Road Seven follows disgraced cryptozoologist Mark Sandoval—resolutely arrogant, covered head to foot in precise geometric scarring, and still marginally famous after Hollywood made an Oscar-winner based off his memoir years before—who has been strongly advised by his lawyer to leave the country following a drunken and potentially fatal hit and run. When a woman sends Sandoval grainy footage of what appears to be a unicorn, he quickly hires an assistant and the two head off to the woman’s farm in Hvíldarland, a tiny, remote island off the coast of Iceland. When they arrive on the island and discover that both a military base and the surrounding álagablettur, the nearby woods, are teeming with strangeness and secrets, they begin to realize that a supposed unicorn sighting is the least of their worries. Road Seven will mark the third of Rosson’s novels to be published by Meerkat Press.
Coming July 14, 2020 from Meerkat Press.
ghosts of the álagablettur
“I asked Alfredo, who had spent a significant amount of time in the house on Montavilla Street as a young boy, who had long been witness to its ever-changing list of horrors, if he’d ever been afraid while inside the rooms, inside the mansion with the red door. ‘Oh no, señor,’ said Alfredo, ‘they meant me no harm in there.’ He touched the crucifix that lay at his throat and drew hard on his cigarette, gazing out at the dusky streets of Mexico City below us. ‘Sad and lonely is different than evil and bad, si?’”
Chapter 2
Our routine—post-Bejeweled Turd Discovery—deepened. It had shaped up like this:
After waking, I’d spend those first few minutes trying to gauge the depth and severity of the tumor, then wander bleary-eyed and cold into the house to wash up. Some mornings the headache wouldn’t even be there, which was almost more worrisome. Like an intruder somewhere inside your darkened house. Karla had insisted that we make ourselves at home, but Sandoval and I both had a sense of propriety that bordered on aloof. We stuck to quietly recharging our gear and making coffee in the morning, using the bathroom, taking dinner with the family. That was about it. Otherwise we were outside.
Occasionally we’d get hit with a dusting of snow and Sandoval would take his laptop or his notebook into the dining room and write at the Hauksdóttirs’ big glass-topped table, but usually he worked on the porch or in his tent. I made coffee, did some dishes or took a shower while the house came alive around me. If the kids weren’t staying at Shane’s, I helped a bit there. They were hilarious in the morning, struck monosyllabic with sleep, flattened hair and pillow lines in their faces. Staring off into some middle distance as they ate the cereal and toast I put in front of them. Karla seemed grateful for the help. It was a weird rhythm to fall into, curiously domestic, but I liked it. I liked these people, liked Karla’s willingness to embrace the odd, kooky angles of herself, and it all helped me ignore how I’d pretty much cut off contact with my own family. I knew it was temporary, I knew it was a mirage, but it felt like this brief hiccup of normalcy. I savored it.
I’d go outside after the kids had gone to school and Karla’s work crew had arrived. They’d all head out to the greenhouses, and there would be Sandoval on the porch, scribbling in his notebook in his fingerless gloves and North Face jacket, hood cinched tight.
Trying to get Sandoval to eat something would produce middling results, and in late morning he’d either keep writing or head into the woods or to one of the hamlets radiating off of Road Seven. We steered clear of Camp Carroll and the álagablettur, everything north of the house, and I liked that just fine. He kept insisting that would be the endgame—the base or the álagablettur, but he also insisted we had to “exhaust all the other possibilities first.”
Part of Sandoval’s blooming paranoia had to do with the internet, with communication. He’d sent the unicorn shit off to a lab in Atlanta and worried that his email could get hacked. That if the results came back positive—“And they will,” he assured me daily—and someone found out about it, we’d be screwed out of one of the greatest discoveries in history. So he wanted the results to be sent to me.
“Why wouldn’t my email get hacked?” I asked.
He shrugged. “No one knows who you are. No one cares about you.”
Mark Sandoval, that envoy of delicacy. But he had a point.
So the best part of my day, hands down, was pedaling into Kjálkabein on my little bicycle to check the email address I’d set up to receive the news. I’d ride to a coffee shop not far from the Hotel Magnificence, take refuge in the comfort of brewed coffee, of people talking quietly, of rain beading the windows. Reveling a little in the normalcy of it, the routine. There were a great number of things I was afraid to do while I was there, of course: check my personal email, reach out to my friends and loved ones, enter the term Stage III astrocytoma into even the lamest of search engines. I would hold tight to that sense of normalcy until it killed me.
