Darkly Dreaming Dexter

by Jeff Lindsay

  “That is no longer your choice,” he said. “You have something inside you that represents a threat to us. We plan to get rid of it, and you.”

  “Actually,” I said, sure he was talking about my Dark Passenger, “that thing is not there anymore.”

  “I know that,” he said, a little irritably, “but it originally came to you because of great traumatic suffering. It is attuned to you. But it is also a bastard child of Moloch, and that attunes you to us.” He waved a finger at me. “That’s how you were able to hear the music.

  Through the connection made by your Watcher. And when we cause you sufficient agony in a very short time, it will come back to you, like a moth to a flame.”

  I really didn’t like the sound of that, and I could see that our conversation was sliding rapidly out of my control, but just in time I remembered that I did, after all, have a gun. I pointed it at the old man and drew myself up to my full quivering height.

  “I want my children,” I said.

  He didn’t seem terribly concerned about the pistol aimed at his navel, which to me seemed like pushing the envelope of self-confidence. He even had a large wicked-looking knife on one hip, but he made no move to touch it.

  “The children are no longer your concern,” he said. “They belong to Moloch now. Moloch likes the taste of children.”

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  “Where are they?” I said.

  He waved his hand dismissively. “They’re right here on Toro Key, but you’re too late to stop the ritual.”

  Toro Key was far from the mainland and completely private.

  But in spite of the fact that it’s generally a great pleasure to learn where you are, this time it raised a number of very sticky questions—like, where were Cody and Astor, and how would I prevent life as I knew it from ending momentarily?

  “If you don’t mind,” I said, and I wiggled the pistol, just so he would get the point, “I think I’ll collect them and go home.”

  He didn’t move. He just looked at me, and from his eyes I could very nearly see enormous black wings beating out and into the room, and before I could squeeze the trigger, breathe, or blink, the drums began to swell, insisting on the beat that was embedded in me already, and the horns rose with the rhythm, leading the chorus of voices up and into happiness, and I stopped dead in my tracks.

  My vision seemed normal, and my other senses were unim-paired, but I could not hear anything but the music, and I could not do anything except what the music told me to do. And it told me that just outside this room true happiness was waiting. It told me to come and scoop it up, fill my hands and heart with bliss everlasting, joy to the end of all things, and I saw myself turning toward the door, my feet leading me to my happy destiny.

  The door swung open as I approached it, and Professor Wilkins came in. He was carrying a gun, too, and he barely glanced at me.

  Instead, he nodded at the old man and said, “We’re ready.” I could barely hear him through the wild flush of feeling and sound welling up, and I moved eagerly toward the door.

  Somewhere deep beneath all this was the tiny shrill voice of Dexter, screaming that things were not as they should be and demanding a change in direction. But it was such a small voice, and the music was so large, bigger than everything else in this endlessly wonderful world, and there was never any real question about what I was going to do.

  I stepped toward the door in rhythm to the ubiquitous music, dimly aware that the old man was moving with me, but not really DEXTER IN THE DARK

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  interested in that fact or any other. I still had the gun in my hand—they didn’t bother to take it from me, and it didn’t occur to me to use it. Nothing mattered but following the music.

  The old man stepped around me and opened the door, and the wind blew hot in my face as I stepped out and saw the god, the thing itself, the source of the music, the source of everything, the great and wonderful bull-horned fountain of ecstasy there ahead of me. It towered above everything else, its great bronze head twenty-five feet high, its powerful arms held out to me, a wonderful hot glow burning in its open belly. My heart swelled and I moved toward it, not really seeing the handful of people standing there watching, even though one of those people was Astor. Her eyes got big when she saw me, and her mouth moved, but I could not hear what she said.

  And tiny Dexter deep inside me screamed louder, but only just loud enough to be heard, and not even close to loud enough to be obeyed. I walked on toward the god, seeing the glow from the fire inside it, watching the flames in its belly flicker and jump with the wind that whipped around us. And when I was as close as I could get, standing right beside the open furnace of its belly, I stopped and waited. I did not know what I was waiting for, but I knew that it was coming and it would take me away to wonderful forever, so I waited.

  Starzak came into view, and he was holding Cody by the hand, dragging him along to stand near us, and Astor was struggling to get away from the guard beside her. It didn’t matter, though, because the god was there and its arms were moving down now, out-spread and reaching to embrace me and clasp me in its warm, beautiful grip. I quivered with the joy of it, no longer hearing the shrill, pointless voice of protest from Dexter, hearing nothing at all but the voice of the god calling from the music.

  The wind whipped the fire into life, and Astor thumped against me, bumping me into the side of the statue and the great heat coming from the god’s belly. I straightened up with only a moment of annoyance and once more watched the miracle of the god’s arms coming down, the guard moving Astor forward to share the bronze 296

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  embrace, and then there was the smell of something burning and a blaze of pain along my legs and I looked down to see that my pants were on fire.

