Darkness Falls (3 page)

“But that’s not even the end of the story. Eventually, the missing kids turned up safe and sound. The townspeople realized they had killed this woman for
doing nothing wrong.
And this town’s been screwed up ever since.”

The silence that greeted Kyle’s report was broken only by more whimpering from Kimberly. Actually, she was crying. Kyle desperately wanted to laugh in her face, but she was all the way in the back of the room, and he didn’t want to walk that far.

From the front of the room, dopey Ray decided to open his mouth, which was always a sign of bad things.

“You’re such a weirdo.”

Coming from this idiot, that was a compliment. “I’m not a weirdo,” Kyle said. “You’re a weirdo—”

“Okay, boys, that’s enough,” Miss Pisapia said before Kyle could explain, in great depth, precisely why Ray was the weirdo and not he.

Ray looked at one of the other morons he hung out with. “Ever since he moved here, he’s been such a weirdo dick—”

“Language,
Raymond!” Miss Pisapia said sharply.

Kyle laughed. “Yeah,
Raymond.”

Ray then did something that surprised Kyle: he spit at him. It landed right on his face.

Right where the blood had been in the bathroom.

Miss Pisapia hauled herself up from her desk and put a hand on Ray’s shoulder.
“That’s
it. You, young man, are going to the principal’s office.”

The teacher droned on about how they wouldn’t tolerate such behavior in the classroom.

Kyle tuned it out. He found his eyes drawn to the pile of school supplies on his desk.

In particular to the protractor for math class.

With its very sharp point.

Kyle remembered the blood he had seen under the green fluorescent lights in the boys’ bathroom.

Suddenly, and for no reason that he could actually speak in words, Kyle found himself very interested in whether or not Ray’s blood was as red as his own.

Miss Pisapia droned on, telling Ray what a disgrace his behavior was, Ray trying to defend himself on the basis of Kyle’s character deficiencies, Miss Pisapia not buying the argument that it’s okay to torment someone if you find him socially unacceptable.

Kyle walked to his desk, grabbed the protractor, and raised it into the air.

Cat Greene’s eyes grew as wide as saucers. Kyle wasn’t sure if she actually cried out, “Kyle, don’t!” or if he just imagined that she did. He didn’t really care, either. He just
had
to know what color Ray’s blood was.

He brought the point of the protractor down into Ray’s back.

Some noise was made in the classroom. Somebody screamed. Somebody else yelled. Cat was saying something.

Kyle didn’t pay any attention to any of it. He was busy staring at Ray’s back to see if his blood was red.

When he saw that it was, he smiled.

three

Days like this, Scott O’Malley felt as if he was back in Boston.

He’d grown up in the Boston public school system and had had noble intentions of giving some of what they’d provided for him back, of being the guiding force to a new generation of South End youngsters, just as his teachers were for him. They had taken a callow, shallow youth and molded him away from the Southie standard of the punk Irish kid and into a somewhat respectable adult who chose college over construction work or some other blue-collar job.

What he never realized was what a pain in the ass it would be dealing with kids like him from the other side of the desk.

He had always thought highly of his teachers when he was a kid, but as an adult he was close to worshipping them for not actually hauling off and murdering the demons in their charge.

After several years of increased stress, he had moved up to administration, thinking—erroneously, and against the very loud objections of his wife, his kids, his father, his mother-in-law, and his psychiatrist—that it would reduce said stress and still allow him to repay the debt he felt he owed to his own teachers.

One diagnosis of high blood pressure and two ulcers later, he had finally given up and started looking for work outside the city. Way, way outside the city.

Luckily, medical history notwithstanding, he had found a position available as the principal of the primary school in the small town of Darkness Falls. A Southie born and bred, O’Malley had always thought of small towns like Darkness Falls as indistinguishable from hick farming towns in Kansas. He was surprised, then, to come for the interview and find, if not what anyone would call a thriving metropolis, a perfectly fine modern city that had such amenities as fax machines and the occasional personal computer. In fact, Darkness Falls School had a better mainframe than the public school in Boston that he’d left behind.

