Hello Darkness

  DEDICATION

  For every parent who looks under the bed

  and inside dark closets

  before saying goodnight.

  Main Street is deserted.

  At four-thirty on a Tuesday morning, every store is closed except for the gas station at the end of the street. A lazy wind slowly pushes loose garbage down the main thoroughfare. Some of the trash lodges in sewer grates and creates more work for the street sweeper who will not be back until Thursday.

  It is getting lighter in Falling Rock with each passing minute. When the sun peeks over the mountains in less than an hour, the stores on the west side of the street will gleam with frozen dew. The bright reflections in their glass-paned storefronts will bounce across the street and paint the opposing shops in broad swaths of yellow gold.

  For now, Main Street is smothered by early morning gloom. Slowly, the heavy blanket of night is lifted as dark purple creeps back to make way for diluted orange.

  A multicolored piece of paper catches the wind at a perfect angle and twirls through the air. It barely touches the ground and is pushed down the dirty sidewalk, under the creaky metal sign of Hank Buckley’s hardware and general store.

  The past month has seen more tourists to the small town of Falling Rock, Colorado, than the rest of the months of the year combined. From early October through the end of November, the town celebrates autumn’s arrival and its own birthday with what the locals call the Falling Rock Town Festival. Vendors from all over the state of Colorado occupy Main Street in rented booths and sell everything from produce to paintings. It is the single largest boost to Falling Rock’s yearly economy. The support from autumn travelers is the sole reason the town is able to limp along the rest of the year instead of shutting down completely as it was expected to have done long ago.

  The vendors and customers are all gone on this cold Tuesday morning. The last of the vendor booths were taken down late Sunday night, and the two small hotels on Main Street are empty once again. Now all that remains are the steadfast inhabitants, most born and raised here in the city, who will bunker down for the chill winter and wait for spring’s thaw.

  At the end of Main Street, just before the road turns and begins its meandering crawl toward Highway 70, sits the only gas station in town. It stays open twenty-four hours a day during the festival but closes at eight p.m. the rest of the year. Today marks the end of the gas station’s twenty-four hour schedule and the reversion to a quieter life in Falling Rock.

  Throughout the rest of the year, Marcus, the owner, likes to open at four a.m. so the sheriff and any other person who is unlucky enough to be up at that ungodly hour can get a hot cup of coffee if they so desire.

  On this Tuesday morning, Sheriff Roy Mills desires a cup of coffee.

  His cruiser sits parked at one of the two gas pumps outside the store. The car is an old beige and white LTD Crown Vic with a dented rear fender. It takes the cheapest gas and has been running solid for ten years, so Mills has no reason to complain. Light from the fluorescent lamps above the gas pumps reveals a thin layer of sun-baked dirt on the vehicle. The dirt is kicked up on the unpaved roads that spiderweb through farmland for miles beyond the town. The sheriff spends most of his overnight shift patrolling the outskirts, where kids have an easier time getting into trouble.

  He could make one of the young deputies work the overnight shift, but the closer he gets to retirement, the more Mills doesn’t want to deal with the everyday nonsense. There is still the occasional call for a missing pet, and some of the jumpier citizens frequently ask him to investigate suspicious noises near their homes. Mostly, though, it’s just plain old boring, and that’s just what the sheriff wants.

  The inside of the gas station is so bright it could be seen from space at this early hour. Marcus keeps it well-lit due to a mixture of paranoia and impending blindness. Gaudy potato chip advertisements adorn every aisle and the small rack of magazines features nothing printed sooner than four months ago.

  Mills knows that an old twelve-gauge Remington rests across two hooks on the paneling of the counter just below the register. There has been no serious crime in Falling Rock for more than a year, but Marcus’s Pa handed him a shotgun at age twelve and told him a truth about this world.

  Inside the store, Mills tilts his complimentary cup of coffee ever so slightly toward Marcus, who nods in return. Mills had seen the shotgun underneath the register up close when he had to talk Marcus down from blowing away a couple of would-be robbers who wrongly pegged the store owner for an easy target during the festival last year. They were transients, and after two nights in lockup were sent packing. Mills has a great deal of respect for a person who stands tall and defends their own.

