The Gift of the Darkness

by Valentina Giambanco

  “Hey, little guy. You heard me, right? You want to go home?”

  John nodded. The man was standing close by, tobacco and August sweat beyond the filthy rag on his face. There was something so ugly and nasty about his voice that John was almost glad he couldn’t see him. What kind of face would go with that voice?

  “C’mon, sweetheart, say it.”

  With the smallest voice, John said the words.

  “Louder.”

  John yelled the words.

  “Ooh, this one got a set of lungs on him.” Somebody sniggered.

  John took great gulps of air and tried not to sob; he wouldn’t give them the satisfaction.

  “C’mon, boy. Let’s hear it.”

  John yelled the words again.

  “Good job. Now, we are going to let you go home in a while, but I want to be clear about something: you ever, ever tell the cops about this, and I’m going to come back and take you out. You ever tell anybody other than your daddies about this, and I’m going to come back and take you out, and I will hurt your mom and dad, too. You understand? You saw nothing and you heard nothing. You just pass on the message to your daddies, and everybody stays alive. You understand?”

  “Yes.”

  Now they knew, it was about the restaurant. The Rock. The grown-ups didn’t talk business around them, but that had to be it.

  “See if you can get louder than that, you little girl.” John felt something sharp slashing at his arm.

  “The hell are you doing, man?” One man’s voice, yards away.

  “Shut up. Don’t make me do this, boy. Let’s hear it.”

  John yelped as the blade cut his arm again.

  “Hey!”

  “Get into the van and shut the fuck up,” the man said calmly.

  “C’mon, man, let’s get out of here.”

  “What are you doing?” It was David’s voice.

  “Leave the kid alone. Let’s go.”

  “Don’t make me do this, you little shit. Let’s hear it.”

  John yelled the words again. He thought of the frogs they gave them to dissect in school: some kids couldn’t wait to start. I bet he’s like that, and I’m going to die, and for a second he felt as if that terror was going to squeeze him right out of his body and into death.

  “Stop it!” That was David’s voice.

  “What did you say?” The man moved away from John.

  “He’s just a little kid. We’ll do what you want—just stop hurting him.” David’s voice sounded out of breath, scared into a higher pitch than normal.

  “If you want to go home in one piece, boy, you’re going to have to shut up right now.”

  And it happened, quicker than he would have ever thought possible: David was breathing fast, and he wasn’t speaking any longer. John had seen a kid once having an asthma attack; David sounded like that but worse.

  “What’s wrong?” Another man’s voice.

  “He’s not breathing. Cut him loose.” Another man.

  “Don’t touch him. He’s going to be fine.”

  “He can’t breathe. Do something.”

  They were speaking on top of one another, and under it that awful choking and gasping.

  “Shit! We have to do something.”

  “Touch him, and I’ll cut your hand off.”

  “There’s something wrong with him.”

  “We can see that, you moron. Cut him loose.”

  “No.”

  The other men wouldn’t go against him; they were standing around, and the breathing was getting faint and shallow. John was straining to hear.

  “Dave?”

  “Dave?” Jimmy’s voice.

  Cameron was pulling at the ropes, leaning as far as he could, but suddenly he couldn’t hear David anymore. He couldn’t hear anything anymore.

  “Dave?”

  The longest silence. Somewhere above him the rustling of the tree he was tied to.

  “We’re done here,” the man said finally.

  “What happened?” Jimmy’s voice.

  They heard someone starting to cut through ropes. “This shit we didn’t sign up for.”

  “Just do it.”

  “What are we going to do with him?”

  “He’s coming with us.”

  “What are we going to do?”

  “Shut up and start the van.”

  “This is not—”

  “Shut the fuck up and start the van.”

  John Cameron couldn’t speak, couldn’t move, couldn’t think. The blackness in front of him spun and closed in. He smelled the acrid cigarette smoke and felt the man near him.

