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

by T. J. Brearton

  When he’d finished, he looked in the mirror. There was some soapy residue on it, as though someone had done a careless job of cleaning it, or as if someone had purposely smeared something on it. He could hear the muffled roar of the furious lake outside, and the ferry’s attempt to sluice through it — the sound: SHUSShhhhhh, each time one tremendous wave crashed over the decks of the boat.

  He looked at his face in the smeared mirror. I’m sorry, Liz. He wasn’t coming for her, was he? He’d have to get his revenge on Christopher another way. This was a nightmare he needed to leave behind. But where would he go from here? He could lay a story on some passenger on board, hide out in their car. The big trooper couldn’t check them all, not before they got to the other side. Crazy as he might be, he was a state trooper, after all. He could delay the whole ferry if he wanted to, check every car thoroughly. But, of course he wouldn’t do that — he was on the run. They were being chased by the proper authorities, the sane law enforcers.

  A knock on the door made Jared jump. The sound reverberated in the steel bathroom. Was it the cop? Had he grown impatient? Had it just been a test, to see if Jared would get out of the car or not, what he would do next?

  “Out in a second,” Jared called.

  He turned the faucet on. A sign above the small sink read: Water Not For Drinking. He decided against splashing it on his face, but pulled a paper towel from the dispenser, wet it, and blotted his eyes and cheeks and nose. Even though it was cold out on the lake, and the rain was icy, it still felt good. It felt normal. He wadded up the towel and chucked it in the trash bin. He left the bathroom.

  Jared expected someone to be waiting by the door, but no one was there.

  He looked at the Caprice. He steadied himself against the wall. The ferry still heaved and lurched through the water. He thought he could make out the head of the trooper inside his car.

  “Sir!”

  Jared turned the other direction. Toward the back of the ferry, just past the overhang, in a yellow jacket with the ferry insignia on it, a woman was standing. “You should get back in your car!” she yelled to him over the noise of the engine, the sea, the rain.

  Jared nodded, his mind working fast. He made his decision. He went towards her. The ferry vaulted up and landed violently — a big one. Jared crashed against the side of the camper van.

  “Hey!” she shouted. “Your car! Get back in your car!”

  Something will keep them, he thought.

  He made his way to her, holding out his hand when he could, the symbol of wait, hold on, and he didn’t dare look back over his shoulder to see if the trooper had heard, or was coming.

  She was holding onto a thick rope, with a walkie-talkie in her other hand, Jared saw. He was close to her, now out from underneath the overhang. There were stairs on his right, leading to the upper deck and the small enclosed waiting area. He thought he saw a figure up against the railing, looking down at him. The silvery-gray spray of the rain and the lake made it hard to see. He reached the female ferry worker. He was surprised to find she looked familiar.

  “What the hell are you doing?”

  He got as close to her as he could, his leg spread wide and his arms out for balance. He could see her clearly now — she was older, late-forties, perhaps, with pock-marked smoker’s skin. She had sparkling, hard eyes.

  He had to yell above the cacophony of the water. It ran along the deck, splashing over his feet, soaking his hiking boots. It came up over the prow, it came from the sides. The water seemed to be rising by the second.

  “You were at the booth.”

  “Yeah?”

  The yellow hood flapped about her head, and a wet clump of hair was stuck to her cheek, strands of it between her thin pinkish lips.

  “You’ve got to help me.”

  “You’ve got to help yourself,” she said, “and stay in your vehicle.”

  Jared shook his head. He was drenched, his hair soaked, the curls flattened against his head, his nose dripping.

  “I came in with the cop. The state trooper. Remember?”

  She scowled at him through the rain and spray.

  “I’ve been kidnapped.”

  He regretted it a split-second later. It sounded ridiculous.

  “Oh?”

  She looked at him with the expression of someone who’d heard a lot of bullshit in her days. She seemed to be deciding whether he was drunk or on drugs when her eyes wrenched away from him and she looked to the upper deck — Jared turned his head and followed her gaze.

  “Hey!” she called out. There was more than one person standing at the railing now, holding on, seemingly look down at them. “Get back inside!”

  She grumbled to herself. Jared only caught snippets. Something about the end of her shift. Last ferry home.

  She pulled herself along the rope towards the bottom of the stairs and started up them. She turned back around briefly and called to Jared, “Back in your car, sir, now!”

  Jared stood there with that wide-legged stance, and watched her go up. He looked up — now there were three people on the upper deck. He followed her, stumbling left and right with the rocking of the ferry before he got to the stairs and gripped the railing tightly and started climbing up himself. He had to convince her. He had to convince somebody.

  Above him, a young man stood in a short trench coat which flapped violently about. The worker gesticulated as she spoke to him. The other two passengers with him wore hoods, and now a fourth seemed to materialize out of nowhere, but Jared imagined that he must have come from inside the waiting area. The ferry worker was trying to usher them back inside.

  Jared hauled himself up the steep stairs, mindful not to slip, careful not to look back and see who might be at the bottom now, looking up at him, that face blank and staring.

  As he reached the top, the ferry worker managed to get the group of guys corralled back into the waiting area, all but the one in the coat, who was looking right at Jared.

