Disappearance at Devil's Rock

by Paul Tremblay

  She struggles to stand up without further soaking herself and shouts “Goddamn it!” at the tipped water glass and the Valdez-sized spill on the couch, and a muffled, metallic doppelgänger of her voice echoes back from somewhere down the end of the hallway. The camera’s green record light is still on. Elizabeth turns toward the kitchen and says, “What the hell is going on?” Her voice echoes again, on slight delay.

  Kate screams, “Mom!” from her room repeatedly.

  “Kate? What is it? Kate?” Elizabeth runs through the kitchen and into the hallway.

  Kate’s bedroom door flies open, and Kate runs out like she’s being chased, like she needs to desperately escape something. She runs straight into Elizabeth, almost knocking her over. She’s crying hysterically.

  “Honey, what’s going on?”

  “I don’t know! I woke up and I was so scared and it felt like there was someone in the room with me, watching, and I was so scared and I couldn’t say anything and I couldn’t move and then your voice started coming out of my phone on the floor but I still couldn’t move and I tried calling out to you and Mom, I don’t know. I don’t know what’s going on, I don’t—”

  “Shh, it’s okay. You had a bad dream. You’re okay—”

  “No, Mom, I was awake. I was—”

  “You’re—you’re all right.” Elizabeth holds Kate tightly and looks all around the dark hallway. She is totally spooked by this. Kate has never been one to have nightmares or night terrors, not like Tommy had when he was a preschooler. His nighttime freak-outs were weekly occurrences. “I’m here, slow down.” She holds Kate until she stops rambling and crying.

  Elizabeth: “Are you okay?”

  Kate: “No. Yes, but no.”

  “Come on.” Elizabeth starts to lead Kate back toward her room.

  “Where are you going?”

  “To your room—”

  “No, I don’t want to go. Can I sleep in your room, please, Mom? Please.”

  “Yeah, okay, sure, but look, I’m just going to turn on the light and shut off of the camera on your phone.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Kate?”

  “What?”

  “The camera came on just now, when I was sitting out there.”

  “I didn’t turn that on, I swear, Mom. My phone wasn’t even with me in bed. It was on the floor, charging.”

  Kate hides behind Elizabeth as she opens the door and turns on the light.

  Much of the mess from Elizabeth’s tear-down of the room is still there, to her great shame. Elizabeth walks in gingerly, trying not to step on too much. Now that she’s in the room, something feels off. Not right. She can’t explain the off-ness. There is something wrong. Even with the light on and the two of them in there, Elizabeth doesn’t blame her daughter for not wanting to sleep in there tonight.

  Elizabeth edges deeper into the room, and the wrong feeling intensifies. She says, “Ugh, I’ll pick up this place tomorrow, I promise. Where’s your phone, Kate? On the floor, right? You didn’t turn on the camera, Kate? Really? You’re telling me—”

  Kate: “Mom, I didn’t. I swear. Cross my heart. I didn’t.”

  “My voice came through your phone? The app doesn’t turn on by itself.” Elizabeth makes it to the side of the bed. Kate’s phone is on the floor and charging. Elizabeth bends to pick it up and she’s suddenly afraid of the dark under the bed, and Kate’s windows with their closed curtains are inches away from the back of her head, and she can feel that small distance, like the bottoms of the curtains are fingers that want to stretch out and lightly brush the back of her neck, or blow open and expose someone standing there at the window, watching them.

  As Elizabeth finally grabs the phone there’s a loud, heavy thud from somewhere behind her, from somewhere else inside the house.

  Elizabeth bolts upright and twists, trying to turn around, and she almost falls onto the bed. “Jesus. What was that? Kate?”

  Kate quickly shuffles out of the doorway and into her room, looking out toward the hallway behind her. She shakes her head. “That wasn’t me! That wasn’t me! It came from Tommy’s room. Oh my God . . .”

  “What do you mean?” she asks. But it did sound like the noise came from the room next door, from Tommy’s room.

  “Something fell. On the floor. Something big. I felt it like vibrating in my toes.”

  “Okay. Relax. Come on. We’ll check it out,” more to herself than to Kate. They walk into Tommy’s room, Kate hiding behind her, and there’s a large, comic art book on the floor in front of the bookshelf, splayed out like a dead body. It lies opened up, facedown, the broken spine pointed at the ceiling.

