For nearly ten minutes without words, Mark and Harmon sat at Harmon’s kitchen table. It was Mark who finally broke the insufferable silence. “I saw the crosses.”
Harmon nodded feebly. “She was here.”
“Who?”
“My baby … my Rosalee.”
“Your wife?”
“My little girl.”
“You saw her? Here?”
Harmon nodded.
“It took her,” Mark said. “Like you.”
“… Took ’em both.”
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” Mark paused. “How long has it been?”
“Don’t matter, does it?”
“No,” Mark said. “Can you tell me how it starts?”
“Gets into you,” Harmon told him. “Gets into you.”
“But how? How did it get into you?”
Harmon told him in gruesome detail.
“And them?” Mark asked. “The same?”
“Wasn’t that way.” Harmon motioned with his empty.
Mark opened a beer for him. He considered one for himself but didn’t ask. The woodsman needed waterin’ more than he did.
“Louise wouldn’t see no doctor,” Harmon said. “Wouldn’t let me take Rosa, either. God knows I begged her. She was afraid. Afraid a what people mighta thought.”
Harmon raised his hand. “You see this? She was four. Four. You got a clue what this shit does to a little girl? Try to imagine it. Then try to imagine a black man tryin’ to explain it all away.”
He drank. “It was winter. Hardest cold I can remember. Ground was like rock. Had to keep her in the barn ’til spring.”
“Jesus.”
“Louise … she hated me for it. Didn’t have two nickels to rub—nothin’ to bury our little girl with. Didn’t matter much, though. Wife went quick. After that, kept ’em both on ice.”
Mark started to speak, but the woodsman cut him off.
“Listen good,” Harmon said. “Nobody knows nothin’. Gonna stay that way.”
Mark assured him with a nod. “I need to know it all. I need to know what I’m up against.”
Harmon settled in his chair. Mark saw sadness sweep through him, as if he knew this were his last chance to set the burden from his shoulders. His last chance to be human.
“I need you to know somethin’,” Harmon said, “so get this straight. I love my boy more than anythin’. He’s gone, but not like his mama and sister. Now don’t get no ideas. He’s gone. But he’s here, all around me. A father knows.
“You ain’t got no kids. Man’s got a spark about him when he does. Don’t see no spark in you. Maybe your wife wanted ’em, maybe it didn’t work out, you bein’ a cop and always gone. Ain’t my business. But I need you to figure what it does to a man to see his boy taken from him, a piece at a time.”
Harmon rose then, disappearing down a lightless corridor. Mark waited as he took the stairs, and barely a minute later the man emerged from the shadows with a thick book slung under his arm. He set it down and slid it to the middle of the table. Grimm’s Faerie Tales.
“That boy was sharp as a blade,” Harmon said. “And curious! Kid’d run you ragged askin’ one thing after another. Don’t know about you, but I ain’t got a clue why the sky’s blue, or what them northern lights really are.
“Now, he wasn’t no nerdy kid. Just a smart kid. Loved to read. Said he was gonna take us all them magical places he’d read about. Castles and ghosts, stuff like that. He used to draw ’em.”
Harmon coughed as he sat. The sound was sickly. When he took his hand from his mouth, he found oily green phlegm in the palm of his hand.
“We should get you out of here,” Mark said.
“Sure,” Harmon said. “See a doc. Have him fix me.” He wiped the slime on his snowsuit. His glance turned to the woodstove and hung there. He asked Mark to feed it. Mark obliged and returned to his seat.
“It was different with my boy,” Harmon said. “Dark got to him, but not like this. Got in his head. Twisted his mind like a stick a licorice. But you wanna know what happened to my Rosa. My Louise. I’m gettin’ to it. Grab a brew.”
As Mark fetched a beer, the black man sniffed out another candy bar and devoured it. Mark took a drink and found he needed it.
“My boy was a real dreamer,” Harmon said. “Trouble is, dreams can make you crazy. Nothin’ else makes sense. Nothin’ else matters.
