Cypress House

by Michael Koryta

Genres: Mystery

Synopsis

Arlen Wagner has an awful gift; he can see death in the eyes of men before it strikes. He’s never wrong. So when Arlen awakens on a train one hot Florida night and sees death’s telltale sign in the eyes of his fellow passengers, he tries to warn them. Only 19 year old Paul Brickhill believes him, and the two abandon the train, hoping to escape certain death. They continue south, but soon are stranded at The Cypress House—an isolated Gulf Coast boarding house run by the beautiful Rebecca Cady—directly in the path of an approaching hurricane. It doesn’t take Arlen and Paul long to realize that the storm isn’t the only approaching danger—a much deadlier force controls the county and everyone living in it. But Paul refuses to abandon Rebecca to face the threat alone, and Arlen’s eerie gift warns him that they’ll never leave.

Release date: January 24, 2011

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 432

Sample

THEY’D BEEN ON THE TRAIN for five hours before Arlen Wagner saw the first of the dead men.


To that point it had been a hell of a nice ride. Hot, sure, and progressively more humid as they passed out of Alabama and
through southern Georgia and into Florida, but nice enough all the same. There were thirty-four on board the train who were
bound for the camps in the Keys, all of them veterans with the exception of the nineteen-year-old who rode at Arlen’s side,
a boy from Jersey by the name of Paul Brickhill.


They’d all made a bit of conversation at the outset, exchanges of names and casual barbs and jabs thrown around in that way
men have when they are getting used to one another, all of them figuring they’d be together for several months to come, and
then things quieted down. Some slept, a few started card games, others just sat and watched the countryside roll by, fields
going misty with late-summer twilight and then shapeless and dark as the moon rose like a watchful specter. Arlen, though,
Arlen just listened. Wasn’t anything else to do, because Paul Brickhill had an outboard motor where his mouth belonged.


As the miles and minutes passed, Brickhill alternated between explaining things to Arlen and asking him questions. Nine times
out of ten, the boy answered his own questions before Arlen could so much as part his lips with a response. Brickhill had
been a quiet kid when the two of them first met months earlier in Alabama, and back then Arlen believed him to be shy. What
he hadn’t counted on was the way the boy took to talk once he felt comfortable with someone. Evidently, he’d grown damn comfortable
with Arlen.


As the wheels hammered along the rails of northern Florida, Paul Brickhill was busy telling Arlen all of the reasons this
was going to be a hell of a good hitch. Not only was there the bridge waiting to be built, but all that sunshine and blue
water and boats that cost more than most homes. They could do some fishing, maybe catch a tarpon. Paul’d seen pictures of
tarpon that were near as long as the boats that landed them. And there were famous people in the Keys, celebrities of every
sort, and who was to say they wouldn’t run into a few, and…


Around them the men talked and laughed, some scratching out letters to loved ones back home. Wasn’t anyone waiting on a letter
from Arlen, so he just settled for a few nips on his flask and tried to find some sleep despite the cloaking warmth and the
stink of sweating men. It was too damn hot.


Brickhill finally fell silent, as if he’d just noticed that Arlen was sitting with his eyes closed and had stopped responding
to the conversation. Arlen let out a sigh, grateful for the respite. Paul was a nice enough kid, but Arlen had never been
one for a lot of words where a few would do.


The train clattered on, and though night had settled, the heat didn’t break. Sweat still trickled along the small of Arlen’s
back and held his hair to his forehead. He wished he could fall asleep; these hot miles would pass faster then. Maybe another
pull on the flask would aid him along.


He opened his eyes, tugged the lids up sleepily, and saw a hand of bone.


He blinked and sat up and stared. Nothing changed. The hand held five playing cards and was attached to a man named Wallace
O’Connell, a veteran from Georgia who was far and away the loudest man in this company. He had his back turned, engaged in
his game, so Arlen couldn’t see his face. Just that hand of bone.


No, Arlen thought, no, damn it, not another one.

The sight chilled him but didn’t shock him. It was far from the first time.

