The Dark Age

by Dallas Mullican

  Spence realized he had been staring at the tree for minutes, lost in the memory. Would it still be there after all this time? He knelt at the base of the oak and pulled the overgrowth away. The box, rusted red-brown and covered in the hulls of dead insects, sat right where they’d kept it. Unable to bring himself to remove it, he concealed the hollow and stood. With a sigh of resignation, he turned from the tree. A glint in the clover at his feet caught his eye. Spence squatted and retrieved a silver medallion on a rope chain. He staggered back, the necklace woven through trembling fingers.

  * * *

  “Charlie never took this off. For anything. He showered in it and slept in it.” Spence thrust the medallion toward Sheriff Blatty. An oval with the letters CM in elegant script etched on one side, the medallion had been a gift from their mother on Charlie’s sixteenth birthday. The simple charm was his most prized possession for reasons Spence couldn’t fathom.

  “So? He could’ve lost it at any time.” Sheriff Blatty squinted at the necklace with a dubious expression.

  “Not a chance. Charlie would’ve searched the place on hands and knees until he found it. He knew I’d come looking for him, and he knew I’d eventually think of the hollow in the tree. Charlie was telling me something happened to him. He didn’t drown or vanish into thin air. Someone took him, or murdered and moved him somewhere.” Spence paced in front of the sheriff’s desk, fighting the urge to slap the smug dismissiveness from the man’s face.

  “Quite a stretch. I don’t see it. No way he could’ve predicted you’d look there. For your theory to work, Charlie needed to make it to the tree, probably injured, with a killer bearing down on him, and bury the medallion enough we didn’t find it in all our searches, but you would.”

  Put that way, it did sound farfetched. “Send out the dogs again. Use methane probes. If he’s…dead, likely the killer buried him somewhere in the forest.”

  “Not gonna happen. I’m sorry. This isn’t enough to warrant another search, or the expense.” Blatty wagged a hand. “I know you don’t agree, but unless you give me something more substantial to go on…my hands are tied.”

  “Goddammit, Sheriff.” Spence slammed a palm onto the desk. “My brother’s out there injured, held hostage, or murdered. Do your fucking job.”

  Blatty glared back. “Listen. I’ve given you my time and tried to be accommodating. I understand what you and your sister are going through. But don’t test my patience. I will send your ass back to Birmingham in a second if you keep this up.”

  “If you won’t, I’ll handle it myself.” Spence’s face flushed with anger and frustration. He balled his fists and tried to keep from saying something he would regret. As much as he hated to admit it, he might need this asshole at some point.

  “Watch yourself. I’m giving you some leeway ‘cause you’re a cop and I liked your brother. But I’m warning you, one wrong step...”

  This was Blatty’s county and Spence knew he could call Metro and have him yanked out of Jackson City in a heartbeat. He took a deep breath, shoving the raw emotion down.

  “Fine. No problems from me.” Spence threw up his hands.

  “Good.”

  Spence stomped toward the door.

  “Spencer.” The sheriff’s voiced halted Spence as he flung the door open.

  “Yeah?”

  “I hope you know I’ll do what I can. I really cared about your brother. He was a good man. Get me something to go on without tearing my town apart and you’ll have my full backing.”

  Spence stared at the floor a moment before his shoulders slumped. He looked up at the sheriff, nodded appreciation, and closed the door behind him.

  On the drive home—and part of him would always consider Jackson City home in some inescapable way—he thought of the medallion. A coincidence? Charlie happened to drop the necklace there and never found it? Not possible. No, the message was not lost on Spence, and it turned his stomach. Did Charlie, in his last desperate moments of life, crawl to that tree and place the medallion for Spence to find? If so, and after so long apart, Spence had come to his mind. Charlie had reached out and cried for him with this small token. Tears streamed down Spence’s face, his heart broken.

  * * *

  Garden Springs Nursing Home came up on his left as if he’d teleported to its location. So lost in regret and worry, the fifteen-minute drive seemed to pass in a single tear-soaked blink. The thoughts fogging his mind lifted as he pulled the Explorer into a parking spot. He noticed Stacy’s silver Camry two slots down. Spence took a deep breath, checked his eyes for redness and puffiness in the visor mirror, squirted in a few drops of Visine, and headed for the entrance.

