Gradually, in crept thoughts that had been there for over a month anyway. All of the little things Tobias did not want to think about. The way Hylas’s mangled hand had looked on his arm. The last thud of his dying heart burying its memory in his bones. The black butterfly that had crawled up his throat and flown from his lips like a secret. The terrible trembling and high, whining scream of Kenneth Wilson as he died. The way blood had squirted from his nose as Tobias murdered him.
He sat up straight on the bench with a jolt and ran his fingers through his hair. He didn’t want to think about any of that. He didn’t want to relive it or revisit it. He wanted to forget about it, run away from it as far as he could with whatever means necessary. All this time he had been telling himself he was coping, but he had not been unless he’d been coping by not coping.
Tobias knew he was responsible for Kenneth-Ken-Kenny’s death, he had killed him as surely as Kenneth had killed Hylas. It would have struck him as impossible and he could have rationalized it away if that had been the first time it happened, but it wasn’t. In the third grade, Tobias had killed Neil Kean as easy as you please. He’d done it with no thought, only the anger of a sad, lonely little boy who’d had enough.
Neil had been a terrible bully, one of the few Tobias had ever contended with. He made it his life’s mission to harass Tobias and make him feel even more excluded than he already did. He’d called him names, his favorite being the always original “Casper”. He’d shoved Tobias down on the playground and tripped him going to his desk at the back of the classroom that was pushed as far toward the corner of the room as the Mrs. Byrd could get away with. Things had finally come to a head the day Neil punched Tobias in the face and broke the little Mardi Gras float he had made for a school-wide competition. Tobias had spent two weeks working on it and it had looked great; he was proud and it made him smile. It was his smile that seemed to piss Neil off the most. He’d walked right up to Tobias in the hallway as they were setting out their floats and knocked it out of his hands. Then he’d stomped on it for good measure right before he decked Tobias.
“Creep,” Neil spat at him.
More than the punch it was the sight of his float—the sight of all that work ruined—that made Tobias see red. He had been proud of the damn thing and Neil Kean had come along and destroyed it like it was nothing. Like it didn’t matter. All because he thought Tobias was a freak and a weirdo and he hated Tobias for it though Tobias had never wronged him.
Tobias stared at Neil then and through his bloody teeth he said, “I want you to die and go away.”
And Neil had. Not right away, he laughed at first, but Tobias hadn’t backed away from him. Instead, he put his hands on Neil’s chest and shoved him backward. Neil had tripped over the ruins of Tobias’s float and his eyes had gone wide with shock, his mouth had dropped open. When Neil hit the floor, he was dead of a massive heart attack at the ripe old age of eight. It had been attributed to a heart defect that had gone undetected, but Tobias knew the truth.
He told Hylas one night in their bedroom a few weeks later, voice hushed and shaking. Hylas had hugged him—Hylas thought hugs were the cure for everything even then—and told Tobias it was okay. He said, “You didn’t mean to do it.”
The thing that Tobias would come back to years and years later was that Hylas never said, You didn’t do it. He had not said, That’s not true, Tobias. He just died is all. No, he said, You didn’t mean to do it.
Killing Kenneth Wilson had been no accident though. Tobias had never wanted anyone dead so much in all his life. When Tobias took Neil Kean’s life he had not been aware he was even capable of such a thing, but afterward the knowledge had been clear in his mind. After Neil, Tobias had been afraid to touch anyone for the longest time, but he’d gradually gotten over it. He’d come to realize in a roundabout way that he didn’t have to hurt people if he didn’t want to. And Tobias seldom ever wanted to hurt people, especially not so badly he killed them. He never forgot that he could do it if he really wanted to though.
When he grabbed Kenneth, Tobias had dragged that unused ability out of its blighted corner and forced every bit of his will through Kenneth, making sure he died in excruciating pain. Tobias had wanted to crush his soul, smash it to bits like crumbly shale and he had poured that intent through his fingers and into Kenneth’s body.
