by Dan Padavona
“I guess the monsters are too afraid to show their faces,” she said.
Tom smiled back at her but noticed that she kept her voice to a whisper.
He was relieved she hadn't done anything crazy to tease him. As he breathed deeply, somewhat sickened by the stagnant air, the forest interior pressed against him with unnatural warmth. His instinct screamed for him to turn back while there was still time.
A branch snapped ahead in the darkness, startling both of them.
For the first time Jen wasn't smiling. Her eyes met his questioningly, and they stood and stared toward the direction of the noise. The hairs on the back of his neck stood on end, and he felt goosebumps spread over his body. If there was a bear or a coyote out there, it wasn't far away, and they would not be able to outrun it if it charged.
Jen moved her lips, but Tom cut her off by pressing a finger to his mouth, signaling her to stay quiet. Nothing moved in the forest. The smell of humus beneath them turned acrid.
The ancient trees stared down at them like giants cloaked in darkness. Branches grew outward like gnarled arms and talons. There was an added depth to the silence, something they could not put a finger on.
They knew they were not alone.
They froze in place, and no words were spoken. Tom could see that Jen was scared, and for one moment he almost wanted to turn the joke on her. But he sensed the danger was not imagined. It was real. He remained motionless, while his eyes struggled to cut through the shadows.
You don't want to flick the light switch on this time.
Another branch cracked, this one much closer.
The unseen danger snapped him out of his trance, and he grabbed Jen by the arm. Terror spread across her face, and then he pulled her from the tree as the shadows shifted at the periphery of their vision.
They turned and ran without caution across the pitfalls of the forest floor. Tree limbs whipped past their faces in a blur, slapping and scratching at their skin. The snapping of branches pursued them out of the darkness, coming quicker now.
A voice from within screamed at Tom, Get to the light! He dragged her forward as they ran, afraid she might fall behind.
The sunlit meadow was not far ahead, appearing as an amorphous sheet of white beyond the comparative blackness of the forest. Leaves rustled and branches snapped like toothpicks behind them, closer and closer. It was gaining on them. The filtered light at the forest edge grew stronger, and they ran to it like frightened toddlers to a parent.
The meadow sunshine appeared blinding from the forest.
They burst into the meadow, and as they ran without looking back, past the cemetery, through the tall grass, and toward Becks Pond, bluestem whistled past their faces in indistinct green blurs. Tom no longer heard the pursuit but was certain it was close behind. He could feel it, like you can feel someone behind you in the dark a split second before they place a cold hand on your shoulder.
The still pond waters shimmered in the distance, heliographing so loudly that the pond seemed to shout for them to reach its edge. The familiarity of its waters gave them hope that safety was within reach. Tom's lungs burned as his legs pumped like pistons. And still he held her arm, forcing her to keep pace.
They were out of breath when they pulled to a stop at Becks Pond. Jen could not have sprinted another ten yards without collapsing.
Tom finally allowed himself to look back. Across the meadow, tall grass and wildflowers danced in the wind. The distant forest edge cloaked whatever lay beyond in a shroud of black. He watched for signs of movement, expecting something to crash out of the forest at any second.
Nothing came.
Jen bent forward with her hands on her knees and gathered her breath. Her eyes met his, and there was an unspoken understanding that passed between them. The danger had been real. They had both felt it.
The sun fell lower, and the western sky was painted in fiery oranges. The drone of car engines moved between Main Street and Blakely Hill. Somewhere below them, a dog barked on the western edge of Maple Street. It was answered by another bark from the east.
They gathered up their fishing rods and hastened down the winding path below Becks Pond toward Maple Street. They did not wish to be near the forest edge when darkness fell.
Eight
The black shingled roof absorbed the sun on the west end of Storberry. Randy Marks watched the house from a distance on Randolph Road. Heat radiated off the blacktop in ripples, like a gateway between dreams and being.
He touched the steel in his front pocket, and it felt as unwavering as the young man's decision.
Randy always thought things through. The day had been well-planned— the neighbors would not be home from work yet; his younger brother Benny was with a friend at school for the Science and Mathematics Awards Show, and then Benny would be spending the night at his friend’s house.
His parents would be alone in the house.
He had finished his chores at the Moran farm, and though he had accepted Evan's invitation to live on the premises, he didn't feel comfortable with the charity, even if he needed it.
Either way, the goodwill would soon end. It was just a matter of time before the town found out, and then he would go away forever.
He had walked west on Standish from the farm, where he caught a ride with an elderly gentleman named Tucker Pence, who Randy knew from Saint Anthony's church. Randy figured it wouldn't take long before the young police chief was in Pence's living room, and—
Yeah I gave Randy Marks a ride to Randolph on the day he shot them. He was such a good boy. Quiet, you know? Aren't they all, before they do something bat-shit crazy? And no, I wouldn't have given him a ride had I known he had a gun.
Randy worried about Benny. After tonight, he would be alone in the world and living with the reality that his brother had killed Mom and Dad. Better that than the alternative, of course, because Randy knew it would start again. Benny was the right age after all, the same age Randy had been when it first started.