  Mills sips his coffee and realizes that Marcus has been staring at him from behind the counter ever since he walked into the store. He has a funny look on his face, as if he wished the sheriff would leave.

  Mills takes a step toward the register. Marcus steps back and bumps into a barstool that he uses for a chair. He looks down at it like it betrayed him and then he looks at the sheriff, who has crossed the distance to the register while Marcus was looking down. Mills can now see the blood that covers Marcus’s arms from fingertips to elbows. A blood-smeared box of large trash bags is on the floor, and one of the bags is half-pulled out of the box.

  Marcus holds up his bloody hands as the sheriff shifts his cup to his left hand and rests the palm of his right on the butt of his holstered .38 revolver.

  “You wanna explain something to me, Marcus?” says Mills.

  “It—” says Marcus. “It—”

  “Go on and spit it out.”

  “It’s outside,” Marcus says with great effort, then sighs. “I didn’t want nobody to find out, Sheriff. I just wanted to clean it up when I saw you was comin’ up the road.”

  The pupils in Marcus’s eyes are filmed over with milky cataracts, but he can still tell the difference between the numbers when it comes time to change the gas prices on the sign outside his store.

  “What’s outside?” asks Mills.

  “Robby found it. The overnight clerk.”

  “I know who Robby is. What’d he find?”

  “Around back,” says Marcus.

  He points with a bloody finger to the back corner of the parking lot. Mills looks outside through one of the large windows that run around the sides of the store.

  “In the woods?”

  Marcus nods. “Just on the edge.”

  The sheriff sighs. “Well, alright, then. Get your shotgun.”

  “Sheriff?”

  “You’re smart enough not to bloody something right next to your store, Marcus. Well—barely smart enough, anyway. I trust you. Now let’s go.”

  Marcus wipes his hands on an old rag before he grabs the old shotgun from behind the counter and follows the sheriff outside. Mills holds his cup of coffee in one hand. He draws his revolver out of the holster on his belt with the other and pulls back the hammer until it clicks loudly into place.

  “It’s already dead, Sheriff,” whispers Marcus. The shotgun rattles lightly in his shaking hands.

  “All the same,” says Mills. He points the barrel of his revolver toward a clump of bushes at the edge of the woods behind the gas station. “Is it over here?”

  “Yeah, to the left of them bushes.”

  Mills walks slowly to the treeline. He uses his revolver to push aside a leafy branch. The ground near his feet is soaked with blood.

  “Jesus,” he whispers.

  Marcus stands next to him and looks down at the mess on the ground.

  “It’s horrible, ain’t it, Sheriff?”

  Stretched out as if it had been dissected by a demented high school science class is the skinned carcass of an animal.
Its four limbs are splayed out wide and pinned down with the sharp edges of broken branches. Red, raw flesh shines wetly in the dim morning light. Its intestines have been pulled out through a hole in its abdomen and lie in a steaming pile next to the carcass.

  Sheriff Mills exhales heavily and shakes his head. “I can’t tell what it is,” he says.

  “Me neither,” says Marcus. “Robby thought it was some kind of jackrabbit, but it’s too big.”

  “Probably a dog. Maybe a wolf. I need to see the head.”

  Mills steps forward to get a better look. The skull is crushed in like a bowl and the thing’s lips have been torn and peeled up into a terrible grin. Sharp, bloody teeth smile at the sheriff.

  He stands up straight and looks up at the early morning sky so he doesn’t vomit. He breathes in fresh air for a few seconds before looking back down at the carcass.

  “How in the blue hell did Robby find it?”

  Marcus shifts on his feet and looks everywhere but into the sheriff’s eyes. “Well, Sheriff, Robby…well, you see he—”

  Marcus stops talking when Mills reaches down to the ground and picks up a half-smoked, hand-rolled cigarette. He brings it to his nose and takes a quick sniff.

  “That ain’t tobacco.”

  “He’s just a dumb kid, Sheriff.”

