Are You Afraid of the Dark?

by Seth C. Adams

  Some things lived. Some things died.

  For that lesson alone, however painfully delivered, he owed the man a debt of gratitude. Or, if not gratitude … fidelity. At least until the end.

  ‘And it was absolutely senseless,’ the killer said, breaking Reggie’s train of thought. ‘My mother had lived, and then she was dead, and neither state changed anything. Living or dead, she didn’t matter, because I was still here. I still had to find a way through life, until I died, and focusing on her was doing nothing but wasting time.’

  The killer looked at him across the pool of light between them.

  Illuminated red, the man looked ghastly. This was his true face, Reggie thought. He was seeing the real thing now, not the man-mask that the killer wore to move about the world undetected.

  ‘So I pushed the drawer shut and walked away,’ the killer said. ‘That was that, and now here I am.’

  2.

  They heard the border patrol officer coming before they saw him. Which wasn’t the surprising part; the officer was calling out to them, announcing his arrival. The surprising part was that they hadn’t heard him approaching until the unseen man started calling.

  ‘Don’t kill him,’ Reggie whispered to the killer.

  The killer had pulled out his pistol, was screwing on the silencer.

  ‘If you kill him,’ Reggie said, ‘I’ll run.’

  It wasn’t lost on him that this exchange was almost a repeat of the incident with Jeff the hunter, who hadn’t been a hunter at all. He was sure it wasn’t lost on Ivan either.

  And they both knew how that situation had turned out.

  The killer looked at him. He had switched off the flashlight when they’d first heard the officer shouting out, but Reggie’s eyes had grown used to the dark. He could see the shape of the killer, and his posture, and the man was facing him, considering.

  ‘If you kill him,’ Reggie repeated, ‘I’ll run and warn the others.’

  Reggie had come to know the killer’s thoughts, to a degree. As repulsive as it was, he realized that tuning in to that shared frequency could have its advantages. Though he couldn’t see the man clearly, he could sense the ideas going through the killer’s head. Hell, they were the same thoughts that would be going through his head if he was in the killer’s shoes.

  ‘If you shoot me first,’ he whispered, ‘there’ll be no one to help with your plan. You’ll never make it across the border by yourself.’

  ‘Reggie—’ the killer started, but Reggie cut him off.

  ‘Don’t kill him,’ Reggie repeated.

  ‘I won’t kill him,’ the killer said, and though Reggie couldn’t read the honesty of his tone, there was nothing else to be done about it.

  ‘Come on out!’ the border patrol officer called again, coming nearer, but his shape still lost in the greater shadow of the trees. ‘I saw you! Come on out with your hands up!’

  He repeated the instructions in Spanish.

  Ducking behind the nearest tree, Reggie tried to imitate a statue, willing his body still, slowing his breathing to a near comatose rhythm.

  ‘We saw the light!’ the officer said. Reggie didn’t like the use of the word ‘we’. It meant others might be out there, on their way or already here, circling about. ‘We know you’re out there!’

  Again, the officer repeated the words in Spanish.

  Reggie heard a snap of twigs, a crunch of leaves. It hadn’t come from him, and he knew the killer would never betray his own location so carelessly. A dim flash of light came from an easterly direction, maybe twenty yards away.

  ‘Soon a helicopter will fly over!’ the officer called out. ‘It’ll be equipped with heat sensitive equipment! And the pilot will radio down to me your exact position! So you may as well come out now!’

  Reggie listened carefully. The night was silent save for the officer’s bumbling footfalls. Maybe the border patrol officer thought he was dealing with a couple immigrants. Maybe a family. At worst, a small-time trafficker or drug dealer.

  Which seemed impossible. Some sort of alert had to have gone out over the various law enforcement radio channels. Warning the search parties about the killer on the loose. But if he’d known the danger he was approaching, the officer surely wouldn’t have come alone.

  Crouched in his hiding place, Reggie turned his head the slightest of degrees. Far off, a faint whup whup sound carried through the night. A helicopter’s blades cutting the air?

