Clouds banked the moon. The lake pooled black from shore to shore, and silence lay on the waters, even the insects of the early darkness now quiet in the wake of midnight.
In daylight, no escape could succeed. Harley had tried several times.
At night the dark forest resisted navigation, and a flashlight drew them—whoever they were, whatever they were—as a porch light summoned flurries of moths. The woodland confounded like a maze, an intertwined raveling of white oaks and sugar maples and black walnuts and dogwoods, but it was not a maze to them, the imposters. They navigated the wilderness as though they had planted every tree themselves according to some master plan that they had memorized.
Harley Higgins, who had hours earlier celebrated his fourteenth birthday, crept along the shore, avoiding the sand that would take clear footprints.
He crossed onto the grounds of Iron Furnace Lake Resort and made his way to the small marina. During the day, the resort rented motorized Duffy boats, rowboats, and pontoon bicycles that tourists could pedal along the scenic shore. At two o’clock in the morning, no staff attended the place, and it stood at a safe distance from the hotel.
A Duffy offered the fastest way across the lake. They were equipped with electric motors, so there would be no noise to bring the imposters down on him. But for one of those, he needed keys, which were in the locked marina office.
The rowboats were tied in their slips, a pair of oars shipped in each. He sat on the dock and hooked his feet over the gunwale of a boat and pulled it against the pilings and dropped down into it with a stealth that pleased him, although then the vessel bumped against the pilings, a hollow thump that might have drawn attention if anyone had been nearby to hear it.
On his knees at the transom, he used an oar to push off from the slip head, and the boat glided into open water, raising no sound other than the burble and slish of the lake parting around it.
Harley sat mid-vessel on the rowing thwart, facing the bow, and used the oar as if poling a gondola, pushing against the lake bed, propelling the boat slowly away from the docks and turning it north with the intention of transiting the lake to the farther shore.
When the water grew too deep to pole the boat, he had to face the stern, risk socketing the oars in the oarlocks, and row in the conventional manner. The locks were well lubricated, but they still creaked softly as they swiveled, and he let the boat glide as far as it would on each stroke, to avoid making too much noise near shore.
He was not afraid of the lake. Nothing dangerous lived in it. But even if there had been sharks and alligators, he would have swum its width to escape, if there had been no boat.
For a few weeks, he had been on his best behavior, as if he had at last resigned himself to his new life. He ceased arguing with the adults, stopped trying to organize a rebellion among the children. He even pretended to enjoy his birthday, the ice cream and cake, as if the giftless celebration wasn’t a mere charade.
He stopped complaining of being imprisoned. They didn’t call it prison, of course. They called it school, although no one attempted to teach him anything and had no expectation that he would learn. There were no classes, no textbooks, no lessons. He and the other seven kids were allowed TV and video games and anything they wanted to amuse themselves and pass the time. They were not, however, permitted to interact with anyone who was not a citizen of the town.
The imposters pretended that what they did to him and the other kids was normal, the way things had been done for generations. They even seemed to believe what they said, though it was all a humongous load of bullshit. The imprisonment had begun ten months earlier, in May of the previous year, just two months after Harley’s thirteenth birthday. Did they think he couldn’t remember what his life had been like then, that he’d been free to ride his bike into town, that he had been bused eleven miles to a real school at the county seat?
The soft landscape lighting of the resort receded slowly to the south. When he looked left, east, the lights of town, such as they were at this hour, glimmered faintly four miles away. The west shore lay at a greater distance, and though there were many homes along its arc, they were dark now.
Most of the north flank of the lake, toward which he rowed, remained in its natural state. He intended to beach the boat there and find his way along the tree line to a meadow that would provide an easy path to Lakeview Road. Lakeview would lead to the county highway. Perhaps there he could flag down an eighteen-wheeler and convince the driver to take him to the county sheriff’s office or even to the state police.
Truckers were good folks. They worked hard, and you could trust them. That’s what Harley’s uncle, Virgil Higgins, had always said before he ceased to be Uncle Virgil anymore, having been replaced by an imposter. Now no one should believe any damn thing the man said.
