Dreams and Shadows: A Novel

by C. Robert Cargill

  “No! No! Please. I’ll get you your money!” He was sobbing again. “I’ll get you your muh-huh-ny.”

  Knocks smiled and narrowed his eyes, motioning to Dietrich. “Knock him out.”

  The chain cracked into the back of Simon’s skull and the world fell immediately into black.

  SIMON AWOKE TO the rising sun, sweat and blood pooling on the fine leather front seat of his car. His head throbbed, his knee screamed. But he was alive. Thank dear, sweet, merciful Christ, I’m alive! Through the morning dew glistening on his windows he could make out the cold, drab gray of an empty parking lot. Reaching back, his fingers tickled the gooey slop at the base of his skull. Everything about the night before felt like a fading dream.

  He needed to get to a hospital. He could call Mallory from there. It seemed like the best way to keep out of trouble. Wives don’t ask too many questions in the ER; they’re just happy you’re alive.

  KNOCKS HADN’T TAKEN pity on the man—he wouldn’t know how—but Simon’s predicament had given him an idea. What Simon felt in that moment when he imagined his family being beaten to death with a tire chain was deeper and more profound a pain than Knocks had felt in decades. It was a true, heartsick terror that wasn’t driven by survival, but rather longing. And love. The dread was palpable. Nuanced. Delicious.

  When you beat a man to death, the fear subsides the moment you stop hitting him. And after a while, your victim only wants to see it over and done with. Fear fades into acceptance and there’s nothing left but to turn the redcaps on him to tear him to pieces and slake their caps. Knocks had spent years feeding this way, luring in sleazebags and horny hipsters with the promise of a tawdry backseat screw, only to beat them down in a dark alley or abandoned warehouse with a couple of his redcap friends. But that only lasted an hour at best.

  Fear like that meant regular violence. Too regular. People got wary around that much crime. So Knocks waited only until the last possible moment, when his hunger could take little more. Then he would lash out and feed.

  But there was something about having a worm on a hook, writhing and squirming in agony, that appealed to him. He wanted to see just how far this would go. So he let Simon go free with a warning, just to see what would happen. Then, whenever Knocks felt the pangs of hunger, he crept into the bushes around Simon’s house, placing a phone call to Simon’s home number. After a few seconds of heavy breathing, he hung up. Simon, terrified that would be the night they were coming to kill him, would turn off all the lights and huddle in the dark with his family, slowly losing his grip on everything he loved. Thus terrifying his wife and kids even more than the thought of them dying terrified him. And Knocks consumed every last bit of anxious panic.

  He’d discovered the long game. And while police would later fish Simon’s headless body out of Ladybird Lake—murdered by his Mexican Mafia creditors—Knocks had already moved on to something even more dastardly. There was no way to truly duplicate a Simon Sparks; he was a lucky break. But one night, while creeping around Simon’s house, he’d noticed how deeply tormented Simon was at the thought of his wife leaving him over his behavior. Here was a man who spent evenings after work shacked up in some hotel with boozed-up college girls and strung-out strippers, terror stricken at the notion of his frigid, nagging wife calling it quits. It was counter to everything the guy stood for. But there it was. Love.

  And that’s when Knocks discovered the true frailty of the human heart. He remembered his own heartbreak from youth, when little Mallaidh the Leanan Sidhe snubbed him for that detestable Tithe Child. As the anger and bitterness welled up within him again, he wondered how hard it would be to string someone along—to create the perfect soul mate for a person, only to slowly unravel them over time, first breaking their heart, then their spirit, then even their will to live.

  It turned out to be much easier and more rewarding than he’d imagined.

  No longer willing simply to prey upon one-night stands, he turned his sights toward lonely outsiders, the invisibles of society, those souls passing unseen through the world, eking out a meager existence, cloistered at home on a Friday night with a stack of books, a cup of tea, a video game. Finding them would prove simple enough. They were everywhere. Though they felt alone, their population was dense and numerous, found in bookstores or movie theaters or working in the farthest, most isolated corners of large offices.

