Devils in Dark Houses

by B. E. Scully

  Their family tree was as hard and hardy as a limber pine, all right. But maybe that one morning James could have stayed in bed. He could have slept in late and just hung around the house watching television. And Gordon could have been the one to go instead. He closed his eyes and replayed the fantasy, the same one every time: he’s running along the pathway when two men step forward and block his way (in the fantasy they’re always two men—no particular race or identifying features, but always two men—any men). They pull a Smith & Wesson .22 rimfire pistol like the one that killed his son and say, “So, you want everyone to own a handgun, eh?” He pulls his own SIG Sauer centerfire pistol and says, “That’s right, exactly because of sick sons-of-bitches like you.” Then he puts a round apiece into each of their foreheads.

  Gordon opened his eyes and stared at the clock. But only in his fantasy did the hands move backward. In real life, the only direction was forward.

  Sooner or later he would have to start taking care of business again. The bills piling up on the kitchen table didn’t care about his dead son any more than the clock did. His customers didn’t care, the people getting up each morning and going about their daily routine the same as always didn’t care. Even the cops didn’t care, not really. To them it was just one more job, one more case that may or may not get solved.

  Only one group of people cared about Gordon Parker and his dead son. In fact, they cared so much they’d been parked outside his house 24-hours a day ever since the shooting. They cared enough to descend on him and his wife every time they put so much as one toe outside the front door. They’d do anything for Gordon Parker, all right—anything to get his story. And why not? When the son of the most prominent gun rights advocate in the state is gunned down, shouldn’t his father have something to say?

  Gordon Parker did have something to say. In fact, he had a lot to say. But it probably wasn’t what the reporters thought he had to say. It definitely wasn’t what the cops wanted him to say. Luckily, Gordon Parker was beyond caring what anyone wanted or expected him to say.

  Maybe if Brenda would let him in just a little—would talk to him, or break down and cry, or even scream and beat her fists against him in helpless rage. Anything but just lying there on the bed, letting the life-raft of pills float her farther away from the wreckage that eight days, thirteen hours, and thirty-seven minutes ago had been their relatively normal, happy lives.

  Normal and happy were gone now. His son was gone, and his wife might as well be. His other kids were technically here, but they were like rescue workers picking through the rubble. They’d do all that could be done and then head back to their own more or less intact lives. Then they’d be gone, too.

  “Going, going, gone!” Gordon Parker yelled to the darkened room. Maybe his mind would soon be gone, too, along with everything else.

  One thing was gone, though, that Gordon didn’t miss one bit. It had been with him like a silent companion ever since he was ten-years-old. And the silent companion had a name: Scotty Mears.

  Gordon hadn’t been a particularly anxious or overly imaginative child. Once the lights went off, he kept one eye on the closet door and steered clear of the bed’s precipice edge just like any other kid. But nothing unusual. Nothing worrisome or excessive.

  That is, until the summer Scotty Mears went missing.

  Scotty Mears was in the grade ahead of Gordon in school. They played on the same Little League team. Scotty and Gordon’s dad went fishing together, and they both had older sisters in the same grade. Scotty lived two blocks away, and all summer long he’d ride his bike all over the neighborhood just like the rest of the kids.

  Only one day Scotty Mears went out to ride his bike and never came home again. At first everyone thought he was just playing hooky. Scotty always was a show-off. It’d be just like him to stay out all night in order to win the summer’s best bragging rights. But when the next morning came and went and still no Scotty, the neighborhood parents formed search parties to fan out through the streets and avenues and down along the creek and even all the way out the gravel road that connected to the interstate. By nightfall a cop car was parked in the Mears’ driveway. All the neighborhood kids gathered around the house in clusters, watching, waiting for whatever was going to happen next.

  That night, their parents called them home earlier than usual.

  They found Scotty’s body two days later, in the weed-choked field behind the power station utility road. None of the adults would talk about it, but in the secret-whisper way kids have of knowing things, it went around that Scotty’s body had been found naked. That horrible things had been done to it, things too terrible to even say out loud.

  Those things must have been terrible, all right, because after Scotty Mears went missing and then got found, everything changed. People started locking their doors even in the middle of the day. The only kids allowed out past sundown were the ones with parents too drunk, too busy, or too something or other to keep them home. That summer, a new wariness came into people’s eyes—neighbors started wondering if they really knew who they were living next to; wives took sharper notice of their husbands’ comings and goings; people who’d known each other for years were on the lookout for strange habits or odd turns of behavior they hadn’t taken notice of before.

  The Mears stayed inside their house with the blinds drawn. After Scotty’s funeral, they put their house up for sale and moved out of town. The house sat empty for four whole years before it finally sold to a young couple from California. They painted it bright blue with white shutters, like a beach house in a magazine.

  The police never caught the person who had killed Scotty and done things to him too terrible to even say out loud.