  Kate says, “So . . .”

  “No big deal. It just fell out of the bookshelf?”

  Kate: “Yeah, because books do that all the time.”

  Elizabeth almost laughs at that purely genuine Kate reaction, and more than anything it makes her believe her daughter has been telling the truth tonight. She says, “Yeah, I don’t know. Well, Allison and I looked through here today, remember? Must’ve not have put it back all the way or something. Left it hanging out?” Elizabeth gives a quick look up at the bookshelf and doesn’t see any other, what, loose books. Books that are about to jump? She remembers flipping through the art book as they searched Tommy’s room. It is well worn, the pages a little loose in the spine. Tommy clearly read and reread this book often. In the margins he’d practiced some of the outlined how-to techniques.

  Elizabeth picks it up, carefully closes the book, and realigns the bent dust jacket.

  “Mom, what are those?”

  There are five loose pages on the floor. They are not pages from the art book. The pages are not white and do not feature garishly colored superheroes. The pages are yellowish, full of handwriting, and all crinkled up like someone balled them up to throw them away but then changed their mind and tried to flattened them back out. They are more of Tommy’s diary pages.

  Elizabeth flips the art book onto the floor behind her and drops to all fours, hovering herself above the pages.

  “Mom? Are they—”

  “Kate. Listen to me. You have to tell me the truth. Did you hide these pages in that book?”

  “No, Mom. No . . .” Kate keeps talking and Elizabeth isn’t really listening. Elizabeth paws behind her for the book and flips through it again. Earlier this afternoon she lingered over the pages of how-to-draw-torsos that feature heroic poses of Spider-Man and the Silver Surfer, and the comically large-chested self-portrait Tommy drew in the margin. There is no doubt she searched this book today and the diary pages were not there.

  “Mom?”

  If Kate hid the pages here, when would she have had the time or ability to do so? She would’ve had to hide the pages in the art book after she and Allison searched the room. Kate didn’t come home until after the big search, and she and Kate spent the rest of the afternoon and evening together, she was never by herself until Kate went to bed. And even then her door was closed and it stayed closed. There’s no way Kate could’ve snuck out of her room and into Tommy’s to hide those pages with Elizabeth just around the corner, awake, and on the computer. Never mind somehow setting up the book to fall out of the bookcase later.

  Elizabeth looks up at Kate. She says, “Me and Allison must’ve missed these somehow. Must not have seen them hidden in this book.” She says it but doesn’t believe it.

  Kate doesn’t say anything.

  Elizabeth picks up the pages. The once-harsh folds and creases add shadows to the sprawl of text and crossouts. The pages bend and crinkle in her hand, as though the paper itself is attempting to speak to her directly.

  The first page is full of Tommy’s handwriting. The text at the very top of the page has a big, loose, wavy X crossed through it. She doesn’t read anything yet. The next three pages after are walls of text, in handwriting that is small, clustered, desperate. The fifth page is a repeat of a couple of lonely sentences.

  Kate stands behind Eliz
abeth in the nowhere space separating the kitchen and the living room. Kate’s arms hang limply by her side and she leans into her mother, forehead resting between Mom’s shoulder blades. Elizabeth awkwardly reaches behind her and rubs Kate’s back. In her other hand is her cell phone. Her head tilts and her shoulder lifts to help cradle the phone against her ear as she talks to Allison. The diary pages are pinned tightly between her arm and her ribs.

  Elizabeth hangs up and turns around. Kate stays rooted to her spot. She’s stopped crying, at least. Elizabeth lifts Kate’s chin and says, “Okay. Allison will be here in like five minutes.”

  Kate asks a lightning round of questions to which there are currently no answers. “Why did they go with Arnold? How could they do what—what they did? To that poor old guy? Did they—why would they let Arnold make them do those things? Why didn’t Tommy help? What was Tommy talking about at the end? I don’t get it. Any of it. Why—” she stops before asking Why didn’t he try to tell anyone what was happening? Kate looks at the crinkly pages under Mom’s arm and knows that he did try.

  Elizabeth: “I don’t know, honey. There’s a lot of things that I don’t know.”

