Are You Afraid of the Dark?

by Seth C. Adams

  In the midst of the woods they came upon a low wall, no higher than a foot. Made of a mixture of clay and rocks, the wall formed a rough square about twenty feet wide. The inner space of the clay wall was littered with stone and bone chips that seemed cut and fractured in specific ways, rather than just the happenstance crumbling of weathering and age. With a gentle hand on the shoulder, the killer urged Reggie forward, closer, and upon drawing nearer to the low wall, he saw things on the wall. There were black and red scribblings on the rock and clay, figures really, some vaguely human and others animal. About the wall the trees were thinner and the light of day came down from above, seeming to spotlight the wall and its interior space, like a museum exhibit on display.

  The killer moved with a deliberate slowness and caution, as if in the presence of something sacred. He stepped cautiously past Reggie and knelt to put a hand against the clay wall. He lowered his head for a moment, as if in prayer. Then he stood again and addressed Reggie without looking at him.

  ‘You know what this is?’ the killer asked, still staring at the wall, and then at the spaces inside and around the wall, as if the clay barrier’s aspect carried out in a ripple and washed its perceived power about the immediate area.

  Reggie didn’t know whether to speak or stay quiet, and so he kept his mouth shut, deciding that saying nothing was better than saying the wrong thing.

  ‘This was a house,’ the killer said, reading Reggie’s silence as rapt interest, or not caring. ‘Probably from the Yavapai tribe,’ he continued. ‘These were a people with pride, unlike the people where we’re headed. They worked every day simply for the necessities. They lived off roots and seeds and small animals. Like most Native Americans, they knew full well the precarious balance of all life. That to live, one must kill. And to die meant merely to be part of the cycle of it all.’

  The killer turned and sat gently on the clay wall. He touched it again with both hands to either side. He patted the wall with his left hand, indicating that Reggie should sit as well; and this time, with a direct prompting, Reggie obeyed without hesitation.

  ‘Like all people,’ the killer said, ‘Native American tribes had their rituals and religions. But they never had the luxury of relying on their gods for supernatural intervention. They had the very real concern of daily survival. Where would the next meal come from? Would the next birth be healthy so that the tribe could continue? Christians are a lazy bunch, having evolved their religion with modernity, so that prayers and God can be for all things. You want your favourite baseball team to win the World Series? Pray for it. Are you in a hurry and need a parking space? Pray for it.’

  The killer looked at Reggie and smiled.

  The smile and flash of teeth looked hungry to Reggie. Like they meant to tear and rend flesh – like they wanted to tear and rend flesh – rather than expressing a moment of contentment.

  ‘This is a great place,’ the killer said, his voice low and awed, like an archaeologist having come upon a great and ancient find, which, Reggie realized, wasn’t far off the mark. ‘This,’ he continued, with his arms held wide to indicate the low wall and everything it represented, ‘is what existence is all about. The struggle, the unknown, the unpredictable voracity of life. We fight to stay alive, and yet the one sure thing is that we’ll all die.’

  Reggie didn’t want to, but he thought of his dad dead in the parking lot of the church, and the change scattered about him. He thought of his dad dead in the coffin, in a fine suit, and the fine cushions of the casket. And he thought of his dad dead in the ground, by now putrefying and decomposing, the very matter of him breaking down and falling apart.

  They sat there for a time on the ancient wall, killer looking up into the bright sky, boy looking down onto the dark soil. Then the killer moaned, a long, protracted sound Reggie hadn’t heard from him before. It was a sound of immense pain and suffering, and Reggie, coming out of his own considerations, looked up at the man beside him.

  The killer was pale, startlingly so, and he was trembling. Much as Reggie had trembled in his earthen hidey-hole not so long ago. Now rather than patting or caressing the old wall, the big man’s hands were clutching it for support, in desperation, or both. He was leaning forward, like a drunk ready to vomit.

  Then he fell, spilling to the ground.

  Curled there, trembling, moaning, he didn’t get back up.

  Reggie leapt off the wall, gave the killer one last look, then turned and ran.

