by Tim Waggoner
“I appreciate the offer, Dad, but you’re just a hallucination. You can’t really navigate for me.”
Martin sniffed. “Maybe you just think I’m not real. Maybe the Overshadow’s touch has done something to your brain, widened your range of perception, and now you’re able to see me.”
Aaron let out a snorting laugh. “So you’re telling me that I can see dead people now? Nothing personal, but I don’t think so.”
Martin shrugged, then crossed his arms and looked out the side window. “Fine, have it your way.”
Normally, fighting with his father — whether the man was real or not — would’ve depressed Aaron. But he felt too damned good right now to care. There was another reason he hadn’t driven off; he had the sense that the others were testing him by giving him some time alone. Had his second experience with the Overshadow removed his earlier misgivings about sacrificing humans to it? The truth was he hadn’t thought too much about this last part. His thoughts were sluggish and fuzzy, drifting this way and that like a fat lazy bee in an endless field of succulent flowers. He knew that sooner or later he’d have to come to terms with what he’d allowed himself to be part of, but that would have to wait for his mind to clear. Assuming it ever did.
Penumbra’s back door opened then, and the most important reason Aaron hadn’t left walked out into the night. Caroline crossed over to the driver’s side of Aaron’s Lexus and motioned for him to roll down the window. He did so, and all at once he was overwhelmed by sensations — the near-deafening sounds of night birds and insects, the moist cool humidity of the summer night air, the acrid-sweet musk drifting forth from between Caroline’s legs, thick and strong despite the jeans she wore. The sudden deluge of sensory input was so intense that Aaron thought he might pass out, but then the feeling passed and he was able to focus on Caroline’s face.
“You all right?” she asked.
Aaron gave her a smile that he hoped didn’t look at dopey as it felt. “Fantastic. A-OK. Peachy-keen.”
She frowned slightly but said, “Go ahead and pop the trunk. Phillip’s ready to bring him out.”
For an instant, Aaron didn’t understand what Caroline wanted. It was as if she was speaking a foreign language, and it took him a moment to translate in his head.
“Right. Got it.”
He reached out and pulled a plastic lever and was rewarded with a hollow chunk! sound as the trunk sprang open. Caroline crouched down and leaned partly through the open window. She gave Aaron an appraising look, then said, “I think it might be better if I drove. You look like you’re still pretty wrecked.”
“Who, me?”
“She’s right, kid,” Martin said from the back seat. “You try to drive you’ll end up wrapping your prized Lexus around a telephone pole. Won’t hurt me since I’m not real — at least as far as you’re concerned — but it’d sure cramp your style.”
“All right, you win.” Aaron undid his seatbelt. Caroline stepped back as he opened the door and climbed out of the car. He nearly pitched forward into her arms, but he grabbed hold of the car door and kept his balance.
“Let me guess,” Aaron said. “This is where you tell me that I’ll recover more quickly from the Overshadow’s touch as time goes by.” He said this to Caroline, but it was Phillip who answered.
“Maybe. But Spencer still quivers like a jellyfish for an hour or so after being touched, and he’s been a member for years.”
Aaron turned to see Phillip walking toward the Lexus’ trunk. In his arms he carried a large object wrapped in an old dirty sheet. Bryan’s remains, and from the relaxed way Phillip carried them, they obviously didn’t weight much anymore. Phillip stopped when he reached the car, and he gently lowered the cloth-wrapped corpse into the trunk. Aaron was surprised to see this unexpected touch of tenderness from Phillip, but then the man said, “Can’t just throw him in there. Wouldn’t want any pieces to break off.” He then closed the trunk and walked around to the driver’s side to join Aaron and Caroline.
“This is it, Aaron,” Phillip said. “The last step in your orientation to our little family. The rule in Penumbra is that whoever brings a playmate is responsible for disposing of the … leftovers at the end of the evening. Caroline will go with you tonight, but after this you’ll do it on your own whenever necessary. There’s little risk of our getting caught. Wyatt helps with that by making sure no other police officers patrol around here late at night. But just in case, we usually handle the job solo. Understand?”