  The place smelled of antiseptic and old age, a smell every elderly person seemed to exude when death stalked around the corner. The halls buzzed with nurses and orderlies, busy with daily tasks. A muscular, young orderly wheeled an old man by in a wheel chair. Unkempt silver-white wisps fell onto his shoulders, patches of darker grey dotting his cheeks and chin.

  “Good day, young man,” said the old man.

  “How are you?” asked Spence.

  The old man’s eyes narrowed, and he flicked a hand toward Spence. “Fuck off.”

  The orderly shrugged with a ‘what can you do’ grin. Spence shook his head and watched the two roll down the hall. Beeps and blips flitted into the corridor from the rooms he passed. Pained groans issued from a skeletal shape writhing on a bed in one. In another, an ancient woman argued frantically with thin air. The pervasive loneliness and hopelessness snaked out as a tangible force. If Hell existed, Spence feared it must be much like this place.

  At Room 121, he paused, his hands shaking. Why so damned nervous? She wouldn’t know him. His mother had been in a catatonic state for years, unable to move, showing no reaction to the world around her.

  Get in, make Stace happy, and get the hell out. He could do this.

  “Spence! Look who’s here, Momma. It’s Spence.” Stacy touched her mother’s arm, a grim smile attempting to hold on her face. She tilted her head in irritation, urging him closer. “Say something.”

  “Uh, hi, Momma.” His voice crawled into the back of his throat, the sound more croak than syllables. He edged to her bedside and tried to will his hand toward her. “Sorry, it’s been so long. I-I’m a detective now, real busy.”

  Guilt constricted his chest, the words echoing hollow in his ears. Spence didn’t know if his career would have pleased her or disappointed her as it had Charlie. His hand hovered over her shoulder. He stared at it, pushing it downward with a mix of need and repulsion. Fingers lightly raked her gown, and his palm settled on her. A flood of memories, painful and joyful, washed through him, abstract and blurred.

  Momma’s head jerked to the side. Her eyes seemed to lock with his own. Spence jumped back. Stacy squealed. The eyes were empty, vacuous things, but mirrors reflecting his own inner turmoil—all the doubt, regret, and grief he’d bottled up for years. A dam within him threatened to burst.

  “Where’s the nurse call button?” Stace, trembling, darted to the monitors, tracing lines to find the call button. She yanked it up and pressed down on the switch.

  Momma’s head remained fixed in place, aimed at Spence. Frozen, he couldn’t shift his gaze from those empty eyes. The monitors chirped at regular intervals, not increasing or decreasing, but his own pulse thundered against his temples. Like a prone statue, Momma didn’t move, but seemed to sink further into rigidity. A thin, lanky nurse strolled into the room, appearing annoyed by the summons.

  “What are you going on about, Ms. Murray?” She spoke to Momma and ignored Spence and Stacy’s presence in the room.

  “She moved. Momma turned her head and looked at my brother.” Stace, jittery, could not keep herself still. She paced like a caged animal at the foot of the bed.

  “Hmm.” The nurse placed two fingers on Momma’s neck. After a nod, she urged the head around facing straight. With a small pen light, she shone a beam into their mother’s eyes an
d dragged it left to right, up and down. She turned to them with an unreadable expression. “Muscle spasm. The neck muscles are tight and a spasm caused the head to jerk around. No reaction to visual stimulus. No change in her condition.”

  “B-but…” stammered Stace.

  The nurse waved a dismissive hand. “Let me know if it happens too often and we’ll give her a relaxer.” She didn’t wait for further comment or question, but sauntered from the room with a distracted air.

  “I can’t stop shaking,” said Stacy, wringing her hands.

  “Here, sit down.” Spence steered her to a sofa positioned beneath a wall-length window with an arm around her waist. They sat quiet for a long time, the sun warm on the back of his neck.

  “I feel like everything’s falling apart, ya know?”

  Her expression tore at his heart.

