Authors: Robert Swartwood
“Listen, I’m sorry,” I said, beginning to feel real pity. In my mind, I imagined an endless field of green grass, innumerable wooden doors marking various spaces across the distance. “I didn’t mean to—”
“No, it’s not your fault. I’m more to blame than you. I ... I should have known better.”
Silence fell between us then, and in that room filled with years upon years of newspapers and magazines and boxes (not to mention silverfish), the silence was thick. The scent of old paper was still strong in the air, invading my sinuses.
I knew I’d asked too much already, that this man had been forced back to a dark time in his past. But still there was more I wanted to know, more I needed to know, and so I asked.
“What made him do it? Did anyone know? What made Beckett just ... snap?”
He looked up at me, his old eyes scrutinizing, and shook his head. At first I thought it meant he didn’t know, or that he wasn’t going to tell me. But then he sighed and said, “Nobody knows, really. Even back then nobody knew for sure. But there was speculation. I suppose no matter what happens, there will always be speculation.”
He stared down at where he’d set the paper.
“Thing is, nobody could have foreseen what happened. Reverend Beckett ... he was a good man. He was in his early forties and wasn’t married, so of course there was talk. A few had ... well, his sexuality had come into question. Or at least that’s what I remember hearing later, when some of the locals had nothing better to gossip about. But that summer, a month or so before the Massacre, rumors started floating about. Supposedly Reverend Beckett was involved with one of the local girls.”
He glanced up at me.
“Supposedly she was a minor.”
I took a moment to let this all sink in, then asked, “So was he?”
Lewis Shepherd shrugged. “To be honest, who really knows? God maybe, but after what happened later that month, not many people in Bridgton trusted him all that much anymore. But those rumors, they started, and they hurt Reverend Beckett and his church. From what I can remember, Light Hill was packed every Sunday. Then, once those rumors started, the congregation began dwindling, until there was hardly anybody else left.”
“So that’s what made him snap,” I said, for some reason disappointed by the denouement. I’d expected something more.
The old man stared back at me a moment longer than he probably needed to, before nodding his head slightly. His face looked more worn than it had earlier when he first invited me inside, and his eyes ... they looked so scarred, so lost.
I did that to him, I thought. I asked for the key to unlock that door and now it’s too late to shut it again. It’s too late to go back.
But the thing was, there was no going forward either. I could think of no other questions to ask. Just as I’d suspected, John Porter’s story was a touch of truth, a lot of bullshit, and now here was the real deal. But the problem arose that after everything I’d heard, what did it change? Joey was still missing, the Beckett House was still a crime scene, and I was still going back home to Lanton tomorrow afternoon. Nothing had changed, so just why had I even bothered in the first place?
Can you feel it, Chris?
No, I didn’t feel it, I didn’t feel anything, and that’s what was bugging me.
“I will tell you one more thing,” Lewis Shepherd said, and when I looked up out of my thoughts I saw him staring back down at
The Advertiser
. His voice was lower than before, and as he spoke I realized he wasn’t speaking to me so much as to himself. “It was pure hell for those surviving firstborns. They were boys, all four of them. I was good friends with one, and I remember a month after the Massacre, we were talking together and he ... he suddenly looked up at me. I forget what our conversation was about, but he just looked up at me and I could see it in his eyes, the understanding of what had happened to him. He started to shake his head, he started to cry, and he said one word to me. He said, ‘Why?’ I didn’t know what he meant then, and I still don’t. Did he mean why was his entire family murdered? Did he mean why only he survived? Or did he mean why did Reverend Beckett place that terrible mark on his bedroom door?”
Something inside me gripped my soul and squeezed it tight.
“What”—I swallowed—“what was on his bedroom door?”
“Not just his door,” Lewis Shepherd said sadly, “but all their doors.”
At that instant I saw myself the morning I found my parents’ bodies—as I backed away from their bedroom and reeled toward my own room
.
“In their own parents’ blood.”
As I ran toward the thing that had been painted on the door in their blood
.
“A cross.”
A cross
.
•
•
•
I
INTENDED
ON
telling Dean. Like Lewis Shepherd said before I left the bookstore, not many people nowadays knew what truly happened that summer night fifty years ago. Mostly because those who lived then wanted to forget, but also in not relaying those events, the story itself would die out just like Devin Beckett and those children as they were burned alive in that stone house.
I wondered if my grandmother knew. I had no doubt she did, having lived in Bridgton her whole life. I wondered if she had known any of the children who were taken, if she even remembered Devin Beckett.
When I returned to The Hill, the deputy’s cruiser was still parked in its place beside the Rec House. The deputy inside the cruiser had given up his duty and had instead nodded off. I banged on the window where his head leaned and he jumped, his head jerking around wildly until his eyes focused on me.
I waited until he’d rolled down his window before I said, “I just wanted to let you know I’m still alive.”
“Right,” the deputy said, wiping at the trail of drool on his chin.
It was as I passed Mrs. Roberts’ trailer that I heard the flies.
Only a few, but I heard their familiar buzzing and had to pause to determine where the sound was coming from. Then I realized it was coming from underneath the trailer, and for a moment I knew that’s where Joey’s body lay. Whoever had taken him had killed him and stuffed him among the sun-neglected grass and weeds, where he’d become food for field mice and stray cats and home for maggots.
“Stop it,” I whispered, closing my eyes. I knew better. I knew that it wasn’t Joey, was instead the corpse of some stray animal or bird. Still the thought lingered, leaving a very unsettling image, and as I continued toward my grandmother’s I wondered if Joey would ever be found.
