“Okay,” she told Bob. “If you’re sure it’s not too much trouble. “
“No trouble at all,” he said, beckoning to the police car and picking up her two pieces of luggage. “I hope you don’t mind if we don’t go to the house right away. Frank Kaylor wants me to check a few of the roadblocks first.” He put the suitcases in the backseat and joined her in the front.
“Roadblocks?”
“Yeah.” Rankin spoke loudly enough to be heard over the engine. “Got eight roadblocks up all around the town.”
“People are trying to get in?”
“Sure. Just like that guy on the train. Curiosity seekers, freelance writers, photographers. It’s amazing. It’s barely been a day, Alice, and already the ghouls are descending. I figure by tomorrow someone’ll be selling T-shirts and souvenir beer mugs.” They drove in silence for a while. Rankin checked the roadblocks and found that the volunteers manning them were doing a satisfactory job. “Glad this happened on a weekend,” Rankin said as he finally turned the car toward his house. “Lots of people to help.” He told Alice then about the schools and stores and factories closing the day before, the way people had gathered in the square, about Marty Sanders (Alice didn’t remember him), and by that time they were home. It was a neat little bungalow on Poplar Street, and Bob honked the horn lightly. Alice shivered as she looked at the pale shapes scattered here and there like transparent leaf bags on some nearby lawns. “There aren’t any inside our house,” Bob said, sensing her discomfort. “Kay’s getting braver,” he added. “Got some shades up.”
When they were halfway up the walk the front door opened, and Kay, older and heavier by ten pounds, stared at them both. “Alice?” she said hesitantly.
Alice nodded, and Kay ran down the steps and threw her arms around Alice, weeping and laughing at once, and Alice began to cry too without knowing precisely why. Bob gave the embracing pair a gentle push toward the house and went to fetch the luggage.
“It is so good to see you,” gushed Kay, unwilling to relinquish the hold on Alice’s shoulders. “I never thought you would come back, and not now especially, but, my God, I can’t think of anyone else I’d rather see. This place has gone crazy, Alice. You can’t talk to anyone around here now; all they want to talk about is this terrible thing that’s happened, and …” She paused for a breath. “Oh, I’m just so glad you’re here.”
“You look good, Kay.”
“Pooh!” Kay laughed. “A dumpy old housewife next to you. And you’re older than me too. You have a portrait in your attic? How about some coffee?”
“I could use it,” Alice said, sitting thankfully in a kitchen chair while Kay pulled a jar of instant from a cupboard. “I got up at five-thirty.”
Bob stuck his head in the door. “I asked Alice to stay with us, Kay. All right?”
“I wouldn’t think of her being anywhere else. Honestly, Alice, you’re like a godsend. I just want you to tell me all the things you’ve been doing, and tell me about the shows. I mean I haven’t seen a show for years, except for the road companies when I can talk Bob into going. And what about that guy you were dating when I was up last? I could swear that I saw him in a soap a while back, and—”
“Kay,” said Alice with a weak chuckle, “please slow down. My brain’s so dopey right now I can barely follow you.”
“Oh,” Kay said, her face falling. “Was I talking too fast?” She tried to smile again, but faltered and took a deep breath instead. “Sorry.” She turned her attention to the coffee.
“I’m sorry,” Alice replied. “You don’t have to stop entirely, you know.”
“No, it’s my fault. I’m not myself.” Her hand shook as she set down Alice’s coffee, sending the liquid over the cup’s rim into the saucer.
Bob’s head reappeared. “Gotta go out again. Your bags are in the guest room, Alice.”
“Again?” cried Kay. “Bob, you haven’t slept since—”
“I will tonight,” he said, smiling. “I’ll be home for dinner.” And he was gone.
“He’s been … busy,” Kay added.
“I can imagine.” Alice started to lift her cup, but froze as she noticed something stirring at the edge of her vision. A ghost, she thought blindly, but could not stop herself from turning to look. “Oh, God,” she said in relief, “Vivo.”
