Light from Distant Stars

by Shawn Smucker

  “I’m done. Anyway, that’s what I told him. I was done. I’d give him some time to find someone else.”

  “How did he take it?” Ava asks. She glances at the other detective, and he gives her a barely discernible nod.

  “Not well.” Cohen gives a short gasp of a laugh, air out through his nose. “Not well. This place is everything to him. Everything. I was supposed to take it over from him, and my son after that, on through the generations.” He stares at the floor. “I don’t actually have a son, in case you wondered.”

  The three of them stand there in silence. Two other police officers orbit around them, taking notes and pictures and whispering to each other. The heat turns on, making the police tape flutter.

  “How long are you guys going to be here?” Cohen asks.

  “We’re almost finished,” the detective answers. “I brought these two back to take a last look at a few things, but we should be out of your hair in the next day or two.”

  “What did your father say when you told him you were quitting?” Ava asks. There is a quiet kindness in her voice.

  “He erupted. He had just finished his drink, and he pulled back his arm like he was going to throw his glass against the wall. But he didn’t throw it. He slammed it down on the coffee table. He didn’t let go of it, and he stared at it while he asked me why I had ‘such disregard for everyone but myself.’ Those were his words.” He pauses and shrugs. “He was right. I am a very selfish person.”

  “Cohen,” the detective says, “was that the last time you saw him before what happened here?”

  Cohen swallows. He looks not at the detective but at Ava. “Yes.”

  “You didn’t see him the morning of?”

  “No.”

  “Where were you that morning?”

  “I was supposed to be here. But I didn’t come to work, not after what we said to each other. I figured he needed some time to cool off, take in the news that I was quitting. I thought he might need some space. You can ask Beth. I think she was here all morning. I didn’t come in.”

  “Yes, but she wasn’t here when it happened,” the detective says in a deliberate voice. “Were you?”

  “I told you, I didn’t come in for work.”

  “Where were you?”

  “At home.” Cohen sighs. “By myself. With no one to corroborate my whereabouts.”

  “Where do you live?”

  “A few blocks over, on Lemon Street.” He looks at Ava. “I went to Johnny’s baseball game.”

  “Your nephew, correct?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Which would have been after . . . this?” the detective asks.

  “I don’t know,” Cohen says, raising his voice. “What time do you think ‘this’ happened?”

  “Cohen,” Ava says, “you don’t have to get upset with the detective. We’re only trying to figure out what happened to your father.”

  Cohen stares at her for one loaded moment.

  “Would you like to know how we found him?” the detective asks in a monotone voice.

  Cohen thinks the man has already arrived at his conclusion. From here on out, everything is part of a drama already written. “Yes.”

  The detective takes a few steps around one of the examination tables. “Your father was lying here, on the floor. He had fallen down. The instrument used for embalming had been thrust up through the bottom of his jaw, up through the back of his throat, and into his skull.”

  Cohen winced. “The trocar.”

  “The trocar?” the detective repeats.

  “Yes. Trocar. It’s the instrument we use to remove everything from the body cavity during the embalming process.” He walks over to the counter that lines the wall, pointing to one of the cabinets. “May I?”

  The detective nods. Cohen opens the door and pulls out a long piece of metal that looks like an oversized eighteen-inch screwdriver, except it has a three-sided blade.

  “This is inserted into the body two inches above the navel and three inches over. Once it’s in and connected to the machine, it sucks out all the body fluids. You have to work it around to get everything, like a vacuum. After that’s over, we reverse the action and use this same tool to inject the body with embalming fluid.”

  The three of them stare at it.

  “Could it have been an accident, Detective?” Cohen asks, breaking the silence.

  The detective raises his eyebrows. “You tell me. Seems unlikely, don’t you think? It would take quite a lot of force and a considerable amount of bad luck.”

  Cohen shrugs, handling the trocar lightly. “The other option is foul play, right? This thing isn’t a weapon. Usually it’s attached to the tube. It’s very rare someone would be handling it on its own. Although . . .”

