Dempsey grimaced, leaned forward and put his hands on his thighs for support. “What do I do, what—what am I supposed to do?”
“Kill yourself.”
“I’ve tried,” he whispered. “God knows, over the years, I’ve tried.”
“There’s no other way. You should’ve done it a long time ago.”
Dempsey’s eyes blurred with rain and tears. “What about everyone else? What about you?”
“You can’t even protect yourself.” Rae leaned forward into the path of the rain falling from the doorframe, let it spatter against her forehead, run the length of her face and drip onto her blouse. “I’ve had the visions—I told you this was coming—I tried to warn you, tried to tell you in readings this would happen, every time you came here sniveling and trying to understand all the shit crawling through your head. You kept coming back but you never believed me.”
“I didn’t know, I—the night stories have been there for so long, I didn’t—”
“Tell me, old man,” she said, her tongue sliding slowly from between her lips to catch the rain. “You believe me now?”
Dempsey stared down at the mud and puddles forming around his boots. “I can stop it,” he said softly.
“Only in you. They’ve been waiting for years. That’s what the dead do.”
“There’s got to be a way.”
“How many, Dempsey, how many years they been waiting on you? You tell me, how many?”
His head remained bowed.
“That’s the thing about evil,” she said. “It doesn’t care about time. Where it comes from there’s no such thing.”
“What are you going to do?”
“It’s roaming free now. You think I don’t know it’ll come for me and my kids, too?” She took another step into the rain, the knife still held at her side. “I know who I am and I know who they are. They came out of me, I gave them life. I know where our salvation lies, and I’ll die before I let it touch one hair on their heads.”
“Run.” Dempsey coughed as something loosened in his lungs. “Can’t you just run?”
“It’s all in where you run to.”
“You’ve always known, haven’t you?”
“Since I was a little girl, since the time I first set eyes on you.”
“You saw the end even then, even back when you and Lacy were friends?”
“I could sense it.” Rae’s face still held no expression. “Same way I sensed things in the way you looked at me. And I wasn’t the only one.”
Dempsey stumbled through the mud, back in the direction of his truck, but it seemed more an attempt to remain upright than a retreat. “It’s gonna bring up the dead, ain’t it? Now that the wall’s down that—thing—it’s gonna bring up the dead.”
“That’s what it does, old man.”
“Do they know, Rae? Do the dead know?”
“Yeah. I don’t know how, but they do.”
Dempsey coughed again, felt spittle bubble over his bottom lip. He wiped it away, his body rocking, feet still anchored in thick mud. “Can’t run from the past, the ghosts they—they always catch up.”
“Don’t have to catch up,” she corrected him. “They’re here all along. You just forget. Until that shiver runs through you or you hear that strange sound in the night, until those thoughts and memories come screaming back and you realize those ghosts never left. They’ve been standing right behind you the whole time.”
“I can’t take no more of it.” Dempsey brought his hands to his head, clutched it as if trying to prevent it from splitting to pieces. “I can’t…”
Rae was gone. The door to her shack remained open, but she had slipped back inside.
“Rae?” he called in a weak and raspy voice. “Rae you hear me?”
He pictured her with her children, huddled in a corner beneath a blanket and clutching that silly knife as a means of defense against things for which there was none. He wished he could follow her, climb the steps and venture inside what remained of her home and hide there with them. He wished they could all ride the storm out together.
But that wasn’t possible. He was alone now more than ever. Before, he’d had the night stories, and horrible as they were, they’d belonged to him.
Not anymore.
Drenched and exhausted, Dempsey slogged back to his truck and fell against the still open door, catching himself before the mud below could claim him. Lightning crackled nearby and tore through a patch of forest to his left, but all he could see was the rain. A relentless, driving rain coming down in sheets and with such velocity that it stung on contact.
And the look in Rae Vadoma’s eyes…the look of the doomed.
The look of someone already dead.
14
The night had gone some time ago, but it still felt like those moments just before dawn, when the light was lackluster and anemic and the world was silent and still as the dead, as if waiting to see if anyone had noticed all that had taken place in the dark. Rain fell in buckets. Beneath a dull gray sky, the buried neither noticed nor minded, their stone markers scattered across the modest cemetery grounds and up along the side of a hill, the summit of which overlooked an old country church.
Anita remained in the car, watched Chris through the windshield. He’d left the Audi running and the wipers going, so she’d glimpse him for a second or two, lose him in the sluicing rain, and then, as the wipers made another pass, find him again, still standing over his mother’s small headstone, hands stuffed in his coat pockets and his head bowed like a child who had just reported to a parent for punishment. And perhaps, in a way, he had.
At thirty, Anita Stevens had never suspected this was where her life would lead her, estranged from her husband of seven years, parked in a graveyard in Nowhere, Maine and sitting in the car of a man she worked for, a married man sixteen years older than she was and with whom she’d already had one sexual encounter and would undoubtedly have more before the weekend was through. Even now she found herself flirting with the possibility of this becoming a long-term and—dare she even think it?—meaningful relationship.
