Point Pleasant (19 page)

Ben huffed out a sad laugh. “To the house, I guess.
Fuck
.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t. You can go to mine.” Nicholas had taken his keys out of his pocket before Ben could refuse. “Take them. If you don’t want to go back to your house, go to mine. You don’t
have
to, but you can if you
want
to.” Nicholas took Ben’s hand, placed the keys in his palm, and then carefully closed his fingers over them. Their weight was almost a comfort.

“Yeah, okay,” Ben said.

“But be there around six either way. I need someone to let me in. I’ll make you dinner.”

Ben glanced up at Nicholas, at those fucking blue eyes that spoke of something deep and ineffable that Ben could not bear to think was truly directed toward him.

Nicholas put a hand on Ben’s shoulder in a brief gesture of solidarity before he turned toward the direction of the Sheriff’s Department.

Ben closed his fingers around the keys. He pocketed them and slid into the Camaro. He took out his phone to dial Kate’s office. He bowed his forehead to the steering wheel when Margaret answered.
Of course
. She sounded perky and cheerful.
Of course.

“Yeah, this is Ben Wisehart again, Margaret. I need to speak to my sister.”

“I’m sorry, Kate is in a board meeting right—” she started, but Ben cut her off.

“It’s an emergency, Margaret. Seriously, please get her. Right now.”

Something in Ben’s voice must have convinced her of the urgency of the call. “I’ll just get her for you. Please hold.”

The jovial drone of elevator music rose from his phone’s speaker, and Ben wanted to get out and kick the burgundy Nissan parked beside the Camaro. A minute later, Kate picked up.

“Ben? What’s wrong?”

“Kate,” Ben said, but he could not continue. The broken sound of his voice threw him off guard.

“Ben? Say something. Talk to me.”

“Dad’s dead, Kate.”

The line went silent.
Kerplunk. 

“
What
?”

“Dad’s dead. Car accident. On the bridge. This morning.”

Ben dropped his head to the steering wheel once more and kept the phone to his ear.

“Are—are you sure?”

“Nic just told me,” Ben said. “He was there.”

“Fuck,” Kate uttered.  

A silence as lengthy as the distance between New York and West Virginia stretched between them while they absorbed the news.

“I’ll fly out,” Kate said finally. “I’ll fly out today.”

Ben brushed a hand through his hair and straightened. “You don’t have to, Kate. There’s nothing to do, is there? Doesn’t the army arrange the funeral?”

“No, Dad had most of that sorted out with his will. I can fly out anyway,” Kate said, and she sniffed. “If you want me there.”

The offer was beautiful, and Ben wanted to accept immediately.
Yes, fly out. Please, fuck, come home. I can’t do this on my own.

“I don’t know, Katie,” Ben whispered into the receiver. “It’s up to you. But you don’t have to.”

“Are you okay?” The concern in his sister’s voice was wounding.

“I don’t know,” Ben answered honestly. “Are you?”

“I’ll finish up some cases today and tomorrow and try and fly out the day after,” Kate said with finality. “And I’ll start making the necessary arrangements.”

Ben nodded even though Kate could not see him. “What can I do?”

“Just call me later. Okay?”

“Yeah, okay,” Ben said.

“Bye, Benji…”

“Bye, Katie.”

Ben hung up and stared down at his phone. He brushed his finger over the face of it, and the call log came up on screen. He skimmed over the list of received calls, and his focus settled on the numberless ones that had come in yesterday while Ben had been in town and at the Freemont Farm.

“Fuck,” Ben murmured to himself.

The library’s automatic sliding doors were visible in the rearview mirror when Ben glanced up. He thought of Emily Lewis, of Silver Bridge, and of how the Native Americans had steered clear of Point Pleasant’s rotten forests. He thought of death omens and wondered if the two phone calls he received the day before had been the Mothman’s warning to him.

Ben wanted to go back to Boston, close his eyes, and pretend he had never ventured down I-79 and crossed into West Virginia. But then he would not have seen Andrew before—
no
. Ben clamped down on that thought. He cranked the car and pulled out of the parking space without even bothering to secure his seatbelt.

