“You got one chance to get down here and help me, boy. You waste another second and they’ll be picking you up in pieces for weeks to come. You hear me?”
The boy didn’t speak. He sat down on the top of the ridge and watched silently. The rain was still pouring down, and the water in the pool was rising and spinning. Campbell’s grip on the root loosened as the water tried to pull him away, but he caught hold again and splashed, fighting for his life.
“Get down here, boy. Get your worthless ass down here unless you want to end up like your uncle.”
Campbell’s voice was fading. His face was stark white. The boy remained silent.
“You don’t understand what you’re tangling with,” Campbell said. “You should by now. You been around me long enough to get a sense. You think I’m just another man? That what you think? I’ve got power you can’t even fathom, boy. This valley’s given it to me. You think you’ll be safe from me if I drown out here? You’re full of shit. There ain’t no hiding from me.”
The boy dragged the lantern closer to him. He held the pistol in both hands.
Campbell gave a howl of fury and tried once again to pull himself out of the water. This time the root tore, almost pulling free completely, and Campbell was submerged for a moment before he tugged himself high enough to get his face clear.
“You’re going to let me drown,” he cried. “You’re going to let me die!”
The boy didn’t answer.
“I’ll have you in the end,” Campbell said in a voice so soft it was hard to hear over the rain. “You will feel my fury, boy, everyone in this whole damn valley will. You think you’re safe if I’m dead? Boy, I promise you this—ain’t nobody safe from me unless they carry both my name and my blood. You understand that? Only my family will be spared, you little bastard. And you ain’t family. I’ll come for you. That’s a vow. I will come for you and anyone else who doesn’t share my blood and my name.”
The dangling root tore free. Campbell gave a harsh cry of surprise and pain, and then he slipped backward and was lost to the water. When he surfaced again, he was upside down and motionless. The boy sat and stared at him. After a while, he picked up a few sticks and threw them at the body. There was no response.
He stood and picked his way carefully down the ridge and out to the edge of the pool. Then he set the lantern down, took off his jacket and shoes and rolled his pants up above his knees, removed the green glass bottle from his pocket, and waded into the water with it in his hand.
Campbell continued to float facedown, thumping against the stone that surrounded the pool. The boy reached him and turned him over, exposed his white face. The eyes were still open.
He looked at the dead man’s face for a moment, and then he shifted the body and found the wound on Campbell’s left side. He pressed the bottle into the wound and watched as blood leaked out of him and joined the spring water that was already inside the bottle. He squeezed out blood until the bottle was full of the mixture, and then he took it away and fastened the stopper.
When the bottle was back in his pocket, the boy grasped Campbell’s shoulders and began to tug him through the water. He waded along the southern rock wall, waist deep, moving carefully. Here the lantern light was dim. He stopped moving at a point where water gurgled between rocks, slipping out of the pool and back below ground. He tried to push Campbell into the dark gap, but the dead man’s shoulders snagged and held. The boy turned him slowly, rotating him in the water, and slid him in feet-first. He went in more easily this time, up to the waist, and then the boy placed his hands above both shoulders and shoved hard, grunting with effort. The body hung up for a moment, but then the water rose up and slapped against the stone and pushed the corpse out of sight beneath the earth.
He waded back to shore and put on his shoes and jacket. He checked the bottle and placed it gingerly back in his pocket. He then took the lantern and the pistol, climbed the hill again and returned to Shadrach Hunter’s body, and knelt and removed the money clip with the fourteen dollars and put it in his pocket.
He rose again, with the lantern in one hand and the pistol in the other, and walked on into the dark woods. A train whistle was shrilling out over the hills. He walked toward the sound.
The lantern’s glow turned smaller and continued to fade until it was barely visible in the shadows, and there was nothing but darkness and the sound of rushing water. Then the lantern began to grow larger and brighter, as if the boy had stopped somewhere out in the woods and decided to return. The light grew and grew until the dark woods melted away entirely and there was nothing but that gleaming, flickering light and…
Sky.
Gray sky.
And a voice.
Claire’s voice.
EPILOGUE
These are the things he remembers. The lantern coming back through the dark woods, the warm flickering light, the gray sky, Claire’s voice.
He is told that he shouldn’t be able to remember a thing. That he had been under the water for fifteen minutes before they got him out.
He learns new terms in the hospitaclass="underline" apneic, which means not breathing; cyanotic, which means displaying a bluish discoloration; PEA, or pulseless electrical activity, which means an electrocardiogram test records some heart function although there is no pulse. The heart still lives, in other words, but it is incapable of completing its job.
These are the terms that were applied to him once he was in the ambulance.
Kellen was the first one in the water. He watched Eric leap, saw where he entered, splitting the water directly between two downed trees that could have impaled him. Kellen marked the spot, but with an ankle broken in two places, he couldn’t make his way down to the water quickly enough, and the body had disappeared.
One thing Eric definitely did not imagine—Claire’s voice on his downward plunge. She was coming down the trail with Detective Roger Brewer in tow. She’d forced the detective to go with her to the last place she’d seen him, stretched out there on the trail, and upon finding him missing, began to shout for him. Kellen heard the shouting. Kellen shouted back.
Brewer entered the water while Claire—with a dislocated shoulder and broken collarbone from her landing on the pavement after Josiah Bradford shoved her from his truck—stood on the bank and shouted at every ripple in the water and shadow over it, thinking they all might be Eric.
The way they all tell it now, Eric just floated up from the depths. Surfaced in the middle of the swirling pool, facedown. Like the Lost River had him, and then decided to give him back.
Brewer and Kellen brought him out. The detective began CPR, then turned it over to Claire and went for his radio when he could not get a response. Claire succeeded in getting a few wet, wheezing coughs.
They could not restore spontaneous breathing or a pulse.
In the ambulance, the electrocardiogram registered a bradycardic—unusually slow—heart rate. Thirty-seven beats per minute. There was still no palpable pulse. The heart’s electrical system was functioning, but the mechanical pumping system was not. The paramedics applied a ventilator to assist with breathing and then administered epinephrine. One minute later, Eric’s heart rate was up to one hundred beats per minute, and a pulse appeared at the carotid artery.
He was driven to Bloomington Hospital at speeds averaging ninety miles an hour, and there he was placed on a different ventilator, and steps were taken to warm his core temperature. Claire was with him for the ride and believed that he would be pronounced dead on arrival, that the epinephrine-induced heartbeat was nothing more than a tease.