Bethel Sykes had always been one to do good the bad way. It was like there was an angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other and the angel just happened to think the devil made a good point most of the time. When he was a boy, his mother was sick and could hardly work. What a miracle it was, then, to see Bethel coming home – just seven at the time – with cash in his pockets. He’d said it was from a paper route, which was true in a way. It was from Jimmy Black’s paper route. Bethel had taken to pummeling the boy weekly for 75 percent of his income. Bethel knew it was wrong, of course, but not wrong enough. In his mind, the money was the thing. His mother was sick. They needed it. He didn’t know Jimmy Black’s circumstances and he never would. That really wasn’t his business, as far as Bethel was concerned.
Forty years later, when the rains came, Bethel knew what he was thinking was wrong – it just didn’t feel wrong enough not to do.
“We oughta go to ya ma’s,” said Gwen, bent down in her chair, glaring at the TV. Bethel felt a strange kind of loving revulsion when she sat like that. She reminded him of a gargoyle, chalky and immoveable, with a smooth hump of folded wings across her back and thick forearms running down into chipped, acrylic claws. “Don’t’cha think?”
It was true the Smiths across the street were gone and so were the Hansons three houses down. But half the block was waiting it out. From the open door, he could see the Vrabels’ second floor window stuffed black with furniture and boxes. They were putting it all on altitude to save them, should things come to that. Some weren’t even going that far. The Lees at the end of the street weren’t doing a thing. They didn’t even buy a single bag of ice.
“Hotel people,” said Ben Lee, when Bethel went walking the block. “Tryin’ to get us all riled up, driving across creation, payin’ for shit-ass rooms. This ain’t even a flood zone!”
Bethel nodded. “That’s true, that’s true.”
It wasn’t true, though. Not in the sort of reality that mattered. Bethel had a friend who worked for the county. He’d laughed and laughed when Bethel had told him about the new house he’d bought.
“It ain’t a flood zone, but it’ll flood. You watch.” He’d explained how it all had to do with the nearby reservoir, which was, “old as shit and ready to fall apart.”
“If it gets even a little bad, they’ll open the reservoir,” the friend had said. “Won’t be the rain that getchu – it’ll be them bureaucrats.”
Now Bethel was counting on it. Because Linda was waiting on him to finish things with Gwen.
She texted him as the rain started falling.
“b safe.”
Bethel deleted the text, as he did with every text Linda sent. He was trying to be smart about all this.
“You sure we’re alright?” said Gwen, still watching the TV. She watched a lot of TV. That wasn’t why Bethel had come to prefer Linda. That was a more complicated thing. But the TV watching was bothersome and agitated Bethel maybe more than it should have.
“I’m sayin’ we’re fine,” he sighed, closing the door, listening to the tap-tap-tap of the rain building strength. “TV people don’t know everythin’. Why don’t you ever just believe me?”
They waited in the rain – her watching the TV, him pacing up and down the stairs. He didn’t wonder if what he was fixing to do was right – that wasn’t how Bethel’s mind worked. He was only wondering if it would work, and if he might get caught.
He felt certain enough he had all the angles covered.
The rain kept coming. That first day and night was fine, but by that second evening, there was a wordless sort of tension between the two of them. Gwen kept eyeing him as he came into the room. She was already blaming him, even though nothing had gone wrong yet. In a way, it made it easier for Bethel. He wasn’t the only one who was miserable, after all.
It was only when the lights went out that Gwen really started in on him.
“Christ, Bethel!” she grunted, somewhere in the dark. “You even got a flashlight ready? Batteries? You do anythin’ to get ready?”
He’d done quite a bit, in fact.
“It’s just rain,” he said, sitting down on the couch. “Just rain and dark. Can’t hurt you. You go to bed, okay? We’ll be fine.”
She did as she was told, though it was clear she hardly believed him or his promises. Bethel didn’t sleep much that night. The rain was making him excited. It was roaring like a waterfall now. Water on water. He wondered if he could hear the reservoir out there in the night, straining and groaning. He thought maybe he could.
When morning came, they looked out and saw the street was full of water. Bethel watched a black grill lid float past like it was riding the rapids.
