[Darkthorn 01.0] Pond Scum

by Michael Lilly

  I love Beth.

  I love Love.

  I hate Keroth.

  “I need help,” I say. I give Love a look that says that I heard and appreciate his thoughts, but it’s time to focus. And I can’t do this one alone.

  In the past, I’ve had certain advantages: access to the case, anonymity, opacity. In this case, all of those advantages were gone, and I’m left going head-to-head against Keroth, but he’s armed to the teeth and I’m just armed with … teeth. But in the cases where you’re not as armed as you’d like, perhaps it’s less about your arsenal and more about your army. And I have one of those now. We’re small, but Beth is sharp as a knife and, well, we’ll find out how useful Love is.

  Castling is a move in chess in which, if your king and a rook haven’t moved throughout the game up to that point, and there are no obtruding pieces, you may move the king all the way to the side of the rook, which then moves to the side of the king from which it moved, effectively protecting it from a threat from outside. While a relatively difficult maneuver to pull off, it is still extremely valuable in many situations. People opt out of it for the versatility of having their second rook out on the field rather than hiding behind a wall of pawns, but in the cases where opportunity arises, one may evade checkmate and turn the tide of victory.

  My rook has appeared, and she is poised. Now is the time for me to disappear into the shadows while she and Love operate how they must, while I augment their effectiveness as transparently as I can manage. Many of my problems thus far have been direct results of attempts to make moves in daylight. Inside or outside the metaphor, darkness is my friend, and I must take advantage of it. It is my only chance of making my moves and landing them, too.

  Invisibility is an art, and I am Van Gogh. Meet my paints and brushes.

  Sixteen

  By this point, we’re drained, emotionally raw from being kept captive, divulging dark pasts, abuse, and reflecting on all of the above. We decide that it’s bed time. If there’s anything that we can come up with, odds are it will be much better thought-out on well-rested minds than whatever state we can call this. Exhausted, hopeful delirium? Beth goes back to the pull-out bed in the living room and I hear her snore within a minute.

  Love fluffs the pillow that he’s been clutching for the duration of tonight’s roller coaster and sets his head upon it, pensive.

  “Remy,” he says. Not Jeremy, not Thorn, not Detective. “Do you think we can win?” He says it with the earnest hopefulness of a child asking his parents if they thought his horse had a chance at winning the race.

  “I think we can,” I say. I’ve never doubted our ability to do so, but even as I express my confidence, I begin panicking about how, precisely, we are to pin him down. It’s like trying to nail smoke to a ghost. It needs more substance, more concreteness, before we can appropriately manipulate it.

  “Let’s go to sleep,” I say. Love nods and rests his head, finally allowing it and his body to relax. I sleep as well.

  My nightmare of the other night returns to me, but with a few differences. This time, I’m aware of the surrounding wolves. I’m aware that it’s a trap. But for reason only known to the logic-less reasoning of the dreamer, I proceed anyway. I anticipate the white wolf, ready to fight it. I ache to fight it. It waits for me on the riverbank where my gruesome end was delivered last time. I turn to look behind me, as last time, and see the eyes again, but this time, they do not attack. They are spectators. They’ve delivered their alpha’s meal and plaything to him, and now they watch.

  But the white wolf doesn’t attack. It walks to me calmly, and sits in front of me, maintaining eye contact all the way. Some part of me remembers reading that you’re not supposed to make eye contact with canines, as it indicates that you want to fight, but I can’t break away. It stands on its hind legs and lays its massive, powerful front paws on my shoulders. I sense the presence of the other wolves diminishing, and eventually they fade into nothingness. At that point, the white wolf backs off, sitting docilely again.

  I wake up.

  We eat our breakfasts at breakneck speed, and Beth and Love call their respective supervisors, each with an excuse that was bad enough to warrant staying home, but not bad enough to necessitate a doctor visit. Beth has to use my phone, as hers is still at her place, probably. At this point, it’s hard to count on anything at all anymore. I wouldn’t be surprised if I left my apartment to find that the ground was made of rubber and the air smelled like cotton candy.

