by Laird Barron
He races out to the bridge above West Creek. There he settles into a shady spot, dangles his legs over the bridge’s edge and studies catfish squirming along the current. Near noon, Michael mounts his bike and rides back to his grandparents’ home.
The pickup truck is parked in the driveway. He takes a deep breath, praying that his grandfather hasn’t seen him making his escape.
“I’m home, grandma,” he calls from the foyer.
Entering the kitchen, Michael is startled by the sight of his grandfather fidgeting at the counter.
“She went into town to run some errands,” he says. “Sit down, your lunch is ready.”
Michael does as he is told. His grandfather plunks down a bowl of stewed tomatoes before him, along with a glass of milk. He nests himself at the far end of the table and chews in silence.
His stomach knots. Michael chokes down the slippery fruit in his bowl.
“I suppose I should have had you wash your hands before we sat down,” his grandfather remarks. “You’re pretty filthy. You’ve got dust all over your clothes and hands.”
Michael freezes. His grandfather’s gaze remains fixed on the food in his dish, which he spoons up and eats in a measured rhythm.
When his bowl is empty, his grandfather sets down his spoon and lifts his eyes to Michael’s. “I have a confession to make,” he begins. “You know yesterday when your grandmother brought up the topic of ghosts? Well, can you keep a secret, just between us?”
Michael nods.
“You swear it?”
“I swear.”
“Cross your heart?”
Michael does so.
“All right then. I wasn’t being honest when I said I didn’t believe in them. The fact is I do. I saw a ghost once myself.”
“You did?”
“Yes. Well, it was something like a ghost. I think what I saw was actually a jinn.”
“A jinn?”
“A jinn is a spirit, Michael. Legend says they are created by fire. They can take all kinds of forms; animals, people. But they’re very dangerous.”
“What did the jinn that you saw look like?” Michael asks breathlessly.
“It was in the form of a young girl.”
Michael feels his palms growing damp. “Where did you see her?”
“In the woods, not too far from here. I think she was planning to burn the forest down. That’s what the jinn do; they bring fire.”
“And did she?”
His grandfather shakes his head.
“So what happened?”
His grandfather tents his hands before him. “They say the only way to combat the element of fire is with ice . . .”
And with that, a silent tension coils between child and elder, winding tighter like a spring. Michael is confused, curious, and scared. He doesn’t know what to do or say.
“Young boys get curious, and when they get curious they sometimes discover things that give them the wrong impression of what the world is like. There are always two sides to things, Michael,” his grandfather advises. “There is the appearance of things and then there is what lies beneath. I want you to remember that, boy. Don’t base your opinions of the world on how it appears. Always try to remember what lies beneath. Sometimes the things that appear to be the most innocent are the most dangerous, and vice versa. It was a long time before I knew this, so I want you to learn it while you’re young. You understand?”
Michael nods even though he does not at all understand.
The sound of his grandmother turning into the driveway brings Michael a relief that borders on gleeful. He runs to her. His grandfather rises and dutifully clears the table.
The remainder of the day moves at a crawl as Michael searches for a way to probe his grandfather further about the jinn. Is this what he has seen? No, what he’s seen looks more like a spirit born of ice. Either way, the woods that surrounded the old gravel pits are obviously haunted, and that means they are dangerous. By bedtime that night Michael has resolved to never again visit the gravel pits. He will find other ways to amuse himself.
He has almost managed to convince himself that everything is right with the world when the girl appears again, this time inside his grandparents’ house.
It is the dead of night and Michael is returning to his bed after relieving himself. She stands in the hallway, her flesh phosphorescent in the darkness. The nuggets of ice sparkle in her hair like a constellation of fallen stars.
Michael is bolted in place. His jaw falls open as if weighted. He looks at her but somehow isn’t truly seeing her. In the back of his mind Michael wonders if what he is experiencing is what lies beneath the surface of the girl and not merely her appearance.
