The questions piled up, gathered in his mind, and were shredded and turned to anger. He answered her questions curtly, one word answers. Finally, when he thought he could bear no more, she left, to go to the bathroom, to get a coffee, something. To still her shaking hands.
Tanya came and stood by the bed. "I made you another bracelet," she said then she produced a red and black beaded bracelet from her pocket. She tied it around his right wrist, over his identification tag, then set his arm down again. She rested her hand on his upper arm.
Tyler smiled at her, feeling soothed. His hand didn't throb anymore, the ghost pain faded. He looked into her eyes and he felt momentarily awed by Tanya's presence, as if she wasn't his sister but he was looking at a mural on a silent church wall.
The feeling faded, his sister was his sister.
"The cloud has come to Kinniwaw," she said and Tyler's hand throbbed lightly again.
"What do you mean?" he asked.
"I met the bad man."
"Who?"
"The man with one face. He's here," Tanya said. He felt frightened. She leaned closer and everything softened, he became calm. "We don't have to be afraid. That's what he wants."
Tyler nodded. Tanya stepped away from him and smiled.
His mother came back into the room and whatever had passed between them was broken.
They left a few hours later and Tyler slept peacefully. In his dreams he floated in a warm safe place.
8.
Early Friday afternoon, Rand and Kari pulled into Bumpa's yard. It was another hot day, so unlike the Septembers they had known all their lives. It lent the day an eerie air, as if somehow the seasons had been switched. Rand wanted it to be cold, his body yearned for it, because this unnatural heat was disorienting. He had driven all the way out to Bumpa's with the air conditioning on full blast, but the inside of the car never became cool, only bearable.
He and Kari pulled into the yard and Bumpa came out to greet them. They got out of the car. Rand noticed that clouds were moving in from behind the house.
Bumpa smiled and shook his head. "So now I've got two of you to eat my food. Come in. Come in. You can't avoid the inevitable." He stopped suddenly, smiled. "Hi, Kari. How are you?"
"Fine," she said smiling back.
He winked with his glass eye, then he turned and they followed him back into the house. They sat in the living room.
"Before you say anything, I'll bring you both a cup of tea." He went, came back with a tray and three cups. He poured them each a cup. Then sat back with his own cup in his hands.
"So what is it?" Bumpa asked. "I gather by the way you spoke on the phone you have something important to talk about."
Rand coughed. "Well, someone broke into my house last night."
Bumpa leaned ahead. "While you were there?"
"No, it was while Kari and I were visiting Tyler. Nothing was stolen." He paused. "Except for a kitchen knife. But there was mud on the floor and someone had broken the bathroom door and the mirror inside."
"You called the police?"
Rand nodded. "They've got their hands full already answering false alarms. Everyone in Kinniwaw seems to be hearing or seeing things. There was a bunch of claims besides mine. Though the officer did say something strange, he mentioned to his partner that there had been mud at one of the other places they had investigated."
Bumpa nodded. "And here comes the question you expect: Who do you think it was?"
Rand let out his breath. "Conn. I'm sure of it now. It was either a warning or a cry for help, I don't know. Or he had come..." He trailed off.
"To kill you," Bumpa finished.
Rand nodded. "Maybe." He paused for a second. "There's one more thing, whoever broke the mirror wrote a name on the mirror."
"Which was?"
"Haydes."
At the mention of that name, Bumpa's face paled. "Stephen Haydes," he said, nodding as if in a trance. "Perhaps we've finally found out what's happening to Kinniwaw. Perhaps we have. It seems to make some sort of sense, if anything can make sense." He got up and left the room. Rand looked at Kari and shrugged. He could hear Bumpa searching though his library. Bumpa came back a moment later with a box. He opened it, pulled out a yellowed newspaper clipping and handed it to Rand. It read:
Haydes: Suicide or Murder?
