by Jeff Lindsay
“I don’t know,” she said dully.
“Ordinary,” I said. “Do you really want to be ordinary?”
“No,” she said, and she didn’t sound quite so unhappy. “But then if we’re not ordinary, people will notice us.”
“That’s why you have to learn to keep a low profile,” I said, secretly pleased at the way the conversation had worked around to prove my point. “You have to pretend to be really normal.”
“So we shouldn’t ever let anybody know we’re different,” she said. “Not anybody.”
“That’s right,” I said.
She looked at her brother, and they had another of those long silent conversations. I enjoyed the quiet, just driving through the evening congestion and feeling sorry for myself.
After a few minutes Astor spoke up again. “That means we shouldn’t tell Mom what we did today,” she said.
“You can tell her about the microscope,” I said.
“But not the other stuff?” Astor said. “The scary guy and riding with Sergeant Debbie?”
“That’s right,” I said.
“But we’re never supposed to tell a lie,” she said. “Especially to our own mother.”
“That’s why you don’t tell her anything,” I said. “She doesn’t need to know things that will make her worry too much.”
“But she loves us,” Astor said. “She wants us to be happy.”
“Yes,” I said. “But she has to think you are happy in a way she can understand. Otherwise she can’t be happy.”
There was another long silence before Astor finally said, just 264
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before we turned onto their street, “Does the scary guy have a mother?”
“Almost certainly,” I said.
Rita must have been waiting right inside the front door, because as we pulled up and parked the door swung open and she came out to meet us. “Well, hello,” she said cheerfully. “And what did you two learn today?”
“We saw dirt,” Cody said. “From my shoe.”
Rita blinked. “Really,” she said.
“And there was a piece of popcorn, too,” Astor said. “And we looked in the microphone and we could tell where we had been.”
“Micro scope,” Cody said.
“Whatever,” Astor shrugged. “But you could tell whose hair it was, too. And if it was a goat or a rug.”
“Wow,” Rita said, looking somewhat overwhelmed and uncertain, “I guess you had quite a time then.”
“Yes,” Cody said.
“Well then,” Rita said. “Why don’t you two get started on homework, and I’ll get you a snack.”
“Okay,” Astor said, and she and Cody scurried up the walk and into the house. Rita watched them until they went inside, and then she turned to me and held onto my elbow as we strolled after them.
“So it went well?” she asked me. “I mean, with the—they seemed very, um . . .”
“They are,” I said. “I think they’re beginning to understand that there are consequences for fooling around like that.”
“You didn’t show them anything too grim, did you?” she said.
“Not at all. Not even any blood.”
“Good,” she said, and she leaned her head on my shoulder, which I suppose is part of the price you have to pay when you are going to marry someone. Perhaps it was simply a public way to mark her territory, in which case I guess I should be very happy that she chose not to do so with the traditional animal method. Anyway, displaying affection through physical contact is not something I really understand, and I felt a bit awkward, but I put an arm around DEXTER IN THE DARK
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her, since I knew that was the correct human response, and we followed the kids into the house.
I’m quite sure it isn’t right to call it a dream. But in the night the sound came into my poor battered head once again, the music and chanting and the clash of metal I had heard before, and there was the feeling of heat on my face and a swell of savage joy rising from the special place inside that had been empty for so long now. I woke up standing by the front door with my hand on the doorknob, covered with sweat, content, fulfilled, and not at all uneasy as I should have been.
I knew the term “sleepwalking,” of course. But I also knew from my freshman psychology class that the reasons someone sleepwalks are usually not related to hearing music. And I also knew in the deepest level of my being that I should be anxious, worried, crawling with distress at the things that had been happening in my unconscious brain. They did not belong there, it was not possible that they could be there—and yet, there they were. And I was glad to have them. That was the most frightening thing of all.
The music was not welcome in the Dexter Auditorium. I did not want it. I wanted it to go away. But it came, and it played, and it made me supernaturally happy against my will and then dumped me by the front door, apparently trying to get me outside and—
And what? It was a jolt of monster-under-the-bed thought straight from the lizard brain, but . . .
Was it a random impulse, uncharted movement by my unconscious mind, that got me out of bed and down the hall to the door?
Or was something trying to get me to open the door and go outside? He had told the kids I would find him when the time was right—was this the right time?
Did someone want Dexter alone and unconscious in the night?
It was a wonderful thought, and I was terribly proud to have it, because it meant that I had clearly suffered brain damage and could no longer be held responsible. Once again I was blazing new trails in the territory of stupid. It was impossible, idiotic, stress-induced 266
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hysteria. No one on earth could possibly have so much time to throw away; Dexter was not important enough to anyone but Dexter. And to prove it, I turned on the floodlight over the front porch and opened the door.
Across the street and about fifty feet to the west a car started up and drove away.
I closed the door and double-locked it.
And now it was my turn once more to sit up at the kitchen table, sipping coffee and pondering life’s great mystery.
The clock said 3:32 when I sat down, and 6:00 when Rita finally came into the room.
“Dexter,” she said with an expression of soporific surprise on her face.
