Well, Levi said, we have no way of knowing. But I suggest you keep an eye out. Watch your children. And the wonderful teens in our youth group, you need to be leaders. You have to be examples to your friends and protect the younger ones.
The group of teenagers, who sat together, all nodded.
Report to me if you see any occult behavior, any increase in interest. Let your peers know that they need to put on the armor of God in every aspect of their lives.
The teenagers nodded grimly, armed with purpose.
7
Billy woke in the dark, the television the only light in the room. Everyone who’d slept over after the party lay on the floor, snoring. Claire lay next to him, curled up with her knees against her chest.
His head throbbed. It was going to split. He imagined it cracking, a seam of blood running from forehead, down his nose, down his lips. He shook his head to get the image out and the pain grew with the movement.
Fuck, he said into the dark, and tried to stand up. He had to piss. It was almost worse than the pain.
Fuck, he said again, and made his way to the door, which was opened. Only the screen door kept out the bugs that whipped against the mesh, trying to get to blue television light.
On TV, a black and white movie about war played, the sound turned all the way down. Two men huddled in the mud behind a barrier, their faces too clean, their hands wrapped around their guns.
Billy stepped outside and went around the back of the trailer where nobody else would stumble out and find him. It wasn’t his place. It was John’s trailer, a rental place his folks had left for him when they’d retired and left town for Florida. John lived in Keno but kept this place for parties—you could do whatever you wanted out here in Heartshorne. No cops. Even if they came, you could get out of things easy. All John would have to do was flash his smile and say his father’s name, and they’d be golden. Unless they killed somebody or something like that, they were untouchable.
Billy lived in Keno now, but he had come out here as a kid for camping. Now that he was an adult, he only came out for John’s parties. These woods gave him the creeps, though he, too, nodded when people said such pretty country, nowhere like it in Oklahoma. That, at least, was true.
He zipped up his pants and leaned against the wall.
Just through the woods, down a trail, was Echo Lake. Billy wasn’t a big fan of lakes, particularly not lakes the way they were out here—no lifeguards, no buoys to tell you where the water got too deep. He was not a fool, not like the others. Sometimes, after a few beers and some weed, they all went out into the lake to swim, but Billy stayed onshore. He’d seen water snakes one night at dusk, their pale heads held above the surface of the water, and now he couldn’t step into the water without thinking of them slinking just below the surface. Plus, he still remembered when he’d cut his lip open as a child on an underwater branch here at Echo Lake—it had snagged him like a hook in a fish’s mouth. His mouth and nose had filled with water as he pulled and pulled and felt his skin tearing before his mother splashed out into the water and extricated him from the branches.
The air was thick, foggy. The day had been unseasonably cool, but the night was humid. His head felt worse after he had pissed. Now, the pain had room to make itself known.
He looked behind him: he heard branches snapping, the sound of something coming toward him. He saw a faint flicker of flashlight.
Hello? He called out.
Maybe one of the girls had stumbled out of the trailer and was confused, he thought. Too drunk or high to remember where she was.
Hello. It was a woman. She shone her light on Billy’s face and aimed it downward again when he held his hands up to guard his face.
Come here, she said, motioning towards herself with the flashlight. He couldn’t make out her face behind the light. Could you help me? She asked. I don’t feel so well.
Me neither, Billy said, and wondered if he were dreaming. Maybe he’d smoked too much—years ago, when he’d taken a big hit of hash laced with something much more potent, he’d felt time slowing, dripping from events like honey from a spoon, and he’d spent the night in the fetal position in some kid’s bedroom, starting at the Hannah Montana posters as they gyrated on the wall. But he’d never thought a dream was real before. That was a new one.
Come here, she said. The light shone at his feet and he followed it until he reached the woman. Up close, he could finally see her. She was older than thirty, thin, her hair blonde. She wore a nightgown that reached just below her knees. She took his hand. Come on, she said.
She took him down the trail to Echo Lake. He wasn’t afraid and thought it strange that he was not afraid. Surely their heavy steps would scare the snakes away, he thought. She wore no shoes.
