Darkness Ad Infinitum

by Regalado, Becky

  “Given?”

  “An extension, so to speak, on your life. Enough time for you to reach a hospital if we’re quick about this.”

  Rogers kept his gun at his side; feeling was returning to his hands, but he knew it would be gone in a second if he drew down on this thing again.

  “They’re my kids,” he said. “My baby. He’s going after my family.”

  “And he is my son,” the man said.

  “What are you?”

  “Pick a name that suits you.”

  Rogers didn’t bother. He holstered the gun and fingered the hole in his uniform. The wound was gone, replaced with smooth pink skin. An extension.

  “I suppose I’ll die if I kill him,” he muttered.

  “One way or another.” The man pulled his dark winter coat tight around his torso. “As I said, he’s my child. We each understand the other’s predicament, yes?”

  “Okay,” Rogers said. His head was swimming and he placed his hand against the side of the store.

  “Are you lightheaded?” asked the man.

  Rogers nodded, knees buckling.

  “It’ll pass,” he heard the man say, and Rogers felt hands gripping him under his arms, and then he was somewhere else.

  Dad likes to take apart old TVs and put them back together. Mom has a big map with quarters glued on it. Boy is far away. You see one time he went to the woods to find a hobby and there was a torn dog there. Its belly was open down to its privates and it lay in a way that stirred the boy, inviting him to come closer and see. “You see with your eyes, not your hands,” Mom would say. But Boy felt bold all of a sudden and he put his fingers inside to explore the cooling guts. He breathed their scent and laid flat on his stomach and entered the dog up to his elbows. Something violent moved inside of him and he knew he had found a hobby.

  Mom and Dad and Boy have been alive for a very long time and there is a room where Mom keeps all her old maps with all different types of coins and a room where Dad keeps all his TVs plugged in and sputtering. Boy does not ask for a room, instead he does his new hobby far away. You see one day he dashed a bird’s head with a rock and he saw its little brain and with the legs still kicking too. He got real close and squinted into the brain but he didn’t see a soul. All things have souls, even people like him. He knows that but he can’t ever see it, can’t see himself at all, and it bothers him. He can’t ask Dad or Mom about it so he keeps his questions to himself.

  One time Mom asked him where he goes far away. She saw the blood under his nails. He lied and said he ate the birds but really he keeps them out there and watches them soften and squints in search of a little pearl or string or something that might be a soul.

  Dad has talked to him before about how they can’t eat people and lately Dad has been bringing it up a lot. It gets the boy thinking. Maybe people have souls big enough to be seen by the naked eye.

  One day not long after that he walks into Dad’s room where Dad is hunched over a Fifties TV set and muttering while he picks through it. He stares at the back of Dad’s head for a long time and then he goes away again.

  Rogers came back screaming. He had seen it all, in moldy sepia tones; but it wasn’t what he’d seen that had rocked him. It had all seemed pretty goddamned boring, matter of fact—couple of uninvolved hoarder parents and their coming-of-age psychopath—coming of age at one hundred fifty years, sure. But kids were kids. No, it was what the kid had been thinking, and how the thoughts had seemed like Rogers’ own, and how he’d grown erect at the last one.

  And good ol’ Dad was cradling Rogers now and telling him to breathe. Rogers jerked away, going for his gun again. He felt his hand go numb and threw it against the side of the building so hard his shoulder almost came apart.

  “Kid’s a monster,” he snarled. “You’re just gonna take him home, is that it? Send him to his room?”

  “What I do with him once I have him is no concern of yours.” Dad offered a hand to help Rogers up.

  Rogers thought back to poor Hammond and the boy feeding on him. He remembered sensing that the feeding was unimportant to the boy, perhaps even unnecessary. No, the kid needed his breakfast; but it didn’t satisfy him the way it did to see an animal lying prone with its skull split like a walnut. He would forgo a century of nourishment for the freedom to explore the human mind.

  Rogers rose on shaking legs. “We’ve gotta get home. My home. You have a car?”

  Dad gestured in the direction from which he’d come. “You’re handling this better than most,” he said as Rogers fell into step beside him.

