by Newman,James
I did not turn back. I just kept running…running…toward my house on the other side of the Snake River Woods…through the rain…in the opposite direction from which I had come…my breath exploding out of me in labored bursts…fleeing through the storm like an escaped convict on the lam from a pack of bloodthirsty dogs…wondering if the sheriff already had his gun out, if a bullet would pierce my skull any second…wondering if I would be dead before my face struck the cold, muddy ground…
“Come back here!” the sheriff bellowed again through the darkness, and I prayed he would not recognize me in the dark. In the rain. His voice echoed through the forest, through the night, so loud and so close.
“We can talk about this, hear? Nobody’s gonna hurt you, son! Come on back!”
I imagined him lumbering after me in the darkness, arms outstretched and eyes wild like Christopher Lee’s in The Curse of Frankenstein.
“You! Get back here!”
“Screw you,” I whispered, and I ran harder than ever. Not slowing down for anything. I barely felt the whip-crack pain of branches and dead autumn leaves against my arms and legs, ignored the midnight rain lashing my face like the sting of a hundred angry, frigid-bodied bees as I burst haphazardly through the forest, seeing only the lights of Midnight’s residential district ahead like a glowing oasis on the horizon…like a promise of sanctuary…
I just kept running…until my whole body ached…
Running like hell…for my life.
CHAPTER FIVE
How I got to sleep that night I will never know—after I saw what I saw—but I did doze off eventually, after lying in the darkness, trembling, waiting to hear Dan pull up in our driveway for what felt like an eternity.
It felt as if only several minutes passed between the time I last remembered staring at my alarm clock in the darkness, praying for sleep, and a hellish nightmare woke me all but kicking and screaming, slick all over with a stinking sheen of sweat that made my skin feel slimy like the walls of the old Well.
The nightmare began innocently enough, as most do. Walking through the woods, I made my way toward my Secret Place. In the distance I could hear the laughter of children, murmurous crowd noise. The occasional whirr-pop of a cheap noisemaker. The whistle-hiss-BAM of fireworks soaring then exploding over my town like so many battling starships. Gala noises.
As I approached the clearing in the middle of the forest, it became obvious right away that something was not right there. An eerie blue glow enveloped my Secret Place, an uncanny luminescence emanating not from the moon but as if from some supernatural force. The Well and the Old Shack appeared oddly translucent, as if displaced from reality. Ghosts of inanimate objects.
And then came the sounds from inside the Well as my dream-self stood there wide-eyed…a sudden din from down there in the darkness which chilled my very soul.
At first, it sounded as if some poor forest animal had fallen into the Well and couldn’t climb back up. Scuffling noises and soft splashing sounds bounced against the chamber’s hard rock walls, echoed throughout the forest clearing.
I moved closer to the Well, not wanting to do so but finding that I could not help myself.
“Help me,” came the nightmare voice, and to this day I can still hear her haunting cry from inside that subterranean chamber. It was a voice so innocent and sweet yet possessed of an underlying darkness at the same time. It seemed to be not one voice, but many. A feminine inflection was the most evident, yet voices of every varying pitch and tone cried out from the depths of her watery grave as well, as if all of the world’s injustices had personified themselves through one dead girl, and now they spoke to me from the bottom of an old well in Midnight, North Carolina.
“Help me,” she said again. “Kyle…”
I shook my head back and forth several times fast. This couldn’t be happening.
“Help me. Please. It’s so dark…”
“Shut up,” said my dream-self. I covered my ears. “You’re not real. You’re dead.”
And that’s when she came up.
I sensed her approach, could feel her floating to the top of the Well. Like a rush of displaced air, I anticipated her silent ascent before she materialized before me. But I didn’t step back.
Now the dead girl—all pale and bloated, yet still pretty in some demonic way, like the stench of something rotten might also smell strangely sweet, though you can’t put your finger on how—rose to greet me as if on invisible wings.
“Help me, Kyle,” she wept. “You must.”
She kissed me, and her breath smelled like mud and earthworms, blood and sweat and sex all at the same time.
