Night Shadows Read online

  His conscious mind chastised his subconscious for getting his hopes up. Despite the fact they hadn’t spoken again since the Christmas matinee, Brad had nonetheless evolved into something of a friend over the past several weeks—at least in Adam’s mind. Adam cheered Brad on during the remaining games of the Barnesville Barracudas, watching unseen from the bleachers as his fellow football players high-fived each other after a win and the cheerleaders swarmed about him as he walked off the field. He stood unobtrusively across the street from Barnesville High most mornings, straddling his clunker of a bike as he watched Brad pull into the student parking lot in the new BMW his parents must have given him as a present after his Christmas shift at the Liberty. Adam had even tricked Louie Carson into revealing Brad’s street address one day after a matinee showing of New Year’s Evil. He kept watch over his new friend, hidden behind the mammoth ancient oak tree across the street from Brad’s house. He peered through the new pair of binoculars he got from Clement’s Hardware and watched as Brad paced his bedroom floor talking on the phone, or lifted weights in the garage.

  Adam thought about marching up to the front door and ringing the doorbell. He imagined Brad’s mother answering the door, could almost see the look of skepticism on her face as she gave him the once-over. She’d wonder why a guy his age was calling on her son, might perhaps forbid Brad to see him.

  No, it was better to remain cloaked in the shadows, keeping invisible sentry over his newfound friend.

  He scanned the crowd outside the Liberty one more time before going in. He’d been convinced Brad would show for the matinee, that he’d remember their Christmas chat and come looking for him. Dejected, Adam walked into the theater lobby, paid for his Goobers, and entered the theater.

  He stood for a minute, allowing his eyes to adjust to the darkness. The movie house had just gone dark, and the film would spring to life on the screen in seconds. He sat in the first seat to his left, hoping that by staying close to the door he’d be able to spot Brad if he came in late. Adam smiled. Brad is always late for these things.

  The film began. Despite his eagerness for Brad to show, Adam soon lost himself in the movie, shrinking down in his seat in a posture from childhood. His eyes began to glaze over as the image of two miners played onscreen, with one miner turning out to be a woman. She tossed her long blond locks and gestured seductively to the other miner as she slipped out of the jumpsuit. Adam felt himself stiffen as he watched the woman stroke the tubing of the miner’s breathing apparatus, the miner’s breaths coming out short and hollow, Darth Vader–like, keeping time with Adam’s own. He watched as the light from the miner’s hard hat scanned the woman’s face, traveling down her neck before stopping at the red heart tattoo just above her left breast. His stomach tightened in anticipation as the miner’s hands began to shake. His own fists clenched as the miner grabbed the woman firmly by the shoulders and shoved her back roughly onto the tip of the waiting pickax. His mouth twisted in a mime of the close-up shot of the woman’s red lips as they stretched into a long, pre-title scream.

  Adam had a soft spot in his heart for crazy Harry Warden. He really dug the miner’s outfit he used, even purchasing a gas mask just like the one Harry wore in the film. There weren’t many opportunities to wear the damn thing, of course. He had only worn it once, in fact, that time last September when he finally hooked up with the chat-line guy who’d pleaded for a decapitation. But the guy hadn’t liked Adam’s chosen ensemble, had called him a freak.

  The asshole called chat lines begging strangers to cut off his head, but he was the freak?

  As the ill-fated youthful denizens of My Bloody Valentine went about their way prepping for the town’s first Valentine’s Day Dance in twenty years, Valentine’s Bluff morphed into Barnesville. Adam wished they had a crazy Harry Warden, some deranged miner who’d go postal on the town with his pickax. He fantasized that all the town whores would get red, heart-shaped boxes delivered to their homes, eagerly tearing into them only to find decomposing human hearts inside. He imagined a simultaneous chorus of screams from across the town, imagined Harry Warden decked out in full miner’s regalia as he walked down the center of town swinging his pickax. The whores would peer from behind the corners of their curtained windows, frightened by his power and terrified of the carnage he would unleash at nightfall.

