The Deep Hours of the Night

by Jonathan Schlosser

  Willis ran his eyes along the bank, half expecting to see Gage Alan Breaston in the same situation, sprawled on the ground with dark blood pooled around his crushed skull. But he saw nothing. He sighed and turned around.

  The small boy stood a few feet from Willis, his hands clasped in front of him. He was hiding behind a stand of trees, but his white skin was visible through the branches. He had dirt and sap smeared across his face; his upper lip trembled like a brewing earthquake. He wore jeans and a green blazer, zipped up all the way to his neck. His eyes were red and the dirt on his face was streaked with the remnants of tears.

  Smiling, Willis knelt. “Hi. And what are you doing out here?”

  The boy tucked his chin to his chest and said nothing.

  “Lost?” Willis held out a hand. “What is your name?” Not that it mattered; even if the boy was somehow not Gage, Willis had found his target. Any boy would work.

  The boy’s lip trembled even more, and his voice cracked when he spoke. “Gage. I was with Mom and Dad, but…” He sniffled and looked at the ground.

  “But you ran off to see the river and you got lost, didn’t you?” Willis’s smile grew; he’d been right, after all. “It’s really a beautiful river. But you must be careful, you know.”

  A new tear ran down Gage’s left cheek. “Can you take me home?”

  “Of course, my boy.” Willis nodded and motioned Gage forward with a finger. “Come with me. I’ll get you home safe and sound.”

  5

  Willis boiled tomato soup and wondered how the police had not found the boy. Gage had confided in Willis that he’d fallen asleep at one point, tucking himself under a pile of leaves and branches. Willis assumed the police line had walked through during that interlude, fortunately not loud enough to wake the exhausted child. If Gaviston had been larger, they would have already had dogs out and Gage would have been found whether he’d been dead asleep or as awake as Willis had him now. As it was, those dogs hadn’t been called up immediately and, according to the news, would be shortly. Willis grinned. But too late.

  “Your house smells bad.” Gage sat on the couch, swinging his legs and looking better already. Willis had helped him wash his hands and face, though he hadn’t been able to give him any new clothes. “Like bad milk.”

  “Yes, I suppose it does.” Willis chuckled. “An old man like me doesn’t take the time to clean as well as he should.”

  “How old are you?”

  Willis poured half of the soup into a bowl and carried it to the living room. He set it on the low table next to Gage. “Old enough to be your dad’s dad. How’s that?” He shrugged. “And let that soup sit for a minute before you eat it; it’s hot.”

  “Okay.” Gage looked at the bowl longingly. “When do I get to go home?”

  “Soon, very soon.” Willis sat next to Gage – exactly where Johnny-Boy had sat hours before – and patted him on the knee. “You wouldn’t want to run out before you’ve eaten, would you?”

  “No.” Gage shook his head hard; his hair flicked back and forth across his forehead.

  “I didn’t think so.” Willis stood. “I need to get something. Will you be all right on your own?”

  Gage nodded. “Yeah. Can I watch television?”

  “Sure; I don’t get many channels, I’m afraid, but you can watch whatever you like.” Willis walked back into the kitchen and around the corner. Behind him, he heard the television snap to life.

  He crossed to the doorway and stopped, leaning against the jam. The hall in front of him led to the laundry room and the bathroom. It branched to the left, where a set of stairs – pitch black without the lights – ran up to the bedrooms and another bathroom on the second floor. Willis had inherited the house upon his parents’ deaths, and he was well acquainted with it, well acquainted with everything that had happened there.

  Including Danny’s death.

  He mounted the stairs slowly, pausing on every step to make sure that his legs felt up to it. They did, barely. He got to the top, turned right, and stepped into Danny’s old room.

  It still smelled like death. Fifty-four years later, and he could still see Danny’s form lying on the bed, his hair matted with blood, eyes closed. Dying. Willis raised a hand to his face, rubbing his eyes with his index finger and his thumb. He looked up, staring at the far wall. “Are you in here? I’m doing what you want.”

