We left the station. I decided my best course of action would be to stop in the center of the previous town – Wilmington, if I remembered correctly – and use a phone there. Maybe I could even stop by the local police station and give them the scoop. Hopefully they wouldn’t think me a complete loon. But more than anything I wanted to find out how Joe and Jacqueline were holding up. Even though they were without a doubt scared, I told myself they would be fine otherwise. With that I smiled. The notion that this long, grinding day could have a somewhat satisfying ending offered me a sensation I hadn’t felt in a while – contentment.
Not even five minutes down the road, however, all those relieved feelings were stripped from me.
Silas leapt from his resting spot in the rear and barked. The noise startled me so much that I swerved to the side and almost ran the Subaru down a steep embankment. I slammed on the brakes, skidding to a stop inches from the guardrail. My heart kicked up its pace again and I peered behind me. Silas had positioned himself on the passenger side, staring off into the woods, his canines exposed.
I backed up slowly and looked to my right. A small, cleared path appeared, like an old dirt road that had been recaptured by the wilderness. I stopped at the aperture of the newly discovered thoroughfare, debating whether I should explore it or not. Everything in me pleaded to stick with the plan, to head into town and alert the authorities.
Curiosity and a need for closure won out over reason.
I entered the passageway. Branches slapped at the sides of the Subaru. The dirt road climbed sharply for about fifty feet and then flattened out.
Sitting cockeyed on the side of the road, at the base of a grassy hillock, was the Staffordville HVAC van. I swallowed my shock at the sight of it, parked, and stepped out of the car. Silas followed, cautiously maneuvering with his nose to the ground. The dark sky above us still held traces of crimson from the setting sun. I stood still, trying to decide whether or not I should check out the van. The tinted windows were just as ominous in their blackness as those back at the service station. A wolf howled in the distance and something large snapped branches in the wooded area at the crest of the rise. Fear washed though me. If Nick Goodman, as strong as he was, wanted to take me down, what could I do to stop him? He’d already proven my better. Suddenly I felt like coming here hadn’t been the brightest idea in the world.
Silas yelped. It was a high-pitched, surprised whimper. He pranced away from me, nipping at his own neck. “Silas!” I whisper-screamed. I felt close to passing out from panic. “Silas, what’s wrong?”
My precious black lab collapsed in a heap by the side of the road, his body thrown into spasms. I wanted more than anything to run up to him, but fear held me back. “Anybody there?” I yelled at the surrounding woods, which grew blacker and more threatening by the second. “C’mon, show yourself!”
No one did. Thankfully.
With my feet moving much too slowly I wandered over to Silas. His gyrations ceased and, other than the gradual rise and fall of his chest, he lay pretty much motionless. I knelt down and placed a hand on his neck. His eyes were closed. “Oh shit, boy,” I muttered, running my hand down his side. My fingers struck something on their way across his smooth fur, something small, cylindrical, and metallic, wedged between his neck and torso.
I plucked out the object and held it close to my face. Even in the sparse light I could see it was a dart, complete with tiny, feather-like veins. Tiny beads of clear liquid dribbled from the tip.
The next instant I heard the soft hum of a small projectile, followed by the sensation of a bee sting just below my right ear. I dropped the dart that had struck Silas and instinctively swatted at the painful intruder, knowing I’d find its exact replica embedded in my own flesh. Sure enough, I was right. My mind started to falter. I stood up and almost fell over. A lack of sensation spread down my neck and into my chest. It was hard to breathe.
I eyed my car and lurched toward it, my vacillating logic saying that if I could only get inside and lock the doors I’d be safe. Despite the fact it was only ten feet away, I didn’t make it. My legs gave out on me after only three steps. I collapsed, falling to the gravel road. Tiny stones cut into my arms, legs, and face. The ever-darkening world grew even hazier. A loud humming reverberated inside my skull, like someone had stuck my head in a vacuum.
“Well, I guess that’s that,” I heard someone say.
I turned to the sound as best I could. From behind a mound on the side of the road opposite the grassy hill walked Nick Goodman. He sauntered across the expanse, whistling while his large body swayed. He twirled a pistol on his index finger.
