I Will Come for You (14 page)

“You can’t touch him, either?”

Isaac asked with spoken language, breaking the silence of their communication. His last word barely leaves his lips before a scythe-shaped arm lashes out from the darkness and tries to hook Isaac around his neck.

Isaac doesn’t pull himself to safety; he is moved from within, and faster than he could ever react.

The black form puddles at his feet then snaps back into the air, arching up over Isaac’s crouching body.

“You won’t make that mistake again,” the other says, “but there are many, many ways for you to fall.”

Isaac feels the breath of this creature on his face. It’s as hot as a blow torch and smells like something dug out of a swamp.

“Go, now, angel of death,” it says. “Your job is done here.
For now.”

Isaac feels the pull, like being reeled in.

He walks backwards toward the door. He wants to stay. The choice isn’t his.

Chapter Sixteen

Sunday, 7:20 pm

Isaac is suspended inches above the floor in his bedroom, his joints relaxed, his toes pointed but not touching. It’s almost as if he’s dangling from a
string, that a breeze could waft through here and stir him. His head is tipped back, his lips are parted, his eyes open. Graham feels the heavy thud of his pulse in his throat, pressure building against his Adam’s apple.

“Isaac?”

He tries again to find a pulse in his son’s wrist, though he already knows there’s life in his body. His son’s chest lifts slowly and a thin burst of air leaves his nose.

“Isaac?” Graham calls louder this time, though it’s hard to push the word through his clogged throat. “Isaac,
it’s dad.”

He pulls on Isaac’s arm, but it’s immovable, as firmly in place as stone or a body in rigor.

No. No. He slams the door shut on that thought, slips his hand between his son’s wrist and hip and feels for a pulse. Slow and steady, but it seems like minutes pass between each beat.

“Isaac!”

Graham looks into his son’s face. Isaac’s stare is vacant, his pupils are fixed but not

dilated
. Thank God, not dilated. Graham pats Isaac’s cheeks and calls his name. Nothing. He snaps his fingers close to Isaac’s ears. No response.

This isn’t shock. No kind of shock Graham has ever seen. When he was kid, before his little brother was murdered, they spent summers in the back yard, tempting the supernatural. Graham remembers he and his friends lifting Lance more than five feet off the ground using only two fingers of each hand.

Isaac is in some kind of trance, something like they did to Lance, and Graham debates trying to move Isaac. He wants to pick the boy up, lay him out on his bed. He remembers the warnings they heeded as children, about breaking hypnosis too soon. How a person can get caught between two worlds and end up barking like a dog for the rest of their lives.

Tales, Graham chides himself. Stupid kid’s tales they told each other to scare themselves silly. But nothing based on fact. Graham lives in a world of facts now.
Cold, comfortable facts that clearly define life.

What he is witnessing right now defies everything he’s clung to since leaving childhood behind, since leaving professional ball and its winnowed perspective of life; since
leaving his marriage and all that he wanted it to be.

But Graham doesn’t have to make a decision. As he stands beside his son, Isaac’s body lowers to the carpeted floor. Isaa
c shakes his head, pushes a hand through his bangs, and then his eyes flutter, the pupils narrow, and the world enters and registers.

“Dad!”
Isaac complains. “You think you could knock?”

“What’s going on here, Isaac?”

Graham watches his son’s face flood with color. The blood is flowing through his veins faster now. His heart is working as it should. This is good. Graham feels the tightness in his chest loosen, his diaphragm opens. One breath. Two. Then he’s back to not knowing that breathing is an exercise.

“Isaac?” he prompts.

“I was going to take a shower,” Isaac says, but his voice is soft, unsure. Graham realizes in that moment that whatever or where ever Isaac was, this has happened before.

“You weren’t here,” Graham says. The whole time he stood beside his son he was aware of the absence of real life. “Now do you want to tell me what’s going on?”

Isaac shifts on his feet and looks beyond Graham’s shoulder to the window, where the black night pushes against the glass.

“Isaac?”

“Forget it, dad.” Isaac brushes past him and walks across the bedroom to his dresser. He pulls sweats out of the top drawer. “You won’t understand.”

Graham follows him. “Try me.”

Isaac turns and tips his head back, looks into Graham’s eyes and says, sadly, “You’re a man of science. Facts. Evidence.” He pauses, thinks deeply enough Graham watches the thoughts form in his eyes before his son says them. “I guess you could call it physics. It doesn’t explain everything,” Isaac warns. “I mean, in theory, an object can be in two places at one time.”

“What?”

“I was here but I was also somewhere else,” his son explains.

The thickness is back in Graham’s throat. Like his tongue is swollen and threatening to cut off his air supply.

“Where? Where were you?”

“Where I always go,” Isaac hedges.

“Where, Isaac?”

“The dying.
I go to the dying.”

Isaac stands beneath Graham’s gaze, shifting on his feet. Then he lowers his head and pushes past his father. Graham follows him.

“Help me understand this.”

Isaac sits down on the edge of his bed. His thin
shoulders lift in a slow, thoughtful shrug, then he looks up at Graham with a small smile on his face.

“That’s a tall order, dad. I don’t even understand it. Not all of it.”

“What
do
you understand?”

“They need me.
The dying. Some of them are scared. Well, most of them are.”

Graham sinks onto the bed beside Isaac. “You’re in the bedroom but someplace else, too,” he repeats.

“You’re having trouble with this, dad,” Isaac says. He drops backwards onto the mattress, stuffs his hands under his head, and then regards Graham with a new softness. “I knew you would. That’s why I didn’t tell you. Not even in the beginning, when
I
was scared.”

