The Sleepwalkers (14 page)

And this one’s still ticking.

“Bean!”

“Bean!”

Caleb hears himself screaming, but doesn’t feel his mouth moving, doesn’t remember making the words.

Floor to ceiling to floor, all around him.

“Bean!”

Ticktockticktockticktocktick.

Who would make a room of all clocks, just clocks?

“Bean!”

Then it came, faint. “Caleb? Jesus, where are you?”

“In the closet! In the attic! Up here!”

Caleb stands very still. His arms are wrapped tightly about himself, as if he were about to freeze to death, and his flashlight beam blazes into the clock, the one that still ticks, the one that somebody must’ve wound.

That’s how Bean finds him.

“Jesus Christ, you okay, man? I thought I’d find you in a bloody pile.”

“Look,” says Caleb, and he lets his flashlight play across the faces of the many clocks.

“What the hell?” says Bean.

“I heard the ticking,” says Caleb.

“What kind of nut-wagon has a room full of fifty clocks?”

“Sixteen,” says Caleb. “There are sixteen of them. And somebody wound this one within the last couple of days.”

They look around in a pregnant silence, then glance at one another with wide eyes, but neither of them speaks.

Caleb waits for Bean to make a joke. He doesn’t. He says: “Let’s get out of here, man,” then whispers: “This is a haunted place.”

They cross the attic bridge, climb down into the closet, trudge to the bottom of the steps, and wordlessly start packing up their stuff.

Finally, Bean starts ranting: “Somebody was here. Somebody wound that shit up. And whoever it was, I don’t want to meet him. I just want to be back home. We can take a road trip up to Big Sur, do some surfing, play some video games. You know, I don’t even care if my parents nag me about what to do with the rest of my life anymore. I don’t care what I do with my life, as long as I’m not here, in this messed-up, crazy place. In fact, I’m glad we came. It’s taught me a very important lesson; namely, no matter how bad anything is, we are some lucky bastards because we don’t have to be
here
. We get to leave. Some people live in this town, and they’re screwed, and I feel bad for them, but we live in a place where, despite the drive-by shootings, child drug use, and rampant bullshit, nobody is crazy enough to put sixteen clocks in one room. I’m just glad—”

“Bean?”

“Huh?”

“What did Christine say about clocks?”

“Ummm . . . ”

“She said something about clocks.”

“Uh . . . I don’t remember.”

Caleb is looking at his friend with fierce eyes. Suddenly, he covers his mouth with his hand.

“Bean,” Caleb says, “we can’t leave. She said
the clocks are ticking
.” “Maybe she snuck out, came over here and wound it,” Beans says, sounding unconvinced.

“Maybe,” Caleb says, “she isn’t crazy at all.”

Eyes open. There’s no sound now, no traffic. Ron looks over at the green-burning numbers on the old alarm clock next to him. They say five-oh-four. He’s never been so awake in his life. He rolls onto his back and looks at the ceiling. There’s nothing to see. With nothing else to look at, he looks back on his life. He does this a lot. He’s gotten good at it, so good that he no longer has to look at it piece by piece. Now he can see it all at once, like a big mosaic. It’s better that way. Like a bed of nails: you lie down on one nail, you might puncture a lung; you lie down on ten thousand nails, no problem. You may never be very comfortable—hell, you’ll never get a good night’s sleep on a bed of nails, but it sure beats the alternative. Praise God.

Ron’s life has been reduced to a movie montage. Sledding with his brother; cut to being slapped in the ear by his drunk mother; cut to the principal telling him “young men who get caught smoking marijuana on school grounds can’t participate in the graduation ceremony”; cut to Nick Wilford appearing out from behind some foliage with a strange, electric look in his eyes and his intestines dangling down to his knees, asking if he can bum a smoke; cut to playing solitaire in the dark at the VA hospital, listening to the guy down the hall who hasn’t quit screaming in three days; cut to hitchhiking through Montana—beautiful. Cut to running his tongue up the dark skin of Camilia’s thigh, tasting her sweat, tasting her desire, the way she moved her hips; pan up, see her nipples poking hard through that thin, worn white tank top; cut to being slapped in the ear by Camilia, drunk; cut to Keisha, Keisha the day she gets her bike, the birthday bike he saved up for three months to buy her. Cut to Keisha sitting on his lap, listening to him read her
One Fish, Two Fish, Red
Fish, Blue Fish
, her big brown eyes really watching him, her arms reaching up to really hug him. Close-up on Keisha. That’s how the montage always ends. Close-up on his little girl.

Tap. The sound chokes off his thought. Tap. A drip. Must be the faucet. Tap. His tired old body doesn’t want to move, but now his mind is running like a hamster on a wheel, and it’ll never stop before sunup. Might as well get up, watch some early-morning TV, catch the weather, maybe. He grunts as he hoists himself up onto one elbow. Reaches over, fumbling, fumbling—where’s the damned switch? Click. Light. He blinks, sits up, rubbing his eyes with the palms of his hands, hears himself sigh deep and thinks what a sad sound it is. Leaning with his elbows on his knees, exhausted but wired, the light’s okay now, not blinding. He sees the map on the floor, half open. Must’ve fallen down last night during the sex earthquake. He gets to his feet slowly—slower every day, now—takes a couple of heavy steps to the table and braces against it with one hand and leans down, about to scoop the map up.

Tap.

