Darkness Falls (7 page)

Larry stood up. “Maybe, but look, this isn’t
Silence of the Lambs.
We’re not gonna get insight into one nutcase by talking to anoth—”

The explosion that Caitlin had held in check while talking to Murphy finally let loose. “Michael’s
not
a nutcase! And neither is Kyle!”

“I’m sorry.” Larry had the good grace to be abashed. “That was a stupid thing to say, I’m
really
sorry, but—” He let out a long breath. “Look, I don’t even know where Kyle is. Last I heard, he was in Vegas, but—”

Without another word, Caitlin headed to the nearest pay phone. As she dialed information, Larry walked up beside her.

After James Earl Jones thanked her for using national 411, the irritating Verizon computerized voice asked her for a city. “Las Vegas.” After being asked for a listing, she said, “Walsh, first name Kyle.”

The chirpy Verizon computer told her to wait one moment. Caitlin reached into her purse to pull out a pen but could find nothing to write on. She turned to Larry. “You have a piece of paper or something?”

Larry was still holding his newspaper, and he handed it over to her. “C’mon, Caitlin, you
really
think that Kyle’s just going to list his number—”

He cut himself off when she started writing down a phone number, starting with 702. Admittedly,
Kyle Walsh
was a common enough name, and there could have been more than one of them in Vegas, but it was worth a shot.

Caitlin didn’t want to call around Darkness Falls and stir up old ghosts if she could just find him the old-fashioned way . . .

She dialed the toll-free number that would charge the call to her calling card, then dialed the 702 number, followed by her own card number and PIN.

After three rings, a male voice said, very tentatively, “Hello?”

“Kyle?” It didn’t sound exactly like him, but it
had
been twelve years. “Is this Kyle Walsh’s number? This is Caitlin Greene.”

There was a pause. Then: “That’s not funny.” The tone of the person on the other side had gone from bewildered to angry.

Which meant it had to be Kyle. Unless there was another person living in Vegas with that name who had some kind of history with someone named Caitlin Greene. She supposed that it was possible, but she’d spent the last six months growing more and more pessimistic, so she was damn well going to give optimism a shot.

“Kyle, it’s Cat.”

Another pause. “Caitlin?” This time, the voice was plaintive.

And it sounded just like a ten-year-old boy Caitlin knew once.

“I know, it’s been a long time, but—where are my manners, how
are
you?” The words just fell out of her mouth. She had no idea what to say to Kyle now after so long, even though she was the one who had called him.

“Fine.” The angry, belligerent tone had returned. “What do you want?”

Caitlin blew out a breath. Right to business. No small talk. No bullshit.

That was what Caitlin had always liked about Kyle in the first place.

“My little brother, Michael, uh—he’s in the hospital. He’s really scaring me. He won’t sleep, not even ten minutes at a time. He won’t let us shut off any lights. The doctors say he’s got something called niktophobia—”

“Noctiphobia,” Kyle corrected. “Night terrors.”

“But they don’t know how to treat him,” Caitlin continued, not really interested in how the damn thing was pronounced. “I remembered that that’s what they said you had, when . . .”

She trailed off. Finishing the sentence with
when you killed your mother
was probably not the best way to get Kyle to give her a hand, after all.

When Kyle didn’t say anything, she went on. “I thought you could tell me how you got over it.”

Yet another pause.

“I’m sorry,” was all he said before he hung up on her.

The dial tone blared in Caitlin’s ear for several seconds before she finally took the phone away from her head. She stared at it, as if it somehow could explain why Kyle wouldn’t help her.

But there likely would never be an explanation. After all, twelve years
was
a long time. Who knew how much Kyle had changed?

Besides, would he really
want
to be reminded of his rather unpleasant past in Darkness Falls?

He had moved to Las Vegas. Maybe he’d rebuilt his life, moved on.

“What did you expect?” Larry asked gently.

“Larry, please,” Caitlin said, not wanting to get into another argument.

“We don’t need him. We’ll get through this.”

Larry had been saying “We’ll get through this” for the last several months. It was starting to ring hollow.

He put what he probably thought was a comforting arm around her shoulder, but to Caitlin it just felt like dead weight.

