Tales from the Nightside (15 page)

“Chuck? Davey, let that boy go immediately!” I rose and slapped his hand loose. Stevie didn’t run away; he only sauntered back to his friends and they moved in a pack toward the swings. “Now, what’s this all about, dammit?”

Davey shoved his hands in his windbreaker pockets and wasted a few seconds scanning the overcast sky. I saw with a start, then, that anger and something else had combined to produce tears he didn’t want falling. He swallowed several times, then ducked his head to gaze at the ground. “Chuck,” he said. “He’s run away from home. Just like El.”

“Davey—”

“I was there!” he insisted. “I was sleeping over, right? I thought I heard this noise outside, so I got up and went to the window. That one,” and he pointed to Darlene, “was standing in the backyard. Chuck was there, too, talking to her. I ran downstairs, but they were gone before I got there. I must have ran around that block a hundred times, Mr. Craig, and I couldn’t find them. I woke his folks, but they only called the police. They didn’t believe nothing about the kid.

They wouldn’t listen.” He looked up, and the tears fell. “They done something, Mr. Craig, and if somebody doesn’t help Chuck soon... there’s only three of us left, Mr. Craig. It don’t make no difference now what we do. God, you got to do something.”

Before I could say anything, he raced to the gates and away, the other two following closer than shadows.

I must be getting old, I thought; I don’t understand a damned thing that’s going on around here. But Davey, for all his fool faults, had frightened himself into something bordering on hysteria. He probably knew Chuck had been in some kind of trouble—a girl, drugs, something like that—and when he ran away, Davey used a dream as his excuse. But I couldn’t help thinking of my own dream that night; the kids and the slide and Darlene on the lawn. I knew it was weariness and a drink or two that made me see what I thought I saw, but it disturbed me nevertheless, made me walk slowly over to where the children were playing.

“Darlene,” I said, “Davey tells me you were at his friend’s house last night.”

She only smiled and pulled at her braids. “Not me, Mr. Craig,” she said when I repeated my not-quite-question. “I have to be in bed right after supper.”

“Me, too,” Stevie said, clinging to my leg, then sliding down to sit on my foot. “Me sleep, too.”

“Good for you, Stevie,” I said.

“Mr. Craig?”

“What is it, Darlene?”

They were all around me now, and I couldn’t help a glance at the slide, the mats, the hole that wasn’t there.

“We...” And she looked to the others, who were smiling broadly and trying not to laugh. I’ve seen that look before, when the children want to be solemn, want you to know that what they’re going to say is important and yet they’re embarrassed. Usually, they run away shrieking, immediately twisting the compliment into a game.

“We like you, Mr. Craig.”

I was startled. Though I didn’t know what to expect, that was definitely not it Miffy took my right hand and rested it briefly against her cheek. And so did the others, one by one until I found it hard to swallow and the light blurred at the edges of my vision.

“We really like you, Mr. Craig.”

The years I had weighted my shoulders. I knelt, then, and Stevie scrambled silently onto my lap.

“Would you please visit us sometime? Sometime soon?”

I would have been pleased to see their homes, but I knew from what Marve had once told me that their parents were beginning to resent the influence I had over their offspring.

“Will you let them get us?” Tim said, pointing vaguely toward the gates.

“No,” I managed to say through Stevie’s insistent hugging. Don’t worry, kids. I won’t let them hurt you.”

They broke, quietly, and after a moment I realized I had been dismissed. And glad I was, because one more word would have had me bawling like a baby. It was a good feeling, a needed feeling, and it should have had me cloud-walking for the rest of the day, but I couldn’t help thinking about Davey and his friends; they were so terrified now they’d be moved to do anything, and I was tempted to call their parents to warn them. Tempted, but I did nothing. It would only be meddling again, or so they would think. And if they complained loudly enough, Marve would be forced to take my playground from me.

I didn’t want that.

But the following morning, Chuck was at the foot of the slide. Staring.

And people began to talk.

5

The disintegration was slow. A child here, a family there, but within a week or so after Chuck’s death the playground was practically deserted and even the comfort of my little friends couldn’t stop me from seeing that proverbial hand writing.