  The trick was to find someone who had a hard time making eye contact. Those were the invisibles who felt they were invisible for a reason. They felt unattractive or unlikable, and they dressed the part, with baggy clothes, face-shadowing glasses, and only passing attention paid to their hair or makeup. Knocks began to spot them in even the most crowded rooms. A quick brush past them and he could feel the tingle of loneliness, the tickle of their yearning to be loved. And that’s when he would strike.

  LIZZIE ANDERS WAS a mess. In another life she could have been beautiful. But not this one. This was the life in which she cried herself to sleep, still thinking of herself as the ten-year-old girl who had pissed herself in gym class, earning the nickname Pissie, which stuck until graduation. The boys would tease her about being into water sports and the girls, far crueler, would get up and move whenever she sat near them. She’d skipped college and gone into data entry straight out of high school, making it a point to never look up from her computer.

  It was a complete shock to her the day Knocks spoke to her on the bus. He was beautiful. Radiant. Pop-star looks and a thousand-watt smile. He said his name was Billy. He’d asked if the seat beside her was taken and never stopped talking after that. She tried to shut him down with silence, but every time she immersed herself in a book or looked out the window, he found something else to talk about.

  It was as if he knew her already. Her every interest, her every dream. He was magical. The guy she cried herself to sleep thinking about, knowing that he couldn’t be real. Not for her. Not for Pissie Anders. But there he was, and he wouldn’t give up.

  Their love affair lasted three magnificent weeks. On their second date, they’d made love on the floor of her studio apartment. By their fifth date, they were making love so much she would pass out from exhaustion. By week three, they were planning trips around the world that they would take after their kids graduated.

  And then he stopped calling. At first it was three days without seeing him. Then five. At last they’d gone three weeks without speaking until he showed up late one night, reeking of booze, for a quick roll on the floor before passing out and sneaking out before dawn.

  When next they spoke, Knocks told her he had met someone else. Someone prettier. Someone better in bed. Someone who didn’t urinate frequently out of fear of wetting herself. Someone he could spend the rest of his life with. That night, Knocks waited outside her window as she drew a hot bath and sawed through her wrists with a steak knife. He giggled as she wailed in the tub. Knocks hadn’t giggled like that since he was a child watching his mothers drown men in Ladybird Lake. Every moment he didn’t call her was a delicacy, but this, this was a feast. Nothing had been this satisfying since Tiffany Thatcher had strung up her rope. And as the life drained out of Lizzie, staining the water a deep, dark red, Knocks knew it would be a long while before he was hungry again, enough time to set up another hearty meal.

  Knocks savored the taste of young love gone sour, with its fondness for razor-blade carvings and pill-popping professions of love. Teen hearts shattered the hardest. Allison Jacobs was a brainy girl with a bright future when an equally intelligent poet with a tousle of curly locks came along. She threw herself into the daydream. When it ended, she threw herself under a city bus. Jaclyn Stanton was a pimple-peppered, perpetually silent high school senior dressed head to toe in black, pining for some dark, Gothic mystery. Her Romeo came to her at night, avoiding the sun, enjoying the silence with her. The night he left her, she never saw morning, choosing instead to slit her own throat. Matthew Cash was an engineering student whose love came to him after traded glances at
a bookstore. By the end, he’d put a shotgun in his mouth just to hear the sound it would make.

  Knocks understood his place in the universe now—his reason for being. He knew why his first two mothers had shunned him; he knew what it was that scared them. They knew what he could become. And while it had taken a long time to get there, all that suffering had only made him better at what he did. It didn’t fill the void, it didn’t dull the pain—but it was comforting to know that everything he’d been through served a purpose, making him what he was now.

  A shark.

  Nixie Knocks the Changeling was ever moving, always eating, forevermore lurking as a shadow on the edge of darkness. And there seemed, for a time, to be nothing that could distract him from his single-minded feeding.

  THE MAN APPEARED from out of nowhere, emerging from the dark one night to walk beside him. Knocks tried not to make eye contact—at first attempting to stay anonymous—but the man knew good and well who he was. Looking up, Knocks recognized him instantly.

