Are You Afraid of the Dark?

CHAPTER ONE

1.

The whisper-rustle of the grass and trees preceded him, like the conspiratorial murmurings of a gathering mob. Then the bloodied man appeared through the low-hanging branches and thick shrubbery, as if birthed from the trembling foliage.

He stopped when he saw Reggie. His hands pressed to his stomach where the blood soaked through. The scarlet blotch, thick and wet, made Reggie think of an ink stain spreading through the fabric of a nice starched dress shirt.

The man’s face was sweaty and pale. His breath was laboured, but he seemed otherwise calm and serene. Not as if he were bleeding to death, but rather as if he’d just entered a room at a party where he was a distinguished guest.

The man tried a smile; grimaced, stumbled.

Reggie set down the stick he’d been carrying and dropped the rock he’d been launching at wasp nests like a missile. He jogged over to the tall man.

The bloodied man staggered against a stout pine, leaned against it, slid down to a sitting position like a morning runner taking a break on a park bench. Reggie knelt down to offer the man what help he could. It was what you did when someone was in trouble and needed help.

The man stopped him with an upraised hand.

‘No ambulance …’ he coughed. ‘No police …’

He reached into his jacket for something. The effort was too great. He toppled over on his side; rolled over on his back. Looked up into the sky. Blinking, staring up as if at something grand and imposing.

The dusk-red sun shone off the blood in bright daggers of light, so that it seemed almost an astronomical phenomenon. Something caught by Hubble for science textbooks.

Then the man’s eyes closed slowly, like window shutters pulled shut, and his breathing slowed also, the chest moving up and down steadily like a billows coming to rest. It was then it dawned on Reggie that this was serious shit.

He leaned over to pull the man’s jacket open. Saw the bundle of money his hand was resting near in one pocket. As well as the shoulder holster strapped to the man’s side, and the obsidian-black surface of the pistol there.

Reggie wondered which of the two – money or gun – the man had intended to grab.

He took the money, pocketed it, looked around him.

The trees, tall and silent. Summer birds twitting and fluttering from perch to perch. No others watching, only the quiet earth.

He ran home as fast as his legs had ever carried him.

2.

He charged into the house, passing the kitchen in a blur where his mom stood over the sink, the water running and dishes clinking together.

‘What’re you up to?’ her voice bellowed after him as he ran down the hall to the bathroom. The cupboard doors under the sink opened on squeaky hinges, making him wince.

‘Just playing!’ he yelled back at her.

The water continued to run in the kitchen. He was safe for the moment and let his breath out. He grabbed the hydrogen peroxide, sterile pads, aspirin, and gauze from the First Aid kit and shut the cupboard again.

He flashed by the kitchen as fast as the first time, back to the front door and out.

‘Be back for dinner!’ she called after him.

‘Okay!’ he hollered back, already dashing across the yard towards the garage.

Inside he found the old sled leaning against one wall, unused for years, still where his dad had last put it. Reggie found a length of rope also, knotted it around the steering grips of the sled, looped the other end around his shoulder, and hefted the sled across his back.

Peroxide, pads, aspirin bottle, and gauze bundled and rolled in the hem of his shirt, sled over his shoulder, he started back down the dirt road towards the near and yet oh-so-distant woods and the gut shot man awaiting him.

3.

The man had awakened while he’d been gone, and pulled his gun on Reggie as Reggie skid to a halt a couple yards away. The man had crawled a good ways from where Reggie had left him, speckled blood trail dotting the leaves and dirt behind him like a snail’s slime tracks.

He stared at Reggie uncomprehendingly, like he was seeing an alien creature. The hand holding the pistol trembled slightly, weak, but also uncertainly, like an epileptic appendage.

‘I didn’t call the police,’ Reggie said, wondering why he hadn’t as he stood there looking into the barrel of the gun. It seemed deep and wide. A chasm of endless depth.

Calling the police was what you did when you saw someone with a gun. Calling an ambulance was what you did when you came across someone injured. He’d done neither.

Reggie thought of his dad sprawled in similar fashion, pressing his hands against a similar wound, and almost turned back then and there. It was a short run to the house, and he could be on the phone in minutes, the police and ambulance here almost as fast.

Then Reggie thought of the man’s admonition, and the gun aimed at his face. Even injured, squinting and gasping through the pain, the man’s face was intense. Focused. His eyes a bright arctic blue.

