The Deep Hours of the Night

by Jonathan Schlosser

  Gerald’s form dissolved, shrinking as it did so. “I’m sorry.”

  Jackson had met Gerald – or had an encounter that came as close to truly meeting him as Jackson figured was possible – nearly two months after he’d moved in. He’d been getting ready for bed, brushing his teeth in the upstairs bathroom. He typically used the downstairs one for such things, though he’d outfitted all three with enough accessories that they could be used. This particular night he hadn’t been able to find his toothbrush in the lower washroom, so he’d wandered up both flights of stairs in search of another.

  Gerald had met him there (he liked the third floor better; as Jackson would eventually find out, it had been his). Jackson had thought he'd spotted a strange shift in the shadows as he mounted the stairs, and a chill had run down his spine. He’d pushed the feeling aside, chiding himself for giving in to such childish fears. Then he had seen it again, in the mirror, as he brushed his teeth. He’d spun around as fast as his knees – not having their best day, as they rarely did at his age – would let him. He’d seen nothing.

  But he’d heard. Not much, just a lone word that came to being in his mind as clearly as if it had been spoken audibly.

  “Hello.”

  Now, looking back, Jackson wished he had just skipped brushing his teeth and gone to bed. He knew deep within himself that it wouldn’t have made a difference – Gerald would have found another time, another place – but he couldn’t help but wonder if that one act had been his undoing.

  He shrugged his shoulders, trying to get some feeling back into his forearms besides the dull throb that came with every beat of his heart. “You still haven’t told me, Gerald. Don’t you think I at least deserve to know?”

  “Maybe. Maybe not.”

  “Not much of an answer for a dying man’s last wish.”

  “I’m tough.”

  Jackson frowned. “What?”

  “I’m tough.” A cold blast of air flew down the hall. “Mom says I have to be tough, so I am. It’s the only way.”

  Jackson cleared his throat, considering his next words carefully. As he’d gotten to know Gerald, or whatever Gerald was, he’d learned a number of things. First and foremost, he knew Gerald was a child. Or had been, at least. He also knew, as evidenced by the precise cuts on his wrists that the broken glass had seemed to inflict on its own, that Gerald could be ruthlessly violent. Maybe that also was tied to his age, a lack of inhibitions. But Jackson had questions he wanted to ask, and he figured he was done for anyway. “How did you die, Gerald?”

  For a moment, there was silence. Then the wind screamed. It had been blowing, whistling, before, but now it lashed out with a frenzy like Jackson had never heard. It tugged at his clothes and flung the glass fragments down the hall. They shattered against the end wall in a shower of crystal.

  In the room across the hall, Gerald’s shadow took on a dense form. It could be made out easily against the dark backdrop of the room, a cluster of dark that looked like a man – only much too short. “I don’t want to think about that.” Gerald’s voice was as cold as the November air.

  Jackson took a deep breath. “Then I’ll leave.”

  “What?” Gerald came closer. “You can’t. I killed you here; you’re trapped, just like me.”

  “No, you’re wrong.” Jackson shook his head. “I can leave if I want to, when I die. The Church promises me heaven.”

  “I went to Church.”

  “Then why are you still here?” Jackson smiled, faintly. “You don’t have to tell me; I already know.”

  “I just want it.” Gerald straightened; he rose to higher than a child’s height, floating on the air. Eyes and a mouth became roughly visible, like shapes in the clouds. “No. I’m fine. I’m tough.”

  “No, you aren’t.”

  “I am! I swear I am!” The blast of wind came again, but lacking in power. It faltered quickly and died out. “I am.” This time, Gerald’s voice cracked.

  Jackson threw all his cards down on the table, feeling himself begin to slip toward unconsciousness. The blood around him could have filled a half-gallon milk jug. “You stayed here because you didn’t want to let go. You didn’t want to let this life end. Now it’s too late and you can’t leave, can you? And you hate it.”

  Gerald slid lower, toward the ground. “Yes. Once you choose, you can’t choose again.”

