The Midnight Ground

by Eric Dontigney

  “Cuttle!” Abby screamed in delight.

  Helena laughed and put her cards down. “You don’t need to shout Cuttle.”

  Abby looked a little embarrassed. “Oh, I thought it was like rummy.”

  I blinked at the girl. “You play rummy?”

  “Grandpa plays with some of his friends. They let me sit in when they need a fourth.”

  It made sense, but struck me as sad. How many games had she sat in on because cancer or chemo made her too sick to go outside, or to see a movie, or to hang out with her friends? How much living had Abby missed out on because her body betrayed her with out-of-control cells? I wondered why she wasn’t a lot more bitter than she appeared to be. God knew that most people didn’t deal with those kinds of experiences with smiles and cheer.

  Come to think of it, I thought, where the hell are her friends? I’d seen no sign of cards or balloons, let alone live human beings, to indicate Abby had any close friends who were worried about her. In my experience, even frenemies tended to find their humanity when someone’s house burned down. It’s the sort of thing I wanted to ask about, because it might be relevant. I kept my mouth shut, though. She didn’t need the reminder if she was essentially friendless.

  I let myself get roped into playing card games with them, most of which I didn’t recognize. I’d have thrown the games, but it wasn’t necessary. Helena and Abby flat-out kicked my ass, game after game, hand after hand, and I smiled through it. I could afford to be a good loser, and Abby seemed delighted to have both company and a distraction. I supposed there was only so much television a person could stand.

  When it started to get dark out, I excused myself. I went down to the lobby and turned my phone back on. I had my doubts about cell phones interfering with hospital equipment, much as I doubted they would interfere with airplane electronics, but why risk it? After my phone finished its interminable startup process and found a network to connect to, it dinged at me. I had a voicemail. I punched in the number and listened.

  “Hartworth, it’s MacIntyre. I know it’s been entire hours, but I’ll assume this is still your number. Call me back.”

  I stepped outside to get a little more privacy and called MacIntyre.

  After the second ring, a gruff voice came over the line. “MacIntyre.”

  “It’s Hartworth.”

  “What’s with the voicemail? I thought this was urgent.”

  “I was in a hospital. They get all tetchy about cell phones.”

  MacIntyre thought, loudly, for a moment. “You get hurt?”

  “Feel free not to sound so cheerful about that prospect. No. I was just visiting someone.”

  “Visiting? Visiting who?”

  “Mary and Randall’s kid.”

  “Jesus. Did someone go after her?”

  I frowned. “No. Not the way you mean.”

  “That’s pretty fucking cryptic.”

  “If someone did, they did it in one of those Hartworth, doesn’t make any sense, kind of ways you love.”

  “I’m so glad you’re in someone else’s jurisdiction. Every time you get cagey, everything goes straight to hell.”

  “Not every time,” I objected.

  “Every damn time, Hartworth.”

  I brushed it off and changed the subject. “You find anything?”

  MacIntyre muttered and made noises without actually forming words.

  “I didn’t quite catch that,” I said.

  “I don’t know. Maybe. It’s all just—it’s just weird.”

  “Weird? Weird how?”

  MacIntyre hemmed and hawed for a few more seconds, heaved a tremendous, put-upon sigh, and started talking. “Near as I can tell, Randall was just a regular citizen. No real brushes with the law, except a couple of tickets and a fender bender.”

  “But Mary?”

  “Yeah,” said MacIntyre, “but Mary, indeed. She was never in trouble, per se, but a whole lot of stuff went wrong for her over the years. You know, the kind of stuff you expect a person to have happen maybe once in their lives.”

  “Like what?”

  “Well, her parents died when she was fairly young. Around twelve or thirteen years old. Got chalked up as a boating accident and both parents died. Sad, but it happens sometimes. So, she ends up in foster care. Foster parents were getting set to adopt her, but they die in a mugging gone wrong.”

  I let that soak in. “Seems improbable.”