He had not heard—nor had he asked—how Kenneth died, but he knew anyway. The arteries in his head had blown out in tremendous embolisms, the nerves in his body had short-circuited, his organs had ruptured inside his sack of skin. His heart had seized like a fist in a spasm and then stopped; no wind down, no slowing. It just stopped. For those few brief seconds, he had felt pain the likes of which no one had ever felt before. He had felt the agony Tobias felt and Tobias had used it to kill him; his hate and grief like poisonous explosions rupturing and shaking and tearing apart Kenneth Wilson from head to toe in a moribund ripple effect.
“Stop it,” Tobias said. He ground his teeth, fingers clenched hard against his knees as he stared into the glaring red light of the slowly sinking sun. “Leave it alone.”
But he couldn’t.
He didn’t feel guilty for what he had done to Kenneth and that bothered him most of all. He felt bad that he didn’t feel bad. Tobias should have felt horrible; he had killed a man in a fit of rage, but it had been no spontaneous crime of passion. Though he had been angry, there had been intent in what he did. Even if he tried to turn himself in for the murder of Kenneth Wilson, no one would believe him because it didn’t look like something a man could do. The authorities had probably attributed his death to injuries sustained in the collision, though it would have left them scratching their heads about how Kenneth got out of his truck at all with fatal injuries like that. It was as though he had been crushed and his organs forced through a sieve and all without breaking any bones. It wouldn’t make sense to the coroner, but they wouldn’t know what else to name as cause of death either and because it was Sparrow Falls they probably wouldn’t try too hard to figure it out.
Tobias was stuck living with the fact he had murdered someone else and the worst part was that Tobias wasn’t a murderer. He had cleaned and dressed many bodies of murder victims in his years working at Greene’s Funeral Home. He’d come to despise the act, the wanton cruelty and greedy stupidity of most murders. He’d seen up close what murder could do to people—both the victims and their loved ones left behind.
“Oh, what a mess,” Tobias said. He rubbed his hand over his mouth. He was losing his mind to a spiral of death-murder-homicide-manslaughter. Killer. Killer. Killer. Mixed in that awful stew was the sight of Hylas blinking-blinking-blinking, like a man stunned awake from a violent dream he couldn’t clear away.
“Lenore!” Tobias called as he popped to his feet. He was officially no longer coping. He couldn’t breathe, his chest felt tight and there was ringing in his ears. He had the maddest urge to run, to just go and go until his legs gave out on him. “Lenore!”
There was an answering caw from an oak near the rear of the cemetery and then he saw her as she winged her way toward him, coasting on the air like she was floating.
Tobias held out his arm for her to land on and when she perched, he said, “I’m sorry to interrupt you, but we really must be leaving. I don’t feel very well at all, Lenore.”
She cawed softly in question.
“Avoidance gets you nowhere, remember that,” he told her. “I don’t know what to do with myself, my dear.”
Lenore pecked him lightly, There, there, then ruffled her feathers as she shook herself off, lifting her wings away from her body to facilitate cooling. Tobias thought she was getting quite spoiled to air conditioning.
“What do people do?” he asked the heavy summer air. “They drink. A lot,” Tobias answered himself. “That’s what they do. Or they go to therapy, but I don’t think that would work out too well for me. I’d scare my therapist.”
That made him laugh and with that laugh the iron ban
d around his chest relaxed some, but it didn’t let go. It was waiting. Everything was waiting and Tobias wasn’t ready to face it yet. He headed home, air conditioner on high for Lenore, with the intention of getting soundly drunk for the fourth time in his life and the first time in about ten years.
“What fun,” Tobias said as he drove away.
He kept liquor in the house, he did enjoy a couple of fingers of whiskey in the evenings. There was actually a bar in Gallagher House and Tobias kept it stocked with more than just whiskey because it looked rather forlorn standing in the corner of the front parlor with nothing on the shelves. Dawn Marie drank enough for the both of them and sometimes she’d play cards with Nick, Wes and Nancy. They turned the parlor into a veritable saloon, which Tobias liked because he liked having life in the big old house. He stayed out of the way for the most part, but he could sit in the great room and hear the happy sounds of their laughter drifting in to him. The grousing when a hand was lost, the crowing when a hand was won. It was nice, it was almost like being a part of something.
