Disappearance at Devil's Rock (26 page)

The article goes on to discuss other mountain climbers, sailors, and disaster survivors who reported similar Third Man experiences. Scientists argue such extreme conditions and stresses provoke these hallucinations of another person being present, perhaps as a physiological coping mechanism. The Third Man or felt presence phenomenon is not unique to survivors of trauma. People who suffer from Parkinson's disease and other neurological disorders have symptoms that include the felt presence sensations. The article's author draws a clear line of connection from the trauma of the near-death experience to the intense emotions of extreme grief the bereaved experience after a loss. Felt presence accounts from heartbroken people who claim to have seen or sensed the presence of a recently deceased loved one are as commonplace as the traditional ghost story. The author then goes into more scientific detail, discussing current studies that cite the possible roles of dopamine and other neurochemicals as being the source of the hallucinatory phenomena.

Elizabeth loses the thread and rereads the final paragraphs multiple times before giving up. She says, “Goddamn it, Mom.”

Doubt gnaws at her. Is it possible what she saw was a grief-induced hallucination and her now-soupy brain is simply associating the pic
ture Tommy drew with what she saw, or thinks she saw? In her head, Elizabeth is back in her bedroom on that night one week ago: she throws her sneakers at the chair again and they bounce and tumble away and Tommy is still there, in shadow, yes, but he's there, crouched next to the chair, his legs pulled against his chest, his head titled, his hair over his eyes, and then the face, the terrible face, and then his smell.

Elizabeth does not haunt her support group message board or the Facebook page, and ignores the swelling swamp of post and comment e-mail notifications. She instead searches the stories referenced in the felt presence article, and from there she searches for and reads other first-person accounts. There are all manner of websites devoted to such paranormal phenomena, from the slickly produced (their margins filled with ads for books and DVDs) to the achingly sad blogs that haven't been updated for years, blogs with virtual tumbleweeds and feature walls of text, detailing the raw, stream-of-consciousness ramblings from the confused, broken, and damned. Her Internet search splinters outward, like cracks in the ice of a frozen pond, and she reads about bilocation: a living person projecting (willingly or not) their spirit/double to another place. There's a legend about a French schoolteacher at a European boarding school in the mid-1800s who repeatedly projected her double in full view of her students. Her double would appear at the blackboard, mirroring the teacher's movements before disappearing. Once, while the teacher was working in the garden, her double appeared to sit in a chair in front of the entire student body at assembly.

Kate opens her bedroom door and announces that she's going to bed. Elizabeth jumps up from the computer and shrinks the window as though caught looking at stuff that she shouldn't be looking at. Elizabeth ducks into the hall and quickly says that she's going to bed soon as well. She's always been a terrible liar. They do not wish each
other a goodnight. After Kate closes her door, Elizabeth takes a lap around the living area, shutting off the lights. She considers turning on the security camera but decides not to. She doesn't want it going off every time she flinches or reaches for the computer mouse.

The glowing computer screen is the only light on in the living area. She sits down and reads more about bilocation and doppelgängers. Reports of bilocation often occur under the similarly stressful circumstances described in the felt presences / Third Man article. But in folklore, doppelgängers represent everything from mischievous sprits and demons, portents of imminent disaster, a vision of the near future, or a temporal shift, to a shudder in dimensional time and space. There is no shortage of pseudohistorical apocrypha regarding doppelgängers. The famous poet Goethe claimed to have passed his doppelgänger on a quiet road to a German town, only years later to realize that his double was a vision of his future self traveling the same road but in the other direction. More chilling are the tales of the doppelgänger being the harbinger or omen of death: Percy Bysshe Shelley (husband of Mary Shelley) had visions of his doppelgänger confronting him and pointing out to the Mediterranean sea in the weeks before his own drowning; Queen Elizabeth I of England died shortly after seeing her double lying prostrate in her own bed; English poet John Donne ran into his wife's doppelgänger walking the streets of Paris with a baby cradled in her arms, while back home their child was born dead.

