Masters of Midnight

by Michael Thomas Ford

  Ben pulled his dick out of Trey’s mouth, backing away. Trey fell back against the chair. Bees swarmed from his lips and nose, covering his face in a blanket of striped bodies and buzzing wings. Trey’s hands hung limply at his sides, his head lolled to one side. His cheeks pulsed as the bees moved behind them, his lips opening and closing in silent screams.

  Ben looked down and saw that several bees still clung to his now-limp dick. His skin was still smeared with traces of Trey’s spit, and the bees were stuck in it. They were buzzing angrily as they fought against the sticky prison, and Ben knew that at any moment they would sting. He moved to brush them away, and as he did one of them plunged itself into him.

  “No!” he screamed, as pain burst through his body.

  He sat up, his heart racing and the image of Trey dissolving into the darkness. He was in his bedroom, alone. There were no bees. There was no Trey. He was seated in the chair by the window. He had fallen asleep.

  He looked at the clock. 4:23. Well, he hadn’t fallen asleep for long. Just long enough for the nightmare to come. He rubbed his forehead, trying to banish the images from his mind. He knew that morning would push them back, but morning was still several hours away. For now they lingered, trying to lure him back into unconsciousness so that they could grow stronger.

  He stood up quickly, before sleep could overcome him again, and made his way through the darkened hallway and down the stairs to the kitchen. There, he filled the tea kettle from the sink, lit the stove with one of the matches from the box he’d found in a drawer, and put the water on to boil. It seemed like an antiquated procedure, one long ago replaced with a few pushes of the buttons on a microwave, but going through the motions brought him some degree of comfort. It was what people did, he imagined, in times of trouble. They made coffee.

  When the water was ready, he poured it into a cup and added some of the instant coffee he’d picked up at the small grocery in town. There had been nothing fresh-ground, and he hadn’t wanted to draw even more attention to himself by asking for the nearest Starbucks. Besides, he wasn’t all that fond of coffee anyway, not really. Coffee had been another of Trey’s things, like Cary Grant movies and sushi. Ben had grown accustomed to them over time, had even learned to enjoy them. But without Trey’s enthusiasm for them to feed his own, they had lost much of their appeal.

  He stirred the coffee listlessly. The smell suddenly made his stomach knot up. Taking the cup to the sink, he poured the coffee down the drain, following it with a long blast of water. The rest of the jar he tossed into the trash. Opening the refrigerator, he removed a carton of orange juice and poured himself some of that instead. He took a large swallow, letting the acidic liquid coat his mouth and throat, washing away any stray traces of the coffee.

  Putting the empty glass in the sink, he leaned against the counter and suddenly found himself crying. Why had he come here? Why had he ever thought that leaving New York would mean leaving behind the memories? All he’d done was carry them with him, packed them up along with the dishes and towels, the books and the paintings. They hadn’t remained behind in the apartment, like the jar of pickles he’d forgotten to clear out of the refrigerator or the stain on the living room rug where he and Trey had spilled a bottle of red wine while making love. They’d traveled, unbroken, across 1500 miles, and now they were unwrapping themselves, one by one, and returning to him in nightmare fantasies.

  He took a deep breath, calming the sobbing, and looked out the window over the sink. The sun was coming up, a narrow line of gold thickening in the east. The darkness, fleeing back to its burrow, was growing thinner. The world was waking up again. Seeing the dawn, Ben felt the heaviness in his chest lift a little.

  Then his gaze moved to the corner of the window. There, suspended in the perfect filigree of a spider’s web, hung a bee. Its body was wrapped round in silk, its wings and legs tethered by the impossibly delicate bonds of death. Only its head remained free, the hollow eyes staring out at nothing. And from its nether end its stinger, small and sharp and full of poison, protruded from the wrappings.

  He watched the bee for a moment, half expecting it to spring to life and free itself. When it didn’t, he looked once more at the rising sun and felt the weariness of the night begin to fade.

