HIGHWATER: a suspense thriller you won't be able to put down (33 page)

Tom looked down the driveway, the way they had come in. He listened to Jim reiterate his instructions into the phone, with the same calm voice he had used at Fletcher Allen, there in the parking lot with the cameraman from News Channel 10 lensing the whole thing, along with the reporter who’d had his pants rolled up as he had poked a yard stick in Lake Champlain the morning before. If anyone came beyond Donna’s Road, if they attempted to turn down the Kingston driveway, Jim calmly explained, he would kill his hostages, doing the child last.

Tom listened to the thudding of the helicopter, somewhere not far off, but staying out of sights. The air smelled of woodsmoke and exhaust, but beneath those odors was another smell, like the garage of his boyhood, where oil dripped onto the concrete floor from the old Ford, and the garbage bins leaked their foul discharge. A rotten eggs smell.

Christopher picked up the child. “Okay?” he asked the baby boy.

“Okay,” the boy said.

Christopher brought his hand to the child’s face and wiped his thumb just under Caleb’s eyes, where the gunk had been. Christopher smiled. He turned to Maddy and smiled at her, too. His clothes dripped onto the ground.

Christopher turned and touched Elizabeth’s eyes. He scowled at the odd, translucent disks which covered them.

Christopher caught Tom’s eye, and both of them at last turned to watch Jared Kingston. Jared was walking towards the house, a man just recently awakened from deep sleep, pulling at his pants, holding the trooper’s Glock in one hand, running the other through his matted, dark curly hair. He glanced back. His eyelids had gone a darker shade of purple. Even his eyes themselves seemed to have changed shape. They were longer, more almond, narrowed, his nostrils flared like an animal’s. Jared stopped, seemed to think better of it, and turned towards the shed just off to the side.

“Jared,” Tom called. “I wonder if we could go in your house and dry off. Maybe all get a chance to talk. Could we do that?”

Jared stopped again. Christopher and Tom watched his back, waiting. Tom snuck a glance at Jim, who had gotten back into the Caprice and was still on the phone, his head lowered, his expression hard to read.

Jared stood in front of the shed. Tom wondered what was really in that shed.

“Whatever,” said Jared.

“Christopher,” Tom said quietly, but the young man already seemed to be in step with what Tom was thinking.

“I’ll keep them with me. I think you have your hands full out here with the officer. We’ll go in with Jared, just have a kind of family discussion.”

Tom half expected Christopher to wink, but the young man didn’t. Instead, he added, “Good to see you again, Tom.”

Maddy needed no prompting either, efficient as ever, she took Caleb from Christopher’s arms and went towards the house, a dutiful nursemaid. Tom remembered hearing about her at Little Rock; you never had to tell Madeline Kruger twice. In fact, you never had to tell her once — she told you.

Jared went over to them with a desultory gait, the Glock swinging in his grip, his eyes on the ground. He headed up the stairs to the porch, paused, looked around, looked into the sky, and the trees. Tom watched him.

The treetops, the branches. Looking for movement. Something hopping from one bough to the next. Calling, its voice like cornhusks scraping together.

Then Jared went in, and Christopher followed.

“I hope there’s a bathroom in here,” Tom heard Maddy say from just inside the kitchen.

Tom walked around the front of the Caprice, watching Jim — he could only see the big man from the nose down, through the front windshield. He saw Jim’s lips move as he spoke into the small phone engulfed by his hand.

Tom glanced down the driveway again.
They won’t wait long,
he thought. But Tom found himself wondering if it was really the pursuing law enforcement Jim was speaking to, or someone else altogether.

CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE

Jared walked through the kitchen with his head down. He stopped and looked over his shoulder at the child and Liz.

“What’s wrong with her?”

Christopher stood just inside the kitchen, in front of the storm door. He was holding Liz’s hand, her eyes sealed behind the discs. Maddy had taken Caleb with her into the bathroom.

“She’s been poisoned.”

“Poisoned? The kid seems alright.”

“Yes,” said Christopher. “He’s a little different. She’s been put to sleep, sort of. They’ve been working on you, too.”

Jared grunted. He started to walk out of the kitchen, towards the hall and the stairs. Then he paused again. With the same lackluster quality to his voice, his head rounding his shoulder to look, he said, “Oh yeah, you wanted to talk. You can have her.”

“You’ll become like them,” said Christopher.

Now Jared turned all the way around and looked at Christopher from under his hooded eyes.

“You’ll burn. When it takes you, you burn. All the rain coming down can’t stop the burning. And when you come out the other side, you’re shrunken. You’re body bloated, your slick feathers coated with ash. You’ll appear different to different people, as obsessions, as fears. You’ll come to them in dreams, but your natural state will become defective.”

Jared regarded Christopher, his head lowered, the gun in his twitchy grip. Christopher paced slowly back and forth in the kitchen, dripping, making a puddle.

