by C. K. Walker
By all accounts Bradley was a happy, healthy, well-adjusted 29 year old man. He was a biology professor at a local community college living with his girlfriend, Megan, and their five year old son. Megan had still been asleep when two cops knocked on her door a few minutes before 9am.
"What is your name?"
"Megan Owens...is something wrong?"
"Do you know a person named Bradley Alligan?"
"Yes."
"Would you like to sit down?"
The officers explained that the body of a man had been seen falling from Cold Spring Canyon Arch Bridge just after sunrise that morning. The witness called police. Bradley's car was found parked on the bridge with a running video camera positioned on his dash board recording his final minutes.
"Oh my God... And did you, did you watch the recording?"
"Yes, ma'am, we did."
"And did he...j- jump?"
"Yes, Ma'am."
This was the detail that Megan would suffer from most in her life. After the shock had passed and the grief had built and peaked and finally cooled to a tolerable ache, after years had separated Megan from that traumatic morning...she never let it go. This one detail was sour to her, it was absurd and inconsistent with Stephen's character. Why record your own death?
Was it because he wanted her to know, without a doubt, that he'd done it to himself? Did he do it because he knew no one would believe he was capable of suicide and he wanted to avoid exhaustive investigations for his family's sake? Had he been trying to actually record something else and had fallen over the railing and into the gorge?
After the ME had officially ruled cause of death to be suicide Megan asked for Bradley's body back. His family intervened and took custody of it, opting to cremate their son and spread his ashes over their rural farm. Megan was in no legal position to stop them.
So when the cops offered Megan the tape she took it, though they stressed to her that the tape should be destroyed.
She didn't destroy the tape, but she didn't watch it either. Instead, she obsessed over it.
The little 8mm drove her slowly insane. Megan spent the last decade of her life trying to understand Bradley's state of mind on the day of his death. She studied his notes, interviewed his friends and colleagues, she made graphs and spreadsheets and suffered horrific nightmares while she tried to make sense of that day.
But she still never watched the tape.
And then, one day, she went missing. I was sixteen at the time and had been staying at my friend's house over the weekend. I thought it was weird that she wasn't there when I came home but I was happy about it. My mom was quiet and moody and we really didn't seem to have anything in common, though we got along alright. She told me I was more like my father. I don't think she liked that about me.
So I was happy to be given an extra reprieve from her negativity. When she still wasn't back when I got home from school on Tuesday I started to worry. I spent most of that night debating whether or not I should call the police.
I didn't, and early the next morning they showed up at my door anyway.
"What is your name?"
"Robby Alligan."
"Is your mother Megan Owens?"
"She-she's missing."
"Is that your mom?"
"Yes."
"When did you last see her?"
"Friday morning. Well, last Friday morning. It was before school. But I've been gone since then, I mean I got back on Sunday but her car was gone so-"
"It's alright, will you take a seat?"
They told me she was found in the gorge by some hikers. They said her car was parked on the shoulder of the road next the Arch Bridge. They asked if she had been depressed lately and also if I knew anyone who'd wanted to hurt her. I said no.
One cop went outside to make a phone call and the other asked me to go upstairs and pack some things, asked if I had family nearby. Only my dad's family, who lived on a farm, who I'd never met.
I packed a bag and then I went into my mom's room to grab the tape that had meant so much to her. I couldn't leave it behind.
I wasn't surprised to find it in our old VCR. Somehow I knew, if she was dead - she'd watched the tape.
The TV screen was blue with the bold, white letters of PLAY flashing in the upper right-hand corner.
I'd always respected my mom's wishes in regard to the tape. Though I was insanely curious about my dad I never watched it, never snuck into her room to so much as touch it, though I'd always known where she hid it. But now I wanted to know what she'd seen. I had to know. Whatever was on that tape had killed both of my parents and I was feeling no emotion about their deaths. I was just...numb. Was I in shock? Or was there something wrong with me? I knew the tape held my answers.
