Bad Man_A Novel

by Dathan Auerbach

  The boy took one step forward and then another, his upturned palm held out. The old woman gritted her teeth, her eyes inflamed, her countenance reviling.

  “This what you want?” she snapped, whipping the necklace as she shook her arm. “This what’s important to you?”

  The red ring dangled at the end of the twine like a hypnotist’s medallion. When the boy reached for it, Ben worried that the old woman might snatch it away, that she might throw it into the dark woods. But she didn’t. She held it as steady as her shaking arm would allow, even when the boy pulled at it.

  “They wouldn’t have bought this for you if they knew what you was. If they knew you like I do.”

  Just take it, Ben thought. Just take it from her. But the boy didn’t take it. He didn’t even try. And then Ben thought he understood. The boy didn’t want to take it; he wanted her to give it to him. Beverly leaned down into the lantern light and spoke so softly to the boy that Ben couldn’t hear. But her eyes said enough. They were the same eyes that Ben saw every time his stepmother looked at him.

  The boy placed his hand on the lantern, right on the side of the glass that chambered the fire, snuffing out all the light to the left of the world. It stayed there long enough for Ben to think about how much it would hurt, long enough for Ben’s legs to start moving. Beverly was looking right at the boy’s palm when he finally moved his hand.

  The globe burst like a glass grenade.

  Kerosene surged in a flaming wave onto Beverly’s head and torso. She tried to scream. Once. Then she folded in on herself, crumpling in a spasming heap. Shards of glass stuck out of her face like clear teeth.

  Ben tried to take a step back but stumbled and fell. He covered his mouth but could still smell the burning skin and hair. Beverly’s lower jaw slunk out of its socket and chattered rapidly, exposing her cracked and twisted teeth under her bisected upper lip. She gurgled once and rolled her eyes over to Ben. And then she was gone.

  Shaking, Ben’s arms finally failed him, and he fell backward onto his elbows. Tall trees swayed above, their branches reaching out for one another with dozens of thin, crooked fingers. Beverly’s body burned in the dead rain. Blackened flakes of her hair were carried away by a cold, silent hearse that only birds could feel.

  61

  The quiet boy knelt over Beverly. Leaves crinkled against his small hands as he brushed and scattered them with care, but there was nothing reverent about his movements. His fingers plucked at the folds of the old woman’s dress. Finally, the boy smiled faintly, withdrawing his necklace from where it had fallen. As he tied it around his neck, Ben couldn’t help but stare. Flat and red, the disk looked like a piece of plastic jewelry made for a bull’s nose. It was the grip ring from a pacifier.

  It bounced against the quiet one’s small chest. A crescent blood moon whose ends had been fused together, bobbing at the end of a string. Ben covered his nose with his forearm and stared—stared at the boy and his happy walk, stared at the crimson prize dangling from his neck.

  “Okay” was all the boy said before he walked past Ben and back into the thick dark.

  Ben groped for the rake, stabbing it into the dirt and pulling himself to his feet. His leg shook, then buckled, and he braced himself against a tree. His eyes lingered on Beverly for a moment, her face splayed and puckered like a rodent’s. Bones, blood, and flesh. That was all. Something had moved those things through the world and ruined a small corner of it forever. A pillar of salt spilled over the soil of other people’s lives. And now all was still.

  Ahead, Ben could hear the slink-clink of a Zippo. Ben wiped his palms against his shirt. The residue of human smoke had leached into his clothes. The smell followed him as he caught up with the boy and the metal whispers of Marty’s lighter.

  “This ain’t that,” Beverly had said. But Ben could see it. The moonchild in the red ring of the boy’s necklace. The crescent curves. The twine body. It was almost irresistible to Ben’s eye, stronger in sensation the longer he looked.

  The boy found it funny. But it wasn’t. Separated by time and place and everything that mattered, the Blackwater beacon and this boy’s treasure had found each other anyway. They’d overcome their own histories, because their beginnings were conjoined to their end, an invisible coupling buried somewhere in the machinery of the world. There was nothing funny in that.

  This child had been in Ben’s home, had probably been the one who’d written in Beverly’s file. And his sketchbook. Those swirling and scribbled eyes. “HI BEN.”