  The theater door swung inward in his direction, and bright light suddenly ripped Adam from his daydream. He recognized Brad, who seemed taller and more handsome than he remembered in simple jeans and a T-shirt. Caught up in his excitement, Adam forgot the movie and jumped up from his seat, startling the boy.

  “Hey, Brad! I knew you’d come today.” There was a startled sound from behind Brad, and a girl’s head peered around his muscular frame.

  “You know this guy?” came the girl’s incredulous voice. She was shorter than Brad, pretty in a whorish kind of way. She smelled of her mother’s good perfume and cigarettes. Brad looked momentarily disoriented, taken off guard by Adam’s enthusiasm. He blinked several times, as if trying to place Adam in proper context.

  “Yes, he knows me. I’m his friend Adam. We watched Black Christmas together. Tell her, Brad,” Adam said in almost childlike tones, eager for the confusion to be behind them. Brad looked back at him, still blinking. Slowly, his expression changed as time and place found their respective spots on the shelf of his mind. His face contorted into a wrinkled look of disgust and contempt.

  “This is the freak who made a pass at me when I was watching some piece of shit slasher movie last Christmas,” he said to the girl without moving his eyes from Adam’s face. Now it was Adam’s turn to blink as his face went numb, his mouth slack-jawed at Brad’s sudden viciousness. The little bitch behind him stepped out to stand next to him, emboldened by Brad’s machismo. She giggled.

  “What do you want, you fucking pervert?” Brad demanded. “Aren’t I a little too old for you, dude?” Adam could feel a stir behind him as other patrons started to turn around in their seats to investigate the sudden ruckus at the back of the theater. He could only continue to stare at Brad’s face, trying to comprehend the origin of the anger and rage that seemed to seep through every pore of the boy’s skin. His cheeks suddenly felt flushed, his head heavy and throbbing.

  “I…” His words trailed off, as if he were having a stroke.

  “Get the hell away from me, you freakin’ pedo,” Brad said, pushing Adam backward. Adam fell back into his seat, stunned, as Brad and his little whore brushed past him and headed for the front of the theater. His eyes already burned from the tears welling up around their perimeter. He felt powerless to close his own mouth. His right hand went to the center of his chest where Brad’s hand had connected roughly seconds before, and Adam could swear he felt the imprint of Brad’s hand burned into this flesh.

  Slightly breathless, Adam turned his eyes back to the screen. He watched through water-rimmed eyes as crazy Harry held Sylvia by her head, her arms and legs flailing as he carried her effortlessly backward toward the jagged water pipe jutting out of the wall. The demented miner gave the screaming girl one last lift and shoved the back of her head roughly into the pipe. And as the rushing water from the pipe mingled with Sylvia’s blood and poured from her mouth like a macabre spigot, Adam’s tears released, coursing down his cheeks in the darkened movie theater. He was ten years old again, and Brad had just ripped up his beloved comic books.

  *

  May

  Adam squinted in the bright spring sunlight as he emerged from the Liberty. He stood alone on the sidewalk in front of the theater for a moment, looked up at the brilliant blue sky, and inhaled deeply. The faint scent of freshly cut grass and spring flowers from the lawn of the municipal building across the street intermingled with the smell of car exhaust from the automobiles idling at the traffic light on Main Street. The last of the Episcopal church’s Sunday services had let out; churchgoers were now making their way to the bakery to get the last of the crumb buns and fresh baked bread bef
ore old Mrs. Shindley and her daughters closed up shop for the day.

  It was just after 1:30 p.m., and Adam had been the only patron in attendance for the Liberty’s first matinee at noon. While moviegoers were likely to spend the more innocuous holidays like Halloween and Valentine’s Day watching a slasher film, few could reconcile the sentimentality of Mother’s Day with slicing and dicing. Still, he had a particular fondness for Mother’s Day, and enjoyed spending time with inbreds Ike and Addley as they raped, tortured, and otherwise terrorized Abbey, Jackie, and Trina at the urging and bequest of their redneck mama.

  Adam would take some good old-fashioned misogynistic sadism over trite Hallmark schmaltziness any day.

