Migrators (35 page)

“You need some help?”

“No. Thanks,” Alan said. Joe watched him as he swung his legs to the floor. He winced at the new throbbing from his foot. He pushed to his feet. “Hand me that crutch, please.”

Joe gave him the crutch. Alan took it and realized he was still holding Joe’s clothes.
 

“Put these somewhere safe, okay?”

He handed the clothes to Joe. His son looked puzzled and then took them to the other room. Alan crutched his way to the bathroom and looked at his pajamas. His shirt was embroidered with “Kingston Village Inn.” He used the facilities and then crutched his way back to the bed and sat down on the edge with the last of his energy. His head swam. Alan found his way under the sheet and drifted back to sleep.

He woke again to another knock at the door. This was the light, insistent knock of his wife—he would know it anywhere.

“Joe?” Alan asked. His son was already headed for the door.
 

Liz came in with two big bags.

“Who wants Indian food?”

“Did you get me gaboosh?” Joe asked.

Liz smiled. “It’s not called that.”

“I know,” Joe said. He took the bags to the desk and started pulling cartons from inside.

“You can eat in bed, Alan,” Liz said.

“No, thanks,” Alan said. He made his way from bed to the table next to the window. He pushed open the curtains and looked down on a strip of grass next to the lake. The view was beautiful. Technically, this wasn’t the same lake that emptied into the stream near their house. This was the next lake up in the chain. Somewhere near the southwest corner of this body of water, a little stream spilled over a dam into their lake. Alan sat down. He propped his leg up on the edge of the bed to relieve some of the throbbing from his foot.
 

Liz brought over a plastic container and set it in front of Alan. The spices smelled wonderful.

“I’ve got a bag down in the car with clothes for us.”

“What?” Alan asked.

Liz took a seat. Joe was still working on dishing out his food—picking out all his favorites.

“Your friend Bob called me after he left here and offered to come pick me up. The two of us went to the house so I could get my car. I figured while we were there, I might as well get us some clothes.”

“Liz, I wish,” Alan started.

“Look, I know you think it’s dangerous, but I didn’t go alone. I had Bob with me. The house is a bit of mess, but everything seems to be in order. They’ve got most of the roads open again except for the big washout. They said on the news that it might take a couple of weeks before that road opens again.”

“I don’t want you going there,” Alan said.

“What? Forever?” Liz asked. She lifted a forkful of rice to her mouth and caught some of it in her hand as it fell.

“It could be dangerous,” Alan said.

“I know. I understand, Alan. That’s why I was careful. Bob and I agreed—it looks like whatever was there is gone.”

Alan sighed. “How can we know? We didn’t know anything was there to begin with.”

Liz frowned and tilted her head a little.
 

“What are you saying, Alan?”

“Just that it’s dangerous. Maybe.”

“Understood—that’s why I was careful. I didn’t go alone. I went with your friend—the same thing you did last night, right?”

“That was an emergency.”

“Today I had to wear borrowed sweatpants into Sears so I could buy this lovely pantsuit you see on me right now. Your son is currently wearing someone else’s clothes, and you’re wearing hotel pajamas. I think having something to wear was a bit of an emergency as well,” Liz said. She abandoned her fork and picked at her food with delicate fingers.

“Fine,” Alan said. “But can we agree that we will go together next time?”

“Yes,” Liz said.

“And that we won’t move back until after Halloween?”

“I don’t know, honey. We’ve got off-season rates here, but this place is a bit pricey for a whole week, don’t you think?”

“Then somewhere else. We can go to that hotel near the highway,” Alan said. “That’s cheap, right?”

“Okay,” Liz said. “I’ll check into it tomorrow. The convention center is right down the street from there, so it might be full depending on whether there’s a show, but I’ll find out.”

“Is that the one next to the movies?” Joe asked.

“Yes,” Alan said. “We could walk over and see a movie while your mom is at work.”

