Into that Good Night

by Levis Keltner

  A police car eased by, vigilant like a sixth sense. It hadn’t seen the boy in the tree line. Doug gave up his bike and tumbled into the runoff ditch. He struggled along the roadside, never happier to see a police officer. He chased and waved frantically, fearing that, if he couldn’t reach it, help would be forever withheld. The brake lights pumped.

  The older officer who’d stopped him weeks before put his bike in the trunk, despite his pleas to go, hurry, now. Doug swore through tears that he’d confess everything if she brought him home before hauling him down to the station. The boy must’ve looked as crazy as he felt. She didn’t press him with questions.

  The first thing Doug’s dad asked was what’d happened to his glasses. Even with the officer in the foyer, whose radio squawked between a dozen other officers in the area, Doug couldn’t tell a word of it until the front door was locked.

  Under the officer’s glare, the story came out jumbled with parts too fantastic to have occurred in real life, to Doug of all kids. Maybe in a movie or a videogame. They said as much, and he agreed—it hadn’t happened in the regular world at all, but deep in the woods where magic was still possible. They didn’t know how to respond to that, other than to reaffirm he was safe. Doug banged his fists on the kitchen table and scolded himself, “I should’ve … I should’ve …” His dad had never seen the boy like this, which he told the officer. Feeling language unhinging, becoming inadequate, Doug ran upstairs and grabbed two of the letters he’d started before John had coerced him not to tell the truth. Even these his dad reviewed skeptically and said, “It’s quite a story, son,” embarrassed to see his boy acting deranged in front of another adult. The officer assured him that any “shenanigans in those woods” would be seriously investigated if related to the Summerson murder, and together they went over the details, again and again, until Doug began to lose focus of the specifics, including the name of the tormentor. The major events went to fuzz, and then all he knew was that he’d experienced enough fear to last a lifetime.

  Dad touched his shoulder. Doug had his forehead on the kitchen table. He couldn’t remember for how long. The officer was still in their home, across from him in a creaky leather jacket. She wore a pair of reading glasses at the end of her nose for taking notes. The boy sat up and her pen went down. The officer looked tired and disapproving. There was concern, too, pity from a distance. Doug had the terrible feeling her expression characterized all the sympathy he would get for the rest of his life. Lightheaded, he took his dad’s hand. He couldn’t look at him. It seemed as if the kid would pass out. He showed his leg. It was an awful crusted mess. Hoping the wound was somehow the source of his son’s strangeness, Dad excused the officer—who ominously assured they’d be hearing from her again soon—and rushed him to the hospital. As Doug rested back in the doctor’s chair, he thought he might lose the throbbing limb. What sympathy would he get, then? The doctor gave him a tetanus shot, a loose handshake, and said to keep those bandages clean.

  A few hours later, he closed his bedroom door on his parents, who were arguing, not with each other, but over the phone with lawyers and counselors to ensure that, if their son had gotten involved in the Summerson case, he wouldn’t be going to a juvenile detention center and that, either way, he would have the best treatment to “recover from this mix-up.” Doug kept his light off. The sun breached the dense clouds on the horizon. It shot liquid gold over Palos Hills, then used the lingering gray sheet to radiate a wistful aura of cotton candy and powder blue before all darkened beneath the beat of long clock strokes. Doug ripped up the letter he’d written to E. and stood dumbly with the pieces for a moment. Dumb on the outside. His insides roiled with discomfort, left him dazed and incomplete, wanting to whine, as a dog does, for something he sensed though could not name. He dropped the letter into the trashcan, then the paperback she’d given him—it felt like—in another life. He mutely took stock of the childish bedspread print that matched his window curtains, the desk littered with keepsakes and junk in the corners, the scarred dresser topped with toys he hadn’t touched in years, and the bare white walls. This was his room. It felt like someone else’s, whom he remembered as a meek and simple boy. The thought made Doug sad, and he lay on the bedcovers in his clothes and shoes. He looked inside then. There were few illusions there. It made seeing himself easier. He was still nothing, a nobody. He was afraid, too. He cared about E. and the others, though he doubted his actions would wake them. He believed it was possible in time if they were separated. Doug surveyed what he was, without mistaking that more was hidden someplace, and watched the light fade in descending slants on the ceiling. Everything was ending. All lives. His in particular. It hadn’t meant anything before, but hit him full-on now. He wasn’t a child anymore. The morning cartoons, street games, classroom pranks, the pleasures dependent on the privilege of drifting through life half in a daydream, without consequences or responsibility, were gone. They were buried in the woods where he could never return. Doug would never again be that boy. He’d leave junior high as he’d stepped into it, without lifelong friends, no longer achingly so, but singular. He might go on for the rest of his life like that. Doug didn’t know for sure. He couldn’t, of course. But he knew some things. He was a teenager. He was going to high school. He was growing up.

