Four Dark Nights Read online

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  “The Circle” by Bentley Little……………………….. 1

  “Pyre” by Christopher Golden…………………….. 79

  “Jonah Arose” by Tom Piccirilli………………….. 167

  “The Words” by Douglas Clegg………………….. 241

  THE CIRCLE

  by Bentley Little

  HELEN

  It was hard to hear the knocking over the noise of the microwave, so Helen wasn’t sure how long it had been going on, but the moment her oatmeal finished cooking she heard the staccato tapping of knuckles on wood, and she strode quickly out of the kitchen and through the living room to the front door. The knocking grew louder, harder, faster as she approached. Whoever was outside wanted desperately to get in, and while her first impulse was to throw open the door and let the knocker find refuge in her home, good sense won out, and she called, “Who is it?”

  “Let me in!”

  It was a child’s voice, a boy’s, and Helen found that she was not surprised. Something about the uninhibited ferocity of the knocking indicated a non-adult origin.

  “Let me in!”

  The kid sounded agitated, scared, and she imagined him being chased by bullies or pursued by an abusive father. Maybe he was fleeing a psychotic killer, like that kid who’d temporarily gotten away from Jeffrey Dahmer before the police had stupidly given him back to the cannibal. Helen unhooked the latch, threw the deadbolt and pulled open the door. She had time to register that he was small, nine maybe or ten, dirty, wearing nothing but a brown loincloth, and then he was speeding past her, running as fast as he could through her living room and down the hall.

  “Hey!”

  She tried to follow after him, but the bathroom door was already slammed shut and locked by the time she reached the hallway. There was something unnerving about that. The kid had not hesitated, had seemed to know exactly where he was going, as though he were intimately familiar with their house.

  Helen knocked on the door. “Are you all right in there?”

  No answer.

  She knocked again. “Hello?”

  The kid didn’t answer, and she wondered if she should dial 911, call the police. What if there was something seriously wrong? She’d only gotten a glimpse of him when he dashed past her, and while he’d looked unhurt, maybe he was injured and she just hadn’t seen it.

  “Are you okay?”

  There was no response, and she jiggled the knob. Worried that he had collapsed or passed out in there, she pressed her ear to the door. From inside, she heard grunting, straining, heard the disgusting sound of plopping water.

  He was going to the bathroom.

  Maybe he was sick, suffering from some intestinal disorder. She moved away from the door, wondering if she should call Tony on his cell phone and have him come home. He’d only left ten minutes ago; he couldn’t be at the office yet. Besides, maybe he’d have some ideas—

  Suddenly the door burst open and the loinclothed kid was running past her down the hall.

  She hadn’t heard the door unlock, hadn’t heard any noises at all, but she didn’t have time to think about that and quickly followed him through the hallway, through the kitchen and out the back door. He sped across the yard and into the garage, slamming the small garage door behind him.

  What the hell was going on here? Helen stood on the stoop, torn between going back and checking the bathroom to make sure nothing was amiss, and following the boy into the garage to make sure he was all right. She finally moved forward and hurried across the lawn. To her surprise, the door was locked. She wasn’t aware that it could be locked; the door was old and practically falling off its hinges, the pressboard peeling away in buckling layers beneath the flaking paint. She tried turning the knob but it was frozen, tried pulling on the door but it was shut tight. She could go inside and get the key for the Master Lock on the big garage door, but by that time he could be gone.

  Theirs was an old garage, with a small window on the side, and she walked around the comer of the building and peered through the glass, trying to make out what was what behind the decades-thick layer of dirt. She saw the boy, in the open area between Tony’s tools and lawnmower and the piled bulk of summer lawn furniture.

  He was squatting on the floor, grimacing, obviously trying to go again.

  Helen thought for a brief second, then glanced around the backyard until she found what she was looking for: the used cinderblocks that Tony had scavanged last week. They were piled against the fence and already covered with dead leaves and spiderwebs, but she grabbed the top one and placed it against the small door, pushing it hard against the wood. The door opened outward, and if she could put enough weight against it, the boy would not be able to get out.

  Six trips back and forth, and she had all the cinderblocks piled in front of the door. She took one last look through the window—he was still squatting, still straining—then ran back into the house. She went directly to the bathroom and looked into the toilet, grimacing, prepared for the worst. She saw—

  —diamonds.

  Helen blinked dumbly. There were not just a few stones; there was a pile of them, a small mound at the bottom of the still clear water, their facets shimmering in the room’s yellowish light. There was only one explanation for their origin, one place from which they could have come, and though she tried to think of an alternate answer, there did not seem to be one.

  The boy shit diamonds.

  It was the only possibility.

  She reached into the water, picked up one that was as big as the fingernail on her thumb. She wasn’t a lapidary expert or a gemologist; she probably couldn’t tell a real diamond from a cubic zirconium. But she placed the stone against the bathroom mirror and drew it down. A long scratch followed in its wake. Diamonds cut glass. That’s all the proof she needed.

