Mason (15 page)

“That's not what I meant,” Cassie said. She'd never sounded more serious in her life. “I saw Mason in the drive out front. He was getting into Hunter's car.”

When the operator came on, asking for the nature of Rene's emergency, she couldn't speak. She just stared at the wall, a wave of fear for Mason crashing over her, making her numb.

Mason?

Hunter's grip on the steering wheel was so tight his knuckles were white. Thinking about what Mason had done to his friends infuriated him, but it also made him uneasy. All the retard had to do was conjure up one nasty image, and Hunter could lose control of the car, just like Lump. Sure the big idiot would suffer as well, but maybe Mason didn't care much about himself.

“I'm going to tell you again,” Hunter said through a tight jaw. “I see one thing that doesn't look right, and my buddy is going to waste your little friend. I don't call him when we get to where we're going, and she's dead. So you just sit there and keep the monsters in your head. You get me?”

That was the lie that got Mason in the car in the first place. Hunter told the dumb-ass kid that he had a friend waiting upstairs and Rene was as good as toast if Mason
didn't do what Hunter told him. The threat worked pretty damn good. Hunter took his eyes off the road and looked at Mason. The punk was shaking all over. Hell, he was crying, blubbering like a five-year-old who had broken his trike.

He continued driving north, past the high school on the Old Parish Road. Gene had told him to take Mason out to the Old Bracken Bridge. Nobody lived anywhere close to the place. It was out of the way, and there was a shed Hunter had used plenty of times when he needed some privacy.

“You gonna tell me why you started taking down my posse?” Hunter asked, eyes fixed on the road ahead, tensed for any sudden changes in the scenery. “I mean, we gave you some crap, but you deserved it. So why all of a sudden you go hoodoo freak on us?”

“Someone's got to step up,” Mason muttered. He was still crying, so the words broke as he spoke them.

“Yeah, step up for what?”

“You shouldn't-a.”

“Oh we
shouldn't-a
,” Hunter said mockingly, imitating Mason's tearful voice. “Well, let me tell you something, pudding head. No one tells me what I should or
shouldn't-a
do. No one tells my boys what they should or
shouldn't-a
do, except me. That's a lesson you need to learn.”

“You hurt her,” Mason said.

“Who? Denton? Damn right we hurt her. But that's nothing compared to what I'm going to do to your sorry ass. You wanna play judge and jury? Well, bring it on.”

The one thing he still couldn't figure was how did Mason know what they'd done? Was he there? Did he see it happen? Denton damned well didn't tell him.

Hunter thought about the cop he'd seen that morning. His mind began to race and his panic doubled when he remembered seeing Mason talking to the guy.

“Did you narc me out?” Hunter roared. He pulled the gun from his pants, held it low so it wasn't visible over the dashboard. “
Did
you?”

Next to him, Mason whimpered. Hunter looked over and saw the kid crammed against the passenger door, trying to make himself smaller, like he could avoid a bullet at this range.

“What did you tell that cop?” Hunter insisted.

“Nothing,” Mason cried. “Nothing. Nothing. He told me to go home.”

“You're LYING to me!”

“I'm not either. I'm not. He told me I shouldn't sit on other people's lawns, and so I should go home, and I was going home, but I wanted to see Rene. I went to the hospital. But I didn't sit on anyone else's lawn. I didn't.”

Hunter's rage faded. He almost felt like laughing
as he put the gun between his legs on the seat. This big crying bitch was the bogeyman that had scared his friends into hospital beds? This pudding-headed goof was the mayor of Nightmare Town? Jesus.

“I didn't,” Mason whimpered again.

 

Hunter followed Mason, pushing the idiot along the path. Willows and dogwoods gave way to cypress trees. Tall grasses reached up at them. Nettles and prickly bushes scraped over the denim of their jeans. Ahead, the river roared, turning white and violent in the narrows beneath the Old Bracken Bridge. As they stepped into the flat clearing before the bridge, river spray cooled Hunter's skin, but not his emotions.

The Old Bracken Bridge was made of timbers and long pine railings. Once it had been used to transport lumber from one side of the river to the other, way back when Hunter's pawpaw worked the logs. Now the railings were broken, and the planks of the bridge were rotting out from below. Hunter knew it was still safe to walk on, but no one was going to be hauling a truck-load of pine over the Old Bracken again.

The shed stood on the far side. Once it had served as a checkpoint run by the lumber company. But it had fallen to crap. Its boards were warped and shrunk with river moisture and sunlight, so that great gaps appeared between them. The square frame that had once held a
window was now empty and crooked.

