Storberry

by Dan Padavona

  “Dad likes her.”

  “I’m certain your father wants more for you than any girl in this town has to offer.”

  “Is this the way it’s going to be from now on?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Will you be choosing my date for the prom next May?”

  “That’s enough, Thomas.”

  “Are you going to live in the same dorm with me in college so you can choose my friends there, too?”

  “Don’t raise your voice to me.”

  “I didn’t.”

  The kitchen stove fan hummed, and the aroma of baked chicken and onions wafted through the downstairs. The tension eased, like a bow string returning to center. She wrung her hands, her voice softer now.

  “Tom, I know you don’t want me running your life, and I don’t intend to. Your father and I have always done everything we could do to support and encourage you. You’re so close now. We don’t want to see you throw your future away.”

  “Have I ever once gotten into trouble or done anything to embarrass you? Have I not made the honor roll every semester? Mom, sometimes I don’t know what you want from me.”

  He turned away and ascended the staircase.

  “Aren’t you going to eat dinner?”

  “I’m not hungry anymore.”

  Tom crossed into his bedroom, shut the door, and sat upon his bed with his back against the wooden headboard. The quiet that followed carried a great weight, and he was lost in his thoughts amid the silence. There was the muffled tick of the hallway clock and the call of a robin from without. Somewhere below, he thought he heard his mother sob.

  He buried his face in his hands. Brushing the hair away from his eyes, he momentarily wondered what it would be like to catch a ride out to Macon Park and throw back beers with the upperclassmen. Wouldn’t his mother throw a tizzy if her prodigy stumbled through the front door smelling like a brewery, painting the porcelain with a Technicolor yawn? Perhaps that was what was needed—a wake-up call to elucidate what many kids did to rebel. Something. Anything to back her off.

  Through the bedroom window, the deep azure glow of dusk spilled surreal light across the wooden floorboards. He didn’t bother to turn on the desk lamp next to his bed.

  After a moment he pushed up the bedroom window and let the evening air pour into his room. The night smelled clean—of fresh-cut grass and rich soil. A light breeze pushed against the drapes, and they danced softly with the varying wind. While crickets sang from the backyard hills on the southern side of Maple Street, he lost himself in the nocturnal scents and sounds.

  He lifted the screen and leaned his head out the window, feeling the breeze caress his face. The Barrows’ home was visible from this position. He could see Jen’s bedroom light reflected in a yellow splash on the backyard grass. She was still awake.

  He studied the elm tree outside his second-story window. The closest branch was no more than a foot away and probably thick enough to support his weight. If he risked the climb, he could be under her window in minutes. If he asked, would she sneak out into the night?

  His eyes followed the upward slope of the backyard, past the garage and flower garden, to the copse at the property border. Beyond the copse stretched the meadow and past that the hill forest.What roamed within its woods? Bears, coyotes, wolves, or something else?

  He thought of the stale, acrid smell of its interior. The pervasive feeling that he was being watched from within. The memory was a cold hand on the back of his neck.

  Tom shut the screen.

  He turned on his reading lamp, and the night scene out his window disappeared into featureless black. The Old Man and the Sea beckoned him, and Tom turned to his book to free his mind from thoughts of dark pursuit through the trees.

  Four

  The night in Storberry is void of sound and light.

  Most people lock themselves away in their homes after the final light of day is extinguished. Activity is confined to The Watering Hole and the Red Lion. The streets are silent and empty.

  The void of sound is in the sidewalk where there are no couples holding hands and no shoppers hustling for last-second items. No car horns honk, and nary an automobile is seen. The birds have gone silent, and somewhere in the far distance a lone dog barks but does not receive an answer. There is only the low hum of street lamps.

  The void of light is in the storefronts, which do not flash neon the way they do in the big city. At the Sweet Nothings Café, Mary Giovanni has long since departed for home. The red OPEN sign is turned off at the hairdresser shop next door, and the doors are locked by the cold steel of a dead bolt. The traffic light reflects ovals of red, yellow, and green on the cool pavement of Main Street, but there are no vehicles to follow its commands.

