The Inside Dark

by James Hankins

  CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE

  Jason followed Cobb up to the father’s room. As he entered, he made a show of looking around, taking in the room as if seeing it for the first time. He let his eyes land on Cobb’s father, whose own eyes were open and staring at the empty white ceiling.

  “Jason, meet Dad,” Cobb said. “Dad, this is Jason. Here’s here to watch me put you down like a crippled dog.”

  “Mind if I sit?” Jason asked, nodding to the chair next to the bed.

  Cobb shrugged. He was looking down at the old man. “Can’t decide if I should pull the plug and disable the backup battery, or just yank the tube from his throat and put it back on after he’s dead.”

  “Let’s take out our phones.”

  Cobb looked up, almost in surprise, as if he’d forgotten Jason was there. He took his phone from his pocket.

  “Now,” Jason said, “we both record the . . . event. You’ll have your evidence against me and I’ll have mine against you.”

  Cobb nodded and worked on his phone. “I’m using video,” he said, smiling an ugly smile. “I’ll want to watch this a few hundred times.”

  He positioned his phone on the nightstand on the opposite side of the bed, which put Jason in the background of the scene.

  “Recording,” Cobb announced.

  “Me, too,” Jason lied, holding his phone up as though shooting a video. “Now, for the sake of posterity, I’ll admit that I’m here voluntarily, and the camera can see that I’m not restrained in any way, but once you start, Cobb, I’d rather just watch, okay? Don’t try to make me a part of it. I’m willing to watch but I won’t pretend to enjoy it.”

  “Whatever.”

  Jason started an audio recording as Cobb looked down at the pale, gray man on the bed, at the father he was about to kill, and Jason was surprised to see absolutely nothing in his eyes.

  “Well, Dad,” Cobb said, “off to Hell you go. You ready, Johnny?” he asked, looking Jason’s way.

  “You mean Jason.”

  “Here we go,” Cobb said as he unwound tape from around the tracheostomy site, where the tubes from the ventilator attached to the old man’s throat. Then he disconnected the tubes. The old man wheezed. A ragged breath stuttered out of him. Then another, followed by more wheezing. Jason tried to ignore it. He tried to tell himself that he was engaging in an act of mercy.

  With no sign of emotion, Cobb watched his father dying. After several seconds of silence but for the sound of the old man struggling for breath, Jason asked, “How does it feel, Cobb? Killing your father?”

  “I thought you weren’t going to talk.”

  On the bed, the old man’s wheezing was growing quieter. After another few seconds, Jason asked, “Are you getting the same rush you got when you killed all those guys as Crackerjack?”

  “It’s not the same, no. It’s not as good. But whatever it is, you’re ruining it for me, Johnny, so shut up.”

  Johnny again. Jason curled his fingers around the edges of the seat of his chair. As he watched Arthur Cobb dying, he prayed he wouldn’t hear a voice in his head . . . cooing or chuckling or sighing with satisfaction. If he was going to do this, he wanted to do it alone, without anything inside him urging him on.

  “I’m just wondering,” he said, “were you tempted to paint his face before killing him? Like all the others.”

  Arthur Cobb’s breaths were getting weaker and weaker, farther and farther apart. Jason tried to tune them out.

  “I told you to shut up,” Cobb said. “Let me get whatever enjoyment I can from this, then I’ll deal with you.”

  “Deal with me? What does that mean?”

  Cobb tore his eyes from the sight of his dying father and focused on Jason. There was something now in his previously emotionless eyes, and it was scary as hell.

  “Just shut up.”

  Cobb began making his way around the bed. He was standing straighter. He looked stronger. It seemed as though pulling the plug on his father had energized him, as if his father’s dying breaths were breathing new life into him. Jason reached under the seat of his chair and loosened what he had taped there earlier.

  “What do you mean you’ll deal with me?” he asked.

  Cobb cleared the foot of the bed and continued toward Jason. From a back pocket he pulled a device Jason recognized as a stun gun. “You aren’t Johnny,” Cobb said. “You’re nothing like Johnny. And since you won’t shut up, I guess you’ll find out right now how I’ll deal with you.”

