Andrew’s office was adjacent to the kitchen; it was as immaculate and orderly as ever. His favorite armchair was in the same corner that it had occupied for as long as Ben could remember. The office was the only room in the house that boasted the stale smell of tobacco.
Ben flicked on the small light by the armchair and sank down into the seat. He ran his fingertips over the worn leather of the right arm and thought of his father in the chair a few nights before when they spoke on the phone. You can always come home.
Ben wished he had stayed in Boston. If he had, perhaps his father would be alive. Perhaps Ben doomed him by returning. It had called him, not Andrew.
An almost empty pack of Marlboro Lights and a silver Zippo lighter were perched on the small table by the chair. He took one of the cigarettes and the lighter and put the filter between his lips. The paper crackled when he lit the end and inhaled a deep puff of smoke. Ben had never been a smoker, but, in that moment, he wanted the cigarette. He needed to feel close to his father. His throat rebelled at the sting of the burning tobacco, and he coughed before he took another drag.
The house stood as a reminder of the parts of himself he would never get back. Ben felt loss. You’re a thirty-three-year-old orphan, Benji. He let out a mirthless laugh. His voice echoed in the small room; it sounded hollow even to his own ears. A wedge of ash formed at the end of the cigarette. Ben flicked it over the tray on the table.
He wished that he had not spent the previous night with Nicholas. He wished that he had not gone for that drink after his release. He wished he had said no and spent the evening with his father.
Ben took the ashtray and shuffled to Andrew’s desk. A bottle of pricey whiskey was hidden away in the bottom drawer just as Ben had anticipated. He swallowed down as much of the amber liquid as he could stand in one go and dropped into the desk chair. He ashed the cigarette and inhaled a further lungful of self-destruction from the filter.
The rush of nicotine knotted Ben’s stomach and he stubbed the butt of the cigarette in the tray. Little lines of smoke wafted up as the fire died out. He wrinkled his nose at the smell and took another long gulp of whiskey.
“You always had the good stuff, Dad,” Ben said to the empty room.
He surveyed the contents of his father’s desktop and glowered at the three framed photographs that Andrew kept there. On the far left corner of the desk was a photo of Andrew with Kate at her graduation from law school. In the middle was Andrew with Caroline on their wedding day. On the far right was Andrew with Ben.
The occasion of the photograph escaped Ben for a moment. At last, he realized it was from his sixteenth birthday. It was the day Andrew had given him the Camaro. Ben leaned closer for inspection and stared down at his father’s grin.
“I was such an asshole,” he said aloud. “I should have come back sooner. And often.”
Ben’s shoulders shook as his entire body gave under the weight of the reality that he would never be able to say these words to his father. Tears he had refused to shed all afternoon darted down his face. He slumped over the desk and rested his head on the leather desk pad.
When he finally sat upright again, his neck was stiff. Ben grabbed the bottle of whiskey and took another long draught from it before he resumed his place in the armchair. He breathed in the complex scent of its old leather mixed with the hint of Andrew’s familiar cologne and the stench of stale cigarettes.
The insistent ringing of the doorbell jolted Ben into consciousness. He bolted up from the chair. His left leg tingled from where it had fallen asleep. He had fallen asleep. He checked the clock on the opposite wall and blinked to clear his blurry vision.
“It’s ten o’clock, asshole,” Ben called out, but he doubted he could be heard from the front of the house. He kicked his foot out a few times to clear the pins and needles before he limped to the front door.
The bell rang again, and Ben grumbled as he peered through the peephole and saw Nicholas. Ben considered telling him to fuck off, but he was in no rush to end up back in a jail cell. He opened the door and tried to appear as sober as he could manage given that his head was still swimming in whiskey.
“What?” he asked when he swung open the door. Nicholas gazed down at him, and Ben was pleased to see the other man looked miserable. “Let me guess,” Ben said as he held up a hand. “I’m under arrest again.”
