9 Tales Told in the Dark 15

by 9 Tales Told in the Dark

  When she saw me, she sprang to her feet and her arms wrapped tightly around my neck, so much so that it felt like my lungs were slightly compressed. I started to say that all would be okay but stopped. I couldn’t say that for sure and I didn’t want to get her hopes up. Eventually, she pulled away, looked me straight in the eye, and began to say something. As her lips began to move, I pulled her close to me to avoid having to say anything, and I could hear my own heart grating against my chest.

  I was sure she could feel it along with me. Once in my arms she buried her head deep within my chest and began to sob. This actually made me calmer and I could feel the thumping subside. I felt guilty about this, and hoped Kya, with her head pressed so deeply against my chest, wouldn’t notice. After another half hour of standing there, I was able to convince her to come back to the house where we could wait for the news. I couldn’t look at the sheriff in the face as we left. His gaze reflected my shame. I think I was responsible for Damon’s unfortunate end. Perhaps he had made an attempt to call the police before me, to tell the truth of what had happened at the party. I have no way of knowing for sure now. The fire blazed for over seven hours on one of the coldest days of the year. It happened at 1:15 PM, and Damon, as well as the five patrons eating their lunch, died of smoke inhalation.

  Some people who were interviewed initially said that there was an explosion, but the Destiny Fire Chief, Randall Hellman, said that he would wait for the final decision of the Division of State Fire Marshal. He claimed they were still in the process of interviewing some of the employees and anyone who had any association with The Lee House. Only a day and a half later the building looked like a firebombed crack house.

  The windows were broken out; others were cracked, as though they had had baseballs thrown at them by a series of indignant adolescents, and inside the windows, a hollow blackness had barged its way in, and it seemed to me to grow more and more each time I either drove by it or saw it on TV. Even the brightest of days couldn’t penetrate it. Almost every inch of the brick building was covered in ice, as though it were some kind of formaldehyde, something that would keep or slow the building from decaying like a corpse under a summer sun. The traffic light next to the building was covered as well. And the icicles, which hung as crystallized daggers, were so low that they had to be cut down. Kya didn’t talk to me much at the funeral, even though I drove her there. I thought at the time that she was just trying to process it all. I was happy to see that she wasn’t crying. The day before, she had done it nearly all day, and the rest of the time, she slept or crept about the house with a hollow expression. Roger Idleman called us to say he was sorry about Damon. He said he would do all he could to find out who or what caused the fire.

  He said he wanted to pay for the funeral, but I declined his offer, stating that I would pay, mostly because of my liability. Throughout the funeral, Kya didn’t talk to me much. She spent most of the time with her family and extended family. This was the first time I had the chance to meet her parents.

  I had spoken to them over the phone several times, but that day they seemed so far away, as though they somehow felt sorry for me but felt the need to avoid me like the plague at the same time. I figured it was because they were grieving, and the overcast day wasn’t helping anyone. The climate was thirty-five degrees. However, it felt much colder. I still felt guilty about not telling Kya what really happened. If I did, I knew she would leave me, either thinking I was pulling a cruel joke on her or had plunged headlong into insanity. Throughout the entire proceedings, I couldn’t find it within myself to cry, and I wanted to badly. Somehow, I felt that would’ve made me feel better, it would’ve, perhaps, relieved the tension building up inside of me, and maybe, just maybe, it would’ve absolved me of all the culpability that I felt, as though my emotions were pieces of riffraff or driftwood in need of flushing out. But it occurred to me, standing there, that I had never truly cared about Damon’s actual loss of life. It was only the fact that I felt responsible for its end, which only served to increase my feelings of blame.

  Few people came up to express their condolences, and that was okay, I really had nothing to say except thank you. They would inevitably follow that up with their best chalk talk. That he’s in heaven now, smiling down upon you talk. These weren’t bad spiels, and for the most part they came from a good place, but if I had to hear it over and over again I probably would’ve felt compelled to kill someone. My emotions and conflicts were running high, causing a lot of tension within me, tension I had to hide for decorum. Then I saw Kya and her family talking to a deftly dressed and closely coiffed man of about six foot three.

