Waking Nightmares (7 page)

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Authors: Christopher Golden

BOOK: Waking Nightmares
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All through high school, Tommy had spent summers working with his father, Norm Dunne. By night, they prowled the waters off Salem, Beverly, and Hawthorne, cast-netting for squid, and by day they netted as many bunkers—what they called menhaden, an otherwise useless bait fish—as possible. Norm Dunne sold most of the squid to local restaurants, and the rest of it went with the bunkers to Tommy’s uncle Paul’s bait shop. Tommy’s mother had died in a car accident when he was nine years old. His father had been out with a few women in the years since, but never dated anyone seriously, which maybe explained why Norm and Paul still referred to each other as brothers-in-law, though the woman who had been the link between them had been dead going on ten years.
Uncle Paul had encouraged Tommy to go to college. His dad had taken a more neutral stance. If Tommy wanted to go, that was fine by him, but if his son preferred to become a fisherman like his father, Norm made no effort to hide how pleased and proud that would make him. Uncle Paul didn’t want this life for Tommy—a life of hard work for little reward, when some years slim margins could turn into big losses.
My sister wouldn’t have wanted her boy to ever go hungry,
Tommy had once heard Uncle Paul say, in a conversation he was sure he hadn’t been meant to hear. Tommy’s dad had been furious.
Have I ever let my son go hungry?
he had shouted.
There’d been beer involved. There always was.
Tommy had loved the summers he had spent working the nets with his father. Days and nights on the water. Money in his pocket on his days off. And there had been no shortage of girls. Being a fisherman during those summers earned him a great tan, lean muscles, and an aura of maturity that other guys in his high school just couldn’t pull off.
But now that he looked ahead to a lifetime of this work, not just beautiful summers but cold, dismal falls and winters, it gave him pause. His father was forty-three and still in decent shape, but he’d started to have problems with his back and his right shoulder, and Tommy had a hard time picturing himself doing this work without his dad. Would he really want to be out here on his own?
Fuck, no.
So he had pretty much decided this would be it. One year off from school. Next fall, he would go to college. Now he just had to figure out how he was going to tell his father.
Tommy heard a splash and then his dad called his name. He jumped up and ran to the port side, where he’d tied off the net. Norm Dunne bobbed in the water, his unruly thatch of salt-and-pepper hair plastered to his skull. Despite his age, his work had kept him in damn good shape. If not for the scar on the left side of his face, he’d have been a pretty good-looking guy.
“Did you get it unsnagged?” Tommy asked.
His dad grinned. “Not exactly.”
“Then what are you smiling about?”
“You’ll see,” Norm replied.
Tommy stepped back while his father grabbed hold of the rail and hoisted himself up and over, spilling into the boat. He scrambled to his feet and reached for the net.
“Gimme a hand, punk,” he said.
Norm had a dozen affectionate nicknames for his son.
Punk
was only one of them. Some people thought Norm was trying to echo Clint Eastwood, and that was fine with Tommy. He would never admit to anyone that it came from his toddler days, when his mom had called him Punkin. Dead mother or not, sappy shit like that could haunt a guy forever if his friends got wind of it. His father knew it, too, and had never breathed a word.
“What was it, Dad?” Tommy asked, moving next to his father and grabbing the line to help him pull up the net.
His father didn’t answer. Tommy wondered what he’d found down there that would make him so weirdly happy. He thought of Gregg McKeown, a friend of his father’s who had found an old cannon while scuba diving and spent the last three years recovering bits and pieces of a sunken Spanish galleon. Surely they hadn’t found something like that; they were much too close to shore. If there was a shipwreck here, someone would have found it already.
Then again, the net had snagged on something. Tommy had cast it himself. It had gone down just as it was supposed to, ballooning like a parachute as the weights around it dragged the edges down. Cast-netters weren’t supposed to drag the bottom, and that hadn’t been his intention, but a lot of times the weights hit bottom before the net could be drawn taut, cinching it closed around whatever had been caught inside. They’d caught it on something, that was for sure.
