Look what happened when you did.
“I talk to the darkness and the darkness talks to me.” Junior’s voice drifted down from the stairs leading up. He would be sitting on the top stair as I could see his knees folded and his scuffed sneakers. One of those sneakers had a single drop of crimson blood on it. Small and as big as the sun all at the same time. “But he’s not all darkness, my master. At times he’s a light that blinds. A light that’s just for me when I give him an especially good offering.” He seemed genuinely pleased about it. Like a dog who’d done his trick just right and got a pat from his master. “I know what he wants. What he likes.”
I knew what his schizoid delusion wanted too: death.
“Sometimes he watches from above, when the lightning fills the sky.”
Skylight. Attic, I thought with instant desperation.
He stood and walked halfway down. He held Cal cradled in his arms as he would an overtired, sleeping child ready for bed. If it weren’t for his small chest moving, I would’ve thought he was already dead. His head was resting against Junior’s shoulder, his hair hanging in his face, his hand fisted in the man’s shirt, because he, at some level, thought it was me. He thought I’d come to save him . . . not hear him die above me while chained in a basement.
God.
“He’s such a scrap of a thing. I’ll bet in a year he’d have shot up like anything. Guess we’ll never know about that, will we? Feisty too. Tried to stab me with a kitchen knife. Kids.” Junior smiled fondly, his eyes bright, cheerful, and so happy.
So very crazy.
“I know you’re close,” he said with an approving tone that made my flesh try to creep off my bones. “Not all brothers are, but I’ve seen you watching out for him. Getting home before dark to check on him because your mama sure doesn’t. A thief and a whore and worst. She would’ve been on my list, you know, if we weren’t neighbors? You two weren’t. You’re innocents, but you were nosy and that’s that. Looking in my windows, following me in that old biddy’s giant green car. I saw you at the hospital too. They say you shouldn’t piss where you live, but you wouldn’t leave well enough alone. Nothing I could do for you then, nothing but this.”
In all ways Junior was more than I’d thought and in the one way he was exactly what Cal had thought. “But for being innocents, for that I’ll give you a gift. When I’m done with him, I won’t clean the knife. I’ll cut you up with the same one. Your blood will mingle. It’ll be good, saving a family. Sending you on high. But first I’ll sign him. I like to sign my work.”
Cal murmured in his chloroform-induced unconsciousness. Junior smoothed his hair and I wanted to vomit again, but there was no time. No damn time for anything. “I like family. You’ll be together always now, the two of you. It’ll make me proud, the work I do, when I see that.”
He started up the rough wood stairs to the first floor. “Good.” He was whispering to himself or Cal now and I didn’t know which made me feel more sick. “It’ll be good.”
I’d fucked up. I hadn’t believed Cal unconditionally. I thought he might have made a mistake. I wanted it to be a mistake. I wanted to find proof first. I hadn’t wanted to leave an anonymous tip and ruin a man’s reputation if Cal was wrong and I hadn’t wanted, more importantly, to get the police anywhere near us.
Worst of all: I’d wanted a normal life. I’d been willing to close my eyes to anything to get that.
But Cal hadn’t been wrong, and because of me we were going to die. My little brother was going to die. Sliced up, throat cut, chopped to pieces, God knew what, and his body would be thrown down that dry well already brimming with death and covered in quicklime. My little brother who’d trusted me. There was blood seeping over handcuffs that had me trapped around the iron column in front of me. I’d already started to pull and yank at the cuffs desperately while Junior had been on the stairs and I continued to rip flesh against the metal. Blood was good. It made things slippery and once I dislocated my thumb then I could slip a cuff. I’d read that in a book. I read most everything in a book because books were easier than real life, but look where I’d ended up. Nothing is as real in life as death.
No thinking of that now. I could . . . I would stop Junior because that was the only choice I had.
This was not happening. I wouldn’t let it.
Arms secured tight, I slammed my hand with brutal force against the pole because pain was nothing when that maniac had Cal. Pain was nothing. Pain was what I deserved. I repeated the motion again and again as blood splattered. It couldn’t be that difficult to dislocate your thumb or break your hand. It couldn’t be. It . . .
That’s when I saw it.