He’s going to die unless I can find a way to stop it, Arlen thought with the sad, sick resignation of a man experienced with such things. Once we get down to the Keys, old Wallace O’Connell will have a slip and bash his head in on something. Or maybe the poor
bastard can’t swim, will fall into those waves and sink beneath them and I’ll be left with this memory same as I’ve been left
with so many others. I’d warn him if I could, but men don’t heed such warnings. They won’t let themselves.

It was then that he looked up, away from Wallace under the flickering lights of the train car, and saw skeletons all around
him.


They filled the shadows of the car, some laughing, some grinning, some lost to sleep. All with bone where flesh belonged.
The few who sat directly under a light still wore their skin, but their eyes were gone, replaced by whirls of gray smoke.


For a moment, Arlen Wagner forgot to breathe. Went cold and dizzy and then sucked in a gasp of air and straightened in the
seat.


They were going to have a wreck. It was the only thing that made a bit of sense. This train was going to derail and they were
all going to die. Every last one of them. Because Arlen had seen this before, and knew damn well what it meant, and knew that—

Paul Brickhill said, “Arlen?”


Arlen turned to him. The overhead light was full on the boy’s face, keeping him in a circle of brightness, the taut, tanned
skin of a young man who spent his days under the sun. Arlen looked into his eyes and saw swirling wisps of smoke. The smoke
rose in tendrils and fanned out and framed the boy’s head while filling Arlen’s with terrible recollections.


“Arlen, you all right?” Paul Brickhill asked.

He wanted to scream. Wanted to scream and grab the boy’s arm but was afraid it would be cold slick bone under his touch.

We’re going to die. We’re going to come off these rails at full speed and pile into those swamp woods, with hot metal tearing
and shattering all around us…

The whistle blew out shrill in the dark night, and the train began to slow.

“We got another stop,” Paul said. “You look kind of sickly. Maybe you should pour that flask out.”

The boy distrusted liquor. Arlen wet his lips and said, “Maybe,” and looked around the car at the skeleton crew and felt the
train shudder as it slowed. The force of that big locomotive was dropping fast, and now he could see light glimmering outside
the windows, a station just ahead. They were arriving in some backwater stop where the train could take on coal and the men
would have a chance to get out, stretch their legs, and piss. Then they’d be aboard again and winging south at full speed,
death ahead of them.


“Paul,” Arlen said, “you got to help me do a bit of convincing here.”

“What are you talking about?”

“We aren’t getting back on this train. Not a one of us.”

THEY PILED OUT OF THE CARS and onto the station platform, everyone milling around, stretching or lighting cigarettes. It was getting on toward ten in
the evening, and though the sun had long since faded, the wet heat lingered. The boards of the platform were coated with swamp
mud dried and trampled into dust, and out beyond the lights Arlen could see silhouetted fronds lying limp in the darkness,
untouched by a breeze. Backwoods Florida. He didn’t know the town and didn’t care; regardless of name, it would be his last
stop on this train.


He hadn’t seen so many apparitions of death at one time since the war. Maybe leaving the train wouldn’t be enough. Could be
there was some sort of virus in the air, a plague spreading unseen from man to man the way the influenza had in ’18, claiming
lives faster than the reaper himself.


“What’s the matter?” Paul Brickhill asked, following as Arlen stepped away from the crowd of men and tugged his flask from
his pocket. Out here the sight was enough to set Arlen’s hands to shaking—men were walking in and out of the shadows as they
moved through the cars and down to the station platform, slipping from flesh to bone and back again in a matter of seconds, all of it a dizzying display that made him want to sit
down and close his eyes and drink long and deep on the whiskey.


“Something’s about to go wrong,” he said.

“What do you mean?” Paul said, but Arlen didn’t respond, staring instead at the men disembarking and realizing something—the
moment they stepped off the train, their skin slid back across their bones, knitting together as if healed by the wave of
some magic wand. The swirls of smoke in their eye sockets vanished into the hazy night air. It was the train. Yes, whatever
was going to happen was going to happen to that train.


“Something’s about to go wrong,” he repeated. “With our train. Something’s going to go bad wrong.”

“How do you know?”

“I just do, damn it!”


