Deep Night

by Greg F. Gifune

  Seth couldn’t be so sure. “What now?”

  He gave a halfhearted shrug. “I don’t know, but we better get back inside!”

  “We have to find him, Louis! We have to find him!”

  Darian hopped out of the way as they staggered through the doorway. Louis closed the door behind him and fell back against it, breathless. Seth began warming his hands, blowing on them and rubbing them vigorously along his thighs.

  “No sign of them out there at all,” Louis gasped.

  Darian let the sleeping bag drop to the floor then stepped out of it. “Why would they do this? Why—why would they go out there in the first place?”

  “I have no idea,” Louis answered. “But it’s one hell of a stupid move. There’s no way they’re still alive if they’ve been out there more than—”

  “We have to go back out,” Seth said. “We have to go back out and try again. We have to find them.”

  “Yes, of course,” Darian said awkwardly. “We have to try again.”

  “Be my guest.” Louis motioned to the door. “You can’t see more than a foot or two in front of you out there, and the wind’s freezing, cuts right through you. If it wasn’t so bad we could go deeper into the woods and look around, but on foot we can’t risk it, we can’t get far without getting disoriented or lost within a matter of minutes.”

  “What about the SUV?”

  “What are we supposed to do, drive through the fucking trees?” Louis unzipped his coat and shook the excess water and snow from it. “The forest out there’s too dense, the only area we could drive on is the dirt road to the main highway, and I’m not even sure we could find either one in that mess.”

  “We have to try,” Seth said. “We have to find them.”

  Darian nodded thoughtfully. “He’s right.”

  Equal parts panic and concern crept across Louis’s face. “OK.” He put the rifle down, wiped his face with a towel then tossed it aside. “Let’s get moving then. Time’s running out on him if he’s—”

  “Darian, see if you can get the fire going strong again,” Seth said quickly. “Louis and I are going to take the Explorer as far as we can along the road and try to see if maybe they walked up that way. It’s a long shot but it’s the only other thing I can think to do. If they went up into the woods instead, then…”

  Darian turned away, busying himself with the fireplace.

  “Then he’s dead,” Louis said. “By now, they’re both dead.”

  Seth pushed by him. “Let’s go.”

  A sudden knock on the door startled them all to silence. They all exchanged glances but said nothing until Darian broke the spell. “Well open it, for Christ’s sake.”

  Seth yanked the door open.

  Raymond stood in the doorway in his coat, a knit hat pulled down over his ears. He was covered in snow, and even his eyebrows and face were laced with ice. His skin was pale and wet, and had he not blinked, the others might have thought him dead.

  “Are you guys all right?” he asked in an oddly placid tone.

  Before Louis or Seth could respond, Darian took Raymond by the elbow and gently pulled him into the cabin. Raymond stared at him with a dumbfounded expression and closed the door. “Are we all right?” Darian asked.

  Seth moved to him quickly, took him by the shoulders and sized him up. “Jesus, Ray, what the hell were you doing? Are you OK?”

  Raymond nodded less than convincingly.

  “Where’s Christy?” Louis asked.

  When he offered no immediate reply, Seth asked again, afraid his brother had perhaps slipped into some sort of shock. “Ray, where is she? Are you all right?”

  Raymond stepped away from him, closer to the fireplace. He brushed snow from his coat before removing it then did the same with his knit hat. “I’m all right,” he said, tossing both items into the nearby chair. “Christy’s gone.”

  “Gone? What do you mean, gone?”

  “I meant to wake you, Seth, like you said, so you could take the next shift, but…I must’ve nodded off. When I woke up she was gone, so I went looking for her.”

  “Why didn’t you wake us up?”

  “I thought…I didn’t think I’d be out there long. I figured maybe she was out on the steps or something.”

  “Why did you leave the door open?” Darian asked.

  “Didn’t know I did,” he answered flatly. “Sorry.”

  Louis stepped closer to him. “Sorry? Is that what you just said?”

