The house watched me now, offering nothing.
While I glared back, the ghosts led my thoughts to the cemetery instead. I hadn’t been there in quite some time, even in my mind. Bernard’s mother and my parents had been buried in the same one, and while I often felt guilty for not tending more consistent attention to my mother’s so-called final resting place, I knew she would have understood. “It’s only our bodies there anyway,” she’d once assured me, eyes blinking tranquilly, telling me everything, and nothing at all. “I’ll be in Heaven with Daddy by then.”
She’d always referred to my father as “Daddy,” as if sweetening his moniker might make his absence more tolerable, the void somehow more human once assigned an innocent and childlike title. But he remained a stranger to me, a character in other peoples’ stories, a smiling and gentle-looking man in faded photographs, a name chiseled into granite. At least I’d had that much; Bernard knew virtually nothing about his father, though I’d never been quite sure which experience was preferable. His mother had rarely spoken about the subject, and it wasn’t until I’d become an adult that her reasons began to make sense. Although Bernard and I never discussed it and I had no way to know for sure, I believed Linda had never told him who his father was because she hadn’t been certain herself.
Visions of the cemetery scurried about, reached for me, revealed Linda sitting atop her headstone, laughing while Bernard crouched before her, digging furiously with fingers raw and bleeding, flinging soil across the flowers decorating her grave.
The demons were at play but the house fell silent.
For now, the ghosts had stopped talking.
CHAPTER 12
In a matter of weeks the public beach would be packed with tourists and locals alike, though for now, but for the steady toll of waves lapping the shore and the occasional cackle of a soaring gull, the area remained quiet. I seldom went to the beach during the summer season, preferring instead to come in the quiet months when it was an entirely different experience. Although I harbored a rather primitive fear of the ocean, I’d been coming to this beach since childhood, and it had figured into many seminal points during my life. I remembered coming here the day Rick was released from prison, in fact, just one of numerous memories of this place, so despite my inherent uneasiness, I also found an ironic sense of comfort in the waves, in the majestic and familiar power of it all.
I drove carefully along the dirt lot, my old car throttled by purposely uneven terrain designed to prevent people from speeding, and parked near a row of stump-like wooden posts connected with heavy rope that separated the sand from the parking lot. Mine was the only car in the lot, but further down the beach, near a stone jetty that stabbed quite a distance into the ocean, I noticed a young woman in a windbreaker playing with a black lab. I wondered if she knew about the body that had been found.
On the seat next to me was a hardback composition notebook I’d picked up a few days earlier. I had begun to transfer my thoughts, memories and dreams to paper in the hopes of perhaps better sorting through them, and decided to consult my notes one more time before making a definite move. The nightmare still haunted me, but not as frequently, and thankfully, there had been no more hallucinations or visions—no more women, no more little boys—only a continued sense of dread and the persistent flicker of memories both recent and distant I found impossible to shake.
I flipped open the notebook, eyed my latest list of options and drew a line through the first, Nightmares, then the second, Hauntings. My pen hesitated at the third, Abandoned Factory, then the fourth, Photograph of Mystery Woman. I skipped over both, moved to the fifth, Memories and Questions. Beneath that I’d written down the most disturbing or curious memories that had come to me of late and followed them with questions.
So many goddamn questions.
Of course the discovery of the young woman’s body changed everything. I had no choice but to continue to force myself to remember the darkest corners of the past, but if I ever hoped to know who Bernard had really been, simple memory would not be enough. To fill in the blank spaces, to know for sure what he had done, and what he hadn’t, I’d need to reconstruct a history of sorts. Bernard’s history.
Somewhere in the distance the black lab barked. I looked up, saw the woman throw a tennis ball. The dog bolted after it along the sand, retrieved it then gleefully galloped back to her. It suddenly occurred to me that had I been so inclined, it would have been ridiculously easy to step from my car, walk across the deserted beach and slaughter this woman. Strobe-like flashes of her covered in blood blinked across my eyes, vanishing quickly. Similar thoughts had almost certainly coursed through Bernard’s mind as well, but allowing even the faint beginnings of the evil he had called upon and held so close to seep into my own head was wildly unsettling. I pushed it all away and focused on the woman instead. She crouched down, took the lab’s head in her hands and kissed his nose. The dog licked her face, his tail wagging. We were so vulnerable, all of us so ripe for the picking without even realizing it, and there wasn’t a fucking thing we could do about it. I closed the notebook, tossed it into the backseat.
The day had slipped away. It was nearly four o’clock.
Brannigan’s was surprisingly busy for a late afternoon weekday. One of the older establishments in town, over the years it had undergone a series of incarnations and varied themes but had essentially remained a sports pub with an attached dining area. It had been a townie watering hole for years, a place to go and have some beers, shoot some pool or play pinball, order a pizza or a wide range of appetizers from the menu and eat them right at the bar or in the darkened booths that lined the back wall, and a place where for the most part, everyone knew one another. But just like those who had come before us, and those who followed, the older we got the less we frequented the bar and opted for the dining area instead. Although I still occasionally stopped in for a beer or two, the bar always had and always would pander to a predominantly younger crowd, and the farther I crept into my thirties the less tolerance I had for the language, music, fashion, and overall attitude of those ten years or so my junior.
I entered through the side door, which led directly to the dining room. It took several seconds for my eyes to adjust to the dim lighting, as both the dining area and bar were always annoyingly darker than seemed necessary, but after scanning the room I could locate neither Donald nor Rick.
“Hi, Alan.”
I turned, saw a waitress fly by, a large tray of entrees balanced on her shoulder. “Hey, how’s it going?” I muttered, unable to remember her name but recognizing her as a local I’d gone to high school with and who had worked there for years. I wasn’t sure she even heard my response, as she’d already slipped between the tables and been absorbed into the noise, so I followed the wall to an archway with double swinging half-doors and moved into the bar. It was packed. All three of the pool tables were in use, and against one wall people were huddled around the pinball machines, the bells and electronic noises barely audible over the strains of a Stevie Ray Vaughn tune playing on the jukebox. The televisions mounted above either corner of the bar normally featured sporting events, but both were tuned to newscasts, neither of which could be heard.
As I walked slowly through the crowd it became apparent that nearly everyone was discussing the discovery of the dead body.
At the far end of the room, I found Rick and Donald sitting in the last of a row of booths. It was even darker there in the corner, a candle in the center of the table and encased in tinted glass providing minimal flickering light.