The Color of Evil - The Dark Descent V1 (1991)
Page 51
evening, claiming to have had a nightmare and the sitter
wouldn’t help him.
Like a shadow.
Like a conscience.
“ Are you going to replace it?” He blinked. “ The cat,
stupid. Are you going to get him a new cat?”
He shook his head. “ We've had too much bad luck with
animals. I don’t think he could take it again.”
She swung herself off the sofa and stood in front of him,
414
Charles L. Grant
her hands on her hips, her lips taut, her eyes narrowed. “ You
don’t care about him, do you?”
“ What?”
“ He follows you around like a goddamn pet because he’s
afraid of losing you, and you won’t even buy him a lousy
puppy or something. You’re something else again, Frank, you
really are. I work my tail trying to help—”
“ My salary is plenty good enough,” he said quickly.
“ —this family and you’re even trying to get me to stop
that, too.”
He shoved himself to his feet, his chest brushing against
hers and forcing her back. “ Listen,” he said tightly. “ I don’t
care if you sing your heart out a million times a week, lady,
but when it starts to interfere with your duties here—”
“ My duties? ”
“ —then yes, I ’ll do everything I can to make sure you stay
home when you’re supposed to .”
“ You’re raising your voice. You’ll wake Damon.”
The argument was familiar, and old, and so was the rage
he felt stiffening his muscles. But this time she wouldn’t stop
when she saw his anger. She kept on, and on, and he didn’t
even realize it when his hand lifted and struck her across the
cheek. She stumbled back a step, whiiled to run out of the
room, and stopped.
Damon was standing at the foot of the stairs.
He was sucking his thumb.
He was staring at his father.
“ Go to bed, son,” Frank said quietly. “ Everything’s all
right.”
For the next week the tension in the house was proverbially
knife-cutting thick. Damon stayed up as late as he could,
sitting by his father as they watched television together or
read from the boy’s favorite books. Susan remained close,
but not touching, humming to herself and playing with her
son whenever he left—for the moment—his father’s side; each
time, however, her smile was more forced, her laughter more
strained, and it was apparent to Frank that Damon was merely
I f Damon Comes
415
tolerating her, nothing more. That puzzled him. It was he
who had struck her, not the other way around, and the boy’s
loyalty should have been thrown into his mother’s camp. Yet
it hadn’t. And it was apparent that Susan was growing more
resentful of the fact each day. Each hour. Each time Damon
walked silently to Frank’s side and slid his hand around the
man’s waist, or into his palm, or into his hip pocket.
He began showing up at the office again, until one afternoon when Susan skidded the car to a halt at the curb and ran out, grabbed the boy and practically threw him, arms and
legs thrashing, into the front seat. Frank raced from his desk
and out the front door, leaned over and rapped at the window
until Susan lowered it.
“ What the hell are you doing?” he whispered, with a
glance to the boy.
“ You hit me, or had you forgotten,” she whispered back.
‘ ‘And there’s my son’s alienation of affection. ’ ’
He almost straightened. “ That’s lawyer talk, Susan,” he
said.
“ Not here,” she answered. “ Not in front of the boy.”
He stepped back quickly as the car growled away from the
curb, walked in a daze to his desk and sat there, chin in one
palm, staring out the window as the afternoon darkened and
a faint drizzle began to fall. His secretary muttered something about a court case the following morning, and Frank nodded until she stared at him, gathered her purse and raincoat and left hurriedly. He continued to nod, not knowing the movement, trying to understand what he had done, what
both of them had done to bring themselves to this moment.
Ambition, surely. A conflict of generations where women
were homebodies and women had careers; where men tried
to adjust when they couldn’t have both. But he had tried, he
told himself . . . or he thought he had, until the dishes began
to pile up and the dust stayed on the furniture and Damon
said does she sing pretty?
It’s always the children who get hurt, he thought angrily.
Held that idea in early December when the separation pa
416
Charles L. Grant
pers had been prepared and he stood on the front porch
watching his car, his wife, and his son drive away from Oxrun
Station south toward the city. Damon’s face was in the rear
window, nose flat, palms flat, hair pressed down over his
forehead. He waved, and Frank answered.
7 love you, dad.
Frank wiped a hand under his nose and went back inside,
searched the house for some liquor and, in failing, went
straight to bed where he watched the moonshadows make
monsters of the curtains.
“ Dad,” the boy said, “ do I have to go with mommy?”
“ I ’m afraid so. The judge . . . well, he knows better, believe it or not, what’s best right now. Don’t worry, pal. I ’ll see you at Christmas. It won’t be forever.”