  “Were you murdered, Gerald? Is that why you didn’t want to leave? Because it didn’t seem fair?”

  “He came here to take our money – at least that’s what he told Mommy, before he killed her. But we heard him, and we woke up. He said we’d identify him to the police, so he had to kill us.” Gerald’s feet met the floorboards. “He shot Mommy in the chest, but she didn’t die. She was bleeding, and she told me to be tough. Then he shot me.”

  “When was this? What year?”

  “Nineteen thirty-one.”

  Jackson whistled. “So you’ve been here for all these years, dead but not allowed to rest.”

  “Yes.”

  “But why did you think killing me would help?”

  Gerald came forward for the first time, past the boundary of the doorway. His shape began to form hard edges, and Jackson wondered if it was because he – Jackson – was dying. “I’m just not as tough, not as tough as she wanted me to be. And I was lonely.” He held out a hand. “You know what I mean?”

  Jackson nodded, thinking back to the moment he’d heard all of his family – his brother and both parents – were dead. He’d felt like the floor had dropped out from under him, throwing him into a fall that would never end. “And you wanted me to join you?” Red touched the edges of his vision.

  “I did. I’m sorry. It’s just so hard.”

  “But didn’t you realize I have to choose?” Jackson let go of his wrists; it didn’t matter anymore. “I have to choose which path I’ll take. The heaven the Church told me about is out there, if I want it.”

  “Not if you die here. This house is mine now; anyone who dies here stays with me – though no one has, so far.” Gerald shrugged. “Plus, I hoped you’d choose to stay.”

  Jackson couldn’t fault that; it was a childish hope, perhaps, but Gerald was a child. He grinned again, knowing it would be his last time, and hoping Gerald would interpret it as something it wasn’t: Submission. “So if I did die in here, inside this house, what would that mean? I could never leave? Never see anyone else?”

  Gerald’s head bobbed up and down. “Yes. Unless someone else joined us.”

  Jackson cringed. “I can’t do that.” Summoning all of the strength he had left, he pushed himself to his feet. The plaster dug into his back as he slid up the wall, but he hardly felt it. “My family is still waiting for me, Gerald. I have to go to them. I want to go to them. I’ve cut myself off from everyone, for all these years, because I was afraid. But this is like going home for me; this is the one thing I’m not afraid of.”

  Gerald stiffened. “It’s too late. You’re dead.”

  Blood slid under his foot, and Jackson almost fell. He caught his balance, glancing out the window behind him. Snow lay like a thick layer of cotton across the earth, piled where the plow had pushed it aside. “Not yet.” He drew his arms forward, then slammed them back against the frozen, brittle glass.

  With a scream, Gerald lunged forward. Wind tore at the glass, sucking pieces of it in through the window; they cut long furrows in Jackson’s flesh. Gerald’s face contorted into a mask of rage, a twisted, howling vision of anger. But, even without his flesh-and-blood body to slow him down, he couldn’t get there in time.

  Jackson knew it; the grin never left his face, even as he threw himself from the third-story window.

  Goat Island

  The dead man stood in the corner, holding his head in his hands.

  Sara willed herself not to look. She stared into the flames of the open hearth, wishing he had put her close enough to feel the warmth. But of course he hadn’t. He wouldn’t do anything to make her more co
mfortable, to ease her situation. Then she wouldn’t be, as he so delicately put it, pliable.

  “You son of a bitch.” Sara clenched her fists behind her back, feeling the tape pull at the hairs on her arms and tighten across her chest. Tying someone up with tape seemed almost laughable in thought, but all the humor drained out when it actually happened. You couldn’t untie tape, after all. Gerald had met her two months ago, in January. She’d been watching a football game in Carl’s, more trying to catch the eyes of single men than taking in the action on the screen. She’d downed a few beers with the rest of them (even though she hated the stuff) and ended up talking to Gerald long after the place cleared out. He’d had black hair then, not white, and he’d offered her a ride home when Carl closed up. She’d accepted without a second thought.

  Sara grinned, though it twisted her lip up into more of a grimace than anything. She’d had plenty of second thoughts over the last week, but they were all far too late to matter.

