by Scott Thomas
Sam shook his head. “I don’t think so.”
“It’s not real. It can’t be real. It’s a delusion.”
“A delusion that we’re both experiencing, almost two thousand miles apart?”
“It’s not unheard of.” Moore was speaking rapidly now, anxious to find a rational explanation. “There have been countless examples of mass hysteria throughout history. Nuns in the Middle Ages who suddenly began yowling like cats. A dancing plague in the fifteen hundreds. The Salem witch trials. The Mothman sightings in West Virginia. People felt compelled to do irrational things. They believed they saw things that weren’t there. People who had no connection to one another. The delusions spread like diseases.”
Moore could see the anger boiling up in Sam.
“This is not a delusion!” he cried. “This is happening. This is real.”
“No. No, I can’t accept that.”
“You don’t have to accept it,” Sam said. “It’s happening. To you. To me.”
Something occurred to Moore. She looked up at Sam with a new sense of purpose. “What about the others? Maybe they’re fine. Maybe it’s just us.”
Sam considered this for a moment, then took out his phone.
“What are you doing?” Moore asked.
“Calling Daniel.” Sam opened his contacts and scrolled down to the S section. There it was, the phone number he had gotten from Wainwright last year.
Sam tapped the number, then Call. He put the phone to his ear.
On the other end, it began to ring.
TWENTY-ONE
THURSDAY, APRIL 20
DANIEL SAT WITH his palms pressed flat against his closed eyes, losing himself in the tranquility of his study. His cell phone, which had been ringing off the hook for nearly a day now, had finally fallen silent. He was thankful for this. He did not want to answer it. He did not want to be forced into mundane conversation.
He could hear his wife shuffling around in the hall, her footsteps light as she passed. She wanted him to come out, he knew this, and he would in time, but not yet. Not until he cleared the unexpected hurdle before him, that blinking cursor on the computer screen, marking the moment when his story had abandoned him.
In the absence of writing, Daniel had allowed his mind to wander, to imagine what it would be like when his publisher read the new manuscript. They wouldn’t print it. It was too dark, not at all the kind of self-righteous trifle to which his Christian audience was accustomed. This was no slim volume of teen-friendly carnage, served medium rare with pipin’ hot sides of judgment and salvation. This was a dense work that weaved through the shadows of the soul, morally ambiguous without even the faintest glimmer of a light at the end of the tunnel. It was real. It was life.
A year ago, Daniel would have scoffed at such pessimistic thoughts. That was before Claire was snatched away from him. In that moment, standing with the deputy sheriff before the house on Kill Creek, a single sentence was uttered—
Your daughter, she’s been in an accident
—and Daniel sensed something snap within him, actually felt it break like the dead branch of a diseased tree, and all the hope, all the peace, all the God-given calm that had once filled his heart began to drain free.
Once, years ago, Daniel and Sabrina were out for a walk, their new daughter snug under a blanket in the stroller, when they came upon an apartment fire. It was an ancient six-story complex on the northeast corner of the intersection. Black plumes of smoke poured from the uppermost windows. The firefighters appeared to have the blaze under control, the powerful streams from their hoses extinguishing the flames.
The residents of the building huddled on the very edge of the sidewalk. It was obvious they would not be returning home. The fire had done too much damage. Some coughed, some stood silent, most watched the inferno with tear-streaked faces. At the far side of the group stood a mother with her son. She was not crying. She smiled warmly at the boy, raking a hand gently through his hair.
“Why are you smiling?” Daniel could not help but ask. “You’ve lost everything.”
“I’ve lost nothing,” she replied softly. “My son is everything, and God has spared him. God has spared us both. I have everything I need.”
It was a profound moment. Coupled with his safe passage through the tunnel of spiders as a child, the words of this humble woman shone a Promethean light on the dark road of life.
No more. The warm glow had been extinguished. Salvation was not a blessing but an absurd joke, plucked cruelly away like a dollar bill at the end of a long stretch of twine.