  4

  Doug woke in the night believing the woods a dream. His parents had been right. Those bad memories hadn’t happened, because childhood never happened like that: kids killing kids over lost loved ones, over territory, over ritual.

  Something had woken him.

  The wind had picked up, and it rustled the bushes beneath his window. Debris flicked the pane.

  Do it, Doug told himself.

  He slipped out of bed. His legs almost buckled. His guts ached, too. Doug went to the window with a sleepwalker’s faith. He didn’t lift the curtain. He lifted his shirt. A head-sized bruise marked his abdomen where he would’ve been knifed to death.

  The boy backed from the window. At one point, the woods had made him nuts enough to climb the side of E.’s house in the rain. The group was capable of far more. Would E. come for him alone? Doug was hoping, again. He didn’t know what he’d feel seeing her. And the others? He imagined them in cloaks on the other side of the curtain, five in the shape of a sickle moon, to spill him in the name of justice. He imagined Rocky’s laughter, the boy’s head pushing through the curtains, chomping them, his gray Master waiting in the wings (with wings?). Or them all outside—together, against each other. Doug in the middle, either way. Weaponless, he thought to cry out for his parents, as if eight years old again and having risen from the crash of a nightmare, mind still under its delusive spray.

  Grow up.

  Doug pulled the curtain. He was prepared to shout the words through the window at E. and anyone else. The bushes were still. Maybe the wind hadn’t picked up. He couldn’t see if the treetops swayed against the sky unless he pressed his face to the glass. The yard was empty. The street glared in the near-full moonlight. Doug inched forward—

  The window shattered. An object—obdurate and hate-flung—burst through the pane.

  Doug’s parents rushed into his room. They’d remained stiff but sleepless in bed, kept up by the frighteningly cohesive amalgam of fantasies their adolescent son had confessed to partaking in beyond their supervision. They’d projected those experiences decades in time, onto the adult man he would become, whom they’d failed.

  Standing before the window, now a web of cracks, Doug put his arm around his mother’s hips. He took his father’s hand reassuringly, in consolation of the future self he’d already accepted, as they discerned the object that looked up at them from the bedroom floor.

  Doug understood the glass skull to mean things had irreversibly ended between him and E. He was OK with that. He’d lost the girl he’d loved weeks ago.

  •

  At 6 a.m. an unidentified caller placed the location of the murder weapon in the investigation of Erika Summerson in the locker
of the recipient of the John H. Walker Memorial Award. Who that was exactly—the principal and several teachers were consulted before anyone could remember, other than that the boy had a rather unfortunate name—was identified, and the evidence confiscated from his locker was more or less confirmed as the murder weapon a few hours later. The call had conveniently incriminated Doug Horolez as the killer, which he regarded—bearing the news silently, almost nobly—as the group’s last effort at human sacrifice. Following his arrest, an anonymous email arrived at the police station with notes, photos, and video that connected Doug to a disturbing overlook near the scene of Erika’s murder and to the delinquent Rocco “Rocky” Lordes. A picture taken of Doug wielding a hammer in one of the school’s restrooms, snapped by a random student, simultaneously leaked on social media and seemed to corroborate that the boy wasn’t all right in the head. Doug spent more than a few hours at the police station believing the group had successfully punished his betrayal and secured their survival. He’d expected to be framed, the group having planned for it, and Doug answered questions as if he no longer cared what happened so long as his time in the woods had ended.