Tommy and his father hauled on the line, but the resistance was still there.
“Dad, it’s still caught.”
Norm gave him that lopsided grin, the scar tugging at the left side of his face. “It’s not caught. We’ve just got something heavy in the net.”
Tommy knew that look. His father had always enjoyed secrets and surprises, and he had one now.
Okay, Dad,
he thought.
It’s your net.
They pulled, muscles straining. Tommy felt the sun baking the back of his neck. The water seemed so quiet, a silence broken only by their grunting efforts and the radio that played low in the small cabin. They swayed, keeping their balance as the boat rocked on the gentle waves.
“Jesus, Dad,” Tommy said through gritted teeth. “Is it a friggin’ anchor?”
They heaved, dragging it up, and then the net was there. Whatever weighted it down was still in the water. The Dunne men thrust their hands into the mesh of the net to get a better grip and pulled even harder. It came out of the water like a cork from a bottle, the splash of its emergence like a sigh. They staggered back, both men swearing, and Tommy nearly fell. He felt certain his father had been wrong. It had to have been caught on something, because it had weighed hundreds of pounds a second ago, and now the dark shape inside the net was a hell of a lot lighter than their usual catch.
It clanked to the deck, and Tommy frowned, peering at it. His father peeled the net away, and at last he could see what it was they had dredged up from the bottom.
An iron box, maybe eighteen inches long and nine high. Once upon a time it had had leather strapping, but now only the tiniest vestiges of that remained. The lid of the chest had a sort of trapezoidal shape, and two heavy locks kept it sealed up tight. The construction was strong but crude enough that the box had to be hundreds of years old. The iron should have been pitted and corroded by salt, but it seemed strangely smooth.
Tommy glanced over to see his father watching him expectantly.
“Come on, Dad,” he said. “Tell me you don’t think this is some kind of pirate treasure. That shit only happens in
The Goonies
.”
“It doesn’t need to be treasure to be worth a fortune to us, bud,” Norm replied. “You’ve gotta ask yourself how it got here.”
They stood back and stared at the chest, the net spread out around it like discarded wrapping paper on Christmas morning.
Is that what this is?
Tommy thought.
A gift?
“You’re thinking of Gregg McKeown,” he said.
Norm nodded, his smile gone. His thoughts had turned serious as he regarded the trunk. “If we can establish that this thing came from a wreck, we could make a claim and . . .”
Tommy looked at him. “Dad?”
“Don’t want to get ahead of myself,” Norm said, heading for the cabin. He opened a hatch and tugged out his toolbox. “Let’s see what’s in this thing before we get too excited. Could be nothing.”
“Are you sure that’s a good idea?” Tommy asked as his father knelt by the iron chest and retrieved a hammer and a big screwdriver from the toolbox. “I mean, what if the box itself is valuable, y’know? Or, like, they can learn something about what ship it came from because of the locks or whatever?”
Norm faltered with the flat of the screwdriver already propped against the hasp of the lock. He looked at his son.
“Sometimes I forget how smart you are, punk,” he said, rubbing the back of his right hand—the hand that gripped the hammer—across the stubble on his chin. “You could be right.”
A few seconds ticked by. Tommy almost felt guilty for taking his fun away.
“Screw it, Dad,” he said. “You know you want to see what’s inside.”
Norm laughed, nodding. “Damn straight.”
He set the screwdriver against the hasp again, raised the hammer, and struck the back of the screwdriver’s handle. On the third blow, the hasp of the lock broke off. The second lock took only one hit to snap off.
Norm set aside his tools and reached for the box, raising the lid and looking inside.
He froze. The way he crouched, Tommy couldn’t see his face.
“Dad? Come on. Don’t keep me in suspense.”
But his father didn’t move. The boat rocked and Norm managed to maintain his balance, but otherwise he seemed almost to have turned to stone.
