The Narrows Page 17

  “Crazier things have washed up.” Like that poem about Santa Claus, Hogarth pressed one finger to the side of his nose. “Craziest thing I ever found was a Viking helmet—bullet-shaped thing with the horned tusks coming out of the sides.”

  “No kidding.”

  “Saw it wedged up in the fork of a tree,” Hogarth said. “I must have been about seven or eight at the time, and a hell of a tree climber. I scaled that tree, pulled the helmet down, and took it home to show my old man. I remember him examining it by the firelight in the hearth that evening—we were living in a tar-paper shack out along what is Tillman Road now—and how he turned it over and over in his big hands. He was afraid of it, thought it meant there were soldiers hiding somewhere in the mountains plotting some attack. My father was a descendant of English pig farmers. He hadn’t the slightest clue what the hell a Viking was, let alone what sort of headgear they wore.”

  “What about animals?” Ben asked. “Did any nonindigenous animals ever wash up?”

  While the look on the old man’s face conveyed a lack of familiarity with the word nonindigenous, he understood the context and did not miss a beat in answering Ben’s question. “There was a snake once. A big one. And I’m not talking your garden variety mountain snake, Ben. This thing looked like it had come straight out of the Amazon.”

  “A python?”

  “Lord knows what it was. It was pale yellow with these whitish, wavy markings down its back. It had drowned in the flood and washed up at a dirt intersection that eventually became Calvert Street, right where the Farmers’ Market used to be. Damn thing was as long as a school bus and, at its widest, thicker than a grown man’s upper thigh. Midway along its body was a massive bulge, an indication that it had eaten something before it died.”

  Ben finished his ice cream float and slid the glass across the counter. Lost completely in the past, Hogarth did not appear to notice.

  “Some men came out of the cannery—there used to be a cannery at the far end of Susquehanna, where all those homes are now—and one of them had this long buck knife. We all gathered around in the street and watched as he cut into the belly of the snake and all this greenish-black ooze spilled out. I remember it taking him some time and effort to cut that belly open, and when he finally got it, the gash separated like a purse.”

  “What was inside?” Ben asked. His voice was close to a whisper.

  Hogarth said, “A little girl.”

  Ben blinked.

  “She had been maybe six years old, judging by her size, though it was hard to tell because she had been partially digested. Her features had been melted and worn away by the snake’s stomach acids, giving her this faceless, inhuman appearance. I was in my thirties back then, but I still suffered about two weeks’ worth of nightmares after seeing that girl’s featureless body slide out of the opening in the snake’s belly, splayed out there on the muddy road in a pool of bile, blood, and digestive juices.”

  “Jesus,” Ben breathed.

  “Yeah. So maybe the Viking helmet wasn’t the craziest thing ever washed up around here after all.”

  “My father never told me stories like that.”

  “Your dad had stories to beat the band, Ben. I once saw him save the little Winterbarger girl when she was chokin’ on a bit of stewed lamb at the county fair.”

  “I’ve heard that story,” Ben said. “I meant stories about the land, the town itself. I was told never to go up into the mountains by myself and, when I got older and could go out beyond the highway, I was told never to swim in the Narrows alone. But I was never told about…well, the way you speak of it, there was a sort of…power, I guess, that the land held. I hear you talk about this town and it’s like listening to stories from another planet.”

  “Every small town has power,” Hogarth said. “The people are aware of it in the way we’re aware of electricity humming through the walls of our homes or that our water is delivered through a network of pipes underground. We sense it like animals sense a tornado coming. You feel it just as much as I do, Ben. I’ve just been around long enough to recognize what it is.”

  He thought about the cold, empty nights in the farmhouse now that his parents were dead and buried. He could not deny the sense of indefinable power that seemed to radiate up through the old, warped floorboards on certain winter nights…the power that funneled down the old stone chimney and moaned like a bear from the cave of the hearth…

  “Lately,” Hogarth said, snapping Ben from his reverie, “I’ve been having trouble sleeping. It started before the last storm and it’s just gotten worse. Not insomnia, per se…but a certain wakefulness that I feel is partially thrust upon me and partially my inbred responsibility. I feel like a warrior keeping watch in the tower of some medieval castle.”

