“What?”
“Ruben?”
Ruben stopped talking. There was a man in the window. Looking out.
“Ruben?”
Ruben didn’t answer. The man was looking at him. Long hair, tangled and matted, a mouth full of straight white teeth. A twisted scar, ugly and waxy on his cheek. Looking straight ahead through the grimy window of the cabin, looking right at Ruben, eyes flat as glass.
Ruben stared, he was staring, the man was turning slowly from the window, walking away, back straight, arms hanging at his sides.
A distant tinny sound from the air somewhere. His father’s voice, from his hand, from the phone, down at the level of his waist: “Ruben? Sweetheart? Are you there?”
It’s him—
Ruben stepped closer to the window, blinking, watching the night man walk, into the interior of the cabin, walking in a long, slow circle. He reached the rear of the cabin and turned back, and Ruben saw it again, the face, framed in the smeared window glass, blank and expressionless. For all of his life this person, this thing had stalked Ruben’s nightmares, all cool ease, a golden striding jackal, and now he moved stiff and automatic, arms hanging as if weighted at his sides.
Hollow. Hollow like Wesley—
“What are you?” said Ruben, his words visible in the cold, and he heard his dad say his name one more time, but he wasn’t listening to him anymore. He was talking to the man in the window. To the night man. “What the fuck are you?”
And then something hit him brutally hard on the back of his head and his consciousness lit up with stars and pain, and he screamed and fell down.
The way it worked in movies, the way Samir had probably intended it to work, was that he’d smack Ruben on the back of the head with the flat face of the shovel, and that single clean collision would put Ruben out of commission. And then, while Ruben was unconscious, maybe he would have, who knows, tied him to a tree or something.
What actually happened was that the shovel’s face glanced off one side of Ruben’s head, and either Samir was too weak or Ruben was too hardheaded for it to do anything near the kind of blunt-force damage that would have been necessary to disconnect him from consciousness.
God, it fucking hurt, though, like Ruben’s head had been smashed in the door of a car, bounced off of concrete. He looked up, clutching his head, and saw a skinny dark-skinned man in a T-shirt and jeans, gaping down at him with the shovel clutched in his fists like a baseball bat.
“Hey,” he said, and Samir brought the shovel down again, swung it like a mallet, and Ruben rolled away just in time, and heard the ugly chunk of the shovel’s sharp edge burying itself in the frozen mud. Samir let out a high-pitched animal shriek, leaping onto Ruben’s back, clawing and clutching, while Ruben struggled up onto his forearms.
Samir stayed on top of him, riding his back, digging his fingers into Ruben’s neck, and Ruben could feel his bone-thin body, curled along the length of his spine.
Ruben growled as all his old wrestler’s instincts snapped to life: his shoulders squaring off like two soldiers, his thigh muscles straining like dogs on leashes. He flipped both of them over, putting Samir on his back, pinned. Ruben punched him, once, a clean cut across the jaw, and rolled off, thinking that this was done—but then Samir hissed and scraped the side of his face with long, ragged nails, cutting into him, drawing blood.
Ruben punched again, viciously hard, and then once again, with the other hand, and he felt the hot sting in his knuckles and watched Samir’s head roll on his wiry neck, saw ropes of blood shoot out of the side of his mouth. A third hit and Ruben felt teeth go loose. A splatter of blood painted itself on the muddy snow. But Samir was like a demon; Samir wouldn’t quit. He brought a skinny pointed knee into Ruben’s gut and knocked the wind from him, got on top of him again, choking him, a line of bloody drool dripping from the corner of his mouth until it dangled, disgusting, just above Ruben’s own mouth. God, did he stink, an eye-watering stench of decay coming off him like a cloud.
The man is gone, Ruben thought. He is all gone.
He had seen Samir twice, ten years ago, once in the office and once in his house. He had been thin and healthy and well-scrubbed, a keen and earnest young man, and now he was fucking gone. He looked like a refugee: eyes like marbles, cheeks hollowed out by time and hunger. He had the wild beard and desperate savage strength of a shipwreck victim, fighting to stay alive. A lost man from a storybook, abandoned by fate, long since having traded away the last human instincts in exchange for one more day’s survival.
