Piercing the Darkness: A Charity Horror Anthology for the Children's Literacy Initiative

by Joe R. Lansdale

  I looked around to see if anybody was watching us, then reached out and put my hand on Kyle’s shoulder. “Hey, c’mon now, it’s all right.”

  “No it isn’t,” he said. “Mom and Dad, they think I’m useless—that’s what Dad’s always saying. ‘You’re useless.’ I wish I could be a ball-player but I can’t run too good, and I can’t always catch my breath.”

  “Those things aren’t your fault, though, Kyle. You can’t help that you were born with problems like those.”

  He shrugged his shoulders. “I’m a sissy.”

  “Why, just because you don’t like the things other kids do?”

  “Uh-huh.” Said so seriously that I knew deep in his heart he believed it. It was easy to understand why: if you were a male in Cedar Hill and wanted to be accepted by the other fellahs, you had to be a White, Athletic, Semi-Articulate, Beer-Drinking Poon-Tang Wrangler who drove a pickup with at least one hunting rifle displayed in the back window, or the son of a man like that. If you were like Kyle, though, if you were a poor, blue-collar, crooked-toothed, skinny, four-eyed, club-footed asthmatic who was more interested in comic books and Night Gallery and spaceships than in sports and fighting and hunting, well, then, you were a sissy, a queer, an easy target for ridicule because you couldn’t fight back. Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot of decent folks in this community, but there’s also more than enough assholes to go around—and Don Hogan was definitely an asshole. So was his wife, but I didn’t find that out for sure until later, and by then…

  Okay, so here I am in the park that afternoon and Kyle’s crying because his dad don’t think much of him or what he wants to be when he grows up. “He says it’s stupid,” Kyle said. “He says that only smart people can write books an’ make any money an’ I’m not smart, I’m a sissy who can’t do anything an’ he says…he says that he’s ashamed of me.”

  I didn’t know what to say to him about that. I had half a mind to march over and knock ol’ Don’s teeth right down his throat, but that’d probably come back on Kyle real hard so I just stayed put.

  “Do you think it’s stupid?” I asked.

  “I think I’d be a good writer. I already wrote a bunch of stories.”

  “Ever show ‘em to your folks?”

  “They don’t want to see them. Mom says she can’t read without her glasses but she never looks for them so she can read my stories. Once I found ‘em for her so she could read a story I wrote about the people who live in the caves on the moon, an’ she...she smacked me hard in the face. She said I was being smart with her, but I wasn’t. I swear I wasn’t.”

  “Maybe she was having a bad day. I’m sure she didn’t mean it.” I was trying to give Cathy the benefit of a doubt. The only thing harder than being a blue-collar worker in this town is being the wife of one. It was that way back in 1970 and it hasn’t changed much today, you ask me. Most of the gals in this town, they’re brought to not to expect much out of life and so they don’t. You get yourself a high-school education (Cedar Hill has the lowest graduation requirements in the state), find yourself a job, and if you’re lucky you marry a man with a steady job and do what you have to to make a good home for you and yours—and if that means having to back down and suffer his occasional cruelties, that’s just part and parcel of marriage. So I gave Cathy Hogan the benefit of a doubt.

  “They’ll come around, Kyle,” I said, hoping he believed it because I for one had my doubts. “I bet they’ll come around and be really proud of you.”

  “Dad scares me.”

  Didn’t quite know how to take that. “Scares you how?”

  “He likes scaring me. Sometimes he comes into my room at night after I’m asleep and holds a pillow over my face until I wake up. He makes me fight him off ‘cause he says I need to learn to fight on account of I’m such a weakling. And sometimes he’ll sneak up behind me and shout and make me jump. He laughs at me then. Says I gotta…what is it? ‘Grow a spine.’ That’s what he says.”

  The ball game was really heating up now, folks were on their feet and shouting, whistling, making all kinds of noise, and then they started up over at the quarry with PIP. Everybody winced and looked over in the direction of the quarry, shaking their heads and complaining about the noise. Fact of the matter is, the noise and vibrations weren’t so bad in the park, not so that the day was going to be ruined. Seemed to me that if anything was going to do that, it was the dark rain-clouds in the sky. I decided right then it was time for Kyle and me to go over and get ourselves a couple of hamburgers, so I turned back to him and said, “Hey, why don’t we mosey—”

  The rest of it died in my throat.

