Reggie kept running.
Behind him he heard the footfalls of pursuit.
CHAPTER TEN
1.
In an earthen den of darkness, curled snug within leaves and dirt, Reggie watched for the killer from a peephole formed of twigs and brush. Beneath a thick copse of trees and a canopy of summer blossomed branches, the space he occupied lay in a preternatural dusk. The daylight struggled to reach him, only breaking through in slim beams of light weaker than that produced by the flashlight tucked away in his pack.
Within such unnatural gloom, every nightmare he’d ever had seemed possible. Every creeping, slithering thing; every malevolent embodied shadow; every sinister sound that had ever populated his night terrors came back at once. And with his father dead and his mother miles away, there was no one to come bursting into his room, gather him in strong arms to a comforting chest, and reassure him that these things were just dreams. Products of an overactive mind. The hulking figure just his dresser. The peering eyes just reflected moonlight. The taunting whisper just the breeze through the parted window. That there was nothing to be afraid of in the dark.
It was just Reggie alone in the woods, and a madman on the hunt.
Trembling, as in a winter chill that wasn’t there, he waited.
***
The killer walked past very close, so that Reggie saw his legs and the legs only, rising and falling, like the gargantuan limbs of a giant. The killer passed him a distance, stopped, leaves and twigs crackling under his boot heels, came back and leaned against a nearby boulder. He looked about, his gaze roaming near to where Reggie was, but passing high, moving over him. The killer spoke in a loud voice, so that it would carry to Reggie if he was anywhere nearby, which he was.
‘You once asked me,’ the killer bellowed, ‘if I’d ever regretted killing people. At the time, I told you about the woman and her son. And that was true. I sometimes think maybe I shouldn’t have killed them.’
He paused for a moment, looked about himself, scanning the woods.
Reggie felt naked in the bushes, under the leaves. He felt the killer saw with otherworldly eyes, and would soon pinpoint his location.
‘That wasn’t the end of it, though,’ the killer called. ‘Soon after them, I stopped taking contracts for a time. I couldn’t get the woman’s face out of my mind. I kept thinking about her holding her child, cradling him, and asking me to kill her too. To kill her after midnight, so that she could die the same time her son had.’
The killer sighed and leaned back, drawing one leg atop the stone, so that he looked like a man resting on a porch step. He lifted his face to the sky. He spoke that way for a time – leg drawn up, face to the sun – and he seemed merely a man for a moment, and not a killer.
‘People contacted me for jobs,’ Ivan said, ‘and I turned them down. I was the best at what I did, and people were concerned. They asked why I was stopping, and I couldn’t explain it to them. I had a hard time understanding it myself. I told them I needed a break. I told them I was worn out. I told them I’d made enough money. I’d worked long and hard, and it was time for me to enjoy what I’d made. I said many things, and they were partly true. Yet it wasn’t the complete truth.’
Reggie moved the slightest bit, extending his right leg which had started to cramp. There was the barest rustle of leaves, and to his ears it sounded like an avalanche.
Yards away from him, the killer took no heed.
He stared into the sky, then at the ground, then off to the distance, talking loud like a speaker addressing a convention audience.
‘I had a house on the coast, and I stayed there for a time. I tried many things to keep myself occupied,’ Ivan said. ‘The first couple days I threw myself into yard work. I mowed the lawn and trimmed the hedges and watered and tilled the garden. For awhile the work made me feel normal. It made me feel like a regular guy.
‘But I went to bed that night,’ the killer said, ‘and still I saw her face. And still I saw her holding her dead son.
‘So the next day I tried exercising,’ Ivan said. ‘I dusted off the equipment in the garage. I pulled the weight bench and the treadmill and the punching bag away from the wall and set them up in the centre of the floor. I worked myself to a sweat. I mean I must have looked like I’d just come back from a swim, I was sweating so much. And it felt good. It again made me think I was just a regular Joe. Maybe I’d just come home from a long day at the office, the wife was making dinner, and I was working out as I waited.
