by John Farris
After that he went hunting for Barry. The sun was nearly down but the light lasted, a hot radiance in the woods, creating illusions from commonplace things: in shafts and wells and alluring beams of touchy sunlight, visions arose from the root beds of earth like half-realized heavenly bodies.
Barry was a shadow slanting out of shadows, accidentally crossing his path. She took off, startled, and he went after her, hauling her aground only after a strenuous all-out footrace.
"Did you call Dr. Edwards?" he said furiously.
She had turned too wild in a week, creeping in the back door for occasional meals, sleeping outside, anywhere, not bathing too often. Something had to be done, and right now. He sat on her, pinning both wrists, made her face him. Barry gasped for air. There was something rank and feral and carelessly incestuous in the way she worked her body against his.'
"Mark made me do it!"
"What do you mean?" he asked, sickened by her fatal, fascinated expression.
"He isn't dead. Alexandra's magic didn't hold. He's coming back, Dal!"
"Don't give me that shit. He's twenty feet down in muck, where he belongs."
"None of us can keep him there!"
"Is that what you want? You want him back?" He picked her up in disgust and gave her a shaking, until her teeth sparked together. But he failed to get rid of the surly deadpan, the cast of unreason in his sister's eyes.
"Then I'll give him back to you!" Dal shouted. "I'll give you back what's left, after a month in the water! When you see him, maybe you'll believe once and for all he's finished."
He dragged Barry from the woods toward the dock and boathouse, a hard hand clamped on one wrist. But she had stopped resisting him so much, and her eyes were on the sinking twilight of the pond.
In the boathouse Dal took down from the rafters a thing of lightweight rusting chains and ganghooks, used for clearing out choked areas of lily pad. He dumped the dragline into the stem of the boat and told Barry to sit forward, facing him, while he rowed. The oars sliced through a calm chartreuse skin forming in the shallows around the dock and carried them into deeper water, lavender and rose-streaked but all black and impenetrable in their wake. Barry gripped the gunwales with both hands, looking around, looking avidly all around at the dimming shoreline, the sky going slowly to seed, and then down into the depths where they rowed, seeing her reflection glide, grow faint, vanish in negative dissolution. Dal grappled with the water, breathing hard, his neck stiff, propelling them past thin looming snags and islands fixed but shaky, incapable of supporting their weight. A large water bird coasted apace, then with an outcry and lazy explosion of wings shot on beyond tiptop shafts of moody evergreen to feed in the brilliant granary of stars.
"Dal, go back!"
"No!"
There was enough light remaining for him to row to the approximate spot, by the sunken spillway, where the body in canvas, embracing stones, had gone down.
The boat rode over the top of the spillway and came to a halt; Dal scrambled forward and stepped out. The water over the spillway was ankle deep. Mosquitoes were humming in; they had a fiery bite. He slapped and cursed and dragged the boat more securely onto concrete. "Get me the dragline," he said to Barry.
She crept over the middle seat and pulled the chain with its several hooks off the bottom of the boat, shuddering as she turned to her brother.
"Help me," he said.
"But I don't want to do this."
"You'll only go crazy if you don't. Get out of the boat."
Dal held out his hand to her. Barry stepped out of the moccasins she was wearing and came over the side, slipped, and almost fell sideways into the water. Dal put his other arm around her, and they teetered together for a few frantic moments.
"Easy. Easy."
He took the dragline from Barry, walked carefully a few feet toward the shore, looking down. Then he stopped and lowered the hooks, began feeding the dragline into the black water. Barry knelt and washed her steaming face; she watched her brother.
With the hooks deep he began walking again, going faint in her eyes against the line of hills a hundred yards away. Almost out of sight, he stopped, the chain taut in his hands.
"Dal?"
"I don't know—wait."
She felt too much alone by the boat; she ventured nearer him, wincing at the whine and stab of mosquitoes, moaning a little in her throat. Dal was pulling hard, straining, hands climbing inch by inch the straight wet chain, which piled up behind him on the spillway. "What is it?"
