Slippin' Into Darkness Read online

  SLIPPIN’ INTO DARKNESS

  by

  Norman Partridge

  Cemetery Dance Publications

  Baltimore

  2011

  Copyright © 2011 by Norman Partridge

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  Cemetery Dance Publications

  132-B Industry Lane, Unit #7

  Forest Hill, MD 21050

  http://www.cemeterydance.com

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious.

  Any similarity to real persons, living or dead,

  is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  First Digital Edition

  ISBN: 978-1-58767-261-3

  Cover Artwork © 2008 by

  Digital Design by DH Digital Editions

  This edition of Slippin’ Into Darkness is dedicated to the Class of ’76…

  and the old home town.

  ONE

  APRIL 8, 1994

  DARK

  April is the cruelest month, breeding

  Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

  Memory and desire, stirring

  Dull roots with spring rain.

  —T.S.Eliot, The Waste Land

  12:03 A.M.

  There’s the windup, and here’s the pitch: a beer bottle flew through the night air and exploded against a granite cross. Shards of broken glass knifed the soft earth. Cold liquor rained down on clipped blades of cemetery grass, shivered, and formed fat tears.

  The pitcher stood on the mounded grave of an insurance salesman who had expired in 1992, exactly sixty feet, six inches from the granite cross. He smiled, appreciating his skill. Half in the bag, but he was still putting them over straight and hard with a strong arm. Dead solid strikes, one after another, each bottle shattering against the center of the granite crosspiece…the cold hard strike zone.

  Graveyard baseball was the name of the game. No men on base. Rounded mounds for first, second, and third; the graves of a telephone solicitor, a war hero, and an infant born without a brain. Not exactly a million-dollar infield, but the infield didn’t matter when the pitches were flying straight and true. Every bottle right on target. A cancer-serious no-hitter.

  The pitcher sighed, concentrating on the cross. He was alone. No men anywhere, but that was to be expected. This was a pitcher’s game, a hurler’s midnight solitaire. Graveyard baseball was a game that disallowed self-deception and required a certain amount of imagination. After all, a granite cross couldn’t really swing a bat, so imagination was truly a necessity.

  Unless the pitches were flying straight and true. Unless the bases remained empty, as they were now. Then the game didn’t require any imagination at all.

  Sweat beaded on the pitcher’s forehead, soaking the band of a Hogan Spartans baseball cap that had spent eighteen years lost in one closet or another. His arm would ache like hell tomorrow. Eighteen years had passed since he had last held a beer bottle in his hand and faced an implacable granite batter. But tomorrow’s pain didn’t matter. Tomorrow didn’t matter at all, because tonight it was April, and it was opening day, and the pitcher’s mind was deep in the pit of memory.

  Memories that had brought him to this place.

  Memories of a girl.

  The pitcher opened another bottle—the dry hiss of released pressure was as cold as the stunted stone forest that surrounded him—and he drank deeply.

  The windup. The pitch.

  The crackle of exploding glass. The smell of beer and a distant ocean breeze and an unseasonably warm April night and clipped cemetery grass.

  A gentle rain of alcohol brewed from pure Rocky Mountain spring water.

  A wet granite cross reflecting the gleam of the moon.

  APRIL LOUISE DESTINO

  APRIL 1, 1958—APRIL 1, 1994

  I’LL SEE YOU IN YOUR DREAMS

  April Destino had brought the pitcher here tonight. She was dead, and he was one of her boys. He wasn’t one of the boys of summer, even though he wore a baseball glove. No, he was one of the boys of April.

  Toeing the mound, the pitcher imagined carrion worms doing their work on the dead insurance man six feet beneath his battered cleats. He slammed another bottle into the webbing of his glove. A puff of dust rose from cracked leather. He twisted off the cap and drank. The windup.

  A flashlight beam cut at the pitcher’s eyes. He turned away quickly, as if acid had been flung at his face, but the tattered bill of his baseball cap couldn’t protect him from the unyielding glare.

  The pitch.

  The sight: the flashlight beam too bright, too strong, somehow able to pull the bottle off course so that it sailed low and outside under the left arm of the cross that bore April’s name. The sound: bottle skidding over grass; brewed Rocky Mountain spring water sloshing, spattering alcohol tears.

  “Hey! What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  The pitcher didn’t answer. The flashlight beam was dry ice on his face, and his eyes burned and his pupils shut down to nothing, and then his eyes screamed.

  A muscle twitched in the pitcher’s neck. He started to get a little angry. He bit his lower lip, and then his tongue went to his upper lip and licked at a trickle of sweat.

  “Goddammit! You can’t sneak into the cemetery in the middle of the night and do this shit! You’re in trouble, asshole! Big trouble!”

  The shouting man was close now. Short and fat and staring up from under the pitcher’s chin, his little fatman voice too loud and incredibly self-righteous.

  The man was an umpire ready to argue balls and strikes.

  The pitcher didn’t say a word.

  The umpire bumped his chest against the pitcher’s.

  The windup…but this time the pitcher’s hand was empty and balled into a fist.

  The pitch: knuckles cracked against the umpire’s jaw, and he shut up, and he fell down.

