Fairy Lights

by Lorn, Edward

  When Officer Juan was done being sick, he called for that backup he’d denied earlier.

  And that should’ve been it. They should’ve waited around for help to arrive. Instead, Lucy was distracted by the soft green glow issuing from the podium in the foyer.

  “What the fuck is that?” she said as she slowly approached the podium with the founders’ plaque.

  The little ball of green light took off, heading for the open entrance, where it hovered as if waiting on her.

  “Juan,” she called over her shoulder.

  “Yeah?” The man sounded emptied and exhausted.

  “Do you see this?”

  “Huh?”

  Lucy heard the clop, clop, clop of the officer’s approach. The sound of shoes on tile stopped beside her.

  “Wha’ is tha’? Some kind of firefly?”

  “Too big.” Lucy took a step forward and the glowing bug, or whatever it was, fluttered a foot or two out into the night. Still, it hovered, buzzing like some ramped up cicada.

  “You think it wan’s us to follow it?”

  Lucy glanced back to the officer. “Are you serious?”

  He nodded as if he saw nothing wrong with that statement.

  Lucy, shaking her head in amazement, faced the green thing again.

  Officer Juan whispered, “Oh, my.”

  And Lucy mirrored her new partner’s shock.

  Instead of the one glowing bug, there was five separate floating balls of green light. Their brightness did not flicker, but remained bright and even. Lucy thought the buzzing sound she could hear was coming from their wings. Somewhere in the luminous balls, there was, Lucy thought, slender bodies, black and sleek and...doll-like? No, that wasn’t quite right. Not dolls in the sense of a baby doll, but dolls in the Barbie sense. Thin with hour glass figures. Something long and tail-like dangling between the legs.

  Lucy saw all this in the briefest instant. Then the group of five darted off in separate directions.

  “How long before your backup arrives?” Lucy asked.

  Officer Juan was silent.

  “If you’re shrugging, Juan, I can’t hear your shoulders creaking.”

  “Sorry. I don’ know. Prolly half an hour?” She didn’t like the way his statement had sounded like a question. “You don’—” he paused, “—don’ think that those things killed these guys, do you?”

  Lucy didn’t acknowledge Officer’s Juan’s question with an answer.

  15

  Shambling through the eerily-lit wood, Bobby couldn’t be sure how long he’d been walking, but it felt like an hour or more. No way to be sure without his cell phone. For the first time in his life, he wished he had a wristwatch.

  But what did time matter? He was lost; navigating a forest by way of fairy light.

  Fairy light? Where’d that thought come from?

  In a way, they did resemble fairy lights—the stringed bulbs people hung around gazeboes and gardens to give off the appearance of swarming fireflies—so he supposed the association was apt.

  At some point, the blender-like grinding of their wings had stopped. Now, the bugs seemed to be content with hanging from the sides of trees, watching Bobby move through the woods. And, although he couldn’t hear them flying, Bobby could see them flickering on up ahead to light the way. It were as if he were walking down a hallway with motion-activated lights installed in the walls. Every four or five steps, another ten feet would be illuminated ahead to light the way.

  The idea that the fairy lights were leading him had occurred to Bobby shortly after Tony had vanished, but he’d decided he didn’t care. Whatever fate awaited him would be better than being lost in the woods and dying of starvation. Right? He assumed that was the case, anyway. Truth was—he had no frame of reference for starvation, had never known anything like it. Growing up in the suburbs with well-employed, loving parents, had seen his hunger sated breakfast, lunch, and dinner, with snacks in between, if he so desired. His concept of starvation was an image of third-world children picking at their flesh in a fog of flies, the kind of image you could smell.

  Ahead, the fairy lights revealed a body laid over a fallen trunk. The figure’s long hair was draped over the top of its head and had spilled down into a black pool of what Bobby assumed was blood. More blood than Bobby had ever seen. Both hands were out in front of the body, as if the person had been holding themselves up until the moment life fled them. The sight caused Bobby to come to a stumbling halt. He hadn’t been moving fast to begin with, but the jarring sight still almost sent him sprawling. Shaking, he slowly approached the corpse.

  The body didn’t have pants on. The bare, pasty white ass jutted skyward due to the body’s jackknifed position over the log. In the green glow coming off the fairy lights, Bobby guesstimated that the figure was either blond or a light brunette. A long, deep slash stretched from one shoulder to damn near the middle of the short figure’s back. All in all, the gash looked to be almost a foot long. Bobby couldn’t imagine the strength it would have taken to make a cut that deep—an amount of pressure fierce enough to cleave through flesh and muscle and bone.

  Bobby looked up, suddenly terrified at the idea that whoever had killed this person might still be around.

  That’s when he found Brenda, ten feet away, slumped over against a tree. He recognized her shoes, first—Nike trainers. Her jeans and shirt were soaked in black liquid, which was most assuredly blood. The right arm was split all the way down to mid-forearm, and she’d been all but decapitated. Her head dangled at a sharp angle, like the flicked open cap of a Zippo lighter.

  Between her corpse and the body draped over the fallen tree, Bobby found a machete, which was, like the bodies, covered in blood that looked black in the green light. Something told him to grab the weapon, but something else stalled him from doing so.