  He wrapped his arms around Kya as though they were long lost friends. However, her parents shook hands with him as though they were meeting him for the first time. At the end of the funeral, I asked who he was. She replied that it was an old friend of Damon’s from high school.

  “What’s his name?”

  “Calvin Hicks, my brother used to call him Cal for short.”

  “I don’t remember Damon talking about him.”

  “They had a falling out,” she replied.

  “Over what?” I said.

  “Over a girl, you men can’t seem to keep your dick in your pants,” she said through her tears.

  “Is that right?” I replied. My face lit up. This was the first glimmer of hope that we were back in stride. Sincerely, effortlessly, she returned my smile, and I saw her cheeks rise up and crinkle her eyelids. This seemed to cause her eyes to catch the light and sparkle, and for the next couple of weeks we were inseparable from each other.

  However, six days later, after stepping out of the shower, she opened the door and asked if she could talk to me once I was out. I thought nothing of this. There was no reason to. Everything was going so well. We were communicating. After drying off and putting on some clothes, I went out to the living room where she was waiting. I sat down beside her and heard her breathing heavily.

  “What is it?” I asked her. She began her explanation awkwardly, often segueing onto strange subjects and topics that had nothing to do with what she wanted to say. This began to make me angry and I told her to fucking spit it out.

  “You know the man at the funeral, the one my parents and I were speaking to?” I didn’t need to hear anymore. I already knew the answer, but I let her explain anyway, and as it all took shape, I felt a strange possession consume me. His real name was David Roth. They had met through a mutual friend eight months before. Through clenched teeth, I asked her what he did and where he was from.

  In a cold manner, she said, “That’s none of your business.”

  “The hell it isn’t, we’re married.”

  “Maybe not much longer,” she said. I paused for a moment. Kya said this in the sweetest way she knew how, but it only served to make me feel what a phony she was. How the coming days after the funeral had only been a ruse to soften the blow. The fact that she could do that to me with a straight face destroyed the façade of her being anything close to genuine. All of the moments throughout our time together flashed in my mind. Moments I saw as sincere I now questioned.

  “Have you fucked him?”

  “I don’t think the question is necessary. You’ve got no right asking me that.”

  “Did Damon know about him?” She refused to respond. I gripped her hard on the arm at that moment, which is something I never did, at least not with her. When I gripped too hard, she began to scratch at the edge of my fingers. The nails of her hands tore in deep, cutting the malleable flesh on my knuckles. The pain made me pull away.

  “You want to know?” She screamed.

  “Yes!” She told me that the Friday night Damon and I went to Kearns party, she and David had sex for the first time, and that all Damon knew was that she was planning to leave me. Kya demanded a divorce, no matter how much I begged her to stay and work it out, but the moment I realized her intentions were fixed I had a waking flashback to my dream rendering of the woman on the stage. This t
ime, however, I saw Kya.

  She wanted to leave. She ran around the open stage, stopping just at the edge, as though there were some strange force field hindering her escape. Looking down at my body I saw myself as the monstrous skeletal figure, and I was struck by the fact that I felt nothing except hunger, not physical; it was just a strong feeling of longing and emotional agony. As I looked over at Kya, I saw her as the only cure for this. Without thought or rational reason, I pulled her to the ground, but before I could follow this feeling fully I was snapped out of it.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Kya shouted. The longing that I had in my waking movie had suddenly afflicted me in reality. It was so confounding and distracting that I yelled at her and told her to leave. Instantly, she walked out the door and slammed it behind her, as though my demand uncovered her deep-seated desire. We met periodically in public places after that, but it was only to talk about the terms of the divorce. I tried to give her the illusion that I was taking this better than expected. I felt that if I showed the disguise of disinterest, she would want to come back to me because of a shattered ego.

