Sarah tattooed the request for an autopsy across my chest, her grin slinking across her mouth every time I winced. And that hint of longing in her eyes like this should be her own name spun cursive into the skin above my pec. But the only names I carried now were the names of the townspeople whose presence in my life led to the abduction of my only daughter, Cathy. Fifteen years ago, the night it happened replaying in my mind like a re-run in a one-show cinema. Distorted tape. The play back a little slower, the colours washed out in my memory, and hallucinatory. And this list of people was burned through my irises, deep back into the amygdala. I had seen it scrawled above the men’s toilet downtown at Shenanigan’s like someone else had written it. Maybe they had. And if the pathologist peels back the layers of my skin tonight, she’ll take a picture of it.
Like the picture the townspeople took of Cathy and I at her mother’s funeral. Back east, in Burmington. 35mm, black and white. In it I’m clutching Cathy close to my chest, my chin resting atop her head. Our eyes looking left, towards the casket, the minister. Unaware of whoever is taking the picture.
And I never did see whoever took it that day. So I felt violated when I took the envelope out of my mailbox a week later, and let the photo drop out onto my hand. A man should never have to see himself at his wife’s funeral. Especially not from afar, like the whole time you thought people’s eyes were shifting around on the ground below, there was a pair of them following you. Watching you. You and your motherless daughter. But that’s how it started. Cathy and I frozen in time. An address scrawled in black ink on the back of the picture. 1116 Fisherman’s Road, Leadville.
The town loomed up at us that first night we broke the border. All snow-crested mountains, great sleeping giants manning the horizon. And I had this sense they were aware of us, but only in the way a person becomes aware of sounds outside their paralyzed body as they dream. I’d kept my red F150 back east in Dad’s abandoned garage. Bought an old Chevy from my friend Lou. Cold hard cash, and then a little more for out-of-state plates. I wanted to avoid this sense someone we couldn’t see was recognizing us.
But that’s how I felt when I pulled through the drive-thru at Leadville. 11pm, ordered a coffee. I put my shades back on, and when the cashier handed me back my change, I stared long and hard at her eyes. “Hey,” I’d said, “you know where Fisherman’s Road is?”
There was a moment, the woman holding my coffee in mid-air. “Where?”
“Fisherman’s Road.”
“Hold on.” I took the coffee from her, and she hurried back into the shop. The flash of headlights behind me. Quick glance in the rear-view: cop.
“Daddy,” Cathy said, behind me. “Did you get me a cookie?”
“One second, baby.” The cop’s engine purred. I could feel my ears begin to burn, sensed the Maine plate glowing in the beam.
The lady came back to the window then. “I’m sorry, sir. No one here knows where that is.”
I cleared my throat, loud. “Alright, give me a cookie then. For my girl.” And when she came back with it, I eased off the clutch, put us back on the road.
Spent a full tank of gas that night, driving around, looking. Cathy dozing in the back seat. When the coffee shop opened again at 6am, I was there, ordering us breakfast, and then it began to go cold, wrapped in paper on the passenger seat. Another hour or two driving, the yellow line bending with the subtle curves in the road. A yellow-teethed grin glinting in the sunrise. There was a grocery store, looked like it’d been closed up for a few years. And I pulled into the lot, parked behind the building. That’s where I passed out.
And that’s where I woke up. And where I opened the wrapper from the coffee shop, and found a cassette snuck in-between my bagel, and the outer wrapper.
***
My legs crossed on the wooden floor, headphones pulled down over my ears, Dad’s rec room, that’s where I first heard the voice I’d think later was Cathy’s, years before she was even conceived. In-between tracks on the portable cassette player, in-between the moment Runnin With The Devil ended, and Eruption began. The music on the cassette swallowed by white noise. I threw the headphones off, glanced toward the window.
Outside, the dusk shod cool colours, greys, and blues across the sky. Autumn here was like that. Like the sky was always over-compensating for the bright reds, oranges, and yellows, the leaves were turning, and so willed the world dark. Rain began patterning itself upon the glass, pattering overhead on the roof.
I put the headphones back on. Through the thick crackle of static her voice came to me again. I clenched my fists, my nails piercing my palms. It was twenty years later, back against the wall in the hospital, that first shrill scream coming from the bed, Cathy’s head emerging from her mother, that I remembered.
But as a kid in ’78, I had no inkling I’d ever even have a daughter. So when Dad got home that night, I showed him the cassette, wanted to see if he could hear it, too. He’d been sitting down at the table, hot sandwich in front of him.
“What’s up, boy?” He’d said, turning to look at me.
“I want you to listen to something.”
“On the tape?”
“Yeah.”
