Darkness Under the Sun

4

Perhaps Howie was becoming a dreamer who would sleep by day and stay awake all night. In his room, in his bed, in the dark, he could not shut his mind off. He kept replaying the entire special morning and afternoon, and those memories were as vivid to him as any movie.

Because his mom got up early for work, she went to bed at nine-thirty. Corrine was already in her room, doing whatever girls did in their rooms; he had no idea.

All was quiet and dark when, at nine forty-five, Howie dressed and went silently downstairs. He damped the beam of his flashlight by pressing two fingers over the lens. The house smelled of furniture polish, faintly of lemon-scented air freshener, and here and there even more faintly of potpourri that his mom made herself from flowers she grew and from kitchen spices. Mr. Blackwood would like the quiet, good-smelling house if he agreed to come visit and look at the apartment. If he could wait until Saturday, when Mom was off work, maybe he could have dinner with them. Howie’s mother was a great cook, and being a dinner guest in the main house now and then was another advantage of renting the apartment.

Howie left the house by the back door, locked it behind him, and stuffed the key in a pocket of his jeans. He switched off the Eveready because the full moon frosted everything.

He walked rapidly toward St. Anthony’s graveyard, but he didn’t run. Running could get you killed because it fanned the flames. He wasn’t on fire, of course; but for a long time he had not been able to run also because of the skin grafts, which were delicate. Scars were tougher tissue than ordinary skin, and here and there, where scars and skin met, sudden extreme stretching, like what occurred when you ran flat-out, could cause dermal cracking and maybe a deadly infection.

Mr. Blackwood said he would probably sleep until nine o’clock. Howie didn’t want to risk waking him, so it was a few minutes before ten when, in the alley behind the old Boswell building, he knocked on the door through which Ron Bleeker had earlier attacked him. The first thing Howie would do was apologize for not being able to wait until breakfast. He was usually very patient. Having to recover from serious burns taught you patience. But if Mr. Blackwood had dreamed a decision about the apartment, Howie just had to know. If the big man stayed in town for a couple months, above their garage, it would be the second biggest thing that had ever happened in Howie’s life, and certainly the best.

Mr. Blackwood didn’t respond to the knock, so Howie rapped his knuckles harder against the door and said, “It’s me, sir, it’s Howie Dugley.”

Maybe Mr. Blackwood was sleeping deeply. Maybe he had gone out for a walk or for a late dinner from some take-out place.

Howie tried the door. It was locked.

He walked back and forth in the moon-washed alleyway, trying to decide what he should do next. Going into the building without an invitation from Mr. Blackwood didn’t seem right. On the other hand, it wasn’t Mr. Blackwood’s building, even if he was camping out there. Besides, that morning, Howie entered without an invitation and encountered his new friend on the roof; and that had gone well. Mr. Blackwood had been glad to see him.

The corroded piano hinge protested, but the basement window pushed inward, and Howie slid feetfirst into that darkness. He switched on the Eveready and made his way toward the stairs, calling out as he went, “Hello? Mr. Blackwood? Are you here? Hello? It’s me, it’s Howie.”

When he reached the ground floor, the large room with all its columns felt bigger at night than in the daytime, immense, vast, as though the darkness stretched on for miles in every direction. Even with the light of the full moon, the dust-covered high windows were barely visible, and looking up at their pale panes, Howie felt as if he were in a dungeon.

His small flashlight didn’t penetrate far into the pitch-black realm of the former department store. In fact it was less effective than usual because its batteries had lost some of their charge, which he had been too excited to notice until now. The beam was less white than yellow, no longer crisp but fuzzy.

“Mr. Blackwood? I’m sorry to bother you. It’s me, Howie.”

His voice wasn’t right, so changed that it almost might have been the voice of another boy. It seemed smaller now than earlier, thinner, and it echoed off the distant walls differently from the way that it sounded in this same space before.

Because Mr. Blackwood had said he kept his gear near the back door, Howie moved in that direction. He no longer called out to his friend because the smallness of his voice made him uneasy.

He found the gear a few steps to the right of the back door. A sleeping bag rolled tight and secured with straps. A backpack with the top-pocket flap unzipped and standing open. Two fat, half-melted candles were fixed to the floor in puddles of hardened yellow wax.

Beside the candles were the photographs that Howie had brought from home earlier in the day. The photo of the house and the one of the garage shaded by the ancient beech tree had each been torn into four pieces.

Only the picture of Howie’s mother and sister remained intact, and it lay next to the extinguished candles, as if Mr. Blackwood had been studying it in the flickering light. Howie picked it up. He slipped it into a hip pocket of his jeans.

He wasn’t a snoop. He respected other people’s privacy, but he couldn’t help noticing that the top pocket of the backpack, from which the flap was peeled back, contained packets of photographs held together with rubber bands. They were those thick, white-bordered snapshots taken with an old Polaroid.

