“Yeah, but she didn’t say much. Didn’t really see anything other than the pages on the floor.” Elizabeth has continued to watch the video in private moments, hoping and not hoping to again see the shadow that she saw there on the first viewing. Hoping and not hoping to see the face that’s in Tommy’s diary somewhere else.
Kate takes a sip from her soda can. She reaches over and lifts the cover of the pizza box and makes a face at the pizza.
Elizabeth says, “I thought you said you weren’t hungry.”
“I’m not. Just looking.”
“I can make you something if you want. French toast?”
“I’m good.”
“That was nice of Nancy to give you a ride home. I should’ve gone out and said hi.”
“There are four news vans out front now. Reporters with cameras and everything came running over when we pulled in the driveway. Nancy was like a superhero and cleared a path for me.”
“That article this morning. It’s totally blowing everything up. Have you read it yet?”
“I got the gist from tweets and texts when I was at Sam’s. We read them together.”
“Like what? What have people been sending you?”
“It’s no big deal.”
“No, no, no. You don’t get to do that.”
“Mom. It’s not that bad, they’re just—”
“What, trolling you?”
Kate smiles at her mother’s using of the word trolling. “Twitter, yeah, some trolling that I block, whatever. And some kids from school, texting, asking if the rumors about Tommy are true.”
“What rumors?”
“That he was doing bad stuff.”
“Drinking?”
“Yeah. And drugs, and some people were asking if he, like, worshipped the devil, or something, when they went out there in the woods.”
“Jesus, where are people getting this shit? Here I was debating whether or not I was going to say anything to you about other online stuff because my saying something will make you go read it.”
“Read what?”
“I was going to tell you to stay away from the Facebook page. There’re some real assholes posting ugly, nasty stuff, and it makes me so angry I can’t even think.”
“Tell me.”
“I don’t even want to say it out loud. Some of it is kind of like what you saw already with the devil worship stuff, I guess, but worse. They go to awful, hateful places, and . . . Never mind. Just don’t go. Please. I shouldn’t have mentioned it. I don’t want you reading it. I’ll deal with that page.”
“Mom. We’re in this together.”
Kate’s general default setting of loyalty and earnestness has always been a shock to her. Elizabeth had been neither when she was Kate’s age. She was angry and rebellious and actively searched for reasons to be so. She stopped wishing long ago that her daughter would be just like her and think just like her. Instead, Elizabeth now hopes that Kate will never lose that earnestness even as she must harden that outer shell that bruises and cracks so easily.
“We are. But I don’t think you should see—”
“Let’s go to the page together and then I can show you how to screencap the trolls’ comments, tweet them out, you know, and totally shame them publicly.”
“We should probably leave them alone. Ignore them. They’ll go away. They don’t sound like the most well-adjusted people.”
“Mom, they don’t go away. That’s why they’re trolls.” Kate sounds like she talks from experience, and Elizabeth is overwhelmed by a giant wave of sadness with a riptide strong enough to suck all the unmoored out to sea.
“I’m not feeling up to that right now.”
They go quiet and have a standoff in the kitchen. Each afraid to be the first to move. Kate’s phone rings.
“It’s Sam. I’m gonna take this.”
“Okay, go ahead.” By the time Elizabeth softly adds, “I’ll be in the living room if you want to come out later,” Kate has answered the phone and walks into her bedroom.
Elizabeth paces around the couch twice, then retreats to the dining room and the computer desk instead of the couch. As she waits for the computer to wake out of sleep mode, she flips through one of Tommy’s sketchbooks that she brought out with her. It was probably his first one, or the oldest one that he saved, and the drawings (mostly robots and dinosaurs) have a hint of blocky-ness and lack proper proportion, but the talent to come is apparent. You can see it. On the inside cover she stuck the little square piece of duct tape that he’d stuck on his laptop cover over the logo, the one with the hungry cloud monster doodle. She let Allison take the laptop back to the station. Elizabeth kept the duct tape doodle.
