by Jeff Giles
“Start with the short one,” said Zoe.
“I love you, and I’m sorry,” said her mother.
“Not feeling it,” said Zoe. She smoothed a towel with her hand. It crackled with electricity. “Try the medium one.”
“I love you, and I’m sorry—and I was wrong to tell the police to leave your dad’s body in the cave,” her mother said.
“Why did you?” said Zoe. “I don’t get it.”
Her mother sighed.
“I’m just going to blurt it out, like you would, okay?” she said. “I think maybe your dad killed himself, Zo.”
Zoe said nothing.
“He was really unhappy toward the end,” her mother continued. “He felt like a failure. He hated who he was. And he thought I’d stopped loving him, which … It kills me that he thought that.” She paused. “I’m only telling you all this because you’ve asked me so many times, and I think you can handle it.”
“I can,” said Zoe. “Don’t stop.”
“Look, I don’t know anything about caving, but it seems like he was too smart to die in some freak accident,” her mother said. “So I thought maybe he killed himself, and I didn’t …” She paused again, and pressed her hands against her eyes. “I didn’t want the cops to go in there and prove I was right.”
Zoe leaned forward. She hugged her mother for real this time.
“I know Dad wouldn’t have done that,” she said. “He just messed up. He stopped to take a picture—and he fell. When I was in the cave today, I could picture exactly what happened. I could feel it.”
Her mother nodded.
“I’m sure you’re right,” she said. “I want you to be right.”
“I am right,” said Zoe. “So you’ll tell the police to go get him now? I kicked ass today, but it was scary as shit—and Silver Teardrop is nothing compared to Dad’s cave. I don’t actually want to die doing this.”
Before her mother could respond, an elderly, German-sounding couple came through the door. Zoe’s mom took their money, and handed them flip-flops, towels, and locker-room keys. She and Zoe watched them shuffle down the stairs, arm in arm, and didn’t speak until they’d descended out of sight.
“I’ll talk to the police,” she told Zoe. “I promise I will. And I’m sorry I didn’t tell you all this sooner.” She paused. “Being a grown-up is the worst,” she said. “You’ll be better at it than me. I can already tell.”
Her mother’s shift was supposed to end at six o’clock, but at 5:58 an employee she referred to as the Flaker called to say that he had weird spots on his tongue and was it cool if he bailed? Her mom was exhausted—she didn’t even have the energy to brush her hair back when it fell in her eyes—and her shoulders sagged at the news. Zoe was still on a high from crushing Silver Teardrop. She offered to cover the shift herself. Her mother did the whole I-couldn’t-ask-you-to-do-that thing, but Zoe said, “Shut up, I’m doing it. Shut up, I’m doing it”—and so on until her mother gave in.
Zoe’s mom told her the pools were basically empty: there was the German couple, who were now making out in the big pool, and a single dad throwing a birthday party for his beastly six-year-old daughter in the smaller one. She reminded her that there was a lifeguard on duty at each pool, and that if she couldn’t find Lance, the security guard, he was probably in the locker room doing Pilates. Her mom told her that she could close up early if the place emptied out—and, on a sort of creepy note, that she should watch the security monitors because they’d been having some sneak-ins.
“There’s one other thing,” she said. She opened her laptop, which lay on the desk in front of Zoe. “I was going to let this wait until morning because I wasn’t sure you could handle it after the cave and everything. But you’re going to want to see it.”
Zoe’s mother called up a news story. She swiveled the computer toward Zoe, and took a step back.
“It looks like X found Stan,” she said.
Zoe’s eyes raced over the article:
A man murdered in a hair salon in Wheelwright, Texas, earlier this week has been identified as Stan Manggold … Mr. Manggold, 47, was a native of Virginia … He was wanted by police … The coroner’s report indicates that Mr. Manggold died of blunt-force trauma to the neck when his body was thrown headfirst into a mirror above one of the stylist’s stations … Hairdressers described the assailant as an agitated, black-haired Caucasian between the ages of 18 and 21. He was said to be wearing dark boots, black pants, and a purple cowboy shirt. Police have released an artist’s sketch, but have no leads at this time.