“In the flesh,” I said, and it was exceedingly difficult for me to maintain my artificially cheerful facade.
She frowned. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing at all,” I said. “I just couldn’t sleep.”
Rita bent her face down toward the floor and shuffled over to the coffeemaker and poured herself a cup. Then she sat across the table from me and took a sip. “Dexter,” she said, “it’s perfectly normal to have reservations.”
“Of course,” I said, with absolutely no idea what she meant,
“otherwise you don’t get a table.”
She shook her head slightly with a tired smile. “You know what I mean,” she said, which was not true. “About the wedding.”
A small bleary light went on in the back of my head, and I very nearly said Aha. Of course the wedding. Human females were obsessive on the subject of weddings, even it if wasn’t their own.
When it was, in fact, their own, the idea of it took over every moment of waking and sleeping thought. Rita was seeing everything that happened through a pair of wedding-colored glasses. If I could not sleep, that was because of bad dreams brought on by our up-coming wedding.
I, on the other hand, was not similarly afflicted. I had a great deal of important stuff to worry about, and the wedding was something that was on automatic pilot. At some point I would show up, DEXTER IN THE DARK
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it would happen, and that would be that. Clearly this was not a viewpoint I could invite Rita to share, no matter how sensible it seemed to me. No, I had to come up with a plausible reason for my sleeplessness, and in addition I needed to reassure her of my enthusiasm for the wonderful
looming event.
I looked around the room for a clue, and finally saw something in the two lunch boxes stacked beside the sink. A great place to start: I reached deep into the dregs of my soggy brain and pulled out the only thing I could find there that was less than half wet.
“What if I’m not good enough for Cody and Astor?” I said. “How can I be their father when I’m really not? What if I just can’t do it?”
“Oh, Dexter,” she said. “You’re a wonderful father. They absolutely love you.”
“But,” I said, struggling for both authenticity and the next line,
“but they’re little now. When they get older. When they want to know about their real father—”
“They know all they’ll ever need to know about that sonofa-bitch,” Rita snapped. It surprised me: I had never heard her use rough language before. Possibly she never had, either, because she began to blush. “You are their real father,” she said. “You are the man they look up to, listen to, and love. You are exactly the father they need.”
I suppose that was at least partly true, since I was the only one who could teach them the Harry Way and other things they needed to know, though I suspected this was not exactly what Rita had in mind. But it didn’t seem politic to bring that up, so I simply said, “I really want to be good at this. I can’t fail, even for a minute.”
“Oh, Dex,” she said, “people fail all the time.” That was very true. I had noticed many times before that failure seemed to be one of the identifying characteristics of the species. “But we keep trying, and it comes out all right in the end. Really. You’re going to be great at this, you’ll see.”
“Do you really think so?” I said, only mildly ashamed of the disgraceful way I was hamming it up.
“I know so,” she said, with her patented Rita smile. She reached across the table and clutched at my hand. “I won’t let you fail,” she said. “You’re mine now.”
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It was a bold claim, flinging the Emancipation Proclamation aside like that and saying she owned me. Still, it seemed to close off an awkward moment comfortably, so I let it slide. “All right,” I said.
“Let’s have breakfast.”
She cocked her head to one side and looked at me for a moment, and I was aware that I must have hit a false note, but she just blinked a few times before she said, “All right,” and got up and began to cook breakfast.
The other had come to the door in the night, and then slammed it in fear—there was no mistaking that part. He had felt fear. He heard the call and came, and he was afraid. And so the Watcher had no doubt about it.
It was time.
Now.
T H I R T Y - S I X
Iwas bone weary, confused, and, worst of all, still frightened. Every lighthearted blast of the horn had me leaping against the seat belt and searching for a weapon to defend myself, and every time an innocent car pulled up to within inches of my bumper I found myself glaring into the mirror, waiting for an unusually hostile movement or a burst of the hateful dream music flung at my head.
Something was after me. I still didn’t know why or what, beyond a vague connection to an ancient god, but I knew it was after me, and even if it could not catch me right away, it was wearing me down to the point where surrender would seem like a relief.
What a frail thing a human being is—and without the Passenger, that is all I was, a poor imitation of a human being. Weak, soft, slow and stupid, unseeing, unhearing and unaware, helpless, hopeless, and harried. Yes, I was almost ready to lie down and let it run over me, whatever it was. Give in, let the music wash over me and take me away into the joyful fire and the blank bliss of death. There would be no struggle, no negotiation, nothing but an end to all that is Dexter. And after a few more nights like the one just past, that would be fine with me.
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Even at work there was no relief. Deborah was lurking in wait, and pounced after I had barely stepped out of the elevator.
“Starzak is missing,” she said. “Couple of days of mail in the box, newspapers in the drive— He’s gone.”
“But that’s good news, Debs,” I said. “If he ran, doesn’t that prove he’s guilty?”
“It doesn’t prove shit,” she said. “The same thing happened to Kurt Wagner, and he showed up dead. How do I know that won’t happen to Starzak?”