  The pain of the fire on my legs jolted through me with the shriek of a hundred thousand outraged neurons, and the cobwebs were instantly cleared away. Suddenly the music was just noise from a loudspeaker, and this was Cody and Astor here beside me in very great danger. It was as if a hole had opened up in a dam and Dexter came pouring back in through it. I turned to the guard and yanked him away from Astor. He gave me a look of blank surprise and pitched over, grabbing my arm as he fell and pulling me down onto the ground with him. But at least he fell away from Astor, and the ground jarred the knife out of his hand. It bounced along to me and I picked it up and holstered it snugly in the guard’s solar plexus.

  Then the pain in my legs went up a notch and I quickly concentrated on extinguishing my smoldering pants, rolling and slapping at them until they were no longer burning. And while it was a very good thing not to be on fire anymore, it was also several seconds of time that allowed Starzak and Wilkins to come charging toward me.

  I grabbed the pistol from the ground and lurched to my feet to face them.

  A long time ago, Harry had taught me to shoot. I could almost hear his voice now as I moved into my firing stance, breathed out, and calmly squeezed the trigger. Aim for the center and shoot twice. Starzak goes down. Move your aim to Wilkins, repeat. And then there were bodies on the ground, and a terrible scramble of the remaining onlookers running for safety, and I was standing beside the god, alone in a place that was suddenly very quiet except for the wind. I turned to see why.

  The old man had grabbed Astor and was holding her by the neck, with a grip much more powerful than seemed possible with his frail body. He pushed her close to the open furnace. “Drop the gun,” he said, “or she burns.”

  I saw no reason to doubt that he would do as he said, and I saw no sign of any way to stop him, either. Everyone living had scattered, except for us.

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  “If I drop the gun,” I said, and I hoped I sounded reasonable,

  “how do I know you won’t put her in the fire anyway.”

  He snarled at me, and it still caused a twinge of agony. “I’m not a murderer,” he said. “It has to be done right or it’
s just killing.”

  “I’m not sure I can see a difference,” I said.

  “You wouldn’t. You’re an aberration,” he said.

  “How do I know you won’t kill us all anyway?” I said.

  “You’re the one I need to feed to the fire,” he said. “Drop the gun and you can save this girl.”

  “Not terribly convincing,” I said, stalling for time, hoping for that time to bring something.

  “I don’t need to be,” he said. “This isn’t a stalemate—there are other people on this island, and they’ll be back out here soon. You can’t shoot them all. And the god is still here. But since you obviously need convincing, how about if I slice your girl a few times and let the blood flow persuade you?” He reached down to his hip, found nothing, and frowned. “My knife,” he said, and then his expression of puzzlement blossomed into one of great astonishment.

  He gaped at me without saying a thing, simply holding his mouth wide open as if he was about to sing an aria.

  And then he dropped to his knees, frowned, and pitched forward onto his face, revealing a knife blade protruding from his back—and also revealing Cody, standing behind him, smiling slightly as he watched the old man fall, and then looking up at me.

  “Told you I was ready,” he said.

  F O R T Y

  The hurricane turned north at the last minute and ended up hitting us with nothing but a lot of rain and a little wind. The worst of the storm passed far to the north of Toro Key, and Cody, Astor, and I spent the remainder of the night locked in the elegant room with the couch in front of one door and a large overstuffed chair in front of the other. I called Deborah on the phone I found in the room, and then made a small bed out of cushions behind the bar, thinking that the thick mahogany would provide additional protection if it was needed.

  It wasn’t. I sat with my borrowed pistol all night, watching the doors, and watching the kids sleep. And since nobody disturbed us, that was really not enough to keep a full-grown brain alive, so I thought, too.

  I thought about what I would say to Cody when he woke up.

  When he put the knife into the old man he had changed everything.

  No matter what he thought, he was not ready merely because of what he had done. He had actually made things harder for himself.

  The road was going to be a long tough one for him, and I didn’t know if I was good enough to keep his feet on it. I was not Harry, DEXTER IN THE DARK

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  could never be anything like Harry. Harry had run on love, and I had a completely different operating system.

  And what was that now? What was Dexter without Darkness?

  How could I hope to live at all, let alone teach the children how to live, with a gaping gray vacuum inside me? The old man had said the Passenger would come back if I was in enough pain. Did I have to physically torture myself to call it home? How could I do that? I had just stood in burning pants watching Astor nearly thrown into a fire, and that hadn’t been enough to bring back the Passenger.

  I still didn’t have any answers when Deborah arrived at dawn with the SWAT team and Chutsky. They found no one left on the island, and no clues as to where they might have gone. The bodies of the old man, Wilkins, and Starzak were tagged and bagged, and we all clambered onto the big Coast Guard helicopter to ride back to the mainland. Cody and Astor were thrilled of course, although they did an excellent job of pretending not to be impressed. And after all the hugs and weeping showered on them by Rita, and the general happy air of a job well done among the rest of them, life went on.

  Just that: life went on. Nothing new happened, nothing within me was resolved, and no new direction revealed itself. It was simply a resumption of an aggressively plain ordinary existence that did more to grind me down further than all the physical pain in the world could have done. Perhaps the old man had been right—perhaps I had been an aberration. But I was not even that any longer.

