Salvage

by Duncan Ralston

  Skip favored her with a doubtful look. "Everett Crouch is dead, Joelle."

  "Somebody oughta tell him that."

  "Owen—is she serious?"

  "I'm afraid so, Mr. Wickman."

  "Skip," the man said distractedly, looking ashen. "There's no such thing as ghosts. The Bible says—"

  "Whatever it is," Jo interrupted, "ghosts, demons, Puff the Magic Dragon—it's Crouch. He's bringing us back, one by one. It's wearing his face."

  "The Devil has many faces," Skip muttered, swallowing a lump in his throat. "You know, I'd always prayed that Crouch and the others had run off to start a real mission in some impoverished country. Like Haiti. Or Guatemala. Like our friend Jim Jones," he said, his expression bleak. "Your father really was a good man, Owen, and one heck of a preacher. It's a terrible thing when a good man falls apart. But his whole world had come undone. That's what made it so hard to leave him, in the end. Especially with his illness."

  "Illness?" Owen said, remembering what Lori had written in her journal: Your father didn't leave you and Mom. He went crazy.

  "Disorder?" Skip asked, making a face like he'd stepped in something nasty. "I never know what to call these things anymore. Your father was unwell. Mentally. Manic depression, schizophrenia. I'm not sure which it was. I'm not even sure how many of his wild ideas were his own, and how many belonged to this… Brother Woodrow he kept talking about."

  "Brother Woodrow?"

  "You know him? They spoke to each other regularly, though I never saw the man myself."

  So Woodrow was a real man—and maybe, just maybe, he was still hanging around Chapel Lake. Or under it. "Thank you so much for your help, Mr. Wickman."

  "My pleasure. And thank you for your concern."

  "Stay safe," Jo said with a foreboding look.

  Again, Skip smiled. "If they do come for me, Joelle, I'll be ready," he said, placid. "I know the Mystery."

  Owen flinched. Skip had heard of Brother Woodrow, and now he was using the man's words. "What is that?" he asked. "What's this Mystery?"

  "God's word," Skip said, as if it were self-evident, beaming his beatific smile at them. "I'll tell you a secret if you promise not to spread it around. Things like what I'm about to tell you aren't quite good for business."

  "Of course," Owen said. He and Jo moved closer to the man, listening intently.

  "God told me the Mystery in person," Skip said. That smile swept across his face again. So confident. So at peace. "He whispered it in my ear while I slept."

  Owen and Jo shared a look, awaiting Skip's big reveal.

  "The Lord said to me, 'Skip, fear not: for death is not the end.'"

  CHAPTER 12

  Leviathan

  1

  OWEN AND JO LAY on their backs in her twin bed, looking up at the dayglow stars she'd stuck on the ceiling as a child. Dim light filtered in through the curtains. He watched her dark eyes, seemingly captivated by relics of her lost childhood. He saw the slight lines between her eyebrows, and at the corners of her mouth, evidence she'd spent at least a portion of her life smiling, despite everything she'd been through. Her dusty blonde hair was raggedly chopped, as if she'd done it herself, but it caught in the dim moonlight from the window, giving her an almost angelic look.

  He thought he could love this woman. He thought he might have loved her all his life, and hadn't even known it.

  She caught him looking, and smiled. Dimples formed at the upturned corners of her lips, reminding him, briefly, of the children they'd been. He flashed suddenly on a memory of chasing her through darkened streets, her golden hair shimmering under the streetlamps as a purple dusk fell, shooting playful looks back over her shoulder that said Catch me, I want you to catch me, and laughing when he couldn't reach her. He remembered the faint, sweet smell of lavender in her hair, and the wide, dark brown of her eyes staring at him in naked curiosity.

  He smiled back, thinking, This is the man I was meant to be. This is what Lori was trying to bring out of me all these years. If only she could see me now.

  "When Lori and I were kids," he found himself saying, "she was always running headlong into another exciting adventure. I was the kid who stayed behind. The one who stood against the wall, while the other kids danced. The one who kept all his clothes on when everyone else jumped into the pool."

  "That's not the Owen Saddler I remember," Jo said.

