Are You Afraid of the Dark?

by Seth C. Adams

  I’m sorry, he whispered in his mind. I’m sorry, he said, sending the words out into the world, the universe, hoping they drifted to a place where dead little girls rested in peace after such a stretch in this forsaken land.

  ‘I followed her through the snow and wind,’ the killer said, his voice the calculated boredom of a telemarketer. ‘Her idiot laughter trailed her, drifting back to me. She tripped at times, stumbled, and once she ran headlong into low-hanging branches. But each time she got up, looked back at me, saw me following and, giggling, she faced forward again and kept running.

  ‘After a time I started to gain on her,’ the killer said. ‘Her running, or trying to, and I walking, the distance between us steadily shrank. I soon saw why. She paused to touch her legs. Even through the storm, even across the distance between us, I could see how deathly white her legs were. They were white and blue, and her breath came out in great plumes of mist. She stumbled again and slid into a seated position against a pine. She looked up at me as I approached. Snot and drool were frozen around her mouth. “I’m cold, brother,” she said, still smiling, still looking like she wanted to laugh, like she wanted to play.’

  Reggie knew what was coming, or something close to it, and closed his eyes against the words. Crawling, sliding, seeking, they slipped beneath his eyelids like invisible slugs, however, latched onto his mind with their slime-slick bodies, and showed him the images he’d tried to block out.

  ‘“I know,” I said to her,’ the killer continued. ‘“But that doesn’t matter anymore.” I knelt beside her, reached out, covered her mouth with one hand, clasped her nostrils with the other. I felt the frozen drool and snot beneath my fingers. Disgusted, I squeezed tighter.’

  His eyes closed, Reggie tried to imagine himself elsewhere. But the killer’s words drilled through the mental constructs Reggie conjured up, shattered them, and left only the sad world they were in.

  ‘She didn’t struggle much. She reached up and grasped my wrists, then let go and patted my arms, as if saying “Okay, that’s enough” but it wasn’t enough, and I kept squeezing. Then she began to kick and flail. She didn’t strike out at me, though. She just kicked and swung her arms in the air, like a person treading water. That continued for a few moments until her arms fell, her legs settled, and then she lost control of her bladder and pissed in the snow.

  ‘And then she was dead.’

  2.

  After his confessional – if confession was what it was; it had sounded more a disinterested recitation – the killer fell again into a troubled sleep. He bucked and thrashed along with his feverish trembles, but he slept.

  That was when the dog appeared.

  Reggie had been thinking about the mutt in the back of his mind since it had taken the hard kick trying to protect him. He had wondered if she was even still alive, if maybe the kick had shattered ribs, and one of the splinters pierced a lung or something.

  But here she was, stepping slowly and softly out of the bushes encircling the clearing around the old Indian wall. She stopped and sat and considered Reggie from the space between them. The dog eyed the killer, ears pricked up and back, hearing his fever sounds and not liking what she heard.

  Reggie wanted to call to her, wanted the mutt to come nearer so that he could inspect her, make sure she was okay. But he likewise didn’t want her near the killer, and so just returned her gaze from across the clearing.

  Considering her, he tried to place her breed, saw some black Labrador and maybe some pit bull in there, a greater part of mangy beast, so that he really couldn’t confidently settle on anything. She was in every sense of the word a mutt, and yet he didn’t think he’d ever seen a more beautiful dog in his life.

  And, in a moment free of the confusion he’d felt so often in the past months, Reggie knew why he felt this way about the dog.

  This stray had tried to protect him.

  His father had died on him, and would never be protecting him from anything ever again. His mother, lost in her own pain, couldn’t see how to continue their family without her husband. She wouldn’t be protecting him anytime soon either. Ivan, the hit man, pretended to be many things and was altogether nothing. Merely a shade of a man trying to play the part.

