The Dark Net

by Benjamin Percy

  “I lose track of time.”

  “Good to see you.”

  “I’d offer to give you a hug, but I’m caught up in something.” She lifts her arms to indicate the IV lines, all bright with blood, at least ten of them. The pint bags dangle from hooks overhead, arranged in the shape of a chandelier, feeding into her wrists, her elbows, her neck, her back. That’s why she looks sixty instead of ninety or a hundred or a hundred and ten, whatever her actual age is. The constant transfusions keep her young. She says it’s not because she’s afraid of dying. It’s that she’s sick to death of it. She likes this life, she says. She doesn’t want another one. And she’s had many.

  “Something’s happened,” he says. “I need your help.”

  “Been a while since something happened. Is it wrong for me to feel excited?”

  There comes a noise from the hallway, a stumbling and gasping, and a moment later the receptionist staggers into the room. He holds a Glock out before him. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m so sorry. I tried to stop him.” He sniffs his bloodied nose.

  “It’s all right,” Sarin says, and her eyes settle on Juniper. “The big man and I go way back.”

  Chapter 7

  JUNIPER IS AN UGLY MAN—he knows this—with the close-together eyes and craggy brow and weak chin that bring to mind a 50,000-year-old cave dweller. But as a child, in Texas, before his features hardened and thickened, there was something impish about his appearance that might have contributed to his fame.

  Heavenly Visitor. That was the name of the book, based on his experiences, published when he was six. He was swimming in a lake, wearing his snorkel and fins, pushing through a thick section of lily pads with the hope of scaring up turtles, when a canoe struck the back of his head and knocked him out. No one realized what had happened for several minutes, his body face-down and floating among the plants. By the time they pulled him out, he had no pulse and his body had purpled along the edges. His father pumped his chest and blew breath back into his lungs—until at last he rolled over and gurgled up a puddle of lake water.

  He died. For over ten minutes. And then he came back. That’s what they told him when he woke several hours later at St. Hannah’s, in the children’s ward, in a hospital bed hooked up to an IV. They said he was a miracle. They said he was God’s precious little angel. And he believed it. Because of the light. It hadn’t been the kind that waited at the end of the tunnel. It had surrounded him, poured through him, a sun-currented ocean. It felt like the beginning of good, as when his mother started his bath or opened the oven to pull out cookies or punched the power on the television to tune in to his favorite program.

  He had always been an incorrigible liar. He saw a lion in the woods. He found a twenty-dollar bill on the sidewalk, no, not in his mother’s purse. He didn’t know who punctured the couch cushion either. A black-haired bully named Marco punched him in the nose, and just because the principal claimed no one named Marco went to his school didn’t mean it wasn’t true.

  So when his parents seemed keenly interested in this light—calling it the light of heaven—he kept going. He gave them what they wanted to hear. Yes, that’s right, he had hovered over the lake and watched his father pump his chest, and then—uh-huh, definitely—there had been angels, one who appeared beside him and took his hand and told him not to be afraid.

  He goes by Mike these days, but back then he was Timmy. Timmy Milton. And Timmy Milton’s words came tentatively at first. The concussion made his head hurt and his lungs felt bruised, but the way his parents and the nurses gathered around his hospital bed roused him. They pressed him gently, but he could tell how excited they were, their eyes brightening, their breath held.

  Every Sunday they attended the massive Cornerstone church complex off the freeway, and he now shared the same version of heaven the Cornerstone minister had shared in his sermons, along with a few improvements. Heaven was everything they hoped for, a city in the clouds where a warm breeze blew, and he had never felt so safe and happy in all his life. Mr. Meow was there. So was Pop-Pop—but he wasn’t old and crooked in his wheelchair anymore. He was strong and wearing a white uniform with stripes on it. When his parents exclaimed, “His naval uniform, it must be true, how would Timmy know that otherwise!” Juniper did not remind them of the black-and-white photo albums his father kept in his office closet. And then he mentioned the baby and they went quiet. “Was it a baby girl?” his mother asked, and he said yes because he could tell by her tone that he ought to. She seemed happy, Juniper said, but he never learned her name—and his mother began to cry and said, “That’s because we never had the chance to give her one.”

