Blackened

by Tim McWhorter

  It was light in my hand. At first I wondered if there was anything in the box at all, but when I held it up to my ear and shook it, something rattled inside. It sounded like something hard, and nothing like fudge, so a small part of my heart fell. Like I said, I was hungry, and who doesn’t like fudge? I pawed at the bone white box with grubby, stained fingers until the clear strip of tape holding the flap in place finally pulled free.

  When I lifted the lid, tufts of wrinkled, baby blue tissue paper immediately started to fluff up, as if they were being held against their will. The tissue paper, crumpled and stuffed into the corners more to take up space than for any kind of decorative presentation, looked to have been used at least once before.

  One piece was poking up further than the others, so that’s the one I grabbed. When I pulled the large clump of tissue paper out, I dropped the box altogether. Not because it slipped out of my hand, and not even on accident. I dropped the box on account of what was inside.

  Chapter 2

  The dead teenagers of New Paris, Ohio, had been everywhere. That’s what the news referred to them as. “The dead teenagers of New Paris.” Like it was some kind of f 'ing title. Everywhere I went around the small town, there were reminders of last year’s tragic events. The ghosts of the first two missing students would have been difficult enough to ignore, although I hadn’t known them all that well. But then there were the chimeras of Becca and, ultimately, my best friend, Garrett. Both murdered. Both still hanging around town one way or another. In the parking lot of the high school. Watching me stuff my face with fries at the McDonald’s. Lounging at my kitchen table, like neighborhood kids wanting me to come out and play.

  Rather than facing his demons, I was that guy who left. The only way my parents thought I would complete my recovery was to sweep me away from New Paris. When it was all said and done, we ended up only a half hour away in Dayton, of all places. Dayton. Ohio. Not exactly across the country, but I guess my parents felt it was far enough. I mean, we couldn’t just up and move to the Black Hills of South Dakota or disappear into the cornfields of Nebraska. There were my parent’s jobs to consider, after all.

  At least I hadn’t left too many people behind. Less than a month after New Paris laid several of its youngest and brightest to rest, Garrett’s parents packed up his sister and left town, heading somewhere out west. Our friend, Cricket, moved back to Mumbai once the work his father was here to do was completed. So, there really wasn’t much left for me there anyway.

  The only one who remained was my long-time friend, Claire, whom I’d grown even closer to over the past year. We were dating now, brought together by the heartbreak and loss of mutual friends. Despite the bond that had helped me through so much, even she was away most of the time, having left for her freshman year of college while I was still doing my stint in the hospital. Sorry, mental health facility. That’s what I’m supposed to call that place. Not a hospital.

  I spent seven weeks in the Sovereign Knolls Mental Health Facility, and I think the boredom made me crazier than I was when I went in. I spent countless hours just talking. About my fears. About my anger. About my difficulty distinguishing between the two. Talking in groups. Talking to my team of therapists. Not just one, mind you. A team. Four of them to be exact. All with PhDs and yachts floating in the Florida Keys thanks to my parents and me. I wouldn’t have been surprised at all to learn that at least one of the yachts was even named after me. Something like “Teenager Overboard” or “Luke’s Insanity.”

  Seven weeks I spent talking about how I felt. Answering the same questions over and over, about whether I was still experiencing nightmares (which I wasn’t), and whether I was still afraid of the boogeyman (which I wasn’t). For the most part, at least. The precious little time I was allowed to be alone, I spent studying for the final exams that I hadn’t been able to take at the end of my senior year. Something had come up. It’s difficult to take an exam when you’re laid up in the hospital with both a shattered ankle and psyche.

  Posttraumatic stress disorder. That was what they called it. What I “had,” like it was some sort of disease or something. The patronizing result of unimaginable trauma. My particular trauma stemmed from the fact that not only had I been the one to find the remains of New Paris’ missing girls in the basement of an abandoned church, but I was also unfortunate enough to watch another one lose her head right before my eyes. On top of that, there was the loss of my best friend in the process. And ultimately, as if all that wasn’t enough, I just happened to narrowly escape the blade of the man responsible for it all. He had done everything in his powers to add me to his grisly list of victims, but I managed to get away. Only me. But it didn’t make me feel lucky. Or even fortunate.

