The Bleeding Season

CHAPTER 39

Summer eventually left us but it refused to go without a fight. Though nothing of significance was ever found in the ruins of the mill itself, after its dramatic collapse the town selectmen ordered the remains bulldozed and immediately set out to have the rest of the old mills either destroyed or inspected for structural damage.

In late July, while crews were still working onsite, a worker accidentally came upon a shallow grave when he wandered into the neighboring forest to urinate. The skeletal remains of two more bodies were uncovered, and dental records identified them as a woman and her young son. They had lived in a low income section of a nearby city, and though both had been reported missing months prior, because the woman had a minor criminal record and drug problems police assumed she and her son had moved away in order to skip out on their rent. From the location described in the newspapers and on television, Rick and I must have walked right by it. Another of Bernard’s slight-of-hand tricks, perhaps.

The bodies brought the total number of victims in town found to four. The fact that one was a child caused even more press and greater anger and fear from residents and local politicians alike.

No one was safe now, they said. Imagine that.

But summer became fall and still the police had no answers or even any decent leads. Little did they know, they never would. A few people were paraded about as possible suspects in the press but all were quickly exonerated, and the violent transient theory remained the favorite of the day with both Potter’s Cove residents and the media. By the time September rolled around the town and the “unsolved” murders had been featured on numerous national media programs, written about in scores of newspapers, and even two books were authored on the subject and quickly released. But nothing came of any of it.

Oddly, by October the murders were becoming a thing of the past, and people had gone back behind their picket fences and into their tidy homes, content with the knowledge that whoever perpetrated these hideous crimes was gone. Like someone who wakes up terrified but just as quickly slips back once they realize it was only a nightmare, the people of Potter’s Cove closed their eyes and went back to sleep. The same quiet secrets, the same quiet screams still resided here, but townsfolk were no longer listening. A few well-meaning law enforcement people vowed to solve the murders, but no one ever did. News reports became fewer and further between, and the police and FBI presence in town dwindled. Interest waned, and I fell into line with everyone else, just another sleepwalker pretending all was well.

Of course the knowledge I had left me with tremendous guilt, and every time I’d see a family member of one of the murder victims in the newspaper, their faces so full of dread and anguish, I wanted desperately to tell them what I knew. But who would believe it? Even months later I wasn’t sure I believed it myself. Anything I might have done would only make things worse for them, would only complicate matters. Their loved ones were gone and they weren’t coming back whether I told them ghost stories or not. Bernard would never be found out, and even I had no proof that he had done anything other than kill himself. So I lived with the knowledge and stopped reading the articles, stopped looking at the pictures of mourning and confused family members hoping for explanations.

The leaves turned and the air became crisper—especially in the evenings. I tried my best to occupy my mind with things more pleasant. I even tried to write again, but every time I sat down with paper and pen, all I could see was Toni or Rick or Donald or Bernard, or those faces in the newspaper and all the sorrow and screams and blood that came with them.

The decision to leave town was surprisingly easy. Though Potter’s Cove was all I had ever known, it was time to go somewhere else and hopefully start again. Within a few days I’d be in Florida, and just as Toni had once wondered aloud, I couldn’t be sure anyone would even notice, much less care or try to stop me. In fact, in my mind, I had already left, and spent my time posturing like some strange hybrid creature suspended at a mysterious point between life and death, filled with perpetual uneasiness now rather than terror, forever destined to watch the windows for anything out of the ordinary, to feel that queasy and uncertain chill when strange headlights swept a darkened room, a telephone rang in the night, or a knock came on the door, forever bound to the knowledge that I was not alone and forced to survive on select memories and the reassurances I whispered to myself each sunset.

I still had bad dreams—and probably always would—but I was no longer having the bad dream. Like Bernard, it had returned to shadow, consumed by the lightless passages in my mind. But just the same, it left behind a residue, a slick trail like the moist wake of a slug, and those things within its wake would remain with me—with all of us—and bind us, one to the other, forever.