Again he heard the floorboards creak as his wife approached his office door. This time, she did not move on. A moment passed, and then there came a light knock.
“Daniel?” Sabrina called out sheepishly.
“I’m working.”
“Can I open the door?”
“I’m working,” he said again, more forcefully.
Another pause, but her footsteps did not recede. Finally, she spoke again.
“Pastor Charlie is here.”
Daniel sighed, irritated. Sabrina had threatened several times to bring their minister to the house. She had made good on that threat. Why couldn’t she just leave him be?
“Daniel?” This was a man’s voice, deep and soothing. “Daniel, why don’t you open the door so we can talk about it?”
“What’s there to talk about?”
“You tell me,” the man replied.
Sabrina’s hands shook as she poured coffee, the lip of the pot clinking loudly against the delicate porcelain cup.
Pastor Charles Norland sat perched on the edge of the couch, his hands folded humbly on his knees as if in preparation for prayer. Physically, Pastor Charlie was not an imposing figure. His dark suit hung limply from his wiry frame, the top button of his white dress shirt undone to allow tiny threads of black hair to peek through. He tanned easily; even with the majority of his days spent inside the First Lutheran Church on the corner of Sixth and Walnut Streets, his skin retained the bronze sheen of summer. At forty-two, his hairline was finally beginning to recede, cutting a widow’s peak. Pastor Charlie was six feet tall and no more than one hundred and sixty pounds. His voice was slow yet deliberate, understated yet powerful. Like water seeping through the fractures of a seemingly impervious boulder, Pastor Charlie’s voice had a way of working its way into your very bones, until you suddenly found yourself broken open before him.
Daniel waited while Pastor Charlie took a hesitant sip of the steaming coffee. He looked to Sabrina, who quickly glanced away.
Pastor Charlie swallowed and asked, “So what’s going on, Daniel?”
“Nothing. I’m working on a new book.”
“And do you usually lock yourself in your office for days when you’re working on a book?”
Daniel shook his head. “No. But this . . . this is a different kind of book.”
Pastor Charlie drew in a long breath, the air whistling in his nostrils. “You haven’t been to church in quite some time, Daniel.”
“Don’t take it personally.” A smirk played at Daniel’s lips. He never used to smirk. Not before.
For the next five minutes, Pastor Charlie backed off a bit, spinning lackadaisical tales of his congregation, how Minnie Conrad caused a bit of a stir with the church choir when she chose a pop song for her solo (“Roar” by Katy Perry), how sixteen-year-old Shelly Ellerman interrupted Charlie’s Memorial Day weekend sermon by throwing up in the second pew (it seems Shelly was battling her first hangover), how the church had finally raised enough money to restore the chapel’s oldest stained-glass window, the one depicting Jesus’s ride into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday (work should be completed by late September).
Daniel felt himself being pulled bit by bit by the calm, steady sound of Pastor Charlie’s voice. He glanced subtly around the room for any conceivable distraction, something to focus on in an effort to break the spell. The coffee table with its neat stacks of appropriately thick books. Charlie’
s shoes, recently polished black yet bearing smudges of rough leather where his rag had missed. The hump of Daniel’s own belly, much smaller than it had been six months ago, rising steadily up and down with each breath. “I’m beating it,” Daniel said suddenly, interrupting the pastor’s rambling.
Pastor Charlie paused, confused. “What?”
“My ‘Dunlap Syndrome.’” Daniel pointed to his shrunken paunch. “When your belly done lap over your belt.”
He chuckled, amused by his own cleverness.
Sabrina put a hand on her husband’s shoulder. “Daniel, please.”
Daniel looked to his wife’s face, pained and fearful. She was going to be thirty-eight in a couple months. She was far from old. She still resembled the pretty little wallflower he had fallen head over heels for in high school. But her eyes had aged, fine wrinkles creeping around the edges like spiderwebs. She looked tired.