“Can it wait?”
But I’d looked away. He could always tell when there was something bugging me. Later, I’d feel guilty when that thing often became him.
He took the portable cassette player in his palm, pulled the headphones on. Clicked the play button down. A few seconds later my dad stopped chewing. Stopped the tape. Rewound. Played it back. He’d nodded to the fridge.
“Beer.”
I laid the bottle down on the wooden table.
“This,” he’d said, flipping the tape deck up, and holding the black cassette. “Don’t mind this.”
“What is it?”
He’d pulled the bottle opener up, the air popping as the cap fell off.
“I bought it used. Someone recorded over it, that’s all.” He took a swig of his beer and turned the radio back up. “You go on, you go back to your room. Maybe tonight we’ll play chess, or –”
“How did someone record that sound?” I’d said. “Why?”
He turned to face me. “Nevermind, son. There’s lots of crazy people in the world. Some of them just happen to have a good taste in music, and bad ideas when it comes to what they should do with it.”
That was when I first became aware of the feeling of someone seeing you. Of listening to you through the hollow walls of the townhouse. Of feeling you, your mood, your intentions. The feeling I’ve dedicated my entire life to escaping.
***
Cathy was still asleep in the back when I found the cassette inside the wrapper. I didn’t want her to hear, so I played the thing real low. It was the same one, Van Halen. Only this time someone must’ve recorded over the entire thing. Because as it began to play, a creaking sound, like someone pushing around in a rocking chair. And her voice coming to me though the stereo, Cathy’s mother.
“Jesus, who did this?” I said, and Cathy stirred in the back. I turned the volume down even lower, afraid she might hear, recognize it.
“Go straight,” her mother had said on the tape. And when I flipped the ignition, and ebbed forward, “take a right, Flat’s Landing.” And guiding me like that, until I was a few miles outside of town. “Turn left,” and I did, into a new subdivision. Around me, the land was flattened, and greyed with the promise of new cement. Dust pirouetting in the air where before seeds might’ve, and someday might again. I lulled the Chevy forward, Cathy coming to.
“Where are we, Daddy?”
I pulled up on the break. Out to my right a squat bungalow sat barren, neighbour-less. An echo of the place I lived with Dad as a kid. The white paint fading on the numbers. 1116. “We’re home,” I said.
***
About a year after that, Cathy was taken from me. We’d been watching The Jungle Book. Something about those snake’s eyes, those animated pupils moving around in hypnotizing little circles must’ve done the trick. I’d awoken with a start, the tape reaching its end, and clicking, loudly. My hand had reached impulsively to the place on my chest where Cathy had nuzzled, but my palm met the warm wool of my sweater. And then the rest of that night didn’t ever end. The calling of the cops, their slow arrival to the house. And by the time I got through all their questions, I was manic. I went down the road with a flashlight, and a gun, and that’s how the rest of my life starts off. Days bleed into one another, still images cut and pasted onto a film strip, and the thing stretches out long and black, grows into years. I never left Leadville. Kept thinking it was only a matter of time I’d find Cathy, because that part of you, your soul, that thing that bonds with your child when they’re born. That thing never stopped telling me she was alive.
***
I started going to the cinema in town. It gave me a place that was dark, where I could be alone with my thoughts. Half the time I didn’t even watch the movie, just stared ahead at the screen, my mind running over every piece of evidence I’d found since that last time we watched The Jungle Book.
A few weeks ago, the cinema ran Hiroshima, Mon Amour. This French flick from the ‘50’s. Cathy’s mom used to have a copy of it, and we would put it on some nights. I couldn’t speak a note of French, but we’d just let the thing play. Small living room lit up in flashing black and white. The words all coming out, blending with the music. And sat beside her on the couch, it all merged into a kind of meaning that went beyond the mere meanings of words.
A sound came from the projector inside the cinema. A click, like there was a hiccup in the tape. I’d realized I’d dozed off, same way I’d had all those years earlier, the screen in front of me had gone almost completely dark. I felt my hand down near my abdomen, checking it.
The shot was dark and grainy. Super 8, maybe. Blotches shooting in and out. And shaky, like the person holding it was walking. A small bungalow. The light on in the main room. I could see dark shadows behind the curtain, like a man and woman embracing. Then a hand, pulling the curtain back.
And it was me. And Cathy’s mother. And there was Cathy. In her arms.
And then the projector clicked again, and the movie resumed. Sweat had broken out on my forehead, and I reeled towards the VJ booth. Scrambled up rows of empty seats until I got to the top. I reached my hand up and smacked the glass, open-palmed. Nothing. Again, one more time, and I could feel the glass shake, tremble. The projector flicked off. Silence.
