Bad Man_A Novel

by Dathan Auerbach

  “I know what you’re thinking of doing,” she yelled into the wind, her coarse white hair blowing wildly, exposing her hearing aids. “Don’t do it.”

  Gusts surged, tugging against the umbrella.

  “It would have all been okay,” she said, or at least Ben thought he heard her say. Beverly raised her quivering arm and pointed toward the shed.

  The ground squished beneath Ben’s shoes, and the wind swirled into the umbrella, shaking it more forcefully this time.

  “Is he in there?”

  “No.”

  “What’s in there?”

  Beverly stopped and turned toward Ben. “You already seen what’s in there and you know it.” There was venom in her voice, and it made Ben feel almost as small as she was. He depressed the button on his watch and checked the time, trying to figure out how long it would take the boy to make it back to town.

  She slid a key into the padlock and pulled on it. When she couldn’t get it to open, she stepped aside and motioned to Ben, who yanked on the lock and then lifted it out of the metal loop. The flimsy door opened with a whine.

  “Eric?” Ben shouted into the dark contours of the shed. “I can’t see nothin in there,” Ben snapped as he held the lantern into the void.

  “There’s nothing in there to see,” she said, running her finger gently between her nose and lip. “That’s for you. Get on in, and I’ll bring Eric right to you.”

  “Quit playing games!” Ben’s fist struck the side of the shed. The two stared at each other for a while. Their breath steamed in the chilled air. “I need to take him home.”

  “He’s got one.”

  “A closet?”

  The old woman nodded to herself with what looked like comprehension, tracing the gorges that ran from her averted eyes with her skeletal fingers. “A home don’t care where it is. You got a place you live, Benjamin. It feel like a home to you?” The look on Beverly’s face invited Ben to answer, but he didn’t. “Everything was fine. Because we had each other. I lost the house. Fine. We made a new one and we was happy and things was good. And then you. You came to tear everything up. From right when I seen your application on that pig-faced prick’s desk I knew it. And you wouldn’t leave. You damn near kick in our door. Almost killed Martin. And you just kept on and kept on.

  “Fine. Then we would leave. That’s all we wanted. And you know how long we waited because of you? Waiting for someplace else to go? Then just waiting for them doors to be unlocked with clear passage? The one night when we was finally left alone, when we could finally get out, who do I see peeking through the glass?

  “And then”—Beverly’s mouth trembled—“I sent them away. By themselves. So they could move faster. And a man sees ’em? Then there’s more men screamin Eric’s name so loud and making him so scared that he has to come back?

  “You and Martin and Frank and the cashier and then Bill and your fucking flyers and on and on. You trapped us in there! I couldn’t even walk around in my own home. You cursed that place with glass that wouldn’t break, with no way out. And here you are, in our way again, where nobody wants you and where you got no right to be.”

  “He’s my brother!”

  “And you hit him!” Beverly roared. Her mouth was snarled and tense, her lips almost invisible. “I seen you. You ain’t got no claim to him that’s worth anything at all, so go on. Just get already!” Beverly coughed violently into her handkerchief. It sounded like something was breaking in her chest. “I love him. You understand? You walk around askin after him”—Beverly mimed holding a sheet of paper—“but you beat on that boy. He was little and you beat on him.

  “I’ll let him die out here before I take you anywhere near him. By the time you get to that boy, he’ll be nothin but bones, and he’ll be happier for it.”

  “You gotta take me to him, Beverly. You’re gonna take me to him or make him come to where we’re at.” Ben reached for Beverly’s arm. She withdrew, bending her arm behind her back, but that was an easy chase for Ben. With her forearm in his grip, Beverly stopped trying to move. “I seen the other one, you know? I seen him out there in the woods, tryin to get away from you. And he did. You wanna know what he’s doin for you? He’s telling the cops where we’re at, and when they get here, they’re gonna make you take them to Eric. You don’t have nobody, Ms. Beverly. Now call for him.”

  “No.”

  “Please.” Ben’s voice quaked as he squeezed Beverly’s fragile wrist. “I just need him back.”

