Are You Afraid of the Dark?

by Seth C. Adams

  ‘What’s this?’ he said, looking at the filthy dog but bending and picking up the shotgun.

  ‘Just some dog,’ Reggie said, shrugging, ignoring the shotgun. Inside, in his gut, something twisted and fluttered.

  ‘Is this what you killed that mountain lion with?’ Ivan said, turning to Reggie and hefting the shotgun in one hand.

  Reggie nodded.

  Ivan looked from the shotgun to Reggie and back again.

  ‘Then it’s yours,’ he said, and offered it to him. Reggie reached out slowly, worried it might be some sort of trick. Worried that somehow Ivan might read what had been in his mind ever since he’d first touched the shotgun back at the posse’s camp.

  But then it was in his hands, and it felt right. The weight of the weapon felt good in his palms, his fingers wrapped about it. The weight and power of it; the silent promise of the things it could do.

  Ivan knelt in front of him, surprising Reggie.

  ‘I’ve got to know that I can count on you,’ he said, his stony blue eyes burrowing deep into Reggie’s. ‘It’s not that far to the border. But it’s far enough, the condition I’m in. No doubt they’re out there, looking for me. Maybe looking for you too by now. I have a plan, though. And I need to know that you’ll go along with it.’

  Reggie nodded.

  ‘These past few days,’ Ivan said, ‘you’ve become like a son to me.’

  Reggie didn’t know what to make of this, and so didn’t reply. He was a son, but to a different man than this. That man was dead, yet something in Reggie told him this didn’t matter. You had only one father in this life, for good or bad, and to pretend otherwise didn’t seem right.

  Nonetheless, in spite of everything he’d seen and heard in his time with Ivan – the killer’s stories, the strangled deputy, the photograph slideshow – a part of Reggie also liked hearing what the killer said. He blinked away the tears threatening at the corners of his eyes.

  ‘We’re in this together,’ Ivan continued. ‘I can count on you, right?’

  Reggie nodded again, and was surprised to find he meant it.

  Ivan pulled him close and hugged him. The big man smelled of sour sweat and he felt hot and his skin was clammy. Pulled close to him, Reggie could feel little tremors rolling through the man’s body like tiny earthquakes.

  He told Reggie his plan.

  Reggie nodded.

  They stood, peed a few feet from each other, zipped up, and started south through the woods, towards the white stretch of desert they’d seen from above.

  The dog, wary, stayed a distance behind them.

  ***

  The man was in hunting garb – boots, jeans, a flannel shirt, yellow hunter’s vest, ball cap – so they didn’t immediately know he was a cop. But he carried a large rifle, and Ivan wasn’t taking any chances.

  What happened next was fast and unexpected.

  They were moving south through the woods. There was but the sound of their own soft footfalls, the crunch and crackle of woodland beneath them. The trees were thick, so that they could see ahead in only broken and intermittent patches. Up a rise they trudged, and then at the top of it there he was, the hunter.

  The hunter and the killer looked at each other across the small space between them. Something seemed to pass between the two men in the silence as they regarded each other. Each read the other, neither liking what they discerned in the reading, and they moved.

  Reggie had never in his life seen someone move so fast. He wouldn’t have thought it possible outside movies and comic books if he hadn’t seen it with his own eyes. The hunter raised his rifle towards Ivan, words on the verge of being spoken, his lips curling and moving with the intent, and then Ivan was there, across the gap between them like a phantom coalesced.

  His left arm moved like a piston, swinging up and under the barrel of the rifle. The rifle leapt up and pointed skyward harmlessly, the thunder crack of its discharge as the hunter pulled the trigger ear-splitting and announcing its intent hadn’t been harmless at all. With his other arm Ivan made a quick, darting jab at the hunter’s throat. The hunter choked and gagged and staggered back, though he held onto the rifle with a vise-like grip.

  Ivan kicked out with one leg, a motion as swift as the darting throat jab, and his heel connected with the hunter’s right knee. There was a pop as of a child playing with bubble wrap. The hunter fell with a squeal. He released his grip on the rifle, which Ivan cast away behind him.

