Into that Good Night

by Levis Keltner

  “Whatever it was—whatever’s here, Erika cared a lot about it,” John reasoned. “You said you’d help me. Help me find what she was looking for. Not for me, but for her.”

  “You said it could be nothing.” E. drew away from the hole, suddenly faint and unwilling to ask for a hand. She leaned against the rugged trunk of the Big Tree for support against a tide of rising guilt. Glimpses of her sister invaded her mind: the girl in her underwear on all fours in the night, clawing ravenously into the earth for … what? E. responded slowly, through the haze of the vision. “You want us to dig in the woods? That’s crazy. Erika—she wouldn’t do that. She was crazy, but like normal crazy. I would’ve noticed. I’m not the worst sister ever.”

  John shook his head. “It must’ve been a secret she kept from everyone. Of course you’d have helped. She was your sister. But you couldn’t, and now you have a chance to do something about it. You said her hands were dirty for about a week, right? Help me for a week. We’ll start Monday after school. After we’ve found it, you can leave this place, having done her proud.”

  “If we find it,” Doug said.

  John didn’t acknowledge him. The guy had his eyes closed, as if listening intently to the forest canopy, which had begun to rustle high above.

  “A week. Then you’re on your own,” E. said from the deepening shade of the tree. Sunlight flooded the valley. She turned her head.

  “The Work begins,” the Dead Man said. He smiled, luminous in a misty beam. To Doug, he appeared translucent, actually supernatural.

  That was the first time Doug truly feared him. The boy grinned as if he’d willed the Grove to glow. Doug wondered what John Walker was capable of, or believed himself to be.

  Doug looked to E. to share his terrible unease. Against the glare and through the dark, however, his friend was so very hard to see.

  6

  Although on a high ridge that overlooked the badlands of Jakar’tep, and the dust of the Rymer Road lay unbeaten by horse hooves below, and the sculpted hills cut back to the wound-pink rock unpeopled, and the desert over his armored shoulder retreated into pixel gusts that closed on the horizon like a sleepy lid over the mean and bloody eye of the sun, Dorion knew no peace.

  The southern pass to Galador was quick, but risky. Death struck wild past its rolling plains and the capital’s spires, where Emamor, his love, suffered under a wasting curse. He’d recovered the bones of a Harradorian saint, lead-heavy and lost in a caravan sieged by the Lupine Raiders. Dorion had barely survived the fight. He was no tactician or master swordsman. He wasn’t quick or clever. He stuck out a challenge. He cared. But would it be enough to save her?

  His bay horse shifted and whinnied, so close to the edge. Dorion dismissed the mount and began an angled descent of the ridge face, deliberate in his footing, to the valley floor….

  Doug tried not to recall his descent into the woods, what they’d done, what he’d agreed to do next week.

  He caught his breath halfway down the slope and peered over a sheer face into a nest of scorpions, small as fire ants from this height. Vertigo pitched his balance—Dorion stumbled back—his burlap mantle caught the wind and billowed. Until then, it had kept his breastplate from glinting across the many miles of desert. If he crossed a battle-hardened warrior, with no place to run, fatigued as he was, chances were that he’d end this quest in the belly of the fat vulture that sunned on a boulder not far off.…

  Doug was a clumsy gamer, over-reactive to the adrenaline of combat. He spasmed, popped random actions—once, he blew a lively lute while repeatedly skewered until blood sputtered forth in lieu of music—or else he covered his eyes IRL and waited to be dead. Sometimes, he didn’t want to run away anymore. He wanted to slay others’ players, counter their flashiest moves and bring them to their knees, begging p-p-p-p-please, before he split into their juicy brains—or not—just to be great at something, or better than most. Doug would settle for as good in a make-believe world that didn’t matter but to a few thousand other dorks across the globe. But he never won duels. Not one. Hacked to pieces, he gawked up at his opponents, who glistened with his blood, large with victory before the game blacked out and reset. He wasn’t one of these guys, didn’t belong here, Doug told himself, regretting that he’d ever wanted to be anything at all.