  "That Owen died when he left Peace Falls, I think. But Lori…. When Lori got old enough to start getting into trouble, she dragged me along with her. I didn't want to go, but there was something about her… you couldn't help but get swept along in her wake."

  Jo smiled, and let him speak.

  "I was thinking about this the other day, about the time she taught me to swim. I'd always hated the water. I guess now I know why. When we were kids, my stepdad tried to throw me into the lake we used to go to some summers, this really nice place called China Cove. I didn't want to go in, not just because I was afraid, but because of Crouch, because of my father. I'd seen him standing on the water. I didn't know who he was, but looking at him… Just thinking about it now is giving me chills."

  He held out his arm for Jo to touch the goose bumps on his forearm, and she ran her hand over them, the hairs tingling.

  "I didn't know who he was back then," he said. "I just knew that I had to get away from him. This was maybe seven or eight years after we left Peace Falls. It's like he'd been obliterated from my memory. Anyway, this happened years later, when Lori was… I don't know, nine or ten. We were back at China Cove, and she told me something that stuck with me, even though I might not have heeded the advice. I told her I'd always been afraid of the water, and couldn't swim with her. What she said to me was, 'Forget about the before. All that matters is now.'" He smiled. "For some reason, that did the trick. I didn't worry about why I was scared, or what might happen if I went in, I just jumped in. And after a little bit of struggling, I realized I'd must have been a pretty good swimmer when I was little."

  Jo's smile became so joyful she might have been on the verge of tears. "You were," she said, and Owen felt his heart swell up with the same joy. If this feeling was just a chemical reaction, what did it matter? He'd fill himself up with it and ask for more.

  She took his hand, her fingers entwining with his, and kissed it. They lay in silence for a while, comforted by each other's breathing.

  "I need to tell you something," Jo said suddenly, sitting up. "It's not as nice as your story, but I want to tell you. I need to tell you. What happened to my parents, it should have happened to me, too."

  Owen sat up beside her. "What do you mean?"

  "I was with them that day," she said.

  "You were—? What, in the car? With them?"

  She nodded grimly. "I was with them. It just seemed like a normal day. We were on our way into town, and they were singing, just like normal. I mouthed along with the words in the backseat, just like normal."

  She took a deep, shuddery breath, and went on: "My parents woke me up early that morning, rushed me to get dressed, said we were going to town to get new clothes. Back then I was always begging them for new clothes. I wore secondhand, mostly, so I was excited. But also suspicious. 'Why are they all of a sudden gonna buy me new clothes?' We didn't have much money, as you can see." She indicated the house with a small gesture.

  "It's not a bad sized house," he said. "A house like this would go for half-a-million in Toronto."

  "I'm sure Skip would tell you the market's not quite that good here," she said, and shrugged. "We'll see how it does. Regardless, we didn't have much, aside from our not-bad sized house. My parents took odd jobs after the flood, wherever someone who didn't know about Crouch and the Purification would hire them. My mom waitressed for a while, did some temp secretarial work in Peterborough, and my dad painted cottages and did small building projects around the lake. 'Decks and docks,' he liked to say. Cottagers don't seem to know or care much about local gossip. Salvage divers, they like to da
bble in the lake's history, but they're generally 'renters and tenters,' as my dad used to say."

  "He liked to rhyme, huh?" Owen said.

  "He used to make up his own spirituals," Jo said, smiling in reminiscence. "He'd play them on his guitar, and he and my mom would sing harmony. They were actually pretty good. I've got some recordings downstairs. They're not professional, just home-jobs on cassette. If we get bored, I'll play them for you."

  "I'd like that," he said, genuinely curious. He'd always had a vague memory of a group of children sitting cross-legged, listening to a man and woman play guitar and sing "Michael, Row the Boat Ashore," and "Whole World in His Hands," and The Byrds' "Turn! Turn! Turn!" He'd always assumed these people had been children's entertainers, but he supposed now they must have been Joan and Edam Dunsmuir.

