There must be more dying, someone close by who needs him. He’s meant to find
them. Him. Isaac is pretty sure it’s a boy. Maybe a baby. This doesn’t come by vision but feeling. He doesn’t doubt it, as he never has and the gift has never let him down.
The boards beneath his feet creak as he moves forward. He reminds himself, no one can see him. No one but the dying. He’s safe here.
The first door leads to a nursery. A baby lies in the crib, on his back, and kicks his feet as Isaac enters. Animals walk two-by-two across the nursery walls, a rocking chair stands mute in a corner of the room. Isaac approaches the crib. He thinks the baby can see him--his big blue eyes seem to follow him and his small arms pump in the air above the mattress like a greeting. Isaac is two feet from the crib when he can draw no closer. He isn’t meant to disturb the natural flow of the world. He can’t prevent events, only assist those who die as a result.
As Isaac watches the baby, his lips part and reveal three small teeth in an otherwise gummy smile, and Isaac wonders if what he’s read about babies and small children, about the elderly, is true: that those closest to the dead zone are able to see the spirits that walk it. It makes sense to Isaac. If the dying can see him, why not others?
Isaac smiles back at the baby. He pushes against the paralysis that makes his arms and legs dead weight. Growing in his chest is the certainty that he must get to this baby. There must be a way to protect the little boy; for sure, there’s no way Isaac can leave him here to die. That couldn’t be asked of him.
He thinks about dragging the rocking chair to the door. If he can close the door and push the chair up under the knob, it would give the kid a fighting chance. He turns toward the chair, testing his mobility, and takes a step toward it before he catches movement in the window; the light reflected there seems to flicker for a moment, turning the glass the black of night before the light reappears, vacant.
They are not alone. The weight of the air changes until he feels like he’s breathing
through the eye of a needle. The baby feels it, too. He rolls over on his stomach, his arms and legs batting the mattress. His small face turns pink before he is able to get a scream out of his terror-blocked throat.
Evil. It wears the stench of blood, as though it is steeped in it.
Isaac can see no more of this man than he did in Shelley Iverson’s home. He is a robe of black suspended in the air, a constantly fluid form that disguises body proportions. Isaac tries to find features, but looking at the man makes his eyes burn and tear. He resorts to using his peripheral vision. Still, he glimpses isolated pieces that don’t seem to go together, that make little sense to a mind that is human and essentially good: beneath the black a white so blinding it causes red spots to dance in front of Isaac’s eyes; gnarled bones sheathed in a thin skin the deep-blood color of port stains. Then a hand, as anatomically correct as Isaac’s, reaches out and fingertips brush against the baby’s cheek.
“You are precious,” the intruder says.
Isaac is standing in the room with the devil himself. Fear releases a string of butterflies in his stomach that fly upwards, fluttering in and clogging his throat.
“No, not the devil. I can’t take credit for that.”
A rasping laughter shakes the room. Isaac feels the breath of it move across his skin, scorches the fine hairs on his arms and his eyelashes.
He doesn’t recognize the voice. Not on a conscious level, but his mind, his heart, knows it, recoils from it, hunkers down and hides from it.
“You’re in here. I can feel you.” The black mass swirls, gyrates like a tornado. “I felt you the last time, too.”
Isaac forces himself to keep his gaze steady on the man, piercing through the
darkness, searching.
“You’re another Elysian,” the other says. “When I catch you, I’ll kill you, too.”
Isaac wonders what an Elysian is. He wonders what this thing is, that can read his mind, but not see him. Is he man or spirit? And why can’t Isaac get a good look at him?
“I’m human, all right. And something else, too. By the time you figure it out, it’ll be too late.” The black cloud settles above the crib and two hands reach from it, dangle above the baby. “Why does He always send the innocent for the innocent?”
More laughter slices the air. The baby whimpers. Isaac pushes against the internal restraints, grunts with the pressure to get closer to the boy, and the cackle that split the air becomes a full roar.
“You can’t get any closer to him than I can,” it says. “Don’t you know your place, Elysian? You’re here to attend death, not to stop it. You’re a shepherd; I’m the wolf.”
