Finding he wasn’t ready to die, Reggie once more followed the killer.
He also thought about how the killer expected to get through the police and border patrol if they saw him as he made for the fence. Reggie didn’t have to ask. He’d seen the man’s manner of solving things these past few days. The deputy at the house; the officer in the woods; everything Reggie needed to know was right there in the man’s title: killer.
He’d do whatever was necessary to make it to the border, past the fence, and into Mexico. And Reggie was powerless to do anything but stand by and watch it all happen.
‘We’ll wait until nightfall,’ said the killer, after they’d gone a ways. He spoke over his shoulder without looking back at Reggie, almost as if he weren’t speaking to Reggie at all, but just to himself. Reggie didn’t think they were friends anymore, and he wondered why the killer still kept him around. ‘The patrols move around more at night, because that’s when most of the immigrants try to make their moves. They won’t be concentrated in one area, like they were at the highway.’
After they’d walked for twenty minutes or so away from the highway and the border checkpoint, the killer stopped to lean against a tree, and then settled on a stone. He put his elbows on his legs and his head in his hands. He breathed unevenly and trembled some. Reggie took a seat on a fallen limb nearby, and watched.
He saw the spreading red-yellowish stain on the killer’s shirt, but said nothing.
The killer saw it too, fingered the area, pulled up the T-shirt and pried away the bandage to take a look.
Reggie grimaced, wanted to look away, but didn’t.
This was infection he was seeing, he had no doubt about it. He’d seen it in movies; read about it in books. The smell wafted to him immediately. The sight was terrible.
The wound was red and inflamed. Tendrils of red spread from the centre like spokes from a wheel. Bile-like pus oozed from the bullet hole like magma from a slow stirring volcano. When the man breathed, the whole thing moved up and down and seemed to wink, again reminding Reggie of some monstrous eye.
‘We tried,’ the killer said with a wicked smile. ‘But I’ll need a doctor to fix this.’ He lowered his T-shirt like a veil over a secret altar, and then slid off the boulder to the ground, so that he was leaning his back against it, his legs out before him. ‘I’ll make it through the night.’
He took out the medicine bottle, motioned for Reggie’s water bottle. Reggie handed it over, then stepped back again. The killer swallowed a few tablets with an agonized expression, then tilted his head back and closed his eyes.
‘I can trust you for this last short while?’ he asked.
Reggie looked at his watch, saw it was early afternoon. Thought about spending a few more hours in the presence of this man. He could still see the wound clearly, though it was now covered. The red, raw eye winking at him; the terrible eye that saw all things; the scarlet eye that was more a part of this man than any other feature. Such a thing would see to the heart of him; would know what Reggie would do before he did it.
He couldn’t keep secrets from such a thing.
He nodded.
‘Yes,’ he muttered. ‘You can trust me.’
Nodding, the killer closed his eyes and slept.
And the boy tried to shield his mind from the piercing terrible eye.
4.
Despite his better judgement, Reggie slept too.
He dreamt of a vast wasteland, a grey and white expanse more barren and forsaken than any desert. No plants grew; no cacti, no shrubs, not the slightest struggling weed. The ground was cracked and marred like a dry lunar landscape. There were craters and valleys like cannon had struck and dimpled the earth. The sky was equally grey and sterile, as if aeons of industrial factory pollutants had settled into place, becoming the new atmosphere. There was a soft wind like dragon’s breath; hot and arid.
Far ahead of him there was a figure in the distance, standing on the bleak landscape, looking back at him. They watched each other across the wretched land, across the craters and cracked ground, neither moving. They were like gunfighters staring each other down across the longest stretch of dirt road in a town that didn’t exist.
The sun rose over the horizon, but it wasn’t the sun. It was a great blood-red eye, and it oozed and bled into the sky. It watched him and the other in the distance across from him. It watched all things; saw all things. When it winked it pulled the sky taut and sent ripples through it like a fabric.