“Oh god, oh god,” said Gwen, slumping back onto the couch. “I told you! I told you we oughta get out of here. Now we can’t leave! And it ain’t stoppin’, Bethel! How high’s it gonna get?”
Bethel shrugged. “It won’t come in. This ain’t a flood zone.”
“It’s already flooded,” said Gwen, gnashing her teeth.
“You’ll see.”
That night the water started coming in. Bethel took a candle and went down to the basement, which was ankle-deep already.
“We gonna lose everythin’,” said Gwen, waiting at the top of the stairs. To Bethel’s eyes, she looked like a demon, standing there in the dark, surrounded on every side by deeper shadows that lurched and danced and wagged a hundred black fingers in his face.
“It ain’t a flood zone,” he said, defending himself and his choices in earnest. It was a good house. And it was a good neighborhood. And he was a good man who’d been a good husband. Linda saw that. Why couldn’t she?
Gwen rolled her eyes. Bethel grabbed her by the throat with both hands. For a moment she didn’t struggle. For a moment she just thought her husband was being the usual kind of cruel and not something new. She stood there waiting for him to finish.
She never takes me serious, thought Bethel as he tightened his grip and dragged his wife to the ground, straddling her, knees wedged into elbow joints, his full weight pressing down. She ain’t happy and I ain’t happy. We can’t just keep on makin’ each other miserable.
She took him seriously then. She fought, and almost – almost – bucked him off. She was a strong woman. But her strength burned hot, then faded in an instant. In that last moment, it felt to Bethel like he was squeezing a tube of meat. His hands buzzed as he pulled them up off his wife’s throat.
The rain roared madly as he dragged her down into the dark basement, laying her face-first in the water. Everything was happening like it should. The reservoir would open, the basement would fill all the way, and Bethel Sykes would have a drowned wife. That happened in floods. It happened to poor folks. He’d seen it on the news.
But Bethel’s plan was a little more complicated than that. He needed a bit of deniability. He needed to be somewhere else.
Upstairs, in the bedroom closet, Bethel had a backpack stuffed with clothes and a little money. There was a shelter a couple miles away. All he had to do was make it there and tell anyone who asked that Gwen hadn’t been willing to leave the house. He’d have to cry some. After a day or so, maybe beg some folks to go back with him. He’d have to play it just right, but Bethel thought he could. He had a way of acting how people thought he ought to act in certain moments. Bethel wasn’t even sure it was acting most of the time.
Water rushed in as soon as he opened the back door. The rain was heavier than it had seemed from inside the house. It was violent, like a plague of hornets. He could hardly keep his eyes open.
Tying the backpack tight around his middle, Bethel waded down to the street. How’d it get so high so soon? he wondered. Was the reservoir already open?
The current, such as it was, pushed him the wrong way, meaning Bethel had to lay out and swim to make any progress. The rain was unbearable, coming from above and below, making it nearly impossible for Bethel to keep his eyes open. And the sound was something else – like a jet engine hovering just overhead.
Then he slipped his shoulder and somehow turned himself right side down. The rain pressed him all over, as the current tried to flip him, front to back. For a moment he was traveling, underwater, his feet the only bit of himself that wasn’t submerged.
He took a swallow by accident and cold water went all through him. A taste of drowning. In that brief moment he thought, This ain’t no way for a man to die. And whether or not that was a silly thing to think, it didn’t matter, because the current pushed him back over and his head was above water.
Gagging and heaving, Bethel dragged himself toward higher ground. It was dark, of course, and he had hardly any sense where he was. Still, he was surprised to find he’d somehow ended up back at his own house.
Exhausted and still struggling to breathe, Bethel decided not to worry about his plan just then. He’d try again in the morning.
Inside, the house was dark as could be. Bethel was too tired and too shaken up to find that candle. Stripping off his soaked clothes, he collapsed on the couch, pulling down the old afghan that hung off the back, and shivering himself to sleep.
Sleep didn’t last long. Somewhere in the night, Bethel woke up. At first, he wasn’t sure why. It felt like he’d had a bad dream – heart racing, chest tight – though he was never one for nightmares. But as he sat there in the dark, listening, he heard something underneath the falling rain.
A noise like the groaning of wood.
A noise like stairs creaking in the dark.
