(19)

In the night, I awoke and lay there listening to my own breathing. It was loud, and I couldn’t control it. I still had my eyes closed, but I felt that sensation I hadn’t felt in a long time, the feeling that someone was in the room. Even with closed eyes I could sense him, and I knew damn well who it was.

The room was frigid and seemed damper than central air set at seventy-four degrees ought to be. There was a tremble to the air, and I was sure I could smell the odor of decay.

He came through the door to my room. I knew that door had not been opened because it was locked, but he came. I didn’t see him enter, but I could hear his footsteps. I tried to get up but couldn’t.

I felt the bed move.

There was a rustling sound, the sheets and blanket being moved at the bottom of the bed, and then I felt his hand on my ankle, like a bracelet of ice. I wanted to pull my foot away. I wanted to yell out, but I didn’t. I couldn’t. It felt like I had a cork in my throat.

“Danny,” my father said. “Do you remember what Mr. Candles told you? About what was up there on the hill in the woods? Do you remember?”

His voice sounded as if it were coming through a wall of mud.

I tried to gather a response, but nothing came. I lay there with that cold hand on my ankle. I trembled as if experiencing an epileptic seizure and awoke to an empty room.

It was still dark outside. I sat up in bed. I was still breathing hard and my heart jumped like a jackhammer.

I checked the end of the bed. The covers were still in place, but for a moment, the streetlights sent pale gold through the open window near the bed and the light lay on the wooden floor, and I felt certain I could see a little puddle there where water from my father had dripped, but when I rolled out of bed and turned on the light, the floor was only shiny, like the wood had been over-polished in that spot.

I took a deep breath and gathered myself. I thought about writing, reading, anything to get my mind off things, but I didn’t do any of that. I ate a banana, left the skin on the windowsill. I went to the bathroom, got dressed, and went outside, carefully locking the door behind me. My car was parked at the curb where the walk ended. I didn’t remember parking it there.

Next thing I knew I was driving out in the country, and the trees and shadows in my headlights were as mysterious as some sort of dark enchantment.

I came to the lake. It wasn’t dry now; it was quite wet. I wondered when it had rained, and how had it rained enough to fill the lake in such a short time. It wasn’t raining now, so what was going on?

At the lake, the night was clear and the moon was full. I didn’t think it was supposed to be a full-moon night, but it was, and its image floated on the lake.

Standing on the bridge, I saw a light move through the dark trees off to my right, flow quickly up a hill into the woods and beyond, and disappear.

It meant something, but I wasn’t sure what.

I shone a flashlight that I discovered in my hand, shone it out at the dead black water. Swimming in the water were skeletons held together by bits of skin and muscle. Their heads bobbed up and then dipped down. Their skeletal arms and hands pulled at the water, and the water flowed through their fingers and into their empty eye sockets and open mouths. They were swimming toward the bridge, and then in no time they were under it. I followed them with the beam of my light.

Looking down between a split in the bridge slats, I could see them. All their skulls were tilted up to look at me, even though there were no eyes in those deep sockets, just darkness. But the darkness in their skulls seemed alive. They lifted bony arms up to me, and though I was high up, they could nearly reach me, and I couldn’t understand how that was. Skeletal fingers were poking through the splits in the bridge slats, wiggling at me. I started to run, and as I ran my feet tangled in the covers and I rolled off the bed breathing hard again.

I worked myself out of the cocoon of sheets and blanket and slowly stood up. The streetlights that came through the window were on my face and on the floor and I was cold.

I went to the bathroom for real this time, washed my face and took a pee. I picked up the covers and remade the bed, and then I saw on the windowsill the skin of a banana, just like in my dream, and I felt a dark shadow move around me and then in me, and I sat on the bed and thought about things for a long time but arrived at no answers. Eventually, I crawled under the covers and slept.

*  *  *

They say dreams try to tell you something that you already know or need to sort out, that ghosts are when your brain sends messages to the eyes instead of the common way, when the eyes send messages to your brain.

Some believe that explains ghosts and so many things that we see, from Bigfoot to dancing gremlins in Bermuda shorts. The brain thinks it, believes it enough to tell the eyes to see it.

I once read that it happens when we drive late at night. When we’re tired, and we keep pushing and are on the edge of sleep. The brain frequently tries to warn us. It wants us to stop and rest. It recognizes we are in the danger zone. It gives us false images, a dog or a person running across the road, for example. Something to alert us before it’s too late.

Had the ghost of my father spoken to me last night, or had the ghost of my memories roused something from deep inside, something connected to those bodies in the trunks of those cars?

I showered and shaved, brushed my teeth and so on, went by the café I had found the day before, had coffee, then drove out to the lake and walked out on the bridge. There were birds singing, cawing, and screeching, and there was the sound of frogs bleating and crickets chirping. A wave of blue-black insects flew past me and into the trees on the far side.

Unlike in my dream, the lake had not filled back up with water. If anything, it looked drier today than the day before.

As I stood on the bridge and looked over the lake bed, spotted with debris, the wind swirled up a wicked-looking dust devil that lifted powdery clay and twirled it in my direction. It came at me for a few moments, then died down as suddenly as it had begun. The dust scattered and became too thin for me to see, then there wasn’t any wind anymore.

