Dennis Yates - Minus Tide

Ann’s arms slipped away. His eye was clouded with sweat but he could see her face tighten into the familiar rictus of fear. He still tasted the elk’s heart he’d eaten earlier, knew that its blood-jam was pumping wildly through his veins. You’re closeAnn…so close. While he pressed down he felt the dogs’ mouths crowd in tighter. Until something inside told him to release her…

When he drew away his hands he looked up and saw Ann’s mother.

She reminded him of a demon story he’d heard as a boy. A tale his grandmother once told him. About a beautiful woman who’d died under suspicious circumstances. And when the townsfolk began seeing her ghost, some warned that she could not accept what had happened to her, that eventually a madness would develop and she’d turn into something terrible.

Most of the time Ann’s mother no longer resembled the woman he’d met years before. What Cyclops saw now was the face of a woman who’d been pulled from a shallow desert grave by coyotes, her eyes milky white and her flesh bubbling with sores from the day’s scorching rays.

You must give me my child!

Cyclops staggered to his feet and tried to run. He threw back his head and screamed in agony. The shadow-dogs clung to his body from his neck down. Their electric teeth sinking deep into his flesh. He stretched his arms out to his sides and the dogs wriggling bodies caused him to sway-moving him past Ann and toward the cliff as if he’d become their marionette. They brought him up to the crumbling edge. He spotted an exposed tree root and looped his arm through it.

“Leave me!”

The shadow-dogs pulled him over and he swung above the dark chasm until they tired and let go, dropping from his body toward the rocks and roaring surf, taking Ann’s mother screaming down with them.

When they were all gone, he climbed back up to look at Ann. She lay on her back, coughing. Her chest heaving for fresh air. He pulled off the remains of his shredded jacket and threw it over her before picking her up in his arms.

Many times after they fought Duane would take off in his car. The screams and shouting beforehand often woke Ann up, and sometimes she’d hear her mother sobbing and go to their room and lie down next to her until the growl of Duane’s Camaro rattled the windows again and she’d slip back to her own bed. If she was lucky enough to fall back to sleep, her dreams would still arrive to scare her and she’d end up lying in bed, staring up at faces in the wood ceiling until the morning half-light came through her window and showed her they were only knotholes. Often her mind was still dreaming when she opened her eyes and the things in the ceiling would whisper too softly for her to understand.

One night she woke up from a bad dream and thought Duane hadn’t come back and she wanted to crawl into bed with her mom because when she did the scary dreams wouldn’t bother her. At the end of the hall, however, she’d seen a strange light coming from the kitchen and decided to see what it was. The side door to the kitchen had been left open and moonlight was pouring inside on the linoleum and she’d gone and stood in it and it made her feel good.

The kitchen door shouldn’t be left open, and she wondered if Duane had just forgotten to close it or if the raccoons were now trying doors in the middle of the night. She heard someone crying, and it sounded a lot like her mother.

She padded into the doorway and saw light coming from the garage door and she went outside to see who was in there. It was a warm night, and the buttons on her pajamas twinkled. She glanced around the yard and didn’t see any raccoons watching her. When she reached the door she could hear Duane and her mother talking, but the window was set too high for her to look through.

She was about to knock but something stopped her hand. Instead she flipped over an old milk crate her mother used to sit on when she was picking peas and set it next to the door. The window was still too high and she’d needed to stand on her tiptoes to be able to see her mother lying back on the old couch and Duane bent over her outstretched arm and giving her a shot like a doctor would do. Her mother’s eyes were glazed and when she looked up and saw Ann’s face floating in the window she began to laugh like she did sometimes when she didn’t think anyone else was around to hear.

Ann suddenly didn’t recognize her and fell off the crate. She hit her head on a stepping stone and lay there until Duane found her and they took her to the hospital. And that’s when the doctor said her trouble with faces may have started, because she’d hurt the place in her brain that did that kind of thing but she’d never told him what she’d seen that night to make her fall.

After learning that their little brother had been last seen headed for Traitor during the storm the night before, Chad’s brothers had started to worry. The phones were still out and no one they spoke to had any idea what had happened to him. And although a second storm was due to hit, they decided to drive up over the old mountain road in a pickup loaded with chainsaws and extra gas.

Chad hadn’t drifted far out into the bay before deciding he wasn’t going to leave Ann behind. When he got back to shore Ann and the sheriff were nowhere to be found. He’d discovered blood on the ground and tracked it from the boat ramp up to the highway. He was limping down the middle of the highway when his brothers found him, shivering and barely able to speak.

Ann was discovered by the side of the highway-semi-consciousness, talking deliriously about a hobo who was trying to kill her. She was wrapped in a blanket and taken to her aunt’s house where she was set next to a blazing fire. A doctor who happened to be down visiting relatives had come over and treated the infected wound in Ann’s leg. He insisted that she still needed to get to a hospital as soon as possible. If the highway was not passable by morning, some locals planned to take her to the hospital in Buoy City by boat. The sheriff was still missing.

Ann recalled only fragments of what happened after Cyclops left her lying on Raven Point. She remembered how cold she was, of the persistent howling of dogs on the trail above her. The skin of her throat felt as if it had been burned and she probed it with the tips of her fingers, expecting bandages but not finding any. When she looked up she saw Aunt Kate beaming down at her.

“How do you feel now, Ann?”

“Better…I’m really thirsty.”

“I think your fever has finally broken. And they say the highway is going to open up.”

Ann heard some shuffling and pulled back the blanket from her face. Chad and his brothers were sitting around a table playing a quiet game of cards. Chad’s left eye was swollen shut but he looked up and smiled when he saw her face. She recognized his shorter blond hair.

“Hey.”

“Hey Chad."

“Where did you go?” she asked Kate. “Chad said he visited you earlier, then went by again later and you weren’t home. I thought something had happened to you.”

“Mrs. Nathan came by the check on me early in the morning. She’s got a generator, you know, and insisted I go stay at her house for a few hours. Some people went out looking for you. I was worried sick. What happened?”

“You must let her rest,” the doctor said, rising from his chair. He was very tired himself and anxious to go back to bed.

As they headed east the air became warmer and drier. He could smell dust and dried hay and knew it would only be another hour before the train would stop at a grain silo where they’d get off. He knew from experience there weren’t any railroad bulls to worry about, but if some of the local famers were in a mood, they might get shot at or have dogs set on them for sport.