Cradle Lake (23 page)

“Goddamn it.” A mouse's whisper.

Back in the kitchen, he replaced the knife in the butcher block. The knife's handle had imprinted itself on the palm of his right hand—he'd been squeezing it so tightly. He went around shutting off all the lights, then headed down the hall toward the bedroom—

—when someone grabbed his ankle.

He shrieked and stumbled backward in the dark, crashing against the opposite wall. The sound was like artillery fire in his head. He jerked his knee toward his chest …
and could feel something tugging back, tightening around his ankle, not wanting to let him go …

“Alan!” Heather flipped on the hall light and stood naked in the sudden blaze. She stared down at him. “What happened?”

“Something—,” he began but cut himself off. Breathing heavily, he propped himself up on his hands and looked down at his right ankle. “Oh, Jesus …”

A thin vine was wound around his right ankle. Alan's eyes followed it across the floor where it disappeared between the molding and the drywall. A strand no bigger than a length of spaghetti but strong as hell. A nervous laugh tickled the base of his throat.

Standing above him now, Heather looked petrified. “Goddamn it, what the hell are you doing?”

“It's nothing.” Laughing louder now, like a madman. “I swear.” He unwound the vine from his ankle. It came away willingly enough. Then he wrapped it around his fist and tugged it until it sprung free of the wall. Unlike the thicker vines, this one left no purplish fluid behind when it broke.

Heather crouched beside him, ran a hand through his sweaty hair. “You scared the shit out of me.”

“I thought I heard someone in the house.”

“Did you check?”

“Yeah. No one's here. Must have been a bad dream.” Although he still didn't believe it.

“Come on,” she said, hoisting him up off the floor. “Let's go back to bed.”

But Alan slept fitfully. And when he awoke, it was late morning and he was still exhausted. He remained in bed for some time, running one hand along the empty spot on Heather's side of the bed, while watching the trees bend in the wind.

He got up, pulled on a pair of sweatpants and a ratty old Clutch T-shirt, and examined his arms. His tattoos were fully gone now, the skin perfectly unmarred. It was as if he'd never had them.

He walked into the hallway, anticipating the smell of frying bacon and coffee percolating on the stove. He smelled none of that.

The kitchen was empty. There was no food cooking, no coffeepot jouncing away on the burner.

The living room was equally empty. He checked the doors and they were all locked. So were the windows. Peering outside, he saw the Toyota still in the driveway.

“Heather?”

He returned to the hallway and froze. There were no windows in the main hall, so it was dark even in midday—just as it was now. The only glimpse of light came from beneath the closed bathroom door.

It was silly—everything was fine between them now—
but his heart began to race nevertheless. It felt like he stood there, unmoving, for the passage of countless millennia.

Don't forget,
he reminded himself.
She fooled me once before. After the pills, she said she was okay and everything was fine for a while. Then, that night, with the bathroom door shut… the razor in the soap dish and the bloodstained bathwater…

(fooled me once before)

“Hon?”

Alan went to the door, tried the knob. Locked.

Panic shook him. For an instant, he forgot
how
to open a door.

Knocked with a fist. Fucking
pounded.

“Heather? Open the goddamn door! Heath—”

The door popped open. Heather stood on the other side, her face creased with concern. She was wearing a flimsy cotton nightdress and looked so small standing there in the harsh light of the bathroom. “What's wrong? Are you okay?”

He looked her up and down. He even grabbed her by the forearms. “Me? Christ, are
you
okay?”

“Were you calling me? I didn't hear you.”

“What were you doing in there?”

A wide smile broke across her face. She looked instantly stunning. Something turned over in his chest seeing her smile like that. Then she hugged him. He returned the embrace, more than just puzzled, until he noticed the white stick and the open package on the bathroom countertop.

“Congratulations,” she whispered in his ear. “You're gonna be a dad.”