  If that was what it was, the chopper would be over them soon.

  ‘No one’s going to hurt you!’ the officer said after repeating his last words in Spanish. ‘But you’re here illegally, and you’ll have to go back! Come out, surrender yourself, and it’ll be easier on all of us!’

  Again, he repeated this in Spanish for the imagined immigrants.

  Reggie hadn’t noticed, but the killer was gone. It was as if the man had melded into shadow. Reggie hadn’t even heard him move.

  He saw another flash of the officer’s flashlight. Dim, he must have been covering it with a hand, thinking it hid his position.

  Reggie prayed his threat to Ivan would save the man.

  But he knew the killer didn’t respond well to threats. He responded to nothing but his own thoughts, his own impulses, which, Reggie was coming to realize, made Ivan more dangerous than he’d ever considered.

  The border patrol officer was closer. Snapping twigs and rustling leaves preceded his clumsy approach. Now Reggie could make out the shape of him. He could see the crisp outlines of the pressed uniform. The brimmed hat and the outstretched arms at sharp angles. And at the end of the arms, the pistol and the muted light of the flashlight, pointing out ahead of him.

  Then the figure fell back. The motion was a fast blur. Reggie thought of a cartoon character slipping on a banana peel.

  The officer cried out briefly, and then the cries were cut off. There was another short-lived rustle of branches and leaves as arms and legs flailed, before everything went still again.

  The night and woods were impenetrable in their silence.

  Then, separating from the night, one shadow sliding out of others, the killer emerged and was there again beside Reggie. He snatched Reggie’s arm and pulled him along. Reggie resisted, or tried to, but it was like resisting a gale force wind blowing him ahead of its path.

  ‘He’s alive,’ the killer said, knowing Reggie’s thoughts.

  ‘I want to see him,’ Reggie said, trying to pull away.

  The killer stopped pulling and instead, with one great yank, brought Reggie face to face with him. Reggie’s feet dangled off the ground. The killer’s eyes darted side to side, the irises bloodshot, the hollows beneath purple and sagging.

  The large man looked both extremely tired and intensely aware. Perhaps running on sheer force of will. Reggie had no doubt even in this exhausted state the killer could end him in seconds.

  ‘Listen you little fuck,’ the killer growled. ‘If we don’t move now, that helicopter will spot us. And then they’ll come in swarms. And if that happens, I can’t promise that a stray bullet won’t find your stupid little face.’

  Reggie needed to pee. He didn’t think he could hold it. He also wanted to cry, and didn’t think he could hold that back either. He hung in the air and felt like a field mouse clenched in a hawk’s talons. He knew then, grasped in those strong arms, more fully than ever before just how powerless he was.

  ‘But if I get to the border,’ the killer said, ‘then there will be little or no killing. I’ll be gone, they won’t be able to stop me, and you’ll go back to your pathetic life, crying over your faggot daddy. But for that to happen, you need to help me this one last time. Got it?’

  Somehow, Reggie retained control of his bladder and tears. But he nodded at the killer’s words. That was one bodily function he wouldn’t deny the man. All he wanted was to survive. He thought that was one thing he still had in common with the killer.

  Satisfied, Ivan set him down, knelt at Reggie’s lev
el.

  ‘You understand the plan?’ the killer asked him, fishing in his pocket, coming out with a lighter.

  Reggie nodded, remembering what the killer had told him earlier in the day, about what they’d do when they reached the border.

  ‘Good,’ the killer said, and pointed east. ‘You’ll go that way, and I’ll go this way,’ he said, pointing west. ‘It needs to be big. Like the flames of hell itself.’

  Reggie nodded again.

  He went east, the killer went west, and together they lit the world afire.

  3.

  The world shone brilliantly with the light of the blaze. It cast the ground in a red, burning coal-like glare, and lit the sky a deep and flashing scarlet. The landscape looked like a fireplace or the interior of a wood burning stove. Everything burned, flaming tongues crawling along in every direction, licking the sky and skittering along the earth.

