by Mark Murphy
For one horrific moment, Amy entertained the unthinkable: Does he have an accomplice?
"Amy? Mimi?" a voice called.
Daisy sat up. Her tail thumped the floor.
"Mal?" Amy yelled.
"Ames?" Malcolm called back.
Reflexively, Amy tried to straighten the hopelessly disheveled mess of her hair. It didn't work. Her fingers were sticky with blood.
"We're in the kitchen," she said.
Malcolm walked into the kitchen with two black eyes, his face covered with a white powdery substance, accompanied by a slim Asian girl, similarly powdered, with a bloody nose.
"What the hell happened to you?" Amy asked, glancing briefly at the Asian girl.
Malcolm's jaw was agape. He stared at the inert body of the Shadow Man lying on the ground.
"We got in a wreck. Are you guys okay?" he said.
"We kicked his ass!" Mimi said.
He motioned to China.
"This is China. She's a med student who was kind enough to drive me here."
China smiled at them and waved sheepishly.
"Sorry we were late. I wrecked the car. But the airbags worked," she said.
Malcolm walked over to the girls and wrapped his arms around Amy and Mimi. His face was smeared with blood. The tears came quickly, tracing latticework designs across the clotting gore.
China began crying, too, gazing at the three of them with her arms akimbo.
No one noticed when the Shadow Man's hand twitched.
None of them saw him roll his head slowly to one side, staring at them with dull red eyes like a shark eyeing its prey.
None of them saw him grinning.
In an instant the Shadow Man was resurrected, balancing on his one good leg, up so quickly that he seemed to have simply materialized out of thin air. He grabbed China from behind, looping his arm around her neck, and began choking her just as he had Amy.
China tried to scream but the words were strangled in her throat, coming out as a garbled "Ghack!"
"I'm leaving," the Shadow Man said. "And I'm taking this bitch with me."
"Put her down, Joel," Malcolm said. "She's not part of this."
"Oh, yes she is. She's a big part of it now."
The Shadow Man dragged China backwards toward the door. Her legs, kicking furiously, scuffed the ground. They stood at the edge of the pool of light from the kitchen. There was darkness behind him.
Malcolm had an idea that if the Shadow Man made it into the darkness, he would be gone forever.
"That's not my name, Malcolm," the Shadow Man said.
"Who gives a shit?" Malcolm said.
"You should give a shit, Malcolm. What kind of person doesn't know the name of his own brother?"
47
For most of his life, Malcolm thought he and his mother were alone in the world.
He barely remembered his father. He was a ghost, a spectre from the shadows of his past. Malcolm knew him from old photographs and stories and from snatches of memory, like the scent of Old Spice, or a vague recollection of reading the comics from the newspaper at his father's feet while his dad sat on the toilet flipping through the paper's News and Sports sections, smoking Benson and Hedges 100's and flicking the ashes into the john.
His dad had died when Malcolm was young and from then on it was just the two of them. Malcolm and Jeannette. Mother and son.
There was no brother.
"I don't have a brother," Malcolm said.
The Shadow Man laughed.
"Of course you don't. Mummy and Daddy wiped their little albino son off the face of the earth when their normal baby came. Why would you remember me?"
"You're lying," said Malcolm.
"Am I? Well, then, let me tell you the rest of that little fairy tale."
China kicked back at him, her face a sickly greenish-purple. The blow glanced off of his bad leg. He grimaced, shaking his head.
"Stop it, bitch, or I'll just snap your neck right now and be done with it," he said.
"E . . . cnt . . . brth," she said.
He relaxed his grip a bit. China drew in a deep breath. Color came back into her cheeks.
"I was born first. I was the oldest. But I was the freak, the albino, sensitive to light, and it was difficult for them. So Jeannette and Al King had another baby, when I was four years old, a baby that turned out just fine. That baby was you, Malcolm. No weird white skin, no red-tinted eyes. Before too long, they decided I was too much trouble and discarded me. They gave me away, sent me to an orphanage in Michigan. Far away."
