Eerie (24 page)

Talbert stood.

Dropped his cigarette on the rotting wood of the porch.

Stamped it out.

Vincent and Grazer rose to their feet, the chairs rocking in the sudden wake of their absence. Their suits mud-stained, torn in places, sodden. Dried blood down the front of Talbert’s pinstripe shirt.

Grant said, “Where is he?”

“Inside.”

Grant nodded and Talbert moved across the porch, came down the steps with his cohorts in tow.

He stopped in front of Grant.

Put a hand on both shoulders, a smile slowly spreading across his face.

“We’re glad you made it,” Talbert said. “It’s almost over.”

Pats on Grant’s back as the others passed.

Talbert released his shoulders and continued on.

Grant turned and watched them climb into the van.

Vincent in the driver seat.

Grazer rode shotgun and Talbert disappeared through the sliding door.

The engine cranked and the van circled through the clearing and headed back toward the road.

A hundred feet in, it vanished into the darkness between the hemlocks, nothing but a pair of brake lights dwindling into the gloom.

Paige got out of the CR-V and walked over.

“What’d he say?”

“That it’s almost over.”

Grant heard the distant revving of the van’s engine as it pulled out onto the highway. Within ten seconds, it was out of earshot. The only note left was the wind moving through the top of the forest and the hemlock branches groaning against its force.

Grant and Paige climbed the steps to the porch.

There were beer bottles and cans strewn across the floorboards. Empty packs of cigarettes. Rounds of Skoal dipping tobacco. Old and shriveled condoms. Spent twelve gauge shells. A Penthouse magazine, waterlogged and faded.

Their old vacation home had become a Friday night hangout for teenagers from the surrounding towns.

The front door stood ajar and sagging, attached to the frame by its lowest hinge.

Grant reached for it with his free hand.

It swung inward, arcing toward the floor until it came to a scraping halt after two feet.

He glanced at Paige. “Hang back a second.”

Grant turned sideways with the blanket and stepped through the narrow opening.

The air inside was redolent of pine and smoke and mildew.

There was a small fire in the hearth, illuminating the room with a pulsating light that made the rafters cast a ribcage of shadows on the vaulted ceiling.

Graffiti covered the walls.

Dates and genitalia.

Names preceded by
fuck
or
love.

In the back corner, rotten railing separated the rest of the room from what had been the kitchenette. It was now unrecognizable, buried under the debris of a failed roof, cabinets and counters long-since disintegrated under seasons of rain and snow. Nothing to suggest its prior status beyond a doorless refrigerator peppered with buckshot.

Grant walked over to the fireplace, the glass-littered floor crunching under his boots.

Two generations’ worth of faded Bud Light cans lined the railroad tie that served as a mantle. It was the only place in the cabin that seemed to command some level of order and respect, if nothing more than a nod by the collective consciousness of those who came here to the passage of time.

He stared at the bare wall above the mantle where a painting of his mother’s—an acrylic of the pond out back—used to hang three decades ago. He could still see the nail hole in the cracking drywall that the picture frame’s wire had rested upon.

He reached up and touched it, then turned and leveled his gaze on the two doors in the wall across the room.

The first led into the bedroom he and Paige had shared as children, but Grant made his way through the detritus of a thousand Friday nights toward the second.

Their parent’s room.

He pushed it open, the hinges screeching.

Could no longer feel the heat of the fire, and its glow didn’t come close to lighting these walls whose wood-paneling had buckled and peeled like the diseased bark of a dying birch tree.

He stepped inside.

All the furniture was gone save for a single mattress pushed into the corner.

His father lay on it, writhing in a straightjacket.

Grant crossed the room and lowered himself slowly to his knees. When he set the blanket on the filthy mattress, his father became perfectly still, lying on his stomach, his back heaving as he panted for breath.

There were four straps going across the back of the straightjacket. Grant reached over and unbuckled them.

Then he turned his father onto his back.

His old man’s eyes were huge. They stared at the ceiling, blinking several times a second.

Grant pulled his arms out of the straightjacket sleeves and arranged them at his sides.

