Darkness Falls (14 page)

“Yeah,” Kyle said as he handed the clerk his credit card. Then he took a look at his watch.

Larry wondered if he had some kind of pressing appointment or something.

“ ’Cause,” Larry said, “if they don’t, we can run down to the old five-and-dime and pick up a shitload of rabbit’s feet and four-leaf clovers for you.”

Kyle gave that the response it admittedly deserved: more silence. He signed the credit-card slip, placed the glow sticks and flashlights in the gym bag, and then hefted it.

Finally, Kyle said something to Larry. “Where’re you parked?”

Larry blinked. Then he pointed at his Lexus. “Right over there.”

As Kyle made a beeline for the car, Larry asked, “Okay, now what?” He also took out his keys, unlocking the door with the remote.

Kyle got in the passenger’s side door and looked at his watch. Larry got in the driver’s side and gave Kyle an expectant look.

“It’s five thirty-six
P.M.
Sunset is in twenty-two minutes. You have exactly twenty-two minutes to get me to the hospital.”

On the list of things Larry expected Kyle to say, that was somewhat low.

Then Kyle pulled out the gun.

Larry started. Somehow he’d missed that in the array of flashlights and batteries and gym bags that Kyle had purchased at the hardware store.

Kyle didn’t make any threatening moves—he was just checking the clip to make sure it was full—but Larry suddenly realized that he should probably do whatever Kyle wanted.

Blowing out a long breath, Larry closed the door and started up the car.

As he wended his way down Main Street, he forced himself to ask the question he usually never asked his clients.

“Did you kill Ray?”

No reply.

“Kyle?”

“I don’t know, okay?”

For the second time in as many minutes, Kyle replied in a way Larry hadn’t been expecting.

“You don’t
know?”

“I have these things, these night terrors. I don’t know what’s real or what’s not. It’s a blank.”

“I guess it’s safe to say you’re not over it,” Larry muttered. Why Kyle couldn’t have just said that on the phone when Caitlin called, Larry wasn’t sure. But there was nothing to be done about it right now.

“This isn’t the way to the hospital, Lar,” Kyle said with an intensity that scared Larry as much as anything—and he’d been scared quite a bit these last twenty-four hours.

Larry ignored him. “You try and be a good guy,” he muttered as he took a turn so fast his tires squealed. “You try and do right by your family. And what happens? You end up playing chauffeur to your possibly-serial-killing cousin. I ask you, is that fair?”

“Faster, Lar.”

“Believe
me, I’m trying!”

A car coming in the other direction nearly swerved off the road to avoid hitting the speeding bullet that Larry’s Lexus had become.

“Why’d you have to come back, man? Everything would have worked out fine if you never came back.”

“I’m sorry.” To Larry’s surprise, Kyle sounded as if he meant it.

Larry, however, was on a roll. “Do you know how long I’ve been trying to get through to her? First it was her brother always there, and then the ghost—”

Kyle whirled and looked at Larry. “Ghost?”

“You!
No one in this town had a chance with her. She never got you out of her head. All she could ever think about was
you.
You guys were only ten years old, for Chrissakes . . .”

“I just wanted to help Michael,” Kyle said in as small a voice as he’d used since arriving.

“Michael’s gonna be fine. They’re putting him in a sensory dep tank, gonna shut out the lights, show him there’s nothing to be scared of.”

Again, Kyle whirled toward Larry, this time looking horrified. “They’re going to put him in the
dark?”

“They’re gonna
fix
him. Tonight. Hell, maybe this’ll work on you, too. You should consider it.”

Larry turned a corner and almost crashed the Lexus into an orange Detour sign. He slammed his right foot on the brake, the tires squealed, and he and Kyle both jerked forward.

The car stopped well short of the sign. Larry was suddenly very grateful for his fifty-thousand-dollar car and its top-of-the-line brakes.

The sun was now most of the way below the horizon.

“Take me to the hospital, Lar,” Kyle said.

To accentuate the point, Kyle raised the gun.

