by Andrew Pyper
Who knows how happy he would have gone on to be—how happy either of us might have been—if we’d had a different father. One who didn’t drink so prodigiously, even proudly, as if someone had challenged him to a self-destructive competition and he was damned if he was going to lose. Other than whisky, his main interest lay in pursuing cheaper and cheaper rents in ever more remote places, dedicating himself to lowering our already poverty-level expenses in the way other fathers dedicated themselves to finding better jobs in better towns.
My mother stayed because she loved him. Over the seventeen years that followed before she died, too, of natural causes (what they still called smoking-related emphysema at the time), she offered no alternative reason to me. Though perhaps self-pity held her in its grip, too, a taste for the tragic, the delicious heartbreaks of the could-have-been.
As for our father, while he could never find his way to love us—he was too busy for that, too distracted by the avoidance of collectors, the hustle for advance payment on odd jobs—he was not especially cruel, either. No slaps, no belt thrashes, no time in locked rooms. No punishments at all, really, other than our not having him present in our lives. A mobile emptiness that occupied the space of the living room chairs and head of the kitchen tables and laid upon the bathroom floors we paid a couple months for, then were asked to leave for the months we didn’t.
Nobody called depression a disease then. Nobody called it depression. People were said to have “nerves,” or be “under the weather,” or allowed themselves to waste away in the name of a “broken heart.” Our father, who still hauled a half dozen boxes of books he’d acquired over his earlier years of training and brief career as a schoolteacher and fancied himself a man of underestimated learning, preferred the term melancholy on the rare occasions he spoke of it. His drinking was justified on the grounds it was the only way he knew how to hold it within manageable boundaries. I never realized until this moment that I learned the word from him.
Outside, I find O’Brien sitting on the edge of the deck, her feet swinging through the grass.
“Feeling better?”
“That’s probably too much to ask,” she says.
“Would you rather wait in the car?”
“I’m fine here. I just need to pull my shit together.”
“You need me, just squeak.”
“Where you going?” O’Brien looks up at me.
“Just going to head down to the river. Take a look around,” I say.
“Don’t.”
“What’s wrong?”
“The river.”
“What about it?”
“I can hear it. Voices. A thousand voices.” She reaches up an unsteady hand and grasps the tips of my fingers. “They’re in pain, David.”
My toes touch the river and it sings with pain.
Tess heard it, too. And though I don’t, I believe O’Brien does. Which means that’s the way I have to go. A conclusion O’Brien comes to even before I do, as she releases my fingers without me having to pull them away. Returns her gaze to her own swinging feet.
The walk down reveals the slope to be steeper than it looked by the cabin. It has the effect of drawing you closer to the water faster than you want to go, an invisible undertow. This part of the property has been cleared and re-cleared over the years, so that while the forest is halfway to reclaiming it with trees, it’s still a patch of unshaded ground. It blinds me all the way down to the bank’s edge. The river alive with the light of the sun’s rage, so that its surface appears to reach out to me, the water ablaze.
Yet it is only a river. Containing memories and voices only to the extent we contain them.
“The mind is its own place,” I say aloud.
Magic words that bring my brother back. Or if not him, the memory of his scream.
I had walked down the slope I just walked down and stood where I stand now when I was six. Looking for Lawrence, whom my mother had permitted to leave the breakfast table before me. I knew he’d be down here. Fishing maybe, or collecting frogs in a jar. The river was where we’d come to be free of our parents, from the sounds and smells of home that are a comfort in other kids’ lives.
Lawrence could have gone left or right from here. A narrow trail followed the bank for what might have been miles past our lot on both sides, and we had favorite, secret spots along its route. The six-year-old me had stood here, wiping the crumbs from his chin, trying to guess which way to try first. And I’d heard Lawrence’s scream in the eastward distance. Just as I hear it now.
I run with my head down, beneath the arching willow boughs, the tails whipping my back. Twice I almost slip off the moistened path into the water but manage to windmill my arms and regain a lurching balance. And as I go, the same rushing question I’d had the first time.
Do you scream like that when you’re drowning?
I’d doubted it then. Not that my brother might have slipped into the water or suffered an accident that had put him in jeopardy, but that he would make that sound if he had. Because his scream had the tremor of shock more than the summoning for help. The horror of something other than the river taking him down.
An answer comes to me now. One I didn’t know enough to recognize as a boy.
You only scream like that when you’re being drowned.
Lawrence watches me emerge from the trees and stop on a flat table of rock. Holding on for me. Wildly kicking against the rocks a foot beneath the surface, straining his neck to keep his mouth from breathing the cold current into his chest. A moment that, at the time of its first happening would have taken a second or less. Yet now in its return engagement has been slowed. Revealing a truth that passed too swiftly at the time, and I too young to read them. A pair of truths.
Lawrence meets my eyes from the far side of the river. The Other Place we never crossed to. The side we feared and where Tess had stood in her real dream.
The second thing I see is that my father stands over Lawrence. One of his big hands on the small of my brother’s back, the other tight around his neck.
