SHADOWS OF DEATH: Death Comes with Fury (and Dark Humor) To a Small Town South of Chicago Read online

  Smiling, Conner said, “Evenin’, ladies,” and stopped right there. He just stared.

  Ricky Martin whispered, “Sit, talk, wink, flex!”

  But the next words out of Conner’s mouth were, “Flower? Almira? What the ’f’?”

  The two girls peered up at the two boys squinting at them.

  The boys were statues. There wasn’t a sound in the whole place. When the noises of the mall came back to the boys’ ears, and people started moving all around them again, Almira and Flower were gone. As if they had never been there.

  CHAPTER TWO

  What The Hell’s Going On?

  The next day was Saturday. Conner got up early, which he never did, and was out of the house before eight o’clock. He didn’t have a car, so he walked to the corner bus stop. A bus came every twenty minutes or so. As he walked to the corner, Conner could see the bus approaching from the west about a quarter mile away. When he got to the bus sign, Conner waited. The bus pulled up, and in a few minutes, Conner was downtown.

  Almira worked at Wafflers, the pancake place. She always had the Saturday early shift, so he knew she would be there. When Conner walked in, he smelled delicious pancake batter and syrup. (Love me some waffles, Conner thought.) He looked around. Pete, another guy from school who worked there, asked Conner how he was and whether he wanted a table.

  “Not sure yet, man. Uh, Almira here?”

  “She never showed. Must’ve been a hell of a night.”

  “What?” Conner looked around. “What do you mean?”

  “Nothing. Just figured you two musta, you know . . . ” He turned toward the door just as a family with two fat kids came in. As he showed them to their table, Conner stood on his toes to get a better look around, as if Pete might have somehow missed Almira and she was actually out on the floor, serving customers.

  But nothing.

  This got Conner spooked, though not completely. The beginning of spooked is how he would have described it. Conner turned and left the restaurant. He walked around for a few minutes, then ducked into Dunkin’ Donuts for a quick coffee. He stood there for a bit, blowing on his hot coffee, and gazing absently out the window. And dammit if Almira didn’t stroll right by.

  Conner squeezed the lid on the coffee as he hustled out the door and onto the sidewalk. He peered ahead in the direction she had been going, but she wasn’t there. Conner jogged along a bit, checking into store fronts, when Almira’s red Volks pulled away from the curb.

  He ran up, waving his free hand.

  “Almira, Almira!”

  Almira stopped, wheels squeaking. She didn’t seem happy to see him. In fact, she seemed a little scared. Well, not scared, upset is more like it. Yeah, upset.

  “Hey,” she said, rolling down the window. “Sorry, I didn’t see you. Just heard some idiot hollering my name.”

  “Yeah, you seem distracted.”

  She said nothing.

  “So, um, can you give me a ride home?”

  Almira pursed her lips. For quite a while. “I guess.”

  Conner hopped in, and they rolled away.

  “The strangest thing.” Conner popped the plastic top off and took a sip of java. “Mmm, that’s good. Anyway, like I was saying, strangest thing.”

  Almira was driving along, a bit too close to the bumper in front of them for Conner’s liking. She stared straight ahead, her jaw was grinding. In fact, Conner thought he could see her jaw muscles flexing under the skin. “Were you at the Totenacker Mall last night, right before closing?”

  Traffic slowed to a crawl and Conner could see that the question annoyed her. She sighed and slapped her small hand against the horn, but not enough to blast it.

  “What are you talking about?” Her eyes were red-rimmed. Probably upset about her dad dying, she wouldn’t look at Conner.

  “Well, I was there, with Ricky Martin. We both thought we saw you. You and Flower, too.”

  Traffic picked up and she gunned it through a changing yellow light, which was technically red. Someone beeped, but they both ignored it.

  A couple more minutes of absolute silence brought them to Conner’s house, which was the last place he wanted to be.

  “You want to hang out?” he asked.

  “Can’t.”

  “We could go to your house—”

  “You deaf? Or stupid? My dad just died. So, no, I don’t feel like ’hanging out’.”