The Camaro’s engine was a comforting hum as Ben drove down Main Street and made the turn for River Bend Road. He floored the accelerator, flew past the Tucker farm, and gritted his teeth. The tires squealed, and the car heaved violently when Ben brought his foot down onto the brakes. He tore himself out of the driver’s side and left the engine running as he strode to the shoulder of the road and screamed.

“Are you fucking happy?” Ben yelled as he threw his arms in the air. “Is this what you do?”

The pervasive silence of the forest met his rage. For the first time, Ben was unmoved by its darkness.

“I’m going to find you,” he said as he balled his hand into a fist. “
I’m going to find you
.”

The Camaro’s engine went dead behind him. Ben twisted around. The driver’s side door was still swung open. White noise hissed from the car’s radio and broke the eerie hush of the surrounding tree line.

Ben stepped closer to the car, forgetting about the forest. He edged toward the open door, leaned inside, and pushed the off-button on the radio, though the static continued to drift out of the speakers. A high-pitched squeal spewed out like the sudden rush of water from a collapsed dam, and Ben threw his hands over his ears as the frequency grew shriller.

“Fuck you!” Ben screamed, spinning to face the woods. “You’re fucking there? Come on! I’m right here!” he called out as he dropped his hands to his side and stood straighter. “I’m right fucking here!”

“
Ben
,” said the radio through the static.

Ben felt like his throat had been filled with cold lead. It was not the high-pitched squeal that said the words. The voice was crippling in its familiarity; it was the voice that had often enquired about the Camaro’s mileage, the voice that had graveled with age and one too many Marlboros, the voice that more often than not had been weighed down by sighs of exasperation.

“
Benji
,” said the voice of Andrew Wisehart.

Horror and repulsion dueled for dominance as Ben stared unblinking at the dials. Tears blurred his vision. The radio went silent, and the engine roared to life as if revved by some unseen force.

Ben turned to the forest and almost expected to see a figure with red eyes crouched in the underbrush, but there was only the empty shoulder and a shadowy boscage from which no sound emerged.

He hopped into the car and slammed the door. He made a U-turn and sped back to Tucker’s farm where he parked in front of the house.

“Tucker!” Ben called when he got out of the car. “It’s Wisehart! Don’t fucking shoot me, all right?” He grabbed his bag from the trunk before he stalked up to the porch.

Tucker stood behind the rusted screen door with the Remington in his hands and alarm on his face. “What the hell’s gotten into you, son?”

“My dad’s dead.”

Tucker ushered Ben inside. “How?”

“Car accident this morning. On the bridge.”

“New Silver Bridge?” Tucker asked, widening his eyes as he led Ben through to the kitchen.

Ben threw his bag on the cluttered table. “Guess you heard about Freemont?”

“Sheriff came by yesterday. Asked me when I last saw Jack.”

“Yeah. Lizzie Collins told me he’d been hearing it,” Ben said. “And that its screams sounded like children.”

Tucker stiffened and reached up to adjust his red baseball cap. “They do.”

“I know,” Ben said and shoved the copies of Emily Lewis’ diary into the other man’s hands. “I found this earlier.”

“What is this?”

“Diary of the daughter of the colonel who led the charge at the Battle of Point Pleasant. She’s writing in 1774 about how the campsite in the forest,
that fucking forest—
” Ben said and waved his arm in the direction of the woods outside, “—felt ‘ominous.’ Like eyes were always watching you when you were in it. She wrote she saw ‘an angel’ by the river, but it was like no ‘angel’ she ever read about in the Bible. It was big, and dark, and had eyes like blood.”

“Jesus Christmas,” Tucker said as he read the copies.

“She said it started appearing to the soldiers in the days before the battle.”

Tucker’s shoulders set even tenser than before. “It showed up on the old bridge a few hours before it collapsed.”

“I got phone calls yesterday. Two phone calls from no apparent number, and it was just static and squealing. Today my dad died.”

“What are you thinking?”

“I think this thing is a fucking death omen. I think it shows up when bad shit is about to happen. And if it’s been showing up all over town like the newspaper says, then something is about to happen here. Something really fucking bad.”

Tucker tossed the papers onto the table and went to one of the countertops. He pulled two glasses and an unlabeled bottle of something dark and amber-colored out of a cabinet.

