From Darkness Comes: The Horror Box Set (33 page)

Sighing heavily
, she told herself that at least Ty hadn't pressed charges today, a development that had surprised her until she realized having her arrested might mean word would spread about what had precipitated the drama between them, and he would be understandably leery about such details hitting the streets where his wife might hear it. It was about the only positive she could find in another dismal day.

Someone was standing outside the apartment.

For a moment, she thought it might be Wayne, but as she drew closer, she saw that the body was too thin and a little too short. Only the jacket he wore looked the same. The man stood there, staring up at the windows on the second floor, alternating between stamping his feet on the sidewalk and blowing into his cupped and ungloved hands. She felt sorry for him being out here so ill-equipped for the harsh cold, but had no notion of stopping to tell him so or to offer him charity, which in this part of the city, was most likely what he wanted. The streets were too dangerous here, and if he wasn't a bum hoping for a handout then chances were he was waiting for some unlucky sucker to rob.

Louise surreptitiously reached for her purse and unzipped it. Inside was the can of Mace Marcia at the Overrail had given her on her first day
, after Louise told her she wasn't driving home, but walking.
Girl
, Marcia had said, with a disapproving shake of her head,
Around here, no one walks anywhere unless they're carrying a gun
. The threat was worse at night, which was why Louise had requested the day shift, but in winter, when the light faded early, there was little difference.

As she approached her building
, stepping off the curb to avoid having to pass too close to the man, he stopped his bouncing and turned. His lower face was hidden by a threadbare black scarf, a wool cap pulled down almost to his eyes.

She saw that he was young
, the visible part of his face unlined by the wringer through which all young men were passed as the dark secrets of life were eventually revealed to them.

Louise ducked her head and moved past him.

He mumbled something to her.

"
Sorry," she said, nerves jangling, and quickened her pace. It was not a question, but an apology that she could not stop to listen. She hadn't been able to make out the words, but it had sounded like he'd said "Wanna sleep." Trying hard not to think too much about what such a cryptic message might mean, she trotted up the steps of the building and quickly snatched her key from the jumbled guts of purse, her hands trembling from the day's ardor as she drove it into the lock and turned. When the man spoke again, his voice was clearer and this time his words made her freeze, every hair on her body standing on end.

You
're dreamin'
.

Eventually
, she turned.

The man—the
boy
—had pulled down his scarf to reveal an uncertain, yet hopeful grin, and with him came a tsunami of emotion that crashed down on Louise, sucking the air from her lungs.

"
Oh God."

Her past approached her in small careful steps
, wreathed in the smells of dust and leaves and forgotten warmth, but it was only a memory, as she feared was the boy standing before her.

It had to be a memory. Or a ghost.

His eyes were wide, and alive, as he came to her. "Mom...it's me."

Finch was there when they brought her home, though he tried not to let himself be seen.

The Lambert House was modest but attractive. A white-tract home with brown decorative shutters and dormer windows
, it was set just far enough apart from its neighbors to avoid looking like part of a subdivision, which is exactly what it was—just one of thirty-nine buildings of similar design. The house was relatively new, had not yet conceded defeat to Ohio's scorching summers or freezing winters. The roof looked pristine, the windows polished, the lines straight, the angles sharp. The lawn was neatly tended. But Finch knew that if there were any validity to the claim that houses absorbed the emotions of their owners, the Lambert home would soon begin to sag. The windows would darken even in sunlight, spots of dirt would speckle the siding, the bones beneath the skin of the house would weaken, and cracks would appear. There would be too much hurt and misery for the house to remain standing proud.

He watched as a gray SUV slowed and turned into the driveway. The windows were tinted
, so he couldn't see the passengers, only a darker version of a sky pregnant with rain, but he knew the car, had seen it many times before. It had spent its fair share of time in his own driveway over the years.

There were no reporters at the house. They had kept vigil there like hippies at a folk festival since the day the news broke about the murders
, but as soon as the murderer was named and his death announced, they started to lose interest. Killers were always popular in the news, particularly one this savage, but dead ones weren't worth the hassle, not when the space could be filled by the latest atrocity in the Middle East. Even at the height of the frenzy, coverage of the Alabama murders had paled in comparison to that of beheaded engineers and assassinated politicians in Iraq. Now, the farther away from the epicenter of the massacre you went, the further into the paper you had to look to find mention of what had happened in Elkwood. It was a different world these days, Finch realized. Since 9/11, society's gaze had shifted outward in search of blame, to places unseen and seldom heard of except in grainy pictures on the news. Everyone was looking for the boogeyman. The worries of a nation were with their soldiers, no longer on their own stoops. And every day there was more cause for grief as word was sent home of another casualty. The internal corruption and strife of America went unnoticed, its troubles measured only by the amount of bodies and flag-draped coffins.

Finch sighed
, shifted in the car seat and lit a cigarette. The smoke filled the Buick and he waved a hand through it.

He had been there
, at the core of the unrest in Iraq, and had seen Hell firsthand. It had infiltrated him, possessed him, destroyed him, and they'd sent him home, promising he would be fine. But he hadn't. He'd taken Hell home with him. The army, the government, some faceless son of a bitch in an expensive suit chomping on a cigar a thousand miles away from the conflict, had put him there and hadn't been able to exorcise it from him when he'd returned. Despite the pride and strength he'd always claimed were his biggest assets, his turmoil was so great he'd sought assistance, but a series of stops at the VA center and hospital in Columbus yielded little help. He was put on a six-month waiting list and told to sit tight. And in that time, he read the papers and watched the news, and saw his fellow marines die of neglect, turned away by the very administration that had made so many promises.
Die over there, or die at home
, seemed to be the consensus, and in that respect, they held true to their word. Finch turned to alcohol, and briefly to drugs, but they only fed the horror inside him, fortified it, allowing his demons a legitimate stage from which to torment him. More marines had died. He quit watching the news, quit listening to the world.