  Yet this dog hadn’t needed to consider things, hadn’t needed to weigh pros and cons, hadn’t tried to be one thing when she was something else completely. This dog had seen him in trouble, and had acted. Drawing upon her simple nature, whether it was instincts or something learned, this dog had accomplished what everyone else in Reggie’s life had failed to.

  She’d cared.

  Without reservation, lacking any ulterior motives, absent any hidden agenda, this ugly dog in front of him had cared. And he would never forget that. It was etched now, indelibly, inside him.

  Reggie raised one hand and waved at the dog. She cocked her head, and her muzzle split in a wide doggie grin.

  The killer, muttering, stirred in his fitful sleep, coming awake.

  The dog stood silently, turned, and retreated stealthily into the woods.

  Reggie stared at the place where she’d been, already missing her.

  3.

  The killer’s fever broke an hour later, and though he still shook and trembled, and getting to his feet was a task of monumental proportions – during which he buckled, vomited, fell to his knees, and had to shakily begin again – stand he did, and together he and Reggie once more started south.

  They walked for a time in silence before coming to a river. It was wide and deep and the gurgle-rush of its clear waters was a chime-like music. The killer stopped before the river, glanced either way along the course of the flow. Standing on the bank, leaning forward a bit, clutching his middle, the man swayed, looking like he might fall forward at any moment to be carried away in the rush of the water.

  Reggie thought about pushing him.

  In his mind he saw the man washed away downstream, waving frantically for help, coughing out the water that surged over him.

  But he didn’t push the man.

  The killer turned unsteadily around to face him. The water rushed whitely behind him. It seemed a wall of sorts, or a barrier, separating them from something else.

  ‘Across the river,’ the killer said. ‘A little more than a mile away is the border checkpoint. Just through there,’ he gestured with a wave behind him at the woods continuing on the other side of the river, ‘the woods end and the desert starts again. The highway is over there. That’s where the police blockade will be. They’ll be watching the highway, so we’ll have to go around through the desert.’

  Reggie nodded and gestured at the river.

  ‘Let’s go,’ he said.

  The killer nodded but didn’t move.

  ‘There’s a whole other world in Mexico,’ he said, looking at Reggie with what he would have said was longing in any other face. In this one, though, Reggie knew it wasn’t. It was a deception. It was a mock-up of human emotion. This was a monster playing at being human; nothing more, nothing less. ‘It will be strange and frightening at first,’ the killer said. ‘But you’ll learn the language. You’ll make friends. In Mexico the past and the present meet in a wondrous fashion. There’s pride in the past and a certainty of a better tomorrow. Deserts stretch out bone-white and woods more green and vital than this one explode across the land.’

  Ignoring him, Reggie walked towards the river.

  ‘There’s nothing here for you,’ the killer said. ‘The world moves past you like you’re nothing. In Mexico, with my resources, you could be anything you want. You could have anything you want. The world would be yours.’

  Reggie moved past him towards the water, that crystal barrier.

  A strong hand on his shoulder stopped him.

  He turned to look up at the large man before him. Not for the first time, Reggie noticed the lines of Ivan’s face. Where he’d previously seen the hard face of a ruthless killer, he now also saw the creased and leathered contours of a weathered, old man
.

  ‘Why won’t you come with me?’ the killer said.

  ‘I thought you knew things that I didn’t know,’ Reggie said. He hadn’t known what he was going to say until he said it. The words just came out. This had happened many times in the past few days with this man. Where previously this freewheeling talk had been liberating – like friends sharing secrets, unburdened by authority such as parents or teachers – now his uncensored words came from another source. In another place and time, Reggie might have called it strength. Right then, next to the killer, before the white river, it just felt necessary. ‘I thought you were strong and could show me things I needed to know.’

  The killer smiled and nodded, as if affirming this.

  ‘But when you were lying on the ground,’ Reggie said, ‘your head in my lap, cold and shivering, I knew you were as weak as anyone else.’

  The hand on his shoulder tightened. Birds of prey grasped their quarry in such a manner before carrying them off to their dens to feed.