Pieces of the whole, as Tommy, Bernard’s wise and patient best friend, had said. I’d never quite understood how right-on his description had been until all these years after his death. But it had been his death that started it all. Bernard was devastated, damaged, his young mind shattered into fragments at the sight of his only friend so violently taken right before what were then his eyes, and that’s when we became like different sides to the same person, the whole split into several distinct and individual sections. Rick, our fearless and indestructible protector, Donald, our witty and urbane intellectual, Toni, our mother, sister, wife and lover, our consistent feminine presence, our voice of reason, Bernard, our evil and angry dark side. And me, a little bit of all of them, and whatever else was left.

Once fractured, Bernard was introduced to the darkness by his mother, and so, we all were, and from that point forward we were reduced to confused and frightened children jockeying for position, doing our best to protect one another and trying to find our way through a world none of us understood or felt particularly comfortable in.

Much like our skin.

And whenever I thought of us together, I didn’t see the tormented and devastated adults we had become, but the children I still wanted to believe we’d once been. Riding our bikes in the sunshine, chasing clouds and the dreams that lived behind them, coming more and more alive with each breath, with each new day. I preferred to remember us that way, healthy and happy—together—the way it was meant to be.

On my way out of state, I found the courage to return to Claudia’s cottage. It was a particularly cold afternoon, which seemed fitting. I got out of my car and stood in the road, watching. With winter ready to descend upon us, it looked even more desolate, more detached from the rest of the world than usual, and maybe that wasn’t such a bad thing.

I studied the clouds for several minutes that day. They were rolling, gliding across the sky—dark and full—graceful even in their impending violence, perhaps because of it, and it occurred to me, while gazing up at the top of the world, how truly insignificant we were.

But when I remembered Claudia—when I missed her—I’d think of this cottage.

I’d remember the cheap ceiling fan slowly rotating above us like a helicopter blade, the way it split the light and dark and formed zebra stripes across her nude body, her head on the pillow next to mine and her eyes opening as she whispered, “You can’t outrun it.”

I’d remember saying, “I want to wake up. I want to wake up now.”

And her saying, “You’re not asleep.”

And I’d remember her dead in the blood-filled bathtub, eyelids cut away, wrists ripped open, the straight razor smeared and bloody on the floor just beyond the reach of her dangling hand, the poster advertising Florida—a destination not quite far enough—crumpled in the corner, candles all around, Heaven and Hell and everything in between watching us.

I’d remember touching Lucifer’s tail as it flicked past in the night. And only then, with the Devil rising, could I begin to imagine what Bernard had felt, what he had done in my absence. Only then could I begin to understand his rituals and who he was.

Who we all were.

He had left behind more than evil and that which he destroyed. He also left behind that which his rituals had made possible: His creations, all of us living on borrowed time, on false memories and histories he had created—but alive nonetheless. A young man fractured beyond repair, gone but for those other personalities he procured to protect him, befriend him, allow him to be things he was not, and to make him whole.

Shadowy forms mistaken for demons and fulfilling his demented prayers, we cast him down into the Hell where he belonged, unaware that by doing so, we could never be completely free ourselves. His rituals had transformed us, but in the end, Bernard was only human and I hated him for it. I hated us all for it. Because without Bernard, there can be no us; there can be no me. And yet, without evil, there can be no deliverance.

Those horrible specters rode the autumn winds, carried off like pollen on the breeze and replaced now with absolution and a dark vision of Julie Henderson watching me through crucifix-adorned windows. “I know who you are.”

I nodded to her, because now I did too.

Those gathered among the skeletal trees beyond Claudia’s cottage called to me across the barren landscape, reached for me with leper-hands and gawked at me with dead eyes.

We’re here, Toni whispered, her voice echoing in my ears.

“Sleep,” I told her. The same as I’d told Donald, the same as I’d told Rick, and the same as Bernard had once told us all. But we were no longer one, we were gone from his nest and he was no more. “He can’t hurt us now. It’s all right to sleep.”

I felt them leave me for the peace they had earned. I turned my back on those taunting me, on those bound and writhing in the unending darkness of the damned, and looked toward the future instead.

My wounds remained. They always would.

But at least for now they had stopped bleeding.

I closed my eyes and smiled, glad to know I still could. Like Claudia had said—for me, for us, and from now on, here in our world of shadows—it was all about the forgetting.