Dead Echo

  Chapter 42: Coming To Terms

  James Arnold pulled into his driveway at 10: 37 p.m. Far too much had happened and he’d thought the ride would help. But of course that had been pure fantasy. He was no closer to understanding the events now than when he lived them. He rolled to a stop just outside the closed garage door and cut the engine. Sat staring emptily into space, wondering, his mind a state of flux. Nothing in his career had prepared him for what had happened today. Nothing in his life. He’d gone to the mailman’s house on a hunch and found something completely beyond his experience. But what?

  Could he honestly believe his eyes, his ears, his instincts? Ordinarily these were the only things a true detective could rely on, but how, now, with this? “Jesus God,” he murmured and worked the latch, opening the door to the night. He got out of the car, leaving his briefcase, all the accoutrements he usually carried in with him when he got home, a security blanket for a child. There was no security now.

  He walked up the flagstone path to the front door, mindlessly fumbling with the keys, and let himself inside. The house was dark, ominous, and he hurriedly switched on the foyer light and the others on the way to the kitchen, leaving a swath of illumination behind him. Like a scared housewife left alone while her husband was out of town. The sheer humiliation of the thing brought a grimace to his face.

  He threw the keys into the bowl by the microwave, loosened his tie, and looked down at his feet. The mud had long ago turned to dirt and dust and the rest of his clothes were no better. Like he’d been in a fight with a buzz saw, as he mother would have said. He shook his head and toe-heeled both shoes off. They were ruined, of course. The pants, the shirt, likewise, but that was okay. He needed them to believe. He hadn’t been scared of the bogeyman since he was five.

  And now, all these years later, here he was again.

  He recalled the conversation with Camp that morning (God, how it seemed another lifetime ago) and the look in the man’s eyes. Not much different, he figured, than the one he had right this minute, that is, if he had the guts to go look in the mirror in the bathroom. “Just fucking crazy,” he whispered to the room. He wiped a hand across his forehead and it came back dirty. No, this was real.

  It had been Skate’s car. Point one.

  He had been accosted by…something. Point two. He didn’t need the gun for evidence. He’d checked it already and there were two chambered bullets left. He’d fired four times. He could count each one, tick them off on his fingers: the one in the air, the second at the tree, the third and fourth at whatever had been in the woods. And after all that, the motherfucker had still kept coming.

  It was hard to recount now, in the familiar sanity of his home. The mad tear down the trail, afraid to look back, just running, running, until he passed Skate’s car and went on like Ichabod Crane pursued by the Headless Horseman. Running and running until his breath caught like a knot in his chest and he thought his heart would explode. Finally, stumbling into the clearing where the house was, smelling that same awful smell that had almost pulled him into the attic, and then on down the drive until he got to the Crown Vic. Hardly believing his eyes when he saw it, as if half-expecting to awaken, sweating and hoarse, in his bed in this very house, free from the nightmare as the new day dawned. But that’s not how it had gone. He’d hurriedly rushed over to the car and unlocked the door, his eyes darting about the undergrowth while his hand refused to step up, finally hearing the dry click of the lock, and then, mercifully, tearing the door open and flopping down in the driver’s seat. Engaging the engine and backing pell mell down that twisting sonofabitch, branches flopping and scratching overhead and along the side panels as he got out. Dust flying in front of the car as if all the hounds of hell were in hot pursuit.

  But no…that was too clichéd. He had to be truthful with himself, especially if he ever wanted to come to terms with any of this. A man. He’d been running from a huge, hulking man with half his head blown away by the bullet Arnold had put there. Up on its feet and moving like nothing doing. The moment like a framed picture with a light trained on it.

  “A goddamn monster,” he said now and laughed at the absurdity of the statement. Then he shook his head again because absurd or not, it was the truth. Unless he’d somehow gone over the bend and had no recollection as to how, then that simple statement was true. He’d shot a man twice today. A big man who hadn’t bled a drop, who’d picked himself up off the ground with half his head lying in scattered piles among the leaves and tree trunks. A man who had pursued him like a ghoul in a child’s nightmare.

  That’s what he was dealing with.

