The Sleepwalkers (31 page)
His truth is marching on . . . Billy?
The sound of something moving in the water is more distinct than before, and it’s more than just the “blip” of a frog or a fish. The sound comes closer, and Christine stiffens with fear.
“Don’t stop singing.” He comes around the trunk of a cypress. His chest rises and falls, fast. Even in the dark, she can see his face is streaked with sweat, dirt, and tears.
“Please, don’t stop,” Caleb says again, almost pleading.
“I thought you were dead,” she says.
“I thought you were crazy.”
She smiles sadly. “I might be. I honestly don’t know.”
“It wasn’t me they shot,” says Caleb. “It was my friend.”
“The dead will be glad to have him,” she says. “They like humor.”
“What do you mean?”
“There’s no time. Let’s go.”
Already, she can hear the distant scratch of the sheriff ’s radio, and the chorus of whispers saying:
Hand in hand, Billy and Christine run along the riverbank. When the rocks hurt her bare feet, he carries her piggyback, and when the sun finally cracks open the darkness and the whispering shadows give way to the birdsong of morning, they are still among the living and are grateful.
As the heat of the day rises, painting the forest with rich greens and browns, the witch (for so even she thinks of herself) hums a song. She doesn’t know the words, or can’t remember them. She doesn’t remember much, nowadays.
Except Anna, dear Anna.
Made a piece of clay in kindergarten, Anna did, put her tiny fingers in the mud and by the magic of science the teachers made the mud hard, made it immortal, and now they sit on the counter, Anna’s hands. Or the empty places where her little hands once were. Hateful, empty places.
That makes her think “The Thought” again, and The Thought makes her bite her lip hard and close her eyes and think of Christine, hateful Christine, the bad, bad girl who put the seed of The Thought into her head.
Even though she’s a powerful witch, no spell will banish the thoughts. She knows; she’s tried.
Now she’s holding a hoe, standing in a patch of sandy dirt and wearing only her socks, a long skirt, and a baseball cap; no shirt. She doesn’t wear a shirt much these days. There are no eyes to see her except those belonging to The Forest, and he likes her skin just as it is. She lifts the hoe and hacks at the unyielding earth. She must make an herb garden. She bought the seeds a year—no, no, two years ago—but so far has been unable to plant them, because every time she tries, the shakes start up so bad she can’t grip the hoe. Because of Christine, hateful bitch-child.
The sun feels good on her breasts and the handle of the hoe feels good in her hand, hard and sure. But as she strikes the earth again, tearing up a big clod of dirt this time, The Thought streaks across her mind again, big as a billboard, horrible and certain.
She cries out and throws the hoe to the ground. It lands with an unsatisfying “pit” sound. (Shouldn’t she be able to make it explode? Shouldn’t she be able to make the earth tremble with her rage? She is a grand witch, after all.) She walks away from the hoe with her hands over her ears, shaking her head back and forth.
The song is in her head still, she realizes suddenly. It’s an old song, she knows that much, and the melody is sure and strong in her head, but the words elude her, all but:
“glory of the coming . . . ”
The phrase thrills her, spreads goose bumps all over her body.
The coming. But whose? Who can bring Anna back? Who can banish these thoughts,
The Thought,
from her mind?
She thinks she knows who.
She heads up to the trailer and reaches for the screen door. When The Thought comes, there’s only one answer, and that’s the bottle.
It isn’t a final answer, but it is a potent magic. It has the power to derail time, even do away with it altogether sometimes. And in time is where The Thought lives.
Anna’s in the dark.
The witch, all powerful, she screams, slams the screen door shut again. Curse The Thought to hell!
Anna is dead.
She tries to think of something else. She should check the cellar.
Never go outside without checking the cellar door.
She lets the screen door go, heads back down the steps, and walks around the side of the trailer, not looking at the hoe, especially not looking at the shadow of the trailer making a sharp, black “V” at her feet as she turns the corner.
Anna is empty with dark, and I will be too, when it takes me.
The witch walks faster.
The cellar door is locked and still. Safe. It hasn’t moved in a long time. Years. Good.
She spins back toward the screen door, toward home, toward safety, and in doing so almost loses her balance. She has to put one hand on the rotting side of the trailer to steady herself. She hates to step into the trailer’s shadow—it makes her shiver to do so—but otherwise she’d have pitched forward onto the grass.
Once the vertigo subsides she walks on. It seems darker out now, but the sunlight is more biting too. The sun is a pale, burning, seeing eye—and she hurries inside, out of its unnerving gaze.
She looks around first when she comes in—to make sure it’s really her living room, really her trailer.
Reality is a reflection on a pond, she’s known that for a while, ever since she was young and pretty and the tits that now hang almost to her waist like empty plastic grocery sacks were ripe and plump and made men do wild things. Reality is a reflection on a pond, and you never know what might be swimming underneath.
Today, though, her living room is her living room. She looks up at the dream catchers hanging from the ceiling, and is comforted to know not a single one is out of place.
