Periphery, page 27
Grace ran her finger over one, feeling the waxy marks. Her initial assessment might have been overly dismissive. There was too much control displayed in the borders to call them doodles. Designs would be a better description.
“You really went to town on the frames. They’re lovely, honey, but I need you to…”
Grace frowned. She’d been absentmindedly shuffling the pictures into one pile when she noticed a particularly thick sweep of green arching off the right edge of the kite drawing. She’s seen a mark of identical thickness curving off the picture of the houses, exiting from the left of the page. She rifled through the sheets until she found the drawing and carefully adjusted both until their borders fell into alignment. They were a perfect match. Every line from one sheet continued on to the other. It took only a moment to arrange all seven into a single image. Assembled, the individual scenes became islands of tranquility nestled within a briar of green snarls.
“You like it, Mommy?”
“Honey, it’s absolutely…”
“Absolutely what?”
Terrifying. That was what she had nearly said. It was the green tangles. Something about them unnerved her. Viewed in their near-entirety (seven pictures of what was obviously intended to be a series of nine), the borders had become the real subject of the drawings, not the quaint images they framed. There were things inside the briars. She could almost make them out, low, twisted shapes holding perfectly still, watching with eyes shaped like beer bottles, coiled and ready to strike. Was that a leg? An antenna? Was that a claw? If she squinted and turned her head just so…
“Okay, crayons down.” She swept the drawings into a pile and flipped them over. “I mean it, Anna. We need to pack and go.”
“But you never finished. All you said was that my drawings were ‘absolutely.’ Absolutely what, Mommy?”
“Absolutely delightful.”
Something in her head had screamed as the shapes wavered on the verge of cohesion. Turn away before it’s too late. Don’t look! Don’t ever look too closely. She could feel her heart’s pounding telegraphed in the cuts across her arms. It was as if she had stepped blindly into a busy street, heard the blare of a horn and jumped back as the speeding truck churned the hot air inches from her nose. Something had been avoided. Something very bad. But only just. Another second and it would have been too late. Too late for what? She didn’t want to know.
The ring of the doorbell sent her slowing heart galloping again. “Jesus,” she gasped. “Who could that be?”
“Daddy?” Anna was still drawing green knots. With a low growl of revulsion, Grace plucked the sheet from under her crayon and stuffed it in among the others.
“Hey!” Anna protested.
“I said no more drawing,” she scolded, more harshly than intended. Anna's eyes widened. “I’m going to see who’s at the door. Why don’t you pick out some nice outfits to take with us? And your bathing suit.”
“We’re going swimming at Grandma and Grandpa’s?” There was a liquid quiver at the edge of her words as she teetered on the verge of tears, but Grace noticed she was still humming under her breath. Was it helping her keep the voices out? Maybe she should…
The doorbell rang again, accompanied by the brisk rap of the knocker.
“Why not? It’ll be fun. Now get busy, I want to leave as soon as we’re packed.”
Grace resisted the urge to race down the stairs. She wanted to fling the door open and throw herself into Andy’s arms, beg him to come with them. She didn’t want to face this alone. She would if she had to, of course, but it would be so much better with her husband at her side.
Her husband! Her thumb worried the base of her empty third finger. Why had she left her wedding ring on the partition at the jail’s visiting room? She’d let her emotions carry her up and out of the room without so much as a backward glance, giving in to the urge to heap new pain on a man already swollen and bruised, a man she had once loved with such intensity she would sometimes wake gasping in the middle of the night, panties already damp, and yank Andy from sleep with hands and mouth and thrusting pelvis. She’d always been the more sexually aggressive of the two. Andy never complained.
Those were what she now thought of as the “good times,” before Andy’s drinking became something more than an occasional beer in the evening or cocktail at a Christmas party. Before Anna’s accident. But was all that gone forever? Andy moving out had been a mistake. His mistake. Hers, she saw now, was letting him go. If she had made even a feeble protest he would have stayed.