On the map in front of him, a drip of water. He looks up. One of the pipes in the ceiling is going. Slow leak, but someone had better get up here before the water damage starts. He knows about water damage—he used to do some construction work. He wasn’t much good at it, but he has enough experience with water damage to know it can be an expensive pain in the ass to take care of, especially if you let it go. He’ll pack up, head down to the office and let them know, then hit the road. Reaches for the map.

Tap.

He stops midreach and leans down, squinting, his sight is still a little feeble in the dim light. The drips are landing on the little black dot of a town. He picks up the map, brings it close to his face to read the tiny letters. They’re hard to make out. He needs to snap out of his denial about needing glasses, but he can still make out the name of the town: Hudsonville.

He’s coughed up enough unanswered prayers to know that while God is great and God is good, he ain’t much of a communicator. He doesn’t seem to deal in signs much anymore. No burning bushes for us. And even if you come across what seems like a sign, chances are it’s just a reflection of the desperation in your own mind, an expression of your own reckless need for meaning—and if you follow this supposed divine advice, you have about a 65 percent chance of wasting your time.
Still,
Ron thinks,
might not hurt to check out Hudsonville
again.
Anything’s worth a shot. Praise God.

The car rattles over train tracks. Ron flicks his cigarette out the window. Hudsonville. He’s passing the downtown now, what there is of it. There’s that diner, there’s a gas station—not much here. Bunch of big, old trees, folks walking along the road looking at him with dark, sharp eyes. Not much here. He remembers where the sheriff ’s station is and turns in. Has to crank the wheel, ’cause the power-steering fluid is low—it’s a pain in the ass with only one gripping hand, but he manages. That’s one thing Ron does well: he manages. Always has. He stops the car in front of the white trailer. Birds are calling. Pine needles and sand. Out of the car, up the steps, and in the door.

The only one in the office is a woman. She’s sitting in the whir of an old electric fan.

“How can I help you?” Her voice is a mechanical drawl. She looks up with her big hair, over the top of a
People
magazine. When she sees Ron she shuts the magazine and tosses it on the counter. “Well, hello,” she says, then squints. “You ain’t from around here, but I seen you before.”

“I guess you probably did,” says Ron. “I wondered if you had anymore information about a missing person, Keisha Bent? She’d be about fourteen. Her momma was black, so her skin is pretty dark. She’s probably tall by now.”

The woman’s popping her gum. She leans up against the counter, looking at Ron hard. She juts out her enormous breasts and her lips bow up into a crimson smile on her saddlebag of a face.

“Yep. I remember you, alright. You was looking for that colored girl, ’bout a year back or something, right?”

Ron nods. “That’s right. She went missing from the beach about thirteen miles away—Rabe Point State Park. It was two years ago, October twenty-seventh, around dusk.”

“Well,” the lady cop says, “she ain’t turned up yet, but tell you what I’ll do. I’ll give you my phone number and maybe you can give me a call and check in with me from time to time, in case she does turn up. How long you in town for?”

“Not long,” says Ron. “Any other children gone missing around here?”

The woman looks surprised, then laughs. “You really ain’t from around here, are you?” She glances over her shoulder, then looks back at Ron, serious now. “There’s a lot of people around here who don’t turn up,” she says.

Ron’s heart flutters. He leans in. “Yeah? How many kidnapping cases do you have open right now?”

“None,” she says. She greets Ron’s confusion with another bout of laughter. “I never said anybody got kidnapped. I said a lot of people just don’t turn up. Maybe they move someplace else to get better jobs. Some of them maybe ain’t happy with their home situations so they hightail it outta here. There’s lots of reasons to leave. Kids run away from their parents all the time.”

Ron says: “My daughter didn’t run away.”

“I didn’t say she did,” says the woman. “My name is Janet. Deputy Janet to you.”

“How many kids, or people, are missing right now?”

“None,” Janet says, “but lots of people—maybe hundreds—might have left.”

“You’re telling me hundreds of people have disappeared in this area, and I haven’t read it in any of the papers, I haven’t seen it in the news, I haven’t heard a word about it from anybody in the two years I’ve been combing this county looking for my little girl?”

“Ron—it’s Ron, right?” she says. “There ain’t no paper in this town. And nobody is going to go to Panama City or someplace and blab to their paper about it because if they do, then maybe they might be the next one to get lost. You get me? People are dumb, you know. They’re superstitious. A lot of them think there’s a witch stealing the kids.”

“And what do you think? Haven’t you done a little investigating, seeing as you’re the law enforcement around here? Haven’t you come up with some kind of evidence, some kind of theory?”

“Sure.” She shrugs. “Sheriff says people move away. Kids run away from their parents. Husbands run off from their wives. There ain’t no laws being broken.”

“My daughter was stolen from me. There’s no law against that?”

“Well, Ron, if you’d like to file a report, we’ll be glad to—”

“I already filed a blessed report!”

“Then when something comes up, we’ll be in touch.” She smiles. “I’ll give you my number, just in case.”

She starts writing on a scrap of paper. Ron is livid. His face feels hot and flushed. The light in the room seems to be growing brighter, then dimmer, to the beat of the blood pulsing through his head. He puts his hand, his good hand, on the counter and presses it flat to steady its shaking. He’s learned to watch all the trappings of his rage as a spectator, to distance himself from his own emotion. Otherwise things get ugly. It’s amazing how well it works. There was a time when he’d have punched a hole in the wall by now.

Deputy Janet presents the slip of paper to him. “You feel free to call me if you need anything,” she says.

Instead of taking the number with his good hand, he reaches up with “the hook,” as he likes to think of it. It splits along its length, following the prompts of his readapted forearm muscles, and clamps down on the little slip of paper.