Bethel tried to think of every reasonable thing that might make such a noise, but his mind was a blank. Slowly, carefully, he stood up from the couch and made his way toward the basement stairs. He meant to go look – to reassure himself – but still he couldn’t find that candle. In the open doorway he looked down, tense, standing on the balls of his feet. It was too dark to see, though. Much too dark. He thought…he thought for a moment he saw the flash of something, but that must have been his imagination. He’d look in the morning.
Almost unconsciously, Bethel found himself closing the door to the basement. There wasn’t much logic to it, but it felt like the right thing to do. Then he found himself dragging the big, wooden TV stand over to the basement door, fighting cords and scraping up the floor, wedging the stand up against the door.
Why had he done that? Once the stand was placed, it was like a spell had broken and Bethel felt foolish. He’d need to remember to push the stand back and put everything in order before he left again. He still needed his deniability, after all.
The noise, at least, seemed to be gone. Bethel fell back asleep, certain he’d find a way to the shelter the next day. Just before he fell asleep, though, he suddenly realized – though obviously he’d known it all along – that Gwen was dead and he’d killed her. There was no weight to that truth, however, and Bethel put it out of his mind almost immediately. After all, she’d been so unhappy. It really was all for the best.
Bethel slept through the morning. By his watch, it was nearly noon when he woke up. He knew things had gone bad as soon as he set his foot on the floor.
“Water,” he sighed, looking down. It was everywhere now, maybe an inch or two high. Sloshing to the window, Bethel saw a world of water rippling and dancing.
He’d need a boat. Or at least something that could pass as a boat.
There was the front door. He’d seen people floating along on flat pieces of wood before. Hell, he had plenty of doors, now that he thought about it. Maybe he could lash a few together?
There was also that old inflatable mattress, which would float for sure, but he couldn’t remember where it was – maybe in the attic, maybe in the basement, and of course the basement was flooded through now.
That reminded Bethel, who moved to the basement door, dragging and kicking the TV stand back to where it had been. He didn’t bother with the mess – the water made that pointless to worry about.
But looking down, it occurred to Bethel how high up the debris was. The water was nearly to his knees. How could it be moving so fast?
The reservoir.
“It’s open,” said Bethel, feeling something like fear for the first time in a long while. It was all happening too fast or not quite right. He took a breath and steadied himself. Doors. He needed doors. The easiest thing was taking the doors not already submerged in water, so Bethel went up to the second floor. He started on the closet door in the bedroom, then remembered he needed a hammer to pull the door off its hinges.
The tools were in the basement.
There’d have to be another way. In the kitchen, Bethel found a butter knife and the rolling pin. It worked, but not well, and it was nearly dark again by the time Bethel finally pulled the closet door down for good.
By then the water was moving steadily up the stairs towards the second floor. It had risen high enough to cover over the couch and anything else that couldn’t float. In the dim light, it took a long moment before Bethel realized that the door to the basement was open again, water moving freely through the black gap.
Something came through, black against black. A large shape, diffused in the darkness. Bethel shouted, dashing into the bedroom and flinging the window open. He couldn’t panic. And why should he? It was only water. Water couldn’t hurt you unless you let it. He’d abandoned any thought of lashing doors together and put his hope in the one door already in hand. But the window was too narrow, and the door too wide. He couldn’t wedge it through, no matter what angle he took.
Out on the stairs, wood creaked and groaned. An echoing crunch – like the sound of too much weight on that old railing.
Bethel slammed the bedroom door shut, turning the lock. Water raced in through the open window, but Bethel couldn’t manage to make his legs move anymore. He stood, frozen, listening to the house murmur and rupture and sigh black mouthfuls of water, in and out.
The door groaned and belled inward. Water seeped in through the cracks. Still Bethel couldn’t bring himself to move. And where would he have gone?
As the last of the evening’s light disappeared and the water crested the heel of Bethel’s worn, white tennis shoes, he remembered the attic.
He found the latch on instinct, not sight, as the room was nearly pitch black by then. The ladder snagged and twisted as Bethel tugged furiously, descending only halfway before jamming completely. It was enough, and Bethel dragged himself upward into the dank, dust-choked blackness of the attic.