  As Cobb neared him, looking really big and royally pissed off, Jason wondered if his plan might have been a huge mistake.

  CHAPTER SIXTY

  Cobb was already feeling stronger than he had in weeks. His son of a bitch of a father was dying, and Jason was right: it felt good. In his head, he could feel the dark thing inside him shriveling up and slinking off to a quiet, shadowy corner of his mind. His fever seemed to be almost gone. Another miracle cure, like all the times before.

  A few feet away, Jason was cowering in his seat. He seemed to know what was coming. Now that Cobb was thinking more clearly, this mutually assured destruction idea was ludicrous. He couldn’t let Jason leave the house with evidence of Cobb’s crimes. He couldn’t let Jason leave the house alive at all. He would never agree to partner with Cobb. He had to die.

  He was about to lunge the last two feet and jam the stun gun against Jason’s chest when Jason surprised him by lunging from his chair first, thrusting his arm as he came. Cobb saw a glint of metal in his hand—a small knife, probably—and Cobb swung his right arm, the one in the cast, knocking Jason’s hand and then connecting with the side of his head. The blow sent Jason sprawling and his weapon flying. Unfortunately, the stun gun slipped from Cobb’s hand and bounced away.

  “You almost got me there, Jason.”

  Jason rose to his feet, looking a bit dazed. Cobb wasn’t sure where he’d gotten a weapon. It hadn’t been on him when Cobb had frisked him. Then he remembered hearing a faint tearing sound, like tape ripping, as Jason leaped from his seat. He must have been in the house earlier and secured something under the chair. Which meant that this had all been part of some plan . . . except for Cobb avoiding his weapon and disarming him. And, of course, the painful death he was about to suffer.

  “Yeah, you almost got me,” Cobb said, “but it was a swing and a miss. I guess that was strike three.”

  “I guess so.”

  “This is where it ends.”

  “Yup.”

  They stared each other down. Both had lost their weapons, which tilted things dramatically in Cobb’s favor. He was a lot bigger. And stronger. And he stood between Jason and the door. He liked his chances. A lot. For the hell of it, just to mess with Jason, he began to whistle.

  “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” of course.

  Suddenly, Jason dove toward Cobb’s feet—for the fallen knife, Cobb figured. Rather than risk losing a crucial second looking for the weapon himself, Cobb dropped on top of Jason. If he could just get his good arm around Jason’s neck . . .

  But the bastard was twisting and bucking and making it difficult . . .

  Soon, though, size and strength won out and Jason was on his back with Cobb on top of him. Even with his arm in a cast, he knew Jason didn’t stand a chance. He closed his good hand around Jason’s throat and began to squeeze. Jason clawed at the fingers at his neck with one hand while his other flopped around the floor, no doubt searching for the knife he’d dropped. All Cobb had to do was finish squeezing the breath from him before he found it.

  Even in that moment, the irony of the situation wasn’t lost on Cobb—they were in roughly the same positions in which Jason and Barton had been in their fabricated version of the story, the one they had told the world in their television interview . . . Jason on his back, his hand scrabbling for a weapon while a killer sat atop him, choking the life out of him. This time, though, it was real. This time, Jason would die. His eyes were already rolling lazily in their sockets.

 
; Suddenly, Cobb felt a small, stinging pain in his leg. He squeezed harder. Jason’s eyes were starting to close . . .

  But so were Cobb’s now . . .

  He felt strangely weak. His fingers slipped from Jason’s throat. When Jason pushed up against him, he nearly fell on his side.

  Jason scrabbled away and stood uneasily. Using the wall for support, Cobb lurched clumsily to his feet.

  Jason backed up a step.

  Pointless, Cobb thought. The room wasn’t that big. There was nowhere to go. And Cobb couldn’t see the knife in either of Jason’s hands, which left him defenseless. He took a step forward and Jason took another step backward, watching him warily.

  “We’re just wasting time now,” Cobb said. His tongue felt funny.

  He took another step and Jason backed up farther, bumping into the bed behind him. Cobb wondered how he could walk backward so well without tripping over the waves in the carpet, rippling as they were, like the surface of an unquiet lake. Cobb’s own steps were unsteady in the waves.

