“Shut up,” Owen said. “You’re lying.”
His whole life after that was going to be miserable. Nothing to look forward to anymore, and still all the work and drudgery of looking after you. And the fear, too. The fear of what would become of you when he was gone.
“It’s not true,” Owen said. He was gritting his teeth. Spitting the words. “You’re only me. You’re my own head screwing with me.”
Afraid not, the voice said, and a second later the feeling in his gut seemed to blossom and spread. Like a balloon full of poison had just burst in his blood. The images became more real, the way the naked girl on top of him had become more real. There was Grandpa at the graveside. Grandpa in his bedroom in the ugly light, making whimpering noises like a sick dog.
All because of you, Owen.
It didn’t seem to matter anymore that it was bullshit. He felt it anyway. Felt it all being his fault, all the pain Grandpa had inside him that he could never talk about. All the things that made his shoulders hunch down like he was hauling weight.
Go back in and break the statue. I promise this will all go away.
“He got it for her. He keeps it because of her.”
He can glue it back together. It’ll be fine.
“Why do you want me to break it?”
So I know you’ll do what I say.
“Give me something else to do.”
No. Go break it. You can tell him you just bumped into it.
“I never go in there. I won’t be able to explain what I was doing.”
You’ll have to make something up. That’s your business. Just go in there now and break it.
Owen made no move to do so. He stood there, his back to the screen door, the dirt yard blurring in his tears.
You want to feel this way all day? All night, too? You want to feel it so bad you don’t even get to sleep? I can make that happen. You know I can.
He knew. You didn’t have to be smart to know that much. His tears overran his eyes and spilled.
Go, Owen. The voice was soft now. Talking to him like a friend who cared. You’ll feel better as soon as you’ve done it. It’ll only take you a second.
Nodding now. Feeling his resistance let go. He wiped at his eyes, turned, and went back to the door.
* * *
In the weeks that followed, there were other tests. Most weren’t as bad as the one with the cat statue, but some were scarier, because they made one thing clear: He wasn’t going crazy. Whoever—or whatever—the Gravel Man was, Owen’s brain wasn’t making it up.
He knew it for sure two weeks after breaking the statue. It was another time when his grandfather had gone into town. The voice sent Owen into the desert on foot, with a hand shovel, to a place three hundred yards due south of the pole barn. There was a spot where three Joshua trees made a triangle, ten feet apart from each other. The voice told him to dig right in the center of the shape, and within thirty seconds he hit something hard that sounded like plastic.
It turned out to be a long rectangular case, and though he knew what it was even before he opened it, Owen took a sharp breath when he saw what was inside.
Have you ever held a gun before, Owen?
“I’m not allowed.”
You can hold this one. It’s called an MP-5. It’s already loaded and ready to shoot. The safety isn’t even on. Pick it up.
It was heavier than he’d imagined. His arms shook a little. Maybe that was just his nerves. He brought it to his shoulder the way people did on TV.
Fire it. Shoot at the dirt twenty feet away. No one will hear.
He hesitated.
You’re not going to fight me on something this easy, are you, Owen?
He took a breath and pulled the trigger. The gun kicked hard against his grip—he almost dropped it.
You have to hold it tight. That’s why we’re practicing. Don’t worry, I’ll tell you all about how to use it.
* * *
The worst test of all came four months later. This time Grandpa was up in Cedarville looking for a new chainfall. He would be gone for hours.
Get on the quad and take it across the road, the Gravel Man said. Go straight north into the desert. We’ll talk while you ride.
Owen got the four-wheeler out of the pole barn and headed north. It was state land up here, this side of the road, no houses or two-tracks, not even Jeep trails. Just empty desert with a few hills and canyons and a lot of wide open nothing. Owen rode, topping one rise after another, his grandfather’s house falling farther and farther behind.
I need to tell you about something important. A basic rule of life that you probably don’t understand yet.
“What is it?”
The way most people deal with pain. The way they pass it off onto others.
Owen had no idea what that meant.
I know you don’t. It’s okay. I’ll explain. You must have had bullies in school, right?
“Yes.”
I’ll bet most of them were getting their asses kicked at home by their fathers. That was how the pain came to them. And maybe they could’ve just taken it in, absorbed it, dealt with it somehow. But they didn’t. They went to school and passed the pain off to you. That’s what people do. Not just bullies, either. There was a girl you liked, right? The summer before ninth grade. Carrie?
Owen had long since stopped being surprised the Gravel Man knew these things. You couldn’t keep secrets from someone who could get inside your head.
“Yes,” he said.
She liked you, too, didn’t she? Isn’t that why you still remember her? Because for those two months you had fun together. She liked working on cars, the same as you, and you weren’t so nervous around her, the way you were with everyone else.
Yes, he supposed Carrie had really liked him. So what, though. What could’ve really become of it, over time? How much chance had it had?
You got back to school that fall and you hung out with her for one day, and that was all it took for her to see what everyone else thought of it. How the girls with the nice clothes laughed at her for being with you. How everyone laughed. And the next morning you went to her locker to say hi, and her friends were there with her, and she looked at you and made that deadpan face. Remember what she said back to you, instead of hi?