Paul looked to the flask, and his eyes said what his words did not.

“I’m not drunk. Haven’t had more than a few swallows.”

“What do you mean, something’s going to go wrong?” Paul asked again.

Arlen held on to the truth, felt the words heavy in his throat but couldn’t let them go. It was one thing to see such horrors;
it was worse to try and speak of them. Not just because it was a difficult thing to describe but because no one ever believed.
And the moment you gave voice to such a thing was the moment you charted a course for your character that you could never
alter. Arlen understood this well, had known it since boyhood.


But Paul Brickhill had sat before him with smoke the color of an early-morning storm cloud hanging in his eyes, and Arlen
was certain what that meant. He couldn’t let him board that train again.


“People are going to die,” he said.

Paul Brickhill leaned his head back and stared.

“We get back on that train, people are going to die,” Arlen said. “I’m sure of it.”


He’d spent many a day trying to imagine this gift away. To fling it from him the way you might a poisonous spider caught crawling
up your arm, and long after the chill lingered on your flesh you’d thank the sweet hand of Providence that you’d been given
the opportunity to knock the beast away. Only he’d never been given the opportunity. No, the stark sight of death had stalked
him, trailed him relentlessly. He knew it when he saw it, and he knew it was no trick of the light, no twist of bad liquor
upon the mind. It was prophecy, the gift of foresight granted to a man who’d never wished for it.


He was reluctant to say so much as a word to any of the other men, knowing the response he’d receive, but this was not the
sort of thing that could be ignored.


Speak loud and sharp, he thought, just like you did on the edge of a battle, when you had to get ’em to listen, and listen fast.

“Boys,” he said, getting at least a little of the old muster into his tone, “listen up, now.”

The conversations broke off. Two men were standing on the step of the train car, and when they turned, skull faces studied
him.


“I think we best wait for the next train through,” he said. “There’s bad trouble aboard this one. I’m sure of it.”

It was Wallace O’Connell who broke the long silence that followed.

“What in the hell you talking about, Wagner?” he said, and immediately there was a chorus of muttered agreement.

“Something’s wrong with this train,” Arlen said. He stood tall, did his damnedest to hold their eyes.

“You know this for a fact?” O’Connell said.

“I know it.”

“How do you know? And what’s wrong with it?”

“I can’t say what’s wrong with it. But something is. I got a… sense for these things.”


A slow grin crept across O’Connell’s face. “I’ve known some leg-pullers,” he said, “but didn’t figure you for one of them.
Don’t got the look.”


“Damn it, man, this ain’t no joke.”

“You got a sense something’s wrong with our train, and you’re telling us it ain’t no joke?”


“Knew a widow back home who was the same way,” spoke up another man from the rear of the circle. He was a slim, wiry old guy
with a nose crooked from many a break. Arlen didn’t know his name—hell, he didn’t know most of their names, and that was part
of the problem. Aside from Paul there wasn’t a man in the group who’d known Arlen for any longer than this train ride.


“Yeah?” O’Connell said. “Trains talked to her, too?”

“Naw. She had the sense, just like he’s talking about. ’Cept she got her sights from owls and moon reflections and shit like
you couldn’t even imagine.”


This new man was grinning wide, and O’Connell was matching it. He said, “She was right all the time, of course?”

“Of course,” the man said, and let out a cackle. “Why, wasn’t but nine year ago she predicted the end of days was upon us.
Knew it for a fact. Was going to befall us by that winter. I can’t imagine she was wrong, I just figured I missed being raptured
up and that’s how I ended up here with all you sinful sons of bitches.”


The crowd was laughing now, and Arlen felt heat creeping into his face, thoughts of his father and the shame that had chased
him from his boyhood home threatening his mind now. Behind him Paul Brickhill was standing still and silent, about the only
one in the group who wasn’t at least chuckling. There was a man near Wallace O’Connell whose smile seemed forced, uneasy,
but even he was going along with the rest of them.


“I might ask for a tug on whatever’s in that jug of your’n,” O’Connell said. “It seems to be a powerful syrup.”


