Dark Duets

by Christopher Golden

  The girl says, “That yours? You that fucking kid’s da da? Were you cheating on me?”

  He’s not the kid’s da da. He hands the baby back, not to the same person, but a different stranger. There he answered his own question. Who hands a complete stranger a baby? He does. Da da that.

  Somebody gives him a full pint of Jameson’s. The seal’s not even broken. He twists the cap off and sucks deeply from the bottle. The liquor hurts his head even more. A couple of the dead kids drink deep, a couple of them go “phphooey, phoo . . . yuck” because they’ve never had a sip of the hard stuff. It brings things into focus for him, for a second. Which is Janet? Which is Timothy? He shoves his way through toward his car. The journalists are on him again. He wants to explain to them how dangerous it is, what they’re doing, where they’re standing, pushing him, touching him. He shoves his way past, makes it back to his car. He’s no longer news, he should no longer be news. Ricky is dead.

  THERE REALLY IS nowhere else for him to go, nothing for him to do, but return to the beach. It’s clear and obvious. He walks alone on it. The waves crash, the waves reach. He scans the sand for the rest of his skull, his mind, his life. He lost it all somewhere around here. He sees footprints and thinks of the girl running for her life. The girl thinks of him lying there dying. Ricky thinks of them both, and the others, and a surge of pleasure fills him like a shot of adrenaline directly into the heart. You’ve got to wonder if he can still be saved, even after the mess with the machine. Some lab assistant in the morgue stealing Ricky’s body out the back and injecting it with bright green liquid, some antideath serum. Somebody’s got to be working on it, some other maniac in some other basement.

  A storm waits over the water. Perhaps it’s been there since the day the kid died, or should’ve died. Perhaps it’s come back to meet him, hovering here for years, waiting. The pain is so great now that the kid drops to his knees as the sand crabs rise and begin to make their way to him. Sparks flash from his fingertips, his eyes, his open mouth.

  The girl says, “This is it. This is the end.”

  Maybe she’s right, maybe not. The storm comes closer. Black clouds swirl overhead, vortexes, funnels, sweeping down and bringing up tens of thousands of gallons of water. It gushes around him in the wind. The dead boys are especially impressed. A couple of them liked fishing, dug boating, lived on the water. Lightning blasts down and leaves more strange patterns of bubbling molten clouded glass the size of Cadillac hoods across the beachfront all around him.

  Ricky calls this the divine. Ricky calls this the infernal. Ricky believes in great mythic resonance. It’s been there since his early religious upbringing. When he was alive, he was always walking along the beach hoping for tidal waves and hurricanes, as well as scoping victims. Ricky wants the world to burn, the world to drown. He wants to ride high on the next ark. Well, he did, when he was alive.

  Ricky paws the dead. Ricky makes moves. He has no need to dismember but he still wants to fuck, still wants to have some fun. The kid turns and turns again as the lightning crashes down. The thunder is explosive but not as loud as Ricky’s voice in his head, not as loud as the dead girls’ disgust and the memories of their shrieks. The metal in his head draws the lightning to him. He’s the tallest thing on the plain, and he’s magnetized. His watch is going nuts. His fillings hurt. His mouth is full of fire.

  Someone has got to be nearby. Ricky thinks his thoughts in the kid’s dented skull. The kid searches strangers out. He looks for retirees, he scans for young lovers, fishermen, he watches for kids who’ve come out to drink beer on the beach in wild weather. His hands glow blue and white. His hands can do amazing things.

  The sand crabs stare up at him, curious, expectant. He sits and waits for the ocean or the sky to kill him. It would be a proper ending. He thinks he deserves that, at least. Ricky got a proper ending. The girl, in her way, received one. And so did the rest of them. He stands and walks along, the tide rising, the waves swelling, breaking against his knees, the foam exploding against the side of his face. Lightning continues to shear down, thunder like thrown sticks of dynamite.

  He moves around an outcropping of rock. He moves around fencing, up and down dunes, slipping past saw grass. Isolated beach houses come into view. The kid keeps going. He walks up to a gorgeous place, the kind of place he and the girl used to talk about buying one day, the kind of place that it’s easy to talk about because everyone talks about places like this, and he knocks on the door with his burning fist.

