I missed my friends during those times. When we’d return to the city, they would tell me about baseball games and the Mr. Softee truck and fire hydrant puddles and stray puppies. I had little to share. During our months at the cabin my father fished and my mother sat on the front porch and read the paperbacks she’d hauled along with her. We ate from tin cans and peed in the woods. My father never seemed to catch anything, which was fine with me. I didn’t like fish, eating them, touching them, or looking at them. They had bulging alien eyes that did not blink. Their mouths hid teeth I could not see.
Most of my time in the forest was spent building things and then tearing them down. Tree houses and huts out of brush and dead wood. Hammocks from vines and saplings. Tiny, stone-lined cities in the dirt through which I’d herd my citizens of ants and spiders. I wasn’t interested in the books my mother brought and I was afraid of the river.
My father never pushed the issue until I was eleven. Then he said he it was time I, as his son, went fishing with him at the Deep Hole. He’d made me a pole from a stick and string, much more primitive than his fiberglass rod and nylon line. I’d seen the Deep Hole before, having passed it on my way to collect building materials. But I’d never stepped to the river’s edge to peer into it. I’d seen enough from a distance. Deep Hole was indeed a deep, dark pool caught up at the edge of the river, socked in by large fallen rocks. This was where my father spent his days, sitting on a folded blanket on the rocks, his bait and hook in the dark gray waters, a canteen and plastic baggie full of peanuts or raisins beside him.
“I don’t want to go,” I said.
“You’ll go,” he said simply, and I knew there would be no discussion. My mother peered at us over her book as we moved down the porch steps and walked to the river. She didn’t say good-bye. I only heard her cough and then the chair squeak as she re-crossed her legs.
We reached the rocks and my father opened the blanket wide enough so we could share it. Still, it was hard and cold, sitting there. I crossed my legs and sat back as far from the edge as I could without falling over backward.
“I don’t like this,” I complained.
My father said, “Shush and watch.” He showed me how to tie a hook onto the string, and how to fold up a squiggling earthworm and push it down on the barb so it couldn’t wiggle loose. I imagined what it felt like to be skewered.
“Put it in the water here,” my father said. “And sit quietly.”
I lowered the worm into the deep, dark, still water, not far from my father’s line. Immediately I felt something huge bumping into the string, studying, thumping, teasing it. I flinched and jerked my pole up out of the water. My father patted my hand and said, “Shhh. It’s better here than elsewhere.”
I thought, This is a better place to fish? My father’s never brought any fish back for dinner, not that I’d eat them.
I put my string and hook back in the water and tried to ignore the movement in the depths.
We sat and sat. Butterflies came and went. Snakes slithered along the top of the water beyond the Deep Hole. Chipmunks ran onto the rocks near us, gave us a look, and raced away. My father did not say a word. Neither did I.
We caught nothing, then returned to the cabin as the sun was vanishing amid the thick trees to the west. My mother made an exasperated sound when my father said he had nothing to show for our time, but had he ever? And so she opened cans of pickled sausages and yellow corn. She put servings on our plates and we ate it cold, as we always did. She told us about the story she was reading and my father listened with care. Quietly, his eyes trained on her as if he was fascinated by what she said or as if he was afraid to look away. For the first time in my life, I wasn’t sure which was the truth. I lost my appetite with wondering and just stirred the corn around until my mother, exasperated, took my plate away.
The following days, my father and I fished. My building and playing times were over. My father was content to bait and re-bait, away from the cabin and my mother, chewing peanuts and staring into the water. I learned to entertain myself to keep from thinking of what was in the hole as the mysterious fish nipped and tugged at my line. I made up stories as I stared across the river into the trees. I invented songs that I sang in my head. I made plans for when I was old enough to move away from home. I would live in the city and never come to the country again. I would design things and build things and sit on soft sofas, not hard stone.