  Things had started out well. Gerald hadn’t tried to get in her pants that first night, not in the car or when she’d invited him to come up to her apartment. He hadn’t even stayed, allowing her no more than a kiss on the cheek to send her off. Sara had thought it was romantic – that he was a real gentleman – and she’d written her number on the back of his hand. He’d promised to call and driven off into the night shrouding Highway 37.

  Sara twisted against the pole as an itch ran up her back. The support beam for the cabin’s main room was made of wood, as was everything else, and it hadn’t been polished at all. The rough bark still clinging. She’d spent the last half-hour trying not to hurt herself on a long, jagged knot behind her head. It looked like the branch had been snapped off but never sanded down.

  The entire cabin couldn’t have been more than twenty feet on a side, a rough square hashed together from the trunks of trees native to Goat Island. Sara let her eyes drift over the patched blue curtains, drawn tight over windows that faced nothing but water. She’d thought the place quaint and rustic when she’d first visited, but that opinion had been shattered as completely as the bones in her right ankle.

  “Are you going to leave me here until I starve?” Sara waited, half-expecting an answer, but none came. Outside, the wind howled against the cabin’s frame like someone blowing over the opening of an enormous bottle. A storm was coming up, and coming up hard.

  Sara’s eyes shifted back to the dead man. He stood as straight and ridged as a British Royal Guard, and the blood sprayed across his chest even reminded Sara of their overcoats. He wore simple clothes – jeans and a gray t-shirt, with a white (well, it had been white, at one point) Nike swoosh on the breast. His hands formed a cradle near his groin, the fingers laced together to support the weight of his head.

  With macabre fascination, Sara couldn’t draw her gaze away. The man’s (she couldn’t bring herself to think of him as Gerald, not when he looked like that) eyes gazed back at her, unblinking but not as dull as they should have been. Instead, they almost seemed to shine, to be alert. To be watching her every move.

  A pulse of pain shot through her ankle, and Sara glanced down with a grimace. She’d unconsciously shifted her legs to the right, as if trying to walk away from the horror in the room, and trapped her broken ankle under her opposite calf. She extracted it, finding another wave of pain to be her reward. If she hadn’t tried to run, Gerald never would have broken it. But something inside her hadn’t been able to stand taking this sort of treatment without putting up a fight, no matter how little that fight might have accomplished.

  Swallowing the urge to cry, again, Sara bit down on her lower lip. She’d cried enough the first day that her face had hurt from the effort, but she couldn’t seem to run out of tears. And Gerald did so love her tears.

  The man’s arm moved.

  Sara should have been expecting it; she’d seen this happen a dozen times already, but she still flinched. Her head snapped back against the aborted branch, distracting her. But only for a moment.

  She watched out of the corner of her eye as the man lifted his head and set it back on his shoulders. There was a wet, sucking sound like a hand being plunged into a bowl of noodles. The red line of gore around the neck retreated, gaining speed until it was nothing more than a slender band of scar tissue. The hands fell away, and Gerald blinked.

  “Glad to see you haven’t tried anything stupid, my dear.” Gerald stepped away from the wall, wiping a bit of blood from his forehead. It had dripped from the collar of his shirt. “You worried me with your antics before. Spitting on me and screaming, all that bit.”

  Sara glowered, trying to focus her fear into anger. That’s what they always said to do, wasn’t it? It worked half as well as she would have liked. “You’re going to be caught, you know. You can’t hide out here forever, and there are people looking for me.”

  “I’m sure there are.” Gerald waved a hand, walking around her to pluck a novel off the coffee table. “But you’re wrong. They’re never going to find you.” He grinned. “But then, you knew that.”

  “My father has money. He won’t stop at anything.”

  “Money alone won’t do it.” Gerald stepped up to her, running his fingers down her cheek. “Don’t you want to know who it was?”

  Sara jerked her head away. “I told you, I don’t care.”

  “Are you so sure?”

  “I am.”