  “You remember what we talked about.”

  “How’s David? What happened?”

  “You and your friend don’t say anything to anyone. Not to the cops, not to your father, no one.”

  “What did you do to him?”

  “Not to the cops, not to your father, no one.”

  “What did you do to him?” John’s voice cracked.

  “Maybe I should make sure you remember.”

  John felt the blade on his skin and the searing pain, and he passed out. The voices followed him into the black.

  “What now?”

  When he woke up a while later, his arms stung, his hands burned, and he was soaked with sweat.

  “Jimmy?”

  “I’m here.”

  “Where are they?”

  “They’re gone.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “I think so. You?”

  “My arms hurt.”

  “I think they took David.”

  Neither of them could bring themselves to say it.

  After a while Jimmy whispered: “Do you think they’re going to come back?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  It was a terrible notion, the men coming back, but if they didn’t, who would find them, and was anybody looking for them?

  “I’m going to try to get free, Jimmy. You try, too. We must get away before they come back.”

  By rubbing his head up and down against the bark, John managed to undo the blindfold a little; after an hour it slid off his face and rested around his neck like a cowboy handkerchief. He opened his eyes wide, blinking the grittiness away: they were in the woods, and night was falling. They could have been anywhere, and no one knew they were there.

  John looked around: there was no road, no path, nothing. How did they get there? He didn’t know. He looked up: the tree he was tied to seemed absolutely huge, the kind they make you count the inside rings of when they chop it down. The rest was just tall grass, ferns, and more ferns, as far as the eye could see, which wasn’t very far, because the woods were thick, and the gloom was already coming in. Then he looked down, and what was left of his courage disappeared: he was covered in blood, encrusted on the slashed fabric of his T-shirt and on his skin; he could barely see the color of the sleeves. He gasped, and Jimmy turned to him, his voice panicky again. “What is it?”

  John looked at his hands, dark and slick, and felt the tears come. He could cry; Jimmy wouldn’t see. It wasn’t the pain—he was completely numb; it was everything inside him suddenly letting go. He moved his fingers a little, and they still worked. The burning pain came in waves.

  “It’s okay, it’s nothing,” he said, and he started on the rope around his shoulders, twisting and turning to make it looser, his face wet and his lips pressed together tightly.

  Darkness found them still struggling. Jimmy was making slow progress and hadn’t even gotten his blindfold off yet. By the time it was pitch-black, they reckoned maybe the men wouldn’t come back; they had left them there to get free or stay lost forever. And the boys talked, nonstop, about anything but where they were and what had happened to them. They talked through the night because they thought the noise would scare any wild animal away and, most of all, because the other’s voice was the only real proof they were still alive.

  Though it was a warm August night, they were cold, but they
could stand it, even joke about it when Jimmy had to pee and said he didn’t understand how it could come out so hot when his thing was frozen. Neither admitted they had wet themselves when the men were still there. The night drew on slowly, small clouds of bugs visiting around their faces and the odd stretch of silence when one fell asleep and the other sort of kept guard for a few minutes before hollering his friend awake.

  At some point John wriggled under and out of the rope around his shoulders. It was a small victory, but it felt damn good. Still, he was so weak that he was almost glad his legs were tied to the tree, or he’d have fallen right on his face. He was hungry and thirsty, and the 3:00 a.m. chill was something neither of them felt like joking about anymore. Jimmy was asleep for longer stretches, and John would keep talking to him until he stirred.

  It was dawn when he got free, biting at the rope around his wrists, so cold that he wasn’t feeling anything in his arms and hands. His bare feet slid out easily, and he found himself on his knees, hands flat on the ground, trembling as if he would need to learn how to walk again. He grabbed a handful of dewy grass and rubbed it over his forehead and cheeks. He staggered to Jimmy, who was asleep, and put a hand on his shoulder.

  “Hey. Hold on. I’m going to take the blindfold off first.”