Aaron wasn’t sure if he did or not. Phillip had used so many words … But he figured that if he hadn’t caught everything now, Caroline would fill him in on the rest later.
“Sure thing,” Aaron said, grinning.
Phillip looked at Aaron for a moment, then laughed and clapped him on the shoulder. “Man, you are still so wasted!” He turned to Caroline. “Was I that bad after my first touch?”
She smiled lovingly at him. “Even worse.” She moved into his arms and gave him a lingering kiss. Aaron watched, not thinking or feeling much of anything at seeing his new lover kiss her husband.
“See you later, lover,” Caroline said to Phillip as they parted.
Phillip nodded. “Good luck, you two. And don’t have too much fun.”
Caroline gave her husband a mock-innocent look. “Why whatever could you possibly mean?”
Phillip laughed, then stuck out his hand for Aaron to shake. It took Aaron a couple tries to get hold of it, but then the men shook.
“See you soon, Aaron.” Then Phillip released his hand, gave Caroline a last wink, and headed back toward Penumbra’s rear door. Once inside he closed and locked it.
Caroline smiled at Aaron. “Let’s go, sweetie. It’s not far away, but the sooner we get there, the better.” She came toward him and cupped his cock and balls through his pants. “Once we’re done with our chore, then you and I can play. Won’t that be nice?” She slid her tongue out between her lips then slowly licked Aaron’s face, starting at his chin and moving over his lips, nose, between the eyes, then over his forehead, kneading his genitals the entire time. She pulled her hand away then and stepped back.
“Let’s go,” Aaron said, voice thick with lust. As Caroline climbed into the driver’s seat and Aaron headed around the front of the car to the passenger’s side, he almost forgot that there was a dried husk of a dead body wrapped in a dirty sheet in his trunk.
Across the street in Speedy Lube’s parking lot, Gerald watched Aaron’s Lexus come around from behind the strip mall and pull out onto the street.
He grinned as he put his VW in gear and began to back out of his parking space. He didn’t have to hurry; there was no need to keep up with them. He knew where they were going, and when he got there, that’s when the fun would truly begin.
Gerald flipped on his headlights and then, rubbing his scabby bald head in glee, he pulled onto the road and followed the red glow of the Lexus’ taillights.
The world outside the Lexus was a swirling, dancing interplay of gray-black shadows. Aaron had the impression the shadows were alive, or nearly so, and he wondered if the entire planet, perhaps even the whole universe, was nothing more than a gigantic version of the Overshadow, greedily draining the lifeforce of the tiny beings that inhabited it.
He laughed. “I feel like a kid who’s just gotten high for the first time.” He turned to look at Caroline. “You know, the one who suddenly has the dazzlingly banal insight that an atom inside his thumbnail could contain an entire universe of its own?”
Caroline smiled and nodded. “Yeah, I know what you mean. I really was a teenager the first time — ” She broke off, frowning. The glow of the dashboard lights colored her skin a pale aquamarine, making her look like a statue carved out of some kind of bluish jade. Aaron didn’t know if the effect was natural or caused by his altered perceptions, but he didn’t care. Either way, she was breathtakingly beautiful. He tried to reach over and embrace her, but his seatbelt held her back.
“Easy, boy
,” Caroline said, smiling once more. “We’ll get there soon. And after we’ve finished our chore, we’ll have plenty of time to play.”
Chore? For a moment, Aaron didn’t know what she meant, but then he remembered the mummy in the trunk. Caroline was driving them to a place where they could dispose of him. No, it. Aaron had the feeling this trip would be a whole lot easier if he thought of Bryan’s remains as it instead of him.
“Don’t be such a wimp,” Martin said from the backseat. “If you’re going to do this, you might as well be a man about it.”
Aaron glanced sideways at Caroline to see if she would react to his father’s words. Aaron was confident that Martin was his hallucination and his alone, but he couldn’t help checking. Being confident was not the same as being certain.