  “What?” Ava asks.

  “It does occasionally get clogged. Bits of bone or other matter get stuck inside. If that happens, you have to take it off the hose and clean it out. Dad would have disconnected it, then walked from here over to the sink on the other side of the room.” He stops where his father had been lying, frowns. “Bodily fluids could leak onto the floor. You could slip while carrying it. My father is an old man. He could have come down on the table, the blade up.”

  He bends over at the table where he had once, a million years ago, stepped over his father’s body. He wedges the trocar between one of the countertops and the bottom of his jaw. He looks over at Ava and the detective, frozen in place, an accident in motion. The point of the trocar presses under his jaw, under his tongue.

  He stands and walks back to the cabinet and puts the trocar back in its place. “Will that be all, Detective?” he asks, looking at Ava.

  “For now, Mr. Marah. We will need to speak with your sister as well.” He pauses. “Mr. Marah?”

  Cohen glances over at him.

  “I wouldn’t leave the area if I were you. Not for a few days, at least, until we get some things straightened out.”

  “Why would I leave the area, Detective? My father is on his deathbed.”

  The detective stares at him. “Very well. Thanks for your time.”

  twenty-four

  The Gun

  Than led the way around the small valley, his stick beating a slow rhythm on the cold ground. Hippie walked behind Cohen, and he felt a bit like a prisoner in a war movie, the one forced to walk in between his captors. But Hippie was kind—she was no captor—and she asked him questions about where he lived and what his family was like, her voice coming up to him from behind like a pleasant memory.

  Than stopped and turned, waiting for them. He looked at Cohen and rolled his eyes, shook his head. “This way,” he muttered, plunging stick first into the briars that lined the bowl-shaped depression in the woods.

  At first Cohen wondered how they were supposed to make their way through. He held back so Hippie passed him, and as she did she looked up into his face, and he saw something different there in those green eyes, something foreign. He gave a weak smile and followed her.

  That’s when he realized there was a path. The narrow trail struck into the briars at an angle that made it easy to miss based on the direction he had been circling. Sometimes he had to raise his arms straight up above his head to avoid the reaching thorns, and sometimes he had to turn sideways. Than plunged ahead, disregarding the reaching stems, some of them clinging to him as he passed, then springing back. Hippie’s movement was more like a glide than a walk, and the blackberry briars seemed to brush off of her as if they were feathers.

  As they descended through the thickets, as the path circled around the hill, lower and lower, the smell of smoke got stronger. The odor of charred and blackened life. The wind came back, sweeping through the branches and clinking them all together, and some old branch that had long ago broken off but had still somehow been entangled finally fell to the earth, crashing into the undergrowth.

  Than whipped around, facing the crash. Hippie’s face went straight to the sky, her hand shielding her eyes from the glaring win
ter white-gray, and she ducked. Cohen felt his heart thudding in his chest and froze. What were Than and Hippie so afraid of?

  Cohen couldn’t move. He wanted to turn and run, but he couldn’t even do that. He glanced back and forth, from one side of the depression to the other, waiting for who knows what. The wind that had first started high in the branches now dropped in among the tree trunks and flowed through the vast expanse of thickets like water. The long, red-black stems of the blackberry bushes rose and bowed, swayed from side to side, as if the presence of the children disturbed them.

  “C’mon,” Than hissed, moving ahead at a trot. Hippie glanced back at Cohen, and he saw she was nervous. She nodded, a small kind of encouragement, and it loosened his body from that fearful paralysis. He nodded back, a smaller, less determined gesture, took a deep breath, and followed the two of them down the hill.

  The blackberry thickets went on for a long time, but they thinned out in the small yard around the mobile home. The only real reason you could call it a yard was that there were no trees, the thorns were few and far between, and there was some semblance of grass, but—and this was true especially in the winter—it was sparse and tan and brittle.