  And with this thought came another. Something that had gone through his mind just before the world turned on him. The weird idea that he wouldn’t report it. He still remembered how alien that thought had been earlier in the bright, sunlit day. It had come right after his slipshod investigation of the mailman’s house, after he’d been blindly led outside to stumble around in the woods…until he found the car. Skate’s car. Almost as if that thing had been leading him to it. He tried to swallow the lump that had suddenly formed in his throat. It was the first time the idea had crossed his mind and that was another failure of judgment, until now…

  He moved over to the cabinet next to the refrigerator and took out the bottle of Jim Beam. Spun off the top and downed a belt, fighting for equilibrium with his eyes closed and watering and his chest heaving like a fist. Then it was down, a fiery ball of glass in his stomach. He took two steps to the right and spit into the sink. Turned on the faucet and took a great draught of water. Breathed deeply a couple of times until the threat of vomiting receded. Yeah, he thought, nodding his head as the pieces clicked together. Led. There’s no way you’d have found the car if you hadn’t been chasing whatever it was in the woods. It would still be sitting right there with no one the wiser.

  But it had and he did.

  He took another, more realistic, swig from the bottle and this time it wasn’t so bad. His brain was buzzing slightly, and as always, right on the cusp of a drunk, his mind seemed to run cleaner, clearer. So, okay, it was goddamned odd, but of the whole incident, finding the car was the most mundane. But it was also proof, as far as he was concerned, that Carolyn Skate was dead. And that made it personal.

  He grit his teeth and took another sip. Now it was like nothing.

  And he thought about reporting it again, within the same breath knowing he wouldn’t. Of course he could relate his suspicions to others but for what reason? So far the connection between Skate’s disappearance and whatever was happening at Leszno’s Acres was tenuous at best. Of course, if someone took the time to connect all the dots, as he had, patterns would begin to show, but there was no one alive he would describe the “feeling” he’d told Skate about. That feeling he’d had while driving through the neighborhood.

  He was alone with this knowledge.

  He walked over to the kitchen table and sat down. Took his gun from the holster and placed it on the table in front of him. Sat. Thinking. What did he know? He needed to place all facts in order and look at them rationally. The only other person who could help him piece through this nightmare was dead. He remembered the conversation he’d had with Skate several days before (and that, also, like someone else’s memories). Her patient, this mysterious woman, Patsy Standish. She lived at Leszno’s Acres. She’d come to Skate of her own accord for that one pivotal meeting, the one that had ultimately cost Skate her life. And from what he remembered of Skate’s account, the woman had also spoke of ghosts. Supernatural entities that, somehow, were plaguing her dead daughter. Like something from a cheap horror film. But, if he was to believe his own senses, real.

  The thought took his mind back. Across the years to his childhood. In all honesty he’d never dreamed of being a cop. He’d wanted to be an astronaut, dreamed of walking on the moon, of perhaps someday building encampments on Mars. But all that had been fluff; he did possess a regimented mind (he could think long and hard over seemingly
mundane points until a crack of light appeared) but his math skills had never developed to the degree necessary. He’d ended up as a high school English teacher in his early twenties. Something he hardly ever thought about now. Just a quick three-year stint before his real life began, but sometimes it came back. Times like now.

  He quit after his brother died. Five years his junior, dead after a high school drinking bout. Edward had left home with a band of friends just after dark on that terrible night and been found dead, asphyxiated on his own vomit early the next morning. It had been in the summer and James still remembered the hysterical afternoon phone call from his mother. A call so broken and discombobulated that he’d had no idea what she was saying until the phone was taken by his father and the story related in more lucid terms.

  And everything had just stopped.

  Ed had been his only sibling, a sweet kid who was always smiling. Happy with life, with who he was. And then one morning to receive the phone call that said he was dead. No longer for this world. Wrenched free with no warning. Just a bleak sounding toll of doom.

  James Arnold had never taught another class.

  He remembered the hell of the funeral, his parents reduced to husks. Ghosts moving in a void from which there was no escape. He remembered his brother’s body in the coffin, the waxy face so like a mannequin’s, the glued lips like some awful cardboard cutout of the person who’d once lived inside. And it was the cruelty of the situation that really ate him, continued even after all these years. He’d been a good kid, As and Bs on his report cards, never a single behavior referral. And then, one night, a simple mistake of judgment and he was gone forever.

