Defy the Dark (5 page)

“A cackler?” Mrs. Markham said to her husband. “In Charter? I've never heard of such a thing.”

“They get out, but they don't last long.” Mr. Markham turned a sour eye on Cado. “Certain people aren't as tolerant as we are.”

“That wasn't any sort of thing I was ready to tolerate,” Cado said. “It was already dying when we flushed it out, but it was more than ready to take us all with it. I got in behind it with my hunting knife and put it down.

“My uncles buried it and said not to tell anybody. That even though it was a crazy mutant, we could all end up in jail.”

“A mutant?” the Markhams exclaimed.

“Uncle Beau said that was the only logical explanation.”

“That a man was bitten by a radioactive pumpkin and became a mutant?” said Mr. Markham. “That kind of logic?”

Patricia said, “What does any of that have to do with the night trolley?”

“Uncle Beau said that it came from here. That Portero was full of mutants. And he told this story about a friend of his who moved here. The locals started in on him, telling him he should move back where he came from, that he didn't have what it took to live in their town. So Uncle Beau's friend asked what was the bravest thing anybody could do. And they all said the same thing: ride the night trolley.

“They said it was a kind of ghost on wheels that only came in the dead of night, and people who rode it were never seen again. They told him that if he could survive a ride on the night trolley, every Porterene would worship him as the most hard-core badass in all creation. So Uncle Beau's friend agreed.

“They sat with him at the stop till three a.m., and after the trolley appeared out of thin air, they watched him climb aboard. They waited all night for him to come back, but he never did.

“You Porterenes have your cacklers and your blood grackles and no fear of anything. Except this one thing. That's the reason I came early, to do what Uncle Beau's friend couldn't— ride the night trolley and live to tell the tale. If I can be brave enough to do that, to experience something that even a Porterene thinks is scary, I can be brave enough to do anything. Even become a classical musician.”

At the end of Cado's long, heartfelt recitation, Patricia and her parents laughed. They laughed until they couldn't breathe.

But Cado was a redneck who played the flute. People would probably still be laughing at him at his own funeral.

 

A
fter dinner, Cado and Patricia escaped her parents and went to Fountain Square to watch the fireworks with her friends who were all band geeks and, like Cado, played uncool instruments: the oboe, the xylophone, the piccolo. Everyone wore black, just as Patricia had claimed, but they also managed to show their patriotism with Fourth of July buttons and hats. Several people had painted the American flag on their faces.

As they sat together in an amphitheater—with a huge fountain at its center spouting red, white, and blue water—Cado noticed that the Porterenes shared an odd resemblance; but not like relations, nothing that simple. More like they had once all been held hostage together and still bore the psychic scars.

After the fireworks show, Cado and Patricia left the square and strolled past businesses still open, past people chatting under awnings and on the cathedral steps and on benches, in no hurry to be anywhere.

The night was warm, but Patricia was cool on his arm. Cado had never seen her break a sweat. The knowledge that she'd never done a hard day's work—unlike the women in his family, who worked on a pig farm—secretly pleased him.

“Why didn't you want to hang out with my friends?” she asked, curious instead of upset.

“It's getting late.”

“You wanna go home?”

“No.” They went up a short flight of steps to a part of the street that held more homes than businesses and so was correspondingly quieter. “I wanna find that trolley stop.”

“That joke stopped being funny two hours ago.”

“It's not a joke.”

Patricia stopped walking, and so Cado left her behind. He didn't have to search for long. The stop was just a few yards down the street, bathed in the warm glow from the windows of the skinny brick homes that stood in a row behind it.

Patricia ran after him and then blocked his way. “You are not getting on that trolley.”

“Sure I am,” said Cado, lifting her out of his path. “It'll be good for me. The kind of experience that'll put my whole life into perspective.”

“Or kill you!”

“Either way.” He sat on the blue bench next to the brown-and-white trolley stop sign. “Death is an answer.”

