The Year of the Storm

by John Mantooth

  “Well, what are we waiting for?” I said. “Let’s go that way.”

  “Trust me. This way is better.”

  Before I could ask him what the other way was, I spotted the hatch. The top of it was sticking out of the swamp water. “There,” I said.

  Seth put a hand on my back and patted me. “Good eyes. Ready to swim?”

  The next part is the hardest part to describe. We swam down into the hatch. The whole shelter was filled with water, so we went right past the ladder without even touching it. We went down, down, down, so deep my lungs felt like they would burst from the pressure, but just before they did, we reached the bottom. The world did its wheel thing, and all the water drained away into the sky. I lay there at the bottom of the storm shelter, soaked to the bone, just breathing. And that’s when a strange thought hit me. I was happy. I was exhausted, confused, my bones ached and my head was still spinning, but damned if I wasn’t happy.

  Chapter Eighteen

  DANNY

  We drove back to Pike’s house in silence. He led us inside and told us to wait in the main room while he went to the bedroom to get something.

  “What do you think?” I said to Cliff.

  “I think those photos are weird, but there’s definitely an explanation.”

  “Ditto on the weird part.”

  “I hope my dad hasn’t noticed that we’ve been gone.”

  “You said that wasn’t an issue.”

  He shrugged. “It shouldn’t be. It’s just that we’ve missed lunch and he sometimes asks me about lunch. You know, what did you eat, that sort of thing. He’s obsessed with food.”

  I couldn’t bring myself to even feel the least bit anxious about Cliff’s father right now. “You can go back if you want,” I said.

  “We both need to go, Danny.”

  Before I could answer, Pike came back carrying a large framed painting. He leaned it against the wall and stepped back, waving us over.

  It was a painting of a swamp at dusk. A full moon hung over a little cabin perched on the edge of the swamp water. High grass and slicks of mud helped complete the landscape, which faded near the edges into dark and luxurious trees. The light rippled through both the clouds and swamp water, setting the image aglow. The cabin, situated on the left of the scene, had a single warm light burning inside the window. Moonshine illuminated the tin roof and tiny, almost imperceptible silver streaks of rain fell on the cabin. Across the water stood three great trees—oaks or elms or something equally stately.

  There was something enchanting about the oil painting. Something comforting. And disturbing. The disturbing part was that I was sure I knew the place, had even been there before, but the details were slippery, half-remembered.

  Frustrated, I dismissed the feeling, deciding it was just the enchantment of the painting, the exhilaration of the moment, of feeling like I was finally making some progress toward finding my mother and Anna. I don’t know. Maybe it was just the idea that such a place, so pure and so elegant, might have once existed. That somebody had thought to paint that very moment when the swamp was settling into itself, making peace with the dusk and the long night to follow. Like the moon had stationed itself in that particular spot on that particular evening because the night was too perfect to allow it to fade away unobserved.

  “I don’t know if your mother and sister are alive or if they’re dead,” Pike said, gesturing to the painting. “But if they are alive, I think this is where they are.”

  “It’s the same cabin that was in the photos,” Cliff said.

  “Yep. My friend Seth, the other boy in the photos. He painted this. There was a time when he moved away from these woods, and he painted this to help him remember. Remembering is important. There’s not much else in this world that matters in the end besides your memories.”

  “So, how did my mother and sister get to this place? How did you and Seth get there?” I asked.

  “Let me get some more cigarettes and I’ll tell you.”

  He left us as he went in the back again. When he came back, he had a cigarette between his lips. He sat down in a chair near his oxygen tank.

  “How old are you?” he said.

  Cliff and I both answered, “Fourteen.”

  Pike looked at Cliff with suspicion, as if he had not expected the boy to still be here. Then he shrugged and blew out a stream of smoke. “Isn’t that something?”

  “Isn’t what something?” I said.

  He looked at the couch across from him. “Sit down. Hell, you’re not planning on standing through the whole thing, are you?”

  Cliff and I sat.

  “I remember fourteen. Best and worst year of my life. Best because I learned to be a man. Worst because I forgot how to be a boy.”

  I glanced at Cliff. He was gazing at the painting, his usual impatience stymied for the time being. Pike had already pulled us in. I should have been terribly impatient. I should have been angry, but I sensed something deep and mysterious in the tale Pike was already beginning to relate. I sensed that Pike could not hurry because if he did the whole structure would crumble to the ground. More than anything, though, I sensed that Pike was going slow because he had to convince himself again.

  He began by telling us about the boy from the photo, about the boy named Seth.

  Chapter Nineteen

  WALTER

  Lying there in the dark silence of the storm shelter, I felt as peaceful as I could ever remember feeling. I could be anywhere, and part of me wanted to believe I was in heaven. If it could be this peaceful, this fulfilling, I think I’d want to go. Then I heard a voice that made it clear this was not heaven:

  “Where the hell did they go?”

  It was Jake, and he sounded angry, a little dazed, maybe even frightened. His voice was coming from somewhere above us, a faraway sound. I sat up and remembered why we’d slipped in the first place. No, this definitely wasn’t heaven.

  “We did it,” Seth said, his voice barely a whisper. “We showed those bastards.”

