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“Something’s got to change,” he whispered to himself, sitting there in the cab of the truck with sweat trickling along his neck and the beer warming in the sun while horses walked in circles at the Amish farm next door, turning some sort of mill wheel, their heads down the whole time, step after step after step. “Something has got to change.”
He got out of the truck but didn’t want to go in the house, didn’t want to sit on the stained couch and look at the cracks in the wall and the sloped floor. The porch rail glinted under the sun, sure, but now he realized just how damn little the porch rail meant. The house was still a dump, with sagging gutters and a stain-streaked roof and mildew-covered siding. Sure, those things could be addressed, but it took money, and even then, what the hell was the point? Could only accomplish so much with polish on a turd.
Instead of going inside, he took the beer and set off on foot, walked through the backyard and into the field beyond, picking his way through the barbed-wire fence that separated the properties. He’d walk up into the wooded hills, have a few more beers.
He was halfway across the field, head bowed against the sun and the warm western wind, when he remembered the second half of his dream, the man waiting for him at the edge of the tree line. The thought was enough to make him look up, as if he’d see the old bastard standing out there. Wasn’t anything in sight, but the memory chilled him just the same, thinking of the way the guy had been shaking his head at Josiah as the day faded away and the night came on. Weird damn dream. And that after the one on the train, the same man standing in the boxcar with water around his ankles.
We’re going home to take what’s yours.
There were those who believed dreams meant something. Josiah had never been of that breed, but today he couldn’t help it, thinking about the man in the bowler hat. Take what’s yours, he’d said. Wasn’t much in the world that belonged to Josiah. Fu
Hopped a train. An old-fashioned train, with a steam locomotive and a caboose, like the one in his dream.
“Was that you, Campbell?” Josiah said softly, tramping across the field, and he smiled. A bunch of crazy, stupid thoughts, that’s what he was lost to today. Setting fires and stealing gems and seeing his great-grandfather in dreams? He was coming unhinged.
The sun was hot and the beer cans clanged awkwardly against his leg as he walked, but he didn’t mind. His shirt was soaked with sweat and gnats buzzed around his neck but that was fine, too. It felt good to be outside, good to be moving, good to be alone. He’d grown up in the woods and fields out here, spent more time in them than in his home. Field ru
That had always been the notion in his head, at least. Now, though, he felt as if he’d sobered up and took a blink and realized there was nothing separating him from Da
The place he was headed today was a spot he’d found when he was a kid, twelve years old and hiking alone. Well, not hiking as much as ru
That day he ran until his lungs were clenched tight as fists and his hamstrings were screaming, and then he’d slowed to a stumbling walk, moved through another field and into the woods, and found himself scrambling across the face of a steep hill. It was a difficult climb, overgrown and pockmarked with slabs of limestone. He’d heard a gurgling noise and frozen, listening and growing progressively creeped out because the sound was coming from beneath him. From right under his feet, he was sure of that, yet there wasn’t so much as a puddle in sight.
He’d followed the sound, fought down through the trees, and found a cliff face, a good hundred feet of sheer rock leading to a strange pool of water below that had an eerie, aquamarine glow. The pool was still as a farm pond, but all around it the gurgling, churning noise of water in motion persisted. Birch trees had tumbled off the ridge and lay half in and half out of the water, their ghostly white limbs fading into green depths. All along the top of the cliff face, root systems dangled free, hanging across the stone like something out of one of those slasher movies set in the swamps.
The ridge ran around all sides of the pool, forming a giant bowl, and it took some effort for him to pick his way down to it. At the bottom the place seemed even more ominous than at the top, because here there was no getting out fast, and the wind picked leaves off the trees that rimmed the ridge and sent them tumbling down on you. Now and then one corner of the pool would seem to snarl, spitting water into more water, and beneath the rocks water trickled, always audible but invisible.
Josiah had never imagined such a place.
He’d risked another beating that night by telling his father about it, swearing the place was something magic, and the old man had laughed and told him it was the Wesley Chapel Gulf, or the Elrod Gulf if you were an old-timer, one of the spots where the Lost River broke the surface again, coughed up by the caves that held it.
“You stay away from there in flood season,” the old man had warned. “You know where the water was today? Well, it’ll rise up thirty feet or more along that cliff when the underground part of the river fills up, and it’ll spin, just like a whirlpool. I’ve seen it, boy, and it’s made for drowning. You go there in flood season and I’ll tan your ass.”
Naturally, Josiah had gone back to the gulf during the spring floods. And son of a bitch if the old man wasn’t telling the truth for once-the water did climb the cliff face, and it did spin like a whirlpool. There was a shallow spot in the bowl-shaped ridge that held it, and the water broke through there and found a dry cha
It was one strange river, and it held Josiah’s attention for most of his youth. He and Da
The gulf became a regular spot for Josiah, but one he’d never hiked to with anybody but Da