| |
THE SHED IN THE BACKYARD still sat there. Dennis looked at it. The warped wood, the grass, the early vines climbing through the cracks. The carpenters nail dangled from a strand of worn twine. It looked less like a shed and more like a mausoleum. It stood at a slant. The grass and soil beneath it soft and wet from the Florida rain. Dennis touched it – he felt the wood, the moss on it, the green age of it all. He opened the door and it squeaked in pain from the rust of the hinges.
Inside the sunlight came in bars through the slats of the broken roof. The floor of the shed was nonexistent. More soil and weeds. The walls still hung on to rakes and shovels. Buckets sat in the corner stuck inside each other, the mud from their use hardened and baked into some clay.
Dennis imagined P.J. being stuck in here during the storm. The rain coming in through the cracks. The wind battering the sides of the shed like an echo chamber. It was after that moment that he always rushed to his brother's side. It was that moment that made him swear to never let his brother be scared again. It was because of that moment that he was there right now.
"I was going to get a new one," the voice said. Dennis turned. His father stood there watching him. One hand held a beer and the other was in his pocket. "But I figured this one isn't going anywhere. I pay people to do all the upkeep anyway, so who am I fooling, right?"
Dennis said nothing. He just smiled and closed the shed door. Then he wiped sweat from his forehead.
"Is P.J. okay?" his dad asked. "He seems off."
"I think he's just overwhelmed," Dennis replied. "He hasn't been sleeping well."
There was a pause. The two men looked at each other. The sun shone high and they squinted. Neighbor's sprinkler systems flickered in the background. A bird whistled and flew from one tree to the next. His dad took a swig of his beer.
"I saw you had a bunch of boxes in your car."
"Yeah. I think P.J. is gonna stay for a while. But I'm gonna head back after a day or two."
"Okay."
Then he turned and went back into the house and Dennis stood there by the shed - a monument to his guilt and shame as a brother. It wasn't until his father closed the sliding door behind him that Dennis realized he was crying.
At first, P.J. spent his time in his room in the dark. He was still not sleeping and when he woke up in the gray of his room he'd have to reorient himself and remind himself where he was. And it always made him feel better. When he started unloading the boxes from his car it started to sink in. He was gone. He had escaped it. He felt a smile of relief spread across his face. Then, he too, cried but for joy and happiness. He felt safe for the first time in a long time. And then he started sleeping fine.
Dennis kept awake. He waited for Max to call him and that never happened so he called Max and that was also fruitless. Then he called T.J. who said he hadn't heard anything but that he'd start looking around.
"I didn't want to make you nervous," Dennis said. He kept his eyes closed and rested his head on the wall of his room.
"I'm sure he's fine," T.J. said in reply. Then they hung up.
Days peeled away before he broached the subject with P.J.
It happened in the evening. The summer night was sticky and humid. It had been almost a week and P.J. had fully molted his skin of fear and burden and made his way through his father's humidor. The deep dark wood of it all felt heavy and thick on his hands but it was the pinnacle of comfort and safety, a haven of tobacco that reminded him of his father more than anything. Dennis followed him outside and resented him. Dennis had taken all of the stress and anxiety that P.J. felt and put it on his own back and although P.J. would tell him that he didn't have to, would tell him that he could just relax because they were safe now, Dennis knew he couldn't.
They sat behind the house near the green glow of the pool lights. The sky was black and fell like a curtain just beyond the reach of their yard. But over their neighbor’s fence the faint babbling of a Koi pond fed into the night a soft soundtrack that looped on and on without a hitch. Further, directly across from their lanai was the lake. There was a dock that was worn and it was barely seen – a gray smudge into the blackness of the water. P.J. sat on a lawn chair and drank a beer and he lit the cigar he had taken. It was light brown and the glow of its end illuminated his young face the way fireflies did to toddlers. Dennis noted that he did look younger and he did look happier. And he resented him more for it.
P.J. took a drag and held the smoke in his mouth. He blew it out softly towards the weak moon. Dennis sat beside him on a lawn chair as well, rubbing his palms against his legs, nervous about starting a conversation he knew should not be had. He opened his mouth to speak but clammed up again. P.J. puff and sipped.
"It's mucky out," Dennis finally said eyeing P.J.'s profile, "I don't know, it just seems muckier than usual I guess."
P.J. didn't reply and his eyes fell closed softly.
"Are you all moved in?"
P.J. didn't reply. He put the cigar down. He felt the scar on his leg.
"I haven't heard from Max. I've called him a thousand times and he never picked up. I even called T.J. to see if he heard anything."