  Jared gripped the railing with both hands, blinking water away from his eyes, and looked back at the young man, who was not hanging on to anything. He seemed completed unaffected by the storm.

  The ferry worker and the others were inside. Jared saw her still talking to them, yelling at them, maybe. She was waving her arms about, her back to him and this other guy. The ferry rose and fell, and the rain battered down.

  “Jared.” The young man didn’t shout, but his voice was clear and audible.

  Still, it was strange for Jared to hear his name spoken aloud. It made no sense.

  “Who are you?”

  “Samuel,” he said.

  Jared squinted through the storm at him. “How do you know my name?”

  I know you.

  “You have to make a decision,” said Samuel, not holding on to anything, unperturbed by the storm.

  “About what?”

  “I think you know. And I can’t do anything to force you one way or the other.”

  “Fucking right, you can’t.” Jared had no idea why he was suddenly so defensive. He had felt, at first, momentarily relieved, but now felt offended, invaded. He thought about going back to the car where Jim was waiting. The big old son-of-a-bitch wasn’t that bad, was he? He was kind of fun, in a way. A little nuts, sure, but you had to be in this fucked-up world. The way he’d plowed through that deer, the way he’d pinned the needle at ninety most of the drive.

  “This is important, now, Jared. Be honest with yourself.”

  “The fuck’re you talking about?” Jared looked past the young man into the waiting room. He thought about going in and explaining his situation to the ferry woman again. But what good would that do? What could she do, even if she believed him? Would he hide out with her, cling to her leg like a little boy? No, it wasn’t any good. She was busy with this little emo gang now, anyway. Soon they would be docking. She had other things to take care of. Jared wasn’t a coward.

  “I’m sorry,” said Samuel. “It’s not a perfect state. Sometimes
I can still be wicked. I don’t want to be.”

  Jared swallowed and wiped rain from his face, still gripping the railing with his other hand. It dawned on him that he was still hanging on, and he decided to let go. If this guy could stand there like that, so could he.

  The young man was watching him. It was unnerving. The ferry came crashing down over another swell and Jared nearly fell and had to grab the railing again.

  “It’s almost here,” said Samuel. “They’re not going to be able to stop you on the other side. Get to the detective — he can help you. Make the right choice, Jared. Whether we think we are or not — we’re always choosing one side or the other. There is nothing else.”

  “You’re a fucking head case,” said Jared and went back down the stairs, back to Trooper Jim Cruickshand.

  He left the kid, Samuel, standing there, his coat tossed by the rain and wind.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

  She was dreaming of an olive-green blanket, the wool itchy on her legs, a sensation that didn’t bother her the way it might other people but was something she welcomed. Maybe it made her feel like she was a part of things.

  Birds flew low over the pond. She didn’t recognize their shapes. Jared often pointed out the birds, and then afterward there would be a look on his face, almost of shame. He didn’t point them out because he was any sort of armchair ornithologist, but because his grandfather was, and because his grandfather had taught him the names when Jared was a little boy.

  Elizabeth looked over at her hand, but the glass she was holding was not her wineglass from before, it was heavier, banded with a prism.

  Then she was at the edge of the pond. She didn’t recall navigating down the steep slope. She stood on the wet, packed sand. She saw that she was wearing Finna’s nightgown, the one she’d always admired and had once stolen (until Finna discovered it was missing and yanked it back, thank you very much). Liz didn’t care for much of her sister’s wardrobe, it was too earthy, too drab, but Liz coveted some of the blouses and sweaters, especially this creamy nightgown.

  As she squatted, she gathered the garment up from her ankles so that the rough, dark-brown sand with its dead-fish smell wouldn’t soil it. She pulled it over her knees and swept her hair back, the wavy blonde fans of it smelling of the rosemary-mint shampoo she’d also pilfered from Finna.

  With one hand holding her hair, and the other the folds of the cream nightgown, she dug her naked toes into the flat wet beach. Water filled the impressions her toes made in the sand.

  Liz let go of her hair, leaned forward, and used one hand to scoop the crystal wineglass through the water, drawing up roils of dark mud and sediment below the glassy surface. She heard flapping above, and looked up to see three of the rust-colored birds flying over the pond. Their wings seemed heavy. She’d never seen anything like them; they looked prehistoric.

  She looked back at what she was doing. She held the crystal glass up in front of her. That dark brown sediment from the pond swirled in the chalice, and then settled. The water above it was fine, as if it were a thinner kind of water.

  She wondered where the light around her was coming from. She knew that west was behind her, since from her Adirondack chair along the fieldstone path, the sun always set to her right. Yet there was no light emanating from that direction, no sun setting over the jagged line of trees, not a hint of its trawling color. Across from her, to the east, there was no trace of the sun’s rays. It was neither morning nor evening, but perpetual dusk, with the sky calmly iridescent.

  She heard voices and drew the glass to her quickly and stood up. Her feet were sinking deeper into the sand. She pulled them out and backpedaled a few steps from the water — the voices had come from somewhere out over its surface.

