Dark Channel

by Ray Garton

  Marvin blinked several times. “Um, do you know this for a fact?”

  After a moment, a small, almost indistinguishable shake of his head.

  “Then why do you say that?”

  “Because … I know my wife.”

  Marvin stumbled a moment, not sure how to react to that one. “Wuh-well, um, what-uh, what do you know about your wife that makes you say that?”

  A long silence, then: “You’re a reporter.”

  “Oh no, no, I’m not—”

  “They still come sometimes. A lot, at first. Now just once in a while. They come askin’ … questions. About her. I don’t talk. No sense talkin’. They … they won’t find nothin’.”

  “Find what?”

  “What they’re lookin’ for.”

  “And what is that, Mike?”

  “Somethin’ …” A slight shake of his head. “Somethin’ bad.”

  “Is there something bad for them to find?”

  Mike’s head turned slowly, his dark, deep-set eyes burrowing into Marvin’s, and the left side of his mouth curled into a cold, mocking smirk as his eyes narrowed suspiciously. Then he turned back to the window.

  “Look, I’m not a reporter. I sell surveillance equipment. See here?” He removed his wallet and took his driver’s license, business card, business license and held them out to Mike.

  He gave them no more than a cursory glance.

  “Right now,” Marvin said, “I’m working with a friend of mine, a private investigator.”

  Mike had apparently retreated once again to his staring silence.

  Marvin whispered, “Listen, Mike, two people have disappeared. A reporter and a little boy. Both have been connected to the Alliance and certain people have reason to believe the Alliance is somehow involved in their disappearances. Now, if you can tell me something—anything—about your wife, her work, her background, her church, you might help us find these people, and if there’s something illegal or—”

  “That’s no church.”

  Marvin stopped, waited.

  “Churches are supposed to do good. Supposed to help people. Comfort ’em.” Another slight shake of his head. “That’s no church.”

  “What is it, Mike?”

  Nothing.

  “Remember, Mike, you might be able to help these two people, this reporter and this little boy, you might be able to …” He saw that was getting nowhere and stopped. Scooting his chair closer to Mike, Marvin put his hand on Mike’s arm cautiously; when nothing happened, he gave the arm a squeeze. “Tell me, Mike. Why did you try to kill your wife?”

  “No one believes me.”

  “I’ll believe you.”

  “You’ll print it.”

  “I’ll tell no one but my associate.”

  “I can’t talk about it.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I … it makes me … I get …” The emotionless mask began to twitch. He frowned so deeply that his forehead, suddenly lined with deep razor-cut lines, seemed to age ten years. He shook his head, hard this time, as if shaking off a fly. His hands trembled. “They give me medicine. Pills. Sometimes shots. But they … they don’t ever help. Not really. Not enough. After all these years, it’s … still there, still in me, like it’s still happenin’, like I’m still seein’ it, and … and I …”

  “Still seeing what, Mike?”

  “No. I can’t.” Firmly, clenching his teeth now.

  “Please.”

  He was silent awhile, staring out the window as unfallen tears began to glisten in his eyes and his lips pressed tightly together, so tight they became white-rimmed. “I … I loved her … so much,” he breathed. “When we met, she was … she seemed … perfect. So pretty. Funny. And smart, smarter than me, ’cause I never finished high school. But she … she wasn’t what I thought. Not at all.

  “I pray every day, every day of my life, for god to forgive me for what I done to my mama. Don’t blame her for never comin’ to see me. None of ’em do. Never have. And that’s okay, because I don’t deserve it. But—” He looked at Marvin, his face more alert now, burning with pain, but more alive. “—I ain’t never asked god to forgive me for what I tried to do, for tryin’ to kill her. All I ever ask is why he didn’t let me do it … why he didn’t let me kill her like I meant to.”

  “But what made you want to kill her? What had she done?”

  “It’s not what she done. It’s what she is. She’s so, so—” He stopped to wipe a thin sheen of sweat from his forehead, “—she’s so evil and so … so powerful… that there ain’t enough medication in the world to make me stop bein’ afraid of what she might do. To all of us …”

  Mike made a great effort to regain his composure. He took a deep breath, exhaled slowly and closed his eyes for a long time, clutching his knees tightly until his white knuckles began to get their color back. His movements were sluggish but his face was suddenly alive with nervous tics.

