“You’re all alone out here, aren’t you, John?”
He didn’t have to answer because it had started to rain—hard. He wanted to hurry back in so they wouldn’t get soaked, but Ghost Bird wouldn’t cooperate. She insisted on taking slow, deliberate steps, let the water needle her face, run down her neck, and soak her shirt.
The blue heron moved not at all, intent on some prey beneath the surface.
HAUNTINGS
000
In his dreams now, the sky is deep blue with just a twinge of light. He stares from the water up at the cliff far above him. He can see the silhouette of someone peering down at him from the top … can see the way the person leans far over the edge to stare—farther than any human could, yet keeps leaning at a more severe angle, pebbles dislodged and peppering the water around him. While he lies in wait, there, at the bottom of the cliff, swimming vast and unknowable among the other monsters. Waiting in the darkness for the soundless fall, without splash or ripple.
020: SECOND RECOVERY
Sunday. An ice pick lodged in a brain already suffused with the corona of a dull but persistent headache that radiated forward from a throbbing bolus at the back of his skull. A kind of pulsing satellite defense shield protecting against anything more hostile that might sag into its decaying orbit.
A cup of coffee. A crumb-strewn Formica countertop with a view of the grimy street through a clean window. A wobbly wooden stool to go with shaky hands trying to hold it steady. The faint memory of a cheap disinfectant rising from the floor, tightening his throat. A woman repeated orders behind him, while he tried to spread out across the counter so none of the customers in line could join him. From the look of the coatrack to his left, some people had come in during the winter and never left.
The Voice, a weak but persistent drumbeat, from centuries ago: “Is your house in order? Is your house in order? Tell me, please, is your house in order?”
Was his house in order?
Control hadn’t changed his clothes or showered in two days. He could smell his own rich stink like the musk rising off some animal prized by trappers. The sweat was being drawn through his pores onto his forehead again, reaching out in supplication to the ever-hotter Hedley sun through the window, the fans inside the coffee shop not strong enough. It had rained from the previous afternoon until the middle of the night, left large puddles full of tiny brown shrimp-like things that curled up and died in rust-colored agonies as the water evaporated.
Control had come to a halt there at the end of Empire Street, where it crossed the far end of Main Street. When he was a teenager, the coffee shop had been a retro soda joint, which he missed. He’d sit at the air-conditioned window counter with a couple of friends and be grateful for ice cream and root beer, while they talked a lot of crap about girls and sports. It had been nice then, a kind of refuge. But over time the straightlaced bohemian leanings of the so-called railroad district had been usurped by hustlers, con artists, drug addicts, and homeless people with nowhere else to go.
Through the window, waiting for the phone call he knew would come, Control dissected the daily terroir playing out across the street, in front of the discount liquor store. Two skateboarders, so preternaturally lean they reminded him of malnourished greyhounds, stood on that opposite corner in T-shirts and ragged jeans with five-year-old sneakers on their feet but no socks. One of them had a brown mutt on a hemp leash meant for a much larger dog. He’d seen two skateboarders while out jogging Tuesday night, hadn’t he? It had been dark, couldn’t be sure this was them. But possibly.
Within minutes of Control watching, they’d been joined by a woman he definitely hadn’t seen before. Tall, she wore a blue military cap over dyed-red short hair, and a long-sleeved blue jacket with gold fringe at the shoulders and cuffs. The white tank top under the jacket didn’t cover her bare midriff. The blue dress pants with a more muted gold stripe on the side ended halfway down her calves and then in bare, dirty feet, with the bright red dots of nail polish visible. It reminded Control of something a rock star might have worn in the late 1980s. Or, idle strange thought: She was some decommissioned officer of the S&S Brigade, missing, forgotten, memory shot, doomed to play out the endgame far from anywhere conducive to either science or superstition.
She had a flushed, ruddy aspect to her face, and talked in an animated way to the skateboarders, a bit too manic, and at the same time pointing down the street, but then breaking off to approach any pedestrian who walked by, hands expressive as she delivered some complex tale of hardship or the logic behind a need. Or perhaps even suggesting more. She shrugged off the first two who ignored her, but the skateboarders got on her about it and the third she yelled after, as if he’d been rude. Roused to action by this, a fat black man in a gray plastic-bag trench coat too hot for Hedley in any season popped up like a stage prop from behind a large garbage can at the far end of the liquor store’s frontage. He harangued the man who had shunned the redheaded woman; Control could hear the obscenities through the glass. Then the fat man collapsed back into his former post, evaporating as fast as he’d been conjured up.