Chapter 13
E
arly Tuesday morning on June 10, 2003, around seven-fifty a.m., a local woman drove along Route 13. Her name was Ellen Gordon and she had just dropped off her two daughters at Horseheads Elementary. She was headed back home toward Sullivanville, timing it so that the whites she had put in the dryer would be finishing up on her arrival, when she spotted something lying in the grass beside the road. As she would later tell police, she at first thought it was a dog. Only when she was less than fifty yards away, already going forty-five miles per hour, did she realize what it actually was.
The cup of coffee that she always brought with her on her morning drives almost spilled on her lap as she cried out and swerved into the other lane. Thankfully nothing was coming in the other direction, or else she probably would not have been alive to pick up her daughters from school later that day. Moments passed before she again managed to gain control of the wheel and pulled off along the berm. Later she would dutifully tell police how she kept a cell phone in her Caravan only for emergencies, and how she didn’t hesitate at all in calling 911.
She waited perhaps five minutes before the first car arrived. By then a trucker—the paper listed his name as Edward Borrow—noticed the same thing as her and had stopped as well. He pulled his tractor-trailer along the opposite side of the road Ellen was parked, got out, and ran to what lay in the grass. He could tell just by looking that the thing was dead, but still he checked for a pulse ... and almost cried out when he felt one. He backed away, almost stumbled, before jogging across the highway to where Ellen waited. He asked her if she was all right. She simply stared past him, tears in her eyes. Her body was shaking. (Two days later, an interview in the
Star-Gazette
informed its loyal readers that Ellen Gordon had continued shaking for the next six hours.)
Once the first police car arrived, things began happening fast. Another car showed up a minute later, followed by an ambulance. A crime scene had begun to materialize along that particular patch of Route 13—what the woman unlucky enough to have driven past that spot called “a nightmare”—but at the time I knew nothing about it. At that time, I was still asleep in the tiny bed of the trailer I had graciously been allowed to stay in.
At that time, I was busy with a nightmare of my own.
•
•
•
I’
M
STANDING
WITH
Joey in the Beckett House. It’s late at night. He’s talking to me, trying to tell me something, but I can’t hear a single word he says. In fact, I can hear nothing—even outside, through the open ceiling, the trees make no noise from the wind, and there are no insects singing out in the grass.
What is it, Joey? I ask, but of course I have no voice. It seems in this dream all sound is restricted. But still Joey talks to me, trying to relate something that he deems important. And still I stand there and listen, hearing only silence.
I glance over his head, notice four motionless shadows standing behind him. I think of the shadow that’s stalking me, that’s still waiting for the right moment, and I think,
Are they demons?
I look back down at Joey, wanting to warn him, and notice his eyes are no longer looking into mine. Instead they’re staring at something behind me. Before I can even turn to see (and really, with the restriction of sound, what makes me think I can move an inch anyway?), Joey opens his mouth and screams. A second later he bursts into flames.
I lay in bed for almost a half hour, staring at the ceiling after I woke up from watching Joey burn ... and burn ... and burn. (In most dreams, where a horrific event almost always causes a person to snap awake, I was forced to watch him burn no matter how much I wanted to look away.) It made me think of Devin Beckett and those seven children. The youngest a baby, the oldest eleven years old.
They say that when you’re in a burning house, you die from the carbon monoxide, not the flames. But for those few that dreadful morning, I knew carbon monoxide would have been a blessing.
For the most part, my things were packed and loaded in my Cavalier. Last night Dean had called while I was eating dinner with Grandma and Mrs. Roberts. He had no news concerning Joey, no news from Steve, and he sounded like he had back in Lanton—worn out, frustrated, lost. I’d made it a point to tell him about the connection between Beckett and my parents’ murder, but he didn’t stay on long enough.
“Tomorrow around one we’ll head back,” he said. “I’ll see you then.”
He hung up and I was left standing there, listening to only silence for however long it took until there was a click and the electronic voice told me what to do if I’d like to make a call. I wondered if my uncle even knew about the cross in blood that had been left on my bedroom door. I didn’t see why not. He must have been told to fully understand why Steve thought it was best for me to hide away. Then again, even if he did know, how could he make the connection when he’d probably never even heard the entire story of Devin Beckett in the first place?
And I wondered to myself, had I even heard the entire story?
•
•
•
T
HE
SPOT
THE
deputy’s cruiser had been taking up last night was vacant. Its tires were imprinted in the tall grass.
I passed my grandmother’s trailer—I could hear the phone inside just beginning to ring—and kept going, up to the Rec House, looking for the cruiser. There were only a few places the car could be, but I couldn’t find it anywhere. It was gone.
Heading back down the drive, I heard the buzzing of flies again. Under Mrs. Roberts’ trailer, I could even see a few of their black pinpoint bodies hovering about. The image that had crossed my mind last night resurfaced and I knew I had to check for myself.
I took only three steps toward whatever lay in the cold shade when my grandmother’s screen door banged open and she called my name.
“Christopher, I was just coming for you.” Her eyes were wide, her breathing heavy, and for an instant I thought she was having a heart attack.
“What’s wrong?”
She paused, took a breath, and said, “They found Joey.”
“Is he alive?”
“Yes, but barely. He was rushed to St. Joseph’s. Deputy Toms drove Mr. Cunningham over there almost an hour ago.” My grandmother paused to catch her breath again. “Dean just called. He’s sending a car to pick you up. It should be here any minute.”