Falls the Shadow (Sparrow Falls Book 2)

by Justine Sebastian

  “Okay,” she said. “I didn’t mean no anyway, I just meant you don’t want to be fucked up for Hylas’s funeral.”

  “Why wouldn’t I want to be high for that?” Tobias asked. If there had ever been a time when he desperately wanted oblivion, it was then.

  “Fair point.” Dawn Marie reached over and rubbed Tobias’s arm gently. “Just don’t get too wasted, that’s all I’m saying. You’ve got to do the final eulogy.”

  “I am aware,” Tobias said as they turned into the driveway at Gallagher House.

  There were cars parked out in front in the big circular drive, all different makes and models. He had opened up his home for people to stay while they were there for the funeral and for the first time in many, many years, all of the bedrooms at Gallagher House were occupied. There were even people sleeping on blow-up mattresses in the great room. All of the guests were a minor reason why Tobias had been making himself so scarce. He did not want to alarm his guests or make them uncomfortable. The little bit he had been at home lately, he’d spent it working in his gardens like a man driven by a team of demonic overseers; always there, but just out of sight.

  “Are our guests doing well?” Tobias asked as they sat in the dark warmth of the garage.

  “They love it here,” Dawn Marie said. “Your head would swell to the size of a hot air balloon if you could hear all the compliments they’ve given us about the gardens alone. Last night, Wes took a few people into the walls to show them the tunnels and shit, too.”

  “Nice,” Tobias said with a faint smile. “I’m glad they’re trying to enjoy themselves. Do thank Wesley for me.”

  “Oh, Toby,” Dawn Marie said. “You don’t have to hide.”

  “Yes, I do,” Tobias said. He opened the car door and got out then waited for Dawn Marie to follow.

  “They’re not up yet,” she said when Tobias paused by the door that led into the main house. “I hate that you’re hiding in your own fucking house. That’s bullshit.”

  “It’s what I have to do,” Tobias said.

  “You need to stop worrying so damn much about what the fuck other people feel and worry about yourself sometime, Toby,” Dawn Marie said as they walked through the silent house.

  “And what would that get me? A fan club?” Tobias asked. “I think not.”

  Dawn Marie made a gah sound and proceeded to stomp her way up the stairs far more loudly than necessary. Tobias followed along behind her, silent as a shadow. She gestured for him to follow her into her bedroom and he did, shutting the door behind them while she went to her closet and took down a small jewelry box from the top shelf. Inside it was filled with a rainbow array of various illegally obtained prescription pills and one small baggy of what Tobias guessed was cocaine since Dawn Marie occasionally felt she needed more pep than she naturally had.

  “Here,” she said, coming up with an ovular pill that was somewhere between blue and purple in color. “Xanax of the kick-ass strength variety. It should calm you down and let you catch a nap without leaving you a zombie later.”

  “Thank you.” Tobias took the pill and swallowed it dry with no hesitation; he trusted Dawn Marie to know what she was talking about and he wasn’t at all concerned about getting loopy first thing in the morning. “I’ll go now.”

  “Fuck.” Dawn Marie frowned at him, her bottom lip quivering. Before Tobias knew what was happening, she threw her arms around him and hugged him tight. “I really am so sorry, Toby. We all miss him, but I can’t imagine how it feels for you.”

  “It feels like heartbreak,” Tobias said. It was easy to say such a thing to Dawn Marie; she was one of the few people he could be so open with. Another was Mr. Greene. The other had been Hylas and the knowledge that he would never talk to him again hit him like a hammer over and over until he was sure his brains would fly out and hit the walls with a wet sponge splat.

  Dawn Marie sobbed into the front of his shirt once then backed away, sniffling. She tilted her head back to look at Tobias then pushed up on her tiptoes to kiss the corner of his mouth. “I know it does,” she said as she settled back on her feet. “It’ll get better.”

