he’d learned very young and in a horrific way.
• • •
It took Nocturne years to realize the monstrous secret of what lived above him in the old farmhouse.
By then, he had created, at his grandfather’s direction, many more explosive devices. He liked the work. It was a game that tested both his mind and the steadiness of his hands. The devices had become increasingly complex and more powerful. Some the old man took and dealt with himself. Others, Nocturne was called upon to plant, usually at night, often after a long ride with his grandfather in the pickup truck. The old man said almost nothing on those drives, yet he seemed pleased with his grandson’s labors, and Nocturne, sitting beside the silent, white-haired man, felt proud of himself. The bombs he built destroyed things, but his grandfather had explained that those things were worthy of destruction. He’d given Nocturne reams of paper to read, his own scribbled manifestos. Sometimes he visited the basement and vented his theories of conspiracy. Even though Nocturne could easily see that his grandfather’s arguments were riddled with logical fallacies and fueled by hate, he held his tongue. The old man seemed to value Nocturne’s work and his company. Sometimes his grandfather would fix him with a steely gaze and quote from Proverbs, “Iron sharpens iron, and one man sharpens another.” The words made Nocturne feel connected to the old man, important in his eyes.
The basement door was almost never locked anymore. Those nights when Nocturne heard the padlock slipped into the hasp and snapped into place, he wondered: Had he done something wrong?
From his reading, he’d come to believe that the essential mechanism of the universe was cause and effect. Everything existed as the result of one thing that triggered another that triggered another that triggered another. He believed that if one were diligent enough, one could trace back to an ultimate source the reason for all things. Although he often indulged in rumination on the broader considerations of existence, just as often he applied his thinking to more specific matters. The locked door, for example.
He was sixteen when he set out one night to discover the reason the basement door was periodically (and randomly, it seemed) locked. Winter lay around the farmhouse deep and still. A storm had just passed, and snow was piled against the outside walls, drifted taller than a man, sealing in Nocturne and his mother and grandfather. For no reason that Nocturne could discern, the old man had slapped the lock in place before going to bed. When the house above was quiet, Nocturne stripped naked, rolled his clothing in a bundle that he tied to a rope looped about his ankle. He worked his way up the laundry chute, out the opening in the second-floor bathroom, and hauled up his clothes. When he was dressed, he stepped into the hallway. He’d walked the old house at night so often he knew exactly where to step to avoid the loose, noisy floorboards, and he slipped silently down the hallway. He stopped at the old man’s room and listened. Inside, all was quiet. He carefully opened the door a crack. Although the curtains were drawn and the room lay in inky dark, Nocturne could see that the bed was empty. He closed the door, wondering. When he came abreast of the door to his mother’s bedroom, he heard a familiar sound, the harsh suck and sigh of air from his grandfather when the old man was laboring hard. That the sound came from his mother’s bedroom was bewildering to Nocturne. He reached for the knob. The metal was cold in his hand. He eased the door open. Although he knew he risked revealing his secret freedom, his curiosity was too great.
The storm had left in its wake a clear, brittle sky shattered by a glaring moon. The curtains were drawn back. Moonlight thrust through the window and slashed across his mother’s bed. Nocturne stared, unable to comprehend what he saw.
She lay on the bed, naked. Above her waist, she was in darkness, but moonlight splashed over her narrow hips, making the damp skin of his grandfather, who’d wedged between her legs, glisten like melting ice. The old man was bent over her, his pelvis in rapid motion. Nocturne’s mother lay rigid, staring at the ceiling above her, her eyes sightless as stones.
Nocturne had read about sex. He understood it as he did many things, in a distant, literal way. The gritty reality before him defied his comprehension, and he stood in the doorway, dumb with confusion. He must have made a noise, for his mother’s eyes fell on him, and she caught her breath with an audible gasp.
The old man stopped his thrusting and looked where she looked. He considered a moment, then pulled back from the woman. He climbed off the bed and stepped toward Nocturne. His penis was erect, huge and wet. His eyes were black, sharp and penetrating. “I suppose you’re old enough,” he finally said. He looked back at his daughter. “You want her, after I’m done, you take her.”
“No,” she cried, weeping. “God, no.”
The old man stepped back to the bed and slapped her across the face. “You’ll do as I tell you.”
Although he didn’t fully understand the horror of incest, Nocturne understood his mother’s pain. He exploded with a howl, and he charged his grandfather in a blind rage, driving him back against a bureau. The old man struggled to defend himself. Finally he grasped a heavy jar from the bureau and swung it against the side of Nocturne’s head, shattering the thick glass. The boy dropped to the floor and entered into his beloved dark.
He woke on the cold, cement floor of the basement. How much time had passed, he couldn’t say. His head hurt. He was thirsty. He stood up, dizzy, and made his way to the steps. Daylight seeped through the narrow gap between the bottom of the basement door and the kitchen floor. He tried to let himself out, but the padlock was still in place. He heard the floorboards of the kitchen creak. The padlock rattled and snapped free. The old man opened the door. Nocturne’s grandfather stood in a blaze of light and held a shotgun aimed at the boy. Nocturne squinted painfully and turned his face from the glare. The old man grabbed him harshly by the arm and pulled him into the light. He shoved Nocturne ahead of him toward the stairway, up to the second floor, down the hallway to the bedroom where Nocturne’s eyes had been truly opened. He forced his grandson inside.
The curtains were drawn against the sunlight. His mother lay in bed, covered by a dirty, wrinkled sheet. She stared up at the ceiling. Her arms were outside the sheet, slightly spread away from her body, each wrist bound in white gauze that was stained red. To Nocturne she seemed an angel fallen to earth, an angel who’d come to rest on that old bed, an angel with red-tipped wings. She blinked, but she didn’t seem to be aware that her son was there.
“Like her mother,” the old man spat. “Weak.” He stepped between Nocturne and the woman on the bed. “Are you like her? Or are you like your father?”
Nocturne looked into the old man’s eyes and understood everything.
He could feel a tearing inside, as if the flesh and the bone were splitting, as if he were giving birth to another self. From a place he’d never stood before, he looked back and saw the boy who’d walked with his mother in the beauty of the night, who’d held her while she wept at the sad music of the phonograph records, who’d learned a kind of happiness in the solitary dark with his books and his gadgets and his imagination and her as his sole companion. The new part of him looked at that child with deep contempt, for clearly the world was a different place, much simpler than he’d ever imagined. There were the powerful and there were the powerless. There were those who created nightmares and those who lived them. Nocturne had been one of the victims. But no more. In the world as he now understood it, there was no room for weakness.
He faced the old man and he heard his own cold voice answer, “Like you.”
Nightmare had been born.
chapter
nineteen
Ibelieve it was very soon after he discovered the incest that he killed his grandfather and his mother,” Dr. Hart said.
“Whoa. He confessed to that?” During the story, Stuart Coyote hadn’t touched his coffee. It no longer steamed in the cup in his hands.
“Another inference of mine.”
“Killed them in anger? A sense of betrayal? What?” Coyote asked.
“Where his grandfather was concerned, I think David considered it justice, retribution. In his world, there was no law but the law of his grandfather, and death the only recourse.”
“And his mother?”
“Anger at her betrayal is certainly a possibility. But I’m more inclined to think he believed he was setting her
