A Neon Darkness

by Lauren Shippen

  But devils are supposed to be at home in the fire. Instead, the fire has made a home out of him. It’s going to keep raging through his body, burning everything inside, and leaving nothing but ash behind.

  Dust to dust indeed.

  * * *

  Void lives up to its name.

  Even though the sun set hours ago, entering the bar, I feel like my eyes have to adjust to the darkness, as if I just came inside from a bright day. The small windowless club is a few miles from Blaze’s apartment, in a somehow even worse part of town, and filled with thumping bass and frantic strobe lights, and I immediately want to be anywhere else. But we have a mission to complete.

  “All right,” Marley shouts over the music, his large body like a battering ram parting the crowd for us, “we gotta find Kenny. He’s usually on the dance floor.”

  Kenny, I’ve been told, is Blaze’s sometimes-friend, sometimes-dealer, and an “all-around mess,” as Neon put it. What Marley generously called a dance floor is really more a mash of sweaty bodies slamming into each other. I glance behind me to see Indah rolling her eyes at her surroundings and Neon with her hands tense, probably ready to shock anyone who gets too close. But no one will. Even without Marley’s enormous frame creating a pathway, everyone in here is going to give us a wide berth. I’ll make sure of it.

  “There he is!” Marley calls, his stature giving him the advantage of picking the messy pale purple curls out of the fray.

  “Wazzzzuuuuuup,” Kenny cries when he sees Marley, launching his squat, teddy-bear body into Marley’s arms for an enormous hug that involves Kenny’s wrapping his legs around Marley’s hips. Marley looks bored by this, simply patting Kenny on the back before setting him down.

  “We need to talk,” Marley yells.

  “Huh?”

  “We need to talk,” he shouts harder, but Kenny just cocks his head, confused. Marley grabs him by the shoulders and starts to steer him out of the crowd, the three of us trailing silently behind.

  Keeping my eyes on Marley’s broad shoulders and my mind on wanting everyone in the club to pretend like we’re not here, I soon find myself stepping through a back entrance and into an alley, the cool, silent night air almost oppressive on my ears after the relentless assault of the music inside.

  “Yo, Marley, what gives?” Kenny says, his voice tinny and raw. “Things were just getting good in there.

  “’Sup, Neon,” he adds when he takes a second to look around. “Who’re your friends?”

  “This is Indah and Damien,” she says, and I feel a thrill up my spine at the use of my gifted name.

  “Good to meet you, bros,” Kenny says cheerfully, giving a cock-eyed salute in our direction. “So, what, you guys looking for some fun? I don’t have a lot left, but I bet I could dig something up…”

  Kenny looks down and unzips the fanny pack around his waist, reaching a hand in and rooting around.

  “No, Kenny, we’re not trying to buy,” Marley sighs.

  “Right, right.” Kenny keeps nodding, craning his neck to make eye contact with Marley. “That’s never really been your scene, huh, Marley boy?”

  “Have you seen Blaze?” Neon asks.

  “Mr. Bonfire himself?” Kenny smiles. “Nah, I haven’t.”

  “When was the last time you saw him?” I ask, stepping forward to come face-to-face with Kenny. I feel the trio around me go silent and still—it’s my time to go to work.

  I stare Kenny straight in the eyes. He’s small—smaller and rounder than me, his face sallow and sunken. He’s probably only a few years older than me, but he looks prematurely aged, like he’s been left out in the sun for too long, right down to the unnaturally dyed hair that’s lost so much of its color.

  Kenny’s dark brown eyes dart around before settling on me. I can feel his nervous energy, his desire to move away from me, to go back into the safety of the club, but I quash that with my own desire to know what he knows. I can sense the connection between us, a strong, thin string tied from my brain to his. A one-way connection—like rolling a ball down a ramp until it hits the first domino.

