The Night Listener and Others

by Chet Williamson

  It stops as though a fist has grabbed it, and at first I fear that is precisely what has happened. But as the shock of impact shivers up my arm, it is followed by a yielding feeling, a vulnerability that amazes me. The sword’s point is pulled downward and the hilt falls from my hand as the thing strikes the floor with a solidity that shakes the kitchen, rattles the silverware. Then comes the sound of its dying. My hand fumbles at the wall, and the light switch I have touched a thousand times seems cold and alien. I take a deep breath, flick the white plastic toggle, and light floods the room

  He is a boy. He is nothing but a boy. Ectomorphically thin, he lies there, his arms protruding from the short cuffs of his jacket like fleshy sticks. A fuzz of wheat-colored beard covers his chin, though it is hard to detect because of the blood. Gloved hands grasp the sword still sticking in his throat, where the jaw waggles to and fro. But no words come, only a wet whistling that sends red froth bubbling up from the edges of the wound. His neck, the front of his jacket, the throw rug beneath him are all sodden with blood. He turns his eyes toward me, and I am struck by how young he is. His dripping gloves tap at the sword blade, and I kneel beside him and draw it out of his sundered flesh. Huge gouts of blood follow the blade, and what seems a river of the stuff runs from the ragged hole I have made. I drop the sword and grab the tired rug beneath him, pressing it over the wound. The pressure of my hands makes it ooze like a sponge, but I hold it there for what can be no more than a few seconds.

  Then I look at the boy’s eyes and I stop. My hands release their grip on the impromptu bandage, and a final drowning breath whispers redly away as the eyes glaze over.

  I hear someone call my name and look up to see my wife standing in the doorway. From her position she can see only me and the lower half of the child’s body, his dungarees and white sneakers with red and blue stripes. She stands there and I look at her and mumble something about a burglar, I’ve killed a burglar, and she disappears into the darkness of the house. When she returns she is carrying my bathrobe. She comes into the kitchen, where she can see the body fully and holds out the robe for me. I put it on apologetically, thinking that the blood will stain it, but she appears indifferent to that. Then I call the police and an ambulance, though it is far too late.

  The police tell me that there have been several burglaries in the past few weeks, and that there should be no legal complications because of the law that permits the use of what they call deadly force to repel intruders. I learn later that the boy was sixteen. I try to apologize to his parents at the courthouse, but they will not speak to me. The father’s face is sad and stony, and his wife cries silently.

  It was so wrong. Such an unfortunate coincidence that the boy came that night, that I mistook him for what I truly sought to kill. Perhaps it sent the child as a scapegoat, thinking his death would satisfy me, put me off my guard. But I am not fooled. It should know I am a wiser, more fitting adversary than that. My sleep is always light, and often I arise and walk to the windows and doors, listening for its coming. It will not find me unaware. I will be ready when it comes.

  But it has been a long time now, a very long time. And I have not heard it return.

  Not once, in all these long, cold nights.

  Season Pass

  I didn’t know what Mr. and Mrs. Younger were when I first saw them. To me they were just one more older couple who come out to Magicland for a sunny afternoon of watching the dolphin show, the stage act, and maybe taking one of the tamer rides—the carousel, or the Tunnel-of-Chills. I was sure I’d seen them before, for there was an easy familiarity about them. They looked at home, sitting on the bench near the bandshell, under the few oaks the new owners had let stand when they changed the old Rocky Grove Park into Magicland ten years before.

  I wasn’t here then, at least not as a security guard. But I came as a guest that first summer, as did almost everybody for a hundred miles around, to see what had been done to the grove. Some had liked the change. I hadn’t. The park had been sanitized away, the grotesque, laughing figures in the funhouse alcoves sold to collectors, the old rides like The Whip and The Octopus prettied up with fiberglass shells and cartoon animals. The Penny Arcade became the quarter arcade, and the flip movies that had intrigued my brother and me as boys were gone, replaced by video screens and pinball machines that offered only three balls for two bits. Everything was bright and clean and shiny. I hated it.