There was something dark in Nicholas’ right hand, which he thrust forward. Ben recognized his suit jacket; he had forgotten the garment in his haste to leave. He grabbed it, but he was careful to not touch the other man’s hand.
“How thoughtful,” Ben said, his tone dry. “Goodbye.”
“We need to talk, and we’re not doing it in your front yard.”
“Why not?” Ben asked. “We did before. Oh, but you’re the big, bad sheriff now. Appearances are important.”
“Ben.”
“Fine. Say what you want then leave. I get it. You need to have the last word. You always needed to have the final say.”
Nicholas rolled his eyes and pushed inside. He kicked the door shut behind him. “You’re drunk.”
“I bet you fucking aced your detective skills test, Nolan.”
Nicholas’ sigh bubbled with deep frustration. “Fuck you, Ben.”
A slow smirk crept across Ben’s lips. “No, you won’t. Too bad for you. I’m a screamer.”
Nicholas strode forward to stand almost nose-to-nose with Ben, but Ben refused to flinch.
“You don’t scare me, Sheriff.”
“I’m not here to scare you.”
“Then get out of my face before we have a problem.” Ben marveled at how menacing he managed to sound. Look at you, Benji. Drunk as fuck and no shits given.
Nicholas clenched his jaw, but he retreated. “I don’t want to have this conversation while you’re drunk.”
“Then go home. I’m going to. Send me a postcard, tell me all about it then.”
“You’re leaving?” Nicholas asked, flaring with disbelief. “You’re fucking leaving again?”
“You know what? That’s none of your goddamn business.”
Nicholas moved forward once more, but Ben shot a warning glare, and the sheriff stilled.
“Ben, you can’t go,” Nicholas said. He sounded like a diligent believer in Santa Claus who had just been told that there was no such person.
“Can you leave now?” Ben asked as he rubbed a hand over his forehead.
Defeat radiated from the sheriff’s countenance. He did not attempt to mask the vulnerability. “You’re right, okay?”
“Excuse me?”
“You’re right,” Nicholas repeated. “There’s something fucked up here, and we bury our heads in the sand because it’s the only way you can live in a town like this with something like that.”
Ben shifted uneasily as he registered the distress in Nicholas’ voice.
“It was decided a long time ago, long before I even became an officer, that the situation was something that needed to be controlled and contained. Any sightings would be recorded for posterity but never investigated. Comments would not be made to the paper. The situation is always to be handled with grace and dignity. Basically, it doesn’t happen.”
“The truth is flapping its wings down River Bend Road, Scully,” Ben whispered, his voice hushed with a note of conspiracy as he slumped against the wall behind him.
“Ben, this is beyond me,” Nicholas said, scrubbing a hand through his hair. Little tufts of it stuck out at odd angles when he dropped his fist. “This goes straight up to the mayor and the Town Council. I know it exists. Do you think I would forget? I can’t forget. I could never forget that night.”
He moved into the dark living room and started to pace. Ben stayed in the hall as Nicholas strode from the Eames to the fireplace and back again.
“But I can’t talk about it. I can’t even acknowledge it, or it would be my head on the guillotine. I’d lose my job. I wouldn’t be able to find another, Silas would see to
that. I’d have to move, and I don’t want that. This is my town. This is my home. I love the people here. If I lived and died here, I’d be happy. I know you don’t get that, you’ve gone from here to there without a care, but I’m not like you. Point Pleasant is where I belong.”
“I’m getting real tired of people telling me I don’t belong here anymore,” Ben started. “First Dad, then Lizzie, now you. Everyone looks at me like I’m an alien from the planet He-Should-Go-Fuck-Himself. How nice for you all to belong here. How nice for you to actually know where you belong. Where you fit, and slot in, and can always come back to. How fucking nice. Don’t you dare presume to know what I do and do not care about.”
Ben remained in the doorway and scowled at his old friend. He felt like the old watermark on his parents’ coffee table: a lingering stain that marred the surface of an otherwise beautiful piece of furniture.