  “Why didn’t you get the police? Hmm? Hey! Why did you come back?”

  “Juh-just to see,” the boy replied.

  “See what?”

  They didn’t talk any more after that. And Ben no longer held the boy’s shirt as they walked, though he knew he should. He told himself that he didn’t think the kid would run, but the truth was that Ben simply didn’t want to touch him. The quiet one walked less timidly now, trampling through the undergrowth with the high and bouncy steps of a real boy, leading Ben through the trees, showing him the way…and leading Ben back past Beverly’s home, showing him that they hadn’t needed to follow the woman at all. It had been a special trip.

  Ben would need to go to the doctor. He thought he could feel the muscle of his thigh moving freely under his torn skin, like it had somehow become disconnected from the bone. He needed to rest. Maybe he finally could when this was all over. It was hard to walk at a steady pace, but when Ben stopped, so did the boy.

  Each time the stuttering boy led them into a clearing, Ben’s eyes darted into its murky edges, ready to use his crutch as a weapon if he had to. The fact was that Ben didn’t know where he was being led or what he was being led to. All he could do was follow and hope.

  “Is this a trap?” Ben asked.

  The boy didn’t turn, and when he spoke it sounded sincere. “I dunno.”

  When his guide finally stopped, Ben was thankful, for no other reason than he could rest for longer than a breath. He leaned against a tree. It didn’t even occur to him that they might be done walking. It didn’t occur to him until he saw the boy gesture ahead of himself, shooing Ben deeper into the undergrowth as he stared with his burning, expectant eyes.

  Ben obeyed. He didn’t even think about it. Limbs and thorns tore at his clothes and skin as he pushed his way into the overgrowth; he didn’t think about that either. He looked back only once, just before the boy was lost from view entirely. He was nothing more than a shadow now, sunken in the crowding woods.

  “Cuh-come out, come out, whu-wherever you aaaaaare!” the boy yelled.

  The sound echoed through the trees, and a chill rolled up Ben’s spine, right to the base of his skull. Then, behind Ben, the woods answered. “Olly olly oxen free!”

  “Oh, God,” Ben blubbered. He pushed through the trees in the direction of the sound. It was far away, but it didn’t feel like it. It felt so close. “Eric! Eric, I’m coming!”

  Gritting his teeth, Ben pushed through the tangle. Every second step, his left leg would falter, but Ben didn’t slow. He didn’t need that leg. He could drag it. So he did, pulling it along and parting the brittle pine straw, driving gouges into the soft dirt. Barreling so hard into the branches that they snapped. Shouting his brother’s name with every scraping step, waiting for the voice to answer, and trying again when it refused. He moved his eyes over and around the glistening trunk of every tree, turned at every noise.

  “Come out, come out, wherever you are!” Ben waited with his breath stuck in his throat, but there was no reply. Nothing at all. “Come out!” Ben pleaded.

  How far away had the voice sounded? Shouldn’t he have reached it by now? Ben hadn’t gone off course. He’d been so careful. But there was nothing—nothing but more goddamn trees. “Eric! Please!”

  Ben pulled in another breath and cupped his hands around his mouth, but the yell collaps
ed in his chest. His foot had struck something so hard and unyielding that it made his whole leg hum. It lay tucked into the bed of the forest, half covered in soggy leaves and pine needles, something alien and strange in this place of unending wood, something metal. Its rungs glistening with moisture. Delicately, Ben swung his lame leg and kicked the forest away from the ladder.

  At first Ben didn’t understand. In fact, he nearly stepped away from it altogether—he wasn’t looking for a ladder. But then he stopped. And after a moment, he looked up, up into the trees, following them until they disappeared in the mouth of the hungry sky. “Eric?” Ben called tentatively, expecting only silence in return. But there was a voice.

  It had been tiny and fleeting, but Ben had heard it. Somewhere in the towering trees above, the voice had finally answered. He called to it again, frantically searching the branches. The voice didn’t reply, but it didn’t matter. Ben plunged his hands into the slippery leaves, wrestling the aluminum ladder from the clutches of the undergrowth.