“Dad?” Tommy ventured again.
He moved up next to his father, but the second he saw Norm’s face he stopped short. His features were contorted with terrible emotion, as though he might be about to scream in fear or collapse in tears.
“What is it, Dad?” Tommy asked, dropping to his knees.
He put a hand on his father’s shoulder and shook him. “Dad!”
When Tommy shook him again, his father let go of the box’s lid and it slammed down. Norm collapsed onto the deck and began to shake, arms and legs flailing, eyes wide and staring at something Tommy could not see.
Then he started to scream.
Fear flowed into Tommy, the terror of loss. “No, Dad, stop,” he said, grabbing hold of his father’s shoulders and pinning him to the deck, trying to trap his arms. He wanted to join in the screaming, helplessness seizing him in its grasp. Ever since his mother’s death he had lived in private terror of losing his father as well.
“Dad!” he shouted. “Look at me!”
Tommy slapped his father’s face, then immediately felt ashamed and afraid it had been the wrong thing to do. He lay down on the fishing net beside his father and gathered the man into his arms, wrapped himself around those jittering arms and legs and trapped them, refusing to allow them to move.
“Stop it! Look at me! Norman Dunne, look at me, God damn it!”
Tommy screamed his father’s name, letting all of his fear out in one burst. When he stopped, the wind carrying his voice away across the waves, his father had gone still. Norm’s eyes were still wide, but they had focus again, staring at Tommy.
“Do you see the shadows, Tom?”
“What? What shadows?”
Tommy glanced around. The only shadows were in the small cabin. Otherwise they were in full sunlight. But his father’s eyes kept darting back and forth, anxiously peering at things in his peripheral vision that Tommy couldn’t see.
“The corners are dark,” Norm Dunne said, like a little boy talking about monsters under his bed. “The shadows are cracks, and they keep trying to slip through.”
That was when Tommy knew that he couldn’t help his father. Either Norm would come to his senses on his own, or he would need someone who could figure out what had happened to him—some kind of aneurysm or something. Had to be, the way he was babbling.
“Okay, Dad,” Tommy said. “Just sit tight, okay? I’m going to bring us home.”
He stood, trying to fight the emotions welling up inside him as he watched his father turning and flinching away from things Tommy couldn’t see.
“I’ll get us home,” he said, pulling out his cell phone as he headed for the cabin.
As he passed the iron box, he stopped and stared down at it. Aneurysm, he thought. Something like that. It couldn’t have anything to do with the stupid box. The timing had to be coincidence. But still . . .
Tommy crouched down, just as his father had, and opened the lid.
He stared into the chest. “You’ve gotta be shitting me.”
Inside the iron box were a small pile of old scrolls. How they had remained dry under the water, how the old chest had remained sealed airtight for who knew how long, he had no idea. But it was just paper, and there was nothing frightening about a bunch of paper. Nothing that would send his father over the edge.
He let the lid slam shut again.
Just paper.
CHAPTER 3
 
SUMMERFIELDS
Orchard occupied acres of rolling hillside in a small valley just north of Brattleboro, Vermont. The huge red barn on the property had been transformed into a marketplace, where shoppers could buy the fresh fruits and vegetables grown at the farm, along with a huge variety of other products, including both dessert pies and chicken pot pies, homemade apple cider, handcrafted goods, and the ever-popular cider donuts, cranked out by the dozens every day, and the hundreds on weekends.
During the summer they were busy with corn and had festivals during which employees grilled corn outdoors for visitors. Children romped in the play area and climbed all over the enormous wooden pirate ship that stood, apropos of nothing, in one of the front fields. But once school started up again the orchard was always quiet on weekdays, visited mostly by older folks and young mothers with preschool children. When apple-picking season got under way—and well toward Halloween, with the pumpkin harvest in full swing—the weekends were wonderful, happy, smiling chaos.

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