Darkness Under the Sun Read online

  “More Sundays than not,” Howie said. “Mom makes me go, too, though she lets me wear a cap to hide the part of my head where hair won’t grow anymore.”

  “She’s a good woman,” said Mr. Blackwood, taking one more look at the snapshot. “I can see how good she would be. She would be very good. And your sister no less than your mom. The two of them, very good, very sweet together.” He tucked the photos in a pocket of his khaki shirt.

  “Will you come to see the apartment, then?”

  “I need to think on it till tomorrow. It’s a big decision. I’m leaning toward staying in this town awhile, but I need to sleep on it first. I don’t sleep well at night. I mostly sleep during the day, but we’ve had such a good time, I haven’t gotten so much as a nap. I’m going downstairs now and have a good snooze. You remember, I’m a dreamer. I’ll sleep maybe till nine o’clock this evening, and when I wake up, maybe what I should do about the apartment will have come to me in a dream. Things come to me in dreams. If not, I’ll know by morning, sure enough. You come see me in the morning, my faithful friend.”

  Howie was disappointed not to receive a positive answer right then and there. But he remained hopeful that Mr. Blackwood would dream about how fine it would be to live in the shade of the beech tree, at the house with the lucky number. Howie could not remember anyone ever calling him a friend, let alone a “faithful friend,” which was like something one of the three musketeers might say to another, or one soldier to another, like in the French Foreign Legion, and it was a positive sign that suggested Mr. Blackwood might rent from them.

  Mr. Blackwood got to his feet, and for the first time Howie saw him standing. He knew that his friend must be tall, but Mr. Blackwood seemed gigantic, even though he wasn’t as tall as any professional basketball player. His thick and weirdly shaped shoulder blades were more prominent when he was standing, and his shirt stretched so tight across them that Howie thought it might rip; it seemed almost as if there were great wings folded on Mr. Blackwood’s upper back, under his shirt. His arms appeared longer, too, when he was standing, and his hands were like shovels.

  As they crossed the roof, their shadows preceded them. Mr. Blackwood’s shadow was three times longer than Howie’s. The sight of their elongated silhouettes moving side by side made Howie feel small, but at the same time it also made him feel safe. No one would be crazy enough to mess with Mr. Blackwood. And if Howie was his friend, no one would mess with Howie, either. No one would dare.

  For the first time, he noticed a special detail of his friend’s black boots. The toes were capped with brushed steel, like boots that a mountain climber might wear. They were supercool.

  As Howie switched on his flashlight, Mr. Blackwood opened the door to the shed at the head of the stairs. He put a hand on Howie’s shoulder—“Be careful, son, that first flight is steep”—and Howie was impressed that the man’s big hand seemed even bigger when it touched you.

  “Where’s your flashlight?” Howie asked.

  “I’ve got one with my gear downstairs. But the few windows are enough light for me. I see pretty good in the dark.”

  At each floor, multipaned windows were set high in the walls, but not many, and they were opaque with dust. Howie figured that maybe being a dreamer and sleeping in daylight might save your eyesight and help you to see better in the dark. Maybe he would become a dreamer, too, and sleep by day.

  On the ground floor, at the rear of the empty building, as Howie opened the deadbolt and put his hand on the lever-style doorknob, Mr. Blackwood said, “Come back in the morning, and we’ll have breakfast together. I’ll tell you all about this famous movie star who was my great-grandmother.”

  “What movie star?” Howie asked, surprised that his friend had kept such an amazing secret even though they had talked most of the day, talked more than Howie had ever talked with anyone but his mom and Corrine.

  “She was in silent movies a long time ago. You wouldn’t know her name, but it’s an amazing story. I love telling it.”

  “Okay, sure, wow, that’ll be great,” he said, and he opened the door into the alleyway, blinking in the brighter light.

  Before Howie could step across the threshold, Ron Bleeker rushed him, shoving him hard backward: “Butt-Ugly Dugley, you little creep, why’re you going in and out of here, what’re you up to, freak boy?”

  Bleeker was four years older than Howie, fifteen and muscular. He wore sleeveless T-shirts sometimes so you could see his biceps better, and he knocked Howie off his feet.

