by James Renner
“Franklin Mills?”
“Here, with you.”
She tugged his earlobe. “You can be a real cheeseball. But I love you, too. Now come inside and take off my clothes.”
7 “Ready,” said Jack as he started his car the next morning. He sipped from a small thermos and studied his reflection in the rearview mirror. He looked like a cheap cyborg. The Looxcie was hooked around his right ear and his Bluetooth was attached to his left. Back at Haven, Cole could see what Jack was seeing, streaming live on his computer, and they could speak to each other using the Bluetooth. The future really was now.
“Ready,” said Cole.
Jack pulled out of Sam’s driveway and onto Giddings, steering the Saturn toward Tallmadge.
“Looks good,” said Cole. “Head for the highway.”
“What am I looking for?” asked Jack.
“TacMars. Ever heard of TacMars?”
“Is that something astronomical?”
“TacMars. As in Tactical Markings. TacMars are directional markers placed out in the open, on road signs. Directions to secret government bases.” He spoke calmly, earnestly, and for all his preparation, Jack found himself wanting to believe.
He turned right onto Tallmadge, passing Mr. Bunts’s squab farm. “How did you learn about these TacMars?” he asked.
“My father worked for a government agency,” said Cole. “They called themselves ‘the Collectors’ or ‘the Twelve Angry Men,’ because there were only a dozen of them for the whole world and they were all men, I think. Don’t know if they were always angry. Man, Dad had a temper sometimes, though. Anyway, that’s what they called themselves. He worked in the financial district, like he told my mother. But he didn’t trade stocks. Technically, he worked for the NSA, but nobody at the NSA would have known who he was. Where his office was, was the thirteenth story of a skyscraper. These Collectors hunted down certain artifacts. If these artifacts fell into the wrong hands, they could reveal the Big Mystery—the mystery that made Tony run away.”
Cole paused for a moment while a nurse came in to give him his morning meds. Jack could hear her in the background. Through the open window he could smell the blooming lilac and dandelion. Spring had finally come to Franklin Mills, just a week before summer.
“Sometimes my father would take me with him,” Cole continued when the nurse was gone. “Once, we drove all the way to Buffalo to pick up an artifact. We kept to back roads in this weird car he drove for work, this shiny brownish thing that hummed like a vacuum cleaner. A man who lived in a double-wide trailer in the mountains had it. It was a plaque. Looked like something you’d win for being employee of the month somewhere. Except the engraved date said 2031. My dad bought it off this guy. Collecting was only half his job, really. What he had to do then was deposit the artifact. There are drop-off points hidden all over the United States—the world, in fact. And to find these facilities you have to follow the TacMars.”
“Okay.”
“The code is relatively simple. Once you understand it, you’ll see TacMars everywhere. Here’s one coming up now, Jack. Look.”
Up ahead, Jack saw a brown sign directing traffic to the baseball fields behind Nostalgia. GILMOUR PARK, it read. BASEBALL, HIKING TRAIL, PUBLIC RESTROOMS. There were three white arrows pointing to the right.
“Three arrows is the key. Three arrows on a sign always means ‘Collector Facility, this way.’ It’s always three arrows. Get it? If you see a sign with one or two arrows, that’s just a normal sign. If there are three, that’s a TacMar.”
“Your dad told you this?”
“He showed me. There’s another one!” On the shoulder just before the on-ramp to I-76 was a small green sign. It had three arrows pointing northwest toward the highway: KENT, AKRON, CLEVELAND, it read. A fourth arrow pointed up, toward RAVENNA.
“The extra ‘up’ arrow means ‘airlift,’” said Cole. “If the Collectors ever got in trouble, that’s where they could get airlifted back to headquarters.”
“All right.”
“All right I believe you or all right, what?”
“I mean … the Ohio Department of Transportation is in on the conspiracy, too?”
“Hey, don’t be a jerk.”
“Just trying to understand your theory.”
“ODOT just puts the signs up. The agency designs them.”
“Okay.”
“I told you I’d show you.”
