The Midnight Ground

by Eric Dontigney

  Tucker the human being might have murdered me in my sleep, but he probably wasn’t wired to murder a teenage girl. The thing inside him would have had to take control and the blood binding wouldn’t allow for it. So Tucker the sock puppet couldn’t do it. The thing living in the Midnight Ground couldn’t do it. I blinked a few times. No, it would have to be able to do it or there wouldn’t be any point in taking Abby. So it just can’t do it, yet, but soon. What would need to change? I reached up and rubbed my eyes. They ached from combination of the impact and the light coming through the window.

  “Light,” I said, realization dawning. “It’s waiting for darkness, when it’ll be at its strongest. Strong enough to overcome the full force of the binding.”

  It might not try to kill her as soon as the sun went down, but I doubted it would wait very long. I did some guessing. I probably had seven hours, give or take, until nightfall. It wasn’t a lot of time, but it might be time enough to get Abby clear. At least I didn’t need to figure out where they were holding her. The trick was going to be convincing myself that I had the nerve to go back into the school. Still, I had precious time to work with and that meant I could get help. I dialed the person I was sure would help, especially since I had a real live human culprit she could handcuff.

  That thought made me smile, which lasted about as long as it took for Patty’s phone to go to voicemail. I tried again and got her voicemail a second time. I started shaking my head in a reflexive negation of reality.

  “No. No. No, this is not happening,” I said.

  I started to dial 911 and stopped myself from hitting the 1 a second time. I had a working theory, but I had no facts. I didn’t know that Paul and Helena were hurt or in distress. I didn’t see Abby get abducted. No one was going to get dispatched based on my instincts. I stood there in indecision, haunted again by the images of everyone I knew dead or dying. I hated the thought of leaving Helena and Paul without immediate aid, but I had to get Patty or the sheriff involved as soon as humanly possible. I called myself ten kinds of stupid for not getting the man’s card. The sheriff’s office was going to have to be my first stop.

  I knew the drive was only about fifteen minutes. I kept reminding myself of that for every subjective hour that crawled by on the drive. I probably could have done seventy the whole way, but I was certain that such behavior would inevitably lead to me either getting into a car accident or killing some innocent bystander. I was desperate, but not quite desperate enough to create collateral damage in a mad bid to get to the sheriff’s office five seconds sooner. After all, something exactly like that, only more senseless, was exactly what had set me off on the mad journey that was my adult life. I had time, I reminded myself. I could spare the fifteen minutes to collect Patty or the sheriff. Just because it didn’t feel that way didn’t make it less true. I parked in front of the sheriff’s office in a more or less legal fashion. I was mostly between the lines. I got out and headed for the front door when a man said my name.

  “Mr. Hartworth?”

  I stopped short and turned. A pear-shaped man with a big soda in his hand gave me a perplexed smile. I dug deep.

  “Mr. Brubaker,” I said. “Nice to see you again.”

  “I heard you were still knocking around in town.”

  “Yeah,” I said, feigning normalcy. “You know how it is when you travel. I got sidetracked. I’ll probably be gone by tomorrow.”

  Gone. Dead. Basically the same, I decided.

  “Oh yeah, I lost a week in Virginia Beach that way once. The car treating you okay?”

  Impatience flared inside me like thermite fire, but I kept things as casual as I could.

  “Oh yeah. Still running fine. I’ve got no complaints.”

  Eddie Brubaker gave the car a wistful look and I heard him say something under his breath. “Lot of fun in that car.”

  I gave him a little tip of the head. “I don’t mean to rush off, but there was something I needed to talk to Patty about. Follow up.”

  “Right,” said Eddie. “The bar fight. Nasty business. I won’t keep you.”

  He gave me a wave, which seemed utterly ridiculous from a distance of three feet away, and then yelled down the street.

  “Tim!”