Elizabeth doesn’t go to the Find Tommy Facebook page and instead checks her e-mail. Twenty e-mails from the top is an e-mail her mother sent her yesterday. She opens it.
Liz. Found this article about ‘felt presences.’ I really think you should read it. Maybe it’ll help explain a few things. Love. Mom.
She takes her hand off the mouse and presses down a corner of the duct tape square, which is curling up off the cardboard.
Her phone vibrates in her pocket. It’s a text from her mother. She says to herself, “Perfect timing as always.”
Janice’s text: “They’re talking about Tommy on Fox News. It’s horrible. Please don’t watch.”
For the two millionth time since the ordeal started, everything inside Elizabeth turns into a liquid electricity that rises up into her head before bottoming out, leaving her momentarily hollow, and then all the fear, anxiety, and despair rushes back, and refills her.
She reads the text again and smirks at herself. She’d pulled the same thing with Kate when she’d told her not to go to the Facebook page knowing full well that she would go directly to that page. Janice is telling her not to go watch because she actually wants her to go watch, and then, afterward, she’ll have the righteous authority to say You should’ve listened. I told you not to watch.
Elizabeth walks to the couch, on her tiptoes, trying not to be heard moving around again. A practice run for later tonight when Kate is asleep. She turns on the TV and searches the guide for Fox News. It’s a standard cable news talk show setup: a middle-aged white guy host with three supposed experts in something, each on their own live feed from somewhere not in the studio. The experts are two middle-aged white guys and one not-middle-aged blonde woman.
Elizabeth watches them for almost ten minutes. She alternates between writhing in her seat and being statue still, frozen by the horror of the media Medusas as they talk about Tommy’s disappearance. They talk about how Tommy comes from a broken home and lament the inexorable disintegration of the traditional family. They quote an anonymous source within the Ames police department saying that Tommy was into “not-so-good stuff” and making terrible decisions. They talk about underage drinking and speculate on drug use and further illegal activities. They talk about the latest report, broken this afternoon by Fox News of course, that cites anonymous classmates of Tommy’s who describe him as a loner and obsessed with the zombies and anything related to the occult. They talk about the occult in the context of the rise of atheism. They talk about folklore and Satanism and its potential role in Tommy’s disappearance. They talk about the locals seeing a mysterious person or persons walking through their yards and standing in front of their windows at night. They wonder if what’s going on in Ames is evidence of a larger satanic cult or conspiracy and they talk about how ‘shadowman’ is trending on twitter. They talk about the mysterious man referenced in the Ames Patch article. They talk about what kind of relationship Tommy might’ve had with this person of interest. They call him a person of interest while law enforcement has yet to do so. They talk about pedophilia and other perversions associated with occult activities. They are loud and are almost yelling, sounding like they’re arguing with one another, but there is no argument; they’re all in agreement. These talking heads do not shy away from further speculation and extrapolatio
n from the facts and nonfacts. It’s as though Tommy’s disappearance has become a national Rorschach test; they blurt out whatever it is they think they see in the chaotic inkblot. They do not once refer to Tommy as someone who needs help, and the only descriptors they use are “misguided” and “perhaps deeply troubled.”
Elizabeth shuts off the television. Instead of burrowing under the couch cushions or sprinting out the front door and going house to house smashing TV screens, she writes a text to her mother.
I shouldn’t have watched. I’m going to put my fist through the TV screen.
Janice: I know. It’s awful. I’m coming back down tomorrow. Leaving here at noon. Need me to pick anything up?
Elizabeth sends her a list of groceries. As she types milk 1% and diet soda and 1 lb turkey and cheese and bread she wonders how it was she got here, to this particular moment; calmly texting an ordinary grocery list seconds after shutting off a national cable news show discussing the evils of her missing son.
She goes back to the computer. Her e-mail box has twenty new e-mails since she last checked ten minutes ago, most of which are notifications of posts and messages on the Find Tommy Facebook page. She returns to the e-mail her mom sent last night and clicks on the article link.