"Coming up. Don't know—if I can—"
Over Barry's shoulder, breaking through the trees, the old moon shone forth; a milky pallor clung to them, to the surface of the water.
With a shocking splurge the thing in the hooks came for his knees, black and dismally deformed, a dripping fright wig of vegetation contributing to the corpselike effect. Dal almost jumped backwards into deep water before he saw what it really was—the gnarled bole on a thick crooked tree branch. He stopped to get his breath, his heart hammering wildly. Then he hauled the six-foot branch up and out of the way, freed his tangled hooks laboriously, and cast them once again. Barry stood by with her thin arms clasped across her breasts, not even responding to the mosquitoes anymore as Dal fished and cursed. Tears slid down her cheeks.
"He's in my head—that's where your hooks should be. He came to rest in my head, Dal, not down in there. And that's why I'll never be free of him."
"Do you want to be?"
"I don't know—I don't know how."
Again the chain tautened, and Dal bent his back to it. As he handled the rough wet links Barry smelled blood. Dal was groaning, heaving, his footing precarious in the shallow water atop the wall.
"Barry!" he cried. "I can't do it—myself. Help me!"
She stood at his side, reaching down. They pulled together. Behind them both the rowboat rocked, as if from an unseen current, and scraped almost inaudibly across the concrete, pulling slowly away.
It was dead, slow weight, and Barry knew, this time, the hooks had found what they were looking for.
Raising him was the problem. It would have been a chore for three strong, fresh men. But Dal by now was in a fanatical frame of mind—he would pull and pull until a blood vessel burst or his hands became too skinned and slippery to grip the chain.
"Son of a bitch, son of a—bitch, you're—coming up!"
Once free of the silt that was thickly deposited against the base of the spillway, their hooked burden rose more easily, but still invisibly, through the cold water to the moonlit surface. Dal's limbs were trembling, but he was exultant.
"We've got it, we've got it!"
It might have been a chest of gold, rather than a waterlogged body turning to a soap-like fatty blob, that he was after. At the first glimpse of greenish canvas still securely tied with the Dacron rope Barry's stomach turned on her and she almost let go of the chain, but Dal snarled at her, and she gave one last convulsive tug as he reached down and grabbed a rope with both hands. He pulled the lumpy shroud atop the spillway, then sat down; he was already soaked with perspiration, and the water lapping around his waist felt good.
"You see? You see? That's where he is. Alexandra's magic—is still good. And you don't have to be afraid—anymore."
"Something's wrong," she moaned, her skin flashing with prickles, her mouth drying out.
"For the love of—God, Barry, what do I have to do? Okay—"
Dal reached into his trouser pocket for a clasp knife, dug it out, leaned forward, prying open the sharp three-inch blade. He began to hack and slash at the tough ropes. They parted. He closed the knife and, on his knees, tore open the canvas.
Barry covered her mouth with her hands, but not in time to keep from puking in terror all over herself.
Dal looked up, eyes rolling with shock toward the distant moon. His hands sank a little deeper between stones into the silt that was slowly washing out of the canvas. There was not a rag, a bone, a tooth to be found.
> Barry turned with her throat burning up, gagging on the vileness in her mouth, and saw that the boat had drifted almost twenty yards from the spillway; rather, it seemed to be backing slowly out of sight, stranding them nearly a hundred yards from the nearest shore. "Dal—the boat—"
He rose slowly, and she sensed he was going to dive in.
"Don't leave me!"
An instant later he arced, splashed, disappeared. But after a few moments his head bobbed up, then an arm, gesturing.
"Jump in, Barry! Swim!"
"No! Where is he, Dal—where's Draven—what's he going to do to us?"
"I'll get the boat!"
"Oh, my God, hurry!"'
"He doesn't exist anymore, that's all—he just doesn't exist!"
"You're wrong! Please! Bring the boat!"