Beneath the bridge, white water crashed into rocks, sending up ghostly clouds of spray. Tiny rainbows shimmered in the mist.

Ahead of Hunter, Mason stopped, his foot hovering over the first plank of the bridge. He looked back at Hunter with a frightened expression.

“Move it,” Hunter said, jabbing his gun into Mason's back.

“Is it safe?” Mason wanted to know.

“Your days of worrying about safe are way behind you, retard. Now get moving.”

Mason did as he was told. He walked slowly across the planks, freezing every time one of them squeaked or groaned. Impatient, Hunter pushed the kid forward, making him stumble twice before they reached the far end of the bridge.

“Now, you get in that shack and don't come out until I tell you.”

 

Mason sat on the dirt floor of the shack. It reminded him of Gene's fort, the place he kept his scary pets. This place didn't smell as bad, though. There had been a wooden floor once, he could tell by the jagged bits of wood running around the inside of the frame. It was gone now—just dirt and litter and bugs. But he didn't care about any of that. He only wanted Rene to be okay,
and he wanted to be okay himself. He didn't like being afraid. He didn't like the sight of Hunter's gun, because Mason had seen those in movies and knew what they could do.

So he sat on the ground, his finger tracing circles in the dirt. Outside, he heard Hunter talking. Was someone else there? Mason didn't know, but he knew better than to look.

“No, man. We're already here. Where are you?”

As he listened to Hunter's voice, a mind picture began to form. Mason tried to fight it away, but he got the same feeling he'd had at the hospital, when he had to draw what came to him. His finger scratched through the dirt. It wouldn't be a good picture, he knew. His fingers were thicker than pencil points, but it didn't matter.

As he drew, Hunter's voice faded away. Even the loud roar of the river disappeared. Mason heard nothing and saw nothing except for the lines and shapes that emerged in the dirt beneath his finger.

When he finished, Mason looked at the picture, confused. It was just like the one he drew after visiting Rene in the hospital that first time. It had Lara's face, and Lump's and Ricky's and Hunter's. But there was another face, a large face hovering over all the others like a moon: his brother, Gene.

His wonderment over this addition to the image
lasted only a few seconds. With the picture had come a certainty. Hunter and the others had hurt Rene, but Gene was the one who had told them to do it. The mind picture said so, and it had come from Hunter.

This was Gene's fault. Like all of the pain Mason could remember—the beatings, the insults, everything—Gene was the cause. And maybe Gene was coming for him now or, worse, he was going back to hurt Rene again.

Oh no
.
Oh no
.

But with the pleas Mason spoke in his head came the anger and the numbing darkness. They overwhelmed him. The hole opened up in Mason again—deeper and darker than it had ever been before—draining his thoughts and his feelings, leaving only an empty nothingness.

Getting to his feet, Mason pushed open the shack's door with so much force it crashed against the side of the building and sprang loose from its hinges.

Hunter stood ten feet away. He held a cell phone to his ear. He was already reaching for his gun.

Mason created a mind picture and forced it on Hunter. It was nothing more than a black sheet. No elegance or artistry, just darkness.

Hunter cried out and dropped his phone. He was still holding his gun though. He swung it around wildly as he screamed. “I'm blind! You sonofabitch. What did
you do? God, I'm blind.”

The gun exploded and a piece of wood tore away from the door frame beside Mason's head. Hunter spun and shot again, sending a bullet into the wooden railing of the Old Bracken Bridge. The third shot similarly blew away a chunk of the railing. Hunter spun in circles. His rage and fear flowed out of him with a series of curse words and gunshots. Bullets hit the planks of the bridge, rocks, and dirt as Hunter rocked from side to side, taking aim at any sound.

Hunter turned back toward Mason and fired three more times. Two of those shots punched holes in the side of the shack. The third hit Mason in the shoulder, spinning him around and sending him back into the shack.

The mind picture retreated into Mason's head, but only for a moment. Once the shock passed, he again sent the black sheet into Hunter's mind.

“Stop it,” Hunter screamed. “Jesus!”

Hunter spun and swatted at the air, working his way slowly across the Old Bracken Bridge, trying to flee the blindness Mason put in his eyes. As for Mason, he walked out of the shack, not even holding his wounded shoulder. With blank eyes and a mouth set firmly in a frown, he crossed the dirt to the bridge, ignoring Hunter's pleas. He crossed the planks until he stood in the middle of the bridge.