  Doug’s preemptive confession proved his saving grace. Later that day, all the kids were hauled in for questioning.

  None of the group walked at graduation. Emily Summerson was found at 9:10 a.m. in Resurrection Cemetery. She recited a poem to her dead sister’s tombstone, revising the lines as she repeated them like an incantation. She didn’t seem to notice the officers calling her name until one took her arm, when she yelled, “I’m not finished!” The girl bit his face and had to be subdued via Taser. At 9:40 a.m., Josué Ortiz was torn, weeping, from the hips of his religious aunt. “Aún verde y sin cortar …” she said over him with her heavy arms crossed. She did not weep. Greg Dombrowski was picked up at 10:15 a.m. in Penny Park, attempting to sink over-the-head half-court shots. Music loud, he didn’t hear the cops until they charged up the middle. He faked by and ran, until left strung by his shoelaces from the top rung of the fence he’d attempted to hop. Alex Karahalios was led out of Palos Junior High by a police escort before commencement at 11:55 a.m. Alex waved to the teachers and gowned lines of eighth graders in front of the gym doors, as if paparazzi, shouting, “It is my job to know what other people don’t!” Tiffany Dennys walked into the police station at 12:20 p.m., oversized sunglasses on and still a little buzzed. The girl gave testimony to every crime she’d witnessed or been victim of during her lifetime.

  The suspects’ stories about the murder didn’t add up. They first accused Doug. An hour later, it was a high school delinquent named Rocky. Thirty minutes after that, each began to suspect one another, and eventually admitted to being responsible for Erika’s death one way or another, though the whats, wheres, whens, and hows didn’t fit the facts of the case. There was, however, enough evidence to place them at the woods over the last month, performing an illegal investigation past curfew, at best. At worst, they were cultish co-conspirators in the murder of Erika Summerson and guilty of the attempted murder of at least one other child. Doug dropped the allegations of attempts on his life when he realized the trouble they faced.

  Rocky was picked up and questioned later that evening. He cried half the time, still recovering from the duress of torture. That’s what he said, at least. He confessed to drug use and breaking curfew. As confirmed by the video, which the police had never mentioned, he claimed to have reached out to Doug after witnessing the group’s “irreverent rites.” He’d wanted to help the boy, though knew he should’ve called the police. Rocky answered every loose end. The murder weapon, clean of his prints, he’d never seen before except when the group had cut his face open. The Man in Gray had been the drug-induced hallucination of a girl with a history of sexual abuse by older men. The groups’ stories were tangled lies, delusions. Investigators showed him Alex’s photos of the hideout with its profane pinups and demanded he tell the truth because a mountain of evidence linked him to it (a bluff, as the scene had been torched in the night). The work of the group, he said. His mother, a Palos Heights City Council Alderman, was livid they would implicate her son, a terribly misunderstood boy playing with kids who were the obvious threat. On the night of the Summerson girl’s murder, he’d performed a private magic show for her and her adult friends. She invited investigators to search his room. They found no book, no cloak, no cigarettes. His brutal wounds were photographed, and Rocky was released with a stern warning about his direction in life.

  The development of the woods into golf course–townhouse residences halted immediately. Public outcry renewed for closure in the case, and the search for evidence in the woods resumed, aided by the trove of data Alex had amassed. As election season neared, a solution to the moral corruption of Palos’s children was demanded of City Council if the murder hadn’t anything to do with perverts, gang violence from the inner city, or the many Muslim families moving into town (though these suspicions persisted among countless, mostly white residents). Few regarded the “Warlocks of the Grove”—as they were dubbed in the press—as proactive and unlikely heroes who’d at least found the murder weapon and two potential suspects. Most regarded them as the town’s mistakes, the consequence of bad parenting, of liberal schooling or the repression of conservative values, of pop culture and the degenerated social fabric of America, or of genetic mishap. Altogether, enough rhetoric appeared in the media to tangent concerned citizens away from what’d happened and to allow the old mayor a slim victory, owing somewhat to nostalgia, over an upstart eighth-grade social studies teacher, and then to allow developers to recode and seize most of the land by the summer’s end, a final solution City Council approved with relief, to civilize the woods as if they’d never existed. Voiced opposition came only from local trail walkers who were forced to migrate to Orland Park Mall. Though, before the woods were fully dozed, already they’d begun to wonder why anyone would want to hike so far without soft music and A/C.