Catherine told me, finally, while we were at dinner. Told me about the whispers, and the letters. “You should hear them, Kit, and read those things. It’s disgraceful the way they’re behaving.”

“What can it hurt as long as they don’t come out to lynch me?”

She puffed on her cigarette angrily, her face momentarily obscured by the smoke. When she waved it away impatiently, her bracelets jangled, the only harsh sound in the dim quiet of the Inn. Then she reached across the table and took both my hands in hers. “Kit, it’s getting dangerous for you. I hear things in the office, I really do, and there’s talk that you did it. All of it. Can you believe it?”

“Ah,” I said. “Just because Gary was killed just around the time I came back, huh? I must have learned some foul, dark sins while tramping across foreign soil.”

“I know it’s coincidence, Kit—”

“Well, of course it is, dammit!”

“—but they don’t know it. Marve called me today and asked me how you were feeling.”

That hurt, more than if she had accused me directly. “What’s his damned problem, huh? Can’t he call me? He has to go through you, is that it? Hasn’t got the damned guts to face—”

“I said you were a little tired is all. I said there was nothing seriously wrong with you.” The “is there,” however, was as clear as if she had said it.

I bridled, immediately paid the check and took Catherine home. In silence. In anger. Wondering what the hell I had done that would make my own town turn against me like that. But all it took, obviously, was one frightened mother, one angry father...

I ran to the playground, ducked into the woods and climbed the fence back by the mats. When I was over, I had to sit on one of the swings to calm my lungs, to wipe the perspiration from my face and palms. And when I was sure I could stand without my legs trembling, I went to the slide and walked slowly around it, touching it, pressing against it, standing at its foot and sighting along its length to the top, and to the mats not three feet from the end. They met in the comer, black slabs against the night, and I blinked slowly when I imagined I saw a hazed shimmering, a distortion of vision not quite circular. I rubbed a knuckle into my eyes and knelt on the ground in front of it. Reached out my hand.

And it vanished.

Into cold/warmth, a feeling of winter/summer, sunlight and clouds.

I yanked my hand back, scrubbed it against my side and ran. Clambered over the gates. And ran.

Again I had had too much to drink. I know it.

But I can’t help thinking:

About coming up undetected on a child in a room, listening to him talk seemingly to himself. There might be a doll, or a shadow on the wall, or a favorite stuffed animal toy truck, tin soldier. There would be a scowl when he was interrupted.

About watching a child chasing himself in the yard, shrieking with delight—and that instant frown when an adult I comes by.

About children sitting on the ground, solemnly and intently staring at a tuft of grass, an anthill, a sliver of bark.

Kid stuff.

But my hand vanished.

Suppose, then, there’s a world—no, not a world, the world, where reality lies uncovered, to which children unaffected yet by us and our deceptions can escape. To remember, to know what it’s like and return with resentment for what they are becoming.

Suppose, just suppose, they really get angry. With a kid named Gary, or Eliot, or Chuck. Suppose they invite Gary, Eliot, Chuck to visit their world. Suppose they drop them down the slide and watch them vanish, rush in after them and haul out their bodies.

Why bodies?

Because despite their youth, Gary and the rest are already blinded; and the light they are exposed to frightened them to death.

We like you, Mr. Craig.

I don’t believe this for a minute, of course. Not a word. - Not a thought.

We really like you, Mr. Craig.

But I don’t think I’m going to look out my window any more.

Would you please visit us sometime? Sometime soon?

That way I won’t see Darlene at the gate, the others beside her. Miffy with a bouquet of flowers in her hand; Stevie sucking his thumb; Tim with his baseball cap pulled down over his eyes. I’m their friend, I know, but what they don’t know is that friendships can hurt more than emnity can.

And if I don’t see them, maybe I won’t hear them. Maybe I won’t hear Darlene when she calls me out to play.