Larry cringed.

Suddenly, the windshield went black.

The road ahead had been nicely illuminated by the Lexus’s bright headlights one minute; the next, he could see only darkness.

The headlights were still on—the dashboard lights were working just fine—but he couldn’t see a thing out the windshield.

He took his foot off the accelerator, not wanting to keep going this fast, and was about to hit the brake and hoping his memory that the road had been going straight was accurate, when the windshield cleared.

The Lexus was heading straight for a very large, very intimidating tree.

Slamming his foot on the brake, Larry desperately turned the steering wheel with both hands.

Too late.

Pain slammed into Larry’s ribs as the seat belt sliced into his chest and the Lexus collided with the tree. He could hear the wrenching sounds of bending metal and plastic as the grille collapsed on impact. And then he felt yet another impact on his chest, as the air bag expanded out from the steering wheel.

It was several seconds too late. Larry wondered whom he could sue to redress that particular flaw.

He crawled out of the car, his glasses having fallen off. He wiped what he thought was sweat out of his eyes, only to look down at his fingers and see that it was blood. And he heard a strange buzzing sound that he thought was a symptom of his head injury.

“All in all,” he muttered, “this is turning out to be a really shitty week.”

On top of this, he could have sworn that whatever it was that blocked the windshield was, well, a
woman,
oddly enough.

That couldn’t have been right, though. Probably all these night terror stories from both Michael
and
Kyle, compounded with staring at Ray Winchester’s mauled body, were causing his imagination to go into overdrive.

After he clambered out of what was left of his car, he reached up to grab a tree branch for support to get to his feet.

Then he realized that it wasn’t a branch.

It was an arm.

The arm of the woman he’d just convinced himself was a figment of his imagination.

The buzzing grew louder.

Larry had once seen the corpse of a man who had drowned—it was one of his first criminal cases. The body barely looked human, covered as it was in the detritus of the ocean, not to mention the rather unfortunate effects of prolonged exposure to salt water on human skin.

This woman managed to look like that
and
look like a burn victim at the same time.

Unfortunately, Larry didn’t have time to think about where he might have seen her before.

In fact, he barely had time to scream . . .

She had been able to claim one of them, at least.

First she broke his legs.

She was about to do worse, but then he crawled into the light that emitted from the horseless carriage.

The other one—the one who had spurned her—stood in that light, which protected him.

It protected her victim, too
—
or, rather, it would have, if his destroyed legs weren’t still out of the light. And in the darkness. And where she could strike.

She few down and grabbed his legs.

He screamed in pain, even as he clawed at the other one. She dragged him into the darkness.

Then she finished him.

Another dead.

Unjust? Perhaps.

But what did justice matter to her? She brought joy to the children of this wretched town, and as a reward, they hanged her and burned her.

They would pay.

She lived her life with a husband who did not give her children, and then with children who thought of her as their very own gift giver, as much a saint as Nicholas, but she came any time of the year, not just at Christmas.

And they hanged her. For nothing.

So if the man whose life she took was an innocent, what did it matter? She was an innocent, and no one came to her defense.

Many of those she’d killed over the years had been innocent. It no longer concerned her.

The other one remained in the light.

Kyle.

She had thought Kyle might be different. But he was like all the others. Fickle.

Despite the danger, she lunged at him, but the light hurt her in ways she could not begin to describe, so she pulled back.

Kyle stared up at her. Unlike most of those who saw her—those unlucky few—Kyle seemed to realize what she was.

She had always known Kyle was special.

A pity he had to die.

“Michael.”

She frowned.

Kyle then got into the horseless carriage and drove off, leaving the vehicle illuminated even on the inside, keeping her at bay.

Damn him.

She followed him as he drove the vehicle—which made several wrenching noises it didn’t make before—back the way it came. She could hear him talking to someone on one of those mechanical wonders that they’d come up with.

Kyle pleaded with whoever was on the other side of his conversation—apparently somebody from the healing place.

He begged them not to put Michael in the dark.

