HIGHWATER: a suspense thriller you won't be able to put down (35 page)

CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX

She watched them from the beach. She could see herself sitting up in the chair, where she had been only a few days before, but which felt like a much, much longer time ago. She saw Christopher take her body and pour the water over her face and eyes. She saw the tendrils of smoke rise up, saw Caleb’s terrified reaction, and her heart was lanced with pain. She knew that Christopher was doing the right thing, though; she knew Christopher would take care of Caleb, now, no matter what.

She looked down at the glass in her own hand, and wondered what it was for. She thought that maybe she should pour the water she had scooped from the pond over her eyes, here and now, in this place, but she was reluctant to do so. What would it do to her? Where would it take her? She didn’t want to know. Not now; she was scared.

In Finna’s cream-white nightgown she stood, her bare feet and her shins, almost up to her knees, in the mire of wet, dark brown sand or mud. The baleful light surrounded her; it was not raining. She could still hear the birds in the trees, but they sounded further away. The thing in the pond, the voice, hadn’t spoken to her for some time. She had heard it, but it too was further away, conducting other business. It was worse, in a way, to have the sense of it largely departed like this. Worse to know that it was gone for the moment, but would be back, and when it came back for her, it would seek the conclusion.

She tried to call out to Christopher and to Caleb — not to herself, no, but to the two of them — but her voice made no sound. Nothing left her mouth. What felt like cotton wads filled her ears, and either the day, the preternatural light of it, was finally darkening, or her sight was beginning to fail as well.

Elizabeth felt panic rise up inside of her. She looked at the crystal glass in her hand. She looked at Christopher and Caleb and her own useless body in the chair, and, finally, she looked at the ripple of water that was nearing them. She tried to call out again, but each time she did, the day darkened, her hearing became more muffled, and her legs sank a little lower into the sand. Her plan to hide from the creature in the pond, to distract it by acting like she had gone over, didn’t seem to be working. It somehow knew her, knew what wiles she was attempting, and had circumvented them.

In frustration and pain, she thought of throwing the glass down on the dock, shattering it. It would be just like before. It would be like when she had been sitting here before all of this began (though it had always been going on, hadn’t it?) Tipsy with wine, lost in her daydream, she’d let that glass slip and smash over the fieldstone. Had it been intentional? If she did that now, she knew, all would be lost. But maybe that was better. Maybe she would be no good for Caleb. She was lost; what good could she be for a child as special as he was? Christopher would take care of him.

She held onto the glass, up to her knees in the pond muck, alone in the perpetual dusk, with only the occasional dragonfly buzzing close to keep her company. Slowly, without thinking, as she had so many times before, her hand went to her neck to feel her locket. Only this time it wasn’t there.

* * *

The smoke, or vapor, cleared. Liz’s eyes were no longer covered in the strange membranes. Caleb blinked rapidly, as if he could will his mother to open hers.

“It’s okay, baby boy. It’s okay, Caleb. Just give it a second,” said Christopher.

In the pond, the thing was coming to them; a long black snake, bigger than any boa or anaconda, and not nearly the same, Christopher knew. For there was another part of its body, that heavier, somehow more brutal part below the surface, in the ground beneath the pond, sunk there in the deep. The rest of its enormous black body was below. The snake part was only the neck and head, a hundred feet long or more, the serpent winding through the water towards the dock, its head on that neck-appendage, a diamond shaped thing.

It approached, and the head lifted out of the water.

God help me
, Christopher thought.

“Vacie,”
hissed the voice. It reached the edge of the water, stretching out over the land and lengthening towards them. The rain rolled off its bloated body like oil on water. The body was covered in those black sores. They were darker, even, than its skin; pores, or eyes, like hot, rotted raisins, like a leper’s sores. The head: the diamond, triangle shape, the broad forehead of it, comprising its most prominent feature, the sunken eyes beneath its jutting cranium, the jowls around the tiny mouth.

But the tiny mouth was misleading, Christopher knew it could open wide, wide enough to engulf the entire child. He had been able to fend the thing off before, to banish it back to the depths, to buy them some more precious time, but it would take more than his tricks now. If it got its way, the thing in the pond would swallow and digest the child over millennia, Caleb’s body moving through the organ-like sacs on its outside, churning, eaten away, moving though the channels and tubes of it.

The thing in the pond, Mobius, would feed on the child for another Age.