Nick grabbed Silas by the nape of his neck and dragged him over to me. Then he took me by the back of my shirt with his free hand and began to tow me along as well, whistling a sickeningly happy song the whole time. He hauled Silas and me up the steep hill. We stopped near the top, where the grass ended and a cluster of evergreens began, and he tossed me aside. I landed face-down in a pile of wet leaves. Cut off from air and powerless to move my own body, I started hacking. I heard a gasp of panic from Nick, and he tilted my head to the side, letting me breath again. He then placed Silas’s unmoving body beside mine.
“Okay then,” said the murderer. He checked his watch. Surprisingly, his tone sounded contemplative, not threatening. “It’s almost the hour. You got here right on time.”
One of his mammoth hands reached into his pocket and pulled out a small disk of some sort. I couldn’t really see it in the darkness, but it seemed to be illuminated somehow. He then wrapped his meaty fingers around it, completely swallowing its light. His eyes met mine and he smiled.
“I’m not usually wrong about people,” he said, “so I guess I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt here. It’s all in the aura, you know.” He lifted his hand to the sky and twirled it in a circular motion. The fist holding the disk glowed with brilliant yellow light. The air around me grew thick. I wasn’t sure if what I saw was actually happening or a hallucination brought about by the drugs pumping through my veins. A part of me didn’t care, because to my gradually devolving mind the lights looked pretty.
“This is the best part,” said Nick. “It’s a wild ride. Pretty soon we’ll be home. And then we’ll see what you’re really made of.
Drowsiness overtook me. I heard Silas whimper. I lost all sense of gravity and closed my eyes, welcoming the sensation, just like the lights. Feel. Pretty. Nice.
Darkness consumed me. Nothing had ever felt so relieving.
21
Ken pauses, glancing at the arms of the clock in his hospital room. It reads 11:32. He licks his lips, feeling how dry and cracked they are. JT looks at him and nods. The young man knowingly gets up, grabs a plastic cup from the cabinet above the sink, and fills it with water. He then hands it to Ken, who slurps down more than a mouthful. His insides cool, the tightness in his throat eases. When things seem to be back to normal, he rests the cup on the table beside his bed and leans back.
“Did all of that really happen?” asks JT, sitting down on the bed again.
Ken lifts the flap off the box in his lap and takes out a file of newspaper clippings. He hands the file to JT. “Inside that folder are all the articles written about my excursion to the Mancuso farm,” he says. “I guess you could say I was a bit of a celebrity at the time…though not the type of celebrity I ever would’ve wished upon myself.”
“I’d say,” whispers JT as he flips from one clipping to the next. His eyes are wide and brimming with tears. “I can’t believe you went through all this. It’s amazing.”
“I know.”
JT closes the file and hands it back to Ken. “But why didn’t you ever tell anyone? After the fact, I mean? Shoot, it would’ve made a great story.”
Ken does not answer right away. His fingers strum atop the box. He has found it strange up until this point how easy it has been to tell his tale – not so much the remembering of it, but the effortlessness with which his voice has emerged
from his throat. He feels young again, almost the age he’d been at the time of his tale. Though it is a wonderful sensation, it also frightens him. Now that he has felt vitality, he fears its inevitable retreat.
But that is not all that Ken Lowery fears. He is a proud man, after all, who has always feared rejection, and he knows what comes next will not be easy for the young man to understand.
“I have not told anyone,” he says, “because I haven’t even told you yet. What I’ve just told you is only the beginning. The rest of the tale is…let’s just say, much harder to believe.”
“Why?”
Ken points to the box. “I’ve shown you the clippings. That is proof – real world proof that something amazing happened to me. However, what comes next I can offer no evidence of,” he taps his forehead, “save the brain in my head and the heart that beats in my chest.”
JT nods. “I understand. I believe you.”
Ken sighs and runs a hand over his bald pate. “You say this, but I’m not so sure. It’s getting late, anyway. Maybe I should go to sleep.”
“Please, Mr. Lowery, believe in me as much as I believe in you,” JT pleads. “You can’t just end there.”
