Drawn Into Darkness

by Nancy Springer

  Since we had left the paved road, we had not met up with another vehicle, not one single car, and it had been quite a while since I had noticed a shack or a trailer or even a mailbox to show that anybody lived back here. I supposed it was not the best place in the world to locate one’s home, what with mosquitoes, flooding, and the omnipresence of the nastiest of all native poisonous snakes, the water moccasin. I gave up forlorn hopes of encountering anyone who might rescue me. These twisting roads ran deep into places where my body most likely would be eaten by alligators before it was ever found.

  If Stoat had not handcuffed me, I would have made a move before now, grabbing the keys out of the ignition, twisting the wheel to send us into a creek, anything for one last chance. Now I thought about throwing myself bodily against Stoat the next time we came to one of those sketchy so-called bridges. All I had to do was send the tires off the planks and the van would drop—

  “Where’s that mouth of yours, Lee Anna?” Stoat drawled. “You’re awful quiet.”

  I opened that mouth of mine. “I was just wondering who’s going to miss me first, the Mormons or the Jehovah’s Witnesses. I couldn’t decide which to join, so I went to both, and—”

  Stoat chuckled. “Good try. I like you, Lee Anna. Don’t feel bad about what I’m fixing to do. It’s nothing personal, just what has to happen, logically speaking.”

  Behind me, Justin hadn’t said a word, and I could not think what on earth to say to him.

  I watched and waited for another bare-bones bridge.

  But I had missed my chance. We crossed no more bridges. Stoat turned the van onto another—not a road, really, but two tire tracks in the sand, weeds thick and tall between them, undergrowth scrubbing against the sides of the van, thick skeins of Spanish moss dragging, sodden, across the windows and windshield. In the wet night it was kind of like being in a car wash.

  And this was a fine time for me to be thinking such clever thoughts when, face it, I was running out of options. Next moment I heard no more brush, saw no more Spanish moss. Night opened into nothing I could see. The track sloped slightly downhill and ended. Or, really, I didn’t know it ended, but Stoat did. He stopped the van and turned it off. Its headlights shone through rain amid darkness in which I heard a bedlam of frogs. All around us, they no longer seemed to sing so much as babble, bark, bleat, and belch.

  “Get out,” Stoat said, apparently to Justin; obviously I wasn’t going anywhere without assistance. Stoat himself got out, but Justin didn’t move. I watched Stoat, ghostly in the rain and headlights, cross in front of the van and come to open my door.

  He snapped his fingers hard. “I told you to get out!”

  I turned sideways on my seat and felt for a step with my feet before I realized he wasn’t speaking to me.

  Justin said, “No.”

  “What you mean, no?”

  “No. I’m staying here.”

  “You get out of this van, boy, or I’ll beat you like you never been beat before.”

  “No. I don’t care what you do to me, I want no part of this. I’m not moving.”

  Shouting obscenities, Stoat snagged me by the shoulders and flung me straight down out of the van to sprawl with my face in wet sand. I didn’t care. Somehow the flipped-out, raging Stoat was easier to handle than the marginally nice Stoat. I heard him rampaging inside the van, trying to grab Justin, but evidently Justin had lodged himself someplace impregnable, maybe under the backseat. Meanwhile I struggled to my feet—oddly, I seemed to be standing on open sand, because I felt no vegetation groping me—and I began to stumble away, blindly, into the unknown. Sure, I felt a faint hope, but realistically I was trying not so much to save myself—with handcuffs on?—as to distract Stoat from Justin.

  And maybe Justin was trying to distract him from me? How ironic.

  “Hey! Hey, stupid woman!” Stoat caught up to me in seconds and whacked me on the side of the head with what felt like the butt of his gun. I saw stars and nearly fell, but he yanked me upright by the handcuffs and started marching me down a slight slope.

  Behind us, the van headlights went out, dumping thick darkness as well as heavy rain all over us.

  “That miserable ass-reamed snot-nosed punk thinks he’s so smart!” Stoat sounded as if he might just possibly blow a major artery, which would have been wonderful. “Screw him. I got a flashlight.” He demonstrated by turning it on, and its wavering circle of white, plus his own triumph, seemed to calm him down as suddenly as he had flipped out. Stoat, a man like a lightbulb, but cracked.

