Cage of Night

by Ed Gorman

"I guess I couldn't disagree with you there."

  "It's all my fault."

  "Don't be ridiculous."

  "It really is, and you know it."

  "God, Cindy, he just needed to explode and he picked whoever was around. It's his fault, not anybody else's."

  "Well, I called your parents and apologized, anyway. Your dad said he'd come down and get you, but I said I'd give you a ride home."

  I felt that old flattery again.

  Girl like Cindy Brasher offering to give me a ride home. And in front of a witness.

  I knew it probably made Garrett jealous and angry to hear all this but I didn't care. In a mean way, in fact, I probably enjoyed it a little bit. His uniform had made him a big man. Cindy Brasher's interest in me was making me a big man, too. That's the thing I figured out about love a long time ago. It's not how your lover feels about you that matters—it's how your lover makes you feel about yourself that counts.

  "Sorry to spoil your fun, Miss Brasher," Garrett said, "but I'm afraid he'll have to ride home with me."

  "With you?" she said, sounding genuinely disappointed.

  "Afraid so."

  "But why?"

  "I've still got some questions to ask him. About what happened tonight, I mean."

  I saw what he was doing. The pettiness of it was so pathetic it was almost laughable. Revenge of the Conan Readers.

  She looked angry.

  I took her hand. "I'll call you tomorrow," I said. She continued to glare at Garrett. "No, you won't," she said. "I'll call you. As soon as I get up."

  She gave me another cautious kiss on the cheek, scowled again at Garrett, and left.

  The squad car smelled of puke and disinfectant and cold, cold night. Cops hauled a lot of drunks.

  After he pulled out of the hospital parking lot, Garrett said, "You going to press charges?"

  "Sure. Why wouldn't I?"

  '"For the good of the cause' as the Mayor put it to me.

  "You're shitting me. The Mayor doesn't want me to press charges?"

  "That's the idea he gave me."

  "Well, fuck him."

  He looked over at me solemnly. "What if I told you that I was going to nail him on a couple of charges a lot worse than assault and battery?"

  "A lot worse?"

  "Uh-huh."

  "Man, you just started working tonight. How could you have anything on him?"

  "Yeah, but I've been following some things very closely. That's one thing they taught us at the Academy. To watch things that don't seem to be related."

  "Like what?"

  He didn't say anything for a time. Just drove. His uniform gave him the right to be mysterious.

  The mercury vapor lights made the glowing snow purple. No other cars were on the street. The town looked doomed.

  "You been following the robberies?"

  "What robberies?" I said.

  "Eight convenience stores in little towns all within fifteen miles east and west of here."

  "Guess not." Of course not. Why would I follow anything like that?

  The radio squawked. He picked it up and checked in and then ten-foured.

  He looked over at me and grinned. "I do that shit pretty good, don't I?"

  "Yeah, Conan couldn't have done it any better."

  He laughed. "That'd make a great movie. You know, fish-out-of-water. Conan gets transported forward in time and is a cop."

  It really was a pretty funny idea.

  Then, "Three weeks ago, in one of the robberies, two store clerks got murdered."

  "That's right. I forgot about that." Then, realizing his implication, I said, "God, you think Myles had something to do with that?"

  "Maybe. But if you tell anybody, I'll deny I said it."

  "Why would he rob convenience stores? His old man's rich and he's a football hero."

  "Have some fun, maybe. Who knows?"

  "Anyway, how could you tie him to it?"

  "Hamstring."

  "Huh?"

  He shook his head. "Maybe I'll explain someday."

  He pulled up in front of my house. All the lights were on. Mom and Dad and Josh would be waiting up. Nervously.

  Just as I was getting out of the car, I said, "You could've let her drive me home."

  "I know. But I figure the less time she spends with you, the better my chances are."

  At least he was finally being honest about it.

  "Man, who would've thought that two comic book nerds like us would be going after the same beautiful girl?"

  I suppose I felt sorry for him again. At the moment I felt that Cindy was completely mine. I could afford to joke with him.

  "Too bad she doesn't have a twin," he said, and then put the car into gear.

  "Yeah," I said, "too bad."

  And then I closed the door.

  And then he was gone.

  Richard Mitchell, KNAX-TV:

  "Another problem they had with the last execution here at the prison was that one member of the execution team snuck in a tiny camera to the death chamber and secretly snapped pictures of the prisoner while he was dying. He then sold the photos to one of the tabloid TV shows for a lot of money. So tonight, before the execution team enters the chamber, every member is going to be searched. The warden doesn't want a repeat of last time."

  Tape 21-D, August 14. Interview between Attorney Risa Wiggins and her client in the Clark County Jail.

  A: The alien was controlling your mind?

  C: Absolutely.

  A: Tell me about the headaches again.

  C: You mean the ones I got right before it would take control of me again?

  A: Yes.

  C: Well, I'd see it for what it was. I'd have these blinding pains in my head and then I'd see the alien, what it really looked like, I mean. It was horrifying.

  A: You do admit that you took LSD a few times several years ago?

  C: Yes.

  A: Could all of this have been some kind of flashback?

  C: No way, no.

