Darkness Under the Sun

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 seances 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 screaming 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.

He glanced at the house next door, at the houses across the street. If Howie shouted for help, if Blackwood realized he wouldn’t get a chance to do to these women what he had done to others, then the killer might nevertheless risk staying just long enough to stab them, slash them, and then run.

The frosted-glass sconce beside the front entrance was on a timer, lit now, denying Howie the cover of darkness as he approached. Holding both stones in his left hand and the key in his right, he unlocked the door. The sliding deadbolt made a whispery scraping noise as it retracted. Howie silently eased the door open, pocketed the key, and transferred one of the stones to his right hand.

The porch light dimly revealed the foyer but not the pitch-black hall beyond, which led past other rooms to the kitchen. To the left lay the archway to the lightless living room, and to the right were stairs ascending from shadows into inky gloom. He realized that he was backlighted, that every second he stood there, he was exposed, yet he hesitated. Taking a chance that Blackwood was still on the ground floor, toward the back of the house, Howie intended to sprint for the staircase, yelling for his mother to get her gun, which she kept in a bureau drawer.

Fearful of going forward, furious with himself for not taking the plunge, at last he crossed the threshold, into the foyer.

A tall figure stepped out of the hallway, darkness moving in darkness. “Hello, son.”

With a mortal thunk, the thrown knife embedded in the door frame, two inches to the left of Howie’s head.

He threw the stone in his right hand, heard it thwack something even as he turned to flee, heard Blackwood grunt, shouted—“Mom, get your gun!”—crossed the porch, plunged the stairs, spun around, threw at a window, which shattered as he raced to the maple and snatched up two more smooth stones. He had lost his baseball cap somewhere, but he scored a hit on another window and rearmed himself as on the second floor lights bloomed bright and as Blackwood rushed down the porch steps, the throwing knife in his hand.

Howie expected Blackwood to come at him as fast as a bullet, snatch him up, slice him open, and spill his steaming guts on the lawn. But the big man’s nose was bleeding, his blood black in moonlight, and at any moment some neighbor might appear. He couldn’t kill the whole neighborhood, though he looked like he wanted to, so he hung back, pointing at Howie to emphasize his threat. “You tell them anything about me, I’ll return some night, tear off your mama’s face. I’ll spend a month cutting Corrine up alive. Keep your mouth shut, and I’m gone forever. There’s a world of bitches like them. I don’t need them unless you rat on me and make me have to come back.”

Blackwood turned and seemed to fly across the lawn, through the night, faster than any man could run,