The Fall of Never (32 page)

“Oh,” he said, “Reverend Taylor from the Lutheran church was arrested for selling narcotics to some of the altar boys. You remember that? That was a pretty big thing back then. My father knew him. I remember when the police came and arrested him. I remember he started crying and it scared me.”

Indifferently, she stabbed at her salad. “What about me?” she said then. “Do you remember anything strange about me?”

Gabriel suddenly looked concerned. “What is it, Kelly? Something’s bothering you. Tell me what it is.”

“I don’t know. It just feels like this whole place is pushing down on me, trying to crush me under its weight.” She shook her head. “Or maybe not. Maybe it’s not this place at all and I’m just going crazy. I felt like this for a while back in the city, too.”

“What is it?”

“I don’t
know.
I wish I did. I wish something made sense to me right now but nothing does. I’m scared to death for my sister, yet I feel like I’m the one falling apart. I don’t know what it is.”

“This sounds serious.” He looked genuinely concerned.

“God,” she said, not looking up from her plate. “What about those three hunters?”

“Who?”

“Some detective was at the house, said something about three hunters that disappeared in the woods here last month. Do you know anything about that?”

He dropped his head. “Yes,” he said, “I confess, I killed them, I forced them into the wilderness and fed them nothing but each other’s buttocks—”

She grinned.
He suddenly reminds me of Josh,
she thought…then quickly chased the thought away.

“I heard about the hunters,” he said, “but I know nothing about them. And what does that have to do with you, anyway?”

“I don’t know. Nothing, really.”

“So what is it? Nerves?”

“I guess so.”

“Well…promise to let me in once you figure out what’s going on, all right?”

She smiled. “Promise.”

“All right. Hey—you want to know a secret?”

“Hmmm?”

He winked. “I think your housekeeper’s cheering for us.”

“She thinks I’m lonely,” Kelly said.

“Well,” Gabriel said, “is she right?”

“And she thinks you’re a godsend.”

“Well then,” he said, “she
must
be right.”

“Eat your salad,” she told him.

That night, she awoke to a noise. Covered in sweat and breathing heavy, she sat up stiffly in bed—and caught movement in the dark, at the opposite end of the room.

Someone stepped out of her bedroom, closing the door behind them.

“Who’s there?”

She pulled back the blankets and swung her legs to the floor. When she stood, her world seemed to cant to one side, as if in an attempt to shake her off balance. She thought she could hear footsteps creaking down the hallway outside her bedroom. She moved quickly to the door and pulled it open—

—and saw Becky’s bedroom door close at the other end of the hall.

The hallway was dark, but Becky’s bedroom door was awash in the white-blue moonlight issuing from the bank of windows that made up the opposite wall. Beyond that, the hallway was a confusing channel of closed doors and, at the end, a pit of black winding stairs.

There was a light on in Becky’s room. Kelly caught movement from inside through the crack at the bottom of her sister’s bedroom door.

Becky!

She dashed across the length of hallway and nearly drove herself into the framework of the door. She grasped the knob with an unsteady hand and turned it—

It didn’t turn.

It was locked.

As if swatted by an invisible hand, she took a step away from the door and simply stared at it. She fisted her right hand and knocked twice against the door.

She heard someone moving on the other side of the door.

“Becky? Honey, open the door. Becky, it’s Kelly. Open the door, sweetheart.”

It’s Kelly,
her mind echoed in an imaginative impression of her sister’s voice.
Who’s Kelly?

“Becky?”

The stairs at the end of the hall creaked.

Fear suddenly hit her, sharp and incensed.

That’s where the dead girls go,
she thought, recalling her dream.

A glimmer of moonlight briefly illuminated what appeared to be tiny pale stones lined up on the banister—tiny white stones with eye sockets and teeth. But they were there and then gone, having never existed.

It’s all in my head,
she thought. She felt her entire body begin to shake and knew that she was very near collapse, very near the end of the line. She’d suffered through three years at an institution, a loveless marriage and divorce, and had not tamed but at least managed to coexist in New York City…and now her batteries were finally about to die, to burn themselves out. All along, she’d been thinking that she was strong, that she could overcome, that things got better when you decided to
make
them get better. But no, she’d been wrong. Because
nothing
got better. Not really. Things kept locked away and forgotten just kept perpetuating themselves until there was no more room in the closet. And then there was nothing left but for those things to blow up.

I’m blowing up,
she thought.

And insanely, she thought of Collin. More specifically, she recalled making love to Collin—and Collin making love to her—and the way they moved in bed together, the way he touched her and how she understood that maybe things weren’t perfect but they weren’t bad, either. He’d touch her and she’d shudder and sometimes force him to squeeze her in his arms. And after the truth of his infidelity was disclosed and they continued to make love, he’d felt the same to her—which was wrong. He should have felt different, she knew, should have felt like an immediate stranger, but he didn’t and it was almost as if his affair had never happened. And she knew it. And he knew she knew it. And it didn’t seem to make any difference to either one of them. Not for a while, at least. And although it made no sense at the time, she seemed to zone in on it now and single that moment out as the initiation of her breakdown. It was like proof, like the foreshadowing of an unavoidable mental collapse. What type of woman makes love to a man fresh from another’s bed? What type of
wife?

Someone was on the stairwell, hiding in darkness. Kelly could almost hear breathing.

“Beck—”

The latch on Becky’s bedroom door popped and the door creaked open an inch. Kelly felt her heart leap in her chest and nearly threw herself backward across the hallway. She brought a hand up to touch the door. It shook badly. She couldn’t control it—couldn’t make the hand go back to her side. Her hand reached out and pushed against the cool wood of the door. Inside, the light had been turned off. And had it ever really been on?