Instead, she had let it happen with a shrug. Go then, if that’s what you have to do to get your head together. But in that god-awful motel room all he’d done was brood and drink. Isolation was the last thing he needed. Why hadn’t she realized that before?
Grace didn’t bother looking through the peephole. She unlocked the door and flung it open with a small, welcoming cry that clogged in her throat. The man facing her across the threshold was not Andy. He was not Max, although he was wearing a Tampa Fire Rescue tee-shirt. Nor was he the firefighter that had been with Andy early. This man was a stranger, and although he bobbed his head sheepishly and took a step back as she hitched out her feeble gasp, she knew he wouldn’t hesitate to strike her if she tried to slam the door.
“I’m sorry about this, ma’am. Truly, I am.” The gun rose slightly until it was pointing directly at her chest. “But I’m going to have to ask you and your little girl to come with me. We’re going to have us a little family reunion. You and Anna, Andy and your father-in-law.” The gun’s muzzle jerked twice to the left. “Get the girl.”
Twenty
The ascent was excruciating. By the time they reached the third-level catwalk, John was trembling in pain and Emily insisted they all take a break until his agony subsided into something more tolerable. When it became obvious that wasn’t going to happen on its own she sent Hector back down to retrieve her medical kit from the car.
“I should have brought the damn thing to begin with,” she said. “I was afraid this would happen.”
“Just give me another ten minutes,” John said through clamped teeth. “I’ll be fine.”
“You have two broken ribs. You’re not going to be fine. You should be in bed pumped full of painkillers and watching cartoons.”
“I can’t…”
Emily waved him off. “We’ve been through all this. It’s completely dark now; we’re safe inside this godforsaken tower, and the vetro can’t sic their nasty little pets on us until dawn, now can they? I’m not going to give you anything that will make you loopy. A couple of codeine-laced ibuprofen to take the edge off. Otherwise, you’ll never make it to the next level let alone all the way to the top. Now quit your damn bitching.”
John wanted desperately to stretch out on the concrete, use one of the duffel bags as a pillow and drift off into the red haze of pain-tinged sleep. But he was afraid if he did that he would never get back up again, with or without Emily’s little white helpers.
What was he hoping to accomplish here? He had to keep reminding himself as the futility of his scheme oppressed him more with each passing minute. Come first light, how much of the vetro offalate’s attention could he realistically hope to draw from the xalanthracoils? Enough to make any difference? Look at me! Look at me! Hey, over here you sons-of-bitches. Don’t worry about the little men scratching around your coils. They’re of no consequence. I’m the one you need to worry about. It was laughable, really.
Pathetic.
“Hey.” Emily surprised him by pressing both palms against his cheeks and leaning forward until they were nearly nose-to-nose. “Don’t.”
“What?”
“Look that way. It’s the pain. It’s messing with your head as much as the sleep deprivation and the vetro trying to claw their way inside our skulls. Don’t start second-guessing yourself. We’re going to finish this even if I have to strap you on my back and carry you and your harmonic blaster all the way to the top myself. Got it?”
“Sir, yes sir!” Despite the pain of raising his arm, John saluted her crisply. He tried to reassure himself Andrew and William would get the job done before dawn and make this sorry excuse of a diversionary tactic unnecessary. They had all night to destroy a coil—just one!—and if they did he was almost certain the entire circuit would short out like a strand of Christmas lights after the failure of a single bulb. God, he hoped it worked that way. It felt right, a little unintended insight after years of exposure to the xalantracoils, but maybe it was all just wishful thinking.
“Better. Now if you’ll excuse me, I literally have a bug crawling up my ass.” Emily stood and without a shred of modesty dropped her pants around her thighs, shaking and shimmying and swatting until something fell to the floor and skittered away.
Around the curve of the catwalk, blocked from view by the tower’s central core, Booker could be heard talking quietly on the phone, his voice distorted by the tower’s odd acoustics. The beam from his flashlight cast his shadow across the outer wall, a top-heavy distortion drifting to-and-fro as he fidgeted through his conversation.