There were many thunderstorms during the nights of that summer. Rain that came down for hours and flooded the yard in front of the cabin. I dreamed that the terrible fish of the Deep Hole were washed up and out, and were waiting on the porch for me to come out. I’d awaken to my parents arguing in the living room. Not so much my father, but my mother. I couldn’t decipher her words over the torrent outside but could hear her anger. I put my head under my pillow and sang some of the songs I’d made up while fishing at the Deep Hole.
I don’t recall the summer ending, although it did, and I returned to school. My mother and father had split up at some point, and she was gone, leaving me with my father. Neither of us knew how to cook, so we fed ourselves as we had at the cabin, with foods from cans.
My friends told me I was different. I didn’t laugh at their jokes so much or want to hear what they’d done over the summer. They said I wasn’t any fun anymore. And they were right. I moped around, feeling cold, sweaty, nervous, and tired. I had to go see the counselor once a week and she tried to get me to talk about my mom, about how I felt since she’d abandoned us, but all I could say was that at least we wouldn’t have to go to the cabin anymore. I didn’t like the cabin. I was afraid of the fish.
I failed sixth grade, was retained, and barely passed the second time through. Dad’s divorce became final and he married a nice woman named Fran who liked to cook real meals and who was kind enough but didn’t know how to relate to me and so left me alone. By ninth grade I was sent to a military school, where I was actually quite content with the regulations and the routines. My roommates, however, picked on me when there was a hard rain and I bit my cheeks so hard they bled.
I’ve worked odd jobs off and on. Dad invited me to live with him and Fran after I was graduated but I couldn’t do it, regardless of the offer of free rent. I leased a tiny apartment and was kicked out several months later for late payments. I worked a variety of jobs, having little patience with any of them, not knowing what the hell I was supposed to do with my life.
Meeting Rita was a good thing. For me. Not so much for her. I was too needy, too clingy, and then too distant. I blamed my parents, as most people would do. My mother who had left me without a word. My father who had been silent and brooding. Rita thought she wanted to marry me until she caught me, half-sane, cowering during a rainstorm and muttering about fish in the Deep Hole. She insisted I see a shrink but I had no insurance. We broke up a few weeks after that. She took one of my sweatshirts but I didn’t care. It was fraying, anyway.
So life goes on, sucking, getting no better. Jobs gained, lost. Apartments gained, lost. Girlfriends gained, lost. An involuntary committal to the hospital’s psyche ward for seventeen days when someone, I don’t know who, found me balled up under a tree during a rainstorm, unable to get even to my car.
My father got cancer when I was twenty-seven. Died when I was twenty-eight, with me sitting by his bed and Fran holding his hand. He looked like an old gray fish, damp and scaly with the disease. He told me he was sorry about Mom and I said it wasn’t his fault. He whispered, “Yes, it was.” Then he said, “And I’m so sorry about you.”
“What do you mean?”
His mouth opened and hissed shut.
“What do you mean?”
No answer, and within the hour he was gone.
They say you have to face your fears. A doctor didn’t tell me that but one of the other patients at the hospital. He was afraid of being out in public, you know, one of those regular fears. He’d gotten to the point where he lived in one room and didn’t bathe or ans
wer the phone. He and his therapist were working on it, taking him out a little at a time.
“You gotta get out there and do what it takes,” he said, his knuckles white from the session from which he’d just returned. “Or you’ll get worse and worse and then what?”
He was right. But who was able to cauterize their own wounds or amputate their own gangrenous limb?
It took me another four months to go. I waited until fall, so it would not look the same as it had years ago and, as the summer had been hot and dry, the river would be running low. As I slipped down the final, briar-choked slope toward the cabin, I convinced myself that the Deep Hole was likely not a deep hole anymore but a shallow, washed out niche crawling with minnows and crayfish. I would sit there and look at it. I would step in it and walk around and make peace with it.
Then my life could start over.