  I watched as he hurried down the street toward a pale teenager that seemed familiar. It took me a good five seconds to place him as the door greeter at Connor’s. He looked even more tired than he had at the store, but he’d probably been going into that damnable school on a regular basis. That’d be enough to exhaust anyone. Tim gave the math teacher a weary look and then forced a smile. I watched them talk for a moment, imagining a conversation about late homework. Then, urgency reasserted itself. I went into the building and took the first two steps up to the second floor in a big, hurried lunge. My aching body howled in agony and told me to stop doing stupid things. I took the rest of the stairs at a more sedate pace that befitted my walking wounded status. I reached the landing and stopped short outside the door. A life filled with trouble gave me reliable instincts about the emotional tenor of a place. There was something very wrong inside the office.

  I braced myself mentally and pushed open the door, fully expecting something to either jump out at me with a machete or for someone to open fire. Neither thing happened. I looked around. Patty was sitting at her desk with her hands clasped together. She wasn’t crying as I came through the door, but it looked like she’d done a bit of it in the last hour or so. She looked haunted. I stared at her for a long time, stunned at the sight. I tried to imagine what could be terrible enough to set a woman that strong to tears and came up empty. I gathered what little calm I had left and stepped into the office. I closed the door behind me. Patty looked up and registered that another human being was in the room. I don’t think she knew who I was at first. That was bad. I needed help, and she looked like she was verging on catatonia.

  “Patty,” I said. “Are you alright?”

  She looked away and then back at me. She nodded down at her desk. “He left this for you.”

  “He who? Left what?”

  Patty’s gaze went through me, as though I were a ghost. I clenched my teeth and walked over to her desk. There was a folded sheet of printer paper sitting on the desk. In tiny block letters, I saw my name written on it. I picked up the sheet of paper and unfolded it.

  I can’t help them either.

  Barnes

  I blinked down at the paper for a second. “I don’t understand.”

  Patty looked up at me, her face pale and drawn in profound pain. That sense of solidity and total focus in the present that always surrounded her was gone. She felt ephemeral. I worried that any loud noise would scatter her like dandelion fluff. She pulled her hands apart and something dropped onto the desk. Whatever it was, it fell face-down. All I saw was a rectangular patch of black leather. I noted that Patty’s hands remained curled like arthritic claws. I wondered how long she’d been holding the thing.

  She didn’t move to turn the object over, just stared through me with that expression of pain. I reached out and flipped the object over. It was a six-pointed star enclosed in a ring, made of a pale, silvery metal. Dry, brown splotches marred the metal surface. The word Sheriff was stamped into the metal. I yanked my hand back when I figured out what I was looking at. The badge was splattered in blood.

  Chapter 41

  That sudden motion of my hand sent ripples of pain across my back, up my neck and across my skull. Things got hazy around the edges as I inched very near to the limits of my tolerance. The pain was so severe that it obliterated anything like coherent thought. Eventually, a thought broke through the surface of that dark lake of agony. The pain wasn’t the problem. The accumulation of injuries was the problem. The human body was a remarkable healing machine, capable of fixing a mind-boggling number of injuries. It just needed time, which I’d denied my body. Add new injuries before old injuries were fully healed, and the pain built up at interest rates that would make credit card company exec
utives blush in shame. I gave the pain a minute to recede.

  I gestured at the badge and started to ask if someone killed the sheriff before I remembered the paper clutched in one of my hands. I can’t help them either, it said. I looked from the badge to the note in my hand. I did the math and the answer was obvious, if horrible and beyond sad. I skipped past the first, awkward sentences of the conversation. I didn’t see any need to make Patty say out loud what I already knew. It wouldn’t make it more real than the blood-splattered badge. Barnes killed himself. So often, the why of any given suicide went down as something of a locked-box mystery, only the locked box was the inaccessible mind of the victim. I’d much rather have been confronted with the haunting questions, but I knew the miserable answer to why already. It was despair and helplessness.

