by Jeff Lindsay
The house was a little more than a mile away, but on the far side of U.S. 1. So far I had seen only the houses on my side of the highway, since crossing on foot in the evening was hazardous. But if I could get across safely, I could loop past it, turn north to see the second entry, and be home in less than an hour.
I ran for about fifteen minutes on the west side of U.S. 1, jogging slowly through an area that had never quite recovered from Hurricane Andrew. The houses were small and looked neglected, even the ones that were occupied, and on most of them it was very hard to see the address. The numbers were worn off, or covered with vegetation, or missing altogether. There were a number of older, battered cars lining the street, and many of them were abandoned wrecks. A dozen dirty kids were playing in and around them. More kids were kicking a soccer ball back and forth in the parking lot of a battered two-story apartment building. I watched the children as I jogged, wondering whether they might hurt themselves climbing all over the old and rusty cars, and I almost missed it.
I had just heard the thump of a well-kicked ball and turned my head to look as the soccer ball soared through the parking lot to the cries of, “Julio! ¡Aquí!” But as I mentally applauded Julio’s skill, the ball sailed past the front of the building and I saw the address above the door: 8834. The number I was looking for was 8837; I had let myself get distracted and almost gone right past.
I slowed my jog to a walk and then came to a stop in front of the apartment building, putting my foot up on a crumbling concrete block wall as if I was tying my shoelace. As I fiddled with the lace I glanced across the street—and there it was. Wedged in beside a huge and untrimmed hedge in front of the house across the street, there it really was.
The house itself was small, almost a cottage, and so overgrown that I couldn’t even see the windows. A huge, knotted vine spread over the top of the house, as if it was holding the roof down so it wouldn’t crumble and fall off. There was barely enough yard in front to park the Honda, and a rusted chain-link fence closed off the backyard. The nearest streetlight was half a block away, and with the row of untended trees along the street, anything that happened at the little house after dark would be almost invisible, which made me truly hope this really was it. The car was pulled in behind a large bougainvillea that took up half the yard and poured down across the roof of the house, and I could see only one small chunk of the rear section that stuck out from the shrubbery. But the certainty grew as I looked at the car.
It had probably started life as a neat little Honda with a metallic blue finish and bright chrome strips on the side. Now it was a mess: faded, dented, sagging slightly to one side, most of the chrome pulled off, the color battered away into a kind of uncertain medley of gray, blue, and primer.
And spread across that small section of the trunk there is a large rust stain, like a metallic birthmark, and my pulse bumps up a couple of notches as dark interior wings begin to flutter.
But far too many cars have rusty patches; I need to be sure, and so I push down the anticipation that is rising up inside. I straighten slowly and put my hands on my back, stretching as if I had run a little too hard, and I look casually at the tail end of the car. I can’t see, can’t be sure; the bougainvillea hides too much.
I have to get closer. I need some stupid excuse to move into the yard and peer behind the leaves and see if the taillight on the far side is the telltale dangling light I remember so well, but I can think of nothing. Very often in the past I have been The Man With The Clipboard, or The Guy With The Tool Belt, and this has gotten me as close as I ever needed to be. But tonight I am already Dude Jogging By; I can’t change costumes now, and I am running out of excuses for lingering here. I put my foot up on the wall again and stretch the leg muscles, furiously rejecting a series of truly stupid ideas for going into the yard and peeking behind that horrible giant bougainvillea, until I have almost decided to risk the stupidest and most obvious—just step into the yard and look, and then jog away. Ridiculous, dangerous, and totally contrary to the picture I cherish of a somewhat more than clever Me, but I am out of time and have no better ideas—
Somewhere far away, sitting on a cloud perhaps, there must be some whimsical dark deity that really likes me, because just before I let frustration push me into stupidity, I dimly hear the voices of the soccer players, calling out in three languages to look out, mister! And before I can even realize that I am the only mister in the area, the soccer ball thumps into my head, bounces up into the air, and then rolls across the street.
