The Sleepwalkers Read online

  Bean laughs. “God, here you go again with the journalism bit. Does everything have to be an investigative report for you? This was supposed to be a vacation.”

  Caleb looks at his friend. “Alright. Tomorrow we’ll go to the beach, okay?”

  “The beach is cool, but I’m talking about going home, man. This place sucks. It’s humid, the people are like redneck zombies, with the exception of your buddy who gave us the pie and . . . let’s see, what else? Well, your dad’s gone, we’re staying in an abandoned, probably condemned, rat-infested shitbox, there are no chicks here who aren’t wards of the state, and let’s not forget numero uno, we live on the beach already! Why are we here? Your friend is nuts, mystery solved.”

  “But she has no one else to help her,” Caleb says.

  “What about her mom?” Bean says. “She even said in her letter that her mom gets weekly reports about her progress.”

  “Her mom got a little weird after Anna went missing . . . I don’t know if she’d be much help.”

  “There you go! Her mom is nuts, she’s nuts, case closed.”

  Caleb looks at his friend. “You really want to get out of here that bad?”

  “Yes!” says Bean. “I got places to be, ladies to do, my friend. And while we’re in Podunkville, USA, none of that is happening. I vote we go back tomorrow.”

  The fire pops and a spark shoots up the chimney. There’s a scuttling sound from upstairs. Probably a rat. Bean is right. What can they do for Christine anyway? She’s already getting professional help.

  Still, a tiny voice of protest in Caleb’s head won’t shut up. He tries to reason with it, he tries to ignore it, but it keeps whispering in his ear as he watches the gyrating, primal dance of the flame. It whispers to him like Christine did earlier. And it won’t be ignored.

  Bean is humming Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You,” and putting a marshmallow on a stick to sacrifice to the fire god in that ancient ritual called “s’mores” when Caleb makes his decision.

  “Okay,” he says. “We’ll leave tomorrow. But there’s one stop we have to make tonight.”

  “What’s that?” Bean asks warily.

  Caleb is staring at the fire again. “Remember when that guy said we should go see the witch?”

  The flashlight beams cut through the night like shears through layer after layer of thick, black velvet. It’s a long walk. Branches claw and unseen things rustle in the weeds, always just out of the light. The path is uneven, studded with roots and puddles and branches. Sometimes it’s not really even a path at all; still, Caleb seems to know his way, leading them onward with step after determined step. Shrouds of Spanish moss hang all around them like wisps of lingering smoke. They pass the huge, deformed stump of a long-rotten tree. Bean’s light flashes over it, revealing a nest of crawling bugs—a kind he doesn’t recognize. All he knows is they’re big. He looks away and keeps walking.

  Caleb’s thoughts race through his mind like a fire through a meadow: I don’t like this. I don’t like it here. This is not my home. This isn’t what I remember. There’s something about Christine, something in her letter—damn spiderweb. (He brushes it from his face.) Nothing worse than walking in the forest and catching a mouth full of spider-webs. Big-ass spiders in this forest. Remember plucking their legs off, me and Christine. And Anna. Why do I always forget she was there? How awful, to be forgotten. Jesus, Bean sounds like a steam engine back there, out-of-shape bastard. A few more sit-ups and a little less beer maybe, buddy. I’m lucky he’s behind me at all. Who else would follow me here? We shouldn’t be here. We don’t belong here. I don’t belong anywhere. But no one belongs here. I don’t remember the path angling left here; I remember it angling right. I remember for sure there was a big rose-colored piece of granite. See, this is what I’m talking about—this isn’t right.

  And that’s when he hears it. He tries to pretend it’s nothing—just part of a song he’s singing in his mind, maybe, just some atonal notes strung together to drown out the sound of bugs, the sound of fear. He glances at Bean. Bean isn’t behind him. For an instant, he feels his heart quicken—then he sees his friend, maybe ten yards back, standing still. Listening. He’s standing under one of the rare breaks in the leafy canopy through which moonlight has been able to spill through. And from the look on his face, Caleb knows he hears the singing too.

  “What the hell is that?” Bean asks.

  “What?”

  “It’s freakin’ eerie,” says Bean. He doesn’t move.

