Page 9 of Going Home in the Dark

The world had changed radically since the four amigos gave one another comfort in high school. Bobby found it difficult to believe he, Rebecca, Spencer, and Ernie had been considered such outsiders that they had been ostracized. These days, everyonewantedto be an outsider. Many were willing to endure considerable discomfort and disfigurement to prove their I’m-a-freak bonafides. Two passengers without apparent disabilities were accompanied by what they claimed were service dogs; the first was an enormous, quiet, menacing German shepherd that focused on Bobby with the intensity canines usually reserved for a bowl of food, and the second was a barking wild-eyed Maltese whose fur had been dyed pale blue. The only nuts Bobby could get with a beer were corn nuts, which weren’t really nuts, although the grim flight attendant repeatedly insisted they were no less nuts than were almonds or cashews.

He took solace in the thought that this trip was probably more pleasant than it would have been if he had been a popular author thirty years earlier. Back then, books sold in greater numbers than was currently the case, and some famous novelists had been semi-romantic figures, recognized and approached for autographs nearly as often as movie stars. Now that everyone spent a significant part of their lives binge-watching TV and movies, authors of bestsellers could earn a smaller though still very good living while retaining their anonymity. No one recognized Bobby, which was all right with him.

However, back in the day when allergies weren’t epidemic, he could have enjoyed a bag of Planters and an icy Heineken with no concern that, in mid munch, he would be responsible for the sudden death of another passenger. And in those days, he would have been less fearful about crashing into an immense Chinese spy balloon that carried a surveillance package the size of two Greyhound buses, less worried that the plane would be brought down by a drone flown into one of its engines by a teenage hobbyist infuriated about the carbon footprint of Baltimore-to-Indianapolis air travel, and less concerned that a Maltese faux assistance dog would abruptly attack his ankles, thereby excitingthe German shepherd to join the assault and rip out his throat while a flight attendant propagandized him about corn nuts. As all those thoughts compounded one atop the other, Bobby was overcome, almost in spite of himself, by nostalgia for the world as it had been when he was a child.

Arguably, the most serious curse under which most novelists labored was the curse of a robust imagination. The engine of Bobby’s imagination never shut off. It was always at least idling, and often it raced like a pumped-up Ferrari in the French Grand Prix. Drama—from stage to page, in prose or verse, in all forms ever conceived—relied on suspense, on threats ranging from mere marital discord to national catastrophe. Therefore, he tended to imagine malign rather than benign plot developments in the story of his life. Indeed, for every unfortunate turn of events that actually occurred, he worried about numerous other disasters that never came to pass.

The prospect of returning to Maple Grove after all these years inspired a carnival of frightening apparitions to wheel through Bobby’s mind, often complete with the music of a carousel. These were not creatures he’d encountered in real life, but monsters from a hundred movies and television shows about carnivals and circuses, traveling phantasmagories in the whirl and dazzle of which were hidden horrific entities with malevolent intentions, fiends behind the frolic. His picture-postcard hometown had no fairground to which such entertainments were drawn in their illustrated Peterbilts and railroad cars that promised marvels to the world through which they sped.

Instead, locals devised their own celebrations. The weeklong Arts and Crafts Fair in May. Freedom Weekend over the July Fourth holiday. The Apple Festival in late September. Residentsof every faith and those of no faith participated in decorating for A Month of Christmas, when the six square blocks of the town center were outlined and garlanded with in excess of one million colored lights and became home to more welcoming elves and angels and carolers and costumed Dickensian characters than you could shake a candy cane at. Thousands of visitors drove from all over the state to experience Maple Grove’s Month of Christmas, when it seemed that the town had been frozen in a better time, a time of peace and fellowship and kindness and plenty.

Nevertheless, as the plane passed over western Pennsylvania, as Bobby decided corn nuts sucked and dropped them one by one into his empty beer can even at the risk of offending the scowling flight attendant, he couldn’t rid himself of a sense of the uncanny. He was troubled by a queasy suspicion that he had forgotten—or been made to forget—events of grave importance, that in spite of its picture-postcard perfection, Maple Grove was a place of unthinkable horror, and that he was flying to his death.

Just then, beyond the windows, the night was seared by a web of lightning so bright and complex that even Robert Shamrock, a writer known for his vivid depictions of scenes, could not have adequately described it. The subsequent hard crashes of thunder were of such frightful volume and shook the plane so insistently that even the most tattooed, pierced, fierce-looking passengers let out cries of alarm so high-pitched and tremulous that they seemed to issue from pale, thin children.

As if the crash of the breaking storm briefly cracked open the door to Bobby’s locked memory, a name from the past came to him—Wayne Louis Hornfly. The name chilled Bobby, elicited a shudder of revulsion, and briefly made him feel as if his bowels had liquefied, a sensation he had experienced only oncebefore when he had eaten some bad guacamole. Those effects were inspired by the name alone, for Bobby could not recall who Wayne Louis Hornfly had been or what outrages the man might have committed or whether he, Bobby, had ever known such a person. Only the name swelled into his conscious mind, while other information about this ominous person continued to be repressed, as though the truth would drive him mad, just like the ill-fated souls in the stories of H. P. Lovecraft were frequently plunged into insanity by forbidden knowledge.

The plane flew on through the storm, and Bobby the Sham had no choice but to go with it.

