Eerie - Crouch Blake - Страница 41
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It was a minute past six a.m.
In the narrow corridor below the trees, Paige had punched on the high beams.
After a quarter of a mile, they broke out of the forest.
He had come here once since that last family vacation when it had been the four of them. Several years ago, a case had taken him out to Nason Creek, and he’d stopped by the old homestead; driven in as far as the clearing, but he’d never shut the car off, never even gotten out. Just sat in his Crown Vic for five minutes, hands clenched around the steering wheel, knuckles blanching, as if he could steel himself against the storm he’d been fighting all of his life.
So much pain caught. So much joy missed.
And there was no better embodiment than this decrepit place.
The cabin stood in the middle of a small clearing that had become considerably less clear in the years since his last visit.
It was a log-frame house, single story, with a steeply-sloping roof of rusted tin.
The front porch was covered, and even though the light was bad, Grant could make out Vincent, Talbert, and Grazer sitting in the rocking chairs.
Paige pulled into the grass beside the black van and cut the engine.
“Are we safe?” Paige asked.
“Why don’t you wait in the car for a minute,” Grant said.
He opened the door and stepped out.
It was freezing, the forest dripping, everything wet.
The hemlocks leaned in above them.
Their smell like a time machine.
He saw Paige—a little girl—running across the sunlit clearing on a summer day. Their mother reading on the porch. His father chopping wood. Their own private oasis.
The smell of Talbert’s cigarette dragged him back to this cold, gray morning.
Grant moved through the waist-high weeds and stopped at the foot of the steps.
Talbert stood.
Dropped his cigarette on the rotting wood of the porch.
Stamped it out.
Vincent and Grazer rose to their feet, the chairs rocking in the sudden wake of their absence. Their suits mud-stained, torn in places, sodden. Dried blood down the front of Talbert’s pinstripe shirt.
Grant said, “Where is he?”
“Inside.”
Grant nodded and Talbert moved across the porch, came down the steps with his cohorts in tow.
He stopped in front of Grant.
Put a hand on both shoulders, a smile slowly spreading across his face.
“We’re glad you made it,” Talbert said. “It’s almost over.”
Pats on Grant’s back as the others passed.
Talbert released his shoulders and continued on.
Grant turned and watched them climb into the van.
Vincent in the driver seat.
Grazer rode shotgun and Talbert disappeared through the sliding door.
The engine cranked and the van circled through the clearing and headed back toward the road.
A hundred feet in, it vanished into the darkness between the hemlocks, nothing but a pair of brake lights dwindling into the gloom.
Paige got out of the CR-V and walked over.
“What’d he say?”
“That it’s almost over.”
Grant heard the distant revving of the van’s engine as it pulled out onto the highway. Within ten seconds, it was out of earshot. The only note left was the wind moving through the top of the forest and the hemlock branches groaning against its force.
Grant and Paige climbed the steps to the porch.
There were beer bottles and cans strewn across the floorboards. Empty packs of cigarettes. Rounds of Skoal dipping tobacco. Old and shriveled condoms. Spent twelve gauge shells. A Penthouse magazine, waterlogged and faded.
Their old vacation home had become a Friday night hangout for teenagers from the surrounding towns.
The front door stood ajar and sagging, attached to the frame by its lowest hinge.
Grant reached for it with his free hand.
It swung inward, arcing toward the floor until it came to a scraping halt after two feet.
He glanced at Paige. “Hang back a second.”
Grant turned sideways with the blanket and stepped through the narrow opening.
The air inside was redolent of pine and smoke and mildew.
There was a small fire in the hearth, illuminating the room with a pulsating light that made the rafters cast a ribcage of shadows on the vaulted ceiling.
Graffiti covered the walls.
Dates and genitalia.
Names preceded by fuck or love.
In the back corner, rotten railing separated the rest of the room from what had been the kitchenette. It was now unrecognizable, buried under the debris of a failed roof, cabinets and counters long-since disintegrated under seasons of rain and snow. Nothing to suggest its prior status beyond a doorless refrigerator peppered with buckshot.
Grant walked over to the fireplace, the glass-littered floor crunching under his boots.
Two generations’ worth of faded Bud Light cans lined the railroad tie that served as a mantle. It was the only place in the cabin that seemed to command some level of order and respect, if nothing more than a nod by the collective consciousness of those who came here to the passage of time.
He stared at the bare wall above the mantle where a painting of his mother’s—an acrylic of the pond out back—used to hang three decades ago. He could still see the nail hole in the cracking drywall that the picture frame’s wire had rested upon.
He reached up and touched it, then turned and leveled his gaze on the two doors in the wall across the room.
The first led into the bedroom he and Paige had shared as children, but Grant made his way through the detritus of a thousand Friday nights toward the second.
Their parent’s room.
He pushed it open, the hinges screeching.
Could no longer feel the heat of the fire, and its glow didn’t come close to lighting these walls whose wood-paneling had buckled and peeled like the diseased bark of a dying birch tree.
He stepped inside.
All the furniture was gone save for a single mattress pushed into the corner.
His father lay on it, writhing in a straightjacket.
Grant crossed the room and lowered himself slowly to his knees. When he set the blanket on the filthy mattress, his father became perfectly still, lying on his stomach, his back heaving as he panted for breath.
There were four straps going across the back of the straightjacket. Grant reached over and unbuckled them.
Then he turned his father onto his back.
His old man’s eyes were huge. They stared at the ceiling, blinking several times a second.
Grant pulled his arms out of the straightjacket sleeves and arranged them at his sides.
He was coming out of himself, out of that deep well. Felt strange to be in proximity to his father, unrestrained and unmedicated. More so to see him lying still, not thrashing around.
Grant unwrapped the blanket, the heat becoming more evident with each layer.
As he peeled back the last fold, he could feel it lapping at his face like a hot breeze.
Its eyes seemed to catch light that wasn’t even in the room. They had changed—now infinitely-faceted, and with the wet sheen of a river-polished stone.
His father’s respirations slowed.
Grant lifted the creature, set it on his old man’s chest like a newborn.
As it began to sink into him, he turned away and walked out of the room.
Paige was by the fire, holding her hands to the heat.
The sound of the door shutting pulled her attention to Grant.
He moved across the room and stood beside her.
“Is Dad in there?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
“Did they hurt him?”
“No.”
“And he’s in there … with it?”
He nodded.
“Why?”
“I have no idea.”
“Just doing what you’re told, huh?” She didn’t say it maliciously.
“Something like that.”
“God, it feels so weird to be here.”
Grant went to the only piece of furniture in the room—a sofa covered in shredded upholstery.
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