The Book of Accidents, page 39
19.
He eased past it, staying on the tracks, lest he fall into the standing water that ran parallel to it.
The Zippo flame illuminated a seemingly endless tunnel. Ahead, shapes stood pressed against the wall—clown mannequins frozen and posed against the curve of the tunnel. Horror clowns, one with a machete, another with its eye hanging out of its head.
Past them, the tunnel kept going, and going, and going.
He turned around, saw that the entrance was a good ways away now. Maybe a quarter mile, already.
A shadow passed in front of the entrance. Like a vulture flying in front of the sun. And then, the tunnel rumbled—down through the top, and to the tracks beneath his feet. Thunder, Nate realized.
A storm.
Not here yet. But…maybe soon.
Carl had said storms sometimes came through, and when they did, they brought hell with them. Chaos was the word he’d used.
Another distant rumble. Made his teeth hum.
And now, a choice. Nate could leave. He could try to get ahead of the storm, head back to Carl’s—assuming the old man would welcome him back. Or he could stay here and take shelter until it passed. Or he could turn and go deeper still. See where this thing led. If this place was truly somehow…transitive, if it could take him to another place, maybe back home, then didn’t it stand to figure that he should press on?
What was the saying?
The only way out was through.
That decided it. He’d go deeper.
But before he could turn around and head into the dark—
“Once upon a time,” a voice sang, down in the deep. “A young man named Eddie Reese found himself in a train tunnel, angry again at being told no—no from another girl, no from another boy: No, Eddie, they’d say, I won’t go out with you, I won’t touch you, I won’t look at you!”
Nate wheeled to face the darkness. He saw nothing there, though the shadows felt oppressive. He eyed the horror clowns on the wall, half-expecting them to come alive—and come at him.
“Stay back,” he cautioned the darkness.
But the voice continued:
“But that day, our young, intrepid Eddie—a fan of numbers, he was—found himself in that tunnel counting first the number of times he had been told no, which, for the record, was twenty-one, and then counting the number of erratic, uneven bricks in the tunnel. Which, for the record, was seven. But Eddie found suddenly that he was not alone, just as you are not alone now. That is when Eddie met the demon.”
“Fuck off!” Nate said.
“The demon, Eligos Vassago, the Archfiend. Above and below, was he. Loyal not to the legions of Hell nor to the filth of Heaven. And he told Eddie that were Eddie willing to undertake a quest, a grand quest, he could break the worlds and become a god, and in doing so, no one would ever tell him no again.”
Now, Nate could see the shadow of Edmund Walker Reese stepping through the dark. A blade gleamed, despite the lack of light.
“Ninety-nine girls,” came a whisper and a giggle from the walls. Had it come from one of the clowns?
“Ninety-nine for the ninety-nine!” came another whisper, across the way.
“Yes,” Reese said, his voice not necessarily loud, yet somehow everywhere. Like serpents slithering up the walls in every direction. The echo of them was slow and deliberate, a crawling voice. “Eligos said to kill ninety-nine girls, pure girls, girls who were young and chaste, not yet sullied, and if I sacrificed them, then at the culmination, all would fall.”
“But you failed,” Nate called. “Didn’t you? The fifth girl, Sissy Kalbacher. She got away. Thanks to my wife.”
“Your wife.” Those two words, hissed with great venom and rage. “Doesn’t that just figure. Yes. I failed. Perhaps it was always a fool’s parade to even try. But try I did, and rewarded I was for my efforts. I was saved from the chair by the lightning—and the demon put me here. Put out to pasture, perhaps. But oh, what a nice pasture, Nate. So many victims for the taking. And once in a while a young woman winds her way into my web. Though for now—it’s just you, isn’t it?”
Nate could feel the tension rising. The air buzzed with it. He had to get out of here. Had to leave. But he wanted to kill Edmund Walker Reese so damn bad. If he wasn’t going to get home, at least he could take this murderer with him…
No, he told himself. You’re not ready. You’re injured, Nate. Still.
