Return to Darkness

by Laimo, Michael

  “Hell no,” Lisa says. “I’m going with my husband.”

  “I need the both of you to stay put until that thing dies. Then you’re both going to drag it back out to the woods, and leave it there. Got it?”

  “No way am I staying here with that thing!” Danny turns to his father. “Dad. Tell the doc. I’m going with you too.”

  “Like fuck you are. Just do what the doc says, got it?”

  “Dad…”

  “Do it!” Pops-Eddie cries, grimacing in pain.

  Lisa nods, then says, “Danny, go upstairs and get the keys to the pickup.”

  “Thank you,” I say, relieved.

  Danny bounds up the steps two at a time, cursing under his breath. Pops-Eddie, still gripping his wound tightly, slowly climbs to his feet. Shea moves to help him, but he shakes her off. “I can do it, I ain’t no invalid.” He sure looks like one though. He’s bleeding like a stuck pig, his face is pale like parchment, and his hair, thinning to show a red scalp beneath, is standing as high as his wife’s unmanageable bush. His glassy eyes roll toward mine. “Thanks doc, I owe you one.”

  I nod, not feeling the slightest bit of guilt over the thoughts running through my head. Little does Pops-Eddie know what I have in store for him.

  Keys jingling in hand, Danny comes hurdling back down the stairs, but Pops Eddie is already making his way over there. Shea stays close to him, while Lisa stands motionless as far away from the moaning Isolate as possible.

  I take one last look at the creature before following Pops-Eddie back upstairs. It’s dying now, most of its blood puddled on the floor beneath it. Its eyes, once bright golden rings circling small black pupils, have faded into murky gray pools, clouded over with near-sightlessness. Its head bobs up and down, like a man on the verge of falling asleep.

  “Fuck you,” I mutter, and follow the family upstairs.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Outside, the late afternoon has turned to night. The skies show only slight twinges of gray, stars long lost behind the ashen shroud. I shiver as cold air frisks its way beneath my clothing like probing fingers, sending shivers throughout my fevered body. The environment wavers about me and I have to stop and hold onto a small tree as we all stagger along the icy walkway toward the Washburn pickup.

  It’s an old rusted Ford, perhaps brown or red—hard to tell in the moonless gloom. Clearly it’s something that was loaned or given to them upon their arrival here in Ashborough. No way this baby made it all the way from Seattle. I step around the front of the cab and confirm this from the New Hampshire plates.

  “Give me the keys,” I say to Danny. He tosses them to me as Shea and her father slide into the front seat, Shea in the middle, Pops Eddie keeping his injured arm away from us. Settling in behind the wheel, I look over at the house and see Lisa peering out the front door at us. My guess is that when she goes back downstairs she’ll either find the Isolate gone, or a half dozen of its brothers unhooking it from the suspension gig. That’s the way they do things around here. It’s happened to me before. They watch everything going down from their hidey-holes in the woods, waiting for the perfect moment to make their move. It’s the perfect psychological warfare for them—what you don’t see is more frightening than what what’s right in your face.

  I start the truck, then shut the door. Danny slams the passenger door shut and Pops-Eddie yells, “Arrgh! That fucking hurt! Dumb bastard!”

  I back out of the driveway, taking Pops-Eddie and Shea away from the other half of their family. I hope to never see those two again.

  Once in the road, I shift the car into drive and leave my closest neighbor’s house behind. My leg is pressed up against Shea’s, and in spite of all my pain, my agony, I can’t help but be allured to the young girl. It feels so damn good to have physical contact with her…with another human being. It makes me feel protected. In my mind I try to convey to her my exact purpose for bringing her and her injured father back to my house, and in some coincidental happenstance, she places her gloved hand on my knee and squeezes, as though she hears me. I look past her to Pops-Eddie, who’s now clenching his teeth and rocking back and forth as if to distract himself from the pain he’s in. His eyes are squeezed tightly shut, and this gives me an opportunity to look into Shea’s eyes. She fixes my gaze and I have to fight the urge to tell her what my plans are for her and Pops-Eddie. But it’s clear she already knows. She’s seen an Isolate now. She’s heard them in the woods, knows their sheer numbers. And she knows exactly why I brought her up there in the first place.