  The trees all looked the same, giant pillars reaching deep into the purple black. Day would be coming soon, but not soon enough to wait for. Nothing could come that quickly.

  Ben’s arms shook as he heaved the ladder; the cold metal clattered against the thick pine, rumbling all the way down into the ground near his feet. He felt weak and dreamy as he took his first step, weaker still the more he took. His eyes saw nothing but clouds and stars above, crooked wood in front. “Eric!” he shouted. And under the hushed rustling of the wind, Eric replied—not with a word, but a sound, and a sound was all Ben needed.

  Ben had chosen the wrong tree. “I’m coming, Eric! I’m coming for you.” Ben whimpered as he adjusted his hands around the damp, cold sides of the ladder. Twice he slipped as he descended; his leg hardly worked at all now. Grunting, Ben jerked the ladder off the ground and away from the tree, straining and yanking against every branch that tried to snag it.

  Here! This one! Dirt and dead leaves scattered onto his face as Ben pulled himself up. His feet slipped off the rungs with almost every step. His leg was screaming, but his mind screamed right back. Higher and higher he climbed. Each step brought more limbs and needles, more jagged plates of waterlogged bark. Ben’s hands clawed viciously at the rungs now. His knuckles were raw from scraping against the tree in his mania.

  And then, as if the darkness itself had grown weary, it simply gave up.

  “Oh my God,” Ben sobbed. Mucus bubbled in his nose. “Oh, God!”

  Eric clutched the thick trunk of the mighty pine with both arms, his weight unnoticed by the large branch on which he sat.

  It was like looking in his sketchbook.

  The contours of Eric’s face were different, more severe somehow. Gaunt and hollow, his cheeks were shallow caves. The chestnut hair that had rolled and curled so much like his mother’s was tightly cropped. But everything else was right, just as Ben had drawn. He wished he could show his brother. For some reason, that wish burned the brightest in his heart, that he could show he hadn’t needed to see Eric’s face to know it.

  Ben’s whole body shook as he pulled himself higher. Shivering from the cold wind, Eric was whimpering as he curled against the wet trunk just above the end of the ladder.

  “Eric, I’m here. I’m here. It’s okay now,” Ben called softly as he wrapped his fingers around the last rung. The boy’s eyes shifted, never landing squarely on Ben for more than a moment. He squirmed as much as his confinement would allow. “Don’t be scared. I’m gonna take you home.”

  Blinking tears away, Ben gripped the ladder with one hand and reached his arm out, first to wrap it around his brother, then just to touch him a little when the boy recoiled. “It’s alright. Everything’s alright now…” A chuckle freed itself from somewhere deep in Ben’s chest, and then he was crying. “I’ve missed you so much. Momma and Daddy are waiting. They’ve got a whole mess of presents for you. You can open ’em just as soon as we get back home.”

  When Ben reached for him again, Eric seemed to whimper more loudly, pressing his cheek into the jagged bark and stretching his arms around the trunk as far as he could. And as he did, Ben could see the black dome eyes and dull gray horns of a stuffed rhinoceros.

  “Is that Stampie, bud?” Ben asked with a struggling smile. “Hey, that’s great. You got him…You got him back.”

  Eric finally looked at Ben: a searching gaze that groped for something Ben didn’t think he understood.

  “What is it, bud? Tell me what I can do.” If he could just know what Eric wanted, then he could give it to him.

  The wind slowed. Everything seemed to slow. And out of that calm, Eric’s noises grew in intensity. Ben wiped his running nose on his shoulder and stared into his brother’s eyes. Tentatively, Ben reached his hand out again, letting it hover in the chilled air for a moment before slowly drawing it back toward his chest. Eric wasn’t whimpering. He was humming.

  Ben carried the tune with his brother. It sounded lighter now, much lighter than when Beverly sang it. And a bit more in key too. It sounded almost as good as when Deidra would sing it—Ben’s breath hitched when he realized that. She never sang this song anymore. Ben couldn’t seem to swallow the lump in his throat. So he hummed around it. Even when his voice fluttered, he kept humming with his brother. This wasn’t Beverly’s song. This was magic given to Eric by his mother. A song that beat monsters back into the dark.

