Floater

by Gary Brandner

  The following day the front page carried an interview with Frazier’s parents, who denied any possibility that their son might have committed suicide. In their grief, they were also angry. They wanted answers to such questions as: Where were the clothes he left home in? Who provided the boat that was still anchored a hundred yards offshore when Alec’s body was found? What had happened to his glasses? Who else was on the lake that night?

  An editorial written by Alec’s father called for a vigorous investigation by Chief Mischock, including calling in the State Police for help if necessary. Alec remembered the tortured, sleepless night he had spent that night.

  Two days later the only mention of Frazier Nunley was an announcement of the funeral. It referred to the boy’s death as a “tragic accident.”

  Alec closed the volume of old newspapers. He sat silently for several minutes at the table, inhaling the varnish and dust smells of the library, thinking about what writing that single paragraph twenty years ago had cost his father.

  Alec was in the Chronicle office that day working with his mother when Judge Grant came in along with Chief Mischock and Elmer Swanke, head of the local merchants’ association. They asked to see Alec’s father in private. Trudy McDowell showed the men into her husband’s office. There they had stayed for an hour with the door closed. An hour during which Alec suffered as he never had before.

  Trudy and Phelan McDowell came out of that meeting pale and shaken. They avoided looking at Alec, and never mentioned to him what went on behind the closed door. Their relationship changed from that day on. His father became silent and withdrawn. His mother cried sometimes alone in the bedroom. They no longer asked Alec to help out at the paper. And after the funeral notice, the Chronicle never ran another story about Frazier Nunley.

  Gossip and rumors, however, persisted. They ranged from a bizarre theory that Frazier was murdered by dope dealers from Chicago, to a guess that was frighteningly close to the truth: that he had been pushed into the water by partying classmates who subsequently fled.

  High school parties were canceled for the rest of the year. The Saturday afternoon cruising ritual was abandoned. Kids who had been best friends looked at each other with suspicion. It was possible to trace the beginning of Wolf River’s decline as a town to the October night Frazier Nunley died.

  Alec’s parents hung on at the Chronicle while the paper declined into little more than an announcement sheet for rummage sales and farm auctions. In 1971, a month before the Chronicle shut down forever, Phelan McDowell put the barrel of a deer rifle in his mouth and pulled the trigger. Alec came home for the funeral, then returned to the University of Missouri to get his degree in, ironically, journalism.

  His mother left Wolf River a few months later and moved to Arizona. There she worked on a tiny desert weekly until she died.

  Alec carried the volume of newspapers back to the librarian’s desk and left the building to return to the inn.

  The desk clerk greeted him. “Looks like you people are going to have a pretty small party.”

  “What people?” Alec asked.

  “You class-of-whatever-it-was reunion types. Only three of you checked in so far.”

  “Three?” For a moment Alec’s field of vision darkened at the edges. He took hold of the edge of the registration counter for support.

  “That’s it.” The clerked turned to the key slots and produced Alec’s along with an envelope with his name on it. “You got a message.”

  Alec walked numbly to the elevator, got into the musty car, and punched 4. While the car creaked and rattled its way up, he tore open the envelope and read:

  Hello, Monkey.

  Welcome home.

  Remember the clown?

  The walls of the elevator car seemed to crush in on him like a coffin, and for a moment Alec could not get his breath. Then it jerked to a stop, the sliding doors clanked open, and he stumbled out into the hallway.

  CHAPTER 18

  THE FLOATER

  Here they were.

  At last.

  All three of them back where this business had begun.

  The Floater drifted about the Wolf River Inn, checking on first one then the other. The temptation to act immediately was strong, but the Floater had waited too long, planned too thoroughly to move this quickly to the climax. No, he would take the time to savor his achievement. Watch them squirm. Make them pay. Make them hurt.

  It had not been easy bringing them all back here to taste finally the punishment they had escaped twenty years ago. It had been more difficult than any problem Frazier Nunley had solved when he was alive. More difficult than any problem he could have imagined.