  “Yeah, it’s rare, but it does happen. So, she winds up with another family. The kind foster kids pray they don’t get. Angry, abusive people that only care about the money. Foster dad decides he likes the look of Mary one drunken afternoon.”

  “Fucking hell.”

  “Yeah. To her credit, she made a ruckus, yelling and screaming. Neighbor heard it. I guess that guy had his Good Samaritan badge on that day, because he busts in and puts a stop to it. According to the report, foster dad had nearly choked the life out of Mary before the neighbor got there.”

  “Lemme guess, nothing happened to the foster dad.”

  MacIntyre laugh was a cold, menacing sound that sent chills down my spine. “Depends on how you look at it. Neighbor was a Green Beret, fresh out of the service. Apparently, he beat the foster dad senseless and then threw him out a window. Last time anyone laid a hand on her, near as I can tell, but there’s other stuff. Her car caught fire on the highway and the locks malfunctioned. She managed to break a window and get out. Nearly got crushed when some idiot cut down a tree the wrong way and it crashed into her house. It goes on and on like that, Hartworth. I mean, mother of God, nobody is that unlucky.”

  I looked back at the hospital. Yeah, nobody but Abby, I thought. Something cold settled around my stomach. “Any indication that Mary’s parents’ death wasn’t an accident?”

  “Not that I could see, but that accident was ages ago. Evidence is all long-gone. Why?”

  “Just wondered,” I said. “Seems to be a lot of accidents in that family.”

  “Noticed that. This is all very you. Anyways, hope it helps.”

  “It might. Thanks, MacIntyre.”

  “This was tame. I wish all your favors were so easy.”

  “I’m getting old. Like things a lot quieter than I used to.”

  “You’re so full of shit, Hartworth.”

  “See ya, MacIntyre.”

  “Not if I’m lucky.”

  Abby’s parents died in an accident. Mary’s parents died in an accident. It was possible that Mary’s parents’ deaths really were just an accident, but my intuition didn’t buy it. If it didn’t start with Mary, where did it start? Did it start with her parents? Even further back? And why? Evil carrying a grudge for twenty or thirty years was hard enough to buy, but forty years? Fifty? What could possibly have been so egregious that a demonic being would spend that much time punishing mortals for it?

  Chapter 22

  I don’t know how long I stood outside, trying to piece together some kind of coherent theory for what was happening. It was long enough that Helena came looking for me. I was deep in thought, almost completely unaware of my surroundings, when she touched my shoulder. Her touch shocked me so much that I took a swing at her. I pulled up short, but it was a close call. She stared up at me, her eyes very wide, like she was seeing me in an entirely new light.

  “So, this is what you’ve become,” she said after an awkward silence.

  I gave her a hard look. “It’s what I need to be to survive.”

  She winced. “There is more to life than survival, you know.”

  “Maybe, but you have to survive for any of that other stuff to be possible.”

  She tilted her head to one side. “I’d never thought of it like that. I guess most of us take day-to-day survival as a given.”

  “Most people can,” I said. “I’m just not one of them.”

  “How’s your back?”

  “Hurts, when I think about it anyway. It’s like background noise most of the time.”

  “Don’t
get lazy about changing your bandages. That burn gets infected and you’ll be spending a lot more time in this hospital.”

  I shuddered. “That’s a cheery thought.”

  “Did you speak with your acquaintance?”

  “I did. Not sure it was much help.”

  I filled Helena in on what MacIntyre said. She listened without interrupting me. Afterwards, she stood in silence, her eyes unfocused and her head moving from time to time, as if she was trying to sort something out.

  She shook her head. “I don’t see how it answers anything. It certainly doesn’t help with the immediate problem.”

  “No, it doesn’t. At least, not that I can see. I know I’m missing something obvious, but this whole situation is counter-intuitive. New information should make things clearer, but it feels like stumbling through a fog bank.”

  “Did you imagine this would be easy and straightforward?”

  I frowned. “Well, yes. Okay, maybe not easy, exactly, but I thought it would be direct.”