The man fell back again, looking up, his gun arm flopping to the ground like a reeled-in fish flopping its last breaths.

‘I brought First Aid stuff,’ Reggie said, stepping tentatively closer to the man.

Flapping fish-arm coming back to life, the man waved him over. Reggie didn’t like it when the pistol briefly pointed his way again with the waving. He thought of the gun going off, accidentally or otherwise, and blood coming out of him like it was from the man.

Or maybe getting hit in the face by the bullet and his head exploding.

Would he feel it? he wondered. Would he feel himself die?

He knelt again by the man, unrolling his shirt like a strip of carpet and the peroxide, sterile pads, gauze, and aspirin fell out in a clutter. The man rolled over, groaning, to stare at the stuff. Then he looked up at Reggie; blinked slowly again like a man in deep, leisurely thought.

‘I’ll need … your help …’ the man said, whispering.

Reggie nodded.

‘You took … the money …’ the man moaned. ‘Means … we’ve got an arrangement …’

Reggie nodded. That word – arrangement – stayed with him.

‘It won’t be … pretty …’ the man rasped.

Reggie paused this time, looking at the man’s bloodied middle. He thought of biology class and what was inside people. He remembered the videos they’d watched and the views given by the cameras. The pink and raw things inside everyone.

Slowly, he nodded again.

‘Then let’s get this … over with …’ the man said, and the hand holding the wound disappeared in the other side of his jacket, coming back out with a switchblade. A flick of his wrist, and four inches of wicked blade glimmered back sunlight like a jewel.

4.

When it was done there was more blood, all over the place: on the forest floor, on the man, on Reggie’s hands. Sticky and wet and slick. The dug-out bullet, dimpled and ruined, lay discarded nearby, gleaming with the wetness.

The man was delirious with the pain and effort, moaning, trembling, falling in and out of consciousness like a restless baby.

Parking the sled next to him, Reggie push-rolled the man onto it, his body shaking and straining with the work. The man was heavy and solid. It was like manoeuvring a sack of concrete, bulky and unwieldy.

It was evening when he started to pull the sled and its bloodied burden.

His mom would be wondering where he was. Stewing in irritation and maybe a pinch of worry. She might yell at him; shake her finger at him in scolding.

She might even cry.

She’d been like that since his dad had died.

The runners of the sled slid along the forest floor with surprising ease once he got moving. The layer of pine needles provided a rolling surface that eased the progress as Reggie tugged with the ropes looped over either shoulder. Knowing the woods well, he chose the most even, unobstructed path, avoiding creek beds, rocky areas, and fallen trees.

The tree house was about a football field’s distance from home, where the woods bordered his family’s property. He’d helped his dad build it a few years ago. Reggie still thought of the summer days cutting and measuring the wood boards; nailing the ladder to the trunk of the oak; passing supplies up and down. The sun bright and high and beating down on them. Pepsis and sandwiches in the shade; man and boy shirtless and smiling. Watching the becoming of the thing above them; the floor and the walls and then the roof. The pounding of the hammers and the buzz of the saws like a music of sorts, hypnotic and calming.

Reggie pulled the sled beside the oak. The tree house above put them in deeper shadow than natural from the early evening. The man seemed almost to disappear dimensionally, only his shoes sticking out from the shadow, so that Reggie had to kneel to see him more clearly.

‘I’ll be back later,’ Reggie whispered, though it would take a full shout for his mom to hear him at this distance.

He recalled the man’s words before he’d passed out again.

It’ll need … stitches, he’d muttered, staring from the bloody, crumpled bullet in his left hand, to the puckered wound in his stomach, dribbling blood like a lazy volcano.

There was nothing to be done about that just now, Reggie thought.

It was dinnertime and his mom was waiting.

5.

His hands in his jeans pockets when he approached the porch, his mom awaited him under the bulb of the porch light, like an archangel haloed by heavenly light ready to pronounce judgment. Reggie shrugged as if it all was no big deal, saying it all at once, their routine – I’m not a kid, I’m almost fifteen, don’t treat me like a baby, I can stay out late – without a word.

‘Wash up,’ she said, too tired to fight, saving him the excuse he’d been planning to get to the bathroom to wash his hands before she saw them. She closed the front door behind him as he turned down the hall.