But Caroline continued driving, her attention fully on the road. If she perceived Martin Rittinger, she was doing a damned good job of hiding it.
Aaron looked out the window again. He wasn’t sure how long they’d been traveling, though he doubted it was more than a handful of minutes. And he wasn’t sure exactly where they were, though he knew they were no longer in town. The sinuous gray-black shapes that writhed and intertwined alongside the road he guessed were trees, temporarily transfigured by his altered perceptions. If so, that meant they were out in the country somewhere, which made sense. You wouldn’t want to dispose of a body by simply tossing it into a Dumpster. You’d want to go somewhere secluded, somewhere private.
“Maybe she isn’t intending on just getting rid of your dried-up friend in the trunk,” Martin said. “Maybe she’s planning on getting rid of you, too.”
Aaron started to turn around and answer, but then he remembered that Caroline couldn’t see his father because he wasn’t there to be seen. So he answered in his thoughts, hoping his dad could hear them.
Why would she want to do that?
“Who knows? Maybe because she’s tired of you already. Maybe you don’t measure up in the sex department, not compared to the kind of kink she’s used to getting. Maybe because she’s a killer and it’s in her nature.”
Aaron was about to protest this last bit, but then he remembered seeing Caroline escort her stripe-shirted young lover into Penumbra a couple nights ago. He considered asking Caroline about the boy, but he decided not to. He wasn’t sure he really wanted to know what had happened to the kid.
I don’t think Caroline wants to harm me, Aaron thought. But even if she did, she wouldn’t take me out to the woods to do it. She wouldn’t waste my lifeforce like that. She’d give me to the Overshadow.
Martin had no reply to that, and Aaron felt a sense of smug satisfaction that he’d finally scored a point against his father. He glanced over his shoulder, hoping to get a look at his dad’s expression, but the backseat was empty. He turned around and looked out the window once more. While the shapes on the side of the road were still undulating, they were recognizably trees now, if slightly blurry, distorted ones. It appeared his perceptions were beginning to return to normal. Or whatever normal might be for him from now on.
Images flashed though his mind. A thick dark tentacle squirming down Bryan’s throat. The man being covered with darkness as the Overshadow’s substance oozed out of his pores. The contorted, withered husk that remained once the Overshadow had finished with its grisly meal.
Don’t think about it, Aaron told himself. There’s nothing you can do to change it now, and he was going to die anyway. Gillian said so. Giving Bryan to the Overshadow might’ve been more merciful that letting him suffer through a slow, lingering death.
Aaron remembered how Bryan had fought to pull the black tentacle out of his mouth, how he’d thrashed as the darkness covered him entirely. Whatever else Bryan’s death had been, it hadn’t been a mercy.
To take his mind off these thoughts, Aaron looked at Caroline and said, “A minute ago you started to talk about your first experience with Penumbra. Tell me about it.”
The road they were now on was narrow and wound through a wooded area. Caroline eased her foot off the accelerator, and the Lexus slowed to a more manageable speed. Caroline didn’t answer right away, and Aaron thought that perhaps she wouldn’t. But after a moment she took a deep breath and began to speak in a calm, toneless voice.
“Like I told you before, my mother and father founded Penumbra, and throughout my childhood, I had no idea it even existed, let alone what my parents did there. But that didn’t mean I wasn’t aware something was going on. As the years went by, Mom and Dad began spending more nights away from home, and they began changing. In small ways, at first. Dad would break off in the middle of a sentence and stare off into the distance, sometimes for minutes at a time, and mom started chewing her nails so badly that her fingers constantly bled. They stopped talking to each other — at least, when they were home — and after a while they stopped talking to me, too. I tried to ask them what was going on, tried to offer my help, but they refused to listen, acting as if I wasn’t even there. By this time I was seventeen, and I figured that it didn’t matter what was wrong with my parents. One more year and I’d be an adult. I could move out and start my own life and leave them to each other.”
