The Homecoming

by Andrew Pyper

  The next thing? What could that possibly be?

  Apply pressure.

  It’s not specialized knowledge. Just something recalled from movies and TV shows. But how is pressure applied? Where? What is pressure in a situation like this?

  I try.

  Kneel closer and place one palm over the wound, then lay my second hand over the first. Push down hard.

  Elias screams. His body spasming inward then falling back again. The heat of his blood pushing up through my fingers.

  “That’s wrong! That’s wrong!” Ezra is shouting inches away from me.

  This isn’t applying pressure. This is an amateur version of CPR. And that’s for heart attacks, isn’t it?

  I pull away from Elias and his eyes follow me, pleading. A second later Ezra’s fist meets my shoulder.

  “Do something!”

  “I don’t—”

  “For fuck’s sake. He’s dying—”

  “I don’t know what to do!”

  Ezra looks at me and sees that it’s true. He doesn’t argue anymore, only bends closer to his brother and whispers looping phrases of comfort—“It’s okay. I’m here. Don’t be afraid.”—until Elias’s breathing becomes a half dozen shallow hiccups before stopping altogether.

  I’ve never seen them as twins as much as now. Before this, I took them as a comical adaptation of a single man, one who carried a mirror with him wherever he went and mimicked his own accent. They were one in a way none of the rest of us were. But now they are divided.

  Ezra rises. His hands held out from his sides as if he’s a tightrope walker finding his balance. Then he walks, toe to heel, toward the lodge’s door.

  28

  THE DOOR IS LOCKED.

  Nobody comes when I knock. I wonder if Ezra and I will have to survive the night out here. Behind me, the forest feels alive with new movement. Some of it animal, some of it unimaginable.

  I knock on the door again, pounding with both fists this time.

  When it opens, it’s Jerry standing there.

  “You left them? Hiding in here alone?” he shouts at me. When he sees his brother’s face, my bloodied hands, his anger drains instantly away. “Where’s Elias?”

  “He didn’t make it,” I say.

  “Didn’t make it from what?”

  “He’s dead, Jerry. He was murdered.”

  The words themselves taste strange in my mouth. Dead Murdered.

  “That was him—that was his voice in the woods,” Jerry says.

  “We heard it too.”

  “I thought it was Lauren or one of your sisters. A woman. That’s why I came back here.”

  I believe him. If I hadn’t known Mom, Bridge, Franny, and Lauren were all inside the lodge when I heard the cry through the great room’s windows, I would’ve guessed it was a female voice too.

  “Jerry?”

  Both of us turn to Ezra as if surprised to find him still here.

  “Yeah?”

  “Is this happening?”

  “Yes.”

  Ezra grimaces, as if he had one last attempt at making all the badness go away and it failed, as expected.

  But then his brother is there. His other brother, one half of all the family he has left, pulling him close in an embrace that gives them both permission to weep.

  • • •

  Lauren takes the news even harder than Ezra. As she’s held by her brothers at one end of the sofa, at the other end Mom and Franny and I console Bridge, whose fear has finally overwhelmed her. It’s overwhelmed all of us, but lending support to the youngest lets us hide the worst of it from view.

  When we’ve partway recovered, the first thing Ezra demands we talk about is me. How I failed to help Elias.

  “I honestly don’t know. I don’t,” I say. “I just—nothing came to me in the moment. I’m so sorry.”

  “You must have been in shock,” Mom offers.

  “I guess. But it didn’t feel like that.”

  Lauren studies me, the psychologist within her performing an assessment. “I’m sure there wasn’t anything you could have done. Not without equipment or facilities.”

  “Maybe if we were in a hospital, it all would’ve clicked in,” I say. “But I’m—I’m not sure—”

  “You’re a fucking doctor!” Jerry is suddenly close to me, shouting. “You were supposed to help him!”

  “I tried!” I look over at Ezra. “You were there.”

