The Face of Midnight

by Dan Padavona

  She massaged the stiffness from her neck and glanced back toward the staircase.

  “I’m gonna lie down again. Do you mind?”

  I told her I didn’t.

  From the kitchen, I followed her footsteps creaking up the staircase, down the hall, and into the bedroom. The springs groaned as she plopped down on the bed.

  When it grew quiet I opened the back door and stepped into the yard. Cold as it was, it felt good to step out of the stuffy, dusty house.

  I started to see why someone would want to live here. The hilltop isolation yielded an incredible view of lakes shimmering to the west. Far to the east cars drove busily between the shopping plaza and downtown Barton Falls. Though I couldn’t see King’s Road Apartments, I saw where the road bisected Cayuga Street. Woodlands west of town grew green and gray where pines mixed with deciduous trees.

  Somewhere deep in that wilderness lay the body of a dead junkie.

  A splotch of wetness struck my forehead and dribbled down my nose. I caught the next drop in my hand. It was half-frozen, the first snowflake of the cold season. It was too wet to stick, but it got me worrying again about how cold the house was after sunset. The weatherman’s promise of sixties by Wednesday seemed a million years away.

  The old house was quiet through the afternoon. Once I heard Becca cross overhead and use the bathroom. The bedsprings squealed, and she settled back into the mattress.

  Good. She needs to sleep.

  Our first stroke of luck came when I found a fan-driven space heater, still boxed, under the tattered den sofa. It was too small to heat an entire floor, but it worked wonders for the den. Later I’d set it up in the bedroom, maybe tidy things up and make the room livable before we turned in for the night.

  I passed time flicking back and forth between the only two television channels the rabbit ears could pull in. Both cycled through predictable soap operas. Brief news reports were given every thirty minutes with never a mention of our crimes. The heater hummed and blew invisible sunshine across my legs. I found myself struggling to keep my eyes open.

  I might have dozed for ten minutes before the wind whipped sleet against the glass and shocked me awake. On the news was a woman with haunted eyes, eyes that had seen the face of death. Text at the bottom of the screen read, Geneseo Woman Escapes Midnight Killer.

  I stumbled off the sofa and hurried to turn up the volume. Lorna Bedford, a pretty, middle-aged single woman with short black hair, claimed she’d been home alone last night and fallen asleep on the couch. When she awoke a little after midnight, she had a sudden sensation she wasn’t alone.

  She thought she heard whispers, but that might have been the television, which she’d left on. Then Lorna turned down the volume and heard the whispers coming from the dining room.

  Two black shoes stuck out from beneath a drawn curtain covering the sunroom entrance.

  The curtain moved. The black shape of a man wielding an axe lunged across the room.

  Dumb luck saved her when a police cruiser with wailing sirens and flashing lights shot past the front window. The killer froze. Lorna reached the front door and ran out into the yard before he caught her.

  The policeman, who’d been in pursuit of a speeding vehicle, glanced over just in time to see the woman running frantic out the door.

  By the time the policeman calmed her down and called for backup, the lunatic was gone.

  My mouth felt like cotton. Geneseo wasn’t that far away, maybe a ninety-minute drive.

  Had my head been clear, I might have visualized a map of The Midnight Killer’s past slayings and seen the spiderweb pattern which closed around Barton Falls.

  Lorna Bedford’s story kindled the memory of an urban legend we used to tell as kids. Unlike the Hook for a Hand and Bloody Mary campfire tales, our story was supposedly true.

  According to the legend, a six-year-old girl in Kane Grove began talking to an imaginary friend named Norman. The development didn’t surprise her parents, for their daughter possessed an overactive imagination. They were new to the area, having moved to Kane Grove that summer from Pontiac, Michigan. The girl was shy and hadn’t made any friends in her new neighborhood.

  The daughter spent her days in the backyard playhouse her father purchased for her, holding tea parties and pretending the cottony summer clouds were hearts and angels and all manner of wildlife. It was during the tea parties that the mother heard her talking loudly from inside the playhouse. When the mother asked her daughter who she’d been talking with, the daughter smiled and said it was Norman.

  Norman, the daughter said, was a real-life prince who loved to drink tea and try on her princess outfits. He promised he’d take the girl to his magic castle and teach her to fly.

  This part of the story troubled the mother. Child predators were real monsters, and many of them promised children wondrous things to lure them away from the safety of their homes.

  Everyday for the next two weeks, the girl held her imaginary tea parties and talked to Norman. After putting her daughter to sleep, the mother would hear the girl giggle and say, “Tell me another story, Norman.”

  Though the mother believed the imaginary friend was nothing more than the manifestation of her daughter’s creativity, she couldn’t shake the creeping sensation that something wasn’t right. Just to be sure, she asked her husband to have a look around the playhouse after the girl went to sleep.

  It was dark when the father wandered out to the yard with a flashlight. Looking back at the house, he saw the orange glow of the night light in his daughter’s bedroom.

  The playhouse sat near the back of the yard behind the swing set. In the dappled starlight, the playhouse looked misshapen and strangely macabre, like something out of a Grimm Brothers fairytale.