  Besides the nightmares, the blackouts were probably the scariest. My blackouts weren’t the kind where you get light-headed or faint. Mine were the kind that stole time away from me. Some people refer to it as “losing time,” but I always felt like mine had been stolen, due to the fact I hadn’t brought any of it on. Either way, they resulted in not knowing what the hell I’d been doing over a period of time. One minute I would be standing in the kitchen loading the dishwasher, and the next thing I knew, I’d be sitting in my truck out in front of the house, not knowing how I got there. The doctor’s assurances that these episodes were common did nothing to alleviate the anxiety they brought on. Being told that other people dealt with blackouts as well didn’t make me feel any better either. The only thing that helped was when they stopped.

  Like the limp I’ll walk with for the rest of my life, I think he will always be with me to some extent, too, never truly gone. The boogeyman, that is. But his once frequent jogs through my mind have diminished to an all-time low at this point, and I can get through most days, sometimes even weeks, without a single thought of Corwin Barnes. But what my parents feared most, and the main reason they swept me away from our home in New Paris, was that Corwin Barnes was still thinking about me.

  In the process of escaping from Barnes, I just happened to kill his equally demented stepdaughter. I won’t lie, this only added to the trauma, despite the fact that the world was a better place without her. I thought I had killed him, too, but it turned out I hadn’t. The cops never did find him, so luckily for me, he was still out there somewhere. And pissed. He was probably really, really pissed.

  Turns out, two questions had been answered when I opened that little white box in the office of Tipsword’s Automotive: yes, Barnes was still thinking about me, and no, Dayton wasn’t far enough away after all.

  I stood at the counter trembling, heart racing, staring down at the empty box and the three white bones lying on the grimy tile floor beside it. The bones, small and somehow staying together, formed a finger. A class ring, silver with an emerald green stone, lay a couple inches away, surrounded by small balls of crumpled blue tissue paper.

  It was Garrett’s class ring. I knew it without even picking it up to look. My heart was already thumping against my chest, not from fear, but from the implications. If it was Garrett’s ring, that meant it was probably Garrett’s finger. And if that was indeed the case, I knew that fear would come soon enough.

  There was a large, plate-glass window in the wall that separated the shop area from the office, and when I glanced in its direction, I could see Dallas. He was standing beside the red Civic with a pneumatic drill in his hand, looking back at me. By the look on his face, he was clearly puzzled by the look on mine. I offered an Oscar-worthy grin and threw in a bullshit head nod. I wasn’t sure he bought the validity of either, but they were convincing enough for him to return his attention to the wheels of the elevated sedan.

  With my heart pounding to beat all hell and my stomach tying itself in knots, I bent down to pick up the box. After a moment’s hesitation, and a quick wipe of my suddenly clammy hands on my pants, I used a piece of tissue paper to scoop the skeletal finger and ring back into the box. The dull clanking sound of the metal ring hitting the bone shot a wave of co
ld electricity down my spine, standing my neck hair on end.

  I had just stood back up when the sound of a car horn almost put me through the ceiling. Spinning around with more alarm than was necessary, I looked out the front window. Between the white and red lettering that spelled out “Tipsword’s Automotive,” I could see the silver Toyota Prius that Claire’s parents had bought her for graduation parked out front.

  With a deep breath, a sizeable cringe and a sense of how wrong it all was, I stashed the box behind an oil filter display. I didn’t want Claire to see it, and I certainly didn’t want her to know what was inside. Not because I didn’t think she was strong enough to stomach it. On the contrary, I witnessed her dissect a gopher embryo in Advanced Biology at the start of our senior year, and Claire had been the only girl in the entire class who didn’t excuse herself to the restroom at some point.