In a living room, pieces of sparse and battered furniture had been formed into a square so that, in her darkness, the old woman could find them, avoid them without the tap of her probing white-tipped cane. There were neither rugs on the floors nor pictures on the walls, and only a single shapeless lamp. No matter the day or the weather, she always wore the same dress, an oddly shapeless garment whose colors had seemed dead for centuries. Her hair was decades long, braided and coiled into a silver basket around the top of her head; and her face and arms and thin, strong legs were shadowed with ancient wrinkles.

But, as she sat at her piano, her hands glided out from long, laced sleeves, and they were beautiful.

Eric sat quietly on the family room floor, his short legs pulled up tight in awkward Indian fashion, his back resting stiffly against the dark-oak paneling that covered the walls to the ceiling. His hands, as pinkly puffed as the rest of him, were folded in his lap, and for a moment he smiled, thinking of how his teacher would approve. Caren lay on the overstuffed couch, her white blond hair sifting down over her face. One hand dangled almost to the floor, and when, in her sleep, she whimpered once, it jerked up to her cheek, touched, and fell again. He was tempted to wake her but didn’t want to move, didn’t want to whisper. The slightest sound might spoil the battle, might make him miss the music, and then it would be too late.

He stared instead at the walls and the pictures there of his father’s favorite game birds. Then he tried to count the floor’s black-and-white tiles; but his eyes blurred and he had to shake his head to clear his vision. A fly, perhaps the last of the year, darted across the room, swerved toward him, and made him duck. Automatically, his hands unclenched, remembered, and settled again. His knees ached where he had scraped them the day before. Caren sighed.

Through the two windows above the couch he could see the brown-edged leaves of a ribbon of flowers his mother had planted along the front of the house. They had been green once, like all the others in the neighborhood; watered, dusted with aerosol sprays, and caressed with eyes that loved and appreciated them. By stretching very slightly he could see beyond the single row of faded bricks that separated the garden from the lawn. The grass was hidden, but he knew it was dying anyway, a perfect camouflage for the leaves that sailed from the elms and willows.

I wish I knew what I was doing, he thought as he lowered his gaze to Caren again. I never killed anyone before. But I guess it’s got to be done or she’ll kill us all first. I know it. I know she will.

Visions of his parents, of Caren’s, of all the others, lying in the street like so much discarded trash.

Visions of television shows, of movies, of twisted evil women burning at the stake and laughing, having their heads cut off and their mouths stuffed with garlic, fading to corpse-gray dust at the first touch of daylight.

Visions, and it was all supposed to be make-believe, and the witch, vampire, werewolf wounds just makeup that washed off with soap.

A strong gust of wind drummed twigs against the windows, and Caren moaned softly in her sleep. As she rolled over onto her back, Eric wondered if he should have talked to some of the others. But he knew most of them would have been too frightened to do anything but call for their mothers. In fact, Caren was the only one who believed all that he said and was the only one who was willing to join in the fight.

Maybe, he thought, we’re both a little nuts. Even in the stories, vampires only drink blood.

But his father, he recalled, had been complaining about things called deterioration, depreciation and plummeting values just before he had been hospitalized; and perhaps if Eric understood it more he might be convinced that this was what was killing the street, and all the other streets in all the other towns. He frowned, scratched at his chin and rhythmically, lightly, thumped his head back against the wall. Maybe. And maybe his father was so involved in just being an adult that he couldn’t see what was real anymore. That’s what Caren had said after her spaniel puppy had been killed by a driver who hadn’t even bothered to stop to say he was sorry.

Murder.

The word popped into his mind unbidden.

“Eric,” Caren had said that afternoon, “we can’t just break into the house and kill her. How can you kill her?”

“I don’t know. Maybe we can find a gun somewhere, knock her out and, I don’t know, cut off her head or something.”

“You’re being silly.”

“Kids kill people all the time. I see it on the news at night”

“Big kids,” she said, pulling nervously at her hair. “We’ll have to think of something else."

“Like what?”

“I don’t know, but we’ll think of something.”

He shifted to ease the discomfort creeping up his back, then rubbed his palms against his thighs. The sun went down unwatched, and the windows went briefly black before reflecting the single light from the floor lamp near the steps. He stretched his legs straight out ahead of him, and his heels squeaked on the tiles. Caren jumped, swung her legs to the floor, and sat up.