  “Lemme think,” he begins, high pitched and frantic, the dominoes falling. “I haven’t seen him in a month probably. Two months? Maybe more. I don’t remember a lot of days these days, you know? He was supposed to come to our Halloween party but he never showed. I remember that much. Which is kinda weird because he was pretty stoked about it. He said he was gonna do up some pretty good fireworks, if you know what I mean. So I guess the last time I saw him was, like, September? Oh yeah, it was definitely September, because we had a birthday party for Max and I got so twisted and got sick and Blaze took care of me. Oh wait! I saw him after that too, here, for eighties night. That was a really good night too. I was dressed like Marty McFly and there was this really cute girl dressed like Cyndi Lauper and—”

  “Wait, you know about what he can do?” I ask, distracted from the purpose of this interrogation for a moment. “You know that he’s…”

  “What, a pyro?” Kenny grins. “Yeah, of course. ‘S fucking awesome. Way better than what I can do.”

  “What?” I balk. “Wait, what can you—you’re an Unusual?”

  “Course I am,” he laughs. “It’s how Blaze and I met. He happened to catch me when I was stone-cold sober—early in the night, you know how it is—and I was able to read his thoughts and yeah, he was thinking about his power. He was always thinking about it, whenever I managed to overhear.”

  “Wait, wait, wait,” I say, hearing my friends shift impatiently behind me. They can keep it together for a few more minutes—they’re the ones who brought me right to another Unusual and didn’t seem to think that was relevant information to share. “You can read minds?”

  “Sure can! Oh, don’t—don’t get that scared look on your face, I can’t read anything now. That’s kind of the point of rolling, ya know? Makes everything else so loud that the inside of my head goes quiet. The music does too, and the dancing—hey, we should go back inside and dance, I don’t know what we’re doing out here—”

  “Have you heard from Blaze since eighties night?” I interrupt, wanting to get Kenny back on task. I have a feeling I’m not going to get a more coherent explanation from him about his ability, as much as I might want it.

  “No, not since he left with that guy,” Kenny says, shrugging. “And I was mad about that too because I wanted to know what the whole deal was with him. He didn’t seem like Blaze’s usual type, you know? Way too old.”

  “What guy?”

  “I don’t know, it was some guy that was talking Blaze up at the bar for, like, an hour. Real buttoned-up type, you know? Wearing a long black coat. Indoors. Which is a bad idea, let me tell you, especially if you’re already buzzing. I don’t know, maybe he was dressed up as, like, a white Shaft? Whatever he was going for, I’m not totally sure it was working, it just made him seem really creepy—”

  “What did he look like?” I push, a bad feeling starting to creep up on me. “Exactly.”

  “Uh, I don’t know, your standard older white dude. Dark hair. Boring face. Kind of a Cryptkeeper vibe. Tall. Really, really tall.”

  The hair on the back of my neck rises.

  “Did you talk to him?” I hear Marley ask from behind me.

  “Not really,” Kenny says. “He seemed pretty into our guy Blaze. And, listen, that’s not my bag so I don’t know what Blaze would have seen in him, but I wasn’t about to interrupt, you know? Bro code.”

  “Bro what?” I ask, unable to keep up with Kenny’s drugged-out ramblings.

  “But you watched them talk,” Marley clarifies.

  “Yep.”

  “Do you have it?” Neon asks, and the way she says it, I know she’s not talking to Kenny.

  “I got it,” Marley says, sounding certain.

  “Let’s go.” I hear Neon’s footsteps on the pavement behind me and look back to Marley.

  “Thanks, Kenny,” Marley says, and Kenny smiles. I drop the thread I�
�ve woven between us and Kenny’s smile drops a few centimeters.

  “What was I just saying?” Kenny tilts his head and squints his eyes at me, still standing a few feet away from him. Marley raises his pale eyebrows at me and I shrug.

  “Force of habit,” I tell Marley. “Usually I like when people forget they’ve talked to me.”

  “Cool move,” Marley deadpans, and I blush under his hard stare, feeling like I got caught with my hand in the cookie jar.

  “Take care of yourself, Kenny,” Marley calls over my shoulder.

  “Yeah, you too, Marley boy.” Kenny waves.

  With that, Kenny pulls a lollipop out of his fanny pack, unwraps it, and sticks it in his mouth before reentering the club. Marley and I stand side by side watching him, and the music from the open door fills the space between us for a moment.