She laughed.

This would be almost too easy . . .

fourteen

In her dream, Caitlin was being pursued by a madman who had Kyle’s body but Michael’s face and was wielding a pair of bloody scissors.

Caitlin tripped and fell, in her dream, and then Kyle/Michael held the scissors aloft with one hand, shining a flashlight into her face with the other.

Just as he was about to plunge the scissors into Caitlin’s heart, she saw that he was wearing a porcelain mask.

The scissors whizzed toward her chest—

—just as Dr. Murphy nudged her awake.

“We’re almost set up,” the doctor said as Caitlin sat upright on the couch. “It’ll just be another fifteen minutes.”

“Where’s the other doctor?” she asked, rubbing the sleep out of her eyes.

“He had to get back.”

“So you’re going to do this?” Caitlin asked harshly, not realizing until it was too late that such a tone—and an unspoken accusation—wasn’t entirely fair to Murphy.

Defensively, Murphy started, “Ms. Greene, I’m perfectly capable—”

“I know, I’m sorry,” Caitlin said quickly, regretting her words.

After a moment, Murphy handed her a clipboard.

“I need you to sign these.”

“What are they?” she asked, taking the offering.

“Standard consent and release of liability forms.”

She shot him a look.

“He’ll be fine. We have to do this for the insurance. You understand.”

Caitlin nodded wearily. She’d learned more than she ever needed to know about the joys of filling out forms for the express purpose of keeping the insurance bureaucracy rolling along over the past six months.

By the time she was done skimming the forms—she wouldn’t sign anything she hadn’t at least given a cursory glance at—and then signing them once she was satisfied that the hospital wasn’t going to claim her firstborn or anything like that, they were wheeling Michael out.

He was strapped down to a gurney—Caitlin had already objected to that precaution but had been overruled by hospital policy—and was being wheeled over to the room with the sensory-deprivation tank.

Caitlin walked beside the gurney in silence, stroking her brother’s hair.

For his part, Michael stared at the ceiling. At first, Caitlin thought he had the same look on his face that Kyle had, but she forced herself to think of that as simply her overactive imagination on overdrive, especially after that dream she had.

“Don’t be afraid, Michael. It’ll all be over soon.”

Michael just stared at the ceiling some more.

And overactive imagination be damned, the look on his face was the
same one
that Kyle had had on his face twelve years ago the night his mother died.

The night
—come on, Caitlin, you can finally admit it to yourself now
—that Kyle killed his mother.

They brought him into a room with what looked like an MRI chamber the way H.R. Giger would have designed it. Michael was set on a table that would be placed inside a wide, dark tunnel.

As the orderly prepared a hypodermic needle, Murphy said, “We need to inject him with a sedative so we can monitor brain activity.”

Caitlin nodded, and Murphy took the syringe from the orderly. Then he took Michael’s arm and started to inject the IV shunt that fed directly into Michael’s arm.

Suddenly, Michael’s back arched off the table, and he screamed as if he were in tremendous pain.

“Hold him down!” Murphy instructed the orderly.

“What’re you
doing?”
Caitlin asked, wondering what
else
could go wrong.

“There can be a burning sensation.” He looked over at her. “He’s not allergic to fish, is he?”

“What the hell are you
talking
about? You didn’t check before—”

“Calm down, calm down—it’s all in.”

As quickly as he had gone crazy, Michael went limp. Murphy took the syringe out of the shunt.

Michael wasn’t actually allergic to fish—or to anything else, as far as Caitlin knew—but it was still a helluva time to ask. She wished more than ever that Dr. Travis hadn’t had to go back to Bangor.

She rested her hand on Michael’s chest, then withdrew it in shock. Even though he was supposedly sedated, Michael’s heart was going a mile a minute.

“It’ll be all right,” she said, the words sounding ridiculous even as she said them, but she was unable to say anything else. “It’s almost over.”

Yeah, right . . .

As soon as the orderly and the nurse picked Michael up to put him into the tank, he started to cry.