Dark Passage

by Griffin Hayes

  Tyson’s eyebrows rose.

  “I need you to sign out,” Joe said with a touch of annoyance.

  Tyson approached the desk, his heart jack hammering in his chest. There was a booklet on the desk and a free line underneath departures. But of course he couldn’t put his own name. Tyson quickly signed a name, then smiled and made his way to the front door.

  Joe scanned the signature. “Thank you, Dr. Stevens,” he said. “Have a great day.”

  But Tyson was already gone.

  The sun had come up. He scanned the parking lot for any sign of Judy. In the distance, a woman was walking briskly away from him and something about her gait made him pause. This wasn’t Judy. No, this woman was short with dark hair and the way she bounced ever so slightly with each step made him think of Ruma. Tyson rubbed his eyes and the act of lifting his arm made the needle mark in his neck sting. Of course that wasn’t Ruma, he told himself. And after what Dr. Hunter had just tried to pump into his jugular, it was a miracle he wasn’t seeing flying pink elephants.

  There were more than five or six cars in the parking lot and none of them belonged to him. Tyson’s heart sank with the realization that Judy had left. But how long had he laid there unconscious?

  Tyson struggled down the steps and began heading for the road.

  They had arrived in the evening and now it was early the next morning. He couldn’t blame her since he told her to go to the police if he didn’t return. And he was sure that’s exactly where she was, too, telling the police a story they would never believe in a million years. He had really just assumed he was going to sign a document to have her life support cut. It was only because Dr. Hunter had failed to keep his end of the bargain, but Tyson certainly hadn’t counted on leaving Sunnybrook with two dead bodies behind him. Four when you counted the ones in the closet he was sure the police would try to pin on him.

  Tyson took in a deep breath, and for the first time in days felt as though an enormous weight had been lifted off his shoulders. He thought of that tiny metal lunch box in the storage locker of his apartment where he kept what remained from his early childhood. He hadn’t opened it in years and could barely recall what it held—a few old toys and pictures maybe. The sad remnants from a childhood that no kid should have to experience.

  In the pocket of Tyson’s pants was his cell phone and he removed it and dialed Skip’s number. It rang for a while before the voice mail picked up.

  Hi, you’ve reached Skip Williams, I can’t take your call right now, but if you leave your name, telephone number and message…beep…

  “Listen Skip, I need you to keep an eye on Kavi a little longer, there’s one more thing I need to do.”

  For some reason, while his mother was alive, he had always been too afraid to look inside that box and perhaps even more afraid to throw it away. Now that she was gone for good, he would do both.

  Chapter 42

  Two hours later Tyson was sitting by the fireplace in his apartment, a Star Wars lunch box in his lap. The wood was dry and crackled as he watched the flames flicker. He was waiting for the right moment to lift the lid. A thick layer of dust obscured the cover image and when Tyson wiped it away, he could finally make sense of what he was seeing. Darth Vader’s TIE Fighter had just fired his lasers across the bow of Luke Skywalker’s X-Wing. Inside the dented tin box, loose objects rattled around like distant memories.

  He had hailed a cab to the closest car rental shop and driven straight to his apartment, somehow expecting, or hoping, to find Judy there waiting for him. When that hadn’t happened, he began growing more and more certain that she had gone to the police, just as he had asked her to. Either way he hoped she was safe. She always had a way of popping in and out of his life over the short amount of time he had known her. He tried to ease his mind that she would show up again before long.

  Tyson undid each of the metal latches and then opened the lid. For a moment, he examined the contents without touching a thing. He could feel the heat from the fireplace making the skin on his cheeks tingle as he took a mental inventory of its contents. In the background, the television set was desperately trying to convince him that a new Lexus would somehow make his life complete.

