Page 37 of A River Red With Blood
He could smell himself.He stank, and he wasn’t alone dirty but unclean, which was something different.Leonard had made him feel that way by the manner in which he’d abused him and the intimate places he’d chosen to target.Yes, the water would be chilly, but compared to what he’d just suffered, it wouldn’t be so bad.
Anthony hung his T-shirt on a hook and turned on the nearest shower faucet.The pipes protested, and at first the head spat water rather than sprayed it, but then the pressure kicked in.Anthony dipped his head under the flow.It was, as anticipated, fiercely cold, and he tolerated it only for a few seconds, but that wasn’t going to make him clean again.He took a deep breath and exposed the whole of his body, clinging to the exposed pipe for strength.The pain was worse where the water hit his injuries, but then it began to ease and a numbness descended.Anthony knew this was how people died of exposure.He liked to read about expeditions and adventures, and stories of polar explorers who’d become lost in the snow.Some of those who survived described the sensation of their systems shutting down, how they stopped noticing the cold and started to fall asleep, and had they done so, would never have woken again.Anthony would have liked that.He could sit in the shower with the water running, going more and more numb until he fell asleep, never to wake, and thus he would escape Spero.It was probably the only way he could, because his parents weren’t going to come for him, no matter what.Mr Santopietro wasn’t going to let him call home to report a beating, and even if he could be persuaded to inform Anthony’s mom and pop that an incident had occurred, Anthony was sure the principal would play down its severity.Tensions between students were always an issue in schools, and more so among the kind of teens with whom Spero was required to deal.If they weren’t quarrelsome, they wouldn’t be at Spero to begin with?Am I right, Mr and Mrs Marshall?Huh, huh?Y’hear what I’m saying?Sure I am.Your boy will be fine.He’s in good hands.What we have here are teething troubles…
Teething troubles.Anthony tested one of his molars with his tongue and felt movement.He hoped he wouldn’t lose it and add a gap-toothed mouth to his problems.
By now the shower had cleared his head and he smelled of nothing worse than the soap in the dispenser.With luck, his roommates would still be asleep and no one would notice him returning to the dormitory.He had a clean pair of pajama bottomsin his locker.He could put them on, climb into bed, and try to get some rest before wake-up at seven.He’d be stiff and sore by then, and what would he tell the others?The truth, he supposed, or as much of it as he cared to share.It wasn’t as if he’d be able to hide the cuts and bruises to his face, but he wouldn’t tell them about the rest of it.
Anthony turned off the shower and reached for his T-shirt.It wasn’t exactly spotless, but he didn’t want to leave without it, and he could use it to cover much of his nakedness.For once, he was glad the shirt was too big for him.But the T-shirt was gone.Anthony looked at the floor, expecting to see it lying where it had fallen, except it wasn’t there either.Once more, Leonard Levesque loomed large in his mind.It wasn’t enough to steal his pajama bottoms, Leonard had to come back for the shirt aswell.
“Shit on you, Leonard,” Anthony said aloud.He rarely swore—those kinds of words never sat comfortably in his mouth—but whereas before he’d been sad and scared, now he was furious.How hard would it have been for Leonard to leave him with his shirt?How low could a person stoop?Anthony wanted to kick the bathroom to pieces, and Leonard Levesque with it.Then, as suddenly as it had flared, the anger was gone.
“Oh, go to hell,” Anthony added softly.Only much later would he identify this as a turning point, the beginning of his escape from the patterns of behavior that had led him to Spero.The old Anthony would have tried to yank a sink from the wall before going mute for days.The new Anthony, or the nascent one, wished only to sleep.Where once blind temper would have reigned, there was now disappointment and resignation.
Anthony left the shower and dried himself as best he could with paper towels.When he was done, he revisited the scene of the crime and used more paper towels to clean up the mess on the floor.It was possible that Mr Sadlier might have taken care of it without mentioning it to Mr Santopietro or one of the other members of staff, but if he didn’t, questions would be asked, with someone obliged to accept the blame.Should no one confess, the punishment would be communal, and the innocent wouldexact their revenge on the guilty party.Taking care of business now would save Anthony from having to do it in the morning, avoiding unwelcome questions into the bargain.