  His fingers were so chilled, he couldn’t undo the knot; instead, he carefully pulled it over Jimmy’s head and threw it into the bushes. The first light was glowing through the mist, and the boys looked at each other. Jimmy’s eyes went to the dark streaks on John’s shirt, and he opened his mouth.

  “It’s okay,” John said quickly, but in fact he was so light-headed, it was difficult to keep things straight in his mind. First, he had to free Jimmy. All right—he could do that. Except that he couldn’t; the ropes were tight and wouldn’t budge. John worked on them for an hour with no result aside from a slight fraying in a couple of places.

  “You have to go get help,” Jimmy said.

  “I’m not going to leave you here.”

  “You’re not leaving me; you’re going to get help. Somebody must be looking for us. I mean, your mom goes bananas if you’re five minutes late for dinner, right?”

  “Right.” John smiled weakly.

  “You’d better go.”

  Neither of them wanted to say how pitifully feeble they felt; it would be like saying they were girls or something.

  “Okay.”

  John looked up to where the sunlight seemed to be coming from. It was as good a place as any to start. He walked off into the bushes and turned around once before going down into a dip. Jimmy’s head was resting back against the tree, and his eyes were already closed. John started running.

  Just over five years later, John Cameron sat in his car. Now he knew exactly what the man who had given him his scars looked like. The man had seen him. He had spoken to him, for Chrissake, and not recognized him—not even a second look, while the very air around him hummed with his fear.

  The door of the bar opened and closed. John slouched in the seat. In the rearview mirror, the man was slowly walking away. The key was already in the ignition; all he had to do was turn it and go. The man was getting to the corner; a few more seconds and he would disappear from his life. John could not let that happen, not this time.

  He pocketed the key quickly, slid out of the car, and closed the door gently. He crossed the road and followed the man.

  He kept well back. The streets were deserted; between them there was little aside from a block of dingy two-stories, with shops on the ground and one-room apartments above them. Ten minutes later, the man stopped and let himself into a door with peeling red paint next to a Laundromat. Seconds later, two windows lit up, and curtains were pulled close.

  John Cameron walked past the red door slowly, close enough to see that there were two doorbells, and neither had a name on it. He got to the corner, crossed the road, and came back, his eyes never leaving the windows. He stood by the end of the block, pretending to look at a pawnshop window through a metal grid. He could go now, but he was reluctant to leave. In the end, he walked back to his car and drove home; his parents were asleep, and his mother had left some cake for him in the fridge.

  He was still stunned and shaken and, if he had to be honest, somewhat exhilarated by the whole night. Standing over the kitchen sink, he ate the slice of cold chocolate cake; he wasn’t hungry, but the food tasted like everything that was good and steady in his life.

  His mind raced, and his common sense tried to keep up. He had to call Nathan; he had to tell him. In his nightmares, in the terrifying dreams he’d had after they had been rescued, there was only ever one man: the others had disappeared, their roles minor and unimportant. One man was responsible for the others. He had forbidden them to help David, and David had died because of him.

  In the chaos of the investigation, with the two main witnesses saying little of any use, there had been only one certainty: David Quinn suffered from a mild form of arrhythmia, a condition that affected his heartbeat. He had taken medication and had been expected to live a normal life, but when his parents were told what the boys had heard, they knew instantly what it meant: their son was gone.

  John went into the living room and poured himself a small measure of his father’s Johnnie Walker. It was something he had never done before; then again, it was that kind of night. He sat at the kitchen table and in his mind went back to the place where his nightmares came from.

  They had talked about it, Jimmy and he, before they had given their statements, but only once. For months after, they had been terrified the men would come back for them and their parents. It hadn’t been hard to lie, to tell the officers that they had never seen the men’s faces and couldn’t recognize their voices. They had been taken from Jackson Pond, drugged, taken someplace in a van. When they woke up blindfolded in the woods, they were tied up, and after that, David had sounded sick. No one had told them why they were there; no one had said one damn thing about anything.