John didn’t know much about the man. Was he married? Did he have kids? He thought he heard a name repeated: Marlene. A wife? A daughter? Girlfriend? What had prompted Booker to risk so much for a virtual stranger? It had taken Andrew twenty years to reach the same place.
A flash of resentment flared and faded as quickly as heat lighting. He had no reason to feel anything other than satisfaction in the way things had turned out between Andrew and himself. Their relationship had unfolded precisely as John had orchestrated from the periphery of his son’s life. Once he’d been infected with the ability to perceive the true nature of reality, John’s only recourse had been isolation. The risk of contagion was too great. And if that meant leaving a confused, resentful twelve-year-old behind, so be it. Resentments might fade. Death was permanent.
And forgiveness? He’d never asked for it. What was there to forgive? But if he ever saw his son again he would tell him he was sorry. Sorry for the way things had to be. Sorry for all the things that couldn’t be. Sorry for the unavoidable pain of a truly shitty situation. Sorry, sorry, sorry.
The soft clang of Hector climbing the wall-mounted ladder prompted Booker to end his conversation with a terse, “Gotta go.”
“I tell you what,” Hector said, tossing the medical kit to Emily. “I’m tempted to shoot out those fucking floodlights.” He leaned out the nearest window for a moment, waved a fluttering insect from his face and yanked his head back with a huff of disgust. “They’re drawing every goddamn bug known to man, and if Book and I need to shoot at something out there we won’t be able to see shit because of the glare.”
The floodlights ringing the base of the water tower had been added during renovations, along with the aluminum ladder ascending to the observation platform seven levels up. Other than giving the interior a cleaning, no other work had been done. John understood why. The foot-thick walls did indeed hearken to the battlements of a medieval castle. Solid, he had thought as they entered. Built to last. Nothing short of a dozen surface-to-surface missiles was going to breach this defense, and as Hector and Booker had swung the metal entrance plate closed behind them, he’d experienced a profound sense of fortified isolation similar to what he imagined NORAD’s military brass felt when the enormous vault door sealed behind them.
The tower’s ground-level chamber was ringed by a concrete catwalk encircling a dark pool smelling strongly of minerals. While Booker chained and padlocked the entrance, John had passed the beam of his flashlight over the glassy surface.
The water—still seeping up from the artesian spring below despite the drought—was surprisingly clear. He could follow the spear of light all the way to the sandy bottom where rusted piping from fallen banisters laid twisted among green beer bottles. What looked like an ancient, muck-covered Igloo cooler was down there as well, a few broken cinderblocks, and something else, something inside one of the blocks, a black coil of cable, thick as his wrist.
As John’s light played over the crevice, the coil swayed, contracted and shot across the bottom, trailing a plume of muddy sand.
“Shit!” It wasn’t like any bilantu he’d ever seen. An aquatic species? He had William had always speculated about the possibility, of course, but neither of them was certified divers. Why hadn’t they at least slipped on a snorkel mask and stuck their heads underwater? This opened an entirely new avenue of research. What if the thing in the water was amphibious? If it posed a threat they would have to rethink…
“Easy, professor. Don’t get your panties in a wad.” Hector gripped his shoulder. “They’re just freshwater eels. Not everything that slithers is one of your creepy-crawlies.”
“How the hell did they get in here?” John asked, trying to pass the slightly breathless quality of his question off as simple zoological curiosity. What the hell was wrong with him? Spooked by a damn eel.
“You’re the one with the Ph.D. You tell me.”
After that, John had restricted his attention to the floor in front of him where insects and geckos scattered at their approach, disappearing over the side. Overhead, the occasional flap of wings announced a pigeon startled from its roost. The wings of the bats were silent, but their small black bodies would sometimes streak through the flashlight beams and be gone before their presence fully registered.
