by Ike Hamill
“Your friend Bob called me after he left here and offered to come pick me up. The two of us went to the house so I could get my car. I figured while we were there, I might as well get us some clothes.”
“Liz, I wish,” Alan started.
“Look, I know you think it’s dangerous, but I didn’t go alone. I had Bob with me. The house is a bit of mess, but everything seems to be in order. They’ve got most of the roads open again except for the big washout. They said on the news that it might take a couple of weeks before that road opens again.”
“I don’t want you going there,” Alan said.
“What? Forever?” Liz asked. She lifted a forkful of rice to her mouth and caught some of it in her hand as it fell.
“It could be dangerous,” Alan said.
“I know. I understand, Alan. That’s why I was careful. Bob and I agreed—it looks like whatever was there is gone.”
Alan sighed. “How can we know? We didn’t know anything was there to begin with.”
Liz frowned and tilted her head a little.
“What are you saying, Alan?”
“Just that it’s dangerous. Maybe.”
“Understood—that’s why I was careful. I didn’t go alone. I went with your friend—the same thing you did last night, right?”
“That was an emergency.”
“Today I had to wear borrowed sweatpants into Sears so I could buy this lovely pantsuit you see on me right now. Your son is currently wearing someone else’s clothes, and you’re wearing hotel pajamas. I think having something to wear was a bit of an emergency as well,” Liz said. She abandoned her fork and picked at her food with delicate fingers.
“Fine,” Alan said. “But can we agree that we will go together next time?”
“Yes,” Liz said.
“And that we won’t move back until after Halloween?”
“I don’t know, honey. We’ve got off-season rates here, but this place is a bit pricey for a whole week, don’t you think?”
“Then somewhere else. We can go to that hotel near the highway,” Alan said. “That’s cheap, right?”
“Okay,” Liz said. “I’ll check into it tomorrow. The convention center is right down the street from there, so it might be full depending on whether there’s a show, but I’ll find out.”
“Is that the one next to the movies?” Joe asked.
“Yes,” Alan said. “We could walk over and see a movie while your mom is at work.”
“Minh has my schedule down to almost nothing next week, so maybe I can come too,” Liz said.
“Even better,” Alan said.
X • X • X • X • X
Alan got into bed when Liz turned out the lights, but he couldn’t sleep. It felt like he’d been asleep for a week. He stared at the glowing numbers on the clock. Almost a whole day had passed since his trip to the hospital, and his body felt better already. His eyes didn’t sting or itch. The pills kept his foot to a dull throb. When Liz’s breathing evened out, Alan slipped out of bed. He hopped over to the desk and sat on the rigid chair.
Alan turned on the desk lamp. It had two settings. He chose “Dim.”
He pulled Rick’s book under the small circle of light. Liz stirred and Alan froze. Her slow breathing resumed and Alan turned his attention back to the book. The cover was worn and dirty. There was no title on the cover or spine. It crackled as he open the cover and turned to the title page. In ornate letters, a single word decorated the page—“Diary.”
Alan turned the page.
The text was faded and difficult to read. After squinting at it for several seconds, Alan puzzled out the first line.
“July 7th.”
What year?
“Father has been gone for two weeks. Mother didn’t hoist the pig properly when she bled it. We ate as much as we could, but most of the meat went bad.”
What does this have to do with anything?
Alan flipped through the pages.
“December 13th. It’s so warm out today—we played in the yard after dinner. Branny made a song about a field mouse. He asked me to write it down, but I forgot.”
Alan set the book up on its spine and let it open to where it would. The book opened to a spot about halfway through.
“October 25th. Mother said she’ll bring them to us tonight. She said I would do the same for my daughter, so I should write down the words. Mother’s writing is indecipherable. She said that Father would recite a verse, and then she would speak, and then it will be my turn.”
Under the Father heading, there was a short verse.
X • X • X • X • X
We open the night and call with a flame.
The darkness, the wind, the water, and pain.
We welcome collectors of wisp and air.
We discard our virtue, our pride, and shame.
The mothers and fathers of spite, beware.
No longer are drawn or desire to pair.
These cousins will bring and then take our name.
So come to our light and grant us your care.
X • X • X • X • X
Alan read the verse twice. He searched his confused memory, trying to recall if he’d heard those words the night before.
“What are you doing?” Liz asked, her voice thick with sleep.
“Nothing, honey,” Alan said. “Just reading.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Bob's
OCTOBER 26
WHEN ALAN pulled up, Bob was outside, working in the yard.
“Hey, how’s the cripple?” Bob asked as Alan got out of the car. “I thought you were supposed to be on crutches.”
“I ditched them,” Alan said. He leaned against the door of his Toyota.
“I see you’ve been back to the house?” Bob asked, gesturing at Alan’s car.
“Yeah, just for a couple of things.”
Bob nodded.
“We’re down at American Suites now,” Alan said. “We moved there today. The Inn was working our budget pretty hard.”
“How long are you staying there?”