  It was frightening to see how quickly things burned. The flames seemed hungry and anxious to burn the world, licking and grasping, as if they were living things desperate for sustenance. Reggie knew it was wrong, holding the lighter underneath a leaf or branch, thumbing it and sparking it alight, and running the flame back and forth until the foliage was burning. People could be hurt or worse if the fire got out of control.

  Not if, he thought to himself, when. That was the whole point of it; a wildfire to distract everyone, to create chaos, so that Ivan could make a break for the border. The border patrol officers and police would become firefighters, rather than immigrant or fugitive hunters. The approaching helicopter would become a wildfire watcher, radioing down instructions about burn paths, rather than watching for migrants or federal escapees.

  For it to work, for the fire to build and spread rapidly, the killer had explained, they needed to light many areas, really fast. And so wanting to be rid of him, believing what he said about maybe Reggie getting shot too should they be found out and a gunfight break out, Reggie had done what he was told, running east and stopping from tree to tree, bush to bush, lighting the vegetation up like candles. The killer had done the same, running west.

  Soon, the inferno spread across the earth.

  The officers, border patrol and police alike, had come quickly as the flames grew. At the sounds of engines roaring to life and coming closer, and the sounds of boots hitting the ground in a rhythmic stomp, Reggie had moved inward, away from the edges of the woods where it gave way to the desert stretch leading to the border. The vehicles and boots stopped outside the woods, also, and so Reggie knew that between the climbing, dancing flames, the intermittent shadows of night, and the woods between them, it wasn’t very likely they could see him.

  But it was unsettling, being so close. Part of him screamed he should race to the officers and explain everything. He thought about it, looking around as he considered it. The fire made the shadows writhe eerily like dark worms, and this undulating living darkness made it somehow more plausible that the killer was somewhere out there right now, watching him. And he’d know if Reggie went to the officers, and he knew where Reggie lived, and he’d come calling someday, in the middle of the night, maybe stepping out of one of these living, roiling shadows like a phantom.

  So instead of running to them, Reggie kept sparking the lighter under the branches and bushes. When the flames were so hot he could hardly bear it, the fiery walls rising and spreading on all sides, he stopped, turned, and ran back the way he’d come. West, following the fires and the other who’d lit them, the one who he should be running from, and yet who drew him back like a dog to its master.

  There were shouts from behind him, heard over the crackles and snaps of the fire. Calling after him or calling out directions to each other, he didn’t know, and didn’t stay to find out. The helicopter was overhead now, its bright spotlight like the eye of God. It didn’t play on him, though, but away from him, dancing among the firestorm. That could change at any moment, Reggie knew, and so he ran faster.

  Reggie thought he’d run in a more or less straight path when he and the killer had turned in opposite directions to start their fires. And so running back he tried to keep a straight route again. Heedless of his intent, however, the incorrigible blaze made him turn and jump and duck frantically with its every twist and turn and pop and snap, eager to light him up also, to charbroil flesh as well as burning vegetation to ash. He tried to edge nearer to where the woods met the desert, but now there were vehicles everywhere, engines revving and tyres grinding dirt as they paraded up and down the length of the woods. Shouts of goddamn and holy shit were thrown about in tones of awe.

  So that when the arm found him and pulled him down, Reggie wasn’t expecting it, hadn’t thought he was back where they’d parted, and he screamed when he hit the ground, screamed like a girl before he rolled over on the dirt and saw it was Ivan. The killer squatting above him, pressing him down with one massive hand on Reggie’s chest, one hand clamped atop Reggie’s mouth, cutting the scream short.

  But he had screamed, loudly, and now they both froze, Reggie on the forest floor, killer poised in a half crouch, like a panther ready to pounce, and they listened. The fire was loud, its snaps like the crisp slaps of a flag in a high wind. The vehicles rolling along the earth and their engines roaring; their thuds and bumps and grinding of desert grit. The helicopter overhead; its blades stirring small tornadoes, the winds parting trees with a hurricane-like force.