  “Will it?” Tobias asked. He could not believe that, not then, not so soon after losing Hylas and maybe not ever again. As it was, Tobias could only echo words originally spoken by Vincent Van Gogh: “Sometimes I feel that the sadness will last forever.” Dawn Marie covered her mouth and gave a quick nod before she bowed her head. Tobias leaned down to press a gentle kiss to the back of her skull, lips cushioned by the thick mass of her pale auburn hair. “I need to lie down.”

  “Me, too,” Dawn Marie said. Her voice was clogged with tears, but she wasn’t actively weeping and it was a relief to Tobias though it left him feeling selfish at the same time. He could not ever leave Dawn Marie to weep alone though and right then, he wanted to get away and be by himself more than anything.

  He left her to go to his own room and hoped she really would be all right and might get a bit more sleep. Lenore was perched on the windowsill outside his bedroom window and tapped at the glass to be let in. Tobias pushed the window open and the bird flew into the room. Then he undressed, put on his pajamas and lay down on top of the covers, waiting for the Xanax to kick in.

  Once again, Tobias drifted off to sleep without realizing it, his brain gently turning off the lights and swaying him down into deep blackness. It was soothing there, comfortable and safe. In the darkness, Tobias did not have to think.

  “Toby, wake up.”

  Tobias heard Dawn Marie’s voice from a long way off and fought the pull of it on his consciousness. Inwardly, he turned away, seeking more dark silence, more of that vast vacuum of lightless space. She touched his forehead and brushed his hair away from his face. He felt her fingers, cool and gentle and it made his bones shiver with dread. Even in the gloom, Tobias knew why Dawn Marie was there and he railed against it.

  “Come on, get up,” she said, shaking him gently.

  The world of night inside his head sloshed like water and he spun with it, twirling up-up-up into a tornado towards the light seeping through his eyelids. He groaned and turned his back to Dawn Marie, pressing his face into his pillow. She laid her hand on his back, stroking down between his shoulders, gently urging him even closer to wakefulness.

  “What suit do you want to wear?” Dawn Marie asked.

  Tobias didn’t want to answer her, but the weight of her patient silence bore down on him until he could bear it no longer. “The black one,” Tobias said.

  Dawn Marie laughed, soft and husky. “Most of them are black.”

  “The Hugo Boss,” Tobias said as he forced himself to roll over again and at last open his eyes to look at her.

  “All right,” Dawn Marie said. “I’ll get it for you.”

  “I can get it,” Tobias said.

  He pushed himself into a sitting position then hung his head, staring down at the dark grey of his comforter. Lenore perched on his back just below the nape of his neck and plucked at his hair. Get a move on now. We can’t be late. The crow was not as patient with him as Dawn Marie; she was the insistent, loving mother that did not let up until her recalcitrant child stirred itself.

  “Okay,” Dawn Marie said.

  Tobias heard her open his closet anyway then the tell-tale rattle of clothes hangers sliding along the bar of the closet. That finally got him moving and he stood up, the world swayed around him and he almost sat back down again. Instead, he shook his head and went to the closet to get his clothes. This could not be put off any longer.

  Dawn Marie was already dressed; smart black pantsuit and a dark blue shirt beneath her lightweight blazer. Her hair was still its usual wild mess, but Tobias knew she’d do something with it before they left. One look at the bright, sunshiny day outside told Tobias all he needed to know about the temperature. Everyone was going to roast in their funeral clothes except for him. Womens’ make-up would melt down their faces in unsightly streaks of foundation and blush. Mascara would run and e
yeliner would ooze. Inside the funeral home it wouldn’t be that bad, but the graveside service was going to be a nightmare of ruined make-up, frizzy hair and the stink of sweat mingling with many different perfumes and colognes.

  He took his suit from her when she passed it to him then gathered the rest of his clothes. It was like any other day, so normal that it took on an aspect of surrealism that Tobias couldn’t shake. Tobias had been on the other side of many funerals and handled them all rather well. Now he was expected to handle this one well, too, even though his entire world had been destroyed and he was about to bury it. He felt like he had been moved into a mirror world where everything was almost the same, but nothing was quite right anymore. It was all off and wrong and fucked up. He couldn’t stop hating this day nor could he stop wanting it all to be a bad dream he would wake up from at any moment.

