After the People Lights Have Gone Off (11 page)

“An angel,” Gwen said.

Evelyn just stared at the spindly man.

“Next,” he said, no humor in his voice at all.

“Who are you anyway?” Lew said.

“Somebody who needs proof,” the spindly man said.

“Of what?” Lew said.

“The intangible,” the spindly man over-enunciated. “You know.”

“I don’t have to tell you,” Lew said. “I never even told my wife.”

“Of course, of course,” the spindly man said, all manners now. “Just leave Marcy running home through the darkness all alone.”

Lew looked from the spindly man to Marcy. Then to me.

“So maybe I saw something once,” he said.

Just to have control again, I nodded for him to continue.

The spindly man shifted his chair in anticipation.

“We were at…well, it doesn’t matter,” Lew started off. “Way past the DMZ. Deep, no support. Somebody was shooting at us from a fortified position. So we ventilated his little roost, and he stopped shooting like you have to. Because you’re dead.”

“Exactly,” the spindly man said. “The dead don’t shoot, of course they don’t. What is this, television?”

Lew wasn’t listening to him anymore, though.

“Only, once we broke cover, that dead sniper, he came back up over the lip of his little parapet. Except—I was the only one to see it—he was still dead. And there was another man up there with him. Moving that dead sniper’s arms like a puppet. Putting his finger on the trigger. We lost three more men that day.”

“And you made it home,” the spindly man said. “Good for you. You’re living breathing proof of the intangible. You saw it, respected it, and were given your life in return. Who else, now?”

There was Jackie, Gwen, Drake, and me.

“When her father died,” Jackie started, her hand gripping Gwen’s knee, but then Drake cut in: “I used to lie in my bed all night. I knew there weren’t any monsters in the closet, or under the bed. That was stupid. But outside. Outside was much bigger.”

“It is, it is,” the spindly man said, smiling again, his lips thin enough as to hardly even be there at all.

“So one night,” Drake said. “One night I decided I was going to call it out. My fear, I mean. I was going to get up, go to my window, peek out the corner. If nobody was there, then it was just all in my head. But then, when I pulled the curtain to the side, there was a pair of eyes looking back at me.”

The spindly man laughed in his chest.

Jackie gripped Gwen’s hand harder.

“It was my own reflection,” Drake said then, right to the spindly man. “It was proof I was being stupid. That I was a kid. Does that count?”

“Did it feel stupid?” the spindly man asked. “Or did you sleep in your parents’ room that night?”

Drake didn’t say anything. Just drummed his fingers.

“After my husband passed over,” Jackie said then, speaking for her and Gwen both, evidently, “we could hear something in the garage some nights.”

“Mom,” Gwen said, trying to shut her up.

“And one time I finally went out there, with a spatula.”

“To scramble some brains…” the spindly man said.

“There was a puppy,” Jackie said. “He’d left us a puppy.”

“The garage door was open, Mom,” Gwen said.

“And, tell me,” the spindly man said. “Did you keep it, this puppy? Are you giving it unmonitored access to your house now?”

“Unmonitored?” Lew said, defensive.

“Who knows what our pets are up to when we’re away,” the spindly man said, angling his narrow face over at me now. “They could stand up on two legs, walk all around. Sniff at the vents for things only a dog could smell living up there. Waiting up there.”

“Stop,” Evelyn said.

The spindly man was still watching me.

“Good professor?” he said.

I looked from face to face of the group.

This wasn’t at all where I’d meant this discussion to go. But, I had to admit, what we were doing, it was showing what we brought to the story. Which had to reveal, in part, the means by which it had got to us. Like an archetypal well of shared stories. One King had the savvy to tap into.

We all had a devil on our back trail.

Or, in my case, in front of me.

“The day of the wreck,” I said, swallowing loudly. At least in my ears. “The driver of the furniture truck. I don’t think he was a person. Not anymore. I think he’d been waiting all day just to cross that intersection. He was—he was smiling when we hit him. And you don’t smile, do you? What kind of a person smiles when a kid’s about to get disfigured for life?”

Jackie reached across Gwen to pat my thigh.

“Now,” the spindly man said, to the group. “The good doctor here. Do you actually believe a man in a black suit was driving that truck that day, or has his own memory and guilt altered his memory of it?”

“This is over,” I said, standing, my chair scraping away from me. It was too loud in the tight gym. Too sudden. And I didn’t care.

“But—” Marcy said.

“He’s right,” Lew said, standing as well, his eyes with mine.

The soldier, always looking for someone to guard. It was so cliché, so stupid. And I was so thankful for him.

He went around collecting plates, everybody else standing to help, to arrange.

Everybody except the spindly man.

He hadn’t moved from his chair. He was just letting the group course around him, his arms crossed like he was in a pout, and wanted us to know it.