  CHAPTER NINE

  It was sort of like being sick when you were a little kid. Everybody was extra nice to you.

  I spent the next morning sitting in the living room watching Repo Man, one of my favorite science fiction movies, and sipping the honey-laced tea my mom made for me.

  Josh came home for lunch from school, something he didn't do very often. He brought me a paperback he thought I might like. Josh didn't know anything about science fiction but he had heard the name Heinlein. The Door Into Summer, the book he'd bought me, just happened to be one I hadn't read in a long time. It was a great book. I hated to call anything "sweet" but that's just what the book was.

  By now, the headache was pretty much gone. The stitches still hurt, and I was moving pretty slowly, but I felt much better than I had when Garrett dropped me off last night.

  Dad came home for lunch, too.

  He handed me an envelope. Inside was a check for twenty-five dollars.

  "You don't need to do this," I said. My parents weren't exactly rich.

  "I should've done a lot more when you were a little kid."

  "You sure?"

  "Sure I'm sure." He smiled. "Spend it on that Brasher girl."

  "Thanks, Dad."

  Josh spent a few minutes with me before he left.

  "You're the big news at school."

  "I am?" I said.

  "Sure. You broke Cindy and Myles up for one thing."

  "They were already breaking up."

  "Yeah, but you look like a heartbreaker."

  "I'm not even sure what a 'heartbreaker' is."

  He grinned. "A heartbreaker is a stud."

  "Yeah, that's me all right. A stud."

  "And people are saying that it's also very cool that you're not pressing charges."

  "I'm not?"

  "Judge Sweeney will arraign him on Monday for the traffic violations, but will let him play today since you're not pressing charges. People're saying it's cool that you put the school's i
nterest before your own. Those are the exact words our esteemed class president said to me. 'It's cool that your brother is putting the school's interest before his own.' Then he said something else but I probably better not tell you what that was."

  "Now you have you tell me what it was."

  He smiled. He loved baiting me. Gave him a sense of power. Picking on me that way.

  "He said, 'You know, it's funny. I guess I always thought your brother was sort of a dip-shit, but I guess I was wrong about him.'"

  I suppose it should have hurt my feelings but I laughed. There was an innocence about it that was funny.

  "Tell him I still am a dip-shit."

  "Yeah," Josh said, rallying to my defense, "but you're not as big a dip-shit as you used to be."

  "Boy, that's comforting to know."

  "Anyway, thanks for not pressing charges. We couldn't win the game if Myles didn't play."

  I hadn't officially been asked to press charges anyway, but I figured I may as well play the forgiving hero. Now that I wasn't as big a dip-shit as I used to be, I had to start doing noble stuff like that.

  Around one, the house settled down again, Josh and Dad back to school and work respectively, Mom off for her Friday afternoon grocery shopping.

  I watched an episode of Land of the Giants on the Sci-Fi channel. The first act was so bad it was good, but the second act was so bad it was just plain awful. I switched over to the beginning of High Plains Drifter, which is just about my favorite western because of the fantasy element, and I stayed with it through the first thirty-six killings, and then I kind of dozed off, I guess. They'd given me some extra pain medication to take home last night. The stuff made me groggy.

  At first, I thought the phone was part of the dream I was having. In the dream, I was getting this call I knew to be urgent but every time I reached out to pick up the receiver, the phone moved away from me, further and further away until I knew I'd never be able to reach it, even though it was like this life-and-death call.

  Then I woke up and grabbed the phone in reality.

  "Hello."

  "You fucking go out with her, man, I'm going to fucking kill you. You fucking understand me?"

  Apparently he'd been told to use "fucking" in every sentence he spoke today.

  I hung up.

  He called back.

  "Last night was just the warm-up, asshole."

  "I'm not pressing charges, jerk-off. I'm doing you a favor."

  "I don't give a shit if you press charges or not. All I give a shit about is Cindy."

  "That's between you two."

  "I want you to leave her alone."

  I was scared, then I was angry, then, and this kind of surprised me, I was a little bit sad. For Myles, I mean. He was a bully and all but he was in great pain right now—in his way, I guessed he probably did love Cindy—and he didn't know what to do with it. All he could do was get angry, but he sensed that wouldn't get Cindy back. And that just made him angrier than ever. If that makes sense.

  "Maybe you could try being nice to Cindy," I said.

  "Don't give me any of your faggot bullshit, Spencer."

  "I'm going to hang up, Myles. And I don't want you to call me any more. All right?"

  "You faggot, you see her one more time and I'll kill you. You fucking understand me?"

  He was the one who hung up.

  CHAPTER TEN

  At first I wasn't sure I liked the idea of the roses. I mean, roses aren't something you send a he-man, even one who used to be something of a dip-shit.

  But after my mom got them in the vase and sitting up on the table in front of the window... they looked very pretty... especially now that the snow had stopped and the sun was out and the afternoon had warmed all the way up to thirty-four..

  "I wonder who sent them."

  "Probably Cindy," I said.

  "Well, wasn't that nice of her?" Mom said. "She sure sounds like a nice girl."

  "Yeah, she is." And then I closed my eyes and pictured her a moment. And then I said again, "Yeah, she is."