  “Just get me there.”

  His head still felt a little foggy. He wondered if the boy had been in his head as he had been in the boy’s. What would he have seen? Rogers didn’t remember much about being little, and certainly not his sexual awakening. He remembered fumbling around with Jake Savage’s mom at eighteen, but that had been late in the game for his generation. He remembered Larry Thomas telling him that getting a hummer from Mrs. Savage was about as smart as banging a petri dish. He’d shaved his entire lower body and spent the rest of that summer looking for warts and crabs. Goddamn dork. Worse in college, courting dollar-store cashiers in that dumpy closet of an apartment. He was pretty sure the space heater he’d bought off some classmate had been a Lite Brite. Never warmed the apartment. Two hundo a month for that pile. Oh yeah, he used to say “hundo.” Goddamn dork.

  He had always been into older women, though. He thought maybe that preceded Mrs. Savage, who’d kept drunk-dialing him at his parents’ house and who he’d finally told to go nest in the roof of a cave somewhere (the monster might have appreciated that line). Ellie was his age, but she was definitely more grown-up than he was. And she was a mom, a damn good one, and there was nothing sexier than that in his book. Younger men like Hammond didn’t get that.

  The kid wanted Ellie too, for different reasons. The horror of it sang in Rogers’ bones.

  Dad led him to the passenger door of a startlingly inconspicuous blue Ford hatchback. It looked like a Nineties model and Rogers almost walked past it before the man caught his arm.

  “No kidding,” Rogers muttered as he settled on a beaded seat cover. Stale cigarette smoke and smudged fingerprints on the dash. He eyed the change in the ashtray, counting up eighty cents, and as Dad started the car and Rogers pulled his seat belt over his chest he had to remind himself he was sitting next to something inhuman.

  As if reading his mind (and maybe he goddamn was) Dad said, “It’s good I don’t frighten you.”

  “Not any more than the man who shot my partner,” Rogers said. Then, thinking of the boy, “But he does.”

  “That’s good too,” the man said. Was that resentment in his voice? Probably ate at him that he’d had to lay low for ten lifetimes, that he could only take apart TV sets and had to leave dismemberment to the Dahmers of the world. But there’s still a ghoul in there. You should be scared of dear ol’ Dad. Don’t get too comfortable. You don’t know Count Dracula and you don’t know him. Hell, even the Muppet Count could have spent his off-hours eating rats and prostitutes for all anyone knew.

  “One generation’s monster is often a jester to the next,” Dad said. Was he reading Rogers’ thoughts? The man slowed to make a right on a red.

  “Just go. There’s no one coming.” Rogers fingered his holster. “How am I supposed to help you once we find him? I can’t make a move against him.”

  “You’ll help your family,” Dad replied.

  The words didn’t make sense. Rogers’ brain was doing the backstroke again. He pressed his fingers into his eyes and tried to will the boy away, but memory overcame him like an icy wind. This time it was his own.

  Fresh out of college and already lost. Drunk, again, in his apartment. He considers wandering the halls for a bit, maybe finding some of his three-AM-friends whose names he doesn’t know and whose loping stoner walks are more recognizable than their flushed faces. Gets off the couch, spins in search of his shoes and decides aga
inst it. When a man can assess the whole of his existence in a 360-degree turn, something’s wrong.

  He’s thought about suicide before but never seriously. Zip-tying down the trigger of an Uzi and eating a couple dozen rounds. Let the papers figure that one out. But as he sits back down on the couch young Rogers has a serious thought.

  Why not?

  He’s not in pain. He hasn’t been robbed of anyone or anything. It’s just this ennui that doesn’t feel any different from what he imagines death to be like. It’s his whole life and the long, boring trip it’s been, no highs, no lows.

  He has a gun, the one his dad carried on the job. He’s thought about taking after the old man but he doesn’t want the numbing comfort of following some well-worn path. Are there any surprises left after your tenth Christmas, or is it all just this?