“You can’t touch him, either?”
Isaac asked with spoken language, breaking the silence of their communication. His last word barely leaves his lips before a scythe-shaped arm lashes out from the darkness and tries to hook Isaac around his neck.
Isaac doesn’t pull himself to safety; he is moved from within, and faster than he could ever react.
The black form puddles at his feet then snaps back into the air, arching up over Isaac’s crouching body.
“You won’t make that mistake again,” the other says, “but there are many, many ways for you to fall.”
Isaac feels the breath of this creature on his face. It’s as hot as a blow torch and smells like something dug out of a swamp.
“Go, now, angel of death,” it says. “Your job is done here. For now.”
Isaac feels the pull, like being reeled in.
He walks backwards toward the door. He wants to stay. The choice isn’t his.
Chapter Sixteen
Sunday, 7:20 pm
Isaac is suspended inches above the floor in his bedroom, his joints relaxed, his toes pointed but not touching. It’s almost as if he’s dangling from a string, that a breeze could waft through here and stir him. His head is tipped back, his lips are parted, his eyes open. Graham feels the heavy thud of his pulse in his throat, pressure building against his Adam’s apple.
“Isaac?”
He tries again to find a pulse in his son’s wrist, though he already knows there’s life in his body. His son’s chest lifts slowly and a thin burst of air leaves his nose.
“Isaac?” Graham calls louder this time, though it’s hard to push the word through his clogged throat. “Isaac, it’s dad.”
He pulls on Isaac’s arm, but it’s immovable, as firmly in place as stone or a body in rigor.
No. No. He slams the door shut on that thought, slips his hand between his son’s wrist and hip and feels for a pulse. Slow and steady, but it seems like minutes pass between each beat.
“Isaac!”
Graham looks into his son’s face. Isaac’s stare is vacant, his pupils are fixed but not
dilated. Thank God, not dilated. Graham pats Isaac’s cheeks and calls his name. Nothing. He snaps his fingers close to Isaac’s ears. No response.
This isn’t shock. No kind of shock Graham has ever seen. When he was kid, before his little brother was murdered, they spent summers in the back yard, tempting the supernatural. Graham remembers he and his friends lifting Lance more than five feet off the ground using only two fingers of each hand.
Isaac is in some kind of trance, something like they did to Lance, and Graham debates trying to move Isaac. He wants to pick the boy up, lay him out on his bed. He remembers the warnings they heeded as children, about breaking hypnosis too soon. How a person can get caught between two worlds and end up barking like a dog for the rest of their lives.
Tales, Graham chides himself. Stupid kid’s tales they told each other to scare themselves silly. But nothing based on fact. Graham lives in a world of facts now. Cold, comfortable facts that clearly define life.
What he is witnessing right now defies everything he’s clung to since leaving childhood behind, since leaving professional ball and its winnowed perspective of life; since leaving his marriage and all that he wanted it to be.
&n
bsp; But Graham doesn’t have to make a decision. As he stands beside his son, Isaac’s body lowers to the carpeted floor. Isaac shakes his head, pushes a hand through his bangs, and then his eyes flutter, the pupils narrow, and the world enters and registers.
“Dad!” Isaac complains. “You think you could knock?”
“What’s going on here, Isaac?”
Graham watches his son’s face flood with color. The blood is flowing through his veins faster now. His heart is working as it should. This is good. Graham feels the tightness in his chest loosen, his diaphragm opens. One breath. Two. Then he’s back to not knowing that breathing is an exercise.
“Isaac?” he prompts.
“I was going to take a shower,” Isaac says, but his voice is soft, unsure. Graham realizes in that moment that whatever or where ever Isaac was, this has happened before.
“You weren’t here,” Graham says. The whole time he stood beside his son he was aware of the absence of real life. “Now do you want to tell me what’s going on?”
Isaac shifts on his feet and looks beyond Graham’s shoulder to the window, where the black night pushes against the glass.
“Isaac?”