“Look, I wish he’d said yes, too,” Larry said earnestly. “Honestly, I’d love to see the son of a bitch. But we can’t make him come if he doesn’t want to.”

Caitlin gently removed Larry’s arm. “I suppose.”

Kyle Walsh liked Las Vegas because it was in the middle of the desert.

No boats. No water.

It was pretty much the diametric opposite of Darkness Falls.

Where Darkness Falls’s homes were all built before the existence of the United States, most of Vegas’s were built after 1950.

In Darkness Falls, everybody knew you. In Vegas, not only did nobody know you, nobody cared.

Darkness Falls got dark at night. It never got dark in Vegas.

Kyle didn’t like it dark.

He looked around his small studio apartment. It was barely bigger than his bedroom as a kid in Darkness Falls. The front door had six bolt locks, and he’d had to restrain himself from installing a seventh. Bars sat dolefully in front of the windows, giving him a convict’s-eye view of the brightly lit city. He had put police floodlights that cast no shadows into the ceiling.

Not that they illuminated much. His furnishings consisted of a mattress and a bureau. The apartment would be almost totally bare but for the kitchenette.

Sitting on the bureau were six bottles full of prescription medication that he’d been taking for so long he could no longer remember a time when his morning ritual didn’t include those damn pills.

No, that wasn’t true. He could remember. He just chose not to. Those were not times he wished to relive.

So naturally, fate decided to intervene and make him relive them anyhow by having Cat Greene call him out of the blue.

He reached under his shirt and pulled out the necklace that he’d worn every day since he was ten.

The one with the sun charm on it.

He looked over at the bureau with the meds and at the door with the dead bolts and up at the lights that cast an almost biblical light upon the apartment, and then he looked back down at the charm.

He thought about a kiss that tasted oddly metallic.

And he thought about a little kid named Michael whom he’d last seen as an infant. Cat seemed to think that the kid was going through what Kyle had gone through.

Kyle wouldn’t wish that on his worst enemy, much less the little brother of a childhood friend.

First, he’d need to call in sick to the casino. MacDougan would probably fire him, but that wouldn’t even be a hardship at this point. It had taken all of Kyle’s self-control—not something he had in any great supply to begin with—to keep from pummeling MacDougan every time he went to work.

Then he’d get a plane ticket. He’d saved up more than enough, even for an overpriced last-minute ticket.

Then, for the first time in more than a decade, he’d go home.

eight

The sign on the door read “Michael Greene—No Visitors.”

Kyle walked right in as if he owned the place.

The plane ride to Logan Airport had been fairly uneventful once he actually got on the plane. Prior to that, of course, he had to deal with two separate random bag checks, not to mention a virtual strip search at the metal detector. Kyle was pretty sure he fit somebody’s profile of a suspected terrorist, so none of it came as any surprise.

After that, though, it was clear flying for five hours across the country, followed by a train ride from Logan to South Station in Boston, an Amtrak jaunt from there to Richfield, and a cab ride from there to Darkness Falls.

He went straight to the hospital from the train station, just as the sun started to go down.

Why wait? Especially since the alternative was to start wandering around Darkness Falls looking for a bed-and-breakfast or somewhere to stay the night. He didn’t want to deal with that. Didn’t want to deal with Darkness Falls at all, even though that was sort of why he had come back in the first place.

No, it was better to do what he had come here to do. So he went straight to the hospital.

It had been easy enough to find his way to Michael’s room. Kyle hadn’t shaved, was heavily medicated, and generally looked like hammered shit, so nobody gave him a second glance in a hospital.

The hospital room’s sole occupant was lying in the bed, asleep. As he gently placed his overnight bag on the floor, Kyle noted that the lights in the room were still on, even though it had long since gotten dark. There was also an irritating buzzing sound in the room, as if a fluorescent bulb had come loose.

As soon as Kyle came in, though, Michael woke up and pulled the covers up to his chin. Kyle almost smiled at that. He remembered hearing an old Bill Cosby routine from the sixties about how there was something magical about covers that monsters couldn’t get at you as long as you stayed under them.

If only that were true . . .