  The hunter’s rifle hit the ground with a clatter a couple feet from Reggie. He looked at the firearm, considering it. In his mind he pictured Ivan moving a little slower. The rifle in the hunter’s hands, in this imaginary rewind, pointed at Ivan and firing with a cannon-like roar.

  Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Ivan reach into his jacket.

  Reggie watched the pistol emerge. The one whose barrel he’d stared down only a few days before. He saw the gun pointed at the hunter.

  He thought of Johnny Witte, battered and bloodied by Reggie’s own hands in the vacant field. He thought of Deputy Collins again, dead at the bottom of the cliff. He thought of the men at the camp, dragged off into the night by the thing that may have been a mountain lion.

  All that blood. It stained things.

  It stained the soul.

  ‘No!’ he bellowed as Ivan levelled the pistol and sighted down the length of his arm at the man on the ground.

  The killer favoured Reggie with the slightest turn of the face, so he looked at him askance. Ivan’s face could have been an alabaster bust, a lifeless, inanimate thing, and not the face of a man.

  ‘He’s a cop,’ the killer said.

  ‘No, I’m not!’ said the man on the ground.

  ‘He’s part of the search party,’ the killer said. ‘He’s looking for me.’

  ‘No!’ said the man. ‘No!’ as if that single syllable explained everything.

  ‘Don’t kill him!’ Reggie said to the killer.

  ‘Don’t kill me!’ the hunter echoed.

  Nothing moved but the killer’s lips. And even those could have been the merest of trembles from a master ventriloquist. His eyes askance on Reggie; his gun arm ramrod straight pinning the hunter to the ground; the rest of his body statuesque, immobile.

  ‘He’s after me,’ said the killer. ‘There could be others nearby.’

  ‘I’m not a cop!’ said the hunter, holding his leg gingerly, whimpering.

  ‘I can see it in his eyes,’ said the killer. ‘His identification is on him.’

  ‘I have kids!’ said the hunter, not refuting the existence of such damning credentials.

  Both looked at Reggie now. One wanting to kill; one wanting to live. And they both looked to him, as if he would determine the outcome of things.

  Reggie looked about frantically. For what, he didn’t know. His mind raced for an answer. Flashes of blood and death flitted through his brain.

  ‘Your belt!’ he bellowed, pointing at the killer. He started unbuckling his own as he spoke, pulling it free of the waistband and tossing it towards the killer. ‘Tie him up!’

  ‘Yes!’ the hunter said, nodding frantically and smiling nervously. ‘Tie me up!’ he said, and started working at his own belt, unbuckling it and pulling it loose. He proffered the length of leather up like a penitent to his confessor. ‘I have kids!’ he said again, though the tone of his voice made it clear who his concern was for.

  The killer looked at the two belts Reggie and the hunter, maybe a police officer, had tossed at his feet. Then he looked back at Reggie, and finally again at the hunter.

  ‘You try anything,’ he said, bending slowly to scoop up the coiled belts, ‘and I’ll stick this in your mouth,’ he said with a waggle of the gun, ‘and blow out the back of your head.’

  There was a radio static-like squawk and the world froze.

  ‘Jeff!’ sounded an urgent voice from within the hunter’s jacket. ‘Was that gunfire? Are you okay? Over.’

  Jeff the hunter, Jeff with kids, J
eff who had said he wasn’t a cop and yet had a walkie-talkie in his jacket, looked from Reggie to Ivan, back and forth, his eyes rapid and panicked. Ivan gestured with the pistol, didn’t fire, but the motion made Jeff the hunter flinch and wince.

  ‘Answer the man,’ the killer said. ‘Tell him you’re okay. Nothing’s wrong. A deer spooked you.’

  Jeff the hunter nodded, dug into his jacket with shaky hands, pulled out the walkie-talkie, fumbled it, and the three of them watched it clatter to the ground. After a pause in which he thought it was all over, that he was dead for dropping the radio, that that was the last straw that would set the killer off, Jeff the hunter reached out and picked up the radio again. Holding it in his hand, thumb on the talk button, he looked from Reggie to the killer.

  ‘Jeff?’ squawked the radio again. ‘This is Sheriff Connolly. Are you okay? Do you copy?’

  ‘Gather yourself,’ the killer said. ‘Calm yourself. Be convincing.’