  The breeze seeped in—sand flew from the steel joints around his knees and the grooved plates over his shoulders—it cooled him, body and spirit. Dorion wasn’t home, yet. He stood and—

  “With two growing boys?” his mother retorted in the kitchen. Bottles clinked—his father pulled a cold one from the fridge. The man stammered a reply that Doug didn’t care to hear.

  Doug rubbed his eyes, itchy from hours of vigilant questing. Why stop? E. hadn’t messaged back. His parents hadn’t settled whether to sell the house. The thought made his heart sink. They would live someplace, he would still have a home, a family, right? He disliked how unwelcome these discussions made the house, enough that Doug couldn’t go in to grab a snack or speak to them for the rest of the night. Dad still hadn’t found a job, his mother worked two, and they fought more about most things. They didn’t ever really fight. They insisted on points the other hadn’t considered until one locked themselves in their bedroom to wonder why they even tried.

  Doug turned up the volume—The hollow wind in his ears, the bored squawks of the vulture.…

  Odd—the bird didn’t flap away as Dorion passed. Its beak clicked the stone. It peered over the edge of a hundred-foot fissure in the rock. Had the bird dropped its dinner? Dorion shimmied alongside the boulder down to the split’s base. He would fish the morsel out, however slight, low on life and, he hoped, more clever than the bird.

  The gap was too narrow to squeeze more than an arm inside. Maybe with his sword—

  About ten feet in, the darkness stirred. Someone was in there—a longhaired warrior in ragged leather, stiffly upright, arms pinned at her/his sides. Head turned, the lodged character stared at him blankly—

  HELP, the player typed.

  How s/he’d survived the fall, Doug couldn’t guess. S/he hopped a few inches off the ground, but otherwise couldn’t budge. Maybe a klutz like himself. After several in-game hours, the character would starve.

  Dorion—Doug typed back, How?

  HELP ME.

  The player hopped again, crunched gravel, otherwise silent. S/he didn’t have a mic. Doug tossed his remaining, low-level rations inside. They lodged at knee height a few feet in. The character hopped again, then continually as Doug backed away.

  An Oil Snake slipped between Dorion’s boots into the stone gap. It was thick—a level 3 mother. The snake pushed its head in and lost the rest of its bulge in the shadows. It slithered without pause, hungrily, toward the trapped warrior. Dorion could save her/him.

  He pulled his sword. In an impressively wide arc he chopped at the tail—struck sand.

  HELP ME. HELP ME. HELP ME.

  The player kept hopping as Doug powered off his console.

  His finger remained over the button for a few moments, then felt gross there. Yet he couldn’t move. That was make-believe, he told himself, a game. What’d happened didn’t matter. The character would respawn. The player, unharmed, would quest another day. Doug pulled at the fuzzy hairs standing up on back of his neck. He considered an older game to take his mind off it, something less real, reflex against a dumb AI.

  “I got downsized—our life got downsized,” his dad moaned.

  “But with two growing boys?” his mother returned.

  Doug went to his bedroom. Cornered by despair, he was left to think about last night.

  On the walk home after Bachelor’s Grove, E. had talked nonstop about the Dead Man. She’d started with his arrogance in believing that Erika had been so interested in him. Then she began trying to figure him out.

  “Why is he really doing this, Dougy?” she’d said at one point.

  “Because the guy has a deadly serious hard-on for your sister,”
was what he’d wanted to say, his jealousy bristling. Still sore from failure, Doug didn’t risk further rejection. The way she talked about the Dead Man, wondered about him … Why didn’t she try to figure him out like that? He didn’t say anything about that, either, just nodded beside her in the dark, hoping she would acknowledge that he’d walked past his house to make sure she got home safe after such a creepshow of a day. After all, the killer could’ve been there, seen them in the woods, and followed in the shadows. On his walk back, Doug could become the second kid whose guts suffered that wretched blade. “Don’t step on a crack,” was all she’d said and, for three-quarters of a block, stepped on all the cracks, loped from one to the next, and at last smacked the pavement with both feet. “What was that for?” Doug had asked. She’d never been so animated. “Why not?” she’d said like a challenge and not really knowing herself. E. smoothed her hair and went the rest unenthused as usual. When she rose to her front door, Doug braved one stair for a smile and a word of thanks, maybe even a kiss, some acknowledgment of his thoughtfulness, for being courageous for her all day. “Don’t forget your dad’s shovels Monday,” she’d said, closed the door, and turned off the porch light. That night, curled in bed, Doug had cried, face red in his pillow though no sound escaped, throat clenched, and willing out his heart sickness. The pain of being unwanted, of having no one to share his thoughts and feelings with, of being deeply alone, he experienced bodily as though a disease. When it didn’t help, he’d willed out his love for E., instead. But he’d taken that wish back a second later and lived with it numb as a block of ice in his chest all the next morning and night.

