1 The Bank of the River (7 page)

Steven sat
cross-legged at the end of the hallway, once again waiting for something to
happen. Roy was seated in the hallway, blindfold on, waiting as well. Steven
hoped things might play out more benignly tonight, but either way, he was
determined to get more answers.

He and Roy
had traded off the night before, keeping an eye on each other while the other
slept. Whether their approach worked or they just got lucky, nothing appeared
and no attacks occurred. They both had received much needed sleep, and they
slept into the late morning, anticipating another late night at Steven’s with
the second trance.

Roy had
spent a good amount of the day with his book. He complained multiple times to
Steven of being “rusty” and that if he’d been more in practice, certain things
wouldn’t have gone past him. Steven wasn’t entirely sure what he was referring
to, other than the idea that the shadow couldn’t follow them to Roy’s, which
was obviously wrong. But for the most part Roy seemed confident he knew what he
was getting into with the second trance, and he talked as much about being
prepared with defenses as he did getting answers to their questions. It was
clear to Steven that Roy was afraid of the shadow, of what it might do to
either of them if they weren’t prepared to deal with it.

The hallway
sat still. It had been half an hour, the same amount of time they waited two
nights ago before things went to hell. Steven had fallen asleep then, and he
felt that he had let his father down. But Roy had asked him details about that,
and had assured him he hadn’t fallen asleep on his own, that he had been “led
to sleep” by the forces in the house. It made Steven feel marginally better,
but he still resolved to stay awake tonight. Twice he had interrupted the
shadow attacking his father, and he didn’t want to find out what might happen
to Roy if there was another attack, or, god forbid, an attack that he didn’t
interrupt.

The
heaviness was returning, and it made Steven think of how Debra had described
it. It seemed as though the air became thicker, and there was additional
pressure in the house. This was the same as two nights ago – just before he
fell asleep, the same feeling.
If I don’t fall asleep, or if it doesn’t
think I’m asleep, it won’t appear,
Steven thought.
Sleep is part of
this. I need to fake it. I need it to think I’m asleep.
He closed his eyes,
and let his mind wander, but kept pinching his left hand with his right. He had
no idea if this would work, but he stuck with it for several minutes.

Just as he
thought he might have to change technique, Steven heard Roy speaking, but it
didn’t sound like Roy. “Come to me…come to me…” At first he thought Roy was
speaking to him, that he should get up and walk over to him. But he repeated
the phrase over and over, dozens of times. It began to take on the quality of a
chant. Steven knew he was not speaking to him.

Steven saw,
over Roy’s head, a face appear. It was one of the child faces he’d encountered
in his bedroom the first night. It was floating, hovering above Roy. Steven’s
legs tensed as he felt an instinctive need to protect his father. But the more
he looked at the face, the more he registered sadness and pain rather than evil
intent, and Steven calmed with the realization that the face was not a threat
to Roy. The face seemed lost, and Roy’s calls, or whoever’s voice was coming
from Roy, were beckoning the child. And now, where it had looked like one face,
there appeared to be several, all overlaying each other.

Steven felt
a wave of pressure pass over him and the hallway seemed much darker. Roy’s voice
seemed muddled, like it was coming through a tube. Steven looked at his arm and
knew if he tried to raise it, it would move slowly, as it had the other night. The
thickness had arrived. He pushed an image of himself sleeping to his
forethoughts, and let the images and sounds of the hallway recede.

In a matter
of seconds, the hallway had filled with water. Steven, still sitting
cross-legged at the end of the hall, was immersed up to his waist.
I’m
hallucinating
, he thought.
No, you’re not hallucinating. You’re seeing
what Roy is seeing. You’ve jumped in.

Once again
Roy’s arms were extended to his sides. The darkness in the hallway made Roy
only a silhouette. “It’s over now…it’s over now…” Roy was saying. The faces had
disappeared, but something else was building. The feeling of sadness and loss
was now replaced by dread.