  I didn’t want her to see what was in the box because Garrett had been Claire’s friend, too.

  Chapter 3

  I spent most of the next hour paying little attention to my lunch, and even less attention to Claire. Even though the conversation was one-sided, it didn’t stop her from holding her end of the bargain. She told me about the job she might be getting for the coming summer and the girl in her dorm who was juggling two guys at once. All the things that were important in her life at the moment, but only registered as white noise in mine. At least right now. I was normally a better listener, but today, I just stared down at my half-eaten burrito. I found I wasn’t as hungry as I had been before opening the little white box. The only times I found myself looking up from my food was to take inventory of the faces coming into the restaurant.

  If Claire suspected something was bothering me, she didn’t show it. After all, seeing me off in my own little world was nothing new for her. Over the past year, she was very aware that I’d made a habit of retreating inside myself from time to time.

  “So where are you today?”

  “Huh?” I asked, fairly aware that I’d been asked a question, yet not quite sure what that question was. I felt like I’d been called on in class while staring out the window.

  “Nothing,” she said, grinning between bites of her taco salad. “So, enough about what’s going on in my life. How’s everything at the garage? I haven’t had a chance to check in much lately, with finals and all.”

  “Alright,” I said, poking at the inside of my burrito with the world’s least durable plastic fork. “Wade’s gone. Dallas canned him today.”

  “So that just leaves you, then?”

  “For now. I can probably have all the hours I want in the next couple weeks.”

  “That’s good,” she said, swishing around the iced tea in her Styrofoam cup. “Maybe you’ll be able to get the rims you’ve been looking at. Start fixing up the truck like you’ve been wanting to.”

  The mention of the truck turned the small amount of food in my stomach into something that would hold a large ship in place. The old Chevy 1500 had been Garrett’s. His parents gave it to me before they left town. It’s what Garrett would have wanted, they said. I’d been driving it ever since, trying to save up enough money to finally fix it up the way Garrett had always talked about. Part of me shared his vision, but I think mostly I was just hoping to make him proud.

  I laid the fork down, crumpled my napkin and dropped it onto the red tray in front of me.

  “I’ll be right back,” I said, pushing my chair away from the table.

  For the first time since she picked me up, a look of concern came over Claire’s face.

  “You okay?”

  “I think I’m gonna get sick.”

  And I did. I barely made it to the men’s room and into the first stall before doubling over and emptying the contents of my stomach. It only took the one time to do the job, so I guess the second and third round of heaves were just for good measure. Luckily, not only did I make it to the awaiting toilet, but it was incredibly clean.

  As I knelt beside the porcelain john, one knee on the ground, stomach lurching as if it was considering going a fourth round, I wondered why I was even here. Admittedly, seeing the bones from my dead friend’s finger was disturbing, but I had seen so much worse in the basement of that church, unimaginable things that no person should ever see, much less a teenage kid. All I could figure was that it was simply hitting too close to home.

  Just as he knew it would.

  Because that was the other thing. The bones and ring aside, there was also the Corwin Barnes aspect of it. Fear was creeping in, keeping my stomach from settling. Fear that he had finally found me. Fear that he was coming my way. Again. He was out there somewhere, and if he had discovered where I worked, he had assuredly found out where I lived, where I went and who I spent time with. He could even be watching Claire and me while we sat eating our lunch.

  The thought of Claire sitting out there alone was enough to lift me to my feet. I flushed the toilet, then washed my hands, looking at myself in the mirror. The face looking back at me said two things. One, I looked like shit, and considering the latest turn of events, I might just need to get used to it. And two, unlike the first time I faced Barnes, I wasn’t going to be able to handle this on my own. I had to tell someone. Just who, I wasn’t quite sure yet, but my mind was sorting out the possibilities as I exited the restroom and made a beeline toward Claire.

