The Narrows(79)
5
Some noise woke Bob Leary from a fitful sleep on the living room couch. He roused with a series of meek little grunts, already muttering nonsense to himself, as he swung one leg over the couch and knocked it against the coffee table. Empty cans of Coors Light and a carton of partially eaten Chinese food slid off the table and onto the floor. All around him, the house stank and the smell of it infiltrated his dreams.
Sitting up, he blinked wearily as his eyes became acclimated to the lightlessness of the house. Outside, the wind blew hard and unforgiving through the old trees, a sound like creaking floorboards. Was that the sound that had awakened him?
He staggered to his feet and wended across the darkened living room to the front door. He opened the door and peered out. The wind whooped down and gathered up the dead leaves in the yard into miniature tornadoes. Whistling sounds emanated from the cavernous hollows of the rusted automobiles up on blocks at the side of the house. In a hoarse voice, Bob Leary shouted his son’s name out into the freezing darkness. Then, shivering, he went back inside, bolting the door behind him.
Billy was a good kid, though maybe a little slow. Bob had known that since Billy’s birth—that writhing, pink, hairless, squealing little contraption that had been wrenched from Lorraine Leary’s womb via Caesarian. Their only child, the kid had blinked his gummy eyes up at Bob and had worked its toothless mouth as if desperate to speak but unable to form words. Sounds came from the infant child, but they weren’t the sounds of a living creature. Rather, they were the sounds of Bob Leary’s life being changed for good and permanent, because the eyes that looked up at him had been trusting and needful, and what are you supposed to do with that? And when Lorraine died a few years back from the Big C, it was just the two of them—Bob and his squinty-eyed, puffy-faced son. The Leary men. It was—
A low groan emanated throughout the house, causing Bob Leary to pause in his tracks. This time it wasn’t the wind; this had been the noise of an animal, surely. It was in the house.
He kept a revolver in the kitchen cabinet. He retrieved it, clicking on all the lights in the house as he went. Then he went down the hall, systematically checking the bedrooms, the revolver shaking in his unsteady hands. “Is that you, Billy-boy?” he called as he stood in the doorway of his son’s bedroom. The room was silent and undisturbed. Bob Leary’s voice echoed off the walls, and if he had closed his eyes, he would have easily imagined himself shouting into an empty bank vault or some underground cavern. “You come home, son?”
No answer.
Back in the living room, he went to the sliding-glass doors that looked out onto the back deck and, beyond that, the dense forest. He finagled the light switch beside the door but the bulb outside did not come on, and he couldn’t remember the last time he’d changed the bulb. Beyond the property, tall black trees swayed in the wind.
They’re calling for another storm, he thought, and that means another flood. That damn kid better get his ass on home before the waters rise up again, so help him…
Again, that low guttural moaning sound. This time, it came from directly behind him. Bob jumped and spun around, clutching the revolver in both hands while surveying the living room. The sound was not unlike a raccoon. He’d spent his entire life in the hills of western Maryland and knew the sounds animals made when they were frightened, trapped, or angry.
He heard a scraping noise and flung his eyes toward the stone hearth in time to see a cloud of soot drop down into the fireplace. When he rubbed the back of one hand along his forehead, he realized he was sweating. He laughed nervously, though he did not lower the gun. Goddamn animals were always getting caught in the chimney. Just last winter, he had a goddamn squirrel drop down into the fireplace and tear pell-mell around the living room before Billy got the front door open and Bob was able to chase the little f*cker out of the house with a couch cushion.
There was a flashlight on the mantel. He crept over to the hearth, his footfalls silent on the carpeted floor, and snatched it up. He clicked it on and saw that it held a strong and steady beam. He eased himself down on his knees in front of the fireplace, the gun in one hand now, the flashlight in the other. There would be no chasing any oversized rodents around his living room this evening; if he got a bead on the f*cker, he’d pull the revolver’s trigger and blow it to pieces.
He swiped aside the chain-link curtain just as a second plume of soot rained down from the chimney. Bob could taste the soot at the back of his throat. It made his eyes water. Crouching forward, he propped one shoulder on the ledge of the fireplace then scooted himself up so that his head was inside the hearth. He brought the revolver and the flashlight up beside his head as he peered up the pitch-black channel. The revolver shook. The flashlight beam swung along the brick wall of the fireplace’s interior then angled straight up through the open flue.
Bob blinked.
What in the—
A jumble of wiry, black fur vibrated within the beam of the flashlight, no more than four or five feet above Bob’s head. It took him a second or two to realize what it was he was looking at—bats that’s bats Jesus f*ck that’s bats up there—but when he did, he felt his heart stutter in his chest. Rabies! screamed his next immediate thought.
Just as he began to inch his retreat back out of the fireplace, the bats began to flap their wings, causing great roiling clouds of soot to rain down on Bob Leary’s face. He sputtered and coughed, swiping absently at his eyes with the back of the hand that held the flashlight. When he blinked his eyes back open and repositioned the beam back up into the flue, he found his son’s slack face staring back down at him. The skin fish-belly white, the eyelids purple and swollen shut, Billy Leary hung upside down in the flue, his body wreathed in bats.