Daniel and Sabrina had been so young when they met, marrying shortly after graduation, both only eighteen. They didn’t know it at the time, but Sabrina was already pregnant. Far from planned, the predicament had been just that at first, a situation neither was prepared to deal with. Terminating the pregnancy was not an option. Their fear and anxiety was no reason to end a life. Before they knew it, one spring day, they had a daughter, a beautiful, insanely perfect baby girl. They named her Claire after Sabrina’s mother’s favorite piece of music in the whole wide world, Debussy’s “Clair de Lune.” Daniel had hoped that their child would take after Sabrina, so he found it breathtakingly remarkable to see hints of himself in her angelic face.
Then a strange thing happened. Sabrina never got pregnant again. They tried, Lord knows they tried, but it just wasn’t in the cards. Claire was their miracle baby, a fateful occurrence never to be repeated. So Daniel and Sabrina put all of their love into this one child, this flawless combination of their separate souls.
It was an indescribable sensation, to one moment be a parent and the next, not. If they had been able to have more children, perhaps the loss would have been easier to sustain, the pain spread over the collective shoulders of a grieving family. Instead, there was no longer a family at all. They were a couple again, as they had been in high school, as they would be when they died. No generation to carry on their name. Nothing to represent the merging of their hearts.
This made Sabrina very sad, and rightfully so. But Daniel was experiencing something he had never truly known before. Daniel was filled with rage.
“What?” he snapped at his wife.
Sabrina took a step back, alarmed by his tone. “Nothing, Daniel. I just . . .”
Pastor Charlie, sensing that the moment was about to spin out of control, leaned back on the sofa and said, “Sabrina has told me about the . . . other things that the two of you have been experiencing.”
Again, Daniel’s accusatory scowl flashed to his wife. She dodged his stare, lowering her head and fumbling with an errant thread dangling from her blouse.
“Daniel,” Pastor Charlie continued, “whatever’s going on, you can talk to me. You know that.”
“Nothing’s going on,” Daniel insisted. He did not care if the words rang true.
“So you haven’t heard noises?” the minister asked. “You haven’t seen anything strange in the past few months? You haven’t felt as if something is in the house with you?”
“No. Nothing. We’ve been completely alone.”
“Is that how you feel? Alone?”
No response.
“Have you prayed?”
“Why would I?” Daniel asked coldly.
The concern on Pastor Charlie’s face was clear. He was not used to hearing such bleak thoughts from this once happy-go-lucky man.
“Because you’re in pain,” Pastor Charlie suggested. “Because you’ve experienced a great loss.”
“And what is God going to do about that?” Daniel asked. His palms were beginning to sweat. He wiped them on his pant legs as he inched forward in his seat. “Is He going to give her back? Is He going to take my daughter and uncrush her skull? Unbreak her bones? Take her beautiful face and patch it back together like a goddamn quilt?”
Sabrina made a small, pitiful whimpering noise, and the sound of it infuriated Daniel. His pale, doughy face was flushed with the flow of hot blood.
He turned to his wife. “Oh, and what? I’m supposed to mourn like you? I’m supposed to shove my sadness down into some deep, dark hole and pretend like nothing has happened?”
“I’m not pretending like nothing happened!” Sabrina screamed.
Daniel ignored her. He turned to the stunned face of Pastor Charlie. “Well, I can’t hide how I feel. Not anymore. I’m mad. I’m furious! I want things, Pastor. I want the respect that other authors get. I want a bestseller. I want a goddamn hardcover. I covet these things. That’s a sin, right?”
Pastor Charlie nodded dumbly.
“I want another child. I want a wife who can give me another child.”
Sabrina shrieked, “Oh God, Daniel! Stop!”
But Daniel did not stop.
“But most of all, the one thing I want is my daughter back! WHY WON’T GOD GIVE ME MY DAUGHTER BACK?”
Pastor Charlie took a breath and attempted to remain calm. “God didn’t take Claire to hurt you, Daniel. God is merciful. He shares the pain you and Sabrina are feeling.”
“Bullshit!” Daniel roared. “How could God know?”