Standing at the foot of the ladder, staring up at what his flashlight could reveal of the two-hundred-foot climb, John realized he would never be able to carry the guitar case up even a single flight. Too bulky. Too heavy. One of the others would have to manage it for him, something he was loath to do but saw no way around. Even the much lighter duffel bag was too much for him. It’d be a miracle if he could drag his own sorry ass to the top.
“Me and Book will haul up the gear.” John touched the guitar case propped against his knees. “No choice, professor. You’re just going to have to trust us. We promise not to drop it out a window or jump on it or smash bugs with it.”
Hector handed John a sizable square of mosquito netting and a Rays baseball cap. “Netting goes first. Make sure you cover all your face and the back of your neck down to your shoulders. Use the cap to hold it in place.”
John did as told while the others toted the gear and guns up to the second level. When Hector carefully lifted the guitar case, something inside shifted, producing the dull clank of metal against metal. Hector's face crumpled.
“No, no.” John reassured him. “It’s disassembled. You’re good.”
Now, as they huddled on the tower’s third level waiting for the painkillers to blur the edges of his anguish, John fought the urge to toss the case out the window himself and be done with it. They were only three levels up and still had a hundred-and-forty feet to climb. Quit, a voice inside chanted. Quit, quit, quit. Only it wasn’t a single-syllable word looping through his thoughts. It was longer, three distinct syllables. Not even syllables. Gurgles, hisses, pops, an utterance that could only emerge from a throat like a boiling mud pot. Ghnphss d’ pak. Ghnphss d’ pak.
Despair.
“Hold hands!” Emily commanded. “Booker, Hector. Link up.”
“Doc, what’s the point?” Hector slid down the wall into a sitting position. “What are we doing here, anyway? This is pointless.”
“Grab Booker’s hand. Now, goddamn it!” With a roll of his eyes, Hector extended his arm and Booker grasped his hand like a man teetering over a precipice. “Now John’s.”
Emily already held John’s right hand. When Hector clasped his left, he experienced a subtle reevaluation, as if realizing an assumed porch light was actually the moon reflected in a window.
Emily settled against the core wall facing the other three and grabbed Booker’s free hand, completing the loop. John expected something profound to happen as the circuit closed. He was disappointed. There was no surge of power, no sudden barrier shielding them from the vetro’s mental barrage. Maybe things didn’t seem quite as hopeless as they had a minute before. They had the vetro offalate’s attention, after all. John supposed that was something. Then again, this minor lifting of spirits might simply be a side effect of the painkillers starting to kick in.
“Now what?” Hector asked. “Should we all start singing ‘Kumbaya’?”
Later, on his descent from the top, John would have the fleeting realization that if they had done exactly that, things might not have turned out as they did.
“Now we pray.” Booker’s tone left no room for debate. John’s eyes found Emily’s. She smiled and lifted a shoulder.
“Can’t hurt, although I have to tell you, I’m agnostic.”
“No atheists in a foxhole,” John said.
“And no agnostics in a water tower,” Hector quipped. John wondered fleetingly if the man knew what the word meant.
Booker led the impromptu prayer group into “The Lord’s Prayer” before launching into an impassioned plea for Jesus’ protection against whatever evils the night and morning might bring. John found himself not so much following Booker’s words as being engulfed in the man’s sonorous baritone. The sing-song quality of his prayers, the regular prompt of “can I get an Amen” and their compliance gradually filled a place in his head, a balloon of human (and perhaps divide) interaction that counterbalanced just enough of the vetro offalate’s relentless inward pressure to allow John to view the top of the tower as a distinct possibility rather than an impossible fantasy.
“I feel better,” John said after Booker concluded with a final, definitive “Praise Jesus.” And because John meant what he said, he added, “Thank you, Booker. Really.”
“Jesus is our co-pilot,” Hector added, but he too appeared to have shaken off much of his malaise. “Hell, I may just start going to church again if we get through this. Can white people go to your church, Book?”
“So you’re white now?”