Late Thursday afternoon two boy scouts who were following the nature trails in Minnow Park came across the body of Stephen Haydes and Angel Smythe. According to police, who arrived at the scene later that afternoon, Haydes had murdered Smythe with an ax and then apparently committed suicide with a rifle. It is unclear at this time when they died, but the coroner places their deaths on Sunday, September 25th. Stephen Haydes, a long time member of the Kinniwaw community, was a decorated war veteran. He won the medal of honour in 1941 for leading his troops and singlehandedly destroying a Nazi machine gun bunker. He is survived by his brother Andrew and mother Julia, both whom live in Hobson, Ontario.
Rand looked at the picture of Stephen Haydes dressed in his military outfit. His eyes were cold, his smile looked forced. He handed the clipping to Kari.
"That's the man I saw at your place, Rand," she said and then she explained seeing the ghost to Bumpa.
Bumpa nodded when she was finished. He was silent for awhile, then he gestured at the clipping. "The paper's right. Stephen Haydes died on September 25th, 1949, fifty some years ago, but I don't think the paper got the circumstances quite right."
"Haydes was a war hero, but he never enjoyed the status of being a hero, in fact it would be more correct to say he hated it. Completely. Stephen was a sensitive man, deeply sensitive to everything around him, a very moral man, but like many men of passion he had a deep, quick anger."
Bumpa sat back in his chair, his face pinched with concentration. "I met Stephen Haydes in the late forties just after I moved here from England. That was before Emma and I got married and I was about sixteen years old. He had a farm two miles north of Kinniwaw, where he lived by himself. His father had died a year or so before and left the farm to him. His brother and mother had both moved out east, I think his brother was a lawyer out there. Stephen was a tall man and strong as I remember him, though I only saw him a few times. And he was in his early thirties. Most of what I know of him is bits and pieces that I picked up from others at the time."
"Haydes fought in the Second World War, he was one of the first to volunteer. I heard stories about his bravery and apparently he did capture a machine gun bunker by himself like the paper says. But war does things to a man, I know from my own experiences in the army. Some men thrive in it and others are so scarred by the injustice and horror that they never do again face it, only in nightmares. But others, a few, go to war and are shattered completely and something else rises inside of them so that they become doppelgängers of themselves. I think that's what happened to Haydes."
"An older friend of mine, Arthur Silkinson, had been under Haydes' command. He said Haydes had held one of his men, a young kid from Nova Scotia, especially close, that he had become this kid's guardian. The kid died when Haydes and his men tried to take some hill in France, died, apparently right in Haydes' arms. And when that man died, Haydes turned into an animal. Silkinson said Haydes was frightening to look at after that. They nicknamed him Werewolf because he could easily find the enemy and he killed without any hesitation or remorse. He gained quite a reputation as being ruthless. Silkinson never told me exactly what kind of horrors Haydes committed, but he said if the rumors he heard were true, then Haydes was little more than an animal."
"When the war ended Haydes came back he was met at Regina with trumpets and fanfare and he was dressed in all the tin badges a hero wears. But he met it all without emotion. He went back to his farm and no one really saw him except when he came in to get groceries. That's where I saw him once, his eyes sunken in, his face unshaven. He met no one's eyes. I made the effort to talk to him but he just nodded, stepped aside and carried on."
"He
never farmed anymore and I guess maybe he couldn't, that part inside a man that loved the land and pulled him out of bed every morning to toil had shriveled up and died. The bank soon took his farm away. Apparently there was some kind of fight, something about a banker almost being shot, or threatened with a shotgun, but the real story never surfaced. In the end Stephen Haydes was forced off his land."
"He moved out into the hills of Minnow Park and built a shack there. That must have been around '46 or so. Haydes never left his place there. It was rare that anyone ever saw him, only if someone accidentally came across his property. It wasn't really his, but no one would bother him. He was out of the way and the town council didn't care."
"1947 was a strange year. I remember it clearly because it was a hot summer, very hot, and the fall was hot too. Three men died that year, brutal deaths that were never explained. I don't know if there was a connection between those murders and Stephen Haydes. The murders stopped just as suddenly as they started."
