Dark Passage

by Griffin Hayes

  You don’t have to do this, Elias. Stop this now and everything will be forgiven, you have my word. You have my word!

  “No, Dr. Bowes. It’s too late for any of that. People like you are a real menace, you know that? You wanted to cut Brenda’s life support, wanted to steal my research, well, I’m sorry but you’ve gone too far. You’re a sick, sick man and sick men require treatment.”

  Bowes was shaking his head violently.

  “I’ve been rather enjoying these conversations of ours, I really have, but I can’t keep you down here forever, can I? Sooner or later someone’s bound to find out.” Hunter’s hand passed over the drill and he could see the tears rolling down Bowes’ face.

  “And to think what might have happened if you hadn’t hired me. You’d probably be off playing golf right now, wouldn’t you? Certainly, you wouldn’t be any closer to understanding the true genius of Brenda Barrett. And the idea you were so ready to cut her life support because of a little state regulation.” Hunter bent down and inserted the plug from the drill into the power outlet. Bowes was suddenly still. Hunter craned his head. “No, you make a great point. Who does this new guy think he is? Hasn’t been here more than a fraction of the time I have. How on God’s green earth does he think he can run Sunnybrook without me?”

  Bowes made a grunting sound and his cheeks flared out. It looked as though he were having trouble breathing.

  “The man who believes he’s irreplaceable is destined to suffer the greatest fall. I’m not sure who wrote that, fact, I might have just made it up.” Hunter strolled over and tore the heavy tape from Bowes’ lips. Maybe he wasn’t as bored with hearing the old man plead for his life as he thought he was.

  Drool ran down the side of Bowes’ face. There was a puncture mark in his neck and on the table beside him a needle filled with Demerol. Hunter had been plucking him every few hours, mostly to keep the good doctor quiet and well behaved.

  He would have made a great patient, Hunter thought with no small amount of pride.

  “This can’t only be about Brenda. Elias, she’s a lump of dead flesh, come to your senses, man.” Bowes’ words were slightly slurred, but Hunter could make them out just fine.

  “She is not A LUMP OF DEAD FLESH,” Hunter shouted barely in inch from Bowes’ face. “You saw her brainwave activity, you saw her body slowly healing itself.”

  “Yes, she’s getting younger, but have you taken a look at yourself lately? You’ve probably aged twenty years in the short time you’ve been here.”

  Hunter hadn’t looked at himself. Didn’t need to. Maybe didn’t want to was closer to the truth. He’d already made up his mind he wasn’t going to let Bowes squirm his way out of this one. He came forward with the duct tape.

  “Hold on, Elias,” Bowes said desperately. Hunter thought the man’s fear had all run out. He was wrong. “Just hold on one more minute. I’ve thought things over and if you feel that strongly then I won’t push to have Brenda removed from life support.” Bowes was crying now.

  “And the research paper?”

  “Dead,” Bowes spat. “I’ll tear all the forms up and put a match to them.”

  Hunter raised both eyebrows.

  “I was wrong,” Bowes continued. His face was a mess of snot, tears and dried blood. “I’m sorry. I’ll also submit my resignation, effective immediately. And recommend to the board that you take my place. It’ll all be yours, Elias. All of Sunnybrook and every single last one of its patients, especially Brenda, they’ll all be yours. And you’ll never see me again. I won’t say a word, I promise.”

  Bowes certainly was a stubborn SOB. Although his boss’ professional sensibilities had prevented him from admitting the truth, Hunter knew very well that Bowes understood just now special Brenda really was. That she could do things with her mind. Unexplainable things. It certainly explained the man’s nervous demeanor around her. It was sad the way simple men were so deathly afraid of anything they couldn’t cram into a tidy little box.

  Of course, he would be lying if he said the thought of a snickering Dr. Bowes sprawled over Brenda’s defenseless body, breathing his hot, diseased breath into her face as he made ready to pull the plug, didn’t make him want to drill a hole in the man’s head. But the old man’s empty promises hadn’t been what he was really after. It had taken hours of abuse and torture to finally extract the three little words Hunter had really been waiting to hear Bowes say.

