And I assure you, there's really no harmful side effects to being raised by the Scary Parent.
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
Barbie in Bondage
Every so often someone asks me how it affects my kids to have a horror writer for a father, particularly one who tells them scary stories. I always say that there's no harmful side effects, and I believe that to be true. However, once in a while I come across something like this arrangement of Barbies in the basement, the work of my four-year-old daughter.
And I assure you, there's really no harmful side effects to being raised by the Scary Parent.
And I assure you, there's really no harmful side effects to being raised by the Scary Parent.
Friday, October 10, 2008
Going to Midnights
For various family-related reasons, I adjusted my work schedule this week so that I'm now working almost exclusively third shifts at the hospital -- 10:30 PM to 6:30 AM, that sort of thing. As you can imagine, there's a psychiatric sticker shock that comes along with re-jiggering those deep circadian cogs and sprockets, and I'm in smack in the middle of that now.
I've always been fascinated by what happens when you tinker with the mind's sleep patterns. Re-reading J.G. Ballard's classic short story "Manhole 69" only made the whole process more ominious. In it, a scientist named Neill experiments with a team of volunteers, severing the hyphothalamic loops that allow the flow of consciousness, essentially making sleep unnecessary. The experiment takes place over a series of weeks in a large and mostly vacant clinical space, and as the men slowly begin to come unhinged, they imagine that they've been abandoned inside it, and that walls and ceiling are slowly closing in on them.
Under the right--or wrong--conditions, such neurological blowback doesn't seem all too far-fetched. Back in the nineties, when I was living in Boston (he rhapsodized) I almost volunteered to participate in a hospital sleep study at Mass General. It was good money and I would have had plenty of time to write while I was in there. What stopped me were the terms -- you weren't allowed to bring any sort of watch or clock into the experiment, which meant for three weeks, you would have no idea what time it was...which of course was the point of the whole exercise. Fascination with the mind's flexibility under such harsh circumstances is one thing, but I remember being a little afraid of how I would ultimately emerge from such an experience. Would I be able to sleep at all? Would I even recognize the pale, slope-shouldered thing gazing back at me from the mirror?
Compared to that, working the midnight shift is not all that dramatic. I've got my Advil PM and a quiet room to sleep in during the day. But if this blog unexpectedly slides off the side of the Earth--or abruptly seems as though it's being written by a total stranger--at least you'll know what happened.
Right?
I've always been fascinated by what happens when you tinker with the mind's sleep patterns. Re-reading J.G. Ballard's classic short story "Manhole 69" only made the whole process more ominious. In it, a scientist named Neill experiments with a team of volunteers, severing the hyphothalamic loops that allow the flow of consciousness, essentially making sleep unnecessary. The experiment takes place over a series of weeks in a large and mostly vacant clinical space, and as the men slowly begin to come unhinged, they imagine that they've been abandoned inside it, and that walls and ceiling are slowly closing in on them.
Under the right--or wrong--conditions, such neurological blowback doesn't seem all too far-fetched. Back in the nineties, when I was living in Boston (he rhapsodized) I almost volunteered to participate in a hospital sleep study at Mass General. It was good money and I would have had plenty of time to write while I was in there. What stopped me were the terms -- you weren't allowed to bring any sort of watch or clock into the experiment, which meant for three weeks, you would have no idea what time it was...which of course was the point of the whole exercise. Fascination with the mind's flexibility under such harsh circumstances is one thing, but I remember being a little afraid of how I would ultimately emerge from such an experience. Would I be able to sleep at all? Would I even recognize the pale, slope-shouldered thing gazing back at me from the mirror?
Compared to that, working the midnight shift is not all that dramatic. I've got my Advil PM and a quiet room to sleep in during the day. But if this blog unexpectedly slides off the side of the Earth--or abruptly seems as though it's being written by a total stranger--at least you'll know what happened.
Right?
Monday, October 06, 2008
My Pumpkin Hat
Well, my wife actually made it for our daughter. But in our house it's kind of a one-size-fits-all type deal...
Saturday, October 04, 2008
Stillwater - A Look Back
I've received a fair amount of positive email about Stillwater, more than I expected, actually. Not because I thought there was anything wrong with it -- but I'm probably the wrong person to ask. In my opinion, the success of a story that I write has everything to do with my own experience writing it -- not exactly the most accurate barometer of a story's value. Years might pass before I get the perspective to see the thing for what it really is, or isn't.
The fact is that I had the time of my life writing Stillwater. In fact, it was probably the most fun I've had writing anything since high school, back when it was always fun. I once described it here as "the book I was born to write," and I wasn't kidding. I've always wanted to write a giant shark book, and the idea of marrying that conceit to a family drama a la Ordinary People (although some might argue the family was more out of Flowers in the Attic) was just too good to resist. I wrote it very quickly, in a matter of six weeks or so, with only a few changes based on suggestions from my agent. The version you read here was very close to the first version that came out of my laptop at the end of last summer, while I was sitting on the back porch of our old house.
So why did I decide to post it online first?
There's a simple answer, and I think it's the most honest one. One of the main reasons I write stories is so that people can read them. For the last couple years I've been lucky enough to have a new book out in the fall, and this fall, due to whatever scheduling and pre-publication tomfoolery, that just wasn't going to happen. So Stillwater became my Fall 2008 novel, and I happen to believe that offering it up for free wasn't such a bad idea. We don't always have cash to plunk down for a new book, or even the time to go seek it out at the library -- but if it's just here online every day for the taking, maybe you're more likely to give it a chance.
And as much fun as I had writing Stillwater, I do get the feeling that this is the kind of book deserved an extra chance. In its search for the next big obvious thing, New York publishing isn't exactly in a hurry to put out a giant shark/family melodrama, at least from a guy best known for his descriptions of zombies and possessed serial killers. And let's be honest, since we're all friends here -- for every person like me who lights up at the idea of such a book, there's probably a dozen who would probably shrug and leave such a paperback in its wire bin, unexamined. As a concept it's probably just wonky enough to turn some people off.
All of which makes the internet the perfect place to debut such a book, don't you think? After all, what good is online access if you can't use it to help a niche product find its niche market?
Anyway, if you liked the story, I hope you'll keep checking out my other stuff. And if it didn't do it for you, well, to paraphrase Hitchcock, I will never again write another novel called Stillwater.
The fact is that I had the time of my life writing Stillwater. In fact, it was probably the most fun I've had writing anything since high school, back when it was always fun. I once described it here as "the book I was born to write," and I wasn't kidding. I've always wanted to write a giant shark book, and the idea of marrying that conceit to a family drama a la Ordinary People (although some might argue the family was more out of Flowers in the Attic) was just too good to resist. I wrote it very quickly, in a matter of six weeks or so, with only a few changes based on suggestions from my agent. The version you read here was very close to the first version that came out of my laptop at the end of last summer, while I was sitting on the back porch of our old house.
So why did I decide to post it online first?
There's a simple answer, and I think it's the most honest one. One of the main reasons I write stories is so that people can read them. For the last couple years I've been lucky enough to have a new book out in the fall, and this fall, due to whatever scheduling and pre-publication tomfoolery, that just wasn't going to happen. So Stillwater became my Fall 2008 novel, and I happen to believe that offering it up for free wasn't such a bad idea. We don't always have cash to plunk down for a new book, or even the time to go seek it out at the library -- but if it's just here online every day for the taking, maybe you're more likely to give it a chance.
And as much fun as I had writing Stillwater, I do get the feeling that this is the kind of book deserved an extra chance. In its search for the next big obvious thing, New York publishing isn't exactly in a hurry to put out a giant shark/family melodrama, at least from a guy best known for his descriptions of zombies and possessed serial killers. And let's be honest, since we're all friends here -- for every person like me who lights up at the idea of such a book, there's probably a dozen who would probably shrug and leave such a paperback in its wire bin, unexamined. As a concept it's probably just wonky enough to turn some people off.
All of which makes the internet the perfect place to debut such a book, don't you think? After all, what good is online access if you can't use it to help a niche product find its niche market?
Anyway, if you liked the story, I hope you'll keep checking out my other stuff. And if it didn't do it for you, well, to paraphrase Hitchcock, I will never again write another novel called Stillwater.
Friday, October 03, 2008
Wait, and who...?
"Among the 11 possibilities for Indiana Jones were David Hasselhoff, Mark Harmon, and Paul Le Mat."
--The Complete Making of Indiana Jones (2008)
Somewhere Hasselhoff is crying and pouring his eleventh vodka and tonic.
Wednesday, October 01, 2008
Stillwater - Chapter 29
This is the final chapter of Stillwater. Hope you enjoyed it!