  The woman didn’t respond, even as Ben squeezed harder; she pressed her lips together and refused to call out. But that’s not to say that she was silent.

  “Please,” Ben pleaded as Beverly whimpered.

  “He couldn’t come even if he wanted to.”

  Ben didn’t want to hurt her. He wasn’t going to. He was going to stop. But he kept turning his wrist, more and more, until there was a pop in Beverly’s arm. Beverly screamed, but not for Eric.

  Ben let go almost immediately. Beverly’s hand hung limply. The umbrella fell against the grass. Tears pooled in her eyes and she made a kind of moaning sound as she tucked her arm up next to her chest.

  There were no voices on the wind. No one answered Beverly’s cry. But Ben could still hear the echo of Beverly’s voice in his ear, still feel the quick and brutal movements of her bones in his hand. He felt woozy. He’d broken her arm. It would never heal. It would always hurt. She wasn’t going to take him to Eric, and it sure didn’t seem like Eric was coming to them.

  Beverly clutched her broken arm in the bend of her opposite elbow. Her head tremored as she stared up at Ben through glassy eyes.

  “What now?”

  57

  Frail but unmoving, Beverly stood in the rain outside the crumbling shed. She was a paper doll that tore so easily that Ben was afraid to touch her again. If she died—hell, if she lost consciousness—then Ben would have no guide at all. Ben picked up the umbrella.

  “That boy you’re countin on,” Beverly said, “he ain’t gonna help you, son. I don’t blame you for gettin it wrong. Truly, I don’t. I love him more than I know how to say, but there ain’t a person alive that understands the way that one thinks. I don’t reckon the world’s ever seen a boy like him before.”

  “He led me here,” Ben said.

  Beverly shrugged. “That don’t mean nothin.”

  “Why would he do it then?”

  Again, Beverly shrugged. “I don’t pretend that I can see what he sees. But I know one thing: after Halloween, he thinks you’re a tattletale, and he hates tattletales. Whatever you think is goin on here, you’re wrong. I can promise you that.”

  The trees had dissolved into a sea of muddy black like a lazy painting. Ben peered into it but saw nothing, no flashing lights, no movement at all other than the swaying branches. Beverly’s pallid face trembled from either cold or sickness, maybe both.

  “Why don’t you lock me in there?” Beverly asked, turning toward the shed. “Then you can have a look around.”

  “No,” Ben said. “I ain’t letting you out of my sight.” He reached for her as she tried to back into the murky shed, and Beverly recoiled.

  “Well, then hold the umbrella right at least.” Her silver hair hung like wet yarn against her face.

  Ben checked his watch. Beverly had brought them out here in hopes that Ben would step under that dark roof. And now she was trying to take his place. Where the fuck were the police? Ben rubbed the back of his neck. It itched like he had ants in his skin. Ben had just wanted a little time. Time enough for the cops to come. And she was giving it to him. She wasn’t worried at all. You’re not the only one stalling here, you dumb fuck.

  The night seemed to writhe and contort like diluted ink. The quiet kid was getting Eric. While Ben wasted his time here, the golden boy was taking Eric somewhere. He was going to have to take Bever
ly back to town. She would know where Eric was or would be. The police could get her to talk. Could he carry her? For short distances at a time, he reckoned. He could drag her for longer, though. And he would. He would drag her for a hundred miles if that’s what it took.

  “We’re going back to town,” Ben said.

  “Lead the way,” Beverly said.

  Ben balled his fists. He wanted to hurt her, but he couldn’t, not even with words. She wasn’t embarrassed about living in the store, about the red room, about the life she’d made for herself and stolen from others. Again, Ben looked to the dark, and it looked right back. There’s nothing for you here, it seemed to say. Ben’s jaw hurt from clenching his teeth, and suddenly words he hadn’t intended to say spilled past them.

  “I know about Blackwater School.”

  Beverly flinched. “And what do you know?”

  Ben’s words stalled. What could he possibly say about the place that would unbalance her? Reggie had talked for a few minutes. Beverly might have lived there for years. Goddamnit. “That when this is over, I hope they put you in a place just like it again.”