  Helen was already late for work, but she grabbed the cordless phone in the kitchen and rather than calling her office dialed her husband as she hurried out the back door. He answered on the second ring, and she quickly told him what had happened, how the dirty loinclothed boy had been pounding on the front door and she’d let him inside and he’d run straight to the bathroom and locked himself in.

  “I heard him … going,” she said. “I thought he was sick or something, like he had intestinal problems. Then he ran out the back door and into the garage.” She paused. “The kid poops diamonds.”

  “Hold on, hold on, hold on.” She could imagine him shaking his head with his eyes half-closed in that annoying way he had. “What did you say?”

  “The kid poops diamonds.” She knew how it sounded. Hell, it didn’t make much sense even to her. But there it was. It happened, it was happening, and no amount of analyzing or rationalization could change the cold hard fact that there was a pile of diamonds sitting in the bottom of their toilet bowl.

  Helen took a deep breath. “When the boy goes to the bathroom, diamonds come out. Big, perfectly cut diamonds. They’re in the toilet of the small bathroom right now. And he’s in the garage. That’s why I called you. What do you think I should do?”

  “I have that meeting with Fincher today, Hel.” His voice had suddenly dropped to a low whisper, and she knew his boss was now in the room. “Do I have to come home? Do I have to come right now?”

  “Tony!”

  “Call Child Services or something. Look it up in the phone book. Let them take care of him. Go across the street and wake up Gil Marotta if you’re scared. He’s home all day. He can help you.”

  “I’m not scared! I told you, he craps diamonds. The kid sat on our toilet, and went to the bathroom and
diamonds literally came out of his ass.”

  “Hel …”

  “I’m serious.” She lowered her voice, though there was no one to overhear. “We’re rich, Tony. I have him trapped in the garage right now—”

  “Trapped!”

  “Just ‘til we figure out what to do.”

  “That’s kidnapping!”

  She was in front of the garage, and she pressed her foot against the stacked cinderblocks, gratified to find that they did not budge. “He went in there himself and he hasn’t even tried to get out.”

  “But if he did try to get out, he couldn’t. You’ve trapped him.”

  “That’s why I called you.”

  There was a frustrated exhalation that sounded like static. “Call someone. The city, the county, the state. One of them has a department to deal with runaways and missing children. Hand him over to them. Your diamonds…” He exhaled again, and she knew he didn’t believe her. “Do what you want with the diamonds. I’ll look at them when I get home.”

  “Okay. Bye.” She clicked off without waiting for a reply and stared for a moment at the peeling door. If he didn’t believe her, what did he think? The only other alternative was that she was lying. Or crazy.

  She didn’t even want to consider that. Her world had been turned upside down as it was; the last thing she needed was to’ find out that Tony, to whom she’d entrusted her deepest, most secret feelings over the past fifteen years, to whom she’d made passionate love this morning before getting out of bed, could so quickly and easily be persuaded that she had lost her mind.

  She walked around the side of the garage and tried to focus instead on the diamonds. They were worth a fortune. Thousands of dollars. Hundreds of thousands. Millions, maybe. But how would they explain the fact that they were in possession of the rocks? Did they have to explain it? She didn’t know. Her knowledge of this stuff came entirely from movies and television, and while the jewelers to whom they sold the diamonds might not ask any questions, the IRS most certainly would. They’d have to be able to explain where they got this sudden wealth, this huge increase of income.

  It was all confusing, and she peered through the dirty window into the garage.

  The boy was squatting on the floor and shitting again.

  Rubies.

  Even in the dim refracted light they glittered redly, and Helen wondered how such a thing was physically possible. It wasn’t, she knew, and she watched as rubies dropped onto the cement floor. One, two, three …

  Maybe they had a miracle on their hands. She and Tony weren’t religious, and she’d never been one to believe in any son of supernatural claptrap, but there was nothing in the known world that could explain what was happening here, and she found herself thinking that maybe they were being rewarded, maybe this was a gift that had been sent to them from some higher power.

  Inside the garage, the boy grimaced, and another ruby was squeezed out from between the cheeks of his buttocks.

  Tony called after his meeting, just before noon, and Helen lied and said that she’d phoned Social Services, the Child Protection division, and a caseworker was here with her now. In math, she was still perched outside the garage, making sure the boy did not escape. He was asleep, curled into a fetal position in the center of the open space to the right of Tony’s record boxes, but he had already produced emeralds and some gem-stone she didn’t recognize in addition to the diamonds and rubies.

  She’d brought out a folding chair and today’s newspaper, as well as a water bottle and a bag of potato chips. No telling how long she was going to be out here, and she figured she might as well make herself comfortable.

  She’d had plenty of rime to think this morning, and she’d revised her theory as to the boy’s origin. He was not a divine miracle sent to reward them for some good deed or morally upright behavior. He was a natural phenomenon who had lucked into their grasp, and if they were smart enough and savvy enough, he would make them rich.

  But where had he been before this? she couldn’t help wondering. And who had had him before? Weren’t those people looking for him, trying to get him back? In her mind, she saw a bunch of bumbling business-suited crooks led by Joe Flynn or Cesar Romero, like in all those old Disney movies.

