Lights Out

by Douglas Clegg

  “What happened to the teacher?” The man tried to hide his nervousness. It was no longer pleasurable. It felt like insects stinging him.

  “I told you, the school district will probably fire her. You can’t hit kids. Not these days. Well, they’ll wait until she’s better.”

  “Better?”

  “She was in an unfortunate accident early in the summer. But when she’s better…”

  “What is it he showed the other kids?”

  “That’s the big question.”

  The man was getting a headache.

  The boys shouted from the field.

  The father said, “Oh, gosh, the game's over. Give me a call if you need some help.”

  The father handed him his business card.

  The man curled it up in a small paper ball and dropped it on the ground once the father had returned to the group of other fathers.

  Charlie stayed in the outfield, raising his hands up to the sky as if he had won or lost the game all by himself.

  When the field was clear, Charlie walked by himself, dragging his feet as he went, heading to Green Street.

  The man picked up his backpack. He reached inside it, digging around the soup cans and rope for the stun gun.

  When Charlie neared, he said, “Hi Charlie.”

  Charlie glanced up. “Hi. Who’re you?”

  “Your mom sent me.”

  Charlie screwed up his face slightly. He squinted. “She did? My mom?”

  The man nodded.

  When they got to his car, the man told him about what was in the trunk of the car. He always did this with boys. It was the simplest thing. With girls, you had to show them something. Usually something pretty. Girls were harder because they usually wouldn’t come near the car.

  With boys, it was easy.

  “Real firecrackers?” Charlie asked, his eyes brightening.

  “Yeah, Roman candles, black cats, all kinds of things.” He thrust the key into the trunk, twisting it.

  The trunk popped open.

  “Aren’t they against the law?” Charlie’s voice was like innocence with just a spark of corruption. Boys were like that.

  “Not around Fourth of July time,” the man said.

  “Fourth of July happened already.” Charlie peered into the dark trunk. There was a blanket, two small pillows, and rope.

  “Where are they?” he asked.

  “Under the blanket.”

  As Charlie reached for the blanket, the man brought the stun gun down and pressed it against the small of the boy’s back.

  The man glanced about as the crackling sound went off.

  The suburban streets seemed empty and painted with sunshine.

  He only had a minute or less.

  The fathers and sons were off in the lot on the far side of the park celebrating both victory and defeat as the man dumped Charlie into the trunk.

  From his backpack, he withdrew the duct tape. He measured off a bit of it, and taped it over Charlie’s mouth. Then he brought out a length of rope from the backpack and tied the boy’s arms behind his back. Then his legs. Then he put the pillows under the boy’s head.

  Shut the trunk.

  The sweat on his forehead was thick.

  He stared at the trunk.

  “Damn it,” he whispered.

  In his mind, he tried to remember what he’d done with the car keys. Unlocked the trunk. Stunned the boy. Dumped the boy in. Reached for the duct tape

  Set the keys on the blanket.

  “Damn it to hell,” he whispered.

  He glanced down the block. A teenager rode his bike slowly by. A flock of sparrows flew overhead, chattering as they vanished into an oak tree’s branches, thick with summer green.

  He brought out his Swiss Army knife and jimmied the lock.

  The blade broke off.

  The father who had spoken to him, drove slowly alongside him in his Cadillac. He lowered his window. “Where’s Charlie?”

  The man shrugged. “He wanted to walk home. You know kids.”

  “Got problems?”

  The man laughed, but it was a fake jittery laugh. Don’t give yourself away. “I locked them in the trunk. My keys. Stupid me.”

  “Want me to call a locksmith?”

  The man waved him away. “No, but thanks! I have an extra set at home. I’ll just walk over and get it myself. Probably catch up with my kid.”

  “Sounds good,” the father said, and then drove off.

  “Damn it,” the man said.

  He went and sat in the front seat of the car. He glanced about, looking for some instrument, something, anything that might jimmy the trunk open.

  He looked at himself in the rearview mirror. Looked like hell. He looked like a junkie dying for his fix, unable to get it.

  His fix was in the trunk.

  A patrol car drove up alongside him, stopping. It was that kind of neighborhood. Patrol cars were always around. He’d noticed that. It had been an acceptable risk, but now it was unacceptable.

  Completely unacceptable.

  He picked this place to scope out a kid because it was just this kind of neighborhood that was easiest to hit. It seemed safe.

  In the world, there was no “safe.”

  A cop, big and burly, strutting as if he owned the block and everything in it, got out of the car, and tapped on his window.

  The man rolled the car window down.

  The cop leaned in. “Hank Wilson told me you were having some car trouble.”

  “Hank Wilson?”

  “Billy’s dad,” the cop said. “You’re Charlie’s dad, right? I’ve known little Charlie since he started school. Wild kid.” The cop flashed a funny look. The guy talked a mile a minute. “I’ve known him since he was five and almost ran in front of my car. Almost gave me a heart attack.”

  “Thanks. Everything’s fine. I just locked my keys in the trunk.”