  Very gently, she narrows her eyes and nods her head, then mouths silently, Let’s do it.

  I turn away and face back toward the road, my house just up ahead beckoning us to begin the ritual anew.

  Indeed, she knows. We’re going to sacrifice Pops-Eddie to the Isolates.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  I pull the pickup into the driveway of my house and roll it all the way to the detached garage out back. I look across Shea’s lap, towards Pops-Eddie, who continues his feverishly painful display of moaning and gritting his teeth. Despite everything I’ve been through, I’ve never been bitten by an Isolate and honestly have no idea what it feels like. Doesn’t look like too much fun.

  “Can you walk?” I ask him.

  “Do I have a choice?” he responds through clenched teeth, instinctual anger and frustration the only thing keeping him from passing out.

  “Not really.” I turn off the truck’s engine. Leaving the keys in the ignition, I slide out of the cab, the pain from the wound in my gut breaking through the illusion of comfort the morphine has provided. With it comes a slight headache, and a wave of chills—the infection’s fever also chipping away at the painkiller’s weakening barrier. Shea follows me around the back of the truck, where I quickly turn to her and say, “You know what we have to do, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” she whispers. “It’s something I’ve wanted to do, all my life.”

  Kill her father. A lifetime of abuse will make a person want to do that. I nod and reply. “I understand.”

  In the next fleeting moments—during the time I make my way from the back of the pickup to the passenger door—I see the true underlying reason for the Washburn family being brought here. It’s Shea they want. And they’re willing to give her what she’s always dreamed of (the death of her abusive father) in order to keep her. I wonder though: why do they want her?

  I open the passenger door and help Pops-Eddie out into the cold. He nearly slips down into the snow as we guide him through the back yard, past my office window and onto the walkway leading to the waiting room. I peer out into the woods alongside my house, the gathering darkness there perhaps teeming with Isolates, all of them peering out at me, watching the events unfold with anticipation and amusement. Fuckers.

  Once inside, I know have to put my plan into action before either Pops-Eddie becomes unmanageable, or Shea changes her mind. I lead them into the examining room, realizing the bitter truth of the situation: that I am about to commit the murder of a man with his daughter. That once again I am going to extreme lengths to save my family.

  It won’t be the first time you killed a man, Michael.

  And again the little man in my head reminds me of Phillip Deighton…how I stood before him in the den of the Isolates, baseball bat held tightly in my sweating hand. I can still feel the vibration of the bat connecting with his skull, can still hear the echo that resounded as he collapsed, brains spilling out onto the muddy subterranean earth.

  “Both of you wait here.” I slip free of the examining room and go into my office, suddenly aware of my slamming heart, my crawling skin, my churning gut. The psychological pain has matured in me now, heaping upon that of my physical torment, so much so that I nearly collapse into the chair behind my desk. I hold myself up, though, peering about and quickly adding up my next few moves.

  There’s an open bottle of bourbon on my desk, left there from some point over the last few days. I bring it to my lips
and chug it, stopping only to reach into my pocket for a couple more morphine pills. I consider the possibility of overdose, but pressing forward without any more painkillers seems an unlikely possibility. The burning sensation of the whiskey and the pills plunging into my system distracts me from everything else that is wrong in my life…and from the act I’m about to commit.

  I grab the bottle and head back into my office. Shea is there, holding Pops-Eddie by his hand, allowing him to clutch it tightly as the pain from the bite continues to assault him. She peers up at me with wide eyes, the feigned concern on her face replaced by the uncertain fear of what is about to take place.

  “Drink?” I say, holding the bottle out towards Shea’s injured father. He’s shivering now. Clearly fever has set in. Any doctor in his right mind would immediately begin cleansing his wound, would give painkillers to ease lessen the suffering. Not offer a swig of bourbon.

  But we all know that I’m not in my right mind now, don’t we?

  Pops-Eddie open his eyes just enough to see the bottle in my hand, then visibly gags, shaking his head. Still he finds it in himself to be the arrogant, abusive prick that he is. “Just fuckin’ fix me up, doc. I’m a-hurtin’ bad.”