“This sort of thing . . . this sort of thing might happen after you die. At times in our world, most of the time, it happens after you die. Where you go. At times like these though, these little voids in between . . . now it can happen to you while you’re still here.”

Jared licked his chalky lips. “What’s so special about now?”
“This is the passing of an Age.”

Jared grunted again. He reached up and scratched at his ear, then wiped at his nose with the back of his hand. Then he straightened up, unfurled his spine, and lifted his head. He was about to speak, but then his attention was snared by something else.

“Do you hear that?”

For a moment Christopher saw the little boy in Jared, the remnants of innocence, spoiled, as with everyone.

Then it was gone. A brief ringing in the air, but not like the sound accompanying Christopher and his ilk, but something else. Sickly sweet. Like a child’s toy with winding-down batteries.

“I hear it,” said Christopher. “Listen to me Jared.” He took a couple of steps, Elizabeth in tow. “This is your last chance.”

“My last chance?” Jared cocked his head to the side. From the other room, Christopher heard the toilet flush, the water in the sink start to run.

“You had your chance with Investigator Milliner, but you lied. You had your chance on the ferry, but you dismissed it. Now you have a chance, here, now, your last one . . . Jared, don’t do it.”

Christopher held out his hand.

“You can be like us. It’s better than the alternative.”

“What do you care?”

“I made a promise,” said Christopher mildly.

“A promise?”

“That’s what I am.”

“A promise to pay down a debt. That’s what I heard.”

“Where did you hear that?”

Jared scowled, as if he didn’t quite know, or didn’t quite remember. Christopher understood. At times like these, people’s heads could become like AM radio.

“What we’re doing is atoning,” said Christopher. “There is no perfect state; we don’t see it, none of us, until the very end. The best we can do in the meantime is to atone.”

Jared looked at Elizabeth. He opened his mouth, closed it, and then opened it again.

“She’s a traitorous slut,” he said at last.

She was still standing just inside the door, her mouth expressionless below the scales covering her eyes.

“I can’t control you. But I’m asking you. Don’t do it. Look at her: she’s defenseless,” said Christopher.

He watched as Jared’s eyes dragged over her from top to bottom, and back up again. He licked his lips and wiped a fist beneath his nose and across his mouth.

“What’s a defective?”

“A scavenger. The iris bleeds in their eyes. A man, like you, if he succumbs. A griffin, or demon.”

Outside, the low morning sun, peaking over the ridge of trees, managed to shoot in from the front windows, through the hall and into the kitchen, so that a band of spangled light briefly crossed the yellow kitchen floor. Jared stood, swaying slightly on his feet. A thin spindle of drool hung from his lower lip. He swiped it away with a knuckle. He looked outside, into the dancing sunlight filtering in through the trees, turning the misty remnants of the dawn’s storm into diamonds. Then the thickening clouds, the gathering storm, swallowed it up again. A noise grabbed his attention, his head jerked, and he listened. His lips moved soundlessly.

Then Jared looked at Christopher directly, those eyes stretched back, the brown color in them fading, becoming liquid. Disappearing.

“She’s a cunt,” said Jared. “I’m going to kill her.”

Christopher heard the rumble of thunder. It would be a warning squall like these others had been, a brief spate, really, of bad weather. Snow and rain and back to snow. Nothing in comparison with the storms to come. The thing in the pond had thrashed and rolled with delight when the waters rose. Before long, the whole area would be both submerged and burning. Like it had been millions of years before, Christopher knew. When the ice had carved swaths so wide and deep they had gone on for hundreds of miles. Scooping clay and basalt and sparkling garnets. Scooping red rock from the bowels of the earth, only to cover it in cobalt water, stretching on like the sea, stretching over the landscape formed an epoch before by boiling, oozing magma.

The young men stood staring into each other’s eyes. Even across the kitchen, Christopher could see that the brown of Jared’s eyes had emulsified, so that the irises fissured into the whites.

Jared’s upper lip peeled back into a snarl. “You won’t try and stop me?”

“No,” said Christopher, “I can’t. But, you have to let me do something first.”

“What?”

Christopher let go of Elizabeth’s limp hand. He reached into the pocket of his long coat and pulled out the coins, which clinked together in his grip. He opened his hand and held out the shining disks for Jared to see.

“
Getragen
,” said Christopher, and saw the flash in the Kingston kid’s morphing eyes, and knew, at last, whom he was speaking to. “Let’s place a bet.”

CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO

Tom watched Jim hang up the cell phone and prepare to get out of the Caprice, the trooper running a hand through his high-and-tight hair. The sound of the helicopter had faded, but the grumbling of fresh thunderheads continued, drifting closer.

When the car door opened, Tom swallowed, feeling a dry click in his throat, feeling the first chill of doubt in his bones. Or maybe it was just the rain.