  “My dad was a contractor and I worked for him,” he began quietly, unsteadily. “She was goin’ to Shasta College and worked in a restaurant where Dad and me and some of the guys had lunch sometimes. I finally got the guts to ask her out and … well, a while after that we were married and …” A shake of his head. “… boy were we happy. We lived in a house my dad had built just down the street from my parents. Took our honeymoon in Grover, up near Mount Shasta. My parents got us a room in a real fancy hotel. Room service and everything.”

  “The same hotel Hester owns now?”

  He nodded.

  So far, everything Mike said jibed with everything Marvin and Jordan had read and heard about Hester Thorne after poring over magazines, newspapers and books and watching all of her videotapes.

  “Our first night there, we, uh—” A dry chuckle, “—we didn’t get much sleep, so I slept in the next morning. When I woke up, Hester was gone. She came back a couple hours later, said she went for a walk. She did the same thing the next morning. Then she asked if we could stay a few more days ’cause she was enjoying herself so much. So we did. And she went for a walk every morning before I woke up.

  “Then … then she, um …” Mike’s face screwed up for just a moment as if he were about to cry or scream, then he stared at his lap. “A few weeks later, she told me she was pregnant. We’d decided if it was a boy we’d name him Benjamin. But it was … it wasn’t … it-it …”

  Marvin could hear Mike’s teeth grinding.

  “I was in the delivery room with her,” he breathed. “When it was comin’ out, I was holdin’ her hand, try in’ to comfort her and everything, and … and I was waitin’ to hear it … y’know, waitin’ for it to cry. But there was nothin’. Just all them, y’know, sticky wet noises. I looked down at the doctor and … and it was all over. He was just starin’ at us like, like he felt real bad for us, or somethin’, and I still didn’t hear no cryin’, there was nothin’, not a sound, and I started screamin’ at him, ‘Why isn’t it cryin’? Why isn’t it cryin’?’ But he just shook his head a little and the nurse took it … took the baby away and … then they took her away and … then the doctor took me to a little room and sat me down and told me.”

  Mike was very agitated now. His fingers toyed with one another and his feet jittered as he squirmed in his chair and his facial expression changed rapidly from fear to disgust to grief to confusion and back again; as he spoke, his breaths came sharp and fast and his eyes darted around the room as if looking for something—or someone—hiding in a corner or behind the bathroom door or under the bed.

  “He gave me a cup of coffee and told me he had bad news,” Mike continued. “Said the baby was a boy, b-but it was d-d-deformed. Deformed real bad. Said it was the worst he’d ever seen. Asked if my wife’d been X-rayed during her pregnancy, or if she’d been exposed to radiation of any kind. I said no. He said it’d be best if we gave it up, had it
institutionalized, because it was gonna need lotsa care, special treatment all the time, and it’d cost a lot of money and … and he said it’d be best if we just gave it up and had another one later. Said before I talked to Hes … to, um, my wife and we made our decision, he thought I should have a look at it myself.

  “I couldn’t for a while. Went to a bar down the street and got drunk first, then went and … and looked at it, and-and …”

  He lifted his arms, fingers curled into hooks and, for a moment, Marvin thought he was going to claw his own eyes out, but the hands only trembled for a while as Mike ground his teeth together, looking around the room frantically.

  “I couldn’t even tell what it was,” he hissed as a tear dropped from his eye. “It was just this thing lay in’ there flappin’ like a, like a-a-a twisted up fish, and I-I couldn’t—I just—I wanted to-to …”

  He shuddered so hard, the chair’s legs chattered against the tile floor and Marvin reached over and squeezed his arm again. He was afraid Mike would get too upset and then the white coats would come in and kick him out before Mike had told his whole story.

  “Can I get you some water, Mike? Anything?”

  A violent sweep of arm, a burst of breath through his nose as he pressed his lips together.