  Littering the space outside of the trailer, like supports strategically placed to help weeds grow, were various plastic things for children. A small blue plastic swimming pool, cracked and upside down. A miniature plastic slide, orange with teal-green steps. A red tricycle with flat black tires. But what made these things seem even stranger was the fact that they were all in various stages of melting. Those closer to the blackened section of the trailer were almost unrecognizable; those farther away were less obviously melted, but the subtle nature of their deformities felt odd, somehow scary. The slide, for example, was farthest away and at first glance seemed unharmed, but the steps sagged ever so slightly.

  It was as if the entire world was melting there in that hollow, as if something so powerful had passed through so as to affect even the basic molecular structure of things. Cohen wouldn’t have been surprised to look over and see Than’s face half melted, or Hippie’s feet slowly dissolving into the ground.

  What he did see when he finally pulled his gaze from the warped playthings was Than approaching the door, the very same one that was still banging open and closed, open and closed. It hung on by only one hinge. There were no real stairs, only cement blocks that had been stacked in a haphazard half pyramid like some kind of Mayan structure. They were blackened from the fire.

  Hippie stood with her back to the trailer, looking up and away, slowly turning as she watched the crest of the hill closely. Cohen was transfixed by her.

  “What’s your name?” Than hissed, startling Cohen.

  Embarrassed that he had been caught staring at Hippie, he tried to sound nonchalant. “I told you. Cohen.”

  “C’mon, Cohen,” Than said, coughing up his name as if he thought it was a pseudonym.

  Cohen made his way through and around the melted plastic remnants. “What are you guys doing here, anyway?” he asked.

  Than shushed him.

  “Sorry,” Cohen whispered. “What are you doing here, anyway?”

  Than glared at him. Hippie walked to the door, and soon the three of them were standing there in a small huddle, Than up on the seared cinder-block stairs, Cohen with his back to the mobile home, Hippie with her back to the forest but still looking up into the sky. She was always looking up.

  Than grabbed the door and held it motionless. The absence of the slapping sound it had made while swinging back and forth caused a deep silence to descend. Cohen hadn’t even realized how much of a comfort that repetitive sound had been, but standing there with nothing now to separate him from the sounds of the forest or the smell of the burned house, he felt exposed.

  “Remember that thing you saw?” Hippie asked.

  “In the dark?” Cohen asked. “On the street corner? Yeah. I remember.”

  Hippie’s eyes left Cohen and traveled around the trailer as if taking everything in for the first time. “It did this,” she said quietly.

  “That shadow thing did this? I thought this was a house fire.”

  Than sneered, laughed to himself, and shook his head. “No, man, the shadow thing, as you call it, did this. No ordinary house fire.”

  “What, can it breathe fire?” Cohen joked, but the other two didn’t seem to find it funny. “C’mon,” he said. “Seriously. What is it, some kind of a dragon?”

  “No.” Than turned and walked into the house. “It’s a Beast.” When he opened the door the whole way, it swung out and away from the house on its one lonely hinge before falling off entirely and crashing to the ground. Hippie didn’t give it a second look—she scaled the pyramid of blackened cinder blocks and disappeared into the house behind Than.

  Cohen stood there, staring. He wanted to leave. Or at least most of him wanted to leave. He turned and saw the place where the narrow path scaled the small hill and wound its way between the thorny blackberry shoots. It was a winding way, and it was tempting. There were too many things here he didn’t understand, too many things he couldn’t put his finger on, but that was what kept him from leaving. He wanted to know more about what he had seen.

  He walked up the cement block steps and they wobbled under him. The last step up, the one from the highest block and into the trailer, was a monumental step, and he had to reach up with both hands, grab the inside of the door frame, and pull himself in. No matter how much he told himself that he had chosen to go in, no matter how he reminded himself that he had climbed in willingly, he still couldn’t shake the feeling that he was being swallowed.

