Shard

by John Richmond

  George reached for his door handle and Will put a hand on his arm. “Stay with the horses, Tonto.”

  “Are you fucking with me, Two-Bears?”

  “No, you and your giant automatic penis stay here and make sure nothing makes off with our wheels.”

  “But—”

  Will dropped his voice into cop, “But nothing. I don’t want you coming in there with that cannon. You’re freaked out as it is and you look scary as hell, George. It’s going to be hard enough getting Loraine to just agree to throw her son into a car and roll out. You showing up looking like the last twenty minutes of Platoon will not help matters.”

  Will popped his door and was halfway out of the car when George said, “Will?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Charlie Sheen, right?”

  “Huh?”

  “I remind you of Charlie Sheen from Platoon, right? It’s just that I don’t wanna’ be Tom Berenger. He was such a dick in that movie.”

  For a second Will wanted to smile and cry at the same time. Looking in at his best friend—dashboard werelight picking out the gash in his head, the machine gun throwing an oily gleam—he was struck with a powerful feeling. It thrummed in his chest like a mini electric generator: they were going to win. Will gave a sideways smile, “I was thinking more Willem Dafoe,” and closed the door. He could hear George’s muffled voice at his back, “Dude! Willam Dafoe fucking dies!”

  Will quick-stepped it up the flagstone walk and raised a fist to knock on the front door. He brushed it with his knuckle and the door pushed open a few inches. His skin crystallized into gooseflesh. He dropped his hand to Smaug and thumbed open the safety snap on the holster. Will pushed the door open all the way with his left hand expecting a drawn out screech of hinges like some B horror movie but all he got was the gentle haaahhh of the carpeted inner hall under the door’s bottom edge. The hall ran for about seven or eight feet before breaking right into the kitchen and left onto the family room. The front hall was broken by two doors, one a coat closet, the other a powder room. He couldn’t remember which was which.

  He did remember Loraine’s injunction against shoes on her white carpet. “If you don’t mind, Constable, I’d rather you not leave your footprints as a momento of your visit.” Will had unlaced his Chucks and left them on a rubber mat by the front door. He looked down now and saw Loraine’s grown-up hiking boots and Kiddo’s kid-sized sneakers on that same mat. Maybe he was just being paranoid. Maybe when Loraine showed him out after he’d run his little census earlier she’d just neglected to close the door all the way. After all, it wasn’t like people in this town worried very much about hermetically sealing their houses. But that was bullshit and he knew it. Loraine had been welcoming enough—offered him a root beer and crackers if memory served—but some distraction kept dragging her face toward the big sliding glass doors that made up one whole wall of the family room. It was like she knew something was out there, or some part of her did.

  The Kiddo had been his usual bright and charming self, but something was different there, too. Sitting on the floor, playing with Darwin while the grown-ups talked, Will got this kind of, well, glow off the kid out of the corner of his eye. And every time Childe had met Will’s glance, the boy seemed galvanized, calm but ready.

  The urge to call out to them surged up his throat and died. Thinking of Darwin just now had brought it home: no barking. The deep-voiced beagle sang out a raucous greeting every time someone came to the door. Now the house breathed silence into Will’s face like a defiant drunk. Whut you got on me, ocifer? You don’t got shit. They were either gone or they were here and couldn’t talk. Will did something then that most city cops wouldn’t think to do. He closed his eyes and took a great breath of air in through his nose. He got the thin background tang of sulfur (always sulfur) surfing the deep wet of a humid summer evening, the scent of a dog who’s just about due for a bath, old burned popcorn. There was something rancid—dead mouse behind the wall or road kill fetched up in a corrugated drainpipe. His eyes opened, hardened.

  Will moved into the house, eyeing those two hallway doors, the muscles on that side of his body tensing as he padded past each one. As he got closer to the light from the family room he could make out muddy footprints on the carpet. He didn’t stoop to examine them, but there were three people here who hadn’t wiped their feet, one without shoes, one in sneakers and one in big old work boots.

  He rounded the corner and the living room spread in a tableau before him. Will didn’t remember hauling leather and leveling Smaug on the scene, but his gun sites were before his eyes, tracking off one horror after another.

