“He’s over here. Jimmy is on our side of the lake.”
“How long?”
“Fifteen minutes, maybe more.”
“Jesus,” said Tom. It was roughly twenty minutes from the ferry port at South Hero to Burlington.
He stood, and the world swam. There were tubes coming out of him.
“Easy,” Maddy said. She put her arms around him.
He blinked at her, not certain she was real.
“Where have you been? Where did you go?” He looked down at his arm and yanked out the IV.
Maddy watched him warily. “I went downstairs, doll, to the security desk. To tell them about something hitting the window. They asked me some questions, then, about Jim. I talked to Mahoney, too. He’s outside, right now, he’s got a whole team of cops, they’re gonna shoot Jim if he shows up acting hostile.”
Tom raised his eyebrows. Jim would likely act hostile.
“When I came back upstairs,” Maddy went on, “you were gone, and then I found you in here. You were talking in your sleep. About birds.”
Birds, thought Tom.
He thought of the inkblots on hotel room walls. Psychic stains, if you wanted to get kooky. But what was kooky anymore? Those inkblots, those protean shapes, like the floaters in your eyes. Like clouds floating overhead; you’re a boy, you and Charlie are boys looking up with your fingers folded behind your heads. Those clouds, those inkblots, can be anything to anyone. Maybe they weren’t birds to Elizabeth Goldfine or Jim Cruickshand, or even Jared Kingston. Maybe they were something else.
Coyotes.
Deformed creatures.
Dead prostitutes.
He grabbed Maddy’s hand.
They ran to Caleb and Liz’s room. The girl was asleep. There was a translucent film covering her eyes. Tom thought of the way she’d been on the car ride to the police station. She wasn’t merely asleep. She’d been put out.
The child sat serenely next to his mother, if that was who she really was.
Tom looked at Caleb and the boy looked right back. Caleb pulled his pacifier out.
“Robians,” the boy babbled. “Cricky robians.”
“The transplant, the transfusion, all a success,” a doctor was saying in a disheartened tone. It was the same doctor from the night before, the one that looked like he belonged on Grey’s Anatomy.
The doctor shook his head, looking at the young woman’s limp body. “We don’t know what this is.”
They stood there, Tom, two nurses, the doctor, and another resident. Caleb was sitting up in the bed, smiling at him. Liz was motionless. One of the nurses was checking her vitals.
“Is it from the anesthesia?” Tom asked.
“She didn’t have any.”
There was a muffled noise from outside, like a car backfiring.
“Maddy,” said Tom.
“I’ll stay with them,” she said. She squeezed past Tom and headed over to the child, smiling.
Tom left the room and towards the elevator, past the nurses station. People were calling for him.
He heard more bangs, like fireworks going off, coming from outside the building. Suddenly, there were screams.
Tom went into a defensive crouch. There were two more reports from outside the hospital, now he was sure it was gunfire. Then things fell silent, except for the murmuring of voices around him.
“Quiet!” he called. He listened intently, and after a moment, heard one more shot. This one was even more muffled. It sounded like it came from the direction of the elevator shaft. How could Cruickshand get in past a dozen or more cops? Mahoney had the downstairs well-guarded. He’d pulled the cops from outside of Caleb’s room — but maybe indicated he was short on bodies. Maybe most of Mahoney’s men were off by the lake. Maybe things had gotten worse while Tom was out for the count.
Oh the irony, he thought, of an insomniac sleeping during the craziest time of his life. Well, he wasn’t going to sleep anymore; now he was as awake as he’d ever been.
The elevator chimed. Tom saw the ground-floor icon light up. Then it blinked out, and the “2” lit up. Pediatrics was the fifth floor. A car was ascending. Jim Cruickshand was on his way up. Tom’s heart hammered in his chest.
Easy, he thought. Steady.
The moment drew out like a blade. The entire floor fell silent. The doctors stood not far behind him, just outside of the door to Caleb’s room.
The “3” then the “4” of the elevator glowed.
