6.
The man was gone when Reggie got back to the tree house. The sled was empty where he’d left it; no trace of the man as if he’d been raptured for judgment.
Then he heard a noise from above, looked up, and saw a pale oval high over him looking down. It moved back and out of sight, and Reggie whispered, ‘I’m coming up’ and moved to the rungs of the ladder nailed to the tree.
At the top he crawled-pushed himself onto the floor and rose to a squat.
The old lantern his dad had given him for the tree house bloomed alive when the man lit it and put both them and the space between them in a dim yellowish light. They could have been Neanderthals huddled in a cave in some distant aeon passed.
‘I brought this,’ Reggie said, still whispering, holding out the spool of fishing line he’d taken from the garage and the sewing needle from the kitchen drawer.
He held it out to the man like an offering and the man took it, setting it down with the rest of their surgical equipment – the sterile pads, gauze, aspirin, and peroxide. The man wore only his heavy denim jacket against the night chill, having removed the shirt at some point. It lay in a bloody bundle in one corner. The flesh of his torso above and below the bandaged area was pale and ghostly.
‘This won’t be … pretty either …’ the man said, sounding stronger and more lucid than before. ‘You may not … want to stay,’ he said, looking across the small room at Reggie with eyes like stone.
‘I’ll stay,’ Reggie said, squatting and watching.
The man unwound a length of fishing line and threaded it through the eye of the needle. He awkwardly and stiffly dug out his wallet from his pants pocket and brought it to his mouth and bit down on it.
Then he started.
Reggie didn’t know what to expect, but what he saw was terrifying and captivating at the same time. The man unwrapped the gauze from around his middle and peeled the blood-sticky pads from just below his ribs. He dug into his pockets again and pulled out a lighter. The lighter was shaped like a boot and he flicked the flame to life and ran the sewing needle under it for about a minute.
Then he picked up the hydrogen peroxide, twisted off the cap, and trickled a good amount over the wound, as he’d done earlier. It fizzled and foamed about the raw flesh like the remnants of ocean waves on a shoreline. The needle poked at the flesh around the wound, reminding Reggie of a tent pole pushing up at the canvas. Resistant until the needle broke and slid through the skin and trailed the fishing line over the wound, then returning the way it’d come, criss-crossing the wound like train tracks.
As he watched, a memory of his mom talking to her sister on the phone shortly after his father’s death snapped to life in Reggie’s mind. He’d caught a snippet of the conversation from his hiding place just outside his parents’ room.
I saw him on the coroner’s table! He was patched up! his mom had said, fighting back tears, sniffling back sobs. Stitched up like a doll!
The man before him now groaned behind the bit of the wallet.
His eyes teared and he had to stop to swipe at them.
His hands trembled and he had to stop again to still them.
And then the wound was closed, trickling blood like a squinty, weeping eye. He motioned Reggie over. Reggie obliged without hesitation. The man took the wallet out of his mouth.
‘Bandage it again …’ he managed, his voice again tremulous.
Reggie nodded and found the unused gauze and pads and went to work, standing, crouching, moving around the man as necessary, bringing the gauze about his middle and over the sterile pads.
‘Make it … tight …’ the man said, and Reggie did so, using the enclosed clasps to bind the gauze. When it was done, he stood and moved back, looking at his work.
The man’s eyes fluttered. He settled back onto the floor, slowly, carefully, favouring his aches and pains.
‘No ambulance …’ he said, losing consciousness. ‘No police … we have an … arrangement …’ he muttered, repeating what he had said earlier. And then he was gone, out cold, and Reggie was alone in the tree house that his dad had built and a stranger now inhabited.
CHAPTER TWO
1.
The man awoke in the middle of the night. He sat up, saw Reggie there still watching him. Reggie smiled at the man, feeling dumb, but not knowing how else to greet him. A handshake or wave would have been even dumber.
‘How long …?’ he rasped. Reggie reminded himself to bring some water back for the man next time he went to the house.
‘A few hours,’ he said.
The man held up his arm, looking at his watch.
‘It’s two in the … morning,’ the man said. ‘You’ve been here … the whole time?’
Reggie nodded.
‘Won’t your … parents wonder where you are?’ he asked.
‘I snuck out,’ Reggie said.
The man nodded solemnly, as if considering something of immense importance.
‘You maybe … shouldn’t help me … anymore,’ he said, his voice gaining resolve, becoming stronger, more assured.
‘Why not?’ Reggie asked.
‘I’m not a good … person,’ the man said, choking back a cough, leaning to the side and spitting. Reggie looked at the spit, saw it was tinged with blood.
Then he looked back at the man.
‘Tell me about it,’ he said.
For a time the man said nothing.
Then he turned back to Reggie and did just that.
***
‘I kill people,’ he began.
‘Why?’ Reggie asked, mildly shocked by the man’s admission, and at the same time immediately interested. A part of him knew he should be scared if the man was telling the truth. Knowing the man was telling the truth, however, didn’t bother him as it should.
Reggie had seen death, close up, on a parking lot’s asphalt. And countless times afterward, replayed in night terrors. Its constant assault over the past year had numbed him.