Harley didn’t know if he could persuade the police that the people in Iron Furnace had changed, that they weren’t who they had once been. But he felt confident that he could raise in them enough suspicion to wonder why all the kids in town under the age of sixteen—eight of them—had been pulled from public schools on the same day, thereafter to attend a private school. When the cops investigated and saw the setup that the imposters called a school, they would know at once that it was in fact a prison.
Perhaps a third of the way toward the farther shore, Harley began to row harder and faster, unconcerned about the noise he made, even if sound might carry well across water.
In time, though fit and athletic, he began to tire. His arms grew heavy, as if they were stone grafted to him, and the vertebrae in his neck seemed to be made not from bone, but from woven bundles of nerves grown hot and sensitive with his effort.
The lake lay wider at night than it appeared to be in daylight. Even in this moonless pitch, he couldn’t have become disoriented, because the resort lights marked the south shore, and due east remained fixed by the lights of town. He told himself not to worry, just to keep rowing, but he rowed and worried until abruptly the bow draft ran aground.
He shipped the oars and abandoned the boat and splashed through the shallows onto the north shore. Here the beach was shingle rather than sand, the pebbles click-clattering underfoot, his wet sneakers squishing as he hurried east along that pale width, the lapping water to his right, a rampart of trees to his left.
Although the south shore and the lake itself lay clear, a thin mist shawled the trees here and seemed to smoke up from the stones. The wet air curdled thick with the scent of forest mast.
He arrived at an inclined meadow and turned north and climbed through wild grass and the faint sweet-rot smell of last autumn’s Mayapple that had decomposed into a rich compost.
When he crested the slope, he came to Lakeview Road. On the farther shoulder of the blacktop two-lane, three vehicles awaited him, including his father’s Range Rover. Five men had come for him, dark figures in the greater darkness, faces shadowed but paler than the rest of them. Lacking a moon or other light, their eyes were devoid of reflections, burnt holes in featureless sackcloth visages.
The county route intersected with this road three miles to the west. With such a posse formed against him, Harley had no hope of getting a hundred yards, let alone three miles.
He would have been depressed if he had not been more than half expecting such an encounter. Although he hoped for escape, he had learned something valuable from this exercise, and the next time he made a run for it, he would surely elude them.
For a moment, the men stood still and silent, the thin gauze of mist weaving among them in slow gray currents, as if they were not men at all, but instead rough spirits shaped by angry Nature from the mold and mire of the forest, sent forth to war with humankind.
Then the imposter who called himself Boyd Higgins crossed the road and put a hand on Harley’s shoulder. “Come along now, son. You need yourself a good night’s rest.”
Harley pulled loose of him. “Don’t call me son. I’m not your son.”
“There’s birthday cake and ice cream left. You can have some before you go back to bed.”
Nothing could be done but cross the blacktop to the Range Rover and get in the front passenger seat and buckle up and slump in the shoulder harness.
The Rover was preceded by the Chevy Silverado, followed by the Honda Accord, as if these five men were escorting a dangerous mass murderer after a failed break for freedom.
“I hate you,” the boy said.
“I’m not the least way hurt when you say that,” the fake Boyd Higgins assured him, “ ’cause I know you don’t ever mean it.”
“I mean every damn word.”
“Don’t cuss, son. It taints your soul. Your mother and I love you. We understand your condition, and we’ll always love you and be there for you.”
“I don’t have a condition.”
“It’s what they call a personality disorder, Harley.”
“Here we go again with this horseshit.”
“Thank the Lord, it’s a disorder you’ll outgrow. We know you’re struggling right now, and we wish there was more we could do to ease you through this.”
“So I’ve got some stupid personality disorder, huh?”
“That’s right.”
“Then why don’t you take me to a psychiatrist, some head doctor somewhere?”
“The school is the best place for your treatment, Harley. You need to see your way clear about that.”
“It’s not a damn school. No teachers, no classes, no lessons.”
The fake father smiled and nodded. “It’s not your usual kind of school. Like I told you before, it’s a waiting school.”