  They cried and hugged him and called him a dear, dear, special, God-blessed boy.

  The Cornerstone minister declared little Timmy a miracle, a messenger of God, and by the time he left the hospital, a crowd of reporters from the local and national news had gathered. There was no going back on it now. None of it was true—nothing except for the light, a sense of goodness and energy that lingered with him—but the more Juniper told the story, the more true it seemed. Everyone wanted it to be true, and he didn’t want to disappoint them.

  They asked him about the angels, and he said they looked like beautiful people, except when they were moving, and then they looked like flashes of light. They asked him about Jesus, and he told them about the bearded man on the white horse that made no noise when it galloped. Jesus smiled down at Juniper in a way that made him feel fizzy, like when you sip a soda, and told him he had to go back home to see his parents, who loved him very much, and do a job. A very important job.

  “What’s that? What job did Jesus Christ tell you to do?”

  “Tell everyone about heaven,” he said. “Share the good news.”

  The interviews led to the book, Heavenly Visitor, penned by his parents. And the book led to the national lecture circuit. He had an agent and manager and lawyer who referred to him sometimes as a brand. His mother homeschooled him as they traveled from parish to parish, sometimes with six hundred people or more in the audience. He learned how to attach his own lapel mic and apply his own foundation before he stepped out under the bright lights. He learned not just to tell his story, but to sermonize. He let people touch him, and he would touch them back, cupping a cheek, and they would close their eyes and smile as if the Holy Spirit coursed through him.

  And maybe it wasn’t the Holy Spirit, but something lingered in him, as if he were a man struck by lightning who retained some spark in his fingertips. He saw things sometimes. A gray shawl shimmering around an old woman in a wheelchair—and an orange glow crackling around a baby at the baptismal font. Shadows would gather where none should be. A whisper or a scream would turn his head and reveal nothing. He sometimes dreamed things before they happened. He worried more than once that he might be crazy, but when every day you’re told you’re special, a messenger of light, it’s a challenge not to believe it.

  This continued until he was twenty. His family then lived in a gated community in Burbank. They had a pool and hot tub, granite and stainless steel everything, stucco walls and a Mexican tile roof, topiaries in the front yard, a casita in the back, Cadillacs in the garage.

  Then something happened. He began to notice a face in the crowd. The same face. Whether Juniper was in Tucson or Buffalo or Oklahoma City. Man or woman, Juniper could not tell, in a dress or in a suit, the fabric always funereal. He, she, it had night-black hair that reached past the shoulders. And eyes of the same color, glistening like hundred-year-old eggs. Its face was long and pale and bony and bent to one side. The thing. That was how he began to think of it. He asked others about it—his manager, the stage crew, pastors—but no one seemed to know what he was talking about. “Where?” they would say, and Juniper would no longer be able to locate the pale, bent face.

  One time, when everyone brought their hands together to pray, the thing lifted its cupped hands and a big black fly fluttered free of them and circled the stage and finally aligh
ted on Juniper’s sleeve, and he crushed it and the black guts burned his wrist and stained the shirt so that he had to throw it away in a hotel garbage can.

  And then he woke one night, in a Best Western in Tacoma, to a shadow darker than the rest. The thing stood at the foot of his bed. A streetlight burned through the shades and lit its bent face. Beside it crouched a hound. It yawned widely and slurped its muzzle with a black tongue. Juniper heard a humming, and it took him a moment to recognize the black flies, their bodies battering the walls and ceiling.

  Juniper felt as well as heard its words, like a cold wind that carried twigs and gravel in its currents. “Normally I don’t pay any attention to the pulpit.” There was such depth to the voice, a throbbing bass that went beyond maleness and into the elemental. “But you make so much noise, little Timmy. You have so much reach, so much impact, that you’re difficult to ignore. You burn with too much light.”

