The Homecoming

by Carsten Stroud

  When he’d mentioned the mirror to Nick, he and Kate had exchanged a look that made him think that they knew where it was. Maybe he’d snoop around Kate’s house a bit, when that Eufaula girl wasn’t around. Eufaula was always following him around like she expected him to steal the silverware or something.

  But Rainey had learned a few interesting things pretty fast, these last weeks.

  For instance, Rainey had figured out that the more you worked out ways to stop other people from making you feel guilty, the easier it got.

  It was like Ninja mind control, and it made him feel tough and confident, not like a kid at all, and the more time he spent listening to the voices in the willow trees, the older and tougher he got.

  They were finally at the roundabout.

  “We gotta get off,” he whispered to Axel.

  Axel looked up from his iPad and stared around at the station stop. It was dark now, and the streetcar was the only light.

  “Maybe we should just stay on and go home.”

  “We’re gonna, but we should take the next car, ’cause Nosy Pants is looking at us.”

  Axel sighed and stuffed his iPad into his knapsack. He had finally managed to get to the naked girl part and he hoped he’d remember later how he had done that.

  The driver had turned around in her seat to watch as they walked up to the front to get off.

  When they got there she asked them if everything was all right but Rainey just said they had skipped school and now they were going to go home and face the music.

  “Well, you’re such beautiful boys, I’m sure your folks will go easy on you,” she said, closing the door after they got down the stairs.

  She waved as she worked the car around the turn. They stood and watched it rumbling and creaking off down the street until it was gone and they were standing in a pool of blue light from the lamppost overhead and beyond the light there was only the dark. Axel didn’t like this at all.

  “Know what we should do, Rain? We should just turn on your phone and call for a taxi.”

  “They’ll know where we are.”

  “I don’t care,” he said. “This place looks different at night. I think I just want to go home. They’re not gonna like kill us or anything.”

  “We’ll get grounded for a month.”

  “I don’t care if they ground me for a year. Call a taxi or something. Mom’ll pay when we get home. I mean it, Rain.”

  Rainey was staring up at the staircase. It had yellow lights set into the stairs so you could see your way if you wanted to go up to the top at night.

  “Come on, Rain. Phone, will you?”

  Rainey pulled out his cell phone, put the battery back in, and flicked it on. There were lots of calls, from Regiopolis, from Kate, from Kate, from Kate—there was even one from Lemon, and a text message.

  He tabbed it and read it.

  BOYS PLEASE COME HOME WE’RE WORRIED SICK

  LOVE KATE AND BETH

  It had been sent about ten minutes ago. Axel read it over his shoulder. “See. They’re not pissed off. Just worried. Text them back.”

  Rainey decided to reply.

  DEAR K&B WERE OK JST RIDING THE STRTCAR BE BACK HOME IN HOUR SORRY ABOUT DITCHING CLASSES LV U R&AX

  “Send it,” said Axel. “Tell them we’re getting a cab. Or maybe they could pick us up?”

  Rainey thought about it, hit SEND, and then shut his phone off. The air was chillier up here on the side of the wall. He got his blazer out of his knapsack and put it on. Axel pulled his out, slipped it on, and they both stood there, looking at each other.

  Axel, who was quick, got it in a few seconds.

  “No friggin’ way, Rain. We are not going up there. Up there is haunted. Like, are you whack? No way.”

  Axel plucked the cell phone out of Rainey’s hand, stepped back a few feet, and hit the CALL button.

  “Yeah, we need a cab at the top of Upper Chase Run. Yeah. The streetcar stop here. Where they turn around. Two of us. My name is Axel Deitz.”

  Rainey made no move to stop him.

  But he felt himself … receding … going away.

  “Yeah, okay,” said Axel. “We’ll be here.”

  He shut the phone off, and handed it back to Rainey. “There. They said five minutes, maybe less. Okay. No weird shit. Rain, you look funny. You gonna be sick or something?”

  “No. Ax, I gotta do something.”

  “No you don’t. The cab’s on the way, man. Just don’t go all zombie attack on me. Rain?”