Locking the door, he turned on the faucet and grabbed the bar of soap on the sink. Scrubbing, he watched the pink swirl away down the drain. The whirlpool effect made him think of the ocean, a sinking freighter, and sailors being sucked down into the depths.

Reggie washed the soap clean as well. Grabbed some toilet paper from the roll and scrubbed down the doorknob where he’d left a scarlet smear. He peed and flushed the bloodied tissue away with his piss.

He looked briefly in the mirror. Saw how normal he looked. Not as if he’d just helped dig a bullet out of a man.

***

His food rolled around his plate aimlessly, like wanderers in a vast wasteland. Then he noticed his mom watching him and he ate to avoid suspicion. Silverware tinkled for a time against china before his mom tried conversation.

‘You were gone awhile today,’ she said, speaking around a mouthful of roast.

Reggie shrugged.

‘I was just walking in the woods.’

Her sharp, short intake of breath was just audible in the space between them.

‘You have to be careful out there, Reggie,’ she said. ‘There’s coyotes, bobcats, mountain lions. Not to mention squatters.’

When he didn’t respond, she continued.

‘You’re gone longer and longer,’ she said, staring at him across the table. Fellow travellers separated by a looming gulf.

He didn’t know what to say and so said nothing.

‘I know it’s summer,’ she said, ‘but it’d be nice to see you around more.’

She smiled to show her diplomacy and earnestness.

‘Maybe we could go see a movie,’ she said. ‘Wasn’t there a comic book movie you wanted to see? Maybe we could have lunch, make a day of it, like we used to.’

‘Like we used to’ meant when his dad was still around. It meant lots of things, but mostly it meant when things were still good. When things still made sense. When they still knew how to be a family.

She waited for him, but he had nothing to say. There was nothing worth saying.

He stared at his plate as if the answers were there. But there was only meat and potatoes, so he crammed these in his mouth to avoid answering. Still, she wanted something; he knew this would continue unless he gave her some acknowledgement, so he nodded vaguely, noncommittally.

In his peripheral, he saw her turn her attention back to her dinner. This submission saddened him in some indefinable way.

They ate in silence and went their separate ways.

***

Reggie lay in his dark room waiting for his mom to fall asleep.

With the door ajar an inch or so, he could see the occasional flash of the television from below like the stroboscopic lights of a landing aircraft. He would also be able to hear the buzz saw sounds of her snores, and know when it was safe for him to get up.

In the meantime, he was in the dark with his thoughts.

Sometimes the darkness frightened him. Other times the blackness was calming – or numbing – like a void. A neutral place where he felt nothing.

Occasionally, as now, the dark was a place in-between, where his mind drifted to things unseemly in the light of day.

Arms behind his head, stretched out on the mattress, at first his lazy thoughts threatened to invite sleep. But then, as so often happened, they converged on the wake in the funeral home not so long ago. He didn’t want them to, tried futilely to steer his mind in another direction, yet it betrayed him.

The place had a lot of curtains, he remembered thinking. The coffin was open at the front of the room. He had to walk down an aisle of mostly empty chairs to get to it. His mom sat off to one side in a black dress like a phantom, crying.

With each deliberate step the coffin drew teasingly nearer.

Until he could see over the rim of it and what was there wasn’t his dad but a facsimile of the man. Waxen and stiff and immobile. A mannequin or life-sized doll and not his father at all.

He stared at it for a time until his mom stopped crying and one of the employees there came up to him and led him gently away. But he glanced back, keeping the thing in the casket in his line of sight for as long as possible.

Then the coffin was shut and that was it.

***

When the deep, droning hum of his mom’s snores started, Reggie rolled out of bed and slipped his shoes back on. He hadn’t changed out of his clothes and his mom hadn’t checked in on him, so there was a minimum of rustle and noise before he was ready and moving downstairs.

He took the steps to the side nearest the wall to avoid creaks.

All the lights were off.

He felt like an intruder in his own home.

At the bottom he could turn to either the living room or the kitchen or hang a hard right down the hall. In the living room the blue flashes of the television screen lit his mom’s sleeping form in an eerie and solemn glow. Intermittent with her snores were higher sounds like whimpers, and he wondered what she was dreaming of. If her dreams were anything like his, it couldn’t be anything good.

He watched her for a moment longer, bundled under an afghan blanket in the glow of the television. She seemed small and fragile there in the dark, in the glow. She was alone in the dark of the room and for a moment he wanted to reach for her. Have her hold him, tell him it was all right.

