“It’s no wonder in this storm,” she said wearily. “I’m surprised you still have power.”
“So am I. Don’t jinx it.” He dialed the police a third time just to be sure then motioned to the other room with his chin. “She OK?”
“Seems to be, but she’s not making a lot of sense.”
“She gonna need a doctor?”
“No, I think she just had a scare and fainted.”
He wasn’t sure he wanted to know but asked anyway. “What scared her?”
“She’s not being too clear on that.”
Nathan…
Duck flinched. The call still hadn’t connected, but through the quiet hiss he was certain he’d heard a voice whisper his name. Nathan. No one called him that, Duck had been his nickname since childhood. Only his grandmother, who had raised him, had called him Nathan, and she was long dead.
“What is it?” Lana asked. “All the color just drained out of your face.”
“I don’t know, I…I could’ve sworn I heard someone on the line but…” He returned the phone to its cradle on the wall and ran the back of his hand across his mouth, wiping it clean of perspiration. “Christ, this heat just won’t quit.”
“Look,” Lana said, lowering her voice, “I have to get back to my cottage. There’s something there I need.”
“You diabetic or need medication or something?”
“No, I—it’s just—there’s something there I want with me, my carry bag.”
“Until we figure out what the hell’s going on we better stay together, OK?”
She fidgeted about nervously. “You don’t understand.”
“What’s so important about this bag?”
“It has some personal things in it I don’t want to lose.”
“It’ll be safe there. You think anybody’s gonna be out robbing cottages in this mess?” He brought his hands together and cracked his knuckles. “You stay here with them and I’ll drive back into town and get a hold of the chief. There’s also a couple people I need to make sure are OK. Dempsey, the guy who owns the cottages, he’s a friend of mine.”
“I met Mr. Dempsey. Sort of. Confused old guy with the trash truck?”
“That’d be him. I want to check in on Rae, too. The woman we saw—”
“In the rain, I remember.”
Duck knew from the look in her eyes she realized there had once been something between them. Women can always tell these things somehow, but now isn’t the time to go into it, he thought, none of her business anyway.
“Couldn’t I come with you?” she asked. “We could stop at my cottage—”
“When I get back, if everything’s all right, I’ll run you over to your place.”
With a sigh and a defeated nod, Lana surrendered. “OK.”
“I know this is a long-shot, but do you have any experience with guns?”
“My father was a cop. I was raised around firearms and taught how to use them from a young age. But I haven’t fired one in years. Not a big fan.”
Duck opened a drawer next to the sink, reached into the back and removed a handgun wrapped in a small towel. He placed it on the counter and pulled the towel back to reveal a .38 revolver. “It’s loaded,” he told her. “And in the back room, my bedroom, in the closet, there’s a 12-gauge pump shotgun on the shelf and a few boxes of shells. There’s also a holstered 9mm, loaded, and a military combat knife.”
“Jesus, were you planning to invade Canada at some point?”
He ignored her attempt at humor. “I don’t think you’ll need them, but wanted you to know just in case something happens.”
“Like what?”
His face remained stoic. “Keep the doors locked. I’ll be back soon.”
“Hey guys?”
They turned in unison. Perry had joined them in the kitchen, looking like a drenched and nervous rat, his mop of hair flattened against his face.
“I think you better hear this.”
They followed him back into the main room, where they found Lennox still on the couch but upright, bottled water in hand. Her eyes were clear but frightened.
“Tell them what you told me,” Perry said, anxiously shuffling his feet back and forth like a child in need of a bathroom, his sandals damp from the rain and squeaking against the floor. “It’s OK, baby, just tell them.”
“That SUV,” Lennox said, voice shaking, “when it went by us, I saw my mother. She was looking out the window. She looked right at me.”
Duck and Lana exchanged uneasy glances.
“That’s why I fainted,” she continued. “It’s not possible.” She took a long sip of water. “My mother’s dead.”
“Must’ve been someone who looked like her,” Duck offered.
“No. It was her.”
Perry raised his hands and let them slap down against his sides as if to say: See?
Lana looked to Duck. “What’s happening?”
“I don’t know.”
“But you saw something too, at the crash.”
“A shadow, I saw a shadow, I—I don’t know what the hell it was.”
“I’ve seen it, too,” Lana admitted. “This morning, on my way to town, I saw something in the woods, but it was just this shadowy blur and it was gone so fast I thought it had to be a trick of the light, so I dismissed it.”
Duck released a heavy sigh. “Shadows don’t rip human beings through windshields and drag them off into the woods.”
“Neither do ghosts.”
“What did you hear on the phone just now?”
Nathan.
“Someone whispered my name. Not my nickname, my real name. Only person who ever called me that was my grandmother, when I was a kid.”
Lana forced a swallow. “Is your grandmother still living?”
“No.”
“We saw the same thing,” Lennox said. She straightened her posture, and with her free hand, pulled her yellow sunflower dress away from her body. The rain had left the thin material plastered against the curve of her breasts and stuck to her stomach. It separated from her flesh with a squishy sound. “The shadow or whatever, it was in the ocean, squatting on a rock near shore.”