  I felt deflated. Not merely empty but finished somehow, as if whatever I came into the world to do was done now, and the hollow shell of me was left behind to live on the memories.

  I still craved an answer to the personal absence that plagued me, and I had not received it. It now seemed likely that I never would. In my numbness I could never feel a pain deep enough to bring home the Dark Passenger. We were all safe and the bad guys 300

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  were dead or gone, but somehow that didn’t seem to be about me.

  If that sounds selfish, I can only say that I have never pretended to be anything else but completely self-centered—at least not unless someone was watching. Now, of course, I would have to learn to truly live the part, and the notion filled me with a distant, weary loathing that I couldn’t shake off.

  The feeling stayed with me over the next few days, and finally faded into the background just enough that I began to accept it as my new permanent lot. Dexter Downtrodden. I would learn to walk stooped over, and dress all in gray, and children everywhere would play mean little tricks on me because I was so sad and dreary. And finally, at some pathetic old age, I would simply fall over unnoticed and let the wind blow my dust into the street.

  Life went on. Days blended into weeks. Vince Masuoka went into a furious frenzy of activity, finding a new more reasonable caterer, fitting me for my tuxedo, and, eventually, when the wedding day itself came, getting me to the overgrown church in Coconut Grove on time.

  So I stood there at the altar, listening to the organ music and waiting with my new numb patience for Rita to sashay down the aisle and into permanent bondage with me. It was a very pretty scene, if only I had been able to appreciate it. The church was full of nicely dressed people—I never knew Rita had so many friends! Perhaps now I should try to collect some, too, to stand beside me in my new gray, pointless life. The altar was overflowing with flowers, and Vince stood at my side, sweating nervously and spasmodically wiping his hands on his pants legs every few seconds.

  Then there was a louder blare from the organ, and everyone in the church stood up and faced backward. And here they came: Astor in the lead, in her beautiful white dress, her hair done in sausage curls and an enormous basket of flowers in her hands. Next came Cody in his tiny tuxedo, his hair plastered to his head, holding the small velvet cushion with the rings on it.

  Last of all came Rita. As I saw her and the children, I seemed to see the whole drab agony of my new life parading toward me, a life of PTA meetings and bicycles, mortgages and Neighborhood DEXTER IN THE DARK

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  Watch meetings, and Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, soccer and new shoes and braces. It was an entire lifeless, colorless secondhand existence, and the torment of it was blindingly sharp, almost more than I could bear. It washed over me with exquisite agony, a torture worse than anything I had ever felt, a pain so bitter that I closed my eyes—

  And then I felt a strange stirring inside, a kind of surging fulfillment, a feeling that things were just the way they should be, now and evermore, world without end; that what was brought together here must never be rent asunder.

  And marveling at this sensation of rightness, I opened my eyes and turned to look at Cody and Astor as they climbed the steps to stand beside me. Astor looked so radiantly happy, an expression beyond any I had ever seen from her, and it filled me with a sense of comfort and rightness. And Cody, so dignified with his small careful steps, very solemn in his quiet way. I saw that his lips were moving in some secret message for me, and I gave him a questioning glance. His lips moved again and I bent just a little to hear him.

  “Your shadow,” he said. “It’s back.”

  I straightened slowly and closed my eyes for the merest moment. Just long enough to hear the hushed sibilance of a welcome-home chuckle.

  The Passenger had returned.

  I opened my eyes, back again to the world as it should be. No matter that I stood surrounded by flowers and light and music and happiness, nor that Rita was now climbing the steps intent on clamping herself to me fo
revermore. The world was whole once again, just as it should be. A place where the moon sung hymns and the darkness below it murmured perfect harmony broken only by the counterpoint of sharp steel and the joy of the hunt.

  No more gray. Life had returned to a place of bright blades and dark shadows, a place where Dexter hid behind the daylight so that he could leap out of the night and be what he was meant to be: Dexter the Avenger, Dark Driver for the thing once more inside.

  And I felt a very real smile spread across my face as Rita 302

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  stepped up to stand beside me, a smile that stayed with me through all the pretty words and hand-holding, because once more, forever and always, I could say it again.

  I do. And yes, I will, I really will.

  And soon.

  E P I L O G U E

  Far above the aimless scurrying of the city IT

  watched, and IT waited. There was plenty to see, as always, and IT was in no hurry. IT had done this many times before, and would do so again, endlessly and forever. That was what IT was for. Right now there were so many different choices to consider, and no reason to do anything but consider them until the right one was clear. And then IT

  would start again, gather the faithful, give them their bright miracle, and IT would feel once more the wonder and joy and swelling rightness of their pain.

  All that would come again. It was just a matter of waiting for the right moment.

  And IT had all the time in the world.

  A B O U T T H E A U T H O R

  JEFF LINDSAY is the author of Darkly Dreaming Dexter and Dearly Devoted Dexter. He lives in Florida with his wife and children.

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