The girl neither speaks nor moves. She stands like a coldly morbid statue, with one arm jutting toward the wall of the corridor.
Michael’s gaze hesitantly runs along the length of the girl’s extended arm, and her pointing finger. Is she indicating the unused phone jack on the wall? Michael turns back to face her but before him there now stretches only darkness.
He lingers in the vacated hallway for eons before finally crouching down to investigate the phone jack. It is set into the moulding, which Michael’s grandmother always keeps clean and waxed. Michael clasps the jack’s white plastic covering and tugs at it. It pops loose.
Within it Michael discovers a pair of keys. One of them is larger than the other and has the words ‘Tuff Lock’ engraved on its head. The smaller key is unmarked.
A creak of wood somewhere inside the house acts as a warning to Michael. He hurriedly recovers the jack and slips back to his room where he lies in thought until the sun at last burns away the shadows.
Only after he hears his grandfather fire up his old pickup and drive off—Is he going back to his secret redbrick vault at the gravel pits?—does Michael leave his room.
His grandmother is sitting on the living room sofa. She seems smaller somehow, almost deflated.
“Morning,” Michael says, testing her mood.
“Good morning, dear,” she replies. Her tone is distant, a swirl of unfocused words.
“Where’s grandpa?”
She stands. “He had some chores to do. Are you hungry?” She advances to the kitchen without waiting for Michael’s response.
“You all right, grandma?”
She forces a chortle. “I’m fine, Mikey, just fine. Your grandpa just seemed a little out of sorts this morning and I guess I’m a bit worried about him, that’s all.”
Michael feels his face flush. “What’s the matter with him?”
“He didn’t sleep well.” She seems to be attempting to drown out her own voice by clattering pans and beating eggs in a chrome bowl. “Your grandpa has bad dreams sometimes, and when he does he wakes up very cranky and fidgety.”
“Oh.”
When they sit down to eat Michael wrestles to find what he hopes is a clever method of interrogation. He needs so badly to know . . .
“Does grandpa ever talk about what his bad dreams are about?”
“No.”
“Do you ever have bad dreams?”
“Almost never, dear. I think the last time was a couple years ago when there was some bad business here in the village.”
“What happened?”
“A girl went missing.” She speaks the words more into her coffee cup than to Michael, but even muffled they stun him.
“Missing?”
His grandmother nods. “She was one of the summer people, came up here with her family. I’d see her walking to and from the beach almost every day by herself. Then one day she went down to swim but never came back. Must have drowned, poor thing. They dragged the lake but she was never found. A terrible event. Felt so bad for her mother and father. That’s why your grandfather and I never let you go to the beach unsupervised.”
“Do you remember what she looked like?”
She shrugs. “Thirteen-years-old or so. Blonde hair, I recall that much.”
Michael excuses himself from the table. His jimmying open of the phone jack is masked by the noises of his grandmother washing the breakfast dishes.
“Think I’ll go for a ride,” he tells her.
“Be careful, dear. Have fun.”
Throughout his race to the gravel pits Michael senses that the village is somehow made out of eyes. He passes no one, but is terrified by the prospect of encountering his grandfather at the pits.
The area is equally abandoned. The cavern of redbrick sits snugly locked, illuminated by a hot dappling of sunlight. He enters the breach in the fence and fishes out the pair of keys from his pocket.
He marries the one labelled Tuff Lock with the padlock that bears the same engraving. The lock gives easily. The clunking noise startles a murder of crows from their nest. Michael cries out at their sudden cawing, wing-flapping reprimand. He quickly looks about, terrified of being caught.
The gravel mounds are as ancient hills, silent and patient and indifferent to all human activity. Michael removes the padlock and struggles to raise the corrugated door. It rattles up its track, revealing the musty, cluttered darkness.
Like an ember, the orange light of the freezer gleams from the back of the shed.
Michael feels about for a light switch but finds none. With great care he makes his way to the light. He is like a solider crossing a minefield. Every motorized tool, every stack of bagged soil, is a danger.