“Jesus Christ, man,” said Ruben. “Stop.” But Samir kept going, digging, clawing, jamming the sharp angles of his elbows into Ruben’s stomach, striking at his eyes. He sank his teeth into Ruben’s wrist, and Ruben yelped in pain and frustration. They grappled, rolling around in the slushy mud of the forest floor, off the trail and then back onto it, in and out of the small piles of animal shit that dotted the muddy path.
Finally Ruben caught the man’s arms behind his back and jerked them until Samir made a guttural, deflating sound, half sob and half scream, and went limp.
Holding him this way, Ruben could feel just how threadbare his body had become; every individual bone fragile as a pencil under the fabric of his skin.
Ruben released his grip very slowly, and just slightly, but Samir didn’t move again. He lay panting, eyes closed, shuddering like a spent child. Ruben was quicker in catching his own breath. His freshly wounded wrist throbbed, and he stared at it, hoping he hadn’t just gotten rabies or something.
He turned his attention from his assailant. Long enough to point to the window.
The figure was still there. Appearing and disappearing at the window. Visible, then invisible. Walking in circles.
“What is going on up here, man? Is that your friend? Dennis? Is that him?”
“No, that’s—” said Samir, and then the effort to speak caught up with him, and his voice collapsed into a spate of dusty coughs. The gift of speech returning haltingly, as if he hadn’t spoken in years.
“That’s not a person.”
The face again at the window, then gone again. Back and forth, back and forth, back and forth forever.
“It’s a vessel.”
“Hey,” Ruben said softly, and kneeled beside Samir in the snow. There was so much to understand.
He helped Samir up until he was kneeling alongside him. The two of them on their knees, like two penitents in the muddy field, their eyes angled up toward the house.
He took Samir’s hands in his. Like a brother; like a father; gathered up the other man’s two hands and clasped them between his own.
“Listen, dude.”
He used the familiar, goofy little word. It felt right somehow. Like: look, all this crazy shit aside, we’re just two guys, right? Just a couple of dudes out here in the woods.
“Why don’t you tell me the whole story?”
Samir nodded. He started to crawl toward the lodge. Ruben followed him up.
In April of 2010, after their final, violent, failed attempt to seize the Keener boy, Dennis and his followers fled Southern California. First, Samir recalled, they went to Tempe. Then they spent some time in Texas, he thought, but it might have been Oklahoma. New people drifted in and out of Dennis’s circle of charismatic influence. Lost souls. Schizophrenics. Perpetual outsiders. For a long time, Dennis was fixated on returning to Los Angeles, on having another go at Wesley Keener. The trial was over, the publicity had died down. The boy would be less protected.
They could get him now. Crack him open.
But then one night—Samir thought it was six months later, or a year—and he thought they were somewhere in Montana, Big Sky Country or something—their leader, whose extraordinary revelation was at the heart of their beliefs, had another one.
Ruben listened patiently through the story. He let Samir talk, and he listened.
There had been a lightning storm. They were staying in a campground, in a circle of ragged tents. Dennis woke up panting an
d shivering, seized by this fresh vision, and got the rest of them up. It was the middle of the night, and they stood together beneath the elements, as the lightning exploded over and over, and the rain came in sheets. They were a dozen, more or less, at that time: his acolytes, his stalwarts, his true believers. Katy was there, of course, rapt, her tears mingling with the rain, ecstatic to hear a fresh round of truth. And Samir, bent over the small notebook he carried to write down everything Dennis said.
Another chance was coming, Dennis told them. This was the substance of the revelation; this was the heart of it. If they had missed their chance to open the vessel the Keener boy had become, there would be another chance, and they had to be ready. The future was always coming. The good and golden world would try again to pour itself into this one, to strip us of our pain and grief, and we had to be ready.
Dennis was determined, this time, to be the vessel himself. This was his pronouncement. He touched each of them in turn; he looked them in the eye, while thunder roared in the dark sky. They had ten years—not ten years from right then, from the night of the Montana lightning storm, but ten years from the last time, from the Keener boy.