  “I’ll talk to him later.”

  “When you showed up I was tryin’ to pick up the…the…” Marcus points at the pile of intestines. He frowns and looks down at his bloody hands. “Should have at least put some gloves on, but I wasn’t thinkin’. You gonna call it in?”

  Mills shakes his head. “We don’t have murder in this town, Marcus. We just don’t have it. But this…whoever did this is only one step away from moving on to something bigger.”

  “You mean like people?”

  “That’s exactly what I mean.”

  Mills stands and walks back to the front of the gas station. Marcus hurries to keep up with the sheriff’s long strides.

  “I seen that preacher walking down the road earlier,” says Marcus.

  Mills turns around. “When?”

  “Well, right after I came in and right before Robby left, I think. I seen him walking back toward the road that leads down to the valley. The one that goes to his church.”

  “Did he have blood on his clothes?”

  “Not that I could tell, but he was wearin’ all black like a thief. And it was dark.”

  “A thief,” says Mills. He takes a sip of his coffee and swishes the liquid around in his mouth.

  “What should we do, Sheriff?”

  “You get that mess cleaned up. And don’t tell anyone about it, you hear?”

  Marcus lets out a genuine sigh of relief. “Oh, you bet, Sheriff. I don’t want nobody to find out anyway. I got a business to run, you know?”

  “Marcus, you own the only gas station in town. Somehow I think you’d do alright even if people did find out.”

  “Whatever you say, Sheriff! I’ll take care of it.”

  Marcus hurries back into the store and trades his shotgun for a large trash bag and a shovel.

  Mills walks to his car and sets his coffee on the roof, then huffs into the cool morning air and watches the fog from his mouth drift upward and disappear.

  He shakes his head and rubs his eyes.

  “Crap,” he says.

  His work week will be over in less than half an hour, at five a.m., but he still has a full day ahead of him. He recently purchased a small parcel of land on the south side of town where he plans to start his very own goat farm. Mills laughs at himself whenever he thinks about it. He will be sixty-two years old at the start of next year and he wants to raise goats.

  As he opens the car door, the small black radio receiver clipped to his shoulder crackles to life.

  “Sheriff Mills, Sheriff Mills, this is dispatch, come-back.” He recognizes the voice of Janet Hayes, likely the only other person awake in Falling Rock at this hour aside from Marcus and the sheriff.

  Mills reaches up to activate his radio. “Go ‘head, Janet.”

  “Everything okay out there?”

  Mills looks behind the gas station as Marcus bends down in the bushes with the trash bag held out in front of him.

  “It’s fine, Janet. What’s new on your end?”

  “Roy, I just got a call from Will Moody about a fire down by the church.”

  Mills frowns. It is far too early, and late, for more nonsense. He depresses the transmit button on his radio. “Down the valley?”

  Janet’s rough smoker’s voice replies a second later. “That’s the one. You want me to give Raines a call?”

  “No.” He sighs. “No, let her sleep. I’ll swing by on my way home and check it out. Probably Mike Laubin and his buddies again. I’ll skip the station check tonight and hit it first thing on Friday.”

  “Sure thing, sugar. Enjoy your days off. God knows you need ‘em. Just don’t forget to call me later.” The radio goes silent. He can almost hear her wink at him through the radio—a habit he does nothing to stop and one he usually reciprocates.

  Mills turns away from the gas station and walks up the steady incline to the edge of the parking lot. The building sits atop a small rise at the end of Main Street as the road leaves the center of town. The parking lot affords a wide view of the wooded valley that stretches out below Falling Rock. Dense green trees cover the majority of the space from mountain to mountain. In the distance, a white crucifix juts above the forest canopy like a beacon in the wilderness, softly glowing in the morning light. The church hidden below the sea of green leaves hosts a handful of the city’s believers every Sunday. The sheriff knows the man who calls himself the Pastor of that distant establishment—the man that Marcus claims was in town last night, right before the dead animal was found.

