The Homecoming

by Andrew Pyper

  “I think we should talk about where things stand. Aaron, maybe Bridge shouldn’t be here for this?”

  “It’s up to her. Bridge, you want to—”

  “You don’t think Mom is missing,” Bridge says. “You think she’s dead.”

  She stands on her own closest to the dining room. For a moment I’m worried that she’s ill. Her cancer has returned and I’m seeing it before she can feel it. But I look at her a moment longer and recognize that I’m wrong. She’s recharging. Her body folding inward. Readying.

  “I don’t know anything,” Jerry says. “I’m just trying—”

  “But that’s what you think,” Bridge says. “My mother is gone and isn’t coming back.”

  Jerry glances at me, sees I’m not going to bail him out. “Yes, that’s what I think.”

  “Because it’s been too long?”

  “And because we know there’s someone out there who is—look, Elias was killed. It happened at night. And it’s night now.”

  “So we shouldn’t look for her anymore?”

  “We should do what we need to for those of us still here.” He reaches for an orange before pulling his hand back, seeing the emptiness of the gesture for what it is. “These search parties we’re throwing together and arming with cutlery and flashlights—it’s not going to work. If your mom knocks on the door tonight or tomorrow morning or whenever, great. But for the sake of all of us, we have to assume she’s not going to.”

  “Fine. Okay, fine,” Bridge says, her lower lip curling out.

  I go to her. My pride in her so great it pushes back against the first plumes of grief blowing up from within, and when I open my arms and she steps into them, it’s me drawing strength from her more than the other way around.

  We talk about what our plan should be. Some radical options are put forward, including Franny’s idea that we climb the fence while wearing oven mitts (nobody goes to the trouble of pointing out all the ways that wouldn’t work). We hypothesize how we might go on the offensive and take down the Tall Man ourselves. But we don’t know if he’s alone. And there’s no question that when it comes to killing, he’s better at it than any of us.

  The conclusions we eventually come to are the same we started with.

  Everyone stays inside.

  Keep all doors and windows secure.

  Ezra, Lauren, Jerry, and I will keep watch in shifts through the night.

  Only then, before going to our rooms, sofas, or chairs to attempt sleep, do we eat.

  44

  THE DREAM OF BLACK WATER.

  Of all the ways it is unique and strange—how it’s passed between us, how it enlarges in scope each night—the strangest and most unique is how it announces itself as the product of the subconscious and, at the same time, feels more acutely real than anything experienced in our waking hours.

  Another odd thing: I have this thought even as I dream the dream.

  I’m in the water, fighting to stay up. There’s no boat in sight. Remembering the descriptions the others gave of a sinking vessel, I rotate and find it behind me.

  Outlined against a sky pinholed with stars, nosing down so sharply the rotator blades poke up through the surface at its stern. A blink of electric light behind the windows of the bridge, brief as lightning. It shows I’m not alone. Other bodies riding the thick swells around me. Some treading water, chins up. Some facedown longer than a held breath would allow.

  Bridge is one of them. Still swimming. I see her, try to go to her, but the water hardens into icy slush.

  When a wave washes over my head, the world is muffled, replaced by the mute simplicity of the water. The alien singing rising up. The voice of the ocean itself.

  Then I’m breaking through again, snapping at breath. The night shattered by screams. A voice that doesn’t belong to the dream.

  It belongs to Belfountain. To my sister.

  45

  IT’S COMING FROM THE KITCHEN. Franny.

  I’m off the sofa and rounding the dining room corner when she crashes into me.

  “It came in!” she shouts into my chest. “It came inside!”

  Whatever she’s referring to isn’t visible in the kitchen. There are the broken plates and a saucepan I’d heard her fling off the counter as she came my way, but nothing else.

  Franny breaks away from me and runs down the elevated walkway toward the bedrooms, where she huddles with Bridge at the far end. I signal to her to stay where she is as Jerry comes up from the great room to join me.