Yes, he remembered. He was never going to forget that.
She said yep. You said hi and she said yep, with that face that really said, What are you doing here? Why do you think you’re good enough for me? And she walked away with her friends, and that was that.
“Why are you talking about this?”
Because she passed the pain off to you, like a bully. The pain she would’ve felt if she’d stayed with you and endured all their teasing. Or the pain she’d have felt if she tried to sit you down and explain the whole thing, how shallow that would’ve made her feel. The easiest thing for her was to make that face and say yep and walk away. No pain for her then. All of it landed on you instead. That’s what people do, Owen. That’s the axis the world spins on, and you need to understand it.
“Why?”
Because you’re going to do it, too. You’re going to pass your pain off onto someone else. You’re going to learn how, today.
* * *
A mile later he topped a final rise and saw a lime green convertible out ahead on the plain. As he closed in on it, he saw a low, dark shape tucked down behind the car’s back end. All at once the shape jumped, and Owen saw that it was a man sitting there, hunched on the ground. The man’s head turned toward the sound of the quad, and then he sprang up—not entirely up, though. There was something wrong with the man. He couldn’t seem to stand up straight.
In the last fifty yards Owen saw what the problem was. The man’s wrists were tied together and bound by a chain to the car’s bumper. His ankles were bound together, too, though they were free of the car. He moved like a fish on a line, his whole body jerking around in big arcing jolts. He had his feet on the ground and he was bent over at the waist, w
atching as Owen stopped ten feet away and killed the four-wheeler’s engine.
“Jesus, you’re a lifesaver,” the man said. He nodded at the quad. “You got tools on that thing? Something to take this bumper off with?”
Up close, the man was barely a man at all. He looked like a college kid. He had dark hair, and he wore shorts and a tight T-shirt. There was a little barbed-wire tattoo going around his upper arm.
You don’t have to say anything to him, the Gravel Man said. You’re not going to help him.
“Did you hear me?” the kid asked.
Owen nodded. “I don’t have any tools.”
“Well, just call the cops, then.” His voice was full of fear. “The guys that did this might come back. Tell me you got a phone.”
Owen only stared. This was another moment that didn’t take a smart person to understand. He knew this much: Like the buried gun had been left just for him, this young man tied to the car had been left here. Just for him.
“Hey!” the kid said. “Are you listening?”
“What is this?” Owen whispered. He heard a shake in his own voice.
Go around the front of the car to the passenger side. On the floor in front of the seat there’s a claw hammer.
Owen understood what he was meant to do. A wave of fear ran up his back, making him flinch.
“I can’t do this,” he said.
You can start with his head. The screaming won’t last very long that way.
Owen’s knees threatened to give. The kid was screaming something at him, red-faced angry now, but the meaning of the words didn’t come through. Owen’s own pulse was thudding in his ears, and his own voice in his head was muttering No, no, no, no.
The Gravel Man’s voice was louder, though.
You’ve seen that I can make you hurt, but I can make it worse than it was before. Worse than anything you ever felt.
“I can’t do it.”
Get the hammer and beat him to death with it.
“I can’t!” Owen screamed.
The young man fell silent at that. He looked confused. That was the last thing Owen saw before the feeling dropped on him like an engine block.
He saw his grandmother’s grave again, but this time Grandpa wasn’t there. There was no one there but himself, and the ground before the headstone was torn open in a deep gouge that exposed the coffin. Down there, framed by dirt and clay, the coffin lid creaked.
Your fault, Owen. Your fault, your fault, your fault—
“I can’t do it, no matter what you make me feel.”
I can make it hurt. So much hurt you’ll have to pass it off onto him. You won’t have any choice.
“I can’t.”
You will.
Before Owen could say any more, the coffin lid swung open, and in the same awful moment he found himself pitching forward and down, off balance, into the pit. He could hear himself screaming, but the sound wasn’t enough to block out the Gravel Man’s voice.
Do you know the word putrefaction, Owen? Do you know it, dummy?
He saw her bones, dirty white in the sun, half a second before he landed on her ribs and snapped them like pretzel sticks. His hands and knees splashed down in the bottom of the coffin, two inches deep in something wet. Wet but thick like gravy.
Putrefaction is what happens after you die, even if they embalm you. Putrefaction means you turn to soup.
Screaming louder now. He reared up, and his hands came up to cover his eyes, but they were thick and dripping with—
Soup. People turn to soup. Your grandmother is soup because it killed her to have to raise you—
How he got back onto the quad, he didn’t know. He was aware of the young man screaming again and rattling the chain, no longer mad but simply terrified. Owen saw all that and then his hand was on the ignition and the four-wheeler was roaring, and a second later he was off. He saw the desert blurring past. He felt the wind searing his face. The young man and the lime green car were far behind him, and—
And what was this? The Gravel Man’s voice had lost some of its hold on him. It was only faint now, barely getting to him. Hadn’t that happened once before? That first night in the desert, driving fast in the pickup, concentrating hard on the ground rolling through his headlights. Wasn’t that all it took? He gave the quad everything. He couldn’t even see his speed through the vibration and the tears. He didn’t care. Faster. Just go faster. He felt his control of the machine slipping away. Felt it want to flip out from under him with every little jarring dip in the ground. That didn’t matter. The distraction was working, that was what mattered. The Gravel Man was speaking, but Owen couldn’t make out the words.