  “Are you really real?” Eric whispered.

  “I am,” Ben sobbed. “It’s me.”

  Slowly, Eric plucked a green pine needle free from its stubby quiver. His hand trembled as he floated it toward Ben. The boy’s face was calm, but his eyes flicked from Ben’s to the needle and back again. The point made a dent in Ben’s forearm that deepened until the thin green rod buckled and snapped. Ben smiled and looked back to his brother’s face. Then he stopped smiling.

  Light seemed to dance in the boy’s eyes, a sparkle that made Ben’s heart pound. Because he hadn’t gotten them right. He wasn’t even close. “It’s me,” Ben said again, reaching for the boy one more time.

  “I thought you was pretend,” Eric whimpered as he dropped the pine needle like it was aflame. The boy folded inward, squeezing his stuffed toy in the crook of his elbow. The child’s tiny chest began to heave as his eyes grew so wide they seemed to lose their lids entirely. Then he screamed.

  He screamed louder than Ben thought a boy could. A scream of fear and anger. A scream of hate. It was so sharp and gouging that Ben was already recoiling as Eric’s feet and hands began striking him violently in the face and shoulder.

  “Quit it, Eric! It’s me! It’s Ben!” He tried to protect his face with the hand that wasn’t gripping the ladder. “Stop it, Eric!”

  Eric shrieked, driving his feet and fingernails into Ben. His stoic, placid face was gone—Ben couldn’t even picture it anymore. It had been consumed by something more savage, more primal. The boy’s skin clung to his cheeks like cellophane as he screamed and lashed. One of his shoes smashed against Ben’s fingers. “Eric, stop! It’s me!” Ben reached for his brother. “It’s okay,” he said as softly as he could to the frightened boy. “It’s gonna be okay now.”

  The sole of Eric’s shoe collided with the bridge of Ben’s nose. His balance wavered, and he tried to stiffen himself to compensate, but his bad leg had finally had enough. The pain was immense. Ben didn’t even feel the smooth metal of the ladder’s rung slip from his grasp.

  62

  Butterflies danced in Ben’s stomach as he fell. His teeth pressed so tightly together that one of them fractured at the root, but he didn’t feel it. His arms and legs swam in the cold air, trying to regain balance that came only through the inevitable and unmoving earth.

  Everything was cold, even colder than it should have been, Ben thought. Someone was crying. How long had he been here? he wondered. Was he still in the tree? Ben didn’t thin
k he was still in the tree. That was above him. If he could just move, he could see where he was. If he could just move at all. Just move.

  It hurt to breathe. Ben had to try for it, like reaching for air that doesn’t want to be caught, like inhaling through a coffee straw. That’s what it felt like.

  If he could just move he could breathe better. Get this weight off his chest. It was crushing him. Even if he couldn’t see it, it was crushing him. Just move a little. Move a little and breathe. Someone was crying.

  He could hear his heartbeat—distant footsteps that seemed to send ripples through the whole world. Not every time, but enough to notice. His head hurt. It hurt so badly.

  Someone was crying. Eric was crying. Ben tried to sit up, to move toward his brother’s wailing moans, but he couldn’t. His legs spasmed when he heard Eric call for help. Again and again the boy cried out, and again and again Ben’s body said no. He felt like he might sleep.

  Don’t leave. Don’t leave him there. Not like this.

  There were voices now. Maybe just one. Ben wanted to stand; he needed to. But his legs didn’t belong to him anymore, not in any sense that mattered. The ladder rattled. Through dim eyes, Ben watched Eric climb down to the dirt. Small footsteps, crunching leaves.

  “Hey, buddy,” Ben said. Or maybe he didn’t say it. He thought he had. Someone else was talking now, talking to Eric. For just a moment Ben thought it was Marty. He’d like to talk to Marty. Ben tried to turn his head, but he couldn’t. It didn’t matter. The sun was coming up, casting purple spears of light through the trees, but everything looked so dark to Ben; every second it grew harder for him to keep his eyes open. Sleep would be nice. He thought it might be dreamless. He could hear the person well enough now. The voice didn’t belong to his friend.