Dark Company (2 page)

C
addy lay on the bed, her long auburn hair a tangled halo around her stricken face. It was coming, the bad feeling. She could tell by the warning smell of burnt toast in her nostrils and the way her hands were shaking. She didn’t want to go—not now, not again. Clenching her fists, she dug her nails into her palms, nearly breaking the skin. But the pain couldn’t stop the swell from taking her under. It rose in her stomach, rushed through her chest and spilled into her head.

“No …”

The wave hit, dragging her to the place she called the Emptiness. She’d called it that since she was a child. And it was always the same. Bitter cold. Wind clawing at her hair. Her bare feet half buried in the ash that flew through the frozen air and collected in long, lifeless drifts across an endless expanse of grey. It wasn’t the icy wind or ash that she feared most. It was the faces of the dispossessed pushing through the ether. An eye. A nose. An open mouth. And then the moaning would begin.

Caddy shivered uncontrollably, her lips turning blue, her eyelashes gathering frost from the moisture in the plumes of breath
that curled from her mouth. She covered her ears and hummed her shining song, the one her mother used to sing to her when the bad feeling would come.
“There is a light that shines in the night … there is a light …”
The voices were only whispers then. Now they were angry and loud, demanding that she listen.

“Please, stop,” she begged.

The mouths twisted and gaped. Gnarled fingers punctured the grey. They reached for her, grasping her arms and legs and clothes until she doubled in half and screamed.

The sound zippered shut and Caddy fell back into the now. She lay on the bed, rocking back and forth, hazel eyes open, glassy, waiting for the shivering to stop. When she was sure it was over, Caddy rose, slowly, steadying herself on one elbow before sitting up on the edge of the bed. Hands stiff with cold, she took the brush from her night table and moved it in deliberate strokes through her hair. Such a simple act. It grounded her. Kept her from disappearing altogether. At seventeen, she was more frightened than ever by the Emptiness.

“It’s a gift,” her mother used to tell her when she was small. “One day you will understand its purpose.”

To Caddy, the visions were a curse, bleeding seamlessly through the ages along her father’s ancestral lines, haunting generation after generation, to rest here, in the nightmares of a frightened and reluctant girl. This was her legacy. And no matter how her mother tried to convince her otherwise, Caddy knew the visions were the furthest thing from a gift. She was marked, not chosen. Born to suffer in confusion and fear, like her father and the dozens of equally cursed relatives that came before him. Whatever purpose the visions served, she wasn’t ready to know, nor did she think she’d ever be. She’d grown up hearing her father crying out in the night, and her mother’s voice, soothing him through the agony of his helplessness. There were too many souls in the Emptiness, too much pain. He couldn’t help any of
them—no one could. Why did her mother and father expect anything different from her?

The visions made her an outcast, a freak. She kept to herself, didn’t make friends because she never knew where or when the bad feeling would come on or how much it would take from her when it happened. The threat of it followed her relentlessly, a malevolent spectre.

And after her mother died, it got harder and harder to take. The car accident had killed her instantly. It had robbed Caddy of her father, too, but slowly, one drink at a time. He’d always taught her to be self-reliant and strong. In the end, he was the one who gave up. Now she had to deal with things on her own. There was no one to put her back together once the bad feeling came on.

Caddy stopped brushing her hair and listened to the silence. Her father hadn’t come home last night. Or somehow she’d missed the familiar sound of him stumbling to his room and his usual loud argument with the dark. Cleaning the hair from her brush, she tucked the little nest of auburn strands into the small linen bag she kept in her night table drawer. She would burn the hair outside, later, along with her nail clippings, the way her mother had shown her. It was meant to protect her from “bad intentions.” This had stuck with her as a child because she wasn’t really sure what “bad intentions” meant, or who was behind them. Her mother never explained that part. Whether the hair-burning ritual worked or not, Caddy had no way of knowing. She instinctively feared things would be worse without her mother’s superstitious practices, so she performed them without question.

Caddy changed out of her nightgown into a pair of old jeans and a blue T-shirt. She checked the clasp on her necklace. It was a simple gold chain with a small oblong stone of polished green fluorite her father had given her for her fifth birthday. A
talisman to ward off negative energy. She called it her “safe stone.” She never left home without it.