  “Come on,” Marley says when the door swings shut. He starts walking toward the street, where Neon and Indah are leaned up against Indah’s car, talking.

  “… not like him,” I hear Indah say.

  “It’s exactly like him to go home with someone he just met,” Neon says, lighting a cigarette.

  “Not someone significantly older,” Indah counters.

  “I don’t think it was like that,” Marley says as we reach the car.

  “What do you mean?” Indah asks.

  “I don’t think it was a hookup.”

  “What’d you see?” Neon asks.

  “See?” I wonder aloud before realizing. “Oh … you looked in his past, didn’t you?” The thought still makes my skin crawl, but I guess Marley’s ability has its uses.

  “Yep.” Marley nods. “That’s why I needed him to think about it specifically—it can help sometimes, kind of like conjuring up a memory. The way Blaze was talking to that guy … it didn’t seem like a hookup.”

  “Someone he was buying from?” Neon suggests.

  “Maybe…”

  “But you got a good look at him?” Indah asks. “You’d recognize him if you saw him?”

  “Definitely.” Marley nods.

  “Well, thank god for that.” Neon exhales a plume of smoke. “Maybe now we can find him.”

  “Especially since we’ve got two people who have seen him,” I say, trying not to sound too satisfied with myself. Three heads swivel toward me.

  “What?” Neon asks, the cigarette hanging limply from her mouth.

  “The tall man. I think I met him.”

  * * *

  Marley thought he was tripping the first time it happened. Which is strange, because Marley has never done any drugs in his life. But, despite that fact, when he was seventeen he started seeing ghosts.

  He was grabbing a late-night burger with his friend Rachel when he suddenly saw her brother sitting next to her in the booth. Her brother who had died a year ago. And then suddenly there were two Rachels, overlaid on top of one another, both drinking a milkshake, one laughing at her brother, one pouting at Marley. It was over as quick as it began, and Marley wondered if maybe there was something in the burger.

  The next day he had the wherewithal to realize that it was probably just sleep deprivation—midterms had him pulling all-nighters and his mind was beginning to crack. He knew that Rachel and her brother often hung out at the diner that had become his and Rachel’s post-study late-night spot—a bit of an odd image for his tired mind to conjure, but not completely out of left field. He did his best to brush it off and refocus on his studies.

  But then, a month later, it happened again. And then again and again and again, and Marley realized he wasn’t just hallucinating. It wasn’t that he was seeing things that weren’t there, he was seeing things that weren’t there anymore. He was getting echoes. It stayed location specific for a while—he could only see the past of someone when they were in the spot where the memory occurred in the present—but Marley had always been an overachiever. Once he understood what was going on, he started perfecting it. Well, no, that’s probably skipping a stage. Once he understood it, Marley had to work on believing it. From there, he could hone. He wasn’t sure if seeing these echoes—seeing people’s pasts—was something you could be good at. Can you perfect something that’s just inherent in your nature?

  Marley was still waiting for an answer on that. He hadn’t perfected it, but that didn’t mean it couldn’t be perfected. It didn’t mean he couldn’t be perfected.

  * * *

  Because Marley and I are the only two people who have gotten a good look at the Tall Man (as we’ve come to call him), the group decides that it makes sense for us to pair up and go looking for the guy. Which strikes me as a bad idea in every sense. I don’t know how wise it is to hunt down a potentially dangerous creep, and I also wasn’t exactly looking for an excuse to spend more time with Marley. But having a purpose, a goal, is a strange and compelling thing, so I find myself agreeing to it before I have too much time to think.

  We play private eye for a few days—going to all of Blaze’s old haunts, talking to everyone and anyone that ever knew him, asking about the Tall Man—but we keep coming up empty. It’s not as simple as it looks on TV. There isn’t a break in the case right at the moment that things seem lost. We hit dead end after dead end, and we’re fresh out of leads.

  “We’re not cops, Robert.” Marley snorts when I say this to him. “We don’t have ‘leads.’ We’re just trying to find our friend.”

