Cradle Lake (2 page)

Faithful Jerry Lee arthritically climbed the porch steps and wove around Alan to gain access to their new home.

Alan's eyes finally locked with Heather's. There was a nonspecific deadness in them, a deadness he had become all too familiar with. His mind slipped back to that night in the apartment when he'd awoken in a cold sweat to find Heather's side of the bed empty. The strip of light at the other end of the hallway issuing through the bottom of the closed bathroom door …

No,
he warned himself.
Not here, not now. We left all that in the city. This is a time for new beginnings, goddamn it. I won't bring those nightmare memories here.

“Heather,” he managed, her name nearly sticking to the roof of his mouth.

After a moment, she crossed the lawn and mounted the porch steps. She paused beside him, so close he could count the creases at the corners of her dead eyes, the conch shell contours of her ear. Then she entered their new home.

New beginnings,
he thought again and wondered, with a deepening sense of dread, if he was only fooling himself.

Twenty minutes later, after the movers arrived and began lugging Alan's and Heather's personal effects into the house, Alan took time to survey the place. His memory of what it had been like based off one childhood visit was not to be trusted. It was much smaller than he remembered (which
was understandable since he was, after all, much taller now). The walls sloughed paint chips, the tiles were cracked and broken in the bathroom, and the kitchen's linoleum floor was carpeted in dust.

The estate sale had cleared out most of his uncle's belongings, although random photos still decorated some walls and the odd coffee mug or lamp could still be found. In the master bedroom, Alan opened the closet and was momentarily dumbstruck at a parade of bedroom slippers on the floor. The entire house smelled old, and he was overcome by the peculiar notion that the house had been sitting here since his uncle's death, holding its breath while awaiting new occupants.

The thought made him uncomfortable.

Heather hadn't left the living room since she entered the house. She stood now, hugging herself as she looked out the sliding glass doors that faced the backyard. Thick vines segmented the glass. The doors led onto a small concrete slab that served as a patio. Beyond the slab, the vast backyard climbed toward a heavy forest. In the distance, like dinosaurs coming awake from their ancient slumber, the jagged peaks of the Great Smoky Mountains were visible.

Alan came up behind Heather, touched one shoulder. He felt her recoil inwardly. Her skin was cold. “That's some backyard, huh?” He was whispering.

No answer.

“This will be good for us, honey. We can make this work. New beginnings.”

He kissed the side of her face, and it was like kissing a wax dummy.

Two hours later, when the movers had finally finished, Alan watched the big moving van shudder down the road and vanish in the cool mist of an early evening. Producing a pack of menthol cigarettes from the rear pocket of his pants, Alan shook one of the smokes out of the cellophane. He lit it and inhaled deeply, casting his head far back on his neck, nearly in ecstasy. He had quit five times in the past year. But, of course, the past year had been a nightmare.
Fuck it.

At his feet, Jerry Lee whimpered and sat on his haunches.

“Let me have my habits, you judgmental bastard,” Alan said to the dog.

Jerry Lee looked up at him, as if considering a rebuke.

He was about to turn around and head back inside the house when a police car, its lights off, slid by and came to an eventual stop across the street. Its engine idled, and its tailpipe sputtered out great belches of black exhaust.

Alan waited for the officer to climb out of the cruiser, but there was no movement inside. He crossed the yard to the
edge of the street and raised a hand in his most neighborly gesture, anticipating a reaction from the driver.

But the driver did not respond except for switching the cruiser into gear and slowly rolling away from the curb. As the vehicle completed a U-turn, Alan could see the emblem on the door—a gold shield decaled with the words
Groom County Sheriff's Department.
Alan stepped into the street and watched the car coast back up the way it had come. Its taillights flared when it approached the nearest intersection. Then the cruiser turned right and disappeared.

Strange. I wonder what that was all about.

Across the street the kids were still playing baseball. There resounded another
tink
as one of the boys struck the baseball squarely with the bat, launching the fist-sized white sphere a good distance into the air. Alan glanced up at it, the overcast sky heavy enough with clouds to shield any glare from the sun. The kids were shouting, and the runner was already bounding down an invisible baseline.

