Darkness Falls (13 page)

About half the room was cast in shadow. About half the items in the room had been piled up against the door.

Of Michael there was no sign.

Then Caitlin saw that the door to the bathroom was closed.

“Michael!” she cried as she ran over to it, turning the handle, fearing that it, too, would be blocked.

However, it opened easily. She ran inside.

The shower curtain was drawn, but she could see something that looked suspiciously like blood running down the inside of it.

Desperate to know what she would see and scared to death of it at the same time, she threw the curtain aside—

—to see Michael lying in a fetal position in a corner of the tub, rocking back and forth. A wicked gash was on his left arm, the blood streaking from the gash onto the tile of the tub.

He was breathing, though. In fact, he was doing so rather heavily.

The nurse finally materialized, with a couple of orderlies behind her, as well as the attending doctor.

“Out of the way, Ms. Greene, please,” the nurse said. “Let us take care of him.”

Caitlin backed out of the bathroom slowly, wondering when she was going to crack. First Michael, then Kyle, now this.

She couldn’t take much more.

“She won’t come in the light.”

Since Michael Greene had first said those words to Kyle back in the hospital, they’d been echoing in his head.

He told Michael he had no idea what the boy was talking about. And he hadn’t. He couldn’t imagine what “she” he was referring to.

Except he did know.

He just wouldn’t admit it.

The creature that hovered in the darkness. The one that whispered in your ear every time it got dark.

The one that claimed you that night.

“No,” Kyle muttered to himself. Then he looked up sharply, but nobody outside the jail cell noticed.

They’d been holding him for hours—in fact, it was almost a full day now. Soon it was going to be daylight. He hadn’t asked for a lawyer. He supposed he could have asked Larry to represent him, but what would have been the point? They thought he had killed Ray.

In a sense, he had.

Or, rather,
she
had.

Because as soon as they were in the dark, that was when she came out.

“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?”

Now Kyle wished he’d told Michael the truth: that he thought it all the time. He even tried it once or twice—those suicide attempts that Captain Henry had thrown in his face.

But he’d denied that it ever happened, even to himself. It was easier that way, especially once he moved to Vegas, got as far away from Darkness Falls as he could.

The minute he got back, though, it all started again. Just as it had that night with Mom . . .

He remembered seeing the scissors. Then, as soon as he had crossed into a shadow, suddenly his mind was not his own.

Then he saw the strange, desiccated creature that looked vaguely female that had whispered, “Don’t peek,” even as his mother lay dying on the bathroom floor, the scissors impaling her stomach.

For years after that, she came after him, but he refused to let her in. He would not allow himself to go into the dark completely. Even as he consciously denied that she existed—and why shouldn’t he? Who would believe that a demon had killed his mother?—he subconsciously did everything he could to keep her away.

So she went on to another target: Michael.

Though if Ray Winchester was any indication, she wasn’t done with Kyle yet, either . . .

thirteen

Caitlin was barely able to focus on what Dr. Murphy was saying to her. Her life had gone from difficult to hellish in less than twenty-four hours. Where Michael had simply been ill, now he was going crazy. There’d been a murder, and Caitlin looked to be responsible for the murderer’s very presence in town.

Murphy was droning on as they walked down the hospital corridor, and she forced herself to pay attention.

“Couple of stitches, he’ll be fine, but that’s not my concern. Michael has no memory of the event. He did this to himself in a transient state. When a patient moves from delusion to self-mutilation, it’s time to take steps.”

Caitlin shuddered. The file that she’d read on Kyle also mentioned self-mutilation.

An older man approached them in the hall, and Murphy indicated him with a sweep of his hand.

“I took the liberty of contacting a specialist in Bangor. Dr. Travis?”

Travis came over and spoke in a gentle, kind voice—a welcome change from the flat, clinical tone of Murphy or, for that matter, the hardened cynical professionalism of Officer Matt Henry.

“Ms. Greene, Dr. Murphy has advised me of your brother’s history and given me a chance to speak with him directly. If we could sit?”

