From Darkness Comes: The Horror Box Set (168 page)

“The CSS code. Yep,
got it. How about the link tags? Good? Okay. Yep, will do.” Brian hung up the
phone and leaned back in his chair.

“Can I talk to
you?” Drew asked. Brian twirled his fingers while sipping bottled water. “It’s
not work related,” Drew added.

“Never
stopped us before.”

“Did you ever
think someone was in your apartment?”

“Once I thought
I had two women in my bed, but it was just a dream.”

“Never mind,”
said Drew as he turned back toward his cubicle.

“Sorry. Sit down,
man.” Brian kicked the edge of another chair, which sent it flying toward
Drew’s knees. He stopped it with his left hand and sat down at the desk
opposite Brian. “You mean like ghosts?”

“Not exactly. A
feeling like someone else is in the room with you.”

Brian tilted
his head toward the panels of the suspended ceiling dotted with emergency
sprinkler heads.

“Honestly, I
don’t think so. I remember being scared shitless as a kid when my folks made me
go upstairs to bed. We had a family room in the basement with our television
and toys. My parents would stay up watching shows and at my bedtime they’d send
me upstairs to brush my teeth and go to bed. I used to leap over steps on the
way up, convinced something was going to get me. I’d run down the hall and turn
on my bedroom light. I felt safer under the covers, but getting there was
always a bitch. And it was the same thing, night after night.” Brian paused and
smirked at Drew. “You looked serious. I didn’t want to fuck with you.”

“Sorry, man. I’m
not used to seeing this side of you.”

Brian shrugged
and tapped a pencil on his phone. “What’s going on, Drew?”

Drew took a
deep breath and placed his elbows on his knees. He hunched over and looked left
to right before replying. “Had a strange feeling last night.” Brian waited,
pencil tapping. “I was on the computer around 3:30.”

“First
mistake.”

Drew ignored
the comment and continued. “It felt like there was someone else in the room. I
felt different. The shadows didn’t act like normal shadows do.”

“Gimme the
money shot,” said Brian.

“I heard words.
Something about ‘short,’ but I fucking heard them, man. I am not kidding.”

Brian whistled
and made the loco gesture next to his right temple.

“I knew you’d
be an asshole about it,” said Drew.

“What do you want
me to say? What if I had come to you with this story?” Brian’s extension buzzed
and lights flashed across the surface of the phone. He reached out with the
left hand and snagged the receiver. “No. No, I have not gotten to the CSS code
yet.”

Brian looked at
Drew and shrugged his shoulders. Drew stood and walked back to his cubicle.

***

He cranked the
radio the entire way home. As “the big 4-0” came closer, he found himself
splitting time between heavy metal and afternoon talk shows, an unthinkable
compromise to the teenager he once was. The clouds suffocated the landscape,
swallowing the snow-covered lawns of suburbia. Spring would arrive in less than
forty days through the seemingly eternal vise-grip of winter. As the
disembodied voices continued to chatter through the stereo speakers, Drew’s
mind floated back to her.

“Why did you
do that?”

“Retract
it?”

“No. Send
it. Why did you send it in the first place?”

Vivian
pushed a strand of dark hair behind her ear and crossed her legs in the chair. “I
was hurt. I lashed out.”

“You could
have ruined my career, my marriage, my life.”

Again,
Vivian uncrossed and recrossed her legs. Drew caught glimpses of the garter
straps at the top of her thighs. He looked around as if he could will another
human to enter the break room. The microwave and mini-fridge sat silently,
offering no help.

“I’ll be
here,” she said.

“You have to
let this be, Vivian. Please.”

“You and I are
fated, Drew. I felt it the first time we met. You’ll come to me and I’ll be
here. I promise.”

She stood
and placed a benign kiss on his left cheek. He felt the moist, warm touch of
her lips, which made his entire upper body twitch. She let her breath linger on
his skin long enough to raise the hairs on the back of his neck, before she tossed
her hair to the side, opened the break-room door, and strutted back to her
cubicle.

“You’re sitting
in the driveway?”