I rewound the cassette back 3 minutes. Then I hit PLAY.
The screen blinked a second and then I was looking at an empty bridge and a concrete railing to the right. There was nothing on the other side of the barrier but dimly lit sky. It was also drizzling lightly, which is something I hadn't known about that day. The POV was through the windshield of a car, like a modern day dashcam.
There were no people in the shot. I hadn't gone back far enough.
I hit STOP and then REWIND. I let it go back another twenty minutes and then I hit PLAY again.
This time, the camera was moving, or rather, the car was. The only sounds were the hum of the highway, the pitter-patter of rain on the windshield and my father's ragged breathing. After a few minutes I could hear another sound as well - quiet crying.
I could see the bridge approaching from a distance and by the time he pulled up to it, his breathing was even and the crying had stopped. My father parked the car on the side of the bridge and rolled all the windows down. Then he got out and I heard the sound of the backdoor opening and a rustling behind the camera.
When he re-emerged at the front of the car, he was dragging something behind him. He stopped to address the camera and spun the thing around to face it. It was a little boy.
A cold shudder wracked through my body as I recognized my five year old self. I'd been there that day? I'd seen my father die? I remembered nothing of it. I hugged my arms to my body and turned the volume up as my father began to talk to the camera.
"What did you do, Megan? We were a family, we loved each other. We were happy."
As he spoke I watched my little face on the screen. Instead of looking scared or confused or uncomfortable, I was smiling. It was the smile of a child who'd gotten away with stealing a cookie from the cupboard, or quietly staying up late playing video games after bedtime.
"I've tried it dozens of times. I've used controls, lab equipment from the school, I've taken meticulous notes, and I've destroyed it all because the result is always the same. He always comes back."
Then, he lifted the child up into his arms and five year old me stared into the camera.
"It's not natural, it's not right." I could hear the emotion creeping into his voice. I couldn't tell for certain in the rain but I was sure he was crying.
"He always comes back." His voice cracked and the child on screen picked up his head and started laughing at him. My father's face registered fear and then he took two determined steps to the concrete railing and then threw me over the side of the bridge. The laughing didn't stop once I was thrown over, just faded down into the abyss with me as I fell.
I stumbled away from the TV and fell onto my mom's bed. What the fuck?! How did I survive a fall from a 400 foot tall bridge? I took quick, unnecessary, stock of my familiar body to see if I could find any scars, phantom pains, or permanent damage.
When I finally looked back at the screen my father was staring out of it, looking directly at me as if he'd been waiting for my attention.
"What did you do Megan?" His voice was so quiet I barely heard it.
"What did you DO?" He yelled this last sentence and then made them his final words by walking over the side of the bridge, throwing his leg over the railing and then sort of just rolling o
ff the ledge.
The rest of the tape was what I'd seen earlier: the sky lightening and the rain letting up. And then the tape just ended. I never watched it again.
I spent the next year living on my grandparent's farm, doing every drug I could get a hold of in their small town. Toward the end of my time there I sobered up just long enough to track down the cops who'd responded to my dad's suicide.
Of the three who had watched the tape, only one remained on the force. I bombarded his office with calls that he never responded to. I was debating giving up when a letter arrived in the mail for me. It was from the officer, a detective now. He asked me to stop calling his office and to please never contact him again. He'd wanted nothing to do with me then and even less so now. It was a polite letter and he did answer my question.
Your father's body was the only one found under the bridge. When we went to inform your mother that her husband was dead and her son missing, we found you sleeping peacefully in bed. How can we charge a dead man with the murder of a boy whose body is still breathing? We walked away from this case.
Although I'm too afraid to continue my father's experiments, I have had some confirmation that I would get the same results. During one of my more intense binges I did enough heroine to kill ten Keith Richards. But I woke up fine. And then last year I was in a car accident that reduced my truck to two square meters of twisted metal. The cops found me dazed, sitting next to the wreckage - my clothes coated in my own blood and torn to shreds. But I didn't have a scratch on me.