  “Well,” Marvin said, “you can take your time. Take it easy. I’m in no hurry.”

  After a while, a little calmer now: “I tried to talk to her, talk some sense into her about the … the, uh … baby. About giving it away. Trying again. Having others. She wouldn’t. Didn’t even wanna talk about it. And the thing that always bothered me was … when I told her, and even when she saw it, she never got upset. She could always coo at it, hold it, rock it, just like any other baby. Never bothered her at all, even the first time she looked at it.”

  “So you kept the baby.”

  Mike nodded. “We kept it. The doctor—hell, every doctor in the hospital—couldn’t believe we were keepin’ it. They all thought we were crazy. So did I. But … but, y’know … it wasn’t like I thought it’d be. At first, he repulsed me, but … other than the way he looked, there was really nothin’ wrong with him. He … smelled. But he wasn’t so hard to take care of. In fact—” A slight smile. “—I could make him laugh. He seemed to like being with me. When he got a little older, we played. He talked to me … as much as he could, anyway. We had fun. ’Cept when she was around.”

  “What do you mean, Mike?”

  His face was darker now and he took a long, deep breath, let it out slowly and said, “When she was around, he changed. We’d be playing—maybe catch, say, with a Nerf ball—and she’d walk in the room. Benjamin would drop the ball and walk over. Like a dog that’d been called. He’d push himself right up next to her, real close. Stand there starin’ at me like I was a stranger. When she was around, he wouldn’t have anything to do with me. And he’d get this sorta … flat, dead look in his eyes. Sometimes he’d scare me when he did that, ’cause he was gettin’ so … big.

  “As he got older, it got worse. He spent more and more time with her. Alone. They’d go down into the basement—I’d made it into a playroom—and stay there for hours. He started talkin’—justa word or two now and then—but he’d only talk to her. Never to me. Just shuffled around the house, slobberin’ and makin’ snorin’ noises. ’Cept once … just once in a while … when we were alone together, he’d give me the best smile he could with that poor face of his. Or he’d reach out and squeeze my hand as he passed. But she never let that happen much.

  “Then some weird things started happenin’. I woke up one night and Hester wasn’t in bed. I looked around the house and found her in the laundry room standin’ in front of the washer-dryer—y’know, the stacked kind, with the dryer on top—just standin’ there talkin’ to it. Talkin’ to the dryer, real soft so I couldn’t understand her, like it was a secret and stoppin’ every once in a while like the dryer was talkin’ right back at her. I just watched her for a little while, then said something, and she turned to me real fast, blinkin’ and stutterin’, confused, y’know? Then she kinda smiled and said, ‘Have I been sleepwalkin’? I haven’t done that since I was a kid.’ Then she yawned and went back to bed and never said a thing about it again.

  “Week or so later, I woke up and found her in the kitchen talkin’ to the fridge. Only it was more like she was listenin’ to it. Noddin’ her head and whisperin’ things like, ‘Yes, I know,’ and, ‘I understand,’ and, ‘Yes, anything you say.’

  “Next day, I told her maybe she should see the doctor ’cause she’d been sleepwalkin’ again, but she just said it was probably somethin’ she’d ate or stress or somethin’.

  “But it kept happenin’. I even came home from work once—middle of the day, remember—and found her whisperin’ to a lamp in the hallway, whisperin’ a sort of, I don’t know, like a chant or somethin’. But this time—” He frowned now, his troubled eyes crinkling to slits, and there was a fearful tremble in his voice. “—Benjamin was standin’ right next to her, holdin’ her hand, breathin’ through that flat snotty nose and lickin’ his big lips with that fat tongue and-and he tuh-turned and looked at me with them eyes … looked at me like I’d better back off or he’d rip my throat out and I got so scared then—I wasn’t sure why, I just knew somethin’ really wrong was goin’ on—I got so scared I just turned and left, went out and got drunk. We never talked about it or nothin’, but from then on … I don’t know, I felt different about Hester. We wasn’t as close anymore. We didn’t talk much. Almost never … y’know, had … had intercourse, and when we did, she didn’t seem to enjoy it much, sorta seemed to be somewhere else. It was almost like maybe she was seein’ somebody, but I knew that wasn’t true. Somehow I knew it was somethin’ else … some-somethin’ worse.

