Dennis Yates - Red Mountain

The man in the garage was asleep and not going anywhere. Robert’s interrogation had yet to produce anything.

He petted Nugget and consoled her the best way he could. Then he turned on the local news and saw his face flash up on the screen. It was so unreal to see himself a wanted suspect, another face among the many you saw paraded in the press every day.

Interesting, he thought. There was no mention of Peggy and Connor missing and nothing about Steven or his family. Maybe the police were trying to keep a tight lid on it, until they were able to find Robert and question him. He channel-surfed over the other local news stations and saw them report the same headlines in almost exactly the same manner.

Robert wondered if any reporters had tried talking to his mother, and was relieved to see they hadn’t so far. She wouldn’t have said anything anyway. She hated most news reporters and their perfect hair and their obsessions with finding the most sensational angle possible. Milking misery until innocent people had their reputations ground into the dirt.

His stepfather would be a different story...

He imagined Dan saying something to the effect that he’d seen Robert have a serious temper on occasion, but otherwise he appeared to be a good father to his adopted son. But that was Dan, and Dan and Robert were never on good terms after Robert caught him talking abusively to his mother one day and called him on it.

There’s still time motherfucker. I’m sure you’re dying to help them decide I’m guilty…

Robert turned off the television. As soon as he lay his head down on a pillow he fell instantly to sleep.

****

Mexico—a dream. He was following the man dressed in white, the one whose shoes had flecks of blood on them from the dogfight he’d just attended. Robert had been keeping tabs on him all afternoon, waiting for the man to show him the way back to where his father and uncle were being held captive.

For several blocks Robert followed the man through crowded streets, watched as he bent over and petted some sleeping puppies a young boy was selling from a wood crate. Then the man continued onward, unaware Robert was less than a block behind. He crossed a busy street and stepped out onto a beach covered with dozing tourists and colorful umbrellas, the sound of salsa music on radios and the greasy smoke of cooking meat.

Before Robert reached the beach he was accosted by a marionette maker. He stopped when the toothless old man began to make the puppets dance. One of them resembled Robert, surrounded by skeletons made from the small bones of animals held together with bits of dirty rag. The old man laughed as he made them dance faster, and the more Robert tried to break past the circling skeletons, the more they’d pick up speed and throw him back to the middle.

He ran from the old fool and his puppets. But when he got down to the beach the man in white was gone…

“Try it again, dad,” said a boy’s voice.

He turned and Connor was standing beside him. A silver kite had materialized in Robert’s hands. He tried to teach Connor how to fly it, but as soon as he got it ten feet in the air a big gust of wind came along and caused the kite to spiral downward and crash into the sand. After the third time he could no longer hide his frustration from Connor.

“I can’t fly these damn things anymore.”

He turned the kite over again to see if he could find any defects. From behind he heard a sound that was between a snort and a cough. When he looked he saw Peggy with both hands pressed to her mouth, trying to suppress an explosion of laughter.

“If you think you’re so good with these things…”

The wind roared down the beach again, and this time it whipped the kite from Robert’s hands. The silver arrowhead climbed high into the sky and was swept out over the frothing surf. Connor jumped up and down with excitement, not upset at all that Robert had lost it.

They watched the kite until it drifted even further offshore. Soon it became a brilliant speck of mercury on the horizon—as close to what Robert imagined an angel might look like if he believed in such things—before being swallowed by a swiftly moving squall line.

The world went black, and he heard Peggy and Connor’s screams for help. He thrust his arms out into the darkness, hoping they were within reach. He felt someone’s head and gently drew whoever it was toward him. When the squall line passed he found himself under a sweltering Mexican sun again and he looked down to see what he’d been holding.

It was his uncle Barney’s severed head. And next to Barney were the severed heads of a dozen eyeless pigs hanging from hooks in an outdoor market flashing with bottle-flies. He could hear the man in white laughing from a balcony somewhere high above the lines of drying laundry. It was the laugh of the devil.

Robert let go and screamed. Barney’s head swung back and forth on its rusty chain while fresh blood streamed from the corners of his mouth. His black eyeless sockets snapped opened and he began to speak.

“Look inside the wooden box, boy. I’ve got something in there for you.”

It wasn’t Barney’s voice, but the ghost who had once pursued Robert through the woods up at his grandfather’s mountain cabin. Just the memory of the tall glimmering figure made his skin feel as if it had been coated with stinging frost.

“What box? I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

“You’ve seen it before. On that day you were snooping in your grandmother’s attic.”

“I swear, I don’t remember.”

“Then you must try harder.”

Cold hands squeezed his shoulders and began to shake him. Somehow the violent movement loosened his memory of the object, made it tumble back into his conscious mind.

An oblong-shaped box no larger than a man’s hand, partially wrapped in the very brown paper it had been mailed in. With carvings on it that moved when you touched them…

Of course this was what the ghost was talking about, Robert thought. But he’d been so young when he’d first discovered the heirloom that he later dismissed it as a dream. His grandmother’s attic had always been a world full of mysteries to him. He never got to spend enough time up there before she’d shout at him to come back down.

****

“Bobby. It’s Will. Wake up.”

Robert rolled over on the couch, shaking. He opened his eyes and saw Will standing above.

“Where am I?”

“You’re safe. You’re inside my house.”

Robert was drenched with sweat and he had a raging headache. Will must have anticipated this, for he pushed a couple aspirins into Robert’s mouth and forced him drink from a glass of water. Nugget stood next to Will, her eyes following everything.

“How long have I been out?”

“Four hours.”

Robert sat up fast, wincing as a network of pain went red hot. “You’ve got to be kidding. How come you let me sleep so long?”

“I couldn’t wake you up. So did you learn anything from that guy?”

“No. I think he’s a waste of time.”

“Well I’ve got some great news. Maybe it’s just a perfect good-cop, bad-cop thing we’ve got going, but Mr. Frosty was in a really talkative mood when I checked on him a few hours ago. I found out where they’re keeping Peggy and Connor…”

“What?”

“He says they’ve got them up at this old farmhouse near Wrath Butte. I cross-checked some things on line and I think he’s telling the truth.”

Will sat down in a chair and began cleaning a revolver with a small cloth.

“Wrath Butte?” Robert seemed to recall the place being a topic of conversation recently but he’d forgotten to whom he’d been talking. Then the image of Steven came rushing back to him—the memories they’d traded about a past family reunion and the realization they both had the same great grandfather Jared Horn.