Bloodeye (8 page)

Take your time, honey.

“I will,” he said.

The stair lift was still in place. But the house was different. It felt empty and abandoned. A whole winter without heat, without people to shift the dust around. It was cold inside, even though it was springtime and Keane wore only a T-shirt and pullover. A faint sheen of dust on the furniture. No doubt the same in the carpets, too, though he couldn’t see that.

He flicked a light switch up and down a couple times. Nothing. Of course. The power company had shut off the electric even before he’d left his house.

He’d figured there would be no electric, no heat, no water. He hadn’t figured on the house actually being uncomfortably cold, though. Felt a little like he was rooting around in a corpse.

At that thought, a remembered feeling of lying in his wife’s cold and congealing blood surfaced and threatened his resolve. He fought the memory away, same as always, with her voice in his head.

You there, Teresa?

I like it when you call my name
, she said, and like that the memories were gone and it was just he and Teresa in the house, like back then.

Where’d I put it, baby? Do you know?
he spoke, this time, in his head. He didn’t try to think through it, or think about it at all. She was in his head, and that was all there was. His companion, even now. Guiding him, holding his hand. Caring for him, like he’d cared for her.

I never saw it,
she reminded him.

No help there,
he thought, but not at Teresa, and not in a mean way. He’d never be mean to her, not even in his head. She’d feel it and the last thing he wanted was to hurt her.

The couch in the front room was covered in a thin layer of white-gray dust. It wasn’t where he wanted to be, so he let himself wander through the house, not thinking much of anything, but touching things sometimes, or just standing for minutes at a time looking around at all the things he’d left behind when he’d left.

Fled?

Maybe. He shrugged, alone in the bedroom, unaware that he’d made any kind of gesture.

Probably. Running from his shadow. But what else was he going to do?

The bastard wasn’t around anymore. He knew that. Knew the shadow was gone, or, more accurately, the thing that lived in his shadow. Nothing, now, for a long time. It’d be a year in the summer. Not yet, but Keane thought that might be hard on him and Teresa’s memory within his mind.

But the picture wasn’t around. Funny that he thought he needed to see it. He knew well enough what was in the picture, and the shadow’s message on the back was burned into his head.

Yet that feeling that he was back in this place for some reason persisted, and if anything grew stronger. It went from a tickle to a punch, an urge to find something…some kind of reason, or answer, or…

Fuck it,
he thought, about to give up. And at that moment another thought:

Attic.

Her voice. His wife. Odd, because of course she wouldn’t know where the picture went. She was dead, wasn’t she?

Dead,
he thought, but just to himself.

Attic, Keane. Go in the attic.

She sounded…eager.

31

Keane hadn’t planned on staying until dark, or going in the attic. The only source of light he had was his cigarette lighter and he didn’t want to use it in the attic near the lagging. He didn’t know how flammable the stuff was and he wasn’t about to risk burning down the house, even if it wasn’t his anymore.

Don’t worry,
she told him.
I’ll show you. Take my hand.

He didn’t want to hurt her, tell her she was just a voice in his head.

So what if she was, though?

She was his, he was hers.

And she was dead. If anyone could negotiate the dark, surely the dead could?

He pulled down the ladder and clambered up into the musty blackness of the attic (warmer than below, for some reason).

He reached out at her bidding to take her hand…and screamed when he found it.

32

He screamed, then, shortly after as she comforted him in her arms (God, he could smell her, feel her…she was standing…she’s solid) he cried. He cried there in the dark and had no idea for how long.

After a time—maybe an hour, maybe more, she let him move. His legs ached from standing so still in her cold arms.

“You can’t rest, baby,” she said. He couldn’t see her, but he could feel her and her words weren’t in his head, but coming from her mouth.

“You know he’s not dead,” she said.

Keane shook his head. He didn’t know if his dead wife could see the gesture in the dark, but he couldn’t speak. Not yet.

His throat felt raw. Like he’d been choked by his shade all over again.

“He’s coming again, Keane. Brother Shadow. He told me.”

Finally, Keane found his voice.

“No,” he said, and felt so tired, so afraid, and yet comforted by this ghost he loved, whether she was real or imagined, he didn’t care. He’d missed her so much, and to have her hand in his in this dark place was more than he could ever wish. He did wonder if he’d finally broken completely, but she felt, she sounded so real.

If this was breaking, he thought, then he could deal with it.

But not
him
.

“You know it’s true, Keane.
You know
.”

The bastard of it was that he did know. He didn’t need her to tell him, yet it drove it home painfully. After all, hadn’t he been looking for him all this time? Trying to find his dark partner, Brother Shadow?

“He call himself that?”

Even though he couldn’t see and she was just a ghost, or maybe his tortured imagination, he sensed her nod, just as he now knew she had sensed his.

“What is it, Teresa? Who is he?”

This time she shook her head.

“I don’t know what it is, Keane. I know it’s not you, though. You know that, right? You believe that?”

