Black Creek Crossing

Chapter 36

YRA SULLIVAN WAS LATE, WHICH SHE KNEW meant that Marty would be angry, which meant he’d be drinking. As she pulled the bag of groceries out of the trunk of the Chevelle she braced herself for the tirade she would almost certainly face the moment she opened the front door. It was her fault, of course — she should have gone to the store earlier, which she would have done if the thunderstorm hadn’t swirled in out of nowhere. In fact, she’d been about to leave the house when the first bolt of lightning lashed out of the sky and a moment later the house shook under the crash of the thunderbolt that came on the heels of the lightning.

And then the skies had opened.

She’d peered out the window for a few minutes, waiting for the rain to let up, but finally took off her coat and went back to unpacking the last of the boxes that were still in the unoccupied bedroom upstairs, while Marty settled in to watch a football game. The lightning was ruining the reception and he could barely see anything on the flickering screen, but instead of shutting off the set and helping her with the boxes, he kept opening more beers and grumbling that she should have had the cable turned on last week. Knowing better than to argue with him, she kept working until the storm finally passed, then went out to get what she needed to feed them that evening.

Apparently, everybody else had the same idea, so it took her twice as long to get out of the store as she’d planned, and now Marty would be angry. Well, it couldn’t be helped. He was her cross to bear, and whatever pain she had to endure in this life would be rewarded in the next.

As she lifted the groceries out of the back of the car and headed for the house, she saw a light glowing in Angel’s window, which was a relief. At least she could stop worrying about where Angel might be.

Preparing for whatever anger Marty might have been nursing while she was gone — and knowing it would be amplified by her lateness — Myra wondered for a brief second what it might be like to have a husband who actually came out to carry the groceries in for her. Banishing the thought almost as quickly as it occurred to her, and offering up a quick prayer for forgiveness to the Holy Mother, she pushed the front door open.

And instantly sensed that something had changed.

Though the TV was still on, Marty wasn’t watching it.

Frowning, she picked up the remote from the arm of his chair and shut off the TV.

The silence that fell over the house did nothing to banish her uneasiness; indeed, the quiet only amplified it. She started toward the kitchen, her strange sense of apprehension growing with every step. And then she saw him.

Her husband was sprawled out on his back, the shards of a shattered beer bottle spread out around him, his eyes closed. “Marty?” she gasped. “Marty, what—” Her eyes still fixed on him, she set the groceries on the counter. “Angel?” she called as she sank to her knees next to her supine husband. Then her voice rose to almost a scream: “Angel!”

A moment later Angel appeared at the top of the stairs. Myra gazed up at her, then turned back to her husband. “Call an ambulance,” she said. “Your father’s—”

She stopped as Marty moaned softly. His right arm moved, and then he opened his eyes. He focused on Angel, who was halfway down the stairs, and sat bolt upright, his eyes widening. “Get away,” he said, his voice little more than a garbled croak. “Get away from me!” Angel froze on the stairs, and Marty, his face pale, clutched at Myra’s arm. “She did it!” he said. “She threw me down the stairs!”

Myra stared at Marty, the shock of finding him unconscious on the floor giving way now to utter confusion. “Threw you?” she echoed. “Marty, what are you—”

“She did!” Marty cried as Angel came down the rest of the stairs. He shrank back from his daughter. “She—”

But Myra had heard enough. Whatever sympathy she’d had for him a moment earlier drained away. “You’re drunk, Marty,” she said, rising to her feet.

“I’m not!” Marty protested. “She—”

“Don’t!” Myra said. “I can see what happened, Marty. You sat here drinking all day, and when you finally tried to go upstairs, you tripped and fell down.” As Marty tried to object, Myra shook her head. “A falling down drunk, that’s what you are. And I won’t have it! To blame your daughter! Shame, Martin! Shame on you!”

“But, Myra—” Marty whined, reaching out as if to grab the hem of his wife’s skirt.

“No!” Myra snapped. “I won’t have it! Now get up and get this mess cleaned up, and then go sleep it off.”

Marty wilted in the face of his wife’s sudden fury. But as he hauled himself to his feet, his anger began to build once again. “I’m tellin’ you, it wasn’t me!” he said. “It was—”

Before he could finish, Myra turned, raised her hand, and slapped him so hard across the face that he reeled away.

