Shades of Night (Sparrow Falls Book 1)

by Justine Sebastian

  Nick nodded and swallowed against a sudden lump in his throat as he walked into the garage to toss his duffel into the bed of the truck. He turned around instead of getting in the truck and went back to Nancy. He grabbed her up in a hug so tight she grunted even as she squeezed back.

  “Thank you, Nance,” he said. “Thank you so much.”

  “You’re welcome, honey,” she said. “Now let me go, big guy, Cousin Nancy can’t breathe.”

  Nick laughed and stepped back. She patted his arm and nodded for him to go on to the truck.

  “Skedaddle,” she said.

  “Yeah, yeah, work,” he said.

  “I’ll ask about you hiring on at the hospital tonight, okay?” she called.

  “Sure and just… really, Nancy, thank you for everything,” he said. He opened the truck door and looked back over his shoulder at her standing there in the rapidly fading light.

  “I know, Nicky, I know,” she said. “Everything’s gonna work out, don’t you worry none about it. It’ll be all right. Now, really, go on to the place. You don’t want to get caught out there in the ooky-spooky dark.”

  “Especially with some man-beast running amok,” Nick said. He kept his tone dry, but in the back of his mind he heard the soft crack of a stick and that rasping breath. The strange tick-tick sound as it (as he, goddamnit, as he) had stepped out of the trees and into the road.

  Nancy said nothing, but her nod was solemn—she believed it without a doubt. Nick didn’t want to believe—and he didn’t—but it still sent a prickle of fear up his spine. Nancy turned and headed back for the house and Nick waited until he heard the back screen slap shut before he got in the truck and cranked her up. She rumbled to life, pleasant and sleepy sounding, but full of power. He put the truck in gear, backed out of the garage and turned it onto the old path that would lead him back through the fields and woods to the place that was now his new home.

  The place was a clearing in the woods surrounding the property that Nancy’s mother’s family had owned for generations. There had once been a smokehouse standing there, but it had been gone a long time. It had been a play area for them as kids; a make-out spot for them to take dates when they got older. Nick and Nancy had drank their first beers in that clearing, had smoked their first cigarettes. Nancy lost her virginity to Martin Thompson there her junior year of high school. Nick used it as a place to take johns sometimes because it was private, but also because it was close enough he’d have somewhere to bolt if things turned ugly.

  A couple of years before Nick had left Sparrow Falls, back when Nancy’s parents still lived in the main house, her dad, Cliff, had an idea. He bought a trailer and put it out in the clearing; he’d run electricity to it and dug a well. He had thought he would make a tidy little sum off of renting it. Except no one had rented the place much; people didn’t like it because it was too secluded. In order to get to the trailer, a person had to go down the main drive, loop around the house and then drive through the cleared area of the property, which was several acres. The drive continued on through the woods for about a mile and a half before the clearing came into view. It was the height of seclusion; if someone had wanted to run a meth lab out of the place, it would have been ideal.

  The original trailer had fallen into hopeless disrepair, but when she had floated the idea to Nick about him coming back home and he accepted, Nancy bought another one. It was used, but she’d had some work done on it and made extra sure the floors were sound

  The road out to the trailer was an overgrown path, deep with ruts that gently bounced Nick around the cab of the truck. It lulled him as he drove, mind on autopilot as he followed the familiar path through the high grass of the disused fields. In a few years, the whole back forty would be taken back by the forest, leaving even the main house sitting in what amounted to a clearing. As he drove into the woods, the light dropped by at least half. He went around a small curve in the road that took the opening to the path away and with it more of the light. It was dark enough that he flipped on the headlights. Immediately, he slammed on brakes with a curse as the lights revealed a large doe standing in the middle of the path. The lights had left her frozen, staring at the idling beast before her with dumb shock. Then Nick hit the horn and frightened her out of her stupor. He watched the deer bound away into the shadows of the forest, the white of her tail almost glowing in the gloom.

  When he pulled into the clearing, he took a moment to just look at the place. It, like the trailer he had grown up in, was lifted high off the ground in case of flooding. There was a porch and two chairs sitting on it. The yellow of the wood said it was new, said it would still smell like sawdust. Nancy had said she had a little work done on the place, but looking at the porch had Nick thinking maybe she had downplayed it.

  The lump formed in his throat again and he flexed his fingers around the steering wheel. He could not shake the feeling that he didn’t deserve this much kindness, that he wasn’t worth it. He was afraid that he would let Nancy down and ruin everything. The only thing Nick was really good at was fucking things up.

  He told himself that was enough of that, got out of the truck and grabbed his duffel. He went up the long flight of stairs to his front door and used the shiny new key to open up the place. He stepped inside the gloom of the trailer and pulled the door shut behind himself. Nick smiled in the darkness as he dropped his duffel. He was shaking and nervous about wrecking things, but the elation from the night before washed back over him again as well: he was free, he was home, his life belonged to him again.

  In the back of his mind, he heard tick-tick and his smile fell away. Ice water chills trickled down his spine as he wondered if the thing in the woods would pay him another visit.

  “Man,” Nick said under his breath as he fumbled for a light switch. “It’s just a man.”