He ran across the barren land, frantically looking for a place to hide. Any crevice, any hole, would do. Anything to be away from that bleeding eye.
But there was nowhere to go. Everything lay bare beneath the great bloody orb.
Then the dark figure in the distance held its arms out, beckoning him. With nowhere else to go, and the bloody sky-eye watching him, Reggie ran towards the figure.
It knelt in anticipation of his arrival. At first Reggie thought it was his dad, and ran faster, pumping his legs harder. Until, the space between them dwindling, he saw it wasn’t his father.
It was the killer, and in one hand was the knife, and in the other the garrotte wire.
He tried to skid to a halt, but the land like a conveyor belt moved beneath him and propelled him forward. And as the killer wrapped Reggie in his arms, the knife came down, and the wire twined around his throat, cinching tight.
He bolted awake to falling darkness.
Through the treeline he could see the edge of the western sky. The sun receding and the last redness of its passing staining the horizon. Reggie lifted his arm and looked at his watch. It was after seven in the evening. He’d been asleep for over five hours.
His body was achy and sore from the hard, unforgiving forest floor, and he stood with groans and joint creaks. He looked about him, saw the killer huddled nearby, sleeping or feigning it.
The man, lying still in the draping dark of evening, could have been dead, and Reggie, considering the fading details of his nightmare, wondered how long before that was actually so and if the dying man would decide to take Reggie along with him.
CHAPTER TWELVE
1.
When the killer awoke, he had Reggie hand him a flashlight from the backpack. He turned it on, pointed the beam at the ground, and set it down between them so they could see each other without the light casting along the trees, potentially alerting the police or border patrol. The outer reach of the light found the killer’s face, casting it a shade of red and partially in shadow, so that he looked like the host of a horror anthology show or creature feature. When Ivan spoke it was in muttered tones, though they were far enough away from the border patrols not to be heard even if he spoke loudly.
‘When I cross the border,’ the killer said, ‘and leave you behind, your life will go back to the way it was. You’ll wake one day and wish you’d come with me.’
‘Maybe,’ Reggie said, matching the killer’s whisper. ‘But I don’t think so.’
‘And if you’re wrong?’ the killer said. ‘When you’re back in school and bigger kids smack you around? When your mother feels her hatred for you rising and smacks you around? When, in the coming years, she dies on you, leaving you just as your father did? When you’re twenty, and then thirty, and one day you’re sixty, and you feel death coming for you? What then? What will you say of your life?’
‘I don’t know,’ Reggie said. ‘But I’ll find out when I get there.’
Thinking of his mom, Reggie thought of a question, surprised he hadn’t asked it before then. Suddenly, it seemed very necessary that he know the answer to it.
‘What about your mom?’ Reggie said, speaking in a normal tone now, the question seemingly so important that it not be misunderstood in soft spoken whispers. ‘You’ve never mentioned her. What was she like?’
Ivan answered immediately. Reggie was surprised, thinking after asking the question that perhaps – now that they approached the end of their time together – the killer was done entertaining
his questions. Or maybe Reggie had hit on a sore spot, and the man would edit his answers. But the directness of his reply spoke of its truth.
‘She died when I was young,’ Ivan said. ‘Petra was only a baby. She was in an accident driving to the market. I remember my father yelling about the wrecked car. He never cried over his wife being dead. But the wrecked car drove him into a borderline rage.’
‘Did you love her?’ Reggie asked.
‘I remember my mother loved to cook,’ Ivan said, not directly answering the question. ‘We never had much money. My father worked in a factory. My mother was a teacher’s assistant and tutor. Neither of them worked full time. Not because they didn’t want to, but because no one was hiring. No benefits. Shitty wages. My mom had to shop at a cheap dollar store, and yet somehow she made each meal a special occasion. I remember coming home after school, smelling her stews, her bread, and thinking I’d walked into some gourmet restaurant.’