“It was like that with my Neville. Now, this is gonna sound all messed up, you got that? I figure the Dark took him to all them places he dreamed of. Or maybe it was all in the kid’s head. So real he could taste it. Like it is when it gets in our heads. Still with me?”
Mark nodded.
“It was the day before school broke for the holidays,” Harmon recalled. “Bus dropped him off like usual. Back then they plowed all the way up past the county line. Anyways, he comes runnin’ up all fulla piss an’ vinegar. Books in one hand, that thing in the other. Had this wild look on his face. The way a kid gets when he’s got a big secret, and’ll just bust if he don’t get it out.
“I asked him straight about it—normally I don’t notice shit—but there was somethin’ about that stick. Wasn’t just butt-ugly. It was like … I dunno … dangerous. You’re a cop.”
“Like knowing a punk when I see one,” Mark said. He hoped Earl Eckert was wasting away in his cell, rotting twice as badly as this man was.
Harmon nodded. “I didn’t get on his ass about it. Maybe I shoulda. But that’s 20-20, ain’t it.”
“You couldn’t know. It’s just a stick.”
“Yeah. Just a stick. But you don’t know how it was. How it is.”
Harmon drank. “A couple days go by. Things are usual. Woman’s takin’ care a things, I’m workin’ down at Skeeter’s. You musta seen the mill comin’ up. It snowed. Jesus, it snowed. Three days before Christmas, it all went to shit.
“I come home real late, on accounta the storm. Wife’s sittin’ right where you are, cryin’ a river. She got this look on her face—angry and scared, both—said she got trouble with the boy. He kicked her. Kicked her so hard she could barely walk.
“I went up, musta been three steps at a time. What’s he doin’? Readin’! Like nothin’ went on.
“Asked him straight why he kicked his mama. Says she wouldn’t let him stay in town with one of his friends. Not on a night like that. Told him the same.
“Know what he done next? Yeah. Kicked me. Right in the shins. Kicked me so hard I had bruises for two weeks. But that ain’t the half of it.
“That day, that boy was hellfire strong. A goddamn bull. At the time I didn’t know how that was, but later I did. Goddamn Dark kicked me.
“I took a round out of him, don’t think I didn’t. But you know what? When I finished layin’ down the law, he just got off my knee with that raw ass and crawled into bed with a goddamn grin on his face. A goddamn grin.
“I went to turn out the light, and damn if he didn’t hand me the coldest look I ever saw. Almost pissed myself. It was like he wanted me dead … like he could just think it and make it happen. His eyes … it was like he was lost, you know? Like he was somewhere else.”
The glow from the woodstove grew as the light outside began to wane. Mark checked his watch. He had about an hour before sunset. He would have to leave shortly, with or without the answers he had come for. It was a long way back through those woods, but what worried him most was that he would not walk alone.
“The next day was a whole new kettle a fish,” Harmon said. “He kept on about goin’ into town. Said he had to. Had to. When I asked why, he got real quiet. Don’t mind tellin’ you, that almost scared me as much as that look he gave me.
“The next mornin’, Louise made me the last breakfast she ever would. Scrambled eggs and hash browns. She begged me not to go into work, on account it was Christmas Eve. But I knew the real reason. She was just plain scared.
“Fact was, we needed the money. Besides, it was the only chance I had to get a few things for under the tree. I told her everythin’ was gonna be fine, I’d be back by sundown.
“Well, sure as shit I was late. It was snowin’ like a bastard. That is, ’til I got about a quarter mile from home. It just stopped. It just stopped.
“I remember how calm it was. It was cold as hell, but the air … it was like summer in a weird kinda way. You know, one of them brutal days when the heat don’t quit. Not a breath a wind. Just dead.”
Mark’s grim expression betrayed him.
“Yeah, you got that straight,” Harmon said. “First time I felt the eyes.”