Fuck it.
He took the lid off the vial and carefully dumped a little mound on the coffee table. Two hundred bucks' worth. He flipped open his wallet and took out a credit card. Using the card, he pushed the coke into two neat lines. Next, he rolled up a five-dollar bill into a tight straw. The big shots used hundreds, but Mark's habit kept him broke. He bent over and snorted the right line into one nostril, tilted his head back, and sniffed. The coke draped a frozen sheet over the base of his skull and his heartbeat accelerated. He bent and tooted the left line into his other nostril, his nose and cheeks going numb. He wiped up the stray dust with one pinky and rubbed the dregs of the coke around his lips, then sucked his pinky clean.
Yeah. Walkin' time. Let's see what the fuck Solom's got to offer a man who's as high as a god and as lowdown as the devil.
He was at the door before he'd even thought about standing, his thoughts racing, trying to stack the images of Jett's story: goats, ghosts, some guy in a black hat, a scarecrow. Now that he was jumped up, the whole thing seemed ridiculous, yet appealing in a strange way. Like some kind of cryptic mystery. He didn't believe in the supernatural. Even though he'd read Stephen King like everybody else on the planet, he couldn't quite get his head around Katy's haunting. More likely his ex-wife was being dramatic in an effort to win sympathy from Gordon. That was just like her, making a play for attention. Maybe to divert Gordon away from Jett's problems, or to pull that selfish "me first" business that had put paid to their marriage.
Mark walked fast, down the hard-packed road and past the Happy Hollow office. A number of other cabins were tucked away in the woods, all offering the occupants privacy without ever letting them lose sight of the Pepsi machine in front of the office. Mark came to the entrance at the highway, then decided to cut across the road instead of making straight for the general store. The river beckoned, a jeweled, frothy dragon, chuckling as it slithered around rocks. The air was wet with the smell of mud and decaying vegetation, and goldenrod shimmered along the banks. The back of Mark's throat tingled, and his feet seemed to be hovering two inches above the ground with each step.
A little trail among waist-high weeds marked what was probably someone's favorite fishing hole. Mark looked up the road and saw a couple of pickup trucks parked in front of the general store's deck. A man in a denim jacket was using the pay phone. Mark headed down the trail, beggar's lice sticking to his trousers, a stray blackberry vine grabbing his sleeve. He scarcely felt the briars that stitched his forearm.
At the river's edge, the mud gave way to smooth pebbles. The water was clear as glass, though its motion distorted the colorful stones along the bottom. A fish raced by, sparkling in the diffracted sunlight before disappearing in a deep, shadowed pool beneath the branches of a drooping sycamore. Nature was a trip. He'd have to get out more.
He was about to walk back to the road and see if the phone was free when something splashed upstream. An old concrete dam spanned the river fifty yards away, though it was more holes than anything. A decrepit mill sagged at one end of the dam, a wooden waterwheel dipping into a gray concrete channel. Most of the wheel's paddles were missing, so it didn't turn steadily. Instead, it juddered and spun a few feet at a time, wobbling like a giant tire with loose lug nuts.
"Help!" someone shouted.
The sound had come from the same general direction as the splash. The white noise of the rushing water confused Mark, or maybe it was the Peruvian flake banging pipes in his brain. He started up the bank toward the sound. That was when he saw the boy attached to the paddle wheel. It looked like his clothes had snagged and he was pushed under the water. Mark waded into the river and fought against the current.
The wheel turned, lifting the boy, who looked to be no more than ten. He was dressed in ragged overalls and a flannel underwear shirt, and as the wheel brought the boy higher into the sky, water poured from his bare feet. The boy was silent, but had seen Mark and raised a weak, desperate hand toward him. Mark plowed through the knee-deep water. The coke had kicked in enough that the river seemed no more powerful than the spit of a garden hose, but time had stretched out so that Mark didn't seem to be making any progress. The wheel took another hesitant roll and the boy was now at the top, his back arched against the metal framework.
As Mark watched, realizing he should have run up the road and then down to the dam, the wheel moved again, and the boy descended headfirst toward the water. His dark hair hung like a dirty mop as he struggled to free himself. He grabbed one of his overall buckles as if to unfasten it, but bis fingers weren't strong enough to fight his weight against the strap. Mark was twenty yards from the boy now, sticking to the shallows near the overgrown banks, kicking water into his face as he ran, knees high like an old-fashioned fallback's. The boy's head went under, and the wheel seemed to hesitate, as if chocked by the boy's head pressed against the bottom of the channel. The wire-and-wood frame shook as the boy's legs flailed in the air. Then the wheel turned again, dragging the boy fully under and pinning him on his belly.
The water was deep near the base of the dam, the edges rimmed with stonework. Mark had to swim the last ten yards, though the current was much weaker where the force of the water spent itself straight downward. He reached the dam and grabbed a chunk of shattered concrete, pulling himself out of the water. He couldn't tell if it was an effect of the cocaine or the angle of the sun off the water, but the drops that poured around him each seemed to contain a tiny rainbow.
The wheel still juddered in place, hung up because of the boy lodged at its lowest point. Mark pulled himself over to the channel, scrabbling for purchase on the slick and jagged concrete. He reached the wheel, wondering if the boy had already drowned, wondering how he could fight thousands of gallons of water, wondering if he'd failed somebody again. Just as he reached the wheel, it issued a moist, rusty groan and turned. Mark braced himself, expecting to see the boy's slack face, eyes shocked wide in death.
Instead, the wheel was bare, save for a few wooden blades dangling from the metal frame.
Mark looked into the river below. The boy couldn't have plunged past without Mark's seeing. He eased along the top of the dam and examined the upstream edge of the wheel. No body.
Shit. Cocaine didn't give you hallucinations. Not unless you were in the screaming pink pain of serious withdrawal.
Mark scanned the road that ran parallel to the river. Through the trees, the general store stood with its green metal roof, white siding boards, and black shutters. Farther upstream was the wooden covered bridge marking the highway that led to Titusville. An old house, its windows broken, huddled at a high bank of the river, boards warped where past floods had touched it. Solom seemed abandoned, as if everyone had driven away for the season and locked up their buildings.
Mark pushed his hair out of his eyes. The water upstream looked too deep to wade, and he was too weary to try it with his sodden clothes. He'd have to navigate the top of the dam, walk to the other side of the river, and push through the weeds to the covered bridge. The wheel clicked forward a few feet, like a roulette given a halfhearted nudge.
That's when Mark looked at the window of the mill house. In the shadows stood a man in a hat, which might have been black like the one Jett had described. Mark couldn't discern any features, but he was struck with the notion of being watched. The man was motionless for a moment before slipping into the deeper darkness of the ruins.