Johnny Compton
2503 Jackson Keller Road #105
San Antonio, TX 78230
(210) 303-1641
jc@johnnycompton.com
EVERY DARKNESS
By Johnny Compton
1
Two hours into the flight and 35,000 feet above the Earth,
Lane Montgomery could not shake the last words Kim had spoken to
him. “I’ll be praying for you to have a safe flight, okay?”
Actually, that was the second to last thing she had said to
him; the last had been, “What?” after he had answered her
penultimate statement with a death glare. For God’s sake, you
don’t tell anyone that you’re praying for them to have a safe
flight, much less someone with an aversion to flying. You tell
them you hope they have a nice trip. You wish them well. Hopes
and wishes hold no weight. No one goes to Sunday morning
service, kneels before an altar and starts hoping or wishing.
Lane wasn’t religious, but he was paranoid enough to believe
that others might know better than he did about such matters. If
you had to pray for something that was supposed to be as routine
as four-hour flight across fly-over country, that alluded to
foreknowledge of a calamity. Kim’s words had left him twitching
like a junkie at every little jolt since takeoff. He had no idea
how he’d make it through the second half of the flight.
To occupy his mind, he tried to figure out who the young
woman sitting beside him was. She had a familiar face, but one
that seemed incomplete without accessories. Glasses, a nose
ring, a lip piercing, something. He believed had seen her on
television or in a movie. She wasn’t a star—or even a prominent,
frequent costar—otherwise he’d have been able to name something
she had appeared in, and she perhaps would have had money for
first class instead of coach. He had started to think she might
be the familiar spokesperson for a brand, like that quirky woman
who sold car insurance, or the other one with the accent who did
the whiskey commercials. Something that might make her equal
parts recognizable and unmemorable.
She had been buried in a paperback since the plane had been
taxiing on the runway. Lane had tried to glimpse the title at
the top of the pages, but couldn’t get a good look without being
conspicuous. It likely wouldn’t have given him any further clue
as to who she was, unless she was some narcissist author reading
her own work. But he was curious nonetheless. She was locked in
to it, like she might snap at the hand that tried to pull the
book away. Maybe she was a student studying a literary work.
Maybe that’s why he wanted to put some glasses on her, to
complete a studious appearance.
Whoever she was, Lane admired her ability to tune out the
fact that she was rocketing across the sky at five-hundred miles
per hour, five miles above the Earth. Lane liked to think he
didn’t fear flying, not anymore. He traveled often for work, and
that had tempered his phobia. In fact, the therapeutic value of
being a frequent flyer—on the company dime, no less—was part of
why he had applied for and taken his current job. But he was
still conscious of the altitude, in a way that no one else
aboard the plane appeared to be. His fellow passengers read
paperbacks and e-readers, watched movies on laptops and tablets,
chatted with neighbors, or slept. None of that worked for Lane.
He always booked a window seat so he could keep the shade closed
for the duration of the flight, but that did little to keep him
from thinking of it. 35,00 feet. During his last couple of
flights, he’d been able to compartmentalize that fact;
acknowledge it, label it, put it in a box and bury it in the
back of his mind where it couldn’t affect him. But with the
thought of Kim praying for him also in his head, the altitude
had regained its power to shake him. The plane hit a small bump
and Lane shivered like an ice cube had been pressed to his nape.
The girl didn’t notice him shiver, and he was thankful for
that. He wasn’t eyeing her, per se, but he still didn’t care for
her to see any cowardice in him. He was thirty-two and was put
together like a mannequin in a menswear store; a man whose dress
code for every flight was business professional; a man with the
inglorious job title of Compliance Consultant. Meanwhile, she
looked to be the type to develop a crush on the self-taught
guitarist who lived in the apartment across the hall; the guy
whose fulltime gig was leading a local cover band, and whose
part time gig was dreaming to make it big one day, but while
still “staying real.” Once the plane landed, she would go her
way and he’d never meet her again. Nevertheless, he was invested
in leaving her with a decent impression, or at least not making
a poor impression. He recognized the foolishness of this, but if
nothing else it was a welcome distraction from thinking of the
myriad mechanical components that kept their plane hovering, and
how a slight malfunction, or a moment’s carelessness in the
cockpit, or the cumulative effect of fatigue, could cause a
fatal chain reaction.
“You’ve probably never heard of it,” the young lady said
without looking up.
He started, blinked at her, realized he’d been staring at
her book for far longer than he had intended to.
“Um, I’m sorry?” he said.
She glanced at him, showed him the cover and title of the
book. Nightfall and Other Stories. Lane frowned. The author’s
name, Isaac Asimov, rang a bell—one of those small bells you put
on a Christmas tree, not a Notre Dame cathedral bell or
anything—but Lane had never read any of the man’s work. Science
fiction had never interested him.
“Heard of it?” she asked.
Lane shook his head.
“Figured. You don’t look like the science fiction type.”
“Well, I think I’ve heard of the author, if that counts for
anything.”
“Eh. Maybe half a point.”
He smiled and she smiled back, pushed a lock of hair out of
her face. She was pretty, and she had a bright clear voice that
made him momentarily forget it was night out—clouds floating
like large gray ghosts beneath them; things men weren’t born to
look down on.
“You don’t fly well, do you?” she said.
“What? No, I’m just—“
“You’re so tense, I need a massage. Either you have a fear
of flying or you’re one of those people who sees what I do on TV
and thinks I’m a real witch.”
He squinted at her like there was a clue hidden in her eyes
that he could almost make out. “Okay, see, I thought you looked
like someone.”
“Did you? Well don’t keep me in suspense, Lane, tell me who
I look like.”
Her almost made a guess at her name, then realized what
she’d said. “Wait, how do you know my name?”
She gave a slight shrug. “Maybe a little angel told me. Or
maybe, just maybe, I know magic.”
Now it clicked for him, exactly who she was, even though he
could only graze her name with outstretched fingertips. But he
could see her now with the trademark glasses she usually wore,
and the vivid pink or purple lipstick, and the small, black
butterfly tattoo that usually adorned her cheek. Must have been
a fake on or something. “You’re that girl. The freaky magician
girl. Um…Denise? No, ah…”
“Delilah Dantes. ‘Freaky,’ but not famous enough to be a
name or anything. You’re doing wonders for my self-esteem,
Lane.”
The gentle heat of embarrassment turned him a nice shade of
red, like he’d overslept on a beach. It wasn’t easy to meet her
eyes, but harder, it seemed, to blink, much less look away.
“‘Freaky’ wasn’t what I meant, I just… you know what, that was
rude. No excuses. I’m sorry. If I may, though, in my defense, I
have to point out that you do keep dropping my name when I know
I never told it to you.” He thought a moment, now unsure. “Did
I?”
She shook her head. “When you passed your card to the
flight attendant to pay for the drink. I might have peeked.”
“Hm,” Lane said, “it would have been less creepy to let me
believe you were psychic or something.”
She chuckled. Lane hadn’t really been joking, but he was
glad to have made her laugh nonetheless. As if he had stumbled
into an impromptu audition, and she might offer him a role in
her next televised special if he proved personable enough.
“Not cool, I know,” she said. “Although, I didn’t give you
shit about trying to spy on my reading material.”
He held up his hands, palms upward, imitating a balance
scale. “Your book,” and he wobbled the imaginary scale, placing
her book in his left hand, “my credit card,” then he dropped his
right hand into his lap and lifted the left to touch the
paneling above him.
“Yeah, yeah. If it makes you feel any better, I’m kind of
rich, and almost famous, so I wasn’t really all that interested
in your card.”
“Why look, then?”
She closed her book and settled back in her seat, finally
committing to the conversation. “Habit. Keeps me in practice.
Fifty-percent of magic is knowing something that the audience
doesn’t know, or knowing more than they think you know. So I get
in places like this, close quarters, I kind of get my Sherlock
Holmes going, you know? Observe every little thing that I can.
Never know when I might have to trick someone on the spot. For
good, of course. Never evil.”
“Of course. So if that’s about half of what you do, then
what makes up the rest?”
She pinched her chin, looked up for a second as though
accessing the answer. “I’d say another forty-percent is
distraction. Get you staring or focused on one thing, when
really the trick is going to come from somewhere else.
Everyone’s looking for the strings, looking up your sleeves.
Looking for the answer before you even get to the question. So
you have to misdirect them.
“And then the last ten percent is animal sacrifice and
deals with the devil.” She could only keep a straight face for a
half-second before laughing at herself and grabbing Lane’s hand
reassuringly. “I’m kidding. Only kidding.”
Lane was taken aback more by her insistence that she was
joking than her comment. A lot of people must really give her a
grief over this, he thought, if she thinks I might have taken
her seriously.
“But really,” Delilah said, “the last ten percent is simply
getting people to buy in. Get people to believe a little bit—
just for a few seconds—that they might have actually seen
something that can’t be explained. If they get a minute to think
about it, they can usually figure part of it out on their own.
If not, they can always look it up online. But if you get them
to buy in, they don’t care so much about how it was done, they
care that it looked cool and gives them something to talk about.
Even the hardcore skeptics that are only watching to figure you
out, they want to be fooled for at least half a second,
otherwise where’s the challenge? If you can tap into that
curiosity, get people to buy in, keep surprising them, that’s
how you stay in style. For as long as you can, anyway.”
“So with all the stuff you do, the secret ingredient is
showmanship?” Lane said.
She grinned and gave a “guilty as charged” raise of her
eyebrows. She had her charms, he’d give her that.
“Then again,” Delilah said, “if you get people buying in
too much, you bring out the crazies. The sweet old ladies who
send you lovely letters about how you’re going to Hell for being
a witch. The talking heads who want to score easy points by
saying you’re what’s wrong with America, for some reason. Or the
guys who just don’t have anything else to do besides call you
every kind of bitch they can think of over the internet. But I
shouldn’t complain. There are worse things after all. There
always are.”
Uncomfortable with the turn of the conversation, Lane
cleared his throat and straightened in his seat. “Well, it’s not
like it really takes much to bring out the idiots and fanatics
these days.”
“No lie,” Delilah said.
A moment of silence held over them, an impromptu two-person
memoriam for the sudden death of their jocularity. Lane was
allergically averse to awkward moments. His knuckles started to
itch, the air got stiff and reluctant to move, leaving him with
short breaths. This wouldn’t do. He had to dig them both out of
this awkwardness.
“Hey, so, I know it’s probably super corny for me to ask
this,” he said, “but would you mind doing a—“
The plane abruptly lurched, rumbled, rocked. Lane gripped
the armrest with one hand, pressed his left hand flat against
the seat in front of him as hard as he could. He shut his eyes,
decided he couldn’t stand not seeing what was happening, opened
them, got dizzy with the steady shaking of the plane, and shut
them again. This was typical behavior for him on turbulent
flights. His only recourse was to push or pull as hard as he
could on his seat and the one in front of him, and delude
himself into thinking that if he held on tight enough, or pushed
hard enough, he could singlehandedly steady the plane.
The ping of the “fasten seatbelts” alert rang in his ears,
a sound that promised this rough ride would not soon subside. He
felt empty, like his insides had retreated to secret, safe
hiding spot that wasn’t big enough to fit the rest of him. A
flight attendant spoke over the intercom, her voice balanced
expertly between stern and soothing. She announced that the
captain had turned on the fasten seatbelt sign and all
passengers needed to return to their seats.
Listen to how calm she sounds, Lane told himself. She does
this all the time. If anything was really wrong, if this wasn’t
routine, you’d hear some urgency in her tone. It made at least a
little sense, but it had no effect on him, because the
overriding thought screaming through his mind was, 35,000 feet;
that’s a long, long way down.
A soft hand grabbed his. “Are you okay?” Delilah said.
He nodded. “Mm hm.” But he had to force himself to open his
eyes, and his neck was so stiff with tension that turning his
head enough to face her was a task. The concern in her eyes
brought him right to the intersection of embarrassment and
aggravation. “What? I’m fine…I—“
A hard shudder went through the plane, like some curious
giant had thumped the aircraft’s underside to see how it would
respond. Lane winced, put a hand over his eyes to mask his
agony. “I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s…I don’t like the motion. Kind
of makes me queasy, that’s all.” He’d put no effort into the
lie. Too much of his energy was devoted to staving off a panic
attack for him to break a sweat on saving face.
Delilah entwined her fingers with his, squeezed. It
injected an ounce of calm into him. She leaned close and said,
“I have an idea. How about a magic trick?”
He glanced at her. She had the grin of someone eager to
share a secret. “That’s what you were about to ask me, wasn’t
it?” she said. “If I could show you a trick? And you’re right,
it is pretty corny. You’re not supposed to ask for that, just
like you don’t ask a comedian to tell a joke, or, I don’t know,
ask a football player to tackle you. But it just so happens I
have a new thing I’m working on, and I need a little help with
it.”
She took her cell phone out of her jacket pocket and put it
in Lane’s hand, closed his fingers around it. “Come on, it’ll be
fun.”
Lane took a deep breath. The plane was still rattling every
ten or twenty seconds or so, and his nerves went to jelly with
every shake, but she had taken his mind off the altitude for the
moment. That was a start. “Sure,” he said, and gave a weak, out
of place laugh, “I can be the lovely assistant.”
She fished a deck of glossy red-backed cards from her
carry-on bag. “Can you find the camera on that?” she said,
pointing to the cell phone with a tilt of her head. “Your job
here is to film this and do exactly as I say.”
“Think I can manage,” he said.
Delilah pulled her tray table down and started to shuffle
the deck. The plane suffered a jilt and Lane was sure, for a
moment, that the cards would spill out of her hand and go
everywhere, but it didn’t disturb her shuffling. Her dexterity
with the deck impressed him, like that might suffice as a trick
on its own. Her expression had tightened, he noticed. That
loose, careless smile—shared so easily it was almost frivolous—
had withdrawn, replaced by a hard grin befitting a mouthful of
fangs. The grin of a strategist in shadow, master plan
unfolding.
“The thing about card tricks,” she said, as Lane brought
the camera up on her phone and started recording, “is you could
make the rest of the deck do something miraculous. I mean,
spontaneous combustion, phase through a wall, teleport into your
pocket. Unbelievable stuff, right? And none of it matters if you
get it wrong when it’s time to say, ‘Is this your card?’ Go
ahead and take one.”
She held the deck out to him and he pulled a card, an eight
of clubs, blinked a mental snapshot and slipped the card back in
the deck. Delilah resumed shuffling.
“Like, really, that’s the most important part of the
trick?” she said. “I just made these cards float in the air and
spell out mother’s maiden name in cursive, but that’s not
impressive enough? I have to find the card you pulled, too? What
if that wasn’t even the point?” She cut the deck. “Maybe knowing
that you pulled an eight of clubs isn’t the important part.
Maybe I’m trying to get you to open your mind up to something
really impossible.”
The plane felt very still to him now, though Lane was
distantly cognizant of the persistent shivers and rattles. “Is
that the trick?” he said, his voice small, something about her
words and tone making him hope the answer was “yes,” that
showing off how easily she could guess his card was the object
of the exercise.
She glared at him. A defiant look, as if he’d challenged
her. He now recalled catching one of her television specials,
watching from the kitchen for maybe fifteen minutes while he
prepared himself dinner, not really paying that much attention.
This was part of her act, he remembered. The swift shift in
disposition, the mercenary grin, all of it. So why, if it was
only an act, did it make him feel trapped in his seat? Why did
he wish he could leave, even if it meant diving out of the plane
and facing gravity and the open sky?
“That was my card,” he said. “The eight of clubs.”
“I know, Lane. That’s why I said it.”
“Oh.”
“I’m not done, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“Oh.”
“Weren’t you listening? I’m trying for something bigger
here.” She sighed, put the deck in her jacket pocket.
“Nevermind. I’m sorry, you might as well give me back the—“
When she tried to pull her hand from her pocket, the pocket
moved with her, like she was holding on to it from the inside.
She looked down, perplexed, then back up to him with sheepish,
almost apologetic eyes. “That’s weird,” she said. Lane relaxed.
All part of the show, he thought. What the hell was I so nervous
about?
“Need any help there?” he said, joking, wanting to be in on
the act.
She gave a nervous chuckle and continued trying to wrestle
her hand free. “I actually might. I’ve never had this happen
befo—“
Her arm suddenly slipped deeper into the pocket, all the
way up to her elbow. It took Lane a moment to register that,
based on what he could see, this shouldn’t have been possible.
The pocket of her slim jacket couldn’t have been deep enough to
fit her entire forearm. Of course, there actually was room in
there somewhere; a secret compartment or concealed hole of some
kind that let her perform this small, impressive illusion. There
had to be. Lane leaned forward, trying to find out how she was
doing this, and wondered what would come next.
For her part, Delilah was committed to the act. She looked
perplexed, borderline stunned, and glanced at Lane as if he
might have some answers. He was about to speak, his next comment
delayed for want of wit, when he heard a tapping sound behind
him. He turned without thinking to identify the source of the
noise. All he saw was the closed window blind. The tapping came
again, from behind the blind, and louder this time. The third
time around, it was a knock.
He glanced back at Delilah. Her eyes were closed, her arm
still buried in her pocket. She was muttering something, but he
couldn’t make out what it was. The knocking came again,
demanding his attention. He turned his eyes and the camera to
the window. Another knock, so loud it made him flinch. His mind
swung back to the concrete concerns he’d had earlier, those of
being aboard a passenger jet stricken by irrevocable
catastrophe.
As awful as it would be to lift the blind, look out the
window and see something that should have been bolted down
hanging precariously off the wing, or see smoke streaming from
an engine, it was unbearable for him to imagine it and not know.
He lifted the shade.
The pale, gnarled hand of a crone clutched at the window.
Crooked and clawed, it rested against the window on its
fingertips, like a sleeping spider on a wall. The lines in the
palm were numerous, and deep as gashes. The nails were long,
cracked and brittle, except at the tips, which looked as black
as unchecked infection, and obscenely sharp. The ring twitched,
afflicted with an odd palsy that did not affect the other
digits, then it bent back at a horrible angle, so far that the
middle knuckle must have touched the back of the hand. The other
fingers remained dead asleep. The ring finger came back down, a
spring loaded hammer with a nail glued to its head. It hit the
window with more than enough force to punch through, but the
window held.
Lane trembled. Black static filled his brain, smothered all
conscious thought. He felt a horror that was so much larger than
him that he believed he must be a part of it. An enormous,
living horror, of which he was at best a cell, if not an atom.