“What?”
“I thought she was a ghost … good old Vivo.” Alice knelt beside the basket and scratched the pale brown head of the dachshund that was only now just finishing the lengthy yawn that had drawn Alice’s attention. “Nice to see you, girl. You’re looking a little worse for wear.”
“Arthritis,” smiled Kay. “You believe it? The one eye’s gone for good, and her sight’s real bad in the other.”
Alice nodded. It was obvious. The one eye had atrophied and was wrinkled like a raisin. The other was as cloudy as an old marble. Nevertheless the dog’s personality shone through the grizzled face. As always, she seemed to be smiling. “Is she in pain?”
“Sometimes. Bob thinks we ought to have her put to sleep. But I think as long as she can still enjoy things … Besides, she’s probably the last dog in Merridale.”
“What do you mean?”
“When this … this thing started,” Kay explained, “the dogs just went crazy. Barking and barking and barking. Even when they were taken out of sight they still kept it up. As if they sensed them. So early this morning they had a roundup. Put all the dogs in cages and on some trucks and took them down to the SPCA kennels in Lansford.”
“My God, there must have been hundreds of them.”
“Try nearly a thousand. Bob said it was a nightmare.” She smirked. “As if anything could be a nightmare after all this.”
“It hasn’t bothered Vivo?”
“No, her eyes are gone, she barely hears anymore. Maybe whatever senses the younger dogs have Vivo’s said goodbye to long ago.” Kay knelt beside Alice and rubbed the old dog’s ears. “I’m glad. She’d never survive a stay in the kennels. Maybe a day or two she’d be all right. But who knows how long this is going to last?”
Who knows indeed? Alice thought, and bit back what she had been about to tell Kay, swallowed down her reason for returning to Merridale. But Kay knew just the same, although she didn’t bring up the subject of Tim Reardon until late that evening.
CHAPTER 12
The years had not changed the place. Jim didn’t know what he’d expected to find—certainly no man-made response to the accident, no new sign saying, “Dangerous Curve for School Buses,” no granite memorial by the roadside as they had every few yards at Gettysburg, where he and Beth and Terry had gone every summer. There was only the rough gray road, the hill, the curve, the high trees now nearly stripped of brown and dying leaves.
He pulled his car as far off the road as he could and got out. At first he listened, but heard nothing but the empty branches clicking together in the wind. He looked around to see if anyone else was there, but saw only a battered car parked several hundred yards down the road. Hunters, he thought. Taking a deep breath, he walked to the edge of the embankment.
Ice settled deep in his throat as he saw them, only dim shapes in the late-morning sun. He stood for a long time before moving down the slope toward the bare patch where even the weeds had not grown again. Ten yards away from the nearest shape he stopped.
It was several inches above the ground, the thickness, he tried to reason with detachment, of the side of the bus. Though it glowed with a weak blue light, the texture of its skin (could skin be so wrinkled, so puckered and deeply fissured?) made it look black. They burned, he told himself, and then remembered that he knew they had burned, that the bus had burned and they were inside. But he had come back today to learn something else, hadn’t he? To learn how they had died. To learn how Terry had died.
Now he knew. Not in the accident, not in the rolling and battering descent down the hill, but in the fire. They had died in the fire. Their pitiable images were like photographs taken at t
he moment of death. If the flesh would have been smooth and untouched save by the kinder cruelties of jagged glass and sharp metal, Jim Callendar could have walked away. But the sad little ghost before him had been touched with flame, blackened by the fire before death came.
There must have been screams. Why can’t I remember the screams?
And he thought that perhaps he had been in the air all that time that the children had been screaming, locked in the middle of that leap from which he was not certain he had as yet descended.
