Yeah? Well, that was bullshit. He wasn’t easy meat for no one.
Nonetheless, following his release from Jessup, he hadn’t come straight back to Stillwater for just that reason—to avoid confrontations with the local hillbillies and rednecks who thought they could give the Codger kid a few shoves without getting shoved back. They were wrong, of course—Ricky had never let anyone take advantage of him like that and he didn’t plan on starting now—but he had had no real desire to jump back into that mess right away. Instead, he spent a few months living on his own in Cumberland, renting a small room in a boardinghouse and paying his rent with money he withdrew from his grandmother’s bank account.
But like all good dogs, he eventually came back home. In the time he’d been gone, which had been about a year and a half, Stillwater had dried up considerably. Even if he’d wanted to snare a job, even a part-time gig, his choices were woefully limited. He wondered what the hell brought him back to this shitty little town after all, aside from a free roof over his head and the luxury of leeching off his grandmother. He couldn’t come up with any answer except for the most obvious—a dog like him knew nothing other than the master who whipped him. Everyone goes back to what they know, no matter how horrible and pointless and static it all is. There was a strange sort of mundane comfort in predictability.
Ricky blinked and rubbed his eyes just as he saw Donald Larrabee pushing his way past the clot of smokers beneath the tavern’s awning and hobbling down onto the uneven pavement of the parking lot. He looked drunk and Ricky wondered just how long he’d been sitting in his car, waiting for the fool. As Ricky watched, Larrabee meandered over to one section of the parking lot where, presumably, he looked for his car. When he couldn’t find it, he unbuckled his pants and released a potent arc of urine onto the tire of a green Chevy van. After shaking off, he buttoned up his jeans and staggered back across the lot to where his sad little two-door Civic sat beneath a darkened lamppost. Ricky watched the headlights come on. A long while passed before the Civic pulled out of the space. Larrabee pulled a wide arc around the lot, nearly clipping the front fender of an old Buick Skylark in the process, before emptying out onto the road. Ricky watched the Civic’s taillights flare briefly before the vehicle chugged forward into the dark.
Ricky followed.
One-on-one, he’d teach the motherfucker to embarrass him in public. He’d teach him, all right.
When both cars crossed the intersection at Highland and Gracie, Ricky shook out a Camel from the pack he kept wedged in the visor and lit it. He was feeling pretty upbeat now. The Civic continued up Gracie, and Ricky followed. They were the only two cars on the road at this hour and in this part of town—where the barns were all unoccupied and dilapidated monstrosities, and the radio signals fuzzed in and out—but if Donald Larrabee realized he was being followed he did not show it in the casual, sloppy way in which he drove.
The right side of Gracie Street sloped down toward the Narrows. Ricky peered out the passenger window and down at the silvery concourse of water that snaked through the valley, and he marveled silently at how high the water had risen. With another storm on the horizon, he wondered just how much Stillwater could take.
It’s like fucking Armageddon,
he thought, chuckling.
Ahead of him, the Civic’s taillights swerved right, leaving smeary black skids on the pavement in the wake of their sudden movement. For one second, Ricky thought Donald Larrabee was about to drive his goddamn car down the embankment and into the Narrows. But then Larrabee overcorrected and swerved left.
At this point, it was clear that Larrabee was no longer in control of the vehicle. Ricky eased down on the Camaro’s brakes, leaving a nice distance between the two of them, and he eventually came to a full stop just as Larrabee plowed the Civic off the road and straight into a tree.
Ricky stared at the scene, dumbstruck. On the radio, a Metallica song came on. Ricky quickly switched it off, popped open the driver’s door, and climbed out of the Camaro.
The air smelled of gasoline and scorched rubber. Steam billowed out from beneath the Civic’s hood, which, from where Ricky stood, appeared to be wedged against the trunk of a thick spruce. The taillights looked like beacons on a sinking ship.
