The Reaches

[Near]

Farr family mythos holds that Everett Farr, who begat the Farr lumber fortune after a deployment to Aisne resulted in his dishonorable discharge from the United States Army and subsequent exodus from East Coast birthplace to the still-young state of Washington, was a man whose abundant wit made up for his meager valor.

Limited evidence survives to support the claim: there is an apocrypha of stories hinging on his obsession with cryptic crossword puzzles; a Farr-specific custom of casting him as a point of negative comparison (“The boy’s bright, but he’s no Everett”); and his crowning achievement, the conception of the name Farr Reaches for the estate where he settled with his wife, a full-blooded Tulalip girl who had played an undocumented but allegedly critical role in his earlier land negotiations, in 1925.

The fifteen-room shrine to his flair for wordplay remained the seat of the family for decades, until a lucky break into oil futures by the second Courtland Farr facilitated a move to the Big City of Tacoma, relegating the old homestead to a half-neglected summer getaway.

Near Farr was eight years old the last time he laid eyes on The Reaches.  At that age, he had accepted both the house’s elevated significance and his great-grandfather’s genius as givens, like Santa Claus or Jesus, with no understanding of the whys of any of it.  Now, granted a couple decades’ distance, his younger self’s credulity was painful to acknowledge, even to no one but himself.  Somebody should have kicked his ass long before anyone actually did.

He wasn’t sure what he had been expecting as he drove up the tree-choked coastline toward the house.  There had been a tingle of expectation.  Revelation on some level, probably.  The reclaiming of a missing piece.  Naive hopes, hopeful notions, the kind of things that he wouldn’t have had the words or the heart to say out loud but which stemmed somehow from his last recollection of the place, one of those memories that lodged deep like a bullet fragment: him a skinny, gape-mouthed kid standing next to Sofia at the edge of the circular driveway, both of them decked out in their school uniforms.  Crescent moon.  Starlight.  And there, indelible, like someone had spelled it out in neon above their heads, The Last Time, The Last Place, He Had Felt Like He Was Home.

That was strange, really, because as salient as the one flashbulb image was, he couldn’t summon another scene from The Reaches with anything approaching the same level of clarity.  But he had been telling himself the story for years, on each threshold.  Now that he had stood at the edge of the driveway again and not been bowled over by a sensation of homecoming or nostalgia or anything else, just this stale disappointment that still lingered at the back of his tongue on Day Two, he was forced to wonder if the snapshot that was burned into his memory was a memory at all, or if it was the distorted memory of a memory of a memory, or a memory of his mother describing it later, recounting the Day She Left to a friend in the kitchen.

It wasn’t that the house -- the solid, half-timbered reality of it -- was unimpressive: it outsized any space he had ever had to himself; it was bigger than most he had shared.  It was vast and it was empty and the woods-quiet that suffused it was denser than any city-quiet.  He had never been one to seek out solitude, so found this, trafficless, neighborless silence, unsettling.  He could hack away at its edges with the sound of his shoes on the floor, the radio playing crinkly New Wave, ice melting in rocks glasses, Lew snuffling around furniture and erupting into the occasional tragic howl; but every inch of progress was lost as soon as it was made.  The quiet crept back in twice as heavy.

Rain had begun an uneven tapping at the windowpane a few minutes ago, following the close of the overcast late-fall day.  Front room curtains wide-open for the view: a bank of trees at the far edge of dusk, beyond the lawn, and if the moon was out there somewhere, the clouds blotted it.  His own reflection was imposed over all: sitting on the floor, back against the edge of the sofa, holding a bottle by its neck.  Per the label, a 1997 Roberto Voerzio Barolo Brunate.  For all he knew or cared it could have been convenience store Chianti; he had never bought into the whole wine thing.  But Daddy had.  Apparently.  Apparently he had bought into the wine thing, the scotch thing, the brandy thing, the aperitif-you-read-about-in-books thing.  Maybe they would have had something to talk about after all.  Maybe that was why Farr The Younger, heir apparent, had yet to leave his haunted house, although he didn’t know what he was doing there: because when he didn’t know what he was doing, he drank.  And the liquor was free here (his, bequeathed -- was there a difference?), and he wasn’t working for tips.

[Jude]

His first memory - a memory that was wholly his own - was that of lying on the floor, cold concrete, and the sensation of sticky membrane pulled tight across his body. For the first few moments he heard nothing, only felt bubbling liquid in his ears.