Graham wonders if it’s possible Isaac falls into some kind of trance and then dreams of the dead. Never really leaving his body, as Isaac seems to think happens, but surfacing into a nightmare. This seems more plausible. It was pretty traumatic, losing his mother the way he did. One minute here, the next gone.
And never truly available. Not present the way a child needs his mother.

“You should have said something, son,” Graham insists. “I’m here no matter what.”

“So you believe me?”

“I know what I saw,” Graham says. “You were
definitely. . .
gone.
You’ve been through a lot, Isaac, with your mom leaving. It’s a lot of change. A lot of time by yourself.”

“I’m not crazy, dad. I thought I might be, at first. But it’s real. I’m there. I don’t know everything about how they die, but enough I can find them in the newspaper the next day.”

Graham places his palms on his knees, rubs the sweat off of them.

“Nightmares can seem real,” Graham offers. There are grown men caught on the battlefields of their minds, nightly, who would swear they were back in Nam or Iraq. “It’s reasonable, after everything---”

“I can prove it, dad. I can tell you all about what I saw tonight,” Isaac offers. “You’ll be there soon, anyway. You’ll know I was really there.”

“What happened tonight?” Graham asks, knowing he’d rather believe in time travel than believe Isaac is following in his mother’s and uncle’s path. “Who died?”

Isaac sits ups and turns to his father.

“A kid.
His name was Jeremy. He was seventeen years old. He lived on Deschuetts Road, in an old Victorian house with a swing set in the back yard. A blue swing set and a wagon stuffed with dolls. It was the King’s Ferry Killer, dad.”

“What?”

“I saw him.”

“You saw the King’s Ferry Killer?”

Isaac nods. “But not like you see him, or how I would see him in the natural.” Isaac explains. “I saw the inside of him, I guess. What he looks like under his human face.”

“Under his human face?”

“He’s evil, dad. He was still in the house when I left. And there’s a baby in there.” Isaac raises his hands between them. They’re blood-stained. “You see, dad?” Isaac says. “This only happens when it’s murder. All the other deaths, I bring nothing back with me.”

“No, Isaac. No.” Graham shakes his head. He rubs a hand over his forehead,
then he reaches for and takes hold of Isaac’s wrist. He brings his son’s hand to his face and breathes in the metallic scent of blood. “How can this be happening. You were here. Here. The whole time,” his father insists.

He stands up, pulls Isaac to his feet, and pushes up the sleeves of his flannel shirt.

“What are you doing?”

“Looking for cuts.”

“I didn’t cut myself, dad.”

“There’s an explanation.”

“I gave it to you.”

“A reasonable explanation, Isaac,” Graham corrects.

He releases Isaac’s hand but continues to stand in front of him, holding his gaze.

Isaac repeats, “I gave it to you.”

Chapter Seventeen

Sunday
, 8:30 pm

Graham travels the coast road, heading south. The moon is full, its silver light seeping through scattered clouds and painting the water of the bay in an almost fluorescent light. Trawlers cut through the inlet, their lights bouncing with the current. Cruisers are docking after a twilight run for king fish and halibut. The beauty and the pace of the island is alluring, but deceiving. It appeals to his senses, but his mind rebukes it, knowing this place for what it is. Purgatory. One of the few places on the planet not ravaged by war, where life and death, violent death, coexist as life as normal.

Peace doesn’t exist here, not anymore.
For Graham, not since the summer of 1997. 

He follows the ribbon of the two-lane freeway until he gets to Deschuetts Road, where he turns inland.

Somewhere along this road, where the tall grass sways under the moon and the homes are lit from within by a warm, ambient light, a young man lies dead in a downstairs room; and the King’s Ferry Killer preys upon a defenseless baby, still alive, but for how long?

     His son exchanged breath with the King’s Ferry Killer.
Stood toe to toe with a serial murderer. Held the hand of a dying boy.

Isaac.

Does his son have a gift? Graham saw, with his own eyes, Isaac suspended above the floor in his bedroom, caught in some kind of trance.
An object can be in two places at the same time
. Could Isaac have been in his bedroom
and
at the scene of the King’s Ferry Killer’s next murder?

Graham slows the cruiser and negotiates a series of winding curves that has him traveling past an elementary school, a farm advertising u-pick figs, and several homes perched atop grassy knolls, with Mount Aerosmith looming behind them.
Choice real estate now.  The island, despite its lurking menace, is becoming popular with Generation X.

His son.
Isaac. Drawn to the dead. Graham doesn’t like it. Yet he can’t ignore their shared impulses. Graham’s job could only be fighting for the rights of the dead. He probably had the aptitude for it before Lance was lured out onto the bluffs and murdered. Losing his brother reshaped his heart. There’s no way to know what he might have been, who he might have been, had his family managed to pass through this world untouched by violence.

His radio squawks and the dispatcher puts a call out for Graham. There’s tension in her
voice, an urgency not completely reigned by her professionalism. He acknowledges the call and anticipates her next words, still they hit a chord deeper in Graham than he’s ever been before.

Isaac and the King’s Ferry Killer.
Same room. Same breath.

“14121 Deschuetts Road,” the dispatcher says. “Man calling in says his son was murdered.
Says it’s the King’s Ferry Killer.”

“I’m there,” Graham says. “I’m two minutes out.” He tells her to send back up, to alert Carter, to dispatch the forensics team.

The remainder the drive, the red and blue lights from the bar on the roof strobe like a

tumbling
kaleidoscope. Graham hurtles through a tunnel of overgrown trees, past a field of tall crabgrass, and shudders to a stop in the gravel driveway of an old Victorian house. The color, the wide, wrap-around porch, the surrounding shrubbery and fields match Isaac's description of the home. Graham knows, when he walks into the back yard, he’ll find the swing set and the wagon filled with dolls.