  The consequences for not gathering himself, calming himself, and being convincing were implicit in the pistol in the killer’s hands, and Jeff the hunter nodded. He closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and pressed the talk button on the walkie-talkie.

  ‘Copy Sheriff,’ he said. ‘I’m fine. A deer startled me. I killed an innocent pine. I might be looking at a five to nine stretch. Over.’

  He did well, Reggie thought. He did great. He sounded calm. With the threat of death over him, he’d gathered himself. The man was good under pressure, which was good for him, or he’d be dead and he wouldn’t have to worry about his kids or gathering himself or being calm and convincing ever again.

  ‘Copy Jeff,’ said the static squawking voice on the other end. ‘Try not to be such a dumbass and go killing anymore trees. If the man’s still out here, you probably just alerted him and he’s halfway to Cancun by now. Over.’

  ‘Copy Sheriff,’ Jeff the hunter said, who most definitely was a cop, a cop with kids. ‘Over.’

  The hunter, the cop, held the radio out to the killer, nodding as if for approval. The killer stepped forward and took it, pocketed it. Then he motioned for Jeff the hunter to lie down and turn over, and he went to work with the belts.

  ***

  The killer started with the basics.

  ‘How many others are out there?’ he asked.

  The hunter who wasn’t a hunter, at least not of beasts but of men, lay with his head against a tree stump. His arms and legs were bound in front of him, at the wrists and ankles, and a third belt, his own, attached those vertically. The belts didn’t make the tightest of bonds, but they hobbled him well enough that the effort he’d have to make to get free would alert them long before he actually was. And they all three knew what would come then.

  ‘Maybe a dozen,’ the hunter said. He answered quickly and eagerly, like a prized student wanting to please a favourite teacher. ‘But they’re not as organized as they were a few days ago. They figure you’ve already made it to Mexico, and now they’re just going through the motions for the public and the reporters.’

  Reggie realized something then, listening to the hunter. It was both a brief and flitting thought, there and gone, and also a clear and distinct realization. He felt this thing without it really being fully formed.

  He saw the officer bound by the belts on the forest floor, and he also saw himself pinned on the sidewalk in front of the drugstore by Johnny Witte. What he realized was this: most people, when at a disadvantage, when faced with fear of the unknown, became cowards. They were quick to please and fast to beg.

  He hadn’t done so when faced with the larger kid and the promise of an ass whooping at the drugstore.

  Yet here before him was a grown man, reduced to a trembling, quivering mess.

  Did this make him better than the man bound at his feet?

  Did this make the hunter smaller than him?

  Reggie saw the bound man and imagined himself in Ivan’s shoes, having the power and the will to use that power. He could hit the man. He could kick the man. He could go to work with his knife. And the hunter could beg and plead and cry and none of it would matter, because it would be up to him when things ended, if they ended at all.

  All of this came in a quick blur through Reggie’s mind, like the flipping of pages in a book. Yet it lingered also, somewhere in the back, in a corner, and its repercussions didn’t escape him.

  ‘Where about?’ asked the killer, waving his gun like a conductor.

  ‘Most to the north and northwest,’ the hunter said with a nod in that general direction. ‘Probably a half mile or so away at most.’

  ‘But not organized,’ the killer said.

  ‘No,’ the hunter who was a cop said. ‘No grid pattern search or nothing. We’re just striking out, searching semi-randomly, keeping in radio contact. Like I said, most of us thought you’d made it over the border already.’

  ‘So the way south is clear,’ the killer said, not a question really, just a statement requiring a prompt response. The hunter nodded. ‘And you know what I’d do to you if we go south and there’s a posse waiting or a blockade or something?’

  This was a question and a statement at the same time, intended for the hunter to imagine the possibilities.

  By the widening of his eyes, like an owl’s round gaze, Reggie saw the man knew those possibilities or imagined his own that were just as bad.

  ‘Yes!’ he said, nodding fast so that his neck waggled like a turkey waddle.

  ‘I might be gone for awhile,’ the killer said. ‘I’d have to lay low for a bit. But if we go south and I find the way blocked, if I find out you lied to me, I’d come looking for you.’