  Now his hand on my elbow felt gentle and ceremonious as if we were going on a date. “This way, Miss Lee Anna.” He had to raise his voice in order for me to hear him, there was so much noise in the night—the frogs twanging their soggy concert, and the patter of rain on leaves making the trees sound like an audience applauding. Stoat led me down an area of open sand between what sounded like two walls of forest. We seemed to be on a narrow beach of sorts, ending at some fairly large body of water.

  “Is this a lake or what?” I asked, stopping as if to look, though I could see very little through rain so thoroughgoing it had already washed the sand off my face.

  “Chatawachipolee River, running so high it’s nearly covered the boat ramp down yonder. Now stop stalling,” he added in the kindest of voices. “My gun’s right here in my belt. Move.”

  Crap. There seemed to be no point in delaying the inevitable. I walked on.

  “Okay, this is close enough.”

  It certainly was. The beam of the flashlight showed the sand ending a scant two feet in front of me. Beyond that I saw swiftly running water.

  Stoat let go of me and drew his gun. “Kneel down.”

  I started trembling, and not from cold. “Why?”

  “Just do it.” With the gun barrel poking my back and his gun hand gripping the handcuffs, he shoved me to my knees at the edge of the water, then stood back.

  “Now, Miss Lee Anna,” he told me in avuncular tones, “you are going into the river, but you’ll be dead before your darlin’ little face hits the water. You ain’t gonna drown, and I promise you, you ain’t going to feel a thing.”

  Not going to feel a thing? I felt sickening fear. I shook so hard my handcuffs rattled.

  Maybe that reminded him. “No use wasting a good pair of cuffs,” he remarked. Bending down to take them off, he set the flashlight aside, on the sand, since he was not about to relinquish hold of the gun and he did not have three hands.

  The moment the handcuffs came off, my arms swung forward and I boosted myself to my feet.

  “Hey! Crazy bitch!” Stoat barked, no longer sounding the least bit avuncular. “Stop right there!” I heard him backing away, presumably so I could not grab the gun. “I’ll shoot you in the gut, slut! You want that?”

  “I want you to look me in the face, you creep,” I yelled, beginning to turn—

  Wham.

  • • •

  A dull cracking noise, but to my gun-shy mind it sounded like a shot. I should have felt the pain; he couldn’t have missed me. I didn’t get it—until I swung around and saw Stoat crumpling to the ground.

  “Justin!”

  I grabbed the flashlight off the ground to verify. Yes. Standing over Stoat, Justin held a wooden baseball bat, and even in the downpour I could tell that the water running down his face was not entirely rain.

  “Justin,” I repeated, dumbfounded, and also weak in the knees with relief.

  He spoke between sobs. “Is he—dead?”

  I wanted to wrap my arms around the kid and weep on his shoulder, thank you oh thank you my hero—

  “I—hit him—hard—but I didn’t want to—kill—”

  My knees still wobbled, but I started to get a grip. Justin didn’t need a clinging vine right now. Like it or not, Stoat had been his family, sort of, for the past two years, and he felt as if he had just betrayed his word and maybe orphaned himself. He needed me to be strong.

  I got strong. “You didn�
�t kill him.” Crouching over Stoat, I felt a pulse in his neck, and I could see him breathing. “You just conked him good.” Stoat’s gun lay near his limp hand. Standing up, I snatched the gun as if swinging a snake by the tail; grabbing it by the tip of its barrel, I winged it like a boomerang into the middle of the Chatawhatchimahoosim. The river.

  Weapon gone, Stoat lay unconscious, yet my terror of the thin gray man only increased.

  “We’ve got to get out of here, Justin!”

  The boy hadn’t moved from where he stood sobbing and shaking.

  “Justin.” I found that I lacked the guts to hop over Stoat, but I got to Justin roundabouts and gave him a solid hug. “Thanks for saving my ass. Now we have to save yours. Did he leave the key in the van?”