“Until the end of the month at least. I don’t know. Joe goes back to school a week from Monday. So maybe we’ll move back next weekend. Still not sure.”
“You think something might happen?” Bob asked. “More trouble?”
Alan looked at the sky. It was a nice afternoon—blue skies with a few puffy white clouds for decoration. The day had warmed into the sixties even though they’d seen frost on the grass that morning.
“You want to take a walk?” Alan asked.
“I’d be happy to. Are you sure you’re up to it?”
“As long as we don’t get too crazy,” Alan said. He motioned towards the path that led to the snowmobile trail.
In a few months, Alan thought, this place might not seem so secluded.
The snowmobile trail looked like it was going to be a major thoroughfare once the snow hit. Another team of eager trail riders had been through with chainsaws and widened the trail even more. Alan and Bob walked down the hill, smelling the scent of freshly trimmed pines. Alan rolled his left foot around the edge with each step to minimize the pressure on his toe. Even with care, the stitches throbbed. He’d skipped his painkillers that morning—he didn’t like the idea of driving while doped up.
“I want to see how the beaver pond looks since the storm,” Alan said.
Bob nodded and stuffed his hands in his pockets as they walked.
“So how much of that book did you read?” Alan asked.
“All of it,” Bob said. “I was waiting around in the hospital to find out how your surgery went, and then when I got home I couldn’t get to sleep. I read it twice, actually.”
“Did you make sense of it?”
“Sophia’s entries were tough to decipher. Marie made a little more sense. I didn’t have any problems at all reading Violet’s entries, except for those little hearts she put over each J.”
Alan laughed.
They reached
the bottom of the hill. As they turned left, Alan saw the devastation from the flooding and destruction of the beaver dam. What used to be a pond was now a muddy mess. The water was only a thin stream between two wide banks of spongy dirt. The beaver lodge was in ruins as well. Alan wondered if the beavers had drowned in the rain.
“What did you think of it?” Bob asked.
“I’d rather hear your perspective first,” Alan said. “I think my judgement might be a little clouded.”
“Okay,” Bob said. “Want to sit?”
He motioned at a couple of big rocks that sat near what used to be the pond’s shoreline. Alan followed him over there.
“I think Sophia started the diary because her mother couldn’t write. I don’t know if the father could. Buster said his father used to read books all the time, so if he wasn’t lying about that, then I guess the father could. Anyway, it looked to me like Sophia was given the task of documenting the processes, so they could move them from an oral tradition to something a little more rigorous.”
“Rigorous,” Alan said with a smirk.
“But Sophia used the diary for more than just documentation. She wrote down quite a bit about her life—she talked about getting married so young, healing people, and then eventually about having a daughter and when her daughter was taken away from her,” Bob said.
“What else did you notice about Sophia?”
“What do you mean?”
“Mental illness?” Alan asked. “Her rants about suicide, and how she talked about amputating her own fingers?”
“Yeah,” Bob said. “But those things happened after they took Marie away from her. It was pretty clear that she was devastated by losing her daughter. I really wasn’t surprised by the change in her mental state. They never told her it was coming and then one day they just took her daughter away to be raised by someone else. I think that would unbalance most mothers.”
“What about her healing?”
“Yeah, I don’t know exactly what to think about the healing. It’s difficult—she didn’t really know what was wrong with the people they brought to her, except in the couple of cases she wrote about where they were physically deformed. I liked the description one of them had. Was it Marie or Violet who suggested that tumors have their own souls?”
“Marie,” Alan said, nodding.
“She said that one of her patients who had a brain tumor was having conversations with it.”
“Perkins,” Alan said. “Dudley Perkins.”
“Yes,” Bob said. “When Marie called the migrators to come take away Dudley’s brain tumor, he sang a song to bid farewell to his friend. That’s an interesting idea—the soul of a tumor. I wonder if anyone’s done a movie about something like that.”
“Cancer’s not a very sympathetic character,” Alan said.
“Despicable characters sometimes lead to good cinema,” Bob said.
“So do you believe any of that stuff from the book?” Alan asked.
“Well…” Bob said. He looked off across the ruins of the pond and thought for a minute before speaking again. “When I was reading it for the second time, I kept thinking how well it all fit. Buster described them as phantoms that fed on the remnants of human spirit. The book said that they would normally stay underground, but a woman with the right training could bring them to the surface to remove demons from human hosts. If you assume that by demons they mean cancer or illness, then it’s like using leeches to suck impurities from a person’s blood, right? One woman of each generation is trained to coax those creatures to the surface to cure people.”
“So you believe that whatever those things were, they perform some kind of psychic surgery?” Alan asked.
“No, not psychic. Maybe they excrete some acid or flesh-eating bacteria or something. Whatever it is, it can be used as a weapon, like on your foot. Or it can be used more precisely. The woman tames those things and makes them behave.”
“Welcome to Kingston Lakes, where logic and reason don’t apply,” Alan said.
