The Year of the Storm

by John Mantooth

  “There was someone down there. The girls, I think. Are they—?”

  He shook his head. “Easy. Don’t get all excited. The doctors say they’ll kick me out if I rile you up.” He took a deep breath. “You know something about the missing girls?”

  “I think he kept them down there. There were shackles on the wall. I—”

  “We found the shackles, but we figured those were for you.”

  “No, sir. I went there looking for the girls. The cabin was empty when I got there—”

  “Hold it. You telling me he didn’t kidnap you? That you went there under your own will?”

  “Yes, I was looking for the girls. Seth told me that his father killed them.”

  “Back up. To what you said before about going there on your own. One more time. I want to be clear,” he said. I couldn’t be sure, but I believed I saw pleasure on his face.

  “I went to find the girls. More than your dumb ass has been able to do.” I realized the instant I’d said it that it was a mistake; everything I’d said had been a mistake. Branch didn’t like me, and before he’d talked to me, he’d believed that I’d been right. That Sykes had kidnapped me and therefore had probably done the same to the girls and Seth too. It had seemed pretty clear. Now, I’d managed to give him an out.

  He took a deep breath and barely hid a smile. “Did you find them, boy? ’Cause if you did, I’d like to know about it.”

  “No,” I said. “I didn’t find them.”

  “You didn’t find them, huh? But you did manage to trespass on a man’s private property and kill him? That about right, dumbass?”

  “What about the shackles?” I said, sure that there would be nothing he could come up with to explain that away.

  “What about them? Ain’t no crime to hang shackles on his wall. For all I know, he used them to discipline his boy.” Branch nodded thoughtfully. “Can’t say it helped much.”

  “You’re an idiot,” I said.

  He patted my knee, smiling. “How old are you?”

  I was silent.

  “I’m going to guess fourteen, maybe fifteen. Either way, old enough for a jury to convict you as an adult for trespassing on another man’s property and killing him in cold blood. Now, I may be an idiot, but you’re a damn fool if you think you’re getting out of this one, son.”

  “Look at me,” I said, on the verge of tears. “He tried to kill me.”

  “A man’s got to defend himself. Especially when somebody comes trespassing on his property.” He stood up. “Get better soon. I’ll be checking on you.”

  —

  A few days later I left the hospital. I waited until the place was dead quiet, and I just got up out of my bed and walked out. I hiked home and, without waking my parents, packed a bag of clothes. Then I left again, walking out to the highway, where I cocked my thumb in the air and waited for no more than thirty minutes before a grizzled old coot in a Ford picked me up. He asked me where I was going (he didn’t ask about the patch on my eye, and I took this as a good sign). I told him anywhere. He nodded as if he understood and began to drive. He let me off somewhere in Tennessee.

  I spent the next four months living hand to mouth in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains. I rummaged for food. I begged for it. I stole. Sometimes I found work, but I never found a place to call home until I met a man who hired me to clean out his barn. After it was apparent I had no place to go, he allowed me to live there in exchange for keeping up the place and helping out with his cows and horses.

  I was pretty happy there, but there was something growing inside me. Call it a darkness or doubt, or maybe it was just confusion, but I felt like I needed to move on to something . . . I don’t know . . . more dangerous. I suppose if I was honest, I’d tell you I never quite got over my death wish, but I think that was only part of it. I also had a desire to go back to the slip, to find a way back to that magic, to prove to myself that it had really happened, that there was something more to this life.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  After I got back from the war, a time came when I had convinced myself I was nothing more than a crazy drunk. That the things I remembered from my boyhood were hallucinations brought on by the alcohol, or maybe I was shell-shocked. If I had any real sense, I’d let them go and get on with life, but my life was a wreck. Three failed marriages, two addictions, and the inability to tell anybody—including the three wives—what was bothering me. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t let go of the past. So eventually, I came back home.

  At first I camped for several months near the storm shelter. For a while, I was afraid to go inside. I’m not sure why. Probably had to do with finding something there that might actually prove my crazy fantasies true, because as much as I obsessed over Seth and the slipping and the swamp, I wasn’t actually convinced I wanted any of it to be real. But eventually, I had to go in. I had to see.

  Nothing happened. I sat there for days waiting for some vision, some flash of the swamp, but there was nothing.

  I was almost ready to move on, to forget that part of my life altogether, when I made a last stop by the ruins of Seth’s old house. Like I said, the place had burned down sometime while I was away, but picking through the rubble I found a couple of things that made me realize I couldn’t take the easy way out. I couldn’t forget.

  I found them in a large metal box near the back. Someone had put them there, almost as if he was expecting the house to burn down. Inside the box, I found the canvas of Seth’s painting, the one I showed you earlier. But more important than that, I found the photos we took. I looked at them just like you did. Wasn’t there some explanation? Sure seemed like there had to be, but the more I thought about it, the less I could convince myself that anything besides slipping could explain those photographs. Before I went to Tennessee, I’d never been out of the county, yet there I was standing knee-deep in a swamp.

  The next day, I put five of the photos in the box that you saw and buried it in the meadow, being sure to count off the paces, so that one day when I doubted again, I could come out and dig it back up. I kept the painting for myself.

