How can I still be alive? he wondered and then, more importantly, Is this real?
When he brushed his hand across his forehead, he uttered a faint cry and winced hard enough to squeeze tears from his eyes. He realized that a thick bandage covered his forehead from his eyebrows to his scalp. The instant he touched it, a hot spike of pain filled his head. A second later, he noticed that his hand, too, was bandaged. When he shifted his legs beneath the blanket, he could tell by the feeling that his legs and feet were bandaged as well.
“What in God’s name?” he muttered.
He let his breath out slowly and, groaning, released the tension in his shoulders and let his head fall back onto the pillow. The sharp smell of clean bed linen almost made him sneeze, but as soon as he closed his eyes, he could feel himself drifting off to sleep again. In spite of a rush of panic, he allowed himself to fade away, grateful to find even a slight measure of serenity in the gauzy shadows that enclosed him.
Some time later—he wasn’t sure how long—he awoke again. This time when he looked around, he felt a measure of relief.
I’m safe…I’m alive, he thought and, deeper in his mind, I’m not one of them.
He had no idea how he had gotten here and only a vague memory of what had happened. Still, frightening images welled up in his mind and blended with his dreams and memories until he had no idea what—if anything—had really happened and what he might have imagined. He shuddered when the image arose in his mind of seeing himself, crawling along the muddy bottom of the river in slow-motion. He could almost feel his hands and knees, sinking down into the mushy slime, and he shuddered when he remembered how hands had reached out for him and grabbed him. He was so lost in the reverie of trying to put all these pieces together that he jumped when someone spoke.
“Hey, you’re awake.”
“Yeah,” Ben replied, his voice breaking off with a dry croak as he shifted his head back and forth, looking for the person who had spoken. The pain in his body, especially along the length of his back, was intense. For the first time, he realized there was an oxygen tube taped to the side of his face and sticking into his nose. That might have been what he mistook for the smell of freshly bleached sheets. He tried to focus on the monitors beside the bed, but the readings confused him. At least they looked steady.
“Feel like telling me what you were thinking, going for a swim this time of year?”
The voice was close to his ear and sounded vaguely familiar. Ben struggled to focus as the speaker gently touched his shoulder. He rolled his head to the side and saw, framed by the muted sunlight streaming through the window, a dark silhouette that seemed to hover dangerously above him. His chest contracted; his scalp tightened. His only thought was that this had to be one of those things he had seen crawling out of the river, but after a moment, his panic slowly ebbed, and he realized that the touch on his shoulder wasn’t in any way dangerous or threatening.
“Am I…I’m not dead, am I?”
“No. You’re alive, all right. But it’s a damned good thing I happened along when I did.”
Finally, Ben recognized the doctor’s voice.
“Is that really you, Ed?”
Ben’s vision was beginning to clear, and he struggled to focus on his friend’s face. He didn’t trust what he was seeing, and he couldn’t help but wonder if all of this was another hallucination. His hand trembled out of control as he reached up and grabbed the crook of Ed’s arm just above the elbow. The white cotton of the doctor’s jacket was crisp and dry to the touch, but Ben could also feel the arm, warm and alive inside the sleeve.
Dr. Porlock smiled tightly and exhaled through his nose as he shook his head slowly from side to side. Ben groaned and let his hand drop back onto the side of the bed.
“Were you trying to drown yourself,” Ed asked, “or is it just that you don’t have any idea how to launch a canoe?”
Ben started to reply, but nothing that made any sense came to mind. He wanted desperately to tell his friend that he had been trying to get to the other side of the river, that someone was over there, and he had to talk to her, but now everything from last night—
Was it really last night?
—seemed so distant and vague, like the lingering fragments of a dream that were rapidly dissolving. He was almost afraid to blink because he feared that what he was looking at would suddenly morph into something else.
“You must’ve tripped on the rocks lugging that canoe down to the water.” When Ed pressed his hand lightly against the bandage on Ben’s forehead, a tingling sting shot across his scalp. “Banged yourself up pretty good, too. Fortunately, no bones were broken.”
“I wanted to…go for a ride,” Ben said, knowing even as he said it how lame he must sound.
“At that time of night?” Ed sounded incredulous. “You feel strong enough to sit up?”
