“Whoo!” he shouted. “So, so, Patrick, you’re saying you totaled out an engine that took me years to rebuild. And…and…you destroyed my gas tank, the filters, I mean, everything really but the interior.”
“Yeah, Scott.”
“I could…” He giggled. “I could just kill you about now, buddy. I mean, with my own bare hands.”
“I kind of figured. Scott?”
“Yes?”
“You’re not done with the Dawes, are you?”
“Fucked up my car,” he said softly.
“Are you?”
“I’m going to go now, Patrick.”
“What’s the fallback plan?” I asked.
“I’m willing to forgive the suspension and even the destruction to my loft, but the car’s going to take some time. I’ll let you know what I decide.”
“What do you have on them?” I said.
“What’s that?”
“On the Dawes,” I said. “What do you have on them, Scott?”
“I thought we agreed to leave each other be, Patrick. That’s how I was hoping to end this call-knowing you and I will never see each other again.”
“Under the stipulation that you leave the Dawes alone.”
“Oh. Right.”
“But you can’t do that, can you, Scott?”
He let out a light, airy sigh. “You sound like you might be a half-decent chess player, Patrick. Am I right?”
“Nope. I just never got the hang of the game.”
“Why not?”
“A friend of mine says I’m good with general tactics, but I suffer from an inability to see the whole board.”
“Huh,” Scott Pearse said. “That would have been my guess, too.”
And he hung up.
I looked at Angie as I put the receiver back in the cradle.
“Patrick,” she said with a slow shake of her head.
“Yeah?”
“Maybe you shouldn’t answer the phone for a while.”
We decided to leave Nelson on watch at Scott Pearse’s place, and Angie and I drove over to the Dawes’, watched their house from a half block down.
We sat on it into the night, well after their interior lights had gone out and their exterior security lights had gone on.
Back in my apartment, I lay back on the bed to wait for Angie to come out of the shower, and tried to push back the tug of sleep, the ache and muscle-tightening of too many days and nights spent sitting in cars or up on roofs, the niggle of dread in the back of my skull that told me I’d overlooked something, that Pearse was thinking a few moves ahead of me.
My eyelids drooped closed and I snapped them open, heard the shower running, imagined Angie’s body under the spray. I decided to get up off the bed. Forget imagining what I could experience instead.
But my body didn’t move, and my eyes drooped again, and the bed seemed to gently undulate under me as if I lay on a raft, floated on a glassy lake.
I never heard the shower shut off. I never heard Angie settle into bed beside me and turn off the light.
It’s this way,” my son says, and takes my hand, tugs at me as we walk out of the city. Clarence trots beside us, chugging, panting softly. It’s just before sunrise, and the city is a deep, metallic blue. We step off a curb, my son’s hand in mine, and the world turns red and fills with mist.
We are in the cranberry bog, and for a moment-aware that I’m dreaming-I know that it’s impossible to step off a curb downtown and end up in Plymouth, but then I think, It’s a dream, and these things happen in dreams. You don’t have a son, yet he’s here, tugging your hand, and Clarence is dead, yet he’s not.
So I go with it. The morning fog is dense and white, and Clarence barks from somewhere ahead of us, lost to the fog as my son and I step off the soft embankment and onto the wooden cross. Our footsteps echo off the planks as we walk through the thick white, and I can see the outline of the equipment shed gradually take on definition as each step leads us toward it.
Clarence barks again, but we’ve lost him in the fog.
My son says, “It should be loud.”
“ What?”
“It’s big,” he says. “Four plus two plus eight equals fourteen.”
“ It does.”
Our steps should be bringing us closer to the equipment shed, but they don’t. It sits twenty yards away in the mist, and we walk quickly, yet it remains in the distance.
“Fourteen is heavy,” my son says. “It’s loud. You’d hear it. Especially out here.”
“ Yeah.”
“You’d hear it. So why didn’t you?”
“ I don’t know.”
My son hands me a map book. It’s open to this place, a dot of a cranberry bog surrounded by forest on all sides except the one I’d driven up through.
I drop the map into the fog. I understand something, but then I forget immediately what it is.
My son says, “I like dental floss. I like the feel of it when you slide it between your teeth.”
“That’s good,” I tell him as I feel a rumble on the planks ahead of us. It’s moving fast through the fog, approaching. “You’ll have fine teeth.”
“He can’t talk with his tongue cut out,” he says.
“No,” I agree. “That would be hard.”
The rumbling grows louder. The shed is swallowed by the white fog. I can’t see the planks under my feet. I can’t see my feet.
“ She said ‘they.’”
“ Who?”
He shakes his head at me. “Not ‘him,’ but ‘they.’”
“ Right. Sure.”
“Mom’s not in the shed, is she?”
“No. Mom’s too smart for that.”
I squint at the fog as it engulfs us. I want to see what’s rumbling.
“Fourteen,” my son says, and when I look back down at him, Scott Pearse’s head sits atop his small body. He leers up at me in the mist. “Fourteen should be awfully loud, you dumb shit.”
The rumble is close now, almost upon me, and I squint into the fog and see a dark shape as it vaults airborne, arms outstretched, streaking through the cotton-candy fog toward me.
“I’m smarter than you,” the Scott Pearse/my son thing says.
And a snarling face bursts through the fog at a hundred miles an hour-snarling and smiling and gasping, teeth bared.
It’s Karen Nichols’s face, and then it’s Angie’s attached to Vanessa Moore’s naked body, and then it’s Siobhan with dead skin and dead eyes, and finally it’s Clarence, and he hits me in the chest with all four paws and knocks me onto my back, and I should land on the planks of wood, but they’re gone, and I fall into the fog, start to suffocate in it.