  Do they see that I’m telling the truth? Whether it’s that or the recognition that this debate won’t solve anything, everyone now turns to Ezra.

  “What about the body?” he says.

  “What do you mean?” Lauren asks.

  “I mean do we bury him now? Or do we do it in the morning?”

  “Hold on a sec. I’m not sure anybody should go out there to dig a grave,” Franny says, as gently as she can, though her ingrained sarcasm can’t be wholly veiled.

  “Not until the morning, anyway,” Lauren offers.

  “In the morning we’re getting out of here. I’m assuming we’re all agreed on that,” Franny says. “Once we’re back, we can send people to get Elias.”

  “No. Nope. No,” Ezra says, shaking his head. “We can’t leave him out there.”

  “I’m sorry for your loss, I really am,” Franny says. “But why not?”

  “He’ll get cold.”

  I send Franny a hard look, silently telling her not to point out that Elias is going to be cold no matter where we put him, and she lets it pass.

  “This must be unbelievably hard for you,” I say. “You lost your brother tonight. But we can’t forget how he was lost. How we’re all in danger now and we’ll only make it worse if we don’t make smart decisions.”

  Ezra faces me. Dry-eyed. His head still.

  “I’m not leaving him out there,” he says, and rises.

  “I’ll go with you,” Jerry says, and looks to me. “We’re going to need some help carrying him.”

  • • •

  I’m almost surprised he’s still there.

  I imagined the Tall Man dragging him off. Doing something worse. Yet, other than the whole of his shirt now discolored by blood, nothing has changed from how he was left.

  Except I’m wrong about that.

  “Where is it?” Ezra says.

  “Where’s what?”

  “The ax thing. The hatchet.”

  We both look around the body, kick at the grass with our shoes. It’s not where I dropped it after pulling it out. It’s nowhere.

  “Somebody took it,” Ezra says.

  Somebody took it back.

  I can see Jerry understand this at the same time I do.

  “You two get the arms,” he says. “I’ll take the legs. Let’s do this fast.”

  Elias is even heavier than he looks. It slows us to shuffled half steps through the high grass.

  “What was that?” Ezra asks. I didn’t hear anything, and can’t decide if I want to stop to listen for whatever it was or keep going.

  “Nothing,” Jerry answers, opting for the latter.

  When Lauren opens the door for us and we lay Elias down on the foyer floor, the violence of the attack becomes more vivid in the full light. We can see it in the breadth of the wound, but also in his frozen expression. The terror not from death, but the way it came.

  “Cover him,” Ezra says, and walks away as if, now that his brother is inside, the duties to the other part of himself have been forever satisfied.

  29

  WE START OUT FOR THE gate at dawn.

  Jerry managed to convince Ezra to give up on the idea of burying Elias before we left, which still left the awfulness of all of us having to walk around his body on the floor, the white bedsheet we laid over him soaked through over the course of the night.

  There’s some discussion about whether we should take the bike or not. Jerry doesn’t see the point, but I argue that one of us might need a rest along the way, and they could sit in the wagon and I could ped
al for a time. In the end he doesn’t stop me from squeaking along behind the rest of the party.

  We don’t talk much. Once in a while someone will ask how much farther it is, and it’s left to me to provide an estimate. The route doesn’t have many landmarks, only the curves around boulders and berms that look like the other curves around boulders and berms, the endless undulations of wooded ground on either side. It both stretches time and shrinks it so that just when I think the fence will be there over the next rise, it isn’t, and its not being there makes me think it’s still miles off.

  “Not far,” I keep saying until they stop asking.

  It’s good that we brought the bike. After what feels like a half hour or more of trooping along like a defeated platoon, Mom starts to hang back farther and farther. When I invite her to ride in the wagon, she refuses at first, repeating what may as well be the motto of her life. I don’t want to be a bother. But eventually even she acknowledges her weakness and climbs in.

  This time, it really isn’t far.