“Minh has my schedule down to almost nothing next week, so maybe I can come too,” Liz said.

“Even better,” Alan said.

X • X • X • X • X

Alan got into bed when Liz turned out the lights, but he couldn’t sleep. It felt like he’d been asleep for a week. He stared at the glowing numbers on the clock. Almost a whole day had passed since his trip to the hospital, and his body felt better already. His eyes didn’t sting or itch. The pills kept his foot to a dull throb. When Liz’s breathing evened out, Alan slipped out of bed. He hopped over to the desk and sat on the rigid chair.

Alan turned on the desk lamp. It had two settings. He chose “Dim.”

He pulled Rick’s book under the small circle of light. Liz stirred and Alan froze. Her slow breathing resumed and Alan turned his attention back to the book. The cover was worn and dirty. There was no title on the cover or spine. It crackled as he open the cover and turned to the title page. In ornate letters, a single word decorated the page—“Diary.”

Alan turned the page.

The text was faded and difficult to read. After squinting at it for several seconds, Alan puzzled out the first line.
 

“July 7
th
.”

What year?

“Father has been gone for two weeks. Mother didn’t hoist the pig properly when she bled it. We ate as much as we could, but most of the meat went bad.”

What does this have to do with anything?

Alan flipped through the pages.

“December 13
th
. It’s so warm out today—we played in the yard after dinner. Branny made a song about a field mouse. He asked me to write it down, but I forgot.”

Alan set the book up on its spine and let it open to where it would. The book opened to a spot about halfway through.
 

“October 25
th
. Mother said she’ll bring them to us tonight. She said I would do the same for my daughter, so I should write down the words. Mother’s writing is indecipherable. She said that Father would recite a verse, and then she would speak, and then it will be my turn.”

Under the Father heading, there was a short verse.

X • X • X • X • X

We open the night and call with a flame.

The darkness, the wind, the water, and pain.

We welcome collectors of wisp and air.

We discard our virtue, our pride, and shame.

The mothers and fathers of spite, beware.

No longer are drawn or desire to pair.

These cousins will bring and then take our name.

So come to our light and grant us your care.

X • X • X • X • X

Alan read the verse twice. He searched his confused memory, trying to recall if he’d heard those words the night before.

“What are you doing?” Liz asked, her voice thick with sleep.

“Nothing, honey,” Alan said. “Just reading.”

O
CTOBER
26

W
HEN
A
LAN
pulled up, Bob was outside, working in the yard.

“Hey, how’s the cripple?” Bob asked as Alan got out of the car. “I thought you were supposed to be on crutches.”

“I ditched them,” Alan said. He leaned against the door of his Toyota.

“I see you’ve been back to the house?” Bob asked, gesturing at Alan’s car.

“Yeah, just for a couple of things.”

Bob nodded.

“We’re down at American Suites now,” Alan said. “We moved there today. The Inn was working our budget pretty hard.”

“How long are you staying there?”

“Until the end of the month at least. I don’t know. Joe goes back to school a week from Monday. So maybe we’ll move back next weekend. Still not sure.”

“You think something might happen?” Bob asked. “More trouble?”

Alan looked at the sky. It was a nice afternoon—blue skies with a few puffy white clouds for decoration. The day had warmed into the sixties even though they’d seen frost on the grass that morning.
 

“You want to take a walk?” Alan asked.

“I’d be happy to. Are you sure you’re up to it?”

“As long as we don’t get too crazy,” Alan said. He motioned towards the path that led to the snowmobile trail.

In a few months,
Alan thought,
this place might not seem so secluded.

The snowmobile trail looked like it was going to be a major thoroughfare once the snow hit. Another team of eager trail riders had been through with chainsaws and widened the trail even more. Alan and Bob walked down the hill, smelling the scent of freshly trimmed pines. Alan rolled his left foot around the edge with each step to minimize the pressure on his toe. Even with care, the stitches throbbed. He’d skipped his painkillers that morning—he didn’t like the idea of driving while doped up.