He raised the phone to eye level, looked at the window
through the viewing pane and hoped that the camera would somehow
display the unadulterated reality that his eyes had obviously
deformed. Instead, he now noticed the black jacket cuff that
came up to the wrist of the hand outside the window. It matched
Delilah’s jacket.
The ring finger twitched, bent back again, curving like a
scorpion’s tail at the middle knuckle.
Behind him, Delilah giggled. Lane turned to her and saw an
empty seat. Delilah’s seatbelt was still fastened. Her carry-on
bag was on the floor, and her book sat on top of it. All
evidence to her having been there remained. But she was gone.
Another hard knock at the window served as a cue for the
plane to fall. There was a heavy bang, then a grating whine as
the plane pitched forward and headed down. A long, long way
down, Lane thought. Long enough, at least, to imagine the impact
and think of whether it will hurt, or be over in an instant. The
dimmed overhead lights flickered, the emergency lights over the
side exits flashed. Passengers screamed. Profanities and prayers
comingled. Then the falling stopped, seemingly as soon as it had
started, like the plane had bounced off a cloud and found its
wings again.
Silence kept as everyone in the cabin collectively held
their breaths, waiting for the next plunge. But the plane
steadied itself, glided smoothly. Uneasy titters and exaggerated
exhalations pricked the lingering tension, bled it out slowly.
Lane stared at the empty seat beside him, then forced
himself to face the window again. The hand was gone. He waited
for it to reappear, or to notice that it had etched something in
the window with its blackened nails; Delilah Dantes’s name or
initials, perhaps, or some kind of message. Some reminder that
he hadn’t been hallucinating. But no signature was necessary.
The sight of that hand was freshly seared into his memory. There
was no denying it, even though the only thing that appeared to
him through the window now was dark, indifferent sky.
It occurred to him just how deep that darkness was. Immense
and immeasurable, akin to the shapeless, enormous horror that
had absorbed him upon seeing the hand outside the window.
Darkness that went on and on, and made the dreaded 35,000 feet
of air below him seem as nothing. There were worse things than
the fall, after all. Things that defied measurement; that defied
the senses and reality.
His fellow passengers, now talking more among themselves,
they all thought that they’d just had a good scare. The flight
attendants were speaking over the intercom again, offering some
kind of instruction or update. Lane couldn’t be bothered to pay
attention. He was too busy laughing. A humming, staccato giggle
skipped up from his chest. 35,000 feet. How grand and terrible
he had believed it to be; how small and harmless it was compared
to worse things. Worse things, he thought, and laughed harder.
As if he knew. As if he had the first damn clue about anything
anymore.
It was all so funny to him. Well, maybe not “funny,” but
laughable, sure. So much so that laughter felt inadequate. A
scream, however, that was apropos.
So Lane screamed, and continued to scream, and would have
been content to go on screaming until his voice gave out.
2
Whatever had happened on ViewStar Airlines Flight 484, Lane
refused to talk about it. The FAA and airline officials had
offered little public comment thus far beyond saying there had
been some brief trouble with the flight—heavy turbulence,
nothing more—and a mild commotion caused by one of the
passengers. Kim Reynolds knew that she should leave it be. Lane
didn’t owe her an explanation, and trying to pester one out of
him would come across as selfish curiosity. But she couldn’t let
it go.
All she knew from the news reports was that the passenger
who subsequently caused the disturbance on board had been
detained and questioned for several hours after the flight
landed. Certain blogs and smaller news magazines had run with
stories suggesting some other ambiguous problem or investigation
related to the flight, but nothing concrete. Knowing how well
Lane handled bumpy flights, and knowing that her clumsy-butinnocuous comment about praying for him had set him on edge
before he’d even boarded, it was easy for Kim to conclude that
Lane had been the passenger referenced in the reports.
Was he embarrassed? Was that why he’d hardly spoken to her
since returning home? Or was he still angry with her over the
“praying for you” remark? Both?
She sat at her desk, in her office, and wondered about him.
Worried about him. Foolish, illogical guilt gnawed at her.
Contrary to Lane’s superstitious sentiment—communicated through
his eyes alone—that she had somehow jinxed his trip by saying
she’d pray for him, Kim knew she’d had zero to do with the
misfortune that befell Lane during his flight. Nonetheless, she
felt bad enough about it to think she should apologize.
Someone knocked on her door and let themselves in. She
looked up and saw Megan entering her office, carrying a manila
folder and sporting a smile that spoke to schoolyard mischief.
Kim waved her in, and Megan took it upon herself to close the
door behind her. So she had something she wanted to speak on
beyond what was in the folder. With all possible discretion, Kim
glanced at the picture of her and her husband that sat on her
desk, and heard William whisper to her for the millionth time,
“Patience. That’s the most important thing.” She’d need it in
spades to deal with Megan’s frivolity now, given all that was on
her mind.
Kim thought herself easygoing, even playful at times, as
much as any reasonable professional could afford to be, but she
had to walk a tightrope with Megan. Engage in her nonsense too
much and she’d enable her; disregard her too often and Megan
might let it slip to her part-time boyfriend—Oscar Wood, the
department head—that Kim was “ostracizing” or “alienating” her.
Megan wasn’t malicious, Kim thought, but she was careless and
melodramatic, and ran to Oscar whenever she didn’t know what
else to do. Oscar didn’t have the clout to cost Kim her
position, especially considering the volume and quality of the
loans her teams reviewed monthly, but he had it in his power to
make her employees suffer, and she couldn’t stand for that.
Megan sat in one of the two empty chairs in front of Kim’s
desk. She handed over the manila folder.
“It’s Paulina’s birthday,” Megan said.
Kim opened the folder and saw a bright yellow card adorned
with enough balloons, glitter and loopy lettering to make any
reasonable adult mildly mortified to be the recipient of it,
which was probably the point, Kim supposed. Underneath the card
was the printout of an online news story. The fear-mongering
tease of a headline read, “3 Frightening Clues to the of Flight
484 Cover-up”. To the right of the article was an embedded, full
color picture of a plane soaring through a cloud filled sky at
night, a frozen, bright whip of lightning striking in the
background. Kim set the birthday card aside and took up the
article. “What’s this?”
“That,” Megan said, the hush of her voice bordering on
mockery of secrecy, “is the real deal of what happened on that
flight your friend was on.”
“Really?” Kim said. “This? With the bad History Channel
headline? I’m guessing the ‘cover-up’ involves ancient aliens.”
“Kim, don’t be silly,” said the young woman who had sneaked
a printout from a glorified gossip blog into her immediate
supervisor’s office. “This is for real. Read it.”
“Where did you even get this from?”
“Someone I know emailed it to me.”
“Nice to hear you’re making good use of company resources.”
“Just read it. Listen, everyone’s talking about how your
side man hasn’t been back at the office since he got back from
his trip. Something went down on that plane. Maybe this explains
why.”
Kim sighed, closed the envelope. She didn’t need a mirror
to know her eyes had darkened, her features had hardened. The
sudden look of concern on Megan’s face told Kim that much.
“I’m sorry,” Megan said, “I didn’t mean—“
“Take a look at this.” Kim grabbed the silver framed
photograph on her desk and turned it to face Megan. The photo
showed Kim—restrained-but-sincere elation on her face—hugging a
man with a trim blonde beard who was a head taller than her.
Their contrasts, particularly her coffee brown skin and his
alabaster complexion, made the image pop, like it was an
artistic endeavor instead of a snapshot captured after a
pleasant dinner and a surprise marriage proposal. The simple joy
on their faces, however, the joy of each other’s company,
eliminated any hint of contrivance that might otherwise exist.
“You must have seen this a hundred times,” Kim said, “but I
want you to really look at it now. I know that you don’t know
Aaron personally, you know that he’s not just a man in a
picture, he’s a real person. You know he works here too, don’t
you? Two floors up, right alongside the same man just you called
my ‘side man.’”
“I know. I didn’t mean to—“
“I like you Megan. I’m about as friendly with you as I
think I can be without making things unprofessional. So I think
I might have given you the impression that you can say certain
things that aren’t really acceptable. If that’s the case, I
apologize. But just to be clear, Aaron…”—Kim tapped the picture
frame—“…is going to be my husband. Lane is my friend. That, and
only that. Any insinuation that Lane is anything more—I don’t
care if you think it’s only a joke—is unwelcome, and frankly
irresponsible. Careless talk like that is how rumors get
started, and misunderstandings happen, and lives and careers get
complicated.”
“You’re right,” Megan said. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have…”
She cleared her throat and looked away, a scolded child. Again,
Kim sighed. She’d been about as gentle as she could be, but
Megan was a glass vase on a pencil-thin pedestal. If you walked
past her too fast she might tumble and go to pieces.
Kim opened the birthday card, grabbed a pen from her desk
and signed. “What kind of cake did you get for Henrietta?”
“Are you actually going to have any this time?”
Kim shook her head. “I’m still five pounds away from being
able to treat myself again.”
Megan smiled, recognizing the tension had passed. “So why
torture yourself? If I tell you what it is, you’ll just be
tempted to have some.”
“Yeah, I guess I’m better off not knowing.”
She gave the card and folder back to Megan, who looked to
be her stable self again. She wouldn’t run to Oscar after work
and claim Kim had handled her too harshly, which was a small
relief. Megan took the folder and headed out of the office. As
she opened the door she turned around and said, “Ice cream cake.
Chocolate, with little cherries and hazelnuts.”
“I couldn’t hate you more right now.”
They shared a laugh, then Megan made her exit, closing the
door behind her. Kim looked at her computer. A meeting reminder
popped up on her screen—five minutes until she was supposed to
call in for the Quality Issues Overview that took place every
Friday. There was never much for her to contribute on those
calls. The managers and team members who reported up to her had
maintained the highest quality ratings throughout the department
for five months running. The issues raised on the Friday calls
always belonged to someone else’s group. It wouldn’t even be
noticed if she was late to the meeting. Or declined to attend.
Something nagged at her. The words “cover-up” stuck out in
her mind like a dangling thread. It was a small thing that
should have been easy to ignore, but now she couldn’t get past
it. She hadn’t read anything beyond the headline in that article
Megan had presented to her. There was no reason to believe it
had any substance, or was anything more than sensationalistic
“click-bait” meant to grab easy hits for the website based on
lazy conjecture. So why couldn’t she pluck that thought from her
head, pitch it aside?
She brought up the internet browser on her computer and
went to her favorite search engine. She only needed to get it
out of her system, read how ridiculous the theories were. Then
she’d be able to move forward. She typed “Flight 484 Cover Up”
in the search bar, pressed enter on her keyboard, and started
browsing.
3
Kaylee McKinney had known there would be drawbacks
countering the obvious perks to graduating high school a
semester early. One she had anticipated, but not truly
appreciated, was that her extra “free time” would become extra
“availability” to be co-opted by parents, friends, neighbors,
cousins, and today, by her Aunt Megan.
In fairness, her “Aunt Megs” had only asked that she reach
an arm into the proverbial rabbit hole of Flight 484 conspiracy
theories and pull out whatever she could find. Kaylee had
emailed Megan the first article she had found that bore the
faintest facsimile of reliability and didn’t rely entirely on
glaring fabrications and fallacies. Granted, in the absence of
any official statements or facts, the article had to resort to
presumption and speculation, but it at least appeared to be
educated speculation.
That should have been the end of it. Kaylee had peers who
loved to engage in conspiracy talk: kids with amorphous
ideologies who might speak of false flag terrorist attacks,
Roswell aliens and rappers being members of the Illuminati with
equal gravitas. She didn’t care for such discussion, although
she could entertain it more comfortably than celebrity gossip or
debates about the merits of one pop song over another. She could
at least understand the appeal of conspiracy theorizing, even if
she didn’t subscribe to it. Deep down, everyone has a need to
feel like they’re in the know, like they’re part of an exclusive
group of sane people who see the world for what it really is,
and who can spot truths that are invisible to others. A group
that could solve all the world’s problems with their secret,
superior knowledge, if only someone would leave them in charge
of everything for a year or so.
On another day, and perhaps with any other topic, she would
have moved on right after she had forwarded Megs the link to the
website she had found. But she had the day off from work as a
cashier at the local grocer. None of her friends would be out of
school before three o’clock, she wouldn’t need to pick up her
sister until five, after her soccer practice, and her mother
hadn’t made any requests for her to run an array of errands on
three different sides of town.
She had planned to have lunch downtown, at the deli truck
in Klyde Warren Park. Traffic in the Metroplex made going
downtown a pain at any time of day, especially from where she
lived in Bedford, but it was worth it for the facsimile of a
getaway. She enjoyed sitting in the sun, putting on her
headphones, and zoning out for a little while. Being downtown
midday enabled the illusion of her being out on her own, away
from home already.
That plan had been abandoned almost by accident. Kaylee
couldn’t say what exactly prompted her to take a second look at
the first few websites she had passed up before emailing Megan
the link. It might have been a simple need to indulgence in some
anonymous, silent superciliousness. You could often count on the
comments posted on a fringe website to deliver impassioned proof
that somewhere out there was a person smart enough to use a
computer, but dim enough to publish their most indefensible
arguments for the world to see. There was some small, petty joy
to take from knowing how wrong someone else was, particularly
someone so convinced of their views. But Kaylee hadn’t stopped
after reading and snickering at comments arguing that an
unreleased passenger manifest was proof of a cover-up regarding
Flight 484. She hadn’t stopped after reading someone’s errorfilled dissertation on the “Lake Michigan Triangle,” the Bermuda
Triangle’s less famous cousin, which the flight from Dallas to
Minneapolis hadn’t even passed through. Instead of ignoring or
laughing at a link someone had posted to another site that was
cataloging all of the “mysteries” and “unanswered questions”
surrounding Flight 484, Kaylee had clicked on it.
When Rowan and Courtney texted her, she didn’t respond.
When they called, she let it go to voice mail. Five o’clock came
and she peeled herself away from the computer long enough to
pick up Tammy from the park where she had practice. Kaylee
McKinney, who typically drove like a tachophobic nun in a glass
car when she had her eight-year-old sister with her, did sixty
through a forty-five on the way home, eager to pick back up
where she had left off.
Tammy had kept quiet. Her face was dirty, her blonde hair
damp, and she had a long scrape on her left knee partly covered
by a row of Band-Aids. Kaylee figured her sister had endured a
rough practice and was too tired to carry on her normal
conversation. That, or she saw that Kaylee was preoccupied and
decided not to bother her.
Kaylee got along well with Tammy. She loved how normal the
kid was. She was on the A-B honor roll at school, but was still
prone to asking the same naïve, obvious questions that any other
eight-year-old might ask. She always said “please” and “thank
you,” “ma’am” and “sir,” but was still subject to occasional
exhibitions of malcontentedness (the latest instance being a
small tantrum thrown in response to her father leaving again
once again to return to his job as a Derrick Hand in an oil
field farther east).
While Tammy was curious about some of her big sister’s
hobbies and interests—particularly Kaylee’s “Diary of Tomorrow”,
a journal she wrote in every night predicting the next day’s
events—she was disinterested in being a clone of her sister. She
was her own, developing little person, into soccer and lousy pop
music and a hundred other things that kids her age were supposed
to be into. Kaylee loved that about her.
But Flight 484 had taken center stage in her mind. When
they came home, Tammy went off to her room to do homework, then
to the living room to watch television. Kaylee, in her room on
her laptop, checked on Tammy every thirty minutes or so, until
seven o’clock came and she realized her stomach was growling. In
the time since she had been back home she had browsed the web
nonstop, the information on the troubled flight passing through
her as quickly as she consume it, barely registered, much less
digested. People made preposterous claims: the plane had
encountered a UFO; several passengers had disappeared midflight; the turbulence that roughed up the plane was actually
caused by a secret CIA super-weapon. She didn’t stop to wonder
why she cared about what these people were saying, or why she
continued when site after site threw recycled nonsense at her.
Part of her was tempted to ignore her hunger and keep searching,
and were it not for her responsibility to make sure Tammy ate
something besides a bowl of cereal or a candy bar for dinner,
she would have done so.
She called her mother’s cell phone while she fixed herself
a sandwich and nuked the last of the leftover stir-fry for
Tammy.
“Hey Kaylee,” her mother said, sighing as she answered.
“I’m so sorry. I meant to call. I didn’t realize how late it
was.”
“It’s cool,” Tammy said. “Do you know how late you’re going
to be?”
Her mothered sighed again. Kaylee held the phone from her
ear and rolled her eyes, letting the heavy breath pass. “I don’t
know. Maybe. This damn…hold on.” A moment pass, then her mother
resumed talking, her voice lower. “This damn woman can’t make
her mind up for anything. She wants the sofas over here, no wait
she wants to try it out over there, no wait, she wants to trade
all the living room furniture with all the furniture in the den
to see how it looks. I’m going to start pulling out hair in a
minute here.”
“Aw, don’t do that. I love your hair.”
“I didn’t say it would be mine.”
Kaylee laughed. “Hey, I thought that your job was to make
up people’s minds up for them? Just do what you do so you can
get home. I’m making myself the world’s best turkey sandwich for
dinner.”
“Maybe another time, Kay. I’m starting to think this lady
doesn’t have anything in her head for me to make up. Anyway,
more than likely it’ll be late. We haven’t even started on the
bedrooms yet.”
“Okay.”
“You fixed Tammy something, didn’t you?”
“That stir-fry from the other day.”
“Good. And don’t let her fall asleep in front of the
television. It gives her bad dreams.”
“I know. I’ve got it, mom.”
“All right. Love you.”
“Love you, too. Bye.”
After hanging up, Kaylee walked into the living room to
check on Tammy. She had barely touched her food, too focused on
the Disney sitcom on the television to remember to eat.
“Hey,” Kaylee said, then snapped her fingers and pointed at
the plate in front of her sister. Tammy shoveled in a massive
forkful of food, then shot Kaylee a thumbs-up and a smile.
Kaylee shook her head then went back upstairs, finishing her
sandwich before she made it to her bedroom.
A minute later she was back in the rabbit hole, as though
she had never left. Page after page, the words melting together,
making her read them twice to piece together what was being
said, what was being alleged. There were a couple of intriguing
items that started to pop up on a few of the more active sites
she had come across. Something about a recording that had been
confiscated by authorities. Something else about a book that
“had all the answers.” A couple of people mentioned dreams
they’d had that they believed were related to the mystery of the
flight. No one paid the dreamers any mind.
