“For?”

  “Follow-up questions. —No, I ain’t gonna ask…Lee, you want me to say it? Fine.— Questions about your grandson and the incident.”

  “Mmm.”

  “At Camp Arrowhead?”

  “…”

  “Mr. Grimsby?”

  “Boy’s shook up by it all. By everything that happened there. All them dead kids around. Good kids too. Probably. And him the sole survivor.”

  “—Did you also just hear him say probab— …And the girl also, Mr. Grimsby. Sir. Alison Vesta survived as well. She’s still in that medically-induced coma. But we hear through the grapevine that she’s improving. Winter formal’s in a few months at the high school. Wouldn’t that be a sight, Alison Vesta in a wheelchair or maybe walking with some crutches. Not a dry eye in the gymnasium, I bet. Might be she’ll wake up sooner than that and fill in some details for us, help us figure out for certain what happened out there that night.”

  “That so?”

  “There’s always hope.”

  “Boy got cut bad, too. There’s a big scar across his belly now. Ugly damn thing.”

  “—I’m getting to it, Lee.— Mr. Grimsby, you still there? Listen, sir, we don’t wanna talk to the boy…I mean Clint. Not just yet. We wanna talk to you. You see, we’re wondering if maybe you noticed anything or if Clint’s said anything to you about what went down at Camp Arrowhead. Or if maybe he’s even done anything to give you the impression he remembers something from the incident. Something he failed to mention to us?”

  “Mm.”

  “Mr. Grimsby…you mind if I call you Roger…what time can we set up a meeting for...? Mister…? —Shh. Shh. Shiiit. Sunuvabitch left the goddamn telephone off the hook. He’s making breakfast now…frying bacon…shit.—”

  A long time’s passed since Roger smiled. But the sizzle and pop of the thick-cut bacon on the skillet underscored by the mumbled cursing from the phone brings him as close to a grin as he’s come in years.

  Roger beats a rapid-fire tattoo on the boy’s black-painted bedroom door. Clint’s dad picked the color when he was filling the role of the sullen, long-haired teen living under the Grimsby roof. Roger still remembers the name on the can of paint. “Perfect Midnight.” He recalls asking his son, “What’s a perfect midnight supposed to be anyway?”

  “God, Dad, shut up.”

  As good an answer as any for such a dumb fucking question.

  But he was a father then and some level of moderate teasing and needling felt like a necessary function of the role.

  Clint sticks his head out from the room, disheveled hair like hedgehog spikes and black rings under his eyes to match his grandpa’s. “Yeah, Grandpa Roger?”

  The old man leans forward on his moccasins. But he holds back from going onto full tip-toes because he’s not sure his liquor holds the way it used to and he’d hate to go sprawling in front of his grandson. There’s nothing much inside the bedroom except for the detritus of youth. Dirty clothes, yellowing pieces of wadded-up toilet tissue, half-drunk Coca-Cola cans.

  Nothing suspicious here.

  Clint steps into the hallway, letting the black door shut behind him. “You got a phone call? Another journalist, huh?”

  “Nah, damn telemarketer.”

  “Mmm.”

  Well, now I know what it sounds like.

  “Got the griddle out, set it to heating up on the wood stove. Made some flapjacks and extra-crispy bacon for us.”

  There’s the ghost of a grin on the boy’s face. Like his body’s re-learning how to enjoy things. Or like he’s faking it. “Great. I could sure kill a stack of flapjacks. With extra maple syrup.”

  The back porch screen door slams shut, and this time Roger does hear his grandson’s feet on the gravel, the car door opening, and the old Mustang roaring to life.

  Glad the boy’s going out. Good for him to get out in the world. To see folks and let folks see him. Gotta get in front of what they’re no doubt already saying. Can’t let ‘em make up their own tales about him, about what happened. Wouldn’t be right…

  Roger glances at the yellow notepad where he keeps his official, though by no means pretty or easy to decipher, painting commission records. One of the art directors, an old-school gal he imagines always takes a scotch with every lunch she eats up in New York City, told him horror books were enjoying an unexpected resurgence among readers and book-buyers alike, hence the increased demand for his work. “Not that I understand it! People are scared enough with the way the world is going these days,” she’d said.

