Darkness Rising (The East Salem Trilogy) (18 page)

“It sounds like a nice little town,” Ben said.

“We had a pretty gruesome crime here last month. People are still
checking to make sure their doors are locked. It doesn’t seem like the kind of place that Satan would pick to hang out in,” Tommy said.

“What do you mean, ‘hang out’?” Ben said.

“We were told this town was the seat of Satan’s throne,” Tommy said. “Maybe not this town but this general area.”

“Who told you that?”

“An angel.”

“Then you should believe it.”

“I do,” Tommy said. “You said the Wendigo came from the devil, but that nobody was telling stories about him until about a thousand years ago. When Hiawatha and Deganawida were fighting Thadodaho.”

“Yes.”

“So where was the Wendigo before he was here? He existed before they started telling the stories about him, right?”

“Yes.”

“And he still exists, right?”

“He does.”

“So where was he before he was here?” Tommy asked again.

“He was wherever someone called him to be. Demons will come if you invite them in by name.”

“So who summoned him here? How could the Native—how could the people who lived here already summon him, if they didn’t know his name?”

“That’s a good question.”

“So how? Was he summoned by someone from somewhere else?”

“I think so.”

“Where did Thadodaho come from? You said he was an Onondaga chief—was he possessed by a demon? By the Wendigo?”

“No. The Wendigo has its own form. Some said it was like a bird or a dragon. But there could have been other demons. Scripture indicates that perhaps a third of all the angels sided with Satan and were cast out. That’s a lot of demons.”

“But who? Who was summoning them?”

“I don’t know,” Ben said. “But I think you’re asking the right questions, Thomas. Good night. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“I look forward to it,” Tommy said as he watched Ben climb the front stairs of the inn.

Look forward
. . . Tommy considered what Abbie had been trying to say when she said, “Don’t look back.” Did she mean the opposite?
Look forward—be optimistic?
Probably not. Another interpretation would be
Look toward the future
.

He thought of a riddle he’d learned in Boy Scouts. A man is standing on the ground floor of a house next to three wall switches. One of them turns on a lightbulb in a windowless closet in the attic, and there’s no way to tell from the ground floor if the light is on in the attic. You’re allowed to turn the switches on or off in any combination, as many times as you want, but you can only go up to check once to see if the light is on. How do you solve the problem?

He’d raised his hand almost immediately, and afterward the scoutmaster said he’d never known anyone who could solve the riddle so quickly. You turned the first switch on, left it on for ten minutes, then turned it off, turned the second switch on, and ran up to check. If the light was on, it was the second switch. If the light was off
but it was still warm
, it was the first. If it was off and it was cold, it was the third.

“That’s very intuitive, Tommy,” the scoutmaster had said. Tommy’d had to look up the word
intuitive
when he got home, but he liked the sound of it.

Look to the future
. How far? Who knew?
But think in four dimensions, not three
, he told himself.

Ruth Gunderson decided that before she closed up the library for the night, she’d check in the attic to see if the squirrels had gnawed on any of
the books in storage. The attic of the old brick library was used to house the town’s historical archives and collections that had been donated or bequeathed to the library—but no one had bequeathed enough shelf space to hold all the extra books, so they sat in the attic in boxes. There’d been talk for years of expanding the building, but East Salem was not a town where anything got done quickly.

She climbed the steep steps leading up to the attic, but when she got to the top and tried the light switch, nothing happened. There were only two bare lightbulbs illuminating the space, one directly above the stairs and a second at the far end of the room. She thought it odd that the two bulbs had burned out at the same time, and wondered if the squirrels had been nibbling on the wires. That could be a fire hazard.

She had a small LED light on her key chain. The battery was low and the light was weak, but she could still see ten or fifteen feet in front of her. She shone the light into the darkness and saw the shapes of a few cartons and containers in what felt like an infinite void.

She sniffed and detected a pungent, horrible smell, as if something dead and rotting was up there. She recalled asking Leon, the custodian, to set some Havahart traps last fall, when they’d last had a problem with squirrels. Perhaps he’d caught one but forgotten to remove the carcass.

She moved farther down the aisle, between stacks of cardboard boxes stuffed with papers and books. She’d closed the door behind her when she’d ascended the stairs, lest some sort of furry critter run out and lodge itself in the stacks downstairs, but now it occurred to her that if something happened to her up here, a broken leg or a heart attack . . .

But she was being a timid old woman to think that way. She scolded herself for being so nervous. It was time to leave anyway—there was little she could do tonight without proper lighting. As she turned for the stairs, the battery gave out in her key chain and her tiny light died. She was in total darkness.

“
Fand!
” she said, an expression her little Norwegian grandmother had
been fond of saying, when
Uff-da!
wasn’t strong enough. She knew the stairway had to be just twenty or thirty feet in front of her, but without any way to judge the distance, she worried that she might accidentally step wrong and fall down the stairs.