When Elizabeth next looks up, disengaging from the computer, she realizes that two-plus hours have eroded away. Her eyes are tired and stinging from all the on-screen reading in the dark. Janice had obviously sent Elizabeth the link to the felt presence article to provide a rational, scientific explanation for the Tommy sighting in her bedroom. But now Elizabeth's head is full of tales of doppelgängers and shadowy presences and the harbingers of doom.

Elizabeth turns on the small desk lamp, opens the desk drawer,
takes out Tommy's diary, and stares at that terrible picture, the shadowman that has since gone viral on the Internet and news. She can't look at it for too long for fear it will burn a hole through her retinas, and then the image will be seared inside her head and she'll never be able to think of anything else without seeing it. She is dreadfully certain this awful, shadowy image that looks like Tommy—even if he wrote that it wasn't him—is the
something
that happened to her son.

Elizabeth powers the computer down and puts the diary back in the desk drawer. She limps into the kitchen on stiff legs, quietly fills a glass with water, and then goes into the living room to wait . . . for what? Tommy to come back? A shadowman at the door, in the windows, or in the room with her? For Kate to sneak out of her bedroom and drop the missing diary pages?

Maybe she should sit on the couch with a bottle of wine and see how deeply into it she can get. She doesn't really like wine, but there isn't any beer in the house. She imagines adding “get beer” to her mom's text grocery list. Then she wonders if Tommy ever stole any beer from her. Not that she ever kept a lot in the house, usually a mishmash of types and brands, usually more than a couple of bottles or cans but never more than twelve, not that she kept inventory. Was it solely because of Arnold that Tommy started drinking beer? Thirteen years old is early for that, isn't it? Were there kids drinking when she was in middle school? Probably, but she can't remember any names or faces. There were vague groups of kids they called the burnouts; the mysterious and dangerous ones who met up in the woods after school, the ones no one seemed to notice or talk to when inside school. Years from now, to so many of his classmates, Tommy will be a cautionary tale, a legend, an odd bit of folklore, a shadowman.

Standing in the dark next to the couch, Elizabeth whispers, “I'm sorry,” out loud to no one and everyone. She asks, “How did I not
know, how come I couldn't smell it on him when he came home?” And the only answer she has:
I was supposed to know
. If she had known, would confronting him about it have changed anything? Would he have admitted to it and admitted to hanging out with this older guy, Arnold? Would she have grounded him, not allowed him to go out or even go to Josh's house to sleep over? Would her removing some of the dominos in the secret chain that tumbled them all to this hellish now have kept Tommy from disappearing?

She sits heavily on the couch, and the green light on the base of the security camera blinks into life. Did she sit on her phone and accidentally turn it on? Elizabeth spills her water as she reaches for her phone, which isn't in her pocket. She left the phone next to the computer, didn't she?

She struggles to stand up without further soaking herself and shouts “Goddamn it!” at the tipped water glass and the Valdez-sized spill on the couch, and a muffled, metallic doppelgänger of her voice echoes back from somewhere down the end of the hallway. The camera's green record light is still on. Elizabeth turns toward the kitchen and says, “What the hell is going on?” Her voice echoes again, on slight delay.

Kate screams, “Mom!” from her room repeatedly.

“Kate? What is it? Kate?” Elizabeth runs through the kitchen and into the hallway.

Kate's bedroom door flies open, and Kate runs out like she's being chased, like she needs to desperately escape something. She runs straight into Elizabeth, almost knocking her over. She's crying hysterically.

“Honey, what's going on?”

“I don't know! I woke up and I was so scared and it felt like there was someone in the room with me, watching, and I was so scared and I couldn't say anything and I couldn't move and then your voice
started coming out of my phone on the floor but I still couldn't move and I tried calling out to you and Mom, I don't know. I don't know what's going on, I don't—”

“Shh, it's okay. You had a bad dream. You're okay—”

“No, Mom, I was awake. I was—”

“You're—you're all right.” Elizabeth holds Kate tightly and looks all around the dark hallway. She is totally spooked by this. Kate has never been one to have nightmares or night terrors, not like Tommy had when he was a preschooler. His nighttime freak-outs were weekly occurrences. “I'm here, slow down.” She holds Kate until she stops rambling and crying.