I crossed the bridge and came to the end of it without having it fall apart. I remembered clearly the story Mr. Candles had told me and Ronnie long ago, about what was up on the hill.

It was a steep hill. There was a kind of trail there, and it was easy to tell it wasn’t much used anymore because it was narrow where the trees and weeds had grown close to it.

The trail forked as I neared the top. One fork was wider than the other, and the smaller one branched off before the peak of the hill and meandered into the greater thickness of the leafy trees.

It was cooler under the trees, in the shade, but I still felt as if I were breathing the contents of a vacuum cleaner.

I paused for a moment to catch my breath. A red fox slipped out from between the trees at the top of the hill where it was bathed in harsh sunlight. The fox paused and looked down the trail at me. After lifting its head in what seemed like a “What’s up?” manner, it darted swiftly and gracefully out of the sunlight and into where the foliage grew dense. It did this without making so much as a rustle.

I climbed up the slanting trail to where the fox had stood, took a deep breath, and looked around.

Off to my left I could see the remains of the sawmill. The mill was now nothing more than a collection of gray buildings of different sizes. The walls of the buildings were made of crude wooden slats with gaps in them you could throw a fat pig through.

I trudged to the biggest building. It had a tin roof, and the front double doors were like those you would expect on a barn. They were thrown wide open, and as I went inside, pigeons burst out past me in a gray-white explosion, causing me to flinch. A moment later I was inside and I could see a gigantic rusty saw with ragged metal teeth tipped red with rust.

Running out from it was a long tin chute resting on concrete blocks. That’s where trees had been fed into the gnawing monster. There were the scattered remains of busted chains and rubber belts that helped work the saw. There was a block of concrete where I assumed a gas-driven engine had once been mounted.

I walked around inside for a bit, but there wasn’t much to see outside of bat shit on the ground. When I looked up, I could see a colony of bats hanging upside down from the rafters. Did they poop like that? I wondered. Wouldn’t it run down their bodies? Or did they do their business on their way out at night in search of insects, let loose with guano bombs to lighten their flights? For a moment, it seemed like an important mystery. I left the bats to their shadows and rafters.

Outside of the building, I strolled around, into, and out of the other buildings. On the hill, I could look down on a lower level where there was a massive patch of green, closely mowed grass that sprawled over several acres. It was a golf course. Behind the course was a huge structure that looked like an English manor. Around it there were outbuildings so luxurious, you could have called them elite housing.

I turned and looked the other way down the hill. There was a junkyard with a shiny tin fence around it. From my position, I could see inside the perimeter of the fence. There were rusting cars and a large, faded red, tin-roofed shed in the middle of the sizable lot.

I walked down to it. The gate between the pieces of tin fence was made of pipe buried in the ground on either side and the gate was made of metal rods and tight mesh wire. There was a strand of barbed wire at the top of the gate, and a big padlock held a looped chain in check. The chain locked the gate. The gate was old and corroded, but the lock was shiny as a gift from Santa. There was a sign on the gate that said No Trespassing.

I looked around and didn’t see anyone. I climbed on the gate without snagging my pants or myself on the barbed wire at the top and dropped over it. I walked around among the cars, half expecting a large dog to come out from between the wrecks and take me down and eat my face.

When I got to the shack door, I tugged at it gently. It was locked. I went to one of the windows. There weren’t any curtains except natural ones made of dust and flyspecks that coated the glass. I wiped one of the windowpanes with my hand. That made it a little better, but most of the dust and specks were inside.

I looked through the glass and could see nothing but emptiness. Where sunlight came through a thin slit in the ceiling, I could see a chair and a small table. The floor was carpeted in rat turds and grime. The place gave me the creeps.

I went back to the gate and climbed over it. I wasn’t sure what I had accomplished by doing all of that, but I felt I was pulling at a string with something substantial but not visible on the other end.

I walked down from the junkyard to a little road that led along the lake. It went in the direction of the bridge. I hadn’t gone far when I gave it up, turned back to the sandy road leading up to the junkyard. I walked past it again, past the sawmill, and then I knew what I was really looking for.

When I got back to the hill, I ambled down the trail and found where it forked. I took the other fork this time and went into the deeper woods.

I hadn’t gone far when I saw off to one side overturned gravestones. Some were broken. As I stepped off the trail and into the woods, the mosquitoes dove down in a hungry pack and went to work on my face and poked their bloodsuckers through my clothes. Slapping at them proved useless. Their numbers were legion.

Drawing closer, I saw there were open graves near the stones, rectangles that were about six feet deep with leaves and dirt in the bottom of them. Some contained the broken remains of wooden caskets and little fragments of colorless cloth. The graves had been plundered.

I heard movement out beyond the cemetery, in the trees, bigger than a fox, maybe a deer, and then there was silence. Something had been there, but it had stopped moving or had moved beyond hearing.

I wanted to look around more, but the mosquitoes were too much to bear and the heavy movement made me nervous. I got back on the trail pretty quick, scampering maybe as fast as that fox had. Those damn vampire bugs buzzed all around me, thick enough to sew together and wear as a suit.

Hurrying back to the bridge, I felt myself pulling on that string again, and this time the thing at the other end seemed to be coming into view.