So Cold the River(101)

Poured from faucets. Indeed it did.

There was no need for another drink. Not now. His headache was gone; the sickness had been avoided.

But he could see the story again if he had more water.

He looked at the empty bottle in his hand and thought about the conversation he’d had with Claire, her insistence that he’d always been prone toward psychic tendencies. Hell, he knew that. He’d lived through the moments, after all, from the valley in the Bear Paws to the Infiniti to the snapshot of the red cottage for the Harrelson video.

The ability had always been there. The gift, if you wanted to call it that. The only change now was that the water gave him some control over it. He’d been scared of the stuff initially, but was that the right response? Should he fear it, or should he embrace it?

“You’ve got to shoot this,” he said softly. “Document it and shoot it.”

Kellen’s response to the idea had been less than enthusiastic. The look he’d given Eric had been more doubtful than any of the looks he’d offered after discussions of ghosts and visions and the rest, and what in the hell kind of sense did that make? Oh, well, Kellen didn’t have to be involved. He didn’t appreciate the possibility the way Eric did. It was the sort of thing that was so damn strange, people wouldn’t be able to get enough of it. He could imagine the interviews already—Larry King’s jaw dropping as Eric sat there and calmly explained the circumstances that had led to the film. The gift was always there… always with me. It just took me a long time to get control of it. To learn how to use it.

He got to his feet and went back inside the room. There was an extension number for the spa listed on the card beside the phone. He called.

The girl who answered told him the spa was closing in thirty minutes. There wasn’t enough time for a session, she explained. A session? All he wanted was to see the damn mineral bath. He told her as much, and was met with polite but firm resistance.

“Sessions in the mineral bath run for half an hour or an hour. There’s not enough time for that, sorry. We can schedule you tomorrow.”

“Look,” he said, “I’ll pay for a full session.”

“I’m sorry, sir, we just can’t—”

“And tip you a hundred dollars,” he said, the situation suddenly feeling urgent to him as he looked at the empty bottle in his hand. “I’ll be out by nine, when you close.”

“All right,” she said after a long pause. “But you’re going to want to hurry down here, or you won’t get much time at all.”

“That’s all right. Say, do you have any plastic water bottles down there?”

“Um, yes.”

He said he was glad to hear that they did.


The spa was beautiful, filled with high-grade stone and ornate trim, fireplaces crackling. He’d routinely mocked men he knew in California who frequented such places, too much of the Missouri farm-town boyhood still in him to sample that lifestyle. Yet here he stood in a white robe and slippers, padding along behind an attractive blond girl who was opening a frosted door that led to the mineral bath.

“It’s a complete re-creation of the originals,” she said, pausing with the door half open. “But most people these days do add aromatherapy. Are you sure you don’t—”

“I want the natural water,” he said. “Nothing else.”

“Okay,” she said, and opened the door. The potent stench of sulfur was immediately present, and the blond girl grimaced, clearly horrified that he hadn’t elected to go with the scent of vanilla or lavender or butterfly wings or whatever the hell it was that you were supposed to use.

“You might feel a little light-headed at first,” she said. “Kind of giddy. That’s from all the gases that are released by the water, lithium and such. There’s a complete list of the chemical content there on the counter if you’re int—”

“Thanks,” he said. “I’ll be all set.”

She’d been on the verge of a full introductory speech, he could tell, and he didn’t want to waste time. He wanted to get to work emptying the two plastic water bottles she’d given him and filling them with Pluto Water.

She left then, and he was alone in the green-tiled room that stank of sulfur. The tub was still filling, pouring out of the hot-water faucet only. There were two faucets, the girl had told him, both depositing mineral water directly from the spring, with the only difference being that one carried water that had been heated to one hundred and two degrees.

There was a sink across from the tub, and he poured the water from his bottles into that, shook them as dry as possible, and returned to the tub. He turned on the cold-water faucet, cupped his hand, and caught some of the water. Lifted it to his mouth and sampled, frowning and licking his lips like some asshole wine connoisseur. It tasted different from Anne McKinney’s, crisper and cleaner. Of course, it hadn’t been in a glass bottle for eighty years. Just because it tasted different didn’t mean it wouldn’t work. He hoped.