CAGE OF NIGHT.

By Ed Gorman.

IN MEMORY OF ROBERT BLOCH.

"Darkness dwells within even the best of us.

In the worst of us, darkness not only dwells, but reigns."

Dean Koontz, "Down in the Darkness"

PART ONE.

Richard Mitch.e.l.l, KNAX-TV:.

"The big question here today is will the equipment work effectively. Not many people will forget what happened seven months ago when another man was executed in this prison. Lethal injection is supposed to be the most humane way to put somebody to death, but last time something went wrong with the hypodermic needle. The prisoner's entire nervous system was paralyzed, but he didn't die immediately. In fact, it took him forty-eight minutes to die, and the medical examiner listed the cause of death as suffocation. A pretty grim way to go. Everybody's hoping for a much quicker and more humane execution today."

Tape 4-D, June 23. Interview between Attorney Susan Amerson and her client in the Clark County Jail (A=Attorney, C=Client.) A: I want you to tell me about the alien again.

C: You don't believe me, do you?

A: I thought we worked through this already. I'm not your enemy. I'm your friend. I'm trying to help you.

C: But you don't believe me.

A: (Long sigh) I want you to tell me about the alien.

From a Police Reporta"August 23, 1903.

Officer Henley became very ill when we reached the victim up in the attic. He had to go home for the rest of the day. That's why I, the junior officer, am writing this report to you, Chief Sullivan. The thing is, he cut off her head. That's what made Henley so sick. We opened the attic door and looked up the stairs and there was her head, very b.l.o.o.d.y and with the eyes torn out, sitting right at the top of the stairs. Henley never did go upstairs. He went down to the main floor and vomited. Then it was left to me to go upstairs and find the rest of her body.

CHAPTER ONE.

I guess by now you pretty much know what happened the last year or so in the Valley here. My name is Spence.

All I can hope is that you'll give me time to tell my side of things. n.o.body ever did. Not the cops, not the press, not even my own parents. They all just a.s.sumeda"

Well, they a.s.sumed wrong, each and every one of them.

I'm here to tell you about Cindy Marie Brasher.

Night we met, I was twenty-one and just out of the Army, and she was eighteen and had just been voted Homecoming Queen. She was not only good looking, she was popular, too.

Which is something I'd never been. Popular, I mean.

Maybe I wasn't an outright nerd but I came pretty close. The few dates I'd had hadn't exactly been spectacular successes, and the only kids who asked me to hang around were the ones I always saw out at the mall playing video games and buying science fiction paperbacks. I was buying them, too.

I wasn't ready for collegea"mediocre grades, and no real desire to goa"so I enlisted in the Army. I have to admit, I had pretty fancy dreams. I'd come back looking like a movie star and possessing secret knowledge of at least forty-eight ways to kill a man in less than ten seconds.

Well, I wasn't quite a movie star when I came back but I had shed my baby fat and my zits, and I had become a fair sandlot softball player. I still knew only one way to kill a man, and that was with a gun. The Army had turned me into a pretty decent marksman.

Right here I probably should tell you about Josh, my younger brother. I wouldn't have met Cindy Brasher that night if he hadn't taken me to the kegger.

When I left for the Army three years earlier, Josh was a skinny, gangly kid who spent most of his time in front of the TV screen watching The Three Stooges and really dorky horror movies. He was even more of a social and academic disaster than I'd been.

But while I was gone, frog became prince. He became one of the three best forwards in state basketball, he developed into a d.a.m.ned good looking kid with all the social skills I lacked, and he managed to accomplish these feats while maintaining a 3.9 grade average.

It was supposed to be the other way around, wise older brother teaching naive younger brother about the ways and wiles of life....

But in my case, I found myself a little intimidated by my brother. We'd be walking down the street and at least half the people we'd meet, young and old alike, would stop to make a fuss over him, to compliment him on his basketball playing, or to tell him how much they liked the particular shirt he was wearing, or to invite him to some function he clearly didn't want to go to.

Josh always dutifully introduced me, making a big thing about my Army years, but very few of his admirers paid me more than pa.s.sing interest. Josh was the star here.

I suppose he was feeling sorry for me the night he invited me to the kegger out in Hampton Woods. I was just sitting around the kitchen table talking with Mom and Dad about my plans to start community college next spring.

He came in the kitchen and said, "Why don't you go to that kegger with me tonight?"

I laughed. "You want to invite Mom and Dad, too? Don't you think I'm a little old for a high school kegger?"

He grinned. "Everybody'll be so drunk they won't even notice how old you are."

Mom frowned, obviously thinking of drunken teenagers driving cars. Josh leaned over and gave her a kiss and charmed her worries away. "Just kidding, Mom." Then: "C'mon, brother. You're going with me."

"Go on, Spence," Dad said. "You might have a good time." He winked at Josh. "Anyway, you'll get to see that Cindy Brasher. She's the Homecoming Queen and a real beauty."

