Bad Things Page 31

“We can’t go back to the car,” Kyle said urgently, near tears. “I’m not going back there”

  Bill ignored him. “They aren’t looking to kill you, John, at least not like that. The rest of us . . .”

  “You’re right,” I said. “Get these people out of here.”

  And I broke from the house and ran straight across the lawn and into the woods.

  CHAPTER 45

  As soon as I got among the trees I dodged over to the biggest trunk I could find and got around the far side of it, crouching low to the ground.

  To the right and left of me lay blackness, undifferentiated but for a few gray lines where moonlight caught jagged bark. Straight ahead, however, there was a different quality to the darkness, as though there might be a clearing in the distance. I guessed that was where I was headed.

  I left it a beat, panning my eyes back and forth, listening. I heard something that could have been two rapid shots from a handgun, but it was a long way from where I was and could equally have been a branch brought down by the wind. It was beginning to pick up again, twitching the tops of the trees back and forth.

  I was just about to move when I heard a noise behind me and whirled around. It was Bill.

  “You asshole,” he said, coming up to me in a running crouch.

  “Fuck are you doing here?”

  He hunkered down next to me, his back to the tree trunk. “I said we needed to rethink—not that you should come in here by yourself.”

  “What about the other two?”

  “Told them to stay where they are.”

  “They going to?”

  “If that girl has anything to do with it, yes. The other kid hasn’t got the balls to do anything by himself.”

  “So—”

  Another scream, from somewhere ahead.

  We set off toward it.

  There was no shape or structure to the forest we were entering. The woods around our old house had paths through it, a couple of scenic vista points, even a bench dragged nearly half a mile from the house by some former owner with more dedication than me. This was just trees, growing every which way. Generations of Robertsons had evidently elected to leave these woods exactly as they were, despite choosing to build their house here instead of in the center of the town they’d created.

  Bill kept pace to the side of me, his shotgun held at port arms. “This place feel right to you?” he asked after a while.

  “No.”

  I knew what he meant. The trees were getting thicker and within a hundred yards there was no snow on the ground. The forest floor barely seemed wet, despite hours of rain. It was easy to run, harder to decide where to run to. The air was heavy and dead with darkness, and for a bizarre moment it was like being fifteen years back in time, two young guns running through the night in another country, on missions we didn’t understand.

  I’m not sure I ever felt that afraid there, though. You can, to a degree, keep yourself out of the way of bullets and shells. What we were running toward now felt like it started inside.

  Bill suddenly stopped dead in his tracks, his hand held up. “Hang on.”

  “What?”

  He was swallowing compulsively. “I heard something.”

  At first I could hear nothing but pregnant silence, so oppressive that it made the sound of my own blood loud and unnatural. Then we heard another shout, from far over toward the left.

  We changed course and ran in this new direction. The forest floor was declining now, and rockier, and more moonlight was making it down through the trees.

  “There’s something up there,” Bill panted.

  I could see it, too, a change in the pattern of the trunks, confirming that something other than forest lay ahead. It seemed to be getting a little warmer, too. It wasn’t just because we were running. It was as though the air itself had been trapped here since the height of summer, or before that, as if the air in this part of the woods had lived here forever and didn’t travel anywhere else, and never had. Suddenly what Carol had said about things living in the wilderness didn’t sound so dumb. Did air count as a thing? What did it think? What did it want?

  I started to speed up, leaving Bill behind, until after a few hundred yards I could barely hear him. I wasn’t even sure I was running in the right direction any longer. I was simply running.

  The trees thinned out all at once, snow once more on the ground, and then there were no more ahead. Instead there was openness, and beyond that, a lake.

  I skidded to a halt.

  It looked alien in this light and with a thin layer of white all around. I’d never seen it from this side before, either—nor with the body of a black man sprawled on its shore, an arm and a leg under its surface, trying in vain to sit up.

  But I knew immediately what this place was, what it had to be. I knew the name of the only lake in the area of anything like this size.

  The water was absolutely still. Patches close to the shore had started to freeze and gather snow, sticks pushing from beneath the surface like tiny bones.

  Bill arrived behind me breathing hard, then went over to pull Switch up onto the shore. The guy had taken a bullet high up to the leg, but looked like he’d live. He was swearing to himself, in a low and insistent tone.

  “Where the hell is this?” Bill asked.

  “It’s Murdo Pond.”

  I was standing close to the lake’s edge, craning my head around to the left. Our old house had to be up that way, a mile or two past a long, wide bend in the shore that would have hidden it even in daylight. I had never been to the Robertson place, of course, and never took a boat out on “our” part of the pond, and so had simply never put it together that their house, assuming deep enough access to the woods, could have had frontage on the same lake, at the other end from where we’d lived.

  The odor came from here. It did right now, at any rate, though I’d never noticed it when we lived on the lake. The thing we’d smelled in the Robertson house, and coming through the forest beforehand; it started here.

  I turned the other way and saw that trees came right down to the waterline on either side of where we were standing. But about a third of a mile away I could make out an open section of rocky shore, and a jetty. Someone was standing on it.