  As the years had passed, theories had come and gone. John Cameron knew now with the wisdom of his late teens that it had been a shakedown, aimed at threatening their fathers, gone wrong.

  He looked at the wall-mounted phone next to the door. It would take him exactly ten seconds to call Nathan and tell him—and then what? He’d get the man picked up, get a formal identification, charge him, put him in a cell, and throw away the key. John had kept his ears open all the time Quinn had worked in the County Prosecutor’s Office. He knew what was what, and that knowledge fell on him suddenly: they didn’t stand a chance. He was the only witness who could identify him—he doubted Jimmy could—and what kind of case was that? The defense attorney, even those public defenders with a hundred cases in one day, would blow his testimony right out of the water. They would never indict; the man would walk away.

  John washed the glass and put it on the draining board. He knew where the man lived; he knew where he drank his beer. That was more than he’d had three hours ago.

  He went to bed, and somehow, in the morning, he managed to sit through two hours of English Lit and one hour of Introduction to Philosophy.

  When the time came, he drove to Eastlake, parked in the same spot, and turned off the engine. He was scared again. So what? The guy didn’t know who he was; all he had to do was sit on the stool and drink his Coke. He had decided earlier that he needed to be stone-cold sober, even if alcohol would kick-start his courage. Fear was only a normal animal reaction, he said to himself. He walked in, saw the man sitting at the back table, and was about to turn and leave. Instead he found his own seat and ordered.

  A short while later, the man came to the bar for a chat with the bartender. John’s insides were frozen solid, but he didn’t blink. The man recognized him from the night before and nodded to him. Cameron nodded back. His eyes followed the man as he returned to his table, and something in John Cameron’s world began to shift.

  Over the next month he would drop by maybe three times a week, and more often
than not the man would be there, and each time the spike of fear would be a little smaller. The bartender was a friendly guy who’d get bored behind the bar and chat to whoever was around—sometimes that was Cameron. One night, John asked him the man’s name, saying he reminded him of someone his father used to know. The man’s name was Timothy Gilman; he worked on the docks and had spent time upstate on some kind of embezzlement beef.

  “Really?” Cameron said, but privately he thought that if the man had been away, it must have been on a violent felony charge: nothing about him said fraud, while everything said I’m going to hurt you and hurt you badly.

  One Saturday evening they were all at The Rock for Jimmy’s father’s birthday. The group of friends and family had taken over the private room. There was loud cheering when the cake was brought out from the kitchen, the candles lit and trembling.

  Cameron’s skin tingled; he couldn’t focus on anything. He knew that Quinn would have believed him, but Nathan and his family had barely survived David’s death the first time round. Reliving it without being able to do anything about it would surely kill them.

  They had walked into that same room years before, the walls still only half painted and the restaurant a week from its grand opening. The grown-ups hadn’t noticed John, who was sitting behind a cardboard box and playing with a brush.

  “I understand that kind of thing has happened before, but no one approached us yet, and we don’t know they ever will,” his father said.

  “It’s just something we have to be aware of,” Quinn’s father replied. “Someone might come knocking. This is a new business, and there are people who might see us as easy targets.”

  “Are you saying we should just pay protection money to whoever comes calling?”

  “No. I’m saying we don’t know if there are feathers to be ruffled here. Hopefully, we’ll be left alone.”

  “And if we’re not?”

  “We’ll cross that bridge when we have to. If we have to,” Quinn’s father replied.

  They had come for the boys one August afternoon, and the bridge was unequivocally crossed.

  Just as his father was standing up to make a toast, John wondered how good it would feel to get Gilman back in the woods and what he would say to him if he managed to get him there. Often, in the quiet nights at the bar, he had played around with that notion. They certainly would have a lot to talk about. The fear wasn’t completely gone—some of it was still there, as well as something else he couldn’t define.