Reggie tried to envision this man, this killer of others for money, as a child, a boy about his age, and couldn’t. It seemed a bad fairytale, that such a man had ever been anything than what he was: a killer. And yet he knew it to be true, and it troubled him.
‘When she died,’ Ivan continued, ‘and my father had stopped yelling about the wrecked car and how he’d get back and forth to work, he turned to me and yelled at me that my stupid bitch of a mother was dead, which I’d already pieced together from his ranting. He said he wouldn’t pay for a funeral. He couldn’t afford it. He’d let the county dispose of her however they chose. He said if I wanted to say goodbye, I’d have to do it at the morgue. He didn’t offer to take me. We didn’t have a car. There was no way for him to take me. That was implicit, but I don’t think that was the reason. He wouldn’t have taken me anyway even if he had been able.
‘But I knew of the morgue by way of young boys’ stories,’ the killer said. ‘I knew a boy from school who claimed to have snuck in there once in the middle of the night on a dare. He said he’d jimmied a window open and crept in. He said inside it smelled of formaldehyde and other chemicals. Like a lab in school, he said, only much stronger. He said there was one room with a wall full of metal drawers. The drawers were large, he said, large enough to fit a man or woman. He knew what was inside, didn’t have to open them, even though the terms of the dare said he had to. There was no one in the morgue with him. All the other boys had stayed outside. He could have just said he’d opened a drawer, and no one would have known any differently.’
Reggie was thinking of a cold white room, smelling of chemicals, and a wall lined top to bottom with metal drawers, like the world’s largest filing cabinet. He was thinking of his dad, clammy and cold and dead, in such a drawer, slid away into the wall like a specimen, stored like a file.
‘But he was a boy,’ Ivan said, ‘and like most boys he had to prove something to himself more than he had to prove anything to the others. And so he crept through the dark room to the wall of drawers, and pulled one open. He saw a woman, blue and dead, and he saw the stitches of her autopsy, where they’d sewn her back together after examining whatever they had to examine. He ran, climbed out through the window, past the other boys, and couldn’t sleep for a week. He saw her whenever he closed his eyes, stitched up like some Frankenstein monster.’
Just hearing about it was bad enough. Reggie wondered if next time he closed his eyes to sleep he would see her too, stitched together and shambling along, blue tinged with the coldness of her storage.
‘I thought about what my mother would look like,’ Ivan said, ‘as I walked the mile into the city where the morgue was. I wondered if I’d recognize her. I wondered if she’d leap up and snatch me as I looked at her. Pull me into the drawer with her and slide it shut, shutting us in the dark together forever, where she’d hold me in cold, dead arms.’
That the two of them had shared such grim thoughts disturbed Reggie. It was almost as if he and the killer shared a wavelength or were tuned in to the same signal. He didn’t like this, and tried mightily to change the station.
‘The morgue itself was a drab, grey building of concrete and brick,’ Ivan said. ‘It reminded me of a small bunker. There was a giant pipe coming out of the roof. A crematory chimney that blew out this heavy black smoke every once in awhile. And there were no windows that I could see; I remember that also. Just this block of a structure with a pipe coming out of it, and no windows.’
Night fallen, the two of them could have been sitting together in just such a windowless, dark structure themselves. Save for the light of the flashlight, dim, shining towards the ground so it wouldn’t give them away, the world was dark around them and above. Night sounds from the woods seemed alien and intentionally menacing, like they were being watched by stern and disapproving spectators. The blackness about them could have been walls, and the ebony sky above a shroud. Not unlike a vast mausoleum chamber – or a morgue drawer like Ivan’s childhood friend had described. Even now the dead could be around them, closing in, encircling them.
‘When I went inside,’ Ivan continued, ‘there was no one there. There was a counter, but no one manning it. I had the sudden and terrible fear that I would have to navigate the place alone, wandering down hallways, roaming from room to room, peering under sheeted mounds on gurneys until I found my mother.