“It’s all fine now,” Reese sang. “My work has been resumed by a more capable candidate. The boy: Oliver. Oliver killing Olivers killing Olivers, dominoes toppling one after the next until the world dies. And when it does, they all come here.” These last two words, he growled, an inhuman sound: “To me.”
He laughed, a mad stuttering whoop.
Edmund Reese surged forward, his hunting knife slashing the air, sparking against the walls. He roared forth, seeming to have not two arms, but four, then six—and his shadow grew larger, stranger, and as he ran it was not just the sound of footsteps in the dark but the wet sound of something slithering, like a clot of infinite worms pushing through the tunnel. And at that, the clowns on the wall began laughing in time with Reese—
Thunder boomed, but Nate saw no choice—he turned tail and hard-charged fast as he could down the tunnel, back toward the entrance. Braving the storm was chaos. But chaos was better than this. He couldn’t take Reese down. Not here. Not now. He had to run.
Nate dared not look behind him, and he kept his eyes fixed ahead. The half circle of light indicating the exit to the Tunnel of Terror dimmed. What was blue sky had gone to an eerie, jaundiced green. A sick sky, stirred up by the coming storm. And like that—
The sounds of footsteps behind him were gone.
Don’t look. Don’t look. Don’t look.
He looked.
Reese stood far back. Flanked now by the outlines of the clowns, who had pulled themselves off the walls, swaying. Something wet gleamed behind them and around them—worms slithering upon the inside of the tunnel. The clowns had stopped, about a hundred yards back. He could see their silhouettes standing there. Watching. Reese was no longer with them. He had returned to the dark. To the tunnel.
Even they dared not go out into the storm.
Good.
Into the storm he ran.
* * *
—
Hail hissed around him as the sky grew grayer, and greener. It fell against the broken amusement park with the cacophony of glass beads pouring from the heavens—and they stung him just the same, pelting him with the sting of stones whipped at his head, neck, shoulders, and back. Nate buried his head under the meager shelter of his arms as he raced through the park, past the concession stands and the burnt-out Ferris wheel—
Lightning throttled the sky. White and bright. Filling everything up. And when it was gone again, and Nate was left blinking the streaks of starshine from his eyes, he saw that he was surrounded.
By his son.
So many versions of his son.
“Oliver,” he said, his voice cracking.
Oliver, gunshot between his eyes, long wet hair plastered against his cheeks. Oliver, throat open like a steamed envelope. Another Oliver, wrists slit, oozing rust-water blood. This Oliver, bloated like a body from a river, that Oliver, half-dissolved pills stuck to the inside of his lower lip like sugar confetti on a cupcake. Another shot in the chest. One with guts spilling out. Some decayed to the point of being barely recognizable. Some pink-skinned and freshly dead, others gray, dead for weeks but not yet decayed. All of them opening their mouths in concert. Humming and gurgling. Blood pouring out. River water pouring out. A cascade of splashing bile.
Their horrible hum-song resolved into a word—
“Dddaaaaadddd.”
Something slammed into him. Nate whirled on it, ax up—
It was Carl. Eyes wide as moons as he looked upon the Olivers all around them. “Jesus Christ,” Carl said, loud over the hissing hail. He gestured with the .45 pistol in his hand. “We have to go, Nate, c’mon. C’mon!” He pulled on Nate, and Nate ran with the old man—he closed his eyes as they moved through the crowd of his son’s corpses, knowing that he couldn’t look, not again. When he opened them again they were gone, or behind him, and he knew not to look back.
The two of them hurried toward the park exit, now in sight.
“Almost there,” Carl called over the cacophony of cascading hail.
Lightning filled the sky once more. And this time, the bolt struck the ground in front of Nate like a hammer—it knocked him backward, flat on his back, and ahead of him he saw Carl, or the shape of him, trapped in the roaring channel of electricity. Nate could see his skin, his bones, all of it turning black and flaking away like fire burning parchment.
