Shades of Night
Justine Sebastian
Copyright 2016 Justine Sebastian
Cover design Amanda Watts 2016
License Notes:
This story may not be shared for non-commercial purposes. No piece of this story may be sold for profit or adapted to other media without the permission of the author.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to persons living or dead; events or locales, is entirely coincidental.
Table of Contents
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Excerpt from Sparrow Falls 2: Falls the Shadow
Author’s Note
About the Author
Also by Justine Sebastian
Now I know the fiendish fable
That the golden glitter bore;
Now I shun the spangled sable
That I watch’d and lov’d before;
But the horror, set and stable,
Haunts my soul for evermore.
— H.P. Lovecraft
“Astrophobos”
1
Nick Lange was released from prison on a Wednesday in early November. Given that he had gone to prison in the state of Texas, it was a wonder they decided to let him out at all. He used some of the money he’d earned working in the license plate shop to pay for a cab ride. He didn’t know a specific address for the kind of place he was looking for, so he told the cabbie to drop him somewhere there was a restaurant, a motel and an interstate off-ramp headed east.
The cab driver gave him a long, hard look in the mirror. Nick’s request was vague, but still specific enough that anyone with half a brain could figure out the basic gist of what he was about. He wanted a meal and a nap and maybe one more meal after. Then he was going to hit the off-ramp with his duffel slung over his shoulder and his thumb out.
“You get caught hitching in this state and you’re gonna end up right back in there,” the driver said, waving his hand over his shoulder toward the prison.
“Then I guess I better not get caught,” Nick said.
“You’re either really dumb or really ballsy,” the driver said.
“Ain’t got shit to do with brains or balls,” Nick said. “I don’t have any other way home.”
“Damn,” the driver said. “Let me think about it a minute, all right?”
“Sure,” Nick said. “But can you do it somewhere else?”
“Yeah, yeah, no problem. They’d make me move in a minute anyway,” the cabbie said. He put the car in gear and pulled away from the prison.
“And lemme guess: If you didn’t do it quick enough, they might throw you inside,” Nick said.
The cabbie laughed, but he walled his eyes to the side a little, giving the prison one last look.
A mile later, the driver said, “I’ve got just the place for you, I think.”
“Good,” Nick said around a yawn.
He was surprised how sleepy he was, but maybe he shouldn’t have been. The night before he had lain awake, listening to the guy in the cell on his right crying and asking to go home in a plaintive voice very much like a child; he was new and he was scared shitless. The guys in the cell on his left had been fucking like newlyweds, the springs in the bottom bunk squalling like a dying cat. Nick’s cellmate had been praying like he did every night. With the backdrop of racket, Nick had mouthed: Out. Out. Out. He was going home for the first time in twelve years. On the surface he’d been stoic about it, but inside he’d been turning in circles and jumping up and down. Out meant free; meant home.
With his joy had come a tempering sense of trepidation. It had been a decade since he set foot in the world beyond the walls of the prison. Nick had no idea what he was going to do with himself or how he was ever going to fit back into the reality normal people took for granted. If he thought about it too much his pleasure began to turn into fear.
When his cellmate had finished his prayers, he got out of his bunk and stood beside Nick’s, looking at him with his lovely dark eyes. Nick had held his hand out and said, “Once more for old time’s sake, huh, Ioan?”
He was beginning to doze in the warm fall sunshine when he felt the car stop. Nick started and opened his eyes to find himself in the parking lot of a Motel 6. In the same parking lot was a Denny’s. When he looked out the back windshield, he could see an off-ramp leading away toward the east. Toward Louisiana.
“We’re here,” the driver said.
“I see that,” Nick said. He grabbed his duffel and got out of the cab. “How much do I owe you?”
“Don’t worry about it,” the driver said.
“What?”
“I said don’t worry about it,” the driver said. “Least I can do is cut you a break. Believe me, you won’t get many of those.”
“Thanks, man, really,” Nick said, at once grateful and sarcastic. He wasn’t expecting things to be easy; he was an ex-con, things typically didn’t go swimmingly for them once they were released. It was a fact of life that was hard to miss and one of the reasons they ended up committing crimes again. Even ex-cons needed to eat.
The driver’s smile said he got what Nick was saying and he waved a little as he began to back up. “Don’t mention it.”
Nick waved back as he stared at the wobbly blue lines of a badly done homemade tattoo on the driver’s forearm. The ink had probably come from the barrel of a pilfered ballpoint pen, the lines drawn with a piece of sharpened metal or the dull blade of a cheap safety razor. No wonder he had given Nick a break; the cabbie knew where he was coming from.
Nick rented himself a room, deposited his bag in the middle of the bed then walked over to the Denny’s. He took a booth by a window, ordered coffee and a short stack of pancakes with bacon and an extra side of bacon. He wanted some grease all kinds of bad. Bacon had been very much missing from the menu in prison. While he waited, Nick looked across the interstate at the off-ramp, imagined the long walk ahead of him and thought of how good it would feel to cross the state line back to the place where he belonged the most. For the first time in an incredibly long time, Nick smiled.