The face of the thing was looming nearer, closing in on them, and Christopher heard shouts from the house behind them. Then Mobius, the
Getragen
, did too, its head snapping up, and Christopher saw it look
through
the house, those large, shining, fish-egg eyes rolling back and up beneath the jutting brow, in between its catfish-like whiskers, as thick as reeds, hanging from the sides of its head.

Christopher seized the opportunity.

“Caleb,” he said, “open your eyes now; look!”

Caleb did as he was told. Squinting into the rain, he looked at the thing, the
Getragen
’s head hovering over the dock, paused in its journey towards them, its eyes rolling back down to look at its prey.

“Caleb,” said Christopher evenly. “Look, my baby boy. Look at it.”

And Caleb did. He sucked on the red pacifier, and he looked.

The eyes, football-sized and elliptical, blacker than night, were matted, grainy, sponge-like. There was a shine within them, a sour gold crescent in each, but it was not a reflective shine. Still, Caleb’s image rose in those eyes, it floated up in them, and Christopher realized something about the
Getragen
, something that had remained undisclosed on “the trip” he’d taken upon being revived. The eyes of the thing were constantly in motion, constantly rolling back, as though on a spit, taking what they saw and bringing the image, the essence of it, into its terrible mind, so that to look at it was to be absorbed into its very being.

A shot rang out in the house behind them, or from the driveway on the other side.

Christopher was suddenly filled with a sickening doubt. A horrible sense that he had made the wrong decision, that to look at the thing there, its hovering, diamond snake head, with the rain coursing from its oiled skin, that small mouth moving, suckling something, tasting the air, ready to expand, and then consume the body after it had consumed the soul, was the wrong choice — that thing would take Caleb away forever. Maybe he should grab the boy, take him and run away, escape this doubt, this horrible guilt he had plunged into, something he had not felt since his rebirth.

But as Caleb’s image rolled with the thing’s eyes, almost from head to toe, but not quite yet, it was interrupted. Its head shifted, its eyes moved away, and it looked beyond them, towards the house.

A man was standing up on the embankment.

Through the rain and grey dim light, Christopher recognized Tom Milliner.

CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN

Tom had doubled back. It was that intuition again, that other sense, something guiding him, those inkblots on the walls. As he heard Jim and the shouting cops closing in, Tom had given up on pursuing Jared Kingston. He had gone back through the living room and out the back door to the embankment overlooking the pond.

He heard a shot fired at the front side of the house. Whether it was Jim pulling the trigger or the law enforcement, Tom didn’t know. He had said goodbye to Jimmy, and left the house without looking back.

At the edge of the embankment, he stopped. He could see the pond well enough. He saw the thing moving towards the shore, the shape of a giant snake, closing in on the dock. He took the girl’s locket from his jacket and held it up in front of him, dangling in air, and he said a prayer.

The relentless rain, the dark billowing clouds, made a virtual night out of day. Still, he saw Christopher holding the baby boy, and saw the thing rise up out of the water, the terrible head of it, and draw closer towards them. Tom was not surprised to see it. He was ready at last.

He had taken the locket from the girl when she was sleeping with Caleb at Fletcher Allen. Kooky or not, Tom had given over fully to his intuition. He had taken the locket and replaced it with a similar one he’d found in the hospital gift shop.

Those things, those birds, whatever they were, they had taken the phony one. Tom held the real one up in front of him, and as Christopher and Caleb watched, he opened it.

“Stranger things!” he shouted into the rain, to the impossible, mind-numbing, looming beast hovering there over the surface of the water. He’d seen that beast before, hadn’t he? It was in motel walls. It was in his nightmares. It had brushed its scaly way through his consciousness that summer with Jim and Maddy.

Maddy
, he thought.
How I love you
.

And as though she’d heard him, Maddy was there, on the back porch behind him.

It was all happening, happening fast like he knew it would. Fast and eternal. He had been standing there behind the Kingston house for a few seconds, but he had always been standing there in that spot, hadn’t he? He had been there every
when
.

He held the open locket in the air as Maddy stepped beside him, and they, too, had always been together.

* * *

Jim had held them off as best as he could, but he knew they meant business; they would not wait any longer. Fresh suits arrived (more Feds, Jim figured) and had taken aim over the hoods of their cars. He fired a warning shot from the front porch steps, yelling at them, putting on quite a good show. He waited, listening, sniffing the air, trying to sense what his friends were doing, how far they had progressed. When he felt enough time had passed, he set down the rifle, held up his hands, and walked towards them out into the pouring rain.

A moment later, he was shot in the back by Jared Kingston.