  The hunter’s eyes widened even more, if that were possible. They rolled side to side in a panic. He shook his head frantically, begging for the killer to believe him.

  ‘You’d never know when I’d come back,’ the killer said. ‘It could be a month, or a year, or ten. But you’d be sitting at home someday watching television, or reading the paper, and you’d hear a noise and look up, and there I’d be. And I’d kill you. I’d kill you slow. And your kids, I’d kill them too, and make you watch it.’

  ‘No no no no no …’ the hunter said, over and over, shaking his head. ‘Please please please …’ he said, back and forth, no no no, please please please, like two alternating bridges of a shitty pop song.

  ‘So I ask again,’ the killer said. ‘Is the way south clear?’

  The hunter didn’t answer as quickly this time.

  His breathing was shallow and rapid. Sweat stains grew about his underarms.

  ‘Is the way south clear?’ the killer repeated.

  The hunter gave his head the slightest of shakes. So slight that it could have been merely a tick or twitch. The killer stepped closer, knelt beside the hunter, and pressed the muzzle of the pistol against the trembling man’s forehead.

  ‘Is the way south clear?’ the killer asked again.

  The crying man shook his head.

  ‘No,’ he croaked. His face was red with his sobs. Snot dribbled out of his nose. His eyes crossed staring at the muzzle between them. He closed his eyes after taking it in.

  The killer leaned closer, spoke softer, more intimately, so that he was almost a lover whispering in the crying man’s ear.

  ‘Why did you lie to me?’ the killer asked.

  The man didn’t answer. He kept his eyes closed and cried.

  ‘Why did you lie to me?’ the killer repeated, leaning oh so close, whispering, almost consoling like one at a friend’s deathbed.

  ‘It’s … my job …’ said the hunter, the officer, through his tears, his eyes still shut, shut against the world that no longer made sense.

  ‘What about being a father?’ the killer asked. ‘Is that not your job also?’

  The crying man didn’t answer. At least not the killer’s question. His lips moved slightly. The words were soft and lost in the air. Reggie knew what the man was doing, and he wondered if anyone was listening.

 
‘You know what I have to do now, don’t you?’ the killer said, sounding compassionate, sympathetic. ‘You know I have to kill you, don’t you?’

  The praying man didn’t answer. But his murmured words streamed faster, so fast they didn’t seem words at all, rather almost a white noise or static from a television or radio.

  The killer rose back to full height. Then bent at the waist, pressing the muzzle hard against the bound man’s forehead.

  Reggie darted forward.

  ‘Don’t!’ he yelled.

  He reached for the killer’s gun. He didn’t even think of the shotgun in his arms. He was met with a backhand, a blow like stone meeting his face, and yet the killer’s motion was nonchalant, almost lazy.

  Reggie fell hard to the ground. His palms and arms were scraped by the grit of the forest floor. The shotgun jumped out of his grip and landed a few feet away. The clatter of it caught his attention, and then he saw it clearly and he wanted it, but he tasted the blood in his mouth from the backhanded blow, the power of it fresh with the pain along his face, and he couldn’t bring himself to move.

  The mangy dog, formerly a distance behind them, darted forward. There was a deep growl emanating from it that was unearthly. It sounded not like a canine or any other animal Reggie had ever heard, but something demonic, something from the darkest nightmares.

  The dog leapt at the killer.

  Without removing the muzzle of the gun from the praying man’s head, the killer somehow did a half turn, raised one leg in a flash of movement, and the dog met the sole of his boot. There was a yelp, the mutt fell to the ground, rolled once, and was still.

  Reggie staggered to his feet, tottered, almost fell again. He felt stuck in some sort of muck, his movements unbearably slow and difficult. The killer looked at him from across the distance between them.

  ‘I’m sorry, Reggie,’ he said. ‘But I have to do this.’

  Reggie turned and ran.

  ‘Reggie!’ he heard behind him, and he hunched his shoulders in expectation of the shot that would kill him, and it came, cracking the day with thunder. Yet he didn’t fall, he didn’t die, and he knew it wasn’t he who was shot but the hunter who wasn’t a hunter, the cop with kids, now dead, head shattered and pouring blood and gruel into the forest soil, feeding the roots hidden beneath.