Darkness Falls (5 page)

“He’s gonna need stitches. He’s a dick, anyway.”

“Yeah.” Kyle stared at Cat. He didn’t get what she was doing there. “Why aren’t you scared of me like everyone else?”

Giving him a look, Cat said, “I weigh, like, twenty pounds more than you. You ever tried that on me, I’d kick your ass.”

Kyle laughed at that, and so did she. It was the first real laugh Kyle had had in a long time. In fact, Kyle couldn’t remember the last time he had laughed for real. Not the laughter he felt building up in him in the bathroom when he stared at the blood or in class when Kimberly was making a jerk of herself or when he stabbed Ray.
Real
laughing at something that was
really
funny.

“I heard they kicked you out,” Cat said after a second.

“They all think I’m crazy.”

She looked down and noticed the tooth, the light from the clown night-light shining right on it. “You
are
crazy, throwing this away. This one’s special.” She picked it up. Kyle couldn’t imagine why.

“Special?”

“Your last baby tooth.” She smiled. “Means you’re not a baby anymore.”

Kyle smiled, mainly because he had been thinking the exact same thing, though he still didn’t see why it was worth saving the stupid tooth. It wasn’t as if the tooth fairy was
real
or anything. She
was
real back in 18-whatever-it-was, but they killed her.

Just like they killed Dad.

Suddenly, Cat leaned forward and kissed Kyle.

Kyle had seen people kiss before, of course. Mostly on TV and in movies and stuff. He’d seen Mom and Dad kiss lots of times, too, before Dad died. It was something he probably knew that he’d do someday, but since most girls were stupid, he didn’t think it’d be any time soon. At least, not as long as he lived in this town. The idea of him kissing somebody like Kimberly or any of her friends was just nuts.

Cat had always been different, though. Cat wasn’t afraid of anything or anyone, and she wasn’t stupid. In fact, Kyle sometimes thought she was the only person besides him who wasn’t in the whole town.

But he’d never thought about kissing her before.

In fact, he’d never really thought about kissing anyone. He had no idea what it was supposed to feel like.

Now that it had happened, now that he had felt her cold lips touch his warm ones, he thought that it wasn’t all that bad.

She broke off the kiss and stared at him. “Tastes like metal.”

“Sorry,” Kyle said, feeling as if he’d let her down somehow. She didn’t taste like metal. He didn’t know what she tasted like, only that it was like nothing Kyle had ever tasted before.

All he’d been tasting today, of course, was the salty taste of his own blood . . .

She turned back to the window. “Wait,” he said quickly, not wanting her to go.

Stopping, she turned and looked at him with That Look again.

“It’s just, I—”

Before he could go on, she kissed him again.

He finally figured it out: golden raspberries. Not that Cat’s lips tasted anything like fruit, but he remembered the time he visited Uncle John in upstate New York, and he had a whole bunch of fruit growing in his backyard, including golden raspberries. They looked like normal, red raspberries, except they were a golden color, and they tasted
so
much better than the red ones. Kyle had thought the golden raspberries were the best thing he’d ever tasted.

He had that same feeling from Cat’s second kiss.

“What was that for?” he asked in a whisper.

“First time shouldn’t taste like blood. Should be sweet.”

Golden raspberries, Kyle recalled, were very sweet.

Cat put the tooth under Kyle’s pillow. Then she climbed up onto the windowsill.

“Don’t forget, when the Tooth Fairy comes—don’t peek.”

Kyle followed her to the window and once again leaned out. This time, Cat’s face didn’t startle him out of nowhere. Instead, she tightrope-walked over to the trellis, then climbed down and ran off toward her own house.

It didn’t feel so cold anymore.

Not even bothering to close the window, Kyle climbed back into bed. The sheets, which had felt almost smothering before, now comforted him. He reached under the pillow and felt his last baby tooth.

Means you’re not a baby anymore.

He wasn’t a baby anyway. Babies didn’t have dreams like he did. Babies didn’t stab people.

Babies didn’t kiss pretty girls.

Kyle had never thought of Cat as pretty before tonight. He wondered how he could have missed that about her.