  “You good?” Dawn Marie asked him.

  “I’ll do,” Tobias said.

  “Yep,” Dawn Marie said. The necklace she wore had a silver snowflake with a small deep blue sapphire in the center. The necklace caught the light and glittered like frost. It had been a gift from Hylas because Dawn Marie loved snow, but almost never got to see any. Hylas had been thoughtful like that.

  She lit a cigarette and wet the filter with her rose-colored lipstick. Tobias felt it against his lips when she passed him the smoke and he took a drag. They’d spent many a lunch break in high school standing in the student parking lot doing the exact same thing. He had gone back to class more often than not reeking of Marlboro reds with the center of his mouth stained with pink, red, blue, black; every color of the rainbow and then some. No one had ever dared say anything to him and he had never wiped it off.

  “I need to shower,” Tobias said.

  “Sure,” Dawn Marie said. She started to walk around him then paused. “Hey, Toby?”

  “Yes?”

  “Will you French braid my hair before we go?”

  “Of course.”

  Dawn Marie smiled at him over her shoulder. “Thank you. It’s hopeless in this heat to try and do anything else with this burning bush of mine.”

  “You make it sound like you have gonorrhea,” Tobias said.

  “Ha!” Dawn Marie’s laughter trailed out of the room and Tobias tilted his head to the side, listening to it echo in the hall. It was a good sound.

  He showered and dressed, combed out his shoulder-length inky hair and tied it back with a plain black elastic. He knotted his tie and laced his shoes, so shiny he could see his reflection in them, nice and snug. When he was done Lenore perched on his shoulder and they went to find Dawn Marie.

  She was sitting at the little writing desk in her bedroom, staring out the window, a cigarette smoldering to greasy ash in the ashtray beside her. She didn’t stir until Tobias ran his hand over her hair. She passed him the hairbrush in her lap and so began the task of untangling, smoothing and ultimately braiding Dawn Marie’s thick hair. He secured the end of the braid with another black elastic.

  “All done,” he said.

  She nodded and stood up.

  “It’s starting to feel really real now,” she said.

  “It is, yes,” Tobias said.

  “It’s awful.”

  Tobias only nodded and said, “We should go now.”

  “Yeah.”

  That one syllable was heavy as a brick and they each dragged it with them out into the hallway, down the stairs and to the car.

  The funeral home was packed, so many cars parked that the visitor lot was full and the vehicles spilled out onto the sides of the street and the empty parking lot of the finance company behind the funeral home. Tobias and Dawn Marie parked in the small employee lot, thankful no one had decided to break the rules and fill it up as well. Mr. Greene’s old Cadillac El Dorado was parked beside Helen’s mist grey Jaguar; they would be working the funeral together that day.

  Mr. Greene still came to most of the funerals to greet and assist the mourners with their needs, but usually it was Tobias helping him out. Helen had worked for her father before Tobias came along that fateful summer, but now she was a respected psychiatrist and hadn’t set foot in the funeral home in years other than to visit her father. For this, she had come out of retirement from the funeral service industry to take up her mantle once again. Tobias made a note to send her a “thank you” card when it was all over.

  They went in through the back, Tobias using his key to let them into the embalming room and he followed Dawn Marie as far as the door to his office. When he stopped, she turned to look at him, a frown creasing her forehead.

  “What is it?”

  “I’ll wait here,” Tobias said.

  “No, you will not.”

  “I will so. I can’t go out there and… and…”

  “And what?” Dawn Marie snapped. “You have as much right to mourn as any of them do. More right than most of them.”

  “I don’t want to,” Tobias said. “It’s not just the people and… the way they are with me. It’s all of it.”

  It was one thing to sit with Hylas at night when no one was around except for Gary, but it was another thing to walk through that crowd of sorrow and have to look into all of those sad faces. It would be hell on Earth to watch those same sad faces flinch and cringe away from him, alienating him when he had never felt more alone in his life.