“Arrows on road signs aren’t enough to sell me on secret government drop points,” said Jack. “But it’s a cool idea.”
“No,” said Cole. “I mean, I’ll show you. I’m taking you to one of the drop-off points. You can go in and see for yourself.”
8 About an hour later Jack found himself cruising a dirt road in that desolate, overgrown region of Ohio near the Pennsylvania border. He thought their destination might be Pymatuning State Park. Jack could smell the lake through the open windows. Pymatuning was an enormous man-made reservoir that had drowned seventeen thousand acres of prime farmland a century ago. Cole directed Jack down a two-lane road that wound through the village of Jamestown, where a Tastee Freez was being overrun by Little Leaguers. “Are we getting close?” he asked.
“Have you seen any TacMars?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Look!”
A maroon sign appeared on the right. PYMATUNING STATE PARK, it read. DAM. SPILLWAY. RESTROOMS. Three arrows pointed to the right. A forth arrow, this one tilted, pointed northeast.
“What’s with the tilted arrow?”
“That’s code for ‘drop point.’ You know, where they could get rid of the artifacts.”
“So…”
“Just follow the signs.”
Jamestown gave way to rural countryside, quiltwork patches of corn and alfalfa. Old Victorians in stages of disrepair leaned easterly on single-acre lawns. Jack passed a tackle shop that doubled as a grocery, then followed the TacMars onto a dirt road. The lake appeared through the trees on his left, a wide expanse of deep brown that sparkled in the sun. It was full of boaters. Fishermen cast lines from shore, white contractor buckets full of sunfish at their feet.
“Before white men, this was Mound Builder territory,” Cole whispered in his ear. “The Indians built giant rock mounds here to honor dead warriors. But it’s all hidden underwater now.”
“Are there angry Indian ghosts here, too?”
“There’s no such thing as ghosts, Jack.”
Around a corner, the dam appeared. It was a quarter mile long, lined by slabs of granite that sloped to the water. The lee side was a sharp hill that cut to a creek fed by the reservoir’s steady release of water. Jutting from the dam was an odd medieval-looking cottage made of stone. It seemed out of place, ancient. It had a single wooden door and windows barred against the world. A cast-iron weather vane twisted in the breeze above its slate roof. It sat above the water, and the bridge connecting it to the dam looked like the kind a troll might live under. THE GATE HOUSE, a sign said.
“The Gate House is one of the ways into the Underground,” said Cole. “Everything we need is in the Underground. My dad only really went there to deposit the stuff he collected. He took me inside. I’ll show you.”
What happens when I go inside the Gate House and all that’s in there is a bunch of stinky lawn mowers? Jack wondered. What might the boy do when confronted with the evidence of his own insanity? Of course, that wasn’t what he was most afraid of. What he was most afraid of was opening the Gate House door and finding a staircase leading into the darkness, into some capital-U Underground where incongruous Nazi artifacts were being stored for purposes unknown.
He turned the car into a gravel lot across from the Gate House. He got out and looked at the old rock building.
“What if it’s locked?” asked Jack.
“I know the combination.”
Jack was about to cross the road when the Gate House door opened and a figure dressed in a charcoal suit and a Panama hat stepped out. The ma
n was too far away and the sky too overcast for Jack to make out further details.
Cole screamed in his ear and Jack jumped at the sound. “A Hound!” he shouted. “Holy shit, a Hound!”
“What is a Hound?” asked Jack.
“It will kill you. It will kill you if it sees you. Run!”
Jack didn’t run. But he did turn around, away from the Gate House, and walked down the other side of the dam to a line of trees below the parking lot.
“What do you want me to do, Cole?”
“Get into the woods,” he said. “Hide behind a tree. Be quiet.”
“Why?”
“I don’t care if you believe me or not,” Cole whispered. “Please just humor me for the next few minutes. If you don’t, that thing will kill you.”
Jack sighed and stepped into the woods, onto a carpet of fern and skunkweed. When he was a hundred feet in, he turned around. The man in the Panama hat was standing between the gravel lot and the forest now. He was holding some tool, twisting it together in his hands. Part of it looked like a small radar dish.
