The Darkest Night

by Mike Ramon

Chapter Sixteen

  Tom picked up Frankie at the park where they had met before. Tom parked and honked, and the boy came walking over, favoring his right foot. When he got to the car he slid into the passenger seat.

  “Hey,” Frankie said.

  “Hey. What’s with the limp?”

  Frankie shook his head.

  “Last night,” was his terse response.

  Tom nodded; that was all that need be said. That was the extent of their communication for a while as they drove. On some of the side streets Tom came across some braches in the road--remnants from the previous night’s storm. He stopped the car each time, ran around the front and tossed the debris away. Frankie waited patiently; he had nothing better to do, anyway. His parents had bought his hasty excuse for the broken window. When the hail got really bad, like silver-dollar-sized bad--their bedroom window couldn’t stand up to the punishment, and had shattered…or so the story went. They didn’t seem to think it odd that the glass had shattered outward and not inward, or that their son had developed a slight limp since they had seen him last.

  “Are you hungry?” Tom asked when he got back in the car after clearing away a toppled-over trashcan that was lying in the street.

  “Nah.”

  Five minutes later they pulled up in front of Patricia’s house. Tom pulled into the driveway, pulling close to the closed garage door before putting the car in PARK and shutting off the engine.

  “Follow me, my man,” Tom said.

  Frankie followed him to the front door. Tom rang the bell. When Patricia didn’t answer the door Tom rang again, and gave the door two sharp raps. Just as he was about to ring a third time (and as worry started to worm its way into his head) they heard the deadbolt turn, and the door opened.

  “Sorry about keeping you waiting, guys,” Patricia said. “I was busy powdering my nose.”

  Tom leaned toward Frankie.

  “That’s what women say they were doing when they were really using the bathroom,” he said in a mock whisper.

  Patricia rolled her eyes.

  “You’re feeling especially charming today, I see,” she said.

  Tom made the hasty introductions:

  “Patricia, Frankie. Frankie, Patricia.”

  She looked down at Frankie and smiled, and held out her hand.

  “It’s nice to finally meet you, Frankie,” she said.

  Frankie, who was still at an age where shaking an adult’s hand seemed weird, shook with her.

  “It’s nice to meet you, too,” he said, returning the compliment.

  “Sit down,” Patricia instructed her guests. “Do you fellas want anything to drink? I have some juice, some diet soda…it’s warm, though. The electricity is still out.”

  “No thanks,” Frankie said.

  “I could use a glass of water,” Tom said.

  “Coming right up.”

  Patricia left them alone in the living room, and they both sat down on the couch. Tom picked up the TV remote from the coffee table and tried to turn the TV on. It was only after he had pointed the device at the TV and clicked the POWER button without a response that he remembered: no electricity, to TV. He put the remote down as Frankie snickered. Patricia came back with a glass of cool water from the tap.

  “Thank you,” Tom said, taking the glass.

  “You’re welcome.”

  Tom took a drink, wiping the moisture from his lips. Patricia stayed standing, her arms folded over her chest.

  “I e-mailed Harry last night to tell him about my nocturnal misadventure,” Patricia said. “I messaged him again early this morning after we talked, Tom. I told him about your expectance, as well.”

  She turned to Frankie.

  “How about you?” she asked. “Tom told me that you had a bad night, too.”

  Early that morning they had played a game of phone tag. Patricia called Tom to tell him what had happened to her the night before, and Tom had related his own story, as well as telling her about the stories of missing kids he had found and that he believed to be connected to the Home. Then Tom had called Frankie and Frankie had told him a condensed version of his own nighttime tale, cutting the story short when he heard his parents pulling into the driveway. Tom had called Patricia back, but since he only had part of the story, he told her that it would be best to wait until the three of them could get together, and for the boy to tell the story himself. Getting out of the house had been easy for Frankie; he only had to tell his parents that he was going to the park to play football with some friends from school, and his mom’s only concern was that he should be wary of any downed power lines he came across.

  Now Frankie told his story, leaving out the screams and the hot tears that had threatened to come forth when he fought against his invisible enemy. Tom and Patricia listened patiently until he was done. They were all quiet for a while then.

  “You say that it felt like the thing that was pulling on you was losing its strength toward the end?” Patricia said. “You just sort of knew it?”

  It was just a question; Frankie didn’t hear doubt in her words, and for that he was grateful.

  “Yeah,” he replied. “It was like it only had so much gas in the tank, and at the end it knew it was running on fumes, and it tried to finish the job quickly. But I was able to hold on.”

  He looked down at his small hands, the instruments of that awesome feat.

  “That pretty much jibes with what Harry suggested this morning,” Patricia said. “Only he used the term ‘plasmic force’ instead of ‘gas’.”

  Tom started to let out a groan, but Patricia gave him a look that made him shut up mid-groan.

  “How’s your foot?” Patricia asked Frankie.

  “Not too bad. I’ll live,”

  Left unspoken between them was the thought of how close they had all come to that statement being false. It was such an unpleasant thought to face up to in the clear light of a brand new day.

