Darkness My Old Friend

took the form of a sneer. Eloise couldn’t remember what it was with the two of them. And she didn’t much care- two old dogs with a bone between them.

“It has been a while, Muldune,” said Jones. Eloise noted how he did always try to be polite, even when he was annoyed. She wasn’t sure if this was a good trait or a dishonest one. She looked again across the clearing in time to see Michael slipping away into the dark between the trees. She still didn’t say anything; something held her back.

The three of them started walking toward the group of men who stood around looking down at the ground. As he approached, Jones asked, “What did you find there, son?”

The man in uniform was just a boy, with a smooth, unlined face free from stubble. He looked pale and stricken.

“Detective Cooper,” the boy said. Did everybody in this town know Jones Cooper? “I think I found bones.”

They all looked at the hole in the earth and saw the shock of white against the dark of the soil.

“Okay,” said Jones. He put up his hands. “Step away and stop digging. Call Detective Ferrigno and get some crime-scene techs out here.”

“Don’t tell them, Eloise. Please.” Marla again. Just her voice, loud inside Eloise’s head.

“It’s too late,” she said. And everyone turned to look at her with grim faces. That was her last awareness of the scene.

Marla sat up from the dirt and brushed herself off. For someone who’d been buried for more than twenty years, she looked remarkably well coiffed. Except for that throat, which was a mottled black and purple.

“He was supposed to spend the night with a friend. I should have known he’d come home. Cara was asleep. You remember how she slept like the dead, don’t you? Once that child was asleep, I had a solid twelve hours before she’d open her eyes again. Mack was working late, grading term papers in his office at the university. I had been looking forward to that time to myself all week.”

She stood up. “That’s what you lose when you’re a mother and a wife. You lose time to yourself. Your time is never yours again, is it? Not really.”

She sighed. “Anyway, it was nothing, what he saw. I had a friend over. As I confided in him about my life, I cried. My friend moved to comfort me. That’s what Michael saw. That’s all, I swear. But the rage in that boy, like all his life it had just been simmering, waiting for a reason to blow. My God. Why was he so angry at me?”

But then Marla was running and Eloise was high above her. It was like a satellite image she couldn’t zoom in on. She couldn’t get closer as she watched Marla darting through the woods. Two large forms gave chase, until one of them gained on her and took her to the ground. The other form came up behind, and there was a fight. Marla ran again, disappeared into the Chapel, while the two men engaged in a vicious physical battle that left one of them lifeless on the ground. The one who remained standing went after her again.

But that was all. Eloise came to on her back in the field with Ray and Jones looming over her.

“Eloise, are you okay?” asked Jones.

Ray helped her up, less concerned. “What did you see?” he asked.

“She said there was someone else there that night. A friend, not a lover,” Eloise said to Ray. She didn’t care about Jones, what he thought of her, whether or not he believed her. She leaned against Ray.

“He was here, watching the dig, Ray. Just now, in the real world.”

“Who?”

“Michael Holt. I saw him run off. Go after him.” She pointed in the direction she’d seen him run, and Ray took off, leaving her alone with Jones.

“Are you okay?” he asked again.

“I’m okay.”

He looked after Ray, seemed to consider giving chase himself. But he stayed rooted. Others had arrived. She saw more men moving into the clearing.

“It doesn’t seem like this whole thing, whatever it is you do, is very good for your health,” said Jones.

She didn’t know how to answer him. No one who wasn’t another psychic, or her daughter, had made that observation before. This is killing you, Mom. You need to walk away from it. In fact, no one seemed to notice her at all. For most people it was only about what she could do for them.

“He’s using you,” said Jones. He was still looking off in the direction where Ray had gone. “You shouldn’t let him anymore.”

She was about to protest. But she found she didn’t have it in her. “He’s my friend.”

She sensed that he was about to make some kind of comment, but then he moved away from her and toward them, the other men, with a quick glance back. She turned and exited the clearing, heading back toward the car. There was nothing left to do for Marla Holt; she wouldn’t visit Eloise again. Eloise couldn’t help her anymore.

chapter twenty-six

Michael ran through the wet woods, branches slapping at his face, roots tugging at his feet. His chest was tight with effort, his heart an engine running too hot, too hard. When he finally came to a stop at the mine head, he was sobbing. Then, in the next moment, everything in his stomach came up in one heaving orange gush. The sound of the splatter against the ground made him dry-heave until he could hardly breathe. Then he sank against the wooden frame of the mine entrance. After a while his breathing slowed, his nausea subsided. The cool air from the mine shaft seemed to wash out and over him, soothing him.

He’d been coming here his whole life. His father had shown him the way. It was here where he went below the first time, first ventured into that always dark and cool and quiet place. There was no chatter, no traffic, no one else to look on him in judgment, to take stock of him and find him wanting.

It was Cooper who had led them all to that place, brought the police. And Eloise and Ray had been there, too. If it hadn’t been for that stupid girl, tramping about where she didn’t belong, no one ever would have known about him digging out there. Now the site would be lost, or someone else would take credit for it. But no, that wasn’t it, was it? That wasn’t why he couldn’t stop crying.

He pulled himself to his feet and stood at the entrance to the mine. When he first returned here after his father had died, the mine head had been boarded up. There was a city sign on it that declared it condemned. DO NOT ENTER, the sign warned. DANGER. He’d brought a crowbar down and pried it open. The boards lay off to the side, a jagged pile of broken wood and jutting rusted nails.

“What did you do to her?” he yelled into the darkness. It was a wet, solid thing, that darkness. It could come out and grab you, drag you down into the earth.

“What did you do to her?” The question bounced back at him, echoing off the mine shaft’s walls. His words sounded desperate and grief-stricken, his voice distorted and foreign, even to himself.

His own memories of that night were boarded up like the mine. Do not enter. Danger. And there was no crowbar strong enough to break through. All he could remember was the bike ride home through silent suburban streets, the moon high, the houses dark. He left his bike on the lawn, carelessly let it twist and fall to the ground. He climbed the porch step and put his hand on the knob. But that door wouldn’t open, not in his memory. He couldn’t get it to budge. And he was tired of trying.

“All the answers are down here,” his father had told him about the mines and caves. “Down here you can hear yourself think, finally.”

Maybe that’s what he needed to do. Go down. Maybe his father was right. Maybe the answers were there.

“Michael!”

He looked up through the trees. The voice was familiar. Ray Muldune. He was making his way slowly, unsteadily closer.

“Michael!”

Ray was a good guy, but Michael didn’t want to talk anymore. Not to Ray, not to anyone. He lifted his pack from the ground and hefted it onto his back. He stooped his head and stepped inside, into the blessed quiet.