The membrane tore as he stretched, moved, shifted away from the other body crossed over his. The concrete grew slick underneath him. He opened his eyes; his vision was blurred with fluid. When he rubbed the wetness away with the back of his hand, he looked and saw red everywhere. It ran from his ears, and he could hear (louder than the whispers, louder than the soft cries of the circle of onlookers) the beating of his own heart, reverbrating.

He knew, then, that blood was his purpose, his birthright, his true and only destiny. He knew what blood was and what it was meant for, the beginning and the end. It came to him so clearly and simply that it shook him still, when he woke in the night, remembering it.

Now he much preferred the rain.

He liked to be places where it rained. He liked all kinds of rain - hot rains, cold rains, sun showers, lightning storms, but most of all he liked the steady downpours, the ones where it rained for hours with only the occasional rumble of thunder, and the wetness that ran down his nose and the back of his neck and filled up his shoes was water, only water, not blood.

⛈

He remembered looking out at the rain from one of the largest rooms in the house, set aglow with geometric cage lamps. He was ten - he was told he was ten - maybe eleven, holding his sister's hand. They were always holding hands if they were near one another, and they almost always were. Their governess had walked away to get them something to drink, and he was left standing by the floor-to-ceiling cathedral windows, watching the rain.

He did not know where he was, precisely, though he recalled the chauffeur  joking that they were going to 'the furthest reaches' of Washington. There were always parties like this, every so often, when his family would gather all together and caravan to some chateau or villa, and the family would talk with strangers for hours, and eventually they would all regroup and ask him and his sister strange questions until the strangers looked tired or afraid or both.

The rain was very beautiful there, pouring down through the pines and hemlocks. Beyond the cathedral window, he felt those woods would be a good place to disappear, to get lost.

His governess came back with juice. His left hand still with his sister's, he took the cup with his right. He looked into the cup. His reflection looked back at him, in blood red.

⛈

The Farr Reaches - he had remembered it wrong. Or, he had remembered the punch line correctly, and forgotten the joke.

The taxi dropped him off at a randomly determined point on the highway. He paid cash, and the driver's memories would come up hazy as early as the next morning, the truth buried in the encrypted location data of his cell phone. It was hours of walking from that spot, but if, somehow, one of the family found that one driver, they would be somewhat delayed in locating their lost son. He would be able to see them coming.

It did not rain for most of his walk. After sunset, he used his red flashlight to trace his way through the woods, pausing sometimes to close his eyes and visualize the house. He drew the pictures in the front of his mind - the memories, the newspaper scraps, the glossy pictures from society magazines printed alongside fluff interviews. This way. That way. His flashlight bobbed in the dark.

How easily he could have been a whiskey dream, a lean figure emerging from the safety of the treeline, a shadow moving across the lawn and toward the house. His pace slowed as the rain came down; halfway across the lawn, he stopped entirely, turning his face up to the sky and closing his eyes. At last.

Furthest reaches. End of the world. Everett had probably planned to be alone out here, but fate had other plans.

[Near]

The dive into Courtland Farr, Jr.’s reserves had been an all-day project, sips and shots and fingers interspersed between the opening of drawers and closet doors, tugging at locked cabinets (keys would be somewhere), puffing breaths toward the little mounds of dust hanging around under beds whose sheets still emanated a faint scent of fresh-washed linen, although who knew when they had last been laundered: he had called and cancelled the cleaning service before coming; didn’t know when he was going to get there or how long he was going to stay -- hours, days, weeks, and something about the idea of a maid showing up while he was there was disconcerting.  He wouldn’t have known what to say to a maid or how to look at one.

So when, on the other side of the window, by the trees, appeared the suggestion of movement, Near was, while nothing that he would ever consider ‘drunk,’ amply immersed in the warm, hazy sensation of having been drinking, slowly but steadily, from a variety of bottles for eight hours.  Give or take.  Awareness of his state shaped his first reaction into denial: crazy.  He was all alone out here.  Who the hell else would bother?  There was nothing moving, just a trick of the eyes.

Second, when blinking and squinting failed to erase the smudgy motion that continued beyond his reflection: animal.  Stray dog.  Deer.  This was the kind of place that would have deer on the lawn.  Stag, antlers, striding through the mist to stand in the middle of the yard and look coat-of-arms majestic.  But whatever he was seeing didn’t actually seem to have dog or deer shape, which led to thought the third (falling like a domino after one and two): burglar.  Somebody had caught wind of Daddy’s passing and come to find out if pickings were easy, which was fair enough and more power to them, except that he had gotten here first.  Not that that had made the papers.