I screamed. I ran. I ran as if my life once again depended on it.
“Please, Kyle,” I heard her phantom many-voice moan behind me, and with it came the spider touch of an elongated bone-finger stroking the nape of my neck. “Don’t leave. I’ll show you things…down here…please…”
“NononoGodno,” I babbled, never looking back.
I knew if I looked back the phantom-girl would be floating along behind me. Just inches away.
I could never outrun her.
“Leave me alone!” I cried.
And then I collided with Sheriff Burt Baker, who waited for me on the edge of the Snake River Woods.
He grabbed me by my collar, pulled me close, and a fat pink earthworm fell from between his puffy brown lips into the carpet of leaves at our feet.
“We’ll have to burn her clothes,” he said. “Everything. Clean all this shit up till there ain’t even a pussy hair left.”
AUGUST 6
CHAPTER SIX
BODY OF LOCAL GIRL FOUND, the headline blared from the front page of the Midnight Sun the next morning. I don’t think I had ever seen a bigger, bolder caption in my hometown’s newspaper. At least, not since the powers-that-be had announced the end of the Vietnam War.
I saw it as I sat down beside my mother for a bowl of Raisin Bran and a glass of Minute Maid orange juice. My heart leapt into my throat, though for Mom’s benefit I tried to act more interested in my breakfast than this news of which I was already far too aware. Mom watched me with sleepy disinterest as I began to eat, sipping loudly at her coffee all the while (MOMS ARE MADE FOR LOVIN’, read the slogan on the side of her mug), but after several minutes of awkward silence she gestured toward the newspaper article before me.
“They found her last night, washed up on the banks of Snake River,” she said. “Midnight’s first murder in over fifty years.”
Mom was always one of those folks who insist on being the first to tell any kind of news (good or bad, but of course the latter is so much more fun), as if this somehow made her feel special. I always let her have her way.
“Really.” I shifted in my seat, pulled the paper closer to my bowl.
“Mm-hmm. Last one was back in the twenties, I think. A moonshine deal gone bad, something like that.”
“Wow,” I replied, for lack of anything better to say. But my tone was deadpan. I wondered if my own family had been involved in the mess of which Mom spoke, decided I wouldn’t bet against it. Her folks always did love a good stiff drink.
I let my spoon slide down into my bowl of cereal, lost it, but didn’t care. I blocked my mother’s voice out as best I could then, and my heart raced for the next few minutes as I read that article on the front page of the Midnight Sun:
BODY OF LOCAL GIRL FOUND
FOUL PLAY CONFIRMED, SHERIFF PROMISES QUICK ARREST
Polk County Sheriff Burt Baker made a tragic discovery early this morning during a random patrol. Upon investigation, a body found on the northern edge of Midnight’s Snake River was revealed to be that of Cassandra Belle Rourke, 16.
While the exact cause of Ms. Rourke’s death has yet to be determined, it is obvious that the young lady was sexually assaulted, Sheriff Baker told the Midnight Sun.
“Cassie” Rourke worked part-time at Annie’s Country Diner, on Main Street. She is survived by her parents and on
e brother.
“(An arrest) is inevitable,” Sheriff Baker said. “The department already has several good leads (and)…this heinous act will not go unpunished.”
I let the paper fall to the table, slumped back in my chair. My Raisin Bran didn’t look so edible anymore. And not just because it had gone soggy in its bowl. I felt sick. Sick from what I had seen the night before. Sick of Sheriff Baker and his lies.
Outside the window above the kitchen sink, a fat robin chirped merrily from its place in Mom’s birdfeeder. The rain had slacked off a bit since the night before, but a soft mist continued to fall upon Midnight like a thin gray blanket of melancholia following one girl’s tragic death. Despite the weather, that damn robin chirped on and on as if everything was hunky-dory in its world.
“I’ve heard she was quite a little slut,” Mom said, her voice so low and matter-of-fact I almost did not hear her.
“What?”
“The Rourke girl. They say she was really ‘easy.’” She gave a little sniffle, looked down her nose at the newspaper before me. “That’s what I heard, anyway.”