Purple cowboy shirt? thought Zoe.
She clicked on the link to the sketch.
The mouth was all wrong. The eyes didn’t have enough depth. Still, there was something about the drawing—the long, wavy hair, the bruises on the cheekbones—that evoked X so powerfully that Zoe felt the blood rise in her cheeks.
She shut the computer and pushed it away.
“It’s over now,” her mother whispered. “The craziness is over. X, the cave—everything. We’re going to be okay.”
But Zoe didn’t want the craziness to be over. She wanted X back. She couldn’t help but hope that now that the lords had Stan in their clutches, they might let X out to hunt more souls.
Zoe’s mom told Zoe she’d pick her up later, and left her sitting behind the desk idly eating yogurt pretzels and watching the bank of snowy, out-of-date security monitors. The single dad ushered the flock of six-year-olds into the night. The old German couple eventually wandered out, too, the wife’s hand on the husband’s butt. Nothing else happened for hours.
Zoe sent Val ten texts to pass the time. Three of them were about caving, five were about X, and two were about yogurt pretzels. Val must have been with Gloria—on the weekends, they often got in bed with a ton of food, hacked into Val’s brother’s Tinder account, and swiped right on all the girls they thought were hot—because she wrote Can’t talk and (when Zoe wouldn’t leave her alone), New phone who dis.
After that, it seemed as if even time itself had gotten itchy and bored, and decided to nap. Zoe padded down the damp hallway toward the pools, and told one of the lifeguards he could go home. That killed about ten minutes. She returned upstairs and stretched her legs, which ached from the cave. That killed about eight.
As Zoe dragged herself back to the front desk, she cast her eyes over the monitors. Everything was empty. The halls and stairways were newly mopped. The vending machines glowed silently. A ghostly cloud of vapor hung over the pools.
She was about to sit when her eye caught on something.
The upper left-hand monitor. The big pool.
Somebody had snuck in.
The man’s back was to her. He was in the water, but wearing a knit hat pulled down low over his ears. The tiniest bit of scruffy hair spilled out from under it.
Zoe called Lance on the locker-room phone—he sounded out of breath from Pilates, as her mother had predicted—and told him to kick the guy out. She checked the monitor again. She saw Lance come into the frame and call out to the guy in the water. The guy didn’t move. He ignored Lance entirely—which was not a thing Lance sat still for.
Lance was a preposterously big, broad dude. He lived for confrontations. His only complaint about being a security guard was that no one had the guts to stand up to him. More than once, Zoe had seen him swat at a fly and say, “Yeah, you better run.”
She watched as Lance went to the edge of the water and knelt on one knee, like the former football player that he was. Zoe closed her eyes. She just wanted to go home. She didn’t want to watch Lance administer a beatdown.
When she opened them again, she got a jolt—Lance was staring right at her in the security camera. His face filled the screen. He gestured for her to come down to the pool.
Zoe’s stomach clenched. She slipped on X’s coat, locked the front door, and walked to the stairs as slowly as she could.
By the time she made it outside, the stranger had swum to the far side of
the pool. He was obscured by the darkness and the rising steam. He was just an outline, really—a head, shoulders, and hat glinting above the water.
Lance stood by the door, looking annoyed.
“What’s going on?” said Zoe.
“The dude says he knows you,” said Lance.
Zoe peered at the man in the water. The mist looked eerie tonight. It curled around him like a wreath—as if he’d summoned it. She didn’t know the guy. No way. She was about to tell Lance to get rid of him when the stranger spoke.
He said just one sentence, but it stopped her cold: “Your name’s Zoe—and you love X.”
Zoe walked slowly around the pool.
She drew near to the man. He had dropped some clothes by the water. She couldn’t quite make them out in the dark. They lay tangled like a nest of snakes.
She tried to think of something to say but the stranger spoke up again—and stunned her a second time.