“I got a call like that once,” he said as he poured a glass and drank it down in a single gulp. He filled both glasses then and shuffled back to offer one to Ben. “Day before my Shirley died. Just screaming static, and no one talking.”

Ben took the glass and swallowed its contents in one shot. The burn of the alcohol rushed down his throat like lava. He sank down onto one of the chairs by the table. He wondered if his mother got a call like that before she baked her last cherry pie.

“Sheriff got one last night,” Ben said. “I was with him. It almost blew his eardrum, it was so loud.”

Tucker sank into the chair across from Ben and looked off out the window toward the forest. “What the hell is it?”

Ben sat straight and rigid as he regarded the photocopies on the table. “Emily Lewis said the Shawnee wouldn’t come into the woods willingly. They said the ground was rotten and something came out of it that tainted the whole place with bad omens.”

“And that was in 1774,” Tucker said. “That would mean whatever it is, it’s
old
.”

“Unless there’s more than one of them,” Ben offered.

“I don’t know,” Tucker said, shaking his head. “I got a feeling it’s the same thing.”

Ben did not know which possibility was worse.

“I’m real sorry about your daddy,” Tucker said after a moment. “He was a good man, what little I knew of him.”

The weight that had been on his chest since the parking lot had disappeared, and Ben felt a numb hollowness usurp its place. “I’m sorry to hear about your wife.”

Tucker’s shoulders drooped. A beat passed between them.

“If it’s a ‘death omen,’” Tucker started, “then it means what happens is gonna happen no matter what, so why would it call?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean if it’s just fate, if somebody’s gonna die on a bridge, or drop dead in the yard ‘cause their heart stopped for no reason, then why would
it
go out of its way to warn people? To call them on the phone, to show up over the bridge before it collapsed? It’s
warning
us. When you see it, when you hear it, it’s warning you something’s gonna happen. Why would it do that?”

Ben shifted in his chair while he mulled over the question. “I don’t know,” he replied finally.

Tucker took another drink of whiskey. “Hell. I don’t know, either. Maybe seeing it or hearing it is what signs your death warrant in the first place. But if that’s the case, I don’t know why you and me and the sheriff are still alive.”

Ben pondered this and was unsettled by the implication. Maybe their time was coming. His eyes widened at a sudden thought. “The Harvest Festival.”

“What about it?” Tucker demanded.

“It’s next week. It’s a huge gathering of people. All of Mason County and even some of the neighboring counties too. What if—” Ben started and leapt up to pace. “What if something’s gonna happen at the festival? What if the bridge goes out again, or a fucking Ferris wheel explodes?”

Tucker’s forehead furrowed, and he stood to get another drink. “Shit,” he said before he swallowed down his third shot. “In a biscuit.”

Ben snorted and slouched against the wall by the window. “Jesus, I
know
the sheriff. I don’t think he’d even listen to me if I told him any of this. It’s fucking crazy.”

“Of course he wouldn’t. He’s gotta serve and protect—
his job
.”

Ben bristled at Tucker’s scornful words. “He’d listen if it didn’t sound so off the fucking rails,” Ben replied with a glint of defense in his tone. “‘Oh, hey, Nic. The giant bat thing that chased us through the woods that one time is really some ancient
fuck-knows-what
that serves as a portent of doom. Oh, and I think seeing it means something at the festival is going to blow up.’”

Tucker snickered with derision. “Well, when you put it like that.”

Ben scrubbed his hands over his face and slumped in defeat. “I don’t know what to do.”

“We find a way to kill it,” Tucker said simply.

“Uh-huh. Then what,” Ben replied, his tone dry from the burn of the whiskey.

“You said the ground was rotten like it was cursed. Maybe the land’s cursed because
it’s
here. Maybe it if ain’t here no more, nothing happens. Just the normal bad shit everyone else goes through without the help of the boogeyman.”

“So what,” Ben scoffed, “we just go in with a shotgun and hope that works? You hit it once. Didn’t do anything.”

“Don’t you watch movies, son? There’s always silver bullets. Or holy water. Fuck knows, but we’ll find what kills it and use it.”

“How do we find that, exactly?” Ben asked.

“I’ll start reading. Maybe check into some lore, try and see what the Shawnee had to say about it.”

“I’ll look into the Mingo tribe,” Ben offered, and resolve straightened his back.