The Briar Archive

5. Bears In The Night

Bears In The Night

“It’s hard to search for a summary when the actual book can’t be found.”

WarriorRose

In the following months, we racked up a small nation’s GDP’s worth of medical bills trying to discover a scientific explanation for what had happened to Sebastian, but every test indicated that he was a normal, healthy, albeit shy, seven-year-old boy. Yet I remained a hole in his vision, a void within his memory that no amount of photographs, home videos, or one-sided interactions could fill. Our son’s inability to grasp my existence was too painful for either Bella or me to handle. And there was a part of Bella that was still convinced I had done something to cause this. A part of her that hated the sight of me.

Six months after that day in the library, Bella left me, taking Sebastian with her. In my absence, she became a wildly successful fashion journalist and Sebastian became a fairly well-adjusted student at Crestview Preparatory.

I became an alcoholic.

It wasn’t as if our divorce was typical and I was being denied visitation. Any attempt on my part to see Sebastian would only cause pain, so it was best I avoided him. At first, Bella sent me pictures and letters regularly, keeping me updated about Seb’s progress. But one day I called and told her to stop. It was a shitty thing for me to do, but it simply hurt too much. I had lost my family and didn’t want to be reminded how much better off they were without me.

And within the year, I lost my job as well. Howard gave me a dozen assignments that I completely blew off. Instead of working, I kept looking for any information about Ackerly Green and the book, convinced I had missed something that might explain what had happened to Sebastian. And when I wasn’t tracking down the missing book, I was funneling cheap whiskey down my gullet by the gallon. It didn’t start out as a problem. But addiction seldom does. For me it started as a way to dim the white-hot pain of loss, to soften all the blows of my life in demolition. And then it became routine, what I did when I wrote. Then what I did when I didn’t write. Then what I did to slip into the warm and welcoming rabbit hole of missing memories, of lost books and lost boys. Then it became the reason I got out of bed, and in time I found that all the things I couldn’t do while drinking I didn’t need to do at all. All I had to do was drink.

It got so far out of control that I lost two toes to frostbite after passing out in an alley behind my favorite bar. The ER nurses called Howard three times to verify that I actually worked for the paper, since they were convinced I was just a vagrant drinking himself to death.

On a painfully sober morning in the Spring of ’88, Howard called me into his office and gave me the ax. He wasn’t terribly kind about it, either, since he thought Bella and Sebastian had left me because of my drinking. I tried to explain—that day at the Octagon, the book, Ackerly Green, the library, Sebastian’s bizarre affliction—but I sounded every bit the drunken madman.

He was completely in the right to fire me, but I was still ugly about it. He threw a number at me I could call for help getting sober and then had security escort me from the building.

I wallowed in self-pity and bottles of Night Train for the next two weeks. I was killing myself, and I didn’t care. That didn’t change until I woke up on my living room floor and saw a crumpled picture of Sebastian in his school uniform that I’d tossed against the wall months before. He had Bella’s features, save for the nose that we Rank men relentlessly passed down through the generations. He was my son. And something had happened to him—something strange and terrible and unfair. As I lay on the irrevocably stained carpet of my apartment, I came to a startling realization. If I was ever going to find out what happened to my beautiful boy, I needed to live.

I dumped every remaining drop of alcohol I had in the sink. It took two trips to the bins to get rid of all the bottles. Life was about to give me a swift kick to the crotch, but I was ready.

That first night was rough; the second night, worse. But the third night of detox, I suffered terrible hallucinations. Brandon Lachmann sat in the corner of my living room, pale and dripping as he read me Bears in the Night. And other missing kids whose disappearances I had investigated were in the room with me as well. Leisha Fuma from Jersey with her menacing braids snaking and slithering about her, Collin Nolan with his eyes that burned like a smelting furnace. And there was Sebastian.

My son sat next to Brandon, the two of them pointing at the book and laughing before turning the page. The more they read, the more Seb’s school uniform sagged under the weight of the water soaking it, until he was just as wet and pale as Brandon. I reached for him, but my hands were shaking too badly to get a hold of him. The shaking became so violent that my whole body began to seize, and then I was on the floor of the public library, looking up at Sebastian’s indifferent face and grunting his name through clenched teeth, but he never answered.

Three days later, I woke in a pool of my own filth. I showered, shaved, and walked to a bakery down the street. For the next five years, that was my daily routine, my ritualistic prayer to the gods of sobriety. That rigid path kept me alive back then. During those years, I was able to find enough work as a freelance writer to keep the lights on, but my investigation into Ackerly Green and the unnamed book hit a dead end.