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Stacy felt liquid warmth splashing down against her knee and calf. When she looked down she saw blood -- what looked like gallons of it -- pouring like bright red high-gloss paint out of Perry’s good leg, gushing so hard she could hear it splattering over the deck. For a second Perry stood exactly where he was, balanced on the metal tubing, staring at this incredible new development. Then both legs went out from under him and he fell face-first on the deck in front of her.
Stacy looked down. To her left, Tim still held the remains of the broken Jim Beam bottle in his hand. More of Perry’s blood dripped from the jagged end of the bottle.
“You fuck,” Perry breathed. His voice, though high, no longer sounded like nails being yanked from a sheet of steel; it was far more erratic, shimmering up in pitch and volume until it was nearly inaudible. “What did you do to me? What did you do?” Rolling on his back, he laced the fingers of both hands over his lacerated hamstring and Stacy saw him pressing hard, but the blood just kept coming.
She took one last glance at Tim. He dropped the bottle and nodded at her, a moment of perfect shared telepathy.
Do it. Go.
Stacy hunched over and put out her arms to forklift Perry under the neck and lower spine (lift with your legs and not with your back, some inner voice instructed with absurd precision) and hoisted him up over the hull of the Sun Tracker. When he realized what she was about to do, Perry stopped screaming and started thrashing hard, swinging and kicking blindly, and there was a second or two where Stacy was sure he was going to tumble right back into the boat and keep bleeding all over her.
Instead, he fell overboard.
He disappeared under the water and bobbed to the surface an instant later, gargling and furious, threw both hands up on the railing and started to climb back in the boat. The blood from his leg was already changing the color of the water on the starboard side, ribboning out of him in different shades of pink and red.
When Stacy saw him lifting himself back up, she took the metal tubing in both hands and rammed it straight down into his face. His hands let go and he fell back again. This time he stayed down longer, but she could still see him thrashing under the surface in his own steadily expanding red cloud.
He was coming up for the second time when she spotted the other metal rod rising up from the water, thirty feet behind him.
And then the fin.
Stacy threw a glance at Tim, knelt down, squeezed his hand. “I’ll be back as soon as I can, okay?”
Tim nodded again, made a noise. Stacy gave his hand one last squeeze and took two steps in the opposite direction, to the port side, jumped onto the captain’s seat and sprung off as hard as she could, hitting the water like a needle. She didn’t look back at the boat, or the man who’d called himself Craig Perry. She didn’t have to.
When she broke the surface, she could already hear Perry screaming.
***
In retrospect, Stacy thought her hundred-yard swim to shore had probably taken closer to a minute, but at the time it dragged on forever. No matter how hard she pushed herself she seemed to be crawling, not traveling nearly fast enough, and her ramped-up heart and breathing only echoed, More-more, faster-faster. With every kick she anticipated the sudden rushing onset of movement from behind her, the lashing predatory attack, the eruption of indescribable, crushing pain.
But it didn’t come, and it still didn’t come, and then, somehow, some way, an eternity later, she felt the scrape of the sandy bottom beneath her toes.
She sprung upright in the chest-deep water, staggering up onto the shoreline, gasping, lungs starved for air, and fell down on her knees on the cold private beach in front of the A-frame cottage.
When she raised her head and looked around in the direction she’d come, she was greeted by a scene so prosaic it was almost surreal: a pontoon boat floating in the middle of a lake, the surface of the water glassine, undisturbed. Far off in the distance to the right, almost an afterthought, the tiny bass boat lay motionless on the rocks where it had foundered.
“I made it,” she tried to call out, so Tim would know, but her breathing was still out of control, and she couldn’t quite speak above a hoarse whisper. “Honey, we made it.”
Getting to her feet, she turned to walk up the steps to the cottage.
***
Matt Ware was driving his old rust-bucket Ford F-150 along Route 11 when he saw the woman come flying out into the road up ahead of him, not twenty feet away, her hands raised up in the air. He slammed on the brakes hard enough to make his seatbelt catch. If she’d run out five seconds earlier, while he’d been looking for music on the pickup’s radio, he guessed he would have nailed her head-on and sent her straight up into the pine trees.
Climbing down, he walked out in front of the truck, and she ran the rest of the way, taking hold of his arm.
“Please,” she said. “You have to help me.”
“What’s wrong?” he asked, though his first impression of the woman was, a lot. She was soaking wet, for one thing, her clothes covered with partially washed-out bloodstains, and her face and arms looked badly scratched and bruised. Worse than all of that, though, was her left eye, the orb filled so completely with blood that it blocked out her pupil. “What happened?”
“My fiancée,” she said. “He’s out in a boat, on the lake.” She thrust one hand back through the treeline from which she’d erupted a moment earlier like a flushed pheasant. “Our boat broke down. There’s a shark in the water.”
Matt stared at her, certain that he was either being put on or had simply misunderstood. “A shark?”
“I swam. He’s hurt. Out there, in the boat. You have to call someone.”
“Sure,” he said, already modifying his expectations for this woman’s story. It occurred to him that there might have been an accident out on the water, a boating accident, and the woman had struck her head. “But I don’t think --”
“I need a phone. I need to call the police.”
“Sure, come on.” He nodded and beckoned her back to the pickup, which was loaded down with a completely random mishmash of fishing gear, his tackle box, and a cooler with a turkey sandwich, some apples and a six-pack of Brown Hound brown ale and a Styrofoam cup of nightcrawlers. It was turning into another breathtakingly gorgeous October day, the kind that God only made once in a while, even up here in Maine, which everybody knew was the last great place in the world. Matt had been on his way up to his own family’s cabin to drop a line in the water for the afternoon, just to see if they were biting.
The woman rode beside him for ten minutes until they pulled up into the gravel driveway of the Ware family cabin. By the time they arrived, she had laid out for him, in calm, declarative sentences, a story that Matt couldn’t quite dismiss as the ravings of a hysterical mind. And that was what he found most disturbing of all. By all accounts, this woman, Stacy Rogers, struck him as a clear-headed, mentally stable upwardly mobile professional -- who had just endured a real-life nightmare.
Events which, if true, were going to have a lot of people thinking very differently about Stillwater Lake.
And what was in it.
***
By the time the County Sheriff’s department dispatched a rescue boat, it didn’t turn out to be necessary.
At noon, Deputy Sheriff Laird Shafer found the Sun Tracker run aground against a rocky shoulder along the northern shore of Stillwater Lake, a half-mile from where Stacy had swum to safety. The breeze had blown steadily from the moment she’d jumped out, and the pontoons scraped against the loose rock and sand, small waves washing over their badly dented aluminum surface.
Shafer docked the police boat, a twenty-two foot Mercury Cruiser, at the nearest dock and radioed his find back to Dispatch. Then he jumped out and walked the shoreline back to the Sun Tracker.
“Hello? This is the police.”
He stepped inside and looked around.
The boat was empty.
***
At six o’clock that evening Stacy sat in the lobby of a State Police Barracks outside of Lewiston, unsure whether she was still dreaming or just waking up. In the last six hours the media presence outside these cinderblock walls had escalated to such an extreme that the access road surrounding the building had to be cordoned off by sawhorses and yellow tape to keep the news crews from knocking on the door.
Stacy was dressed in clean scrub pants and a Maine State Police sweatshirt with the right sleeve rolled up to accommodate the IV running into her arm. Saline and glucose had been dripping into her veins since noon, when she’d been brought here, the news of the Sun Tracker’s discovery following soon after.
At first she hadn’t believed it. She still wasn’t sure she did. But the first two detectives that had initially questioned her, two middle-aged white men whose names she didn’t remember, had assured her that it was so. Tim wasn’t in the boat. The boat was empty. Besides the copious bloodstains all over the Sun Tracker’s deck, the entire Acton family appeared to have been erased from existence without a trace.
Those first two cops she’d spoken to were gone now, replaced by a swarm of evening shifters, all of whom introduced themselves perfunctorily, looked her up and down, murmured a few redundant questions before they disappeared again. When they weren’t speaking to her directly, they conferred up the hallway in hushed tones that were barely whispers. But even so, Stacy recognized the same sound over and over, echoing through the offices, the shh sound that came at the beginning of the word shark.
Stacy stared at the IV bag dangling from the metal pole next to the sofa. It was almost empty. Looking at the pole, she felt a sudden burst of total recall, the lake and the boat and the figure of Craig Perry lunging for her from the corner of her eye, all of it so vivid she had to bite her lip to keep from screaming. Nobody around her noticed, or if they did, they didn’t react.