  “If you really knew anything about that place,” Beverly said, “then you’d know that they’d do anything they could to keep me out of it.”

  When Ben had come here with Marty, they’d been at the top of a modest hill, with the property down and a little to the right. If he walked back in that direction, then maybe he could find the road. It was hard to visualize, hard to even imagine. Because the way it felt, there in that pocket of enveloping dark, was that they weren’t anywhere. That there was no way back, because this place was all there was: a rotting house, a skeletal shed, and a sea of trees that stretched on to the edge of forever. That Marty and the golden boy had known some course that Ben did not, an invisible path through a labyrinth that Ben would never find his way out of.

  As Ben reached out for the old woman, he heard something. It seemed far away, somewhere mingled with the endless shadow. Then, beneath the pattering of rain on dead leaves, there was another sound. A shuffling. Too soft for Beverly to hear, perhaps. She leaned against the shed and nursed her arm with her opposite palm, looking only at the tattered house across the yard.

  Squinting, Ben held his breath in his lungs until they began to starve. His eyes tried desperately to parse the blackness from itself, slipping and fumbling at every frozen contour. But there was something. Ben could just make it out, like fingers dancing before sunbathed eyelids: the impression of a thing he could only imagine. And what he imagined moved his feet backward. Something that shifted and shuddered through the rotten undergrowth. He could hear it on the wind, couldn’t he? Chittering through its broken jaw, pleading with a sneering mouth: Itsmeitsmeitsme.

  Ben shook the sound from his ears and from his mind. He’d dreamed for long enough, imagined for too long. But he could see now. He could see that Beverly had been wrong, and it made him want to cry. His knees felt like they might buckle, and that would be fine, because it was over.

  “Over here!” Ben shouted. “Officer!”

  Beverly turned and raised her arm to shield her face from the stinging rain. Her expression made Ben uncomfortable. Maybe it was her relaxed silence, a countenance so stoic that Ben couldn’t help but doubt his own eager eyes. But his eyes hadn’t deceived him; they’d shown him exactly what was stirring in those woods. It was his mind that had failed him. And now it was screaming.

  Wind swirled through the grass and whipped at the boy’s blond hair.

  “What’re you doing here?” Ben yelled. “Why did you come back? You weren’t supposed to come back!”

  Beverly huffed, then threw her voice into the wind. “Did you bring him here? Hmm? Didja?” Beverly snapped as the boy moved in next to her. “That ain’t what I told you to do.”

  “Did you tell someone?” Ben demanded, peering out past the quiet boy and into the sheet of blackness draped behind him. “Did you call for help?”

  “What’re you doin back here? Speak up now. Speak up!”

  “Huh-he wuh-wouldn’t—”

  “Spit it out!”

  “Hhhhhee wuh-wuh-wouldn’t let me guh-g-go.” The boy’s face tensed each time his breath hung on a sound. His lips quivered in what was almost a snarl, as if he were angry at his own uncooperative mouth. There was a stiffness in both Beverly and the boy, as if invisible hands fastened their wrists by their sides.

  “Are you okay?” Beverly finally asked, and the boy nodded, his amber eyes flashing in the darkness. “You know what has to happen now,” she continued wearily.

  When the boy smirked, Ben lunged for him, catching his arm and squeezing it like a vise.

  “D-don’t-t-t. Don’t tuh-tou—” The meat of Ben’s forearm slid across the boy’s throat.

  “Don’t you hurt him!” Beverly screamed, lurching at Ben. He stepped back and dragged the boy.

  “I just want him back. I don’t want to do this,” he pleaded, desperately trying to sound more resolved than sick.

  “Do what?” Beverly asked.

  Ben felt the boy’s back press harder against his stomach. His arm grew warm in the tight curve of the boy’s neck. “What do you reckon Eric will think if you let me do this?”

  “What’ll he think of you if you do it?”

  Ben squeezed and felt the bulb of the golden boy’s throat compress against his forearm. The boy struggled, but not as much as Ben had expected. He thought to press harder, but he didn’t know what would happen if he did. But when Beverly didn’t say anything, Ben squeezed anyway. He squeezed until the boy’s feet were off the ground, and he watched the smug confidence wilt off Beverly’s face.