  2.

  He ran maybe a hundred yards before he stopped and turned back. He was thinking of lying with Ivan in the tree house, looking up into the stars. He thought of pounding the bigger kid to a pulp in the vacant field, and whose words it was that had fuelled him. He thought of the deputy pushing his way into the house when Reggie’s mom was gone, throwing him to the ground, and who’d been there to save him by choking the life out of another.

  There seemed a greater weight upon Reggie’s back than merely the pack slung over his shoulders. His father would have called it responsibility. It was a burden, his father would say. That was how good people knew good decisions from bad ones. The weight of responsibility served as a compass or a beacon, letting you know when an important decision was coming, and how to find your way when it did. It was an ever-present thing, this weight, going away or at least subsiding only when you made the right choice. Guilt and shame hounded you if you made the wrong choice, stealing rest and peace of mind.

  Guilt and shame were with him those first hundred yards he ran.

  When Reggie stopped, they subsided a bit.

  Then he turned, headed back, and with each stride the shame retreated further, until he was standing over Ivan, the man still curled on the ground, eyes clenched shut in pain, shivering, frail, and barely conscious.

  The killer’s eyes fluttered; saw Reggie through a hardly perceptible squint.

  Reggie knelt so they were closer to each other.

  ‘I’ll help you to Mexico,’ he said. ‘But I won’t go with you.’

  The only response was a wordless groan. The pain in that syllable-less grunt was so immense that Reggie could almost feel it himself. The man’s agony made his skin crawl. No one should suffer like that. But he couldn’t let sympathy control the situation. He couldn’t let his compassion make him weak.

  ‘Say you understand that,’ he said to the killer. ‘Tell me you agree to that.’

  Arms clutching his middle, Ivan unwrapped one like a tentacle unfurling, and reached out towards Reggie. His fingers clutched claw-like at the dirt. Through his squinting eyes, tears gleamed like jewels.

  ‘Say “OK”,’ Reggie said. ‘I take you to Mexico, and no farther.’

  The word was a croak, a moan, something hoarse and ugly like a word spoken from a severe asthmatic or centennial smoker’s blackened throat. But Reggie heard it, and it was enough.

  ‘OK,’ the killer whispered.

  Reggie leaned forward and fished through Ivan’s jacket until he found the antibiotics he’d filched from his mom’s medicine cabinet a couple days ago. He sat, slung his backpack off, unzipped it, and pulled out a bottle of water. Reading the instructions on the medicine bottle, he shook out a couple pills into his palm, handed them and the water over to Ivan. Watching the shaking, pale man swallow the tablets, coughing, nearly choking before getting them down, Reggie felt the last tendrils of that weight called responsibility fall away from him.

  Feverish, trembling, making noises and sounds, some of them sensible, some of them not, the killer rolled this way and that, crying out, falling silent, until Reggie put an arm around him. Holding the man close, smelling his fever, smelling his sickness, Reggie wondered who’d been there for his dad in his final moments, bleeding out in a dark, empty expanse of asphalt.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  1.

  It started with a whisper.

  ‘I killed her,’ the fever-stricken killer muttered.

  And unable to ignore it, knowing by now that he should – that
he wouldn’t want to know more, he shouldn’t want to know more – Reggie nonetheless prodded the killer to continue. The man was still on the forest floor, his head leaning against Reggie’s leg so that Reggie had a strange parental feeling, like a father looking over his son. The change of things, the swapping of roles, disturbed him. It made him feel that he was responsible for the killer, and that was an obligation he didn’t want. Reggie had a hand on the man’s shoulder, felt the tremors, not as great and frightening as before, but still persistent, passing from the sick man into him.

  ‘Who?’ he whispered back, for some reason matching the man’s tone and timbre. As if that would reinforce the communication, like soldiers across a battlefield finding the same radio frequency for strategic purposes. ‘Who did you kill?’

  ‘It was a … test,’ Ivan said, finding a little more strength in his voice. ‘I had to.’

  ‘Who?’ Reggie pressed.

