Seize the Night

by Christopher Golden

  Inside the house, Orlando didn’t wait for his leash to be unclipped; instead, toenails clacking on the tile floor, he scrambled through Tony’s office to the kitchen. Dressed in a fuzzy purple robe and pink pajamas, her curly hair gathered in a bun, Rebecca, Tony’s second wife, was whisking batter in a white ceramic bowl. Orlando danced around her. “Good morning, baby,” she said, craning her head toward him. “What was all that barking about? Did you see a squirrel?” Orlando dropped at her feet. “Hi, August,” she added.

  “Good morning,” he said, moving past her to the refrigerator, from whose top shelf he removed the orange juice.

  “Where’s your dad?”

  “He went to check out something at the foot of the hill. Actually, that was what set Orlando going. Someone put up a building down there.” August stepped to the other side of Rebecca and took a glass from the cupboard.

  “A building?”

  “It’s for a movie. That’s what Tony thinks.” He placed the glass of orange juice on the kitchen table and returned the carton to the fridge. “He said one of your neighbors shoots his films on your property.”

  “Nate, yes.” She nodded. “Last summer, he constructed a small castle in the meadow.”

  “Well, maybe he’s making a sequel, because he built a tower this time—not much of one, really, just a single story. Tony called it a round, squat turret.”

  “That sounds like your father.” Rebecca wiped the whisk off on the rim of the mixing bowl and placed it in the sink, then plugged in the waffle maker. “Ever the teacher.”

  “He said it was from a poem by Robert Browning.”

  “One of his favorite poets. He taught a special topics course on him a couple of years ago.”

  “Who’s one of Dad’s favorite poets?” Forster said. At ten, August’s half brother had already left behind pajamas for gray sweatpants and a red Minecraft T-shirt.

  “Robert Browning,” August said.

  “Oh.” Forster went to the cupboard for a plastic cup.

  “So how do you like police work?” Rebecca said. She opened the waffle maker and ladled batter into it.

  August shrugged. “It’s okay.”

  “You’re keeping safe?”

  “As much as I can.”

  “August,” Rebecca said, “those kinds of statements do not fill me with confidence. I know Newark’s a dangerous place; I want you to tell me you’re being careful in it.”

  “Have you shot anybody?” Forster said.

  “Forster!” Rebecca said.

  “What?” He finished filling his cup with white grape juice. “I was only asking.”

  “My firearm has remained in its holster,” August said. “Fortunately. Which is not to say there haven’t been a few times I thought I might have to draw it.”

  “Really?”

  Rebecca’s frown stalled the anecdote forming on his lips. “Nah, not really.”

  “Awww,” Forster said.

  “I figure I’ll stay in Newark for a few years, then see about going federal.”

  “The FBI?” Rebecca said.

  “What’s the FBI?” Forster said.

  “Or the US Marshals,” August said.

  “FBI stands for ‘Federal Bureau of Investigation,’ ” Rebecca said to Forster. “They’re like the police, only, they work for the government in Washington, DC.” To August, she said, “I imagine the benefits are great.”

  “Oh yeah,” he said, “but you may have to move around a lot, which I’m not sure how I feel about. It’s the same thing with the Marshals.”

  “You’re young. You should see the country. Besides, it would give us the excuse to visit you wherever you’re stationed. Is that what they say, stationed?”

  “I think it’s assigned.”

  “Right. So make sure you’re assigned somewhere nice.”

  “Okay,” August said. “Any requests?”

  “I’m still lobbying for your father to take me to Hawaii,” Rebecca said.

  “Can you go to Wyoming?” Forster said.

  “Wyoming?” August said. “What’s in Wyoming?”

  Forster shrugged. “I don’t know. I just want to go to Wyoming.”

  “Fair enough,” August said. “I’ll see what I can do, buddy.”

  Forster smiled into his juice.

