Michael Koryta - So Cold the River

He didn’t know why he would bother with this talk, but he couldn’t help himself. He said, “Yeah, I see it.”

“That’s called an overshooting top.”

Great, he wanted to say, now pardon me, but I don’t give two shits, old woman, but no words left his lips. He was staring at the cloud and thinking she was wrong. That aberration across the top of the anvil didn’t look like a bubble. It looked like a dome.

“What’s it mean?” he said.

“Will take a few minutes for me to know. But it’ll be the part that tells the tale. You see how the rest of that cloud is all hard-edged? Could be some serious weather in there. But that bubble just formed. If it goes away soon, this one’s no real bother. If it stays on for more than ten minutes, then we could have a gully-washer headed our way.”

“How many minutes has it been?”

“Six,” she said. “Six so far.”

Anne wished Josiah would stand back from the window, stop blocking her view. This thing rolling in was on the verge of being something special, something dangerous, and she needed to see it clearly. Instead he just stood there with his face to the window as the minutes ticked by and the storm front advanced.

She leaned to the left and looked around him, studying the cloud and trying to remember all of the signs she needed to remember. The bubble on top of the anvil formation was holding steady. That meant the updraft was strong. The storm was being fed. The body of the cloud had a soft cauliflower appearance but its edges were firm and distinct and that meant…

A shrill ringing broke the silence that had grown in the house, and Josiah gave a startled jerk before reaching into his pocket and retrieving a cell phone.

“Yeah, I’m here,” he said. “Speak loud, boy. Where in hell you been? You didn’t lose them, did you?”

Josiah bristled at the response, and when he said, “They looking ’round my property?” his voice was softer than it had been and drove a chill through Anne. She willed herself to try and ignore the words, focus on the storm again.

Josiah shifted away from his spot at the window then, and when he did, Anne saw what she’d been missing, knew that the cloud edges were no longer important. Josiah’s body had blocked the development of a new feature from her eyes. A lower formation, trailing beneath that bubble, long tapering wisps like an old man’s beard. It was called a-

“What do they think they’re doing?” Josiah hissed. “What are they doing in those woods?”

– wall cloud, and it was pulling in the rain-cooled surface air, sucking in that moisture and feeding it to the updraft. The tips were spinning, as if unseen hands were twisting the end of the beard. Behind the wall cloud-

“You got a knife on you? Then go back down there and put an end to that Porsche’s tires, Danny. All of them. Then you sit tight. I’m headed your way.”

– amidst all that purple and gray was a slot of bright white. Downdraft. It slid out of the dark clouds and dropped toward the earth, cutting right through the blood silhouette Josiah Bradford had drawn on her window. The white light seemed to turn those dark red eyes into a shimmering black.

Josiah Bradford disconnected the phone and lowered it slowly, put it back in his pocket. He’d just removed his hand again when the air split into a wailing all around them. At the sound, he lunged for his gun.

“Don’t need that,” Anne said. “It’s not the police. It’s the tornado siren.”

ERIC STOOD IN SILENCE and stared back at Kellen as the wind bent the treetops and tore leaves loose and spun them into the air.

“If your experience has more to do with the blood and less with the water,” Kellen said, “maybe we’re wasting our time up here.”

He didn’t answer. Kellen said, “Maybe finding that spring isn’t worth anything, is what I’m saying. If there’s nothing about the water itself-”

“There’s something special about the water,” Eric said. “I think it was the balance to his blood. The counter.”

A steady rain was falling now, and he wiped the moisture off his forehead and turned away from Kellen, looked into the windswept trees. His head throbbed and his hands shook. The agony was approaching again, the fruit of poisoned water, of a dead man’s wrath, and he had nothing left to fight it with. The hell of it was that the sorrowful sense of defeat had little to do with fear of what was coming. No, it was the understanding of what would not be coming: a continuation of the story, an eerie insight into that hidden world, and the glory it could have brought him. He could see the foolishness of his idea now. All thoughts of the fame that would surround his strange gifts were bullshit; he’d have been a fifteen-minute tabloid freak show, a washed-up almost-was who drank a bottle of old blood and fancied himself a psychic.

“A counter?” Kellen said.

Eric nodded. “Everything changed with Anne’s water, with the water that didn’t have blood in it. The story it was showing me was a warning.”

“Of what?”

“Of what I did,” Eric said. “I brought him back.”

Campbell Bradford. His spirit, his ghost, his evil-pick your term, Eric Shaw had returned it to the valley, and the water allowed him to see that, caught his body with agonized cravings and forced him to drink more so it could force him to see more. He hadn’t understood in time, though. Somewhere along the line he’d lost all sense of purpose entirely, had begun to fantasize about what the water could do for him, to think of it as a gift instead of what it really was: a warning.

“Now they’ve stopped,” Kellen said. “Right? The visions are done.”

“Yeah. They’ve stopped.” Eric was thinking of the blood in the bottle and the way Campbell Bradford had looked right at him last night and said, I’m getting stronger.

There was a reason the visions had stopped. The past was not where it belonged anymore. The past was here.

Josiah needed that siren to stop. Damn thing was chewing into his brain, disrupting his focus, which needed to be on Danny’s message.

Wesley Chapel Gulf. That’s where Shaw was right now. In the sacred spot of Josiah’s boyhood. It made not a lick of sense but still felt as purely right as anything he’d ever heard. Of course that’s where they’d gone. Of course. There’d been something at work here for a while, something he couldn’t get his head around, and now he understood that it was time to stop trying. Let the chips fall. Stop trying to figure out the house rules-there were none, at least not any he’d ever understand. Wasn’t his place to lay plans now, was his place to listen to those that had been laid for him.

All you got to do is listen…

Yes, that was all. He was told that hours ago and still he’d been fighting it, making his own plans, trusting himself. Just listen, that was all he needed to do. He had a guide now, a hand in the darkness, and he wanted to listen but that frigging siren kept shrieking and screaming…

“Shut up!” he howled, tightening his hand on the gun as if he could put a few shells into the air and silence it all, silence the whole damn world.

“Won’t stop till the cloud passes over,” Anne McKinney said. “There’s rotation in that cloud. Could touch down.”

“A tornado?” he said. “A tornado’s coming here?”

“Won’t be here. Going to be well over our heads if it touches down. But it may hit the towns. It may hit the hotels.”

She said this as if it were the very definition of horror.

Josiah said, “I hope the son of a bitch does. I hope it spins right into the damned dome and leaves nothing but a pile of glass and stone behind.”