Clutching at his stinging cheek, he lurched toward the back door. “The hell with you,” he muttered. “The hell with you both.” Jerking the door open so fast it slammed against the wall, Marty Sullivan stumbled away into the darkness outside.

“Zack should have been home half an hour ago,” Joni Fletcher said, frowning as she glanced at the clock above the kitchen sink. “I told him six o’clock and absolutely no later.”

“Hey, he’s a teenager,” Ed replied. “So he’s a few minutes late — what’s the big deal?”

“The ‘big deal,’ as you call it, is that I’ve got a roast almost ready to serve. And not just any roast — it’s the kind of prime rib that you and your son love the most. It was done exactly fifteen minutes ago, and it can rest for exactly fifteen more minutes before it’s going to start getting less than prime. And in half an hour, it’ll start getting cold, and after that—”

“Okay, okay!” Ed Fletcher held up his hands in exaggerated surrender. “So if he’s late, he’s late. I vote we eat it when it’s perfect, and if he’s not here, that’s more for me.”

“And I vote,” Joni retorted, “that you hop in the car and go see if you can find him. He knew what I was serving, and he swore he wouldn’t be late. He’s probably over at the Jacksons’, so how long can it take?”

Ed rolled his eyes. “Come on, Joni — do you have any idea what it’s like for a sixteen-year-old to have his daddy come looking for him? I remember—” But before he could begin expounding on every dire consequence that could pertain to the humiliation Joni was suggesting, the phone rang.

“Where?” Joni his wife asked after listening briefly, the receiver pressed to her ear. “All right — we’ll be right there… not more than two minutes.” As she hung up, and looked at him, Ed guessed what the call was about.

“Zack?” he asked.

Joni nodded, but was already heading toward the door that led from the kitchen to the garage. “I’ll tell you on the way.”

In less than a minute, Ed was backing down the driveway.

“That was Sheila Jacobson,” his wife explained. “She lives on Court Street? That’s where we’re going. Anyway, she heard something in front of her house a few minutes ago, and when she went to look, she found Zack on the sidewalk. He’s — oh God, Ed, he was almost unconscious, and she’s already called an ambulance, and—” Her voice caught. She struggled against the lump rising in her throat, forced it back under control, then went on. “Just hurry.”

When he pulled into the Jacobsons’ driveway on Court Street, Joni leaped out of the car. At nearly the same time, an ambulance, lights flashing and siren screaming, raced around the corner and pulled up to the curb. Now, in the light of the ambulance’s headlights, Joni could see the still form of her son lying on the sidewalk, with a man bent over him. A moment later, as Ed joined her, they rushed over to kneel next to Zack, where medics had edged the man aside and were examining the boy.

“Please, God,” Joni whispered, unaware that she was speaking out loud. “Don’t let him be dead! Let him be—”

“I think he’s okay,” one of the medics said. “Get a stretcher and—” Before he could finish, Zack groaned, lifted an arm, then tried to sit up. “Easy,” the medic said. “Just take it easy.”

Zack let the medic ease him back down onto the sidewalk, but gingerly touched the top of his head with his fingers, winced, and pulled them away.

The fingers were red with blood.

Joni gasped. “My God, Zack — what happened to you?”

Zack said nothing for a moment, then his eyes narrowed angrily. “Seth Baker,” he said. “The prick jumped me! He — He hit me with a rock or something!”

The medic was already examining Zack’s head, while his partner held a powerful flashlight on the wound. “Something in his hair, here,” he muttered softly, and carefully picked a fragment of something that looked like wood out of Zack’s blood-matted hair. “Looks like bark.” He grinned. “Sure you just didn’t try to tackle a tree, big fella?” he asked.

“He threw me!” Zack said. “He threw me right up into—” He fell abruptly silent, as if realizing just how strange he must sound.

The medic with the light frowned, and then shined the light up into the tree directly above Zack. Standing, he moved around, playing the light over the lowest branch. “For Christ’s sake,” he said, holding the light still. “Would you look at that?” He jumped up, barely managed to touch the branch, then looked at his fingers.

More blood.

Now Zack was sitting up, and it was apparent that his injuries weren’t terribly serious.

“You say Seth Baker did this?” Ed Fletcher said, eyeing his son skeptically.