The daylight faded away unnoticed to her. She set the
laptop down once to pee, at the behest of a bladder that was by
then almost screaming at her, and once to check on Tammy.
Otherwise, you might have thought the world didn’t exist for her
beyond the glow of the screen. Several seconds passed before she
noticed the silhouette of the little girl standing in her
bedroom doorway.
When she did perceive the small, dark figure standing in
her doorway, she started and gave out a hiccup of a gasp.
Initially, before her eyes adjusted, the little girl in her
doorway looked a bit younger and shorter than Tammy. Her eyes
looked flat and glassy, almost shimmering. Then this image
became her sister, who looked a bit worried—the look she usually
had whenever she saw a spider or a wasp—but didn’t appear to
have been crying. Kaylee sat up straight in her bed, rubbed her
eyes.
“Hey, Tam. Everything okay? Did mom come home?”
Tammy shook her head no. “I was calling you. You didn’t
answer.”
“Sorry. I didn’t hear you. What happened? Did you see a
bug?”
“I heard something. Somebody was downstairs talking to me.”
Now Kaylee’s heart jumped, got on its toes like it was
ready to fight or flee. Her mind, however, remained settled,
overriding her instinct with simple logic. Relax. You know what
this is, it happens all the time.
Kaylee set her laptop aside, turned on the lamp beside her
bed. The light would help settle her sister, remind Tammy of
what was real and chase away whatever might linger in her head.
“Could you see the person talking to you?”
Tammy shook her head again and looked embarrassed, knowing
where the conversation was headed. Kaylee cocked her head and
smiled warmly. She opened her arms and called Tammy over.
Reluctantly, Tammy entered the room and allowed Kaylee to hug
her, then sat beside her on the bed.
“Did you fall asleep with the TV on?” Kaylee asked.
“Yeah.”
“You know you’re not supposed to do that right? When you’re
tired, you go to bed. Every time you fall asleep in front of the
television—“
“I know. I dream things and hear things.” The little girl’s
eyes narrowed, pleaded, and she looked somehow even younger than
she was. “But I really heard someone this time!”
“Someone you couldn’t see?”
“Yes, but they were there. They were standing right by me.
She sounded like an old lady. I couldn’t see her, she was
there.”
“And what was on television when you woke up?”
“It wasn’t the TV! I heard someone!”
“Okay, okay,” Kaylee said, pulling her sister in for a kiss
on the forehead. “How about I go downstairs and check for you,
all right? You probably left the TV on anyway, didn’t you?”
Tammy said nothing to this. In her eyes, Kaylee saw that
Tammy resented her fear. Kaylee felt for her. She knew firsthand
what it was like to be so young and feel so helplessly afraid,
although Kaylee’s childhood fears had been born of something
more tangible than Tammy’s. She didn’t like to remember what it
was like for her at Tammy’s age, and had worked hard to shove
bury those memories.
“You think you’ll be okay in your room?” Kaylee said. “It’s
about time for you get ready for bed anyway.”
“Yeah.”
“Okay. I’ll be back up in a sec. Go get ready.”
Tammy followed Kaylee out of her room, then took a right in
the hallway to head to her own bedroom, while Kaylee went left,
to the stairs.
The television was, indeed, still on, and Tammy had also
left her half-eaten dinner on the floor, next to the remote
control.
“This kid,” Kaylee said, picking up the dish and the
remote. Before she turned off the television she noticed that
the teenage characters on the show Tammy had been watching were
engaged in some daft ruse that required they dressed up as an
elderly couple. They were speaking with strained, quaking voices
that made them sound brain damaged instead of aged. The studio
audience laughed after everything the characters said, as though
the throaty, croaking inflection were a joke on their own.
Kaylee swore that she’d never been into anything this lame when
she was eight-years-old, though this was patently false.
She shut off the television, then took the plate to the
kitchen. As she scraped the remaining food into the trash bin,
she heard a sound behind her, in the living room. Something
heavy had fallen, a hard thud like someone had thrown a bowling
ball into the floor, only it seemed to come from higher up,
somewhere between the first and second floor of the house. There
was a half-second pause, then a series of thumps, and now Kaylee
realized something was coming down the stairs. No, tumbling down
the stairs. It’s Tammy, she thought, panicking. Damn it, she’d
told her to wait in the room. Why was she even coming
downstairs?
Kaylee dropped the plate and rushed back into the living
room to help her sister, hoping she wouldn’t be hurt too badly.
Just before she reached the stairs, it occurred to her that the
sound was too loud, too heavy to be Tammy. Exiting the kitchen,
she turned to face the stairs and saw nothing. The sound of the
fall continued for another second, then culminated with a loud
crack, like a baseball bat splintering from impact with a
fastball.
A disembodied voice whined helplessly between hard breaths
at the foot of the stairs. Then the voice, weak and with a pitch
that made it sound almost feline somehow, said, “Call… call an
ambulance…oh Lord, my leg. Please, Kaylee…”
Kaylee stood frozen, as she had ten years ago, unable to
process what was taking place. That cracking sound had made her
nauseous, dizzy. There was no one there, no one speaking to her,
but she could hear the voice nonetheless. She could almost
visualize the woman who should have been there, who once had
been there lying on the floor, her left shinbone snapped in
half, bent grotesquely at a right angle. She could smell urine
as the unfortunate old woman had wet herself, either due to the
fear during the fall, or due to the pain from the broken leg.
The darkness in the living room intensified, as if
moonlight had passed the house over, sensing something foul
inside. Kaylee stood still and listened to the phantom woman beg
her to call an ambulance over and over. Bewilderment splintered
her mind. Her legs turned to boards, she had no muscle, no
mobility, no option to do anything but remain where she was.
“Aunt Gladys,” Kaylee said, a name that she had forced
herself not to speak or even think of for the past five years. A
name she hadn’t quite expunged, but had suppressed out of
necessity thanks to years of therapy.
“Call 911,” the voice said, stronger now. “Call them and
tell them what you let me do. What you made me do. Tell them
what you did to a poor old woman. Tell them what an awful, awful
girl you are.”
The voice went on, increasingly resentful. It ceased to be
the voice of an old woman in the dark, and became something
comprised of darkness, a thing unspoken but known, soundless but
sensed. A petty, cruel impossibility. Like any other darkness,
it disintegrated in the presence of light.
Kaylee’s mother, Rose, had entered through the front door
and flipped the light switch on the wall. She found her oldest
daughter at the foot of the stairs, rigid, face pale, eyes wide
and staring at nothing. It had been an exhausting evening for
Rose, and at first she didn’t pick up that something might be
wrong. Not until Kaylee refused to respond when Rose called her.
By the time she was able to get Kaylee’s attention, Rose was
near tears, and had been reduced to shouting at her daughter,
and shaking her like she meant to dislodge whatever had a grip
on her.
4
“Thought you were ‘between jobs’?”
Vanderbilt Campbell grinned at Mack Willis. He leaned back
and grabbed the front of his collared shirt as though it were an
open coat with lapels to grasp. “Was and am,” he said,
brushstrokes of Dixie coloring his accent, “but as you know,
I’ve been awaiting a gift from a great man’s grave, and today
that gift was at last delivered.”
“Uh huh,” Mack said. To an independent observer, the two
could have passed for peers, in terms of age, with both men
being in their late forties or early fifties. In actuality, Mack
was sixty-three, his time spent in the Coast Guard and his postretirement fitness compulsion accounting for his physical vigor.
Vander, on the other hand, had been a cigar and whiskey
enthusiast since his junior year of high school, and was liable
to break into hives at the thought of doing a push-up. He had
turned forty less than a month ago.
Mack looked again at the hundred-dollar-bill Vander had
placed on the bar. On most days, Mack Porter’s disposition was
as sunny as a catacomb. Today fell into the majority. Vander had
hoped that seeing the Benjamin would at least get Mack to raise
an eyebrow, but the man remained as grim as ever. There was a
certain charm to Mack’s stone façade, Vander knew, which
accounted for the reasonable popularity of his bar. Some folks
got a kick out of patronizing the dive owned by a curmudgeonly
barkeep who grumbled about being too generous with his liquor.
But damn, Vander had been sure he’d at least get Mack’s eyes to
light up a watt or two when he’d put the money down.
“So what’s it from? Gambling? You hit some pull tabs?”
Vander let his arms drop, shoulders slump. “No. Damn it,
Mack, don’t you ever listen?”
“When you’re talking? Shit no.”
Two stools down, to his right, a man within earshot of the
conversation laughed. Vander looked at him, but the man, a
grizzled, chubby man sitting under a ratty baseball cap, went
back to sipping his pint and munching his basket of fries.
Vander turned to his left, saw a dour man in a wrinkled blue
shirt who was too lost in his liquor to pay attention or laugh
at his expense, then looked at the mirror behind the bar. The
younger men and women in the booths behind him were laughing,
but too uproariously for it to be in response to what Mack had
said. That was good. Most days Vander didn’t mind being the butt
of Mack’s jokes and insults. Today, though, for whatever reason,
he wanted Mack to cut him a break. Perhaps even be a little
impressed.
Mack poured Vander’s usual: Evan Williams Bourbon, neat, in
a short tumbler. Vander usually sipped and savored it, but this
time he gulped down half the glass at once. The burn of the
liquor blossomed in his chest, then settled into a low red
warmth, comforting as a hug. Nothing like it, he thought. The
whiskey burned off any hint of embarrassment, and when he next
spoke he’d found his beloved Little Rock drawl again; an accent
he seasoned with gallantry and artificial modesty.
“Well,” he said, drawing out the l’s, as if unsure of where
the rest of the sentence wouldtake him, “my grandfather—my dad’s
dad—dabbled in some country and bluegrass music in his day. I
think I might have mentioned that to you before.”
“Only once or twice or every time you’re in here.”
“So you have been paying attention,” Vander said, and
laughed. “Well, the old man wasn’t much of a singer or
guitarist. His real calling was in managing and promoting—and,
if I’m being honest here, God bless him, in duplicity. You could
count on him to pack the house when you came to town, but you’d
be foolish to count on him to count your money. But he loved to
write and loved to sing, and had dreams of breaking into the big
time pretty much up until the day he passed.”
Mack opened his mouth to say something and Vander held up
his hands, begging patience. “I’m getting to it,” he said. “So,
the old man wrote one song called ‘Not My Angel’ that actually
got released as a single. Didn’t make a dent on any charts, but
got some spins here and there with some DJ’s he’d made some
contacts with, the ones who didn’t hate his guts by then. It was
this oddball song, sad but sort of spry. You could tap your toes
to it without a second thought if you didn’t pay attention to
the words. The whole song was about a single mother and her son,
who was a local thug. Kid knocks up the preacher’s daughter,
knocks out the preacher’s son when he tries to defend his
sister’s honor, and then the kid steals the preacher’s car and
goes on a cross-country crime spree. Forms a gang, robs liquor
stores, graduates to robbing banks, and eventually kidnapping
and murder. Finally gets gunned down by the cops, dies, somehow
goes to heaven and starts raising hell there before getting
kicked out—“
“Wait, what?” Now Mack’s eyebrows raised and he looked
interested, or at least bemused, for the first time since Vander
had started.
“Told you it was odd. Anyhow, in the song’s verses the poor
mother keeps hearing about her baby boy’s crimes and sins. Then
in the chorus she sings back, ‘No, not my angel, he couldn’t
hurt a soul.’ It’s pathetic, really. But my granddad thought it
was funny. Especially the heaven part. When the song didn’t take
off, he said it was because people were too dumb to get the
joke. What can I say, he was like that.
“Anyhow, for some reason, he used to say that I reminded
him of the son in the song. Said it like he was proud of it. I
was a boy when he first started saying that, so I thought it was
cool. I was a little bit of a troublemaker in school, got into
some fights, broke anything I looked at, and talked too much in
class—if you can believe that. Nothing crazy, but you know,
enough to give my parents headaches. Anyhow, granddad would say
I was the ‘angel’ from the song, that I’d grow up to have a
fast, wild life like that, and my daddy hated it. Hated it. Him
and the old man didn’t get along, so as I got older, I figured
the old man was saying that just to dig at him. But then the old
man died and left me the royalties to the song. Wrote me a
little note telling me…well, telling me how he felt. I’ll leave
that at that. But the song meant a little to him after all. He
spent almost everything he’d ever earned before he died, left
most of us with nothing, but he left me the royalties to that
song.
“So, every once in a while, a check would come in, because
the song got picked up for some collection. One of those tendisc sets they sell on infomercials and stuff. I don’t really
understand how it all works, other people handle his music and
rights and stuff. The lawyers usually just give me a heads up
when money’s coming my way. A couple months ago they called to
tell me that some new show on HBO—some crime drama thing set
down in Georgia—wants to use a cover of the song as the main
theme. Apparently the guy running the show heard the song
somewhere and loved it, pretty much used it as inspiration to
make the show. They bought the rights to do multiple covers so
they can change it up from season to season or something. I
don’t know all the details, I just know they told me I’d be
getting a lot more out of this deal than I’d ever gotten before.
Got my first deposit yesterday and turns out they weren’t lying.
“So this little bill here,” and Vander tapped on the
hundred still resting where he’d placed it, “is just one of a
bunch more that’ve come my way. And if the show gets as big as
they think, the song should sell pretty well, so I’ll have some
more royalties coming too. As I said, gift from a great man’s
grave.”
With that, he smirked and leaned back in his stool, his
short arms folded across his ample stomach, like he’d just won
an eating contest and was waiting on one of his competitors to
claim second prize. For a moment, Mack stared at him, expecting
the story to continue, though by now he should have been aware
of Vander’s proclivity for bookending his anecdotes.
“I’m not sure what surprises me less,” Mack said, at last,
“that your grandfather was apparently shady, or that you’d
somehow still consider him ‘great.’”
“Hell on Earth, Mack, I tell you all that and all you pull
from it is my granddad was shady? You can’t even spare me one
kind word? The hell happened to ‘Minnesota Nice’?”
“What do you mean? It’s right here in front of you, right
next to New York Charm and Texas Humility.”
A light twitch pulled at the corner of Mack’s mouth, the
closest he ever came to a smile, at least as far as Vander knew.
Any mention of “Minnesota Nice” prompted Mack—who, like Vander,
was not a native to the state—to come up with what he believed
to be an equivalent oxymoron. “California Real,” “German
Hospitality,” “English Food,” and Vander’s personal favorite,
because it only made sense to Mack, “Oregon Honest.” The latter
appeared to be Mack’s favorite as well, as he used it in his
everyday parlance whenever someone was telling him a story he
couldn’t quite buy. “Is that the God’s honest, or Oregon
Honest?” Vander had never bothered to ask about the phrase’s
origin. He presumed Mack had met someone from Oregon who hadn’t
been truthful with him, once upon a time, just as he’d
apparently met a Minnesotan who’d been unkind to him once and
had decided to hold it against everyone in Minneapolis.
The near-smile was Mack’s mea culpa, his way of apologizing
for disparaging Vander’s grandfather, or acknowledging that
Vander’s story hadn’t been a total waste of breath. This was
enough to mollify Vanderbilt. He was as easy to please as he was
easygoing. He glanced to the right, to the man who’d laughed at
him earlier, and thought of buying him a drink. Something pricey
enough to say, “Hey, no hard feelings,” and “Fuck off; how well
are you doing?” at the same time.
He finished off his bourbon, then turned back to Mack to
order another. That’s when he felt something hovering over his
left shoulder. For a second he was confused, it was like he’d
seen the sun shining through the window, turned his head for a
second, and then seen black clouds and a raging storm outside.
It was nothing so dramatic as that, but something perhaps
stranger in a way.
The man who had been sitting at the end of the bar to his
left, the man in blue, was now standing beside him. Hell,
standing over him. The man had a strange look, his lips quivered
slightly, like he was trying to smile to keep from crying. Dark,
puffy bags sat under his eyes, and now that he was closer,
Vander could smell through the haze of liquor that the man
hadn’t showered in at least a few days He didn’t look like a
vagrant or a junkie, to Vander’s eye, and that somehow made him
more off-putting. A homeless man had no roof, a junkie had an
addiction; what the hell was this guy’s excuse?
“You’re him,” the man said to Vander. “You’re the man I
saw…”
“Nah, I don’t think so,” Vander said. “You have me mistaken
for some other handsome devil.”
“No, it’s you,” the man lifted his hands and Vander
flinched, but the man only raked his fingers through his own
hair. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to come off this way. I haven’t
slept in a minute.”
“Hey, buddy.” It was Mack. He was leaning forward, a cat
ready to pounce across the bar if the man in blue made an
aggressive mood. “Maybe you ought to get back to your stool?
Give my man here his space, hm?”
“No, no, it’s okay,” the man said, flustered.
“It’s really not. You’re harassing another customer, in
case you can’t tell.”
“No, it’s not what you think. I’m…look, I’m a pilot.” Then
to Vander, “I’m a pilot.” He said it with a grin and a nod, as
though it was a self-evident explanation for his behavior. He
took a quarter-step backward and went on, “I fly for ViewStar. I
was on the flight…the one people have been talking about…”
Vander and Mack looked at each other for a clue, neither
man finding or providing one. There had been something in the
news recently about a flight, a passenger on board causing
commotion, something like that, but Vander knew nothing of the
details. There wasn’t much in the news these days that Vander
felt deserved his attention. Scaremongering and tragedy, stories
to keep people tense and divided, that’s all he thought it
amounted to.
The man in blue looked deflated, lost. Vander shrugged.
“Sorry, I wish I knew what you were talking about, but…”
The man shook his head. “No, you don’t. And I’m the one
who’s sorry. I thought you already knew. Don’t know why I
thought that. Stupid…but, I haven’t been thinking straight.
Haven’t been sleeping since the flight, since the girl went
missing…”
“Buddy, you need to get the hell to the point of whatever
you’re trying to say, and then drop it,” Mack said. “That, or
get out of my bar.”
The man in blue turned and headed back toward his stool. He
pulled out his wallet, pulled out some money and laid it on the
counter. Before leaving he turned to Vander and said, “You’re
going to start dreaming about it. Same dreams I have. I thought
I was supposed to talk to you about it…I guess not. I’m sorry. I
think she just wanted me to put it in your head. I’m sorry.”
After he left, Vander stared at the door for a few seconds,
a part of him expecting the man in blue to come right back in
and resume rambling. When he was satisfied that that the man was
gone for good he said to Mack, “What the hell was that about?”
“Who knows? Seems like once a week I have to deal with one
or two idiots like that. ‘Minnesota Nice.’ Hm. ‘Minnesota
Nuts.’”
