Dark Advent

by Brian Hodge

  And minutes later, when he set it back in the alley, it gave him one last look as if to say Feel better now? Good, and trotted off.

  Later, after he’d reclaimed the van and driven back home and had parked in the little loading area behind Kelly’s, Jason looked at himself in the rearview mirror. His face was slick with sweat and oil, trickles of blood dried a rich brown down his cheek. Spiky clumps of hair hung matted together like red-brown ropes.

  He let himself in through the rear door of Kelly’s store, found Kelly in the small cubicle that served as his office. Jason tossed the van keys onto the desktop, and Kelly jerked up, staring at him, mouth agape. “Next time,” Jason said with a bitter little grin, “pick up your own damn suits.”

  9

  They were having a good time two doors down. Sounded like one hell of a party going on down there.

  Travis Lane grumbled and rolled over to check the clock on his nightstand. Ten thirty-three. Not too late yet, but he knew they’d keep it going for hours to come. That was their style. They’d keep blasting their stereo and breaking their bottles and laughing and the cars would continue to come and go well into the night. They’d keep shooting off their minor arsenal of Fourth of July fireworks, left over from yesterday’s holiday. Looked like a long night ahead.

  Travis knew he could blot out most of the noise simply by shutting up the house and turning on the air, but damn it, it was his house, and if he wanted it open that was his right. The night was warm and thick, and his skin was moist with a faint sheen as he lay atop the covers. He slept his best on such a night.

  He sighed with a weary disgust, then swung up to sit on the edge of the bed and slip on a pair of shorts that lay balled up on the nightstand. He made his way into the kitchen, belted down a slug of Wild Turkey. As he sat at the table in near-darkness, pondering the situation, his teeth began to grind. He’d just thought of a way to class up the neighborhood by leaps and bounds.

  Travis hoped they were enjoying their party down there. Because it was sure as shit going to be their last.

  He threw on some clothes and left the house for a few minutes. And found what he needed at a liquor store.

  * *

  The party finally seemed to wind down after two-thirty. Travis had been keeping an eye on their house from his back yard, returning inside his home only for an occasional mug of coffee. He watched as the lights downstairs winked out, and those upstairs, probably the bedrooms, came on briefly. Then all was dark, quiet.

  Travis folded up his lawn chair, left the obscuring shadows of the maple tree he’d stationed himself under. He returned the chair to his garage, then grabbed a five-foot length of two-by-four. Opened his car door to retrieve what he’d bought at the liquor store hours earlier.

  And then he waited. Give them time to fall asleep good and sound. Nestled snug in their beds, visions of MTV dancing in their heads. Sweet dreams, kids. Uncle Travis is going to pay a visit tonight. And he just might be your worst nightmare come true.

  Three o’clock. He left the sweaty darkness of his garage, eased across the back yard of the old woman who lived between him and the kids. She’d been a widow for as long as he’d known her, and he thought she must go to bed around dusk. He rarely saw a light burning over there.

  Travis reached their back door. Luck was with him; they too were sleeping with the house opened up, although the screen door was locked. No matter. He took his pocketknife and made a slit along the edge of the screen, just large enough to fit his hand through to unlock the door. He crept in, moving past the landing and the stairway that led down into a pitch-black basement exhaling cool musty air. He slipped quietly into the kitchen.

  Travis paused for several moments, letting his eyes grow accustomed to the darkness within, waiting until the moonlight was adequate for him to make his way through the unfamiliar house.

  The kitchen…its floor felt grimy even through his shoes. Empty cans and bottles lined the countertop and table. A stack of pizza boxes sat on the floor beside an overflowing trashcan, and as he moved past the refrigerator, he caught a sickening whiff of something spoiled.

  He rounded a corner, peered into a room whose window looked out on the widow’s house. Travis made out a single form on a bed, then wrinkled his nose. The room smelled of sheets that had needed changing back in the spring.