The Deep Hole was as deep as it had always been. I saw that and barricaded myself in the cabin to think it over, to think it through. I sat in the kitchen, thinking of my mother and her books and tins of food, of her coldness toward my father and his cowardice around her. It made my stomach twist, the remembering. I vomited into the sink because I wasn’t ready to go outside, even to relieve my sickened stomach.
And now it is raining. It is nighttime and it is pouring steadily, pounding the roof, throwing water flecks through the cracked window and onto my bed. I have tried to sleep but my mind shows me the flood rising and bringing the fish from the Deep Hole up to the porch steps, where their fins become legs and they crawl under the door to find me hiding.
I sleep and morning comes. And with the morning, the sun, bright and comforting. I can see from the front porch that the river has not risen in the least. I walk out to the yard through the wet weeds and tell myself I must either go to the Deep Hole or die of my insanity. Although I say aloud, “There are no monster fish,” I whittle a sharp stick to take with me, just in case.
The rocks have not changed. The water in the Deep Hole is the same slate ominous gray, now covered in a film of fallen leaves. I take a breath and lower the stick into the water. It goes in deep, deeper than the stick is long. I draw it out and there is nothing but water on the stick.
I put it back and after a moment, I feel the bumping and nibbling. My blood chills but I begin to move the stick around. If I can stab one of the fish, and haul it up and into the air, I will face what I fear and see it is not as I thought it was. As my friend at the hospital suggested, this will be the beginning of my cure.
The stick goes up and then down, swiftly. I snag nothing. I try again; up and then a quick jab downward. Again, nothing. Another stab, and I feel a scraping, and sense the stick is caught in something rather than through something. Carefully I lift the stick, tipping it backward so as not to lose what it has found.
There is a filthy brown skull on the end of the stick, upside down, the sharpened end hooked through the loose jawbone. My teeth scrape across each other and I fling the skull behind me onto the soft, wet riverbank. I don’t want to look at it but I must. I must know, and I must remember.
I turn back, pick up the skull, and wipe it clean as best I can. There are what appear to be teeth marks all around the forehead and pointy cheekbones.
Then I remember.
It was in August and I was eleven. My father invited my mother to join us at the Deep Hole. He said, “Bring your book, you might enjoy sitting by the water and watching the dragonflies and hummingbirds.” My mother would have none of it, of course, and told my father he was an idiot. Silently, as always, my father took his fishing pole to the Deep Hole with me in tow. We fished all day, catching nothing but mosquito bites.
That evening my mother chided my father as we ate supper. “I’m sick of you. I’m sick of looking at you and being around you and smelling you.”
My father said, “I know that, but I hope you still care about our son.”
Her nose wrinkled and she cast me a nondescript, sidelong glance. “Of course I do. What kind of mother do you think I am? He’s the only thing that makes me able to tolerate you.”
“Then you’ll want to see what he found.”
I frowned, not knowing what he was talking about, but my father pushed the issue. “Truly, he found something today that he wants to show you but he is too afraid to ask you to have a look.”
The side of my mother’s lip went up and down. She glared at me. “You aren’t afraid of me, are you?”
I shook my head.
“He is,” said my father softly.
“He shook his head,” she said.
“Then come, let him show you what he found. It’s really quite astounding. He’ll be so disappointed if you say no.”
My mother let out a very loud breath and clambered to her feet. She looked at me as if daring me to produce something worth her leaving the cabin. I remained silent, and followed my parents to the Deep Hole.
It was there that my father shoved her down upon the rocks with all his might, and as she shouted and kicked he forced one of her arms down and into the water. I could not move, but stood there with my fingers hooked to my scalp.
At first there was nothing, just as it was when we had our lines in the hole. But then there was a violent churning in the water, a foamy red frothing and a scream that sent crows out of the treetops. Her arm came up out of the water. The flesh was raked and torn from the bone. As my mother bucked beneath his weight, my father forced the arm back in again.