  Chapter Three

  The basement was, not surprisingly, dusty and strung with cobwebs. As Ben wiped away the tattered strips of spider silk that hung from the joists supporting the enormous weight of the bookshelves above, he thought that perhaps venturing into the underbelly of the library wasn’t the best idea he’d ever had. He kept glancing up, alert for tiny scurrying shadows, and pulling the collar of his shirt closed in case a clumsy arachnid happened to fall from its hiding place and tumble onto his body.

  It was, however, cool in the basement, much cooler than in the upstairs rooms, and that was a relief. Without the benefit of air-conditioning, the library was suffering in the afternoon heat. The old fan Ben had found in the office closet—a rattling Zephyr Airkooler whose badge was stamped 1942—was doing its best to move air through the building, but even with its valiant efforts it was still unbearably warm. Wilting in the oven-like confines of his office, and bored with organizing the checkout system for the third time that day, Ben had gotten the notion to inspect the contents of the library’s nether realms, an area Martha had neglected to include on her tour of the place.

  Now he saw why it had been left off the itinerary. Small, dark, and musty, the cellar contained little of interest. An ancient typewriter, almost certainly acquired at the same time as the fan wheezing away on the counter upstairs, sat in one corner atop a wheeled table whose one missing caster caused it to lurch to the left. Stacks of newspapers, neatly bundled but nonetheless in the last stages of decay, were piled against one wall. Ben glanced at the date on the topmost one—November 17, 1958—and made a mental note to find someone to cart the whole lot away before it managed to spontaneously combust in the summer heat.

  There were also some books. Several cartons of them were placed at seemingly random points in the room. It reminded Ben of an exhibit he’d once seen at the Museum of Modern Art, an installation in which the artist—a thin, bearded man the New Yorker described as “the savior of conceptual art,” and who later died of a heroin overdose in a famous rock star’s hotel bathroom—had filled an entire gallery with boxes of books that had at one time or another been banned. Visitors were encouraged to pick books at random and open them, thereby freeing them from the tyranny of censorship. The books, however, had each been glued shut, rendering them useless. As Ben remembered it, the whole thing was supposed to have been a statement on the sadness of having a treasure trove of thoughts so close at hand yet so unavailable. His only lasting memory of the experience, though, was of a well-dressed Manhattan socialite desperately clawing at the unyielding cover of Alice Walker’s The Color Purple with her manicured nails while saying to her bemused husband, “Harold, I just don’t get it.”

  The books in the library’s basement were, he assumed, ones that had been weeded out of the main collection due to either their unpopularity, deteriorating condition, or irrelevance in the face of more current scientific discovery. Such discards were common in all libraries. He himself had held annual purgings, offering the unwanted volumes to collectors, curiosity seekers, and generally anyone who was willing to pay a dollar for a copy of Valley of the Dolls whose spine was weakened to the point of inefficacy, or perhaps an edition of Edward Gorey’s The Curious Sofa in which someone had blacked out potentially offensive parts of the illustrations with Magic Marker.

  The graveyard of the Downing Public Library, unfortunately, appeared to hold nothing even that interesting. A quick inventory of the nearest box revealed several Nancy Drew mysteries whose covers had been torn off, half a dozen novels from the 1930s and 40s whose titles Ben didn’t recognize, a fly-fishing manual, some outdated encyclopedias and, inexplicably, a Sears Christmas catalog from 1974. The other boxes appeared similarly loaded, and f
urther exploration was deemed unnecessary.

  Ben was turning to go back up the stairs when he happened to notice another box. Like the others, it was an old produce box—in this instance for Boy-O-Boy Lettuce. Unlike the others, however, its top was sealed shut with several shimmering lines of packing tape. It had also been placed in the farthest corner, where it was almost completely concealed by the shadows.

  Intrigued by the box’s special handling, Ben went for a closer look. Finding the edge of the tape with his fingernail, he pulled back one of the strips. The others followed quickly after, and he opened the box. Inside he found more books. Unlike those in the other boxes, however, these had been neatly stacked.