  Chapter 4

  The entire ride back to the garage, I remained just as quiet as I had been at the taco joint. Add to that my abrupt disappearing act right in the middle of lunch, and I was sure Claire suspected something was wrong at this point, something more than my usual awkwardness. She was a smart girl, way smarter than me. Whether she believed it to be just a simple stomach problem or something more, she didn’t press, and I appreciated that. As much as I wasn’t ready to let her in on what was going on just yet, I also knew I wouldn’t be able to keep her in the dark for long.

  Part of me wanted to protect her from the emotional aspect of it. After all, she had been good friends with Garrett, too, and this would undoubtedly rip off her emotional scabs just as it had mine. But there was also a part of me, albeit a small part, that was afraid she would think I was having a relapse of my PTSD. In the back of my mind, there was always the fear I would say or do something and people would give me that look that said, “Is this it? Has he finally lost it?” I guess that problem would be solved once I showed her the white box and all its contents, though I wasn’t looking forward to the prospect of that, either.

  Still, the knowledge that I had to tell someone was nagging at me. My parents? I should tell them for sure. Sooner rather than later. They would get the police involved, and that would probably be a good thing. The only issue with telling my parents is that they’d just recently gotten to the point of letting me out of their sight without staying up all night worrying. Just because my fragile psyche had been dealt a blow earlier today, I was in no hurry to do the same to theirs. I decided to hold off telling them for now.

  As Claire steered the Prius into Tipsword’s’ parking lot, I decided there was only one person I could go to who could possibly help, but didn’t have a direct stake in the matter.

  I could see Dallas perched on his stool behind the front counter when I got out of the car. The large front window brought almost the entire office into view, and it didn’t take long before I started wondering just how vulnerable I was while in the office, or for that matter, the garage. The entire front of the building, from the office to the shop, was more glass than anything else. You could see everything going on inside from anywhere on the street. That realization put the queasiness back in my stomach. It had been feeling better since we left the restaurant, but now I wondered if stomach problems were something I just might have to get used to.

  Despite the creeping sensation that there were neighborhood eyes on me, I stood outside the office until Claire pulled away. As she did, I waved and she blew me a kiss in return. Just like that, she was gone, leaving me standing there al
one. I scanned the street and nearby buildings, not really knowing what I was looking for, before ducking into the office.

  The bell above the door chimed as I entered, and Dallas looked up from his muscle car magazine. It was his passion. In the far corner of the shop sat a ’66 Chevy C10 Stepside that he had spent the better part of five years restoring. The engine, transmission and everything else under the hood were primed and ready to go. It was the weathered midnight blue body with its patches of grey primer that still needed work. But, according to Dallas, that wouldn’t take much longer now that he was divorced, and the “Dragon Lady” wasn’t standing in his way, bitching about the amount of time and money he spent on it. It was a guy thing, he’d said. She didn’t understand.

  “How was lunch?” he asked, before tipping his head back and draining the last remaining crumbs from a small bag of chips.

  “Good,” I lied.

  He looked at me for a moment, crunching his last bit of lunch before speaking his mind.

  “Bullshit.”

  “What?” I crossed over to where the water cooler sat, a stack of clear plastic cups on top. I had the worst taste in my mouth, and I was pretty sure that if I didn’t get water soon, I would be stuck with it forever.

  “Bullshit,” he said matter-of-factly. It wasn’t like he was calling me out, but simply calling it like he saw it.

  It was actually the opening I needed.

  Twenty minutes later, I’d laid it all out for him, both figuratively and literally. The little white box, along with its contents, were spread out on the counter between us. We were probably lucky no customers had come in during that time. I told Dallas everything. I told him about the missing girls, the abandoned church, Garrett, Becca and Corwin Barnes. Especially Corwin Barnes. Afterward, I stood there leaning against the counter and waited, letting it all sink in. Every couple of minutes, I would look out the front window and wonder if anyone might be watching. I also wondered just how long the paranoia would last.