  I didn’t come back after that first visit until this spring, when I answered the ad for security guards. The office where I worked laid me off in March, and though the Magicland stint paid far less, I thought it would be a pleasant way to spend the summer while keeping my eyes open for something better. And I was hungry for something better. I used to think that hunger was a good thing, something that made us grow. Maybe open hunger, honest ambition, still is. But when hunger disguises itself as something else—kindness, maybe—it turns ugly, makes us less than human.

  To look at the Youngers, you never would have imagined that hunger in them. When I first looked at them with more than casual interest, I guessed that they were in their early sixties. He was gray at the temples and near the top, but there were still dark brown patches. She too had streaks of gray-white, but the tawny hair around the whiteness made it look almost platinum in contrast. Neither was overweight, and both their complexions were healthily ruddy. The only outward signs of age were that the man limped slightly and carried a cane, and both wore thick bifocals. Their clothing was neat and clean, if a bit out of date. They looked well cared for, as one might make a suit last for years by judicious handling.

  The Youngers. God, how that name suits them. So many don’t. A potential assassin named Hinckley? A successful one named Oswald? Those are the names of buzzard towns and cartoon rabbits. But Younger —that sums up their deeds nicely, while smacking of the outlaw family too, though I doubt a connection. What my Youngers have done is soft and subtle, far from gunshots and holdups.

  I noticed them, really noticed them for the first time, giving candy to a kid. I was twenty yards behind where they were sitting on their bench, and there was one of those sudden hushes that comes to the park once in a while, and I easily heard what they said.

  “Young fella?’’ The man’s voice was hearty and friendly. The boy, about ten, stopped but didn’t say anything. “Want this?” the man went on, holding out a Hershey bar.

  I tensed. I kept hearing my mother and father and teachers and the state trooper who visited the school once a year saying, “Never take candy from strangers!‘‘ For kids, it replaced the commandment about adultery.

  “We just can’t eat two,” the woman said kindly. “And it’ll melt in this hot sun. Won’t you take it?”

  The kid came closer and smiled a little. He looked cautious, like he’d heard the warnings too, but shrugged and took the candy. I guess he figured there were people all around, and that’s what I figured too. “Okay. Thanks a lot,” he said, and walked away with the candy. I watched the couple a moment longer, just long enough to see them smile at each other, as if to enjoy a good deed shared. But there was something else in the look, something more than gratification at giving away a 35¢ candy bar.

  I started to notice the Youngers every day now, occasionally walking around the park, but mostly just sitting on the bench near the bandshell, whether a show was going on or not. For the life of me, I didn’t see how people were able to sit through “Babes on Broadway” once, let alone five times a day, six on weekends. But the Youngers were always there, holding the bench like a fort, watching with interest as our “professional cast” butchered songs from A Chorus Line and Oklahoma!, or when little kids scrambled up into the bandshell between shows and pretended that they were our music school dropouts who moved their mouths to the canned tunes.

  And they kept giving away candy, too. I’d see them do it once or twice a week, and since I spent only a little of my time watching them, they must have done it far more frequently than that. It was the last week o
f July when I got suspicious. I saw the woman give a Hershey bar to a little girl of six or seven. I smiled, for I’d written the couple off as just nice, generous folks with no grandchildren of their own to spoil, getting their parental kicks by making kids happy with chocolate. But a few hours later, I saw the same little girl, white as a skull, sitting with her worried parents in the nurse’s station.

  Little kids are always getting sick in the park—the station doles out twenty or thirty doses of Pepto-Bismol a day to deal with the gut-wrenching mixture of rides and junk food. But the little girl didn’t look nauseated. She looked drained, as if something were eating at her. I checked back an hour later, but Jeanie, the nurse, told me the girl felt better and that she and her parents had gone.