“That’s X’s coat, right?” he said. “Kinda big for you.”
She crouched for a better look at his face. He was in his late 20s. Handsome in a battered sort of way—but shaky somehow. Unhealthy. The whites of his eyes were streaked with red.
He smiled up at her. His friendliness made him seem all the more menacing.
She inspected him closely, without speaking.
He had dark, crescent-shaped bruises near his eyes.
They looked like X’s bruises.
“Who are you?” she said.
“I’m Eric,” he said. “’Sup?”
The sunniness of his voice was freaky.
“X never mentioned anybody named Eric,” she said.
“X doesn’t use my real name,” he said.
He drew an arm out of the water—he had a wild sleeve of tattoos almost identical to X’s—and lifted his hat the tiniest bit. Zoe winced. His forehead was horrifically bruised.
“He calls me Banger.”
He’d come with a message from X, he said.
Zoe couldn’t tell from his face if it was good news or bad. The anticipation was awful.
She told Lance and the remaining lifeguard that they could leave. They looked shocked. Still, they reluctantly headed up the stairs.
Zoe waited for Banger to speak, but he seemed to enjoy her impatience. He was an odd sight in the water. He’d taken off his shirt but he was still wearing his hat and his jeans, which were so drenched they clung to his legs. He floated on his back to the center of the pool, and gazed up at the bright needlework of the stars.
“What’s the message?” said Zoe. “Tell me.”
Banger smiled, and floated even farther away in the dark, his white belly shining. He never took his eyes off the sky.
She followed him around the pool, picking up dirty towels and stray flip-flops as she went.
“Don’t mess with me, Banger,” she said. “I don’t care if you’re dead—I will seriously injure you.”
“Can I just swim one more minute?” he said. “You know how long it’s been since I’ve felt warm water?”
Zoe felt a twinge of sympathy. She straightened a row of white deck chairs that should have been trashed years ago and went inside.
After ten minutes, Banger climbed out of the pool, put on his shirt and shoes, and joined her. He’d pulled his hat back down over his nightmarish forehead. But he still looked feverish and sickly to Zoe, and then it struck her: he had the Trembling.
“You’re supposed to be hunting somebody?” she said.
He turned to her, surprised. He wiped the perspiration from his face with the back of his hand.
“Yeah,” he said quietly. “Guy who drove a school bus while he was high on crack. I’ll spare you the details.”
He drifted around the lobby, inspecting every poster, every piece of furniture, and every knickknack to see what they could tell him about the years that had passed since he was yanked down to the Lowlands. Zoe wished everything in the place wasn’t so shabby and old. She asked if he wanted to see her cell phone. His eyes sprang to life. He spent ten minutes playing with the thing, then handed it back with an air of regret, saying, “I had a BlackBerry. Thing sucked.”
Zoe asked Banger if he was hungry.
“No,” he said. “Because I’m dead, if you want to get technical about it. But what are you offering?”
“I’ve got some seitan and quinoa my mom made,” said Zoe.
Banger lifted an eyebrow.
“Those aren’t real words,” he said.
“There’s also junk food in the vending machine,” said Zoe.
Now his eyes were shining.
“Are Skittles still a thing?” he said.
Zoe opened the register for cash, then she and Banger trooped downstairs. The vending machines hummed expectantly in the vacant hall. The drink machine was the only new thing in the entire building: it was the science-fiction-y kind that sends a miniature elevator up and over to retrieve your selection. Banger gazed at it in fascination. He agonized about what to buy for five minutes. Zoe found it touching. They returned to the lobby with 14 dollars’ worth of energy drinks, candy, chips, and gum.
They sat on the stone floor, the loot piled between them. The night sky had turned from blue to black. Zoe wasn’t particularly hungry. Still, she got a kick out of the way Banger devoured the candy. She leaned back on her hands and watched. Eventually, she figured, he’d get around to delivering X’s message.
“Sorry I’ve been jerking you around,” he said at last. His face was still pink from the hot pool, his mouth smeared with chocolate. “I know you want to hear about X. It’s just that I know once I tell you everything, you’re going to get bored of me and kick me out.”
