There was another sound. Rain. We weren’t expecting this.
“Uncle Luke?” he called once he made it to the hallway. The house was silent. He did not hear their voices like usual. “Aunt Franny?” Making his way around the staircase, he thought, that doesn’t smell like cooking. It smells like burning.
Downstairs, he called for his aunt and uncle again, and they still didn’t reply.
When he made it around the bend he saw the kitchen engulfed.
Danny screamed for his aunt and uncle. Their room was just across from the living room. He tried to think if they had a fire extinguisher, but never recalled seeing one. How can I put it out?
He raced to their bedroom. The handle was locked.
Get out of here.
Not before I make sure they’re not…
A small shove and their door gave. His aunt and uncle were sleeping. The illusion fractured. He spotted rugged halos of blood and dark matter on the wall behind their heads. His Aunt Franny clutched the black matte handgun.
“What the hell?” he said.
Danny turned and rushed out. Do I have everything I need?
No.
Then…
Yes.
I’m in one piece. Get out now. Run.
Getting outside was a blur.
He ran several yards away before he turned. He was shocked to see the flames had covered nearly the entire left, kitchen side of the house. The fire had been much worse than it’d seemed.
“No,” he said.
He made to run, and did. Gallows Road wasn’t far, but the nearest house was a mile away.
Before he could get to the main road, there were people in the driveway he didn’t recognize. They had umbrellas. He’d forgotten it was raining.
Beyond, he saw the San Quinlan River, ready to breach.
There wasn’t supposed to be a storm.
“You all right, young man?” A middle-aged woman asked, her bright blue eyes scanning him.
“I’m fine,” he said. “My aunt and uncle, though. They’re gone.”
“Gone?” she asked. The man next to her watched Danny’s face.
“They shot themselves. And the house is on fire,” he said.
She stood next to him and put the umbrella over his head. The man and she exchanged a curious look. “The police and fire truck are coming,” she said. “Don’t worry.”
On cue, the small San Quinlan fire truck pulled into the driveway. They aren’t using the sirens? He wasn’t sure why. Maybe there’s no one in the way to warn.
The truck drove close to the house and the firemen rushed out. One on each side pulled out large feet, like kickstands, anchoring the truck. Two more pulled the main hose from its spindle, rushing toward the flames. The nozzle opened and water flowed.
Why isn’t the rain putting out the fire?
But he knew. Somewhere deep inside, he pictured his aunt and uncle pouring gas all over the kitchen. They’d wanted the house to burn.
They almost took me with them.
The left part of the house fell. How could it have gone so quickly?
A large bit of the wall slid down the muddy embankment, edging close to the river. More debris slid behind, pushing the pieces in front inside the water.
The floor was gone where the side of the house had stood. Danny looked inside the basement, reminding him of a dark cavity or well. Water glimmered inside. It’d flooded, just as his uncle had always said.
The door that led from the basement toward the outside had opened. A grayish mass floated to the top.
“Is that a person?” asked someone behind him.
The shape drifted away from the house, the water from the basement rushing behind it, making a small stream toward the river. It carried the gray figure down until it crossed from land into water. Inside the current the figure’s arms fanned out like two waterlogged wings. The shape collided with something unseen, before breaking into several pieces, then each disintegrating into countless bunches of ashen sand. The clusters spread and her silhouette dissolved away, washed down the San Quinlan.
Chloe.
She was trapped down there.
All this time.
And then she was freed by fire, carried away by rain, her secret released.
Why didn’t she wake up? He heard Aunt Franny’s haunting cries. She must’ve fallen asleep down there before it flooded. They kept her down there. Underwater. This whole time. That’s why there was a picture on top of the coffin. She wasn’t inside. She was under the house.
Danny wiped rain from his cheek, turned, and made the first steps back toward the life from which he’d come. He thought of the fish trapped in the pools at the mission and pictured them freed, too, from the rising water, their fins carrying them like wings through the water.
He heard her voice.
Come catch me, little Danny boy!
Come catch me.
COME UP
by Brian Evenson
ONE
In late June, Martin’s wife dove off the dock behind their house and into the lake and never came up again. At the time, Martin was sitting on the patio, lazily reading. She walked past him, smiled shyly, and padded barefoot down the dock. Having already returned to his book, he did not see her dive off, only heard the splash.
How much time passed before he realized something was wrong? A minute, maybe two. He was reading, still reading, but his mind kept catching on something and soon couldn’t thread the words into sentences. What was wrong? It was, somehow, too quiet. Marking his place with a finger, he looked up, saw the empty dock, the placid, smooth waters of the lake beyond.
“Kat?” he murmured.
There was no answer. He half-rose from his chair and craned around to stare at the glass doors leading back into the house. No sign of movement within. He walked out onto the dock, the wood hot under his feet. There was nothing to see there either. Just the surface of the water stretching away from him and toward the pines on the other side.