  I WAS WRONG.

  Now came the fun part. Hunter strolled over to the heavy door and swung it shut.

  Chapter 32

  At first, all Tyson had was a name, Marlboro. The town where he’d spent the first five years of his life. He could find it easily enough with a GPS, but pinpointing the house where he’d lived, that was another matter entirely.

  Truth was, he was running on instinct. Tyson hated to think of it that way since it made him feel like a dog, lost on vacation, sniffing into the wind to find his way home, but that was exactly what he was doing. The one distinct flaw with the analogy was that home, in the strict sense of the word, definitely wasn’t where he was heading. To him, home was a place full of warm smiles and even warmer hugs. The kind of place you go to escape from a world that wants nothing more than to tear a strip off you. It wasn’t all that long ago he used to know that kind of safe haven. But not anymore.

  God how he hoped that when he came out the other side of this, Kavi might forgive him for what he’d put him through. And that maybe somehow they might both find that warm, safe place again, together. Tyson looked over at Judy. Her left hand was behind her, resting on Kavi’s tiny leg. There was a faint hint of a smile on her face and for a moment Tyson wondered if she wasn’t already there. Judy caught him staring and asked the very thing he’d been trying all this while not to think about.

  “You ready to see your childhood home again?”

  Tyson felt a bolt a tension run through him.

  “As ready as I’ll ever be.” He smiled faintly. He decided he would keep quiet for the next little bit. He needed time to dust off some old memories and sort through them in his head. Memories that felt about as far away and dilapidated as the ratty looking lunch box he kept in the storage locker with the sole surviving remnants from his shattered childhood.

  Before long they passed a sign.

  Marlboro. Population 2339.

  Ruma had always chastised Tyson for living somewhere out on the edge and now that’s exactly where he had to go. What could be further from someone’s comfort zone than rummaging through the house where as a child they were almost murdered?

  Marlboro looked like a depressing enough place to live. Signs of the recent recession were still visible. Tyson had counted no less than half a dozen out of business and bankruptcy signs before they had reached the first major intersection.

  “Any of this coming back to you?” Judy asked delicately.

  Tyson shook his head. “Not really.” The car slowed. He was trying to take in as much as he could. They rolled past a piece of green space. Park benches ringed the statue of an Iroquois brave holding a hatchet up over his head.

  But that’s not what Tyson saw. To him, that brave was holding an old plastic bread bag and its eyes were sparkling like sharpened dagger points. He could hear it whispering.

  Mommy loves you most of all.

  Judy’s voice jerked him back. The car was veering slowly into oncoming traffic. Tyson spun the wheel, the car lurched, narrowly avoiding a beat up Ford Taurus. The car’s balding occupant had just enough time to flip Tyson the finger.

  Tyson rubbed at his tired eyes and reached for his caffeine pills. He popped two out from the foil and placed them on his tongue. The taste was bitter and a touch worse than chewing aspirin, but the psychological security he gained knowing he’d be up for the next twenty-four hours was worth it.

  They drove aimlessly for the next fifteen minutes before Tyson found an intersection that looked vaguely familiar.

  “We’re getting closer,” he sai
d. “I can feel it.”

  They had driven past nearly a dozen split level houses when Tyson slammed the brakes.

  Judy stuck her hands out to keep from hitting the dashboard.

  “My goodness, Tyson, what’s…?”

  But when she followed his eyes to the house on their right, her words petered out.

  “This is it,” Tyson said.

  The lawn was all weeds. The windows shuttered with boards covered in graffiti. It was a bungalow and even from here he could see that a part of the ceiling had collapsed. When he caught Judy’s expression again he couldn’t help but wonder if that was terror or awe on her face he was seeing.

  Tyson killed the engine and stepped out onto the pavement. His legs felt like Neil Armstrong, back from a week-long stint in zero gravity.