  Ricky enjoys the isolation, the deep loneliness out here, in the storm, on the water, away from the hateful population.

  A girl very much like the girl, his girl, his dead girl, like all the dead girls, answers. Ricky’s mouth waters. The kid’s mouth waters.

  She says, “Can I help you?”

  The metal in his head clashes together and rings like the loudest church bell in twenty centuries.

  It’s a familiar story—

  Dark Witness

  Charlaine Harris and Rachel Caine

  It seemed to Emma Saxon that she’d been driving forever when she saw the crosses. No—not the crosses. First, she saw the woman.

  Mom, her daughter Laurel’s voice was saying, in the blurry, distorted tempo of a slowed recording. We’ll be late if we don’t hurry up. So Laurel must have been in the passenger seat, but Emma couldn’t seem to turn her head that way. The road was black, the headlights showing nothing, yet somehow there was a woman kneeling down under a single streetlight. Her image was broken into stark blacks and whites by the harsh light.

  She was hammering crosses into the hard ground.

  Two crosses: mere crooked boards, nailed together, painted white. Cheap tinsel streamers floated from them in an unseen, unfelt wind.

  Emma was pressing the gas but the van was slowing down, slowing down, and to Emma’s horror the woman turned to look at her. She had only a black hole for a face and a flash of pale, nauseatingly yellow eyes. The horrible woman inclined her head toward the crosses, and Emma had to look. The crosses read EMMA and LAUREL in crooked letters of blood, blood that dripped down the chilly white of the crosses, and her daughter was saying Mom, we’re going to be late, late, late . . .

  And then Emma turned her head, finally, away from the crosses and the light and the blood and the eyes, and he was sitting in the passenger seat, smiling at her with that sharply handsome face and those piss-yellow eyes and she opened her mouth to scream and the scream turned into a shrill electronic shriek that went on and on and on . . .

  Emma opened her eyes and slapped at the snooze button on the alarm clock. She missed the first two times, got it the third. In the sudden, terribly thick silence she tried to get her breath, tried to blink the tears out of her eyes. The room felt very cold, and she turned on her side and wrapped the covers more tightly around her shaking body.

  Not again, not again, I thought I was past this. . .

  She’d stopped having dreams about the bastard years ago. Why was she thinking about him now? What had she done to deserve that new trip into hell?

  The shower started up in the hall bathroom, and Emma groaned into her pillow. Laurel was already up. Although she was more than old enough to get up, fix her own breakfast, and be off to school, Emma had made it a rule to sit down with her daughter every morning, even if there was only time for a cup of coffee (for Emma, milk for Laurel) and a breakfast pastry apiece. Emma needed that touchstone of normal life.

  Get up, Emma told herself, but part of her didn’t want to obey. The bed was warm and safe, and the world out there . . . that was cold, and uncertain, and—with the dream lingering in her head—terrifying. Get up for Laurel. You have to do it.

  That got her moving, though she felt frail and her skin was sensitive, as if she were recovering from a feverish illness. Everyday items seemed oddly juxtaposed, sinister, dangerous. Emma hesitated before thrusting her bare feet into her slippers, sure they hid scorpions or spiders, but when she stood she felt only the normal
comfort of cotton-covered foam. She put on her bathrobe, brushed her hair, and was in the kitchen taking out the ingredients for scrambled eggs before Laurel came down the hall.

  Her daughter was sixteen, and with the birthday had come attitude, tons of it. She was wearing eyeliner today. Emma didn’t protest; they’d had a fight about last week’s experimentation with eye shadow, which had been extremely overdone, so now she elected to pick the battles she was likely to win. The eyeliner looked good; it made Laurel’s rich brown eyes seem larger and brought out the golden gleam in their depths.

  Gold, not yellow. It isn’t yellow. “Good morning, sweetheart,” Emma said, her voice coming out in a croak. She cracked four eggs into a bowl while clearing her throat. “Sleep well?”