  Tyson reached down and began removing items one at a time. First an old yellow Volkswagen Transformer he still recognized as Bumblebee. He studied it for a while before tossing it onto the fire. It spat and crackled as the plastic slowly came undone and began to drip down in thick globs. Next was his favorite GI Joe action figure, Shipwreck, and after that a pair of red dice. Tyson held each of them for a moment before throwing them into the flames. Then came Han Solo and Chewbacca. Han’s left arm was missing. On a whim he stuffed those into his pocket, but in went the other toys, each flooding him with powerfully mixed emotions. On the one hand, seeing them again brought back all the old childhood wounds he had buried long ago. And on the other, these toys had been the only real source of joy in a difficult life.

  Underneath the toys were a set of photographs. Most of them were of the house and the pristine condition his mother had kept it in. He examined each one in turn before tossing them into oblivion and as he did so he would release a deep breath. The load he had been carrying around for so long was becoming lighter with every flick of the wrist. Catharsis, he was beginning to understand, wasn’t really about facing the difficulties of life head on, it was about learning to let go of them.

  Somewhere in the back of his mind, on an almost alien frequency, came something from the television.

  State troopers say they’ve found…

  More pictures of the house he grew up in and this time with him, dressed in a tiny suit, standing by the front entrance, alone. No smile. Off it went.

  …the body of a woman…

  Another one of him at the kitchen table. Laid across him was the shadow of whoever was taking the picture. There was a smile here, but Tyson couldn’t help but sense the tension about his young face.

  …up in the Catskill Mountains.

  He was about to toss it into the flames along with all the others when something hit the ground. It was another picture. The two must have been stuck together. It seesawed quickly to the ground and landed right side up. The picture of a beautiful young woman in her mid twenties…

  The victim, a woman in her early fifties, has been identified as Judy Stahl. Police say she was strangled in her home, a remote cottage where she lived year round.

  Tyson turned toward the television, hardly aware that all the muscles in his face had gone completely slack and that his jaw was hanging open.

  The coroner’s office says the woman had been dead for nearly a week.

  The newscast flashed a picture of what Judy Stahl had looked like in life, but it was a face Tyson had never seen before. That wasn’t his Judy.

  His eyes fell to the picture on the ground; his mother in her early twenties. The room was starting to spin.

  This was the Judy he knew. Young, attractive. Not this dead woman on TV.

  Something about this building, he remembered her saying about Sunnybrook. I hate it.

  Course you do.

  Tyson sprang to his feet, sending his old Star Wars lunch box clanging to the floor. He fished his cell phone from his pocket and frantically dialed Skip’s number. Voice mail again. Tyson’s heart was slamming against his chest. He wasn’t sure if he quite understood the totality of what was going on, but he was damn sure about one thing. And the very thought of it was almost too much. If his mother had found a way to stick around after her physical body had died, then Skip and perhaps even Kavi might already be dead.

  Tyson snatched the keys to his rental and dashed out the door, a single thought echoing through his mind.

  Please God, don’t let me be too late.

  Chapter 43

  When Tyson arrived, he found the door to Skip’s apartment wide open. He was calling Kavi’s name, but there wasn’t any answer. Beneath his feet was something sticky. What looked like dried ice cream and be
side that a broken bowl.

  To his left was the living room. Tyson’s heart sank when he saw his friend, lying face down, and you didn’t need to be a doctor to see that he was dead. A pair of bloody footprints led from the area rug by the couch to the entrance. Tyson went to Skip’s side, knelt down and turned him over. His body was stiff and it made a ripping sound as it tore away from the blood binding it to the floor. The black handle of a kitchen knife, one that looked a lot like something out of his own apartment, was protruding from the top of Skip’s head and across his throat was a long deep gash. Tyson was staring incredulously at Skip’s right hand now and the flap of skin bunched in his closed fist. It was difficult to tell exactly what part of her it had come from, but Tyson was certain of one thing: there had been a struggle and Skip had died fighting for Kavi’s life.