The sun watched overhead, a lone witness in the depthless blue. He felt his forehead burning. Blood pulsed in his neck, and the shiver he felt when he looked at the house belied the oppressive heat. The two windows looked back at him, eyes which had seen all and knew his intentions.
It had happened beyond those walls of concealment, through his childhood and into his teenage years. It would have continued too, had he not grown strong enough to stop the man's advances. He hadn't possessed the power to defend himself as a child, any more than would Benny now.
It had to end today.
He climbed the steps, and as he cast a glance at the empty neighboring driveway, he tested the knob. The door was unlocked. His mouth was cotton dry, and he licked his lips.
When he pushed against the door, it didn't squeal or groan. It swung open smooth as silk on well-oiled hinges.
The living room was shadows and vague outlines, his eyes not yet adjusted to the dark. The heat felt stifling.
The son-of-a-bitch is too cheap to run the air conditioner for his family.
The television was off, and he could hear the transistor radio from the kitchen playing harmless pop drivel, as though it were an integral part of the house's facade. He thought they might be in the barn behind the house, but then he heard the rocking chairs from the sun room.
Reeek. Reeek.
The sound brought a rush of memories, like a dam giving way.
He thought of the many times the man had come to his room. He would close the door, latch the hook-and-eye, and pull the shades. The man who called himself his father liked it better when it was dark, as though he figured God could not see into the shadows.
Randy had been nine when it started. Calvin Marks had wanted to show Randy something, to teach him a new kind of exercise he said. He used soothing tones to warn his son that it might hurt a little at first, and Randy remembered the uneasy feeling that had crept over him while his father talked, like he was Hansel being coaxed inside a house made of cho
colate and candies.
And it had hurt like hell. A burn which erupted into a tearing pain. All the while Calvin spoke in soothing tones, as the pain increased.
“Just a little more Randy...that's it...easy peasey...”
Then, when he was finished with Randy, who lay slick and sobbing, he would return to the sunroom and his favorite rocking chair.
How wonderfully ironic that he was in his chair today.
Huey Lewis sang about the power of love when Randy Marks crossed the kitchen to the sun room. The music sounded tinny and hollow through the cheap radio speaker. And still they rocked, unaware or uncaring of his presence.
Reeek. Reeek.
Sue Marks was lost in a paperback when he opened the screen door dividing the dining room from the sunroom. Her long black hair was pulled back from her face.
Randy felt a tinge of guilt when he saw her. Was it necessary for her to pay the same price?
She had always known. The lines on her face, too deep for a woman in her late forties, were proof enough. She could have ended it years ago. Her inaction made her complicit.
“Oh, I didn't see you there dear,” Sue Marks said, placing the novel in her lap.
As Calvin Marks thumbed through a sports magazine, his reading glasses on the edge of his nose, Randy noticed that there wasn't so much as a line on his father’s alabaster skin. His thinning hair was slicked back, and he wore a polo shirt which Randy found maddening. Calvin Marks was probably the only pompous ass in this one-horse town that owned a polo. It was always about appearances with Calvin. His father flipped the glossy pages to an article about the upcoming baseball season.
He won't even look at me.
“You don't look well, Randy. You shouldn't work so hard in this heat,” she said.
“He's a busy boy, Sue,” Calvin Marks said with his head still buried in the season preview.
“That's what you do when you graduate high school with honors. You stay busy. Shoveling horseshit for some two-bit teacher who couldn't make it up north.”
He sniffed.
Hatred roiled through Randy like boiling water in a lidded pot.
“Fuck you, Calvin.”
The words hadn't finished reverberating off the glass walls when Calvin's head shot up from the magazine. The boy had never so much as raised his voice to him in nineteen years. Calvin was tempted to burst out of the chair, but the look in his son's eyes froze him. There was a danger about the boy that radiated from his skin, like heat off the pavement.
Sue Marks was too stunned to move. Her mouth hung agape, and the novel fell from her lap.
“What did you say to me, boy?”
Randy took a step closer to his father. His body trembled as though he were fevered.
“It ends today.”
“What ends today? You don't make much sense, if you ask me. Now you apologize, or so help me—”
“So help you what? What are you going to do to me, that you haven't already done?”
“Randy!” Sue pleaded.
Randy turned his head in her direction.
“And you let it happen.”
Her eyes filled with horror, borne of dark secrets and the knowledge that those secrets had been released.
“I don't know what you are talking about,” Calvin Marks said.
His eyes locked on his son's, daring the boy to let the words spill from his mouth.
“How long until you start with Benny too? Or has it already happened.”
Calvin jumped from his chair, a cornered animal ready to lash out. Then his son pulled something from his pocket. As diffused sunlight reflected off of cold steel, Calvin stopped in his tracks.
“Where in the hell did you get that thing?”
Sue's lips quivered as though she carried a silent conversation with a phantom.
“My God, Randy, please don't. Think about what you're doing. That's your father!” she cried.
The first shot exploded with a loud pop that reverberated within the enclosed space. Calvin Marks looked down, as though searching for the bullet hole in his chest. He was shocked to find himself unscathed.
Sue Marks slipped to the floor. Blood poured from her chest, and she breathed in harsh gasps that sounded like duck calls. The air was redolent of gunpowder. The gun shook in Randy's hand, regret pouring out of him in tremors.
