The Year of the Storm (16 page)

DANNY

W
hen something really traumatic happens to you, the world starts to looks a little different. I'm not talking about how it looks when your dog just died or you discovered that you won't be getting into medical school after all. I'm talking about finding out you have cancer or losing your kid to some stranger with a candy bar in a Honda Civic. I'm talking about watching your mother and little sister walk out into some storm-ravaged landscape and never return.

You begin to notice the shadows. Before they were just a nuisance, a distraction from the sunlight. But when there's a turning point, like what happened with Mom and Anna, the shadows cast a spell. You feel it when you try to remember and when you try to forget, omnipresent, sticky, and so cloying you try to make your mind go blank just to live a moment without them.

After a while, the melancholy becomes so commonplace that you grow numb. You find that you are forgetting now without even trying. The shadows become more inconspicuous, just trees, bare and cold, lurking on the periphery of your vision. All of which seems good, except by then you're so used to the heartache that when it fades away, you're left with nothing but emptiness. You're face-to-face at last with the bottom, and it stares at you, unrelenting, calm, ageless.

Even at fourteen—especially at fourteen—the bottom is a scary place.

I went through all of this in the months that Mom and Anna were gone, and even though I came face-to-face with utter hopelessness, I never bottomed out completely. I always held a spark of hope—sometimes nothing more than a sputtering flame—that my mother and sister lived. I believe if I'd been older, wiser to the way the world has of knocking you in the mouth repeatedly, I would have dismissed Walter Pike's story with a cynical shake of my head. I would have walked away from his place numb, and content in my numbness because the ache of hope hurt too damn much to mess with again.

Nowadays, I think a lot about what it means to slip. About the ways a person can slip, because it's really something we do all the time. You go along, thinking everything is fine, and ignore all the tiny slips, the glimpses of what your life could be. It's easy to ignore because you come back so quickly, until you really slip, you fall off the path and spin and tumble and hit the water much too fast. You find yourself in another world, a disorienting one, and no matter how many times you look for the exit, it just keeps moving, until the only way out is too painful to even consider.

I didn't know then if I believed Pike's story. I know I wanted to. Now, I'm no better off. Doubt still dogs my every step, but there is one thing I do know, one thing that I've learned.

We all slip. In one way or another.

And when we do, very few of us ever find our way back to the surface.

Sometimes you get lucky, though. At fourteen, I still had hope. Just the smallest sliver, but I clung to it like a man clinging to his very last match in a world without light.

—

H
e told us just a little more.

“When I came back this last time, a few weeks ago, I decided I was going to stay. I came here, to this cabin.”

I opened my mouth to speak, but Cliff beat me to it. “This is where you killed Sykes.”

Pike nodded. “And don't forget, it's where those girls died too.”

“And it's where Sykes was with his mother when she died.”

Pike pointed at me. He seemed pleased I had been listening so closely.

“Yeah, that's something to remember. Seth believed that the storm shelter was the way, but somehow the cellar right below us is important too.”

Suddenly, the darkness seemed oppressive. I wanted a bright light to shine in every corner of this place.

“I came here because I began to wonder if this cabin could connect me to the swamp.” He was silent for a moment, and it was weird to see him sitting still, no cigarette, no oxygen, just him, and it made him seem naked, vulnerable beyond all telling. “I've been having other dreams about the swamp. Hell, I don't even know if they're dreams. It's almost like I go there, but I'm helpless, just an eye in the sky, watching.”

“What do you see?” I asked. “Are the girls still there?”

He nodded. “Yeah. And somebody else.”

I said, “Sykes.”

“Bingo.”

“But how?” Cliff said.

Pike shrugged, and the spell of his stillness was broken. He patted his shirt pocket for a cigarette. “Seth always worried that he'd find a way in.” Pike lit the cigarette, and in the glow of ash, I saw pain etched into the creases of his face. “I worry that maybe I killed him in the wrong place. I worry that somehow, it's my fault.”

“It can't be,” I said, amazed by the outrage in my voice. “Don't even think like that. The note Seth left. He said he was going to make it right. That meant he was going to take the girls' remains to the swamp, right? Like the rabbit.”

Pike grinned around his cigarette. “Hell, now how did you figure out in a couple of hours what it took me years to get ahold of?”

I blushed in the darkness, thankful that Cliff couldn't see. “It just makes sense. But it proves that killing somebody in the cellar doesn't take them there. Sykes must have found another way in. Maybe it's genetic. I mean, your grandmother saw it first, then Sykes, and finally, Seth and you.”