  “I, um, I guess so.” Justin’s guess-so was hardly more than a whisper.

  “Then come on. Run!” Still holding the flashlight, grabbing his wrist with one hand, I hauled him with me toward the van. Partway there he kicked out of neutral and got himself in gear, passing me. He yanked open the passenger’s side door at the same time as I got to the driver’s side and aimed the flashlight at the ignition.

  No key.

  “Sometimes he sticks it on top of the sun visor,” Justin said, voice strained.

  I flipped the visor. Papers fell down, but nothing with a metallic jingle. I scanned the dashboard, the seats, the floor. Nothing.

  “Oh, shit.” Justin sounded choked. “He must have put it in his pocket.”

  “Come on.” I started running back toward where we had left Stoat, but after only a few strides I stopped dead, grabbed Justin by the wrist so I wouldn’t lose him in the dark, and turned off the flashlight.

  From where we had left Stoat, maybe thirty feet away, I heard the sounds of groans and fervid curses. Chillingly specific curses regarding the punk and the bitch and what he would do to them when he caught them.

  “Run!” Justin sounded panicked, yet he had the good sense not to yell; he spoke just loud enough for me to hear him in the hullabaloo of rain, river, and frogs. No way had he betrayed us to Stoat.

  Just the same I pulled him toward me and spoke close to his ear. “Run where?” Heading into the woods, thick with palmetto, would have been like running through razor wire in the night. And Stoat would catch us with the van if we tried to escape back up the road.

  “I—I don’t know!”

  Stoat roared, “What the fuck? A baseball bat! I’ll show them how to use a baseball bat.” Damn. He didn’t have his goddamn gun, but he did have a weapon.

  I imagined him using the baseball bat like a walking stick, staggering to his feet.

  In the total drenching darkness we could not see him and he could not see us. But to find the van, all he had to do was feel his way up the sand slope. And once he turned on the headlights, we were roadkill, if not worse.

  Adrenaline is a remarkable stimulant of both body and mind. I said softly, “Justin, can you swim?”

  “Of course. Why?”

  “We’re going into the river.” I envisioned a Southern, sandy river with no rocks, no white water, and most certainly no waterfalls.

  “That’s crazy! Alligators, moccasins—”

  Well, yes, there was that.

  People down here called the poisonous cottonmouth viper, aka water moccasin, simply “moccasins.” Indeed, some people called all snakes “moccasins,” as if they were terrified by Native American footwear.

  I declared, “I’d rather face a snake any day than him.” By Stoat’s constant swearing I could tell that, yes, he was on the move, feeling his way toward the van—and us. “The river, Justin. It’s our only chance.”

  I felt his hand grip my wrist the way mine gripped his, so that we forged a strong link. “Okay.” He sounded more brave than desperate. “Let’s go.”

  “Quietly.” Instinctively I crouched, keeping my head down. Justin did the same. Like a pair of soldiers under fire we scuttled past the noise pollution that was Stoat—I think we blundered within ten feet of him, and if he had shut his foul mouth, he might have heard us. But he kept stumbling toward the van. Quite blindly in the dark we dashed away from it, toward the hiding place we could not see.

  NINE

  First I felt water puddling around my ankles, and within a few steps, the river current shoving against my shins. Stumbling, I almost lost my balance, and Justin stood still, bracing his feet and hanging on to me. Now the water reached up to my knees—

  Muffled by frogs and distance, I heard a slamming sound.

  Slam. Door. Van.

  “Down!” I hurled myself into darkness, pulling Justin with me.

  We ducked just as the van’s headlights blazed on, blindingly bright for an instant before our heads hit the water.

  Had Stoat seen us? Would he see us now? Desperately hoping not, I held my breath and did a pretty good imitation of a log just by keeping still. Clutching my arm and taking his cue from me, Justin did the same. Meanwhile, the river current swirled us around and took charge of us, so by the time I had to raise my head and gasp for air, we were nicely downstream, away from the area where the van’s headlights still shone across the surface of the water.

