Sleep No More

She opened her car door and dropped into the driver’s seat. She tried to fit the ignition key into the slot on the steering wheel, but this simple task was beyond her, like trying to thread a needle in the dark. The fourth time she missed the slot, she began to weep, and darkness began closing around her.

She suddenly remembered her father, dying of cancer. At the end he had been afraid to go to sleep. If he did, he believed, he would never wake up. Superstition, she’d thought at the time. Now she knew his fear as a palpable reality. If she succumbed to the darkness now, darkness was all she would ever know.

“No!” she screamed, hammering the steering wheel with both hands. “Mallory is dead! You’re dead! Your body’s rotting in the dirt!”

A sudden flash of light drove back the shadows. She slid the key into the slot and cranked the Acura’s engine.

“John hates you!” she screamed. “He hates you! He never wanted your children…. That’s why he made you kill them. And he wanted to kill you last night!”

Agony knifed through her chest. She gasped but managed to get the car into gear and back away from the motel door.

“You’re dead,” she repeated. “You’re rotting in the ground on Cemetery Road. You’re a lost soul…fading into nothing. You’re nothing.”

Light bathed Lily’s mind like cool water.

She put the Acura into drive and pulled onto the highway. The bridge loomed in the distance. She wanted to blow past every car and truck between her and the bridge, but the police were aggressive about ticketing on this side of the river. Though she held the car to forty, the superstructure of the bridge neared rapidly. Soon she would ramp up onto it.

Thirty yards ahead, a pickup truck moved into the left lane, making room for her to pass on the right. A girl about Annelise’s age sat in a wicker chair in the back of the truck, facing Lily. Her face was dirty and her arms bare in the cold, but her eyes shone as she waved at Lily. Pure sadness filled Lily’s chest. At seven years old, Annelise was already remarkably independent, with a distinct personality that would only become stronger with the passing years. But she still needed help. She was so fragile in some ways-

The front of the Acura lifted onto the bridge and started up the grade toward the center of the span. Lily gripped the wheel, her mind filled with love for her daughter. That love warmed her whole body, so it was all the more terrifying when the rear of the pickup truck ahead wavered in the air like a mirage, and the sunlight went dim. With the dimness came a rush of malice from deep within her, like a tumor metastasizing at a fantastic rate, amorphous but swift, swallowing her spirit.

“No!” she shouted, battering the wheel with her hands. “Stop it!” The pain in her hands momentarily anchored her, yet still the darkness grew. “You can’t do this! You can’t-”

She could barely hold herself in the proper lane. At the limit of desperation, her mind searched back to childhood for some weapon to protect her. She had stopped going to church after losing her baby, but now words poured from her mouth in a flood, as though of their own accord:

“The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want; He maketh me to lie down in green pastures. He leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul…He…yea…yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death…I will fear no evil…no evil…He restoreth my soul…He restoreth my soul!”

As tears flowed freely from her eyes, blue sky burst into her vision, and the road and bridge appeared before her. Every physical detail burned itself into her brain: the cement surface of the road, the dirty face of the girl in the back of the pickup, the rivet heads holding the silver superstructure of the bridge together, a workman hanging suspended from the girders on the right side. He wore a red bandanna beneath his hard hat, and he looked directly into Lily’s eyes, his expression timeless and kind. As Lily looked back, time seemed to slow, then stop, and in that timeless space began the only epiphany of her life.

She understood now, why she had done all she had since calling Mallory that morning. So simple and profound. She looked from the workman to the road, and as she did, the little girl sitting in the back of the pickup raised her hand and waved.

Lily raised her hand and waved back. Farewell, little one.

She reached beneath the seat, grabbed the handcuffs, and quickly cuffed her left wrist to the steering wheel. Then she yanked the wheel to the right and pressed the accelerator to the floor.

At sixty miles per hour, the Acura smashed through the makeshift guardrail and hurtled into space. The air bag deployed on impact, blowing into Lily’s face and blinding her for the duration of the fall. Her stomach flew into her throat, her inner ear lost all orientation, and she floated through space like an astronaut in a ship without windows, her mind filled with bliss, a sweet peace that asked nothing of the world but to bid it good-bye.

The world snatched her back with an explosive impact, driving her head like a cannonball into the headrest behind her. She could neither breathe nor see, but only feel the strange weightlessness of the car bobbing in water. Then she heard a sloshing sound.

My feet are wet….

The Acura had righted itself. High above her hung the underside of the bridge, getting slowly smaller as the powerful current carried her southward, spinning the car as it slowly filled with water. She looked down at her handcuffed wrist with detachment. It seemed to be the wrist of someone else. As she stared, she heard a scream of rage and terror, and she looked outside the car for its source. When it came again, she realized it had burst from her own mouth.

Her arms suddenly began to flail, and the cuffed wrist jerked the steel chain taut, trying to break free. Lily felt as though someone had wired her to a computer and begun operating her limbs with a joystick. The scream came again, and then the malignant force she’d felt on the bridge returned. She tried to resist, but resistance was futile. This time the light did not merely dim but disappeared altogether. She felt like a woman in a coma who hears people speaking around her but cannot speak herself. And the person she heard now was shrieking like someone being stabbed to death.

The interior of the car flashed white, then vanished again, as though illuminated by lightning during a storm. Only the storm was in her mind. She saw a black flashlight in her free hand, the heavy Maglite John had put in her glove compartment. It rose to the roof, then hammered down against the handcuffs. The Maglite rose again, but this time when it hit the steel cuff, the head of the light flew off. Lily heard a scream of fury, and on the next upstroke, batteries sprayed into the air.

The nose of the Acura tilted forward, and brown water rose to her waist. Her body heat leached out at a terrifying rate, causing her to shiver violently. Let it be over, she thought. Dear God, let it be done. But it wasn’t. Blood poured from her wrist as the water rose over it, yet still her arm thrashed against the metal, utterly beyond her control. Another scream exploded from her throat.

“You gutless bitch! You can’t take him from me like this!”

The Acura wallowed onto its left side. The water rushed over Lily’s left shoulder and into her ear, then her mouth.

“Please God…forgive me,” she gasped. “I did this for my family.”

And then the water covered her.

Chapter 21

John Waters stood bolt upright and gripped his left arm like a man having a heart attack. He was leaning over the sink in the bathroom of the police station when the pain hit. Now he staggered against the wall, unable to breathe.

Lily, he thought, and inexplicable terror filled his mind.

With soapy hands he pulled his cell phone from his pocket and dialed his wife’s cell number. After five rings, an automated message saying the subscriber was out of the service area began to play. He hung up and dialed Linton Hill, but all he got was the machine.

“Damn it,” he muttered.