Chapter Nineteen

Katherine did not remember sinking, falling beneath the water and spiraling downward into the murky depths of the lake. She only remembered floating, her arms out and slightly above her head, legs dangling lifelessly below her and her hair hovering and gliding about like a dark aura. The water was chilly and sobering, but not freezing. It stung her eyes, yet she kept them open and fixated on the dull light in the distance overhead, fearful that if she lost sight of it she would never again find her way to the surface. Her bare toes brushed the bottom as the remote sunlight, filtered by the water and plant life surrounding her, cast the lake in a strange emerald tint.

It’s all right to sleep now.

Her husband’s voice was as clear as if he were floating right next to her.

We all sleep, Katherine.

The need to breathe taunted her, and though the inherent inclination to panic was present, she somehow remained calm.

Even angels in Heaven and demons in Hell sleep.

His voice was echoing now, less natural, but he was still nowhere in sight. Rather than look for him, Katherine continued to stare at light breaking the surface overhead.

Sometimes the Devil himself sleeps.

It looked so very far away.

Even God sleeps, did you know that?

Katherine felt tightness in her chest…

That’s when we need to be afraid, my love, when God sleeps.

…a crushing pressure that fanned out across her breasts and up into her shoulders…

Because that’s when the Devil opens his eyes and comes awake.

…weighting her down and keeping her suspended there near the bottom of the lake.

And that’s when he makes us remember, Katherine.

She wondered how she was still able to hold her breath.

That’s when he makes us see everything we want and need so desperately to forget.

Years of smoking had rendered that capacity virtually impossible for anything other than a few seconds at a clip, and yet…

Those things we wish we could forgive ourselves for…but never do.

Her lungs began to burn and ache, and a spasm rolled through her abdomen.

Because the Devil isn’t in the forgiveness business, Katherine.

“James!” she screamed, voice muffled by the water. An explosion of bubbles and air rushed from her mouth and nostrils. See watched it race toward the surface in an oddly beautiful and graceful rush, reminding her once again just how deep the lake was.

But Katherine did not drown.

It’s all right to sleep now.

The sunlight changed from an emerald hue cutting through water to a more natural shade. She could feel it now, warming her arms.

The woods…she was in the woods…but not the woods surrounding the lake. This was foreign terrain, a place she had never been before, even in dreams.

A small booklet lay at her feet. She crouched, retrieved it and recognized it as one of the collections of poetry James had published over the years. She opened it to reveal a single poem covering the page facing her.

 

STEAMING REMNANTS

 

I will be there soon

I can feel the depth of its power

Not throttling me as I’d once feared

But calling softly, beckoning

As convincing as the color bleeding soundlessly

Through cracked window shades

Revealing a dying sun

And the realities of nature and man.

 

The noise will stop there

All the rage and mindless violence

Hatred born of ignorance and fear

Slipping away like dew from beveled leaves

And me, falling there

Shattering without pain into endless pieces

Becoming one with all that once made me whole

While absorbing secrets and destinies in silence.

 

I will be so still and quiet

Not afraid but full of joy

As the last breaths of this world

Flutter off like so many seagulls floating

With both grace and predatory purpose

Above bins filled with steaming remnants

Of what was once alive.

 

A breeze blew through the trees, and the booklet fell to pieces, disintegrated into ash carried off on the wind.

Katherine followed after it, along a path through the forest, until she emerged into a small clearing. Beyond it, nestled in the forest like the oasis it was, sat a small pond. On the far banks, an old rope hung from one of the larger nearby trees, summoning visions of boys and girls swinging out over the pond then dropping into it, laughing and enjoying a warm summer day much like the one Katherine now found herself in.

But on this day the pond was deserted.

A large boulder sat perched at the edge of the left-hand bank. James sat atop it; his legs pulled up close to his chest, arms wrapped around them and chin resting on his knees. He hadn’t seemed to notice her, but Katherine could tell he knew she was there. Nude, as she was, he looked cold despite the warmth from the sun beating down on them, and was still wet from a recent swim. “I never told you about Parker.”

Katherine moved closer. “No.”

“He was just a boy,” he said softly. “But then, so was I.”