  The fence comes into view as a gray lattice. As we move closer its height, the sharpness of the razor wire laid atop it, its purpose to repel and contain, becomes clearer.

  “That’s where they keep the phone?” Jerry asks, spotting the metal box next to the road on the other side.

  “That’s what the lawyer said.”

  “Okay. We’re all decided then? We leave together, all of us, right now. Agreed?”

  We show our votes of assent through small nods and kicks at the stones by our feet.

  “Good,” Jerry says. “How do we open it?”

  He poses this question to himself as he inspects the outline of the gate just as I had done when I first encountered it.

  That’s when I notice the humming.

  An ambient resonance, constant and low, as if the product of the air itself. An electric lullaby.

  “Don’t!”

  Jerry looks around at me, puzzled, at the same time he grips his hand to the metal edge of the gate.

  His body stiffens. As in a game of Simon Says, his posture, his facial expression, the way his back heel is lifted in midstep off the ground—all of it is frozen. You could think it was a brilliantly deadpan joke if it wasn’t for the reddening flesh of his hand. The wisp of smoke that seems to push its way out through the skin.

  Jerry is flying.

  There is no visible effort on his part, no kicking away or rolling of arms, and he looks like a plastic action figure that’s been arranged into an inhuman contortion and then tossed by a giant’s invisible hand.

  He hits the ground next to Bridge, and she kneels next to him, putting her hand to his cheek, asking if he’s okay.

  “Don’t touch it,” Jerry manages, locking eyes with Bridge. “Nobody touch it.”

  Ezra hurls himself to the ground next to his brother on the opposite side from Bridge. Mom releases one of her sob-laughs.

  “You’re kidding me,” Franny says. “It’s electrified?”

  “Locked too, I’d guess,” I say.

  “All of it?”

  “Unless there’s another gate somewhere along the perimeter, I’d say yes.”

  No one says aloud what this means. No one needs to. The only one of us who speaks is Lauren, who is saying the same thing over and over. “Oh my God oh my God oh my God.”

  Eventually, she’s quiet too.

  From out of the forest, something howls.

  LEGACY

  30

  EZRA GUESSES COYOTES. FRANNY THINKS it tends more to the mournfulness of a hound. I don’t say it out loud, but to me the howling could only be wolves.

  It doesn’t carry on for long. Distant, but not unreachably so. As likely coming from a source within the fence as outside of it.

  When the sound stops, we don’t speculate on what it was or where it came from any further than we already have. Every thought in our heads is a threat. Every turn from that thought only confronts us with another.

  “We have to go back,” Bridge says.

  Jerry rides in the wagon. He’s conscious and not outwardly injured aside from the burn on his hand, but his balance is shot. That means the trip back takes a while. Jerry’s extra pounds force me and Ezra to push the bike along by the handlebars every time we come to a hill. But what really deadens our legs is the recognition that everything has changed. Even more now than after Elias’s death. The cold fact is that was the end for him but not necessarily for us. Now we slouch back into the heart of the woods, the air pressing down on us with the weight of our error.

  Here’s what we know. What each of us is working to order in our minds according to our own fears or outrage or calculations of survival:

  The stay on Dad’s estate wasn’t intended to be a get-to-know-one-another therapy session. It wasn’t a game. The gate may be opened after another twenty-seven days, or it may not. It won’t take nearly that long to determine how this turns out. Belfountain was never a fairy-tale kingdom. It’s a prison.

  Once we return to the lodge, we’re reluctant to go inside. All of us seem to remember Elias’s body in the foyer at the same time.

  “It’s going to take shovels,” I say.

  The equipment shed. The only chance we have to find not just what we need to dig a grave with, but tools to barricade the lodge’s doors and smaller windows. There may even be something we can use to fortify the great room’s wall of glass, if not cover it altogether.

