Scribner Horror Bundle: Four Horror Novels by Joshua Scribner (33 page)

Afterward, Sully lay there in bed and
reflected. He felt a sense of relief sweep over him. He wasn’t sure
who would go pick up Monica the following week. But at least he had
bought himself that much more time. And, in the vision, he had been
taking Monica when it happened, not bringing her back. He wasn’t
sure if that was the way it worked, like some court case, where a
simple technicality could save someone from a terrible fate. He
wasn’t even sure if there was anything to have worried about in the
first place. He ignored the fact that he was giving in, that he
might be accepting something he should fight against. For now, he
just let himself feel better.

#

Anna left Friday afternoon. She said
she wouldn’t be back until late Saturday. She could have planned to
be back earlier, but she wanted him to have the extra time with the
book, without her creeping around the house waiting for him to get
done, creating a sense of urgency that wouldn’t be there for the
readers whom purchased the book.

“Don’t force yourself to go on, just
on my account,” Anna had said. “Read it like you would any fiction
book. If it bores you, put it down.”

But it didn’t bore him at all. He
picked it up around four o’clock and was hooked within the first
three pages. It ceased to be a story that his girlfriend had
written, and it became a story that he was absorbed into. He
thought only about the characters and their lives, and forgot about
the author.

Sully had been worried to put the two
of them out on the road. He thought it only natural that he would
be wary, even minus the horrifying trips he had made. Placing his
two favorite people in a fast-moving, metal beast, out on a road
full of strangers and other metal beasts, was scary.

But his fear didn’t last. He simply
forgot about it. He forgot about his usual world completely. The
book was just that good.

It was about seven o’clock, the single
pile having become two piles of pages, the read and to be read,
when the phone rang. Sully’s initial reaction was to ignore that
phone. He could let the answering machine get it, and all the while
stay in this fascinating place. But reality would not let him
ignore that phone. Great book or not, his girls were still out
there, and he thought it might be Anna calling.

Sully left the story and picked up the
portable unit. “Hello,” he said after bringing the phone to his
ear.

“Hey, Sully,” his dad said.

“Yeah, Dad,” Sully said, a bit
abruptly.

“Girls make it out okay?”

“Yeah, of course.”

“Well good. Are you busy?”

Tremendously
, Sully thought. But he
couldn’t do that to the old man. “Well, I’m reading Anna’s
book.”

“Oh. Is it good?”

“Outstanding,” Sully replied. He became aware that he had just
complimented Anna’s book in an automatic way.
How was my test, Mr. Jacobson? Outstanding, Tommy.
He hoped his dad didn’t sense that he was trying
to be concise to speed along the conversation.

“Good,” his dad said. “Do you think
you can take a break from it?”

A break? No, he didn’t really want to
take a break. He had actually thought of reading straight through
the night, stopping only to pee and make coffee.

“I guess I could,” Sully
said.

“Great. I have something kind of
important that I want to discuss with you, Son.”

There it was again, that timidity in
his old man’s voice, just like when he called to tell about the
tanker explosion. Sully was suddenly torn. Two worlds were pulling
at his curiosity now.

“All right, Dad. I’ll come right
over.”

“No, Sully,” his dad said and then
laughed nervously. “Why don’t you meet me up at the bar. We’ll talk
over a couple of beers.”

#

There was one bar in Little Axe. It
was right downtown, on the same block as the little post office and
police building. The place was called Ledbetter’s, after its owner,
Sonnie Ledbetter. It catered to the farmer crowd. Old men showed up
to play dominoes and drink beer all day long. There wasn’t much of
a younger crowd, at least of drinking age, in Little Axe. Many were
off in college or had otherwise left the area. Sully took pride in
the fact that he had had a lot to do with the college part. He had
proudly helped to drain the town of its young adult
crowd.

They met outside the bar and went
inside without exchanging more than casual nods.

On Friday night, the bar was fairly
dead. A few old men sat at the bar and shot the shit with Sonnie. A
few guys about Sully’s age were shooting pool in the back. They all
knew Sully from high school and stopped to say hello, before going
back to their game. After getting a pitcher of beer, his dad found
them a booth, right in the middle of the bar, away from
everybody.

They sipped at the beer for a little
while, shooting the breeze about school and the government,
listening to the old country music coming through the jukebox.
Sully quickly realized that his dad wasn't eager to get drunk
tonight, Sully finishing his first beer before the old man. He was
glad. He didn’t want a repeat of the day his dad had become crazy,
especially not in a public place.

With half a mug of beer left, his
dad’s face grew serious. He sighed and then said, “You know, a
couple of months ago, I wanted to tell you what I’m going to tell
you now. I started to but just couldn’t work up the nerve. It’s not
easy to talk about this sort of thing.”

“Okay,” Sully said, again thinking
back to the day his dad had been drunk.

His dad looked off, like he was
reading what he had to say off the wall of that bar room. “I guess,
in a lot of ways, I must have looked heartless when you were in the
hospital. I guess I didn’t act sad enough.”

That
sounded cold to Sully, and it didn’t sound like his dad. Why would
he have to
act
sad? If his child, Monica, were dying, he wouldn’t have
to
act
sad?

“Not long after they took you into the
hospital, the doctors came and told us about your condition. A few
days later, Faith left town, leaving us to make decisions on your
behalf. So we had to decide how long to keep you on the life
support. Well, of course, your mom was willing to keep you hooked
up to those machines forever.” He shook his head. “Truth is, given
the knowledge she had, I’m not sure I wouldn’t have kept you on the
machines too.”