She allowed herself to think of Tim, lying in the bottom of the boat, bleeding out. Some part of her had known then that he wouldn’t survive, that he was too badly hurt, but she had still expected to be able to see his body again. This was worse. She imagined the shark hitting the Sun Tracker one final time, its metabolism fueled by the meal that she had given it, slamming the underside of the vessel forcefully enough to fling Tim’s body overboard. She could only hope that he’d lost consciousness by that point -- that he had succumbed to death before the black mouth enveloped him.
Yet in some cold part of herself she knew that wasn’t the case. That unsentimental part of her soul -- the part that whispered, It was your idea to have drinks on the boat, your idea, all yours, Stacy -- knew that Tim had just waited out there for her, fully conscious, staring up at the sky. And when the shark finally hit the boat one last time, and threw him over, he had known exactly what was happening.
She knew that he had felt every second of it.
She closed her eyes, pressed her knuckles in hard, feeling tears leak out down the webbing between her fingers. She could hear the voices of cops getting louder around her as the evening wore on, discussing her story, getting more cavalier about what they thought and how loud they said it. There was already talk about who would go out with Fish and Game officials to verify her story. Stacy hoped they would at least wait until morning. She hoped they believed her about how big it was, and what it had done.
But they don’t, that same coldly pragmatic part of her spoke up. As much as they might like to believe it, they can’t. Their imaginations aren’t that robust.
Not that she could blame them. Until yesterday, she could never have imagined it either. Even now she wondered if she would ever fully believe it. In fact, though she couldn’t know it now, there would be times in the future, after she had moved back to New York, when she would still have dreams of Tim’s return. She would wake up to hear a knock and go to the door to find Tim standing there. Not as she’d last seen him, torn apart and dying on the family boat, but alive and well, with Thai takeout and videos from Blockbuster. Singing that stupid Todd Rundgren song he sometimes sang, just to make her laugh: “Hello, it’s me...” And the worst part would be that even when she’d known she was dreaming she would fall for it, every time.
“Miss Rogers?”
Stacy opened her eyes. The pudgy cop in front of her was bald, with a round face and brown eyes, deep and sympathetic, a thick moustache drooping tiredly over his upper lip. She had talked to him earlier this evening but didn’t remember his name.
“You all right?” he asked.
She shrugged, not saying anything, and he seemed to understand.
“I just wanted to share with you, we were able to follow up on that man you told us about, the one who called himself Craig Perry.” The cop tapped the thin manila folder in his hand. “Before she was adopted by your fiancée’s parents, Karen did have one biological brother, a man named Lloyd Fleming. Primary residence was Washington State. He had a pretty extensive criminal record -- assault, theft, attempted robbery, some rape charges. He’s been in and out of various institutions since he was a kid, but that’s not surprising given his pedigree.”
Stacy shook her head. “What do you mean?”
“I got in touch with his former social worker in California. Lloyd’s parents, the Flemings, Don and Patricia, were your basic complete counterculture screw-ups. Dopers, vagrants, petty criminals -- after the Sixties ended, they fell in with the San Francisco fringe crowd, Vietnam vets and acid casualties, and lived out of a van. The father was a wannabe musician and low-level pot dealer who never got further than elementary school. Mom was borderline psychotic with a religious nut with a thing for inhalants. Supposedly they were Jehovah’s Witnesses for a while, made Lloyd and Karen go around handing out tracts door-to-door while they sat in the van sniffing paint and listening to Hendrix.” The cop shook his head. “It sounds callous but the best thing they could’ve done for their kids was when they both overdosed and took themselves out of the picture permanently.”
“They both died?”
“Yeah, in 1979. Lloyd was nine when it happened; Karen was just seven. He was the one that found the bodies. The Acton family adopted Karen right away, but Lloyd was passed around foster homes until he finally hit another kid hard enough to land in juvenile hall. From there it was just a hop, skip and a jump to jail. He’s done three different prison terms. Most recent one ended just twelve days ago -- that was probably when he finally went to track down Karen. You said she had his picture on her phone, right?”
She nodded, numbly. The cop didn’t seem to know what else to say. He cleared his throat.
“Well, anyway, we’re still investigating, like I said. I just wanted to let you know what we’ve found out so far.” And let you know that at least THAT part of your story checked out, his tone implied.
Stacy nodded again, and the cop, looking relieved for his opportunity to be excused, gave her an awkward pat on the shoulder and started to walk away.
“Officer?”
He stopped and looked back. “It’s detective, actually.”
“Are you going to send men out onto the lake?”
“What -- Stillwater?” A broad smile, the first spontaneous one in the conversation, broke over his face, and she saw that she’d been wrong in her initial assessment, that his brown eyes hadn’t been particularly kind as much as simply pitying. “After the story you told us here today? I’d say the problem is going to be narrowing it down to four or five hundred guys.”
“You don’t believe me.”
“Miss Rogers, I’ve lived here all my life. I grew up swimming in that lake. My own kids --”
“They’re at least waiting until daylight, aren’t they?”
He hesitated, and scrubbed both hands over his hangdog jowls. “I can’t speak to that. At this point I think Fish and Game’s talking about sending a few of us out tonight to check out the water...just to see what’s what.”
“In the dark?”
“We’ll bring flashlights.”
“It’s a mistake,” Stacy said. She started toward him and felt the IV pull in her arm. “Listen to me. They shouldn’t go out there in the dark. Tell them they need to wait until daylight.”
“Easy,” he said, gesturing her down. “Just relax, okay? You’re in good hands here. You’re totally safe. We have trained professionals for this, men who know that lake like they back of their hand. Trust me. If there’s anything out there like what you described, we’ll nail it. I promise.”
She watched him go, listening to the locker room noise inside the barracks growing louder still, police and Fish and Game authorities talking to each other on the other side of the hallway, no longer trying to hide their excitement. She closed her eyes but couldn’t block out the sound. The mood among them men was enthusiastic, almost raucous.
Soon they would be going on a hunt.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Stacy felt liquid warmth splashing down against her knee and calf. When she looked down she saw blood -- what looked like gallons of it -- pouring like bright red high-gloss paint out of Perry’s good leg, gushing so hard she could hear it splattering over the deck. For a second Perry stood exactly where he was, balanced on the metal tubing, staring at this incredible new development. Then both legs went out from under him and he fell face-first on the deck in front of her.
Stacy looked down. To her left, Tim still held the remains of the broken Jim Beam bottle in his hand. More of Perry’s blood dripped from the jagged end of the bottle.
“You fuck,” Perry breathed. His voice, though high, no longer sounded like nails being yanked from a sheet of steel; it was far more erratic, shimmering up in pitch and volume until it was nearly inaudible. “What did you do to me? What did you do?” Rolling on his back, he laced the fingers of both hands over his lacerated hamstring and Stacy saw him pressing hard, but the blood just kept coming.
She took one last glance at Tim. He dropped the bottle and nodded at her, a moment of perfect shared telepathy.
Do it. Go.
Stacy hunched over and put out her arms to forklift Perry under the neck and lower spine (lift with your legs and not with your back, some inner voice instructed with absurd precision) and hoisted him up over the hull of the Sun Tracker. When he realized what she was about to do, Perry stopped screaming and started thrashing hard, swinging and kicking blindly, and there was a second or two where Stacy was sure he was going to tumble right back into the boat and keep bleeding all over her.
Instead, he fell overboard.
He disappeared under the water and bobbed to the surface an instant later, gargling and furious, threw both hands up on the railing and started to climb back in the boat. The blood from his leg was already changing the color of the water on the starboard side, ribboning out of him in different shades of pink and red.
When Stacy saw him lifting himself back up, she took the metal tubing in both hands and rammed it straight down into his face. His hands let go and he fell back again. This time he stayed down longer, but she could still see him thrashing under the surface in his own steadily expanding red cloud.
He was coming up for the second time when she spotted the other metal rod rising up from the water, thirty feet behind him.
And then the fin.
Stacy threw a glance at Tim, knelt down, squeezed his hand. “I’ll be back as soon as I can, okay?”
Tim nodded again, made a noise. Stacy gave his hand one last squeeze and took two steps in the opposite direction, to the port side, jumped onto the captain’s seat and sprung off as hard as she could, hitting the water like a needle. She didn’t look back at the boat, or the man who’d called himself Craig Perry. She didn’t have to.
When she broke the surface, she could already hear Perry screaming.
***
In retrospect, Stacy thought her hundred-yard swim to shore had probably taken closer to a minute, but at the time it dragged on forever. No matter how hard she pushed herself she seemed to be crawling, not traveling nearly fast enough, and her ramped-up heart and breathing only echoed, More-more, faster-faster. With every kick she anticipated the sudden rushing onset of movement from behind her, the lashing predatory attack, the eruption of indescribable, crushing pain.
