The Jetty Read online

Jack’s face didn’t change, as if he weren’t even capable of hearing

  Michael’s voice. What was this thing wearing Jack’s face?

  “I tried to warn you,” Jack said, raising his voice just slightly. “‘Don’t trifle with them,’ I said, but you wouldn’t listen.” Jack straightened up, his arms bent casually, fingers sliding into his front pants pockets.

  “I listened, Jack, I . . . ” Michael started walking again, approaching the last pew, where he would have to turn the corner and walk toward Jack. It would be futile to turn and run back the way he had come. Even if he could reach the front of the chapel before Jack – very unlikely; Jack was faster than Michael – Michael’s only escape would be the door into that narrow dark hallway. The idea of plunging into that tunnel closely followed by a pursuing figure didn’t sound like escape. It sounded like madness. Instead Michael raised his voice and spoke the words “not trifling” as if there were nothing wrong between them, as if his legs weren’t trembling as he thought of approaching his new acquaintance.

  “Michael, I warned you.”

  Jack’s voice was still light and bantering, but it had an undertone of bedrock. It demanded explanation. Jack was still walking, almost to the end of the center aisle.

  Jack’s grin split his face. For an instant Michael imagined the corners of Jack’s mouth continuing to open, in a crack encircling Jack’s head, until the top of the head fell back and off and something hideous emerged. But the grin remained in place, easy-going and confident.

  Michael turned the corner, approaching Jack as if in sympathy for him. What he was really approaching was the front door of the church. Jack turned the other corner and stopped, standing in Michael’s path. Michael saw that Jack’s feet were bare. There were wet footprints on the carpet behind him.

  “Forever,” Jack said. “That’s my problem.” Michael hadn’t seen him move, but Jack seemed to be more directly in Michael’s path, planted there, legs spread. Jack’s stare never left Michael’s face, his eyes holding a resolute sadness as if he’d been betrayed and was determined to do something about it.

  Michael was steeling himself for the walk toward the door when suddenly, with his feet still rooted to the floor, Jack moved. His face was suddenly right in front of Michael’s, nose to nose. Jack’s upper body in the white shirt was stretched ten feet, in an amorphous flow. Michael gasped and tried to jerk back, but Jack grabbed him, which made Michael gasp again. Jack’s fingers, just above Michael’s elbow, were like bands of cold metal. Michael made a strangled noise and tried to pull away. But the hand’s grip was remorseless.

  Jack snapped back into solidity. He was standing at Michael’s side,

  looking normal again, but his face was rigid as if he were straining to keep something locked inside his body. His grip on Michael’s arm became even tighter. “Your problem,” Jack said fiercely, “is that if you don’t leave the island you’re going to die.”

  “All right, Jack!”

  Jack smiled. His hand released Michael’s arm but he could still feel the grip. Jack’s fingers seemed to have dug icy furrows into Michael’s arm. Cold still emanated from the spot, making Michael’s whole arm stiff. He touched it surreptitiously with his other hand.

  Even in Jack’s moment of anger, his face remained pale. Blood didn’t fill his face. He didn’t have any blood. Michael no longer enjoyed the pleasant illusion that Jack was alive after all. There was no question what Jack was.

  “They know what you’re doing here. Checking up on them.”

  They. Them. Michael wasn’t concerned about them in the least. Jack

  was enough to keep him frightened.

  “I won’t tell anyone. I promise.” “What won’t you tell them, Michael?” “I won’t tell them anything.”

  Jack touched Michael’s back in a friendly way, but the touch made Michael jerk forward the way a cattle prod would have. They walked on toward the church door, side by side.

  “I believe you,” Jack said, switching his voice to a casual chatty tone. “But unfortunately, they don’t.”

  There was something outsized about Jack. It started with his laugh. An echo in his voice, as if it were being reprised by an unearthly chorus. When Jack grew angry, he seemed to grow beyond the boundaries of his skin – which were, after all, arbitrary and unreal. His appearance seemed to be whatever he wished. The air was chilled with the threat of transformation.