As Steven
watched, a figure rose from the water, next to Roy. It was shaped like a man,
but it was twisted and grotesque, as though something had genetically gone
wrong. Parts of it appeared more animal than human, but even the animal parts
were wrong. Steven strained his eyes to take it in, to make a mental picture of
this creature. Once it had fully emerged, it turned to Roy. Steven studied its
face, but the bends and folds of skin where skin shouldn’t be made it hard for
him to process what he was seeing. Its eyelids were closed. It had no hair, and
the bare skin looked armored in places, like a reptile or a beetle. Flaps of
skin hung down from the forehead and cheeks, as though it was inside a flesh
costume that was too big for it. Its chest was massive and its torso was shaped
like a man’s, tapering at the waist. Its phallus was definitely not human, it
looked more like a dog’s. Its legs disappeared into the water. As Steven
watched, it took a step toward Roy. Then it opened its eyes, and Steven
recognized them immediately.

He knew he
needed to send it way, as he had the first night. He attempted to stand, but
his motions were slowed by the resistance of the water and the air in the room
– he was moving through clear quicksand again, just like before. It took an
eternity just to make a step.

As he progressed
towards Roy and the figure he saw its lips move. He couldn’t tell what it was
saying, but he could hear Roy’s replies.

“It doesn’t
matter…it doesn’t matter,” Roy was repeating. Was he attempting to repel the
figure? Or was he speaking to him, Steven? He lifted another foot and with
agonizing slowness continued his march toward the couple, engaged in a
conversation he could only half make out.

“Why should
I care? The only thing that matters is gone,” he heard Roy speak. It was Roy’s
voice, but it wasn’t Roy speaking. The figure was having a conversation with
someone other than Roy.

The figure
reached a hand towards Roy, and Steven saw Roy’s body go rigid.
The attack
has begun, I’ve got to do something,
Steven thought. He focused his mind
and shouted “BE GONE” as loudly as he could. Nothing seemed to come out. He was
too far away. He focused all of his energy on moving closer, taking as many
steps as he could, as quickly as he could. Roy was shaking now, and a panic set
in Steven, feeling that if he didn’t do something soon, Roy wouldn’t last. He
was a step closer to them and he tried again: “BE GONE. LEAVE HIM ALONE.”

It worked,
or at least for a moment he thought it had worked. The figure’s eyes shifted
from Roy to him. At the same moment its eyes reached him, Steven felt all of
the water in front of him rush towards him, an additional force pushing him
back. It pushed him off his feet, and he fell backwards into the water.

It was just
like the dream. Everything in slow motion, holding your breath, but knowing you
were going to have to open your lungs eventually and then you’d be in trouble.
He moved his arms to push himself up from the floor. It took forever. The water
was rushing at him with the force of a fast moving river. It took all of his
strength to fight against it, get his arm into position against the floor, and
push himself up above the water level. As his head cleared the water, he gasped
for air, sucking in a huge lungful, and raising his knee to stand.

How long have
I been underwater?
he wondered. As he looked up, the scene had changed. Roy was pinned against the
hallway wall opposite the figure. There was a knife in his hand, and as Steven
cleared the water from his eyes, he saw that Roy’s throat was cut. It was a
ragged, gaping wound, and blood was pouring from it down his shirt and into the
water below. Roy’s body was still shaking, and the sight aroused such anger in
Steven that he focused his mind with all of the energy he had left and shouted,
“LET HIM GO!”

In the blink
of an eye the water was gone and the ability to breathe normally returned.
Roy’s body slipped from the wall into a crumpled heap on the hallway floor. The
eyes in the shadow closed, and Steven saw it descend into the floor. Steven
rushed over to his father, checking him for damage. There was none, no blood,
no cut throat. As Roy came to, Steven asked him if he was ok.

“Hurts. All
over.”

“You were up
on the wall,” Steven said. “When it ended, you slid down to the floor.”