Keane wasn’t so sure. He wondered, often, late into the night. Was his shadow him? A part of him? Something he couldn’t see, like an epileptic seizure dream?

Was his shadow just a fugue state? Keane, acting out some kind of demon inside? Did he own this? Was all this his doing?

She heard his thoughts, even though she wasn’t in his head but outside in the dark attic.

Teresa squeezed his hand.

“No, honey. No. Don’t think that. You don’t need to think like that. He is Brother Shadow. He’s real. Real as you.”

He noted she didn’t say “real as me,” but then did it matter? Maybe she was just a part of him, but either way, she was telling him like it was, and despite the chills he felt, the fear, the fucking awful horror of his dead wife and a demon in his own shadow, he smiled.

That smile felt good here, like a torch against the darkness.

And at that thought, he knew she smiled, too.

“A torch against the darkness?”

“It’s all I can give you. I can’t come back. I can’t fight your battle. I can give you a torch against the dark.”

“A real torch?” he asked. It seemed to him a stupid question, but he could think of nothing else.

She pulled him close and she kissed his cheek. He cried again, but followed this time as she led him through the dark. He walked hunched, aware that the rafters were overhead. Cobwebs brushed and stuck to his face and hair. The ceiling groaned whenever he missed a beam and stepped on the plaster instead, but he wasn’t as heavy as he’d been a year ago.

“Here,” she said.

There, in front of him, a box. He touched it first with his foot, then bent down to pick it up. Cardboard, he judged. A little moldy and damp. Not very heavy, nor big. Just a box.

“This?” he asked.

She kissed him once more on the cheek, then pulled him to his feet. He held the box one-handed, and her delicate hand in his.

The kiss lingered. Washed away some of the doubt and fear.

“You’re going, aren’t you?”

“I have to,” she said. “You know why, don’t you?”

“Because you’re dead?”

“Yes, baby. I’m dead,” she said, and then she was just a voice in his head again. He carefully wended his way back toward the dimming light from the hatch, down the stairs, and took a look at the box.

The quality of the light through the windows was different. Duller.

He’d been in the attic most of the day.

33

It was a box full of shadows.

On the lid was a child’s drawing of a pirate’s treasure chest, complete with doubloons spilling forth. The doubloons had once been yellow, but the color had faded over the many years since this had been a child’s treasure box.

It was hers, and her shadow was in every little thing within the box.

There was a hairclip and a half-stub of a movie ticket. A tattered old doll with a missing eye, three smooth stones, a piece of Lego, a peacock feather folded in half to fit, some other pieces of brick-a-brac he didn’t really understand, a cassette tape (Prince) without the case, and two objects that were heavier than the rest combined, heavy because they were full of memories and memories are big fucking weights that sit on your mind and push down your shoulders.

A sleeve full of negatives, and a diary.

Shadows that weighed more than he’d imagined possible.

34

Pictures and words.

A torch against the night.

He held up the negatives to the window, and, outlined in the dimming springtime sunlight, saw what she’d wanted him to see.

Them.

Keane and Teresa, younger, before the accident that had robbed her of the ability to walk. The two of them laughing, holding hands, pictured with drinks and cigarettes on holidays and in bars. At parties and in the garden, with and without friends.

Negative images of the present. The positive images of the past.

Keane cried a little, looking through those old photos up against the light, backward in tone but perfect in their message.

Then he opened the diary and read until it became too dark to read. Closed the diary and pushed himself up. He hadn’t realized his legs had grown numb while he sat cross-legged looking at the old photographs and reading the diary of a schoolgirl who’d got lost somewhere between here and there.

“I got it, honey,” he said, even though she was silent the whole time.

He closed the door to the house with a soft
snick
, got in the car, and drove to the supermarket, finally, armed. Loaded.

He came back maybe an hour later, in the full, hard dark, though the orange streetlights still glowed.

He couldn’t feel her, or him—Brother Shadow. But he knew he’d come. He’d come for this.

The perfect shadow, the contrast, the light, the dark.

Keane entered his old house for the last time, armed with a torch against the dark.

VI. To Bind the Shadows; ’07

You don’t beat it by hiding it in the darkness. Shine a light on it, whatever it is; be it Brother Shadow or the black dog or the demon that haunts your footsteps as you sit, walk, run.

Don’t hide, don’t let it slink off to lurk in the black places.

Life, you figure, isn’t dark or light. Isn’t good or evil, black or white.

It’s about the contrast.

35

Revenge is a dark, dark thing.

Love is bright.

Keane knew how to trap a shadow.

With light, and dark. With contrast, the thing that lets you see the shape of things and tell the difference, whether right or wrong or light or dark.

Full dark outside and heavy curtains. But so bright inside. A hundred flickering candles and lanterns and torches burned in the living room of Keane’s old house, and in the center of it all, Keane.

Cross-legged, once more. He didn’t know why he didn’t sit on the couch, but he wanted…needed…to be in the circle of light. He wanted to see him coming.