by Barry Napier
He scrolled to Stephanie’s number, his thumb hovering over the CALL icon. He was nearly certain that she wouldn’t answer but didn’t see the harm in trying. He was sure she was expecting him to at least try a few times.
He sent the call and listened as the phone rang twice and then went to voice mail. He listened to her recorded message and almost stayed on the line to wait for the beep. But he killed the call, not even sure what sort of message he would leave.
As he sat in the quiet of the hotel room with its bland and perfectly square shapes to everything, Cooper came to a realization that he did not like at all: for the first time in more than five or six years, he was legitimately frightened.
He had no expensive government-purchased equipment to help him. He had no book or hidden agenda at the forefront of his mind to use as motivation. All he had now were parents that had never truly stopped grieving for their dead child, unable to do so because of the ghosts that occasionally visited their house. The desire to help someone other than himself was his only true driving motivation, and that scared him.
What if he failed? What if he found that after his disappearance and without the aid of his old ego and drive, he could not face the unknown as he once had? He felt especially naked and useless without his government-purchased equipment. What good could he do without his old technological fallbacks?
These were all heavy thoughts that seemed to make the motel room feel like a coffin. He stepped out of the room and walked down to the parking lot. To the right of the lot, the motel was separated by the neighboring motel by a strip of asphalt that was filled with sand. A fence ran along the length of this divide, meandering to the back of both buildings where it stopped at a wooden walkway that led out onto the beach.
Cooper followed this path and found the beach empty. He walked out in his bare feet, reminded of how he had felt yesterday morning when he had first stepped out onto this sand. It felt like two weeks ago rather than two days.
He looked out to the sea, trying to rationalize his fears. He had never fully understood the hold that the ocean had on some people, but as he watched it under the moonlight, it made a bit of sense. From where he stood, it seemed to go on forever. Out near the horizon, there was a darkness that seemed to promise limitless depth and things without end. In comparison, his fears about what he was planning to do seemed insignificant.
He knew how clichéd he looked—the lonely troubled man staring blankly out to sea at night. But he was surprised to find that it helped. He thought of Pickman and of Mary Guthrie’s Scrabble tiles as he stared into the darkness.
Dark water, he thought.
For a moment, it sounded like the crashing waves were speaking those words to him.
A chilled breeze swept through. The ocean droned on, offering its tired but enchanting lullaby. The water remained moving yet unmoving all at once. It was peaceful, it was—
Without warning, Cooper saw a perfect picture in his mind that took his breath away. It came to the surface of his mind like a whale out there in the endless darkness of the ocean, only to surface for a moment before plunging back into the deep.
Cooper caught the briefest glimpse of something but he wasn’t sure what it was. He saw flat terrain the color of rust and the shapes of boulders in the distance. He saw an endless vista of sky that was a faded shade of blue so light that it was almost white. At the horizon, there was a delicate shade of purple that looked like it was dancing. It wavered in a way that looked like it was beckoning, telling him to come forward. Behind that there were faint ghostlike shapes, the peaks of what he thought to be enormous mountains.
There was uncertainty in this place, in the muted colors and the horizon that seemed to be pulling him forward. But there was also a sense of tremendous peace that he felt in every muscle of his body, every—
And then it was gone.
Cooper stood on the beach, eyes wide. He was holding his breath, concentrating with everything he had to get the vision to come back.
No, he thought. Not a vision. A memory.
Then, with a certainty that was as large as the sea before him, another thought came.
That’s where I was. That’s where I went when I disappeared.
Cooper continued to stare out to the dark sea, hoping that it might trigger whatever had pushed that momentary memory to the surface. He tried dredging it back up but it was like trying to think of a word that was on the tip of your tongue but got little assistance from the brain to be spoken. Whenever he tried to find those memories, all he could come up with were images of the small town of Tilton, Kansas, the last city he had visited before disappearing.
He remembered a teenage boy, but not his name. He remembered a junk yard and some weird fear that was linked to it.
But that’s where the memories ended.
After five minutes of this, he grew frustrated. He was also suddenly very tired. He didn’t know if it was the mental strain or the effect of the memory itself, but he was exhausted. With a final look to the sea and the white caps of the countless waves, Cooper turned back around and walked back to his motel.
When he reached his room, he shook the sand from his feet and crawled into bed. He set the alarm clock for 5:30, knowing that tomorrow’s events would be grueling and might take all day. He lay down in bed with the picture of that place that had suddenly come to his mind on the beach.
Already, his memory of it was starting to fade.
He looked to the red digital numbers of the clock, his eyes growing heavy. He faintly read the time, 11:51, and then let sleep claim him.
22
When the phone rang, Cooper snapped awake with a jerk. It was not the gentle purring of his cellphone, but the annoying blast of the motel phone on the bedside table. He sat up quickly, his thoughts in a jumbled mess. Had he called down to the desk for a wake-up call? He didn’t think so. He was pretty sure he had set the alarm clock.
The phone rang again. With blurry eyes, Cooper looked at the alarm clock and saw that it was 3:22.