Grabbing her phone off the dresser, Caddy quickly pinched her cheeks to bring the colour up. She didn’t need a mirror to know how thin and pale she looked, especially lately. The bad feeling was coming so often these days it left her drained. “I’m still here,” she said to no one.

Her father’s door was half open. His bed was unmade and empty. It was always unmade, unless she made it. But empty? Never. Not this time of day. She checked her phone. He hadn’t called. She surveyed the mess in his room for clues, her eyes skipping over the endless bits of nature he’d collected over the years—bird eggs, dead bugs, leaves, stones. And seeds. Always the seeds. Gathered from every plant he found and kept in little bowls and cups and envelopes scattered throughout the house. He insisted on teaching her the names, including the Latin. He’d even taught her how to germinate them, their pale green shoots pushing up through the soil, searching for light.

Caddy closed his door. There was nothing out of the ordinary in his room as far as she could tell.

In the kitchen a chair lay on its back like the victim of a bar fight. Dirty dishes crowded the sink. She tested the taps for water. The pipes whined and sputtered, coughing out rust. No surprise. It was water-rationing season. Sometimes it got so bad the dishes would sit in the sink for days.

Abandoning the taps, Caddy righted the chair and checked the living room. An empty whiskey bottle and a newspaper lay where they’d been dropped by the couch, next to a yellowed glass ashtray mounded with spent cigarettes. The room stank of stale smoke. She shook her head at the sight of the newspaper. It was another one of his eccentricities. No one read the paper anymore. He wore an old watch, too, the wind-up kind, one his father had given him as a boy. And he read books—real ones. So few
people did. She used to poke fun at him for that, calling him a relic. But she never chided him for leaving the TV on. It helped drown out the loneliness, she knew that.

The TV flickered, soldiers marching soundlessly across the screen. “A simple show of force.” That’s what the government had said it would be. Then one country pushed another too far. Now there was talk of bloodshed and bombs.

Caddy stared at the screen. It was too horrible to fathom. Was the world really heading for war? She looked for the remote. When she couldn’t find it, she turned up the volume manually. The marching soldiers were interrupted by a blare of music, and the bright face of a young girl appeared. She smiled hopefully into the camera, holding a small sheaf of wheat in her perfect little hands.
“Real solutions for a better world,”
the voice-over proclaimed.
“Brought to you by the Company.”

Caddy scoffed. The Company never did anything for anyone unless there was money to be made. It squeezed oil from sand to keep the cars running, bottled and sold water to the highest bidder, mined uranium and dammed rivers to keep lights burning. It even developed seeds guaranteed to solve world hunger—for those who could afford it. Yeah. She knew all about the Company. It thrived when everything else failed. It shuffled employees like playing cards and tossed them just as easily. And somehow, its hands were always clean. Her own father had been thrown on the discard pile along with so many others. He’d worked in the company research department doing … something. She didn’t know what exactly because she’d never asked. When he got fired she just assumed he’d locked horns with someone he shouldn’t have over something he cared about. That was his problem. He cared too much. At one point in his life he actually thought he could change things. It didn’t take a genius to see that the Company was self-serving and corrupt. And someone like her father, no matter how brilliant, would inevitably become a problem.

“God bless the Company,” Caddy muttered. She searched for the remote again, stumbling over the whiskey bottle and upsetting the ashtray on the carpet in the process. Yanking pillows from the couch, she found the remote wedged between two cushions. She aimed it at the TV and pressed the power button several times. Nothing. She checked the batteries. Missing. Typical. She tossed the remote back on the couch, shut the TV off, and retrieved the newspaper to scan the headlines, even though there was no point. They were always the same. War, drought, epidemic, jobless rates. Then this:
One-Armed Bandit Strikes in South Town
.

Good old Scum Town. It amused her that they called it South Town because it wasn’t a town at all. It was an industrial wasteland on the margins where the city fell away to decay. Another casualty of the crumbling economy. No one went there unless they absolutely had to. And even then, only in daylight. Caddy skimmed the article. It was the third murder in less than two weeks, it said. So why wasn’t it all over the news? Not that murder was extraordinary in South Town. Lots of bodies showed up there. But this was different. This was weird. The victims were all found with their left arms missing—and no other obvious connection. Even stranger was the fact that the arms had apparently been removed with a knife.