“I won’t,” said Zoe softly. “I don’t have anywhere to go. I mean, my boyfriend’s in hell.”
Banger smiled mysteriously.
“Not for long, maybe,” he said.
Her heart jumped.
When Banger finally began to spill, Zoe could barely take in all the details because her brain was spinning so fast. All she wanted to hear, all she cared about in the world, was finding out whether she’d see X again.
The lords had put him on trial, Banger said. X had shouted them down—he’d questioned their authority!
Banger was shocked that X had it in him.
“I mean, the dude never even talks,” he said. “Am I right?”
“Stop it,” said Zoe defensively. “He’s shy—but he talks!”
“Oooh,” said Banger. “Somebody’s got a crush.”
Zoe blushed, but recovered quickly.
“Do not even make fun of my star-crossed supernatural love,” she said.
Banger grinned. His teeth, Zoe couldn’t help but notice, were chipped and gray.
“Anyway, X does talk now,” he said. “You must have taught him how to stand up for himself. I can already tell you’re a lot cooler than him.”
Banger poured half a bag of Skittles into his mouth—a strange decision given that he was already chewing gum. Zoe watched, weirdly mesmerized. How could he swallow the candy without swallowing the gum? She’d never seen anyone even try.
“Were you always this disgusting?” she asked him.
“Oh, much, much more so,” he said.
His mouth was grinding away like a cement mixer as he continued his story.
The trial had ended in chaos, he said. Finally, one of the lords brought X the verdict.
Here, Banger appeared to get hit with a sugar high and, at the pivotal moment in his story, went on a tangent that Zoe found excruciating.
“The lord that showed up?” he said. “Only cool lord in the whole place. We call him Regent. He treats X like a son, almost. Anyway … Sorry. Lost my train of thought.” He giggled. “Choo-choo! Choo-choo!” he said. “Train of thought—get it?”
Zoe gave him a stern look.
“Tell me what happened,” she said. “Or I will take away your candy.”
Banger opened his mouth wide to air out his tongue.
<
br /> “You gotta take a chill pill,” he said.
“No one says that anymore,” said Zoe.
“Yeah, they didn’t even say it when I was alive,” said Banger. “But it’s a solid expression. Hey, is Taylor Swift still a thing? Is Chipotle still a thing?” He thought for a moment. “Is saying ‘is that a thing’ still a thing?”
Annoyed, Zoe reached forward and began pulling the candy away from him piece by piece. A Reese’s. A PowerBar. A Twix.
“Not the Twix!” said Banger. “It’s a candy bar and a cookie.”
He delivered the rest of the story in a rush:
“They told X he has to collect one more soul. If he doesn’t screw it up, if he doesn’t run crying to you or whatever—he’ll be set free. He can leave the Lowlands forever.”
Zoe listened as Banger spoke, her heart charging ahead of her.
“Forever?” she said. “I didn’t know that was even possible.”
“Me neither,” said Banger. “I still don’t understand half the rules. Friggin’ place should have a website.”
Zoe stood, so full of energy and emotion that she all but ran across the lobby. She didn’t want Banger to see her face.
“I can’t believe it,” she said. “It’s so—it’s so fair. Because he shouldn’t have been there in the first place. He was an innocent little kid and they treated him as if he was some kind of monster like—”
She broke off.
“Like me?” said Banger.
“I’m sorry,” said Zoe. “I’m not judging you. All I know is you were a bartender and you stabbed somebody in a bar—I don’t even know why. I’m just glad that X doesn’t have to suffer anymore.”
Neither of them spoke, as Zoe absorbed the astounding news about X. The only thing that stopped her from tap-dancing around the room was that she felt sorry for Banger. He would never be free. He shoved the remaining junk food into his pockets now—she could hear the potato chips splintering into dust as he forced them in—and threw the empty wrappers into the trash.
“You don’t have to leave,” said Zoe. “Do you? Can you stay a bit?”