Hello Darkness

by Sam Best

  It was two weeks before she could sleep in her own bedroom.

  Highway 70 just outside of Vail was lined with the occasional tree—Ben recognized pyramidal white firs and the sharp needles of Colorado spruce along the way—but the big payoff was the view. Once the road climbed into the mountains it slowly wound its way along the ridges, through man-made tunnels and over expansive bridges stretched between natural outcroppings. He and Annabelle were surrounded by snow-capped mountains whose lower halves were a mixture of rock and green brush. The sides of the road plummeted into deep valleys, some with large lakes sitting placidly at the bottom.

  Ben had been born in Denver, Colorado, and spent only one year there as an infant before his parents moved west to Falling Rock. It was always a dream of theirs to own a decent-sized plot of land in one of the quiet recesses of America and raise a family. The old house to which Ben was driving his own child had been built by his father and grandfather back when those types of things still happened. His father played at being a residential architect when he wasn’t designing and maintaining city sewer systems. There must have been some seed of talent in his father’s hands for Ben’s childhood home was one of sturdiest in Falling Rock and had not needed a single plank of reinforcement in its four long decades of existence.

  The house was sealed up more than ten years ago after Ben’s parents passed away. All of the furniture was covered with sheets and the doors were bolted shut. Ben couldn’t bring himself to sell the place and he wouldn’t have turned much of a profit anyway because no one wanted to move to a small town west of Denver when they could just live in Denver instead.

  The house was always there in the back of his mind when he lived in Baltimore. He used to talk with Marissa, his wife, about retiring to his childhood home after Anna was grown and off to college.

  He and Marissa had made so many plans. Vacations, retirement, more children—a whole life planned with the anticipation of being together for years and years.

  Ben still saw her when he closed his eyes at night. Most of the time she was smiling at him as they lay on the beach, or laughing with him as they sat on a blanket in the middle of a field during one of the many picnics they had taken before Annabelle was born.

  Sometimes, though, he saw her floating under the ice, and he knew he was trapped in a nightmare. She pounded against her frozen ceiling; the tips of her hair floated out from her face like a blooming flower; her eyes bulged from the distortion of the ice and freezing water.

  Hands pulled him back—back out of the water after he jumped in to save Marissa.

  Ben shook the memory away and focused on the highway. Annabelle hummed contentedly in the seat next to him. He reached over and smoothed down the hair on top of her head.

  He had been lost after Marissa passed away.

  Ben took some time off work to sort out his financial and mental situation. A small life insurance policy they had taken out for the both of them years ago awarded an amount adequate enough to pay for his and Annabelle’s move out west. By then, the fledgling thought of one day migrating to Falling Rock caught hold and was impossible to ignore. There were too many memories of Marissa in Baltimore. He would see her everywhere he looked; in the faces of strangers, on billboards, and in T.V. commercials.

  Annabelle had been struggling as well. Her preschool teacher told Ben that Anna would get aggravated too easily and lash out at other children. She was never physically violent but the outbursts were enough to raise a few red flags. Ben’s heart skipped a beat when he remembered it was Marissa who used to drive Anna to and from the daycare center every day.

  His main goal in moving to Falling Rock was to start making new memories as quickly as possible—memories that would make his daughter smile when she looked back on them as a grown woman.

  Ben looked over at Anna as she turned to the last page of her picture book. Her eyes scanned the page quickly, taking in every detail. There was a large drawing of a blue dog with a big smile on his face sitting next to a small cottage in the country.

  “Hey, that kind of looks like where we’re going,” said Ben. Anna looked up at him, then back to the picture. “Well, without the big blue dog.”

  She smiled and closed the book. Wind from her half-rolled-down window blew her light blonde hair around her face. She scooted her butt farther back into the seat and tucked several long wisps of hair behind her ears. Annabelle was just tall enough to see out of the window when she stretched her neck. She watched the green trees zip past the car and studied the mountains beyond.

  “How ‘bout some tunes, kiddo?” asked Ben. “You pick it.”

  Anna brightened up at the prospect of music. She loved to listen to Ben’s old collection but she loved rooting through his cassette tapes even more. After a quick press at her seat belt buckle she climbed over the center console and into the back seat. She eagerly dove her hands into the large cardboard box behind Ben’s seat. He could hear the clacking of plastic as she shuffled through the box’s contents. Most of the cassettes had been copied over from his old vinyl records after Marissa bought him the tape player for his Cherokee. Sometimes Anna had a hard time reading the custom labels written in Ben’s signature chicken scratch, but before too long she found a tape and climbed back into the passenger seat.

  “Looks like we have a winner,” said Ben.

  “I think this one’s the good one,” she said as she brushed more hair from her face. Anna chewed on her bottom lip as she held it out for him.

  “You should probably do it,” said Ben. “I think you’re better at it than me anyway.”

  “Daddy, we’re both good at it,” she told him with confidence. She leaned forward in her seat and clumsily pushed the tape into the dashboard cassette player. Paul Simon’s “Cecilia” played softly through the Cherokee’s old speakers.