But it didn’t come, and it still didn’t come, and then, somehow, some way, an eternity later, she felt the scrape of the sandy bottom beneath her toes.
She sprung upright in the chest-deep water, staggering up onto the shoreline, gasping, lungs starved for air, and fell down on her knees on the cold private beach in front of the A-frame cottage.
When she raised her head and looked around in the direction she’d come, she was greeted by a scene so prosaic it was almost surreal: a pontoon boat floating in the middle of a lake, the surface of the water glassine, undisturbed. Far off in the distance to the right, almost an afterthought, the tiny bass boat lay motionless on the rocks where it had foundered.
“I made it,” she tried to call out, so Tim would know, but her breathing was still out of control, and she couldn’t quite speak above a hoarse whisper. “Honey, we made it.”
Getting to her feet, she turned to walk up the steps to the cottage.
***
Matt Ware was driving his old rust-bucket Ford F-150 along Route 11 when he saw the woman come flying out into the road up ahead of him, not twenty feet away, her hands raised up in the air. He slammed on the brakes hard enough to make his seatbelt catch. If she’d run out five seconds earlier, while he’d been looking for music on the pickup’s radio, he guessed he would have nailed her head-on and sent her straight up into the pine trees.
Climbing down, he walked out in front of the truck, and she ran the rest of the way, taking hold of his arm.
“Please,” she said. “You have to help me.”
“What’s wrong?” he asked, though his first impression of the woman was, a lot. She was soaking wet, for one thing, her clothes covered with partially washed-out bloodstains, and her face and arms looked badly scratched and bruised. Worse than all of that, though, was her left eye, the orb filled so completely with blood that it blocked out her pupil. “What happened?”
“My fiancée,” she said. “He’s out in a boat, on the lake.” She thrust one hand back through the treeline from which she’d erupted a moment earlier like a flushed pheasant. “Our boat broke down. There’s a shark in the water.”
Matt stared at her, certain that he was either being put on or had simply misunderstood. “A shark?”
“I swam. He’s hurt. Out there, in the boat. You have to call someone.”
“Sure,” he said, already modifying his expectations for this woman’s story. It occurred to him that there might have been an accident out on the water, a boating accident, and the woman had struck her head. “But I don’t think --”
“I need a phone. I need to call the police.”
“Sure, come on.” He nodded and beckoned her back to the pickup, which was loaded down with a completely random mishmash of fishing gear, his tackle box, and a cooler with a turkey sandwich, some apples and a six-pack of Brown Hound brown ale and a Styrofoam cup of nightcrawlers. It was turning into another breathtakingly gorgeous October day, the kind that God only made once in a while, even up here in Maine, which everybody knew was the last great place in the world. Matt had been on his way up to his own family’s cabin to drop a line in the water for the afternoon, just to see if they were biting.
The woman rode beside him for ten minutes until they pulled up into the gravel driveway of the Ware family cabin. By the time they arrived, she had laid out for him, in calm, declarative sentences, a story that Matt couldn’t quite dismiss as the ravings of a hysterical mind. And that was what he found most disturbing of all. By all accounts, this woman, Stacy Rogers, struck him as a clear-headed, mentally stable upwardly mobile professional -- who had just endured a real-life nightmare.
Events which, if true, were going to have a lot of people thinking very differently about Stillwater Lake.
And what was in it.
***
By the time the County Sheriff’s department dispatched a rescue boat, it didn’t turn out to be necessary.
At noon, Deputy Sheriff Laird Shafer found the Sun Tracker run aground against a rocky shoulder along the northern shore of Stillwater Lake, a half-mile from where Stacy had swum to safety. The breeze had blown steadily from the moment she’d jumped out, and the pontoons scraped against the loose rock and sand, small waves washing over their badly dented aluminum surface.
Shafer docked the police boat, a twenty-two foot Mercury Cruiser, at the nearest dock and radioed his find back to Dispatch. Then he jumped out and walked the shoreline back to the Sun Tracker.
“Hello? This is the police.”
He stepped inside and looked around.
The boat was empty.
***
At six o’clock that evening Stacy sat in the lobby of a State Police Barracks outside of Lewiston, unsure whether she was still dreaming or just waking up. In the last six hours the media presence outside these cinderblock walls had escalated to such an extreme that the access road surrounding the building had to be cordoned off by sawhorses and yellow tape to keep the news crews from knocking on the door.
Stacy was dressed in clean scrub pants and a Maine State Police sweatshirt with the right sleeve rolled up to accommodate the IV running into her arm. Saline and glucose had been dripping into her veins since noon, when she’d been brought here, the news of the Sun Tracker’s discovery following soon after.
At first she hadn’t believed it. She still wasn’t sure she did. But the first two detectives that had initially questioned her, two middle-aged white men whose names she didn’t remember, had assured her that it was so. Tim wasn’t in the boat. The boat was empty. Besides the copious bloodstains all over the Sun Tracker’s deck, the entire Acton family appeared to have been erased from existence without a trace.
Those first two cops she’d spoken to were gone now, replaced by a swarm of evening shifters, all of whom introduced themselves perfunctorily, looked her up and down, murmured a few redundant questions before they disappeared again. When they weren’t speaking to her directly, they conferred up the hallway in hushed tones that were barely whispers. But even so, Stacy recognized the same sound over and over, echoing through the offices, the shh sound that came at the beginning of the word shark.
Stacy stared at the IV bag dangling from the metal pole next to the sofa. It was almost empty. Looking at the pole, she felt a sudden burst of total recall, the lake and the boat and the figure of Craig Perry lunging for her from the corner of her eye, all of it so vivid she had to bite her lip to keep from screaming. Nobody around her noticed, or if they did, they didn’t react.
She allowed herself to think of Tim, lying in the bottom of the boat, bleeding out. Some part of her had known then that he wouldn’t survive, that he was too badly hurt, but she had still expected to be able to see his body again. This was worse. She imagined the shark hitting the Sun Tracker one final time, its metabolism fueled by the meal that she had given it, slamming the underside of the vessel forcefully enough to fling Tim’s body overboard. She could only hope that he’d lost consciousness by that point -- that he had succumbed to death before the black mouth enveloped him.
Yet in some cold part of herself she knew that wasn’t the case. That unsentimental part of her soul -- the part that whispered, It was your idea to have drinks on the boat, your idea, all yours, Stacy -- knew that Tim had just waited out there for her, fully conscious, staring up at the sky. And when the shark finally hit the boat one last time, and threw him over, he had known exactly what was happening.
She knew that he had felt every second of it.
She closed her eyes, pressed her knuckles in hard, feeling tears leak out down the webbing between her fingers. She could hear the voices of cops getting louder around her as the evening wore on, discussing her story, getting more cavalier about what they thought and how loud they said it. There was already talk about who would go out with Fish and Game officials to verify her story. Stacy hoped they would at least wait until morning. She hoped they believed her about how big it was, and what it had done.
But they don’t, that same coldly pragmatic part of her spoke up. As much as they might like to believe it, they can’t. Their imaginations aren’t that robust.
Not that she could blame them. Until yesterday, she could never have imagined it either. Even now she wondered if she would ever fully believe it. In fact, though she couldn’t know it now, there would be times in the future, after she had moved back to New York, when she would still have dreams of Tim’s return. She would wake up to hear a knock and go to the door to find Tim standing there. Not as she’d last seen him, torn apart and dying on the family boat, but alive and well, with Thai takeout and videos from Blockbuster. Singing that stupid Todd Rundgren song he sometimes sang, just to make her laugh: “Hello, it’s me...” And the worst part would be that even when she’d known she was dreaming she would fall for it, every time.
“Miss Rogers?”
Stacy opened her eyes. The pudgy cop in front of her was bald, with a round face and brown eyes, deep and sympathetic, a thick moustache drooping tiredly over his upper lip. She had talked to him earlier this evening but didn’t remember his name.
“You all right?” he asked.
She shrugged, not saying anything, and he seemed to understand.
“I just wanted to share with you, we were able to follow up on that man you told us about, the one who called himself Craig Perry.” The cop tapped the thin manila folder in his hand. “Before she was adopted by your fiancée’s parents, Karen did have one biological brother, a man named Lloyd Fleming. Primary residence was Washington State. He had a pretty extensive criminal record -- assault, theft, attempted robbery, some rape charges. He’s been in and out of various institutions since he was a kid, but that’s not surprising given his pedigree.”
Stacy shook her head. “What do you mean?”
