1 The Bank of the River Page 7

  “No idea,” said Roy. “But we need it if we’re going to figure this out.”

  Steven sat thinking. He wasn’t at all sure he wanted to reach his hand into the space and search for whatever might be lurking there.

  “Oh for fuck’s sake,” Roy said. “Get out of the way, I’ll do it.”

  -

  “This is all just crazy lunatic rambling,” Steven said as he flipped through the book they had found under the hallway floorboards. “Debra mentioned this to me. Ben went off his rocker, completely paranoid. This reads like a stream of consciousness from a sick mind.”

  “Ben might have been paranoid,” Roy said, “but he had every right to be. And he wasn’t unbalanced, I’m sure of that.”

  “Then you’ll have to explain this to me,” Steven said, abandoning it, tossing it to his father on the other side of the kitchen table. “It seems like the crazy shit you see on the walls in a serial killer’s lair in a movie. It’s useless.”

  Roy took the book and began reading through it. “Yeah, I see what you mean,” he sighed, turning the pages. “I can’t think straight right now anyway. Let’s get some shuteye and approach this fresh in the morning.” Roy closed the book and stood, but his legs gave out under him, and he fell to the floor.

  “Damn it, goddamn it,” Roy exclaimed. Steven rushed over and grabbed Roy’s arm, attempting to lift him. “What happened?”

  “I’m fine, I’m fine,” Roy said, attempting to get to his feet. “I just need to…” and he slumped into Steven’s arms.

  “Dad? Can you hear me?” Steven asked, carrying his father back to the kitchen chair and setting him into it as carefully as he could. Roy fell forward onto the kitchen table and stayed there. Steven checked Roy’s breathing and heartbeat, both of which seemed fine. Maybe Roy was just exhausted and needed rest, but he wasn’t taking chances. With everything he had seen his father go through the past few days he was surprised it hadn’t happened earlier. Roy was a tough old man, but he was old, and he had his limits.

  As much as Roy would be against it, Steven picked up the phone and dialed 911.

  Chapter Eleven

  “Here, I brought you something,” Steven said, tossing Ben’s book from the floorboards into Roy’s lap on the hospital bed.

  “Unhook me and take me home, goddamnit,” Roy said.

  “Not a chance. Not until they tell me you’re OK,” Steven said.

  “I’m telling you I’m perfectly fine. They wouldn’t know anyway,” Roy replied.

  “Well, humor me. The doctor is supposed to come around in a few minutes. In the meantime,” Steven said, pulling up a chair, “I wish to retract some of what I said about this book last night.”

  “What was that?” Roy asked.

  “Turns out there is something useful in it. After I left here last night, I went home and tried to sleep, but couldn’t. So I started going through it, more carefully, page by page. These pages in the middle, the ones that look like scrapbooks, where he taped in newspaper articles?” Steven said, turning the book to the pages to show Roy, and pointing to one in particular. “That’s what I found.”

  Roy took the book and read what Steven had pointed out. It was a Seattle Times article taped to the pages of the journal. Suspect Released in Abduction Case, the title read. “Hand me my glasses,” Roy said, pointing to the stand by the bed. Steven grabbed them and handed them over to Roy, who put them on and began to read, sometimes muttering the words, other times stopping to shoot a glace up at Steven, who stood by the bed watching Roy’s reaction.

  Roy finished the article, and turned back a page. Here was another article, this one about cancer radiation from power lines. Before it was an article on contaminated baby food from China. “OK, what does it mean?” Roy asked. “I don’t see any connection.”

  “That article on the abduction suspect is the Rosetta Stone to the rest of the book. Not the stuff that comes before it, but everything after. I’ve marked some other sections with post it notes. I want you to read them, but read them with the abduction article in mind. Everything before it is Ben trying to find an answer, rambling, lost. He found what he was looking for when he found that article.”

  Roy turned to the first bookmark Steven had inserted into the book, and read some of that page. The penmanship was very small. Ben had managed to cram thousands of words on a single page, filling every available space. The overall effect of the page was lunacy, but the content, read as Steven instructed, became more lucid with each word.