“Kat?” he called again, louder this time. Dropping his book, he started looking for her in earnest.
At first, he hoped she simply had left him. The thought, anyway, crossed his mind—she had, as he would tell the police a few hours later, left him before. He was, he admitted to the police, a philanderer—they would discover this on their own once they started talking to his wife’s friends, he reasoned, so better to admit it from the outset—and she periodically got fed up.
“But we were getting along well,” he told the two officers. “I wasn’t cheating. It makes no sense that she would have left now.”
Besides, every time she left it had been after screaming at him. This time there had been no screaming. Usually, she wanted to demonstrate forcefully that she was leaving, and tell him why. She would scream and throw things and pack her bags and only then go. But last he had seen her she was wearing a bathing suit and sauntering to the end of the dock with no indication that everything wasn’t all right.
The police shined their flashlights at the dock. They shined them into the water, the beams of light quickly lost in the murk. They came into the house and looked through his wife’s things, asked him if anything seemed to be missing.
“No, nothing,” he said.
“Let me ask you,” said one of the officers, a paunchy man with a shaved head. “What sort of life insurance did you have on her?”
“Excuse me?” he said.
“It’s just, in cases like these, nothing missing, wife vanished, husband a philanderer, she’s usually dead and it’s usually the husband.”
There had been times when Martin wanted to strangle his wife, sure, but he thought better of telling the officers that. It was like that in every marriage, wasn’t it? There was always a time when you wanted to kill your spouse—certainly there had been more than a few times when she wanted to kill him. But he didn’t want the officers to misunderstand.
Instead, he said, “The normal amount of life insurance. I didn’t kill her.�
�
“What’s the normal amount?” the officer said.
“I didn’t kill her,” he said again.
“Nobody’s saying you did,” said the second officer, the one with hair.
“I loved my wife,” he said.
“There, there,” soothed the second officer.
Eventually they sent for a diver, who found nothing. The water was too cloudy, he explained. He couldn’t see more than a few feet, and the lake was exceptionally deep.
“If she’s actually down there,” he said to Martin and the officers, “she may never come up again.” His scuba mask pushed up on top of his head looked to Martin like a nascent second face, staring upward. “Or, who knows, maybe she will. But I’m not going to find her. We’ll have to wait for the body to come up on her own.”
By we he means me, thought Martin.
The officers hung around after the divers left, but in the end weren’t sure what, if anything, to do with—or to—Martin. They would file a report, they finally decided. Had there been a crime? If things had happened just as Martin had claimed, then, no, there hadn’t been.
“But what happened to her?” asked Martin.
“What do you think happened to her?” said the bald officer.
“If we get any leads, we’ll let you know,” said the second officer.
He was to call them if he remembered anything that might be relevant, no matter how small. Anything at all. If his wife turned up, dead or alive, he was to call them, too. Probably that went without saying, the second officer said, but he still was saying it.
“And above all, stay in the area,” the bald one said. “Don’t go anywhere.”
TWO
He might have sought a little physical consolation with one of the women he had cheated on his wife with, Mindy or Megan or Sue or Ally and so on and so on, but he had seen enough true crime shows to know this was a bad idea. He hadn’t killed his wife, he knew he hadn’t, which is why he must do absolutely nothing more to give the police of this backwater town the impression he had. He had to be careful, more careful than he had been when his wife was alive. People were watching him now, and they’d already decided he was a murderer. They would try to make anything he did prove it.
Which was why, later that evening when he discovered that the bottle of sleeping pills prescribed to him was inexplicably empty, he wasn’t sure it would be wise to call the police. He tried to remember his wife’s expression as she ambled out onto the dock. Had her eyes drooped, had her gait been more erratic than usual, had she been herself? He wasn’t sure. At most, he was sure she had seemed relaxed. But was she too relaxed? He couldn’t say. He hadn’t been paying enough attention at the time. He hadn’t known it was the last time he would see her.
If he gave the police the empty bottle of pills with his name on it, would they think, Poor man, his wife committed suicide? Or would they think, The fucking husband drugged her and then drowned her?
Probably, he was sure, the latter. In the end he kept the information to himself. He scraped the label off the bottle and disposed of the latter in a trash can on the edge of the municipal park. I am doing exactly what I would do if I were guilty, he thought as he was doing it, and yet he did it anyway.
They had moved to this house because of his wife. She had grown up near it, in the area that, according to the police, he was now not allowed to leave. The move had been one of the conditions of her forgiving him for a series of dalliances: they would leave the city and move to what was basically a village on the edge of a muddy lake, to a place where she was known, a place where, if he cheated, everyone would inform on him.
Even here, he had cheated, though he had been careful not to cheat with friends of hers. She had found out, they had fought, they had separated briefly, they had come back together. That was, he had come to believe over time, how their marriage worked. She (so he often told himself to keep himself from feeling guilty, even though he wasn’t sure he believed it) liked the drama of it. These other women meant nothing to him, she knew that. Besides, it had to count for something that he had paid her the consideration of not sleeping with her close friends. Mostly. The one time he hadn’t, she knew nothing about. At least, he believed she didn’t.