  Tyson’s head fell into his hands as he wept. Skip was the closest thing to a real friend and maybe even a parent Tyson ever had. The reality of it was almost too much to bear. She had been there right under his nose the entire time, slowly guiding and manipulating his every move. Tyson pulled the knife out of Skip’s head and flung it across the room.

  The bitch wanted to be unplugged, didn’t she? Wanted him to be isolated from anyone who might have helped him. Anyone he’d ever loved so that she might be the sole focus of his affections. And at first maybe she wanted him back, but now, she wanted Kavi.

  It isn’t you your mother wants, but I’m sure by now you’ve already figured that out.

  He knew it just as surely as he knew he was going to kill her once and for all. And this time there wouldn’t be any hesitation. This wasn’t some helpless old woman lying in a bed filled with tubes and wires. She never was. No, this was a monster.

  He was mumbling to himself as he searched Skip’s apartment.

  Where did she take Kavi, Skip? Where’d they go? You gotta help me, ol’ buddy.

  On the kitchen counter was a copy of Frommer’s New York State.

  Why would Skip have his map book out?

  Tyson held the spine and leafed through it with his thumb. The pages in the middle made an unusual clapping sound. He fanned through them again and heard the same noise a second time. Some of the pages had been torn out. It wasn’t more than a few seconds before he identified them. P. 241-245. He flipped to the table of contents and suddenly he knew.

  She’d taken him to Skip’s cottage on Lake Harmony.

  Chapter 44

  Tyson slowed the car to a crawl when he reached Skip’s cottage. The house was dark and had a disquieting stillness about it that sent the flesh on Tyson’s arms crawling. His initial impulse had been to go charging inside swinging his fists at anyone that wasn’t Kavi. But the hour long drive up—which he had cut down to forty minutes with the sort of reckless driving that would have landed him in jail—had given him time to think up another plan of attack. Back at his apartment, the news people had left him with the impression that cops and crime scene techs would be swarming all over the cottage where the real Judy Stahl had been found. If he could swing by there first, maybe he could show up with the cavalry in tow. He was taking a real chance here though, since for all he knew, the police were getting ready to pin him with half a dozen homicides.

  Tyson’s tires cut through the gravel as he sped down the road. Time was the other factor he was risking since the slightest delay could mean Kavi’s life. Tyson had no clue what she was doing to his son, but Dr. Hunter’s words were still ringing in his head.

  It isn’t you your mother wants…

  And if Dr. Hunter’s gaunt appearance was anything to go by, the boy wouldn’t last long.

  The two patrol cars and a crime scene technicians’ van in the driveway was all he needed to find the real Judy’s cottage. Tyson pulled up behind one of the cruisers and bolted from the car without bothering to kill the engine.

  The real Judy’s place was a one floor bungalow. The front door was ajar and Tyson slowed as he approached. The silence was unsettling. The cottage was modern and whitewashed and inside he could see the lights were all on, but where were all the people?

  He passed through a doorway into the kitchen and something touched his face. He recoiled and slapped it away. It was sticky. He examined his hands and noticed the heavy white filament. Looked like a spider web, but unlike one he had ever seen before. This was much thicker and when he tugged at it the filament stretched but would not break. Tyson passed through the kitchen and into the living room and that’s when all the muscles in his body bunched up. Suspended from the twenty-foot vaulted ceiling were the partially mummified corpses of two adult males and one female. Their bodies had been wrapped inside a swath of white filament which covered them from the neck down. The skin on their faces looked like it was vacuum sealed to their skulls and he knew then that something had sucked the life out of them.

  Things were slowly falling into place. The Judy he thought he knew wasn’t simply a product of his own haunted memories. She was a composite, the way the brother that he had never known, the one that had chased them out of his apartment building and killed Ruma, had been a mishmash of his memories and hers. He looked up at the ceiling again. One thing was certain. The version of his mother who had done this, wasn’t from him.