Alan got under the ball and, pushing his hand up through his T-shirt to soften the impact, caught it.

The shouts of the children died in midair. Even the runner slowed to a jog before coming to a full stop between second and third base.

Alan suddenly felt like a comedian who had just bombed onstage, hearing nothing from the audience but the chirping of crickets. No doubt these kids were wondering who the hell this strange guy was—a guy wearing a Megadeth T-shirt and camouflage BDUs, smoking a cigarette, and boasting a smattering of tattoos and an unshaven face. What had he gotten himself into?

“Hey!” one of the kids shouted. “Nice catch, mister!”

“Thanks!” Alan lobbed the ball across the street.

The kid hunkered down on his knees and snatched it up in his glove.

“Does that mean he's out?” one of the other kids wanted to know.

“I'd say it's more like a home run,” Alan suggested.

The runner—a chubby kid in a gray sweatshirt and baggy jeans—pumped a fist in the air and continued loping toward an oversized wicker purse that obviously served as third base.

But the outfield wasn't having any of it. “Interference!” the center fielder yelled. “Doesn't count! Interference!”

“No way!” one of the runner's teammates shouted. “You wouldn't have caught that in a million years. Automatic home run.”

“Yeah,” said the runner. “You heard the old guy.”

Old guy,
Alan thought with some humility.
Christ. When did that happen?

“Do-over!” the pitcher demanded. “Do-over!”

The runner groaned in protest. Slouching, dejected, he turned around and dragged his feet back to home plate. Casting a glance over his shoulder, the kid eyeballed Alan from across the street. He'd been the kid's savior just a moment ago, but now the kid looked at him as if he'd just ran over his dog. “Shouldn't smoke, mister,” he said. “Bad for your health.”

Alan nodded, somewhat surprised by the kid's effrontery. He even considered tossing the cigarette to the ground and crushing it beneath his sneaker, setting a good example
and all, but then decided to hell with it and finished it off as he walked around to the backyard. “Come on, Jerry Lee.”

The retriever padded after him, tongue lolling out like a circus pennant.

The grass was thick and green, patches of it almost as high as his hips. Colorful swells of wildflowers blossomed up from the ground. Jerry Lee's upraised tail cleaved through the grass like the dorsal fin of a shark. Alan walked several yards into the field until his left foot snagged on a tangle of thick grass low to the ground. He tugged it free with a popping sound. With a little loving care, it promised to be a wonderful yard. He would need a lawn mower, of course—he'd never owned one in his life and, in fact, had never
operated
one—and maybe Heather would plant a vegetable garden close to the house in the spring. Fresh tomatoes, asparagus, parsley … whatever. It was amazing just how different their lives would be now that they'd left the city behind.

You can escape the city, but you can't escape what happened there,
said a voice in his head. It sounded frighteningly like his dead father.
You can run away, but darkness has quick feet and large wings, and it will follow you.

There was a rustling off to his left. He looked up and was shocked to see a deer staring at him from the edge of the pine forest. Its moist dark eyes were like pools of India ink, its hide a sleek sorrel hue. It was a doe, its head absent of antlers, and it looked much bigger than Alan would have suspected a female deer to be. (Until now, the only deer he had ever seen had been on television or in magazines.) A world of difference from the diseased squirrels that scavenged
from trash cans and shat black marbles in the alleyways back in Manhattan …

“Hey,” he cooed. Made kissing noises. “Hey, there …”

At his heels, Jerry Lee whimpered and lowered his head on his front paws.

“Coward,” he said to the dog.

He took a tentative step in the doe's direction. Except for the rotating, bovine-like motion of its jaw as it chewed grass, the animal did not move. He hazarded another step, but this time his sneaker caught under another tangle of weeds; the ripping sound it made as he liberated his foot from the tangle was enough to send the doe bounding off into the forest. The last thing he saw was its white tail flitting good-bye.