Steph, he thought. He hoped.
He answered the phone in the middle of its far-too-loud third ring. He was still so jostled and sluggish from sleep that he nearly dropped the receiver as he brought it to his ear.
“Hello?” he said.
The voice on the other end was female, but it wasn’t Stephanie.
“I’m sorry to call so late,” the woman said. Her voice was thick and wavering with fright and panic. “It’s Jenny Blackstock. We…I…I think we might need your help.”
The sleep that had been clinging to him slid off instantly, as if it had been nothing more than a cheap sheet.
“What is it?” Cooper asked. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah, we’re fine. It’s just…I don’t know…something happened. It’s worse than it’s ever been. We don’t know what to do and—,”
In the background, Cooper heard something clatter to the floor. Immediately after this was Sam Blackstock’s voice yelling “Get out!”
Cooper was now very much awake. More than that, he felt a surge of adrenaline spiking through him.
“I can be there in ten minutes,” he said.
He hung up the phone so fast that he cut off Jenny Blackstock as she gave him a shaky “Thank you.”
***
The first thing Cooper noticed when he pulled up to the Blackstock’s house was that every light in the house was on. It looked like a weird misplaced lighthouse in comparison to the darkened houses surrounding it. As he walked to the front door, Cooper looked to the left and could just barely make out the murky shape of Mary Guthrie’s house six houses down. He wondered if Amy and Kevin had ever come back after their little Scrabble encounter.
The front door to the Blackstock’s house opened up as Cooper was walking up the stairs. Jenny stood aide, letting him come in. It was obvious that she had been crying; her eyes were red and puffy and she looked exhausted. Her hair was still in sleep-stressed shambles. She tucked a loose strand of it behind
her ear as she greeted him.
“Is everything okay?” Cooper asked.
“We’re fine,” she said. “I don’t think they can hurt us. Can they?”
“Who?”
She shrugged and said just two words. When she said it, she did so with a broken nervous laugh. It chilled Cooper. He thought it was the sound of someone that was losing their grip on their sanity.
“The ghosts,” she said.
“Are they still here?”
Jenny looked surprised for a moment. Cooper assumed that she had been expecting some disbelief or hesitancy on his part. His eagerness to accept her word on such a wild claim had taken her by surprise.
“Yes. Upstairs. Come on.”
He followed her up the stairs and could sense the changes in the house right away. The atmosphere was drastically different from when he had last been in their house. The air was thicker and chilled. While the cold air in Mary Guthrie’s house had made the hairs on his neck stand on end, the one in the Blackstock’s house made him want to shiver. He’d experience this sort of coldness a few times and on each occasion, things of monumental importance had occurred.
Cooper found himself mentally filing through each case where he had experienced such a dramatic shift in the atmosphere of a house, but wouldn’t allow himself to get distracted. He sensed that things were happening far too fast and that he had very little time.
“Where’s Sam?” he asked as they neared the stairs.
“He’s on the back porch, watching the beach,” Jenny said. “He swears he saw someone standing down there after all of this started happening.”
They came to the top of the stairs and Cooper paused before walking into the living room. He took in the scene as best as he could, trying to make sense of what was happening before he focused solely on the fact that there was definitely another presence in the room with them.
The living room and the adjoining kitchen were littered with fragments from broken plates and glasses. The handle to a coffee mug was on the living room carpet two feet in front of Cooper. Two pictures had been thrown from the walls and a few refrigerator magnets were scattered across the floor.
Jenny pointed to a small glass that was lying by the foot of the couch, partially shattered. “That hit Sam in the side of the head,” she said. “It didn’t hurt him—not really—but it scared us.”
Cooper slowly walked across the room, towards the small dining area. He looked through the sliding glass door and saw Sam standing on the porch. He stood at the top of the stairs, looking out to the sea. Cooper looked in that direction as well but saw nothing beyond the Blackstock’s yard, despite the back porch light.
Cooper then turned and walked back into the living room, trying to get a feel for the other presence. He didn’t feel anything immediately threatening, but there was certainly something in the Blackstock’s house that was darker than what he had experienced in Mary’s home.
“What happened?” he asked. “Tell me as much as you can.”
“At first, it was just like all of the other times,” Jenny said. As she spoke, she glanced cautiously around the living room, as if she were waiting for some unseen assailant to come out of hiding. “We heard the laughing kids and Sam got out of bed right away. Within a few seconds, the laughter sounded more like crying. This one…well, it was a boy this time and we…we…,”
Jenny stopped here, looking to the shattered plates, glass, magnets and other debris on the floor.
“You thought it might be Henry,” Cooper said.
“Yeah. Isn’t that stupid?”
“No, it isn’t Not at all.”
Jenny shook the thought away and did her best to go on. “We came out here and the laughter or crying or whatever it was…well, it was right here in the room with us. Usually, it sort of fades out, but it stayed this time. We asked if the laughing boy was Henry. We didn’t get an answer. But the noise tapered off and the room got really cold.”