In a half-trance similar to the one that had overcome him when he had stepped through the nearby door into the alley, leaving Ron Bleeker to learn the new rules from Mr. Blackwood, Howie reached for one of the groups of photos. Strangely, the hand with which he picked up a packet of Polaroids did not look like his hand: It seemed thin, insubstantial, like the ectoplasmic hand of a ghost in one of those stories about séances that Mrs. Norris, their tenant, had liked to tell. Howie felt as if maybe he were dead already and just didn’t know it, the way that haunting spirits sometimes didn’t realize they were ghosts.

He stripped the rubber band from the Polaroids. In the jiggling beam of the flashlight, he saw that the top picture was of a pretty girl with blond hair and green eyes. She looked very unhappy. No. Not unhappy. She looked frightened.

The second photo was the same girl wearing scary makeup for Halloween. Her face was supposed to look as if it had been slashed several times, and the makeup was convincing.

In the third picture, a pretty girl with brown hair looked scared, too. The fourth shot was of the same girl stripped naked and lying on her back. Things had been done to her body that were not makeup.

The loose photos slithered through Howie’s fingers and spilled across the backpack. The flashlight shook loose of his hand and struck the floor with a hard, cold sound.

An instant later, he thought he heard something elsewhere on the ground floor, off in the gloom, a metallic sound, perhaps the steel toe of a boot scraping across a floor tile.

Heart knocking hard against his breastbone, breath caught in his throat, Howie snatched up the flashlight and backed away from where he thought the sound might have arisen. But sound was tricky in such a big dark space, and after he took a few steps, he thought maybe he had misjudged the source. He changed direction — and within a few steps, he bumped into something, someone, spun around. With the flashlight, he found Ron Bleeker’s body suspended from a huge knife that pierced his throat and pinned him to the wall, his chin held high by the handle. Something had been jammed into his mouth, something big enough to make his cheeks bulge grotesquely. Duct tape pressed his lips shut. His eyes were open wide, he still had his eyes, but his ears were missing.

In memory, Howie heard his voice and then Mr. Blackwood’s:

You had surgeries?

Nope. Don’t want any, either. I’ve got a thing about knives.

You’re scared of being cut on?

Not scared. I just have this thing about knives.

Suddenly Howie was at the rear entrance, although he didn’t remember stepping away from Ron Bleeker’s corpse. He disengaged the deadbolt, yanked open the door, and plunged into the alley, certain that one of those shovel-size hands must be digging toward him through the dark air, inches from the back of his neck.

In the night, under the moon, he staggered three steps, turned, and though no one loomed behind him, he cried out because he had at last gotten his breath and found his voice. He almost screamed for help, but realized at once that he couldn’t afford to waste a moment explaining this to anyone. He was the only help that his mother and sister could count on, small as he was and as ugly as he was, he was nevertheless the motel manager with the fire extinguisher, Blackwood was the fire, and fire was fast, fire could change everything in one bright screaming minute.

He was halfway across the graveyard, dodging around headstones, when he saw the raven fly across the full moon. He hurried under the sheltering limbs of the immense oaks, and in an autumn memory he saw the cemetery in drifts of scarlet leaves, but in his mind’s eye, the leaves rippled like a lake of blood. He said, “No, no, no,” because he feared, he knew, he would find his mother and his sister as blood-red as the autumn ground under a scarlet oak.

He had to resist the urge to sprint full-tilt. His pounding feet and his ragged breathing might alert Blackwood. Running could get him killed.

His footsteps were soft and swift through the moonshadows of the old beech, past the garage, across the yard, to the back-porch steps. As Howie fumbled his key from his pocket, he saw that one of the French panes in the kitchen door had been cut out.

He didn’t need his key. The lock wasn’t engaged anymore.

Howie quietly opened the door, started to cross the threshold, but hesitated. The kitchen was as dark as the old department store from which he had fled moments earlier. There was no sound, real or imagined, no phantom scrape of a steel-toed boot, but the silence seemed unnatural. He felt that Blackwood was listening for him just as he was listening for Blackwood. Intuition told him this was not the way to go, this was equivalent to the moment, back in the day, when he woke to the cold wetness and the smell of gasoline, the instant before the match was struck. Death was in the kitchen or in the hallway beyond, and there was no motel manager this time, only Death and Howie, and Death was big and strong and meaner than a million Ron Bleekers.

With all the stealth that he could manage, he eased the door shut and backed across the porch to the stairs. Still relying on intuition, he hurried around the house.

He made noise only when he passed too close to a Japanese maple in the front yard and raised a soft clatter from the loose ornamental river stones that encircled its base. He halted, snatched up two of the stones, each about the size of a lemon, and then continued to the front porch.

He glanced at the house next door, at the houses across the street. If Howie shouted for help, if Blackwood realized he wouldn’t get a chance to do to these women what he had done to others, then the killer might nevertheless risk staying just long enough to stab them, slash them, and then run.

The frosted-glass sconce beside the front entrance was on a timer, lit now, denying Howie the cover of darkness as he approached. Holding both stones in his left hand and the key in his right, he unlocked the door. The sliding deadbolt made a whispery scraping noise as it retracted. Howie silently eased the door open, pocketed the key, and transferred one of the stones to his right hand.