Dennis stopped. It was late. Their father had gone to sleep. A breeze blew and ruffled the trees of their backyard.
"It's probably time to head back and see what's going on. Hell, maybe even everything blew over."
P.J. stood up and walked out. He left the lanai and walked into the backyard. The crickets were loud, but he strained to listen to the neighbor's fountain. It, along with the cigars, brought him to a place he always regretted leaving so soon. It was true that he could get a cigar anywhere, but none of them ashed or smelled like the ones his dad gave him. After their mother left it was a long time before he saw his dad smoke again. When he finally saw it, it was like a punctuation mark on the whole ordeal. On the heartbreak. On the pain. It was a sign to live again. To enjoy yourself again. And so P.J. smoked.
"You can go alone," P.J. dropped. It thumped into the grass like a missed ball. Dennis stood behind him.
"Alone?"
Crickets. Koi.
"I have no interest in going there with you and having you drag me into stupid danger," P.J. said. "I told you I was leaving. I told you I was moving. Did you think I was joking?"
P.J. turned to Dennis.
"What if something bad happened to Max? Are you just going to let that happen?"
"I don't know that guy. He's not my problem."
"So, what about me?"
Crickets. Koi.
"What if something happens to me?" Dennis asked again. He felt his jaw grow tight. His lips quiver. "Because," he started and then stopped. "Because I'm going back to help him. And if you don't come with me then you don't care about me either."
"If I go back, I will die."
"What the fuck –
"I know this."
"You know this? How the fuck do you know this?"
"I can see it when I sleep!" P.J. said. It came in a shout. "I can feel it when I close my eyes. The water on my skin when I take a shower. The dreams I have when I sleep. I will die. He will kill me."
Dennis didn't know what to say. He hated P.J. for not coming but wanted him to be safe. He hated P.J. for being a coward his whole life but loved him too much to watch him be scared.
"So what if something happens to me?"
"You're choosing to go out and put yourself in danger. If something happens to you, then something happens to you. And I'll never forgive you for doing this to dad and me. For putting yourself in irresponsible danger and leaving dad and me."
A moment passed.
"I keep thinking about that time with the shed," Dennis said. He kept his hands in his pockets. He looked at the grass. Then past P.J. to the lake, a dark shape lying there like a disk.
"What time?"
"That time with the storm," Dennis said. He looked up at P.J. "When I locked you in the shed and the storm came. Before mom left."
"I don't remember."
Dennis nodded. Then he walked away feeling immense sorrow and confusion. He stopped before entering the house and turned back hoping to see P.J. behind him, marching forward with newfound heroism. But he didn't. He just stood there in the dark of the backyard and his face was a slight orange from the cigar. He puffed and sipped and wrapped himself in the safe haven of nostalgia, the comforting refuge of times more certain.
P.J. watched his brother go. He knew he couldn't force Dennis to see his side of things. Force him to understand the great terror that he felt in his soul. And he grew angrier and angrier at the irresponsibility of it all.
Dennis entered the dark house and closed the sliding glass door behind him. And it was over.
When P.J. woke up around noon the car was gone. Dennis wasn't home. He felt his absence in the house before he even opened his eyes. He almost called for him in the house but he knew he was gone. Their minds were already made up and they were drastically parting, two trains barreling onwards to opposite lands. He sat on the edge of his bed and closed his eyes. He felt the side of his leg, where the gash had been from the boat, the small curves and valleys of the jagged scar, and his eyes stayed closed for a minute or so before he stood up.
He fixed himself breakfast and had decided that when his father asked he was not going to go into detail about why he was home. That was one thing he could have never understood until he dealt with it – the struggle of explaining fear. In how many words, sentences, pauses, metaphors, can one describe their fear until it is fully appreciated? He rested outside by the pool and ate slowly. He left his phone in his room.
"She's gotten a little better," Kyle said.
Dennis held the phone to his ear. He spoke while he drove, the Florida sun coming in hot through the windshield. He squinted at the glares off the cars in front of him.
"I really need you here, man," Dennis said. He dropped all notions of strength. He let desperation seep into his words. He blinked the tired from his eyes and drank coffee as he drove. He hadn't slept right in days.
"I can't leave yet," Kyle said, "And there's no way she's coming back to the beach."
"Please. I can't do this alone. I need your help. There is a bad man doing crazy shit out here."
"What's he doing?"
Dennis didn't have the answer. He kept talking.
"When Abby is scared what do you tell her?"
"I tell her there's nothing to be scared of and that I'll protect her."
"Does that work?"
"Sometimes."
A pause.
"I'm gonna take your boat out, okay?"
