“I love you, son.”
“I love you too, Mom. Are you okay?”
“Oh, I don’t know, honey. I guess it’s going to take some getting used to.”
“Yeah. I know.”
Jacob stayed with her.
#
His mother wanted to go in early, to be the first one there, to get things ready. Jacob went with her. They passed by Ledbetter Bar and Sonnie’s apartment on the way to the church. Jacob tried not to look. He didn’t want his mother to think his mind was elsewhere. But he looked anyway.
Jacob and his mother walked into the church alone. His mother sat down at the front. She began to cry. Jacob comforted for a little while. Then he noticed the third guest.
He walked along the side of the pews, looking at the stained-glass windows as he went by, whistling sadly all the while. He exited through a door at the front of the room. Jacob got up and followed.
On the other side of the door was a reception area. There were three cafeteria-sized tables set out. The two closest to Jacob were empty. At the third, sat the man in white.
Jacob walked up slowly, the man in white not once looking up at him. Jacob sat down right across from the ominous figure. For a while, Jacob was silent. The man in white continued to whistle. Jacob looked at the man’s eyes. Then he was able to tell. This man was dying.
“What are you doing here?”
The man in white stopped whistling, but he still would not look at Jacob. “Why Jacob, I’ve come to say goodbye.”
The man’s voice was weak. He was fading. Jacob did not fear him now.
“Why? You’re not close to me. You don’t have to say goodbye.”
Now the man in white smiled gently, but condescendingly. “Oh Jacob, I’m much closer to you than you’d like to think.”
Jacob laughed. “You’re dying, aren’t you? The process ends, and you have to end with it.”
“Yes.”
“Good.”
Now the dying man looked at Jacob. But it was only for a second, and it was not the look Jacob expected. It was proud. Jacob looked away.
“I didn’t kill Tommy Carmichael. You did.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
Now the man’s voice was nearly indifferent. “Because I could. I don’t think anyone expects that I did it. Do you?”
“And with the rest of them, to stay hidden, you used me.”
“Yes, I think you helped.”
Jacob shrugged. The man in white’s voice grew as he spoke the next words.
“I can make a truck stall in the middle of the road, and nobody ever knows I was there. I can make a gas line break, and nobody expects me. I can control the bees.”
“But you can’t put people in the places you need them to be.”
The man in white lifted a hand to his bare chin and began to rub there. “No. I don’t do that. At least, not anymore.”
“Not anymore?”
The man in white smiled. Jacob wanted to change the subject.
“So why Tommy Carmichael? And why does the process end now?”
“I believe you know where you’ll get those answers.”
“When the class comes together again?”
“Yes. Look for the history man. He’ll tell you what you want to know.”
“But . . .” Jacob let it go. There were other things he wanted to know now, before this man was gone. “So why did you make me wicked?”
The man in white laughed again. “We, Jacob, are not wicked by nature. What we do is not wicked. We, Jacob, have helped make the world keep turning.”
“Yes, I understand that.”
“Wickedness makes our understanding more palatable.”
“But why must we understand at all? I could have done all this and never known.”
“Because, our kind transforms. We are shown little pieces of what we were. We must understand at least some of what we were if we are to be able to deal with what we become.”
Jacob was becoming more and more sickened by this. There were too many “we’s” for his taste. “And what will I become?”
“I’m not sure. Time will tell.”
“But I do go on?”
“Yes.”
“And you leave me?”
“Yes. I leave you, and I leave this world.”
“So, go then.”
The man in white stood up. He walked past the three tables and turned around. “I have always been what I am now, Jacob. But I have been trapped inside of a human consciousness, just like you are. That consciousness had compassion. That consciousness had pity. Recently, I was invited to leave that consciousness, and in this form I feel only for the process. But I kept my old decrepit body alive.”
“Why?”
“So I would have a place to go where I would have the compassion to warn you.”
“Warn me of what?”
“I have one more deed to perform before I go.”
“What?”
“You were warned Jacob!”
“No!” Now Jacob stood up.
“And by your reaction, I think you know what you were warned of.”
“She won’t tell anyone! I promise!”
“No, she won’t. She won’t because I helped you understand that she should not.”
“You didn’t help me. My grandma—”
“And I warned you of more Jacob. I let you know that it all must end.”
“And it will. Just don’t!”
“End the line, Jacob. I told you to end the line.”
“No! You didn’t! You’re not my grandmother!”
“End the line. Don’t make a child.”
“No!”
“I tried to call you right before. I tried to make you stop! But you put your seed in her. You put our seed in her, and it can never be.”
“Don’t kill, Sonnie!”
The man in white smiled very big. “I didn’t kill her. I only filled in the hole on the spout, and blended the steel under the cap so it wouldn’t pop off from the pressure.”
Jacob saw the teakettle in his mind.
“You wanted the coffee, Jacob.” The man in white looked away and toward the wall, like he was looking through it. “And I think it’s just about ready.”