  ‘He said … to fully embrace my new life … I had to break all ties … to my old one,’ the killer said, this relatively long sentence reducing him to a violent fit of coughing. He tried tilting the water bottle to his lips, took a sip, choked on that, and coughed awhile longer.

  It was awhile before they spoke again. From the more even rhythm of his breathing, Reggie thought Ivan fell asleep for a time. It couldn’t have been a very peaceful rest, though. The man’s arms and legs twitched like a dog’s in some frightful running dream.

  Chasing or being chased? Reggie wondered.

  When next he woke, Ivan seemed slightly more lucid, though his skin was still clammy with sweat, and the occasional tremor passed through him like a wave. He looked up and backward, momentarily panicked, saw Reggie there and calmed a bit. With one hand he squeezed Reggie’s booted foot, a strangely warm and grateful gesture.

  ‘Who’d you kill?’ Reggie asked after a moment.

  At first he didn’t answer, and Reggie didn’t think he would at all. The fever at its peak had brought forth memories that the killer would have otherwise left buried. Now, though still hazy through the waves of the fever, it was a diminishing tide, rolling back, and though his body was still tormented, his mind was more fully his own. What came out of his mouth was solely up to him. And if there was something he didn’t want to talk about, didn’t want Reggie to know, he would keep it that way.

  ‘You said it was a test,’ Reggie said.

  The killer rolled away from him, breaking that strangely familiar contact of his head with Reggie’s leg. Contact lost, Reggie thought the subject of the killer’s delirium-induced memories would be also. But, facing away from him, looking off somewhere into the woods, the killer started to speak again.

  ‘It was a test,’ he said. ‘The old man said it was the last test, and then I’d be ready.’

  ‘The old man from the limo?’ Reggie asked. ‘The one who found you on the streets?’

  Reggie watched the back of Ivan’s head as he nodded.

  ‘Yes,’ the killer said. ‘Him.’

  Reggie glanced in the direction Ivan was gazing. He wondered what the man was seeing. All he saw were trees. Ivan was seeing something else. Reggie thought he was probably lucky he couldn’t see what the killer saw. It was better that way. It was safer. And, yet, even if he couldn’t see it, he had to know.

  Reggie took a deep breath before asking the next question.

  ‘Who was she?’ he asked. ‘Who was your final test?’

  ‘My sister,’ Ivan said, quickly, his tone flat, as if committed now to this course he could say what needed to be said without reservation. Like it was nothing more than an item on a grocery list checked off. ‘I had to kill my sister.’

  ‘I thought she died of pneumonia,’ Reggie said. ‘She got out of the home she was staying in. It was snowing, and no one found her for hours.’

  ‘That was the official story,’ the killer said. ‘That’s what was put in the records.’

  ‘But that’s not what happened,’ Reggie said.

  ‘No,’ the killer said.

  Reggie felt again what he’d felt before, now stronger than ever. He felt as if he was in the presence of some vast evil. There was a taint and filth in the immediate vicinity. It was as if a sewer pipe had erupted underground and the filth had percolated up to the surface.

  But it was more than that. It wasn’t just a physical sensation of the unclean, that skin-crawling, nausea-inducing threshold of contamination and impurity. This was a sense of deep-rooted pollution that signified the world around you just wasn’t right, and was unsuitable for habitation. Like the nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl, the poison seeped into everything.

  And the centre of it all was Ivan.

  ‘He told me that I could never truly begin my new life,’ the killer said, ‘without ending my old one. I asked him, wasn’t that what I was doing? I was leaving the old things behind, going where he led. He said that wasn’t enough. It wasn’t enough that I just leave the old things. I had to end them. I had to erase them.’

  Reggie wanted to let this revelation sink in. He needed a moment to let it settle in his mind. Killing strangers you were paid to kill was one thing, especially if they were criminals themselves. No great loss there. Even killing one’s own father, if that man was a child-molesting son of a bitch, wasn’t so difficult to accept either. Now, though, the killer was saying he’d killed a child, and not any old random kid, but his handicapped little sister.