She pulled her Blackberry from her purse. “No useable signal,” she muttered. “Awesome.”
Clicking on the Photo icon, she scrolled through a few shots until she’d located one of her husband Brendan, taken a year ago while on a weekend getaway to Cape Cod. He was standing on a sand dune, the wiseass grin she’d fallen in love with plastered on his face, eyes hidden behind dark sunglasses. Her heart sunk. He’d never seen the breakup coming, never for a moment even suspected they had anything but a happy marriage, and it hit him like a baseball bat to the face. He’s so bruised and battered now, she thought. Barely recognizable the last time she’d seen him, the confident, funny and boyishly handsome man her husband had been was gone, replaced by a haggard drunk wasting away to nothing in the studio apartment he’d rented.
Destroyed, she thought. Destroyed without me. Destroyed by me. Murdered.
“Why are you doing this?” he’d asked her. “Is there someone else?”
“No,” she lied. “I just need some time.”
“For what? What’s happening? What are you doing?”
Breaking your heart. And just because I can.
There was something hideously powerful in that, her ability to hurt others while doing what she felt she needed, wanted and desired. Not that she was a mean or deliberately hurtful person—she wasn’t—but the power of having the ability to inflict emotional damage or pain on another human being was an intoxicating premise at times. With Anita, it boiled down more to selfishness. The only child of middleclass parents who spoiled her, she’d always been somewhat unconsciously self-centered. In fact, she’d moved through much of her life completely unaware of the destruction in her wake. From boyfriends in high school on, she’d been something of a heartbreaker, as those she initially found irresistible often quickly turned unbearable. And she had no idea why. She’d once had dreams of being a doctor, a coroner, but college neve
r materialized, much less medical school, and instead she worked a few office jobs, met Brendan, fell in love and got married.
She had a nice life, a successful marriage, a loving husband.
Then why can’t I be happy?
She was always chasing something, it seemed, though she was never quite sure what. She’d thought she’d found her Holy Grail, and at first told herself the separation from her husband would only be temporary, that she’d get herself together and come to her senses with Chris and she and Brendan would get back together, move on and forget any of this had ever happened.
But, in the last several weeks, Anita had begun to believe their marriage was more than likely over and done with. They’d been so happy once. Until she’d gotten that job, met Chris and…what? Fallen in love? Become infatuated? Regardless, despite all that had happened, an ember still remained, a possibility that at some point they could end up back together. Stranger things have happened, she thought. Yeah, like making it with your boss, a married man who happens to technically be old enough to be your father.
Brendan was a good man, a good husband, and didn’t deserve the hell she’d put him through in these last few months. Despite everything that had happened, Anita was sure if she wanted to get back together he’d do it in a heartbeat. He was still wildly in love with her, and she loved him too, but at the end of the day was reconciliation really what she wanted? Although she felt horribly guilty about what had happened, she knew she had to see this through to the end. Whatever this thing was she had with Chris (she still wasn’t quite sure), she had to find out before she made any final decisions.
To a degree, Anita had always been something of a loner. She had few friends—especially female friends—and had often been accused throughout the course of her life as someone distant and removed from the people and situations around her. Not a cold person, particularly, just one for whom genuine warmth tended to be reserved for a small circle in select situations, she was the type of woman one might be acquainted with for years and never truly know at all. One saw and knew precisely what Anita allowed and wanted them to see. Nothing more. Nothing less. And that could vary greatly, given the person and/or circumstances she found herself in. As a result, the Anita her husband Brendan knew was distinctly different than the Anita Chris knew or the Anita one of her girlfriends knew. All were real. All were her. Yet the extremes were often so severe that one might be unrecognizable to the other.
In years past, Anita had always felt she had control of it, of all the different versions of her moving about simultaneously in the world.
But no more.
The tap of keys on the window startled her. With a jump, she closed the photo program, sending the vision of her husband into oblivion as she looked up to find Chris standing next to the car. She lowered the window. “Sorry, I—”
“Let me get that trash,” he said; voice barely audible above the rain. “They’ve got a barrel over there.”
Anita gathered up the bag and cup holder from the diner and handed it out the window to him. As Chris turned and strode to a trash bin several feet away, she raised the window, sealing herself off from the storm once again.
The moment the window closed she felt a disturbingly powerful sensation of dread the likes of which she’d never experienced before. It was as if she’d just been given some horrible news or had awakened from a particularly unsettling nightmare, the residue of which still clung to her like a second skin. Invasive, it felt like someone had not only been watching her, but listening to the intimate thoughts moving through her mind.
With a sigh she tossed her Blackberry back into her purse, swept a wisp of hair from her eyes and looked back out the windshield at the graveyard.
Something stood on the far side of the grounds.
A man, a…a very tall man…just a shadow, really.
Anita sat forward and squinted through the rain, timing her focus with the tempo of the wipers. Standing perhaps half a football field away between a headstone and a modest mausoleum ravaged by age, she couldn’t tell if the man was facing her or had his back to her. In fact, she couldn’t be certain it was a man at all, but at that height and girth the odds of it being a woman seemed highly unlikely.
