So Cold the River (2010) (44 page)

“One of the dry channels?” Eric said.

“I’d say so.”

They slid down into the ditch and used one of the limestone pieces to cross the water, then got back to climbing. It was about
five minutes before the ground flattened out and it was clear they’d reached the top. By now Eric was breathing hard—Kellen
didn’t seem to be breathing at all—and if not for the sudden absence of slope, it wouldn’t have felt like much of an arrival.
Everything up here looked pretty much the same as the hill had—thick with trees, tangled with brush and weeds, dark with shadows.
Insects buzzed around them, and a pair of crows shrieked in discontent. The humidity seemed twice as high as when they’d started,
and Eric lifted his shirt and used it to dry sweat from his face. When he lowered the shirt, he felt an odd tingle, like a
ping of static electricity. The crows shrieked again and he winced at the sound.

“I feel like we’re just wandering now,” Kellen said. “We’ve got no idea where we should be looking.”

“I know it,” Eric said. A gust of wind blew up, and a thin branch from one of the young trees whipped into his face. When
he lifted his arm to ward it off, his hand passed through a spider web, which stuck to him with wispy, sticky threads. He
swore and wiped his hand off on his jeans and continued on as Kellen fell in behind him. They’d gone no more than twenty feet
before Kellen’s phone began to ring. Eric didn’t turn at first, but when Kellen began to speak, his voice was low and serious
in a way that brought Eric to a stop. When he looked back, he saw Kellen’s face knotted in an expression of disbelief.

“You’re sure?” he was saying, voice hushed. He was turned sideways, as if trying to retreat from Eric, attain privacy. “Thanks.
Yeah, I know. Crazy. All right, baby. I’ll talk to you…. Look, yeah, I got to go. I’ll talk to you soon. Thank you. Okay?
Thank you.”

He disconnected and slid the phone into his pocket, a thoughtful look on his face.

“Your girlfriend?” Eric said.

“Yeah.” He was looking at Eric with a frown of scrutiny.

“Why are you looking at me like I’m a test subject?”

“Danielle just got results on your water.”

“Really.” Eric’s eyelid twitched and fluttered again. “Were we right? Is there something in it besides the mineral water?”

Kellen nodded.

“Alcohol?” Eric asked. “Some sort of whiskey?”

Now Kellen shook his head. “Not even a trace of alcohol. It was, according to Danielle, a mixture of mineral water and blood.”

“Blood.”

“Yeah.”

“Just… blood. She has no idea where it might—?”

“Human blood,” Kellen said. “Type A human blood.”

Eric thought of the bottle, and his senses seemed to slam him right back into contact with it—he had a flash of the cold touch
in his palm, the honey-tinged odor, the sickening-sweet taste…

“I feel like I should get sick,” he said.

“Brother,” Kellen said, “you already are. And there isn’t a doctor alive that’s going to know how to treat it, either.”

“What about the other bottle? Anne’s bottle.”

“Typical mineral content. Nothing special at all.”

“Not that shows up in a lab test, at least,” Eric said.

A few drops of rain fell around them as they stood and looked at each other.

“Wonder whose blood it was,” Eric said.

“Yeah,” Kellen said. “I’m a bit curious about that myself.”

J
OSIAH WAS STANDING WITH
his nose almost to the glass, staring out at the storm like a child. When he stepped back and looked at it from the right
angle he could still see Campbell sitting there watching him, his face perfectly aligned with the silhouette Josiah had drawn
in his blood. Campbell hadn’t spoken in some time, but Josiah hoped he’d been pleased by the gesture, the only thing Josiah
had been able to think of that would show his loyalty, show that he would indeed listen, would indeed do the necessary work.
He’d brought Campbell into this world, at least to the point that the old woman could see him, and he’d done it with his own
blood. Surely Campbell saw that as indicative of respect. Of loyalty.

Now he couldn’t see Campbell, though, because he’d stepped too close to the glass. Couldn’t help himself—the storm was doing
something strange. There was a massive cloud taking shape ahead of them now, shaped almost exactly like an anvil.
It advanced slowly but steadily and seemed to carry both threat and calm at the same time. Like you could flip a coin and
if it came up heads, the cloud would pass on by, or maybe offer a gentle shower. Came up tails, though, and God help you.
God help you.

