Sacrifice (29 page)

Marc taught his literature students about the crucial points in novels, the critical moments when one decision sends the tale careening off on some unexpected trajectory. If his life ever imitated art, this was the place where it had happened. This damn tower and six kids deciding to pull the year’s best graduation prank.

A closer inspection revealed the tower’s one big difference. The cheap fencing around the base had seen an upgrade. The chain link was a few feet higher, and now the top hosted three strands of barbed wire. A chain stout enough to hold a ship’s anchor bound the gate shut, secured by a lock thick as a phone book.

Marc’s decision to scale the tower was cast in stone. Nothing less would do. Acrophobia be damned. Since going though the fence wasn’t going to work, that only left going over.

Marc grabbed the wire mesh. Dew had already settled on the links, and they were slick and cool. He scaled the fence but his feet found poor purchase on the way up. Was it a tighter fence or did he have bigger shoes? Had they even climbed the fence all those years ago or had the gate posed less of a challenge? He couldn’t remember.

His arms burned as he reached the top and cursed himself for getting so out of shape. He tried to grab the barbed wire between the points. He missed and the rusting steel scratched his skin. He got a flash of his overprotective mother making him get regular tetanus shots. He pulled up and swung his leg over the wire.

Barbs caught the legs of his jeans. The wire tugged and then tore his pants. Another barb pierced his chest and sent a stab of pain through his sternum. Warm blood spread across his skin.

“Son of a bitch.”

At this point, it didn’t matter. He pulled himself across the wire strands. One barb sliced into his leg like a serrated knife. Marc stifled a scream and skittered down the back side of the fence. He didn’t bother to check the damage.

Metal rungs ran up one of the tower legs. Fear-induced adrenaline pumped through his veins. He started to climb.

As he scaled the tower the sensations of that pivotal night came back to him. The heady mix of exhilaration and dread. The camaraderie of being out at night with his five best friends. The anticipation of the school’s reaction when everyone saw the tower. Only now did he realize that moment had been his life’s high-water mark.

The tower might have seemed smaller from the ground, but the climb to the top seemed longer. It didn’t help that pulling himself over the fence had strained a few muscle groups, and his bleeding leg felt like someone raked a knife against it with each step. Sticky blood soaked his sock and pooled in his shoe. He almost cared.

The rungs were wetter than the fence had been. The soles of his shoes slipped against the slick steel, and he had to slow down just as anxiety demanded that he accelerate.

When he made it to the tower catwalk he could see the whole town, from the sprawling subdivisions south to the old village and the harbor up north. Street- and houselights twinkled like a sea of earthbound stars.

Thousands of people were planted in their living rooms now, watching reality TV and mindless sitcoms, unaware of the tempest brewing out here in the night. Unaware of the sacrifices of six kids at the mill three decades ago. Unaware of the risks the remainder were about to take to finish the job.

A light breeze blew in from the Sound with a hint of salt and seaweed. Marc hated that smell, the scent of the harbor where he nearly drowned. He hated it as much as he hated the rank smell of the millpond where his friends almost died, and where they might die again, because of him.

He grabbed one of the catwalk’s vertical supports and climbed up onto the catwalk railing. He looked down for a second and swayed. He clenched the support and regained his balance.

Life rewound before him. Marriage, his teaching job, college graduation, hours of therapy, the last night at the mill. His last visit to the tower had set the Half Dozen down the paths they had taken, but only he had taken the lower, darker path. Only he had answered friendship with betrayal. He saved one life, but cost Bob his. How many more lives would his weakness reap before it was finally over?

Perhaps just one more. If there was a God who liked to bargain, he might just take the deal Marc was about to offer. One atoning soul in trade for the unstained souls of four others. Would a soul in the hand be worth four in the bush?

Marc inched out along the catwalk railing until just his fingertips touched the support. He stood in momentary, perfect balance between past and future, between here and beyond.

He knew they would find the note. They may never grant him forgiveness, but at least they would know where to bind the Woodsman to Hell. With no weak link in the chain, this time the plan would work. Marc just needed to add some insurance.

He shifted his body weight forward. He closed his eyes and, arms outstretched, fell forward. At first it was in slow motion. Then as he accelerated, Marc felt weightless. There was no sense of falling, just the increasing, liberating rush of wind through his hair. The farther he dropped from the tower catwalk, the lighter he felt, until, an inch before impact, he was finally free of all burdens.

Chapter Sixty-Five

1980

The mill on Friday night.

The basement door crashed open. The silhouette that filled the doorway had on a peaked cap and a pistol hung from his hip. The boys froze.

“Police! Don’t move,” boomed the voice of Constable Pickney.

Paul launched a shovelful of dirt into the constable’s face. He sputtered and took a step back from the door.

“Run!” Paul yelled.

The boys scrambled up the stairs to escape. Marc, in the far corner, leapt across the excavated pit and missed the far edge. He slipped down the side and his foot crunched against dry bones. With hands and feet flailing, he clambered to the bottom of the stairway. His friends were gone.

His way was blocked. The constable had transformed. In his place, lit by some personal illumination, stood the Woodsman. Strips of ragged flesh dangled from his face. His eyes burned like two emeralds trimmed in blood.

Marc’s heart jumped into his throat. He felt the overwhelming need to piss. He stepped back and nearly fell into the pit.

“Remember me?’ the Woodsman said. He stroked the edge of his hat with his long, bony fingers. “I sure remember you. We met out on the dock a long time ago.”

Marc, so full of confidence before, felt his courage desert him. Being in the Woodsman’s presence, feeling that awful, powerful force so close, sent him back to age three, just a scared little boy on a wintry dock.

“The toddler who was going to swim with the turtle,” the Woodsman mocked. “How cute the little turtle was.”

