Beneath Still Waters Read online

This sinkhole stayed.” Leeper looked around, smelling the

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  air, breathing in the place. “And a lot of people lost their

  little beach houses.” He gave a small laugh. “But they

  learned respect for nature, Dan. Respect for . . . power.”

  “So that’s why your house is on a hill.”

  Leeper shook his head. “No. Not for that reason.” His

  eyes were screwed into a permanent squint in the bright

  sunlight. “What are you scared of, Dan?”

  He smiled, made uncomfortable by the strange question.

  And it suddenly felt like he was having this dialogue with

  the moon. “I don’t know. My phone bill. My ex-wife—”

  Leeper grabbed his arm and squeezed, hard enough to

  send a quick, painful jolt traveling to Dan’s brain. “No,

  dammit, what are you scared of?”

  The question was in earnest, and if he wanted anything

  from Billy Leeper—crazy or not—he decided he should

  answer.

  “Bridges. It’s a funny thing, but—”

  “What else?” Leeper demanded.

  “I don’t know. Being trapped, not being able to

  breathe—”

  “What else?”

  And he remembered a day.

  He was ten. Tension was in the air, wafting through his

  home like some kind of smoky fire. Building, building, un-

  til everyone—his mother, his two sisters—knew that some-

  thing, something had to happen.

  His father had lost his job—Dan never knew why—and

  had come home. He started drinking, talking loudly, walk-

  ing from room to room, and the tension, the icy cold feel-

  ing in Dan’s stomach, grew.

  By the time Dan knew that it would be best to be out of

  the house, it was dark. A cold, dark November night, when

  the room lights seemed a poor replacement for the sunlight

  of a summer evening.

  Dan’s room was a mess. As usual it was filled with the

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  flotsam and jetsam of a boy’s life. Rocks, soldiers, scattered

  coverless comic books, sneakers, dirty clothes. A real pigsty.

  His father stormed into his room—on his random

  prowl—and then out again. (The voice now unrecogniz-

  able, loud, yelling his name. “Dan! Where the hell are

  you?”)

  He hesitated, but then he answered his father.

  “Have you looked at your room, that goddamn garbage

  dump of a room? Just what the hell do you—”

  His mom appeared, ready to intervene. (His sisters, one

  younger, another older, both had notice of storm warnings

  and had hidden away.)

  “I’m so tired of you screwing up this house, so sick . . .”

  he said, lingering over the last two words.

  And young Dan—prisoner—tried to explain. Which

  was a big mistake.

  “Don’t give me that crap, just don’t feed me that line—”

  And again Dan protested, then realized—too late—that

  he had pushed the wrong button.

  His father’s hand came flying out of nowhere, smacking

  him solidly across his face with a blow that knocked him

  sideways, off his feet, banging into a nearby wall and tum-

  bling down to the ground (where his father looked even

  more powerful . . . more dangerous).

  His mother yelled—a shallow, weak sound compared to

  his father’s roar.

  Dan saw something he never forgot.

  Never.

  His father wasn’t there. For that split second his father,

  who took him to ball games, who played catch with him,

  who liked to take Dan to his Little League games, was gone.

  Vanished.

  Something else was there. Ready to hurt him.

  Liking it—

  And then, with the palm of his hand glowing red, his

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  father seemed to change. He looked at Dan. His lips moved,

  then, when no words came, he turned and left the house.

  Leaving the smoky vapor of fear behind him.

  What do I fear?

  That thing.

  That horrible, living rage that was in my father that day.

  And it’s in me.

  He looked at Leeper, who nodded and started talking.

  And Dan listened to his story. . . .

  “Nobody found me that day. To tell the truth, nobody was

  looking for me. It was past midday, I could tell that from

  the sun. I got up, rubbed the bloody bruise on my head—I

  later found out I had a concussion—and started walking

  back to my house.”

  He climbed the dunes slowly now, following the natural

  rise and fall of the sandy hummocks.

  “I didn’t tell my parents what happened . . . not at first. I

  don’t know what I said. Boy, when Mom saw my cut and

  got all excited, I broke down and started crying. Then I

  grabbed her arm and yelled—actually yelled—that Jackie

  Weeks was still down there. Still in the town.”

  Leeper reached down and picked up a crumpled, rusty

  Budweiser can. “Which was a lie.”

  “A lie? But he didn’t come out with you?”

  Leeper bent the can in half. “No, he didn’t. You see,

  Jackie heard something inside the house, and he went in.”

  Leeper laughed. “Jackie was always the brave one, a real

  adventurer. A good friend. He would have loved World

  War II.” He paused. “But he didn’t come out . . . so I had to

  go in.”

  “And?”

