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  Time to go, he thought. Bye, Sondra.

  And he was gone. Back to the hospital room. His mother was still sitting by the bed. He had been gone only minutes.

  The bed was empty. The hospital gown he had been wearing was spread out on the bed. It had collapsed when he started becoming whatever it was he was becoming. Energy. Somehow, he knew it was some sort of darkness energy. The bandage that had been on his head was on his pillow, like some sort of empty helmet.

  “Mother,” he said, in his new voice. “I am back.”

  She nodded. “I could tell. I could feel you. And the room just got a little darker.”

  “What’s happening to me?”

  She sighed. “It’s a long story. Something I probably should have told you, long ago. There are some of us, in our family and some others, too, who seem to have unusual abilities. Your grandfather could turn into animals. A shape-shifter, he called it. He was sometimes incorrigible. He would turn into a giant wolf for Halloween.” She smiled at the memory. “Your aunt, my sister, could communicate with animals. And me, I’m a healer. I knew something was happening to you, that you had some sort of ability and it was becoming activated, when I tried to heal you here in the hospital room but found my power had no affect on you. I knew you were changing into something different than you were. Something my power could no longer affect.”

  “So, I can, like, what? Become the darkness?”

  “I don’t know yet. Can you bring yourself back to your normal self?”

  He tried. He tried to pull himself together, to go from a sort of dark fog hovering about the room, to become once again a flesh-and-blood boy. But it didn’t work.

  “I don’t think so,” he said. “I think I’m stuck like this.”

  She said nothing. Maybe she didn’t know what to say. A tear began rolling down her face.

  “Don’t cry, Mother. I think it will be all right. After all, I never really had any kind of life before. Not really. But now, I seem to have a sort of freedom like I have never known.”

  “You had a life with me,” she said quietly.

  “And that will never change. Maybe it has on the surface, but that’s all. It’s not like I’m going anywhere. You’re still my mother. I’m still your son.”

  She nodded. “That will never change. You can count on that.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  One year blended into another, and the boy learned how to control the darkness. He learned his limits, which were few. As long as it was night and there were shadows for him to zip through, he could travel from the city he and his mother called home, which was Boston, all the way to New York with the speed of thought. He came to call it the Speed of Darkness.

  He knew his mother was sad for him. After all, he would never have anything even resembling a normal life. He would never marry, never have children. Never have a house or a mortgage. He would never mow the lawn on a Sunday afternoon. Maybe his mother blamed herself, because she also had an extraordinary ability and apparently passed the gene down to him. But he doubted he would ever have had a normal life, anyway. Not a kid who was such a dork, who was always on the outside looking in. A kid girls like Sondra Schwartz looked past, not at.

  He had to decide what his place in the world would be, and he decided it would be protector. He had a lot of time on his hands, because he would never have a career or a family, and he found he didn’t need to eat or even sleep. So he decided to protect people from the Dirks of the world.

  He eventually learned he could move objects about by focusing his energy. As such, he could throw a violent attacker around like he was a leaf in the wind. A mugger hauled a woman into an alley one night and pulled a knife on her. The Darkness, as he was coming to think of himself, simply threw the man against the wall, knocking him unconscious. The woman was scared witless, but she escaped the mugging unharmed.

  He also learned if he could dim the lights in a room enough, he could then take a sort of partially corporeal human shape for a short time. And he could touch things. Like, he could sometimes give his mother a brief hug. This was as close to being human as he figured he would ever be.

  He found streetlights caused him discomfort, and the light of the sun caused him out outright shearing pain. He was strong enough to block out the streetlights, effectively dropping a street corner into a pocket of darkness, but he couldn’t hold back the sun. During daylight, he often hid in the shadows – there were always shadows. Inside a basement or a darkened room. Though he had no need to sleep, he would sometimes fall into a sort of semi-conscious trance while he waited out the day. And then at night he would roam freely. Through the night skies, through darkened alleys.

  Through all of this, Sondra was never far from his thoughts. After a few years, he decided to visit her one night. A visit she would never be aware of.

  She was now maybe twenty. Her front teeth had been fixed, and her hair had been colored to a lighter shade of brown and was streaked with blonde highlights. It was summer, and she was in a tank top and a floral-printed skirt. A guy was with her, maybe a little older, but not much. He was taller than she was, and had a square jaw and hair combed into a wave that fell across his forehead.

  She was holding her left hand out, and on one finger was a diamond.

  “Oh, Dean, it’s so beautiful,” she said, in the cooing way a woman has when she’s admiring a diamond on her finger.

  The man was smiling. “I’m glad you like it. And I’m even more glad you said yes.”

  “Come on in.” She snatched his hand. “We have to show Mom.”

  He held back. “But she hates me.”

  “No she doesn’t.”

  He nodded with a smile. “Yes, she does.”

  “She doesn’t know you, that’s all. Come on in. Let’s tell her together.”

  She was happy, the Darkness saw. And it made him happy. She would never smile like that at him, but he had long since accepted what he had become, and what the limitations were. It seemed to him you could not truly appreciate the benefits of a situation if you could not accept the limitations.

