Darkborn

by Matthew J. Costello

  Close enough so that he could smell it. Smell the rancid odor.

  He looked up.

  Checking out the rats. They blotted out the ceiling, covering it with a gravity-defying living rug of brown-gray fur and whiskery bristles. They were shitting exploding little turds that landed like hail on the floor, on Kiff.

  But not on the shadow man.

  It’s not real, Kiff repeated. Oh, God, this isn’t real. I was told this could happen. Like Ray Milland in The Lost Weekend. The walls would come alive, the VA doctors said. Happens to every drunk. A moment of reckoning. You enter a nightmare land and you don’t leave for a long time.

  But I can prove that! Kiff thought. Sure, I can prove that to myself.

  Another can popped open. Another squirming human-thing slid out, its snake body a baby-fresh pink, squirming, slithering around on the floor as if awaiting instructions.

  I can make the dream go away, Kiff said, screaming inside his head, making himself listen to reason, to logic.

  Sure.

  He knelt down.

  Closer to the squirming things.

  One was near him, writhing around with a newborn’s crazed inability to control its life, searching for something.

  I’ll touch it. Touch it, and it will go away, Kiff told himself.

  Because it’s not real.

  Closer. Almost tottering forward, unbalanced on his heels. His leg muscles worth shit.

  He stuck out his bony hand.

  Oh, please, God, he begged. Please —

  Close to the mouth of one of them, open and shut, a tiny adult head on the pink-worm body. Closer. Right next to it.

  And it struck.

  Yes, like a bass taking the lure, like a snapping trout jumping in the air, it rolled and closed its jaws on two of Kiff’s fingers. It bit down with enough force that Kiff knew — even as his eyes filled with red flashes that signaled horrible pain — that it could easily bite his fingers off.

  But it didn’t do that.

  Kiff fell backward, sliding on the rat offal, the rain of shit that splattered down upon him.

  The others sensed him. He saw them rolling and twisting, making their way to him. He shook his hand.

  But the human snake stayed locked on his fingers. And now, besides the incessant screeching of the rats and the popping of the beer, he heard something else. A high-pitched keening.

  It was coming from his own mouth.

  Something plopped into his open mouth.

  “This is bad,” the man said, walking close. Kiff saw just his black polished shoes. The crisp crease of his gray slacks. “But not as bad as what will happen to the others, Kiffer. And certainly not as bad as what will happen to Will and his family. Not even close . . .”

  The man laughed.

  The heads nibbled him, on his side, at his legs, through his shoes to his ankle, his toes —

  This little piggy . . .

  The pain didn’t get any worse.

  There is a threshold. I reached it. It can’t get any worse. No matter what happens.

  The man turned and walked away.

  Kiff felt one of the sausage-sized things sliding up his thin chest, squirming, nearly at his throat, his dry tongue, his rheumy eyeballs.

  Nearly there. Nearly over.

  He heard a door slam. A laugh.

  And then — this last bit of awareness.

  I know who it is.

  I know who it is.

  And then the rats fell …

  All of them. Onto the floor. Onto him.

  * * *

  29

  The guard was a pleasant, rotund man who smiled too damn much considering how much time he spent listening to the howling prisoners in the county holding pen. And the guard always had a pleasant word for Will whenever he came down to confer with one of his “clients.”

  The guard always said, “Nice day, Counselor.” And, “How’s the wife and the kids?” And always the caveat, “Don’t work too hard.”

  Will was leaving a half-hour conference with a man staring down the muzzle of his third DWI conviction. It was a hopeless case, and the now-sobered man would probably lose his license for a year, maybe more. And — as the guy just finished explaining, blubbering through his remorseful gasps and tears — there’s no way he could get to his construction jobs without a car.

  You’ll have to beg rides, Will told him.

  Not adding . . .

  Tough shit. How long do you think we can let alcoholics pilot their cars like kamikaze pilots, ready to wipe out some poor sap with three kids who doesn’t know he’s sharing the road with a drunk?