  Roy stopped and flipped to the next bookmark. Same reaction. As Roy continued to work his way through the sections Steven had prepared, he watched the color drain from Roy’s face. When he reached the last one, Roy glanced up at Steven and said, “You gotta get me outta here. I insist. Right now.”

  “Wait, there’s more,” said Steven, smiling, pleased that his father seemed to pick up on what he had discovered in the book.

  “More?” asked Roy, clearly intrigued.

  At that moment the doctor walked into the room, and Roy handed the book back to Steven. Steven guessed Roy preferring to not be discovered with something so lunatic by a doctor who would be giving him a prognosis.

  They chatted for a few moments, with the doctor saying all tests were negative and giving Roy a clean bill of health. Steven asked about the cause of Roy’s collapse.

  “Well, Roy tells me he hasn’t had a good night’s sleep in several days,” said the doctor. “I’d say it was due to exhaustion. Nothing else appears wrong. You can go, but I’m prescribing sleep – lots of it.”

  Roy sat upright in bed, looking between the doctor and Steven, with a grin on his face. “Great, let’s go,” Roy said. “Where’s my clothes?”

  The doctor held his hand up to stop Roy. “I’ll need you to wait here until a nurse comes around and removes the IV. Then you’ll find your clothes in the drawer of the cabinet by the door. But please don’t leave the room until a nurse brings the paperwork by for you to sign.” The doctor turned to Steven. “You’ll make sure he gets out of here OK?”

  “Yeah, I’m driving him home,” said Steven.

  “Great. If this should happen again in the next 72 hours bring him back in. Thank you both, have a nice day,” the doctor said, and left the room.

  “If this is right,” Roy said as soon as the door had shut, “Ben found who killed his son.”

  “Little Tony,” Steven offered, “and others. Who knows how many more.”

  “I’m going to guess four,” Roy said.

  Steven looked at him, knowing he was right. “Yeah, four.”

  They paused. Roy cleared his throat. “OK, let me start this again, see if we’re thinking the same thing. Ben is searching for what happened to his son. He tried several wild ideas, but they’re all just stabs in the dark. But then he settles on this abduction story, decided that this suspect they released was the man who abducted Little Tony. Then what?”

  “He stalks the guy,” Steven offered. “I know I would. Ben had all the time in the world on his hands, remember, he’d been combing through parks and fields and abandoned properties. He switches his focus to this guy, to see if his theory is correct.”

  “Because,” Roy interjected, “if it is, he might be able to save Little Tony.”

  “So,” Steven continued, “he stalks the guy, until something confirms to him that he’s the guilty one. He discovers that Little Tony is gone, all the children are gone; this guy has killed them. In his anger, he kills the guy, and he disposes of the body. He feels a sense of justice, that he’s avenged the death of his son, and he’s taken a killer off the streets, saved countless others.”

  “But that’s not the end of it.”

  “No, it’s not. Because whatever he killed came back to haunt him. All of Ben’s journal, following that article, is about the stalking and the haunting. He conveniently left the killing out.”

  “I would have left it in,” Roy said with indignation. “Any father would have been justified. I�
�da helped him pull the trigger.”

  “I know,” Steven acknowledged, “but this guy’s no John Wayne and there’s no happy ending. He kills the guy, he disposes of the body, it comes back to haunt him, and, in the end, it haunts him to death.”

  “That means,” Roy said, “that Ben’s reason for haunting you has been to alert you to this fellow. We’ve been thinking the haunting was because Ben killed himself in the house, but that’s only part of it. The haunting is because Ben wants you to know who he killed, and why he killed him, because the job isn’t finished – it’s still alive, in some form, still preying on people.”

  “All of the occurrences I experienced, with the exception of the shadow, those came from Ben?” Steven asked.

  “I believe so,” Roy replied. “The shadow was a different matter altogether.”

