Black Creek Crossing

by John Saul

  A bit of earth from loved’s grave/The blur of grief will help to save.

  One fragment of it had echoed all through the long hours of the night:

  . . . symmer long to bring back life . . .

  When morning had finally come and she went downstairs, she’d wanted to call Seth, to tell him what her father had said, and see what he thought.

  And maybe even go back out to the cabin and . . .

  But the minute she’d picked up the phone, her father demanded to know who she was calling. And when she turned to her mother for support, her mother shook her head. “Nice girls don’t call up boys,” she’d pronounced. “Nice girls wait for boys to call them. And besides,” she added, “we’re going to go shopping this morning. We’re getting you a brand new dress for the dance tonight.”

  So here she was, in a dressing room with the worst dress she’d ever seen, and her mother waiting for her to come out and model it. Knowing there was no point in trying to postpone the inevitable, Angel began taking off her jeans and sweatshirt.

  She was just hanging the sweatshirt on a hook when she heard a familiar voice from the dressing room next door.

  “So what are you wearing tonight?” Heather Dunne asked.

  “I hate costume parties,” someone replied. It was a voice Angel didn’t recognize.

  “Oh, come on,” Heather said. “It’ll be fun. Besides, if you don’t wear a costume, you’ll be the only one, and then how will you feel?”

  “I’d feel like Angel Sullivan,” the other girl said. Then: “Are you sure no one told her it’s a costume dance?”

  Angel felt her face begin to burn.

  “Who would?” Heather said, snickering. “I mean, who even speaks to her?”

  “Beth Baker,” the other girl answered.

  “Oh, like he’s even going to go to the dance!” Heather said, giggling. “What would he go as? A fairy princess?”

  “What are you going as?” the other girl said after the laughter died away.

  “The Queen of Hearts,” Heather declared. Then: “And you could be the White Rabbit.” There was a short pause, then Heather said: “I know! Why don’t you go as Alice?”

  “I love it!” the other girl said. “But where am I going to get a costume?”

  “It’ll be easy,” Heather said. “I’ve already got most of it from last year, and we can just pin it to fit you instead of me! At least you won’t look as stupid as Angel Sullivan when she shows up without any costume at all!”

  There was a flurry from the next stall as the girls left, and Angel barely breathed as she prayed none of them had noticed her in the store. Five minutes later, just as she was wondering if it was safe to leave the dressing room, she heard her mother’s voice.

  “Angel? What’s wrong? If the dress doesn’t fit, I’m sure they have it in a larger size.”

  With the dress in her hand, Angel came out of the dressing room. “It doesn’t matter if it fits or not,” she said. “It’s a costume party.”

  Myra looked blank. “It’s what?”

  “A costume party,” Angel repeated. “I heard Heather Dunne and some other girl talking about it. She’s going as the Queen of Hearts, and the girl she was with is going as Alice.”

  Myra frowned uncertainly. “Then I suppose we’ll have to find you a costume.”

  Angel shook her head. “I already have one,” she said. “And it’ll be perfect!”

  Myra knew even before she and Angel walked into the house that Marty had been drinking. It wasn’t just that the leaves she’d asked him to rake while they were in town were still scattered over the lawn and the rake she had left on the front step, where he couldn’t miss it, hadn’t been moved. Those things only reinforced the dark sense of apprehension that came over her as she moved toward the front door. She had lived with Marty long enough so that she knew yesterday’s bender was still going on, and today she was certain that Angel also knew what was waiting for them inside the house. For a moment she was tempted to turn around and just walk away. She and Angel could get lunch at the drugstore and then maybe go visit Joni.

  Except she couldn’t afford lunch at the drugstore, or anywhere else, and Joni—along with Ed and Zack—was already at the country club. The country club that only this morning Marty had declared he’d never set foot in.

  “You were the one who wanted to go,” Myra had said when he’d announced his decision while she was fixing breakfast.

  Marty only shrugged. “So I changed my mind.”