She noticed the sun through the trees, how it filtered through the foliage and decorated a section of forest just behind James in an intricate pattern of shadow and light. It felt so peaceful here, so safe and serene, a haven for daydreams and flights of childhood fantasy, a place of innocence and joy. And yet, there was something else, horrible and deadly, slithering just beneath this tranquil shell, something that didn’t belong. An intruder, a destroyer amidst the beauty, it was wrapped and hidden within it, waiting patiently.

“Most people have no idea what it’s like to be alone,” James said, “really, truly, utterly alone. They think they do, but they don’t.”

“James, where are we?”

“It’s not so bad when you can pick and choose the circumstances, when you can isolate yourself if you want or need to, when you can control it. It’s not so bad if you know you have love, are loved, and have that as a sanctuary at your worst points. But when it’s decided for you, when it’s the hand you’re dealt, so to speak, and you have no real love to save you, when you’re just a child it…” For the first time, James raised his chin from his knees and looked over at Katherine. “Alone and unloved is something a child should never feel.”

“It’s something no one should ever feel.” Katherine held his gaze.

“Yes, but especially a child,” he said.

“I know you had a difficult childhood, James.”

“Do you now?” He turned back to the pond before them.

“Yes, and I’m sorry. I’m sorry you had to go through—”

“I thought when I went to live with the Covingtons I’d found something I’d never had before,” James said quickly, his voice louder now. “A real family where people cared about one another, where I didn’t have to feel so alone anymore…a family, a real, loving family like everyone else. I actually believed it for a while, the way children sometimes believe in things they shouldn’t, in things they know aren’t true but choose to believe anyway. Because when you’re a child you think that maybe—just maybe—if you believe long enough and hard enough, that wishing will make it so. But that’s just another lie, like life itself, and when we get older we realize that all the little fibs we tell ourselves from the time we’re old enough to comprehend and imagine them only exist so we can make it through.”

“Where are we, James?”

“I had a foster brother when I first lived with the Covingtons, a little brother named Parker. He was a beautiful little boy with the brightest eyes I’d ever seen before or since. I still see those eyes every time I close my own. I tried to forget them over the years, and now and then I did. But they always come back. Always, Katherine. Always.”

“What happened here?” she asked. “Did something happen here when you were a child?”

“They tell you such lies.” Pain dominated his expression. “They tell you they love you the same as they love their own child, and you believe them because you need to so desperately. But it’s not true. It’s not true because their real child can do no wrong and you can do no right. You’re always second best, always coming up short. And it hurts but you accept it because it’s all there is. You try so hard to please them, to do your best, but it always falls just shy. And then something happens…something bad…and nothing is ever the same again.”

Katherine slowly closed the gap between them until she could reach out and touch his leg. His skin was warm, alive. “What happened here?” she asked again. “What was the bad thing that happened?”

“That bitch Josephine,” he said, turning his head so he could rest his cheek against the tops of his knees. “She always blamed me, always accused me. I could never get her to believe me. I didn’t hurt Parker. I would never have hurt him, I—he was my little brother.”

“Tell me what happened, James.”

“The Devil came awake while God slept. In me, he came awake in me.”

Katherine reached out in an attempt to hug and console him, but he was sitting up too high on the boulder. With one hand still resting on his thigh, she started up the side of the rock so she could sit with him.

Until she saw what was floating in the pond just beyond the shore.

A young boy floating faceup just beneath the clear water, eyes open but seeing nothing. Eyes long dead.

Katherine staggered back and nearly fell. “I know him,” she gasped. “I-I’ve seen him before, he was on the lake with you when you were crossing the ice with those children. He’s the little boy in the gray suit.”

James nodded without raising his head. “I didn’t kill him, Katherine. I never touched him. I loved him. Josephine always believed I drowned him, she blamed me but I—I didn’t do it. I didn’t do anything.”

“How did he drown, James? Tell me how he drowned.”

“There used to be a small wooden raft in the middle of the pond,” he said dully. “Children weren’t supposed to swim here unattended but everyone in town did. Kids were the only ones that came here. I took Parker a lot that summer, and nothing ever happened…until one late afternoon. Parker insisted on swimming out to the raft and back. I wouldn’t allow it because I knew he couldn’t make it. He’d only just learned to swim with any kind of ability the year before. But I was showing off, swimming out there and back, and he wanted to do it too. I didn’t realize how much he looked up to me, how much he loved me too.”