  Doug weaved his bedroom curtains between each of his fingers and clutched them as hard as he could to keep from being pulled under another crying fit. The street was empty. He gazed at the sky. The moon was full. Then he couldn’t wait a moment longer for E. to return his many messages about how selfish John was in his quest for Erika’s killer, putting their lives in danger.

  Look at that moon, he sent. He stared dumbly at the screen, waiting.

  She might turn to her bedroom window. They might see it at the same time. Wouldn’t that be something?

  The moon wasn’t yellow, but silver. A mirror in the sky. It was late. Exhausted, his mind wandered.…

  Could she see him reflected, around the curve of the Earth? Would she like what she saw?

  Messages: 0.

  Doug was only looking back at himself.

  7

  They returned to the woods Monday after school. John reared his spade to break earth near the Big Tree, when four kids appeared up the path. They came over the creek with shovels and buckets and a competitive strut as if come to bury someone, and quickly. The tallest had a basketball under his arm and looked up in awe and said, “That’s one big motherfucking tree.” John met the newcomers—all familiar from the halls at school—with a round of formal handshakes. He led first name introductions: “Greg, Tiffany, Josué, Alex, meet the rest of our team.” Then he detailed the first of three tasks before the group—which, John added without explanation, should never be named. By the light of Erika’s memory, they’d assembled to dig holes on the Big Tree side of the creek, approximately three feet in depth, no different than the model holes discovered Friday. Any found objects could be evidence and should be reported to the group immediately. He didn’t elaborate on what their second or third tasks might be.

  The Dead Man’s leadership gnawed at Doug’s timidity enough that he very seriously considered asking him to quit showing off. Doug couldn’t tell if the guy was deliberately out to steal E., if that’s all the investigation was about, because surely his assertiveness was warping her better judgment. To make matters worse, Doug’s forehead had broken a sweat and he fought to keep his glasses from slipping off his nose after realizing two more girls would be in the group. Tiffany Dennys was Erika’s closest friend and well known as the hottest eighth grader. She was so hot that she was, like, painful to look at, too hot to be yanking roots with her angelic hands and sculpted nails. Alex Karahalios was the opposite—preppy, a stout, shorthaired tomboy with sandy freckles on her cheeks—also amazingly cute. Doug’s heart buzzed with guilty pleasure at the thought of spending time with girls superficially prettier than E., which was meaningless beside her intellectual integrity, of course. He tried to will away the guilt, but didn’t possess the same powers as John to make things appear when and how he desired. If he did have such talent, John’s disappearance would’ve been his first act.

  None of the newcomers were truly stranger than Doug or E., only unusual as a group. They were so different from one another that it seemed more likely that John had drafted an Erika sympathizer from each clique at school than that they were friends. Doug considered this a stratagem to discourage mutiny before the week’s end. To have convinced seven kids into a wild ghost chase in Bachelor’s Grove couldn’t have been simple, and to keep them working diligently for an entire week would prove a challenge, even for a megalomaniac. Doug looked forward to seeing the guy squirm, show weakness, and fail just once. John had likely employed the same tactic on the others that he’d used on E. and himself—sympathy for the last wishes of a soon-to-be-dead guy plus sentiment for the dead girl he was obsessed with. And if something terrible happened out here in the middle of nowhere? It wasn’t like John would be around long enough to pay the consequences. All it would take was one kid to squeal to a buddy or a parent, and they’d be in huge trouble, maybe jailed. Doug especially worried about Alex. She was an eighth grader who was a sixth grader age-wise, known for skipping grades and taking the school mathletes team to state. She was also a notorious tattletale on principle. For his own sake as much as everyone else’s caught up in John’s scheme, Doug waited until the group had spread around the Grove to dig before confronting the Dead Man about her.