Groping in the dark, Bethel found an old chest big enough to cover the opening over the broken ladder. Dragging the chest over the hole, he paused and considered what he’d done.
He was stuck now. Truly. There would be no escape until the waters went down and then…
What would he say about Gwen?
In the dripping dark, Bethel’s mind turned to his story – to what he could say about a wife that drowned in the basement while he hid in the attic – and he found peace in the thinking. His panic seemed to slip off his shoulders like an overwarm blanket.
“She went down while I was sleeping,” said Bethel, testing out the taste of the words in his mouth. “Must’ve gone lookin’ for somethin’. I don’t know. We were together, but then I woke up and she was gone and the water was too high to search the house…or get help.” Bethel nodded. “Pictures, maybe. Maybe she went to save the pictures. I don’t know.” It felt right, and that was what mattered. Bethel found himself at ease, despite everything that had gone wrong. Because there was only so much water in the world. How high could it go?
Still, there was no sleeping that night. Bethel sat upright on a half-rotted board, clawing at the thick coat of wet dust that stuck to his exposed skin. The rain was dying away – he could hardly hear it falling anymore. How long before the water drained out of the house? How long would he be stranded up there?
Bethel rolled those questions through his mind for a long time, only stopping when he heard a strange burble and drip. Reaching out, his fingers traced the dusty boards back to the entrance – where water was slowly, steadily seeping in.
Bethel cursed, rising to his feet. The water was still chasing him. In less than ten minutes it was up over his ankles.
“How can it get so high?” he half-shouted, slapping the sloping walls, looking for a weak point. Now he needed to get out. Not even the attic was safe. He needed to get higher, but he didn’t have an ax. He didn’t have anything, just his fists.
He found a damp spot on the exposed beams and punched. It didn’t do anything but hurt his hand. Bethel punched again. And again. He could feel the skin tearing around his knuckles. The bones rattled and throbbed. He punched again. The roof shifted, just a little. Bethel thought he could feel the slight hint of a crack forming.
The water was up to his waist. In such a small space, the water could really race, quickly, madly, purposefully.
Bethel felt things separate and pull apart in his right hand. The cool water seeping in through the roof mingled with the hot blood pulsing in between his knuckles. He switched to his left hand, still pounding blindly into a web of wet, wooden shards.
The water tickled the underside of his chin and began slipping out in sputtering rivulets through the ever-widening hole.
It was dawn outside. There was sunshine out there. Bethel wanted to press his head through the narrow gap and breathe in the yellow and the blue, but the hole couldn’t even fit his hand.
Something bumped into Bethel. He shouted and flailed, but it was just the chest, floating in the attic full of water.
The water pressed higher. Bethel pushed himself up, letting the buoyancy take him to the last pocket of air in the gap of the A frame. A spear of pale white light passed through the hole in the wall, and in that sliver of light he saw another figure, dark and opaque, glide through the black water. A figure like a body, with wings and claws and hair like a nest of snakes.
The darkness wrapped itself around Bethel like a lover, warm, wet fingers gripping the back of his neck, tugging at his clothes, searching his hidden places. He tried to think of Linda as he sank below the water, but all he could see, all he could feel, was Gwen.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Fifteen days later, when the water finally fell, Van Smith from across the street came by to see how the Sykes had held up. He would have skipped the attic if not for the smell and the flies.
What he found in the attic hardly seemed like a person, much less like two. It took a gruesome moment to sort the lines and trace the beginning of one and the end of the other.
Of all the couples in the world to die in each other’s arms, wrapped tight in a last embrace, Bethel and Gwen Sykes were about the last pair Van would have guessed.
“Suppose you never know,” he said to his wife that night, after the police had come and gone.
“Know what?” said Estelle Smith, smoking a cigarette on the steps, looking out on the ruin of the Sykes’ house.
“People,” said Van. He had a dripping can of Coors in his hand that he didn’t seem to remember was there. “Some just don’t show love the same as the rest of us. Just funny how it comes through in the end, though.”
“Jesus.” Estelle flicked her cigarette into the gravel. “It ain’t a fairy tale, Van. It’s two dead bodies in an attic.”
Van just nodded. It wasn’t worth arguing over.
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