  At Jo's Dress Shop the lights are off. In the silence of its walls, one might hear the echo of girls excitedly shopping for prom dresses from hours earlier. In the store window mannequins in contemporary clothing stare lifelessly into the night, perhaps wishing for freedom, but the bolts are thrown here too, and there will be no escape tonight.

  The darkness surrounds the Barrows home on Maple Street, where Jen Barrows lies in her bed listening to the muffled tones of the downstairs television. No monsters haunt her from without tonight, and soon she will sleep.

  Five houses away, Tom Kingsley has forced the darkness to recede from his bedside, but it pools in the corners like a waiting tiger. His mind wanders, and he is in the forest again.

  At the Moran farm, the dark void seeps into Randy Marks' skin like pluff mud. It clings to his insides, stifling and hot, and he lies sleepless in the night. The pitch of the night is absolute, and he replays the death masks of Calvin and Sue Marks, like moving pictures of the Grand Guignol.

  On the northeast side of Storberry, the Last Stop gas station is quiet. There is no foot traffic inside, and there are no vehicles at the pumps without. Candy, beef jerky, and loaves of stale bread wait silently on the store shelves for some unsuspecting customer to pay a 25 percent markup. A tiny black and white television on the counter plays the same baseball game Art Stults watches at the police station. Fake security cameras at the counter and the pumps record nothing.

  The Last Stop was nothing more or less than what its name claimed it to be: the last chance for fuel before the speck on the map that was Storberry gave way to miles and miles of wilderness.

  While restocking chocolate bars at the front counter, Jeff Branyan had Katy on his mind.

  Where is she now?

  None of your damn business.

  Is she safe?

  She can take care of herself.

  Who is she with? Will she be there when I get home?

  Nary a customer had visited in the last hour, and he had little interest in the exhibition baseball game on the television. He had two hours of shift time remaining, which may as well have been two weeks considering how slowly the seconds ticked by.

  The store interior had an antiseptic white look to it, not so different from a doctor's office

  (or an insane asylum)

  and was well-lit by strip lighting strung above four neatly stacked aisles. The owner, Craig Peterson, saw to it that the floors were buffed daily regardless of foot traffic. The white tiled floor gleamed and reflected shelves of junk food like images from a parallel universe. The brightness often gave him headaches. As he rubbed between his eyes, he could feel the beginnings of a doozy.

  Several varieties of beer were displayed behind sliding glass doors at the back of the store. Whenever he opened the doors, cool air would roll out from behind the glass like a polar front, sometimes condensing against the warmer air to form a miniature cloud.

  Usually by now he would have turned down at least a few underage would-be drinkers carrying doctored driver's licenses. No parties tonight.

  Sounds from the baseball game carried indifferently in tin tones. As the second hands of the wall clock ticked silently, he could see his reflection in the glass doors of t
he beer display at the back of the store.

  A panicked thought entered his mind. What if I'm not the only one inside the store?

  He tried to shrug off the thought, but it persisted like an itch that he couldn't scratch. The last customer, a little old lady with a penchant for scratch-off games, had come and gone around 8 pm. Because the door opened to a chime, he would have heard an entrant even if he hadn't seen him.

  Except from the storeroom.

  And hadn't he spent considerable time in the storeroom, bringing out stock, breaking down cardboard boxes, and sometimes just sitting and thinking? Thinking about

  (Katy)

  nothing.

  Sure. Someone could have slipped inside unnoticed while he was in the storeroom. But nobody would bother sneaking into The Last Stop. Except for a

  (maniac with an ax)

  shoplifter.

  Peterson carried a gun, but he did not trust his employees enough to keep one on property. This was Storberry, after all, not Richmond. Which meant Jeff had nothing to defend himself with.

  He carefully walked along the front counter, perpendicular to the four aisles. In the aisles he saw...

  Not a whole hell of a lot.

  There's someone behind an end cap.