  The flashlight flew out of Howie’s hand, and Bleeker came through the door fast, dropped on top of him, grabbed Howie by his ears, by his good one and his ugly one, threatening to jerk his head off the floor and slam it down again to crack his skull. The wedge of daylight narrowed as the swinging door closed, and in the gathering darkness, Bleeker said, “You little puke-face shit, what’re you—”

  His voice cut off with a wordless sound of surprise and pain, and in the same instant, as if Bleeker suddenly took flight, his weight lifted from Howie.

  From the darkness, Mr. Blackwood said, “Get your flashlight, son.”

  Howie crawled to the Eveready, which was the source of most of the light now that the door had closed. With the flashlight in hand, he thrust to his feet and turned in confusion, trying to locate his friend and his enemy.

  They were together, and they were an amazing sight. One of Mr. Blackwood’s hands was tight around Ron Bleeker’s throat, and the other hand clutched the boy’s crotch. He held Bleeker off the floor, letting his feet dangle in empty air. Old Bleeker rolled his eyes in terror when the flashlight revealed his captor’s face.

  “You try to take one punch at me,” Mr. Blackwood told Bleeker, “and I’ll crush everything I’m holding in my left hand, crush it and tear it off, and then you can wear girls’ clothes the rest of your life.”

  Bleeker didn’t look like he had either the intention or the strength to take a punch at Mr. Blackwood. Tears rolled down his face, which was as white and greasy as the belly of a fish, and the most pathetic kittenlike whimpers escaped him.

  “You go on home, son,” Mr. Blackwood said. “I want to have a few words with your friend here. I want to set him straight about a couple things.”

  Howie stood transfixed, astonished at the sight of Bleeker, so long a figure of terror, abruptly reduced to helplessness, looking so small, like a half-broken doll.

  “If that’s all right with you?” Mr. Blackwood said. “Is it all right with you if I just explain the new rules to this young fella?”

  “Sure,” Howie said. “That’s okay. So I’ll just go now. I’ll go on home.” He went to the door and glanced back at them. “The new rules.” He opened the door, stepped outside, and glanced back once more. “In the morning, maybe you’ll tell me the new rules, too. I guess I’ll need to know them. So I can be sure everybody is, you know, living by them.” He pulled the door shut.

  Dazed and amazed, he followed the alley through the afternoon light and shadows. He was most of the way across the cemetery beside St. Anthony’s when his half-trance, like a veil, slid off his mind and the full importance of what had just happened became clear to him. The rest of the way home, he couldn’t stop grinning.

  4

  PERHAPS HOWIE WAS BECOMING A DREAMER who would sleep by day and stay awake all night. In his room, in his bed, in the dark, he could not shut his mind off. He kept replaying the entire special morning and afternoon, and those memories were as vivid to him as any movie.

  Because his mom got up early for work, she went to bed at nine-thirty. Corrine was already in her room, doing whatever girls did in their rooms; he had no idea.

  All was quiet and dark when, at nine forty-five, Howie dressed and went silently downstairs. He damped the beam of his flashlight by pressing two fingers over the lens. The house smelled of furniture polish, faintly of lemon-scented air freshener, and here and there even more faintly of potpourri that his mom made herself from flowers she grew and f
rom kitchen spices. Mr. Blackwood would like the quiet, good-smelling house if he agreed to come visit and look at the apartment. If he could wait until Saturday, when Mom was off work, maybe he could have dinner with them. Howie’s mother was a great cook, and being a dinner guest in the main house now and then was another advantage of renting the apartment.

  Howie left the house by the back door, locked it behind him, and stuffed the key in a pocket of his jeans. He switched off the Eveready because the full moon frosted everything.

  He walked rapidly toward St. Anthony’s graveyard, but he didn’t run. Running could get you killed because it fanned the flames. He wasn’t on fire, of course; but for a long time he had not been able to run also because of the skin grafts, which were delicate. Scars were tougher tissue than ordinary skin, and here and there, where scars and skin met, sudden extreme stretching, like what occurred when you ran flat-out, could cause dermal cracking and maybe a deadly infection.