Vander laughed, as did the man in the ratty hat, as Mack
poured each man another round. The remainder of Vanderbilt’s day
went according to expectation. He drank himself jolly, made
liberal use of the jukebox, sang along to every other song,
whether he knew the words or not, and didn’t leave until hours
later, when Mack called a taxi for him.
The seed planted in Vander’s mind by the man in blue would
not germinate until he was home, passed out on his living room
sofa.
5
The landscape of the dream was vast, and so, though it was
shared, it started in a different location and took a different
course for each individual brought into it. For Vander, it
started with him standing beside his van, pulled over onto the
side of a desert road, an indecipherable map in his hands.
For the man in blue, the co-pilot of Flight 484, it started
with him rowing a dinghy in a placid lake. From the boat, and
through the fog, though it should have been too misty for him to
see and too far for him to hear, he could make out Vander’s
face, and hear the song coming from his van’s speakers. No, not
my angel, he couldn’t hurt a soul…
On the opposite end of the lake was a dense forest. A
broad, blocky six-story office building peeked above the
treetops. Though she hadn’t arrived yet, this building was where
Kim Reynolds’ dreams would take place. The forest also contained
the roofless two-story house where Kaylee McKinney would soon
find herself. Deeper within the woods, an acre-wide forest fire
trapped an aspiring murderer named Wilmer Martel.
Beyond the forest, the lake, and the road were other
locations and other dreamers. One such place was a field strewn
with the smoldering wreckage of a downed aircraft. Inside the
fractured fuselage, a man who wasn’t there a second ago appeared
in a window seat, his seatbelt still fastened. Lane Montgomery
took a large breath, eyed his surroundings. His pulse sped as he
recognized he had survived a plane crash, though he had no
memory of boarding the plane to begin with.
There were others in the plane. People who sat limp in
their seats and did not answer when Lane asked, “Is anyone else
alive?” Lane unfastened his seat belt and walked up the aisle.
He could not look for long at any of the silent, motionless
bodies he passed. Could not see if they were injured, dead,
incapacitated, or if they were silently watching him. His eyes
stayed low, too heavy for him to lift them. Likewise, it was a
struggle to keep his eyelids open. An obscuring blur thus
encroached on his vision, and anything he did manage to glimpse
with clarity snapped out of focus if he lingered for more than a
couple of seconds. So it was difficult for him to tell, when he
did glance at one of his fellow passengers, if the streak of
white across their faces was from a rictus grin, or their skin
having been stripped to the bone.
He kept moving forward, toward the gaping hole where the
cockpit had detached from the fuselage. Once he made it out he
collapsed on the grass, dug his fingers into the soil like
gravity might forsake him to the sky if he didn’t hold and
cherish the earth. He was dizzy and disoriented, aware of the
world rotating, unaware that he was in a dream, but cognizant of
the abnormality of his predicament and surroundings. The stars
were large, too close and too bright, and there was a sensation
similar to sunlight on his face. The wreckage of the plane had
moved a dozen yards farther away from him when his back was
turned. There were dream indicators about him, but he couldn’t
piece together what they meant. He was too relieved from
surviving the crash, too disturbed by the strangeness of the
situation.
A flurry of voices drifted to him, distant and thin,
stretched flat by the space separating the speakers from the
listener.
Hello! I think I found her!
Is anyone else even—
Where am I? Why I can’t I get out—
I just want to go home…
Lane stood up, looked around. The voices weren’t coming
from any direction. They were just with him, on top of him. They
the understanding into him that he needed to search, just as the
others were searching. And suddenly he knew better than anyone
else who was missing.
“Delilah! Where did you go?” He took a few steps forward,
stopped, turned left and moved in that direction.
“Delilah!”
He turned around, ran forward a few steps then stopped dead
again, unable to make up his mind which way to go.
“Delilah! I know you’re out there. There’s nowhere else for
you to be!”
Back and forth he went, confined to an invisible cell of
his own, unconscious making. He screamed louder, trying to be
heard above the voices that strode with him. Panic rose within
him the longer it went on. I just want to go home, one of the
voices had said. What if he’d be stuck here if he couldn’t find
her? Shit, he didn’t even know where here was. How in the hell
was he ever going to get home?
His voice strained as he called out more desperately, so at
first he inadvertently shouted down the woman shrieking for
help. But she managed to reach him in one of the moments where
he paused for a breath. He stood still, felt a penetrating cold,
like he was a corpse at the bottom of the ocean.
The woman’s voice was muffled, so he couldn’t actually make
out the word, “Help.” But it was easy to infer from her distress
and repetition. He turned around, toward the plane’s hollowed
cabin and crushed cockpit. There, sticking out of the ground
right in front of the wreckage, was a woman’s hand. It seemed to
have been planted there, like a macabre marble statue. The
fingers were curled and stiff, arthritic, but the hand otherwise
looked dainty and weak. Lane stared at it for a moment. Then it
shook, an inhuman motion, like a small plant shaken by a hard
gust. The buried woman screamed. This time, though he still
couldn’t truly hear her words, he believed she said, “I’m here!”
Lane raced to her. The earth surround the hand was packed
hard, like she’d been buried by a mudslide.
“It’s okay, I’ve got you,” Lane said. “I’ve found you. I’ve
got you right here.”
He grabbed the hand and the fingers uncurled to match his
grasp; an animatronic motion. As he pulled, he surprised himself
with his strength. The earth gave her up freely. He saw her
forearm, her elbow, her shoulder…
The earth bulged before the rest of her came out, a mound
of dirt large enough to push the destroyed cockpit out of place.
Suddenly Lane was standing on a rising hill, sliding back but
still clutching the buried woman’s hand, still pulling to free
her. Another arm shot out of the dirt and reached for him.
Instinctively he grabbed it, thinking it must belong to the
buried woman. It wasn’t until a third arm emerged—impossibly
long and knotted with a dozen elbows and shoulders—that he
started to fear again. A fourth arm, blackened and demonic, came
up from the dirt between his legs. A fifth grabbed the back of
his shirt. Out came a sixth, seventh, eighth, more…
Before he realized what was happening, there were more
hands than he could count taking hold of him.
“Stop! Let me go,” he said, and tried to jump off the hill.
“Let me go!”
The hands obliged, casting him to the flat ground beneath
the bulbous mound that continued spreading upward and outward.
The mass of earth and arms—many of them broken, misshapen,
deformed or discolored—displaced the destroyed airplane cabin
and loomed over him. A section of mud and grass slid away as it
grew, and a large, lidless eye peered looked out through the
hole. The sclera was red, lined with black veins, and the milky
iris swirled in the dark fluid of its pupil. It locked on to
Lane, and if he’d had a gun in his hand, he’d have put a bullet
through his head to escape its gaze.
The buried woman screamed again. He could hear her clearly
now. Her voice was no longer distressed, but taunting and
commanding. Loud enough to shred the heavens, reduce the stars
to strips of tinsel. “Help me HELP me HELP MEEEEE!”
Lane tried to retreat but couldn’t move. His body was no
longer his to command. Fear paralyzed him, turned him into a
discarded puppet.
In his mind, underneath the horrible screaming, he heard
Delilah Dantes telling him once again, “There are worse things.
There always are.”
6
Ten minutes after midnight, Kim was snatched out of her
dreamless sleep by two sudden realizations: she was alone in her
bedroom, and someone else was roaming the house. She gasped and
her breath caught in her chest, her body went rigid. It’s Aaron.
As the fog of sleep dissipated, and she was able to think
clearly enough to put two and two together, she relaxed.
“Aaron…?” she said, and turned over in bed to confirm that
her fiancé wasn’t there. Indeed, his side of the bed was empty.
The sheets on his half of the bed were rumpled, though, and the
space where he usually slept felt warm. He hadn’t been up long,
wherever he was.
Her heart was still tapping rapidly, like impatient fingers
on a countertop. She sat up, worked the stiffness out of her
neck. Why the hell had she been so tense a moment ago? You’d
have thought she’d heard rushing footsteps or unfamiliar
whispers.
There was a soft, pale glow coming from down the hall. It
was either the light above the stove, or the overhead light in
the dining room, dimmed to its lowest level. Part of her thought
she should let Aaron be; if he needed her, he’d have awakened
her. But the rest of her—the remainder that was still buzzing
with nervous energy—though she had to go to him. Not because
something was wrong, but because it felt important to see him.
She slipped out of bed, picked up the oversized t-shirt she
had taken off and tossed aside earlier in the night, during
foreplay, and put it on. Down the hall from the master bedroom,
and to the left, there was the dining room, on the other side of
the spacious kitchen. Aaron sat at the round, glass-top dining
room table, facing the window, his back to Kim as she entered.
He had on his pajama bottoms and nothing else. She hustled
across the cold floor of the kitchen, unconsciously curling her
toes to elevate her arches and keep minimal contact with the
chill tile. He didn’t move as she approached, and for a few
seconds she got the sick feeling that he couldn’t move. That
she’d look at his face and it would be frozen, the life drained
from his eyes…
Instead, as she took the chair to his right, she noticed he
had ear-buds on and his mp3 player in his lap. She gave him a
mild start which he overcame and laughed off almost as soon as
it hit him.
“Hey,” he said, taking the headphones out. A dreamy,
classical lullaby drifted from the open ear-buds, so faint it
was nearly imperceptible. “I didn’t wake you up, did I?”
“No. Not really. I just noticed…what are you doing up?”
He gave her his patented bashful, boyish smile, the one
that, to her, looked so adorably practiced. Only this time he
wasn’t using it to charm or disarm her. This time it was real;
he didn’t want to tell her why he was up.
“Aaron…”
“It’s nothing,” he said.
“Aaron,” she said again, more firmly this time. He hated
when he took that tone with him—“Don’t do your ‘boss voice’ to
me,” he’d tell her—and she didn’t do it often. But it was late,
and she was tired. Patience was in short supply at the moment.
Above that, she was concerned, and a bit paranoid. Some grain of
thought was nagging her that this was somehow connected to Lane.
“It’s—”
“It’s not nothing. If it was, you’d be in bed.”
“Silly, then. It’s silly.”
“What is it?”
He sighed through his teeth, his smile unwavering. “I
think…when I was trying to get to sleep, every time I closed my
eyes, I kept kind of seeing things. I couldn’t get it out of my
head. I kept thinking I was going to have a nightmare. Wow, that
sounds weird as hell hearing it out loud.”
“It’s okay. Talk to me.”
“I don’t even…have I ever told you about the only time when
I was a kid that I was ever really scared? I doubt it, because
it’s dumb as hell.”
She raised her eyebrows, wordlessly encouraging him to go
on.
“Okay,” Aaron said, “Don’t say I didn’t warn you. When me
and Lane were kids, like ten-years-old, he had me and some other
friends over for his birthday to spend the night and watch
movies.”
“Aww, a slumber party.”
“No. No. Boys don’t have ‘slumber parties’. We have…movie
watching, overnight…things. Anyway, his dad had rented a bunch
of corny horror movies us to watch. One of them was this weird,
badly dubbed foreign flick called Photon 808. It was this crazy,
cheap, Alien, Terminator, and Exorcist hybrid. A spaceship
crashes in a small town, and out comes this skinless, evil alien
that’s also part robot, and also possessed by a demon, and also
from the future. It was one of those kinds of movies.”
“Sounds like a winner.”
“Absolutely. So normally this sort of flick would be good
times to watch and laugh at. But it had these effects that…they
were cheap, and really lame, but there was something about them.
When the alien would kill someone, it was like they weren’t
human anymore. Which, you know, they obviously were using
dummies and props and stuff. But in my head, as I was watching,
for some reason I stopped thinking of it as bad special effects,
and started thinking of it as the effect the alien had on
people. Like it could turn your body into something completely
different as it killed you. When it sprayed acid into this one
woman’s face, a second later her whole head had melted into this
goofy pudding while she was still screaming and twitching. All
my friends were laughing at how stupid it was, but I was
horrified. It’s one thing to get killed; it’s another to be
turned into something you can’t even be right before you die. I
don’t know why I started thinking of it like that, but once that
was in my head, I was done. I couldn’t watch. But I couldn’t
leave either. My friends would never let me hear the end of it.
So I had to sort of look down and look away from the TV without
making it obvious, and then I got even more scared that my
friends would notice that I was scared.”
Kim patted his hand as a show of sympathy, though she
couldn’t resist smiling. “You poor thing.”
“Don’t joke, Kim. It was harrowing. Harrowing.”
“I’m not joking. I’m sure it was.”
“So, anyway, I make it through the movie. All my friends
are too busy cracking jokes to notice that I was shook up. So I
make it through the night and everything’s good. Once in a while
I’d have some crazy dream about being in the movie, trying to
hide from the future-demon-robo-alien, but aside from that, I
mostly forgot about it.
“Then, in high school, I first found out about Lane’s fear
of flying when we at the airport for our spring break trip. And
I was, you know, a dumb high school dude who didn’t know how to
maturely respond to anything at all, least of all his friend’s
confession of abject terror. So I started making jokes. Not
making fun of him, but trying to lighten things up, put him at
ease a little bit. Like, ‘What, do you think the wings will fall
off if we fly too close to the sun? Stop being a little girl,
we’re going to be fine.’ So he puts up with that for a bit
before he finally tells me, quietly, so no one else can hear,
‘You know, some of us are afraid of real shit that could really
happen, not aliens from the fucking future.’”
Aaron paused, the playfulness faded from his smile,
wistfulness filling the vacancy. Something else too, but Kim
couldn’t place what it was. But for a moment he looked
incredibly weary, like he’d sleepless for days, not hours.
“I couldn’t believe it,” he said. “He’d known that whole
time. Hadn’t said shit, hadn’t told anyone else, hadn’t ever
given me shit about it. Nothing. Naturally, in light of that, I
felt like a dick for giving him grief about the flying thing.
But again, I wasn’t exactly the King of Maturity at the time, so
I mostly resented that he even brought it up. So I just walked
away from him, cussed him out under my breath. Might have wished
for the flight to be bumpy, and that he would piss himself in
his seat…not my best moment. I honestly planned not to talk to
him for the whole trip, and he probably had the same thing in
mind. But then we landed in Belize and I mean, come on, how can
you stay mad at your best friend in freaking paradise?”
Kim shrugged. “I wouldn’t know anything about that.”
Aaron laughed and rolled his eyes. “Here we go.”
“I’m just saying.”
“I know, I know. Your parents couldn’t have afforded such a
trip. You had to get your Coach purses at the outlet stores, not
the real stores.”
“Don’t joke about that Aaron. It was harrowing.”
He grabbed her hand, lifted it to his lips, kissed it. A
simple gesture, but it made her feel warm. And it made her want
him again tonight. He had lovely, gentle lips that were liable
to make her lighter than air without warning when they touched
her. Well, since you’re up, we might as well take advantage of
it, she thought, and almost said. But the remedy to his
sleeplessness might not have been more sex. In fact, unless she
was misreading him, she didn’t think he wanted to go to sleep.
“So all of that’s why you can’t sleep?” she said.
“Yeah. Sort of. I guess…after what happened to Lane, up
there in the plane, I’m feeling sort of guilty. Like I’ve got
something coming to me. I did wish for something like this to
happen to him, after all.”
“That was over ten years ago, babe.”
“I never took it back. I never apologized for it. I just
tried to ignore it, forget about it. So I think it still counts
against me. Bad karma. Rotten karma. You don’t wish that sort of
thing on anyone. Well, maybe like a plane full of serial killers
or something.” He tried to laugh at himself, mustered something
between a cough and a sigh. “But you definitely don’t wish that
on your friend. And then, to make it worse, I never owned up to
it.”
She wasn’t sure how to respond to that. Maybe she should
tell him about the guilt she still felt for telling Lane she
would “pray” for him to have a safe trip, and how Lane had tried
to turn her into stone with that look he’d given her. She
couldn’t see how it would help, and decided not to mention it.
Besides, this wasn’t about her. For that matter, it really
wasn’t about Aaron. He could stand to be reminded of that.
She moved her chair even closer to him, rubbed his back.
“You know what I think? I think tomorrow we should go to Lane’s
place, make him some dinner. Maybe bring some wine, bring some
cards or a game, or a movie. Make it a night. I think Lane would
appreciate that.”
“He’s barely even answering our calls, babe,” Aaron said.
“He’ll answer the door. And if he doesn’t, at least we
tried. Better than sitting here making yourself sick about it.
Sometimes, if you want to be there for somebody, you have to
literally be there.”
Aaron nodded. “You’re right. You’re a damn genius, babe.
We’ll do that. Thanks for getting up to talk to me. Sorry for
waking you.”
“Ah,” she said, shrugging off his apology. Then, unable to
stop herself, “If you’re really sorry, I know how you could make
it up to me. Right now.”
He grinned, receptive. “Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. And I think it’ll get us both back to sleep, too.”
She eased her hand over his thigh and between his legs. He got
hard on contact. It would be an hour before they finished and
made it back to the bedroom. Neither of them would dream
tonight.
7
Dear tomorrow…
Kaylee picked her pen up from the page, stared at the two
words she had written, and tried to free her mind to write
whatever came to her.
Daylight had crept through her bedroom windows only a few
minutes ago, but Kaylee had been awake for at least an hour. She
had spent much of that time staring at the ceiling and trying to
convince herself that she wasn’t insane, but now she had her
diary in her lap. Typically she updated it at night, prior to
going to sleep. She started every entry with “Dear Tomorrow,”
then wrote personal divinations addressed the day itself. Last
night, of course, had been anything but typical, and she hadn’t
had an opportunity to log an entry. At least she could be
grateful to be in her own bed; her mother had wanted to take her
straight to the emergency room. As poorly as she had slept last
night—plagued by voices and restlessness; more dazed than
asleep—she imagined it would have been worse for her in a
hospital cot.
When pressed by her mother, Kaylee had explained her
temporary catatonia a “panic spell.” She was forthcoming about
it being related to the memory of her Great Aunt Gladys, in
addition to pressures of being out of school with college
looming, but did not tell her mother about the phantom fall and
disembodied voice. No sense in sharing that. As it was, her
mother was so worried about her that—after acquiescing on not
going to the hospital—she tried to convince Kaylee to sleep in
the master bedroom with her. “What if this ‘spell’ comes back?”
she had said. “It could hit you in your sleep and something
could happen to you. What if you hurt yourself? I don’t want you
alone if something happens.”