  “But if the shadow was after Ben, and it succeeded in killing him by getting him to cut his own throat, why continue haunting the house? He’s achieved his goal at that point, right?”

  Roy thought about this. “It could be,” he said, “that we stirred it back up.”

  A nurse appeared at the door, asking to remove the IV in Roy’s arm, which he eagerly presented to her to facilitate the task. In another twenty minutes they were in Steven’s car and headed back to Roy’s house.

  “What did you mean when you said we ‘stirred it up’?” Steven asked.

  “Before I came over that first night,” Roy replied, “what you’d seen was limited to things Ben wanted you to see. All of the manifestations – the knocking, the faces, the head over the bathtub – that was all Ben, things that referenced him, his knowledge of events. I show up two nights later, and bam!” Roy clapped his hands together for dramatic effect, “the shadow appears, and has ever since. I think it was stirred up by me, by my involvement.”

  “By you? How?” Steven asked.

  “I think my involvement was what both Ben and the shadow wanted all along. I think they used you to get me involved. The reason why the shadow attacks me, why it never even showed up until I arrived at your place, is because it needs, it eats, what I have. It attacks me and not you because I’m stronger, I’ve got the gift. And it sucks it out of me – that’s what it’s doing when it attacks, it’s draining me. It’s why you put me in the hospital.”

  “But why?” Steven asked. “I understand it attacking Ben, but why you? Because you’re able to communicate to Ben?”

  Roy sighed. “I don’t know. Nothing’s surfaced that explains why. I still need to figure that out. What is our next step?”

  “No more trances,” Steven said. “I mean it. If you’re right, they only give the thing what it wants, more access to you.”

  “Fine,” Roy shot back, “but I intend to go through Ben’s journal with a fine tooth comb.”

  “I think that’s a great idea, so long as you stay awake.” Steven pulled into Roy’s driveway, but left the car running.

  “You’re not coming in?” Roy asked.

  “Nope. You get to work on that journal, see if anything pops out. I’m going to do some research on that news article and the abduction suspect.”

  “You be careful,” Roy warned, getting out of the car. “We don’t know everything we’re dealing with here, so don’t take risks.”

  “Look who’s talking,” Steven shot back, and put the car in reverse.

  Chapter Twelve

  Steven returned home from the library a little after 5 p.m. The house was trashed – the hallway was still torn up, the kitchen hadn’t been dealt with in days. Steven ignored it all and called Roy.

  “Get in your car and meet me at Bent’s in ten minutes,” Steven said.

  “I’m not hungry,” Roy replied. “Besides, I think I dug up something you should know.”

  “Well, I am hungry.” He checked his watch. “Meet me there at quarter of six. And I have something for you, too.”

  “Fine, goddamn it…” Roy said, hanging up. Steven grabbed a couple of flashlights, then rummaged in a closet for a pair of binoculars that normally only came out for concerts. He stuffed them into a duffel bag and went back downstairs and out the basement door.

  Within a few minutes he was at Bent’s. Roy wasn’t there yet, so he ordered and sat in a booth that seemed to offer the most privacy. He was three bites into his burger when Roy arrived and sat at the table.

  “You having anything?” Steven asked.

  “I told you I wasn’t hungry,” Roy replied.

  “You gotta keep your strength up. You’re an old man and I wouldn’t want to have to put you back into the hospital just because you hadn’t been eating.”

  “I’m not hungry because I already ate. And you need to show more respect for your elders.”

  Steven brushed it off. “You said you found something?”

  “Yes, I have,” said Roy. “The sections you marked in Ben’s journal aren’t the half of it. Yes, Ben hunted him down and yes, he was terrorized by the guy’s ghost. But I think Ben must have talked to the guy at some point, confronted him, had some kind of conversation with him. He knows things about him, or claims to, and he uses some terms to describe him that I had to reference in my book.”

  “Your secret book? His name was Lukas Johansen, by the way,” Steven added.

