Dark Passage

by Griffin Hayes

  Tyson was standing now, patting himself all over. Those little blue bastards had to be somewhere, he thought desperately.

  “You look like a man who just realized his wallet’s not where it should be.”

  “The Noxil. I’m supposed to take a shot after every meal and I haven’t the foggiest idea where I put those little blue—”

  “Maybe you left them back at the cottage?”

  Tyson froze. “I might have. I’m telling you, these last couple of days have been something else. Come to think of it, I can’t seem to find my inhaler either.”

  “Okay, no biggie. Just call that drug coordinator guy. What’d you say his name was? Stevens?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Call Stevens in the morning and get some more.”

  “Morning?” Tyson shouted. “Are you crazy? I can’t wait that long. I need them now.” He plucked his phone from his pocket along with the wallet from his hip. Inside was Stevens’ card. He dialed the number. Tyson let the phone ring ten times before hanging up.

  “Asshole’s not answering!”

  Tyson was pacing now.

  “Easy, Ty. I think you’re blowing this way out of proportion.”

  “I need that dose.” The red bulbous veins in Tyson’s eyes made them look like road maps.

  People were beginning to stare.

  Skip straightened. “At least that tells me the stuff’s working. You’ve been sleeping, I take it?”

  Tyson didn’t answer. He was busy wrestling with the lock on his briefcase. It finally opened. He grabbed a thick stack of twenties and slid it across the table. “This should cover lunch. Sorry, Skip, I gotta run.”

  Then Tyson took off, briefcase in hand, bounding for the door at nearly a full run, leaving Skip Williams just a little more certain that his long time friend was losing his mind.

  Chapter 11

  Tyson’s first stop was the Ralph Lauren store on Madison Avenue where he had spent the last two hours feeling like the cowardly lion when he first arrived in Oz.

  “Oh, Mr. Barrett, I hope everything is all right with the suit. Oh shoot, there’s a stain on our shirt.”

  “Did you find anything in my change room after I left?”

  Henrique was still fiddling with the mark on Tyson’s Keaton Twill dress shirt. “I’m not at all sure this will come out.”

  “I don’t care about the shirt,” Tyson snapped. “I’m looking for a small case with blue colored vials inside. I may have left them here.”

  Henrique’s expression turned serious. This was old hat for a salesman who mingled in the circles that Henrique did. Aren’t rock stars, celebrities and royalty always losing their high class prescription dope?

  “Give me a moment, Mr. Barrett,” he said in a low calm voice, “and I’ll see what I can do. Little blue vials, you said?”

  “That’s right.”

  Tyson was sure they were here. He must have dropped them when he was changing and hadn’t heard them fall. It was then that he noticed he was pacing back and forth.

  You’re gonna give yourself an asthma attack and then were will you be? Flat on your back in the hospital or maybe even dead!

  He looked in one of the full length mirrors on the wall, admiring his new suit.

  Then he caught the brown stain, not more than a few inches below his collar. The one Henrique’s prissy little hands had been dabbing at. This was turning into a day full of new personal records. Biggest single windfall. Most expensive suit he’d ever purchased and now two grand flushed down the tubes on a shirt he had owned for less than an hour. And wasn’t Henrique just crying his big gay eyes out that Tyson had to shell out another huge wad of dough on more clothes. I’ll say this though, if he comes back with the Noxil, I’ll buy ten shirts. Hell, I’ve got the bread, why not make it a hundred.

  Henrique did return and the solemn expression on his face made Tyson’s stomach roll.

  “Nowhere?”

  “I’ve turned the place upside down, I’m afraid. Even spoke to each of the salespeople. I’m sorry, Mr. Barrett. Now about that stain. We have a new collection of—”

  Tyson didn’t catch the rest of Henrique’s pitch, mostly because of the noise the revolving door made as it swung closed behind him. On his way to his car he dialed Stevens again. Twenty infuriating rings later and still no answer, he hung up. Stevens better be there, he muttered. For his sake, Stevens better be there.