  “Damnit, Tobias.” Dawn Marie huffed. “Fine. Fine. You sit back here and hide. Let them win if that’s what you want to do. But you had fucking well better come out here when I come get you for the final eulogy.”

  “I will, I promise.” He would never let Hylas down that badly and for that, yes, fuck the people if they didn’t like it.

  “Good.” Dawn Marie straightened her blazer. “Motherfuck,” she said as she walked away.

  He shut himself inside his glorified closet of an office and sat down behind his desk. He could just hear the soft murmur of many voices talking. Once in a while, someone would cough. A little while later was a loud sneeze that Tobias was willing to bet was Wes. All the pollen from the funeral flowers had to be giving him fits. He took comfort from it in his own strange way and after a while, he let himself pretend he was listening to the distant sounds of someone else’s funeral.

  Tobias turned on his computer, determined to do something—anything—to further distract himself. Unlike Hylas, however, Tobias was not an internet junkie. He liked it well enough, but he could think of a million better things to do than play Farmville online. Social media did have a certain appeal for him due to his isolation, but Tobias didn’t really have anything to tweet or blog about. He subscribed to a few blogs that interested him, but other than that, he was adrift in the digital sea a lot of the time.

  After clicking around for a while, he decided to check his email; there wouldn’t actually be anything to read, but he could occupy himself with deleting all the spam he got. No one ever sent Tobias emails just to say hello. Sure, sometimes Dawn Marie would forward him something, but it wasn’t usual because they were together most of the time; she could just show him whatever it was if it was important. The only person who ever had sent him emails—sometimes upwards of twenty a day—was Hylas and that clearly would not be happening any longer.

  Tobias swallowed the lump in his throat and went back to deleting the emails one by one, checking the box beside each before tapping the delete key. It was done on autopilot while in the back of his mind he thought about deleting his email account entirely and just keeping the one he used for work. He checked the box next to one and started to tap delete again when he saw the sender’s name: Hylas M. Dunwalton, Esq. Hylas had never cared that “Esquire” was used only by lawyers and then only pretentious ones, it seemed. He said it looked cool and in Britain, it was just a polite way of appending a man’s name when they had no other title available. It had been a light, friendly bit of bickering back and forth between him and Tobias over the years that had amused them both.

  The surrealism from earlier welled up
again and Tobias hesitated to open it, afraid of the pain. It was like getting a letter from a dead person, but worse than that was knowing that Hylas had been alive when he sent the email. The subject line was simply “…” like most of Hylas’s emails were. After another moment’s hesitation, Tobias swallowed hard because he couldn’t just delete the email either, so he clicked to open it.

  Hey,

  Took this pic at your place the other day and thought you might like it.

  Take it sleazy,

  Hylas

  Tobias downloaded the attachment and opened the picture. He stared at it for a moment then put his face in his hands, reaching out blindly to fumble for the power button on the monitor to turn it off. The picture was of Hylas grinning at the camera, face close to his outstretched hand on which the tiniest, greenest baby praying mantis perched on the tip of his index finger. It stared into the lens, alien head cocked to one side like it was assessing the strange machine’s intentions: Friend or foe? Hylas often came to Tobias’s with his camera and tripod and took pictures of the property in all seasons because he said it was like a park or a nature preserve; it was a great place for landscape studies. He seldom ever took pictures of himself, though he had a remote control timer switch that he could use to snap shots like that if he wanted. It had to have been what he did that day and the picture had turned out perfectly.

  His stomach heaved and Tobias shoved himself back from his desk and ran to the employee bathroom just down the hall. He barely got the door closed before he was throwing up everything he had in his stomach, which was mostly sour bile that left his tongue feeling like it had been scraped by razor blades. He’d thrown up a lot since he felt Hylas die in his arms and his stomach muscles were strained and sore from it. Tobias leaned his clammy forehead against the cool porcelain of the toilet while he caught his breath and swallowed against the rawness of his throat. The pain made him think of that single black butterfly, that brilliantly vivid hallucination that had fluttered around his face, lightly brushing his cheeks with its velvety wings.