I watch the ball roll, just a little dazed, not so much from the thump on the head, but from the sheer happy, improbable, stupidly lucky coincidence of it. And the ball rolls across the street, into the yard of the grubby little house, and comes to rest against the Honda’s rear tire.
“Sorry, mister,” I hear one of the kids say.
I look into the parking lot at where they stand in an uncertain knot, watching carefully to see if I will take the ball and run away, or perhaps even start shooting at them. So I give them a reassuring smile and say, “No problem. I’ll get it.”
I walk across the street and step into the yard where that wonderful, beautiful prince of all soccer balls has rolled to a stop. I loop to the left ever so slightly as I approach the Honda, trying not to look like I am staring at the car with feverish greed. Three steps into the yard, five, six—and there it is.
For a few long and delightful seconds I pause and just look at it and let the adrenaline flood into me. There it is, that telltale dangling left taillight, the same one I saw when I was seen, the same one that blinked at me as it raced away on the Palmetto on-ramp. There is no more doubt. This is the Honda I have been looking for. Deep inside the Dark Tower of Dexter there is a rumbling hiss of satisfaction, and I feel a shadowy tickle at the base of my spine that moves slowly up my back to my neck, and then settles across my face like a mask.
We have found our Witness.
And now he becomes our prey.
From inside the moldering, vine-covered house I hear voices rising in a very nasty argument, and then the front door slams. I tear my eyes away from that gorgeous dangling light and turn to look, just in time to see a man’s back as he spins away and hurries back inside again to finish the fight. I feel a flutter of apprehension; he must have seen me—but the front door slams behind him; my luck has held, and his voice rises inside, hers answers, and I have found him and he doesn’t know it and now it truly begins to end for my Witness. So I walk quickly the rest of the way across the grass to the Honda, pat it affectionately, and pick up the ball.
The soccer players are still standing in their insecure cluster, and I hold up the ball to them and smile. They look at it like it might be an improvised explosive device; they don’t move. They watch me with great care as I throw the ball back to them. And then it bounces twice, one of the boys grabs it, and they all race away to the far end of the parking lot, and the game picks right back up where it left off.
I look fondly at the dirty little cottage and marvel at my luck. The overgrown yard, the street without lights—the setting is perfect, almost as if we have designed it ourselves as the ideal spot for an evening of dark-hearted fun. It is shrouded, tucked away in the shadows—the fussiest monster could not ask for a better playground.
A shiver of anticipation trembles the flagpoles of Castle Dexter. We have searched, we have found it, and there is suddenly a great deal to do, and very little time to do it. Everything has to be just right, exactly the way it should be, the way it always is, always has to be, so we can slide back here tonight—tonight!—back through the comfy dark to slice our way to blissful release and the promise of safety as we trim away this small and ugly blister that has been rubbing up against the heel of our comfort. And now the chafing unwanted threat was in our sights and as good as taped to a table, and soon all would be gleaming happiness once more. One, two, three, snicker-snee, and Dexter’s life would return to its bright plastic case, all happy fake normal and human. But first—a program of
careful but rapid preparation, and then a very sharp word from Our Sponsor.
A deep breath to beat down the rising tide of need and let shadowy balance back in; it must be done, but it must be done right. And slowly, carefully, casually, we turn our face away from the house and the Honda in its yard, and we jog back the way we had come. Home for now, but we would be back, very soon, as soon as it was dark.
And Dark is coming, with a capital “D.”
It was a sweaty but very contented Dexter who jogged onto his street, slowed to a walk, and sauntered into his house. And that contentment surged to a level that might almost have been happiness when I went in the front door and saw my children gathered on the sofa, blissfully killing things with their Wii, because Astor looked up—it was Cody’s turn in the game—and said, “Mom wants to see you. She’s in the kitchen.”
“That’s wonderful,” I said, and it really was. I had found my Witness, had an hour of healthful exercise, and now Rita was in the kitchen—it could be stir-fry, or roast pork again at last. Could life get any better?