  The hissing sound came again, somewhere between laughter and a growl. Willis didn’t know if that was an affirmative or not. As much assurance as the sound gave him that Danny still lived, after a fashion, he never could tell if his brother was trying to talk to him or mocking his feeble attempts to please him.

  Willis shook his head. But he knew, at least, knew that Danny was in the room. He had been ever since Willis had let him die on that bed, in agony.

  Sometimes Willis could feel him. It wasn’t the same as any other sense, but he could just tell that Danny was there, his spirit lurking in every shadow, every corner, behind every piece of furniture. Watching Willis, Willis who had failed him and allowed him to die, and waiting for his moment. Danny wanted revenge, retribution, but he liked to see Willis agonize over it, and so he let him live.

  Willis had began killing fifteen years ago. It had been an accident, that first one. A workman had come over to inspect the electricity, which had been shorting out. He’d turned off the breaker and taken apart an electrical panel, looking for the problem. He’d been up to his elbows in wiring when Willis had bumped the switch and flipped the power back on. The smell of burning flesh had taken three days to leave the house.

  But in that moment, as he stared in horror (the man’s feet had been doing a little dance, a jig, against the kitchen floor as he fried, his mouth locked open in a silent scream with smoke pouring out of his ears and his hair burning), Willis had felt Danny consider leaving.

  Consideration was all the farther it got. Willis could feel the conflict, as if it were in his own heart instead of his brother’s. But then, for whatever reason, Danny changed his mind. A chill washed over Willis’s chest, but he knew what he had to do.

  He made his second killing two months later. This time it was a traveling salesman who made the mistake of thinking the rural community would be interested in further health insurance. Willis invited him inside for coffee and then blew off half his face with two barrels full of buckshot.

  Again, Danny had considered leaving. And decided to stay.

  Willis had grown frantic. If he didn’t get rid of Danny, his brother would tire of waiting. He would take his revenge, take Willis’s life. If Willis hadn’t been so careless as to let him fall, or so stupid as to procrastinate calling the authorities, everything would have been all right. But he had been, and Danny wouldn’t let that lie. He wouldn't let Willis forget it. The skeletons were dancing.

  The third and fourth killings had been a Girl Scout and her mother, selling cookies. Willis had claimed he had to leave, and climbed into his pickup. As the disheartened pair walked back to their minivan, he’d popped the clutch and ran them both over. The girl’s head hit the grill hard enough to break out all of her teeth and she’d gone down under the tires. The mother had been propelled forward and pinned between the van and the truck, breaking most of her ribs and (Willis assumed) puncturing her lungs. The sound she’d made breathing could have meant nothing else. He’d left her there while he watched television, and she’d been dead two hours later.

  Still, Danny had stayed. Willis had hoped the double sacrifice would be enough, but he’d been wrong. Maybe because he’d done it outside, and not in the house that Danny still clung to.

  The rest of the killings had become a blur. Cheerleaders raising money for the football team. UPS men dropping off packages. A tourist who’d gotten lost after he took the wrong exit on I-75. It didn’t matter. For one reason or another they’d all been wrong. As Willis stared into the bedroom, he began to smile. They’d all been wrong until now. A boy sat downstairs, a lost boy that no one could
find. A boy the same age Danny had been when he’d died.

  Willis picked up the hammer from the bed and turned back to the stairs. “Gage!”

  “Huh?” He heard the patter of running feet, and Gage appeared at the bottom of the stairs. From the red splattered on his shirt, he’d grown impatient and finished his soup in a hurry. “What, Mr. Willis?”

  “I want to show you something.” Willis motioned with a hand. “Come up here.” To the very room where it happened. You can’t reject this one, can you Danny?

  “What is it?” For the first time, doubt flickered across Gage’s face.

  “Just a little something I want to give you. I think you’re perfect for it.”

  “Like a present?”

  Willis smiled. “Yes, exactly like a present.”

  “Sure!” Gage clambered up the stairs, eyes bright. Even the total darkness didn’t hinder his speed. Light from a bedroom window was all that shone.