The article is hosted on a new long-form essay site, the kind that people link to on social media even though they probably have read only the headline and the first paragraph. She wonders if her mother has read the whole thing.
The article is about Third Man Factor or Syndrome; a widely reported phenomenon of a ghost, spirit, or what the author calls a “felt presence” that appears during a traumatic, terrifying, or stressful experience. These presences are often described as formless shadows. The article includes a brief summary of perhaps the most famous Third Man account: that of Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton. With their boat frozen in the ice, Shackleton and two other men trekked for thirty-six hours across a mountain and glacier-filled South Georgia to a whaling station. The three men barely survived the harrowing trip, spending weeks convalescing in a hospital afterward. Shackleton and his crewmates reported that a mysterious fourth man had joined them and had walked silently alongside during the latter stages of the trek. The mysterious man never spoke, but his presence was a comfort and helped to keep them moving forward. When Shackleton and his companions finally arrived at the whaling station the mysterious man was gone. Shackleton’s experience inspired lines in T. S. Eliot’s The Wasteland that refer to a “third man” always and mysteriously accompanying two others as they walk down a road. It’s the lines in that poem for which Third Man Syndrome is named.
The article goes on to discuss other mountain climbers, sailors, and disaster survivors who reported similar Third Man experiences. Scientists argue such extreme conditions and stresses provoke these hallucinations of another person being present, perhaps as a physiological coping mechanism. The Third Man or felt presence phenomenon is not unique to survivors of trauma. People who suffer from Parkinson’s disease and other neurological disorders have symptoms that include the felt presence sensations. The article’s author draws a clear line of connection from the trauma of the near-death experience to the intense emotions of extreme grief the bereaved experience after a loss. Felt presence accounts from heartbroken people who claim to have seen or sensed the presence of a recently deceased loved one are as commonplace as the traditional ghost story. The author then goes into more scientific detail, discussing current studies that cite the possible roles of dopamine and other neurochemicals as being the source of the hallucinatory phenomena.
Elizabeth loses the thread and rereads the final paragraphs multiple times before giving up. She says, “Goddamn it, Mom.”
Doubt gnaws at her. Is it possible what she saw was a grief-induced hallucination and her now-soupy brain is simply associating the picture Tommy drew with what she saw, or thinks she saw? In her head, Elizabeth is back in her bedroom on that night one week ago: she throws her sneakers at the chair again and they bounce and tumble away and Tommy is still there, in shadow, yes, but he’s there, crouched next to the chair, his legs pulled against his chest, his head titled, his hair over his eyes, and then the face, the terrible face, and then his smell.
Elizabeth does not haunt her support group message board or the Facebook page, and ignores the swelling swamp of post and comment e-mail notifications. She instead searches the stories referenced in the felt presence article, and from there she searches for and reads other first-person accounts. There are all manner of websites devoted to such paranormal phenomena, from the slickly produced (their margins filled with ads for books and DVDs) to the achingly sad blogs that haven’t been updated for years, blogs with virtual tumbleweeds and feature walls of text, detailing the raw, stream-of-consciousness ramblings from the confused, broken, and damned. Her Internet search splinters outward, like cracks in the ice of a frozen pond, and she reads about bilocation: a living person projecting (willingly or not) their spirit/double to another place. There’s a legend about a French schoolteacher at a European boarding school in the mid-1800s who repeatedly projected her double in full view of her students. Her double would appear at the blackboard, mirroring the teacher’s movements before disappearing. Once, while the teacher was working in the garden, her double appeared to sit in a chair in front of the entire student body at assembly.
Kate opens her bedroom door and announces that she’s going to bed. Elizabeth jumps up from the computer and shrinks the window as though caught looking at stuff that she shouldn’t be looking at. Elizabeth ducks into the hall and quickly says that she’s going to bed soon as well. She’s always been a terrible liar. They do not wish each other a goodnight. After Kate closes her door, Elizabeth takes a lap around the living area, shutting off the lights. She considers turning on the security camera but decides not to. She doesn’t want it going off every time she flinches or reaches for the computer mouse.