Caroline slowed down as they approached a narrow gravel path on the right. She stopped, turned, and drove slowly down the path, gravel crunching softly beneath the tires. The trees and undergrowth were thick here, and it was like the Lexus traveled between walls of solid green. Caroline drove only a few yards on the gravel path before a chain-link fence blocked their way. She stopped, put the Lexus in park, and got out of the car. The fence was old, the rusted metal so brown it seemed like it had grown here, organically blending with the woods around it. The section that stretched across the path was chained and padlocked, and Caroline removed a single key from her pants pocket — how did she keep all those keys straight without a ring to hold them? — and undid the chain. She pushed the fence door inward until there was enough room for the Lexus to get through. She then got back into the car, put the transmission in gear, and eased forward once more.
When they were past the fence, Aaron said, “Shouldn’t we close and lock it again?”
“Don’t worry about it,” Caroline said. “We’re way out in the boonies here. No one’s going to drive by the path entrance, and even if someone does, they’ll go right on past without noticing it.”
Aaron wasn’t so sure, but then this was his first time coming here. Caroline had made this trip many times before and knew what she was doing.
As they continued down the path, Caroline resumed telling her story. “One day Mom was at the dining table waiting for me when I came home from school. For the first time in months she seemed like her old self, talkative and sweet. She said she was sorry for the way things had been lately, that she and Dad had been having problems, and they hadn’t wanted to involve me. But things would be better from then on, she promised. And then she asked if I wanted to take a little drive with her. She had something she wanted to show me, she said. Something important. Something amazing. I had no idea what she was talking about, but I didn’t care. Right then I would’ve gone anywhere with her. I was just so thrilled to have my mom back.”
Aaron knew where this story was leading. “She took you to Penumbra.”
Caroline nodded. The trees and underbrush began to thin out, and the gravel path widened slightly.
“She took me around the rear of the strip mall and through the back door. She didn’t quite close it all the way; I’m not sure why. Maybe it was because she had demented too far and wasn’t thinking straight. Or maybe — and I admit this is probably just wishful thinking on my part — on some level she wanted me to be able to see, to be able to defend myself. Whatever the reason, I could see her well enough when she came at me. We fell to the ground and fought for several moments, rolling back and forth, screaming, slapping, scratching, hitting … Finally I shoved her off of me, and she rolled into the Overshadow’s circle.
“I’d been distantly aware of the
Overshadow from the moment I’d first set foot in the room, but I’d been so busy struggling with my mother that I hadn’t really noticed it, you know? I watched as it fed on my mother. It’s funny, but even though she fought and thrashed around like anyone else as she died, I thought I saw a look of relief in her eyes just before the darkness engulfed her. When it was over … well, she was like Bryan. And then the Overshadow stretched a tentacle toward me. I thought it was going to do the same thing to me that it had done to Mother, but I was too scared, too grief-stricken to do anything but stay there and let the tentacle penetrate my forehead.”
The trees gave way to a field of waist-high grass. Caroline braked, parked the car, and turned off the ignition. She then turned to face Aaron.
“I don’t know how my father ever figured out where we were, but when I began to recover from the aftereffects of the Overshadow’s touch, he was there. Without a word, he took me to his car, then went back into Penumbra to get Mom’s body. He drove me here and showed me how they disposed of their sacrifices when the Overshadow was finished with them.” She sighed. “And that was my introduction to Penumbra.”
They sat in silence for several moments, the only sound the ticking of the Lexus’ cooling engine. Eventually, Aaron asked, “What happened to your father?”
“He continued going to Penumbra for a few more years. I started going too, bringing companions, both male and female, when it was my turn to do so. Then one day I stopped by the house to visit Dad — I’d gotten an apartment of my own by this time — and he was very excited to see me. He told me he had a neat trick to show me. He led me into the kitchen, where he’d put on a large pot of water to boil. As I watched, he walked over to the stove and submerged his entire head in the boiling water. Sometimes, late at night, I can still hear his screams.”
She pushed the button to activate the trunk release.
“C’mon, we’ve got work to do.”
