The Darkest Night

by Mike Ramon

Chapter Seventeen

  The week was a quiet and uneventful one, for which the three of them were grateful. That first night was a long, sleepless one for all of them, but as the days wore on sleep came easier.

  Tom made a few appearances at the office, staving Charlie off with hints at the big story he was working on, and how it was worth the time he was spending on it. He was careful not to be definite on a time frame for the completion of the story, or on the exact nature of said story.

  Patricia spent every weekday at the rec center. Over the weekend she caught a Buster Keaton double feature at the Egyptian, and visited her sister in Waterville. She went through all the motions of how she thought a reasonably happy, contented, not-scared-witless thirty-two year old woman was supposed to act. She smiled, she laughed, and she listened attentively to her sister’s concern about her daughter’s newfound pre-teen rebelliousness. In truth, though, her thoughts were never far from Cedar Falls, the Home, and the dark things she had a feeling she wasn’t quite through with (or rather, that weren’t through with her).

  Frankie spent a lot of time at the park, he watched a movie (not at the Egyptian, which only showed old black & white movies and art house films, but the Northstar 16, which showed all the good shoot ‘em up movies with lots of explosions). He even went swimming at the Sports Complex again, scanning the pool and surrounding area carefully for any sign of Buddy or his minions. The coast looked clear, and he swam laps until he was pleasantly exhausted.

  He didn’t see Buddy, but Buddy saw him; the boy left after seeing Frankie, brooding on his failed attempts to teach the little bastard a lesson he wouldn’t forget. Frankie would never know that he and Buddy were just feet from each other that day at the pool, Buddy staring needles into his back.

  In short, they spent as much time away from their respective homes as possible. Those places had become places to fear, and even if they were able to sleep a little better, they each on their own thought it better not to tempt fate, and to be home as little as possible.

  Tuesday dawned bright and warm. Early in the day a few clouds rolled in from the southeast, but they passed quickly, leaving the town to bathe in the pure sunlight of summer. At two in the afternoon Frankie told his parents that he was going to his friend Tony’s house. Tony had been his friend through the last school year, but Frankie hadn’t seen much of him during the summer, and that’s not where Frankie was really going. Instead he walked to the McDonald’s where Tom had parked the day he had come stumbling into Frankie’s backyard like a second-rate secret agent. Tom was waiting for him there. They had a late lunch before heading over to Patricia’s house. Patricia wasn’t home when they got there, but she had let Tom know to check under the doormat for a key. Tom let Frankie and himself into the house, and Frankie went straight for the TV remote. He turned on the tube and started channel surfing, looking for something good to watch. Tom helped himself to a Snapple bottle, feeling a little guilty about taking something without asking, even though Patricia had said for them to make themselves at home. He then took a seat beside Frankie on the couch just as Frankie settled on a movie.

  “What is this?” Tom asked.

  “Transformers 3. I’ve seen it before, but it’s pretty cool. Have you seen it?”

  “Can’t say that I have.”

  They watched the movie together, but Tom barely noticed anything that was happening on the screen; he was thinking about Patricia, who had driven into the city to pick up what passed for their cavalry--Harry and his assistants. He checked his watch often, and each time he was surprised by how little the hands had moved.

  When it reached six o’clock, and as Frankie sat absorbed in another movie, Tom took out his phone and thought about calling Patricia to ask her what the hold-up was. He wrestled with it for a minute before putting the phone away; he didn’t want her to know just how nervous he was.

  Six minutes later a car pulled into the driveway. Tom got up off the couch and went to the front window, pushing the curtain aside to look out. It was Patricia’s car, and he could see three silhouettes inside it besides hers. The living room got quiet as Frankie turned off the TV.

  “Is it them?” Frankie asked.

  “Yes,” Tom said as he let the curtain fall back into place.

  Tom turned away from the window, pacing back and forth in front of the sofa. From outside came the sound of cars doors opening and closing, and the soft chatter of people talking amongst themselves. Tom moved to the door and opened it just as Patricia was about to slip her key into the lock.

  “Good day, Miss Gomez,” he said with a smile. “Would you like to come in?”