  Tick-tick.

  He didn’t feel better until the room was bathed in the warm, golden glow of the overhead lights.

  5

  November faded away without so much as a whimper. Nick and Nancy had a small Thanksgiving dinner together; she cooked a turkey breast and he discovered that he still knew how to make a damn good green bean casserole. Her persistence at the hospital finally paid off and the first day of December, she told him that he had an interview for the janitorial staff on the eighth. Since Nick had done his fair share of cleaning in prison, he felt confident that he could mop hospital floors just fine.

  The longer he was out of prison, the more he became aware of how much he had missed. It had been apparent from the jump, but the movies and television shows alone were enough to keep him rooted to his couch for a week and a half, desperately trying to play catch-up. The best thing about it though was that Nick had control of the remote; it was his bitch to do with as he pleased. There was no one to argue with him about it when he decided to watch Captain America instead of Pineapple Express before bed. He could hit pause or rewind or stop whenever he wanted. He would not be sent to bed thirty minutes before his program ended. Nick grew so attached to the remote control that he took it all over the trailer with him until he caught himself doing it. Shortly thereafter, he realized he would never catch up on all the movies and television shows he had missed while he was on the inside. It was a little depressing if he thought about it too much, one more glaring reminder of how the world had left him behind.

  He still watched movies though because he loved them. He watched them until his eyelids were drooping and he fell asleep in front of the television one night. When a howl tearing apart the night jerked him awake, he thought he was only hearing the movie. The living room was dark though and the movie had ended, the credits had rolled and the Blu-ray player had turned itself off after being idle for a while.

  Nick listened closely and only heard the soughing of the wind through the trees and the sound of his own breathing. He must have been dreaming, Nancy and her crazy shit having taken root in his subconscious to dredge up the sound of a large wolf howling. Or as Ms. Zelma Tindel
had put it, a “not-coyote”. Nick turned off the television and got up from the sofa. He needed to brush his teeth then maybe try sleeping in his bed. He winced as his neck cracked like a shot when he turned his head to try and stretch out the kinks in it.

  He got ready for bed and had just flipped off the bathroom light when the howl came again. Twenty minutes or more had passed between him waking up thinking he heard it and where he currently stood, hand still on the light switch as he stepped into the hall. Nick froze, stomach dropping and heart picking up its pace. The howl sounded closer, louder, like whatever it was was down at the creek. Maybe it was standing there on the opposite bank, looking through the hanging boughs of the trees toward the trailer at the faint glow reaching through the forest.

  Five minutes passed with him standing half in and half out of the bathroom doorway. The linoleum of the bathroom was cool under his bare left foot, the carpet warm beneath his right. The usual forest sounds were absent. It was like the night Nick had walked through the hollow and he thought again that such silence was only reserved for large predators. Something was out there and it wasn’t very far away.

  No. Not something.

  Someone.

  Nick would not believe that it was some kind of animal like Nancy seemed to think. He damn sure wasn’t going to believe it was fucking Bigfoot like Mr. Fussell, who was too old and intoxicated to give a damn if anyone thought he was insane. No one else had floated any theories about what they believed it was, though Nick got the idea that maybe Melinda Turner shared his belief that it was a human being. Nick didn’t know the woman though, so he couldn’t very well go chat her up: So. Your dog’s messy decapitation—can we talk about that? Not only would that be ultra-shitty, it also wouldn’t get anything accomplished.

  Nick had lived in the fishbowl of prison. He knew how easy it was to get sucked into the gossip mill, to buy into the little scraps of drama that were thrown his way. It kept people occupied, gave them something to think about other than the fact they were locked up in a concrete box with razor wire wreathing the walls. It was better to get wrapped up in the half-truths and outright lies, to believe that so-and-so had done such-and-such, than it was to think about that. Prisons, like small communities, were places where people lived tightly together and could become divided on the grounds that one side believed one thing, but another believed something else entirely.

  He became aware of night sounds gradually creeping into the quiet again. A knot released inside of him and he sagged back against the bathroom door frame. He hadn’t even been aware of it, but the entire time he had been waiting to hear something scratching at his door. A soft growl. Tick-tick.

  What had that sound been? Trying to place it was driving Nick up the wall. Tick-tick. Something hard tapping against something else hard—the surface of the road. But what? Did the asshole where hobnailed boots? The answer was most likely no.

  Tick-tick.

  In his room, Nick picked up his wallet and counted his money. He had thirty dollars to his name. “Fuck,” he said as he tossed his wallet back down.

  He needed new clothes, new shoes, a winter coat; all he still owned in this world were the (verging on decrepit) clothes he’d been wearing the day he was arrested, plus a couple of white undershirts he’d bought at the prison commissary and two pairs of jeans picked up at a thrift store in town. His old clothes had gotten way too tight for him in his absence and weren’t even worth wearing except one of the shirts.

  He hadn’t been a small guy before, but prison had definitely added some bulk to his build. All the drugs he’d been doing before had been thinning him down from the strapping young man that had spent every summer since he was sixteen working construction to what Nick had come to think of as “a meat splinter”. He could have bought more shirts with what he made in the plate shop, but Nick had been saving up for when he was released. He went without a lot of little things in the name of the big picture and still he found himself coming up short. Of course it wasn’t like he got paid a fair wage working in prison either.

