He closes the door leading to the hall and begins ransacking the office as quickly as he can. Instantly, disappointment envelops him.
The desk drawers: empty.
The filing cabinet: hundreds of folders, all empty.
The trash can: empty.
In fact, the only scrap of paper in the entire office is the “evaluation” the director had given him, and the only other object of any interest at all is the lasso, hanging on the hat rack.
The place is sterile.
There’s a soft knock at the door. Caleb’s heart races. He wants to run and hide, but there’s nowhere to go. The window is frosted and barred. He looks for a weapon, but there’s nothing, just the pencil and the coat rack, and he doesn’t think either one will do him much good. So if he can’t fight and he can’t flee, all he can do is go along for the ride.
“Come in,” he says, his voice sounding hoarse, his eyes locked on the door.
The man who opens the door is not the director.
At first, Caleb has trouble placing him (maybe because the drugs he was given are wearing off, maybe because his wrist is throbbing with pain again, so much that it’s difficult to think). After a moment, he realizes it’s the man from the front desk with the shaved head. Caleb surmises it might be Karl from the other end of the director’s phone.
“Hi, Karl,” he says.
“Hello, Mr. Mason,” says Karl. “Please, come with me.”
Karl is unarmed and seems as mild as milk. With no better option available, Caleb follows him.
They pass down a long hallway. Every other rectangle of fluorescent bulbs above is shut off, and the effect as they walk from light to darkness and into light again is a little painful to Caleb’s still-woozy brain.
They pass many doors on either side, each made of heavy oak and each bearing a number. Now he’s passing 333. There are sounds behind a few doors, a shuffling sound behind one, a sharp cough issuing from another, but mostly there is only silence. Finally, Karl leads Caleb to a lobby area with padded chairs and a fake flower arrangement on a big, laminated wood table. There is a bank of elevators, but Karl doesn’t push a button. Instead, he opens a door that leads to a stairwell of steel railings and peeling paint. Caleb follows him as he winds his way down and down with only the echo of their footfalls to mark their progress. When Caleb is sure they must be several stories underground, the man, Karl, pushes open another door. He gestures to Caleb, you first.
“Where am I going?” Caleb asks as he warily passes Karl, stepping through the doorway.
“Wherever you like,” Karl says, and Caleb, squinting, realizes that he has stepped into the light spilling through the front doors of the building. This is the main lobby.
“Thank you for visiting the Dream Center. We’ll see you again soon,” says Karl. He walks around the counter, sits down on a stool, and looks down at a magazine.
“I’m free to go?” asks Caleb.
“That’s right,” says Karl, without looking up. “The director saw no need to admit you.”
Caleb just stands there, frowning. Trying to figure out what’s going on right now makes his head hurt. He’d rather sort grains of sand on a beach. Finally, he decides to simply be direct.
“Karl, please tell me what’s going on.”
Karl looks up from his magazine, a little annoyed. “What do you mean? You can go,” he says.
“I know that,” says Caleb. “What I’m asking is what’s going on in the grand scheme of things here? Kids in this town are missing, my friend was abducted by—I don’t even know what, then all this. And Christine . . . Can you just please tell me what’s happening? Please?”
Karl looks a little amused. “Look, kid, it’s not my place to say. My job is the desk,” he says, and he thumps the palm of his hand on the counter.
“So you don’t know what’s going on either?” Caleb asks.
“Oh, no,” says Karl. “I know exactly what’s going on. I’ve been here since the beginning.”
“Then why won’t you tell me?”
“Because asking me is like . . . like asking the wick of a candle what the flame is going to do. A flame burns whatever it wants, it doesn’t give half a shit, excuse my French, what the wick thinks.”
“And who—or what is the flame?” asks Caleb. He feels that he’s close to something if this guy would just— But Karl only laughs.
“You mean you really can’t hear them, kid? They’re all around you. Tune in,” Karl says.
Karl’s words hang in the air for a second, and “who are they?” hangs on Caleb’s lips, but before the words can come out, the phone on the counter rings, and Karl snatches it up.