Ricky flicked his cigarette into the woods and slowly approached the wreck. By no means did this let Larrabee off the hook—not in Ricky’s book—but the suddenness of the whole thing had shuffled the world into a sort of replay mode in which Ricky kept seeing the car swerve and strike the tree over and over again. Trying to catch up to reality was like trying to run through a pool of syrup.
When he reached the rear of the car, Ricky knocked one fist against the Civic’s trunk. He knocked again as he approached the driver’s side of the vehicle, this time on the driver’s side window. The windows were fogged up with condensation and it was difficult to see inside. From what Ricky could make out, it looked like the airbag had been deployed.
A shape moved from within. Ricky hopped back a few steps, suddenly aware of the slimy sheen of sweat that coated his forehead and the palms of his hands. The driver’s door cracked open and Donald Larrabee fell out. Larrabee’s skin was the color of ancient parchment and there was a lightning-bolt gash vertically bisecting his forehead. He crawled, trembling, on his hands and knees away from the car. Through the open door, Ricky could see that the airbag had indeed been activated and that fine, white powder—or possibly smoke—clouded up the whole interior.
Larrabee crawled to Ricky and looked up. There was dislocation and confusion in his eyes. There was something else in there, as well.
Fear,
Ricky thought, recognizing it instantly.
Absolute fear.
“What…the fuck…was
that?”
Donald Larrabee gasped as blood drooled out of his mouth.
“A car accident, you shit heel,” Ricky said…but then he froze as he looked past Larrabee and out onto the road. Something pale and vaguely humanoid stood there, watching him. When it began to creep forward and Ricky registered the unnatural way with which it walked, a cold dread closed around his heart. When moonlight struck the side of the figure’s face and he saw that it was, in fact, a young boy, the realization only heightened his fear. He turned and ran for all he was worth back to the Camaro.
He never paused to look back over his shoulder, even when Donald Larrabee began screaming.
Ricky dove into the Camaro, slammed the door, and cranked the ignition until the engine roared. He jerked the gearshift into reverse and spun the wheel while slamming the accelerator. The car lurched dizzyingly backward until Ricky jammed on the brakes with both feet.
Only then did he pause to glance up at the rearview mirror.
What little he saw would haunt him till his dying day: the pale-skinned child atop Donald Larrabee’s writhing form, pinning him down, down, with brute and unnatural strength, a gout of steaming liquid belching forth from the child’s face and splattering against the back of Larrabee’s head—
Ricky Codger had seen enough. He slammed the car back into Drive, jumped on the accelerator, and got the hell out of Dodge.
3
As a strong wind blew hard against the house, old Godfrey Hogarth awoke from some disremembered nightmare that had left him covered in perspiration. He crept slowly out of bed, his heart racing and his skin seeming to tingle. Around him, the house creaked and moaned in the wind, and it was like walking through the belly of an old whaling ship. Hogarth went directly to the bathroom and, without turning on the light, pulled on the faucet. Beneath a cool stream, he washed first his hands then his face and, lastly, the nape of his neck. He remained standing there at the sink in the dark, the water still running, for some time; time enough for his heartbeat to regain its regular syncopation and for his nerves to calm.
Before going back to bed, he paused before the tiny octagonal window in the hall that looked out upon the cold blue curl of asphalt that was Trestle Road. In the moonlight, the asphalt looked like polished steel.
Something’s fixing to happen, sure as I’m standing here breathing,
he thought then, feeling the creeps overtake him all over again. He was an old man and possessed an intuition about certain things, much as infants know when they’re hungry and mothers know how to provide the milk.
Something bad.
Like an electrical current, it radiated through the marrow of his bones.
4
His mother’s pointy foot poked him awake. Dwight stirred and blinked open his eyes. He’d fallen asleep again in front of the television in the living room—some black-and-white horror movie playing on the public access channel out of Pittsburgh—and was temporarily disoriented. His mother’s tired face hung above him like the disapproving face of God.
“Trash needs to go out to the curb,” Patti said around the cigarette jutting from between her lips. “Your father’s probably gonna forget when he gets home. I’m going to bed.”
