David Silva - The Disappeared

My sincere gratitude to Bentley Little, a fellow traveler in this strange world of storytelling, and without whom this novel may never have been written.

My continual appreciation and wonder to Alicia Dayton, who is still willing to answer the phone no matter how many times I call her with silly questions.

For Dean Koontz, I wish there was more I could say than simply thank you. For his generosity, his guidance, his friendship, I will forever consider myself fortunate.

For Paul F. Olson, who has never stopped being there when I began to feel a little too isolated from the real world. Thank you, Paul, and please, pick up a pencil and write another story for us!

In autumn, a leaf drops off a tree and flutters this way and that on the afternoon breeze, like a butterfly languidly strolling the currents. It touches down on the clear, calm surface of a pond. A ripple is brought forth. The ripple expands outward in a series of concentric rings. It is these rings that represent the true nature of time.

Time is not the linear propriety we have come to believe it is. We speak of the past as something that has come and gone and is lost except to our memories. We speak of the future as that which is yet to be. There are many pasts, many futures, each arising from the moment like ripples from a fallen leaf.

How had it come to this?

Retreating to the safe, familiar darkness of the house.

Keeping the drapes drawn, day and night, summer, winter.

Wearing sunglasses in public to keep others from looking in, to keep her from looking out.

Fading hopelessly into the mind-numbing distraction of television, hours fading to days, days to months.

Dreaming him, missing his little-boy laughter, the sweet summer-sun smell of his hair, the mesmerizing dark brown eyes.

Giving up on him.

Such a long time now.

How had it come to this?

She didnt want to think about it.

And that was precisely the point, wasnt it?

Someone was knocking at the door.

Teri Knight, who was lying on the couch with a damp wash cloth draped over her forehead, opened her eyes and stared at the living room ceiling, listening. The sun had gone down. It was late evening now, seven-thirty, maybe eight. She had drawn the drapes earlier, and turned out the lights, and now there was a slit of brightness from the neighbors back porch light slipping through the sliding glass doors, through the far corner where the drapes didnt quite cover, pitching a rectangular gray cast across the wall next to the fireplace. In the background, she could hear the gritty chorus of Round Here by Counting Crows. It seemed a thousand miles away.

Teri closed her eyes again, fighting against a headache that had come on late this morning, just before her lunch break at the post office. It had dogged her relentlessly all afternoon, through her regular postal route, through the traffic after work, through four doses, 500 milligrams each, of ibuprofen, and there was still no sign of relief in sight. Michael would have told her there was nothing she could do about it, that she just had to let it run its course, as if it were a cold or the flu. Michael would have told her to let go of it and get on with her life. But then Michael was a ghost now, wasnt he? Or as close to a ghost as a man can get without dying first.

Michael.

In the distance, a crack of thunder exploded.

The music wandered away, voice to thunder, rhythm to rain, sweetly, innocently. Maybe it would be back. Maybe it wouldnt. And maybe Michael had been right. Maybe she just had to learn to let go of it and get on with her life. Let the past rest in peace. If only the past wasnt such a long stretch of road.

She didnt know where all the miles had gone, only that somewhere along the line the miles had begun to run together, monotonously, an endless stretch of yellow dashes leading the way into the horizon. She would be forty-three in late November, wife to a man who lived on the other side of the country, a man she hadnt seen in several years; mother to a son who had gone to the park on his bicycle one day and had disappeared off the face of the earth, a ghost of a different kind.

Such a long, long stretch of road.

Another crack of thunder exploded.

Teri felt it rumble across the floor beneath the couch. Just the storm, she thought wearily. She let out a slow, deliberate breath, feeling her headache ebb and rise, then ebb again, fighting to hold on.

Just the storm.

A flash of lightning illuminated the sky, burning white-hot into the back of her eyelids before leaving a trail of browns and grays and blacks. Teri winced and turned away. She wasnt a woman who normally gave herself to nightmares. If they wanted her, they had to come get her. Lately, that was exactly what they had been doing. And just now, she thought she had caught a glimpse of something that looked like a granite headstone, its face weathered and spider-webbed with cracks, a name chiseled crudely into the stone, unreadable against a backdrop of muddy colors and a gray-white mist rolling in from somewhere in the

in the

past.

Another roll of thunder.

She shuddered, and sat up again, the wash cloth slipping off her forehead and dropping into her lap. It wasnt the storm that frightened her. Storms were like out-of-state relatives, they came and went with a vengeance, but once they had moved through, life soon returned to normal. It wasnt like that with everything. Nightmares, especially the bad ones, had a way of coming back for you. She tossed the wash cloth at the coffee table and when it fell off the far side, she made no effort to pick it up again.

Behind the roll of thunder another sound made itself evident. It took a moment before she was able to make sense out of what she was hearing, and this time there was no mistaking the sound. It wasnt the storm. And it wasnt the music.

Someone was knocking at the door.

When she went to investigate, Teri found a young woman pacing uneasily off to one side of the front porch. She was not a familiar face. Teri would have remembered this particular woman, whose hair was tied back in a ponytail, revealing the most striking eyes Teri had ever seen. They were pale blue, almost ghost-like, the kind of eyes that you couldnt turn away from even if you wanted.

The woman was not alone. Behind her, looking rain-soaked and a bit out of sorts, stood a young boy, maybe ten or eleven. He appeared on the thin side and a bit pale, as if he had been out of the sun for a good long time. His hair was long and pressed against his face by the rain. From beneath his bangs, he looked up and Teri felt an instant, tugging sense of familiarity. Her hand tightened on the doorknob.

Mrs. Knight? the woman asked.

Yes, Teri said. It was unmistakable how much this boy looked like Gabe. All the way down to the clothes he was wearing: Levis, a black tee-shirt, a blue-and-white wind breaker like the one she had bought at J.C. Pennys only a day or two before Gabe had disappeared. Part of a white sock was visible through a rip in the toe of one shoe, and though Teri didnt remember the rip, she did remember those shoes. They were a generic brand that K-Mart had quit selling a number of years ago.

I think hes missed you, Mrs. Knight.

What?

The rain began to come down in sheets. It took her back in a flash to when Gabe had been young and had come home from school one day and asked her about God. One of the kids had told him that whenever God cried, it rained. Only there was something he didnt understand. He didnt understand what was so terrible that it could make God want to cry? Teri had been at a loss for words. And here she was again at another loss. She looked at the woman and smiled, numbly trying to comprehend what she was apparently failing to grasp.