  “Oh, good choice,” said Ben. He turned up the volume and hummed along as Paul sang about the woman who broke his heart. Anna drummed her fingers to the wrong beat as she watched the passing scenery.

  “Why’d she break his heart?” asked Annabelle.

  “Hmm?”

  “The lady in the song. She breaks his heart and then shakes him up.”

  Ben smiled. “He’s upset because he likes her and she doesn’t like him back.”

  “That’s mean.” She plopped back against her seat heavily. “I’m hungry, Daddy.”

  “I think we still have some chips in the back. You want some chips?”

  Anna wrinkled her nose and shook her head. They had brought all sorts of snacks along for the ride and devoured most of them by the time they hit Denver. All that remained were two bags of regular potato chips.

  “Might be time for some real food, then,” said Ben. Anna nodded her agreement and hummed along with the music.

  “How much longer?” she asked.

  “Just another hour or so, I promise.”

  “I have to pee.”

  “Me, too. We’ll go when we get food, okay?”

  She held up her fists and popped both of her thumbs upward, mimicking a gesture Ben often used when they made an agreement.

  “Oh-kay!” she said happily. She rubbed her eyes and yawned, and looked to Ben exactly like a childhood version of her mother. There were times when he swore they could have been identical twins; he rarely saw any hints of his genetics in his daughter except for her occasionally dry sense of humor, and even that was most likely a result of being forced to talk with him day after day.

  A short while later they rounded a bend and saw a large green sign just off the side of the road. Big white letters read “Welcome to Falling Rock”. Insignias for a half a dozen local organizations were stamped across the bottom of the sign, including Boy Scouts and Elks.

  Anna sat up straight in her seat. “Is that it, Daddy? Is that it?”

  “That’s it. We made it!”

  She clapped excitedly and bounced in her seat. Her head waggled back and forth as she sang her own made-up song. “We maaaade it,
we maaAAaade it!”

  Ben looked over and smiled as she danced in her seat. Before he turned back to the road, Anna looked up and screamed.

  A large Great Horned Owl swooped out of the trees next to the highway and flew directly at the Jeep.

  “Daddy!”

  Ben turned the wheel to veer into the other lane but the owl shifted course and dove straight at them. It moved so fast it became a brown blur. It spread its wings wide and smashed headlong into their windshield. The glass cracked and a net of blood exploded from the bird’s head. It flapped its wings violently and tried to pull its skull free from the windshield.

  Anna screamed and wept as Ben screeched the Cherokee to a stop just off the road. The owl beat its large wings against the glass until finally its head popped free. Its talons scratched against the hood and its wings churned sadly as it tried to take flight. One of its wings hung broken and bleeding from its body. The owl’s eyes were pierced with glass. It squawked loudly and Ben quickly reached over to hug Anna. He pressed her face into his chest to shield her from seeing any more. She cried heavily into his shirt.

  The owl scrambled to the edge of the hood and fell down onto the street. Ben could hear its feathers flapping against the concrete, quickly at first then more slowly, slowly, until it was silent.

  Anna spoke through her tears. “Is it okaaaay Daddy? Is it okaaaaaay?”

  “Shhhh, shhhh,” was all Ben could think to say. He kissed her head reassuringly. “You stay here, sweetie, okay? I’ll check on him.”

  “He’s deh-heh-head!” she sobbed.

  Ben kissed her again and looked at the broken windshield. She was probably right; the owl had left behind a substantial amount of blood and tissue in its frantic struggle to free itself from the windshield. Between Anna’s sobs, Ben could not hear the bird moving on the road.

  “I’ll be right back.” he said.

  He slowly opened his door and got out of the car. A large streak of blood trailed from the windshield down to the front bumper, and then onto the asphalt. The owl had managed to drag itself along the road for about ten feet before finally dying. It lay in a heap of bloody feathers and broken wings next to the median line in the center of the road.

  Ben heard a car door open and turned to see Annabelle climb down out of the Cherokee.

  “Sweetie,” he said, “you need to stay in the car.”

  She ignored him and marched over to the owl with her arms crossed. “I want to see him.”

  “Sweetie, he’s dead.”

  She looked down at the owl in something that seemed to Ben like anger. “What a stupid bird!” she said between sniffles. “He went right into us!” She crossed her arms and glared at the dead owl.

  Annabelle rarely got angry and it was the last emotion Ben expected from her after such a grim incident. “He was probably really scared,” he said.

  “Scared of what?” she asked in a disbelieving tone.

  “Of us. Our car. We’re pretty big to him, you know?”

  She sniffed loudly and uncrossed her arms. “We are?”

  “You bet!” Ben moved in to put his arm around her small frame. “Everyone is afraid of something, you know. It’s just a part of life. Even big strong birds like him.”

  She wiped her eyes with her sleeves. “Except you, right daddy?”

  “Except me, what?”

  “You’re not afraid of anything.”

  Ben thought of his life without Marissa. “Oh, even I’m afraid of some things.” He smiled at her.

  They looked down at the owl. Several loose feathers blew away in the wind.

  “Do you think he had a family?” Anna asked.

  “Hmm, I better check.” He knelt down and got real close to the owl. He made a good show of inspecting some fictional area near the bird’s neck before sitting back up and brushing off his hands. “Nope,” he told Anna. “This bird was a mean bird.”