  He pulls the pistol out from the bottom of the sock drawer and steps over to the mirror. Was he really almost about to go out of the apartment? He’s dressed only in his briefs, shrunken in the wash, one ball hanging out. It looks like a hydrocephalic wearing a bandana. They’ll find him like this.

  Rogers howls with laughter until he’s on the floor crying. Still holding the gun, he wipes the tears from his view and, standing back up, fixing his junk, he admires the way that the firearm wears him. Most men can’t even pull that off in pants.

  “Are you back, Officer?”

  “Get him out. Outta my head.”

  “That’s where he likes to be. Sometimes quite literally. Please understand that despite what you may now know of us, what my son is doing has nothing to do with sustenance. He kills for his pleasure.”

  Rogers shook his head back and forth. It felt like a sack of potatoes. “What time is it?” He rubbed his eyes and yawned. He felt like he was losing chunks of nighttime. How long had they been driving? He didn’t recognize the back streets outside.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Your home. This way is quickest.”

  “Did I tell you the address?”

  “I know it.”

  “Will the kid have to fall back when the sun comes up?”

  “The sun doesn’t affect us,” Dad said.

  Rogers should have suspected as much; the memories of the boy that he’d experienced had seemed oddly bright, but he’d thought it was the light of recall rather than Sol adrift in the sky.

  “Are you in my head too? How do you know the address?”

  “I retrieved it from your wallet.”

  “Oh.”

  “There—damn!” Dad slammed on the brakes, the car fishtailing. Rogers gripped the door handle and fought against inertia and his own sluggishness to stay upright and see outside. The car lurched and came to a stop sideways in the road. The street was empty.

  “What!” Rogers exclaimed, but Dad was already out of the car.

  “I saw his eyes!” the man cried, running down the street.

  As Rogers began to climb out, he felt the fog growing thicker in his head. God damn! He tried to call to the kid’s father, to let him know he was going the wrong way, but the thoughts came back—the boy’s thoughts, memories, and a rush of raw sensation that was so abrupt and so real that Rogers felt as if his soul had been forcibly penetrated. He saw and knew it all and he could not make words from the screams that came.

  Vaguely, he detected footsteps approaching, Dad coming back. He felt hands shaking him. Finally he could speak, and Rogers slurred, “He killed his mom.”

  “What?” Dad knelt and held Rogers’ head in his hands. With his thumbs he pried the cop’s eyelids open. “What did you say?”

  “He thought about it for months before he did it. He split her head. She was dead before she fell down the stairs.” Rogers stared blankly into the eyes of a fiend who was suddenly very human. He didn’t want to tell the rest, but it left his mouth anyway, what the boy had done with his mother’s remains before Dad had returned home and found—

  “He was crying,” the man stammered. “Don’t you see? Didn’t you see? He was crying when I found her. He was hysterical. She fell. He would never—never.”

  “He did.” Rogers blinked wetly. “You can’t see in his heart. I can.”

  Dad sat in the street beside Rogers, leaning back against the car. Rogers was reading him clearly now. The reality Dad had been trying to chase away had turned on him like a feral beast. It had been inevitable, Rogers realized, that in his efforts to contain the boy and the boy’s urges, Dad would be forced to accept the truth. Maybe tonight’s melee was the only way Dad could bring himself to do what needed doing. Seemed that way. Dad went to the back of the car and returned with a small black box which he set in Rogers’ lap.

  “I can’t open it. There’s silver inside.” Dad held out his hands. “Before you do this, know that the silver will affect you too. It’s going to open that wound of yours. Just touching it.”

  Rogers lifted the box’s lid—heavy for its size, like it was solid lead—and saw bullets of varying calibers in foam bedding. The ache in his side came on immediately.

  “He won’t be able to stop you this time,” said Dad. “Not with silver in hand. But you have to go now—Officer, you’re already bleeding again. Please.”

  Rogers emptied the magazine of his gun and replaced the rounds with silver, silent all the while. He chambered the first bullet and looked up at Dad.

  “He’s going to kill my family.”

  “Not if you get after him. Now.”

  “Wouldn’t have to if you’d done it back then. Wouldn’t be bleeding. Wouldn’t be fuzzy. Wouldn’t have to bury Hammond. Wouldn’t be here.”