“Stay there,” a voice, female, said from above.
Her body was small. Jean-jacketed. A flash of messy hair atop her head. My eyes adjusted to the dark, and I could see her eyes peering into me through the dim of the theatre.
“How did you get that?” I said.
“What? The footage of you?”
I stood there rooted. “Who are you?”
But instead of answering, she gestured for me to take a seat. The lights were coming back on in the theatre, a security guard passing through.
“Look,” she said, her voice low. “There was a party here. Two weeks ago. They do it every now and again, same people.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know. They dress up. In these weird masks and stuff, sit there for the entire night.”
My breathing had become all short, cut off. Someone was going through the first aisle with a flashlight and a broom. “And these people—they had that footage?”
“Yeah,” she said. “A reel of it. I think someone brought it, and meant to pass it on to someone else, but it ended up on the floor. We got a weird call a few days later, someone asking if anything had been found in the theatre.”
I was looking away, down over the rows of seats.
“Look,” she said, putting her hand on mine. “I recognized you when you came in. I couldn’t believe it was the same guy, you know?”
Silence between us again.
“Jesus,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be,” I said, finally. “But I’m going to have to see the rest of that tape.”
She looked at me. I’m Sarah,” she said, and gave me her hand.
***
Sarah just wanted to be a tattoo artist.
“Then how’d you get stuck in Leadville?” I said. She’d moved a lamp into the square dining room on Fisherman’s Rd, and the glow was warm and red, and we were eating this vegan pasta made out of quinoa she’d made for supper.
“I almost didn’t,” she said. chewing. “Mom left when I was a kid. Wanted to take me with her, but dad wouldn’t have it.”
“You know where she is now?”
Her fork twirled around in the spaghetti. “Three years ago, I got a phone call. Said she was in Canada. Said I ever wanted to come, she’d let me stay with her. But we haven’t spoken since.”
“But you think you’re going to go?”
“Once I save enough money,” she said, and stopped chewing, pointed the end of her fork at me. “But you can’t tell anybody. I don’t want my dad to know, it’ll—”
My palms were up, open above the table. “Who do I have to tell?” And then as soon as I’d said it the pang of desperation in my stomach.
“Your dad’s place,” she said. “You think there might be something back there?”
I shook my head. “He didn’t leave much behind.” The night after his funeral, I’d gotten drunk on Tennessee Whisky and had the entire house cleaned out in a couple of hours.
Sarah was pouring herself more wine. “You sure? You don’t think he’d leave something only you would find?”
“It’s possible.” I was playing with my food, the way I was too hungry to do as a kid.
“He leave a will? Anything?”
The casket had been closed in the funeral home. Folks said he’d blew his face off. I was drunk all the time, sober sometimes to go elk hunting in the woods with a bow. Kill enough meat to stay full and drunk in a cabin for the winter. Never got called in to identify his body. Showed up for his funeral unsurprised. Just another inevitable job rearing its head, needing doing.
“If he’d had anything to show me,” I’d said. “He would have done it when he was alive.”
But even as I finished saying the words, I was unsure. Those years before I met Cathy’s mother, those were soulless years. Marked now only by the single mistake of allowing the gap between myself, and my father to grow too wide. So that when he tripped, fell into it, I was so far gone that if he’d made any cry for help, I wouldn’t have heard it.
Four years, no contact. Not a letter. Not a phone call.
“What’re you thinking about?” Sarah had said.
That group has the theatre booked for tomorrow night, right?”
“Yes.”
“Then it gives us enough time to get to my dad’s and back,” I said, and then stood. Took the keys out of my pocket as I moved to the door.
***
There was a dust-coated mirror propped upright against the wall, and for a moment I watched myself in it; a ghost of my father in the room he’d spent that last night in 20 years ago. I’d cracked open the bedroom window, and from outside came a stagnant humidity perfumed by the smell of lavender, and mud. My skin sensed the chaos laying dormant within the heat.
The floorboards dad laid himself were scuffed to hell now. Like the wood had absorbed the lines, wrinkles, calluses in his hands, and took them in as a part of itself. A map of scratches as puzzling, and un-readable as the man it pointed to.
I sat there a long while, listening. I believed it was the way I’d felt the house listening to me, as a kid. Eyes closed, my hearing taking on more responsibility, growing more sensitive, playing with my intuition. Gut feeling. Shit you use in the woods frostbitten and listening for the whispers of hooves that will become next year’s food.