  Which end cap?

  You have a one in four chance to guess correctly, sucker.

  Movement at the periphery of his vision flashed spectral in the sliding glass doors. There had been something. Or maybe it was just his imagination. His pulse quickened.

  He circled behind the counter and searched for something he could defend himself with. Cigarettes. A box of receipts. Hit'em with the friggin cash register, tough guy! Nothing.

  A wrench.

  He grabbed the wrench. Good enough.

  As he circled out from behind the counter, he watched the glass at the back of the store for signs of movement. The belief grew within him that he had seen something. Someone watched him—he could feel it. He turned in a full circle, his lips parched and the wrench held at the ready.

  He propelled himself into a sprint down the center aisle. At any moment, he expected a figure to spring from behind the end cap. Holding a bloody knife. Swinging an ax. Cocking a shotgun.

  He reached the end cap and turned to his right, wrench held above his head. In the split second it took for his mind to register the empty aisle, he swung 180 degrees and prepared to lay waste to the intruder.

  But there was nobody behind him.

  While his reflection stared stupidly back at him in the storeroom window, he exhaled, and for the first time in the last several minutes, he felt thankful for the fake security cameras which did not record his antics.

  He returned to the front counter, feeling a little more dimwitted with each step. He placed the wrench behind the counter where he had found it.

  If he didn't keep busy, he would drive himself insane. The outside sidewalks hadn't been swept this evening, so he grabbed a push broom from the corner. Fresh air sounded like a pretty good idea, too.

  Maybe it'll make your brain grow, Einstein.

  When he stepped outside, the evening air had cooled noticeably, and the deep blue of twilight had settled in the western sky. The stars were bright to the east, shining back at him like glistening diamonds on black felt. He could see the red barn of the Moran farm, the tallest structure on the east end of Standish, around the bend in the road to the north. The barn was illuminated by the cool glow of the half moon, which made the sides appear ashen.

  Jeff used the push broom to clear the dust off the sidewalk in front of the store entrance. After that he refilled the windshield cleaning solution and rinsed off the squeegees. He checked his watch to see that only two minutes had passed. The streets were silent, and he could hear distant music from a country and western band at The Watering Hole. He thought he could use a beer.

  Mosquitoes and moths darted into the lamp lights over the pumps and ricocheted off of the glow. The light pooled out several feet past where cars would park, then dissipated toward the back corner of The Last Stop. It was here that Jeff missed the movement in the shadows. He never saw Dell Lawrence coming.

  Jeff's head exploded with pain as Dell crushed him from behind, the overhead lamps tumbling past his vision like a ride on the county fair's Tilt-A-Whirl. Another punch thundered into the back of his skull, and he fell to his hands and knees.

  “You fuckin' my daughter, boy?”

  Dell kicked him in the side and the wind went out of his lungs. His ribs buckled, and he screamed in pain. A kick to the head rolled him over, but Jeff saw only a blur of lamp light and the vague shape of someone standing over him.

  “She's seventeen!”

  A strong hand gripped him by the shirt and pulled him to his knees, and a closed fist smashed against his face. As Jeff tried to cover himself, he realized that he could not raise his arms. The pain in his middle made every breath agonizing, and now panic gripped him as he realized there was something seriously wrong with his ribs.

  “You son of a bitch! You think you are better than my family?”

  Dell reeled back, and another punch slammed Jeff just above the jaw. The blurred images in front of him spun wildly. He felt himself being lifted off the pavement.

  Dell threw him into the pumps. The newly-filled windshield cleaning solution containers crashed to the ground around him. The last thing he felt was the end of the squeegee jammed into his ribcage. A final moment of panic—

  What if he douses me with gasoline?

  The thought faded to black. The void of sound and light enveloped Jeff Branyan. He drifted into unconsciousness.

  Five

  The depth of liquid night is absolute at 3 am. Long before the first signs of the coming dawn wash ashore in the eastern sky, the people of Storberry sleep off their days.