  He slapped my shoulder.

  “We showed them. Yes, sir, we did. You okay?”

  “I think so.” I tried opening my eyes just a little. Seth had moved away, to the other side of the shelter. I heard him scratching at the ground, digging.

  A light appeared from the other side. Seth held up a lantern.

  He came back over, his face lit by the lantern. He was smiling so big. “That was the coolest thing ever. I wish I could have seen the look on their faces.”

  “So while we were there in the . . . swamp, Jake and his friends came in here? And we weren’t here?” I couldn’t get my mind around it.

  “That’s about how it works. Pretty cool, huh?”

  “Cool. Jesus, Seth. That’s the most incredible thing that has ever happened to me.”

  Seth started laughing. I’d never heard him laugh like that before. It was loud and obnoxious. The kind of laughter that came from the heart. I started laughing too, thinking about Jake and his buddies finally getting in and finding nothing. Just an empty storm shelter. We laughed so hard, I began to worry they might still be around and hear us, but when I tried to stop laughing I thought about Jake’s face if he did hear us laughing and that was funny too, so I kept right on.

  —

  We sat in the storm shelter for a long time after that. When we finally decided to leave, the batteries in Seth’s lantern had started to die and the darkness was creeping over us. Most of time, Seth talked and I listened.

  He told me about his mother trying to leave his father when he had been younger. “That was a mistake. She paid for that one.”

  “Paid?”

  In the dim light, he shook his head. “You saw my bruises.”

  “What’s wrong with him?” I asked.

  “My father?”

  “Yeah.”

  �
��I can’t explain it.” He swallowed hard, and an awkward silence passed.

  Maybe I should have pushed the issue, but I let it drop because it was obviously painful for Seth.

  “Don’t you even want to hear about how it works?”

  I sat up. Of course I did. This was probably the only thing that could distract me from Seth’s father.

  “When my mother . . . her disappearance. After she was . . .” He hesitated, like he was searching for the right word. Finally, he shook his head in frustration and went on. “After my mother went away. That’s the first time I actually slipped. I was so upset one day that I was determined to come out here and lose myself in these woods. I wanted to find a place so hidden from the rest of the world that nobody’d ever find me. I found this storm shelter. I came down here and just sat for a long time. I think I was close to giving up that day. You know, ending it.

  “But this place. I liked it instantly. It was dark, and I could be alone here. I came almost every day after that, and eventually, I began to realize I was going away. I mean, I’d always been able to go away in my mind, but this was different. This was real.”

  “Going away? You mean slipping?”

  “Sort of. But not quite. At first, I just saw the place, as if from a distance. I wanted to go there. So one day I came down during a storm. I’d been here no more than a few minutes when it happened. The first time was just a glimpse like your first time, but the door had been opened. I started staying longer and longer.”

  I shook my head. “I still don’t understand how you do it.”

  “I’m not really doing anything. It’s already there. I just found it. This place is so close to our woods. It’s the same place, really. Think of it like a book. The other world is on the front side of the page. This one is on the back. What separates the two is as thin as a sheet of paper.”

  “How did you know it would work? I mean, how did you know that by touching me, I would go too?”

  “I experimented. I took objects with me. I brought things back. Want to know something I learned?”

  “What?”

  “The swamp has special powers.”

  “Special powers? You’re kidding me, right?”

  “I took a dead rabbit once. I wanted to see what would happen. It came alive again. In a way. I mean, it was all shady and dark like a shadow, but I could touch it. So I brought it back. Then it was dead again.”

  “Whoa. Did you take it back again?”

  “Yeah. He’s gone now.”

  “Gone?”

  Seth shrugged. “Moved on, I guess. That’s what dead things do, right?”

  I had no answer for this.

  “He seemed so normal.”

  “Who?”

  “Your dad.”

  “He’s not normal at all, Walter. He’s evil.”

  I remembered the way he’d examined Seth’s injuries. “Maybe. But he knows about slipping.”

  “What did you say?”

  “The day you were hurt, the day he came to take you home, he talked to me about being in the cellar with your grandmother. He told me he’d been nearly starved, and he started to see visions. He saw the swamp.”

  Seth said nothing for a long time. The lantern was almost dead. I was still reeling from what had happened. My senses were overloaded, and suddenly I wanted nothing more than to be home in my own bed.

  “I think you’re right,” Seth said quietly. “He told me the same story. It’s one of the things that scares me most. I thought I’d finally found a place to get away from him, but then I find out he’s been there before me, and if he’s been there once, he could go again.”

  I thought about the swamp, how beautiful and special the place seemed. It was hard to imagine Seth’s father there. “Maybe,” I said, “he lost the ability to go. Maybe it’s only something you can do when you’re young.”

  The lantern went out. We were in utter darkness again.

  “Maybe,” Seth said. “And if that’s true, one of these days I’m going to go there and never come back.”

  —

  That was the point where Seth and I didn’t agree. As much as I liked visiting the swamp, I didn’t want to stay. Each time we went, Seth wanted to stay longer. Each time, I had to talk him into coming back.

