by Brian Keene
Yeah. We’ll get to that in a minute.
Believe it or not, I escaped murder and manslaughter charges. My parents used their retirement money to get me a good defense attorney. The DA, wanting to get re-elected, didn’t press too hard because public sentiment was on my side, thanks to the media and how they spun the story. In the end, I got sentenced to time served, with seven-year’s probation and a big ass fine that will probably take me the rest of my life to pay off. As part of my deal, I pleaded guilty to discharging a fire-arm, trespassing, evading and resisting arrest, theft of industrial property, and abusing a corpse.
At least they didn’t nail me for improper disposal of a corpse, while they were at it.
The day after my release from prison, a bunch of terrorists shot up an elementary school in Florida, killing over one hundred children, and the media—and the rest of the country—forgot all about me. It was like I’d ceased to exist.
Sort of like Sondra did.
Oh, she didn’t cease to exist. She wasn’t dead, at least, not that I know of. But she did vanish and as far as I know, nobody has seen or heard from her since. According to a few law enforcement officials who were sympathetic to my case, she skipped town immediately. Probably made a break for it while Whitey and I were still at the lake. The FBI made several arrests, rounding up what was left of Whitey’s crew, and then confirmed that a large amount of cash had been stolen that night. Stolen by a pregnant stripper named Sondra. Like her, the money’s whereabouts were unknown. Nobody ever told me what the amount was.
The investigation continued, even though I was no longer a part of it. Witnesses were interviewed again. I found out that several of my neighbors had placed Sondra at my apartment shortly after the incident at the lumber yard. The yellow police tape on the door, warning people that it was a crime scene, had been cut and the door had been forced open. They theorized that Sondra had hidden the money in my apartment all along. They said that she’d probably hidden it when she went to clean up, while Darryl and I sat in the kitchen and discussed how to help her. I told them that was bullshit—explained that when we’d found her, Sondra had been barely dressed, wearing only a pair of skimpy blue silk shorts and a matching silk top, more like a pair of pajamas than clothing. She’d had nowhere to stash the money. And she couldn’t have hidden it in my Jeep because that had been locked.
I’ve thought it over. Run through various scenarios. I believe she stole the cash. But I don’t know where it is. Maybe that’s a good thing. It’s blood money, after all. Maybe it should stay buried, like those who died because of it.
At least Webster wasn’t harmed. He made it out relatively unscathed. Didn’t escape when the cops searched my apartment. He spent a few nights at a no-kill shelter run by a very nice pair of old hippies, and then my parents rescued him from there and kept him until my release. Now he and I live in a new apartment.
I think a lot. About Sondra. About my friends. I miss them all. Even her. Especially her. She betrayed me and hurt me and used me like the sucker I was, but I miss her all the same. When I dream, it’s often about Sondra—her simultaneously annoying and endearing broken English, dancing on stage to the beat of the music, making love to me in my bed, holding my hand as we raced through the sewer. In the dreams, she says that she loves me and that she’ll never, ever leave. In the dreams, we are together.
But dreams are just lies.
In the real world, I never saw her again. She disappeared.
Just like Whitey.
His body—what was left of it—was never found, despite State Police divers and repeatedly dragging the bottom of the lake. They found a seven-foot long catfish, a stolen car, and another corpse—that of a teenage girl who’d been missing for three months, abducted and killed after her car broke down at a lonely exit ramp along Interstate Eighty-Three—but there was no sign of Whitey. No bones. Not even his clothing or jewelry. He’d vanished. The authorities had other cases to solve, and this one had wrapped itself up pretty neatly, so they didn’t go searching for explanations. The theory was that the storm had increased the lake’s currents, and that Whitey’s remains were sucked down into one of the sinkholes and deposited in the network of caverns beneath the surface. Either that or the catfish ate him. The cops seemed pretty satisfied with that explanation. I was supposed to accept it, too.
But I didn’t. Not at all.
A little more than a year later, I was up late one night. I’ve suffered insomnia since it all happened. My new apartment was quiet. I sat on the couch, drinking beer and petting Webster. Bored, I flipped through the channels, looking for something to watch. The first Friday the 13th movie was on, and I settled for that. It wasn’t until near the end of the film that I remembered the conversation I’d had with Yul and Sondra when we were hiding in the abandoned warehouse. Before I could change the channel, Jason lunged out of the lake and attacked a woman in a boat. They’d thought he was dead, but all that time he’d been down there waiting.
When he jumped out of the water, I screamed. My beer spilled all over the carpet and my pizza fell onto the couch. The sudden reaction startled Webster, and he ran away hissing. My neighbor pounded on the wall, telling me to quiet down. I put my hands over my mouth and screamed again.