  “I gotta see something, Ax. I’ll just be a minute, okay. Don’t freak out on me.”

  “Rain, please.”

  Rainey shook his head, turned, and looked at the stairs, following them as they rose up, a dwindling chain of tiny yellow bars that disappeared into the dark at the distant top. The words come and be recognized played in his head.

  He had no idea why.

  But he began to climb.

  “Rain, please,” said Axel, coming up a step or two after him. Rainey turned and looked down at him.

  “I gotta. I’ll catch the next trolley, Ax. Be cool, okay. Tell them I’ll be right along. Tell them I had to do something.”

  Axel’s eyes were welling up.

  “Rain, there’s something wrong with you. I mean it, you look all white and stuff. Your eyes look funny. Don’t do this.”

  Down the road a car turned the corner and came up towards them. The light bar on the roof had a sign—CHASE TAXI. The driver flicked his brights and pulled up alongside the station, beeped the horn, and rolled down his window.

  “You guys call a cab?”

  “Yes, we did,” said Axel. “Rain, come on.”

  Rainey shook his head.

  “Can’t, Ax. Gotta do this. You go now. I’ll be right along.”

  The cabdriver blipped his horn again.

  “Guys? Let’s move it, hah?”

  Axel blinked at Rainey, tears in his eyes, his cheeks shining.

  “Why are you doing this, Rain?”

  Rainey had no answer.

  Axel picked up his knapsack and turned away without another word. Rainey watched him get into the cab. The driver asked him something and he heard Axel say, “No, just me.”

  The driver glanced up at Rainey, standing on the steps, shrugged, and pulled away. Axel watched Rainey as they turned and headed back down Upper Chase Run, his young face a white blur, his big eyes wide. The cab turned the corner and was gone and Rainey was alone in the yellow pool of station light, the black immensity of Tallulah’s Wall rising up behind him, a thousand-foot wall of nothing, blocking out the stars.

  It took a long time, or seemed to, but he finally reached the landing at the top, out of breath, his knapsack dragging behind him. He set his knapsack down on the landing and leaned on the railing. Niceville was spread out before him, from the lights of Mauldar Field far off to the northwest to the clustered glitter of the Galleria Mall, where something big must be going on, since there were police lights flashing all over it, and the Live Eye news chopper was buzzing back and forth above it.

  Closer in he could see the golden glow of downtown Niceville, stitched all over with power lines that, from up here, looked like black netting. Farther down the river the lights of the Pavilion were all lit up like a necklace, and here and there he could see the softer glow of the neighborhoods of Garrison Hills and The Glades and Saddle Hill, buried under all those oaks and willows.

  He could even see the dark triangle of the Confederate Cemetery. That was where they had found him, buried alive in a grave with a dead guy inside it. There were boats on the river, blobs of colored light. Rainey imagined people on the boats, a party, pretty girls, rich guys like Coleman and his homies.

  Why was he up here?

  Come and be recognized?

  What did that mean?

  Rainey turned away from the view of the pretty little town with a stray line from a poem they had studied in English Lit playing in his head—anyone lived in a pretty how
town … he sang his didn’t he danced his did—and walked out onto the path that led through the old forest to Crater Sink.

  There were tiny solar lights marking the path. All around him the pines and oaks and willows rose up, getting older and taller and more tangled as he got farther into the forest.

  The path was stony and he slipped a couple of times, but as the bony ridge crested, it flattened out and the going got easier. There were no noises at all, just the flip-flop and skitter of his running shoes and the sound of his own breathing. If there were crows around they had all packed it in for the night.

  He pulled out his cell phone, put the battery in again, flipped it on, just to see the time, because he felt he had been walking along this path for hours, but it was only a few minutes after nine.

  Of course there was a text message from Kate:

  DEAR RAINEY THANK GOD WE’VE BEEN CRAZY DO YOU WANT US TO COME AND GET YOU OR YOU COULD TAKE A CAB AND WE’LL PAY AS SOON AS YOU GET HERE PLEASE CALL ME PLEASE CALL ME RIGHT NOW IS AXEL OKAY HIS MOM IS WORRIED BUT EVERYTHING IS OKAY HERE NOBODY IS ANGRY BUT WE WANT YOU BOTH HOME—

  Rainey texted her back.