  They dream, too. Some fantasize of successes they could not hope to achieve in their waking hours. Some remember a past romance. Still others see departed loved ones again but wake confused by their messages, which seem as impossible to grasp as the will-o-the-wisp. Some are haunted by the real-life monsters which pursue them through their sleep: the inevitable bank foreclosure, fields stricken by drought and flood, company downsizing, cancer.

  A few, especially the young, flee from creatures in the dark and cower as their closet doors creak open. The Boogeyman is real, but he's only visible to the unfettered imagination of a child.

  Jeff Branyan's dreams are disjointed and full of fury. At once he is capsized in a hurricane, ocean waves crashing against him and threatening to pull him under. The sea growls and roils. White caps raise high, displaying rows of jagged teeth, and the salty maw closes about him.

  He is face down in the grass, vaguely aware that he is in his football gear. The crowd is screaming for him to get up. Out of the corner of his eye he sees a man holding a wooden bat above his head. The bat crashes toward his skull, then the scene switches again.

  He is alive, but barely so in the intensive care unit of Armstrong General Hospital on the west end of Jensen Road. There is no telling if he will wake in a few hours or in a few weeks, and for now his dreams will continue.

  Evan Moran dreams, and he is young again. Becks Pond sparkles as though lit by a million underwater flashbulbs, and the day is warm under the Virginia sun.

  There is no cemetery, only the rolling meadow of bluestem and a kaleidoscope of summer flowers. It would be good to stop here, to lie in the tall grass and decipher the shapes of soft cumulus clouds as he likes to do on lazy summer afternoons. Here is a man shooting an arrow. Here is a dog leaping, or maybe it is a rabbit. And here is a heart shape.

  But he is drawn away.

  The forest edge appears at the end of the meadow as though a blanket of fog has suddenly lifted to reveal its presence. The good feelings disappear. He knows he should turn back, past the pond toward the safety of the neighborhoods. But his feet move without him, and the forest draws near like a camera zoom.

  Now he is standing i
n the forest.

  He is too deep inside the woods and can't remember how he arrived here. He turns in a circle but sees nothing except trees. Thin beams of sunlight break through the dark every so often, giving shape to the huge trees and leafless brambles which block each exit. The forest floor smells of filth and disease, like a bog which has sat too long and gone bad.

  Shadows shift at the edge of his vision. His skin crawls, and soft footsteps approach from somewhere ahead. He knows who comes, for Evan has been here before.

  He spins in panicked circles, but the trees and thorny brambles close in. He hears a sickening laugh, a child’s laugh, and his heart freezes. Red eyes burn through the darkness.

  Evan screams in his sleep and awakens to find the bed sheets drenched in sweat.

  The Storberry Police Department is more active than it should be at this time of night. Art Stults' hope for a quiet evening disintegrates the moment a patrol car finds Jeff Branyan beaten and bloodied in front of The Last Stop. The early morning shift arrives, and Stults’ eyes are heavy from lack of sleep, but he has too much on his plate and will need to stay longer.

  He knows Dell Lawrence is responsible.

  Another officer had brought Lawrence in for questioning, but there was no evidence to hold him and no witness to the beating. Until the Branyan kid awakes, there will be no definitive answers. The smug look on Lawrence's face had made Stults want to tear off his badge and dole out his own form of frontier justice. That had been five hours ago.

  At the end of East Avenue, six trailers lay quiet in a hummock-ridden dirt lot. In the second row, Dell Lawrence is asleep. There are no regrets for what he did to the Branyan boy, but Dell’s sleep is troubled, too.

  The trailer was empty when he arrived home, just as he knew it would be. He had hoped Katy had returned and that she had forgiven him again, but silence had greeted him instead. The sink was piled high with unwashed dishes. Beer cans lay scattered about the trailer floor.

  As he collapsed on his daughter's cot, hands resting behind his head, he could still smell her perfume in the bed sheets, and he longed to see her again. He stared at the ceiling, knowing that something was different this time. Something was wrong.