Salvage (11 page)

"But
immersion
is necessary for
salvation
," the minister blustered, a look of caution on his ruddy face. "We must be cleansed of our sins and the sins of our fathers before we are permitted passage into His Heavenly Kingdom!"

"I know," Owen said. "I know. But I just don't think it's right for me. At this time."

The people looked to their minister. Brother Woodrow remained silent, favoring Owen with a grim smile. "Very well," the minister said flatly. "You know where to find us, should you change your mind." Then he added, somewhat ominously, "Or should it be changed for you."

Owen remembered the name. "Blessed Trinity Mission."
She's with us now, Owen.

Brother Woodrow nodded reflectively. "Go in peace, brother. We have a young, uh…
soul
here to save."

The mother smiled and gently bounced her weeping child, the crowd parting like the Red Sea. Owen trudged through the frigid water, feeling the stares of Woodrow's ministry as he stepped through them, backing away from their circle. He stopped before the heavy pine bough and looked back. Gently shushing the baby in his arms, Brother Woodrow nodded brusquely to Owen, bidding him a silent farewell before he began his magical incantation over the innocent child.

Get ‘em while they're young, padre
, Owen thought, his fear lessening. He pushed the bough aside and stepped out in front of the Hordyke property. The branch swung back behind him, hiding the Blessed Trinity—
Father, Son, Holy Ghost
, Owen thought reflexively—from view.

The parishioners raised their voices in song again:
I'm on my way, praise God, I'm on my way
… The sweetly sung words followed him to the house, where he peeled off his dripping clothes down to his boxers, reflecting on the strange event he'd just been part of, and tossed his shirt and pants over the porch railing. Inside, he went upstairs, peeled off his underwear into the sink, and toweled off in the bathroom.

By the time he was dry and in fresh clothes, he was starving. The clock showed just past two, but it had to be later than that. His digital watch said 3:20. The kitchen clock must have run out of batteries. He told himself to find some later, get it started again, but right now, feeding himself was imperative. His stomach growled as if he hadn't eaten in days. He took a can of chicken noodle soup down from the pantry and opened it with a rusted can opener.
Soup for the soul
, he mused. It smelled okay, not spoiled. The stove lit on the first click with a whiff of sulfur.

Isn't sulfur the same as brimstone?

Owen peeked out the window as he placed the pot on the burner and stirred. By now, the Blessed Trinity Missionaries were likely all dried off and holy-rolling it back to their respective homes, comforted in the belief that they'd spared a young soul from eternal damnation, though likely irked that they hadn't been able to convert the stranger next door.

Tomorrow, he'd go back down to the water, but not to pray. The diving gear was calling to him; despite what he'd told Brother Woodrow, he was eager to go under, out in the main lake. But already he was exhausted. Tonight, all he could hope for was some mindless cable TV, or a decent book to read among the ones lining the wall.

Anything but the Bible.

1

OWEN DREAMED OF HIS SISTER.

She wore the flowing white nightgown, its hem soaked by the dark waters of Chapel Lake. Owen watched her from where he sat in a wooden rowboat. Between them, a black silhouette split the surface of the water: the cross of the church beneath the lake. Shallow waves rippled around it, catching glints of moonlight. Standing before the steeple was the man who walked on water, the Shepherd, holding out his arms to them in welcome.

Lori reached out toward Owen, mouthing her soundless plea. Without an oar, his desperate efforts to reach her were no match for the current steadily drawing him away. Worse, the boat was taking on water from a hole in the bottom, which was rising alarmingly fast. Owen searched for something to bail the water, and found nothing but a rusty old can with no bottom.

The boat was going down. He jumped out into the water, splashing against the current toward his sister, the steeple between them, the cross looming above him, eclipsing the sun. He clutched at its slimy wooden shingles. Waves struck his face. He spat, blinked water from his eyes, and began climbing to the cross, hugging it—

Lori was gone, and so was her ghost.