  But he had done it. They were all here now — beautiful Lindy Grant, arrogant Roman Dixon, and clever Alec McDowell.

  They were here solely at his bidding, and they were under his control. They did not know that yet, though they were beginning to suspect. Their poor earthbound minds did not have the capacity to know what was happening to them. But they would learn soon enough. God, yes, how they would learn.

  The Floater was at peace now, or as nearly at peace as he would ever be. Over the years he had adjusted to the unnatural state in which he was forced to exist. He had done better than merely adjust, he had strengthened himself. From the first frantic attempts at contacting others to try to save his drowning body, the Floater had perfected his techniques. There had been long torturous periods of failure, frustration, and pain. And there had been some triumphs, too.

  The worst part had been right after it happened. Right after he died. The shock of seeing his own dear ugly body dead pale in the water and being unable to reenter had sent the astral essence of Frazier Nunley careering off into an endless void with madness all around him. There was no time, no space, no sensation beyond a terrible indescribable pain.

  A mind weaker than Frazier’s would surely have snapped, lost its tenuous hold on existence, exploded to astral atoms. And that would have been the end. But Frazier would not let go. The lingering strength of his living mind held together its astral counterpart, and slowly, slowly he began to regain control.

  Spatial comprehension returned. The void was a nowhere, but there was a way out. A way back. Frazier put his mind to work; the astral mind, now unencumbered by the need to care for the clumsy body, could stretch its limits. It could return from the Nowhere void to Somewhere. The mind returned, but because of the violent way it had been wrenched from the living body, it would forever be warped.

  The Somewhere that Frazier returned to was, naturally enough, Wolf River. That was where he was born, where he had lived the brief fourteen years of his earthly life, where he had died sucking icy lake water into his lungs.

  The things Frazier saw as he moved spectrally through the town dismayed him. More accurately, the things he did not see appalled him. Where was the hue and cry over his death, especially the cruel manner of it? Why were the lives of those who had brought him to this state allowed to continue as though nothing had happened? Where was the punishment? Where was justice?

  Only in the house of his parents, the house of his birth, did Frazier find any real mark of his violent passing. His mother, the strong, serene Viking goddess of a woman, shattered like a porcelain figurine. After the death of her only child she never again touched her beloved piano. For many months afterward she spent her days sitting at an upstairs window, staring out along the street as though waiting for her boy to come walking home.

  Mother! shrieked the astral mind of Frazier Nunley. Mother, I’m here! I can see you! Please hear me! Know me!

  But Orva Nunley could not hear her son, for he had no tongue. She sat in the window and looked out on the street and waited for her boy to come walking home.

  She spoke less and less during those months, and the things she said sometimes made no sense. Ellis Nunley gave up his position at the college to devote himself to his wife. He tried valiantly to cope with his Orva’s growing alienation, but it hurt him deeply to see the
woman who had been a strong and true partner to him draw steadily away.

  Finally, when he could no longer care for her, Ellis drove his wife to the county hospital in Shawano, where they had a psychiatric clinic. Orva was tested for weeks for every known form of physical and mental ailment, but in the end the doctors could not identify her illness. They agreed only that she would need care. More intensive care than her husband could give her at home.

  He left her there, standing in the hospital garden with a doctor, not yet comprehending that she was going to stay. When he got home, Ellis Nunley, for one of the very few times in his life, got thoroughly drunk.

  He continued to visit her at the hospital regularly for a year. The doctors said Orva might start to get better at any time, but Ellis never saw any improvement. He began to go less frequently. Orva didn’t seem to notice. Much of the time she didn’t even know when he was there, and the visits always left Ellis drained. Finally, he just stopped going.

  During the years that he had tended his wife, both in their home and at the hospital, Ellis grew thinner and aged rapidly. He developed a racking cough and had to give up smoking his pipes.