  “If that’s supposed to make me feel better, it doesn’t.”

  The old man’s smile looked pained. “Me either, Ben. Me either.”

  2

  The moment he stepped back out onto the sidewalk, Ben’s cell phone trilled. He anticipated that the call was from Paul Davenport over in Garrett County with the number for the Fish and Wildlife folks who had come and collected the carcass of the dead mountain lion, but he was wrong.

  “Ben Journell,” said a man’s voice, vaguely familiar. “It’s John Deets over in Cumberland.”

  “Oh. Hello, John.” Deets was the county ME whom Ben had brought in to deal with the drowned boy who’d washed up along Wills Creek almost two weeks ago. He’d forgotten that Deets had been trying to reach him.

  “Listen,” Deets motored on, talking in his clipped and rushed way, “I’m sorry to bother you on your day off, Ben, but I’ve been trying to get in touch with you and, well, it’s your name I’ve got listed down here as the case sergeant.”

  “I heard the boy has been identified,” Ben said. “Is that correct?”

  “Well, we did happen to hear from a couple whose son went missing a few days before the body was found. They were on a road trip and had stopped at a motel off Route 40. The kid went outside to walk the family dog and never came back. The father went out looking for him and found the dog sniffing around some Dumpsters out behind the motel. No trace of the kid.”

  “Have they identified the body?” Ben asked.

  “They were going to.” Deets’s voice sounded unsteady. Apprehensive.

  “John,” he said. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

  “Ben,” said Deets. “The boy’s body is gone.”

  3

  “What the heck are you doing here?” Eddie said, peering at Ben from around the side of his cubicle. He had one of his horror magazines open in his lap. “It’s your day off.”

  “I’m just grabbing some stuff to take home,” Ben said, going immediately to his desk. A stack of slim blue case folders sat at the corner of his desk. He picked them up and hastily thumbed through them.

  “What’s the emergency?” Eddie asked as he flipped casually through his magazine.

  “I just heard from John Deets at the morgue.”

  “They get an ID on that kid?”

  “The kid’s gone.” Ben set the folders back down on his desk. He met Eddie’s eyes from across the Batter’s Box.

  “What the heck are you talkin’ about, gone?”

  “They’re not sure if the body’s just been misplaced or if this is some kind of theft—”

  “Who’d steal a body?”

  “All I know is they don’t know where the hell the boy’s body is.”

  “Maybe it’s a Halloween prank?”

  Ben frowned at the ridiculousness of the statement. It reminded him of what old Ted Minsky had said last night, after they’d come in from examining his slaughtered goats—I thought it might’ve been a prank, seein’ how close we are to Halloween. But after I seen my goats this evening…well…I don’t know nobody thinks somethin’ like that’s a prank.

  “Where’s the kid’s case file?”

  Making a face as if he smelled something foul, Eddie
sat forward in his chair and scrounged around the top of his own desk. When he found the slender blue folder, he handed it to Ben. “What’re you gonna do about it?”

  “I’m not sure yet. Just seems awfully coincidental that it’s been one thing after another around here for the past two weeks or so, don’t you agree?”

  Lethargically, Eddie La Pointe nodded. “It’s the storms.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Storms like we been havin’ are bad juju.”

  “I don’t believe in that stuff.”

  Eddie shrugged, obviously disinterested in Ben’s opinion on the matter. “Your whatchamacallit has been chirping its head off in the sally port. I think it’s hungry.”

  He’d forgotten about the bat. “So now it’s my whatchamacallit? You guys were the ones who wanted to keep it, remember?”

  “Hell,” Eddie drawled, “not me. Bats, they freak me the hell out.”