  Inside the playhouse, he swept the flashlight beam from wall-to-wall. The daughter’s costumes lay in scattered heaps. On the child-sized table, two sets of saucers and tea cups were set across from one another. In the center sat a teapot.

  The father removed the lid, smelled inside, and turned it upside down for good measure. It was empty.

  There was nothing here but the playthings of a little girl. He thought his wife’s imagination was nearly as overactive as his daughter’s.

  He swung the light behind him and saw it.

  Dolls, stripped of their clothing, lay piled in the corner.

  A mangled cigarette pack peeked out from under the mound.

  For one frozen moment of confusion, he wondered how his daughter had come into possession of cigarettes.

  Yet he knew they weren’t hers. He knew…

  The father started running for the house and saw a man’s shadow through the girl’s bedroom window, hunched over the bed.

  I call the story an urban legend because it existed in several incarnations. In one story, the father saw the shadow of Norman holding hands with the daughter as he led her out of the house.

  In another, the parents heard the daughter talking after midnight, telling Norman he could sleep in her bed that night. The father threw open the girl’s closet door and shot the grinning lunatic.

  In yet another version, the father returned from the yard and found his wife butchered inside the house. The front door was open. His daughter was gone.

  Maybe none of the stories were true. Maybe they were no more real than the escaped psychopath with a hook for a hand or the woman who spoke, “Candyman,” into a mirror.

  Yet I knew people who swore the stories were true. My uncle claimed to know one of the police officers who searched for the mysterious Norman. I had a friend whose cousin worked as an orderly at the Kane Grove hospital when the ambulance arrived with the family. According to his story, the father required ten staples for the bloody knife wound on his arm.

  Years from now, maybe Lorna Bedford’s close call with The Midnight Killer will become urban legend. On this day, it was a warning of how close the danger was. I should have heeded the warning.

  The television dramas were
back from commercial, and my phone’s screen was lit, indicating full charge. I considered messaging Riley, then pushed the idea away. I was still sore with him for thinking I’d had something to do with the assault on Harry Jenkins. Not to mention how stupid it was for him to text me about it.

  I’d started to sift through the DVDs—twelve of them, I counted again—when I heard Becca coming down the stairs. She sagged into the couch and drew her feet under her knees, eagerly consuming the space heater’s warmth.

  “You sleep okay?”

  “Yeah,” she said, smiling and stretching. “Thanks for letting me rest. I hope I didn’t overdo it and can still sleep tonight.”

  “You’ll be fine.” I nodded at the heater. “This little baby puts your lights out. I love it.”

  Becca handed me another granola bar. My stomach groaned in protest; I was sick of eating the same stuff day-after-day. But I needed energy. I also knew how much worse off homeless people were. For some, a sports bar or a bag of salted peanuts was a king’s feast. Sleep took place in dark alleyways, not in a house overlooking the countryside.

  Another problem had been gnawing at me while I waited for Becca to finish her nap.

  “Becca?”

  “Yeah?”

  “We don’t have a computer anymore, and I doubt your scraping program will work with my phone.”

  “No, it won’t.”

  “So how are we going to find another house?”

  “You need to work on your resourcefulness.”

  She grinned and patted me on the shoulder, an act that seemed both reassuring and patronizing.

  “I found this house.”

  She shivered.

  “I appreciate the effort. Just don’t expect me to stay a minute longer than needed. But hey, you outdid yourself by finding the heater. I could kiss you for that.” My cheeks turned strawberry-red. “Regarding my program, in every decent-sized town there is a library, and libraries have computers with Internet access.”

  “I don’t think it’s a good idea to go back to Barton Falls, library or not.”

  “That’s for sure. You said it’s supposed to get warm soon, right?”

  “Three days, yeah.”

  She chewed her lip. “When I steal, I only do so to survive. And I doubt a national supermarket chain will miss a few cups of yogurt or a bag of apples. Now and then, though, I have no other choice but to bend my own rules. How far do you think we could get on your bicycle in one day?”

  “With you riding behind me? Not far. Maybe thirty or forty miles. We’d draw too much attention biking illegally, anyway.”

  “And if we obtained a second bike?”

  “A lot farther. At ten miles per hour, with over ten hours of daylight, it would depend on how tired we got and how much we rested. Theoretically, sixty or seventy miles if we really pushed it.”

  “Then it’s settled. Tonight, we steal ourselves a bicycle.”

  From her bag, she pulled a dog-eared roadmap with a small tear running down one of the folds.

  “We’re here,” she said, pointing just west of Barton Falls. “Avoiding the highways, the back roads could get us to Pennsylvania on day one. If we can get to the Maryland border by Friday—”

  “That’s a lot of biking in three days. You’ll be sore as hell on Thursday and won’t want to ride so hard.”

  “You’d be shocked what you can will your body to do when you have no other choice.”

  The determination in her eyes made me think maybe she could handle the ride. But there was something else there: a lifetime’s worth of nightmares trying to catch up to her again. I wouldn’t let them catch her.

  We debated the issue as the storm abated. Maryland was just the first leg of a long journey which Becca expected would conclude somewhere between the Georgia border and Miami. She’d stayed in the north for too long and needed to get away before winter set in. New York was no place to be in December if circumstance required you to camp in the woods.