The way back was shorter than Dennis would have liked. Secretly, he wished the journey to be long and monotonous, putting off the re-entry to the island as much as possible, but rather, it came fast. Almost abrupt. A blink of an eye or the change of the radio and before he knew it he was sitting in the parking lot of his apartment, his car humming softly, the morning clear and hot. Ribbons of heat rose off the asphalt. He sat back in his stuffy car and turned off the engine. From the windows he watched people pass left and right. Some moved around with a face of caution. These were the locals, the ones who weren't used to disturbances and so when confronted with them, lingered on them for months. Then there were the tourists that had just come in and have yet to hear the news. They were the ones smiling, ignorant to what lay in the water. There was a man in small swim trunks making his way up the sidewalk. He was wearing rubber flip-flops and was shirtless and he was holding the hand of a little towheaded girl, probably his daughter. Dennis thought of Kyle and almost called him again to ask about his daughter, but then he didn’t. Instead, he watched the pair pass by, then through his rearview mirror, then out the other side. He felt his knuckles involuntarily white themselves as he gripped the steering wheel. Then he exited his car and made his way up the steps to his room.
On his door was a brown stamp, hardened like a scab. He inspected it closely and entered his quarters with his brother's now useless key card. The apartment he had abandoned now sat before him stagnant with bacteria, the way a lake was. In how the mud nestles to the bottom and coagulates, only rising for darting moccasins and feet, so was his flooring. The ceiling fan had not been on and the sun shone in through the windows and balcony glass doors and it cast a faint glow of natural light around the place. The white walls were now a faint gray, rather than the shout of black it had been at night, when the feasting had occurred only dusks ago. Dennis put down his bag on the kitchen counter and walked through the place softly. Though he had been gone about a week the place offered up a hostile memory of abandonment and forsakenness. Dennis felt claustrophobic and the ceiling felt lower, heavy with rain or dread, bending down to a damp bow. He could hear the faint runnings and playings of kids floors below and even outside on the sand. They chirped back and forth as they kicked sand with the heels of their soft feet.
"Max?" he called out. But there was no response. The place was empty.
His bed was still unmade. It wasn't that things felt foreign to him; no, they simply felt out of bounds. He regarded all of his possessions as dangerous, sought after by evil, like everything was braided with a fine trip wire, poised to snap and slay the intruder. He checked his closet and under his bed and the shower behind the curtain, as though he was ready to find someone hiding, then looking up at him with a toothy smile. In fact, Dennis thought, he had yet to see the countenance of the bad man. Those who had are now underwater, so far below that the heat vents of the earth shake and shimmy your vision with bubbles and tumult. He thought some more. He hadn't seen the face of Rory in a long time, not since he showed up at the kiosk asking for a ride. But even still his presence was felt. It darkened his world like a storm. So when Dennis peeled back curtains and looked over his shoulder he wasn't sure what to expect. He just felt something coming.
He imagined again the line that separated the horrors. Everything was still piled on to one side. The side he could handle. The side that kept him from leaping off the balcony head first. With each question he had and with each detail missing, the picture was still feasible and explainable. He knew something was dangerous and evil but he didn't know to what extent. It was possible that he was overlooking some perfectly plausible and rational explanation. Even serial killers, though twisted and depraved, had their base in reality. They walked the same roads and ate at the same restaurants. If a man was turning people into chum, he could be caught. He could be shot. But as he thought about it, he felt the line start to break. These horrors and these questions and this ever-present feeling of dread shaking and uncoiling in his stomach started to claw over the line. They started to stretch their long spindly arms over the line into the other side. The side where P.J. was drowning and choking for help. And Dennis knew that if his monsters got to that side – that cosmic unknowable side – he'd never come home.
He poured himself a glass of rum and stood at the counter and sipped it. His eyes panned back and forth across his living room slower and slower with each glide. He listened carefully to the sounds in and out of his walls. He downed the glass and poured another.
P.J.'s room was empty. Dennis rested against the doorjamb and surveyed it. It sat like a cavern. The thick curtains were pulled close. The bed was made tight. For a second he was afraid that it'd all turn back into the hut he broke into. Blood and fish rot smeared along the walls. He blinked often and he blinked hard. He touched his cell phone in his pocket but he did not pull it out.
