by Andrew Pyper
“We should leave,” she says again. “Now.”
“Why do you say that, Eleanor?” Jerry asks, ready to be convinced.
“It’s not safe.”
“Well, with respect, we don’t know that. If you consider the facts—the likelihood that it’s just a vagrant that Aaron and Lauren saw. Some tent-city guy who hitched a ride up here and can’t find his way out again.”
“That’s not what’s happening.”
Nobody denies this. Not even Jerry, who, whether out of deference to Mom’s seniorhood or to avoid hearing the sharpness that may come out in his voice, shrugs and sits on the arm of the sofa.
“We’re all free to go,” Lauren says, moving closer to Mom. “It’s just a matter of the will—”
“I hate that word!”
Because I’m still standing at the top of the steps down to the great room, I can see how all of us jolt back at the force of Mom’s shout.
“It was his will that was the only important thing all his life, and it’s still him telling us what to do,” Mom goes on. “What about us? What about our will?”
“I understand what you’re saying, I truly do,” Lauren says. “But it seems you’re making a more practical suggestion. Am I right?”
Mom calms herself before speaking. Whatever she’s about to attempt to convince us of, this may be her only chance.
“If we all leave, we can be safe,” she says. “If any of you are concerned about the estate, we can contest it. Legally. What’s going on, what he’s asked—it’s not normal. I can’t imagine it standing up in a court of law, especially not if it’s all of us together.”
“I dunno. That Fogarty guy seemed pretty legit,” Ezra counters.
“And we can’t get legal advice without a phone,” Elias adds. “To walk out now—that’s a hell of a risk to hope some judge sees it our way.”
“Bridge?” I say, and it takes a moment for her to blink her eyes clear. “What do you think?”
“We’re all here,” she says. “There’s a reason for that.”
There’s nothing in her delivery to suggest if she thinks this reason will work for us or against us. But her posture is firm. She’s not going anywhere.
Mom looks to Franny. The most likely vote to go her way, under the circumstances. But Franny only sighs.
“It’s millions of dollars, Mom,” she says. “There’s so much that could be done—so much good. So much change.”
“It is a lot of change,” Elias agrees.
“A good chunk of change,” Ezra nods.
“Just because nothing awful has happened doesn’t—”
Mom lets this sentence hang there, as if speaking aloud the words we know to logically follow would risk triggering some magic of fate.
“Shall we take a vote?”
I’m the one who asks this, and so it’s me who my mother looks at with despair.
“Don’t trouble yourselves. I know the count,” she says, and starts away toward the kitchen with first Bridge, then Franny following after to console her. I consider doing the same, but Jerry is coming at me to deliver a clap to my shoulder.
“What do you say we fortify the castle, doc?” he says.
22
TURNS OUT THERE’S NOT MUCH we can do. Once we confirm the bedroom and bathroom windows are locked, we search the lodge for any other possible points of entry. There’s the front door, the glass door built into the giant windows along the length of the great hall that Franny had used to slip out for her smoke, and a third one off the kitchen that leads to the garbage bins with metal lids to discourage animals and bears. All locked.
Which still leaves the giant windows. Jerry guesses they’re more solid than the walls; the reinforced glass is of the kind used in skyscrapers. Yet as the afternoon fades and the dusk grows, what’s worrying is what we might see outside as much as how it might find a way in.
Over dinner, there’s a discussion about the threat the Tall Man poses that eases our minds somewhat. His appearance suggested mental illness of one kind or another, and as Lauren points out, the mentally ill are statistically no more inclined to violence than anyone else. Our best guess is that he found his way inside Belfountain’s fence somehow and is trying to survive.
There’s also some talk about ways we could get our hands on the satellite phone in the metal box on the other side of the gate. But the rules Fogarty laid out would disqualify whoever went to fetch it from participating in the will’s proceeds. How would anyone know if someone did? Maybe they wouldn’t. Then again, maybe there’re cameras recording our movements all along the perimeter.
None of us volunteers to try. Partly this is because we actually don’t need the phone. It’s also partly because nobody wants to be the one eliminated from the will and have to trust the rest of us to voluntarily make up for their lost cut. I wouldn’t say this latter thought indicates any deep distrust between the two Quinlan families. It’s simply a consideration that all of us judge best left unspoken.
After we’ve eaten, Bridge, Mom, and Franny retire to their rooms, leaving Jerry, Lauren, me, and the twins to determine two-hour shifts for each of us to keep watch while the others doze in the leather chairs. I take the middle of the night. Two to four. An island of nervous wakefulness between two seas of insomnia.
Yet there must be some sleep for me before the morning, because when I wake, I remember the dream I had. The same one from the first night at Belfountain that I shared with Franny and Bridge.
Jerry is up already, as he isn’t in the chair he slept in. Judging from the restless snorts and coughs from the twins, they’re having nightmares too.
When they both open their eyes, I ask if they can remember their dreams.
“Not usually,” Ezra says. “But the one just now was a doozy.”
“Got that right,” Elias says. “Like nas-ty.”