  Loraine stood frozen, her eyes huge. Lizzie Owens stood behind her, her meaty arms wrapped tight around Loraine, one pinioning her arms to her sides, the other around her upper chest, a thick hand clamped over Loraine’s mouth. One bare leg twined around Loraine’s right leg like a cellulite-dimpled tree root. She was enveloping Loraine as much as holding her fast. How she was balancing was impossible to see. Erica had told Will of the dead woman in the trailer, the one who had a shotgun in her mouth. He had found nothing, of course, and here was why. Lizzie had gotten up and walked away. Her face hung just over Loraine’s left shoulder, her eyes bleached white. He couldn’t see the back of her head, but something told him (the rotten smell, perhaps) that there wouldn’t be a lot to see. Shotguns didn’t leave much behind at close range.

  Will followed Loraine’s hurricane lamp gaze and shifted Smaug to cover the other nightmare in the room. Sitting in a beautiful chair constructed of graceful wood and leather bows was a timeless classic: young boy on the lap of an adult. In another time and place this could have been a beloved uncle telling a story, or even Santa and a hopeful child. But no, not here, not now. Childe Harold sat stiff as a board, beads of sweat shining on his bloodless face. Cyrus MacCoy was playing the part of the beloved uncle this evening, holding Childe to his lap by gripping the back of his neck. Kiddo was trying to recoil from what was in front of his face, but the man’s hand was like bridge cable encased in old, crumbling cheese. Cyrus held his other hand in front of the boy’s face, palm up like a little landing pad for the biggest fucking wasp Will had ever seen.

  It filled Cyrus’s wide hand, deep blue/black and slick with moisture. It passed its antenna through its serrated mandibles and scraped its back legs over its wings, drying them. It seemed sluggish as if it had just woken up or emerged from hibernation. Cyrus tilted his face toward The Constable and Will put it together when he saw the hole chewed in his grub-white cheek—that thing had been in Cyrus’s mouth. Childe’s eyes were the size of liberty silver dollars. Even from across the room Will could see the boy was focused on the stinger. It was an inch long spike, and as if the little monster it was attached to sensed the attention, a drop of black venom blossomed at its tip. Childe whimpered.

  Will’s entire body went numb. His fear crested and washed him away. What was left was a stone pylon in the shape of a man with a gun. He whispered, “Cyrus, let go of the boy.”

  Cyrus tilted his head, the bruises below his eyes standing out in sharp contrast to the pallor of his face. Fissures of purple black ran in the veins under his skin as if some terrible drug addiction had collapsed them. The tip of his nose had turned black with rot and his lips had gone a fishy green-white. Those lips bent into a smile and one white eye winked. Will was suddenly, ridiculously glad he’d gone to the bathroom at George’s before they left because had he not he would have pissed himself right there on Loraine’s nice white carpet. It was not Cyrus who had winked at him, but someone who was looking through Cyrus like a closed-circuit TV camera. Will knew who that someone was.

  He thumbed back the hammer and the big pistol made three very loud clicks. At this range he couldn’t miss, wouldn’t miss, and the better part of Cyrus’s head would vaporize. Will wondered for a moment if he could end it all right now. Would killing Cyrus while the, the enemy was inside him kill the enemy as well? No, it wouldn’t. Will could
feel its essence staring through Lizzie Owens. Even the wasp seemed to be channeling the real evil in the room. So many eyes on him. In his chilled state, Will imagined what it would look like to the viewer—insectoid, like a wasp’s compound eyes.

  Three quick shots if his aim was perfect: Cyrus to the head, Lizzie to the head and then the wasp. Cyrus would fall to the side and the wasp would either fall with him or take to the air. Either way, it would clear his field of fire so Childe wouldn’t be in danger of being hit. Either way it was bullshit; no one was that good. And besides, Lizzie’s head was already mostly blown out and she was still standing. Will didn’t know what to do.