  “We’re missing one,” John said, too lost in thought to notice Doug at his side. His hands sagged on his hips in the manner of a coach disappointed with himself. A glimmer of a smile chased the grimness out of his features. “I guess she wasn’t ready. Eh, it’s perfect. Seven—my old lucky number.”

  “Hey, Dead—whoa. I’m … John—you’re John. Obviously. I mean—hey,” Doug stammered. His confidence buckled under the mess his mouth made. Saliva drowned his tongue though his throat was parched.

  “There a problem already?” The guy’s hands replanted higher on his hips.

  Doug apologized for the interruption. He kept his lips parted, mouth-breathing noisily as he asked was it really such a good idea to have Alex here? What they were doing—disrupting a crime scene—most likely, it wasn’t legal.

  “Alex approached me in the cafeteria.” The guy’s face softened, humored by the recollection. “She said it was obvious I’d been planning something ‘of great importance’ for a few weeks, and wanted in. That really surprised me. It’s the kind of light you don’t say no to, no matter what you think you know.”

  “So you don’t care … I mean, if we get caught? My parents will kill me.”

  “Dying isn’t a joke, buddy. It’s the hardest inning you’ll ever play.” He squinted as if back on the field, against the stadium lights. “It’s just you out there—a one-on-one in the rain. And the big guy is batting to take your head off. Except you’re on the field with me now.”

  John seemed to have hit his head this morning. He was probably on some hardcore painkillers and dizzied by visions that flashed behind his eyeballs. He’d probably been up all night, Doug could picture it, the guy tirelessly planning how to catch Erika’s murderer and to restore his lost fame.

  “But we’re not …” Doug stopped, feeling foolish for believing he could talk such a person out of anything. “Forget it.”

  John seized his arm. It was a tough guy gesture. There was something desperate in it, too.

  “Talk to me, Doug. Do you prefer Douglas? Or is it Dougy, like E. calls you? I want to hear what you’re not saying.”

  “Just … Doug,” he said.
The Dead Man’s grip surprised and spooked him, yet Doug caved to his earnestness. No one had ever asked before what he liked to be called. His throat still felt irritated, unsatisfied. He tried to slow down. “If it’s so … serious—I mean dying … why are we here?… is what I’m saying.”

  John released him and patted his shoulder in the fatherly manner he’d assumed Friday in the hallway.

  “That’s easy—to make a play that matters before the game ends.”

  Doug stepped out from under his hand.

  “But if something happens. If. Something … bad—”

  “I won’t let it. Not to you or any member of the team. Our team. That’s a promise. We’ve made the right moves so far. I plan to keep us playing smart. I know we don’t know each other very well, yet, but I hope you trust when I say that I couldn’t live with myself, otherwise.”

  This last “promising his safety” bit whupped Doug, crushed his apprehensions, and, without an equally clever rebuttal, he thanked John—like the weakling he was—and sulked to a lone spot across the Grove to bury his shame from E. and everyone. The Dead Man was completely full of himself, a real wacko. He did seem to mean to do right. He spoke so confidently, almost ominously, as if able to peer into the future, which made resisting his assurances futile. Doug recalled him bathed in light on that first trip to the Grove, smiling as if having passed through the gates of Heaven. Doug seriously questioned then if John’s having one foot in the grave allowed him access to stuff that most people didn’t, or couldn’t, understand, like powers. It seemed a fair trade for so soon departing the world. More likely, the guy was a charismatic bully on the verge of losing his mind after having lost his place in the world. Doug expected an equally bizarre answer from him about including Josué—a kid from Mexico who got suspensions a lot for school fights—and Greg—a kid from the city who hardly showed up to school at all. Though concerned, Doug didn’t ask how the other newcomers cared enough about E.’s sister to be trusted, let alone to be following the cursed or blessed maniac into the wilderness. John was simply too commanding a presence for Doug to face in conversation. This was the kind of guy that made E.’s brain skip a beat? Doug would help until the end of the week. After that, he would have to make a tough choice: follow his friend deeper into the woods after the doomed guy or let her go and learn to live as a very lonely person.