  Kyle was rigid as a board and pale as a corpse. I’ve never seen a kid that scared before. He was holding his breath and his eyes were so wide I thought they might pop right out of his skull.

  “Kyle, hey buddy, what’s wrong?” I laid a hand on his arm and felt how he was shaking, the kind of shakes you usually think of when someone talks about getting the DTs; this boy was shaking right down to the insides of his bones.

  And he still wasn’t breathing.

  “Hey, buddy,” I said, trying to work his inhaler from his pocket, “are you all right? Do you need—”

  “They’re coming!” he screamed so loud that half the folks watching the game turned around to look at us.

  “Kyle, hey, what—”

  “They’re coming, they’re coming, THEY’RE COMING!” And now he was up on his feet and looking around him like a bank robber who’d just run out to hear the police sirens screaming down on his ass and I knew he was gonna bolt so I tried to grab hold of his arm again but he was so far into panic I didn’t have a chance and then he was off like a shot screaming they were coming they were coming everybody had to hide everybody had to get away before they got here because they’d kill us all and by then I was on my feet and going after him but there’s a lot of difference between the speed of a terrified seven-year-old even if he does have a club foot and a fifty-year-old factory worker with a tricky back but now the game was stalled and some of the players got into the act and just as I gained some ground one of the teenagers had easily tackled Kyle and knocked his glasses off and Kyle was thrashing around and screaming at the top of his lungs and crying so hard that snot flew out in ribbons and covered his face which was getting redder and redder by the second and all the time he kept shrieking on about how they were coming they were coming didn’t anybody hear them and look up there can’t you see their shadows starting to block out the sun oh god please everybody has to hide before they kill us all—

  —and then he stopped screaming because he couldn’t get air into his lungs; even from where I was I could hear the way he was wheezing, how his throat was making all these wet crackling sounds, so I pushed my way past the crowd of gawkers who’d gathered round and had to shove the teenager who’d tackled Kyle off the boy because the idiot was parked with his knees on Kyle’s chest, then I had Kyle sitting up and was holding his inhaler for him but he was still thrashing around in panic and by now Don and Cathy had come over, both of them looking for all the world like the most humiliated couple God had ever created, looking more embarrassed for themselves than concerned over their boy, and I managed to get the inhaler in Kyle’s mouth and gave him a couple of pumps but he didn’t get it all, he jerked his head away and tried to scream as he saw the shadow that was falling over the park from the rain clouds, I knew that’s what was scaring him because he pointed to the shadow and croaked out something like “…sore hay…” and then his eyes rolled up into his head and his legs shuddered and he wet himself and passed out.

  An ambulance had to be called to come get him, and they hooked him up to some oxygen and loaded him into the back and took off for Memorial. By now it was starting to rain and what folks weren’t running for one of the covered shelters or their cars were gathered around Don and Cathy offering their sympathies and trying to think of things to say to make them feel better about being so embarrassed by their boy.<
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  All I could do was stand there and shake my head, listening to the constant whump-whump-whump! from PIP at the quarry and looking at Kyle’s inhaler that I still held in my hand.

  ««—»»

  By the time I got over to the emergency room the rain was coming down pretty hard. It was lightning and thundering to beat the band, too. I got inside and found Don and Cathy in the waiting room, both of them smoking one cigarette after another (you could still smoke in hospitals back then). I wondered if they both smoked like that around the house, knowing how it would affect Kyle’s asthma, but I didn’t say anything about it. Didn’t seem like the right time for a lecture.

  “How is he?” I asked.

  Cathy just gave me a look that would have frozen fire and went back to her smoking. Don looked at her none-too pleasantly, then shook his head and said, “They got him back there but we haven’t been told anything yet.”

  I handed him the inhaler. He looked at it like it was a piece of dog shit, then snatched it out of my hand and whirled on Cathy. “How many goddamn times have I told that kid to keep this on him? Christ! Sometimes I think he doesn’t have the sense God gave an ice-cube!”