Bumpa paused for a moment there and Rand noticed that the room was darker. He glanced out the window behind him. The clouds he had seen earlier behind the house had made their way over the valley.
Bumpa coughed and continued on, "It was the spring of '48 that stories first started to circle around that someone else was staying at Haydes's. No one knew how he had got there or if he had known Stephen before, but someone had seen him and Stephen down by the main road. It was Clyde Walkins, if I remember right, and he said he stopped to talk but Stephen just stared at him and the kid smiled as if apologizing and they walked back into the trees."
"We learned the stranger's name a few weeks later when he wandered into town to buy groceries, who knows what Stephen had been eating before that. The kid was driving Stephen's truck, which probably hadn't run for two years. He introduced himself as Angel Smythe and said he was a friend of Stephen's. He was young and thin, maybe twenty-one, with long black hair. He was quite friendly and soft spoken. He would attract a lot of stares when he came into town because people in Kinniwaw always wondered who could live with crazy Haydes. And there was always a hesitancy in their treatment of Angel Smythe as if something must be wrong with him for staying up there on that hill."
"Angel came into town once a month or so and people slowly got used to him. But there was always talk about him and Stephen, secret talk, wondering what two men would do alone up there. But talk was just talk and it went on this way for a good year.
"Then one day some of the kids from Kinniwaw, I don't know if it was a dare, followed Angel back to Haydes' place and they spied on them. They sat watching for hours and finally saw Angel and Stephen come out of the hut, holding hands. Or at least that's what they said they saw, not all of the kids agreed. Either way it didn't matter. Thank kind of love might not be looked down on now, but then it was a sin. Evil and bad. The kids left without saying a word and I don't think Stephen and Angel even knew they were there. But within a few days the story, and other made up stories with more detail, circulated around Kinniwaw. I don't know if anything was true. He could have just been his adopted son, for all we knew, to make up for the boy he lost in the war. But stories have a way of taking on their own lives."
"The next time Angel came into town in that old beat up truck the grocer refused to serve him and when he asked why he just clammed up. Angel left, but it didn't end there. Harassing Stephen and Angel became the entertainment of the young men my age. I even went up there with a group of friends and we threw stones at the shack and flattened the tires on the truck. I was part of it. I feel sick thinking about that now. I was old enough to know better. I never went back, but I guess they returned two or three times more in the span of a few weeks."
"By this time it was late September. No one knows exactly what happened but I guess Angel couldn't take the harassment anymore, or maybe he just wanted to leave and Stephen wouldn't let him. But if the stories and paper are right Stephen went insane and took an ax and killed Angel. Then he shot himself. It was quite the scandal and shock for Kinniwaw and became the fuel for gossip for many years."
Bumpa stopped and looked at both of them. The house creaked suddenly, as if something heavy were pressing against its side. The noise unsettled Rand.
"So what does this all mean now?" Rand asked.
"I'm not sure. Do you remember that story I told you about Thursten and his cousin? About the draugr." Rand felt a coldness pass over him when he heard that name. "I think something like that is happening here and..." He stopped suddenly, "You know maybe Thursten told me that story just to warn me. He was one of the men who went up there to bury Haydes, he must have seen something, known somehow what was happening to whatever remained of Haydes. Maybe that was the message he wanted to give to me." Bumpa nodded to himself. "Maybe somehow this all could have been avoided if I hadn't missed meeting with him...I guess we'll never know."
