Strangewood

Strangewood Page 16

As Thomas watched, a bee crept out of Nathan's right nostril and rested on his upper lip.

The sound that came from Thomas then was not a word, really. More a simple exhalation of breath, but every bit of his fear and despair was expressed in that single syllable. Slowly, he took a step toward Nathan.

The buzzing stopped. The bees fell silent. All of them, in an instant. Thomas blinked, shook his head, wondering if he were deaf now, because deaf was so much more acceptable than crazy, which was what he'd been thinking so much the past two days. It might not be happening at all, that was the problem. It might just be him, and what then?

A pair of bees emerged single file from Nathan's slightly parted lips.

"Stop it!" Thomas screamed. "Stop it! Get away from my son! Get out of here!"

Raving, he flapped his arms as though he were shooing cattle and screamed at the bees. As one, they rose from their roosts, moved into a tight knot in the center of the room, and buzzed there. There came a light rap on the open door and a worried male face poked inside. As if on cue, the bees moved for the door.

"Oh, shit!" the nurse exclaimed, losing his professional cool as he scrambled backward across the hall and stared at the small swarm of bees as it buzzed from the room and then swept down the hall before dispersing into various rooms and dark corners and crevices.

Thomas stared at the nurse. The man stared back at him.

"You saw them?" Thomas asked, and realized immediately how asinine the question must have sounded.

"Where did they come from?" the nurse asked.

Thomas thought of the bees creeping from Nathan's open mouth and shook his head, denying the thought even the beginning of entry into his head.

"I don't know," he said. After a moment, he believed the lie and tried to figure out who might have been able to release the bees into the room.

The stalker? He determined to call Detective Sarbacker first thing in the morning. For the moment, he was too rattled to talk to anyone.

"Look, I'm sleeping in my son's room," he said. "But after that, I really need some fresh air. I'm just going to take a walk out front, and then I'll be back. Is that all right?"

"Just tell the guard on your way out," the nurse said, now standing at the door to Nathan's room and staring around inside. "If he has any questions, tell him to call LaMarre and I'll back you up."

"Thanks," Thomas said, and with one glance at the peaceful form of his son, he moved swiftly for the elevator. He had to get out. Behind him, LaMarre was muttering something under his breath. Something about the bees.

Outside, under the stars, with a light breeze blowing cool across his face and in the trees above, Thomas tried to shake the horrible feeling in the pit of his stomach. He couldn't do it. He was more convinced than ever that someone was stalking him, and Nathan. Even now, he might be in danger. And yet, he was much more concerned about his son. The doctors had turned nothing up, but Thomas was going to demand a second opinion about the toxicology report. There must be some kind of poison, some reason for the scents in the room.

The bees hadn't just appeared there by magic, that much was certain.

Out of the hospital, with the fresh air clearing his head, he also began to wonder if his own weird hallucinations that day might not also have some kind of chemical origin. It was possible that he had also been poisoned somehow. In which case, he ought to have his blood tested right away. Thomas had a history of seizures, ever since he was a child. He hadn't had one in years, but he kept that bottle of phenobarbital in the medicine cabinet, just in case.

The thought of having another seizure, after all those years, was enough to make him forget the bees. They were terrifying, when they came. With a shiver, Thomas made a mental note to have that blood test.

Some kind of poison. The more he considered the possibility, walking along the grassy hill in front of the hospital, hands jammed into the pockets of his jeans, the more he realized that it had to be true. It was the only answer that made any sense whatsoever. The only sane answer.

Thomas had loved Sherlock Holmes as a boy, and he'd always sworn by one of Holmes' greatest maxims. Once you had eliminated the impossible, Holmes had believed, whatever remained, no matter how improbable, had to be the truth.

Well, Thomas had decided that very night, breathing in the clean air and hoping to purge his system, that it was time he eliminated the impossible.

He'd talk to the doctors in the morning, but he wasn't going to wait that long for the cops. No, the moment he got back inside, he planned to call Walt Sarbacker.

He turned to walk back toward the hospital. He'd been told to come in through the emergency room, since the main lobby was shut down for the night. He stepped off the grass onto the pavement of the parking lot and headed for the massive electric doors to the ER. It seemed very quiet, even for a Tuesday night. He thought about ambulances.