  ‘I had to do it,’ the killer continued, denying Reggie the time to let it all sink or settle in, instead jamming it all in roughly. ‘I had to kill her.’

  He turned and met Reggie’s eyes then, and the expression on his face seemed to say If I had to do that, then you have to listen. Reggie thought this was indeed true, but not because the killer said so. Someone other than the monster before him had to bear witness to the dead girl’s passing, even if it was a testimony decades overdue.

  ‘He offered to have someone drive me to the group home. I said no. I walked across town alone. It was cold, and it was dark, and in the cold and the dark I thought about what I was going to do. I never thought about not doing it. I just thought about the logistics of it. How would I get in and out? How would I kill her? Would I dispose of the body or leave it to be found?

  ‘The group home was a two-storey structure,’ Ivan said. ‘It rose out of the white wall of the snowstorm like a fortress. My sister’s room was on the first floor. I found the window to her room and stared in at her for a time. Watching her I couldn’t drudge up the affection I’d had for her in the past. I couldn’t remember what it had been like to love her as a brother.

  ‘I watched her watching a wall. Then she shuffled across the room and stared into a corner. Then she sat in her bed and stared at the sheets. I knew then what I was doing was okay. Watching her watching nothing, I was at peace with what I had to do.’

  Likewise, in that moment Reggie was at peace with his budding hatred for the killer. As certain as the killer said he was of the acceptability of his looming fratricide, Reggie was equally certain there was nothing good about the man. In his own grief, Reggie had been very confused to ever think otherwise.

  He wanted nothing further to do with Ivan, and yet there was this sick compulsion to hear more, to see things through. It was almost as if their relationship had gained its own momentum. Though he was disgusted by the things the killer said and did, there was a gravity or magnetism that kept pulling him back.

  Reggie said nothing and continued to listen.

  ‘I tapped on the window and she turned to look at me,’ the killer said. ‘At first there was this stupid look on her face. She didn’t register anything. She wasn’t thinking of anything. She was just responding to a stimulus, like an animal. Impulses were firing in her brain, but they were just biochemical reactions, not actual thoughts. Looking at her made me sick.’

  ‘After a time,’ the killer continued, trembling occasionally with the fever, ‘me staring in at her, she looking out at me, she came to the window. I
motioned her to open it, and again it took her a moment to process and understand this request. She fumbled with the window latch like she was trying to work some advanced NASA computer. Finally, she got it open, and, finally, she recognized me.

  ‘“Petra,” I whispered. “Come outside. Let’s play!” the killer said, his voice dropping and becoming sly and suggestive, as it must have been that night. ‘We used to play together as children, those days when our father wasn’t around to stop us. When he was home, we couldn’t do anything. The slightest thing could set him off. So we sat like little statues or hid in our rooms.

  ‘But when he was gone, at work or at a bar,’ the killer said, ‘we’d play. There were many games that didn’t require toys, of which we had none. We played hide-and-seek, tag, follow the leader. These were the only times I saw any hint of normal emotion on my sister’s face.

  ‘Standing at the window of her room in the hospital, asking her to come out and play, did the trick. She smiled a drooling, crooked smile, said “Brother! Brother!” and climbed out the window in her nightgown. Seeing her bare feet and legs in the snow momentarily made me feel like her brother again. But I squashed that emotion down, told myself I didn’t care, and then I didn’t. Neither did she apparently, and I was going to kill her anyways, so what the hell did it matter?

  ‘“Petra,” I whispered to her, hunching against the biting wind. “Let’s play tag!” I said. Her level of joy was foolish and inappropriate for such a setting. She laughed and nodded and giggled and pulled on the sleeve of my jacket. “I’m it!” I said. “Run and hide!” I said, pointing off into the storm. Obediently, she turned and ran, kicking up plumes of snow behind her. Walking at a leisurely pace, I followed.’

  Reggie found himself doing something strange. He found himself praying for a dead girl. Knowing she was dead, it wasn’t a prayer for her safety. It was more of an apology that her brother had been such a person, that the world had been such a place which saw her die in such a horrible, undignified way.