“ I don’t like it, dad. I ’ll run away.”
“ No! You’ll do what your mother tells you, you hear me?
You behave yourself and go to school every day, and I ’l l . . .
call you whenever I can.”
“ The city doesn’t like me, dad. I want to stay at the Station.”
Frank said nothing.
“ It’s because of the lady, isn’t it?”
He had stared, but Susan’s back was turned, bent over a
suitcase that would not close once it had sprung open again
by the front door.
“ What are you talking about?” he’d said harshly.
“ I told,” Damon said as though it were nothing. “ You
weren’t supposed to do that.”
When Susan straightened, her smile was grotesque.
And when they had driven away, Damon had said I love
you, dad.
Frank woke early, made himself breakfast and stood at the
back door, looking out into the yard. There was a fog again,
nothing unusual as the Connecticut weather fought to stabilize into winter. But as he sipped at his coflee, thinking how large the house had become, how large and how empty, he
I f Damon Comes
417
saw a movement beside the cherry tree in the middle of the
yard. The fog swirled, but he was sure . . .
He yanked open the door and shouted: “ Damon!”
The fog closed, and he shook his head. Easy, pal, he told
himself; you’re not cracking up yet.
Days.
Nights.
He called Susan regularly, twice a week at preappointed
times. But as Christmas came and Christmas went, she became more terse, and his son more sullen.
“ He�
�s getting fine grades, Frank, I ’m seeing to that.”
“ He sounds terrible.”
“ He’s losing a little weight, that’s all. Picks up colds easily. It takes a while, Frank, to get used to the city.”
“ He doesn’t like the city.”
“ It’s his home. He will.”
In mid-January Susan did not answer the phone and finally,
in desperation, he called the school, was told that Damon
had been in the hospital for nearly a week. The nurse thought
it was something like pneumonia.
When he arrived that night, the waiting room was crowded
with drab bundles of scarves and overcoats, whispers and
moans and a few muffled sobs. Susan was standing by the
window, looking out at the lights far colder than stars. She
didn’t turn when she heard him, didn’t answer when he demanded to know why she had not contacted him. He grabbed her shoulder and spun her around; her eyes were dull, her
face pinched with red hints of cold.
“ All right,” she said. “ All right, Frank, it’s because I
didn’t want you to upset him.”
“ What the hell are you talking about?”
‘ ‘He would have seen you and he would have wanted to go
back to Oxrun.” Her eyes narrowed. “ This is his home,
Frank! He’s got to learn to live with it.”
“ I ’ll get a lawyer.”
She smiled. “ Do that. You do that, Frank.”
He didn’t have to. He saw Damon a few minutes later and
418
Charles L. Grant
could not stay more than a moment. The boy was in dim
light and almost invisible, too thin to be real beneath the
clear plastic tent and the tubes and the monitors . . . too frail,
the doctor said in professional conciliation, too frail for too
long, and Frank remembered the day on the porch with the
saucer of milk when he had thought the same thing and had
thought nothing of it.
He returned after the funeral, all anger gone. He had accused Susan of murder, knowing at the time how foolish it had been, but feeling better for it in his own absolution. He
had apologized. Had been, for the moment, forgiven.
Had stepped off the train, had wept, had taken a deep breath
and decided to live on.
Returned to the office the following day, piled folders onto
his desk and hid behind them for most of the morning. He
looked up only once, when his secretary tried to explain about
a new client’s interest, and saw around her waist the indistinct form of his son peering through the window.
“ Damon,” he muttered, brushed the woman to one side
and ran out to the sidewalk. A fog encased the road whitely,
but he could see nothing, not even a car, not even the blinking amber light at the nearest intersection.
Immediately after lunch he dialed Susan’s number, stared
at the receiver when there was no answer and returned it to
the cradle. Wondering.
“ You look pale,” his secretary said softly. She pointed
with a pencil at his desk. “ You’ve already done a full day’s
work. Why don’t you go home and lie down? I can lock up.
I don’t mind.”
He smiled, turned as she held his coat for him, touched
her cheek . . . and froze.
Damon was in the window.
No, he told himself . . . and Damon was gone.
He rested for two days, returned to work and lost himself
in a battle over a will probated by a judge he thought nothing
less than senile, to be charitable. He tried calling Susan again,
and again received no answer.
I f Damon Comes
419
And Damon would not leave him alone.
When there was fog, rain, clouds, wind . . . he would be
there by the window, there by the cherry tree, there in the
darkest comer of the porch.
He knew it was guilt, for not lighting hard enough to keep
his son with him, thinking that if he had the boy might still
be alive; seeing his face everywhere and the accusations that
if the boy loved him, why wasn’t he loved just as much in
return?