And because he was thinking about ambulances, his first thought was that the high, rhythmic sound was a siren.

But it wasn't a siren. It was a sound he'd thought he'd heard on Sunday night outside Nathan's room. Now he heard it again, like someone playing the violin seductively, while the breeze tickled a large set of wind chimes.

Thomas stopped. Shook his head, whispered "no," and then began to weep.

It simply couldn't be. He'd had it all worked out just seconds earlier. It just could not be possible.

Slowly, Thomas looked up into the sky, leaves rustling with the breeze through the trees nearby. But there were no trees above his head just now. Only the stars and the sky, and soaring above the parking lot, a little green dragon with an orange belly, whose wings made a beautiful music when he flew.

Fiddlestick circled twice, far above the lot. His wings had never sounded so beautiful in Thomas's mind.

CHAPTER 9

As Thomas drove to the house he had once shared with Emily and Nathan, thunder rumbled across the sky. With a sound like the night being torn in half, the storm began in earnest, assaulting Tarrytown with a dense, punishing rain. The wipers on Thomas's Volvo had needed replacing for several months, but he had always conveniently forgotten to get around to it as soon as the sun came out again.

Now he regretted it. He could barely see past the windshield enough to notice that the light thrown from his headlamps was splintered and refracted by the curtain of rain. Turning up toward Tappan Hill, he bumped over the curb, nearly hitting a fat blue mailbox.

A year ago, his life had been as close to perfect as anyone could ever hope to get: a beautiful home, a wonderful wife, a sweet little boy playing in the back yard, and a burgeoning career in a creative yet brutal field that crushed most of those who ventured into it. Everybody wanted him. Time magazine had called him "the A. A. Milne of the new millennium."

A week ago, he was still the envy of nearly everyone he knew. Divorced, yes, but at peace with his ex, spending time with his son, with his pick of movie and television deals and the luxury to consider resting on his laurels.

That was all perception, of course. Inside, Thomas had always been Thomas. The same boy who had been dragged from base to base as a child as his father was transferred to a new post every few years. A military brat, he'd lost himself in books and movies and found nearly all of his best friends that way. When his son Nathan had created an imaginary friend, it hadn't seemed at all odd to Thomas. Crabapple was the creation of a fertile mind, and Thomas could relate.

A part of him would always be that little boy whose best friends were encountered in libraries, in comic books snapped up at the drugstore for a quarter, and on the battered black-and-white Motorola they carted from one end of the world to the other.

TJ Randall. Thomas Randall. Tommy, his mother had called him, and she was the only one he never corrected. Inside, he still felt all the insecurity, all the anxiety, and all the wonder that he'd felt twenty years earlier.

Emily had touched him there, been part of that innocent love that still existed deep inside. But only Nathan had ever lived there. From the moment he took his first breath, from the moment Thomas first held his son in his arms, Nathan had taken over that place in Thomas's heart completely.

In essence, Nathan was his heart; he was everything that made Thomas fundamentally himself.

Now, with Nathan lying in that bed, and the future so somber and obscure, Thomas felt as though he had lost his way. It was all falling apart, everything he'd ever known or believed in or trusted about life. Things were happening that he had no capacity to understand. His mind was playing tricks on him, of course. That was the only possible solution.

But it was so real.

As real as the friends he'd woven out of fictional fabric had been to him as a small boy, these episodes, hallucinations, whatever they were, they were even more real. They weren't the flighty imaginings of a child that a parent could never grasp. No, this bit of madness had the texture of life, such as a man could recognize and understand.

He needed help. He knew that. But it was late, and the only help he could think of was the only person who might be able to understand, just a little.

The useless windshield wipers threw rain off the glass in sheets, but it wasn't nearly enough. He bumped up over the curb turning into Emily's driveway, and nearly hit the rear of her car as he slammed on the brakes. Thomas popped the door open, pocketed his keys, and slammed the door. He squinted through the rain at the front of the house. There were a few lights still on inside.

For a moment, he didn't move, only stood in the soaking rain, his clothes and hair quickly becoming saturated. He felt a moment of longing as he looked at the house and wondered if he hadn't left a piece of himself here when he'd moved out.