They shivered in the rain. They cried out in ecstasy. The mission was clear. The future was coming.
Samir was shivering now. He clutched at his skinny arms. Ruben sat beside him on the dusty floor of the ranger station, their backs against the wall, like kids in the middle-school cafeteria, talking quietly at lunchtime.
And while Samir told his story, Dennis was walking. From the window to the door, from the door to the window, and each time he passed within feet of them, within inches of the soles of Ruben’s boots. Dennis was in heavy work pants and a tattered collarless gray shirt. He did not move his head. His arms were straight beside him. He just walked, back and forth, tight circles in a small room, and every time he passed, Ruben felt the same small shudder of horror.
This ranger station when it was active had been a true working outpost, not any kind of visitors’ center. A cot, a desk, a trunk for supplies. But whatever it had been, it wasn’t anymore. The cot was a rusty metal frame, the lid of the trunk was thrown open, loose from its hinges, the edge of a blanket hanging out. There were food wrappers everywhere, broken bits of wood and flakes of paint.
And it was full of blood. While Samir talked, Ruben looked around the room and saw blood in every corner. Blood in splatters on two walls; an archipelago of blood on the floor.
Ruben tried to tell if the blood was new. Tried to summon whatever investigative instinct he had found at Cosmo’s. Was the blood tacky? How red was it? It didn’t seem new, but not old either.
Samir meanwhile was in the past, out on the road. With Dennis, when he was still Dennis, cool and charismatic at the core of a ragged band, hustlers and madmen and thieves on their secret and glorious mission to summon the other side. Stealing drugs, stealing money. Working shit jobs, robbing strangers, undertaking other activities that even now, in his dead-voiced wilderness confessional, Samir could not bring himself to confess.
Dennis was working to empty himself out. Letting the others handle the material things, while he disappeared into the maze of his mind, focused on that riddle, on getting himself all stripped down so the good and golden world could find him and fill him up.
Eventually they drifted up here, to the great wilderness. The cold and undiscovered country. Mid–last year, Samir thought? Maybe September. The time had blurred together, the seasons collapsing.
“Why?” Ruben asked. “Why Alaska?”
“Cheap. And we had to leave Tacoma. Quickly.” Samir looked fleetingly distressed, remembering whatever had happened in Tacoma. “Someone’s brother knew about this place.”
He was still having trouble speaking. He was taking greedy sips of water from the canteen Ruben had brought from the store in town. Ruben had put out a small pile of granola in front of him, and Samir picked at it like a bird, taking fingerfuls and pushing them into his cracked lips, chewing them drily, having small sips of water.
“And we didn’t have much time. Dennis was close. He thought he was close.”
By now most of the others had drifted away, and it was back to the three of them, the same core group who had visited Shenk & Partners a decade ago. Katy and Samir and Dennis, Dennis crouched on the ground most of the time, bent over, palms pressed together, muttering and murmuring.
It was going to happen, he told them, when he was lucid. When he was present in the room. Time was ticking. It was fucking imminent.
“He wanted to be somewhere safe when it happened. Somewhere we could be alone.” Samir paused, licked his cracked lips.
And meanwhile, thought Ruben, Theresa was at home in Indianapolis, in the birdcage of her childhood, in the grips of her parallel madness. Pacing and muttering. Tunneling in. Wandering in circles, moaning behind the locked door.
Until, in November of last year, she had her own revelation.
She understood it all, including the part of the secret that Dennis had chosen not to tell.
It was on the strength of this understanding that she flew forth. Emerged at last from her room, suitcase in hand, and left her bewildered mother and got herself all the way to Alaska and found Dennis and his acolytes, trying to work the same miracle she was.
Dennis walked past again, and Ruben watched him, his lank blond hair and his pale cheeks.
Ruben felt a surreal wash of pity for his old nemesis. Laid low. Hollowed out.
It had happened on November twelfth, Samir reported. Exactly ten years since it happened to Wesley. Ruben would have bet it was the same day Theresa Pileggi experienced her revelation, back in Indiana.
