1 The Bank of the River (4 page)

The two
stood in the hallway, unsure of what to say or do next.

“Every
fucking hair on my neck is standing up,” Roy said.

“It was
looking at you,” Steven said.

“Yeah,” Roy
replied. “That’s the creepiest goddamn thing I’ve seen in a long time.”

-

Steven told
Roy about the faces he’d seen earlier in his bedroom. They discussed having a
cup of coffee, but it was still before 1 a.m. and opted instead to try and
return to sleep, to see if more would occur. Steven mentioned that they still
hadn’t heard the knocking that occurred every night, and that it usually
happened around 3 a.m. Both Steven and Roy retired to their rooms and tried to
get back to sleep.

Steven
looked at the bottle of sedatives that the doctor had prescribed for him,
sitting on his nightstand.
Not tonight,
he thought.
I’ll start them
tomorrow, but tonight I need to make sure Dad hears the knocking, and I’m not
sure how heavy he sleeps.

After a half
hour of replaying the occurrences of the evening in his mind, Steven’s eyes
finally closed and he drifted off.

-

Old
faithful,
Steven
thought, as he swung his feet to the floor and stood, preparing to walk into
his father’s room, even before the final rap of the first series of four had
ended. The clock read 3:09.

He turned
the corner into the hallway and approached the guest room. They had about
fifteen seconds before the second series of knockings would come, and he wanted
his dad to be fully awake to hear them.

But as he opened
the door to the guest bedroom he realized something was wrong. Something was in
the room with Roy, he could feel it. He scanned the room quickly, still wanting
to wake his father, but feeling he should identify what was wrong first. He
took a step into the room and saw it – the shadow, and the eyes. They were
staring down at Roy as he slept. The eyes were floating in mid-air, inside the
shadow, which was in the middle of the room. It seemed to be pulsing, at times vivid
and pronounced but then fading and becoming indistinct. It didn’t seem to care
that he had entered the room, it just kept staring at Roy.

Steven
called to his father to wake up while watching the eyes to see if they would
react. They didn’t. His dad didn’t respond; Steven called again. He shifted his
gaze to his father, and Steven saw for the first time that something was wrong
with him. His body was as stiff as a board, shaking very slightly, and – he
blinked his eyes to be sure – hovering about an inch off the bed.

It seemed to
Steven that his father was under some kind of attack, that the shadow figure
was doing something to him. He heard the first knock of the second series. It was
much louder than he’d ever heard it before, it seemed to be coming from
everywhere. Now he wasn’t worried about his father hearing the knocking, he was
worried that the shadow was harming him, maybe even killing him. No longer
concerned about the eyes or his own safety, he rushed to his father’s side,
grabbing his shoulders.

“Wake up,
Dad!” he said as he shook Roy. “Wake up, for god’s sake!” It seemed that every
muscle in Roy’s body was contracted. Shaking his shoulders caused Roy’s whole
body to move. He looked at Roy’s closed eyes, waiting for them to open, but Roy
was unresponsive. He heard the second knock, as loud as the first and lasting
longer than normal, as though the sound itself was in slow motion. He felt
under his father, confirming there was space there, enough for him to slide his
hand entirely under his father’s body. He glanced back over his shoulder to see
if the shadow was still there, and yes, the eyes still hovered in the same
position, now staring at both Roy and Steven.

Steven knew
he had to do something. “Let him go!” Steven yelled. He stood from the side of
the bed and approached the shadow, more angry than scared. He didn’t have any
idea what he was going to do once he reached it, but it felt like his only
option. The third knock resounded in the distance and the eyes in the shadow
shifted now to look at Steven. Steven froze. The eyes looked human, but they
were off, not quite right. He sensed malevolence, the kind of feeling you
sometimes get when you read about something abhorrent and repugnant.
This thing
is evil,
he thought.
There’s no other word for it.
His body felt
freezing cold and a wave of despair washed over him that made him want to drop
to his knees in defeat. He forced himself to take another step toward it, and as
he approached within an arm’s length, the eyes closed, leaving only the black
of the shadow, which began to move away from him. He felt the cold and
hopelessness diminish. He watched it drift towards the bedroom door, as though
it was walking out of the room. He followed it, and once again he saw it
descend into the floor of the hallway as the fourth knock hit and reverberated
throughout the house.

He rushed
back to his father, who now was lying firmly on the bed. He grabbed his
shoulders again, to give him a gentle shaking. He could tell instantly that the
muscles were now relaxed, like they should be. Roy’s eyes opened and then
winced in pain. “Goddamn,” he complained, looking at Steven.

“Are you
hurt? Do I need to call an ambulance?” Steven asked.

“No
ambulance, no,” Roy replied, wincing again. “I feel like I’ve been hit by a
truck.”

“Can you sit
up?” Steven asked.

Roy tried,
and found himself able, though certain movements surprised him with pain. “I
could really use a couple aspirin or something,” he said.

“What
hurts?” Steven asked.

“Everything
hurts,” Roy replied.

“Stay there,
I’ll bring you some.” Steven walked into the hallway and down to the bathroom,
retrieving a couple of pills and a glass of water. He waited while his father
swallowed them and drank the water. “I heard the knocking, and came in to get
you. The shadow we saw in the hall earlier, it was in here with you.”

Roy looked
up at him.

“It had some
kind of hold on you,” Steven told him. “Your body was completely stiff, and…”
Steven paused, becoming uncomfortable with the irrationality of what he was
about to say.

“Yeah?” Roy
asked. “What? Tell me.”

“You were
floating above the bed.”

“Really?”
Roy seemed intrigued, but Steven didn’t know if it was sarcasm.

“Maybe it
was something else, maybe it was due to your muscles spasming,” Steven said.