“Death is a question. The ultimate question.” Patricia tugged at him but didn't have the muscle to move him off the bench.

The more frantic she became, the calmer Cado felt, happy even. She wasn't laughing at or pitying him now.

Patricia gave up her attempts to haul him bodily from the trolley stop and instead sat beside him. She took his face in her hands, forcing him to look at her. “Only one person ever came back. One person. Who gave birth to many, many babies. With many, many legs.”

“Obviously I'm not gonna give birth to anything,” said Cado, amused.

“It was a guy who came back,” Patricia said, stabbing Cado's amusement in the back. “And his babies ate him alive; he smiled the whole time.” She didn't see what she wanted in his face, so she released him and stared out into the street. “They killed all the babies, of course, but there's one on display in the museum.”

“Bullshit!” Cado said before he could stop himself. Before he remembered that Patricia wasn't a bullshitter.

“I'd show you if it wasn't closed. The trolley—the regular trolley—is part of the museum. A rolling exhibit. They started work on it in the 1800s, but they ran out of money. So it doesn't go anywhere. Tourists get on from the museum, and it takes them around the square and that's it. Except not really. Sometimes people travel a lot further than they ever intended.

“This town is full of doors. Crawl spaces. Jagged little holes that you never see until you step through them. That's why we have things like cacklers and blood grackles and the night trolley.

“The man who had the babies? He said the trolley took him to the dark side of the moon, only it wasn't dark at all, but filled with a light so pure and holy that he couldn't stop smiling. The things he gave birth to, though, were neither pure nor holy.”

Cado saw it then, the gulf between them—he never had before. He stared at her the way she'd stared at his daylilies: like she was an alien. That inexplicable awareness screamed from her face, as loud as language.

“When you shine a light into the dark places,” Patricia continued, “you see the world as it really is. The rats peeing on your toothbrush, the roaches laying eggs in your shoes, the bogeyman salivating as he watches you sleep. You don't want to see those things.”

“Sure I do.”

“You do not!” Her voice scared a pigeon into flight. “You don't even want to face the truth—that you'd rather die than be looked down on for being a candy-ass flutist!”

Cado knew that the truth hurt, but he'd never felt its jagged claws rip into him before.

He fished out his cell and pressed the number three nine times. When Patricia realized what he was doing, she tried to bat the phone out of his hands, shocked that he even knew what to dial.

“Wait!” She grabbed his wrist before he could press
SEND
. “This isn't a game, Cado. Why can't you understand that? Sometimes people prank call that number, just to see what will happen, and then they don't show up to take the ride. So the trolley pulls up in front of their homes and gets them.”

Cado knew that Porterenes were scared of the night trolley, but seeing that fear on Patricia's face frightened him in a way all her talk had not.

“If you call,” she said, her icy fingers digging into his flesh, “it will come for you.”

“And take me to another world? You said I could make it in any world. I believe you. Even if you don't really believe in me.”

He pressed
SEND
.

Patricia's hands flew to her mouth as if to stopper a scream.

“Night trolley.” The bored, sexless voice was decidedly unfrightening.

“This is Cado McCoy.” He took a deep breath. “I need a ride.”

“It's a dollar, one way.”

Cado said firmly, “This'll be round trip.”

“This stop, three a.m.,” said the voice. “Don't be late.”

After he put his phone away, Patricia said, “Do you realize what you've done?” She couldn't look at him, her hands still covering the lower half of her face.

“I'm not afraid—”

“Because you're an idiot!”

“—of the trolley,” Cado continued calmly. “But knowing you don't have any more faith in me than I do”—he touched Patricia's face—“now, that's scary.”

 

C
ado had meant to rest before his otherworldly appointment, but it was impossible. Mr. Markham kept coming in to check that he was still in the guest room and not lolling sexily in Patricia's bed. When the door opened for the fifth time, Cado threw his pillow at it. “Dammit, Mr. Markham, I'm—”

But it wasn't him.