  “Dan, the house was filled with people. Filled. All of

  them having some kind of party. Talking and laughing. In a

  few hours the water was going to come. At first I just smiled

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  and stared at the whole thing, embarrassed, half expecting

  Jackie to come bumbling over.”

  “He wasn’t there?”

  “Oh, yes, he was there. I just didn’t see him at first. I

  mean, it was dark in there. Dark, shadowy. No electricity,

  you know. It had been turned off. None. So I didn’t see

  much. Then I looked down. The floor was wet, slippery, a

  real mess. I didn’t know what it was . . . at first.”

  Dan could picture the scene perfectly, and he knew what

  it was.

  “Blood?”

  Leeper nodded. “Twelve years old, and I was standing

  in a pool of blood, all over the damn place. Then my eyes

  adjusted, and I looked at the table . . . the party table . . .

  where five or six guests were eating. And . . . and—”

  His voice caught in his throat, and it lost its gravelly,

  rock-hard steadiness, quickly degenerating into a blubber-

  ing, whimpering sound.

  “Jesus, I saw Jackie there. God, I saw him on the table,

  in pieces, strewn all over, while they picked at it, grabbed

  at the pieces . . .”

  A gull screamed. And Dan felt his heart start to beat

  faster.

  “I don’t know . . .” he started to say mindlessly, search-

  ing for something to bring some normalcy to Leeper’s

  words.

  (We need some normalcy here.)

 
; Leeper grabbed his wrist.

  “Then one of them, a woman, held up a piece, and God,

  she grinned and offered it to me. Actually held it up and—”

  He snorted and dug out a handkerchief.

  His honking blow brought a momentary release from

  his story.

  Is he crazy? Dan wondered. Lost in some kid’s Gothic

  memory?

  “One of them grabbed me, but I squirmed away—they

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  were all slipping on the floor. I ran as fast as I could . . . as fast as I could. Funny, Jackie was the real runner, the real

  bolt of lightning.”

  Leeper stopped, and Dan noticed that he was heading

  back toward his house. “And they found the house?”

  “They found nothing. No one believed my story. Hys-

  teria, I think the doctors called it. Too many Saturday

  matinees. By the time they started searching the house on

  Scott Street, there was a foot of water covering the whole

  town. But they found nothing. No blood. No Jackie. Just a

  boarded-up old brown house. They went on searching for

  days—and nights—all over the town. But I knew that he

  was gone.”

  Leeper led the way up the hill, climbing more briskly,

  as if eager to get back to his fortress.

  “That’s one hell of a story.”

  “It’s not a story.”

  “I only meant—”

  “Sure.”

  A few clouds were gathering in the east, dark clouds.

  “And after that . . . what did you do then?”

  “I went to school, lived with my family, tried to forget

  Gouldens Falls, Jackie, and the whole thing.”

  Leeper opened the door to his house and held it for Dan.

  “And did you?”

  Leeper smiled. “What do you think? You think I just put

  that little event out of my mind, went on with my normal

  life, and forgot all about it?” The smile faded. “You think

  that’s possible?”

  He walked over to the bookcase. His hand reached up

  to the top shelf and removed an old marble composition

  notebook. Its yellowed pages seemed loose.

  “This is my first notebook on Gouldens Falls . . . and

  the dam. Started it in high school.” He replaced it, then let

  his fingers trail over the remainder of the shelf, passing a

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  dozen others overstuffed with paper. “My first notebook . . .

  leading to my last. A life’s work, Dan. Crazy, huh?”

  Leeper stood there, transfixed by a dozen notebooks,

  some bulging, fat with clippings.

  “That’s how long it took me to learn about it.”

  Dan stepped closer to Leeper. He was shaking.

  “Learn about what?” Dan asked, in almost a whisper.

  “The Club,” Leeper said, turning away from the books.

  “They call themselves the Club. I learned about them,

  about Gouldens Falls, and—”

  He laughed, a hoarse, manic belly laugh that reminded

  Dan of some crazy shaman he’d once photographed in

  Kenya.

  Talking to the moon, the interpreter had explained. The

  shaman was asking the moon for its help.

  Leeper’s laugh punctuated each word.

  “And the—hah, hah—one that—oh, yeah—got away.”

  He pointed at the shelf. “They’re all yours. The torch,”

  he said with a grim chuckle, “is passed. Take them the fuck

  out of here. Today. Just don’t tell anyone where you got

  them from.” Leeper went to the window and looked out,

  at the darkening shadows on the beach.

  “ ’Cause if you do, he’ll come and get me . . . and I don’t

  want to be got. Not now.”

  The old man—suddenly a scared boy—shook against

  the window.

  “Now take them and leave.”

  T W E L V E

  James Morton liked to think of himself as a conscientious

  state employee. Though the life of an emergency safety in-

  spector was none too thrilling, it offered a nice pension;

  regular, if small, salary increases; and, when he was lucky,

  the occasional oddity.