“I got in touch with his former social worker in California. Lloyd’s parents, the Flemings, Don and Patricia, were your basic complete counterculture screw-ups. Dopers, vagrants, petty criminals -- after the Sixties ended, they fell in with the San Francisco fringe crowd, Vietnam vets and acid casualties, and lived out of a van. The father was a wannabe musician and low-level pot dealer who never got further than elementary school. Mom was borderline psychotic with a religious nut with a thing for inhalants. Supposedly they were Jehovah’s Witnesses for a while, made Lloyd and Karen go around handing out tracts door-to-door while they sat in the van sniffing paint and listening to Hendrix.” The cop shook his head. “It sounds callous but the best thing they could’ve done for their kids was when they both overdosed and took themselves out of the picture permanently.”
“They both died?”
“Yeah, in 1979. Lloyd was nine when it happened; Karen was just seven. He was the one that found the bodies. The Acton family adopted Karen right away, but Lloyd was passed around foster homes until he finally hit another kid hard enough to land in juvenile hall. From there it was just a hop, skip and a jump to jail. He’s done three different prison terms. Most recent one ended just twelve days ago -- that was probably when he finally went to track down Karen. You said she had his picture on her phone, right?”
She nodded, numbly. The cop didn’t seem to know what else to say. He cleared his throat.
“Well, anyway, we’re still investigating, like I said. I just wanted to let you know what we’ve found out so far.” And let you know that at least THAT part of your story checked out, his tone implied.
Stacy nodded again, and the cop, looking relieved for his opportunity to be excused, gave her an awkward pat on the shoulder and started to walk away.
“Officer?”
He stopped and looked back. “It’s detective, actually.”
“Are you going to send men out onto the lake?”
“What -- Stillwater?” A broad smile, the first spontaneous one in the conversation, broke over his face, and she saw that she’d been wrong in her initial assessment, that his brown eyes hadn’t been particularly kind as much as simply pitying. “After the story you told us here today? I’d say the problem is going to be narrowing it down to four or five hundred guys.”
“You don’t believe me.”
“Miss Rogers, I’ve lived here all my life. I grew up swimming in that lake. My own kids --”
“They’re at least waiting until daylight, aren’t they?”
He hesitated, and scrubbed both hands over his hangdog jowls. “I can’t speak to that. At this point I think Fish and Game’s talking about sending a few of us out tonight to check out the water...just to see what’s what.”
“In the dark?”
“We’ll bring flashlights.”
“It’s a mistake,” Stacy said. She started toward him and felt the IV pull in her arm. “Listen to me. They shouldn’t go out there in the dark. Tell them they need to wait until daylight.”
“Easy,” he said, gesturing her down. “Just relax, okay? You’re in good hands here. You’re totally safe. We have trained professionals for this, men who know that lake like they back of their hand. Trust me. If there’s anything out there like what you described, we’ll nail it. I promise.”
She watched him go, listening to the locker room noise inside the barracks growing louder still, police and Fish and Game authorities talking to each other on the other side of the hallway, no longer trying to hide their excitement. She closed her eyes but couldn’t block out the sound. The mood among them men was enthusiastic, almost raucous.
Soon they would be going on a hunt.
39 Today
I turned 39 today. Look what my 4-year-old daughter picked out for my birthday present --
That's right, the coolest Barbie ever...The Birds Barbie. This is so awesome. She's being attacked by birds, and she still looks so beautiful.
I will not take it out of its box and play with it...
I will not take it out of its box and play with it...
I will not take it out of its box and play with it...
That's right, the coolest Barbie ever...The Birds Barbie. This is so awesome. She's being attacked by birds, and she still looks so beautiful.
I will not take it out of its box and play with it...
I will not take it out of its box and play with it...
I will not take it out of its box and play with it...
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
Stillwater - Chapter 28
This is the newest and next-to-last chapter of Stillwater. For those of you who came this far with me, I hope you enjoyed the ride as much as I did.
Tune in tomorrow for the final chapter.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
“You know, that thing did you a favor.”
Stacy flinched and sat up, realized with a start that she’d been dozing -- or if not dozing exactly, then drifting deeply away from the moment. Perry was still in the captain’s chair, watching her. How long had he been speaking to her? Her locked knees ached and her butt felt numb from sitting so long in one place. On her lap, Tim was still looking at her, dragging in shallow breaths, but he looked drugged, deep in a trance.
Then she saw the shore, and realized that her mind was not the only thing drifting.
In the time she’d been zoning out, ruminating on whatever, the wind had started up again. The Sun Tracker had floated toward shore in an almost perfectly straight line, and the A-frame cottage where she had spotted the deer now tantalizingly close, perhaps not even a hundred-yard swim from here. Maybe even closer. Staring at the dock as if the intensity of her gaze could somehow turn gravity sideways and haul them the rest of the way in, Stacy noticed that she could see white ropes tied to metal hooks on the wooden pilings. She imagined climbing up on that dock, running to shore. Being --
Safe.
Without even being asked, her muscles tensed, getting ready. Say it was a hundred yards. In high school she’d done the hundred-yard freestyle in a minute twelve. Not a record, but close enough to get her picture in the paper and have some the cool kids saying hi to her in the hall. Of course that was almost thirteen years ago. She was still in shape, swam fifty laps three times a week, but she hadn’t trained competitively since then. Add another thirty seconds for her numb legs and the stale blood she’d have to work out of her joints on the fly.
Call it a minute fifty.
Two on the outside.
“Did you even hear what I said?” Perry asked.
She tried to speak and managed only a muzzled grunt. Then on her second attempt: “What are you talking about?”
“This whole fucked up family,” Perry said, gesturing at the empty boat around them. “Catherine especially. Jesus, what a piece of work she was.”
Casually, trying to make it appear incidental, Stacy shifted Tim’s weight away from her, extending one leg and then the other. Pins and needles flared through her joints, gathering in her knees and ankles, bringing a dull steady ache of combined relief and pain. Slowly the sensation began to return.
“What are you doing?” Perry asked, voice tightening slightly.
“Nothing. My leg just fell asleep.”
“You’re moving around.” It seemed to agitate that ominous, sliding-away quality in his expression, accelerating the transformation into whatever he was going to become next. “How come you’re moving so much all of a sudden?”
“Just trying to get comfortable.” Stacy wanted to keep him talking. “So you did know Tim’s family,” she said, “before all this?”
“Know them?” Perry closed his eyes, mouth tightening, and his shoulders shook slightly. She realized he was laughing. “Oh yeah, you could say that.”
“And you followed them back here to...what? Rob them?”
“Christ, no.”
“What then?” She had worked herself out from under Tim’s upper back and shoulders, leaning him back as gently as possible against the mangled Bimini roof, where it lay beside her like a mangled deck chair. The physical disturbance of being moved had stimulated a glimmer of awareness in his eyes and she felt Tim observing her, listening in on the conversation. Stacy patted his head, touched his cheek, but she was too preoccupied with the idea of swimming to shore to let her hand linger for long on his face.
Perry was staring at her. “Go ahead,” he said.
“What?”
“Jump in. Start swimming.” He cast one hand in the direction of the shore. “I’d like to see how far you get.”
Stacy felt the last moisture evaporating from her mouth. “I wasn’t --”
“No, seriously. Go ahead.”
“No,” she said.
“Before you do, though, you should know that the first thing I’m going to do is toss your boyfriend right back in the drink. When the shark comes for him, I’m going to start swimming after you.”
Not with that broken leg, you’re not, Stacy thought. She tried to imagine Perry thrashing in the water, trying to kick and claw his away to shore without further displacing the shattered bone. She supposed it could be done, but she could almost certainly outswim him.
“And when I catch you,” he said, reading her mind, “I’ll give it something else to eat.”
“You wouldn’t catch me.”
“Yeah?” He stood up. Even with the broken leg he was unbelievably fast and light on his feet, bracing himself on the railing, and Stacy felt his hand clamp onto her throat before she’d even fully processed the fact that he was in motion. She felt herself being lifted straight up by the neck. All at once she couldn’t swallow, could barely breathe. Her eyes felt like they were bulging in her sockets. On the floor she heard Tim thump his head and make a watery gargling noise of protest and alarm.
Perry squeezed a little tighter, and Stacy wondered if this was it, if she’d inadvertently knocked away the last veneer of his humanity like a child accidentally pulling off another child’s Halloween mask to reveal the true grinning face underneath. She seized his wrist, tried to pull free, but his fingers only constricted, inhuman, nearly crushing the delicate cartilage. She tried to think of something -- anything -- that would make him stop.
“Lloyd,” she rasped, hardly a whisper. “She called you Lloyd.”