“You saw it,” Perry corrected her, pacing about furiously. “I didn’t see shit. I don’t know what the hell any of you are talking about, OK, and you’re freaking me the fuck out. What’s going on?”
“He shot it.” Lennox pointed to her boyfriend. “With his digital recorder.”
“But there wasn’t anything there,” Perry insisted.
“Let’s have a look.” Duck motioned to the recorder. “You may have gotten something useful.”
Perry removed the recorder from around his neck, switched it on then slid open a small video screen for playback viewing, and fiddled with some tiny buttons. Without handing it over, he angled the screen so Duck and Lana could see what he’d recorded earlier. “This part’s just some ocean stuff I was shooting.” He fast-forwarded until there was a break then resumed play. “OK, this is when I turned it on and tried to get what Lennox said she saw, I—”
“There, in the water,” Duck said, pointing.
“That’s just a rock, isn’t it?” Perry asked hopefully. “Looks like a rock.”
Mesmerized, Lana gently shook her head. “No.”
Duck wiped more sweat from his brow as he tried to wrap his mind around what the recorder had captured. Again, just a shadow really, but not an ordinary shadow, there was clearly something tangible and with a humanoid shape crouched on a large rock in the water. The waves breaking around it helped to conceal and somewhat disguise its presence, but it was definitely there.
“How could I…” Perry’s hands began to tremble, blurring the image. “I didn’t see it before but…come on, dude, it’s got to be part of the fucking rock. What else could it be?”
The segment ended, replaced by a black screen.
Lennox remained on the couch. She said nothing, but her eyes glistened with tears.
“I’ll
be back,” Duck said abruptly.
“Where are you going?” Perry tossed the recorder onto the couch. “I mean, what’s—what the hell’s going on? What do we do?”
“Stay put for now.” Duck turned, watched the storm through the window. Dempsey’s ranting and raving the day before came back to him. He’d known something was wrong, that something was coming. He’d known. “I’ll get hold of the chief and bring help.”
“Yeah, well maybe we should all go. I’m not exactly jacked about being left out here in the middle of nowhere.”
“Until we know for sure what’s out there, you’re safer in here.”
“Maybe that’s what you think, but—”
“Lock the door behind me and sit tight,” he said to Lana. “I’ll be back.”
Before Perry could offer further protest, Duck strode quickly through the door and back out into the rain.
Running across the small front yard with keys in hand, he closed on the cab, which he’d parked in the dirt driveway along the side of the house.
He was still a few feet away when he stopped to make a slow visual sweep of the woods surrounding the cottage, and though it was difficult to make out much of anything in the downpour, subtle movement in the tree line to his right caught his attention.
He frantically wiped the rain from his eyes to better identify the source.
A woman—a young Vietnamese woman—stood watching him from the edge of the dirt road. Dark hair long and matted with rain and blood and mud, her face smeared with it as well, she stared at him with hopeless eyes, her shoulders slumped slightly forward as her petite body swayed with the wind, looking as if it had been propped up and held in place with invisible wires. Her hands, held out in front of her, were coated with bright crimson, dripping and mixing with the rain to form a river of bloody mud that collected about then ran in a steady stream from her filthy bare feet.
In a tiny voice, through lips torn and trembling, she said, “Vi sao?”
Wracked with horror, Duck backed away. “Stop it,” he said softly, emotion strangling him as the nightmares swirled in his head, dragging him back to Hell. “Stop it, please—stop—stop it.”
As the woman’s hands fell away and her arms returned to her sides, her eyes grew even darker, as if something within her had suddenly been switched off. Void of life, love and warmth and replaced instead with something hideous, her mouth followed suit, curling into a terrifying demonic grin.
“I didn’t know,” he moaned, fighting back the terror. “I…I…I didn’t know…”
Though her lips did not move, as Duck stumbled backwards toward the cottage, he heard the young woman’s voice whisper to him again and again, the same as she had in his dreams for all these years.
Vi sao…Vi sao…Vi sao…
18
In all the time he’d known her, Chris had never seen Anita so spooked. She’d insisted he drive away from the cemetery before she’d even discuss what had frightened her so, and eventually, once they’d gone three or four miles, he pulled over along the side of the heavily wooded road, dropped the car into Park and turned to her.
Hands shaking, she rummaged through her purse a moment and came back with a nip of vodka. With a quick twist of the cap she brought the small bottle to her lips, took a long pull, and then, looking a bit embarrassed, offered it to Chris. When he shook his head no, she finished the rest of it in a single try.
“Since when do you carry nips in your purse?” he asked.
“I don’t normally,” she explained, her voice still vaguely laced with fear. “I had a few at the apartment and just tossed them in my purse to bring with me in case later on we wanted to have a drink…or something.”
“Nita, I don’t understand. What’s rattled you like this? Was this man in the cemetery so frightening that—”
“It wasn’t a man.”
Chris arched an eyebrow but she glared at him with challenging certainty. “All right,” he said patiently, “an animal then?”
