Dark Water (Cooper M. Reid Book 1) (16 page)

“When you drowned, were you close to this house? Were there tall black rocks sticking out of the water?”

YES

“And did someone pull you into the water?”

NO BUT I SAW A MAN

The tiles were moving faster now. Cooper was pretty sure that they were moving
too
fast. He didn’t think they were being moved by fingers anymore. He’d always wondered if ghosts—poltergeists in particular—were able to move objects not with the physical movements of their phantom bodies but with some form of emotional thought. If so, he felt certain that was what he was witnessing with the Scrabble tiles.

“Kevin?” Mary asked. “Have you been here in my house before?”

YES ONCE

Mary’s smile faltered a bit and Cooper didn’t blame her. He tried to think of what questions to ask to get the information he needed but his thoughts were interrupted by the scattering of tiles again.

He watched them dance and slide as Kevin spelled out:
BYE NOW AMY

The tiles sat still and motionless as Cooper and Mary stared at the message. Cooper was afraid it meant that the weird little session was over, but Mary was looking skeptically around the room as if she knew better.

“He’s gone,” Cooper said, no longer feeling the coolness in the air. It was a hard sensation to describe. To Cooper, it felt as if someone had placed a thin layer of wet paper towel on the back of his neck for several minutes and then removed it.

But as soon as he was certain Kevin had gone, he felt it again. This time, the sensation was a bit more present—a bit more
there.
If he’d had his thermal imager, he was pretty sure he would have been able to pick up the figure a small person standing a few feet away from them.

Cooper gave Mary a quick wave to get her attention and then nodded to the tiles. She looked down just as they started to move again.

HI MARY

“Amy?” Mary asked.

The tiles were moving slower now, back to a normal speed. They were moved with a child’s care as they were sorted out, three tiles pushed to the side to spell out
YES.

“I have a friend here to visit you,” Mary said. “Is that okay?”

Amy quickly spelled out
GOOD.

When Cooper spoke again, he understood how surreal this truly was.. He was essentially speaking to a stack of Scrabble tiles. But he had seen and felt more than enough in the last ten years or so to know that there
was
some supernatural force standing by the end of the table and manipulating the tiles.

“Amy,” Cooper said, “I asked your friend Kevin about a boy named Henry Blackstock. Do you know him?”

The tiles moved slowly at first, but then quicker. By the time Amy was done with what was the longest message they had seen tonight, there was an obvious urgency to the message.

YES HE DROWNED
was spelled out and then pushed to one side of the table. Then, on the other side, the one closest to Mary, the tiles moved around and spelled out
HE SAW DARK WATER.

“What do you mean by dark water?”

HIS WATER

“Henry’s water?” Cooper asked, confused.

The tiles were flipped through and scattered again and now it was very apparent that they were being moved by much more than just phantom fingers. As they were sorted through, some of them moved with such speed that they seemed to be a blur as they were moved.

NO THE BAD MANS WATER

The tiles were scattered, rearranged, and then once more spelled out
DARK WATER.

“Amy, I don’t know what that—,”

He didn’t get a chance to finish before the tiles started moving again. They moved with such speed and prominent clicks against the table that it was obvious that Amy was trying to interrupt him. Cooper snapped his mouth shut and watched the tiles move, spelling out a series of messages that made his heart grow cold.

NO TIME HE KNOWS YOU R HERE

This message was swiped back into the pile, leaving a blank table for only a few seconds before she started spelling out another one. This one read:
HES ANGRY WANTS TO HURT PEOPLE

“Who?” Cooper asked. “Who does he want to hurt?”

DROWNS KID IN DARK WATER

“How can I stop him?” Cooper asked.

DONT KNOW

“Amy, was the dark water the last thing you saw?”

YES

Cooper wondered if, like Henry Blackstock, her body had remained undiscovered.

“Is Henry with you? Not here tonight, but wherever it is that you are the rest of the time.”

YES BUT NOT HERE NOW

Mary spoke up next. Cooper was surprised to find that she was close to tears. Her bottom lip trembled slightly as she spoke. “Amy…where are you? Where do you and your friends stay?”

DARK PLACE WITH BAD MAN

This message was swiped aside and then the entire pile of tiles seemed to separate slightly. Cooper watched as one of the blank tiles was selected and then slid all the way over to him, directly beside his coffee cup. This was followed by the spelling out of a repeated message.

HE KNOWS YOURE HERE HATES YOU

“He knows I’m trying to stop him” Cooper said out loud.

YES

“Do you know his name?” he asked, certain that the bad man the little girl was referring to was Douglass Pickman.

NO

“Where is he? Where can I find him? Is it in a cave?”

The tiles moved with blinding speed. As he watched them move around, Cooper became aware of the air growing even colder. The room started to feel thick, as if the oxygen was slowly being sucked out of it.

From across the table, Mary whispered to him. “Do you feel that?”

He nodded, still watching as a new message was spelled out.

DONT KNOW COLD NO LIGHT DARK WATER

“What else can you tell me?” Cooper asked.

NO TIME HAVE TO GO HES MAD

“Amy, please…,”

The letters were being moved frantically now, the clicking of tiles against the table like the sound of someone typing.

HELP HE HATES PLEASE DARK WA

But Amy was not able to finish her last message. The tiles exploded all across the table, some being flung across the room where they clattered against the wall and fell to the counter. One hit Cooper squarely in the face, bouncing into his lap face-up to reveal an
M.

Mary cried out and jumped back in her chair. She looked around the room frantically, as if she was looking for someone. There was a profound look of sadness on her face. When she looked to Cooper, he saw that she was terrified.

“That’s never happened before,” she said.