  “Probably just . . .” and Caleb has no platitude to fit this. This is inhuman singing. Chanting.

  The devil is close. Her words blow through every synapse in his brain.

  But Christine is crazy, isn’t she?

  They walk on.

  This whole thing is screwed. He shouldn’t have brought Bean. He has to get his friend out of here.

  “Do you want to go back?” asks Caleb suddenly. Bean clearly does. He’s sweating badly and keeps looking over his shoulder at nothing.

  “Do you?” Bean asks.

  Caleb does want to go back. And not even just back to his dad’s house, but back to Malibu. Back home, to surf and go for runs on the beach every morning, to get ready for college, read some good books, to meet Amber at a hotel in Santa Barbara and screw her and bask in the secret thought that he doesn’t really care about her anyway. To do some writing, maybe even finally get something in the LA Times. These are all things that Caleb understands. Here, he understands nothing.

  The singing starts up again. It’s a howl now, chopped up with a few explosive consonants that ring through the woods like gunshots.

  Caleb looks in the direction of the sound. He whispers: “Look, I think the witch the guy was talking about is Christine’s mother. The kids in school always used to make fun of her, saying her mom was a witch and everything. I only met her a few times, but she seemed okay—and they say kids are the best judges of character, right?”

  Bean gives him a wary look.

  “Okay, man.” Caleb says, “I promise, if everything is cool with Christine’s mom, and we still think that Christine is just a crazy girl getting the help she needs, I swear we’ll get on a plane tomorrow, deal?”

  Bean looks at his friend and exhales heavily. “Deal.”

  “But we have to talk to her mom tonight,” says Caleb.

  “Dude, I said ‘deal.’ Move your ass before I renege.”

  Caleb turns and takes a step forward to lead the way—and sees that he has come to a fork in the path.

  “Whoa . . . ” he says, half to himself. “I don’t remember a split here.”

  “Stop trying to scare me, dickhole,” says Bean. “Which way?”

  “This way,” Caleb says, leading his friend down the left fork. What he doesn’t mention is that he wasn’t trying to frighten Bean at all. In fact, Caleb is the scared one. Because the path is changing.

  Above, it looks like a Van Gogh painting. A field of stars. That’s how Caleb describes it to himself later. There’s a clearing, mowed and empty of everything but a crappy trailer and an old, rusting propane tank. Light spills from the windows of the trailer across the brown, parched lawn— in fact, every light in the place seems to be on, judging by the beacon-like aspect of the little square panes of glass. And above, stars pepper the sky, sloppy traces of a higher power, maybe, like Jesus’s breadcrumbs or God’s dandruff. There’s something in the air. It’s heavy. Not just humidity, either. Something humming. Something hissing. Caleb doesn’t like it.

  The singing is coming from behind the trailer. And it’s louder now, a shrill warble. Like some terrible battle cry, it crescendos loud enough to pierce reality before degenerating into barely audible chattering.

  “I do not like this,” says Bean.

  “I do not like it, Sam I am,” says Caleb, feigning a grin. He steps into the clearing. Bean follows like his shadow. They make a wide arc around the trailer, passing in and out of the glare from the trailer windows. Caleb
is struck for the second time that day by the stillness of a place.

  This is what it’ll be like on doomsday, he thinks, but he doesn’t know where the thought came from. Certainly it isn’t his. He isn’t a morbid guy. He’s a guy who believes in . . . what? He doesn’t know how to finish the thought and doesn’t have to, because around the corner of the rundown trailer, on the other side of the clearing, underneath the wide-reaching arms of an ancient live oak, a bonfire burns. Caleb hurries toward it.

  “Hey, man—I don’t think we should . . . ” Bean begins, “I don’t know if we . . . ”

  But Caleb is already striding with determination, so fast Bean can hardly keep up. He senses his friend lagging behind, but something, some impulse deeper than will, stronger than desire, pushes him onward. The singing is everything now, as bone-chilling as the roar of a siren but gilded with words of a tongue he doesn’t understand, and doesn’t want to.