He started talking again, and Rand noticed a new light in his grandfather's eyes. "In two days it'll be the anniversary of Stephen's death and that date is very important. I think everything that's happening now is leading up to that day. Remember when I said Thursten's cousin was so full of hate that he came back to life? Stephen's hate has finally reached such a fevered pitch that things are happening. But I don't think it's just Stephen, it's more than that. It's been a hard summer for farmers, for Kinniwaw. And the drought's been going on for so long and there's so much depression and anger pent up in the community that maybe it woke Stephen. You said when you saw him, Kari, that it looked like he was swallowing, well maybe he is; he's ingesting all the dissatisfaction and anger here and turning it into something else. Thursten told me once that there were times when doorways opened in the world and things beyond the ordinary could step through. His hate is opening doorways, and maybe it pulls things towards it. Maybe this Missouri Butcher didn't just come up here by accident."
Rand and Kari nodded. "What do we do?" Kari asked.
Bumpa shrugged. "I don't know."
"Leave?" Rand suggested.
Bumpa shook his head. "That would leave Kinniwaw unguarded. I don't think the people here know what's going on or they're afraid to believe what their guts are telling them. I think both of you have been targeted for some reason. I think he's felt us out in his own way and he knows who his enemies are. Maybe doorways really do open in times like this, and maybe we can somehow tap into the same power. Stephen is a focal point now, it's taken years for the right events to coincide. We'd better hope it works both ways."
"But how can we tell?" Rand asked. Again he had the feeling as he spoke of someone watching, just behind him.
"I think we should go there, the three of us. Tomorrow. And just look around. How about that? This could all be our imagination."
Kari nodded. "Let's go," she said.
Bumpa looked at Rand. "How about you?"
Rand looked at both of them. "Yes, let's go."
Die!
The window behind them shattered and fell inward over Rand and Kari. Kari screamed. A wind shot through the room and a sound like howling filled their ears. Rand jumped up, glass rolling off his shoulders and out of his hair. Something hit his forehead, something else hit his knee and he fell. Glass cut into his hands, he yelled in pain, tried to stand. The wind swirled around the three of them, particles of glass with it.
Then the wind stopped dead and the room was calm.
They looked at each other. Bumpa's face was pale. He let out his breath as if he had been holding it for ages. "He knows," he whispered. "He knows."
Rand and Kari nodded. Rand looked at his hands. They were covered with a number of tiny cuts, blood was slowly making its way down his palms.
"You O.K.?" Bumpa asked.
Rand nodded. "Yeah, none of the cuts are deep."
They stood there for a few silent moments. "Either of you changed your minds?" Bumpa asked.
Rand shook some of the glass off his shoulder. For some reason he thought of Conn. "No," he said, and Kari echoed him.
On their way home they passed a man standing on the road, but Rand went by and the man just looked up as they passed, his left hand opening and closing like a claw.
9.
Wayne watched with vacant curiosity as Rand's car passed. The bright lights filled his eyes reaching all the way back into the caverns of his mind, illuminating, briefly, the violence and images of the past. Wayne stared like a fox sitting quietly by the side of the road. He wasn't sure if he wanted the car to stop. They were going the wrong way anyway and he would have to ask the driver to turn around and head the other way.
Wayne wasn't sure where he was going, he just walked. But a hand seemed to be guiding him, if his boots strayed too far from the road, it would pull him back in the right direction.
Wayne never thought of Swallower directly. The thing or creature that spoke to him was just a huge voice in a chorus of voices. But it was nice to be directed, he decided. The voice that guided him seemed to know where people were.
And people were always nice to meet.
Soon another car came by, this time going in the right direction. Wayne stood as still as a statue, then, judging the time right, he jumped to the middle of the road. The car swerved past, skidding and twisting like a dark salmon caught in a net, and finally it came to a stop on the edge of the road, its brake lights shining angrily. The red lights dimmed and the door burst open. A man launched himself out of the car and stood up. He was silhouetted against his car, a tall shadow that gestured violently. "What the hell are you doing?" he started to walk towards Wayne, his steps full of purpose and anger.
"What the hell are you doing," Wayne echoed calmly. He walked towards the man.
"I almost hit you, you idiot!"
"Hit you, Idiot." Wayne could see the man's face now, the moonlight lit up one side. There was so much anger there.
Damage Page 16