  Adam started east down Main Street, stopping at an assortment of items gathered on the sidewalk at his feet. Their presence was out of place, the incongruousness of the display making it impossible to pass it by without looking. Several glass-ensconced candles, their wicks long ago burned down to nothingness, stood amidst a makeshift shrine. Cards with hopeful messages and prayers were wedged between bouquets of dried and decaying flowers and other trinkets—a teddy bear dressed in a football jersey, a high school yearbook, and several photos warped and faded by the elements. A solitary flyer with the headline Missing was taped on the wall of the theater above the display. A handsome, youthful face framed by thick golden hair looked out with promise on the world. Adam viewed the menagerie with indifference for a moment, his eyes scanning these tokens that expressed some collective sense of simultaneous hope and anguish. He cocked his head to one side, then shoved his hands into the pockets in his khakis and continued down Main Street.

  He ducked in at the local Eckerd drugstore and returned to the sidewalk moments later carrying a flat paper bag and a small bouquet of slightly withered yellow carnations wrapped in cellophane. The floral pickings were slim this time of day, but these would have to suffice. Adam turned right onto Highland Street and walked the two remaining blocks to his destination.

  He paused in front of the Barnesville Convalescent Center, admiring the exterior of the building long ago abandoned to disrepair. The nursing home was one of the glorious old-school varieties—not like the newfangled facilities that adopted that pseudo-Victorian look and almost blended into the neighborhood with wraparound porches and gables and turrets. No, Barnesville Convalescent Center stood defiant in its shabbiness—from its uninviting red brick façade punctuated by the occasional gutter hanging precariously off its roof, to the neglected grounds reduced to a few measly patches of crabgrass and a pot full of pansies planted by some well-meaning activities director who had probably long ago fled for greener pastures. Even the nursing home’s choice to retain the far less aesthetically pleasing moniker of convalescent center bucked the popular trend toward sugarcoating old age and death: healthcare facility, care center, nursing and rehabilitation center.

  Convalescent was a fitting term speaking honestly of the piss and shit and decay and dying characterizing such places.

  Adam had chosen it for Elaine Mitchell because the ambience matched his mother’s withered, feeble body and the sheer ugliness of her spirit. Following her stroke five years ago, he’d been offered several choices by a well-intentioned social worker at the hospital. She had spread out a half dozen or so brochures for him to peruse, launching into a polished discourse about how to pick a nursing home for a loved one. But Adam had barely heard the social worker’s fluent dissertation on what questions to ask when considering such facilities when he spotted the cover of a brochure featuring the red brick building he stood in front of now. He remembered fingering through the other brochures, with their sunny shots of sprawling, manicured lawns and close-up shots of kindly old people smiling fondly at impeccably uniformed caregivers, and reaching for the one with no fancy catchphrase about caring for your loved one like family, but simply spelled out the nursing home’s name in plain Times New Roman lettering with a dingy shot of the building underneath it.

  “This one,” Adam had said with uncharacteristic conviction, tapping the brochure firmly with his index finger. The social worker could only stare at him in disbelief.

  “But perhaps you’d like…” she began earnestly.

  “I want this one,” Adam had demanded.

  Defeated, the social worker had arranged for Elaine Mitchell’s transfer to the Barnesville Convalescent Center on a snowy January morning five years ago. The nursing home proved to be a bastion of melancholy and degradation for its inhabitants. On good days, his mother was gotten out of bed. She was fed unappetizing pureed food while sitting at a half-moon-shaped table alongside five other residents as an overworked nurse’s aide systematically went down the line and shoved spoonfuls of bland-looking glop into flaccid mouths. Sometimes the nurse’s aide would forget to switch spoons, nervously glancing up to where Adam sat watching from the corner, offering a shrug of silent apology.

  But Adam never complained about the care—which on good days was poor at best.

  Adam was, in fact, one of the most popular family members who ever set foot in Barnesville Convalescent Center. The skeleton crew of staff nurses, nurse’s aides, and activities director who called out bingo numbers in a droning monotone to a sea of semi-comatose residents staring off into nothingness seemingly admired Adam’s loyalty to his mother. But the reality of his relationship with the caregivers at the Barnesville Convalescent Center was they cared less about the selflessness of his daily visits than they did about the fact that he appeared to turn a blind eye when he caught one of them slapping an unruly resident into submission or pilfering money from a newly arrived birthday card. Adam was indeed well-regarded—not as a model son, but as a silent co-conspirator in the ongoing perpetration of abuse and mistreatment at the home.