  What had happened here? He tried to assess the situation with the provided evidence. His father was a fan of the long-running television series Bones, and like Temperance Brennan, Bobby tried to recreate the events that had led up to Brenda’s death.

  He assumed that in a state of fear-fueled adrenaline-powered strength she’d used the machete to fend off her attacker. But who was her attacker? Up until this point, Bobby had assumed Brenda’s fate involved the creature who had stolen Tony away. Stumbling across this scene only served to confuse Bobby further.

  Not wanting to gaze upon his friend’s dead mother another moment longer, Bobby looked up and out into the woods.

  All at once, the fairy lights went out. He was left in total darkness.

  Something twinkled in the distance—red and blue.

  Couldn’t be…

  One moment he was standing beside Brenda’s mutilated corpse, and the next he was sprinting into the woods. He didn’t start screaming until he was absolutely sure what he was seeing was the lights of a police car.

  16

  Everything happened so fast that, later, Lucy would tell investigating officers that the boy’s screams had been unintelligible, that he’d simply been screaming his head off. Her exact words: “He was screeching like a banshee.”

  Lucy, as curious as a cat and bolstered by the presence of Officer Juan and his firearm, stepped outside of the observatory to find the source of the green balls of light. Officer Juan joined her, his flashlight and gun at his side.

  When he eventually testified in court, Officer Juan Vincenti would state, “I raised the wrong arm. I meant to shine the flashligh’ on him. I swear to God.” This statement would go against his later admission of, “He looked like a demon when he came around the back of the cruiser and into the ligh’s coming off my flashers. I feared for my safe’y and the safe’y of tha’ park ranger. He looked possessed. I didn’ mean to kill ‘im.”

  However, when the kid came sliding into view, Lucy saw, in her peripheral vision, Officer Juan’s gun and flashlight come up. There was less than a second between the raising of the gun and the first shot.

  “I hollered for him to fre
eze, but he didn’. I fel’ threatened,” Officer Juan would say.

  After the first shot hit the kid in the chest, Officer Juan screamed, “Stay back!” Lucy had no idea whether or not Officer Juan had been talking to her or the shot kid.

  Lucy would recall to the jury how she screamed and cried for Officer Juan to stop shooting. She went into great detail about how he kept firing long after the kid hit the ground.

  The boy’s feet kicked out ahead of him. He landed on his back. Officer Juan put five more bullets into the kid’s supine body. Lucy stood in silence, watching every round hit, like a hammer striking a side of beef. The last one entered under the boy’s jawline and sprayed brain matter onto the cruiser’s headlights. When the officer stopped firing, he approached the body. His steps were tentative, shuffling. “A kid?” Officer Juan said. “He’s jus’ a kid?”

  When asked why he continued to fire into Robert Johnson’s unmoving body, Officer Juan Vincenti would repeat to the jury and all those in attendance, including Lucy, that, “I was in fear of my safe’y.”

  Had the kid been yelling for help when he ran around the back of the cruiser? Lucy could not, for the life of her, remember.

  17

  “Today, Officer Juan Vincenti was acquitted of wrongful doing in the shooting death of Robert Johnson. The jury found Officer Vincenti innocent of manslaughter. Many judicial analysts admittedly thought the verdict in this case would return with a hung jury. Given the details of the case, a full acquittal was thought unlikely.

  “As of the time of the shooting, Pauma Valley did not require their officers to wear cameras on their person. A policy change is now under consideration.

  “Robert Johnson was shot to death while he was allegedly camping with Brenda and Anthony Turk. The mother and son have yet to be located, leading some to believe that Robert Johnson may have had something to do with their disappearance.

  “Marcus Johnson, Robert Johnson’s father, was interviewed post-trial. He had this to say: ‘My Bobby was a good kid. He wasn’t a threat to anyone. He wasn’t a demon. He wasn’t even armed. He never would’ve hurt anyone. If anything, he trusted people too much.’”

  “Johnson’s statements have drawn the interest of such high-level personalities as Oprah Winfrey, Beyoncé, and Al Sharpton. The Black Lives Matter Movement in conjunction with the NAACP plan to aid the Johnsons in filing a wrongful death lawsuit against Officer Juan Vincenti.

  “Pauma Valley Police department, who’ve since suspended Officer Vincenti with pay, has declined comment.”

  “Thanks, Barbara. Sad business all around, I’d say. Now we go to Richard Flott with a story unfolding on Huntington Beach.”

  “Thanks, Paul, and yes, here I am on Huntington Beach where a dolphin has been found, beached. This heavier-than-usual suspect has caused plenty of grief to those trying to help him back out into the sea. One woman was bitten during her attempts to help drag the animal back into the water. No word on her condition.

  “Dolphins can be beached just as easily as their oceanic brethren whales, though they are considerably smaller. There’s no telling how or why this particular dolphin came to be stranded here on Huntington Beach, but it will need the help of locals if it is going to survive. Back to you, Paul.”

  About the Author

  Edward Lorn is a reader, writer, and content creator. He’s been writing for fun since the age of six, and writing professionally since 2011. He can be found haunting the halls of Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, and Goodreads. He has blogs on both Booklikes and Wordpress, with such popular features as Ruminating On and Randomized Randomocity.

  Edward Lorn lives in the southeast United States with his wife and two children. He is currently working on his next novel.