2
When Nick set foot in his hometown two weeks later he was bemused to find that Sparrow Falls wasn’t much different from the way he had left it twelve years earlier. Bemused as well as grateful. Nick knew things had changed by leaps and bounds since he was locked up, but only after he walked outside again after a decade did he truly realize how far behind he had fallen. At thirty-four he felt like a relic and it unnerved him and left him feeling stupid and helpless; redundant.
As he’d waited out his sentence, the world had moved on and left Nick a dinosaur in the digital age, a creaking old man that should be put out to pasture though his posture was good and he had no grey in his hair. His brain felt atrophied and stagnant, too slow to catch up with all the apps and buttons and blinking lights; things that beeped, clicked, hummed. Machines that spoke in absurdly realistic and patronizingly kind female voices like the most passive-aggressively hateful pre-school tea
cher in the known universe. Nick named her Robo Bitch and wished she would materialize out of the data stream just long enough for him to wring her pixellated neck.
If he thought about such things for very long then Nick almost wanted to go back to prison where time had the courtesy to stand still, where he knew what was what and didn’t need to push buttons in a certain sequence to get to it. It was like he walked out of prison into one a gigantic, labyrinthine rat maze he didn’t know how to run and was too far behind to ever learn. It wasn’t just unnerving when he looked at it that way, it was downright terrifying. It was culture shock within his own culture; he’d gone inside with the awareness of one reality and walked out into a new one.
To find Sparrow Falls largely the way he remembered it was comforting, which was ironic given how he’d felt about the place before he left it. Like all doomed dreamers, Nick had left Sparrow Falls with a whooping, “FUCK YOU!” He had been determined to never come back and had laughed at the echo of his own voice as it chased him down Main Street the night he cut out on his no-good, going nowhere little slip of a life.
His ideas of the great big world beyond Sparrow Falls were gilded and spangled in his mind though and the reality of what Nick found was not what he had hoped. He’d flown out of his hometown into the open arms of a world full of ugly people with even uglier tricks up their sleeves. He had sold what innocence he had left and his sense of self to the highest bidder for a chance at what, to a small town boy with big-time aspirations, felt like a piece of the pie. As it turned out, the pie was poisoned and the sugar dusted on top was powdered glass. It was lethal any way you looked at it, but Nick… Nick had just kept right on eating because he was convinced that he would eventually get somewhere.
And he’d been right. He got himself a golden ticket to prison.
His story wasn’t an unusual one; that seemed to typically be what people found in that world if they didn’t find death first. Unless they were wealthy and had the means to buy comfort instead of having to earn it, most of those were the success stories. Of course there were exceptions to every rule; some successes were dropouts and burnouts, but most of them knew somebody or fucked somebody or knew somebody that fucked somebody and either way, they had a foot in the door. The exception went both ways though: Sometimes money would only get you a place in the ditch with the other throwaways.
Nick retraced his long ago steps with a wry smile as his boot heels scuffed the sidewalk. There was no old motorcycle roaring beneath him this time. All he had was the clump of black combat boots to carry him into the world he had once left behind with such joy. Combat boots that had sat in some storage locker for ten years. It was a wonder they hadn’t dry rotted while they were waiting for someone to wear them again.
Nick limped his way through town, past the Fair City Café, past the drawn shades of Greene’s Funeral Home. In the back room lights burned, turning the windows into jack-o’-lantern eyes. Someone was being dressed up for their coffin by the ghouls who worked in there at night after all other living people had gone away with the sun. Nick wondered if it was the same two he had known before or if new ghouls had taken their places. Either way, the light seeping yellow and golden from the narrow, dirty windows of the back room gave Nick the willies. He picked up his pace and disappeared beneath the shadows of the mock pear trees that lined the streets of Sparrow Falls.
There was a small town square that was actually an isosceles triangle across from the big old Baptist church that sat in the middle of town like a self-righteous centerpiece. The town square was a patch of grass just big enough for a flagpole, two benches and a border of flowerbeds. The flag snapped in the wind as Nick sat down for a much needed rest on the bench farthest from the two small floodlights that shined on the pole: See? This is America. That’s the American flag, that right there.
Nick grinned at his own little joke and took out his smokes to light one. He’d learned the hard way about where he could still light a cigarette in this new and bizarrely health conscious age. You couldn’t smoke within ten feet of a door, but it was still okay to drive vehicles that belched diesel exhaust and rust particles from their slowly decaying tailpipes. There was a lot confusion in Nick’s mind about the new world order that seemed to be taking hold like a fungus or maybe a virus—something so slow-acting that you didn’t realize it was fatal until it was too late.