  Helena stared out into the mostly empty parking lot. She shivered, but I didn’t think it was because of the cooling night air. There was a tightness around her mouth and eyes that made the lines stand out a little more. She looked older, more tired, and fragile.

  “Given your experiences, that assumption probably makes sense to you. It’s a stupid assumption, though. Evil isn’t always banal. If it were, we’d know it on sight. Evil can be subtle, Adrian. Old evil can be frighteningly intelligent and seductive.”

  “Seductive?”

  “Lucifer convinced a full third of the angels to rebel, didn’t he?”

  “So the story goes,” I said.

  “How do you think he did that? It certainly wasn’t by logical deduction. Logic dictated that it was an unwinnable fight. Yet, they fought. He didn’t convince them. Lucifer seduced those angels with words and thoughts.”

  I stared at her. “You think we’re fighting the literal devil here?”

  She gave me a wan smile. “No. It’s just an illustration, but the point stands. You’re used to being smarter than the people who pick fights with you. You’ve brought that mindset into this situation. I think you’re underestimating what we’re up against here.”

  “I’ve seen what we’re up against, Helena. I’ve felt its power. I’m not kidding myself.”

  “Power is just power. Having a lot of it doesn’t make you unbeatable. A river has a lot of power until someone dams it. Whatever we’re up against here, it’s obscured its existence for a long time. It hasn’t been sloppy or stupid. Think about it.”

  I rolled my head. She was right. Of course, she was right. That idea had been lurking behind my own thoughts for a while. I just hadn’t been savvy enough to see it. I’d been so fixated on how goddamn powerful that demon was, I hadn’t given enough consideration to how it was operating.

  “I have been thinking about it, in a roundabout way. If I thought he was the type, I’d tell Paul to get the hell out of Dodge and take Abby with him.”

  “Do you think that would work?”

  I thought about Mary’s many brushes with death. They were scary, but they had been intermittent. Whatever the demon was, it wasn’t all-powerful. It was limited or constrained in some way. I’d felt the scope of its power, and if it wasn’t constrained, it would have vaporized Mary. Abby wouldn’t have fared any better.

  “No,” I admitted, “but I think it would slow things down enough to give Abby a fighting chance. Whatever is happening is tied to this place somehow. Unless I’m misreading things badly, which is possible, that demon needs to build up a lot of strength to reach out into the world. Even here, Abby isn’t dead yet. It wants her dead, but she’s survived this long. Get her away from here and I’d be surprised if her cancer didn’t vanish outright.”

  “Seems like she’s got a start on that already, thanks to you.”

  “It won’t last. I wish it would, but it won’t. I caught that thing off guard. Once she walks out of here,” I hitched a thumb over my shoulder at the hospital, “she’ll get very sick, very fast.”

  Helena nodded. “She wasn’t that excited about going back to school. Brutal way to avoid it, though.”

  An intuition set my stomach lurching. “Wait. What did you say?”

  “Cancer, it’s a hell of a way to avoid school.”

  “No, not that. The other part about her not wanting to go back to school. What’s that about?”

  Helena shrugged and gave me a look that suggested that I was being entirely too serious. “She doesn’t like it. Honestly, can you blame her? It’s hard enough to be in high school when you’re healthy.”

  “Did she say why she didn’t want to go back?”

  “She just said she didn’t like it at the school.”

  That rang a bell. I scoured my memory. It was hard. There’d been so much pain and medication right at first that everything was blurry. Someone else had said something about not liking that school. Was it Patty? No, I thought. She’d told me who it was. It was the sheriff that didn’t like the place. It creeped him out. The stomach lurching intensified. I turned and ran into the hospital. I heard Helena yelling behind me.

  “Adrian! What’s happening?”