  I hadn’t realized how late it was until the clouds parted and the sun appeared above the western horizon. The color of the sky was burnt yellow. Soon it would be deep orange, the color of Halloween pumpkins burning in unison on the other side of the world. Then the light would be gone, and we’d be alone in the darkness of the old house. I flicked off the television, not wanting its bluish glow to travel into the living room on the off chance someone drove past.

  She started to rise, and I touched her hand. Imagination filled in the details of what little I knew about her past, and it anguished me. I wanted to empathize, though I was sure nothing in my disappointment of a life could compare to her hardships.

  “What’s wrong, Steve?”

  I stammered. The words were in my head, but none of them sounded right. I looked away, concentrating on the accelerated descent of the sun.

  She started to walk away, and I said, “You told me you want to live.”

  “Yes.”

  “This is no way to live, Becca. I don’t know what you’re running from—”

  “No, you don’t.”

  “Maybe if you told me, I’d understand.”

  She stood rigid in the failing light. For a second, her defenses faltered. She nearly opened up to me.

  “Would you, Steve?”

  “I’d try to.”

  She shook her head.

  “Get ready,” she said. “It’s almost dark. I don’t want to be anywhere near Barton Falls once the weather changes.”

  We thought we had a plan. We had nothing.

  We never made it out the door.

  The sun went down. The sky turned indigo, then black.

  Becca and I were in the bedroom, sweeping dust and vermin droppings onto a piece of cardboard, when the sun dropped out of sight. I’d salvaged a dirt-smeared bulb from the living room ceiling, knowing we could never turn that light on. It felt safe to install the bulb in the bedroom. The boarded window hid us from prying eyes.

  I was about to dump the mess out the bathroom window when something thumped below. It was loud enough to make me fumble the cardboard and dump the sweepings onto the floor.

  “Did you hear that?”

  I jumped again. I hadn’t heard Becca sneak up behind me.

  “I can’t tell where it came from.”

  “I think it was the basement.”

  My stomach went sour.

  We descended to the living room and stopped.

  What little light congealed here was dingy and grim and deceitful.

  I couldn’t see the back wall. The room seemed to stretch on forever.

  Thump.

  Again.

  I couldn’t tell if it came from the basement or from outside, as though someone was prodding along the foundation, looking for a way in.

  “Could be an animal,” I said.

  “I don’t think so.”

  I worried about the police. Maybe they’d tracked us here. Had someone seen a light or heard the generator?

  I realized how exposed we were in the living room. The window offered no sanctuary.

  We slipped behind the lip of wall separating the living room from the kitchen. I eyed the basement door.

  She mouthed, Check the lock.

  As I started across the kitchen, the floor groaned. Becca flinched.

  She moved behind me, somehow able to slide across the floor with barely a whisper.

  Maybe she should be doing this.

  I don’t know what I expected to happen, but I didn’t want to touch the basement doorknob. I kept waiting for the unidentified thud to come from outside so I wouldn’t have to check the basement. Quiet suffocated the house.

  I looked back at Becca, who was staring questioningly at me, obviously wondering why I hadn’t yet checked the lock.

  I swallowed my fear and grabbed hold of the doorknob.

  It was cold.

  It should have been cold, I told myself. The whole freaking house was frigid, and brass always captured cold preternaturally well. Still, the c
old unsettled me, as if something dark and ghostly waited on the other side of the door.

  I clenched my teeth and twisted the knob.

  The door was locked.

  Breathing deeply, I slumped down against the door. Nobody was in the basement. The noises could have been caused by the wind, a raccoon, anything.

  Another sound came from outside.

  It was unmistakable this time: the crunch of someone stepping on dead leaves.

  Becca’s eyes locked on mine as a shadow passed across the kitchen window.

  I crawled across the kitchen. We were on the other side of the lip separating kitchen from living room.

  The person in the yard couldn’t see us from here. Unless they circled back to the front yard. Then we’d be sitting ducks.

  “The generator,” she whispered.

  I heard it running. Whoever was outside knew we were here.

  The front door was a short dash away. With a head start, we might outrun whoever was following us. I thought about my backpack upstairs. My wallet was inside the pouch along with my phone.

  The shadow passed over the back door and slid across the den window. I pulled Becca back from the lip and threw myself against the wall.

  We were trapped.

  “Christ, it’s a cop,” I said. “It’s gotta be a cop.”

  “Then why no flashlight?” she asked. “Why hasn’t he announced his presence? If the police were on to us, I doubt they’d send one cop by himself.”

  The shadow was gone from the window.

  “Where is he?”

  I hadn’t heard a vehicle approach the house, but the driver could have parked down the hill and walked up.

  The night was silent.

  Part of me wanted to leave my belongings behind and make a run for it. Without knowing where the intruder was, I didn’t know whether to try the front or back door.

  Then I heard a voice.

  “Steve.”

  The stranger called my name in a loud whisper. Becca’s eyes were fierce.

  “Steve. Is that you?”

  The shadow was back at the kitchen window. I could see it rise and fall as someone leaped up to glance through the pane.