As the realization struck him, a bony hand burst from the water and clutched his ankle, its gray, chicken-skin flesh, cold and slimy; and as more hands broke the surface to drag Owen down to their watery grave, the words from the religious tract came back to him:
The dead are in deep anguish,
those beneath the waters and all that live in them…

He awoke to his own voice, shouting: "
Abaddon!
"

Rattled, he tried to get his bearings as his heartbeat began to slow. Dark. Cool. The bed stood lengthwise between an open doorway and a small, dim window, not the large, bright windows of his condo, and had a wardrobe at the foot of it (filled with unfashionable women's attire from an earlier era, he recalled). For a moment, he thought he must be at his mother's, but the smell of old wood and musty bed coverings, along with a slight fishy odor, brought everything back. He'd trudged upstairs to the single bed at Fisherman's Wharf after a short evening of mindless TV with fuzzy reception, and had fallen asleep almost immediately.

I saw Lori!
he marveled, sitting up in the dark. He wanted to go back to sleep right away, to return to what he'd been dreaming before the things below the water had grabbed him, to see her again. She might have been dead in the real world, but in his dreams she was still very much alive.
Trying to tell me something—but what?

He got up, stepping in a wet spot on the carpet, further evidence of cracks in the roof, and trudged down the hall to the small bathroom to urinate. When he stepped out again, the flush gurgling down the pipes, a light came on downstairs.

Fear gave way to reason. "Probably on a timer," he told himself. In the dim light, he glanced at the clock in the bedroom. Just past two in the morning.

Who the hell would set the lights to come on so late?

He answered himself right away:
Someone without a proper alarm clock, that's who. Someone who wanted to get up in the dead of the night to go diving. Someone like Lori.

The light downstairs dimmed, then brightened again.

"Lori did this," he said. Downstairs, the light dimmed and brightened once more.

It's your imagination. A trick of light, like the shadow in the shower. The light's not dimming—or maybe it is, but not because of… It's faulty wiring. Happens all the time. Don't mistake poor craftsmanship with paranormal activity.

"There's no such thing as ghosts," he said aloud, though he didn't sound convinced, even to himself.

The light dimmed and brightened.

"Screw it," he said, and peered over the railing to the living room. The light by the chair at the bookshelf was on, barely enough to brighten the darkest corners of the room. Under the table, behind the sofa, anyone could be hiding.

"Hello?" he called out. Another flicker of the reading lamp seemed to answer him.

The darkened windows made him uneasy as he crossed to the lamp.
You can look in
, he thought,
but you can't see out
. He reached for the light switch. The bulb dimmed with a buzz. Brightened again.

That happened. Not my imagination. Gotta screw it in tighter
.

Taking a tissue from the box on the end table to protect his fingers from the hot bulb, he reached up under the lampshade—

POW!

The bulb shattered, sharp little bits striking his fingers, plunging the house into darkness. Owen jerked his hand free, cursing under his breath. It hadn't cut him, but it had scared the living bejesus out of him, and now he couldn't see a thing.

What are the odds of that happening, huh, Mr. Home Inspector? You didn't even touch the bulb and it
bursts
like that?

"I don't know," he said, the wavering in his voice fueling his terror in the dark. He stood perfectly still, waiting for his heart to slow. Floorboards creaked and groaned, probably the house settling. Something tinkled to his right, at the bookshelf—not broken glass, but a small metallic sound. At least he could see through the windows now, black branches swaying in the cool night breeze. Cold comfort.

Can't stand here forever.

Finally his eyes adjusted to the dark enough to move. The main light switches were near the front door, so he headed there, careful of his footing, aware there was a low table around here some—
there it is
. He felt his way around it, bending to touch the tabletop.
Past the table, you're home-free all the way to the door
.

He bumped into something tall and fuzzy, and nearly stumbled back in fright of a shadow the size and shape of a man. He threw up his hands to defend himself from the intruder, and then squinted into the gloom.

Just the coat rack, idiot.

Chuckling nervously, he reached past it, slipped his fingers along the rough log wall until they grasped the light switch. He flicked on the overhead lights.