“He jumped me!” Zack repeated. “He grabbed me from behind and—” He seemed to lose track of what he was saying for a moment, then shook his head as if trying to clear it of an idea that made no sense. “It was weird,” he finished.

“And he was by himself?” Ed asked. “Nobody was with him?”

Zack started to shake his head, then changed his mind. “I–I don’t know.”

“Well, did you see anyone?” Ed Fletcher pressed.

“It was dark!” Zack complained. “I could barely even see him!”

Ed seemed about to say something else, but Joni spoke first. “Can we please take care of Zack first, then figure out exactly what happened?” She turned to the medics. “Do you have to take him to the emergency room?”

“We’d better,” one of them replied. “That’s a pretty nasty cut, and it’ll probably take a few stitches to close it up. And it won’t hurt to make sure there’s no concussion.”

“All right,” Joni said. “We’ll follow you.”

A few minutes later Ed backed the Mercedes out of the Jacobsons’ driveway and fell in behind the ambulance.

“Okay,” Joni said. “Do you really believe Seth Baker attacked Zack?”

Ed glanced over at his wife. “What do you mean? He said—”

“I heard what he said,” Joni cut in. “But it just seems so unlikely — I mean, Seth Baker? He’s never even tried to fight back during all the years the other kids have picked on him. And I’m including Zack in that,” she went on before Ed could interrupt. “Why would that suddenly change tonight?”

“Maybe it didn’t suddenly change,” Ed suggested. “I mean, look what he did at the club yesterday, sandbagging us by pretending he couldn’t play golf for nine holes, then never missing a shot on the back nine! I mean, at the beginning I thought it was a fluke, but nobody goes through nine holes the way he did without knowing exactly what he was doing.”

Joni was silent for a moment, then: “And I saw the look on Zack’s face when Seth beat him yesterday, Ed. He looked like he wanted to beat Seth up on the spot. And you weren’t very happy about losing to Blake Baker either. So with Zack being mad at Seth rather than the other way around, why would Seth have jumped Zack? And what was Zack doing there in the first place? Court Street is on the way to the Bakers’ house, not ours.”

Ed’s grip on the wheel tightened. “So what are you saying? That Zack’s lying?”

Faced with the starkness of her husband’s question, Joni found herself unable to answer it directly. “I–I don’t know,” she finally temporized.

“No, you don’t,” Ed said in a tone that Joni recognized. It was the one he always used when he was about to stop discussing something. “And I don’t either. But I know something’s going on with Seth Baker, and tomorrow I’m going to have a talk with Blake and find out just what it is.”

Neither of them spoke again until they were parked in the lot next to the small hospital. “So what do we do?” Joni finally asked. “What do we say to Zack?”

Ed took a deep breath, then slowly let it out. “Nothing,” he finally said. “Tomorrow I’ll talk to Blake and see what he’s got to say. For tonight, we take Zack home.” He looked pointedly at Joni. “And you at least act like you believe what our son told us, all right?”

Joni hesitated, then reluctantly nodded. Yet as they entered the hospital, she had the feeling that nothing was going to be as simple as Ed seemed to think. Something had happened to Zack, and while she knew that her son’s explanation didn’t make much sense — especially since he’d changed it after the medic found blood on the branch high up in the tree — she also knew there had to be something Zack wasn’t telling them.

Marty Sullivan stared dolefully into the bottom of his empty glass, shifted his gaze to the greasy mirror behind the bar, and shoved the glass out for a refill.

“Haven’t you had about enough?” the barman asked, eyeing him with a look of such boredom that Marty didn’t bother to respond to the question. “Your funeral,” the bartender sighed as he filled Marty’s glass with the watered-down whiskey he kept in the well for people like Marty, who had already consumed enough alcohol that they’d barely notice that their drinks no longer carried the punch of the first half dozen, and weren’t in good enough condition to fight even if they caught on and tried to object. “Just try to make sure you don’t kill anybody but yourself on your way home.”

Marty uttered a disinterested grunt, drained the drink, and threw a wad of bills on the bar. The bartender eyed the crumpled paper, decided there was more than enough to cover the tab and a good tip for himself, swept it off the counter, and moved down to the other end, where he began pouring a round for a group near the pool table that were even drunker than Marty.

As he pushed his way through the door and out into the cool of the night, Marty considered the possibilities.

He could go to another bar, have a couple more drinks, and maybe pick up a pool game.

