And then a week later, Franco Collins. Another acquaintance of Angel’s. Rumors of a pogrom began to sweep through the community. Some right-wing fundamentalist Christian zealot. Some closeted psychopath projecting his repressed desires. A battalion of cops went undercover, posing as lonely men looking for company, and still the bodies piled up, a new one every month or two. Finally, after one of the policemen had played his part so well that he had become the body discovered dismembered in the bushes, they had simply fenced off the woods along the river and posted signs declaring a thousand dollar fine for anybody caught trespassing.
That was over a year ago, and while every so often a police public relations officer would announce that evidence had surfaced confirming that the killer had fled, and they were pursuing promising leads, Henry Quail told a much different story. The guy obviously lived in the woods, he said. They found a few of his dens, but he was always moving, and once a cop got taken down, the off-the-record order had been Fuck it. If a bunch of homos want to risk their lives screwing in the forest...
They'd put up a fence and declared that area no-man's land. No more problem, as long as he never decided to come out...
Angel looked at the eight-foot-tall chain link fence, just behind the businesses to his right. If he ever decided...
Even the tiger in the cage could be deadly if you blundered too close to the bars. He listened to his own quickening footfalls echoing off the wet concrete. He shrugged lower into his coat.
And when The River Killer took him, he caught just the slightest glimpse of hands, hands in red gloves, coming over his shoulders, squeezing his neck, driving him forward into the street, his head smashing against the concrete–
Awakening, he could hear the water before he could see, hear the water slapping and jostling and then he could smell the wet foliage and he knew that everything he could imagine was, indeed, happening to him. Adrenalin nearly stopped his heart and he threw up. His eyes adjusted to the darkness.
Angel was tied to a tree, thick rope wrapped a dozen times pinning his arms to his sides and his back to the trunk. The river ran right behind him. Squinting into the dark, silent forest, he wondered whether or not to call for help. The question was erased as the brush rustled wetly and a huge shape moved into the clearing in front of him. Angel went rigid and stopped breathing.
“Well well, what do we have here?” The voice was thick and wet, unused and guttural as an abandoned well.
He stepped into the moonlight.
“Oh, God, oh no...”
The River Killer was everything Angel might have concocted in a horrible nightmare. A giant man, debris in his matted black hair and beard, filthy in rags and combat boots. His eyes were hot and yellowish, his protruding teeth black and jagged. Angel could smell him; blood and disease and rotten meat.
Angel's eyes went to the huge rusted blade in his hand. “Oh it's been a long time. It's been too long...”
He lunged forward, ripping at Angel's hair, jerking his head to the side, his teeth digging into Angel's entire throat and Angel screamed...
Angel felt something give inside his neck and the hot thick blood burst up over his face and as he fell down into the blackness of death his entire being shrieked, thrashing, as he fought against the rushing darkness. Angel's ears were ringing and he tasted the hot thick blood and he knew that he was dying. Angel's eyes burned with hot blood and he knew...
Angel blinked.
The River Killer lay at his feet, one side of the shaggy mane shorn away and the skull exposed, cracked, grayish pink tissue seeping through.
A figure stepped out of the bushes wearing a ski mask holding a smoking shotgun and no sooner had the sickening wave of relief broken over him than it was replaced by a bright spike of renewed horror. The person held the gun in red-gloved hands. It had been some kind of partnership gone wrong, some double cross...
It came forward keeping the gun trained on the dead beast. As the figure reached Angel it looked up, meeting his eyes–
The River Killer exploded up off the ground like a reanimated corpse, grabbing the shooter from behind, his teeth sinking into the masked cheek, thrashing his head like an attack dog. The masked figure clubbed him with the stock of the gun, knocking him back, creating just enough distance to raise the barrel and shoot –
Half The River Killer's face disappeared in a spray and he spun a monstrous piroquette and fell heavily into the wet loam.
Into the ringing silence Angel heard his own ragged breath. The mask had been torn away, and he vaguely recognized the face, bleeding from the ravaged cheek...
The man made a reach for the mask in the dirt, but realizing Angel had seen him, stopped. He looked at the corpse, then into Angel's eyes. “You recognize me?”
“I think so?”
“I saw you at The Pearl a couple of times. But that was before...” He swallowed, wiped his eyes, shook his head. “I was Quincy's friend.” His pale features were heavily lined, the flesh around his eyes red. His voice was a torn whisper. “Please understand,” he pleaded, “I'm so sorry about all of this. I shouldn't have...” The frantic, haunted eyes cooled, went hard. His gaze drifted from Angel, off into the forest. The trembling voice steadied, steeled. “There wasn't any other way. The cops weren't going to do anything. Ever. And it's not just Quincy. He,” he kicked the massive corpse, “would have come out of the forest eventually. And gone somewhere else, and done the same thing, and as long as he didn't come knocking on doors in the suburbs, nobody would have done anything to stop him.”
He sighed. “It'll be years before anybody has any reason to come in here and find the body.” Angel flinched as he slid a long wicked knife from his belt.
Slitting the rope, he helped Angel stumble away from the tree, leading him by the elbow. “I'll take you home.”
