Darkness Follows

by Mike Dellosso

Politicians weren’t allowed to change their minds. It was an unwritten rule of governing the public: no flip-floppers allowed. When, during a press conference, he released the news that he was now pro-life, the Democratic Party and his constituents all but disowned him. A week later, when he announced he was changing parties, the backlash almost ended his career.

  The news outlets went into a feeding frenzy, the talking heads jabbered on about the turncoat senator, and the bloggers spun all kinds of ridiculous stories. But eventually the dust settled, and people started talking about the moderate Republican from Pennsylvania who might just be able to make a bid for the White House come next election. The White House, as in the president of the United States. Something Lincoln had thought about, naturally, but never seriously.

  Here, four months after the whole incident, he was an apparent front-runner to occupy the Oval Office after next year’s election, the sweetheart of every talk-show host out there. People were saying he was the perfect candidate: young (though Lincoln didn’t think forty-five was all that young), handsome, articulate, and politically positioned to capture the majority vote. He was just what the people wanted, just what the country needed.

  Lincoln flipped through the notebook again. Written by a group of Republican senators spearheaded by Senator Humphrey Michaels from Georgia and Senator Mitch Maka from South Carolina, this bill was the first of its kind. It laid the groundwork for a constitutional amendment protecting life in the womb and provided firepower for legislation that could outlaw abortion once and for all.

  Stephen Lincoln, senator from Pennsylvania and presidential hopeful, was being asked to put his name on the bill. To make history. And he was going to do it.

  Seventeen

  SAM STARED AT ANOTHER JOURNAL ENTRY:

  Captain Samuel Whiting

  Pennsylvania Independent Light Artillery, Battery E

  This page, though, was not from Eva’s notebook. No, he’d given that back to her after he’d torn his writings out and stuffed them under some unpaid bills in the top drawer of his desk. This entry was written on white printer paper. It lay cockeyed on the desk, begging him to read on. But Sam didn’t want to read it. He wanted to tear it to shreds and never think about it again.

  And yet, like the voice of a dead lover calling from the dark beyond, it beckoned him to come near and enticed him with words of urgency. He believed, in this moment, that if he didn’t respond, it would read itself aloud. How crazy would that be?

  Sam rolled out the chair and sat. He dared not touch the paper, but his eyes were drawn to it. He had to read it, just as he had to answer the call of his dead brother.

  Leaning forward, elbows on the edge of the desk, he took in the words as if they were sustenance to a starving traveler.

  July 2, 1863

  4:00 a.m.

  I was awakened and given orders to be relieved by another battery and reSupply. Went to a valley of lush wheat and also a peach orchard. Two other batteries joined us there, making a total of ten field pieces of varying sizes. Our first job was to supPort the infantry, in case of an assault or advance.

  There was some light skirmishing all day. About noon to 2:00 p.m. the booming of cannons grew louder, and then the infantry suddenly advanced well right of our position (this was a mystery to us all). Then the musketry grew to a loud roll of thunder. We could see much smoke, so I ordered,” All guns ready,” as the wounded came through by the hundreds and thousands, saying they were being pushed back.

  Then it happened. We saw our battle flags streaming to the rear, and finally the stars and bars of the enEmy. There were thousands of them. We opened up. At first they reeled from the shower of flying lead, but within minutes our infantry support broke and ran for cover. I ordered, “Retreat by recoil.” We fired and went back as the guns recoiled.

  Within twenty minutEs or so, we were almost out of ammunition and forced to withdraw up a slight rise. We set up again and received some rounds of ammunition. By this time the enemy was pushing steadily and easily up the rise.

  At once there was a cheer, and one regiment (1st Minnesota) charged down like demons, giving us enough time to gather our forCes and repel the enemy.

  Losses to my battery were very heavy. Out of seventy-two men, in two days:

  Dead, 16

  Wounded, 27

  The regiment (1st Minnesota) lost almost every man. Oh! how brave they were. Their charge saved the day. God bless them!

