Children of the Dark

by Jonathan Janz

  But I refused to indulge in false hope. I’d been burned too many times.

  “From now on,” Mom continued, “we check in with each other every hour. If I have to go somewhere—today’s Sunday, so I should be around most of the day—but if I do go somewhere, I’ll tell you.”

  “You go back to work tomorrow,” I pointed out.

  “Which makes it all the more important that you and Peach stick together.”

  “Yay!” Peach said, bouncing in her seat.

  I eyed her good-humoredly, some of the weirdness in the kitchen dissipating. I didn’t particularly like my mom suddenly playing the role of house overlord, but maybe, I decided, this was part of it, part of her rehabilitation. I still only gave it about a two percent chance of sticking—she’d vowed to get straight before—but if telling us what to do made her feel more in control of her life, then I’d go along with it. The yellow haze in the sky foretold bad weather anyway. I was sure my friends would be housebound as well, so what else was I going to do? Roam the streets of Shadeland and hope that Eric Blades and his evil-looking Mustang didn’t veer around a corner and turn me into road kill?

  “Can you swing me on the goon-goon?” Peach asked.

  I chuckled. “Sure.”

  The goon-goon was Peach’s name for the rope swing I’d rigged on a big sycamore branch in the back yard. It was only about twenty feet from the woods, and right next to the graveyard, but it would be broad daylight, and we’d be together. I acted like I was only humoring Peach, but deep down I was looking forward to it. It was kind of fun spinning her on the swing and watching her hair whip around like a pinwheel. She made this high-pitched, delighted squeal too, which was sort of entertaining.

  Mom was smiling at us from the sink. She was grasping a coffee mug, the steam rising around her face.

  It was a good moment, the kind we’d had too little of as a family.

  It was a moment I’d look back on later after everything good in my life was destroyed.

  ¨

  “Higher,” Peach demanded.

  I realized I’d been drifting, my eyes on the graveyard and my mind on last night’s mad dash to the porch. Despite how long Peach and I had slept in, I was severely sleep-deprived, and when I felt that way, my whole personality was altered. I was quieter, first of all, in a mood Mrs. Herbert would have deemed taciturn. I was also more emotional, which really bothered me. I hated crying, but the truth was, I cried a lot more than the average guy. Chris and Barley knew that about me, and they never mocked me for it, but it still annoyed the hell out of me when it happened. Like I was defective or something. I couldn’t help but wonder if I’d cry as much if I’d had a father in the house growing up. People who had fathers took them for granted, but I felt that absence nearly every day.

  I wasn’t close to tears now, however. Quite the opposite. As I pushed Peach harder and then backpedaled out of the way so she wouldn’t kick me in the face, I thought of Kylie Ann, of the hand that had shot out of the darkness last night and closed over her mouth.

  I didn’t like Kylie Ann much. Okay, I didn’t like her at all, but that didn’t mean I wanted her to get kidnapped. Part of me had been tempted to turn on the TV to see if it was on the news, but I’d refrained, maybe because I knew I’d feel responsible for her abduction. I knew I’d done my best—I had pursued them after all, and gotten punched in the nose for my troubles—but that didn’t lessen the sting of failing. And now she was…

  I shuddered, mentally retreating from the horrid possibilities.

  I looked up and saw Peach’s face, which was crimped in a look of pain. “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  She swept by me on the goon-goon, her body twirling. “Tummy ache,” she moaned. “I think I have to go to the bathroom.”

  “Ah.”

  When she swung toward me again I snagged the rope, steadied her as quickly as I could without hurling her off the swing, and helped her off the goon-goon. Clutching her belly, she hurried toward the back door.

  I found myself alone in the yard. I remembered Mom’s directive—Don’t let each other out of your sight—and drifted toward the house. I knew I was in no real danger; whoever had taken Kylie Ann—even if it had been Carl Padgett—wasn’t going to strike in the middle of the day. Padgett was The Moonlight Killer, after all. And no other criminal would have the guts to go after a kid like me who was already in high school. Not in broad daylight.