  It was a juvenile trick, but I was desperately clinging to any hope I could. The entire time we spoke, I wore a poker face, trying to block any remanence of emotion that might appear in my eyes or features. On our last meeting, we were sitting at a local diner, and I was surprised to see the sheer emptiness in her facial features and gestures. She made most of the stipulations, while I just sat there and took it. She wasn’t being unreasonable, I guess. Her new boyfriend stepped through the door just as our meeting was ending. He had on a pea coat and his hair was the same as it was at the funeral. He stood back, seemingly out of some sense of decency, but when I looked up at his face he gave me a smug grin that he seemed to realize was there because he wiped it away only seconds later. My default emotion at that moment was apathy, mostly because I had conflicting feelings. It seemed my thoughts were caught on a spinning merry-go-round that wouldn’t stop, and when she finally left I put my head in my hands. The actual divorce itself went rather quickly.

  We didn’t have children, we didn’t argue over personal possessions. However, there were times I wanted to punish her, drive some metaphorical knife into her chest that would hurt forever. I contemplated hurting her financially. When I was young, I had a friend whose father would consistently cancel or postpone court dates so his mother had to spend more money. He managed to stretch it out three long years by doing this, but my guilt over Damon always kept my bitter passions at bay.

  After everything was finalized, I would periodically see them out shopping in different places. This didn’t happen often, but each time I would feel an urge surge through me. It was a feeling of extreme loneliness and desperation, but it manifested itself as some kind of hunger, some starvation that couldn’t be satiated, if that indeed makes any sense. It was both a physical and emotional sensation. I still can’t explain it. The law office where Martin Kerns conducted business soon turned off their lights, the letters of his name were scraped off the window, and the building reflected the glare of a bitter old man with nothing left. It was as though he was never there. Eventually, over time, I became invidious when I was alone. There were times when I would be sitting in a public place, a restaurant or bar, and I would feel a strange urge to follow a women out the door. Sometimes it was to their car, sometimes they were walking home, but that strange feeling of lust, loss, and craving always drove the charge.

  I felt I needed to run away, disappear, anything, from both Kya and that horrible night which still replayed in the darkest depths of me. Damon’s case was never solved. They couldn’t even find evidence of an accelerant. The case remains open to this day. After the family I rented my father’s house to moved out of state, it was quickly bought by another family only a few months after. Not long after that, I began sending out my resume and I ended up taking a full-time teaching job in a small drive-by town called Hinton.

  It’s just twenty minutes outside of Sioux City, Iowa. I have a house in the country. It’s quiet, filled with hills and flat territory, and either a valley or a mile of land separate each country house, but as much as I enjoy these surroundings, as the years have gone by these deep yearnings only progressively get worse. It’s so bad it has made it impossible to continue my writing, so I’ve given it up altogether. I’ve found it impossible to find that subconscious world one needs to write anything of interest. In the past, I’ve wondered if any of the other people who were at the party have the same affliction as I do. However, I must admit, I’ve never actively searched.

  The only one I know of is Melissa Cardel. She was on some kind of news program. They called her a real life Emily Grierson, a reference to A Rose for Emily, a story by William Faulkner. She lived in an apartment. It was summer time, there was a horrible smell coming from her floor. The tenants complained, thinking at first that perhaps a raccoon had died in the walls.

  However, before long, they realized it was coming from Melissa’s apartment. The landlord eventually called the police. The smell was so noxious, and when they opened the door to the bedroom, the body of her boyfriend was lying on the bed in a state of decomposition. The news reporter claimed that there were even large bite marks on the body, and the penis was halfway gone.

  The parallels to A Rose for Emily, though slim, were hard to resist by a media in need of their own pound of flesh. I personally congratulate her for finding someone. That’s a very powerful thing. It takes work, dedication. That’s one of the deepest sacrifices. My sacrifices are briefer. As far as relationships go, for me, they are always magic when they start, but if they last too long they spoil, like rotten fruit on the vine. The woman I am with right now is named Andrea. We only met a few days before, but I could tell she shared my philosophy of brief relations. She is waiting for me now, and the fire is making me sweat, so I must retire to the bedroom where Andrea is waiting. Because of her age, she makes me feel youthful and potent. As of now, she is my only refuge from suicide. She is but a girl, you see, only eighteen years of age, but like the other flings before her, she makes those painful hungers go away. I can see the bedroom light is on, so I know she’s awake. I imagine her still, splayed out before me. She always is. You see, that’s another thing about new relationships, their splendid predictability, that trust you know for a fact will never be broken in the beginning. The room is so cold, freezing even.