  “Yeah.” He searched for something consoling to say, but nothing came to mind. Words seemed insignificant, trivial things, unable to soothe their wounds.

  As the sky darkened, Stacy’s head resting on his shoulder, Spence made a decision. Even if it required quitting his job and returning here permanently, he would not leave until he found Charlie, or discovered what had happened to him. He owed it to his sister, to his mother, to Charlie, and to himself. Spence knew he could never repair the years of separation and hurt feelings, but he could do this one thing right.

  He had to get this right.

  CHAPTER

  14

  Evan drove slowly through Lee, Alabama, sixty miles from the Tennessee state border. Indistinguishable from every other small town in the Deep South, it made Walnut Grove seem a sprawling metropolis by comparison. A highway ran through the heart of town, serving as Main Street, with a single caution light at the turn-off to the high school. With the closest grocery store or fast food joint a good half-hour south in Rockford, a Jiffy Pep gas station doubled as a food mart, complete with ridiculously high prices. The sparse modernization blended into a canvas of green rolling hills, azure lakes, and jade-yellow pastures. A handful of residents drove forty miles to Huntsville to work in the city, but Lee remained essentially an agricultural area, and its residents lived off the land. People here cultivated fruits and vegetables in vast fields, tended livestock on farms, and hunted game in the abundant forests.

  The town elicited a heady mixture of nostalgia and loathing. Every sight and scent brought back a memory—some good, some bad. The school, which housed all grades one through twelve, produced apathetic feelings. Evan had not been popular nor unpopular, simply there. No close friends came to mind and no meaningful events. He had skipped his prom and could not recall a single date. He avoided sports, clubs, or anything requiring social interaction, never comfortable in groups.

  A park, complete with picnic tables and a walking trail snaking through the woods and circling a small lake, passed on his right. He remembered the occasional Sunday afternoon outing with his grandma. The squirrels would come up and take crumbs right from his hand. No resentment followed his return to Lee, but neither did fondness. Bad memories lacked any sting, and good ones carried little joy.

  At County Road 17, he took the left and drove three miles to Cornelius Road—the white trash district, a winding narrow road littered with rusted mobile homes and dilapidated houses. Evan pulled the pickup to a stop in front of a vacant lot, his gaze lingering on the area across the street. In the forty years since his childhood home burned to the ground, the forest had encroached to consume the small lot in pines, ragweed, and thistle. White honeysuckle and yellow daisies gave the spot color and warmth never present when his family’s ramshackle one-level home had stood there. Cold fear and tentacles of repressed loneliness and abandonment slithered out from dark rooms in his mind to stir memories he wished forgotten.

  * * *

  “I don’t want to Momma, I’m scared,” six-year-old Evan begged while digging his bare feet into puke green carpet, resisting his mother’s effort to urge him down the hall.

  “Just ‘til company leaves. Keep quiet and maybe we’ll go for ice cream after.” His mother shoved him on, a stiff palm pressed to his back.

  “They don’t leave. They stay for days, and you forget me. The room’s scary, Momma. There’s things in there making scratchy sounds. They’re gonna get me.” Evan looked up at her with tear-filmed eyes, wide and pleading.

  Stringy blonde hair crept over skeletal shoulders and flopped across her forehead to conceal her gaze. Evan needed to take care and ease off his complaints before her devil appeared in her expression—that’s what he called it, something he picked up from Grandma. Momma’s devil wasn’t near as bad as Daddy’s, but either could flash in an instant. When it took over, there would be no place to hide, and no mercy. His back and legs wore permanent scars of the devils’ visits. He shied from her glare with a whimper.

  “Stay away from ‘em. Now no more talkin’ back. Get in there and keep quiet. Not a peep. You hear me?” With long nails digging into his arms, Momma forced him into the room and shook an annoyed pointed finger in his face.

  His bottom lip quivered, but no look or plea would change her mind. The door slammed and the lock clicked from the outside. His sleeping bag lay on the floor at his feet in a six foot by five foot area next to the door, the remainder of the twelve by twelve room heaped high with boxes and a myriad of broken and useless junk floor to ceiling. The sun still shone outside, giving Evan some comfort, but it would be dark soon and the room light didn’t work. A lamp sat next to him, the bulb shot weeks ago. The only illumination would come from beneath the door and through the threadbare curtains if luck provided a moon tonight.