When they reached the beach, she shone her light on the water.
Look, she said.
Across the surface of the lake, a yellow fog rose. It billowed from the water as though the water were breathing. It was thick, darker than the air around it.
Shit, he said, watching it pulse and movie its almost physical bulk. That’s fucked up.
She nodded. It’s making me dizzy. She stood on her tiptoes and breathed in heavy and hard, as though trying to catch a smell high in the air. Then she laughed. The more you breathe it in, the funnier you feel, she said.
Billy nodded. He could feel it entering his nose and mouth. It tasted faintly like oil and metal. His stomach hurt and his headache widened. He was all pain from ear to ear. He imagined the smoke invading his lungs, hooking his blood vessels (he wasn’t quite sure how oxygen got to the blood—that part of high school had flown right past him), making his whole body feel heavy and fogged. He looked across the water, where power lines were strung along the roads with lights at the top of the posts, dotting the bridge. The trees below it made a jagged mass of black.
Come on back to my house, she said. She was quick and light, happier now than she had been when she first met him. He wondered how she could be so cheerful in such thick, suffocating air. He could almost feel the fog rising from the lake, the mass of it carrying a physical force. He had the quick, paranoid thought that if it wanted, it could knock him off of his feet. He took her hand to steady himself and found his feet following her along the edge of the river and down another path. He followed her light, not sure now where he was—he hadn’t gone by foot much farther than the path from John’s to the river and then up the road to the gas station that sold Bud Light and Kool-Aid colored bottles of wine coolers.
I should go back, he called, but she didn’t turn or acknowledge him. Without her light, he wouldn’t be able to find his way back. He followed behind her, though his head pounded with each step, with each swing of his arms through the air.
It’s right up here. She turned and the light shone in his face.
She lived in a trailer much like John’s—flimsy, but neat, the skirting in a design of white hatching. She sat on the front steps and motioned for him to sit beside her.
His head throbbed. I’m going to die, he thought. I’m going to die right here in front of this woman I don’t even know. My skin is going to split and my tongue will tear from my mouth and then my heart will stop.
Please, he said, kneeling on the ground. Can I use your light to get back? I’m sick. I’m sick with something.
The woman stood over him. You’re just not used to the fog, she said. Or you’re hungover. Why don’t you come inside?
He shook his head, on his hands and knees. His right knee leaned against something sharp—a baseball-sized rock with a tip like an arrowhead. He pushed the rock out of the way and let his knees sink down in the mud. He couldn’t think through the pain.
She knelt down close to his face. She smelled of sweat and shampoo and of the fog rising from the lake, vaguely salty and poisoned.
Hey, she said so loudly the sound echoed in his head, in the hollows of his face, and the pain crowded in behind it.
Please don’t shou—
What? She lean
ed close to his ear. I can’t hear what you’re saying. Can you hear—
The sound of the rock against the back of her head was sharp and quick and satisfying. She made small sounds, her mouth against the ground, and when he hit her again, her head collapsed slightly beneath the rock, she made tiny, jerking movements, one arm reaching up to slap the ground and then go limp. Her hair blackened in the light. The white dress was mud streaked, the collar splattered with blood.
He waited on his hands and knees until the headache faded enough for him to stand. He took the flashlight and the rock and went back down the path, back down the edge of the lake, where he stopped to throw the rock out into the water and wash his hands. The rock made a heavy, fleshy sound against the water and he imagined the lake swallowing it up and letting it rest down at the bottom, where the yellow fog came from.
He walked back up the path to John’s without any trouble. Inside, the room was just as he’d left it. How long had he been gone? He didn’t know how far it had been to the woman’s house, how long he’d stayed. Already, his memory was fading. The headache was like a buzzing television, a sound that drowned out his memory of the events or images. He remembered the rock, sharp against his knee, and how the smooth side fit perfectly in his hand.