  Laurel grunted. Yes or no? It didn’t much matter. She was at that awkward stage where she could—and would—mutter secretively to her friends for hours on her cell phone, but you couldn’t get three words in a row from her if you were her mother. Even now, Laurel pushed her long, straight hair back over her shoulders in an absent gesture and bent over her phone, fingers flying as she texted. Emma had tried to make a no-phone-before-breakfast rule, but that had been a battle she definitely couldn’t win. She said, mildly, “No phone at the kitchen table, Laurel; you know that.”

  Laurel groaned dramatically, but she put the phone on the counter next to her backpack. She emphasized her instant boredom by drumming her fingers on the table, maintaining her silence.

  Fine. Let her work for it. “Milk’s in the fridge,” Emma said.

  “Where else would it be?” Laurel asked, and rolled her eyes, but she got up and poured herself a glass. Without being prodded, she loaded the coffeemaker and set it to brew, a hopeful sign of morning cooperation. Emma whisked eggs and loaded up the skillet, made toast, and plated the food. The two of them sat down to eat in (mostly) companionable silence. Emma made two attempts to find out what Laurel planned to do over the weekend. Laurel’s response was a shrug that could mean anything.

  Typical.

  Laurel gulped down her eggs, toast, and milk, hastily dumped her dishes in the sink, and grabbed her backpack and phone as if they were life preservers in a shark-filled ocean. She headed for the door.

  “Forget something?” Emma asked, standing. Laurel sighed—dramatically, of course—and came back to give her mom a quick kiss on the cheek. “That’s better. Have a good day, honey. And call me when you’re on the way home.”

  “I can walk three blocks, Mom; I’m not five.”

  “Just to be safe, okay?” Emma said quietly.

  “Okay! You know, you have to let me grow up.”

  “Sure. But not today.”

  The put-upon look on Laurel’s face was pricelessly funny, but Emma didn’t laugh—at least, not until her daughter slammed the door and went jogging down the driveway to meet her friends for the walk to school. Next year, she’ll be driving, she thought. Dear God. How am I going to survive that?

  But next year’s problems were just a dark cloud on the horizon. Emma felt better now, stronger, more in control of her life as she washed the breakfast things. She showered briskly, dressed for work, and headed off to the office. As she drove, she thought of her one o’clock meeting, and the presentation she had to prepare before then. Of course, accounting wouldn’t have any of the figures ready until an hour before. It was a relief to occupy her mind with the mundane. How could she have let the dream spook her so badly? Why had she even had such a nightmare?

  She had no idea what had brought it on until she stopped for a red light four blocks away from their house. Something fluttered at the edge of her vision. With dread, she turned her head to look. Two white crosses had been pounded into the hard ground, just at the base of a streetlight. Cheap tinsel streamers tangled and bounced in the morning breeze.

  Emma’s breath caught in her throat. She looked in the rearview mirror. Empty. Impulsively, Emma parked in the gas station lot on the corner. On unsteady legs, she walked over to take a look. The sun was still unbelievably fierce in late September, and the Dallas heat was unrelenting. Scorched grass crunched like tiny bones beneath her feet, and she felt the dream overlap into reality and bend it all out of shape, into the sharp angles of adrenaline and madness, until she saw the names.

  JEREMY. AUDREY. And a faded picture stapled to the larger cross, Audrey’s cross, that showed a middle-aged woman with a young boy next to her. There was no indication of what had happened. Weren’t such crosses always erected for traffic accidents? She’d never stopped to look at one of these homemade roadside memorials before, and the faded picture brought home to her that the intersection she used every day was a place where someone else’s dreams had died.

  “Sorry,” she said, and felt embarrassed when she heard her own voice. She hurried back to her van and started it up and felt the knot in her stomach slowly untie. The dream was just a dream. Not her name on the cross, and not Laurel’s. It was just an ugly mash of truth and fiction, like all nightmares. Now she knew where it had come from. Nothing to worry about.

  Accounting didn’t have the figures ready when she got there. Typical.

  By the time her presentation was over, she’d forgotten all about the dream.

  LAUREL BROUGHT HOME friends for dinner. She texted first, though, which gave Emma time to evaluate the contents of her refrigerator. Luckily, there was enough steak and chicken to go around.