‘For money,’ the man said.
‘Good people or bad people?’
‘Any people,’ he said. ‘Whomever I’m paid to kill.’
‘How many people have you killed?’
‘Many,’ he said slowly with a small nod of his head, as if confirming the answer. ‘Many people.’
‘How long have you been doing it?’
‘A long time,’ he said with another nod. ‘A very long time.’
‘Does it pay well?’
‘What?’ the man said, a slight note of surprise in his tone.
‘Killing people,’ Reggie asked. ‘Does it pay well?’
‘Yes.’
‘So you don’t need the money anymore.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘I guess I don’t.’
‘So why do you keep doing it?’
He didn’t answer immediately. It was as if speaking gave the man strength, but in pausing his body rattled with laboured breathing. When he spoke again the tremors passed.
‘I guess it’s all I know how to do,’ he said.
‘Do you like it?’ Reggie asked.
‘Do I like it?’ the man repeated, taken aback once more.
‘My dad did many jobs until he found what he liked doing,’ Reggie said. ‘Then when he found the job he liked, he never left it. We don’t have to do things we don’t like. So you must like doing it.’
The man said nothing.
‘You must like killing people,’ Reggie said.
‘There’s a power in it,’ the man finally said. His hand roamed and found his gun, stroking it, almost as if he wasn’t aware of it. ‘Knowing you hold someone’s life in your hands. That you can end them and the world will continue as if they’d never existed at all.’
Reggie nodded as if he knew what the man was talking about.
But he didn’t speak. Waited instead for the man to continue.
‘There’s a thrill,’ the killer said, ‘a rush when I pull the trigger or tighten the wire around the throat or sink the
knife in the belly. There’s no one to tell me what I can and can’t do. I answer to no one.’
‘Have you killed women?’ Reggie asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Have you killed children?’ he asked.
‘Yes.’
‘What about God?’ Reggie said.
‘What about Him?’ the man asked.
‘What about hell?’
The man shook his head slowly. He smiled but it wasn’t a happy smile or even a smile of amusement, like he thought what Reggie said was funny or stupid or both. It was a sad smile, like he missed something he’d once been fond of.
‘I’ve never seen anything that would make me believe in a heaven or a hell,’ he said. ‘I’ve seen cruelty, and greed, and men and women pushing and manoeuvring to make it to the top. Only to find that when they’re at the top there’s somewhere else they want to be. Somewhere higher.’
‘Will you kill me?’ Reggie asked.
The man stared at him long and hard.
‘I haven’t yet, have I?’ he said.
‘That’s because you still need me,’ Reggie said. ‘You’re not healthy enough yet to get along on your own.’
The man smiled again and nodded sagely.
‘That’s very perceptive,’ the man said. ‘Always mind the details.’
‘Will you kill me when you’re better?’ Reggie asked.
‘No,’ the man said. ‘I don’t think so.’
‘Why?’
‘Because we have a deal,’ the man said. ‘And in my line of work, a deal’s a deal. A man’s word means everything.’
‘What if I break it?’ Reggie asked. ‘What if I call the police?’
‘You won’t,’ the man said, looking at him intently, as if he were reading fine print on a contract.
Under such scrutiny, Reggie had to look away.
Not because he was scared, though. And not because of any suggestion of threat beneath the man’s words should the deal be broken. But because, Reggie realized, he knew he wouldn’t call the police.
He’d made that decision the moment he’d run up to help the man and hadn’t turned away even after seeing the gun beneath the jacket.
Reggie looked away because the killer, having known him only a few hours, already read Reggie like a book. This was the kind of insight that only a close family member had.
Someone like a mother … or a father.
They were quiet for a time, looking across the space at each other. The lantern was lit but carried hardly a few feet. Outside the open windows of the tree house the night was heavy and dark. As if the two of them were in the last habitable space in an abyss.
The man looked at his abdomen, then out the window nearest him, then at Reggie again. He looked tired, aware, and restless all at the same time, like how Reggie felt when he had a big test the next day at school. Something important that much else depended on.
‘You should probably go to bed,’ the man said.
Reggie nodded and moved to the ladder.
‘I think I’ll need something for infection,’ the man said.
Reggie looked back and nodded again.
The man gave him the names of some drugs. Some for pain, stronger than the aspirin, he told Reggie he could find in a store. Others, he’d have to look around at home, maybe search his parents’ medicine cabinet. The man told Reggie to be back as soon as possible in the morning with them.
Reggie nodded again and started down the ladder. Then he paused and poked his head back up.
‘What’s your name?’ he asked.
‘Ivan,’ the killer said.
‘I’m Reggie,’ he said.
The man nodded in his direction.
‘Good to meet you, Reggie,’ he said.
‘Are we friends?’ he asked.
The man smiled that same sad smile for the third time.
‘I guess we are at that,’ he said. ‘Now get along to bed.’
Reggie gave a little wave and descended the ladder. He jumped down the last few steps and turned back towards home.
The distance and darkness from the woods to the house seemed immense; shadows everywhere where things could hide. Yet he wasn’t frightened at all. He felt as if there was something watching his back. Something protecting him. Something that killed and wasn’t afraid of hell and didn’t answer to anyone.