It reached pediatrics. Tom, still crouched, took aim. The doors slid open.
Jim Cruickshand stepped out, his firearm, held in his free hand, was smoking. In his other hand he had the Kingston boy, Jared, held by the neck. On the floor of the elevator was a security guard, crumpled and unmoving.
“Hey Tommy,” said Trooper Jim. He paid no attention to Tom’s position or the fact that Tom had a bead on him. He causally pointed the gun at Jared Kingston’s head, and then he looked past Tom.
He looked at Caleb’s room.
“Is Cruder in there?”
She must have been standing there behind Tom, with the doctors, because Jim broke into a grin.
“Hi Maddy,” he said.
Then his smile faded.
“Better bring your friends out of there and give them to me.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX
The Adirondack chair rocked back and forth in the wind as it was pelted with rain. The windows of the Kingston house, left open, let the rain in, it puddled on the hardwood floor of the living room. Upstairs, the bedroom curtains flapped and the rain soaked the carpet.
Christopher walked through the house.
He entered the upstairs bedroom, turned left and into the bathroom with the slanted ceiling. He looked at himself in the mirror. He looked into his blue eyes. They used to be green. He unbuttoned his ripped black shirt. He didn’t really need to — he could have easily just torn it apart — but undoing the buttons seemed the right thing to do.
He blinked. He looked at his chest. He had never believed in resurrection — that wasn’t part of his thing; it hadn’t been, even after his change. For a while, anyway.
The OD two years ago hadn’t been accidental, but a conscious attempt at suicide. Between the night he’d spent scoring and injecting the hotshot which would take him down, and the moment he had found himself by the road in Red Rock County, there had been nothing. This new form of himself, this incarnation, was someone who had the same memories as his former self, the same tools in his brain, one might say. This new Christopher shared the same way of walking and talking. Everything felt the same except for the two years unaccounted for, the mutated gene of the eyes, and the fact that he felt encoded with something new.
He also carried with him a sense that he had been displaced. Suffering amnesia. He’d concocted a few theories, and went about living, his instinct telling himself not to go to the authorities, but to lay low, to wait and see what might come.
A week after he’d found himself in the Adirondacks, he was approached by a young man named Samuel, wearing a ski parka, making his way through the snow. Christopher had been living in an abandoned farmhouse some miles outside of Red Rock Falls, and Samuel had discovered him there.
Samuel explained what had happened to Christopher. He had been brought back, quite simply, because he had a job to do. He’d been repurposed. It was possible, Samuel had explained, because eternity is not just time, but time and space together. Eternity was both everywhere and everywhen.
Christopher had learned that his old girlfriend Elizabeth Goldfine had moved to the area. And then she’d shot him.
His chest appeared unmarred in the mirror, save for one small mark that looked like a scratch. He touched it. Sluggishly, black-cherry blood began to ooze from it. He watched it slowly form rivulets, down from his solar plexus and spilling over his belly button and then branching off to one side. That was right, he remembered, he had slumped onto his side.
He remembered Liz pointing the rifle at him — a hi
gh-powered rifle, an A-bolt, and it had kicked back against her shoulder where she’d seated it like a decent amateur, like her boyfriend had taught her.
And now, here he was. Just like before. Only this time, it had been no more than a day which had passed.
Getting shot felt like being punched really hard. Not like you might think a bullet would feel, small as it was, entering into you, but as though your whole chest had been smashed with a wrecking ball that had come whistling out of the sky.
It had knocked the wind out of him, and he was on the floor beside the bed, and then, it was as it had been before. Only this time, Christopher remembered.
It was both a hallucination and a narcotic nod. It was nothing he could explain beyond that, nor, he knew, would there be a need to. It wasn’t some experience to dwindle into an anecdote. It was quick, quick for time on Earth, he figured, but it was also long — oh so long, like becoming an adult, maybe, where there was no definite beginning, no real end. And the noise, the same sound he remembered from before, something Samuel told him was called background radiation. Three-degree black-body radiation.