  “He had it on him,” I said. “He just dropped it when he took off like that.” I didn’t care about this lie, not one little bit.

  “Doesn’t make any difference,” Don said, not looking away from Cathy. “You gonna say something or just sit there like a knothole on a log?”

  “I’m sorry that he embarrassed us in front of all your buddies,” she said.

  “You got that right. Kid’s been nothing but a pain in the ass since he came into this world. If you hadn’t listened to that quack doctor of yours, putting you on Thalidomide—”

  “—which I stopped taking after the first month. I heard the stories. Besides, it made me feel sick all the time.”

  “You shouldn’t’ve took it in the first place! If you hadn’t, maybe we’d’ve had a normal kid with good feet and healthy lungs and—”

  “—so now it’s my fault Kyle’s sickly? Oh, you’re really a fucking prize sometimes, Donald, you know that?”

  “I’ll thank you not to—”

  They both realized I was still standing there and got real quiet. I was trying to think of a graceful way to leave when the doctor came out and told us that Kyle was going to be all right but they were going to keep him overnight to just to make sure. “It was a fairly serious episode,” he said. “It could have been fatal. Has he been taking his medications?”

  “When we can afford them,” said Cathy. “But we always make sure he’s got his inhaler.” She let out a long stream of smoke, and I knew the doctor was thinking the same thing I had when I saw them puffing away.

  “Would you like to see him?”

  “Not particularly,” said Don. “I have to go to work in the morning to make the money to pay for this goddamned hospital visit.” He looked at Cathy, who wouldn’t look at him, then turned to me and said, “You two were getting all buddy-buddy there. Why don’t you go back and see him, Jackson?”

  “Think I will, thank you.”

  They had him off in a room by himself, all hooked up to an oxygen tank with a mask over his nose and mouth. He looked fifty years old, all pale and sweaty with dark half-crescents under his eyes. He smiled when he saw it was me and waved.

  “Hello, yourself, little man.” I reached into my coat pocket and brought out the comic books he’d left back at the park. “I grabbed these up for you. Didn’t think you’d want them getting ruined in the rain.”

  He nodded his head and reached up for them, but the IV tube and needle wouldn’t let him reach very far so I laid them on the bed next to him. “That new issue of Ghost Rider got pretty wet, so I stopped off and bought you a new copy, plus they had this Special Issue just come out, so I got that for you, too.”

  He looked at the comics, then at me, and smiled under his mask. He looked like he was gonna cry again and I didn’t know that I could handle that, so I pulled up a chair next to his bed and said, in as light a tone of voice as I could manage, “So…they treating you good here so far?”

  He nodded.

  “I half expected you to be conked out after what happened. Gave us all quite the scare, is what you did.”

  He pointed to something in the corner. There was a small black-and-white television on a wheeled stand, tuned to the local PBS channel. Even though the sound was turned down pretty low, I recognized the theme they play at the start of the National Geographic shows.

  “You want me to turn it up a little bit?”

  Nod.

  I did, then adjusted the rabbit ears for a better picture, rolled it closer to the bed, and sat back down next to him. “You know, I watch this sometimes, too” I told him, which was true. “This is what you wanna watch, right?”

  Nod, nod.

  “Okay, then.”

  It was a special about this thing called the “Bog Man” they’d found in the Netherlands. The narrator said the man had been buried in this peat bog for over two thousand years. They had film of it. His brow was furrowed and there was this serene expression on his face. He wore a leather cap that reminded me of my own work hat and lay on his side. His feet and hands were shriveled (I wondered how seeing those shriveled feet made Kyle feel about his own problems but didn’t say anything) but aside from that, he looked no different from any number of guys that worked the line. Put a metal lunch bucket in his grip and it might’ve been me two thousand years from now.

  The narrator kept going on about how well-preserved the Bog Man was, and likened it to a similar discovery made in Siberia a few years back when they’d found a fully-preserved Mammoth.

  Sometime in there Kyle reached out and took hold of my hand and gave it a little squeeze. I squeezed back.