  But not quite far enough downstream to suit me, because the van’s lights also shone on the all-too-familiar figure of a quick, slim man near the flooded river’s edge.

  “Uncle Steve!” gasped Justin, bobbing alongside me.

  “Stop calling him your uncle! He’s a kidnapper and a pedophile and a rapist and he deserves—” I managed to cease firing from a sawed-off shotgun of rage I hadn’t even realized I had in me. Words badly aimed, scattering, good for nothing. “Sorry, Justin. Are you okay?” I tried to reach for his hand, which had slipped out of mine, but I didn’t find it.

  “He knows where we went,” Justin said in the dead voice of someone who has already given up.

  Actually, bent over and pacing back and forth at the edge of the water, Stoat seemed to be hunting upstream and down like an old hound dog. And the river carried us farther away from him every moment.

  “I don’t think so,” I told Justin. “Our tracks are rained out. He doesn’t even know what he’s looking for.”

  But he did. He found it, reached down to seize it, and turned it on.

  The flashlight.

  Justin gulped air and disappeared underwater at the same time I did. Holding my breath and hurrying myself along with the rushing river, I fired some angry mental bullets at myself. Damn flashlight, I didn’t even remember dropping it. Stupid, clueless, what was I thinking, why hadn’t I thrown it into the drink like the gun?

  Really, rationally, I did not think it likely that Stoat had seen us when he had turned on the flashlight, but at the same time, I felt an irrational fear that he had, and I knew Justin would be feeling it a hundred times worse, would be absolutely sure his “uncle” knew exactly where he was and would come after him.

  A burning feeling started in my lungs. I thrust myself to the surface and gasped for air while trying to clear my eyes of bleary water so I could see.

  But there was nothing to see. Complete darkness. Either the river had taken us around a bend that hid everything from our view, or Stoat and his flashlight and his van were gone.

  I asked the darkness, “Justin?”

  No answer.

  “Justin!”

  Nothing. And it was high time to get out of this flooding river. At any moment it might conk me with a floating log or smash me against a fallen tree. Which, with my luck, would have snakes on it.

  “Justin!” I called, uselessly, before I kicked, managing to lie more or less on top of the water, and by swimming across the river current, I aimed, I hoped, toward shore. The opposite shore from the one we had left Stoat on.

  I was just getting into the rhythm of a pretty good Australian crawl—stroke, up and over, stroke—when my extended hand touched something that felt like a big tree. But when I tried to grab on to it, it lashed like a giant whip, threw me aside as if I were
made of cork, and took off.

  “Sorry, alligator,” I said politely, treading water. Having never before in my life been in a situation like this, I found it impossible to predict my own reactions or even explain them. I reached out again, could not find the alligator, and promptly panicked because now it could be behind me, underneath me, anywhere.

  “Justin!” Why not yell? Between the swoosh of the water and the gibbering of the frogs, he could be a few yards away from me and still not hear me.

  No answer.

  Anxiety kicked me from inside as if I were pregnant with worry. That boy might as well have been one of my sons. Getting myself drowned along with him would not help him. Once again I swam, trying hard not to thrash (were alligators, like sharks, attracted to thrashing?), and headed toward shore.

  But where was my strength? I was only menopausal, dammit, not geriatric. I had been a lifeguard not so many years ago, which meant I had been a strong, fast swimmer. But I couldn’t seem to make any progress muscling myself out of this damn pushy water—

  Conk. The river bashed my shoulder against something rough and hard that could have been an alligator but didn’t move and was therefore of the tree persuasion. Or so I surmised in the total darkness. The river immediately twisted me and tried to whirl me away from it, but I grabbed hold and managed to get a leg flung over the thing, which lay horizontal, partially above the waterline.

  Definitely a tree, I found as I crawled onto it. A nice, round, fat, sturdy tree. Embracing it—I had always aligned myself with tree huggers, but never before had I actually thrown my arms around a trunk—I lay on my belly with the side of my face pressed against the bark and most of me at last out of the flooded river. Despite rain and darkness, I felt tension drain out of me; I lay limp, with no idea how exhausted I had been until strength began to return.

  “Justin?” I called to the night.