The new carpet feels too firm, even through his shoes, but at least it’s warmer now. The long chilly spring is behind them, and summer will be here soon.
Sierra’s door is open, just a crack. He presses the back of his hand to it and nudges it wider, stepping into her room. The bedside lamp is on, its shade casting a warm orange cone over her bed. Sierra is facing the wall, her pink comforter riding up past her shoulder, making a little tent over her head.
Ray pads to her bedside, reaching for the lamp. What stops him from turning the switch or finding it with his fingers at all is the strange way Sierra’s chestnut-brown hair looks blonde on her pillow. Not light brown or dirty blonde, but actually blonde. It reminds him of Colt’s hair, the way it looked when she was about Sierra’s…
Ray lowers his hand and takes two steps back. His chest is tight and he realizes he has been holding his breath since he reached the top of the stairs. He exhales now, mouth gone arid, and a tickle presents itself in his throat. Swallowing three or four times doesn’t help it go down. He gags involuntarily, the tiny speck freeing itself on a bit of saliva, catching in his teeth. Ray wipes his mouth, and what remains stuck to his second finger is the same color as Sierra’s hair.
A grain of sand.
The hump of pink comforter shifts and Sierra rolls over, sitting up. It was not a trick of the light.
‘Uhhhnnn…’ Ray manages, before losing his voice and the ability to move.
Her hair is blonde, but it’s not Colt or Sierra, this thing in the bed. It isn’t anyone but a doll without a face. There are no eyes, no mouth, no nose. No such indications or shapes that there used to be. There is only a flat ovoid of flesh stretching from hairline to chin, and ear to ear, if these could be called ears. The two slightly elongated nodes are sealed over, smooth as halved pears. It is blind, deaf, mute and no one knows what else. Ray knows one thing, though. He knows that it knows he is here.
He feels certain he is screaming but there is only ear-ringing silence. Underwater silence. He commands himself to run, look away, fall down, but his body won’t respond.
The girlish thing in Sierra’s bed makes no attempt to reach for him. Her arms hang at her sides, where her ribs are showing like white bones through the cellophane of skin. Somehow it is worse this way than if she were leaping at him or screaming. It wants something of him, of whomever it senses standing by the bed. He can feel its longing like a hunger of his own, but not for food, not for blood. Maybe only for comfort, for love, and that he cannot give.
Not to this faceless thing under Colt’s girlhood hair.
Thinking of his sister for the last of many times today, a bit of sympathy combined with insanity swells up inside him and he finds his voice. It sounds older, like his father’s used to, when his father was Ray’s age and Ray was this thing’s age.
‘I’m sorry. I can’t help you. Go back to sleep now.’
The doll does not react, not then, and not as he begins to step away, his father’s voice somehow breaking the paralysis in his legs. Ray backtracks the same way he came in, never taking his eyes from the empty flesh that used, or someday hopes, to be a face.
The room feels as long and wide as an airport terminal, the time spent evacuating it measurable in hours not seconds, but eventually he is in the hall, inching the door back to its original position. He leaves a small gap of light, the prospect of shutting it all the way seeming a cruelty undeserved.
It is still sitting upright, watching him in her own way. Silently pleading for him to stay. Ray turns his back on it and walks down the hall, to discover what has become of Mommy.
The carpeting is still too firm. Passing under the central hall light, he notices that the fibers – a soft gray tone the decorator referred to as gunmetal but which has a pleasing violet hue in daylight – are clogged.
Ray bends, running his fingers over the carpet, and grains of sand spring loose. There is more, he knows, and he doesn’t want to inspect the rest of the hall to find out how much.
The master bedroom door is latched firmly, leaving only a thin blade of light across the gray carpet. Ray opens the door and finds himself there, back in the restaurant, Pescado Rojo, one of several his father once owned. He is standing beside his old booth in the corner, the afternoon hot, the open-air patio sprinklers misting patrons while desert music plays from the stereo system built into the walls. It is just like that day three days before the trip, when he still had time to say no.
It is like that day, but it is not that day.
Time has had its way, moving in the opposite direction.
As always, he feels her before he sees her, and he pretends to be busy at work, staring at meaningless to-do lists and his laptop, nervously waiting for her to come and say hello, ask him if he would like another Modelo or if he had dinner yet, and will it be the lobster mole enchiladas again, for real, doesn’t he ever want to try something new?
But he can’t avoid her forever, he is always dying inside with the desire to see her, because he loves her, even though he knows nothing about her, except that she is a waitress who, using nothing more than a smile, gives him enough kindness to get through his lonely days.
Her tanned bare ankles and the smooth calves above a pair of bright yellow flats are the first things he sees, and the jolt that normally causes him to look down, until his blush of desire has cooled, this time causes him to look up.