He reaches the freezer. Its surface is gritty with dust. He sees the metal clamp that holds its lid shut. It is secured with another padlock. Before he’s fully realized what he is doing, Michael inserts the smaller key and frees the open padlock from its loop. He can hear the freezer buzzing and he wonders if he is truly ready to see what it contains.
‘You’ve gone this far,’ he tells himself. He pulls the lid up from the frame.
Frost funnels upward, riding on the gust of manufactured arctic air. Like ghosts, the cold smoke flies and vanishes.
A bundled canvas tarp reposes within the freezer’s bunk. Its folds are peppered with ice, its drab earthy brownness in sharp contrast to the white banks of frost that have accumulated on the old freezer’s walls. The tarp is secured with butcher’s twine, which Michael cannot break, so instead he wriggles one of the canvas flaps until his aching fingers can do no more.
But what he has done is enough. Through the small part in the bundle the whitish, lidless eye stares back at him, like a waxing moon orbiting in the microcosmic blackness of the canvas shroud.
Michael whimpers. All manner of emotion assails him at once, rendering him wordless.
A shadow steps in front of the open shed door. Michael spins around, allowing the freezer lid to slam down. His grandfather has caught him. Michael sees his future as one encased in stifling ice.
But the figure in the doorway is too slight to be his grandfather.
Michael then sees the ghost-eyes staring at him from the dim face. A face that is brightened by rows of teeth as the girl grins. She bolts off into the woods.
“Wait!” Michael cries. He stumbles across the littered shed, but by the time he reaches the gravel pits she has gone.
What do I do? Michael keeps thinking as he locks both freezer and shed. He needs help.
His confusion blurs the ride back to his grandmother.
It also makes him doubt what he sees once the house comes into view.
His grandfather’s pickup is once more in the driveway. Beyond it the entire house is engulfed in flames.
Neighbours are rushing about the property, seemingly helpless. Michael speeds up to the lawn, jumps off his bike and attempts to run through the front door.
A man stops him. “No, son! We’ve called the fire department. Stay back, stay back!”
Ushered to the edge of his grandparents’ property, Michael can see the window of their bedroom. The lace curtain is being eaten by fire, allowing him a heat-weepy view of the figures that are lying on the twin beds inside. He sees his grandmother, who appears to be bound to her bed with ropes. Next to her, Michael’s grandfather lies unbound, a willing sacrifice. The large can of gasoline stands on the floor between them. The pane shatters from the heat.
Michael feels his gaze being tugged to the trees at the end of the yard, where some kind of animal is skittering up the limbs with ease.
In the distance, sirens are wailing their lament.
Scott Nicolay
* * *
EYES EXCHANGE BANK
Over half a century back a child was born amidst the toxic waste dumps and devil haunted swamps of New Jersey . . . 26 years later that child packed all he could fit in a ’72 Dodge Challenger and lit out for the high desert of northwest New Mexico and the Navajo Nation, where if the dogs bark at night it is only the skinwalkers . . . along the way he had three children and held jobs including dishwasher, restaurant and hotel cook, factory worker, camera salesman, DJ, security guard, teacher, and sheepherder . . . as a teacher he and his students cofounded the New Mexico Youth Poetry Slam and the National Youth Poetry Slam . . . as a caver and archaeologist he studied and explored the caves and lava tubes of Belize, Easter Island, and the U.S. Southwest . . . several years ago he tailed Jack Spicer’s Martian to the uncertain boundary between our reality and the cobbly worlds . . . now he spends his nights there peering through a grimy window and reports what he sees. Fedogan & Bremer published Ana Kai Tangata, his first book of weird horror tales in 2014.