  4

  Before leaving for home, Ben stopped off in the sally port with some fresh slices of apple. The bat was upright, clinging to the bars of the birdcage with the fang-like little hooks at the apex of its wings. It sniffed blindly at the air, its tiny pink mouth open.

  “You hungry?”

  Yet as he approached, he saw a few half-eaten bits of apple still at the bottom of the bat’s cage.

  “What’s the matter?” He spoke in a low, soothing baritone. “Are you getting picky all of a sudden? You want some caviar or something instead?”

  He squeezed a fresh wedge of apple through the bars of the birdcage.

  “What the hell’s going on around here, huh?”

  The bat tittered.

  Chapter Eight

  1

  Just as Ben Journell stood outside Hogarth’s Drugstore speaking to the county medical examiner, Brandy Crawly awoke from a fitful sleep. For a moment she remained lying on her back, wondering if her waking hours had somehow become her dreams, while her dreams had somehow become reality. It was Monday, a school day, but she had no intention of going to school; in fact, she had slept through much of the morning.

  There was a dull ache at the center of her head. Matthew is gone.

  She got out of bed and passed by her beveled mirror without pausing, going straight to the bedroom windows. The windows looked out onto the road that ran along the front of the Crawly house, twisting and curling like a ribbon of asphalt until it disappeared over the nearest hill toward town. On the other side of the road, the sloping green fields yawned all the way out to the tree-studded foothills. Within the shadows of the mountains, heavy darkness still pressed low to the ground out beyond the fields, and the hillsides looked mottled with alternating blackness and spangles of red and white sunlight. What leaves were still in the trees blazed with all the colors of an inferno.

  Downstairs, her mother dozed on the couch, still propped up in the approximation of a sitting position. The living room windows were partway open and a cool autumnal wind had dropped the temperature. Brandy unfolded an afghan that hung over the back of one of the wingback chairs and spread it over her mother’s sleeping body. Wendy Crawly did not even stir. Then Brandy clicked off the television, which was tuned to some ancient black-and-white movie, the volume turned down so low it could have been a silent film.

  In the kitchen, she dumped five scoops of Maxwell House into the coffee machine then clicked on the red Power button. The machine hissed and burped. There was still some food left out on the counter from the sandwich her mother had made her the previous night—sliced turkey, crusts of bread, an empty jar of mayonnaise, a wilting head of lettuce. There were some open Tupperware containers and ceramic dishes out along the countertop as well, and she assumed her mother had taken these items out of the refrigerator late the previous night after Brandy had gone to bed.

  Brandy opened the window over the sink, hoping some fresh air might combat the aggressive odors of the stale food. There were plastic trash bags in the cupboard beneath the sink; she took one out and flapped it like a matador’s cape until it opened. Systematically, she moved down the length of the counter, dumping the Tupperware containers into the trash, whether they were disposable or not. She scraped hunks of pot roast, foul-smelling chicken legs, and congealed, quivering cubes of stew out of the ceramic dishes and into the trash bag. The bag sufficiently weighted down, she hauled it out onto the back porch and, hefting it over the railing, dumped it into one of the Rubbermaid trash bins that were lashed to the porch by bungees. A swarm of flies spiraled up out of the trash bin and dissipated like smoke into the atmosphere.

  Matthew’s bike still slouched against the garage. It troubled her to look at it so she decided to stow it away in the garage until Matthew returned. Kicking on her mother’s sandals that still sat by the door, she went down into the yard and was making a beeline for the bike when she paused in midstride. Bats, like little black pods covered in bristly hair and pointy devilish ears, hung from the eaves of the garage. As she stared at them they seemed to vibrate as if alive with electrical current. Some of them opened and closed their wings with mechanical rigidity. There was even one hanging upside down from the clothesline that stretched from the garage to the back porch.

  Like most everyone in this part of the country, she was no stranger to the creatures. Customarily, they came out around dusk and zipped through the sky in erratic, confused patterns that could not be confused with those of birds. Once, she had spied a tiny one nesting in the latticework around the raised back porch. It had looked like a leaf until it cranked open its fragile little wings in a manner that reminded Brandy of the hydraulic doors on the school bus.