She was complicit, dammit!
A new terror was in Calvin's eyes, for he knew his fate. There was no talking the boy out of it now. If he had murdered his mother, he would have no problem pulling the trigger one more time. Pulling the trigger at the man who had violated the most sacred of bonds. No, it wouldn't be hard at all. Easy peasey.
Ain't that right, Calvin? It's going to be easy peasey!
Randy had planned from the beginning to shoot his mother first. He had wanted to get the pain and regret out of the way, quick and clean. But most of all, he had wanted to watch Calvin squirm. And squirm he did. His body quivered, teeth chattering as though he were on the brink of hypothermia. Sweat beaded on his forehead and ran down his cheeks in rivulets of mock tears. It poured down the bridge of his nose, and he nervously fixed the glasses which teetered on the tip of his nose.
“Randy. Son. Let's talk about this. Let's—”
After the second shot tore through Calvin Marks' heart, he fell to the ground, his eyes pleading with his son. A red spot formed near the top of his polo and began to pool outward. His breath came in labored bursts.
His mouth moved, but no voice followed. Blood ruptured out of his mouth, and ran down his face into streams which pooled on the floor like a river meeting the ocean.
He died minutes later with his eyes open. Randy's hands trembled until he could no longer hold the gun, and he dropped it to the floor.
Randy dug two long holes behind the garage and waited for sunset. Then he dragged Sue Marks to the first hole, said a prayer, and covered her with earth. He dragged Calvin Marks to the second hole, doused the body with kerosene, and lit a match. The body lit with a woosh, the heat radiating outward in waves. He gagged at the stench of burning flesh.
He watched the body burn until it was charred and hardened, like barbecued chicken which had slipped through the grates onto hot coals, his eyes seeing another place and time. He dropped the gun through his father's burnt out chest cavity and covered the hole.
The western horizon was bloody glory when Randy Marks hitched a ride from Jensen Road to the Moran farm, where he would sleep and wait for the town to come for him. Nothing mattered, as long as Benny was free of it.
Chapter Two
Evan Moran parked his pickup on Main Street in the northern end of downtown. As the late afternoon sun began its slow descent, bathing the west-facing building tops in vermillion, shadows spilled out from the building bases and elongated across Main Street.
A bell jingled when he opened the door to the Sweet Nothings Café. Air conditioning, which had pooled inside the doorway, rushed to greet him, and he was momentarily chilled.
Several people were scattered at round mahogany tables in the small room, and a glass counter and display case bordered the café to his right. Behind the counter a stout woman, with the beginnings of gray showing in her ponytail, recorded entries into a sales registry book.
Renee Tennant waved to him from her table at the back of the café. He weaved through the scattering of tables and turned sideways to avoid knocking over someone’s drink, then sat down across from her.
“Sorry if I am late,” he said.
“You're right on time. I'm early actually.”
The café proprietor, Mary Giovanni, wished a good day to a departing couple. She was 51, and built solidly from years on her own farm. She had an entrepreneurial spirit, and had taken a second mortgage against her home to start Sweet Nothings in 1979. It was to be the first dedicated café in Storberry, and she was confident it would be a niche success. The first years were so strong that she had paid off the fifteen-year mortgage in seven years. The steady revenu
e from the café went straight into the profit column now.
“’Evening, Renee,” Mary said. “Did you close the library early to enjoy the warm weather?”
“No, I have my students running the show. It's been slow all day. I guess there are better things to do than nose through card catalogs when it’s 80 and sunny.”
“And you must be Mr. Moran?”
“Yes,” Evan said, rising to shake her hand. “Evan, please.”
“I'm Mary. I remember you when you were just a little one. I doubt you’d remember me, but I knew your parents well. I was so sorry to hear about your father. He was a good man.”
“That's very kind of you. Your family had the farm on the west side of the town – the one with the big cow painted on the side of the barn?”
“Yes, that is us,” she said with a laugh. “Make the Moo-ve to Giovanni Milk. The farm is still there. My folks still run things, believe it or not. Though they have plenty of help for the hard labor. How are things on the Moran farm?”
“Good. Mainly thanks to the Marks boy. It's amazing how much you can forget when you've been away from the job for a while.”
“Ain't that the truth. I'd be lost if I started my own today. What can I get for the two of you? We're doing espressos now.”
“Just an herbal tea for me, Mary,” Renee said.
“One herbal. And for you, sir?”
“I could go for a coffee – cream and sugar, please.”
“I'll get those right away for you.”
Mary returned to her post behind the counter, rang out two customers, and began working on their order with workmanlike efficiency.
As Renee crossed her legs, they brushed up against his under the table. They were curved and smooth, he thought—more like a runner's legs than a librarian's.
“So you've been back for about half a year now, right?”
“About that. Yes.”
“But I've never seen you in the library. Actually today is the first time I've run into you. Where have you been hiding all this time?”
“The first several weeks were a blur. Besides dealing with my father’s estate and the paperwork for the farm transfer, getting back into the business has been intimidating. I felt like I was in over my head. Which is why I brought in help.”