Kaylee had insisted she would be fine, telling her mother
this wasn’t the first time this had happened, only the first
time her mother had happened upon it. A lie, and a risky one, as
it initially made her mother more upset, but ultimately an
effective one. Rose eventually agreed to trust her daughter,
under the agreement that Kaylee had to tell her anytime she had
such an episode, so Rose could gauge the frequency of
occurrences and determine the seriousness of these “panic
spells.”
Kaylee was loath to admit it, but Rose had been right. She
should have accepted her mother’s invitation to sleep in the
same room. At one point in the night she had snapped alert to
find herself clenching in a pen as though intending to stab
someone with it. On second thought, perhaps she’d been better
off alone. She’d rather hurt herself than her mother or her
sister.
Were she not imbued with her father’s protectiveness and
stalwart devotion to self-reliance, she might felt differently.
Were she more capable of denial, she could have cast last
night’s experience into a memory abyss, a place for things not
worth remembering. Instead, she was alone, facing something she
could hardly wrap a single thought around.
The phantom voice from the night before had taken up
residence in her head, a deranged, ranting hermit ambling around
on the border of her mind. Its words popped into her
intermittently, like a recording set to a malfunctioning timer.
Each time it spoke up, a cold dagger of panic cut through her.
She had narrowed the explanation of last night’s incident
down to two options: she had gone spontaneously mad and had been
hallucinating, or she had witnessed what could only be
identified as a supernatural phenomenon. The former was the more
rational conclusion, except that, well, she hadn’t felt like she
had lost her mind. Granted, she hadn’t quite been herself to
that point in the evening; her curious obsession with Flight 484
was evidence of that. There was also the fact that she had no
clue what madness felt like. For all she knew it was
indistinguishable from sanity from the perspective of the
afflicted. Although her friend Rowan had once described to her a
bad trip he’d had, courtesy of synthetic marijuana, and
described it as having his “head hijacked.” He’d been aware that
something was wrong, that his perceptions were scrambled, but he
couldn’t maintain control of his actions until after he came
down.
That hadn’t happened to her last night. Overnight, while
she had been asleep, sure, but that wasn’t a sign of madness,
just troubled sleep. Lots of sane people suffered through
moments like that. But last night, at the foot of the stairs,
she’d been clearheaded. She had been frightened and bewildered,
as well, but derangement hadn’t commandeered her senses, so far
as she could tell.
A supernatural explanation was all that remained. It was a
ridiculous conclusion, she knew, but it was also preferable to
the possibility that her brain had, without warning or catalyst,
suffered a critical glitch. It was odd that the idea of being
haunted by the worst thing that had ever happened to her was the
more comforting option, but it was.
She had given it enough thought to believe that, if it was
some kind of haunting, it was a corrupted manifestation of the
moment itself, not a spectral visit from her Aunt Gladys. The
old woman had been too kind in life to become a lying, malicious
spirit in death. Even if she had become that, why would she wait
so long to appear? That struck her as less plausible than the
idea of the supernatural itself.
She hadn’t had time to flesh out any other theories, but
she remembered once reading a “paranormal investigation” story
that likened ghosts to echoes. That’s what last night was, she
thought. An echo that had taken a decade to bounce back from the
original event, and had become vile and twisted in the meantime.
A single sentence flashed across her mind and she was
compelled to write it down. It will happen again tonight. She
stared at the words in her diary and urgently wanted to strike
them out, but stopped herself from doing so. That was against
the rules. It wasn’t a “stream of consciousness” type of
journal. She could take her time and think through whatever she
intended to print. Once it hit the pages, however, it was fixed.
No scratching anything out, no tearing any pages out of the
diary, no clarifications stating, “Forget that thing I wrote
before. That was bullshit, I was lying.” She didn’t know what
prompted her to write down that the echo was coming back
tonight. She certainly didn’t want it to return; didn’t even
want to think about it. But there was her prediction, printed in
large black ink on thin white paper. The only solace she could
take was in knowing that her predictions weren’t often accurate.
The point of the diary wasn’t to be prophetic, but to reinforce
understanding of what she could and could not control.
Even so, the words on the page worried her. She stared at
them for several seconds, drawn in by a notion that there was
something else here worth noticing. Something escaping her. Then
it came to her; the haphazard writing on the other side of the
page. Her penmanship was always steady, neat. The jagged streaks
and careless loops on the underside of the paper didn’t remotely
resemble her handwriting. In fact, faded and reversed through
the paper, they didn’t resemble letters or language at all. How
she hadn’t noticed this before, or when she first opened her
diary to a fresh page this morning, baffled her.
She flipped the page over and saw what was written. She
remembered waking up in the middle of the night, pen in hand,
but still couldn’t believe she had written this. Maybe…God, she
hoped not, but maybe something else had written them, or made
her write them. Maybe what she had taken to be an “echo” was
something decidedly more palpable, something with an agenda.
The words alone, with no context, were not disturbing, just
nonsensical. Connected with the lunatic handwriting, and with
recent events, however, they made her shiver. The first line
read Delilah is watching. The numbers 484 were written next,
repeated twice. Then, taking up the rest of the page was a
simple question, written over a dozen times in varying sizes.
Where did she go?
Where did she go?
Where did she go?
#
She had to get out of the house. Her mother usually worked
on Saturdays, but she had taken today off, and had come knocking
on her bedroom door that morning insistent on spending time with
her. “When was the last time we had a day to ourselves?” she had
said.
It pained Kaylee to leave her mother behind. Rose was
justifiably concerned, and wanted to help, but Kaylee knew she’d
be unable to think straight with her mother attached to her hip
and trying to force conversation all day. She lied and said she
had to go in to work early, and that everyone in the store had
been warned about unplanned absences recently, but that she was
only working a half-shift. Rose had been reluctant, but she had
let her go after cementing a promise that Kaylee would be home
in time to have lunch with her.
She would have preferred to go to the Bedford library, a
place where she could be sure of silence and solitude, but it
wouldn’t be open for two more hours. So instead she drove to
Rare Finds Bookstore, a tiny shop owned by her friend Courtney’s
father, Phillip. The store wouldn’t be open yet, either, but she
knew Phillip, would be there already, readying for the day.
When she pulled up and parked, she could see him through
the storefront window, a gangly, balding man with glasses and a
moustache. He was, in her opinion—and she meant this with all
the affection in the world—the most comfortably nerdy person in
existence. He was two parts Ned Flanders, one part Bill Nye and
one part Weird Al Yankovich. An inexhaustible font of
friendliness, silly jokes and awkwardness. He noticed her
getting out of the car, backpack in tow, and waived at her in
his goofy way, his entire arm swaying so emphatically it set his
hips in motion.
He unlocked the door and welcomed her inside. “Well how
goes it, Kaylee McKinney,” he said. Or practically shouted.
“What brings you to my modest market of manuscripts this
morning?”
“Good morning Mr. Tisdale. Sorry to show up like this.”
“Nonsense,” he exclaimed. “No need to apologize. If
anything you should visit more often. Bring the family. And, I
suppose, you can bring Court along too… if you must.”
Despite being in no mood for humor of any sort, she
chuckled. She couldn’t help it. The man’s perpetual glee was
infectious to an almost disturbing degree.
“How is your family?” Phillip Tisdale said. And without
missing a beat followed with, “How’s the graduated life?”
“The family’s good. I can’t complain,” she said. “Actually,
the reason I’m here is to see if I can use your wi-fi? I need to
research something, and need a quiet place where I won’t be
bothered for a while. I’d have stayed home but…our neighbors are
having some work done on their house or something. There’s all
this banging and drilling, and—“
“Say no more,” he said, then looked around as if there
might be spies about. He leaned in and said, “I’ve got just the
spot for you.”
He led her to the back of the store, past the rows of long,
wooden bookcases to her left. Tucked in the far corner near the
door to the office, in the space between the wall and the last
bookcase, was a small, plush club chair.
“You need a coffee or anything,” he said before leaving her
to her work. “Got a fresh brew going.”
“No thanks. I’m good.”
He gave her a thumbs-up, told her to let him know if she
needed anything, then lurched back to the front of the store to
continue stocking the shelves.
The chair was softer than she anticipated. She had to make
a deliberate effort to sit up straight. She pulled her laptop
out of her backpack, accessed the wi-fi and internet and typed
“Delilah 484” into the search engine.
To her surprise, the first search results weren’t links to
“underground” conspiracy sites, but links to articles from
several news organizations. The articles sported similar
headlines: Hoax? Magician’s Publicist Says Missing Client was
Aboard Troubled Flight; Delilah Dantes, Street and “Stunt”
Magician, Vanished After Flight, Says Publicist. There were
three more headlines on the first page saying the same thing.
Underneath the first five headlines was a link to “Related
Stories.”
Apparently this story had blown up overnight. She hadn’t
come across a single mention of this in her hours of research
yesterday, but here were dozens of articles echoing the same
general information. The story was originally reported by the
Associated Press, and most of the articles she clicked on
offered little of substance beyond the initial report.
Allegedly, Delilah Dantes had been a passenger on Flight 484,
headed to Minnesota to film part of her next television special.
No one associated with her—personally or professionally—had
heard from her since the flight landed. While the articles
focused on the possibility that something had happened to her
before departure or post arrival, there was also intimation, at
least from Kaylee’s reading, that something had happened to
Delilah while she was on the plane.
There were a couple of editorial pieces attacking the
veracity of the claim and the folly of any media organization
treating this as anything but a publicity stunt. They cited the
history of Delilah Dantes. She had, in her most infamous act,
“vanished” from a clear isolation booth she had locked herself
in in Times Square. She had advertised that exhibition as an
“endurance test”; she had promised to stand in the box without
sleeping or sitting, and subsisting only on eight ounces of
water, for 96 hours. Instead after the convenient distraction of
a masked flash mob of thirty people engaging in a bizarre,
ritualistic dance routine nearby, she had managed to escape the
booth and “disappear.” She had pulled several other stunts like
this. It was her forte, promising one trick or feat, then
actually performing something different.
Kaylee remembered the Times Square vanishing from a year
ago. It had been a big deal for about two days before everyone
she knew moved on to the next thing. Since then, apparently
Delilah had put on two more television specials, but Kaylee
hadn’t been aware of any of them. No one she knew was into that
sort of thing.
After scanning several articles, she decided to move on to
the comments sections to see if there was anything to glean from
them. There was no shortage of the expected, bilious, ad hominem
swipes and japes at Delilah, her unnamed publicist, the author
of the article, and—apropos of nothing—the current President. It
did surprise Kelly to see how many people were accusing Delilah
of practicing actual witchcraft. Some of these comments—
occasionally peppered with colorless expletives—were of a
religious bent, denouncing Delilah Dantes as being a “in league
with Satan,” or a “pagan heathen.” Other comments, however, took
the tone of ominous warnings. “This is only gonna get worse” one
lonely sentence said. Another commenter wrote two rambling
paragraphs, warning of “things we can’t know, but need to know,”
and “things that rob men’s souls” that “have been here all
along, waiting for the right time.”
The more Kaylee read, the more she wanted to read.
Queasiness stirred in her gut, fluidic and hollowing. At the
same time, she felt an odd, welcome tingling in her limbs and
head, like she’d had nothing but coffee and champagne for
breakfast.
She left the news articles to search for information about
Delilah Dantes and her relation to Flight 484 elsewhere. She
burned through several blogs on various Fortean and paranormal
websites, many of which elaborated on the notion that Delilah
Dantes was not an ordinary illusionist, or indeed an ordinary
person. Bloggers and commenters wrote of her “powers” and
“abilities,” words better suited to describing a superhero. None
of these people could provide any concrete evidence of said
powers. The ones that bothered to offer proof resorted to links
and embeds of online, video essays made by likeminded
enthusiasts and devotees who explained why the illusions Delilah
performed were, in fact, exhibitions of real magic disguised as
illusions. Kaylee watched two of these videos. They were
amateurish, stuffed with inaccuracies, selective exclusions and
asinine deflections of contradictory facts. The narrators for
both had wispy voices that nearly drowned beneath the
meandering, ethereal synthesizer strings and flutes that
accompanied each video. Despite all of this, Kaylee remained
intrigued.
The store, in the meantime, had officially opened, and
individual shoppers shuffled in once or twice an hour. A small,
cheerful bell rang every time the door opened, and Phillip
greeted each customer with a firm, “Hello there,” followed by,
“Is there anything I can help you find today in my modest market
of manuscripts this morning?” From there a brief conversation
would take place, with Phillip speaking like he meant to wake
the world, and the customer speaking in low tones, trying to
demonstrate to the ebullient proprietor the appropriate volume
for speaking to someone who was three feet away from you. These
exchanges were mild distractions to Kaylee, nothing to get
aggravated over, although she did wish she had brought her
headphones.
Tucked away in her corner, her attention devoted to her
investigation, she didn’t register how quickly the morning was
passing her by. Phillip came back to check on her a couple of
times, keeping silent and asking her if she was okay with an
exaggerated, inquisitive raise of his eyebrows and a shaky
thumbs up. She would nod, then he’d smile and give her the “ok”
sign, then he was gone again.
Kaylee was just happening upon another new turn in the
Delilah Dantes-ViewStar flight connection—something about a book
titled Nightfall—when the lights in the store cut off. There was
more than enough daylight coming through the storefront windows
to keep total darkness at bay. But there in the back corner,
behind a large bookcase, the shadow was still thicker than
Kaylee could have anticipated. She looked up at the ceiling,
waiting for the fluorescent tubes to spark back to life, buzzing
like unseen insects somewhere off in the night as they shared
their light. As she waited, she heard the bell ring, signaling
entry of another customer.
“Hello there,” Phillip said, a bit quieter than usual. She
waited for him to welcome his guest with a corny joke about the
lighting situation. Instead she heard dull murmuring, followed
by Phillip offering clipped hums of understanding and agreement.
When he spoke next, it was so softly that Kaylee couldn’t make
out what he was saying.
The shadow in the back corner of the store seemed to
intensify, and Kaylee felt a chill that emanated from within
herself, like she was suddenly in the throes of an illness. She
took a few deep breaths that confirmed for her that the air
around her hadn’t gotten any colder; something inside of her
had.
She looked at her computer screen again. She was following
a discussion among members of a post forum called “Paranormal
Reality.” It’s so obvious they’re lying to us, one member of the
forum had written, I have it from good sources that she was on
that plane. They found a book she took with her on the plane.
It’s called Nightfall, and it’s—
At the front of the store, Phillip gasped. “No,” he said,
his voice hushed and disbelieving, not urgent, not afraid.
Someone else spoke after him, still too low for Kaylee to make
out a word of it. When this person finished speaking, Phillip
replied, “I…I don’t even know what to say. I had no idea…”
More whispering from the customer, then Phillip again. “No,
no, you have all of my sympathies. I can’t even imagine what
that must be like.”
Curious now, and starting to feel the weight of the
darkness in the back corner of the store, Kaylee set aside her
laptop and headed toward the front. She came out of aisle and
looked straight to the front counter.
A woman stood at the counter, across from Phillip, short
and stout. She leaned on the counter, her hands flat on top of
it, her arms trembling, straining from supporting her weight.
Stringy hair hung in the woman’s face, and the strands over her
lips shuddered with her breaths and she spoke. She wore an
oversized sweater, orange and yellow, and loose white pants.
Kaylee recognized the woman, though part of her mind was working
frenetically to deny the sight, like she was looking at a
floating mountain or a blue sun against a yellow sky. Some sign
that her sanity had slipped clean off the edge of a cliff.
She looked at the woman’s legs, saw the left was bent and
twisted below the knee, so that it stuck out like a kickstand.
The left foot was twisted outwards at over ninety-degrees,
almost pointing backwards.
From Kaylee’s point of view, the whole world leaned and
swayed. She became lightheaded, her skull flooded with helium.
The woman impersonating her deceased Great Aunt Gladys
stopped speaking to Phillip, and he nodded, then turned to
Kaylee. He tilted his head and aimed his eyes at her like she’d
already fed him an obvious lie.
“Kaylee, I never would have figured you someone who could
do something like that.”
He paused, arched his eyebrows, expecting an explanation.
“Why did you let her fall? Why did you make her go upstairs in
the first place?”
“I didn’t.”
“Don’t lie. She told me everything. Your dad told you to
look after her that night.”
“I… I was eight.”
“Mm,” Phillip said, and shook his head, as if expecting
that response from her and finding its bullshit to be selfevident.
“I was.”
The woman’s head whipped around face Kaylee. An unnatural
shadow shrouded her features. Kaylee waited for her to speak
again, but the woman said nothing, she only stared. Or so Kaylee
believed; the woman’s eyes were invisible beneath the shadow.
“I’m sorry,” Kaylee said, her voice a strangled squeak.
“I’m so sorry. But…it wasn’t my fault.”
“It wasn’t?” Phillip said. “Oh that’s right. That’s what
your parents and your doctor have been telling you all this
time. But that’s not what you really believe deep down, is it?
I’d be so much more disappointed in you than I already am if
that’s what you really believed.”
Kaylee opened her mouth to defend herself, but the words
got locked in her throat. It was an accident, she wanted to
scream. It was a stupid accident and I didn’t make it happen I
tried to prevent it and people aren’t supposed to die from a
broken leg anyway and it WASN’T MY FAULT. But there was
something inside her, long buried under hundreds of hours of
therapy, now disinterred and stretching out to fill every inch
of her, that still believed, as she had ten years ago, that she
was to blame.
The woman—who Kaylee refused to accept as being her
deceased aunt—turned and leaned toward Kaylee. She took a step,
stumbled on her broken leg, then steadied herself mid-fall, her
fists tightening and clutching invisible bars to keep her
balance. Then the woman came closer, gliding on rails, her legs
dragging behind her as she closed in on Kaylee, who surprised
herself by finding the will to retreat. She couldn’t feel her
legs, and the frigid terror within her had subordinated her mind
like a split personality. She could not think, but she was on
the move, back to the far corner of the store where she had been
before.
The door to Phillip’s office was locked. The knob would not
turn when Kaylee tried it. She gripped the doorknob tight with
both hands, twisted as hard as she could. It refused to give.
She slammed her palms into the door, banged it with a fist,
sobbed and rammed the door with her shoulder. She was a slight
girl, and had no hope of forcing the door open, but she tried
again and again. She could hear the woman…the creature…the
impostor…coming to the back of the store, the dragging of her
shoes like two sheets of paper sliding against one another.