  “Hello, Ewan,” said Coyote. His skin was as coppery as it ever had been and his hair was as tangled and black as he remembered.

  Knocks glared at Coyote, gritting his teeth, spitting out, “I’m Knocks.”

  “Of course you are,” Coyote apologized. “It’s dark and I’m used to seeing Ewan out and about at this time of night around here.”

  Knocks stopped in place. “What?”

  “Oh, I thought you two would have run into each other by now, what with him working downtown. He and Colby are both here. Weren’t you all friends as kids? I seem to remember something like that.” Coyote smiled slyly. “Well, I’m off. Running late and all.”

  Knocks stood there, dumbfounded, a fourteen-year-old fist slamming into his gut as Coyote once again slunk away into the shadows. It felt something like what Lizzie had felt. Like what Simon had felt. What they all had felt at some point. Had Ewan been here all along? he wondered. Living out his perfect little life? For a moment, the shark was gone. He was a seven-year-old boy watching his mother trampled to death beneath hellish hooves; watching as the love of his life fell into the arms of another; watching the little boy he was made to look like reap the rewards of the Tithe, only to escape its fate, leaving the crowd howling for Knocks’s blood. One can never go back to fix the wrongs of their pasts, but they sure as hell can relive them. For a moment, the seven-year-old Knocks stood awash in the painful tides of time.

  But with those tides came the shark; and with the shark returned, Knocks knew what he had to do. His anger and pain and confusion and heartache knew only one relief, had only one release.

  He had to find and kill Ewan Thatcher.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  THE YOUNG MAN EWAN BRADFORD

  The years since he’d left the Limestone Kingdom had not been unusually kind to Ewan Thatcher. Never having known his given surname—as the fairies hadn’t used it—the kindly old shelter worker who’d taken him in off the street had named him Ewan Doe. And it wasn’t until he found his way to his first foster home that he’d taken the name Bradford.

  The Bradfords were sweet enough, a pudgy pair of professional types who had tried for fifteen years to have a child of their own. Barren and cursed, they took in what they called strays, making the best of what the system could find them. Parenting, much like conceiving a child, wasn’t in their genes. It took less than a year for them to get fed up with Ewan’s screaming nightmares, strange behavior, and eccentricities before dumping him back into the system and trying their luck with another. From that point on, Ewan referred to the Bradford line—the point at which a family had kept him for as long as the Bradfords had. Three hundred and twelve days. Only two families since had ever gotten that far, neither getting much further. In the fourteen years since he’d entered the system, he’d been with twenty-two families.

  Despite the foster care system having shipped him all over Texas, it was only natural that, when of age, he found his way to the only home he really knew. So on his eighteenth birthday, he packed his stuff, hugged his latest foster mother good-bye, and took the bus to Austin, Texas, where lived his closest friend in the world, the only person who remembered him from before: Colby Stevens.

  While Colby had mysteriously turned up time and again throughout his life, consistently writing letters that always knew how to find him, he was still something of a mystery to Ewan. Always off on some adventure in a far-off part of the world, it struck Ewan as odd that he felt the need to keep in touch with someone he had known stateside when they were too young to remember even meeting. But Colby was a good friend, always there for him, providing the only real sense of stability in his erratic life.

  At the age of twenty-one, Ewan was a mess. Tall, gaunt, and tattooed, he wore both his clothing and his dyed hair shaggy and black, concealing his innate good looks. While he never wore makeup, it was hard to tell without looking closely, his skin so pale and his eyelashes so thick that, coupled with the hair, he seemed to be aspiring to vampire chic. In truth, he embraced the look because with his hair its natural brown, he simply looked ill—like he was missing some essential component of his diet. The occasional crack about his style from a stranger was much easier to take than smothering concern. Are you eating right? You look sick. You need more iron in your diet. Or bananas. Potassium is good for that sort of thing. There was no need for the attention; it was humiliating. He was just naturally pale. So he dressed the part and people left him alone.