  Kate: “Did Tommy tear out—”

  Elizabeth stops her. “Look. I can’t. Not right now. I, um, need to call Nana, too. Before Allison gets here. You okay for now?”

  Kate says, “Yeah,” only because she is supposed to.

  Elizabeth rests a hand on Kate’s head. “Go wash your face and have a drink. Warm milk, maybe? I’ll be right with you. And we’ll talk to Detective Allison together when she gets here.”

  Kate walks down the hall. She hears Elizabeth say, “Mom. It’s me,” into the phone in a papier-mâché voice.

  Kate wanders into her bedroom instead of the bathroom and closes the door gently. Whatever was in the room and freaked her out earlier was gone. She isn’t afraid anymore. She goes over to her bed and picks up her phone off the floor. She flips through her multiple pages of apps, tempted to turn on the surveillance camera again to watch and listen to Mom as she talks to Nana.

  Kate navigates to her contacts list instead and calls Josh. He gave her his phone number earlier when she was over at his house. Their shooting hoops together didn’t last long. Mrs. Griffin called Josh in to wash up for dinner after only like ten minutes out in the driveway, even though she’d never mentioned to Kate that they were close to eating dinner. Kate hopped on her bike, and before the garage door closed and Josh was swallowed up by the house, she asked for his phone number. More like she demanded it.

  Josh doesn’t pick up, and the call goes to voice mail. She calls again. He picks up on the third ring. He says, “Hello?” in a voice that doesn’t sound very you-just-woke-me-up.

  “It’s me. Kate.”

  “Oh, hey. What’s going on? Did something happen?”

  She says, “We found the rest of Tommy’s diary pages.”

  “You found it?”

  “Yeah. In his room. Like he left them for us to find, you know.” She stops and waits for Josh to have to say something.

  “Um, okay. Wow. What does he say?”

  Kate gets right to the point. She doesn’t think Mom will be on the phone long with Nana, so she’ll have to hang up soon. “Tommy wrote about what happened with Arnold, about when you guys went to some old house or something and then all helped beat up and like, what, stab some old guy with pieces of glass. I mean, holy shit.” Kate couldn’t believe that Tommy not only watched but took part in the violence and then never went to the police himself or told anyone about what happened. That he would ever be part of such a horror show of events, and then make it worse by doing nothing, will forever mar how she feels about her big brother. She’ll always wonder if there were other terrible secrets that he kept.

  Josh whimpered, a sound a mouse might give after finally being stomped on by the petrified elephant. “Oh my God . . .”

  “It was his uncle or something, right?”

  “Yeah, I guess—”

  “Josh, did you guys kill him?”

  “No. My God, no. He was hurt bad but he was alive when we left, I swear.”

  “Oh, so he was like totally okay then.”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know. We don’t know anything about him.”

  “Why didn’t you tell anyone about this? Why are you guys hiding—”

  “We didn’t know what to do! And we didn’t know how it happened, we never meant to hurt anyone. We were drunk and we didn’t know how any of it could’ve happened. We were pushed into it and didn’t—”

  “You should’ve stopped, said something! Done something, anything! Why didn’t you do anything, Josh?”

  “We were so scared. I swear, we weren’t trying to protect him or nothing.”

  “So, what, you guys were scared of getting in trouble? Didn’t care about the guy at all?”

  “No. It’s not like that. I mean, yeah, we were scared about everything, and Arnold, when he drove us back, he threatened to hurt us, to kill us, I swear, and he said he’d hurt you guys too if we ever said anything to anyone.”

  It’s not as easy to tell if Josh is lying when he’s on the phone. “How about now, then? Or a week ago? Tommy is missing, you know? Gone. And you don’t tell anyone about this guy? I don’t understand why you didn’t even say anything about Arnold that first night Tommy was gone.”

