The Chill

by Scott Carson

  He turned the page, and there in his all-caps lettering was a single sentence.

  LISTEN TO THE WATER.

  “Perfect,” he said aloud. He needed real-world wisdom, and he’d found a teenager’s attempt at Buddhist awareness. Listen to the water. It read like a line that had been cut from a Kung Fu Panda script.

  Listen to the water. Sure. That had served him well today.

  Holding the book brought his hand close to his face, and he could see a ragged red line there. The cut wasn’t deep enough to require stitches, so they’d simply cleaned it and left it uncovered. It wasn’t a scrape or a slice but an indentation, the mark of something thin and strong pressed deep enough into his hand to break the skin.

  Fishing line. It was all around my hand, and when I moved, the body moved, and that was when I saw the skull clearly, when it slid out from under that black hood…

  He flipped pages and switched the book from his right hand to his left so he no longer could see the wound.

  This page contained more sage advice, counseling him to master the skill of “de-stressing.”

  Now, that was not such a bad idea. He set the book down, sat up in bed, and listened to the house. Silent. His father had to be asleep. It had been a long day for Steve Ellsworth.

  Aaron cracked the window, letting a cool, damp breeze fill the room, and pulled a baggie with a nugget of pot from the drawer in the nightstand. He broke it, separated it, and rolled a small but potent joint. He felt the first pang of desire for something stronger, something like he and Riggins had hit last night. The synthetic shit with a name like a kid’s sugared breakfast cereal but a kick like a mule on steroids.

  Peaceful Passages. You promised.

  Holding the joint put the line of sliced flesh along the back of his hand in front of his eyes again. Once more he switched from right hand to left, just to get it out of sight.

  Chains and a padlock. And those hooks—they weren’t for fishing. Unless someone thought there were tarpon in the Chilewaukee tailwaters, they wouldn’t use a hook like that.

  It was easy to hallucinate when you were underwater, though. Down in the dark depths, panicked and running out of oxygen, you could imagine anything.

  But what about on the surface?

  He could feel the weight of the bottle in his hand and see it slicing through the air and bursting on the stranger’s face. The same stranger who’d walked out of the woods with his odd smile and chipper laugh just before the cop named Gillian Mathers would have arrested Aaron for murder.

  The joint burned out, and it took him four tries to relight it. His fingers were trembling.

  A chime came from under the bed. His iPad, forgotten on the floor, buried beneath a tangle of jeans and a gaming headset. He set the joint on the windowsill and picked up the iPad. A chat session was open, filled with messages. Riggins. Wondering where the hell he’d been, what had happened.

  Bro—you out there? Or did your old man freak out and lock you down? the last one read.

  Yes and no, Tyler. Yes and no.

  He hesitated, then pecked out a response.

  What in the hell did we get into last night? I had a strange day.

  A strange day. Bit of an understatement, that.

  Riggins responded immediately.

  It could’ve been worse. Where are you? I need to talk. My lawyer says it would be a big help if your old man would throw a kind word my way. Like… a HUGE help.

  The request made Aaron angry, although the previous night it wouldn’t have. The night before, the idea would have seemed fair and reasonable.

  A lot of things had seemed more reasonable last night.

  He didn’t answer, but Riggins didn’t wait on him.

  Let’s get a beer I’ve been calling your phone all day. Where the hell are you?

  Home, Aaron answered, and again he hesitated. He wanted to ask Riggins some questions directly. Things that he didn’t want to type, things he couldn’t risk his father overhearing. Like some details about what exactly they’d smoked and whether Riggins had experienced any, ahem, unusual side effects.

  You out? Aaron messaged.

  Just cruising, yeah. You need a ride?

  Yes. I need to get my phone, and my dad’s truck. You sober enough to give me a ride?

  He could almost hear the sneer in Riggins’s voice when the next message came in.

  Do you care?

  Actually, yeah, Aaron typed.