He faded off to sleep, comforted by the presence of the tooth under his pillow, not because he expected some stupid Tooth Fairy to show up and take it away in exchange for a quarter, but because Cat had put it there.

The last thing he saw before he went to sleep was the curtains blowing in the night’s breeze.

For once, he didn’t dream.

He was, however, awakened by a buzzing noise.

His eyes flew open. He looked around the room.

The curtains still flapped in the breeze.

The clown night-light continued to cast its shadows.

But something about the shadows looked different.

Like monsters.

But only babies saw monsters in the dark.

And Kyle wasn’t a baby anymore.

He closed his eyes, forcing himself to go back to sleep and not be stupid.

A minute later, he opened his eyes again.

He still heard the noise. He had no idea what the noise was, but it would not go away.

Looking up at the lamp next to his bed, he debated turning it on.

No. That was what a baby would do.

He closed his eyes again, pulling the covers up tight around his neck.

The noises would not stop.

Then the night-light went out.

Bereft of the red-and-white light coming from the clown face, Kyle’s bedroom was plunged into darkness.

No darkness! There has to be some light!

He fumbled for the lamp and switched it on. The darkness went away, eaten up by the bright light of the lamp.

Everything in Kyle’s room was right where he’d left it. His desk, his hamper, his posters, his comic books, his action figures, his school stuff, all of it. He reached under the pillow, and his tooth was still there. Everything was fine.

He got up and went over to the clown night-light and jiggled it in the wall socket. It came back on, the smiling face with its wide eyes and bright red lips—

(Lips the same color as the blood in your mouth and on Ray’s back.)

—shining brightly. It had just come loose. No big deal.

Only babies were afraid of the dark.

So why wouldn’t he turn the light back out?

There was something in the room with him. Kyle just
knew
it.

(The same way you knew you had to stab Ray?)

If he turned the light back out, whatever it was would come out.

Kids always thought monsters came out only in the dark. Maybe they did, maybe they didn’t, but right now, Kyle wasn’t taking the chance.

The house had one bathroom on the second floor, which had doors to both bedrooms. Kyle went into the bathroom and saw that Mom had left her bathroom door open. He looked into her room.

She was sleeping soundly, tucked into her bed as snug as Kyle had been before Cat’s appearance woke him up.

He wouldn’t wake her. Not until he was sure.

Looking around the bathroom, his eyes settled on the scissors Mom kept on the sink. They were perfect.

(Just like the protractor was for Ray.)

Grabbing the scissors in his hand, holding them over his head, point downward, he went back to his bedroom, ready to face whatever was there.

Margaret Walsh dreamed of her husband.

She knew that her son was in his bed, dreaming of something more horrible. They’d gone to doctors, to guidance counselors, but nothing seemed to help him get over the night terrors.

Margaret was scared for her son.

And she missed her husband.

She wondered how Kyle would grow up. Would he be plagued by these dreams all his life, or would they fade as he got older? Would he start finally having friends? Would he go through puberty like any normal boy and start dating girls and roughhousing and doing all the other things boys did? Or would he stay sullen and moody and difficult?

Would he continue to have these odd violent episodes?

And would he keep having that dead look in his eyes that he’d had when she picked him up at school? She almost hadn’t recognized the near-zombie sitting outside the principal’s office that afternoon. It was a huge relief to see Kyle’s eyes back to normal
—alive
again—tonight.

Margaret didn’t know what the future was going to bring. The thought scared her. She knew that motherhood didn’t come with an instruction manual, but it
was
supposed to come with a support staff: the father. She didn’t have that, either.

Now she needed to find a new school for Kyle. Maybe a new town. True, they had family here, but maybe it was time to start over completely.

She missed her husband.

In her dream, the two of them were walking along the coast of Darkness Falls, approaching the lighthouse. The moon was full, and they were holding hands. She could feel the sand between her toes as they walked, but, oddly, she couldn’t feel her husband’s hand, even though she clasped it tightly.

They stopped walking, in the dream, and stared into each other’s eyes. He had such beautiful hazel eyes.