  After a last sad visit to Orva, Ellis Nunley sold the Elm Street house and everything in it. He paid most of the money he had gotten to the hospital to assure Orva’s continued care and just wandered away. He was known to have spent time in Appleton, Milwaukee, Chicago, and finally Detroit. There he was knifed to death on the street by a sixteen-year-old boy for the eleven dollars in his wallet.

  Orva was eventually released from the county hospital. She found a room in Wolf River, which she paid for from Ellis’s insurance money, and was seldom seen on the streets.

  As he saw these things happen to the only two people who had ever loved him, the astral mind of Frazier Nunley raged impotently against those who were responsible. Still unable to make his presence felt by the living, he swore to the dark gods that somehow, no matter what he must do or how long it might take, he would have his revenge. And he sank deeper into madness.

  But even as the rage sapped his sanity, it gave him strength. The searing hatred of three people kept the essence that remained of Frazier Nunley from flying apart like cobwebs in the wind. He followed the three as they played out the final days of their high school lives. He screamed at them from behind the astral barrier. Called them by the unspeakably foul names they had earned. He rushed around them like a dust devil, plunged through their very bodies like a ghostly sword.

  Of course, they could not see him, they could not feel his rage. His screaming curses were silent. Only sometimes … sometimes he could sense an uneasiness about one or the other of the three. Just the vaguest sense that something was not quite right. It was not much, but it meant he could reach them. That kept Frazier going. One day he would have the power he needed, and on that day these three would suffer as they deserved.

  Then the three of them went away from Wolf River, each in his or her own direction, to his or her own destination. The mind of Frazier Nunley writhed in frustration that he could not follow. Not then. He understood that his existence was in Wolf River, the only place he had known in life. Even as he grew in strength and cunning, his power was always here. Only here in the town where they all had their beginnings would he have the strength to control their destinies. Frazier knew then that when he was ready, when he had learned what he must know, he would somehow bring them all back here. And here they would pay.

  The days in Wolf River stretched out into years. Frazier worked and strained and concentrated every gram of his essential power into making his presence known to others. That was where he must start. Without the power to communicate, he was helpless.

  He hovered about, observing the most intimate activities of the people of Wolf River. He reached out to feel them with nonexistent hands. He shouted at them with no throat. He probed and prodded and poked them with his mind. Except for an occasional unexplained shudder, or a sudden glance back over a shoulder at nothing, there was no response.

  In his despair, Frazier floated aimlessly one spring day outside a house not far from his own, where Victor and Nancy Yarrow lived with their year-old baby. The sun was bright, and warmer than usual for that time of year. The child sat on the lawn in a playpen while his mother worked among her flowers. Frazier drew closer to watch.

  The delight of the baby in a plastic rattle charmed him. He floated nearer, striving to share the uncomplicated joy of the little child in a silly toy and in its own sense of existence. How blindly people take existence for granted, he thought, whatever their age. How foolishly they spend it.

  It was there on the lawn in front of the unpretentious house of the Victor Yarrow family that Frazier Nunley discovered he would no longer have to float aimlessly. He was about to begin learning the extent of his powers.

  • • •

  Nancy Yarrow patted the sod carefully around the base of her ailing rosebush. Her husband had run the lawn-mower carelessly close and bruised the poor stem. However, Nancy was good at nursing living things back to health; she helped out in the summer at St. Martin’s Hospital when the nurses took their vacations. She would not have minded working full-time as a nurse, but Victor wouldn’t allow it.

  She stood up, pulled off the gardener’s gloves, and regarded her repair job critically.

  “You’re going to be okay, baby,” she told the rosebush. “And I’ll put a little fence around you so no lummox of a husband can push a lawnmover into you again.”

  Chuckie gurgled over in the playpen. Nancy turned to look. She smiled a soft, mother’s smile. After twelve years of trying, she and Vic had almost given up on becoming parents, and then Chuckie had come along. Her smile slipped a notch as she saw Chuckie acting a little more animated than usual. Did his little face look flushed?