“I’m fine standing.” Caitlin had been sitting either in Michael’s room or in the police squad room or in her car for most of the last few days. She preferred to stretch her legs.

“We should sit,” Travis said in a firm voice that still didn’t lose its gentleness.

Caitlin recognized it as an old teacher’s trick: make the order sound like a nice request. Appreciating the technique, at the very least, she sat on a nearby couch, Travis and Murphy doing likewise. The cracked vinyl made an odd, almost rude-sounding noise as the three bodies settled into it.

“Your brother,” Travis said, “is suffering from a highly specialized form of
pavor nocturnus,
or night terrors. Because of his consistent lack of sleep, he’s suffered a psychotic break. Once the break occurs, the subject enters a trancelike state wherein he or she ceases to be able to discern what is real and what is not. Eventually, they begin to manifest a response.”

“How do you mean?” Caitlin had a good idea what the answer was, but she held out a slim hope that it was just her overactive imagination at work.

“An example. A patient of mine from Poughkeepsie had a recurring dream that he could fly. One night, he got out of bed, walked to his window, and jumped out, all without waking up. He fell seven stories.”

So much, Caitlin thought, for an overactive imagination.

“In Michael’s case, he believes something is after him, wanting to kill him. His self-inflicted wounds are consistent with this fantasy. Now, the good news is that there is a procedure we can perform right here that has had an overwhelming success rate.”

“Is it surgical?” The idea of cutting a child open filled Caitlin with disgust and was an option she would consider only as a desperate, last, life-saving resort.

“Not at all,” Travis said, to her relief. “Michael will be placed in a sensory-deprivation chamber. The boy faces his fears and realizes there’s nothing to be afraid of.”

Caitlin found this plan to be deeply flawed. “He hates the dark.”

“That’s the
point,”
Murphy said, a bit acidly.

Surgery all of a sudden sounded a lot better. “What’s the alternative?”

The doctors exchanged an odd look. Caitlin recognized it instantly:
The patient is not going for our preferred approach; now we have to give her all the options we don’t want to do but have to tell her about.

“Aggressive medication,” Travis said after a moment, “coupled with counseling. But there’s no guarantees. And in the meantime, Michael might hurt himself again more—successfully.”

Caitlin squirmed on the couch, prompting another rude vinyl noise. Aggressive medication coupled with counseling was what she’d been doing for going on six months now.

“We can get the chamber from Bangor and be ready to go as early as tonight,” Travis added.

Closing her eyes, Caitlin thought about Michael and the blood she had seen in the shower. She thought about the ever-increasing agony of the last six months just increasing as Michael got worse.

And she thought about Kyle Walsh and what happened to him when
he
got worse.

She did not want Michael to grow up and turn into
that.

Opening her eyes, she said, “Do it.”

Larry Fleishman’s mood had started out bad when he woke up and deteriorated from there.

When he had left police HQ the previous night—after being given the usual runaround from the father-and-son tag team of Tom and Matt Henry—he had been assured that Kyle Walsh wouldn’t be questioned until tomorrow, so Larry could go and get some sleep if he wanted. This was after he had assured both Matt and his father that he would be representing Kyle.

What they neglected to mention was that Kyle was already being held—they had picked him up at the hospital, then snuck him in so Larry wouldn’t know he was there—and had been interrogated. Larry was sure that Kyle had been advised of his rights—the Henrys might play the usual cop mind games, but they wouldn’t out-and-out break the law like that—but Larry also doubted that Kyle would bother to name him as his lawyer.

So when he showed up early the next afternoon, having spent the night tossing and turning with images of Ray Winchester’s brutalized corpse dancing in his head, he was appalled to find out that he’d been duped. Worse, Kyle had been attacked by, of all people, Ray’s ex-wife, Marie, who apparently had more feelings for Ray now that he was dead than she ever did when he was alive.

It took several hours to get in to see Tom Henry. Larry took that time to check in with Caitlin at the hospital. She seemed surprisingly uncaring about Kyle’s fate, though she was also heavily focused on the new treatment they were going to try on Michael.

