Closed at Dark

Soren shut the bedroom door as he left and went to work.

  It was late, but that didn’t matter. There was no chance he was going to fall asleep, not with Sara stirring up so many memories. If he closed his eyes, he could see her waving to him and John as they drove away. It was the last time she’d seen John alive.

  The case also intrigued him. He wanted to know more about what he was dealing with.

  He grabbed his laptop from the kitchen, sat down at the dining room table and flipped it open. He didn’t bother doing research on ghosts. He was confident in what he’d told Sara earlier — this wasn’t their modus operandi. He was looking for a creature who could disappear, probably read minds and possibly tell the future.

  Unfortunately for him, that wasn’t nearly descriptive enough. He came across at least a dozen monsters who fit the bill, but none of them matched the description Sara had given. Her reference to “silver eyes” also intrigued him, but pinning anything down proved elusive. He found nothing in the paranormal websites he visited. He also couldn’t remember where he had heard the description before. It was possible it was from another case he worked, but he couldn’t recall it.

  Not that a failure to remember something vital was unusual for him. Ever since the accident, his memory was filled with holes. It wasn’t complete amnesia — he knew who he was and retained most of his history — but there were critical parts that were missing. He would just have to live with that. Still, “silver eyes” nagged at him. He knew he’d come across it somewhere before.

  Yet after an hour of searching, he was finding very little.

  He decided to try a different approach. Instead of focusing on the monster, he should look for the man. If there were sightings of a mysterious white-haired guy trying to kidnap kids, there were likely other mentions of it somewhere.

  When he typed the description into Google, he was blown away. He whistled softly to himself.

  “The man with the white hair” was everywhere — literally. He’d been spotted in at least 15 states, always near places where kids congregated, like schools or playgrounds. The descriptions were the same description as Sara had offered: very pale, unusually tall, with white hair. Some went further and described him as soft-spoken, but with a menacing air.

  Soren found dozens of mentions of the man across various message boards, always from concerned parents claiming to have heard he was in their community. The messages were eerily similar to each other. The man always approached kids when they were alone and usually tried to convince them to come with him. The kids reacted to him differently. Some found him charming, others said he spoke with authority, like a teacher. But he always wanted to lead them away from other children.

  Soren didn’t like it, and it wasn’t just because the guy was targeting kids. There was no doubt about it — the man with the white hair was his own urban legend. The entries lacked certain concrete specifics. They talked of what had happened to “their friend” or “a neighbor” and sometimes even “my sister.” What was missing, however, were entries from the actual people involved.

  He could remember John telling him some story when they were kids. He remembered it only vaguely, but it was about a woman home alone with only her dog to protect her. When she woke during the night, she would reach down under her bed and the dog would lick her hand to let her know everything was okay. But one night she awoke in the morning to find her dog dead outside and a note that read, “Dogs aren’t the only thing that can lick hands.”

  Soren had been unable to sleep when he heard that. After all, it was a true story. John said it happened to a friend of his cousin — and John seldom lied. It had to be true.

  It took years for him to realize the tale was preposterous. Even assuming that someone broke into a woman’s house and then left her alone, why would it occur to him to lick the woman’s hand? How in the world would an intruder know the woman’s routine with her pet?

  That wasn’t the story’s only flaw, but it was enough for Soren to challenge John. Eventually the truth of it came out — it was a friend of a friend. And, of course, it had never really happened at all. It was akin to the “vanishing hitchhiker” story or the one about the escaped killer with a claw for a hand. Everyone heard the tales, always passed off as real, but nobody had any firm details. The advent of the Internet only made the situation worse. Now stories could be passed like viruses and some of them even had the semblance of authenticity.

  The man with the white hair seemed to fall into that category. Individually, the stories seemed plausible enough. But taken as a group, there was no way they could be true. There were reports of him in Texas and Kentucky at virtually the same time — and neither story had a solid source behind it.

  There were also just far too many similar tales with the exact same permutations. There was a persistent one about how a nanny confronted the man after she spotted him leading one of her charges off the playground. According to this account, the man had chased the nanny when she grabbed her child back. The problem with the story was it popped up too often. Was it likely that nannies in California and South Dakota had shared the exact same experience?

  All of this might have led Soren to dismiss the man’s existence altogether, but for two things. The first was that this wasn’t some fresh-off-the-street client or one of his blog’s many fans. This was Sara and he knew her well. She wasn’t given to flights of fancy. If she said she saw a man with white hair trying to kidnap her son, he believed her.

  The second was a far more disturbing headline he came across during his research. Unlike the message board postings, this one was not vague or second-hand information. It was a bona fide news article published by The Oregonian. “Police Seek White-Haired Man in Connection With Child’s Disappearance.”

  The article was filled with frighteningly specific details. A little over two years ago, five year-old Alastair Horne had vanished from his home in the dead of night. There was no evidence of a break-in, and his sibling, who slept in a bed next to him, heard nothing. All his parents found the next morning was an open window. The cops initially suspected a local contractor who had worked at the house, before briefly exploring the possibility that the parents themselves committed some crime. But their investigation apparently led nowhere. Alastair Horne was never seen again.

