by Richard Cox
David shut off the car, and the three of them climbed out. Weeds and vines had overgrown shrubs in a flowerbed beside the porch. Jonathan reached the door first, which was flanked on both sides by narrow windows covered by gauzy white curtains. He knocked. After a moment, a pair of thick fingers pulled one of the curtains back a little, and eyes appeared in the opening.
“Who’s there?” a man asked.
“Jonathan Crane. Alicia Ulbrecht. David Clark.”
The guy didn’t answer right away.
“What do you want?”
“To ask about your son,” Jonathan responded. “Are you Pete Willis?”
More silence.
Even more silence.
“I don’t know where my son is,” the man finally said. “He’s probably dead.”
“What about your grandson, then?” Jonathan said. “We know he’s not dead because we just spoke to him half an hour ago.”
Now the man threw the lock and jerked open the door. He was a stocky fellow, not quite six feet tall. His hair was gray and receding and too long for his age. He was wearing a plaid shirt and jeans and brown shoes.
“You talked to Thomas?” the man asked, which seemed to certify his identity as Pete Willis.
“We did.”
Willis looked away.
“We believe he’s been waging attacks on us. He burned down Alicia’s house, my house, and a restaurant owned by David’s dad, who was killed. You might have seen all this on the news.”
“Goddamn son of a bitch,” Willis said. “Of course you had to wait till the last goddamned day.”
“I’m sorry?” said Jonathan.
“I finally let myself believe it wasn’t going to happen, and now you show up at the last minute. Goddamn son of a bitch.”
“What’s going to happen?” Alicia asked.
“Just come in. Jesus Christ.”
Willis opened the door further and they followed him inside. Soon the three of them were sitting on a couch together in a den not unlike the one at Christine Willis’ house. In one corner stood a roll-top desk. In another, adjacent to the couch, stood an ancient-looking upright piano. Sunlight streamed through a sliding glass door and painted a bright rectangle on the carpet. David appeared to be shrinking away from it, like a vampire might.
“So how much do you know?” asked Willis.
“We came here to ask about your son,” David said. He seemed bored with Willis and their visit here in general, although Jonathan couldn’t understand why. “Surely you must know Todd is not like most other people.”
“No shit. Why else would you be here?”
“Mr. Willis,” Jonathan said. “Obviously we’re at a disadvantage. We came here to find out if you know where Todd is, and to ask you about some strange encounters we had with him when we were kids.”
“You mean how he knew about music that didn’t exist yet?”
Jonathan looked at Alicia to gauge her reaction, but by now she didn’t seem surprised.
“It wasn’t just the music,” Willis said. “That was the part he remembered best, probably because he was so talented that way. He saw other things in there, too. When he was catatonic. I . . . I can’t believe this. I can’t believe you came here at the last minute like this. Goddamn it.”
Willis rubbed his eyes and looked away from them.
“We don’t mean to upset you,” Jonathan said. “It’s just that—”
“We left town that summer because of the trouble Todd caused,” Willis explained. “We hoped he could start fresh somewhere else, that maybe he would feel better, but instead he got worse. He had these terrible, crazy dreams where he would see pictures of people he didn’t know, or what looked like home movies, or file folders. What other kid has nightmares about manila folders?”
Jonathan noticed David was sitting up now and looking carefully at the old man.
“When Todd was fifteen or sixteen we came back to Wichita for a few weeks and took him to see a doctor at that mental hospital in Lakeside City. The man who first treated him had moved out of state, so a new doctor listened to Todd’s stories and put him on medication. But the medication only made things worse. Todd became bored with everything and eventually dropped out of school. He was such a smart boy, but he could not focus on anything. He said it didn’t matter if he graduated, that nothing he did mattered because everything was already decided.
“And anytime he got agitated, he would go on about this endless white space where he lived while he was catatonic. He said being there was worse than death.”
Willis’ hands were shaking. When he looked up again, his eyes were glassy and bloodshot.
“He came back here a couple of years ago, and you could see the intervening time had taken its toll. By then he was a shell of himself. He left some things behind he wanted you to see. At first I didn’t look at them—out of privacy, you know—but eventually I couldn’t help myself. When you see what he left, you’ll understand why I was hoping you wouldn’t show up. Hold on just a minute.”
Willis left the room through a doorway behind the couch. Jonathan watched him go and then turned to Alicia.
“He’s talking like Todd isn’t around anymore.”
“He sounds frightened to me,” David replied. “And maybe a little paranoid.”
“Paranoid?” Alicia said. “He says he was expecting us. This should be like your wildest dreams come true.”
“You think this is so fucking funny,” David said. “If we’re so full of shit, why are you even here?”
“Because I’ve lost everything. If your house burned down, you could buy another one the very next day. But Jonathan and I have to live with our parents or in hotels and hope our insurance claims aren’t denied by some guy whose job is to deny claims. I don’t know if I believe this horror movie stuff, but someone has attacked us, specifically us, and I want to know why.”