  Willis tightened his grip on the hammer. A single blow to the temple ought to do it. A blow to the skull, just like Danny’s. Maybe Gage wouldn’t even die, and Willis would be able to let him spend his last hours on Danny’s bed, slipping away. He hoped so, but knew he couldn’t count on it. He would just have to strike, hard and fast so that Gage couldn’t run, and hope for the best.

  Gage stepped into the room and stopped just at the top of the stairs. He grinned upward. “What is it, Mr. Willis?”

  “Thank you, Gage,” Willis said, and swung the hammer.

  His legs, overworked by far for a man his age, finally gave out. As the hammer came around, both knees buckled at once. Willis fell to the side and forward with a yelp; his swing went wide and the hammer flew from his grasp. The room spun, and then he was on the stairs, tumbling, head over heels. He felt an ankle snap, then a knee, then a wrist. Pain lanced through his entire body as he rolled. The hammer clattered past and he saw it come to rest, lying claw-up at the bottom of the stairs, and then he cart-wheeled one last time. Bright lights exploded behind his eyes as something sharp slammed through the back of his skull, where his spine ended, and his fall came to a screeching halt.

  He lay at the bottom of the stairs, blood pooling around his head, and heard Danny’s laughter fade.

  Genesis 6

  Kenneth David Marian was born with wings in a dirty basement in Larson, Ohio, on November 27th, 1998. The basement smelled like cabbage and stale air and there was no one in it but Susan, and then, all at once, Kenneth. They went from one to two in a span of hours, and it was something unprecedented in Susan’s mind. She was eighteen and had never had a child before, let alone one with wings.

  Kenneth was pink and wrinkled and cried as he tried to use his wings. Those wings not fully developed yet, only thin membranes that looked like wet paper. They fluttered around with a sound like mucus on the tongue, and Kenneth cried.

  His mother, Susan, cried as well. She cried because she understood and she cried because she knew what had to happen. She cried because the only book she had was the Bible and she’d read it plenty of times. She’d read and read and read Genesis 6, when the angels, the Sons of God, lusted after human women. How they came and took them and how the race they created was terrifying until the flood wiped everything from the face of the earth.

  Susan stroked Kenneth’s face and watched his wings flap. He was small, slight, but already growing. It had been two hours since he’d arrived in the dirty little basement, two hours and he weighted probably three pounds more. It was remarkable, since they’d eaten nothing.

  The house belonged to her, had been left to her when her parents died in an auto accident out on the freeway. They’d been doing maybe sixty and ambling along in the right lane when a pickup doing maybe ninety-five jumped the median and rolled right over them. The driver was drunk enough that he didn’t even know what he’d done. Didn’t realize it until the police pulled him out of his truck and drove him away.

  She’d locked herself in the house. It wasn’t much, but she couldn’t leave. The pavement reminded her of her parents; the sound of engines reminded her of death. Every time she saw a white line or a yellow dash she thought of the pickup crossing both and crushing her mother under the glove compartment and her father behind the steering wheel. The column had gone right through him, the police report had said. She'd read it only once, but you only need to read something like that once.

  Kenneth whimpered, and Susan shushed him. He didn’t have long to live, and she didn’t want him to do it in sorrow. She gave him a piece of old bread; he chewed it for a moment before spitting it back out. He chewed it with teeth that had already grown in.

  The neighbors had tried to come by, but she’d put locks on the doors. She’d boarded the windows (save for the small ones around the basement, red with the falling sun) and nailed them shut. She’d even boarded up the chimney. Neighbors weren’t the issue, then; there were worse things that could come down the chimney. Could come down and crawl inside and slink along the walls and the floor until they found her.

  Susan thought about Genesis 6 and shivered.

  They’d come to her, once, and it had been enough. They’d found her alone and scared and without anyone to see. They’d found her with her head uncovered – they’d seen her and lusted after her and come to her.

  She couldn’t remember it now. She only knew that it had been terrible and that she had become pregnant. The first weeks had been spent in denial and the last weeks in horror. Desperately hoping for a flood to wipe her, at least, from the face of the earth.