  I’m a suspicious type to begin with—always been a little paranoid—so the combination of candy and illness put me on my toes, and I began thinking about the kind of crazies who put razor blades in apples. Something in the candy? A little rat poison? A shot of Raid? Were these nice old folks retired elementary schoolteachers with a taste for vengeance? I decided to keep a closer eye on the sweet old couple the next day.

  I was stationed at the rear of the grove a full hour before they walked in at 9:30 and sat on their usual bench. They talked softly, but from their expressions and the gentle tones that drifted back to me, I knew it was the talk that people make when they’ve been with each other for a long time and are happy to stay that way. They looked up at the trees, stretched, turned, situated themselves differently. At times he would put an arm around her, or they held hands, and often they didn’t touch at all. Finally she took two paperbacks from her big straw purse, handed one to the man, and they both began to read. It looked like a long day.

  At 10:45, when the park was beginning to fill up and people were grabbing benches for the 11:00 “Babes on Broadway,” the woman got up and went to the nearest snack bar. I followed and watched as she bought two Cokes and four Hershey bars, then returned to the bench, giving a Coke to her husband and setting the candy between them. In five minutes they gave one away to an Asian kid and his younger brother. There was no way they could have doctored it. I saw them all the time, watching their hands and the candy through the slats in the bench. All she did after she made the offer was pick up the Hershey bar and put it in the kid’s hand, and watch and wave as the boys scampered away.

  I’ve got to confess that I was a little disappointed at not being able to nab two kiddie-poisoners, but the relief of knowing that if there were people like that they weren’t in my park more than made up for it. I gave the couple a clean bill, and left the grove feeling better about human nature.

  But after lunch I saw the Asian boy in the nurse’s station, and that cool lump settled in my throat again. With him were the younger boy and a woman, obviously his mother, and I walked over to them. “Tummy ache, huh?” I said, trying not to sound too interested.

  The woman smiled and nodded, not saying anything. The boy just looked ahead, his face pale. But the younger child answered. “I told him not to ride that scary ride, but he did it.

  “Yeah,” I said sympathetically, “that happens, especially when you eat a lot of candy too. You have any candy today, champ?” I asked the older boy.

  “Not him, not him,” said the younger one. “I had a Hershey bar.”

  “You?…” I hoped I didn’t look as dumb as I felt.

  “Sam gave it to me. A lady gave it to him and he gave it to me.”

  “Uh-huh. You feel okay though, huh?”

  “Yeah, I feel okay.”

  “Is something wrong?” said the woman, understandably curious about my interest in her son’s diet.

  “No, no.” I smiled, and left the station after a nod to Jeanie, who was also looking at me strangely.

  I didn’t get it, but I wanted to, so I went back to the grove and parked behind the old couple again. This time I didn’t have long to wait. They gave a little girl a candy bar in less than fifteen minutes after I’d gotten there, and this time I trailed the kid, who joined some friends, showed them the candy, and broke it up into pieces to share. A half hour later, after only two rides and nothing else to eat, she began to slow down and look a little sick. She sat on a bench with one of her friends, while the others tackled the Sooper-Loop, but in a few minutes she was back on her feet, as though whatever had troubled her had passed quickly, and I let her get lost in the crowd.

  Coincidences. It was possible, but I didn’t believe it, so I decided to find out a little more about the generous golden-agers who so dependably held down that bench. I figured they’d have to have season passes, so the next morning I asked Pete, the old guy who heads the ticket-takers, to do me a favor. I told him there was a couple I’d seen in the park who I thought I knew, but that I couldn’t place their names, and maybe he’d check for me when they showed their passes. I thought it sounded dumb, and the frown he gave me showed that he did too, but he said he would. I stood by his side until I saw the couple walking in from the parking lot. The man’s cane was gone, and there was no sign of a limp. I nudged Pete and pointed in their direction. When he saw them he crumpled up his mouth as if he’d tasted vinegar. “Don’t need to see their pass,” he said softly. “Name’s Younger. Carl and Ethel Younger.”