  “Yeah.” Raymond’s eyes watched the slowly mounting fire. “Sorry.”

  “Are you out of your fucking mind? You went looking for that bitch in the middle of this storm? Where? We went out there and couldn’t find any trace of you. Didn’t you hear us calling you?”

  “Can’t hear anything out there but the wind.”

  “Ray,” Seth said patiently, “where exactly did you go?”

  Raymond faced him. He already looked a bit better than he had when he’d first appeared in the doorway, but something still wasn’t right. There was something off, something slightly askew. “I told you. I went looking for her. I figured she wandered off or something.”

  “We’re in the middle of nowhere,” Louis snapped. “If you’d gone up into those woods, you—man, you think the deep woods are some kind of playground? Trust me, they’re not.”

  Raymond’s eyes shifted slowly, found Louis. “You don’t know any more about the deep woods than I do, Louis.”

  “Yeah? Well I’ll tell you what I do know, hotshot. In these conditions and in these temperatures it’s a miracle you didn’t die out there. We could’ve gotten hurt or died ourselves looking for your sorry ass, you ever think about that?” Louis clenched his fists but kept them at his sides. “Did you, you stupid sonofabitch? Did you ever think about that?”

  Raymond glanced casually at Louis’s fists. “You don’t want to do that, Lou.”

  “Look, everyone just relax.” Seth moved closer to both men. “Ray, you scared the hell out of us. We just want to make sure you’re OK. You’re not acting right, you’re not making sense.”

  Louis shook his head with disgust. “You better check the idiot for frostbite.”

  “I’m fine,” Raymond said again.

  “Un-fucking-believable, this guy. You weren’t even supposed to be here in the first place. I let you come along and you pull this shit. Nice. Where the hell’s the girl?”

  “I don’t know. She took off, I guess.”

  Seth didn’t believe him and knew no one else did either. “We were out in that storm, Raymond,” he reminded him. “We stuck close to the cabin and didn’t last more than ten minutes. You never would’ve found your way back here if you’d gone even as far as the trees.”

  “Well obviously, Seth, I did.” His face remained expressionless, but there was something more, something similar to fear just below the surface.

  “What do we do now?” Seth asked, turning his attention to Darian and Louis. “We can’t just leave her out there to freeze to death. She’s not in her right mind and this proves it, we have to try to find her.”

  “There’s no telling how long she’s been gone.” Darian knelt by the fireplace. He had the fire going strong again. “The odds of finding her at this point can’t be good.”

  “Try nonexistent,” Louis growled.

  “We need to try,” Seth said. “Come on, we can’t just—”

  “I already risked my life once tonight for this douche bag.” Louis stabbed a finger in the air at Raymond. “If that brainless twat wants to freeze to death out there that’s her business, but don’t put my life on the line by being just as stupid and following her out there.”

  Seth and Darian looked to Raymond, fearful of what his reaction might be.

  Raymond stared at him a moment before responding, then looked into the fire and muttered, “I think Louis is right. We can’t help her now, best to just wait until morning and see what happens then.”

  “Now I know this must be a nightmar
e.” Louis returned to his bed and flopped down onto it. “Raymond’s actually making fucking sense.”

  “Was there any sign of her out there at all?” Darian asked. Raymond shook his head no. “Why would she do this? Why would she just pick up in the middle of the night and leave? She had to know she’d have no chance in this storm.”

  “I didn’t trust that little bitch from the minute she got here.” Louis pulled his boots off. “Maybe she tried to go back to the other cabin or something, who knows?”

  “She was probably afraid we’d involve the police,” Seth said. “She was terrified; the poor girl was clearly traumatized. In that state of mind you don’t always make sound decisions. But what the hell do we do now? We have to do something; she could be freezing to death out there somewhere.”

  “Seth,” Louis said firmly, “there’s nothing we can do. She’s a whore-sicle by now.”

  “Jesus Christ, Lou, you’re making jokes? That girl’s probably dead.”

  “Hey, nobody told her to take off, did they?”