Hunter stumbled. He tripped over a cracked board and hit the railing hard. The board snapped away. Hunter reached out with one tattooed arm. His fingers found nothing to support him and he toppled over the side, plunging headfirst into the vicious river below.

Gene parked behind Hunter's car. He threw a glance up the road and then turned to check over his shoulder. No traffic moved in either direction. He touched the gun tucked in his waistband and set off down the dirt road.

If all went well, Gene would come out of this day free and clear. He'd set Hunter up, and in a few minutes he'd be knocking him down. The guy's incompetence had nearly cost Gene his freedom, and now he had to step up. The story Gene would tell the cops was simple enough—he saw Mason in Hunter's car and followed them to the bridge. Hunter had a gun, which Gene wrestled away from him. In the ensuing struggle, Hunter was shot.

Mason would simply be an innocent bystander, the last victim of Hunter Wallace's killing spree, which had
begun with Dusty Smith. Gene figured the cops could put that together easily enough once Rene remembered the night of her attack. Even if she never remembered, Hunter would be the most likely suspect. The cops had already been keeping tabs on him, or so Hunter said.

Easy. Clean. Free and clear.

Gene stepped on a dead branch and the crack startled him out of his thoughts. Ahead, thick bushes and low tree branches blocked the abandoned dirt road. He reached the thicket and pushed his way through. Branches snagged on his shirt and scraped over his cheek. Gene didn't mind. It would confirm to the police how anxious he'd been to rescue his little brother.

A chill rolled down Gene's neck and he paused. He trembled amid the overgrowth and reached for his gun. The plants around him began to shrink and melt. Then the world turned dark.

It happened so quickly that the woods around him might have been nothing more than painted cloth, suddenly yanked away to reveal the gloomy world behind them. Black trees wrapped in writhing snakes stood all around him. The leaves and grass at his feet turned black with rot.

Gene blinked. He rubbed his eyes. Though he knew this change of landscape was his brother's doing, unease seeped over him like cold water. The icy stream spread
over his shoulders and back until it felt as if he were leaning against a sheet of ice.

Then the monsters stepped out of the woods. The dogs came first. Deformed and rotting. Eyes drooping over wrinkled muzzles. Teeth too long to belong to real dogs, bared in rage.

Horrible mutations traveled through the nightmare forest. One creature slithered toward him on legs made of fat snakes. Its torso was that of a man with long muscular arms the color of rotten hamburger meat, and its head was that of a mutilated dog, tongue lolling through teeth as long as steak knives.

Gene knew these things did not exist. They were perverse images spewed from Mason's mind. But they still had an effect. His skin shriveled tightly with goose-flesh and he hurried through the bushes.

When he emerged at the edge of the Old Bracken Bridge, Gene nearly lost his footing; the scene before him was so unnatural that it confused him and threw him off balance.

The black forest ran up to the bridge on the near side of the river and rose from the bank on the far side. The river raced through this nightmare, but the water rushing downstream was crimson. Dozens of freakish creatures like those in the woods flailed and slithered in the water. Thousands of black birds filled the sky. They dove over the treetops and swooped low to the foaming
river. Arcing up, they flew in a high loop before diving again. Gene followed the flock with his eyes. The currents they created in the air were smooth, precise, and hypnotic. Gene felt his stomach roll as if with motion sickness. He closed his eyes for a moment and squeezed the grip of his gun tightly. It seemed the only solid thing to hold on to.

Once his head stopped spinning, Gene opened his eyes and was again drawn to the swooping performance of the birds. Mason stood at their center, leaning on the railing of the bridge, gazing down into the current, which looked like a river of blood.

Gene searched for Hunter amid the trees and Mason's twisted menagerie, but there was no sign of him. Had Mason managed to get rid of him?

Perhaps the doorknob did something right
, Gene thought.
That'd be good. One down. One to go
.

He raised the gun. It was time for Mason to step up one last time.

 

Mason didn't see Hunter fall. He didn't notice the body carried downstream by the current. All Mason saw was a dark forest in which monstrous creatures walked over the ground and clung to the branches of black trees. Blood ran in a thick stream down his arm, but Mason only felt a distant throbbing. The pain was in a different world, like the blue sky and the green trees. Mason
thought that was just fine. Despite the horrible creatures, Mason wasn't afraid of the forest. Here he could see the monsters for what they were. In the other world, they hid until it was too late.

There was no reason to stop the mind picture, no reason to look at the real world at all. Except for Rene.