  John Walker’s involvement was received with no little amount of skepticism. Under interrogation, when asked what’d initially drawn them to the woods, if they weren’t a cult, why come together and get involved in solving the girl’s murder, the group invariably responded, “John knows,” the boy’s name dropped casually, almost as an afterthought at the end of their testimonies, as their guide to the woods. Police entertained the kids’ statements enough to call the Walker residence and inquire as to the boy’s whereabouts and explain that he was being incriminated as a scapegoat. It was discovered then that John wasn’t in his room and hadn’t gone to commencement. An APB was put out. For several days, the boy was nowhere to be found. In that time, they combed the woods with dogs and volunteers. The group was again interrogated, this time as suspects in his disappearance, which didn’t add up except in terms of circumstantial evidence. These were desperate people at a desperate time, cops who’d learned more about criminal investigations from a child than from years working the streets, and whose esteem was plummeting daily in the eyes of the community they were committed to serve, and eventually in their own eyes and the eyes of their families who suffered beside them through the long nights, false starts, bum leads, dead ends, and an increasing number questions seemingly without answer about what human beings, children, are capable of under watch in a small American suburb. John wouldn’t be found in the woods by daylight, if at all, the group asserted unanimously, their eyes glazed over. They seemed to know more but refused or, more accurately, were bound by reverence or terror to a code of silence on the subject of the boy. This was exactly the kind of supernatural nonsense that needed to be surmounted if progress were to be made and justice served, investigators insisted among themselves. At the same time, a part of them came to believe, as members of the group had suggested, that at last John Walker had truly and transcendently vanished.

  •

  After John reappeared a few days later, it was decided by the groups’ parents that their children would be separated. The Summersons filed fo
r divorce that June, and E. went west with her mother. After her father’s sentencing, Tiffany lived with her grandmother and enrolled in an all-girls private school on Chicago’s North Side at her own request. Josué moved to Phoenix with one of his aunts and attended a STEM school. Many years passed before he drew again. Greg went to trade school in Cincinnati, but dropped out at sixteen to change oil. Alex spent half a semester at Palos Community High with Doug and another at a local community college before starting over on the east coast.

  So, for several years, Doug was the only ex-member of the group who heard other kids remark offhandedly before exams, performances, driving tests, and so on, not to “John Walker it.” What they meant was: Don’t screw up and kill yourself or your reputation. Students from Palos Hills Junior High who wanted to appear tough and other local high schoolers used the phrase, which some sad child that wasn’t Doug must’ve invented. Some kids claimed to have witnessed the boy’s epic demise firsthand. Others insisted it a sick rumor, that John was still very much alive, successful though humbled after winning his bout with cancer. This split over local historical fact owed mostly to the private debates of residents and their neighbors after his return as to whether John had been Palos Hills’s savior or its bane all along. Not as Erika’s killer—though fringe individuals spun that urban legend for a while—but in the sense that the celebration of the boy’s potential had led to the neglect of other, more fragile-souled children, the mental health aspect of national school tragedies being popular discourse at the time. Deliberation over John’s fate and his role in the story, their story, inevitably led folks back to the known details of the Summerson girl’s murder and her friends’ unfortunate intervention, which caused the subject to crest and curl back in on itself, a question without answer that roared (from what point?) for a good while (to what end?) and proved only one thing: John H. Walker had been a wonder. As time rolled on to claim that remainder of the boy’s legacy. And the woods were fenced up or paved over. In the world and in the minds of those who told the story. And at last in the minds of the group. But never for Doug, who wondered, nights behind a heavy curtain inside his home, peeping at the glare of the full moon light, What ever happened to that kid? To the kids we’d been?