Best of all, the kids were
nice.
Okay, they weren’t about to win Best Behaved Kids of the Universe awards or anything, but they generally weren’t armed with switchblades or violent or in need of serious therapy at best and jail time at worst.

The teachers weren’t exactly the best and the brightest. The curricula were no doubt cutting edge when they were first printed in 1927 but left something to be desired a mere ten years away from the twenty-first century. O’Malley had been struggling to change that, which had been difficult, but, unlike the challenges of the South End, this was more a case of getting the old guard to change its habits and was a gentle fight against tradition, not a physical fight against fists or an ideological fight against bigotry.

All in all, he was content with his life in Darkness Falls, as it was nothing like the nightmare that was being an educator in Boston.

At least until the Walsh family moved to town.

Kyle Walsh in some ways reminded O’Malley of himself as a youngster. Quiet, withdrawn, incredibly bright, and prone to nasty bouts of temper. But young Scott O’Malley had actually had friends when he was ten. Kyle’s only friend was Caitlin Greene.

And now—now, he’d stabbed a boy. With a protractor, not a switchblade, but it was still giving O’Malley unpleasant flashbacks to the bad old Southie days.

Dorothy Pisapia had come in blubbering like a madwoman, saying that one boy had stabbed another, and O’Malley had recovered quickly enough to calm her down, have his secretary call 911 and then the respective boys’ parents, and get the nurse over to Dorothy’s classroom to administer first aid until the paramedics arrived.

The ambulance arrived fairly soon and took Raymond Winchester, the victim, away to the hospital. Kyle Walsh, the perpetrator, had been sitting outside O’Malley’s office since the incident, never saying a word. O’Malley noticed that there seemed to be a glob of spittle on Kyle’s chin. This, he soon found out from a still-blubbering Dorothy, was what precipitated the whole thing: Ray spitting on Kyle. Dorothy didn’t seem to think it was a stabbing offense, and O’Malley had to restrain himself from pointing out that he’d seen worse in his time.

But not here. Not in Darkness Falls. And even if he had, there were still going to be serious consequences.

Ray’s parents arrived first. The mother had immediately gone off to the hospital to check on their son. The first thing the father—a calm, reasonable man who also happened to be one of the town’s more prominent attorneys—had said was, “I assume the boy responsible for this has been expelled?”

In fact, O’Malley hadn’t given it a thought yet, but he knew what the unspoken next sentence was:
If not, the lawsuit will be filed first thing in the morning.

O’Malley spent the next fifteen minutes soothing Jeremy Winchester. Yes, the school would cover all hospital bills. No, they’ve had this sort of trouble from young Mr. Walsh before, sad to say—he hasn’t been right since he arrived, really. Of course, the lad would be immediately expelled. That was school policy—even though, in truth, no such policy existed, simply because the idea of one student stabbing another hadn’t entered into the thoughts of whoever came up with Darkness Falls School’s assorted regulations. O’Malley mused that this was a touch ironic for a town most famous for the lynching of an innocent woman . . .

After reassuring Jeremy Winchester that the school would do everything in its power to hold off an embarrassing and costly lawsuit, the next person O’Malley had to face was Margaret Walsh.

He sympathized with the woman, he really did. She had lost her husband and now had to raise a moody, violent child on her own.

But that didn’t change the fact that he had to expel her son.

“Mr. O’Malley, I understand why this may seem like—”

O’Malley cut her off. “It doesn’t matter what it seems like, it matters what it is. Even if I could come up with a reason why I shouldn’t expel Kyle, I can come up with ten reasons why I should—and most of them would come from the school’s lawyer. Besides, Kyle has been having enough trouble since he got here. Do you really think he’d be able to continue to function even at the low level he was at before now?”

Margaret Walsh had nothing to say to that. She just looked at O’Malley pitiably. The principal wanted desperately to be able to comfort her and reassure her. He probably could have done so far more sincerely than he did Jeremy Winchester.

But years of facing up to irritated Southie parents and entrenched Boston bureaucracy had made it easy for O’Malley to harden his heart. “I’m afraid we have no choice, Mrs. Walsh.” He hesitated, then decided to invoke the old when-in-doubt-try-psychobabble rule. “This isn’t the first time he’s acted out.”