  I’d say we went at least once a day for a solid month. We explored everything—the cabin, the outer reaches of a swamp that seemed to go on forever. We learned that time never really moves there. It’s always the same. Dusk, a light mist of rain. The same moon in the same sky.

  Eventually, Seth got his hands on one of those Polaroid cameras, and we took photos. There were others besides the ones I showed you, but they’re gone now. Sometimes, thinking of those photos is like thinking of a dream, and sometimes I believe that’s all it was. The slip was a special place, but it’s also a burden that I’ll carry as long as I live.

  Still, those days of going to the swamp with Seth were probably the best of my entire life. I wanted them to last forever, but I don’t need to tell you boys that nothing lasts forever, do I?

  See, I couldn’t stop thinking about Seth’s father, Mr. Sykes. Seth wasn’t telling me everything. I knew that. Every time I’d bring up the subject of his dad, he’d tell me to quit ruining his day. “I come to the swamp to forget him, so please stop bringing him up,” he’d say.

  The more I thought about Mr. Sykes, the more sure I became: He was the one behind those girls going missing. I knew it. I knew Seth knew too, but he was too afraid to tell me. What’s more, I decided I had to do something about it.

  Chapter Twenty

  One warm spring day I skipped school and walked the three miles to the police station.

  Back then we only had the chief—his name was Wyatt Branch—and one deputy. You’ve seen Andy Griffith, right? Imagine that, and you’ll just about have it nailed. Except there was one difference. Chief Branch was a dark, brooding, and cold man who did not suffer fools. It was well known that he didn’t like kids, and when he saw me coming toward his desk that morning, he held his hand up.

  “Hold it. I don’t have time for bullshit today.”

  I stopped a few feet away from his desk. He had his feet up and a cup of coffee in his hand. A newspaper lay open on his desk.

  “Just turn around and go home. Better yet, go back to school. I’m sure whatever it is that brought you in today will take care of itself eventually.”

  “I got something important.”

  “Of course you do.” He blew on his coffee and took a swallow.

  “It’s about the missing girls.”

  He put his coffee down. “You’d better not be shitting me, boy.”

  “I’m not. I know who took them.”

  “You got a name, Sherlock?”

  “Last name is Sykes.” I realized I didn’t know his first.

  “Hell, there’s a whole clan of Sykes round these parts. Which one are you talking about?”

  “He lives out by the cotton fields, across the highway, not too far from the apple orchard.”

  “I think I know who you’re talking about. Paid them a visit not too long ago. Boy wasn’t going to school.” He put his coffee down and looked me over. “You Preston Pike’s boy?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Tell your daddy if I catch him publicly intoxicated again, I’m going give him something worse than a hangover.” With that, Branch stood up and put on his hat.

  “I’ll tell him.”

  “Good. You can tell me why you think this Sykes is the one on the way.”

  —

  Don’t think I haven’t realized the similarities. Seems I’m always destined to be the bearer of unbelievable news. As we rode in that police car, I had no idea I’d be trying to convince people nearly thirty-six years later of something even harder to believe. Not that convincing Branch wa
s going to be easy.

  We made a turn by the gas station and saw them—twenty or so men—all shirtless, bent over, their backs shining with sweat in the morning sun.

  Branch parked the car along the side of the road and started to get out.

  “Don’t tell him it was me,” I said.

  He looked at me as a smile spread across his face. “You’re a dumb kid,” he said.

  He left me in the car and walked through the cotton until he found Jim Reynolds, the foreman. It was a nice day and the men moved easily with smiles on their faces, enjoying the breeze.

  He and Jim spoke for a moment and I saw Jim looking over toward the police car, shading his eyes as if trying to make me out. I slumped down in my seat, laying my head against the leather. I lay there for a long time, thinking all sorts of dangerous thoughts. What if Branch brought Seth’s dad back over? What if he marked me next? I tried to think of the swamp, the twilight, and the full moon. The cabin. I thought of the way the water stirred just against the bank, the snakes and birds and maybe even an alligator slipping off into the swamp. I wanted to go there, but it wasn’t happening. Even if I’d been in the storm shelter, I doubted I could go without Seth.

  Branch finally came back to the car and sat down in the seat heavily. He wiped a line of sweat from his brow. He cranked up the cruiser and waited for a truck to pass before pulling back on the highway.

  “You never told me why you thought it was him,” he said.

  “I just know. Why didn’t you arrest him?”

  “Son, I can’t just go arresting folks because some kid walks into my office and says he just ‘knows.’ Jesus Christ almighty. You got to have some reason for making such an asinine accusation.”

  I almost told him about Seth, but I stopped myself.

  “If you don’t tell me something else, son, I’m going to start thinking you might have something to do with the missing girls. This Sykes fellow ain’t the one. I talked to Jim Reynolds. Jim vouched for him, said he knows him from way back. Said he was one of the survivors from the storm in thirty-two. Bottom line, I trust Jim, which means you must be full of shit. Besides, I talked to him myself. Rodney’s his name. Nice guy. Couldn’t quite get his head around why some kid would accuse him. He did say his son has some . . . difficulties. You know, personality or whatnot since his mama left a few years ago. Said maybe his boy had started some foolish rumors. That the case?”