  “You know them?”

  “Never spoke to them. But I’ve seen their passes enough times that I remember their names.”

  I felt I had something. “How long have they been coming to the park?”

  Old Pete snorted. “They’ve had season passes ever since this place got civilized. And before that…” He paused.

  “What?”

  He turned and looked at me, his gray eyes stone cold and serious. “They were here when I ran The Whip. In the old days. Used to be over by the grove.”

  “I remember,” I said. And I did, from when I was a kid.

  “I remember them from then,” he went on. “They used to sit by the band-shell all the time, talking to kids.” His eyes narrowed. “What are you really interested in them for?”

  “I told you, I…”

  He smiled grimly. “Yeah, you told me.”

  “They must have been a lot younger then,” I said with a little smile, trying to get him back on the track.

  “They looked pretty much the same as they do now.”

  “Well then, they age well.”

  “Damn right they do,” Old Pete said. “I ain’t run The Whip for twenty-five years, and I saw them a long time before that yet.” My smile vanished. “Anything else? Or can I get to my work now?”

  I thanked him and went to the nearest water fountain. My throat had gone dry. Pete must have been wrong, I thought. Twenty-five years? Hell, they looked sixtyish now, so if they were sixty back when Pete had seen them first, that meant they must be eighty-five, ninety, even older.

  I walked over to the grove again and watched them. When Carl Younger got up, he walked briskly over to the snack bar to buy the candy. When he returned, they sat and talked, then started to read their books. Neither, I noticed, was wearing glasses. I moved closer, so that I stood a couple of yards behind them. The grayness I’d seen in their hair at the start of the summer had nearly vanished, and Carl Younger’s hand that lay on his wife’s shoulder looked strangely smooth and youthful for a man of his years.

  They didn’t seem to notice me, and after a while a young girl passed, and Ethel Younger looked up. “Miss,” she said, “would you like this candy? I’m afraid I bought too many for just us.’’

  The girl hesitated, then looked at me standing nearby in my uniform, as if asking for permission. I gave a little nod, and just as I did, both Youngers turned around and saw me. Their smiles never faded and, after only a flicker of interest touched their shining eyes, they looked back at the girl. Ethel Younger held out the Hershey bar. The girl smiled back, said “thank you” softly, and took it, her fingers just brushing those of the woman as the exchange was made. She tucked the candy in a red plastic purse, and walked away.


  The Youngers looked straight ahead, apparently neither curious nor bothered by my being there. But there was a smugness to the set of their shoulders, a stealthy triumph in the way they held their heads. My heart was beating quickly, and I felt my ears growing hot. They had done something, something while I was standing right there beside them, and it was as if they knew I couldn’t stop them, as if they were laughing inside over the great joke they’d played.

  I choked down my anger until I thought I could speak clearly. Then I sat down on the bench next to Ethel Younger, looking at her face in profile, her blue eyes staring out across the benches, the crow’s feet in their corners only small lines now, almost unnoticeable.

  “What?” I said quietly. Her head didn’t turn, but her eyes shifted, looking at a spot on the ground a yard in front of my feet. “What are you doing?”

  She looked at me then, her head pivoting slowly. “Doing?” Her eyebrows arched in a question.

  “To the kids,” I said, still almost whispering. “To the children.”

  Now Carl Younger was looking at me too, leaning forward slightly to see past his wife. “I don’t know what you mean,” he said calmly.

  “I’ve been watching you,” I said. “You give them candy and they get sick.”

  Carl Younger shrugged. “I’m sorry to hear that.” Then he smiled. “I hope they get better?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “They get better.’’

  “I hope there’s nothing wrong with the candy,” said Ethel Younger. “We buy it right here at the concession stand.”

  “I know. I’ve seen you buy it.”

  “Oh.” Her mouth grew round. Her teeth were very white. “And have you seen us do anything to it afterwards?’’

  “No,” I said. “You don’t touch it.”