“Here, take one of these. I’ll keep the other for now.”
Christopher had something in his hands. Tom had no idea exactly when the kid had grabbed them down from the top of the hutch by the cabinets, next to the phone, but he had one in each hand. They were drinking glasses Stephanie had left behind, ones that had fancy patterns — they looked like prisms, like glasses that had been smashed and glued back together in a stylish way. “Crystal,” Stephanie had called them.
“So what’s happening to him,” said Tom referring to the burning kid, numbly playing along. “He going back to the source?”
Christopher held one of the crystal glasses out to Tom. The kid stood there, his brow furrowed, making him look apologetic. Tom realized the odor of the kid had evolved from stale to mountain-air, from a cloistered scent to a nostalgic blend of childhood days, snowball fights, and ice forts.
“No,” said Christopher. “I think he’s being taken by the other side of things. We’ll try and ease his pain.”
“What’re you doing with those?”
Christopher said nothing. Instead he held the glass out closer to Tom’s reach. Tom almost started to say how they couldn’t take Steph’s good crystal, but stopped himself. Saying that, for some reason, would threaten to break him right on the spot, would at last make all that was happening too real or too unbearable, or both. Instead, he reached out and took the glass.
“Where does your water come from?”
“It’s well-water,” said Tom.
It made him think again of the kid who’d placed the call from the convenience store.
“Good,” Christopher said. “Fill it up.”
Tom was starting to get it. He looked at the kid with a raised eyebrow in return. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
* * *
The garage smelled of oil and paint thinner. The shelves Tom had been building for Brian still sat in the corner, unfinished. The can of polyurethane he had planned to varnish them with sat on the workbench at the back of the stall, the jar of pungent paint thinner next to it.
Christopher got in the passenger side of the car and Tom rounded the front of the Chevy to get in the driver’s side. He made a conscious effort not to look outside, not to peer through the six side-by-side garage door windows and become fixated again on the burning kid.
The keys were in the console. Tom never bothered to hide them. Not out here.
His empty coffee cup was still in one of the cup holders. He tossed it into the back and replaced it with Steph’s crystal glass filled with well water. Christopher set his next to Tom’s in the other holder.
Tom started the engine. Moving a little faster now, he reached up and clicked the button on the garage door opener, clipped to the visor. The door started with a jerk, noisy, and began to trundle up along its pulley. They drove out of the garage, into the wet, snowy night.
Once clear of the garage, Tom braked. They were in the open part of the driveway. The short way out to the main road was ahead and to the right. Parka was only a couple of yards away. The kid at the back was still burning, still snapping and popping silently, those comet-like things issuing from him, somehow, the flames orange and blue, limned white. Tom looked at Christopher, and the question must have been printed on his face.
“Go,” said Christopher. “We need to go now.”
Tom continued to sit a moment longer. “I can’t,” he said. Discouraged by the smallness he heard in his voice, he cleared his throat and said. “I’ve got to go inside. Call Bill Wepple. Call an ambulance. I’ve got to.”
“They’re wagerers,” said Christopher immediately and emphatically, having likely anticipated the argument from Tom. “They’re not the same as people. And this one is turning.”
“Turning?”
“Yes,” said Christopher. “Defective.”
“They’re just kids,” Tom said again. The Blazer was cold, despite the heated garage. They had only been back for maybe three hours, maybe a little more. The engine rumbled.
“No,” said Christopher, “they’re not.”
Tom leaned forward and, despite his internal opposition, looked closely at the four figures in his driveway. They each watched the Chevy Blazer. Mannequins. Still as statues.
“I can’t just go around them.”
“No. Stop at the last one. The one turning.”
The Chevy rolled forward. Tom started around the first kid, passing him on his left.
The wide-body Chevy did not easily fit between this first figure and the next. Tom spun the wheel and angled in between them. It was barely enough. The vehicle rubbed against the kid, and as it drew ahead, the side view mirror on Tom’s side caught the kid in the crook of his elbow and rotated him slowly.