For lack of anything better to say, Kyle said, “You must be Michael.”

In response, Michael drew the covers up closer to his lower lip.

Kyle sighed. Nobody had said this would be easy.

“It’s okay,” he said. “I’m not gonna hurt you. I just want to talk a little. My name’s Kyle.”

He extended a hand. Michael tried to get further under the covers. Kyle withdrew the hand.

“Your sister says you’re afraid of the dark. Makes it tough to sleep. You get a lot of sleep?”

Michael shook his head no. Kyle considered this a major breakthrough.

“Me neither.”

Then Michael turned away from Kyle and started staring at the far wall. Kyle recognized the move, having practiced it many times himself: Michael had lost interest in the discussion and wanted the annoying grown-up to go the hell away.

“Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea,” he muttered.

The buzzing, a mild annoyance when Kyle had come in, was now driving him nuts. Or maybe he just needed a distraction. In any case, it was the work of a moment to trace the sound to the bulb over the in-room sink right next to the door to the bathroom. Kyle walked over to it, reached up, tightened it, and the buzzing stopped. The bulb also burned brighter now, shining down on the metal and ceramic of the sink.

Kyle had had a lot of practice with lightbulbs over the years . . .

Suddenly, Michael spoke. “Caitlin says that when you grow up, you’re not afraid of the dark anymore. Is that true?”

“Yes,” Kyle lied.

“Why not?”

Kyle hesitated. “Because you grow up and realize there’s nothing to be afraid of.”

Michael, unsurprisingly, saw through him. “Then why are you still afraid?”

That was a question Kyle had been asking himself for many years now. “Because old habits die hard.”

As Michael stared at him, Kyle found himself suddenly at a loss for words. He shoved his hands into his pockets, for lack of anything better to do, and his hand closed around his keys.

He smiled. “You want to see something?”

Michael nodded.

Kyle pulled out his key chain, which had his numerous house keys, as well as the casino keys that, had he known Kyle still had copies, MacDougan would kill him for possessing. Also attached to the key chain was a green glow stick.

Removing the glow stick from the chain, Kyle said, “This is my peace of mind.”

“Huh?”

“My peace of mind,” Kyle repeated, “the thing that makes me feel safe.” He finished taking it off the chain and held it out to Michael. “You want to hold on to it for a while?”

Reaching his hand out from under the covers, Michael took the glow stick.

Then he looked back up at Kyle and noticed the small flashlight that he kept hooked to his belt.

“You want the flashlight, too?” Kyle asked. That was another bit of his peace of mind, but he had plenty more flashlights in his bag, as well as a smaller one in his pocket.

Besides, the kid needed it right now more than Kyle did.

As Michael took the flashlight in his other hand, he said, “She won’t come in the light.”

Kyle frowned, wondering who he meant. It couldn’t have been Caitlin.

“Who?”

“You know who.”

“No, I don’t.”

Michael turned the flashlight on and shone it into Kyle’s face. “Yes, you do. You’ve seen her, too.”

The kid was
really
starting to scare Kyle—and he didn’t scare all that easily.

“Why would you say something like that, Michael?”

“Because it’s the truth. I can tell.” He turned the flashlight off. “Sometimes I think about just turning off all the lights and letting her come and take me. Sometimes I think that would be easier than being so scared. Did you ever think that?”

Kyle found himself unable to say anything. He had no idea what the kid was talking about—

(Yes, you do!)

—and couldn’t form any kind of coherent reply.

“She’s gonna kill me, you know.”

That Kyle could respond to. “No one’s going to kill you, Michael. Nothing’s going to happen to you.” He was about to say he wouldn’t let it, but somehow he didn’t think that would carry much weight, so instead he said, “Your sister won’t let it.”

“My sister can’t stop her.”

“Step away from the patient!”

Kyle whirled around at the new voice. It was one of the nurses, flanked by a couple of goons wearing uniforms with “Security” stenciled on them.

“What’s going on?” Kyle asked.

Then the two goons grabbed him.

“Hey!”

“You’re not authorized to be here, sir,” the nurse said in that patronizing voice that nurses always used when they talked to patients they deemed troublemakers. “Please don’t cause a scene.”