Until it took his brother from him.

Danny
.

The last he
'd seen his face had been on the main evening news, his gangly arm thrown over the shoulders of his girlfriend Claire. Now he was dead, hacked to pieces by an insane doctor.

But of course
, that wasn't true. Not if Claire was to be believed, and why shouldn't she be? Who else alive could tell the world the truth about what had happened down there in that dirty little town? Except, they refused to believe what she'd told them because they had already celebrated the end of their grisly case weeks before Claire was even conscious, buried it in the same pit with the remains of the old doctor, who they knew without a shadow of a doubt had, despite having no previous history of violence, gone berserk and hacked up a load of kids. Backs had been slapped, folders had been tossed into filing cabinets, and sudsy beers had been tossed back while they grinned at each other, dug into steaks and thick fries smothered in ketchup, before going home to their wives and girlfriends, maybe to sleep after a hard day's work, maybe to make love to put the proper end to a case they hoped someday to tell their grandchildren about.

The Sheriff who
'd seen to Claire in Birmingham, a man by the name of Marshall Todd, had called Finch's mother to offer his condolences for the umpteenth time, to let them know Claire's release was imminent, and that they might do well to prepare for all kinds of questions from left-field. The girl's story, he informed them, ran contrary to what they knew to be true. He suspected she was out of it from the painkillers, was misremembering things as people do in the aftermath of such a terrible trauma. All it would take to inspire a story like that, he said, would be repressed memories and a shifting of the wrong ones. She could be remembering the scenes but superimposing things over them that hadn't been there at all. He could understood completely how a woman forced to endure such an awful ordeal, crazy with pain, disorientated from the abuse she'd taken, would see phantoms where there had been none.
Even so
, he'd conceded,
if it turns out Wellman had an accomplice, we'll look into it, but the important thing to keep in mind is that the main figure at the center of this atrocity is dead, and I hope that brings you some little peace of mind.

Finch shook his head as rain beaded the glass and the SUV squeaked slightly to a stop close to the front door of the house.

It hadn't brought them peace of mind, and, standing in the kitchen, trembling, his mother had yelled at the Sheriff, questioning his foolishness in thinking it might when her son was dead.

The driver side door of the SUV opened and Claire
's mother got out. A high school teacher at least two decades his senior, he nevertheless recalled fantasizing about her during those halcyon days back when everybody lived forever, and happiness was daydreaming about taking your teacher over the desk during detention, or asking a girl out and having her look at you like she thought you'd never ask. It was a basketball victory, a smoke behind the bleachers, a Friday night cruising with your friends, sipping beer outside Wal-Mart until the cops came, the smell of the air, electric with possibility.

Then the war had come
, and he'd taken it home with him, only to find a worse one waiting.

He shuddered the smoke from his lungs and squeezed his eyes shut for a moment
, then raised his head.

Mrs. Lambert didn
't look nearly so appealing now. Her face was wan and pale, her eyes liquid smudges peering out at a world she no longer took for granted, or trusted. Her long curly brown hair was in disarray, her clothes shabby and wrinkled from a long drive.

The year Finch graduated
, Mrs. Lambert retired from Hayes High School after coming home one night to find her husband dead on the kitchen floor in a puddle of milk after his heart gave out while he was getting a drink. Surviving him had aged her considerably. Finch suspected what had happened to Claire would push her further to the grave than time alone could ever manage.

He watched Mrs. Lambert move to the side door of the SUV and
, with visible effort, wrench it open. She looked like a scarecrow trying to throw wide a barn door. At the same time, the front passenger door slammed shut, and Kara emerged, looking like a younger but just as harried version of her mother. Finch felt something akin to excitement in his stomach, but it was immediately quelled by the memory of what had happened between them, how she had managed to move on with her life and he had gone to war to forget his, only to have bullets compound the fear that wherever he turned, he'd still be punished.

Unlike her mother
's, Kara's hair had been cut short. Finch didn't approve of the style, but figured that would hardly send her world careening out of orbit if she somehow got wind of it. Besides, when they'd been together, she'd had her hair long to suit him. The new cut was to suit someone else, or maybe just herself, as whenever he saw her around town she was alone, and not looking at all put out by it.

It made him ache to see her.

Now she joined her mother and reached in, pausing a moment to look around, probably to ensure no cameras were rolling. Finch guessed that the hospital might have leaked news of Claire's discharge to the media, but the date would have been intentionally inaccurate, allowing the Lamberts to get Claire home a few days before the vultures descended. The reporters would figure it out, of course, but by then there'd be little they could do, assuming they'd care.

Kara
's gaze settled on his Buick, where he'd parked it facing out of a driveway two houses down on the opposite side of the road. He had to resist the urge to duck and felt his insides squirm the longer she watched him. She would recognize the car of course; he'd had it since their dating days, had driven her to Niagara Falls in it, made love to her in the back seat one drunken summer night then laughed about the immaturity of it, and the rearview mirror still held the memory of her standing at her front door six months later after she told him he scared her, that she couldn't tolerate his moods or his temper any longer.