  “Can’t you just pop it open from inside?” the cop asked, peering through the window.

  “Wish I could. Nothing works right in this old pile of junk,” the man said.

  “You sure?”

  The man offered up a blank stare. “Don’t you think I would’ve done that already?”

  The cop shrugged. “Trying to help. Well, jeez, Charlie’s dad. What must that be like?”

  The man felt sweat break out on the back of his neck. “Yeah, he’s a handful.”

  “That time we caught him with that baby. Remember that? I know he didn’t know what he was doing. Kids never think about death like it really is. I got worried we were gonna have a pan of baby soup on our hands, know what I mean? Just a joke. Glad he didn’t really hurt that baby. There’da been hell to pay. Hey, I can help you with that,” the cop said. He went back to his car, and returned with a long thin bar. “Come on, I’ll show you how to use it.”

  The man got out of the car and leaned against the door. He wasn’t sure if his heart was still beating. He heard a clanging noise in the back of his head.

  “Here, it’s easy, done this a million times,” the cop said.

  The man walked to the back of the car.

  The cop took the long slender metal bar and pressed it into the lock. “This isn’t going to be wonderful for your lock, but I assume you were going to have to get a locksmith anyway?”

  “No, really,” the man said, touching the cop’s arm. “I have an extra set of keys at home.”

  “Oh,” the cop said, retracting the instrument. “Okay. You want me to give you a ride?”

  The man glanced at the trunk. Charlie would be awake by now.

  “It’s a nice day. I don’t mind the walk,” the man said.

  “You sure? I don’t mind,” the cop said.

  “I need the exercise.”

  The cop nodded. “Don’t we all. Well, good to meet you, Mister… ”

  The man tried to remember Charlie’s last name.

  Charlie Jones.

  Charlie Howard.

  Charlie Randel.
r />   Charlie…

  “Carter. Mike Carter.”

  “Mike Carter,” the cop said thoughtfully.

  The man wondered if the cop knew Charlie’s father’s first name.

  “I knew a Mike Carter back in high school. You never went to…”

  “I grew up in the South,” the man said.

  “Oh,” the cop grinned. “Well, good to meet you, sir. That Charlie of yours is something. I know he’s a big joker, but man I’ve had to rescue more kids and dogs from his clutches. He’ll grow up to be something, he sure will.”

  The cop waited by the car, writing something up in his log book, which frightened the man a bit, but it was too late. It’s not like he could go back and erase this day, this day that had begun so perfectly.

  All the man needed to do was walk around the corner to the drugstore, buy a screwdriver and do some major damage to the trunk of his car. Then, tie it shut, and drive back to his place.

  He would take Charlie down into the cellar, where no one ever heard the screams, and then he could go to work on him and set up the cameras to take the pictures.

  The man walked down Green Street, remembering that there was a convenience store just a block or two over. The heat of the day was getting to him, and he wished he had planned for such possible mistakes with an extra set of keys, but he had been too eager. That was always his problem. He was too eager to get on with it. He had always been overly cautious before, but he’d been younger then, and now, he was getting sloppy. He had thought Charlie was such a perfect target, and everything had seemed as if it pointed to this day, but maybe he was wrong.

  Still, he got an adrenaline high, knowing that Charlie was in that trunk and that he had passed himself off as the boy’s father—the ultimate thrill—knowing that a cop had almost opened that trunk.

  He found a small screwdriver down the second aisle of the convenience store, and slipped it into his back pocket.

  Part of the thrill was shoplifting. It aroused him a bit too, watching the young woman at the counter who watched him. She knew he was up to something, but she had missed that second—no, that millisecond—when he’d stolen the screwdriver.

  It took him ten minutes to get back to the park, and at first he thought he was on the wrong street.

  Then, he saw the police car.

  The cop drove up beside him at the sidewalk. “Sorry, Mike. I called your wife.”

  “My…wife,” the man said.

  “Yeah I figured I’d save you the trip home, but she said she didn’t have any extra sets of keys.”

  “My wife said that?” the man asked. He felt something clutch at his throat.

  The cop nodded. “She told me to tow it. She told me you had about twenty outstanding parking tickets and two speeding tickets and your license was suspended.” The cop shrugged. “I had to follow up. Dispatch hasn’t confirmed, but your wife swore up and down on a stack of Bibles. She sounded a little funny, too, so maybe you better get home.”

  “My wife,” the man repeated again as if he could not believe any of it.

  “Look, I’m sorry. But you’re lucky the Sheriff hasn’t sent someone out to arrest you yet.” The cop paused, while the man took all this in. “One other thing, Mike. You got one nasty old lady.”

  “My wife lied,” the man said, stunned.

  “Well, maybe she did, but I can’t take that chance. If you don’t have tickets, I’ll go down personally with you and get that car. But until our computers come back up at dispatch, I’m going to assume for the good of my job that she may be telling the truth. Seems to me, Mike, I remember someone down at the office mentioning those tickets when I had to go talk to Charlie about how not to hurt little babies. Seems to me.”