He left the bar alone when he got home, though he did consider its contents; he even toyed with the idea of sitting at the round table they all played cards at. In the end, he decided against it and took his bottle of whiskey down from the cabinet by the microwave in the kitchen. He poured himself his usual two fingers then shook his head. He was getting drunk, not having an after dinner tipple. Tobias filled his glass nearly to the brim then walked outside, bottle in his other hand, to sit under the wisteria arbor while he consumed it.
As the hours passed, the liquor started to go down much smoother and Tobias began to understand why people were so fond of drinking to forget their troubles. Intellectually, he knew that it didn’t really work—at least it was no permanent solution—but a few hours spent imbibing spirits did make the sharp edges much duller.
Dawn Marie came out to sit with him for a couple of hours and have a drink as well. They played cards while she waited for her date to show up, some guy from Mandeville that she’d met online. Tobias disapproved, but was too busy losing his ass to her in poker that he neglected to mention it. It wasn’t the date part that he disapproved of anyway, it was that it hadn’t been too long ago her last paramour had slapped her down to the ground. With Dawn Marie’s unfortunate taste in men, Tobias was convinced already that this newest fellow—Chris—was no Prince Charming either.
“The tragedy of it all,” he slurred to himself around 1:00 a.m. when Dawn Marie had yet to come back home and he was still dwelling on it. The idea of one of those men hurting her was cause for preoccupation with Tobias more often than he would have liked. One day, he thought she was going to end up dead.
“I should take a look-see,” Tobias said to Lenore who was sitting in the center of the table watching him. The crow was a great listener, Tobias had decided. She seemed to really get him. He snorted laughter, puffing whiskey fumes all over Lenore who blinked, but seemed otherwise unoffended. He tapped his temple. “Take a peek, you know. Maybe if I know then I can stop it and that would be nice. I’ve a’ready… already… fucked up so badly that I can never be forgiven. Mustn’t do that again, oh, no, that would never do.”
He hiccuped then reached for the bottle. It was nearly empty, but he was still wide awake. Tobias frowned at the dregs of whiskey. “To the bar!” he declared, lifting his hand to point toward the house. Lenore hopped back a couple of steps, startled by his outburst. “Onward!”
Greatly amused by his own genius, Tobias tottered toward the house and inside to the bar. He grabbed a bottle of something dark, so it wasn’t gin, though he couldn’t make out what the label said. So he did the next best thing: he performed a taste test. Very scientific, it was.
“Rum.” Tobias smacked, considered replacing the bottle and trying again, then decided to hell with it. “Yo-ho-ho!” he called as he stumbled back outside.
After a while of that, he grew bored and lonely. Lenore was good company, but she wasn’t much of a conversationalist. She tried, but Tobias didn’t speak crow, though he was nearly certain Lenore could understand human just fine. It was, at times, a tad bit unsettling to consider.
Tobias took his bottle and cigarettes, a lit one already dangling from the corner of his mouth, and made his unsteady way around the side of the house. He located the narrow path to the cemetery by the light of the full moon and shuffled gamely forward. Halfway up the path a howl broke the night. It was loud and deep, the sound of a wolf only bigger. It was mournful and spine-chilling all at once. Nick had been grieving in his own way since Hylas’s passing. The night of Hylas’s burial, Tobias had sat on the back veranda and listened to Nick singing his sad werewolf goodbyes most of the night; the sounds coming from up the hill. If Tobias had gone up there, he knew he would have found Nick, shaggy pelt gleaming like dull gold in the starlight, as he stood over Hylas’s grave. It had been too depressing to consider, so Tobias had stayed put, though he had heard Wes head that way around two in the morning.
“Everyone misses you like hell,” Tobias said once he made it to Hylas’s grave and was sprawled in the poppies, leaning against Hylas’s headstone to keep himself upright. He drank deeply from the bottle of rum. “Even that crazy little man, Aaron, is bereft. You never did tell me your secret, you know: How did you make people love you so much? I couldn’t make someone love me if I tried. I love you and you were—are… whatever—a lovable soul, but still. It’s as fas—fasci— Damn it all. Fascinating. Yes, there. It’s as fascinating as it is boggling. I think though that maybe it was just you, hmm? That’s probably correct. Not something I could’ve learned anyway then. Nope.”