Despite the moon she could barely make it out anymore. Dal took a deep breath and struck out in the direction the boat was moving. He was fast, an expert swimmer. But for Barry the stars had locked in their flight, the night had darkened beyond hope of illumination; Dal would, in his nightmare crawl toward the dwindling boat, swim mindlessly on to the edge of the universe.
She swayed but didn't faint. She closed her eyes. That made it better somehow, sightlessly experiencing nothing but the brush of a mosquito against her skin, the odorous water around her feet.
"Barry!"
He sounded all right—calm. She looked out across the pond but couldn't see him.
"Dal? Where's the boat?"
"I've got it—I'm coming."
She heard the oars then, saw the flashes of water out there.
"You doing okay?" he asked, in a normal tone of voice that carried very well.
"Yes. Yes. Just hurry."
Then she took a wrong step somehow, awkwardly nudging the piled chain and hooks. Suddenly, inconceivably, it was all falling off the spillway. And her other foot was caught, wrapped tight. Barry screamed in a panic as she was yanked into the water. She scrambled against the sunken side of the spillway, trying to hold on to it, though it was slick with algae. Her face was submerged, she couldn't scream again for Dal. It was all she could do to keep from being dragged to the bottom by the weight around her ankle.
She knew the hooks and chain combined weren't that heavy. Something had hold of them.
She heard the metal boat scrape against the spillway. She had found a piece of rusted iron reinforcing rod to cling to. But the pull from below was stronger now, the chain cutting into her ankle.
Barry, felt Dal's hands groping for her. She lifted her own hand, and he grabbed her arm. At the same time the drag on her foot eased, and Dal was able to pull her up.
"What happened?"
She couldn't speak. She pulled herself half into the boat, and he saw the tangled mass of chain and hooks dangling from her foot. He reached out and unwrapped them, let them drop.
"Dal! Dal!" she said, and began to retch.
"What a mess you got into."
"No—accident. Afraid. Row. Row!"
"Calm down, kid, you—"
"He wants to kill us!" She reached up and seized him by his wet shirt, eyes blinded by fear. "He's right here! In the water! No! Don't look. Just row."
Dal stared at her for an instant longer, and then he looked at the laceration on her ankle where the chain had bitten. Not believing, but fueled by her extreme anxiety, he grabbed the oars and began to pull away from the spillway.
"I don't know, kid, I don't know what we're going to do now. You've got me sick worrying about you all the time."
Her hair was stuck to her face, her lips were blue. "Oh, Dal, it's so horrible what I got us into! I want to kill myself."
"Easy with that kind of talk, we— Shit!"
Barry went rigid in the seat facing him, seeing the oar jump from his right hand and drop into the water. "What happened!?"
"Don't do that—hit a log or something, but I can reach it—"
He was leaning over the gunwale, hand extended for the oar floating only a foot or so beyond his grasp, when the water between erupted and Draven arose, as if catapulted from the bottom, clutching in his right hand the ancient ceremonial dagger they had last seen driven through his heart.
Draven came up out of the water to a fearsome height, his feet almost to the level of Dal's astonished eyes; for three or four seconds he hung there, leveling out as if by the impulse of the moon behind him, and then he was in the boat with them, driving the dagger into Dal's shoulder as Dal screamed in horror.
The boat rocked, and before Barry could react she was thrown into the water.
Her head hit something, possibly the other oar; it knocked her dizzy and water gushed into her throat. She swam instinctively beneath the surface for a dozen feet or so before lunging upward to gulp sweet air and hear, renewed, her brother's agonized screams. She turned her head quickly and saw the huge dark figure of Draven, the flashing dagger in his hand, Dal down in the boat, only his feet feebly kicking as he was stabbed again and again by the weapon which Alexandra had contrived to protect them from the mad and indestructible tulpa.
But Draven had caught sight of her; the dagger was poised beside his head. Dal made no further sounds. Barry turned and thrashed away.
"I'll find you," Draven said, his voice echoing across the pond.
She heard him. Terror turned to despair as she swam, and then to a small but glowing coal of anger in her heart.
