GeneSix (3 page)

He stopped in for a visit the year she turned thirty. She was sitting in a rocker early in the evening, a magazine in her hand. On the cover was a photo of a young man with slicked back hair. Plastered below his face was the name, Ricky Nelson.

In a small play pen on the floor was a little girl maybe six months old, cooing and drooling and seeming generally happy. Dean was out in the garage at his work bench, hammering something together.

Sondra’s hair was pulled back in a tail, and she had put on maybe ten pounds, but she still looked incredible. The Darkness allowed himself to simply admire her for a moment.

She glanced up from the magazine. Was it getting darker in here?

“Dean!” she called out.

“Yeah?” he called back. The door leading to the garage was hanging open so they could hear each other.

“I think you might need to check the fuse box.”

Time to leave. But he would be back. He would always be back.

Sondra and Dean had a second child two years later. A boy. He played baseball and basketball. Dean’s hair had receded and his stomach filled out, and he coached the little league team D.J. (Dean Junior) played on. Their daughter, Lisa, was long and skinny the way Sondra had been, and marched with the band and twirled a baton.

The Darkness busied himself about Boston, sometimes flitting about New York but usually remaining close to home. One night, a man broke into a convenience store and shot down the cashier in cold blood, and helped himself to the cash drawer. He got away, running down an alley. The police found him at the end of the alley, simply sitting against the wall, his eyes wide open but not seeing. He was alive, he was breathing, but there was no brain activity. His mind had gone dark.

He often visited Mother, who never seemed to age. She did allow her hair to become streaked with silver, though. Looks distinguished, she said. But otherwise, she looked about forty. The way she always had as long as the Darkness had known her.

He visited Sondra the year she turned forty-eight, and found her saying to Lisa, who was now a senior in high school, “Now, where did I put my glasses?”

Sondra wore her hair shorter now, and it was seriously graying. Moreso than Mother’s. She was now probably twenty-five pounds heavier than she had been when she and Dean were first married, and there were now serious lines engraving themselves into her face, trailing away from her eyes and mouth.

Lisa was still tall and willowy, but now had curves and had filled out her shirt a little. She was sitting on the couch with a paperback by the new writer all the kids at school were talking about. Stephen King. On the cover was the title
Salem’s Lot
.

The Darkness decided to conduct a quick hunt about the house for the glasses. He found them within seconds, tucked behind a couch cushion.

He had found that with a little effort, he could actually wrap his darkness around an object and transport it from one place to another. To a normal human, it would seem that the object simply appeared out of nowhere.

He did this with Sondra’s glasses. He deposited them on an end table beside the couch.

Sondra was going through her purse for the third time, hoping to find the glasses in there. Lisa glanced casually at the end table, and said, “Mom, they’re right here on the table.”

Sondra shook her head and chuckled. “For goodness sake. Right there in plain sight all along. How could I not have seen them?”

Lisa returned to her book, then glanced up. “Hey, Mom, is it getting darker in here?”

Sondra said, “It does that, once in a while. It always has. Your father has had the wiring checked more than once. We put in circuit breakers a couple years ago, and it still keeps happening.”

Time to leave.

The years passed. D.J. joined the Army. Lisa went to college and met a guy and got pregnant and split up with the guy. She returned home and had the baby, then went to community college at night and worked a part-time job by day, and eventually met another guy and got married.

The Darkness continued to patrol the city at night. There were others like him about, those who developed extraordinary abilities due to some sort of mutated gene. He kept them safe. He also did his best to stop abusers and violent offenders. And he did this always from secret, so no one would know he was there. Whenever he stepped in, it was deemed somehow unexplainable. A coincidence. Something we’ll never quite understand.

Sondra turned sixty. And she turned seventy. Dean died, and Sondra turned eighty. Lisa was divorced, but had gone to school to become an accountant and made halfway decent money. Lisa had a daughter Emma who had, like her mother, gone off to college and come back pregnant, and was now living with Lisa. Emma was working a job by day, and taking classes at night.

Bush became president and then was gone, and half of the country thought a nightmare had ended, and Obama became president and the other half of the country thought a bad dream was starting. There was violence in the Middle East (when was there not?), and violence in the street (when was there not?).

Emma graduated from college, and got a position as a paralegal, and her daughter Kaylie turned four and then five. The Darkness watched over them all.

One cool thing about what he was, the Darkness thought, was his ability to feel a person’s energy. He popped into Sondra’s house one night, and found it deserted. It had been a few months since his last visit. But he was able to find her easily just by reaching out for her energy. He found it within seconds, and followed it in less time than it took to talk about it, and found she had moved in with Lisa and Emma.

And then, something happened to Sondra’s family. Something really bad. Something so bad that when the Darkness stepped in, he was no longer able to keep his presence a secret. But when it came to the safety of Sondra and her family, the Darkness pulled out all the stops.

Emma’s daughter, Sondra’s great-granddaughter, had disappeared from the daycare center.

The Darkness zipped into the house Lisa owned just outside of Plymouth, and found an unmarked police car in the driveway. He found a detective in the house, taking notes as Emma tearfully told about how little Kaylie had been dropped off at daycare that morning, but had been picked up early in the afternoon by a man claiming to be the grandfather.

Lisa, now with a little gray in her hair, was standing beside Emma, her arm about her shoulders. Sondra was in a rocker not far away. Her hair was now white, and her face severely lined. Her jowls sagged, and her shoulders were rounded. She was eighty-six, which amazed the hell out of the Darkness when he thought about it, because to him, she had been fourteen not long ago, wearing her slacks too tight and wiggling her but as she walked through the school hallways.