Eventually, I came to believe that fateful day at the library was an elaborate fiction I had concocted in my drunken fugue state as a way to explain my failures as a husband and father. There was no mystery book, Ackerly Green was only a small publisher that had gone belly up decades before, and my wife and son had left me for being an alcoholic. It was time for me to stop pretending otherwise.

And then I got online.

The Internet was still in its infancy, but by the early 90s it was already becoming an invaluable resource. I used it to contact sources via email (an exciting new way of communicating at the time) as well as to search online databases. All I had to do was type something into a “search engine,” and the elves of the Internet would bring me the information I sought. Like magic.

On a whim, I searched for the book, a tough task given that I couldn’t remember anything about it. But as I cycled through different search engines, I came across several discussion boards about missing books. Most were populated with librarians and educators looking for out-of-print titles, but there was one board that caught my eye. A small group of people from around the world were searching for a book series they called “the Lost Collection.”

A series published by Ackerly Green. I blinked, willing my eyes to focus on the screen. I had to have been misreading; but no. There it was. Ackerly Green.

Though there were only a handful of people on the board, each of them was thoroughly convinced they had read these books at some point in their childhood. But somehow, there were no records of the books ever having existed. This was exactly what I was looking for.

At that moment, I knew my experience in the library had been real, that my son hadn’t suffered because of a viral infection or other trauma. The story I had told him that day had been the thing that changed him, erasing me from his world just as the story itself had been erased from ours.

But I knew now that it was real. That it had been real. It was a strange, vertiginous feeling that I had only had once before in my life.

* * *

I was a freshman in college the first time I heard John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme.” Like most people my age, I had heard of John Coltrane before, but never any of his music. I was raised in a house filled with Vegas crooners and country classics, artists like John Denver, Barry Manilow, and Loretta Lynn. That pretty much defined my musical upbringing.

So when I sat on the floor of my friend’s dorm room, the green carpet he had rescued from a dumpster scratching against my legs, and I heard “A Love Supreme” for the first time, I was overwhelmed. The dancing notes of the saxophone, the soft trickle of piano keys in the background, a gentle rain of cymbals falling through the speakers—I had never heard anything like it. But it was more than that. It was more than just the experience of discovering something wondrous. To this day it’s still hard for me to quantify, too difficult to express what I felt in that moment in a way that doesn’t sound painfully abstract or patently ridiculous.

Up to that moment, I had never heard the song before. I knew, without a doubt, that I had never heard it before. But as impossible as it seems, deep down, I also knew, just as fervently, that I had been waiting to hear it.

The song was instantly familiar, as if it were a friendly face I had once touched in the blindness of a distant and foggy childhood, and it wasn’t until those notes floated through the air alongside the smell of stale beer and clove cigarettes that the blindfold was finally pulled from my eyes and those contours I felt beneath my clumsy fingertips so many years ago were suddenly made flesh. Hearing that song was like seeing that face for the first time, smiling at me. As if I had known the song in a previous life and was now being reminded of it. It was a delightful moment of déjà vu. That song spoke to me in a way that nothing had spoken to me before or since.

That is, until that moment I first visited the Lost Collection message board. A slow blanket of electricity fell over me and the hairs on my arms raised as I read that some of them remembered what they called “the briar books.”

There it was. That first trickle of piano, the throaty prayer of a saxophone, a friendly face lost to the recesses of a failing memory smiling at me once more.

As I stared at those words on the screen, I was filled with an overwhelming sense of familiarity, like a bolt of purpose as electrifying as a lightning strike from the heavens. Though clouded and vague, its pull on me was unflinching, just as it had been that day in the library, just as it had been when I saw the Ackerly Green logo on the discarded book in the Octagon.

There was just one problem. A problem my inner child gleefully dismissed as a mere inconvenience while my rational mind struggled to accept the cold impossibility of it. The briar books didn’t exist.

I didn’t care. They had existed at some point, and the handful of people on this board knew it as well as I did. If I was ever going to find out what happened to my son, I needed to solve this mystery.

I joined the board and mentioned, rather vaguely, my brief recollection of the Ackerly Green book I saw that fateful day in 1982.

I was relieved beyond the telling of it. The story I had told my son that day in the library was something real that I’d remembered, even if I wasn’t supposed to. It wasn’t all in my alcohol-addled brain after all.

This small group of people looking for the Lost Collection called themselves the Mountaineers, a name inspired by an old pamphlet called Monarch’s Mountain, which referenced the mountain that migratory monarch butterflies steered around every year. A mountain that no longer existed and hadn’t for thousands of years. A mountain stricken from history. Yet the butterflies remembered.

Even at that moment of desperate need to grasp anything that would lead me to answers about Sebastian, I still couldn’t shake the skepticism that journalism had instilled in me over the years. Still, this was a start, and I was going to follow this as far as it would take me. If necessary to the top of a mountain that didn’t exist.