The Year of Disappearances

by Susan Hubbard

Page 25

  “I’m scared,” I whispered, and I heard the surprise in my voice. Fear tingled and spread through my blood with each heartbeat.

  “We could call for help,” Jacey said.

  “Wake everyone up?” I wasn’t that scared. “Jacey, they’d make fun of us all over campus. We’d never live it down. ”

  Then the thing outside stopped moving. It began making sounds, softly at first, then louder. I can’t describe what they sounded like—imagine a puppy yelping, then pitching its voice higher, and finally so high that it threatened to shatter your eardrum.

  Jacey made a strange sound too, a low gurgle in her throat.

  Fear wasn’t fun anymore. She grabbed my shoulder, and I held her hand. I don’t know how long we stayed that way, wrapped in our sleeping bags, clutching each other, listening to the keening that came out of the dark. Sometimes I thought I heard words in the howling. Once I thought I heard it speak my name.

  I heard Jacey thinking, And tomorrow they’ll find our dead bodies in the tent. I wondered what she’d think if she knew she was holding the hand of a vampire.

  We didn’t sleep again that night. The thing outside eventually went away, but we knew it could come back anytime it chose.

  Once daylight was strong, I unzipped the tent flap and saw only grass and trees and sky. I chided myself for being a coward. Why hadn’t I simply gone outside to see what made the noise?

  The scariest things are the ones that visit us in darkness, the ones we never see. And the fear that kept us paralyzed in the tent that night left a funny residue, a bitter taste in my throat, a reminder that, after all, in some ways I was vulnerable as any mortal.

  Chapter Twelve

  Humans see things differently than animals do. Humans are much better at detecting unmoving objects. Animals’ nervous systems have evolved to detect movement, since motion may indicate the approach of a predator or prey. But a frog can’t even see a stationary object because of neural adaptation; its visual neurons don’t respond to unmoving things, in order to save energy.

  Theoretically, humans do better at seeing stationary objects because their eyes are always moving, counteracting neural adaptation. But sometimes they fail to see objects in their field of vision because their attention is directed elsewhere. Skilled magicians know how to induce and manipulate states of inattentional blindness. That’s why tricks work.

  Not much research has been devoted to examining vampires’ vision, but based on the little I’ve read on the Internet and on my own observations, it tends to be more acute than humans’. A vampire’s retina has more rod and cone cells than a human’s, making it more responsive to light and color. Yet even with that enhanced vision, the vampire eye may be susceptible to inattentional blindness. Like humans, and like frogs and dragonflies, we sometimes fail to see what is right in front of us.

  Jacey and I avoided each other for the rest of our time in the swamp. Each of us reminded the other of the sour experience of fear that began as fun and progressed to something malignant.

  Bernadette—who said she’d slept like a baby—did the paddling that morning. I slumped in the rear of the canoe, half-asleep, ignoring the alligators slumped along the banks, half-asleep.

  Professor Hoffman, wide awake, gave us an impromptu lecture that drifted back to me in partial sentences. He was talking about alligators’ vision—how their eyes have layers of reflecting tissue behind the retinas that act like mirrors. “We call the tissue tapetum lucidum,” he said. “Anybody know what that means?”

  It means “bright carpet,” but I felt too sleepy to volunteer. Hoffman said the tissue acts like a mirror to concentrate available light, helping the gators to hunt in the dark. And it’s also responsible for the way alligators’ eyes look at night if you shine a flashlight on them—they glow red, like burning coals.

  Bernadette said, “Creepy. ”

  The whole trip had been a little too creepy for me. And I wasn’t looking forward to spending the night on a wooden platform, surrounded by who knew what. Vampires need sleep even more than humans do, to keep our immune systems healthy.

  Hoffman was talking about something called succession—the natural process of change that occurs in a habitat. If the peat in the swamp built up, the swamp would become a shrub, and later a hardwood, habitat. “What keeps the swamp a swamp is the natural occurrence of wildfires,” he said. “As fires burn away peat, open lakes are left. Without the fires, this place would be a forest. ”

  One moment, I was half-asleep, half listening to the lecture, feeling mildly annoyed at the prospect of what I thought lay ahead. The next, we were all fully awake, thanks to Jacey’s screaming.

  She saw it first: close to the shore, amid the golden club plants, something dark was floating.

  Jacey said, “What? What?” She screamed again, and then someone else screamed.

  I sat up, but the other canoes blocked my sight. But as we drifted, I had an open view of the shape in the water—dark clothes billowing out and a head of dark hair. The shape looked terribly out of place. It looked wrong.

  The professors took out their cell phones. Neither had a signal. Then they pulled out maps, trying to identify our location and find the best route to a place where the phones would work.

  “Jacey, you okay?” Professor Riley said.

  She’d hunched forward, panting. Later she told me she was trying not to vomit.

  Hoffman told the other girl in Jacey’s canoe to do the rowing. “The rest of you—everybody paddle. ”

  We turned the canoes around and Hoffman led us back toward the landing where we’d launched them. The pace of our paddling was twice as fast as it had been on the trip out.