He was coming out of himself, out of that deep well. Felt strange to be in proximity to his father, unrestrained and unmedicated. More so to see him lying still, not thrashing around.

Grant unwrapped the blanket, the heat becoming more evident with each layer.

As he peeled back the last fold, he could feel it lapping at his face like a hot breeze.

Its eyes seemed to catch light that wasn’t even in the room. They had changed—now infinitely-faceted, and with the wet sheen of a river-polished stone.

His father’s respirations slowed.

Grant lifted the creature, set it on his old man’s chest like a newborn.

As it began to sink into him, he turned away and walked out of the room.

Paige was by the fire, holding her hands to the heat.

The sound of the door shutting pulled her attention to Grant.

He moved across the room and stood beside her.

“Is Dad in there?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

“Did they hurt him?”

“No.”

“And he’s in there … with
it
?”

He nodded.

“Why?”

“I have no idea.”

“Just doing what you’re told, huh?” She didn’t say it maliciously.

“Something like that.”

“God, it feels so weird to be here.”

Grant went to the only piece of furniture in the room—a sofa covered in shredded upholstery.

The springs groaned and the cushion released a mushroom cloud of dust as he sat.

He swatted it away.

Old chimes clanged on the back porch.

The walls of the cabin strained against a blast of wind.

Being indoors somehow made the cold feel colder.

Paige looked around the cabin.

“Haven’t thought about this place in ages,” she said. “It’s like something from someone else’s life. I do love what they’ve done with the place.”

Grant glanced at the ceiling.

The names
Mike + Tara
stared down at him in faded, billowy letters.

“I always thought the ceiling was so much higher,” Grant said. “I think I could touch the rafters now if I jumped.”

For a long time, neither of them spoke. Grant tried to hear any noises coming from the room, but the only sound in the cabin was the brittle crackling of the fire. He couldn’t shake the feeling that he was slowly waking up, the last several hours steadily descending into a subconscious fog like the memory of a dream, or a nightmare. The taste of it fading. Fragments gone missing or out of sequence. The flat-out strangeness of this moment, and all that had come before, beginning to register.

At first, he thought it was the work of the wind—something blown loose and knocking against the cabin. But as it continued, he identified the noise as footsteps on weakened floorboards.

The door to what had been their parents’ room creaked open.

Paige had already turned away from the fire.

She drew in a sharp breath.

James Moreton stood barefoot in the doorway wearing the same light blue pajama bottoms and button-down shirt he had been drugged and put to bed in by the hospital staff. It looked as though he’d attempted to smooth down the chaos of his hair, but most of it was still frazzled, sticking out to one side in wild tangles of white. A boney shoulder peaked through where the shirt slipped down.

Standing under his own steam, Jim Moreton looked impossibly frail.

A lifetime in the acute ward had aged him well beyond his fifty-nine years.

Grant stood up.

Paige said, “Daddy?”

Jim was looking right at them. Even from across the room, Grant could see the bright clarity in his father’s eyes.

And their focus—

His father hadn’t looked him in the eye with anything approaching recognition since he was a child.

Jim smiled, said, “My children.” He looked at Grant. “You did great, kiddo. Come on back now.”

It was like being pulled from deep water. Grant’s ear popped, and he was suddenly keenly aware that he was standing in the old family cabin with his sister nearby and his father upright and alert in the doorway. His recollection of Paige’s room, the car ride, unwrapping the creature—it all retained its vivid detail, but held no immediacy. As if the last three hours were something he’d seen on a TV show.

Jim took a wobbly step forward but then clutched the doorframe.

Grant rushed over and grabbed his father under his arms, kept him upright. He could feel the tremor in his old man’s legs—atrophied muscles already maxed. He reeked of the hospital.

Jim said, “Been a little while since I stood on these feet.”

Two days of strange happenings could not compete with the shock of hearing his father speak. Not groans or sighs or the ravings of a man whose mind was gone, but the sound of his actual voice powered by lucid thought. It contained the soft, raspy element of an instrument that hadn’t seen use in decades.

“Son, would you help me over to the sofa?”

“Yes, sir.”