I was heading back out of town after another fruitless visit and was pedaling along that stretch of Road Seven where everything went sagging and industrial when someone honked behind me. A blat like a clown car.
I veered onto the shoulder and waved them on, still pedaling. The horn sounded again—bluuunk!—and I turned and saw a little blue Peugeot puttering along behind me, swaths of paint in different hues like someone had taken spray cans to it. The driver honked again, and an arm came out of the driver’s window, motioning me over. The size of that arm did not dispel in me the notion of a clown car—it was a massive appendage, poking out of the little blue vehicle like that.
Both of the men in the car wore black balaclavas tucked into their collars.
I thought about pedaling as fast as I could down that straight stretch of road, but the ridiculousness of it stopped me. It was broad daylight! We were on a highway! The main road! I halted, my scalp tightening, my body flooded with that loose, watery feeling that was becoming so familiar, that feeling that screamed run. I felt the space where my tooth had been, the little knot of scar tissue on my lip.
The car rose on its shocks when the two men stepped out. The passenger was tall, thin, the driver short and muscled. Warped, funhouse versions of each other. Both wore gloves, cargo pants tucked into combat boots. Those masks. Only the pale skin around their eyes showed, their lips.
The skinny one held a wooden fish bat in one fist.
I rode the bike into the field, had some vision born of decades of bad cinema—as if my feet would be a blur on the pedals, as if the men would grow to distant, frustrated specks behind me as I rocketed toward the tree line.
I made it ten, fifteen feet, until my front wheel hit a lava rock embedded in the earth. I toppled over the handlebars, rolled, got a face full of gritty loam between my molars. Someone grabbed a fistful of hair and yanked me up to my knees.
My arm was hoisted behind my back and I was frog-marched back to the car. “Help,” I yelled, and across the road, a sheep bleated as if in response. The men laughed. The one holding my arm smacked my forehead against the lip of the roof when he pushed me in the backseat.
Not another car anywhere.
They sat in the front—the shocks sank again—and turned to me, each putting an arm over their seat.
“Let me start off by saying kiss my ass,” I said, my voice cracking at least twice in the process, and the driver, almost casually, punched me in the eye. My head bounced off the seat behind me. It was so close in there, he hardly had room to extend his arm. It still hurt.
“Shit,” I said.
He said, “You need to get out of my country, man.” It was spoken in a bad Hvíldarlandic accent, like an American shooting for a bad punchline.
This was to be my hell, then—to be beaten repeatedly, while my assailants said the same dumb shit over and over again.
“Get out,” said the passenger. “Go home, don’t come back.” This was said in a heavy Russian accent, and he made a shooing motion towards me like he was being harried by flies. Everything on them looked brand new. Gloves, masks. Even their teeth were white and beautiful.
The tall one reached over and gently tapped the fish bat against my ear, twice. Action films once more ran dizzyingly through my head—I could take the bat, break his arm, hoist my legs over the seat and choke the other one out. I had to piss. I felt like I might have already pissed when I had fallen in the field. There was still grit in my teeth.
A car drove by, an old white pickup stacked high with caged chickens. It kept on going, had no interest in the drama that was unfolding in this little square of a car. I looked out into the field and saw my little bike out there, its color forlorn and strange amid the desolation. “You’re wasting your time,” the driver said. “There’s no such thing as an einhyrningur, okay?” The other one pressed the roughened tip of the bat against my forehead.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t even know what that is.”
The passenger pushed the bat against my forehead until I was looking up at the roof of the car, and then the driver leaned over the seat and gripped my testicles and squeezed. That dark roiling ache exploded up into my guts. I bellowed and tried to curl over but the passenger kept the bat against my forehead so instead I raised my legs up, tried to curl into a ball that way.
“Forget about the fucking unicorn,” he said, pronouncing it like eyooni-corn. He pushed the bat against my forehead once more and then took it away. “Nobody wants you here. Go home.”
In between gasps, I said, “You’re the guys that trashed our stuff. At the hotel.”
“Maybe,” said the driver. “Or maybe all of Hvíldarland wants you gone. Maybe wherever you go, someone’s watching you. Maybe time ran out for you a while back.”
“Go home,” said the passenger. “We’re not asking again, tovarishch.” Languorous and slow, a single eye winked beneath the mask.