He closed the ten yard gap then, walking dreamlike to the banquet table to gorge himself on the physical evidence of his guilt. The guilt opened now, like a bloom fully mature, its five blue petals gleaming in the sun: Bobby Miller, his hair charred to a pale ashy fluff, as easy to blow away as a dandelion gone to seed, his eyes hollow, abraded, the blood from the cavities frozen in tiny bubbles on his blackened cheeks, as though about to boil.…
Tracy Gianelli, her burned hands out in front of her as if warding off more flame, her black changeling eyes ruptured by the heat, mouth wrenched open in a silent scream.…
Jennifer Raber, in a more peaceful position than the others, lying fetally curled, her flesh only darkened, not burned, as though she had died more quickly than the rest. Perhaps, then, Terry had not suffered for long either.…
Frank Meyers, his fingers like burned sticks clutched to his throat, trying to rip out the searing pain that had lined his nose, mouth, windpipe, lungs, his body blackened and wrinkled far more than the others, proof that he had taken far longer to die…
Finally he saw Terry, apart from the others. He was lying as Jim had seen him lie a million times, facedown, arms bent so that his hands were next to his face, his head turned to the left. His naked skin was clear and untouched by the fire. His eyes were partly open, his mouth a small “O” of surprise.
He didn’t burn. The crash killed him. He didn’t burn.
At that second guilt dropped from him to let the wide expanse of relief flow in, not for himself, not from any sense of vindication, but solely from the knowledge that his boy had not suffered too much. Jim Callendar cried in that relief, and lay on the cold bare ground next to Terry’s still shade, his face only inches from the boy’s, as he had years before, sharing the closeness of father and son, grabbing the moment in a wish that it would stay forever and the boy would never go away.
But the hollow, he learned quickly, was no cozy bed; the vision beside him, no living son whose breath puffed in and out with a reassuring metronomic precision. This was his dead boy, now truly ash, just the impression in sand of a seashell whose inhabitant is long dissolved in the waters. He took one more look at the small face and stood up, again aware of the other blue forms nearby, again allowing the guilt to settle on him with crushing weight. Then he heard the voice: “This must be visiting day.”
Jim whirled, staggered, righted himself, looked twenty yards up the slope to where a man was standing. He was of medium height, stocky, in an old fatigue jacket. Long hair and a beard nearly hid his face. At first Jim didn’t recognize him.
“Startled you? I’m sorry.” The man walked down the slope toward Jim with a feline grace. As he came closer Jim remembered the close-set eyes, the straight white teeth in the wide mouth that now grinned at him without humor.
“Meyers? Bradley Meyers?”
“Brad’s fine. For my friends. And we ought to be friends. After all, we’ve got a lot in common, huh?” He jerked his head at the tableau of dead children. “Each lost a son, right?”
Jim nodded.
“What’s that?”
“Yes.”
“Ah.” Brad looked around with slight interest, as though he were in a singles bar checking what was available. “So. This is your first time?”
“What?”
“Out here. First time you came out here? Since the bang-up, I mean.”
“Yes.”
“Really something, isn’t it? You know, if it hadn’t been for this weird thing that’s happened, why, we really wouldn’t’ve known how our kids died. I mean really died, not just what the coroner says.” He shook his head back and forth. “I think there’s a reason why things like this happen—oh, not the accident, but these, uh, ghosts. What do you think?”
“I don’t know.” Jim felt sick, but unable to walk away from Brad Meyers.
“Do you believe in God?”
Jim nodded.
“Sorry, I didn’t get that.”
“Yes. I do.”
“That’s good. I do too. Maybe not, uh, God exactly, but in something. That divinity that shapes our ends. I think there’s a reason for everything. Even the smallest thing that happens. The way the leaves fall off the trees. Where they land. It all affects other things.” Brad crouched, resting his buttocks on his heels. “Haven’t you ever thought that when some things happen, they happen just for you?”
“I guess so.”
“You guess so. You think that maybe what happened here in Merridale, these ghoulies and ghosties, that maybe that happened just for you?” Jim didn’t answer. “Well?”