  “Hello, Mother,” Adam said tersely as he walked into the room Elaine Mitchell shared with four other residents. Today was a bad day, when staffing levels were critical, and his mother remained in bed wearing her bedclothes from the night before. He pulled a vinyl guest chair over to her bedside, set the paper bag and flowers down, and pulled a long length of tattered privacy curtain around the bed. His mother lay inert, her frail body perfectly centered on the twin mattress. A flimsy sheet covered her brittle limbs. Two sharp eyes followed him—the only part of her body she was still able to consciously control.

  Adam sat down and pulled the chair closer, holding up the bouquet of carnations close to her face. “Look what I’ve brought you, Mother,” he cooed. “You know what today is, don’t you?”

  Elaine Mitchell blinked at her son.

  “Why, it’s Mother’s Day, silly.” He laughed, tossing the bouquet onto the bedside table. “And today I have a very special treat for you, Mother.” Adam looked down at her as if expecting an excited reply.

  He regarded her for a long moment, trying to locate the vibrant, strong woman she once was. Despite the wrinkles and yellowed hair, the slackened jaw and sagging skin around her neck, he caught a glimpse of the old mean-spiritedness in her eyes. Although the shell was failing her, the mind stayed sharp and alert behind a voiceless mouth, sewn shut by the cerebrovascular accident that had set Adam free and turned the tables on her.

  Now the wrath was his, playing out in painfully slow increments of time in this hellhole of a nursing home.

  Adam picked up the paper bag and slid the thin comic book out reverently, like it was an artifact of priceless beauty. He gazed down at the cover, taking in the colorful images of superheroes and villains battling in the air above some futuristic metropolis while frightened city dwellers fled in panic. These characters were unfamiliar to him now; his beloved favorites were long ago relegated to the backburner to make room for the new and improved variety of superhero. My superheroes.

  The ones unceremoniously shredded in an act of maternal carnage at the hands of the wretched old woman lying in the bed before him.

  He looked up from the comic book at her, his eyes glassy with the emotional scars of years past. Elaine Mitchell met he
r son’s eyes, her gaze momentarily triumphant before flickering into two opaque puddles of fear. She was in there, but the old self was caving into the new. Her new self transferred the power of the old self to Adam—restoring him, rejuvenating him, healing him.

  Adam smiled down at his mother, opened the comic book, and began to read.

  Capturing Jove Lunge

  Steve Berman

  Oh, how the cab stank. A rattling heater raised from the scarred seats the ghosts of dog-cheap cigars the driver must have smoked over decades. Like the one he was savoring now. Trapped in the back, Gus rolled down the window to let fresh air, cold and late January sharp, seep inside.

  He regretted the boss insisting he take the train from New York to Providence rather than drive the Rover. Saul had sworn that the best way into this case was for Gus to appear down on his luck. Which meant a visit to a rag shop to buy some fellow’s former Sunday best. Underneath his trusty pea coat, though, Gus’s immense frame strained the suit’s threadbare patches.

  The cabbie took a turn too sharply. Brakes squealed as the car tires struggled to stay along the snow-covered road. The seams in Gus’s sleeves tore as he stretched his thick arms to keep from tumbling about the backseat.

  Gus whistled his appreciation when the house came into view. Saul had been square with him about the artist’s taste: something out of a storybook, with lots of shingles, a crooked roof, and plenty of eaves. Gus expected Boris Karloff to be sitting on the front porch with his hands cupped around a steaming mug of joe.

  The cab slowed on the cobblestone driveway, which circled a frozen fountain. The driver chewed around the stogie stub and muttered that he’d return the next night. Gus grabbed his bag and had barely stepped out of the car when the cab drove off, one rear door swinging like a canary’s broken wing. Gus considered pitching a rock at the cabbie’s back window, but he made it a point not to earn trouble while always anticipating it.