  “That’s Mrs. Gomez,” she corrected him.

  Tom could have kicked himself for the mistake. He moved back and let her enter. A burly, bearded man followed behind her, and then two younger people, a man and a woman who looked to be in their early- to mid-twenties. Tom nodded to the new arrivals, and Harry nodded back.

  “Harry Starks,” the bearded man said, sticking out one beefy hand.

  “Tom Dwyer,” Tom said back, shaking the hand briefly.

  Harry gestured with a hand first at the young man, then at the woman.

  “These are my assistants Jack Ketchner and Katie Newsome.”

  Tom shook their hands as well.

  “It’s nice to meet you all,” he said.

  Frankie, forgotten until now, came forward.

  “I’m Frankie,” he said simply.

  “Glad to meet ya, Frankie Boy,” Harry said, giving the boy’s shoulder a playful punch.

  Frankie waited until the attention had turned away from him to rub the spot where the tap had landed. After offering refreshments all around (and receiving a “no thanks” all around) Patricia pulled three chairs into the living room from the kitchen, and the group took seats. Harry sat down on one end of the couch, and Patricia sat next to him. Frankie took the other end of the couch. Jack, Katie and Tom sat in a semi-circle on the chairs, facing the couch.

  “So, what do we do now?” Tom asked.

  “First, let’s review,” Harry said, and then did just that, reciting from memory. “Approximately two years ago James Gomez went missing after visiting what you call ‘the Home’. After this Patricia started having dreams of being stuck inside that same building. Then about five weeks ago Jessica Gardener went missing after climbing through a window into the Home.”

  He looked at Frankie.

  “And that’s when you saw these ‘living shadows’, right?” Harry asked.

  Frankie nodded.

  “And then you started having bad dreams as well,” Harry said.

  “At first the dreams were all about being trapped in the Home,” Frankie said. “They always ended with the shadows getting me, hurting me. Then I started having the dreams where I was seeing things that had really happened at the Home a long time ago. Bad things that happened to the kids there.”

  Harry was nodding his head.

  “Retrocognition,” Harry said.

  “Retrocog-what-tion?” Tom asked.

  “Retrocognition. Think of it as a sort of time warp, where a subject finds themself in the past, seeing or experiencing events that have already happened. What I would be interested to know is if there is any level of retroactive psychokinesis.”

  Tom started to speak again, but Harry raised his hand up, fending him off.

  “Retroactive psychokinesis,” Harry explained, “is a rare phenomenon in which a person experiencing retrocognition can actually influence the past events that they are witnessing, or change them in some way.”

  The big man turned to looked over Patricia’s head at Frankie.

  “Have you been able to do anything like that while having these ‘dreams’?” he asked.

  “No. If I could have, I would have stopped that stuff from happening.”

  “You think that people can actually do that?” Tom asked, incredulous. “Change the past, I mean.”

  “There have been cases that I have heard an
d read of,” Harry answered.

  “Did you see in in any journal or magazine that I might have read?” Tom asked.

  “Probably not, unless you have a keen interest in parapsychology.”

  “So you’re saying--”

  “Tom, shush,” Patricia said.

  Tom obeyed, but he wasn’t happy about it.

  “When was the last time you had one of these dreams?” Harry asked, turning his attention back to Frankie.

  “They stopped after that thing that happened last week. You know, the--”

  “Yes, yes,” Harry interrupted him. “We’ll get to that. That’s when the dreams stopped?”

  “Yep.”

  “And how about you?” Harry asked Patricia. “Have you had any of your dreams about this place since the incident a week ago?”

  “No,” she replied. “But then again, I haven’t had many dreams like that at all for the past year or so. They were more frequent right after James disappeared.”

  Harry turned to Tom, who sat with his arms folded over his chest.

  “And the only dream you had was the one where you saw the old fella get taken into the Home?”

  “Yes. His name was Walter.”

  “This suggests ESP, or far-seeing. Not nearly as rare as retrocognitive dreaming, but what’s unique as that you had the sensation of seeing through the eyes of one of these entities, although you had no control over it physically. Usually far-seeing entails the agent--that would be you--witnessing an event from a third-person perspective, much like Frankie and his latter dreams.”

