Darkness Falling Read online

  There was nothing else for it. He had to check upstairs. But first, he also had to check outside.

  Virgil moved across to the curtains and pulled the left one back about an inch, so that he could put his face against the wall and look down the street. It was deserted. No traffic.

  No traffic? OK, so it wasn't six o'clock yet but there should be signs. They were close to the meat packing plant over on Roylston and refrigerated trucks were moving in and out of there all day every day.

  He looked some more.

  And this time, he looked closely. Just for a moment, he thought he saw a shape out there, a shape like a woman just standing there over in the shadows on the sidewalk opposite but then the figure either backed off or it was just the window-pane, a trick of the glass and the darkness outside against the light behind him. And now, over behind the Jansson warehouse complex near the overpass, he thought he saw some more movement. But when he focused in on it, like Clark Kent, he saw it was only a piece of paper, maybe a potato chips bag, blowing in the wind.

  "There's nobody out there," Virgil told the house, and somewhere, in the deepest part of his bowels, his stomach groaned a faint agreement.

  Virgil looked at the door, then at the body and then back at the staircase. First things had to be first.

  He found the knife in the third drawer along from the washbasin – third time's a charm – a long-handled job whose handle looked to have split: someone had wound some kind of green twine around it. Virgil hefted it from hand to hand, checking the balance, and then he moved quickly but calmly (businesslike, his mom would have said) out of the kitchen, flipped the light switches at the foot of the stairs and ran up two at a time, sliding his back up the wall and holding the knife right out in front of him. When he reached the upper landing he kicked open each door, starting at the end of the corridor, working through the bedrooms all the way to the restroom, and then a kind of storage cupboard piled high with freshly ironed clothes and linen, and finally a bathroom at the other end. With each room, he marched right in there, kicking at things, knocking things off of the tops of dressing tables and bedside cabinets, checking inside wardrobes and behind doors, even behind curtains which were still bunched up at either side.

  In the second bedroom, he stopped for a minute and looked out of the window.

  It looked as though the whole of the neighborhood had ground to a complete halt. There was a part of him then, then while he was standing at the window, which just wanted to see a pair of car headlights snaking along the road, or maybe some old guy, a derelict or a wino or a bum, a druggy… any damn thing at all. But there was nothing.

  He stood there challenging the old fart-woman, wherever she was, to come at him from behind, screaming an old fart-woman's scream as she whacked him across the shoulders with a broom handle or a Dictionary, or maybe jabbed a knitting needle into his side . . . whatever. He just suddenly felt afraid of being alone.

  The next room, he went into without all the noise and the bluster. He knew she wasn't in there. Not under the bed, not in the fucking closets, and not outside clinging to a tiny ledge up above the street. No, the windows were closed, the shit-to-fuck doors were closed, every fucking thing was closed. And seeing how every fucking thing was, indeedy, locked up tighter than a nun's snatch, and the fact that she just wasn't anywhere to be found, just what exactly–

  Hey, no, don't put the thought into words, man, don't beard this monster in its lair cos it's just as like to whip your pants down and chomp on your pecker, ripping it right out and leaving a bloody stump down where the curly hairs grow…

  –did that mean?

  Virgil backed up until the backs of his knees touched the bed and stopped, still staring out of the window. He lifted his hand to his mouth and started chewing on his thumb.

  He went back downstairs, clumping loudly.

  "Hello?" he shouted.

  There was no answer.

  So, she had gone out. She'd somehow managed to get herself untied–

  And how the hell did she manage to do that, oh wise one?

  –and instead of introducing her captor's head to the flat side of a heavy pan or putting a hole in his chest from a snuck-away Saturday special she kept maybe in the hallway drawer or a secret cookie jar on a kitchen shelf, she had quietly left the house–

  Miraculously locking the door again…. from the inside – don't forget that one, Sherlock….

  –and gone to look for help.

  Virgil chewed his lip, eyes darting to and fro as he took in all the possibilities.

  So, if he accepted that – because, after all, what else was there, true believers? – then he needed to get the hell out of there.

  Virgil didn't know where the next thought came from – maybe it was from the great Central Casting of all secret thoughts – but he lifted his hands and looked at them. The plastic gloves had gone.

  "Shit!"

  He ran into the kitchen, checked the counter-tops and ran back into the hall. Nothing there. He glanced up the stairs, halfexpecting to see the old fart standing there with a gun in one hand and the gloves in her other, hanging like a limp prophylactic: unassailable evidence of a gross misdeed, your honor. But the stairs were clear. He turned back to look at the window, concentrating to hear the first faraway wee-wah sound of an approaching cop car. But then, maybe they'd sneak up on him, not give their presence away with a siren.

  Virgil shook his head. "Think!" he snapped at himself, emphasizing the urgency of the instruction with a slap to the forehead with the heel of his right hand.