“Forget it, dad.” Isaac brushes past him and walks across the bedroom to his dresser. He pulls sweats out of the top drawer. “You won’t understand.”
Graham follows him. “Try me.”
Isaac turns and tips his head back, looks into Graham’s eyes and says, sadly, “You’re a man of science. Facts. Evidence.” He pauses, thinks deeply enough Graham watches the thoughts form in his eyes before his son says them. “I guess you could call it physics. It doesn’t explain everything,” Isaac warns. “I mean, in theory, an object can be in two places at one time.”
“What?”
“I was here but I was also somewhere else,” his son explains.
The thickness is back in Graham’s throat. Like his tongue is swollen and threatening to cut off his air supply.
“Where? Where were you?”
“Where I always go,” Isaac hedges.
“Where, Isaac?”
“The dying. I go to the dying.”
Isaac stands beneath Graham’s gaze, shifting on his feet. Then he lowers his head and pushes past his father. Graham follows him.
“Help me understand this.”
Isaac sits down on the edge of his bed. His thin shoulders lift in a slow, thoughtful shrug, then he looks up at Graham with a small smile on his face.
“That’s a tall order, dad. I don’t even understand it. Not all of it.”
“What do you understand?”
“They need me. The dying. Some of them are scared. Well, most of them are.”
Graham sinks onto the bed beside Isaac. “You’re in the bedroom but someplace else, too,” he repeats.
“You’re having trouble with this, dad,” Isaac says. He drops backwards onto the mattress, stuffs his hands under his head, and then regards Graham with a new softness. “I knew you would. That’s why I didn’t tell you. Not even in the beginning, when I was scared.”
Graham wonders if it’s possible Isaac falls into some kind of trance and then dreams of the dead. Never really leaving his body, as Isaac seems to think happens, but surfacing into a nightmare. This seems more plausible. It was pretty traumatic, losing his mother the way he did. One minute here, the next gone. And never truly available. Not present the way a child needs his mother.
“You should have said something, son,” Graham insists. “I’m here no matter what.”
“So you believe me?”
“I know what I saw,” Graham says. “You were definitely. . .gone. You’ve been through a lot, Isaac, with your mom leaving. It’s a lot of change. A lot of time by yourself.”
“I’m not crazy, dad. I thought I might be, at first. But it’s real. I’m there. I don’t know everything about how they die, but enough I can find them in the newspaper the next day.”
Graham places his palms on his knees, rubs the sweat off of them.
“Nightmares can seem real,” Graham offers. There are grown men caught on the battlefields of their minds, nightly, who would swear they were back in Nam or Iraq. “It’s reasonable, after everything---”
“I can prove it, dad. I can tell you all about what I saw tonight,” Isaac offers. “You’ll be there soon, anyway. You’ll know I was really there.”
“What happened tonight?” Graham asks, knowing he’d rather believe in time travel than believe Isaac is following in his mother’s and uncle’s path. “Who died?”
Isaac sits ups and turns to his father.
“A kid. His name was Jeremy. He was seventeen years old. He lived on Deschuetts Road, in an old Victorian house with a swing set in the back yard. A blue swing set and a wagon stuffed with dolls. It was the King’s Ferry Killer, dad.”
“What?”
“I saw him.”
“You saw the King’s Ferry Killer?”
Isaac nods. “But not like you see him, or how I would see him in the natural.” Isaac explains. “I saw the inside of him, I guess. What he looks like under his human face.”
“Under his human face?”
“He’s evil, dad. He was still in the house when I left. And there’s a baby in there.” Isaac raises his hands between them. They’re blood-stained. “You see, dad?” Isaac says. “This only happens when it’s murder. All the other deaths, I bring nothing back with me.”
“No, Isaac. No.” Graham shakes his head. He rubs a hand over his forehead, then he reaches for and takes hold of Isaac’s wrist. He brings his son’s hand to his face and breathes in the metallic scent of blood. “How can this be happening. You were here. Here. The whole time,” his father insists.
He stands up, pulls Isaac to his feet, and pushes up the sleeves of his flannel shirt.