  Darian waved Raymond closer to the now crackling fire. “Have a seat over here for a while. You still look frozen solid.”

  Raymond pushed his coat and hat onto the floor and sat in the chair. He held his hands out toward the flames and smiled blandly at Seth. It was a helpless, joyless smile.

  “I tried to find her,” he said. “I did my best but she was just…gone.”

  “Way I see it, we tried to help her.” Louis crossed his legs, propped a foot against his opposite knee and began to rub his toes. “I’m sorry if she didn’t make it out there but in the long run it’s better for us that she left. We didn’t need to get involved in all that.”

  “Don’t you think we’re already involved?” Seth asked.

  “Far as I’m concerned, the best thing to do is pretend none of this shit ever happened.”

  Darian nodded. “Seth, I think he may have a point.”

  “Then explain it to me.”

  “If what she told us about what happened was true, we’re better off not getting involved at all, assuming that’s still possible.”

  “So we just pretend she was never here?” Seth laughed but it was more a nervous reflex than anything else. “We don’t even go look for the body once the storm clears? We don’t get a hold of the police and let them know what happened? We don’t even notify them so they can get a search party up here for her remains? We can’t do that, what the hell’s wrong with you guys?”

  “Who says we can’t?” Louis asked. “You want to get involved with the local yahoo cops up here? You want to explain to the press and your wife and the hard-ons at work what in the fuck we were doing up here in the middle of nowhere with some young girl that’s got a record for prostitution and drugs? Not to mention she might’ve axed one of their cousins to death not far from here. And now she’s probably dead too, out there in those woods somewhere. Want to explain how that happened, how or why a young girl just got up in the middle of the night and ran off, knowing she’d freeze to death in a matter of minutes? What if the cops don’t buy it?”

  “But it’s the truth.” Though Seth’s tone had been insistent, even he had begun to question what was or wasn’t true. Nothing from the moment Christy had gone into the bathroom to change seemed clear or convincing anymore. Everything else had been reduced to jumbled recollections, shadowy flashes and sleepy, disquieting sensations.

  “We know it’s the truth,” Louis told him. “But you got to admit it sounds weird. I mean, you looking forward to explaining to everybody how we just came up here for some laughs and relaxation on a little vacation and got mixed up with dead hookers and murdered rednecks? Jesus Christ, it sounds like a Joe Lansdale novel.”

  “Look, crimes have been committed here. We need to tell the truth. We’ve done nothing wrong; we tried to help that girl. We all know what happened.”

  Louis shrugged. “What happened? Some crazy girl came running into our camp covered in blood, telling all kinds of crazy stories? Maybe she was telling the truth, maybe she wasn’t. Point is we helped her and she took off in the middle of the night and we got no idea why except for maybe she didn’t want the cops involved, right? I say we wait the storm out and as soon as it clears and we can make the road, we get the hell out of here. None of it ever happened. Besides, there’s nothing to tie us to her, no proof she was ever here.”

  “I gave her one of my sweatshirts and a pair of socks,” Seth reminded him.

  “Clothes she could buy at any department store in the country. You got your name stenciled in them or something?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, that’s not the point.”

  “That’s exactly the fucking point, dude.” Louis stood up, pacing about the cabin now with long, nearly theatrical strides. “There’s nothing to connect her to us, so why get involved at all?”

  “What about the shirt she changed out of? The bloody shirt, where is it?”

  “Right here, it…it’s right here.” It was the first thing Darian had said in some time. Still kneeling next to the fireplace, he pointed to the shirt, which had been tossed there and now lay in a crumpled heap next to the hearth. “She must’ve dropped it here after she changed. Maybe she thought we’d burn it.”

  “We still can,” Louis said.

  Seth stepped forward, into his path. “That’s evidence.”

  “Who are you, fucking Johnnie Cochrane all of a sudden? Who gives a shit? We toss it in the fire, it burns up—poof!—it was never here. Just like her, none of it ever happened. We go home and get on with our lives and forget about all this. Sooner or later somebody will come looking for the dead redneck or somebody will stumble over Christy’s remains out there and that’ll be that. None of it will have anything to do with us.”