Elizabeth: “Are you okay?”

Kate: “No. Yes, but no.”

“Come on.” Elizabeth starts to lead Kate back toward her room.

“Where are you going?”

“To your room—”

“No, I don't want to go. Can I sleep in your room, please, Mom? Please.”

“Yeah, okay, sure, but look, I'm just going to turn on the light and shut off of the camera on your phone.”

“What do you mean?”

“Kate?”

“What?”

“The camera came on just now, when I was sitting out there.”

“I didn't turn that on, I swear, Mom. My phone wasn't even with me in bed. It was on the floor, charging.”

Kate hides behind Elizabeth as she opens the door and turns on the light.

Much of the mess from Elizabeth's tear-down of the room is still there, to her great shame. Elizabeth walks in gingerly, trying not to step on too much. Now that she's in the room, something feels off.
Not right. She can't explain the off-ness. There is something wrong. Even with the light on and the two of them in there, Elizabeth doesn't blame her daughter for not wanting to sleep in there tonight.

Elizabeth edges deeper into the room, and the wrong feeling intensifies. She says, “Ugh, I'll pick up this place tomorrow, I promise. Where's your phone, Kate? On the floor, right? You didn't turn on the camera, Kate? Really? You're telling me—”

Kate: “Mom, I didn't. I swear. Cross my heart. I didn't.”

“My voice came through your phone? The app doesn't turn on by itself.” Elizabeth makes it to the side of the bed. Kate's phone is on the floor and charging. Elizabeth bends to pick it up and she's suddenly afraid of the dark under the bed, and Kate's windows with their closed curtains are inches away from the back of her head, and she can feel that small distance, like the bottoms of the curtains are fingers that want to stretch out and lightly brush the back of her neck, or blow open and expose someone standing there at the window, watching them.

As Elizabeth finally grabs the phone there's a loud, heavy thud from somewhere behind her, from somewhere else inside the house.

Elizabeth bolts upright and twists, trying to turn around, and she almost falls onto the bed. “Jesus. What was that? Kate?”

Kate quickly shuffles out of the doorway and into her room, looking out toward the hallway behind her. She shakes her head. “That wasn't me! That wasn't me! It came from Tommy's room. Oh my God . . .”

“What do you mean?” she asks. But it did sound like the noise came from the room next door, from Tommy's room.

“Something fell. On the floor. Something big. I felt it like vibrating in my toes.”

“Okay. Relax. Come on. We'll check it out,” more to herself than to Kate. They walk into Tommy's room, Kate hiding behind her, and
there's a large, comic art book on the floor in front of the bookshelf, splayed out like a dead body. It lies opened up, facedown, the broken spine pointed at the ceiling.

Kate says, “So . . .”

“No big deal. It just fell out of the bookshelf?”

Kate: “Yeah, because books do that all the time.”

Elizabeth almost laughs at that purely genuine Kate reaction, and more than anything it makes her believe her daughter has been telling the truth tonight. She says, “Yeah, I don't know. Well, Allison and I looked through here today, remember? Must've not have put it back all the way or something. Left it hanging out?” Elizabeth gives a quick look up at the bookshelf and doesn't see any other, what, loose books. Books that are about to jump? She remembers flipping through the art book as they searched Tommy's room. It is well worn, the pages a little loose in the spine. Tommy clearly read and reread this book often. In the margins he'd practiced some of the outlined how-to techniques.

Elizabeth picks it up, carefully closes the book, and realigns the bent dust jacket.

“Mom, what are those?”

There are five loose pages on the floor. They are not pages from the art book. The pages are not white and do not feature garishly colored superheroes. The pages are yellowish, full of handwriting, and all crinkled up like someone balled them up to throw them away but then changed their mind and tried to flattened them back out. They are more of Tommy's diary pages.

Elizabeth flips the art book onto the floor behind her and drops to all fours, hovering herself above the pages.

“Mom? Are they—”