By February’s end he decided it was time to make a friendly
call on a fellow professional, a doctor who shared the office
building with him. It wasn’t so much the laces that he saw—
he had grown somewhat accustomed to them and assumed
they would vanish in time—but that morning there had been
snow on the ground; and in the snow by the cherry tree the
footprints of a small boy. When he brought the doctor to the
yard to show him, they were gone.
“ You’re quite right, Frank. You’re feeling guilty. But not
because of die boy in and of himself. The law and the leanings of most judges are quite clear—you couldn’t be expected to keep him at his age. You’re still worrying yourself about
that woman you kissed and the fact that Damon saw you; and
the feet that you think you could have saved his life somehow,
even if the doctors couldn’t; and lasdy, the fact that you
weren’t able to give him things like pets, like that cat. None
of it is your fault, really. It’s merely something unpleasant
you’ll have to face up to. Now.”
Though he didn’t feel all that much better, Frank appreciated the calm that swept over him when the talk was done and they had parted. He worked hard for the rest of the day,
for the rest of the week, but he knew that it was not guilt and
it was not his imagination and it was not anything the doctor
would be able to explain away when he opened his door on
Saturday morning and found, lying carefully atop his newspaper, the white-feced Siamese. Dead. Its neck broken.
He stumbled back over the threshold, whirled around and
raced into the downstairs bathroom where he fell onto his
420
Charles L. Grant
knees beside the bowl and lost his breakfast. The tears were
acid, the sobs like blows to his lungs and stomach, and by
the time he had pulled himself together, he knew what was
happening.
The doctor, the secretary, even his wife . . . they were all
wrong.
There was no guilt.
There was only . . . Damon.
A little boy with large brown eyes who loved his father.
Who loved his father so much that he would never leave him.
Who loved his father so much that he was going to make
sure, absolutely sure, that he would never be alone.
You’ve been a bad boy, Daddy.
Frank stumbled to his feet, into the kitchen, leaned against
the back door. There was a figure by the cherry tree dark and
formless; but he knew there was no use running outside. The
figure would vanish.
You never did like that cat, daddy. Or the dogs. Or mommy.
The telephone rang. He took his time getting to it, stared
at it dumbly for several moments before lifting the receiver.
He could see straight down the hall and into the kitchen. He
had not turned on the overhead light and, as a consequence,
could see through the small panes of the back door to the
yard beyond. The air outside was heavy with impending snow.
Gray. Almost lifeless.
“ Frank? Frank, it’s Susan. Frank, I ’ve been thinking . .
.
about you and me . . . and what happened.’’
He kept his eyes on the door. “ It’s done, Sue. Done.”
“ Frank, I don’t know what happened. Honest to God, I
was trying, really I was. He was getting the best grades in
school, had lots of friends . . . I even bought him a little
dog, a poodle, two weeks before he . . . I don’t know what
happened, Frank! I woke up this morning and all of a sudden
I was so damned alone. Frank, I ’m frightened. Can . . . can
I come home?”
The gray darkened. There was a shadow on the porch,
much longer now than the shadow in the yard.
I f Damon Comes
421
“ No,” he said.
“ He thought about you all the damned tim e,” she said,
her voice rising into hysteria. “ He tried to rim away once, to
get back to you.”
The shadow filled the panes, the windows on either side,
and suddenly there was static on the line and Susan’s voice
vanished. He dropped the receiver and turned around.
In the front.
Shadows.
He heard the furnace humming, but the house was growing
cold.
The lamp in the living room flickered, died, shone brightly
for a moment before the bulb shattered.
He was . . . wrong.
God, he was wrong!
Damon . . . Damon didn’t love him.
Not since the night on the comer in the fog; not since the night
he had not really tried to locate a cat with a milk white face.
Damon knew.
And Damon didn’t love him.
He dropped to his hands and knees and searched in the darkness for die receiver, found it and nearly threw it away when the bitterly cold plastic threatened to bum through his fingers.
“ Susan!” he shouted. “ Susan, dammit, can you hear me?”
A bad boy, daddy.
There was static, but he thought he could hear her crying
into the wind.
“ Susan . . . Susan, this is crazy, I ’ve no time to explain, but
you’ve got to help me. You’ve got to do something for me.”
Daddy.
“ Susan, please . . . he’ll be back, I know he will. Don’t
ask me how, but I know! Listen, you’ve got to do something
for me. Susan, dammit, can you hear me?”
Daddy, I ’m—
“ For God’s sake, Susan, if Damon comes, tell him I ’m