  Planning and plotting with Love and Beth feels almost ridiculous, like an almost mockingly grand conspiracy formulated by a band of rebellious twelve-year-olds who, deep down, knew that it wouldn’t pan out in the end. I feel like we’re a bad parody of one of those small, elite bands of mischievous geniuses, like in The Italian Job. We’re The Italian Hand Job.

  Frustratingly, we determine that our window of greatest opportunity wouldn’t come for another few days. Under normal circumstances, that’s a wait that I can handle without problem. However, that’s three days of outwardly maintaining a façade. Three façades, even. As detectives, we’re all good at acting, hiding, pretending, and dodging. Unfortunately, our peers are also detectives, who are good at spotting when people are acting, hiding, pretending, or dodging. My entire reputation is built around it, so it’s relatively easy for me, but Beth and Love have a new challenge ahead of them in the next few days.

  So instead, I opt to focus on today. Our goal for the day is to re-arm ourselves. The sobriety and clearer thinking brought on by a night of sleep forced me to realize that, while we are now a small army, a force to be reckoned with, even a large army isn’t all that intimidating without some respectable artillery. Our ammunition takes the form of whatever bits of evidence we can use to frame our friend. So we’ll take turns following Keroth, finding out whatever we can. His normal schedule is still burned into my memory, but as he’s working here these days, rather than his home town, familiarity with his routine amounts to nothing in terms of useful intel.

  I never anticipated how much of a relief it would be to be around people without having to hide. The charade of clumsiness and forgetfulness dissolves in a satisfying whoosh, carried into nothingness on the winds of authenticity. Beth and Love are visibly impressed with my coordination, and I keep having to remind myself that the version of me with which they’re familiar is the one who trips over flat ground every time he gets a new pair of shoes. They don’t know the calm, subtle observer that I truly am. But they seem to like this version of me just as much as, if not more than, the previous model; my personality is unchanged. Just a smoother ride is all.

  We decide that our headquarters would be better stationed at Beth’s house. Yeah, it has already been broken into once, and my apartment was fairly cozy, but in the endeavor of security, ‘cozy’ doesn’t quite cut it. Beth has a legitimate security system and two beds instead of one real bed and an uncomfortable pull-out bed. And while I love Odin, he doesn’t qualify as a security system. Much cuter, though.

  Why she has a second bed is beyond me; the entirety of Beth’s home company for the year is here in the room. I think she entertains the idea of having family over for Thanksgiving or Christmas one of these years, but as of yet, the thought hasn’t taken root. Hell, maybe she just wanted something to put into her otherwise empty guest bedroom and had a few bucks to throw at it.

  Whatever the case, I pack lightly; we have to walk there, as the only one of us who owns a car is Beth, and that car is presently parked in her driveway, probably.

  “Ugh,” Beth says on the way to her place. “I forgot about the mess from the other day. How bad was it?”

  “Not too bad,” I say. “Pretty contained, at least. You’re probably missing a fork, though.”

  “Ha fucking ha,” she says. Love laughs, clearly elated at being afforded opportunity to witness our friendship at work, outside the borders of last names and whiteboards and get-to-the-point-or-fuck-off. It makes me appreciate it just that
little bit more.

  We get to Beth’s, and it appears that it hasn’t been visited since Keroth’s pet idiot (or idiots) came and grabbed her. Regardless, she draws her gun, in case an assailant lies in wait. We enter the house, and she checks for intruders in the kitchen while I disable the alarm. Love looks around, admiring the Ellen DeGeneres quality.

  “I like it,” he says, offering a supplemental nod of approval. “Modern, with a touch of … I-don’t-give-a-fuck.”

  “Just like me,” Beth says, returning from the kitchen, smiling exaggeratedly.

  We check the rest of the house and find it vacant, ready for us to occupy. Love and I visit the guest bedroom. A queen mattress, with generic white sheets and a heavy duvet. A side table on each side, each equipped with a lamp that casts an easy, red glow. It looks like a hotel room. The room is south-facing, toward the street, and thus flooded with natural, noontime light. It’s overcast, which adds to the overwhelming gray-and-white-ness of the room, but I don’t mind. Despite my preference and affinity for darkness, I can appreciate light from time to time.