Dr. Regina Crawford was tall, with short-cropped hair the color of polished silver and an edginess to her overall demeanor that called her sexuality immediately into question. But she was a frank and pleasant enough doctor who made Alan comfortable the moment he shook her hand.

“So you've had two miscarriages in the past,” Dr. Crawford said, flipping through a chart.

They were crowded together in a tiny examination room, Alan sitting as straight as an arrow in a chair against the wall while Heather, still in her paper gown, sat on a reclining, cushioned table covered in butcher's paper. Crawford leaned against a counter that could have used a good scrubbing.

“The doctors could never actually tell us why,” said Heather.

“How've you been feeling?” Crawford asked, motoring on.

“I've been feeling good. Strong.”

“And eating?”

“I've been eating well. Alan has taken over the cooking duties, too, and I couldn't be more thankful. Sometimes the smell of food cooking makes me violently nauseous.”

“And you've been keeping away from medical books?” Dr. Crawford cocked one slender black eyebrow. Her eyebrows appeared to have been drawn in with a grease pencil. “Been refraining from chitchat with other pregnant women to compare aches and pains and everything else?”

“Well,” Heather said, “I've been reading some stuff on the Internet but nothing I—”

“Bah.” Dr. Crawford held up one hand and scowled.

Heather grinned.

“Next thing you know, you'll be telling me you think you have malaria or rickets or X, Y, Z, whatever. If you want something to read, I can give you a list of materials.”

“Oh,” Heather said. “Okay.”

“So,” said Crawford, “you two want to have a look?”

After Heather had reclined on the table, Crawford switched on a TV monitor bolted to a stand and produced a cylindrical phallus, the tip of which she greased up with clear jelly. “This is going to feel about as comfortable as you might expect, honey, but try to bear with me.”

“I've done these before,” said Heather, and she shot Alan a glance.

He smiled and gave her a nod of approval.

The cylindrical phallus disappeared beneath Heather's paper gown. The black-and-white image on the TV monitor changed. Alan leaned forward in his seat. Something that looked like a clown's smiling, toothless mouth appeared.

“That's the cervix,” Dr. Crawford said.

The image readjusted. What Alan was looking at now was the vague suggestion of a well, or the opening to a well, and nothing but empty space beyond it. Blackness. For one terrifying moment, he wondered what he'd do if Heather was wrong—if the pregnancy test had been wrong—and they weren't pregnant after all. What if the sonogram showed no baby, just an empty womb? What would the goddamn car ride home be like?

No,
he thought.
I feel it. It's different now. It has to be. Because I couldn't take any more heartache …

(dead baby plastic biohazard bag blood dead)

He noticed something clinging to the top of the well-like opening on the screen. It looked like a partially bent finger.

“There you go,” Crawford said matter-of-factly. “There's your little peanut.”

Alan leaned even closer. “Look at that …” To him, the relief sounded all too evident in his voice.

“And there,” Crawford said, pointing to a fluttering diode on the screen, “is the heart. See?”

“Yes.” Heather was crying. “Yes.”

Crawford withdrew the horrible plastic phallus. There was bloody mucus on the tip. “I can print you off some photos.”

“Thank you,” Heather said. “That would be wonderful.”

Crawford smiled with half her mouth. “Your due date is June 15.”

Afterwards, they had lunch at a quaint bistro. They talked little about the baby, though Alan could tell from the glow
in Heather's eyes that the baby was all she was thinking about. He had seen that glow before. He hoped things would end differently this time.

And he thought,
Maybe this time I will become a father. Maybe this time things will take—things will work out—and I will do all the fatherly things I've always thought I'd do, the things my own father didn't do for me.

As they drove home, Heather found an alternative rock station on the radio and leaned back in the passenger seat as if she now ruled the world.

“Oh, God,” Heather intoned, leaning forward in the passenger seat, straining the seat belt. “Will you
look
at those things?”

But Alan was already looking. He eased down on the brake until the car came to a stop midway up their driveway.