The lightning was gone.
And so, too, was Carl Graves.
70
Carving Birds
What a grand spread.
Maddie beheld the feast—sorry, “feast”—before the two of them.
Canned cranberry sauce: a classic.
Canned sweet potatoes: She preferred to make her own most years, but okay, this would do fine.
Cheap Martin’s potato slider rolls: a piss-poor substitute for biscuits, but Maddie did what she could, toasting them over the woodstove; now each had the char-black crust of the Devil’s heart.
Lunch meat turkey in jarred gravy: the pièce de résistance.
Oliver poked at it with a fork, glumly elevating the meager meal to his mouth with a fresh pout for every bite. A little spike of resentment shot through her, and she wanted to rage at him: You know, a lot of kids in this country get a lot worse, and you could appreciate the effort I put into giving us some kind of Thanksgiving in the middle of this tornado of shit. But she bit her tongue, because she knew it was unfair. It wasn’t that Oliver didn’t like the food (though, why would he, ugh). It was that his dad was missing. It was that their lives had been overturned. They were on the run, alone, in the middle of nowhere. He’d almost been killed, and not by some rando, but apparently by himself. Plus, he was still taking antibiotics for the hand injury—and that left his guts unsettled.
Kid had been through the wringer.
So have you, she told herself.
And that’s when Oliver said, “So when does this end?”
The question hit her like a truck.
“What?”
“When does all this stop? Jake is still out there. They’re not going to find him. He has magic. He’ll get away, or outwit them, or maybe kill them. And then he’ll come for us here.” He wasn’t just looking at her, but through her, like he had speared her with his gaze. “What’s the endgame? What’s the plan, Mom? You always have plans.”
It felt like she was falling, like someone had pulled a lever and opened a trapdoor underneath her chair. She felt cold. Then she was hot. Could barely catch her breath and she thought, Is this menopause, is this a heart attack, is this a fucking aneurysm? but of course, she knew, it was panic. Sheer, bloody-fanged panic taking a hard bite.
I’m someone with lists and goals and plans, always knowing what to do, but here she was and she had nothing. No answers. No direction. They’d just removed themselves from the world, as if they’d died and gone to this interstitial place, this limbo, this cabin at the end of the world.
What was the end?
Was there an end?
“You okay?” Oliver asked, no longer watching her eyes, but now looking toward her middle. Toward her heart. What does he see?
“Yeah,” she lied. Then, the truth shouldered its way to the front of her mouth: “No! God. Fuck no.” She gasped in a sudden sob, and wept hard for ten seconds—ten nearly eternal seconds. Wiping her eyes, she cleared her throat and said, “This dinner is rat food. It’s shit, and I’m done with it.”
“Oh—I didn’t mean—”
Standing up suddenly, she added: “Come on. Let’s go do something.”
Bewildered, he asked, “What? Why?”
“Because, my boy, when the time comes, when your head’s just full of…” She gesticulated wildly, her fingers scribbling madly in the orbit of her skull. “Nonsense, the best way to machete the weeds and drown out the static is to go make something. So that’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to go and make something. For us. For the world. We make.”
For the first time in weeks, she saw her boy smile.
It gave her life.
* * *
—
They sat on the cabin’s narrow front porch in the burgeoning cold, under a porch light that was just a bulb inside a large mason jar. Beyond the meager light was the muddy-rut parking lot in front of the cabin, and a long driveway that cut through a fence of dark pines standing sentinel. Above was a clear, star-sprayed night. The moon was just a thin shaving of white bone.
Oliver’s joy at the idea of creating was hampered by his difficulty actually doing it—he struggled to hold wood in his ruined hand and carve with the other. Mom must’ve detected his frustration, and instead did most of the carving—she just let him decide what they’d look like.