“This is ridiculous,” Cliff said suddenly. “Listen to yourself, Danny.”

I looked at Pike. He nodded. “Maybe he's right, Danny-boy. Maybe it is ridiculous. Hell, I know he's right. It is ridiculous, and if we could tape-record our voices and listen to them again, we'd probably commit ourselves to Bryce Hospital over there in Tuscaloosa, but, and this is a big God-blamed
but
, that don't mean it isn't the truth.”

He was talking to both of us, but his eyes were on me. He blew out a stream of smoke. “Sometimes you got to take a chance. Sometimes, that's all you have left. A crazy, ridiculous chance.”

He laughed, and the laugh turned into a cough. When he finally cleared the smoke from his lungs, he leaned forward. “What do you say, Danny-boy? Take a chance? Get your mother and sister back?”

These days, I might try to fool myself and pretend I agonized over the decision, but that would be a lie. I was desperate for something, and when I saw it, I grabbed it with everything I had.

I opened my mouth to speak, but Cliff interrupted me.

“What's that?”

Far away, I heard the sound of an engine.

Pike held his hand up for silence.

“Sounds like a—” Cliff began.

“Shhh!” Pike shot him a look.

The sound got closer. It was a car. Coming this way.

“You boys had better go in the back.”

Cliff and I sat there.

“You heard me. Get in the back. Don't come out until I tell you to.”

We both got up and went down the darkened corridor to the back room, the same room where we'd found him in his own vomit the other day. I'd been nervous then, full of something like dread at what I'd find. I felt the same way now as I stumbled forward, hands outstretched into the utter darkness.

Shapes—dark and undefined—floated in front of me. I reached for one and felt a softness. The bed. Pulling myself around, I settled down on the floor on the other side. I heard Cliff join me, his breathing rapid and shallow.

Other than that, the cabin was quiet.

A car door slammed outside, and I heard Pike rising from his chair, the hardwood floor creaking under his feet with each step. I imagined him walking over to the window and peering out.

“Who do you think it is?” Cliff whispered.

I had no idea, but for some reason I was frightened. There had been something in Pike's voice when he told us to go to the back, something that suggested he had been expecting the visit. That put me on edge.

“Don't know,” I said, my voice barely even a whisper.

There was a knock on the door. Three of them. I heard Pike clear his throat and say, “Come on in.”

The door swung open with a long creak. I leaned forward, frantic to hear something, anything that would tell me who it was.

A moment of agonizing silence passed. Then Pike spoke.

“Help you?”

“Are you Walter Pike?”

“That's right.”

“I'm Deputy Sims from the county sheriff's department. We received a call about thirty minutes ago from a Eugene Banks. Know him?”

Cliff pinched me hard. His dad had called the police. I shook my head, willing him to be silent.

“Don't recognize the name.”

No one spoke, but I heard movement, saw a shadow down the corridor, and I pictured Sims—in my opinion the biggest buffoon in the department—taking his hat off, walking over to look out the window, rolling his neck, posturing like he always did when Dad had to deal with him.

“I'm going to shoot straight, Walter.”

“Mr. Pike.”

“Say again.”

“You called me Walter. Seems a little too familiar for my taste. My friends call me that. You can call me Mr. Pike.”

“I don't think you quite have a handle on the situation here, Walter. You picked a hell of a time to come back. Sheriff is dying to pin this shit on somebody, with the election coming next spring and all. You, though? Heh. A known queer that was a major suspect in the last mystery these woods have seen that shows up when you did
and
immediately starts messing with young boys? Hell, man, this town will burn you at the fucking stake.”

“You plan on arresting me?”

“I'll ask the fucking questions.”

Pike said nothing.

“Now, the way I figure it, you got the bodies somewhere on these premises . . .” I heard the floorboards creak as Sims moved across the room again.

“What's back here, old man?” Sims's voice was closer. I could feel Cliff tense up beside me.

“Don't go back there.”

“I'll go wherever I like. Sheriff warned me you didn't have a bit of respect for the law.”

“I respect the law, just not the lawmen around here,” Pike said. “I'm telling you to stop.”

“How about this, old man? How about you stick one thumb in your mouth and the other in your ass and shut up?”

I heard Cliff draw a sharp breath as the footsteps echoed toward us. I was looking for a back window to escape out of when it happened.