‘But I went to bed that night,’ the killer said, ‘and still I saw her. Holding her dead son. Asking me to kill her too.’
There was a tickle at his nose, a sneeze threatening, and Reggie wiggled it, sniffed softly, fighting back the urge. The sniffing sounded small and barely audible, and loud and alerting at the same time. Again he watched the killer, waiting for the man to come dashing his way, to grab him up and strangle him, or shoot him, but the man remained where he was, sitting comfortably on the rock.
‘Next I tried reading,’ Ivan said. ‘I used to read a lot as a kid, and I’d tried to keep up with it as I grew older. I always bought books, I still do, but they just pile up on my shelves. I sat down that day on the front porch, cracked open a novel, started reading it. It was a bestseller by a great writer, but I found myself lost after five pages. I tried moving indoors, settled on the sofa, started reading again. I was lost even quicker. My eyes moved over the words, but they wouldn’t come together, they didn’t make any sense. I saw them on the page, fitted them to sentences, but their meanings were gone as soon as I read them.
‘And I went to bed that evening,’ the killer said, ‘and again I saw her, and I saw her son.’
Reggie saw a spider in front of him; a big, brown, hairy thing, crawling slowly over a leaf. He could see its eyes, black and glassy. He could hear the weight of it, the legs of the arachnid tapping on the sun-dried leaf. It sounded to him like war drums, announcing his location for the killer.
‘The following morning I went for a walk along the beach,’ Ivan said. ‘On winter mornings sometimes a mist rises from the cooling water. So that it seems all the world to the horizon is lost in some barrier of fog. Like maybe out there things just end, and there’s nothing left. I went out walking and it was like I was the last man in all of creation. Then the fog started rolling onto the beach, and over the sand. And when other people started to get up and come out, they just appeared out of the mist like ghosts. I watched the faces of those passing me, they smiled or nodded, and I smiled and nodded back.’
The killer turned the slightest of degrees in Reggie’s direction. A compass needle honing in on its bearing. But he still looked over and past Reggie’s location.
His right leg cramping, left arm under his chest burning with pins and needles numbness, Reggie fought the urge to shift into a more comfortable position. The greater urge to jump up and run again was harder to push down.
‘It was like I was summoning them,’ the killer continued. ‘They came out of the mist to greet me. They came out of the mist for me. Then returned to the fog from which they’d come. As if they weren’t even real.
‘That night I slept soundly,’ the killer said. ‘The woman and her son were gone from my dreams.’
The killer pushed off of the boulder and strode directly towards Reggie.
Reggie tried not to move, tried not to breathe, telling himself he was out of sight, he couldn’t be seen.
Yet the killer came straight to him, knelt, pushed a hand through the bush, through the leaves, found Reggie, pushed away his struggling limbs, found his collar, and hauled him out. Reggie was dragged out and shoved to the ground.
‘Do you know why I didn’t dream of her that night, Reggie?’ the killer asked, looking down on him.
Reggie looked for a direction to run. He got up and tried to dart away. The killer was there, snatched him by the collar again, threw him down again.
‘Do you know why my sleep was peaceful that night?’
the killer asked again.
Reggie shook his head frantically. He didn’t know, and he didn’t want to know. He was starting to cry, was ashamed of the feel of the tears trickling down, and didn’t care at the same time. He heard the killer’s words from days ago – They know you’re weak – and he remembered the older kid knocking him down in front of the drugstore. His mom slapping him at the cemetery.
Reggie didn’t want to be weak, but he was. So he cried.
‘It was because I saw those people coming to me through the fog that morning,’ the killer said, ‘and I knew they belonged to me. It was like a vision, a revelation. They were all lost in a fog, wandering aimlessly through the wasted years of their lives. I called them forth, whether I realized it or not. Everyone else existed for me to do with as I pleased. And when I killed someone, I wasn’t changing the world for the better or the worse. What I did had no impact on things at all. All the world was a fog, a mist in which everyone was lost and to which everyone returned.’