  He picked one up and looked at the cover. “Witchcraft of the Ozark Mountains,” he read out loud. “Interesting.”

  He put the book down and looked at what else was in the box, taking each book out and examining the cover before setting it aside. Soon an odd collection was assembled on the floor. In addition to the witchcraft book, the box yielded up Riddles of the Devil: Hexes and Curses in American Folk Magic; Poppets, Talismans, and Charms; Banishing the Dark; Haints and Haunts of the Ozarks; and Dreaming Demons: The Downing Child Killings and the Search for a Monster. This last title particularly interested Ben, as did the remaining books, of which there appeared to be two dozen or so. But rather than sit in the basement, taking them out one at a time, he decided to take the box and its macabre contents upstairs.

  Putting the books he’d already removed back into the box, he picked it up and carried it up the steps. Shutting the cellar door, he continued to his office, where he deposited the box on his desk. His shirt bore several streaks of dirt, but he ignored these as he sat down to explore the contents of the strange box more closely.

  Once again he removed Dreaming Demons. This time he opened the cover and read the description printed on the book’s jacket flap. “In the summer of 1932, the children of Downing, Arkansas, seemed to be under attack by something murderous,” he read. “It began with the death of thirteen-year-old Jacob Brewer, found in the woods with his head severed from his body. What at first was blamed on an attack by a bear or mountain lion quickly took on a far more sinister air when a second boy, nine-year-old Dylan Whitemore, was discovered dead in his bed, his body drained of all blood and bizarre symbols carved into his flesh. Soon talk turned from a maddened animal to something more sinister. And as three more children were killed in the course of a month, the tiny community rippled with rumors of devil worship, magic, and creatures of legend.”

  There was more, most of it having to do with the investigation into the killings and the resulting effects on the town and its inhabitants. Ben read through the description with increasing interest. He was surprised, when he reached the end, to discover that the murders—which ultimately numbered seven—had never been officially solved by the police. The town, however, had ultimately meted out its own brand of justice, blaming the horrific murders on one John Rullins, an unemployed tinker who some said had turned to witchcraft in an attempt to reverse his failed fortunes. “Rullins, convicted without the benefit of judge or jury,” the book’s description concluded, “himself became the final victim when a mob first stoned him to death and then burned his body in a desperate attempt to bring the summer of evil to its grisly end.”

  Ben turned from the jacket to the title page of the book. It had been written by someone called Wallace Pyle Blackwood, and published by the University of Arkansas Press in 1979. Ben turned to the back flap, hoping he would find a little information about the author. He was rewarded with a photo and a brief bio. “Wallace Pyle Blackwood, a graduate of Short Mountain College, is the librarian at Downing Public Library in Downing, Arkansas,” he read. “Twenty-two years old at the time of the Downing child killings, he knew all of the victims.”

  Ben put the book down on his desk and stared at it. The idea of something so grotesque happening in a quiet little town like Downing was unthinkable. Certainly murder wasn’t limited to big cities, and he was well aware that unbelievable things happened on a regular basis. Mothers drowned their children in bathtubs. People set one another on fire. Entire groups poisoned themselves in the belief that they would be rescued by alien saviors. These things did happen. But something about the child killings—and the town’s way of putting an end to them—was particularly brutal.

  Equally puzzling was why the book had been included in the box along with the other occult titles. Why had they all been hidden away in the basement? And where had such a peculiar assortment of books come from in the first place? They weren’t exactly the kinds of books he expected to find in a collection like the one housed in the Downing Public Library, even if one of them had been written by its former librarian.

  Martha. Martha would be able to provide some answers. She was also old enough that she likely remembered the killings herself. He would have to ask her about them. Picking up the phone, Ben looked at the number she’d scribbled on a piece of paper and began to dial. But before he could complete the call, he was interrupted by the appearance of a boy in the doorway. He appeared to be about nine years old, with red hair and a face dotted with freckles.