Perry blinked. He didn’t let go, but his grip stopped tightening, and he held her there a moment. His gaze slipped away from her face, the unsubtle pressure of his stare moving downward over her body encased in the wet, dirty, bloody clothes.
Stacy felt him taking her in, taking the full measure of her for the first time, as if mention of that other name -- Lloyd -- had somehow triggered the realization that she was a woman and he was, at least technically speaking, a man.
“Yeah,” he said, huskily. His hand trembled a little on her neck. “She did.”
Unexpectedly, his fist sprung open and she was free, stumbling a little, gasping for air. Her heel came down on something lumpy and solid, but it wasn’t Tim. It was a piece of the Bimini roof.
“She knew you from before?”
“Not really. I called her when I got out...asked her where I could find Karen. I told her she owed me that much.”
“Got out of where?” Stacy asked. “Jail?”
“You still want to take that swim?” Perry asked, no longer even looking at her, but glaring off in the direction of shore. “Now’s your chance. Hell, I’ll even give you a head start.”
Stacy followed his gaze and saw what he was looking at, the long gray shape of the fish coming round again, circling their stern. Its fin had not broken the surface, but she could see the aluminum tubing protruding where she’d shoved it in. It rose up out of the water like a miniature flagpole.
“Yeah,” he said, “that’s what I thought.”
In spite of everything else, the pain in her neck, the swelling, bruised sensation where his fingers had dug in, Stacy found she couldn’t take her eyes off the thing in the water. The sheer size of it just defied all logic, and the aerodynamic way it glided through the water, seemingly without resistance, hearkened back to some ancient relationship that predated the clumsy intrusion of humanity. She saw the distance to shore, ran the numbers in her head again -- a hundred yards, a minute fifty -- and knew right then she didn’t stand a chance.
“You’re right about one thing,” Perry said, in an oddly detached voice.
“What’s that?”
“The wind.” He licked the index finger of his right hand and held it up. “It’s moving in the right direction. If it keeps up like this, I figure in an hour or less, it’ll blow us right to shore. The question is...” The hand dipped toward her face, only this time softly, peeling a half-dried strand of hair from her forehead, “...what are we going to do to entertain ourselves in the meantime?”
* * *
Stacy glanced back where she’d put the aluminum pole, but it was gone. Her thoughts flew back to the uncertain span of time where she’d been blanked out, zoning, and wondered now if she really might have fallen asleep for a minute or two, long enough for Perry, with his rattlesnake reflexes, to snatch the piece of tubing back and stash it somewhere. She didn’t see it.
“You want to know my deep, dark secret?” he asked. His breath in her face smelled overripe, like garbage that had been left to spoil inside a hot, closed-up house. It smelled like what she imagined a crime scene smelled like, and, not a particularly fresh one. “I’ll tell it to you if you really want to know. I’ll tell you anything. All you have to do is ask.”
She tried to step back and bumped into the seat cushion behind her. There was nowhere else to go, and she sensed now that keeping him talking had been a truly bad idea, maybe the worst one in her life. Rather than maintaining a mood of civility between them, it had only hastened Perry’s transformation into what he had now become.
He reached up and placed his hands on her cheeks,
pinching them painfully.
“You’re hurting me,” she said.
“Karen liked it.”
Stacy felt him pushing closer, bearing down, so that the weight of him forced her against the hull. Perry leaned toward her, close enough to kiss, but stopped short of actually placing his lips on hers. Turning her head to the side, Stacy found herself averting her gaze out at the water, praying for the shark to slam into the boat, to hit it as hard as it could, to knock them down and give her the one last chance she needed to escape. But Stillwater Lake was as silent as it had ever been in late October. There was only the maddening thunk-thunk of the wavelets against the pontoons, and the sound of Perry’s breath whistling in her ear.
“Karen always liked it,” Perry said. “Even when we were really little.” His fingers plowed up through her wet hair, catching on its dirty tangles, pulling it from the roots. “She liked that too.” She sensed him tensing up slightly in remembrance. “I loved her. And she loved me -- God, so much. Our mom and dad were so fucking stupid. Nobody ever understood how much a big brother and little sister could truly love each other.”
In spite of the pain, Stacy looked back at him. Perry was smiling at her, showing only the tops of his incisors and pink gums. His upper lip was so tight that it looked bloodless, pale. His irises had a glazed, frozen look, but the pupils inside them were sharp and hard.
“They took her away from me. Passed her off to this other fucked up family, rich East Coast doctor, uptight turtleneck-wearing collegiate mom -- ” Perry glanced down at Tim, where he lay shuddering on the deck, “ -- and a new big brother. Still fresh from the family tragedy and looking for a new pet, a little girl to fill the hole in their lives.” He shook his head. “But it’s all right. I’m not mad. See, I always knew I’d find her. It just took a little longer than I thought, but I found her out in California. She was happy to see me, just like I thought. What Karen and I had was the real deal. I put my mark on her.”
“What do you mean?”
“No matter what she said she did with him, all she was doing was remembering me.”
“Who?” Stacy managed.
“Who? Her new stepbrother, that’s who. Your boyfriend, Captain Fantastic here.” Perry hawked and spat down at Tim, hitting him below the eye, the gob of saliva oozing slowly down his cheek. “She told her shrink all kind of stories about how they did it, just like she and I did.”
“Tim?” Stacy asked.
On the deck Tim peered up at her dully, hardly seeming to follow the conversation at all. His face looked like a bad plaster cast of itself, a partially dried deathmask of a person who had somehow, against all odds, clung to life. He moved his mouth open and closed but no sound came out.
“Don’t worry,” Perry said. “Nothing ever happened between those two. The doctors said she was, you know, projecting. See, she wanted me so bad that she started thinking it was him, not me, that did it to her. Wrote it up in her diary. All that shit.” Perry giggled, a falsetto metallic noise, nails pried from a metal plate, eee-eee-eee. “Right, Tim?”
Tim’s lips twitched. Stacy actually thought she heard sound pass through them this time.
“What’s that, good buddy?” Perry asked.
Tim grunted, mumbling, still incoherent. He shuddered and gave up.
“Speak, boy. Woof!” Perry pushed down on Stacy hard enough that she nearly fell over, bracing his weight on top of her chest and shoulders, and kicked Tim hard in the ribs. With a faint huffing noise, Tim managed to curl slightly sideways in a meager attempt to protect what was left of his consciousness.
“I’m talking to you,” Perry said, biting off each word. “You tell her. You tell her it was me the whole time.” He kicked Tim again, harder, though his vocal inflection remained constant. “Go on. Tell her. Tell her, go on. Tell her it was me.”
“Stop it,” Stacy said. “He can’t talk!”
“Oh, he can talk.” Perry grinned at Tim. His face had become incandescent. “You can talk, can’t you? You know all kinds of big words.”
“Why...?” Tim gasped.
“Why did I come out here?” Perry asked. “That’s easy. I came for Karen. See, the day after I got out of the joint, I went and picked up Roxy from the people that were keeping her from me, and then I tracked Karen down at her place in San Fran. She was happy to see me, too. Threw me that party and everything -- hell, you saw the pictures. It was like old times. Then all of a sudden she says she’s coming back here, up to the family cabin for a weekend with her new brother. I packed up Rox and we got on the plane the day before yesterday, picked up a car and a gun in New Hampshire, finally got here yesterday...broke into some poor retired bastard’s cabin up the shore. Then I drove around the lake to the old Acton family compound last night to drop in and say hi. Imagine my surprise when the house was empty. And the boat was gone.”
“That’s when you called Karen’s cell phone from yours?” Stacy said. “Last night?”
Perry beamed. “It took me a while to lay hands on the retired bastard’s boat key -- old geezer was a real hard case -- but I convinced him. And finally this morning, I got out here.”
“Why did you come after Karen?”
“Why? Shit. To take her back where she belonged. She left me in California, but I came to protect her like a real brother should.”
Tim couldn’t even turn his head up to look at them anymore. Fresh blood seeped from one corner of his mouth, tracing the cracked webbing of his skin. Stacy tried to tell herself that she saw him take in another breath, but she couldn’t be sure.
“And by the way, you’re right,” Perry told Tim, rolling up one sleeve of his new flannel shirt, carefully folding it back so that the cuff would stay rolled just above his forearm. There was a tattoo there, a design that Stacy didn’t recognize, and below it, in Gothic script, the name Karen. “It doesn’t matter much now. Karen’s gone. She was the one great love of my life, and she died on your watch. So before you die I want you to know that I can take what’s yours just as easily. Before you die, I really want you to see this.”
