Deke decided he had to give up looking, just head on home. The only thing that had kept him out this long was the certainty that Chrissy was out there and needed his help. But drowning out in the streets wasn’t going to help her any.
In his raincoat, the water up to his waist, he made for the higher areas of Crandon, away from River Town and the river itself.
He wished he’d given up earlier.
Because there was something infinitely claustrophobic about Witcham now. The flooding. The dark. The sounds you heard. He had his dad’s hunting knife with him. Something had told him it was best to be armed, so he’d taken the knife and now he had it out, all those sounds in the shadows getting to him.
He kept thinking about Lily Barron.
Those crazy things she’d been saying. Dead people down in the sewers. It made him think that all those sewers and even the Deep Tunnel System he’d told her about were connected with the streets drains all around him. Maybe he couldn’t see them, but those drains were everywhere and he knew it. They’d all backed up, flooding the streets with rainwater and probably sewage, too. Whatever had been down in that coveting, wet blackness, had been vomited up into the streets now. The idea of that chilled him. He kept picturing all those living dead people in the water around him. Sometimes he almost thought he could smell their rank stink and feel their lewd presence. Dead things that were monsters now…rotting and watery, but whose minds were sharp and lethal.
Stop it for chrissake.
Words to the wise. He kept on this way, they were going to have to commit him. Maybe he’d get to share a room with Lily. Again, that wasn’t nice, but he was feeling suddenly very uncharitable.
All of them we lost through the years, they just went below into that secret sea and that’s where they are now. All the brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers and children, they’re all down below in those secret tunnels waiting for us.
God, Lily was insane. She had to be.
But insane or not, it made him think of Nicky.
He’d loved that kid, but had never told him so or even realized it until the funeral. And by then it had been too late. They always say to tell the people you care about how much they mean to you…but who really does and who doesn’t wish they had when it’s too late? Nicky. Nicky-boy. A.K.A., The Drainage, Butt-Wienie, Pain-in-the-ass- little-shit-that-could-never-leave-me-alone.
Oh God, but it all hurt so much, remembering.
It made Deke think of the funeral. The memories were all distorted and surreal, like something reflected from sideshow mirrors, but they never let him go. Never. He remembered the room over at the Styer Funeral Home. All done up in cranberry velour and he’d overheard his Uncle Jake say that it looked like a French brothel in there and he hadn’t known what a brothel was then, but now he did. And it almost made him laugh. Almost.
He wished then as he wished probably every day since that he’d told Nicky that he’d loved him. But what would Nicky have said to something like that? Deke, you so cwazy, you a cwazy cat. Nicky had trouble with that R- sound and had been going through speech therapy for it. Something Deke had teased him about, of course. But isn’t that what big brothers did? Sure, they picked on their kid brothers, belittled them, made fun of them.
That’s what they did.
But surely they weren’t supposed to stand around in dusty, flower-smelling funeral homes and stare at their kid brothers lying in coffins. No, there was something criminal about that. Before Nicky’s funeral, Deke had known nothing of death. His grandparents had died before he was born and there’d never been any pets to teach him the realities of death. Death was like alien abduction or something equally as exotic…it was for other people. You heard about it, but you didn’t really believe it. Not really.
But then came the Styer Funeral home.
That perfectly awful cranberry room.
And Nicky lying in that little silver casket in his powder-gray burial suit and tie, hands folded primly over his belly. Deke could remember it all so vividly that sometimes he thought the memory was not real, but something manufactured by his fevered mind. Nicky had not looked like Nicky. He had looked fake, unreal. He had been compressed or sunken, as if death had taken something big out of him, something that had filled him and in its place they had inflated him with gas, then allowed him to deflate. They had rouged his cheeks to give him that boyish glow, but beneath Deke had seen something darker like maybe his flesh had gone purple or black. His lips were shrunken, his body like that of a waxen dummy that had been left out in the sun too long, allowed to melt and sink and thicken. He couldn’t put his finger on it, but what was in that casket that everybody cried over just looked absolutely phony.
It wasn’t until later that Deke had cried.
And then much later still, he’d began to have nightmares. He’d wake up in the dead of night certain something had come into the house, that something was standing darkly out in the hallway or maybe in the closet, just breathing. And he knew that something was Nicky, but Nicky come back from the dead, Nicky risen from the grave, stinking and dark and covered with dirt and worms. It got so bad that Deke had had to sleep with the light on for nearly six months. And even so, he’d come awake certain he could hear his brother breathing in the darkness outside the door or in his old room, playing with his toys, sitting there, moldering and falling apart, leafing through comic books or playing with plastic army men by pale moonlight. It was bad. And even with that light burning, he still had the dreams that he would wake from, certain Nicky had been standing over him as he slept, blowing foul grave breath in his face, clots of rank soil dropping from him.
And even now, eighteen months after the funeral, he still would dream of his brother. But not good and sweet and happy Nicky, but a fusty and vile thing that whispered from beneath the cellar stairs?
Okay, that was enough.
Deke wasn’t going there anymore.
He had to get a grip. Nicky was dead. It was tough and it was ugly, but that’s the way life was. Even at sixteen, Deke knew that. Yes, he loved his mom and dad, but he did not respect them. Could not respect what they had allowed Nicky’s death to do to them. And more than anything, he would not allow himself to become like them, things that should have been shoveled into the grave with his brother.
Deke was up on the sidewalk now.
The water was only up to his thighs and that was at least a little better. He had about four more blocks to go before he reached home and that was a damn long way in the darkness and water.
He hoped that Chrissy was safe, even though he suspected she was in trouble.
He rounded a corner with infinite slowness. He passed by a few dark, brooding houses and then saw one lit up by candles or lanterns. Someone was still alive down here in the low-lying areas of Crandon then. That was reassuring. He hadn’t seen anyone in hours and even then they’d been in the far distance…muted voices, the occasional sound of oars on a boat or a motor cutting through the drink.
Deke stopped.
Christ, he was tired.
Maybe I should go into that house, he thought, rest up for a couple minutes. They probably wouldn’t mind seeing me.
The front door was standing open.
Deke made his way up there, the house sitting on a low hill that brought it up out of the water and he desperately needed to get out of the water. He was beginning to feel like a frog, bloated and heavy and waterlogged. He moved up the walk, then up the porch steps. The water receded to around his feet and he felt heavy, ungainly.
In the house, the light was coming from the living room. He followed its glow, splashing along the carpet. The house smelled dank from all the rain, but it was nice in there. Water was dripping, but there was no rain in his face.
There was no one in there.
Even without looking farther than the living room, he knew the house was empty. The silence there was huge and echoing. Whoever had lit the lantern was gone now. It sat lone and forgotten on the mantel above the fireplace next to a bunch of framed photographs. Deke went over to look at those pictures, maybe he’d recognize someone.
Something shrilled and he jumped.