  Then he was sinking, sinking into the carpet. It was already up to his knees. He looked down. No, he wasn’t sinking into the carpet. He was kneeling on it. Something was sticking out of his leg, a few inches above his knee. Was it the knife? No, it wasn’t. There never had been a knife. Only this . . . thing. It looked vaguely familiar. What was it? And why on earth would he choose to kneel now? It seemed like a terrible time to be kneeling.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE

  Jason took a moment to catch his breath as he watched Cobb kneeling unsteadily on the floor, the hypodermic needle and syringe sticking out of his thigh. Jason had been lucky. His first strike was supposed to catch Cobb by surprise. It was supposed to land cleanly. Instead, things had gotten dangerously dicey.

  His search of the house earlier had been fruitful. He hadn’t found anything he recognized as evidence that could tie him to the Crackerjack crimes, but he had found syringes, hypodermic needles, and vials of some drug. Not wanting to add anything suspicious to the search history on his smartphone in case anyone looked later, he used a desktop computer he found in a downstairs office—from which Cobb had clearly operated his plumbing business—to conduct a quick web search. It didn’t take long to learn that the drug was a sedative used by veterinarians that, due to its rising use in the production of recreational drugs, wasn’t hard to find on the street, which was probably where Cobb obtained it. It was likely what Cobb had used to knock people out after initially taking them down with a stun gun. As for whatever he had drugged Jason with in his water bottles at the stable, there were several prescription insomnia medications in his medicine cabinet that could have done the trick. Apparently, Cobb didn’t sleep well.

  Cobb swayed a little from side to side on his knees but didn’t fall over unconscious, which was what Jason had expected him to do. Jason looked at the syringe sticking out of Cobb’s leg and noticed that he hadn’t depressed the plunger all the way. Apparently, he’d given him a big enough dose to dope him up, but not enough to kill him. The dose he had meant to administer—the killing dose, according to his quick and dirty research—was still in the syringe.

  Jason took a careful step closer and looked into Cobb’s glassy eyes, then exhaled with relief. He spotted his cell phone on the floor, picked it up, and stopped the audio recording, nearly dropping the phone as he did. He clenched his hands into fists to quiet the tremors in them.

  “Damn it,” Cobb said in a thick voice. He sounded drunk. From his knees he watched Jason, moving only his eyes. “Didn’t have to be like this,” he added. At least that was what Jason thought he said. It was difficult to understand him.

  “If you think that, you’re even crazier than I thought. Of course it had to be like this.”

  “You gonna kill me?”

  “Yeah. No choice. Can you move?”

  Cobb seemed to try, then said, “No,” and Jason believed him. Still, he was wary as he approached, half expecting him to lunge at him like the slasher at the end of a horror flick, after everyone thinks he’s dead. He patted Cobb’s pockets and found a cell phone. He knew that Cobb’s was on the nightstand recording everything, so this must have been Ronald Wheeler’s.

  “I’ll get rid of this one.”

  “There are . . . phone records,” Cobb slurred.

  “If they care enough to look, which I doubt they will for Wheeler, especially when it looks like he died in a household accident, breaking his neck falling down the stairs.”

  It was time to start moving quickly. He turned toward the bed—letting his eyes rest only briefly on Cobb’s father, who Jason chose to believe looked peaceful in death—and snapped on a pair of the baby-blue latex gloves from the box on the nightstand.

  “What are you doing?” Cobb asked, sounding half-asleep now. His eyes were nearly closed.

  “Covering my tracks.”

  First, he deleted the video Cobb had just recorded. Second, he got rid of the one Cobb had sent earlier of Jason stuffing Wheeler’s dead body into the trunk of his car. Third, he deleted the voice message he had left Cobb a short while ago.

  Cobb was still on his knees, still swaying from side to side. “Mom . . . ,” he said, his eyes closed now. Was he hallucinating? “Mom . . . sang to me . . . when I was little.” Maybe he was talking to Jason, but he might have been talking to himself. “Stevie used to smile . . . a lot.” A faint trace of a smile appeared on Cobb’s lips before fading quickly. “Johnny used to hurt . . . all the time . . .” The remembrances were oddly intimate and Jason almost felt guilty hearing them. “And my dad . . .”