  He found another asleep on the couch in the living room. And he grinned. Asleep on the couch, so much the better. A light glowed in the corner—the power on the stereo was still on, the turntable revolving endlessly without an album.

  Travis set down the items he’d brought with him, then moved quickly and silently throughout the first floor, easing down the windows. He wanted no ventilation, no breezes to ruin anything.

  Travis returned to the living room, stood before the sleeping boy. He took the bottle from the liquor store, broke its seal, unscrewed the cap…Everclear, 190 proof and very very flammable. He poured it onto the couch, soaking it into the fabric and cushions beneath the kid’s head, then as an afterthought, poured a generous amount onto his mouth and chest. And waited.

  The kid’s eyes fluttered open as he sputtered Everclear. He saw Travis, and there came a brief and terrible moment of recognition of both identity and purpose, and his eyes grew wide.

  For Travis, it was surely the most supreme moment in his life…in all ways a turning point. His thickly muscled arm flashed, and his fist put the kid back into unconsciousness once more.

  Travis set the bottle on its side on the floor by the couch, where it soaked into the rug. He searched the long, scarred coffee table until he found an ashtray, which he rested beside the bottle.

  Same old story, poor kids. Smoking and drinking and sleeping just don’t mix. Such a waste of young lives.

  He dug into his pocket for the matches, lit one, its flare smarting at his eyes. He stood as far back as he could and still have an accurate shot…and tossed the match.

  The burst of flame was immediate and scorching hot. The kid stirred once, weakly, then fell still as flames consumed both him and the couch. Within twenty seconds after the match had hit, the entire couch was one solid mass of fire.

  No place to hang around, this room. Travis moved back through the kitchen, the rear landing, outside. He knelt in the shadows with his two-by-four, waiting. Just in case.

  In the living room, the ceiling temperature had reached 1200 degrees in just under four minutes. The couch was a charred, shapeless mass, and within its ruins laid a body that only dental records could identify. By this time the other furniture was blazing as well, along with the curtains and paneling behind the couch. The Everclear bottle blew apart, spewing liquid fire. Polyester and other synthetics in the furniture’s fabric and the paneling spewed out a steady flow of toxic fumes into the superheated air: cyanide, carbon monoxide, various hydrogen gasses. These were sucked upstairs along with the smoke, into the bedrooms. The ceiling itself burst into flame, and as the temperature climbed past the 1600-degree level, a fireball rolled up the stairs to ignite the second story.

  Travis, kneeling at the rear of the house, checked his watch. It had been eight minutes since he’d first struck the match, and he’d yet to hear so much as a single scream. Too bad. It took some of the fun out of things. Might as well go back home now. He should no longer risk being seen around here.

  The sound of a window sliding up…must’ve been from around the side facing the widow’s house, the bedroom off the kitchen. Travis rose and, in a crouch, crept over to peep around the corner. He heard someone inside coughing harshly, deep wracking coughs. The screen popped out onto the ground and he saw a bare leg dangle out across the windowsill.

  No way. None of them were going to screw up his average for the night. When he played, he played to win, and tonight he was going to nail them 100 percent. No prisoners, no quarter, no survivors.

  He waited until two arms appeared outsid
e the window, and then a head and shoulders. Travis surged around the side of the house like a charging rhino, bringing back his two-by-four like a baseball bat. The kid never saw it coming. Travis swung with everything he had, the end of the five-foot length of board catching the kid in the face with the sound of a bursting melon. It swatted him back through the window as easily as a fly.

  He had to see. He just had to see.

  Travis dropped the board and latched onto the windowsill, chinning himself up to peer through the open window. He grinned. The kid lay spread-eagle across his bed, face up, a thick flow of blood streaming from his mouth and nose. Such a lovely scene by firelight.

  And then it all went wrong.

  The kid must’ve been storing fireworks in his room, the ones they’d been shooting off earlier, because something in a box on the floor erupted like a colorful volcano. A burst of green and red sparks showered in front of his eyes, and Roman candles shattered the window and sizzled his cheek. Travis dropped to the ground but by this time it was too late, way too late, and he could barely see to grope his way back home.