“Dream Center. . . . Of course, right away.” He hangs up.
“Who?” Caleb asks. “Who’s all around?”
But Karl is already disappearing out the door behind the desk. It slams shut, and Caleb is alone in the lobby.
His shadow stretches long at his feet from the light spilling in the doors, reflecting brightly off the polished floor. Somewhere far off, someone is yelling. Caleb shivers. He should be glad he can leave.
Glad he’s getting away. Christine isn’t as lucky. He takes a slow step through the doorway and out into the hush of impending twilight.
Should it be twilight now, or should it be morning? Time seems suddenly disjointed. He feels like he lost a day somewhere, but he’s not sure where. He walks up the gravel driveway on soggy legs. The wrist is aching bad enough to set his teeth on edge, but his jaw is slack, his eyes are slack, and his mind is adrift.
He finds his way to the car, still parked where he and Bean left it a lifetime ago. It starts right up. The only problem is there’s nowhere to go.
After what he’s seen, no place can be home again.
Chapter Eleven
BEFORE DARKNESS SETTLES IN, Caleb kneels next to the car, parked in the driveway of his lost father’s house, and pulls the laces of his running shoes tight. He stretches, first one leg, then the other, then both, feeling the burn run along his sinews. The sun is lost behind the trees, but the color of the sky above is still vibrant, and he figures he still has a good half an hour until darkness marches in. When night comes he doesn’t know what he’ll do. He walks to the end of the driveway, looking at the woods all around him, eyes scanning the ferns for moving shapes, glancing at the treetops for lurking apparitions, finding none. When he reaches the road, he kicks into motion. At first, his legs feel heavy. He doesn’t know if it’s the drugs the doctor gave him, the fatigue (when was the last time he slept?), or simply the fact that he hasn’t run in a while, but for some reason, he’s dog-tired. Soon, though, all of it melts away: the leaden legs, the slight cramping in the chest, the pain in his wrist that strikes with every step. His surroundings, his pain, and the world, they all thin into one line of motion and become simple. Which is why he loves running so much in the first place.
Running is what he always does when he needs to think about a really important problem. His mind is clear, his thoughts are sharp.
I can’t get lost. Can’t make any turns. I’ll just go up and back.
I have to get out of this town. This place is— I have to find Bean. But how? He’s gone, taken. Or worse. . . .
And Christine, too.
I need help.
I have to get that guy out of jail, that—Ron—I’m pretty sure that was his name. He didn’t know what trouble he was getting into, giving me a ride. Or maybe he did. He followed me to the Dream Center. No, the asylum, because that’s still what it is, isn’t it? How many others are locked up in there? Maybe my father even. But not me. Why?
Too many questions.
But then there’s the other good thing about running: you can shut your mind off. That’s what Caleb does now, and he kicks out harder.
The soles of his shoes slap the pavement, his legs feel free like they’re running on their own. The forest dissolves all around him and there’s only the sound of his breath, the simplicity of his brea
th.
And he thinks of Bean and how he lost him.
And he thinks of Anna and how he lost her.
He thinks of how he might lose Christine.
And his father.
And he runs his ass off.
When he gets back to the house, the dark is just coiling itself around the world. He walks up the squeaking boards of the front steps and into the living room. He’s dripping with sweat and his legs ache, but it’s a good pain. His wrist aches too, and that’s not so good, but he bites his lip and ignores it. A terrible thought comes to him, that there might be no hot water—after all, who pays the bill at an abandoned house? And of course, there’s no electricity. But after rummaging through a broom closet and finding a match and some candles to light his way up the stairs, he finds a working bathtub; one mercifully void of raccoons. He sets the candles up on the basin and disrobes. The shower actually works, and once rust runs itself out, the water is clear enough. The shower curtain is hopelessly moldy, but he leans as far away from it as possible as he climbs his way in. He finds an old, hard sliver of soap and makes do.