  It shook everything Arnold had held sacred. Because until that moment he’d believed life was fair, good. He believed that a benevolent God looked down from His Heaven and bestowed gifts on the good and meted out punishment on the bad. Another fantasy. Perhaps, initially, that had been the investigation that had led him to police work. He’d simply wanted to know. And, my God, over the years how he’d been proved wrong. Every bit of foulness was allowed to exist in the world, even as goodness was so frequently snuffed out. And the stain it left on the living. His parents were old now, had been old since that day. They’d split two years after Ed’s death, his mother staying in the house where they’d lived since the boys were born and his father off to a squalor of cheap apartments and boarding houses. He’d lost his job, his mother, eventually, the house. They both lived, now, in tiny rent-controlled duplexes surrounded by people that Arnold usually found himself chasing. He helped out but it really didn’t matter. They’d died (for want of a better word) when Ed died. His parents were living ghosts and that’s what he’d had to live with all his adult life.

  He gripped the bottle and drank out of the neck. Put it back on the table and noticed his hands weren’t shaking anymore.

  He’d been a realist from that moment forward, seeing his younger brother dead in his coffin, his parents’ daunting lack of interest in anything thereafter. It had made him so. Standing there before the casket it had struck him how utterly useless his life had become. An English teacher. Droning on and on about made-up lives and trying to make them important. So much letters on a page. Useless. A week later he’d registered for the police academy and the rest, as they say, was academic. Now, years later, he was no closer to understanding anything. People lived, people died. There seemed no rhyme or reason. These things happened according to the whim of others, of nature, of circumstance. There was no balance to attain. It just was.

  But…

  His eyes drifted back to the bottle. Hypnotizing, really, like a snake. His knuckles were white. He drank again, felt a little more of himself slip away. Because that’s what he wanted, release. An end to the plague in his mind. He’d long ago reconciled himself to the belief that dead was dead. From the dark we come and into the dark we leave, but…

  How could this philosophy account for today?

  Sure there were men who could take two blasts from a Colt and keep on ticking, but he’d never seen one who didn’t bleed. Or any who could pick themselves off the ground, minus half a head, and continue on as if nothing was wrong. No. That spoke of something beyond reality. That spoke of something beyond the grave.

  His hand started to shake again and he took another belt. His mind was getting wishy now, but what good was reason? And in the absence of reason there was only instinct. He’d felt it earlier when he decided not to report the incident. What did it say? Merely a name, over and over. Patsy Standish, Patsy Standish. He could sit here all night trying to drink it away and it would remain like a stone in a shoe. She was the key.

  Somehow she was the link between all the disappearances and general weirdness that seemed to circle that desolate spate of land like vultures over a corpse. Whatever was going on had started with her; Skate had known as much and it had gotten her killed. Now he knew it too and it very well might mean that he’d get his also, but there was no shying away from the facts. That was the only reality he had left. The only fact he could check.

  With this thought he stood up and walked back to the cabinet. Replaced the bottle. Moved over to the sink and washed his face in cold water. Slapped himself red to bring him around. He closed his eyes as if praying and gripped the counter top until his hands spasmed. He left the kitchen and entered the bathroom, threw his clothes in a pile on the floor and stood before the mirror naked, sizing himself up. Reality or not, he’d always believed lives headed toward some crescendo. Nothing preordained (or so he’d long believed) but a crescendo nonetheless. Perhaps it was the English teacher whispering out from the deeps of his mind, trying to put order where there was none.

  Regardless, his was fast approaching.

  Everything in his mind screamed as much. He’d reverted back to the reptile brain, that cold, calculating knowledge that was neither good nor bad. It just was. Like instinct. Reason told him to shower and go to bed, get up tomorrow and consider the next steps. Perhaps it would be a good idea to bring in some heavies…

  But the other thing in his mind, the only thing that mattered now, was the voice telling him to go, to go now because it was almost too late.