I pawed at the floor. Pushed on it, hard. My eyes were closed, moving in tandem with the room, not against it. I ended up in the far corner near the window, moved into the closet. In the ceiling there, a small rectangle cut into it. The attic; I couldn’t remember if I’d checked it when dad had first died, so I reached up, and pushed the plate upwards. Stood on my tippy-toes and scanned the dark with the flashlight. Dust. Mouse shit. Something scurried silently from the light.
Sarah was spaced out standing in front of the kitchen window. My hand found her shoulder and stayed there.
“The root cellar,” she’d said. A wooden door camouflaged now into the brown, leaf-covered hill on back of the property.
I shone the light around inside. Shelves still lined the walls, but empty now. There was a coolness to it. The smell like the first morning of spring was torn up from the ground and allowed to live permanently inside.
I squat to the floor and beamed the light around. Empty milk crates, plastic containers. A lot of dirt, mostly. The concrete floor covered with it. Then —
“Holy shit,” Sarah whispered.
A handprint sunk clear and heavy in the thick layer of dirt.
I studied it for a long time. Placed my own hand above it, hovering. I hadn’t been out here after the funeral. Bypassed this old cellar somehow.
Sarah was watching me. “Think it’s…his?”
I hovered my hand above the print, pretending it was mine. Tilted my head up slightly — what was he looking at when he left this here? All I could see was an empty space beneath the shelves. I crawled forward from there, the ground cold upon my skin, until I was under the shelf. I ran my fingers down the damp soil.
There, something budged. I ran my hand up, and then back down. There it was again. Through the calluses on my fingertips I could feel the smoothness of a rock. Like a pebble flattened by eons of ocean. “This doesn’t belong here,” I said, and then gingerly, began to remove it.
Onto my palm plopped an oval-shaped beach rock. I stuck my hand into the now-empty hole in the wall, surprised at how far back it went. That’s when I felt it. Using the tips of my fingers, I got a grip, and began to pull it out. A barbie doll with a film casing taped to the back.
Sarah was beside me. I scraped dirt off the doll’s head with my thumb. This was Cathy’s. It’d been a gift from her grandfather, after her mom had died. But what was on the film?
Sarah took the casing from me, and I shone the flashlight onto it.
“Super 8,” she said. On the plastic holding the film inside, permanent marker marked words. On the front: They’re with me, son. I flipped it over. On the back: it’s what’s you saw they’re after.
My eyes met Sarah’s and for the first time since the night Cathy was taken, I felt my soul flit forward, recognized. My father was alive, and he’d taken Cathy. But how long ago had he left this here? Was he intending me to find it after the funeral, all those years back, so I’d realize he was still alive? That they were still alive? My face searched Sarah’s for an answer, but saw she was silently asking me the same questions.
“We’ll run it at the theatre tomorrow night,” she said. “Interrupt their screening.”
“If I don’t make it out?”
“An autopsy.” She laughed, then. “Let’s get you tattooed.”
***
It’s a peculiar feeling: the weight of your father’s revolver in your hand. The knowing that by the end of the night, it will likely have outlived you, and so too will have your father. I slipped the gun down into my belt and stepped into the movie theatre. My breath rattled against the inside of my mask. The neurotises unfurled in my mind, and tendrilled down through my body like the blackened limbs of a burnt willow.
I passed in front of them. A black mass of hoods, and capes filling the end of the first three rows. I tilted my head to take them in. From above, the light from the projector flashed on. I made my way around the side, rather than walk over their feet. I slipped into the third row.
The murmur of their voices surrounded me. I strained myself to hear them more clearly, but already my molars were grinding against one another. Any second now. Sarah would be cutting the tape. Beneath the cloak, my hand intuited towards the gun. Middle finger pulling back and forth, muscle memory danced in fast-forward.
The light from the projector died. The sound of 15 plastic-covered faces turning toward the control room in unison. My breathing stilled. The eye holes in the mask made it hard to see through my peripheries, and I fought myself to not turn hard left.
The light flickered back onto the screen. It was the same kind of quality as before, grainy, but for the first time, this thing was in colour. A shot of a fire on the screen playing out like someone’s nightmare of a fire.
I saw that the black mass around me were now on the screen, as well, standing around the fire, and I could intuit their apprehension all around me in the theatre.
On the screen, the shadows converged around a central point. A man stood next to a barrel, the fire from it illuminating his cape in an excited dance. A sound like the choir of shadows around all inhaled at once: the man hoisted an infant into the air.
For a second, I felt a tightness in my chest: those blonde curls cascading down the child’s small forehead. The sound of her cry, the stillness of the black-cloaked bodies around her. Standing, doing nothing. And yet, within me, a relief — that cry wasn’t Cathy’s. Although the resemblance was real enough.