Buzzards were everywhere: in the grass, on the porch railing, the roof. The sheer number of them caused the gutters to sag. There must have been twenty-five, thirty of the fuckers.

“Where did they come from?” Heather rolled up her window, as if in fear the giant birds might swarm the car and try to get in. “They look like monsters.”

“The woods.” His throat was dry. “I've seen them before.”

“There's so many.”

“Wait in the car.”

She clamped a hand around his wrist. “What are you doing?”

“I'm going to scare them off.”

She wasn't even looking at him; still leaning forward in the seat, she was silently counting the birds that had
gathered like a plague upon the house. There was even one perched at the top of the stone chimney. When it spread its wings it looked like something prehistoric. Heather gasped.

He opened the driver's door and stepped outside.

“But what are you gonna
do?”
Heather called after him.

“Just wait in the car,” he said and shut the door.

Outside, all was eerily silent. Alan could smell burning leaves in the distance and the crisper scent of the trees on the wind. But there was another smell beneath those—a decaying, fecal odor that he knew was coming from the carrion birds. The ones closest to him in the tall grass, crouched like black-feathered tombstones, shuffled closer. They made shrill noises that sounded nearly mechanical. He noticed whitish-gray shit splattered in dried clumps on their feathers.

He waved his arms. “Beat it!”

Several of the birds on the rooftop spread their accordion wings and trilled like alarm clocks.

“Alan,” Heather said, leaning over the driver's seat and speaking through the partially opened window, “should I honk the horn?”

He nodded.

She honked. Repeatedly.

The sound did nothing.

Get the hell out of here, you filthy fuckers.

He leaned in the window and pulled the keys from the ignition. Again, Heather asked him what he was doing but he didn't respond. He went immediately to the rear of the car and popped the trunk. Inside, beneath the spare, was an emergency roadside kit. He snatched it up and cracked
open the lid. Sifting through jumper cables, a jack and tire iron, a fire-retardant blanket, and some first-aid equipment, he located what he was looking for: road flares. They looked like miniature sticks of dynamite.

Alan grabbed two and lit them. Purple fire exploded from the top of each stick, raining down like fireworks on his fisted hands. The sticks grew instantly hot.

He hurried around the front of the car, waving the flares like a madman. The birds nearest to him squawked and unfurled their shit-splattered wings. They were as large as dogs up close, their necks and heads like the curved rusted spigots of European fountains. He could see their eyes, too, and they were yellowed, bleary smears with dark pupils like chips of obsidian at the center.

“Go!” he shrieked. “Get out of here!”

The birds closest to him retreated into the tall grass toward the house. As he continued closing the distance, they flapped their great wings and rose off the ground in unison. On the porch, several of the vultures leered at him, their tapered, smoke-colored beaks hanging open as if on broken hinges.

Winding back his right arm, he flung one of the flares onto the porch.

The attack incited a cacophony of discordant cries from the creatures as they leapt almost
catlike
off the porch railing and into the grass. Again, their great wings unraveled and began pumping. They were ungainly and implausible looking, but they all somehow managed to climb into the air and take off over the nearest line of trees. For a second, the mass of them completely blotted out the sun.

“Jesus,” he breathed, watching them go. His mouth tasted sour.

Only the one on the chimney remained. The thing was plucking at something on the roof—what Alan initially mistook for a snake. But when the buzzard raised its head, the length of the snakelike thing trailing from both corners of its beak, Alan knew unequivocally that the monstrous bird had one of those thick vines in its mouth.

For a moment he contemplated chucking the second flare at it. But then he thought about the roof catching on fire and hesitated.

Atop the chimney, the large bird eyed him—

Son of a bitch, it's like the fucker's mocking me …

—then spread its wings. Only it didn't fly away immediately. It remained perched there, its talons scratching the crumbling stone chimney, its eyes never leaving Alan. Startlingly, it emitted a high-pitched, strident cry that shook the marrow of Alan's bones. Then it flew off the chimney and disappeared over the trees.