In his bare feet, he remained mindful of the glass, turned off the lamp and unplugged it, worried it might short circuit and shut out all the power in the house. He crossed to the kitchen, got the broom and dustpan, and swept up as many shards of the light bulb as he could find. He dumped them in the trash before returning to the lamp.

"Piece of crap," he said, looking down at the pale yellow-brown lampshade, decorated with dark brown beavers using logs as toothpicks. "Probably been here since they built the place."

Again, the delicate metallic tinkling came from the bookshelf. Curious, he moved toward it. Dozens of books lined the shelves, mostly mysteries—though likely not the same Mystery that Brother Woodrow spoke of—with titles by Agatha Christie, James M. Cain, Dashiell Hammett, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who'd allegedly believed in ghosts. There were a few others of various genres, plays by Ibsen and George Bernard Shaw, the collected works of Dickens and Shakespeare, a few novels which had spawned movies and movie franchises. Owen selected a book at random,
The Dice Man
by Luke Reinhart, and was about to retrieve it when the small metallic chiming drew his attention again.

Tucked in among the books was a pendant on a thin chain. He recognized it right away:
Lori's necklace
. The unicorn hung loose against the clasp, but when he pulled the rest of it free, the crucifix was nowhere to be found. The chain had broken, snapped at three-quarters its length, and was still clasped. The crucifix must have fallen off, lost somewhere in the house. He pulled down a book, with a shiny black cover, that held the chain in place, newer than the rest of the dusty volumes and almost twice as tall as the paperbacks. Then he pushed the others aside to feel around to the back of the dusty shelf for the trinket, but he came up empty-handed.

Maybe she kept it with her
, he thought.
Ward off evil.

It didn't work though, did it? Why did you put this here? Was it for me to find? Did you make it rattle so I'd find it?

"Are you here with me?" he asked the eerily quiet house, and peered around himself, suddenly certain he'd find Lori standing in the second floor hall, dressed in the damp white gown from his dream. But the house was empty. In the kitchen, the fridge ticked away in place of the stopped clock, while an animal chewed on the underside of the house.

Owen slipped the necklace and pendant into his pocket, then happened to glance down at the table where he'd left the book he'd pulled down to hunt for Lori's crucifix.

It was a notebook. His breath caught in his throat when he recognized the handwriting on the first page. His knees buckled.

"
Lori
," he said, dropping down into the recliner. Too excited now to go back to bed, despite his exhaustion, Owen began to read:

June 8, 2014

First things first, I feel I should apologize for how I left things with you and Mom. I was under a lot of stress, and if you read on, you'll understand why—

His heartbeat quickened.
She wrote this for me
. She'd put it where he might find it, and he'd found the treasure without their usual game of clues.
I am on a dusty shelf
, he mused, and read on.

—I have so many things to tell you, and hopefully this won't have all been for nothing. It's my first day in the house, but it took a fair bit of recon to get me here. Fisherman's Wharf, they call it. The realtor, with the incredibly silly name of Skip Wickman, told me why they called it that, but I'm sure he's told you, so I won't repeat it here. Needless to say, there's a lot of local colour, and that's just the tip of the proverbial iceberg, I'm sure. I'm looking forward to talking with some of the people who were here before the flood, see what they think of it all. I've got a feeling I should be cautious, though; there's likely still some sour grapes about the whole deal. I mean, wouldn't you be pissed if the government took your home or your farm because it happened to be in a deep enough valley along a river some consultant said would make a suitable source for a hydroelectric dam?

I know talk like this might bug you, Owns, considering you might've had to expropriate land for a few of your own projects. I'm thinking about the wind farm, in particular. I know there's been quite a bit of protest against it, but you have to remember, in cases like that,
the end justifies the means
. And I guess I should remember that here. They may have lost their land, but because of it, hundreds of thousands of people don't have to rely on fossil fuels to power their smart fridges and cell phones. That's pretty amazing, dontcha think?!