Are You Afraid of the Dark?. Seth Adams C.

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      He felt like an intruder in his own home.

      At the bottom he could turn to either the living room or the kitchen or hang a hard right down the hall. In the living room the blue flashes of the television screen lit his mom’s sleeping form in an eerie and solemn glow. Intermittent with her snores were higher sounds like whimpers, and he wondered what she was dreaming of. If her dreams were anything like his, it couldn’t be anything good.

      He watched her for a moment longer, bundled under an afghan blanket in the glow of the television. She seemed small and fragile there in the dark, in the glow. She was alone in the dark of the room and for a moment he wanted to reach for her. Have her hold him, tell him it was all right.

      Then he was heading into the kitchen, pausing briefly at one drawer. Out the back door, moving with a stealth borne of youthful practise, and heading across the lawn to the garage for the second time that day, the building small and squat and solid like a battlefield fortification in the night.

      6.

      The man was gone when Reggie got back to the tree house. The sled was empty where he’d left it; no trace of the man as if he’d been raptured for judgment.

      Then he heard a noise from above, looked up, and saw a pale oval high over him looking down. It moved back and out of sight, and Reggie whispered, ‘I’m coming up’ and moved to the rungs of the ladder nailed to the tree.

      At the top he crawled-pushed himself onto the floor and rose to a squat.

      The old lantern his dad had given him for the tree house bloomed alive when the man lit it and put both them and the space between them in a dim yellowish light. They could have been Neanderthals huddled in a cave in some distant aeon passed.

      ‘I brought this,’ Reggie said, still whispering, holding out the spool of fishing line he’d taken from the garage and the sewing needle from the kitchen drawer.

      He held it out to the man like an offering and the man took it, setting it down with the rest of their surgical equipment – the sterile pads, gauze, aspirin, and peroxide. The man wore only his heavy denim jacket against the night chill, having removed the shirt at some point. It lay in a bloody bundle in one corner. The flesh of his torso above and below the bandaged area was pale and ghostly.

      ‘This won’t be … pretty either …’ the man said, sounding stronger and more lucid than before. ‘You may not … want to stay,’ he said, looking across the small room at Reggie with eyes like stone.

      ‘I’ll stay,’ Reggie said, squatting and watching.

      The man unwound a length of fishing line and threaded it through the eye of the needle. He awkwardly and stiffly dug out his wallet from his pants pocket and brought it to his mouth and bit down on it.

      Then he started.

      Reggie didn’t know what to expect, but what he saw was terrifying and captivating at the same time. The man unwrapped the gauze from around his middle and peeled the blood-sticky pads from just below his ribs. He dug into his pockets again and pulled out a lighter. The lighter was shaped like a boot and he flicked the flame to life and ran the sewing needle under it for about a minute.

      Then he picked up the hydrogen peroxide, twisted off the cap, and trickled a good amount over the wound, as he’d done earlier. It fizzled and foamed about the raw flesh like the remnants of ocean waves on a shoreline. The needle poked at the flesh around the wound, reminding Reggie of a tent pole pushing up at the canvas. Resistant until the needle broke and slid through the skin and trailed the fishing line over the wound, then returning the way it’d come, criss-crossing the wound like train tracks.

      As he watched, a memory of his mom talking to her sister on the phone shortly after his father’s death snapped to life in Reggie’s mind. He’d caught a snippet of the conversation from his hiding place just outside his parents’ room.

      I saw him on the coroner’s table! He was patched up! his mom had said, fighting back tears, sniffling back sobs. Stitched up like a doll!

      The man before him now groaned behind the bit of the wallet.

      His eyes teared and he had to stop to swipe at them.

      His hands trembled and he had to stop again to still them.

      And then the wound was closed, trickling blood like a squinty, weeping eye. He motioned Reggie over. Reggie obliged without hesitation. The man took the wallet out of his mouth.

      ‘Bandage it again …’ he managed, his voice again tremulous.

      Reggie nodded and found the unused gauze and pads and went to work, standing, crouching, moving around the man as necessary, bringing the gauze about his middle and over the sterile pads.

      ‘Make it … tight …’ the man said, and Reggie did so, using the enclosed clasps to bind the gauze. When it was done, he stood and moved back, looking at his work.

      The man’s eyes fluttered. He settled back onto the floor, slowly, carefully, favouring his aches and pains.

      ‘No ambulance …’ he said, losing consciousness. ‘No police … we have an … arrangement …’ he muttered, repeating what he had said earlier. And then he was gone, out cold, and Reggie was alone in the tree house that his dad had built and a stranger now inhabited.

       CHAPTER TWO

      1.

      The man awoke in the middle of the night. He sat up, saw Reggie there still watching him. Reggie smiled at the man, feeling dumb, but not knowing how else to greet him. A handshake or wave would have been even dumber.

      ‘How long …?’ he rasped. Reggie reminded himself to bring some water back for the man next time he went to the house.

      ‘A few hours,’ he said.

      The man held up his arm, looking at his watch.

      ‘It’s two in the … morning,’ the man said. ‘You’ve been here … the whole time?’

      Reggie nodded.

      ‘Won’t your … parents wonder where you are?’ he asked.

      ‘I snuck out,’ Reggie said.

      The man nodded solemnly, as if considering something of immense importance.

      ‘You maybe … shouldn’t help me … anymore,’ he said, his voice gaining resolve, becoming stronger, more assured.

      ‘Why not?’ Reggie asked.

      ‘I’m not a good … person,’ the man said, choking back a cough, leaning to the side and spitting. Reggie looked at the spit, saw it was tinged with blood.

      Then he looked back at the man.

      ‘Tell СКАЧАТЬ