Do you feel cold, Kaylee? The black voice from the night
before had returned, invading her mind. It has been colder for
me, in the ground. All these years, alone and cold in the
ground, all because of you.
Kaylee held her head and screamed to drown the voice out.
She screamed to shake the door’s hinges loose, screamed to
frighten the lights back on. Screamed to ensure survival. The
dead don’t scream; some loose tendril of her frayed, panicked
brain looped around this curious fact. The dead cannot scream,
and she was screaming, therefore she must be alive, even though
she felt colder than a corpse inside. That was all she could
take solace in now.
The impostor’s bloated shadow grew larger as it came
closer, and blotted out the light from outside the store. Kaylee
stepped back and kicked the door. Stepped back again and threw
her entire body at it. A sharp pain stabbed through her shoulder
and into her chest as the door held firm. She dropped to her
knees, lacking the energy even to scream, only sob.
The head and shoulders of the impostor’s leaning form slid
past the last bookcase and into view.
I will show you how cold it is in the ground. How cold it’s
been since you let me die.
Before resignation to her fate could set in, Kaylee saw the
doorknob turn, seemingly of its own volition. She leapt to her
feet, pushed the door open and slammed it shut behind her,
pressing her back against it. The office was windowless, pitch
black. Kaylee put her hand on the doorknob and squeezed. She
wouldn’t let anyone else in. She didn’t know why the door had
opened for her, or how she could actually escape the store and
get to safety, but she wasn’t going to let that thing pretending
to be Aunt Gladys inside. She knew that much.
“Hello, Kaylee.” Someone was in the room with her. The
person who had let her inside. “It’s okay to be afraid. You’re
supposed to be.” The voice was gentle. It belonged to a woman,
young. It was smooth and soothing, reminiscent of Doctor Lux,
Kaylee’s childhood therapist. But it wasn’t her, or anything
pretending to be her. This was a stranger, unseen in the
blackness, who sounded close enough to grab her.
“The book is a good start,” the stranger went on. “I had it
with me on the plane. Keep looking into it. I’d explain, but I’m
already late for another appointment. You can relax now, though.
Phillip is at the door, and he’s himself again, more or less.
Sorry to put you through this, but you’ll have to learn to deal
with fear. There’s more coming, and worse.”
Then she was gone. There was a void in the room where the
young woman had been, Kaylee could feel her absence. A moment
later, a knock at the door made her jump.
“Are you okay? Kaylee? It’s Mister Tisdale. I’m not… I just
want to make sure you’re okay.”
Kaylee held tight to the doorknob. “Is she gone?”
The lights snapped back on before Phillip could answer. The
mundaneness of Phillip’s office—tan cabinets, tan desk,
inspirational posters featuring vistas and mountains and pets
hanging on the walls—answered her question. But Phillip said,
nonetheless, “Yes, she’s gone.”
Kaylee exhaled, surrendering of a winter’s worth of ice in
doing so. Sure as she may have been that Phillip was telling the
truth, her stomach still knotted up as she opened the door.
There was a distant despondence in Phillip’s eyes, like
he’d just said goodbye to something precious that he’d been
forced to burn. He looked at Kaylee and said, “I was… I was
hoping you hadn’t seen her too. That would have meant it was all
in my head and… shit, did I really…? Those things I said…”
Hearing Phillip Tisdale swear gave her a twinge of nausea.
It was so out of character that she worried he wasn’t “more or
less” himself after all. That concern passed as she realized
that even a saint might pitch a few profanities after what they
had just witnessed.
“I didn’t mean any of it,” he said. “I wasn’t… I wasn’t
even me. I couldn’t control it. What on Earth was that? What
happened to me?” Phillip was on the verge of tears, and that was
more than Kaylee could handle at present. She was still scraping
the bombarded bits of her own emotions into a pile to be glued
and taped back together. She couldn’t deal with Phillip Tisdale
being a mess as well.
“I think it’s best if I go,” she said.
“Who was she? How did she… what did she do to me?”
She brushed past him and gathered her belongings. “I’m
sorry, Mr. Tisdale. I shouldn’t have bothered you.”
“No, no. Don’t be silly,” he said, his politeness so
ingrained it was his autopilot. “I’m the one who should be
sorry. Those things I said…”
She slipped her backpack on and turned to him. She wanted
to say something encouraging, remind him that it hadn’t been him
saying those things to her moments before, but instead she
turned to leave. As she made it to the front of the store, she
stopped.
“Mr. Tisdale?” She looked back to see he had followed her,
his gaze glued to the floor, hoping an answer for what
transpired might have fallen out of her back pocket. It took him
a moment to register that she had spoken to him.
“Oh, yes?” he said.
“Do you know if you have a book here called Nightfall?”
8
Noon came and the thunderstorm localized to Vander’s head
had only intensified in the two hours that he’d been awake. His
veins were full of sludge, his stomach a bubbling cauldron. His
mouth and throat were sandpaper, and his muscles stubbornly
wanted to stay asleep. This was, without question, the worst
hangover he’d suffered since his Junior year of high school.
He didn’t think he had drank that much last night, not
compared to what he was capable of, anyway, but there were
enough gaps in his memory for him to be mistaken. His sleep had
been restless, that much he knew, though he couldn’t say why.
There was a vague, lingering sense that he’d seen something
disturbing in his dreams, but he couldn’t remember much of that
either. Something about a desert, and then a man in a cabin. A
basement door, or a trap door, or a hole in the floor. Something
in the basement or underground. Broken, incomplete pieces that
didn’t fit together, that’s all he had, and he was thankful for
that. He didn’t dream often, and when he did it was seldom of
unpleasantness. The bad dreams he did have tended to stick with
him for two or three days, because he was so unaccustomed to
them, and because he didn’t have anyone to bounce them off of.
Mack could hardly stand his real world stories; the man would
have no tolerance for hearing about Vander’s dreams.
He was in the kitchen, brewing some coffee, when four sharp
raps hit his front door. The acoustics of his house amplified
the noise and he winced. The sound and the pain called to mind a
Bible verse that had intrigued him as a boy. She drove the peg
through his temple and into the ground and he died. It was
strange how liquor and a potent hangover could stir up random
thoughts. He had learned about Jael and Sisera in Sunday School
classes his mother taught. It had stood out to him because,
well, the woman had hammered a fucking tent peg through a
sleeping man’s head. And she was the hero. It was the kind of
thing a boy with young Vander’s predilections was destined to
latch onto. He couldn’t recall what the ultimate lesson from
that story was. Something about how everything fun is bad and
everything boring is divine, if his recollection of Sunday
School lessons in general served him.
The knocks came again, four in a row, firecrackers popping
an inch away from his ears.
“Hold on a second,” he shouted, and felt as though his head
would explode from raising his voice. He started toward the
door, reexamined himself. This morning he had changed out of
last night’s clothes and put slippers, a stained gray
sweatshirt, and sweatpants that had shrunk enough over multiple
washes to be too short for him. He thought about taking a second
to at least change out of the shirt as it was unbecoming of his
crafted “Southern Charmer” persona to answer the door looking so
slovenly. But if he didn’t get to the door soon, whoever was on
the other side would knock again and hammer another spike
through his head.
He lumbered through the living room, nearly tripping over
the coffee table in his clumsy haste, and opened the front door.
Outside—with her fist up almost like a “black power” salute,
ready to knock again—was his neighbor and landlord, Jillian. She
was a heavyset, middle-aged Chinese-American woman who never
left home without a bandana on her head. When she saw Vander,
took in his glorious condition, she offered an apologetic smile.
“Hi, Vanderbilt. Sorry to bug you about this, but um…”
She tightened her lips, then backed away and pointed toward her
house. Vander accepted her invitation to look.
His van was parked almost entirely in Jillian’s front yard.
The passenger side tires were on the concrete driveway of his
home, but that was the only part of the vehicle that wasn’t
sitting on Jillian’s grass like it believed it belonged there.
Vander looked at this, mouth agape, face red with
embarrassment. “I have no idea…”
“Hey, it happens,” Jillian said. “At least you didn’t park
it in my kitchen. No damage done. I was just hoping you could
move it. I was going to wait a little while longer for you to do
it, but then it hit me, you probably had a long night and didn’t
realize—“
“Jillian, I am so sorry. You know I don’t ever do anything
like this.”
“I know.”
“Honestly, I have no idea how I even…”
“Well, not to get too fussy, but maybe you shouldn’t drive
home when you’ve had that much to drink.”
“That’s what I mean, though. I didn’t drive last night. I
swear. I always take the rail down the Mack’s and he calls a cab
to get me home. Always. There’s no way I drove home last night.”
“Oh. Well, that’s odd.” Jillian turned to look at the van,
then looked back at him, like they were on a game show and she
was deferring to him to provide the answer.
Vander shook his head. “Maybe someone else,” he started to
say, but then trailed off. A remembrance from last night flashed
before him. He’d left the house at some point after getting home
from Mack’s. Left in a hurry, in fact, as if… no, not “as if,”
because someone else had been in the house, or so he had
thought. He had gone to the van to get away from whoever it was.
He got as far as backing out of the driveway, but had then
thought better of it. Figured he had spooked himself. Bad dream.
The man in the cabin; whatever was behind the cellar door.
That’s all it had been. So he had gone back inside and back to
sleep. Clearly he had butchered the job of parking van back in
the driveway, but in his defense, he’d been drunk as hell and
half-asleep at the time.
“I’m super sorry, Jillian. I’ll move it right away.”
“Hey, it happens,” she said, and meant t. Vander wanted
take her downtown, show her off to Mack and say, “See? It
exists: Minnesota Nice!”
“You know what,” Jillian said. “After you move it, you
should come over. Melinda and I made chicken soup for lunch.
Soup would do you good. Most underrated cure for a hangover is
chicken soup. You know who told me that?”
Vander smiled, even though it hurt a bit just to do that.
“Your granddaddy?”
“My granddaddy. The man knew everything. Come on, you
haven’t been over in a while. We’ll sit around and trade some
lies. I’ll beat you and Melinda in some Scrabble.”
“Ugh. My head cannot take looking at all those little
letters right now.”
She slapped him on the arm and laughed. “Sounds like an
easy win for me, then. I’ll see you in a bit.”
She turned and walked back to her house. Vander watched her
leave, wanting to call out for her to come back and accompany
him as he went in the house. But he said nothing, and lingered
in front of his house, staring at the open door that was
inviting him to step through.
The house that he rented from Jillian Li was humble,
unremarkable. One story with a full basement, brick and wood, a
decent little deck made of old planks overlooking a sloping
backyard. There was nothing foreboding about it. No windows that
looked like glowing eyes when the lights were on, no large,
ominous trees in the yard. Nothing of the sort. He had lived
there for close to two years and had liked it more than most of
the places he’d stayed in his quasi-nomadic travels. But here he
stood, the tingle of dread percolating through body and out
through his skin at the sight of the entryway.
Something had chased him out of the house last night. Of
that he was sure. He was sure that the culprit had been his
imagination, but given that he didn’t consider himself a
terribly imaginative man, he was also sure that something
actually inside the house must have triggered it. Whatever that
something might have been, although logic told him otherwise, he
wasn’t convinced it was entirely harmless, and was nervous about
encountering it again.
#
Jillian and Melinda—the latter a willowy brunette who was a
few years younger than her spouse—made for a nice couple, and
pleasant company. After retrieving his keys, hastily changing
clothes and moving his van, Vanderbilt accepted Jillian’s
invitation to share lunch with them. He had thanked them at
least four times for letting him cover since he arrived, and had
complimented the décor of their living room as though he had
never been there before.
Although his hangover had insisted he take his time, he had
rushed around the house, suppressing nausea and dizziness and
his Biblical headache, to find the keys, throw on a sweater and
jeans and get the hell out of there. It had taken less than a
minute to do all of that. When he went to leave, part of him
anticipated the front door not opening. The house would try to
keep him, buy time for whatever else was inside to catch up with
him. But that didn’t happen, so here he was at Jillian and
Melinda’s.
Melinda was sitting in a recliner, huddled under two
blankets and consuming a paperback. A Jack Russell terrier named
Laika lazed in her lap. For a native Minnesotan, Melinda came
across to Vander as almost comically averse to the cold. Then
again, even going into his third winter here, the frozen north
was still something of a novelty to him. It was something he
marveled at. Any time it dropped below zero, bitter and vicious
as it was, a part of him got giddy. Back home, and in most of
the places he’d lived, twenty-degrees overnight in January
wasn’t just cold, but goddamn cold. Up here, as he’d felt last
night while walking from the cab to the front door, twenty
degree lows in late March weren’t unheard of.
Vander had headed down to Florida when he first left
Arkansas, then got bored and made his way west. By his estimate,
the “True South,” as he called it, ended just with Houston, with
the Southwest being a wholly different culture. This was where
he started to thrive, forging his Southern Man in Foreign Lands
persona. He had cut through southern Colorado, headed back down
to find a curious fondness for New Mexico for a few years. Then
the call to move came again and he eventually made it to
California. He’d spent some time in southern California, enjoyed
himself, then planned to move up through Oregon and Washington
before falling hard for a waitress in San Diego named Lucy. His
“Lucky Lucy” had gotten homesick for Minnesota after she found
out both of her parents had taken ill, and on an impulse Vander
had followed her back to Minneapolis. They lasted less than a
month together after arriving. His fault entirely, he accepted
that. She needed someone more supportive, given what was
happening with her folks, and he just wasn’t that type. An old
boyfriend and family friend reentered the picture, Vander
noticed her making eyes at him more than once, and decided to
graciously recuse himself from her life, wishing his Lucky Lucy
all the luck in the world.
It was coming up on two years since he had spoken to her.
He’d had a fling here and there since then, but no one serious.
It would have been nice to have Lucy with him last night.
After the first serving of soup—served in an oversized mug
that looked like a ceramic pumpkin—Vander’s headache started to
subside. Jillian collected his mug and spoon, along with her
own, and got up from the card table, where she was indeed
kicking his ass in Scrabble.
“I’m going to get some more,” she said. “You want some? You
can have as much as you like, since Melinda apparently isn’t
eating.”
“I’ll be done in a minute,” Melinda said, licking her
finger and turning the page.
“You said you were done yesterday.”
“I needed to read it again.”
“You already read it again yesterday.”
Vander asked Melinda, “What is it?”
She showed him the cover. The art featured a solar eclipse
centered amidst a starry night, the orange hade of fading
daylight underneath the darkened sun. He read the title and
authors’ names. Nightfall by Isaac Asimov and Robert Silverberg.
“Asimov,” he said. “Nice.”
“You’ve read it?”
“Been meaning to get around to reading some of his stuff.
Him and Clarke. You ever heard of him?”
“Don’t think so. Is he good too?”
Vander shrugged. “Supposed to be. Haven’t read him yet
either, so I can’t say for sure.”
“Oh right. You said.” She rolled her eyes at her own
question and thumped her forehead.
“Mel, do you want me to fix you a bowl,” Jillian said,
standing by the entrance to the kitchen, “or are you gonna wait
for it to get nice and cold?”
“It’s soup. It’ll reheat.”
Jillian grunted and went into the kitchen. Vander was glad
for the opportunity to continue talking to Melinda about her
book, though he was a little disappointed she hadn’t expressed
more surprise at his recognition of Asimov and Clarke. He went
out of his way to be aware of things that he believed people
wouldn’t expect a country boy from Arkansas to be aware of. Part
of being a Southern Charmer, in his eyes, was setting up certain
stereotypes, only to defy them. Or at least pretending to defy
them; he knew of Asimov and Clarke in a general sense, but had
no intention to familiarize himself with either man’s work, and
he had no idea who Robert Silverberg was.
“So what’s it about?” he said.
“The book?” she said.
He nodded, biting his tongue to keep from saying something
playfully sarcastic that she might take as more acidic. Melinda
looked back at the open pages for a second, as if seeking
permission from the book itself to discuss it. Then she set the
book down and took the opportunity to scratch Laika’s back.
“It’s about a world that’s basically surrounded by six
suns, so the people there have never seen night or the stars.
They don’t even know that nighttime exists. Darkness is so
foreign to them—it’s wild, darkness is spelled with a capital
‘D’ like it’s a proper name—it’s so foreign to these people that
they don’t think life could exist on a world like ours, that
wasn’t surrounded by constant sunlight, twenty-four-seven. At
one point they talk about this scary theme park ride, and the
whole ‘ride’ is just a slow trip through a completely dark
tunnel. And it’s so scary to them that some people go insane
from it. Some people died. One character gets nervous early in
the story just from having the curtains drawn when the sun’s
still out. They’re that scared of the dark.”
Jillian came back in the room with two refilled servings of
soup, steam rising from the mugs. She placed one in front of
Vander, and one at her place at the table.
“Now tell me that isn’t one of the silliest things you’ve
ever heard,” she said to Vander.
“Oh, whatever,” Melinda said. “You need to buy an
imagination. Vander, would you like me to go on?”
He smiled and nodded for her to continue. The story
intrigued him, though it also reminded him of the irrational
fear he had experienced less than an hour ago while in his
house.
“Okay,” Melinda said, leaning forward a bit in the chair,
“you might already see where this is headed, but the whole story
is set just before a rare eclipse that occurs every two-thousand
years. And it just so happens that every two-thousand years or,
civilization on this planet tears itself apart and has to start
all over again.”
“Probably not a coincidence,” Vander said.
Melinda grinned. “Not at all. Something as simple as
nightfall ends up driving nearly everyone on the planet crazy.
They light fires to keep the darkness away, and pretty soon
every major city is up in flames. All because they can’t hold
out for twelve hours and wait for the night to end. Oh, but I
didn’t really spoil it for you, I promise. I didn’t even get
into the ‘Apostles of the Flame’ stuff. You should really read
it. I can’t do it justice. It’s fascinating.”
“Maybe I can borrow it from you after you’re done. If
you’re actually done this time.”
“Oh God yes, she’s done,” Jillian said. “By all means, take
the damn book. Get it out of her hands. She’s been up all night
with it. I haven’t seen any action in two days.”
Melinda’s eyes widened in synch with Vander’s. “Jillian!”
she said, blushing and giggling. Jillian smirked, put her hand
to her mouth like she meant to share a secret, leaned toward
Vanderbilt and mock-whispered, “Taaaake the booook, pleeeease.”
He looked to Melinda. “Yeah, I suppose I can loan it to
you,” she said. “Just let me wrap up this last chapter.” Her
tone belied her generosity. She struck Vanderbilt as the type
who was hesitant to let anyone borrower anything of hers, and
she most likely hoped he would tell her thanks, but no thanks.