  Throughout their conversation, as the smell of warm vanilla threaded the air, Orlando had remained at Rebecca’s feet, his eyes lifted to her while she prepared breakfast, his tongue darting out to lick his lips and nose. All at once, he was up, his eyes on the back door, a growl rumbling his chest. Rebecca looked down at him and said, “What’s—” but the rest of her question was drowned out by the barks that burst from the dog. These were not the anxious yelps Orlando had voiced earlier; these were deeper, louder, full of the same aggression that was evident in the dog’s stance, legs squared, quivering; chest out; heavy head forward. He’d positioned himself between Rebecca and the back door, which, August saw, his father was pushing open. There was just enough time for him to register something different about Tony, something off, and then Orlando sprang from his position and in one snarling bound was on the man.

  Rebecca and Forster screamed simultaneously, she, “Orlando! Tony!” he, “Dad!” She stepped toward the back door, which Tony had been forced most of the way out of by Orlando, who scrambled up him, tearing his clothes with his claws, snapping at his neck and face. August ducked in front of his stepmother, trying to work out how he was going to haul eighty pounds of pit bull off his father. Maybe the dog’s collar . . .

  His hand was almost at the blue band when he heard a pair of sharp cracks, like wet branches being snapped, and Orlando’s snarls gave way to howls. Something was still growling—Tony? It wasn’t the dog, whose wails continued as August’s fingers hooked his collar. Before he could pull Orlando away from Tony, there was a tearing sound; the dog’s cries were swallowed by a liquid choking, and Orlando flew against August with sufficient force to knock him off his feet. His head smacked tile. Stars flared in front of his eyes, dissipated in time for him to see his father leaping over him into the kitchen. Rebecca said, “Tony?” and screamed.

  August rolled Orlando off him, noting as he did the splintered bones protruding from the dog’s forelimbs, the great, bloody hole in Orlando’s not-inconsiderable throat. Tony was standing with his back to him, bent forward, his arms out. Rebecca had retreated to the other side of the kitchen table, where she’d grabbed Forster from his chair and had pulled him against her. Her face was bloodless white, Forster’s wide-eyed, tearful. “What happened to Dad?” Forster said. His mother answered with a groan.

  Tony clearly heard the squeak of August’s sneakers on the floor behind him but didn’t turn fast enough to evade his son’s tackle. The impact carried both men stumbling across the kitchen, Tony’s right arm sweeping the waffle maker and bowl of batter into the sink. August caught the shoulders of his father’s T-shirt and wrenched them to the left, steering Tony into the refrigerator with a crash. Tony rebounded into August, forcing his left hip into the kitchen table’s nearest corner. Though dimmed by adrenaline, the pain was enough to loosen August’s grip on his father, who twisted around, swinging his left hand in a sloppy backfist that scraped August’s ear. Now that it was plainly in view, August saw that there was indeed something wrong with his father’s features, beyond the blood and bits of flesh smeared around the mouth. It was as if he were looking at Tony’s face in a smashed mirror, the particulars arranged in cubist angles. He was sufficiently startled not to track Tony’s left hand coming back the other way for a punch to the jaw that jolted August’s head. He released his hold on Tony entirely, striking his hip against the table a second time as he stepped back. Who knew the old man could hit so hard? For that matter, who knew he could rip out the throat of the family dog with his teeth?

  August’s hand trailed over the plate set out for him as Tony rushed at him. One of the good plates that Rebecca brought out whenever he visited, it shatter
ed against Tony’s head, driving him to August’s right. August pivoted and snapped his right fist into Tony’s solar plexus. With a hoarse gasp, Tony collapsed against the sink, his eyes bulging. August considered a follow-up chop to the neck, to the vagus nerve, but the combined plate to the head and shot to the midsection appeared to have quieted whatever had animated Tony. His legs had given out, and unable to prop himself up on the sink, he sagged to the floor. His face was still different—wrong—but August needed to call 911 before worrying over it.

  Obviously, his father had suffered a psychotic break and required immediate medical attention. The cordless was in its cradle on the other side of the refrigerator. He lifted the phone with a hand suddenly trembling so violently the device almost slipped from his fingers. In an instant, the shaking spread to the rest of his body, accompanied by a combination of nausea and dizziness. He leaned against the fridge, closing his eyes to keep from vomiting at the bloody mess that was his father, the ruin of Orlando beyond him. The coppery stink of blood mixed with the vanilla odor of the waffles. From somewhere behind him—the bathroom, he guessed—he heard Forster murmur, Rebecca hush him. August swallowed, called out, “You guys okay?”

