The plink of water in the casket black of his room woke him with a start and he listened paralyzed until he was certain that the dream was gone. The dream; his son. Still somewhere outside himself. Outside. Ghostlike in the gloom of his room.

He listened. No sound. Not even his breathing. It was just a dream. Gone. All of it gone.

He drew in ragged breath, spine rigid as a gang-plank, and let himself relax, muscles uncoiling like rope. He breathed. How many nights had the dream revisited him? Too many to count.

In his dream he floated along a tunnel, concrete walls and concrete ceiling, circular, intestinal. A riven chain link fence. In the tunnel, water, motionless, a black glassy corridor, opaque and acidic. The bowels of some unknown animal. At the tunnel's far end, the shadow of a child, his child, impossibly alive, scrap-booked against the wan light of an inescapable conclusion.

His son. So frail. So small. Ashen hair and ashen eyes. Sitting in the small boat they use to fish in. Sitting and waiting for him to come, waiting. But he never came. He would never get to know what his son would become. There was no more becoming. Only sorrow and death.

He sighed and stretched out on the coolness of the sheet beneath him. He thought that in the whole of his life there had been more pain than punishment. 

Plink of water, and he froze mast-like among the sheets, arms spread wide. Heart pounding. Was he still dreaming?

Plunk.

A sob escaped his lips. No. He was not dreaming. In his dreams he could endure the sorrow of his life for the chance to see his son again. In the waking world, chance was no chance at all. In the waking world, his son was dead, and he relived the pain of it every night.

Plink.

He cast off his sheet and made his way naked and unsteady to the bathroom to shut off the dripping sink, letting the tears stream blindly down his face.

In the bathroom, a single window looked out upon the lake. The palest of light lit upon the sill, starlight reflected off the water perhaps. He moved past the dripping faucet, past the tub. The small dock with his small boat lay out there, black against the black water, like the last jagged tooth in the ruined maw of some watery beast.

He pressed his brow against the dark glass, translucent now through his fading tears, and there it was. The boat. Not so frightening. Just a dock and a boat upon the long, narrow water that smeared past his sloping back yard. Just the boat upon the lake, the boat in which his son last sat, the lake in which his son had drowned.

There was a culvert a mile down the lake to the left of his dock. He had seen it once, a circular hole filled with murk that led beneath the highway, a constricted artery that oozed black water into the lake. The lake, long, slender, shallow, was once a stream before they dammed off the far end and let the stream bloat with the culvert's runoff. The dam was no more than a concrete wall with a sluice running beneath it to lower the lake in the Fall. Sunken beneath the sluice, a metal grate. He had seen that, too, watching the water suck over the edge of the sluice and disappear beneath the wall, thinking that if a man fell in there he would surely die, that if a man fell in he would get pressed against the grate and never get out. How would they ever retrieve the body, he had wondered?

He heard the hard answer to that question a month later. They drained the lake to recover his son's. It took six days before the water level fell sufficiently, leaving the sluice exposed, empty, its deathly chamber safe for divers. Six days.

They never did find his son's body.

He squeezed his eyes shut against the memories, his life an acceptance of what had been and what would be, and when he opened them he gasped.

A shadow moved within the shadows of the dock, blank and amorphous. Cresting the tree line, the thinnest of moons, its sickle-tip slowly exposing the scene like some nightmare Polaroid. Within the boat, alone, unmoving, sat a boy, staring solemnly up at him as he stared breathlessly back.

He blinked and the boy vanished, the black shape of him like a moonlit after-image on the glass of the window. And when he breathed at last, the phantom image wavered and disappeared.

He hung his head, the pulsing of his heart like beating fists upon his chest.

Look up, Daddy.

From outside the window, the whisper drifted. Impossible. He steadied himself and looked again. And when he did, the boat was drifting from the dock out upon the jet black lake. In the boat, the boy, motionless and starkly outlined against the kiss of moonlight upon the water.

Without thinking he bolted from the bathroom to the basement door across the narrow hall, flung it wide, his racing feet missing the top step, and tumbled flailing into the darkened pit of the cellar. The crunch of his neck as his head struck the stairs knocked the thoughts from his brain, and he lay at their bottom, buckled like a broken board, stupefied, senseless.

