Echoes of Darkness (18 page)

Well, he understood it now. If this cootie-riddled, bullying, mean man of a cop wasn’t strutting his way back to the cells, then Kyle thought he’d
never
understand the word.

They got to the cells, and Grandpa entered one and sat on the cot. Officer Downs turned to fetch the folding chair that leaned against the wall facing the cells, and saw Kyle bringing up the rear. He froze for a second, hand outstretched, eyes wide with surprise.

“Oh! Christ, I forgot all about Kyle.” He paused a moment, then put on a more official cop voice. “Officer Saltz, can you bring young Mr. Hickey home, while I—”

“No,” said Grandpa, and though he was sitting in a jail cell, there was command in his tone, like he was back home, tossing orders across the kitchen. “The boy stays. He’s why I’m doing this, after all.”

Mr. Downs looked at Officer Saltz, but Saltz just shrugged without turning around, like he’d known Kyle was there all along. “I say we let him stay, then. Besides.” His back was still to Kyle, so the boy couldn’t see the officer’s expression, but his voice grew jolly, like he was almost laughing. “I don’t think I want to miss this.”

“Kyle.”

The open cell door was right beside him, but Grandpa had chosen to thrust a hand through the restraining bars instead, leaving them separated. Kyle was shocked to see the old man looked close to tears.

Grandpa
never
cries.

This, more than anything else, left Kyle stranded in uncertainty. All thoughts of Minecraft were gone as he wondered just what was going on here, and what in the world could make Grandpa
cry
? His own eyes welled as the great mass of callused knuckles enveloped his hand. His grandfather gave a slight tug, and a little squeeze, and his voice, when it came, was as gentle as Kyle had ever heard it.

“Now, boy, don’t you cry. I need you to listen, and watch, and remember, okay? I tried explaining all this to your pop, but he didn’t want to listen. He was pretty clear about that. I would have tried to change his mind, but”—he cast a glance over his shoulder, at the small, wire-threaded window set in the cell wall, and shuddered—“I’m runnin’ out of time awful quick here, and we Hickeys can be some stubborn assholes on occasion, so you’re gonna have to do.”

A tiny smile flicked across his old mouth, and was gone.

“Probably wouldn’t do you any good to repeat that to your ma, though, okay?” Kyle nodded, fighting back the tears. A parade of questions marched through his head, but he daren’t ask any: the intensity pouring off of his grandfather was enough to leave him tongue-tied.

“Good boy.” Another hand squeeze, harder this time. “You go over in the corner and you watch, and listen. And remember.” With a sudden jerk, he yanked Kyle almost nose-to-nose, and the steel crept back into his voice. “And when you get in that corner you don’t come out, you hear? You
do not
come back near this cell, understand? You do and I’ll tan the hide right off your backside.”

At Kyle’s frightened nod, the big hand pushed him, only half gently, away from the cell. Grandpa turned and took his seat on the cot again, just as Mr. Downs carried the folding chair into the cell.

“No,” said Grandpa. “You sit outside. And close the door—you can hear me just fine from out there.”

A snort came from Officer Saltz, leaning against the corridor wall, a derisive sound with a lot of flapping lips, but Officer Downs just swung the chair out into the corridor, pushed the cell door to without latching it, and planted himself in his seat.

“This better, sir?”

Grandpa reached out and gave the barred door a yank, closing it with a decisive
click
.

“Is now. You ’bout ready? ’Cause I’m ’bout out of time.”

Officer Downs pulled out a small, gray object, about twice the size of the Zippo lighters they sold down at the corner store. He pressed a button, and a small, red light winked into existence.

“Do you mind if I record this session?”

The question was asked with the air of one who already knew the answer: Kyle had seen cops on TV and figured it didn’t matter what Grandpa said, that recorder was staying on. Grandpa just flipped a hand toward the little thing.