  “We’re all right,” Rebecca answered. “Are you?”

  “I’m okay,” August said. “A little shaken up, but all right.”

  “Is Tony . . .” She let the remainder of the question hang.

  “He’s . . .” August glanced at his father, slumped at the base of the kitchen counter, his pants and T-shirt torn and soaked with blood, his chest heaving as he struggled to breathe. “I have to call 911,” August said. “He’s okay, but we have to get him some help. I want you guys to stay where you are for the moment.”

  “Did you kill my dad?” Forster’s voice was high, frightened, full of tears waiting to spill.

  “No,” August said, “I just . . . subdued him. But he’s okay, buddy, I promise. I’m going to phone for an ambulance, all right?”

  “All right,” Forster said. “What about Orlando?”

  August grimaced. “I’m not sure. He’s hurt pretty bad.”

  Forster wailed, his cries ringing on the bathroom’s tiles. “Shhh,” Rebecca said.

  The 911 operator was brisk, efficient. There would be help at the house shortly, she said. August was reasonably certain he remembered a firehouse nearby; all that remained was for him to keep an eye on his father and offer what assistance he could to the EMTs when they arrived. He returned the phone to its cradle, thinking that the remainder of his visit was going to be radically different from what he had anticipated. Once Tony was on his way to the hospital, August would have to tend to Orlando’s remains, carry the dog outside if he could, cover him if he could not, in either case, do what he could to ensure that Forster was not confronted with the sight of his dog’s mutilated corpse. No doubt, Rebecca would want to be at whatever hospital accepted Tony, even if, as August suspected, his father was headed for a locked ward. He couldn’t imagine she would want Forster with her, but neither could he picture her leaving his younger half brother here, amid the bloody wreck of Tony’s rampage. Something else that would have to be seen to—

  Faster than August would have predicted possible, Tony heaved himself onto his feet and ran for the back door. He was through it by the time August was halfway across the kitchen. Son of a bitch. The old man was full of surprises today, wasn’t he?

  At the threshold, at the top of the four stairs that led down to the back lawn, August paused, sweeping his gaze from side to side. If Tony still had his sights set on Rebecca and Forster, then he might feint, lead August outside while he circled to the front door and gained readmittance to the house that way. But no, there he was, racing down the hill behind the house, in the direction of the neighbor kid’s prop. Had he been in uniform, standard procedure would have dictated August remain where he was until help arrived. He weighed doing so. Through the woods beyond the meadow at the foot of the hill, wasn’t there another house? Hadn’t Tony and Rebecca complained about its owners allowing their dog to roam off-leash, provoking Orlando? By the time the help August had requested appeared, Tony could be done with his neighbors and their wandering dog.

  Cupping his hands around his mouth, he turned toward the kitchen. “Tony just ran out of here,” he called. “I’m going after him. There’s help on the way; someone should be here in a minute. Don’t come out until they arrive.”

  Without waiting for an answer, he leapt down the stairs and sprinted after Tony.

  His third week in the academy, one of August’s instructors—Officer Bennett, a tall, sparse man in charge of the recruits’ daily exercise—had delivered a speech about running. The first time someone runs from you, he had said, and they will run, because they see you’re new, or because they panic, or because they are, in fact, guilty of something—that first chase, you must catch them. If you do not, word will get around—word will fly around—that you can be outrun, and in short order, every time you approach anyone, they will take to their feet. You cannot permit that to happen. August had taken the instructor’s words to heart, adding a two-mile run—the last fifty yards of which he sprinted—to his daily workout. In the seven months since he had graduated the academy, the extra training had served him well: in fourteen foot chases, including one through the aisles of the enormous IKEA near Newark-Liberty, he had not been beaten once. Even with his father’s head start—even with his hip throbbing from its collisions with the kitchen table—August had little doubt he would catch him, and quickly, at that.

