Nobody Floats It This Time of Year - Part One: 2018 (4)

The cold closed over his head and drove the air out of him.

For a moment there was nothing at all, no up and no light, only a dull roaring that was the creek in his ears. His chest locked. His mouth opened on its own and took in water, and the water was so cold it burned going down. Then his feet struck stone and pushed, and his head broke the surface into the night, and he was gasping in great tearing whoops that he couldn't stop, his whole body heaving for air.

His right arm was up. He found it there, over his head, rigid, the fist closed around the phone. He hadn't decided to put it there. The light was still on. It swung across the water and the black underside of the deck and the water again, and he understood dimly that he was moving, fast, that the current had him and was taking him toward the bridge with his arm held up out of the creek like a man in a painting.

The tube was gone. The dry bag had been clipped to it, and that was gone too, the battery pack and the last of the glow sticks. He thought of none of it. He kicked, and his legs were heavy and slow and full of water, his shoes and his fleece dragging at him like weights, and he kicked again.

The deck went over him.

He saw it go, the girders and the rows of empty nests, the phone light shaking across them. And then, high up and off to one side, out over the water at the height he had last seen it, the soft green smear of the glow stick. It hung over him as he passed. He couldn't turn his head to look. He went under it on his back, swimming, his arm up, the light of his phone and the light of the glow stick both on the water around him for an instant, gray and green, and then he was out the other side and the bridge was behind him and the green was gone.

---

His knee hit stone. Then his hip. He was in shallow water over a gravel bar, rolling, and he got his free hand under him and his knees under him and crawled, the creek pulling at his legs as if it didn't want to give them back. He crawled until there was no more water. Then he crawled farther, up through wet sand and into the dead leaves at the foot of the bank, and stopped there on his hands and knees with his forehead almost on the ground.

The shaking came then, far bigger than shivering, a violence that took his whole body and wrung it so hard that his teeth cracked together and he tasted blood where he'd caught the side of his tongue. He rolled onto his side in the leaves and curled around the phone and let it happen, because there was nothing else to do with it.

It went on a long time. When it eased enough for him to move, he lifted the phone.

The case was beaded with water but the screen came on. Twelve percent. The recording was still running. He stopped it, and the screen showed him the last thing it had seen: leaves, close, gray, and a corner of his own wet sleeve.

He scrolled back to the bridge.

He watched it come up in the gray light: the near pier, the rust stains, the heart, the empty ledge. He watched the frame tilt up as his arm had lifted. Under the deck the light died a little way into the dark. And up at the rail, in the faint green glow, he could see the diagonals of the truss, and the rail itself, and the glow stick.

It was hanging in the air at the height of a man's chest.

Nothing was holding it. There was the rail behind it, and the empty sky beyond the rail. The small green light hung in front of them both with nothing under it and nothing around it. He watched it the whole way in. He watched it move, slow, out over the rail, out over the water, lower, held out by nothing at all over the place where he would pass.

He stopped it there. He lifted his head from the screen and looked back upstream toward the bridge.

He couldn't see it. There was only the creek going away pale in the dark, and the trees, and no green anywhere.

---

He didn't know how long he lay in the leaves. The cold had turned into a heaviness, like sleep coming on, and some small part of him that was still awake knew that this was bad and made him get up.

He got to his knees, then to his feet. He couldn't feel the ground. He had to look down to see where his feet were, and when he looked down the phone light shook so badly that the leaves seemed to jump.

When he lifted his head, there was a light in the trees.

It was up the slope from the creek, away from the water, somewhere deep in the woods. It was a warmer light than his headlamp's, yellow, and there was more than one, a scattering of small soft points strung through the black of the trees at different heights, some steady and some going out and coming back, the way old bulbs do.

He thought: the landing. Then he thought: people.

He went toward it.

There was no path. The slope went up from the gravel bar through laurel so thick he had to turn sideways to get through it, the leaves leathery and wet against his face, the branches knotted together at the height of his chest. He pushed through with his shoulder. Briars took hold of his fleece and his legs and let go only when he tore free. He fell twice. The second time he lay for a moment with his face in the wet leaves and the lights up ahead of him through the trees, and then he got up again, because they were still there.

They grew as he climbed. They separated into strings and shapes. There was a long line of bulbs that sagged between two dark poles like a hammock. There was a great half circle, standing up out of the trees and taller than the trees, ringed with bulbs, most of them dark and some of them burning, so that it looked like a wheel with its spokes picked out in light and pieces missing. Below it there was a glow, low and round, that turned. He could see it turning. The light swung past the trunks of the trees in front of him in a slow repeating sweep, and threw their shadows across the slope and drew them back.