  “My ankles hurt like hell,” Tom said.

  “It’s my back that’s killing me,” Patricia said. “I was thrown up there against the wall.”

  She nodded to the wall above the couch.

  “What do you think is going to happen tonight?” Tom asked. “Do you think we might have a repeat performance?”

  Frankie tensed up at the suggestion. He felt that he had gotten very lucky in surviving his scrape with whatever forces had set upon him in the night--they all had--and he wasn’t so sure if they would get that lucky again.

  “I’m not so sure,” Patricia said. “I think it’s like Frankie and Harry both suggested. These things, it’s like they can only expend so much energy before they have to take a break. Harry says that they would have a fountain of energy in their primary habitat, which is the Home, but as they stray farther that all changes. It’s like when they’re in or near their habitat they are plugged into a power socket, but when they leave it they have to operate on battery power.”

  “And their batteries might not be very efficient,” Tom said, expanding on the theory.

  “Right,” Patricia agreed. “Think about it. First there was that incident at the library--they moved some stuff around and knocked some boxes off the shelves. Frightening, yes, but it’s not much when you think about it. Then there was the apparition of your wife. Again--scary, but physically harmless. I think it took them some time to charge up enough juice to pull off what they did last night. I don’t think they would be able to charge up enough to do it again so quickly.”

  Frankie felt a weight being lifted off of him while hearing this. He thought that maybe he would be able to get some sleep that night, after all. Then Tom went and deflated this sense of hope.

  “But this is all just conjecture,” Tom said. “We don’t actually know anything.”

  “If you have a better theory, I’d be interested to hear it,” Patricia said.

  “All right, all right; I didn’t mean anything by it,” Tom said. “I’m just saying that we should be cautious. We don’t w
ant to get complacent and then get blindsided by something.”

  “If they do come back tonight, there’s nothing I can do about it until it happens,” Frankie said. “I mean, I have to go home. It’s not like I can tell my parents, ‘Hey, it’s not safe here anymore because some evil ghosts are trying to kill me, so could we move to Nebraska or something?’”

  “Look, maybe you guys are right,” Tom said. “Maybe these things ran out of energy, or gas, or plasma force--”

  “Plasmic force,” Patricia corrected as she left the living room, heading down the hallway. “Keep going; I’m listening.”

  “Whatever. Maybe they ran out of it, and by making it through the night we bought ourselves some time. Just try to…I don’t know, be aware and on the lookout for anything strange. If something happens, we’ll just have to deal with it.”

  Patricia came back into the living room carrying her laptop, sat on the couch next to Tom and flipped up the lid.

  “What are you doing?” Tom asked.

  “Harry said he would probably send me something,” she said. “And that I should keep an eye out. I’m checking my e-mail.”

  Tom took another drink of water, which was starting to get warm. As Patricia tapped the buttons on her laptop Frankie rubbed his hands together in an unconscious gesture that betrayed his continued uneasiness in spite of Tom’s attempt to reassure him that they would probably (a key word, that) be okay for a while.

  Tom watched Patricia as her eyes moved back and forth over the screen, her lips screwed up in concentration. When she was done reading she looked up at him.

  “Good news,” she said.

  “Spill it.”

  “Harry will be here in a week. He’s bringing the two assistant he mentioned while we were IM’ing the other day.”

  “Shit. A week is a long time.”

  “Beggars can’t be choosers. And please don’t swear in front of Frankie.”

  “I don’t mind,” Frankie said.

  Patricia typed a reply, letting Harry know that they had gotten the message and that they would be waiting patiently (or trying to, anyway) for his arrival. After sending the e-mail she closed the lid of the laptop and set it aside.

  “We’ll meet here next Tuesday,” she said. “Is that going to be all right for you guys?”

  “Yep,” Tom answered.

  “Yes,” Frankie said, nodding his head.

  “Good. Later, we’ll figure out the best time to meet up. I’ll call you.”

  “All right,” Tom said.

  With that agreed upon the three of them sat in a row on the couch, Patricia and Frankie flanking Tom, none of them saying anything.

  “Well,” Tom said, cutting through the silence. “If there’s nothing else to go over right now, I guess we should get going. Come on, Frankie; I’ll drive you home.”

  They all got up from the couch and Patricia showed her visitors to the door.

  “Be careful,” she cautioned them as they left. “But stay positive. The cavalry is on the way.”

  “I just hope the cavalry knows what the hell they are doing,” Tom said.

  He high-tailed it out of there before Patricia could retort.

  “Bye,” Frankie said.

  “Bye, sweetheart.”

  Frankie blushed at the comment, but he turned away so Patricia wouldn’t notice. When he got into Tom’s car Tom took one look at him and saw the flush.

  “Yeah, she has that effect,” Tom said. “Trust me, though--you don’t want to see her when she’s angry.”

  They pulled out of the driveway and drove away from Patricia’s place.

  “Hey Frank, what do you say we catch a bite to eat before I drop you off?”

  “Sure.”

  “You’re hungry, huh?”

  “No, not really,” Frankie said, staring out his window. “I just don’t want to go home right away.”