“I don’t really know.” If Brad Meyers had sounded stupid, if he’d slurred his words, Jim wouldn’t have felt as uncomfortable as he did. But Brad’s words were slow, studied, his delivery, if not the ideas themselves, smooth and intelligent.
“I think it did. For you. And maybe for me too. For us, Jim. May I call you Jim?” Jim nodded again. “That’s good. And I’m Brad, Jim. Jim and Brad. Brad and Jim.” Brad’s face didn’t change as he went on. The thin smile stayed in place. “Do you know you killed my son?”
Jim didn’t, couldn’t, answer. His throat was thick with sickness.
“That’s all right. You don’t have to say anything. I’m certain you’ve been feeling pretty badly about it ever since it happened. That’s why I never did anything about it, never said anything to you. That, and also the fact that I didn’t know what the truth was. My guess is that you didn’t either. Not until today.” He straightened up and took a deep breath of the cool fall air. “But now, well, seeing what I can see and remembering what you said at the hearing, I think I can figure out what happened. Postulate a bit.
“When the bus caught on fire, I mean really caught so that the underside was in flames, you jumped, just like you said. No big deal. I might’ve done the same thing. Something like that happens, and self-preservation takes over. Understandable.
“But now, and here’s where the problem comes in, I don’t think that fire could’ve killed those kids right away. In fact, I think that maybe, just maybe, there would’ve been time to get them out. And the reason I think that is that if there hadn’t been time, you would’ve remembered. The reason you forgot, the reason your story is so fuzzy, is that you blotted it out, because you did something that you had to blot it out. Am I making sense, Jim? Or am I full of shit?”
After what seemed like minutes, Jim made himself answer. “It … it makes sense. Yes.”
“Good. Thank you. Now would you like to know what you blotted out? What you did while the fire spread? I think you did nothing. I think you sat where you landed, maybe even got farther away, and then you watched. I think you heard the kids screaming, I think you saw the fire engulf the bus, I think maybe you even saw my son go up in flames. And I think you didn’t do anything, and when it was too late … then … then you remembered.”
“Then I landed,” whispered Jim.
“What?’
“Nothing. Nothing.”
Brad Meyers sucked his lower lip and looked at Jim appraisingly. “You notice I preface everything I said with ‘I think.’ Conjectures only. No certainties. But with some things we have to react as though our conjectures are true. We have to trust our feelings, do you agree?”
“Yes. “
“Good.” He turned in the direction of the road. “Will you come with me a minute? I’d like you to see something. Oh, don’t worry, they’ll still be here when you come back. I think they’ll always be here.
For us anyway.” He started walking, but Jim did not follow. Brad turned back. “Ahab beckons. Are you afraid to come with me?” Jim followed, his eyes on Brad Meyers’s boot heels as they crushed down the dying weeds.
They walked up the slope to the road, then turned left and went to the curve where Henry Martin’s truck had wrecked. Brad climbed over a cable barrier and started to disappear from view. “Come on, Jim,” he called, and Jim followed obediently, digging the sides of his shoes into the loose dirt that covered the steep grade.
“Here we are,” Brad said, pointing to another dim blue shade half covered by very high weeds. He pushed the weeds back so that Jim could see what was left of Henry Martin. The gaunt bony frame was savagely twisted, the head attached by only a scrap of flesh. “Meet Henry Martin, Jim, whose carelessness in mechanical details has condemned him—or his shade—to hover here for … eternity?” Brad released the weeds, which closed over most of Henry Martin’s revenant. “There’s your son’s killer, Jim. I can tell from seeing your boy that he bought it in the crash, not the fire. You know that, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Then you know too about the others. You saw my boy.” Brad jammed his hands into his deep pockets, the smile gone from his face. He sighed deeply. “If Henry Martin were here right now—I don’t mean that, I mean Henry Martin alive, healthy, untouched—what do you think you’d do?”
A Haunting of Horrors: A Twenty-Novel eBook Bundle of Horror and the Occult Page 68