I neared the Mustang. Someone was waiting for me in there. The skull-headed Stark. He was grinning at me through the windshield from behind the wheel. I lifted my gun to shoot him dead but before I could, a bullet sizzled by my ear . . .
I looked over my shoulder and saw the gunman in the house, at the window, aiming at me through the frame. I fired at him and he tumbled back into the house’s darkness. I faced forward, ready to blast Stark in the Mustang.
But the car was empty. Stark was gone.
I ran for the car. I looked around me wildly. In the misty woods, there were children everywhere, dead children standing among the trees, in the mist, staring at me.
I reached the Mustang. Yanked the door open. Dropped in behind the wheel.
Stark leapt at me out of the backseat, his flaming fingers reaching for my throat.
I screamed in terror, my arms flailing wildly, but then he was gone.
“Christ!” I shouted.
I turned the engine on—hit the gearshift, hit the gas, and wrenched the wheel. The Mustang whirled around on the broken road, throwing up gravel. I straightened it. Jammed my foot down, driving the gas pedal to the floor.
There was a fire,
I thought crazily.
That’s why I keep smelling smoke. That’s why I keep seeing flames. There was a fire in the house
.
I drove as fast as the car would go, back up the broken forest road, the dead children watching me from the mist.
There was a fire,
I thought.
I was beginning to remember.
12
Flashback: The Room in the Tower
T
HE
W
ASHINGTON
F
ALLS
library was nestled under a pair of maple trees on a small leafy street off the main road. It was an impressive white stone building with a square tower like something from an old English church. There was a stately white columned mansion on a rolling acre of lawn nearby. There was a sprawling glass and metal schoolhouse across the way.
This was the town I’d seen on the website. The quaint prosperous modern country village ten miles north of the ghost town I’d just left behind.
I parked the Mustang around the corner, alongside the library. I killed the engine and fell back against the seat. I raised my eyes and looked at myself in the mirror.
Jesus, I looked like the walking dead. My skin was the color of cement. My forehead and cheeks were clammy with sweat. My mouth was slack and my eyes . . . unfocused, crazy. Had I just shot another of Stark’s killers? Did they know where I was? How could they? Was it all just the drugs, the hallucinations, the fractured memories . . . ?
There was a fire,
I thought.
That’s why I kept smelling smoke, seeing flames.
There was a fire in the house. And I was there
.
And so was Samantha
.
Samantha wore a purple dress. She had curling red hair. Her face was ethereal and gentle. I stole glances at her across the classroom. Sometimes she would look up from whatever project was on her desk. She would lift her face to the sunlight streaming in through the window. She would close her eyes and bask in the warmth of it. The gold light would gleam on her auburn ringlets. I would watch her, breathless.
We were seven years old.
She had an aura of stillness and calm. At recess, she sat in the sandpit. She dug holes and built castles and played with dolls and figures. Sometimes other girls would join her, but she didn’t seem to need them. Often she sat alone.
I was drawn to her helplessly. I scrambled up the climbing frame, which was in the sandpit too. I monkeyed my way to the top rung, grabbed it with my two hands.
“Hey, Samantha!” I called.
When she looked up, I lifted my feet up over my head, standing on my hands upside down.
“Watch this!” I said.
I swung my legs down through my arms and sat on the bars again, then pitched off backward until I was hanging by my knees.
Samantha watched me from the sand below, shading her eyes from the sun with one hand.
“I’ll bet you can’t do this!” I shouted to her.
I swung myself up until I was sitting on the top bar again and then slowly stood, balancing up there with my arms stretched out on either side of me.
“You’re going to break your stupid head if you’re not careful,” Samantha said.
I was thrilled to hear her say that. She was worried about me. She cared about me. I squatted quickly and grabbed the bar and flipped myself around—very nearly braining myself on the bar beneath—and flew out into the air. I landed
whump
in the sand beside her, posed in a dynamic crouch I’d seen the heroes use in comic books.
Samantha’s eyes were wide. Her lips were pressed tight together.
“What’s the matter?” I said. “Scared I’d hurt myself?”
“I don’t care if you kill yourself,” she said.
But she had to lower her face to hide the fact that she was blushing.
Given the ancient look of the stone façade, the library was surprisingly bright and clean inside. Tidy blond-wood chairs at tidy tables with a blond-wood finish, a row of carrels with computers and microfilm readers, all surrounded by stately shelves of books.
Behind the front desk just within the entrance sat a woman about my age. She was tidy and stately too. She had frosted blonde hair and wore a more or less colorless skirt suit. According to the nameplate on her desk, her name was Mrs. Bell. She looked at me the way I guessed her settler ancestors looked at the Indians who dropped over for dinner red and naked except for their tomahawks. I didn’t blame her. I knew what I looked like.
“Can you tell me about the old town?” I asked her. “Old Washington Falls? The ghost town I saw a few miles south?”
I was distracted and didn’t really listen to her answer. I was thinking about the little girl digging in the sand. Samantha. And me on the high bars of the climbing frame.
Watch this!