They’d found a crude knife in the kitchen drawer that Mom was using to carve bits of softball-sized firewood into owls. She gritted her teeth and whittled the pair of ears into their final points before handing it to Oliver. The owl he held in his hand felt substantial—not light and airy, but heavy in a way that almost seemed impossible. He lined it up on the wooden porch railing with the other two she’d carved. Each was a little different from the one before it. It felt almost like they were watching him. He guessed that’s what was cool about being an artist: the feeling your work was more than what it was. Like you gave it life. Imbued it with some spirit.
“Hand me the next chunk,” she said, and he reached down into the pile of firewood they’d chopped. Oliver did as she asked and she said, “Screech owl this time? Barn owl? What?”
He laughed and shrugged. “I don’t know. Like, um, one of those frogmouth owls?”
“The tawny frogmouth is not an owl,” she corrected, gesturing with the knife.
“How do you know that?”
“Kids aren’t the only ones who can watch YouTube, buddy.”
“Fine, fine. We just did a horned owl, so yeah, I guess, screech?”
“Good choice, kiddo. Pull one up on the phone for me, we’ll get a photo for reference.”
He nodded and got to work.
“Why owls?” he asked.
She smiled. “You know, when I was a kid? I had an owl. Er—not a real owl, but not a toy, either. It was this little tchotchke that my dad bought for me on some trip upstate one time. Something for a shelf, a decoration. It was an owl, and it was made from coal. Carved from it. I don’t know that I ever thought much about it but…it sat on my dresser, night after night. Watching over me.”
“Maybe these owls can watch over us.”
“Maybe, Dude. May. Be.”
As she talked and worked, Oliver noticed that the pain and rage inside his mother had ebbed once more. He’d watched it peak during dinner—while they were talking, a maelstrom of frustration had danced up inside her, like a desert twister. It filled all parts of her with whirling, flensing darkness. But now it was smaller. It had shrunken down to a small, pulsing thing. Was that good? It felt good. But again, Oliver grappled with questions over the nature of pain. Was it better for the pain to be made small, but allowed to remain? Or was it like an infection that needed healing? A bad tooth that demanded extraction.
I could just reach in and take it from her…
“As to your earlier question,” she said suddenly, “I don’t know.”
“What earlier question?” he asked, even though he knew.
“What the plan is. How long this lasts. All of it.” She idly spun the knife in her grip. “I don’t know. I don’t have any answers.”
“What if he comes for us?” He didn’t have to say who.
“I dunno, Dude. We have your father’s pistol, and he taught me how to use it long ago. We’re way out of the way, in the middle of nowhere. There’s a gate at the bottom, and we have the key. It’s pretty defensible and, worse comes to worst, we could escape into the woods. Highway’s only a few miles north of here.”
“Wouldn’t it be better to be…like, near people?”
“No.” He watched the pain in her bloom at that, like black smoke. “We can’t trust other people, Olly. You trusted Jake—look how that went. Dad trusted Jed, too. It’s best if it’s just you and me.”
“You know where Jed is, don’t you?”
Mom narrowed her eyes in suspicion. “Why do you ask?”
“You said you found him. And then you let him go again.”
“Uh-huh.”
Oliver felt her gaze crushing him into paste. “What?”
“Don’t act all incredulous. You looked at my phone.”
Gulp.
“Well. I mean.” He hated lying. Hated it. “Okay! Yes, yeah, I was looking for games, like, anything, even Candy Crush or some other old app because I was bored and…then I saw the text and…”
It was a text that said, in all caps because that was apparently how old people texted, HOPE YOU AND THE BOY ARE OKAY. IF YOU NEED ANYTHING AT ALL, TEXT THIS NUMBER. I’M SURE YOU DON’T TRUST ME, AND I UNDERSTAND THAT, BUT IF EVER THE NEED IS DIRE, I’M HERE.
If ever the need is dire…
Mom shrugged. “We haven’t talked much. He doesn’t know where we are.”
“Do you know where he is?”
“Nope.”
“So, why even talk?”
She sighed. “They’re only a few texts. He was just checking in.”
“Maybe because he’s still working for Jake.”