Jonathan couldn’t help himself: He loved watching Alicia being surly with David. And though he disagreed with her assessment of the available evidence, Jonathan hoped Alicia might come to understand that the loss of their homes and possessions, while devastating, might eventually be outshined by what they stood to gain from these events. Namely each other.
Willis returned carrying a cardboard box about the same size as the one Jonathan had brought down from his attic on Friday. He placed it on the floor in front of his chair and sat down to rummage through it.
“This was Todd’s when he was younger. It’s the first instrument he ever owned and the one he learned to play on.”
Willis retrieved from the box a rectangle of white plastic upon which was mounted a row of black and white keys. It was an electronic keyboard. A Casiotone MT-45.
“Wow,” Jonathan said. “So that’s the one he used to play for us.”
“What else is in there?” David asked.
The next thing Willis retrieved was a handheld cassette recorder. He handed it to Jonathan.
“Does it still work?” he asked Willis. “Give it a try and find out.”
Jonathan pressed the play button, and low-fidelity sound burst out of the onboard speaker.
It was a kid’s voice, growling angsty lyrics in time with silly, cartoonish notes of the Casio.
“Nirvana?” Alicia asked. “I thought he only knew songs from the 80s. Did he change into flannel when he played this?”
“Is there anything else on the tape?” asked David, who seemed unimpressed. “Maybe something Todd said?”
Jonathan pushed the fast forward button and the cassette recorder whirred. No one said anything while they waited for the tape to advance. The air conditioner clicked on and began to hum.
When Jonathan stopped the tape and began playing it again, he recognized the track at once. It had been popular only a couple of years ago, and as he listened to Todd sing, he wondered if Alicia might finally be forced to accept what Jonathan and David had suspected from the beginning: there was something larger at work here, some force guiding the narrati
ve of these strange events.
I remember when, I remember, I remember when I lost my mind
There was something so terrible about that place.
Even your emotions had an echo
In so much space
And when you’re out there
Without care,
Yeah, I was out of touch
But it wasn’t because I didn’t know enough
I just knew too much
Does that make me crazy?
Does that make me crazy?
Does that make me crazy?
Probably
“These lyrics,” Willis said, “it’s like Todd wrote them about the endless white space he was so afraid of, the one he saw when he was catatonic. Except, from what I understand, the song itself was released maybe two years ago with slightly different lyrics.”
“Do you still think we faked the tape?” David asked Alicia. “How could he have known about this song twenty years ahead of time?”
Jonathan knew religious friends whose beliefs had been shaped by or borne from what they described as a transcendental event, a connection to the world deeper than what could be attained by everyday experience. This incident, they believed, was the act of God speaking to them. Jonathan did not believe in God, not in the church-going, Ten Commandments kind of way, but if there existed in the universe some method by which Todd or anyone could glean information from a future not yet lived, then it stood to reason that reality was not necessarily defined by the input collected by a human’s five senses. That maybe there was some other form of reality out there.
“But honestly the music is incidental,” Willis said. “The last time I saw Todd, he gave me this. This is what he wanted you to see.”
Willis handed Jonathan a sheet of paper folded in half. On the inside surface of the page were several paragraphs of text that had been produced by an ink jet printer. Jonathan opened it and read from the top.
If you believe legend, the city of Wichita Falls was doomed from its first day. Erected near a small waterfall on a muddy tributary of the Red River, where white settlers displaced a tribe of Indians known to them as Wichita, the community was officially named on September 27, 1872. Just before sunset, as new landowners celebrated their good fortune, the revered chief named Tawakoni Jim recalled an old Caddo legend about a boy bestowed with the Power of the Cyclone, which enabled him to summon black clouds and bring their powerful winds to the ground . . .
“What is this?” Jonathan asked. He tilted the page so Alicia and David could read it, also.
“Something Todd found. Something his son, Thomas, wrote. Keep reading.”
The text comprised a short tale about the genesis of the Wichita Falls community, and a curse that had apparently been cast on the town by an Indian chief. The story sounded like the kind of old wives’ tale that a quick search on Snopes.com might easily dispel. But it was the last couple of lines that caught Jonathan’s attention, that helped him understand why Pete Willis seemed so disappointed by their visit today.
What happened in Wichita Falls on June 2, 2008 has been described as “biblical,” though Wichita Indians know the Bible had nothing to do with it. Careful readers of the story that follows, however, will find clues to a mysterious book that did contribute to the demise of a Middle American city and a number of characters contained herein.
“June 2?” Alicia said. “That’s tomorrow.”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Willis. “So you can see why I was hoping you folks wouldn’t show. It’s been two years since Todd brought this to me, and if I could have made it one more day without seeing your faces—”
“So what did he say is going to happen?” David asked.
“The end of the world.”
“What does that mean? Were those his exact words?”
“It’s been a while, son. But yes, when I asked why he was so upset, all he would say was his son had done something terrible, and your appearance here would mean the end of everything.”
“Our appearance here?” David asked. “Like the three of us? Or someone in general?”
“You three,” answered Willis. “Jonathan Crane, Alicia Ulbrecht, and David Clark.”