“I don’t know.” She stared in the direction of the dashboard but saw only memories. “It was like a man, but it had these appendages on either side that were tucked in tight against it.” This time, when she looked to him, her eyes brimmed with tears. “Like wings, Chris.”
Fear rose from deep in his gut, and with great effort, he tried to ignore his own memories of what he’d seen the night before moving through the trees in his backyard. And there were other memories, lost long ago in time and only then clawing back to the surface, unstoppable despite his fear and discomfort.
Lacy…
Lacy had spoken of a creature not long before Chris left home. She swore the first time she’d seen it was days before their mother took her own life, and then again in the days leading up to Chris’s escape. It was just beyond her bedroom window, standing there staring at the house. At first she’d thought it was an enormous owl of some kind, but then realized it was something more. She’d even drawn pictures of it, terrifying pictures Chris thought he’d forgotten but that came rushing back to him now with startling clarity. Lacy believed, he remembered, that whatever it was, it had come not to harm her but to warn her of imminent danger.
“It made me feel things,” Anita said, bringing him back. She ran a shaking hand over her forehead and wiped away a thin sheen of perspiration that had collected there despite the car’s air-conditioning. “Horrible things…”
Chris’s sighting had summoned in him awful feelings of horror and doom as well. “Well,” he said, struggling to hold his voice steady, “maybe it was a bird. There are quite a few large ones up here. It could’ve been a hawk or for that matter, even an—”
“No,” she insisted in a quiet voice, as if afraid whatever it was might hear. “It was too big to be a bird, too big to be most men.”
Chris gathered himself, and without thinking, went back on the clock. “Nita, listen to me. Whatever this was it was a good distance away, in a heavy rain, and you were looking at it through a distorted windshield in bad light after having had very little sleep the night before. Whatever you saw obviously—”
“Don’t patronize me, OK? Save it for your patients.”
“I’m simply trying to—”
“What am I even doing here?” She drew a deep breath, let it out slowly. “Why did I come here? I don’t belong here. This is private family business you have to deal with, I—I don’t belong here. I don’t belong here at all.”
“Take it easy.” He reached out to take her hand but she leaned away from him. “I’m glad you’re here, all right? Did you hear me? I’m glad. I need the moral support and I wanted you to come. This will more than likely be a very difficult situation. Things with my father always are.”
“Maybe it’s this place,” she said as if she hadn’t heard him. “Maybe this place is just…bad.”
“Places aren’t bad, Nita.”
“Maybe not.” She smiled through her tears. “But people are.”
“No. People are damaged and hurt, sometimes they’re sick or broken, lost and in need of help to find themselves and their way again.”
“Which ones are we, Chris?”
He looked away, out the window at the flooding road as the rain continued to pound the roof and assault the car. “You tell me.”
Neither spoke for what seemed a very long while.
“You’ve never really talked much about your life here,” Anita eventually said. “Or about what happened with your family.”
“It’s all very unpleasant.”
“Are you ashamed of where you come from?”
“My mother aside, I’m ashamed of who I come from.”
Anita searched her purse again but this time came back with tissues and dabbed her eyes with them. “She died when you were young, your mother.”
“She hanged herself.”
Anita froze. He’d never told her that before. “Oh God, Chris, I’m sorry.”
He shrugged but it already felt like thousands of insects were crawl
ing over his skin. “I don’t blame her, I never have. It’s not unusual for family members to have anger issues with those who take their own lives, but I didn’t. She tried. She did her best. My mother was a good woman, and she didn’t deserve the life she got with my father. I never understood the attraction in the first place, and I wasn’t alone on that count, trust me.”
“People don’t always turn out to be the same person you fell in love with.” Brendan came to her then, confused; hurt. “As a matter of fact, they rarely do.”
He watched the rain run along the window. “My father was…is…a deeply disturbed man. He’s heard voices in his head for years but has always refused to seek help. And he has a serious drinking problem, he’s a binge alcoholic. He always claimed the drinking was the only way he could quiet the voices, the madness, but it only made things worse and often turned him violent. He’d be fine for weeks at a time then suddenly go off on one of his benders and drink until he snapped. And then, God help you.”
This time she reached out for his hand. “I didn’t know it was that bad.”
“After my mother died I knew I had to get out. I had to get us both out one way or another.” He accepted Anita’s hand, placed his other atop it and held on tight in the hopes that it might calm their trembling. “He didn’t kill my mother but he may as well have hung the rope and helped her up onto that stool. He drove her to it. There was no other way out for her. She was a simple woman who only knew her life and this goddamn town. I swore I wouldn’t let him do any more harm to Lacy or me or anyone else, and that I’d get us both out, but…I ran. I abandoned her here and by the time I had the guts to come back and get her she was already gone.”
“And you never heard from her again?”
“Not a word. And I don’t blame her. I left her here with that monster.”
“There are no monsters, only damaged, broken and sick people who have lost their way.” She withdrew her hand. “Remember?”
“Maybe it’s all in who’s looking.”
“Maybe it’s all in who’s looking back.”
Chris gave a sullen nod.
“What I saw at the cemetery, it…”
The Living and the Dead Page 11