“It’s not the liquor you’re hearing,” Arlen said. “It’s the truth. Boys, I’m telling you, I seen things in the war just like
I am tonight, and every time I did, men died.”


“Men died every damn day in the war,” O’Connell said. The humor had drained from his voice. “And we all seen it—not just you.
Some of us didn’t crack straight through from what we seen. Others”—he made a pointed nod at Arlen—“had a mite less fortitude.
Now save your stories for somebody fool enough to listen to them. Rest of us don’t need the aggravation. There’s work at the
end of this line, and we all need it.”


The men broke up then, drifted back to their own conversations, casting Arlen sidelong stares. Arlen felt a hand on his arm
and nearly whirled and threw his fist without looking, shame and fear riding him hard now. It was only Paul, though, tugging
him away from the group.


“Arlen, you best ease up.”

“Be damned if I will. I’m telling you—”

“I understand what you’re telling us, but it just doesn’t make sense. Could be you got a touch of fever, or—”

Arlen reached out and grabbed him by his shirt collar. Paul’s eyes went wide, but he didn’t reach for Arlen’s hand, didn’t
move at all as Arlen spoke to him in a low, harsh voice.


“You had smoke in your eyes, boy. I don’t give a damn if you couldn’t see it or if none of them could, it was there, and it’s
the sign of your death. You known me for a time now, and you ask yourself, how often has Arlen Wagner spoken foolish words
to me? How often has he seemed addled? You ask yourself that, and then you ask yourself if you want to die tonight.”


He released the boy’s collar and stepped back. Paul lifted a hand and wiped it over his mouth, staring at Arlen.

“You trust me, Brickhill?” Arlen said.

“You know I do.”


“Then listen to me now. If you don’t ever listen to another man again for the rest of your life, listen to me now. Don’t get
back on that train.”


The boy swallowed and looked off into the darkness. “Arlen, I wouldn’t disrespect you, but what you’re saying… there’s no
way you could know that.”


“I can see it,” Arlen said. “Don’t know how to explain it, but I can see it.”


Paul didn’t answer. He looked away from Arlen, back at the others, who were watching the boy with pity and Arlen with disdain.

“Here’s one last question for you to ask of yourself,” Arlen said. “Can you afford to be wrong?”

Paul stared at him in silence as the train whistle blew and the men stomped out cigarettes and fell into a boarding line.
Arlen watched their flesh melt from their bones as they went up the steps.


“Don’t let that fool bastard convince you to stay here, boy,” Wallace O’Connell bellowed as he stepped up onto the train car,
half of his face a skull, half the face of a strong man who believed he was fit to take on all comers. “Ain’t nothing here
but alligators, and unless you want to be eating them come dinner tomorrow, or them eating you, you best get aboard.”


Paul didn’t look in his direction. Just kept staring at Arlen. The locomotive was chugging now, steam building, ready to tug
its load south, down to the Keys, down to the place the boy wanted to be.


“You’re serious,” he said.

Arlen nodded.

“And it’s happened before?” Paul said. “This isn’t the first time?”

“No,” Arlen said. “It is not the first time.”

THE FIRST TIME Arlen Wagner saw death was in the Belleau Wood. That was the bloodiest battle the Marines had ever encountered, a savage
showdown requiring repeated assaults before the parcel of forest and boulders finally fell under American control, and the
bodies were piled high by the end. The sight of corpses was not the new experience for Arlen, whose father had served as undertaker
in the West Virginia hill town where he was raised, a place where violence, mining accidents, and fever regularly sent men
and women Isaac Wagner’s way to be fitted into their coffins. No, in the moonlight over the Marne River on a June night in
1918, Arlen saw something far different from a corpse—he saw the dead among the living.


They’d made an assault on the Wood that day, marching through a waist-high wheat field directly into machine-gun fire. For
the rest of his life, the sight of tall, windswept wheat would put a shiver through Arlen. Most of the men in the first waves
had been slaughtered outright, but Arlen and other survivors had been driven south, into the trees and a tangle of barbwire.
The machine guns pounded on, relentless, and those who didn’t fall beneath them grappled hand to hand with German soldiers who shouted oaths at them in a foreign tongue while bayonets
clashed and knives plunged.