The day Dennis finally did it.
The day he became a vessel.
“So then, you know…” Samir coughed, spat on the ground. “Then we were just waiting.”
“You were waiting for what?”
The sky had opened up again, and now, as Ruben eased Samir toward the end of the story, rain hissed and muttered on the roof of the station.
“Waiting till it was time to do it. The future was inside of him now.” Dennis walked past, slowly, eyes empty, reached the door, and turned around. “Now it was our job to bring it out.”
Ruben knew exactly what Samir meant. He would never forget it: the night man smiling on his lawn, a thousand years ago, when Ruben asked what they would do to Wesley Keener, if they got him.
Get it out, the man had said. Crack him open.
“Katy wanted to be the one to do it,” Samir said. “She had become—I don’t know.” Samir shivered, recalling whatever Katy had become. “She was very keen. But so yeah. We had a gun. There was one here, in the station. This guy, Jonathan, he was with us for a while, but then he took off. Him and a girl, Elsie. He left it behind.”
“What kind of gun?”
“It was a handgun,” Samir said. “Some kind of semiautomatic.”
Ruben knew the rest, of course. A Donner P-90. Very unusual gun. He was there—he was almost there—he almost understood everything. He could almost tell Samir the rest.
“The thing is, we had to wait. It was supposed to be that once he became like”—he paused, pointed at Dennis as he walked past, empty and staring—“like that, then after some time, he would glow. Like the boy did, your boy. Wesley. Light up, like, like, from the inside. But Dennis didn’t…he never did that. So we didn’t know if we were supposed to. I kept saying I wasn’t sure, you know? What if he’s just—just sick, or—I don’t know. I mean can you imagine, if we—you know, if we—we killed him and…and nothing happened? I just thought we oughta wait, and I told Katy that. So we waited. Katy was so ready, and I said let’s just give it a week. A month. Let’s just wait.”
Samir trembled. He coughed. Ruben waited, and then he prompted him. He didn’t ask. He told Samir what happened next. “Then Theresa Pileggi came.”
“Theresa,” said Samir, softly, almost fondly, like he had just learned a pleasing secret. “Was that her
name?”
Ruben nodded. Streaks of rain clawing at the window like fingers.
“She did, yeah. That’s right. She came. She was here.”
Ruben could picture it. There was something about Theresa Pileggi that was always so locked in, so certain. It made sense. Once she had understood the truth—the real truth—what she thought was the truth—she had come not hesitantly, but like a locomotive. Like a bullet from a gun.
She found Dennis walking and she found these two emaciated wild-eyed misfits trying to steel themselves to murder him—to crack him open—and she told them to stop. She told them they had to stop.
Don’t do it, she said. You can’t do it.
She explained what was really going on. The revelation she had received in her Indianapolis bedroom. She explained the part that Dennis had left out. What would happen if they went through with it.
Katy wouldn’t accept it. She told this new arrival she was wrong; they had to do what Dennis had told them to do—they had to release the good and golden world.
And now Samir told all of this to Ruben. Rain battering at the roof. Dennis walking and watching.
“And you believed what she told you? It made sense?”
Samir laughed, a dry, terrible, cracking sound, and then he couldn’t stop laughing. He bent forward, shaking, clutching himself and laughing.
“Did it make sense?” he managed at last, flecks of spit and blood on his lips, his eyes wide with the hilariousness of it all. “Did it make sense? Does any of it make fucking sense?”
Poor Samir had given his life to this. To all of it. His was the dilemma of the zealot, the cult victim, the fundamentalist with blood on his hands. He had believed it all. How does he stop believing it now? And then Theresa came in, carrying this last piece of truth. The final piece of the puzzle.
The answer to Ruben’s question, finally, was yes. Samir had believed her. He had wanted to believe her, maybe, because he didn’t want to go through with what they’d started. He didn’t want to crack open Dennis, even though that’s what Dennis had told them to do, because in the end it would just be murder, after all. So he was looking for a reason not to go through with it. He was ready to receive the warning that Theresa had brought. Ready to believe her.
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