  Barnes was faced with a situation he could not alter. The mass death of the people he swore to protect was the only apparent outcome. Why wouldn’t he think that? I’d told him so, repeatedly. He couldn’t stop it or even mitigate the damage. He couldn’t evacuate the town because there was no tangible threat. There was no federal authority he could appeal to for help. All he got was me. I felt a swell of shame. The man had needed hope. He needed a life preserver in a storm he didn’t comprehend. I threw him a barbell weighted with the inevitability of failure. I thought it went deeper than that, though. If everything did go to hell and a bunch of people died on his watch, Barnes did not want to have to live with it afterwards. I couldn’t blame him for that. My plan had been to run like hell.

  I looked at Patty. “When?”

  She spoke in flat, mechanical tones. “Early this morning. He called me. Told me he thought I’d be a good sheriff. He said goodbye. I knew something was wrong. I told him not to do anything until I got there. I tried to keep him on the line, but he hung up. I called him again and again, but he never picked up. I drove as fast as I could, but when I got there,” her voice failed for a moment, then picked up in the same monotone. “He did it before I could get there. He was in his uniform. He used his service pistol. He left the badge on a table with a note for me. It said, ‘This is yours now.’ Like that mattered somehow.”

  I was acutely aware of the clock ticking on the wall. Six-and-a-half hours sounded like a long time to most people. Most people were stupid about a lot of things. I knew just how fast six hours could evaporate and I felt it happening, second by precious second. Tick-tock, and maybe Helena finished bleeding out. Tick-tock and maybe Abby was screaming in a dark room somewhere. Tick-tock. All those maybes, but the only thing I knew for sure was that a person I liked, someone I respected, was bleeding to death emotionally right in front of me. I hated Barnes a little for what it did to Patty, no matter how understandable his decision was in other respects.

  I looked around and pulled a chair over to sit facing Patty across her desk. I thought she was probably using the desk as a kind of mental shield. It was normalcy. It was a symbol of her professionalism. As long as she sat behind it, she could put on her deputy face and do her best to ignore what she was feeling. I had no idea what to say to her. Give me a supernatural crisis and I can either figure out what to do or when to cut out. Give me an emotional crisis and I’m as useless as the next man, which means pretty damned useless.

  “You couldn’t have stopped him,” I said after a while.

  “You don’t know that,” she said, her voice going flatter and even more mechanical.

  “I read somewhere that there are two kinds of suicide attempts. One kind is the cry for help. Those are the ones where people do something knowing they’ll be found or making sure someone has time to get to them,” I said, positive Patty knew these facts better than I did. “The other kind is when there’s nothing anyone can do, unless you happen to walk into the situation right as it’s going down. Those people don’t want help or take half measures. Sheriff Barnes didn’t take half measures.”

  I looked at the blood splattered badge. I was struck by how small and how flimsy it looked. It was hard to believe that anything so small conferred so much power. That little piece of metal allowed men like Barnes to detain, to question, to investigate, and even to use lethal force against fellow citizens. Yet, as it sat on the desk, I thought that it wouldn’t take much more than some pliers to mangle it beyond recognition. Then, I was struck by how something even smaller took all that apparent power, along with everything else, away from Barnes. We were so fragile compared with the forces we could bring to bear on each other or ourselves. I wondered how anyone ever managed to survive into adulthood, let alone managed to die of old age.

  Patty sat there, said nothing, and I bit back impatience. Tick-tock. Tick-tock. Repent Harlequin, thundered the voice of wild inappropriateness in the back of my head. I felt another stab of shame, followed by a deeper stab of guilt. I knew that I hadn’t killed the sheriff. He must have been on the verge for a while, but I couldn’t help but wonder what role I played in his tragedy. I accepted that he might not have done it without my involvement, but I also acknowledged that he might have done it anyway. To call the human heart hideously complicated underestimated the truth by orders of magnitude, and I’d probably never know for sure where my influence fit into his decision. If I survived the next few hours, I expected my conscience to spend a lot of time poking at that uncertainty.