“I want to see how the beaver pond looks since the storm,” Alan said.

Bob nodded and stuffed his hands in his pockets as they walked.

“So how much of that book did you read?” Alan asked.

“All of it,” Bob said. “I was waiting around in the hospital to find out how your surgery went, and then when I got home I couldn’t get to sleep. I read it twice, actually.”

“Did you make sense of it?”

“Sophia’s entries were tough to decipher. Marie made a little more sense. I didn’t have any problems at all reading Violet’s entries, except for those little hearts she put over each J.”

Alan laughed.

They reached the bottom of the hill. As they turned left, Alan saw the devastation from the flooding and destruction of the beaver dam. What used to be a pond was now a muddy mess. The water was only a thin stream between two wide banks of spongy dirt. The beaver lodge was in ruins as well. Alan wondered if the beavers had drowned in the rain.

“What did you think of it?” Bob asked.
 

“I’d rather hear your perspective first,” Alan said. “I think my judgement might be a little clouded.”

“Okay,” Bob said. “Want to sit?”
 

He motioned at a couple of big rocks that sat near what used to be the pond’s shoreline. Alan followed him over there.

“I think Sophia started the diary because her mother couldn’t write. I don’t know if the father could. Buster said his father used to read books all the time, so if he wasn’t lying about that, then I guess the father could. Anyway, it looked to me like Sophia was given the task of documenting the processes, so they could move them from an oral tradition to something a little more rigorous.”

“Rigorous,” Alan said with a smirk.

“But Sophia used the diary for more than just documentation. She wrote down quite a bit about her life—she talked about getting married so young, healing people, and then eventually about having a daughter and when her daughter was taken away from her,” Bob said.

“What else did you notice about Sophia?”

“What do you mean?”

“Mental illness?” Alan asked. “Her rants about suicide, and how she talked about amputating her own fingers?”

“Yeah,” Bob said. “But those things happened after they took Marie away from her. It was pretty clear that she was devastated by losing her daughter. I really wasn’t surprised by the change in her mental state. They never told her it was coming and then one day they just took her daughter away to be raised by someone else. I think that would unbalance most mothers.”

“What about her healing?”

“Yeah, I don’t know exactly what to think about the healing. It’s difficult—she didn’t really know what was wrong with the people they brought to her, except in the couple of cases she wrote about where they were physically deformed. I liked the description one of them had. Was it Marie or Violet who suggested that tumors have their own souls?”

“Marie,” Alan said, nodding.

“She said that one of her patients who had a brain tumor was having conversations with it.”

“Perkins,” Alan said. “Dudley Perkins.”

“Yes,” Bob said. “When Marie called the migrators to come take away Dudley’s brain tumor, he sang a song to bid farewell to his friend. That’s an interesting idea—the soul of a tumor. I wonder if anyone’s done a movie about something like that.”

“Cancer’s not a very sympathetic character,” Alan said.

“Despicable characters sometimes lead to good cinema,” Bob said.

“So do you believe any of that stuff from the book?” Alan asked.

“Well…” Bob said. He looked off across the ruins of the pond and thought for a minute before speaking again. “When I was reading it for the second time, I kept thinking how well it all fit. Buster described them as phantoms that fed on the remnants of human spirit. The book said that they would normally stay underground, but a woman with the right training could bring them to the surface to remove demons from human hosts. If you assume that by demons they mean cancer or illness, then it’s like using leeches to suck impurities from a person’s blood, right? One woman of each generation is trained to coax those creatures to the surface to cure people.”

“So you believe that whatever those things were, they perform some kind of psychic surgery?” Alan asked.

“No, not psychic. Maybe they excrete some acid or flesh-eating bacteria or something. Whatever it is, it can be used as a weapon, like on your foot. Or it can be used more precisely. The woman tames those things and makes them behave.”

“Welcome to Kingston Lakes, where logic and reason don’t apply,” Alan said.