Drew looked out
the driver-side window at Molly, standing there in the snow-packed driveway,
her coat pulled tight to her chest with her left hand. The engine was still
running, the radio personalities still arguing.

“Yeah. Didn’t
want to miss the end of this segment. Interesting stuff on global finance.”

Molly gave Drew
a halfhearted smile and then climbed through the snow to the garage door. She
kicked the clinging ice from her boots and stepped inside. Drew turned the
volume knob to the left and winced at the sting of the little white lie. He
turned the ignition off and sat in the car listening to the engine block ping
and crack where extreme heat met extreme cold.

Gotta quit
looking over my shoulder
, he thought as he reached to the passenger seat to
grab his messenger bag and gloves.

***

“Are you okay?”
Molly asked.

“Yeah, hon. I’m
fine,” replied Drew.

“You seem to be
a bit out of it recently. I was just mentioning it in case you thought it might
be wise to see Dr.—”

“I said I’m
fine,” replied Drew, cutting off Molly’s sentence.

“I can’t go
through that again. I mean I would, ‘cause I love you, but I just don’t know if
I have the strength.”

Drew looked at
Molly and saw the scars on her psyche caused by his breakdown. He thought about
her coming out to the driveway this evening, and could not remember how long he
had sat there once he shoved it into park.

“I’m fine,
really. I’ll go and have them double-check the dosage if you think I should.”

She reached
across the table and placed her hand on his. He saw the sparkle of her
grandmother’s engagement ring in the light, and the way it reflected off her eyes
made his heart flutter.

“With the kids
now, it’s just that—”

“I fucking
heard you the first time!”

The wall shook
from the force of Drew’s chair smashing into it. Several glasses on the table
toppled and rolled to the edge, dispersing milk to the floor below. Billy and
Sara came running into the dining room. Molly clutched the collar of her shirt
to her neck and ushered them up the steps and into their bedrooms.

Drew walked to
the living room and collapsed on the couch. He felt the walls closing in, his
vision narrowing with the onset of the migraine. He thought about his outburst
and the look on Molly’s face for a split second before seeping back into his
anger. The television war between Tom and Jerry continued as Jerry shoved a
bomb into Tom’s mouth. Drew fumbled for the remote control and pushed buttons
until he could no longer hear the commotion. He turned to his side and buried
his head in a pillow on the couch. Drew laid there for a few minutes before he
opened his eyes. The room sat under a blanket of solitude. The only light came
from the VCR clock, which read 2:29. He had slept for the better part of four
hours.

A buzzing sound
came from the end table where Drew’s phone sat.

Text or e-mail
?
he wondered, while reaching for it. He could not remember setting it to
vibrate, but that’s what it was doing. The vibration ceased as Drew turned it
toward his face. When he touched the screen, there was no message.

He dropped the
phone on the table hard enough to register disgust, but without enough force to
break it. Drew sat and rubbed a hand through his hair. He heard Sara snoring
and smelled the sour milk that had congealed on the floor underneath the dining-room
table. He had lost the evening to rage and a migraine, a couple that liked to
go out together at his expense.

The old
refrigerator buzzed and popped while the amber glow from the streetlamps
returned to the room. A few random toys lay scattered on the floor, novelty
pencils and scraps of notebook paper scribbled with the broad strokes of a permanent
marker. The winter wind grabbed the wooden storm doors and shook them to the
core. Drew stood and felt the floor shift beneath his feet. He sat back down on
the couch.

“Prison.”

He turned to
face the gaping maw of the doorway leading to the stairs. Shadows wavered like
a mirage on a desert highway. Drew slid a finger between the blinds and scanned
the front yard for a sign. Nobody outside the house and nobody at the door.

“It’s all a
prison.”

The sentence
could not be mistaken for random noise. Drew sat back on the couch and closed
his eyes. He felt swirls of red passing beneath his closed eyelids and a slight
buzz in his extremities that caused his fingers to tingle. His mouth went dry
and his tongue turned into a wad of cotton.

“What is?” He
heard his words, but could not tell if they originated from his mouth or from
the charged ether of the room.