  “Sure,” I say.

  I gently push Shea aside. She steps back, looking at me as I grip the half-filled bottle by the neck…and hand it to her.

  She reaches forward, takes the bottle, and in one fluid motion gulps down a couple of mouthfuls before handing it back to me.

  I nod once to her.

  She nods back.

  Pops-Eddie’s eyes are still closed, but his mouth isn’t. “Hey doc, what do you need me to do? C’mon, man, it hurts! It hurts!”

  “You just stay still,” I reply.

  Like an obedient dog, he stiffens up.

  Good. I don’t do well with moving targets. In a single fluid motion, I swing the bottle back over my head…and bring it right back down onto the abusive bastard’s skull.

  The bottle shatters in a rainstorm of amber glass and liquid. Pops-Eddie makes an odd grunting noise—something more bovine than human. Blood splatters the wall behind him in a weird-art kind of way. His body collapses, wholly unconscious by the time it hits the floor. Behind me, Shea gasps, then cries out, hands cupped over her mouth as if trying to shove the sudden outpouring of sobs back in. Tears spring from her eyes like drops from a leaky faucet.

  I look down at Pops-Eddie, feeling oddly invigorated from the terrible act I’ve just committed. It makes me realize how much of a changed man I’ve become, how less than a year ago I couldn’t step on a spider that’d found its way into my house, but now have killed a human (two if you count Old Lady Zellis, three if you add Pops-Eddie into the mix), my daughter’s dog, and half a race of little man-creatures living in the woods surrounding my home. I also wonder whether I’ll able to beat back the strong threat of insanity should I actually survive this brutal mess.

  Pops-Eddie stirs.

  With no hesitation or regard for what must be done,

  …the animal must be alive at the time of sacrifice…

  I kick Pops-Eddie in the head.

  This time, after a grunt, he stays silent. I lean down, check his pulse. Still strong. Good.

  “Is he dead?” Shea asks from over my shoulder.

  “No, he’s not.”

  A pause. Then, “Now what?”

  “Now we bring him to the altar. We put him on the center stone. And then you, Shea, must make the sacrifice to the Isolates.”

  “How…” she mutters, staring glassy-eyed at her father. She looks like a lost soul, a babe in the woods afraid of the looming dark. “How am I supposed to do…it?” Her hand goes to her mouth again, attempting to suppress the sobs fighting to make their way out.

  Not bringing a weapon is a mistake I don’t plan to make twice. Problem is, outside of the bloody hatchet (poor, poor Bonzo) or a steak knife, I’ve got nothing suitable here for killing a human being. “Is there a gun in the pickup?”

  Shea shakes her head. “Pops has only one rifle, and it’s in the basement with Danny.”

  “Wait right here with him. If he moves, shout for me.”

  Shea nods quickly, keeping her tortured (but beautiful) eyes fixed on her father’s motionless body. Sour tears continue to dampen her cheeks, and I cannot tell if they are born of fear or of joy. Part of me truly feels it’s the latter, which in turn seems to justify my actions, however warped that might seem.

  I stagger from the room, now aware of a limp in my walk. It’s my wound. The infection has spread further, the pain, although tamed, still barking up a storm. Despite this, the drugs have lent to me a feeling of serenity, as if the broken situation is workable, and within the realm of fixing. I pass through the hallway (oh, the scent of clean laundry is still there, the only smidgeon of normalcy remaining in my life) and move into the kitchen, where I begin rifling through the drawers in search of a tool that would prove effective in taking a man’s life.

  After sifting through a drawer full of sharp but mostly useless utensils—forks, butter knives, spoons, a corkscrew, a spatula—an eight-inch steak knife finally comes into view. I hold it up and gaze at my oblong reflection in the shining stainless steel…then place it back into the drawer. It’s not meant to be. I don’t know why I feel this way—certainly it's not the little man in my head voicing his opinion. It’s because I feel drawn to the weapon sitting amid the blood of my wife and the deer and Bonzo the cat as a more useful weapon…a more symbolic weapon, given the big picture.