“And you know what else? Bullshit, Nic. Fucking bullshit. If you love this town and the people so much, you’d do something to protect them regardless of what happened to your job. This thing pops up and history shows that people die. People fucking die, Nic. And you want to pretend nothing is out there for the sake of happy townspeople who don’t know up from down?”
“No one ever made that connection before,” Nicholas said. He eyed the wall on the other side of the room as if something about its pale green tone had captivated him. “I went to the station after you left. I went through all the files we have on the sightings. And you were right. Every one of the witnesses experienced some kind of personal tragedy within days of their encounter. Donna Everton drowned in the river, Ray Johnson drove his truck into a tree, died on impact, and Mason Ingles fell off the roof of his house and broke his neck.”
Ben arched an eyebrow at the familiar names.
Nicholas cast his chin down at the rug beneath his feet. “I didn’t know. I didn’t realize.”
“Well, now you do,” Ben sighed. “So what are you gonna do about it?”
“I have no idea.”
“That was my reaction,” Ben said. “Then I went to Tucker.”
“Bill? Why?”
“Because he’s the only one I knew who’d believe me.”
Nicholas ran a hand through his hair. “I’m sorry, Ben. My hands are tied.”
“Who the fuck are you?” Ben demanded, huffing out a sound made of equal parts frustration and disgust. “What happened to the kid that threw rocks at this thing? Is he still in there somewhere? Because he’d know this is all bullshit. It’s the illusion of safety, harnessed and wielded by some mediocre men in positions of power they have no business with! It’s not real, Nic. It’s a fucking construct. The people in this town are real. The husbands and wives. The brothers and sisters. The shop keepers and the soccer moms. The kids at the elementary school. All of them, and they’re going to be at the festival. And you’re just gonna stand back and watch something happen to them because your ‘hands are tied?’”
Nicholas kept his head lowered and said nothing.
“This is worth losing your job over, Nic. If that even happens.”
Nicholas’ jaw clenched. He stood straighter as if he had finally found his resolve. Or his backbone, Ben thought with cynicism.
“Can I see the photo? And the diary?”
Ben nodded and headed to the front door. With annoyance, he noted that he was still uneasy on his feet as he grabbed his bag. He flicked on the living room lights so that they were no longer shrouded in darkness.
“Here,” he said, passing the photocopies to Nicholas. “Those are the relevant entries from Emily Lewis’ diary.”
“Where did you find this? The library?” Nicholas asked, skimming the first page. He sat down on the edge of the coffee table while he read, and Ben frowned, thinking Andrew would have disapproved.
“In the archives,” Ben confirmed, sinking onto the sofa. The leather emanated the same coldness that had coiled itself in Ben’s chest, refusing to ease even under the warmth of Andrew’s best whiskey.
Nicholas’ lips pursed into a tight line as he shuffled through the pages. “Holy shit,” he said at last.
“Here’s the picture.” Ben offered Tucker’s journal, which was already open to the pages on the collapse of the old Silver Bridge with the photo attached.
“This Tucker’s?”
“He let me borrow his research.”
“Why are we alive, then? And Tucker?” Nicholas asked, standing to pace again. “We saw it, all of us, twenty years ago. We should be dead if seeing it means you’re going to die.”
“I don’t know,” Ben answered honestly. “Maybe because we found it. Maybe because it didn’t come to us. We stumbled across it, after all.”
“I don’t even know what we’d do if we found it again,” Nicholas said. “I doubt my G22 would have much of an effect. Tucker’s 12-gauge didn’t. And anyway, what if your theory is wrong? What if this is all just a coincidence.”
“Nicholas, seriously? A coincidence? Every sighting?”
Nicholas dropped onto the coffee table once more and put his face in his hands.
“Don’t be too hard on yourself,” Ben said, shifting awkwardly. “It is pretty fucking crazy.”
Nicholas shook his head. “All those people,” he said. “They’re expecting over six thousand visitors to the festival. Over the course of the week, there will be over six thousand people who could end up dead if what you’re saying is right. And who is to say that we can even stop it from happening?”