  I’ve grown to like it that way, and it seems Andrea has adjusted. There are tattoos of my love all over her body. They’ve replaced what was once unattired skin. I pull back the sheet. Her once brimming banquet of skin cream and perfume has now been replaced with the odor of loss and corrosion. This signals the end for us. If I didn’t need her, I wouldn’t even let it reach this point, but I am weak and in need, so I go back to the kitchen to pick up the sharpened blade I use, look it over, walk back to the bedroom, and then I say, “One last sacrifice, my love, my rapture for your relief.”

  THE END.

  THE DEMON KIDS by Derek Muk

  Jill handed change and tickets back to a customer with a smile and said: “Thank you.” After the driver of the red tour bus closed the doors they were on their merry way. She ascended the stairs to the upper level of the bus, grabbed a microphone, and grinned pleasantly at the tourists who packed the vehicle to capacity. It was one of those tour buses with an open top.

  “Oh, my, what a smashing crowd we’ve got today!” Jill said with her British accent. “Welcome to San Francisco, ladies and gentlemen. Hope you all have a fun stay in the city by the Bay. My name’s Jill. Our driver today is the amazing Marco. Why don’t we all give three cheers to him, everybody?”

  “Hi, Marco!” the crowd roared.

  “Listen to that, Marco! Now that’s a bloody awesome audience!”

  Marco tooted his horn three times.

  “You’re going to have fun today, I guarantee that,” Jill smiled. “Our tour this morning will cover Union Square, North Beach, Fisherman’s Wharf, Pier
39, and Ghirardelli Square. So sit back and relax and take in the beautiful sunshine.”

  The red tour bus crossed busy Market Street. “We are now slowly approaching Union Square. . .”

  Jeff, a handsome, rugged Asian man with slicked back dark hair, sat in a seat next to the rail, way back in the last row of the bus. He resembled the actor, Daniel Dae Kim. An expensive looking Nikon camera with a zoom lens rested in his lap and his backpack was stuffed full of tourist brochures and coupons, the result of a bad habit he had developed when traveling. He always raided a hotel lobby’s brochure stand, trying to hit up all the tourist traps in town, all the major sights, but usually wound up getting totally overwhelmed by everything. Well, life was short and he just wanted to enjoy it all. Who knew when he’d have time to visit San Francisco again?

  Jeff snapped a couple of shots of the Union Square plaza as the bus was parked near the curb. Using his zoom lens he zeroed in on myriad happenings going on in the plaza. It was a great place to people watch. He clicked a shot of an elderly couple arguing before turning his attention to a creepy looking young girl and boy standing near the base of the plaza’s statue. Both children appeared to be about seven or eight years of age, with gaunt, pale features and completely black eyes. They had no whites! Eerie. Jeff quickly captured them with his camera. Their otherworldly appearance was further enhanced by the shabby clothes they wore.

  The two children just stood near the statue, staring out into space as if in a trance. Their parents were nowhere in sight. Who are these kids? Jeff wondered. Just as his curiosity was piqued, someone brushed against him so fast and so subtly that, by the time he turned to see who it was, they were long gone, their footsteps clattering down the stairs of the bus to the lower level. When he looked down at his lap his camera was missing!

  Jeff raced after the person. When he jumped out onto the sidewalk he faced a huge sea of humanity, some staring at him curiously. It could’ve been any one of these people, or the thief could’ve already disappeared into the thick crowd. Brilliant! Expensive camera gone, along with all those precious photos. He clenched his fists into tight balls, sighing heavily.