  Nearly ten years passed. During that time, I lived off the grid, so to speak. Sometimes I came back here, but mostly I roamed the Southeast, working odd jobs for cash. I stopped paying taxes, receiving mail. I didn’t even have an address. Most days I wondered if I had a purpose, but I held on anyway. Now that I’ve met you, Danny, I see that after all these years I was meant to do something.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  DANNY

  When something really traumatic happens to you, the world starts to looks a little different. I’m not talking about how it looks when your dog just died or you discovered that you won’t be getting into medical school after all. I’m talking about finding out you have cancer or losing your kid to some stranger with a candy bar in a Honda Civic. I’m talking about watching your mother and little sister walk out into some storm-ravaged landscape and never return.

  You begin to notice the shadows. Before they were just a nuisance, a distraction from the sunlight. But when there’s a turning point, like what happened with Mom and Anna, the shadows cast a spell. You feel it when you try to remember and when you try to forget, omnipresent, sticky, and so cloying you try to make your mind go blank just to live a moment without them.

  After a while, the melancholy becomes so commonplace that you grow numb. You find that you are forgetting now without even trying. The shadows become more inconspicuous, just trees, bare and cold, lurking on the periphery of your vision. All of which seems good, except by then you’re so used to the heartache that when it fades away, you’re left with nothing but emptiness. You’re face-to-face at last with the bottom, and it stares at you, unrelenting, calm, ageless.

  Even at fourteen—especially at fourteen—the bottom is a scary place.

  I went through all of this in the months that Mom a
nd Anna were gone, and even though I came face-to-face with utter hopelessness, I never bottomed out completely. I always held a spark of hope—sometimes nothing more than a sputtering flame—that my mother and sister lived. I believe if I’d been older, wiser to the way the world has of knocking you in the mouth repeatedly, I would have dismissed Walter Pike’s story with a cynical shake of my head. I would have walked away from his place numb, and content in my numbness because the ache of hope hurt too damn much to mess with again.

  Nowadays, I think a lot about what it means to slip. About the ways a person can slip, because it’s really something we do all the time. You go along, thinking everything is fine, and ignore all the tiny slips, the glimpses of what your life could be. It’s easy to ignore because you come back so quickly, until you really slip, you fall off the path and spin and tumble and hit the water much too fast. You find yourself in another world, a disorienting one, and no matter how many times you look for the exit, it just keeps moving, until the only way out is too painful to even consider.

  I didn’t know then if I believed Pike’s story. I know I wanted to. Now, I’m no better off. Doubt still dogs my every step, but there is one thing I do know, one thing that I’ve learned.

  We all slip. In one way or another.

  And when we do, very few of us ever find our way back to the surface.

  Sometimes you get lucky, though. At fourteen, I still had hope. Just the smallest sliver, but I clung to it like a man clinging to his very last match in a world without light.

  —

  He told us just a little more.

  “When I came back this last time, a few weeks ago, I decided I was going to stay. I came here, to this cabin.”

  I opened my mouth to speak, but Cliff beat me to it. “This is where you killed Sykes.”

  Pike nodded. “And don’t forget, it’s where those girls died too.”

  “And it’s where Sykes was with his mother when she died.”

  Pike pointed at me. He seemed pleased I had been listening so closely.

  “Yeah, that’s something to remember. Seth believed that the storm shelter was the way, but somehow the cellar right below us is important too.”

  Suddenly, the darkness seemed oppressive. I wanted a bright light to shine in every corner of this place.

  “I came here because I began to wonder if this cabin could connect me to the swamp.” He was silent for a moment, and it was weird to see him sitting still, no cigarette, no oxygen, just him, and it made him seem naked, vulnerable beyond all telling. “I’ve been having other dreams about the swamp. Hell, I don’t even know if they’re dreams. It’s almost like I go there, but I’m helpless, just an eye in the sky, watching.”

  “What do you see?” I asked. “Are the girls still there?”

  He nodded. “Yeah. And somebody else.”

  I said, “Sykes.”

  “Bingo.”

  “But how?” Cliff said.

  Pike shrugged, and the spell of his stillness was broken. He patted his shirt pocket for a cigarette. “Seth always worried that he’d find a way in.” Pike lit the cigarette, and in the glow of ash, I saw pain etched into the creases of his face. “I worry that maybe I killed him in the wrong place. I worry that somehow, it’s my fault.”

  “It can’t be,” I said, amazed by the outrage in my voice. “Don’t even think like that. The note Seth left. He said he was going to make it right. That meant he was going to take the girls’ remains to the swamp, right? Like the rabbit.”

  Pike grinned around his cigarette. “Hell, now how did you figure out in a couple of hours what it took me years to get ahold of?”

  I blushed in the darkness, thankful that Cliff couldn’t see. “It just makes sense. But it proves that killing somebody in the cellar doesn’t take them there. Sykes must have found another way in. Maybe it’s genetic. I mean, your grandmother saw it first, then Sykes, and finally, Seth and you.”