“All of it.” The
voice delivered the words with perfect diction, but as if spoken from the
bottom of a well. Each syllable resonated and reverberated with mathematical
precision.

“I don’t
understand,” Drew replied, this time certain he had spoken the words and not
thought them.

“You will. Now
that we have been introduced, there are important things that must be done.”

Drew put both
hands on his ears. He had to convince himself that he was not wearing
headphones, listening to a psychedelic recording that pushed the audio back and
forth across the stereo field. The voice bounced from left to right as if a
cyclone of sound swirled around his head. “I’m coming apart. Again.”

A slight sigh
brushed past Drew’s nose. His eyes saw nothing but the darkness of the witching
hour holding dominion in his living room.

“I can help
you.”

“Where do I
begin?” Drew asked.

“The
temptress,” replied the voice, the last syllable trailing away like the hiss of
a serpent.

***

Drew awoke by
leaping out of bed. He leaned over and kissed Molly on the cheek, something
that had all but been extinguished around year seven of the marriage. She
opened one eye and smiled before turning over and hitting the snooze button on
her side of the alarm.

He smoothed
down the collar and fixed his tie in the mirror. A set of bright eyes and a
slightly upturned smile looked back. Drew pulled Billy’s and Sara’s doors shut
to give them another thirty minutes of sleep before they had to prepare for
school. He bounced down the steps, mumbling the melody of a long-forgotten tune
from the 1940s big-band era. He never listened to the Benny Goodman stuff, but
his grandfather loved it. Drew remembered going to his grandparents’ place
every Sunday and thumbing through his grandfather’s record collection. The album
covers intrigued him more than the music. The big band and jazz records
celebrated sadness that promoted a good mood, a paradox lost on children.

***

The
sedan cruised toward the off-ramp like it had hundreds of times before. Drew
steered the vehicle with the slight guidance of his left hand while the right
fumbled through the controls on his MP3 player jacked into the car’s stereo
system. He scanned through the folders and hit the play button on the Dropkick
Murphys.

Irish
punk-drunk rock
, he thought.

He ripped the
volume knob to eight and basked in the fast-paced, bagpipe-laden motif of
Boston’s finest. With Bob Marley and the Dropkicks on his player, it was
difficult to feel down for long.

He grabbed his
travel mug, messenger bag, and gloves as he skipped through the revolving doors
of the office building. Drew smiled at the others in the elevator, even those
hammering away on their smartphones and BlackBerrys. He hummed “Jump Jive &
Wail” as the cable tightened and pulled the occupants into the upper reaches of
the building.

***

“Resigned?”

“Quit.”

“Same
difference. How did you find out?”

“Got the whole
department buzzing. Haven’t you been to the break room yet?”

Drew shook his
head, indicating that he had not been part of the rumor buzz infiltrating the
floor. “What’s the scoop?” he asked Brian.

Brian sat on
the edge of Drew’s desk. He leaned forward and lowered his voice as if
divulging top-secret, highly classified information. “Johnson found a letter of
resignation on his desk this morning. Her desk is cleaned out.”

“What did it
say?”

“Something
about a family situation that ‘demanded immediate attention’ and that she
regretted leaving this way.”

“She doesn’t
have family. I thought she was an only child and her parents were dead?”

Brian sipped
from his coffee and exhaled a satisfied breath. “Extended family?” he asked
Drew.

“None that I
know of,” Drew replied.

“Don’t you
think it’s weird that she printed out her resignation? Why not e-mail it or
leave a voice mail? I know that it’s more professional to write a letter, but
if you quit like this I’m not sure what good a hard copy does ya.”

Drew
contemplated what Brian said and shook his head. “I’m sure details will emerge.
She had friends in the department, right?”

“Yep. Leave it
to me, hoss. Next happy hour at Sully’s I’ll get the scoop from Brooke or Jen. Even
if I have to sleep with them to get it.”

“You’re such a
team player. Always willing to sacrifice yourself for the good of the whole.”

Brian smiled
and slapped Drew on the shoulder. “Somebody’s gotta do it,” he said, and walked
off toward his cubicle.