  But Roger disagreed. “We’d always rather be scared by the shadow on the wall than of the thing making the shadow,” he’d replied, impressed by his own answer. Like he knew what the hell he was talking about well enough to hand down such fortune-cookie aphorisms. He’s got a few pieces with approaching deadlines to mail out, so he’s heading into town later to drop them at the post office. A lot of presses ask him if he’ll work digitally, but Roger tells them it’s like asking if he’ll ever flap his arms and fly. Sometimes tradition wins out and there’s no chance of evolution. I’ll stick to the muck I call home, thank you very much!

  No blue-sky morning for Roger, a storm’s moved in by the time he reaches town. A thick, black wall of rain-heavy clouds encases the city proper, making Roger suspect the previous night’s dark skies won’t relinquish their control. Driving along, he finds a welcome committee of empty streets to greet his arrival. Not even one sad person is visible, no one with their coat pulled over their head as they dash for a nearby parked car.

  At an intersection, Roger notices graffiti spray painted in huge black aerosol-blasted shapes across the plywood boards nailed in place over the old art supply store’s windows. THE MOON MAN’S WATCHING, the dripping letters declare.

  The store used to be the place where Roger ordered all his brushes, paints, pencils, erasers, and more. But its loss doesn’t cross his mind too much these days. He gets Clint to order new supplies for him on the computers at the town library whenever his materials run low.

  The store’s been gone for a while, but the words scrawled across the planks appear to be new.

  THE MOON MAN’S WATCHING.

  Roger checks out of the pick-up’s back window. No one’s there but his reflection, which is disrupted by the wriggling worms of splattering raindrops, and the slick, shimmering blacktop stretching behind him, its asphalt face scarred by staccato lightning bolts of fading yellow paint. Focused back on the task at hand, he pushes his foot down with practiced deliberateness, so the tires don’t spin and send him slaloming on his way.

  Driving ahead, he listens to the rain on his windshield and the water splashing from his tires, like he’s eavesdropping on the conversation of strangers conducted in a foreign language. When he notices the signs for Mercy General Hospital and not the cracked parking lot of the post office, he’s not surprised.

  Well, this isn’t where I wanted to go, but maybe it’s where I’m meant to go.

  “She’s improving,” that one detective said. Talking about the girl they found alive with Clint.

  His blood on her and her blood on him.

  Damnedest thing.

  When the authorities described the scene to him on that breathless morning where every word came like the speakers didn’t believe them even as they spoke them, Roger’s mind focused on the colors he’d use to paint the scenes as they were laid out for him. Burnt umbers, glimmering royal blue, yellow ochers blending with peach and velvet at the sight of the entry wounds. Dark black streaks framing the teens and a pale white light washed over them from the front. While he sat and listened, Roger’s hand moved like it had a mind of its own, crawling across the tabletop until it found the nub of an old pencil and a scrap of paper. This sketch of his bloody grandson and the girl marked the first piece of art he’d made in years that wasn’t for a commission.

  Nothing more than art for art’s sake.

  Roger sits with the ignition off in the back of the hospital parking lot, letting rain cascade around his truck. He goes over the details of the initial call as he received it on that humid summer evening when the cricket string quartet played sharp notes among the tall blades of grass. “Something happened at the Camp.”

  Roger’s mind can’t help but wander along to the TV crews and the story-hungry reporters swooping into town, plus the politicians, big and small, using the deaths of all those children for justifying their support of one cause or another, then all of them getting bored and pulling up stakes once they grasped how small the town they’d landed in really was and how little impact the deaths—even as lurid and bloody as those from the ‘Camp Arrowhead Atrocity’—would have on the wider world, where stabbed and chopped white-bread teens didn’t move the ratings needle too much.