He looked up at the flag and blew smoke out of his nose as he pondered things. He should have been happy to be free and he found that the longer he was out of prison, the unhappier he became. Most of it was the feeling of being left behind, but he was also starting to be dismayed by what he had come back to. It all looked so nice and good on the surface, but something beneath it felt dark and wrong to Nick. Like there was a war brewing right there under everyone’s feet and in the backs of their constantly uploaded minds. Again he thought of an insidious virus, the end of everything sneaking in the back way to push the big red button.
With a disgusted sound at his bleak worldview, Nick crushed his cigarette out under the heel of his boot, hefted his duffel and stood again. He had many miles left to walk and he wanted to get there before sunup, before the loggers and chip haulers and school bus drivers began trundling out. Nick wanted to disappear before then, be cozied up in the trailer his cousin Nancy had promised him would be his when he came home. She’d confirmed the offer still stood two nights ago when he’d borrowed a trucker’s cell phone that he soon realized he didn’t know how to dial on (he couldn’t even find the number pad).
The trucker had been kind enough to dial for Nick and let him talk to Nancy. Then he’d invited Nick into his rig for some suck-and-fuck. When Nick declined, the trucker got handsy and Nick got annoyed. He walked home in the pre-dawn dark with a bruise the color of a thunderhead on his left jaw and a split in the corner of his mouth. If the trucker had offered Nick seventy-five or even fifty for the suck-and-fuck then he might not have been so disagreeable about the whole ordeal, but as it was, Nick had laid him out in the parking lot between two idling refrigerated trailers. Another thing he’d learned was that the price on a piece of ass seemed to have gone way down and the cost of human decency had gone way up. Thank you should have sufficed for the phone call.
Wind howled down the street and Nick rolled his shoulders against the force, tipped his head back and breathed out. The air was almost cold against his cheeks, heavy and moist with humidity. It was strange to breathe it in after so long, his lungs still acclimated to the bone dry air of Texas near the Mexican border. The roar of the wind in his ears was the hum of hundreds of miles and days rolling through his head. Nick walked against the wind to the last caution light in town, took a right and kept going, the wind shoving him onward.
3
The walk to Nancy’s place took Nick nearly three hours. Civilization fell away behind him the moment he turned at the caution light. The farther he walked, the thicker the darkness became. He breathed it in and relished it; too long he had been a creature forced to live in light. In prison it was never totally dark, lights burned inside and out all hours of the day and night. It became maddening after a while and most inmates slept with their pillows over their heads, seeking a little bit of shadow to rest inside of.
He turned off the main highway after about four miles and began his way down the road that would take him the rest of the way home. That he even had one of those to go to was a miracle. The wind sighed through the high, dead grass and black-eyed Susans in the ditches; other than that, the night was silent. It was only Nick and the wind; the listening trees and the unblinking stars. It was the closest thing to bliss he could remember.
His throat felt tight and his chest felt light, his head was full of softly buzzing static. Nick’s sudden relief was profound and it left him feeling weak, so drained that he stopped in the middle of the rutted one lane blacktop road. He bent at the waist and put his hands on his knees, breathed in and out slow and deep. He laughed, a hiccup of sound that he tried to grab hold
of and tamp back down, but it got away from him. Soon he was laughing hysterically because he was finally, really, truly happy to be free again. He’d been pleased about getting out, but from the moment of his release uneasiness had followed him, worry had dogged his heels. Fear had slept beside him every night and stood beside him every day while he hitched his way home.
His laughter broke off when something moved in the woods to his left. It sounded heavy, but like it was stepping lightly, doing its best to be quiet. He choked on his laughter as it died in his throat, felt it catch as he inadvertently sucked saliva down his throat when he gasped with startled surprise. Nick coughed and scowled into the shadowy pines on the right side of the road. Something was watching him; he could feel its eyes on him though he couldn’t see a damn thing in the faint light from the half moon that was partially obscured by clouds. The road was a faint gunmetal gleam in front of him, the star-sprinkled sky visible through the tops of the pines in places, but near the ground the darkness was absolute. Nick still leaned forward, squinting; he hadn’t heard anything walk away, so whatever it was still stood there.
The wind died down with a tired sigh; Nick could imagine it lying down right there in the ditch for a rest. The newest silence was so deep it hurt Nick’s ears. No night should ever be so quiet. He shuffled backward a step and stuck his hands in his pockets, feeling for something that might pass as a weapon. All he had was his cigarette lighter. He sincerely doubted he could set something alight before it tore him apart. He was thinking bobcat, maybe a lone panther or a black bear. The air did not hold its breath for a deer passing through; the night did not strain its ears to listen for the stealthy footsteps of a raccoon in the underbrush. Such tense reverence was reserved only for predators. Bears didn’t typically qualify, but they were big and strong and unpredictable, so they got an honorary nod from the natural world regardless of their omnivorous tendencies.
Shades of Night (Sparrow Falls Book 1) Page 1