  I hoped.

  My eyes glided toward the alcove between the porch and mom’s bedroom window. It was just a small space in which we stored the wheelbarrow and some of our old toys. I headed in that direction, moving aimlessly and with nothing much on my mind except the hope that Peach had made it to the toilet before her bowels uncorked. I was the one who cleaned up messes.

  I reached the alcove, studied the rusty tricycle, a cracked whiffle ball bat.

  To the right of those things, the mossy stairwell to the basement.

  I hadn’t ventured down those steps in maybe a year, and then it had only been to relight the pilot light on our ancient water heater. But today something felt different. Maybe it was all I’d gone through in the past forty-eight hours. Being threatened by Brad and his buddies. Seeing Kylie Ann abducted. Or being cracked in the face by her kidnapper.

  It occurred to me that no one had ever asked me if I was okay. You got hit in the head in baseball or any other sport and they performed a dozen tests to make sure you didn’t have a concussion. Yet they didn’t check you if you got your bell rung by a dangerous criminal? Where was the logic in that?

  For whatever reason though, the gloomy basement stairwell didn’t look as menacing this morning as it usually did, and I found myself striding down the steep steps, my nostrils already picking up the dank odor wafting up from the nearly lightless dungeon.

  I opened the door and was assaulted with the vile aromas of stagnant water, unwholesome grime, and a vague tinge of sewage. I also glimpsed one of my least favorite things, the rainwater cistern meant to prevent the basement from flooding. A circular black hole in the concrete, I’d always imagined a demon, or maybe Satan himself emerging from its depths.

  I went inside anyway, figuring Peach would be on the toilet for at least ten more minutes. She took her time doing her business anyway, and when she had a stomachache she could kill a whole hour in there with no problem. This wouldn’t have been an issue if we’d had more than one bathroom, but if someone was in there, you either had to hold it or go in the woods.

  Many times I’d ended up going in the woods.

  But today I didn’t have to go at all. In fact, despite all I’d been through, I felt strangely content. Mom’s decree to stay in the house was, in a bizarre way, kind of liberating. I could laze around here without feeling like I was missing out on something elsewhere.

  But I was feeling more than that.

  I’ve read about these things called dowsing rods, this phenomenon involving branches that help people find water underground. I felt a little like a dowsing rod at that moment. There was a tingling in my bones, like I was catching the residual electricity from a nearby power transformer. Whether this was a premonition or not, I don’t know. All I know is when I spotted the old boxes piled on a rotting wooden shelf on the far wall of the basement, that mental dowsing rod jerked down and told me I’d found what I was looking for. Moving with the surety of some primitive instinct, I cut through the scattered debris Mom had abandoned down here—my Thomas the Train push-along car, Peach’s first crib, a microwave that had ceased working long ago—and knelt before the shelf.

  The boxes were stacked two high. Flanking them were dented paint cans I was sure had long since dried up. I selected one of the boxes. It was damp. About six inches high and a couple feet wide. I made to lift it, but it was pretty heavy, and I had an idea it might come apart in my hands if I tried to lug it upstairs. I dragged the box toward me instead and eased it down on the clammy concrete. I brushed away a membrane of cobwebs and wrinkled my nose a
t all the desiccated flies and ladybugs collected in the gob of webs. I opened the box gingerly, suspicious of brown recluse spiders and other unpleasant surprises. But other than the musty stench, the only things I discovered within were my old school projects, a few of them dating back to kindergarten. There was a misshapen clay bowl painted green and black. That one, I was pretty sure, had been a Mother’s Day gift back in first grade. I found a whole folder full of graded assignments, most of them spelling tests and quizzes on addition and subtraction, and a few early writings mixed in too. One was a report I’d done on tsunamis back in third grade. Another I remembered fondly from the same year: a stapled book I’d created about wolves that featured original artwork, pictures I’d snipped from magazines, and a few scientific facts I’d copied from the encyclopedia. Nobody cared if you plagiarized in the third grade.