At the risk of earning Melinda’s quiet ire, he decided he’d
take her up on the offer. Reading, for the most part, put him in
the lazy limbo between bored and relaxed. That space where you
do something not because you necessarily want to, but because
it’s something to do, and it’s comfortable, or at least it’s not
uncomfortable. In this instance, however, his interest in
Melinda’s summation of the story had been sincere. Science
fiction wasn’t his bag, but this story had a good hook to it,
and on the off chance that the topic of science fiction ever
came up at a party, he could dazzle people with own summation of
the story (peppered with his own musings about the nature of
fear and discovery, of course).
And if Nightfall could occupy his mind and put him to
sleep as well, that would be a bonus. Otherwise, if his unease
with staying at home persisted, he might have to spring for a
motel tonight.
9
The phone, set to vibrate, buzzed again, the noise like a
large cartoon beetle ineptly fluttering its wings. Celeste Hurst
fished the phone from her sizable, designer purse and set it to
“Silent” mode. Then she placed the phone back in her purse, in
the zippered side-pocket opposite the one that contained her
compact .22 caliber pistol. She returned focus to the younger
woman sitting across from her on the other side of the small
coffee table.
“Well, Miss Smith?” Celeste said. She had a formal accent
that, to an ignorant ear, could be mistaken for British.
Gina stared blankly at the older woman in the black dress,
pearls, dark glasses and black scarf sitting in front of her; a
reaper disguised as an aging 1940’s starlet. All that was
missing was an opera length cigarette holder and evening gloves.
“I don’t know,” Gina said.
“You ‘don’t know’? Or you simply hadn’t thought that far
ahead?”
“I just… I don’t know, okay? He… he said he would—“
“I did not ask what he said. He is a man. He is full of
want. His word is doubly worthless. I asked you to tell me how
you thought this would end for you?”
The young woman, Gina Smith, shifted in her chair and
grimaced like she was sitting on thumbtacks. Celeste felt an
impulse to slap the girl and demand she sit still. She had done
this a hundred times before. She regularly had to visit with
spoiled debutantes and playboys, junkies and drunks, sociopaths
and stalkers. None of them offended her on any personal level.
They were simple variables in the linear equation that kept her
employed. But the Gina Smiths of the world put a rotten taste in
her mouth. Gina Smith was meant to be no one. She was not
particularly privileged or disadvantaged. The real question
Celeste wanted to ask the girl—with apologies for the vulgarity—
was how does one so majestically screw up at being ordinary?
Gina tried to meet the older woman’s hard gaze and instead
shrank, or rather braced herself, like she expected Celeste’s
stare to solidify into a brick and smash into her.
“I’m waiting, dear,” Celeste said.
“I thought… I thought it wasn’t going to end the way I
wanted it to.”
“And how did you want it to end? With him leaving his wife
for you? Whisking you away on a winged pink unicorn to go live
in a castle?”
Gina lifted her eyes and tried to match Celeste’s
sternness. The older woman was impressed. Perhaps Gina had an
ounce of backbone after all.
“I’m not some dumb little girl,” Gina said.
“Ample evidence to the contrary.”
“I was… I thought I was in love. I thought he loved me. He
said—”
“No, dear. You wished and hoped that it was love. But what
you thought was that it would end badly. You just said that, and
I want to believe that’s the truth. Otherwise, you’d be a moron.
You keep coming back to what he said to you. Have you ever read
a book, dear? Seen a film? Seen the news? This story’s been told
a million times and it generally ends the same way. Do you at
least know the definition of the word mistress, and understand
that to call you that would be generous? I believe the answer to
all of those questions is ‘yes.’ And with that, I’m going to say
that you didn’t just think this would end with him using you,
you knew it would end this way.
“So that brings me to the next question: if you knew what
was coming, why are you acting as though you didn’t? The
messages, the threats, showing up at his office. What are you
trying to accomplish?”
Gina’s mouth opened, lips quivered. “What he did wasn’t
right. He needs to know that. You can’t just treat someone like
that.”
Celeste shook her head, smirked. “And you’re going to teach
him that lesson? Oh dear, I’m not sure you realize how fortunate
you are that they’ve sent me. Believe it or not, my fee is much
more costlier than it would have been to simply hire a man to
break into your nice home here and kill you. And your roommate,
had she the misfortune to be here. He would ransack your home,
take your things, give it the appearance of a robbery gone
wrong, and no one would ever suspect it was anything other than
that. Pity, but such things can happen to young ladies, even in
a nice town like this.”
It was hard for Celeste to suppress her grin as she saw the
Gina’s already pale skin somehow find a shade even closer to
talcum. “You can’t come in here and threaten me like that,” she
said. It was closer to a question than a statement.
“Dear, that was no more of a threat than it would be to
advise a child that they’ll be crushed by a truck if they play
in traffic. You may have displayed a cavalier attitude toward
your well-being in regard to this—perhaps you’re so heartbroken
you think you don’t care if you live or die—but it’s my job to
prevent you from forcing the hand of a desperate man. You should
never underestimate desperate men. Particularly ones with
moderate power, and delusions of grandeur, and ambitions for
more. They can be very protective of their dreams, and the
things they want. The good doctor wants to keep the illusion of
his good reputation. He wants the option to someday try his hand
at politics. And he will take whatever action is necessary to
remove you as an obstacle. That is not a threat, it is a simple
truth. Do you understand?”
Gina didn’t respond. Celeste figured the reality of her
predicament might have gotten too surreal for her. By design,
her appearance and her presence tended to have that effect.
Celeste stood. She had long legs and was taller than you
might expect if you first met her while she was seated. “Thin”
did not adequately describe her. She looked sharp; all points
and edges, nothing dull or rounded. You could whittle wood on
her collarbone, elbows or jawline. She walked behind Gina’s
chair and rested her slender hands—fingers like letter openers—
on the young woman’s shoulders.
“Have you given any honest thought to how unpleasant it
might be to die, Miss Smith?”
A gasping sob skipped out of Gina’s throat like hiccup.
“I suspect you haven’t,” Celeste said.
Gina brought her hands to her face, pressed her fingertips
against her closed eyes in a vain effort to seal her tears. “I
don’t… I don’t want to…”
“This is your one opportunity, dear. If you’re capable of
making at least one wise decision in your life, you’ll let all
of this go. No more messages, no more threats to go to his wife,
or to surprise him at a fundraiser and embarrass him. No more.
It’s time for you to get back to the real world, Miss Smith.
Find yourself a nice, plain boy, very unlike our doctor. Someone
who better fits you. He’ll take care of you, and you’ll take
care of him. Don’t expect fire and ecstasy, or trips to exotic
places. On birthdays he’ll buy you flowers and take you
someplace nice for dinner. On Valentine’s Day he’ll buy you
flowers and take you someplace nice for dinner. On anniversaries
he’ll buy you flowers and take you someplace very nice for
dinner. And that ought to be enough for you. It’s not a fairy
tale, but it’s not a nightmare either, now is it?”
Celeste squeezed Gina’s shoulders, sincere affection in the
gesture. She didn’t wish the worst for the girl, despite her
general disgust with her type. It was unbecoming to wish
violence on fools, Celeste believed.
“Be wise, dear,” Celeste said, then gathered her purse and
left the crying girl alone in her apartment.
Outside, Celeste checked her phone. She had missed several
calls and text messages, all from the same number. She skipped
to the last message: CALL US BACK THIS FUCKING BITCH IS GOING TO
RUIN EVERYTHING.
On her way to the car, she allowed herself a grin, and then
some controlled laughter. Better to get it all out of her system
now, before she called Wilmer Martel back. The simplicity of her
work, and the reliability of others to keep her employed, was
comical. There were always men like Doctor Walsh, always women
like Gina Smith. Sometimes the genders were reversed. Sometimes
a third or fourth individual was involved. Sometimes the issue
wasn’t adultery, but some other exhibition of perfidy or
dishonesty, as was the case with her next client. It didn’t
matter to Celeste; x, y or z, a variable was a variable, and the
equation always added up to her being paid. But the fact that
people were so consistent at making such messes that she could
fashion a career out telling them how to clean up? She thought
it inhuman to see no humor in that.
#
You work too hard to be miserable. His wife’s words, a
deliberate double-entendre. Clever, he had to give her that, but
wrong on every count. First, he wasn’t miserable. Being a
realist—as opposed to a happiness-huffing meliorist like Bonnie—
didn’t make him miserable. He certainly didn’t “work” at being
miserable. Nor did he think, as she did, that hard work was in
itself reward enough for someone to be immune to misery. But he
couldn’t be upset with her when she told him such things. He had
known her mind when he married her, known her endless optimism,
and had hoped an ounce of it might rub off on him. Her world was
so much easier than his, and he wished he could live there. In
her world, joy was a natural, erosive force steadily scouring
life of anything undesirable. Unfortunately for Wilmer Martel,
he couldn’t live where Bonnie lived; he was stuck in reality.
He checked his watch again, groaned, stood up, paced the
room. His brother George’s study was large, bookshelves full of
political and historical writings lining one wall, cityscape
paintings on the opposite wall. A curtained, three-paned bay
window on the exterior wall faced the spacious front yard. Near
the window was George’s computer desk and hutch, filled with
small photos of family and associates, and various trophies and
certificates, including a heavy, ivory, star-shaped statuette
awarded by a local charity at a banquet last year. Front and
center on the desk was a framed photo of George with his wife,
Tracy, and their two pre-teen sons. He had asked Tracy to take
the boys up to Washington for the weekend to visit their
grandparents while he stayed home and tried to sort things out.
She hadn’t asked details, just obliged. Beside the photo was a
heavy, ivory, star-shaped statuette—an award from a local
faction of a charity organization.
George sat at the edge of the chaise in the middle of the
room, next to an antique globe sitting in a tall brass stand.
His head was down, his elbows on his knees, his hands shielding
his eyes like he couldn’t bear the light, limited as it was in
the room. He hadn’t looked up for several minutes.
“Fuck this,” Wilmer said, and took his phone from his
pocket, “I’m calling her again.”
“Don’t,” George said.
“She said she’d be here by five. It’s already half past.”
George sat back. “And calling her is gonna do what? Get her
here faster?”
Wilmer squeezed his phone. He wasn’t a small man—five-footten, broad-shouldered, one-sixty—but he wasn’t as large or
strong as he pictured himself to be. He forced himself to loosen
the grip on the phone, thinking he actually had the capacity to
break it in his grip.
“Don’t get smart with me,” he said. “This is your fucking
mess, not mine.”
“I already told you, you don’t have to be here.”
Wilmer snorted and shook his head. Of course he had to be
here. He always had been. Nine-years-old, recess at St.
Catherine’s Elementary, finding the pair of skate-punk fourth
graders hanging out behind the gym who had called his younger
brother—still in first grade—a “dirty Mexican.” Beat the shit
out of them both. Cracked one in the skull with his own
skateboard and made him piss himself. The school’s principal,
Hector Martel, had come down hard on his son to ensure no one
accused him of nepotistic leniency. George had cried more for
his brother being suspended than he had over the initial
epithet. Hell, George had barely understood that he was Mexican
at the time.
That’s why Wilmer had always needed to be there. George was
brilliant, but in some ways more naïve than even Bonnie. He
understood that the world, that nature, wasn’t designed by
default to improve every day. He understood that the average
person was not, by default, a saint. But he behaved as if he
expected things to work out for the best nonetheless. Acted as
though he owed it to people to trust them, until they
definitively proved themselves unworthy. That’s why Wilmer had
spent the bulk of his childhood and teenage years fighting and
fuming on his brother’s behalf. And why George was in his
current predicament with his former colleague, Jennifer Bonham.
“I’m calling,” Wilmer said. As he started to dial, the
doorbell rang. He looked at George, who shrugged.
“What do you know,” George said, “it made her get here
faster.”
Wilmer stuffed the phone in his pocket and waited as George
left the study. When he returned, a statuesque older woman with
a stone-carved jawline entered ahead of him. George introduced
her as Celeste Hurst. Wilmer shook her hand and offered her a
seat.
“Thank you,” she said, taking the study chair Wilmer had
been in earlier. George returned to the chaise. Wilmer, still
feeling cagey, decided he’d rather stand.
“Thanks for coming on such short notice,” George said to
Celeste. “Things are… they aren’t looking great.”
Celeste raised an eyebrow, took off her sunglasses. Fifteen
seconds after meeting her, Wilmer had already developed a
healthy dislike of this showy woman.
“Did you do as I advised?” Celeste said.
George looked up to Wilmer who snorted again. “I wasn’t
going to stand pat and wait for this bitch to fuck up George’s
life.”
“Mister Martel, please. A lady is present.”
“Whatever—“
“Willy, come on,” George said.
“No, George. This is bullshit. She’s charged you how much
to tell you to do nothing? At least with what I did, your little
friend Jennifer knows we’re not going to sit here and take
this.”
“What exactly did you do Mister Wilmer?”
Wilmer’s tongue swept the inside of his mouth, a nervous
habit. He tried to stare Celeste down. He didn’t care for her
tone. Who was she to accuse him? Who the hell was she at all? A
former looker who apparently thought she was Bette Davis, with a
tongue sporting more tarnish than silver.
Who was she to
question him about his family’s affairs, and regard him as
though he were a child?
“Did you contact her?” she said.
“I gave her a call. Let her know that she needs to think
twice if she thinks George is a pushover.”
“You called to tell her that George isn’t a pushover?”
God, this woman. Absently, Wilmer balled his fist. “Lady,
there’s some things you need to understand here.”
“Will,” George said, “be cool.”
Wilmer turned to his brother, held up a hand to silence
him. George huffed, but let Wilmer continue.
“You see this house,” Wilmer asked Celeste. “Pretty nice,
huh? I was the one who told George that he had to get the place.
He wanted something smaller. I told him that if he wanted to get
into this consulting thing—campaign management, telling people
you can make them successful—then they’ve got to see that you
made yourself successful first. I’m the one who told him that.
And when he couldn’t get a loan for this place, guess who put
the money up. That’s my kid brother. My job is to always look
out for him, no matter what. Sometimes—like this time—I have to
help him fix a mistake. Sometimes I keep him from making one.
Whatever I need to do, I do, because he doesn’t always know
what’s best for himself.
“Honestly, I’m not even sure why you’re here. I think I can
handle this myself better than you. Wouldn’t be the first time I
stepped in for my brother. Doubt it’ll be the last.”
Celeste smiled politely. “You’re welcome to send me away,
then, if you don’t care for my services.”
Yeah, I’ll send you away, bitch, Wilmer thought, then
turned red at the childishness of his unspoken retort. Secretly,
he wished he were a wittier man for occasions such as this. It
would have been beyond satisfying to draw the words to
eloquently put Celeste Hurst in her place. But that wasn’t who
he was, and for the most part he accepted that. He was a man who
shouted, swore and did whatever else was necessary to make his
point, and for the most part that had served him well. He’d
gotten to where he was—co-owner of Capital Trucking Delivery—by
being blunt and forceful. He’d permanently sent away George’s
ex-girlfriend, Sara, weak-hearted fool that she was, before she
could ruin George’s life. His track record spoke for itself.
Still, he wasn’t ready to dismiss Celeste Hurst just yet.
She needed to know who was in charge, and that Wilmer was
certainly capable of handling this on his own, but she might
still be useful. If nothing else, she could be an added buffer
between George and Jennifer, in case things went the way Wilmer
suspected they’d have to.
“I’ll take the silence as an invitation to stay,” Celeste
said. She turned to George. “May I inquire as to the exact
nature of the issue, here? You seem to think this woman has
enough information to jeopardize your career.”
“His career?” Wilmer said. “She’s threatening to—“
“Hey,” George said, finally fed up. “I think I can answer
this one.”
Wilmer snorted yet again, bit the inside of his bottom lip
to keep from speaking, and turned away.
“She’s not making any threats, first and foremost,” George
said. “If anything she wants me to go in with her on this ‘tellall.’ But I don’t think going public with this stuff is going to
work out half as well as she thinks it will. The stuff Harris
got away with when we worked in his office, the stuff he had us
do…that was back when he was just a mayor. If he had that much
pull back then, imagine now. He’s got so much money behind him
it’s insane. Even after all the stuff that went down these past
four years—the water shortages, school closings, everything—
he’s a lock to stay in office, unless someone produces of a
photo of him choking a baby or holding a rifle on the grassy
knoll. Even then, it’ll probably just give him a little dip in
the polls. He can’t be touched. But if he turns around and
decides he wants to bury us…”
Celeste nodded. “You’re less worried about the information
she has than the retaliation from the Governor.”
At the word “retaliation” George shut his eyes and pressed
his fingers to his temples. “That’s exactly it. Jen thinks she—
we—have enough dirt on Harris to bring him down. But he has a
lot more on us.”
“Such as?”
“Oh for God’s sake,” Wilmer said, unable to hold his tongue
anymore, “what’s it matter?”
Celeste didn’t acknowledge Wilmer beyond a glance. When she
was sure his outburst had concluded she turned back to George
and awaited his answer.
“Where to even begin,” George said. “There was a lot of
corruption in Santa Mira at the time. We did whatever Harris—or
really his lieutenants—we did whatever they asked us to do.
Covered for people, leaked info to the press, destroyed things
that might have embarrassed or incriminated any of Harris’s
friends. We weren’t making decisions, obviously, but you know…
emails, phone calls, shredding… lots of shredding. That’s what
we did.
“Probably the worst situation involved this fire at a food
processing plant on the edge of the city. Started by accident,
probably due to equipment malfunctioning according to the
initial report, but that never made it public. Six people died,
four men, two women. All six were workers. No managers, nobody
in charge, they all got out fine. One of the deceased was a man
named Mitch Taylor. Mid-50’s, divorced, no family, new to town
and new to the company. Perfect patsy.”
George paused, cleared his throat. Wilmer had to turn away
again, his brother’s sensitivity was worse than nails on a
chalkboard to him. “The building hadn’t met safety standards for
several years. Bad emergency lighting, no safety drills, faulty
sprinkler system. Some of the exit doors didn’t even open. Rumor
had it they were locked from the outside—the owner of the
factory thought workers were sneaking out for extra smoke breaks
and had the doors locked. But the owner was a friend of Harris,
and Harris had pull, and it was Santa Mira, so those safety
problems never got exposed until it was too late. Then somebody
had to answer for it. That somebody became Mitch Taylor. It’s
pretty scary how easy it is to turn someone into a monster when
they’re gone, as long as no one’s willing to speak up for them.