  The truly ironic thing, he thought, is that he was really no more invisible to her now than he had been back when he was human.

  And so he left Sondra and the man who was making her happy. He intended to stop by every so often, in his nightly travelings, and the guy with the square jaw had better make sure he continued to make her happy.

  More years passed, and he continued to check in on Sondra every so often.

  He saw her and Dean move into their first house. After a while, he saw a FOR SALE sign go on the lawn, as they left this place and moved into a larger one, a couple miles outside of Boston.

  He stopped in for a visit the year she turned thirty. She was sitting in a rocker early in the evening, a magazine in her hand. On the cover was a photo of a young man with slicked back hair. Plastered below his face was the name, Ricky Nelson.

  In a small play pen on the floor was a little girl maybe six months old, cooing and drooling and seeming generally happy. Dean was out in the garage at his work bench, hammering something together.

  Sondra’s hair was pulled back in a tail, and she had put on maybe ten pounds, but she still looked incredible. The Darkness allowed himself to simply admire her for a moment.

  She glanced up from the magazine. Was it getting darker in here?

  “Dean!” she called out.

  “Yeah?” he called back. The door leading to the garage was hanging open so they could hear each other.

  “I think you might need to check the fuse box.”

  Time to leave. But he would be back. He would always be back.

  Sondra and Dean had a second child two years later. A boy. He played baseball and basketball. Dean’s hair had receded and his stomach filled out, and he coached the little league team D.J. (Dean Junior) played on. Their daughter, Lisa, was long and skinny the way Sondra had been, and marched with the band and twirled a baton.

  The Darkness busied hi
mself about Boston, sometimes flitting about New York but usually remaining close to home. One night, a man broke into a convenience store and shot down the cashier in cold blood, and helped himself to the cash drawer. He got away, running down an alley. The police found him at the end of the alley, simply sitting against the wall, his eyes wide open but not seeing. He was alive, he was breathing, but there was no brain activity. His mind had gone dark.

  He often visited Mother, who never seemed to age. She did allow her hair to become streaked with silver, though. Looks distinguished, she said. But otherwise, she looked about forty. The way she always had as long as the Darkness had known her.

  He visited Sondra the year she turned forty-eight, and found her saying to Lisa, who was now a senior in high school, “Now, where did I put my glasses?”

  Sondra wore her hair shorter now, and it was seriously graying. Moreso than Mother’s. She was now probably twenty-five pounds heavier than she had been when she and Dean were first married, and there were now serious lines engraving themselves into her face, trailing away from her eyes and mouth.

  Lisa was still tall and willowy, but now had curves and had filled out her shirt a little. She was sitting on the couch with a paperback by the new writer all the kids at school were talking about. Stephen King. On the cover was the title Salem’s Lot.

  The Darkness decided to conduct a quick hunt about the house for the glasses. He found them within seconds, tucked behind a couch cushion.

  He had found that with a little effort, he could actually wrap his darkness around an object and transport it from one place to another. To a normal human, it would seem that the object simply appeared out of nowhere.

  He did this with Sondra’s glasses. He deposited them on an end table beside the couch.

  Sondra was going through her purse for the third time, hoping to find the glasses in there. Lisa glanced casually at the end table, and said, “Mom, they’re right here on the table.”

  Sondra shook her head and chuckled. “For goodness sake. Right there in plain sight all along. How could I not have seen them?”

  Lisa returned to her book, then glanced up. “Hey, Mom, is it getting darker in here?”

  Sondra said, “It does that, once in a while. It always has. Your father has had the wiring checked more than once. We put in circuit breakers a couple years ago, and it still keeps happening.”

  Time to leave.

  The years passed. D.J. joined the Army. Lisa went to college and met a guy and got pregnant and split up with the guy. She returned home and had the baby, then went to community college at night and worked a part-time job by day, and eventually met another guy and got married.

  The Darkness continued to patrol the city at night. There were others like him about, those who developed extraordinary abilities due to some sort of mutated gene. He kept them safe. He also did his best to stop abusers and violent offenders. And he did this always from secret, so no one would know he was there. Whenever he stepped in, it was deemed somehow unexplainable. A coincidence. Something we’ll never quite understand.

  Sondra turned sixty. And she turned seventy. Dean died, and Sondra turned eighty. Lisa was divorced, but had gone to school to become an accountant and made halfway decent money. Lisa had a daughter Emma who had, like her mother, gone off to college and come back pregnant, and was now living with Lisa. Emma was working a job by day, and taking classes at night.

  Bush became president and then was gone, and half of the country thought a nightmare had ended, and Obama became president and the other half of the country thought a bad dream was starting. There was violence in the Middle East (when was there not?), and violence in the street (when was there not?).

  Emma graduated from college, and got a position as a paralegal, and her daughter Kaylie turned four and then five. The Darkness watched over them all.