  They reached the door of the church, chatting like old pals, their

  friendship restored. But Michael was not soothed. He was afraid that when they reached the door of the church he would find it locked; find himself trapped with the thing in the guise of a real person.

  “Well, I –” Michael said, but instead of trying to complete a thought he lunged for the handle of the door. Jack made a startled noise, giving Michael the satisfaction of knowing he had taken him by surprise.

  And the room went black. Michael, lunging forward from the force of his eagerness, reached for the door handle, but his hand closed on nothing, and he fell. Rising to his knees, he groped forward. The door should have been right in front of him, but his swinging arm hit nothing.

  Michael looked back over his shoulder, thinking he might run back to the stained glass window and crash through it, but there was no sign of the window; no lighter patches in the darkness.

  He heard Jack moving close to him and he cowered away from the sound. Jack seemed lost too. He even called out, “Michael?” and then made a strangled sound.

  The air was dank and very close, as if the tall old chapel had shrunk to the size of a closet. The humid air almost clogged Michael’s throat. He scrambled to his feet. He was trying to reach the door of the church, but running mattered more than direction. If he ran into something, at least he’d have some clue where he was.

  He did. His groping arms must have passed on either side of the object, because Michael’s face ran right into it. It was soft, like human flesh, but then unlike flesh. It clung to him as he tried to pull away.

  Michael gave a short, chopped scream of revulsion and tried frantically to pull back. From the darkness came a low chuckle, close to his ear. Arms wrapped themselves around him. Fingers gripped his back.

  Michael screamed again, and flung his arms outward like a prisoner breaking the shackles on his wrists. He was strong in his panic, stronger than any specter. He broke free, ducked his head, and ran. Something grabbed at him, but he got away.

  Then he tripped and fell full length onto the floor. It wasn’t a hardwood floor where he landed, it was dirt, hard-packed dirt like in a cave. Michael lay there for a moment panting, afraid to run again. He could feel things close at hand, some of them merely obstacles, some of them moving. Again he heard the grating chuckle, the rasping of a voice long unused.

  Then all sound stopped, and all movement. It was as if everything in the darkness had been startled by a new intrusion. This is my chance, Michael thought, but he discovered he couldn’t move.

  The darkness was no longer complete. There was a glow somewhere, but not as from an electric light or even a candle. The glow was reddish. Michael turned his head to look for the source of it. Thirty yards away he saw the glow. Two pinpricks of it in the darkness, close together. Two red coals, like peepholes cut into the door of a room that was on fire.

  Eyes.

  And the smell in the church had changed. Once musty and smothering, like layers of old clothes that had lain too long in an attic, the smell now was sharp and acrid. Michael heard a grunting sound that made the hairs stand up on his arms and the back of his neck. He wasn’t sure of the distance or the angle, so he couldn’t tell how high the red eyes stood from the ground, but they seemed to be taller than Michael’s head.

  Jack’s voice suddenly cut through the air. “Michael, run!”

  Michael didn’t want to. He wanted to just lie where he was and try to burrow down into the ground. But after the shouted warning the eyes turned, slowly, seeming to take in everything in the dar
kness, then stopped, facing Michael. They came lower.

  No time for options now! No time for a, b, or c. Just survive. Just run! And Michael got up and did run in the only direction possible: away from those glowing eyes. Behind him he heard the grunting sound again, and a rushing sound, not like footsteps. Like a train coming.

  He banged into something, maybe the arm of a pew. His thigh felt

  bruised, and began throbbing, but he couldn’t dwell on that. He ran on, daring to look back over his shoulder. The eyes were enormous. They were right behind him. He screamed and threw up his hands. The glowing red coals expanded as they came toward him. They weren’t eyes, they were windows into Hell. They engulfed him.