  The pitcher turned off the man’s flashlight and welcomed the darkness. In a moment his eyes adjusted, and he picked up the thing he had brought with him in place of a bat. He stood over the umpire, not looking down, looking instead at the playing field, the mounded bases, the baselines that were nothing but fugitive shards of moonlight. A marble Christ waved at him from centerfield, daring him. It was an unseasonably warm April evening, but in the pitcher’s mind it was an April afternoon and the ghost of a morning fog born on Pacific tides could still be tasted in the air.

  A thousand echoes of a thousand lives haunted this place. Crashing waves washed the silence. Foghorns sang baritone and time-clocks clicked a staccato rhythm and a shipyard quitting whistle played sharp counterpoint. Blue-collar fathers shouted encouragement to boys in dirty uniforms. Worn cleats bit into dusty earth.

  And then came the single echo the pitcher wanted to hear: the musical voice of a cheerleader begging him to put one over the fence.

  It was not a bat that he held in his big hands, but in his mind he imagined that it was.

  The crack of the bat. He wanted to hear it.

  The roar of the crowd. He could hear it still.

  April was here, asleep in the ground.

  And it was opening day.

  1:12 A.M.

  Marvis Hanks, Junior, climbed the stairs that led from the basement to the foyer of his house. His long fingers were interlocked so that his hands made a shelf at crotch level; a stack of videotapes was scissored between his hands and the point of his chin, and consequently his eyes were trained on the ceiling instead of the stairs. Normally Marvis wo
uld have eschewed such daredevil activity, but he had been climbing these stairs for thirty-four of his thirty-five years. Each step was completely familiar.

  He breathed a short sigh of relief as he left the staircase. The heels of his expensive Bally loafers clacked smartly against the white pine floor in the foyer. Marvis had lived alone since the death of his parents, both of whom had succumbed while he was in college, so the whisper of his sigh and the tapping of his heels were the only sounds in the house.

  The only sounds, until he passed the living room.

  A subdued giggle jolted Marvis mid-step. The crowning tape in his carefully balanced stack twisted under his chin. The videos toppled from his grasp like so many oversized dominos and clattered to the floor.

  The giggling sound came again. Moonlight washed the living room from an Anderson bay window, the sash bars casting a dark net over the brass-and-mahogany pool table that dominated the room.

  And lying on the pool table…something, or someone.

  Marvis squinted. His green eyes zeroed in on a tangle of crisp blonde hair framed by a square of black shadow. The giggles spilled into full laughter. A pair of lips were trapped in the black shadow frame.

  But these lips couldn’t laugh. It was impossible.

  Stiff fingers entered the shadow-frame and caressed the waiting lips, twisting them into a dull purple smile. Marvis didn’t breathe. The girl’s long legs were beautiful, her fingers slim and eager, her skin as pale as a winter moon. A naked foot traveled her smooth calf as her fingers danced. Two perfect knees came together, then parted. And then she laughed again, her firm belly shuddering as she sat up. Straight, long hair swept a face that seemed nothing more than shadow. But Marvis didn’t need to see this face to recognize it. It was locked in his memory.

  Blonde cobweb strands tickled her hardening nipples. The net of shadows embraced her, slicing her arms and legs at the joints, turning her torso into a complex jigsaw. The shadows were only a trick of moonlight and window sashes. Marvis knew that, just as he knew that the shadows had transformed the girl into something both obscene and pathetic—a living, breathing butcher’s diagram.

  But she wasn’t living. Not this girl. She wasn’t breathing.

  Her face was nothing more than a shadow.

  He was seeing—

  Her laughter was the only thing that lurked in the shadows.

  He was hearing—

  She was a ghost.

  Somehow, Marvis managed to choke back his scream. But it stayed with him, a secret locked in his chest, even when she turned on the lights.

  * * *

  She closed the drapes, still laughing. “Well, it’s what you get for leaving your front door unlocked. Anybody could have wandered in.”

  Something witty. Marvis knew that he was supposed to say something witty. That was the game. But he couldn’t think of anything to say.

  “You should have seen yourself,” she said.

  He was still frightened. She wasn’t a ghost. That’s what he kept telling himself. She wasn’t a dead girl. She was only Shelly Desmond, a fifteen-year-old piece of meat who stood naked in his living room, thinking that she was funny.

  “I mean it, Marvis.” She giggled. “Oh, man, the look on your face.”

  He glanced away sharply. At the ebony videocassettes on the white pine floor. At his whiteboy loafers, his faded black jeans. At his black hands hanging there before him, long fingers still trembling.

  Negro hands. African-American hands.

  No. Not quite. His hands were the sweet color of butterscotch. Come August, any redneck had darker skin than his.

  “And your eyes.” Shelly wiped away tears of laughter. “Your eyes were as big as saucers.”

  Marvis glared at the girl. “As big as saucers.” The words were ice on his tongue. “Like a spook butler in some old movie. Is that what you mean. Shelly?”

  She crossed her arms over her breasts, as if exasperated. “I didn’t mean…. Geez, Marvis, why do you say things like that? It’s the nineties. Wake up. All that stuff happened a long time ago. Do you think I’d even be here if I was like that?”