“You see the bubble?”

He twisted and stared back at the old woman, baffled both that she’d spoken at all and by what she’d said.

“Top of that big cloud,” she said, nodding, “the one you’re looking at that’s shaped like an anvil? It’s all flat across the
top except for one part. You see it there? Looks like a little bubble up on top?”

He didn’t know why he would bother with this talk, but he couldn’t help himself. He said, “Yeah, I see it.”

“That’s called an overshooting top.”

Great,
he wanted to say,
now pardon me, but I don’t give two shits, old woman,
but no words left his lips. He was staring at the cloud and thinking she was wrong. That aberration across the top of the
anvil didn’t look like a bubble. It looked like a dome.

“What’s it mean?” he said.

“Will take a few minutes for me to know. But it’ll be the part that tells the tale. You see how the rest of that cloud is
all hard-edged? Could be some serious weather in there. But that bubble just formed. If it goes away soon, this one’s no real
bother. If it stays on for more than ten minutes, then we could have a gully-washer headed our way.”

“How many minutes has it been?”

“Six,” she said. “Six so far.”

Anne wished Josiah would stand back from the window, stop blocking her view. This thing rolling in was on the verge of being
something special, something dangerous, and she needed to see it clearly. Instead he just stood there with his face to the
window as the minutes ticked by and the storm front advanced.

She leaned to the left and looked around him, studying the cloud and trying to remember all of the signs she needed to remember.
The bubble on top of the anvil formation was holding steady. That meant the updraft was strong. The storm was being fed. The
body of the cloud had a soft cauliflower appearance but its edges were firm and distinct and that meant…

A shrill ringing broke the silence that had grown in the house, and Josiah gave a startled jerk before reaching into his pocket
and retrieving a cell phone.

“Yeah, I’m here,” he said. “Speak loud, boy. Where in hell you been? You didn’t lose them, did you?”

Josiah bristled at the response, and when he said, “They looking ’round my property?” his voice was softer than it had been
and drove a chill through Anne. She willed herself to try and ignore the words, focus on the storm again.

Josiah shifted away from his spot at the window then, and when he did, Anne saw what she’d been missing, knew that the cloud
edges were no longer important. Josiah’s body had blocked the development of a new feature from her eyes. A lower formation,
trailing beneath that bubble, long tapering wisps like an old man’s beard. It was called a—

“What do they think they’re doing?” Josiah hissed. “What are they doing in those woods?”

—wall cloud, and it was pulling in the rain-cooled surface air, sucking in that moisture and feeding it to the updraft. The
tips were spinning, as if unseen hands were twisting the end of the beard. Behind the wall cloud—

“You got a knife on you? Then go back down there and put
an end to that Porsche’s tires, Danny. All of them. Then you sit tight. I’m headed your way.”

—amidst all that purple and gray was a slot of bright white. Downdraft. It slid out of the dark clouds and dropped toward
the earth, cutting right through the blood silhouette Josiah Bradford had drawn on her window. The white light seemed to turn
those dark red eyes into a shimmering black.

Josiah Bradford disconnected the phone and lowered it slowly, put it back in his pocket. He’d just removed his hand again
when the air split into a wailing all around them. At the sound, he lunged for his gun.

“Don’t need that,” Anne said. “It’s not the police. It’s the tornado siren.”

E
RIC STOOD IN SILENCE
and stared back at Kellen as the wind bent the treetops and tore leaves loose and spun them into the air.

“If your experience has more to do with the blood and less with the water,” Kellen said, “maybe we’re wasting our time up
here.”

He didn’t answer. Kellen said, “Maybe finding that spring isn’t worth anything, is what I’m saying. If there’s nothing about
the water itself—”

“There’s something special about the water,” Eric said. “I think it was the balance to his blood. The counter.”