  His apartment was a third-story, one-bedroom walk-up in a shadier part of town nestled between gas stations, a strip club, a liquor store, and a greasy-spoon diner where Janis Joplin had gotten her start as a singer—paid for by washing dishes and working as a bar back at a downtown club. While he could have made better money elsewhere, he kept the job because it meant occasionally talking the manager into substituting Ewan’s band as an opener when acts fell through, netting him almost weekly stage time. The manager—a seedy, overweight, and similarly overconfident hipster who looked surprisingly like a balding, overcooked potato in plaid—would let him play, but not for cash; that way they both got something out of the deal. He got a free act and Ewan got to experience firsthand how piss-poor his band really was.

  He had no idea what his band’s name meant, but it had sounded cool when it came to him: Limestone Kingdom. They weren’t particularly good, but they weren’t dreadful either; they were just uninspired. Ewan played guitar, backed up by a pair of brothers he’d found through an ad on a telephone pole: LOOKING FOR LEAD SINGER/GUITARIST TO FRONT BASS AND DRUM DUO. MUST HAVE OWN EQUIPMENT AND SONGS. He wrote most of the music himself, but could never get it right. There was this music lingering just out of reach in the back of his head—something familiar but inaccessible—and that’s where he tried to write from. But it came out all wrong. So he assembled the chords the way he thought people would like them, layering them with lyrics about his life, short and poorly lived though it was. It never gelled, but he kept plugging away at it with the hope that one day they’d click and he’d never have to wash dishes again.

  He was mediocre, unremarkable, and altogether ordinary, everything he strived every moment to break free of. So when his manager slapped his back with a meaty palm and asked, “Do you think you can get your band here by eight?” he was ready.

  “Hell yeah,” said Ewan. “They’ll be here.”

  The crowd was thin that night; the cancellation had been the headliner, bumping the opening act into the top spot, leaving Limestone Kingdom to open for the openers. Far from ideal. But it was still a gig and they played their hearts out—which is to say they played as well as they could. Few noticed and fewer cared. Thirty or so people milled around, mostly in groups, nursing beers or doing shots, often checking their watches and phones for the time, wondering how much longer before the next band took the stage.

  Only one person in the audience was watching. She was hard to notice at first—sitting in a pool of shadow at the back corner of the club—but the momen
t Ewan caught a flash of her eyes, she was the only thing he could see. She was transfixed, sipping her drink, watching not the band, but Ewan himself—her eyes unwavering, as if he was the only thing onstage.

  Thin and waifish, a stiff breeze could have knocked her over, dragging her several feet. Her eyes were large, brown, and dazzling, set below a high forehead framed with wisps of short brown hair. When she smiled, her delicate cheekbones dominated the landscape of her flawless, milky skin. She wore a gauzy top, a gossamer broom skirt, and a modest black beret, a handmade scarf hanging about her neck in a snarl of rainbow-colored wool. There was something entirely elegant about her every detail, a charm even to the simple way she sat.

  The moment Ewan caught sight of her, his breath grew short. His throat swelled with dried cotton. His heart pounded. He was dizzy, mad with love; his eyes grew nervous and his knee twitched, as if his entire right leg might give out and cave in beneath him at any moment. Never once had he suffered stage fright, but here, for the first time in his life, he was terrified. Ewan knew, even at his age, that a girl who knocked the wind out of you came along rarely, if ever.

  He couldn’t mess this up.

  So he played, and he played, and he continued his awkward plunge into the depths of mediocrity. His voice cracked like a teenager bludgeoned into manhood by puberty. The music languished in the air, stillborn, tired, and repetitive. The crowd murmured, trying to ignore it, but the girl stayed tangled in the melodies. She got it; while there was not a lot there to get, she understood, felt its roots, connecting with whatever it was that it wanted to be—and never taking her eyes off him.

  His set ended an unbearable twenty minutes later. He tried to keep his cool, but it was clear he was rushing through breaking down their equipment. The bassist looked down at him as Ewan unplugged from the onstage amp. “We saw her.”