The Homecoming

by Andrew Pyper

  “Is there another way?”

  “Well, your sister’s the shrink, not me. But seeing Dad as wanting each of us to open him up—I don’t know, it speaks to a certain kind of experience.”

  Jerry cocks his head. Shakes an apparent stiffness from his legs. “You seem to be aiming at something here.”

  “We were both his sons, Jerry. Odds are, whatever contact you had with Dad was of the same kind I had with him,” I start. “I just think, now that he’s gone, we might compare notes. Maybe help each other see stuff that maybe we’d rather not see.”

  “I think I know where you’re going here. And I’m going to ask you to stop.”

  “Don’t you ever think about how Dad is kind of blocked from us? If something happened to me, maybe to all—”

  “I’m asking you to shut your mouth.”

  Jerry looks more wounded than angry.

  “I’m sorry. This is difficult for me to even bring up. And I didn’t mean to—”

  He holds his hand up. I figure it’s to cut this conversation off, but then both of us hear something in the trees off to the right. At least, that’s the direction I turn, though Jerry looks in the opposite direction.

  He doesn’t say anything. Not Stay here or Get down or Circle back around. He just bends low and starts into the bush to the left.

  If he’s wrong about the direction, whatever made the dull whump on the forest floor is closer to me than it is to Jerry. But he sure as hell seems certain. If I’ve learned anything over the last forty-eight hours, it’s that noises can bounce around in the forest in a way that makes it hard to figure their distance or position. He may be going straight at the Tall Man. He may be leaving me behind.

  I move in the same manner he did—crouching low and striking into the bush—except to the right. Hoping I’m wrong. Looking for a place to find cover and wait.

  There’s lots of potential camouflage out here if you happen to be wearing any shade of green. But if, like me, you’re dressed in blue jeans and a blue Seahawks T-shirt and matching windbreaker (Dad getting all our favorites right in his duffel bag clothing purchases), there isn’t anything but tree trunks to use as shields. None of them quite wide enough to be sure something on the other side couldn’t spot you.

  I keep moving as quietly as I can. Not looking for anything in particular now, not even a place to disappear, only advancing into the forest because the idea of waiting to be found is worse than the slow chicken walk I’m doing now.

  When I look up after a minute or so, I find that the underbrush has thinned around me, the thistle and ferns only recently reclaiming the cleared soil. I wonder if it’s an old burn site, maybe a lightning strike, a bald anomaly in the otherwise ceaseless thicket. But a few steps on and the growth only thins more and more before opening into a broader clearing.

  That’s not what stops me.

  It’s not much of anything now, but I recognize what it was. A single L-shaped wood structure the length of two tractor trailers fused together. Here and there on the flat ground around it are wood platforms that once acted as the foundation for wall tents. A circle of stones bordering a black mound of cinders. The two iron spikes of a horseshoe pit.

  A summer camp.

  It’s not a place I’ve ever been to before. In fact, it’s hard to imagine any parent sending their kid here, even when it was in good repair. The space of the site slightly too small, as if the effort of cutting its grounds out of the forest proved too difficult and what resulted was a cramped compromise. Hard to find even if you were looking for it.

  Abandoned places are always a little sad, especially ones where children once played, sang songs by the fire, ran laughing. Yet this place feels more ghostly than sad. Maybe it’s because I can’t imagine what laughter would sound like here, what music would be allowed.

  I think of turning back but convince myself there’s a reason I’m here, push away the immediate counterquestions—Why? Who says there’s anything here for you?—and start toward the sagging building I’m guessing was once the dining hall. Looking for something. A piece of my father. Something to convince myself that he’d intended I be the one to find it.

  The windows along the walls and in the main entrance doors are boarded up, but carelessly so, leaving gaps at the corners and between the two-by-fours. On the ground, there are stray tent pegs and opened tins of food, the labels melted away on most but only faded on a couple others. Baked beans. Beefaroni.