* * *

The thing in the pond hadn’t expected the state trooper to turn out the way he had. Or any of them, for that matter. Things had not gone according to plan, but they had gone close enough. The biddable mother had been rendered ineffective, despite the coy way she had tried to play. The old cop was bound to have his heart attack while climbing up those stairs, chasing after the decoy, the Kingston boy.

But, when the old cop had turned around and instead shown up at the edge of the pond, the thing had been angered. It had thrust out with its mind one last command to the Kingston boy;
kill the big betraying, son of a bitching trooper, vacie.

But the locket held in the air now, that was the worst of all.

What the locket contained did not make sense. Mobius had eyes which could see in a hundred directions, like the dragonflies that fluttered over the surface of its home. Those eyes were now focused on the piece of jewelry the old cop held, drawing its complete attention.

It could see; it could see too well. How, after the many millions of years it had lived, could God exist? It made no sense that a creature like Mobius was a reality in the same universe where God was a reality. The only God fathomable was one of total knowledge, one of total power. It made no sense to have a God thwarted by evil; it countermanded the entire
idea
of God.

What was it then, coincidence? Chance?

There, inside the locket, was the tiny sonogram picture that Liz had kept of her developing son. She had lost that pregnancy, never carried it to term, this the
Getragen
knew. Yet the name engraved in the silver opposite the picture, in handsome script — there was no denying it.

The name read:
Caleb
.

The child had somehow been born, anyway, yes. But that the mother had somehow
known
, that any of the vacies could know
anything
of the sort — that was too much for Mobius. Too much.

What was in them? What enlightened them that they may conspire like this?

Pain began to crawl over its forehead, its eyes, pain from this revelation. It was the pain of cold things, unpleasantly gelid even to the ancient pond-dweller. A great unease rippled down its sinuous upper neck and below to its body, enmeshed there in the earth, in this spot, for many centuries. It was blinded by dread. It struggled to open its eyes again — not with its lids, for it had none, but from the inside, the way its eyes functioned.

It called out to its retinue of great birds as well, and shook off the rain and returned its attention to the idiot cop standing, holding the blinding locket, and lunged for him.

CHAPTER SIXTY-EIGHT

Caleb had protested; somehow he knew what was coming, that the water was going to hurt his mommy. He didn’t like her being leaned back. It scared him. He was afraid she would pitch over backwards, out of his daddy’s grip, spilling out of the chair and tumbling away, forever tumbling, like Alice down the rabbit hole. He never liked it when someone did it to him, either. Not when someone tipped him back to rinse shampoo out of his hair, and especially not when the
dockers
had him tilt his head back so that they could poke up his nose with flashlights, or feel around his neck with their big hands, or the other times they’d given him the eye drops. He didn’t want it done to his mommy either, but something in the middle of his fear — that was how it felt, something right in the middle of it, like his fear was a picture he had drawn and smack in the center of it was the place — something there assured him that it would be okay; he needed to be a
big boy
and let it happen, this time, especially.

So when the water poured over her eyes it burned her, but not like fire burned — but like sunburn, maybe — he felt it, too. Caleb could feel his skin tightening, all the wetness and pliability sucked from it, the heat leeched from his core, and then everything became bright, bright, bright.

The man, his daddy, was still holding her while the brightness came inside Caleb as the goop melted away from his mother’s eyes. And then his daddy was laying her back against the chair and Caleb was wondering why, why she didn’t wake up, when the older man came out of the house and held up his mother’s pretty necklace.

Caleb had heard the shushing of the water then, and the thing moving through it, and the rain driving fast into it as it at last spilled over the edge of the pond, and began surging towards the house.

The beast-monster his daddy called the
Getragen
was now going to try and eat the man who had just come out of that house, the nice man who had been helping them. As the beast-monster came, Caleb knew, it lifted a foot out of the pond.

It wanted to get out. It was so close to getting out.

Caleb had known about the monster for some time. As far back as he could remember, really. He had dreamed about it, seeing below the surface of the pond and drifting around its large, oval body (sort of like a hen on an egg, like he knew existed on Reverend Isaac’s farm), with much of its body sunken into the marshy, gooey under-earth. He had even seen the face of it, seen in it all sorts of colors;
roja, azul, morado, amarillo
. He had given it a name,
azul
, as it had appeared to him most of the time to be a liquid dark blue, a burnished kind of blue that reflected like scales, refracting the other colors, the purples and reds and occasional yellow when the sunlight reached down into the murky water that was part of its home.