  Michael was on fire. He was inside the red glow. It illumined everything. The whole sanctuary was blazing. It was falling into ruins. The roof was coming down on his head, dropping more burning coals onto him. He heard the sound of screams, and knew they came from souls that should have been dead, and were dead, but didn’t know it in their agony.

  Through the fire, down the center aisle of the church, a figure was coming toward Michael, almost as fast as the red glow had come, a black, shambling shape that absorbed color and light. It was the only object not on fire. It came on relentlessly. Arms separated themselves out of the black mass and reached out toward him. Michael tried to run backward away from it, but he tripped on something and started to fall.

  Hands grabbed him. He was lifted so that he managed to regain his footing. Instead of falling to the ground he stumbled back several steps until his shoulders slammed into the wall. The jolt to his head seemed to blind him. The room went dark again. Michael shuddered and tried to cover his face.

  Light opened beside him. He was leaning back against the door of the church and it opened.

  Michael ran, down the steps of the church, out into the main street of town. Even in the light that seemed so bright after the darkness in the church, he felt pursued.

  Where was Michael?

  Kathy drove, glancing into store windows. Finding a single person even in a town as small as Port Aransas seemed hopeless. Michael must be on this one short stretch of Alister, though. She drove slowly down the

  street, from the stop light to the public library where she was supposed to meet Michael. She looked only to the right, not sparing glances at the police station or baseball diamond or white church on the other side of the street, because Michael would have had no reason to go any of those places. There were people coming in and out of the stores on the other side of the street, but none of them was Michael. Where was he?

  When she’d found the town library empty, Kathy had panicked. Where could he have gone? Had he decided to leave? Had he figured it out about Jack? If he had, he had every right to go. What if he was hurt, or dead? She was overreacting, she knew she was overreacting, but she couldn’t help it. Something was playing with Kathy’s emotions on this leaden day.

  She turned around and drove back to the stop light and across it to the harbor area of little cafés. The restaurants and bars were close to the library; Michael might have gone into one. She glanced into a couple, entered a third. The places were all nearly empty in mid-afternoon. Before she could duck out of the last one the bartender alertly asked her what she was having, so she sat and had a beer. There was nothing better to do.

  Crazy thoughts were crowding close to her, pulling up chairs at the table like old friends. She gulped down the last of her beer, threw money on the table, and walked out.

  When she reached her car, she saw Jack leaning against the Subaru’s

  driver’s door.

  “Jack, have you seen Michael?” “I’ve seen him,” he said.

  “Then where is he? Is he okay?”

  “Michael’s fine. A little frightened, but fine.”

  “Thank goodness,” she said. Jack put his arms around her as if he expected a reward for being the bearer of good news. Kathy was so relieved; Michael wasn’t injured or dead. She was so comforted that she

  hardly noticed Jack’s embrace. So elated, that when Jack kissed her, she didn’t even resist. She had expected a quick brush of the lips, but Jack extended the kiss more aggressively. She broke away from him. He smiled like a soldier, a victor in an early skirmish.

  “Start the car,” Jack said, going around to the passenger side. “I want to show you something.”

  Kathy followed directions, like a hostage. Unconsciously, she began changing as soon as she was in Jack’s presence. His aura enveloped her. It wasn’t that everything he said sounded like the most reasonable thing she’d ever heard. It was that with him she felt they were the only two real people. Everyone and everything else shimmered into insubstantiability. With Jack she became as special as he was. It was only natural that they were together.

  Today, there was something different about him though, and her feelings about him changed too. She couldn’t say what exactly, but she was uneasy. She was frightened, but still irresistibly attracted to him. Michael had said he was dangerous, now she was beginning to think he was right. There was something not normal about him.