“Because He, too, lost a child,” Pastor Charlie explained. “He sacrificed His only son so that we may be saved.”
Daniel nodded, a bit too enthusiastically, his head bobbing as if it were on a spring. “That’s right. That’s right, He sacrificed His son. He made the call. He gave the okay on that one.” Daniel jammed a finger into his own chest. “But I didn’t. I didn’t have a say in my daughter’s death. I didn’t give the old green light for a car to hop the median and broadside her. He did! God did! So fuck Him!”
“Daniel!” Sabrina’s mouth hung open, not even a breath to fill it.
Daniel spun on her, eyes wild. “What?”
Fat tears spilled from Sabrina’s eyes. They coursed down her cheeks like rainwater, carrying with them streaks of black mascara. She took a step away from him, holding one trembling hand out in front of her as if she expected him to lunge her way. Her left heel settled on the plush cream carpet, and Sabrina slowly spun on it, allowing the momentum of the movement to point her toward the hall. A moment later, she was hurrying up the stairs to the second floor, the sobs suddenly too powerful to contain.
Pastor Charlie remained on the couch, stunned by the uncharacteristically hateful show Daniel had just put on.
There was nothing more to say.
A sudden odor filled the room. The scent of decay, of rotten things in darkness.
The scent of the well.
Daniel winced and looked to Pastor Charlie. The long-faced man was fixated on his clasped hands, lost in a silent prayer. He did not appear to notice the foul smell.
The odor brought another moment rushing back to Daniel.
Standing at his daughter’s open grave, watching as the coffin was lowered down into the ground. He had noticed the scent then, too, although his grief had kept him from fully recognizing it. Now he remembered, standing at the edge of that hole, an inexplicable gust of air rising up and with it, that awful smell of decay. He remembered seeing shadows in the hole. Now, in the theater of his mind, he saw them again. Yet this time they moved, swaying like sea anemones. They were arms waving, hands reaching to welcome his daughter into the darkness.
“She’s in hell,” Daniel whispered.
From somewhere above in the house, he heard a faint squeak, like the turning of a wheel.
A tear slipped free and ran down Daniel’s cheek. “I have to go,” he said.
Pastor Charlie stood into a shaft of light, his face lit from above, creating huge pools of shadow that obscured his eyes.
“Please, we need to talk about this,” the pastor said
, reaching out a hand.
Daniel gave a helpless whimper and raced up the stairs.
Sam ended the call. He had left nine messages for Daniel, and now, on the tenth attempt, an artificial voice told him that the mailbox was full.
“Maybe he doesn’t have his phone on him,” he speculated.
“Or maybe he’s just not answering,” Moore replied. She was standing at the large picture window in her living room, her back to Sam. The knobby green hills beyond were bright with the perfectly even California sunshine. She was a sleek, powerful silhouette against them.
“He could be out of town, on a trip. Out of cell phone range,” Sam offered.
Moore shook her head. “How many times have you gone out of town since we left Kill Creek? Better yet, how many times have you left the house?”
Sam gave a knowing nod. “This is the first.”
“Exactly. No, Slaughter’s there. He’s just not answering his goddamn phone.”
Sam had spent the night at Moore’s house, crashing in the sparsely furnished guest room. With one duffel bag packed with only two changes of clothes and essential toiletries, he was unprepared for extended travel. He was beginning to realize how spur-of-the-moment this trip had been. He’d never asked himself what would happen if he stayed longer than a day.
He had showered in the extravagant bathroom downstairs, letting the water fall like rain over his body. He emerged from the shower, a towel wrapped around his waist, to find Moore at a large vanity. She was running a pair of electric clippers over the sides of her head. Clumps of short black hair fell into the sink below. When she was done, Sam held out his hand. Without a word, she handed him the clippers. He adjusted the guard and began to mow strips through his overgrown hair. Then he removed the guard entirely and shaved off the beard that crept across the lower half of his face and down his neck. In a matter of minutes, he was done. He ran a hand over his buzzed hair, enjoying the sensation against his palm.