  Rogers shot Dad through the neck—he’d been aiming for the head, but had stumbled while getting to his feet. Still, it was good enough, and Rogers took the car keys from the man’s coat, not bothering to take in the spectacle of bubbling and melting flesh, instead making his way to the nearest intersection so he could get his bearings and get home.

  His awareness of time and distance came and went with the pain, the silver affecting him even with the gun resting in the passenger seat. But at least he was free of the other fog, the boy’s intruding presence. He found familiar streets, empty and dark. He rolled up onto the curb in front of his house and steeled himself against the dull but insistent pull of his ebbing life. Crossed the yard, threw open the front door. No time for strategy. No bullshit. Storm the castle.

  Boy.

  Boy.

  Been there and gone already, the monster.

  Rogers spent some time among the remains before his friends arrived, having been called by some passerby who’d glanced through the open door. He tried to stop them from photographing and cataloguing the scene, from collecting and labeling his family, because he knew that when this was done Ellie and the girls were going to be taken away from him, and, after all, he still hadn’t found the baby who wouldn’t even have a name for his grave marker.

  Boy.

  Baby.

  Boy.

  Some years later, Rogers handed a fat wad of bills to a stone-faced Mexican and said, “Hang around and there’ll be extra in it for you.”

  “I won’t go in,” the man said firmly.

  “I know. Just stay out here. If something—if it goes bad, just make sure you burn everything.”

  Rogers turned to the shack. In the blazing sun, heat rippled off the corrugated metal in waves. It almost looked like a mirage in the middle of the desert, and Rogers felt a pang of fear—what if it was?—but told himself to go in and make it real.

  Wearing heavy gloves that still didn’t quite protect from the heat of the metal, he pried open the door and entered the shack. Darkness, wet and thick and boiling, enveloped him. He closed the door behind him, reached down, and felt for the electric lantern.

  It snapped on and the pale blue light played eerily over the boy’s blistered flesh. He’d been cooking in here for a while now. The silver chains wrapped around his bare skin now touched only corroded tissue and bone. He was half gone already, the
thing, but still smiling.

  Rogers felt he had to ask. He didn’t want to, because he didn’t want the illusion of hope to return, nor did he want to allow the boy to play with him, but he had to ask. He had never stopped being a dad. That wasn’t something that was ever undone, not even when a man was left all alone. It defined a life that otherwise would have been cashed out long ago.

  “Where is my baby?” Rogers said quietly.

  The boy’s grin spread wider, blisters peeling at the corners. “Not a baby anymore,” he sang in a hoarse voice. He stuck out his swollen tongue.

  “Where?” Rogers repeated. He took pliers he’d fashioned himself from his jeans pocket, slippery in his sweaty hands. The heat was making his head swim. It felt just like the good old days.

  The boy wagged his tongue at Rogers.

  Rogers fingered the scar in his side and said, “You know the silver doesn’t bother me anymore. But I remember what it felt like. And I know you won’t let me see it, the way it feels when I’m taking you apart, but I’ll still know.”

  He crouched and took hold of the boy’s tongue with the pliers. “That your life never had meaning—that you never had love, not even from your parents—that you never gained anything you could lose, maybe you think that makes you strong. But the truth is you’re empty. On the other hand, this will haunt me for the rest of my life. As much as I hate you, what I’m about to do will ensure I never sleep another night without dreaming of it. That’s because I have loved, and was loved. And because I’m going to do it anyway, that makes me stronger than you.”

  The boy made a noise in his throat like he was going to say something. Rogers didn’t wait.

  He walked to the edge of the Rio Grande and stood there for a long time with his father’s gun in his hand. As the sun went below the earth, he threw it into the water.

  Thirty years on. Another night in the trenches.

  Rogers’ figure was slight and unimposing, and no one questioned him as he took the elevator up to the NICU. He looked like someone’s granddad, and the bag he carried probably had some overnight stuff for a new mom or even a handycam, although the hospital’s infant charges were all asleep at this hour unless something was wrong.