  “What’s going on?” he asks.

  “I don’t know. Franny thinks she saw—”

  “Saw what? I thought it was your shift!”

  “Is it?” I glance over at my watch on the coffee table, the timepiece we were using to designate our turns to be awake, but it’s too far away to make out what it says. “I was—Ezra didn’t wake me up. What time—”

  “Shit, Aaron.”

  Jerry is about to curse me out, or maybe throw a fist my way, when he looks behind him. “Where’s Ezra?”

  He’d been on the other extension of the sofa from me before the start of his shift when I drifted off. Not there now.

  Jerry and I turn to look at the far end of the kitchen at the same time. The pantry door is slightly ajar. I start toward it with Jerry at my shoulder, his breath whistling and catching in his throat.

  “Hold up,” he says. He looks in the drawers, the sink, opens the dishwasher. “All the knives are gone. Everything.”

  “Someone took them?”

  He shakes his head. “There’s sure as hell nothing here we can use.”

  “Oh my God.”

  Lauren stands at the entry to the kitchen. Her eyes held by something neither Jerry nor I have noticed.

  And then we do.

  Jerry’s breath doesn’t whistle or catch anymore. It just stops.

  I lean my body over the blood on the floor. A wide line pushing out from under the door and around its edge, tonguing around the corner, coming faster along the grouted crevices in the floor than over the tiles.

  My hand on the knob. Pulling the door open through the crimson pool.

  Ezra’s blood. Easing out from his stomach as it had his brother’s. His body in a self-defensive posture, arms crossed over his front and knees curled up, a question mark on the pantry’s concrete.

  Jerry nudges me aside. “Oh, shit.”

  It came in. Franny’s conclusion after finding the body. It came inside.

  Which means it might still be.

  The kitchen door, the one that opens to the garbage bins outside. It’s the most likely way the Tall Man would have gained entry. I start down the short hall and flick on the light.

  The door is open. Not forced. Unlocked.

  I shoulder it closed. Turn the bolt.

  “Was it—”

  “Yeah. I’ll check the front door and make sure the others are safe,” I tell Jerry. “You search the rest of the place.”

  Lauren has joined Franny and Bridge outside the bedrooms. None of them are speaking but it’s clear Lauren has told them about Ezra. Even after I confirm the front door is secure and stand with them none of us say anything. None of us touch.

  When Jerry returns, he comes at me.

  “You were supposed to be on watch,” he says, raising his index finger and jabbing the air inches from my chest.

  “I know that. I—”

  “It was up to us!”

  “Jerry, listen. Ezra didn’t wake me up. That was the way it was supposed to work.”

  “Or you don’t remember him waking you up. Like you don’t remember how to be a doctor.”

  “No, not like that.”

  “Oh for fuck—” He slides a hand over his face as if wiping a set of darker intentions away. “You’ve got so many excuses, you’ll have to forgive me for not being able to keep up with the bullshit.”

  “What’s just happened—you’re hurting more than I could ever imagine. But everything’s changed now, so we—�
�

  “You’re right about that, Dr. Quinlan. It’s all changed.” Jerry circles his hands in front of him, his body searching for something to do, something to strike at. “I don’t have brothers anymore. It was your turn to make sure nobody got in, but they did. And unless that psycho has his own goddamn key, somebody opened the door for him.”

  I hear what Jerry is saying. We all do. His accusation isn’t that I might have welcomed the Tall Man inside, but that I killed Ezra myself. I might suspect the same of me if I was in Jerry’s position, reeling off the cocktail of his rage, his fear.

  The thing is, I am feeling his fear. It’s what allows me to see how all of us are standing at a point where everything will be decided. Yet I have no idea how to direct this moment, how to bring us back to a place where we can preserve the narrowing chance of saving ourselves.

  “I would never hurt Ezra,” I say.