  Mr. Blackwood said he would probably sleep until nine o’clock. Howie didn’t want to risk waking him, so it was a few minutes before ten when, in the alley behind the old Boswell building, he knocked on the door through which Ron Bleeker had earlier attacked him. The first thing Howie would do was apologize for not being able to wait until breakfast. He was usually very patient. Having to recover from serious burns taught you patience. But if Mr. Blackwood had dreamed a decision about the apartment, Howie just had to know. If the big man stayed in town for a couple months, above their garage, it would be the second biggest thing that had ever happened in Howie’s life, and certainly the best.

  Mr. Blackwood didn’t respond to the knock, so Howie rapped his knuckles harder against the door and said, “It’s me, sir, it’s Howie Dugley.”

  Maybe Mr. Blackwood was sleeping deeply. Maybe he had gone out for a walk or for a late dinner from some take-out place.

  Howie tried the door. It was locked.

  He walked back and forth in the moon-washed alleyway, trying to decide what he should do next. Going into the building without an invitation from Mr. Blackwood didn’t seem right. On the other hand, it wasn’t Mr. Blackwood’s building, even if he was camping out there. Besides, that morning, Howie entered without an invitation and encountered his new friend on the roof; and that had gone well. Mr. Blackwood had been glad to see him.

  The corroded piano hinge protested, but the basement window pushed inward, and Howie slid feetfirst into that darkness. He switched on the Eveready and made his way toward the stairs, calling out as he went, “Hello? Mr. Blackwood? Are you here? Hello? It’s me, it’s Howie.”

  When he reached the ground floor, the large room with all its columns felt bigger at night than in the daytime, immense, vast, as though the darkness stretched on for miles in every direction. Even with the light of the full moon, the dust-covered high windows were barely visible, and looking up at their pale panes, Howie felt as if he were in a dungeon.

  His small flashlight didn’t penetrate far into the pitch-black realm of the former department store. In fact it was less effective than usual because its batteries had lost some of their charge, which he had been too excited to notice until now. The beam was less white than yellow, no longer crisp but fuzzy.

  “Mr. Blackwood? I’m sorry to bother you. It’s me, Howie.”

  His voice wasn’t right, so changed that it almost might have been the voice of another boy. It seemed smaller now than earlier, thinner, and it echoed off the distant walls differently from the way that it sounded in this same space before.

  Because Mr. Blackwood had said he kept his gear near the back door, Howie moved in that direction. He no longer called out to his friend because the smallness of his voice made him uneasy.

  He found the gear a few steps to the right of the back door. A sleeping bag rolled tight and secured with straps. A backpack with the top-pocket flap unzipped and standing open. Two fat, half-melted candles were fixed to the floor in puddles of hardened yellow wax.

  Beside the candles were the photographs that Howie had brought from home earlier in the day. The photo of the house and the one of the garage shaded by the ancient beech tree had each been torn into four pieces.

  Only the picture of Howie’s mother and sister remained intact, and it lay next to the extinguished candles, as if Mr. Blackwood had been studying it in the flickering light. Howie picked it up. He slipped it into a hip pocket of his jeans.

  He wasn’t a snoop. He respected other people’s privacy, but he couldn’t help noticing that the top pocket of the backpack, from which the flap was peeled back, contained packets of photographs held together with rubber bands. They were those thick, white-bordered snapshots taken with an old Polaroid.

  In a half-trance similar to the one that had overcome him when he had stepped through the nearby door into the alley, leaving Ron Bleeker to learn the new rules from Mr. Blackwood, Howie reached for one of the groups of photos. Strangely, the hand with which he picked up a packet of Polaroids did not look like his hand: It seemed thin, insubstantial, like the ectoplasmic hand of a ghost in one of those stories about séances that Mrs. Norris, their tenant, had liked to tell. Howie felt as if maybe he were dead already and just didn’t know it, the way that haunting spirits sometimes didn’t realize they were ghosts.

  He stripped the rubber band from the Polaroids. In the jiggling beam of the flashlight, he saw that the top picture was of a pretty girl with blond hair and green eyes. She looked very unhappy. No. Not unhappy. She looked frightened.