A heavy boot came down onto the wet dirt, followed by the other, and then Jim Cruickshand rose, seeming bigger to Tom Milliner than he ever had before.
He’s not hunching
, thought Tom, picturing Jim as he normally stood, that stoop beginning two-thirds of the way up his spine, pitching him slightly forward so that he looked down at most everything.

Jim shut the door to the Caprice, hitched up his belt and holstered his firearm there along the left side of it. He did not so much as glance down the driveway to where a whole society of law enforcement likely sat just beyond sight, growing impatient, nor did he look to the sky, where the clouds had glued together once again, threatening a fresh deluge of freezing rain. He merely looked at Tom, as one man cursorily making eye contact with another during events which were beyond them. Then Jim turned his square head and looked at the Kingston house, and past it.

Jim walked around to the back of the vehicle, and Tom let the trooper’s tall frame sweep past before beginning to head in that direction himself. He intended to follow, to keep an eye on Jim while continuing to concede him authority and control.

Tom wondered if Jim Cruickshand had truly gone crazy, had finally cracked after months of people watching him out of the corners of their eyes. Tom knew they talked about him, cops in bars speaking freely about Jim when sober propriety had dissolved into a few drinks at Guildersleeve’s or the Lanes. They brought up Jim’s father, in the hospital, so marinated in his homemade gin that the medical staff had induced a coma in order that the old, pickled hayfart didn’t die of the DTs while he detoxed.

They gossiped about Tom, too, he was sure. Tom imagined that they scoffed at his lack of education. They snorted about his skirting the draft. But with Jim, well, with Jimmy they would say he was the bad apple whose worm had finally turned.

Tom watched the broad back of the man as he unlocked the trunk of the Caprice, pulled out Kingston’s A-bolt rifle, and then, toting it cavalry-style with the stock up against the front of his shoulder, the oak grip resting in his palm, walked away from the car, towards the house.

“Jim . . .” Tom fell in beside him.

Jim looked at the shed. He spoke quietly, as if not wanting to be overheard. “I knew it was a trick,” he said.

“The girls?”

“Nothing in that shed but tools and an old refrigerator,” Jim said.

Tom followed him along the worn path around the side of the Kingston home, the wind scattering some rotted, previous-year’s leaves, the thunder growling in the near distance. Tom’s eyes lifted to the trees once more.

They stopped at the front of the house by the pond.

Tom gazed down at the pond. He half thought of getting Rory Blaine back on the phone and asking him to send the picture he’d taken the day before. To verify, maybe, once and for all, if Tom had his right mind intact. If what he was seeing was not some sort of hallucination or delusion.

The pond was so high that the edges of the bowl of earth it rested in had disappeared. Trees grew out of its perimeter. It must have been at least forty feet deep in the middle.

There in the center something floated, oil-black and throbbing. It seemed instantly to try and instill itself into Tom’s mind, to force itself upon him. This made little sense to one side of Tom, to the skeptical Investigator Milliner, that a floating object, a piece of some huge fish in the center of Macmaster Pond was psychically trying to wriggle into his brain like some mental Guinea worm.

Another part of him understood completely.

Tom looked over at Jim, who was scowling out over the water. Was Jim seeing the same thing? Feeling the same thing? Been
talking
to the damned thing on his cell phone?

The teenage boy in Tom responded. Tom had once dived into that pond, seeking out the bottom, but had never reached it. Brave as Tom had been as a boy, concerning all the usual stuff — he had still turned back from the bottom, not because he had run out of air, but because it had been terrifying. The pond was always so black, so full of life that little sun penetrated, and the brown-black bottom offered no reflection back to illuminate anything. It was, and always had been, a dark pond, nothing like Pine Pond or Little Owl, which were more like lagoons. Macmaster was murk.

Still, all the times he’d dived in, with the fear that he
would
encounter something down there in the thick black, that his hand would brush something horrible and obscure and alive — he never had. He’d imagined he had, once or twice, with the hallucinogen in his body, the acid he and Maddy and Jim had taken, but nothing that Tom could ever really verify. But the pond
had
contained something then, Tom now knew. It had harbored something then, and harbored something now.

It had been buried for centuries, millennia, just beneath the pond floor, until something —natural gas drilling, an earthquake, an act of God — had set it free. Tom imagined the bubbles coming to the surface, as air thousands, millions-of-years trapped had now been released.

* * *

As he at last accepted the truth, Tom coughed. He coughed and he kept coughing. He put a shaking fist to his mouth and gagged and coughed into it. The world filled with dancing dots, spinning confetti.

Tom dropped to one knee. The spasms racked his body, electric heat tearing through his lungs like long fingernails. It burned. He coughed and he spat, and looked through his watering eyes to see blood spattered in the dirt beneath him.