Not trying to pull him up. Pushing him under.
And then he does.
My father has been waiting for me, too. To be a witness. To leave his mark on my soul.
Lawrence thrashes in the shallows. Held down lengthwise as though unsuccessfully learning to swim and my father his inattentive teacher. It is a configuration that led to my misunderstanding at the time. My father unable to get a grip to pull him up, my brother’s struggle hindering his rescue. Confusing enough to build an alternative history around. A lie to tell myself from that point until today.
But when Lawrence goes still and my father looks up to me there is no question what his goggled eyes say. A triumphant hatred. The self-congratulation that comes with three lives taken at once.
It is my father who holds Lawrence down, but my father in body only. Even as I watch, his face alters to show the presence inside of him. A sharp-edged skull. Needle chinned. The cheeks—too wide, too high—bulging against his skin. What the Unnamed actually looks like. Belial’s face.
The demon’s malice was not satisfied even with this.
It released my father from its hold, and I watched him return to himself. Look down at what he’d done. Then look at me.
My father. Not Belial anymore, not a spirit. It was my father who had looked into his youngest son’s eyes and spoken the truth in his heart.
It should have been you.
From out of the darkness, O’Brien’s voice. A far-off shriek.
“David!”
I’m running back the way I came. No more than a couple hundred yards, though it feels longer on the return, the river slopping over the bank and squelching underfoot. My heart a knot of pain finding its way out between my ribs.
Her voice again. Weaker this time. Not really a shout at all, but a hollow echo.
“Run!”
Is she urging me to come faster, or warning me away? Not that it matters. Belial is here. I know that. I’v
e seen it. But the sound of O’Brien’s desperation has, for this moment at least, swept his influence away.
When I come out from the willows and start up the slope I notice the van first. White, new. A rental. Ontario plates at the front. YOURS TO DISCOVER. Just visible around the corner of the cabin and parked in front of the Mustang.
Then I see O’Brien. Lying in the cabin’s rear doorframe, her head uncomfortably propped against the wood and the rest of her splayed out. Her legs leaping in spastic jolts. Her tongue repeatedly licking her blanched lips as though in futile preparation to deliver a speech.
I see the wounds last, so that I’m kneeling next to her at the same time I notice how whatever had been used to cut her had left the pattern of a cross in her chest. The blood coloring through the fabric of her shirt.
“You have to go,” she says. Her voice a series of small cracks.
“I’m not going anywhere. We have to get you to a hospital.”
“No hospitals.”
“This is different.”
“I’m saying I won’t make it even if you try.”
She takes a breath and with it the wounds open wide, pulsing out. I cover her with my hands but there are too many entry points. Her body warm but turning instantly cool in its exposure to the air.
Yet she is calm. Her eyes rolled back to a line staring somewhere just above my head. Not afraid, no evidence of pain. One last squeeze of adrenaline. A final insight or vision, true or false.
“I can see her, David.”
“See who?” I ask, though I already know.
“She’s . . . waiting for you.”
“Elaine—”
“She’s holding on. But it . . . hurts. She—”
“Elaine. Don’t—”
“—needs you to believe, too.”
O’Brien’s gaze lowers and she takes me in. It is the only way to put it. Her eyes hold me as though she’d lifted me into her arms and pressed me close to feel the last knocks of her heart. She doesn’t have the strength to raise her hand let alone offer her embrace, so she manages it with her eyes. A dimming smile.
By the time I lower myself against her, she’s gone.
It’s quiet. Not in the sense that the birds have stopped singing or the breeze stopped blowing, but quiet in the way it has been quiet all along. There is only the river behind me. The water passing over the stones in continuous applause.
I lean against the doorframe opposite O’Brien. The sky a collection of clouds of the kind you might see animals or faces in, though none show themselves to me. There is the idea that something should be felt now, something clear. Sadness. Rage. But there is just the flat erasure of exhaustion.
And the knowledge that whoever did this to O’Brien is still here.
As if appearing by the power of my thoughts, there’s a figure I hadn’t noticed before ankle-deep at the river’s edge. Bent over, hands in the water. Busying himself with a task I can’t see from here.
For the briefest moment the thought of attempting escape occurs to me. It might be possible to rise unnoticed, slip around the cabin, and get to the Mustang, be the first one to start back along the trail to the road. But he knows I’m here. Knows I’m entertaining these very thoughts and is no more bothered by them than an untied shoelace.
The Pursuer only turns once I’ve walked down the slope to stand a dozen feet behind him. Close enough to see the soiled bandage he’d tied around his head. To see that he’s washing a knife. The blade long, rubber-handled. The knife we’d left next to him on the motel pillow.
He glances over his shoulder and, at seeing me, grins in welcome. Though there is no warmth in it. It is the look an animal gives another animal to lull it into calmness before doing it harm.
Slowly, he shifts his body around so that all of him faces me. His feet still in the water. Its movement carrying away discolored plumes washed from the knife blade, his pant legs, dripped from the ends of his fingers.