  When they arrived, all together, Emma knew two of the guests: Laurel’s best friend, Amy, she of the curly red hair and pale blue eyes, and Elena, who was dark haired and dark eyed and spoke with a faint Spanish accent. Elena had become a friend more recently, but her manners were good and she had a sweet smile.

  This time, for the first time, Laurel had brought home a boy.

  He was good-looking, too—a little taller than Laurel, with shaggy blondish hair that kept falling in his eyes. He was tanned and fit and broad shouldered. He didn’t look up much, but when he did, Emma caught a glimpse of dark eyes. There was something familiar about him—maybe the cheekbones. Perhaps he’d gone to school with Laurel when they were much younger?

  Laurel said, “This is Tyler.” She didn’t say anything else about him, which was unusual. Normally, she’d have been babbling out the details (He’s in my history class, He’s on the tennis team, He wants to design video games). Tyler himself volunteered nothing. He seemed to be working hard at blending in with the furniture. He sat at the far end of the table, as far as he could get from Emma.

  “So, Tyler, how do you know the girls?” Emma asked, as she passed the potatoes around to Elena. The girls all exchanged quick looks that Emma couldn’t read, and Tyler didn’t raise his head. He was spooning gravy over his potatoes with great concentration.

  “I met Laurel at the library,” he said. He spoke softly, and he definitely did not meet her eyes. “We both like biographies.”

  That was almost suspiciously nonthreatening—like something rehearsed. But she supposed it could be true. Laurel nudged the boy, and he said, “History, too.”

  “I didn’t know you liked history,” Emma said to her daughter, her tone bright and conversational. “I’m always trying to get you to read historical novels.”

  “Not novels, Mom. History. Real history. And myth and legend and all kinds of things. You’re always trying to get me to read fiction. I don’t like fiction.”

  That was news, because there were shelves of well-read novels in Laurel’s room. The Harry Potter series. Tons of paranormal books for teens. All kinds of things that Laurel and her friends had been white-hot passionate about for the past few years. Suddenly, that was over.

  “What are you all reading now?” Emma asked, and that got the conversation jump-started again, with the girls talking over each other excitedly. Amy was still on the fiction bandwagon. Apparently Elena was the driving force to move Laurel over to the nonfiction shelves.

  Tyler stayed quiet, eating his steak as if his life depended on it. He seemed shy and aw
kward. Despite her native caution, Emma’s heart went out to the boy. This wasn’t easy for him. Though he ventured a comment every now and then, the girls’ conversation flowed over him like a river. At least he was trying.

  When dinner was over, Emma served cake and ice cream and put on a movie. She left them to have fun.

  A couple of hours later, Emma could hear their voices in the hall and registered that they were saying good-bye. She wasn’t listening with much attention: curled up in a chair in her office, she was engrossed in her own book. She didn’t expect them to come thank her for the meal, though that would have been nice. She was surprised to hear a quiet knock on the open door. Slipping her bookmark in her place, she looked up to see Tyler standing there.

  For a split second, she saw a glint of yellow in his eyes. Something inside her cringed. She scolded herself severely; her reading lamp had a lemon-yellow shade. She’d only seen its reflection. She forced a smile.

  “I just wanted to say—” He licked his lips and started again as he shifted uncomfortably, one foot to the other. The boy was very neatly dressed, Emma noticed. He surely hadn’t gone to school dressed in the stiff khaki pants, checked shirt, and clean sneakers. “I just wanted to say thanks. For having me in.”

  Emma smiled more genuinely. How nice! But from his grave face, she could see he wasn’t finished.

  “I—look, you’re going to hate me, I know that, and I just wanted to say that—I’m doing this all wrong.”

  He looked so wretched that Emma put her book aside and stood up, feeling sorry for him. “It’s okay,” she said. “Tyler, why in the world would I hate you? If you and Emma are going out together—”

  “No!” he said, and looked up at her. Again, she caught that odd flare in his eyes, and she felt the answering sick kick in the pit of her stomach, but it was the lighting. Reflections. Tricks of memory. “No, that’s not it. I—look, it’s just that I wanted to meet you. I wanted to know why.”