  Like the Kenicut Dam.

  While the phrase they don’t make ’em like that anymore

  was an overused cliché, to his mind it certainly applied to

  this baby. In fact, he would have thought they didn’t even

  build them this way fifty years ago.

  First, it was done fast. Usually these small dams sank all

  the pumps and plumbing under the base of the dam, well

  into the ground. It was time-consuming, just like digging a

  caisson for a bridge, but it made the wall of the dam just

  that—a solid wall, really rooted to the bedrock.

  But this dam was rooted to a solid slab of poured con-

  crete, big, probably buried down fairly deep, but done too

  fast. And what made it worse, all the pumping stuff was in-

  side the wall. Okay for a small dam, but this wall was hold-

  ing back a good-sized lake.

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  How many hundreds of thousands of gallons of water?

  Pressing against the wall, day after day, year after year . . .

  A fast piece of work.

  Still, checking the wall as he walked down the metal

  stairs, everything looked in good shape. In fact, it looked

  reassuringly strong, with massive stone blocks on both

  sides of the spiral stairs leading down.

  The lighting, though, was for the birds. Just a random

  bulb hanging here and there.

  He began to worry as he neared the base that his tungsten

  lamp was fading, yellowing. He banged it, hoping to encour-

  age a battery to a few more minutes of light. Just long

  enough so he could check the leak . . . if there was a leak.

  “I’m getting a bit too old for all this climbing around,”

  he said, grunting. He was comfortable talking to himself—

  an occupational necessity, he conceded. It didn’t bother

  him to hear his voice echoing strangely around him, no one

  answering.

  He kind of liked it, actually.

  He let the lamp fall on the main heater pipes, snaking

  their way left and right. They looked in good condition.

  “No problem,” he said, his yellowish lamp moving back

  and forth.

  But he could smell the water.

  Then he stepped into it.

  “Shee-it,” he said, allowing himself one of his infre-

  quent lapses from his normally reserved speech. (Since

  discovering religion ten years ago, he’d become a pillar of

  his small Lutheran church. It was as much a part of his life

  as his thirty-plus years of marriage.)

  The water—ice-cold—quickly soaked his right foot. He

  stepped back onto a higher, dry step of the staircase and

  looked around for a pole or something he could stick into

  the water to check its depth.

  “Gotta be . . . something,” he said, craning right and

  left, searching for anything he could use.

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  His light dimmed a bit more.

  “Ah, c’mon,” he pleaded. “Don’t make me go all the


  way back up.”

  The fading light picked up a twisted piece of wire

  wrapped around a pipe. Not much, but he should be able to

  use it.

  “Great,” he said, leaning out over the railing. “Yeah, close

  enough now,” he said, his fingers just about touching the

  wire.

  He dug an index finger under the wire and yanked. It

  snapped off suddenly, and he tottered backward.

  “Whoa, you almost went in the sink, Morton. There,” he

  said, looking at his prize. “This’ll do fine.” He straightened

  the wire, crouched down—

  And stuck it in the water.

  The waterline went past his fingers, almost touching the

  sleeve on his New York State Public Works windbreaker.

  “Oh, boy,” he said. It was two feet at least, maybe a tad

  more.

  A trickle yesterday, and now two feet of water.

  “Not good, not good at all.”

  He stood up and started searching the northern wall for

  the source of the water.

  He found it just where the site engineer’s report said it

  would be.

  Only it wasn’t as described.

  Massetrino reported a thin crack, barely visible, with a

  tiny line of water running to the ground.

  That’s not what this was.

  The lamp blinked, and he gave it a quick bang. He could

  barely see the wall.

  No, this was like a gash in the wall, a couple of inches

  wide, and who knew how deep.

  And the water poured out of it like an open faucet, plop-

  ping down noisily onto the flooded floor.

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  “Oh, boy,” he repeated. “This is going to take some

  heavy repair work.”

  He started up the staircase. “First I’ll have to call Al-

  bany, tell Mr. Karl, get a time here on the double. Yes, sir,”

  he said, climbing the stairs. His heavy boots held the water

  uncomfortably, and he thought, When’s the last time a dam

  went down? And he knew the answer. Ridge Hill, Ten-

  nessee, 1954. Just a small dam designed to protect the wa-

  tershed . . . to help flood control. It had been built in the

  twenties, and built badly. And when it went down, it went

  all at once.

  A few people were killed . . . some kids, some people

  fishing. Some houses in the water’s path washed away.

  Now you see ’em, now you don’t.

  But there was no town on the other side of that dam. No

  town, and about one third of the amount of water.

  This?

  This would be an entirely different story. Entirely dif-