He took his fingertips away from the wound, which seemed to stop oozing almost immediately, the blood drying and becoming tacky. He thought that surrounding each individual, all the time, were the answers, but they were encoded. The trip, his experience not being, had broken the code.
The trip was the decryption, and the answers were revealed — only the questions that were answered weren’t exactly the same as those asked in life.
The meaning of life.
The search for something after.
The existence of God.
These pursuits didn’t apply in the same way during the trip. They were their own answers, fulfilling questions never asked. And how could they be? The questions we ask are part of the DNA of the world which surrounds us.
Samuel had recruited Christopher. He was working on new men all the time, he explained. Some of them succumbed, some of them prevailed. “It’s not a perfect state,” Samuel had said.
“Succumbed to what?” Christopher had wanted to know.
But Samuel had told him that it was best not to focus his mind there. Best not to look deeply into that abyss.
“Vacie,” said a voice, now.
Christopher looked out the bathroom door, and listened.
“Der robians vacie.”
Christopher re-buttoned his shirt. He left the bathroom, switching the light off. He also switched the light off in the bedroom, and then the one downstairs, in the kitchen, and the porch light as he walked out.
He headed down along the fieldstone walkway, towards the edge of the pond, the rain shushing down. Behind him, the house was now completely dark. Now he could see the ripples of water out in the middle of the pond amid the silver splash of the rain. He could see that the rising water was beginning to spill over the banks, and creep into the woods. That which floated in that glacial scoop of a pond would soon be spilling out as well, able to sluice its terrible body through the darkened, aphotic muck of a flooded land, freed.
* * *
At the end of the path were a chair and a footrest and a small table. A neatly folded blanket, drenched by the downpour, lay on the footrest. Christopher reached into the pocket of his long coat containing the thick, crystal glass Tom Milliner had given him at his house in the Acres. It clinked against the coins he carried. He brushed them aside, swabbing them with some sticky blood he was unaware of, and pulled out the glass. He carefully placed it on the wet, green woolen blanket, so that it sunk in a little and settled.
He made his way down the steep embankment, dragging one hand behind him along the dirt and rocks to avoid slipping. The air smelled rotten like the water, laced with mineral elements, and some other stink. The homes near the pond, Christopher knew, had sewage that drained into leach fields and then traveled via aquifers into the pond. Bullhead fed along the bottom, bass swimming closer to the surface.
The other smell was of gas.
Natural gas, siphoned up from the depths. Christopher knew these things because others knew this. It was one of the things that happened during the trip; there was a convergence of information, to say the least. Somewhere, amid the bullhead and bass and pike and frogs, loons, otters and beavers, somewhere below the clusters of black flies, the waterbugs skimming the surface, where the bats swooped and took mosquitoes and gnats and even dragonflies from the air, was the thing in the pond.
Long, powerful, its black sacs of organs on its outside. Smooth and rubbery.
It was talking, not to him, but to someone else.
“Very cricky robians,” it said. “Der robians vacies, mu jere.”
Christopher knew the voice. There were a few people that did, that had heard it in their lives. He’d met one or two of them in NA, and in other places, back before his conversion. Even then he’d known, and they’d known, and their eyes were unable to meet for very long. He was sure Liz knew the voice, too.
He reached the edge of the water. It was high indeed, the rim of it only a few feet away from where the embankment leveled out. A rowboat was tethered nearby, the rope hanging from the prow disappeared into the slippery black covering the submerged dock.
Christopher walked to the dock anyway, wading through water up to his knees. His feet squished into the bottom. The sand tried to suck him in. He climbed up onto the planks of the dock, water at his ankles now, and walked out to the end where he squatted and called out:
“Mobius. Der robian mobius.”
Out over the water, something swirled. A wind eddy, like a small cyclone. He saw the water ripple, the whirlpool form. On the other side — his eyes felt very keen in the dark and rain — he could see the embankment, the trees, and above that, the glow of the setting sun. He took in the scent of the air again: oil and gas.
