. Anne’s water hasn’t been causing problems; it’s been preventing them. Showing me the truth but keeping Campbell at bay. I need to find the spring that mattered so much to all of them, though. There’s a point to these visions, Kellen, and they’re all headed in that direction. I need to follow them.”

  Kellen was silent.

  “Can we find it?” Eric said.

  “The uncle’s name is a start, but I don’t know how much of a help it will be. There’s nothing else that we can go on? Nothing else you saw or heard?”

  “No,” Eric said. “Just that his name was Thomas Granger, and—. Wait. There was something else. Campbell told Shadrach he knew he’d already been out in the hills, looking for the spring. He said it was by the gulf. But what in the hell would that mean? The only gulfs I know are in the ocean.”

  “Wesley Chapel Gulf,” Kellen said. “You’ve got to be shitting me.”

  “What?”

  “It’s part of the Lost River. A spot where it rises from underground and fills this weird stone sinkhole and then sinks again. One side of the sinkhole is like a cliff, must be a hundred feet high at least. I’ve been there once. It’s a very strange spot. It’s also where Shadrach Hunter’s body was found.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Nope. His body was found in the woods on the ridge above the gulf. That’s why I went out there. I just wanted to see the place and, like I said, it’s strange.”

  “Well, maybe I should see it, too.”

  “Yeah,” Kellen said, and there was unconcealed fascination in his voice. “You’re really seeing it, man. The truth. Everybody thought Campbell murdered Shadrach, but it’s never been proven, you know? What you just saw, with the two of them heading out there… that’s the truth, Eric.”

  I knew it was, he thought, and maybe now you’ll see the potential in this.

  “You can get me there, then?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “We’ll go tomorrow,” Eric said. “First thing.”

  “All right,” Kellen said. “But before you hang up, there’s something I wanted to tell you. I talked to Danielle, and she said the bottle’s getting warmer.”

  “Warmer?”

  “Yeah. The Bradford bottle, the original. I thought it had warmed up a little during the drive, but she said it’s almost normal now.”

  “Weird,” Eric said. He didn’t know what else to say.

  “Yeah. I was just thinking that suggests whatever’s happening has a lot to do with its proximity to this place.”

  “Maybe,” Eric said, thinking that it had been cold back in Chicago, though, and that was miles farther away. “I’ll call you in the morning, all right?”

  He hung up and went out onto the balcony, stood and looked down over the hotel. The bottle could be affected by its proximity to this valley. Eric had consumed its contents, and the effects had changed dramatically once he left Chicago and came h
ere. Perhaps if he left, they would lessen. Stop altogether, even.

  But then I wouldn’t be able to see it, he thought. I want to keep on seeing it.

  He’d stay, then. There was no other choice. He couldn’t leave now.

  I’m getting stronger, Campbell had said.

  Never mind that. He was a figment, nothing more. He had no real power in this world.

  None.

  Josiah waited until midnight to call. Originally, he’d planned to do it later but he was impatient and there was something about the hour of midnight that attracted him.

  Both phones had full charges by then, and he used the second one and didn’t worry about trying to block the number. It was an anonymous phone, paid for in cash, and even if they could trace it to the gas station where Danny had bought it, Josiah didn’t much care. Anything coming from that sort of detective work took time, and he wasn’t too worried about long-term plans. More concerned with getting what was owed to him. He didn’t know what that was yet, but his gut said that Lucas G. Bradford did.

  He called the number that was listed as residence on the paperwork he’d taken from the detective, listened to it ring. After five rings it kicked over to a message. He disconnected, waited a few minutes, and tried again. This time, it was answered. A male with a husky voice, speaking low, as if he didn’t want to be overheard.

  “Lucas, my boy,” Josiah said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “I’m sure you’ve heard the unfortunate news of your friend in French Lick.”

  The silence that followed brought a smile to Josiah’s lips.

  “Who is this?” Lucas Bradford said.

  “Campbell Bradford,” Josiah said. Hadn’t even planned on that; it just left his lips, natural as a breath. Once it was said, he liked it, too. Campbell. That felt right. Hell, felt almost like the truth. He wasn’t Campbell, of course, but he was a representative. Yes, these days, he was the next best thing.