  Will waited for the electronic cell entrance to beep open, and then he hurried along the corridor. He had a court appearance scheduled in twenty minutes. There was just enough time for a hot dog in the new cafeteria upstairs.

  He passed another electronic barrier, another guard, this one with an appropriately grim demeanor. And then past the last guard at a desk, and up the stairs to the courthouse and the cafeteria.

  And his hot dog.

  But the guard at the desk stopped him.

  “Mr. Dunnigan. Your wife called. Left a message. She’d like you to call back.”

  Will nodded. “Thanks.”

  Will continued up the stairs. He turned left, at the top, heading toward the public toilets — always dicey places considering the clientele — and a bank of pay phones. He called home using his FON card.

  After three rings, he assumed Becca was out. Shopping, doing something at Beth’s school. He went to hang up the phone when he heard the click. A breathless “Hello?”

  “Hi, babe. Got your message.”

  She was breathing hard.

  “Had to run in,” she said. Another breath.

  Will heard clicking steps down the hall, near the stairs. He heard the sound and he turned around.

  Funny . . .

  It was a young lawyer, a cute blonde right out of LA Law. Working with the DA’s office for now.

  But not for long, Will knew. The private concerns will snap her up prontissimo. She didn’t look at Will. Nobody saw public defenders in this place.

  We’re invisible.

  “What’s up?” he said to Becca.

  “That guy called this morning . . . around nine.”

  “Yeah? Who?”

  “Ted Whalen. He sounded upset, Will. Practically stuttering on the phone.”

  “Groan. It probably has to do with yesterday. God, I’m sorry I ever —”

  “Wait, Will. He told me to tell you something.” The cute lawyer disappeared around the corner. “He said . . . that Jim Kiff is dead.”

  The phone seemed to slip in Will’s hands. Oops . . .

  For a second he thought he again heard the clicking of high heels, lonely and forlorn, echoing in the hallway. But all he heard was the clank of a jail cell rumbling from below.

  He took a breath. “What?”

  “He said to tell you that Jim Kiff died. That he’s dead. He wants you to call him.”

  Will didn’t say anything.

  “Will? Will, honey? What’s wrong? Are you okay?”

  Will cleared his throat. “Sure. I’m fine. Just a bit. shocked. I saw him just yesterday. Did Whalen say how it — ?”

  “No. He just said you should call him.”

  Call him. Sure.

  I didn’t really want a hot dog anyway, he thought.

  He asked his wife to find Whalen’s number, there on a Post-it above his desk. She gave it to him and he copied the number down on the corner of a yellow pad.

  “Thanks, honey,” he said to his wife.

  She gave him a kiss on the phone, which he forced himself to return. It always seemed like a dumb thing to do.

  Then he hung up and called Ted Whalen in sunny California.

  Whalen was home. He picked up the phone after just one ring.

  “What happened?” Will asked.

  Whalen sounded a bit incoherent, a bit sloshed, even though it was pret
ty damn early in the California morning.

  But Whalen had questions to ask first.

  “D-did you see him? Did you go see Kiff?”

  “Yes, Ted. I went yesterday. He was a wreck. A basket case. Lost to his own paranoid world of voodoo.”

  Whalen cleared his throat, a tic, Will guessed. Something he recognized from countless cell-side interviews. I — er — didn’t do it, Counselor. No way . . .

  “But, shit, did he talk about what happened?”

  “A bit. Look, Ted, it was all this crazy talk. Stuff about human sacrifices and how Narrio paid the price and, look, I just wanted to get the hell out of there.”

  “Oh, Christ . . .”

  “What happened?” Will said. “What happened to Kiff?”

  “They found my number,” Whalen said flatly. “The police. The guy Kiff worked for. He must have given it to him. I don’t know. They had my number so they called.”

  Will looked at his watch.

  He was due in court in five. No, make that four minutes.

  “Yeah, go on, Ted. I’m running out of —”

  “They called me, Jesus. I don’t know why they’d call me. Just because the crazy fuck didn’t have —”

  He was babbling.