“And then one day a giant squid washes up on the beach and science has to revise its thinking. It happens all the time—just less often than it did a thousand years ago,” Bob said. “Maybe they built this whole mythology around a little nugget of a perfectly natural phenomenon. Once you strip away all that other window dressing, maybe the phenomenon isn’t that hard to believe. I’m curious to know what happened in that cabin.”
“I suppose it was the passing down ceremony,” Alan said. “It seemed like the same ceremony described in the book. The one that transferred the knowledge from Sophia to Marie, and Marie to Violet. When they passed the knowledge they had a wedding at the same time. They were there to transfer from Violet to Pauline, but I interrupted the process.”
“So they didn’t finish?” Bob asked.
“I don’t know. I guess not. You read the part about the bones?” Alan asked.
“Yes. It said that the bones of a practitioner must be kept safe from the migrators. I assume that’s why we found Sophia’s bones in that ceramic case.”
“Exactly,” Alan said. “It was like the ceramic acted as an insulator that they couldn’t get past.”
“But it didn’t say why it was important,” Bob said.
“Well, it was implied,” Alan said. “In the Mother’s Verse it said something like, ‘Keep safe the bones, away from migration. Keep safe the soul to aid the temptation.’ I don’t remember exactly. But, if I was reading it right, there was a part that suggested that if those phantoms fed on the soul of a practitioner, that the bones would lose their potency to bring the migrators to the surface again. That means that somewhere around here Buster’s mom must be in one of those porcelain boxes.”
“And Marie,” Bob said. “Don’t forget her. So your instincts were right—those things wanted to get at Sophia’s skeleton. You think that giving her remains to the migrators broke the cycle.”
“It’s a thought,” Alan said. “It certainly seemed to disrupt whatever they were doing. But it’s impossible to separate superstition from fact without more information.”
“Tell me what you saw in there,” Bob said.
Alan took a deep breath. He put his left foot up on his right knee. Even that small change in elevation helped the throbbing.
He told Bob the whole story, beginning with when he walked through the door and ending with his blind escape.
“I wonder if anyone else made it out alive,” Bob said when Alan was finished. “That whole cabin exploded in flame right after you stumbled out.”
“I’m not going back to find out,” Alan said. “Probably get arrested for murder.”
“Our fingerprints are all over that box,” Bob said. “Do fingerprints survive fire?”
“I don’t know,” Alan said.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Discovery
OCTOBER 30
ALAN OPENED his eyes. The monster was still there. Behind him, Liz and Joe were pressed against the sink. The only thing between his family and the monster’s snapping jaws was Alan’s camera. He was swinging it, keeping the monster at bay with the bulky camera body. He had an idea—maybe the flash on the camera would blind the monster and he could sneak his family out the window or something.
Alan stopped swinging and brought the camera’s familiar weight to his hands. He flipped the switch with his thumb.
The monster inched forward. It looked like a giant dog crossed with a lizard. It growled and snapped its jaws. The monster’s rotting breath washed over Alan.
He triggered the flash. Nothing happened. Alan looked down at the camera and saw the crack in the display. His camera was mortally injured.
The monster opened its jaws impossibly wide, like a hippo. A hundred sharp teeth gleamed with white enamel.
The jaws closed on Alan’s hands.
“Alan, wake up,” Liz said. She shook his shoulder.
“What?” Alan asked.
“You have to stop reading that book every night. It al
ways gives you nightmares.”
“I know,” Alan said. He flipped the pillow over and turned away from his wife. This hotel had puffy pillows. He couldn’t get comfortable with them.
“You might as well get up,” Liz said. “You said you’d take Joe to that breakfast place and I’m sure he’s already up.”
“Yeah,” Alan said. He drifted back to sleep.
“Alan!” Liz said. She laughed and hit him with her own puffy pillow.
“Okay, okay.” Alan said.
He slipped out of bed and lurched to the bathroom. The Kingston Village Inn was definitely more luxurious, but the American Suites room was nice and generic. There was no character and no history. It could have been anywhere in the country. Alan liked it much better. He brushed his teeth with one hand while he reached around to scratch his back with the other.
“Hey, Dad,” Joe said.
“Whuh?” Alan asked through his toothpaste.
“Look.”
Alan looked at his son. Joe smiled, revealing fangs.
“I’m going to be a vampire. Mom got me a cape, and I’m going to put some blood in the corner of my mouth.”
Alan leaned down to spit in the sink.
“I thought you were too old for costumes.”
“I’m not too old for scary costumes that get me candy,” Joe said. “Mom said she would take me to the neighborhood near her office tomorrow night. There’s a lot of houses there.”
“You’re going too,” Liz called from the other room.
“I don’t have a costume.”
“He said he doesn’t have a costume,” Joe relayed to his mom.
“That’s okay,” Liz said. “He doesn’t need candy.”
“Why don’t you go get dressed,” Alan said to Joe. “We’ll go out to that breakfast place you found.”
Joe gave him one more fang-smile and then retreated to his own hotel room.
On the other side of their hotel bed, Liz was doing her morning back stretches next to the window.