Katherine felt her legs tremble, and she slowly sank into a sitting position on the ground. She’d become suddenly lightheaded.

“Parker disobeyed me and started swimming out to the raft. I knew he could make it there all right, so I stayed here on this rock and watched him. I was mad at him for going out there, I wanted to go home, it was late in the day and everyone else had left. I was angry so I stayed here and glared at him. He made it to the raft, climbed up and waved. He was laughing.” His face twitched into a smile, but the dark memories wouldn’t allow him to sustain it. “I called to him to wait there a few minutes before swimming back so he could catch his breath, but he insisted he could make it and wanted to prove it to me. He was so sure he could do it like a big boy, like—like me. He was wrong.”

Katherine felt her eyes fill with tears. How could her husband have carried this with him his entire life and not told her? So much of his inner turmoil and pain now made sense. “You couldn’t reach him in time?” she asked.

“He hadn’t even gotten halfway back when he started having trouble. I knew he was drowning. He started flailing his arms frantically over his head, and he screamed a few times, trying to call me, but the water was choking him and he couldn’t stay afloat.”

“James, did you try to—”

“I was just a little boy myself!” he said, anger rising in his voice as he turned his face away from her so she could no longer see him. “I froze, I—I just sat here while he fought to live. And, my God, how that little boy fought. I knew I should’ve gone into the water for him but I couldn’t move. Every fiber in my being was screeching at me, ordering me out there to save that little boy, but I couldn’t move. I couldn’t move. I just sat here, quietly and casually, and watched him drown.”

“My God,” she whispered, the words escaping her before she could stop them.

“You know nothing of gods,” he muttered. “Nothing…and everything.”

“I don’t understand.”

When James turned back to her, his face was streaked with tears. “I ran home and told Josephine and Darren what happened. When we got back he was floating dead in the pond. I knew he’d already be dead. Do you know how I knew that, Katherine? Because he was dead before I left.”

“You were just a child yourself,” she told him. “You froze, you were frightened, and you froze. It happens to people all the time. It wasn’t your fault, do you understand? It wasn’t your fault that Parker drowned.”

“I should’ve saved him. I could’ve saved him.”

“No, you were in shock and—”

“I could have saved him, Katherine,” James said, forcefully this time. “But I didn’t. I sat here and watched him die instead.”

“James, listen to me. You were in shock, you—”

“I didn’t kill Parker,” he said, an eerie calm returning to his tone. “I didn’t do anything. I didn’t even try. And somehow, that’s worse. It’s even more insidious than if I’d drowned him myself. It had to be dealt with, painful as it was and as much as I tried to hide from it. I’m an artist, it’s what I do, Katherine. It’s who I am.”

“You were just a frightened little boy.”

“The Covingtons never forgave me,” he said as if he hadn’t heard her. “Especially Josephine, she always accused me of hurting her precious Parker but never once thought about me and how I felt, what I had gone through. She was horrible to me after that, and Darren, spineless bastard, went along. He hated me too. They never seemed to realize—or maybe they did—that right or wrong, we’re all defined in many ways by who we love, and by who loves us. They…”

Katherine wiped tears from her eyes and struggled to hold herself together. “What did they do, James? What did they do to you?”

He slowly slid off the boulder to the ground and knelt at the banks of the pond where Parker’s small body was still floating lifelessly. “They stopped lying.”

Katherine’s fight to control her emotions was a losing battle, as visions of the delicate child James had once been—a damaged and terrified little boy ravaged with guilt and deeply traumatized by what had happened—refused to leave her. Her heart tore in two for that little boy, that sad and frightened and broken little boy.

“They stopped lying to me because they didn’t care anymore now that their real child was dead,” he said. “But they didn’t understand how much I needed those lies. They were all I had. Without them, I had to see the truth. I was alone again, unloved again.”

“Until you met me,” she said.

“Yes,” he sobbed, “until I met you.”

“And the Japanese boy?” she asked a moment later. “He was another little boy you couldn’t save, and it brought it all back, didn’t it?”

“That’s when I first knew what was truly happening,” he said, continuing to cry. “I knew then it wasn’t about Parker or that little Japanese boy. It was about me.”

“It made you feel like you’d failed by not somehow being able to save him, and by not saving him it was like not being able to save Parker all over again, wasn’t it?” Katherine pressed.