  From time to time I glanced over at Jacey to see if she was okay, but all I saw was the back of her jacket. She still bent forward, head inclined so that she couldn’t see anything beyond the canoe’s interior.

  Bernadette kept looking at Jacey, too, and I heard her say something indistinct. “What did you say?” I said.

  She turned her head sideways. “Jacey looks like the Six of Swords. ”

  I remembered the image of that tarot card: a cloaked woman leaning forward in a punt, a ferryman behind her, using a long pole to propel them to shore, and six swords before her, holding her in place. Bernadette had said the card signified escape.

  We felt exhausted by the time we reached the landing. Professor Hoffman called 911, and Professor Riley arranged for the van to pick us up. We’d had enough wilderness to last us a long time.

  The other students were uncharacteristically quiet. No one wanted to talk about what we’d seen until we knew what we’d actually seen, yet no one could think of anything else. Once the van came and we were headed back to campus, Riley insisted on stopping at a fast food place, but no one ate much.

  The campus and our dormitory building looked and smelled reassuringly familiar. Bernadette and I carried our trash bags of supplies and sleeping bags into the room, and I dropped mine in order to turn the light on. But I couldn’t find my lamp.

  “Turn on the overhead,” I told Bernadette.

  When she switched on the bare bulb, the room’s details jumped out at us—our unmade beds, Autumn’s sleeping bag on the floor, and across and around it, the remains of my lithophane lamp. It must have fallen hard, because fine shards of glass and porcelain glittered in a wide arc across the floor. Autumn wasn’t there.

  I felt too shocked and tired to say what I was thinking: Why did Autumn have to break my lamp?

  “Let’s clean it up later,” I said.

  Bernadette looked from the broken glass to me. “But where will Autumn sleep?”

  “We’ll leave her a note,” I said. “We can crash in Jacey’s room, and Autumn can have the sofa in the lounge. ” I didn’t care where she slept. I wanted my lamp back.

  Bernadette picked up her trash bag again, and I followed her down the hall to Jacey’s room.
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  Bernadette knocked. When Jacey opened the door—her face white, eyes red—Bernadette said, “You’ve got company. ”

  When it was time to go to dinner, we stopped back at the room. Autumn still wasn’t there.

  “Where do you suppose your friend is?” Bernadette asked.

  I thought of Autumn and her tendency to get into trouble in the past. “She’s an independent kind of girl,” I said. I hoped she hadn’t broken anything else.

  Very early the next morning, my cell phone rang. Dashay’s voice sounded odd, lacking emotion and inflection. She said, “I’m calling to tell you to expect some visitors. ”

  The way she spoke made me think someone else might be listening to our call, so I made my voice neutral, too. “Who’s coming?”

  “Your mother,” she said. “And Cecil. Agent Burton. ”

  “May I talk to Mãe?”

  “She’s not here,” Dashay said. “She’s in Georgia, visiting family. ”

  The only family my mother had was a sister in Savannah, and she never visited her.

  “Is everything okay?” I asked.

  “She’ll explain when she gets there. She’s already on her way. ”

  “How are you?” I asked, feeling as if I were in a play.

  “I am all right. ” Her voice bordered on singsong. “I took a trip to Atlanta last week, to look up an old friend. ”

  She must mean Bennett, I thought. “How is he?”

  “He and his fiancée are very well. ”

  Dashay’s artificial calm began to worry me. Soon after that, we said good-bye.

  I went back to our room and stepped around the glass shards to get my towels and shampoo. After a shower and a change of clothes, I realized how hungry I was. Bernadette was still asleep, so I went to the lounge to see if Autumn wanted breakfast. But the old couch in the lounge was vacant.

  I went to breakfast alone.

  Back in the room again, I was sweeping up the remains of my lamp when Mãe came in. I dropped the broom to hug her. When we pulled apart, the sight of her face alarmed me—she looked drained, as if she hadn’t slept in days.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  That’s when Agent Burton walked in. He apologized for disturbing us, but his voice didn’t sound sorry.

  At his suggestion we went to the library, to a closed-off nook called a carrel. Burton took out his tape recorder and coughed a few times to test it. He looked more somber than I’d ever seen him.

  Then he told me that the thing in the swamp was a body, and the body was Autumn’s.

  Later—after a week of being interviewed by Burton and the Georgia State Police, of being given a series of polygraph tests, of walking around in a state of shock—I listened to my mother apologize. She said she’d wanted to call, warn me about what was coming, but she and Dashay decided it was better for the police to witness my first reactions to the news.

  By the end of that week, Burton felt fairly certain that I hadn’t caused Autumn’s death (she’d been strangled, he said, but they weren’t sure where it had happened), but he was troubled by what he considered the “unbelievable coincidence” of three girls who knew me disappearing and two (at least) ending up dead. (To a lesser degree, he was troubled by the polygraph’s measurement of my abnormally low skin temperature, which Mãe persuaded him was a side effect of treatment for “a rare form of lupus—the same kind that killed her father”).