They turned around in their seats then. Dismissive like that, like I wasn’t worth worrying about. The passenger tapped the bat against the glass of his windshield. “Get out of the car now,” he said, and the Russian accent here was gone, a facade cast aside. This was spoken with just a flat, almost droll kind of menace. Boredom, even.
I stepped out onto the shoulder of Road Seven. The driver let out another honk as they turned around and sped away. I walked, hunched over and aching, toward my bike.
• • • •
I found Sandoval at the edge of the woods, threading a tripwire along a line of trees with a spool of sewing thread. I watched him, crouched, testing the buoyancy of the line with his fingertips. Somewhere I heard a little bell jingle. I knew that it would either be buried beneath the sound of the wind or alert whoever had tripped it, and I thought, This was the man who’d written half a dozen books? Whose body has purportedly been scarred by extraterrestrials? This was our supposed envoy, our spokesman?
“That’s not gonna work,” I said, setting my bike down. “Whoever trips it will hear it first, then they’ll run.”
It was like watching someone wake up. The way his features drew away from that dulled, sleeping look into someone here. And it took an unnerving length of time, the two of us just standing there. But then he grinned, pushed a lock of hair out of his eyes, and it was Sandoval again. “That’s okay,” he said. “We’ll get ’em on video first. I’m thinking we should start putting the cameras in the woods. Maybe leave the EVP on overnight.”
“The hell is happening to you, Mark?”
“What do you mean? Nothing.”
“You’re . . . What was that, right there?”
“I am absolutely fine.”
“Listen.” I exhaled. “I, uh—I just got jumped by two men in masks. On the road.”
Sandoval nodded, looked at the woods again like he couldn’t wait to get back to it.
“One of them had a bat. They said no one wanted us here. They told us to leave.”
He spat on the ground, nodded again. “Walk with me, Brian.”
We made our way to the house and sat down on the porch. Sandoval lit a cigarette, saw that the wind was blowing the smoke my way, and switched sides with me. He stared out at the driveway and Road Seven beyond, scratched his chin with the hand holding the smoke. “You know I’ve been walking around with an EVP recorder out there.” He tilted his chin at the trees. “Just talking. Asking questions.”
“I know.”
“Haven’t gotten anything yet. I keep trying. But part of me . . . I don’t know, part of me just likes walking around out there. You know why?”
“No, man,” I said, weary. Tired of all of it. “Why?”
He leaned in close. “Because I’m a little afraid to,” he said. “I think of those poor British bastards all the time. Poor guys thinking they lucked into the safest spot in all of the war, and then getting blown up by their own ordnance. That’s dark. That’s a dark turn.”
“How in the hell is a ghost going to activate a tripwire, Mark? Or ring a bell? What’re you looking for out here? Ghosts or unicorns? What the hell are we doing here?”
“You think I’m falling down the rabbit hole.”
“I never said that.” Classic Brian Schutt. Pure chickenshit. Brooke would have laughed her ass off. Here I was, obviously alluding to something, and then buckling like rice paper when I got called on to say it plainly.
“Give me a break, Brian. It doesn’t take a genius to see that you’re phoning it in. Scale of one to ten, how many shits do you give about any of this? How invested are you?”
Now the anger came, the righteousness. Still adrenaline-shook, I embraced it. “I just got jumped by two men in masks. I’d say I’m invested.”
“You remember when we talked in Don’s office? The interview?”
“Sure.”
“And I asked you if you believed in any of this stuff. And you said you wanted to.”
“Yeah.”
“Did Don Whitmer ever mention me?” Sandoval asked.
I was confused by the curve ball in conversation. “No. I didn’t even know you knew each other until that email you sent. When you said we should meet at his office.”
“I rode out of that part of my life like I was on a bullet train, okay? I was in a bad way. And I had to make certain choices after that. Don, I hadn’t seen him in years, since he threw me out on my ass. Justifiably.” He ashed his cigarette. “I wanted to rub it in his face.”
“Why?”
Sandoval winced, rubbed an eye with his thumb. “You know, success. The fact I’d done something. That I’d made it in spite of him. Fifty-one years old and in a dick-swinging contest with a man who tried his best to help me out. Pathetic, right?”
“Listen, Mark. No offense, but what does this have to do with what just happened to me out there?”
He ground his smoke under his boot, stretched back and put the butt in the coffee can behind us. “You saw the evidence. I mean, you literally held some of it in your hands. My question is, what will it take for you to believe?”