He could go home, where Myra would be all over him for getting drunk, and Angel—

Angel!

He shuddered as the vision that had hung before him through the long hours he’d sat drinking in the bar rose once again, this time hovering in the quiet darkness of the village’s empty streets.

Angel, holding that damned cat and staring at him with a look he’d never seen before. For a second she’d appeared frightened and her face had gone all pale, but then, just before she came at him, something in her face had changed.

It was her eyes. They’d suddenly taken on the same golden glow — like there was a fire burning inside them — that he’d seen in the cat’s eyes as it lunged at his face.

Then, so quickly he hadn’t seen it at all, she’d come at him, shoving him so hard he flew off his feet, tumbled backward down the stairs, and—

Nothing.

Except that there was one other image that kept popping up in his mind too. It was after Angel had pushed him down the stairs. He’d been lying on the floor, just barely conscious, when he’d felt something.

Something sniffing at him.

The cat! The damned cat!

He’d struggled to open his eyes, raised a hand to fend off the animal, but when he finally managed to lift an eyelid, what he’d seen wasn’t a cat at all.

It was a girl — a girl about the same age as Angel. But she didn’t look like Angel. Her face was ghostly white, and her eyes were the palest blue he’d ever seen. She was wearing an old-fashioned black bonnet, and a black dress, and there was some kind of brooch on her chest that looked like it was carved out of ivory or something.

Then, in an instant, her face changed. The flesh began to fall away, leaving nothing but a skull with that terrible golden light shining from the empty eye sockets. And as she leaned forward, her lips dropped off to expose her teeth.

Long, curved, feline teeth, each of them tipped with blood.

As she moved her face closer to his, her mouth opened, but instead of a tongue, a serpent emerged. Its jaws were spread wide, and its fangs, already oozing venom, came directly at him.

The worst terror he’d ever felt had risen up in him, and then—

Nothing.

He’d passed out, and remembered nothing else until he awakened to find Myra looming over him, and wished he could escape into unconsciousness again.

And now he was standing alone on a street corner, whiskey burning in his belly, a sour taste rising in his throat, and so dizzy he had to hold on to the lamppost to keep from falling down.

And all the images — all the impossible memories — were still there.

As his stomach finally rebelled against the alcohol he’d poured into it, Marty sank to his knees, leaned over, and threw up into the gutter. Over and over again his stomach contracted, until finally there was nothing left to spew out of his throat. At last he leaned back, resting against the lamppost, a cold sweat breaking out over his body. His breathing came in shallow gasps and the sour taste of vomit filled his mouth, while its acid burned in his throat.

A car drove by, and through his bleary eyes Marty saw the driver glance at him, then look quickly away.

Finally, half pulling himself up on the lamppost, he got back to his feet and began walking, cutting diagonally across the intersection, then weaving along the sidewalk on the other side of the street, neither thinking about nor caring about where he was going.

After a few blocks — he didn’t know how many, exactly — he found himself in front of a church.

A little church, with its name neatly chiseled into a granite plaque attached to the wall next to the front door.

CHURCH OF THE HOLY MOTHER.

Marty gazed at the sign for a long time, trying to remember the last time he’d been in church.

He couldn’t.

He gazed at the church door, and suddenly felt a need to go inside.

Except this late on Sunday night, it would be locked up tight.

But when he gave the door a perfunctory pull, it opened.

Marty stepped though the open door into the tiny foyer. Though no lights were on, candles were burning everywhere, and the small sanctuary was filled with a soft golden light that seemed to swirl around him as the candle flames danced in the draft of the open door.

Automatically, he dipped his fingers in the font, crossed himself, and mouthed a quick prayer.

As he was starting down the aisle, a figure rose in front of the altar and turned toward him.

“How may I help you?” the priest asked.

For almost a full minute Marty Sullivan simply stared at him. Then, almost unaware of what he was doing, he sank to his knees. “Something happened,” he whispered. “Something terrible.”

Father Michael Mulroney walked slowly up the aisle and laid a gentle hand on his shoulder. “You’re Marty Sullivan, aren’t you?” he asked.

Marty looked up at the priest, his eyes wide. “H-How do you know who I am?”

The priest smiled. But there was something in his smile, and in his eyes as well — a sadness that seemed to come from somewhere deep within him — that sent a chill through Marty. “I’ve been expecting you,” he said.