  As darkness fell, laughter and conversation wafted through the house—his parents and their low-life friends well down the road toward inebriation. His father hadn’t worked in years, living off disability for some injury that didn’t seem to affect him much in Evan’s estimation. Food stamps and a child stipend went toward drugs and booze for the most part. His present predicament was the norm. Evan spent more time locked in the room than out. Wednesdays, when the lady from Social Services came, his mother would dress him in clean clothes after a bath, and his parents would pretend to be the Cleavers for a few hours. His only other escape from the daily dysfunction was when they shipped him off to his grandma’s for a few days. He would have liked to live with Grandma all the time, and his parents would have been happy with the situation as well, but in order to get their monthly checks, Evan had to live with them.

  Huddled against the wall with nothing to entertain him, Evan tried to focus on the voices and ignore the scraping coming from the far wall. Roaches skittered past, but they didn’t frighten him. He could smash them with his hand if they came too close. Whatever clawed at the boxes across the room, however, proved more disconcerting. Large enough to shake a box every few minutes, the creature took form in Evan’s child mind. A troll or a gremlin like he had seen in the movies. His father had laughed at the little monsters’ antics, but they had terrified Evan—all green and scaled, long razor-sharp claws and fangs. His sleep was plagued by nightmares for weeks after.

  In the dim light, a furry shape fell out from the top of one box and tumbled to the floor with a plop. The scrape of tiny, clawed feet ticked on hardwood—the carpet in this room yanked up due to insect infestation some time ago. The pitter-patter drew closer and paused at the border of miscellaneous odds and ends and Evan’s sanctuary. He held his breath, staring into the dark gaps, heart pounding and hands shaking. A pair of eyes appeared in the crevice and glowed yellow back at him. A scream pushed into the back of his throat, threatening to burst through his mouth and over quivering lips. For what seemed hours, the two stared each other down, the furry shape twitching sporadically. Evan pushed into the corner between wall and door, gaining as much distance as possible.

  A gray blur, the size of a kitten, dashed out of hiding and scampered toward him. He squealed as the soft exterior of the thing’s body touched his feet, pricks of pointed claws
sticking into his flesh. Backpedaling like a crab, Evan shoved himself to one side and kicked out in a bicycling motion. The rat flew across the room and landed with a soft thud. Evan turned to the door and banged until his hands throbbed.

  The door flew open. Mommy glared at him, wearing her devil face. In the end, he did not escape the room or the rat, but curled up in his sleeping bag, his butt on fire from a violent thrashing. Not an unusual occurrence—some variation of that night had taken place on a regular basis for as long as he could remember. It was easy to anger Mommy or Daddy, and Evan saw their devil faces more times than he cared to count.

  One fateful night, everything in Evan’s world changed. Someone, maybe the nice policeman, told him the blaze started in a back room and spread throughout the residence. Drinking vodka and smoking cigarettes, his parents, drunk, must have caused the fire by accident. The house, all old wood, went up in seconds. Everyone claimed it a miracle Evan escaped without a scratch.

  Grandma took him in and life turned for the better. Her church donated clothes, he had his own bed with a real mattress, and not a rat or roach was to be seen anywhere. The house wasn’t much larger than his parents’ hovel, but it exuded warmth with bright flowers in vases, greenery rowed along a narrow porch, and Grandma’s knitted ornaments hanging here and there. The most prevalent elements of the home were the religious symbols and pictures. He could not look in any direction without seeing a haloed Jesus or cross, a scene from the Gospels, or an Old Testament event. Grandma defined herself by her faith; her belief permeated every aspect of her life, and now Evan’s as well. They attended church twice on Sundays, and on Wednesday nights for Bible study. Vacation Bible School in the spring, and a host of other activities, kept Evan immersed in dogma. They woke to prayer and scripture readings every morning and concluded their day with the same each night.