A steady rain was falling now, and he wiped the moisture off his forehead and turned away from Kellen, looked into the windswept
trees. His head throbbed and his hands shook. The agony was approaching again, the fruit of poisoned water, of a dead man’s
wrath, and he had nothing left to fight it with. The hell of it was that the sorrowful sense of defeat had little to do with
fear
of what was coming. No, it was the understanding of what would
not
be coming: a continuation of the story, an eerie insight into that hidden world, and the glory it could have brought him.
He could see the foolishness of his idea now. All thoughts of the fame that would surround his strange gifts were bullshit;
he’d have been a fifteen-minute tabloid freak show, a washed-up almost-was who drank a bottle of old blood and fancied himself
a psychic.

“A counter?” Kellen said.

Eric nodded. “Everything changed with Anne’s water, with the water that didn’t have blood in it. The story it was showing
me was a warning.”

“Of what?”

“Of what I did,” Eric said. “I brought him back.”

Campbell Bradford. His spirit, his ghost, his evil—pick your term, Eric Shaw had returned it to the valley, and the water
allowed him to see that, caught his body with agonized cravings and forced him to drink more so it could force him to see
more. He hadn’t understood in time, though. Somewhere along the line he’d lost all sense of purpose entirely, had begun to
fantasize about what the water could do for him, to think of it as a gift instead of what it really was: a warning.

“Now they’ve stopped,” Kellen said. “Right? The visions are done.”

“Yeah. They’ve stopped.” Eric was thinking of the blood in the bottle and the way Campbell Bradford had looked right at him
last night and said,
I’m getting stronger
.

There
was
a reason the visions had stopped. The past was not where it belonged anymore. The past was here.

Josiah needed that siren to stop. Damn thing was chewing into his brain, disrupting his focus, which needed to be on Danny’s
message.

Wesley Chapel Gulf. That’s where Shaw was right now. In the sacred spot of Josiah’s boyhood. It made not a lick of sense but
still felt as purely right as anything he’d ever heard. Of course that’s where they’d gone. Of course. There’d been something
at work here for a while, something he couldn’t get his head around, and now he understood that it was time to stop trying.
Let the chips fall. Stop trying to figure out the house rules—there were none, at least not any he’d ever understand. Wasn’t
his place to lay plans now, was his place to listen to those that had been laid for him.

All you got to do is listen…

Yes, that was all. He was told that hours ago and still he’d been fighting it, making his own plans, trusting himself. Just
listen, that was all he needed to do. He had a guide now, a hand in the darkness, and he wanted to listen but that frigging
siren kept shrieking and screaming…

“Shut up!” he howled, tightening his hand on the gun as if he could put a few shells into the air and silence it all, silence
the whole damn world.

“Won’t stop till the cloud passes over,” Anne McKinney said. “There’s rotation in that cloud. Could touch down.”

“A tornado?” he said. “A tornado’s coming
here?
”

“Won’t be here. Going to be well over our heads if it touches down. But it may hit the towns. It may hit the hotels.”

She said this as if it were the very definition of horror.

Josiah said, “I hope the son of a bitch does. I hope it spins right into the damned dome and leaves nothing but a pile of
glass and stone behind.”

The idea thrilled him, drew him to the window. He looked off to the east as if he might actually be able to see the place.

I ought to be the one to take it down,
he thought.
No damn storm—me.

“You don’t think I could do it, do you?” he said. “Well, I got
a truck full of dynamite parked out back would do the job. Bet your ass it’d do the job.”

Anne didn’t answer, and he blinked and shook his head and tried to get his mind back to the task before him. He had to force
his mind back to that fact time and time again, like a man trying to cross the deck of a ship that was forever tilting him
in one direction and then another. Never mind this pissing contest with some old bitch, he had to get moving. That required
a decision on what to do with her, though. He stared at her and pondered as the window glass rattled in its frame beside him.
Best tie her up. Problem with that was she was in front of the big window, visible to anyone who stopped by. There was a basement
in the house. With no phone to use, she could holler her lungs out down there and never be heard. Tie her up and stick her
ass down there.

He crossed the living room and pulled open one door, found it went to a bathroom, then tried a second and saw the steep wooden
steps leading down into the dark, smelled the moisture. Yes, that would do fine. He’d get her to walk down there before he
bound her, make things easier to handle.