The Vanishing (19 page)

She went into the bathroom, got a drink out of the faucet, then turned off the television and returned to bed. It took a while for her to fall asleep, and when she did, she dreamed of a black mountain honeycombed with caves, where snakelike monsters with shiny white penis heads popped out and screamed at her, their voices those of Holly and Maria and herself.

Thirteen

‘‘I’m glad you could come,’’ Jillian said. ‘‘I . . . I didn’t know what to do.’’

Brian walked into his mother’s house and gave his sister a quick hug. He was dead tired. Jillian had called at the end of a long, grueling day that had capped a long, grueling week, and Friday traffic had ensured that he had not made it to Bakersfield until nearly midnight. She’d said it was an emergency, so he hadn’t stopped off for dinner, and now he was tired
and
hungry.

‘‘Mom’s been out of her mind. I don’t know what to believe and what not to believe. She seems to think Dad’s come back and is, I don’t know,
stalking
her. She said she’s seen him a whole bunch of times and he’s threatening, and . . . and she’s just very scared.’’ Jillian paused. ‘‘She got another one of those letters, too.’’

That perked him up. ‘‘Can I see it?’’

‘‘I think you should see Mom first, let her know you’re here.’’

Brian looked at his watch. ‘‘She’s still awake?’’

‘‘I don’t think she’s slept in days.’’

Their mother was at the kitchen table, reading the Bible. She looked awful. She was wearing torn pajamas and a bathrobe, her hair was wild and her face was puffy, her eyes as red as an alcoholic’s after a particularly bad bender. He was shocked by her appearance but tried not to let it show. Just a few weeks ago, she’d been her usual prim and perfectly coiffed self; now she looked like a completely different person.

‘‘Hi, Mom,’’ he said.

She ignored him, kept reading.

‘‘Jillian says Dad came back again.’’ When she didn’t respond, he continued. ‘‘Do you have any idea why? Do you think he wants something?’’

She wasn’t answering, but she’d heard him. He could tell by the way her finger was shaking as it underlined the Bible verses she was so intently reading. She was scared.

And that made him scared.

Brian decided to leave it alone for a few moments. He was starving, for one thing, and he knew he’d be able to think better on a full stomach. He opened the refrigerator, taking out a carton of orange juice and a foil-covered plate that turned out to be fried chicken. ‘‘Where’s Del?’’ he asked. He hadn’t seen Jillian’s husband when he’d arrived, but he knew she wouldn’t have driven this far on her own.

His sister nodded toward the back of the house. ‘‘Asleep. It was a long trip.’’

Brian picked up a drumstick, slowly swiveling his neck to get the kinks out. ‘‘You’re telling me.’’

‘‘Sorry.’’

He waved her away. ‘‘Don’t be.’’ Biting into the drumstick, he poured himself a glass of orange juice. ‘‘Mom,’’ he said. ‘‘What’s going on? Why are you up this late?’’

‘‘He came home,’’ she said, her voice hushed. ‘‘I saw him through the window.’’

‘‘Did—’’

‘‘He comes home every night,’’ she told him. ‘‘I hear him out there. I see him. He’s
looking
for me.’’

There was such terrified conviction in his mother’s voice that goose bumps popped up on Brian’s own bare arms. ‘‘What do you think he wants? Have you tried talking to him?’’

‘‘No!’’ she shouted, so loudly that it made Brian and Jillian jump. She grabbed her Bible and ran out of the kitchen.

‘‘Now you see why I called you?’’ his sister asked.

Brian nodded tiredly. ‘‘Let me check out the letter,’’ he told her.

While she went to get it, he finished eating the drumstick and quickly downed the glass of orange juice. He washed the grease off his hands, drying them thoroughly before touching the paper. As before, the page was dirty and smudged, filled with wild symbols and strange pictographic characters. But this time, there were letters of the alphabet mixed in as well, recognizable vowels and consonants. He had no evidence to back this up, only a gut instinct, but it looked to him as though whoever had written this—

—had been trying hard to send a message, had been attempting to break through the alien language that had been imposed upon him and communicate in English.