  His job interview was the eighth of December; he had three days to get the money together so he could at least dress nicely. Nick tapped his fingers on the dresser, thinking. Clothes didn’t grow on trees and neither did money. Nick knew exactly how to make money though and decided that tomorrow he’d jump back in the ring for a round or two.

  Satisfied with his decision, Nick climbed into bed, turned off the lamp and rolled over to sleep. In his dreams, something mean and hungry growled at him from the shadows. In the darkness of the clearing, the night had fallen silent again.

  6

  Whoring himself out was not something that bothered Nick any longer. It was just something he did. People would probably find that appalling because they found prostitution itself appalling. They would expect Nick to hang his head and cry about how ashamed he was for selling his body to strangers. Such hypothetical people would have a long goddamn wait on their hands if that was the case.

  There had been a time when Nick did feel shame and guilt for what he did. It hadn’t been over the first time though; the novelty had been too sharp and the feel of the hundred dollar bill in his hand too crisp. His virginity had not been something he cherished or wanted to save for someone special. Nick had gladly given that up and he had been even more amazed at how hard he’d come. He hadn’t really expected that to happen, he’d expected to get his ass pounded then be shown the door. It hadn’t worked out that way though and the guy who paid for his virginity had taken his time and made sure Nick liked it—he made sure Nick never forgot him.

  Over the years, he had learned there was a rare kind of john that like that. They wanted to buy an hour of Nick’s (or whoever’s) life and fuck them so thoroughly their joints felt liquefied by the end of their time together. It was as though the real thrill for such johns came from making the whore come; like they paid for an opportunity to reverse their roles.

  Unfortunately, it didn’t usually work out that way and Nick would spend twenty minutes staring at the ceiling saying, “Oh. Yeah, baby. Fuck me so hard.” It didn’t matter what his tone of voice was or really even what he said; he could say, The capital of Denmark is Copenhagen and get the same effect. The johns weren’t really listening, not to something like inflection. They heard the words, not how they were said or even usually what was said and that was good enough. They were fucking champions in their own eyes that way. They were the most common of all johns; the boring ones who treated whores like what they were: fuck holes. It was that simple.

  The worst, of course, were the beaters and the rapists; the vicious, teeth-baring sadists. The ones who would pinch bruises into your skin or put a cigarette out on the back of your shoulder when you weren’t paying attention. Nick had that scar, like a three-quarter moon, still faintly pinkish even after all the years it had been there.

  Nick went out that day in the bright, cold December air. In the shimmering gold light of the high noon sun, the Christmas decorations on all the light poles in Sparrow Falls glittered and gleamed in red and green. They were almost as pretty during the day as they were at night. The fairgrounds were being prepped for the upcoming Christmas Carnival and Nick caught a whiff of pine and spruce wafting to him from down that way. People were already hard at it, decorating what they hoped would be their prize-winning Christmas trees. He wondered how many would be done in New Orleans Saints and/or Mardi Gras themes because such things were eternal in the area.

  He parked his truck at the library and walked from there. Sparrow Falls wasn’t a huge town, but it wasn’t small; though it didn’t qualify as a city either. It was still one of those places where people felt safe walking home at night. Or they would have had it not been Sparrow Falls, which was a town with a long history of dangerous goings on and strange deaths. Consequently, only the very brave (or stupid) walked home alone at night and no one ever forgot to lock their doors.

  Nick enjoyed his stroll through town more than he had the night he ca
me home. He went through the tunnel where a man’s body had been found some years back. Nick had been seventeen years old at the time, but he still remembered the story of Stevie Buttons (so he had been named by the local kids; his real name had been Stephen Reya). He’d been found suspended from the roof of the tunnel with a harpoon puncturing his abdomen smack dab through his navel. It had punched upward to lodge into the stone overhead, yanking Stevie off his feet to leave him dangling above the floor of the tunnel like a grotesque mobile. So the story went anyway.

  Kids still went under the bridge to chant Stevie’s name, to try and call his spirit to them. They said he would appear, dangling there, twirling lazily on the rope the harpoon had tied to it. They said he looked like a broken pull-string toy.

  Nick, in his more morbid moments, would wonder what Stevie might say if the kids pulled his string. Would he spout bullshit catchphrases like most such toys? We’re gonna be best friends! Rock out! Stevie Buttons loves you!

  He walked through the tunnel and out the other side. Across the street was Glynn’s Drive-Thru, home of some of the best damn roast beef po-boys in the state. The place was one few claims Sparrow Falls had to anything resembling fame. Beyond Glynn’s lay the bright, peaceful greenness of Laylie Park. Nick had wasted many an hour of his misspent youth getting wasted in that park and had fond memories of it.

  Nick leaned against the wall of the tunnel, lit a cigarette and watched the whirl of lunch rush customers coming and going at Glynn’s. He recognized his high school geometry teacher, Mr. Milner, waddling out of the restaurant and tilted his head.