HIGHWATER: a suspense thriller you won't be able to put down

by T. J. Brearton

  The next thing she knew, someone was in the doorway again, and this time she was sure that it was Tom — she could smell the cigarettes and Old Spice cologne on him. He came in and looked at the two of them again. She wanted to open her eyes and sit up and acknowledge him, but she didn’t. She couldn’t. A strange pall had come over her. Her body would not respond to her commands, and the words, Hello? and Help! felt like they were spoken behind soundproof glass.

  Milliner left the room. She heard the sound of the door snick shut as it closed.

  She tried to move again and found that she could, a little. She shifted her weight and withdrew her arm from Caleb. She touched her eyes gingerly. Something was covering her lids and lashes. Like plastic. Touching it sent a shockwave of memory through her, and she felt her heart leap. She was suddenly there, sitting on the chair and overlooking the pond, glass of wine in her hand, and then she was standing, in her memory, and the glass fell and shattered on the fieldstone path.

  When the electric wave of it passed, she found that she had brought her other hand to her neck. The locket was gone.

  She wished Finna was there, or even the nurse, Madison. She wished anyone was there. She was tired.

  Elizabeth put her arm back around Caleb.

  No one was in the room with them now. No investigator, no malformed, oversized demon-creature. She felt sure they were alone. She also knew, deep within her, that something was going to take place which she would have to face alone. With no Christopher or Jared by her side, no Finna to defer to, not even the protection and friendship of Investigator Milliner or the mothering comfort of the loving nurse.

  Something was very close now, waiting, waiting for her, and she would have to encounter it alone. It had covered her eyes, preparing her. It would come for her again. For years, she had known it was coming.

  Liz pulled Caleb closer to her and kissed the top of his head, smelling the shampoo again.

  Whatever it was, whatever was coming, it was not going to take her son.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  Caleb woke up.

  His first concern was where his mother was, but he almost immediately sensed she was next to him in the bed.

  Caleb had wondered about his mommy for some time. He had been told by other people that he had a mommy, and sometimes was shown pictures by the one who they said was his daddy, but it felt like they were telling stories. He knew that the woman in the picture and the man named Mark Massey weren’t his real mommy and daddy; he had known for some time.

  He had dreamed about his real mother, and when, one night, he had awakened, crying out for her, and his not-real mommy and daddy weren’t there, a nice man had come to him, and the nice man had made him feel better. He had told Caleb that his real mommy “was at her house,” and so that was what Caleb began to tell his friends at nursery school — that his mommy, his real mommy, was “at her house.” He knew that meant something else.

  The nice man had told him, “Your mommy is away, but she loves you very much.”

  And Caleb had hugged him and said, “Yeah, my mommy loves me very much. She wants to give me a big hug.” Then Caleb had cried and said, “What did I do?”

  “You didn’t do anything,” the nice man had said.

  Caleb reached up and pulled the pacifier from his mouth and let it fall onto the mattress. He felt along his mother’s forearm. He tried to open his eyes, but he couldn’t. They were stuck.

  The birds had gotten him again.

  Although Caleb thought of them as birds, he knew that they weren’t birds really. He’d seen many pictures of birds, and seen them in real life, sitting on telephone wires, in the branches of bare trees, hopping along the ground at times (which he chased after, whether in his dreams or not he wasn’t sure) — these creatures were different.

  They had different mouths. Birds, he knew, had “beaks.” Some had “bills,” like you called money, but not. These had a kind of sucker instead, like the end of an elephant’s trunk. These long sucker-noses could come out — once, he’d seen one stretch all the way across his bedroom when he was in what he had been told was fosser care. Because his not-real mommy had drug problems.

  He’d seen it go across the room, around the beds of the other little boys and girls. A long, black thing, with little white hairs on it.

  Caleb brushed his mommy’s forearm with his fingers. She was by far his most special person. He had lots of special people — he had a soshu worker, for one, whom he hadn’t seen in a while and had almost forgotten about. She seemed to be around most all of the time, but he wondered why she wasn’t here now, at the hospital. The hospital, the place Curious George and Corduroy Bear had gone before him, making it alright.

  Caleb knew that something was in the room with them. He knew it was one of the birds. The bird had arms and legs, though, kind of like he did, but walked on all four of them, like a doggie or a tiny elephant. He knew it had gotten up onto the bed; he had been dreaming when it climbed up.

  Caleb really had no concept of time. Not like grown-ups did. He did know, though, that his mommy had been gone. The nice man had told him; still those others had tried to convince him who his parents were, but he had always known the truth.

  He also knew: court. He also knew: jail. He also knew lollipops and clean underwear. He knew that he loved his mommy and daddy, both the real ones and the not-real ones. He knew that he loved everybody, even the birds, even though they were not nice birds, but the kind that could hurt you.