“On prend un peu de recul. On abandonne la douleur un instant—on s’éloigne. IL N’Y AVAIT QU’à FERMER LES YEUX—”
—Maurice Roche, Compact
Ray Bevacqua hated what winter did to central Jersey, but he was barely over the bridge from Lambertville before he decided he hated it even worse in eastern Pennsylvania. The everywhere dull grayness, the dirt and soot fouling the plow-curled mounds of snow along the roads, all that was the same. But west of the Delaware, rows of low and lumpy hills ate the daylight, and last week’s snow had not even begun to melt.
Route 202 was a tunnel through a shadowed world whose brightest color was brown. Woods that in spring or summer would offer green relief from the drab and dreary towns were gnawed to bleak orchards of black bone. Ray’s mood already sucked, and the PA landscape only aggravated it.
Even without the miserable scenery, Ray experienced increasingly mixed feelings about this trip. Spending the weekend with Danny and Colleen, having to sit through their lovey-dovey bullshit . . . this was not looking like the best way to heal his own mangled emotions. Worse, the last time he saw them was the day he and Lisa drove down to help them move into that same dingy little apartment in Lansdale. The high point of their trip was almost getting caught mauling each other in Danny’s bathroom when they thought everyone else was downstairs, and that meant he would be reminded of Lisa every time he took a leak, standing there with his dick in his hand . . .
Lansdale. It looked even more dismal than the other sorry-ass towns he’d driven through to get there. More boarded up shops, more abandoned vehicles, everything grayer, deader. A total shithole. But this was where the last of his three best friends had packed off to with his just out of high school girlfriend.
It was always the four of them: Danny, Luke, Lisa, and Ray. Danny and Ray grew up in the same central Jersey burb, friends since junior high. They met Luke and Lisa freshman year at Rutgers. Lisa that first week of Freshman Comp, when she leaned across the aisle to him while their untenured junior prof scrawled a line from “Sailing to Byzantium” on the board, and said, “I must tell you, this man knows absolutely fuck-all about William Butler Yeats.” And, oh, there it was: that accent . . . Dublin and Manchester blended so smoothly as to give the lie to the shattered marriage that produced her.
Two months later they met Luke at a party in Frelinghuysen, the tower dorm on the Raritan River wh
ere he lived on the special floor reserved for students in the Fine Arts Honors program. It was Lisa who got the invite, but she and Ray and Danny were already inseparable by then and she brought them along. Luke, Mr. Perfect Hair and Tortoise-Shell Frames, cornered Ray to ask who his friend was, the blonde, and they struck up a conversation about symbolisme in art and literature, Odilon Redon and Rimbaud. And then they were four. Ray always considered himself the pivot that brought them together, made them a group, the Nick Fury of their Avengers. Had he thought they’d be a team forever? Wrong again. Truth was, the whole thing began falling apart months before the class of ’90 walked.
First Danny found this young bimbo from Temple over Christmas Break, just a frosh, and they saw less and less of him until June when he finally packed off to Colleen’s hometown in PA. That meant back to working in a garage, same as high school. Brand new BA in Communications and he’s replacing fan belts. The rest of them didn’t even need to look at each other to share their disgust. But Ray hadn’t complained: his roommate’s departure left room for Lisa to move in. First girl he actually lived with after dating all those others, the one he wanted all along.
Next Luke got a plum design job in the city and an apartment in the Village. Which left Ray the last one still at RU, in grad school and switched from English to Comp Lit, dissecting Poe and struggling through Maurice Roche with a measly three semesters of undergrad French. Tel quel. . .if he could just tell what the hell . . .
But he still had Lisa. They finally started up as a couple third quarter senior year. None of them had discussed that this was a big part of the reason Luke left, but Ray was sure they all knew it. Well, maybe not Danny, but Danny was busy with his own thing. And Ray kept asking himself why he hadn’t asked her out way back freshman year, back when he wasn’t buried in grad work and she didn’t have a full-time job. Back when his dad was still around. He remembered how she hit it off with the old man when he discovered they both smoked Benson & Hedges Multifilters. “Why don’t you strike up with this one?” he asked one night in front of them all, and who squirmed worse: Ray or Luke?