  Two tiny marks on the far wall caught his eye. Bullet holes. And three more high above him. There was a struggle here and it looked as though the police had been shooting in all directions. But what exactly had happened? Had she been running on the ceiling?

  A noise from the room next door startled him.

  Slowly, Tyson backed out through the kitchen, suddenly feeling like someone who may have walked in on an intruder. He was acutely aware of the fact that he didn’t have a weapon.

  He searched the room, but couldn’t find anything the police might have dropped during the struggle. He knew full well that sticking around to keep searching wasn’t an option. Not simply because she might still be here, but because every minute Kavi spent in her presence brought him that much closer to death. She was going to use Kavi like some kind of recharging station, drain him for everything he was worth and then spit the kid out, just as she had done to him.

  There was a flashlight on the kitchen counter and Tyson snatched it. He left through the front door at a brisk pace and stopped when he reached the first police cruiser. If seeing those bodied dangling had convinced him of anything, it was that he needed a weapon.

  The cruiser door was unlocked and he jerked it open. Inside was a shotgun in a locked gun rack. He grabbed the handle and tried jarring it loose, but it wouldn’t move. The key must be inside the pocket of one of those dead cops, he realized with growing hysteria.

  There isn’t time. Kavi might already be dead.

  He would have to think of something else. Tyson was heading back to his car when he remembered something from Skip’s letter. The cottage prep list. Yes, there was a weapon, he just wasn’t sure if he’d be able to find it in time.

  • • •

  A few minutes later, Tyson was standing before Skip’s boathouse, rattling a locked door handle. Once he’d seen how she’d made short work of those cops, he’d have to be insane to charge in with nothing but a flashlight.

  Tyson took a step back and slammed the heel of his boot against the space just above the knob and the door flung open.

  He turned on the flashlight and followed the beam as it cut a path through the darkness. Tiny waves broke against Skip’s Bombardier speedboat and it sounded like a wet hand slapping the lid of a coffin. Tyson tried to swallow, but his mouth was too dry. Inside a storage closet, below the snorkeling and scuba gear that Skip had loved so much, Tyson found what he’d come looking for. He reached in and took hold of the speargun. If a crossbow ever had a younger, gawky brother this would have been it. Inside a leather case nearby were half a dozen three-meter-long bolts. He’d have to make every shot count.

  His hands trembled as he followed the directions on the handle.

  Step one, lay the bolt in p
lace. Step two, reach out and pull the wire to your chest until it clicks into the groove. The process required two hands and Tyson had to set the flashlight on the bench beside him while he worked. His teeth ground together and he felt the muscles in his forearms burning as he attached the wire to the metal release lever.

  Tyson then slung the bag of bolts over his shoulder and followed the tip of his speargun out of the boathouse and up the damp stony path that led to Skip’s cottage.

  He was before the front entrance when he realized his dilemma. The speargun, at nearly a meter in length, might be too cumbersome for going room to room. But what other option did he have? He slid the flashlight into his pocket. The door knob turned freely and he pushed his way inside, feeling more and more like that terrified child he had once been, pushing his way into the room where the monster lived. But this time the monster was real.

  Before him was a void of impenetrable blackness. He fished the light out from his pocket and switched it on. The beam swept back and forth across the room. He was in the solarium. White sheets clung to the furniture like the discarded skin of ancient spirits. An archway led from the solarium into the kitchen. Heavy tendrils of spider silk crisscrossed the doorway. Tyson reached out with the light to swipe them aside, but instead the light snagged and wouldn’t budge. Tyson grimaced as he wrenched it back and forth. Finally the light came free. These strands were far stronger than even the ones he had found down the street at Judy Stahl’s.

  She’s getting stronger, he realized. With every kill she’s becoming more and more powerful.

  A noise up ahead somewhere. Low and distant. A whimpering and he didn’t need to see to know exactly who it was.

  Kavi.

  Tyson held the speargun out in front of him as he darted through the kitchen and toward the sound of Kavi’s voice.