  “Sounds like you made some progress, too,” Roy said. “Well, for starters, Ben didn’t think he was human. Not that he was inhuman because he killed people, I think Ben thought he was another species altogether. We saw what he really looks like the other night, in the trance. Definitely not human. Ben keeps referring to him as a pupa, something in development. What he was changing into was some kind of being that would live forever. Ben thought this guy was trying to become immortal.”

  “What, like a vampire?” Steven asked incredulously.

  “No, not like that. Although there are some disturbing similarities as far as blood is concerned. Our friend Lukas was completing some kind of process or recipe that he needed. And here’s the horrible part, and it probably made the guy very easy for Ben to kill: it called for the bodies of children.”

  Steven stopped chewing his hamburger and stared at Roy, unsure if he should swallow.

  “I know,” said Roy, “disgusting.”

  “Are you sure?” Steven mouthed around his food.

  “No, I don’t know any of this for sure, but Ben believed it. Ben had decided this Lukas guy had abducted his son, killed him, drained him of his blood, and ingested it. And that he had done it to others, and would continue to do it, until he achieved his goal.”

  “Immortality?” Steven asked.

  “That’s what Ben thought, it’s what he’s written here. But Ben cut the guy’s plans short. Ben describes it as smashing the moth in the cocoon.”

  Steven considered this. “Sounds like he managed to eke out some immortality – he’s still terrorizing people from the grave.”

  “This guy is like a battery running with a very low charge. He needs an occasional recharge to keep going, he can’t do it on his own. When he finds someone like me, hell, I’m a fucking three course banquet to him.”

  “Can we put a stop to it?” Steven asked.

  “Don’t know,” Roy said. “Ben killed him. I don’t know how, but it obviously wasn’t enough to end things. I’m not sure how you deal with something like this.”

  “Well, I know what we’re going to do next,” Steven said, finishing his burger. “Lukas Johansen used to live two blocks from here – a house on 34th.”

  “We’re going to check it out?” Roy asked with some excitement.

  “That’s what I’m thinking.” They left the booth and headed to Steven’s car.

  -

  “That’s it straight ahead,” Steven said, pointing to a house further down the block from where they were parked.

  “How can you be sure, you can’t see the numbers from here,” Roy replied.

  Steven pulled out his cell phone and showed Roy the house on Google. “You can see every house online
. Street view.”

  “Well, that’s amazing,” Roy said.

  “You’d know that if you’d get a computer,” Steven said.

  “I don’t need every house in my phone,” Roy said.

  Steven dropped it. His father was never going to own a computer or a smartphone, and they both knew it.

  “So, what are you thinking?” Roy asked. “Stake it out? See who comes and goes?”

  Steven was using the binoculars, mindful of how he must look to any neighbors along the street who might be checking out the parked car in front of their houses. “Well,” he said, “yeah, that’s what I’m thinking. Of course, Lukas is dead, so we won’t be seeing him. At least I don’t think we will.”

  Steven scanned the front of the house. It was a turn of the century classic Victorian, but it was in need of repair and a new paint job. All of the curtains were closed except for one upstairs bedroom, and there were cracks in the glass of several of the windows. The trees and plants in front of the house were in need of pruning and weeds were abundant. The small lawn in front was a month from its last mowing. There was no garage, and from this angle they couldn’t see anything in the backyard.

  Over the course of the next hour, Steven and Roy watched as several kids came and went from the house. They were all in their early twenties and dressed in black from head to toe.

  “I’ve never seen such a thing,” said Roy.

  “What?” asked Steven.

  “All the black clothes. Is it a cult?”

  “No, they’re goth kids, Dad. It’s a style. Although from the goth kids I knew, wearing black was almost like a religion to them.”

  “I don’t get it,” Roy answered. “It’s dark enough here without running around completely in black. So they’re just kids?”

  “Yup,” Steven answered.

  “I’m gonna go talk to them,” Roy said, opening the car door.

  “Wait!” Steven cried, but Roy was already marching up the road. Steven jumped out and ran up to his dad.