If somebody paid the water bill, they certainly forgot the gas, because the water is by no means hot. It isn’t cold enough to make Caleb cry, though, so he bears it.
He keeps thinking he hears something and cranes his head around the shower curtain, but all he sees is the back of the closed bathroom door. As he scrubs himself down, growing numb with cold, he asks himself the hard questions:
Do I leave?
Christine is still locked up, and even though that director let me go, I know there’s something wrong at that place. There always has been. And maybe Bean is still alive; maybe he’s locked up there. It’s too much to hope for, but still. If he’s alive, I can’t leave him. And either way, if I don’t help Christine, then he suffered, probably died, for nothing. So I stay.
And do what?
. . . I don’t know. I have no friggin’ clue. Help that guy Ron get out of jail? How? Bail him out, I guess. Then what? Find my father. Where? In Atlanta? But I know he’s not really in Atlanta. I don’t know how I know that, but I do. He’s probably locked up in the Dream Center too. He probably tried to fight it, probably sued or something. There are too many people who need rescuing.
So . . .
Bail out Ron, try to rescue Christine, find my dad, in that order. Not much of a plan, but . . . what the hell good are plans anyway? I’m supposed to be in Africa. Dealing with simple things like starvation and AIDS. I’d give anything if all I had to worry about was writing a crappy article about starvation and AIDS right now. God, this water’s getting cold. . . .
Caleb climbs out and gets dressed. He keeps looking over his shoulder, half expecting a sleeping demon to appear out of the shadows and claw him to death, but none do.
Night is deepening and the air is still as Caleb walks out to the car, starts it up, and drives to the sheriff ’s station—or the “Trailer O’Justice,” as it might more aptly be called. He cracks a tiny smile at his own wit, but when he dwells on the fact that his friend isn’t there to share the joke with him, the smile on his face quickly melts into resolve. He has to focus. There is somebody he can save tonight. It might not be Bean, but at least it’s somebody.
He goes over it in his mind the whole way there, the plan, everything he’s going to say. He’s going to tell them that Ron is his uncle, that he was under the influence of medication so he said the wrong thing. He’ll tell them that the whole situation was just a misunderstanding and that he’ll be glad to make a statement or even testify on Ron’s behalf. And then he’ll take his mother’s credit card (just thinking of the shit storm that’ll rain down on him when that credit card bill with “Calhoun County Sheriff, $500” written on it comes in the mail makes him wince). And then what? He’ll cross that bridge when he comes to it. Maybe Ron will know—whoever Ron is.
But his plans are laid to waste, as most plans are, when he rolls into the police trailer driveway and finds the windows dark and the driveway empty. He gets out and knocks on the door, even waits for ten minutes for somebody to come, glancing over his shoulder the whole time, but in the end he simply walks back to the car. As he sits in the driver’s seat, he sees a sign in the window that simply reads closed. Apparently in Hudsonville no crimes are committed after six pm.
Up the street he stops at the only gas station in town and buys a couple of PowerBars and a cup of coffee from a polite (but not friendly), old black guy and drives back over the desolate, carless streets to his father’s empty house. He goes into the living room, builds a fire, stares at it, and is lost.
After maybe half an hour letting the fire’s light burn into his brain, listening to the tiny sounds of the house, he walks over to his duffel bag on the dusty, old couch, and takes out a small leather-bound book. He goes back to the fire, worms his way into his sleeping bag, then sits, staring at a blank page of his journal. He clicks his pen, clicks it again, and clicks it again.
Come on, he tells himself, you’re a journalist; one day you’ll be a famous one. And here it is, the biggest, most horrifying, most important story you’ll ever have the chance to write. Maybe you can get the FBI to come here. Maybe you can spark a national investigation. That Dream Center must be licensed; who oversees the licensing?
But even as he thinks that thought, he’s disgusted with himself. Who gives a crap about licensing or pointing fingers at some bureaucrat? This is about lives. Bean’s life, Christine’s. This is about evil, real evil like Caleb never imagined could exist. But it does exist. And the world has to know. So he takes his pen, and in the firelight he writes:
The children of Hudsonville, Florida, are missing.