  "I saw the look in Mr. Jebson's eyes as we passed him on the road, and I started to get scared. I mean really, gripping-the-seat terrified. I turned to watch him out the back window. He dropped the sledgehammer he'd been using and ran after us, like there was something wrong with the car only he could see. My parents must have heard him shouting at us, seen him in the rearview mirror, at least, but they just kept on singing and driving. And when I turned back to them, to tell them to stop the car, that Mr. Jebson was running after us to beat the Devil, there was Crouch, buckled into the seat beside me. I remember his seat belt being buckled more clearly than anything, because I wondered why a ghost would need one. And that thought was what really struck it home: Crouch's ghost was sitting beside me, and my parents kept singing 'Swing Low, Sweet Chariot, comin' for to carry me home.'

  "That's when I realized we were driving toward the lake. I heard Crouch whispering something, but I couldn't tell what, muttering low and quiet and smiling, like you'd sometimes see him walking down the street, whispering and smiling, and you'd think he was praying.

  "I wanted to shout for my dad to stop the car, to pull over so I could get out, but I couldn't talk. My lips moved, but my breath was caught in my lungs, like in dreams, where you're so scared you can't scream. And all of a sudden, Crouch turned to me and sang the next verse in my face at the top of his lungs: 'When Jesus WASHED my sins aWAY!'"

  Her shout cut through the silence of the night, startling him, making his heart beat faster.

  "My dad jerked the wheel. It was marsh on one side, trees on the other. Either way he took us would have been bad, but Crouch wanted us in the water, so my dad went right. We went down in the ditch before I really clued in what was happening, and my parents never stopped singing, 'If you get there before I do,' and I saw them hold hands and smile at each other as the front end hit the water, 'tell all my friends I'm coming there too.' They sang until the words were just bubbles on the surface of the water."

  "I'm so sorry," Owen said, because he genuinely was, and he understood then why people recited platitudes at funerals—because more precise words would cut them open, would lay their emotions bare. Platitudes allowed them to express sympathy without making themselves vulnerable.

  Jo shrugged. "It's all right. It was a long time ago. I'm not gonna dwell on the past anymore. My whole life, I've been living with these ghosts, and I'm tired of it, Owen. I'm tired of living for my parents. I want to live for me," she said, reaching out for his hand. He took it, smiling. "For us."

  "I want that, too."

  She was silent for a moment. Then she said, "Something else always bothered me about that day. Crouch sat beside me and smiled at the back of my parents' heads the whole time they were drowning. The car went in at a steep angle, so my head was still above water when theirs had been under for a while already. I tried to unlatch my seat belt, to get free, but Crouch put his hand on it, holding it in place, and I froze up. I couldn't make myself touch it with his hand there, even if it killed me. All I could do was struggle and wriggle while my parents grew still, and eventually, a sense of calm came over me. I knew I was going to die. Mr. Jebson had left us, and I'd drown in the car with my parents dead already and Crouch's ghost muttering prayers.

  "Except it wasn't prayers, Owen. He was talking to someone. Somebody who wasn't there—and I heard him say, 'Brother Woodrow.'"

  "Woodrow?"

  She nodded. "So I asked him, I was curious, and I guess my curiosity must have overcome my fear, because all of a sudden I could speak again. I asked him, 'Who's Brother Woodrow?' And suddenly Crouch stopped smiling. He looked at me with fear in his eyes, Owen. 'You were talking to him,' I said. 'Who's Brother Woodrow?' Crouch opened his mouth to say something, I don't know if he was going to answer me or what, but right about then I heard Mr. Jebson calling out from up on the road, and Crouch looked out the back window, still terrified, like he was the one who'd seen a ghost. Then he unlatched my seat belt."

  She looked like she couldn't believe it herself. "He let me go, Owen. I tore open the door; the windows were open already, so it was easy, and I stumbled out up to my hips in the cold, mucky marsh water, and Mr. Jebson met me on his way down the ditch, and I just about jumped into his arms, babbling and crying. He hugged me for what seemed like forever, before we remembered my parents were still in the car. Anyway, that's all I remember. The rest is just a blur, the sort of crime scene stuff I might have mixed up with memories from a thousand TV shows."

  "That's awful," Owen said. "That's gotta be the worst thing that could happen to a kid, and you survived it. You've lived with that for twenty years."

  "But it's odd, isn't it? Crouch could have drowned me, and instead he spared my life, all because I mentioned Woodrow. Woodrow was the man who had all kinds of parenting advice for Crouch, don't forget. I wonder if he's the one who put the idea in Crouch's head that you had to die to save the ministry."