With an arthritic finger Ken points at the young man and says, “No laughing and no interrupting, okay?”
“Okay.”
He leans back again and stares at the ceiling. Through the shadows he can see a black form running across the white tiles, chasing a Frisbee, chasing a stick, chasing a…
Yes, Ken realizes, the rest of the tale must be told. For him, if for nothing else.
22
For a span of time I have no way of calculating, I existed in a dream. In this dream Wendy and I were on a long and winding beach. We nuzzled together in the sand, her head in the crook of my arm. A few feet away from us, holding a bright green bucket and wearing a huge grin, was a boy. He played at the edge of the water, slopping mud from his bucket onto a collapsing sand castle. Wendy squeezed my hand and leaned over, planting a kiss on my cheek. Isn’t he beautiful? she said. I’d never seen her happier. I desired her more than anything in that moment. I wished I could sprawl her out on the blanket, rip off her bikini, and make mad, passionate love to her right there.
The boy of around eight, our son, approached us. He had a thick mat of black hair atop his head and his body was stocky. Must take after Wendy’s side, I thought. He held out his hand and offered me whatever treasure he’d discovered in the crashing waves. It was the strangest looking starfish I’d ever seen, colored a brilliant shade of purple with long, sinewy tendrils snaking off its glimmering body. That’s very nice, I said, ruffling the boy’s hair. What else did you find out there? The boy smiled at me and shrugged, then moved on to Wendy and showed her the starfish, as well. She reacted to him the same as I, with adoration and affirmation. I gazed with wonder at the two of them and then drew them in close. I could smell Wendy’s lilac perfume and the salt permeating her skin. The boy, our son, then stood on his tiptoes, lips puckered, coming in for a kiss.
I felt a sharp pain in my back and the boy’s countenance withered. I opened my eyes to see a horizon split in half – blue haze beneath the dividing line, swirling crimson above. My head pounded and my mouth felt gritty and dry. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. Dirt poured into my lungs. I coughed. It hurt.
Something whimpered to my left and the next moment the side of my face was being molested by a sponge lathered in hot slime. “Cut it out,” I muttered, and then rolled over. There was Silas, sitting so close to me that he might as well have been in my lap, mouth open and panting while beads of drool oozed down his tongue. He leaned in to lick me again but I blocked him. I already felt close to vomiting, what with the ache in my head, droning whir in my ears, and tightness in my gut. Adding slobber to the mix would only make it happen quicker.
My weary brain started on the awkward and painful task of memory. Situations, names, and faces flickered across my mind’s eye. Wendy wanted a divorce. Then there was a dead Bridget Cormier and a rescued Joe and Jacqueline Talbot. And then there was Nick Goodman, the redneck electrician with a black heart. My mood, not all that great to begin with, plummeted with this recollection. The guy had knocked me and Silas out cold. He probably dismantled the Subaru and left us stranded on the mountain, and if that was the extent of it, I would’ve been happy.
But something didn’t seem right. No, not right at all.
The buzzing in my ears, I came to realize, wasn’t a buzz at all. It was a rumbling, crashing, familiar sound. Very slowly, I turned around and looked behind me. What I saw shocked me.
Just as in my dream, below me was a long and winding beach of white sand and rock jetties. I shook my head and rubbed my eyes, wondering if I was still dreaming. I wasn’t sure of anything at that point. And when I felt a breeze blow past and shivered, only to look down and realize I was only wearing my underwear, my insecurity heightened.
I stood up on shaky legs. Silas pranced to my side, using his large frame to keep me from falling. “Thanks, bud,” I said. With uncertainty chopping away at my judgment, I stepped toward the surf.
The beach was at the bottom of a grassy hill, and the sand was hot. It burned as it crept between my toes. Silas sat down beside me, his tail wagging. Labradors are water dogs by nature, but I felt thankful that I’d never before brought him to the ocean. He seemed doubtful, and with good reason. The waves were huge, crashing against the jetties with enough force to send shards of black stone skyward every time. On shore, the gently rolling water shot backward as if yanked by a high-tension spring once it reached its apex. I watched a rock the size of a volleyball be snatched away as if it weighed nothing. That’s one hell of an undertow, I thought. It all seemed so unreal, I thought I might’ve been hallucinating – an unfortunate byproduct of whatever drugs that bastard Goodman had pumped into me.