Grant let his old man lean against him for support. He was light as paper. They took slow and shuffling steps together, Grant doing his best to guide him around the broken glass.

When they reached the sofa, Grant eased his father back onto the center cushion and took a seat beside him.

“Hi, princess.” Jim was smiling up at Paige. He patted the cushion beside him. “Come here. I want to be near you.”

She walked over and sat with him, wrapped her arms around his neck.

“Don’t cry,” he whispered as she buried her face into his shoulder. “You have absolutely no reason to cry.”

Jim looked down at his hands. Turned them over. They were long and gnarled, the joints swollen, nails trimmed to nothing.

“How old am I?” he asked.

Grant answered, “Fifty-nine.”

Jim laughed. “So this is what old age looks like. God, I could use a smoke.”

For a moment, the cabin clung to the stiffest silence.

Nothing but Paige’s muffled sobs.

Even the wind had died away.

“Dad,” Grant finally said, “I’ve been visiting you every two weeks for the last twenty years. They keep you drugged and restrained. The few times they haven’t you’ve injured others and yourself. They said your brain suffered so much trauma in the accident that you barely retained cognitive function. Said you’d never recover.”

“I’ve been gone,” Jim said.

“I know.”

“No.” His father’s lips curled into a small smile that Grant hadn’t seen in thirty-one years. “You don’t.”

Jim raised his arms and put them around his children, pulled them both in close.

He said, “You cannot imagine what it feels like to touch you again. To speak to you and hear your voice. To see the color of your eyes. I’ve seen so much, but nothing can touch this.”

“What do you mean you’ve seen so much?” Grant said. “You’ve been confined to a psychiatric hospital since the accident.”

Jim shook his head.

Again with that sly little smile.

“I’ve been everywhere, son.”

Paige lifted her head off Jim’s shoulder.

“What are you talking about, Daddy?”

“How much do you kids remember about the night of the accident?”

Paige said, “I was five, Grant was seven. He probably remembers more than I do. For me, it’s just a few images. Light coming through the windshield. The guardrail. And then after … you not moving.”

“I remember a lot of it,” Grant said. “Most clearly talking to Paige when the car was upside down and she was hurt and scared.”

“I’m so sorry I wasn’t there to help you,” Jim said. “Not only for that night, but for every moment of your lives leading up to this one.”

“It’s okay,” Grant said. “You were hurt. There was nothing you could do.”

“I wasn’t hurt that night.”

“Of course you were. I can rattle off ten symptoms and behavioral manifestations associated with your traumatic brain injury.”

“What you visited in the hospital wasn’t me. It was just my hardware.”

“What are you talking about?” Paige asked.

Jim sighed.

“That night, we were on our way here. It was late. I was tired. Lights blinded me—I thought it was a semi. I over-steered, took us through the guardrail. We were in the air forever. You guys weren’t screaming and I remember thinking how strange that was. I guess you didn’t understand what was happening. We hit the side of the mountain and rolled and rolled and rolled.

“When we finally stopped, I knew I was bad-off. I could feel my ribs in places they shouldn’t be. Breathing was excruciating. I couldn’t move. Neither of you were making noise in the backseat and the rearview was busted so I didn’t even know if you guys were alive. I called out to you, but you didn’t answer. I just hung there from the seat and cried. I don’t know for how long.

“At some point, I realized I had missed the end of the game, and somehow I convinced myself that if the Phillies had won, you kids were alive. I can’t explain it. It just made perfect sense in the moment. I’m sure the blood loss had gone to my head. So I started praying, ‘Dear God, let the Phillies win.’ Not ‘Dear God, save us’ or ‘Dear God, please don’t let my kids be hurt.’ The Phillies were our ticket out of there.

“The pain grew unbearable—the physical, the psychological, worrying about the two of you. I remember seeing a light coming through the trees. At first, I thought it was our rescue party, but the light kept getting brighter. It wasn’t a solitary beam or even a collection of them, but all-encompassing. It intensified until everything—the car, the trees—was bathed in a blinding white radiance. My pain vanished, and everything I am—my consciousness, the unbreakable essence you would think of as a soul—was taken.”