He was shivering again, and any numbness from the shower had worn off, so he was hurting too.He went to the door but the handle wouldn’t turn.He tried shouldering it, with no result.He didn’t think the door was locked, since only staff had keys, so either the lock itself had failed or Leonard Levesque had jammed it to keep him inside.If Anthony kicked hard enough, whatever was blocking it might come loose.He stepped back and struck the door with the sole of his right foot, but succeeded only in sending waves of pain through his damaged body.
He was done.He needed help if he wasn’t going to spend the rest of the night in the block.You’ll catch your death: that was what his mom, who was born in England, would have said.To her, it meant you risked getting a bad cold, but Anthony was afraid it might have a more literal meaning in this case.He banged on the door, shouted, and listened.No response.He tried again—bang, shout, listen—with still no sign of anyone coming to his aid.
Something landed on the floor beside him, so softly that he didn’t even notice it was there until his left foot brushed against it.He glanced down at the ball of wadded paper that he’d recently deposited in the trash can.He turned, his right leg raised to shield his groin from the blow he was certain was coming.He saw nothing, but Leonard Levesque had to be hiding somewhere.He had to be, because if he was not—
In the gloom at the far end of the block, close to the last stall, Anthony detected movement: a swirling in the dark, like smoke billowing in a breeze, and then it was gone, or not gone, not totally, because patterns shifted in the mirrors on the wall, gliding from one pane to the next, and Anthony realized that he was looking at a human form, the reflection of a shadow, but there was nothing to offer substance, no shape to be reflected.Yet something was drawing nearer.Anthony could follow its approach in the mirrors, could hear its breathing, and while it might only have been visible in reproduction, as if it possessed a moreprofound reality behind the glass than in front of it, some aspect of it was nevertheless present in the block.
Anthony tried the door again, keeping his back to it because he was afraid to look away from whatever was coming, and he mumbled words that had no meaning, even to himself.Then the presence was standing before him, perceived but concealed, while in the closest of the mirrors the darkness of it expanded, like ink diffusing in water; and Anthony knew it for what and who it was, though some atavistic part registered that it was not the totality of a person but one aspect of it; and he was right to be terrified because what had returned was a creature excised of rationality, retaining only an emotional purity beyond regulation, and what roiled in the glass was a manifestation of its hostility.The hair above Anthony’s left ear rose as if by the action of static electricity.The strands were being handled—gently at first, then harder, so that he was abruptly yanked toward the presence, and he smelled mud and mold and the stagnancy of standing water.In the mirror only his face was visible, while all around him was enshadowed, and he feared that this blackness might flow into him and he would drown in darkness, drown like this boy had drowned.For the second time that night, Anthony pleaded.
“Don’t hurt me, Scott,” he said.“Please.I’m sorry for what happened to you, honest I am.Please, just let me go.”
But as the presence embraced him, Anthony knew that this was not Scott, or not Scott alone.No, here were multitudes.The grip on his hair tightened as the room swam around him.The floor rushed toward him, and he wondered how it could be moving so fast, and only when his head connected with it did he think,Oh, it was me all along—
Chapter 36
Tim Sadlier woke alone in his bachelor bed.He couldn’t recall when last he hadn’t woken alone, but it must have been before COVID: two years before, if he was being charitable, three if not.The pandemic had blurred his conception of the passage of time, and he was no longer always sure of when it had begun—2019?2020?—or even that it had really happened at all.It represented an unwelcome interregnum, a hiatus in reality.
The clock on the bedside table showed 4:08 a.m., but Sadlier liked to set the time ten minutes fast.It meant he was never late for anything, which made no objective sense because obviously he was aware, on one level, that all his timepieces were wrong.However, he lived his life as though they were not, just as he lived it as though the larger world was not itself out of joint.It had been out of joint for as long as he could recall.As a boy, he’d endured the fear of nuclear war, and later, the hole in the ozone layer.Now, as an adult, nuclear war remained a possibility, but he didn’t know whether the hole in the ozone layer still existed.If it did, nobody was talking as much about it, probably because it had been overtaken by worse environmental threats.Sadlier was glad he’d never had children, as it spared him having to explain to them why everything was all fucked-up and no one seemed interested in unfucking it, or how children at summer camp in Texas could be washed away by a river swollen by months of rain falling in a matter of hours and the response from the authorities could amount towell, shit happens.All Tim Sadlier could say for sure was that a lot of people’s grandchildren were going to be cursing their grandparents as assholes.