  There’s a sign over the door I hadn’t noticed when I first entered the clearing. Letters gouged into a slab of tree trunk and nailed into the pine so that, as all of it succumbed to the sun and mold, the words looked like they were becoming something else. A retraction.

  BELFOUNTAIN

  For as many times as I’d heard my father say the name, this may be the first time I’ve seen it written out. Pretty to hear and to speak, but it looks different to me now, the obese B followed by a jumble of letters. Over-voweled, inviting misreadings. Elf and bell and mountain.

  Inside, I’m met by long-past odors: fried margarine and boiled bones for the making of soup. But these are only phantom smells. There couldn’t be any of that left in the air after the years of neglect that have passed in this place. The watery strands of light that seep through the cracks of the windows show a row of tables and benches, award plaques high on the walls with the names of past orientation and archery champions engraved on brass plates. There are squares paler than the rest of the wall where photos probably hung, but they must have been taken away when the place was left, apparently the only things that were.

  I should go because Jerry might wonder where I am. Because there’s nothing here. Because I’m afraid that there is.

  One of the swinging doors to the kitchen has been ripped away, and the fact that I won’t have to touch the other one to step inside brings me closer. I float forward, reading the painted sentences on the exposed roof beams as I go.

  MY LITTLE CHILDREN, LET US NOT LOVE IN WORD, NEITHER IN TONGUE; BUT IN DEED AND IN TRUTH.

  On the floor, boot prints in the seedlings and dust. Comings and goings along the same aisle I walk down. Likely from years ago. Though they could be more recent than that.

  THE MEMORY OF THE RIGHTEOUS IS A BLESSING, BUT THE NAME OF THE WICKED WILL ROT.

  Lines of Scripture. Little children. Stern, magical, ambiguous. Is all of the Bible like this? Or is it only me not wanting to be here yet having to be, like many of the campers who would have read these same lines as they looked up from their hamburgers and oatmeal.

  THE WICKED WILL ROT.

  There’s something on the floor. I can feel it before I see it, a series of cuts carved into the planks, the simple outline of a map. Then I look down and see it’s more like a compass—but no, that’s not it either.

  I recognize it from the movies we’d rent for those teenage slumber parties where I could never sleep. Something bad.

  A pentagram. The circle with a star made of triangles inside it. Wider than the aisle, so that it reaches under the tables. I bend down to fit a finger into one of the grooves and it comes back blackened with soot. The lines not drawn. Burnt.

  When I stand straight, I notice similarly made, smaller lines in the tables and on the walls. Messages. Summonings. A crude language in competition with the biblical quotations overhead.

  SATAN HEAR OUR VOICE

  The sort of thing stoned vandals leave behind, kids who’ve got their hands on those paperbacks about rituals and “true” accounts of devil worship, sacrifice, possession. Hard to find a picnic table in a park or wall of a public toilet without some version of it.

  Knowing this doesn’t make me any less afraid.

  WE SING FOR YOU

  I step out of the pentagram’s circle in the floor. Before entering the kitchen, I cast my eyes up at the ceiling and catch the last line of scripture on the rafters, sounding through my head as something close to a threat.

  UNLESS ONE IS BORN AGAIN, HE CANNOT SEE THE KINGDOM
OF GOD.

  In the kitchen’s leaden light, the stainless steel counters shine greenish as a snake’s skin. Some of the larger cooking pots are still here, sitting on the stove top, the lids on. I don’t pull them off to see if there’s anything inside.

  It’s the walk-in freezer that’s captured my attention. The padlock hanging open through the latch.

  The handle pulls back with a guttural clunk, and from there the door eases wide without my having to do a thing, as if wanting to show me its insides, wanting to breathe. It reminds me that I haven’t taken a breath myself for a while. When I do, the sound I make is that of a child startled after being struck.

  There hasn’t been power here for a long time, which makes it even more unsettling to walk into the freezer’s warm tomb. The insulation within the stained steel walls holds the airless humidity inside, as it would any sound or voice that might try to get out. There’s more space than I was expecting. The shelving has been completely removed, leaving only rust-weeping holes in the walls. Room that had to be made for the trapdoor in the floor.