He came up the last of the slope on his hands and stood at the edge of the trees.

---

It was a park. An amusement park, small and old, set down in a clearing in the middle of the woods where no road ran. The wheel stood at the back of it, enormous, its cars hanging from it in the half-light. In front of the wheel, under a peaked roof, a carousel went around. It made no music. He could hear it, a low wooden creaking and a tick of gears, slow, like a clock in another room. There was a little train on a track that ran around the edge of the clearing, and a row of swings hanging still on their chains from a tall spindle, and booths with their shutters down, and bulbs strung everywhere, half of them dark. Leaves had drifted against everything. Leaves lay on the seats of the swings and on the roof of the train and in the gutters of the booths, and nobody had swept them, and nobody had swept them for a long time.

There were people on the rides.

They sat in the cars of the wheel, two and three to a car, at every height. They sat in the train. They sat on the horses of the carousel and in its painted benches as it went slowly around. From where he stood at the edge of the trees, with the warm light falling on them and leaves stuck to his face and his body still shaking in long slow waves, they were a crowd. He could see the shapes of their heads and their shoulders. He could see that they were dressed.

His legs started him toward them before he did.

"Hey," he said. It came out of him as a croak, and he tried again, louder. "Hey. Help. Can you help me?"

None of them called back. None of them got up. He kept going.

He raised the phone without thinking about it. Its light had almost nothing left to do here; the park was lit. It was the oldest habit he had, and his arm did it. He looked at the screen.

The screen showed him trees.

Black trunks close together, and the gray circle of his own light falling on leaves. That was all. No wheel and no bulbs. His breath came and went across the bottom of the frame, white in the phone light.

He looked up from it.

The park was there. The wheel stood over it, half lit. The carousel went around.

He looked down at the screen. Trees.

He lowered the phone. He didn't stop it recording. He let it hang against his chest on its cord with its light pointing at the ground, and he walked out of the trees and across the clearing toward the gate, because it was the only light there was, and because they were waiting.

---

The fence was old iron, waist high, the paint gone and the rust come through it in scales. The gate stood open. Over it there was an arch with the park's name spelled out along it in bulbs, and most of the bulbs were dark, so that only a few letters burned at intervals along the curve, and he couldn't put them together into anything. Beside the gate was a ticket booth, its window dark, a little drift of leaves on the counter under the window where the money would go.

Up close he could smell the place. It smelled of wet leaves and old grease, and under that, faintly, of something sweet that had been cooked a long time ago.

He went through the gate.

It was warmer inside. He felt it on his face first, a dry, close warmth like a room where a stove has been going, and his body leaned toward it on its own, the way a plant leans. The carousel was ahead of him and to the left, turning. The wheel stood over everything. In the train, the riders sat in their seats with their hands in their laps.

The carousel brought its riders around.

He watched them come. A woman on a white horse, sitting very straight. A man on a black horse with a hat on. They came around out of the shadow under the roof into the light, slowly, and their heads were turned toward the gate. Toward him. Every one of them was looking at him, the way a crowd looks at a stage.

They went on around. The platform carried them past him and on toward the far side, and their bodies went with it, the horses rising and falling, the benches swinging past.

Their heads didn't go with it.

The man in the hat came around the turn and kept going, and his face stayed on Brody. It turned on his shoulders as the platform carried him, smoothly, without any hurry, farther than a neck can turn, and then farther than that, until the man was facing almost backward over his own shoulder and still looking at him. The woman on the white horse did the same. All of them, as the carousel bore them away, turning in their seats without moving their bodies at all, keeping him in sight.

Up on the wheel, in the cars, at every height, the faces were turned down toward him too.

He stood just inside the gate. His legs had stopped. His hands had stopped shaking; he didn't notice. The phone hung against his chest with its little light pointed at the dirt between his feet, recording the dirt and nothing else.

The carousel ticked. The cars on the wheel creaked on their pins in the warm still air. Somewhere among them, in the seats, there was a sound like many people settling at once, the small dry shifting of a crowd that has been waiting a long time.

The little light on the dirt between his feet went out.

 

~End of Part One~

 

Part Two:
https://www.abctales.com/story/soulfire77/nobody-floats-it-time-year-par...