  Beth takes a shower, then we all load into Beth’s car to go pick up some clothes and toiletries from Love’s place. He lives in a small house on his own, on the south end of town. It’s old, but well-kept, and tastefully furnished. It’s one floor and has a wood-burning fireplace, along with a stack of wood underneath the shallow overhang on the side of the house. While I thought my apartment was cozy, Love’s place makes it look like a hospital waiting room.

  The inside is hardwood, and to the right, the living room is dark, shades and curtains drawn. There’s a squashy, worn recliner in the corner set underneath an overhead reading lamp, with a ceiling-high bookshelf in the background, packed with various volumes ranging from cookbooks to sci-fi to crime fiction to American classics to British classics and beyond. Twain, Hemingway, Bradbury, Fitzgerald, Hawthorne; a high school English teacher would be proud. Some are old, worn, like they’ve been read several times. Others look brand new, and are placed with their spines protruding slightly from the rest, apparently waiting to divulge their contents to a curious reader. A book lies on a table beside the chair, with a bookmark neatly slotted about two thirds of the way through the pages: Saint Odd, by Dean Koontz; the last in the Odd Thomas series. I knew I liked this guy.

  I find the previous seven in the series side by side on the bookshelf, in order, sandwiched by the same author’s False Memory and Phantoms. I suppose his taste for thrillers has been invigorated by Halloween and not yet diminished. Or maybe he’s just a connoisseur of the genre. Either way, I approve silently.

  Looking left from the front door, I see the kitchen, with an attractive, dark, wooden table complemented by a bowl of fresh fruit. There are four chairs around it, as in my apartment, seemingly unused, also as in my apartment. There’s a wire rack against the far wall, bearing all sorts of culinary gadgets and devices, many of which I haven’t seen before. A stainless steel fridge, dishwasher, gas range, and double oven sparkle immaculately, and the matching sink contains only a steel wool scrubber.

  Among the dark-stained cabinets is an open-faced unit that houses numerous cookbooks, offering an explanation as to why there are so many on the bookshelf in the living room. I’m suddenly without doubt that he has at least one more bookshelf in his bedroom. Probably two. Maybe three.

  Love is quick about his business, having plunged into the darkness of his inner hallway and emerging within a minute or two, carrying a small but visibly heavy backpack.

  “Ready?” he says, interrupting Beth’s and my silent, individual analyses of his house. I don’t want to leave, but alas, we must. We have urgent matters to which to attend, and their warrant of our attention and action is not optional.

  From what we can tell, Beth’s house remains thoroughly unvisited, but we zip through the house anyway to make sure. The certainty that I have that nobody is in the house resides in my confidence that, so far, most of their watching has been from the outside. Not that it brings much comfort, but I’m sure that they’re watching us from outside right now, unwilling to risk the danger of being caught behind enemy lines with three trained and armed agents of the law.

  To my frustration, there’s extremely little that we can do until the sun goes down. In eight hours. Future plans depend on the successful execution of our next step, which can’t take place until nightfall. Should it fail, we must react accordingly, and even so much as a Plan B is beyond our grasp prior to an attempt at Plan A.

  So, we wait. Again. Some more.

  Beth, understandably, wants some time to be alone, so she shuts herself into her room for the time being. Love and I sit in ours, the window cracked just enough to invite a light chill into the room, but not enough to allow that chill to breed and spread. It whispers through the drapes, which in turn billow and shudder, imposing on the side wall a strange, rippling shadow. We both lie on the bed, silent for a time.

  I’ve never been as comfortable with someone as I am with him, but simultaneously, the sensation of security is twisted by the freshness of it. Our vulnerability to each other last night, while still just as real as then, seems like something that’s much more guarded in the daylight. I’m sure that we will remain good friends for a long time, but I’m apprehensive about the process of easing into it. I feel like I just bought a new, expensive pair of boots, but am still breaking them in.