  “Let him go!” Beverly’s whole body contorted as she screamed. “That’s enough! Don’t you hurt him!”

  But Ben didn’t move; the boy was so light that Ben thought he could hold him there for hours. But he didn’t reckon he’d have to do anything close to that, not when he saw the pain in the old woman’s face.

  “I want my brother!” The boy’s heel struck Ben’s shin, but not hard enough to hurt. “You want to lose everything?” Ben’s voice stung in his throat. He didn’t know if he meant what he was saying. He didn’t think he did.

  “Alright!” Beverly shouted.

  “No more games!”

  “Let him go,” Beverly moaned. Her eyes were wide and frightened. “I’ll bring him to you. Just don’t hurt my boy.”

  “You’ll take me to him!” Ben snapped.

  Beverly backed into the shed and was swallowed up by the unmoving shadow. Ben still held the boy as he rushed in after her, as if she might disappear within the small cube. Even when the woman tore through the black, he held the boy. Her face was twisted with feral madness. There was something in her hands. Her arm bowed where Ben had made a new joint. But still, she swung. Ben couldn’t let go of the boy. And he couldn’t get out of the way.

  The teeth of the rake landed squarely in the meat of Ben’s left leg, and he crumpled like a pile of old clothes. His mind collapsed in the pain. He wasn’t even sure he was screaming.

  A strange and vicious noise poured out of Beverly’s mouth. Ben was only dimly aware of her movements, even as she twisted at the waist, bending more than Ben thought an old lady could. She grunted and pivoted. Ben moved his hand in front of his face in reflex, his other arm still pressed against the boy’s chest. The rake handle struck Ben’s wrist, sounding like gloved knuckles striking a winter door.

  Ben yowled. Beverly pulled on the pole, and the wood slid against Ben’s still-ringing forearm. The rusted prongs of the tool scraped against his shoulder. Turning his wrist, Ben felt for the handle, and when his palm found it, Ben closed his hand. Through the neural fire in his brain, Ben could make out only a single salient thought. Don’t let go.

  The metal teeth scratched against Ben’s face. Beverly grunted, pulling on the
wooden handle, pulling hard against Ben’s grip. Finally, she threw the pole down. Then she crouched.

  Ben felt her hands on his face, rough and cold. He thrashed his head but couldn’t move it enough. Don’t let go. Her thin fingers crept up toward his eyes, and nature shut them just before he could feel the pressure of her thumbs. The woman snarled as she strained to force her way into Ben’s sockets. One hand was weaker.

  He hadn’t searched for the words. In truth, Ben wasn’t even aware that he remembered them, much less that he was speaking. But he could hear Reggie’s voice in the depths of his mind, could hear him chanting. And now Ben was chanting too.

  “Night’s out. Lights out,” he said. “Night’s out. Lights out.” Again.

  The pressure on his eyes disappeared. Through sore slits, Ben saw the paralyzed face of a woman being devoured by her own mind, hollow and vacant and inert. Something in her throat clicked. Her hands shook like a bad mime. And then all at once she was screaming, low and guttural, like a record played at the wrong speed. Her fist smashed into Ben’s face. She swung her arms without any apparent concern or awareness of the fact that one of them was broken. Beverly didn’t speak. There was nothing about the woman now that would lead one to believe that she even could. She swung her hands at Ben like that’s all they’d been made for. The boy was laughing wildly in Ben’s embrace.

  Still, Ben chanted. Yelled. Bellowed the rhyme, and in a few short seconds it was done. The mask was gone. The woman stomped on Ben’s leg with all her weight. Once. And then again.

  Her fingers scraped at Ben’s arm. Ben squeezed tighter while the boy kicked. Deep breaths through clenched teeth. The pain was otherworldly. Ben could feel his mind trying to escape, but he had to stay awake. He couldn’t black out. Beverly’s fingers wormed between Ben’s forearm and the boy, until they reappeared with a piece of twine. She slipped the cord from around his neck. The red disk swung in the air like a pendulum until she tucked it into her pocket.