He looked at the pond, realizing something. At that moment, the black shape submerged itself again, with little flourish, simply disappearing below the glassy surface.

Tom felt an arm around him. Jim was helping him to his feet. Jim’s hands were large and powerful, his grip terribly strong. He righted Tom, and clapped him on the back.

The trooper was looking back out over the water. His mouth curved up in a half-smile. It was a friendly smile, Tom thought, though discordant.

“I fished you out before, I’ll fish you out again,” said Jim.

“What?”

Jim pointed to the pond. “I pulled you out of there, stinking drunk. You don’t remember? Come on. Mouthful of water. Maddy gave you mouth-to-mouth. You ought to remember
that
. You coughed and sputtered for hours.”

Tom didn’t know what to say. Slowly, testing his rubber-feeling legs, he walked the few steps to the fieldstone path that now led directly into the softly lapping water. An Adirondack chair and footrest sat by the path. Folded on the footrest was a blanket, and sitting on that, a glass. Tom went over and examined it. Stephanie’s glass. One of her good crystal ones. The one Christopher had taken. He picked it up.

“What is it, Jim? What are we doing here?”

The thunder rumbled again, getting closer.

“It lives in there,” said Jim. “Did you see it?”

Tom felt the weight of the glass in his palm. He set it back down on the blanket. “I did.”

“Can you hear it?”

Tom listened. He heard the wind soughing through the pines, and then another roll of thunder, slow and ponderous, like a bowling ball at the Lanes, where the cops did their gossipy jawboning. He looked at the edge of the forest above the pond, it stretched between there and Lake Colden, the little lake across from the RRMC. Above the trees, the morning light retreated, swallowed by the encroaching clouds. The sun glowed like fire on jagged tree-topped horizon. There were two helicopters hovering in the orange light, from here they were the size of flies.

It was like Tom imagined Vietnam.

“I don’t hear it.”

“It talks to me,” said Jim.

“Jim,” said Tom, with sudden vehemence he hadn’t expected, “you have a battalion of police waiting to take you down. You’ve injured people. You’ve kidnapped the Kingston boy, the girl, the child . . .” He trailed off. He feared another coughing fit. His hand went instinctively to his mouth.

Jim raised his bushy eyebrows so that they almost disappeared up under his wide-brimmed hat.

“I know.”

Tom shook his head and put a hand on his balding head. His scalp was cold and clammy to the touch. For a moment he had the feeling that, were a drink in his hand right now, everything would be better, more manageable, in perspective.

“After Steph left,” said Tom, feeling as though he were listening to his own words rather than choosing them, “I let it fall apart. My job’s been hanging by a thread. I’ve thought about throwing in the towel. To all of it. But something has kept me . . . here. I’ve been on the minor circuit, fighting little fights, you know? I’ve been licking my wounds, nursing myself back to health, trying to return as a better fighter than before, a better man, not knowing how.”

He looked at the center of the pond.

“And then this comes along, Jim, whatever this is.”

He slapped his hand against his thighs, then put them in his pockets.

In his right pocket was a chain and locket. Belonging to Elizabeth.

He kept looking straight out, standing next to Jim. It was around seven in the morning, but the sun had been swallowed by the clouds marching east, giving them one luminous area, as if it seined through volcanic ash in a wasteland.

“And I know you’ve had it rough, Jim, I do.”

“It hasn’t always been a party,” said Jim, glancing at Tom.

“But you’re the guy I’ve always known would get down off his horse and chase the beast on foot, if he had to.”

Jim laughed.

Tom took his hands out of his pockets. “So tell me. Just level with me, Jim. What are we doing?”

When Jim spoke next, his words were clear, low, but not whispered, distinct and defined. Each one rang in Tom’s ears like the tone of a small bell, or a note in a song. He thought of crosswords, and he visualized all the across and down words rearranging into lines, the boxes, the cages of each letter fading.

Jim said: “I’ve been hearing the thing at the bottom of the pond for a while now. Six months, maybe. It started about the time of a drunk stop I backed up.”

Jim jerked his head at the house behind them.

“The Kingston kid was involved. That’s where I first saw him. Where I first knew, somehow. I can hear that voice now, only now it’s in the background, like behind the sound of waves, like an ocean. I think that kid hears it, too. Been hearing it.”

“What has it been saying?”

Tom searched Jim’s eyes. Somehow, he stayed in it then, stayed there with Jim, without the benefit of a drink, or any drug — though it was, in a way, like the connection they had made so many years ago. There on the perimeter together, eyes dilated, the stars coursing through and between them.

Jim’s pupils were flints of obsidian. Tom saw the lenses of those eyes shifting, swiveling, as he looked back over the rippled, wind-blown surface of the pond. Helplessly, it seemed, Tom’s own eyes searched the pond, always drawn back to the center, as if magnetized.

“It’s been saying it’s time to fish or cut bait,” Jim said.