"I don't believe you. My mother would not have done something like that."
"Your mother? You mean our mother. And yes, she would. Because she did."
The Shadow Man shook his head. He was staring absently into space, his mind someplace else.
"To make matters worse, I was brilliant. I did well in school, starting second grade at age five. And I was destined to be a surgeon from birth. In fact, I was already dissecting animals by the time you were born. Dear old Mom and Dad didn't appreciate it, of course. I got in trouble when the neighbor's cat disappeared, but I hadn't ever done a cat, you know? Only fish and frogs and birds. A squirrel once. It wandered into the basement and I caught it there. I thought it was a rat, and I killed it with a brick, but then I saw its tail and realized that it was a squirrel, which was even better. But I'd never done a cat before, and that cat was old, anyway. When Dad found it, he buried it in the back yard and said we weren't going to tell anyone about it, which disappointed me. They should have been impressed by the fact that I knew I was going to be a surgeon even then. But no. They didn't like it at all."
"Joel," Malcolm said.
"Don't call me that!"
"You're a sociopath. You know that as well as I do. That wasn't dissection you were doing. That was animal torture."
"It was all in the name of science!"
"You're ill. You're a sick, sick man."
"That's what they said. We'd lived together a little over a year, the four of us, and everything seemed okay. Then, one day, we went for a ride in the car. Mom and Dad said that I was sick, that they couldn't control me, so they were going to give me to some people who could. I tried to get them to understand me but they wouldn't listen to me anymore. They stopped believing me after I bit you on the arm."
Malcolm felt the blood drain from his head.
"What did you say? You bit me?"
"They said that was it. The last straw. Their excuse for deciding to give me away."
Malcolm looked at his right arm.
The scar was still there, puckered and white. He'd had it as long as he could remember.
"Mom told me a dog bit me," he said.
"That's what they told everybody," the Shadow Man said.
Something nasty settled down inside Malcolm. His heart was beating more quickly now.
"So why did you take this long to find me?" Malcolm said.
"They sealed the records. And to make matters worse, when I first got to the orphanage, they gave me drugs that made me not think clearly. I was doped up for a couple of years. When I got better they took me off of most of them, but it was too late. I had forgotten what Mom's name was, and Dad's, and where we had lived. Heck, I even forgot my own name for a while. I called myself what they called me: the first initial of my first name. Until I got the files, I had forgotten what that name was."
"What did they call you?"
"'Q.'Just Q, every day, for years. But then, as I got older, I learned what they wanted. I figured out that if I acted the way they wanted me to they would be nicer to me. Eventually, they took me off of the medication. They let me go back to school. I got a full scholarship to undergraduate school at Northwestern, graduated with high honors, and just kept doing what they wanted. Playing the game. And so I went on to medical school and residency, all along doing just what they said, being very careful not to get anyone riled up. And then, a few years ago, I found them."
"Found what
?"
"The orphanage files. When they finally went digital a few years back, it was just a matter of hacking into them—something I have a knack for. My past all came back to me when I read them. I saw how Dad had killed himself, and how Mom had died of cancer, and you became a surgeon, just like me. I wanted to meet you, but I had to work up the nerve first."
Malcolm could feel his pulse in his temples. He was lightheaded.
"Mom said Dad died in a car wreck," he said.
The Shadow Man smiled, thin-lipped.
"It was suicide by car. He drove through a bridge abutment and off the bridge. Depressed, I suspect, over having to give me up."
China wriggled, trying to free herself again, but the Shadow Man clamped down on her throat like a vise.
"Stop that shit! I'm telling my brother a story!" he said, his teeth clenched.