He crosses it out. Below it, he writes:
Deep in the woods in the small town of Hudsonville, Florida, something horrible is happening: people are disappearing.
He goes to cross it out, but then he continues.
The police, those assigned with investigating the disappearance of these people, are interested in nothing but . . .
He stops and crosses it all out. It’s hopeless. Even if he could write it, it would sound more like a Stephen King book than a Newsweek article. And he wonders if that’s how all truly horrific acts come to pass: nobody can, or will, believe until it’s too late. If somebody had come to him in Malibu and told him that there were sleepwalking ghosts in northern Florida who lived underground and kidnapped people, would he have believed it? Never.
Except maybe for the part of him that never stopped thinking about Anna Zikry. That part would believe it, whether he liked it or not.
He closes the book and lays it under his head like a pillow. He doesn’t have enough facts yet to write this story, and even if he did, exhaustion is too near to let him get any work done tonight. He pushes his feet deeper down in the sleeping bag. This is still somehow like camping. But lonely. The house doesn’t seem horrible anymore either. Just sad. And empty. He sighs. He’s about to close his eyes, then thinks twice. He reaches over and grabs the poker out of the fireplace rack, making a thick “tung” sound, then closes his eyes with one hand wrapped around the wrought-iron handle. Better safe than sorry.
Chapter Twelve
THE CLATTER ’CROSS THE RAILROAD TRACKS MEANS two-thirty AM. Wakes Margie up and pisses her off every night without fail. ’Course this morning Margie hasn’t even been to bed yet. Which is unusual. She normally goes to bed early, wakes up at two-thirty, closes her eyes again, and sleeps like a stone until the four-thirty freight goes by and rattles her kitties (thousands of tiny, ceramic cat figurines adorn every flat surface of her little house), then she wakes up, runs a brush through her hair, and walks the half a mile to the diner. The plates won’t wait, she always tells herself. That’s a funny little phrase she made up herself, and she’s proud of it. The plates won’t wait, and neither will the grouchy, old regulars like Red Delaney or the truckers passing through. Nobody has an ounce of patience anymore, or a sense of humor either. Maybe that’s a
s it should be. Not much worth laughing about in Hudsonville these days.
In any case, when the train blazes past today, blowing its whistle as it sometimes does (just for spite, it seems to Margie), she is already dressed, sitting at her kitchen table, staring at the phone for no other reason than that it’s right in front of her, hanging on the wall. Certainly, she isn’t expecting it to ring. Time was when it might have, when certain truckers passing through would get an appetite for a mouthful of something besides eggs and grits, and they’d look to Margie for that. Hell, she was right good-looking in her time. Wouldn’t say beautiful, nobody would say that, but she’d given her share of truckers a swell in their jeans, there was no denyin’ that.
She looks over at the stove. Minute and a half left. She gets up and opens the oven, peers inside. Well, it’s getting pretty brown, no need to keep it in longer. Might get too crisp. She pulls it out, sets it on the stove, and stares at it.
She wonders what’s gotten into her, sitting up in the middle of the night like this, baking a pie of all things.
Her daddy, rest his soul, always used to say the best remedy for restlessness is hard work. Well, that’s what waiting tables for twelve hours a day, six days a week amounts to, she imagines. Usually, she sleeps like the dead, wakes up as her duty calls, and nods off again the minute her head hits the pillow once her day’s work is done.
But not tonight. Tonight sleep seemed to be passing her over –completely. Is it the guilt?
Did Lee’s words bite her that deep?
Might be. Or might be she’s just getting old. Age plays tricks on you, they say. And it’s worse being a woman. Christ, first there’s the bleeding along with what they call PMS, then you gotta bear the babies (’course, no babies for old Margie with her mixed-up pipes), then you get old and you get the hot flashes and all that. Now what? Insomnia?
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