“I’m not afraid of you,” Marc managed. His right leg shook like he was keeping beat for a band.

“Oh, but you are,” the Woodsman said. “You’re a founder child. I’d be justified in killing you. But here’s what’s more fun.”

The Woodsman shrank and shimmered and when he came back into focus, he was Marc’s mother wearing the same brown dress she wore to work that morning.

“See here,” the Woodsman said in Marc’s mother’s voice. “I can take this form for you if it makes you happier.”

Marc recoiled in horror and hopped back across the pit and against the wall. He fought back the urge to vomit. The Woodsman followed to the edge of the pit.

“I know it’s you,” Marc said.

“But he won’t,” the Woodsman said. He reached out and touched Marc’s forehead with a finger.

Marc’s brain lit up with a vision of the Woodsman sitting on the roof of Marc’s garage in the guise of his mother. Danny looked out from a second floor window.

“Ma?” he said. “What are you doing there?”

“Danny,” the Woodsman said in Marc’s mother’s voice. “Come out and help me.”

Marc’s defensive instincts overrode his fear. He swung out to slap the Woodsman’s hand from his forehead. He passed through the spirit, and his arm went numb from cold. The vision winked out.

“He can’t see you,” Marc said.

“Yes he can. He
does
have the mind of a child, just my playground. And when you jackasses try your little incantation to send me away, the last thing I’ll do is get little Danny killed. He’s so simple, I can get him dancing on that rooftop before you get to the top of the stairs.”

“You bastard.”

“So, here’s what you’ll do for me instead. One bone, one doorway, stays right in this hole. Or I’ll drop your brother in one permanently.”

Marc thought of Danny, the loving, innocent little brother who would never grow up, never grow out of the grasp of the Woodsman. There were other kids at stake though, a future full of them. But weighed against Danny, at this moment, they amounted to nothing. He flicked a finger bone from the pile with the toe of his shoe. It dropped into the dirt.

“Now upstairs, Turtle Boy,” the Woodsman said. “And that bone gets touched by anyone but you and Little Danny reaps the whirlwind.”

The Woodsman winked out.

Guilt spread through Marc like malignant cancer. He gathered the corners of the decaying sack and hoisted the pile of bones off the floor. They clinked together like unholy wind chimes, and the sack felt like it weighed a thousand pounds. He looked down at the stray bone in the pit. The impulse to pick it up struck, but then he remembered Danny’s sweet smiling face declaring “Marc’s here!” from the kitchen table. He trudged up the stairs. Feet pounded on the floorboards from multiple directions. He pushed the trap door open.

Ken’s face greeted him at the top of the stairs.

“Are you all right?”

Hell no, he wasn’t all right. He was as far from all right as he’d ever been.

Marc nodded. “Yeah. Hey, there’s no constable down there. I think it was—“

“We know,” Ken said. He pulled the sack from Marc’s hands.

Marc almost snatched it back, knowing that, short one bone, its power to destroy the Woodsman was incomplete. But Danny…

“We all stay in Dave’s sight for the rest of this,” Ken said.

Marc argued with himself internally about the wisdom or cowardice of his decision. The argument would continue for decades, until he found his answer at the Sagebrook water tower.

Chapter Sixty-Six

Present day.

Later that night after dinner and the revelation of Marc’s letter, Ken sat alone at the desk in his room. A blank piece of Village Green Inn stationery lay on the desk and taunted him.

A year ago he could have done this without thinking. He still remembered whole passages from translating Caesar’s Gallic Commentaries. He had lists of properties and prices at his beck and call. He remembered the mean distance of each planet from the sun because he once read it on a chart.

But that was a year ago. Now he not only forgot his hotel room number, he had a hard time consistently knowing where he was at all. He’d filled pages in his notebook today with two truths and a lie. He was deathly afraid he’d disconnect in front of his friends and never find his way back. What hope was there that he could retrieve that old Latin prayer he’d last spoken on the worst night of his life?

He’d even resorted to the Internet from his laptop. Three search engines yielded exactly zip. If the worldwide web didn’t contain obscure prayers to eradicate evil spirits, what the hell good was it? He was on his own.

He colored in the center of the “g” in the “village” logo, as if getting the ink to flow might make his mind follow suit. No dice.

He had two hours to get this finished. The pressure was on, and that only made the white space in his brain grow whiter. The harder he tried to remember, the farther the memory raced away.

He was sure he’d never remember it. A three-decade-old prayer in a dead foreign language he hadn’t spoken since that miserable night in the mill? Who was he kidding, especially now that his memory had all the holding capacity of an inverted bowl?

He thought about how he got back to the Village Green Inn when he had disconnected before. How parallel memories made connections to the one he sought. If he could remember that inconsequential moment in his life when he saw that moving truck, he’d damn well better be able to pull this little rabbit out of the same hat.

A frontal assault wasn’t working. Perhaps he could sneak up from behind. He stopped trying to remember the prayer. Instead he tried to remember when he was studying the prayer. He’d looked at it dozens of times, but he seriously worked it the Thursday night before finals, when he and Jeff should have been studying…what was it…yes, physics.

He put himself back in his bedroom circa 1980. He saw the old Boston concert poster on the wall, the tiny B-17 suspended from the ceiling. The bedspread was that awful avocado color that was the rage of the mid-70s. He saw Jeff at the desk, feet propped up like he owned the place, dumb-ass Mets cap pushed back on his head. He could hear Jeff’s voice, talking about getting into college, about how graduation would change everything.

Then Ken saw it, in all its black-and-white glory. The missing prayer sat in his lap as he lay propped up against the headboard. He heaved a sigh of relief and began to copy it to the paper.

“
In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti. In nomine Dominum Jesum Christum, Filium Dei unigentum
ajuvandum me festina.”