  Juniper tried to retreat, crabbing back against the headboard. He almost cried out for help, but his throat felt strangled of air, thick with a brinish liquid that he knew was lake water. He gagged and coughed up onto the pillow a splatter of duckweed, a black water beetle that scrabbled off under the covers.

  “You should have died, little Timmy. You should have stayed wherever it is you went.”

  Juniper almost said he came back for a reason—he had a purpose, a job to do here on earth—but the thing seemed to anticipate this and made a dismissive motion with its long hand and said, “You’re furthering the cause of the light. It’s a twisted, fib-soaked, money-grubbing version of it, but still. The time has come for silence.” The thing cocked its head in debate. “But I think I’ll make you suffer first. Then you can share some of the pain and hopelessness with all those who are so eager to listen to you.”

  The hound whined and the thing petted it.

  Finally Juniper found his voice. “Who are you?”

  A siren called in the distance, maybe an ambulance or maybe a police car, and the thing turned its head curiously toward the window before speaking. “In your sermons—which I must say are quite good, you’re an excellent performer—you’re always talking about the light. You can probably guess what that makes me . . .”

  “The dark?” It felt at once silly and terrifying to say.

  The thing shrugged. “Part of it at least. One shadow of many. There is no singular Dark. Just as there is no Vulture. There is much, there are many, always circling, feeding on carrion.” When the thing moved toward him, reaching for him, the tendons of its arms creaked like old ropes.

  ❖

  He believed it a dream when he woke in the morning to his phone ringing. A terrible dream. He took the call—fielding an invitation to a weeklong residency at a Houston megachurch—and put it on speaker and stumbled to the bathroom to lift the seat and drop his boxers. The piss came in a white stream that soon went orange and pungent before sputtering to a stop. “Can’t you talk them up a bit?” he asked his agent. “Their coffers are deep, and I bet we could get another ten thou without too much trouble.”

  An unbearable pressure followed, and he gritted his teeth and tried to empty himself further. He dropped to the floor. A sudden sweat made his skin slick. He noticed then the flies crawling across the ceiling and the bruise on his belly in the shape of a long-fingered hand. He tried to massage the pain, to rough away whatever blockage stopped him up, but that only made it worse. There was a feeling like a pulse, but out of rhythm with his heart. And then something gave, and when he pissed, he pissed blood. From the other room came his agent’s voice: “Tim? Tim, are you okay?”

  He wasn’t. The MRI revealed the tumor. It looked like a giant piece of chewed-up gum stuck among his organs. They cut out what they could, but the cancer had metastasized, spread throughout his body. He could choose chemo and radiation, or he could choose nothing. He chose nothing after hearing his odds of survival. He’d take quality of life over quantity. A few good months. That’s what he had to look forward to. He still didn’t know if the thing in the hotel room was real, if it had done this to him, or if he had once more built a fantasy to make sense of his nearness to death.

  He told his parents about the cancer and they hugged him and wept with him, but it wasn’t thirty minutes later that they brought up his estate, and signing it over to them. And then they proposed a platform for his death. Letters to Heaven—that’s what they’d call it. There would be a book, maybe a television special. They’d announce it on the Hour of Power at the Crystal Cathedral. For a fee, Juniper would deliver messages directly to loved ones, or Jesus, or even God directly. What did he think? “We can make your death great,” his father said.

  He could barely muster the request to be alone. He felt suddenly vacant, as if everything that had once filled his life had spiraled down a drain. He stopped preaching. He refused to attend Sunday service. He unplugged every phone in his house. He stopped checking his email and wouldn’t answer the door.

  He closed down his investment accounts, ignoring the penalties and fees. It didn’t feel like his money. It felt stolen. Maybe he had done some good—giving people hope—but it was hope founded on a lie. He started writing checks. And every check he wrote—to charities, to libraries, to YMCAs and domestic abuse shelters and literacy programs, none to churches—made him feel unburdened, truer.

