CHAPTER SIXTEEN

By the time spring rolled into summer, Tab had heard through his mom, who heard through the grapevine, that the broken arm and ribs Ashley Reardon suffered from the school’s front doors were almost healed. A local newspaper, the Hollow River Echo, latched onto the incident. Its editorial board called out the school and its governing body for their negligence. The building’s entrance hadn’t been updated since the early 1970s. Until 1995, that wing of the building had been part of the high school.

High school students, the Echo argued, were strong enough to open such doors without harming themselves like little Ashley. Middle schoolers and elementary kids were not. Nor were they likely to help themselves by pressing the accessibility button to open the single area of entry it operated. To do so without disability might make them look weak in the eyes of their peers.

The editorial generated outrage, calls for change, and backlash among Lost Hollow citizens, officials, and the county school board. There were the folks who wanted to protect the school children from future harm. Then there were the folks who thought the kids should just suck it up and learn the proper way to open heavy doors. Tab didn’t understand this argument. Was there more than one way to pull open a door? The Echo’s letters page expanded to two over the issue in one late spring edition. Soon, the story gained enough traction and talk that it was picked up by Channel 6.

Tab paid the controversy little mind after it blew up in the media. The newspaper held no interest for him. He also switched off the television before the syndicated afternoon shows faded into news teasers. His drawings became more frequent, except without the dinosaurs or superheroes he’d fancied in the past. Instead, he drew scenes, people, places, and things he knew or imagined from real life. Often, scary things. He hated being surprised by the news, discovering that scenes he drew in a trancelike state—while his body rocked and his bump burned and stabbed at his temple—had clawed their way into reality.

Once, Tab overheard his mom chatting on the phone about a school bus that had crashed head-on with a semi on a stretch of highway in Hollow River. The bus was ferrying a group of Lost Hollow and Hollow River kids to a summer camp. The driver, who had been drinking, had fallen asleep at the wheel and crossed the center line. The bus plowed into the Mack without braking.

At least no one was killed. The driver’s foot had slipped off the gas, slowing the bus. The semi was still in low gear, having just rolled away from a green light. The bus driver lost his job and went to jail. At least one kid got a heinous concussion. Another broke his wrist.

When his mom finished her call, Tab closed himself in his room and paged furiously through his latest sketchbook. Sheet after sheet of the pad was filled with mundane nightmares of modern life: car accidents, shootings. He’d also drawn an overdose, although Tab knew only that he’d depicted a three-quarter portrait of a strange thin man with long hair and an open mouth. Bubbling foam and thick vomit flowed from the corners of his lips like lava rolling out of a volcano.

The final drawing was another of Stinkeye Roy. Just Roy, he chided himself. Seated on a short stack of concrete blocks, Roy stared back at him from empty eye sockets, menacing and piteous. A light, paternal smile curled his lips. There was no bus accident to be found among his sketches.

Tab allowed himself to relax. The bus was one disaster for which he would not hold himself responsible. He slapped the sketchbook closed, crossed his arms over it, and laid his forehead on top of them. Tears would not come. He was past tears. Drowsiness and psychological exhaustion held stronger claims. As he drifted, the sensation of a gentle hand on his left shoulder stirred him awake again. He peered over it, but the room behind him sat empty.

There was no bus accident in your sketchbook, his conscience repeated. You didn’t do anything wrong. This time.

Sleep overtook him. His dreaming mind dropped him into a land he visited often now. It was a world where his dad had died but was also somehow still alive. Dad beckoned to him from behind a wall of milky, semi-opaque haze. He mouthed words. Sometimes, Tab thought he could pick out one or two of them, but most of them were lost. The ones he could pick out in the dream were forgotten by the time he awoke. Except for two. One was Dad. The other might have been Roy.

Outside his head, Tab snorted and fell into the rhythmic log-sawing of a middle-aged man in the slow-wave stage of sleep. He slapped at a phantom tickle on the end of his nose, shifting so his bump pointed skyward. A tiny dark hole, no larger than an average blackhead, appeared in the center of the bump. It widened in a lateral fashion, ripping apart the layer of temple skin like a sewist cutting a row of stitches.

When the open seam had spread across the entire diameter of the bump, the upper and lower layers folded back on themselves. From within emerged a wet, gray orb full of spidery bottle fly-green and black capillaries. In the center, an angry crimson iris more elliptic than round drowned a pupil about the size of the head of a pin.

The eyeball trembled in its socket, blood vessels pulsing. Hot ichor flowed through them. Tab shifted in his sleep and sat up. His normal, human eyes fluttered open but remained unseeing. Unconstrained by his waking mind, his hands spread open his sketchbook and located a blank page. His right hand plucked a No. 2 from its place in the jar and traced a series of light circles onto the page. The circles later became connected by bolder lines.

Soon, a figure began to take shape: a masculine hand, filthy and spattered with crusting, flayed open flaps of rotting flesh. The hand emerged from solid earth, as though its bearer had been buried too soon, demanding to reside among the living. Wrapped around the fourth finger of the hand was a ring. It bore a striking resemblance to his dad’s white gold wedding band, an ivy vine engraved around its diameter.

The image completed, Tab plunked the pencil into the jar, closed the sketchbook, and collapsed atop it again. He would not discover the new drawing until the next day.