The detective explained how a man maybe sixty had shown up at school claiming to be Dean Chambers, and had a driver’s license as identification.

“Dean was my husband,” Sondra said in a voice reedy and crackling with age. “He died a few years years ago.”

“I know ma’am,” the detective said. He was in a cheap suit jacket, and his tie was crooked. “Somehow, that information didn’t make its way to the school records. You and he were both listed as people who could pick the child up, and that hadn’t been changed. The driver’s license was obviously a forgery.”

The Darkness wanted to say to them that everything would be all right. He would find the child. He didn’t want Sondra or Lisa or Emma to worry. He was here, as he had always been. But he and Mother had decided long ago that his operations should be done in secret. The rest of humanity was simply not ready for the existence of people like them, people with mutated abilities, to be revealed.

And so, he simply reached out for the energy of Kaylie. If she was still alive, he would feel her energy. And if she was not, then he would find the perpetrator, and bestow upon him a new definition of the word horror.

But he found Kaylie’s energy. She was maybe eight miles away. It was child’s play for the Darkness to cover that distance in the blink of an eye.

There was an apartment on the south side of Boston. Rat infested. Smelling like cat urine, like such places often seem to. And little Kaylie was in one bedroom, lying on a dirty mattress on the floor. She was crying and looked a little rumpled, but seemed otherwise unhurt.

The room was lighted by one bulb, hanging from a fixture overhead. Easy for him to blot out the luminescence.

Kaylie realized the room was getting darker, and she started to get more scared.

The Darkness said, trying to sound as reassuring and soothing as could be with a baritone that seemed to project itself from all around you, “It’s all right, Kaylie. I’ll take care of you. I’ll get you home.”

“Who are you?”

“I’m a friend. Are you hurt?”

She shook her head. “But I’m scared. I want my Mommy.”

“I’ll take you home right now.” 

A man called from the other room. “Hey! I said quiet in there!”

The Darkness said to Kaylie, “You stay right there. I’ll be back in a minute.”

The man was forty-two, with a middle-age spread. He was in a wife beater shirt, sitting in a tattered stuffed chair, and the television was on. In his hair was some of the white coloring he had added so he would appear much older when he went to the daycare center, earlier in the day. He had a beer in one hand.

It suddenly began getting darker in the room. Rapidly. When the Darkness wanted to turn out the lights, he found he could do so with gusto.

The man was looking about, confused. Then, suddenly, he realized someone was standing in front of him in the near darkness. Or, at least, it looked like a person. All he could really see was a dark silhouette.

“Hey,” he said. “Where’d you come from?”

“I don’t know you’re name,” the Darkness said. “But you made a grave mistake. Today you attacked my family. So tonight, you die.”

“Hey, wait a minute, buddy.” He went to rise from the chair, but found he was propelled back by some unseen force, though the humanoid shape before him hadn’t moved. “What are you?”

“I am your executioner.”

The man said nothing. He didn’t know what to say. The beer bottle slid from his fingers and landed on the floor.

There was an ability the Darkness found interesting, one he had discovered a few months ago. He had never tried this ability on a living thing, as the results might seem a little gruesome, but he felt now was a good chance to try it out.

He reached not into this man’s mind, but into his actual body. The man gasped as darkness energy wrapped itself about his insides. And then, the Darkness simply expanded outward. Hard. With extreme force.

The man simply exploded, blood and gore splattering to the walls, the windows, the ceiling.

The Darkness then reappeared in Kaylie’s room, taking as much corporeal shape as he could muster.

“What was that?” she said. “What happened out there?”

“I just gave a very bad man a spanking. He’ll never bother you again.”

He then reached down and took her in his arms. “Rest easy, little one. I’ll have you home in seconds.”

He enveloped her in darkness, and they were gone.

The detective was still taking notes. Emma was standing, tears streaming down her face, and Lisa still had her arm about her. Sondra was sitting in the rocker. The great grandmother, who thought in all of her eighty-six years she had witnessed pretty much everything bad that can happen to a person. But now she was witnessing this. An innocent child abducted. Probably brutalized. And she was feeling the mind-numbing helplessness of being unable to do anything about it. Of being able to do absolutely nothing to protect her family.

Suddenly the room began growing darker. Not in the gradual way it had so mysteriously done over the years, no matter which house she had lived in. It had begun in the first house she and Dean had lived in, oh so many years ago. Except, this time it was fairly suddenly, like someone was playing with a dimmer switch.

A voice suddenly boomed out from all around them. Baritone. Almost menacing. “Everything is all right. No need to fear. I am bringing Kaylie back to you.”

A shape began to appear in the middle of the room. Lisa and Emma gasped, physically taking a step back. Sondra pulled off her glasses to rub her eyes. She had had a cataract removed a year ago by laser surgery, and wondered if the other eye was going. She put her glasses back on, and the shape was still there. Coalescing.

It began to take on a sort of human image. Like a silhouette of a man. And he was holding something.

It was Kaylie. The man/thing set her down, and she ran to Emma. “Mommy!” she squealed gleefully.

“Kaylie.” Emma barely breathed the word, kneeling down and scooping Kaylie up in her arms.

The baritone spoke. “She is safe.”

The detective simply stood and stared. His mouth was open. The pen and notepad he had been using to jot down things Emma had been saying simply fell to the floor.

Sondra should be afraid, she knew. After all, a man had appeared out of thin air right in front of them. And he was not really a man, but some sort of ghastly apparition. And yet, somehow, she was not.