  He opened his eyes a crack. “My dad . . . you made me kill him . . . an innocent man . . . at least to you.” A strange sound burbled from his throat and Jason realized he was chuckling. “We aren’t . . . so different after all.”

  “You’re wrong about me. You have been from the start.”

  “But my father . . .”

  “Was an act of mercy.”

  Cobb nodded, his head bobbing loosely. “Maybe . . . but now you’re gonna kill me . . . not mercy . . . cold-blooded murder . . .”

  Jason said nothing.

  “Your morals.” Cobb made that burbling laugh sound again. “Where are they now?”

  Jason didn’t answer.

  “If you kill me,” Cobb said as his eyes slip closed again, “I win.”

  Maybe he was right. Or maybe Jason simply needed to end this once and for all.

  “Congratulations,” he said with a shrug. “You win.”

  He leaned down suddenly, grasped the syringe sticking out of Cobb’s leg, and depressed the plunger the rest of the way, injecting the remainder of the horse tranquilizer. As he did, he let out a yell, mostly to drown out any howl of triumph that might have—just might have—echoed from a dark corner of his mind.

  His research had been accurate. Over the next few minutes, Cobb died as Jason watched.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO

  It was over. And Jason was still standing. He allowed himself a minute to process all that had happened, then got to work. He’d planned it out ahead of time. Earlier, he’d retrieved from his trunk the items Cobb had planted in his apartment, as least the ones he could find—he was thankful he’d never touched any of them with his bare fingers—and put them into Cobb’s box of face-painting supplies, which he left on the floor of the hallway closet with the door ajar. It couldn’t be missed. Then he listened to the audio recording he’d made of Cobb’s murder of his father and the aftermath and decided that he didn’t need to trim it. There was nothing there to contradict the version of events Jason would tell the police later.

  Next, he stuffed Wheeler’s cell phone into one of the latex gloves and stomped on it several times, shattering it into pieces. Then he made sure that Cobb’s fingerprints were on the syringe, and on the duct tape that Jason had found earlier in a kitchen drawer. He wound it around his own wrists, not too tightly, then twisted it and stretched it until it looked as though he had been able to free himself. H
e slipped one hand out of the loop. He took off the gloves, stuffed them into the other glove, the one containing the smashed phone, and took the little bundle downstairs.

  He hurried through the house and out the back door, and when he felt confident that no one was watching from a neighbor’s window, he slipped through the shadows and dropped the glove down a storm drain on the street.

  Soon he was back upstairs again, steeling himself for what would come next. When everything looked right, he retrieved Cobb’s stun gun from where it had skittered under the bed. On its side was printed 500,000 VOLTS. He pressed the power button for half a second and heard the deep thrumming crackle, saw a tiny thread of blue-white lightning arc between the prongs. The power in the little device was frightening.

  He lay on the floor, took a steadying breath, then touched the weapon’s prongs to his bare neck as he thumbed the power button. It had been a quick test, no more than a fraction of a second long, but God, how it hurt. A stabbing, burning shock. The contact had been far too short to incapacitate him, even briefly, but hopefully it had left burn marks. That was the point, after all. In case it hadn’t, he steeled himself and did it again, pushing it against the side of his neck, holding it for a full second. As he did, fire lit up his insides. Pins and needles shot through his entire body before he dropped the stun gun involuntarily.

  For several moments—he wasn’t sure how long—he lay motionless. His neck ached. His muscles ached. At last he reached up and touched two tender welts on his neck. Perfect.

  He sat up, with effort. He wiped his fingerprints from the stun gun, then pressed Cobb’s dead fingers to it to add his prints to the device before dropping it by Cobb’s body. Slowly, he stood and found himself relatively steady on his feet. He pulled the syringe from Cobb’s leg and added a tiny bit of the tranquilizer from the vial he had stashed in the nightstand. The Internet had told him how much, based on his weight, might be enough to put him to sleep. He cut that dose by half, just to be safe. All he wanted was for the drug to be in his blood for a while, and for a needle mark to be visible on his skin.