But, of course, happiness is fleeting at best, and usually it’s a hint that you haven’t understood what’s really happening. In this case it fled the moment I stepped into the kitchen, because Rita was not cooking at all. She was hunched over a large pile of papers and ledgers that spread over most of the kitchen table, and scribbling on a legal pad. She looked up as I came to a disappointed halt in the doorway. “You’re all sweaty,” she said.
“I’ve been running,” I told her. There was still some tint of something in the way she looked at me that I didn’t recognize, but she looked a little relieved, too, which was almost as strange.
“Oh,” she said. “Really running.”
I wiped a hand across my face and held it up to show her the sweat. “Really,” I said. “What did you think?”
She shook her head and fluttered one hand at the heap on the table. “It doesn’t— I have to work,” she said. “This thing at work is completely— And now I have to …” She pursed her lips and then frowned at me. “My God, you’re covered with— Don’t sit down anywhere until— Damn,” she said, as her cell phone started to chirp beside her on the table. She grabbed at it and said to me, “Could you order pizza? Yes, it’s me,” she said, turning away from me and speaking into her phone.
I watched her for just a moment as she rattled off a string of numbers to someone on the phone, and then I turned away and took my crushed hopes of a real meal down the hall and into the bathroom. When my mouth had been watering for a home-cooked meal, pizza was a bitter pill to swallow. But as I took a shower it began to seem like mere grumpiness. After all, I had Things to do tonight, Things that made even Rita’s roast pork seem a trivial pleasure. I ran the water very hot, and scrubbed off the sweat from my run, and then I turned the shower to cold. I let the cool water run on the back of my neck for a minute, and felt icy glee return. I was going out tonight for a rare combination of necessity and true pleasure, and to make that happen I would gladly eat roadkill for a week.
And so I toweled off cheerfully, got dressed, and ordered a pizza. While I waited for it to arrive, I went to my office and prepared for my evening activities. Everything I needed fit easily into a small nylon shoulder bag, and I had packed it, then repacked it, just to be sure, by the time the pizza arrived a half hour later. Rita was completely occupied with her work, and the kitchen table was covered with her papers. So to the delight of the children, I served the pizza on the coffee table in front of the TV. Cody and Astor actually liked the stuff, of course, and Lily Anne seemed to catch their mood. She bounced happily up and down in her high chair and flung her mashed carrots at the walls with great skill and vigor.
I chewed on a slice of pizza, and luckily for me I barely tasted it, because in the dark corners of my mind I was already far away in a little house on a dingy street, placing the knife’s tip here and the blade there, working slowly and carefully up to a blissful climax as my witness thrashes in his bonds, and I watch as the hope dies in his eyes and the thrashing grows slower and weaker and finally, at long loving last—
I could see it, almost taste it, practically hear the crackle of the duct tape. And suddenly hunger rolled away and the pizza was nothing but cardboard in my mouth, and the happy chomping of the children was an irritating artificial din and I could wait no longer to return to the reality waiting for me in the little house. I stood up and dropped the last third of my pizza slice back into the box.
“I have to go out,” we said, and the chilly coiled sound of our voice jerked Cody’s head around to face us and froze Astor open-mouthed in midchomp.
“Where are you going?” Astor said softly, and her eyes were wide and eager, because she did not know the “where” but she knew the “why” from the ice-cold edge of my voice.
We showed her my teeth and she blinked. “Tell your mother I had some work to take care of,” we said. She and her brother goggled at us, moon-eyed with their own longing, and Lily Anne gave a short and sharp “Da!” that jerked at the corners of my dark cape for just a moment. But the music was swelling up in the distance and calling for its conductor, and we had no choice but to lift our baton and take the podium now.
“Take care of your sister,” I said, and Astor nodded.
“All right,” she said. “But, Dexter—”
“I’ll be back,” we said, and we grabbed our small bag of toys and were away out the door and into the warm and welcoming night.