They pushed into the wet fronds. “I hope you don't tell anybody.”
THE END
THE NIGHT FRIEND by Daniel J. Kirk
Silt lined the creek bed. It had come from runoff upstream and coagulated just before the river. The grayish mud looked like it smelled bad, like rot and mildew. But there was no odor and clear water flowed over and through it, cutting caverns in some spots where the silt had gathered.
Jim Tulips crouched at the creek, but he wasn’t watching the water, his eyes were trying to sneak contact with the eyes of a three year old girl—his sister’s daughter.
“Can you tell me what happened?” he asked.
Candice preferred to splash the thin layer of water, and dig her toes into the mud.
So Jim repeated himself. “Last night, do you remember what happened?”
“Want to watch me jump?” she asked.
“Sure.” Jim went along, hoping he could crack through her fortress of focus.
Candice leapt a whole two inches up and then smacked her feet back into the mud. It shot up her legs and beneath her pink shorts. A couple of specks of mud reached her unruly blonde curls.
“Very impressive!” Jim clapped.
“Wanna watch me jump from up there?” She pointed to a steep incline on the opposite side of the water.
“Not really, Candice. Can I ask you a question instead?”
She hummed in silence, squashing her toes deeper into the mud.
“I want you to tell me about last night. Your mom said you were outside last night. Do you go outside after bedtime often?”
“Look!” She shrieked and bent over a 90 degree angle. Her hands on her cheeks, with a shriek of glee ready to boil over. “A centipede!”
“Oh yeah.” Jim reached down to remove the insect from her sight, assuming it frightened her.
Candice swatted his hand away. “No. Let me pick him up.”
Jim sat back on his heels and observed. Candice bobbled the plucked centipede until it curled into a ball in her palm.
“Look! He turned into a ball!”
“Do you know why he does that?”
“I don’t know.”
“
Because he’s scared of you. He thinks you’re going to try and eat him.”
“You only eat food,” Candice said.
“Well, he is food. Birds and toads like to eat him. He thinks…”
“I’m not a bird.”
“But he doesn’t know that. He doesn’t know that you’re a good guy.”
“It’s okay, little centipede. I won’t eat you,” she said.
“Can I kiss him?”
“I wouldn’t. You don’t know what kind of germs he’s got.”
“He don’t wash his hands?”
Jim laughed. “Maybe that’s what he was doing in the creek.”
“Creek’s got mud.” She mocked Jim for such a silly answer. Then the centipede uncurled in her hand and started to move. That glee she had contained, broke through. She shrieked. “Look! He loves me! He loves me now!”
“Yes, he knows you’re not trying to eat him,” Jim supposed. “Hey, Candice, can you tell me what you told your mother? About last night when you came outside.”
“He’s fuzzy feeling. It tickles!” The centipede spiraled up and around her forearm.
“Candice. What. Happened. Last. Night?”
Candice froze. Jim’s tone was that of a grownup—someone like her mother and not the fun uncle who brought her toys and spoiled her dinner with frozen fruit pops.
“I get scared,” she said.
“Why? Tell me what you saw?”
“I’m not supposed to be out at night. Only the owls are supposed to be. But he was making too much noise.”
“Is that why you went outside, because you heard an owl?”
“I go outside all the time.”
“At night?” Jim asked.
“I’m not supposed to.”
“But before last night, you were going out?”
She nodded.
“You can’t do that, honey. It’s not safe.”
“I know.”
“Did what you see last night scare you?”
Candice gave it thought, and just before Jim rephrased his question she answered, “He not going to be my friend.”
“No, he won’t be.”
“He leave,” Candice said. She dropped down to search the muddy leaves for the centipede. “He leave me,” she fussed. That’s when Jim realized she hadn’t been talking about what she saw, but the centipede.
“He has to go back to his home.”
“I want to keep him.”
“He’s probably hungry.”
“What do he eat? Do he like peanut butter?”
Jim almost conceded that he didn’t know. But that’s never an acceptable answer for a toddler. Jim guessed. “They eat leaves.”
“I don’t eat leaves.”
“No. People and bugs need to eat different things.”
“I tell that to the ants but they come to eat my ice cream. I say bad ants. Not yours. How come they don’t listen?”
Jim sighed. He was good at playing with kids, entertaining them. But he didn’t really have any special skill. Not like his sister expected.
“The man you saw last night is a bad guy, Candice. A very, very bad man. Listen to me, you do not want to see him again. Even if he tells you, you do not want to be his friend. He…eats those he calls friend.”
“But they get to see the castle.”
Jim gasped. “You spoke with him? Candice, you can’t do that. He is dangerous. Very dangerous. He will hurt you, your mommy, and daddy and your baby brother. Do you understand? He is not a good guy.”
“He says you’re wrong.”
“I’m not wrong. He is trying to trick you. Do you know what a trick is?”
“Uh-huh,” Candice lied.
“It’s when someone gets you to do something bad, by lying to you. That’s a trick.”
“He said he didn’t want to trick you. He said you were his friend.”
“Oh really? I guess he wouldn’t forget me,” Jim said. “I gave him the scar above his eye.”