They kissed. Margaret thought the kiss tasted metallic.

Somebody screamed.

Margaret jumped awake, almost strangling herself with her covers.

Kyle. Kyle was screaming.

She disentangled herself from her bedsheets and ran to the bathroom that adjoined her bedroom and Kyle’s.

He wasn’t there, nor was he in his bedroom, though the light was on in the latter.

She ran out into the hallway, scared that something—something
else
—had happened to her son. Margaret wasn’t sure how much more of this she could take. First Kyle’s father dying, then Kyle’s dreams, then his
stabbing
people . . .

Taking a deep breath, Margaret pulled herself together. He was somewhere in the house, he had to be. He probably just had another bad dream.

As she passed the hallway entrance to the bathroom, she heard a sound. She whipped her head around and saw her reflection in the mirror.

She also saw something in the shadows behind her.

Then she heard the noise again. She whirled around to see that it was just the clothes on the hallway hanger, rustling in the breeze.

Except there was no breeze out here.

“Kyle?”

The next thing she knew, a sharp object impaled her stomach, blood spurting out all over the place.

Oddly, the first thing she thought was that it would take forever to get the stains out of the hall carpet.

The last thing she thought was that the kiss with her husband in her dream shouldn’t have tasted so metallic . . .

Caitlin Greene didn’t understand what had happened.

She stood on the front porch with her mother and her infant brother, Michael. The flickering red-and-white lights of the ambulance lit up the street with odd colors and shadows. It was kind of like a strobe-light version of the way Kyle’s clown light lit up his room.

Kyle . . .

Caitlin had
just
seen him. He was
fine.

Okay, sure, he hadn’t been sleeping much lately, but why should that matter? That was why she had gone by to visit him in the first place, because she knew he’d been having a hard time sleeping.

She had even
kissed
him, for God’s sake!

She still wasn’t sure why she had done that. Kyle just seemed so much cooler than the other people in town. Everyone else was so caught up in their silly cliques or whatever—it was all just so phony.

But Kyle had never been phony. She really liked that.

So why did he turn out to be a killer?

No. Caitlin refused to believe it. She just
saw
him. There was
no way
that Kyle could have killed his own
mother.

And yet there was Officer Henry putting a tag on a bag that held a bloody pair of scissors. And Mrs. Walsh being put in a bag by the paramedics. And Kyle sitting, wrapped in a blanket that one of the cops had given him, looking just as dead as his mother, in total shock.

Just as he did when he stabbed Ray.

Half the town was gathered nearby, of course. It’s not as if anything as interesting as a boy stabbing his mother the same day he stabbed a classmate usually happened in this town. Hell, it was probably the most exciting thing to happen around here since they lynched the Tooth Fairy . . .

Caitlin could hear the mutterings from the grown-ups. “He was in class with my daughter.” “Spooky kid.” “I always thought there was something, y’know,
wrong
with him.” “That poor woman, to have to live alone with
that.”

Then another voice sounded over the noise of people kicking Kyle while he was down and over the cops talking to one another.

“Let me through! This is my aunt’s house! What hap—”

The voice cut itself off just as the person it belonged to came into view. It was Kyle’s cousin, Larry.

One of the cops—Caitlin couldn’t tell who it was from this far off—started talking to Larry in a quiet voice. Meanwhile, Officer Henry walked over to Kyle with some old lady who reminded Caitlin of the school’s icky guidance counselor.

Caitlin hated guidance counselors. So did Kyle.

“Kyle, this is Dr. Jenkins,” the officer said.

Dr. Jenkins didn’t actually say anything, she just guided Kyle by the shoulder toward a van that said “County Social Services” on the door.

Caitlin realized that they were going to take Kyle away. Probably forever.

Stupidly, the first thing she thought was that Kyle never got his money from the Tooth Fairy.

Then again, what more natural thing to think in
this
town?

Idly, she fingered the charm necklace that she always wore. Her mother had given it to her when her little brother, Michael, was born—a kind of consolation prize, a way to reassure her that they still loved her even though they had a new baby.