by Steven James
“I’m meeting up with Nicole, and then later this afternoon we were thinking about checking out a movie in Superior with Kyle and Mia.”
“Listen, I snapped at you last night. I’m sorry. It’s just that there’s a lot going on. I should’ve cut you some slack.”
“Yeah, no. It’s cool. It’s fine. Did they find another wolf?”
“No. But I’d say four is plenty.”
“Do you have to work today?”
He nodded. “I should be home by six.”
After breakfast, Daniel took the bottle of meds that his dad had gotten for him yesterday and went into the bathroom.
He shook two pills into his hand.
They’re going to help you, Daniel. They’re going to make things better, get things back to normal.
But then another voice: Things aren’t ever going to get back to normal. Not after last fall. Everything has changed and there’s no going back.
He nudged the pills around his palm.
No going back.
Take them, Daniel.
No. Get rid of them.
Daniel was aware that everyone hears voices in their heads. We all carry on imaginary conversations, reframing what happened and thinking of clever comebacks after the fact. And it’s not just that: our consciences dog us and afflict us and ghost-words from long dead insults and cheap shots haunt us. Sometimes for a lifetime.
But this was different. These weren’t just words whispering through his mind. It was almost like one of the voices was coming from outside his head, as if he were hearing it spoken from another person altogether.
I’m real, Daniel. I am. You can listen to me and I’ll tell you what you need to do.
Then the voice inside his head replied: No, you’re not. You’re just an illusion, one that I hear.
I’m just as real as your conscience, as your dreams, as your memories. Everyone hears voices, Daniel.
But you’re not real. I know you’re not.
You can hear me. You can talk to me. What makes me less real than someone you can see?
Because they’re really there.
If I wasn’t real, you wouldn’t be able to hear me. If I wasn’t real, why would you be arguing with me?
Conflicted, Daniel stared at the two pills.
His thoughts continued to go back and forth, shifting, tilting, turning into an argument with himself.
If it was going to be a week or two until the medication kicked in, even if he did take these now, it wasn’t going to change things for a while.
He walked over to the toilet, just as he’d done so many times in the past couple months, to flush the two pills—always two at a time, never the whole bottle, just in case his dad happened to check his meds.
However, taking them would at least start to help. That was the thing. Everything had been getting weirder and weirder since yesterday morning and he needed to reverse that trend as soon as possible before something serious happened.
You need them. You need whatever help you can get.
He poured himself a glass of water, took a gulp, and swallowed the pills.
Daniel told himself that now things would be different, that the incident last night wasn’t anything to be concerned about. But, as hard as he tried, he couldn’t convince himself that he had carried that knife into his dad’s room without any intention of using it.
He needed answers and he needed them before tonight when he would go to sleep again, and perhaps have another nightmare—or worse, go sleepwalking.
And maybe do more than just carry that knife around.
Maybe use it.
He texted Nicole, asking her to give him a call when she got a chance and only a few minutes later his phone rang.
“Hey,” she said. “What’s going on?”
“You’re up already?”
“Weird dreams. What about you?”
“I had trouble sleeping. Listen, there’s something I want to check out. Can you meet at the parking lot to the trailhead for the Pine River Trail?”
“When?”
“This morning sometime. Ten or so?”
“Done.”
“Dress for the weather.”
“Are you going to tell me what we’re doing?”
“It’s a surprise, silly.”
“You got that line from me.” He could almost hear her smiling.
“That is possible.”
Okay, so ten o’clock gave him a little over an hour to look into things before he needed to leave.
He’d been planning on searching for information about wolves to follow up on some ideas he’d had about the poaching, but right now, reading up on sleepwalking seemed like more of a priority.
Last summer he’d heard that there were people who had driven across town in their sleep, had even murdered people while sleeping, and, though it seemed unbelievable, it didn’t take him long to find information online to confirm it.
He found himself reading account after account of people who’d done strange things while they were asleep: cooking meals, tweeting meaningful messages, swimming across a lake, and yes, even killing people.
Just the thought that it was possible to murder someone while you were asleep made him never want to go to sleep again.
How can you fight something like that? How can you control what you do while you’re sleepwalking?
When he checked the time, he saw that it was already past nine forty and he needed to get moving if he was still going to make it to the Pine River trailhead by ten.
He texted Nicole that he was on his way, tugged on his winter boots, grabbed his coat, hat and gloves, and took off.
CHAPTER
FOURTEEN
Though still covered with snow, the trail was flattened out and packed down by people cross-country skiing on it.