  Tony, however, proved to be fleeter of foot than August would have predicted of a man his age and with his physique. Already, his father was two-thirds of the way down the back hill, his apparent destination the short tower in the meadow. How was the old man doing it—any of it? The blows he’d taken should have kept him on the kitchen floor. Conceivably, he could have regained his feet, but for him to cover ground like an Olympic sprinter seemed beyond the realm of possibility. Yet there Tony was, drawing closer to the prop while August barreled downhill in pursuit. Whatever had broken in Tony’s mind, it had opened reserves of fearsome strength. August thought of the tube of pepper spray clipped to his car keys, lying on top of the dresser in the guest room, and wished he’d brought it with him.

  As Tony approached the tower, he veered left. Once beside it, he turned right and plunged into the structure. August slowed, waiting to see whether his father would come hurtling out of the prop the same way he’d gone into it, crash through the opposite side, or remain within. Tony had to know he was behind him, didn’t he? How could he not?

  While he was still a good ten yards from the tower, August circled right. From the top of the hill, the prop had appeared amateurish, if ambitious, a frame wrapped with heavy brown paper whose surface had been covered with hundreds of rectangles executed in black Magic Marker. Seen up close, the structure was considerably more substantial and impressive. It consisted of at least one layer of actual bricks, laid together with a neatness that suggested extensive workdays for something this size. The bricks were composed of reddish-brown material that gave the impression of incredible age, an effort August guessed might have been produced with the use of certain tools, which added to the amount of time it must have taken the neighbor kid—and his assistants, surely—to build it. How could Tony and Rebecca have missed it for so long? How could Forster have failed to notice it?

  Coming around to the place where Tony had disappeared into it, August saw a narrow entrance in the brick. No doubt it was a consequence of the morning sun, which saturated the air with hazy brilliance, but the doorway to the tower appeared too dark, as if the kid had draped it with a thick black cloth. August walked all the way past the opening, but no matter what angle he surveyed it from, the aperture remained impenetrably dark. Had he not witnessed Tony passing through it, he would have been tempted to assume it was painted on. Tony was likely concealing himself to either side of the entrance, seeking to evade, and possibly ambush
, August.

  If his father was waiting for him to charge in after him, however, his wait was going to be a long one. Standard procedure in a situation such as this one, where Tony was safely contained—alone—within a building with a single doorway, was to remain outside and wait for backup, and that was exactly what August intended to do. Once properly equipped officers were on scene, August would apprise them of the situation and they could decide how best to proceed. He had not yet picked a spot at which to station himself when the screaming started.

  It poured from the doorway, a single ragged note that extended long past the limits of what August would have judged possible. August jumped as the scream was succeeded by another, and another, the cries echoing on the tower’s brick, lingering, so that each new scream overlapped the ones that had preceded it, strata of pain. He couldn’t discern whether all the screams were Tony’s. He recognized the tones of his father’s voice in certain of the cries, but others sounded different, distinct. Oh, Christ, is there someone else in there with him? If there was, then SOP did a one-eighty and you entered the building in question immediately.

  Of course there was something wrong with it, with all of it. The time span didn’t work. From the construction of the tower in the first place, to Tony’s abrupt and catastrophic psychic collapse, to his father’s bringing a third party into the tower and hurting them sufficiently to drag the screams of the damned out of their throat, the last thirty minutes’ events should have required much longer to happen. Tony and Rebecca should have been walking to the top of the hill to watch the neighbor kid build his tower for weeks on end, and Tony’s mental break should have been forecast by warning signs for at least as long. (Shouldn’t it? August was no expert in the psyche; that was his mother, and at the moment, he could not consult with her.) As for Tony’s kidnapping someone and dragging them to the tower—that, too, should have been a lengthier process.

  Unless this had been occurring for more time than August had realized. Perhaps his father had been sliding into madness for weeks, months. Tony could have put up the tower on his own, with the neighbor kid available as a convenient explanation. After the structure was done, he could have brought someone to it . . . no, none of that worked, either. Rebecca was on sabbatical this semester, making it difficult for the kinds of activities he was imagining Tony engaged in to have escaped notice.