I swallowed a lump in my throat. “‘Easy?’”
She gave an exaggerated sigh, as if I had solicited her crude commentary to begin with but my questions had become tedious and disrespectful. “Far be it from me to speak ill of the dead, Kyle, but word is she ‘got around.’ She was a ‘loosie-goosie’, if you will. I don’t know. I’m just telling you what I’ve heard. Eileen Sealy says she’s been sniffing around her boy, Paul, since he taught her class in Vacation Bible School last summer. And he’ll be thirty next month!”
I frowned. I didn’t know what Mom meant, then again I did. Somehow. I felt dirty, certainly did not wish to continue such a conversation with my mother.
For that matter, I no longer wanted to talk to her at all. I stood, preparing to leave the kitchen.
As much as I loved my mother, sometimes she could be my least favorite person in the world.
“Something wrong, Kyle?” Mom asked as she poured herself a generous shot of brandy from a bottle beside the refrigerator. She topped it off with more coffee, took a hearty swig and smiled sweetly at me. “You barely touched your breakfast.”
“I’m fine,” I said. I wanted to take that damn bottle of hers and chuck it out the window. Preferably at the gay little songbird perched there. “I’m just not hungry.”
“Suit yourself.” Again Mom sipped at her mug. Some of it dribbled down her chin, but she must not have noticed. She didn’t wipe it off.
My chair scraped loudly against the linoleum when I pushed it back under the table.
Mom winced as if I had just shattered the morning’s tranquility with an ear-piercing scream. But I ignored her.
I staggered into the bathroom across the hall.
“Oh, Kyle? Will you wake Dan, please?” she called out to me. I could barely understand her as she asked in the middle of a loud yawn, but I caught the gist of it. “He’s gonna have to hurry if he doesn’t wanna miss his flight…”
“Whatever,” I groaned.
“Kyle!” Mom called.
“Yes!” I shouted back, with all the twelve-year-old fury I could muster. “I heard you the first time!”
Into Dan’s room I went, moving like a zombie.
I stood over my big brother, watched him snore for a minute or so. His mouth was open, his lips spit-wet. His nostrils flared.
“Dan,” I said. “Time to get up.”
I fought back tears as I stared down at him.
“Dan.”
I had never felt so helpless in my life.
“Dan. Wake up. Come on.”
I cursed myself. Cursed my yellow-bellied way of avoiding this whole matter.
I knew damn well Dan had overslept. Mom didn’t have to tell me. It was I, after all, who had switched the time on my brother’s alarm clock from seven a.m. to seven p.m. shortly before I drifted off to sleep beside him in the wee hours of the morning after telling him my story.
I did not want to go see Deputy Linder, report what I witnessed out there in the Snake River Woods, yet I had known Dan would make me no matter how strongly I objected. He would take me to the Sheriff’s Department himself, and he would make me tell Deputy Mike what I had seen.
I had fixed that problem, though.
This way my brother would barely have enough time to throw on his clothes, load everything into his truck, and still catch his plane to Florida.
I should have been smiling. But I wasn’t.
I felt so low, as if I had betrayed my whole family. Myself. That poor girl in the woods.
I realized too late that I had made the wrong decision.
I ran from Dan’s room then, leaned over the toilet, and puked up everything I had eaten in the last twelve hours or so.
I wiped my mouth, grimaced.
I heard Mom turn on her radio in the kitchen, the one atop the refrigerator. A few seconds later she started singing along with it. Something about cats in cradles and silver spoons.
I leaned over the toilet again, starting dry-heaving. Slammed the bathroom door to muffle Mom’s off-key crooning about Little Boy Blue and the man in the frigging moon.
“What the hell am I gonna do now?” I wept.
The only answer was my own anguished cry, echoing inside the toilet bowl before me.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Sunday, August 6, 1977, proved to be one of the worst days of my life. As if I have to tell you.
I idolized my big brother, all but worshipped him…and he left me behind like an unpleasant memory.