  “That’s wonderful. What am I supposed to do with that, Aaron? Because here’s the thing: you’re not my family. I don’t know you.” He swings around to take in Franny and Bridge. “Any of you.”

  Jerry is bouncing on the balls of his feet. A boxer’s dance.

  “Don’t hit him.”

  He looks over at Bridge, his fingers curling into fists.

  “Please don’t hit him,” she says.

  Her words add invisible sandbags to his legs. The hands stop circling the air and loosen, but only a little, his fists now opened to show their hollow cores.

  “I’m not staying here,” he says.

  At first, I take him to mean in this spot, this chilly, slate-tiled foyer with the rib cage chandelier hanging above us. But he moves to the door and it’s clear he means he won’t stay in the lodge.

  “Lauren?”

  He pauses for her to join him. I’m anticipating his disappointment when she refuses. But as Jerry starts for the door, she goes after him. When I put my hand to her shoulder, she spins around.

  “This is a mistake,” I say.

  “He’s my brother.”

  She looks into me. It allows me to see something too.

  This is how families operate. They forgive, they bail each other out. But they can’t forget the walls that define them, how they decide who’s allowed in and who must be kept out.

  “He’s my brother,” Lauren says again, and is the first out when Jerry opens the door.

  46

  EZRA’S GRAVE ISN’T NEARLY AS deep as his twin’s.

  Franny and Bridge help as much as they can with the shoveling, but they’re as tired and broken as I am. After singlehandedly pulling his body from the lodge to the spot next to where Elias lies, it’s all I can do to fit him into the long groove in the ground and cover him with loose soil.

  • • •

  That night, we’re putting away the dishes when Bridge points out that Jerry and Lauren didn’t take any food with them.

  “They’ll be hungry,” I say. “Which means they’ll come back in the morning when it’s light out.”

  This doesn’t come out sounding particularly believable. But all we have is the performance of hope and we stick to the script.

  • • •

  I stay awake all night. It gives me time to form the lie I plan on telling Franny in the morning. The announcement that Bridge and I are going to the fence’s gate to check for new supplies, when in fact we’ll head into the woods to find another entrance to the underground hallway where we saw the Tall Man and the witch.

  But at sunrise, when Franny shuffles into the great room and I tell her this, she does the opposite of what I thought she would. She insists on coming along.

  “We can’t leave the door open,” I say. “Someone has to stay.”

  “It’s not going to be me. I won’t be left alone, Aaron. I won’t.”

  “We should tell her,” Bridge says, appearing in the bedroom hallway behind her.

  “Tell me what?”

  I step up onto the dining room’s platform, pull out chairs for the two of them.

  “Have a seat.”

  • • •

  The story of the camp, the key, the murderous beings that live inside. How Bridge and I believe whatever was going on down there is connected to Dad. Franny listens to all of it with her head lowered so that I vacillate between thinking she’s crying or sleeping.

  “Our father,” she announces when I’m done. “I’ll be honest. I wasn’t too blown back to find out about the secret second family thing. But this? Didn’t see it. You got me there, Dad.”

  She slaps her knees. The only thing that’s missing is actual laughter.

  “It’s why we’re here,” Bridge says.

  “I don’t doubt that, honey. But here’s my one reservation. Why should we do what he wants us to?”

  “Dad brought me here. Before.”

  Franny looks the way I probably did when Bridge told me the same thing.

  “Why’d he do that?”

  “I think it was to show me everything he’d done. Show me the truth.”

  “Couldn’t he have just sent us postcards or something?” Franny asks, her exasperation reddening her face into an eraser atop a thin, yellowed pencil. “ ‘So sorry for being evil and insane. Move on with your lives and don’t look back. Love, Daddy’?”

  “I didn’t say he was sorry,” Bridge says. “I think he just wanted us to see.”

  This stops Franny. Her body transformed to a wax figure in the first stage of its melting.