  Wait around long enough and some no one will get all geared up and shoot as many “some bodies” as he can because no one’ll touch his willy and that’ll steal the headlines for a week…or a day. Sure seems like it gets shorter and shorter every time.

  The boy’s wounds healed, leaving the scars on his stomach—showing how whoever got him stuck him good but not good enough that he wasn’t able to breathe on his own when the paramedics arrived. The injuries appeared rough and ragged-edged to even an untrained eye, but they’d also all landed nowhere near any vital organs.

  The coma girl’s mother stands under a gazebo set up a short distance from the hospital. The pebbled ashtray cemented nearby overflows with butts. The woman seeks to contribute, balancing a thin Virginia Slim on her trembling bottom lip and rummaging through her clutch. Her hands come back empty and tears cling to the edges of her long, curling lashes, sitting thick as the raindrops fall beyond the structure’s curved awning.

  Thin white hairs plastered to the top of his head, his denim jacket turned a deeper, darker blue thanks to the downpour, Roger steps forward, out of the rain. His Zippo’s out, and his thumb’s poised, ready to strike the flint. He’s watched the woman long enough through the front windshield of his pick-up to figure out what she needs.

  The girl’s mother—Roger knows her name’s Jeanie on account of all the news reports—forms her mouth into a surprised circle. Her lipstick’s a smear against her chin like she got interrupted during its application and her urge to smoke overwhelmed any clean-up attempts.

  “Ma’am,” Roger says, trying to match his drawling intonation to some charming cowboy helping out a damsel in distress. But a crack of lightning and a boom of thunder overhead swallow his words, lessening whatever impact he’d intended.

  Before Roger’s hand comes too close, someone strikes it, clubbing away the offered lighter. The metal skids across the cement, like a skipped stone against the still surface of the millpond.

  That’ll be the father then.

  The not-quite-dead girl’s daddy places himself between his wife and Roger. Puffed up with enough spite and venom to make the elder Grimsby keep his distance.

  “What the hell’re you doing here, old man?”

  Silent, Roger makes his face a blank, a mask.

  “Grandson of yours…he tell you what happened yet? He tell you all about what he did out there? Bet you done a lot of talking with him, huh?”

  Still, Roger doesn’t say a word. He listens. He wonders how much this angry man knows about where he and Clint live. He wonders about the high beams on the man’s vehicle. Are they champagne color, foaming white with electric power or are they pale, haunted like the surface of the moon?

  When it is time to speak, Roger chooses his words with care. “Understand your daughter’s doing better. Considering what our families both went through, I figured I’d come here and pay my respects.”

  The father’s hand, palm flat against Roger’s chest, pushes the old man out from under the gazebo and back into the rain.

  “We don’t want your respect. We don’t want your help. We don’t want your pity. Go ask your grandson what happened. Go ask what he did to our daughter and all those other children. Have you done that yet, huh?

  “You know my Mama warned me about your family when I was growing up here, told me all about you painting those awful things for those books…devil’s work. Satanic! And that Richie…we’re all glad he left town again…”

  His wife abandons her cigarette, flicking it out into a puddle at Roger’s feet. The pale smoke curls up to the cuffs of his pants. The woman grips her husband’s arm tight, pulling him away from further confrontation. “Come on, let’s go back inside…”

  “I need a drink,” the weary father says, never taking his eyes off the old man onto whom he’s focused all his unchecked frustrations.

  Roger doesn’t reply to the torrent of abuse directed his way. In silence, he retreats further into the downpour, carrying the father’s anger with him.

  The detectives look like children to Roger, waiting by the mailbox he hammered deep into the ground across from the turn-off to his driveway long ago. Both men stand near their sedan, city-issued based on its throwback quality, wearing matching green parkas a couple of sizes too large even for their bulky frames. Roger pulls his truck beside them and reaches across the console to the passenger window, cranking the handle to roll it down.

  “Mr. Grimsby, Roger. Fancy meeting you here,” one of them—Detective Norris or Charles—says.