“You came down here just to wash that off or to give me a chance to leave?”
“You’re not going anywhere,” he says. “I pulled the plugs from your car.”
“I could run.”
“You wouldn’t get far.”
“There’s still your van.”
“Yeah,” he says, and pulls his keys from his pocket. Dangles them tauntingly in the air. “There is.”
All at once the fullness of his intentions burns up from my legs, and though I try, I can’t prevent myself from shaking. The Pursuer sees it. Grins his not-grin again.
He pulls one of his feet out of the water and onto the bank.
“Why a van?” I ask, seeing that talking is better than not talking.
“Disposal.”
“I would’ve thought this place was ideal for making a couple bodies go away.”
“Burying isn’t the way to do it,” he says, shaking his head as though still disappointed to hear people make this mistake. “And you know what? I don’t like it here.”
The Pursuer brings his other foot out of the water and stands straight. For the first time I notice the blood on his jacket. Not the spray that came from O’Brien—though this is on every part of him, too, his cheeks, the tip of his nose—but a gash in his side, just above his hip. An oval seeping wider through the cotton.
He follows my line of sight. Nods at the hole in his body as if it’s a mildly inconvenient task he’ll have to tend to later. A dry cleaning pickup. An ATM withdrawal.
“Your girlfriend put up quite a fight for a sick lady,” he says.
“You like killing women?”
“There’s no liking or not liking about it.”
“Your employers,” I say. “What are they afraid of?”
“They don’t have to justify their decisions to me.”
“Guess.”
“I’d say you’re too close to something,” he says, and shuffles up to the top of the bank. He stands below me still, but has swallowed up half the distance between us in a single stride.
“Wouldn’t the Church approve of something like the document becoming public?” I say, my mind spinning around, looking for a plan that isn’t there. “Might win a few million converts on the panic factor alone.”
“They’re not in the changing-minds business. It’s about maintaining what they’ve already got. Keeping balance. If it ain’t broke, don’t let some stupid fucker fuck it up sort of thing.”
“Something you’re happy to help them with.”
“I’m a hired man,” he says with a weariness that seems to surprise himself. “I’ve done this quite a few times.”
“A murderer for the Church. That ever trouble the conscience of an altar boy from Astoria?”
“You Catholic, David?”
“My parents were. In name.”
“Still. You know what it is to follow holy orders.”
“Thou shalt not kill.”
“The most frequent exception. But hey, you’re the expert, right?”
His laugh at this is genuine, cut short only by a burning flare in his side that bends him over a moment before he straightens again.
“You could tell them I got away,” I say.
There is nothing in his expression that shows he’s even heard this. Just another sliding step closer. And another.
He expects me to run. His arms held slightly out from his sides, knees bent, ready to get a jump when I start up the slope. He probably figures he’ll be all over me before I have a chance to take a single step.
It’s why he’s startled when I run at him.
Not even thinking about the knife. Not thinking about anything but speed. Reaching him before his trained responses have a chance of booting up.
It almost works. The flats of my hands slamming into the top of his chest as he raises the knife, so that it passes over instead of into me. Cuts a flap through my shirt. A red line from shoulder to shoulder.
He’s bringing the blade up again—unhesitating, unlike me, who pauses in this quarter-se
cond to uselessly think—as I push into him once more. It’s little more than a nudge, the roughness of contact you might have riding the subway at rush hour. But it’s enough for him to wheel back slightly, for one of his feet to try to find firmer ground just behind him. Instead, the foot uproots a clump of turf and slides away. And I run into him again.
We both fall. An awkward embrace neither of us can release the other from. It keeps him below and me on top. Stays that way when we hit the water.
An insane thrashing. Sideways fists. Watery puke.
There is no fight, only the reflex to keep our heads above the surface. Beneath me, I can feel the Pursuer’s fear as acutely as my own. Instead of creating a hesitation in me, his terror gives me a focus. I want him to experience more of it. The promise of this moves everything faster.
My knee comes to rest on his elbow so that while the swings of his knife can’t connect with my gut or chest, he can reach my hands that are now clasped around his throat. Finding the windpipe. Pressing down with the weight of my body, arms locked straight. The click of something soft giving way in his neck. But he keeps swinging the knife at me until the blade lands on the base of my thumb. Gains purchase with the first gouge, the exclamation of blood. Then he starts to cut. A steady sawing through tissue. Then bone. Even as his face turns from crimson to purple to near-black he keeps methodically sawing. But I don’t let go. The pain screeches like an animal locked inside me, biting itself, using its claws to get out. But I don’t let go. With a jerk the Pursuer’s knife cuts through to the other side and my thumb drops into the current. It floats away, bobbing playfully, leaving an oily stain upon the surface. I watch it. Feel the life now draining from me as it has just stopped draining from the man whose head I now plunge underwater. Hold there. Watching his nostrils and lips for bubbles that roar up, then slow. Then stop.
The white of unconsciousness veils over my sight. I don’t let go. Even as I’m slipping forward or back or down, slipping away.
I don’t let go.