Stacy said, “What are you --”
There was a muted crack and she felt her head rocking to one side, noticing a part of lake she’d never seen before, filtered through a peculiar reddish haze. Broke a blood vessel in my eye, she thought. She’d done it once before, as a kid, running headfirst into a tree. This time, she hadn’t even felt the blow, just the impact of it, spinning her to the left. Recovering, or thinking she was, she realized that Perry was already on top of her, pressing down. Unmindful of what she was lying on, the broken Bimini roof, Tim’s outstretched left arm, Perry was working his body down on top her, arching his back, pumping his hips, his hands doing something in front of his belly, unsnapping his pants and pulling himself out.
“Okay,” he said, and he wasn’t even looking at her anymore. “Here we go.”
Stacy drove her knee up between his legs. She had already come to the conclusion that she would have one chance and consequently put everything she had into the move, hooking the entirety of her lower back and hips into the momentum of it. In the instant of impact she actually visualized her kneecap making contact with his testicles, an ultrasound image of twin orbs exploding in their sac.
Perry never even screamed. Arching back, abruptly gone, clutching himself, he sprung and twisted, still silent, but the shocked pain was already dialing down to anger, and it disturbed her greatly how fast he made that change. Here was a person whose entire existence had become a clinic on how to turn pain into rage, and here she was foolishly betting her life on his inability to do it one more time.
Then she saw where he had hidden the last piece of metal tubing.
It came up all at once, a glint, a flash, there. Perry’s right hand clasped it, the jagged end pointed toward her, and she had the merciless clarity of vision to see the small, cruel barbs, incidental consequences of its forced detachment, actually glinting at her as he rammed it toward the soft part of her throat.
She whipped her head to the side, and the pole slammed into the seat cushion while the back of her skull collided with the fiberglass gunwale. Stars, rockets, pinwheels. When they cleared, she found Perry behind them, Perry with his metal rod that she had so obediently torn loose for him. She could see the muscles constricting in his arm, preparing to bring it down, and this time, unlike before, she had nowhere left to go.
But then it was Perry, not her, who started to scream.
Tune in tomorrow for the final chapter.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
“You know, that thing did you a favor.”
Stacy flinched and sat up, realized with a start that she’d been dozing -- or if not dozing exactly, then drifting deeply away from the moment. Perry was still in the captain’s chair, watching her. How long had he been speaking to her? Her locked knees ached and her butt felt numb from sitting so long in one place. On her lap, Tim was still looking at her, dragging in shallow breaths, but he looked drugged, deep in a trance.
Then she saw the shore, and realized that her mind was not the only thing drifting.
In the time she’d been zoning out, ruminating on whatever, the wind had started up again. The Sun Tracker had floated toward shore in an almost perfectly straight line, and the A-frame cottage where she had spotted the deer now tantalizingly close, perhaps not even a hundred-yard swim from here. Maybe even closer. Staring at the dock as if the intensity of her gaze could somehow turn gravity sideways and haul them the rest of the way in, Stacy noticed that she could see white ropes tied to metal hooks on the wooden pilings. She imagined climbing up on that dock, running to shore. Being --
Safe.
Without even being asked, her muscles tensed, getting ready. Say it was a hundred yards. In high school she’d done the hundred-yard freestyle in a minute twelve. Not a record, but close enough to get her picture in the paper and have some the cool kids saying hi to her in the hall. Of course that was almost thirteen years ago. She was still in shape, swam fifty laps three times a week, but she hadn’t trained competitively since then. Add another thirty seconds for her numb legs and the stale blood she’d have to work out of her joints on the fly.
Call it a minute fifty.
Two on the outside.
“Did you even hear what I said?” Perry asked.
She tried to speak and managed only a muzzled grunt. Then on her second attempt: “What are you talking about?”
“This whole fucked up family,” Perry said, gesturing at the empty boat around them. “Catherine especially. Jesus, what a piece of work she was.”
Casually, trying to make it appear incidental, Stacy shifted Tim’s weight away from her, extending one leg and then the other. Pins and needles flared through her joints, gathering in her knees and ankles, bringing a dull steady ache of combined relief and pain. Slowly the sensation began to return.
“What are you doing?” Perry asked, voice tightening slightly.
“Nothing. My leg just fell asleep.”
“You’re moving around.” It seemed to agitate that ominous, sliding-away quality in his expression, accelerating the transformation into whatever he was going to become next. “How come you’re moving so much all of a sudden?”
“Just trying to get comfortable.” Stacy wanted to keep him talking. “So you did know Tim’s family,” she said, “before all this?”
“Know them?” Perry closed his eyes, mouth tightening, and his shoulders shook slightly. She realized he was laughing. “Oh yeah, you could say that.”
“And you followed them back here to...what? Rob them?”
“Christ, no.”
“What then?” She had worked herself out from under Tim’s upper back and shoulders, leaning him back as gently as possible against the mangled Bimini roof, where it lay beside her like a mangled deck chair. The physical disturbance of being moved had stimulated a glimmer of awareness in his eyes and she felt Tim observing her, listening in on the conversation. Stacy patted his head, touched his cheek, but she was too preoccupied with the idea of swimming to shore to let her hand linger for long on his face.
Perry was staring at her. “Go ahead,” he said.
“What?”
“Jump in. Start swimming.” He cast one hand in the direction of the shore. “I’d like to see how far you get.”
Stacy felt the last moisture evaporating from her mouth. “I wasn’t --”
“No, seriously. Go ahead.”
“No,” she said.
“Before you do, though, you should know that the first thing I’m going to do is toss your boyfriend right back in the drink. When the shark comes for him, I’m going to start swimming after you.”
Not with that broken leg, you’re not, Stacy thought. She tried to imagine Perry thrashing in the water, trying to kick and claw his away to shore without further displacing the shattered bone. She supposed it could be done, but she could almost certainly outswim him.
“And when I catch you,” he said, reading her mind, “I’ll give it something else to eat.”
“You wouldn’t catch me.”
“Yeah?” He stood up. Even with the broken leg he was unbelievably fast and light on his feet, bracing himself on the railing, and Stacy felt his hand clamp onto her throat before she’d even fully processed the fact that he was in motion. She felt herself being lifted straight up by the neck. All at once she couldn’t swallow, could barely breathe. Her eyes felt like they were bulging in her sockets. On the floor she heard Tim thump his head and make a watery gargling noise of protest and alarm.
Perry squeezed a little tighter, and Stacy wondered if this was it, if she’d inadvertently knocked away the last veneer of his humanity like a child accidentally pulling off another child’s Halloween mask to reveal the true grinning face underneath. She seized his wrist, tried to pull free, but his fingers only constricted, inhuman, nearly crushing the delicate cartilage. She tried to think of something -- anything -- that would make him stop.
“Lloyd,” she rasped, hardly a whisper. “She called you Lloyd.”
Perry blinked. He didn’t let go, but his grip stopped tightening, and he held her there a moment. His gaze slipped away from her face, the unsubtle pressure of his stare moving downward over her body encased in the wet, dirty, bloody clothes.
Stacy felt him taking her in, taking the full measure of her for the first time, as if mention of that other name -- Lloyd -- had somehow triggered the realization that she was a woman and he was, at least technically speaking, a man.
“Yeah,” he said, huskily. His hand trembled a little on her neck. “She did.”
Unexpectedly, his fist sprung open and she was free, stumbling a little, gasping for air. Her heel came down on something lumpy and solid, but it wasn’t Tim. It was a piece of the Bimini roof.
“She knew you from before?”
“Not really. I called her when I got out...asked her where I could find Karen. I told her she owed me that much.”
“Got out of where?” Stacy asked. “Jail?”
“You still want to take that swim?” Perry asked, no longer even looking at her, but glaring off in the direction of shore. “Now’s your chance. Hell, I’ll even give you a head start.”
Stacy followed his gaze and saw what he was looking at, the long gray shape of the fish coming round again, circling their stern. Its fin had not broken the surface, but she could see the aluminum tubing protruding where she’d shoved it in. It rose up out of the water like a miniature flagpole.
“Yeah,” he said, “that’s what I thought.”
In spite of everything else, the pain in her neck, the swelling, bruised sensation where his fingers had dug in, Stacy found she couldn’t take her eyes off the thing in the water. The sheer size of it just defied all logic, and the aerodynamic way it glided through the water, seemingly without resistance, hearkened back to some ancient relationship that predated the clumsy intrusion of humanity. She saw the distance to shore, ran the numbers in her head again -- a hundred yards, a minute fifty -- and knew right then she didn’t stand a chance.
“You’re right about one thing,” Perry said, in an oddly detached voice.
“What’s that?”