He assumed, when he noticed them, that the four antique-looking guns that hung on the wall behind the sofa were unloaded.  Assumption alone, no verification.  Nobody would keep loaded guns on a wall.  So it was a bluff, as far as he was concerned, when he lifted one at random -- cold in his hands and heavy -- and walked barefoot out onto the porch with its darkmetal nose pointed toward the lawn. 

“Somebody out there?”  As if anyone would answer. Raindrops landed in his hair and on his shoulders, and his voice was dwarfed by the outside.

[Jude]

"Yes." A low rumble of thunder punctuated the word, kind enough not to interrupt.  Rain pattered over his shell jacket, sliding down his sleeves until it dripped down his fingertips. He could see Near now - couldn't see him before, not through the streaked windows, but he knew Near was there.

Then again, it was difficult, that word, 'know'. For example, did he 'know' the sun was going to come up tomorrow? He did not. The likelihood that the sun would not come up was simply so infinitesimally small as to make the event appear certain. Did he 'know' that Near Farr had been sitting in the drawing room, drunk, listening to the moans and creakings of the old house? He did, but not in any manner of the typical human senses, not even prediction. Jude 'knew' things that were essentially unknowable, things outside his experience, things that appeared in his mind like he'd read them in a book or heard them over the radio or seen them on television, and he'd forgotten for a while, and then suddenly recalled. Sometimes he 'knew' things because he had 'done' them, though his linear experience of time implied that he had not, for example, witnessed the human lamps of Nero's gardens.

Maybe the gun was loaded. Maybe Near would shoot him, perhaps kill him. Jude had never been shot before, so he was not confident he could survive it. All that kept him from fear was that odd sense of knowing - that if he was going to die here, he would have guessed it already, somehow. It seemed miserably anticlimactic to die on Near Farr's lawn.

"It's cold out here." He offered the prompt the way a man might bow at the beginning of a formal dance with a lady: the gesture had a predetermined response, known to all with good manners. Secrets, code words, symbols - manners was all these things, and hopefully the Reaches, if not Near himself, had not forgotten.

[Near]

For as long as he aimed the gun out into the yard, its muzzle engaged in the sway of a teenage couple at the end of a high school dance – tentative and slow – so that, when the answer came, and a ripple began around the middle of his spine and ended with his finger contracting against the trigger, odds were good that he would not have done any damage to the voice’s owner even if the result of the reflex had been more substantial than a his of metal against metal that proved his theory of the weapon being out of commission.  Nevertheless, he released the grip he had on it with his right hand and swung it down with his left, startled by a bleary idea of what would have happened had he been wrong and a bullet had waiting in the barrel.

The sky reacted to his poor judgment with a growl that defied his interpretation.  He waited for it to fade, then digested “It’s cold out here” before answering.

“What the Hell.”

Not a question, at its core.  More raw exclamation: a too-loud construct of anger at the intrusion and indignation at this absurd commentary on the weather, balanced atop a foundation turned shaky by competing surges of adrenaline and relief that resulted from not having fired a gun.

His follow-up was somewhat more meaningful, though no more welcoming: “It’s not that cold.  Who the fuck are you?”  Conventional wisdom might have advised against confronting strangers who lurked in unfamiliar places in the night.  He was inebriated enough not to care.

[Jude]

In his youth Jude had once come across a series of horror books for children, one that offered choices at the end of several paragraph, each choice prompting the reader to flip to a particular page, where they learned whether or not they met their doom at the hands of a werewolf, or stumbling into a pit in the woods, or electrocuting themselves with a toaster oven. The early endings were terrifically unsatisfactory, especially when death arrived too quicckly, in some dull or banal form. What a bad ending it would be, if somehow Near killed him with that old, decorative gun. How anti-climactic.

But Jude figured this was a different type of book, a more regular sort, where the end was written at the start, though the reader was generally quite ignorant of what fate had in store for the characters. If Near was meant to shoot him, then he would. Jude's purpose was to turn the pages, not to predict every outcome.

"It is that cold." Jude's voice tinged faintly with peevishness; Near's response was incorrect. "Are you going to make us talk on your lawn?" A lawn confrontation, like death by toaster oven, felt offensive. And yet, what was to be done? Jude shifted the bag slung over his shoulder, as if preparing to drop it and converse right there. "Whatever you want, Mister Farr."

He tried to remember. Had he met Near Farr, all those years ago? Or was Near fast asleep, or away from home, while Jude drank his juice and waited for his caretakers to turn him out?