Patricia snuggled next to Cado, her gown soft, but not as soft as her body through the gown. Her feet curled around his ankles. She must tiptoe across the backs of geese and the tops of clouds to keep such velvet skin.

“If I were nicer,” she whispered, “you wouldn't be doing this, would you?”

He brushed his thumb over the tip of her nose. “You're the nicest girl I know.”

“I'm not nice! I wish I had a dungeon so that I could throw you into it and chain you up until this madness leaves you.”

“Would it be weird if I said that sounds like fun?”

His alarm went off, and he had to leave Patricia's embrace to shut it off. He turned on the lamp and got dressed.

Patricia threw back the covers and held out her arms. “Come back to bed.” Her nightie wasn't black, but sunset-colored, like the daylilies she hadn't wanted. Her toes sparkled at him.

“I refuse to be distracted by your body right now,” Cado said, lacing his Chucks. “But feel free to distract me with it tomorrow.”

“What tomorrow?” she said bitterly, and then with an equally bitter resolve climbed out of bed. “I'm coming with you.”

“No way.”

“Why not? We're the Bonnie and Clyde of the classical music world, and they died together in a car—we'll die together on a trolley. I'd prefer a private jet or a yacht, but I'll take what I can get.”

“It doesn't count if I bring a brave kick-ass girl to hide behind. I have to do this on my own.”

“You're taking your flute?” Patricia asked when he grabbed his case.

Cado stroked the cracked black leather. “Turns out I don't need your magic purse after all. I got my own right here.”

“
A flute case?
” she said in a voice too shrill for two a.m. “You think you're one of the Hardy Boys or Harry Potter? That if you're clever and plucky, you can play a tune and save the day with the power of music?”

“I know what I'm doing,” he reassured her. “And it doesn't involve pretending to be the Pied Piper.”

“What does it involve?” she asked, not in the least reassured.

“What's going on?”

Mr. Markham's robed appearance in the doorway barely registered, Cado and Patricia too busy staring into each other's eyes as if for the last time.

“Nothing,” said Cado, finally looking away. “I was just leaving.”

“Where do you think you're going at this hour?”

“To learn about fear,” he said, his mind already on the adventure ahead. “About real fear.”

But instead of walking out the door, he looked back at Patricia and immediately wished he hadn't. She seemed bruised somehow, as if he had struck her. That's how she would look at his funeral. Of course she wouldn't stand over his grave and laugh at him. Cado was amazed he had ever thought such a thing.

“I wish I had kept those flowers,” she said. “Looks like they were a good symbol after all.” She put her hands on his shoulders. “At least kiss me good-bye?”

Cado kissed her between the eyes and once on each cheek.

Patricia made a tsk of impatience. “That's not good enough!”

“That's because it wasn't a good-bye kiss. Just, you know, a ‘see you later' kiss. I'll kiss you for real when I get back.”

“What is going on around here?” Mr. Markham asked as Cado escaped downstairs.

Patricia answered but her tears distorted the words. Her father's response, however, was as clear as arsenic:

“You should have kissed him good-bye.”

 

S
t. Teresa Avenue was within walking distance of the Markhams' home, so it didn't take long to reach. Cado had the town all to himself, the shops now closed and the street empty. His steps echoed like a giant's. The purple-tinged fairy glow beneath the lampposts only illustrated the absence of light.

Cado went up the steps that beveled the sidewalk and stumbled over an indistinct lump. No. Not a lump. A person.

A bum?

A stroke victim?

“Hey, you okay?” Cado grabbed what felt like an arm and pulled the person beneath the lamppost a few feet away. The weak light illuminated a woman in black sweats with long, pale hair and no face. It had been peeled neatly off from hairline to chin like the skin from an apple.

Cado scrambled away and fetched up against the blue bench at the trolley stop. After winning the struggle to free his phone from his pocket, he sat and dialed the sheriff's office with fingers that had gone numb and spoke with a voice he hadn't used since he was thirteen.