As they hiked, Daniel debated whether or not to tell Nicole about what he’d written in his notebook, or about the girl with the tears of blood, or especially about waking up in his dad’s room holding that deer-gutting knife.
She already knew about the blurs he’d had last fall so it wasn’t like any of this would be a complete shock to her. But still, the things that’d been happening to him over the past twenty-four hours were getting more and more disturbing and he didn’t want to frighten her or make her worry about him.
In the end he decided that maybe she would be able to help him sort things out.
“Nicole, I walked in my sleep last night.”
“Did you . . . I mean . . .”
“No. I didn’t try to dig up any dead animals. I ended up in my dad’s bedroom. He woke up while I was standing there. It freaked him out pretty bad.”
“Yeah, no kidding.”
She listened quietly as he summarized what’d been going on with the visions of the girl in the white nightgown, the one who’d burned up. For the time being he didn’t mention the knife or the texts from Madeline.
“I think the blurs are trying to tell me something,” he said. “Like part of my mind is working through things and then trying to . . . Well . . .”
“Reveal answers to you.”
“Yes.”
“Like with Emily last fall.”
“Exactly.”
“But answers to what?”
“That’s the thing—I don’t know.”
He still wasn’t sure he wanted to bring up that knife.
Move into the topic slowly.
“This morning I was doing research on homicidal sleepwalking—it’s when someone who’s sleepwalking kills another person.”
“Why?”
“Why would they kill someone?”
“No, why were you researching it?”
“Because of . . . Well, because I wanted to find out if I might hurt someone while I was sleeping.�
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“But homicidal sleepwalking? That’s crazy.”
“I know, but it actually does happen, usually between family members. One time in England this guy strangled his wife in his sleep and when he woke up he had no memory of it. He was found not guilty of murder. Another guy threw his daughter out a window. Then this one woman—”
“Okay, I get it. I don’t want to hear any more. It’s kind of disturbing.”
“Right.”
“And so all this scares you? Is that it? I mean, considering that you’ve started sleepwalking again?”
“Yes. It does.”
They both walked in silence for a little while, then Daniel finally said, “So the scariest thing is: How can you stop yourself from doing something terrible while you’re sleeping? I mean, if you’re not even conscious of it happening, you could climb out of bed, murder someone, crawl back into bed and wake up and not remember any of it.”
“I don’t think you need to worry about any of that happening.”
Tell her about the knife.
No.
Yes. You can trust her.
No, she’ll be afraid of you. You’ll scare her.
When he didn’t reply she reiterated. “Really, Daniel. You would never do anything terrible in your sleep.”
You need to tell her. Go ahead.
“Nicole, last night when I woke up in my dad’s bedroom I was holding a knife.”
“What?”
“I was holding a knife. A hunting knife.”
“So that’s why you were looking up the stuff on homicidal sleepwalking.”
“Yes.”
“You would never hurt him, Daniel. You wouldn’t hurt anyone. I just don’t believe a person could do that, harm someone—or especially not kill ’em—unless that’s part of you, unless there’s something inside of you—I don’t know, I mean without some hatred or anger or something like that motivating you to do it. And that’s not you. Not you at all.”
Two wolves inside.
Fighting.
Always fighting.
“I’m not so sure,” he said. “But I know one thing.”
“What’s that?”
“We need to figure out why the blurs have started again. And we need to do it before tonight.”
“When you go to bed again.”
“Yes.”
They had to leave the trail to get to where Daniel was planning to take her. After they did, he led her through the woods to the south, toward the Traybor Institute.
There were a few ponds nearby. The lakes and waterways in this part of the state would freeze, not always this early in winter, but it all depended on the weather. Right now, the ice was at that stage where you could probably walk across it safely, but taking a snowmobile or a car out there to go ice fishing would definitely not be a good idea.
“It’s not too far,” he told her as they bypassed the nearest pond.
They crossed a snowmobile trail that ended at an isolated road that led to a series of cabins encircling Waunakee Lake.
“So, are you going to tell me where we’re going or is it still a surprise?” she asked.
At this point he couldn’t think of any good reason to keep it from her. “It’s that place they built last fall over on the edge of the forest, you know, that research station.”
“Why are we going there?”
“I was looking through some maps last night and it got me thinking.”
“Go on.”
He still hadn’t told her about the mysterious texts he’d been receiving. Everything else so far involved what he had been doing or thinking, but the messages involved someone else, because obviously someone was sending them to him.
The text last night led him to the basement.
It’ll hurt her feelings if she finds out about the texts. She’ll wonder who Madeline is. She’ll wonder if there’s something going on between you and another girl.
