The Year of the Storm (18 page)

The wind shifted suddenly, and my body twisted. My hand slipped, and instead of flying away, I was driven down into the hatch.

T
o this day I don't know what happened. I think I hit my head on either the ladder or the oxygen tank, maybe even the ground, or maybe I just passed out. Either way, the next part is indistinct in my memory, like the fragments of long-remembered dreams, images shaken out of a tree, hundreds of leaves falling at once. Only a few stand out.

Mom. Her face, filled with the sweetest light, sitting in the backyard, peeling a pear, her knuckles wet with the sticky juice. Me bounding across to her, so full of enthusiasm it hurts to remember it because the hard fact hits me: I won't ever be that enthusiastic again.

I buried my head in her lap, and she tousled my hair. Her hands in my hair. Jesus, I go back to that even now, even when I can no longer determine if the image was a real memory or just a dream. In the end it does not matter.

There's not an honest man anywhere who would deny the sweetness of a memory like that. Even now, the emotion of that moment is a real thing. And it occurs to me that if all of life had to be reduced into one moment, one gesture, this is the one I'd put forward.

The second image is of Seth. He came to me in the darkness, the boy from the photograph, his face lit with a glow that illuminated his whole body. He knelt beside me, whispered in my ear. Told me things about the slip. I listened so close, but when I came to, I could barely remember any of it, just his presence, his soothing voice in my ear, a phrase that he kept repeating—
Sometimes you find your way when you stop looking so hard.

The third was even more dreamlike, but somehow, it is the one that I go back to the most now, as if it really happened, as if I can place real meaning in the contours of its mysteries. It was Pike, standing over me, his white hair dangling around his neck and hanging down in my face. I could smell the scent of Wild Turkey and cigarettes on him (two smells I've continued to love even through adulthood). He shook me awake, pulling me up with both hands. “You've done too much believing to quit now,” he said. “Besides, if you don't believe for yourself, nobody is going to do it for you. Seth and me got lucky and found something important. It wasn't a new world or a swamp or a little cabin in a picture at dusk. It was more. It was a piece of God. The piece that resides in us, that lets us be more than just dirt. It was a door and we opened it. Now you've just got to do the same.”

I tried to tell him I couldn't open it without him, that I was still in the storm shelter, and that he was dead, and I didn't buy this shit about a piece of God. But every time I tried to stand up, he pushed me back down, telling me to wait, to rest. “You'll need your energy.”

Overhead, rain continued to pelt the hatch, and I could hear it leaking through the cracks, splattering on the soil.

“Aren't you dead?” I asked him.

He nodded.

“What do the dead know?” I asked him.

“Nothing. We know nothing. But we see everything. You've got to
see
, Danny.”

Then he was gone, and I was too.

The last thing that happened before I returned to full consciousness (though my therapist, Dwight, would suggest that I didn't ever really return to full consciousness until days later) was the falling.

Even while it happened, I remembered how Pike had described it and found myself amazed by how it was exactly like I'd imagined it. The wheel first. The world shifting, turning over like a great stone behemoth, and then the eerie dusk, the bottomless blue sky, the full moon, and—something I don't remember—the lightest touch of rain on my skin. The cabin flashed by, the water below, the giant oak trees, again and again until I slapped the water and sank to the bottom of a new world. Either that or an old dream.

When I woke some time later, it was to the sound of silence, and I knew the storm was over.

—

D
im light filtered through the opened hatch. I sat up, groggy. Hungry too. When had I last eaten? I tried to remember, but images got in the way—me pulling Pike through the mud, Sheriff Martin and his deputy running to get in their police car only to see it picked up like a plaything and tossed God knows where, the sound of Pike's labored breathing, that awful broken-glass sound.

“Pike.” I scrambled across the storm shelter, feeling for him in the darkness, sure that when I touched his body I'd find it cold and lifeless.

But how could I imagine that I wouldn't touch it at all?

I walked the shelter over twice, and then twice more, before I allowed myself to believe it. He was gone.

But where? Better question: But why? He wouldn't leave me. Unless he'd been crazy all along. I dismissed that. There was no point in even considering such a thing.