Then he was heading into the kitchen, pausing briefly at one drawer. Out the back door, moving with a stealth borne of youthful practise, and heading across the lawn to the garage for the second time that day, the building small and squat and solid like a battlefield fortification in the night.

6.

The man was gone when Reggie got back to the tree house. The sled was empty where he’d left it; no trace of the man as if he’d been raptured for judgment.

Then he heard a noise from above, looked up, and saw a pale oval high over him looking down. It moved back and out of sight, and Reggie whispered, ‘I’m coming up’ and moved to the rungs of the ladder nailed to the tree.

At the top he crawled-pushed himself onto the floor and rose to a squat.

The old lantern his dad had given him for the tree house bloomed alive when the man lit it and put both them and the space between them in a dim yellowish light. They could have been Neanderthals huddled in a cave in some distant aeon passed.

‘I brought this,’ Reggie said, still whispering, holding out the spool of fishing line he’d taken from the garage and the sewing needle from the kitchen drawer.

He held it out to the man like an offering and the man took it, setting it down with the rest of their surgical equipment – the sterile pads, gauze, aspirin, and peroxide. The man wore only his heavy denim jacket against the night chill, having removed the shirt at some point. It lay in a bloody bundle in one corner. The flesh of his torso above and below the bandaged area was pale and ghostly.

‘This won’t be … pretty either …’ the man said, sounding stronger and more lucid than before. ‘You may not … want to stay,’ he said, looking across the small room at Reggie with eyes like stone.

‘I’ll stay,’ Reggie said, squatting and watching.

The man unwound a length of fishing line and threaded it through the eye of the needle. He awkwardly and stiffly dug out his wallet from his pants pocket and brought it to his mouth and bit down on it.

Then he started.

Reggie didn’t know what to expect, but what he saw was terrifying and captivating at the same time. The man unwrapped the gauze from around his middle and peeled the blood-sticky pads from just below his ribs. He dug into his pockets again and pulled out a lighter. The lighter was shaped like a boot and he flicked the flame to life and ran the sewing needle under it for about a minute.

Then he picked up the hydrogen peroxide, twisted off the cap, and trickled a good amount over the wound, as he’d done earlier. It fizzled and foamed about the raw flesh like the remnants of ocean waves on a shoreline. The needle poked at the flesh around the wound, reminding Reggie of a tent pole pushing up at the canvas. Resistant until the needle broke and slid through the skin and trailed the fishing line over the wound, then returning the way it’d come, criss-crossing the wound like train tracks.

As he watched, a memory of his mom talking to her sister on the phone shortly after his father’s death snapped to life in Reggie’s mind. He’d caught a snippet of the conversation from his hiding place just outside his parents’ room.

I saw him on the coroner’s table! He was patched up! his mom had said, fighting back tears, sniffling back sobs. Stitched up like a doll!

The man before him now groaned behind the bit of the wallet.

His eyes teared and he had to stop to swipe at them.

His hands trembled and he had to stop again to still them.

And then the wound was closed, trickling blood like a squinty, weeping eye. He motioned Reggie over. Reggie obliged without hesitation. The man took the wallet out of his mouth.

‘Bandage it again …’ he managed, his voice again tremulous.

Reggie nodded and found the unused gauze and pads and went to work, standing, crouching, moving around the man as necessary, bringing the gauze about his middle and over the sterile pads.

‘Make it … tight …’ the man said, and Reggie did so, using the enclosed clasps to bind the gauze. When it was done, he stood and moved back, looking at his work.

The man’s eyes fluttered. He settled back onto the floor, slowly, carefully, favouring his aches and pains.

‘No ambulance …’ he said, losing consciousness. ‘No police … we have an … arrangement …’ he muttered, repeating what he had said earlier. And then he was gone, out cold, and Reggie was alone in the tree house that his dad had built and a stranger now inhabited.

CHAPTER TWO

1.

The man awoke in the middle of the night. He sat up, saw Reggie there still watching him. Reggie smiled at the man, feeling dumb, but not knowing how else to greet him. A handshake or wave would have been even dumber.

‘How long …?’ he rasped. Reggie reminded himself to bring some water back for the man next time he went to the house.

‘A few hours,’ he said.

The man held up his arm, looking at his watch.

‘It’s two in the … morning,’ the man said. ‘You’ve been here … the whole time?’