Darkness Falls (6 page)

All of a sudden, Caitlin came to a decision.

Looking up, she saw her mother staring ahead, rocking Michael in his blue blanket.

Then Caitlin unhooked the smiling sun charm from the necklace and, before her mother could stop her, ran out toward Kyle.

She got to the van just as Kyle took his seat in the first passenger bench right behind the driver. He still looked all dazed and confused, but he did actually turn his head to look at Caitlin.

Grabbing his hand, Caitlin put the sun charm on top of his palm and closed his fingers over it. She even smiled at him.

Kyle didn’t return the smile.

Dr. Jenkins gently pushed Caitlin aside so she could slide the door to the van shut. Then the older woman got into the shotgun seat, and the van drove off.

Caitlin wondered if Kyle would ever smile again.

six

1840

Sam Smith thought going to the Tooth Fairy’s house was a bad idea.

It was one thing if they actually had any teeth to offer her. All the children of Darkness Falls knew that if you went to the weird lady up at Lighthouse Point with one of your baby teeth, you’d get sweets in return.

But neither Sam nor his best friend, Thomas,
had
any teeth.

What they had was hunger. After all, it was
hours
until supper, and they’d been playing all day. Neither Sam’s mother nor Thomas’s would let them have anything to spoil their appetites. “Dessert comes
after
the meal,” Mama had always said.

Thomas, though, wanted treats
now,
and he knew that the Tooth Fairy would be baking something.

“How do you know that?” Sam had asked.

Rolling his eyes, Thomas said, “Because she’s
always
baking something.”

Sam then punched Thomas in the arm.

But up to Lighthouse Point they went. Or, rather, Thomas went and Sam reluctantly followed.

“Are you
sure
this is a good idea?”

“Why shouldn’t it be?”

“My papa says—”

Again, Thomas rolled his eyes. “Your papa says that mermaids ate all the fish in the Atlantic Ocean last year.”

“How do you know they didn’t?” Sam asked defiantly. “Anyway, Papa says that the Tooth Fairy is a crazy old witch woman and that she eats children who don’t bring her teeth.”

They were almost at the house now. Sam could smell the honey and the baking bread.

“She is
not
a witch woman. Sarah saw her when
she
lost her first baby tooth and said she was beautiful.”

“So?”

“So, oaf, witch women aren’t beautiful. They’re ugly and warty.
Everyone
knows that.”

Sam stuck his tongue out at Thomas. “Sarah Orne’s just a girl. What does
she
know about anything?”

“But you believe your papa about mermaids?”

“I didn’t say that!” Sam was feeling defensive now. He wanted to go back home. He didn’t like the sound of the waves beating against the rock the lighthouse was on, didn’t like having to run uphill to the house.

However, he did like the smells that were coming from the house. His mouth started watering, his stomach grumbling. Suddenly, the time until supper seemed like forever.

Now that they were almost at the house, Thomas put his finger to his lips, and they stopped running and started tiptoeing.

One of the windows was open. Crouching low so that the Tooth Fairy couldn’t see them, Sam and Thomas dashed to the space under the window. Thomas then slowly poked his head above the windowsill so he could see inside.

Sam whispered, “Do you see any—”

Thomas crouched back down, out of sight of anyone inside, and gave Sam a stern look. “Shhh!” he whispered back. “Your stomach makes enough noise.”

Self-consciously, Sam put his hands over his stomach. He couldn’t help it. The house smelled
so
good.

“She’s made crullers with honey,” Thomas said with a smile.

Sam had to wipe his lips. Those were his favorite, and Thomas knew it.

Again, Thomas poked his head up. Then he looked down. “She’s leaving the room,” he whispered. “Come on.”

Thomas clambered up onto the windowsill as he spoke. Sam got out of his crouch and did the same.

It was, of course, unbearably hot in the kitchen. The stove had been going full bore, after all. That was probably why the Tooth Fairy had left the kitchen, so she could cool down.

Which left the place free for Sam and Thomas to raid the crullers, since they didn’t have the usual payment.

Thomas headed straight for the crullers, of course, and Sam was about to follow, when something caught his eye.