"I'm sort of surprised they let her be queen," Mom said. "You know, after her troubles last year and all."

I wanted to ask what kind of troubles but Josh was tugging me away. He was like somebody from a different speciesa"tall, poised, good looking, self-confident. Sometimes it didn't do my ego a whole lot of good to stand next to him.

"We'll be home early," Josh shouted merrily as we walked through the house to the bedroom we shared. "No later than dawn for sure."

Then he laughed so Mom and Dad would know he was joking.

In my room, while I changed shirts and pants, he filled the wallet I'd bought for his birthday last week. He dumped the contents of the old wallet on the dresser top, then transferred everything to the new wallet.

"You ever use these?" he said, flashing me a kind of condom I'd never seen before. It came in an aqua wrapper. "French ticklers. Girls love 'em."

I wondered if I should tell him, then decided against it. He'd only feel sorry for mea"or think something was wrong with mea"if I told him I was a twenty-one-year-old virgin.

In the car, a convertible a jock-happy Pontiac dealer let him drive gratis, we rolled through the warm, smoky October night with the top down and the radio loud.

"You dig chicks, right?" he said.

"Sure," I said. "Why?"

"Just wondered. I mean, you never have any dates."

"Guess I just haven't found anybody to date yet. I've only been home two weeks."

"I'm going to find somebody for you."

I almost laughed. He was still my little brother, despite his size and physical ac.u.men, and here he was conducting a father-son conversation with me. And he was the father.

"I can probably find my own."

"You mind if I say something?"

"Be my guest."

"The way you dress, and your haira""

"Bad, huh?"

"Real bad. No offense, I mean."

I felt a kind of isolation, then. I'd never fit into any kind of social group before and apparently I wasn't going to start fitting into any now. Not even one that included my own brother.

"How about if I send you down to Peyton's?"

"The men's store?"

"Yeah. Peyton's a big basketball booster. He lets me charge a lot of clothes. He says as long as I score 30 points a game I don't have to worry about paying him back. I'll see if he'll let you put some clothes on my account. Then I'll take you over to King's."

"What's King's?"

"This styling salon."

"Oh, like a barber."

He shook his head. "That's why your hair looks like that, brother. Because you go to a barber instead of a styling salon."

I tried to make a joke of it even though he was starting to irritate me some. "I guess I've got a lot to learn."

He said, quite seriously, "Yeah, brother, you do."

CHAPTER TWO.

Back in my high school days, getting invited to keggers out at Hampton Woods meant that you had been accepted by the popular kids.

I suppose because I'd never been invited, I'd created this picture of a kegger that looked like a beer commercial on TVa"you know, lots of attractive young people having a good time being attractive and young.

There were probably fifty cars parked in a fallow cornfield surrounding the edge of the woods that ran alongside the river. You could hear the music from a half mile away. The moonlight gave everything a slightly dangerous, nocturnal feeling.

Josh parked his convertible and we started walking to the edge of the river, where most of the people had congregated.

But before we got there, we saw a small circle of teenage boys forcing themselves to throw up.

"Puking contest," Josh explained as we pa.s.sed them.

So much for my image of attractive young people having a good time being attractive and young.

A bonfire next to the water's edge threw flickering golden images high into the autumn trees. All I could think of was the war fires Indian tribes used to have on these plains in the early part of the last century. The electric guitar had replaced the war drum.

There had to be a hundred people gathered around the fire. Some were drinking, some were toking on joints, some were making out, some were arm wrestling, some were just sitting very stoned and gla.s.sy-eyed and staring up at the bright prairie stars that covered the cloudless night.

Oh, yes, and some were puking.

This time there wasn't any contest. This time it was simply a matter of kids being genuinely sick. The girls generally found this repellenta"making noises like "issh" and "iccck" and "oh s.h.i.t!"a"while the boys, being boys, seemed to find the vomiting hilarious.

Josh mattered.

I saw that the moment we stepped into the light of the bonfire. People talking paused to look at him; maybe half a dozen kids surged forward to speak to him and touch him in some way; and three different people got him dripping paper cups of beer from the three huge kegs that had been neatly arranged on top of a picnic table.

Josh didn't forget about me.

"This is my brother, everybody," he said. "He just got back from the Army, and he's got some great stories to tell. Right, brother?"

"Yeah," I said, finding a stupid grin on my face, making the "Yeah" sound as if I'd maybe stopped some spies from sneaking into secret Army installations. Or led some kind of guerrilla operation that not even the Senate knew about.

But about the only stories I knew had to do with the night our barracks ran out of toilet paper, and the night that Southern kid went crazy and destroyed the communication shack, after learning that his girlfriend back home had a new boyfrienda"a black boyfriend.

"Hey, brother here doesn't have a brewski," Josh said.

At which point three or four kids dashed to the kegs to get me one.

Once my hand was filled, Josh said, "I'm going to check out the chicks. Why don't you just sort of mingle around, you know?"

"Sure," I said, wanting to smile.