She thought,
Little Baby Roundabout, someone let the Baby out…

Catching her breath, she stepped a foot into Becky’s room. The breathing she’d thought she’d heard—it was coming from in here, from Becky.

“Becky?” Her voice shook the silence. “Sweetheart?”

Across the room, Becky’s window was wide open; the sheer curtain flagging in the cold wind.

“Goddamn,” she moaned and ran for the window—slicing her bare feet on bits of sharp somethings—her lungs aflame—the entire room seeming to spin before her eyes—dizzy. The flailing arms of the curtain wrapped around her body. The wind hit her, frozen and angry, and she brought an arm up to prevent her eyes from watering. Blind and with her free hand, she reached out impulsively, her fingers probing for the raised window. Her hand thumped glass and she leapt forward and slammed the window closed on its sill. The frame rattled and the curtains withered around her.

Catching her breath, she moved backward several paces from the window. The moon was full and pale yellow.

Man in the moon!
her mind screamed.
It’s a face, just like a face!

And her mind made no sense.

Broken bits of plastic lined the carpet. The shards had cut her feet. And they almost reminded her of something—there and there and almost there—but she couldn’t grasp it.

This is all coming together, all coming down, all starting to reek like two hidden dead girls in the third floor broom closet.

“Kelly…”

And it was a
perfect
sound, those words—as if all space and time had briefly given way to absolute silence in order for that word—that
sound—
to justly impress and frighten her…like words spoken in a room filled with no one but the dead…

“Becky,” she managed and sprang forward toward her sister’s bed. In the darkness she groped for her sister’s hand, found it, squeezed it—and recoiled. It was cold and stiff: the hand of a corpse.

A scream threatened her throat. She felt the room tilt to one side, desperate to shake her off balance.

And again that voice:
“Kelly…”

She spun around and peered through the darkness. For the briefest of moments, Kelly stood in the darkened bedroom staring at the half-open closet across the room. And the shape inside, pale and moving, nearly
squirming…

“They did it in the closet where no one could see,”
whispered a voice from the closet. It was undeniably a female voice, yet gritty and baritone.

Kelly couldn’t move.

They did it in the closet…

“Mouse.” The name did not simply issue from her mouth; rather, it was coughed up through her throat and forced through her lips like verbal constipation.

Snapping, she scrambled toward the closet door, grabbed the knob, and—

—ohGodohGodohGodohGodoh—

—flung it open, prepared for the worst.

The closet was empty.

Kelly stood there in the darkness, her chest heaving, sweat sliding in large rolls down her ribs, her eyes wide and staring.

I heard you. My God, I really heard you…

I’m losing my mind here…

Yet now, all she could hear was the sound of her sister’s labored breathing from halfway across the room.

And, of course, her own.

Chapter Eighteen

“Time’s catching up to me,” the hermit Graham Rand said, sizzling sausage links over a flame on his range. He dropped several pats of butter into the pan. From over Graham Rand’s shoulder, Sheriff Alan Bannercon watched as grease from the pan spat and exploded like miniature fireworks. “No spring chicken, that’s for sure. You can tell everywhere you look at me—I see my hands shakin’ and I know. Like some sort of warning, some way of God’s, tryin’ to tell you your time’s almost up. Better make the goddamn beds and milk the cows, because it’s about to fall to dark.” The old man turned and faced the sheriff. “There’s chairs around th’ table for sitting, you know.”

Five minutes ago, Alan had been standing outside Graham’s secluded cabin, staring at the peeling siding and splintered roof with passive deliberation. In short, Alan had no patience for the old hermit—considered him more a nuisance than anything else, really—and regretted having to speak with him. That Graham Rand was the last person to see Felix Raintree was unfortunate. If he could coax even the slightest suggestion of helpful information from the old recluse, Alan Bannercon could go home a happy man. But he hadn’t counted on it; there’d simply been too many phone calls in the middle of the night, too many occasions where the old fool had seen—allegedly—the apparition of his dead wife floating among the trees of the surrounding forest. He was a lonely old man that, over time, had managed to trick himself into believing in the purely absurd.

“Mr. Rand, I need to ask you about Detective Raintree.”

Graham swiveled the pan on the burner, skirted to his left to retrieve one final pat of butter, and dropped it into the sizzling grease. He turned around and faced the sheriff, his face looking hollow and malnourished.

“That man is a good man,” Graham said, wagging a tree-branch finger at Alan. “He knows about these woods, I think.”

“You spoke with him two nights ago at the station? He gave you a ride home?”

“It’s
considerate.”
He said this with an unflinching air of stateliness. “And don’t think I don’t know about
some
of you boys.”

“What was it you spoke with Detective Raintree about the other night?”

“Specters,” Graham said, and flared his nostrils. He half-grinned.

“Beg pardon?”

“Things
out there.”
The half-grin widened. “Do you know something, Sheriff?”

“What?”

“You think things are peaceful here, but they’re not.”

“Is that right?”

“In real life, things are mostly just up and down. Straight up—and straight down. No in-betweens. But around here—and most especially recently—things is all up and down and left and right and side to goddamn side and no one knows which damn way they’re turning.”

Alan crossed his arms and leaned back against the wall. The kitchen was small and rustic, empty except for a badly marred clapboard table and a water-stained refrigerator with a busted door handle. Only one of the three light fixtures worked; it cast an ominous luminescence along the filthy counters and scuffed tile floor.