“I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in Me, though he may die, he shall live. And whoever lives and believes in Me shall never die.”
—John 11:25
From the May second edition of the Portland Press Herald:
BIZARRE STORM ROCKS SMALL TOWN WHITE
FALLS—The strange weather patterns that had plagued the small Maine town of White Falls for over two weeks came to a tragic end yesterday, the day the town was to hold its traditional May festival.
Experts are at a loss to explain the powerful storm front that developed over the course of several hours, caused extensive damage and claimed the lives of over 50 residents. In a prepared statement, a representative from the weather observatory claimed that the storm had raised a type of tornado, caused by the extreme variations in the temperature of several storm fronts in the area.
During the course of the storm the mill dam, a fixture in town for over 100 years, gave way under the tremendous water pressure, spilling what amounted to a small tidal wave down a mile of riverfront property. Both town bridges were damaged, and three houses were lost to the flood.
“There was no warning,” claimed a survivor. “One day we’re told the sky’s going to clear, and the next thing we know all hell breaks loose.”
The bizarre story does not end there, claim those who have witnessed the tragedy. For reasons yet to be brought to light, the town cemetery was vandalized during the storm. Many remains are now missing and presumed stolen. Several survivors reported seeing things that “defy description.” One unidentified man, after barricading himself inside his house during the storm, took pot shots at state police from a second floor window, screaming incoherently and holding them at bay for over three hours. Psychiatrists called in to assist on the case referred to these incidents as stress related, and declined to go into any further detail as to what witnesses claimed to have seen…
From the diary of Gloria Johnson:
It’s been two days since it happened, and Harry has left me alone in this ugly little hospital room for the first time. I have settled down with a pen and a pad of paper in my lap because I feel that I have to write it all down or go crazy. But nothing comes. So I sit here, holding this pen in my hand like an idiot who doesn’t have a clue what it’s for, and I cry like a baby. All I feel is emptiness, as if a part of me has been taken away, a part that I don’t know how to live without. How can I write anything down when such a vital part of me is gone? I don’t know where to begin. There’s too much unfinished business.
So I guess maybe I should try to finish it first, and go on from there. I’m going to make this a letter, because that’s what I need it to be. We have some unfinished business, Billy Smith. Are you out there somewhere, watching me? Are you taking this down?
Ever since we met I felt like you were a part of my destiny. Even during those first few days, when I was scared and angry, I knew that you had come to me for a reason. There were the dreams, of course, but what I felt went deeper than that. I had the feeling you had come to save me. Isn’t that funny? I mean, we didn’t exactly meet under the best of circumstances, did we? But my life was a mess. Anyone could have seen that. I had gotten myself in over my head in Miami, and I didn’t know how to get out before I drowned. You saved me from that, even if you did have your own reasons.
I’m in some pain. Harry says I had a spontaneous miscarriage, caused by the stress of what happened. He says there will be no lingering effects, and I should be able to have children again when I’m ready. I told him I was glad, because I didn’t want him to worry too much about me.
But inside I’m dying, Billy. I try to make sense of your death and I can’t do it—not because I don’t know what you did for me, what you did for all of us, but because it seems so damned unfair. I’m selfish, and I don’t care. I need you with me.
On the third night following the flood, Gloria Johnson had a dream. She was standing on the edge of a beach, and the surf was washing softly against a stretch of white sand. The sun was shining brightly, but the light did not seem to warm her, and as she watched the unbroken line of blue water against the lighter blue horizon she felt something familiar suddenly touch her face. She shivered and turned, but saw nothing, and yet the touch was still there, inside her mind.
When she turned back toward the water, her brother Michael was standing at the edge of the surf, looking back at her. He was whole and healthy, and smiling in that teasing way he did when she had done something especially crazy or silly, and she felt a sudden gentle twist of her heart.
As she watched him, the touch inside her mind changed. Michael changed. One moment it was her big brother, smiling at her, and the next she found herself staring into the pale, shadowy face of Billy Smith. Her heart twisted itself tighter in her chest. Billy wore Michael’s same teasing, lopsided grin. He raised a single white hand and waved.