  But before the case faded from the papers, the police launched a search for a mysterious “white-haired man.” It seems he was the subject of a disturbing encounter just two days before Alastair was taken. Alastair’s mother said her son was playing in the creek behind her home when she heard him talking with someone. Curious, she investigated and found him interacting with a stranger, who was urging him to follow him further into the woods.

  When the mother intervened, the man grew “angry and upset.” According to the article, he told her, “Your son is next.” And then he reportedly ran off.

  Only when Soren read the story, he had a strong suspicion the man hadn’t fled anywhere. If he called the mother, he bet he knew what she would say — that he just disappeared before her eyes.

  The police never caught the man, but they were sufficiently wary of him that they published a sketch of his likeness. Soren was willing to bet that somehow this actual story had sparked the hundreds of other copycat tales that worked their way across the country. Probably unconsciously, people had stripped it of its vital specifics. The white-haired man had become the bogeyman for thousands of frightened parents.

  Soren stared at the picture of the sketch. He tried to imagine the man with silver eyes, and felt like it triggered some memory. He was just at the moment of recollecting it when he heard a noise behind him.

  “That’s him,” Alex said, coming to stand behind Soren. “That’s the man who talked to me.”

  He was staring with wide eyes at the picture on the laptop, and Soren slammed the lid shut. He didn’t want the kid reading the other particulars of the case. There was no reason to scare him any worse than he was.

  S
oren turned and looked at the boy. In that moment, he looked like he was seven years old going on eighty.

  “Are you sure?” Soren asked.

  Alex nodded.

  “Did he kill that other boy?”

  Soren closed his eyes and cursed himself. He was so wrapped up in his own research, he’d never heard the kid sneak up behind him. He must have seen more than just the drawing. Soren opened his eyes and looked at Alex.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe.”

  “Is he going to kill me?”

  He asked the question with an air of resignation, as if there could be no doubt what the answer was.

  “No fucking way,” Soren said.

  The swear word clearly caught Alex off guard. He flinched as if he’d been hit and looked at Soren with wide eyes.

  “You aren’t supposed to use that word,” Alex whispered. “Mom doesn’t like it.”

  Soren allowed himself a smile.

  “I know,” he said. “But I was trying to make a point.”

  He grabbed Alex by the shoulders.

  “I’m not going to let anything happen to you,” Soren said. “You understand me?”

  “But he’s a monster, isn’t he?” Alex said.

  Not much tugged at Soren’s emotions anymore, but seeing this scared boy — John’s son, for God’s sake — broke his heart. He thought of John saying to him all those years ago, “We’re best friends forever. We’ll always protect each other.”

  How old had they been? They couldn’t have been more than ten, but it didn’t feel so long ago. And John had protected Soren against the usual schoolyard bullies. It had been Soren who failed to live up to his end of the bargain. He was damned sure he wouldn’t do the same for John’s son.

  “Fighting monsters is what I do for a living, kid,” Soren said. “And I don’t want to brag, but I’m really, really good at it. That’s why your mom brought you to me.”

  “She said you knew my dad,” Alex replied.

  Soren nodded, glad for the change of subject, even if it was painful.

  “I grew up with your father,” Soren said. “We met when we were about your age.”

  “What was he like?”

  “The best man I ever knew,” Soren said without hesitation.

  “Was he smart?”

  “Very,” Soren replied.

  “Funny?” Alex asked.

  “He used to wait until I was drinking something to say something funny just so he could watch it come out of my nose,” Soren said.

  “Ewww,” Alex said, but he laughed at the same time. “Did he like Star Wars?”

  “Of course,” Soren said.

  Soren had too, once upon a time. But the accident had wrecked a lot of his memory, starting with TV shows and movies. He knew he liked those films, but he couldn’t remember much about them anymore. That was sufficiently weird that he didn’t feel like explaining it to Alex.

  “I like Star Wars too,” Alex said, as if he were the only young boy who felt that way.

  Soren grinned at him.

  “Your father would’ve loved to have known you,” he said.

  This won Soren a flicker of a smile, before it abruptly dropped from his face.

  “What is it?” Soren asked, though he had an inkling.

  “I lied to my mom,” Alex said.

  “I wondered.”

  “I told her I didn’t remember anything the strange man said to me,” Alex said. “But that’s not true.”

  “What did he tell you?”

  “He asked me if I wanted to meet my dad,” Alex said.

  His voice had taken on a dreamy quality, as if he might not be entirely awake anymore.

  “You know your father is dead,” Soren said.

  The words were hard for him to say, and for just a moment, there was a brief memory of John reaching out to him, his friend covered in blood. But he banished the image from his mind.

  “Uh-huh,” Alex said. “But when the man spoke to me, it was like I couldn’t remember that. It seemed like my dad was just down the path and this was my only chance to see him.”

  “What else did the white-haired man say?”

  “That my dad was waiting for me,” Alex said. “He said my dad wanted to take me away.”

  “Away where?”

  What Alex said next chilled Soren.

  “To where my daddy lived,” Alex said. “My dad was going to take me home.”

  Chapter Four