In the deer's wake, Alan noticed a dark impression in the wall of trees. He trumped through the tall grass and realized he was looking at a parting in the trees, like the opening in a curtain. A rutted dirt path cut through the opening and, from what he could estimate, wound deep into the woods. Had the day been sunnier he might have been able to see farther into the woods, but as it was the woods were dense with shadows. He thought he could make out the shape of the deer arcing through the underbrush, obscured by shadows and the green-blue arms of evergreens.

It was a man-made path; he realized this the moment he stepped onto it and through the opening in the trees. The ground had been worn down to dirt from the traction of human feet. Around him, the world grew unusually quiet, the thickness of the inner firs providing natural insulation against outside noises. Even the quality of the air seemed
different: constricted somehow. Motionless.

Like being in a sealed tomb,
he thought. Then reconsidered:
Like being in outer space.

There was
one
sound, he noticed. But it took him several seconds to learn it was the sound of his own respiration. Then, a moment after that, the forest seemed to instantly come alive with an arrangement of bird caws, buzzing insects, the crunch of dead leaves underfoot—or, more accurately, under
paw
or
hoof.
Up ahead, the dirt path twisted through the trees, vanishing behind a thick stand of bluish firs so dense they practically formed a wall. The silvery sky was crisscrossed by a canopy of interlocking tree limbs.

He turned and beckoned to Jerry Lee to follow him, but the dog only whined and did not move from where he had hunkered down in the grass. Alan felt a pang of compassion for the old beast; a city dog all his life, Jerry Lee probably had no clue what to make of their new surroundings.

Alan turned around and moved farther down the path, having to bow his head several times to clear the overhanging limbs.
Good way to lose an eye,
he thought. When he came to the place where the path cut through the firs, he noticed a smooth white stone sitting at the apex of the path's bend. It was roughly the size of a football, and there was something carved into it: an upside-down triangle. Was it supposed to be an arrow instructing which way to go? Because the path led in only one direction—

A giant bird burst into flight no more than two feet in front of him, forcing a startled cry from his throat and causing him to stagger backward. He fell down hard on his ass, the right side of his face skimming the bark of the nearest tree. Fireworks exploded before his eyes, and his cheekbone felt as
though someone had addressed it with a swatch of sandpaper.

The bird cut easily through the tangled canopy of tree limbs overhead. Alan heard it squawking as it vanished into the air, its visage a blurred hieroglyphic approximation.

“Son of a bitch.” He brought one hand up to the side of his face. His right cheek burned and felt twice its normal size. When he fingered the tender spot just above his right eyebrow he winced. His fingers came away slick with blood. Nonetheless, he couldn't help but shake his head and grin like an asshole. He was such a goddamn city boy. What the hell was he doing out here in Bumfuck, North Carolina, anyway?

He returned to the house, Jerry Lee trailing behind him in a cloud of his own cowardice, hoping to locate the first-aid kit in one of the bathroom boxes without much difficulty. But when he opened the front door, he was surprised to find they had guests.

Heather stood in the middle of the living room holding a ceramic dish tented with tinfoil and a bottle of wine. Beside her stood a handsome couple and a girl about ten years old.

“Well, hey, here he is now,” said the man, a wide smile nearly cracking his face. He extended a hand to Alan. Alan shook it. “I'm Hank Gerski. This is my wife, Lydia, and my daughter, Catherine.”

“Alan Hammerstun. Hello.”

“Lord,” said Lydia Gerski. “What happened to your face?”

Alan pawed at the fresh wound as if he'd forgotten about it. “It's nothing. I was a little careless out in the yard.”

“Looks like someone sucker punched you good, partner,” Hank Gerski said.

“Violent trees around here.”

Hank laughed. Lydia cocked her head and smiled like someone out of an Ira Levin novel about creepily perfect housewives. Catherine twisted her hands together in front of her, looking just as out of touch and aloof as Heather.

“We saw the moving truck earlier and just wanted to welcome you both to the neighborhood,” Lydia said. She had a squeaky, birdlike voice.