  Reggie’s scream could have been lost among those sounds. Probably had been.

  Or maybe it hadn’t. Maybe now the shouts and cries they couldn’t quite understand were calling the police and border patrol together for one vast raid into the woods, where killer and boy alike would be killed in a hail of bullets.

  Ivan atop him, Reggie tense and breathing hard, they were silent and waited. The crackling heat of the flames was close, and crawled closer.

  When the storm troopers still hadn’t come some moments later, the killer hauled Reggie to his feet and took his hand from across Reggie’s mouth. But he leaned close and spoke clear.

  ‘You fucking scream like that again,’ he said, ‘I’ll cut your fucking head off.’

  Reggie nodded, feeling numb and slow as if coming out of a heavy sleep. None of this seemed real anymore. How could it be? Not a week ago, life had been mundane. Even the death of his dad had been so. The man’s very absence had been real, but the pain had become a routine, just a part of the day. It was a prescribed path of life he’d come to accept, like getting up and going to school, or eating breakfast in the morning.

  This, though – guns, murders, monster cats, wildfires, and police chases – was unreal. It was the stuff of movies and books, fantasy, and however many times he’d dreamed of stuff like this, now Reggie wanted nothing more than for it to be over.

  The old, boring pain was preferable to this madness.

  ‘We go a little further west,’ the killer said, ‘away from the checkpoint. Then we go for the border. Someone will be there, waiting for me.’

  Reggie heard the ‘we’ and wanted to say something in defiance. He didn’t want to go any further with this man. Fuck the responsibility he’d felt earlier when the killer had passed out and Reggie had run, only to stop a short ways and turn back.

  With the killer’s very presence, Reggie could feel the ticks and tocks of his life clicking away, like the second hand on a clock. Even being near this man was to tempt and invite suffering. Every moment he was with the killer was another that could be his last.

  And Reggie knew now with a certainty that he wanted to live a little longer.

  The killer started walking again, and Reggie resignedly followed. His legs weren’t his own. His mind not his entirely, either. The fear controlled him. Or maybe Ivan had tuned in to that shared frequency, and now controlled the dial. At the controls, working the dials and knobs, the killer had found he controlled not only the signal, the thoughts in Reggie’s head, but the body as well. Punching in commands and operating him like a machine.


  The killer beside him had one hand in his jacket, working idly there under the fabric. As if caressing something; the switchblade that had dug out the bullet, maybe, or the garrotte wire, or the gun, the pistol. Reggie remembered it well, and its muzzle, the black eye.

  No, the killer controlled the situation, but not through some psychic manipulation. It was through violence and threat of violence that he commanded things. But Reggie was minding the details, watching things, and waiting.

  The blaze was behind them and about them. The world red and afire.

  At the edge of the woods they looked out; a stretch of desert and the fence there at the end of it. So close and yet so far away. The police cars and border patrol Humvees there to the east, their headlights washing over the desert soil and along the treeline. Far but not far enough, Reggie thought. Then the killer was moving again, and a handful of Reggie’s shirt in his fist, Reggie was moving with him.

  Here we go, he thought, waiting for the bullet that would stop him, that would end him, and the only thing Reggie could think about was if it would hurt, and whether he’d get to see his dad again.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  1.

  Along with the gunfire and the heat of the bullets passing dangerously close – kicking up dirt around them like mortar fire on a battlefield – there was the large shape Reggie saw moving almost parallel with them a bit to the west.

  It was low and fast and glowed at the eyes with reflected firelight. He wondered if this was the feline demon returned from hell, sent to retrieve him for the part he’d played in the events of the past days. Because he knew that now, if he hadn’t known it earlier, which he thought he did but had just ignored.

  He’d indeed played a part.

  The death the killer had brought with him was partly on Reggie’s shoulders. He had been complicit in it. Allowed it by his very inaction. But more than that, Reggie now acknowledged that his responsibility had started that very first day in the woods when Ivan had stumbled out, holding his bloodied gut. Even then, he’d known something was wrong about the man.