In fact, the walk back was quite peaceful.
2.
Reggie awoke rested and energetic. He ate his breakfast fast and enthusiastically and this seemed to please his mom. He told her the pancakes were great and swallowed them down with a large glass of orange juice. This made her smile.
Dropping his dishes into the sink, he told her he was thinking of riding into town. This seemed to make her even happier.
‘It’s good for you to get out and do things,’ she said. ‘You’ve been holed up in this place too long.’
No doubt she assumed a trip to the comic book or video game store was his destination. Reggie said nothing to make her think otherwise. He just smiled back and walked out of the kitchen.
Upstairs, he showered, dressed, then left the house, wheeling his bike out of the garage for the first time in months. He checked the tyres, hopped on, and was soon down the road and turning onto the highway. The desert road twisted downwards, a serpentine thing, and the town out there ahead of him, miniscule but growing. Like a toy model magically rising to human dimensions.
A mile down the road he saw the sirens, flashing red and blue.
To either side of the highway desert fields stretched to the horizon in great white expanses. Sparse cacti and trees and bushes dotted the bone-white stretches like stragglers of a great migration. Periodically, ditches and arroyos dipped the surface like moon craters. Men and women in police department blue and sheriff’s department tan spread out to either side of the highway, moving further from the road and deeper into the fields. Some lingered by the shoulders of the road and leaned against open patrol car doors and spoke into radios.
A young deputy flagged him with a wave when Reggie rode near and he braked in front of the man. Reggie squinted in the morning sunlight and visored his eyes with a hand to look up at the deputy.
‘How’s it going, kid?’ the deputy asked. He chewed gum or tobacco like cud as he spoke, and hooked his thumbs in his belt like a movie marshal swaggering into town.
‘Fine, officer,’ Reggie said, being respectful as his parents had raised him to be.
‘Where you off to?’ the deputy asked, not really looking at Reggie as he asked the question. He looked this way and that to either side of the highway, like he wanted to be out there with the others, and not on the sidelines directing bicycle traffic.
‘Town,’ Reggie said. ‘It’s summer break.’
‘Yeah,’ the deputy said, turned and spat a large black wad, ‘well, just be careful.’
‘What happened?’ Reggie asked, following the deputy’s lead and turning and looking out into the barren desert fields where others were fanning out, checking ditches, peering behind pathetic gnarled trees and rocks.
The deputy looked at Reggie for the first time. A hint of a smile touched the corners of his mouth.
‘There’s a dangerous man out there,’ he said, not doing a good job at keeping the amusement from his tone. ‘A really bad, dangerous man.’
‘That so?’ Reggie asked, trying to sound interested and worried at the same time.
‘That’s so,’ the deputy said, grinning.
‘What’d he do?’ Reggie asked.
The deputy looked to either side again and then leaned in confidentially, as if he was sharing a secret. He motioned Reggie forward and Reggie pushed the bike closer with his feet on the ground.
The deputy cupped a hand conspiratorially around his mouth.
‘He raped and killed a woman and killed her kid,’ he whispered.
Reggie didn’t say anything.
‘You know what rape is, kid?’ the deputy said, speaking above a whisper now,
but not by much.
Reggie nodded.
‘Do you really?’ the deputy said, cocking his head a bit like he didn’t believe Reggie. ‘Because I don’t think you really do unless you’ve seen the results.’
Reggie shifted uncomfortably in his seat.
‘We’ve got pictures,’ the deputy said.
Reggie didn’t know what to say.
‘Of the crime scene,’ the deputy elaborated. ‘I can show you, if you want.’
Reggie started pedalling again, steering around the deputy.
‘I’ve gotta go,’ Reggie said, his heart beating fast.
‘Stay on the road where people can see you!’ the deputy called after him.
The asphalt rolled along under him, the town drawing closer. The laughter behind him grew vague and distant and was gone. Leaving Reggie alone with his thoughts of pictures of raped women and dead children.
***
He chained his bike in front of the drugstore and walked in, the whoosh of the air conditioning meeting him in a cool wave. Brilliant white and sterile walls and floor made the place seem dreamlike. As he passed by the checkout area a clerk waved to him and said hi and Reggie said hi back and moved deeper into the store.
He found the pharmacy and drug aisles towards the back. A line mostly of old people stood in front of the window, behind which clerks in white lab coats browsed shelves for bottles and passed them over to the old people.
Walking past, Reggie peered down an aisle where a teenaged boy a couple years older than him was trying to discretely peruse the rubbers. He saw Reggie looking at him, and Reggie hurried past.
In the aisle with the aspirin and sinus and cold medicine he found some of what he’d come for. He had the names on a slip of paper in his pocket and pulled that out to compare it with what was written on the labels.
The man in the tree house had told him some of the drug names on the list wouldn’t be available over the counter, but Reggie thought he recognized them from bottles in the medicine cabinet at home. He grabbed a couple boxes off the shelves in front of him and headed back across the store to the checkout area.
Are You Afraid of the Dark? Page 2