  He fell asleep after about fifteen minutes, so I got up, made sure the comics weren’t going to fall off the bed, and then did something that surprised even me; I bent down, brushed some of the hair from his forehead, and gave him a little kiss there. It seemed right somehow. I started to walk away as quiet as I could and then bumped into a clipboard hanging at the foot of his bed. I caught it just in time. As I was putting it back I glanced at what the doctor had written, then read some of the typed material.

  On top of everything else, Kyle was diabetic. I felt my heart jump a little. My Maggie had been diabetic, it was what killed her eventually. Thinking this made me sad and I missed her all the more for the thinking, then I saw something about “…macular degeneration,” and “…visual hallucinations commensurate with Charles Bonnet Syndrome.” I knew that it was pronounced Shaz Bone-eh because my Maggie’d had the same problem. You see things that aren’t there. She used to tell me toward the end that she always saw this well-dressed Negro butler following me around the house, then she’d joke about how we could use some extra help, seeing as how she’d be blind soon enough. She was totally blind the last ten days of her life.

  And Kyle Hogan was slowly losing his sight just like her.

  There’s some anger that takes on a life outside your power to do anything about it, and sometimes this anger comes wrapped up in sadness like a mummy in bandages. I was that kind of angry. Didn’t seem fair, this great kid who held my hand and smiled at me having so many problems and not even ten years old yet. Hell, I’ve know people my age who couldn’t handle half of what this kid was dealing with on a daily basis. Don and Cathy had themselves one great boy here, and needed to be reminded of it. So I put the chart back and marched out to the waiting room, all set to cross yet another line.

  Don was by himself. “Cathy and me had some words and she took off,” he said. “I was hoping I could trouble you for a lift.”

  “No problem.” I figured it’d give me a chance to say a few things to him.

  We’d been driving along a couple of minutes when Don said, “I suppose Kyle gave you quite an earful today. Kid’ll talk your head off you give him half a chance.”

  “Right before he
passed out in the park, he tried to say something to me. Sounded like ‘sore hay’ but that don’t make any sense.”

  “‘Dinosaur Day,’ is what it was. Sunday is Dinosaur Day.”

  “That something else you use to scare him with?” I asked, making sure I put a hard emphasis on the else so Don’d know that I knew things.

  He eyeballed me for a second, then grinned. “Yeah, it is. He hears old PIP start up and feels the ground start shaking and he thinks it’s monsters, so, yeah, I go with it. I tell him that it’s the sound of big old dinosaurs waking up and going for a walk. I tell him that on Dinosaur Day he needs to behave himself or else I’m gonna lock him outside so the dinosaurs can step on him or eat him. Goddamn sissy thinks that pile-driver is a dinosaur’s footsteps. No kid of mine’s gonna have an imagination like that. Won’t do him a damn bit of good later on in life.”

  “But he’s a great kid, Don. He’s smart, and he’s sensitive—”

  “Don’t give me that ‘sensitive’ shit, okay? ‘Sensitive’ and ten cents’ll get you a cup of coffee over at the L&K Restaurant. Big deal. He’s a sickly kid who ain’t never gonna get any better and on account of the way he is, Cathy doesn’t want to have another one…so I don’t get to have a boy that I can cheer on while he plays football, or teach him how to duck-hunt, or how to drive—no. I got the likes of him to deal with. You think I don’t know how the other guys at work are gonna look at me come tomorrow? ‘Too bad about Don, having himself a boy like that. Makes you wonder about his being a real man.’ And don’t tell me they ain’t gonna think that. A man’s son is the measure of his father, and I don’t want anyone thinking that Kyle is any measure of me.”

  “That may be the lousiest thing I’ve ever heard anyone say.”

  “I’ll thank you to mind your own business, Jackson.”

  “For god’s sake, man, don’t you see what you’re doing to that kid? Scarin’ him like that all the time and—”

  “—and if he’s gonna stand any chance in this world, then someone has to scare him! Don’t you get it? I got to put the fear inside of him so he’ll know what life is like. I figure there’s only so much that a kid can be scared before it becomes a permanent part of him, and then he won’t be scared of nothing anymore, and that’s the only way he’s gonna survive in this life. He’s got to have the fear within him.”