The Ferryman (25 page)

“I hope you feel better,” she said.

His expression of relief that he could depart alone stung her. She hoped he would regret it.

From the moment he walked out of the Harlequin, David had tried desperately to think of something other than the dress Jill had been wearing at dinner.

Jill?
he thought now as he got into his car.
Stop kidding yourself, Dave.

During the meal, he had the bright idea that in the morning he might check out her story about attending Suffolk University in Boston. An old college friend worked in admissions there. David also had friends at the Registry of Motor Vehicles and the state police. It would be a relatively simple thing to find out more about her, to find out if she was what she claimed to be.

Then, as he went through his mini-interrogation, she had glanced up at him with an almost petulant expression on her face.Though he had known the moment he walked through the door and saw her in that dress—the dress so similar to the one she had been wearing the first time they made love, his junior year at St. Matt's—it was that look that shook him of his illusions. Up to that point, he had tried to deny the truth to himself. The dress had shocked him, chilled him, but it could have been coincidence, could even have been him remembering wrong.

But that look, that knowing smile.

Her name was not Jill.

David slipped the key into the ignition and the rental car gave a tame little growl as the engine purred to life.There was very little traffic as he pulled away from the curb, but he drove slowly, just in case. Every couple of blocks he glanced in the rearview mirror and looked over his shoulders to check his blind spots.

His breathing seemed too loud to him. A chill came over him that raised goose bumps on his flesh, but he could not shake it. His grip was tight on the steering wheel and he sat forward a bit, as though he were navigating through a blizzard.

But the night was clear.

The only storm was the one in his heart and soul.

Though he had been drunk that night, all those years ago, certain things lingered with harsh clarity in his mind. The flash of streetlights across the windshield. Maggie telling him he was too drunk to drive, that he should give her the keys.The way her sweater stretched across the top of her breasts. How much he wanted to get her away from that party, somewhere he might get that sweater off. The copper taste in his mouth that he always associated with both beer and blood.

Past and present seemed to converge upon him now, the road ahead now two roads, the car two cars, and he himself two Davids: a young, drunken boy and a man, haunted and afraid.

“Jesus,” he whispered, low and harsh. While it was indeed a curse, it was also, in some way, a prayer.

The headlights of cars going the opposite direction passed like a lighthouse beam across his windshield, and the illusion was complete. It was not enough that he should be confronted with this specter, whatever she was, but the night around him now seemed almost transformed into the ghost of that fateful moment back in high school. Though he knew that this phantom, at least, was the product only of his mind, it chilled him nevertheless.

David never liked to think about that night. It was something he had lived most of his life trying to forget.

Laughing, bleary-eyed, drunk, and horny, he had been driving too fast. Maggie had asked him to slow down, but not angrily. They were in love. She was nervous, but along for the ride. Lynyrd Skynyrd had come on the radio, his favorite band back then. The song was “Sweet Home Alabama.” Right after the first guitar riff in the song, Skynyrd's front man said, “Turn it up.”

“Fuckin'-A right,” David had muttered.

He had leaned over to fiddle with the volume control, trying to comply.

There was a curve in the road.

When Maggie screamed, he looked up to see a telephone pole looming up in front of him. David had jerked the wheel, afraid but numb from alcohol. The front bumper missed the pole. For a split second he had thought they would be all right. But he had cut the wheel too far, and the car slewed sideways, slammed into the pole.

His forearm had slipped into the opening of the steering wheel. Upon impact, he was thrown to one side and his arm had broken with a grinding snap. He tore something in his shoulder. The combined pain was enough to burn off some of his inebriation. The car was not moving. The engine had died, and it ticked several times.

“Sweet Home Alabama” still played on the radio.

His teeth gritted against the pain in his broken arm, it had finally occurred to him to glance at Maggie, to see if she was all right.

At first he had thought she was unconscious. The telephone pole had buckled her door and splintered her window. Her head lay against the glass.Then, in the light from the streetlamp above, he had noticed the blood that had seeped into the million tiny cracks in the webbed glass. It crept and seeped along ridges of glass shards that barely hung intact.

The music had kept playing on the radio.

“Jesus,” David whispered again.

With a jerk, he clicked on his turn signal and pulled over to the side of the road. A car that had been following too close behind him beeped as it went around him. He reached out and punched the button to turn the radio off with a kind of horror. A sickening feeling roiled in his stomach as he rolled down the window and laid his head on the steering wheel.

The sweet spring air blew in, and the weird sense of displacement that had enveloped him began to dissipate. His breathing returned to normal.

He understood nothing.

There was freedom in that.

Jill did not exist. Somehow it was Maggie, a bit older, but nowhere near the fifteen years that had passed. Questions churned in his head like the nausea in his gut.
What is she? Why is she here now? What does she want with Annette?

They were questions he could not answer. In the morning, first thing, he would call Father Charles and ask if his research had turned anything up. If that led nowhere, he realized that he would have to confront this creature, this ghost, this thing that now haunted him.

David doubted he would be able to sleep that night.

H
e was wrong about sleeping.

Upon arriving at home, David had slumped fully clothed onto the couch, channel-surfed for twenty minutes, and then fallen fast asleep in front of a documentary about old Hollywood. A short time later, he woke just long enough to reach for the remote and shut off the TV, but made no effort to relocate.

When his eyes flickered open again, the clock on the DVD player read 12:17. Though he was cramped on the sofa, and had the urge to pee, neither issue was urgent enough to move him just yet. His gaze flicked from side to side. His thoughts were muddled by sleep, a kind of curtain of warm, stupefying static that lay over his mind, and yet it occurred to him, just for a moment, to wonder what had woken him.