Sometimes I sober up just long enough for the clouds to part and clarity to descend. I remember more of my childhood in these moments, and I remember further back than I should. Lost memories resurface like whales from the depths of the ocean, breaking the surface so briefly and then sinking back into the abyss.
I remember how much my parents loved each other. I remember how much they loved me. I can see my mother smiling; I'd never seen her smile before. I remember the sickness too, sometimes. Laying in my warm bed at home for months and then laying in the cold one at the hospital. But then another memory lapse in and I'm outside playing, just your average healthy three year old. And then I remember my father on the tape, confused and scared and desperate.
"What did you do, Megan?"
BORRASCA: Part 1
It’s a long story, but one you’ve never heard before. This story is about a place that dwells on the mountain; a place where bad things happen. And you may think you know about the bad things, you may decide you have it all figured out but you don’t. Because the truth is worse than monsters or men.
At first I was upset when they told me we were moving to some little town out in the Ozarks. I remember staring at my dinner plate while I listened to my sister throw a temper tantrum unbefitting of a 14 year old honors student. She cried, she pleaded, and then she cursed at my parents. She threw a bowl at my dad and told him it was all his fault. Mom told Whitney to calm down but she stormed off, slamming every door in the house on the way to her room.
I secretly blamed my dad as well. I’d heard the whispers too, my dad had done something wrong, something bad and the sheriff’s department had reassigned him to some little out of the way county to save face. My parents didn’t want me to know that, but I did.
I was nine so it didn’t take me too long to warm to the idea of a change; it was like an adventure. New house! New school! New friends! Whitney, of course, felt the opposite. Moving to a new school at her age is hard, moving away from her new boyfriend, however, was even harder. While the rest of us packed up our things and said our goodbyes, Whitney sulked and cried and threatened to run away from home. But a month later when we pulled up to our new house in Drisking, Missouri she was sitting right next me texting viciously on her phone.
Thankfully, we moved over the summer and I had months of free time to explore the town. When Dad started his new job at the sheriff’s office, Mom drove us around the city commenting on this and that. The city was much, much smaller than St. Louis but also a lot nicer. There were no ‘bad’ areas and the entire town looked like something you’d see on a post card. Drisking was built in a mountain valley surrounded by healthy forest land with walking trails and crystal clear lakes. I was 9, it was summer and this was in heaven.
We’d only been living in Drisking a week or so when our next door neighbors came to introduce themselves: Mr. and Mrs. Landy and their 10 year old son Kyle. While our parents talked and drank mimosas, I watched the Landy’s lanky, red-headed son hung out in the doorway, shyly eyeing the PS2 in the living room.
“Uh, do you play?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Not really.”
“Do you wanna? I just got Tekken 4.”
“Um…” Kyle glanced at his mom, who had just been handed her third mimosa. “Yeah. Sure.”
And that afternoon, with the ease and simplicity of our age, Kyle and I became best friends. We spent the cool summer mornings outside exploring the Ozarks and the hot afternoons in my living room playing the PS2. He introduced me to the only other kid in the neighborhood our age: a skinny, quiet girl named Kimber Destaro. She was shy but friendly and always up for anything. Kimber kept up with us so well that she quickly became the third wheel on our tricycle.
With my dad at work all the time, my mom consumed with her new friendships and my sister locked in her room all day, the summer was ours to take and take it we did. Kyle and Kimber showed me where all the best hiking trails were, which lakes were the best (and most accessible by bike), and where the best stores were in town. By the time the first day of school rolled around in September I knew I was home.
On the last Saturday before school started, Kyle and Kimber told me they were going to take me somewhere special, somewhere we hadn’t been yet – the Triple Tree.
“What’s a ‘triple tree’?” I asked.