Tobias drank more and slumped down in the tall grass, shoulder scraping against the side of the tombstone in a way that would have smarted if he was sober. “I think gravity is telling me I should lie down,” he said. “I’m not sleepy. Am. Not.”
He lay down anyway after pouring out a shot for Hylas then setting the rum aside somewhere in the tall flowers and grass. He hummed a song to himself for a little while, breathing deep, steady and deliciously rummy. He snickered to himself and let out a deep breath then easy as that, he was asleep.
Tobias dreamed of Hylas standing on the shore of some vast ocean, stars bright and static-white against the rich nighttime blues of the sky. Tobias’s heart leapt with joy as he ran to Hylas, calling his name, kicking up puffs of sand in his wake like the sappy finale of a bad romance.
Hylas turned away from the calm sea and smiled at him. He was as beautiful as ever in the glow of the half moon hanging overhead, the light turning his tanned skin to silvered honey. Tobias grabbed him and wrapped him in his arms, squeezing him like he was trying to merge their bodies into one.
I thought I lost you, Tobias said. His tears wet Hylas’s hair and dripped off his chin to run down Hylas’s back.
Nah, I’m right here, man, Hylas said as he pulled back to look at Tobias. He smiled, but it didn’t quite reach his eyes, then he shrugged away whatever was bothering him and embraced Tobias again. Hylas rocked them lightly from side to side, patting Tobias’s back. It’s all gravy, Tobias. No worries.
But there were worries because something was off.
Why are you so sad? Tobias asked as he pulled away. Hylas was rarely, if ever, sad.
I can’t sleep, Hylas said, voice distant, wondering. Tobias, I can’t sleep. It’s so weird. If there’s one thing I can do, it’s fucking sleep. He blinked and rubbed his eyes then looked at Tobias, troubled gaze sharpening on his face. Shit, never mind that. Tobias, I need to tell you something. It’s important, okay? I need you to listen—
Hylas was ripped away from Tobias so quickly that he didn’t even flicker. One second, he was happy on the shore of his dream-sea and the next, he was awake in the damp summer night, his back on fire with multiple spasms that started at his shoulders and went all the way to his waist. The world around him felt flimsy and thin as he gasped and struggled, trying to sit upright. Tobias couldn’t catch his breath; it w
as as though all the air was being sucked out of the clearing and he was being dragged along with it. He could feel it like the mouths of leeches all drawing hard at his flesh with the assistance of little fingers plucking at his clothes, pinching his skin.
Tobias raised his hand in an automatic, mindless gesture, trying to ward off whatever it was. Maybe his dream had become an agonizingly real nightmare; he could hardly move the twisting pain in his back muscles was so severe. The dark blue of the night sky shone through the translucent alabaster sheet his skin had become. He could see the bones in his hand, the flex of the tendons when he curled his fingers into a fist and let his hand drop again. He was growing flimsy and translucent. Something was dragging him away like the night he had awoken to the sharp tug on his ankle. Only this was infinitely worse and more alarming.
It pissed Tobias off, that sheet-ice of anger that lay buried beneath his skin burning with cold fire. One thing he hated above all others was being fucked with. He’d had his fill when he was a very young child and it didn’t matter that this was not some cruel schoolyard bully or a mean old lady throwing oranges at him. It was still unacceptable and Tobias would not tolerate it.
“No,” Tobias said through his teeth. He dug his semi-transparent heels into the dirt and sank his fingers in along with them. He pulled away from the force tugging at him and shook his head. “I said, no.” It came out as a growling rasp as Tobias gathered his strength and shoved back as hard as he could against the invisible force that had hold of him.
The terrible feeling released him, he felt and heard it tear away with a sound like ripping paper. Without the force pulling at him, holding him upright, Tobias fell back on the ground with a hard thump. His back still ached, but it was already fading and when he held his hand up toward the moon that peeked over the tops of the trees, he could not see it through his hand. All of the crows were cawing, agitated and angry, he realized once he could think again. Lenore sat on his chest and pecked at his mouth, around his eyes and cheeks—checking him for injuries, asking if he was okay.
Falls the Shadow (Sparrow Falls Book 2) Page 22