  The second photo was the same girl wearing scary makeup for Halloween. Her face was supposed to look as if it had been slashed several times, and the makeup was convincing.

  In the third picture, a pretty girl with brown hair looked scared, too. The fourth shot was of the same girl stripped naked and lying on her back. Things had been done to her body that were not makeup.

  The loose photos slithered through Howie’s fingers and spilled across the backpack. The flashlight shook loose of his hand and struck the floor with a hard, cold sound.

  An instant later, he thought he heard something elsewhere on the ground floor, off in the gloom, a metallic sound, perhaps the steel toe of a boot scraping across a floor tile.

  Heart knocking hard against his breastbone, breath caught in his throat, Howie snatched up the flashlight and backed away from where he thought the sound might have arisen. But sound was tricky in such a big dark space, and after he took a few steps, he thought maybe he had misjudged the source. He changed direction—and within a few steps, he bumped into something, someone, spun around. With the flashlight, he found Ron Bleeker’s body suspended from a huge knife that pierced his throat and pinned him to the wall, his chin held high by the handle. Something had been jammed into his mouth, something big enough to make his cheeks bulge grotesquely. Duct tape pressed his lips shut. His eyes were open wide, he still had his eyes, but his ears were missing.

  In memory, Howie heard his voice and then Mr. Blackwood’s:

  You had surgeries?

  Nope. Don’t want any, either. I’ve got a thing about knives.

  You’re scared of being cut on?

  Not scared. I just have this thing about knives.

  Suddenly Howie was at the rear entrance, although he didn’t remember stepping away from Ron Bleeker’s corpse. He disengaged the deadbolt, yanked open the door, and plunged into the alley, certain that one of those shovel-size hands must be digging toward him through the dark air, inches from the back of his neck.

  In the night, under the moon, he staggered three steps, turned, and though no one loomed behind him, he cried out because he had at last gotten his breath and found his voice. He almost screamed for help, but realized at once that he couldn’t afford to waste a moment explaining this to anyone. He was the only help that his mother and sister could count on, small as he was and as ugly as he was, he was nevertheless the motel manager with the fire extinguisher, Blackwood was the fire, and fire was fast, fire could change everything in one bright screa
ming minute.

  He was halfway across the graveyard, dodging around headstones, when he saw the raven fly across the full moon. He hurried under the sheltering limbs of the immense oaks, and in an autumn memory he saw the cemetery in drifts of scarlet leaves, but in his mind’s eye, the leaves rippled like a lake of blood. He said, “No, no, no,” because he feared, he knew, he would find his mother and his sister as blood-red as the autumn ground under a scarlet oak.

  He had to resist the urge to sprint full-tilt. His pounding feet and his ragged breathing might alert Blackwood. Running could get him killed.

  His footsteps were soft and swift through the moonshadows of the old beech, past the garage, across the yard, to the back-porch steps. As Howie fumbled his key from his pocket, he saw that one of the French panes in the kitchen door had been cut out.

  He didn’t need his key. The lock wasn’t engaged anymore.

  Howie quietly opened the door, started to cross the threshold, but hesitated. The kitchen was as dark as the old department store from which he had fled moments earlier. There was no sound, real or imagined, no phantom scrape of a steel-toed boot, but the silence seemed unnatural. He felt that Blackwood was listening for him just as he was listening for Blackwood. Intuition told him this was not the way to go, this was equivalent to the moment, back in the day, when he woke to the cold wetness and the smell of gasoline, the instant before the match was struck. Death was in the kitchen or in the hallway beyond, and there was no motel manager this time, only Death and Howie, and Death was big and strong and meaner than a million Ron Bleekers.

  With all the stealth that he could manage, he eased the door shut and backed across the porch to the stairs. Still relying on intuition, he hurried around the house.

  He made noise only when he passed too close to a Japanese maple in the front yard and raised a soft clatter from the loose ornamental river stones that encircled its base. He halted, snatched up two of the stones, each about the size of a lemon, and then continued to the front porch.