  All of it would have been really cool and nostalgic if not for the fact that it was beginning to rot or crumble because of the conditions down here. It pissed me off that Mom didn’t care enough to preserve these items in a closet upstairs. Disgustedly, I shoved the contents back inside the box and plopped it on the shelf. If my childhood memories didn’t matter to Mom, I reasoned, why should they matter to me?

  A distant part of me said that was dumb logic, but at the moment I didn’t care. It hurt my feelings. It seemed Mom was always hurting my feelings. Or maybe I was just too emotional, and I needed to be tougher.

  I was preparing to leave when the dowsing rod dipped again.

  By their own volition, my hands reached out and grasped another box, this one on the bottom shelf. This box was bigger, heavier, and when I tried to handle it the same way I had the last one, a huge flap disintegrated in my grip. I squatted closer to the box, moved it with greater caution, and soon it was sitting before me on the concrete.

  Every molecule of my body thrumming, I spread the moist flaps of lid and wrinkled my nose at the reek that puffed out of the box. Rather than old math assignments and science reports, this box appeared to be crammed with newspaper clippings. The first one showed my mom as a 4-H fair queen.

  Or first runner-up, I amended. The clipping was damp, but it revealed a completely different woman than the one I knew. This version of Michelle Burgess was smiling, attractive, and—I admit that this weirded me out a little—well, curvy. There were four or five pictures like it from the local newspapers, but though I could still read the captions beneath the pictures, the moisture down here had begun to fade the words. At least my mom was an equal-opportunity neglector; she didn’t care enough about herself to preserve these either.

  Beneath the fair queen articles I found several items that perplexed me. There was a photo of Barley’s family’s store, its grand-opening from more than twenty years ago. There was an article about some real estate agent starting his own office. I’d never heard of him.

  I dug deeper into the pile, noticing that there were several clippings that featured the real estate agent. His name was Ted Dexter. He looked like an actor from some eighties sitcom. He had feathered hair and a big smile. Many of the clippings were just advertisements for Ted Dexter Realty.

  Below, I found other familiar faces. My baseball coach. The superintendent of our schools, Jim Blades, who back then was an industrial tech teacher. There was an article about a teenage girl who disappeared sixteen years ago. A really old shot of a younger and thinner Bryce Cavanaugh, who was shooting a jump shot for the Shadeland High School basketball team.

  Then I came to a picture that made my skin gather into goose flesh.

  Carl Padgett.

  The date at the top of the page was from seventeen years ago.

  The sight of the Moonlight Killer as he was back then was more than a little chilling. From outward appearances he seemed like a normal guy. What was more, I realized with dawning amazement, he had been a normal guy back then. Or at least everyone had believed him to be normal. The three clippings in which he was featured showed him at various groundbreakings: a local restaurant that had since gone out of business. A Baptist church and a gas station. Padgett looked normal in every respect, from his button-down shirts to his bushy sideburns and jovial grin.

  He looked nothing like the man who murdered nine children.

  Wait a minute, I thought. The articles were all local, which meant, at the very least, that Carl Padgett had spent time in Shadeland. Not only that, I thought as I shuffled the pictures, but he’d shared at least a passing acquaintance with many of the same people I knew.

  Had Padgett once lived in my town?

  “What are you doing?” a voice yelled.

  I shrieked in terror and tossed about a dozen clippings into the air.

  “Will Burgess,” my mom said, her voice fast approaching, “you promised me you’d watch your sister!”

  I scrambled to shove the clippings back inside the box, but I could hear her footsteps right behind me, and there were still half a dozen scraps of paper lying about.

  “What are you—” she began to ask, then I heard a sharp intake of breath. “You have no right to look at those!”

  I was so stunned by the force of her anger that I found myself cowering before her. Never mind that I was a good deal taller than she was—at that moment I might as well have been Peach’s size.

  She elbowed past me, began stuffing the remaining clips into the box. Then, without regard to the fragile state of the moist cardboard, she hoisted the whole thing back onto the shelf and slammed down the lid with pointed fury.