  He also knew that the birds were somebody else’s pets. Caleb had a keen understanding of what was “somebody else’s.” There were lots of things that were somebody else’s. Food, toys, clothes, even bodies, the adults told him. “You can’t touch him,” they would say if he had pushed another boy, “because his body is his own.” Caleb understood this, but he also knew that his body was all of him. It was as much a part of who “he” was as anything else. Everybody’s body was. Therefore, he had learned not to push, not just because of what they had told him, but because of his own feeling that a person’s body was also their soul. That everything was a part of Soul; arms and hands and fingers and feet and toes. Everything.

  The young boys who visited him called it Atman.

  When the thing left the bed, Caleb felt some relief, and he was not upset that he couldn’t see; it had happened to him before. His mommy might not react in the same way, though. The gunk on her eyes might be scary, and he thought that he might have to protect her.

  Above all, at his tender age, Caleb knew that he was different. Not just because of his family — everyone had a unique family— but because of something else which he couldn’t quite grasp, not yet anyway.

  It was a good something, though. He knew that he was going to have to help people, like his mother, in the same way the nice man had helped him. He knew that, beyond and above everything, that helping was the most essential thing. That helping was the key to it all — and that while many grown-ups fretted over the mystery and meaning of things, an answer lay in helping. It was the kind of answer that made the question itself something else, because, really, the question was as important as the answer.

  This knowledge of things did not stress Caleb or cause him worry. He didn’t understand how he knew such things, or how he knew that he knew such things, but it didn’t matter.

  He thought of the nursery rhymes and songs the boys had performed for him, and their shining coins. He thought of how each of them had glowed as they stood around his bed. He thought of how scared his mommy had been at first, and how she had become happier, less afraid. How, he felt, that his mommy had let go.

  He’d heard the bird’s sound — SHHHshhhhSHHHHshhhh — and then it was over. Things were quiet. The policeman, the one without too much hair on his head, had come and gone, and Caleb was alone in his room with his mommy. The bird was now gone too. The bird had done its job and now the one who owned the bird — and all of the birds like it, with their long suckers and strange hands and feet an
d rust-colored, matted feathers — was going to come.

  The one who owned the birds was not a nice man.

  Caleb felt his mother sleeping beside him. She was in a deep sleep; he could sense it, hear her breathing, even smell the thickening cataracts now covering her eyes, and he knew that this was what the birds did. They put people to sleep first. Then the rest happened later.

  But not Caleb. They were never able to put him to sleep.

  He gently touched his mother’s face in the dark, and he waited.

  PART VI

  FORCES

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  The birds crawled along the hospital floor of the Pediatric ward, their claws clicking like marbles, their throats ululating with their calls. Their sailcloth feathers, coarse and blunted, scraped along the baseboards in papery whooshes.

  They moved by hugging the walls, gathering in corners, scaling to the ceiling, perching, waiting, then darting quickly with bursts of speed like pulses of black light. They were bioluminescent, a glow seining through the thick orange feathers so that their plumage at times appeared morado; at other times it was rojo; a dark iron-stained red. The size of cats, or small dogs, they were the scouts; expendable, copious, with not so much individual thought or will, but a collective one. They were extensions, the eyes of what they served, and then were called back to it after performing their reconnaissance.

  They traveled using the treetops, or down in the rank sewers.

  The birds (some called them griffins) were conscripted with tasks. They administered sleep and tended to dreams. They could create phantoms; confusing and distorting reality, and, at times, given their certain collection and just the right orientation of their numbers, temporarily reconstruct reality.

  They worked on the minds of the spirits they attended, often appearing as a manifestation of their subject’s worst fears.

  But the birds, or the source of the bird’s intelligence (now residing, corporeally, in the pond by the Kingston home), knew that the child was different.

  Of course the child was different. They were always different. At the ushering of every eon of time there was one who was different; this gap between ages and this vacio were no exception.

  The Age had moved again. This happened. Ages on Earth came and went, sometimes overlapping, sometimes parallel, but always attended by upheaval. The thing in the pond had lived through nearly all of them. The thing in the pond had been on Earth since the earth was fire, and after that, when the earth was ice, and, finally, when the earth was water, as it was now, at its culmination.

  The thing in the pond knew of its millennia of pain amid the roiling, blasting furnace that bore it from the earth’s depths. It knew of the epochs it had spent entombed in ice. It knew how it had grown and gradually changed form in the sea.

  It was aware of its birth.

  This was the only issue which frightened the thing in the pond by the Kingston home. It was the one aspect of its existence that it was unsure of. The fact it knew there was a beginning to its existence meant there was a period when it had not existed.

  Somehow the child, as with the others who had emerged during the shifting of previous Ages, represented that shadow; indicated something the thing was not privy to.

  It listened to the calls of its birds in the distance, around a hundred miles away, where their quarry currently rested.

  The mother had led them to the child.

  She had come farther than expected. In the beginning, she’d lost the child before it came to term. Then, when the child had still emerged, somehow from another set of padres, the young female had shown reluctance and fear. Many times the thing in the pond had worked on her, calling to her, sending its birds to distract and cajole her towards escape, towards further distraction. The birds had the substantial gift of shape-shifting; their transformations manifested in the minds of the vacies and showed them their dark obsessions, of horror or grandeur. What they feared — even what they loved.