The television was still on, but now it showed an infomercial for a bottle of pills. A number flashed across the screen and a man with teeth as bright as the concentrated light of a flashlight (how did he get the one in his hands? Billy thought) smiled and his mouth moved. Billy lay back down in his spot, curled his body into a ball, and fell asleep.
Shannon Dawkins was found four days later. She was a loner, a little strange, people said, and had been missing from work for three days before anyone came out to see how she was. She lived in the country, far out even for Heartshorne, and her parents were used to not hearing from her for long stretches of time. She’d had trouble with drugs when she was a teenager, and she hadn’t been quite right since then. But she was quiet and kept to herself and worked at the Dollar Tree fifty hours a week from Monday through Saturday.
The sheriff found her in the front yard of her trailer. He had to shoo away the birds, who’d ripped holes in the thin white fabric of her nightdress and had pecked holes into her scalp, leaving her hair scattered across the lawn.
By the time her body was found, John and his friends had cleared out. Billy had seen blood underneath his fingernails when he woke that morning.
Fuck, he said. How much did I drink?
John laughed. You had your share.
I think I must have scratched myself in my sleep, he said. Or maybe that girl, Judy or Claire or whoever, the one I was sleeping next to.
He remembered dreaming of a woman in white who had led him down to the edge of Echo Lake and had tried to drown him in yellow, soupy water.
8
Emily repainted the walls a softer white than the bright bluish white they’d been before and had the carpet torn up, revealing real wood floors that needed only to be polished and finished. When the carpets were gone, Frannie seemed gone, or at least the image of her death had faded. Emily was glad she had never met the woman—it would have been that much more difficult to live in the house if she’d had a face to match with the name.
She had called the police station and inquired about Frannie’s death. It was unsolved, but deemed a random act of violence, unrelatd to any of the other recent deaths.
The other ones are probably drug-related, the woman who had covered the case said. And Ms. Collins’ death could be related to drugs, too, though not by any fault of her own; sometimes meth heads, looking for money or drugs or simply out of their minds, do things like this. It isn’t common, but I’d get your locks re-done, your windows secured, all of that. Otherwise, I’d say you are in no more danger than anyone else.
The news didn’t comfort Emily, but at least she knew what to do about it. She had the windows reinforced, the locks changed. Every night, she shut the house up tight except for her second-floor bedroom window.
Despite what had happened there, the house was becoming hers. And she had to make it hers, had to stay, because she had nowhere else to go. She’d considered leaving after the church meeting, had told herself that she’d just go back to Columbus, where at least she had friends from work, or more accurately acquaintances that she had once called friends. Maybe she could get her old job back if the position hadn’t been filled already. She imagined herself going back to the office after buying a new black skirt and button-up shirt from the thrift store, explaining that she’d been wrong to leave, that it was an error, that she’d had nothing waiting for her where she’d gone and that she wanted nothing more than to slip back into the life that she’d abandoned.
But it wasn’t possible. She had only a small amount of money saved to tide her over until she found a job. Having no rent helped, but she was still running out of money—food, gas, home repairs, and electric bills were slowly picking away at her savings. She had enough for four months, tops. She couldn’t make the two-day trip back to Columbus with no place to go, no job secured. Renting an apartment and paying the first month plus deposit would take out the equivalent of four months food budget here in Heartshorne. She was here for good, despite her fear after learning of how Frannie had died, despite the fact that (she had to face this, it was true) she didn’t feel much in common with the people she had met here so far, at least not the ones at the church meeting.
She felt unkind to even think it, but there was a gap between her and the people she’d met so far. She’d been to college, she had lived in a city, she had lived with a man for almost ten years, yet had no children with him—these were all relatively rare things in Heartshorne. She had realized that at the church service, where questions about her job, her children, her family, had all fallen flat. So Emily was a rare and strange creature, somebody that they didn’t know how to categorize, exactly. And she, too, didn’t know where she fit.