He couldn't be gone. I searched again, this time on my hands and knees, but the shelter was empty.

The adult me finds this hard to believe now. It's one of those easy places where a skeptic will say, “You were groggy. It was dark. He was there, you just didn't find him. Hell, maybe you were still dreaming.”

And maybe I was. Maybe, a part of me still is.

It doesn't matter, though. What matters is that I searched five times, and Walter Pike was gone.

I
've always thought the shadows were deepest at dusk when they lengthened and twisted themselves into ominous distortions. If you are caught walking at the moment when the sun dies and the woods go silent from birdsong, it can be disconcerting. The trees take on new, sometimes vulgar shapes, their vines casting out a more expansive web, the birds disappearing with sudden hushed eeriness, the very ground before you shifting and offering new contours, and sometimes a strange figure is glimpsed, flitting among the trees like a washed-out image from an old motion picture before disappearing in the periphery of your vision, blanketed by the oncoming night.

All of this might make a person disoriented, sure of themselves in the light of the day, but now—in the sudden dusk—leaving them groping for something familiar.

Sometimes I wonder if this is what happened to me when I came out of the shelter that day and saw the landscape changed, the very trees grown denser and more full of vines, the water on the ground, murky and knee-deep. Sometimes I wonder if stumbling out onto the flooded ground, I fell into a long, perilous delusion—a dream state brought on by the stress of the storm and Pike's disappearance.

Here's the thing: I've spent the last sixteen years trying to fashion the events I've been telling you about into pieces of a larger whole. But no matter how many times I try, no matter how thoroughly I analyze things, I can't make some of them fit. I get ideas, fleeting images; sometimes I wake in the morning with the maddening sense that I had it all figured out in my dream, but the dream is always gone, leaving me with the tantalizing feeling akin to having a name on the tip of my tongue, except this is not a name—this is my life.

When I become frustrated with this conundrum—pieces of a puzzle that never quite interlock—I tell it back to myself, much like Pike telling the story of his time with Seth not only for my benefit, but also for his own.

And when I tell it, this is how it goes.

—

I
know what my therapist thinks. Dwight doesn't say it, but he thinks it. I can read his face. It's an easy face to read, lacking true guile. His face tells me that he believes I'm delusional. The way he hesitates, the way he parses his words just so, the way he scribbles on his pad to fill the uncomfortable silences, the silences he wants to cover up with words. But he doesn't. Not yet. He leads, mostly, and it's almost funny to watch him try to lead me to places I've already been, places I've already considered, turning them over like found things, artifacts from the imagination. I've touched them all.

When I told him the part about the story, about how it helps to tell it back to myself, he smiled. He tried to hide it, but I saw his lips break their flat line and crease ever so slightly. I saw something like the shine of satisfaction in his eyes.

“What?”

He shrugged. “Nothing. Continue.”

“No, you were smiling.”

He pushed his glasses up and looked at me directly then. His face turned smug, superior, and this was the only time I hated him. When he was so sure of himself, so unwilling to even consider for just a moment that there could be truth to my story. It must be how people who have seen ghosts or claim to have been abducted by aliens feel. It's a hateful, frustrating, alone way to be, and it makes me sympathize with every last one of the poor bastards who carry either the reality or the delusion of something the rest of the world won't accept.

“Why were you smiling?”

He shrugged. “It's just from my perspective, your words make it so clear.”

“So clear?”

“What you're doing. How you're coping.”

“Tell me.”

“Maybe it would be better if you just continued. I think the discoveries you make on your own are the ones that will stick. Anything I say right now will be of lesser value.”

I leaned forward, gritting my teeth to keep from raising my voice. “Tell me.”

Dwight held out his hands, a gesture of supplication. “Sure, okay. You have a right to know where I'm coming from. It's just that the things you've told me are so unbelievable that you can't even justify them. Seriously, you can't. Instead you're using the storytelling, the narrative itself, as a kind of coping mechanism.”

“Not following.” I felt mean and ornery. Ready to snap.