In the next instant he crested a rise and found himself airborne. His stomach heaved upward and his shoulders clenched. Then the wheels came down and the shocks compressed and the chassis slammed against the undercarriage, and his hands took over and killed the throttle and worked the brakes.
He was atop the next rise by the time he stopped. His breath was ragged, and the engine was growling low and guttural.
He turned and looked back the way he’d come from. Over the swells of the land he could see the convertible half a mile back. The young man had twisted around to stare at him. His face was a tiny white circle in the sun.
You can’t get away from me. It’s not even worth trying.
“Please,” Owen said.
You know what I want. You know what I’ll do to you if I don’t get it. I can still make it worse. I can keep you in the soup as long as I want to. Take a few minutes to think about it. Our friend isn’t going anywhere.
The voice went silent.
There was no sound but the low rumble of the quad’s engine and the ringing of blood in Owen’s ears.
When he breathed in, he could still taste the air inside the coffin. Like the smell when a rat died in a wall somewhere in the house, and there was no way to find it to get rid of it. He looked at his hands. They were clean and dry, but he could still feel the thick liquid coating them, dripping through the gaps between his fingers.
He slid off the quad and sank to the ground next to it. He crossed his arms and gripped his own shoulders and began rocking forward and back at the waist. He hadn’t done that since he was very young—kids at school had teased him to death for it—but here it was, back again. He didn’t fight it.
* * *
When he rolled the quad back up to the convertible and cut the engine, the kid didn’t say anything. He only stared at Owen, his eyes wary.
Owen went around to the passenger door. The claw hammer was there in front of the seat. He leaned down and got it, and when the kid saw it, a kind of nervous hope seemed to fill his face. Like Owen had found a tool to help him with after all. Then the kid met his eyes and saw what was there, and he drew away like a chained-up animal. He made sounds that weren’t quite words—or if they were words, they might have been please and no. His bound-together feet slipped out from under him and he thrashed his body around.
Owen stood above him with the hammer down at his side.
“I don’t mean it,” he said.
* * *
He rode back up to the spot two days later, when Grandpa went into town for brake pads. The convertible was gone, and where the young man had bled, there was only a scoured patch of ground. A good bit of the desert topsoil had been raked up and taken away.
Three months had passed since then. Every night at bedtime, the Gravel Man visited and made the girls in Owen’s memory come to life. It was always good—there was no denying that—but whenever the nice feelings faded and he was alone again, the same thoughts always came to him. They circled like ghosts in the dark of his bedroom.
Where was all this going?
What was it for?
To those questions, the Gravel Man never offered any answers.
PART TWO
BETA
This world nys but a thurghfare ful of wo,
And we been pilgrymes, passynge to and fro.
—GEOFFREY CHAUCER
CHAPTER TWELVE
It was raining when Holly Ferrel arrived at Amarillo Children’s Medical Center. The car pulled under the overhang at the entrance, and two of the three men with her—the two seated on the passenger side, front and back—got out fast. From her position in back, Holly couldn’t see their heads, but she knew they were sweeping their gazes over the geography surrounding the hospital’s entry. She could see their hands ready to go under their suit coats for the sidearms holstered there. She could see their posture, tense and wired, the embodiment of her own anxiety.
One of them gave the roof a double pat with his fingertips; only then did the driver put the car in park.
“Clear,” the driver said to her. He said it the way a ticket taker at a movie theater might say “Enjoy the show.” Every step in the process was routine—to him and to her. It’d been going on for weeks.
One of the others came around and opened the door for her. The two of them followed her as far as the entrance, then took up positions outside as she went in. She liked to tell herself the fear stayed outside with them. That it was like an overcoat she could hang up at the door and not think about again until it was time to go home. Some days it almost worked.
Sixty seconds later, and five stories up, Holly passed through another door. An engraved steel sign beside it read ONCOLOGY.
She didn’t go straight to her office. She nodded hello to the nurses on duty at the station, crossed to the north-wing hallway, and went to the third doorway on the right. The door was wide open. Even before reaching it, she saw the dim room inside strobing with familiar light. She came to it, leaned in, and knocked on the frame.
Ten feet away, Laney Miller looked up from the video game on her laptop. Her eyes brightened.
“Hi, Holly.”
Laney’s voice, soft and raspy, reminded Holly of a teenaged girl who’d just spent a week singing lead in the high school musical. For a second the awful math swam into Holly’s thoughts: the odds against Laney ever doing that. The odds against her becoming a teenager at all. Holly buried the notion before her face could register it.