And suddenly it was gone and she snapped out of her daze. The steaming dishes from the washer gone cold, the afternoon just a bit darker, the sun a bit closer to the horizon.
She looked at the clock. It had been fifteen minutes and Jacob should be home. The bus had already come and gone. Dizzy at the sudden time shift and now afraid there was some unknown person stalking through the neighborhood where her seven-year-old son was getting off the bus, she ran out the front door toward the corner bus stop. The neighborhood was bright and empty. She heard the diesel engine of the school bus roaring two streets over, continuing its route. Normally, two other children disembarked at the same corner, but she saw no one at all. She heard no voices. She was completely alone.
The police were interviewing everyone, she said – teachers, the bus driver, parents, neighbors. They retraced his steps throughout the day. Mary sat for hours at the kitchen table as detectives ran through her day, asked where her husband was, debated with her the timing and nature of her absence at the bus stop. She told them she had seen someone in the woods and reminded the officers of the man who had approached Aria less than a week earlier. She told them there had been strange noises outside the house at night. She showed them the scratch marks on the door. They frowned at her answers; skepticism hung on their voices. What did this man in the woods look like? She couldn’t give a clear answer. It was impossible to tell, the shadow and light crossing his face, his eyes glowing bright, boring into her. Police and local volunteers combed through the woods, made their way to the wetlands that stretched between two low ridges, the place where small liquor bottles littered the ground and fallen trees served as benches for small gatherings around a fire. Search dogs were brought out, picking up the scent from Jacob’s tiny red shirt, pulling their handlers deeper into the places hidden between beacons of homes and neighborhoods and then farther out into the surrounding hills.
They wanted to know where Jonathan was, how long he had been gone. “How is your marriage?” they asked her. “Did you have an argument with your husband before he left?”
“Where are you?” she cried, but he could not answer. He didn’t know just then. He just knew he was away – too far gone to make any difference whatsoever.
“I’m lost,” he said quietly.
And then Mary screamed. It rose up from her gut, from her heart, from her whole being – summing up the past years and everything with it. It was a familiar sound, an animal-like scream that cried out through the distance and echoed across the mountains. It had been with him all along. That pain-filled shriek that heralded the coming of horrors and the torture of loss.
It was the sound only a mother could make, and the earth shook with its vibration.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
He ran, tumbling and tripping through the snow and grass down the slope. He dropped his pack; his rifle remained strapped tight to his back. The long reeds of the meadow whipped across his thighs. Unknown muscles, suddenly shocked to life, tried to balance, push, lift and absorb. His ankles rolled, feet slipped, but it didn’t matter – he kept going because he didn’t know what else to do. He ran to escape this place and to get home to find his son; he ran to escape the trappings of his past and the presence that stalked him through the trees. He wanted to believe that if he could get home the nightmare would end, but a voice in the back of his mind – one he sought to ignore and deny with all his heart – told him it was already too late and the true nightmare, the kind in which you walk through the darkness, eyes open to a world beyond, was just beginning. Perhaps, if he could get home in time, he could save Jacob. Perhaps he could save Mary from the terror and the loss. He was unsure if he could save himself. All would be revealed in due time. He would be exposed once again, not as a good man but as his true self – weak, destitute and dying. Evil is patient, secure in its timelessness, content to slowly strip away the facade piece by piece until death is a relief.
The dark trees that marked the entryway into Coombs’ Gulch bounced and shook and blurred as he stumbled and ran down the hill. Visions from the rocky shore of the lake ran through his head. He pictured the men who took Thomas Terrywile from that small path through the woods as he walked home from school. He remembered the strange, deathly smell of them as they carried the boy to that place deep in the forest. He remembered the bitter cold and loneliness of the void in which he was trapped for decades, the confusion of his random appearances in strange places, his tears and yearning as he tried to reach out to everyone, anyone to rescue him from hell; he remembered the feel of that long, clawed hand gripping the boy’s shoulder as it stood looming over him like a demonic father figure. Was that what it wanted? A child it could keep, abuse and terrify at its whim?
It did not accept sacrifices; it accepted offerings brought to it by human puppets.
Jonathan tried to tamp it all down, tried not to think of it, of what it meant for his only son. He focused on this one fact: Jacob was still alive. He could be found, and Jonathan was the only person who could find him,