An explosion sounded and something heavy hit Mason in the back. He was slammed forward against the bridge railing. It creaked against his weight, but it held. Suddenly the dark landscape of his mind picture was yanked away, and he looked down into the white froth of the river. Pain blossomed between Mason's shoulder blades and his legs grew weak. He slipped down the railing and sat on the planks of the bridge, trying to breathe. But every time he inhaled, it felt like someone was stabbing him with glass.

“Doorknob,” Gene said, smiling and pointing his gun at Mason. He walked over the planks, shaking his head. “You never learn, do you?”

“It hurts, Gene,” Mason said, trying desperately to breathe. Gene would help him. Gene was his brother. They were family, they had to…

But no. That wasn't right. Gene was bad. He hurt Rene. Gene had hurt a lot of people. He wouldn't help.

“Well, of course it hurts,” Gene replied. “You've been shot.”

“Go away,” Mason whimpered.

“Why don't you
make
me go away? Why not show me some of your scary monsters and send me away? Oh, I know, because it won't
work
on me! I'm not like Daddy. I don't let stupid pictures control me.”

“Just go.”

Gene walked up to his brother and knelt down. He put the gun against Mason's cheek, and the scorching metal burned him.

“Ow!” Mason cried.

“You killed our mother,” Gene whispered. “Did you know that? It was you. You told Mama and Daddy all about my little hobby with the crows, and that night I decided to see what killing you might be like. It sounded like fun. But you remembered those birds. You made them live again with your damn mind pictures. That's what Daddy was swinging at when he knocked Mama over the banister. He was swinging at the birds you put in his head.”

“Mama,” Mason blubbered. He wanted her now. He wanted to see her nice smile and smell the sweet chocolate-chip-cookie scent of her. Where was she? Why wouldn't she stop Gene from being mean, like she used to?

Gene stood and brushed at the knees of his pants. “I can't believe you wasted your talent,” he said. “The one good thing our daddy gave either of us, and he gave it to
you. Then you wasted it. And for what? Rene Denton? Did you really think she liked you? Jesus, Mason, are you that stupid?”

“Go away,” Mason said. His head was growing light. The rush of the river thundered in his ears and the bright daylight burned his eyes. Everything was so harsh and cold. He just wanted to close his eyes and go to sleep.

“Am I losing you, doorknob?” Gene asked, laughing. “You going nighty-night?”

A high-pitched wail rose from the dirt road beyond the brush.

“Before you go, Mason, I want you to know something. I'm not done with Rene Denton yet. Not by a long shot. You take that to bed with you.”

Gene turned toward the sound of the police siren. He threw his gun into the river. Looking back at Mason he said, “No gun, no guilt.”

Mason heard the car coming up fast. He saw dust rising above the trees to the south. Good. He wanted them to get Gene. They'd stop him from doing anything bad. Wouldn't they?

No gun, no guilt
.

Leaves rustled and Mason heard deep voices shouting nearby. He forced himself to look up, and he saw a police officer leaping through the green bushes. The
man had his gun drawn, and he was aiming at Gene.

“Step away from him,” the officer shouted. “And drop your gun.”

Gene Avrett didn't move. “What are you talking about?” he yelled back.

“Get away from that boy and drop your weapon.”

“I'm unarmed.”

“Drop the weapon!”

Gene looked down and saw a gun resting against his right palm, but he didn't feel its weight. It wasn't real. It was just another picture.

“Wait!” he screamed.

But the officer fired two shots in rapid succession. Both hit Gene in the chest. Stunned, he backed up a step. Then he crashed forward, dead before he hit the planks.

Mason coughed and cried. He couldn't breathe anymore. His body wouldn't work, and that was okay because it hurt so much, and he just wanted the hurt to stop. Someone was talking to him. He felt hands on his face.

“Stay with me,” the police officer said. “Hang in there.”

But Mason didn't see the man. He saw his mama's face. He saw her nice smile. Her eyes were big and they looked happy, the way they used to when she'd tuck him in at night. Across the bridge, Rene, looking pretty
like she always did when he imagined their picnics together, waved at him, but he couldn't raise his arm in reply.

“I'm sleepy,” Mason told his mama.

“I'm here,” she replied.

Suddenly the scent of sweet chocolate-chip cookies filled his nose, and he knew it was going to be fine. The pain was gone. All of the ugliness was gone. He just saw his mama and Rene and lots of golden light.

“'Night,” he whispered, sliding into his mother's arms.