  He felt as if he could hear the sigh of disgust from Riggins when he wrote back, Don’t be a bitch. I’m fine. I’ll head your way now.

  Aaron stood, stubbed the joint out between his thumb and forefinger, then tucked it in a drawer. He pulled on his jeans and a sweatshirt and his Wolverine work boots, going slowly with the right foot and leaving the laces looser. He grabbed a jacket from the post on the footboard and was about to leave the room when the iPad chimed again.

  Riggins: Where’s your truck, anyhow?

  Aaron typed, Down by the Chill. At the dam.

  Almost instantly: Hell were you doing down there?

  Just come get me, Aaron replied, and this time he closed the iPad’s cover.

  He hadn’t even made it down the stairs when his father’s bedroom door opened and he came out and stood in the hallway. He was wearing sweatpants but no shirt, his wide chest pale beneath a tangle of gray hair. Although he still looked big enough and fit enough in his uniform, Aaron couldn’t help but notice how he was aging now. Faster each year since Mom died, it seemed, the grief taking a physical toll.

  Think you’re not a part of that toll, too? a voice in his head chided him.

  “You need some more Tylenol?” his father asked, wary, as he studied Aaron’s wardrobe, which definitely suggested he was headed somewhere farther than the kitchen counter.

  “I’m going to run down and get your truck.”

  “We don’t need to worry about that now. It’ll hold until morning.”

  “I’d like to get it now.”

  A pause. “All right. Let me get dressed.”

  “I’ve got a ride, actually.”

  That earned an undisguised grimace. Aaron knew what he was thinking: that everything Aaron had said on the ride back from the hospital had been bullshit and he’d needed only a few hours to fall back into his old ways. That he couldn’t even make it through one night—twelve hours—of pretense.

  “Riggins is coming to get me, and he’s sober,” Aaron said, keeping his voice level and his eyes on his father’s. “If it turns out he isn’t when he gets here, I won’t get in the car with him. I promise. But I want to ride down there with him and clean up my mess.”

  “It’s a truck in a parking lot. Not much mess.”

  “I want to tell him why I’m going to be gone soon,” Aaron said. “And where.” Then, as a thought came to him that was both hopeful and pointless, he added, “Maybe see if I can talk him into going to the same place. I doubt it, but… he doesn’t have anybody else in his life who will even try. He deserves to have somebody try to help him. He doesn’t have anyone like you.”

  His father stood silently in the shadowed hall. Behind him, the TV flickered in the bedroom. ESPN, but muted. Father and son had taken the same approach: retreat, put on sports. Sit up sleepless and silent. And separate.

  There’d been a lot of those nights once Mom was gone.

  “You have two choices,” Aaron said, suddenly exhausted. “Trust me or don’t. I can’t blame you if you don’t. But I also promise you I wasn’t lying about Peaceful Passages, and I’m not going out to drink. I’m going to get your truck, and my phone, and tell my friend what I’m doing from here on out and what I think he should be doing.”

  The truth. Every word. He just left out the part about the questions as to whether Riggins might have had any intense side effects, any hallucinations so vivid that you questioned reality.

  “There and back?” his father said so softly, Aaron could barely hear the words. “There and back, that’s all?�
��

  “That’s all.”

  “So you’ll be in home in an hour.”

  Aaron nodded.

  “Please,” his father said. “Please be home in an hour.”

  “I will be. Thank you.”

  He got the keys for the truck and went outside, using one crutch for balance, and sat on the old porch swing. A frigid wind blew across the yard. Dry, though. The rain had finally stopped.

  He sat on the swing, easing it back and forth and trying to pretend he didn’t see his father standing in the window, staring out at him. The creaking complaints of the rusted chain made him think of the chains he’d seen wrapped around the thin ankle bones of the corpse, and so he brought the swing to a stop. Then he sat motionless, waiting for headlights and trying not to remember things he could not possibly have seen.

  DOWNSTREAM

  20

  The nightmare woke Deshawn just before midnight.