“What are you doing?”
“Looking for cuts.”
“I didn’t cut myself, dad.”
“There’s an explanation.”
“I gave it to you.”
“A reasonable explanation, Isaac,” Graham corrects.
He releases Isaac’s hand but continues to stand in front of him, holding his gaze.
Isaac repeats, “I gave it to you.”
Chapter Seventeen
Sunday, 8:30 pm
Graham travels the coast road, heading south. The moon is full, its silver light seeping through scattered clouds and painting the water of the bay in an almost fluorescent light. Trawlers cut through the inlet, their lights bouncing with the current. Cruisers are docking after a twilight run for king fish and halibut. The beauty and the pace of the island is alluring, but deceiving. It appeals to his senses, but his mind rebukes it, knowing this place for what it is. Purgatory. One of the few places on the planet not ravaged by war, where life and death, violent death, coexist as life as normal.
Peace doesn’t exist here, not anymore. For Graham, not since the summer of 1997.
He follows the ribbon of the two-lane freeway until he gets to Deschuetts Road, where he turns inland.
Somewhere along this road, where the tall grass sways under the moon and the homes are lit from within by a warm, ambient light, a young man lies dead in a downstairs room; and the King’s Ferry Killer preys upon a defenseless baby, still alive, but for how long?
His son exchanged breath with the King’s Ferry Killer. Stood toe to toe with a serial murderer. Held the hand of a dying boy.
Isaac.
Does his son have a gift? Graham saw, with his own eyes, Isaac suspended above the floor in his bedroom, caught in some kind of trance. An object can be in two places at the same time. Could Isaac have been in his bedroom and at the scene of the King’s Ferry Killer’s next murder?
Graham slows the cruiser and negotiates a series of winding curves that has him traveling past an elementary school, a farm advertising u-pick figs, and several homes perched atop grassy knolls, with Mount Aerosmith looming behind them. Choice real estate now. The island, despite its lurki
ng menace, is becoming popular with Generation X.
His son. Isaac. Drawn to the dead. Graham doesn’t like it. Yet he can’t ignore their shared impulses. Graham’s job could only be fighting for the rights of the dead. He probably had the aptitude for it before Lance was lured out onto the bluffs and murdered. Losing his brother reshaped his heart. There’s no way to know what he might have been, who he might have been, had his family managed to pass through this world untouched by violence.
His radio squawks and the dispatcher puts a call out for Graham. There’s tension in her voice, an urgency not completely reigned by her professionalism. He acknowledges the call and anticipates her next words, still they hit a chord deeper in Graham than he’s ever been before.
Isaac and the King’s Ferry Killer. Same room. Same breath.
“14121 Deschuetts Road,” the dispatcher says. “Man calling in says his son was murdered. Says it’s the King’s Ferry Killer.”
“I’m there,” Graham says. “I’m two minutes out.” He tells her to send back up, to alert Carter, to dispatch the forensics team.
The remainder the drive, the red and blue lights from the bar on the roof strobe like a
tumbling kaleidoscope. Graham hurtles through a tunnel of overgrown trees, past a field of tall crabgrass, and shudders to a stop in the gravel driveway of an old Victorian house. The color, the wide, wrap-around porch, the surrounding shrubbery and fields match Isaac's description of the home. Graham knows, when he walks into the back yard, he’ll find the swing set and the wagon filled with dolls.
He climbs out of the SUV, unsnaps his holster but doesn’t draw his weapon. The man sitting on the porch steps is sobbing. His arms are wrapped around a squirming infant. The baby Isaac told him about. Alive.
“My boy. My boy.” He pushes a hand into his hair, tears at his scalp, pours his tears into his baby’s neck where he cradles him. “You’re too late.”
Graham doesn’t recognize the father. Some people move to the island for the isolation. Especially when they settle this far out, when the closest neighbor is a quarter mile down the road. In any case, King’s Ferry and its surrounding region is populated by more than eighty thousand people and he doesn’t know everyone. It doesn’t matter. This part of his job is never easy.
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