“Not sure,” Ben said. When he tried to shift into a sitting position, every muscle in his body felt like it was about to tear. The sheets made a too-loud crinkling sound when, after a momentary struggle, he released the tension in his body and eased himself back down.
“Give me a second or two, ’kay?”
“No hurry,” Ed said, folding his arms across his chest as he stepped away from the bed and looked at Ben with an expression of genuine care. The muted brown sunlight coming through the Venetian blinds behind him gave his silhouette a vibrant, fuzzy glow. After a few seconds, Ed cleared his throat and said, “Feel like telling me what you were really doing out there?”
“Are you…real?” Ben asked.
He realized how silly he must sound, but he had to ask it. He still couldn’t shake the feeling that he might already be asleep or maybe even dead and imagining all of this.
Ed leaned forward, patted Ben gently on the back of the hand.
“As real as you are, my friend. As real as you are.”
“That’s not as much reassurance as you might think,” Ben replied.
“So what happened?” Ed asked after another short pause. “Do you remember any of it?”
Ben groaned as he shifted his head from side to side. The stiff pillowcase chafed the back of his head.
“I told you. I was taking my landlady’s canoe out for a paddle.”
“At midnight?”
Ed’s voice sounded faint; Ben could no longer take even the muted glare of light in the room, so he closed his eyes. The instant he did, a terribly cold emptiness slid open inside his stomach, and he recalled listening to another voice…Lori’s voice—
Or was it Mary’s?
—as it came to him from the darkness on the other side of the river.
The memory of that voice filled him with a deep sense of loss and a sharp desire to hear it again. The urgency made him shudder and, in spite of the hollow feeling inside, gave him enough strength to open his eyes again and shift up in the bed. He shivered as he scanned the dimly lit room. Even the faintest shadows seemed charged with menace.
“I was…I thought I…this is gonna sound crazy to you, but I heard someone calling to me…from the other side of the river. I wanted to go over there and see who it was, and I…on my way back…I guess I lost my balance and fell overboard.”
“You don’t say?” Ed said, nodding.
Ben could hear the doubt in his doctor’s voice and see it in Ed’s expression as he leaned closer.
“Yeah, I—”
But Ben couldn’t finish. He sighed wearily and shook his head as though he could wipe away the memory of Lori’s voice and the cold emptiness he’d experienced there on the muddy bottom of the river. He brushed his bandaged hand against his face again. The touch numbed him, and he was surprised by the utter deadness of his own touch.
“I—I’ve been seeing and…and hearing things,” he finally said, not quite sure where he found the courage to admit this. “I don’t know what happened. The canoe tipped over, I think, and I must’ve tried to…to swim back, but I…I…”
His voice drifted off into a w
hisper that added to the hushed silence of the room.
“Ben,” Ed said mildly as he smiled reassuringly at him. “When I got there, it looked to me like you’d never even got the canoe down to the water. You dinged up the sides up pretty good on the rocks, but the bow wasn’t even wet. My guess is you tripped and fell into the river before you launched it.” He indicated the gash on Ben’s forehead. “Bumped your head on the rocks. Had a pretty bad nosebleed, too.”
“No, I…”
Ben’s weak protest twisted off to nothing as confused images of what he had experienced filled his mind. He knew that what he remembered happening wasn’t really possible, but he was positive he had sunk down to the bottom of the river and then crawled all the way back to the other shore on his hands and knees while things…terrible, frightening things he couldn’t quite see grabbed him and tried to hold him down. His hands were trembling violently as he raised them in front of his face and stared at the bandages that covered them.
“You were out cold when I got there, and your face was underwater,” Ed said. “If I hadn’t come along when I did—” He left the thought unfinished and, glancing down at the floor, simply added, “You’re lucky I was there.”
“Yeah,” Ben mumbled, but his voice drifted off as his gaze shifted over to the window. Against the warm, buttery glow of the blinds, he saw hazy clots shifting across his vision like floaters in his eyes. He could almost imagine they looked like dead leaves that were changing, taking on the distinct form of the human-shaped pile of leaves he had seen earlier. A sudden, terrifying thought struck him.