I couldn’t help but feel a trill of pleasure run through me, that dark little ripple of joy people took when committing acts of pure meanness. It was my turn to lean toward him now. I hissed, “That was a pile of horse shit. With some junk jewels and glitter sprinkled on it. That was somebody screwing with you, Mark.”
“Nah,” he said. “You’re not seeing the whole picture.”
“I’m done,” I said. “I’m leaving.”
He waved a hand at the woods and said, “I see the lights out there sometimes. At night. These floating lights.”
I went cold. All-over cold. “What’re you talking about?”
“It’s their souls, Brian.”
We sat there.
I said, “You see lights in the woods. At night.”
“Yeah.” He stood up. His knees popped.
“Why don’t you film them?”
“They don’t show up. Not on motion sensors. Infrared, digital. Nothing.”
“But you can see them.”
He said, “Who trashed my room, Brian? Ruined my manuscript? Busted up the equipment? Who threatened you?”
“Nationalist assholes? Xenophobes? Somebody who thinks we’re grifters?”
“Keep trying.”
“It doesn’t matter, Mark.”
“It does. It’s actually one of the very few things that matter. Who calls to me out here?”
“Jesus Christ,” I said. “Are you hearing yourself?”
“The tests will come back, Brian. When they do, it’s gonna blow the lid off of everything we’ve ever thought of these animals. Of the world. Historically. Culturally. Genetically. Spiritually.”
I laughed, a sound that came out strangled and afraid. I was afraid. “The kids and I are making band shirts when they get home from school. I’m gonna do that, and then I’m gonna have dinner with this family and pack up my stuff. I’ll be heading to Kjálkabein in the morning and catching a flight to Reykjavík.” I stood up. “It’s been real, Mark.”
“I need this,” Sandoval said.
“I’m sorry I didn’t turn out to be the right guy for the job. Things got out of hand.”
“You have plane fare? Enough to get home?”
“I’ll figure it out,” I said.
“Listen. Brian, listen to me. We’ll move things ahead. We’ll go the álagablettur tomorrow, and then we’ll go to the base.”
“That’s just stupid, man. I just told you someone jumped me!”
“What if Shane can get us in? To the base. Someone to act as a, a guide.”
“Mark, no one wants us here.”
He pointed a finger at me, bared his teeth at me in this wolfish grin. “Why? Think about why. If there’s an answer to all of this? It’s either in the woods or at the base. That’s all that’s left.”
“Mark.”
He said, “I know that stipend I’m giving you won’t be enough to get you plane fare back to the States. There’s no way.”
“Fuck you.”
“Do tomorrow—the álagablettur and the base—and I’ll buy you out. Give you your commission early. We’ll call it even.” He started walking backward, hands in his pockets. Heading back to the trees, to his bells and threads and floating lights. Who calls to me out here? That grin, laconic as it was skeletal.
I said, “You’ve lost it.”
“I need this, Brian. I need you. I’m sorry, but I do.”
Chapter 3
Sandoval was already in the dining room when I trudged into the house the next morning. It was sleeting outside and the rest of the house was still silent and sleep-heavy. He was writing in his notebook, a cup of coffee at his side. I decided right then that I’d call my parents today, both of them, and Brooke and Ellis, too. I still didn’t know if I’d take Sandoval’s deal—I mean, I knew I’d take it, but that early in the morning, I told myself I reserved the right to change my mind. But calling them today, when I knew I was heading home, it gave me some breathing room. It ceased to be an open-ended abandonment of everything. My sojourn to Hvíldarland could become less a crazed bridge-burning of my life and more just an odd trip coming to an end, now that there was an endpoint. Everyone—especially Brooke and my mom—would be furious with my silence, but it was a lot easier to frame stuff like that when you could say, Anyway, sorry I didn’t call, but I’ll be home tomorrow.
Like some cheap-shit, worrisome harbinger, my head hurt like hell that morning.
I poured a cup of coffee and gazed out the front door at the grim weather, then put on my coat, hoisting my bag over my shoulder.
“Going somewhere?” Sandoval asked from the table.
I stepped out on the porch, felt the bite of the morning. Got on my stupid little bicycle. My knees clacked against the handlebars all the way to Kjálkabein, rain spitting against my coat.