  “It’s Family Day,” Myra began. “Joni said—”

  “ ‘Joni said, Joni said,’ ” Marty mocked. “What do I care what your snotty sister said? I’m not going, okay? So just don’t bother me with it.”

  Myra had hoped that by the time they got back from shopping he’d have quit drinking and changed his mind yet again, but even as she opened the front door, she knew he had done neither. Just as she expected, Marty was sprawled in his chair, a beer in his hand and three empty bottles on the floor next to him. He peered balefully at her through eyes that were already bleary, even though it was barely lunchtime. “Figured you’d be at that fancy-ass country club by now,” he said, his words slurring.

  Myra’s expression tightened. “You don’t have to talk like—”

  “I’ll talk any way I want to! This is my house, and—”

  “Angel, why don’t you see if you can find something for lunch?” Myra cut in. Only after her daughter had left the room did she turn to her husband again. “I don’t want to have a fight,” she said, her voice quiet but her eyes hard. “But—”

  Marty rose out of his chair and towered over her. “You don’t want to have a fight?” he asked, his voice as low as Myra’s but carrying a dangerous edge. The fingers of his right hand gripped the beer bottle so tightly that his knuckles turned white, and he raised it up so it was hovering in the air above Myra’s head. “Well, guess what, sweetheart?” he spat. “This is my house, and you’re my wife, and I’ll do any damned thing I please, and you’ll do any damned thing I say. And I say that if I don’t want to—”

  Suddenly his words choked off and his eyes widened.

  The hand holding the bottle began to shake, and Myra saw his face turn pale.

  Was he having a heart attack? Or a stroke?

  “Marty?” she said, reaching out.

  “Get it away!” Marty said, taking a step backward.

  Get it away? What was he talking about? For a moment Myra thought she must have misunderstood Marty’s slurred words, and then she realized that he wasn’t even looking at her. His eyes, now utterly terrified, were looking past her, as if there were something behind her.

  Then she heard it.

  A hissing sound, so soft it was barely audible, but carrying a note of menace that made Myra’s blood run cold.

  Marty took another step backward, and the beer bottle dropped from his hand, clattering to the floor. “No,” he whispered, his voice suddenly sounding stone sober. “Get it away from me—get it away!”

  The hissing sound came again, a low angry sibilance that sent another chill through Myra.

  A snake?

  Myra had never even seen anything but a garter snake, and even though she’d heard that every now and then someone came across a timber rattler, she didn’t know anyone who had actually seen one.

  The hissing came again, and now Marty had backed all the way to the wall. His face was still ashen and there was a sheen of sweat on his forehead. Her heart pounding, Myra turned to see exactly what had so terrified her husband.

  A cat!

  A black cat with a white blaze on its chest. It was crouched low on the floor, its twitching tail stretched straight out behind it, and it was creeping slowly forward as if stalking prey that might sense the impending danger at any second and flee to safety.

  The cat’s golden eyes seemed to glow with a fire from within, and they were fixed on Marty.

  Myra gazed at the cat for a moment, then quickly moved toward it,
stamping her foot and waving her hands. “Shoo! Scat!”

  The cat seemed not even to be aware of her, let alone frightened or startled.

  “Shoo!” Myra said again, and once more moved toward the cat.

  This time the cat moved. But instead of darting out of the room, it shot past Myra in a dark blur, and a second later she heard Marty utter a choking scream. Spinning around, she took a step toward him, then stopped in her tracks.

  Instead of a cat, she saw a figure clad in an old-fashioned black dress and a bonnet. The figure’s back was toward her, and its arm was raised as a moment ago Marty Sullivan’s own arm had been raised.

  But instead of a beer bottle, the black-clad figure held a knife with a stiletto-sharp blade that glinted even in the shadowed light of the living room.

  The blade was stained red, and over the figure’s shoulder Myra could see a bloody slash across Marty’s cheek.

  The figure turned, and for an instant Myra got a glimpse of a young girl—perhaps a little younger than Angel—with a cameo brooch pinned to the breast of her black dress.