She sits down heavily, not noticing the waft of dust that rises up from the cushion of her chair as she whops down into its embrace.
And she picks up the bottle, so smooth and hard, so nice-feeling with the little white tatters of the torn-off label as soft as goose down against the palm of her hand. So real. She unscrews the cap slowly, teasing herself.
She glances at the window. Did a shadow move behind the blinds? Did it? Did it?
Now, an instant later, she’s forgotten about the blinds, about the shadow, about everything.
She takes the magic of the bottle inside her, feeling the burn, and the burn is good, because the opposite of the burn is The Thought, is the
First, the spinning in her head steadies, then it feels like she’s doing great wide backflips—except she’s still sitting in her favorite orange and brown plaid armchair, watching the bottle drain
There’s a wind in the trees, and all the birds are flying away. Caleb and Christine walk very close together along the sandy bank of the stream, in and out of light beams filtering through the boughs of the forest. They’ve walked out of the night and into the morning. Sometimes they would think they heard a sound behind them, a footstep or the rattle of a bush, and they’d sneak into the woods, away from the water, and watch. But their pursuers never appeared, neither the cops nor the sleepwalkers.
Christine has wanted desperately to talk, to gush all her feelings and fears and the experiences of her imprisonment to Billy, but every time she takes a breath to speak, fear seizes her jaw and thrusts it shut again. Whether it’s being heard by her pursuers or being alone with Billy that scares her more, she doesn’t know. But for the last hour or so, since the sun has evaporated much of the previous night’s horror and sorrow, she has been marshalling her will to break the silence. Finally, she does.
“Thank you for coming. Even though I don’t remember sending you that letter, I did think of you. I dreamed of you rescuing me. Even though it was completely far-fetched, part of me knew you would.”
“Really? How, after you hadn’t seen me in so long?”
She smiles. “I don’t know, I just knew. Besides—when we would play—you, me, and Anna—you were always the hero. I guess I figured you always would be. You were always a pretty lucky knight, having two damsels in distress.”
Caleb musters a small, sad laugh. “Yeah.”
“Are you sorry you came?”
“No,” he says. “No. When I read your letter, I knew I had to come. I didn’t know what was going on, but I knew I had to do something . . . I’m just sorry Bean came.”
“Don’t be sorry,” she says.
From the look he shoots her, she’s afraid she’s pissed him off big-time. But when she takes his hand, he doesn’t resist.
“How can you say that?” he says. “It’s my fault he’s dead.”
“He’s with Anna now,” she says, “making her laugh. Soon, we’ll be able to hear him too on the radio.”
“How is that possible?”
“The clocks, I think.”
“But how does it work?”
She shrugs, as if to say “it doesn’t matter.”
“It just does,” she says.
“And you listened to the clocks too?”
“Yes.”
“When? Why?”
“The director made me listen to them at the Dream Center. But I could hear them—the voices—before that. I always could, but only really faintly. Since the clocks and the surgery, I hear them everywhere. But I hear them most clearly on the radio, especially 535 AM”
“Wait, you mean you can hear them right now?”
“Yes, but . . . ” she hesitates.
“What do they say?”
“It’s hard to hear. They all talk at once.”
“How many are there?”
She spreads her hands, looking up at the emerald treetops.
“Many,” she whispers.
“And what are they saying right now?”
“Nothing, just . . . ”
“What?”
“One is saying ‘time to reap the field.’ They’re happy because their work is almost done. And the end is near. And they’re happy because . . . ”
“Because of what?”
She looks at him hard, then just shakes her head. “It’s hard to hear,” she mumbles.
“What are they talking about?”
“Who knows?” she says. “Something’s been going on here for a long time. Anna was one of the first to disappear, I think, but there’ve been a lot more. Some folks even called a meeting at town hall when it started. Mom and I were there, and she spoke. She was a lot more ‘together’ back then.”
“What happened?”
She looks down at her feet, then at the swirling water of the river, and sighs to her core.
“Some wanted to fight, but nobody knew who the enemy was. The kids just disappeared. Other people wanted to call in the authorities.
They made the mistake of expecting the mayor and the sheriff to take care of that. Others, just . . . ”
“What?”
“Said nothing.” She smiles sadly.
“So what happened?”
“The mayor didn’t go for any outside help for a long time. When he did, it was too late.”
“What do you mean, too late?”
“The people who he went to for help betrayed him, as far as we could guess. Then he disappeared. He’s in the dark now. The rest of those who still had the will to fight formed a militia. Some of them had seen who took their children, and they didn’t think they were human—not really, anyway—but they were willing to stand and fight all the same. The militia would patrol, even had a phone line for emergencies. But they couldn’t hold guns all the time. They had to sleep and eat, and one by one they disappeared. The few folks left who had a mind to fight changed their tune fast. They shut their mouths and locked their doors at night, and there were no more town meetings.”
“What about the sheriff?”
“He played everyone along for quite a while, but now everyone— or the few of us left, anyway—know he’s part of it, whatever it is. He never lifted a finger to find one missing child.”