FIFTEEN
IT WAS FULL DARK OUT NOW AND THE FIRST RUSH OF THE FREE night air roared into my lungs and out through my veins, calling my name with a thundering whisper of welcome and urging me on into the purring darkness, and we hurried to the car to ride away to happiness. But as we opened the car door and put one foot in, some small acid niggle twitched at our coattails and we paused; something was not right, and the frigid glee of our purpose slid off our back and onto the pavement like old snakeskin.
Something was not right.
I looked around me in the hot and humid Miami night. The neighborhood was just as it had always been; no sudden threat had sprung from the row of one-story houses with their toy-littered yards. There was nothing moving on our street, no one lurking in the shadows of the hedge, no rogue helicopter swooping down to strafe me—nothing. But still I heard that nagging trill of doubt.
I took in a slow lungful of air through my nose. There was nothing to smell beyond the mingled odors of cooking, the tang of distant rainfall, the whiff of rotting vegetation that always lurked in the South Florida night.
So what was wrong? What had set the tinny little alarm bells to clattering when I was finally out the door and free? I saw nothing, heard nothing, smelled nothing, felt nothing—but I had learned to trust the pesky whisper of warning, and I stood there unmoving, unbreathing, straining for an answer.
And then a low row of dark clouds rumbled open overhead and revealed a small slice of silvery moon—a tiny, inadequate moon, a moon of no consequence at all, and we breathed out all the doubt. Of course—we were used to riding out into the wicked gleam of a full and bloated moon, slicing and slashing to the open-throated sound track of a big round choir in the sky. There was no such beacon overhead tonight, and it didn’t seem right somehow to gallop off into glee without it. But tonight was a special session, an impromptu raid into a mostly moonless evening, and in any case it must be done, would be done—but done as a solo cantata this time, a cascade of single notes without a backup singer. This small and wimpish quarter-moon was far too young to warble, but we could do very well without it, just this once.
And we felt the bright and chilly purpose close back around us; there was no lurking danger, only an absence of moon. There was no reason to pause, no reason to wait, and every reason to ride away into the velvet dark of a Bonus Evening.
We climb into the driver’s seat of the car and start the engine. It is no more than a five-minute drive back to the neighborhood of the moldering apartment building
and the small crummy house. We drive past it slowly and carefully, looking for any sign that things are not as they should be, and we find none. The street is empty now. The one streetlight half a block away flickers off and on, casting a dim blue glow rather than any real brightness. Other than that the only light in this tiny-mooned night comes from the windows of the apartment building, a matching purple halo from each window, a dozen televisions all tuned to the pointless, empty, idiotic unreality of the same reality show, everyone watching in vacuous lockstep as true reality cruises slowly past outside licking its chops.
The dirty little house shows one faint light in a front window half-covered with vines, and the old Honda is still there, tucked into the shadows. We drive past and circle halfway around the block and park in the darkness beneath a huge banyan tree. We get out, lock the car, and stand for just a moment, sniffing the breeze of this very dark and suddenly wonderful night. A light wind moves the leaves in the tree overhead, and far off on the horizon, lightning flickers in a huge black pillow of clouds. A siren wails in the distance, and a little closer a dog barks. But near at hand nothing stirs and we take a deep and cooling breath of the shadowy night air and let our awareness slide out and around us, feeling the stillness and the lack of any lurking danger. All is right, all is ready, all is just what it should be, and we can wait no longer.
It is time.
Slowly, carefully, casually, we slip our small gym bag over one shoulder and walk back to the crumbling house, just an ordinary guy coming home from the bus stop.
Halfway down the block, a large old car lurches around the corner and for just a second its headlights light us up. It seems to hesitate for half a second, leaving us uncomfortably illuminated, and we pause, blinking in the unwanted light. Then there is the sudden bang of a backfire from the car, accompanied by a strange rattling sound as a piston knocks in unison with a loose bumper, and the car speeds up and rolls past us harmlessly and disappears around the corner up ahead. It is quiet once more and there is no other sign of life in this fine dark night.