  Something banged against the big sliding glass door. Everyone in the room twitched. (Will’s trigger finger, which lay along the chamber of the gun and not on the trigger, not yet, also twitched.) Will slid his eyes to the side. A bird had flown out of the dark and smacked into the window. It was fluttering around against the glass. He squinted. It was a bright red cardinal. For a moment, it seemed to lock his stare with its own beady oil-drop eyes. Before anyone could react another cardinal smacked rudely into the glass. It fell to the ground, dazed, shook itself and then started fluttering against the glass like its brother. Another bang! and another orangey-red kamikaze bludgeoned into the glass, this one hard enough that a tiny crack caught the light like a single neon thread. Another second went by and a wall of roiling red filled the night as hundreds, maybe thousands of cardinals careened into the glass, some of them fell dead in a growing drift at the bottom sill. The noise was like booming hailstones in a sideways rain. The birds themselves made no sound at all.

  All those eyes on Will, staring, impelling, chips out of the night itself, black as… His eyes widened. Black as a spider’s eyes. Will dragged the gun around in a stiff-armed arc and squeezed the trigger, Smaug roared, the glass shattered, and a bloodstorm exploded into the room.

  * * *

  Twenty minutes earlier, Loraine was sitting on the couch reading a copy of The Week. Childe and Darwin lay on the floor across from her, Kiddo with his head propped up on Darwin’s back, while reading a graphic novel that was probably too violent for a kid his age, but what the hell, it was Batman. If being a mother had taught her anything (especially the mother a child who’s father had elected not to remain in his life after the divorce) it was never get between a boy and his superheroes. She peered at him over the edge of the magazine and stole over his curly hair, his eyelashes, the little divot of his upper lip quivering ever so slightly as he read the dialogue.

  “Hey, boo-boo,” she said.

  Kiddo smiled but didn’t look up from his book. “I know,” he sighed. “You’re lovin’ me like crazy again.”

  “Ooh, tough guy.”

  “Mo-om!” He shook the big comic book for emphasis. C’mon lady, this is the best part.

  She blew him a kiss and went back to The Week. This was her favorite part, the double-page spread toward the back that featured six or seven houses up for sale from all over the country. They were grouped by a different theme every issue and this week’s was Houses on the Maine Seacoast. Most of the properties ranged from a million to over five in some cases, but in the lower left there was always the “Steal of the Week”. It was a renovated lighthouse jutting out from a sharp point of land. The photographer had snapped the shot just as a wall of crashing foam had leaped up almost half as high as the house, the sun throwing rainbows around it. Loraine lingered. She missed the ocean. Granted this was the wrong one and the weather in New England was, well, fucking horrible, but something about this place was yanking at her. She looked at Childe. Could she uproot him again so soon? It wasn’t like there were a lot of kids around here to play with and the school consisted of one crabby old lady. The only real friend Kiddo had was that pudgy kid, Howard Sams. A real sweetheart, always ma’am this and ma’am that, and boy could he put away the brownies.

  “Hey,” she said, “boo-boo.”

  Childe levered the graphic novel down with a whap! and stared at her. “May I help you?”

  “How would you feel about living in a lighthouse?”

  Childe, who had come to expect his mother’s flights of fancy to come to fruition about a third of the time, remained skeptical. “A lighthouse? Like for ships an’ stuff?”

  “Well, let’s see,” Loraine read, “Property for sale includes three bedrooms and one bath, an oil room and a stucco keeper’s quarters.”

  “What’s a stucco keeper?”

  “Not stucco keeper—stucco quarters for the keeper. The lighthouse keeper.”

  “Oh.” Childe heard the sound of crashing waves in his head as he fell asleep each night. He blinked. “Where is it?”

  Loraine smiled. Gotcha. She peered over her bifocals, what Kiddo called her “granny glasses” and said, “Point Maddox, Maine, United Federation of Planets.”

  “Maine, huh?”

  “Yeah. I think you’d like Maine. It’s a lot like Mendocino but without all the pot.”

  Darwin, who had been dozing on the edge of his humans’ conversation, popped his head up and looked toward the front hallway. Loraine noticed. “Looks like the amazing Ninja dog smells prey.” She frowned and checked her watch. “It’s almost eight o’clock.”

  Childe brightened, “Maybe it’s Will again.”