“We’ve gotta try something. Anything. Even if we have to shoot it with silver bullets, we have to at least try if there’s any chance that finding it and killing it would make this shit stop.”
“You’re awfully cavalier about the fact we could die doing it.”
“My dad is dead,” Ben said, fixing an empty expression on the other man. “Because of the thing in the woods. Because I didn’t know what the phone call meant. It called me twice, okay? Whatever happens, I’m probably dead anyway.”
“I won’t let that happen, Ben.”
Ben laughed without humor and slumped to let his head loll against the back of the Eames. “Maybe I should leave,” he said. “I should never have come here. Maybe this curse, omen, or whatever you want to call it only works when you’re in Point Pleasant. On the rotten ground.”
“Maybe you should go,” Nicholas echoed in a whisper. “If that’s what keeps you safe.”
“You know what I keep wondering?” Ben asked as he stared up at the stucco design on the ceiling.
“What?”
“I keep wondering if my mom got a phone call.”
“Don’t think about that.”
“Maybe seeing it when we were twelve was a curse in and of itself,” Ben mused. “We didn’t die, but we might as well have.”
Nicholas said nothing, but he moved to sit next to Ben.
“Tucker brought up something,” Ben said after a moment. “Why would it warn us? Why would it go out of its way to let us know that something shitty was about to happen?”
“What, like it has a conscience?”
Ben shrugged. “And then there’s Grant Harper.”
“What about him?”
“Well, you remember. He disappeared from his backyard but then he showed up perfectly okay a county over. Said he got ‘saved.’ Everyone just assumed he meant something saved him from the thing in the woods. But what if—what if it saved him from something else?”
“I could ask him,” Nicholas said.
“He still lives here?”
“Works checkout at Chapman’s. Doug was really good about it when he took over after the Harpers’ finally lost the Save n’ Shop. Said he wanted to make sure Grant had something constructive to keep him out of trouble. People think Grant’s simple, but he’s just quiet. I don’t think he ever got over what happened to him.”
“Trauma’s an asshole,” Ben murmured, and he ignored the way Nicholas’ gaze jerked toward him. “Do you think he’d talk to
you?”
“It’s worth a shot,” Nicholas said, frowning as he assessed Ben with a closeness that made Ben want to slither into the fireplace and set himself alight.
“I was gonna find Evelyn Lewis and Charlie Warren tomorrow,” Ben said, trying to focus on the situation. “Do they still live in town?”
“They do. I understand Lewis, but why Warren?”
“He knows the history of the area better than anyone else. Or he used to. I figured maybe he might know something about how the Shawnee and Mingo defended themselves.”
“You’re not gonna ask him outright?”
“Of course not. But considering Lizzie blew my cover, I can’t really go with the ‘I’m writing something about local legends’ line I would have liked to use. Even if it was true.”
“Right,” Nicholas said, sighing. “I guess it’s fair to say you’ve got the material you need for your next book.”
“I don’t think I’ll be writing about this.”
Nicholas regarded Ben in silence for a long moment before he whispered, “I’m sorry about your dad.”
“Me too,” Ben said. He stood to return to the office for the whiskey. Nicholas followed.
Ben grabbed the bottle and collapsed into the desk chair. “You know, all the fucking things I wanted to say to him but never did. Now all I get is this fucking room. And that fucking chair,” he said and gestured at the armchair in the corner. “And his fucking voice on my car radio.”
Nicholas lingered in the doorway as Ben kicked his feet up onto the desk and took a swig of whiskey. “What about the radio?”
“I drove out to River Bend Road after I saw you this afternoon.”
Nicholas stepped closer and crossed his arms.
“I got out and screamed at it. Like that would do any good,” Ben said, laughing without humor. “All of a sudden, my car just died. But the radio came on, and it was all static and this weird screeching noise. Then my dad—my fucking dad’s voice—was there. It said my name. It said, ‘Benji,’” He shook his head and drank again. “It was taunting me.”
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