  It’s all part of Ashborough’s Grand Scheme, Michael, the little man says.

  Indeed, it is.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  “Shea—everything all right in there?”

  At first there’s only silence, and it alarms me, but soon I hear her voice whisper from the other end of the hall. “Yeah…but he’s bleeding pretty bad.”

  “Don’t worry about that.”

  She pokes her head through the doorway at the other end. The dim bulb in the hallway casts a shadowy glow across her soft but bruised features, making her look like a distraught princess in some dark fairy tale.

  “Just make certain he doesn’t wake up.”

  “And if he does?”

  “I’ll be back in less than a minute.”

  She nods then offers up a slight yet flirtatious smile, as if she’s thrilled to be taking part in this crime of the century, a hostage of evil somehow allured to her adverse situation, sexually attracted to her kidnapper. It’s happened like this before, and she’s just the type to relish in a similar dilemma. For once, something has gone my way.

  I return the smile, then turn away and move as quickly as I can (which isn’t very quickly at all) through the living room and upstairs to my bedroom. Once there, I am confronted with the bloodbath that has seemed to take on a life of its own. Bonzo’s little head stares up at me not unlike the doll’s head had in my real-dream. Its eyes are open and they seem to be sizing me up. For a moment I think they start glowing gold, but it’s my morphine-afflicted (CRUMBLING) mind playing games with me. The hatchet is still there, between the head and the body, a puddle of gore beneath it all. As I come close to the butchery, I can see tendrils of soft tissue strung out between the severed parts like strands of thread pulled from a tattered rag.

  I reach for the handle of the hatchet…

  …and my (CRUMBLING!) mind sees Bonzo’s little head come to life, its bloody eyes turning towards me, its little whiskered maw moving as Lou Scully’s voice seeps out: "Do what Phillip once did to you! Maltor! Maltor! Maltor!"

  Freaking out, I snatch the hatchet from the bed and flee the scene of the crime, praying once more for this to be the last time I ever step foot in my bedroom again. My wound is screaming in pain, a boiling hot band across my midsection, and the fever in my body is making itself known again with horrible chills ripping through my bloodstream. The thought of heading back outside into the cold is intimidating, and I do my best not to thin
k about it as I swallow a thick lump in my throat that feels like razors. As quickly as I can, I move back through the house, and return to the examining room.

  Shea is there, standing over her father’s body.

  “Everything okay?”

  She nods. “I’m watching his belly go up and down.”

  “Good.” I go to the sink, rinse the hatchet of Bonzo’s blood (it’s the least I can do; asking her to employ a hatchet to kill her father is upsetting enough, not to mention one doused in the blood of her pet). I dry it on a clean towel and tuck the handle through the belt loop of my pants.

  “Michael…just how are we supposed to get him up there?”

  I look at Shea and realize with horror that she’s got a damn valid point, one I hadn’t considered until now. But if there’s a will, there’s a way. Ain’t no different than when I pulled a near-dead deer all the way to my neighbor’s house on my daughter’s sled.

  “There’s two of us. We can do it.”

  “And what if he comes to while we’re doing it?”

  I fix her gaze with mine: four serious laser beams of sight boring into each other’s souls, commanding one another to gather strength. “Then we crack him over the head again.”

  I rush out into my office, open the closet in the rear of the room and pull down a couple of blankets. They’re both woven in heavy gray wool, left over from my days in New York that’d never found any good use here in Ashborough until now. Staggering back into the examining room, I unwrap one and lay it on the dirty tile floor. Then, with Shea’s assistance, I roll Pops-Eddie’s body onto it, quickly wrap him up, and repeat the action with the second blanket. In less than a minute, Pops-Eddie has become a gray wool burrito. I grab a roll of adhesive gauze tape from one of the cabinets and wrap nearly a quarter of it around the blankets until I’m sure the man inside cannot get out should he regain consciousness.

  I look at Shea and again see tears streaming from her eyes. “This is for your own good,” I tell her, adding, “In more ways than one.” I reach beneath the sink and get out the yellow flashlight, still there from the time I had to tighten the leaky drainpipe. Seems like ages ago.