At first I thought the whole cabin was coming down, that something had fallen from the sky and landed on the roof. The very air shook with it. Cliff shrieked and I clamped my hand over his mouth. He nodded quickly, to show he understood, and finally, I did too. Somebody had fired a shot. Since I hadn't seen a gun in the cabin, I could only assume . . .

I came out of the corridor on the run. I almost collided with Sims, who was standing at the end of the hall, his hands up, his back to me.

Pike stood across the room from him, the lantern burning bright at his feet, holding a sawed-off shotgun to his shoulder. The double barrel was pointing right at Sims's face.

“I told you not to go back there.”

Very slowly, I slid back down the hall into the darkness of Pike's room. Cliff grabbed me.

I put my hand over his mouth again.

“You going to shoot a lawman?” Sims said.

“They told you some shit about me,” Pike said, and his voice was ragged, full of sharp edges and menace. “But they must have left out the most important parts. I'm a crazy motherfucker. I spent nearly three years in the Hanoi Hilton letting Charlie pour sand down my throat. I've killed before, and it ain't nothing for me to kill again.”

Sims was silent.

“Now I'm going to step out of this doorway and you're going to walk out of this cabin and get back into your cruiser. You're going to drive all the way back to the sheriff's office and tell them what a crazy, murderous bastard Walter Pike is.”

I heard footsteps, shuffling. The door groaned opened.

“Tell your sheriff if he wants me, he better send more than Deputy Sims next time.”

“Oh, we'll be back.”

“Bring the whole damn force next time.”

The door slammed. Cliff tried to get up. I held him down. I wanted to wait until I heard the cruiser pull away.

A few minutes later, it did.

W
hen we came from the back, Pike was seated, using his oxygen tank. He looked pale in the lantern light. The shadows around him had lengthened and he seemed to have become lost inside them.

“We got work to do,” he said. “This is going to happen sooner than I planned.”

“Okay,” I said. “The sooner the better. Just tell me what to do.”

Pike chuckled softly. “So you're not scared? I mean after what just happened, you still trust me?”

I thought about this for a second. I knew that I shouldn't trust him, and my parents had raised me to stay away from men like Walter Pike. He was obviously not playing with a full deck. He was a beaten, broken man, prone to outbursts of violence and masochism, and maybe some of that would have mattered if I hadn't been so sure that he was telling the truth. At fourteen, I believed the truth was in someone's voice, the tone of it, and for the most part this belief did not fail me. I only wish this ability had followed me into adulthood. But like so many things that change when you get older, determining who was telling the truth and who wasn't became akin to navigating an endless series of switchbacks and dead-end roads in a blinding snowstorm. All you could do was close your eyes and guess.

Not at fourteen. At fourteen, I knew.

“I trust you.” I had no more gotten the words out of my mouth when Cliff elbowed me.

“What?”

“Can we talk? Alone?”

I looked at Pike. He nodded. “Better make it quick. We're about to have police all over the these woods looking for me and you.”

Cliff and I walked outside. The air was humid, the way it gets before rain. It was quiet out here, except for the sound of bullfrogs down by the pond, the drone of their voices broken only occasionally by the night sounds: a branch breaking, the hoot of an owl, the low rustle of wind sweeping through the leaves.

Cliff grabbed my arm. “What are you thinking?” His voice was fierce, urgent.

“What do you mean, what am I thinking? You heard his story too. Don't you believe him?”

Cliff let go of me and stepped back. He put his hand over his face. For a second I thought he was about to start crying. “It doesn't matter if I believe him or not. It can't be true. It just can't.”

“Why not?”

He laughed then, but it wasn't the kind of laugh that someone does when something is funny. It was the exasperated, I-don't-know-what-else-to-do kind of laugh. There was an edge to it, and I knew then Cliff had already had about as much of this as he could take.

“Why not? You are absolutely kidding me, right, Danny? Well, let's just see. Well, why don't we start at the beginning? He says they threw Seth into the quicksand. I've told you a hundred times, quicksand doesn't work like that. People don't sink into it like they sink into water. That's just the movies. This simple point puts his whole narrative in doubt.”

“Narrative—what?—you're kidding, right? You're willing to believe that somebody can slip into another world, but you question drowning in quicksand?”

“I never said I accepted the slipping. The quicksand was first, so I started with that. He's lying. Let me take that back. He's delusional. Shell-shocked. Probably not quite the same as lying, but the effect is the same.”

“And what's the effect?”