  Every night that summer, the windows were shut and locked in the Parker household no matter how hot and stuffy it got. Ten-year-old Gordon lay in bed listening to every tree branch scratch against glass, every floorboard creak or window shutter bang. He’d never noticed before how noisy a quiet house could be. Watching the shadows reach across his train-wallpapered walls, he imagined the killer out there, waiting to come and take him away to a weed-choked field.

  Maybe the killer was even someone he knew.

  One day, about a week after Scotty Mears had been found, Gordon was playing with his toy soldiers beneath the laurel bush in the corner of the yard when he overheard his dad talking to some other neighborhood dads. They were standing in a tight cluster at the edge of the yard, and they didn’t know Gordon was there. They were talking so low that Gordon could only hear snatches of words.

  “—that goddamn Surrett boy always did have something wrong with him.”

  “I say we go over there and—”

  “—saw Ben Lindzer down by that field just two days before—”

  “Wait a goddamn minute! I’ve known Ben since—”

  “Could’ve been someone from over at the high rise.”

  “Could’ve been a drifter.”

  “Could’ve been anyone.”

  Was it Mr. Stewart, the jeweler everyone said was “a little funny” because he’d never been married and wore a full suit and tie to work every day, even in summer? Or maybe it was Mr. Lane, the math teacher who’d hated Scotty Mears ever since the time Scotty had made sex sounds every time Mr. Lane turned around to write something on the board. Maybe it was the Parkers’ own next door neighbor, Mr. Abrams, who always turned the lights off at Halloween and pretended not to be home when trick-or-treaters came to the door.

  It could have been anyone. It could have been everyone.

  One late summer night when it was too hot to even think about sleeping, Gordon was in bed listening to the house when he heard the floorboard in the kitchen creak. Gordon wanted to stay in bed, to hide his head under the covers and pretend he hadn’t heard it. But then he heard a scraping sound, like a chair being drug across the floor. Or maybe a dead body.

  If he didn’t get out of bed soon, he’d wet it.

  First he’d wake up his mom and da
d and then go to the bathroom. His dad would get the hunting rifle from the hall closet and shoot the killer where he stood.

  Putting one careful foot in front of the other, Gordon crept out of bed and was halfway down the hallway to his parents’ room when a strange sound stopped him cold. It was coming from the kitchen, where the killer was.

  Gordon stood there in the hazy gloom of the hallway, listening. It was a high-pitched, strangled sound, kind of like the one their dog Harley had made when he accidentally got his foot caught in a rabbit trap.

  Maybe the killer was murdering someone right now! Maybe he was murdering Gordon’s sisters, or even his mom and dad! Maybe all of them!

  Gordon crept to the hallway closet and opened the door as slowly and quietly as he could. Pretending to be under the spell of some slow-motion superpower, like in a Saturday morning cartoon, Gordon reached out and took hold of his dad’s rifle. It was a house rule to never, ever touch it without permission, but Gordon figured a killer in the house was the one exception.

  His shaking legs somehow carried him back down the hallway and into the doorway of the kitchen. A shadowy figure sat at the kitchen table, both hands wrapped around some oblong object.

  The murder weapon! Run, run and get dad!

  But Gordon didn’t run. Instead he stood there and felt the warm, somehow comforting stream of urine let loose and travel across the front of his pajama bottoms.

  He must have made some kind of sound, because the figure turned around, turned toward him in the moonlight and he could see—

  He could see his dad, sitting there with a bottle of what his mom called “rot gut” in his hands. His father’s face was twisted up in an awful expression Gordon had never seen before. He realized that the strange, terrible sounds had been coming from his dad.

  “Dad? Daddy…?”

  Gordon’s father stood up. For one terrible, confused moment the killer and his dad got mixed up in Gordon’s mind. He almost turned and ran, but his dad came rushing at him first. He scooped Gordon up and squeezed him so tight Gordon thought he might add #2 to his already soiled pajama bottoms.

  His dad smelled awful, like the stuff Gordon’s mom used to clean his cuts after he fell off his bike or got caught by briars. He was still making those terrible sounds, and it took Gordon a minute to figure out he was crying. He’d seen his dad cry before—when Grandpa Parker got hurt in the tractor accident, when they’d had to put old Harley down—but not like this. Never like this.

  Before the summer Scotty Mears went missing and then got found, Gordon hadn’t known a grown-up could make those kinds of sounds. He hadn’t known they’d ever have a reason to.

  After a while Gordon’s dad stopped crying. He loosened his bear hug and looked at the rifle in Gordon’s hands as if he’d never seen it before.

  “Son, is that the gun—”

  “I’m sorry, Daddy. I know we’re not ever supposed to touch it, but I thought—”

  His dad gripped his arms so hard Gordon almost cried out. The long barrel of the shotgun was sticking up between them like a flag pole. Gordon really, really wanted to get out of his wet pajama bottoms. But he kept as still and quiet as if he were still under the superhero spell.

  “Listen to me, Gordon—you go and get that gun any time you think there’s trouble. Sometimes it’s a bad, bad world out there, full of bad, bad people.” His dad looked away and gave his eyes a rough swipe. Gordon thought he was going to start crying again, but he soon got a hold of himself and looked Gordon straight in the eyes. They were as steady and hard as the steel barrel between them. “You’ve got to protect yourself and your loved ones at all costs, you hear? Don’t you ever, ever be afraid to protect yourself!”