  One cool thing about what he was, the Darkness thought, was his ability to feel a person’s energy. He popped into Sondra’s house one night, and found it deserted. It had been a few months since his last visit. But he was able to find her easily just by reaching out for her energy. He found it within seconds, and followed it in less time than it took to talk about it, and found she had moved in with Lisa and Emma.

  And then, something happened to Sondra’s family. Something really bad. Something so bad that when the Darkness stepped in, he was no longer able to keep his presence a secret. But when it came to the safety of Sondra and her family, the Darkness pulled out all the stops.

  Emma’s daughter, Sondra’s great-granddaughter, had disappeared from the daycare center.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The Darkness zipped into the house Lisa owned just outside of Plymouth, and found an unmarked police car in the driveway. He found a detective in the house, taking notes as Emma tearfully told about how little Kaylie had been dropped off at daycare that morning, but had been picked up early in the afternoon by a man claiming to be the grandfather.

  Lisa, now with a little gray in her hair, was standing beside Emma, her arm about her shoulders. Sondra was in a rocker not far away. Her hair was now white, and her face severely lined. Her jowls sagged, and her shoulders were rounded. She was eighty-six, which amazed the hell out of the Darkness when he thought about it, because to him, she had been fourteen not long ago, wearing her slacks too tight and wiggling her but as she walked through the school hallways.

  The detective explained how a man maybe sixty had shown up at school claiming to be Dean Chambers, and had a driver’s license as identification.

  “Dean was my husband,” Sondra said in a voice reedy and crackling with age. “He died a few years years ago.”

  “I know ma’am,” the detective said. He was in a cheap suit jacket, and his tie was crooked. “Somehow, that information didn’t make its way to the school records. You and he were both listed as people who could pick the child up, and that hadn’t been changed. The driver’s license was obviously a forgery.”

  The Darkness wanted to say to them that everything would be all right. He would find the child. He didn’t want Sondra or Lisa or Emma to worry. He was here, as he had always been. But he and Mother had decided long ago that his operations should be done in secret. The rest of humanity was simply not ready for the existence of people like them, people with mutated abilities, to be revealed.

  And so, he simply reached out for the energy of Kaylie. If she was still alive, he would feel her energy. And if she was not, then he would find the perpetrator, and bestow upon him a new definition of the word horror.

  But he found Kaylie’s energy. She was maybe eight miles away. It was child’s play for the Darkness to cover that distance in the blink of an eye.

  There was an apartment on the south side of Boston. Rat infested. Smelling like cat urine, like such places often seem to. And little Kaylie was in one bedroom, lying on a dirty mattress on the floor. She was crying and looked a little rumpled, but seemed otherwise unhurt.

  The room was lighted by one bulb, hanging from a fixture overhead. Easy for him to blot out the luminescence.

  Kaylie realized the room was getting darker, and she started to get more scared.

  The Darkness said, trying to sound as reassuring and soothing as could be with a baritone that seemed to project itself from all around you, “It’s all right, Kaylie. I’ll take care of you. I’ll get you home.”

  “Who are you?”

  “I’m a friend. Are you hurt?”

  She shook her head. “But I’m scared. I want my Mommy.”

  “I’ll take you home right now.”

  A man called from the other room. “Hey! I said quiet in there!”

  The Darkness said to Kaylie, “You stay right there. I’ll be back in a minute.”

  The man was forty-two, with a middle-age spread. He was in a wife beater shirt, sitting in a tattered stuffed chair, and the television was on. In his hair was some of the white coloring he had added so he would appear much older when he went to the daycare center, earli
er in the day. He had a beer in one hand.

  It suddenly began getting darker in the room. Rapidly. When the Darkness wanted to turn out the lights, he found he could do so with gusto.

  The man was looking about, confused. Then, suddenly, he realized someone was standing in front of him in the near darkness. Or, at least, it looked like a person. All he could really see was a dark silhouette.

  “Hey,” he said. “Where’d you come from?”

  “I don’t know you’re name,” the Darkness said. “But you made a grave mistake. Today you attacked my family. So tonight, you die.”

  “Hey, wait a minute, buddy.” He went to rise from the chair, but found he was propelled back by some unseen force, though the humanoid shape before him hadn’t moved. “What are you?”

  “I am your executioner.”

  The man said nothing. He didn’t know what to say. The beer bottle slid from his fingers and landed on the floor.

  There was an ability the Darkness found interesting, one he had discovered a few months ago. He had never tried this ability on a living thing, as the results might seem a little gruesome, but he felt now was a good chance to try it out.

  He reached not into this man’s mind, but into his actual body. The man gasped as darkness energy wrapped itself about his insides. And then, the Darkness simply expanded outward. Hard. With extreme force.

  The man simply exploded, blood and gore splattering to the walls, the windows, the ceiling.

  The Darkness then reappeared in Kaylie’s room, taking as much corporeal shape as he could muster.

  “What was that?” she said. “What happened out there?”

  “I just gave a very bad man a spanking. He’ll never bother you again.”

  He then reached down and took her in his arms. “Rest easy, little one. I’ll have you home in seconds.”

  He enveloped her in darkness, and they were gone.