  “There’s the money.”

  “That hurts, Marvis.”

  She pouted, and, of course, that made her a magnet. Marvis came to her. His fingers encircled her tiny wrists. Gently, he moved her arms to her sides, forced her hands against the cold brass rail of the pool table. “You can’t imagine, Shelly.”

  She didn’t look away, and that struck him as particularly brave. “It doesn’t matter anymore,” she said. “It doesn’t matter what color—”

  His grip tightened. “But you like my color, don’t you. Shell? You’re the one who told me that I’m the man with the sweet butterscotch skin.” She giggled, and for a moment her arms relaxed. “But what if my skin was darker? And what if my eyes weren’t green? What if they were as brown as dirt? What if my skin was black as unsweetened chocolate? Would you still want a taste of me?”

  The muscles in Shelly’s arms became knots of nervous tension. The pool table shuddered, and Marvis caught sight of the eight ball teetering on the edge of the corner pocket nearest him.

  Teetering there, on the edge of a pit of shadow. An ebony sphere on the brink of a pit. A bottomless pit like the shadow-face he’d imagined seeing earlier….

  No, that face belonged to Shelly. Shelly, and a few shadows. And now the shadows were gone and Shelly wasn’t so frightening. Or brave. She looked away—not daring to struggle, actually blushing if that could be believed—and it was Marvis’s turn to laugh. He released her wrists and stroked her rosy cheeks with his sweet butterscotch fingers.

  “You’re red, Shell,” he said. “You’re a little Indian.”

  “A little Native American,” she corrected, and they both laughed.

  * * *

  His fingers left her cheeks, traveling more familiar territory.

  “Don’t you want to get the camera?” she asked.

  “Maybe we’ll do this just for us.”

  “You want to do it here? On the pool table?”

  He thought of the dead girl as he looked into Shelly’s eyes, and he had to laugh at the misplaced fear that he’d felt just a few moments before. “Yeah.” His fingers smoothed the cool green felt that surrounded the eight ball, never quite touching the ball itself. “It’s something I’ve always wanted to do.”

  “I don’t know….” Shelly was looking over his shoulder now, not looking at him at all.

  He sensed someone behind him, watching. In an instant the fear was back with him. There were plenty of self-righteous cops in the world and there were plenty of people in his business who were much more dangerous than any self-righteous cop.

  He turned quickly, confronting nothing more dangerous than an old hand-tinted wedding photo of his father and mother that hung on the wall.

  Marvis smiled. So this was the source of Shelly’s unease. He had always thought the photo told the truth. His father’s skin so black, his mother’s so white. In the wedding photo, Marvis’s mother was almost as white as her dress. In reality, his mother’s skin had been the color of a honeycomb still slick with sweetness. Marvis was nearly that light, though his hair was darker than his mother’s.

  “It’s like they’re watching us,” Shelly whispered. “And your father looks so angry.”

  “Of course he looks angry,” Marvis said flatly. “He was a cop. Cops always look angry, especially when they’re off duty.”

  “Oh, Jesus.” She giggled. “You’re kidding, right?”

  Marvis shook his head.

  “Did he know? I mean, did he know what you do? How you make your money?”

  “He died when I was in college. A junkie slit his throat three months before he was due to retire. My mother’s heart gave out a few weeks later. All they knew was that I wanted to open a camera shop.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. Marvis knew that she wanted to say more, so he didn’t say anything. “That must make it so hard for you. Kno
wing what they’d think.” She stared at the picture, trying to find something of Marvis in his father’s face. “If he knew that someone like me was in his house…I mean, he’d hate me.”

  Marvis stroked her pale breasts, inhaled her perfume. God, she even smelled white. “No, he wouldn’t hate you.” The conclusion was simple, logical. “Not my father.”

  Marvis turned the photograph to the wall, but Shelly couldn’t bring herself to look away. “Maybe we could use a little something to take the edge off,” she suggested.

  Marvis nodded. Shelly slipped from the table and started toward the hallway, but he stopped her with a single glance.

  “I know where it is,” she said. “Remember? You showed me—the very first time, when we did it in the bedroom.”

  “I’ll get it,” he said.

  * * *

  His girls were waiting for him in the bedroom.

  Marvis winked at them. “I guess I haven’t lost my touch,” he said, and his voice held genuine surprise rather than the hollow ring of braggadocio.

  Marvis always felt like a teenage boy when he entered his bedroom. It didn’t really seem like an adult’s room at all, not with his girls there. It would forever belong to a nervous teenager that everyone had known as Shutterbug.

  Marvis stared at his girls, trying to see them as he once had, with Shutterbug eyes. To his younger eye they had been perfection. Now he could see their flaws. A nose that was just a little too large. Teenage breasts that would never swell to desired dimensions. A smile that would be eternally crooked, because orthodontia wasn’t covered on blue-collar health plans.

  And here they were, eighteen years later, still locked in his bedroom. Each one of them trapped in an eight-by-ten inch frame, sealed behind a slab of clear glass. Untouched and untouchable.