  "That seems likely," Owen said. "Woodrow was the Old Testament fire and brimstone guy. Crouch was 'God is Love.'"

  "Right. Whatever the reason, it seemed to me like Crouch came to his senses just then. Like hearing Woodrow's name snapped him out of a trance. And he spared my life. He saved me. Crouch saved my life, and all this time I've been trying to figure out why." She ran her fingers through his bangs, absently. "When I saw you that day at the lake, that's when I put it all together. He saved me to help you, Owen. To put an end to this, once and for all. He's still under Brother Woodrow's spell, I think, whoever Woodrow is. And the two of them together are a dangerous combination."

  She smiled triumphantly. The smile faltered as something occurred to her. "I need to pee," she said. "Will you be okay for a minute?"

  "Go ahead," Owen said. "I'm thirsty. After all that, all I can think of is a tall, cool glass of water."

  "You're a tall, cool glass of water," Jo said, smirking as she made a show of looking him up and down.

  Owen laughed heartily before stepping out of bed. She followed him. Owen planted a kiss on her lips. "You need anything?"

  "I'm good, thanks." She smacked him on the butt as he moved down the hall ahead of her. "Don't flash the neighbors!"

  "Aw. Party pooper."

  He padded down the small, carpeted stairs and into the kitchen of the backsplit house. Jo and her family hadn't used their share of the money to haul their house up the hill. He'd noticed on their way in that the house was as old as the foundation, mid-'60s, most likely.

  At the sink, he peered out the window at the sad lawn and the trees, making sure there were no neighbors to flash. Then he turned on the cold water, let it run for a moment, and dipped the glass Jo had drank from under the tap.

  The faucet rumbled, loose parts in the plumbing. He turned off the water, and brought the glass to his lips.

  "OWEN!"

  A loud crash startled him. Cursing under his breath, he ran barefoot to the hall.

  "Help! Owen!"

  Owen's blood raced as he bounded up the steps, still carrying his water glass, and what he saw through the open bathroom door nearly made him stumble back down the steps. The far wall and bathroom window were warped and rippled as if he were looking through old glass. Jus
t as it had done at the dam, the water had risen up, this time from the tub, this time holding Jo several feet above the floor in colossal, translucent fingers. A second shape like a human head formed a grin as it studied Jo's bloodless face, her eyes widened in terror, her mouth an agonized rictus. The hand made of water closed around her, crushing her alive. The face, Crouch's face, watched as she died.

  "… help…"

  Owen threw the glass. It splashed through Crouch at the throat, shattering against the far wall. Crouch whipped his massive, rippling head round to observe the interloper, and as his giant's face formed a scowl, a second hand emerged from the tub, as big as the first, which was still tightening its hold on Jo's midsection, cracking her ribs with a wet crunch. Jo's eyes met Owen's for the last time, and a look of peace washed over her. In the next moment, Crouch's other hand swatted angrily at the door.

  The door struck him on the forehead, knocking him backward, and still it slammed shut. Fireworks exploded across his vision as he stumbled back toward the stairs. He grabbed the stair rail, stopping short of tumbling down backwards. Blood from the gash in his forehead fell on the carpet in a rapid stream of fat, heavy drips while he steadied himself. Dizzy, he staggered back to the bathroom door, shouting Jo's name. He jerked the handle, pounded his fists—thundering my fists upon the soil—against it, all to no avail. "Jo! Oh, please, don't let him kill her, please!" He threw himself against the door, once, twice, so hard his teeth rattled. He tasted blood from his tongue. Blood dripped down into his eyes. His vision went momentarily pink, and he blinked it away. On the third strike, the door cracked open, and he stumbled forward, slipping on the wet tiles.

  Jo lay sprawled over the toilet. Blood streamed from her nose, her ears, her mouth. The bones in her chest and arms were so badly broken she had the look of a marionette with its strings cut.

  Owen slipped again and staggered to her, a gurgle in the drain capturing his attention just long enough to see the water that had been a monstrous version of his father disappearing down the drain. The Reverend Everett Crouch had killed Jo Dunsmuir, the same girl he'd bounced on his knee when she'd been a child, and now that his work was done, he returned home, back to the lake.