  Gerald laughed, then cross the room and dropped into the easy chair near the fire. It flared up as he sat, and Sara could finally feel some of the heat. Gerald’s gaze stole most of that, but not all.

  They’d gone to dinner seven times in the two weeks after she’d met him. Gerald was ever the gentleman, holding doors and picking up checks like he had nothing he’d rather do. He took her to the theater – not the cinema where the high school kids went to eat popcorn and make out in the second row, but the actual theater with live performances every Tuesday and Friday – and the beach at night. They wished on stars and drank expensive champagne. It had been everything Sara had wanted and so much more. She’d noticed his aging then, accelerated as it was, but chalked it up to her mind playing games with her.

  One night, after a rather liberal amount of champagne, Sara had been sure he would ask to stay the night. And she’d been more than ready to let him – and not solely because of the alcohol. She’d made all the advances she’d deemed prudent, and then a few more besides. Gerald had taken none of them.

  Sara had finally just asked him, strait up, if he wanted to go upstairs. Gerald had sat up (they’d been lying on the ugly green couch in her living room) and told her that he was sorry, very sorry, but he couldn’t. She’d grown angry at the time, and embarrassed considering the circumstances, and told him that he might as well go home and call her when he felt like being a man. He’d told her that he would stop by the following day, and gone. When he left, his wallet had been lying on her couch. Sara hadn’t noticed it until the following morning.

  Part of her, probably the part her father worked hardest to form as she grew up, was naturally suspicious. And if not suspicious, then at least curious. She’d immediately begun digging through his abandoned wallet and had been surprised at what she found.

  Which was, namely, nothing.

  “Snap to it, babe.” Gerald clapped his hands together, the sound harsh in the otherwise silent cabin. As if in answer, the wind cracked a few tree branches against the cabin’s exterior walls. Goat Island had under a square mile of landmass, but it was big enough to be covered in cedar trees just as heavily as the mainland.

  Sara took a deep breath. “What do you want?”

  “When are we talking? Right now? Ten years from now?” Gerald’s grin flashed back, a grin Sara remembered thinking was so charming just a few weeks before. The wrinkles now lining his face made it sinister rather than handsome. “I think you know.”

  “I think you’re insane.”

  “Do you?”

  “Yes.”

  Gerald stoo
d, cracking his neck. “Well, you have to believe me by now. About not being a part of this world, I mean.” He gestured to the scar. “This isn’t the sort of thing than can be explained away by science.”

  Sara had to give him that, and the thought sent a tremor through her spine. She’d wondered at the wallet, empty of everything but the credit card he’d been using to pay for their dates. No driver’s license, no social security card, not even an expired student ID from college. Nothing at all.

  But she’d never asked him. She’d meant to, of course; it was too strange to let lie. When she’d given the wallet back, the words had been on the tip of her tongue. As if anticipating just that, Gerald had kissed her quickly, almost violently, and informed her that he had plans for the evening that would blow her away. He’d seemed so excited that her questions had fled her mind.

  “So what do you think, dearest Sara?” Gerald walked over again, stepping close until his face was an inch from hers. His hand slid to her waist, the fingers working in and out in a gentle massage that Sara hated. “You know I need your consent for this, or you’ll die. Do you think you can ever agree?”

  “I think you can rot in hell.”

  “I probably will, soon enough.” Gerald shrugged and stepped back. “I killed the chief of police. He was getting too close.”

  Sara wrenched forward, ripping out a new patch of arm hair and jolting her destroyed ankle into a fury. “You’re a liar!”

  “Am I?” Gerald shook his head. “I told you money wouldn’t be enough, Sara. And your father paid a good deal of it to Chief Mason to enlarge the search area after they found your car. Mason started looking to the islands, and it was only a matter of time.”

  “You’re just giving them more lines to trace back to you.”

  “Not really. When I leave this body, it’s not as if I take on another.” Gerald tapped his chest with two fingers. “Bodies are worthless. What I become without it isn’t something you could even see, let alone follow. And when they find Mason, it’ll look for all the world like he choked to death on that chicken bone I shoved down his throat.”