  Josh is crying. “I know, I know, but you don’t understand. Arnold, in the car right after, he was freaking out, going crazy driving like a hundred miles an hour, drove right at a tree saying he was gonna do it, he was gonna do it! and swerved away at the last second, saying he was gonna do it. And he was yelling that he’d tell the cops it was all us, our idea, we broke into his house, we’d all get it for what we did to his uncle. Juvie. He kept saying juvie, and we wouldn’t last five minutes in juvie. And then he said he’d find us before that anyway and do the same thing we did to his uncle to us and our families, only he’d make it count. He said that a bunch of times, making it count, and like from now on he’d be watching, watching us all the time. He kept saying—”

  “Josh—”

  “Wait, listen. That same night he was outside my window, standing there, looking in at me, watching and I was so scared because he wasn’t lying, and he’s been there like every night after and oh, shit, Kate, you gotta understand, we didn’t know—”

  Kate: “I can’t believe you wouldn’t help us find Tommy. That you’d protect Arnold because you’re scared.”

  “No, it’s not like that. We’re not protecting him. We were trying to protect you guys, and protect Tommy, too. I swear. Not him—”

  Kate is about to demand that Josh tell her why they snuck out to Borderland that night, but Mom knocks on the bedroom door lightly and then opens it.

  She says, “Kate? Are you on the phone? Who are you talking to?”

  Kate says, “It’s Sam.” The lie surprises her with how quick it is, and how easy it still is to lie. She hates the easiness. She says into the phone, “I have to go. The detective is on her way here, and I have to talk to her.” Kate sounds robotic and knows it. “I’ll talk to you later. Bye.”

  Kate wakes up to her vibrating phone at 2:15 A.M. She set the alarm after putting Mom to bed. Kate hasn’t been asleep for long, and that makes her groggier. The night of her room is fuzzy around the edges, the continued slippage of reality feeling probable, inevitable. She gets up slowly, willing the creak of the bed frame and rustle of the sheets to not travel beyond her bedroom walls. She probably doesn’t need to be so careful tonight, because Mom is passed out.

  Detective Allison left a little before midnight with the last pages, totally confused (and clearly mistrustful) as to how the pages turned up in Tommy’s room. Detective Allison pushed hard at Kate. Kate realizes that Allison now thinks it possible (probable?) that she kept the entire diary to herself because she had been trying to protect Tommy, hadn’t wanted him to get in trouble based on what he’d written about doing to the old man. Alli
son was terse and stern, not the keeper of the peace from yesterday afternoon who had politely asked Kate to empty her backpack. In the face of her questioning Kate was calm and patient, and that part of it was easy, because she was telling the truth. She’d never seen those last crumpled up and flattened out diary pages before she and Mom found them on the floor.

  Post–detective visit, Mom succumbed to a bottle of wine, drinking half of it in less than thirty minutes. Kate tried to ask Mom about earlier and how the camera turned on by itself and then the book randomly crashing out of the bookcase in Tommy’s room, but Mom didn’t want to talk about any of it. She was broken again, like the first day plus after Tommy disappeared. Mom simply told Kate how much she loved her and how they had to help each other through the next few days, and the rest of the days after that. Throughout Mom’s drunken, spiritless pep talk, Kate imagined Tommy’s shaking hand pushing broken glass into the old man’s skin even though it filled her head with static. Mom refused when Kate offered to help her into bed, opting to use the walls to hold herself upright as she swayed down the hallway into her room. There was no more talk of them or of how as a team they were going to make it, any of it. Kate dutifully followed Mom into her room to ensure she made it to bed, anyway.

  Kate turns on the camera app, and the living room glows black-and-white on her small, rectangular screen. The room is empty. Kate peeks her head out into the hallway. Mom’s bedroom door is open, which was how she left it. Mom’s snoring is muffled. She’s likely in the exact same position as Kate left her.

  Kate sneaks down the hallway to the living room. She watches herself on her phone. She starts out as a distant blip, progressing to the back of the couch, then walking around the front so that she stands a few feet from the camera. She likes this viewpoint, not because she wants to watch herself, but because she can see if anyone is sneaking up behind her. No one is there. Kate’s eyes are fluorescent and her skin is washed out, almost green tinted. It’s her but it’s not her on the screen. Tommy would’ve joked that she was seeing the ghost-her. But ghosts aren’t white or bright. Ghosts are shadows of someone or something gone wrong. Maybe she’s the opposite, the film negative of a ghost, then, which is something that hasn’t been given a name yet. This film-negative ghost-her isn’t doing the haunting and is instead haunted by everyone (including herself) and everything.