  That night, reflection and new orders. The day and the one past are days I will remember, but wish I would not! I curse this war and those who started it. Good men with wives and cHildren and brothers and sisters are dying. Men who love their country and their home.

  Is it necessary? Is such loss and suffering needful? My mind grows dark at the thought of continuing in this madness, and if not for my men I would abandon this war and be done with the killing. There is no light in my life now, only darkness. At times I feel I am not my own.

  Again the letters were there, dropped like lost coins. He grabbed a pen and jotted them down. It didn’t make sense, but then none of this did, not one word of it.

  Sam scanned the words again, not believing what his eyes saw. It was his own penmanship, but he could not recall writing even one word of it. It was as foreign to him as ancient cuneiform written on stone tablets. And yet, seeing those alien words written by his own hand sent such shivers through his body that he swore he could hear his joints rattling.

  Who was this Samuel Whiting? How had he gotten into Sam’s head? And, the question that burned more than any other, when had he written this?

  He walked through his morning again, reviewing each moment—waking, using the bathroom, sliding into his jeans and T-shirt, having coffee while Molly made breakfast, eating with Eva, seeing them out the door, then …

  The voice. Tommy’s voice calling to him from the study.

  Sam had walked up the steps—no, he’d been pulled up the steps by an unseen tether—stood at the top, and had the vivid memory of his brother. That’s when he’d noticed the yawning door to the study, as if someone had opened it wide. Had he blanked out? Gone into some kind of trance? Or seizure? Had he actually entered the room, grabbed the paper from the printer, and written this stuff before returning to the staircase?

  He’d read some time ago about a local man who killed his dog, decapitated the poor thing, then disemboweled it and left the entrails on the kitchen counter for his wife to find when she came home from work. He claimed that he had no recollection of doing such a hideous thing, that he’d blanked out, and when he came to again, Scooter, his beloved Jack Russell, was already headless and gutted. He loved his dog almost as much as he loved his wife. Some said he was a world-class liar who hated his wife and butchered Scooter to get back at her for canceling his cable subscription. Others said he’d experienced “missing time,” a common report of those abducted by aliens. They claimed men from the other side of the universe, or maybe just the other side of the neighborhood, had kidnapped the man for experiments and disassembled Scooter for fun.

  The one that had made the most sense to Sam was a physician’s speculation that the man suffered from dissociative fugue disorder, a psychiatric condition characterized by short-lived amnesia and often accompanied by wanderings and other activities of which the sufferer had no recollection.

  Dissociative fugue disorder sounded right to Sam. Amnesia. Wanderings. Writings from 1863. He had no memory of any of it. At least he hadn’t disemboweled anything yet.

  He smacked the top of the desk with an open hand. He couldn’t go nuts. He couldn’t. But he felt he was heading that way, and there was nothing he could do about it.

  Eighteen

  A HALF MILE FROM HOME, WITH A CAR FULL OF GROCERIES and Johnny Cash coming through the speakers, Molly spotted the smoke. It reached above the distant treetops, like an arthritic finger pointing at the heavens, where there was no more suffering, no more morning stiffness.

  Molly’s breath caught in he
r chest, as it always did at the sight of smoke. When she was nine, her family had returned from a visit to Aunt Elaine’s to find their house nothing but charcoal and matchsticks. Her mom had left the stove on, and the pot of boiling water had burned dry. Or so said the fire chief, a large, round man with a pencil-thin mustache and only four fingers on his right hand. Molly remembered him well. She had rummaged through the ruins for hours, sifting through their blackened possessions, salvaging what she could (which didn’t amount to much), and listening to her father curse at her mom the whole time.

  As she neared her own home now, she realized it was just the burn barrel belching smoke, and the tension behind her ribs eased. Since Sam’s accident they had depended on the meager income from his long-term disability, and they—or rather, she—had decided to discontinue the garbage service to save themselves the four hundred dollars a year and instead burn the trash in a barrel at the end of the yard, where lawn met field.