When he finally got in to see Captain Henry, along with Matt, he immediately started protesting as soon as he sat in the guest chair in Henry’s office.

Henry just smiled.

“Matt told you we’d interrogate him tomorrow. That was at eleven-thirty. We started interrogating Walsh at one-thirty. Last time I checked, that made it the next day.”

“Very cute, Tom.”

Henry smiled. “Thank you, I thought so.”

“Now I expect my client to be released immediately.”

“Your client?” Henry gave his son, who stood leaning against the wall, a questioning look. “Do you recall Mr. Walsh naming Larry here as his attorney?”

Before Matt could answer, Larry said, “I’m naming myself his attorney, unless he’s chosen someone else?”

The silence that followed answered Larry’s question nicely.

Matt shook his head. “Dammit, he
killed
Ray!”

“You have any proof of that?”

“This is
bullshit,
Larry.”

Larry leaned forward. “No, bullshit is the fact that you’ve kept my client locked up for sixteen hours, you interrogated him without me present, and you have yet to actually charge him with anything. On top of that, you can’t produce a single piece of physical evidence linking him to the crime. Shit, he’s already been attacked while in police custody. You can’t even keep him safe in here!”

“It’s not
his
safety I’m worried about!”

“Both of you,” Henry said, “calm down.”

Matt fumed.

In a much lower tone, Larry said, “Bottom fine, you can’t hold him for more than twenty-four hours without charging him, and you don’t have the evidence to charge him. So you either turn him loose to me now, or I go to Judge Siegel and file harassment charges.”

Slamming the table in frustration, Matt said, “Dammit, Larry—”

“Matt,” Henry said with an undertone of warning.

Then the captain looked at Larry.

“Well?” Larry prompted.

Henry sighed, then turned to Matt.

“Kick him.” Then he turned back to Larry. “Inform your
client
that we may have more questions for him. Especially once all the lab work comes back.”

“When that happens,” Larry said, getting up from the guest chair, “my client will be happy to talk to you—with me present.”

Matt walked out of the captain’s office without bothering to see if Larry followed. Larry did follow, all the way to the holding cell, where Kyle sat with that same damn blank look on his face.

After Matt opened the cage, Kyle’s first question was, “Where’s my stuff?”

“Lab’s not through with it.”

Larry sighed, wishing there was some way to avoid that, but the local lab wasn’t much to work with, and for a murder, they’d have to send things to the county lab, which was quite a haul from here.

As Kyle walked toward him, Larry said, “I believe the words you’re looking for are
thank you.”

Kyle said nothing but simply pushed past Larry and walked out into the street.

It was already late afternoon, almost a full twenty-four hours since Larry had the silly idea of taking Kyle out for a drink, and the sun was starting to go down.

Although Kyle seemed to be walking with a purpose, Larry couldn’t imagine what it was. He had nowhere to go, after all. His time in Darkness Falls had been spent either in the hospital, in the bar, or in a holding cell.

“You want to tell me where we’re going?”

He continued to say nothing but kept moving—toward, Larry realized, a hardware store.

Larry watched as Kyle grabbed a gym bag and then proceeded to relieve the store of one of each type of flashlight it had. He also asked the clerk for a few other items that were in the back—which was, Larry noted, the first time Kyle had spoken since leaving police custody.

“Y’know,” Larry said, “this isn’t exactly the sort of thing that inspires confidence in your lawyer.”

Still, Kyle said nothing.

But his eyes looked different.

They weren’t dead anymore. They were, however, scared.

The clerk returned from the back area carrying a box of glow sticks and a high-tech lantern that looked as if it belonged in a
Star Trek
episode.

As Kyle looked over the lantern, the clerk said, “That’s the shit, ain’t it? Shine a spot on the damn moon. Hunters use ’em at night, mostly.” He pointed at one of the many indicators on the thing. “Even has a gauge to tell you when the battery’s running down. Cool, huh?”

“Not for three hundred bucks,” Larry said, noting the price tag and thinking that it was indeed “the shit,“ as in “piece of.” Then he looked at Kyle. “These make you feel better?”