Jim finally had eye contact. There was awe behind Candice’s brown eyes, almost as if they had become illuminated.
Jim nodded at his attentive audience.
“He tried to eat me when I was a little boy. I was bigger than you were. I was nine,” he said. “And I was good at swinging a baseball bat. He got me to come outside at night, just like you did, but I had heard the stories. I knew what he really wanted.” It was something terrible. Something he didn’t want to explain to Candice, something he wanted to apply with broad strokes of black and white. “He wanted to hurt me and your mom and… Did you know your mother had another brother, like me?”
Candice nodded.
“Then she told you that he is dead. That he got hurt real bad?”
“He told me.”
“Huh?”
“Mom didn’t tell me. You were supposed to save him.”
“I-I-I tried,” Jim said. He searched for the words he wanted to say, not the ones his mind was plagued with, day-in and day-out since it happened. “You see, even though I was older and bigger than you, I wasn’t strong enough. I couldn’t save my baby brother.”
“Did you try?”
A lump formed in Jim’s throat. His niece had asked the question he’d feared from his sister and parents’ mouths all his life. That they would ask him what he feared.
“I was scared. I was too scared.”
“I’m not scared,” Candice said.
“You should be. How come you came screaming back last night if you’re not afraid?”
“I got scared then because I was just a baby.”
“That was last night!”
“Want to see me splash the mud again?”
“Candice. Stop. You can’t go outside at night anymore. Ever again. I mean it. Even when you’re old like me, you have to stay inside. I can teach you how to protect yourself. But you have to promise me that you will never go outside at night again.”
Candice wanted to jump.
“Promise me.”
Candice swayed.
“Promise me.”
“Promise.” And light the flick of a switch her mood changed and she jumped, lifting her knees up before kicking them down. The mud splashed Jim and drenched her.
“Now you’re going to need a tubby,” he said.
Candice played on. Jim reared back away from the creek, trying to contain his anger and frustration. At times, he thought he was talking to an adult—he had to remember she was only 3 years old. Then he looked upstream and saw what at first appeared to be a large tan rock—one he was not familiar with on a creek he’d often taken his niece to. He walked until the glare of the sun did not distort the form.
It was the body of a dead dear.
He grabbed Candice’s arm and yanked her out of the creek.
“We need that tubby right now,” he said.
“No!” she cried, and fought his grip. He jerked her from the creek.
“We go now.”
Jim closed the front door. From the inside he turned the key and locked the deadbolt. Then he picked up his tools and gave his sister a flick of a smile. Meredith looked exhausted. Thick bags hung below her eyes, and a small newborn boy slept on her shoulder.
“You need a key to lock or unlock it on either side now.” He handed her the key. “I’d keep it close or hidden somewhere she won’t look.”
“I was going…”
“Don’t tell me,” he said and rolled his head to the side as if to imply that Candice was doing more than talking to her dolls in the other room. “The sliding glass door just has a latch at the top now. She shouldn’t be able to reach that, but I’d look into replacing it with some french doors or something you can put a good lock on.
“Windows?” Meredith asked.
“Old renting trick, I just put a nail three inches up on either side of the channel. The top goes down and the bottom comes up, but not enough to crawl through. If there’s a fire. You all have to go out a door.”
“I didn’t think about t
hat.”
“Hopefully you won’t have to,” Jim said.
“Then we do it all over again when we move, right?”
Jim nodded. “Mom and Dad moved us a lot.”
“It wasn’t fair. I hated it.”
Jim said, “I’m sorry.”
“I didn’t mean… it’s just that I didn’t want Candice or Steven to grow up like we did. It’s not fair that after all these years, it has come back to me.”
“Sorry.”
“It’s not your fault. I doubt it even knows Candice is your niece. How could it. It’s just a—”
“It knows, Meredith. It told her about Brian.”
Candice tried to swallow her lips. Her eyes clenched and she cried. “H-h-how do we stop it?”
“Just stay inside at night. It has worked for me all these years. Just stay inside. She’s not afraid of him yet. You have to keep her inside.”
“But it’ll keep calling her won’t it.”
Jim nodded. “You have to scare her. Show her horror films, the kind you wouldn’t want to watch. Make her scared of the dark.”
“You’re staying the night, aren’t you?” Meredith asked.
“It’s too late for me to leave now.”
The sun put on a final showing worthy of notice. It was blaze orange like hot embers. All the shapes of trees became jet black, while the green grass surrounding the house turned gold.
Jim felt a great sense of unease, even protected by the panes of glass. He could sense it waiting in the darkness of the woods.
“I can’t believe you’ve never been outside at night since,” Meredith said. She was drinking red wine. She had stressed she was allowed to have one glass. Jim would not have judged her otherwise. She needed to be calm. Her husband was away on business, as he routinely was. Breastfeeding be damned, if she lost her wits, no good would come of it.
“You get used to it. Most people I know come home from work and flick on the TV. I do that, or read.”
“But what about college?”
“I studied and didn’t date, remember.”
“You…”
“How do you think I stayed single for so long? It’s not me, it’s them crazy ladies who are afraid daylight,” Jim said.
9 Tales Told in the Dark 17 Page 9
