HIGHWATER: a suspense thriller you won't be able to put down (36 page)

AFTERLIFE

“Caleb,” said Christopher. “Are you okay?”

Caleb’s nose tickled, and he scratched it. “That was very cricky, Daddy,” he said.

Christopher picked him up. He hugged him close. They were both drenched. Sheriff Johnston and Rory Blaine came running around the house. Blaine leapt up onto the porch to where Tom Milliner lay, having been brought there to rest by Christopher and Maddy.

Johnston slowed now, as he approached the scene. The big Sheriff’s mouth gasped open, rainwater running from its corners. His feet sloshed through the pond water which had at last escaped. His eyes slowly took in the flames, rippling in the rain and wind out over the center of the pond, where some huge twisted mass (
screaming, it had been screaming in my head
,
calling in its debt, something about its debt, and a gamble with God, oh dear, oh good Mother of Lord
)
was now charred and black, orange in places, and blue in others, still licking with flames.

The sky was the hue of an inferno — red and orange over the trees, a thick cloud of cloying gray smoke. Johnston pulled his eyes away from that scene. He sniffed the air and recalled the smell of his own propane stove, and he saw himself at the griddle, cooking eggs for his wife, sick with cancer.

Johnston turned his attention to the baby boy on the porch. The one, he was learning, this whole mess was somehow about. Caleb was looking down at his hand, where something had left a small mark, and he was scowling. Johnston glanced at the pond once more, as the hulk of mottled tissue there began to sink.

Then the Sheriff asked, “Is it gone?”

“For a little while.” Christopher stood near him, looking out. Johnston followed the young man’s gaze. He thought he couldn’t look any more, or shouldn’t, but he did. With the blaze in Red Rock Falls (mercifully abating, thanks to the efforts of three counties) painting the sky orange, and the rolling clouds of smoke thick as canvas, the sky alone was quite a picture. But what occupied the sky was something else.

Huge birds soared and flapped above the pond, heading west. Their wingspan and their oddly-shaped bodies — they seemed too big and round to fly, it weren’t for the enormous wings lifting them — made them look decidedly prehistoric. With the mass of charbroiled
Loch Ness
, or whatever the hell it was, stinking and sinking in the middle of the goddamned water, well, that just completed the picture. Johnston felt like he was looking into the past, deep into a time far more predatory, more red of tooth and claw than he cared to ever know. It hurt his mind to look at that sky, those birds (he hoped to God they were leaving the scene for good), and so he turned away.

The kid, Christopher, was watching him. He looked old, thought Johnston, much older than a kid in his early-twenties should look. Johnston was about to say something when Blaine called out, “Bus is coming through!”

It was miraculous, Johnston thought, they had got an ambulance in all this mess. It was a good thing they’d had it from the beginning. The paramedics would be here momentarily. He felt relief.

The Feds came running first, slopping through the water, squinting through the rain that, yes, looked like it could be at last tapering off some. Then again, who knew? The Feds stopped and gaped at the pond and the people. Tom was trying to sit up.

“Stay down, Milliner. You’ve had a heart attack.”

The boy, Caleb, cried out. Johnston looked at the child, who was reaching out towards the pond.

Johnston followed the arc of the boy’s outstretched arms until his eyes found the mother. She was still in the chair, and the water threatened to float her away.

Caleb wriggled free from Christopher, and made for her, but the Sheriff caught him by the shoulder.

Two Feds stirred into action, wading over to her, but it was Christopher who got there first. Whether he looked fatigued or not, the kid was fast, thought the Sheriff, and then realized that the boy he was holding onto was damn hot. Feverishly hot. Just who in the hell were these people?

The girl appeared unresponsive, indifferent to her imminent drowning. Christopher picked her up, like a husband lifting his wife over the threshold. He was up to his waist in the water. The girl’s mouth was closed, Johnston saw, but her eyes were open and clear.

“Mommy!” The boy was screaming. Throughout the entire ordeal Johnston had been told, the child had been remarkably calm. A real trooper. Now, he seemed to be at last unraveling, and Johnston couldn’t blame him.

“Caleb!” Christopher called over. It sounded both authoritative and reassuring. The Sheriff watched as Christopher waded back through the deep water towards the porch, the Feds either side of him trying to help, but struggling to get through the powerful water themselves. The water was starting to run towards the center of the pond, as though draining there, following that terrible thing back to the depths from where it had sprung.

Tom Milliner was being carried into the house, out of the cold, anyway. The Sheriff called out. “Get her out of there!”

But it was too late. The Feds who had gone into help were losing their own battle.

One of them thrashed with a panicked overhand stroke after his feet gave way. He swam desperately from where he was being dragged. The other had gone under but bobbed up again. He was treading water in a panic. Christopher was succumbing to his own struggle. If the girl didn’t wake up, he would lose her.

“Stay with us, Tommy!” Somehow the young man managed to shout, imperiled as he was. The Sheriff turned as Tom Milliner was taken into the house, Maddy Kruger was by his side. Johnston had no choice but to follow them in with the child. It would be dry in there, at least for now.

The child struggled against him, straining towards the people trying to stay afloat. People, who, as Johnston turned back and saw, were not actually above the turgid water anymore at all.

They had been overcome and disappeared beneath its pewter surface.

***

In his dream, Tom trudges up the embankment from a shallow, not overflowing, Macmaster pond. He smiles to himself, because in the dream Tom is a teenager, in the thick of the summer before his senior year. He’s smiling about a covenant he’s made with his friends, Jim and Maddy, after they’ve had something of a bad trip, and each of them, in their own way, has decided to dedicate their lives to service.