  Bill saw it, too. “There, look, John.”

  The person at the end of the jetty looked as if they had two heads, one smaller than the other.

  I could hear the distant crying of a child, and the ragged sound of a woman shouting, Carol gone way past the edge of hysteria, screaming as if trying to break someone’s mind.

  “Going to have to leave you here,” I told Switch. He nodded, his face pulled tight with pain.

  “Fuck them up bad,” he said.

  Bill and I plunged back into the trees and ran.

  We tried to, anyway, but the trees stood even closer together, the ground between them uneven and rocky and plagued with small gullies where spring thaws would trickle down toward the lake. Moonlight struggled to reach the ground here, and cast strange shadows, and for a moment I thought I saw a small group of people running with us, over to the right, but it couldn’t have been. There was no way anyone could have got to that side, or be running that fast without making any sound, and a few of the shapes had seemed no bigger than children.

  The wind was really starting to pick up, high in the trees, making the branches move constantly against one another. Rustling, whispering sounds, and a harsh crack, a feeling like someone was behind us, or to the side, or perhaps even all around.

  Then we were out the other side of the thicket and all was still like a tableau. I saw Carol standing on the shore, pleading. I realized with horror that the double-headed creature on the jetty had not been her, but Brooke.

  The walkway went forty feet out into the lake, and she was close to the very end, holding Tyler fast in her arms. He was struggling, but she was strong.

  Carol turned when she heard me running out of the woods. Her face was broken with grief, red and wet
with tears. She didn’t look like anyone I’d ever met.

  “John,” she screamed. “Get him back!”

  I started toward the jetty, but Brooke held up her hand.

  “One more step and I’ll throw him in,” she said.

  “Two steps,” said another voice, “and I’ll blow his mother’s head off.”

  Cory Robertson was stationed past the other side of the promontory, standing in shadow and braced against a tree. He had a hunting rifle trained straight at Carol. I’d used a gun like it in the past, and knew it could stop a deer from over half a mile. At this range it would punch a hole in a car door.

  I turned, looking for Bill. I thought he’d been right behind me in the trees, but now he was nowhere to be seen. So I kept my head turning smoothly in an arc, as if all I’d been doing was scoping out the terrain, establishing the degree to which I’d become surrounded. “Anybody else I should know about?” I asked.

  “Just us,” Brooke said. “But Cory’s an excellent shot.”

  “I believe you,” I said. “I’ve seen the picture gallery.”

  I knew, however, that I’d just seen the shadow of at least one more person amid the trees, staying close. A fairly hefty someone. “Bet Deputy Greene isn’t too shabby, either.”

  “Bravo. Well, yes, I did lie just a little. A few friends have been kind enough to assist us. I’m not going to tell you how many, though, or where they are.”

  “Okay, then,” I said, slowly raising my hands. “In which case I’m not going anywhere. You win.”

  “Drop the gun.”

  I dropped it.

  “Get Tyler,” Carol shouted at me, her voice cracked. “She’s going to kill him.”

  I turned to face the jetty. “What’s this about, Brooke? Why have you got my son?”

  “He isn’t yours.”

  “That’s not what his birth certificate said.”

  “You want a prize for having screwed your own wife for a change? You wouldn’t even have that boy if it weren’t for me.”

  “Quickening, 2004.”

  “Very good.”

  “I didn’t know anything about that until twenty minutes ago. I don’t understand it now, either.”

  “Of course you don’t. Darling Carol already had a child but that’s just not enough for some people, is it? She was so worried that number two was being a little sloooow in arriving, and so she came visiting her old friend Brooke. She didn’t tell you about this, naturally. It’s astounding how much of life is invisible, don’t you find? That’s not the only favor Carol’s asked down the years, either, or the only lie she’s told.”

  “We all lie, Brooke. Big deal. Tell me—how much does it cost? For someone who wants a boy to fall in love with her, or another child? What do you take from people like that? Is it just money? What else do you demand for pretending you can do these things?”

  “I don’t claim to be able to do anything. But I know someone who can.”

  “Right, yes, a witch. And why would a witch need a broker for her services? What does she gain from that?”

  “Do you know who she is?”

  “I don’t even believe there is one.”

  Brooke grinned, cold and knowing. “Precisely. A few hundred years ago that could save your life.”

  “And in return you take a cut of the money?”

  “And keep the dog on its lead. People with that kind of power tend to be unstable. They need a steadying hand. A patron. Someone with an overview.”

  “Just sounds like bullshit to me, Brooke.”

  “Luckily I don’t give a damn whether you believe in it or not.” What was Bill doing? Where was he? Would a few extra seconds help ?

  I turned to Carol. “Did you tell Tyler about this? Is this why he said to me I wasn’t really his father?”

  Carol just glared at me with open hatred, as if I was something that had come into her life from underneath the bed in the middle of the night, a thing that had brought only badness into her life.

  “Oh, Cory,” Brooke said lightly, as you might alert someone to the fact you’re ready for another cocktail. There was a beat, and then a rifle shot.

