That night at the cabin…what the hell happened to you out there, Raymond?
* * *
Louis couldn’t remember exactly how long he’d been sitting at his kitchen table, but it had been dark when he’d taken position there the night prior, he knew that much. The sun had risen perhaps thirty minutes before, pushing bright beams of light through the small windows over the sink and bringing with it a promise of clarity he could only recall in distant memory. His mind rarely seemed lucid anymore, and when he sunk into these dark waters time held little meaning.
The apartment was small, cramped, and needed a good cleaning. The sink was overrun with dirty dishes and the floors were littered with debris—old pizza boxes, spent bottles of beer and cola, and the like. He’d never lived like royalty, but this place, particularly the small size, irritated him to no end. With each passing day, Louis resented the apartment more and more.
He knew he couldn’t keep this facade up much longer. Sooner than later the house of cards his life had become would come toppling down and he would no longer be able to hide from those things that dwelled beneath it.
In some ways he felt like a drug addict. He’d once read an article about a crack addict, and remembered how the man had described his life coming apart slowly at first, and then suddenly, and how throughout his descent into addiction and darkness, things most take for granted became irrelevant and unimportant. Bathing, cleaning, paying bills—none of it mattered. Only the high mattered, only the escape. This was similar, he thought. It was devouring him steadily but slowly, an alpha male predator that had brought him down and now lay next to him, eating him alive and at a leisurely pace before others arrived and were granted permission to rip him limb from limb in frenzied hunger. There was something at once heartbreaking and humorous about that. Laugh or cry, he couldn’t decide. So Louis did neither. Instead, he sat in the same chair he had been sitting in for hours and stared at a framed picture on the table before him of his family in happier times. Surrounded by empty beer bottles he’d consumed during the night, it seemed a fitting shrine to both the past and present—the once smiling faces of what had been a family—his family—amidst the garbage, clutter, loneliness and angry mess his life had become.
His eyes found the knife. Next to the framed photograph, it lay in its nylon sheath, a Marine Bowie Knife. Fifteen inches including the ribbed handle, with a ten-inch carbon steel blade, he had purchased this magnificent weapon at an online Army/Navy shop, and though he’d never actually used it for any practical purpose, he often removed it from the sheath and thought about many of the possibilities such a large and savage knife could yield. Like his rifle, Louis found something exciting about holding the weapon that bordered on the sexual. The weight of it in his palm, the way the handle felt against his skin, the way the slant of the huge blade reflected light when he held it at the appropriate angle—it all came together to make him feel alive and powerful—nearly invincible. Because brandishing a knife such as this changed everything. It transformed him from a manager in the shipping department at Severance into a fighting machine—a potential killer—a dangerous man to be feared and respected.
Louis rarely took the time to investigate why things like guns and knives made him feel inherently more masculine and tough, he only knew he embraced such feelings, particularly of late. In the past year his fascination with many things dark and deadly—particularly weapons—had increased dramatically. He could sit with the knife in hand for hours, his mind racing and calculating any number of violent and satisfying scenarios.
And then memories would come. Just flashes at first but then as the weeks became months, little by little, he remembered more. Slowly, he felt himself coming apart.
But he was not alone. He knew that now. He was being watched, influenced, controlled by...something. There were eyes on him…watching him, judging him, changing him.
“I remember,” he mumbled, as in answer to questions only he could hear. “You hear me you motherfuckers? I know you can hear me. I’m remembering. I remember.”
He blinked, focused on the photograph on the table, on Becky. How he loved her even now, he couldn’t help himself. The mother of his children, his former wife, how could he ever hate her?
“It’s all right,” he said, addressing the photograph now, his voice heavy and slurred with exhaustion. “It’s OK, Beck, you—you’re doing the right thing.”
That’s right, a voice from deep within him said. Fight it. Fight them.
Still, even in those rare instances when the voice of reason escaped the recesses of his mind and offered moments of clarity, Louis couldn’t shake the other side, the dark side that continued to haunt him, to goad him with promises of relief if only he’d give in and let it take total control. But he realized now this was a battle he’d eventually lose no matter how hard he fought, and like a boil that needed lancing, the pressure continued to grow, to strengthen to a near-breaking point.
He forced his eyes back to the photograph. Danielle and Louis, Jr.—his children. His children. “Only worthwhile fucking thing I ever did,” he told the photo. Emotion rose, choking him to tears. Louis shook his head as if to ward them off as visions of Becky with that new boyfriend of hers came to him. Five and seven, Danielle and little Lou were still babies, he thought. And that guy, this new guy, he’ll be their father. “Forget me,” he said aloud. “Forget me.”
Something whispered to him, something far away. He cocked his head, listened.
And then the fear returned, that same awful, relentless fear he’d been running from for a year hit him again like a whirlwind.
Screams. Snow. The dark—that awful, endless darkness…
Louis pushed his chair away from the table with such force it nearly tipped over. He staggered to his feet, gained his balance and leaned against the stove for support.