By evening the Marines had sustained the highest casualties in their history, but they also had a hold, however tenuous, in
Belleau Wood. Arlen was on his belly beside a boulder as midnight came on, and with it a German counterattack. As the enemy
approached he’d felt near certain that this skirmish would be his last; he couldn’t continue to survive battles like these,
not when so many had fallen all around him throughout the day. That rain of bullets couldn’t keep missing him forever.


This was his belief at least, until the Germans appeared as more than shadows, and what he saw then kept him from so much
as lifting his rifle.


They were skeleton soldiers.

He could see skulls shining in the pale moonlight where faces belonged, hands of white bone clutching rifle stocks.

He was staring, entranced, when the American gunners opened up. Opened up and mowed them down, sliced the vicious Hun bastards
to pieces. All around him men lifted their rifles and fired, and Arlen just lay there without so much as a finger on the trigger,
scarcely able to draw a breath.


A trick of the light, he told himself as dawn rose heavy with mist and the smell of cooling and drying blood, the moans of the wounded as steady
now as the gunfire had been earlier. What he’d seen was the product of moonlight partnered with the trauma from a day of unspeakable
bloodshed. Surely that was enough to wreak havoc on his mind. On anyone’s mind.


There were some memories in his head then, of course, some thoughts of his father, but he kept them at bay, and as the sun
broke through the mist he’d done a fine job of convincing himself that this was nothing but the most horrifying of hallucinations.


It was midafternoon and the Marines were readying another assault, seeking to push deeper into the Wood, when he turned to two of the men he’d known best over there, known best and
liked best, good boys who fought hard, and saw that their eyes were gone. The flesh remained on their faces but their eyes
were gone, the sockets filled with gray smoke that leaked out and formed wreaths around their heads.


Both of them were dead within the hour.

For the rest of the war it was like that—bones showing in the night battles, smoke-filled eye sockets smiling at him during
the daylight. That promise of death was all he ever got. Never did a ghost linger with him after the last breath rattled out
of tortured lungs, never did a phantom version of one of those lost men return in the night to offer him some sense of the
reason behind it all. No voices whispered to him in the dark, no invisible hand guided him in battle or menaced him in sleep.


He spoke of it only once, knew immediately from the looks exchanged around him that if he kept telling the tale he’d soon
be hospital-bound with all the other poor shell-shocked bastards who gibbered on about things far from the grasp of reality.
Arlen kept his mouth shut and kept seeing the same terrible sights.


As the war went on, he discovered some of them could be saved. They would perish if left to fight alone, but if he could keep
them down and out of the fire line, sometimes they made it through. Not often enough, though. Not nearly often enough. And
there were so, so many of them.


After the armistice the premonitions ceased, and for a time Arlen thought it was done. Then he’d walked into an Army hospital
back in the States to visit a buddy and had seen smoke-eyes everywhere he looked, stumbled back out of the place without ever
finding his friend. He’d gone to the first speakeasy he could find and tipped whiskey glasses back until his own vision was
too clouded and blurred to see smoke even if someone lit a match right in front of his face.


He’d worked in a railyard for a time, had seen a man with bone hands and a gleaming skull face laughing over a joke just minutes
before the chains on a log car snapped and he was crushed beneath one of the timbers. The last time Arlen ventured back into
West Virginia—it wasn’t a place of warm memories and welcoming embraces—he’d gone hunting with a friend from the war who’d
turned into a bitter drunk with a stump where his left hand belonged. One-handed or not he’d wanted to go hunting, and Arlen
had agreed, then saw the smoke swirling in the man’s eye sockets about thirty seconds before he stepped into a snarl of loose
brush and a rattlesnake struck him in the calf, just below the knee. Arlen had shot the snake, whose thick coiled body would’ve
gone every bit of five feet stretched out full, and cut the wound to bleed the venom, but still the smoke wouldn’t leave those
eyes, grew thicker and darker as Arlen dragged his old friend back to town, and he was dead by noon the next day.