Then she heard something, a scratching sound, coming from somewhere to her left. The sound they’d all heard earlier, but much louder now. And the animal making it seemed much bigger than a squirrel.

“Who’s there?” she said.

No answer.

She heard it again.

Darn squirrels!
she thought.

“I’ll give you three days to leave, and then I’m telling Leon to take care of it,” she said into the darkness. Her heart beat faster, but she was being foolish again, she thought, scared of the dark like a child.

She felt her way forward, tapping the floor in front of her with her toe before she stepped. Finally she found the top of the stairs and the railing.

Back on the second-floor landing, Ruth closed the door leading to the attic. And locked it. At the reception desk she wrote herself a note to tell Leon to change the lightbulbs in the attic and to find whatever it was that was making that smell.

Carl nudged the gear lever up with his left boot toe to shift the motorcycle into fifth and rolled the throttle back with his right hand as he sped onto the Taconic at 80 mph. He rode north at a speed well over the legal limit because he didn’t care if he got a ticket, and he didn’t care if he had an accident, and he didn’t care about anything at all. He tried to let the deep thrum of the engine and the roar of the wind and the fierce vibration of the machine nullify the many sad and dark things he felt inside. He turned into Taconic State Park and paused, idling at the waterfall, where
he remembered the man with the poodle, the man Tommy thought could be an angel. When Carl remembered him, he saw only a man who was pathetic and alone except for a dog, a man who’d settled for something far less than what was possible, and then Carl hated the man with the dog, which made no sense, he knew. What Carl hated was himself. That made sense.

When Carl returned to his house, he took off his coat, then went to the cupboard above his refrigerator, where he found a bottle of bourbon toward the back of the cupboard. Carl generally never drank to excess, but tonight seemed like a good night to make an exception. Tonight he had a secret that he’d kept from Tommy and the others. The story of Hiawatha losing his daughter had served to make the pain all the more acute. Today was Esme’s birthday. She would have been twenty-six, an elegant young woman, possibly with a family of her own. No.
Would have been
was wrong.
Should have been
was more like it.

He found a rocks glass in the cabinet, opened the bottle, filled his glass with ice and bourbon, and took a sip. The sip was good. If the sip was good, the gulp would be better, and if a gulp was good—it was—several gulps would be exquisite. He refilled his glass and emptied it again just as quickly, feeling the alcohol burn and glow inside, coating him with a false warmth, because inside he felt empty, dead, like the cast-iron woodstove in his living room that he knew he probably should fill with a couple of fat pieces of hardwood that would burn all night. Instead, feeling frivolous, he loaded the stove with split birch, tossed in some kindling, and struck a match.

He opened his mouth to sing “Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you,” but no sound came out.

The birch quickly jumped to life and gave off a sharp dry heat and a golden light that made the shadows dance. Carl pulled his chair in front of the stove and refilled his glass. This time he sipped more slowly. The house was small, but tonight it felt like an enormous cavern, too large for one man to live in or, more accurately, too large for half a man to live in.

He sipped and briefly thought that tonight might be the night he would go upstairs and open the door to the room down the hall from his, a door he had not opened in ten years.

The room was probably a mess, with the bed half made and a basket of dirty laundry on the closet floor, with a few items on the floor that had not made it all the way into the basket. Resting against the pillows would be a well-used stuffed bear named Figaro with one eye coming loose. The left one or the right one? He couldn’t recall, though he could remember promising Esme he’d fix it for her, and saying her mother was the one who knew how to sew and fix things like that, but now that Mom was gone and it was just the two of them . . .

There would be a picture in a frame on her desk, somewhere amid the books and drawings, of a boy named Louis. Esme had just started dating and Louis was a nice boy. Carl had gotten a Christmas card from him last year. He’d probably get another this year. The last time Carl had opened the door to Esme’s room, he’d seen the photograph of Louis, and he’d told himself he really needed to have The Talk about sex with Esme, even though he was certain she would roll her eyes and say, “I know, Daddy, I
know
!”

He sipped and then gulped. He’d already had too much to drink. But so what? It took so much effort to maintain the positive façade that other people saw, when he knew how he really felt inside. For one night he could let go. Collapse. Tomorrow he would rally, the way he always did.

He thought about the long summer afternoons when, starting in first grade, he’d meet Esme at the town park at three o’clock after her day camp was over. It was his job, because his wife had a nine-to-five job, to keep Esme happy and occupied until dinner. She’d insist that they go to the pool. She’d change into her suit in the girls’ locker room—first she’d hold up a finger and tell him, “Daddies are
not
allowed”—and then she’d jump bravely into the water, without testing it first by dipping a toe. Carl always tested the water first, and then he had to count to three, sometimes more than once, while Esme treaded water and called out, “Come on, Daddy!”