  His last three hundred thousand he cashed out. He planned to drive up the coast and hand out stacks of bills at diners, rest stops, beaches, Walmart parking lots. He liked the idea of making a palpable difference. Here you go, he’d say, buy yourself a meal, buy some diapers for your kid, put it toward rent, whatever. He just wanted to walk away from the transaction knowing he had earned nothing but a smile in return. That felt like a more honest currency of light than any he had dealt before.

  He bought a used Buick and grew out his beard. He toyed with different names when checking in at dive motels, and finally settled on one. Mike for his middle name and Juniper for the trees that blurred past his window as he drove north. Some of them were thousands of years old, he knew, and they appeared unkillable but tormented by their long life, twisted and gray.

  To avoid an investigation, he left a suicide note that said they would never find the body. There was a brief media frenzy, but he was by all accounts dead when a few weeks later he walked along the Willamette River in Portland, feeding seagulls torn-up pieces of bread and handing out hundred-dollar bills to the bench-sleepers and trash-can-pillagers. “You look like you could use a little help,” he would say, and more than one person said in response, “So do you, buddy.”

  There was blood in his cough and his urine. Every few steps, he had to pause and close his eyes to make the world stop quavering. His skin was bruised and sunken in some places, red and swollen in others. He felt like he was growing inside, shrinking outside.

  He wasn’t walking anywhere in particular, just following a trail of litter and syringes and shopping carts stacked high with cans. He spotted a group of teens wearing ratty hoodies and stained jeans. They catcalled, practiced skateboard tricks, handed out the Street Roots newspaper, bummed for change.

  Juniper dropped a hundred-dollar bill in a ball cap, stuffed another in an outstretched hand, and it didn’t take long for the teens to close around him, everyone snatching the bills he offered and saying, “Thanks!” and “God bless!” and “You’re a good man.” He didn’t smile. He let them take it all, every last bill, hurling the last of it in the air as though it was confetti. He said, “That’s it, that’s all I’ve got on me!” and sank to the ground and remained there long after they departed and the sun began to sink and the shadows thickened. He didn’t feel any sort of peace, only a crushing exhaustion, like the weight of night.

  He vaguely heard the boots clomping toward him and vaguely felt the toe nudge his shoulder. His eyes were crusted over, and it took some effort to open them. A face swung into view—a woman with white hair and a black stripe running through it. Black jeans, motorcycle boots. Sarin, thoug
h he didn’t know her name then. She smoked a cigarette, and when she spoke, it ashed on him. “You’re the one giving away money?”

  “I was.”

  “I all of a sudden get twenty, thirty customers—throwing down hundreds, asking me for hits—so I naturally get curious.” She paced a circle around him, studying him from different angles. “You’re one of those saintly do-gooders, then? Give away all your money before you croak?”

  He tried to speak, but his lungs felt deflated, and he coughed and turned on his side. He was on a ledge before a black metal fence that overlooked the wide gray stripe of the Willamette.

  She got in the way of the view, crouching before him. She looked old enough to be his mother, but acted twice as vital as he was. The tip of the cigarette burned bright when she sucked on it. “You’re on the spectrum, I see,” she said.

  “I’m what?”

  “You’re like me. You’ve got a little light in you.”

  He didn’t know how to respond to this. His life felt so utterly absent of light that he had stopped believing in any of it.

  “Somebody put a mark on you,” she said, her words made of smoke. “What did you do to piss them off? Or were they just in a bad mood? Whoever they were, they obviously wanted you to suffer.” She dropped the spent cigarette—nothing but filter—and crushed out the ember. “Fucking demons.”

  Juniper had put the man—the black thing in the hotel room—out of his mind. He was nothing more than a nightmare. Or a hallucination from the cancer fingering into his brain. But her words recalled the vision of him now. His voice like many deep whispers sewn together. His tendons creaking when he moved like the floorboards of a rotten house.

  “Jesus. I can smell it on you even. You stink, you know. Like sulfur.” She laid her hand across his cheek, then ran it down his neck, his chest, flattening her palm over his heart. “Lucky for you I’ve always been a sucker for charity cases.”

  The warmth of her hand changed over to a searing heat, focused through her fingers.