I’ll always be here, Angel, he said. Remember. I’m a part of you, a special part, and that can never be taken away. We’re the same, you and I.
She raised a hand in return, and watched in silence as he slowly made his way into the surf and disappeared. But she felt him there still, and it was as if something missing had finally been returned to her.
When she woke up her pillow was wet, but the tears seemed to have lost some of their bitterness, and when she slept again, she slept peacefully.
From the diary of Gloria Johnson:
Yesterday morning, three days after I left the hospital, I drove back to town. It was a beautiful day. Reminded me of the first morning after Billy and I came here, the day we met Annie and Harry Stowe …
She crossed the bridge into town, seeing the damage for the first time since that day, seeing it in the bright and hopeful spring sunlight of mid-May. Harry had told her some of what was going on, but until now she hadn’t been back. She hadn’t known if she would ever come back.
On her right the river now flowed unbroken, swelling slightly through what was left of the mill lake. The Old Mill Inn leaned dangerously toward the water, and she knew that they were going to just let it go. Bob Rosenberg had been one of the people who had disappeared that hateful day, and no one had come forward to run the inn in his absence. Worse than that, nobody seemed to care.
On her left after she crossed the bridge, uprooted trees stuck up here and there like hands coming up out of the earth. Giants buried in the barren soil, unable to free themselves. Most of the debris from the flood still spread itself across the open stretch of road leading down to the scenic turnout. A telephone pole had gone down, and it had been propped up but not yet replaced. The clinic was still open, although Harry hadn’t gone back to work and swore that he never would. Not there, he said. The town had gone sour for him, as she supposed it had for many of them.
She turned and drove past Johnny’s and the grocery, and beyond them, the cemetery. That, at least, had been cleaned up, the graves filled in, though many of them probably contained nothing more than dirt and empty coffins now. The Portland paper had carried a single follow-up story about what they called a “senseless act of vandalism”; they claimed that most of the bodies had been dug up by a still unidentified person or persons and then left for the river to sweep away. The bog below Black Pond was reputed to be a gruesome display of partially decomposed body parts, some of which had been disposed of, some which would never be recovered. Billy’s and Jeb’s bodies had not yet been found, as far as she knew. Maybe they never would be.
Someone stood out near the gazebo on the square, which had been one of the few things left whole by the storm. The figure held a big green trash bag and slowly bent to pick things up and stuff them inside. Beyond that was the Thomas mansion, and though she couldn’t see much more than an occasional glimpse through the trees, she knew it was still there, as it had stood for over two hundred years, empty and cold and silent. Have they found the passage yet? she wondered. And if so, had they found Sheriff Pepper and Barbara Trask? That would surely raise some interesting questions. There were bullet holes in them, after all.
They won’t find a thing, she thought suddenly. Because somehow those bodies disappeared too. I don’t know how, but they did.
The thought brought a chill to her, though it had been warm enough to drive with the windows down most of the way from Portland.
She kept going past the town office, turned onto Indian Road, but it wasn’t until she was almost there that she realized where she was going.
Yellow police tape had been stretched across the beginning of the narrow dirt track that led down to the old Taylor property. She pulled over to the side of the road, turned off the engine, and got out to walk. She had her own demons to face.
The track was much as I remembered it, tree branches hanging down on all sides, mud under my feet, only a lot of trucks had been down here since it happened, and the ground was even more rutted than before. And it was cold in there out of the sun. I started getting a little scared, which is natural I guess, after what we went through. Except I began to get that funny feeling again, and this is what really made me nervous, that feeling of being watched, as if something big and ugly was hunched down in the bushes. I felt it coming up through my feet, too, as if the ground itself was crying out at a high pitch I couldn’t quite hear.
That’s when I began to wonder if it was really over, if it ever could be over. Maybe the land is spoiled, and maybe this is the most rotten spot, like the dark bruise in an apple that’s been sitting around awhile. I thought about what Annie said, about certain places calling out the sick, the weak, and making them fester. I almost turned back, but I forced myself to keep going because I knew that if I didn’t face it now, I never would, and it would keep haunting me for the rest of my life.