As was custom in our little group, I stayed in what had been our circle, shook hands and gripped shoulders. It made me feel like the captain going down with the ship. Lew held onto my hand longer than he had to, pulled me close.

“You good?” he said, meaning the spindly man.

“I’m golden,” I said, and smiled to prove it, then ducked my head for Evelyn to drape her just-made scarf around my neck.

She pecked me on the cheek, Drake shook my hand, and the last one through the double doors was Gwen. She looked back to me, her eyes plaintive, almost. Like she was telling me no.

I raised my hand in farewell.

Behind me, the spindly man coughed into his hand.

“We have to leave now,” I told him.

“Thought it went until eight,” he said, standing to face me.

“Not tonight.”

When I reached for his chair, to put it up, he took it instead, jerked it away.

“Good selection,” he said. “‘The Man in the Black Suit.’ I identify with it, you could say.”

“You never told us your proof,” I said. “Of the intangible.”

We were standing at center court.

“Some of us don’t need proof,” he said, measuring his words. “But, tonight. Next campfire I find myself at, I might tell the riveting story of the book group. The one who didn’t know what they were playing with. The one who thought stories are just made up. What do you think, doc? I got a winner there?”

“Tonight was a horror story for us,” I told him, more than a little proud of myself for coming up with that, “not you.”

“So I take I’m…uninvited?” he said.

“Will that stop you?” I said back.

He looked to the dark gym behind me. To get me to look as well, it seemed.

I didn’t. I wouldn’t.

“Maybe tonight’s story isn’t even over yet,” he said, then, before I could reply, he was pushing back into the double doors. “Tell Captain Lewis thank you if you will, for the dish. And for remembering.”

“Rememb—?” I started, but now he was tipping his hat, bowing out.

Gone.

I finally breathed.

And looked behind me, now that I could.

The whole gym was dark, a patchwork of deeper and deeper shadows. At work tonight, there was going to be walls and walls of shadows, I knew. Me moving silently through them with a cart, a dolly, a back brace. A broken son. One I was so grateful for it hurt.

I wanted to cry, I think.

Instead, I straightened the spindly man’s chair. It was already straight, but I wanted to make it straighter.

Next I turned like always, to nod bye to the ghost of the book group. To thank it for keeping me sane, for letting me give back, pay my dues.

And then I walked across the thick blue sideline, for the double doors that would lock comfortably behind me, and only looked up when I was almost there, to the crashbars, the door handles.

Two points of flame, flickering in the reflection.

My back straightened and I gulped air as quietly as I could.

Behind me. The spindly man, he’d crept around to a side door, let himself in, was standing behind me now, his fingertips extending into claws, his rows of teeth glistening against each other, his eyes on fire.

I jerked back from the reflection. It was a stupid move, should have sent me right into his chest.

Only—nothing.

I even looked again, which is always the first mistake, the first step onto that slippery slope.

Just emptiness behind me. The whole gym, nobody.

I spun back around to the doors, sure he’d got around me somehow, would be waiting.

It was just me.

I nodded that I was being stupid, that I was scaring myself like Drake had been talking about, and took another step forward.

The orange eyes faded in again.

I shook my head no, no.

The eyes did too.

And then, like I had to, I cupped my hand over the right side of my face. And then lowered that hand, covered my other eye.

It was me.

I was the devil, I am the devil, the one smiling behind the wheel that day.

In Stephen King’s story, the kid’s dad’s looking over his shoulder into the tangled woods, he’s cueing into some indistinct rustling in the trees. Some smell, some evil presence.

My face was lost in the brush, though.

He couldn’t see me hunched over and grinning, my face wet with tears, my split tongue reaching up to dab them off my cheek.

“Run,” I’d said to that kid, that nine-year-old. Or, I’d tried to, with every trick I had. If he stayed, then something might happen to him, something bad.

But it does anyway.

Just with the back of his finger at first, like hello.

Hello.

His mom throws it in with all of her wonderful finds and then they’re ducking back out into the bright, bright day.

•

By the end of the week, the hoodie makes it up from the utility to Dick’s room. Now it smells like mountain spring detergent.

Dick—Richard if he had the choice, or Rick, Ricky, hell, even Detective—Dick huddles in his headphones and watches the hoodie, pretending to interrogate it from his place on the bed. Waiting for it to make the first move, here.

Where his mom’s left it is draped across the back of his desk chair. Like Dick’s name, the chair’s a hand-me-down, like he’s standing at the bottom of the family hill, all this unasked-for history snowballing down onto him.

Thanks, Dad.

As for the hoodie itself, it’s black of course, but somehow not that stupid athletic shade of black. This shade of black’s better. Dick can’t really explain it, just knows that the vagueness of this particular black, it was what drew him to that one rack in the first place. And of course there’s no decal or insignia or corporate affiliation on front, back, or down along the waist. It’s the kind of generic that feels intentional, that feels paid for at some place in the mall, except Dick wouldn’t be caught stealing there.