Something had been nagging at him, something to do with Scott Theriault, Leonard Levesque, and Spero.In his sleep, hehad almost figured out what it was, or thought he had, but awake, it slipped from him.He could try to drowse awhile in the hope of recapturing it, but he knew from experience that this would make it harder for him to get up in an hour or so.Chasing sleep was like chasing memories or motes of dust: the object only drifted farther off.
Sadlier lived in the same six-room Plains house in which he’d been born: two bedrooms, a kitchen, a dining room, a living room, and a bathroom.Until 2015, his elderly mother had shared its spaces with him, until she could no longer look after herself while he was at work and he’d been forced to consign her to an assisted living facility in Dover-Foxcroft.She remained there, telling him how much she hated it when he visited each week, and how she wanted to go home.He’d taken to popping a pill a few hours in advance to help keep him calm.If he took two, he even forgot what a bad son he was.
Sadlier went to the bathroom, showered in lukewarm water because the tank was only starting to heat up, dressed, and headed to the kitchen, where he intended to make a cup of coffee and read for an hour.He knew he ought to catch the early-morning news, but that was a penance he decided to shirk.A novel would offer him some escape from reality.
Tim Sadlier didn’t have many luxuries; he couldn’t afford them.He didn’t have the internet for the same reason.When he did need it—which was less often than when he wantedto use it, the two being easily conflated by the simple-minded—he had access to Spero’s, or he could log on at the Bingham Union Library.He could also visit the Starbucks in Waterville for a change of scenery, but that would have required him to travel more than forty miles just to pay for a coffee, and he wasn’t willing to give Starbucks money for what they put in their cups.
Which brought him back to the matter of luxuries, however modest.Sadlier liked to start the day by grinding beans bought at Jimmy’s Shop ’n Save in Bingham, brewing enough coffee for two cups in the Bialetti Moka pot that someone had donated to the Goodwill in Windham, unused and still in its box, with a card inside from Chris and Irene wishing Daniel and Bethanyevery happiness on their wedding day.Sadlier’s mother, had she known about it, might have warned that the pot would bring him no luck, and Daniel and Bethany were now either divorced or dead.But whatever about Daniel and Bethany, the pot had brought Sadlier nothing but pleasure, from the grinding, the measuring, and the tapping, to the smell of the coffee infusing the kitchen, and finally, that first sip.
But on this morning, with its sluggish dawn and the trees in the yard sticky with dark, Tim Sadlier would not have his coffee.When he entered the kitchen he saw that the coffee jar was overturned and his precious beans scattered across the counter, some of them spilling into the sink for the dripping tap to spoil.More of the beans lay on the kitchen table, where they had no business being, not if the rest were on the counter.Sadlier’s first thought was that an animal must have gotten into the house and he’d have to hunt for an engorged rat or a hyped-up raccoon.He was surprised he hadn’t heard anything during the night because he was a light sleeper and—
Sadlier stared at the bean jar.The jar had a screw-top lid, which stood beside it on the counter, and the glass was unbroken.Sadlier kept the lid screwed tight to save his beans, and while raccoons were dexterous enough to be able to manipulate a host of objects, no raccoon yet born was strong enough to open that coffee jar.Also, he couldn’t see how the coon might have gained entry; the doors and windows were all closed, and Sadlier didn’t pick up any hint of a draft.
He looked more closely at the beans on the kitchen table.What had first appeared a random sprinkling now revealed a pattern: letters, words.
SAD-LIER.
HELP.
Chapter 37
Sadlier got to Spero an hour earlier than usual, which would ordinarily have pained a man who begrudged the school every minute for which he wasn’t being paid—and doubly on this morning, when he was unfueled by coffee.After what was done with his beans, he’d given the routine a pass.And while there was much about the incident in his kitchen that justifiably gave him cause to be disquieted, it was the way his name was hyphenated that bothered him most: Sad-lier, or more correctly,Saaaad-lier, with the first syllable drawn out.Only one person at Spero had given it that emphasis, a person now drowned to death, so either someone was playing a very mean trick, or—
