The Eyes of Darkness

Charleston Boulevard. No one was following them, but he kept checking.

“It isn’t hopeless,” he said again. “We just need time to think about it, time to work out a plan. Maybe we’ll come up with someone who can help us.”

“Like who?”

The traffic light turned green.

“Like the newspapers, for one,” Elliot said, accelerating across the intersection, glancing in the rearview mirror. “We’ve got proof that something unusual is happening: the silencer-equipped pistol I took off Vince, your house blowing up… I’m pretty sure we can find a reporter who’ll go with that much and write a story about how a bunch of nameless, faceless people want to keep us from reopening Danny’s grave, how maybe something truly strange lies at the bottom of the Sierra tragedy. Then a lot of people are going to be pushing for an exhumation of all those boys. There’ll be a demand for new autopsies, investigations. Kennebeck’s bosses want to stop us before we sow any seeds of doubt about the official explanation. But once those seeds are sown, once the parents of the other scouts and the entire city are clamoring for an investigation, Kennebeck’s buddies won’t have anything to gain by eliminating us. It isn’t hopeless, Tina, and it’s not like you to give up so easily.”

She sighed. “I’m not giving up.”

“Good.”

“I won’t stop until I know what really happened to Danny.”

“That’s better. That sounds more like the Christina Evans I know.”

Dusk was sliding into night. Elliot turned on the headlights.

Tina said, “It’s just that… for the past year I’ve been struggling to adjust to the fact that Danny died in that stupid, pointless accident. And now, just when I’m beginning to think I can face up to it and put it behind me, I discover he might not have died accidentally after all. Suddenly everything’s up in the air again.”

“It’ll come down.”

“Will it?”

“Yes. We’ll get to the bottom of this.”

He glanced in the rearview mirror.

Nothing suspicious.

He was aware of her watching him, and after a while she said, “You know what?”

“What?”

“I think… in a way… you’re actually enjoying this.”

“Enjoying what?”

“The chase.”

“Oh, no. I don’t enjoy taking guns away from men half again as big as I am.”

“I’m sure you don’t. That isn’t what I said.”

“And I sure wouldn’t choose to have my nice, peaceful, quiet life turned upside down. I’d rather be a comfortable, upstanding, boring citizen than a fugitive.”

“I didn’t say anything about what you’d choose if it were up to you. But now that it’s happened, now that it’s been thrust upon you, you’re not entirely unhappy. There’s a part of you, deep down, that’s responding to the challenge with a degree of pleasure.”

“Baloney.”

“An animal awareness… a new kind of energy you didn’t have this morning.”

“The only thing new about me is that I wasn’t scared stiff this morning, and now I am.”

“Being scared — that’s part of it,” she said. “The danger has struck a chord in you.”

He smiled. “The good old days of spies and counterspies? Sorry, but no, I don’t long for that at all. I’m not a natural-born man of action. I’m just me, the same old me that I always was.”

“Anyway,” Tina said, “I’m glad I’ve got you on my side.”

“I like it better when you’re on top,” he said, and he winked at her.

“Have you always had such a dirty mind?”

“No. I’ve had to cultivate it.”

“Joking in the midst of disaster,” she said.

“‘Laughter is a balm for the afflicted, the best defense against despair, the only medicine for melancholy.’”

“Who said that?” she asked. “Shakespeare?”

“Groucho Marx, I think.”

She leaned forward and picked something up from the floor between her feet. “And then there’s this damn thing.”

“What did you find?”

“I brought it from my place,” she said.

In the rush to get out of her house before the gas explosion leveled it, he hadn’t noticed that she’d been carrying anything. He risked a quick look, shifting his attention from the road, but there wasn’t enough light in the car for him to see what she held. “I can’t make it out.”

“It’s a horror-comics magazine,” she said. “I found it when I was cleaning out Danny’s room. It was in a box with a lot of other magazines.”

“So?”

“Remember the nightmares I told you about?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“The monster in my dreams is on the cover of this magazine. It’s him. Detail for detail.”

“Then you must have seen the magazine before, and you just—”

“No. That’s what I tried to tell myself. But I never saw it until today. I know I didn’t. I pored through Danny’s collection. When he came home from the newsstand, I never monitored what he’d bought. I never snooped.”

“Maybe you—”

“Wait,” she said. “I haven’t told you the worst part.”

The traffic thinned out as they drove farther from the heart of town, closer to the looming black mountains that thrust into the last electric-purple light in the western sky.

Tina told Elliot about The Boy Who Was Not Dead.

The similarities between the horror story and their attempt to exhume Danny’s body chilled Elliot.

“Now,” Tina said, “just like Death tried to stop the parents in the story, someone’s trying to stop me from opening my son’s grave.”

They were getting too far out of town. A hungry darkness lay on both sides of the road. The land began to rise toward Mount Charleston where, less than an hour away, pine forests were mantled with snow. Elliot swung the car around and started back toward the lights of the city, which spread like a vast, glowing fungus on the black desert plain.

“There are similarities,” he said.

“You’re damned right there are. Too many.”

“There’s also one big difference. In the story, the boy was buried alive. But Danny is dead. The only thing in doubt is how he died.”

“But that’s the only difference between the basic plot of this story and what we’re going through. And the words Not Dead in the title. And the boy in the story being Danny’s age. It’s just too much,” she said.

They rode in silence for a while.

Finally Elliot said, “You’re right. It can’t be coincidence.”

“Then how do you explain it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Welcome to the club.”

A roadside diner stood on the right, and Elliot pulled into the parking lot. A single mercury-vapor pole lamp at the entrance shed fuzzy purple light over the first third of the parking lot. Elliot drove behind the restaurant and tucked the Mercedes into a slot in the deepest shadows, between a Toyota Celica and a small motor home, where it could not be seen from the street.