“The wind.” He licked the index finger of his right hand and held it up. “It’s moving in the right direction. If it keeps up like this, I figure in an hour or less, it’ll blow us right to shore. The question is...” The hand dipped toward her face, only this time softly, peeling a half-dried strand of hair from her forehead, “...what are we going to do to entertain ourselves in the meantime?”
* * *
Stacy glanced back where she’d put the aluminum pole, but it was gone. Her thoughts flew back to the uncertain span of time where she’d been blanked out, zoning, and wondered now if she really might have fallen asleep for a minute or two, long enough for Perry, with his rattlesnake reflexes, to snatch the piece of tubing back and stash it somewhere. She didn’t see it.
“You want to know my deep, dark secret?” he asked. His breath in her face smelled overripe, like garbage that had been left to spoil inside a hot, closed-up house. It smelled like what she imagined a crime scene smelled like, and, not a particularly fresh one. “I’ll tell it to you if you really want to know. I’ll tell you anything. All you have to do is ask.”
She tried to step back and bumped into the seat cushion behind her. There was nowhere else to go, and she sensed now that keeping him talking had been a truly bad idea, maybe the worst one in her life. Rather than maintaining a mood of civility between them, it had only hastened Perry’s transformation into what he had now become.
He reached up and placed his hands on her cheeks,
pinching them painfully.
“You’re hurting me,” she said.
“Karen liked it.”
Stacy felt him pushing closer, bearing down, so that the weight of him forced her against the hull. Perry leaned toward her, close enough to kiss, but stopped short of actually placing his lips on hers. Turning her head to the side, Stacy found herself averting her gaze out at the water, praying for the shark to slam into the boat, to hit it as hard as it could, to knock them down and give her the one last chance she needed to escape. But Stillwater Lake was as silent as it had ever been in late October. There was only the maddening thunk-thunk of the wavelets against the pontoons, and the sound of Perry’s breath whistling in her ear.
“Karen always liked it,” Perry said. “Even when we were really little.” His fingers plowed up through her wet hair, catching on its dirty tangles, pulling it from the roots. “She liked that too.” She sensed him tensing up slightly in remembrance. “I loved her. And she loved me -- God, so much. Our mom and dad were so fucking stupid. Nobody ever understood how much a big brother and little sister could truly love each other.”
In spite of the pain, Stacy looked back at him. Perry was smiling at her, showing only the tops of his incisors and pink gums. His upper lip was so tight that it looked bloodless, pale. His irises had a glazed, frozen look, but the pupils inside them were sharp and hard.
“They took her away from me. Passed her off to this other fucked up family, rich East Coast doctor, uptight turtleneck-wearing collegiate mom -- ” Perry glanced down at Tim, where he lay shuddering on the deck, “ -- and a new big brother. Still fresh from the family tragedy and looking for a new pet, a little girl to fill the hole in their lives.” He shook his head. “But it’s all right. I’m not mad. See, I always knew I’d find her. It just took a little longer than I thought, but I found her out in California. She was happy to see me, just like I thought. What Karen and I had was the real deal. I put my mark on her.”
“What do you mean?”
“No matter what she said she did with him, all she was doing was remembering me.”
“Who?” Stacy managed.
“Who? Her new stepbrother, that’s who. Your boyfriend, Captain Fantastic here.” Perry hawked and spat down at Tim, hitting him below the eye, the gob of saliva oozing slowly down his cheek. “She told her shrink all kind of stories about how they did it, just like she and I did.”
“Tim?” Stacy asked.
On the deck Tim peered up at her dully, hardly seeming to follow the conversation at all. His face looked like a bad plaster cast of itself, a partially dried deathmask of a person who had somehow, against all odds, clung to life. He moved his mouth open and closed but no sound came out.
“Don’t worry,” Perry said. “Nothing ever happened between those two. The doctors said she was, you know, projecting. See, she wanted me so bad that she started thinking it was him, not me, that did it to her. Wrote it up in her diary. All that shit.” Perry giggled, a falsetto metallic noise, nails pried from a metal plate, eee-eee-eee. “Right, Tim?”
Tim’s lips twitched. Stacy actually thought she heard sound pass through them this time.
“What’s that, good buddy?” Perry asked.
Tim grunted, mumbling, still incoherent. He shuddered and gave up.
“Speak, boy. Woof!” Perry pushed down on Stacy hard enough that she nearly fell over, bracing his weight on top of her chest and shoulders, and kicked Tim hard in the ribs. With a faint huffing noise, Tim managed to curl slightly sideways in a meager attempt to protect what was left of his consciousness.
“I’m talking to you,” Perry said, biting off each word. “You tell her. You tell her it was me the whole time.” He kicked Tim again, harder, though his vocal inflection remained constant. “Go on. Tell her. Tell her, go on. Tell her it was me.”
“Stop it,” Stacy said. “He can’t talk!”
“Oh, he can talk.” Perry grinned at Tim. His face had become incandescent. “You can talk, can’t you? You know all kinds of big words.”
“Why...?” Tim gasped.
“Why did I come out here?” Perry asked. “That’s easy. I came for Karen. See, the day after I got out of the joint, I went and picked up Roxy from the people that were keeping her from me, and then I tracked Karen down at her place in San Fran. She was happy to see me, too. Threw me that party and everything -- hell, you saw the pictures. It was like old times. Then all of a sudden she says she’s coming back here, up to the family cabin for a weekend with her new brother. I packed up Rox and we got on the plane the day before yesterday, picked up a car and a gun in New Hampshire, finally got here yesterday...broke into some poor retired bastard’s cabin up the shore. Then I drove around the lake to the old Acton family compound last night to drop in and say hi. Imagine my surprise when the house was empty. And the boat was gone.”
“That’s when you called Karen’s cell phone from yours?” Stacy said. “Last night?”
Perry beamed. “It took me a while to lay hands on the retired bastard’s boat key -- old geezer was a real hard case -- but I convinced him. And finally this morning, I got out here.”
“Why did you come after Karen?”
“Why? Shit. To take her back where she belonged. She left me in California, but I came to protect her like a real brother should.”
Tim couldn’t even turn his head up to look at them anymore. Fresh blood seeped from one corner of his mouth, tracing the cracked webbing of his skin. Stacy tried to tell herself that she saw him take in another breath, but she couldn’t be sure.
“And by the way, you’re right,” Perry told Tim, rolling up one sleeve of his new flannel shirt, carefully folding it back so that the cuff would stay rolled just above his forearm. There was a tattoo there, a design that Stacy didn’t recognize, and below it, in Gothic script, the name Karen. “It doesn’t matter much now. Karen’s gone. She was the one great love of my life, and she died on your watch. So before you die I want you to know that I can take what’s yours just as easily. Before you die, I really want you to see this.”
Stacy said, “What are you --”
There was a muted crack and she felt her head rocking to one side, noticing a part of lake she’d never seen before, filtered through a peculiar reddish haze. Broke a blood vessel in my eye, she thought. She’d done it once before, as a kid, running headfirst into a tree. This time, she hadn’t even felt the blow, just the impact of it, spinning her to the left. Recovering, or thinking she was, she realized that Perry was already on top of her, pressing down. Unmindful of what she was lying on, the broken Bimini roof, Tim’s outstretched left arm, Perry was working his body down on top her, arching his back, pumping his hips, his hands doing something in front of his belly, unsnapping his pants and pulling himself out.
“Okay,” he said, and he wasn’t even looking at her anymore. “Here we go.”
Stacy drove her knee up between his legs. She had already come to the conclusion that she would have one chance and consequently put everything she had into the move, hooking the entirety of her lower back and hips into the momentum of it. In the instant of impact she actually visualized her kneecap making contact with his testicles, an ultrasound image of twin orbs exploding in their sac.
Perry never even screamed. Arching back, abruptly gone, clutching himself, he sprung and twisted, still silent, but the shocked pain was already dialing down to anger, and it disturbed her greatly how fast he made that change. Here was a person whose entire existence had become a clinic on how to turn pain into rage, and here she was foolishly betting her life on his inability to do it one more time.
Then she saw where he had hidden the last piece of metal tubing.
It came up all at once, a glint, a flash, there. Perry’s right hand clasped it, the jagged end pointed toward her, and she had the merciless clarity of vision to see the small, cruel barbs, incidental consequences of its forced detachment, actually glinting at her as he rammed it toward the soft part of her throat.
She whipped her head to the side, and the pole slammed into the seat cushion while the back of her skull collided with the fiberglass gunwale. Stars, rockets, pinwheels. When they cleared, she found Perry behind them, Perry with his metal rod that she had so obediently torn loose for him. She could see the muscles constricting in his arm, preparing to bring it down, and this time, unlike before, she had nowhere left to go.
But then it was Perry, not her, who started to scream.
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