“Fuck,” whispered Cole. “In a second the Hound is going to be able to hear your thoughts. You have to empty your mind.”
“This is nuts.”
“Clear your mind of any thought about us. If it hears you thinking, it will come down here and kill you.”
“I don’t believe in this, Cole. I—”
“Do I sound like I’m making this up?”
No. He didn’t. If this boy was crazy, his insanity was complete and total. Jack felt the first pangs of real fear, though he couldn’t tell if he was actually afraid of the man in the Panama hat or if he was simply afraid that he’d allowed the boy to get too far into his head.
“How do I clear my mind?” asked Jack.
“A wolf, a goat, and a head of lettuce sit on the shore of a lake,” said Cole. “There is an island in the lake and a boat to take you there. If left alone, the goat will eat the lettuce and the wolf will eat the goat. How do you get the wolf, the goat, and the lettuce onto the island safely?”
For a moment what Cole had said was such a non sequitur Jack thought the boy’s mind had finally broken. Then he understood. It was a logic puzzle, a way to keep his mind from forming any thought except for the solution.
“Come on, Jack.”
“Give it to me again.”
Cole did.
Jack pictured the problem. In his mind he saw a wolf, a goat, and a head of lettuce sitting on the side of Pymatuning Lake, a rowboat resting on the sandy shore. He pictured himself pulling the goat on board, rowing it to the island, letting it out to munch on the scrub grass, then returning for the lettuce. But when he dropped the lettuce off to return for the wolf, the goat ate it. He tried again, this time returning for the wolf, only to have the wolf devour the goat on the island. He’d never been good at these brainteasers.
Finally, Jack gave up and peered around the tree. “He’s gone,” he said.
“Good.”
“Who do you think it was?”
“A Hound,” said Cole. “The Hounds are the security force for the Collectors. They’re not human. Not entirely. They were created by that Nazi scientist Mengele.”
“Wait. Josef Mengele?”
“Right.”
“What do you mean, ‘created’?”
“I don’t know the details. I just know they’re called the Hounds. That’s what my dad called them. He was a fan of Sherlock Holmes, and since those things’ headquarters are in the Catskills, he called them the Hounds of the Catskills, after the book The Hound of the Baskervilles. He told me that in the book, people were being killed by a giant beast on the moor that they thought was a devil dog but it actually turned out to be an escaped orangutan. Funny thing is, he remembered it wrong.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. The orangutan wasn’t from The Hound of the Baskervilles. He got the story mixed up with ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue,’ the Edgar Allan Poe story that inspired Sherlock Holmes. Anyway, he called them the Hounds.”
“You’re asking me to believe too much,” said Jack. “It’s too much all at once.”
“Everything will fit together soon,” said Cole. “I promise. Just have a little faith in the story I’m trying to tell you.”
“Back to the Gate House, then?”
“Not with that thing out there,” said Cole. “There might be more. Jack, it’s like they knew you were coming.”
9 Sam knew just by looking at him that Jack had lost control of the situation with the kid. His face was pale in the diffused lamp light of Nostalgia, his eyes shifty and bloodshot from too much thinking. It was a look Sam knew well. It was the same way Tony had looked the day he came home with sand on his shoes, the day he disappeared.
“I couldn’t stay in your house,” said Jack, leaning against a framed Uncle Wiggily board game from the twenties. “It felt strange to be there by myself.”
Sam was behind the register, reading a crinkled copy of The Long Tomorrow she’d found hidden in the bottom of a box of tattered paperbacks. Gordon Lightfoot played softly from the overhead speakers.
“You okay?” she asked.
“I’m fine,” he said, too quickly. Then he shook his head. “It’s just, I thought we were close to something today. Like maybe I was close to a clue about where Tony took off to. But it didn’t work out.”
“What did you two do all day?”
“We talked about stuff like secret military codes on highway signs. Tonight he has me looking into something called HAARP.”