  I heard Bill cry out, and knew then that whatever happened next, it was very likely to be going Brooke Robertson’s way.

  A moment later this became even more clear, when people started coming toward us out of the trees.

  Bill had evidently frozen deep in the forest when he saw what happened to me, and tried cutting across the back, to get around the other side of Cory. But something—moonlight, the bulk of his passing against the snow—had given him away.

  Cory shot him in the upper right side of the chest, out of mercy or more likely from swinging the rifle around too fast. Either way, it was enough. You could smell the blood from where I stood, unless that was merely a different note in the odor coming in waves off the lake. Bill was knocked flat on his back, just inside the trees. He was moving as if trying to stand up in the wrong direction, and his gun had fallen some distance away.

  Meanwhile, shadows kept coming toward me.

  Initially I’d assumed it was just Cory’s buddies, the guys I’d seen in his photograph. It quickly became clear there were more people than that. At first just ten or so of them, then more, and still they kept coming.

  Deputy Greene was the first. Then I saw the man who ran the coffee truck in the bank parking lot, and the woman who ran the hair salon on Kelly Street. I saw the guy who owned a market where I’d bought cigarettes a couple times in the last few days, and people I’d seen sitting reading the paper in the Write Sisters, and talking together in the Mountain View, or passing me on the street.

  I saw Courtney.

  And I saw Marie, the woman who ran my motel.

  Most stopped only as far from the trees as was needed to accommodate those still coming up from behind. But Marie came farther, halfway to where I stood. Her eyes were closed and her lips were moving constantly.

  Then finally she opened her eyes.

  The trees suddenly shook up in their highest branches, as another cold and vicious wind came down out of the mountains, or perhaps from deeper in the trees. This wind whipped Marie’s hair up around her face in a cloud, as she turned her head to look at me. She looked very, very different here. She seemed both younger and very old, dreadful with power, as if the movement in her hands could provoke movement in objects she was not in contact with.

  She also looked, bathed in a moonlight that found harsher planes buried in her face, a little like someone I knew.

  I realized that none of the other people were looking my way, or even seemed aware that I was here. They all seemed to be gazing at the lake, or perhaps at the other side of it, and none was dressed for the weather. One of the nearest to me was the hair-salon woman. Her face was blank, cloudy, like Courtney’s had been every time I’d seen her. Almost as if she didn’t even have a real face, or I was seeing beyond it to an emptiness within, to the truth that there was nothing inside anyone that could be depended upon.

  “You first,” Brooke said to Carol.

  “Fuck you, ” Carol said.

  I turned as Brooke took a step backward, bringing her even closer to the end of the jetty. She moved her arms so that the child wriggling in her grasp was hanging fully out over the lake.

  “This water here is always very cold,” she said. “How good a swimmer is your little boy?”

  Carol looked at me, helpless now. The anger was gone from her eyes and I saw only the girl I’d met long ago, someone who’d convinced me to come live in these mountains because she loved them and they had always been her home—perhaps not realizing that it was also a case of never being able to get away.

  I didn’t know what to tell her. Death hung in the air with nothing left to do but fall. If we didn’t do what Brooke said, then she was going to go through with what she intended anyhow. So far as I could tell, half of Black Ridge was here to see this, or to witness it. To avoid this moment we needed to have started thre
e or four years back, or longer, perhaps on the days we were born. We needed not to have met each other, to be different people, to have always been dead and never tried to be alive. All we could do now was slow it down.

  “Do what she says,” I said.

  Carol didn’t move. I started walking.

  “No,” Brooke said, her voice cracking just a little. “Carol first.”

  Carol still wouldn’t budge. Perhaps she thought she could create an impasse by refusing to move. Maybe she, too, was playing for time. I didn’t think either was going to work. There was only one way I could see out of this.

  “Carol, listen to me.”

  “Why would I listen to you?” Carol said. “Why should I believe you care about him?”

  “Because he’s my son,” I said. “You and I are done. But he and I can never be. Unless there’s something else you haven’t told me.”

  “No. Screwing other people was your department. Don’t worry. He’s your son.”

  “And yours. So go to him. You want him alone out there, what-ever’s going to happen next?”

  Carol hesitated, and then abruptly started toward the jetty. Climbed up the three steps, and began to walk out over the water.

  I glanced over at Cory. He was holding his position. Evidently whatever Brooke planned had to happen out over the lake, but I didn’t know whether it needed the three of us to be there together at the same time, or if her brother was just going to shoot Carol on her way to the end.

  He had the rifle in place, but didn’t look like he was sighting on her with immediate intent. And why would they have waited to do all this, and planned it this way, unless they needed all three of us at once?

  I heard Carol’s feet on the jetty. A few more steps. Then Cory abruptly turned and fired.

  Carol flinched, but the shot had been for Bill, who’d been trying to get to his gun. This time he was hit high up in the left thigh.

  Cory swiveled back to sight on Carol once again.

  The whole forest seemed to exhale.

  The warmth I’d felt earlier was suddenly gone, and it was utterly cold. Bill was making the kind of noises men find in their throats when all they want is for an angel to come and take them away.