Are You Afraid of the Dark?

by Seth C. Adams

‘For murdering people,’ Reggie said, ‘you deserve to die.’

  The killer nodded again.

  ‘But you don’t want to be the person to do it,’ the killer said. ‘Take it from me. When you kill someone it never leaves you. You never forget a person when you take their life. They stay with you forever.’

  Reggie could detect no lies in the killer’s tone. He wasn’t trying to talk his way out of the situation. He was just telling the truth as he saw it.

  ‘You try to sleep,’ the killer said, ‘and you see their faces. You walk in a crowd, and a passing face looks like theirs. You always see them. You can never get away. I’ve tried to many times, in many ways, and I can’t.’

  Reggie held the pistol in two shaking hands. He tried to steady them, but they wouldn’t settle. He stared down the sight of the gun at the killer, and the killer looked back up at him. Across that bridge there was an exchange, unspoken, unseen, and as real as anything passed between hands.

  ‘I think I’m dying anyway,’ the killer said. ‘Even if you don’t shoot me, I have to make it across this desert and find someone who can help me. A doctor – a surgeon – who can help a man shot multiple times and with widespread infection. What do you think my chances are out here?’

  Reggie didn’t say anything.

  ‘Leave me alone,’ the killer said. ‘Go back across the border, leave me here, and I’ll probably die anyway. There’s no need for you to shoot me. There’s no need for you to take the burden on yourself.’

  Reggie still said nothing. But his hands were steadying.

  The killer’s face was centred by the pistol’s sightline.

  He heard the killer take a deep and expansive breath.

  ‘We had a deal,’ the killer said, without conviction, as if he knew the answer to this proclamation anyway.

  Leaning to one side, holding the gun in his right hand, Reggie found his backpack, zipped it open, and removed one of the last things he’d put inside before leaving the house what seemed an eternity ago. He tossed the wad of money back at the killer, watched it bounce and settle in the man’s lap, where it sat curled like a dead creature.

  ‘Deal’s off,’ Reggie said.

  The killer breathed deeply again, and they both heard the loud, moist gurgle from somewhere inside him. The broken hidden pieces sputtering their last.

  The killer looked first one way, then the other, then turned his gaze back on Reggie. Even dying, the man’s eyes glinted with their cold, blue light.

  ‘I’m lying,’ the killer said, his voice hardening and taking on a flat tone. ‘If I live, I’ll come back someday and hunt you down. Even if you move to another town, I’ll find you. Even if you change your name, I’ll find you.’

  The killer rose shakily to his feet. His ruinous leg, the meat and flesh hanging from it, the white bone peeking out from it, straightened and bore his weight.

  There was a squelching noise as he stepped in something wet beneath him.

  ‘The deputy was right that day,’ the killer said. ‘He was telling you the truth. The day I escaped from the police, I also raped and killed a woman. If I live, I’ll find you and your mother, and I’ll rape her before I kill you.’

  Reggie’s gun-bearing hand – his entire body – was calm. He felt as if all the world had silenced and stilled itself for his benefit. His eyes seemed to filter the night even better, so that the shapes about him grew sharper and more defined. The killer wasn’t merely a shadow of a man anymore, but a man, whole and clear standing before him. He could make out the contours of the killer’s clothing, the features of his face.

  And the eyes, formed as if by arctic ice.

  ‘I’ll make you watch,’ the killer said. ‘I’ll make you watch as I rape her. Then I’ll make her watch as I kill you. It’ll be slow. I’ll make you watch each other suffer.’

  Somehow, Reggie knew the killer was lying. He hadn’t raped anyone the day he’d escaped. That wasn’t how the killer did things. That wasn’t the business he was in. Yet, Reggie was surprised to find that it didn’t matter. He didn’t care.

  Lie or not, rape or murder, the threat was true enough. The man’s very life was the threat. Every breath he drew, every day he lived, was a day of potential terror for someone else.

  There was movement at the top of the arroyo wall. Without turning his attention away from the killer, Reggie watched in his periphery as a low shape stepped up to the edge of the drop.

  The mangy dog sat and stared down at the scene. The killer heard the movement and saw the dog, giving it a cursory glance before turning his attention back to Reggie.

  ‘Kill me,’ the killer said. ‘Or I’ll kill you.’

  He blinked once, like an invalid giving a signal, an affirmation, and Reggie obliged and pulled the trigger. The loud crack echoed through the night, and the killer slumped over, dead. From his face a new hole spilled forth a red, soupy gruel.

  The dog watched from her perch above, and Reggie, dropping the pistol, climbed up to meet her. They headed across the dark desert together back towards the border, silent companions on a grim journey.

  4.

  They entered their own country through the hole in the fence without trouble. No border patrol or police waited to arrest him. The boy wondered about this, and then he remembered all that had happened in the past week, and wondered about it no more. The world was the way it was, and there was no sense, no rhyme or reason to it.

  He followed the highway home rather than trek through the woods. Some sign of civilization – be it as simple as a road – seemed important to him at that time, and it calmed him, the way it stretched over the gentle roll of the desert into the horizon.

  The dog walked beside him on the long, harsh road, and there was a cursory comfort that he again had a friend in this wide and desolate world. Yet even this weak hope was heavy laden by the knowledge that it wouldn’t last.

  Nothing in this world does, and that was okay. Save the memories of fleeting, better times, and the anticipation of more to come, there was nothing worth preserving.