  “Then she started goin’ on them walks. Them walks.”

  Mike stood and walked around the chair, leaning on the windowsill with both hands staring through the glass, shaking his head. He wasn’t very tall but seemed almost diminutive because of his posture: somewhat hunched, slouched, as if he were trying to curl up and disappear. He kept shaking his head and breathing, “Them walks, them … I don’t know, them … them walks …”

  After a long wait, Marvin asked softly, “What about the walks, Mike?”

  “She … she’d leave once in a while on the weekends. She’d take Benjamin on a drive, say they were going up to see the dam or go into the mountains and walk around, look at the trees and stuff. I believed her at first, didn’t have no reason not to, but … then it was every weekend. And they’d be gone for hours, all day, they’d leave in the mornin’ and come back at night, and when I asked where they’d been she’d just say they’d went for a drive, they went to the mountains or up to the dam or the river or the lake or … whatever. But pretty soon, I didn’t believe it anymore. Every weekend? From eight in the mornin’ till eight or nine at night?” Staring out the window, he shook his head. “No, I knew they were doin’ somethin’ else. Somethin’ … somethin’ bad. So one weekend, I borrowed Dad’s truck and—” He turned to Marvin and paced slowly. “—and I followed ’em.” As he paced, he twisted the hem of his pajama top with trembling hands.

  “They went to the mountains, all right. They went up to Grover. Stopped for breakfast in a little diner. I parked and watched, then followed ’em when they left. Followed ’em to the north side of Grover toward Mount Shasta. They drove down a dirt road, real twisty and narrow, then parked and walked. They walked a long way through woods, really dense woods. Like … like they knew exactly where they were going. They did know.”

  Mike stopped pacing, put his head in his hands, ran fingers through his hair, pulled lightly on his cheeks for a moment then ran a finger over and over one eyebrow, his face looking lost, sweaty and frightened.

  “They went to a cave. Huge. A big, big cave, dark and, and … with those—whatta you call those? Stalam … stalat …”
<
br />   “Stalactites and stalagmites?” Marvin prompted.

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah, those things, and … she had a flashlight with her, but … I got the feelin’ she, like, didn’t really need it, y’know? Like she would’ve been able to find her way through all that dark, and they went, they went… deep into this cave—” Gesturing frantically with his hands now, very animated as he glanced around the room, as if he were being watched, “—real deep they went, and I followed a ways behind and watched and watched and they didn’t say nothin’, just walked and walked and they went deeper and deeper and I felt creeper and creeper and darker and—no, no, I—no, wait a minute, I’m—” He shook his head hard and held up his palms in a stop! gesture. “—I’m, I went, I followed and pretty soon I started hearing things and smelling things, dirty things, thirty things, thirty dirty things—” Walking in circles now, his voice dry and breaking as his words spilled out and ran together, “—and there were flapping sounds, like-like wings, like big wings and pretty soon I saw them up ahead, three of them, flying around this hole, this-this thing in the rock, like a-a-a cunt, a big giant slit that was—it was—I saw it, it had these, like these lips, and there was like this light coming out of it, a light from deep inside, a bad light, sick, like a, like a-a, I don’t know, like radiation, or something, and these things were flying around it, these big things with big wings, things and wings, wings and things, and—” A little laugh now, a quiet, high-pitched machine-gun laugh, “—and they all flew down to see her and they-they bowed, these things, they bowed down in front of her, but not before I saw what they had, what they had between their legs, these-these big huge wet… dicks, and then I knew, I knew!” He spun around and faced Mike, grinning around yellowed teeth. “I knew Benjamin wasn’t human, he wasn’t, and I knew … he wasn’t … my son.”

  Martin was afraid. He’d been growing more and more anxious as Mike’s behavior deteriorated rapidly, but now he was genuinely afraid because he saw nothing sane in Mike Lumley’s eyes, nothing safe or familiar, nothing he could identify with … only something to fear.