“You can put it on a billboard up by the highway for all I care—just listen, and let me talk. I’m running out—”

“I just have the official stuff to get through, sir. One moment.” Officer Downs looked at the little red light in his hand. “This is Officer Joshua Downs, of the Spreewald P.D., accompanied by Officer Timothy Saltz, also of the Spreewald P.D., and we’re sitting with Mr. Carl Hickey Senior, also of Spreewald. Mr. Hickey has come to the station of his own free will to make a statement of confession, and has been informed of his rights.” He looked at his watch, added the date and time, then looked up at Grandpa, holding forth the recorder like a reporter’s microphone. “All set, sir, thank you for your patience. It’s your show.”

“It’s about damn time,” said Grandpa—then stopped. He looked about a moment, as if searching for words, but when his eyes fell upon Kyle he seemed to settle down, and took a deep breath.

“I been having dreams for years. Long as I can remember.” His gaze swiveled from Kyle to Officer Downs. “Always during the full moon. Took me a long time to figure that out, when I was younger, but I did. Might have been that a lot of ’em were about the moon, but whatever. Three nights every month, I had these moon dreams—I called ’em moon dreams, even when they wasn’t about the moon—and for the longest time, they was just fine. Enjoyable. Runnin’ through the fields and the woods, mostly. It wasn’t like anything really
happened
in ’em, it was more the
feeling
they gave me. Woke up feeling, I don’t know, just great. Relaxed and happy, like after the first time a young gal let me take her for a tumble. Three days a month I could count on waking up feeling like everything was right with the world, you understand? Been like that for ’bout as long as I can remember.”

He’d begun to look almost pleased, as if just thinking about the dreams was enough to make him happy. Then he hesitated, his expression caving in on itself.

“But then, a few years ago, the dreams . . . changed. See, sometimes the running dreams were hunting dreams. Stalking little things through the woods, like rabbits. Squirrels. Stuff like that. Not every time, but enough. Enough for me to notice. I wasn’t catching them, or anything. Just every once in a while I was chasing them, like it was a game, you know? Tag, or something like that. It was kind of . . . well, it was kind of beautiful.”

He raised his chin as he said that last, obviously daring anyone to poke fun at him for the sentiment. Kyle waited to hear that derisive snort from Officer Saltz, but it didn’t come. He glanced sideways, and found the little cop still leaning against the wall, arms folded over his chest, but for once the sneer was gone, replaced by an intense stare. Saltz didn’t look at Kyle at all, watching Grandpa as if hanging on his every word.

“A few years back, though, it changed again. They wasn’t
always
hunting dreams, but they was more often than not. And I started . . . I started
catching
things.”

Grandpa’s chin had relaxed to its usual position, but now he wasn’t looking at anyone. He stared at the bars to one side of Officer Downs, but his eyes looked funny to Kyle, like he wasn’t really seeing anything. Or maybe seeing stuff the rest of them
couldn’t
. Like running rabbits and squirrels.

“I was catching things—still the little things I’d been chasing before, you know, woodchuck, maybe a raccoon—and I was killing ’em. With my teeth. Like an animal.”

His head swiveled, and he looked straight at Officer Downs, and Kyle thought the policeman met his eyes.

“I’ve hunted—near ’bout everybody ’round here does, at one time or another—and I know some guys who done that thing where you drink the blood of your first buck, supposed to bring you closer to the spirit of the deer. I never went for that shit. My daddy never told me to when I was a kid. But in these dreams, taking these little critters down like that . . . I did taste their blood.”

His gaze drifted off into the middle distance again, caught up in the memories. “It was the strangest thing. I’d never really thought about it—why would I?—but the blood tasted . . . you know,
different
, depending on what it came from. I guess I’d always just thought blood was blood, but it’s not. Woodchuck don’t taste like rabbit don’t taste like squirrel—and nothing tastes like deer. And in the dreams I liked it. I liked it all. I was always disgusted when I woke up, and started thinking of the moon dreams as nightmares. Told myself I wasn’t looking forward to the full moon each month any more . . . but I was lying to myself. Part of me was always looking forward to it. But then they changed again.”