He walked down to the diner and ordered food to go and then ate it on the beach until the buzz of the rum had come and gone. He watched the water undulate against the sand. It was a marvel how people played without a care in the world. But how could they know? How could anyone know about the evil around them? How could anybody be aware of the constant threat their life was in? There were the evils of murder and theft and rape but then there were the evils of a different pedigree. The great ones of eons ago that sat with their mouths open on either side of the orbit. Whose veins flowed with ichor, bright and pulsating colors never seen. Those are the ones to fear. But perhaps because of their incalculable size it was all too pointless to fear, like fearing the land when you've already slipped. What was worse was that Dennis, really, had no idea of the latter kind. To him, Rory was still something to be beaten, something that could be defeated, but P.J. knew better. He had an inkling of it, barely a glimpse, and it had sent him home reeling. Dennis thought about that.
He drove to Max's motel and pulled into the parking lot. He looked for Max's car and tried calling him again, but nothing happened. The monsters started to cross the line. He went up to the door and knocked. No one came. Then he ran down the sidewalk and into the lobby to the front desk.
A stout woman with glasses sat behind the counter. Dennis took a breath and eased his panic. He kept his hands in his pockets because he wasn't sure if they were shaking or not.
"I'm wondering if Max Gear checked out yet," Dennis asked. The woman looked at him over the rim of her glasses. "I think he was supposed to a week ago."
She typed into a computer.
"He did."
"So he's not here anymore."
"That's what I said." She looked at him again and then back at the screen. "We already turned over his room and everything so if you're looking to find something, there ain't nothing to find. He didn't leave nothing behind. Except a broken lamp."
The monsters crawled more. The line was almost gone. They had almost crossed it.
"How'd the lamp break? Who broke the lamp?"
The lady grew annoyed.
"I can't say. I wasn't looking. But I charged his card for it. That's for certain."
Outside, he stopped at Max's door again. He knocked once more and then noticed the marks on it. He brushed his hand lightly against the cracks and dents. Someone was trying to get in. He recalled the brown scab on his own. Then he turned and ran to his car and sped back home. He listened to nothing as he drove, but he still couldn't hear his own thoughts. They were shouting in every direction like a parade of drunks. In his head, though, the two doors stood side by side. His donned the brown scab and the other had the marks of a battering ram.
When he pulled into the parking lot of his place he stood out of his car and watched his building. He waited for it to come alive and destroy the world. He waited for the metal and stone to pull itself apart and to open a gate to hell and reveal all of the secrets to him. Instead, it sat there unknowing and apathetic. He paced the length of it, formulating in his mind some sort of reasonable connection he can make. He jogged up the steps and to his door. He looked at the scab. It was brown, but that's all it was. Brown and dried out. He reached to touch it but then pulled back. He looked down the hallway.
He went back into the parking lot. It was hot and the sun baked the black asphalt and bounced off from the shine of the parked cars. The air smelled like salt and ocean and the sky was blue with clouds here and there moving without effort. Even the breeze felt warm. He scanned each car until he found what he was looking for - Max's Toyota sitting there like a toad.
The windshield was covered in parking tickets. The car would be towed away soon and it seemed a miracle that Dennis caught it before that happened. He cupped his hands against the hot windows and peered inside. The same junk that commonly collects in most cars sat in the floor of the back seat: fast food bags, water bottles, scraps of random notes and papers, even a pair of running sneakers. But there on the back seat were duffle bags. He did pack up. And he drove here.
Then he saw a tape recorder on the dash. He tried the door, but it was locked. There was a stone near his foot. He picked it up and had a quick flashback to him and Max outside of that hut. They should've never looked in there. Maybe everything would have slowed to a stop that night. Maybe P.J. would still be here.
He surveyed the area and waited for the right time to strike. In all that sun and in all that heat, he stood there. He didn't realize he was sweating until it stung his eyes. He wiped at them with the back of his hand and waited. When nobody was around he tossed the stone at the car window. It cracked right on his reflection and the stone fell back to the asphalt. Then the car started whooping and hollering its alarm like a klaxon. For a second, Dennis was distracted by his reflection in the blue tint; the jagged crack across his face, distorted and curved. Again, he picked up the stone and hurled it at the window, and again it cracked in a different place and fell back down with a thud. Now the crack shot through the sky of his reflection, cutting the image in two parts: the clouds with the sun in the sky, and his cracked face standing below on the dry earth. The alarm kept on, changing its pattern and rhythm. People were going to notice.
He picked up the stone once more and reared back in a pitcher's stance and pitched the rock at the window and it hurled through, shattering it in full. He reached inside and grabbed the recorder from the dash and ran back to his room, leaving the open car in the heat behind him and really hoping Max would actually be around to find the car and to be pissed at him.