  Sam must have started the fire while she was gone. Not like him. Lately, disposing of the accumulating refuse outside the back door was the last thing on his mind, along with every other household chore she had to direct him to do.

  She steered the Ford Explorer into their driveway, stopped beside the sidewalk, and beeped the horn twice. Within seconds Sam emerged from the house, hands in the pockets of his jeans.

  “Hey, mind helping me unload these groceries?” she said.

  “Sure.”

  “Saw you started the burn barrel. Thanks.”

  Sam hesitated, and Molly noted the shadow of irritation that passed over his face. “Yeah. The garbage was piling up, and the smell was coming into the house.”

  She opened the back hatch and handed Sam a bag. “Everything go OK with it?” She handed him another.

  “’Course it went OK. Why wouldn’t it?” His voice was edged with annoyance.

  “I’m just asking, honey. No need to get snippy.”

  “Why do feel you even need to ask? I’m not allowed to start a fire without my mommy around?”

  She stopped, holding a bag in each hand. His sarcasm always reminded her of her father and sent alternating waves of anger and frustration through her. She lowered her voice, tried to calm herself. “That’s not what I said. I was just wondering, is all. No need for you to get all irritated about it.” And with that she walked past him and into the house.

  The rest of the groceries were unloaded and dumped on the kitchen counter in silence. When the last bag was removed from the Explorer and the hatch closed, Molly mumbled thanks to Sam as he disappeared upstairs. She heard the study door shut, the desk chair roll against the wood floor.

  Then she let the tears come, curtains of them. She hated arguing with him. It brought to memory the countless battles she’d had with her dad, battles he always won, even when he was dead wrong.

  Thirty minutes later, eyes still blurry, lump still in her throat, Molly put the last of the groceries away. When new food went into the refrigerator, the old leftovers were removed. She dumped them into a paper bag, then headed out the back door to toss them in the burn barrel before the fire died. If she left a bag of spoiled food outside, it would be an invitation to every raccoon, opossum, and stray cat within a mile radius. Feast at the Travis house.

  Walking across the yard, she realized the grass would need one more mowing before winter arrived. She’d get the riding mower out Saturday and do it. Beyond the barrel, a rusted and burnt fifty-gallon drum, a couple of vultures picked at something in the field, not more than ten yards beyond the property line. They flapped their massive wings and took flight as she neared the barrel. They circled, silent but watchful, as if warning her not to mess with their find.

  After dropping the bag in the barrel, Molly walked to the line where lawn met witchgrass. The carcass in the field had not yet bloated, so it couldn’t have been there long. The fur looked like that of a—

  A groundhog.

  For the second time that day Molly’s breath caught in her chest. She edged closer and confirmed that it was indeed a groundhog.

  The vultures still wheeled overhead, occasionally swooping dangerously close. Molly was moving in on their territory, on their meal.

  But curiosity drew her closer to the carcass. She noticed part of the beast’s head was missing, not pecked away by the beak of a very large bird, rather carved away by the slug of a high-powered rifle.

  Sam.

  She turned her head and located his study window on the second floor. He was standing there, behind the glass, watching her.

  Nineteen

  TRASH LITTERED THE PASSENGER’S SIDE OF THE DODGE Intrepid. Soda cans, cake wrappers, and foil bags spilled off the seat and almost filled the leg space to the dash, but Symon didn’t care one bit. Outside the weather couldn’t be better—midsixties, clear sky, light breeze—but Symon didn’t care one bit. From across a quiet street and down the block came the noise of children at play in the schoolyard—giggling, screaming, hollering—but about this Symon didn’t care one bit either.

  There was only one thing he cared about, one thing that caught his eye and held it captive: the target. The girl. He had no need of the photo; that could remain on the refrigerator back at the Moeller’s place. Her image was stained on his memory like one of those inkblots the shrinks had you look at. Whenever he shut his eyes, she was there, on the insides of his lids, a perfect ghostly negative of her face.

  But she wasn’t in this group of recessing children.