“But that’s . . . ” Alicia said, and then trailed off. “When did you last see him? Exactly?”
“Like I said, two years ago, maybe less. He moved back to Wichita Falls to be near Thomas, but apparently the kid had problems and wanted nothing to do with him. And when Todd found that page you’re holding, I think it pushed him over the edge. He showed up here nearly out of his mind. He said the only way to stop his son was to kill him. I said, Todd, no matter what you think is going to happen, you can’t hurt that boy. But he wouldn’t listen. He explained how you three would show up one day looking for him, that I should give you the letter, and he begged me not to read it. I tried not to, but you should have seen him. He looked like a man on a ten-day bender. Like he was a junkie in need of a fix. After Todd dropped off the letter, he left again for Wichita Falls, but I don’t think he ever made it. They found his car on the highway a little south of town. There was a four-inch hole in the windshield right over the steering wheel. Like something had been driven through the glass and into the headrest. There was blood in the car and a trail of it on the highway, and then it just stopped. Like someone picked him up or he just vanished. No one has heard from him since.”
“So he could still be alive,” David said.
“If you saw the look in his eyes that day, if you saw what happened to the car, you wouldn’t think so. Plus, Thomas is still alive, and I think if Todd had made it to Wichita—”
Willis’ eyes were filling with tears again and he stopped to compose himself.
“So his body wasn’t found?” David asked.
“No, it wasn’t.”
“He disappeared and you just assume he’s dead?”
Jonathan didn’t like David’s tone, and apparently Willis didn’t care for it, either.
“I believe I’ve said all I’m going to say about my son. I think it’s time you folks leave.”
“David,” Alicia said. “You’re out of line. You owe him an apology.”
“No, he doesn’t,” Willis said. “I only talked to you folks because I promised Todd I would. I’ve done my part and now I’m ready for what-ever’s coming.”
He stood up and waited for the three of them to do the same. Then he led them toward the door.
“What do you think is going to happen?” David asked as they stepped out onto the porch. “What do you think that letter means?”
“I don’t know, exactly. But I’ve never seen Todd wrong about anything before, so there’s no reason to believe he’s wrong about this. And if the ship is going to sink, I plan to have my brandy on the deck and take it like a man.”
To Jonathan this seemed like a curious thing to say. He felt like he’d heard something similar recently but couldn’t remember what it had been.
“Is there anything we can do for you?” Alicia asked him. “Anything at all?”
“You can’t do anything,” he answered. “At this point I don’t think anyone can.”
71
David had brought along a flask of scotch to nip from during the afternoon, because there was honestly no other way to function. He’d incurred too much damage the night before, and the only way he would be able to get through this day was with a moderate, ongoing buzz. The problem he faced was that Jonathan and Alicia were with him nearly every single minute. When they stopped the first time, to meet Christine Phillips, he’d managed to sneak a pull while Jonathan and Alicia were climbing out of the car. But since then there had been no opportunity at all, and as the energy from his buzz leaked away, it was replaced by throbbing hangover agony.
But he would be rid of them soon enough, and once they were gone, David would drink more scotch and begin making calls.
He was going after the kid.
The two of them had shared a long moment of eye contact when Thomas walked
into the living room, and David was sure they had developed an understanding. And if the kid possessed a gift equal to or greater than Todd’s, that made him extremely valuable. Together, he thought, the two of them could do something special.
“David,” Alicia said, as they climbed into the car. “You’re such an asshole.”
He figured he was doing something right if three different women had called him that in less than twenty-four hours.
“Why? Because I, as a father, wouldn’t just assume my kid was dead because someone found an empty car?”
“You as a father,” she replied. “That’s rich.”
“The guy was obviously hurting,” Jonathan said. “You didn’t have to press him.”
“We came here to ask him questions, so I asked.”
David pulled away from Willis’ house and drove in the direction of Wichita Falls. No one said anything for a while.
But eventually Jonathan ruined the silence. “So what do you guys think is going to happen tomorrow?”
“I don’t know,” Alicia said. “A part of me is never going to accept the crazy shit you guys believe. But two people are dead and I don’t have a house or a way to build another one. Neither do you. Let’s say something terrible really is going to happen tomorrow? Do we call Detective Gholson and tell him that? What’s he going to do with the information?”
This, David reasoned, was what separated people like him from everyone else. Most people took an essentially passive view of the world, a wait-and-see attitude, whereas David was the kind of man who seized opportunity wherever it presented itself. When you were aggressive, you occasionally got burned, but overall the payoff was worth it. And let’s be honest: David himself never got burned. Not even singed. Last July he had begun to sell off many of his stock holdings and invested the proceeds into low-risk securities and credit default swaps. This had raised eyebrows in his circle of investor friends, especially with the Dow pushing to record highs seemingly every day, but David’s instincts had once again proven to be on the mark. With mortgage lender IndyMac headed for insolvency, as major banks began to buckle under the weight of their mortgage-backed securities, those same friends were now close to panic. Irresponsible lending practices and the toxic investment products built upon those loans were poised to collapse the world economy and no one was sure how the markets would respond.