  As Myra gazed at the vision—for surely that was what it had to be—the face changed. Its flesh began to dissolve, skin and muscle falling away to leave nothing but a skull.

  A skull with sharply pointed teeth jutting from its jaws, and golden embers glowing deep in the empty eye sockets.

  An instant later, so quickly that Myra wasn’t sure she’d seen it at all, the horrible apparition vanished.

  Marty was on the floor now, his back against the wall, his knees drawn up. He held his hands to his face and was whimpering. “No . . . please . . . get it away from me. . . .”

  Stunned by what she’d seen, Myra remained rooted for a moment, her mind reeling as she tried to make sense of the apparition. But there was no sense to be made of it—the images that churned in her mind wouldn’t fit together.

  A cat—

  A girl—

  A skeleton—

  And now nothing! No trace anywhere in the room of the cat, or the girl, or the knife the girl had held. But a moment later, when Marty dropped his hands away from his face and looked up at her, she saw the deep slash in his cheek—a slash that began just beneath his eye and ran all the way down to his jaw—and she knew that no matter how impossible it had been, she had indeed seen something.

  But what?

  Then, from behind her, she heard a strangled voice and whirled around to see Angel standing in the door to the kitchen, her face as ashen as Marty’s, her eyes wide. It took no more than that single glance to understand that whatever it was she’d seen, her daughter had seen it too.

  Mother and daughter gazed at each other, and the silence between them seemed to stretch to eternity. It was Angel who finally broke the silence, her eyes shifting from her mother to her father. “Is—Is Dad okay?”

  Before Myra could say anything, Marty lurched to his feet. “That cat,” he rasped. “It tried to kill me.” His eyes fixed furiously on Myra. “And you saw it too, so don’t tell me it didn’t happen!”

  “I—I saw something,” Myra breathed, her mind still reeling.

  “It tried to kill me!” Marty repeated, wiping away the blood that was streaming from his wound.

  And it kept you from killing me, Myra thought, remembering the look in Marty’s eye and the fury in his voice as he’d stood above her only a few moments ago, the beer bottle raised high, poised to come crashing down into her face. “I don’t know,” she finally said. “I don’t know what I saw.”

  I know what you saw, Angel thought as her mother began tending to her father’s wound. You saw Houdini. And you saw Forbearance.

  And they are the same . . .

  Chapter 31

  ELL, AT LEAST I DON’T HAVE TO WORRY ABOUT beating my biggest client,” Blake Baker sourly observed as he and Seth gazed at the list that had them matched up against Ed and Zack Fletcher. His eyes shifted from the list to Seth. “Just try not to look like too much of a damn fool out there, okay?”

  The words stung almost as much as the lash of his father’s belt, but Seth stared straight ahead, trying to pretend he hadn’t heard them. Besides, it could have been worse, at least for him—he could have gotten matched up against Chad Jackson or Jared Woods, who made fun of him even more than Zack Fletcher did. They and their fathers had managed to get paired together, which Seth figured had a lot to do with the fact that Chad’s father was the chairman of the tournament committee, and Jared’s father was Chad’s father’s best friend. Not that it was supposed to matter who was paired with whom, since the father-son “tournament” wasn’t supposed to be a real tournament at all.

  It was just supposed to be fun.

  It wasn’t supposed to matter who won, and it wasn’t supposed to matter how good anyone was. Besides, it wasn’t even like a real tournament where everyone had to play their own ball. It was just a best-ball foursome of match play, where Seth and his father would take turns playing the same spot while Zack and Ed Fletcher took turns hitting from theirs, and in the end whoever won the most holes won the match. The total number of strokes wouldn’t even matter, and twenty minutes later no one would care who won. They’d all go have a barbecue, and everyone would have a good time, and that would be the end of it.

  Except that wouldn’t be the end of it for him, because no matter how hard he tried, he wouldn’t be able to play well enough for his father, and even though his father didn’t want to win—at least not against his biggest client—he didn’t want to be embarrassed by his son either.

  What his father wanted, Seth knew, was to lose, but only by a hole or maybe two at the most.