I watched black shapes converse around me, strained to hear the waves of their whispering when from the screen, a shrill scream came. I glanced toward it, my eyes widening. The man who had held the child, now held his hands above his head, empty. The shadows around him swarmed closer to the barrel, where only shrieks could be heard.
I stood then, moved the revolver from beneath the cloak, and blasted the man in front of me. Put one in the guy’s back who was sitting down to my left.
Masks dropped to the hard floor then, plastic rain, and I stole a glance toward the screen: the monster who had dropped the child into the barrel was holding another baby aloft now: a baby boy.
Then came the unconscious uncoiling of memory. But whether it was memory, or simply recognition, I couldn’t tell. I did know that child, had grown up with his picture stuck on the mantle piece back in Burlington: it was me.
But now, the man was twirling around in a semi-circle, and I let myself become transfixed to his psychotic movements. I became aware far off, behind me, something, or someone was pawing for my attention. But on the screen, the man hoisted my infant self high in the air with his right hand, his fingers clasping around my throat. And with his left, flicked back his hood. He removed his mask, and let it fall to the earth below.
The grain in the film danced, out of sync with the flickering shadows of the flames, and yet all these movements seemed controlled by my response to seeing the man’s face. I watched myself contort as a child, uncomprehending what it was seeing, and a shrill yell erupted through the speakers in the theatre. Amplified, distorted, like the Super 8 couldn’t record the sheer amount of volume coming from my larynx.
I stood planted there, staring at the screen, aware the bodies around me were rushing to the exit. But they would find it locked, find themselves trapped here now with me, the same infant they’d lined up to watch voluntarily all those years before, but grown now.
There was a hesitance then on the screen, a moment in which the camera fell, and there was just the ruffle of feet moving forward.
I turned then to duck beneath a looping right-hook. As my knees sprang back upward, I aimed, capped the man between the two eyeballs, and he dropped forward like a tripped cyclops.
And then I saw the black pool of them. The mass of cloaks, and hoods, moving backwards along the wall. A ripple in them like the surface of a black water was being met casually by a summer wind. Two of the men near the front were trying to kick down the exit door. And as I watched this desperate plight for the continuation of their abysmal lives, I tasted the salt of my tears. My tears now an echo of the tears I’d cried as a baby child, staring in the face of the man who led these people. Who had sacrificed a child on camera, and who had been prepared to sacrifice me.
But why had he shown me his face?
I wanted an answer, and inhaling, I wanted to find something within myself akin to forgiveness. But the closest thing to it was my throat stinging as if it could remember all that yelling all those years before and had never healed. And so I wheeled, aimed, shot into the black pool, until exposed to my black sun, there was nothing left to shoot.
***
From my back, all I could see in the dark was the glint in Sarah’s white teeth, the smell of her brew steaming beside me.
“Is the camera ready?” I asked.
I sensed her nod. The memory of the monster that had led them, that had sacrificed that child was inside me all this time. A black hole pulling the world towards its unfillable emptiness.
“You think you can get this thing out of me?” I said. “Make me remember?”
Sarah lit a candle then, and through the wicker of flame, I watched her watch me. “My dad almost killed me as a kid,” she said. “Lost control one night, kicked me in the stomach. Mother brought me into the hospital to stop the internal bleeding.
“He didn’t stop trying to hurt me until I learned to fight. Boxing, judo. Now he’s a broken ego. Goes to work, comes home, drinks. Has to live with the fact that his own daughter can sleep him with one good hook.”
I laughed at that.
“But first, I had to learn to remember why I needed to protect myself. Had to remember what it was like to lie in the hospital, barely conscious from the painkillers. The kind of painkillers that doesn’t replace the lack of love your father never gave you.
“Hours, and hours of therapy. My mom stayed long enough to pay for it, and then left. I couldn’t fight for both of us.”
I was staring at her. “Sarah,” I said. “What if my father took Cathy, not to protect her from the people who are after me. But from me, the part of me that saw that man’s face, as a child.”
“You were one of them,” she said, looking down. “But you were young.”
There was something laying unspoken between us, and I could sense it filling the room like the steam rising from the hot liquid beside me. I closed my eyes and held the hot liquid to my lips. “I think that was my sister,” I said. “That girl he killed.”
Sarah leaned forward in her chair. “Look, whatever’s inside of you, whatever memory, we’ll free it. We’ll get to the bottom of this.”
The last thing I remembered as my former self, before the pain began, was the taste of her brew on my tongue, stagnant like mould. And her voice, waning in, amplified, asking me to remember the weight of Cathy’s infant body, sleeping upon my chest.
by 
Latest posts by Sam Westcott (see all)
- 1116 Fisherman’s Road - March 6, 2021
Well done. Such tension!