  “It’s not right,” Seth said softly. “It doesn’t…It doesn’t seem right.”

  “Seth,” Louis said evenly, “I got enough fucking problems, OK? We didn’t ask for any of this shit. We just came up here to drink some beers, play some cards and hang out for a few days, am I right? If we get involved in all this it’s not gonna change anything. That redneck’s still gonna be dead, and that girl’s still gonna be dead. The only thing that’ll change is our lives because we’ll get dragged into the middle of it. I don’t need that. Do you?”

  Raymond, who was still staring into the fire, finally spoke. “You need to listen to him, Seth.”

  Seth held his hands out like a victim of robbery. “Mother, surely you can’t agree with this.”

  “I think maybe…” Darian looked away, back into the fire with Raymond. “I think maybe Louis is right.”

  “I don’t believe this. I’m the only one who thinks we need to do the right thing here?”

  “The right thing,” Louis said through a yawn Seth found horribly inappropriate, “is to stay the hell out of this. Burn the shirt and forget it.”

  “I agree,” Darian said.

  “Raymond?” Louis asked.

  Without turning from the fire, Raymond offered a slow but deliberate nod.

  Seth wanted to protest further, but he was becoming tired. In the last several minutes he had felt an intense wave of exhaustion wash over him, and it was weakening his resolve. “I don’t think it’s the right thing to do,” he said. “This is a mistake and it’s lying for no reason. All we have to do is tell the truth. We haven’t done anything wrong.”

  “I’m not gonna stay up talking about this all night.” Louis moved by him and returned to bed. “I’m sleepy. I need to get some rest.”

  “It has to be all of us,” Darian said. “Unanimous or nothing.”

  “You really think this is the way to go, Mother?”

  He nodded. “I do, Seth.”

  “All right,” he sighed. “Then burn it.”

  Darian bent over, picked up the shirt and threw it into the fire. They all watched it burn for a while without comment. After several minutes Darian gave Seth a quick pat on the shoulder, extinguished the Coleman lantern
he’d lit earlier and headed back to his sleeping bag. “I’m so tired,” he said softly. “I need to sleep.”

  Why was everyone going to sleep? Wasn’t it strange to simply be going back to sleep after all that had happened? Seth couldn’t be quite sure. His head was swimming a bit and the waves of exhaustion were growing stronger. He could barely keep his eyes open.

  “Don’t stay up all night, you two.” Darian slipped into his sleeping bag.

  Seth turned back to the fire. “Yes, Mother.” He watched his brother a moment, the fire now the only source of light in the cabin, and tried to figure out where he had gone for so long. He knew Raymond could sense his concern and his physical presence behind him, but he refused to look at him again. He just gazed into the fire and remained quiet, a look of reserved fear on his face. Nothing was right, even his reaction to Louis. His brother had been in numerous scrapes and could handle himself. In a fistfight Raymond would destroy Louis, but even had it not come to that, under typical circumstances Raymond would’ve defended himself more vehemently, more than likely to a fault. As an adult he’d never been one to avoid a fight, physical or verbal, yet he’d done just that.

  “What were you doing out there?” Seth finally asked.

  Several seconds came and went before he answered. “Looking for Christy.”

  “But you couldn’t find her? No trace of her at all?”

  “No.”

  “How were you able to stay out there so long without freezing to death?” Seth moved closer to him. “Answer me, Raymond. Where were you?”

  “I told you.”

  “You’re lying.”

  The directness of Seth’s comment should have shaken him, but it seemed to have no impact whatsoever. Instead, Raymond seemed preoccupied, staring into the fire as if it held some special significance. After a moment, he said, “Why would I do that?”

  It was impossible for him to have survived out in the storm for thirty-some-odd minutes, which Seth calculated was the approximate amount of time he’d been gone. Raymond had always had problems, but this was not like him. “Raymond,” he said softly. “I need to know you’re all right.”