  He lurched up on the couch, gasping and reaching, his hand outstretched and fingers spread wide, head turning, a Heisman Trophy pose, as if he were about to avoid a tackler.

  The apartment was dark and silent. Almost silent. There was his heartbeat, so heavy in his ears it seemed audible throughout the room.

  And there was the drip.

  Plink, plink, plink.

  The bathroom faucet had been dripping for weeks now. Probably a dried-out O-ring. A ninety-nine-cent fix. He kept meaning to hit the hardware store, but when he thought of it, he was usually at work. In the tunnels the sound of the drip was constant. Groundwater seeped and trickled, and when the Mole wasn’t boring through the bedrock, you could hear the individual drips falling like composed music, a soundtrack to the experience of being so far belowground.

  Deshawn would hear the water music down there and think of his faucet with the slow leak and tell himself to go to the hardware store on the way home. Then the Mole would rev back up to its shuddering roar or a muck car would clatter away or Matty Silvers would tell the dirty joke about the paratrooper, and the tunnel would be alive again, it would be work again, and you could no longer hear those soft, insignificant drips. When the Mole fired up and the crew got to work, it was back to real life, and in real life there were things you forgot.

  That damned faucet in the bathroom was one of them.

  Plink, plink, plink.

  He sat up and took a deep breath and rubbed his eyes. His palms came away damp with cold sweat. He tried to remember the details of the nightmare and couldn’t. How did that happen? You could dream something so real that it made your heart race and sweat spring from your pores—so real that you woke with a raised hand and a turned head as if expecting a blow… and then the dream was gone. How could that happen so fast?

  The nightmare had involved the sound of the drip. He was sure of that. The real sound had snuck into his unconscious mind and caused havoc, but now the details of the havoc were gone and couldn’t be recovered.

  He stood up.

  Just go to bed, he told himself, but the bedroom was dark, and for some reason he didn’t want to walk into it. He went toward the only light instead, which came from the window that looked out onto the street. The Chinese restaurant across the way never went fully dark; the neon stayed bright at all hours, but that didn’t bother him. In fact, right now it was a comfort. He stood at the window staring down at the street. Trash pickup was tomorrow, so the sidewalk was lined with overflowing cans. Two doors down from the Chinese restaurant was an empty storefront that had once been a dry cleaner’s. A few kids sat on the stoop in front of it and passed a joint back and forth, the golden flicks of the lighter and the glow of the joint the only illumination where they sat just out of reach of the streetlight.

  Deshawn watched them, then looked back at his dark bedroom and knew that he would not sleep again soon. Whatever had scared him awake was gone, but its effects were not, and he did not want to be alone.

  I’ll call Gillian, he thought, but then he remembered the time. If he called her at this hour, he would only scare her.

  Besides, what would he tell her? That he was seeing ghosts in the tunnels? He’d never admit that. And he wouldn’t tell her of the way the old memories were plaguing him—memories he hadn’t thought of in years, memories he believed he’d boxed away.

  Boxed, yes. But burned? No. You still have her sketchbook.

  His mouth was dry and there was a cold, coppery taste at the back of his throat. He crossed from the window and into the bedroom slowly, as if afraid of making noise in his own empty apartment. As if something might awaken.

  The gun safe was under his bed. There wasn’t a gun in it, but still the steel box felt dangerous to him. He slipped it out from under the bed, placed it on the nightstand, and sat on his knees on the floor while he punched in the code: 1-8-0-4.

  The light went from red to green. He spun the dial. There was a metallic snap, and then the safe was open. He pulled the heavy lid back, and where thieves might’ve expected to see Glocks or Rugers, there was a stack of letters, all with the TORRANCE, NY, postmark, and all with a handwritten return address of Galesburg, New York. As if Deshawn could return the letters with a line and sinker, and some postal worker would reach up from the depths, unclip it, and carry it away. Sure, Kelly. You’re not crazy. No, certainly not.