His dad’s smile changed. It was almost
mischievous. “But given the knowledge that I had, every day you
were on those machines was like another knife in my
side.”

The old man looked right at Sully, a
question on his face. It was almost as if he expected Sully to see
what he was getting at. But Sully had no idea.

His dad finally looked away and then
said, “I held out for a few more weeks, just to humor your mother.
Then, knowing there was no way I was going to change her mind, I
talked the doctors into saying that her emotional condition at the
time made her unfit to make decisions on your behalf. Then I signed
off on the papers alone, and they cut the life support.” He
laughed, not crazy, but like he was amazed by his own words. “Me
and your mom sat with you. She held your hand, cursing me all the
while, and I stood and watched. And, Son, you may not believe this,
but I knew exactly what would happen.”

Sully couldn’t help but wonder,
sitting there in the bar, listening to his dad’s spiel, if this man
had gone crazy. Maybe it was the guilt. He had pulled the plug and
been wrong. Maybe this was his way of justifying it in his own
mind.

“We watched you die, Sully. We watched
as you faded away. It didn’t take ten minutes after they pulled off
the support. You were as dead as could be.”

His dad slammed a fist down on the
table, so loud that he actually caused heads to turn at the bar.
Sully watched those same heads turn back around, smiling, just a
little surprised at the noise. But Horace Jacobson was oblivious to
them.

“Then we watched you come back alive,
Sully, just as I knew you would.”

For a few seconds, he looked at his
father and his father looked back at him, a triumphant look on his
face, like he, himself, had been the one to revive
Sully.

Finally, his father spoke again. “Do
you wonder, Son? Do you wonder how I knew you’d come
back?”

All Sully could do was nod. This was
almost as awkward as seeing his father cry. But it was also a
fascinating little tale.

“Because it wasn’t the first
time.”

His dad laughed, loudly. Heads turned
again.

“Hey! Keep it down over there,”
someone said playfully from the bar.

“Because it wasn’t the first time,”
his dad repeated, this time quietly.

Sully looked at the old man in awe.
Yes, it sounded insane. But his dad? He wasn’t the type, was he?
Did men like his dad go crazy over things like guilt?

His dad calmed down a bit. He took a
big drink of beer before he started again. “You were just four
years old when it happened. You were smart for your age. I guess
that’s why I thought it was okay to leave you alone like I
did.”

Sully’s mind flashed back. He
immediately knew the day his dad was talking about. “No, Dad. I
remember. It was just a nick. No big deal.”

His dad smiled. “Yeah, I suppose
that’s how you would remember it. That’s what I told your mom. And
that’s the story you heard growing up. But I’m telling you, adults
do a funny thing to a child’s memory. They tell them things in a
way different than they really happened. Kids hear the lies so many
times that they start to believe what they’re told. They can even
come to remember things in that way. And I’m sure that’s what
happened to you. But I’m telling you now, I was there. I saw the
aftermath of what happened, and it was no nick.”

The image of what happened was strong
in Sully’s head. He didn’t know if he could believe that image
wasn’t real. But he would hear the old man out.

“It was a Wednesday night, so your mom
was off to church. I had you in the backyard, playing. The phone
rang from inside. I actually thought about it. I shouldn’t leave
him alone out here, I thought. But I did anyway.” He stopped for a
second and then said, “I wouldn’t leave you like that again, not
till you were way older. Even now, when short britches wants to go
out, I’ll just stop what I’m doing and go with her. And the farm
ain’t near as dangerous a place as it was back then.”

Sully smirked. His dad was
understating his protectiveness of Monica. The old man was
reluctant to let her play in her bedroom by herself.

“But on that day, I went in and got
the phone. It’s the one thing that slips my mind, looking back on
it. I don’t even remember who it was.”

Sully thought he knew why his dad
couldn’t remember who was on the phone. It was because there had
been no phone call. At least, there had been no phone call that
Sully could remember. His dad had been there, in the yard with him.
Sully had darted out into the field.

“Whoever I was talking to, I hung up
when I heard the commotion outside. It was the cattle. You know the
sound they make, like when there’s a snake.”

“Yeah, Dad. I know how they do,” Sully
said, the familiar sound in his head: a higher pitched tone than
cows usually make.

“Well, I heard them. But I never heard
you. I came rushing out the back door. I looked over to the
sandbox, where you’d been playing. I saw you was gone and knew it
was no snake that spooked them cattle. It was the most excruciating
thing I'd ever felt. Cause I knew exactly what had happened. I
could picture it in my head as if I saw it.”

Sully remembered the vision of Monica
on the road. It wasn’t hard to imagine the feelings his father was
describing. But was his Dad’s story real? Or could it have been
like what Sully had gone through? Just a vision? This is what could
happen. Or maybe his dad had gone a little crazy then, and Sully
was going a little crazy now.

“It was in the back field, right along
the backyard. Those cows were just standing there, looking at me.
It was almost as if they knew one of them had done a terrible
thing. And there you were, lying on the ground among them. I jumped
the fence. The cows didn’t act like they normally would, to see me
come rushing like that. They just kind of moved out of my way. Then
they still didn’t take off. They just stood there and watched the
show, like people might if they came upon a car
accident.”

Sully pictured a bunch of cows
standing around, stunned looks on their faces, but all the while
thinking they couldn’t wait to tell their friends about this
later.

“You were flat on your back, and you
weren’t moving. One of those cows had done a real number on you.
Your face was covered with blood. You had kind of a crescent shaped
indention in one place, just like the edge of a hoof would make.
The rest was just destroyed, like it wasn’t enough for that cow to
just kick you once. It had to stomp you good.”