  Something about it feels wrong to the sheriff. The preacher is quiet for the most part, sociable when he needs to be, and outright evangelical when it is least convenient, but Mills never got the feeling he was capable of hurting anyone or anything.

  Mills stares at the church steeple in the morning haze and squints to clear his aging eyesight. To the left of the steeple, several hundred yards to the south, a small ribbon of black smoke rises slowly from the woods. It snakes lazily into the sky and dissipates in the lower atmosphere. Mills shakes his head.

  “God-damned kids.”

  He wouldn’t be surprised to find out that the fire and the dead animal behind the gas station were connected. In his experience, when someone goes bad, they go all the way bad. If it hadn’t been one of the kids, Mills would have no other choice than to question the preacher. Maybe he was in town practicing some kind of voodoo black magic to get back at the sheriff for not listening another of his crazy ideas that the town was in danger and needed to be evacuated.

  Mills turns and adjusts his belt as he walks back to the car. Every once in a while the troublemakers in Falling Rock need a good swift kick in the ass to get them back on track. Lately, though, it seems as if he is having to kick harder and more often than usual.

  Fortunately, Sheriff Mills figures he is grumpy and tired enough to muster a lecture that will keep the hooligans on the straight and narrow at least through Christmas. He grins at the thought and grabs his cup of coffee from the roof, then fires up the engine and turns his trusty LTD onto Main Street, heading for the valley.

  1

  Highway 70 through Colorado was a long stretch of road.

  Traveling west past Denver into the mountains was a route meant for those who were not rushing to get any place fast. The wide open views shocked the senses and forced travelers to reconsider ever going back to their old lives. One started to get the impression of untethered wilderness unmatched by anything ever before seen; images that cracked into the deep recesses of the human brain and pulled forth longings not acknowledged for hundreds of years; desires for adventure and exploration which were once considered necessary alongside social standing and personal responsibility i
n equal parts.

  It was just over two hundred miles from Denver to Falling Rock, Colorado, and Ben Howard wanted to make the whole distance before nightfall. His red ‘82 Jeep Cherokee handled well enough during the day, but Ben rarely trusted its fading yellow headlights once the sun went down. There was also the small matter of his conscience restricting him from driving in too dangerous of a situation given the other passenger in his car.

  His four-year-old daughter, Annabelle, sat quietly reading a picture book. When they had left Baltimore last week Ben made sure to grab as many of her books as he could find, knowing his little blonde bookworm could lose herself in them for hours on end. Her favorite detailed the adventures of a precocious kindergartener named Zippy, a little girl who always found ways of getting into trouble. Ben knew that Annabelle had a friend at her daycare center that resembled the fictional character and thought his daughter accepted their singular existences interchangeably.

  Besides her mother’s death at the end of the previous year, pulling Anna away from her friends in preschool had been the hardest thing for both of them. Ben didn’t know how other four-year-old children processed information, but Annabelle always had a way of understanding the complex reality he was too-often forced to explain. Perhaps she only scrunched her face up into serious thought because she didn’t understand and instead successfully fooled her father with a look of confusion instead of contemplation. Whatever the case, it resulted in Ben often thinking her older than her actual age.

  The journey so far had been a pleasant one with only a handful of minor emotional incidents occurring along the way, the biggest of which being the embarkation itself. Ben, who had lived most of his adult life in the greater Baltimore area, found the city pulling at his back as he turned his car west. Annabelle cried, mostly for her mother, but also because it was the only home she had ever known.

  Ben thought that fear of the unknown was as dominant in children as it was in adults, it was simply addressed more often and openly.

  He had smiled and caressed her small face. He told her everything would be alright and about all the wonderful things they would see in his childhood town of Falling Rock. The stories of bears roaming onto Main Street and stopping business for hours at a time had brought her back to him somewhat. She was never afraid of real-world beasts and instead regarded them with a strange sort of fascination. Fictional monsters were another thing altogether. Annabelle had once watched two minutes of a horror movie on T.V. while Ben was in the bathroom. He came back just in time to see a tentacled alien spring out of an actor’s chest and to hear his terrified daughter scream from under the coffee table.