  A loon, for instance, carefree and alone in the spell of the sensuous. Gently cavorting on the water’s surface before diving into oblivious freedom.

  But the female had persisted. Somehow, despite the efforts of the thing in the pond and its avian extensions, the female had been persuaded to stay by the other vacies. She had remained with the child after all, and even grown affection for it, though she had not birthed it, she had not linked with it chemically — something had still attracted her, something had stayed her, something had worked with her.

  The thing in the pond, with great disgust and irksome fear, knew that there was a connection between the female’s tenacity and the mystery of its own existence; to what lay even before its own existence, that shadow of time.

  The thing twisted in the water, breaking the surface, chasing with renewed vigor after something that moved there. Rain stuttered the pondwater. Yet the thing could see perfectly clearly. It slithered along the surface, its massive body oily black.

  The birds had incapacitated the girl and were conspiring to drive the detective insane. They could do little with the child, but the thing in the pond had anticipated this. So it had sent the other two men, the inebriated, angry young one, and the one who had been damaged in war.

  The thing in the pond had been watching this second man, the trooper, for years, since he had first visited the pond along with the detective and the nurse, the three of them drinking and tossing cans into the water. The trooper would have been just another worthless vacie of no consequence if it weren’t for that one particular summer.

  The trooper had seen. He’d been a skinny young man peering in at his own reflection, but he’d seen more beneath the surface of the water.

  The thing in the pond was sure of this. Only certain vacies, occasionally, bore the misfortune of being able to see such horrors as itself.

  Usually tortured men, men who held violence within them.

  The trooper had run, and his fears had pursued him. They’d found him in the theatre of war, in that place called Vietnam, where he’d discovered one charnel house after another in My Lai. Houses bearing the bodies of innocents, many of them prostitutes.

  Now the trooper was on his way to the child, almost back to the pond. In his company was the angry young man. The one who thought he was clever. All was as it should be.

  Moving quickly through the water, nearing what floated on the surface of the pond in the splashback of rain – a loud world of silver and black – the thing moved in serpentine, whiptail fashion and finally struck.

  With the loon in its great mouth, thrashing, struggling, it dove deeper into the pond, where no light shone, and it ate.

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  Trooper Jim Cruickshand’s Chevy Caprice Classic rocketed towards the dawn. The early morning sunlight was low in the trees. Jared sat in the back, his cigarette long finished. He was clutching the seatback in front of him so fiercely that his fingertips were white.

  “Once we get to the ferry,” said the cop with the buzzed neck to Jared, “we’ll lose them. Takes fifteen minutes between ferries. So, that’s how much time we’ll have when we get to the hospital.”

  “Won’t they be waiting for us on the other side?”

  “No. Something will keep them.”

  Jared watched that thick neck for a second, then looked out the front at the rushing road. They had been on the interstate, only briefly, for just two exits north. As they’d rounded the winding entrance ramp, rising up in elevation to the interstate, Jared had seen the frenetic lights coming after them.

  There was a caravan of four, maybe five vehicles on their heels. He wondered why they hadn’t been roadblocked yet, or intercepted. Surely someone would have radioed to Plattsburgh.

  Something will keep them.

  Now that they were off of the interstate, the cop had backed down on his speed some, but as Jared leaned to the right to look around the man’s neck and shoulder, he saw that they were still doing well over ninety. They were losing the low sun
now. The sky, in front of them, was murky; only a band of lighter grey and blue shone on the horizon in the cloud cover. Soon, Jared was sure they would be spackled with a mixture of snow and rain. They were driving headlong into a storm.

  Jared knew he needed to be careful. He had managed to win the trust of this grim Statie, as much as it was possible to do so. Jared had been scared at first. It wasn’t so much dying he feared, but the period before, in the hands of this very peculiar officer of the law, a man who had clearly turned the screw too far and cracked the surface of the grain.

  He had been pissing his pants at the beginning, yeah, okay. But he’d connived his way onto the officer’s side. He’d placed a bet and beaten the house. The old fucker was sadistic, a woman hater — Jared had pegged him right. Why else had he imagined the dead women in the shed, and come up with a conspiracy between Jared and his girlfriend’s ex?

  That part was really interesting.

  He needed to plan his escape. Whatever insane agenda the Statie had, it wasn’t going to shape up so good, Jared was sure of that. He knew now why the cop had brought him along. It had to do with Elizabeth. When the trooper had mentioned her, Jared had understood. The cop planned to use him.

  He’d be long gone, looking for this Christopher, because the whole thing had started with him, hadn’t it? Him and Liz together. The old detective had been asking questions about him. Because no doubt she was seeing him behind Jared’s back. No doubt they were going at it like rabbits while Jared was out having a few innocent beers with the guys, thinking his sweet woman was at home. Hadn’t she acted strange the other night? Washing all the towels? She and the ex were soiling the place with their infidelity. Jared would have to set them both straight.