  Tony took off work early, and she was inside the house for a quick bathroom break when he arrived home just after three. She was using the bathroom in the master bedroom, having left the diamonds in the toilet untouched in the bathroom off the hall, and when she heard him call tentatively, “Helen?,” she quickly finished and met him in the living room.

  “Everything all squared away?” he asked when he saw her. “That kid gone?”

  “Actually,” she told him, “he’s in the garage.”

  “What?”

  “Now we have emeralds and rubies and, I think, sapphires and topaz. At least, that’s what the pictures in the encyclopedia look like, but it’s hard to tell.”

  “You didn’t call anyone? You kept him prisoner in the fucking garage?”

  Helen had never heard him so angry, and for a second she thought he might actually hit her. But instead he smacked his own forehead, palm hitting head skin with an audible slap, then ran his fingers so hard through his hair that it pulled up his eyebrows. “What the hell has gotten into you?”

  “Come here.” She led him down the hall to the bathroom and showed him the diamonds in the toilet. He reached in wonderingly and picked up a small handful, holding them up to the light.

  “Jesus.”

  “I told you.” She smiled and could not keep the excitement out of her voice. “We’re rich.”

  Tony shook his head, carefully putting the diamonds down on the counter next to the hairspray. “That’s still no reason to lock up that poor boy in the garage. He’s not a rabid animal.”

  “No, but he’s wild. He’s—”

  “I’m getting him out.” Tony pulled off his tie as he walked, throwing it on the table in the breakfast nook as he headed through the kitchen and out the door. Helen followed, feeling chastened and embarrassed and… something else. Afraid? Maybe so, though she didn’t know why. She stood on the lawn, not helping but not hindering, as he removed the stacked cinderblocks from in front of the door.

  “Hello?” Tony announced. “Are you okay in there?” But there was no answer.

  He carefully opened the garage door—

  And the boy ran out.

  “Catch him!” Helen yelled instinctively, and for a brief confused moment Tony tried to do just that, but the dirty loinclothed child slipped between his hands, ran around the lemon tree and darted into the oleander bushes that hid the chain-link fence separating their yard from the woman’s house next door.

  Tony moved up to the bushes, carefully parting branches, looking for the boy but apparently not finding him. He moved all the way to the back fence and the end of the oleanders, but the boy seemed to have disappeared.

  “You think he went next door?” Helen asked.

  “I don’t see how. The branches are all tangled in the fence; I don’t see how he could get over it. Maybe there’s a hole underneath the fence that I missed. …”

  “What do we do now? Do you still think we should call someone?”

  Tony thought for a moment, shook his head. She could see that the decision weighed on him, that he felt uneasy about it. “Since you imprisoned him all day long in our garage, I’m not that anxious to announce our connection to him,” he said. “Let someone else take care of it. Let the next person figure out what to do with him. It’s out of our hands now.”

  Helen smiled. “And we’re rich.”

  She walked into the garage to gather up the rubies and the emeralds and all the other gems.

  They still hadn’t told anyone else about their newfound riches. They hadn’t even bothered to find out the going rate for precious stones. They had weighed their haul, however, placing each type of gemstone in a separate sack and placing the sacks on the bathroom scale to get a rough approximation of what
they had.

  Helen had decided to quit her job and never go back to work. She had not called in sick today, and no one from the office had called home to inquire about her, so she figured she just wouldn’t show up again. They could send her last check through the mail. Tony was not so optimistic. These could be fake jewels, he told her. They could be stolen.

  He was planning to go to work tomorrow as always. It was late. They’d stayed up far longer than intended, talking about what had happened, debating what to do, but not really coming to any conclusions. Too tired for her usual shower, Helen took off her clothes and put on her nightshirt. “Where do you think he went?” she wondered. She pressed her face to the bedroom window, placing her hands on both sides of her face to filter out the glare and reflection from the inside lights. It was completely dark at first, black, but then her eyes adjusted and she could make out the lemon tree, the storage shed, the oleanders.

  The boy.

  He was crouched in the bushes, staring at the house, staring at her, and his eyes seemed to be luminescent.

  She nearly jumped, her heart leaping in her chest. A chill passed through her, and though she didn’t know why she was scared, she was, and she wished to God that she had not decided to peek out the window.

  His eyes were still staring, unblinking, and she thought that he was probably taking a shit.

  What had seemed magical and wonderous in the daytime now seemed spooky and vaguely sinister. Why had he come back? Why hadn’t he left for good? What did he want?

  “What is it?” Tony asked from the bed.

  She was afraid to move away from the glass, afraid to let him out of her sight. “He’s out there. The boy. He’s in the oleanders, staring at me. I can see him.”

  Tony scrambled out of bed, rushed over, but in the few seconds it took him to reach her, the boy looked to the right, his luminescent eyes shifting in a different direction … and then he was gone. She squinted at the spot where he had been, looked to the left, to the right, but he was nowhere to be seen. It was dark outside and he could have easily slid into the shadows, could be hiding right in plain sight, but somehow she didn’t think that was the case.