The porch light dimly revealed the foyer but not the pitch-black hall beyond, which led past other rooms to the kitchen. To the left lay the archway to the lightless living room, and to the right were stairs ascending from shadows into inky gloom. He realized that he was backlighted, that every second he stood there, he was exposed, yet he hesitated. Taking a chance that Blackwood was still on the ground floor, toward the back of the house, Howie intended to sprint for the staircase, yelling for his mother to get her gun, which she kept in a bureau drawer.

Fearful of going forward, furious with himself for not taking the plunge, at last he crossed the threshold, into the foyer.

A tall figure stepped out of the hallway, darkness moving in darkness. “Hello, son.”

With a mortal thunk, the thrown knife embedded in the door frame, two inches to the left of Howie’s head.

He threw the stone in his right hand, heard it thwack something even as he turned to flee, heard Blackwood grunt, shouted—“Mom, get your gun!”—crossed the porch, plunged the stairs, spun around, threw at a window, which shattered as he raced to the maple and snatched up two more smooth stones. He had lost his baseball cap somewhere, but he scored a hit on another window and rearmed himself as on the second floor lights bloomed bright and as Blackwood rushed down the porch steps, the throwing knife in his hand.

Howie expected Blackwood to come at him as fast as a bullet, snatch him up, slice him open, and spill his steaming guts on the lawn. But the big man’s nose was bleeding, his blood black in moonlight, and at any moment some neighbor might appear. He couldn’t kill the whole neighborhood, though he looked like he wanted to, so he hung back, pointing at Howie to emphasize his threat. “You tell them anything about me, I’ll return some night, tear off your mama’s face. I’ll spend a month cutting Corrine up alive. Keep your mouth shut, and I’m gone forever. There’s a world of bitches like them. I don’t need them unless you rat on me and make me have to come back.”

Blackwood turned and seemed to fly across the lawn, through the night, faster than any man could run, magic-fast toward St. Anthony’s and the graveyard, and Howie ducked as a large bird — a raven? — flew so low over his head that he felt its talons comb through his hair and graze his scalp.

He almost wet his pants then, it was a close thing, but instead he ran toward the house, throwing one stone, then another, shattering two more windows. He reached the top of the porch steps as his mother appeared in the open doorway in her pajamas, holding a pistol that she pointed at the floor.

“Howie, what’re you doing, what’s happening?”

Although Howell Dugley was only one week short of his eleventh birthday, he’d known more pain than most grown men ever would, more loss than was right for any child to suffer, more humiliation more humbly endured than might be sufficient to ensure the beatification of a saint, and although he had still been naive until this terrible night, he was naive no more. He realized things that other boys his age would not, including that life was hard but sweet, that life was a long series of losses and that you had to hold on tight to what you loved as long as you had any strength left. He knew that evil dwelt behind kind and familiar faces but that not all evil was hidden, that sometimes evil was brazen because it knew you didn’t want to believe it existed, and it mocked you by its brazenness. He realized that no one could save the world because the world didn’t want to be saved, that all he could hope to rescue from the fires of this world were those who were most precious to him, his family and — if he ever had any — his friends, and that it was prideful in the extreme to think he could do more, just as it might be damning not to try.

Those things understood, he made his choice there on the porch with his mother. If he couldn’t at that moment clearly see the full consequences of his decision, he had a sense of what they might be, and he perceived that remorse might be a weight he would have to carry in years to come. Believing Blackwood’s threat and the big man’s ability to fulfill it, still feeling the talons that had grazed his scalp, Howie decided to leave the world to its self-destruction and save those he might be able to save.

To his mother, as sirens rose in the distance, he said, “It was just stupid kids, those kids that always rag me and knock me around. I was still awake, reading in my room, when I heard them and came down. I didn’t see faces, I can’t name names, but it was them, all right, throwing rocks at the house, and I chased them off.”

When the police arrived moments later, Howie told them the same story. He told it well and sincerely. Howie’s history of being an object of torment for the cruel of heart lent credibility to his simple tale. Furthermore, he understood that good policemen could read your eyes to detect whether you were telling falsehoods and that when you looked away from them, you made them suspicious. He met their eyes directly and did not once look away, because he knew that his eyes were harder to meet than theirs. They would worry about him seeing the pity in their eyes and would be concerned that they might glance at the ravaged side of his face and be caught staring at his scars. Therefore, they would spend more time looking at their notepads as they took down the basics of his statement, would not allow themselves to doubt anything he said, and in the morning would hold their own children tighter than usual.

Howie was lying, and he loathed having to lie, in part because he didn’t want to be a liar like his father. He told himself that his falsehoods were not meant to spare himself, that they were intended instead to spare his mother and sister, but maybe that was mostly — rather than entirely — true.

Later, after the police left, Howie found the square of glass that Blackwood cut from the back door, where it had been set aside on the porch. He cracked it into pieces underfoot and put the fragments on the kitchen floor with a stone. He could not — and didn’t need to — explain the divot in the front-door frame where the throwing knife had embedded after missing his head by two inches.