Chapter 38
Barry's first thought when she crawled ashore was to look for her father and then get help. But who could help them? And she was afraid to go back to the house. Draven would anticipate that. She had to hide somewhere, try to think what to do.
The tree house, long disused, had been her secret place deep in the woods. Dal had helped her build it, years ago. Now it was a potential refuge. She had shown Draven everything but the tree house, had forgotten it herself. The tree house had a trapdoor entered by squeezing between two branches of an elm tree, a feat that, despite her thinness now, she found difficult.
Inside it was snug and dry. There was a small latched window, too dirty to admit much of the light from the moon, which faced the pond. But she felt safer, less vulnerable, without the moon shining in.
She hadn't left much behind when she'd outgrown the tree house. A box with some toys and an old bedroll. She untied the bedroll, shook it in case there were spiders, then took off her soaked clothing and crept into the bedroll, teeth chattering, to dry. Despite her terror, or because of it, she fell asleep and awoke to an owl's screech just outside.
Barry started up, listening for other sounds, perhaps the crunch of footsteps beneath the tree.
Barrryyyy.
She shuddered violently, not certain she'd actually heard him call her name. He just might have been trying to get inside her head again, from wherever he was. Her heartbeat slowed, but she felt too edgy and confined to stay much longer in the tree house.
What had happened to Dal? Was he dead?
The hopelessness of her predicament struck her full force. There was no one she could go to, even good friends like the Copperwells, who would believe her story. They'd be sympathetic, of course. And concerned. And call a doctor to give her a shot to calm her down. While she was lying helpless in a hospital bed, Draven would come. . .
She couldn't take that chance. There was no one else who could do anything about Draven. She was utterly alone, with no idea of what to do next.
The jeans and shirt she'd had on were sodden—they wouldn't be wearable for hours. She had left her moccasins in the boat; her feet were already cut and bruised from stumbling in the woods, and a ripped nail on her left foot had bled. In rummaging through the toy box she found another pair of moccasins, the soles worn very thin. They were snug and stiff, but she could still wear them. There was, however, nothing else to wear.
Barry opened the trapdoor an inch at a time, pausing often to listen. She was wild with an anxiety she knew she must hold in check, or it would surely do her in. Movement
was what she needed now—some sort of purposeful action that might stimulate her to think. Scared as she was, Barry was aware of the dangerous power of her mind.
But Draven was even more powerful.
She had killed him once—but killed was not the word. With an act of violence she had severed a vital connection between them, and so he had ceased to live, for a little while. Had he been lying in the water these weeks, secure, incorruptible, waiting for her return? Or had she created him all over again, out of desire? Yes, a perverse desire this time to be punished for everything about herself she imagined to be wicked.
Barry climbed down the tree, trembling in the mild night air. Her heartbeat was so loud in her ears she couldn't hear anything else. With her feet on the ground and room to run she was calmer, but still indecisive.
I made him, I unmade him, I made him again.
Why, or how, she didn't know. She had no thought of getting close to him again, even with Alexandra's dagger. She lacked the strength and probably the courage. Barry walked, not knowing or caring where she was, or if she was going in circles.
There had to be some way to keep him from springing back, recurring like a nightmare. But Dal was already dead—there was so little time for either her or her father.
She came to a deep ravine littered with the metal carcasses of defunct machines, threadbare old tires. In the midst of brambles and junk something glinted like the eye of a fallen giant. She stared, finding it familiar, then went clambering over the machinery, heart thumping.
"Mrs. Prye! Mrs. Prye!"
The glass dome was cracked but not broken. The eyes of the manikin, jolted open by the fall of the fortune-telling machine into a grave of gutted autos, looked dustily out at her.
"Mrs. Prye, help me. What can I do?"
Barry heard nothing. Worse, she felt nothing. She tried again to raise the medium. Tears came to her eyes. In desperation she put her mouth to a crack in the glass and blew her breath inside.
There was a flicker, a glow within.
"There you are!"
Has returned, has he? The medium's voice was weary, distant. Alack. What a sad state we find ourselves in.