"So anyway, after I downloaded the files, I decided that you and I needed to meet. I started stalking surgeons at medical meetings, trying to work up the nerve to get to you. At first, I just thought we'd talk, kinda like this. But then I killed someone. That first time, it was sort of an accident, but I realized that I liked it. Killing people was a huge rush, even better than surgery, and I hated to give it up. I thought about killing you, but I was afraid that if I just murdered you, I'd just go back to being little old boring surgeon me. But then I got the idea of setting you up as a murderer, of ruining your life utterly. I had a few trial runs at it. Billy's brother was one of those, but Billy figured it out and cornered me, and I had to move on. It was after that when I took on the Joel Birkenstock identity and contacted you about writing the lap appy paper. And when I saw your name on the list for that meeting in Miami, I knew that it was time to finish this. That was fate. Kismet, y'know?"
China had turned a deep, unhealthy purple. She appeared to have stopped breathing.
Malcolm saw the shadow standing behind the Shadow Man. It seemed to absorb all of the light in the room.
And then the shadow moved.
The Shadow Man just disappeared, vanishing into the darkness, and China dropped lifelessly to the floor. Malcolm checked China.
"She's breathing," he said, scanning the dark for the vanished killer.
And then the shadows moved forward.
Billy had the Shadow Man in a stranglehold. The killer's arms were trussed up behind his back.
"Thank God it's you!" Malcolm said. "When he disappeared like that, I didn't know what to think. You must have gotten my message."
Billy shook his head.
"I never got any messages. Phone's dead," he said.
"But how did you know to come back?"
Billy waved an arm to the sky.
"The blackbirds told me," he said.
"What?"
"My people have long said that an ancestral Raven created the world. Even to this day, the spirit world communicates with the earthly world through the other ravens, who are his children. Ravens are our spirit guides; they accompany our souls to heaven. A raven came to me in a waking dream and told me what was going to happen. So I came here. When I saw the flock of birds flying over your home from the river, I knew the dream was true. The birds were calling me, leading me here."
"You came by boat?"
"In my dream, the raven told me the road would be blocked. I came here by water before. It seemed fitting that I should come by water again. And I had my boat with me. It was being pulled behind the truck."
"How did you grab him from the shadows like that? I did not even hear you come into the house."
Billy smiled.
"That is a trick I learned from my grandfather, kemosabe. And even though you are my spirit brother, and a member of the Littlebear clan, I cannot tell you that one. Not yet."
"I'm his brother by blood, Chief, and he doesn't even know my name," the Shadow Man said.
Malcolm closed his eyes.
There was a memory buried deep, a name Jeannette King had mumbled as she lay dying. A man's name. Malcolm had thought it mere delirium at the time, but now he knew better. His mama had been trying to tell him something.
The name started with a Q, of course.
Of course.
"Quincy," Malcolm said, at last. "Your name is Quincy. Quincy King."
The Shadow Man's eyes opened wide. His entire body shuddered and seemed to melt, collapsing into the earth like the Wicked Witch in The Wizard of Oz.
"No. It can't be. How did you know?" he pleaded. His voice was a thin whine, like a mosquito.
Malcolm smiled.
"Mom told me," he said.
The Shadow Man's face hardened into an expressionless mask. He stood rigid, unblinking, silent as a totem pole. His mouth had swung open like a gate, but not a single sound came out.
Malcolm would never hear the Shadow Man's voice again.
Mimi and Amy helped China to her feet. Mimi got a cold rag and dabbed at the bruises on China's face.
"Thanks," said China, her voice as soft as moist cotton.
Mimi shot a glance at the face of the Shadow Man.
"Billy, what will you do with him?" she asked.
"I will take him back to the Seminole people. He has murdered members of our tribe. Justice must be served."
"Be careful, Billy," said Malcolm, placing a hand on the big man's shoulder.
"I will, my friend," the Seminole said.
Billy stepped back into the shadows with his catatonic prisoner. Before Malcolm could even utter his goodbyes, Billy and the Shadow Man vanished, slipping into the thin ether of the night as though they were made of vapor.
"Sonofabitch," said Malcolm.