He paused for a moment, as if to let that sink in for Reggie. But something in the killer’s eyes told Reggie the man was letting those words sink in and settle in his own mind as well.
‘I woke the next day,’ the killer said, ‘walked along the boardwalk this time, among the stores and restaurants, watched the people pass by, and verified this, so that I would know what I saw the previous day was real. People went to jobs, they went to school, they went shopping, they ate at restaurants, they fished and surfed and walked dogs and roller-skated and bought newspapers and nothing they did meant anything.’
Reggie stayed on the ground. Didn’t move.
‘Do you know what I’m getting at?’ the killer asked, staring down on him.
Reggie shook his head, afraid even of that small motion, lest it be the wrong one and he get a bullet in the head like the hunter who wasn’t a hunter, Jeff the officer with kids, whose kids no longer had a father.
‘Everyone’s just filling time,’ the killer said, spreading his arms for emphasis, smiling, as if saying isn’t that just strange? Isn’t that just absurd? ‘None of them was doing anything with their lives. And even if they were, what did it matter? Nothing they did impacted anything. Other than a small circle of friends and family, no single life really adds anything to the world, has any impact.’
The killer bent, reached for the ground.
Reggie flinched and cried out, ready to be strangled, shot, beaten, or stabbed.
The killer rose again without having touched Reggie. He held something in his palm; reached for it with his other hand and pinched it between thumb and forefinger. He held it out for Reggie to see.
‘Our lives are like this grain of dirt,’ the killer said. ‘They mean absolutely nothing. They have no purpose whatsoever.’ He flicked the kernel of dirt away. ‘And they’re disposed of just as easily, with no pomp and circumstance. Like so much dust in the wind.’
The killer bent, offered his hand to Reggie.
Reggie didn’t want to touch it. But he was also afraid that such an offence would mean the aforementioned strangling, shooting, or stabbing. So he took the man’s hand. The killer helped him up gently and brushed the dirt off of Reggie like a doting mother.
‘So you see, Reggie,’ the killer said, ‘what I do is the only meaningful thing there can possibly be. I help cull this meaningless world of the meaningless apes that inhabit it. I will always be here, or someone like me. I’m a force of nature. I have to be here.’
Standing now, Reggie saw not for the first time just how large the man was. Two Reggies standing one atop the other, totem pole-like, would have only barely equalled the killer’s height. Looking up at him was like pondering the heights of a vast mountain, the peak brushing the heavens. From above, the face of a god looked down on him.
‘So when you oppose me,’ the killer said, his tone gone from nonchalance to winter cold in a single beat, ‘you oppose nature itself.’
The backhand came fast. The knuckles met his cheek like a hammer. Reggie tumbled to the ground again, landing hard on his forearms and elbows, the dirt and grit biting flesh. He lay in the shadow of the god, the killer, his face thrumming with the blow, his very bones aching from it.
‘Don’t ever oppose me again,’ the killer said. He bent, grabbed Reggie by the hair, hauled him up, and flung him to the ground again. ‘Don’t ever run from me again,’ the killer said. He grabbed Reggie by a fistful of shirt, wrenched him to his feet once more, and flung him down again. ‘You do what I say, when I say it, do you understand?’
Reggie was crying, and through his tears he was nodding, he was begging, yes, yes, he’d do what he was told, he understood, he was sorry, he’d do what he was told!
Now the killer walked over to him, kneeled on the ground, and gathered Reggie to him. Reggie flinched and went stiff. And at the same time he knew that might be the wrong response, and so he went limp in the man’s arms. His heart raced and thudded, on the verge of exploding. His mind was wild, his thoughts rampant, the fear like a rushing river, carrying all sense and reason and order away in a wild current.
‘I care for you,’ the killer said in his dead, emotionless tone. ‘I do, Reggie, I do. You helped me, hid me. Even when you knew who I was, what I was. I care for you because of that, even though I know I shouldn’t.’