“Did you see
it all?” Roy asked. “Did you see
it
?”

“Yes,”
Steven replied. “I didn’t fall asleep. I saw the whole thing. I saw it.”

Steven
raised Roy to his feet, and they walked out of the hallway and into the
kitchen. They both sat down in kitchen chairs and stared at each other.

“Do you need
some aspirin?” Steven asked.

“I’m
thinking whiskey,” Roy replied.

“I’ve got
whiskey,” Steven said, and went to the liquor cabinet. He brought back a bottle
and two glasses, and they each poured a shot and downed it in silence.

After a
while Steven said, “I’m not sure I can do this kind of thing again. You were
suspended on the wall with your throat cut. I could barely move to do anything
about it.”

“But you did
do something about it,” Roy said. “You ended it. And we got what we were
looking for. Well, part of it, anyway.”

“What part?
What did you learn for all that?” Steven asked.

“For
starters, I figured out we’ve been looking at this all wrong.”

“What do you
mean?”

“There are
different entities here,” Roy explained. “We thought we were dealing with the
ghost of the man who committed suicide, but it’s much deeper than that.”

“How many
entities?”

“Well,
there’s two for sure. Probably more. Ben is one. He’s the one I’m most able to
contact. Many of the manifestations we’ve seen have come from him. The
knocking, for example, that’s Ben. But whenever I make contact with Ben, a
second entity shows up. Every time.”

“The
shadow?” Steven asked.

“Yes, but
you saw him tonight, didn’t you? The real thing, not just the shadow with
eyes.”

“Yes, I saw
him,” Steven said. The image of the distorted and twisted shape was still vivid
in his mind.

“I believe,”
said Roy, “that that thing, the shadow, is the reason Ben took out his eyes.
When I was in the trance, I was able to see things from Ben’s perspective. He
was saddled with an enormous amount of grief. I remembered that feeling when
Claire passed, it feels like a mountain weighing you down, and that you’ll
never get over it. And he was being haunted – attacked, really – by this thing,
this shadow. It had been attacking him for a while. And I could tell Ben knew
the shadow, he knew who or what it was. Ben’s despair was so large, once he
realized that the shadow would never stop, would never go away, he couldn’t
bear to see it anymore, it horrified and sickened him, and he got to a point
where he just wanted it to stop. In the trance I felt what he felt when he
decided to remove his eyes. I understood it completely.”

Steven
gulped. He wasn’t sure what kind of depths a person had to sink to to take that
kind of a step, and the thought of it unnerved him. It made him feel a little
sick to his stomach.

“It didn’t
work,” Roy continued. “He didn’t have to see it anymore, but it didn’t stop the
shadow from attacking. He was having the life drained from him every night,
every time he slept. Not being able to see the shadow made it easier to endure
the rest of what he went through.”

“So he
killed himself to end the pain?” Steven asked.

“Did it in
that bathtub,” Roy replied. “But he was also trying to stop it, the shadow. He
was denying it something by killing himself; his suicide was also an attack
back at it, his way of striking back.”

“I can’t say
I understand that,” Steven said.

“It’s
because it wasn’t just haunting him, it was using him, draining him,” Roy said.
“He wanted to deny it any more of himself.”

“But why?
Why was it after him?” Steven asked.

“That’s something
we don’t know yet,” Roy said. “But there’s another thing I learned that might
answer that question.”

“What is
that?”

“There’s
something in the hallway that we need to find. Something Ben hid.”

-

Steven used
a screwdriver to pry the baseboard away from the wall in the area that Roy
suggested they try first. It exposed the corner where the floorboards met the
wall.

“Look along
the edge,” Roy said. “See if one of the floorboards is a fraction of an inch shorter,
or doesn’t go all the way to the wall.”

Steven
shined a flashlight into the corner of the wall and floor, on his hands and
knees, inspecting each floorboard. They all came flush against the wall, no
spaces, nothing unusual. “Nothing,” he said.