Cooper nodded slowly, looking around at the scattered Scrabble tiles. He looked for hidden messages in them but could find none. He stood up, staring to the table where he had witnessed one of the oddest things he had ever seen in his controversial career.

“Are you okay?” he asked Mary.

“I think so,” she asked. She thought about something for a while, looking through her sliding glass door and to the night-shrouded beach beyond. “Do you think the
he
Amy mentioned is this Pickman character you learned about?”

“I do.”

“She made it sound like he pulled them under water somehow. And now he’s keeping them trapped in the dark with him.”

Mary stifled back a weak sob that made Cooper think that, oddly enough, Mary had grown quite attached to Amy.

“It seems that way,” Cooper agreed without much emotion.

Still looking out to the ocean, Mary asked, “Do you think you can stop him?”

Cooper faced the sliding glass door and looked out to the beach as well. He stared towards the black ocean, in the direction of where the black rocks broke through the water. He could not see them; all he could see out there were the white crests of waves, like fissures in the surface of the world.

Looking out into the darkness, he said, “I’m sure as hell going to try.”

21

When Cooper returned to his hotel room, it was just after eleven o’ clock. He looked a the bed skeptically, well aware that he was too wired to sleep. He had a plan in mind—an idea to potentially stop whatever it was that Douglass Pickman had planned—but it would be useless to start before morning. He sat on the edge of his bed and pulled out his phone.

He scrolled to Stephanie’s number, his thumb hovering over the CALL icon. He was nearly certain that she wouldn’t answer but didn’t see the harm in trying. He was sure she was expecting him to at least
try
a few times.

He sent the call and listened as the phone rang twice and then went to voice mail. He listened to her recorded message and almost stayed on the line to wait for the beep. But he killed the call, not even sure what sort of message he would leave.

As he sat in the quiet of the hotel room with its bland and perfectly square shapes to everything, Cooper came to a realization that he did not like at all: for the first time in more than five or six years, he was legitimately frightened.

He had no expensive government-purchased equipment to help him. He had no book or hidden agenda at the forefront of his mind to use as motivation. All he had now were parents that had never truly stopped grieving for their dead child, unable to do so because of the ghosts that occasionally visited their house. The desire to help someone other than himself was his only true driving motivation, and that scared him.

What if he failed? What if he found that after his disappearance and without the aid of his old ego and drive, he could not face the unknown as he once had? He felt especially naked and useless without his government-purchased equipment. What good could he do without his old technological fallbacks?

These were all heavy thoughts that seemed to make the motel room feel like a coffin. He stepped out of the room and walked down to the parking lot. To the right of the lot, the motel was separated by the neighboring motel by a strip of asphalt that was filled with sand. A fence ran along the length of this divide, meandering to the back of both buildings where it stopped at a wooden walkway that led out onto the beach.

Cooper followed this path and found the beach empty. He walked out in his bare feet, reminded of how he had felt yesterday morning when he had first stepped out onto this sand. It felt like two
weeks
ago rather than two days.

He looked out to the sea, trying to rationalize his fears. He had never fully understood the hold that the ocean had on some people, but as he watched it under the moonlight, it made a bit of sense. From where he stood, it seemed to go on forever. Out near the horizon, there was a darkness that seemed to promise limitless depth and things without end. In comparison, his fears about what he was planning to do seemed insignificant.

He knew how clichéd he looked—the lonely troubled man staring blankly out to sea at night. But he was surprised to find that it helped. He thought of Pickman and of Mary Guthrie’s Scrabble tiles as he stared into the darkness.

Dark water,
he thought.

For a moment, it sounded like the crashing waves were speaking those words to him.

A chilled breeze swept through. The ocean droned on, offering its tired but enchanting lullaby. The water remained moving yet unmoving all at once. It was peaceful, it was—

Without warning, Cooper saw a perfect picture in his mind that took his breath away. It came to the surface of his mind like a whale out there in the endless darkness of the ocean, only to surface for a moment before plunging back into the deep.

Cooper caught the briefest glimpse of
something
but he wasn’t sure what it was. He saw flat terrain the color of rust and the shapes of boulders in the distance. He saw an endless vista of sky that was a faded shade of blue so light that it was almost white. At the horizon, there was a delicate shade of purple that looked like it was dancing. It wavered in a way that looked like it was beckoning, telling him to come forward. Behind that there were faint ghostlike shapes, the peaks of what he thought to be enormous mountains.

There was uncertainty in this place, in the muted colors and the horizon that seemed to be pulling him forward. But there was also a sense of tremendous peace that he felt in every muscle of his body, every—

And then it was gone.

Cooper stood on the beach, eyes wide. He was holding his breath, concentrating with everything he had to get the vision to come back.

No,
he thought.
Not a vision. A memory.

Then, with a certainty that was as large as the sea before him, another thought came.

That’s where I was. That’s where I went when I disappeared.

Cooper continued to stare out to the dark sea, hoping that it might trigger whatever had pushed that momentary memory to the surface. He tried dredging it back up but it was like trying to think of a word that was on the tip of your tongue but got little assistance from the brain to be spoken. Whenever he tried to find those memories, all he could come up with were images of the small town of Tilton, Kansas, the last city he had visited before disappearing.

He remembered a teenage boy, but not his name. He remembered a junk yard and some weird fear that was linked to it.

But that’s where the memories ended.

After five minutes of this, he grew frustrated. He was also suddenly very tired. He didn’t know if it was the mental strain or the effect of the memory itself, but he was exhausted. With a final look to the sea and the white caps of the countless waves, Cooper turned back around and walked back to his motel.

When he reached his room, he shook the sand from his feet and crawled into bed. He set the alarm clock for 5:30, knowing that tomorrow’s events would be grueling and might take all day. He lay down in bed with the picture of that place that had suddenly come to his mind on the beach.