[Near]

The longer he stared through the drizzle, the better he could make out his visitor: skinny, rain-bedraggled kid.  In different circumstances, he probably would have been granted his invitation to come in without having to argue for it.  Here, though …

“Mister Farr’s dead.”  Flat.  Continuations on his tongue, slower to crystallize into words.  No, he wasn’t going to make them talk anywhere.  Put that fucking bag away.  “How about you –"

Lew at the door, then, the thud of all her weight hitting high on the pane, skitter of nails against glass as her paws flailed, and, after a moment of absorbing the scene in the yard, she launched into one of those forever-long wails that usually made Near regret having taken her, but that this time, by virtue of its being shot through with what he interpreted as extra hostility -- a gravelly undertone directed at the prowler -- made him repent (after he recovered from the startle of it) all the curses he had lobbed at her over the past few weeks.  Beware of dog, kid.

Just the one bay, though, after which she remained upright but quieter, chest heaving visibly in muffled whines.  How about you what?  Fuck off?  Go home?  Come back in the morning?  Instead, "Did you know Courtland?"

[Jude]

Kid: somewhere between sixteen and twenty-six, old enough to drive and barely old enough to rent a car. Old enough to come out here all alone, apparently; old enough to have a sense of almost Victorian manners. The rain began to collect in puddles at his feet, impressions made by standing. He could stand here all night, if he had to. He could try to explain that unexplainable, in the dark, with the wind and thunder cutting in, with a poor view of Near's face, and thus a poor gauge of what he found believable. If it had to be that way, then it would be.

Jude did not jump at the dog. He barely looked at her. Rabbits, cats, dogs, sheep, deer - common sacrificial animals, for the family, killed first for Jude, then eventually by him. It behooved him not to develop a fondness for things whose blood ended up on his hands.

"My family did. I met him, once. Maybe twice." At some point, it all blurred together - the blood and the parties and the rich pseudo-aristocrats who peered at him and were taken in. He remembered Courtland Farr because he remembered the house, and because he could remember what he thought was a flicker of fear and doubt in the man's eyes. Hopefully, Courtland Farr the third took after his father.

[Near]

“Okay ...”  Mostly puzzlement in the just-elongated word, the unclosed ending, as that initial territorial surge seeped out of crevices both congenital and temporary, bored by the gently caustic collusion of wine and whisky.  If the kid were a robber, he was a piss-poor one.  Unprepared, unthreatening.  Didn’t pull a gun in the face of a gun.  Other theories gathered, hazy.  He’d met Courtland.  "Once or twice."  Distant friend of the family?  Neighbor?  Not that either possibility helped explain this appearance in the yard.  Unless it was planned.  Nocturnal lawnboy  What did he know?

He shook his head, provoking a tickle: his free hand moved toward his face to redirect a rivulet that had formed above his forehead and was now running between the edge of his nose and the inside corner of his eye.  His other hand still gripped the useless (but heavy) gun, index finger tracing the seam where the stock met the barrel.  The rain was starting to soak through his shirt.

Fine, maybe it was cold.  He glanced back over his shoulder to note that the sitting room, washed amber with lamplight, looked inviting.

“... Okay.”  Added finality in the echo, a moment later.  Familiarity with the late Courtland Farr, Jr. accepted, for lack of an inclination to disbelieve.  “So why are you here now?”  One chance.  He had already decided: a good, reasonable answer ended with them both inside, for better or for worse.  A bad answer, a non-answer, left one of them locked out in the rain.

[Jude]

Once or twice. Hearing it parroted back at him, Jude realized his own response was incorrect. He shrugged to himself; now they were even. Once or twice - maybe enough to know the late Sir Farr's favorite flower, or what he wore once to a Halloween party. Enough times, perhaps, to consider oneself a friendly acquaintance. 'Once or twice' was technically accurate. 'Once' was a little brook where elementary school children hunted for frogs and salamanders. But 'once' with Jude was an ocean, a span of time that stretched so much further, elongated by strange horrors that were best not discussed on lawns.

He had seen this exact conversation go badly. He had sat in front of the blood sigils with his sister, the tips of their fingers red and wet, and watched as adults three, four, five times his age devolved into choked sobs, hysterical laughter, paralyzed silence. Past a certain point, Jude could not distinguish belief from disbelief. It would be better if things did not go that way. It would be better if Near did not ask Jude to prove things, right here, right now.

"To talk to you. About... things your father knew." Jude sighed. He could not tell if it was his patience or his hope that was thinning. "Maybe you can help." Maybe he's not the one. Maybe. So many maybes, like raindrops from a cloud.