“Grandma! No!” Jacob jumped over one table. He landed hard on the floor but got up quickly. He jumped over the second, but the man in white lifted a hand, causing Jacob to stop in midair.
“The process is efficient. I come to take away.”
#
Jacob falls onto the table and bounces to the floor. He runs out of the dining area and into the church. He sees his mother’s surprised face as he runs past her and out of the building.
Before he makes it to the street, he hears the popping sound. He runs faster and faster and then stops suddenly.
“There’s nothing there. It wasn’t real.”
Jacob thinks about going up into Sonnie’s apartment and waiting with her until the funeral starts. He thinks maybe he will leave for Connecticut tonight, and he will beg her to come along. Then he thinks that maybe they’ll skip the funeral and just leave now.
Jacob thinks these and similar thoughts for the next few minutes. He thinks these things because it’s just easier that way. Anything to keep his mind off what he really sees. It will be months before he acknowledges what lies in the middle of the road with the broken glass and the old teakettle with a hole blown through its side. It will take time for him to realize that Sonnie was there, her long hair sticking to the blackened skin on her face, the half-crisped towel still wrapped around her.
Chapter 16
Jacob didn’t want to return to Nescata, ever, and for a long time, he did not. Against the will of his protesting family, he returned to Connecticut soon after the funerals were over. Jacob didn’t remember being at Sonnie’s. It was just an empty space in his mind when he looked back on it. He did remember his granduncle’s ceremony. He died within a week of Jacob’s grandmother. They said it w
as a heart attack. Jacob knew different. Then there was Clay Tandros, the counter boy who had confronted Jacob about Larry Confad’s death. He was standing behind the counter, when he was shot by a passer through, not even half an hour before Sonnie was killed. Those were the last three deaths to occur in the wake of the process.
Jacob didn't return to law school. He left Connecticut soon after returning. He got in his car with what little he had and just headed North. He scraped buy for a while, working as a busboy in a little resort town in northern Michigan. Then he took a test and was hired on as a tollbooth operator at the Mackinac Bridge. The job suited him perfectly. He had minimal interaction with people—he took their money and gave them their change. And it was far away from Nescata.
Jacob didn’t like his life, but he didn’t hate it either. He was isolated, and that felt safe. For a long time, he only waited, getting up each day and doing his job, doing very little at night other than reading and sleeping. Jacob knew all the while that his life would change again someday. He didn’t know what he would be, but he knew he would be used again. But first, there was one more piece of business to take care of in Nescata. There was just a little more he needed to know.
The invitation came in the mail one spring. It was nearly four years since he had last been to Nescata, but Jacob knew he had to go back now. He booked a flight home.
#
Twenty-eight people had graduated from Jacob’s class. All but two made it to the ten-year reunion. One was doing missionary work in Africa. The other worked for the CIA and could not comment much on what she was doing.
People greeted Jacob as he moved about the gymnasium. Many asked where he’d been. Jacob tried to be polite, but he didn’t think he did too well. He was very out of practice with social interaction. After a while, people seemed to ignore him, and he was able to walk around, hanging out in the background, hearing their stories. He was there for nearly two hours before he spotted another person doing the same thing.
“Kevin Rach?”
Kevin looked at Jacob like he was looking at someone he had never seen before. By the way he tilted his glass forward a little and his slow movements, Jacob could tell that Kevin was working on a pretty good buzz. Then, suddenly, Kevin’s eyes lit up.
“Jacob Sims?”
“Yeah. How are you?”
“Can’t complain.”
Jacob turned to the crowd of people in front of them. He couldn’t handle the inquisitive way Kevin was looking at him. But even looking away, Jacob could feel his stare. He stared at Jacob as if he were some rare piece of art that he had been searching his whole life for.
“So Jacob, what do you think of all this?” Kevin eventually asked.
“Oh, I don’t know, some surprises, some not.”
“Yeah, I guess you could say that. But step back and look at the whole thing, and tell me what you see.”
Jacob thought for a moment, not about what he saw, but about how to describe it. “I see a lot.”
Now Kevin had a look of satisfaction on his face. “Yeah, I think so, or more accurately, I thought so a while back.”
“What do you mean, Kevin?”
“What I mean is, I thought it odd that so much came from a little town in Oklahoma."
“Go on.”
“You know, Jacob, I graduated from here without making too many friends. I guess most people probably saw me as a bit of an eccentric. Or better yet, as a rambunctious little twerp. But that’s okay, because I was. In many ways, I still am.”
Jacob wondered why Kevin was telling him all this. But, even more, he wondered why he was somehow interested in knowing what Kevin had to say.
“Anyway, I sort of left without telling anyone where I was going. I went to California, where I found this nice little liberal arts college where I could split my time between studying and checking out tan line contests at the beach. After I left there, I went to another small college to work on my Masters. Now, I’m at Benton College, where I teach history.”
“History!”
“Yeah, you know, stuff that has already happened, those classes they make everybody take but hardly anybody really uses.”
Jacob could only nod. It had been a long time since he felt the magic of this place, and now he could feel it again. He realized that he was with the history man.