  ‘There’s nothing you can show me,’ Reggie said, ignoring the tightening fingers, or pretending to. ‘There’s nothing I need from you.’

  The hand on his shoulder balled into a fist, gripping his shirt.

  ‘I could force you,’ the killer said. ‘I could make you go with me.’

  The water whispered its tinkling song behind them. The hum of it, the white-noise rush of it, the friction of it against the banks containing it and the stones lining its bottom, was indeed a barrier: a wall dividing here from there. This static-like rush brought clarity, however, unlike the interference from a poorly tuned radio or television.

  Reggie stared up at the man. He didn’t break eye contact. He looked deep into that face; the ancient contours, the lines like a map. The eyes were vast and deep and shallow at the same time. He tried to decipher the thoughts behind them, and was met with an alien force. Something that couldn’t be understood. It had been a mistake on Reggie’s part to ever think he could.

  Something of Reggie’s thoughts must have been apparent on his face. The killer first relaxed his grip, and then the hand released him.

  Making a short sniffing-snorting sound of disgust, Ivan moved past him into the waters. It took him in, the river, cutting his bottom half from his upper so that he seemed again like a figure dimensionally torn, as he had on the sled under the oak’s shadow so many days ago. Something of this world and yet of another, caught between realities. Reggie followed him; the cool water seeping through his jeans, caressing his legs, welcoming him in its embrace.

  They crossed the barrier and the current pulled at them, threatening gently to yank them downstream into its flow, but they crossed, and rose out of its baptism on the other side.

  ***

  The killer walked ahead of him, stomping a path through the woods.

  ‘My dad died trying to help another human being,’ Reggie said, the killer moving at a steady pace ahead, not giving any indication that he was listening. That was okay. Reggie knew he was, and so he kept talking. ‘I was angry for a long time. I thought, how stupid could he be? Going out at night by himself to check on the church. And when he discovered who it was breaking in, he probably tried to console the guy. He probably tried to talk him out of it. He may have even prayed for the man.

  ‘And then he was shot, and my mom and I were left alone.’

  The killer slapped low-hanging branches out of his way angrily, like they were there just to annoy him. He moved faster than Reggie would have thought possible in his condition, almost as if he were trying to get away from something.

  Reggie trudged after the killer, pausing only briefly to take a swig of water from the bottle in his hand. He eyed the woods about them and the sky above, and was startled to see the brightness of the day and of the things about him.

  ‘I hid my Bible for a time after my dad died,’ Reggie said. ‘I couldn’t stand to look at it. My dad was always carrying his around the house; and in public, when we were out and about in town, he had a little pocket Bible stuffed in his jacket or jeans pocket. People around town knew him, and often told him their problems, and it wasn’t unusual for him to stop in the middle of the grocery store, or the mall, or at the gas station, and say a prayer right then and there for someone.’

  Some woodland thing – flora or fauna, Reggie didn’t know – had the tenacity to get in the killer’s way, and he muttered a ‘Fuck’ as he manoeuvred past it. Feeling more and more as if he were on a leisurely stroll, Reggie continued to speak as he followed.

  ‘I would cram the Bible under the bed,’ Reggie said, ‘or far back in a desk drawer. Or I’d bury it in a box on the top shelf of my closet. But wherever I put it, it never seemed to be dark or deep enough and I always knew it was there. So then I’d take it out, throw it on my bed, and yell at it. I’d call it names, horrible names, and I wasn’t talking to the book, but to God, and not really God, but through Him to my dad.’

  Reggie smiled the embarrassed yet amused smile of someone remembering some small foolishness. Like the day they’d tripped in public, or been caught by a passing motorist picking their nose in slow traffic. Those little awkward things that reminded us we were human.

  ‘I thought he was weak,’ Reggie said, ‘for caring for others. I thought he was a failure, for dying on his family. I called him a bastard, a son of a bitch, a fucker, for leaving us. All because a phone call one night got him up to go check on the church alarm. Because he found the man breaking in and confronted him, and probably tried to help him.