• • • •
It was a mustard-colored, rectangular three-story building on the town’s southeastern end. Unlovely and utilitarian, Lögreglan in foot-high letters above the glass double doors.
The desk clerk took my name, eyed my ID for a minute and then got on the phone. He hung up and gave me a room number down the hall.
I found Constable Jónsdóttir hunched over a Tupperware container of soup in the Kjálkabein Police break room. The room overlooked the rear parking lot and the police motor pool. Dumpsters, chain-link fencing, a line of four or five squad cars parked at an angle, sleek as sharks. The room held a few couches, a pair of tables, a microwave, refrigerator and sink. A vending machine sat in one corner. It looked like any number of teacher’s lounges I’d been in.
Jónsdóttir laid her spoon down on one napkin and dabbed at her mouth with another. We were alone. She seemed wholly unsurprised that I’d dropped by. “Mr . . . Scott, was it?”
“Schutt.”
“Right, Mr. Schutt. Your face is looking better. How are the Hauksdóttirs?”
“They’re good.”
“I told my husband you were here.” She looked down at her soup for a moment, bashful. “He was hoping we might drive out to the farm and visit Mr. Sandoval. He has some books he was hoping to have autographed.”
“Listen,” I said, “I’m leaving the country, but I wanted to let you know. Two guys in masks jumped me on Road Seven yesterday. They told me that Mr. Sandoval and I had to get out of the country. You know, or else.”
Jónsdóttir stood up, carefully put the lid on her soup container. Something her husband had made her, I hoped, before she hit the cold, brutal streets of Kjálkabein, where sheep wandered brazenly into the city limits, and guys got into bar scuffles over whose dad had once pulled up a torpedo in a fish net. Maybe that wasn’t fair, but my head hurt like a monster that morning, and I was afraid and frustrated and angry.
“Let me go get some forms and I can take your statement. But you’re leaving the country today?”
“Tomorrow, probably.”
“Nothing official can be done if you aren’t here to press charges. You understand? If we find anything, I mean.”
“I understand. I’m not willing to wait around. I’d still like to make a statement.”
“Of course,” Jónsdóttir said. She put her soup in the refrigerator, balled up her napkins and threw them in the trash. “I’ll be right back with the forms.”
• • • •
The fields lay furrowed with water, the sound of the rain soothing as it fell from the eaves of the house. I’d ridden home through it, and now was warming up in the living room. Thumbing through channels, looking for that loathsome lasagna, knowing it was there somewhere. It’d become some kind of talisman to me. Gruesome but telling, like Roman haruspex divining bird entrails. But, you know, with more dick jokes. The lasagna never left, moored forever on that goddamned table.
Karla was upstairs showering. The zippering and clomping and clicking of various pieces of equipment told me that Sandoval was in the dining room, prepping our gear for the trip. We were just waiting for Shane to show up. The children, their yellow slickers glowing in the fey afternoon gloom, their fingers fat and useless with heavy gloves, were playing outside. Polar bears, those children. Impervious to cold.
A gelatinous blur on the screen: there it was.
“What I mean is, you and me could make some beautiful music together,” the lasagna said in English, Icelandic subtitles across the bottom of the screen.
An exchange student? A pen pal of the daughter? A girlfriend? She had on a beret and a fringed sweater befitting the era. She was doing the dishes, her back to the leering lasagna. She said in a French accent, “Sorry, I do not date dinner foods!”
The laugh track went big on that.
The lasagna said, “Where you from, darlin’?”
“Nice,” she said.
“Nice?” he said.
“No, Nice,” she said.
“That’s what I mean. Nice.”
Laugh track subdued.
I was losing my mind. My skull was a detonation.
“You asshole,” I whispered, jamming my head into the back of the couch. “You viscid, mucilaginous asshole.” A half-dozen ibuprofen roiled my guts, had barely taken the serrated knife-edge off of the ache.
I walked to the foot of the stairs. “Hey, Karla?” Even raising my voice squeezed the membrane of my skull.
“Yes?” Her voice drifted from around the corner of the stairwell.
“Can I make some calls? I can leave you cash now, or PayPal you the money later.”
“Yes, that’s fine.”
I heard Gunnar and Liza clomp up the front steps. They ran through the house, found me in the kitchen staring at the phone. “Brian,” Liza shrieked, “come play with us! Be the monster again! Come outside!”