  It’s also made of steel except it’s new, a square plate of dimpled silver the size of a compact pickup’s flatbed. A handle on the left to lift it open. It would be heavy if I tried.

  I try.

  It sends a warning flare of pain up my back, from my hips to the back of my skull. But I manage it. Once I have it past the halfway point, I let it go and it rests against the wall with a single nick, like the touching of nails to a blackboard.

  Stairs. Each step made of smooth cement, heading into the ground beyond the range of what I can see.

  Why do I do it? I ask myself this as I start down, ducking my head and reaching my hands out blind. It may be raw curiosity, but if it is, I don’t experience it as wanting to know what may be down here. If anything, it’s the opposite. I wish only to be protected from discoveries, from any new layer of Belfountain’s possibilities. It’s like the patients I have who demand surgery instead of the alternative therapies or pharmaceuticals or waiting and seeing, things they could do to avoid it. They don’t want to be opened up, but if they submit to it, they hope they can put the entire matter of illness behind them.

  The stairs are steeply sloped but remain straight so that once I get used to it, just enough daylight filters in to see shapes and outlines by. The equidistant seams in the ceiling. The irregularities in the cement’s cratered face.

  The steel wall.

  There’s no way around it. The stairs come to an end and there it is, no space to stand.

  A moment of inspection shows it isn’t a wall, but a door. One with no handle, no markings. I smooth my hand over its cold surface, drawing lines through the condensation, and feel nothing interrupt its gray surface but a single keyhole built into the metal.

  I press my shoulder against it. It feels more than locked. Sealed tight.

  As an object, as an incongruent thing, it makes no sense. And the longer I lean into it, feeling for a vibration or voice from within, its possible meanings flee from my grasp. The door has a purpose and history distinct from the forest, from the Christian kids’ camp built on the ground fifteen feet above my head. Beyond that there isn’t a single guess I could make.

  But I do know this: the door is special. My knowledge of it even more so.

  Which means I can’t stay here.

  For the first few steps I don’t turn, backstepping my ascent and keeping my eyes on the door as if in readiness for it to be pulled open. Then the darkness reclaims it and not being able to see it frightens me more than imagining the thing that might open it, and I spin around, jumping the last few steps up into the walk-in freezer’s airless space.

  I don’t drop the trapdoor closed. Don’t touch the freezer’s door. I just get out.

  WE SING FOR YOU

  Through the dining hall, dancing over the lines of the pentagram in the floor, keeping my pace to a walk as if to do anything else would confirm how terrified I am, I bring out the childish moan I can feel swelling up my throat.

  Only once the light makes visible the stones around the charred circle and the overgrown horseshoe pit, a verifiable place in the world where things not only happened but are happening now, do I feel like I’m being watched.

  A sudden wind picks up, blowing fast against my face. That’s what my mind interprets it as before it discovers my body has taken charge. Moving my legs. Throwing me forward.

  Running.

  21

  I HAVE A SENSE OF the way I’d come and where the main trail is but I can’t find any sign of either. I’m relying on the logic that if the trail is reasonably straight I’ll meet up with it if I don’t get turned around.

  The sight of Jerry standing a hundred yards ahead proves it’s a good guess.

  He doesn’t see me approach, but he hears me, judging by the way he searches the horizon of brush surrounding him. It gives me the strange feeling of being the Tall Man myself. Semi-visible, deciding what action I will take next.

  “Hey!”

  I call out to him as I step back onto the main trail and he approaches with deliberate steps.

  “Where’d you go?” he asks.

  “Back that way.”

  “See anything?”

  “Nothing. You?”

  “Not a goddamn thing.”

  He keeps his eyes on me.

  “You look spooked,” he says.

  “It’s a spooky place.”

