Ed Krieger's Arc

Chapter 4 of 4

Inside the chest, the whisper paused. Ed felt it before he heard it. A bus hissed to a stop at the edge of town, and a stranger stepped off onto the curb. The man carried a heavy plastic bin against his hip. Water sloshed inside. Sharp red shapes darted behind the clear walls. Ed's hooks went still in the dark. Mark Brennan walked straight to the water. He did not stop at any house. He pitched a torn blue tent on the shore, ropes pulled tight, flaps snapping in the wind. He nailed a hand-painted sign to a post out front. Children Welcome. Stay Inside After Dark. Word spread fast. A few mothers came with their kids and watched from the grass. Mark knelt by the bin. He tapped the lid. The piranha inside churned the water white. "Something rotten lays down there," he told them. "I aim to feed it to these." In the chest in the Jones living room, Ed's whisper cut off mid-word. The chain rattled. He poured himself down through old roots and groundwater, back toward the lake bottom, back toward the bones tied to cinder blocks. He had to be there when the lid came off that bin. Mark dragged the bin to the rock at the shoreline. He braced his boot against it and tipped. The water hit the surface in a slap. Red shapes scattered into the dark. Below, in the silt, teeth found cloth, then galoshes, then the soft holes in a blue face. Ed felt every bite. He could not scream underwater. He never could. When Mark walked back to his tent, the lake was quiet again. But Ed was still there. Chewed, scattered, furious — and now he knew the stranger's name. A name, after all, is a door that swings both ways.