  Did the woman – the old fart – did she know him? No sir, she did not.

  Did he have any priors? No sir, he did not.

  So no fingerprints recorded anywhere? Uh uh.

  No DNA samples to be gotten from hair follicles or skin scrapings or dried-up blobs of jizm? Nope, nada.

  He glanced down at the body on the kitchen floor.

  And the alleged dead person? No such animal, mein Kapitan.

  Virgil rushed to the front door, flicked off the room light and turned the key. As he edged open the door he expected a light to wash over him – the same light from his dream, perhaps – and a bullhorn voice to croon across at him from the street: OK Banders, make it easy on yourself and come out with your hands held high.

  Virgil wished he had a gun. He wasn't about to let them put him in prison, nosirree. He wasn't going to let his sweet and untainted ass become jerk-off meat for some 300-pound tattooed love-boy with more gaps than teeth. He would have gone out in a blaze of glory, gunned down by the cops as he raced out into the yard brandishing his piece – I'm at the top of the world, ma!

  He looked back into the room and felt a sudden calm come over him.

  "Fuck it," he said, and he pulled the door open wide.

  The street was empty. The old Honda flatbed was still at the curb, no police car was parked behind it or across the front of it, and there were no sudden blasts of light freeze-framing him against the house front. Nope, he was all clear.

  Minutes later, he was staggering down the path to the sidewalk, the bandaged Suze Neihardt over his shoulder like a roll of carpet. He pulled down the flatbed gate and dropped the roll on. Then he fastened the gate and pocketed the keys, checking around some more. Boy, it was quiet. He checked his watch. It was coming up to 5.45. There should be more traffic than this.

  No, strike that last one sports fans. There was no fucking traffic at all.

  Virgil walked a little way up the sidewalk, turning around every few feet and walking backwards and then turning again and moving forwards. When he reached the intersection he stopped and looked back. The door to Suze Neihardt's house still wide open. He suddenly didn't seem to feel that was important anymore. Something just was not right here. He stopped and looked around. Nothing.

  He walked across the street and back up the other side until he reached the vinyl store, checking both ways, maybe even hoping, from somewhere deep down where hopes start out that he wou
ld see a cop car turn a corner a couple blocks up the street and swing out towards him, the siren starting up like a wildcat's howl.

  But there was still nothing.

  Nothing and nobody.

  "Hey," he said, his voice soft and almost drowned out by the early morning breeze, "this is not right."

  Virgil stepped out into the street. When he reached the midway mark, he looked around again. Then he lifted his hands up to his face, cupped them around his mouth and shouted out, "Hello?"

  The wind soughed through the skeletal branches of a couple of small cedar trees and a newspaper dispenser along the sidewalk.

  Virgil bent over backwards and shouted again, louder this time – much louder. "Anybody there?"

  He felt his heart miss a couple of beats, skidding around in his chest someplace, as he jogged back across to his pickup.

  "Hello?"

  Nothing.

  He picked up a piece of broken cement and hefted it in his hand as he checked the windows of the houses further along the street. Then he pitched it. The rock hit a piece of wall between the first and second floor windows of the next-but-one house to Suze Neihardt. He figured the dull clunk it made followed by the resounding clatter as it landed on something metallic should have caused those drawn curtains to pull apart a little and some guy to lean out–

  What the hell's goin' on down there, for fuck's sake? People's tryin' to sleep up here ! It's goddam six ay emm in the fuckin' morning!

  –and give Virgil the benefit of his feelings on the noise, but when nobody appeared, he looked around for another piece of rock, this time one slightly bigger.

  The rock sailed through one of those second floor windows, billowing the curtains out and spraying glass shards all over the sill and the bedroom floor. The noise reverberated but, when it faded, it left a silence that was somehow much louder.

  And nobody appeared.

  Maybe the people in that house weren't home. Maybe they'd gone to stay with their son and daughter-in-law in Des Moines or Cedar Rapids, leaving the house empty and silent behind them. He hefted another piece of rock, this time through the lower window of the house behind him. More shattered glass, more billowing curtains. More goddam silence.

  "Hey, now just wait up a minute here!" Virgil shouted. He strode purposefully across to the first house he'd hit and hammered on the door.

  When nobody appeared, he hammered some more, and kicked.

  And then he took a step back and did a series of flat-foot kicks until the door sprang open in a flurry of wood bits, the security chain twanging and sending something skittering along a wooden floor inside. Virgil stepped inside the house, flicking on a light switch.

  "Knock, knock!" he shouted.

  No answer.

  He moved across to the staircase and shouted up. "Sir? Ma'am? There's an emergency here…"

  He waited. Nothing.

  "I'm coming up."

  He went up the stairs, clumping all the way.

  "Coming up the stairs, now… no cause for alarm… we got an emergency here…"

  On the upper landing there were two doors facing him, with another over to his left. The one to his left and the right-hand one of the two facing him were closed.