  Tyson got to the old commercial space that housed Sino-Meck’s clinical trial to find that Dr. Charles Stevens, the arrogant prick of a head coordinator, wasn’t there. Driving there as fast as he could through busy New York traffic, Tyson had prepared himself for that very eventuality. Stevens or not, he felt confident that if he simply gave someone his name, they could get him a fresh new case brimming with vials of Noxil. There had to be a list. If they wanted their ‘oh so precious’ test results, they had better keep feeding him his dope, right? But this time would be different, wouldn’t it? This time he would empty out a two-gallon water jug and make sure they filled it right to the fucking rim with that dark blue hooch. When he arrived, however, what he found was far worse that he could ever have imagined.

  Strung along the glass door was a wide yellow sticker. On it in bold black letters was the following:

  By order of the Food and Drug Administration and the Greater New York Ethical Review Board all and any biomedical research conducted on these premises have henceforth been suspended.

  Tyson felt the strength go out of his legs all at once. His knees buckled and before he knew what hit him, he’d taken a rather awkward seat on a dirty New York sidewalk in a suit that probably cost more than some families earned in a year. Foremost on his mind wasn’t the very real fear that he might have just lost his meal ticket to endless riches. That one would hurt, sure, but his primary concern was something else entirely.

  Stevens had flaunted Noxil’s lack of side effects. Ha! But Tyson knew better. How about real solid things coming back with you from your dreams? Is that side effects enough for you, Dr. Stevens? He almost couldn’t wait to fill out his journal.

  Why bother? that annoying little voice began to ask. Certainly not for your precious drug trial. Didn’t you hear, that’s been shut down for good.

  Somehow, the Noxil had managed to scatter away nightmares once filled with unspeakable horrors desperate to rip him apart on a nightly basis. For once, sleep had become a pleasant experience again and not something to be feared. And when objects began to follow him home from that other reality, wherever the hell that was, he had allowed that too because hey, who couldn’t use a million dollars, right? Tyson was starting to feel as though he had signed a deal with a man who appeared to have a pair of rather large horns stuffed under an unbelievably small hat. Deal or not, there was one more place those vials could be. And if they weren’t there? If he was bone dry, as the junkies liked to say, then he would at last discover the answer to that terrifying question bouncing around in his head all day long: What happens when the nightmares return?

  Chapter 12

  The cottage was dark and silent when Tyson arrived. He pulled into the gravel driveway, his headlights washing over the tiny country house. The outside looked different somehow. Sagging and tired. He got out of the car, every inch of his body aching, growing all the more certain he was projecting his own exhaustion onto a house that couldn’t be more than a decade old.

  The crickets were out in full deafening force tonight. So much so that he could barely hear the water lapping against the side of the boathouse down by the lake. But lapping water and crickets weren’t why he had driven an hour and a half from New York City.

  The cottage inside was exactly as he had left it. He had cleaned up as much as he could before he left, considering that he’d been about to blow a chunk of the money he nearly broken his big toe on.

  Tyson’s first act was to scour the bathroom for any sign of the vials. He must have opened every drawer ten times, praying with each pull that they migh
t magically appear. Of course they didn’t, but that didn’t stop him from trying. There was something comforting in the ritual. The thought that if he did things a certain way or enough times, everything would turn out okay. A shrink might have called it OCD. To Tyson it was wishful thinking.

  That his tendency to ritualize had anything to do with his biological mother and the disturbing environment in which he had spent the most formative years of his young life was little more than a vague and distant notion to him. His wife. His ex-wife, he amended, had consistently accused him of being a hypochondriac. She had done so over the phone as recently as the other night when he had spoken to her from this very cottage. She had once even gone so far as to suggest that the asthma pump he carried in his pocket was nothing more than a prop. That he was a healthy man playing sick.

  “I’ve seen the way you try and pump Kavi full of meds every chance you get. There are enough real sick people in the world, Tyson, we don’t need fakers.”