I don’t know the details. I went out of my way not to know. I
did what I was asked to do: signed here; stamped there;
delivered this; shredded that. Dropped anonymous tips to local
reporters I knew were already bought. It was easy. Terrifyingly
easy. Mitch Taylor went from being an innocent victim to an
arsonist who got caught up in his own crime. An outsider and
psychopath who hated his life and job and just wanted to see
something burn for his troubles. He got crucified and convicted
post mortem. Harris’s buddy at the factory paid a few fines and
made a donation for a commemorative plaque. And that was that.
“When Jennifer first came to me about blowing the whistle
after all these years, she told me she’d been having nightmares
of Mitch Taylor lately. He shows up in her sleep, burned all to
hell, trying to say something to her, but he can’t. No voice.
When she told me that, I felt sick, because as bad as I always
felt about what we part of, if I’m being honest here, I never
lost much sleep over it. I told myself it was just the way
things were done, and I couldn’t fight this system until I got
deeper into it, became more a part of it. I could only do real
good from the inside; that’s what I told myself. And that let me
sleep at night. It wasn’t until a few days ago, when it really
hit me that if Jennifer goes public with all of this, the ones
who’ll take the fall—and I mean prosecution and potential prison
time here—it’s going to be the people like me and her. We’re the
ones who stand the most to lose, not Harris, not as protected as
he is. And she means well, she’s got a great heart, but she just
doesn’t get it.”
Wilmer let out a derisive hiss and injected himself in the
conversation again. “Good heart my ass. She’s looking for a
payday and some attention, that’s all. George has a soft spot
for this woman, but I’m not buying this ‘born again,’ ‘guilty
conscience’ bullshit. I’ve been in church my whole life, and
never once has Jesus told me I need to clear my conscience by
fucking up somebody else’s life.”
“It would be out of character for Jesus to say that,”
Celeste said. “George, it sounds like we need to show your
friend Jennifer the error of her judgment.”
“It’s not that easy,” George said. “She’s already been to
some lawyers, she thinks she’s done all the research and
protected herself and me. She doesn’t get it. I don’t know how—
she was there with me, she should know what Harris is capable
of—but she doesn’t. And now she’s got her faith and her
nightmares and…when I talked to her yesterday she—“
“You what?” Wilmer said. “When did you talk to her
yesterday?”
“I met her at the park to settle her down. She wanted to go
to the police after you called and rattled her. She thought you
were crazy. After what you said, I can’t blame her.”
“Hey, don’t call me crazy,” Wilmer said, jutting a finger
in George’s face.
“I didn’t call you anything. I told you what she thought.
Now can I finish what I was saying, please?”
Wilmer backed away and George addressed Celeste. “Jennifer
sounded paranoid. I’m sure my brother’s little call didn’t help.
She told me she saw Mitch Taylor a few days ago. I asked if she
meant she dreamt of him again, and she said no, she saw him.”
“And I’m crazy…” Wilmer said under his breath.
“She’s hell-bent on this,” George went on. “I’ve tried to
talk sense to her, Mrs. Hurst, but she’s at a point where she’s
saying that she has to do this. And I don’t know what else to do
about it. I’m hoping you can persuade her. I can’t afford to let
her do this. My family…my kids…we have too much to lose. I’m
desperate here.”
At this, Celeste Hurst smiled. Wilmer wanted to ask her
what the hell she thought was so funny, but something in that
smile unnerved him. It was too certain; it belonged to someone
who had been to the future, consorted with the Fates. Celeste
looked like someone who knew she could never lose, and that
troubled Wilmer, even though she was ostensibly on his and
George’s side.
“Well, gentlemen,” she said, “I’m have no doubt that
there’s an effective solution to this problem. I just need to be
sure that you’ll both follow my direction from here on.”
“We will,” George said, then turned to Wilmer and told him,
“We will.”
Uncomfortable as he was with this agreement, Wilmer didn’t
protest. Whatever script Celeste came up with, he knew he wasn’t
bound to it. He was bound solely to his brother, and—as he’d
demonstrated time and again—he’d do whatever was necessary to
protect him.
10
It took a few minutes for Lane to answer the door. He tried
to wait Kim and Aaron out. They must have rang the doorbell and
knocked on the door—always using the knocker, like it was a toy
they had just discovered—a dozen times altogether. He had seen
them pull into his driveway through the living room window. He’d
been sitting on the couch, reading by lamplight when the
headlights beamed through the window, then cut off. Acting
quickly—and with no negligible amount of denial—Lane drew the
living room curtains closed and shut the lamp off. Then he went
to the door to make sure it was locked. There he waited, hoping
they would give up.
“Come on Lane,” Aaron said, his voice muffled. “We brought
spaghetti. And movies. And…women.”
There was some snickering, playful arguing, then Aaron
spoke up again. “Sorry, okay, not women. But we did bring some
of that classy Scandinavian porn that you’re into, so…”
More snickering. Lane rolled his eyes, but felt laughter
tugging at the corners of his mouth. This annoyed him. He was in
no mood to laugh, but here they were coaxing it out of him. More
impactful, they were reminding him of a thousand other laughs
he’d shared with his friends. Damn it, he hadn’t spent any real
time with them in days. He missed them. He unlocked the door and
opened it.
“Hey guys. Promise me you’ll excuse the mess. It’s been a
rough week.”
In addition to a pot of spaghetti and a loaf of garlic
bread, Kim and Aaron had brought three bottles of wine. Red
Moscato for Kim, Merlot for Aaron, and Chardonnay for Lane, as
red wines invariably gave him headaches. The movies were all
light comedies that he’d seen before, with familiar stars and
safe, expected jokes. Time passers, and that was welcome for
now.
He cleaned up as much as he could while Kim and Aaron went
to the kitchen to reheat the food and ready the plates and
glasses for dinner. The place was indeed a bit of a mess. Empty
soda and water bottles, paper plates with crumbs from hastily
made sandwiches and chips, used napkins, and a half empty box of
sugary cereal that he’d been snacking from. There was also paper
galore. Sticky notes and loose-leaf pages with copious notes
written, and brown sketch-pad paper with drawings from the
dreamscape. The plane wreckage, the lake, the desert and
highway, the forest and all it contained, a distant skyline, and
more. Some things he hadn’t yet seen, but knew were there
nonetheless. And, of course, there was the mound of hands
boiling out of the earth. He had drawn that picture the most.
The refuse he collected in a garbage bag that he later
disposed of in a trash bin outside, but the notes and sketches
he collected and dumped into the storage cavity of his ottoman.
He wasn’t stupid or deluded enough to think that Kim and Aaron
hadn’t seen any of his homework scattered about as they made
their way through the living room to get to the kitchen. But he
doubted they would bring it up to him so long as it remained out
of sight. The purpose of the visit, he figured, was to get his
mind off what had happened to him, not stage an amateur
intervention.
In this, he was correct. The evening went as expected. The
food and wine were good, and the conversation pleasantly
distracting. Aaron provided commentary for the movie that was
wittier than everything happening onscreen. Kim picked her
spots, chimed in with dryer humor when appropriate. Lane said
enough to encourage the jokes and was generous with his
laughter. It surprised him how easy it was to set aside the
lodestone of his dreams, and the disappearance of Delilah
Dantes. He’d have to pick it back up as soon as his friends
left, he knew that. But for the moment, he was relieved to be
free of it.
As the closing credits rolled on the first movie, and
before they could begin watching the next one, Kim picked up the
book he’d left face down on his coffee table and turned it over
to read the cover.
“Oh, you’ve probably never heard of that,” Lane said,
reaching out to take it from her.
“Sure I have,” she said, allowing him to take the book. “I
had to read that in high school. Senior English. Mister Comer.
He let us read all the cool stuff.”
“What is it?” Aaron said.
“Nightfall,” Kim said. “Classic science fiction.”
“Hm. Since when do you read sci-fi, Lane?”
Lane started to respond, stopped himself. He was about to
say that he’d always been interested in this sort of thing, just
kept it to himself. That might have fooled Kim, but not Aaron.
He had befriended Kim through work; they had been hired on the
same day and went through training together. They had hit it off
well from the beginning, and introducing her to Aaron had sealed
their friendship, but there was still a lot she didn’t know
about him. Not the case with Aaron. They’d been all but
inseparable since third grade. Pop Warner football, Aaron had
been quarterback and Lane the running back. Little League, Aaron
pitched and Lane suited up as the catcher. Their parents had
conspired to buy them matching bikes for Christmas when they
were twelve. They had been as close as brothers. Perhaps closer,
as not living together gave them sufficient separation to breed
deeper fondness. They’d only had a handful of arguments
throughout their friendship, and each of those had blown over in
less than a day. Aaron knew his likes and dislikes. He’d bought
him a biography of Theodore Roosevelt for his birthday a few
years back. A documentary on World War One to lift his spirits
after his father passed last year. Aaron had been there in
college when Lane got so into Hemingway he wouldn’t shut up
about the man. And the two of them had been on opposite sides of
several friendly debates about why Star Wars, Star Trek and “all
of that ridiculous, out of this world stuff,” as Lane termed it,
were overrated.
So, in answer to Aaron’s question, Lane shrugged, and hoped
that would somehow be enough to quash further discussion of the
book. Miraculously it was. Aaron gave a shrug of his own, not
indifferent, just not wanting to press the subject. Taking that
as a cue to move on, Kim stood up and said, “Well, I think I’d
like another glass of wine. Either of you want another while I’m
up?”
“Just bring the bottles back, babe,” Aaron said.
Lane smiled, relaxing again. “Sure, why not.”
By the halfway point of the next movie, two of the three
bottles were empty, and Lane’s Chardonnay had just enough for
half a glass left.
#
Drinking enough to warrant spending the night had been part
of the plan. After about an hour of fun conversation and
reminiscence that followed the end of the second movie, Lane had
offered Kim and Aaron his spare bedroom, then called it a night.
In the morning, they would drag Lane along to brunch at
Blue Mesa, let the day lead them from there. They would have to
leave him alone eventually, they had their lives to get back to
come Monday, and he had his, but for one more day at least they
could keep his mind free from whatever plagued him.
At present, though, Kim wasn’t thinking about tomorrow. The
vino in her veins sent a vaporous tickle flowing through her.
Gentle inebriation held her somewhere between an embrace and a
caress. She needed to her fix. Multiple fixes, preferably.
“Babe, he’s right down the hall,” Aaron said.
“He won’t hear us,” she told him, straddling him on the
bed, pulling at his undershirt, tempted to tear it off. “He’s
two doors down.”
“He’s my best friend. I’m can’t to do this in his house.
Especially not while he’s here.”
“Seriously? You’re going to act like y’all never had sex
with a girl under the same roof? Come on… come on, you went to
college together.”
“That doesn’t… what does that even mean?”
She put her finger to his lips, leaned in and kissed him on
the neck. She felt him shiver under her, just a little. Just
enough to encourage her.
“Come on,” she said, “I promise to be quiet.”
“I’ve seen absolutely no evidence that you’re even capable
of being quiet.”
“I can be. I promise.”
“No evidence,” he said. “And I’m not basing this off of a
small sample size here.”
“You need to let me get a sample of your size, right here.”
He put his hand to his mouth to stifle a laugh. “Okay, you
know what, now I’m game. We’re going to do this, just to
commemorate you saying something so corny even I wouldn’t have
thought of it.”
She smiled, cupped his face in her hands, and drew him into
a kiss.
After, past the post-coital cuddling when Aaron had fallen
into a restive sleep, Kim lay in bed, the invisible glow of sex
fading. She felt at ease, a feather on a cloud, but could not
find sleep. A grain of disquiet, divorced from her conscious and
body, embedded amidst her instincts, nagged at her to remain
alert. She thought little of it. A byproduct of the alcohol,
perhaps. She didn’t drink as much or as often as she used to, in
support of Aaron. He had a family history of alcoholism and
tried to be mindful of what, when and how much he drank. In the
two years since they had been together her tolerance level had
dwindled from being able to slam shots with the best of them, to
getting tipsy from a few glasses of wine.
Eyes closed, enveloped in soothing silence, Kim waited for
the niggling, undefined anticipation keeping her awake to
subside. Instead, it intensified. It snaked through her, thin as
thread, working just beneath the skin. It passed through her
legs and arms, down to her hands. A sensation similar to
fingertip tracing lines in her palm made her reflexively clench
her fists. She sat up in bed, aware now that she was thinking
too much about getting to sleep to actually be able to sleep.
This wasn’t going to work. She decided she would try to walk it
off. She needed to pee anyway.
The bathroom was down the hall, between the guest room and
the master. After she had finished and flushed she started to
wash her hands in the sink. Over the running faucet she heard a
short, seized groan. Her ears perked up. She turned off the
water, listened. It came again, less of a groan this time, more
of an arrested shout. She left the bathroom and stood in the
hall, unsure of where the sound had come from. The third
instance of it—higher pitched, pained, and cleaved by a gasp—
pointed her to Lane’s room.
The bedroom door was ajar. She came to the door, tried to
peek through the gap, vaguely concerned she might see something
that would render her a voyeur. Heavy curtains covered the
windows, smothering the room with near absolute darkness. The
only source of light was the red glow courtesy of a tiny bulb in
the smoke detector on the ceiling. Kim’s eyes adjusted enough to
see that the covers of his bed were rumpled in a heap at the
foot of the mattress. She could not see Lane at all. Another
groan, this one cut off by a choking noise, like something got
caught in his throat.
She opened the door. “Lane? Are you okay?” She spoke
softly, on the off chance that he was still asleep. When he
didn’t answer her she stepped inside. “Lane? I just want to make
sure you’re—“
A startled yelp, mixed with a quick inhalation, dropped on
her from above. She looked up, saw something move across the
ceiling. It was still too dark to make out what it was, but not
quite dark enough to convince herself there was nothing there.
She stepped back instinctively. Her hand groped the wall near
the door for the light switch. She found it, flipped it.
The switch cut on a floor lamp plugged into the opposite
wall. The lambent white of an energy efficient bulb painted the
room with a corpse’s pallor.
There was Lane. Eyes shut. Struggling, flailing. Thin scars
adorned his chest from where he appeared to have scratched
himself. He was fixed to the ceiling by something invisible,
something he was fighting against to little avail. His face was
contorted, anguish and terror giving him the mask of a man he
might be related to, but who was older, and who’d been born with
a chronic pain that had tortured him all his life.
Kim was too confused and fearful to move. The surrealism of
the sight short-circuited her brain for a moment. Then she
collected herself enough to have an idea. Perhaps not a
brilliant idea, certainly not one that she had the time to think
through, but an idea nonetheless. She screamed out Lane’s name.
She hoped to wake him. Maybe that would end whatever was
happening with him. Likely not. But what else was there to do?
She screamed again for him to wake up, and again, and
again…
#
The dream had followed the same course as the night before,
right up until the moment that the multitude of hands growing
out of the earth had thrown him off the ever-growing mound. This
time, when he called out to be let go, the hands—filthy and
ragged and uncannily strong—tightened their grip.
Delilah Dantes, invisible and everywhere, laughed and sang.
The earth under Lane’s feet loosened, turned to mud, sucked him
down to his ankles. Swallowed his calves, then his knees. So
much was happening at once that he didn’t notice he was sinking
until the mud was up to his waist. He let out a tremendous
scream then, and heard a few of his fellow dreamers asking, “Who
was that? What’s happening?”
He was low enough now that some of the hands were no longer
pulling, but pushing, able to get on top of him and press down
on his shoulders, his head. He swung his arms wildly. The
compacted earth held his legs like they were encased in
concrete, but he tried to kick nonetheless. One of the tugging
hands crawled across his face and he bit the pinky finger that
strayed into his mouth. Bit it clean off. The hand did not feel
it, and continued its work, forcing him down into the roiling
hill.
He pleaded, “Wait, please, oh God, don’t-“
And then he was under. The earth was wet and warm. It
crushed his head like a helmet that was a size too small. The
pressure against his chest and back threatened to flatten his
torso. His cries were muffled, insistent. He was dimly aware
that all of this was impossible, but that didn’t matter. He
could die here. He would. Possibility and reality had no sway
over his fate. He could not breathe, and he was being crushed.
Death was certain. But the hands continued to drag him down,
further and further.
The tightness of the earth fell away from his stomach, then
his chest, then finally his head, and suddenly there was air,
breath, life. The nightmare had breech-birthed him into a new
part of its world. A worse part.
He looked down and saw thirty-five-thousand feet of night
between himself and the ground. Clouds drifted far below, and
beyond them, the twinkling dots of a city. Directly above him
was a swarming, dense mass like that of a dust storm. Within the
dark cloud, unseen hands still had him at the wrists. He
reciprocated, holding on for dear life.
More hands emerged from the cloud. These pushed at his face
and arms. Tiny hands like those of children pulled at his
fingers. Tried to break his grasp.
“No! No!”
Delilah spoke to him through gusts that swung and rocked
him like he was on some reckless, hellish theme ride. “You
wanted to be let go, Lane. I asked for your help, and you told
me to let you go. So I will.”
He held on tighter, tried to pull himself up. More hands
emerged, operating with a different agenda. Long slender fingers
tipped with black nails sharper than talons seized his throat,
clamped onto his shoulders, clawed through his back. Lane
writhed, screamed. He wanted to pull away, but the fall still
terrified him. Explosions were going off in his head, his
sensors overloaded by pain and panic.
“Stop,” he cried. “I’ll do whatever you want! Christ,
please, just…”
“Wrong god,” Delilah said. “And I can’t decide what I want,
Lane. To see you fall, or torn apart. Which is worse? You’ll
help me decide, won’t you?”
A hand swiped at him and ripped a chunk of muscle out of
his chest. Jagged agony struck, and he reflexively bucked to
escape it, so hard that he almost freed himself to gravity’s
inexorable will. He dropped for only a fraction of an instant,
but that was long enough to feel the total, empty horror of the
fall. When he reaffirmed his grasp, his fingers into cramped to
the point of petrification.
“Which is worse, Lane?”
“Please…”
“You have to decide,” Delilah said.
And then a new, familiar voice came to him. Someone calling
to him from afar, telling him…begging him to wake up. It was
weak at first, not for lack of effort, but because of the
barriers between him and the speaker. There was the dream, there
was Delilah telling him to decide, there were the corrugated
crevasses of pain freshly carved into his body, and there was
terror, tumorous and throbbing in his skull.