“He’s been having a very hard time of it since his father’s passing,” Mrs. Walsh said. “He hasn’t been sleeping lately.”

If she was going to whip out her own psychobabble card, O’Malley had no choice but to take the blunt route. “I sympathize with his loss, Mrs. Walsh, but it’s no excuse. He
stabbed
another child. The boy’s going to need stitches.”

“He was
provoked!”

O’Malley tried not to sigh. The psychobabble defense having washed out for both of them, she was now going for the old standby: it had to be the other child’s fault, because
her
child would
never
do something like that.

“My son is not violent—” she continued, but O’Malley interrupted with his trump card.

“The only way for our school to avoid a lawsuit is to expel Kyle. I’m sorry.”

Mrs. Walsh, unsurprisingly, had no reply. O’Malley was worried that she might try the we-can-fight-the-lawsuit argument, but either she knew better, or she had just lost the will to keep the argument going.

Given how much of a troublemaker her son had been, O’Malley suspected that she’d be having a lot of these conversations. And they’d all end the same way. It was not going to be easy, and O’Malley felt a pang of sympathy.

“If you like,” he said as he got up, “I can give you a list of schools that specialize in troubled children.”

Mrs. Walsh also stood. “That won’t be necessary.” They exited the office. Kyle was sitting on the bench outside O’Malley’s office, staring straight ahead. To O’Malley’s dismay, he
still
hadn’t wiped the spittle off his chin, and it had now dried, making it almost look like a scar.

“Come along, Kyle,” Mrs. Walsh said, holding out a hand. Kyle took it and got up from the bench.

The two of them walked toward the door to the school. O’Malley watched them and thought that it was all such a waste.

Then Kyle turned around and looked at O’Malley over his shoulder.

When he was the dean at the Southie high school, there was one boy named William McGreal. McGreal was like Kyle: sullen, not too many friends, always getting into fights. There were rumors that McGreal and one of his friends—the friend was also a Southie but enrolled in a different school—were involved in an assault on three kids, though no charges were ever filed.

One day in the cafeteria, McGreal got into an argument with one of the other kids. McGreal then took out a switchblade that he had somehow got past the metal detectors the state had required them to put in and plunged it right into the other kid’s chest.

When the police came and took McGreal away, he stared at O’Malley. This was a boy of fifteen who had just taken the life of a fellow student. But O’Malley saw no remorse in his eyes, no caring, no regret. Nothing.

William McGreal’s eyes were dead.

The next day, Scott O’Malley started looking for another job.

Today, O’Malley saw the same look in Kyle Walsh’s eyes that he had seen in William McGreal’s.

Shuddering, O’Malley broke the gaze and went back into his office, grateful for the bottle of Scotch he kept in the bottom drawer of his desk.

four

1838

Sarah Orne was scared.

The four-year-old girl’s mouth had been hurting for days now. Mother said that it was normal, but then one of her teeth started
moving.
Teeth weren’t supposed to
move.

Mother tried to explain it to her, but it didn’t make any sense. Why would her teeth just fall
out
like that?

Sarah was scared that she was going to wind up like Auntie Margie. Auntie Margie didn’t have any teeth, and she talked funny. Sarah did not want to be like her.

But then her older sister, Mary, explained it to her. Mary had always been better than Mother or Father at explaining things. Her parents’ explanations never made any sense, but Mary’s did. Mary had explained once before about the difference between rain and snow: snow came up out of the ground, where rain came from the sky; it only looked like snow fell down because of the wind. And she also explained that losing teeth was a way of not being a baby anymore.

Mary also knew a secret. You could trade your old teeth that fell out for sweets.

“Really?” Sarah said with her mouth that still hurt.

“Uh-huh. When your tooth finally comes out—and it’s a
baby
tooth, so you don’t want it anymore anyhow—we’ll go up to the Lady of the Lighthouse, and she’ll give us sweets!”

Sarah had heard about Lady Lighthouse from her friend Charlotte. Charlotte’s mother told Charlotte that Lady Lighthouse used to make cakes for Charlotte’s older sister Samantha’s birthdays, and for Charlotte’s, too, when she was one and two, but Charlotte didn’t remember that because she was just a baby then.