  AX IS GOOD HE IS IN A CAB NOW HOME SOON.

  Kate’s reply was instant.

  WHY NOT YOU WHERE ARE YOU PLEASE CALL US

  Rainey shut the phone off, took the battery out.

  He stared down at it for a while, feeling suddenly bone-tired. When he looked up there was a girl standing in the pathway, lit up by one of the solar lights.

  His chest got all cold and it was impossible to breathe. He stood and looked at her and she stared back at him with a disapproving frown on her face. As he looked at her he saw that she wasn’t really a girl at all.

  She was a woman, a young and pretty woman. She was barefoot and she was wearing an old-timey dress made out of cotton or something. It was just a simple thing that covered her body from the shoulders down to her knees. She had a scarf or maybe a big necklace around her neck.

  Even in the dim light from the solar lamps Rainey could see that she wasn’t wearing a bra or anything because her breasts were like right there and her nipples were sticking out like buttons. She had her hands at her side and the necklace looked more like a snake than a scarf, a pretty big snake, with yellow and red and green and black rings all along its body.

  As he was looking at it, the necklace lifted up its head where it had been resting on the woman’s left breast and it stared right at him with its tongue going all fluttery in the air.

  Its eyes were green and shiny and when he looked back to the woman’s face he saw that her eyes were green and shiny just like the snake necklace, which, Rainey understood with a shock of recognition, was not a snake necklace at all but a real live snake.

  He found that he could not move and when he tried to talk his mouth was so dry that all that came out was a bunch of dry clicking sounds.

  The woman opened her mouth and words started to come out of it, but it wasn’t like it was a voice.

  It was more like the words were coming from someplace else, someplace that had an echo, and she was out of sync with her own voice, the way it happens when the sound track and the film are out of whack.

  “You afrighted,” the voice said. “That’s why you cain’t speak. You aright to be afraid.”

  She had a deep southern accent, and her voice was silky, but there was nothing silky about her.

  Rainey worked up some saliva and managed to get his voice going.

  “Who are you?”

  “My name is Talitha. I knows who you are. I knows why you walking in to Crater Sink.”

  “My mother is in Crater Sink,” he said, in a hoarse, defensive croak, while one of his knees quivered like a plucked string. “I have a right to go see my mother.”

  Talitha shook her head.

  “Your momma ain’t in Crater Sink. She has gone beyond Crater Sink.”

  “How do you know?”

  Talitha seemed to be listening to someone else. Her attention came back to him. He felt her look settle on him. It had weight and force and it frightened him. She shook her head and her expression was full of warning.

  “I knows what is in Crater Sink, boy.”

  “What’s in Crater Sink?”

  Talitha paused again, as if listening for something. After a moment, she spoke.

  “Nothing is in Crater Sink. Nothing is what lives there.”

  The way she was saying “nothing” made it come out like a name.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I knows that. That’s why Glynis sent me, Rainey. To help you understand.”

  “How do you know who I am?”

  Talitha studied him for a while.

  “I believe that deep down you’re another one of them Teagues. But not yet. You ain’t all the way a Teague just yet. You still got some of your real momma in you. But they trying to get you. They trying real hard.”

  “Who’s trying to get me?”

  “They is. Abel Teague, he wants to be alive again. Nothing is helping him.”

  His chest was tighter now, and tears came.

  “How do you know my mother is dead?”

  “Your real momma or your step-momma?”

  This was too much for Rainey, but not for Talitha. She was without mercy.

  “Your real momma was a poor lost child kilt by Abel Teague soon as she had you. Sylvia, she was your step-momma, but she love you like her own.”

  Now he was fully in tears.

  “How do you know?”