“It’s kind of a long story,” he said. “But this one map made me think of that institute. I’m wondering if it has something to do with the wolf poaching.”
“Why would you think that?”
“After it was built, maybe a month or so later, the wolves started getting killed. Plus, it’s located pretty much right in the middle of the area where the wolves are being shot.”
They tramped through the snow until they could see the outline of the facility a few hundred feet away through the bare, leafless trees.
Going closer, they found a metal fence surrounding the property. It had a slanted top that was laced with razor wire.
“So, do you know what they do here?” Nicole asked.
“Fish management studies. That’s what I heard.”
“A fish management place that’s surrounded with a razor wire fence?”
“Doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, does it?”
“I’m thinking not.”
While they stood there, a van from the Wisconsin Department of Corrections rounded the corner of a nearby county road and rumbled toward the building. The gate opened and the vehicle entered the property.
“Okay,” Nicole said, “and why would a prison transport van be visiting a fish research facility?”
“I have no idea.”
The two of them ducked behind a downed log, but leaned up just enough to watch what was going on.
Two officers—or they might have been prison guards, it was hard to tell—led another man out of the back of the van.
Nicole whispered, “Is that guy in handcuffs?”
“I think so.”
“Okay, this is too weird. We should take off.”
“They might see us if we do. We need to wait until they’re inside.”
Daniel recognized one of the cops as the man who’d driven into the snowbank last night, the one who’d congratulated him after the game.
When he and Kyle had gone to help him, Nicole hadn’t gotten out of the car so Daniel doubted she would realize who it was. “That guard on the left,” he said, “that’s the man from last night, the one who went off the road.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No. It’s him.”
Their conversation was interrupted by a series of deep, guttural growls coming from the other side of the property hemmed in by the fence.
Dark flashes of movement appeared between the trees as four guard dogs barreled toward them.
The officers who were leading their prisoner stopped and stared in Daniel and Nicole’s direction, but the two of them quickly slipped behind the log again.
Daniel wasn’t sure if they’d made it down fast enough to avoid being seen. He imagined the men coming closer, finding him and Nicole and questioning them, and he tried to think of a good reason why they would be out here hiding behind a log, something he could tell them that would satisfy them, but he couldn’t come up with anything that sounded very reasonable.
He waited, waited, waited until he thought maybe the officers would’ve stopped checking in their direction. When he glanced at Nicole, he saw her staring at him, her eyes wide and nervous.
From the sound of it, the dogs were close.
Slowly, Daniel raised his head just high enough to have a look.
The guards and the prisoner were disappearing into the facility’s front door, but the dogs had arrived and leapt at the fence, snapping and clawing at it.
“Okay. Time to go,” he told Nicole. “Before someone comes to see what’s up with those dogs.”
They retraced their steps through the snow and were almost back to the Pine River Trail when a gunshot echoed through the air.
It didn’t come from the facility, but rather from the other side of a hill just to their left.
CHAPTER
FIFTEEN
Daniel scanned the forest to see if h
e could locate the person who’d fired the gun. Though he couldn’t see anyone, to really get a good look he would need to climb the hill and search the woods nearby.
“Is it hunting season?” Nicole asked uneasily.
“Maybe for turkey and small game, but that sounded like a rifle, not a shotgun.” If someone was rifle hunting, the shot could have been taken from a hundred or more yards away—depending on how good a shot the person was.
“And there aren’t any shooting ranges around here,” she said.
“Not even close.”
“So. Poaching.”
“Yeah. Maybe. Probably.”
“What do you think we should do?”
“I guess we should check it out—at least take a quick look and see if we can catch sight of the shooter.”
“Do you think that would be safe? Looking around, I mean?”
“As long as we’re careful.”
“But if the person who fired the gun really is poaching wolves, he certainly won’t want to be caught.”
“You’re thinking he might fire at us?”
She was quiet.
If Daniel had been by himself he might have been a little more apt to poke around, but with Nicole here he realized he didn’t want to take any chances. “Good point.”
They skirted along the base of the hill. No one appeared; no more shots were fired.
They hadn’t gone far before they found the trail of frothy blood in the snow.
It was still fresh and was paralleling a set of wolf tracks.
“Oh, no.” Nicole’s voice was ripe with sadness. “Please, no.”
From Daniel’s deer hunting trips with his dad, he knew that the frothy blood meant the animal had been hit in the lungs. Most likely a kill shot.
He studied the woods in front of them for any sign of the wolf, then looked back to see if the person who’d taken the shot might be following the blood trail. He didn’t see the animal, and the forest behind them was empty.
Nicole looked at him. “We should follow the tracks to see if it’s okay.”