If he even makes it home tonight at all,
Dwight thought, already scrambling to his feet while pawing the sleep from his eyes. There had been more than enough instances—where Delmo Dandridge, after a night of getting shit-faced down at Crossroads, had either fallen asleep in his car in the tavern’s parking lot (or on the side of the road) or been hauled into jail—for there to be more than an ounce of truth to Dwight’s musing. He shut the TV off and headed down the hall where his sneakers sat in a heap beside the front door, while his mother climbed the creaking stairs to go to bed. Gideon, the German shepherd, lifted his head up off his paws. The dog had been snoozing in the foyer and he looked now at Dwight with the sleepy disorientation Dwight himself had felt just a minute earlier when his mother’s toes had jabbed at his ribs.
“Good boy,” Dwight told the dog. Gideon rested his head back down on his front paws and narrowed his eyes to slits.
The house was cold and he assumed it was even colder outside, so he snagged a sweatshirt with a John Deere logo on it from the hall closet and tugged it on over his head before he stepped out onto the front porch.
Outside, the night was absolute. Insects and frogs exchanged heated dialogue in the long grass and the three-quarters moon looked sharp enough to cleave a wound in the sky. The trash cans were at the side of the house, and Dwight hurried down the porch steps now, not pausing to look around and survey the rest of the property. It was the same way he went down into the basement to retrieve tools for his old man when Delmo got what he called the “fixin’ bug”—a quick dash down the stairs, grab the item, and a quick dash back up. Slam the door, too, for good measure. (It was always on these dashes back up the stairs that he swore he heard a second pair of feet hurrying up right behind him, moving at the same speed as he was but just a half-second off.) Taking out the trash was no different…particularly since he’d been hearing someone moving around outside the house at night.
Those noises outside his window began roughly around the time the hairless boy’s body was found along the banks of Wills Creek. It might have been a week earlier, though he couldn’t remember exactly…though after the boy’s body was discovered, he recalled thinking about those noises he’d been hearing and wondering if whatever had gotten the hairless boy had also spent the previous week lurking outside the Dandridge house. Or…worse yet…he had wondered if those noises had been the boy himself. Had he been lost? Searching for help? He quickly realized it couldn’t have been the boy since the noises continued after the boy’s body was found. The boy was dead; the noises were made by someone or something else.
At the side of the house, Dwight found the two metal trash cans overflowing with bags of refuse. He tried to drag them both along at the same time but they were too heavy. Instead, he grabbed the handle of one in both hands and, sliding backward through the muddy lawn, pulled the first can around the side of the house and out to the curb. It was on his return trip back for the second can that he heard the noise.
Dwight’s feet skidded to a halt in the dirt. He jerked his head to the right, where overgrown foliage and bamboo stalks rose up over a rusted and bent chain-link fence like aboriginal spears. Suddenly, he was aware that his mouth had gone dry.
“Is someone there?” he croaked. The words practically stuck to the roof of his mouth like peanut butter. “Dad? You back there?” It wasn’t unusual for someone to drive Delmo home when he’d had too much to drink, and he often passed out in the yard until morning came to sober him up…
The foliage rustled but no answer came.
Dwight thought of Miss Sleet’s classroom, now with those two empty desks—Matthew’s and Billy Leary’s—as incontrovertible as craters made from bombs dropped from a great height. It was the loudest silence Dwight Dandridge had ever heard in his life.
He thought he saw some of the bamboo shoots separate.
His compulsion was to run back into the house and forget the other trash can. But then he thought of his father’s wrath when he sobered up the following afternoon and found the second trash can still overflowing against the side of the house, and for whatever ill-defined reason, Dwight found himself even
more
terrified of that scenario. So he dashed quickly back around the side of the house, grabbed the second trash can by the handle with both hands, and hurriedly hauled it across the lawn to the curb, too. When he’d finished, breathing heavily and prickling with perspiration under the John Deere sweatshirt, he staggered a few steps backward toward the front of the house, his eyes still trained on the bamboo shoots and the rustling, heavy foliage. There was definitely something back there.