Yet, in front of him, Christopher leads the way, Caleb in his arms, the small boy reaching for his mother with both arms over his father’s shoulder, who tows her behind his back. Tom catches the scent of her limp body in the air; nothing unpleasant, only slightly sour, mostly sweet, but still shocking him into memories of people throughout the years since Jim and Maddy and the covenant. Memories of victims and perpetrators alike, hurt in some way that they had become comatose or semi-conscious — they’d all had that faint smell about them. It was like something left on the windowsill just long enough to spoil, or the stale air inside a sealed container.

Tom was not an educated man, no, not academically, and he knew it. Not a college man like his brother Charlie, or like DA Rory Blaine, and not a veteran, either. Tom was a local man, something he had felt stupidly ashamed of for years, as though he should have been better, gone somewhere better, but hadn’t, he had remained. A person learned things over the years, and what they might not have learned firsthand, they learned from watching. Tom learned a good deal during his many sleepless nights in the Acres, or in shady motels, or passing time in the Blazer, staking something or someone out, watching the town sleep and then stir awake in the early hours.

Tom knew that there were three distinct kinds of energy in this grand world. There was thermal energy, chemical energy, and electromagnetic energy. What he has witnessed (whether dreaming or awake he can’t be quite sure) between the boy and the terrible thing he’d seen coming out of the pond and over to the Kingston house had been the last form of energy, the electromagnetic kind. The thing’s head hovered there over the dock, glinting and silver, as though covered with a morass of crawling, shifting bottle flies.

It was what they had all seen, each in their own way, that summer of 1970.

And then Tom had seen the baby boy, with those tiny white lights, like seeds, moistened and blurred by the rain, or by the tears that had formed in Tom’s eyes, floating around the child’s head, dancing there. Motes, like a dancing crown.

And then the boy had combusted, like the young man on Tom’s lawn in the acres, into a bright and prismatic fire.

Being in the boy’s presence now, and being back here at the pond
with
the boy, and with Christopher and with the Goldfine girl and Jim Cruickshand all at once must have been a powerful set of ingredients, Tom thinks. His semi-conscious mind is alive, charged, as though he’s had three cups of the strongest coffee, but, of course, so much more than that. He is pellucid, he is sharp, doing the kind of thinking he had tried to do before but was unable, had been either too tired and weary or too mentally confused — now he feels as though he’s been rebooted, and anything that had been sick or looping or defective in him has gone, and he is fresh as a daisy now, like the rain.

At the same time, he is being carried. Carried away from the pond, away from the people still there. Away from the reality of what’s happening now.

They are helped up the rest of the way by policemen in neon-striped slickers. Rory Blaine is there, and Sheriff Blake Johnston. They fight the water and watch the last of the flames die out. It’s happening all over the county, an incredible reversal, Tom hears someone say; the water is receding somehow, rushing back into the aquifers, sucking out the fires as it goes.

Tom opens his eyes and sees a woman from Child Protective Services, not one who’d been in Burlington, inching closer to the boy through the rabble of cops, staties, deputies, firemen, EMTs. The boy is crying, crying for his mother and father.
They’re still out there,
Tom wants to say, but he can’t speak. He can only think of the payphone dangling from the cord. He can only think of the boy who had called for help, and for whom none came.

Johnston has got everyone that can be spared from the mayhem in town, but it’s still not many people. Tom tries to sit up, but they press him gently back down. He wants to see. He wants to see out to the pond. To see Christopher again. To see the Goldfine girl, Liz.

He locks eyes with Blaine. Tom raises his eyebrows, but Blaine blinks and gives him a look, conveying with his gravestone-colored eyes that it’s okay, that the shock will pass, that somehow order will trump chaos again. He watches as Blaine and Maddy allow the EMTs to take the boy, crying now, his arms stiffly waving in the air in the direction of the pond, his person being examined for cuts and bruises and contusions, the CPS caseworker hovering near him. The rain covers everything, everyone, making the whole scene seem small to Tom Milliner, somehow less important, less real than it should have been. Rolled away with Rory Blaine’s hand gripping the meat of his arm, Tom thinks that it all looks like a dance, choreographed long ago, and each person was simply carrying out their role, some under its spell, some watching it, as if from the wings, or even above.

And in the middle of it all, Maddy. She turns from the boy briefly to smile at Tom, and in that moment, she is radiant.

***

Water, everywhere. Rushing around them. An eddy of bubbles. Christopher’s arm around her. His body whipsawing through the water, pulling her up behind him, trying to break the surface. But she sinks. Oh, sink and be done.

She had been gone. She had watched everything happen, she could even still see herself: standing there. She’d screamed, but no sound came from her throat, and she had sunk to her waist. She was going to get taken with the rest of it, the mud, the marsh, bits of bottle flies, dragonfly wings, the detritus of sticks and rocks and stumps and fish skeletons.

She shouted and screamed — it made no difference. She saw them all up there on the high edge of the pond, and she could see the child crying for her, calling her, reaching for her, as the men and women examined him. She stood there, that numb body of hers shut down, that shutdown soul, the others probing her too, looking into her eyes with lights, all of them in the drenching, interminable rain.

Then what was she; this, here, now? She realized that it didn’t matter. Perhaps this was consciousness, her consciousness that had evaded and escaped, at last. Stuck now, threatened to be swallowed with the rest of the draining water, water that was now suddenly, everywhere around her, in full Cambrian force, trying to pull her under, trying to suck her down to the depths.

Down to where she could be free of it all at last. But she held onto Christopher’s hand, and she stayed. She stayed with him, her lungs burning, her every muscle stretched.

Even when they wheeled her into the back of the waiting ambulance, IV in her vein, bouncing over the bumpy road and away, away from the Kingston house and its many nightmares, she stayed.

She could even still see him there, Christopher, in the water with her, his face a ghost but his eyes like cut stones. At last she could see his eyes.