The glowing computer screen is the only light on in the living area. She sits down and reads more about bilocation and doppelgängers. Reports of bilocation often occur under the similarly stressful circumstances described in the felt presences / Third Man article. But in folklore, doppelgängers represent everything from mischievous sprits and demons, portents of imminent disaster, a vision of the near future, or a temporal shift, to a shudder in dimensional time and space. There is no shortage of pseudohistorical apocrypha regarding doppelgängers. The famous poet Goethe claimed to have passed his doppelgänger on a quiet road to a German town, only years later to realize that his double was a vision of his future self traveling the same road but in the other direction. More chilling are the tales of the doppelgänger being the harbinger or omen of death: Percy Bysshe Shelley (husband of Mary Shelley) had visions of his doppelgänger confronting him and pointing out to the Mediterranean sea in the weeks before his own drowning; Queen Elizabeth I of England died shortly after seeing her double lying prostrate in her own bed; English poet John Donne ran into his wife’s doppelgänger walking the streets of Paris with a baby cradled in her arms, while back home their child was born dead.
When Elizabeth next looks up, disengaging from the computer, she realizes that two-plus hours have eroded away. Her eyes are tired and stinging from all the on-screen reading in the dark. Janice had obviously sent Elizabeth the link to the felt presence article to provide a rational, scientific explanation for the Tommy sighting in her bedroom. But now Elizabeth’s head is full of tales of doppelgängers and shadowy presences and the harbingers of doom.
Elizabeth turns on the small desk lamp, opens the desk drawer, takes out Tommy’s diary, and stares at that terrible picture, the shadowman that has since gone viral on the Internet and news. She can’t look at it for too long for fear it will burn a hole through her retinas, and then the image will be seared inside her head and she’ll never be able to think of anything else without seeing it. She is dreadfully certain this awful, shadowy image that looks like Tommy—even if he wrote that it wasn’
t him—is the something that happened to her son.
Elizabeth powers the computer down and puts the diary back in the desk drawer. She limps into the kitchen on stiff legs, quietly fills a glass with water, and then goes into the living room to wait . . . for what? Tommy to come back? A shadowman at the door, in the windows, or in the room with her? For Kate to sneak out of her bedroom and drop the missing diary pages?
Maybe she should sit on the couch with a bottle of wine and see how deeply into it she can get. She doesn’t really like wine, but there isn’t any beer in the house. She imagines adding “get beer” to her mom’s text grocery list. Then she wonders if Tommy ever stole any beer from her. Not that she ever kept a lot in the house, usually a mishmash of types and brands, usually more than a couple of bottles or cans but never more than twelve, not that she kept inventory. Was it solely because of Arnold that Tommy started drinking beer? Thirteen years old is early for that, isn’t it? Were there kids drinking when she was in middle school? Probably, but she can’t remember any names or faces. There were vague groups of kids they called the burnouts; the mysterious and dangerous ones who met up in the woods after school, the ones no one seemed to notice or talk to when inside school. Years from now, to so many of his classmates, Tommy will be a cautionary tale, a legend, an odd bit of folklore, a shadowman.
Standing in the dark next to the couch, Elizabeth whispers, “I’m sorry,” out loud to no one and everyone. She asks, “How did I not know, how come I couldn’t smell it on him when he came home?” And the only answer she has: I was supposed to know. If she had known, would confronting him about it have changed anything? Would he have admitted to it and admitted to hanging out with this older guy, Arnold? Would she have grounded him, not allowed him to go out or even go to Josh’s house to sleep over? Would her removing some of the dominos in the secret chain that tumbled them all to this hellish now have kept Tommy from disappearing?
She sits heavily on the couch, and the green light on the base of the security camera blinks into life. Did she sit on her phone and accidentally turn it on? Elizabeth spills her water as she reaches for her phone, which isn’t in her pocket. She left the phone next to the computer, didn’t she?
Disappearance at Devil's Rock Page 21