And I almost did. Nearly took it as a sign, brushed aside the phone calls, put on my heavy coat, went to play with these kids that I’d come to care about. But I’d be heading home after our trip to the base later tonight. If I didn’t do this now, I never would. So I said, “I’m sorry, Liza. I’ve got to make some calls first. But if I’ve got time afterward I will, okay?”
Gunnar nodded, the responsible one. “That’s fair, Li-li.”
• • • •
I was the only one of us who had actually talked to my father since he’d abandoned us for Traci and the nudist colony. It wasn’t out of any profound sense of loyalty on my part; he’d called me once to complain about my mother’s lawyers, maybe a month after he’d left, and I, eternally afraid of conflict, had stood and listened. This had always been the inherent nature of our relationship. Me, nodding and grunting my “uh-huhs” rather than refuting his shit. I’d done it my entire life. He’d started with, “It’s safe to say I’m being grievously misaligned by the women in our family, Brian.” It seemed like he’d had some drinks. We hadn’t talked since. If it was an attempt at reconciliation, some fatherly attempt at showing love or building allegiance, it was a shitty effort.
But today, my head jammed full of coals the way it was, on my way back home with this odd failure of a trip in my pocket . . . today felt different. I was halfway around the world. I was impervious, at least from him, his anger and contempt. Couldn’t it afford me a moment or two of bravery?
It was ten-thirty or so in Arizona. As the phone rang, Brooke’s terrible images zipped through my mind like tracers. Downward Dog, tan lines, the faint scars of breast implant incisions. Jesus.
“Hello?”
I cleared my throat. “Hi, Traci. I, uh, was hoping to speak to Brad.”
A momentary pause. “Sure, can I tell him who’s calling?”
“This is Brian.”
Another pause. “Brian.”
“His son, yeah.”
“Okay.” I could faintly hear the television in the living room of the Hauksdóttir house. “Well, I can try to find him for you. He should be out doing his laps at the pool.”
I leaned my head against the wall. My father, sleek as a porpoise, nude in the community pool, sunlight knifing off the water. He’d been such an unhappy, private man, so many sharp, tucked-away corners to him. So distant from us all. Now he did the breaststroke naked in the community pool, traveled the emotional landmines of polyamory, lovingly traced Traci’s implant scars while Scottsdale burned. Everyone was someone else. “Okay, thanks,” I said.
But then Traci surprised me. “But do you think it’s wise, Brian?”
“Sorry? Do I think what’s wise?”
“Talking to him.”
“Talking to my dad?”
“Aren’t you all, you know, embroiled in a legal battle right now? Shouldn’t you let everyone’s lawyers handle things at this point?”
I let out a little laugh, incredulous. “I’d like to speak to my dad, Traci.”
“I’m just saying, I think things might be kind of irreconcilable right now. He and your mom are in the thick of it, and he’s upset. He might take that out on you when he doesn’t mean to. You’re the last person he should go off on, but you know how he is.” This was Traci? This was the woman that Brooke spent hours concocting revenge fantasies against? Why, I suddenly wondered, would a twenty-four-year-old move to a nudist colony populated by people as old as her father? That was a loaded question, sure, but I considered the possibility that she might actually be in love, and able to find some avenue of tenderness or connection within the man that my mother hadn’t been able to unearth.
I asked Traci to let him know that I’d called. That I was out of town but would be home in a few days. That I’d to talk to him when he was up for it.
Before we hung up, I said, “So what’s life like out there?”
“Hot,” she said.
“Does he really do the Sun Salutation with his balls out?”
There was a moment of silence on the other end. Then Traci said, “Goodbye, Brian,” and hung up.
Sandoval, in the dining room, had the good sense to not say anything.
Ellis when I called was freer with his language. He picked up, wary at the international number, but once he found out it was me, unloaded with a seething, “Dude, what the hell is wrong with you? I’ve written you like ten emails! Not even kidding. Ten.”
I’ve been afraid to get near a computer, Ellis. Sorry. “Sorry,” I said. “Things have been crazy.”
“Where the hell are you? You’re seriously with Mark Sandoval?”
“Yeah. I can’t really say.”
“What, that NDA you signed?”
“Exactly,” I said.
Ellis sighed. “Your sister’s pissed. She came over here looking for you and just about blew a gasket when I told her you’d left the country. Especially with Sandoval.”
I took a grim pleasure at this. “Did she know who he was?”