Not statues after all, thought Tom.
The kid didn’t fall over, but his body, his clothes, made a shushing noise as they rubbed alongside of the Chevy. The sound sent chills down Tom’s spine.
Now past this second trespasser on his lawn, Tom had to spin the wheel hard left to get around the third. Then there was the kid who was on fire. Tom hit the brakes. Even though he hadn’t been going fast, not on the slick lawn in between the flanking trees, not with such a short drive to Cherry Road, the vehicle still slid for a moment. Tom felt the terror flash through him, the terror of impact, of running this kid over. Running him down like a deer.
“Tom,” said Christopher.
Tom looked over. Was he dreaming? Maybe this was only a dream, after all.
“Get out,” said the green-eyed stranger in the denim coat.
Then Christopher took his glass of water out of the cup holder. He opened the door, stopped and looked back in at Tom. His eyes went down to Tom’s glass still seated there in the console. Grab it.
“We can do this together.”
As soon as Tom got out, he heard the ringing again; high and distant, coming from all directions, faintly oscillating. As he met with Christopher at the front of the Chevy, the noise intensified, as it had before.
Tom forced himself to look at the burning kid.
What he was seeing wasn’t possible. The fire going like that, for as long as it had been, the kid should have been a crumpled heap of foul-smelling, charred flesh. But he looked out at them, at least, he looked toward them, and his face glowed inside the nimbus of fire around it; this ring of dancing, burning motes, a weird corona, a perversion of Christ’s crown of thorns. The edges of the flames licked out, now blue and purple. In fact, the more Tom stared, the more colors he saw. And still those corkscrewing bits, like embers from a bonfire spiraling off into the night.
He could see a face within the concert of light and particles. Not marred, not melting, but changing. The kid’s eyes looked animalistic, elongated. The irises seemed to bleed out into the whites, the color claiming the whole eye, turning it a muddled grey-black.
“This is. . .” Tom started to say. There were no words for it. He’d already thought it all, said it all, one way or another. There was nothing left. The only thing that made any kind of sense in this mad ordeal was in his hands. Without spending another moment deliberating, he tossed the well water onto the burning boy. At the exact time, waiting for his move, Christopher did the same.
The fire went out instantly. There was a hiss, but no steam. The second the water made contact with the flames (if it had been “contact” — it seemed the water had just passed right through, like the fire was merely a mirage) the human pyre was extinguished.
And the kid left standing there was soaked.
Head to toe; soaked. As if he hadn’t been doused with two cupfuls of water from the tap, but drenched in a downpour, or soaked to the skin with a fire hose. He dripped into the snow, forming a dark place where he stood.
Suddenly, Tom gagged. He turned and heaved, and brown vomit splattered the ground.
***
A few moments later they barreled down the narrow Cherry Road, evergreens and maples blurring past. Tom wiped his mouth. He saw spots, like co
nfetti, and was for a moment afraid he would pass out. The spots looked like the things that had been dancing and zipping around the lookout.
He felt a hand on his shoulder, but he didn’t look over. He angrily shrugged it away.
“What the hell did we just do?” He hadn’t intended on speaking. He barely recognized his own voice. He stopped. He took a deep breath. He reached into his inner pocket, his fingers squeezing past the crystal glass he’d put there, and pulled out his battered pack of cigarettes.
“Here,” said Christopher, “let me.”
Tom didn’t. He shook one out himself. Two more fell between his feet. He put the cigarette in his mouth and pressed in the lighter on the dash. The smell of his vomit, acidic, like so much burnt coffee, hung around his nostrils.
The lighter popped out and they turned out of the Acres, onto Route 33, headed back towards Lake Meer.
Tom lit his cigarette. His hands shook. The first inhalation of the smoke made him cough.