  He stumbled in through his back door, one hand clutching at his cheek. Beneath his fingers, the skin felt hard and ragged. He made his unsteady way into the bathroom, flipped on the light. Son of a bitch! Two angry raw trenches had been seared across his left cheek, and his eyebrows and short bangs had been crisped, and flecks of ash and soot stained his cheeks and around his eyes. And the pain! It felt like a thousand hot needles were probing at his face. He splashed water onto his face, cool soothing water, to wash away the flashmarks. The rest he was stuck with for a while.

  Dizzy, he grabbed a beer in the kitchen, pressing the cold can to his cheek as he returned to his bed to collapse once more. Just rest a few moments, think of what to do next, everything would take care of itself, so long as he could grab a little shuteye.

  The last thing he heard before he fell asleep was the cluster of sirens, coming closer, closer, louder.

  In the end, it could’ve been the perfect crime. Travis hadn’t been particularly stealthy about it. He could’ve been seen by another neighbor, although this wasn’t the case. In the smoking ruin of the house, investigators found nothing to indicate arson. To the contrary, they found a shattered liquor bottle next to the remains of the couch and a horribly charred body, along with a heavy glass ashtray. Telltale signs of carelessness that had ended in tragedy.

  But outside the house they found a length of two-by-four, unburned and clearly not part of the structural framework. Upon closer examination, they found it tainted with a small amount of blood and tissue and mucus.

  The perfect crime, if not for the fireworks.

  Police and arson investigators began making the rounds in the neighborhood in mid-morning. Travis had slept through his alarm, then the phone calls from work when he didn’t show up. The doorbell finally cut through, and he shuffled to the front door, barely awake, swearing under his breath at whoever was out there.

  And when he swung the door open to reveal himself…heavily muscled, cruel-eyed, burned face, and singed hair, wearing a dark T-shirt that still smelled faintly of smoke…the investigators knew they had someone who warranted more than a routine questioning.

  And Travis, who wasn’t yet wholly awake and thinking clearly until the July sun started to clear his mind, knew he’d screwed up.

  10

  After Erika Jennings fled that shabby theater, choking back tears, she knew it didn’t matter where she went, what she did, how anonymous she made herself feel. Fact was, she’d never be just like everybody else. She’d always be set apart. A misfit. A mutant.

  She drove to the riverfront and parked near the Gateway Arch, that silver-skinned monolith that reminded her of an enormous croquet wicket. She always felt humbled in its presence, maybe because she was such a tiny speck beneath it, and she wandered around its base.

  On the drive below, a group of late-hour revelers had walked down from one of the bars up at Laclede’s Landing. One stumbled, they all laughed. They took no notice of her.

  “You guys are so blissfully ignorant,” she whispered toward them. “You belong with the rest of them in the movie.”

  Because something bad was on the wind, she knew it now, something utterly wrong. Something so bad that, if it had a face, it could send you into gales of lunacy just for gazing upon it. She understood, she felt…she knew.

  And so she walked.

  * *

  “How long has it been since you’ve worked?”

  “Hmmm?” Erika had heard her mom plainly enough. But if you could stall for time, there’s always the chance something else would come up.

  Her mother, Gloria, paused as she sliced fat from cubes of stew beef. “I asked how long it’s been since you’ve worked.”

  “About a week, I guess. About that.” Not since after I woke up scared enough to wet the bed again after all these years.

  “I didn’t realize you’d put yourself on vacation again.” She scraped the last of the beef from the cutting board onto the vegetables in the crock-pot.

  Erika tried out a disarming smile but didn’t think it did much good. When her mom got ticked, she got that way to stay, as if getting her money’s worth. “That’s just part of the job, Mom.”

  “Think again. You can work whenever you darn well please.”

  She’s got you there, might as well fess up. Erika worked as a Kelly girl, filling in for sick or vacationing office employees, and she could work as often as she wanted. That was the only thing that had drawn her toward this job in the first place, the safety net of knowing she could take a few days’ respite to reassemble her head when needed.