  “Mmm.”

  Roger sits back against his seat. The truck’s hazards blink in the rain. The ticking mechanism inside the cabin goes click, click, click, click. Like the 60 Minutes stopwatch playing on Sunday evenings.

  “We thought we’d bring the party, so to speak, to you. Got time for a few questions? Let’s drive to the house and we’ll find somewhere to chat. Oh, and is your grandson home by any chance?”

  The detective talks a lot, squeezing out too many words with each exhalation. He’s smarter than he looks in that case. Knows his time with me is limited.

  Roger shakes his head. Then, to back it up, says, “No.”

  “No? No, what? No, your grandson’s not home? Or, no, we can’t talk?”

  Roger faces front once again, but tracks the detectives from the corner of his eye. He turns off the hazards. Then, he throws the truck into drive but leaves his foot on the brake.

  The other detective, whichever one’s not spoken, clears his throat and clamps his hand on the open passenger-side window. “Wanna hear something they left outta the papers? Something we didn’t even share with the families of the deceased because we felt it might be…too traumatizing? Sure, most of those kids got stabbed. Over and over like someone had it in for ‘em something fierce. But still…for some of those campers, the killer took his time. Not stabbing. Well, not only stabbing. But carving pieces off them too. According to the coroner, some of those kids…were still alive when he cut them. Like a goddamn deli-counter butcher.”

  Roger lets the truck roll forward. Both detectives roar, like he’s run over their toes. Like they’ll find some way to shout louder than the wind and rain in order to get the driver’s attention. “Get off my property!” Roger shouts back into the maelstrom. Even though he’s got as much chance of being heard and understood as the detectives, he still relishes the resulting feeling of exhilaration. He gives the steering wheel a sharp turn and speeds up his driveway, kicking rocks, dirt, and pine needles behind him.

  Of course, part of him hates storming off like that, letting his frustration show through so blatantly. It reminds him of a baby, kicking up a tantrum. Screaming so someone will acknowledge his existence.

  When he gets to the house, there’s a note Scotch-taped to the front door, its presence illustrating how far the two detectives actually came onto his land before they set up stakes by the mailbox, playing like they needed or were waiting for his permission. Roger pulls the folded page free and opens it. Wet thumbs stain the white paper. But the detectives’ words show clear even when the water turns the lined sheet translucent. “How well do you know your grandson?”

  When Richie came home with Clint, he left the care of the young child to his parents. Mostly that meant Alma, Roger’s wife. But Roger wasn’t immune to having to pick up the parenting slack from his neglectful son. By then, with the horror book market flatlining and commission work drying up for his macabre masterpieces, Roger put serious consideration into making the switch to painting generic landscapes, the kind of earnest pabulum designed to fill spaces on the walls of hotels and restaurants with homey atmospheres. He knew of at least one artist, close to his age, who’d made a real name for himself with those paintings. Before the artist—Varmette was the man’s surname—passed away, he’d even parlayed his Hallmark card canvas success into setting up an annual painting camp he ran with his own son down at the seaside every year. Roger had thought about attending, but never for very long.

  Quite an impressive racket if you can get into it, Roger always believed. But he stopped short of falling into full-fledged jealousy. After all, he’d never had any true desire to leave the woods he called home. He’d burn up with too much sun exposure, and the millpond was quite enough water for him.

  All the time Richie could’ve spent feeding, changing, or playing with his son, he’d instead given over to playing his guitar, to working on his compositions. The hiss of the amp behind the Permanent Midnight-painted door sounded like a nest of snakes stirred into a venom-spitting anger orgy. Sometimes, the Grimsby patriarch swore his son had long abandoned any notion of trying to play something resembling a tune. Instead, Richie crafted these piercing waves of feedback bouncing from guitar to amp and amp to guitar. When the music grew loud—or louder at least—Alma cleared her throat and gestured first to Roger and then to the black door, like she expected her husband to do something about it.

  “A father needs to spend time with his son,” she’d say.

 

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