  Caleb is getting close now, almost into the ring of firelight, and he can see clearly that all the ear-splitting sounds come from the lips of one woman. She kneels, shirtless, her dark, gray-streaked hair spilling over her face and down to her bare chest, which looks as ashen as the skin of a corpse in the moonlight. She wears a dark skirt, which seems to seep from her waist into the grass around her like liquid. Caleb follows her downturned gaze to a small book, sitting open at her knees. Next to her left hand is what looks like a cowbell, but there’s no mistaking what lies next to her right hand, half-obscured in the grass. It’s a big, serrated knife.

  The woman’s song deteriorates into another bout of guttural clicks and snapped, unintelligible phrases, and that’s when Caleb does it:

  “Ma’am?” he says.

  The woman’s eyes snap up from the book and her song pinches into a scream—whether it’s anger at being interrupted, fright at their sudden appearance, or simply another phrase in the song, he can’t tell.

  Instantly, the woman snaps her mouth shut. With one groping hand she seizes the cowbell, and with the other hand she scoops something out of the grass. She leaps directly over the probably three-foot-tall bonfire, and stands before the guys, brandishing what now looks to be a bowie-style survival knife in one hand, and ringing the bell violently with the other.

  “It’s okay,” says Caleb to Bean, trying to sound as calm as possible.

  He takes a step forward.

  “Don’t break the circle,” the woman says fiercely.

  Caleb stops and puts his hands up. He glances at his feet and sees there is indeed a circle made of some kind of white powder that stretches around the bonfire.

  “There are spirits here that will drag you into the netherworld, where no eyes see and no lips speak,” the woman yells with wild wolf ’s eyes.

  “Say your names,” she commands. The clangor of the cowbell is maddening.

  “Benjamin Michael Friedman,” says Bean.

  “Billy Mason,” says Caleb.

  The witch freezes, her bell clanging its last clang. She squints at Caleb, leaning forward as if trying to read some distant word.

  “Billy? You’re the little boy that was friend to my Annie?”

  “Yes,” he says, relieved. “You remember me.”

  “Don’t move.” She jabs her knife in the air. “My Annie was only a little girl, and you’re halfway a man. Yer a liar.”

  She drops the bell. It lands in the grass with a metallic clank.

  “I’m not lying. It’s me, Billy. I visited Christine at the Dream Center. I wanted to come and talk to you. This is my friend. I swear to God it’s me. I remember you used to make the cookies with the M&M’s because Christine used to sneak me some. It’s me, Billy.”

  The witch says nothing. She slowly turns the knife in her hand, as if twisting the blade in the heart of some unseen beast. She stares at Caleb.

  “Where’s my Annie?” she demands finally.

  “I don’t know, Mrs. Zikry,” says Caleb. “I wish I did.”

  In the moment that ensues, a strange thing happens. The woman’s fearsome scowl melts away and is replaced by a look of childish disappointment. She scratches her head with the knife-blade, almost as if confused, then sniffs and covers her breasts with her arms. Her shoulders hunch over and she seems to collapse in on herself.

  “I was hoping you’d know, Billy,” she mumbles. “I was really hoping.” “I’m sorry,” says Caleb, not knowing what else to say.

  The witch looks at the boys and tries a smile. It seems she’s putting up a mighty fight to hold back tears. She looks down at her mud-stained bare feet.

  “You boys want a Coke?” she asks. The question might be directed to her toes, but Caleb answers:

  “Yes, ma’am. Thank you.”

  “Ahright,” she says. “There’s a hose over there. You boys put out the fire and come in when you’re done. Don’t step in the circle. And don’t forget to wash yourselves up out here—you know the water don’t work inside.”

  Caleb had no idea the water didn’t work inside, but he obeys just the same, walking around to the side of the trailer with Bean in tow, turning on the water, and dragging the dirty green hose across the field of stars. On the way back to the fire, they pass the witch. She’s walking to the trailer, taking small steps, her arms full with her hunting knife, cowbell, and the book, on the spine of which Caleb reads the words: Holy Bible. As she passes them, the witch gives a little nod and wistfully mumbles:

  “Little Billy.”

  Bean only speaks once during their chore: as the fire gives up the ghost, he looks at Caleb, snorts, and says, “Dude, you owe me big-time.”