Brian sat down at the table and studied the characters on the page. They were not arranged in lines or any particular order, and he tried reading left-to-right, right-to-left, up, down, sideways, but could make no sense of any of it. ‘‘Do you know if it came in an envelope or anything?’’ he asked, looking up.

Jillian shook her head. ‘‘I have no idea.’’

He carried the paper carefully out to the living room and placed it between the pages of a
Good Housekeeping
magazine that he laid on an end table close to the door, where he’d be sure to see it on his way out of the house. After the situation with his mom was straightened out, he was going to take it to Dr. LaMunyon and see if the professor couldn’t use it to help crack the code of that unfathomable language.

‘‘I think we should call Reverend Charles in the morning,’’ Jillian said. ‘‘Mom respects him. Maybe he can help us.’’ She took a deep breath, and Brian could tell that she was very close to tears. ‘‘I just don’t know what else to do.’’

He put his arm around her, held her tight. ‘‘We’ll get through this.’’

‘‘You think it’s really Dad?’’

He nodded slowly.

‘‘Part of me hopes that it is and part of me hopes that it isn’t, you know? I mean, I hope he’s alive, and I want to see him again, of course. But . . . what would we say to him after all this time? ‘Thanks for abandoning us’?’’

‘‘If he’s the way Mom describes him, I don’t think he’ll be doing much talking.’’

She waved him away. ‘‘That’s just Mom. She’s having some kind of breakdown or something. It doesn’t make any sense—’’

‘‘I believe it,’’ he said.

‘‘I don’t. Just look around. The house is a mess, the yard’s a jungle . . . Those weeds must be two feet high.’’

Brian’s pulse raced. ‘‘What did you say?’’

‘‘I said the house is a mess—’’

‘‘No. What about the yard?’’

‘‘You’ll see it for yourself in the morning. She must have fired the gardener and not hired anyone else. The place is a disaster.’’ She sighed in exasperation. ‘‘My point is that I think she needs help. Mental help. I think we should talk to Reverend Charles, even though this is probably way out of his league. If he can’t help, at least he might be able to direct us to someone who can.’’

But Brian was still thinking about the overgrown yard and Wilson’s theory that abundant vegetation was another piece in the puzzle. Such an idea had seemed nonsensicalat the time, but from this vantage point, it didn’t seem quite so stupid.

‘‘Hello!’’ Jillian said. ‘‘Earth to Brian. Are you even listening?’’

‘‘I am.’’

‘‘And?’’

‘‘And I don’t know that I agree with you that she needs mental help. But if she did, the last person I would go to is Reverend Charles. She sees far too much of him already, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he was the one who got her worked up into this state. You saw her sitting there reading the Bible.’’

‘‘She finds it comforting. You know, just because you don’t believe in anything doesn’t mean that other people can’t.’’

‘‘That’s not what I’m saying.’’

‘‘Then what
are
you saying?’’

‘‘Jesus, I feel like I’m talking to Mom.’’

Jillian glared at him. ‘‘Thanks a lot.’’

‘‘You know that’s not what I meant. Look, we’re all under a lot of stress here. Let’s try not to jump down each other’s throats over every little misstep.’’

Jillian sighed. ‘‘You’re right. I’m sorry.’’

‘‘It’s late. We’re all tired. Why don’t you go check on Mom, and if everything’s okay, we’ll go to bed, get some sleep, and see what things look like in the morning.’’

She started toward the hall, then stopped, turned around. ‘‘You really don’t think she needs help?’’

‘‘I think she probably did see Dad.’’

Jillian nodded, said nothing, then turned away and headed down the hall.

Their mom had crashed and lay dead asleep on top of her still-made bed. Jillian tucked her in, then said good night to Brian and went into the guest bedroom, closing the door quietly so as not to wake her husband. Brian took a couple of sheets from the linen closet, pulled out the couch in the living room, made up the sofa bed and lay down in his clothes. He had never felt so tired, but he could not seem to fall asleep. He counted sheep up to five hundred, tried to think of nothing, forced himself to breathe in a sleep rhythm, but nothing worked.

Finally, after a frustrating hour, following a single chime from the grandfather clock that could have signaled one o’clock or could have meant one thirty, he dozed off.

