SIX
***
Jason held his flashlight high so as to take in as much of his surroundings as he could. His flashlight was powerful but small, so that it created an almost laser-like beam that slashed through the darkness in thin slivers, illuminating only glimpses.
The glimpses were enough.
Blood was everywhere; he could immediately see what Hatty had meant when she had said there was "too much blood." Shelves were knocked down, and....
Jason knelt and felt at the floor of the basement. It was concrete, tough and unyielding. But in spite of the strength of the material, he saw what he could only describe as long furrows or gashes in the ground. As though...
(as though a monster's claws had gashed the place while gutting the boy)
...as though something had gone to town on the floor with some kind of chisel or something.
Jason pursed his lips. What could have caused this? he wondered.
Then he whipped around suddenly.
Had something moved behind him?
He cast his light around as he again sensed as much as saw something moving, something dark and dangerous. He was reminded of another dark time, another dark place, and could almost hear a gun cocking, could almost feel a man lining up a woman and her innocent son in his sights.
Jason turned again, soon finding himself spinning around, ever more disoriented and afraid.
There! He had heard it that time, he was sure of it! A gun cocking. Just like...
(just like that night)
...he had heard countless times at the Academy in Los Angeles, just like he heard all the time now when he practiced at the makeshift firing range he had created behind his own home.
Then the beam of his flashlight caught something. Something dark and small and round. Rolling along the floor toward him.
Jason stooped and picked the object up with trembling fingers.
A black crayon.
He flashed back to that night, that dreadful night, and once again...
Elizabeth's feet disappear into the darkness of the alley.
Jason is almost there. But too slow. Moving too slow.
Something rolls out of the alley: a single crayon. Black.
Complete silence, save only the sound of blood pumping in his ears.
He runs as though through syrup, cloying and nasty, pulling him one step back for every two steps that he takes.
He can hear his watch ticking. Slow. Everything is slow. Tick...tick...tick....
Then, at last, a pair of hard, fast sounds pierce the night: two gunshots.
Jason felt every fluid ounce of blood drain from his face in an instant; felt himself grow cold and weak and faint as his heart started pounding again at his ears. He shone his light all around, but he was alone.
Only him and the ghosts of the dead in this room, in this place, in this entry to Hell.
He left then, almost running out of the basement, sure when he reached the top that the door
(and the door was closed had he closed it he didn't remember closing it so what could have closed the damn thing)
would be locked to his touch; that he would have to stay and learn in the most horrifying fashion exactly what had taken Sean away.
But no. The door opened easily on well-maintained hinges, and Jason was through the door in an instant, fairly slamming it shut behind him in his hurry to get away.
It was only after he had been standing in the kitchen for several seconds that he realized he was still holding something tightly in his hand.
The crayon.
"Aaron?" he whispered.
The name of his dead son seeped into the still depths of the house, like the susurrations of dying leaves as they cast themselves from a tree that would sleep through the winter, leaving behind so much of itself in the process.
Nothing moved. All was silent, dark, deep.
Haunted.
A chill prickled at the back of Jason's neck as the word leapt into his mind unbidden. Haunted. Ghostly. The ghosts of the past were here.
He left the kitchen quickly, and for some reason he felt himself consciously avoiding looking at the microwave. Even though he had unplugged it, even though there was no way that it could hurt him, even so he did not want to look at it, convinced for a moment that if he did he would once again see those horrible, blurred green numbers.
Haunting him.
He went back into the entry, then went up the steps to the second floor. He was spooked, but he still had a job to do. Still had a boy
(no boy there was too much blood, far too much blood)
to find.
He went into the first room and could see at a glance that it was little Sean Rand's room. Bed shaped like a racecar, a pinboard with family pictures above a used desk that had clearly been inherited from his daddy, a chest of drawers. It all fairly screamed out to him of Sean's presence.
Jason poked through a few things, but found - as he had expected - very little. Only evidence that a truly nice kid had spent hours of happy time here. He moved to the desk and opened a drawer, then cried out in disgust as hundreds - no, thousands - of black, writhing cockroaches squirmed over and upon each other within the drawer. Jason felt himself propel backward, knocking into the bed and falling onto it with a small cry before managing to stand up again.
He could hear the cockroaches hissing. Did cockroaches hiss?
He reached out to slam the drawer shut, to trap the vile insects inside until he could come back with some gloves and find out what had attracted them to this place...then he stopped in mid-motion.
The roaches were gone.
But what was there - what had not been there before, he was sure of it - was equally disturbing.
He opened another drawer, and it had more of the same. Another drawer, and still more. Soon all the drawers in the room were open, and Jason felt something inside himself slide, as though he were a mountain and a part of him were sloughing away to plummet thousands of feet, never to be found again.
It can't be, he thought. Not here, not like this.
Every single drawer held the same thing. Thousands of them, all exactly the same, all bringing forth memories of a night - of the night - with their dark, burgeoning power.
Crayons. Thousands and thousands of black crayons. Just like the one that Aaron had dropped before....
Jason stared at the crayons all around him, unsure what they meant, unsure what to do. He actually pinched himself, hard enough to draw blood, to make sure he wasn't stuck in some insane dream; to make sure that he wasn't going to wake up and find himself still hunting in the woods.
He looked over then, and saw one more thing that chilled him to the bone.
A clock on the windowsill. Digital. A happy clock, Donald Duck with a clock inset in his belly. Normally this would be nothing but a fun though kitschy child's plaything. Three-fifteen in the afternoon and all's well.
But as Jason watched, the numbers shifted. Blurred, just like the microwave clock had done, the numbers suddenly disappearing in a faded swatch of gray on the LED screen. And again he heard Sean's mother, Amy-Lynn, saying "The clocks" in that gravelly voice from beyond.
A cloud moved over the sun outside.
Shadow draped the room in darkness.
Jason's breath caught in his throat. He stared at the clock for along moment. Then the cloud moved past the sun. Light returned to the room, and with it the clock returned to normal once again. Jason felt himself breathe once more.
At least, he breathed until he looked again at the desk. And this time the breath didn't catch in his throat, no this time it exploded out of him in an insane rush of air that left him instantly gasping. Gasping in the center of a room filled impossibly with darkness and black crayons and blurred clocks and there...on the desk...in a place where just a moment ago there had been nothing, there was now a piece of paper. Large and white.
The kind that children drew on in school.
Jason couldn't move for a moment. Then he did move. He grabbed the paper and crammed it in his pocket, then left. Fast.
The paper felt like it was burning him all the way down the stairs, charring a hole in his pants and then in his leg itself, searing its way through to his femur.
The paper was large and white. The kind that children drew on in school. And on it, in large, panicky letters written in black crayon, there were four words. Four words on a paper that Jason was damn sure had not been there only moments before. Four words that chilled him even as they burned:
I wiL be FiRSt.
***