  As they mount the steps to the trailer, Bean pauses behind Caleb.

  “You hear that?”

  “No, what?”

  Bean frowns. “Nothing, I guess. Sounded like a crackly whisper or something. I thought it was coming from under the steps. Never mind, I’m just cracking up. Let’s get this over with.”

  The screen door moans as Caleb pulls it wide and sticks his head inside the trailer. A wave of nausea twists his gut instantly; the place stinks so bad he turns his head away.

  “Billy? Billy, come in,” the woman says. Her tone is pleasant, matronly.

  Caleb takes a deep breath and steps into the trailer. The reeking, stagnant air is so pungent he can almost taste it. Flies are everywhere, zipping into his ears and bouncing off his arms, tangling themselves in his hair. What must be the remains of fifty TV dinners lie stacked, one upon the other, on a flimsy-looking dining table. The carpet crunches with crumbs, and its stickiness tugs at the soles of his shoes with every step.

  He hears Bean exhale sharply behind him. Caleb figures his friend’s reaction is probably to the filth of the place, but there is plenty else to be shocked about. Both guys are forced to duck, because what must be thousands of Native American dream catchers hang by little threads from the ceiling. Some are wound together with dusty old cobwebs. A stack of yellowing newspapers as high as Bean is tall sits in one corner, behind a plastic-covered recliner. Caleb presses deeper into the living room. In front of a worn, brown couch, on a badly scratched coffee table, sit a Ouija board, what must be six or seven decks of tarot cards, a book entitled Hearing Ghosts: A Guide to Communicating with the Spirit World by someone named Chuck Macomb, and several old bottles of whiskey, most of them long since cashed.

  “Seriously,” whispers Bean, “if we don’t get out of here, I’m going to puke.”

  They hear the familiar slam of a fridge door, and the witch appears from a doorway veiled by strings of clicking beads. She has a can of Coke in each hand.

  “Here, here, take them. Sit down. Let’s talk about my Annie,” she says, settling into the recliner and gesturing to the couch.

  Despite its dark color and the dim light (the only illumination is provided by a lamp made in the shape of a horse head in the far end of the room), they can clearly see that the couch is badly stained and littered with crumbs. Caleb sits anyway, setting his dusty Coke can next to one of the tarot
decks. Bean brushes a crushed beer can, a wadded-up paper towel, and several pieces of candy corn onto the floor and, wincing, sits next to Caleb.

  “Here are pictures of my Annie,” the witch says, producing a huge stack of photos. “Yes, here she is. She’s only four here. Look at these pretty barrettes. She was going to be a great dancer. Ballerina. Look, here she is with her cute little ballet shoes. This was her birthday, I forget which year. Isn’t she beautiful? This was right outside here, right out there by the woods. She loved to play in the woods, her and the other one.”

  “Yes,” Caleb says. “Her sister, Christine, is in the big hospital over there. She said they send you reports about her. How’s she doing?”

  The woman frowns, flipping through a couple pictures of people Caleb doesn’t recognize. “Christine is a bad girl,” she says dismissively. “Oh, now look at this. Here’s my Annie at her First Communion. What a little peach pit! Her dress was so pretty. And here she is sleeping. . . .”

  “Mrs. Zikry,” Caleb says, “why do you say Christine’s bad?”

  “Here’s Annie with her little swimsuit on, her little water wings . . . ”

  “Why is Christine bad? What did she do?”

  “Oh, and here,” says the witch, then, “oh, no, no, no,” and she flips past that picture and the next. They look like more pictures of Annie, but Caleb figures they must be of Christine—who knows? You could never tell them apart. Mrs. Zikry stops flipping. “Here’s Annie on her new bike.”

  “What did Christine do, Mrs. Zikry?”

  The witch raises one trembling hand to her face and seems to stop breathing.

  “Do you want a drink? You boys are too young to have a drink, but I’ll have one, and you can have Cokes. Do you boys like Coke?” she asks, standing.

  “We already have Cokes, Mrs. Zikry,” says Caleb.

  Mrs. Zikry takes a half-full whiskey bottle off the table and tips it vertical for a long moment before letting it fall sloppily to her side, exhaling sharply.