“You don't believe what happened to you, but facing that means you'd have to accept some other things you're not ready to accept, so you cling to the story. The story as some magical boon—a tool, if you will—a tool capable of tying all these impossible things together. You lift the narrative above the fray, so to speak.”

“So to speak?”

He grinned, this time his fake grin, the patronizing one.

“Maybe we should slow down. Not push things. Sound fair?”

I nodded despite myself.

“Please,” he said, holding his hands out. “Continue.”

So I did.

—

W
hen I came out of the shelter, the woods were flooded. The water came up almost to my knees. That was the first thing I noticed. The second thing that struck me was that Pike's cabin was still standing. The roof was there, the structure still intact. No—I saw that this was different. This cabin had a porch, crooked and slanted, but a porch, nonetheless. The roof was pitched differently, and a warm orange light bloomed from one of the windows.

I stood for a moment, completely stunned, trying to make my mind understand how I could have been so confused. I turned, pacing back my steps to the shelter only to find more murky water.

These days, I wonder how I could have been so damn slow to realize what had happened, but I think I forget how truly confusing a situation like that can be. To realize that another world, totally different from the one you've known your entire life, had emerged from the shadows, and that it had been there all along,
you just failed to see it
, is so disconcerting, it's a wonder I dealt with it as quickly as I did.

It was the trees, really. They were unharmed, not a one of them crippled by the straight-line winds and the tornado that was almost certainly an F5. They were the same trees too, but different. These were swarming with Spanish moss, cloaked in kudzu, their limbs grown out at odd angles, holding things in their shadows—perhaps the other woods, the ones I'd grown up playing in. Likely others too.

Then I remembered the photos of the cabin, the ones of Pike and Seth standing in the water. I must have stood there for a long time, staring at the cabin in front of me, mentally checking it against the one he'd showed us. It was like all truly great successes—at first I wouldn't allow myself to believe I was actually there. But there was no denying the cabin. It was real. Somehow, without even meaning to do it, I was here. If Pike was right, and I believed he was, Mom and Anna were here too. I'd check the cabin first. What if I found them inside with Pike? What if he smiled and said, “What took you so long, Danny-boy?”

I was overcome by the image and felt my legs go weak. I sat down right in the water and began to sob.

I'd slipped. I had started in another world, my world, and I'd found my way into this one. Now all I had to do was get them and go—

Suddenly I remembered what Pike had said about the hatch.
It moves. Getting in is the easy part. It's getting back out that can be a challenge.

I took off on a run, sloshing the swamp water as I went. I kept my head up, surveying the swamp as I moved, looking for that hatch, knowing it had to be somewhere. That's when I nearly ran into them. And even if I hadn't, seeing them would have made me break my stride. They were breathtaking.

What I saw could only be properly called ghosts, but I think that's more a failure of the language than an apt description of what they were—evanescent sunbeams cutting through the dusk. I immediately thought of my earlier visits from Anna. Anna had been different, more like a vision or a trick of the shadows, a messenger from my subconscious. These girls were simultaneously not there, yet more present than anything I'd ever seen. Hadn't that been how Pike had described them? He was right. Damn, he was exactly right.

Their spirits burned and shone with a dim light, and when they moved, they left the scent of mossflower and the tinkling sound of tiny bells.

They watched me, their eyes wide with something—hope? I thought it was.

They wore dresses, old and pleated. Their shoes were leather and immune to the dirt and grime of the swamp because they floated, their toes dangling just inches above the silt. Each of their dresses was torn at the hem, and a single piece of fabric hung down, dragging the water and causing the tiniest of ripples, like anchors keeping them moored. Without these loose hems weighing them down, I could imagine the girls floating away or dissipating into the dusk, becoming one with the mist.

Neither spoke, and I wasn't sure if they could. I pointed to the cabin. “I'm here for my mother and sister. I want to help you too.”

The girls didn't answer me, and for a moment I thought maybe they couldn't. Then I realized their attention was fixed on something just behind me. I started to turn when I heard him laugh.

It was a high hollow sound, like the scream of a bobcat that used to wake me up late at night.

“We got another one, girls,” the voice said. “He's slipped down the rabbit hole and now he'll never climb back out.”