  The problem is the padlock on the shed’s door. We talk about taking a rock to it or even heating it to a temperature where it would melt off (Franny vaguely remembers her high school science teacher saying such a thing was possible). As the rest of us carry on the brainstorming, Ezra walks away. We watch him head into the lodge. A moment later he emerges carrying the poker from the fireplace, long and heavy as a knight’s sword.

  The loop of the padlock is just large enough for the first third of the poker to slip through. Ezra positions it flat against the shed, grips the handle tightly with both hands, hikes one foot against the door. He puffs his lungs full like a squatting weight lifter. Heaves back on the poker.

  The lock snaps and falls to the ground.

  “Leverage,” he says.

  We all go in at the same time, including Jerry, who rises from the trailer and shambles into the shed’s gloom. I’m the first to spot the pair of spades leaning against the wall, but there are other items of interest we pull off shelves or discover lying under oil cloths on the floor. Eight or nine two-by-fours spotted green with mold. A Folger’s can of finishing nails.

  The things we can use right away we haul out, and the rest—mostly just gardening tools, a battery-powered weed whacker, a box of mousetraps—we leave in the shed. For some reason I slip a pair of pruning shears into the pocket of my windbreaker. A butter knife would probably make a better weapon. But I like the weight of them bumping against me, another heartbeat held close as I walk.

  “I’d help but—” Jerry offers once we’re all outside again, indicating his dizziness with the same tapping to his head he used to show the effects of his football concussions.

  “We got this,” Ezra says, picking up one of the shovels and handing the other to me. “Don’t we?”

  “This would be a good spot for him,” I say, pointing over to a shady patch next to a clutch of buckthorn saplings between the Orange and Green trailheads. “What do you think?”

  Ezra nods his approval. Steps close to me and grips my elbow with his free hand.

  “Okay,” he says. “Let’s do this.”

  • • •

  It takes the rest of the day to dig a hole, carry Elias’s body swinging between us like a roll of wet carpet, and drop him in.

  For the first hour of shoveling, I blink through the sweat and stop to look around the lodge’s cleared drive, expecting to see the Tall Man step out of the trees. Ezra must be plagued by similar thoughts, as he proposes taking shifts with one of us digging while the other stands watch.

  Plunge the
spade’s edge down. Separate the soil from the ground. Launch it to the loose pile beside the hole.

  Stab, divide, heave. Stab, divide, heave . . .

  It dulls the urgency of wondering what we ought to do next. It also quiets my guilt over watching Elias die.

  Stab, divide, heave.

  When we return inside, Jerry shows us how he’s hammered some of the two-by-fours over the bedroom and kitchen windows, and done the same to reinforce the door next to the pantry. The nails he had to use are too short to make them very secure. And as for the great room’s windows, there’s nothing to be done. Yet he seems as grateful for the tasks he was able to complete as Ezra and I are.

  “Just have to keep an eye on it,” Jerry says, as if all of us aren’t doing that already, looking for the monster to step out of Belfountain’s snarled mass of life.

  31

  I COME OUT OF THE bathroom after a shower and Franny is there to corner me in the hallway.

  “You were in there awhile,” she says, and with these words she’s a teenager again, complaining about me hogging the hot water.

  “I had a lot to scrub off.”

  “That must have been rough. Having to drag—”

  “I’d rather not go through a play-by-play, if that’s okay with you.”

  She grimaces in apology. “I’m scared, Aaron.”

  “Me too.”

  “Not just about what’s happening out there. But in here.”

  She looks at me as if expecting her meaning to be clear. I assume she’s talking about suspicions she has about members of the second Quinlans. In the next second, another possibility arrives. The in here refers not to the lodge, but our heads.

  “Help me out,” I say.

  “Do you ever have the feeling you’re losing your memory?”

  “Little bits here and there. Names, some words. That’s what getting older is all about, right?”

  “I’m talking about since coming here.”

  “It’s hard to keep a grip on the outside world in this place.”

  “That’s not what I mean.” She squeezes her eyes shut. When she opens them, they’re shining with tears. “It’s like I never had a past to begin with.”