It didn’t make sense. It was
so
hot in the kitchen that they needed to grab their treats and get out as quickly as possible.

But there was this urn on the shelf . . .

Most of what was on the shelf consisted of pots, pans, and other dishware. But sitting in the middle of it all was a large green urn.

Thomas was grabbing a cruller with one hand and stuffing another one into his mouth with the other hand. “Hurry up, Sam,” he said, though it sounded more like “Hermy mmp, Sum” with his mouth full of baked bread and honey.

Sam, though, was captivated by the green urn, which stood out so much from the wood of the kitchen—blackened from so much exposure to the heat and flames of the stove—and the dark cookware. It wasn’t in the cupboard with the other containers or in the scullery with the supplies.

He found that he
had
to know what was in it.

“Sam!” Thomas urged, having swallowed his first cruller, the second poised to go into his mouth at a moment’s notice.

“Hang on, Thomas, I just want to see something.”

The shelf was just in Sam’s reach if he stood on the tips of his toes. His small fingers brushed against the green urn, and it started to topple. As it fell forward, he was able to grab it with both hands.

Then he lost his balance.

He tried to straighten himself out and still hold on to the urn, but he needed both hands for that, so he couldn’t balance himself, nor could he hold on to anything. So he let go of the urn and flailed his arms.

It didn’t work, and he went crashing down to the kitchen floor.

So did about half the cookware, which made a horrible racket.

Sam was so scared that the Tooth Fairy would hear the noise that he didn’t even think about what the falling cookware might do.

Thomas yelled at him, no longer really worried that he might be heard, all things considered. “Sam, you stupid oaf, watch out for—”

Several pots clattered to the floor. One or two of them hit the small door to the stove. The stove, which still had embers burning from the baking, sparked, and some of the wood shifted as the pots knocked the door open.

“—the stove,” Thomas finished just as some of those embers arced across the kitchen and hit the wood shelves.

It didn’t take very long after that for the kitchen to catch fire. Especially since Sam and Thomas just sat there amidst the fallen cookware with their mouths hanging open, waiting for—

What?

Once the fire started seriously going, Sam got up and ran for the window, Thomas right behind him. What had already been a steaming hot kitchen became a roaring inferno, and Sam was convinced that his skeleton was going to catch fire, it was so hot.

Thomas reached the window first and climbed up to the sill. As Sam waited to climb up after him—convinced that his pants would catch fire and that he’d die right there and go to hell for stealing even though he didn’t actually steal anything—he turned around.

Expecting to see only more fire, he was surprised to see a woman standing in the middle of the flames. Her blond hair glowed in the firelight.

It was at once the most beautiful and the most frightening sight Sam Smith had ever seen.

She was clutching the green urn in one arm, the other arm making sure the lid was secure.

“Don’t peek.”

Sam shouldn’t have been able to hear her. The fire was getting very loud, competing also with the sound of the waves crashing into the lighthouse. Plus, Sam’s own heart was beating so fast he was sure they could hear it in Boston town. And the Tooth Fairy—for that was who the blond woman had to be—hadn’t spoken very loudly.

But Sam heard her clearly.

Thomas was already running down the path. Sam wiped the prodigious amounts of sweat from his brow and climbed up onto the sill. His sweaty hands slipped on the sill, and he almost fell to the floor again, but this time he managed to right himself.

As he and Thomas ran down the path away from Lighthouse Point, the cool sea air feeling so refreshing, Sam cried out, “I
told
you coming here was a bad idea!”

seven

2002

Caitlin Greene hated the smell of hospitals.

She had grown up with the tangy, salty air quality of living by the sea in Darkness Falls. The antiseptic odor of the typical hospital corridor had always felt wrong to her.

So naturally, she had been spending far too much time in hospitals lately.

She hadn’t even realized that she’d been tuning out the doctor—the latest in a series—until he repeated her name three times.

“Sorry,” she muttered.

The doctor, a nice bespectacled man in his fifties named Murphy, continued with the diagnosis regarding her brother, Michael, as they walked down the corridor toward his room. Caitlin had heard so many doctors talk about Michael at this point that she could recite his words before he did.