  “You two stay here,” he said. All the saliva had suddenly gone out of his mouth.

  Kavi was struggling with his seat belt. “Daddy, I’m coming with you.”

  “Not a chance, Buzzman, you stay here with Judy.”

  Judy’s eyes were still locked on the house. “I’ll keep an eye on him.”

  Tyson looked at her. “You’re the expert on early childhood development. Tell me, once I’m in there, how will I know when I find what I’m looking for?”

  She glanced up at him, shielding her eyes from the sun. “If there’s anything left inside after all these years,” she said solemnly, “I’m sure you’ll know it when you see it.”

  Tyson rolled his eyes. “I thought you were gonna say that.”

  Judy tried to smile. “Sometimes facing what scares us most helps to lessen its grip on us.”

  Although he hadn’t been able to articulate it, he knew that was exactly why he was here.

  To let go.

  Tyson started for the house. But now each step felt like he was wadding through a raging river. There was some part of him that didn’t want to go inside that house.

  The front porch was an impenetrable fortress of junk: old sofas, broken tables, the eerie remnants of a baby stroller.

  Had his mother pushed him around in this as a child? he wondered. Of course she hadn’t, another voice shot back. She never let you leave the house.

  Tyson circled around back and found a hole in a wall large enough for a child to squeeze through.

  For a second, the thought had crossed his mind of sending Kavi inside to look for another opening, but how could he when he didn’t even know who or what might be in there?

  Tyson lay down in the tall grass and reached his hands into the hole. The air inside was cool and he grasped around until he found something solid he could latch onto. Sharp splinters of wood and brick dug into his ribs as he pulled himself through the grass and into the house. From here the place looked gloomy, seriously run down. If something were to come scurrying at him from out of the darkness—and by something he meant whatever he had seen scratching at the door of his apartment—it would have no trouble at all opening him up like a fat beetle trapped on its back. His hands clambered blindly and found a broken pipe poking up through a dirty shag rug and he used it to slide the rest of himself inside. He stood and dusted himself off, realizing he’d need to find a better way out than this. As his eyes began to adjust, the contours of the room he was standing in took on a more solid form. Against the wall was an old TV with a set of crooked rabbit ears. Across from that a battered sofa. Tyson went to it and placed the palm of his hand on the cushion. He could see it was covered in plastic and the creaking sound it made under his full weight made his skin crawl. If ever there were any doubts that he had found the right house, those doubts were now gone. And the more he looked around the more plastic wrap he found. Forks and knives littered the kitchen floor, still in their protective packaging. Door handles looking new and pristine under years of grime and decay.

  Tyson stood before a short hallway.

  How impossibly long this had looked all those years ago, he thought.

  At the end of the hall was a door, and for some reason seeing it again made his heart begin to stutter.

  The door was slightly ajar and Tyson stood for what felt like a full minute waiting. But waiting for what exactly? Did he think it was going to move on its own? The feeling of déjà vu was overwhelming.

  You’re not that little frightened boy anymore, he tried to tell himself.

  He was walking toward the door at the end of the hall now.

  Be a good boy or Mommy will have to let the monster out.

  He brushed the thought out of his mind as he passed a bedroom that may once have belonged to him. The room was gutted and the memory—like so much of his life—seemed like a faded old photograph. His focus shifted back toward the end of the hall and the monster’s room.

  He approached the door and took a deep lungful of air as he raised his hand and placed his palm against the peeling frame. He pushed. Slowly. The door swung in.

  Tyson braced himself. Certain that when the room came into full view he would see something inside, waiting for him. Something unspeakable.

  The room was dark. The windows boarded up. The only light came from a small tear in the ceiling where the roof had fallen in.

  Strangely, Tyson’s fear quickly turned to disappointment. On some level he had wanted to come face to face with whatever nasty thing he thought might be living here. But what he had found instead was a house filled with broken junk. He was wasting his time chasing ghosts.