“The effect is trouble for you if you go along with him.” He put his hand on my shoulder. “Let's go, Danny. Right now. Let's get out of here. He shot at a police officer, for God's sake.”

“Sims had it coming. He's an asshole.”

Cliff sighed. “Let me repeat. He shot at a police officer. Asshole or not, that's a huge deal.”

I was about to speak, to try to explain that
asshole
didn't quite do Sims justice, when we heard it. A siren.

Pike's door swung open. “Time to shit or get off the can,” Pike said. “You coming with me or not?”

I knew he was speaking to me and me only.

“Depends,” I said. “Are we going to get my mother and sister back?”

Pike stepped out of the cabin. He was smoking a cigarette. “Is there anywhere else?”

“Then, yes, I'm coming.”

Cliff shook his head in disgust but offered his hand. I took it and squeezed. When I let go of his hand, I knew our relationship would never be the same again.

—

E
verything went to hell after that. Apparently, a squad car had been sent out ahead. It pulled up way before the one with the siren arrived. Cliff had just disappeared into the woods heading back home while Pike and I were caught in the headlights.

We ducked into the trees just as an officer on the car's loudspeaker told us to freeze.

“We need to split up,” he said.

I tried to reply, but he was already walking away. “Meet me at the storm shelter. One hour,” he said, and then he was gone.

I took one more look at the police car—two men were getting out now—and then took off as fast as I could run in the other direction.

—

F
or a long time I just ran. Branches beat at my arms, neck, and face. The woods seemed endless, and I was lost. Panic started deep in my gut and crept outward. I didn't know where I was going. Every time I thought about slowing my pace, I thought about the sheriff's car and the policeman. Had they seen Pike and me? Or were they searching the cabin right now, disgusted that it was empty?

I kept running.

I didn't stop until I came out of the trees and saw my house looming in the distance. I stopped hard, skidding my Keds across the gravel drive. Rocks flew up, bouncing off my pants leg. Sheriff Martin was standing near my front stoop, under the big oak tree, not too far from where Pike had stood just a few weeks ago. Martin was talking to one of his deputies in the glow of his headlights. The deputy pointed in my direction, and Martin swung around. I wished I could evaporate back into the woods, but I knew there were several dozen feet before I could make the trees again.

“Hey, boy!” Martin called. “Danny! Come on over. We've been looking for you.”

I didn't answer. Instead, I took a couple of tentative steps back before turning and running full tilt for the trees. Martin shouted at me once, and then I heard car doors slam shut.

In my rush I failed to find a proper opening in the foliage to escape through and found myself nearly at a standstill, fighting through a thick drapery of kudzu and creepers. Behind me, the cruiser crunched and spit gravel as it closed in on me. I plowed on through, the vines breaking open wet on my arms, lashing my face. Some bent for interminable lengths of time, and then bent more, and only broke when I'd tunneled deep enough to bind myself with other vines, no end in sight.

There was a chirp from the road and then Sheriff Martin speaking through his loudspeaker: “If you can hear me, Danny, please stop running. I want you to listen.” There was a pause, and to my surprise I stopped fighting through the vines. I was in so deep, I felt confident they wouldn't find me, at least not at night unless I gave myself away by making too much noise. I also realized I wanted to hear what the sheriff was going to say. I wanted to hear something about Dad.

“This man you've been with. Walter Pike is his name. He may have told you something different, but he's a deeply disturbed individual. Danny, let me repeat. He is deeply disturbed. I know you're angry about your father. I know you're in a place right now . . . a, hell, a vulnerable place, but you have to think things through, son.” There was a squawk and I heard the cruiser pulling closer. “You have to know that this man may be responsible for killing your mother and sister. Even more, he might have killed those girls thirty years ago.”

I started fighting through the vines again. The sheriff continued to talk—he must have sensed I hadn't gone far—but I didn't listen anymore. If he believed my mother and sister were dead, he didn't have anything to say that I wanted to hear.

Sometime later, after the loudspeaker had at long last fallen silent and the pounding in my heart had subsided and my journey through the vines had become more about steady, deliberate clearing than headlong crashing, I reached the end and broke through to open air and space. I had no idea what time it was. I only had the vaguest of notions of how to find Pike, but what was worse was the tiny, tiny seed of doubt I felt growing inside the pit of my stomach.

I decided to ignore it and broke into a steady jog, aiming as best I could for the center of the woods and the place I hoped would take me out of this world and into the next.