Grandpa gulped, Adam’s apple bobbing visibly in his skinny neck.

“I had one . . . I had one where I et what I killed.” He shifted on his cot, sliding his bony shanks into a more comfortable position. “Up ’til then, the hunting dreams ended when I caught up. I’d tackle what I was chasing, or sink my teeth into it if it was a killing dream, they’d let loose this little screech, and I’d wake up right then, with the feel of the thing on my skin, or the taste of its blood still in my mouth. But it was all just a memory, you know? Like when you wake up and you’re not sure whether you’re still dreaming or not, but then you wake the rest of the way up and it all sort of fades away. It was like that. Then one time I didn’t wake up.”

He swallowed again.

“Not ’til I was done. It happened about a year ago, and that one
was
a nightmare. I—”

He broke off and looked at Kyle, his eyes showing fear for the first time since he’d started. “I’m sorry.”

What
? Kyle thought, then opened his mouth to voice the question, but Grandpa turned back to Officer Downs.

“I dreamed I chased Jingles, my daughter-in-law’s cat. Caught it out behind the shed and drug it off into the woods.”

Kyle gasped, but the old man went on like he hadn’t heard.

“That’s the first time I remember eating in the dreams. I woke up that morning with the taste in my mouth, and I
was
upset about that one, not just pretending. She was a crotchety old bitch, but I liked Jingles just fine. I was lying there, waiting for the taste, the memory, to fade, lying there for quite a while before I realized it wasn’t going away. Then I noticed my big toe.”

Kyle sniffled. Tears ran down his face, though he was trying his best to fight them. His grandfather didn’t cotton to tears, ’specially not in public.
You gonna blubber
, he’d say,
you take it t’home, you hear me? ’Tisn’t nobody’s business but your own.
Grandpa glanced at Kyle, and his gaze stuck. When he went on, he was telling his story to Kyle, not the cops.

“My big toe was hurting something fierce, like I’d smacked it a good one, but I didn’t remember doing that at all. I yanked my foot up to check it out, and that was when I saw the dirt. The bottoms of my feet were black with it—not just the usual inside-the-house dusting up, mind, but real dirt, like I’d been walking around outside. My hands, too. Palms were scratched and dirty, fingernails filthy. I realized I was wide awake, but I could still taste the blood—Jingles’s blood—and I started rooting about in my mouth with my tongue.”

Another throat-working swallow.

“There was blood in there, and something else, something solid, all worked down in between my teeth. I sucked a bit out and spat it in my palm, and it was fur. Like cat fur. Then I ran into the bathroom to throw up. I puked for a while, bits of stuff coming out that didn’t look nothin’ like the dinner I’d et the night before.

“I tried to ignore all that stuff, the fur in my teeth and my dirty feet, tried to tell myself it was just a dream and nothing more, just like it always had been. But then the cat turned up missing. Abby kept a-callin’ it, and it never came. Then, two days later, the boys found the cat in the woods. Found . . . what was left of it, I mean.”

Tears rolled down Kyle’s face now, and to heck with that old man. Kyle remembered him and James finding Jingles half-buried under a fallen tree in the woods behind the house. The bugs had gotten to the cat by then, and between the maggots and the smell, both boys had puked their guts out in the trees. Then James had stayed to mark the spot while Kyle ran for home, crying and spitting, puke and snot running from his nose, to fetch their pop.

They had really only been able to identify her by the little tag hanging from the collar still about her neck, but Kyle would
never
forget finding the crumpled, ruined form sticking out from under that log. Grandpa said they’d found a cat, but that wasn’t quite true. They’d found the front half.

Well,
most
of it.

“So now I knew,” Grandpa said. “They wasn’t just dreams after all. Maybe they never
had
been. I don’t know. But I’ve heard stories of things that go bump in the night my whole life, and I been to the movies. Someone getting out to go a-killin’ when the moon is full, waking up with no memory of it but some kind of jumbled dream? I ain’t stupid: didn’t take me but that morning of the missing cat to put two and two together and come up with werewolf.”