Roy chuckled.
“Even with all this, everything in the last few hours, you still think it’s
hallucinations?” Roy asked.

“I don’t
know what it is,” Steven replied. “Yes, my mind looks for something normal to
explain it.”

“Oh, you’re
making my head hurt more. I need a cup of coffee. Make me some, OK?”

-

Steven and
Roy sat at the kitchen table. Each had a mug of strong coffee in their hands,
drinking liberally. Roy asked a few more questions about what happened, and
Steven filled him in.

“So,” Roy
asked, “you went at the shadow because you thought it was attacking me.”

“Right. I
couldn’t get you to wake up and I could tell something was wrong with your
body. You were as stiff as a board.”

“That would
explain why I feel worked over,” Roy said.

“And it just
left. Closed its eyes, drifted out into the hallway, and disappeared into the
floor, just like earlier.”

Roy spent a
moment contemplating this. “I suppose there’s something we should talk about,”
Roy said.

“Yeah?”
Steven asked, almost dreading what his father was about to say.

“In my
younger days, I used to be able to…” he paused, seeming to search for the right
words. “I used to be able to feel things. I could pick up on things other
people didn’t seem to be able to feel or notice.”

“What do you
mean?” Steven asked, sensing he was about to hear what Bernie had referred to
years ago. He felt uncomfortable.

“You know
what I mean,” Roy replied. “I know you know. You just hate admitting it.”

“I’m not
sure I do,” Steven told him. “Maybe I do. But why don’t you just tell me, so I
don’t have to guess.”

Roy shook
his head. “Always this way. You’ve always been this way, ever since you could
speak. Always on the banks, but never with a pole in the water.”

“What?”
Steven asked. “What are you talking about?”

“Stevie,
there’s a wide river in front of you, rushing along, thousands and thousands of
gallons of water moving every second, all coming from somewhere, all going
somewhere. You can’t see what’s in there, but there are things in there, moving
along with it. We both know that. You, because someone told you there’s things
in the river. You like to pretend they’re not there. Me, I know they’re there because
I jump into it and find them, touch them, experience them.”

Steven wasn’t
prepared to go along with it. It sounded too kooky. “A river?”

“Not a
literal river, no. It’s one that most people can’t see or choose not to see.
But it’s there, moving, full of things. I found out when I was younger that I
could jump into that river, swim in it. Find things. Come back out. When I told
some people about it, it scared the hell out of them, but my father knew what I
meant. He could do it too. He taught me to be selective in whom I told.”

“I had no
idea,” Steven said. It was a lie, but he wanted to see where this was going.

“Your mother
knew,” Roy said. “She did not approve of it. There was an incident, early in
our marriage, just after you were born. She got a glimpse of it. Scared her to
death. I felt bad about it, tried to soothe her. I tried to explain it to her,
make her understand it was nothing to be afraid of. But she was so jarred by
it, so shaken, that she went the other way. Turned completely batshit
Christian, made me swear to never do it, especially not around you. Or your
bother, when he arrived. I agreed, partially because I knew I could still do it
and she would never know, I just had to keep it secret from her. But I
suppressed it for years and I think that created a sense of something being
bottled up. Every year she got more and more churchy, dragging you boys off to
bible-this and that, goddamn church camps and all, and it didn’t matter what I
had to say about it.”

“I always
wondered why you never came to church,” Steven said.

“Did you like
going to church?” Roy asked.

“God no,”
Steven said.

“Neither did
I,” Roy said, slapping the table. “Wasn’t going to waste my time. But I think
she felt that shoving Jesus down your throat would protect you from this other
side of things. I think she was afraid one or both of you would…inherit it, and
she was gonna build up defenses so it wouldn’t take.”

Steven
considered this. Was Roy implying that Bernie, or himself, might have this same
ability?

“What do you
call it?” Steven asked. “This ability you have. Does it have a name?”

“I don’t
have a name for it,” Roy replied. “And to be honest with you, I haven’t dabbled
in it much for a while. I got so tired of hiding it from Claire, I gave up
after a while, it was just easier. She got really crazy about it in those last
few years, I didn’t dare mention it, it would send her into hours of crazy
bible thumping. I think at the end she began to view me as the devil or
something like that. Accused me of it more than once during the dementia. Then,
after she passed, I considered cranking it back up, but I’ve not done much with
it. One night after she was gone, when I was particularly lonely, I thought
maybe I’d try to contact her – you know, from the other side.”

Steven felt
a lump in his throat, saddened that his dad had felt that lonely. He suddenly
felt guilty for not visiting him more.

“But,” Roy continued,
“I didn’t because I knew even if she could talk to me she never would that way,
out of her hatred of it. She’d be too busy staring endlessly into the eyes of Jesus
to bother and talk with me. Hell, I don’t think we said a dozen words to each
other that last year she was alive anyway. But I did miss her.”

They sat in
silence for a moment. Steven knew his mother’s extreme religiousness was a big
reason why he was such a rationalist now. It was pure rebellion, a one-eighty
from what she hoped he would be. He hadn’t considered his father also held
beliefs he found just as unpalatable but were never expressed.

Roy stood
and refilled his coffee mug. “Listen, I think you made your point. You’re not
crazy, there’s no brain tumor. Something’s going on here and it’s taking a toll
on you. Like I told you, you look like shit.”

“It’s
because of sleep,” Steven replied. “The knocking, every night.”

“Fuck the
knocking,” Roy replied. “The knocking is just the appetizer. You got a real
problem here. The knocking is just to wake you up so they can scare the shit
out of you. And it’s working, because they know you can’t accept what you’re
seeing. Nothing more horrible than a brain tumor.”

“They?”
Steven asked. “Who is ‘they’?”