I didn’t sleep the rest of that night.
I don’t sleep much at all anymore.
Eventually, my hair grew back. It doesn’t get very long, and there are places where it’s still thin, and my scalp shows through, so I wear a ball cap most of the time. My body healed, for the most part. A little stiffness sometimes in my back and neck. I suffered some permanent hearing loss—not enough to make me deaf but enough to qualify for disability. So I’ve got that going for me. I don’t have to work. Now I sit around all day, bored. At night, I do the same thing.
Once I got it back from the authorities, I traded in the Jeep and bought a blue Chevy Nova instead. Found it at the junkyard for cheap and restored it myself. New paint job and tires, rebuilt engine, chrome rims, custom upholstery. I had to get rid of the Cherokee. I didn’t have a choice. Every time I drove it, I’d think of my friends. Once, while listening to God Forbid on the way to the grocery store, I swore that I smelled Darryl’s cigarette smoke. Not a ghost. A phantom memory, of course, but a painful one. I still don’t believe in God or demons or spirits. Whitey was almost certainly supernatural, but that doesn’t prove there’s an afterlife. It just proves he had some fucked up genetics. Spirits don’t exist.
The only kind of ghosts we see are the ones we carry with us.
Mine are with me all the time. I can’t get rid of them. I’ve tried. I drink and find things to occupy my time—try to lose myself in sports and sitcoms and whatever else is on TV. Turn my music up and try to drown out the world and the voices in my head. But no matter what I do, I can’t lose my ghosts. They haunt me like those abandoned industrial parks haunt this state.
I drive out to the lake sometimes, on days like today when the weather is bad and the park is deserted. I don’t bring an umbrella. I let the rain fall where it may. I walk out onto the pier and throw stones, skipping them across the surface while the storm rages. I think about my friends and of Sondra, and especially Whitey.
They never found his body, but I don’t believe he got sucked into a sinkhole. If he had, then why wouldn’t the same thing have happened with that missing girl’s body? Her corpse was discovered.
Whitey’s is still missing.
Fish have stem cells. So do frogs, and everything else that lives in the lake. I wasn’t sure at first, so I looked it up on the internet. I found out that scientists use fish stem cells for all kinds of research. What if Whitey can use them too? What if Sondra was wrong? Sure, maybe he would have preferred the stem cells from his own offspring. Perhaps they were more powerful or gave him faster results. But what if he had no choice? What if he had to rely on the stem cells of other living creatures—like fish? There are plenty of fish at the bottom of the lake. Rasputin drowned beneath a frozen sheet of ice. Maybe there weren’t any fish around when he went. But it was summer when Whitey and I faced off on this shoreline.
What if Whitey isn’t dead?
I’m standing here on the edge of the pier, staring at my reflection on the lake’s surface, but all I can see is Whitey’s eyes and how they glared at me that day, as he slipped beneath the water.
I’m thinking about my old life. Thinking about my friends and how much I miss them. Thinking about Sondra and how much I miss her. Thinking about Whitey, too.
And while I do this, I wonder what Whitey is down there thinking about…
Did I love Sondra? Even after all this time, I still don’t know. All I know—all I’ve learned—is this.
Love and obsession both run deep.
So do these waters.
And so does revenge.
Revenge runs the deepest of all.
About the Author
BRIAN KEENE is the author of over twenty-five books, including Darkness on the Edge of Town, Take The Long Way Home, Urban Gothic, Castaways, Dark Hollow, Dead Sea, and The Rising. He’s also written comic books such as The Last Zombie, Doom Patrol and Dead of Night: Devil Slayer. His work has been translated into German, Spanish, Polish, Italian, French and Taiwanese. Several of his novels and stories have been developed for film, including Ghoul and The Ties That Bind. In addition to writing, Keene also oversees Maelstrom, his own small press publishing imprint specializing in collectible limited editions, via Thunderstorm Books. Keene’s work has been praised in such diverse places as The New York Times, The History Channel, The Howard Stern Show, CNN.com, Publisher’s Weekly, Media Bistro, Fangoria Magazine, and Rue Morgue Magazine. Keene lives in Pennsylvania. You can communicate with him online at www.briankeene.com, on Facebook at www.facebook.com/pages/Brian-Keene/189077221397 or on Twitter at @BrianKeene
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