  “This is ridiculous,” Cliff said suddenly. “Listen to yourself, Danny.”

  I looked at Pike. He nodded. “Maybe he’s right, Danny-boy. Maybe it is ridiculous. Hell, I know he’s right. It is ridiculous, and if we could tape-record our voices and listen to them again, we’d probably commit ourselves to Bryce Hospital over there in Tuscaloosa, but, and this is a big God-blamed but, that don’t mean it isn’t the truth.”

  He was talking to both of us, but his eyes were on me. He blew out a stream of smoke. “Sometimes you got to take a chance. Sometimes, that’s all you have left. A crazy, ridiculous chance.”

  He laughed, and the laugh turned into a cough. When he finally cleared the smoke from his lungs, he leaned forward. “What do you say, Danny-boy? Take a chance? Get your mother and sister back?”

  These days, I might try to fool myself and pretend I agonized over the decision, but that would be a lie. I was desperate for something, and when I saw it, I grabbed it with everything I had.

  I opened my mouth to speak, but Cliff interrupted me.

  “What’s that?”

  Far away, I heard the sound of an engine.

  Pike held his hand up for silence.

  “Sounds like a—” Cliff began.

  “Shhh!” Pike shot him a look.

  The sound got closer. It was a car. Coming this way.

  “You boys had better go in the back.”

  Cliff and I sat there.

  “You heard me. Get in the back. Don’t come out until I tell you to.”

  We both got up and went down the darkened corridor to the back room, the same room where we’d found him in his own vomit the other day. I’d been nervous then, full of something like dread at what I’d find. I felt the same way now as I stumbled forward, hands outstretched into the utter darkness.

  Shapes—dark and undefined—floated in front of me. I reached for one and felt a softness. The bed. Pulling myself around, I settled down on the floor on the other side. I heard Cliff join me, his breathing rapid and shallow.

  Other than that, the cabin was quiet.

  A car door slammed outside, and I heard Pike rising from his chair, the hardwood floor creaking under his feet with each step. I imagined him walking over to the window and peering out.

  “Who do you think it is?” Cliff whispered.

  I had no idea, but for some reason I was frightened. There had been something in Pike’s voice when he told us to go to the back, something that suggested he had been expecting the visit. That put me on edge.

  “Don’t know,” I said, my voice barely even a whisper.

  There was a knock on the door. Three of them. I heard Pike clear his throat and say, “Come on in.”

  The door swung open with a long creak. I leaned forward, frantic to hear something, anything that would tell me who it was.

  A moment of agonizing silence passed. Then Pike spoke.

  “Help you?”

  “Are you Walter Pike?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I’m Deputy Sims from the county sheriff’s department. We received a call about thirty minutes ago from a Eugene Banks. Know him?”

  Cliff pinched me hard. His dad had called the police. I shook my head, willing him to be silent.

  “Don’t recognize the name.”

  No one spoke, but I heard movement, saw a shadow down the corridor, and I pictured Sims—in my opinion the biggest buffoon in the department—taking his hat off, walking over to look out the window, rolling his neck, posturing like he always did when Dad had to deal with him.

  “I’m going to shoot straight, Walter.”

  “Mr. Pike.”

  “Say again.”

  “You called me Walter. Seems a little too familiar for my taste. My friends call me that. You can call me Mr. Pike.”

  “I don’t think you quite have a handle on the situation here, Walter. You picked a
hell of a time to come back. Sheriff is dying to pin this shit on somebody, with the election coming next spring and all. You, though? Heh. A known queer that was a major suspect in the last mystery these woods have seen that shows up when you did and immediately starts messing with young boys? Hell, man, this town will burn you at the fucking stake.”

  “You plan on arresting me?”

  “I’ll ask the fucking questions.”

  Pike said nothing.

  “Now, the way I figure it, you got the bodies somewhere on these premises . . .” I heard the floorboards creak as Sims moved across the room again.

  “What’s back here, old man?” Sims’s voice was closer. I could feel Cliff tense up beside me.

  “Don’t go back there.”

  “I’ll go wherever I like. Sheriff warned me you didn’t have a bit of respect for the law.”

  “I respect the law, just not the lawmen around here,” Pike said. “I’m telling you to stop.”

  “How about this, old man? How about you stick one thumb in your mouth and the other in your ass and shut up?”

  I heard Cliff draw a sharp breath as the footsteps echoed toward us. I was looking for a back window to escape out of when it happened.

  At first I thought the whole cabin was coming down, that something had fallen from the sky and landed on the roof. The very air shook with it. Cliff shrieked and I clamped my hand over his mouth. He nodded quickly, to show he understood, and finally, I did too. Somebody had fired a shot. Since I hadn’t seen a gun in the cabin, I could only assume . . .

  I came out of the corridor on the run. I almost collided with Sims, who was standing at the end of the hall, his hands up, his back to me.

  Pike stood across the room from him, the lantern burning bright at his feet, holding a sawed-off shotgun to his shoulder. The double barrel was pointing right at Sims’s face.

  “I told you not to go back there.”

  Very slowly, I slid back down the hall into the darkness of Pike’s room. Cliff grabbed me.