Where her tanned bare ankles and the smooth calves above her worn down, no longer bright yellow flats sway in the air. There must be a draft in the room, an open window, some other reason for the fractional motion, the twist that turns her one way and then another in almost imperceptible increments. It is not because this was recent. No. He is sure of that.
Ray’s favorite waitress, the only girl he ever loved, has been up here for hours. She is gone now, no longer a part of this, no longer with him, no longer holding on inside this shell. He looks up, higher, over her small black apron, where she always kept two pens and her order pad, above her pretty peasant blouse and the pale shoulders it revealed, and higher still to the historic brick building’s interior steel girder, an architectural irrelevancy they decided not to panel over for the sake of character and instead painted sky-blue.
Her features are all there, but the faded white nautical rope coiled around her neck has turned them a deep swollen purple, soon to be black, and there is nothing he can say to this one. She wouldn’t hear him, his Megan, and, besides, Ray has no comfort left to give. She waited for him, always. And he made her wait too long.
He turns away and leaves her in her chosen state, the way she wanted him to see her at the end, because he refused to buy them more time. He refused to make a true offering, and so she sacrificed herself, and there can be no more time because this is the end, her end, their end, his own.
He leaves the door open as he returns to the hall and finds his way back down the stairs, never noticing, through all the hours he stood inside it with her, that their bedroom floor was covered in sand.
Inches of it, enough to fill his shoes.
Then there is only one door left, set in the exact middle of the two massive store windows. The pink stencil lettering that once read Sisters is gone, or smothered by such blackness it is no longer visible. No more than are the street, the sidewalk, the cars and bikes and café tables and lampposts, the portrait of his new neighborhood that barely had time to form an impression on him, let alone become a solid enough place to build a future upon and one day call home.
Ray does not fear this door, the one that leads into the blackness pressing itself to the glass with the howling fury of gale-force winds. He knows now what awaits him on the other side, and he is ready to become a part of it, even if there is nothing but a void, a fathomless pit, a cold universe where the nearest warmth is forever out of reach, light years and lifetimes away.
Because Raymond Mercer has outlasted all his people, and helped send them to their graves. He has no fear left inside him, no more love to
give.
He has become ancient, with but one thing left to do.
He opens the door, and steps through.
Down…
Ñí Brásge
… into the sand, and the moment his sandals reach the ground, the howling wind tears the camper doorknob from Raymond Mercer’s small hand, throwing sand at his eyes. The storm has been raging for hours, hours he has been trapped inside, scared and wondering when his family would return.
Hours that felt like a lifetime.
He hurries through the camp site, and the wind swings up a lawn chair, sailing it at him with a gust that nearly blinds him just before the aluminium frame pinwheels into his forehead, drawing blood.
Raymond cries out, covers his eyes with one arm and presses on. He ducks low to the ground and dashes around the overturned picnic table, only to trip on Leonard’s Honda. The wind knocked the dirt bike down, leaving the kickstand up like a spike. He falls over the front end, gashing his knee on the kickstand, smelling spilled gas. He rolls sideways, crying out again, hating the wind, hating the big invisible bully.
He sits up and rubs his knee, and the sight of his own blood makes him want to run back to the camper. But he’s already out, he has to try and locate them, make sure they are okay.
He gets to his feet and runs the last twenty steps, to the place with the best view. The wind assails him, shoving at his back, as if it wants to throw him over the edge. Standing atop the cliff, he sees them. His mother and father, Colt and Leonard. And a little further down the beach, another family, the ones who’ve been camping in their big green tent. The parents are heavy, their teen son thin, and beside them the little blonde girl Ray saw on the beach yesterday with her dog. Yesterday? Or was it this morning? His sense of time is all mixed up, stretched and folded around itself like one of the crashing waves below.
But she’s there. Her dog seems to be the only one missing.
All of them, both families, are standing in the moist sand where the waves break down and surge over their ankles. They are staring at the lake, mesmerized by the incredible rows of water, broken waves as tall as his father and as wide as a school bus. The raging lake is deep gray like the sky, except down there, closest to everyone, where it is turning black. The blackness spreads in an expanding circle, half of which lies under the waves with unnatural stillness. The other half, he decides, must be hidden in the sand.
Raymond’s father shouts to the others, excited, pointing at the waves as he hop-steps out a little further. He laughs, head thrown back, mouth open to catch the rain. He hollers like a cowboy and comically beats his chest. Raymond can’t hear their voices over the wind and the waves, but he understands what’s about to happen. His father is in a rare mood and, now that the gear has been secured, he wants them to dive in. Swim the waves, embrace the danger and get a little crazy on the second to last day of their vacation.