“We can put out a BOLO,” I said. “We might get to him first.”
Deborah kicked the wall. “Goddamn it, we haven’t gotten to anything first, or even on time. Help me out here, Dex,” she said.
“This thing is driving me nuts.”
I could have said that it was doing far more than that to me, but it didn’t seem charitable. “I’ll try,” I said instead, and Deborah slouched away down the hall.
I was not even into my cubicle when Vince Masuoka met me with a massive fake frown “Where are the doughnuts?” he said accusingly.
“What doughnuts?” I said.
“It was your turn,” he said. “You were supposed to bring doughnuts today.”
“I had a rough night,” I said.
“So now we’re all going to have a rough morning?” he demanded. “Where’s the justice in that?”
“I don’t do justice, Vince,” I said. “Just blood spatter.”
“Hmmph,” he said. “Apparently you don’t do doughnuts, either.” And he stalked away with a nearly convincing imitation of righteous indignation, leaving me to reflect that I could not remember another occasion when Vince had gotten the best of me in any kind of verbal interchange. One more sign that the train had left the station. Could this really be the end of the line for poor Decaying Dexter?
The rest of the workday was long and awful, as we have always heard that workdays are supposed to be. This had never been the case for Dexter; I have always kept busy and artificially cheerful in DEXTER IN THE DARK
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my job, and never watched the clock or complained. Perhaps I had enjoyed work because I was conscious of the fact that it was part of the game, a piece of the Great Joke of Dexter putting one over and passing for human. But a really good joke needs at least one other in on it, and since I was alone now, bereft of my inner audience, the punch line seemed to elude me.
I plodded manfully through the morning, visited a corpse downtown, and then came back for a pointless round of lab work. I finished out the day by ordering some supplies and finishing a report. As I was tidying up my desk to go home, my telephone rang.
“I need your help,” my sister said brusquely.
“Of course you do,” I said. “Very good of you to admit it.”
“I’m on duty until midnight,” she said, ignoring my witty and piquant sally, “and Kyle can’t get the shutters up by himself.”
So often in this life I find myself halfway through a conversation and realizing I don’t know what I’m talking about. Very unsettling, although if everybody else would realize the same thing, particularly those in Washington, it would be a much better world.
“Why does Kyle need to get the shutters up at all?” I asked.
Deborah snorted. “Jesus Christ, Dexter, what do you do all day?
We’ve got a hurricane coming in.”
I might well have said that whatever else I do all day, I don’t have the leisure to sit around and listen to the Weather Channel. Instead, I just said, “A hurricane, really. How exciting. When did this happen?”
“Try to get there around six. Kyle will be waiting,” she said.
“All right,” I said. But she had already hung up.
Since I speak fluent Deborah, I suppose I should have accepted her telephone call as a kind of formal apology for her recent pointless hostility. Quite possibly she had come to accept the Dark Passenger, especially since it was gone. This should have made me happy. But considering the day I had been having, it was just one more splinter under the fingernail for poor Downtrodden Dexter.
O
n top of that, it seemed like sheer effrontery for a hurricane to pick this moment for its pointless harassment. Was there no end to the pain and suffering I would be forced to endure?
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Ah well, to exist is to wallow in misery. I headed out the door for my date with Deborah’s paramour.
Before I started my car, however, I placed a call to Rita, who would be very nearly home now by my calculations.
“Dexter,” she answered breathlessly, “I can’t remember how much bottled water we have and the lines at Publix are all the way out into the parking lot.”
“Well then we’ll just have to drink beer,” I said.
“I think we’re okay on the canned food, except that beef stew has been there for two years,” she said, apparently unaware that anyone else might have said something. So I let her rattle on, hoping she would slow down eventually. “I checked the flashlights two weeks ago,” she said. “Remember, when the power went out for forty minutes? And the extra batteries are in the refrigerator, on the bottom shelf at the back. I have Cody and Astor with me now, there’s no after-school program tomorrow, but somebody at school told them about Hurricane Andrew and I think Astor is a little frightened, so maybe when you get home you could talk to them? And explain that it’s like a big thunderstorm and we’ll be all right, there’s just going to be a lot of wind and noise and the lights will go out for a little while.
But if you see a store on the way home that isn’t too crowded be sure to stop and get some bottled water, as much as you can get. And some ice, I think the cooler is still on the shelf above the washing machine, we can fill it with ice and put in the perishables. Oh—what about your boat? Will it be all right where it is, or do you need to do something with it? I think we can get the things out of the yard before dark, I’m sure we’ll be fine, and it probably won’t hit here anyway.”
“All right,” I said. “I’ll be a little late getting home.”
“All right. Oh—look at that, the Winn-Dixie store doesn’t look too bad. I guess we’ll try to get in, there’s a parking spot. Bye!”
I would never have thought it possible, but Rita had apparently learned to get by without breathing. Or perhaps she only had to come up for air every hour or so, like a whale. Still, it was an inspiring performance, and after witnessing it, I felt far better prepared to put up shutters with my sister’s one-handed boyfriend. I started the car and slid out into traffic.