“What sense does that make?”
Still smiling, the imposter took one hand off the wheel and patted Harley’s shoulder as if to gentle him out of his anger.
Exasperated by that condescension, Harley said, “You’re not fooling us. Not for a minute. All the kids know none of you is who you look like.”
“As you’ve said so often before. But that’s just part of this here particular darn personality disorder, Harley—the sad idea that we’re some kind of robots or pod people or something. You kids will outgrow it with treatment. Don’t you worry yourself about that.”
“With treatment, huh?”
“That’s right.”
“We aren’t getting any damn treatment.”
“Don’t cuss, son. It’s unbecoming.”
“What stupid treatment are we getting?”
“More than you realize. You’ll understand in time.”
They rounded the northeast corner of the lake. The town lay a few miles ahead.
“You don’t scare me,” Harley said.
“That’s good, son. There’s no reason for you to be scared. No one has raised a hand against you, and no one will.”
The father thing looked identical to Boyd Higgins. He sounded like Boyd Higgins. But the real Boyd Higgins never lied to Harley or patronized him, and this guy was nothing but a patronizing, lying sack of shit.
“You’re a lying sack of shit.”
The imposter smiled and shook his head. “You think so ’cause of your condition, but that’s sure to pass when you heal.”
“If you were really my dad, you’d punish me for saying a thing like that.”
“Well, now, if you’d lost your legs, son, I wouldn’t punish you just ’cause you couldn’t walk. And I surely won’t punish you just ’cause of your condition.”
Chevy Silverado, Range Rover, and Honda Accord passed through town in solemn procession.
For a burg so small, Iron Furnace had a large number of gift shops and galleries and restaurants, all quaint, arrayed along a wide main street with brick sidewalks and antique streetlamps. It flourished not just because of the two hundred or more rich guests who stayed at the always-full five-star resort, but also because it was a popular day-trip destination for people from as far away as Nashville and Louisville and Lexington.
Big Pembury Blue conifers with pendulous sprays of blue-green foliage lined both sides of the street. They were decorated year-round with thousands of tiny lights, which inclined the Chamber of Commerce to call this the Town Where It’s Always Christmas.
This had been a great place to grow up, especially when your mom and dad owned Higgins’s Haven, a combination sandwich shop and ice-cream parlor. But it wasn’t Harley’s town anymore. He wasn’t permitted to walk its streets. The old buildings and the businesses and the trees, not lighted at this hour, looked the same as they had always looked, but what had been welcoming and even magical to him in the past now appeared sinister.
Outside of town, Lakeview Road turned west. Two miles ahead lay the resort in all its splendor.
Harley said, “So tell me again why it is you call the place a ‘waiting school.’ ”
“Well, now, though I’ve told you a hundred times, I don’t mind telling you again, if it helps you settle yourself. We call it the waiting school because this here condition you have—it mostly has to be cured by time. There’s nothing to be done but wait the darn thing out.”
“Until I’m sixteen.”
“That’s right.”
“Meanwhile, I’m in prison.”
“Now, Harley boy, don’t torture my heart with such talk. You know it’s not a prison. There’s nothing you want you don’t get, plus good food and fresh air and the finest care.”
Harley wanted to scream. Just scream, scream, scream until he exhausted himself. He knew he wasn’t crazy. But truly insane people screamed like that in asylums, didn’t they?
Instead of screaming, he said, “I’ve been reading a book about personality disorders.”
“Good for you. Know thyself, as they say.”
“I might want another book about them.”
“Then you’ll have it, son. We’ve gotten you all kinds of books you asked about. You know, we encourage you to read anything you want. Your mom and me, we don’t care, whatever it is, even if it’s spicy, anything that keeps you interested and passes the time. You just have to stay in the school and pass the time.”
“What kind of personality disorder cures itself when you turn sixteen?”
“Why, the kind you have, son.”
“What’s the name of it?”
The imposter laughed just like Boyd Higgins. “Lord bless me, boy, I’ve spent my life making sandwiches and ice-cream treats. My mind hasn’t been shaped to remember thirty-letter medical terms.”