I could feel a sort of mental dam breaking inside me, the memories flooding through. I had gotten it started, yet now I wanted it to stop. But it was too late.
“. . . then when they built the new highway, the population shifted and the old town died,” the woman said. She had a crisp, distant voice like a recorded tour in a museum. “The old property is part of the wildlife management area now. The state runs it. Not that anyone ever comes through but the occasional ghost hunter or television reporter, that sort of thing.”
I nodded, thinking about the little girl lifting her face to the light, her red hair gleaming.
“Is there a local paper from back then?” I asked her. “You know,
The Washington Falls Gazette
or something like that?”
“
Recorder,
” Mrs. Bell said with only the faintest smile. “
The Washington Falls Recorder
. It goes back over a hundred and fifty years. It’s not in the computers yet, but we have most of it on microfilm. Is there something you were looking for in particular?”
“A fire,” I told her. “Thirty years or so ago. A fire in the old town.”
In the orphanage, they kept the girls and boys separate. But in school, Samantha and I could be together. Especially at recess, out in the playground, I would find her where she was sitting alone in the sandpit, building castles, playing with dolls and figures
.
I stood on my hands and walked in circles around her. She pretended not to notice. I finally tumbled down into the sand and sat beside her. She went on digging
.
“You have to be really strong to do that, you know,” I said.
“I know,” she said as if it didn’t matter to her one bit how strong I was.
“I’m really fast too. I win, like, every race.”
“I know,” she said again.
“You ever see me racing?”
“Maybe sometimes. I’m here, after all. You shouldn’t brag, you know.”
“I’m not bragging. Why are you always building sand castles?”
“I just do, that’s all.”
“You do it, like, all the time.”
“They’re part of my stories, that’s why.”
“What stories?”
“Just stories I tell.”
“Tell to who?”
“Just to myself.”
“Well, like what?” There was a silver knight figure mounted on a white horse—it lay on its side in the sand under the castle. I picked the figure up and made it charge around. “Like about knights and dragons?”
“Not dragons exactly,” said Samantha. “But a terrible beast. At night, the handsome knight was climbing in the princess’s window to visit her. Because he loved her. But the king, her father, caught him and put him in the dungeon and in the morning he was going to feed him to the beast.”
“Well, that’s stupid—wasn’t the knight strong enough to break out?”
“He was in chains. No one is strong enough to break chains.”
“Well, what did the king do that for?”
“Because he wanted his daughter to marry a prince from another country.”
“Oh.”
“But the princess loved the knight, so when everyone was asleep, she snuck down past the guards into the dungeon. She had to be very careful because if the king caught her, he would put her in the dungeon too, even though she was his own daughter. You see, the princess knew a magic spell that would help the knight fight the beast
. . .
”
I sat cross-legged on the sand beside her, mesmerized—by the story and by her voice and by the sight of her white, white hands working on the castle.
“In the morning, the guards brought the knight up into the castle courtyard
. . .
” she said.
I watched her hands. I could picture the knight and I could picture the beast waiting to devour him and I could picture the pink princess fretting in the bleachers. I was so wrapped up in it that a long moment passed before I realized Samantha had stopped talking.
Then I did realize. I looked up. Samantha had gone straight and stiff and still. She was gazing over my shoulder into the distance. Her calm, ethereal face was taut and alert.
“What’s wrong?” I asked her.
“There she is again.”
“Who?”
But even as I asked, I twisted around to follow Samantha’s gaze. I looked to the edge of the playground, to the diamond link fence that bordered the parking lot, to the figure on the other side of it.
“That fat woman,” Samantha said. “Over there.”
“Oh, yeah. I see her. What about her?”
“She keeps coming back. She keeps watching us. She’s been watching us for days.”
I sat at a carrel with a big old relic of a reading machine hovering vulturelike above its partitions. I pressed the button, scrolling the microfilm through, watching the editions of
The Washington Falls Recorder
flash past. Now and then I had to pause to wipe the sweat off the side of my face. My stomach was queasy. I felt the mist gathering around me as the memories flooded my mind . . .
She keeps coming back. She keeps watching us
. . .
My God. How had I forgotten? All this time. More than thirty years.
I scrolled through the
Recorder
. It was quick work. It was a small paper without much news in it. Anything that happened out of the ordinary made the front page. Inside, it was all pancake breakfasts and charity picnics and weddings.
The library door came bursting open. Lost in my search, I was startled by the suddenness of it. I nearly jumped out of my chair, twisting toward the door, my hand slipping inside my windbreaker to my holstered gun. But it was just kids—a bunch of kids just out of school. They came barging in, shouting. Their babysitter—a cheerful pie-faced brunette teen—followed behind them, telling them to hush. The brunette gave a wave to Mrs. Bell behind her desk. But the librarian sat frozen, staring at me, aghast. Her stern, widened eyes were trained on the bulge of my hand inside the windbreaker . . .
I let out a long breath and brought my hand out of my jacket and settled down again behind the microfilm machine. I tried to ignore Mrs. Bell’s stare. I pressed the button again and scrolled through the
Recorder.