  “Sounds like astral projection,” Katie chimed in.

  “”Huh?” Tom asked.

  “That’s a fancy term for an out-of-body experience,” Harry said. “But I don’t think that’s quite correct. When a person has an out-of-body experience they are still uniquely themselves, even if they have become detached from their physical form. This was different, however. Our friend Tom here found himself inside another form. It’s very strange.”

  “You can say that again,” Tom said.

  “Then there is the apparition of your late wife, Mr. Dwyer. As I told you and Patricia when we messaged each other the day after the event, such manifestations are actually quite rare.”

  “Don’t people claim to have seen the ghost of their loved ones all the time?” Patricia asked.

  “Yes,” Harry said. “And most of them are probably telling the truth.”

  “Wait,” Tom cut in. “Didn’t you just say that it was rare?”

  Harry let out a sigh.

  “Allow me to explain. It is not rare for people who have passed on to come back in some form to see their family or friends again, but in these cases it is the deceased person themselves choosing to come back, for whatever reason. In this case, from what you told me, I don’t think the apparition was actually your wife, but rather a crude facsimile of her. A fake, a forgery. The apparition was put-on that was meant to scare you.”

  “It did a great job of it,” Tom said. “And you’re right--that thing was most definitely not Michelle.”

  “This is all over the place,” Jack said. “We have an inhabited building that is connected to unexplained disappearances, we have retrocognition, far-seeing, apparitions--it’s a complete mishmash of sub-types of paranormal events.”

  “Wait until you hear what happened to all of us a week ago, kid,” Tom told the young man.

  “Yes, let’s talk about that,” Harry said.

  Tom groaned and mumbled something.

  “What’s that?” Harry asked.

  “I said that I would rather not. But go ahead. What the hell, we might as well get it all out there.”

  Harry went on:

  “All three of you, in separate locations, experienced violent telekinetic phenomena on the same night, at the same time. The event at the library was one thing, but the event last week was a whole different ballgame. Just to think of the force, the will that it must have taken to project such kinetic force in three separate places, all of them a good distance away from the Home, and at the same time, is a bit staggering.”

  Harry went over his theories again about how what he called “aural remnants” rarely strayed beyond the boundaries of the location they primarily inhabited, which in this case was the Home, upon which Patricia passed on Frankie’s “gas tank” analogy in explaining why the things that had attacked them seemed to run out of energy and disappear.

  “Not bad,” Harry said. “I think that’s probably about right. Or maybe ‘battery’ is a better term. They charged their battery up, and the battery simply ran out of juice.”

  “That’s what I said,” Patricia said with a smile of self-satisfaction.

  “Why us?” Tom asked.

  “Excuse me,” Harry said. “I’m not sure I understand the question.”

  “Why the three of us?” Tom said, sweeping his hand toward Patricia and Frankie, and then pointing at himself. “Why does this place keep screwing with us?”

  Harry thought about it for a moment.

  “Well,” he said, “Patricia and Frankie each have a personal connection to the Home, and you have a connection to them, so…fuck if I know, man. Excuse my French, Frankie Boy.”

  Harry coughed into a closed fist.

  “We were thinking that maybe the Home is aware of us,” Patricia said. “Maybe even afraid of us. I think it’s trying to scare us enough that we’ll drop all of this.”

  “That’s a good theory,” Harry admitted.

  “What are we going to do now?” Tom asked.

  “Well, like I’ve told Patricia before, I believe that these entities are the aural remnants of the children who died at the Home, murdered most likely. I have a friend who I asked to look for more info on the history of the Home, but he wasn’t able to dig up anything that you guys hadn’t already found on your own. We know that a number of children almost certainly died under violent circumstances within the Home. This seems to be confirmed to an extent by Frankie’s retrocognitive dreams.”

  “So these ‘remnants’ are the ghosts of kids?” Tom asked.

  “I believe that they are.”