The killer stroked Reggie’s hair. Reggie remembered his dad doing that sometimes, and hated the feel of this man doing it. Leaning against the killer, he could smell the sick-sweet odour of the man’s wound; the blood and the infection; the rot inside the man. He wanted to push away from him, the killer, away from the poison inside the man, and yet he dared not.
‘We have to make it to the border,’ the killer said. ‘And I can’t have you slowing me down. You’ve got to do what I tell you to, when I tell you to do it.’
The killer cupped Reggie’s chin in one hand and turned his head so that Reggie was looking him in the eyes. The thoughts that moved behind those cold, blue baubles were of a nature Reggie couldn’t even begin to understand. Why he once thought he had was beyond him. The mind behind those lifeless orbs – so like the glass eyes of a taxidermist’s kit – didn’t house thoughts like those of regular people.
Whether or not the killer was even human suddenly didn’t seem too far-fetched a thought.
‘Come to Mexico with me, Reggie,’ the killer said. ‘I can show you new things. We can start over, as a family.’
Reggie couldn’t believe what he was hearing. It was like he was in another world. The rules of reason and order didn’t apply here in this other place.
‘You have nothing here worth staying for,’ the killer said. ‘Your father is dead; your mother doesn’t love you; you have no friends. Come with me and I’ll be your father, your family, and you’ll be my son.’
The high sun above seemed to shine its light upon a dark, new world. They rose together to their feet, killer and boy, and started to walk again, south, away from what was and towards what would be. As they strode across the landscape, the killer regaled the boy with the new things of the new world, beyond the border, beyond the horizon, far away and yet frighteningly near.
***
‘In Mexico,’ the killer said, ‘there are stretches of desert so vast that they seem to reach to the end of the earth. And yet it’s not lifeless, sterile land. There are towns and hamlets that have tamed the wilderness. I have a small villa, purchased under another name that no one knows about. Everyone is corruptible in Mexico. Everyone has a price. I will see to it that no one bothers us. The Mexican police will never come after us. We will have the privacy and seclusion to live out our lives.’
Reggie both heard these things and did not. He walked in front of the killer obediently yet in a state of protracted numbness, knowing that things no longer made sense and that anything could happen, at anytime.
‘I’ll teach you the things of the world,’ the killer said, ‘as your former father failed to do in death. He failed you by dying, but I’ll be with
you always. We’ll go sailing on the Pacific in a boat you’ll help me restore. The deep brown of Mexico and the great blue of the Pacific, stretched out before us, and a new life without limitations.’
The woods had changed from the wondrous place Reggie had come to know as a child, camping and hiking with his parents. With them there had been a thrill and mystery when in the yawning breadth and depth of the forest. Walking trails and climbing hills there had seemed the possibility of coming across ancient ruins or a vast and high castle or a subterranean cavern where great and mighty beasts lived, at any moment. Just through the next copse of trees or just over the next rise, and another world would appear looming before him. The quiet of the woods, the stillness of it, lent an ease to such meanderings, nurturing the mind and the imagination.
But now, being herded forward by this other man, this killer, who’d strangled a man, rolled the body down a cliff, and shot another man, all in a matter of days, the woods around them were completely different. The oaks and pines and firs were heavy and gloomy, sorrowful things, rather than the proud and tall species that they had once been. Their limbs were dragged down by the gravity of the world. Their trunks seemed weathered and aged by aeons of strife. Reggie thought of drunken winos, bent, haggard, bedraggled and lost in the world, stumbling down sidewalks, sunk and collapsed against storefront walls. The shit and vomit of the intoxicated mixing with the greater toxins of the world around them.
‘I’ll teach you responsibility,’ said the killer. ‘I’ll teach you pride. Though Mexico is an old land its people lack both. They lack the discipline and strength to change their own homeland, so they sneak across borders on their bellies and in the back of trucks, in dirt and filth, to find a new one. That’s bad for them, but good for us. In their squalor and malfeasance we’ll use them as a contrast against ourselves. You’ll learn what is great by observing what is pitiful.’
Are You Afraid of the Dark? Page 17