Scales. Like
The Rainbow Fish
, one of the stories that were read to him, one that he wasn’t too crazy about, not as crazy as he was about
Winnie the Pooh
, anyway, or
Buzz Lightyear
. But, scales. Scales that were like bird feathers too. Kind of both at the same time; ugly.

He knew that the monster had other names.
Mobius
was one, yes. That was what not only his daddy sometimes called it, but the other men that were daddy’s friends. The ones who had come and sung him songs, the ones who had been smiling at him and glowing outside of the first hospital, the one where he had finally met his real mommy again. The ones who would sometimes burn when they were all done, when they were all used up and could no longer help, or when they were sent back to their First Bodies. Some of them turned bad, yes, some of the time, but only a few, and so the burning wasn’t all bad. The burning was good, too. The burning was God.

Caleb watched as the Nice Man and the Helpful-Lady-Who-Smelled-Nice stood, like children themselves, in front of the monster, Mobius, as it came screaming down at them, huge gobs of something awful foaming and flying from its rippling lips.

It meant to eat them, to break their bones in its jaw, to mangle them just enough so they would slip into its caliginous throat, but stay alive. But before it could do this, Caleb saw that the man was hurt; he grabbed his arm and fell to the ground, and the nice lady dropped down beside him.

Still Mobius came for them, its mouth open wider than its triangle head, its eyes bright and spinning. It was then that Caleb knew he was ready, and his daddy did, too. The two of them — he and Daddy — called out to it, and the beast stopped inches from devouring the man and nice lady. It curled its awful head around to look at them with its thousand eyes.

Caleb had gotten his footing on the wet stones. His daddy had placed a steadying hand on his back. His daddy whispered something to him, but the rain drowned out his voice. Still, daddy’s voice was soothing, and Caleb rocked back on his heels a little then, off balance. But with the steadying hand of his father he now stood firmly as the face of the monster took shape in the brightness in front of him, as its big, upside-down triangle head twisted back on its long, long neck to look down at him, at Caleb.

The brightness. It was growing sallow. The edges of things were blurry to Caleb; yellow smears, and the things in front of him were mottled like daubs of paint. The neck of the thing, extending to the dock from the middle of the pond, and the head of it, these were a charcoal grey. All was grey except for the eyes, blazing their bright fire:
roja, amarillo, anaranjado.

The water rose around them, now beyond the lip of the embankment, now pooling around Caleb’s feet. The sky roiled black in the distance, over the jagged line of treetops. The air smelled of metal and foulness and rot, and the breath of the thing boiled the air in front of Caleb and Christopher.

“
Hier sind Sie, Söhnchen,
” said the monster. Caleb thought the monster’s voice sounded like a young man’s, someone like his daddy, but also like the voices sounded in the hospital, the ones that came out of the ceilings and the high corners of the walls. It boomed all around, but still played softly within him, like a sibilant friend.

Its eyes rolled. Many colors, indeed, that monster’s eyes. Caleb remembered the
Jungle Book
, and remembered Ka and remembered what happened to Mowgli when Mowgli looked into Ka’s eyes. But Caleb couldn’t look away, even if he was afraid. Even if he was afraid the monster would try to put him to sleep. Even if he was afraid that the monster would try and put him to sleep in order to eat him right up. He couldn’t. He had to look.

The looking made Caleb feel sick in his stomach. It hurt his head, as it had hurt to look even in his dreams, his dreams which had made him sick. They had been what had caused him to have to go to the hospital and see the
dockers
in the first place, but he couldn’t worry about that now. He had to do what he could to help. That was what he was here to do. That was all there ever was.

Caleb reached out with one hand, his fist closed, as it had been since the hospital, closed around his secret possession. He turned his hand over, and opened his little pink fingers.

“Here, Robian,” said Caleb.

He saw a flash of something white go through the eyes of the monster,
azul
the Robian, Mobius the
Getragen
, and saw the creature-demon’s head jerk back.

Its snarling mouth formed a kind of sneering smile, that thick pink tongue lashing around inside of it, waiting to strike.

“
Where did you get that? A los mocosos?
”

“Those mans are diggily,” said Caleb. “Cricky,” he added. They were his own words. Words he knew that the monster understood. He liked the language the young daddy friends used when they told their stories. He knew it was
espon yoll
. They spoke
espon yoll
, or “Spanish” as his daddy called it, and other languages too, because things got mixed up over long, long times. He didn’t like it when the monster used the same kind of words.