The big flakes of snow threw themselves on the windshield in death kisses, melting. He flipped on the wipers and sluiced them away, and looked over at Christopher. Christopher was watching the road.
“I’m taking you to the station,” said Tom. Christopher didn’t look over. “I’m sending a car out to my house to pick up the rest of your friends and take them in, too.”
“They won’t be there.”
“Well, they’ll be found. In the meantime, I think it’s best you just hang tight at the station with me.”
“I need to go to the hospital. To Little Rock.”
“Why?”
“The boy is there.”
“What boy?”
Christopher didn’t answer. He watched the road coming at them. They passed under a streetlight, one of few out here, and the flakes falling against the windshield dappled his face in shadows.
CHAPTER NINE
The digital clock on the Chevy’s dash read 2:38 AM. They drifted through downtown Red Rock Falls which looked to Milliner like a studio backlot. On Broad Street, the two and three-story buildings were made of brick, but appeared as though they were wooden flats, backdrops in a play.
The Red Rock Hotel was one of only a few buildings standing over three stories. Ten floors high, the old building was one of the last vestiges from when the region had been a more cosmopolitan place, teeming with outsiders who had big plans to cure tuberculosis and make movies.
“Moviemakers are liberals, and liberals are just intellectuals who have yet to be burned by the fire,” Tom’s father had once said.
Was he hallucinating now? Was this the fire which had burned that kid on his lawn? It was possible. This could all be what they called a schizo-paranoid breakdown, or something like that. The insomnia, plaguing him for months now, maybe longer, could be to blame. Like an after-effect, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder from Stephanie’s departure. Brian’s too. Tom had had a family not too long ago; he’d gotten up in the morning and strapped on his shoulder holster and slipped in his .38 Special. He’d stood in the bedroom door, watching the blanket rise and fall as Steph slept. You could hear and smell the sleeping in your home. You could feel it somewhere in your chest. For a very short time, life had felt good as he broke the day with a first cigarette, standing on the lawn in front of his woodland home.
Not long ago, no, but nevertheless in the past. History.
The Falls had burned before. In the twenties the village had been luminous, a beacon; a vacation spot and a place of recovery for various diseases of the fledgling century. The power elite had built their great camps. The institutes thrived. And then, with bootlegging at its height and the population at its peak, the great fires destroyed most of downtown. They’d been called “insurance fires,” and had taken place over a period of only a few years.
What remained now of the historic buildings, the cure cottages, the unused railroad station, was only an echo of that period.
There was no one in the streets. They drove through the ditch hours. Christopher was awake, though the kid’s breathing was barely perceptible.
From the beginning, Tom’s gut had told him that the kid was okay. Different, maybe, but different never hurt anybody.
What hurt people. . . well, it wasn’t exactly evil — evil was a word hipshot all too often, especially in small, predominantly religious communities like Red Rock. Evil often supplanted a more specific, perhaps more realistic explanation, whether it was “secular” or not, Tom didn’t care. Low-income. That was one. Mental illness was another. If some root evil was responsible for poverty and insanity, Tom didn’t know. That wasn’t part of his investigations. If there was a bigger picture, then it had more to do with the bureaucracies, the corporations which governed. And the past, which lorded over all.
Tom had never been much of an activist, but neither had he gone to Vietnam. Maddy had told him once, before she disappeared over the hills, bound for San Francisco, that he was the luckiest man alive. Both Tom and his brother had gotten some of the highest draft numbers possible, making them almost literally last on the list. While the war had been ongoing, Tom had honed his carpentry skills with Charlie (a far better carpenter) and they’d plied the trade in Red Rock, and in other nearby villages and hamlets, finding all the home-building and home-repair they could in a wartime economy. There were few men to compete for the work, and people weren’t saving their money. Demand-pull inflation, it’d been called.
But afterwards, Red Rock had again become a dismal place overnight. Something his mother had said summed up the transformation in Tom’s mind, something that resonated more than any socioeconomic theory. “The world has left Red Rock,” she’d said.