“As I was saying, noctiphobia is very common in his age group. We’ve run one CAT scan and two MRIs at your behest, and the conclusions all say the same thing: there’s nothing wrong with your brother.”

Which is exactly what Caitlin had expected him to say. As if the tests were more right than what she’d been
seeing
with her own eyes.

She tried to hold in her temper as she said, “My brother has not been able to sleep for more than ten minutes at a time for the last six months.
You
go tell him there’s nothing wrong with him.”

Dr. Murphy stopped walking and sighed. Caitlin also stopped and fixed him with an expectant glare.

“I meant there’s nothing
physically
wrong. Ms. Greene, we’ve run every test possible. There’s nothing more we can do—”

Murphy was interrupted by a scream coming from a room down the hall.

Caitlin’s legs were off and running before her conscious mind even registered why: that was Michael’s scream.

God knew she’d heard it enough times over the last six months.

The door to his room was open, so Caitlin was able to dash in at a dead run, to see Michael, wide awake and freaking out as if someone were coming after him with a knife.

But the only other person in his hospital room was a nurse, whose eyes were as wide as saucers.

“What happened?” Caitlin asked.

“He was asleep,” the nurse stammered. “I just shut off the light by the window—”

“Don’t let her shut off any lights!”

It was all Caitlin could do to hold in a curse. Didn’t these stupid nurses
read
the charts? She had specifically said when they checked Michael in that there always had to be a light on in the room no matter what. Caitlin had seen Dr. Murphy mark it on the chart and everything.

She walked over to Michael and embraced him as best she could with him in the hospital bed. “It’s okay, Mikey, it’s all right now.”

Michael was shuddering in Caitlin’s arms as he spoke. “Please don’t let them shut them off.”

“I won’t,” Caitlin said. “We’ll leave all the lights on. Just try and sleep.”

She spent several more seconds soothing and calming him until he finally came out of the embrace and lay back down. His eyes, bloodshot from months of inadequate sleep, finally closed, his thin arms drawing the heavily starched hospital sheets up to his neck, his mouth hanging open, showing the gap where he’d lost a baby tooth.

After giving a final glare to the nurse, Caitlin went back out into the hallway. Murphy had a quick whispered exchange with the nurse—Caitlin hoped it was a reprimand of some kind—before rejoining her.

“Isn’t there something else you can check on?” she asked plaintively.

“No. He is a twelve-year-old boy who is afraid of the dark, and that’s all.”

God, he made it sound so—so—
mundane.
Caitlin was about halfway between punching Murphy out and breaking down and crying.

Just when she thought she’d do both at the same time, Murphy’s face softened.

“Look, I’m not saying your brother doesn’t have a problem—”

Caitlin had to bite her tongue to stop herself from remarking snidely,
Gee, how generous of you to acknowledge that.

“—but whatever it is, it’s psychosomatic. My advice would be for you to get a second opinion.”

Refraining from pointing out that Murphy was around her fourteenth opinion, she instead just said, “From
where?”

“From someone who’s more experienced in this field. Someone who’s dealt with it before.”

“And where am I—”

Caitlin cut herself off.

She thought about the gap in Michael’s mouth where his most recent baby tooth had fallen out.

And she remembered someone else who had been having trouble sleeping.

More to the point, she remembered what had happened next.

He had lost a baby tooth, too.

“I think I know just who to call,” she told Dr. Murphy, and then walked off before he could ask who.

She went out to the waiting area, where Larry Fleishman was sitting reading the paper.

At her approach, Larry put the paper down, pushed his glasses up his nose, and started to ask, “What did the doc—”

“Do you know where your cousin Kyle is?”

Larry blinked. “Kyle? What does
he
have to do with—”

“I think Michael’s going through the same thing Kyle did.”

“Michael—” Larry hesitated. Then he spoke very gently. “Michael hasn’t killed anyone.”

Caitlin winced. “I know, but—maybe he can help Michael get through it. The doctor just said that we should try talking to somebody who’s dealt with it before. Kyle certainly has.”