  I bypassed the elevator and went straight into the stairwell. I took the stairs two at a time. Somewhere between the second and third floors my lungs mutinied. A wave of dizziness rolled over me. I would have toppled down the stairs if my hand hadn’t slapped down onto the railing. I grabbed it hard and tried to fight off the vertigo. I forced myself to take even breaths until the dizziness passed. It felt like it took twenty minutes. As it was, my arms and legs were weak and shaky, like I’d just run a half-mile flat out. It was oxygen deprivation, I realized. Standing, walking, those I could do without any trouble because they just didn’t demand as much oxygen. Running, any running, was just more than my lungs could support.

  I felt a surge of anger at my own body. It had never failed me like that before. Sure, the ravages of time had taken their toll. My knees ached more than they did when I was younger. I wouldn’t be catching any teenagers in a foot chase. My endurance wasn’t what it had been. Those things I expected and understood. That wave of dizziness, though, felt somehow like treason.

  “Stop being an irrational tool, Hartworth,” I wheezed to myself.

  I turned and scrambled up the stairs in a lurching jog that I thought my body might support for the rest of the steps. By the time I got to the landing, I was starting to feel dizzy again, but not the deadly vertiginous spinning I’d felt lower on the stairs. I hurried to Abby’s room and crashed through the door. I must have looked god awful because Abby stared at me in open concern.

  “Mr. Hartworth, are you okay?”

  “Helena said you didn’t like the school.”

  She gave self-conscious roll of her shoulders. “Yeah, that’s true.”

  “Why don’t you like it?”

  I watched something pass over Abby’s face, a kind of calculation. “School sucks.”

  I stepped closer to her. “Abby, this is important. Even if you think it sounds crazy, I’ll believe you. I swear to God, I will. Please tell me, why don’t you like the school?”

  She pulled her knees up to her chest and hugged them hard. She watched me like she expected me to call in the cops or the navy or, more likely, the men with the butterfly nets. She turned her head away and looked at me from the corner of her eye.

  “It makes me feel sicker. Whenever I’m there, it’s like I can feel the cancer getting worse. I hate that place.”

  I closed my eyes. So, it was centered there. The closer she got to the demon’s epicenter of power, the more influence it could exert. It was nothing short of a damn miracle that she hadn’t had an “accident” in the science lab or experienced an “unexpected fall” from a climbing rope in gym class. Tell them to get out, I thought. Paul can work from anywhere. They just needed to get the fuck out of this cursed town. Then I wondered how I would explain it to him
. What excuse could I possibly use to justify that advice?

  “You don’t believe me, do you?” Abby asked.

  I opened my eyes. Huddled in that bed, she looked small, afraid and very alone. I had the brief, paternal urge to give her a hug. I decided that would have crossed a boundary. Instead, I gave her the steadiest smile I could manage.

  “I do believe you, Abby.”

  I’d all but known before I even asked the question. I didn’t have to work hard to sell it.

  She blinked at me in apparent disbelief. “You do?”

  “I do. There are places in the world that are bad for some people. Sounds like that high school is one of them, for you any-ways.”

  “I wish grandpa believed me. He thinks I just don’t like school, but I like learning about things! Just—” she took a shaky breath, “just not there.”

  I felt a surge of protectiveness and fought down another impulse to hug the beleaguered girl. I had a moment of insight then. I understood why I had stayed, when everything told me to leave. It was so obvious, so stupidly obvious, I couldn’t believe I hadn’t realized it sooner. If Marcy and I had a child, the way we’d planned to, that child would be about Abby’s age. If we’d had a daughter, and she’d been unlucky enough to favor me, she might have even looked a bit like Abby. Later, I told myself. You’ll have plenty of time to psychoanalyze yourself later, if you survive this mess.

  “He means well,” I said. “Teenagers not liking school is sort of a time-honored tradition. He’s seeing what he expects to see.”

  Helena burst through the door, casting wild looks at every corner. I felt the power she’d gathered around her like mist against my face. It was cool and refreshing, the kind of protective, healing magic that Helena specialized in wielding. My magic, when I used it, did not feel like that. Healing wasn’t really my forte. I gave her the tiniest of head shakes. Helena glared at me and I felt her power drain away.

  “Whoa,” said Abby. “They must have given me some drugs when I wasn’t looking.”