Page 48 of Backwoods
“I’ve always been tough.” Grandpa Lee lifted his broad chin with evident pride. “I was out for a bit, but I got it together. Hell,I was ’bout to go back to fetch you and your gal, ’til you showed up here.”
“Can you please lower the gun?” Nick asked. “Can we talk, please?”
“Put down the car keys.” Grandpa Lee motioned with the gun. “Toss ’em onto the porch.”
Nick obeyed, the fob clattering onto the floorboards next to the mud-covered boots Grandpa Lee still wore.
“Okay?” Nick asked, hands raised.
Grandpa Lee lowered the shotgun slowly. Nick wondered if his granddad really would have shot him and decided it was wise that he hadn’t pushed it. Grandpa Lee wasn’t in his right frame of mind.
“Come have a seat on the porch.” Grandpa Lee shuffled to one of the Adirondack chairs and eased onto it carefully. He angled the gun across his lap.
Nick took the chair next to him. “Grandpa, we need to get you to a hospital. You collapsed out there.”
“That’s enough of that, son. I’m not going anywhere. Neither are you right now.”
“All right, I’ll drop it,” Nick said, but he felt dizzy. He clasped his hands in his lap as if to stabilize himself. “You know what Amiya and I saw out there? Are you willing to talk about that?”
His grandfather grunted. He removed his glasses and massaged the bridge of his nose. “I never wanted you to know, not until it was time, not until after we had prepared you.”
“Prepared me for what?”
“The truth,” Grandpa Lee said. He slipped his spectacles back on, his gaze sharpening. “Westbrook is cursed, son. The land, the people, everything on it, it’s all cursed. Including me.”
Grandpa Lee wiped his lips with a blood-spotted handkerchief and added, “Including you.”
31
At any other time, Nick would have dismissed Grandpa Lee’s words as the demented ramblings of a man suffering from a deteriorating mental condition. Curses? In the twenty-first century? But his grandfather’s demeanor was grave, and though he was unwell, the alertness in his eyes was impossible to discount. He was telling Nick what he believed to be the truth.
“I don’t understand,” Nick said.
“We can thank our ancestor John.” Grandpa Lee looked away toward his garden. He coughed once into his handkerchief. “He took on the burden, he bore the weight, and that weight has been passed down the family’s bloodline. It finally fell into my hands. It was gonna fall into your mother’s. Then on to you.”
“The weight of what?” Nick asked. “Those people out there in Westbrook, they call you the Caretaker.”
“BecauseI have the burden,” Grandpa Lee said. He leaned forward, resting against his knees, and gestured wildly. “I keep out the outside. I live out here with no phone, no electricity, nothing except for what I can put together with my bare hands. I don’t sell. Ican’tsell. You know what kind of offers I’ve gotten,son?” Grandpa Lee cackled. “You think I want to be here? I could be living out my golden years on a beach somewhere, but I’m here, keeping all this mess pent up, keeping it safe.”
“How are you keeping it safe if people are getting sucked into this place?” Nick asked.
“I can’t do nothin’ ’bout that.” Grandpa Lee shook his head. “If someone gets too close, the land chooses ’em. It chooses whomever it wants.”
They had gotten no closer to Nick really understanding anything. Nick felt as if he could scream. He shot to his feet, paced back and forth across the porch. Grandpa Lee merely watched him, sighed.
“None of this makes much sense to me,” Nick said. “But I know people are living out there in squalor, Grandpa. They want to leave, and they can’t because someone branded a mark on their bodies. These are innocent people who got tricked into coming here somehow. And now Amiya is there in the house, too.”
“Y’all wandered off,” Grandpa Lee said. “After you wrecked my truck, I got up—it took me a while to get my bearings—and I roamed around a little, not thinking straight, but then I came back to the truck, and y’all were gone. I would have gotten you out.”
“We were looking for you!” Nick sucked in a breath, tried to calm himself. “Now Amiya is trapped there, like a prisoner. I have to get her out of there, and I need to free those innocent people living there like slaves.”
“You remind me of myself, son,” Grandpa Lee said. He shook his head sadly. “Big, brave ideas to set everyone free. I tried that, too. I’d convinced a handful of them that I could get them out. Do you know what happened?”
Nick stopped pacing, lips pressed together. He didn’t need his granddad to tell him.
“Poof!” Grandpa Lee said, punctuating the word with a snap of his fingers. “When we tried to cross that bridge, they went off like firecrackers, five people, gone like that, and it was all on me, son—I’d might as well have shot them in the head myself. If you bring in the outside folks, the police, when they try to remove those poor people from Westbrook?—”
“They’ll all die,” Nick said, and lowered his head.