  “I knows because I am the one who took Anora to the mirror and Anora knows about who your mother really was. Anora and your step-momma, they is blood kin. So is Glynis. Glynis sent me to warn you because part of you isn’t a Teague yet. Your mother was a lost girl, but she had good in her.”

  “Who was she?”

  Talitha stopped to listen to the forest again, and then she shook her head.

  “Ain’t no time for that. Did you ever meet a man named Second Samuel while you was in the mirror?”

  This was said with such a note of sadness and grief and longing that Rainey felt like lying to her and saying that he had.

  But she did not wait for his answer.

  “I can’t ever live on that side of the mirror with my daddy, because of what I done. But it ain’t too late for you. You ain’t a Teague yet. You got good people in your life, Mercer kin, and if you go back now you can be like them and not like a Teague. But you got to leave this place now.”

  Rainey felt heat in the center of his cold. He knew he’d been adopted, but he had always felt like they were his real parents. His anger rose up.

  “My father was a Teague.”

  Talitha’s expression grew infinitely colder.

  “Your father was a Teague, yes. But his name ain’t Miles. You knows that. You knows you was a chosen child. Boy this is cruel hard to hear, but I will tell you that it was Miles Teague brought your step-momma up here to Crater Sink and pushed her in. That’s what Teague men do. It was a Teague man who kilt me.”

  Rainey’s knees went wobbly and his face turned icy cold. He fought for the words.

  “My dad killed my mother? My … stepmother?”

  Talitha nodded.

  “Why would he do that?”

  “Because she was nosy and asking questions about you. Where you come from. Who your momma was. Who your daddy was. What you really are.”

  “But now my dad is dead too.”

  “He is. By his own hand, yet he lies in consecrated ground with all his people.”

  She spoke with such conviction in that disembodied voice that it was impossible not to believe her.

  “Why did my dad kill himself?”

  Talitha was silent for a time, giving every appearance of listening to something he couldn’t hear but she could.

  “He killed himself because nothing was coming.”

  Now Rainey heard the sound of crows.

  A long way off, but clear enough.

&nb
sp; Talitha heard it too. Perhaps that was what she had been listening for all along.

  She looked up into the darkness of the forest roof and then back at him.

  “Nothing is coming. Turn away now and run back down them stairs just as fast as you can.”

  “What is it? What is coming?”

  Talitha only stared at him with a look of sorrow and disappointment.

  “If you stay you will see. I done what I could do for you. Now I have to go.”

  “Why do you have to go?”

  “Because nothing can kill the dead.”

  And she was gone.

  There was no woman on the dimly lit path. Maybe there never was. The path wound away into the darkness beyond, a dwindling sequence of small yellow lights. Above him the forest canopy shut out the night sky. Black things were fluttering through the branches high up there, and the air was full of chittering and scraping sounds, the clacking of sharp beaks. The black flying things were coming down from the branches and settling onto the ground around him. By the light of the lamps he could see that they were crows. Their glittering eyes watched him, and when he watched them back, they puffed up their backs and shook out their wings, and then settled into stillness. Horror came into him. Horror and dread.

  He turned to run back to the stair-head. His ears suddenly began to ring, a high-pitched drilling whine that seemed to slice through his skull. At first it was a steady shriek, but after a while the tone began to rise and fall. There was a pattern in it. He stood there on the pathway and found that the rising and falling of the ringing had words inside it and that he could understand what was being said. He stood there inside the milling flock of crows and listened to the words for a long time. As he listened he was aware of a rising up from the forest floor all around him.

  It wasn’t a visible rising at all. Nor was it invisible. It was neither visible nor invisible. It was nothing. He could see nothing. Nothing was here.

  He had come and been recognized.

  Deitz Sees the Light

  Chu was standing on the upper balcony of the Bass Pro Shop, racks and rows of guns and shelves of boxed ammo lining the wall behind him. He was watching a Live Eye news chopper buzzing past the windows. All the exterior windows of the store were tall, narrow rectangles with bulletproof glass in them—Deitz had called them “security slits”—so the chopper was passing from one slit window to the other in a sequence that reminded Chu of frames in a filmstrip.