When Dennis re-entered his apartment he did not feel safe anymore. The cloud of violation hung tangled and heavy from the ceiling, dripping down like slime, soaking into the floor. The walls could've been glass, where he could see past every corner, through every barrier, and he still would've felt like somebody was inside, nearer, breathing close on his neck. He set the tape recorder upright on the coffee table and sat down on the sofa across it. In his hurry he forgot to turn on the lights and he sat in the rectangle of natural sunlight from the balcony. The rest of the room was gray and dingy. Even the light he did sit in felt cold and unnatural. It wasn't like the sun cats often seek out to stretch in. It was something far more sinister. It felt like a spotlight on him. Allowing him to be seen.
The recording started with static and by the end of it Dennis sat with his fist clenched and his face red from holding back tears. At the end of the recording Max's voice said, "I'm keeping the recorder in the car because I'm worried it can be taken," then the tape wheeled on a second more and then stopped.
Dennis sat in silence and cried and the monsters in his head fully crossed over the line.
In the ocean, at this point, the hard enamel substance had replaced his flesh. The ridge of his head had fully formed, protruding from his skull a few inches, a Mohawk structured with rods of cartilage. The same had happened with his back; building itself off of the faint scoliosis he was diagnosed with as a child, shirtless, bent over in front of his father. The fin of his back extended from the base of his neck, rising up and dipping back down to complete at his tailbone, a solid half-foot in the peak of the rise. It's heavy behind him and he's off-balance when he stands straight. His gills have begun to form, but he still had his lungs. When he rises from the water, a crouched, horrifying creature of the deep, he pants heavily and gasps before his respiration system shifts and accommodates. His hands have webbed and his nails have grown out several inches, the same with his feet. His genitals have congealed in a mass of leathery cartilage. This is only his penultimate form. The black-eyed demon is eager to finish.
He swims deep below gaining speed in the rips of currents and the swells of the undertow. He feels free body and soul. Deep through forests of weed and kelp he spins and spirals and eats the fish he's allowed to and respects the ones he's not. The deities sit low and deeper than the reach of light. Hollow inside but forever breathing and thinking. He can swim low to them, deep down where it grows cold, and he can pray with the rest, bobbing slowly in the matrix of water.
Sometimes, though rarely, he thinks of his past. He recalls times of hard church, walking between the aisles of pews, presenting the altar with the necessities of rites. It seemed, in his memory, to always be twilight, even in the morning mass. The deep purple of the sky loomed over the dirty parking lots. The old and damned shuffling to bright white rooms to pray and kneel. They were so undoubting. If there was anything his religious upbringing taught him, it was that there was something out there, knowing. When his father had left him in a tumult of buckshot he knew that no matter what guardian he was tossed to, he would never know love until he sought it himself.
He thought of the time he was in trade school, before he came to work for the Shell. He worked silently in the classroom and out of it. He lay in the bunk of his sterile room and admired the glow of his roommate's aquarium. He was hypnotized by the colors of the artificial coral, the orange and white of the clownfish, and the rhythmic bubbles of the filter. Sometimes he would ask his roommate to turn on the aquarium light at night. His roommate would protest and claim they need sleep and Rory would smile at that and think of all the goodnights they must whisper to each other as they pass.
It was a bit later on when his roommate suggested that if he liked his aquarium so much he should just go to a real one. And so Rory did. And soon enough he walked through the darkened blue hallways of glass and rock. The man, old enough to drink, stared wide-eyed and innocent at the humongous tanks. He would press his hands against the cold and press his nose too, to view deep into the water, all the way through. His deep-voiced giggles and sighs of wonder made the other goers uncomfortable and they'd veer away from his prolonged presence at each and every tank. When he finally approached the sharks it was indeed a poor example for the future. It sat heavy, near the bottom of the tank, weak and old. It was sickly, but Rory didn't have the foresight at the time to determine that. When he looked into the eyes of the blue beast he knew something was wrong. If one were to ask him now, he'd say that in many ways that was when he knew he was destined for a second chance. When the blue beast stared at him across the way it planted something dormant, under his skin, but it never spoke. Not until he read that book so many years later. Then, like gunpowder, it ignited all at once.
He tried harder to remember the past, of where he came from, of how things were before, but his memories were tangled and mixed with the others. It was getting harder and harder to distinguish them. The idea of memory was leaving. Soon, it was to only be here and now. Eat and smell and swim and eat and serve and swim and eat and swim and move and serve some more. Do not remember. Do not think. Do not reflect.
Now the sun set over the gulf and the water below grew darker than before. But he doesn't sleep. Now he only waits, emerged from the dark waves in the dead of night, the moon shining on his back, and he feels with intent for any vibrations coming from the room where Dennis wept earlier. And emitting from him is the foulest stench of low tide.