‘I started to panic,’ Ivan said. ‘My heart was beating fast. My breathing was shallow. My legs shook and the corners of my vision went grey and hazy and I thought I would faint. Then, unconscious, they’d rise, those sheeted mounds on the metal gurneys, and they’d shamble out of their rooms and down the halls, surround me, and tear me to shreds.’
Reggie took a breath, steeled himself, and intentionally stared at the dark of the woods around them. He waited for his eyes to adapt better to the darkness, so that he was able to see the vague outlines and shapes of the trees. He remembered his recent nightmare about the funeral home, the lights going out, and his dad’s cadaver slithering out of the casket. The dark wall of the forest around them was just such a place the shambling, dragging dead could be moving in right now.
Inching closer. Hungry for the life they no longer had.
Refusing to give in to his fear, Reggie gazed long and hard at the woods. Reaching arms resolved themselves into hooked, gnarled branches. Eager, hungry faces into the whorls of tree bark upon thick trunks.
As far as he could tell, no zombies lurked, and this helped calm him a little.
He remembered what the singing posse leader had said just last night:
You’re not afraid of the dark, are you?
Reggie had said no then, would have said the same now if asked, but it wouldn’t have been completely true. Because it was easy to be afraid of the dark when sitting in it with a killer as he shared his tales of death.
‘But then a man appeared,’ Ivan said, continuing his narrative. ‘He stood behind the counter in a black suit and he looked very official. His presence calmed me and he asked how he could help. Somehow I found my voice and told him who I was, gave him my mother’s name too. He gave me a sympathetic look and motioned me through the door to the right of the counter.
‘Like I imagined, he led me down halls and through doors, though not as numerous as in my head. And we came to the room of drawers that my friend had told me about, or one like it. He walked over to the wall of drawers and motioned for me to follow him. He put one hand on my shoulder as he opened a mid-level drawer with the other.’
Reggie didn’t need to hear the rest of the story. He could picture it well enough.
But Ivan pressed on, and Reggie listened.
‘She was naked,’ Ivan said, ‘which should have shocked me, but didn’t. I’d never seen my parents naked. But her nudity didn’t bother me. It was just very sad. There were stitched areas on her torso, and a small one on her face – injuries from the crash that the mortician had closed to make her more presentable. But she wasn’t monstrous. She was just … dead.
‘I stared at her for a t
ime,’ Ivan said, ‘and the man in the suit was patient. I think he thought I was mourning, but that wasn’t it. I was just interested. I was wondering how this came to be: one moment my mother was alive, and the next she was dead and a thing in a drawer.
‘I was seeing something for the first time,’ Ivan said, his voice changing from a monotone lecture-hall tone to one of curiosity and inquisitiveness. ‘I was seeing something of the world that had always been hidden from me. I knew about death, of course, but I had never known death. Yet now here it was, right in front of me.’
These words were familiar to Reggie. He’d heard them before. He’d thought them before. His train of thought had been very similar when he’d first seen his dad in the parking lot of the church, and later at the open casket viewing.
He’d remembered his dad, living and there and all the memories of their time together rolled up into a collage of images in his mind. And then there’d been his dad, dead in the parking lot, dead in the casket. The two things didn’t fit together, seemed irreparably opposed to one another – his dad alive, and his dad dead.
Like the killer as a boy, Reggie had felt a similar sense of the mystery of it all. That with the death of his dad he was peering in through a veil that had previously always been drawn across the world. Things had been hidden from him; secrets had been kept.
Then, before his dad’s lifeless form, he’d seen the truth of things. The temporary nature of everything. The fragility of life. Things lived, and things died. Those were absolutes that should have never been kept from him.
And it had been the killer – not his mom, and not his dad, gone forever – who had been the first to give voice to this dark lesson. Nearly a year after the funeral. Until this man had come along, stumbling through the forest, Reggie had been on his own, stumbling likewise himself. Trying to make sense of the senselessness he’d felt inside.
Are You Afraid of the Dark? Page 20