  "I wasn't sure if you'd like them."

  "They're great."

  "Your mom fixed them up so nice."

  "Yeah."

  "I really like your parents."

  "They really like you."

  "Really? They said that?"

  I smiled. "Really. They said that."

  Mom and Dad had gone to a movie at the Cineplex. Josh had gone to the game. They'd all been there when Cindy had shown up. It was kind of awkward at first, me never having exactly had a girlfriend before, but then everybody got along great.

  "When did they say it?" Cindy said.

  "When did they say what?"

  "That they liked me?"

  "Oh. Right before they left."

  "I didn't hear them say anything."

  "They whispered it."

  "You're not making it up?"

  "Huh-uh."

  For a beautiful, bright girl, Cindy had almost as many insecurities as I did.

  We were on the couch. She'd already given me eight or nine kisses so I wasn't nervous about kissing her back. I took her face to mine and gave her a kiss and it was like a contact high.

  "There's a David Cronenberg movie on in twenty minutes."

  "David Cronenberg?"

  "He's a director. Canadian."

  "Oh."

  "It's a little bit gross."

  "What's it called?"

  "The Brood."

  "What's it about?"

  "These little babies that are monsters."

  "Do they look real, you know, icky and stuff?"

  "Pretty icky."

  "Do you have any Barbara Streisand movies?"

  "Huh-uh."

  "Maybe there'll be something on MTV."

  "Yeah, maybe."

  She made popcorn and we watched MTV. It was the usual stuff. The VJ named Kennedy kept trying to make a fool of herself and pretty much succeeded; and a couple of rap songs talked about what pigs girls were and how white guys pretty much deserved to die; and then one of the MTV male-model types came on and traded a few yuks with Kennedy and pretended that he was pretty much like all the guys watching the show, except maybe for his Porsche convertible and the $10,000 worth of caps on his teeth.

  After MTV there was this show called Dimension 4, which was about all these allegedly true stories of people who have been abducted, and who have paranormal powers, and who claim they can channel the voices of people who used to live in condos in Atlantis.

  I started mocking some of the guests and for the first time, Cindy got irritated with me.

  "That's not very nice."

  "Cindy, the guy claimed that the alien gives him extra sexual powers and that he'd like to hear from a bunch of women so he could demonstrate how good he is these days."

  "So?"

  "Doesn't that sound like a put-on?"

  "Gee, the way you like science fiction, I'd think you'd have more of an open mind."

  I saw that it really was bothering her, the way I'd made fun of the people, and then I realized that I'd slipped back into my dip-shit mode. Putting people down. Sounding like Mr. Know-It-All on the Bullwinkle show.

  "Hey, I'm sorry, I really am."

  "I believe in aliens," she said.

  "You do?"

  I couldn't help it. When she said that, my mind immediately went back to the breakdown she'd had, and the time she'd spent in the mental hospital.

  "Yes, I do." She looked distant a moment, as if she was remembering something painful. "In fact, I know someone whose mind has been taken over by an alien."

  "You do?"

  "Yes. And you know him, too."

  "I do?"

  She nodded. "There's a well out in the woods."

  "A well?"

  "I'd like to take you there. Would you go?"

  "Sure," I said. But I was thinking about her breakdown and the mental hospital again.

  For a moment there, I had the suspicion that she was putt
ing me on. Then I realized that it wasn't her style, being sly like that. For all her beauty, she was nervous a lot of the time, and spoke in a very straightforward way. The put-on wasn't part of her.

  I was going to say more but that was when I saw headlights sweep the front windows, and heard a car pull into the driveway.

  "My folks," I said.

  She looked at the clock. "Gosh, it's after ten already."

  "That's not very late."

  "For you it is," she said. "You need your rest. That's the only way you're going to get better."

  "I'm already better."

  I tugged her face gently to mine. "Especially after tonight."

  This was our first French kiss.

  I wanted to start running around the room and yelling yippee the way Yosemite Sam might have but I decided that that was something only a dip-shit would do.

  Instead I said, "I really like you, Cindy."

  And she just looked at me and I couldn't read her.

  And I was scared because I knew she could break my heart any time she wanted to, utterly destroy me. When somebody has that kind of power over you, you're a fool not to fear them in some ways.

  "I really do know somebody who's being controlled by an alien," she said very softly. "When you're better, I want to take you someplace, OK?"

  "I'd love to go."

  I was afraid she wasn't ever going to say anything romantic back to me.

  Then she smiled and said, "I really like you, too. I just wanted you to know that."

  Then my folks were there, and the fun was all over.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Two nights later, we went to get a pizza, and afterward she took me out to the well.

  Everything was silent except for our feet crunching through the layer of ice. The town spread out below us like a mirage on a vast white prairie. A midnight train ran the length of the distant countryside, tearing through the darkness with purpose and fury.

  The moonlight on the snow gave the woods a soft glow. Fox and possum and raccoon and rabbit darted through the undergrowth as we made our way deeper into the stands of hardwoods. My nose and cheeks were frozen. Our breath was vapor. Despite the cold, every time I'd touch her for any significant time, I'd get an erection. I was a virgin, but not a happy one.