When I reached the clearing I knew that something was there. It shouldn’t have been anything but a bare patch of ground by an ugly little pond, but it was more than that.
The clearing was empty, the shack and the old shed washed away, just a sunken hole in the ground left to mark where they had stood. I could see a few boards sticking up out of the brush at the far end, but that was all.
Then I heard something calling to me, and I knew. It didn’t speak, exactly, not in the way people do, but it called just the same.
I walked across the clearing to the spot where those boards were sticking up, and there it was, lying in the dirt like the world’s biggest jewel. I say that because it was sparkling, as if it had caught the sunlight and held it inside.
I picked it up before I knew what I was doing. It seemed much heavier than it should be. The carvings were fascinating. The two serpents with their tails in their mouths, and the red eye in the center, which was the part that seemed to sparkle, almost as if it were a real eye, watching you, letting you know it was awake and knew exactly what was happening. Clever. It felt nice in my hand, a little warmed by the sun.
And then it jumped. My God, it wriggled against my skin like it was alive and trying to burrow inside me. I grabbed one of the boards and laid it flat on the ground, and then I put the amulet down on it. There was a good-sized rock nearby, and I picked that up and brought it down with everything I had. I swung that rock again and again, until my shoulder started to ache, and it felt like Billy was there with me, watching. Maybe he took a few swings himself.
Then when I was done, I took the pieces in my hand and I threw them as far as I could into the pond. When they hit the water they didn’t make a sound or even a splash. They just disappeared.
I think I found that window you told me about, Annie. The one between the worlds. And I think maybe I closed it, once and for all.
Two weeks later, Gloria Johnson made the drive up from Portland again, where she had taken a motel room. She parked on the square and hiked into the hills, above what remained of White Falls. There, by the big slab of rock overlooking the valley, she found a good spot. The ground here was dry and soft and full of pine needles and rich soil.
She did what she had been wanting to do for a while now. She built a marker for Billy Smith.
It took her an hour to collect the rocks, and close to another hour to get them the way she wanted. Then she knelt in the good, soft ground. She did not speak and did not pray, only waited, and remembered.
A cool breeze blew in across the pines, bringing their fresh clean scent. A squirrel began to chatter in the trees, angry at whatever had interrupted its daily routine; after a few moments, it ran farther up the trunk and then jumped to another, moving steadily away, and before long she couldn’t hear it anymore.
“Billy,” she said softly. “This is a good spot, isn’t it? The one you would have wanted?”
She waited, feeling a few hot tears work their way out and burn her cheeks. But no answer came. She thought she felt him there, or maybe it was just the wind and the smell of the pines and the way the ground felt against her knees. Maybe it was just the feeling of a good clean spring morning.
She thought of him every day, and every day it seemed he got just a little farther away from her. At first she had tried to hang on, tried so hard, and then she realized that it wasn’t what he would have wanted. He would have wanted her to live her life and make it a special one. Remember the past, she could almost hear him saying, learn from it, but don’t live in it. There’s a difference. She understood his strength, his sacrifice, that by taking that final secret to the grave with him, he had spared her an unnecessary agony. He is stronger than he thinks, Annie had said, and she was right. He had given her her life back. She remembered a question he had asked her; Do you believe in goodness? She had thought on that one quite a bit lately, and wondered if perhaps it didn’t rest within each and every human soul, in small sacrifices and small events.
Harry was still visiting her every day, and was helping her find a job in Portland. He was a good man, kind and attentive, and she thought eventually he might ask her to dinner, and eventually she might even accept. But that was a long way from now. Right now even thinking about it made her feel like a traitor.
Billy, she thought. I miss you so much. It’s so hard.
She stayed there for a while, and finally the squirrel came back. It sat in a tree above her head and chattered at her, and she decided that she was being asked to leave. Her time was up. It wasn’t really a place for humans, after all.
As she started down the trail she looked back, and for a moment she could see Billy standing there. He looked the way he had looked in her dream, smiling gently, hand raised in greeting. Or perhaps it was farewell.
Then he was gone, and she made her way back down the trail to her car, tired but no longer quite so empty.
She was healing.