“What were they about?”
“Water,” Elias says.
“Dark water. Salt water,” Ezra adds.
“And this weird music. Like singing.”
“Alien singing.”
Elias turns to his twin brother. “You were there,” he says. “In the dream.”
“You too.”
“Treading water.”
“Not a pool or pond or lake, nothing with a shore. The water all the way to the horizon.”
“Except you couldn’t even see the horizon.”
“Or the bottom below us.”
“Like it was deeper than the ocean.”
“Like space.”
“Yeah. Empty as outer space.”
Lauren sits upright in the chair she slept in.
“I had the same dream. I had it the first night I was here too,” she says.
“Me too,” I say. “Except last night it was different from before.”
“Different?” Elias asks.
“Different how?” Ezra adds.
“My sisters were in it. And so were you.”
23
ONE OR TWO OF US were missing in some of the retellings. Others had a small detail to add that the others lacked. But unless some of us were outright lying, everyone who slept in Belfountain’s castle last night dreamed the same dream.
Everyone except Mom.
She doesn’t say she didn’t, just avoids the topic when she shuffles into the great room in her slippers and purple velour tracksuit that must have come in her duffel bag. She listens to us talk about the dark water, the fear of what lived beneath our kicking feet, the cosmic singing. When Franny asks her directly about it, she shakes her head—what could be a yes or no or I can’t think about this now sort of gesture—and heads off to the kitchen to get started on mixing pancake batter.
“You’re the shrink,” Franny says to Lauren. “What the hell is happening to us?”
“I’ve heard of shared dreams within families before, but nothing this extensive,” she says. “There are theories of how telepathy can be explained—you know, how people claim to have jumped out of bed at
the exact same time a relative died miles away. This is different. Psychology proceeds from an individual clinical basis, not a group. We work on the assumption that while we influence one another, our minds process these interactions in distinct ways.”
“So, bottom line, you have no idea and you’re as freaked as the rest of us.”
“It sounds like you’re after my job, Franny.”
“To be the shrink to this crew? I don’t want it.”
• • •
After an assessment of the dwindling supplies that remain in the freezer and fridge, it’s decided we ought to send someone out to the gate and see if any food has been left for us. On the basis that I’m the only one to have made the journey there and back, all eyes turn to me.
Before I go, I wait for an opportunity to speak with Bridge.
Ever since I returned from the forest after discovering the camp, I’ve hesitated in sharing it. Even with all the strangeness of this place, the tunnel leading down through the hole in the walk-in freezer radiated something different. A thing not meant to be seen.
The best course would be to keep it to myself. An underground staircase, a solid steel barrier—none of it is going to attack us all on its own. If we never come upon it again, whatever it may contain will stay below.
I wouldn’t disclose it to anyone if it wasn’t for the promise I made to Bridge.
Later that morning, as Lauren and the twins busy themselves making a couple trays of lasagna, Franny and Mom whisper to each other in a corner of the great room, and Jerry walks through the place checking on everyone and giving pats on the back and little pep talks like the high school coach he is, I pull Bridge aside. We close the door to the bedroom Mom and Franny are using, and I tell her about the camp.
I’m expecting her to voice the same questions troubling my own mind—Who built it? Why way out there?—but she makes a statement instead.
“Daddy took me there.”
“Where?”
“To that old summer camp. The door at the bottom of the stairs,” she says, nodding as she works to summon the details. “He didn’t call it a door though. He just said, ‘There’s something I want you to see.’ ”
“What did he show you once you got there?”
“Nothing. We were walking through the trees for what felt like a long time, and then it was there. A couple old buildings, a swing set. We went into one place, into the kitchen. Inside the freezer there were stairs going down. When we got to the bottom, he seemed about to say something but then changed his mind, and we turned back.”
“Did he have a key? Did he open it?”
“I don’t remember a key. And like I said, I don’t remember it as a door. It was just the end, y’know?”
The sound of footsteps creak over the floorboards in the hallway outside. There’s a pause as whoever it is notes the closed bedroom door before turning and heading away again.
“What do you think it is?” Bridge whispers.
“My guess is a gate of some kind.”
“Like the fence we drove through? A gate inside a gate?”
“Something like that.”
I start for the door, seeing this as an opportunity to return to the others without rousing suspicion, but Bridge stops me.
“Why me, Aaron? Why would Dad bring me there?”
“I don’t know. Maybe he had to show someone, and he thought you’d have the best chance of understanding.”
“That might make sense if he told me. But he didn’t.”
She flinches. A blade within her twists with the effort of trying to grasp our father’s intentions. That I know how these attempts will invariably prove useless only doubles my sympathy. She needs a theory to cling to, a narrative that indicates he was human. It’s not about making excuses for him. It’s about seeing a way of not being the child of a man who meant to break you.
“Secrets—the big ones—are hard to let go of,” I say. “Even when you want to, even when they’re too much to bear. It’s like they hang on to you by a power of their own.”
Bridge nods again.