“Why sixteen, exactly?”
“Well, now, as I understand it, the brain is still in some ways growing past sixteen, but that’s the golden age when it’s mostly matured. So when it’s mostly matured, then you’re ready.”
“Ready.”
“Ready as you’ll ever be,” the imposter confirmed.
“Ready for what?”
“Well, ready to be done with this condition you’ve got.”
“Overnight, you mean?”
“If my own poor brain understands it, that’s right.”
As they cruised past the entrance to the resort and kept going, Harley said, “Two years from today.”
“From yesterday, your true birthday. It’ll be such a relief to us when you’re cured, son. To have our Harley back like you used to be.”
After a hesitation, Harley said, “Will I be like I used to be?”
“Whyever wouldn’t you be? It’s a passing condition.”
They rode in silence, into the darkness past the resort and farther west along the lake.
Then Harley said, “Dad, doesn’t it sound crazy—or at least weird—that every kid in town under sixteen has the same condition, and they’ll all be cured overnight when they turn sixteen, and until then they have to be kept locked up and away from people? Meanwhile nobody’s teaching them any schoolwork? They’re just supposed to entertain themselves? When you think about it, Dad, doesn’t it seem not just wacko but plain wrong?”
Boyd Higgins—if he was Boyd Higgins—frowned and stared at the road where the headlight beams intersected in the distance, and he remained silent for half a mile. Then he shook his head and smiled. “You don’t need teaching, Harley, ’cause you’ll know it all when you’re sixteen.”
“Know it all? All what?”
“Everything you need to know and nothing you don’t need. You wait and see. You’ll be all set when you turn sixteen.”
Four miles past the resort, the Chevy Silverado slowed and hung a U-turn and headed back toward town. The Honda Accord followed it.
The imposter slowed and turned right into a driveway that came to a tall gate flanked by stone walls receding into the night. He put down the driver’s window and pressed a button on a call box and identified himself. The gate rolled aside.
“Please don’t do this,” Harley pleaded.
“You’ll be okay, son. They care about you here.”
“It’s like I’m going crazy.”
“But you’re not, dear boy.”
“Maybe I am.”
“You’re not. And you won’t.”
They passed through the gate and along the driveway toward the place that wasn’t a school and never had been.
Harley had told this man that he wasn’t afraid of him, which was true. There were, however, things he feared.
He feared spending two more years in this place.
He feared his sixteenth birthday and what would happen then.
He feared also that this Boyd Higgins was no imposter, that this might be his father strangely changed, never to be as he had once been.
The driveway led to the mansion. Under the pillared portico. two attendants—the woman who called herself Noreen and the man who called himself Harvey—waited there in a fall of amber light from the coffered ceiling.
Man and boy got out of the Range Rover at the same time. The man came around the front of the vehicle and embraced Harley, because Boyd Higgins had always been a hugger. He kissed Harley on the forehead, then on the cheek, because Boyd Higgins had always been a kisser. He said, “I love you with all my heart, son,” because Boyd Higgins had always been generous in the expression of his love for his wife and child.
Harley met the man’s stare and saw the warm blue-green eyes that cherished him throughout his life. If he perceived sincerity in those eyes, sincerity and love, Harley recognized something else as well: a wimpling shadow in the depths, like he sometimes glimpsed on a sunny day when he was boating on the lake and he peered into the water and saw, at the farthest reach of light, a torsional finned form that seemed as mysterious as anything in this world of mysteries, yet could be known for what it was. However, the shadow in the deeper water of these eyes wasn’t as clean and right as a fish in the lower currents of the lake, was instead a twist of torment, as if the man before him, in the saying of good-bye, felt tortured and knew if only briefly that something was gravely wrong. But then the eyes shallowed away from those depths, and as if in the grip of some power demonic and unknowable, the man became insensate to the boy’s misery. He smiled and got in the Rover and drove off, leaving Harley with the devastating and terrifying certainty that he had been driven here by neither a robot nor a pod person, but only by what remained of a good man named Boyd Higgins.