  Macmaster pond was like a bowl most of the way around. The water was lower than usual. She remembered hearing about a high water table this year, though she couldn’t say where she’d heard. She remembered, too, sitting out, looking over the pond, thinking it was high. Here, though, the water, wide across as a couple of city blocks —someone standing on the bank on the other side would be about a fingernail tall — seemed to be lower. As if draining.

  She wondered whose voices she had heard. Sometimes Jared and his friends’ voices would float across to her, from where they were drinking and fishing in the rowboat. Their voices carried so easily and flawlessly that the sound was surreal, as if they were beside her as they talked, but with the volume turned down. This voice, now, was like that.

  A whisper in her ear, it said, “Vacie”.

  Liz stayed where she was. She looked up towards the dark house. She thought she’d left the porch light on, and the kitchen light inside as well, but they’d been doused.

  “Como esta, mujere,” the voice continued, and Liz froze. She’d forgotten her blanket, and the night was getting chilly. Almost cold enough to snow.

  Liz looked at the pond. She directed her attention towards its black center. She could see nothing there, but, then, she thought she could hear something. Like someone treading water, out there in the middle, beyond where the light would go, past where she could see.

  The voice was calm and distinct, cut like a jewel with clean edges.

  “No puedo vivir otro dia sin ti, mujere. Mi vacie.”

  And the jewel was on display in a glass box in a room full of stagnant air.

  Liz recognized the language easily enough — it was Spanish, though maybe not the last word. It wasn’t the Spanish she’d learned at Jessiai Preparatory. This was different. An accent she couldn’t quite place.

  Then: “It was very cricky, Liz. Very cricky robians.”

  The sound of her name caused her heart to quicken. The same voice, with the same accent, now speaking English. Again she looked up at the house and felt she should get back to it, but she couldn’t move. She looked down and saw that she’d sunk into the sand up to her ankles.

  She tried to pull her feet free, but they wouldn’t come. She held the crystal glass with both hands.

  “Robians, Liz,” said the voice, now without the accent. It was a flat voice, uttering empty sounds that somehow contained words, but this was all they contained. What was behind the words, producing them, was something Liz didn’t want to think about.

  She felt that she might know something about those words because she’d heard them before.

  Are you happy, Serafina?

  “Cricky, mobius robians, Liz,” said the voice. It was warning her, it was flirting with her, it was conversational, it was weird, and something else. The strange birds, which had settled into the tall pines behind her, made scratching noises, ripping noises, like paper dragged over grit, tearing as it went.

  “Escuchame, mujere. La vacie. Those cricky Robians. The mer-machine. The merming machine of Mobius.” And then there was that sound of water displaced, like someone swimming, out there in the middle.

  Liz looked down. She was now up to her knees.

  Then came the sound of the disrupted water, someone or something treading there in the pond, black skin in black water. It drew nearer.

  Liz pulled the glass of water to her chest. She closed her eyes.

  I’m dreaming, Finna. Just dreaming. If I really fucking thought about it, I’m only dreaming, and I could wake up.

  She heard the papery, slow-tearing noise of the birds in the trees; the sound of their breathing, the friction of their fitful wings. The voice was still right there, hovering like a speaking mist around her head, and the thing in the water continued toward the beach.

  She could not wake up.

  She thought of cricky robians. She thought she knew what that was too, but couldn’t get her mind fully around it, couldn’t shine the light of her memory on it directly; it stayed hidden, like the thing in the pond, talking to her.

  Christopher, she thought. Help me.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

  Jared stared, wide-eyed, out of the back of the Caprice. Around him, the dock was in chaos.

  Po
lice lights twirled, but the cops in those vehicles weren’t worried about keeping Jim Cruickshand from venturing onto dry land. There was a queue of cars in front of him, but Cruickshand was making his way around. Metal squealed as he pressed the Caprice through the traffic. Jared noticed the trooper grimacing, even heard him over the racket saying “baby, baby,” in a kind of moan, but Jared kept his attention on the bedlam outside.

  A levee had been only recently built, but already it had been overtaken by the water. The furious water slashed the shore, toppling a telephone pole. The pole hit the water, sparks flying, and a second later, Jared saw flames. The water was on fire.

  “Gas! Gas!” the police shouted, working frantically in the downpour. It was a mind-bending sight, fire on water. Jared stared out the window, his mouth open, his heart thumping against his rib cage.

  After Cruickshand had plowed past the last vehicle in his way, a pick-up truck whose owner was nowhere to be seen, the trooper lit another cigarette.

  “See?” he said. “Told you.”

  Like a kid himself, like a teenager feeling invincible, the state trooper tramped on the accelerator. They raced south towards Burlington, now impeded only by the water sluicing off the dark tarmac where it lay in great pools.

  They were almost there.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

  Tom woke up. He heard sirens. There was a commotion on the floor — someone was shaking him.

  He opened his eyes and saw Maddy standing over him.

  His hands went to his face, where his fingertips felt around his eyelids. He wasn’t sure why he was worried about his eyes — maybe something the Goldfine girl had said. Tom’s head was fuzzy. He vaguely remembered that his glasses were still in his vehicle.

  His phone was buzzing in his pocket. He looked at Maddy.

  “Milliner,” she said.

  “Yeah.”