  But not by the whole eighteen. If they lost every single hole, which Seth was pretty sure they would, he wasn’t the only one who would be teased about it. It would be his father too. And then, when they got home—

  Seth felt the lash of his father’s belt rise out of his memory, and half an hour later when he shanked his first swing on the first tee and sent the ball flying off to the right, where it had rolled into the shrubbery around the tee box, he’d felt the lash yet again.

  And heard Zack Fletcher snickering.

  Then, to make it worse, Zack had stepped up to the tee, set up a ball, and driven it almost 250 yards straight down the fairway.

  Seth felt like crying as he thought about what was to come, and as the afternoon wore on, it only got worse. The more Zack snickered at him, the worse he played. And the worse he played, the angrier his father grew. Hole after hole, the torture went on. It seemed that every ball he hit went either nowhere or in the wrong direction, and every time his father hit a good shot, Seth managed to spoil it with his own following shot. Zack and his father won hole after hole, usually by two or three strokes.

  And Seth could feel his father’s rage building.

  When they came to the eighth tee, Seth gazed dolefully at the green.

  “Gee, too bad it isn’t Seth’s turn to drive,” Zack Fletcher said. “Didn’t he hit one almost that far, back on Five?” Then, as if just remembering, he slapped his forehead. “Oh, yeah! I forgot—it went in the water, didn’t it!”

  Seth’s face burned with embarrassment.

  And his father’s burned with fury.

  Ed Fletcher teed up, took a couple of practice swings with his seven iron, and stepped up to the ball. He drew the club back, paused for a moment at the top of the backswing, then swept the iron downward.

  Seth watched as the ball arced through the air and dropped onto the green about twenty feet from the pin. Turning, he bowed to his son with mock grandeur. “Just get it close, and we have another par.”

  Then Blake Baker stepped onto the tee box, set up his ball, and after taking almost a dozen practice swings, finally took his shot.

  The ball rose off the tee and rose toward the sky, heading directly toward the pin.

  “Looks good,” Ed Fletcher said.

  The ball struck the ground about ten feet in front of the green and bounced straight forwa
rd.

  “Member’s bounce,” Ed said. “Looking even better!”

  The ball rolled straight toward the hole, and suddenly both the Fletchers and the Bakers were standing still and silent, watching.

  When the ball finally stopped rolling, it was only a foot from the cup.

  “Another foot,” Blake Baker groaned as the four of them started from the tee box toward the green. “One lousy foot and I would have had an ace.”

  “And if Seth weren’t putting, you’d have a sure birdie,” Zack said.

  Seth felt a knot form in his stomach as his father laughed at the joke but said nothing. When they got to the green, he marked the ball his father had driven, then watched as Zack carefully circled around the green, studying the twenty-some-foot putt from every angle. There was a rise between the ball and the cup, and once the putt crested the rise, it would start to speed up. If Zack didn’t hit the ball hard enough, it wouldn’t make it over the rise, but if he hit it too hard and missed the hole, it might very well end up going ten feet past it. Finally Zack crouched down, cupped his hands over the bill of his cap, and peered at the line from the ball to the hole one more time. At last he stood up, squared the putter behind the ball, and swung.

  The ball started up the slope of the rise, moving more and more slowly, until at last it came to the top, where it almost stopped.

  But it didn’t stop.

  Instead it made one more slow revolution, then began rolling down the gentle slope, curving slowly to the right.

  It picked up speed, and the curve straightened out, sending the ball directly toward the hole. It was still gaining speed, and even Seth could see that if it missed the hole, it wouldn’t go just ten feet beyond the cup, it would go at least fifteen, or maybe even more.

  But it didn’t miss the cup.

  Instead, it rolled directly into the center of the hole, struck the opposite side, then dropped out of sight.

  Now it was Zack who turned to his father with an exaggerated bow. “Looks like our hole,” he said. “Unless Seth can figure out how to make his putt.”

  The knot in his stomach tightening, Seth carefully replaced the ball on the spot he’d marked, then stepped back to look at the putt.