  She brandished an index finger. “Don’t you ever come down here again. These things are none of your business.”

  Ordinarily I would have been enraged by being spoken to like that, but this was no ordinary moment. I had the feeling that if I attempted to question her about the contents of the box, she might well lose it completely.

  My belly churning, I made for the basement door.

  “Chris is on the phone,” she muttered.

  I turned and blinked at her in the semidarkness. “Huh?”

  She gave me a mordant look. “Chris Watkins? Your best friend? He’s on the phone. It’s why I came looking for you. You left the door open. Otherwise I never would’ve known you failed to watch your sister.”

  This was too much. “I didn’t fail Peach. I do more for her than you do every damn day, and you know it.”

  My voice sounded frail and croaky, but despite mom’s anger with me, she seemed to realize she’d gone too far.

  She blew out a long, frustrated breath. “I know you didn’t mean…look, Will, just don’t go snooping again, okay?”

  I said nothing.

  She searched my face. “How much did you…oh, never mind. You better talk to Chris.”

  Alarms went off in my head. “Is something wrong?”

  She hesitated. “I think it has to do with the Lubeck girl.”

  ¨

  “Chris?” I asked. “You there, man?”

  His voice was subdued. “Hey, Will.”

  With a sinking feeling, I realized Mom had probably been right. I didn’t want to ask the question, but I did anyway.

  “Any news on Kylie Ann?”

  “You haven’t heard?”

  “Uh-uh,” I said. “Is it bad?”

  He didn’t answer for so long I feared we’d been disconnected. Then, I heard him sigh. “Yeah. It is.”

  With a new tug of misgiving I realized he was struggling to keep his voice under control.

  “Come on, man, what’s going on?”

  For the billionth time I rued my family’s lack of technology. How many kids in the western hemisphere didn’t have access to the Internet or a cell phone? I was the last person to find out everything. Like I was some pioneer who’d time-traveled to the twenty-first century.

  “It isn’t good, Will. They don’t know for sure, but if it’s true, it’s really…”

  “What isn’t good? Would you just spit it—”

  “They found something.”

  My body turned to sto
ne. I sat there staring at the kitchen wall and repeated the words in my head: They found something. They found something. They…

  “Chris,” I said slowly, “are you telling me they found evidence of the kidnapping?”

  He said, “You know how Dad always has his scanner on?”

  I did. Since Chris’s dad was a lawyer, he made it his business to know anything that happened in Shadeland as quickly as possible. As a result, he often kept the police scanner on for long periods of time. I assumed that Chris, having nothing else to do today, had staked out a spot near the scanner in the hopes of hearing some news about Kylie Ann.

  “Anyway,” Chris went on, “it was Deputy Schwarber who found it. Dumb luck, I guess. They were searching down by the creek, just a few hundred yards from where Kylie Ann was…you know.”

  “Taken,” I said.

  “Uh-huh.”

  I swallowed. “You said Schwarber found it, but you haven’t told me what he found. That’s kind of an important—”

  “Her hand, Will. They found her left hand.”

  Chapter Eight

  Dark House and a Ghastly Memory

  If Mom’s attendance at work had been better, she could have stayed home with us the next day. Problem was, her attendance over the past several years, like her parenting, had sucked ass. Which meant she was about a half step from being fired.

  She explained to us through tears of humiliation that she’d arranged all-day play dates for us that Monday. Peach was to spend the day with Juliet Wallace; I was to hang out with Chris. But today, the notion of spending the day at Chris’s made me sick in the pit of my stomach.

  Because I didn’t want to be separated from Peach.

  The Wallaces were good people. Mrs. Wallace was a stay-at-home mom, and she adored my little sister. Several times she’d pulled me aside to tell me how thankful she was for me and the way I cared for Peach.

  But I wouldn’t be caring for her today. Today she’d be several miles out of town. And as mom dropped her off at the Wallaces, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was making a grave mistake.