He was alone in the house. Her friends, even the one he had slept with, avoided him. Obviously they thought he had killed her, and they told others or maybe the police did, so, soon, when he went into town to buy groceries everyone stared at him. He wasn’t imagining it, at least he didn’t think so. He kept to himself. It was safer. They hadn’t been here long enough for him to have his own friends. At best, everybody else treated him like a stranger; at worst, like a murderer.
Why are you acting like a murderer? he asked himself. Ignore them. You have nothing to feel guilty about.
But of course he did. He was lying to himself. He wasn’t a murderer, of course, that was true, but he had a great deal to feel guilty about: the way he had treated her, how he had cheated on her. And there was, now that he had discovered the empty bottle of sleeping pills, the nagging suspicion that perhaps she had killed herself, and killed herself because of him.
Without his sleeping pills, he was having trouble sleeping. He would lie in the dark, staring at the ceiling, his mind racing. He needed the pills—he’d been taking soporifics of some sort or another ever since he was a teenager, his prescription shifting each time he built up a resistance to whatever drug he was on. He needed to go to the doctor and ask for a new prescription, but the bottle had been full, he wasn’t due for a refill for weeks. What if the police spoke to his doctor and he mentioned how he, Martin, had seemed to go through his sleeping pills suddenly very quickly, maybe even too quickly? Wouldn’t they see this as evidence that he had drugged and drowned his wife?
No, now that he’d gotten rid of the empty pill bottle without telling the police about it, he had no choice but to pretend he still had his sleeping pills until the pills would have been gone. He would have to tough it out.
He paced the house, back and forth, back and forth. Twenty times a day he would walk out onto the dock and stand there looking down at the water, searching for changes in color, irregularities, clues of any kind. But it was just water, inscrutable, illegible. Back in the house he tried to read but was too tired to read, the words slipping out of his mind nearly as rapidly as they went in.
The house was isolated enough that most days he didn’t see anyone. Of course, if he wanted to see someone he could. He could walk or drive into the town center and see other humans walking around, laughing and chatting and going about their business until they saw him and fell silent. That being the case, why would he want to see anyone? They didn’t want to see him, so why would he want to see them?
Besides, still unable to sleep, he was so tired that half the time he wasn’t sure what he was saying. His mouth was moving and words were coming out, but what did they add up to? What if he said something people took the wrong way? As revealing something even though there was nothing to be revealed? No, better to talk to nobody.
He wasn’t healthy, he knew. Something was wrong with him. Maybe more than just one thing.
He filled his car with groceries, everything he would need for the next few weeks. He would keep to himself until then, not leave the house, and then it would be all right to refill his prescription of sleeping pills. After that, he told himself, things would go back to normal.
What was normal?
Did he miss his wife? Of course he missed her. But it was hard to grieve when he didn’t know what had happened to her, wasn’t even sure if she was dead. He didn’t know if he should be angry at her for leaving or distraught over her suicide or despairing because she had suffered a freak accident—struck her head after diving off the dock, say, or becoming entangled in something (what?) below the water’s surface.
There was just a hole, a void, where his wife had been. You couldn’t feel anything about a void. All you could do was try desperately to keep it from swallowing yo
u.
He walked from the house to the dock and back again. He listened to the water lap against the shore. He waded in, sometimes in his clothes, sometimes not, and felt the water move against his legs, somehow thicker than he remembered. Was some water thicker than other water? As soon as they were beneath the water, he couldn’t see his legs at all. It was as if they were gone, swallowed. Anything could be under the water, just inches from you, and you wouldn’t even know it was there.
Come up, he told her in his mind, come up, but nothing changed.
The police came back, knocking on his door until he opened it to them. They looked quizzically at him, taking in his unshaven beard, his filthy hair.
“Can we come in?” they asked.
“Have there been any developments in the case?” he asked.
The one with hair shook his head. Doing so shook his hair too. “Not per se. We have a few questions for you. Nothing serious. Can we come in?”
“Can’t you ask them here?” he said.
The two officers exchanged a glance. What did it mean, that glance?
“Is there anything you’ve remembered that might be of help?” the one with hair asked.
Clearly, thought Martin, they don’t really have any new questions. They just want to come in. Why do they want to come in so much? he wondered.
“No,” he said.
“Nothing at all?”
“No,” he said again.
“Is there anything you’d like to get off your chest?” asked the bald one.
They were trying to catch him off guard, Martin realized. Catch him tired, in a moment of weakness. But his whole life was a moment of weakness now. He couldn’t talk to them, not while he couldn’t sleep.
“No,” he said, “no.” And closed the door.
Come up, he told her in his mind, come up. And then said it aloud just to make sure she heard.
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