I turned around slowly.

Sykes was different than I'd imagined him. Taller, his head a wilder shade of red than I'd pictured. His face was locked into a garish smile; his eyes carried the wide, bugged look of a madman. This didn't surprise me, but his presence did. Unlike the girls, he was completely here, as if his body had been hauled, wholly resurrected, out of the swamp. His feet were sunk into the water as deep as mine. His face was lined with scars, the skin of his cheeks and lips loose against his skull from where Pike had pulled on it for so long. He walked with a stoop, tilting toward me, and his feet stirred the water, causing the fish to scurry for more remote parts of the swamp.

Up to this point, I'd felt every emotion I could imagine: joy, despair, grief, blind hope. Every emotion, I realized, except fear. Not the brain-numbing kind anyway, not the
Oh shit, here comes pain in my face right now
kind of fear. I couldn't react. Finally, when he lunged at me, his face—God, I'll always see that face—contorted into that crooked grin, my paralysis broke.

I made it to the porch steps before he caught me, his hand falling on my calf and pulling me back. He lifted me in the air, dangling me face-first over the swamp water. He was strong. Sixteen years later, I still marvel at his strength.

One of the girls screamed, a high, pure note of misery. Sykes laughed.

I do not know why evil exists in the world. Like many other people before me, it's a question I've pondered on sleepless nights, and I've yet to find a satisfactory answer. But I know what evil is. Even today, I can see it in the faces of certain politicians, talk-show hosts, and those that seek power at the expense of others. I know it, and I think the moment I heard Sykes laugh at the girls' terror was when I learned what it looked and sounded like. It was a lesson I would not forget.

Filled with rage, I twisted my body and reached for him, grabbing his crotch and squeezing for everything I had. He groaned and let go of me. I dropped headfirst into the swamp, the world going from a shimmering haze to a dank, slick blackness in an instant. I might have been in the storm shelter again, it was so dark.

I pushed myself up in time to see Sykes lunging at me. I rolled over, making him fall into the water. My hand found the bank and I pulled myself to the porch steps for a second time, my determination growing inside me like a ball of ever-expanding energy. I was too close to stop. Inside my mind, I heard Pike's voice cajoling me on as he had on the way to the storm shelter.

Halfway up the steps onto the rickety porch, my ankle gave way and I fell in a heap.

Sykes was standing over me, the loose skin of his jowls hanging inches from his skull, swaying gelatinously.

He tightened the skin into a smile. His eyes were so damned big, and I noticed that he never blinked. Maybe Pike had ripped his eyelids off in the struggle.

“Do you really think you can go in there?” Sykes said.

I didn't answer; instead, I scooched myself away from the steps, away from Sykes.

“Go ahead,” he said. “Try it.”

Warily, I worked myself to my feet and reached for the door handle.

Somewhere out in the swamp, I heard bells and worried murmuring.

I reached for the door handle—an old, rusted knob. It turned easily in my hand. I pushed it.

The door wouldn't budge.

—

S
ykes laughed, a wet cackle that rang out through the trees. Have you ever been walking in the woods, alone, around dusk, when one world starts to settle down and another begins to wake up? Have you ever heard a sound—some shrill and distant sound—that you don't recognize as a whippoorwill or a loon or anything else that would be in your woods? It had happened to me dozens of times before I visited the swamp and dozens since, and after hearing Sykes cackle like that, and having the benefit of sixteen years to mull it over, I think I understand that sometimes sounds—like people—slip through.

I was about to lunge at him, thinking my best shot was to bring the fight to him, when I heard a click behind me.

I turned to see the door open just a hair. I fell over trying to move so fast and hit my head against the door. Before I could get myself back to my feet, two things happened almost instantaneously—Sykes grabbed my ankles, trying to haul me back off the porch, and I reached for the door frame, clutching it with both hands.

For a moment, I felt like I'd be split in two, but Sykes won out. He was too strong, and he ripped me away. However, in pulling me back, he lost his balance on the steps and tumbled backward. I hit the steps pretty hard, my knee colliding with the edge of one of the bottom ones, my chin against the top.