He was alone in the room…for now.
“Go,” he told the photograph of his wife and children. “Take them and get the hell away from here, Beck, away from me, you got to go. Go!”
He snatched the knife from the table and clutched it to his chest like a child. Heart thudding, he drew a deep breath and did his best to control himself. But within seconds he felt the same odd popping sensation in his temples he had felt numerous times before, followed by a feeling of release, a release of pressure. Something tickled his nostril. He brought a finger to his nose, pulled it away and saw the bright crimson staining his fingertip. A bit of dizziness swept through him and was gone.
There were tissues in the bedroom but he made no move for them, not this time. He let the blood trickle from his nose, down across his upper lip and into his mouth. Becky, Danielle and Louis Jr. all watched from the kitchen table, eyes fixed and dead. Watched him bleed. Fucking fitting, he thought. Watch me bleed, kids. Watch Daddy bleed. This is who I am now. This. A fucking disease—that’s what I am now. They’d stolen everything else. They were inside him, burrowing deeper, ripping through his head, twisting through his brain like tiny fingers clawing to get out.
The tears ran the length of his face, mixed with the blood.
“Make it stop.” Louis slowly drew the knife from its sheath. “All of it.”
Reason slipped away, lost in the darkness along with him.
* * *
Daylight filtering through the curtains on the far wall broke his concentration.
For now, the rain had stopped.
“What are you doing?” Raymond mumbled drowsily.
“I was just checking on you,” Seth said, startled. “I thought you were asleep.”
Raymond rolled out from under the comforter and planted his bare feet on the floor. But for the lack of boots and socks, he was still fully clothed. “When you’ve slept in some of the places I have, you learn to sleep light.”
“I made coffee.”
“Cool, thanks.” With both hands, Raymond pulled his hair back away from his face and dropped it behind his shoulders. “Look, man, I didn’t mean to freak out on
you last night, it’s—”
“Don’t worry about it.” Seth made a point of not looking at the pills on the coffee table. “These things happen.”
“I get attacks.” Raymond pawed at his eyes and yawned, glancing around the room as if subtly inspecting it for things not immediately evident. “Like last night, it’s hard to explain but it’s an anxiety thing. It’s like standing on the tracks watching a train coming right at you, only you can’t get out of the way, you know?”
“You’re my brother Raymond, you don’t have to apologize to me.”
“They hit me out of nowhere sometimes. Panic attacks. Doctor told me stress brings them on.” He motioned to the pills. “Anyway, I can’t always control them, so if they get out of hand I take one of those to chill me out until they pass.”
Seth rose from the chair, smiled politely and headed for the kitchen. “Let’s have some coffee and—”
“You want to know about that night, the night at the cabin.”
The response stopped him cold. He stood there a moment; let the chill run its course along his spine. “Last night you said you didn’t want to talk about these things.”
“Do you really think we have any choice?” Raymond patted himself down then rolled over so he could grab his leather jacket from the arm of the couch. He rummaged through the pockets until he located a pack of cigarettes and a lighter.
“Can you not smoke in here, please?”
“Christ, whatever.” He tossed the items aside and let out a long sigh.
Seth stood in the doorway a while, unsure of what to do with himself. “No one’s been the same since that night. If you know something, please tell me. What the hell is happening?”
“That’s it exactly,” Raymond said, eyes dull and lifeless. “Hell is happening.”
CHAPTER 9
With bits and pieces of that snowy night still spiraling through his head, Seth searched his brother’s brooding face, hopeful it might anchor him to the present, where at least for the time being, he still felt relatively safe. The quiet of the kitchen embraced them, cradled them a moment while they drank their coffee.
“Whenever that shit used to happen to me it’d take me a while to realize I was even awake. I’d already be running, scared out of my mind, no clue where I was.” Raymond brought his coffee to his mouth with both hands, took a sip then replaced the mug on the table. “Most of those days just blend together now. The field behind our house, I ended up there, what, dozens of times?”
The words triggered memories of those nights in Seth too. He closed his eyes defensively, but the darkness he found there was even more unsettling than the thoughts coursing through his mind, so he opened them and stared down into his coffee instead.
“We both remember these things happening when you were a child, but neither of us can remember when any of it started,” he said. “Can you honestly tell me how or why it all began?”
“No.”
The word ricocheted about in Seth’s memory, replaying from the hospital room their mother had died in. So sterile and impersonal, mechanical, a place of machines and wooden people who moved about like zombies, emotionless and withdrawn from the things they saw day in and day out. It was no place for the living, the vibrant or the sane.
“No,” Raymond had said then too, repeating the word again and again as Seth put his arms around him while wrestling with the harsh reality of their situation himself.
Eventually Raymond had broken free of Seth’s protective arms and draped himself across their mother’s corpse, his tear-stained cheek pressed to her chest. “Goddamn it, no.”