  She appeared willing to give Conner five seconds to get out of her car, or she would shoot him. He took the wise way out and asked no more questions. Except one.

  “You seen Flower?”

  “Why would I have seen Flower?” she said through gritting teeth. She revved the motor and reached over to slam the passenger door shut. The Volks sped away, kicking pebbles and anger over Conner’s shoes.

  He stood there, not knowing what to think but realizing he’d left his coffee in her cup holder.

  Saturday night was usually the night Conner went out, but he was thinking of staying in. It was cold anyway, and Conner hated the cold. Almost as much as he hated the night. Nighttime is fine if you’re indoors somewhere, like a friend’s house or a club or a theater or at the mall. But not outside, when no one’s around. He just didn’t like the dark. Saw horror movies as a kid that he probably wasn’t old enough to take. Conner was checking his Facebook page when Ricky Martin messaged him on his phone.

  [ Yo! ]

  [ Hey, what’s going on? ]

  [ Where you at? ]

  [ Home. You? ]

  [ Downtown. Want me to come get u? ]

  Conner wasn’t sure about that, but what was he doing home anyway?

  [ Yeah ]

  [ 10 mins ]

  [ k ]

  [ Hey, u hear Almira’s back? ]

  [ Damn, no ]

  Conner looked again at his list of friends who were currently online. Sure enough, there was Almira’s name, as clear as day. He clicked her name and typed:

  [ Hey! <3 ]

  Conner waited for her to respond. He kind of stared at her pic and name, pissed off.

  Nothing.

  Then she was gone—offline.

  Maybe he had missed her. Or maybe, more likely, she was dodging him.

  Fuck that, Conner thought. First stop after Ricky gets here: We’re going to Almira’s place.

  “No lights on,” Ricky Martin said. “That can’t be good. He scratched at his chin as if he had fleas. He was growing a little patch of beard there, not a goatee; Conner didn’t know what it was supposed to be. But it obviously itched. All the time. “Whole family’s gone, it looks like.”

  They sat there in the ’79 Camaro for a minute or two.

  For some reason, Conner started to scratch his own chin. “I’m getting sick of this. What the hell’s going on?”

  He got out of the car and walked up to Almira’s front door and knocked obnoxiously loud. Conner was only being that rude because he knew no one was home.

  The door swung open, and Conner barely kept himself from staggering backwards.

  A sharp whisper shot out at him from behind the screen door:

  “Get in here. Ricky, too.”

  It was Almira.

  Conner turned to wave Ricky Martin in while still keeping an eye on Almira, but Ricky had already left the car and was sprinting toward the house.

  As soon as Conner and Ricky stepped inside, Almira quickly and quietly shut the door.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Blind As Eyeless Beggars

  On the other side of town, a shadow lurked, waiting. Or so it seemed, but shadows are just shadows, aren’t they? Sometimes they hold danger, but the danger is the man or the monster hidden inside the shadow. There’s no intrinsic danger in the shadow itself. Is there?

  The night was not particularly dark, but there were no stars, only a waning moon asleep in a black sky.

  The shadow was hidden away in the alley between two buildings. On the first floor of one was a drugstore. On the first floor of the other, a
shop that specialized in rugs. Both were closed for the night. The drugstore was long abandoned for the evening, but the owner of the carpet place was just locking up. He was a middle-aged guy, married, no kids. Balding in back but still with most of his hair, and not too gray. A bit of a paunch and too-big bags under his eyes, but not bad-looking. George Clooney after adding the weight for Syriana, and gone to seed. Clooney without the Hollywood success and with a broken nose.

  Door secure, Mark O’Neal, Clooney from a Bizarro world, pulled the creaky metal barrier in front of the store’s display windows to the ground and locked that, too. Standing up, he felt the crick in his back that had been bothering him for years. The pain was sharp tonight; it came and went like that, sometimes dull, sometime sharp, sometimes apparently cured. Tonight it was particularly cruel.