  Gordon Parker had never forgotten those words. But he’d never forgotten Scotty Mears, either. He wasn’t afraid to protect himself. But he was afraid of the things he had to protect himself from. And he was even more afraid that he might not even be able to figure out what—or who—those things were until it was too late. Scotty Mears hadn’t been able to, and Scotty Mears had been way smarter than Gordon any day.

  But Scotty Mears was dead and Gordon Parker was alive. He kept playing Little League, kept riding bikes, kept growing up. He graduated from high school and then college, got married, had kids of his own. Scotty Mears eventually sank beneath the surface of his memory. But like some deep sea creature lurking in the lightless depths below, he was always waiting to resurface. And he never had long to wait.

  Every time a new killing blared across the T.V. or newspaper headlines, Scotty Mears came back—Son of Sam, the Green River Killer, and Pogo the Clown to round out Gordon’s childhood. Ted Bundy, the Night Stalker, and the Railcar Killer to take him through high school and college. The D.C. Sniper, Jeffrey Dahmer, and then, after a ten-year hiatus, the reemergence of the BTK Killer to sail him straight through to middle age. And those were just the ones that made the front pages. It seemed Gordon couldn’t even keep up on the sports scores or discuss the weather down at the local coffee shop without hearing about rape, murder, home invasion, kidnapping, assault, terrorism… America, it seemed, was under siege by psychos and sickos.

  A bad, bad world full of bad, bad people.

  After their second child was born, Gordon and Brenda bought a three-bedroom ranch house with the money they’d been saving up. Like his dad, Gordon had always owned hunting rifles, maybe a small handgun tucked in a drawer for good measure. But now he had a home to protect, a family to think about. Eventually, he had to build an extra addition onto the back of the house just to store his guns and ammunition.

  His favorite column from the National Rifle Association magazine was called “Armed Citizen.” It featured true accounts from people like the 92-year-old World War II veteran who fended off an armed intruder with his hunting rifle, or the young woman who shot and killed her abusive ex-husband when he came back to take revenge on her and the kids. Sometimes, those armed citizens were close to home: the 22-year-old woman in a nearby town who pulled a handgun and scared off an attacker who dragged her out of her car by the hair; the elderly man on a farm less than thirty miles from Gordon’s own home who held a burglar at the business end of a shotgun for half an hour until police arrived.

  All three of Gordon’s kids knew how to handle firearms and regularly accompanied him to the shooting range. Eventually, Gordon went from being a member of the local gun club to being its president. In 1999, two kids in Columbine, Colorado went into their high school one day with pump-action shotguns, semi-automatic handguns, and ammunition purchased at a K-Mart store. When they were finished, twenty-seven people were injured and fifteen were dead, including the two shooters. After that, half the country started shouting for stricter gun controls while the other half shouted back about the Second Amendment. Six months after the Columbine shooting, Gordon founded the Oregon Right to Firearms Coalition.

  Two years later, the sporting goods store where Gordon had started out as a salesman before working his way up to management was bought out by a global corporation. After months of research and countless sleepless “what if” nights, Gordon decided to go into business for himself selling guns online.

  Firearms had always been a part of his life, and now they were his livelihood. Only one time had the guns turned on him. Gordon could still perfectly remember the bitter, sleet-soaked February morning he’d gotten up early to go and look for the raccoon that had been showing up in their yard at all times of the day and night, circling the garbage cans and barking and howling like a horror movie monster. Brenda thought it might have rabies, and Gordon wanted it gone either way. One of the many Parker house rules about guns was to never, ever load or unload a firearm inside. But it had been so cold that morning. Just this one time wouldn’t hurt…

  The gun discharged one round before Gordon even knew his finger had been on the trigger. Gordon had been handling firearms almost his entire life. He had never, ever had so much as one misfire or accident. How had the safety gotten off
? How had the weapon fired? He hadn’t even had his finger on the trigger!

  He sat there listening to the dead quiet of the house. The rest of the family was still sleeping. The blast had happened so fast, and had been much quieter than he would have thought. He looked up and saw a tiny bullet hole in the corner of the room’s ceiling. On the other side was the second floor, where the bedrooms were. Gordon kept staring at the little round hole in the wood. Then he finally stood up on legs that wouldn’t hold him and then sat back down again. Gordon was sitting directly below his oldest son’s bedroom. The bullet had gone through the ceiling and up through the floor into…into what?

  Gordon could still remember the wet-cement feel of his body going up the stairs one by one, of going down the hallway one step at a time…it was exactly like the night he’d found his dad in the kitchen the summer Scotty Mears had disappeared and then been found. Only this time it wasn’t a super-hero power sending him into slow motion. This time it was the absolute terror of actually reaching his son’s bedroom, of going over and putting his hand on the small, impossibly fragile chest, of checking his breathing and pulling back the covers and finding—