  When the road ended at the beach, Jack reached across and gently tugged at the steering wheel, turning it toward him. Kathy turned the car that way, to the right, away from the more populous part of the beach – outbound, to where human habitations dwindled to nothing. She didn’t want to go that way. She didn’t want to be in the car with Jack in the passenger seat. But she was helpless. Her hands had dropped to the bottom of the steering wheel, almost into her lap. She couldn’t feel her foot on the gas pedal. Her breathing was so shallow it didn’t make her chest rise or fall. She couldn’t turn her head.

  The beach was lonely. In this gloomy dusk, post-Labor Day, there was almost no one about. Out in the water in high waders a fisherman was barely visible. Light caught on his pole as he cast. Kathy drove on.

  Even without turning her head she remained aware of Jack next to

  her. It would have been nice to pretend he was a momentary illusion but she knew better. He’d come for her, as she’d known he would. She was in a state of mindlessness. She had expected this, this sliding over the edge of sanity. She’d always been aware of that horizon. She continued to drive.

  Jack directed her through multiple turnings and onto a side street, driving until she found herself on a road that ran past the marine research center and down to the beach again, coming out close to the main jetty that stuck like a rocky finger out into the Gulf. The wind-tossed waves made the jetty seem like the only solid thing in sight. Kathy turned and drove along the beach.

  “Stop here,” Jack said. His voice was startling, it was so ordinary. Someone had left a yellow beach umbrella stuck in the sand, almost as if marking the place. Jack indicated for Kathy to pull up beside the umbrella. What was he going to do? She turned to him. Jack smiled at her.

  “You’d better stop the car,” he said. “You’re going to drive into the water.”

  Kathy didn’t respond. The car inched forward. Jack moved closer to her, reached his leg easily over the console, and stepped on the brake himself. His leg lay against hers.

  Kathy stared at him, looking for some telltale sign, but found none. His eyes? They were pale and gray – but full of life. The small bump that raised one eyebrow ever so slightly? It was all too human. A scar; the slight tilt of his nose; the way, when he smiled, one side of his upper lip lifted just fractionally higher than the other side. If he was an illusion, he was a faultless one. But still, there was something abnormal, even if it was not visible.

  She jerked her leg away from his. Her whole body flung itself backward, pinning her back against the car door. Her scrabbling hand found the handle and pulled. The door opened with such force, propelled by her fear, that she fell backward onto the sand. Her feet were still inside the car. She jerked them out as if from a fire, and somersaulted backwards,

  landing on her feet and rising upright so fast she didn’t know how she’d gotten there. Then momentu
m died in her. She stood staring at the car, at its open door, wanting to run but not wanting to turn her back.

  The car’s other door opened slowly, with the creak of a tired spring. Nothing happened. She was suddenly terrified with the idea that she could no longer see him; he could be right beside her, all around. She put her hands out defensively.

  Jack’s head rose into view on the other side of the car, unmoored, like a child’s balloon drifting upward. Kathy almost screamed before she saw that no, his head was still on his neck and shoulders, but in the dimness his skin and his shirt were as colorless as the sand behind him, and blended into the background. It was his eyes that kept him from fading to nothing. His eyes that looked as if they could pull her in.

  In another moment he would reach for her, he would take her, Kathy would be dragged under, beneath the waves or the car or the sand, she didn’t know, she only knew that her life was about to end. Her body was already shutting down, preparing for the last numbness. She couldn’t feel anything.

  “Kathy. I’m real.”

  His voice again. A not-so-familiar voice, like memory speaking. It anchored her for a moment, it gave her a handhold to grab.

  Well, that is what a hallucination would say, wasn’t it? She felt no reassurance. Madness was supposed to be alluring; it was supposed to put its victim at peace. Where was that calm of insanity?

  He spoke again. “It is me.”

  He/it stepped back, letting the car door shut, and moved to the side so she could see it across the hood of the car, from the waist up. He/it wore a broadly striped shirt. But the shirt’s stripes began to fade. Now the shirt was as colorless as Jack, as if Kathy were gradually going blind, first losing the ability to take in colors.

  The vision took another step to its right, toward the front of the car.