  His car—a fairly new Dodge Charger—was parked around back. A bit out of character, but he liked the new Charger. It made him feel young, virile. He shucked on his brown coat—the one with the suede collar—wriggling it into place as he walked, and headed down the alley.

  As he entered the alley he passed through the shadow there, and Mark felt a strange chill. He buttoned his coat and quickened his steps. At his car, he fumbled briefly for his keys and then stabbed the car key into the door lock. He couldn’t explain it, but he was rattled. A sense of foreboding.

  He opened the car door, but before he climbed in, he did a quick survey of the back lot. One other car (been sitting there since June; he kept meaning to call the city and have it towed), a couple of boxes of junk near the dented dumpster, nothing out of the usual or even out of place. The shadows against the brick walls and down the alleyway even looked ordinary.

  He hopped in, shut the door, and started the car up. Then he did something he never did. This wasn’t an unsafe neighborhood, at least not at this time of night. But he locked all the doors and made sure the windows were all rolled up. Then he backed up, shifted into first, and headed up the alley toward the street, through the deep shadows between the buildings.

  When the collision came, he was already dead. Brain aneurysm, they’d eventually determine. Sudden, surprising. No previous symptoms. He had died in the alley, as his black Charger pulled out of the shadows. His foot had slid off the accelerator pedal and the car rolled as slow as a kickball kicked by a kid, into traffic, into harm’s way, and his new Charger was crumpled beyond repair by a truck being driven by first-time driver (and one week out of truck driving school) Roy Fedder, twenty-six years old, no previous accidents. When he found out later the driver was already dead, that Roy hadn’t killed him, Fedder went on the drinking spree that he had been holding inside himself since the accident happened. Twenty hours of drinking and partying and three days of recovering. He lost his job, but he didn’t care about such mundane concerns at this particular crossroads in his life.

  “We’re in a bit of a—we’ve got a problem,” Almira said. “I mean, things are bad.”

  Almira sat at her parents’ dining room table. She was the only one of Conner’s friends whose parents still had a dining room, let alone one of those big wooden tables. Conner sat across from her, rubbing the back of his neck. Ricky Martin was doing something that approximated jumping jacks “lite,” a kind of jump-twitch thing that he did when he was nervous or excited.

  “What is it? Did someone threaten you?” Conner reached to take Amira’s hand, but she didn’t extend hers so he tapped his fingers in the middle of the table, arm outstretched, as if that was the normal way he sat and thought.

  “Nothing like that,” Almira said. They all still sat in the dark, only the light from the street lamps illuminating the dining room. From the outside, the house would still look as if no one was home, or that everyone was asleep at a quarter to eight in the evening.

  Which was why it was odd when the doorbell rang.

  “Shit,” Ricky said, jumping up and trying to touch the ceiling, as though he was working on his vertical jump, thudding back to the linoleum.

  “You expecting someone?” Conner said, turning his head toward the door. He started to get up, scanning the room for something that could be used as a weapon. Other than some old plates on the wall, he didn’t see anything particularly helpful in a home-invasion scenario.

  “Yeah,” Almira said. “Flower.”

  Conner and Ricky Martin both froze like the bas relief angels formed into the crown molding around the top of all the walls in the dining room. Ricky spoke first. “Flower. From last night?”

  “You know anybody else named ’Flower’?” Almira was at the door. She unlocked it and let Flower in.

  “What are they doing here?” Flower said, sneering.

  “They just showed up. I think it’s good that they did, though. I think we should, you know, tell ’em what’s going on. What we saw.”

  The girls walked to the dining room. Almira plopped back into the chair she’d abandoned. Flower stood for a moment, almost squinting Clint Eastwood-style, rolling her eyes back and forth between the two boys, before she chose a chair and sat down with a sigh.

  A long silence elongated like pulled taffy as the four contemplated who-knows-what: life, fear, danger, lies, secrets? Finally, Almira spoke, saying pretty much the same as she had started saying before Flower arrived.