By the time Dan fully awoke and stumbled out of bed he did not even have time to take a shower. He threw his bags in the back of his pick-up before running all over the house, swearing up and down that he knew he was forgetting something and holy shit his plane left in forty-five minutes and what happened to that goddamn alarm ’cause he was sure he’d set it for seven-thirty!
“Where did you learn such terrible language, Danny?” Mom asked him from her place upon the couch. “Christ. You sound so uncivilized. Perhaps if you hadn’t stayed out all night with that Julie girl…”
A year-and-a-half they’d been dating, and still she was “that Julie girl” to Mom. Sure, I had experienced my own occasional pangs of jealousy, since Dan started spending most of his time with Julie. But I was twelve. And I liked my brother’s girlfriend, for the most part. The same could not be said for our mother.
“I just hope you were safe,” Mom mumbled in a condescending, sing-songy tone, but Dan did not respond even if he did hear her.
Several years would pass till I knew what Mom meant by that. At the time I assumed she meant Dan and Julie should always wear their seatbelts, or perhaps keep in mind the old “stop-drop-and-roll” rule if they ever caught on fire.
I kept my mouth shut throughout the chaos. Stayed out of the way and prayed those final forty-five minutes with my big brother could just stretch out into forever. I did not help Dan carry his things to his pick-up, though I could tell he needed me. I just sat there wishing I could stop time, like the guy with his magic stopwatch on that old Twilight Zone episode.
Mom drove Dan’s truck to the airport in Asheville. For years our mother had expertly driven under the influence without weaving all over the road or running into telephone poles. It was a hell of a talent, let me tell you—if such a “skill” were something to boast about—yet it terrified me to no end each time I rode with her in Dan’s Ford F100 or her own station wagon. I’d heard stories of Mom’s cousin Tony, who had been in prison ever since he killed a young lady on his way home from a bar in Weaverville shortly after I was born. Surely it was just a matter of time, I feared, until my mother suffered the same sad fate…
I sat between Mom and Dan for the ride, gazing up at my big brother as he stared out his rain-streaked window, nervously tapping his fingers on his knees in some offbeat rhythm only he could appreciate. He reminded me of a scared little boy, sitting there in his maroon FSU cap a
nd his new denim jacket that was a size too large for his skinny frame. At some point Mom turned on the radio, and for the last few miles of our trip Leo Sayer crooned “When I Need You” from the truck’s speakers. It sounded like shit. Not only because the song was disgustingly sappy and Mom’s humming along made it even more horrendous, but also because one of the pick-up’s speakers had been blown a few months back when Dan drove to Charlotte with a bunch of friends to see a Kiss concert. I hardly paid attention to the music, though. I sank in my seat, nearly started crying when I saw the airport on the horizon, the planes coming and going like massive silver birds roaring over our heads, the control tower in the center of it all overlooking the chaos like a proud parent supervising the chores of its offspring.
It wouldn’t be long, I knew. Dan would soon be gone.
I clenched my fists. I hated them all. The pilots, up there in their cockpits. The shaky old man in the SHORT-TERM PARKING booth who gave Mom a ticket before waving us through the gate. The long-legged flight attendant standing outside the main entrance, puffing on a Virginia Slim in the early-morning drizzle.
My mother.
My big brother, for leaving me.
After checking Dan’s bags then braving a veritable labyrinth of moving sidewalks and too-slow escalators and hundreds of bustling strangers, we reached the correct terminal with just five minutes to spare. A skinny stewardess with big boobs but too-thick glasses and a high-pitched, squeaky voice was announcing that all remaining passengers of Flight 237 to Tallahassee, Florida should now board.
I noticed she smiled at Dan when we walked up. He smiled back, and her cheeks turned bright pink as she returned her microphone to its cradle.
Before I forgot, I made sure to place her on my ever-growing shit list as well.
Dan hefted his carry-on bags, staggered beneath their weight. He glanced out the huge plate-glass window, over the busy tarmac below, and I couldn’t help but notice the lost-little-boy expression that loomed upon his normally strong, worry-free face.