“Harp?”
“H-A-A-R-P.”
“What is it?”
Jack shrugged. His cell phone rang, a shrill chirping from his pants. He looked at the display, said, “One minute, Sam,” and walked out of the shop to take the call.
As Sam watched him go she was suddenly aware that she was in love with him again. Their love was not such a passionate thing. This was old love. Stronger, almost indifferent, like old magic. And with it came a quick forgetting of the span of years that had separated them, a conscious back-turning from the bad decisions that had kept them apart. And wasn’t there was something magical in that?
There are days in everyone’s life they would forget if they could. Days for do-overs. Days full of enough bad decisions to distract the course of a life forever.
For Sam and Jack and Tony, that day was the same day: September 11, 1999.
* * *
It was Virginia who called. When it was bad news it was always Virginia.
It was a Saturday morning. Sam lay on Jack, her head resting on his naked chest. They were sharing a twin bed in his dorm at Miami U. She had driven out to see him the night before and they’d stayed up past three watching cheesy horror movies and fucking. Fast-food bags and condom wrappers were strewn about the floor and the room smelled of delicious funk.
Jack reached behind his head and snatched the phone from its cradle. “’Lo?” he said.
“Johnny? It’s Mom.”
He heard the panic in her voice. His first thought was that his father had died in a plane crash en route to La Guardia.
“What happened?” he asked. The tone of his voice alarmed Sam and she looked up at him, waiting.
“Huhhh,” Virginia sighed. “It’s Tony. Tony’s mother. She’s in the hospital. In a coma. I think she’s going to die, Johnny.”
“His father?”
“He beat her head in with a radio. Then he called the police and told them what he’d done. The cops found him on the porch, still holding the radio, rocking back and forth, repeating one word: forget, forget, forget.”
“Where’s Tony?”
“Nobody knows. He hasn’t called you?”
“No.”
“You better get home.”
They left Sam’s car at school and raced back to Franklin Mills in Jack’s rickety Rabbit, its muffler kicking against the carriage. By the time Jack got there the Captain was back with some new information: doctors at
Robinson Memorial were saying Tony’s mother would likely survive but there would be significant brain damage. Tony’s father, meanwhile, was confined in a straitjacket in the county jail. “His mind just broke,” the Captain said. Virginia sat with Jean at the kitchen table, their eyes puffy.
“I’m going to look for him,” said Jack, pulling Sam by the hand toward the door.
“I’ve been all over Franklin Mills,” the Captain said. “He ain’t here, man.”
“I can find him.”
For the next five hours, until the sun was a memory on the westerly clouds, Jack and Sam drove over the quiet roads of Portage County. They tried everywhere they’d ever been: the movie theater, the arcade in Kent, the nudie bar in Rootstown, the bowling alley. But no one had seen him or his ridiculous BMW.
A quarter moon peeked through the treetops by the time they returned to SR 14. Instead of pulling into his family’s driveway, Jack continued on to Porter, hooked a right, and drove up the access road to Claytor Lake. There, hidden in the waist-high goldenrod, was Tony’s car.
“You don’t think he killed himself?” whispered Sam.
Jack shook his head. In fact, that’s exactly what he thought.
In the moonlight Jack could make out the dark liquid glass of the water’s surface and the hard edge of the earth around it. They searched the shadows of the shoreline. There, a silhouette against the stars. Tony stood atop a sandstone boulder on the ridge to their left.
“Whatcha doing, Tony?” he asked.
Tony shrugged. His face was slack, devoid of emotion. There was less than an inch between his feet and the drop-off.
Jack leaned against the boulder, beside an Iroquois petroglyph that resembled an aspen leaf. He watched his friend sway slowly, like he could hear music they could not.
“I told everybody. I told them he was sick. Nobody believed me.”
“I know, man. I know.”
“I’ve been standing here all day. I don’t want this memory, any memory from this day. It’s too much. Don’t want it. I should kill myself, I think. But I can’t. I’m too scared. I’m a coward.”
“The hell you are.”