Then, as he had ignored the demands of his body, he shrugged the thought away and resettled himself on the sofa. His eyes closed once more, and he drifted into sleep.

A stair creaked.

David's eyes opened again. The clock read 12:18.

Quiet, heart thumping in his chest, he sat up and listened to the darkness. Every nerve ending seemed to be attuned to changes in the air around him, an alteration of the atmosphere in this house, where he had lived off and on for his entire life. It was a noisy old house, true enough. Pipes rattled and walls creaked in a heavy wind. Changes in season made the wood pop loudly as it expanded or contracted with the temperature.

But David knew all of the noises in his house.

The stairs did not creak unless someone trod upon them.

He breathed through his mouth and his tongue and lips became dry. He dared not even blink as he glanced around the darkened room again, still listening. His chest ached, so hard was his heart pounding.

Nothing.

Adrenaline began to subside and he relaxed a bit, the pressure in his bladder suddenly more insistent.

Then he heard it again.

For just a second, David pressed his eyes shut with his fingers, attempting to calm his mind and heart. With a long breath, as quietly as he was able, he stood and looked around the room for a weapon of some kind.

When he was eleven, a burglar had come to the window and startled his mother into a scream. He had been sleeping at the time and her cry of alarm had woken both him and his sister, Amy. But this was something else.This was no face at the window.

Another creak, this one farther away, and a rustle of clothing.

Two of them,
he thought.
Fuck.

One man, without a gun, he thought he might do all right. But two? With greater desperation he searched for something, anything, to fight with, and his eyes settled on a small bookshelf near the windows. On top of the antique piece of furniture sat a half dozen dusty leather-bound volumes bookended by a pair of heavy granite gargoyles.

Careful not to make a sound, David hurried across the room and hefted one of the gargoyles in his right hand. It was no Louisville Slugger, but it was better than nothing.

“Don't fight,”
a voice whispered.

He stiffened.

It had not come from the hall, but from there in the room with him, almost right beside him. David glanced over his right shoulder and a tiny gasp escaped his lips as he saw the ghost of Ralph Weiss up close for the first time.The old man's eyes were wide with alarm, his face etched with sadness.Through his ephemeral form, David could see the window and the street outside. The spirit shimmered and drifted, and for some odd reason he was reminded of a jellyfish, buffeted by the water around it.

“Don't fight, Mr. Bairstow,”
the ghost repeated, and now its voice sounded as though it were inside David's head.
“Just run.You are not prepared to face Charon's creations.”

David swallowed hard, took one last look at the ghost, then headed for the hallway.This was no ordinary burglar, then.

He had known that from the moment he had opened his eyes.

Just inside the TV room, he leaned against the door frame and peeked out.A low, almost inaudible creak came from the corridor.The intruders had stopped just outside his bedroom.

If I hadn't fallen asleep on the couch ...
he thought.

Then he pushed it away. No time for “if.”

A single light fixture burned out in the hall. David pulled back a second, took a breath, and then peeked again.They stood in the corridor just across from the TV room, stood just outside his bedroom door. In the half dark, and from behind, he could make out only silhouettes. A teenager with dark hair, short but with clenched fists. He bounced on his toes like a boxer about to enter the ring.

For a second, the kid glanced at his companion and that half-moon glimpse of his face was enough to confirm David's instinct.

For real. He was not sleeping now; there was no rainstorm, no car accident, nothing to confuse him.

The most frightening thing was that he was not surprised. If he could have dinner sitting across from the girlfriend whose death he had caused in high school, why not a late-night visit from a teenage drug dealer who, as a teacher, he had reached out to and failed to save?

The gargoyle felt heavy in his hand. How could he fight this boy, this thing? Whatever it was, it wore the face of this kid he had wanted so badly to rescue. Then he remembered the accident, his fear as the car had slid and then rolled, the river so close he held his breath.

His fingers tightened on the stone bookend.

But what of the other? The much older man with white hair and a thick beard. He was taller than Themeli, more broad-shouldered, a powerful figure despite the age revealed by the color of his hair.

Move,
he whispered to himself. In another second they would enter his bedroom and see that he was not there.Then they would begin to search the house. He would have the element of surprise for a few more seconds; that was all.

Run,
the ghost had said.
Don't fight.
But in order to run away, he first had to get past them. Whatever they were, they were solid enough to hurt him, kill him.

David patted his pocket gently to make sure his keys were still there. Had he gone to bed, he would be lying defenseless and naked in the other room just then. He did not even want to think about it.

Jaw tight, heart racing, he shot out of the door and into the corridor. The older man was nearest to him. David shot out his left hand, grabbed a fistful of white hair, and slammed the intruder's face against the wall, hard.

Themeli began to turn.

Even in the dim light, there was a spark of malevolence in his eyes that drove an icy spike of fear into David's brain. He almost faltered, but then instinct took over.They would kill him; he was sure of that.

“Get the fuck out of my house!” he screamed, and his voice sounded cracked and hysterical to his own ears.

He brought the gargoyle down hard. Themeli attempted to parry the blow, but he was too late, too slow. The stone bookend crashed across the bridge of his nose and bone gave way. With a scream of pain, the dead kid fell back into the bedroom.

David clutched the gargoyle in his hand as though it were a crucifix and ran for the stairs.

A deep, bass voice rumbled behind him. “This is not
your
house, boy.”

Four steps down, David stopped, nearly toppling over as he whipped his head around. The voice was familiar. It had always filled him with fear and dread, made him feel small and useless.