  But none had come. God had not heard her pleas, or had not cared, or had been otherwise occupied. And now she had this child, Kenneth David Marian, and he had wings.

  “I’m sorry,” Susan said, not knowing to whom she was speaking. It may have been God. It may have been Kenneth. It may even, in some way, have been her parents. Because they’d always had such expectations for her, expectations that she’d all but forgotten.

  She had a knife, and she took it out. It was rusty and dull and would do what it had to. She looked at Kenneth, at his pink, wrinkled body and his translucent wings. She set the blade of the knife against his throat.

  “I’m sorry,” she said again.

  “Wait,” Kenneth said.

  He was only hours old. He could not talk, half-breed or otherwise. This much, Susan knew.

  “Please,” Kenneth said.

  Susan set the knife down on the concrete, remembering how she had been all alone before him. Before he’d just been there, with her. It had been amazing and wonderful and she wondered now if she was dying. There had been a lot of blood, and it hadn’t fully stopped coming.

  “Let me leave,” Kenneth said. He pointed at the little windows; his arms shook with effort. “Let me go. I can help you.”

  “Will you?” Susan looked at the blood on the floor, at the little basement windows that she hadn’t boarded over because they were too small for anything to come through.

  “Yes,” Kenneth said. He flapped his wings again, this time with something like strength. Like power. As if they almost worked, but not quite.

  “Then go,” Susan said, and set him on the floor.

  For the first time, Kenneth smiled. It was not the smile of a boy, however, but of something else. The teeth were too long and the eyes too red and the lips pulled too far back. But he was her son, and Susan found that she loved him. Loved him so much. He began crawling toward those little windows, clenching his fists and preparing to break the glass, and Susan began to sob.

  This time there would be no flood to sweep him away.

  Crashing Stolen Cars

  The car was rust and steel and rotting leather and the smell of gasoline. It crouched in the shadows, overhung by sweeping branches, the dust slowly settling. Two jagged tracks split off from the pavement, breaking free and into the gravel of the shoulder, and came to termination perfectly behind the car’s rear tires. The wind blew through the trees, whistling and dropping a shower of leaves onto the
exposed seats and the young man behind the convertible’s wheel.

  Adam licked his lips. He hadn’t yet pried his hands away from the leather wheel. Or set them in his lap. Or reached back to feel skin already cooling over a nonexistent pulse.

  “Kels?”

  The girl said nothing. She just sat in the back, her head lolling against the window, her eyes closed. Adam looked at her in the mirror; his tongue tasted like cotton, or polyester. Amazing how stress dried one’s mouth out. A cosmic mistake of the vaunted fight-or-flight syndrome.

  The roadway was desolate. Not just empty, not just abandoned, but as barren as a graveyard. This far toward the middle of nothing, there weren’t many people to happen along, especially not at three in the morning. Of course, that was why they’d come.

  Somewhere, far off and lonely, a raven spat out a call at the deep night. Why it was even awake, Adam had no idea. Not nocturnal, surely. Perhaps just restless. He couldn’t fault it for that.

  “Come on, Kels. If you’re playing with me, that’s enough.”

  Nothing. Not even a flicker of movement as if the girl were trying to wake up, trying to talk. Her half-unbuttoned blouse fluttered, tugged to one side by the wind, but that was all.

  Adam swore and got out of the car. The gravel crunched beneath his feet like grinding bones and a forgotten relic of a childhood song played through his head: Fee fi fo fum. He raked a hand through his hair, staring at the forest and wishing he could pinch himself hard enough. He grabbed the corner of his lips and squeezed until a thin trail of blood ran down his jaw, but the world stayed as it was.

  Funny how ten minutes could change the course of everything. Well, not funny, not really. Not in the causal sense. But surprising, all the same.

  The car was steel and rust and part of it flaked away as Adam stepped up to the back seat and laid his hands on the edge. The rear window was up. He leaned around it, close to her. Close enough to see where her skin had split in a tear across her brow; cracked white bone lurked beneath. It wasn’t bleeding as hard anymore, but it had been. Oh, it had been.