  My normal ice-breakers won’t work here; I know what books he likes to read. I know what book he’s currently reading. I know about his past, his true past, and I don’t want to talk about that, and surely he doesn’t, either. Opting to perpetuate the silence instead of break it with forced small talk, I scroll through various apps and articles on my phone while he continues reading through Saint Odd. I resist the urge to spoil it for him. We can talk about it when he’s finished, I suppose.

  After an absolutely unidentifiable amount of time, he puts down the paperback and looks at me. “What happens next? After all of this is done, what happens then? We just … go back to our jobs like normal?”

  That’s always been my routine, yeah.

  “I’m not sure,” I say. “This is all assuming that we can pull it off and get Keroth behind bars without any of us getting thrown into the mix. I know he has people watching. He knows we’re all together. I don’t know whether he suspects that I’ve brought you guys in on this, but he definitely knows that we’re on the same team. It’ll be hard to pull much off without him knowing about it.”

  “Hmm. Yeah. But assuming we succeed.”

  I’m not sure what he’s digging at.

  “Yeah? I guess we do go back to our jobs. We cling to routine and hope that that’s enough to drive some sense of normalcy into us. Enough to keep the trauma at bay.”

  “But… can we hang out? Like … will we be friends?”

  His face betrays none of his emotions, but I can hear it in his voice. It strikes me that, despite the shitstorm that the past couple of days have been, despite the potential of getting killed when we went to rescue Beth, despite the certainty of emotional trauma bound to fester as a result of all of this, he’s taken a sort of solace in it all, if only for the fact that he’s involved in others’ lives.

  He suddenly looks so childish. No, that’s not the word. Not childish. Childlike.

  My mind zips back to his house; the floor-to-ceiling books and cozy reading corner, the immaculate kitchen. That isn’t the dwelling of somebody who spends a lot of time with friends and family. The poor kid is as alone as I am, but not until recently did he realize that, in addition to being alone, he’s lonely.

  Focus. This is an emotional wall that I lack the capacity to scale at the moment. Not so much because of the wall itself, but because of what waits inevitably on the other side. I’ve always had a talent for hopping, dodging, or bursting through the emotional walls that people put up, but it’s a talent typically employed on behalf of my employment, and as soon as I get the information I need, I can radio for an air
lift. In this case, however, there will be no “Extraction at point Tango.”

  “Yeah, definitely.” I give him a brief smile. My heart nearly breaks trying to stretch itself into the desperately barren plains of his being.

  For a moment, I entertain the idea of having a friend other than Beth. A true, consistent friend, like on Seinfeld. Admittedly, I’m drawn to it. But this is no time to speculate on any tense other than the present, conditional included. If, and only if, we all get through this, I’ll have a clearer image of what I want, and then I can decide how to proceed. But our tasks for this evening require unadulterated, unmitigated focus, something of which I usually have stocks to last weeks, months. But given the past couple of days, my supply has been all but spent, and I’m running on fumes while my unconscious darts about, trying to provide more.

  He’s tense. Not quite shaking, but maybe a notch or two away from it on the adrenaline scale.

  It’s time for a soothing voice. I’ve never used this tone genuinely; I always use it when I need a hysterical witness to be calm enough to provide details, or when I need to throw a suspect off guard so that Beth can come in for the kill.

  “Hey,” I say. He looks up at me again. “What happens will happen. We’ll do what we can today. And then we’ll figure out personal details. You’re not alone.”

  As usual, I’m certain that it’s more the volume and tone of my voice than the words themselves that calm him, but whichever the active ingredient was seemed to work. He nods, sets his book aside without marking his page, and relaxes his whole body, his face sinking into the squashy pillow.

  “Yeah,” he says. “I think I’m just going to sleep until it’s go time.”

  Probably a wise decision.

  I find myself thanking Orion that Daylight Saving Time is over, and that dusk is thus far earlier than it would have been two months ago. With that in mind, I decide to rest, too, all the while picking at the part of my brain that is suddenly okay with sharing a bed with someone I’ve only known for a day for two nights in a row. This analysis doesn’t last long, though; moments after I hear him begin snoring, I, too, drift out of consciousness. The nightmare does not return.