  “How was he mean?” She looked at the bird in a whole new light.

  “He stole from other birds and called them names.”

  Anna thought about it a moment. “That is mean. But it’s still sad.”

  Ben hugged her. “I know it is, sweetheart. Why don’t you go back in the car and wait for me, okay? I need to give it a little funeral.”

  She returned his hug and ran over to the Cherokee. After she was back in her seat, Ben reached down to move the owl off the highway.

  2

  Her target was forty yards away and closing fast.

  Karen Raines walked lightly, trying her best to avoid the dry leaves of late autumn that littered the forest floor. It wasn’t easy. She pushed her feet forward, barely touching the ground, instead of lifting them like she normally would. The steady woosh woosh made more noise than she liked, but there was no other option.

  One of the two joyriding car thieves she and her partner had chased into the valley from Falling Rock moved quickly through the woods behind her. She could sense him back there, ducking from tree to tree as he led her away from the safety of the city.

  The thieves had ditched the car on Main Street across from the hardware store after Karen and her partner boxed them in with their police cruisers. The thieves ran into the woods, toward the valley, with Karen and her partner close behind.

  She slowly wiped a small drop of sweat from her eyebrow and squeezed the rubberized grip of her custom .38 special. She held it firmly in both hands at a downward forty-five degree angle from her body, ready to snap it up at a moment’s notice. She felt much stronger with the weight of the gun balanced properly in her hands, as if its aura extended outward from the revolver to form a large force-field in front of her. Little mind tricks like that worked to keep her sane on the more dangerous calls.

  She had only been with the Falling Rock Sheriff’s Department for ten months; straight out of the academy and into uniform, much to her surprise. Several other higher-ranking classmates were still unemployed and looking for work. A soft-spoken voice deep within her mind told Karen that part of the reason she was hired so quickly was because of the way she looked in said uniform. She kept herself in great shape by exercising every day and adhering to what her friends liked to call “the caveman diet”; mainly lean meats and vegetables. Karen doubted that cavemen had any form of alcohol, and that was the one vice she allowed herself more than any other; never to excess but always to the halfway point, at least.

  What else was a girl to do in the small town of Falling Rock? Everyone had to have some outlet or they would implode from boredom.

  The sharp crack of a dry twig snapped Karen’s attention back into focus. She froze instantly and listened as the soft breeze blew leaves across the ground. There was another noise, though, mixed in with the rustling of dead leaves. Ever so quietly, someone walked toward her. The city was two hundred yards up the mountain and the valley was so thick with trees just off the main road that Karen could only catch brief glimpses of her surroundings.

  She carefully stepped over to a tall fir tree and pressed her back against it. The grip of her revolver grew hot from the heat of her nervous palms. In her mind, she made the gun’s force-field grow in diameter until it touched the ground at her feet and curved up over her head.

  Karen heard breathing.

  She wondered which one of her targets was still mobile. Her partner, Frank Mitchell, had neutralized the first perpetrator as the thieves were being chased away from Main Street. Karen and Frank crashed through thick underbrush as they closed in on the first target. He went down quickly without ever knowing they were so close. They didn’t stop to I.D. him since he fell face-down into a pile of dead leaves, but Karen thought it was probably Larry Holloway, the smaller of the two thieves.

  Frank had signaled for them to spread out as they advanced on the second target. With Larry down for the count, that meant Karen and Frank were chasing his larger and more competent partner, Walt Foster, a real son-of-a-bitch. Walt gave them a good run for it, too. It was obvious he knew his way around the woods out
side Falling Rock. Karen had spent a fair few of her days off down in the valley working at target practice and also to familiarize herself with the lay of the land, but she had no chance against someone who had been born and raised in town.

  Foster had taken his time leading them away from the city. The chase switched gears from furious pursuit to hesitant advance as soon as it hit the dense woods. Frank and Karen communicated only through hand signals to try and conceal their locations.

  After first leaving Main Street, they had followed a wide swath of forest that had been washed away by a flash flood several years ago. The bare scar ran down from the city all the way to the valley basin. Surviving trees clung heroically to the edges of the devastation; mostly older pines whose roots had been locked into the mountainside for a century.

  Karen’s feet had constantly threatened to slip out from under her as she walked. Loose debris trickled down ahead of her and forewarned her approach. Frank was having just as much trouble staying upright on the other side of the flood-scar.

  Foster had been waiting for them around the other side of a massive Limber Pine. He could have easily gotten Karen, but Frank had been walking down the right side of the wide path that led into the valley. Before she could even raise her gun and find her target, Frank was down. Foster had darted off into the thicker brush off the path and ran up the mountain, back toward the city. With a loud curse, Karen had followed after him.

  Now, as she stood pressed against the trunk of a large fir tree, Raines could tell that Foster wanted to end the game. He could have easily disappeared into the woods and escaped, but instead he lingered. Karen decided that was fine by her; she was tired anyway and the thought of an ice cold drink made her salivate every time it passed through her mind. She tightened her grip on her .38 special and stepped out from behind the tree.