  He watched as one of the adults, a young slender woman with a fine build, blew a whistle, and the children assembled in a line, single-file. What good little kids.

  One boy, a big-headed, pudgy kid with shaggy hair, stepped out of line and hit another boy in the arm. Symon could tell the smaller boy was hurt and trying desperately not to cry. Crying was a sign of weakness, even in the social structure of elementary school. A girl hollered at Shaggy, and the woman with the nice figure said something and motioned him to the back of the line. He obeyed, but not before giving the woman a very adult hand gesture behind her back. Symon had half a mind to walk over there and teach Shaggy some respect. But he refrained; he had to stay focused.

  The line began to move like a segmented worm, disappearing into the school through double glass doors. Shaggy shoved the boy in front of him as they stepped into the darkness of the building. Minutes later another line wormed out through the same doorway. As soon as the children hit the blacktop, the line disintegrated and kids scattered like bugs under a rock at the first glimpse of sunlight. Somewhere among this group was the target. Earlier the voice had supplied him with all the information he would need to complete the mission. And Symon never forgot a detail.

  He lifted the binoculars from the passenger seat and aimed them at the playground. It took him only a few seconds to locate her. She was on the swings, kicking her feet, trying to generate momentum. She looked exactly as she did in the photo.

  A memory, like a gunshot, exploded in Symon’s mind, causing him to drop the binoculars on the seat …

  He remembered a girl, about the age of the target. Brown, curly hair, and an upturned nose. Brown eyes too. She was laughing, talking to him, pulling on his hand and telling him to follow her. They were in a park or clearing of some kind. In the distance a tree line marked the edge of shadow-filled woods. The leafless trees loomed like an army of the walking dead, and it scared him. In contrast, the girl’s voice was musical, and the feel of her hand in his angelic. He resisted at first, fighting his fear, yet wanting to give in to her urging. Eventually courage won out, and he let her lead him toward the tree line.

  And that’s where it ended. That was it. He tried to coax more from his mind, replaying the scene over again, hoping it would lead to more. But it didn’t. Just as quickly as it had surfaced, it vanished and left so many questions unanswered. Who was the girl? Where were those woods? Why did it frighten him so?

  On the playground the target was going higher in the swing now, and Symon wonde
red if he had a daughter. He didn’t know what kind of life he’d had before … before what? Of course, it no longer mattered. The only thing that mattered was the target.

  Again he pressed the binoculars against his eyes and watched the target at play.

  A knock on the car door startled him. He swung his head around and found an older man, sixties maybe, bent at the waist in a blue jogging suit.

  “Mister, what are you doing?” the man said. His words were clipped and tight.

  Symon smiled politely. “Just watching my daughter. She’s on the swings. I’m on my lunch break from work, and thought I’d stop by. Don’t get to see her much, except on weekends.”

  The man looked toward the playground. He stood like that for several seconds, eyes moving back and forth. A few streets over, a horn honked and tires screeched.

  “She’s the one with brown hair on the swings,” Symon said. “She loves the swings.”

  The man fixed his eyes on Symon again. They were steel blue and deep set. He looked like a man who once wielded a good bit of authority and was used to peering into men’s souls. “She’s a cutie,” he said and tapped the door. “You enjoy your day now. It’s a beauty.”

  “Sure is. Enjoy your walk.”

  Symon watched the man stroll out of sight, showing no sign of age in his gait, then returned to watching the target.

  Twenty

  AT HIS DESK SAM TRAVIS STARED AT HIS HANDWRITING ON the paper. The words, so foreign and strange, seemed to swim on the white background, and it made him dizzy to look at them too long. Molly had found the groundhog, and she knew he’d shot it. Her look said it all. He would hear about it sooner or later. She’d question him and tell him that she didn’t like him shooting small animals in the backyard, that it wasn’t safe. She had no confidence in him anymore. She no longer respected him, no longer looked to him for answers or comfort or protection. He was nothing more than a burden or, at best, an extra child she had to mother.