Still squatting there, both of his arms dangling between his legs, his fingers dipping in the water, Christopher looked to his right. He saw what remained of the small beach there, and footprints that disappeared into the water. In the center of the pond, the eddy continued to swirl, gathering centripetal momentum. He could hear the wind of it, and beneath it, the burbling sounds of the water in the pond from fissures along its bottom, cracks in the earth, releasing the dank, wet rot of its underbelly, and what lay below that.
In the trees, the sounds of the birds, whickering.
The voice: “De donde eres?”
Christopher watched the growing cyclone and the deepening whirlpool of water and replied, “I’m a wagerer, Mobius. You know where I come from.”
“Bag,” said the thing in the pond. “Bag robian der Mobius. Vacie.”
Christopher lowered his head. He flicked his fingers through the water for a moment, and then lifted his eyes to the pond’s center again.
He saw, along the circumference of the whirlpool, the swish of the thing’s long body, the snake of it slicing though the purling, rippling water. Air bubbles were popping out beyond its widening perimeter.
“Du er ikke noe,” said the thing in the pond. The smell of gas grew stronger.
Christopher nodded. “Maybe so,” he said. “But my son is something, isn’t he?”
A jet of water, as though from the blowhole of a great whale, shot up into the night, and the whirlpool seemed to tilt, and bubbled more violently.
The voice came again, brimming with an ancient anger.
“Ich werde Sie TOTEN!” it boomed, and pond water sprayed out in a funnel all around the whirlpool, and the cyclone undulated and picked up even greater speed, growing in circumference.
“Come and get me then, Getragen.”
Christopher slowly stood up after he said this, feeling the water rise around his legs. He thought he heard the thing laughing. It was unlike any earthly laughter, nothing that any sane person would qualify as laughter, a sound both shrill and blunt and penetrating, a noise that sounded like the amplified nattering of those freak birds, a screeching static, shredding canvas, nails o
n chalkboard — and the gas-tinged air now filled with an even more putrid, sulfuric smell.
The cyclone, the eddy, the torrent of the spray and jettisoned water calmed and settled, and the pond became almost still then, only moving as if a swimmer, perhaps, had just dived beneath the surface, leaving behind quiet ripples.
Then, an instant later, the water boomed up in a tremendous spray, a mini-tsunami rolling towards the shore, and Christopher held his breath.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN
“Jim,” said Tom, “the one and only.”
“I’m known from coast to coast,” said Trooper Jim.
“Like butter and toast,” Maddy finished for them.
She remained in the doorway to Caleb’s room. She was staring past Jim at the body on the elevator floor. Then the doors closed.
Jim smiled broadly at Madison Kruger once again. “Guard that came down and tried to intercept me,” Jim said. “He’ll be alright.”
Tom saw the teenage boy in that smile, bare-chested and leaping into Macmaster Pond. His hay-blond hair. Taller than Tom Milliner, more masculine. Jim had already got to home base with a girl. It was Jim who had initiated things with the three of them, wasn’t it? Maddy who had brought the wine and the food and the LSD dessert. It had been Jim, though, who had gotten them to take off their clothes. Jim who had later disappeared into the woods, frightened of something he’d said he’d seen in the pond. Jim who had never really been the same after that summer.
Jim who had gone to war shortly thereafter.
The pleasantries were brief, and Jim’s smiled faded.
The big state trooper orchestrated everything that came next with the skill, Tom thought, of a trained choreographer, director, and drill sergeant all rolled into one. It helped, of course, that Tom was brandishing a Western .38 Revolver. Tom knew the gun, and knew that Cruickshand liked to use KTW ammunition, commonly known as “cop-killer” bullets. It was the kind of irony that Jim Cruickshand was known for.
Tom could smell his old friend, an odor of sickly sweet sweat, like rotten corn, his breath like a bird dog after a day in the rivers and ponds, carrying fowl around in its maw. Though his eyes were sunken and his skin waxy, Jim exuded a dark vitality, and moved with speed and determination.
HIGHWATER: a suspense thriller you won't be able to put down Page 29