  Virgil moved straight ahead, pushed open the door and flicked on the light.

  At first, he thought there was someone in the bed but then he realized it was just the sheets, pulled up and rumpled as though encasing someone – perhaps two someones? he wondered – who was no longer there. Yes, now that he looked closer, he could see that the pillows were pulled down a little way from the headboard and scrunched at their lower ends, as though a shoulder had until recently been jammed into each of them, and each was indented in the middle where a head had lain. A paperback novel was tented on the side table of the left side – Robert B. Parker's School Days – and a pair of house shoes (slippers but made of leather with thicker soles and heels) was neatly placed just below the bed edge. A blue toweling dressing gown was lying in a heap next to the slippers. Pieces of broken glass littered the floor and lay on top of the dressing gown and the slippers.

  He moved around to the other side and saw another pair of slippers, this one backless and topped by plumes of yellow fluff. Virgil looked at the side table and saw a pack of Pepto Bismol chews, a dainty watch, a pair of rimless glasses and a Good Housekeeping magazine.

  Virgil leaned over and placed a hand beneath the top sheets. It felt vaguely warm in there.

  "What the hell is going on here?" Virgil whispered.

  He backed out of the room as slowly as he could, scared – deep, deep down where the irrational has a face and an expression and, all too often, a set of very sharp teeth – that if he turned his back then someone or maybe something would crawl its way out from beneath those still-warm sheets and pounce noiselessly on him.

  Back on the landing and still facing into the room he had just left, Virgil turned left and saw the other closed door.

  His heart pounding now, he moved along the landing and pushed the door – it started inwards with the faintest squeak and then continued to open even when Virgil removed his hand.

  He didn't turn on the light here. He could see enough.

  It was clearly a child's room, a boy's. Posters of Wolverine out of the X-Men movies, Jerry Seinfeld and Angelina Jolie in her Lara Croft outfit all looked down at him as though questioning why he was here. A shelf against the side wall housed a run of Stephen King paperbacks while on the shelves below it sat piles of comic books.

  Virgil turned to the bed. It was the same as the other one: indented pillow, rumpled bedclothes, the works. It was as though the occupant of this bed – and the ones from the one in the other room – had somehow been spirited away.

  Virgil moved back into the light of the landing and, just for a few seconds, he considered looking around the place to see what he could steal. There must be money here, maybe some credit cards – though the increased security measures made that a nono these days. But then the idea popped out of his head just as fast as it had popped in: where had these people gone?

  Virgil went back along the landing, giving a wide berth to the open doorway of the main bedroom, and jogged down the stairs two at a time.

  He checked all the rooms downstairs, not sure what he was looking for but increasingly convinced that whatever the problem was in this house might well extend outside.

  And he was now almost certain that the old fart had not set herself free and walked off. She'd gone to wherever it was that the couple upstairs and the kid in the small room had gone.

  On a hunch, Virgil walked across to the telephone and lifted the receiver. He punched in 411 and waited for an operator. The phone rang a couple times and then went into a solid tone. He cleared it and re-punched. Same thing. There had to be a sensible answer to this.

  Right on, man… like maybe all the operators just stepped out for a smoke – same thing with the folks upstairs, sneaking out from their beds without disturbing any sheets, just stepping out at five o'clock in the morning for a smo–

  One more time. He punched the numbers: 4-1-1.

  Same thing again.

  Virgil went back outside. The sky was lightening over to the east. The city should now be coming awake but there wasn't a sound anywhere.

  He walked into the street and looked back towards the west and downtown Denver. A thick pall of smoke was filling the sky over there. He hadn't noticed it earlier because it was still dark, but he could see it now. It was a lot of smoke.

  So what was it? Terrorists? But terrorists couldn't remove people from their beds without disturbing the sheets. And anyway, why was he still here? So many questions.

  And no goddam answers.

  A few minutes later, he was heading west with Suze Neihardt's body bouncing around on the flatbed. As he moved out of the suburbs and onto the deserted interstate, where the buildings flattened out and offered further visibility, Virgil could see that the ceiling of smoke was coming from several
drifting plumes, like mini-tornados, each of them twisting and turning into the early morning.

  Cars and trucks were littering the blacktop, some of them just pulled up against the metal sidewalls and some turned over or actually half through the walls. A little way along, he saw a pale green Pontiac convertible turned sideways right in the middle of the road. Virgil stopped and got out, walked across to the car and pulled open the door. No handbrake had been applied but the car was a manual shift so he guessed that it had simply stalled when–

  When the bad thing happened, right? When the bad thing happened and everyone on the planet got themselves wiped out… erased – everyone except him, of course…

  –and had just run to a stop. Virgil slipped into the driver's seat, shuffled the lever to park and turned the ignition. It started first time. He checked the gas gauge – three quarters full.