  The darkness inside the burned-out mobile home could be felt, like humidity. It was like its own environment—heavy, sticky—and even though it was a cold winter day, the darkness made him feel like he was sweating. He reached up and pulled the collar of his coat away from his neck to let in some fresh air. He cleared his throat and waited for his eyes to adjust, at least a little bit. Under his feet, with each step, was the grinding of broken glass. He had once stepped on the skeleton of an opossum in the woods, and the floor of the trailer felt like that, like a bed of old bones. He took another crumbling step.

  A flash of light. He jumped back, raised his hands. Than laughed.

  “Easy, Than,” Hippie said.

  “We’re here to find something,” Than said to Cohen. “Hippie’s going to watch the door. Me and you, we’re going to look. Got it?”

  “Okay. What are we looking for? I thought we were looking for the Beast.”

  Than rolled his eyes and shined his flashlight into Cohen’s face again.

  “Than,” Hippie said.

  “Fine,” he muttered, lowering the beam.

  Cohen’s eyes were dazzled, and it took them some time to readjust to the darkness.

  “We’re not looking for that thing, not yet,” Than said. “We’re on the lookout. There’s a big difference.”

  “So . . .”

  “So,” Than continued, turning and walking toward the back of the trailer, “we’re looking for something someone left here. Something that will help us destroy it.”

  Cohen looked over at Hippie in frustration. “You can’t tell me what we’re looking for?” he asked.

  “We don’t know. Not for sure,” Hippie said quietly, never looking away from the hillside. “Than seems to think there might be something we missed, something useful.”

  “You were here before?”

  Hippie sent a glance at Than, and in the half-light coming through the door, it looked like a warning.

  “I can’t tell you what we’re looking for because I don’t know what we’re looking for,” Than said, leading Cohen slowly back into the hallway.

  “So how will we know . . .” Cohen began, but Than turned and shined the light in his eyes again.

  “Just. Look.”

  “Fine, fine,” Cohen muttered, shielding his face with his hands.

  “You start in this room,” Th
an said, turning into the first room on the left. He walked brashly through the small space and flung up the blind that covered the window. Daylight eased its gray way in. He stomped out and went back to the hallway, his flashlight bobbing from side to side as he walked.

  Cohen looked around. The back half of the mobile home hadn’t been as affected by the fire. The rooms still smelled of smoke, and a few of the walls had turned brown due to the heat that had climbed up the other side of them, but they were intact. There was a small single bed with a pink blanket, a side table with a lamp that had a white shade, and a pale green rug spread on the floor over the top of the nasty tan carpet that stretched wall to wall through the trailer. He lifted the mattress and peered between it and the box spring. He opened the closet door warily, but it was empty. He stared hard at the ceiling, the light fixture, and even pulled up the heat register in the floor. Nothing.

  What was he looking for, and where would he find this unknown thing?

  Cohen approached the window. There was a thin, stained white sheer tacked into the wall with pushpins above the window frame. He pulled it to the side so that he could look out into the front yard again. He saw the melted toys. The bramble-covered hillside. The naked trees, tall at the top of the hill, dark against the gray sky. He scanned the blackberry thorns for any movement, any sign of the Beast.

  A jolt of panic surged through him. Was he alone? Had the other two left him? It was the same feeling he had walking up the stairs at night, when he was certain a hand was preparing to seize his foot.

  He turned and trod over the throw rug, the worn tan carpet, and peeked into the hallway. He glanced into the living room, but Hippie wasn’t there.

  “Hippie?” he said, his voice swallowed quickly by his fear. Or had he even spoken out loud? Had he only called for her in his imagination? He was finding it difficult anymore, identifying the line between what was hard, concrete, real, and what was not.

  “Than?”

  He heard a rustling sound farther back in the trailer, deeper into the shadows. He took a few steps into the hall, passing a pitch-black bathroom. It smelled like bleach and bug spray and feces. The next room was almost as small as the bathroom, but it had a window.