Webster stayed hidden for hours. Maybe it brought back bad memories for him, too.
I didn’t sleep the rest of that night.
I don’t sleep much at all anymore.
Eventually, my hair grew back. It doesn’t get very long, and there are places where it’s still thin, and my scalp shows through, so I wear a ball cap most of the time. My body healed, for the most part. A little stiffness sometimes in my back and neck. I suffered some permanent hearing loss—not enough to make me deaf but enough to qualify for disability. So I’ve got that going for me. I don’t have to work. Now I sit around all day, bored. At night, I do the same thing.
Once I got it back from the authorities, I traded in the Jeep and bought a blue Chevy Nova instead. Found it at the junkyard for cheap and restored it myself. New paint job and tires, rebuilt engine, chrome rims, custom upholstery. I had to get rid of the Cherokee. I didn’t have a choice. Every time I drove it, I’d think of my friends. Once, while listening to God Forbid on the way to the grocery store, I swore that I smelled Darryl’s cigarette smoke. Not a ghost. A phantom memory, of course, but a painful one. I still don’t believe in God or demons or spirits. Whitey was almost certainly supernatural, but that doesn’t prove there’s an afterlife. It just proves he had some fucked up genetics. Spirits don’t exist.
The only kind of ghosts we see are the ones we carry with us.
Mine are with me all the time. I can’t get rid of them. I’ve tried. I drink and find things to occupy my time—try to lose myself in sports and sitcoms and whatever else is on TV. Turn my music up and try to drown out the world and the voices in my head. But no matter what I do, I can’t lose my ghosts. They haunt me like those abandoned industrial parks haunt this state.
I drive out to the lake sometimes, on days like today when the weather is bad and the park is deserted. I don’t bring an umbrella. I let the rain fall where it may. I walk out onto the pier and throw stones, skipping them across the surface while the storm rages. I think about my friends and of Sondra, and especially Whitey.
They never found his body, but I don’t believe he got sucked into a sinkhole. If he had, then why wouldn’t the same thing have happened with that missing girl’s body? Her corpse was discovered.
Whitey’s is still missing.
Fish have stem cells. So do frogs, and everything else that lives in the lake. I wasn’t sure at first, so I looked it up on the internet. I found out that scientists use fish stem cells for all kinds of research. What if Whitey can use them too? What if Sondra was wrong? Sure, maybe he would have preferred the stem cells from his own offspring. Perhaps they were more powerful or gave him faster results. But what if he had no choice? What if he had to rely on the stem cells of other living creatures�
��like fish? There are plenty of fish at the bottom of the lake. Rasputin drowned beneath a frozen sheet of ice. Maybe there weren’t any fish around when he went. But it was summer when Whitey and I faced off on this shoreline.
What if Whitey isn’t dead?
I’m standing here on the edge of the pier, staring at my reflection on the lake’s surface, but all I can see is Whitey’s eyes and how they glared at me that day, as he slipped beneath the water.
I’m thinking about my old life. Thinking about my friends and how much I miss them. Thinking about Sondra and how much I miss her. Thinking about Whitey, too.
And while I do this, I wonder what Whitey is down there thinking about…
Did I love Sondra? Even after all this time, I still don’t know. All I know—all I’ve learned—is this.
Love and obsession both run deep.
So do these waters.
And so does revenge.
Revenge runs the deepest of all.
BRIAN KEENE is the author of over twenty-five books, including Darkness on the Edge of Town, Take The Long Way Home, Urban Gothic, Castaways, Dark Hollow, Dead Sea, and The Rising. He’s also written comic books such as The Last Zombie, Doom Patrol and Dead of Night: Devil Slayer. His work has been translated into German, Spanish, Polish, Italian, French and Taiwanese. Several of his novels and stories have been developed for film, including Ghoul and The Ties That Bind. In addition to writing, Keene also oversees Maelstrom, his own small press publishing imprint specializing in collectible limited editions, via Thunderstorm Books. Keene’s work has been praised in such diverse places as The New York Times, The History Channel, The Howard Stern Show, CNN.com, Publisher’s Weekly, Media Bistro, Fangoria Magazine, and Rue Morgue Magazine. Keene lives in Pennsylvania. You can communicate with him online at www.briankeene.com, on Facebook at www.facebook.com/pages/Brian-Keene/189077221397or on Twitter at @BrianKeene
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty One
Chapter Twenty Two
Chapter Twenty Three
Chapter Twenty Four
About The Author
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