Page 55 of Going Home in the Dark

Ernie shook one fist. “Totally.”

Spencer said, “Damn straight.”

“I second that emotion,” Bobby said.

Ernie stood tall. “Back off, buttercup.”

Spencer said, “All for one—”

“—and one for all,” Bobby said.

Hornfly turned his fiery stare on Ernie, on Spencer, on Bobby, on Rebecca. After making eye contact with each, during which none of them looked away, he cleared his throat. In spite of his game-show voice, he sounded sincere and profoundly impressed when he said, “Holy crap, what a bunch of losers.” He took one step forward, and they took one step backward in unison. “Time for you to come back from Neverland and face reality. This tourist who came to Maple Grove and got himself beheaded,” saidHornfly, “can’t just be left here to be found. He must disappear. Do you know how we’re going to make him disappear?”

The amigos shook their heads. They had suspicions regarding how Hornfly would make the dead man disappear, but they were reluctant to entertain those suspicions at any length.

The monster said, “We are going to eat him. By ‘we’ I am not referring to you. We do not need your assistance to eat him. Do you want to know how we are going to eat him?”

“Not really,” said Ernie, and his amigos shook their heads again.

“We are going to eat him right here. It won’t take more than two minutes, maybe three. You really should watch, because if you dweebs don’t back off and mind your own business, we will eat you just the same way.”

“Whoa,” Spencer said, consulting his wristwatch, “I didn’t realize how late it is. They expected me home before this.”

“Me too,” said Bobby. “I’m out way past curfew.”

Ernie and Rebecca made noises of agreement, although no one in any of their lives cared how late they stayed out or whether they ever came home.

Wayne Louis Hornfly said, “We like to start eating from the crown of the head and finish with the toes. Because this man is in two pieces, we would much enjoy having an intermezzo of some kind, something soft and rotten, but as the Rolling Stones have told us, ‘You can’t always get what you want.’ So there will only be a short pause between courses.” He bit into the skull as if it were no harder than a peach and began to gobble through the brain.

The amigos bolted from the pavilion.

32Liberty Park

So then, following a late lunch at Adorno’s Ristorante and the mutual recovery of the lost memory involving Wayne Louis Hornfly and Halloween night, Bobby suggested they engage in some brainstorming and that Liberty Park should be the place to do it. When Rebecca and Spencer at once agreed, Bobby felt warmed by a sense of friendship almost as intense as the camaraderie that he had enjoyed so much back in the day.

In the Genesis, on the way to the park, when the three amigos spoke of the Night the Tourist Was Eaten, you could hear that they capitalized those words. This doesn’t mean the consumption of the chubby-cheeked individual had been designated as an official holiday in picturesque Maple Grove. It certainly had not. But now that the amigos had been made to remember that long-forgotten episode, the incident possessed such terrible power that Bobby couldn’t speak of it entirely in lowercase, and his friends also adopted the subtle vocalization of capital letters. Indeed, standard capitalization did not seem adequate to convey the horror of that murder and devouring. However, while capital letters can be conveyed by the human voice, italics and bold typeface cannot; if we stop to consider the issue for a moment, which is what’s being proposed here, we must agree we can hear the capital letters in “Memorial Day” or“New Year’s Day,” but we are unable even to imagine how italics or bold typeface would sound.

During the drive, they arrived at the inescapable conclusion that memories of forgotten events were not returning spontaneously. Someone was intentionally unlocking their memory vaults, setting free the experiences of which all recollection had been previously denied. The unknown master of memory must be supernatural or in possession of a technology far more advanced than anything human beings had yet developed.

In the latter case, the amigos didn’t feel qualified to reach a conclusion about who the technological wizard might prove to be. If they failed to find clues that led them to the responsible party, they would perhaps consult a scientist—or better yet, a science-fiction writer, if one could be found who was sober.

That thought was not a slam at science-fiction writers. Bobby did not believe they were more likely to be inebriated than authors working in other genres. He’d met a lot of writers of all kinds, and it seemed to him that the stress of their work led them to strong drink more often than occurred with people in other professions. The pressing need to decide whether to use a comma or semicolon; whether to employ a dialogue tag, what that tag should be, and whether it should come before or after the speaker’s name; the extent to which the use of adverbs must be limited; whether the best choice for a lead character was a perky brain surgeon or maybe a moody homicide detective or perhaps a perky homicide detective studying to fulfill his or her dream of becoming a moody brain surgeon—several such decisions needed to be made every minute of a workday, without surcease. Any wrong choice could lead to a finished novel that, for the life of copyright, resulted in semiannual royalty payments that never exceeded nine cents.

This might seem to have nothing to do with visiting the scene of the beheading in Liberty Park and brainstorming about what steps to take next. But it’s important to understand that, as a writer perpetually seeking material and considering how it might best be developed, Bobby had mundane concerns that crowded into his mind along with all his worries about Hornfly. He wasdistracted. This is important because distraction could cause him to make a mistake and become the only amigo to die horribly. We should prepare for that eventuality.

And so, well fed but with much on their minds, the three amigos stepped onto the dance floor of the pavilion, though not to dance.

The late-summer day was pleasantly warm, with a light breeze out of the west. The leaves of the surrounding maples fluttered prettily, as if the trees were demure Japanese maidens concealing their lovely faces behind geisha fans.

On benches throughout Liberty Park, people were reading books, feeding squirrels, and mesmerized by their smartphones. A few walked dogs, and fewer pushed strollers carrying small children who were in various states of uneasy consideration of the world into which they had recently been thrust.

In the pavilion, Bobby’s attention—and that of his friends—was initially focused on the approximate center of the floor, where Wayne Louis Hornfly had stood over a mutilated corpse, holding a severed head by its hair. They half expected to find telltale stains that had been dulled but not worn away by thousands of feet engaged in waltzes, foxtrots, jitterbugs, cha-chas, sambas, and contemporary terpsichorean performances that had no names, prescribed steps, or obvious connections to the worddance.But of course, more than once over these twenty-one years, the concretehad been sanded, resealed, and polished to facilitate graceful movement.

Suddenly Rebecca’s eyes widened, and she covered her mouth with one hand. This could have meant she had eaten too much garlic, or it could have been an expression signifying that she’d had a surprise realization of such potential importance that she was reluctant to speak without being sure that she remembered correctly. The latter was the case, but she nonetheless at once revealed what had occurred to her.

“Björn Skollborg,” she said.

The name electrified Spencer. “Björn Skollborg! That was him. His severed head. His headless corpse. He was the one.”

---