[Dear Reader, I am acutely aware that at a moment like this in such a story, many of you will become frustrated with a character like Robert Shamrock. You will even shout at him not to return to Maple Grove, as if he can hear you, just as you might shout at the people living in a haunted house, enduring all kinds of terrors when they could simply leave. I ask that you shout at me instead of at Bobby, because he suffered great trauma during his years in Maple Grove; he is currently in a delicate psychological condition and deserves your understanding. I have much thicker skin than he does. Besides, if you think about the reason for your frustration, you’ll see I’m to blame, not Bobby, because I’m compelling him to return to his hometown even though it’s likely that what will happen to him there will not be pretty. Shout at me all you want, but remember that I can’t hear you any more than Bobby can and that there might be lifelong consequences from a ruptured larynx.]

5Funny

There was nothing funny about what happened to Ernie Hernishen that summer when all the amigos were thirty-five; actually, it might be more accurate to say that, regardless of how amused other people might have been, Ernie would not have laughed uproariously about anything that happened to him. Perhaps he could have avoided a coma and worse if, like his beloved amigos, he’d left Maple Grove after high school or earlier. However, Ernie was a gentle soul, shy and self-effacing. He lacked the ambition that drove Rebecca, Spencer, and Bobby to rise to the top. He was a small-town guy with a big heart, a humble soul with modest dreams. He would have been happy enough if only he had married the girl next door, fathered the 2.2 children per couple that were needed to sustain the human race, become a librarian, and spent his life in a labyrinth of books.

Unfortunately, the only girl next door to the Hernishen house was Wanda Saurian. When Ernie was twelve and Wanda was fifteen, she murdered her parents, stole the car, and ran away with Randy Docker, her twenty-year-old psychopathic boyfriend. Together they embarked on a five-state killing spree, after which she was not suitable to be the wife of a librarian.

Even if Wanda had refrained from wholesale slaughter and saved herself for the younger boy who yearned for her, Ernie’sdream of being the primary authority at the Maple Grove Public Library would have been beyond his reach. By that fateful summer when Ernie was thirty-five and terrible things happened to him, Alma May Wickert had been the town’s librarian for an astonishing sixty years. She cherished her power and guarded her job with such ferocity that no one dared seek her position or force her into retirement; thus she remained emperor of the stacks for yet another nine years. At the age of ninety-four, she perished in her sleep from what Dr. Sweeny Feld called “spontaneous mummification,” though the physician was known to imbibe to excess at times and to have a macabre sense of humor.

Curiously, the library burned down on the night of Alma May’s death. Voters eventually declined to fund a new one for pretty much the same reason that they wouldn’t fund a buggy-whip factory or an encirclement of massive catapults to protect the town from invading barbarians. The city council unanimously agreed with Mayor Susan Glow that even before a new library could be designed and built, artificial intelligence would transform the world, and everyone would have a personal robot to read stories to them, making it unnecessary to engage in the onerous chore of reading to oneself.

Consequently, even if Ernie had survived the year when he was thirty-five, he could not have become the town librarian when the town had no library. This is not the place to reveal whether Ernie came out of his coma and lived; maybe he did, maybe he didn’t. These immediate pages are for the purpose of introducing the fourth of the four amigos so that readers—or their robots—will understand who all the principal characters are, thus allowing the wheels of the narrative to turn faster from this point.

We must consider how extraordinary it is that all four of these people, although social outcasts in their youth, becameoutstanding successes in their chosen fields, Ernie Hernishen no less than the others. He was just eighteen when he wrote his first song, “The Girl Next Door Is to Die For,” which Garth Brooks came out of retirement to record; it spent eleven weeks as the number one country song in the USA, even crossing over to rise to number two on the pop charts. That was of course quickly followed by “Mama, Don’t Teach Me Your University Ways” and “Three Friends and One Dog Are All I Need,” which were also enormous hits for different country artists. If the amigos endured some torment or terror in their youth, some ordeal they had been made to forget, perhaps the stress and trauma of the experience had driven them to become achievers, to gain social position and a measure of power as defense against whoever or whatever had so profoundly shaken them back in the day.

Unlike his pals, Ernie shrank from the prospect of celebrity, as if being known was asking for trouble. Although he could play the piano, the guitar, the fiddle, and the ocarina, he had no desire to perform his songs in public. The stage did not call to him. Life in the spotlight had no appeal. When he wasn’t writing an astonishing number of memorable and often haunting songs, he pursued solitary interests, some of which he found puzzling and even inexplicable.

He wasnotpuzzled by his love of nature, of which there was plenty to be found in and around Maple Grove. He enjoyed long walks in the woods. He could spend hours studying wildflowers in a meadow, recording their infinite variety with his camera. He became such an avid bird-watcher that he was able to name most of those he saw.

Because nature seemed vulnerable to him, he took a major role in stopping a highly promoted new landfill on a thousandacres a few miles outside town, where a hundred thousand tons of worn-out solar panels were to be buried along with undisclosed thousands of cumbersome burnt-out wind turbines. His activism had led to unannounced visits by Britta, his mother, who insisted that his priorities were foolish.

On one occasion, popping into his kitchen while he was peeling potatoes for dinner, Britta said, “Sustainability. Renewables. A cleaner way. What about this don’t you understand, Ernest?”

“Solar and wind aren’t sustainable.”

“Do you think the sun is soon to go out? Will the wind never blow again?”

“You have to calculate the immense amount of steel and copper and concrete, historic amounts, and the—”

She cut him off by taking the potato peeler out of his hand. She held it beyond his reach, as if he were five years old and being denied a lollipop. “Tell me, have you started smoking something potent, Ernest?”

“You know I don’t smoke.”

“Is that so?”

“I think it’s a terrible habit.”

“Is that what you wish me to believe?”

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