  “You know, I’ve been wondering if this has something to do with that night last week when you didn’t come home ’til after daylight.”

  Erika loudly scraped a plateful of carrot shavings into the trash. Let that do her talking for her.

  Gloria tapped her on the arm, pecking with her fingers like a bird. “Are you in some kind of trouble?” And that face of hers…so maternally suspicious, wary.

  Erika almost had to laugh. Are you in some kind of trouble? Come on, let’s skip the watered-down version. Let’s cut through the crap and get down to the real questions.

  “You mean am I pregnant?” Erika asked sweetly. “You mean have I been screwing around again? Is there dust on my Tampax box?”

  Gloria eyed her with distaste. “You don’t have to speak about it like a sailor.”

  Erika sighed. “To answer your question, no, I’m not in any trouble. You know as well as I do that I’ve been a lone wolf for quite a while.” And now she’ll start in on me about how I spend too much time alone, and how I should get back to college.

  Gloria added beef bouillon to the crock-pot, covered it, turned it onto the high setting. Stared at the countertop a long moment. “It’s something else, then, isn’t it?” she finally said.

  “Mmm-hmm.” Mild surprise on Erika’s part. She suspected that it had been in the back of her mom’s mind all along, the little crew in Erika’s head that ran the previews-of-coming-attractions. But it certainly wasn’t like Gloria to bring it up in conversation. Her dad tended to skirt that issue whenever possible, but he was a talkative fool compared to Gloria.

  Erika waited for more from her mom, but there was none. Just like always. Sweep it under the rug and it goes away, simple.

  “Mom,” she said after a moment, “you said something a minute ago about putting myself on vacation. That’s not a bad idea. Why don’t we take a trip, all of us? Dad’s pretty much free to let himself off for a couple weeks, and Cal’s out of school. Why don’t we?”

  A desperate idea, perhaps, but when images of diseased and burning people haunt your mind, where’s the harm in a little desperation? Why not kiss St. Louis goodbye for a while, before it struck? Whatever it was. An epidemic? Maybe an industr
ial accident, or a chemical spill. The Red Death? So many pleasant choices.

  Her mother hadn’t answered.

  “Mom?” Erika asked. “How about it?”

  Gloria’s mouth became a grim, taut line. Erika involuntarily flinched back. “I know why you’re saying this all of a sudden. I know.” Her breath came quicker, nervously. “I know. And I don’t want to talk about it with you anymore.”

  “We haven’t talked about it at all.” Erika took a step forward, her heart sinking when she saw her mom take a fearful step backward. “Please, Mom? Why not?”

  “Because it’s not natural!”

  There. It was out in the open. The two of them faced each other like adversaries instead of the closest of allies, and both knew it could never be taken back. Erika shut her eyes and dipped into the reserve of strength she kept for such moments. Whenever isolation was the only answer. Whenever someone she’d invested love and trust in had flung it back. Only this time the love and trust had built up over twenty-two years, and she wasn’t sure if that reserve was going to be enough. Not this time.

  “Okay, Mom,” she said very softly, evenly. “Have it your way.” She started out of the room, looking back over her shoulder to add, “Just like always.”

  Erika left the kitchen, then the house. She kicked off her flip-flops to feel the back yard’s grass tickle her bare feet. The day was sunny and warm, but there was plenty of shade and the breezes were cool. She settled into the hammock stretched between two trees, swayed gently, folding her hands over her stomach. Stared upward at everything and nothing.

  And as had become habit, she wondered where she could go to protect herself from the hurt. She’d been wrong last week after fleeing the theater, wrong in thinking she’d always be a misfit. It was only where she was known that she could be pegged with that kind of label. It was only the people who really knew her that could trash her emotions, however unthinkingly. If only she could go someplace where she knew no one, where no one knew her. Go there and compress that dark, hated part of herself into a tiny cube until it no longer existed.