He jogged to the front steps, water sheeting off his sodden jacket. The rain was loud enough that he couldn't tell if the doorbell had rung when he punched it with a finger, and so he began to knock almost immediately.

Desperately.

Thomas heard the deadbolt being thrown back and the door opened. Emily stood in only her robe, disheveled, her makeup smeared, and Thomas realized he had roused her from bed. The way her hair was mussed and fell in swirling disorder over her shoulders, he felt a wave of nostalgia rush over him so powerful that he could barely contain the urge to embrace her.

"Thomas, my God!" she said frantically, pulling him in from the rain. "What is it? What's happened to Nathan?"

The room flashed around him: Asian prints he'd bought for her in Los Angeles, an enormous potted plant she'd bought a week before they split, a coatrack he'd had since college and had never thought to take with him, the plush rose patterned sofa in which he'd lain, holding Nathan against his chest, watching old Abbott and Costello movies as he rocked the baby to sleep.

"No," he said, the one word coming out of him like a mournful groan. He couldn't blame her for her reaction. He knew what he must look like, what the surrender and grief on his face must have made her think.

"I'm sorry, Emily," he said, trying to focus. "It's not . . . I mean, Nathan's all right."

Even as he saw the hope rise in her eyes, Thomas said, "There's been no change."

Emily pursed her lips, tiny lines forming around the edges, and her eyes grew hard. She stood up, cinched her robe tightly, and stared at the water dripping from his clothes to the carpet. Thomas started to speak, to try to explain, but he was distracted by sudden movement in his peripheral vision.

"Huh?" He spun quickly, wondering what it would be now. Some other hallucination, or a flesh-and-blood stalker at the window.

But the man with a scruff of reddish-blond hair wasn't at the window. He wasn't a stalker. From what Thomas knew, he was an English professor named Joe Hayes, and he was currently bedding Thomas's ex.

"Damn it, what the hell are you doing here?" Emily demanded. "You're supposed to be with Nathan."

Thomas did his best to regain his dignity. He stood up straight and twisted his neck a bit to sort of reset his entire body. With great deliberation, he ran his hands through his soaking hair, straightening it as best he could. Before he turned back to Emily, he took a quick glance at Joe.

"I can see why you were in such a hurry to start spending some nights at home," Thomas said.

Even as he said the words, he felt his stomach begin to churn. It wasn't only uncharitable and childish, it was incorrect. Her going home had been Gershmann's idea, and they had decided together that she would have the first night off. It didn't matter. Sometimes words were nothing more — or less — than weapons. Given his occupation, he understood that better than most.

"Thomas . . ." Emily began.

Joe cut her off. "There's no need for that," the professor said, and stepped forward to offer Thomas his hand. "Joe Hayes."

Thomas stared at the hand a moment, dumbstruck. He noted Emily's similar expression. Hayes wasn't playing the game. Thomas studied him carefully and found himself feeling more like an idiot than a righteous arbiter of morality.

"Thomas Randall," he said, almost before he realized he had reached out and grasped the other man's hand.

Hayes didn't smile. Thomas liked him for that. No bullshit here.

"I'm sorry you two had to meet like this," Emily said. "But it's late, Thomas. I never could have . . ."

"Forget it," Thomas said, waving her apology away. "You're right."

He felt Hayes' eyes on him, but could not look at the man again. Not then. Thomas was surrounded by the laughing ghosts of that house. Certainly, there were the ghosts of pain and sadness there, as well, but the ones he saw now were those of good times. His mind held a map of the house, of each step in the hall, the layouts of pieces of furniture, how many steps up to the attic. He recalled the way the towel bar in the master bath had always rattled, and exactly how far to turn the faucet in the tub to get the perfect temperature for Nathan's bath.

Thomas sat heavily in the rattan rocker he'd bought Emily at Pier One, just after they'd moved in. He ran his hands through his hair again, then over his face, and finally, he actually managed a slight, wistful smile.

"I'm sorry," he said again, and then he looked up at Emily and saw the concern that had replaced her anger. She was beautiful, of course. She always would be. But more than anything, he just needed to talk to someone who really knew him.