“Of course she did. I think your mom is pretty freaked, and Brooke’s less than thrilled that she has to carry, you know, the banner of familial solidarity all by herself.”
“She’s used to it,” I said.
“Seriously, where are you?”
“Can’t say.”
“You asshole. What’re you guys looking for? Oh! Robert and I had some drinks and looked some up! Hold on, I’ve got a list right here. Is it Goatman?”
“I really can’t say, Ellis.”
“Loveland Frog? Momo the Monster?”
“You know what ‘not at liberty’ means, right?”
“Skookum! Old Yellow Top! Ogopogo!”
I said, “Even if you guessed it, I wouldn’t tell you.”
“Ghost deer.”
“Nope.”
“Unicorn,” Ellis said.
I didn’t say anything.
“Holy shit!” he crowed. “It’s a unicorn! You’re looking for a fucking unicorn with Mark Sandoval, oh my God!”
Mindful of Sandoval in the other room, I said, “Let’s drop it, you’re never gonna guess.”
“Oh man, is he right there? He is, isn’t he?”
I said, “Glad we agree on that.”
“Gotcha. Okay, Brian. I will accept your apology for not answering any of my ten emails. Wow.”
“I am sorry about that,” I said. “We’ve been busy.”
“Call your momma, young man,” Ellis said. “Call your sister. They’re worried.”
“I will.”
“So have you officially just flamed out of school? Just crashed and burned?”
“Looks like it. But I’ll be heading home tomorrow.”
“Really? Did you find it? You must’ve found it! I know you can’t answer that, but give me something, Brian. Grunt once for yes, belch twice for no.”
In the dining room, I heard the various beeps that meant that Sandoval was cycling through the camera feeds on his laptop. “If Brooke gets in touch, just tell her I’ll be home soon.”
“So you’re not going to reach out to her yourself, huh? Damn. That’s cold.”
“We’ve just got a lot going on here before we wrap everything up.”
“Okay,” Ellis said. “For Christ’s sake, at least you called me. That counts for something. The second you get home, I want to hear everything, nondisclosure or not. Talk to you later. Safe travels, my dear.”
That done, I picked up the receiver again, ready to call my mom. And then Liza’s scream drifted from right outside the kitchen.
• • • •
The children stood at the tree line at the rear of the house. Liza’s yellow slicker shone bright in the gloom. She stood with her back to me, and Gunnar crouched beside her. I was out the back door as fast I could, and I could hear Sandoval’s footfalls behind me.
I took Liza by the shoulders, gently, and crouched down. She turned to me, her face red, tears spilling off her chin. She tucked herself into me, tiny in my arms.
“What is it?” I said. “What’s the matter?”
“Holy shit,” Sandoval said behind me.
Karla came running out the back door in a robe, her wet hair in strings, eyes widened in panic. She called her daughter’s name and Liza ran to her, buried herself in Karla’s arms. I looked back and saw Sandoval and Gunnar crouched down before something in the churned mud.
I stood up and walked over to them. At their feet lay something that looked like clotted fabric, sheared in mud and moss. Something next to it: twigs, an old branch.
I should’ve known better, of course. Should’ve remembered the intricacies of a site, the careful way we cull the remnants of the past from the living world. And how, until we do that, the most striking remains can look like the blandest ephemera. A centuries-old pottery shard presumed to be a hunk of shale.
“Holy shit,” Sandoval said again, and—in a move that eschewed every goddamned bit of education and training he had most likely ever received from Don Whitmer—hooked a finger in the fabric that sat half-buried in the mud and pulled.
Gunnar let out a sigh: half wonderment, half disgust.
“Brian,” Sandoval said, still crouched. “Gonna wanna call the cops, bud.”
“What is that?”
And then I saw the yellowed, atrophied hand coming out of the mud-clotted sleeve that Sandoval pinched between his fingers. The waxy nails, the worming green veins. Desiccated and skeletal and skin-tightened.
A hand lay buried there in the mud outside their house.
Copyright © 2020 by Keith Rosson. Excerpted from Road Seven by Keith Rosson. Published by permission of the author and Meerkat Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the author.
Keith Rosson lives in Portland, Oregon and is the author of the novels The Mercy of the Tide and Smoke City. His short fiction has appeared in Cream City Review, PANK, December, the Nervous Breakdown, and more. A fierce advocate of public libraries and non-ironic adulation of the cassette tape, he can be found at keithrosson.com.