Yet the sensations I felt, everything from the hotness beneath my feet to the salt stinging my eyes, said otherwise. I glanced at the sky and my jaw dropped. The sun was out, and it was red and at least twice the size I remembered it. I swore I could see flares licking off its surface.
A high-pitched wail shook the air. I covered my ears and spun around, almost losing my balance in the process. The howling soon stopped, but its reverberations bounced around inside my skull. Silas moved in front of me, his nose pointing toward the forest at the top of the rise. His tail stood straight out and he let loose a low, rumbling snarl.
“What the hell was that?” I whispered.
As if to answer me, the yowl echoed through the midday sky once more, this time sounding more distant. I shivered and wrapped my arms around my chest. Probably nothing but a hawk or something, I thought. The only problem with that reasoning was that it would have to be one huge hawk.
After a few minutes of staring at the tips of the trees at the crest of the mount, I smacked my leg. The cold, hard reality of my situation started to sink in. “What do you think, boy?” I asked Silas. “Should we walk the beach or head up the hill?”
Silas barked and glanced up the rise.
“Thought so,” I said. “So where do you think we are, anyway? Maine? Were we out long enough for him to cart us all the way to the coast? That doesn’t seem right, does it?”
Again, he barked.
“Yeah, enough conjecture. It’s only gonna drive me crazy.” I started for the hillock, thankful for the cool contrast of the grass underfoot. “I say we get started on the high road,” I continued. “Maybe there’s a town somewhere around here.”
We scaled the verdant cliff face, my lungs burning as my legs pumped away. The sensitive muscle in my chest beat faster and faster. Sweat leaked from my pores. It had to be a hundred degrees outside, or more. By the time we reached the summit, I felt like I was going to pass out.
I cupped my hands around my mouth and yelled, “HELLO!” My own voice ricocheted back at me, but nothing else. I tried again. “HELLO, ANYBODY THERE!” Still nothing. “Figures,” I muttered. I patt
ed Silas on the top of his head. “Looks like we’re gonna have to brave it alone, bud.” I glanced into the dark forest, packed to the brim with gigantic trees whose trunks were almost as wide as the Redwoods Wendy and I had seen on our trip to California a few years back. There could’ve been any sort of wild creature lurking in the confines of these woods, hidden by the barricade of trees, so we stuck to the cliff face.
Luckily the ridge was barren enough to allow for easy passage. I figured that with a little good fortune we’d find a fire road or something along the way. This was the American coast, for Christ’s sake. Wherever there’s an oceanfront, there’s sure to be civilization not too far behind.
I kept an eye on the beach during our trek, hoping to spot someone either picking up seashells or searching for lost nickels with a metal detector. Deep down, I knew I wouldn’t see anyone. The shoreline grew even more ragged the further we walked, and before long even the sand disappeared, replaced by an undulating, cracked landscape of weather-beaten stone. Waves crashed closer inland now, striking the cliff on which we strolled. Mist peppered my face. The water was warm, much too warm for the ocean. I shook my head and looked down at Silas.
“Shit, that’s hot,” I said. “Whoever said global warming was a farce?”
Silas stuck his tongue out and lolled his head. Wendy would’ve laughed if she’d seen him. She so loved our dog’s goofy side. The thought of her formed a twang of guilt to cramp my stomach. No matter what problems we were having, she’d most certainly be worried sick about us. I had to find a phone and call her, just to let her know we were fine.
Two hours into our walk and there was no civilization to be found. Clouds rolled in, huge and black, blocking out the massive red sun and bringing about a gratifying chill. Then the rain started, heavy drops that plummeted like ball bearings, stinging my flesh and turning the cliff’s ridge to mud. Pushing aside my fear of the unknown, I darted for the trees with Silas just ahead of me, searching for cover.
Silas: A Supernatural Thriller Page 10