I could not look away. My mother’s eyes met mine and I don’t think I’d ever seen such hatred in my life.
Pain and loss of blood must have put her in shock, because it was only a few minutes until my father was able to roll her body over and into the Deep Hole. She sank with only a bit of thrashing and was gone.
My father watched the Deep Hole for a long time as I stood and watched him. His face seemed to relax at long last and he looked back at me and said, “Time to go home.”
We went.
Now I’m back.
I put the skull back down on the ground and scoot out over the rocks, raking the bottom of my jeans, to look into the Deep Hole. A blood-red leaf spins in a breeze I can’t feel, then drifts up against the rocks. I see my face reflected in the water, no, not my face but the outline of my head with no face at all, just a dark nothingness.
Then I see another face looking back from just beneath the surface of the water. There are huge, unblinking alien eyes and colorless lips which, for a brief moment part to smile and reveal razored teeth. And with a splash, it is gone.
Dead Gods Book One:
By James A. Moore
James A. Moore is the award winning author of over twenty novels, thrillers, dark fantasy and horror alike, including the critically acclaimed FIREWORKS, UNDER THE OVERTREE, BLOOD RED, the SERENITY FALLS trilogy (featuring his recurring anti-hero, Jonathan Crowley) and his most recent novels, SEVEN FORGES and THE BLASTED LANDS. He has also ventured into the realm of Young Adult novels, with his new series SUBJECT SEVEN. In addition to writing multiple short stories, he has also edited, with Christopher Golden and Tim Lebbon, the British Invasion anthology for Cemetery Dance Publications.
Chapter One: The Wishing Well
They say that confession is good for the soul. Well, my name is Thomas Doolty and I guess you could call this my confession. Should you read it through to the end, perhaps you can decide for me what my penance should be for the sins I’ve committed.
I’m not sure they can be forgiven, but I can say this in my defense: I never meant to cause any harm.
I didn’t used to believe in miracles, but these days… Well, let’s say I have more reason for accepting the impossible. Though I suppose the term miracle might seem a bit off key. After all, the miraculous is supposed to be beneficial, isn’t it?
When I was growing up in Dunham, damned near everyone went to church and we all heard about miracles, but I never really gave them much more credence than I did the stories of Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny.
They were stories to me, nothing else. My parents were both college professors at Osborn University, scientists who believed in the here and now and what they could see with their own eyes, and while they were the ones who took me to church, they were also the ones who explained that the stories were meant as parables, not as fact.
Who was I to question them? I mean, seriously, when we’re little kids aren’t our parents as close as we get to gods?
Anyhow, what I wanted to talk about was Jack Chambers and the miracles that seemed to surround his life. Jack grew up in the same neighborhood as me and was born one month earlier to the day. My delivery into the world was uncomplicated, but Jacks was unusual to say the least. He came into the world four months early, a preemie. He survived solely because of the wonders of modern science. Almost half a year passed before we ever crossed each other’s paths, because it was that long before his parents got to take him home.
It was inevitable that we would become friends. His folks, just like mine, worked at the university and we lived two houses apart in the same small neighborhood. Given the circumstances our connection was almost guaranteed.
Jack’s health got better, but not much. Most of the things that could go wrong with a child born so early in his development did go wrong for him. He was born with a minor neurological disorder that caused him to have muscle spasms if he got too active, and that was a downside to being on the baseball team or anything else that would let him run rampant. So instead, he normally just watched the games and occasionally became the unofficial referee if there was an argument about whether or not somebody had hit a foul ball. There were a few kids that ragged him about it, but I was normally around to put a stop to that shit if it got too bad.
I was an active kid. Jack was only active in his mind. He watched the games a lot of times, but as often as not he had a comic book in his hands, or later a novel. He became a dreamer out of necessity, I think, rather than by choice. He became a loner the same way.
Widowmakers: A Benefit Anthology of Dark Fiction Page 31