  “Maybe so,” said Patty, snapping me out of my dark thoughts.

  Her expression remained unchanged, but her hands relaxed away from the rigid claws and she let them rest on the desktop. That was progress, but it was happening too slowly. I needed to move before it was too late.

  “So, now what?” I asked.

  Barely contained rage contorted Patty’s face. “Now what? Now I bury my friend, you self-involved son of a bitch!”

  I let her words pass through me without feeling one way or the other about them. I was a convenient target for a tremendous amount of psychic and emotional pain. Besides, rage beat catatonia any day. I needed her feeling and thinking, not staring blankly at walls while the world came to an end.

  I gave her a calm look. “I meant what happens now with the sheriff’s office?”

  She averted her face, but I saw her awkward embarrassment.

  “Oh,” she said, her voice quiet. “I’m the acting sheriff for now. At least that’s what they tell me.”

  “They?”

  “The mayor and town council. They’re trying to keep it quiet, at least for today.”

  I nodded, and then gave the badge on the desk a pointed look. Patty’s hands closed into fists and she shook her head in a couple spasmodic jerks.

  “I just can’t,” she whispered. “It’s his badge. It wasn’t supposed to be like this.”

  I reached out and picked up the bloodied badge. A second examination told me about as much as my first brief look had told me. It was just a badge. The metal looked a little worn around the edges, smoothed by years of handling, but still serviceable. I stood slowly. It wasn’t because of the pain. It was the murderous look that Patty gave me. I held up a hand to put off her anger. I took the badge to the little bathroom and turned on the hot water. A balled up paper towel would serve well enough as a wash cloth. I removed the badge from the leather case and wiped the blood from it with care and reverence.

  It was just metal, but it was also a symbol of power and authority. Practitioners who got into the habit of treating symbols with a cavalier attitude rarely understood their folly until right before it killed them. Looked at one way, the badge was just a mass-produced hunk of metal. Looked at another way, that six-pointed star in a circle was indistinguishable from the Seal of Solomon. In my circles, treating that symbol without care and reverence was wholesale stupidity. I dropped the bloodied paper towels into the trash. I wasn’t normally so careless with blood, but it couldn’t hurt Barnes anymore. I took a couple minutes to do one more thing to the badge before I went back out to the office proper. I set the badge on the desk in front of Patty. She looked from it to me.

  “Like the ma
n said, that’s yours now, and we’ll need a sheriff today,” I said.

  Those words reached her in a way nothing else did. She blinked and some of that lost solidity seeped back into her. “What? What are you talking about?”

  “It’s happening today. Unless I miss my guess, all hell will break loose right after sunset.”

  “This more of your conspiracy stuff?”

  She tried to make it sound like a mocking joke, but it came out sounding grim and final. A self-flagellating part of me said that I was a complete bastard for what I was doing. It was true. I was using Patty’s sense of duty to yank her out of her mourning. Another part of me noted that I was just doing what I promised to do, which did nothing to alleviate the feeling of right bastardness in my heart.

  “Yeah, but that’s not why I came here. You made me promise to tell you if I found a person. I did.”

  She sat statue still for a five count, before she planted her hands on the desk and rose. I saw the effort it took for her to push her pain and grief aside, but she did it. Tough lady.

  “Who?” She asked.

  “Tucker Smith.”

  She gave me an annoyed look. “If you’re trying to settle some score, Hartworth, it won’t go well for you.”

  “He attacked me this morning. Told me I was already too late to stop what’s happening.”

  “He attacked you? What happened?”

  Then she looked hard at me. It was coldly evaluative.

  I shook my head. “I didn’t kill him.”

  “What did you do?”

  I shrugged, “I might have set him a little bit on fire.”

  Her mouth hung open for a second before she said, “You did what?”