“It’s a totally awesome, totally huge treehouse out in the woods.” Kyle said excitedly.
“Pfft, whatever, Kyle. Come on, you guys, if there was a freakin’ treehouse you would have showed it to me already.”
“Na-uh, we wouldn’t’ve,” Kyle shook his head. “There’s a ceremony for first-timers and everything.”
Kimber nodded eagerly in agreement, her dark orange curls bouncing off of her tiny shoulders. “Yep, it’s true Sam. If you enter the treehouse without the proper ceremony you’ll disappear and then you’ll die.”
My face fell. Now I knew they were making fun of me. “That’s a lie! You guys are lying to me!”
“No we’re not!” Kimber insisted.
“Yeah, we’ll show you! We just have to get a knife for the ceremony and we’ll go.”
“What? Why do you need a knife? Is it a blood ceremony?” I whispered.
“No way!” Kimber promised. “You just say some words and carve your name into the Triple Tree.”
“Yup, it takes like one minute.” Kyle agreed.
“And it’s a really cool treehouse?” I asked.
“Oh yeah.” Kyle promised.
“Okay, I guess I’ll do it then.”
Kyle insisted on using the same knife he used during his own ceremony but we paid a price to get it. Mrs. Landy just happened to be home with her youngest son Parker and despite Kyle’s many objections his mother insisted he take his six year old brother with him.
“Mom, we’re going to the treehouse, it’s only for older kids. Parker can’t go!”
“I don’t care if you’re going to see an Exorcist movie marathon, you’re taking your brother with you. I need a break, Kyle, can’t you understand that? And I’m sure your friends won’t mind.” She flashed Kimber and me a challenging look. “Right?”
“No, not at all,” Kimber said and I nodded in agreement.
Kyle made a loud, dramatic sigh and called his brother. “Parker, put your shoes on, we’re leaving now!”
I’d met the youngest Landy several times before and found that he was as unlike his older brother in looks as in disposition. Where Kyle was
a wild, excitable fireball with hair to match, I found Parker to be an anxious, fidgety boy with small eyes and dark brown hair.
We got on our bikes and made our way to a lesser known hiking trail a few miles away. I’d asked before where the trail led when we’d ridden across it several weeks before and Kyle had given me the underwhelming answer of “nowhere interesting”.
We pulled up to trail head and leaned our bikes against the wooden sign post which read “West Rim Prescott Ore Trail”.
“Why are so many trails around here named Prescott?” I asked. “Is this Prescott Mountain or something?”
Kimber laughed. “No, dummy, it’s because of the Prescott’s. You know, the family that lives in the mansion up on Fairmont. Mr. Prescott and his son Jimmy own like half the businesses in town.”
“More than half,” Kyle agreed.
“Which ones? Does he own the Game Stop?” The only store in Drisking I really cared about.
“I don’t know about that one,” Kyle wound a lock around the 4 bikes and clicked the bar into place, then spun the numbers on the dial. “But like the hardware store, the pharmacy, Gliton’s on 2nd and the newspaper.”
“Did they start this town?” I asked.
“Nah, mining started the town. I think they-“
“I want to go home.” Parker had been so quiet I’d completely forgotten he was there.
“You can’t go home,” Kyle rolled his eyes. “Mom said I had to bring you. Now come on, it’s only like a two mile walk.”
“I wanna take my bike.” Parker answered.
“Too bad, we’re going off trail.”
“I don’t wanna go. I’ll stay with the bikes.”
“Don’t be such a wussy.”
“I’m not!“
“Kyle, be nice!” Kimber hissed. “He’s only 5.”
“I’m 6!” Parker objected.
“I’m sorry, 6. You’re 6.” Kimber smiled at him.
“Alright fine, he can hold your hand if he wants. But he’s coming.” Kyle turned and started up the trail.
Parker’s face fell into an undignified frown but when the charming Kimber stuck her hand out and wiggled her fingers at him, he took it.