Seth heard his brother’s cries for years. Some nights he still did, though he could rarely recall his own. He could only remember the cold seeping through his body like a foreign substance injected into him without his knowledge, spreading through him from the inside out, tentacles of fluid filling his veins until no warmth could survive and his body had turned as cold and lifeless inside, as their mother’s had outside.
Seth sipped his coffee; let it bring him back as he embraced the warmth. “Everything has a beginning, Ray, even what happened to you as a child.”
“Nana used to say I was special,” Raymond mumbled. “Remember?”
“You told me once that you knew things before they happened.” Seth put his mug aside and placed his hands flat on the table, steadying himself. “Was that true?”
“Yeah,” he said faintly. “Still is sometimes.”
Seth thought on it a moment, then let it go for the time being. “The earliest I can remember your night terrors was when you were eight and I was twelve,” he told him. “My sessions with Doc have helped me remember that much.”
“Twelve and eight,” he said softly, looking as though he couldn’t quite comprehend such a time span.
Just for a moment, Seth glimpsed their parents in his brother’s face, their parents as they’d looked prior to the world coming apart, melded together into a single surviving entity sitting there at his kitchen table.
Their father had resembled Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider, eccentric and cool, with unruly hair, a renegade sense of fashion and a persona that was equal parts oblivious and magnificently profound. A former hippie, he worked for a defense contractor, a large manufacturing plant nestled into the woods of Adamston, the otherwise unassuming little hamlet just north of Boston where Seth and Raymond had grown up. “It’s an assembly line of death, man, where mostly poor people build weapons the government can use on other poor people in other places,” he’d told them. Because it was virtually the only employer in town, their father viewed his employment there as a personal mission to infiltrate the hearts and minds of everyone else on the payroll with his concepts of peace and love rather than bombs and violence. “One person at a time, man,” he’d told them. “Just like a preacher, right? One soul at a time.” Like many of his ideas, it was based more on unadulterated optimism (along with a bit of convenient self-deception) than reality, but this was their father.
The town itself was less than half an hour from Boston, a quiet and woodsy suburb solidly divided between the haves and the have-nots, and though many residents who worked at the plant arrived each morning wearing suits and ties, their father reported in workpants and a matching shirt with his name embroidered over the pocket. It wasn’t until they became older that the boys realized their father’s job as a janitor could be used as a source of ridicule. It was honest work, he told them. “Boys, I’m an honest man in a den of iniquity,” he’d often laugh. “Got to be on my toes at all times, see what I mean?”
A freethinker, he was a man who left those who didn’t know him (and occasionally those who did), unsure if they were in the presence of a fool or a genius. And in the end it hadn’t seemed to matter either way.
During the course of his life he never made a lot of money or achieved even remote professional success, but neither fact seemed to bother him. He and their mother made enough for them to all live comfortably, and for their father, family was everything, being together, having one another—that was what life was about. The intensity that eventually surfaced in their family when Raymond began having his night episodes eventually changed him somewhat, and from then on he often seemed distracted or deep in thought. Yet even in his more pensive moments, he always had a story to tell—a tale to spin, some moral or ethical treatise about life or love—especially when he was around his sons. And that was how Seth liked to remember his father, as a reflective but happy eccentric who viewed the world on his terms and in his own unique way.
Their mother, a thin and rather gangly woman with mousy brown hair, dark doe-like eyes and a toothy smile a bit too large for her face, was the kind of person easily overlooked. She was not a woman who stood out in a crowd, except to those who knew her, had spoken to her, or had heard her sing. Though she was soft-spoken to the point of sometimes being mistaken for timid, her singing voice was soprano and angelic, more prepubescent boy than grown woman. She wrote most of the songs he
rself, and sang around the house while doing chores, or in the backyard while tending to her flower and vegetable gardens. The only time Seth heard his mother sing away from the house was in church. Not always as part of the choir, but sometimes as one of many parishioners hidden among the pews, singing pre-selected hymns, her voice a bit higher than the rest, a bit more melodic, at least to his ears. And when she sang she seemed happy, removed from the harsher aspects of life and the hours she spent toiling as a social worker.
As unconventional as their father could sometimes be, their mother was generally quiet, introspective, and reserved, like she carried with her the weight of tremendous wisdom but was only capable of sharing or revealing it in small, periodic increments. Though initially she appeared shy and somewhat submissive, in reality she was a very strong, intelligent and articulate woman that was easy to get along with but not easily manipulated or maneuvered. Despite being the main breadwinner in the family, it was never something she spoke about or seemed bothered by. She adored their father, faults and all, and had she ever been unhappy in their marriage, Seth and Raymond were wholly unaware of it.
Relegated to the world of dreams and memory for so long now, it was often difficult to remember them as living, breathing, fully realized human beings. They’d become bland faces watching from the dark corners of his mind, silent and passive.
In time, those faces faded, and it was only Raymond sitting before him, tired and wounded Raymond, a man and little boy all at once, pure and innocent and tough as nails in a single breath, a solitary look, or three simple words. “Long time ago,” he said.
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