  “That’s Constable MacFarlan to you, young man.” And then to herself, “Maybe he forgot something.” Calling on someone in Shard after eight o’clock on a week night was akin to showing up at midnight just about anywhere else. There was a knock at the door, more a rhythmic scratching, knuckles brushing the wood.

  Childe popped up, “I’ll get it.”

  Loraine raised a hand in protest, but he was already gone. Instead she said, “Stay, Darwin,” as the dog got to its feet and made for the door after his boy. Darwin regarded her over his shoulder. Hi tail waved a question. “Stay, buddy-roo.” Loraine listened for Will’s voice as Childe opened the door. From around the corner she heard her son say, “Hey, man, what are you doing here?” then a sound like someone falling against the wall. The door slammed open. Shuffling feet. Childe cried out, “Mom!”

  Loraine didn’t remember crossing the floor. She surged into the hallway and into the waiting embrace of Lizzie Owens. In the darkened hall she had time to glimpse a smaller figure tussling with Childe who had given off calling for his mother and commenced grunting as he struggled and fought. Behind them the silhouette of a man filled the open door. Rancid, heavy air pounded in Loraine’s nose as Lizzie’s sausage fingers palped her face searching for purchase. Darwin was barking, roaring at her feet. He slipped into the forest of shifting legs, caught one of the smaller intruder’s bare feet and bit down for all he was worth. There was a wet crunch, like a bag of moist twigs being trod upon, but it didn’t register with the attacker. The shadowy figure caught hold of Childe’s wrists and began to bend him to the floor. Kiddo howled in pain as something began to give in his wrist. It audibly creaked as his assailant bent him down.

  Out of the corner of his eye, Childe saw the heavy work boots of the third intruder clump over the threshold. The stench was astonishing. Once when Kiddo was much smaller, Daddy took him for a picnic in one of the city parks. Daddy had been chatting with a pretty lady with big hair and tight clothes when Childe had wondered off. He found a cooler that looked just like theirs next to a big green dumpster. Childe had bent down and opened the lid to find the week old corpse of a cat. The cloying reek in the hallway was like that. He was sure he would faint from the smell. The world began to gray and Childe thought Good thing Darwin likes to roll around in dead stuff or he’d be puking his guts out all over Loraine’s precious white carpet.

  The thought of his dog galvanized Kiddo. A dump of adrenaline gave him enough energy to shout in the voice of a much older person, “DARWIN! RUN! GO, BOY! OUTSIDE! GO OUTSIDE!” He was almost sure the dog wouldn’t listen to him, compelled to stay and probably die trying to help his masters.

  The beagle threw his
master a look of depth and inquiry that lasted only a moment then bolted. He dodged the groping hands of the man in the work boots and plunged out into the night, barking and howling in his most operatic doggy voce. There was a scent in the back of his brain that equaled help and power. The smartest of dogs will go fetch a human if another is in trouble. A hundred thousand years of symbiosis with homo sapiens sends them to find the next available upright monkey when things get really dicey. But instead of going for the road, Darwin raced around the back of the house and into the woods.

  Carried on the humid summer air, a fount of glorious smells flooded his forebrain—new growth, tannins, animal spoor, prey and predators—but Darwin shook it off with a rattle of his collar and tags. He pressed his nose to the earth and found the scent he was after. It was a strange smell, not something he could taste but more a line of direction he could feel way, way back behind his dilated brown eyes. It was far, but growing stronger as he trotted along in the pitch dark. Somewhere over the darker line of a ridge a coyote sent up a howl. Darwin froze, head cocked. A chorus of howls answered. Darwin’s hackles bristled and his teeth shown in the gloom. Let the forest dogs try to get in his way tonight, just let them try.

  Time to a dog is forever; it does not shift. When Kiddo was gone from Darwin, it was always forever. When he played or ate or slept it was also forever. And so forever passed as he traversed the forest floor, sometimes thrusting his way through tangles of briar (earning a nasty, flaring scratch on his soft muzzle), sometimes tearing along a well worn deer trail. Time didn’t matter. He was what he was doing. Darwin was The Finder and always had been. And so it was forever before he found the source of The Scent and no time at all. Darwin stopped and sat. He barked once, loud and urgent. A great, complicated shape rose up in the night, unfolded.