He was awakened by the sound of howling from outside in the front yard. The cries were wild and Brian could not tell if they were of joy or anguish, but they sounded as though they came from wolves or coyotes. He quickly scrambled out of the sofa bed and over to the window. There was another element present in those cries, something familiar that made his flesh crawl and filled him with dread. Opening the curtain, he peered out. It had started to drizzle in the hours since he’d arrived, and a sheet of tiny raindrops was visible in the dim yellow light of the streetlamps.

There was something else visible as well, something dark and shadowy that sprang from the overgrown bushes on the right side of the yard and leaped behind the pecan tree before disappearing.

Pulse racing, Brian pressed his face against the glass, trying to determine where the figure had gone. Jillian was right. The yard was a veritable jungle, and he didn’t know how he hadn’t noticed that on his way in. What had been a well-manicured lawn offset by a few nicely trimmed shrubs and trees was now a chaotic mess of untamed vegetation.

From off to the left, the figure leaped out again, passing closely in front of the window, and for the first time, Brian got a good look at him.

It wasn’t his dad.

It was Stephen Stewart.

The multimillionaire was naked and on all fours, bounding about like a wild animal. But that wasn’t the craziest thing about him. No, it was his body itself that provided the biggest shock. For even in this weak, diffused light, Brian could see that Stewart was hideously deformed, his back shiny and segmented, almost wormlike, while thick tufts of hair grew abundantly from the sides of his stomach. He was behaving like a lunatic, running from one side of the yard to the other, and every so often he would leap into the air and howl with a soul-deep ferocity that scared the holy hell out of him.

His heart pounding insanely in his chest, remembering the gruesome photos he’d seen of Stewart’s wife and son, Brian grabbed the phone and dialed 911.

There was a commotion in the hallway, and a second later Jillian rushed into the living room. ‘‘What is it?’’ she demanded, her voice frightened. Next to her, Del was wide-awake.

‘‘I told you!’’ their mother screamed. She pushed through them and ran to the window, holding the curtains closed in her fist and peering out through a small open sliver.

Brian quickly explained to the police dispatcher what was happening and where, but when she asked him to remain on the line, he hung up and went over to his mother. She was shaking her head and muttering to herself. It sounded as though she were reciting a prayer.

‘‘It’s not him,’’ he said gently. ‘‘It’s not Dad.’’

‘‘Of course it is!’’ she snapped. ‘‘Look at him!’’

He peeked through the open slit.
Strange.
Now that it had been brought to his attention, he did notice a certain similarity. He had no idea why it now seemed so noticeable, but his mom was right. There was some aspect of the psychotic tycoon that reminded him of his father.

The drizzle stopped instantly, as though a spigot had been turned off, and now he could see even more clearly. Stewart was filthy, and while Brian couldn’t be certain, he was pretty sure that there was blood as well as mud befouling the man. His eyes searched the yard for a body. Or a part of one.

The police arrived impossibly fast—there must have been a patrol car already in the neighborhood—and Brian went out to meet them. Shifting into reporter mode, he brought with him a notepad and pen to write down quotes and the name of each officer to whom he spoke. Two cops got out of the car, which had pulled to a stop in front of the house, and he immediately identified himself. ‘‘I’m the one who called. My name’s Brian Howells. I’m a reporter for the
LA Times
. The man on the lawn is Stephen Stewart. He’s wanted for—’’

‘‘I know who Stephen Stewart is,’’ the older cop said, a trace of annoyance in his voice. ‘‘And, no offense, but I don’t think—’’

Stewart attacked.

None of them were prepared, and the older policeman went down under the millionaire’s assault, involuntarily crying out as sharp fingernails raked across his cheek, drawing blood. Brian ran back to the safety of the house while the younger officer scrambled out of the way, fumbling with his holster as he attempted to pull out his sidearm. A second police car pulled up just at that moment, screeching to a sideways halt next to the first, but the two patrolmen inside must have been able to gauge the situation through the windshield because they emerged with batons drawn and rushed immediately into the melee.

Stewart fought like a wild beast, biting into the first cop’s face, then jumping up and ripping at another’s midsection with his long-nailed fingers. There were screams and blood, but with four cops on him, Stewart succumbed, and in a matter of moments he was on his stomach, eating grass, while his arms were being yanked up behind him and handcuffed.