  And no matter what he did in the years to come until the end, it was the blood he remembered most, pouring into the desert sand. The red dirt, the red earth; life in its unbecoming.

  Undone, forever gone.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  1.

  The stain upon the asphalt was still discernible from the surface around it even after all this time. That seemed fitting to Reggie. Blood shouldn’t be so easily scrubbed away, as if nothing had happened.

  His mom stood beside him over the dark spot, giving his hand a squeeze before letting go. The mangy mutt sat in the space between them, having given the dark blot a single perfunctory sniff before shying away from it.

  The FOR LEASE sign hanging in the church’s window was new. Everything else looked the same, if a little run-down. Paint along the adobe walls flaked away in places. Along the roof’s gutters the occasional tile hung askew, blown or battered by desert winds and rains.

  Surprisingly, the place was worse in Reggie’s mind, where thoughts and fears mingled into nightmares creating realities that had never existed, than it was in person. The church was neither a place of God, where the Almighty dwelt among his children, as he’d been raised to believe, nor a house of death, where his father’s wake had been held and Reggie had spied the waxen corpse in the casket that had haunted him the past year.

  It was just a building, weather-worn and slightly dilapidated.

  ‘You okay?’ his mom asked, and Reggie nodded.

  He knew that simple question referred not simply to what they were doing now, standing at the site of his dad’s murder. It also signified everything that had happened in the past few days.

  Returning home after the shoot-out with the border patrol, Reggie had arrived to find his mom waiting for him on the porch. The glow from the porch light revealed the note from his desk in her hands, clutched fiercely like an heirloom.

  He’d told her everything. Finding Ivan in t
he woods. Nursing the man’s injuries as best he could. Deputy Collins coming to the house and the struggle that followed. How Reggie and the killer had disposed of the man. The false trails laid through the woods to put the police off of Ivan’s track. The excursion into the woods and crossing the border.

  And, finally, the killer’s death.

  ‘We don’t have to do this now,’ his mom said as they stood over the old stain, even though it had been Reggie’s idea. ‘We’ve got all the time in the world.’

  But that was exactly it: they didn’t. Time was catching up to all of them, and no one got away. He had to do this now, today, because there was no telling what tomorrow would bring.

  ‘I’m fine,’ Reggie said, startled to realize that this was actually the case. Or, if he wasn’t exactly fine, he was getting there.

  He knelt, touched the darker spot on the asphalt. It was warm under the Arizona sun, and he kept his fingers there for a few moments, letting that warmth chase away the prior coldness that had been inside him for awhile.

  After listening to the whole story that night on the porch, his mom had rejected Reggie’s suggestion to call the police. It would make no difference, she said. The killer was dead across the border. The things the man had done were over, and there was no way to undo them.

  What about the things I did? Reggie had asked.

  You’ve got your whole life to make up for them, she’d said. You can’t do that from juvenile hall or some halfway house.

  This wasn’t an evasion or an excuse. Reggie could see that in the stern set of her face and the firm gaze with which she considered him. His days of wallowing in self-pity were over. She would expect many things from him in the coming days, months, and years. And he would expect them from himself.

  Together, the three of them – mother, son, and dog – turned away from the old building, crossed the parking lot back to the car, and got in. As they turned out onto the highway, Reggie cast one last glance in the rear-view mirror, watched as the church shrank in the distance.

  Summer heat was baking the street, wafting up in distortion ripples. For a moment the colourless currents seemed to take a vaguely human form, and it seemed to nod or wave in their general direction. As if in parting or farewell or approval. Deciding this was something worth believing in, Reggie smiled, closed his eyes, and allowed himself to be carried forward into whatever tomorrow would bring.

  Keep Reading …

  If you enjoyed Are You Afraid of the Dark?, make sure you’ve read Seth C. Adams’s previous novel …

  We were so young when it all happened. Just 13-years-old, making the most of the long, hot, lazy days of summer, thinking we had the world at our feet. That was us – me, Fat Bobby, Jim and Tara – the four members of the Outsiders’ Club.

  The day we found a burnt-out car in the woods was the day everything changed. Cold, hard cash in the front seat and a body in the trunk … it started out as a mystery we were desperate to solve.

  Then, the Collector arrived. He knew we had found his secret. And suddenly, our summer of innocence turned into the stuff of nightmares.

  Nothing would ever be the same again …

  Click here to order a copy of If You Go Down to the Woods

  Acknowledgements

  Thank you to Tamara Thorne and Dean Koontz for impressing upon a young writer the importance of the technical side of writing (syntax, grammar, etc.). Though not the sexiest part of the job, it’s at least equal to the creative aspects in the pursuit of delivering to the reader a quality story. And thank you to Kathryn Cheshire and Janette Currie, editors extraordinaire, for their eagle-eyed attentiveness to early versions of the manuscript. Everything right with this novel is in large part due to these four individuals. Any shortcomings are solely on the shoulders of the author.

  Also by Seth C. Adams

  If You Go Down to the Woods

  About the Author

  Raised on Marvel comics, horror fiction, The Twilight Zone, and other genre entertainment unsuitable for an impressionable young mind, Seth C. Adams knew he wanted to tell stories at a young age. With a Bachelor’s in anthropology from the University of California, Riverside, and completing his Master’s in North American History at Arizona State University, as an adult he’s learned that real life is indeed often stranger–and more frightening–than fiction. He currently splits his time between California and Arizona, and is always working on, or thinking about, his next story.

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