  “We’re in deep shit. I think we need your help and—”

  “Almira!” Flower interrupted.

  Almira looked over at her, and Flower raised her eyebrows meaningfully. Almira shrugged. The other girl nodded aggressively, as if trying to loosen a rope from around her neck.

  Almira said, “I know, Flower, I know. But this is serious.”

  “What,” Conner said, “the fuck,” he paused for effect, “are you talking about?”

  This did not prompt the girls to give it up.

  “Jeez. Seriously?” Conner said. “We can’t help if you don’t tell us what’s going on. No more secrets. Spill it.”

  “All right, all right,” Almira said. “It’s weird, though, and you better not laugh. It started—what?—a week ago? We’d been walking home after school. We’d stayed late, it was around, I don’t know, seven? You know? Maybe seven-thirty.”

  “Shit, Almira. I better tell it,” Flower said, placing her hand on Almira’s wrist. She cleared her throat. “We found a portal. The boys looked at her, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

  “A portal to Hell.”

  A massive figure—a shadow, really—moved across I-57. It drifted through all six lanes of the empty highway. It was as if the shadow of a non-existent deer leapt from the woods on one side to the woods on the other.

  When it reached the distant side, this shadow blended with all the darkness on the perimeter, all the blackness made by the tree trunks, the tree branches, and the brambles and bushes. This shade moved like an eel through brackish water, wiggling its way through the suburban forest, past fallen branches, decaying trees, and hidden garbage. Washers, old bikes missing a wheel or two, pots with rusted bottoms, soda bottles a decade old. The shadow streaked along the back edge of the woodland, skimming the backyards of the houses that lined the interstate.

  To any casual observer, the shadow only appeared like ripples in the brush, a faint breeze, perhaps a doe finding its way home. But this shadow was not innocent. It continued for about six or seven backyards, then turned in, toward a house painted light blue with a stone façade all around from the ground to about four feet up. It had shadows of its own. Shadows from the oak tree in the front yard, from the spruces in the back, from the bushes by the basement windows. The shadow from the woods melted with the shadows by the bushes.

  And waited.

  For this is the way Death comes. On feet silent as a doe. Moving softly as a breeze. Its approach unnoticed, its presence unknown. Maybe expected, but never this soon, not at this time.

  Tonight was different, though. For no one in this house was sick. Not in the slightest. And most certainly, no one was near death. The house was occupied by a young
couple in their mid-thirties and their children. Nicolas and Valeria Ruiz and six-year old Diego watched television downstairs. Upstairs, asleep in her crib lay Sofia, just one month old, and a joy to the parents. The apple of the old man’s eye, and the love of Valeria’s life. Sweet, rosy-cheeked, dimpled Baby Sofia. Sleeping in the shadows of her nursery, just the sliver of light from the hallway through the partially open door illuminating her room.

  She was well-fed, having woken just an hour before. Now, she slept, and on any other night wouldn’t awaken again until one or two in the morning. Enough time for her parents to squeeze in three or four exhausted hours of sleep before the feeding ritual began again, typically culminating in a groggy diaper change as well.

  But this was not to be like any other evening. Baby Sofia would not be waking the poor, bone-weary parents tonight. In fact, her parents would get the best night’s sleep of their lives since the new baby arrived. Which was good. Because when they awoke, a nightmare would begin that would never leave them, which they could never awaken from. In the morning, they would find their new baby, their delight, unmoving in her crib.

  The shadow slid up the outside wall and slipped into Baby Sofia’s room. For a brief moment, it hovered near the crib and then slid closer to it, the shadow slowly covering the crib and the baby in it, until both were completely hidden by the shadow. The baby made a muffled sound—not a cry, but more of a whimper—its face pressed against the Disney characters of her soft sheets and mattress.

  In the morning, her parents would find her. Not crying. Not cooing. Not smiling. But gone.

  Not kidnapped, just no more Baby Sofia.

  Crib death worked that way, just that terrible way.

  When they found her, her little bedroom would glow in the new morning’s light—no shadows in the room at all.