  Funny, he thought, how so many of the fears that we carry with us aren’t much more than a product of an overactive imagination.

  Of course there hadn’t been any monster at the end of the hall. His mother was a sick woman. Exactly the reason she was shacked up in Sunnybrook. But you didn’t have to be crazy to scare the shit out of your kids so they would behave. Or at least behave the way you wanted them to.

  If you’re very quiet at night you can hear it scratching to get out.

  He could hear the floor boards moaning underneath him.

  The real danger wasn’t being attacked by something twisted and demonic scuttling out from under a rotting bed. Those were the bogeymen adults used to mess with kids’ minds. Here, the real danger was snooping around inside a house that was about as stable as a house of cards. He was thinking about finding a way out that didn’t involve crawling through the equivalent of a glorified mouse hole, when something caught his eye. It was on the inside of the door and went from the knob all the way down to the floor. Tyson stooped down for a closer look, trying desperately to quell that cold, sick feeling rising up within him. One that was telling him to run away as fast as he could.

  He reached out and ran his finger along the marks he had just found. It looked almost as if long ago something had been reaching up for the knob, but hadn’t quite made it. Even with a darkened room wrapped tightly around him, he could still tell what he was seeing: scratch marks.

  Chapter 33

  Tyson had no sooner risen to his feet when he heard the floorboards underneath him let out a final cry before giving way. His hand shot for the doorknob—at the time, the closest thing within reach—but fell just short and his nails scraped along the rotting wood of the door as the ground swallowed him whole.

  He opened his eyes. A thin stream of light was beaming in from a tiny window above. Voices shouting, clammy hands grabbing at him, shaking him hard. A face came into the brightness, then another.

  “Are you hurt?” his mother asked.

  Tyson swung his arms out protectively.

  “Whoa! Take it easy, Tyson.” It was a panicked looking Judy Stahl.

  Tyson sat up and tried to orient himself. He had fallen through the floor into the basement and now Judy and Kavi were helping him. He tried to wiggle his toes, could feel each of them in turn moving in his shoes. At least his back wasn’t broken, although it sure hurt like hell.

  “I musta got the wind knocked out of me. I feel like I went a round or two with George Foreman.”

  “Daddy, who’s George Foreman?” Kav
i asked. “Did he make you fall through the floor?”

  “No.” He was holding his head. “I should never have come inside.”

  “We were worried…” Judy started to say. “Came in to see if everything was all right and—”

  “Worried or not, I told you to stay put.”

  “You found something, didn’t you?” Judy asked, looking behind into the shadows as if something might be there.

  “Scratch marks on the door.”

  Judy’s face was blank.

  “That thing that chased us from my apartment complex. The one you thought was a dog, well, I found it at my front door scratching to get out the very same way. I remember it made me think of the monster that had terrified me as a child. So I’m saying that maybe that thing is real or at least was real at some point and now, somehow, whenever I sleep, it follows me back from that other place.”

  “But Tyson, you’re talking about memories from when you were five years old.”

  “I know and trust me, I’ve spent my whole life trying to forget. The few snippets I remember feel more like the loose pieces from some disjointed jigsaw puzzle.”

  Kavi’s hands were scrunching inside the pockets of his tiny jeans. “But you were sleeping when we found you, Daddy.” He said the words as though his child’s mind had connected two disparate facts. “Did you see him again when you were dreaming?”

  Tyson and Judy both looked at each other. Kavi was right. How long had he been out? Truth be told, he couldn’t say. Couldn’t have been longer than a few minutes, but then again, it had taken less time than that for a cocoon the size of a hockey bag to form in his kitchen.

  “This place isn’t safe,” Tyson said, not entirely sure yet if he even had the strength to get to his feet.

  Judy rose and grabbed Kavi’s hand. In the faint light, her face was a mask of tension.

  Tyson was getting to his feet when he saw the fly land on Kavi’s forehead. Kavi swatted it away, almost absently. Then two more buzzed passed his nose.