  In his shaving kit, Tyson kept a spare Asthma pump and he slid it into his pocket. Just the feeling of having it was reassuring enough. Hell, there’d been a few times today where he could probably have used it.

  Ruma called it his security blanket, but his symptoms felt about as real as they came. Did it really matter that he had seen eight doctors before he found one that would finally agree with his diagnosis?

  “I love you, Tyson,” she had said to him then and right now that seemed like a lifetime ago. “You can’t lock away all the horrible things that were done to you as a child. That will only make them so much worse. I can’t imagine what it must have been like living with that crazy woman. But you need to understand something. She can’t hurt you. Not anymore. Not when she’s locked up a hundred miles away.”

  At the time, Tyson had paused when Ruma said that, staring at her with a look bordering on rage. The event was less than a month old, but the rawness of it hadn’t quite faded yet. “What do you mean locked up hundreds of miles away?”

  The expression on Ruma’s face had also changed and Tyson knew she had just revealed something he wasn’t supposed to know.

  “She’s alive? Is that what you’re saying?”

  Ruma sighed.

  “And how long have you known about this?”

  “I don’t know. Not long. Around the time you started acting strangely.”

  Tyson had gone to the cabinet, taken out a glass and poured himself more vodka than he could probably drink.

  “Numbing yourself isn’t going to solve anything.”

  “No, but it’s a hell of a start.”

  “Darling, I’ve been so worried about you lately. The nightmares. Shrieking in the middle of the night. I needed to know you weren’t going through some…” She paused, searching for the right word and finding none. “I needed to know you hadn’t inherited a condition.”

  “Condition.” His tone was flat. “You mean insanity.”

  “This is not easy for either of us. It feels like I’m the only one trying to keep our family together and I needed to know what I was up against. I tracked your mother down and spoke with one of her doctors at the asylum over the phone.”

  “Asylum. Great! Is there anything else about my life you’re withholding?”

  “Tyson, I wasn’t trying to betray you. I was preparing myself for a worse case scenario.”

  “Worse case scenario. You sound like a fucking robot.”

  He had seen then that Ruma was crying and he had fallen back onto the sofa. He sat there for a while, vodka in hand, watching her wipe away the tears, mindful of her mascara.

  When the initial blinding fury passed, he regained his ability to speak. “So what did he say, this doctor?”

  “His name is Dr. Bowes and he wouldn’t speak with me over the phone other than to say that yes your mother was under his care, but that she had fallen into a coma. I couldn’t get any more out of him. But Tyson, all this isn’t the point. Yes she’s alive, but she’s old and locked away in a place where she will never hurt anyone ever again.”

  “Where is she?”

  “Oh Tyson, please. Please don’t do this.”

  “I have a right to know,” he shouted. “Where is she?”

  “Sunnybrook.” Ruma said, looking utterly deflated.

  “That’s upstate.”

  Tyson came and sat down beside her. He curled an arm around her shoulder and pulled her close to him.

  “Deal with your past or it’ll deal with you,” he said, his mouth resting on the top of her dark hair. “You’ve always said that.”

  “It’s the truth,” she said. He could tell her bottom lip was quivering. “You haven’t slept in weeks now and there’s a chance it may trace back to what happened to you as a child. Those nightmares. A child’s mind is a delicate thing. You suffered damage at the hands of that woman, Tyson. She isn’t right in the head. She’s disturbed and I can’t even fathom what that life was like. I can only imagine it must have been…”

  Sick. Little Tyson was suddenly pushing open that big peeling door and he was sure he was going to be sick. The smell from inside the room was so strong his eyes were tearing up. It was like old garbage mixed with the earthy scent of pine needles. The boiled ham Tyson had eaten for lunch began to lurch up from his stomach and into his mouth. But he caught and held it there before it could spill out. The taste of bile was making his eyes water. He forced himself to swallow it down. There was no way he would make it to the toilet in time and he didn’t even want to imagine what Mommy would do if she had come home to find throw up on the carpet. When he wiped the water out of his eyes, he could see tiny objects dangling from the ceiling. They were in the shape of Christmas trees. He had seen Mommy putting those same shapes around the house and she had called them air fresheners.