  “And why are they snatching people out of the night, and trying to hurt us? Patricia’s husband and Frankie’s sister didn’t do anything to these kids, and neither did Walter or anyone else who went missing near the Home.”

  “As I’ve said, I don’t believe that the aural remnants are malevolent or evil. I don’t think they are even capable of being such things. You have to get out of this mindset that these ‘ghosts’, as you call them, think, experience or feel the way that you or I do. They are operating on a whole other level than us, where there is no good or bad, no right or wrong. Their entire existence is probably a tortured one, where they relive the horrific experiences that they endured in life, and when someone, anyone, intrudes on their territory, they just react without thought, lashing out at anything and everything, the way a dog with rabies will attack the very person who has fed and cared for them all of its life. They are in pain, and they will snap at anything that comes within reach. Now they sense a danger in the form of your trio, and they are probably thinking, ‘Hey, why are these jerks trying to mess with us? We are the ones hurting here.’ Get what I’m trying to say?”

  “I think it’s a load of bullshit, if you want to know the truth,” Tom said. “I’ve seen how these things go after people. That thing whose head I got inside of, it stalked that old man. It was like a game. Malevolent intent? Ask Frankie if he sensed any malevolent intent when he was thrown through a window.”

  “Look, I don’t claim any definitive knowledge about the nature of these particular remnants,” Harry placated. “I’m just giving you my theory of the most likely situation that we are facing here. I could be wrong. We’ll have more definitive answers after tomorrow.”

  “What’s happening tomorrow?” Patricia asked.

  “Tomorrow we are going to set up our equipment inside of the Home, and then we are goin
g to wait, and observe anything that might happen.”

  “Your equipment?” Patricia asked. “The stuff in the bags you put in the trunk of my car?”

  “Correct,” Harry said. “I would set up tonight, but it’s getting dark, and I want to set everything up in daylight. Remnants such as these are usually more active at night, and more powerful. I want to set up camp in peace, if that is at all possible. Then we will wait and see what happens. I don’t think we’ll have to wait long, but if we have to we’ll spend the night there.”

  “Are you sure that’s a good idea?” Tom asked.

  “Of course not. But we’ll do it anyway. Anyone who wants to pull out can do so at any time.”

  “Who’s going with you?”

  “Well, there will be me, Katie and Jack. I would also like for you and Patricia to be there. You two have had first-hand experience with these forces, after all.”

  “What about me?” Frankie asked.

  “No way,” Tom said.

  “But I’m a part of this, too,” the boy protested.

  “I have to agree with Tom,” Harry said. “No offense, son. You’ve got a lot of heart, but you’re too young. I don’t think any of us could forgive ourselves if things went south and you got hurt, and I don’t think that your folks would ever forgive us, either.”

  “But--”

  Frankie stopped himself, seeing that he would get no help from anyone there.

  “Whatever,” he said sulkily.

  “So tonight we’ll stay here, if it’s all right with our hostess?” Harry said, looking at Patricia to see if it was in fact all right.

  “Yeah, that’s fine,” she said. “And I will come with you tomorrow.”

  “Me, too,” Tom, said. “I guess I should stay over her tonight, too.”

  “Good,” Harry said. “Tomorrow we are off to search the abyss.”

  “Not me,” Frankie said.

  Patricia frowned and patted Frankie on the shoulder. The shoulder was still sore from Harry’s friendly greeting punch, but Frankie didn’t mind her comforting gesture.

  “Then it’s all set,” Harry said. “And now I wouldn’t mind those refreshments you offered earlier, Trish. Maybe a glass of water? I’m parched.”

  “Sure thing,” she said, getting up from the couch.

  Tom rolled his eyes at the pet name.

  “Come on, Frankie,” Tom said. “It’s about time I took you home.”

  “Yeah, great,” Frankie said. “Everybody say goodnight to the little kid.”

  Tom didn’t respond to the boys words. He drove Frankie home, dropping him off two blocks away from his house. He watched as the boy walked away into the gloaming. Frankie stopped once, turned back and waved at Tom. Tom waved back, and Frankie continued on his way home. When Tom couldn’t see him anymore he pulled away from the curb and drove back to Patricia’s house.