There had been concern that their father would disapprove of their not going to Vietnam, if even by legal and mathematical means. Particularly, Tom had been worried about what his father would say or do to him, since Charlie seemed to be the son that always flew under the radar when it came to Frank Milliner. But Frank never said or did much of anything — he hadn’t even called Tom a coward, which had been the young man’s fear.
There was one thing Tom remembered his father had said to him directly, one admonishment that had never left him.
Dying in his own bed, besieged with an illness that had the doctors scratching their heads, Frank told his son: “You will still need to serve.”
Tom now thought of it, this maxim that his father had bestowed on him, as a sort of capsule. We receive, Tom sometimes reflected late at night, these capsules from time to time, usually when we are younger. In them lies a seed. But it takes time for the capsules to dissolve, and for the seed to take hold. They say that an oak exists in an acorn. Did the acorn know? There was a feeling, so implacable that it was distinct, which filled Tom’s being when he received such a capsule — it was the feeling, unarticulated, that the answer already lay within.
You need to serve.
But we sometimes resist what we instantly recognize to be our destiny.
Tom made a left through a blinking yellow and they started out of downtown, toward where the police station sat on the eastern outlet of the village.
Christopher stirred beside him. He straightened himself and sat upright.
“Dozing like that,” said Tom, “not very fitting for a vampire, ghost, what-have-you.”
Tom lit a cigarette, feeling punchy. He held the pack over in front of Christopher, who shook one out. There were only a couple left. Tom thought he would have to get some more when the shops opened —the Sunoco would be the first. That place which used to be called “Augsbury Market” years ago, with Chevron gas for a dollar fifty a gallon.
And the payphone outside.
Tom pulled the Blazer abruptly over to the side of the road.
He turned to look at Christopher, expecting him to be looking back with raised eyebrows and a puzzled expression, but the kid just lit his cigarette, and then rolled down the window on the passenger’s side. He dragged and exhaled.
Tom watched him. The jury
was still out, but the running theory on things was that Christopher had been to the Kingston place earlier that night, yes, and had been inside with the girl, Jared’s girlfriend. Tom had seen her once. Cute. Young. Likely there had been an altercation — perhaps the young woman was cheating on Jared with Christopher, or maybe they had once been together, and he was suffering unrequited love. Who knew? But likely there had been some sort of conflict, and Christopher had left.
Tom realized he would have a lot of explaining to do at the station. After picking Christopher up, a kid with no ID or money on him, Tom had driven them home, to his place. He hadn’t notified the troopers, and he hadn’t dropped the kid off anywhere. Both of these facts strongly suggested an altered state of mind and a violation of procedure. Not to mention, he was going to have to describe some sort of supernatural event on his lawn. They’d look at him with those sad eyes and they’d ask him to kindly step aside while they hatched plans to get him psych-evaluated or tender his resignation.
Cold tendrils invaded his pelvic area, circling the base of his spine, in the same way real anxiety had hit him since he was a kid. The idea that his mind had turned on him at last made him feel cold, lonely, and afraid. The idea that his ability to do his job would be called into question was next in line. But, really, though, beyond all of this, he had to wonder.
For God’s sake, a kid had been burning on his lawn. Tom had put him out with a fucking tiny glass of water. And here he was, bringing Christopher in to the goddam station like a petty thug. Something was going on. To stop now, to lay it in front of the Red Rock County Sheriff’s Department, would destroy any chance Tom would have of getting to the bottom of what was going on. And wasn’t that his job? Christopher had committed no crime, but here Tom was, ready to turn him in. Ready to pass it on to someone else, to hope someone else would handle it, just the way he had with the payphone caller from the convenience store those many years ago. The kid who had wound up in the bottom of a well.
“How did you know about this place?” Tom jerked his head out the window. “The payphone. The whole scene.”
HIGHWATER: a suspense thriller you won't be able to put down Page 7