Caddy flapped the paper on to the couch and picked the cigarette butts from the floor, dropping them back in the ashtray. She balanced the tray to the kitchen and dumped the contents into the trash, coating the discarded Styrofoam takeout containers and dirty tissues with a thin grey film. It was a sticky mess and she was considering changing out the bag when she noticed something: a tiny square of white paper, singed at the edges and folded several times. She plucked the paper from the garbage and shook it open, careful not to tear it. There were light pencil marks, barely visible. Holding the paper up to the bulb over the
sink she could see it was an address written in her father’s choppy hand. 80 Knox—a South Town address. What were the chances of that? Why would her father want to go there?

For a while after losing his job he went around the city scavenging scrap—copper pipe torn from abandoned buildings, sheets of metal roofing. He was never comfortable going to South Town. If that’s where he’d spent the night, she had reason to be worried. Was he in trouble? Maybe she should go to 80 Knox, to make sure he was all right. No, she was getting worked up for nothing. It was just a piece of paper with an address. Who knew what it meant? Her father would be back before she got home from school, she told herself. He’d probably stepped out for more booze and cigarettes. Besides, she had a Physics quiz today. She’d already missed two this month when the bad feeling came on before class. She’d missed so much school because of it—sometimes hiding in the girls’ washroom, sometimes crouching in an alleyway. Or not even getting out of bed. Refolding the square of paper, she slid it into a crack between the cupboard and the wall for safekeeping.

Caddy checked the time. She was going to be late for school—again. Stuffing her feet in her sneakers, she shrugged on her jean jacket and swung her small leather duffle bag over her shoulder. She stepped into the hall, quickly closed the apartment door and then stopped before turning the key in the lock. Maybe she should stay home and wait for her father after all … She thought about this for a moment, decided against it and locked the door.

Navigating the minefield of garbage on the stairs, Caddy cursed under her breath the entire five flights to the landing, the sound of people arguing and babies crying filtering through closed doors. How she hated this dump of a building. It wouldn’t be bad living on the top floor if only the landlord would fix the elevator. There was no hope of that. It’d been broken for as long as she could remember. Caddy averted her eyes when she passed
another tenant in the foyer. She had no interest in knowing anyone else who lived here.

Outside, the air was sour and the sky heavy with smog. It made it difficult to breathe. Caddy flipped up the collar on her jacket, put on her scowling face and walked beneath the shadow of the tenement buildings. Picking up the pace, she nearly stumbled over a rat as it scurried past her feet. She jumped back with a shout. More than anything, she hated rats. Their twitching noses and sharp yellow teeth. Their ceaseless digging and squeaking and fighting in the walls of her bedroom at night. They were a plague in the city, crawling up through the plumbing, biting babies in their cribs. “Get out of here!” she yelled, kicking a stone. The rat dodged it and vanished down a sewer grate.

One minute to the bell. Breaking into a trot, Caddy crossed the street and had just reached the curb when she heard the screech of tires against asphalt. There was a sickening thud, followed by the cymbal crash of a bicycle hitting the pavement. Instinctively, Caddy grabbed for her safe stone, clutching it through her shirt as she spun around to see a girl flop helplessly beneath the wheels of an old car. Blood pooled on the ground around her head. There was a heartbeat of perfect silence as Caddy froze, unable to move. She knew the girl pinned under the car. It was Meg Walters, Poe’s girlfriend. Beautiful, grey-eyed Meg, the most popular girl in the school.

A man in a tin-coloured suit stepped calmly from the car, straightened his tie and walked away as though nothing had happened. And then a boy began shouting.

“Someone’s been hit!”

In an instant, hundreds of students poured into the street. Caddy pushed against the crush, panic taking over. She couldn’t stand witness to another car accident, ever—not after her mother. She was only ten years old when it happened, strapped in the
back seat of the car. Her mother never wore a seatbelt. It made her feel claustrophobic, she said.