  “Whalen! Could you cut to the chase! I don’t have all day.”

  Will hated chewing off Whalen’s head, but the meter was running.

  “Jesus, Will, they found Kiff lying facedown on the floor, in the bar . . .”

  Not surprising, Will thought. Nothing too spectacular about that. The guy was hanging by threads.

  “Facedown, and his whole body — shit. It was all chewed up.”

  Will’s breath caught in his throat.

  “What?”

  Two minutes.

  “Chewed the fuck up. They found gray fur — rat fur — all over the place, and beer cans, and blood, and Christ, Will —”

  One minute, fifty. Forty-nine.

  I gotta go, he thought.

  I got to —

  “Look, Ted. I’ll call you tonight. Will you be there?”

  “I’m not going anywhere, Will. I’m not going —”

  “Good. We’ll talk. I spoke with Kiff. He gave me some stuff. I don’t know . . . But I’ll call you. Tell you all about it. Okay?”

  Silence. A nervous, prolonged silence, and Will felt the tremendous distance that separated Whalen and himself. And Will thought, Kiff was alone. Whalen’s alone. And who knows about Mr. Tim Hanna? Who knows what his rarefied life is like?

  I’m the only one with a family, wife, kids . . .

  He felt cold.

  And Whalen said, whispering throatily, “Okay.”

  “Speak to you,” Will said.

  And then Will ran — late — to Courtroom C.

  Whalen looked at the phone. He looked at it wishing that he could pick it up and call someone else.

  But there was no one else to call.

  I should have gone to work today, he thought. I shouldn’t have let myself get so rattled. Started drinking. It’s just that . . . just that —

  What? Just because that somehow there’s a connection between me and Kiff? That, yeah, because Kiff is crazy, because he gets himself killed, I have to let it ruin my day, my life?

  He stood up.

  His beige pants were stained from the poached eggs he ate this morning. That, and the drops of scotch that dribbled onto his pants.

  Whalen walked over to his vertical blinds and pulled one strip aside to look out.

  It was a brilliant, sunny morning. Another perfect fucking day, with the sun, obnoxious and oppressive, insisting on working its way into his house, through sliver-thin cracks in the folds of the blinds, under the doorjamb, tiptoeing in from other rooms not quite so perfectly sealed.

  Why the hell am I so rattled? he thought.

  What is wrong with me?

  He saw an ant.

  It was on his glossy black coffee table, almost camouflaged by the black wood. The ant, a big fat carpenter ant, hesitated. Whalen watched the ant do something to its antennae. Cleaning them. Or something. Then it continued moving across the table, up the side of a bowl, leading to the crumbs of some hard-as-wood Pennsylvania Dutch pretzels.

  It kept going.

  “Bastard,” Whalen said. He slammed at the bowl with his hand, not caring that he was using his fingers to smash the insect.

  He smacked at it.

  He pulled back.

  The ant was stuck to his fingers. Half of its body was crushed, but the other half — including the head — was still alive, still writhing.

  “Goddamn —” he said, and he brought his hand thwap! flat against the table. Definitely flattening the ant this time.

  He tried to return to his thoughts.

  What am I worried about? he asked himself.

  What?

  But a tiny, nagging voice at the back of his head suggested that he knew what he was worried about.

  Oh, yeah.

  He knew that Kiff wanted to tell the truth about that night. The fucking truth.

  The truth that even Will didn’t know. But I do.

  And I didn’t say anything.

  And now what was going to happen? Kiff was going to tell the world. There might have been new hearings.

  Maybe it was no big deal, Whalen thought.

  But it doesn’t matter now anyway. Because Kiff is dead.

  Chewed by rats.

  What a way to go. Poor bastard. Poor haunted —

  Another ant. And another! Christ, they were like crooks breaking and entering, darting across the tabletop, looking left, right, preening their antennae, probably dropping a chemical trail for the others to follow.

  This way to the eats, gang. This way.