  “It makes me crazy too,” I say to her. “The idea of submitting to Dad’s plan—whatever it is—it makes me sick. But this is his place, Franny. Belfountain is his brain. Which means we have to find out its language. We need—”

  “We need to find out who he was,” Franny says.

  “We need to find Mom,” Bridge says.

  47

  BRIDGE LEADS THE WAY ALONG the green trail with me and Franny behind her. I don’t like having her exposed as the first in line but she’s got the compass and she’s the only one who can read it right.

  “This way,” Bridge says, striking out off the trail where I wouldn’t have guessed we should.

  I’ve been here twice before, yet this part of the forest feels particularly unfamiliar. The trees appear closer together than elsewhere, the trunks of the birches peeling and huddled. It prevents any view farther than twenty feet or so. It also throws every crack and crunch our feet make back at us.

  When we reach the camp we stop to figure where the second underground entry point might be. Bridge thinks it’s some distance beyond the clearing.

  We walk through the high grass of the camp’s grounds trying to imagine the children who would have run here, laughed, and played Capture the Flag, but nothing comes.

  “It’s like a cemetery,” Bridge says. And even though it’s not like a cemetery in any obvious way, it seems to me that she’s right. A place of markers for the dead, stand-ins for lives of unguessable shape.

  As we go, I estimate that if the hallway we saw through the porthole window runs more or less straight, we’re passing over it now. If I’m right about that, the most likely second entrance will come at the opposite end.

  We’re into the forest again. I’m about to suggest we’ve gone too far when a ridge rises up from the ground like a partly collapsed wall. Fern covered and leaning away from us. A dozen feet to the top.

  In the center of it, a gaping mouth. Nearly perfectly oval, perfectly dark, the stones on the visible part of its floor black as coal nuggets. A cave.

  We climb up without a word between us. It takes longer than the modest slope of wild thyme and jutting limestone would lead you to believe. At the top we look back the way we’ve come, and I’m so ready to see the Tall Man at the base that for a moment he’s there, starting after us, effortless and swift. And then, in the next instant, he evaporates like a shadow when the sun goes behind a cloud, and there’s only the bunched trees that, from this elevation, look oozy and squat.

  The entrance isn’t large,
only twice my body width and a foot shorter than I am when standing. I know because I’m upright now. Walking to the edge of the darkness and peering inside. A trickling rivulet of water rushing toward my shoe as if it recognizes something.

  We turn our headlamps on, revealing circles of yellow on the damp stone floor. The illumination only works to make the walls feel closer than they were in darkness. The bulbs and joints of the rock wall. The sharp fins that jut down from the ceiling. As we advance, the motion of the beams lend the rock a lurching animation, its arrowhead edges and zigzagged cracks grabbing and retreating.

  It’s why we almost fall into the hole.

  An opening in the cave floor that marks its farthest point. It appears to be a natural formation until we gather close to its edge. See the concrete steps heading steeply down into its depths.

  “Doesn’t look too stable,” I say.

  “And I don’t feel too stable, so maybe I’ll go first,” Franny says, and starts down.

  The stairs are so narrow and steep it requires us to descend in side steps. We have to hold our beams down at our feet to prevent slippage, as any of us falling would take out those below.

  While clearly built by industrial means, these stairs are far more basic and hastily constructed than those that led to the door with the porthole window. I try to occupy my thoughts with how it was done, holding at bay the claustrophobia that sounds in my ears as a shrill ringing of tinnitus. A noise that hides, just beneath it, the breath and scratch of a human shriek.

  “Wait,” Franny says, farther below than I thought she was. “There’s something here.”

  Bridge and I join her, and the three of us take up the entire breadth of the tunnel that is now level and starts away into a hallway with concrete floors, walls, and ceilings. But there’s also something else. A barrier that separated where we are now from the rest of the hallway. A square of plate metal smashed off its hinges, now leaning up against the wall.

  “Somebody fought their way in,” Franny says.

  We study the metal as if reading it. And in return it relates an episode of violence and desperation.