—

I
heard the dogs before I reached the shelter. Their bleating filled the night from one horizon to the other. With every step I took toward what I hoped would be the storm shelter, I heard the sounds come closer.

When I finally reached the shelter, I was so tired I could barely breathe. I stood there, outside the hatch, marveling at how I'd been here just a few days earlier, during the storm, and not had a clue in the world that I'd be coming back again with a purpose.

I opened the hatch and went inside.

Taking the ladder slowly, I made it to the bottom and held my hands out in front of me to ward off the darkness. “Mr. Pike?” I said.

There was no answer.

I stepped closer to what would be the back wall, ducking my head a little for fear of scraping it against the concrete top, and called his name again.

Nothing.

I was alone. The hatch was still open, and I could hear the dogs baying through it. They were coming this way. Hands out again, I made my way back to the ladder. I was halfway up when I heard him call for me.

His voice sounded like a deep moan from hell.

I didn't hesitate. Springing out of the hatch, I took off at a dead run. It had started raining, and thunder cracked the sky open, letting out hail and huge, hard pellets of rain.

He was still hollering my name. I ran blindly toward his voice, ignoring the other voice—the one inside my head—that told me it was foolish to run toward the dogs.

When I found him, he was on the ground, lying in the mud. His breathing was labored, and he couldn't seem to stop cursing.

“My oxygen,” he managed. “Left it. Goddamn it all to hell.”

I knelt beside him. The dogs were impossibly close, maybe only a minute or two away.

“I tried to throw them off, but I nearly killed myself doing it.” He grimaced and reached for my hand. “We aren't far, are we?”

I looked at him blankly. He squeezed my hand so hard it hurt. “Damn it, Danny. Wake up. How far are we from the shelter?”

“I don't know. Maybe two hundred yards.”

“Drag me.”

“What?”

He kicked my shin.

“Ow!”

“Drag me. Let's go.”

Before I could answer, a streak of lightning jumped out of the sky and struck a nearby tree, momentarily lighting the night up like one of those disco strobes. The world seemed to splinter between light and dark, frozen in a split-second burst of blinding, soundless white.

The dogs howled. I got Pike under both his shoulders and dragged him through the mud.

We'd made it no more than a couple dozen yards when he let loose a series of hacking coughs that made me wonder if he didn't have rocks in his lungs.

“Let's rest,” I said.

He shook his head. “Those dogs aren't resting. Besides, this storm is going to be a big one. We rest too long, we'll die out here. The real storm ain't even here yet.”

Something told me that Pike's real problems weren't here yet either. Something told me he was only going to get worse.

I got him going again, trying to keep his body off the rocks and sticks, Pike cursing under his breath, me just trying to find the leg strength to keep moving forward. It went like this for another hundred feet before I collapsed.

“Shit,” he moaned. “Shit.”

I started to get under his arms again, to lift him for one last heroic pull, but he felt heavier this time, and my muscles quivered as I strained to get him up. The dogs were even closer now, having clearly locked onto our scent.

We made it three more steps before his weight became too much for me, and we fell.

This time I just lay there. What was the point? I'd only get him up again and then fall again. I was so tired.

The dogs drew closer, their throaty calls increasing in intensity and fervor. I wondered what Sheriff Martin would think when he found me here, lying in the mud next to Pike.

“And where exactly were you and that old fool headed?” he might ask.

“To the slip, sir.”

“The slip?”

“Yes, sir. It's where my mother and sister are.”

I saw him laughing then, his mouth first forming a half-open, slack-jawed look of incredulity and then opening wide into a belly laugh.

And at that point, I'm ashamed to admit, I think I might have been done. The rain was coming down so hard it felt like someone was spraying us with a hose. The dogs were so close, I couldn't imagine outrunning them, and the faith that I had held so dear for so long was beginning to feel like a fantasy after all.

Then I heard Pike grunt. He kicked me. I sat up not because I was ready to move but because he kicked the shit out of my knee and it hurt.

“Goddamn it. I thought you wanted your mother and sister. I thought you were going to do anything to get them. Well, this is it, son. Get your ass up and take my hands and drag me over to the storm shelter.”

I stood up, getting my legs back under me. They hurt so badly. Then I took his hands and pulled. He groaned, and so did I, but I didn't stop. If I slowed even the slightest bit, he shouted at me to pull harder, cajoling me with gasping taunts about being weak, about being just like all those other bastards who didn't believe. Whether it was because he made me angry or because he made me believe again, I can't say, but I began to pull harder, closing my eyes and driving my legs.