  “I know that,” I sigh, flopping down on Marley’s couch. This is the second time that we’ve come back to his apartment post-investigating, and I’m beginning to feel comfortable here. I never realized how much someone’s space could be a reflection of who they are. Indah’s apartment is soft edged and homey, the living room just generic enough that you know it’s shared by multiple people. Neon’s “crash pad,” as she calls it, is exactly that—a place to crash, hastily thrown together. I’ve gotten the impression that Neon is a bit like me—transient and noncommittal—but her apartment still has her flair. Bits of blue everywhere, an amp in the corner that doesn’t seem to hook up to anything, a fully stocked bar, motorcycle parts in the silverware drawer. I think she spends most nights at Indah’s—even though Indah is the one with the roommates—but Neon’s apartment is where she can fully be herself. Where she can be messy.

  I’m learning that, for Marley, being fully himself seems to mean the opposite. His tiny downtown studio apartment is sparsely but purposefully decorated—quiet in the way that Marley is quiet. It isn’t that he doesn’t speak—that he doesn’t want to speak—it’s that he doesn’t say anything unless he has something to say. Marley doesn’t mince words, and he doesn’t blow hot air, and I want so badly to crack him open and see what he would say if he expressed every thought that ran through his head.

  “I don’t know what we’re going to do,” Marley sighs as he collapses on the couch, the dense weight of him jarring me out of my reverie. “We’ve looked everywhere, talked to everyone, and we’re not any closer than we were a week ago.”

  “Have you looked through his stuff yet?” I ask, jerking my head toward the boxes stacked along the far wall, completely at odds with the fastidiousness of the rest of the space. Given his proximity to Blaze’s loft, Marley took all of his possessions home so that Blaze’s vulture roommates wouldn’t pawn them.

  “Yeah.” He nods, leaning his head back against the couch. “Nothing in there. Mostly just random odds and ends, some journals … his passport, which I thought was kind of weird.”

  “Why?” I ask, realizing that I have no idea if a passport is even something most people have. It’s never occurred to me to travel outside of the country, to go somewhere They couldn’t track me down.

  “Well, if he was going to leave for a while, it seems like an important thing to bring with him. Plus,” he adds, softer, “I didn’t even know that he had a passport.”

  “Is that weird?” I ask. “Don’t you have one?”

  He shakes his head, digging his neck into the cushion behind him.

&nbs
p; “Yeah, but I had to…” He trails off, sounding sad. I want to ask more but he quickly deflects. “What about you? You seen the world?”

  I don’t answer right away. I’ve noticed that this is a thing that Marley does—any question I ask him, he immediately turns around and puts it on me. I don’t know if he thinks it’s an effective way to deflect my ability’s influence on him, but as far as I can tell … it’s not. I indulge him anyway, feeling confident that he won’t go looking into my past to see the truth of why I stick around—it’s easier to want him to keep his nose out of my business when it’s just the two of us.

  “Nope,” I say. “Seen most of this country though. Or at least most of what’s west of the Mississippi.”

  “Why so much moving around?”

  Marley has tilted his head toward me, the side of his face lying on the cushion and yet still somehow so much higher than my own. He has an open, vulnerable expression that I’m not sure I’ve ever seen from him before, and I wonder how much of that is just the normal process of getting to know someone and how much of it is some underlying wish I have for him to show his true self to me. I try not to think about what the likely truth is and focus on the question he’s asked me. Maybe if I match his vulnerability with some of my own, we’ll start to form something more like friendship and less like a hardened cop and a rookie forced to work together.

  “I think you know why,” I mutter, chickening out at the last second.

  “It doesn’t really work like that,” Marley says, voicing what seems to be the motto of the Unusuals. “I don’t get the full biopic when I meet someone.”

  “Then how does it work?” I ask, genuinely wanting to know. Neon’s ability is pretty easy to understand—and Blaze, even though I don’t know him, haven’t seen him in action, I can imagine it. Pyrokinesis is one of those things you see in movies and comic books. But what Marley can do seems nuanced and complicated in the way that my ability is nuanced and complicated, and I both want to talk to someone about that and am terrified to in case they tell me that no, actually having that kind of power is really manageable and easy and you’re just bad at being a person, Robbie.