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“Because they want me to stay,” I whispered.
I took a shower, put on a pair of gym shorts, closed the door to the en suite bathroom, and lay down on Greg Ackerman’s big double bed. As a more-or-less swinging bachelor, he’d probably shared it with any number of honeys. My own honey was gone. In the ground. Like my son.
I crossed my arms over my chest in an unconscious gesture of protection and stared up at the ceiling. It hadn’t been her, it had been them. They wanted me to stay. They wanted to work on me. They wanted me to take over from their mother, so they wouldn’t have to go to wherever uneasy revenants go to. They liked it right here on Rattlesnake Key. Where—if I didn’t want my head filled with tumbling and repetitive thoughts, if I didn’t want to hear the stroller’s squeaky wheel behind me—I would live in Allie’s house. I would eat in Allie’s kitchen and sleep in Allie’s bed. I would push them in their stroller.
I would eventually come to see them.
I don’t have to stay here, I thought. I’ve got a rental car with a full tank of gas. I can get away. Away from them. I don’t think the County Sheriff will issue a warrant for my arrest, although some judge might issue a bench warrant ordering me to come back pending the inquest… Rutherford would know, and I guess he’s my lawyer now… but I’d fight it. And while the lawyers wrangled, Jake and Joe would be getting weaker. Because she’s gone and I’m what they have.
Yes. All true enough. And I was scared, you can believe that. There’s a line from Scorsese’s Mean Streets that’s always resonated with me: “You don’t fuck around with the infinite.” But I was also angry. I had been put in a box I wasn’t supposed to escape. Not by their mother—in my heart I was sure that Allie Bell hadn’t been in on this—but by a couple of kids. Dead kids, in fact.
I had no secret weapon to fight them with, no cross or garlic to ward off vampires (which, if I was right, is sort of what they were), no rite of exorcism, but I had my mind, and I was too damn old to be pushed around by Bad and Badder.
If Allie hadn’t built the box I was in, how could they have done it? Most little boys—I had one, remember—can hardly plan a trip to the bathroom.
I fell asleep thinking of Donna, minutes from her end: You’re all grown up! Look how tall you are!
Squeak. Squeak. Squeak.
I didn’t come awake in the dark at least, because I hadn’t turned off the lights. This time the stroller’s squeaky wheel wasn’t coming from the en suite; it was further away. I thought it was in the part of the house Greg grandly called “the guest quarters.” Those quarters consisted of a small living room on the ground floor and a spiral staircase leading up to a bedroom and attached bathroom on the second.
The stroller was in the guest bedroom. The real stroller might be still in the garage, but the ghostly one was also real, and so were the twins pushing it so maniacally back and forth.
The thoughts seeped back in. They were low at first but grew louder, as if an unseen hand was turning up the volume. See us, roll us, dress us. See us, roll us, dress us! SEE US, ROLL US, DRESS US!
I lay on my back, clutching my hands together on my chest, biting my lip, trying to make the thoughts—their thoughts, my thoughts—stop. I might as well have insisted that the sun not go down. I could still think other thoughts—how long that would last I didn’t know—and there seemed to be only three courses of action I could pursue: lie here and go mad once those earworms swallowed everything; go down and touch the stroller in the garage, which would silence them for the time being; or confront the twins. That’s what I decided to do.
I thought, I won’t be driven mad by children.
And I thought, roll us, roll us, push us, push us. We’re yours, you’re ours.
I got off the bed and started down the upstairs gallery to the guest quarters. Halfway there the squeaking wheel stopped. I didn’t, and the thoughts—roll us, push us, dress us, we’re yours, you’re ours—didn’t, either. I didn’t hesitate at the door, which was ajar. If I had stopped to think in the part of my mind that was still capable of independent thought, I would have turned tail and run. What was I going to do in there? I had no idea. Telling them to go home or get a spanking certainly wouldn’t work.
What I saw froze me in place. The stroller was beached in the middle of the floor. Jacob and Joseph were in the guest bed. They were no longer children… yet they were. The bodies under the coverlet were long, the bodies of full-grown men, but the heads, although grotesquely swollen, were those of children. Rattlesnake poison had so bloated those heads that they had become pumpkins with Halloween faces. Their lips were black. Their foreheads, cheeks, and necks were stippled with snakebites. The eyes were sunken but hellishly alive and aware. They were grinning at me.
Bedtime story! Bedtime story! Bedti—
Then they were gone. The stroller was gone. One minute the twins were there, waiting for their bedtime story. At the next the room was empty. But the coverlet was turned down on both sides in neat triangles, and that bed had been perfectly made when I came here from Massachusetts. I had seen it for myself.
My legs were stilt legs again. I went into the room on them and looked at the bed where the boys had been. I didn’t mean to sit on it but I did because my knees gave out. My heart was still thundering away and I could hear myself, as at a distance, gasping for breath.
This is how old men die, I thought. When I’m found—probably by Pete Ito—the medical examiner would conclude it was a heart attack. They wouldn’t know I had been scared to death by two dead men with the heads of children.
Only the twins wouldn’t like me to die, would they? Now that their mother was gone, I was their only link to the world in which they wanted to stay.
I reached out to touch a turned-down triangle of coverlet with each hand and knew they didn’t like this bed. They had their own beds in the house down the road. Good beds. Their mother would have kept their room just the way it had been on the day they died, forty-some years ago. Those were the beds they liked, and when I lived there I would tuck them in at night and read them Winnie-the-Pooh, as I had to Tad. I certainly wouldn’t read them Tad’s Monster Words, because they were the monsters.
When I could get up, I walked slowly back down to the gallery to my own room. I might not sleep, but I didn’t think I’d hear the stroller’s squeaky wheel again that night. The visitation was over.
There was never a question of keeping the car in which my son had died. We wouldn’t have kept it even if it hadn’t been bashed at a dozen places by the dog trying to get in and get at them. A wrecker brought it back to our house. Donna refused to even look at that, either. I didn’t blame her.
There was no junkyard in Castle Rock. The closest was Andretti’s, in Gates Falls. I called them. They came, got the Pinto—the death car—and ran it through the crusher. What came out was a cube shot through with bright seams of glass—windows, taillights, headlights, windshield. I took a picture. Donna wouldn’t look at it.
By then the arguments had started. She wanted me to go on her weekly pilgrimages to Harmony Hill, where Tad was buried. I refused that as she had refused to look at the crushed cube of the death car. I said Tad was at the house for me, and always would be. She said that sounded highflown and noble, but it wasn’t true. She said I was afraid to go. Afraid I’d break down, and of course she was right. I imagine she saw it in my face every time she looked at me.
She was the one who moved out. I came back from a business trip to Boston and she was gone. There was a note. It said the usual things, you can probably guess: Can’t go on this way… start a new life… turn the page… blah-blah-blah. The only really original thing was the line she’d scrawled under her name, perhaps as an afterthought: I’m still in love with you and I hate you and I’m leaving before hate gets the upper hand.
Probably I don’t have to tell you I felt the same way about her.