But do they see the black shelf, the darker thing spreading out from the beach? Raymond doesn’t think so. He knows from his time spent playing down on the beach that you can’t really see the lines in the lake, where the soft brown becomes green and then the deeper blue. Also, if they were seeing what he is seeing now, they wouldn’t be considering diving in. They would be running away as fast as they can.
Raymond has no idea what the blackness is, or why this moment feels so important, but he is overcome by a terrible premonition: if his family dives into that water, the black thing will find them. It will do something bad to them, or to the other family. Someone will get hurt, or drown.
The little blonde girl yells at her parents, and at first Ray thinks maybe she understands. She is smarter than they are, she sees the black thing too. But that’s not it; she is simply crying. Stomping her feet, looking up and down the beach, shouting for something. She is looking for her dog, the missing dog with his wheels. He must have gotten lost in the storm.
Her brother comes to her side and takes her hand and leads her to the water. Something in the girl seems to give up. She does not call for her dog again, only holds onto her brother while he drags her out near their parents.
‘Stop!’ Raymond yells down. ‘Stop! Stay out of the water! It’s not safe!’
No one turns to look up, and he knows they can’t hear him. It’s at least a thirty-foot drop, the water line is another hundred feet from the cliff, and the storm is too loud. He tries again anyway, screaming as loud as he can. Over and over, until his throat hurts. Still no reaction.
They are transfixed, backs turned to him, wading in. Tiptoeing, then taking a couple bold steps, sometimes hopping back again, laughing. Raymond’s father is in up to his knees, the others to their shins and everyone is gaining confidence.
Raymond no longer believes the wind and crashing waves are the reasons they can’t hear him. They’re not that far out. It’s the lake. The lake has captivated them somehow.
He has to go down. It’s the only way to stop them.
To save them.
But he doesn’t have time to run to the boat ramp, or even to the cutaway path his mother led him up just a few hours ago. Every second counts now. The fastest route down is the scariest one.
The drop is sheer for at least twenty-five feet, the last five or eight a grade of steeply sloping sand. But it’s not the same white powdery stuff as down on the actual beach. This sand is dark brown, chunky, with clods that looks like rocks. Some are small as pebbles, others like deformed bowling balls. If the clods break apart easily, he will probably be all right. They will help absorb the shock. But if they’re hard, if he lands on the wrong one, or at a bad angle… he may never see his ninth birthday.
Raymond looks out one more time. His father is in up to his waist, waving them on. Leonard paddles on his back, Colt is up to her knees, and Mom and the other family are not far behind.
The black sheet spreads below the frothing waves, waiting.
Ray can’t wait anymore.
He pushes off with his right foot, and the wind seems to welcome him, pushing at his back again, sending him farther out than he meant to go. He throws his arms forward as if to push off a wall but there are no walls up here, only his mind filling with images of his body breaking into pieces, and then he simply drops.
He screams all the way down. Not in hopes they will hear him. Only because he is certain he just made a fatal mistake. His legs kick involuntarily. His hands flap in circles. The lake rushes up to greet him, the waves flashing before him as if close enough to touch. Raymond’s stomach contracts into a hard ball as it floats up into his throat.
The impact feels as if he has jumped out of a tree into a pit of gravel, jarring his teeth with a crack that cuts the side of his tongue open. He tastes blood as he loses the ability to breathe. His spine compresses down upon itself and springs him somersaulting over jagged clods, sand bursting in his eyes, his mouth, until he flops uselessly to a halt.
He can’t hear or see anything. His heart feels as though it is beating inside his skull, through his jaw. He has no idea whether the gray field in front of his eyes is the lake or the sky, and he cannot draw a breath. His lungs are being clamped between two massive steel walls. Raymond tries to sit up, falls to his side. He can’t see the lake. It must be behind him, stealing his family away. All he can see is a wall of dark brown sand. He reaches for it, reaching for anything, begging to get his air back. Something in his throat clicks like door latch, again, three times. But still he cannot breathe.
And then the big brown wall is leaning over him, shaking the ground under his back, and Raymond closes his eyes to hide from it. The weight is gentle and perfect, enveloping him in a blink, snugging his entire body inside of a very dark glove.
Muffled voices. Faint screaming. Total darkness.
Pressure above his arm. Something poking into his leg. A flash of brightness, the taste of sand in his open mouth. Dry, full. He tries to breathe, swallows more sand. Coughs fractionally, continues to suffocate. The weight on his chest eases, the voices grow louder. People
are shrieking, grunting, and one of his ears takes a rough scrape that opens another door. Blink of gray-brown light. Another scrape, this one cranking the volume back into the world.
Beneath the Lake Page 38