“We should get out of here before someone asks what we’re talking about,” I say, pulling the door open.
“We’re not telling anybody else about this?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Because if they knew, they might try to find the camp.”
“They might.”
“And that would be bad.”
“I’m not sure it would be good.”
Judging from the way Bridge walks past me without another word, she agrees.
24
AT THE LAST MINUTE BEFORE I set out, Lauren announces she’ll come with me. It’s a decision Jerry doesn’t look too thrilled about but doesn’t attempt to prevent.
We start out walking the bike but soon guess it will take us the better part of what remains of the morning to reach the gate at this pace. That’s when I suggest Lauren ride in the wagon attached to the back.
“This is ridiculous,” she says, correctly, as she curls herself up in the plywood box.
“You’d rather do the pedaling?”
“Are you kidding? I just hope nobody sees us.”
It felt like we were about to break into laughter a moment ago, but the idea of the two of us being observed by something out here, out in the woods, chokes it off.
After I get us up to a speed I can maintain, I’m impressed by how well the contraption rolls along, the momentum of our weight combined with my pride in showing Lauren I can handle the physical challenge of getting us to the gate in what feels like not much more than forty-five minutes or so.
When I dismount, she’s out of the trailer and heading straight toward the food-delivery opening in the fence.
“Looks like we got a drop-off,” she says.
Two cardboard boxes sit on the half of the metal circle on the outside of the fence. There’s no sign of a vehicle or anyone waiting to ensure the delivery gets into our hands. I squint to see if there are tire tracks in the road and there may be—snaking lines that could be tire treads—or all I’m seeing is the dried retreat of rain.
“So this thing just turns around, like this?” Lauren says, spinning the plate around and plucking the boxes off.
“Okay,” I say. “Let’s get out of here.”
“Hold on. How do you think this works?”
She’s looking at the dangling wires over the hole in the fence the boxes passed through.
“I’m guessing it’s part of the security features.”
“You think they’re electrified?”
“I haven’t touched them to find out. But I—”
She pinches one of the wires with her thumb and forefinger before I can stop her.
“Nope,” she says.
I watch as she stacks the boxes in the bike’s trailer and rips one of them open. Pulls out a loaf of bread and a jar of peanut butter.
“Picnic?” she says, holding them both in the air.
“If you can find some jam in there, I’m in,” I say, happy to be with someone brave for a change, instead of pretending to be brave myself.
Lauren puts her hand into the box and brings out a jar of raspberry jelly without looking.
“Where there’s the pb, there’s got to be the j,” she says, settling into a level circle of tall grass at the edge of the trees a dozen feet behind us.
It’s mostly shady, but the light finds its way through the overhead branches in irregular shapes so that as I sit next to her, she is visible in blocks of gray and dazzling yellow. We open the jars and each roll up a slice of bread, dipping it into the peanut butter and then the jelly with each new bite.
“You’re not afraid, being out here?” I ask her.
“I’m not afraid of you.”
“I wasn’t talking about me.”
“I know what you’re talking about. The unknown,” she says, and takes another sticky bite.
“Yeah. I guess I am.”
“Well, I try not to
worry about that too much,” she says once she’s swallowed. “As a matter of fact, I go out of my way to face it down. It’s helped me.”
“I suppose your patients are like that. People just imagining things.”
“My patients? No. My patients have been through the most real shit ever. They have no need to imagine anything except maybe a day of feeling close to normal or a good night’s sleep. It’s why I’ve never understood people who go to horror movies or read novels about dragons or demons or whatnot. Why go looking for scary stuff when there’s plenty of that available all around us?”
“Unless you’ve been protected from it.”
“Safe,” she says, and pauses, as if the word was the name of a fabled island. “Safety is a privilege.”
“But it’s one you had, right? We both did. I mean, we’re Quinlans.”
I intend this as a kind of joke, an acknowledgment of how, despite our upper-middle-class circumstances, our upbringings were fundamentally less than picture perfect. Instead, it nudges Lauren into a cloud of thoughts that make her lower what’s left of her bread onto her knee.
“I’ve never told anyone this,” she says, “but I think I know what it is to be a Quinlan better than anyone.”
Lauren looks up into the branches and the new angle of her face makes her look different. Sadder, angrier, less controlled. More beautiful too.
“After she had the twins, my mom wanted another child, but their birth was hard on her—she couldn’t carry children on her own after that,” she says, lowering her eyes to me again. “Adoption. She liked the idea of rescuing a kid from the wrong side of the tracks, someone she could use the Quinlan sandpaper on to smooth away the rough edges. Dad seemed okay with all of it. If anything, he paid more attention to me than my brothers. It was like he felt more comfortable with someone who wasn’t biologically his than the ones who were. It’s funny, but sometimes I got the impression that he saw himself as an outsider just like I was, someone dropped into this reality who had to bluff their way through it, find a way to fit in. As if we were both adopted. Know what I mean?”
“Maybe he never liked himself,” I say, and hear the subtext so clearly I worry I actually said it aloud. Maybe he never liked me.