Weird, she thought. They’d been alone in the cemetery the whole time.
It was as if the person had simply appeared from nowhere.
She swallowed nervously, put her hands on the dash and leaned closer still to the windshield. Although basically a silhouette, quite a distance away and visible only in short intervals as the wipers wagged back and forth against the storm, she could still tell there was something wrong with this person. It almost looked as if he was wearing a full-length coat with something beneath it on either side of him, something bulky but symmetrical and held close to his sides. Or was he simply built in this manner, the victim of some odd deformity?
The driver’s side door opened, Chris slid behind the wheel and slammed the door behind him. He was soaked to the bone and dripping wet, his eyes still a bit distant. “Christ, this goddamn rain is relentless,” he said, and then realized the look on her face was a mix of confusion and something approaching terror. “Nita, what’s the matter? What’s wrong?”
She looked back out the windshield and pointed.
The man, or whatever it was, had gone.
But just like the night, it felt as if a part of him was still there.
15
Her shopping complete, Lana stood by the door of the General Store, a brown paper bag of groceries held against her chest. An unremarkable rain had again evolved into a furious storm, and this time there seemed no end in sight. She had just resigned herself to being stranded, when through the rain-mottled store window she noticed the cab parked diagonally across the street.
She considered opening the umbrella but opted to make a run for it instead. With a deep breath, she hurried across the street, feet splashing puddles. The cold rainwater drenched her ankles, and a gust of wind nearly knocked her off her feet, but she held tight to the groceries, pressed forward and closed on the cab just as Duck leaned over and opened the passenger-side door for her. She dropped onto the seat and closed the door behind her in one frenzied rush. “My God!” she said breathlessly. “I’ve never seen rain come down like this!”
A spray of water flew from her as she jumped into the car. Duck casually wiped his face and offered a smile. “You know, you could’ve just waved me down. I would’ve picked you up out front. Not exactly fighting off the fares.”
Lana let the umbrella fall to the floor, adjusted the grocery bag in her lap then ran a hand over her hair and back across the ponytail, as if to be certain it was still intact. Her face was flushed and moist, her clothes soaked. “What the hell, little exercise never hurts.”
She returned his smile, but there was something slightly off about her. Up close Duck found it easier to read her. The smile seemed fairly genuine but was accompanied by a reserve that kept things guarded, a melancholy that prevented this woman’s emotions from being uninhibited and natural. “You need to go anywhere else or you headed back to the cottage?”
“Is there anywhere else to go in this town?” she asked, absently brushing water from her shoulders.
“Good point.” He pulled out and drove slowly along Main Street without bothering to start the meter. “Probably best to get inside and lay low until this mess blows over.”
“It doesn’t look like that’ll be happening any time soon.” Lana noticed the meter wasn’t running. “Isn’t your meter working?”
“I figured we’d call it a personal favor instead of a business transaction. You know, one friend driving another friend home?”
“Thank you, but I’d just as soon pay if you don’t mind.”
Duck could almost feel her body tighten, her muscles constrict and her jaw clench. He activated the meter. “Business it is.”
Neither spoke for a time, leaving only the steady drone of rain and windshield wipers.
�
�Look,” she finally said, “I didn’t mean—”
“Hey, I’m just a driver, no need to explain.”
“I didn’t mean to be rude, OK?”
“Yeah, I get it.” Duck tightened his grip on the wheel. They ventured onto bumpier terrain and powered through the storm, the trees on either side of the road looming over them. “You’re one of those women who’re impossible to be nice to. You think if a guy holds a door for you or says hello he’s looking to get in your pants. Well, sorry to disappoint you, lady, but not every act of kindness has ulterior motives. I suggest you get over yourself.”
Lana faced the window. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“No really, I apologize, I—”
“It’s cool. No skin off my ass.”
“Now who’s being impossible?”
He was about to answer her when through the blur of wind and rain he saw a dark smudge sticking up from the right side of the road. Duck slowed the taxi, rolled to a stop. He didn’t need to tell Lana why, she was looking out the window and had seen it, too.
“Oh my God,” she muttered.
The back left tire of an SUV protruded up over an incline on the side of the road. The remainder of the vehicle was stuck in the ditch below and on its side.
Lana fumbled through her purse and pulled free a cell phone. She’d refrained from using it until then because it might give some clue as to her whereabouts if the provider tracked where her phone’s signal had originated from. But she had to take the chance, someone might be seriously hurt. “I’ll call for help.”
“Not on that you won’t. No signal in town, that’s why hardly anybody around here has them.” Duck pulled the car over to the side of the road. “Only place you can get a signal is over at Ryan’s blueberry patch. There’s a big hill there. If you go to the very top sometimes you can get enough of a signal to make a call, but that’s about it. In this storm, I wouldn’t even count on that.”
The Living and the Dead Page 9