  Tyson peered through the gloom and was astonished to see what looked like the bedroom of a young boy. A boy who might have been five years old, just like he was. Toys were stacked neatly in one corner. A Buck Rogers rocket ship, a carrying case filled with toy cars and a Light Bright set still wrapped tightly in plastic.

  Beyond that was a comfy looking bed with more dolls and stuffed animals than Tyson had ever seen. They watched him rather indifferently with their saucer shaped eyes. But from here, looking into this new room filled with shadow, well, it almost looked like one of those dolls wasn’t looking back at him in quite the same way. One of those dolls didn’t seem to have eyes at all, but two cavernous sockets. Tyson took a steady step closer, his heart beginning to hammer a rising beat in his tiny chest.

  And it was then that a single fly, buzzing lazily about his head, crashed right into his eye. He swatted it away and was suddenly aware of a deeper sound. A swarming sound that had perhaps been there from the beginning but one he hadn’t been attuned to. Just then a second fly bounced off his forehead. A third off his nose. Then the room was full of them, all buzzing madly about as if they had somehow smelled him coming into the room and now they were coming for him. Tyson’s eyes were slowly adjusting to the light and he was beginning to get a better idea of where he was and why that doll buried in with the others didn’t seem to have any eyes. He was close enough now where he could see it rather clearly and he knew at once what he was seeing was no toy at all. He screamed. It must have been a loud scream too, louder than he’d ever screamed before, because he never heard the front door open and close. Never heard his name being called. Never heard a thing until he looked back and saw the long shadowy silhouette running toward him, a grinning face all twisted out of shape.

  Mummy was home.

  Chapter 13

  Sunnybrook Asylum

  A diseased shit fly lands on my toast and jam and looks up at me. His eyes glisten like jewels. He’s staring at me and rubbing his legs together like he wants to play some sort of nasty little trick. The latrine. That’s where he’s from. Everyone knows our communal washroom next door is a cesspool. I’ve told Dr. Bowes a million times to move me somewheres else, but he never does. They
want me dead and they’ve decided to kill me by sending diseased flies into my room. They think they can play God.

  But we’ll have the last laugh on them and their little shit fly, won’t we, Alexander? I snatch that fly right out of the air. Feel it buzzing around inside my hand and I toss him into Alexander’s web. Squirming to break free. The panic. That’s what brings him. I’m so proud of my Alexander. He comes shuffling out from behind the book case and is on that fat shit fly before it even knows what hit him. He’s still wiggling as Alexander wraps him up. Then Alexander turns to me and says, “Thank you, Mummy, for this meal I am about to eat.” And I say: “I love you, Alexander.”

  “I love you too, Mummy, more than life itself.”

  “I know you do, son. Eat well.”

  “Elias, have you heard a word I’ve been saying?”

  “Huh? Yeah, sure I have,” Hunter lied, stumbling into the present. “You were saying how Denise Crosby on five is sleeping with Dr. Cruz on two.”

  “I said I think they’re sleeping together, I didn’t state it as a fact, silly. You’ve been so flaky lately, everything all right?”

  Hunter found himself nodding before his brain had even understood the question. Cindi Jaworski was staring back at him with those big doughy nurse’s eyes of hers, looking about as concerned as ever. She wanted to sleep with him. On some primitive level where animals communicate with one another, Hunter knew that. And at one time he might even have been interested, but lately, something inside him had shifted a little. Nothing earth shattering, but a subtle movement that had rendered past pleasures stale and suddenly unsatisfying. She was still looking at him with those bug eyes of hers and he realized they were probably what had made him think of Brenda’s diary. He had been reading another entry he’d found scrawled inside one of her children’s books. It was amazing really that no one had ever looked inside them before. In a way, Hunter felt as though he had stumbled upon a treasure of vast importance sitting right under everyone’s noses, ignored for years.