“Did you hear anything other than laughter and crying?”
“Yeah. It was like a bad radio reception, only without the static. That’s the only way I know how to describe it. We heard a few kids and it sounded like their noises were coming in through that sort of filter. That was before all of the plates and glasses started coming out of the cupboards.”
“You didn’t see anything while it was happening?”
“Just the stuff flying out of the cupboards and off of the kitchen counter.”
“But no kids?”
“No, I didn’t see anything like that. But Sam started yelling at something. He said he saw a man leaving the house, leaving off of the back porch and heading for the beach.”
“Was he able to describe him?”
Jenny shook her head. “He said all he saw was black. Just the black, shadowy shape of a man.”
“Did he—,” Cooper started, but he stopped before he could fully form the question.
The room went frigid and for a split second, Cooper felt like someone had taken the air of his lungs. It was like being punched in the stomach, only without the punch.
“What is that?” Jenny asked. “Do you feel it?”
Cooper nodded and started looking around the house. Somewhere off in the distance, he thought he heard a child screaming.
“Did you hear that?” he asked.
Jenny nodded, her eyes wide. She was crying, a single tear rolling down her cheek. She looked absolutely terrified as she brought her hand to her mouth.
“I hate to ask you this,” Cooper said, “but does it sound like Henry?”
Jenny seemed to think about it for a moment and then shook her head. “No. But my God, what the hell is that cold?”
As if in response to her question, the dining room table trembled next to them. They both turned that way and when they did, they saw the chair closest to Cooper begin to rise into the air.
Again, Cooper heard a child’s scream and it was just like Jenny had described—like hearing a crackled voice through a bad radio reception.
Cooper tried to understand it, sure that it was saying something. But as he concentrated, the chair was suddenly thrown towards him. It came with very little force, but it struck him on the waist hard enough to make him stumble.
Jenny cried out as Cooper went to his left knee. He stood up right away, fully expecting another chair to come sailing at him.
Instead, he received something that he was unprepared for. It was something that he had experienced only once before in his decade or so in the field, and he had hoped to never experience it again.
There was a split second where he saw a figure standing directly in front of him. It was rushing at him, its edges nothing more than blurs of motion that trailed out in transparent waves behind it. Just before the figure struck him, he saw its face. It was the same face that he had seen on the black rocks the night before, right down to the rotted teeth.
The apparition passed through Cooper, sending a spike of frigid energy through him. It brought with it a simple message, echoed with voiceless words that sounded like low rumbling thunder creeping across a field on a humid summer evening.
GO AWAY!
Cooper went to the floor, his stomach clenching and his heart feeling as if it had been pierced with an icicle. He clenched his teeth and let out a moan, trying to keep some aspect of the apparition inside of him. He needed to feel it, to understand it…it was something he had not known to do when it had happened to him years ago.
But now with the fear pushed to the very fringes of his mind and a chilly determination gripping him, Cooper felt the presence inside of him a something other than the simple coldness of its being. He saw flashes of what the figure was and could actually sense what it felt for the briefest of moments.
The entity was full of hate…a blinding rage that made Cooper cringe. He saw a large ship right out of the history books, a little girl, and a crowd of people. Many of the people were shouting. Some had guns.
He then saw blood, the darkness of
a tunnel, and water so black, it looked like oil.
Dark Water.
And around it all, there were the children. The screaming children that reached out for something to grab onto as ocean water poured into their mouths, into their lungs—
That was enough. Cooper let out a brief scream and allowed the last remnants of the apparition to exit his body. He felt it go like some large insect that had landed on his chest and crawled around for a while, suddenly taking off on misshapen wings.
He coughed twice, feeling like there was something that needed to come up. But once he caught his breath again, he was fine.
There was a hand on his shoulder that he realized belonged to Jenny Blackstock.
“My God, what happened?” she asked.
Cooper made it to his knees and then, using the side of the dining table, he got to his feet. The chill inside of him had already started to thaw and he could sense an immediate change in the room.
“I was attacked,” Cooper said.
“By what?”
Cooper caught his breath and then took a seat at the table. He rubbed at his temples, feeling a headache starting to bloom. There was too much going on in there right now. He heard Pickman’s demand (GO AWAY) and the screaming of those children, all layered together.
“Go get Sam,” Cooper said. “He’ll want to hear this, too.”
He had made up his mind that the Blackstocks should know the basics of what he thought was happening.
“Is everything okay?” Jenny asked.
“I don’t know. But the man Sam is watching for on the beach just left. His name is Douglass Pickman and he just passed right through me.”
“Did he hurt you?”
“It wasn’t pleasant, but I’m okay. He just wanted to scare me, and he did a damn good job. But I’m not going anywhere just yet.”
“One second,” Jenny said. Her face was pale as she headed for the sliding glass door.
Cooper watched her open it, leaving it cracked as she went out to her husband. The soft sounds of the night surf crashing on the shore crept in and until Jenny and Sam came back in, Cooper could have sworn he heard Pickman speaking through it, repeating that same message.