  Whalen walked into his kitchen, sliced by sunlight spilling onto the windows. The brilliant light hurt his eyes.

  He reached above the refrigerator and opened a cabinet.

  He moved some cans aside, until he found a big yellow and purple can of Raid ant and spider spray. Industrial strength.

  I don’t have spiders, Whalen thought. But I sure as hell have ants. He grabbed the can, gave it a test spritz to make sure that it was full and ready for action. He pressed the nozzle down and the perfumy toxin filled the kitchen.

  Now we’re ready for business.

  Whalen walked back out to the living room.

  Only now the pretzel bowl was filled with ants. They scurried around inside, some holding giant flakes of pretzel crust over their ant heads like trophies. Still more were climbing up the coffee-table leg, hurrying across the shiny table surface, ready to party.

  “Oh, shit,” Whalen said, and he pointed the canister right at the bowl and blasted away. The jetlike vapor blew some of the smaller, less facile ants flying right out of the bowl. Whalen muttered to himself, cursing, as he adopted a side-to-side motion with his hand, spraying the whole table now, in a great are, back and forth.

  He watched the ants stop dead in their tracks. If he saw any twitching, hanging on to their happily communal existence, he gave them a direct blast that left their black exoskeletons sopping with Johnson Wax’s best bug-killing petrochemicals.

  “Take that, fuckers,” he said.

  In a few seconds, the battlefield was still. The ants were dead.

  But he looked at the floor.

  God, there were some more! Damn! There were ants making their way to the table leg.

  Maybe I need an exterminator, Whalen thought. Maybe this is a serious ant problem. But he remembered dealing with ants other years. They come in when it’s too hot, or too cold, or too wet, or —

  Too something.

  If I can get the message out that they aren’t going to fucking prosper here, why, then I’ll have the problem licked.

  Sure.

  I just have to find out where they’re coming from.

  He licked his lips, thinking that he’d like another sip of scotch. But — he saw — unfortunately his glass had been in
the bomb zone. However toxic it was before, it was far worse now.

  So, Whalen thought, screw it. And he got down on his knees, on the plush blue rug, ready to follow the trail of ants back to their point of entry.

  “Your Honor —” Will was standing, and he flipped through some papers he had, just to make sure that he knew what he was about to do to whom.

  It was mighty easy to get screwed up when you carried a thirty-plus caseload.

  “I’d like to ask for a continuance. The prosecutor’s office has agreed to supply me with copies of the blood tests and —”

  The judge, a rather glitzy-looking woman, held up her hand and consulted some oracular pages on her desk.

  Will stopped.

  And he thought:

  About Kiff. And rats. He tried to imagine what happened, how it happened, and came up with a blank. Chewed to death. Now, there’s a nice way to go. There’s a nice one to tell the folks at home. Your son was chewed to death, Mr. and Mrs. Kiff.

  We think it was rats.

  Shit. But then — he thought about Whalen.

  And he knew that there was something going on with Whalen, something secret that he wasn’t telling Will. But Will couldn’t imagine what it could be.

  Judge Feinstein looked up. “Counselor, could you approach the bench?”

  A snag, Will thought. And he pushed aside the weird thoughts, the strange pictures in his head. Thinking: I’ll get to the bottom of this later.

  When I call Whalen.

  * * *

  It was the bathroom, no doubt about it, Whalen thought. He held the can of Raid in front of him, ready to blast the little black suckers right against the wall.

  He had found the ants spaced evenly, every three or four feet, trailing back to the small bathroom.

  Somewhere here there’s a hole. That’s how they’re getting in, Whalen thought.

  He crawled into the small room. He smelled the pungent odor of urine, the result of his own sloppy aim.

  But he didn’t see any ants.

  He looked up, to the ledge of the small bathtub. And he saw an ant perched there, watching him.

  “Damn,” Whalen said. He slowly brought up the can — and shot the intruder off the ledge and into the tub. Whalen didn’t bother getting up to see if he was dead.