“Anyway, it doesn't pay much, but I’m a happy man. I’m happy because I’ve found something that fascinates me more than money. I do what I like to call dynamic historical research. I study historical patterns of certain geographical areas.”
“Really? Ever publish?”
“Every once in a while, but nothing big. But now I think I’ve found something huge.”
Kevin looked at Jacob as if to ask if he really wanted to hear this.
“Go on. What did you find?”
Kevin looked at Jacob inquisitively again. He looked into his eyes, staring away, like he was trying to find something there.
“Anyway, a few years ago, I began to study the historical patterns of Nescata. I found a bit of a pattern, a spasmodic pattern, but still a pattern. It seems that, every so often, our little town produces a senior class not unlike our own. The classes that graduate within a couple of years before it and after it are also extraordinarily well to do, but it’s mainly the one class that really stands out.”
Kevin motioned with his hand.
Jacob looked around. There were two crowds. One was formed around Tim Lester, who was sporting a Super Bowl ring. Then there was Kris Macabe, whose latest record had gone platinum.
“You mean like those two?”
“Those two, yes, but it’s not just them. There are much more in the background. And if the pattern repeats itself in the same way, those in the background will do very important things and receive very little notoriety.”
“Oh really?”
“Yes. Take your friend Adam Masters. He developed a statistical technique called Ecological Sampling Analysis. Basically, it uses big samples made up of people all over the world to identify rare characteristics. Right now, that technique is being used in labs all over the world. It’s used to identify patterns of disease spread.”
“That’s impressive.”
“I’d say. Do you know they’ve identified a very small group of people who are not susceptible to the HIV virus? That would not have been possible without our friend.”
“And you don’t think he’ll receive notoriety?”
“Oh, he might get his name on a few thank-you lists, but he’ll never win the Nobel. That type of fame will go to the researchers, not the statisticians. And he’ll never be another Tim Lester.”
“I think you’re right.”
“And there’s more here, Jacob. And there’s a lot more from the past classes. I’ve connected people from Nescata with people ranging from Martin Luther King to Albert Einstein. And like Adam, they’re always in the background.”
Jacob thought about that. He thought about the way Nescata was. It was Sonnie who had noticed it. People in Nescata had a way of not knowing things. He wondered if people in the world had a way of not knowing things. Stars were who were known. Those who kept the world turning, those in labs, those under the figureheads who make the speeches, they rarely received notoriety.
“So what did you do after you noticed this pattern, Kevin?”
“Well, I set out to understand it more thoroughly, using the best research method I know. I went into the town and started asking around. I hoped to find an old man who had spent many years sitting on his porch observing it all, or some town busy-body who had stumbled upon enough of other peoples’ business to help my cause. Better yet, in my case, the most helpful kind of person you can find is sort of a town vagabond, someone who roamed the town and knew a lot about people."
“Tommy Carmichael,” Jacob heard himself say.
“Yeah, Tommy Carmichael would have done just fine,” Kevin said, giving Jacob another strange look. “Unfortunately, I still haven’t been able
to find anyone. It’s the strangest thing.” Now Kevin looked dejected, buzzed and dejected.
“So Kev, do you think anything will ever come of your Nescata work?”
Kevin sighed, then said, “No, I don't. The way I see it, there’s two respectable ways to go about proving a pattern like this exists. The first, I have just told you about. You go into the town and try to find the source of the pattern. But, as I said, I have searched the town inside out, but still haven’t found one iota of useful information. The second way is to make predictions about the future, based on what has happened in the past, and then sit and wait for the pattern to repeat itself. You see, if it is truly a pattern, it will cycle again.”
“Then you got something. Are you going to publish?”
“Not a chance, old Jake. Not a chance.”
“Why not, if I may ask?”
“Because I would be setting myself up to play the fool. I would use the past pattern to predict a future that would never materialize. The esteemed members of my profession would label me as a mystical buffoon.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You see, historical patterns have a strange way of ending once they have been identified. It’s kind of like the way legends seem to hide themselves. Once they’re exposed, they take up and move into a remote location and take on a new identity, leaving those who chased them with nothing but a few stories that are eventually explained away as coincidences.”
With that, Jacob thought he understood why he had come here. “Legends must die once they are identified.”
“What’s that, Jacob?”
“Oh, nothing, just talking to myself.”
Kevin sighed again. He looked almost ready to cry. “I know something occurred here. I feel it in my gut, but I’ll never find enough evidence to be taken seriously by anyone except the most avid readers of the tabloids. So I’ll just go on teaching history to classes full of uninterested, blank faces. But I’ll always know in my heart that I found something real, and for me that’s enough.”
“Sounds safe,” Jacob said, but he doubted Kevin had any idea how much he meant it.
“Yeah, I guess so,” Kevin replied. “But thank you anyway. Most of the people here remember that I’m a rambunctious twerp. Can’t get a one of them to stand around long enough to hear my story.”
Scribner Horror Bundle: Four Horror Novels by Joshua Scribner Page 65