  She had never seen this many before, all in one place. And they were usually gone before the first shimmer of daylight painted the eastern sky.

  After standing there in a mixture of fear and deliberation, she decided to forego moving the bike into the garage and went back into the house.

  2

  Her mother awoke around three in the afternoon, shambling out of the living room and into the kitchen to fill up a mug of coffee that had already gone lukewarm. Brandy was at the kitchen table, one of her school textbooks before her, a partially eaten apple browning beside an untouched glass of milk.

  “I don’t suppose anyone called?” her mother asked, drinking her coffee while looking out the window over the kitchen sink.

  “No.”

  “What time is it?”

  “About three.”

  “Why’d you let me sleep so late?”

  “You looked tired. I didn’t want to bother you.”

  Her mother said nothing.

  “Do you…” Brandy faltered. “Mom?”

  “Hmmm?”

  “Do you think we should call Dad?”

  Just by staring at the matted hair at the back of her mother’s head, Brandy could tell that a wave of emotions coursed through her. The hand holding the coffee cup shook.

  “He might want to know, is all,” she added quietly, turning back to her textbook. True, her father might want to know that the son he’d left behind had now similarly disappeared…but that wasn’t the only reason for Brandy’s suggestion. Her reasons were deeper than that, but they were so pitiful that she did not want to even acknowledge them herself. Before he’d left, Hugh Crawly had been the family protector, the strength and the decision-maker. To the extent of Brandy’s knowledge, he had never been broken or weakened or brought to his knees a single day in his life. To have him back home now would be—

  Stop it, she chastised herself, feeling a hot flush spread across her face. He walked out on all of us two years ago. Remember what it did to everyone? Remember how it felt? Brandy Crawly remembered. She hated feeling a childish need for him now.

  Her mother dumped the rest of her coffee into the sink then went out onto the back porch. A minute later, Brandy heard her sobbing. She contemplated going to her and attempting to comfort her, but the simple prospect of doing so seemed to weaken her spirit. Instead, she went up to her bedroom and switc
hed on the stereo. From one window she could see Dwight Dandridge seated on the curb across the street. He had something tucked under one arm and was looking at something else on the pavement between his sneakers.

  Unable to help it, she thought about the boy who had washed up along the shores of Wills Creek two weeks ago. When news of the boy’s discovery had hit the town, Brandy had simply assumed that the boy, who had not been identified as a resident of Stillwater or any neighboring towns, had been careless, fallen into the swollen waters of the Narrows, and drowned. Now, she was not so sure. What if his death were the work of something more sinister? What if something had attacked and killed that boy? She found she could not recall if the newspapers had spoken of a cause of death. Rumors were that he had been hairless and pale and naked, but had there also been…injuries?

  Feeling sweaty and unclean, she showered quickly, changed her clothes, and went out the front door without saying a word to her mother. Across the street, Dwight was still perched on the curb looking at whatever it was on the ground between his feet.

  He looked up at Brandy just as her shadow fell across him. “Hey,” he said. The thing between his feet was a tiny turtle.

  “What are you doing?”

  Dwight shrugged and looked back down at the turtle. “Just hanging around, I guess.”

  She sat down beside him on the curb.

  “Is that your turtle?”

  “Nah,” said the boy. “It was just here. I ain’t messin’ with him. Just watching where he goes.”

  She glanced at the thing tucked beneath Dwight’s arm. It was a plastic bag, though she could not make out its contents. “What’s in there?”

  Dwight pulled the bag between his knees and opened it. He took out a rubber vampire mask from which the price tag still hung and seemed to appraise it longingly. Something about the boy’s sullenness resonated with Brandy.

  “Picked it up for him this morning, before school,” Dwight said. “You know, before anyone else could grab it. Figure I’ll hold on to it until he comes home.”