The Robian spoke many languages; maybe all of them.

Around Caleb the brightness continued to wane, and the grey-blue encroached. Still the looming face of the monster wavered in front of him, as though seen through a quicksilver prism, octagons of hues,
a honeycomb
, thought Caleb
, a honeycomb
.

“
Diggily
,” said the monster, and Caleb thought it might laugh at him, but then he remembered that
azul
didn’t laugh. Not ever.

Caleb didn’t nod or answer, merely stood where he was, no longer feeling his daddy’s hand on his back, but okay with that. He held his small hand higher into the air and said, “Here.”

The monster didn’t do anything for a second or two, its head just floating there on the end of the long, winding trunk of its neck, the eyes rolling, rolling, rolling through all of their colors, its mouth constantly working, puckering, suckling at the air, tasting, talking, whispering, ingesting everything. Then Caleb watched as that long tongue started to come out, unfurling like a chameleon’s, and extending at the same time, searching the air, smelling and tasting, until it reached him.

Caleb felt his daddy’s hands on him again, one under each armpit, ready to yank him back, carry him away, but he shrugged free of them, holding the coin as high as he could. As the tongue neared, Caleb heard the birds again, their whispery, husky talk; the sound of their thick feathers, sad and mischievous above the sound of the shushing rain, a conspiring chorus that sounded like crickets, rustling leaves, and static.

The tip of the creature’s tongue touched the coin and the entire boulder-sized, corneous head of the monster winced back again, but only for the briefest moment, as though it had been shocked. The tongue, gruesome, blotted with sickly spots, touched the coin again, and touched Caleb’s hand and he heard

the dead spill noise from the throat on the stage painted chalk-white against the black nothing with rose-tipped cheek spots moving left to right rolling over the branches of sprouted blue veins above the albatross — hanging cords of the neck teeth barred silent scream I still don’t believe I will not believe I now call in my debt you owe me this life you horrible spiteful God — no sound choir chorus melting gold sun spreading over heart poured ventricles the shaman speaks “my ancient form refuses your luminescent buds - you topple like rubble whispering like whickers of cornhusks swaying in the humidity of Isaac’s buggy farm night” but over time with maggot maple leaves mashing together as the evening brood of alabaster cornices forms this blockade — I will never bow to you I will bring the marked ships of death on the marked worlds the marked ages and

voices, words, shapes. Caleb saw them all as though they were right in front of him, the mind of the beast Robian poured out in front of him, and it was as if he were floating just above the water of the pond himself, beneath a bosk of birch trees along its edge, with the young woman, sitting Indian-style, her eyes closed, the sky above clear and blue and taut as only summer skies can be and then the two young men, just about the age of the boys who had come, the diggily mans, the daddy’s friends who had sung and rhymed and offered their coins.

Those two young men were holding each other’s heads, and their eyes opened and Caleb could see that they were large and black in the center. They were talking to each other without moving their lips, then chanting, saying these things, and then throwing each other back and laughing and then grabbing each other by the ears again, sitting down now, Indian-style too, and the young woman just kept her place, chewing on a stem of seeded grass with a smile and long brown hair with bits of grass and dirt in it —
Madison
was her name. The Helpful Lady Who Smelled Nice.

The coin stuck to the monster’s tongue and then the tongue withdrew, faster than the cautious way it had sought out Caleb’s hand, and disappeared back into its mouth.

“
Obrigado
,” said the monster, but Caleb knew it was not over. The thing had its meal standing before it, and it meant to have it.

“No!” Caleb heard. A shrill cry, a mother’s cry, coming from somewhere far away. It made him smile, to hear his mother like that. It made him happy to know that she wasn’t lost forever. Maybe it had been the Helpful-Lady-Madison who had cried out, yes, maybe that, but that didn’t matter. He would think and feel and know it was his mommy.

Mobius, the
azul,
lowered itself down over Caleb with terrible, lightning speed. Its mouth was open again, and Caleb saw its drool quivering on either side of that long tongue. He saw the flash of the coin slipping down into the blackness of its throat, the sacs festooned in the corners of its maw, throbbing with their anxious juices. He saw these things and felt the furnace of its breath and felt the water around his ankles now, flowing steadily out of the pond. For all things evil are permitted, and Man hangs in the balance.

Caleb kept his eyes wide open as the mouth of the great monster came down on him, and clenched his fists. As Mobius took its meal, Caleb burst himself into flame.