  “Can I help you?” Ben asked, setting the phone down.

  The boy nodded. “I’m looking for something to read,” he said shyly.

  Ben nodded. “Then you’ve come to the right place,” he said as he stood up. “Come with me. I bet we can find something for you.”

  As he walked out of the office to help the boy, he took one last look at the book on his desk. The mystery could wait a little longer.

  “Have you ever met a guy named Harry Potter?” he asked the boy as he led him to the stacks.

  Chapter Four

  “Wally Blackwood. Now there’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time.”

  Martha Abraham poured some more wine into Ben’s glass. They were seated at the table in her kitchen, picking over what was left of the roast chicken Martha had made for dinner. Martha refilled her own glass and took a sip before continuing.

  “I meant to clear out all those old books of Wally’s,” she told Ben. “All the other garbage in that cellar, too. I guess I just forgot.”

  “You knew Wally then?” Ben asked.

  “Of course I did,” answered Martha. “Learned most of what I know from him. He was the librarian before me.”

  “What happened to him?”

  Martha grew quiet, and a pensive look passed over her face. She sighed. “He died,” she said finally. “Shortly after the publication of his book.”

  “I’m sorry,” Ben said. “I didn’t mean to bring up unpleasant memories.”

  Martha waved a hand at him. “It’s all right,” she said. “It just all seems so long ago now. Reminds me that I’m getting old.”

  “If you don’t mind me asking, why did you put those books down in the cellar?”

  “Wally was interested in some very—unusual—subjects,” said Martha. “Those books of his upset a number of our patrons. I felt it would be best to remove them from the stacks.” She hesitated, looking at Ben. “I know what you’re thinking,” she continued. “A librarian should never censor her own collection. Perhaps you’re right. But Downing isn’t entirely like other places. There are some deep wounds here, and they need time to heal.”

  “You mean the child killings,” Ben said carefully. He’d been trying to find a graceful way to bring up the subject of Wallace Blackwood’s book, and now that Martha had provided an opening, he took it.

  Martha nodded. “There’s not a family here who wasn’t affected in some way by those events,” she explained. “If it wasn’t one of their own children who was killed, it was kin of some kind.”

  “But that was more than seventy years ago,” Ben said. “Surely people can talk about it now.”

  “People here don’t talk much about anything,” Martha told him. “When Wally published that book, well, it reopened some doors that should have stayed shut.”

&n
bsp; “Have you read the book?” asked Ben.

  “Oh, yes,” said Martha. “For Wally’s sake I read it.”

  “And do you agree with him that John Rullins was the victim of some overactive imaginations, that people were looking for someone to blame the tragedy on?”

  “Who can say?” Martha replied. “Was he possessed by demons? Was he practicing some kind of evil magic? I don’t believe in such things. But did he do it? Did he kill those children? The people who killed him thought so. My father thought so.”

  “Your father?” said Ben.

  Martha nodded. Then she stood up and went into the living room. When she returned, she was carrying an old photo album, which she placed on the table in front of Ben. Opening it to the first page, she pointed to a faded sepia photograph. It depicted a group of young boys dressed in old-fashioned baseball uniforms, some of them holding bats and gloves. Behind them a man stood, his handsome face stern yet kind as he peered out from beneath his cap. His hand was on the shoulder of a small boy standing in front of him.

  “The Downing Rockets,” Martha said. “Every family in town had a boy on the team that year.” She pointed to a tall boy in the back row, his chest thrust proudly out and his hair neatly plastered against his head. “Jacob Brewer,” she said.

  “The first one killed,” Ben said.

  Martha nodded. She moved her finger to another boy. “Dylan Whitemore,” she told Ben. “Arthur Rikes. Michael Privet. George Jenkins. Leyton Settles.”

  Ben recognized the names. They were the boys who had died in the summer of 1932. He looked at each of their faces as Martha pointed to them. Each one looked back at him, filled with happiness.