“Don’t you understand even now?” he asked, wiping the tears from his eyes and face. “I was able to save Parker. I can do whatever the fucking hell I want to do, can’t you see that? I chose not to.”

“It wasn’t a choice,” she told him.

“Yes, my love,” James said as he slowly rose to his feet, “it was.”

“This isn’t reality,” she said helplessly.

“Reality is perception…and perspective.”

Something moved behind him…slowly, sneakily.

An enormous gray snake with black markings slithered over the top of the boulder, down over the side and onto the ground, where it slowly coiled next to him and came to rest. James crouched and ran a hand over the creature’s head. It did not seem to mind.

Katherine felt a shiver slowly course through her. She drew her feet closer to her body in an attempt to shrink farther away from the animal. Over the years James had come to know and understand her fear of snakes, and he’d always made an attempt to keep the lake area as clear of them as possible. Whenever one ventured down from the forest he would return it with his usual loving care, aware of how frightened Katherine was of them.

“Cliché, I know, forgive me. But snakes are such wonderfully effective metaphors for evil, don’t you think? Unless you’re a snake, of course, because from their perspective it’s probably demonizing them unfairly in most cases, they’re just animals like any other. You see? Perception, my love, it’s all perception and perspective.”

“You know snakes terrify me,” she said softly, as if it might hear.

“Yes, I do.” James grinned at her, but there was nothing warm or funny about it. “Fear of snakes is primeval in many people, and why shouldn’t it be? The stories of snakes as living embodiments of evil are older than Man. Remember the Garden of Eden? The snake was even there at the dawn of humanity, if you believe in such things. Regardless, it’s one of the most misunderstood stories ever. So few people seem to realize that the story isn’t about beginnings at all, it’s about an end. It’s true that something was born in that garden, but something also died there. Man, as God had originally intended, Katherine. All thanks to our little friend here.” He ran his fingers across the serpent’s body. “And what was left? Mankind scrambling for answers and creating so many religions, so many philosophies to choose from, most with just enough truth and common sense to comfort and control, but none with definitive answers. No, we mustn’t have answers from either side, Katherine, because then there would be no need for faith, no need for hatred or love, greed or charity, war or peace, cruelty or kindness. Not in the light, not in the dark.”

“What’s happening, James, what—”

“Do you know what the Hindus believe?” he asked suddenly.

Katherine remembered the weeks before his disappearance, when he’d become consumed with reading everything he could get his hands on regarding the nature of reality and existence, parapsychology, various religions, philosophy, and strange psychic phenomenon.

“Their gods and demons experience birth and death just as we do,” he answered before she could. “They live what seem to be nearly wholly human lives, experiencing the same things we do. Yet they’re eternal, because they’re not human, Katherine. They’re something else, something similar disguised as human. All religions have some truth. That’s theirs. That’s the part they got right, and I’m living proof. What I never realized was that we always assume gods and demons know what they are, but maybe some are just as lost as humans are here, dumped and expected to wing it, to fight their way through like everyone else. Maybe, just as humans do, they—I—have to search for my true self and nature, and if they’re lucky, one day they find it. They find the truth about who and what they are.”

I’m not who you thought I was, and I’m not what you thought I was.

“Maybe sometimes,” he added, “no matter how hard they try to hide from it…the truth finds them.”

I’m not even who I thought I was.

“You’re not a god or a demon, James,” she said, voice shaking. “You’re just a frightened and wounded little boy.”

“Can a frightened and wounded little boy do this?” he asked, turning a palm to the sky and sweeping his arm slowly between them to indicate their surroundings. “Can a frightened and wounded little girl like you?”

I can do things human beings cannot do. Things you could never understand even if I was able to explain them to you. What does that tell you?

“And if we live,” James said, “then we dream, Katherine. All of us, we dream.”

Tell me, Katherine, what do you suppose demons dream?

“Who are the children?” Katherine asked. “Who is the man with them?”

As James lifted the snake onto his shoulder and allowed it to slowly wrap itself around him, the sunlight faded, blurred, and the pond and woods reverted to the depths of the lake from which Katherine had come.

She was beneath the water again, watching the sunlight beyond the surface above.

And then she heard his answer. “The children are mine,” his voice whispered to her. “The man is me…and you are my dream.”