  I just want you to understand, she would say, trying to mask the unsettling desperation in her tone. It’s so important for our baby that you understand this place.

  Deshawn had understood plenty about the place by then. He understood that in the way you might’ve understood Jonestown or Ruby Ridge if you’d wandered through.

  His hand was trembling when he pulled the first letter free from the gun safe, and he hated himself for that. He tossed the letter onto the bed, then clicked on the bedside lamp. Read the old lines, the last she’d ever written to him.

  Deshawn, honey, there are so many important things I want to write, but I know it is asking too much to tell you too many of them. I understand what you believe, and what you don’t want to believe, and that’s fine. I will never blame you. How could I?

  But if you never believe me, please, please promise me that you’ll let my baby girl—OUR baby girl—believe me. Let her remember the lessons she was taught here. My mother’s lessons. My grandfather’s lessons. All that came before us. Please do not seal her away from those memories, from those stories. Those truths. She must understand her role in a larger ecosystem. All things seem small to you in Galesburg, but they’re not. Deshawn, they’re so much bigger than you can imagine. And she is so special. Our beautiful baby girl is so, so special. She will embrace her legacy.

  You’ll have all the years ahead with her, all the moments. I envy you, of course. How could I not? But I don’t blame you. Just promise me you’ll never let her forget the lessons. The legacy. Promise me that you’ll leave her with my mother until the time is right for you to take her.

  He pushed the letter across the bed as if it were a living thing, a snake slithering out from beneath the covers and across the shadows.

  The letter was the last one Kelly had sent before she’d driven off a ridge and tumbled two hundred feet to her death in the water below. Drunk driving, the police said; went off the road, they said; and before they told him where she’d landed, he knew. The Dead Waters, of course. There was no other option. She might have been drunk, but it was no accident. She’d needed the liquid courage, that was all.

  His daughter’s mother, dead of suicide. Or sacrifice, as she would have called it. Gone off to take up residency in a town that no longer existed. She thought there were people down there. Spirits, maybe. But active. Whatever was down there was definitely active, and she belonged with them.

  Deshawn could join them, too. Whenever he was ready. No rush. They’d be waiting.

  These were the things he’d heard and tried to forget. The things he had never even considered speaking of with his daughter. It was too difficult a conversation to imagine.

  But wer
en’t the most dangerous things the ones left unsaid?

  Promise me that you’ll leave her with my mother until the time is right for you to take her.

  He had, too. Pathetic coward, sorry excuse of a man, let alone a father, he had left his daughter with Molly Mathers in that house in the woods. Made a lot of rationalizations about how it was the only home Gillian knew, how it would be only more traumatic for her if he brought her to the city, to a strange new world. Made a lot of promises that it would be only a few months before that happened. He’d let Molly help her get around the curve of her grief, that was all, and then he’d do the right thing and claim his daughter.

  Never did he let himself consider the truth head-on: he was frightened of his daughter. He was frightened of the whole family.

  So months turned into years, and the years would have kept going if not for the right time that Kelly had promised in her last letter. The right time coming when Molly Mathers kissed Gillian goodbye and went for a walk to the lake and never came home.

  Before she vanished, she made two phone calls. One to the local sheriff, requesting someone come to check on her granddaughter’s safety, and one to Deshawn. He was underground at the time, and so she left a message. It was time, she said, for him to take Gillian away. She told him that he was a good man, that she’d seen that in him despite all of the reasons she had to think otherwise, and that she knew he would be a good father. Gillian will be fine, she said. She’s a stoic little girl. Take care of my baby, Deshawn. Take good care of her, and don’t blame her for things beyond her control. Don’t fear her. You don’t need to come back to this place again, and you don’t need to speak of it. She’ll remember when the time is right. Just love her. That’s all you need to do.

  By the time he played that message, there had been a second one from the sheriff’s office. That one was the more important message in some ways, but he didn’t remember it well. Molly’s, though, stuck with him. Lingered.

  Don’t fear her.