For now, being alone was a welcome change: she could walk around in her underwear and lie on the floor to read in the middle of the day, nowhere to go and no-one to please, but she could already feel that the freedom would soon weigh on her. Too much of nothing to do had never suited her well, and she knew she’d grow tired of it and look for something—a job, a friend, a lover—to create those limits and edges that would push her into some shape. She’d looked in the Heartshorne Gazette for jobs, hoping for something administrative. She could file and type and answer phones, at least until something better came along. But there was nothing administrative, which made sense—there were few offices in the area until you reached Keno, and the people who already had desk jobs probably held on tightly to them. She circled jobs that she never would have imagined herself taking: car hop at Sonic, waitress at the Keno Kitchen diner, stocker at Wal-Mart.
Though objectively she understood that she’d have to take some kind of job—and soon—it didn’t feel urgent. She had lost the drive that she’d had her whole life, the feeling that she had to be doing something, anything, no matter how little she liked it or how little she understood its purpose. Now, she found herself satisfied to do nothing, and it frightened her. She woke up in the mornings and ate her breakfast at the kitchen table, the windows opened out into the damp backyard, trees and underbrush rustling with the movement of animals she couldn’t see. She’d waste hours just listening to how the house filled with sound as soon as she opened a door or window into the outdoors: the cricket-filled silence after dark and the daylight sounds of faraway car noises and the damp stickiness of her legs against the vinyl of her kitchen chairs or her feet slapping against the newly revealed living room floor. In Columbus, she’d been afraid of being still, of not moving forward, not moving forward was a kind of death. But how had she been moving forward while supporting Eric, moving up slowly in the ranks of a job she could hardly remember just a month after leaving it? She sometimes tried to think back to the steps she’d had to take every morning for four years at her pre
vious job, which had involved typing new information about clients into computer accounts. She’d done this thousands of times, but she now she could only remember clearly two things: the blue border around the program she had used to input statistics and numbers and the curious ping sound that the program made when she typed something in incorrectly. This was how her days had been filled, and she couldn’t even remember how it felt or exactly what she did. Emily was alone, but not lonely.
Living as she did in Heartshorne felt like camping. She drove to town every other week for toilet paper and weekly groceries and drove back and loaded up her refrigerator so she wouldn’t have to go to the convenience store and subsist off of hot pockets and chicken strips. She was alone with herself and sometimes so bored that she read books she hadn’t cracked since college: the essays of Montaigne, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and The Catcher in the Rye, which made her miss being young enough to be charmed and not annoyed by Holden Caulfield. The days were long and warm. And her house, not yet cluttered with the things that she would inevitably buy to fill it, was all empty spaces and bare corners. She hoped she’d never fill the space. She practiced being there in all of that empty, in lying down on the living room carpet and staring at the white ceiling until she could memorize the stipples of paint and cracks. So much had passed her by in her previous life. She wouldn’t forget so much now, she decided. She wouldn’t be the kind of person who couldn’t remember what she had done everyday for years or exactly how the places she spent her time had looked.
She hadn’t met many people in Heartshorne yet, aside from the church meeting. She wasn’t quite sure where people lived. The main roads and highways were all but deserted, dotted only with infrequent houses and convenience stores and churches, but each afternoon a schoolbus full of children passed her. She’d driven her car down the dirt road that went past her house until it branched off in two smaller dirt roads, each labeled with a direction and a number: SW 56, NW 305. She supposed all of the houses were there, but where did they go? Did the roads even out and widen and become pavement again? There were mazes of roads and houses beyond hers, she imagined, but she feared getting tangled up, her car stuck in a muddy ditch miles and miles from a house or phone. Her cell phone didn’t work out here—didn’t work until Keno, where she didn’t much need it anyway, there being nobody to call. She had called Eric once, when she arrived, to let him know where she was. He had said little when she called and she heard the faint sound of music in the background. He asked her how she was, but she could hear the boredom in his voice, so she’d told him that she had a job interview to go to and hung up. But she knew Cheryl at Rod’s Swap Shop, and often visited, making excuses about having to stock up on supplies, though there truthfully wasn’t much there she had any use for. She could only use so many beer cozies and wind chimes and American flag flip-top lighters.
Echo Lake Page 6