  He studies me a moment longer. Measuring the hazards I could potentially pose. It’s only after he starts back along the trail that I realize I’d been doing the same thing looking at him.

  • • •

  When we return to the lodge, Ezra and Elias are in the middle of reprising their roles in a recent Delta Airlines commercial. A tearjerker involving twins separated at birth reuniting at JFK Arrivals after a lifetime apart.

  “You haven’t changed a bit!” they both declare at the end, chins trembling with emotion, before throwing their arms around each other.

  Mom, Bridge, Franny, and Lauren, seated on one of the great room’s enormous sectional sofas, applaud in the restrained manner of a golf gallery.

  “A single day’s work,” Ezra says.

  “Paid the mortgage for two years,” Elias says.

  “Do you two live together?” I ask, and all of them swing around, startled to find me and Jerry standing there.

  “No,” Elias answers.

  “That would be weird,” Ezra adds.

  Lauren is the first to get up. “Hold on,” she says. “How’d you get in?”

  “The door was open,” Jerry says. “I’m assuming that the boys didn’t lock it after they came in looking for breakfast?”

  The twins look first accusingly, then guiltily, at each other.

  “Sorry,” they say at the same time.

  “Did you find anything?” Lauren addresses this to me.

  “No.”

  “So what’s next?”

  “Maybe your brothers could do a live performance of the first season of Better Together for us?”

  It’s meant as a tension reliever, but it comes out as unkind. Everyone hears it, none more acutely than the twins themselves, who take seats on opposite sides of the rug from each other, turtling their shoulders forward against further injury.

  “I didn’t mean—” I’m on my way to apologizing, but Jerry steps ahead of me to stand directly in front of Lauren.

  “This man that Aaron saw,” he says. “You saw him too?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re certain?”

  “Jesus, Jerry. Yes. I’m certain.”

  Jerry paces once between Lauren and the twins before stopping to look down at Mom, Franny, and Bridge on the sofa—one, then two, then three—counting them off in his head as if taking a head count.

  “I say we all stay here until we can sort this out,” he announces.

  Franny snorts. “It’s so funny,” she says.

  “What part?”

&nbs
p; “You. Automatically assuming that you get to make the decisions.”

  “I’m offering my opinion, that’s all.”

  “Please! Look at you. Standing in the center of the room with your arms crossed and all of us waiting to hear what the great leader is going to say. We’re out here and there’re no cops, no laws, and you see an opening. Grabbing power.”

  “First of all, what’s going on here—this isn’t political. And second—”

  “You voted for him, didn’t you?”

  “What? Hold—”

  “Thought it was time to build some walls, go back to the good old days when nobody bothered people like you.”

  Jerry pauses. “How do you think you know who I vote for?”

  “When’s the last time you looked in a mirror?”

  I wonder if Jerry is going to hit her. Not that he looks like he will. Not a violent man in the compulsive sense, but one distilled in the culture of weight rooms and off-campus keggers and sports bars who proves his masculinity through the giving and taking of shots to the jaw. As a pretty boy, he’s probably had to prove it more than most.

  But Jerry doesn’t hit Franny. He grins at her. As warm and genuine an expression as I’ve seen him or any of us make.

  “Okay, you got me, Francine,” he says. “Of course I voted for him.”

  “Bingo!”

  “Here to help.”

  Fear doesn’t always take the form you assume it will. It can be a scream into the darkness, paralysis, a hopeless sobbing. But it can also come out in a guffaw, hearty and loud, as it does now from my own throat. I’m not the only one either. The twins rouse from their sulk to giggle like a pair of school kids. And Bridge, uncertain at first, is soon laughing along with the rest of us.

  It’s a release. But soon it distorts in our ears, the hysteria rising up through the hilarity, twisting our voices into those that come from behind the closed doors of an asylum.

  “We should leave.”

  Without any of us noticing, Mom has gotten up and watches us from the farthest edge of the room. She doesn’t speak loudly but we hear her clearly all the same. One by one, the laughter dies and returns to ice in our chests.