  She crossed the velvety lawn to the playpen and looked down on her child. Chuckie’s plump little face was tight with concentration as he tried to grasp the plastic rattle with tiny fingers that did not yet have the dexterity.

  “Hey, Chuckie, what you doin’?”

  The child continued to play with the rattle and didn’t look up. That was so unlike him that Nancy was immediately alarmed. Always the sound of her voice got his complete attention, with the open happy smile he always had for her. She reached down into the playpen to pick him up. The baby squirmed away from her, giving her a frightening look of almost adult anger.

  Nancy flinched away from her baby. Then, recovering from her momentary shock, she reached down and firmly brought Chuckie up out of the playpen into her arms. She felt the child’s forehead, detected a light fever.

  “What’s wrong, little guy? Something hurting you?”

  A quick check told Nancy the baby did not need changing, and no errant pin was jabbing him. There was just something in his expression — a look that should not be on the face of an infant. She hurried into the house with him while the baby wriggled in her arms for all the world as though he were trying to get away.

  Nancy laid her child down on the bed and felt icy cold inside as she watched the strange workings of the little face. The baby showed no recognition of her as its mother. The eyes darted back and forth as though seeking escape, then gyrated wildly in their sockets.

  In a rising panic, Nancy kept one hand on the baby’s body to keep him from wriggling off the bed while she pulled the bedside telephone within reach by its cord. She had the telephone in her hand and the first three digits of Dr. Tichman’s number dialed when Chuckie began to cry. Nancy’s immediate feeling was one of inexpressible relief. The baby’s cries were so natural, his distress so babylike, that she sensed that whatever had been wrong a minute ago was all right now.

  She put the phone down and held her little son. She stroked him and soothed him and kissed his little head. Gradually the crying subsided to gurgling sobs and finally ceased. The face that looked up at her was tired and red from crying, but it was her child’s face. Nancy put him down on the bed, covered him, and almost
immediately the baby was asleep.

  Nancy completed the call to Dr. Tichman, and the next morning took Chuckie to see him, but nothing was found wrong with the baby. Dr. Tichman suggested an allergy, and told Nancy they would make tests if anything like that ever happened again.

  It never did.

  • • •

  It had all transpired so smoothly, so subtly, that Frazier didn’t realize at first what a significant breakthrough had taken place. One moment he was watching the baby, concentrating, forgetting for that moment his own terrible loneliness. Then, with no conscious effort on his part, he was the baby. No, not exactly. The baby still existed, but Frazier Nunley was in its mind.

  He had a body again. Not really his, but for a brief period he was in control. The effort it took was draining. He could feel the unformed mind of the child trying to push back in, and he forced it away. Frazier knew he could not maintain the control for more than a few minutes, but the experience exhilarated him and gave him the energy necessary to hold on for a little longer.

  He made the plump little hands reach out and touch the plastic toy. The feel of its smooth, slightly yielding surface brought him intense sensual pleasure. He smelled the fresh-cut grass of the lawn and the talcum on the baby’s skin. He gloried in the furry softness of the blanket on which he sat. Frazier put a tiny fist to his mouth and tasted the sweet-salt flavor of flesh.

  He could feel the unformed little mind of the child recoiling in confusion, trying to get back into its head. The strength of Frazier’s intellect and the powers of concentration he had honed for months allowed him to sustain the thin edge of control.

  The mother looked over at him then. Her expression told Frazier she recognized something was wrong with her child. She came toward him and spoke to him. The subordinated infant brain tried to respond.

  Get away, damn you! Frazier shouted soundlessly at the mother. Leave me alone! Let me feel!

  However, as the mother carried him toward the house Frazier could sense the growing panic of the infant mind. He knew as surely as death that if he stayed there fighting for control the mind of the child would be irreparably damaged. It was not that Frazier had any compassion for the fate of the child, but he feared for what might happen to his own astral existence. Oblivion? Madness? Unspeakable pain? He could not give up what he had, especially not now when he had just discovered his road to revenge.