He lay paralyzed for the length of a full breathless minute, taking stock of his body, gauging the damage done, all the while his heart beat down the passing seconds as he realized how utterly lost he must be to even consider the idea that his son was in that boat. Still, he could not leave it at that, could not just crawl back up the stairs and return to the discomfort of his bed and pry back into his dreams. He needed to look.

He levered himself from off the floor, the wood of it cold against his throbbing hands. His feet speared pain up his legs as he righted and staggered to stand against the bottom banister, eyes sightless as the dead in the pitch of black. His neck didn't hurt, but he gave it no thought as he moved carefully to the rear of the house where a back door led to the backyard that fronted the lake and the dock. He needed to take a look. Needed, and wanted, more than anything to confirm the horror and see his son, that lost and lifeless boy, once more.

The door stood ajar, and a chill moved through it and into the room to clutch at his naked legs. He stopped for a moment to listen, then went on, the open door inconsequential, only the boy and the boat and it floating from the dock in his mind. The grassy yard sloped steeply from the house to the lake and he stair-stepped his way downward in a jig-jaw fashion like a man with some peg-leg won in a war. But he made it, and soon stood on the darkened dock and peered left up the length of the lake, mired in the murk of night. He could just make it out, the dimmest cast of the boat as it drifted away in the distance. He turned and gazed stupidly down-lake. No breeze. How was the boat moving against the current?

The boat would soon be out of sight, that he knew, and with little more than a thought he strode quickly back to the house and seized the front of the small kayak he kept leaning there, a gift from his ex-son's ex-mother, another ex in his life since the divorce that righted all wrongs in his ex-wife's life, seized it and dragged it back to the dock. In moments he was on the water, still naked, sculling after the boat, the boat with his son that fled against the current toward the far off culvert.

He cut the water like the fin of a hunting shark, swift and eager and straight. Still, the boat remained a dull white smudge ahead while the blanketed shoreline kept silent vigil, as immobile and immutable as the sides of a grave. He dug hard, scooping up swirling suck-pools of water on each side of his kayak, and soon was gaining ground. The boat drew closer.

Then it vanished, and he froze holding the double ended paddle level before him as his small craft glided slowly to a standstill before the dark, circular opening of the culvert that ran beneath the highway, like a singular black eye examining him with ill intent.

Six feet wide, half that high in a low sullen arch, how did the boat manage to wring its way down there, he wondered?

No lights from the highway a hundred feet above. There would be few travelers at this late hour. He peered squint-eyed into the void where the boat had disappeared. He tilted his head just so. Was there a light down there? He pondered whether he had finally lost his mind completely, sitting naked, debating the voices in his head. Yes, he had. He paddled forward and threaded his kayak into the narrow, flooded tunnel.

There was no light, only a shroud of gloom, the black of it filled with the drip of water. Scrape of concrete as he tried to keep his kayak centered along the long and tapered tract. The culvert narrowed further, his paddles useless, and soon he was using them to tap and pry his way forward between the constricting walls like a blind man, the echo of his passage like the crack of limbs in a cave. He struggled on. A splash of water washed into his naked lap and he gasped at the coldness of it. He stopped and chugged to a stop against the unseen wall, and listened as the low booms of his floundering trailed along the tunnel into silence. Darkness immutable. He had to turn back.

I'm down here, Daddy.

Not a whisper in his head. The voice of an angel, clear and crisp and as a bright as sunny autumn morning. His son's voice! The air had turned colder and he could feel his breath plume from his mouth as he gasped and dropped his paddle and labored at the walls with his bare hands to propel himself forward and to his son, his impossible and glorious son who waited for him just out of reach in the darkness ahead. This time he would come. This time he would reach him. He scuttled his way ahead by inches as the prow of his kayak chiseled left then right then back against the concrete walls of the culvert contracting around him. He saw ahead of him a pall of light, pale and translucent, like a watery cataract in the eye of some great, subterraneous creature. Within it, the shape of a boat, the outline of a boy, sitting. Waving!

"I'm coming!" he shouted, the cry of it lost in the tumult as he scrambled up, struck his head on concrete, and leaped into the icy water.

The tunnel closed in around him. A crushing weight. A burst of light.

"It's my boy!" he heard himself cry. "My beautiful, baby boy!"

But he never said a word.