Outside, there was a furious rush of wings and feathers. The raucous cries of ten thousand blackbirds echoed into the heavens as the flock departed, flapping off into the night sky like an avian whirlwind.
The police arrived, on foot, within the hour. It took him another hour beyond that to tow away the smoldering remains of the pair of wrecked vehicles which blocked the Rose Dhu subdivision gateway. When the wreck was cleared, four squad cars came screaming up to Rose Dhu House, sirens blaring, lights flashing, as though there were some dire crisis afoot.
There were reports of a huge flock of birds in the area, as well, but those reports were unconfirmed, and were eventually dismissed as fabrication.
After the police left, Malcolm was far too wired to sleep.
Fear kept him awake.
Malcolm was worried that, if he slept, Billy's raven might come to him in his dreams and impart some dark wisdom, a morsel of knowledge that Malcolm would rather not hear. Instead, he stood on the back porch, feeling the breeze in his face. He could taste the rich blood taste of the sea on his lips. He could not help but stare at a sky studded with billions upon billions of stars, thinking of all that was and all that might have been.
For Malcolm, dawn could not come soon enough.
EPILOGUE
Spring gave way to summer, and summer to early fall.
Hurricane season brought threats but no real harm, and the languid canter of summer baseball graduated into the headlong gallop of October, where myths are made and legends are born. College football season was soon underway, and Malcolm caught himself occasionally looking into the crowd at televised Florida State games, trying to find the familiar face of a true Seminole warrior.
He never saw Billy Littlebear, not even once.
In fact, Malcolm never even spoke to Billy again after that fateful spring day when the Seminole tracker vanished from his living room, his spirit brother carrying with him the biological brother Malcolm had never known. Malcolm had called Billy on his cell a few times, but the calls went straight to voicemail and were not returned. After a few months, the cell number itself was disconnected.
The weather turned colder. Leaves fell and the days grew short. But the arc of life in the King household gradually returned to normal after the mayhem of the prior year.
Amy had her teeth fixed and took a watercolor class at the Sa
vannah College of Art and Design. She spent many an evening out on the dock, her palette in hand, working on her interpretations of life's inherent beauty.
Mimi started spending more and more time with a boy named Jake, a tousle-headed young man with a sharp wit and a ready smile. Even Malcolm had to admit he liked the kid.
Daisy went on being Daisy, as resilient as ever. Her injuries, miraculously, were relatively minor, her recovery complete.
Malcolm finally published the lap appy paper—minus Joel Birkenstock's name, of course, since Joel did not really exist—and listed Dr. Carter Straub posthumously as first author. The paper revolutionized the performance of laparoscopic appendectomy, and the technique described in it was thereupon called "the Straub Technique." Malcolm was glad to give his former chief resident some small measure of immortality.
The dream came in late December.
It was not unpleasant. His mother was sitting at her sewing machine, as she often had.
"How are you, Malcolm?" she said in a soft voice.
"I'm fine, Mom."
She motioned out a window with her slim, well-manicured hand.
"Your brother is free now. His curse has been lifted. His soul has flown back to heaven. See it?"
Malcolm looked through the window.
The sky outside the window was brilliant, so brilliant it hurt Malcolm's eyes to look at it. A few wispy cirrus clouds traced lacy patterns in the sky, high in the silent altitudes where even the wind's shrill voice is but a whisper.
A small dark bird was silhouetted high against the sky.
"God has taken his spirit," Jeannette King said.
And with that, Malcolm woke up.
He never dreamt of his mother again.
But, in the fall, a family of blackbirds built a nest on the eaves at the house at Rose Dhu. They awakened him with their twittering song each and every morning.
It's a sign, Malcolm thought, smiling to himself.
For he knew that is what Billy would have said.
As Malcolm thought of this, he rubbed his fingers over the bear claw amulet that Billy had given him and said a prayer.
It was a prayer for all of them.
A prayer for peace and forgiveness. And for love.