  “Yes, now I remember. Yes, the tickets.” The man felt his mouth go dry. “Where was it towed?”

  “Impounded, Mike. You can’t get it back today. On Monday, go down and pay your fines and it’s all yours.”

  The man watched the police car as it slowly drove on down the road.

  The cop glanced in his side view mirror and looked back

  All right. All right. Enough.

  He could get it. There’s a way to get it. To get the boy. To get in the trunk and get the boy out of the trunk and then get the boy somewhere else. The boy would have to be killed right away. The fun was out of it now. The fun was definitely out the door.

  But it could be fixed. It could be fixed and then it would be all right.

  The man had no friends. He had business associates, but they never liked to be called in times of trouble. He had his parents, but they didn’t really like to hear from him either. He was very much a loner. He walked across the park and sat in the bleachers as the afternoon wore on, wondering how he would get to the car, and ultimately, to Charlie.

  When it came to him, it was like a pinprick at the back of his skull.

  He would just leave Charlie there.

  The old car would be in the lot for at least a month before anyone would decide to do anything about it.

  In a month, he’d be in some other country.

  He could create a new identity. Sure, they might find the other kids buried beneath the house, but that would be all right. He would already be someone else, somewhere else.

  It seemed like a plan.

  The more he went over it, the better it sounded.

  It was either that or suicide, and he hated the thought of not being on earth anymore. He wasn’t even sure that it would serve anything to kill himself. And Mexico was nice. He heard good things about Puerto Vallarta. Even Costa Rica was supposed to be lovely. He could just get a house on the edge of a beach and be free.

  He had lots of money.

  Then he remembered.

  The money was in the cellar of his house.

  His house was fifteen miles away.

  He glanced at his backpack, sitting beneath the tree where he’d left it that afternoon.

  He kept almost everything he needed with him, except the cash.

  One could not be too careful.

  It was nearly seven at night, still fairly light out, when he began the walk home. By one a.m., he arrived at the small house at the end of the cul-de-sac. The lights were off, but the front window seemed to reflect some yellow light from inside.

  The man was usually very good about turning lights off when they were unused, but he was getting sloppy, he knew. As he stepped up to the door, he remembered that he had no key.

  Of course you have no key, you fool. You locked it in the trunk with poor little Charlie.

  He thought it again, Poor Little Charlie.

  The boy had been doomed from the start of his life. The misfit of that little boring suburb and those boring people. He was off in his own world half the time anyway. The trunk would not be a big change for him.

  Poor Charlie.

  Humming his tunes, whispering his prayers, cutting the hearts out of dead cats.

  That last bit was a strange sort of thing. Even as a child himself, the man had never cut hearts out of anything he’d killed.

  It was too intricate.

  Too primitive.

  He preferred the torture and the pictures, but not hearts. Nothing so…so…visceral.

  Poor crazy little misfit Charlie.

  The man took the screwdriver he’d stolen from the convenience store and jammed it against the door. The old wood crackled and gave, and after a few moments, the door flew open.

  He went inside, flicking on the overhead lights. The place was empty of all things. He hated cluttered homes. He liked sparse. He liked clearings, not thickets.

  There, on the bare living room floor, a little boy sat in a circle of small stones and candles. Red and white chalk markings of foreign symbols were all over the floor. A ram’s skull in the center of the circle, at the boy’s feet. Circling in and around the flames, houseflies, as if they’d been trapped by the dozens in the house all day. Charlie had his hands up in the air, his legs crossed in front of him,
his shirt off. He wore only his shorts. His skin was covered with painted symbols. Paint covered his face, one half, blood red, the other, bone white.

  Charlie looked up at him. “You left me to die.”

  The man grasped the wall to steady himself. “How did you…”

  “You put me in that trunk and left me to die. By the power of the Loa, and Chango, my guardian, I send to you all that you were gonna do to me.”

  The overhead light began flickering on and off.

  Charlie grinned. His voice changed, as if he’d swallowed something distasteful. “We’re going to spend the night here, just you and me. That’s what you want, huh?”

  “How?” was all the man could say, and as he stood there, some instinct in him told him to run.

  When he turned, the door slammed shut right in front of his face. He tried the knob. The door was locked.

  “Poor man,” Charlie said. “Poor little misfit man.”

  The man turned around to face the boy. I’ll kill him. I’ll kill the little creep.

  Charlie’s lips moved but made no sound. The candle flames rose up like spears, and a smell of sulfur permeated the room.

  A growling, as of some panther, came from back near the dining room, but the man could not see for all the smoke and fire.

  Then all the lights went out.

  The man grew faint, unable to breathe, and felt his knees buckling under him just as he lost consciousness.

  When the man awoke, he found breathing difficult.

  The tape over his mouth prevented him from screaming, but he tried anyway.

  He guessed where he was. He smelled gasoline and oil and the way trunks of cars smelled. He didn’t know how the little boy had done it.

  Something else was in the dark place with him. He sensed it there.

  It began to growl after the second day.