  ‘Caring for people was stupid, I told myself,’ Reggie said. ‘Giving a shit in a world full of shitheads was a waste of time. Worse than that, it wasn’t just a waste of time. You set yourself up for major hurt. As my dad learned, and as my mom and I learned after him.’

  ‘You were right,’ the killer grunted ahead of him, his words only just audible. It was like someone heckling in a crowd – they wanted to be heard, but didn’t want to be singled out at the same time. An act of cowardice masquerading as brazenness.

  ‘No,’ Reggie said, ‘I was wrong.’

  Reggie took a breath before continuing. He was on to something, and he was excited by the building revelation. He felt a lightness inside him. A tingling through his body.

  ‘By putting others before himself,’ Reggie said, ‘my father showed himself to be better than this world.’

  ‘He was a fool and an idiot,’ said the killer, heckling again from the safety of the distance between them. ‘He sold lies and lived a lie.’

  ‘No,’ Reggie said, stepping sprightly over a fallen trunk. ‘Liars don’t die for their lies. He believed in something for a reason.’

  The killer said nothing after that, and so Reggie paused for a time also. They strode through the woods like migrants through a new land, destination somewhere ahead. The killer moved decidedly and aggressively still, his footfalls loud and angry. Reggie walked casually, the birdsongs and the wind and the crunching of leaves beneath him settling him, providing a rhythm for his thoughts. When he spoke again, he could see the tightening and hunching of the killer’s shoulders, like the flinching of one hearing fingernails dragging across a blackboard.

  ‘My mom doesn’t hate me,’ Reggie said, the spoken words giving the truth of the statement, so that he weighed them, considered them, and knew them to be right. ‘She was lost, just like me. It was her and my dad long before I came around. It was the two of them versus the world. When he died, she didn’t know what to do. She broke, and didn’t know how to put the pieces back together.’

  ‘She hates you,’ said the killer. ‘She sees you and knows she’ll never see her husband again, and knows she got the raw end of the deal.’

  ‘No,’ Reggie said, smiling. ‘When you have a family, people you care about, whose lives you share and who share yours in return, you know about death as an idea. But you never really feel in your heart that it’ll come your way.’

  There were stones and boulders in their path, and they scaled them
. The killer climbed down the other side, but Reggie paused for a moment at the top. He closed his eyes, breathed deep the clean air, and hopped down.

  ‘When my dad died,’ Reggie said, ‘death became a reality for my mom. For both of us, but she was the only adult left, I was just a kid, and so the responsibility of what came next belonged to her. And it scared her, having to figure it out for both of us without him. There’s no way to plan for something like that. There’s no way to deal with it until it’s right there in front of you. She’s doing the best she can.’

  ‘She hates you,’ the killer said. ‘She despises you.’

  But his words were weak, the lies obvious. He had no power anymore, and Reggie felt sorry for the man. He was just like the rest of the world. He held no sway over the fundamentals of life, was lost in that realization, and tried to squash it with pain and anger sterilized into a mock coldness, a false pretence of detachment.

  And all the while the killer was drifting down the same wild river that everyone was caught in. Cascading down the currents and twists and bends, carried to an unknown destination called life, and death, and all the things in between.

  ***

  From the treeline they could see the highway to the east and the border checkpoint. There were several police cruisers parked alongside the road, along with the border patrol vehicles. The border fence stretched out of sight to either direction like a great metal serpent and shone brightly under the sun. About a half mile away, the gathered authorities were still too close for Ivan’s comfort.

  ‘We’ll move further west,’ he said, falling back into the woods and starting to move that way. ‘If they see us, they’ll move fast. I’ll need a head start to make it to the fence.’

  Reggie thought about running across the desert expanse to the police right then and there. Then he thought about the killer’s gun, pointed at him only days ago when he’d come upon the man in the woods. He thought of getting a bullet in the back, falling, dying in the dirt.