That’s what I was going to become! They wanted to turn me into that!
A low, strangled moan escaped him as he focused on his friend again. Even as he did, the image sharpened in his mind, and he saw the monstrosity lurching toward him with the streetlight glowing behind it. He could still all too easily imagine the deadliness of that thing’s embrace as it suffocated him, and he knew, without a doubt, that he would have died and turned into one of those things if his friend hadn’t pulled him out of the river when he did.
“How did you find me?” Ben finally asked. “How did you know to come down to the river?”
“After you called the office yesterday, I was still pretty worried about you.”
“That was yesterday?” Ben’s voice wasn’t much more than an echo. All the while, his inner eye was focused on the lumbering figure of leaves. In his mind, now, it was seething with horrible life, making sickening, slopping sounds as it shifted ever closer to him.
“Yeah. You called around noon yesterday. You don’t remember?”
Ben shook his head and rubbed his eyes, trying to wipe the image from his mind. “I—I’m still kind of confused. Maybe from bumping my head.”
“Maybe,” Ed said, “but I was concerned, so I called you after I got home from work. I didn’t get an answer, so after supper, I figured—what the heck and swung by your place to check in on you.”
“Oh,” Ben said, all too aware of the tightness in his voice. “Yeah, but how did you know I was down at the river? You can’t really see it from the apartment.”
Ed shrugged. “Your brother told me.”
“My brother?”
“Yeah. He came to the door when I rang.”
“My brother—” Ben repeated as though those were the only two words he knew. He narrowed his eyes as he tried to let this sink in, but the line between what was real and what was imaginary was much too blurred.
“He told me where to find you.”
“But my brother is—”
Ben let his voice trail off. A bone-deep shudder ran through him when he thought again about what he might have become. He knew now that—without a doubt—he hadn’t imagined any of it. His breath came hard. Even the slightest motion of his chest sent jabs of pain between his ribs. Once again, he raised his bandaged hands and looked at them against the diffused daylight. He flexed his fingers, amazed that he could move them.
“When do people give up?” he finally said, not really addressing Ed. “When do people start to die?”
“They start to die the day they stop living,” Ed replied. “But that’s the good thing about you. One of the things I admire about you. You have a tenacity that makes you hang on to life, no matter what.”
Ben started to say something but realized he couldn’t possibly put what he was thinking and feeling into words. And for the first time in a long time, since even before Mary died, he knew that he hadn’t given up and that he wasn’t going to give up. Closing his eyes, he stared into the darkness that closed around him, muffling him in a cocoon of silence so deep he thought he had to be imagining in.
Chances were, if Ed hadn’t come along, he wouldn’t have made it out of the river alive and, given just a slight shift in the ways things had worked out, even now he might be lying spread-eagle on the muddy river bottom, his eyes staring sightlessly up at the shimmering gray vault of the sky. And at night, when darkness descended, he would lurch up out of the river and onto the shore, and he would mindlessly amble around town in the darkness. The thought of what might have been left him feeling cold and frightened, but after taking several shallow breaths, he opened his eyes and looked at his friend and doctor again, unable to express how truly grateful he was that he hadn’t died.
The faint but steady thumping of his pulse throbbed in his neck, and he stared wide-eyed at the warm, brown light that spilled like liquid into the room. Within seconds, waves of fatigue swept over him, and he could feel himself falling into a deep, restful sleep. And as he faded away, the only thought in his mind was—
This is real and I’m alive and maybe just maybe that’s enough.
Cemetery Dance Publications
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Quote
Table of Contents
Introduction
Tin Can Telephone
Miss Henry's Bottles Part One
Miss Henry's Bottles Part Two
Miss Henry's Bottles Part Three
Blood Ledge Part One
Blood Ledge Part Two
Cold River Part One
Cold River Part Two
Cold River Part Three
Cemetery Dance Publications
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Quote
Table of Contents
Introduction
Tin Can Telephone
Miss Henry's Bottles Part One
Miss Henry's Bottles Part Two
Miss Henry's Bottles Part Three
Blood Ledge Part One
Blood Ledge Part Two
Cold River Part One
Cold River Part Two
Cold River Part Three
Cemetery Dance Publications
Four Octobers Page 25