So there were incidents, but in this warless world they were far less common, and he worked hard at burying the memories just
the same as they’d buried the men who created them. Drinking helped. Even through Prohibition, Arlen always found a way to
keep his flask filled.


Like many of the men back from the war, he’d wandered in the years that followed, taking work when and where he could, unable
or unwilling to settle. When the Bonus Marchers had moved on Washington, demanding wages for veterans, only to be driven away
with tear gas, he’d watched the papers idly, expecting nothing. But after Roosevelt allowed that some veterans might join
his Civilian Conservation Corps, out to save the nation one tree at a time, Arlen had some interest. Dollars were getting
scarcer, and the idea of laboring outdoors instead of down in a coal mine or inside a foundry sounded mighty fine.


In the end he’d signed on in Alabama as what they called a local experienced man. It was CCC labor, same as any else, but he didn’t have to join up with one of the veteran companies.
Instead, he was tasked with providing instruction to a bunch of boys from New York and Jersey, city kids who’d never swung
an ax or handled a saw. Was the sort of thing that could try some men’s patience, but Arlen didn’t mind teaching, and just
about anyone could be shown how to drive a nail or square an edge.


Paul Brickhill, though… he was something special. The closest thing to a mechanical genius Arlen had ever seen. A tall, dark-haired
boy with serious eyes and an underfed frame, same as almost all the rest of them, he had not the first bit of experience with
carpentry, but what he did have was the mind. The first thing that caught Arlen’s attention was how quickly the boy learned.
In all those early days of instruction, Arlen never repeated himself to Brickhill. Not once. You said it, he absorbed it and
applied it. Still, he’d appeared little more than a reliable boy and a quick study until they got to work building a shelter
house. They’d laid masonry from foundation to windowsill and Arlen was checking over the rounded logs they’d set above the
stone when he caught Brickhill changing his measurements for the framing of the roof.


He’d been ready to light the boy up—took some first-class ignorance to dare pick up a pencil and fool with Arlen’s numbers,
make a change that could set them back days—when he looked down and studied the sketch and saw that the boy was right. Arlen
had the angle off on the beams. He would’ve discovered it himself once they got to laying boards, but he hadn’t seen it in
his measurements.


“How’d you know that?” he asked.

Brickhill opened his mouth and closed it, frowned, then steepled his hands in the shape of a roof and then flattened them
out and said, “I just… saw it, that’s all.”


It wasn’t the sort of thing a boy who’d never built a roof should see. Not a fifteen-degree difference without a single board
set.


They got to talking a bit after that. Arlen had been in the habit of telling the juniors only what was needed—cut here, nail there—but Brickhill wanted to know more, and Arlen told him
what he could. Didn’t take long to see that the boy’s innate understanding of building was such that Arlen’s experience didn’t
seem all that impressive. A few months later it was at Brickhill’s suggestion that Arlen approached the camp foreman with
the idea of constructing a three-hundred-foot-long chute to get concrete down to a dam they were building. The chute worked,
and saved them who knew how many days.


It was getting on toward the end of summer and things were winding down at Flagg Mountain when Brickhill’s six-month hitch
finished up. He intended to reenlist—expected he’d continue to for some time, long as they’d let him, he told Arlen—but he
didn’t want to stay with his company, which was set for a transfer from Alabama to Nevada.


“I got something else in mind,” Brickhill said. “But I figure it’s going to take your help to get me there.”

The boy proceeded to inform him, in exorbitant detail, of a new CCC project in the Florida Keys. They were building a highway
bridge that would conquer the ocean, same grand thing that Henry Flagler had done with the railroad. Labor for the project
was being provided by the Veterans Work Program, but the CCC had just taken over the management. As they didn’t have a junior
camp down there, it was going to take a bit of work for Paul to join up. Considering how Arlen was an ex-Marine, same as the
local officer in charge of enlistment, and might have some pull, Paul was looking for help.


Arlen agreed to it, and what he told the enlistment officer had been true enough—the boy needed to be working on such an endeavor,
not planting trees and clearing drainage ditches in Nevada.


“What you have here,” he’d said, “is the next great engineer this country will see.”

It didn’t fly. Seems they’